Varun Parmar: belief

Transcript context

…Let's do it. Which is we talked about how do you ladder this up and stuff, and then the question is, okay, how do you know that everything that you're doing, is that in the right direction or not? Should you move slow and be much more mindful about the things that you're doing or should you move fast and make certain bets and then decide certain things and stuff? I think there are two views that are out there. My personal perspective on this is that what you want to do is that you want to be the first one to hit the brick wall. This is particularly true when you are in a market that is competitive. The reason for that is that if you consider yourself as an innovation-centric company and you believe that you are building experiences that fundamentally don't exist anywhere else and you're sort of paving the way for the rest of the folks to basically get inspired with how you are building these experiences, speed is the single biggest determinant, in my experience, in terms of who ends up being more successful versus not. I don't know, maybe this is a little bit controversial where people say, Go slow to actually go fast." I think I have a lot of respect for that and there's certain areas you should do that, but when you are trying to figure out new experiences and stuff and you don't know if it's going to resonate or not, speed is something that you should accelerate for the organization. I think Frank Slootman talks about this a lot in his book and how can you accelerate? I think for me from a product perspective, the fundamental concept is can you be the first one to hit the brick wall where you have the learning faster than anyone else in the market so that you can decide, "Oh my god, the path that I was going was not the right path. I need to do 10 degrees west or I need to do 30 degrees east." I think as long as you're one or two or three steps ahead of everyone else in terms of uncovering or discovering those insights, then I think you can continue to be ahead of the pack in terms of building your product in business. You're talking about urgency. I've never met a founder or a product leader who doesn't want their team to move faster. They're always encouraging their team, "How do we move faster?" I'm curious if there's something you've learned tactically about helping your team move more quickly. You mentioned Frank Slootman's book. Amp It Up is what it's called, by the way, in case folks want to check it out and he's big on just like creating a sense of urgency, constant urgency, and we'll link to that and share notes. But yeah, what have you found helps create urgency and generally helps your teams move faster other than just like, "Move faster, everyone"?…

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