Ivan Zhao: belief

Transcript context

…It's interesting that so much of this conversation is this and the way you think about building this company is this balance between practical, useful things people need and business and practical stuff, and then the value of building something you're proud of and craft. And there's always this trade-off almost of speed and quality, and I know that's an important element for you. Just thinking about trade-offs between decisions, so talk about just trade-offs, just how you think about making a trade-off. Yeah, I think this is quite relevant especially for product makers and business makers is there's no free lunch. You don't get something for free. You have to give up something. Then what do you give up? It's essentially you give up the right thing that market or your user wants at that given space and time. It's just the craft of building a business or building a product. And that the market is so dynamic, especially now with AI. The optimized function for the market changes so then you need to make new trade-off and new technology emerges. I always feels like AI language model feels like a new type of wood. It feels like aluminum. It's a new type of material. So you can make... Mass air travel wasn't available until aluminum become cheap enough that people can make airplanes that support this at cost. And it's like computer wasn't there until semiconductor becomes... It's like require new technology to unlock new way to making trade-offs, and then you need to balance the technology trade-off with human behavior trade-off. As a human, ever since we got out of Africa, we're set, right? That's a constraint. It's invariable. And every generation pick up some new things but after you're 16 years old you don't want to learn new things. So those are there are the people trade-off, technology trade-off. There's some macro. There's a different dimension of things just cooking together that come together as a product more as a business than what is that? And I think a product maker, business maker's job is to find that sweet spot of all the multiple dimensions, then create something has a right to exist. At least it's more durable to exist. And I'm hearing there's this thread of just like with new technologies, what is now possible. And I know you guys are doing some cool stuff with AI that I'm going to get to that is unlocking some cool new ideas. But before I get there, I want to talk about just you as a leader. At this point, you've been at this for 12 years, something like that.…

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