Raiza Martin: commitment

Transcript context

…Oh my god. Okay, I could keep going about this all day, but let me come back to the team that's working on this and let's talk about Steven Johnson's role. So he's basically your peer. You two essentially lead this with the engineer, I imagine. Just like what's his role? How does this work at this point? What is the team looking... look like? It's so funny, I'm so fond of Steven and I tease him a lot that whenever people ping me and they want to have a meeting and I don't want to go to the meeting, I say, "Oh, I'm not the PM, it's Steven Johnson. Talk to that guy." And he was like, "So that's why all these people have been picking me." But kidding aside, Steven joined, I was like, well, this is super interesting. This has never happened to me before. There's this very accomplished, distinguished person that I really respect, love his books, love his writing, and now he's going to come work with me in a capacity where I was like, I'm just not sure what he's going to do here. But the thing about Steven is he is the most curious, most respectful, and really just full of ideas kind of person. And so when Steven joined, a lot of what was really interesting to me is I would watch how he worked, the way that he thought about language, the way that he thought about information, the way that he thinks about knowledge and sharing that with others. Because Steven's books are really incredible. It's like part mystery, super science. It's just very cool. And I was watching the way that he works and he does all of this research, and I thought, maybe this is the nugget, right? Maybe I watch Steven and I look at the way that he does these things and I look at how much time it takes for him to do it, and then I make it my own metric to crunch that down, to bring that expertise to everyday people who are not Steven Johnson. And so I learned a lot just from watching Steven, of his craft and thinking about, okay, how do I make people really, really good at de-densifying information? Because that's something we all do every day, in our own little ways. Maybe not in a Steven Johnson way. But from the get-go, I told him this. I was like, "Steven, I think you are the product. I think it's you. I'm going to follow you around. I'm going to watch everything that you do and we're going to try to figure out how we use technology to build it." And he always laughs about this, and it's really funny because he does have some very interesting workflows that I'm like, I do not see any person ever doing anything like this. He always talks about his Readwise with his 8,000 quotes or something. I'm like, that's extreme. That's crazy. I have post-its that sometimes they're crumpled in my pocket. This is the average normie flow. And what I learned from Steven is like, hey, there's something powerful about doing that, thinking about this person who has a super flow and trying to bring that to people. And so Steven is also just such a great partner with ideas. I always tell him ideas and I'm like, "Hey, crazy idea of the day." And he'll just banter with you and he'll be like, "Well, what about this? How can people do this?" And so it feels really incredible to have them on the team. Is there any lessons here for how you think you'll want to build product in the future or how teams might find their own Steven for building their own product? Or is this kind of a unique case you think?…

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