Dalton Caldwell: belief

Transcript context

…Fair enough. Going in a slightly different direction. So someone else that worked with you, another Lenny, Lenny Bogdonoff who started a company called Milk, and then he was head of growth at OpenAI for a bit. He asked me to ask you about things product leaders and startups should watch out for. Does that ring a bell? I don't remember the specific office hours, but I understand the question and I of course remember Lenny. I think that the advice that he's referencing here is just how important it is to not overdelegate and for the founders to stay close to things, as well as watch out for the trap of hiring super senior people with fancy resumes, really early in a startup. I think that's what he's referencing there. And again, this is definitely one of those very basic things that we find ourselves repeating a lot where they're like, "Yeah, yeah, I get it. Don't overdelegate. We get it, Dalton." And then two years later they're like, "Wow, we overdelegated. We need to go clean that up." So that is probably the best product advice. And the folks that are really great at product, the founders that are always deeply in the weeds on product and still care a lot and are still talking to customers, no matter how late stage it gets, again, I'm sure you experienced this in Airbnb culture, but you can't delegate caring about your users and you can't delegate caring that the product is great. That is so critical. To make this even more real, what is it that you see them do? It's they hire a PM too early, they hire a senior salesperson too early, what are the-…

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