Jessica Livingston: evaluation

Transcript context

…It's so funny. I love this metaphor. And I totally get what you mean. I want to unpack a couple of these, because this is exactly where I was hoping we'd go. So this idea of looking for defensiveness and being open to change and being flexible, why do you think that was so important to successful founders? Why did you look for that? Why was that a predictor of success? Several things. First of all, being defensive is really bad, if you're a startup founder, because you're always going to get people who question you. And it's your job to educate them, if it's a new area, you're doing something presumably pretty new, you're always going to have people who question it or say, "That product's already out there, why is yours better?" You have to educate them. You don't want to be defensive about it. Also, a lot of times, the first idea isn't bang right on, the right idea, and you have to be open-minded and maybe adjust it in a certain direction. The famous PayPal story, how it started off being the PalmPilot, or money transfer. And money transfer between the PalmPilots or whatever. And then all the customers were using a janky version on the web, and they were begging for this to be on the web. And finally, the founder said, "Oh, I see what most people want this for." You have to be open-minded to see what direction really is what your users want. And so if you find someone is defensive, usually they're not open-minded. The other thing is that the best founders will want to learn from other people and listen to other people. You talk to the Collison brothers and say something, they ask you a question, they're listening to your answer. So many founders think, oh, I can't learn from anyone. But the best founders are always listening and having spirited debates about things. I mean, that's part of the process. And so I think when someone's defensive, it's just a bad sign. So I would look for that. I loved when I'd find someone sort of showcase that they'd make something happen no matter what; they're scrappy, they're hustlers. I remember... Can I tell the story about the Airbnb interview? Please.…

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