Will Larson: observation

Transcript context

…He's coming on the podcast. Amazing. He also wrote, The Crux I think came out this year sometime, which I also read. I think both great and just a phenomenal thinker who has so much depth. I think one of the challenges of writing about strategy is you're like, I've seen two things and I write the book, but I think the thing that's impressive about Richard Rumelt is he's seen so many different scenarios that he's able to really operate from both the particular but also the general and dataset in a really interesting way. Another book with similar characteristics is How Big Things Get Done by... I forget the authors, but really amazing dataset of how mega projects kind of succeed and fail. But anyway, Richard Rumelt, definition of strategy is basically three components. There's a diagnosis. What is the current status quo? What are the things that are real today? There are guiding policies which are basically based on the diagnoses, how do you want to address them? And there's actions. And actions are how are we going to implement these guiding policies. He talks a lot about actions because concerned about this idea of inert strategy where you have like, "We're going to deprecate our old product features we don't use, but no one deprecates any of them. " So he's really concerned about this non implementation kind of useless strategy that doesn't do anything. On engineering, I'm a little bit less worried about that. I think strategy is more interesting on engineering in terms of clarifying how we make future decisions. And so what are a few examples of that? At Uber, we only used our own data centers. We didn't use the cloud. And this has changed since the era I was there, but in the 2014 era, no cloud, and we had a strict no cloud policy. And this was annoying because we had to indent everything ourselves or run copies of everything ourselves. But it also meant that we were able to spin up in China in literally three months and some surreal stories from that. We couldn't fit our racks into the data centers, so they had to take the roof off the data center and lift the racks in with the crane. Holy shit.…

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