Ami Vora: evaluation

Transcript context

…Okay, what is that all about? For me, the hill climb is all about the difference between the local optimum and a global optimum. That sounds very abstract, but I think a lot of the time when we're doing our job, when we're doing life stuff, whatever you're doing, you try to just get better and better and you optimize your current system and then you feel really good about it, and that is great. You're standing on top of the hill, you're looking down, you can see the, I don't know, rolling hills, the sheep, the grass, whatever. But then way off from the distance you can see a mountain, one that's even higher than you can't even see the top of it, and you have to decide, are you going to take the risk of climbing down your hill, crossing an unknown chasm, and then climbing back up, just to get to the same level you started at with more climbing to do to get to that summit? And that is really hard. I'm thinking of things like, maybe the first time I saw this was like a lot of companies were really good at desktop and you could see the mobile mountain way out over there, but to get there you had to really make a lot of trade-offs in your core desktop business that you were not totally sure were going to pay off when you made it to the mobile mountain, and you had to do a ton of work. You had to fundamentally rewire a lot of what you're doing without a guarantee that you're going to get there. I mean, you can see it in life when you think about new jobs or new moves or new relationships, anything that you think about. You are giving up something that is working pretty well without knowing whether you're going to make it to the top of that next mountain. And that's been really helpful to me just to place where I am on different things, where you get the inkling that there is a much better way to do this, there really is. Is it going to be worth going down into the valley, climbing up, keeping climbing? Is that going to be worth it? Most of the time the answer is yes, but it's helpful for me to know, boy, this feels like a slog. It is supposed to? Because I'm still in the valley and the thing that gets me through the valley is remembering what the summit feels like. When you're on top of it and you're like, this is great, it was absolutely worth it. My life is better in these ways, we're able to solve these problems in these ways. It was worth it. I love that. It feels like a big value of the metaphor, which I love is that to set expectations, it's going to be really hard for a little bit or we will slow down what we're trying to do now, but the idea is there's a bigger hill and a bigger mountain.…

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