Rahul Vohra: prediction

Transcript context

…Do you feel like you are uniquely equipped to be able to hold yourself to that bar because you were a second time founder? Yes, but only because founders were a core target market for who we were going after. Because I had experienced the pain that we were trying to solve when I was running my last company. I very clearly could see we haven't solved that pain. Not yet. I could feel ourselves getting closer every single day, but I had to find a way to explain this to the team. These are hyper-ambitious, super intelligent engineers and designers and people of all disciplines who poured their hearts and souls into the product. They needed a way to understand not only that we weren't ready, but how not ready we were or how close we were and the precise steps that we could do in order to get there. So I went out and about, I read everything I could find, I started searching for definitions of product market fit. There's quite a few out there. For example, Paul Graham would say, “It's when you made something people want.” I think that's a pretty good definition but I wanted something more actionable. I think Sam Altman had a slightly different take, which is it's when users love your product so much that they spontaneously tell other people to start using it without you even asking them to do that. And that's a different take on it. PG’s take is around desire, Sam's take is around a distribution or sort of net promotion, but perhaps the best definition I found all the most interesting at least was Marc Andreessen's and he had the most vivid definition. He would say—I have it right here because it's quite lengthy and detailed—“Number one, you can always feel it when product market fit is not happening. Customers aren't quite getting value, users are not growing quite that fast, word of mouth is not spreading, press who use it are a kind of blah, and the sales cycle takes too damn long. But you can always feel it when product market fit is happening. Customers are buying as fast as you can add servers, you're hiring cells and support as fast as you can, reporters are constantly calling you about your hot new thing, money is piling up in your checking account, investors are staking out your house, and you start winning Company of the Year awards from Harvard Business School.” My favorite is the part about staking out the house.…

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