Keith Yandell: belief

Transcript context

…Same at Airbnb, is something the founders brought up all the time. And speaking of that, another area that you have a lot of expertise on is legal. So, you led legal for a while at DoorDash. And I was thinking, as thinking about this question, "I wonder what's more difficult, to be head of legal at Airbnb or head of legal at DoorDash," both fraught businesses and ideas. But we'll avoid that question for now. So my question is just legal and product. It's always this interesting relationship, how much legal has say over what happens versus how much product has final decision-making powers. Any lessons there about just how to set up a product and legal relationship within a software business? Yeah. And both for the product folks that are listening as well as the entrepreneurs who want to be founders, I've had the pleasure of working with two founders who are very product-driven, product-first folks, in Travis and Tony. And I've found that the way they engage on the legal side is with the curiosity I referenced earlier, which is they're both hyper curious, and they will ask questions until they understand the law in the particular area about as well as the lawyers. And then they will apply a first principles product mindset to their understanding of the law, and they will push the lawyers to make sure that they're not being overly conservative, which sometimes they can be. And so, when you're on the product team, especially if you're in a consumer-facing business, it may not be as pronounced for SaaS businesses, but if you're in a consumer-facing business, working on a consumer-facing product, you had better have at least a general understanding of what type of regulations are going to apply to your business, and what type of constraints there are, and how to push those constraints. Yeah, and so for me it's just about that level of curiosity and actually engaging in the profession. Right? There's nothing magic about the law. There's a finite number of things that you can learn. And just like all the other functions I've learned, I think you can engage them in a way, till you are proficient and actually really accretive to your business. Keith, this has been incredible. I can see why people want to work for you, why they keep giving you more teams to run. I learned a ton. I'm really excited for folks to listen to this and learn from you. Two final questions. Where can folks find you online, or if they want to reach out or learn more, where do you point them? And then, two, how can listeners be useful to you?…

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