Jiaona Zhang: belief

Transcript context

…I'm going to actually give you my biggest thing across all four on the product side. And then on the people side. There are so many nuances also, and we could spend another two hours talking about each one of these. But I think just to impart my biggest high level learning. On the product side, it's about really understanding why people love you and not forgetting to invest deeply in that core concept and then building everything around that. And so I'll walk you through the different companies. So specifically for Dropbox, I think we did waste cycles where we would be like, "Oh, we see X happening in the market. Slack is really taking off. Why don't we build a Slack competitor? Or why don't we build chat?" And I think that it really missed this idea of, "Why do people love Dropbox and what do we need to do to continue investing in that so that remains true?" People love Dropbox for simplicity, for how delightful it is, how easy it is to use. I think we actually went for a period of time where we didn't invest enough in just performance of our client. How long it takes for the thing to sync is a big part of the experience of using Dropbox. And so I think that is a big, big learning where it's really understanding that would've shifted your investments into doing that performance work as opposed to chasing the competitive space. And I think going back to chasing the competitive space, it's this idea of what is your alpha? Again, why do people come to you? People come to Dropbox again for all the things I mentioned, but also ultimately we have your files. So if you're going and building a chat product, that's fine, but really the best chat experience or collaboration experience is going to be more around your files as opposed to around just the conversation. So I think really understanding that is a huge, huge learning. And I think that same lesson can be... It's very true for Airbnb. So at the end of the day, Airbnb is known for all the homes, the fact that these are homes that real people put on the platform. We spent some time talking about Airbnb Plus. When you are thinking "I got to go in and I got to manage the inventory and inspect it," you're almost like taking away from the thing that is what makes Air Airbnb special as opposed to leaning into it. We also spend a lot of time on experiences. We dabbled in transportation, we spent a bunch of times on other things. But if you really sat back and you're like, "What makes Air Airbnb special and how do you double down on your strength?" It's spending the time to make that experience of really understanding what's in a home so people don't go and get surprised. Making that onboarding journey for the host and then discovery journey and guest booking journey really, really great. ce of really understanding what's in a home so people don't go and get surprised. Making that onboarding journey for the host and then discovery journey and guest booking journey really, really great. So I think that that same lesson when applied to Airbnb, would've in my head changed the way we invested and I think we would've gotten more returns, as opposed to spreading ourselves and then having things that sort of work but then didn't quite work. And then again, same principle applies to WeWork, what is the thing that makes you really special? It's the inventory it. It's not actually like, "Oh, it's so amazing that I get to use this key card and this key card does 10 different things." That's not what makes the WeWork experience special. And so again, if you knew that you wouldn't spend all that time being like, "I'm going to really deeply invest in the tech team, I'm going to do all these interesting things." You'd be like, "I just need to make inventory management great. I need to make it so that the sales team, the operations team, they have the tools they need to go out and get the inventory on the platform." You wouldn't do all this other stuff that's just not the core. And then finally, even at Webflow, we are learning this lesson all the time where at the end of the day, people really love our designer. They love the fact that they can use it. It does so much for them, it's so powerful. And then you add our CMS and it's really powerful. You can design with data. So investing deeply there as opposed to spreading ourselves too thin is also a lesson. I think across so many companies this lesson around understand why people love you, double down on that and then whatever else you build around it... Because again, you don't want to also be like... You're not like a single product company, you're not like a one trick pony. You are going to invest in these multi products, but when you invest in a new product, really go back to, again, what's the core of our advantage and how can that be something we leverage in delivering a really great product experience for our users in X adjacent area or x add-on? Final question before we get to a very exciting lightning round.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.