Lenny Rachitsky: commitment

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…Absolutely, Lenny. We've heard so many horror stories of outages from even just a single bad record in transactions, employee files, purchase orders, you name it. Debugging these issues is often finding a needle in a haystack. OneSchema stops any bad data from entering your system and automatically validates your files, generating error reports with the exact issues in all bad files. I know that importing incorrect data can cause all kinds of pain for your customers and quickly lose their trust. Andrew, thank you so much for joining me. If you want to learn more, head on over to oneschema.co. That's oneschema.co. There's a lot of founders listening to this and a question that I'm thinking and they're probably thinking, and there's two questions here. One is how hardcore to go potentially with their own forward deployed operation. And then two is just how and a company I know is actually doing this, how far to go with one company's problem and invest in just like we are going to nail solving this one customer's problem with the hope that this is something we can abstract and sell as a big platform. So let me start there. And you're building a company, any I guess insights or advice on just how far to go down this road of we'll solve customer one's problem and we bet that this is going to be a big opportunity for a lot of other companies? So I would say on the forward deployed piece, my friend Barry McCardel, the CEO of Hex, the analytics company, he wrote a really good post about this actually, and his take was just like, "You probably don't need forward deployed engineers." It's very specific. But I think basically the thing there is you have to be willing to be quite almost wasteful. You have to be willing to invest a lot in finding the thing. And for that you just need a certain ticket size. So you need each customer's revenue to be probably in the billions of dollars. If it's below that, you're probably not looking at a traditional forward deployed engineer motion. It's something a little bit different. So I think one thesis that a lot of people left Palantir with and started companies around was there's a lot of customers that Palantir won't serve because maybe they're too small a ticket size. So actually you could go and do something like Palantir for those companies, but instead of charging them $5 million, you're charging them 250K. So in a scenario like that, you might still have forward deployed engineers, but they're not going to France and spending five days a week in a factory. It's more like you'll have one person and they're looking after five different customer accounts. It's more of that ratio in order to make the numbers work. So I think a lot of the principles can be abstracted from that experience, but it is a really specific sales motion that depends on a specific way of doing business. I think to your other question, yeah, I think it's obviously something that is very hard to give a general answer to. My main thing here is just that you can definitely tell when you are just doing consulting and when you are closer to building a product. And I think the error that people make more often than not is they are actually too stuck on their own product vision. That's the mistake I've seen a little bit more actually than the other way around. If you go to an enterprise customer, and let's say you think you're doing analytics software and it turns out they don't actually care about internal analytics this much, they actually have this other massive burning problem and they don't have a good solution to it yet. I think a lot of people are unwilling to go and pivot to the big problem because they're like, "Well, we're analytics software and so maybe this customer is a fit for our thing," and maybe that's the right call. In some scenarios, that is the right call. You should go find a different customer where your thing resonates more. In other scenarios, it's actually the right call to pivot and just put everything on that big problem instead and then go and find other customers for that thing. There's no hard and fast rule. I remember reading a really interesting post by, I think it was David Hsu from Retool who had this exact thing. I think he worked at Palantir for a while too. He said that they had the Retool product and it wasn't getting any traction at all.…

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