Daniel Gross: evaluation

Transcript context

…Maybe you gave us one. Say you gave the Diet Coke question to someone who came to you with a start-up. What would count as a bad answer, and why would it be bad? I think in interviews, in general, a very simple thing to look for that I’m still . . . By the way, I should mention a preemptive huge asterisk that I’ll only say once on this podcast, which is, I may say different hypotheses that I have, but they are opinions of a student, not of a master. I’m still learning. But all of that said, I think sometimes in interviews, and when you meet people in general, there’s just a sense of being asleep or awake. Asleep is someone who doesn’t really even have the idea to think about the world as just like, maybe Diet Coke is something really good. What actually drives that? Someone who’s awake has actually had that thought already. For me, the rejection of the question would really be the only bad answer, and I think that’s true in a lot of interviews in general. Like this very conversation we’re having — you can tell if people are having fun with each other’s questions and whatnot, or whether it’s monotonous. And someone who locks up and freezes when you ask them if maybe Diet Coke is correlated to productivity — which is a bit of a silly question at the end of the day — just the fact that they’re not having fun with it, I think, is something to look for. What’s another good question? The Diet Coke question I like. What else is good?…

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