Ivan Zhao: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, blessing and a curse. Speaking of a blessing and curse, this is a great segue to where I wanted to go in the final area I want to spend time on which is building horizontal software and building software that bundles together a bunch of different stuff. Notoriously hard to build a horizontal platform that does a lot of things when there are often point solutions that are very, very good at that one thing. And it's interesting. If you look at the timelines of companies that have built horizontal products, they all take a long time to build and finally find product market fits. It's actually a really common pattern. And when we were talking about what would be fun to talk about, the way you described it is the joy and pain of building horizontal products. So let me just ask broadly just what have you learned about what it takes to successfully build a horizontal platform type of product? First of all, no regret. And second, I wouldn't want to build anything else because going back to the value, Lego for software doesn't exist and Lego is a horizontal thing. So that's the thing we want to build. We always want to do that. So we did not start to optimize for business but we're optimized for that vision. Learning-wise, I think segmentation is quite important because people can use a Lego for different things. Only hardcore Lego fans care about Lego bricks. Most people care about Lego boxes. And they actually want the Lego box to be ready-made. When you unpack the box, the set is there for you, right? That's what we're learning a lot, especially move up market. There's this term that took me a while to learn. It's called solutions. You need to be a solution for enterprise customer, you need to sit somewhere on a P&L to optimize for their business where due third risk. That's Lego box. It's not a Lego brick. Segmentation related to that. So you need to shift your mindset as you more towards B2B, more towards move out market. I wish we have done earlier. For the longest time, I've stalled too much in the Lego brick mindset, now in the solution Lego box mindset. That's such a good metaphor. I feel like even if you're not building Legos for business, just this idea of what is the box that you are selling to people, how's it being positioned? How do you picture it? What are the value? Props such a good metaphor.…

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