Albert Cheng: belief

Transcript context

…Okay. Let me ask you a couple more questions. One is just zooming out a little bit, what's the most counterintuitive lesson you've learned about building products or building teams across the many companies you've worked at? Yeah, I've talked a lot about products. So maybe I'll flip to the team side for a bit. I think the standard way to hire and build a team is you fill out a JD, it's got a whole bunch of different characteristics that you're looking for. You typically will find a short list of companies that are kind of similar to yours, and then you try to hire for that, right? I think that's the typical default path that a lot of companies take. And I was really struck by my experience working at some smaller startups or take Duolingo as an example, where over and over and over, I saw some of the highest performers just being people that had very high agency, had that clock speed, had that energy. Yes, they cared about the mission, but they didn't necessarily need to have deep experience on that matter. And in fact, sometimes that experience could be a crutch in certain ways, especially in this world where the grounds are shifting so fast with AI, a lot of your learned habits actually need to be intentionally discarded. You need to have a beginner's mind on this type of stuff. So I think this is more true than ever, looking for people that respond and move quickly and think just faster and move faster. I think the fastest speed of learning, those types of companies are the ones that I want to bet on. I think those will end up surviving and thriving. So just to double click on this idea of high agency is very trending these days of just higher high agency people. To unpack that a little bit, you mentioned a few of these traits, so let's just help people see what you see. So one is clock speed, just they think fast, they move fast, they learn fast. What else? What else do you look for that helps you see that there are high agency people?…

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