Aarthi Ramamurthy: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. And this was 2005/2006, so right before the iPhone came out, the two years and we were fresh out of school, both of us worked on this. And there was basically an ID, Visual Studio, and we had an extension where you could write code on a slimmed down version of the .NET Framework and you would run apps on these small phones and these small Pocket PCs. And the team was fantastic, we're all still friends and without that, we wouldn't have our jobs or careers, so that's not the point. The point is we all knew these phones were terrible and slow and awful, but what we were told all the time was, "Listen, nobody can change this because the carriers control this market. They determined what software goes on a phone, goes on a device, so this entire ecosystem is all about competing with Blackberry." In fact, the codename for Windows Mobile 5.0 was Crossbow and kind of a little secret which I think is kind of public now, Crossbow was a weed killer, it killed blackberries. And so the whole idea was how do you kind go after the enterprise market Blackberry and work with the carriers? And then in 2007, Steve Jobs comes out and says, "I have three launches for you, actually it's one thing." I remember texting my manager, I was like, "You have to see this keynote," because it was so obvious that this thing was going to change everybody. And everyone in Microsoft was like, "No, it's the carriers who have all the control. They will never let these devices [inaudible 01:07:32]. But actually, it turns out that's not true. I learned two lessons from that. One is the market is bigger than all of you. You can work with the amazing team, you can work with the A plus team, A plus company, but if the market shifts, you can't overcome a bad market or a bad space. The second part is at the heart of it, if you feel some product is bad and if you feel like this new thing, it's just better to use and you can just feel it instinctly, you have to follow the instinct. Because I remember being like, "Yeah, the iPhone is cool, it feels so much better, but okay, maybe they're right, maybe it is the- All these people are so much more senior than us, clearly they've put so much more thought into this, clearly what do I know kind of thing. And you realize that now, I think over, what, we've done product for 15, 16 years now, and we look at it and go, "We now have these patterns to go match against. " We know when something is better, when something is working, when something feels like it's intuitive, you follow that intuition now then and not try and fight it and be like, "But here are all these things where this is not going to get there," kind of thing. It just doesn't work that way, the market ultimately wins. And I think when you're younger, you should really trust your instincts. And instincts can mean, "I just hear people talking about this other thing a lot," or, "I hear that other company's name come up a lot," or, "I tried this thing and... And you may not have the framework to articulate it and you may not trust your instincts, but there's something there and you should learn to listen to that voice. You're like, "Why is that? Why are we talking about it? Maybe they're doing better marketing, maybe their CEO is better on Twitter or they have Lenny Rachitsky as an angel investor or they advertise on your podcast," there we go. I tried to get a plug in there, Lenny. But you have to listen to your instinct because there's usually something there to follow.…

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