Julian Shapiro: evaluation

Transcript context

…Got it. I like that lens actually through a lot of these things you're talking about is maybe it's less like change your product to make this happen, and it's more idea selection. I know you're also an investor, and so it's a really good lens on how many of these things does this company have that I'm investing in. Earlier I was mentioning why do I write handbooks, I wrote the handbook that PLA and state building come from to cement my diligence criteria for companies I believe might grow super fast and retain customers. You're exactly right. My investor's perspective is if you have a zero cost of acquisition mechanism for customer acquisition, such as PLA, and you can retain them through something like state building, but there are other ways to retain customers, then I lean in harder because I think you'll be more defensible as a company. Actually interesting little side note is you'll often hear retention and stickiness refer to as a moat, right? But I find this term actually very misleading because very few companies have actual moats. To have a real moat, you're basically exploiting kleptocratic, meaning you're friends with the government and they're creating a literal barrier to entry for your competitors, or you have a scientific moat where you have an actual scientific breakthrough in the fusion energy space, plus protected by patents. Those are real moats. But the way most people use the word moat is wrong. In practice, your "moat" is just your mechanism for retaining users a little bit more than the average company. I believe state building is one of the best ways to do exactly that. Really it just comes down to what are you doing to help users build state and get more value over time out of the product, not the same level of value over any time period. Awesome. Shifting a little bit away from growth and into writing, which I know you've spent a lot of time writing about, very meta, and sharing on Twitter and all the ways, you have a handbook where you go into this concept of novelty and a framework for how to be novel and why that's important in writing. I'd love for you to talk about why novelty is important in writing and ideally share your framework for creating something novel that keeps people engaged in reading.…

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