Michael Truell: belief

Transcript context

…To me this sounds like build it and they will come actually working. You guys just built an awesome product that you loved yourselves as engineers, you put it out, people just loved it, told everyone about it. It being essentially all just us, the team working on the product, and making the product good in lieu of other things one could spend one's time on. We definitely spent time on tons of other things, for instance, building the team was incredibly important, and doing things like support rotations are very important. But some of the normal things that people would maybe reach for in building the company early on, we really let those fires burn for a long time, especially when it came to things like sales and marketing. And so just working on the product, and building a product that you like first, your team likes, and then also then adjusting it for some set of users, that can kind of sound simple, but then, as you know, it's hard to do that well. And there are a bunch of different directions one could have run in, a bunch of different product directions. I think focus, and strategically picking the right things to build, and prioritizing effectively is tricky. I think another thing that's tricky about this domain is, it's kind of a new form of product building, where it's very interdisciplinary in that we are something in between a normal software company and then a foundation model company, in that we're developing a product for millions of people, and that side of things has to be excellent, but then also one important dimension of product quality is doing more and more on the science, and doing more and more on the model side of things in places where it makes sense. And so that element of things doing that well too has been tricky. The overall thing would note is maybe some of these things sound simple to specify, but doing them well is hard, and they're a lot of different way you can run in. I'm excited to have Andrew Luo joining us today. Andrew is CEO of OneSchema, one of our podcast sponsors. Welcome, Andrew.…

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