Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…I think this is a great segue into the other thing I wanted to talk about here about the PayPal Mafia. Again, you could make an argument. It might be the most impactful thing that they've contributed to the startup ecosystem even though for and above all the other things we’ve talked about, there’s a really, really great video on YouTube of course. Jim Goetz who’s a partner at Sequoia, great, great venture capitalist speaking at the Business School at Stanford, which has a fond place in my heart, and he’s talking about what makes great companies that Sequoia would invest in, and that he talks about the PayPal Mafia and he says, you know, the one thing to him that really sets PayPal alumni apart from other people in the ecosystem is they learned at PayPal both willingness and ability to iterate really quickly with a product. Put a product out there that is very far from finished and iterate like mad on it based on true market feedback. He says “not BS-ing themselves about what the actual signals from the market are.” That’s how you can create a recursive platform. A recursive thesis like that is you can’t start with the end state. You got to start with a very, very small idea and then work on it bit by bit by bit based on market feedback. Yeah. That market feedback thing is so hard where every line of code that you write or every little piece of product thinking that you do that then gets solidified in any form be it physical or design or code, it’s like a burden you carry from that point forward where the more you’ve created, the heavier it is and the less you feel agile to move away from it. So I just have tremendous respect for people at companies like this that can write something and put it out there and understand market signals quickly and within days say that’s actually not the thing and, like, rip half of it out and put a new piece in and say that’s not the thing either. Then, just keep repositioning because I think that we just get emotionally attached to what we make and people will get really emotionally attached to their vision. If you can just keep responding, it's a really incredible and really valuable skill. I think the skill is holding both of those… to borrow a phrase from my wife, she loves this phrase, “holding both of those things in your head at the same time.” One is absolute dedication and commitment to a vision of the future that you see, your recursive vision about the future. And two, an utter lack of bias or pre-determined thought on how you’re going to get there and be willing to take the random walk that you need to take of product and product market fit discovery to get there.…

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