Nick Turley: commitment

Transcript context

…So, along those lines, I talked to a bunch of people that work with you, that work at OpenAI. Joanne specifically said that urgency and pace are a big part of how you operate, that that's just something you find really important, to create urgency within the team constantly, even when you are the fastest growing product in history, growing like crazy. Talk about just your philosophy on the importance of pace and urgency on teams. Well, it's nice of her to say that. Two things, with ChatGPT, when we decided to do it, we had been prototyping for so long and I was just like, "In 10 days, we're going to ship this thing," and we did. So, that was maybe a moment in time thing where I just really wanted to make sure that we go learn something. Ever since then, I spent so much time thinking about why ChatGPT became successful in the first place, and I think there was some element of just doing things where there was many other companies that had technology in the LLM space that just never got shipped. And I just felt like, of all the things we could optimize for, learning as fast as possible is incredibly important. So I just started rallying people around that, and that took different forms. For a while, when we were of that size, I just ran this daily release sync and had everyone who was required to make a decision in it, and we would just talk about what to do and to pivot from yesterday, et cetera. Obviously, at some point, that doesn't scale, but I always felt like part of my role here, obviously, was to think about the direction of the product, but also to just set the pace and the resting heartbeat for our teams. And again, this is important anywhere, but it's especially important when the only way to find out what people like and what's valuable is to bring it into the external world. So, for that reason, I think it's become a superpower of OpenAI, and I'm glad that Joanne thinks that I had some part in that, but it really has taken a village. I love this phrase, "the resting heart rate of your team". That's such a perfect metaphor of just the pace of being equivalent to your resting heart rate.…

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