00:38:39 · Sachin, Mina Radhakrishnan, Adam Miller
[00:38:39] S1: Yeah. And I think it's also asking yourself, do you need to be using AI as well? I've spoken to some friends that worked with some really notable fintech companies, for example, and the founders there were, like, really pushing, like, an AI first approach, but they didn't actually need it because this company, they had enough of a moat because of all the sort of regulations they're involved in, the difficult, payments infrastructure they were binding together. So some companies won't need AI. And so knowing, like, do you have a competitive advantage or not? [00:39:03] S0: Yeah. And I think, yes, maybe not on their day to day product. Right? But it's... I I think that there's always gonna be applications or AI. Whether or not it's about how your product teams work or where you go. And, of course, you have to be thoughtful. Think especially as a larger growing company, you don't wanna feed in all of your proprietary confidential data into servers randomly who knows where. But there's lots of tools to be able to come around that. Like, I just think AI is gonna be a huge part of how we build product and tech. [00:39:31] S2: What do you think makes a brilliant product manager?
00:39:34 · Mina Radhakrishnan
[00:39:34] S0: So here's my my thinking on on product management, Nolan. It's just... It's evolved a lot. Right? Like, in terms of, like, what do you need when you're building products or software products is you need someone to understand why it should do what it's supposed to do and how it's gonna be... Like, what it means for it to achieve it, be successful, and achieve its outcome in in an in an objective clear way. You need to know... Like, you need somebody who's actually gonna build it to, like, make the thing come to life, and then somebody who's gonna spend some time making sure that it actually, like, works in a way in which people want to use it. And so I think that, like, the traditional role of product management of just being like, oh, well, I just, like, figure out what it should do. Right? And I'll leave the rest of it to somebody else is gonna go away. And I think that people shouldn't be thinking about that. What a product manager should be doing is, I think, thinking about what is the best way to achieve this outcome, whether I'm building it or whether somebody else is building it or somebody else is designing it. And so I think it's it's somebody who... And, you know, maybe this is the theme is, like, who can ask why and and answer why, you know, in a very clear and in a very direct way because they should... And they should be able to do that, frankly, about anything. Like, it doesn't matter if they're talking about, like, you know, humanist philosophy and Dante or whether they're talking about, like, the intricate guts of their fintech product. It's it's that ability to understand and to explain.
00:40:58 · Sachin, Mina Radhakrishnan
[00:40:58] S1: Yeah. It seems like critical thinking and communication, I think, are just gonna become more and more important in the age of AI [00:41:04] S0: Yeah. [00:41:04] S1: Because you're still gonna need to be, like you said, like, if we can build technology so quickly, making sure it's going on the right path and you're not just building, at a really accelerating rate towards nothing that isn't actually going [00:41:15] S0: to use always to get these sweaty know, that does the random thing. Like, you've got to understand what it is that you're doing and why it's achieving it and how it's achieving it, and and you have to be able to describe that. [00:41:26] S1: Yeah. Maybe as we start to round out the episode, I know you're a board member on the tech council for a while, and we sort of touched on this before about the sort of Australian startup culture. And I'm assuming you have to think a lot about the ecosystem here and how people are building. Do you have any takes on what Australia could do or Australians could do to improve, start up culture here? Is there anything you think people are doing particularly wrong here?
00:41:51 · Mina Radhakrishnan
[00:41:51] S0: Like, I don't I don't know, like, if it's if it's wrong, Mercy. I I will say that I think one of the most powerful things about San Francisco, and we were talking about this a little bit earlier, is how it's such a pay it forward culture. The way in which people work and that community interacts with each other, it's like, what can I do to help? What do you need from me? What what can I provide? And not in mercenary way of, like, I'm gonna hold this as a favor, like, come back to you just because, like, I know I can help. Let me let me figure out how, and let me do it in that way. And everybody's very open about what they're working on because it's like, you know, it's like vision is like 1% of it and execution is 99%. The number of people, oh, I'm working on something stealth, something secret, something else. I was just like, really? Who cares? Like, if that's what you're working on, great. Like, I'm not gonna sit here and try and, like, poach your idea. So I think it's it's what we need to shift as a community as a whole is just to be much more open, much more, like, pay it forward, and just be be... Celebrate. I think to celebrate, like, the wins and the losses as a whole because there are gonna be losses. They're absolutely gonna be bad days. And that's okay. It's fine. We make our way through it. It's again... It's like with athletes, we talk about recovery. How you recover is actually one of the most important things. I'm I'm a big tennis fan. I'm terrible tennis player, but, like, I really love the game. And I remember reading this stat about, like, the the best tennis players in the world. Okay? And off there, like, I don't know if you guys are tennis fans, but, like, I'm sure you've heard, you know, Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic. Like, what percentage of points do you think the best player in the world's... Well, like, over all of their matches, right, out of a 100%, what percentage are points?
00:43:31 · Sachin, Mina Radhakrishnan
[00:43:31] S1: 55, is it? 55%. [00:43:33] S0: 54.95. That... That's the... That's, like, that's the greatest tennis player in the world. Right? Yeah. And, like, we're sitting here expecting people to be a 100 every single time. That's just not how it works. [00:43:46] S1: Yeah. Yeah. I think there's a lot of analogies there to being a founder. Like, a lot of what makes successful founders is this velocity of decision making, and no one's right a 100% of the time, but they're just incrementally more right. Yep. And then you quickly, you redirect yourself if you are wrong, and then you try and make that into a right decision.
00:43:46 · Sachin, Mina Radhakrishnan
[00:43:46] S1: Yeah. Yeah. I think there's a lot of analogies there to being a founder. Like, a lot of what makes successful founders is this velocity of decision making, and no one's right a 100% of the time, but they're just incrementally more right. Yep. And then you quickly, you redirect yourself if you are wrong, and then you try and make that into a right decision. [00:44:03] S0: Yeah. Yeah. One other thing that I think comes to mind now that you mentioned that is that I think that there's too many people who run startups in the way that they run big companies. Like, I just hear from a lot of people, like, there's a lot of, like, agonizing over decisions. And I don't know what... Don't... I'm not saying this is uniquely Australian. I'm just saying I've noticed a lot more with Australian founders of this agonizing over decisions. It's like, I really come back to this sliding this doors philosophy with Amazon, where it's a two way door and one way door. And it's like, you can change the decision. It's okay, but you gotta make it. You can't agonize over everything. And there's too many people, I think, who spend time thinking that two way doors are actually one way doors when they aren't. And and that's one of biggest things. Just move fast. Let's build. Let's really get it out there. Let's try and do a lot more things and may... See what see what comes.