Kevin Weil: belief

Transcript context

…I imagine being a PM at Open AI is a dream come true for a lot of people. At the same time, I imagine it's not a fit for a lot of people. There's researchers involved, very product minded engineers. What do you look for in the PMs that you hire there for folks that are like, "Maybe I shouldn't go work there. I shouldn't even think about that." I think, I've said this a few times, but high agency is something that we really look for, people that are not going to come in and wait for everyone else to allow them to do something, they're just going to see a problem and go do it. It's just a core part of how we work. I think people that are happy with ambiguity, because there is a massive amount of ambiguity here, it is not the kind of place, and we have trouble sometimes with more junior PMs because of this, because it's just not the place where someone is going to come in and say, "Okay, here's the landscape, here's your area, I want you to go do this thing. " And that's what you want as an early career PM. I mean, no one here has time and the problems are too ill-formed and we're figuring them all out as we go. And so high agency, very comfortable with ambiguity, ready to come in and help execute and move really quickly. That's kind of our recipe. And I think also happy leading through influence because... I mean it's usual as a PM, people don't report to you, your team doesn't report to you, et cetera, but you also have the complexity of a research function, which is even more sort of self-directed and it's really important to build a good rapport with the research team. I think the EQ side of things is also super important for us. I know at most companies, a PM comes in and they're just like, "Why do we need you?" And as a PM you have to earn trust and help people see the value, and I feel like at Open AI it's probably a very extreme version of that where they're like, "Why do we need this person? We have researchers, engineers, what are you going to do here?"…

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