Shaun Clowes: evaluation

Transcript context

…Wow, that was an awesome story and an awesome perspective. It's similar to the advice I always give PMs of people always wondering, "Should I go deep on a specific subject? Should I just try different things?" And I find just variety, especially earlier in your career is really powerful, not just to help you discover the thing you like, but also to your point, just using insights from all these different parts of the product and internal tools and trust and safety and platform and consumer product side and growth and just core stuff. The more of that you have, the stronger you get. And I feel like another benefit of your approach is if you work at just B2B SaaS companies, if you have too many of that on your resume, it's very hard to get hired a consumer company. And so just having it creates a huge optionality for you if you do, which you did. Yeah, it's interesting because people used to talk about people who are T-shaped or whatever, and I've never really loved the analogy because it's more like people are scribble shaped. I mean, there's the really best people you've worked with, they're more like scribbles than they are T-shaped because of course you want to be horizontally capable, so you want to be broad and you do want to be deep, but you actually want to be deep in way more than one thing. Now obviously when I say deep, I don't mean I'm not able to do the job of our finance function all day every day, but I'm 100% good enough to go three clicks below the simple financial analysis. I can go reasonably deep in our financials because I want to and because it's partly it matters. It's important to be able to do that. And so maybe a different way to think about that bingo card is I've rarely regretted going deep in something that isn't quite my job. I've rarely regretted it. The worst case scenario is I've learned something new that I will never use, which I guess at least that made my brain slightly more agile. I don't know, there must be some potential benefit of that. But the very best case scenario is that when I least suspect it at some point in the future it will turn out to be the thing that matters. It will be the tool that I need, but I'm facing some important problem and I will be like, "Oh my god, this was worth every cent." And so if you think about it on an ROI basis, doing things that aren't in your wheelhouse, that aren't the things directly in front of you, the ROI can really be outlandish. It can be off the charts great, but I guess it's speculative. Because you don't know you're going to need it tomorrow. You don't know if it's going to be something that's going to be a regular tool you use. What's interesting is the bingo card is the analogy. Is there a bingo moment at the end of this? Is there retirement?…

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