Oji Udezue: evaluation

Transcript context

…I want to pull on this sharp problem thread. This is my favorite Oji meme. We talked about this a bit when you visited the podcast last. I think it's such a useful concept, so I just want to make sure people learn this while we're talking about it. Talk about what a sharp problem is and why that's important. One of the things I learned from failing a lot at building companies is that sometimes the way that YCO, the people pitch it, is that you build something and if it doesn't work, you pivot, da-da-da, stuff like that. But it turns out that in the world of high technology and the world of figuring out what customers need, there are many shortcuts that mean that pivoting isn't just a habit, something you walk around drunkenly doing, right? A lot of the most successful people, Bill Gates, Facebook, and so, they didn't even pivot. They had an idea, but it turned out that the idea was a sharp problem. So the way to avoid drunken startup building is pick things that are old, their core needs and the way you profit is when you reimagine old needs in new technological ways. And that's important. Now, let's frame it in the sharp problem. What do people feel they need help with? What is still difficult to the point that if you improve it three to five times, maybe 10X, or you take cost out of it, like 10X costs, one 10th, they'll be like, "This is so compelling, you should take my money now." And that's what most founders should really, really focus on if they can. There's extended stuff we've talked about over the years, like the unicorn framework, which is like if you're building for B2B specifically, how do you draw a quadrant around a problem? So you know if it's highly frequent because frequency also means a lot of pain and figure it out, but that's something people can read on the Substack. Yeah, we talked about that in our last chat, so I'll point people to that. Okay, so building on this idea of being a drunken walk of figuring out what to build, you have this concept of the shipyard, and this is a way to think about... Uh, how to think about what product development might look like going forward and just a model for how to work in this chaotic world that we're in. Talk about what that looks like and the advice here.…

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