Shawn Wang: belief

Transcript context

…Sam's fiercer and nerdier just for the record. Um, but I think part of it is just like the strength of my conviction, I guess. Like I'm, I'm willing to. Work harder and grind it out, uh, more than people that are smarter than me. And I'm only slightly stupider than people that are willing to work harder than me. Right. Like I'm just the right mix of, uh, the kind of grinded it, kind of work at it, stick to it for extended periods of time. If I think I'm right, I will latch out, latch on and not let go until I can either like prove to myself that it's not. Um, so even like the natural language thing, it's like, you know, it took 20 years, but eventually I got to a point where, uh, the world caught up and it became possible. Uh, but yeah, I think. And part of it is, uh, I think this is partly, I think what makes me like, I'm a nice guy. Uh, sometimes they're the most dangerous kind, right? It's like, okay, well, I, I don't make enemies or whatever, but so my advice would be my, this is my take on competition. I don't think of it as like war. I think of it as, uh, their opponents. All right. And this is, it's not worried up. It's like, it's, it's a game, right? And you can use whatever analogy I happen to play a fair amount of chess. I'm a student of the game. That's partly, I think what, uh, makes me. Effective, uh, I'm solving for the long-term, uh, so I'm kind of hard to deter. So for those of you out there looking to kind of compete with HubSpot, uh, no, uh, I'm going to be here 18 years. I'm going to be here for another 18 years. So, but not that you shouldn't do it. It's a big market. Uh, I'm not trying to sway anyone, but yeah, I think like something I struggled with, with this conviction, you said you pursue things to conviction, but like you start out not knowing anything. Yeah. And so how do you develop a conviction when there's. You, you find it along the way, or you, you stumble along the way, then you lose conviction and then you stop working on it, you know, like, how do you keep going? The way I've sort of approached it is that, um, so I don't generally tend to have conviction around a solution or a product. I have conviction around a problem, uh, that says this is an actual real problem that needs to be solved. And I may have an idea for how to be solved, uh, you know, right now, and that I may get dissuaded. It's like, ah, I'm not smart enough. Technology's not good enough. Whatever the constraints are, but it's the problem I have conviction around. It's like, oh, that problem still hasn't gone away. Uh, so like I sort of filed away in the back of my brain and I'll revisit it's like, okay, well, you know, the kind of board changes, uh, and then it changes really fast now with AI, like things that weren't possible before are now possible. So you kind of go back to your roster of things that you believe or believed and say, maybe now, uh, now is the time maybe then it wasn't the time, uh, but I'm a big believer in kind of attaching yourself. Passionately, uh, with conviction to problems that matter, um, that, and there are some that are just too highfalutin for me that I'm not going to ever be able to kind of take on. I have the humility to recognize that. Yeah.…

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