Gokul Rajaram: prediction

Transcript context

…Awesome. That's really helpful advice. You mentioned Brian Armstrong, Brian Chesky, and some of the other folks that you have worked with and gotten to know. I'm curious, of the companies you've worked at, say now Coinbase on the board, Google, Facebook, Square, DoorDash, what are some things that have kind of stuck with you? Things you've taken away about maybe how to run a company, build a product? or anything else that's kind of just taught you a lesson about how to do what you're doing? One of the most interesting things I've realized is there are multiple paths to greatness. What I mean by that is, if I were to look at one word to describe each of the companies I've actually worked at, Google would be technical. It was very, very technology-focused, because Google believed if you build great technology, they will come. Facebook was very growth-focused, very much, here's a goal, we want to hit 1 billion MAUs, let's work backwards from there. Square was very design-focused, let's build the cleanest, minimalistic design, the most well-designed product, think good things happen. DoorDash, by nature, is more operational, probably the right word to use, where product and operational are intertwined. Uber probably is the same word. So I I think there are multiple paths to greatness, but I think the founder and market fit in terms of even the type of company that's needed is very strong. In other words, I think founders have to be authentic to themselves. The other thing I saw is that each founder, whether it's Tony Hsu at DoorDash or Jack They all had their distinctive styles, but they didn't try to change their style. In some ways, the company was built almost in their image in some ways. And that was fine. I think if you try to build a company that's inauthentic to who you are as a founder, that's not going to work. So ultimately, you want to, if Jack had tried to build a company that sold enterprise software, I don't think that would have worked. That's not who he is. And so you want a founder and a company culture that are essentially synonymous and founders to be authentic. And I think... Finally, the one other thing that I've seen is the product itself ideally needs to have some remarkability. What I mean by that is it needs to be better than anything else that solves that pain point along a few dimensions that really matter, even if it's worse along other dimensions. So I think every great product, it needs to have a lot of word of mouth. I think especially nowadays, I'm seeing a lot of consumer companies challenged because they relied on Facebook or paid media to drive customer acquisition. And a bunch of young companies are coming to me saying, Google, what do we do now? I'm like, look, the biggest thing you did wrong initially was you didn't pay enough attention to organic growth, basically. Was this product compelling enough that people talk about it and bring other people along? And you completely relied on paid, and that's coming back to bite you. So a good metric is that 40 to 50% of your new customers should ideally come from organic channels and 50% from paid. If 90% come from paid, that is at some point that the music is going to stop. Unless you've got some magical insight or someone that's just killing it. Or a growth hack, right?…

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