Elena Verna: preference

Transcript context

…We touched on this a little bit of just working in AI, working on AI companies, challenging, stressful, a lot of work. What's your advice for folks that are thinking about, should I join a Lovable? Should I join a Cursor? Should I- ... are thinking about, "Should I join a Lovable? Should I join a Cursor? Should I just go work at Google?" Not to throw them under the bus or anything. Although Google, very, very successful in AI now, maybe a less AI-focused company. I really believe that there's different... You need to understand what's the environment that is right for you. Just please understand that AI companies are very hectic at the moment. They're very unstable by definition of that product-market fit treadmill, about that distribution of how they're actually distribute to the market, really changing about how product is even being developed in the first place. So if you are very comfortable in being in that messy middle and really comfortable of converting chaos into clarity for you and those around you, then yeah, AI company is a wonderful place for you to really absorb new skill sets right now. Because even before joining Lovable, when I kept seeing AI, I'm like, "My gosh, I'm so tired of seeing AI everywhere. Is it really changing the world? Is it really changing the way people work?" And I was at Dropbox before, and yeah, we would use AI here and there and I would use ChatGPT. I've never used AI there the way I use AI at Lovable and the things that I'm capable of accomplishing at Lovable, and I don't know if I ever would've made that leap so fast unless I joined Lovable. If I would've just read or listened about it, it's just different compared to be surrounded by people where it's expectation. It's not like a nice-to-have or something that somebody's asking you to do. This is just how you get things done. And you have to think about everything of, "What can AI do here versus where do I add value versus in a traditional sense of work?" because I start with my own value and then I augment it with AI. And here, the mindset has completely shifted. Now, I don't think AI is replacing everybody's job, so please don't look at it as that cliche saying. I actually often call AI as average intelligence that helps me get the platform up. And then I add my human thinking and my human creativity on top of it to get it to the next level. But at least I can get this base level done with AI really freaking quickly. So from that perspective, I think if you want to leapfrog on what it means to be AI native employee and how to use all of these AI tools, you should go to AI company. But if you know that your superpower is in more structure and more definition and a really high specialty of things, because in AI companies, they're all fairly small, so you'll have to generalize quite a bit and have a lot of ownership, all of areas that you usually maybe not have ownership over, then you shouldn't join it, because AI companies will evolve to be more stable too. So it's just a matter of time on where you can join. So I would just urge people to look at their superpowers and the type of environments that really speak to them so they can feel happy, because this can lead to burnout for wrong type of personalities very quickly. Yeah. My sense is if you want work-life balance, don't join one of these companies, because that's just not the way they work.…

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