Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
· Gokul Rajaram
[00:00:00] S1: Shifted the level. And so that kind of lazy, but brilliant onboarding is something that characterizes a lot of good thinkers. Sergey, very similar. When we were going to launch AdSense in 2003, I'll never forget this. We were doing our final launch things. Sergey was a sponsor. He came and sat in the meetings. He said, "What are you guys building here?" We're like, "Website publishers are going to apply from all across the world. It just sells a product. We have to review them and say, we should approve them, not approve them to run AdSense." He's like, "Why do you need to approve them?" We were like, "What do you mean? Our ads are going to be, we are going to be running ads on these things. Google ads, or ads powered by Google. You don't want to be on a porn site or something else." He's like, "Why not?" We didn’t even have a good answer to why not. It was like, "Well, you know, standards or policies." Okay. "But what if they lie?" He was right. What if they lie? We had so many people applying with Nike.com, for example. It's true. It was very hard to know who owns a domain. I could apply with your domain and, you know, get accepted. He was right. In some ways, we were just doing it to cover our asses, it turns out. And so he said, "Oh, kill all this." So we had literally spent half of our engineering team building this complex approval system with ops and so on. Ops are super excited. They hired a lot of people and now he was telling us not to do it. And instead, do it in real time for every page that loads, because we had the JavaScript on it, we know what URL it is. Look at the content at that point. And we were like, "It's too slow. We won't be able to look at the content because it's billions of pages." "That's fine. Let it load for a hundred times. And after a hundred impressions, if any URL hits a hundred impressions, then start reviewing it." It actually makes sense. Not trying to put lots of checks upfront, but being intentional about where and why. Most things don't even get to the level where you care about them.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Gokul Rajaram
[00:00:00] S0: In both these amazing examples, and then you also said that Jack would do this across the company, not just in the product. How would you sum up the process of great design that you've observed from the people that are the best at design? What is the method that they're going through over and over again as they apply it to different parts of the company or product? [00:00:00] S1: The number one thing I've seen is they try to minimize the number of steps. Everything should be in one page and you need to cut down things. In fact, Jack called the product manager role product editor. Why? Because he believed rightly so that the role of the product manager is not to add more features. Any of us can look at a product and say, "Here's 10 things you should build." The best designers, the best product people edit down things. Similarly, we have a hundred features. What are the two things that really matter that will drive the customer outcome? So the best designers really will takes 10 pages of design and say, "Cut out all the extraneous stuff." So I think it's the process of editing, and this goes to judgment. In an AI age, humans with amazing judgment, which is really editorial capabilities, are the ones that are going to do well and thrive, I think. [00:00:00] S0: Apparently, Rick Rubin would say that he wasn't a producer, he was a reducer. [00:00:00] S1: Great example. Reducer. I like that.
· Gokul Rajaram, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S1: Great example. Reducer. I like that. [00:00:00] S0: I wonder how that applies also to communication. Maybe this is a fun opportunity to ask you about the format that you've alighted on that a leader can send to his team on a weekly basis, I think. It seems like this idea of reducing and simplifying can be applied in so many ways by great leaders. Talk about it in terms of communication from leadership to a team.
· Gokul Rajaram
[00:00:00] S1: One of the things that people, especially founders of startups, don't realize is – initially most startups start with two or three people and then they go to people who are all sitting in a room together. Everyone can hear what you're saying, but as soon as a company goes into, I think I call it two rooms, where they're not in the same room together, then you have to communicate. You have to let people know what's going on. And there are a few artifacts that companies need to start putting into place. One is the notion of an all hands. It seems cliched and unnecessary, but even with a 15%-20% company, just getting together once a week and basically just sharing what people have built and been working on in a way. And then having the leader address everyone or one of the leaders address everyone is a great way to get people together. The second thing is a weekly CEO email. And I think this is a very powerful way for the CEO to get across to the team what is on their mind. The best way I think is, that I've done myself – is during the course of the week, you start jotting down things that you think you want to communicate. And then you'd spend Sunday taking all of those things and adding it to two or three things that matter, that you want to get across. Most businesses, I think, can be communicated along three dimensions, product, business, and team. What's happening on the product? How is it becoming more remarkable or serving the customers better? What's happening to the business side? How are we doing better as a business? And then what's happening on the team front? Who have we added, subtracted? What changes have we made? And most importantly, don't be afraid of repetition. Because repeating it once, twice, thrice, four times. That's when actually it seeps into their bones.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Gokul Rajaram
[00:00:00] S0: What is the literal format that you do in your email? What is the structure that you do personally? [00:00:00] S1: I've used in the past, and what I recommend, and what people I've seen now – I've seen at least 15 CEOs adopt it, and to good effect. It’s three sections. One is called top of mind. So this is product, business, and team. Doesn't need to be all three. What's keeping you up at night? I think this is the thing that literally everyone is hanging on to. I mean, because I remember seeing it from Jack, from Mark, from Sheryl. Seeing it put in paper or put in an email is just so powerful. That's one. The second thing is performance update. I think everyone wants to truly understand how's the company doing? How's the company doing on the dimensions? This is where, especially being a startup, I think most people are one dimension removed from how the company is doing. They all want to know that they're doing well. I think this is the way. And the third is miscellaneous. There's things like recognizing specific people. It's quotes from customers. It's maybe an offsite announcement. But the most important section where you should spend 60% or 70% of your time on, is top of mind.
· Gokul Rajaram, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S1: I've used in the past, and what I recommend, and what people I've seen now – I've seen at least 15 CEOs adopt it, and to good effect. It’s three sections. One is called top of mind. So this is product, business, and team. Doesn't need to be all three. What's keeping you up at night? I think this is the thing that literally everyone is hanging on to. I mean, because I remember seeing it from Jack, from Mark, from Sheryl. Seeing it put in paper or put in an email is just so powerful. That's one. The second thing is performance update. I think everyone wants to truly understand how's the company doing? How's the company doing on the dimensions? This is where, especially being a startup, I think most people are one dimension removed from how the company is doing. They all want to know that they're doing well. I think this is the way. And the third is miscellaneous. There's things like recognizing specific people. It's quotes from customers. It's maybe an offsite announcement. But the most important section where you should spend 60% or 70% of your time on, is top of mind. [00:00:00] S0: How transparent should one be in that? As a leader of a business, I can tell you what’s top of mind, but a lot of it either might be sensitive, or I would worry about scaring people or worrying people about something that I'm thinking about or worrying about. What keeps me up at night might create stress in the business. Where should one draw the line in terms of how candid they are?