Dharmesh Shah: prediction

Transcript context

…No, we're getting to the first principles of everything. Talk about that. What does that mean when you... And what does that look like when you're running a business? Okay, so in lay person's terms, the second law of thermodynamics, I'm paraphrasing here, is that, "Over time, unless you intervene, everything goes to crap." I'm paraphrasing. Which is, essentially, the amount of disorder and randomness in a system is going to increase over time. You see this like when you break an egg, the molecules don't come together and form an egg. That doesn't happen. It's always the other way around becomes disorderly and more random. That's the second law of thermodynamics. And this happens in companies as well, and it happens in code, almost every level of abstraction, you will see some variation of this. And so the way I think about this is that in the early stages of a company, you're essentially fighting to survive. Just trying not to die. That's the thing. Okay, priority one, don't die. In the second phase of a company, you're trying not to stagnate. But it's like you still want to be able to drive growth and be able to do things like, "Okay, we managed not to die, because stagnation is essentially death, so we're still trying not to die." But then the third stage is you're fighting complexity. And that's the thing that you will crumble under your own weight over time, absent some external intervention. And you see this happen all the time, and it shows up and manifests in different ways, which is, everything gets more complicated. You need more layers of management, more headcount, more this, more that, more everything. Everything becomes harder. Margins go... It's like just bad things start to happen, you become slower. And that's the eventual... It's a slower death, because you're at more scale now, but it's still eventual death. Complexity does kill companies. Maybe not as quickly as other things, but much more reliably than other things. And so this is why it's never too early to plant the seeds of simplicity, put them in there, make that part of the culture of the organization. And we have a thing that are part of our culture and guiding principles around what I call "fight for simplicity." It's literally those three words. And the message we're trying to convey is, "Simplicity is worth fighting for." That's thing number one, it's important, but the other one is that it requires fighting for. It does not happen, and it will be a fight, because the universe is working against you. And it will take calories to fight for that simplicity, because everything, even well-intentioned people, will introduce complexity because that's the natural way of the world. We want more tiers in our pricing, we want these knobs and dials in the product, we want these more... It's like all of it tends towards the second law and entropy increases. So anyway. I love this. The algorithm for seating is a good example of this. Is there any other examples, either in the product or strategy, where you pushed for simplicity and that ended up being right?…

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