Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
· Kareem Amin
[00:00:00] S1: I actually think the trickster thing is the thing that’s been a common thread between us. There’s this place called 69 Atlantic that we’d been going to — it’s a small speakeasy for magic, close-up magic. There were about 23 spaces in the back of this bookstore, and they get world-class magicians every month. And the thing that I remember from these really incredible magicians is that it’s not just a sleight-of-hand thing. There’s a storytelling component. It’s kind of wild. A lot of them are telling a story of a deep understanding of how your mind works or how the world works — where they’re like, hey, I’m showing you this thing, and really what they’re trying to do is spark curiosity. We’re gonna do something about this at Clay. We’re calling it re-enchanting the world. In a world where there is AI — it’s literally magic in some form. And to remember that this is magic, a lot of these things that we’re sitting in front of are still magic. It’s pretty wild. And to re-enchant the world again, and not make it this boring place where you think you understand how it works, ’cause you really don’t. So I think they’re doing simple things to reignite that feeling of wonder. And I think if you take that feeling of wonder into your everyday life, you’re a more friendly person, because you’re not like, oh, I understand how this person works, or how this works. You’re more curious. It makes you more curious about our customers. It makes us interact in a more pleasant way, because we’re like, oh, there’s stuff to learn here. I think what I’ve actually been getting from this magic stuff is remembering what it feels like to be like, I have no idea how this is working. I can’t even begin to comprehend how to think about it. I know that it’s a trick, but I can’t figure it out.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S0: For whatever reason, this makes me wonder the same question about music — the role that music plays and has played in your life, and what you’ve learned from your many, many experiences with music.
· Kareem Amin
[00:00:00] S1: I’m a dilettante musician, but I actually just started a band. I was talking to another famous musician who was calling me because he’s starting a company, and I’m like, wow, I’m going the opposite direction, man. But I was reading this piece that was super interesting for me. And one of the key things I think with music, versus other things, is time. You can’t listen to a song without time. Time is actually a core component, and silence is a core component — the spaces between things. So it’s a good reminder that those are fundamental things you have to work with. It’s very Zen — where the room isn’t is where we are. If this room was full of things, we couldn’t sit in here. And we only think about making things. We don’t think about removing things. And we don’t think about things unfolding. I think video is also like that, but a painting isn’t. You can see it all at once. So I think about narrative. How are you telling the story? How are you bringing people along with you on the journey? You can’t tell everyone everything all at once. It’s overwhelming, because you’ve had time to process. They haven’t. This piece that I was reading, it was talking about endings. We always think about beginnings, but we don’t really think about endings. When you’re starting a company, you’re not thinking, what about all the people that I’m going to fire? And so many crazy things genuinely happen. As soon as you have a large number of people, you’re dealing with a microcosm of humanity. You’re running like a mini society. So it was like, hey, we can look to music to think about the different forms of endings, and learn from that. Some songs end by just repeating, and it goes down in volume. Some things end suddenly, like a whimper, or with intensity. You can think of these as different ways to end something. Another one that I think is really cool — this was an essay that I read that was called The Emancipation of Dissonance, which first of all is a really cool title, but it was theorizing the history of music as a history of accepting more sounds as music. So in the beginning it was just maybe drumming. First it’s like the tonic — you play the C and then the C an octave above — and then it was adding the fifth. That’s why it’s called the perfect fifth. A lot of music had that.
· Kareem Amin, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
And then people started adding the third, which is what creates chords, minor and major chords. And initially that was resisted. People are like, what the hell is this? This feels off. But then you add the seventh, and you get jazz. And people were like, that’s unacceptable, this is not music. And then eventually you start to add more and more tones. So this was arguing — in Western music there are 12 notes, but in Arabic or Indian music there are 24. And there are other scales you can use that have even more tones. You can use microtones. Now that you have electronic music, you can make any kind of sound. I think this idea of accepting more sounds as music is actually a helpful product principle. Just a way of being where you can start to think, what are all these other ways of being that you think are off, that actually could be productive or useful if you put them in the right context? [00:00:00] S0: It also seems like an interesting through line — in the world we’re going into, how important it’ll be to make people feel something, but maybe also something new. If we can create anything — the logos of it all is yeah, whatever, you can create anything you want. So the pathos becomes really important on top of that. The insight from music is, make people feel something new.
· Kareem Amin
[00:00:00] S1: We use this a lot — to bring it back to the business, I guess. I’m telling people, hey, we’re not building a microwave. Microwaves are useful, but they’re commoditized. You just go and say, hey, one minute, heat it. It does what it needs to do. There’s no difference between most of them. But we’re building a guitar. With a guitar, there are just six strings and 12 frets, but you could spend your whole life just getting better at that. And you can be playing one style of music and it’s still new. If you bring that to sales, or go-to-market things, it can feel like a crazy stretch. If you actually respect that discipline and ask, hey, what’s the ultimate version of sales, marketing, or customer success? That’s why it’s called go-to-market, in my opinion. It’s just, how do I take the thing I made and give it to you when you need it? If I really, truly asked, hey, what’s the idealized form of this? That’s what it is. It’s raining, I bring an umbrella, you’re like, great, thank you. That’s what you actually want to get to. And I think there’s a place where I made something — especially as people make so many new things — and you happen to need it, and it’s very niche, and I’m able to find you and give it to you without necessarily manufacturing that desire in you. Ideally, if you need something, we can get it for you because we happen to be making it. We’re thinking about all of the creative ways to figure that out.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S0: One really interesting conversation you and I have had before is about the role of vision in company building, and the leader’s responsibility — or lack thereof — to have one in the first place, or to have one sometimes. I’d love you to riff on the leader’s role and responsibility to have or not have a vision.