Chris Hutchins: preference

Transcript context

…Reminds me, I think Andy is the person who on a podcast once said that every year he picks like a, "We're going to bet the company on this idea." Kind of project, is that? I would say we've done that a few times. I think the thing that I always told people that I wanted to work on is like, "I want to work on a project that if successful makes everything we do as a company today feel like it's not that important because we did something that was 10 times bigger than everything we're doing today. And what we're doing now is just 10% of the company." Those are the kind of crazy ideas I like to work on. They're very hard sometimes you're like, "Ooh, I've got one." And then it just doesn't work. Sometimes you do one and it takes a turn. But I think that when companies find those things, they're so powerful. But if you don't have the buy-in for management that that's your goal... Andy, he always talks about slugging average, not batting average. He's like, "I don't care if you hit the ball every time. If one in 10 times you hit a home run that's better than someone who hits it every three out of 10 times but gets out a lot." He thought about that and the balance. He's written a lot internally about the balance between working on iterative improvements to current features and then taking big bets and trying to find the balance amongst it all. But I think he does believe there is always exploration necessary for taking big bets and trying to take swings that could have outsized impact. You got to balance it because you're often wrong. And I think that's something that I was like, "That's the thing I want to work on." As someone who is kind of running a company, when you get to go to a big company and you're like, "Now I can solely focus just on this big product bet. I don't have to worry about hiring and recruiting and all these other things." So that was fun. Speaking of being solely focused on something, let's talk about the podcast. So this is kind of the new thing that you're going to be focused on full-time. You just left Wealthfront and you launched the podcast maybe a year and a half ago, correct me if I'm wrong, by a year and a half ago. The podcast is Top 30, top 40 business podcast. It's probably gone a lot of higher at some points. And so there's a bunch of questions I want to ask about just how you launched this thing and built this thing. But broadly, what did I miss about the [inaudible 00:22:18] framing of the podcast?…

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