Keith Coleman: preference

Transcript context

…Yeah, I think descriptive names just makes sense. This connection with Elon, and I want to talk later about just how you've dealt with so many strong personalities over and kept this alive throughout so many changes, but before we get to that, you did something that I think a lot of product leaders, angel leaders, just people that have managed people dream of give up all this power, in air quotes, and career trajectory and influence and just, "Forget all that. I'm going to go back to just building something awesome, small team." Is there any advice there that you could share from that experience that you think might be helpful for other leaders to share or to hear to help them maybe do that same jump? Because that's really difficult in practice. Easy to talk about, hard to do. Yeah, I think it is a difficult jump. I've done it a bunch of times in my career and I've always been very happy with it, where I started with a small team, that it grew into something bigger, and then I was like, "We're dealing with a lot of big production stuff, team's really big. I want to go back to doing something like crazy and new with a small team again." I've done that sawtooth leap a bunch of times, but it can be hard, because certainly, the natural... The classic career path is, I don't know, rewards or running a large organization or being a manager, or things like that, but I think, at the end of the day, you got to work on stuff you love, you got to be having fun, and I think people want to be having impact. I think there's one myth that can get in people's ways. The idea that the more people you manage or the larger your scope is, the more impact you have. I definitely do not think that is true. I mean, look at Community Notes for example. If I had stayed running a large consumer PM team, what would I have produced? 16 more pages of OKRs? I don't know, a bunch of documents? I think building Community Notes has had way bigger impact on the world. It's become the industry standard for how to deal with this now, which is super cool. People love it, it's the first thing that is plausibly dealing with the internet-scale issue of information quality. I think it's unquestionably a bigger impact than I would've had if I were just doing whatever, doing some standard management track thing like I was doing before. I think that's true of so many other small companies and startups. Someone screenshotted I think it's Blake Scholl's LinkedIn the other day. He went from director of coupons or something to building the first supersonic- Yeah, from Groupon.…

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