(highlight:: Life Strategy: Stay Alive and Play the Infinite Game After Achieving Product Market Fit
Transcript:
Speaker 1
You want to have an infinite mindset. You want to have this open generative kind of like we're doing it for its own sake. It's a really powerful, powerfully positive perspective, but you live in a finite world. And the reality is you got to pay your bills, you know, rent or mortgage or whatever. And, and so there's a, my rule of thumb generally is one, stay alive. Make sure the product, get to product market fit. And I mean that for your product, for your career, for your, make sure that if people ask to go, you know, no, like you want to minimize number of people who go, huh, why is that product exist? Why is that person, why is that person employed here? You want to minimize our people say that that's your, that's your lower bound. And this is not like a, and then this is your survivability. Now once you survive, you now are in a position where your runway is longer because by default, people will survive because people think that you're adding value and doing a useful thing Where your product is. And from there, you can now take an infinite mindset where you start saying, I've run my is effectively infinitely long, I can be placing small bets. I can be doing things that have indirect value.)
- Time 0:09:00
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(highlight:: Communicating the Unmeasurable Value You Bring: Be Credible, Be Authentic, Be Rigorous
Transcript:
Speaker 2
There's a lot of stuff that can't be measured that still matters. How do you make that sales pitch? How do you convince leadership to give you the rope?
Speaker 1
Honestly, it's really hard. And the answer is that I found is two things. One, I make sure I add, I earn credibility that I, by adding direct value and people see that I don't like that I am authentic, that I will do, I will apply rigor to what I work on and I'll focus On making sure the right thing happens from the broadest possible perspective and that everybody I interact with, I try to have that come away with that. Like you earn the credibility to get the benefit of the doubt and say, I can't, I cannot prove this thing to you, but I do think this is going to maximize the value. You're going to take a little bit of a risk. And so they need to, I need to have that credibility in the first place. The second thing, honestly, the part in my career where I got 10x, what I believe to be my broader impact was when I stopped trying to get promoted. And I just said, you know what, I'm okay, never getting promoted ever again. I achieved director at, which was, you know, a long slog and like, I did it, yay. And like, cool, I don't care to everyone ever again in my life. Not because people who know me, like it's not because like, oh, I'm just taking it easy. I kind of a hard time taking it easy. So spun up with creative ideas and talking to interesting people and connecting up interesting people. And that was when it was started being like, oh, I can just focus on indirect value. I don't have to focus like every perforview system, every single one. Oh, man, we finally fixed the problem in our perf system, our company. No, you didn't. Of course you didn't. Because again, it's scarce rewards with directly measurable things. You will get good hearts law. There is no way to fix this because fundamentally impossible to, because like, how do you differentiate between somebody who is says they're adding indirect value, W actually is. It's really hard to do it in any direct way. You can't run the counterfactuals. And so it becomes down to this kind of like, I don't know, but like, I really would want to work with that person again, because I feel like there are, you know, a multiplier, a force multiplier On the outcomes. So I just say, you know what? I don't care to be legible to a purpose system anymore.)
- Time 0:13:32
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(highlight:: Innovating from the Adjacent Possible: Why Big Bold Bets Don't Work
Transcript:
Speaker 1
So I firmly believe that basically everything of any import that has ever happened in society or the physical world is a set of adjacent possible things. Things are actually viable ideas that are then put in place from the adjacent possible and then now become a stepping stone onto something else. And so like, I, we're like, oh, I'll have a big bold bet. I hate big bold bets. I want to see a constantly stretching the adjacent possible for viable ideas and then building up into something much, much larger. So someone says, I'm going to have this great ecosystem. You know, all these different parts of all these things. It's like, me, the only proof that that idea works is the existence of such an ecosystem behaving as you describe. It's I can, I can point out very often ahead of times why is extremely unlikely a given ecosystem frame will work. Hey, you're doing value capture at every layer of the stack and you have no all the benefit is theoretical. If you had a network effect going and you don't have that yet, like, it's almost certainly is not going to work.)
- Time 0:22:02
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(highlight:: Building Platforms/Networks: Start with a simple community and strategically cultivate it
Transcript:
Speaker 1
And so like in an ecosystem, you're doing super duper simple. You make it so that there's like a, you know, a place to a message board or something. And then when you see somebody come in, it's our asking questions, you fan the flames and you answer their question in that space and you make sure it looks like a very active place and, You know, there's lots of tricks for this. So in your message board, what you do is people think come in, you want to make sure it looks alive. You don't want anyone to look at it and go, is this actually still like, is this product still working? Is anyone actually going to respond to this? You want to go to look at and think this community is alive, this community is thriving. And so then what you want to do is make sure it's not just, you know, you responding to everything. Ideally you want other people to be responding to it. So what you'll do is if someone asks you a question directly, you say, Hey, that's a great question. Can you be a favorite? Can you ask on the public message board? And then nobody knows that you did that behind the scenes. All they see is this person proactively went out and did this thing. I guess this is the kind of place where people did proactively ask questions no matter how silly they might sound. And then you answer it there. And now other people see, Oh, and it's the kind of place that people will answer. And then what happens at a certain point, once a community gets going, you want somebody else from the community who doesn't work for you to answer the question for them. That is gold when that happens because it is a, it shows the community is thriving. People care enough to come here and actually do some work to help other people in the community, which is shows extraordinary motivation and shows that you have something very, very
Speaker 2
Real happening in your ecosystem.)
- Time 0:23:38
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(highlight:: Every Community is a Spin Off of an Existing One
Transcript:
Speaker 2
This sort of ongoing debate, like on the one hand, it seems like there are downsides to trying to like enter an existing ecosystem or community. You know, obviously you can be, you can come across as a mercenary or you can, or you can, you know, a lot of ways to do it wrong or you can just not have control over the direction. But building from scratch, I don't know, it just seems like a fool's errand if it feels like community is something that has to emerge organically.
Speaker 1
And so one way looking at this is every single community and every single like thriving system has grown out of a previously thriving system. It's not possible everything everywhere has grown out of the same life force from back to the first organism and before indirectly. So you can borrow like a, you know, this, this community is a raging bonfire is awesome. And like a little spark goes out over here and then that starts in the growth of the larger. So every single community all the way back to the beginning of time, we trace back. So like you, there's no new community, it has somebody who has a existing motivation or energy and you're looking for not so much to steal it because it's a, it's a positive something You, you know, creates more energy and motivation when it starts going. So you're looking for people in communities of like, Oh, wow, these people have a problem that they really want this particular thing solved. I can help solve that problem. I'm going to go talk to them. I'm going to say, and you like generally my rule of thumb is you should know your top, you should know your three concrete customers banging down the door saying, when can I use your thing? I need it right now. And that demonstrates extremely clear motivation. And that's your starting point. And then from there, you'll see, you'll see your spark. And then from there, you can grow that into a community. Another rule of thumb is if you have customers crawling through broken glass to do a thing, that is a thing that you would like to, that they're glad that they are doing. That's a really great sign that you have a product market fit and almost certainly an easy thing to do to grow your, your, your market share is to reduce the amount of broken glass that To crawl through, because there's almost certainly other people right next to them who do not have quite as high of a paint tolerance. So you lower the bar or paint tolerance required and you'll almost certainly unlock adjacent demand. And the question is, is that enough to have a plausible enough, you know, to support your valuation, your intended size and scope of your, of your opportunity? That's another question.)
- Time 0:25:24
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(highlight:: Platforms Are Meant for Value Extraction, Not Specific Use Cases
Transcript:
Speaker 1
Another thing I hate when people say, what's the killer use case for your platform? The entire point of having a platform is that you don't need to know the killer use case. If you knew the killer use case, you would just build that thing and charge a premium for it. So the entire point is that you go from one thing that you build being the way that you extract value to anything that anyone builds, you get some value out of and you have a six amount of Relationship. That is a game changingly different thing. It is fundamentally different. People will ask, I think I believe it to be fundamentally impossible to make a platform argument from concrete examples. I think it requires an abstract argument and some people just won't go there. They just won't agree and they'll say, I'll say, another thing that happens a lot of ecosystems they go, what does somebody does? I think that we don't like in our ecosystem. Ecosystems are messy. That's the point. The mess is the magic. It's where all the energy comes from to do interesting things that you didn't think about. That's the entire point. So people say, I want to be messy. It will definitely be messy. Now you can do things to hide the mess from most of your end users, but you fundamentally do have to have it be messy. Otherwise it's not. It's like it's potential energy isn't very high.)
- Time 0:29:09
- use cases, platforms, value extraction,

Doing Experimental Things (With a Product or Team Requires Achieving Existing Product Market Fit
Transcript:
Speaker 2
So like if we can build this, you know, increase our luck surface, build this broader platform and then we get to observe how users behave, there's an obvious beauty to that. And there's so many examples of that working. There is also plenty of basically, I don't have a product. I don't even have a problem to solve. I'm just going to put out some stuff and then just like hope that, you know, product led growth becomes, I put out stuff and then I hope that people start using it in ways and find a use case. And that's kind of more like on the fringes of like maybe what would move out of being an actual business but be more like open source communities and experimental things, which are very Needed. When it comes to like a business, what are some of the guardrails you put on when you're sort of like trying to create space for these platforms to evolve and emerge? What are the place that you say, okay, we got to rein it in at some point.
Speaker 1
When you do the luck surface area move, you have to be able to survive for a long time. You have to have effectively infinite runway. So if you don't get a product market fit for your product or I'm using product also a team within an organization where people are like, why don't we have that team again? Like then you don't have product market fit. Then your horizon is your runway is short and you like so this method only works if you will survive for long enough. You will survive for long enough. You can plant some of these seeds so you have exposure to if an ecosystem starts showing up, you can start moving. But if it doesn't, like what's one of the cool things about seeds? You plan to see a seed that you can sit there for a thousand years sometimes and then grow when the conditions are right. That's awesome. If you need to go right now or otherwise we're going to go bust, probably you did the wrong business model then because you didn't start from concrete enough demand or so you can't do the Luck surface area thing unless you'll survive for a long time.
Speaker 2
Yeah, it's interesting. One of the we recently, a previous episode, I think it was just the last episode we're talking with the CEO of Impact, which is a platform for, well, it started as a platform just to manage Affiliate marketers. So if you have a bunch of affiliate marketers that you're connected with, you can manage your whole process there. And they just started to notice all of these companies and brands were using it in all these different ways. They weren't just partnering with normal affiliates. They were doing all these weird, bizarre partnership types that they had never, and they for a while they just let them do it and they just called them non-traditional sort of use cases And they're just like whatever. They go in this bucket, fine. And eventually those became like such a large part. They became like almost bigger than the sort of traditional and they're like, okay, maybe that is maybe they're the ones that are doing the normal thing and we're just calling it non-traditional. They're almost like forced to become to broaden their platform, but that's because they had already nailed one. They had product market fit in one relatively tight area. And that kind of gave them the permission to say, okay, now let's go crazy. How broad can we get? What can we do here now that we've got something that pays the bills?
Speaker 1
Yeah, exactly. That totally tracks us like, yeah, we build it as a product that is good enough on its own to at least keep on going and they just make bringing in enough money to like extend our runway for Longer. And now we have this positive exposure. And sometimes what happens is people use your ecosystem and you're like, wait a second, they're doing this thing that like completely goes against their entire business model. And like if they use that, then like we don't exist anymore. And it kind of, so you get, you can get stuck in some of these situations where you don't. So ideally what you want is the ecosystem to do like surprising things that you're like, huh, that's kind of cool. Or like, huh, I'm okay with that. Like that's, you know, that's a, but when you have that, compounding growth dominates linear growth over time, it will crowd out linear growth in your like, fundamentally. So people, people, this thing where they're like, well, this thing is going to grow at linear rates like this. And this is going to go to linear rates like this. How's your thing to do? If there is a compounding loop, which ecosystem do have a compounding loop and it works, then it will dominate the other ones. End of story, like you don't need to go. I don't know. It's going to be 23.2 and 25.8. Like you don't know, but you do know that the compounding growth will dominate the linear growth at nearby it if it does become compounding growth.
Speaker 2
Yeah. Yeah. You know, I'm curious, Alex, your thoughts on, because we've been talking primarily about sort of the architecture or the infrastructure of a platform of an ecosystem or of a community. I'm curious your thoughts on like what might be called the brand or maybe just we say reputation because when I think about thriving ecosystems, I mean, even even take programming languages, There's because we're dealing with humans, humans care about status. They care about belonging. They care about being cool. And so when you look and you're like, okay, what am I going to, you know, what language am I going to use to build this thing? Well, I love this community over here. They're really cool. I like going to their conferences. I like this community. Even if the code is better, if it works better for this use, they're kind of like not cool, right? And that plays a role. So we've been dealing with companies, like certain companies just have an aura. People just want to be around to them.)
- Time 0:30:44
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(highlight:: 2min Snip
Transcript:
Speaker 2
Yeah. Yeah. You know, I'm curious, Alex, your thoughts on, because we've been talking primarily about sort of the architecture or the infrastructure of a platform of an ecosystem or of a community. I'm curious your thoughts on like what might be called the brand or maybe just we say reputation because when I think about thriving ecosystems, I mean, even even take programming languages, There's because we're dealing with humans, humans care about status. They care about belonging. They care about being cool. And so when you look and you're like, okay, what am I going to, you know, what language am I going to use to build this thing? Well, I love this community over here. They're really cool. I like going to their conferences. I like this community. Even if the code is better, if it works better for this use, they're kind of like not cool, right? And that plays a role. So we've been dealing with companies, like certain companies just have an aura. People just want to be around to them. They want to be a part of their ecosystem. They want to brag about it. And like, how can you be deliberate about that? Because that's where you often get, this is where marketers will get, will catch shit for being too vague and abstract, right? They'll be like, well, we just had to create this brand and create this feeling and, you know, right? C-suite is like, show me the ROI. What role do you think that like brand and reputation and that part of the, you know, plays into things?
Speaker 1
I think brand reputation is extremely critical. And by the way, I don't think it's just the human nature of like, oh, we're status seeking monkeys and that's in some random back. But it's a reason we're status seeking monkeys. It's because status does confer in a scarce environment. Like, like, there's like, there's a lot of these heuristics that like actually make sense that humans do.)
- Time 0:34:49
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(highlight:: The Correlation Between Accessibility/Authenticity and Polish in Branding
Transcript:
Speaker 1
So I was just a small interview of someone, the lead of the economist, which is talking about, you know, type those are road credibility because they demonstrate that like we aren't They kind of puncture this view of us as, you know, thoughtful and judge, you know, holistically understanding everything. So like, type was looking, obsessing over type was as a tactic to make to have polish, which is kind of fits with a, who earn credibility, but it's a tactic. Sometimes the tactic is, I'm going to be really authentic. I'm going to have a podcast where I talk to a bunch of people and it's going to be me and I'm going to, you know, be very present as the CEO and founder in the message board is very authentic About your right. That's a, that's a bug or a gap in our functionality. We that love to just just being real as opposed like this. We're perfect.
Speaker 2
And we're going to, you know, it's like, it's almost like the, there's like a, there's a continuum or a trade up between, or a correlation rather between accessibility and polish. So like the more accessible you are, the more it matters that you don't have time. I bows and things like that because it shows that you're like putting in time. It's a good signal. The less accessible you are, like people love that Elon Musk will just tweet something really quick and it's not, it doesn't have perfect grammar because it makes them feel like, or Like they go, people go on Joe Rogan and just talking an off the cuff manner. It makes them feel like I'm just entering this guy's daily life stream of consciousness. He's not polishing anything or running it by legal or HR first. In that case, that's great. Some unknown person who has no, nobody begging for their time and is very accessible in general, just spewing out a bunch of badly, you know, spelled stuff. It's not going to have the same effect, right?)
- Time 0:38:40
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(highlight:: "Somtimed Living People the Opportunity to do You a Favor Creates More Value for Them"
Transcript:
Speaker 2
It's almost like I like to use the analogy if like my best friend says, hey, I'm moving in, will you come help me move on Saturday? And I'm like, yeah, if he said, hey, if you help me move on Saturday, I'll give you 20 bucks. I would be less likely.
Speaker 1
I'd be a. Exactly. I feel like, what the hell, man, I know you like I'm doing this because I care about this relationship in like the, like the commitment that we've done and like the credibility and trust That we've earned in one another. And like you're going to see here and cheapen it with this thing, this transactional thing.
Speaker 2
Like sometimes, sometimes giving someone the opportunity to do you a favor actually creates more value for them, right? 100% and making it transaction.
Speaker 1
I think I'll be jaded. This is one of the weird tricks I picked up at some point is like asking specific people to do favors when you were in an authentic trusting train, like non transactional kind of looking Out for one another kind of relationship. It does bring people closer and yet to be really careful because some of these tools, a lot of these tricks, by the way, tactics are morally or amoral, which is to say they can be used for Good and they can be used for ill.)
- Time 0:48:02
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(highlight:: Slime Mold: Embracing Silos and Autonomy as Organizational Complexity Grows
Transcript:
Speaker 2
As an organization grows in size, the complexity increases and there's this tendency like really hard to get things done. You get kind of bureaucratic and you say that this like using the slime mold as an analogy is kind of the best way to deal with these inevitable problems. Can you give us like the give us like the two minute, give us the elevator pitch on this?
Speaker 1
So the elevator pitch is first of all, it's told in emoji football style, which is a as a aesthetic choice, I kind of tripped across and like turns out to really work for that kind of that Kind of argument. And the the better point is everybody who's been in any organization ever knows that organizations that once were successful and fast moving and able to do a bunch of stuff over time As they grow become it just almost impossible to anything done. And this effect arises fundamentally based on size of number of people interacting on a project, a fundamental like probabilistic way. It's an inescapable course of gravity that's hidden that we all kind of ignore and pretend doesn't exist, which makes us all feel frankly kind of gassed lit and working really, really Hard to accomplish in quite a bit less. And the answer, the way that you address these things are almost exactly the exact opposite of what you people think. So people think, okay, I got to be more heroic, I got to throw more spread sheet coordination spreadsheets into it. And like, no, no, it's not how that work. Like you need to pull back, you need to create a little bit more slack, you have to be okay with something being good enough for now and then on a path to eventual convergence. You to people say, oh, we should break down boundaries and silos. Actually boundaries and silos are precisely the answer to how you address some of these things. Just make sure that the individual things are talking to each other well enough that they can be independent and autonomous and yet also on a path to convergence and in a path to sort of Coherence. So it's a, people have told me they have cried reading that deck.)
- Time 0:51:08
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(highlight:: Life Strategy: Stay Alive and Play the Infinite Game After Achieving Product Market Fit
Transcript:
Speaker 1
You want to have an infinite mindset. You want to have this open generative kind of like we're doing it for its own sake. It's a really powerful, powerfully positive perspective, but you live in a finite world. And the reality is you got to pay your bills, you know, rent or mortgage or whatever. And, and so there's a, my rule of thumb generally is one, stay alive. Make sure the product, get to product market fit. And I mean that for your product, for your career, for your, make sure that if people ask to go, you know, no, like you want to minimize number of people who go, huh, why is that product exist? Why is that person, why is that person employed here? You want to minimize our people say that that's your, that's your lower bound. And this is not like a, and then this is your survivability. Now once you survive, you now are in a position where your runway is longer because by default, people will survive because people think that you're adding value and doing a useful thing Where your product is. And from there, you can now take an infinite mindset where you start saying, I've run my is effectively infinitely long, I can be placing small bets. I can be doing things that have indirect value.)
- Time 0:09:00
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(highlight:: Communicating the Unmeasurable Value You Bring: Be Credible, Be Authentic, Be Rigorous
Transcript:
Speaker 2
There's a lot of stuff that can't be measured that still matters. How do you make that sales pitch? How do you convince leadership to give you the rope?
Speaker 1
Honestly, it's really hard. And the answer is that I found is two things. One, I make sure I add, I earn credibility that I, by adding direct value and people see that I don't like that I am authentic, that I will do, I will apply rigor to what I work on and I'll focus On making sure the right thing happens from the broadest possible perspective and that everybody I interact with, I try to have that come away with that. Like you earn the credibility to get the benefit of the doubt and say, I can't, I cannot prove this thing to you, but I do think this is going to maximize the value. You're going to take a little bit of a risk. And so they need to, I need to have that credibility in the first place. The second thing, honestly, the part in my career where I got 10x, what I believe to be my broader impact was when I stopped trying to get promoted. And I just said, you know what, I'm okay, never getting promoted ever again. I achieved director at, which was, you know, a long slog and like, I did it, yay. And like, cool, I don't care to everyone ever again in my life. Not because people who know me, like it's not because like, oh, I'm just taking it easy. I kind of a hard time taking it easy. So spun up with creative ideas and talking to interesting people and connecting up interesting people. And that was when it was started being like, oh, I can just focus on indirect value. I don't have to focus like every perforview system, every single one. Oh, man, we finally fixed the problem in our perf system, our company. No, you didn't. Of course you didn't. Because again, it's scarce rewards with directly measurable things. You will get good hearts law. There is no way to fix this because fundamentally impossible to, because like, how do you differentiate between somebody who is says they're adding indirect value, W actually is. It's really hard to do it in any direct way. You can't run the counterfactuals. And so it becomes down to this kind of like, I don't know, but like, I really would want to work with that person again, because I feel like there are, you know, a multiplier, a force multiplier On the outcomes. So I just say, you know what? I don't care to be legible to a purpose system anymore.)
- Time 0:13:32
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(highlight:: Innovating from the Adjacent Possible: Why Big Bold Bets Don't Work
Transcript:
Speaker 1
So I firmly believe that basically everything of any import that has ever happened in society or the physical world is a set of adjacent possible things. Things are actually viable ideas that are then put in place from the adjacent possible and then now become a stepping stone onto something else. And so like, I, we're like, oh, I'll have a big bold bet. I hate big bold bets. I want to see a constantly stretching the adjacent possible for viable ideas and then building up into something much, much larger. So someone says, I'm going to have this great ecosystem. You know, all these different parts of all these things. It's like, me, the only proof that that idea works is the existence of such an ecosystem behaving as you describe. It's I can, I can point out very often ahead of times why is extremely unlikely a given ecosystem frame will work. Hey, you're doing value capture at every layer of the stack and you have no all the benefit is theoretical. If you had a network effect going and you don't have that yet, like, it's almost certainly is not going to work.)
- Time 0:22:02
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(highlight:: Building Platforms/Networks: Start with a simple community and strategically cultivate it
Transcript:
Speaker 1
And so like in an ecosystem, you're doing super duper simple. You make it so that there's like a, you know, a place to a message board or something. And then when you see somebody come in, it's our asking questions, you fan the flames and you answer their question in that space and you make sure it looks like a very active place and, You know, there's lots of tricks for this. So in your message board, what you do is people think come in, you want to make sure it looks alive. You don't want anyone to look at it and go, is this actually still like, is this product still working? Is anyone actually going to respond to this? You want to go to look at and think this community is alive, this community is thriving. And so then what you want to do is make sure it's not just, you know, you responding to everything. Ideally you want other people to be responding to it. So what you'll do is if someone asks you a question directly, you say, Hey, that's a great question. Can you be a favorite? Can you ask on the public message board? And then nobody knows that you did that behind the scenes. All they see is this person proactively went out and did this thing. I guess this is the kind of place where people did proactively ask questions no matter how silly they might sound. And then you answer it there. And now other people see, Oh, and it's the kind of place that people will answer. And then what happens at a certain point, once a community gets going, you want somebody else from the community who doesn't work for you to answer the question for them. That is gold when that happens because it is a, it shows the community is thriving. People care enough to come here and actually do some work to help other people in the community, which is shows extraordinary motivation and shows that you have something very, very
Speaker 2
Real happening in your ecosystem.)
- Time 0:23:38
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(highlight:: Every Community is a Spin Off of an Existing One
Transcript:
Speaker 2
This sort of ongoing debate, like on the one hand, it seems like there are downsides to trying to like enter an existing ecosystem or community. You know, obviously you can be, you can come across as a mercenary or you can, or you can, you know, a lot of ways to do it wrong or you can just not have control over the direction. But building from scratch, I don't know, it just seems like a fool's errand if it feels like community is something that has to emerge organically.
Speaker 1
And so one way looking at this is every single community and every single like thriving system has grown out of a previously thriving system. It's not possible everything everywhere has grown out of the same life force from back to the first organism and before indirectly. So you can borrow like a, you know, this, this community is a raging bonfire is awesome. And like a little spark goes out over here and then that starts in the growth of the larger. So every single community all the way back to the beginning of time, we trace back. So like you, there's no new community, it has somebody who has a existing motivation or energy and you're looking for not so much to steal it because it's a, it's a positive something You, you know, creates more energy and motivation when it starts going. So you're looking for people in communities of like, Oh, wow, these people have a problem that they really want this particular thing solved. I can help solve that problem. I'm going to go talk to them. I'm going to say, and you like generally my rule of thumb is you should know your top, you should know your three concrete customers banging down the door saying, when can I use your thing? I need it right now. And that demonstrates extremely clear motivation. And that's your starting point. And then from there, you'll see, you'll see your spark. And then from there, you can grow that into a community. Another rule of thumb is if you have customers crawling through broken glass to do a thing, that is a thing that you would like to, that they're glad that they are doing. That's a really great sign that you have a product market fit and almost certainly an easy thing to do to grow your, your, your market share is to reduce the amount of broken glass that To crawl through, because there's almost certainly other people right next to them who do not have quite as high of a paint tolerance. So you lower the bar or paint tolerance required and you'll almost certainly unlock adjacent demand. And the question is, is that enough to have a plausible enough, you know, to support your valuation, your intended size and scope of your, of your opportunity? That's another question.)
- Time 0:25:24
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(highlight:: Platforms Are Meant for Value Extraction, Not Specific Use Cases
Transcript:
Speaker 1
Another thing I hate when people say, what's the killer use case for your platform? The entire point of having a platform is that you don't need to know the killer use case. If you knew the killer use case, you would just build that thing and charge a premium for it. So the entire point is that you go from one thing that you build being the way that you extract value to anything that anyone builds, you get some value out of and you have a six amount of Relationship. That is a game changingly different thing. It is fundamentally different. People will ask, I think I believe it to be fundamentally impossible to make a platform argument from concrete examples. I think it requires an abstract argument and some people just won't go there. They just won't agree and they'll say, I'll say, another thing that happens a lot of ecosystems they go, what does somebody does? I think that we don't like in our ecosystem. Ecosystems are messy. That's the point. The mess is the magic. It's where all the energy comes from to do interesting things that you didn't think about. That's the entire point. So people say, I want to be messy. It will definitely be messy. Now you can do things to hide the mess from most of your end users, but you fundamentally do have to have it be messy. Otherwise it's not. It's like it's potential energy isn't very high.)
- Time 0:29:09
- use cases, platforms, value extraction,

Doing Experimental Things (With a Product or Team Requires Achieving Existing Product Market Fit
Transcript:
Speaker 2
So like if we can build this, you know, increase our luck surface, build this broader platform and then we get to observe how users behave, there's an obvious beauty to that. And there's so many examples of that working. There is also plenty of basically, I don't have a product. I don't even have a problem to solve. I'm just going to put out some stuff and then just like hope that, you know, product led growth becomes, I put out stuff and then I hope that people start using it in ways and find a use case. And that's kind of more like on the fringes of like maybe what would move out of being an actual business but be more like open source communities and experimental things, which are very Needed. When it comes to like a business, what are some of the guardrails you put on when you're sort of like trying to create space for these platforms to evolve and emerge? What are the place that you say, okay, we got to rein it in at some point.
Speaker 1
When you do the luck surface area move, you have to be able to survive for a long time. You have to have effectively infinite runway. So if you don't get a product market fit for your product or I'm using product also a team within an organization where people are like, why don't we have that team again? Like then you don't have product market fit. Then your horizon is your runway is short and you like so this method only works if you will survive for long enough. You will survive for long enough. You can plant some of these seeds so you have exposure to if an ecosystem starts showing up, you can start moving. But if it doesn't, like what's one of the cool things about seeds? You plan to see a seed that you can sit there for a thousand years sometimes and then grow when the conditions are right. That's awesome. If you need to go right now or otherwise we're going to go bust, probably you did the wrong business model then because you didn't start from concrete enough demand or so you can't do the Luck surface area thing unless you'll survive for a long time.
Speaker 2
Yeah, it's interesting. One of the we recently, a previous episode, I think it was just the last episode we're talking with the CEO of Impact, which is a platform for, well, it started as a platform just to manage Affiliate marketers. So if you have a bunch of affiliate marketers that you're connected with, you can manage your whole process there. And they just started to notice all of these companies and brands were using it in all these different ways. They weren't just partnering with normal affiliates. They were doing all these weird, bizarre partnership types that they had never, and they for a while they just let them do it and they just called them non-traditional sort of use cases And they're just like whatever. They go in this bucket, fine. And eventually those became like such a large part. They became like almost bigger than the sort of traditional and they're like, okay, maybe that is maybe they're the ones that are doing the normal thing and we're just calling it non-traditional. They're almost like forced to become to broaden their platform, but that's because they had already nailed one. They had product market fit in one relatively tight area. And that kind of gave them the permission to say, okay, now let's go crazy. How broad can we get? What can we do here now that we've got something that pays the bills?
Speaker 1
Yeah, exactly. That totally tracks us like, yeah, we build it as a product that is good enough on its own to at least keep on going and they just make bringing in enough money to like extend our runway for Longer. And now we have this positive exposure. And sometimes what happens is people use your ecosystem and you're like, wait a second, they're doing this thing that like completely goes against their entire business model. And like if they use that, then like we don't exist anymore. And it kind of, so you get, you can get stuck in some of these situations where you don't. So ideally what you want is the ecosystem to do like surprising things that you're like, huh, that's kind of cool. Or like, huh, I'm okay with that. Like that's, you know, that's a, but when you have that, compounding growth dominates linear growth over time, it will crowd out linear growth in your like, fundamentally. So people, people, this thing where they're like, well, this thing is going to grow at linear rates like this. And this is going to go to linear rates like this. How's your thing to do? If there is a compounding loop, which ecosystem do have a compounding loop and it works, then it will dominate the other ones. End of story, like you don't need to go. I don't know. It's going to be 23.2 and 25.8. Like you don't know, but you do know that the compounding growth will dominate the linear growth at nearby it if it does become compounding growth.
Speaker 2
Yeah. Yeah. You know, I'm curious, Alex, your thoughts on, because we've been talking primarily about sort of the architecture or the infrastructure of a platform of an ecosystem or of a community. I'm curious your thoughts on like what might be called the brand or maybe just we say reputation because when I think about thriving ecosystems, I mean, even even take programming languages, There's because we're dealing with humans, humans care about status. They care about belonging. They care about being cool. And so when you look and you're like, okay, what am I going to, you know, what language am I going to use to build this thing? Well, I love this community over here. They're really cool. I like going to their conferences. I like this community. Even if the code is better, if it works better for this use, they're kind of like not cool, right? And that plays a role. So we've been dealing with companies, like certain companies just have an aura. People just want to be around to them.)
- Time 0:30:44
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(highlight:: 2min Snip
Transcript:
Speaker 2
Yeah. Yeah. You know, I'm curious, Alex, your thoughts on, because we've been talking primarily about sort of the architecture or the infrastructure of a platform of an ecosystem or of a community. I'm curious your thoughts on like what might be called the brand or maybe just we say reputation because when I think about thriving ecosystems, I mean, even even take programming languages, There's because we're dealing with humans, humans care about status. They care about belonging. They care about being cool. And so when you look and you're like, okay, what am I going to, you know, what language am I going to use to build this thing? Well, I love this community over here. They're really cool. I like going to their conferences. I like this community. Even if the code is better, if it works better for this use, they're kind of like not cool, right? And that plays a role. So we've been dealing with companies, like certain companies just have an aura. People just want to be around to them. They want to be a part of their ecosystem. They want to brag about it. And like, how can you be deliberate about that? Because that's where you often get, this is where marketers will get, will catch shit for being too vague and abstract, right? They'll be like, well, we just had to create this brand and create this feeling and, you know, right? C-suite is like, show me the ROI. What role do you think that like brand and reputation and that part of the, you know, plays into things?
Speaker 1
I think brand reputation is extremely critical. And by the way, I don't think it's just the human nature of like, oh, we're status seeking monkeys and that's in some random back. But it's a reason we're status seeking monkeys. It's because status does confer in a scarce environment. Like, like, there's like, there's a lot of these heuristics that like actually make sense that humans do.)
- Time 0:34:49
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(highlight:: The Correlation Between Accessibility/Authenticity and Polish in Branding
Transcript:
Speaker 1
So I was just a small interview of someone, the lead of the economist, which is talking about, you know, type those are road credibility because they demonstrate that like we aren't They kind of puncture this view of us as, you know, thoughtful and judge, you know, holistically understanding everything. So like, type was looking, obsessing over type was as a tactic to make to have polish, which is kind of fits with a, who earn credibility, but it's a tactic. Sometimes the tactic is, I'm going to be really authentic. I'm going to have a podcast where I talk to a bunch of people and it's going to be me and I'm going to, you know, be very present as the CEO and founder in the message board is very authentic About your right. That's a, that's a bug or a gap in our functionality. We that love to just just being real as opposed like this. We're perfect.
Speaker 2
And we're going to, you know, it's like, it's almost like the, there's like a, there's a continuum or a trade up between, or a correlation rather between accessibility and polish. So like the more accessible you are, the more it matters that you don't have time. I bows and things like that because it shows that you're like putting in time. It's a good signal. The less accessible you are, like people love that Elon Musk will just tweet something really quick and it's not, it doesn't have perfect grammar because it makes them feel like, or Like they go, people go on Joe Rogan and just talking an off the cuff manner. It makes them feel like I'm just entering this guy's daily life stream of consciousness. He's not polishing anything or running it by legal or HR first. In that case, that's great. Some unknown person who has no, nobody begging for their time and is very accessible in general, just spewing out a bunch of badly, you know, spelled stuff. It's not going to have the same effect, right?)
- Time 0:38:40
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(highlight:: "Somtimed Living People the Opportunity to do You a Favor Creates More Value for Them"
Transcript:
Speaker 2
It's almost like I like to use the analogy if like my best friend says, hey, I'm moving in, will you come help me move on Saturday? And I'm like, yeah, if he said, hey, if you help me move on Saturday, I'll give you 20 bucks. I would be less likely.
Speaker 1
I'd be a. Exactly. I feel like, what the hell, man, I know you like I'm doing this because I care about this relationship in like the, like the commitment that we've done and like the credibility and trust That we've earned in one another. And like you're going to see here and cheapen it with this thing, this transactional thing.
Speaker 2
Like sometimes, sometimes giving someone the opportunity to do you a favor actually creates more value for them, right? 100% and making it transaction.
Speaker 1
I think I'll be jaded. This is one of the weird tricks I picked up at some point is like asking specific people to do favors when you were in an authentic trusting train, like non transactional kind of looking Out for one another kind of relationship. It does bring people closer and yet to be really careful because some of these tools, a lot of these tricks, by the way, tactics are morally or amoral, which is to say they can be used for Good and they can be used for ill.)
- Time 0:48:02
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(highlight:: Slime Mold: Embracing Silos and Autonomy as Organizational Complexity Grows
Transcript:
Speaker 2
As an organization grows in size, the complexity increases and there's this tendency like really hard to get things done. You get kind of bureaucratic and you say that this like using the slime mold as an analogy is kind of the best way to deal with these inevitable problems. Can you give us like the give us like the two minute, give us the elevator pitch on this?
Speaker 1
So the elevator pitch is first of all, it's told in emoji football style, which is a as a aesthetic choice, I kind of tripped across and like turns out to really work for that kind of that Kind of argument. And the the better point is everybody who's been in any organization ever knows that organizations that once were successful and fast moving and able to do a bunch of stuff over time As they grow become it just almost impossible to anything done. And this effect arises fundamentally based on size of number of people interacting on a project, a fundamental like probabilistic way. It's an inescapable course of gravity that's hidden that we all kind of ignore and pretend doesn't exist, which makes us all feel frankly kind of gassed lit and working really, really Hard to accomplish in quite a bit less. And the answer, the way that you address these things are almost exactly the exact opposite of what you people think. So people think, okay, I got to be more heroic, I got to throw more spread sheet coordination spreadsheets into it. And like, no, no, it's not how that work. Like you need to pull back, you need to create a little bit more slack, you have to be okay with something being good enough for now and then on a path to eventual convergence. You to people say, oh, we should break down boundaries and silos. Actually boundaries and silos are precisely the answer to how you address some of these things. Just make sure that the individual things are talking to each other well enough that they can be independent and autonomous and yet also on a path to convergence and in a path to sort of Coherence. So it's a, people have told me they have cried reading that deck.)
- Time 0:51:08
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