00:04:39 · Praveer Melwani, Seema Amble
[00:04:39] S0: By many hours. Yeah. And you hope you got it right the first And then we eventually hired data scientists, and I'd go and tap them and say, hey. I have this thing I went and built. Can you go and add it to our ETL process so it goes and there's a recurring job that I can then use that same information and pass it to Salesforce or Marketo or whatever systems that we were using at the time. And that was like the initial sort of unlock for me of, oh my gosh, if I can get consistent in our definitions in the way that we're talking about things, no longer are we ever debating, like, what's true and what's fact. And we can just get past that and really focus on how are we actually gonna go and drive the business. [00:05:09] S1: I was talking to someone who was in their early twenties who was complaining about how long a prompt takes to run. And I was explaining to them, you've not lived the pain of hours on hours of waiting for a SQL query to to run and then only to come back and be like, shit. It didn't totally work. And so, yeah, it's... It is just an order of magnitude.
00:05:09 · Seema Amble, Ivan Makarov
[00:05:09] S1: I was talking to someone who was in their early twenties who was complaining about how long a prompt takes to run. And I was explaining to them, you've not lived the pain of hours on hours of waiting for a SQL query to to run and then only to come back and be like, shit. It didn't totally work. And so, yeah, it's... It is just an order of magnitude. [00:05:28] S2: Totally. Yep. Yeah. The time is really interesting. Right? Especially the era that we've lived through. When I was at Webflow at Figma, we saw, for example, a huge spike in usage in COVID that I could not believe in the beginning. Know. It's experienced it this way too, where I thought our data was broken or something else was broken, but it took us weeks to figure it out. Yeah. And I feel like today, in this day and age, we live in a day where you could figure it out to an hour. With some of the spikes, some of the usage revenue as well. This is a very different world we live in. Did you experience that as well?
00:05:55 · Praveer Melwani, Ivan Makarov
[00:05:55] S0: I mean, yeah. I mean, our business took off during the early days of the pandemic. I think that was actually the time where we started to partner with the folks at Andreessen. It was, like, right at the early stages over there. But, yeah, I mean, I wake up every day. I mean, I have the ability to go and rebuild my context on what's happening, and then at any moment during the day, the team loves it when I'm... I don't know if they love it, but they know that I'm constantly in there going and taking a look at, you know, hourly dashboards or sort of daily metrics on things to make sure that I'm also sourcing things that I think maybe look like anomalies or asking the right questions. And I think they view me similarly to how they view their role within the organization as, you know, a counterpart who has ideas, who wants to come to them, and truly build the best business possible, all using and having access to the same data available to each other. [00:06:33] S2: Yeah. What's interesting, like, when you and I went to college around that time, that was more of a monthly or quarterly cadence, and then it became a weekly cadence. I remember maybe... Especially with data moving more into the cloud, it became like, let's have a big weekly dashboard to where now what's possible is daily. Has that changed your habits the way you even just look at...
00:06:51 · Praveer Melwani
[00:06:51] S0: Think about data? How often you think about it all? Honestly, I view data and having access to it as the key unlock to how I can run my day effectively. And so throughout my time at Figma, was the thing that I would wake up every day and I... Yeah. I remember there would be, 30 people that would sign up for a paid plan in those first few days when I joined, I'd go through line by line who are they? Are they personal addresses? Are they business addresses? Are they people that we can reach out to? What can I learn from this to help us inform what we eventually built, which was our organization's product? And I think early days, it's extremely important. And then now, I just understand the repercussions of movement in any one direction. And if you catch something before it becomes a big deal, it can actually save the business, like, hundreds, thousands of dollars. But if you catch it in the other direction, you can really put more juice behind it and really seek to unlock in the other way. So if anything, like, I view this as, like, a daily, if not more than that rhythm. And I think the goal for me is how do I empower other folks on my team and across the business to similarly feel the accountability to those same metrics and truly act as business owners and want to go and triage things and not say, like, hey. I can wait till next week. Like, you do need to solve it sooner rather than later because I do think the rhythms here are moving really rapidly.
00:07:59 · Seema Amble, Praveer Melwani, Ivan Makarov
[00:07:59] S1: And before we get into what you've automated, we'd love to hear a little bit about what made someone a great hire on your team, a great person in the leadership role, maybe pre AI. [00:08:11] S0: I think, I mean, honestly, lot of similar things today, but I think that you'd apply them slightly differently. I want folks that feel extremely intellectually curious. You're coming in and trying to solve and try to understand the business really well and then seek to problem solve in a way that was trying to drive the right outcome. I don't think that necessarily has changed today. Like, I still very much value that. I do think that you can make a lot of the tedious tasks or the repetitive nature of things feel like they take less and less of your time so that you can spend more and more of your time really trying to seek how you can find the places of magic within the business that you can go and supercharge. So intellectual curiosity, fluency with data, ability to ask really solid questions, and then structure your thoughts in ways where you can actually make sense of the data that's being given back to you and then thoughtfully communicate it on the other side of it. [00:08:59] S2: How do you interview for that?
00:08:59 · Ivan Makarov, Praveer Melwani
[00:08:59] S2: How do you interview for that? [00:09:00] S0: It's interesting. Right now, I'm hiring for VP finance, and the case study part of the process for me is so, so sacred. I wanna both test for, like, how are you using the tools available to you? So, yes, I fully expect folks to... I don't give them a lot of information as part of this case study. We're a public company, I get the benefit of a lot of data out there. But how you actually piece those puzzle pieces together in a way that actually makes sense, the model output makes sense. You have the ability not just to go and create that output, but you truly understand how it works. So then I focus the case study conversation on have you really, really understood the structure that you've created? Have you molded it in a way where you've tested what are the highest... What are the pieces of that model that are the the most sensitive to any change? Do you have a strong intuition on how the business is actually working using the tool that you've created? And then, like we were just talking about, can you effectively communicate that? Because, yes, I think anyone can go and create, like, a model sitting in... Pick your favorite LM. You can go and do that really easily. But are you using it as an effective tool that, like, actually is enabling you to think? I think you don't wanna outsource your thinking today. Like, I think you wanna use AI as a tool to help you and empower you, but it's really, really critical to still be that thinker.