Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
· 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.
· Kareem Amin
[00:00:00] S1: I think when we were having that discussion too, my instinct is to go one level deeper, or at least that’s how it’s coming up in me. Let’s turn it back to one of our statues, Truth. You need to say the truth. So if you don’t have a vision, then you don’t have a vision. If you do have a vision, then you do have a vision. I think it’s important to not say something that actually isn’t happening. That’s my answer to that. Ultimately, I do think you need to have some guiding principle or some compass, but you don’t need that at all times, and you don’t need to force it. If you just know what the next step is, you should take the next step. And sometimes things happen in all kinds of ways. Most medical discoveries are complete coincidences. So many of the most advanced things — the cosmic microwave background — complete coincidence. You couldn’t have gone out and said, I want to discover the cosmic microwave background. There are so many of these things. And so I think we’re telling ourselves a story that is not true about the nature of discovery and how it happens. And I think we do a disservice to everybody when we go back and retell the story in a way that is not honest, because it confuses the people who are on the path of figuring it out. So for me, a much more honest version — let’s say you’re starting a company and you don’t know what to do. So many people have that problem. You’re like, okay, I want to start a company. I don’t even know why I want to start a company, but I feel like this is what I want to do. You don’t need to have a reason, and then you can go and start doing things. And once you find something, you can be like, okay, this is interesting to me now. All the stories of greatness are like, I was 13 and I saw this one thing and then I dedicated my whole life to it. And I think that happens, and it also happens in other ways.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Kareem Amin
[00:00:00] S0: Optimizing for discovery rather than destination would be one way to think about it. [00:00:00] S1: Leave the space for the opportunity to discover. If you do have a vision, you should be clear about that, and clear how confident you are in that. And if you don’t have a vision, I don’t think that’s a problem. I think you can take the next step and allow the vision to come. In Native American traditions, there are things called vision quests, where you go and fast for a few days and you’re asking for a vision. Sometimes you need to do things in order to get the vision of what you’re supposed to do. And by the way, in companies, it also could change over time. So you might have a vision, and then the vision is wrong. Or, a lot of companies that started five, six years ago — they’re confused now because things have changed. It’s time to change the vision, and you don’t need to settle on a new one immediately. You can say, hey, we don’t know what we’re doing right now, and we can take the immediate next step in what we’re doing right now and wait to receive that vision. [00:00:00] S0: Do you feel like you have a vision right now? [00:00:00] S1: Yeah, right now I feel pretty clear about what the vision is, within the scope of what we’re doing. We’re helping every company in the world find who their best customer is, find more of them, and accelerate that.