Vlad Loktev: observation

Transcript context

…That's an amazing story, and it reminds me of something else, just to take a quick tangent here. Brian is incredible at just asking people always, "That's a great goal you have there. What would it take to 10x that goal?" He'd get to the FP&A projections, and he's like, "Great. How do we 10x this?" I found that to be really scary, but also, really effective in helping people think a lot bigger. Is there something there you can share about just what you learned from Brian about thinking that big? I think it's less about hitting the goal. I think a lot of people, when they see really big goals, they get immediately afraid of the goals, because they think, "Oh my God, I don't know how to hit this. If we don't hit it, what happens?" You start thinking about all the downstream consequences. The reality is, it's not about hitting the goal, it's about thinking how to hit the goal, and going through that creative journey of, what does the world need to look like for this to be true, this crazy goal to be true? How should we think about it? Oftentimes, it pushes you to test extremes, when the whole world is going to operate this way, or nobody in the world is going to operate this way versus something in between. Usually, it's when you start testing the extremes that you begin to realize, "This is the path that we should actually take." Yeah, I've found exactly the same thing, just thinking backwards from what is the best possible thing we could do, versus incrementally forward ends up unlocking a lot of big ideas. Something I imagine is in people's minds as they hear some of this stuff, like designing something in 24 hours or thinking 10x bigger is, "I don't want to work that way. That sounds incredibly stressful. That sounds really hard." You mentioned this, that this isn't necessarily for everyone. Not everyone needs to work at this company, or work this way. Part of it is hiring, is finding people that want to lean in, to work really hard. Other people don't. Is there anything there, of just, this is actually really hard, and it's not for everyone, but it also ends up being successful, and you end up having a good time a lot of times afterwards?…

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