00:23:00 · Luca Ferrari
The returns will be on a excessively long timeframe, whereas we can amortize those investments across the entire portfolio and also the portfolio, our expectations of the portfolio expanding in the future. Future. So it's just a scale advantage that's unavailable and another big advantage in building this operating system is that as all of our businesses use all of these tools, when they find that one of these tools does not serve their needs as it should, perhaps there is a bug or a certain corner case is not handled or an entire area of need is not fully covered, that business can improve tool almost like if you were an in house open source community, and then those improvements are propagated to benefit all the other businesses. And so as we expand our portfolio and our organization grows, our ability to make these tools effective expands with it.
00:23:57 · Molly O'Shea
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00:25:50 · S1
[00:25:50] S1: I find this super fascinating because you've effectively created one operating system where you can use across anything. What was kind of like the unlock and how did you determine how to architect that system?
00:26:04 · Luca Ferrari
[00:26:04] S0: A lot of iteration, you know, one of the big lessons as an entrepreneur, my colleagues and I learned early at a failed startup in between 2010 and 2013 and some lessons we learned that were instrumental to building management was that you need to be intellectually humble. It's good to have a vision at the same time, it's good to assume they're probably wrong. And so for our technologies, we operate in a similar manner. We try to be opinionated on what ideal looks like, but then we never make multi year investments. And before we test them on the ground, we like to identify smaller pieces we can build, put in the hands of our different businesses to see if they're useful and depending on adoption reception, we will further develop or rethink. And also we, while we have platform teams who own all of these technologies, we have found that it's never a good idea to take a platform team and task them with building something entirely new. It's much better to have the people who need it build it. So we will identify one of our businesses where that particular tool will be especially important, and then they will build it themselves. And if it's, once it's successful or if it's successful, it'll be handed over to our platform teams to be further refined, expanded. And the reason why this works is that when you need something, when you have experienced the pain of a certain problem, you're far more likely to develop a... An actually useful solution as opposed to taking a more academic angle where you think you know what the problem is, and then you get more excited about the engineering challenge than actually solving the problem. So these are probably the two main principles. Iterate with small iteration cycles, quick iteration cycles with high levels of intellectual humility, assuming you're wrong, you wanna constantly test and and and confirm you... We are... You're in fact right. And if not, you know, just... And and to always start building with people who have faced the problem, people in the trenches, and as opposed to with centralized teams who are in an ivory tower and I haven't actually gotten their hands dirty with that particular issue.
00:28:20 · Luca Ferrari, S1
They're fine later to to refine, expand and manage, but I think when when you go from zero to one with a new technology, it's better to have it built if you if you have that possibility by the people who understand the issue very, very well. And for us, it's fine because ultimately we have engineers in our businesses and in the platform. So it's, you know, it's not that we lack the capabilities either way and we can move them around all the time. [00:28:48] S1: You're taking an extreme first principles approach to software companies, but you also have a bit of an algorithmic of bend to it. Where's the tension between the intuitive approach versus deploying a system?
00:29:05 · Luca Ferrari
[00:29:05] S0: I think you ultimately to get to the truth. If you had a perfect understanding of the truth of your relevant context, life broadly, your business and the market more narrowly, you would be almost guaranteed to succeed because you would not set objectives for yourself that are impossible. And those you set, which would presumably be possible unless you're mosaicistic, you would be almost guaranteed to reach them because you would know exactly. It's almost like if you're a physicist and you need to compute the trajectory of a ball, we have the formulae, we have the math, it's basically you're always gonna get it right, assuming you don't do calculation mistakes. Now the point is, it's very difficult to know the truth. It was very difficult to figure out how physical bodies behave, you know, through physics, thanks Newton and others, but it's in many ways equally difficult, sometimes more difficult to figure out how a business works, how the market works, because there are so many variables. It's a fast changing context. So I think it starts with taking a scientific approach of doing everything you can to probe the world, learn from those experiments, those observations, adjust your model of reality and then execute accordingly. So be highly disciplined and deliberate in improving your level of understanding of the truth. Again, takes a level of intellectual humility, intellectual honesty, that if you think your vision is right, you're perfect, already got the whole thing figured out, know, let me break the news, haven't, not even Steve Jobs, maybe one of the best ever doing, not even him had it all figured out, he failed repeatedly, so you haven't either. So you wanna, again, probe things, figure things out. I... Through through that process, I think of of approximation of toward the truth, you expand your competitive advantage, because most people don't have almost any understanding of the truth. Most people don't actually seek the truth. They seek pleasure or comfort and they wanna just confirm that they're right and they're good. Just that mindset, that scientific process of approximation toward the truth will set you apart and give you very good chances of succeeding.