Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth: evaluation

Transcript context

…This touches on something that comes up a lot on this podcast. And there's this debate between how in the weeds founders and execs should be, whether they delegate, empower versus, no, we're just going to do it this way. I'm going to be very involved in every mock. And there's always this like up and down that happens where it's like, okay, cool. We're going to let people run and do their thing. And then things start to not work as well often. And then, cool, we're going to take back control. Do you have just a perspective on when it makes sense to go deep, how founders, execs should think about that? Such a useless answer for founders. It depends on the weeds. Like, you know, like there are some weeds that really matter and there's some weeds that really just don't. And I should say, like, that doesn't mean they don't matter at all. You have to do them. But like they aren't the hinge upon which success or failure will happen. Yeah. There's people I really respect. Brian Chesky's been on and said, like, look. The Airbnb is going to work only on the things that I can work on. That's the extent of what it's going to do. And that's a super extreme form of it. I have a lot of respect for him and how they're working things. I think that if you have great, super talented people that you can trust who can own bigger pieces, that's one option. If there are ways to structure it so that you can check in effectively and make sure that it's on track, that's another way to structure it. And there probably is still work happening at Airbnb that has to happen, finance and accounting and HR, that Brian isn't personally managing. So there are clearly non-technical areas that are illegal. There are areas that we do trust that this is happening at. And so I think a lot of founders... regret delegating too much from what I, you know, my conversations. And I totally get that. Or they delegated something critical that really turned out to be the most important thing. For me, the judgment is like, how do you most important determine what is what matters the most? And so Mark, we joke inside of Meta to this day, we call it the eye of Sauron. When Mark has determined that the thing that you're working on is the most important thing, there is no detail too small him to notice like uh he will be in a review and in the same review we'll be like strategically i think we're off course and also this one pixel is is definitely wrong you have to fix that like you know that's a big range i frankly if i i'll be a little bit self-congratulated i probably myself may be able to do the same and i think people who work with me often comment that the style of leadership that we have and i think chris cox is the same is that where it's like, we will go high to low on the things that matter a ton. And there's a bunch of other things that certainly matter. Like we're glad we're doing them, but either they have pretty clear roadmaps, pretty clear examples in the industry, or it's like, that's a feature that you have to have, but isn't going to determine success or failure. So getting it into rough shape and then iterating on it is fine. And so I think it really does depend on the weeds, how deep you want to get. It's so funny. I use exactly that same metaphor that I have Sauron when I talk about working on things at Airbnb that matter a lot to Brian. And my advice to people is you don't want to be in that eye of Sauron for too long in your career because you're just going to burn out if you're working on the most important thing all the time. But you want to be close. You don't want to be in the shire, but you want to be like around the...…

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