Noam Lovinsky: belief

Transcript context

…For someone that is thinking about trying to create a startup within a startup, something a lot of big companies are trying to do, is there a piece of advice or two that you'd share for helping this be effective? Maybe one is just the goal may not be build the next big business. There's these sub goals also. What comes to mind? God, there's so many. Schrep did a really fantastic job of removing a lot of these constraints. So one is I would say think really hard about the incentive system. Smart, good people, even if they're not trying to, they end up kind of gaming things towards the incentive system. And so think long and hard about that. So for instance, if you're a large organization and you do some performance management process like twice a year and that's how you're going to evaluate and incentivize people in your 0 to 1 incubator, you've already killed it. It's the wrong incentive, it's the wrong timeframe. It creates adverse selection, problems for the sort of people that you bring in. And so it's hard in an existing organization to say, "We're going to take all these company processes around even how we level people and pay them and motivate them. And we're going to throw them out the window for this group." How you build the infrastructure you use, this is something that the NP team did really well. Everyone got to do their own thing from an infrastructure perspective. Just do what is best for the problem you're trying to solve in this moment, knowing that you're likely going to throw away a lot of this code anyway. Being able to do that in an organization like Facebook or Google, if you ask anyone that works on those things, is really hard. It takes someone like a Schrep to be like, "Nope, they're going to get to do this. Sorry." And so I think that's really helpful. For what it's worth, one of the organizations that we talked to that I felt like was doing this in one of the best ways was Nike. Nike has this incubation lab. It's a completely different operating model. They recruit a completely different type of person, very different incentive system. And essentially, where they end up plugging them into Nike is that when they have something into the distribution marketing kind of growth arms of Nike. But for the product discovery process, they're doing their whole different thing. Once they find some fit, then kind of Nike comes in and goes, "Boom. I'm going to help you explode your fit." But I think that the number one thing I would think about would be the incentive system and the adverse selection that that can cause. To me, the most important element of the incentive system, and maybe I'm reading between the lines, is you're basically competing against them starting their own thing. And having upside if things go super well feels really important versus, "I'm just going to get a cool salary at Meta and work on this thing." That doesn't lead to the same experience as a startup where everything's on the line. Yeah.…

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