Mihika Kapoor: belief

Transcript context

…I imagine people listening to this will feel like, "Oh shit, I don't really love what I'm working on. I don't work at Figma. I don't have the best of most amazing products." Maybe it's hard to get excited about stuff. Is there anything you could share there? Just say you're working on something that you're not so passionate about, is it a fine thing, keep searching, or is it just figure out something you're excited about? Any advice there for someone in that boat? My first piece of advice would be to not just think about the scope of what you are working on as the thing that happens to be in flight at any given moment. But, if you're working in a company, take a step back, understand the vision of that company, and understand your users, and understand if there's anything in that space that you are passionate about. I think it's quite easy to believe that the project that you're working on is your scope. My take is that your scope is the world, and to the extent that you can figure out does the idea that you're passionate about fall within your company, versus fall outside of your company, that should guide the next steps in your career. And so, I think that potentially common misconception is that founding something is just for capital F founders, but I think that anyone can found something. You can found something inside of an existing company, you can found something from scratch. And, there are different reasons why you would do each, right? The reasons why you would found inside of an existing company is if you think that there is a distribution advantage that you want to take advantage of, if there is a technical or platform advantage that you want to take advantage of. Or, there's also a reality which is it's slightly less risk. So, depending on what your risk tolerance is, you can figure out what makes sense. There are things that are harder inside of an existing company, right? It's harder to take an executive decision. You actually cannot take an executive decision. You need to receive buy-in on every single decision that you make. Sometimes it's harder to move faster. And then sometimes, there are things that are just different when you're starting inside of an existing company, versus starting something outright. So the things that are different is building a team is quite different. The way that you recruit and the set of folks that you can recruit from, that composition is quite different. And then, the way that you pitch and who you are pitching to is quite different. And so, I think that sometimes, yeah, it makes sense to found inside of a company and to use that to make your flame burn, right? Sometimes it makes sense to found outright. But I think that the first key to being passionate about what you're working on is to find an idea that you're passionate about. I love this as a metaphor of the flame where it applies both to you as a person at a company and keeping that flame going and building it. And then also the idea and a project that accompanies little flame that you're growing over time, building momentum around. So you've hinted at this whole idea of starting zero to one and building new products within larger companies, which I want to get to. We've gone really deep on a bunch of awesome stuff and I'm really happy we did. There's four more skills of things you're amazing at. So here's an idea, let me share the four. How about you pick two that you're most passionate about that you think you have the most advice to share, and then we'll just do those, and then we'll go to what you've learned about building something completely new at a larger company? How does that sound?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.