Noam Lovinsky: evaluation

Transcript context

…I want to circle back to this first point you made, an experience you had convincing people that your first project shouldn't be something you work on. How long do you stick with something that isn't going well and then decide, "Okay, let's convince people this is something I should move on from," versus you don't want to give up on a project quickly, you want to give it a shot? I mean, look, I don't know that it's a perfect answer, but I think the reality is just that what kills most projects most early companies is stamina. And I think that we all need to work on being more resilient about kind of like, I remember at Thumbtack, Marco, the CEO, we used to say that it feels like we're running uphill and chewing glass, and you're kind of like, "That's right, we want to do that. That's good for us. Take our medicine." So you want to practice that sort of resiliency. But ultimately, I think that what starts to happen is you start to lose the stamina and you're just not bringing your best self to the situation. And so many of these things that are so high ambiguity where you don't know exactly what to build or you don't know exactly, you're not getting the signal you need or the feedback you need to be able to hone it in and know that you're doing something well. They require just an ungodly level of faith and stamina. And so that's sort of what I look to. When you see a team that is motivated, that is building something like they're really excited about, I mean just the inertia, the quality, it's like a whole different game where when you see a team that's sort of down and out and they've really been hitting their head against the wall for a long time, sometimes they just need a change of scene, a change of pace, and they get to a much better situation. So my honest answer is, yeah, it's the, when do you run out of steam is usually the question. I think that happens usually like in the startup case, a lot of times before you run out money or these other things. We've talked about Thumbtack a couple of times now, so let's talk about that. I love this description of running a pill, chewing glass. My understanding is when you joined, things were going well, and then things started to go much less well, and then you helped turn things around. Talk about that part of your journey and what you learned from that time.…

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