Jen Abel: evaluation

Transcript context

…One of the biggest fears I think founders have is having a company pull, basically build just for their use case and then it ends up not being used by a lot of people. And so how far do you go fixing their specific problems? Any advice on just how far to go with one company? That is the founder's job. The founder's job is to have a clear vision and do not let anything delineate from that. It's important to take feedback in terms of what is the market's reality, but it is the founder, and this is why being a founder is so hard. It is the founder's job to interpret that because a lot of feedback you get is this is the old way, they're responding this way because it's the old way of working. They want you to build this because that's how they're traditionally expecting to do that. It is not, "Here's where we're going, this is why we're not doing that. I hear you, but here's why we're not going to do that because we're going to completely change the way you do this. " That is the founder's job. And I think we did a bunch of design partnerships late last year and there was a lot of feedback given, a lot of feedback given, but the founder had such clarity with where he wanted to go that he was like 80% noise, 20% had I not asked this question, I wouldn't have gotten that gold in terms of where they are today. And it's that 80/20 rule where 80% of what they're going to tell you is probably going to be not related to where you want to go or based off of the old way, but that 20% of, "Oh, I did not think about it that way." That drives everything. Have you seen a design partner pull a company in the wrong direction? Just screw their path? Have you seen that or is that pretty rare?…

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