Jay Baxter: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. I don't know if I would've begun the project had I not known. We had that structure, that ability to make decisions, the autonomy, the speed, the ability to go fast. We started with that in 1.0 and it's been continued and if anything, furthered in X. X as a whole company operates with a lot of those attributes, and I think it's one of the reasons the product is successful. I think those are big reasons why at least, Jay can speak for himself, I have so much fun working on this. I love working on it. It's great to wake up every day and solve these problems. We get to do them efficiently, make decisions quickly, build stuff that helps a lot of people. It's awesome. This whether thermal or Elon way of operating is definitely more fun and the fact that... That combined with the awesome mission is super important for internal recruiting. I remember when I was first chatting to Keith about this back in early 2020, I had another project. I worked on a few, but one was like personalize the number of push notifications that we send, and it drove a lot of DAU without losing opt-outs significantly. So that was setting me on track, or if I had kept working on that, I could have probably gotten a promotion from that with low risk, or I could take this huge career... It's not as big at a career risk as joining or founding an actual external startup, but there is still career risk, I guess, in joining a team like this. I think all of the same aspects of recruiting that apply to external startups and apply internally, and if you can have an exciting vision, that is key. Related to that and your list, Lenny, one thing we missed that's super important is that on this project, and I think of successful projects like it in startups, is that people are self-selecting to join. We did not assign anyone to this project. People reached out to join or they applied to join the job. I and the team interviewed every single person that joined the team and we were like, "We want that person on the team. They want to be on the team." And so people are totally bought in to the goal, mission, the way the team works, the other people they're going to be working with. And that makes a huge difference. So a great time to do that is at the start of one of these things. If you're going to try something crazy, it's going to be tough if you're just assigning random people to it. But if you let people opt in and self-select much more likely to be successful. And one thing that I have observed at X, which really surprised me was that this is also possible at a large scale. One of the things that Elon did when he bought the company was he basically asked people to self-select to stay. You had to click the button. And he sent an email out that was like, "Hey, Twitter 2.0."…

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