Elena Verna: preference

Transcript context

…Okay, number five. Okay, I have this one. It's a little bit Meta, but I see it happening all the time. We love to think that our problems are unique. I'm working in this company and we have this gross problem and we need to go and figure out the solution from the grounds up. Maybe this is a little bit related to the competition point, but I'm very sorry to break it to all of you, but your problem is not unique. I am 99% sure of that. Your problem has been felt by somebody somewhere in probably many, many places and you trying to re-engineer solution is time lost to market and has a huge opportunity cost. So my biggest thing that I try to get people is don't think that you have unique problems. You don't. I know we love to. It'd be fun to have something unique to learn, but with so many startups, with so many people in our industry, in your industry, whichever industry that is, your problem has been solved by somebody. Or at least that there's a lot of failures on the problem that you should be learning from. And number one thing that whenever you have an initiative or whenever you have a metric that you need to go and move, to not start from scratch, ever. Do not start from scratch. It's the worst thing that you can do because you can waste so many cycles on trying to do something that probably has already been solved, which means how do you approach this as a result? Well, you can look at competition and how they're solving the problem. That's one input, for sure. You should go find people that have solved this problem because there are people there and people love to talk about what they do. So take advantage of that human psychology and go find those people and just ask them, "How did you do it? What did you do? What happened?" Obviously, not all the time everybody's going to respond, but we have LinkedIn, we have X. Go out there, find the people that you think or ask around in your network of who you think might have similar solutions and just go talk to people. It would be incredible shortcut if you're talking about an actual hack that is a hack to get to an optimal solution. And then the last thing that I would also say is that solving any one problem uniquely is extremely inefficient. We are evolving so fast in our market, you need to be able to patternize your solutions. Patternize, is that a word? Let's make it a word.…

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