Qasar Younis: evaluation

Transcript context

…So imagine I'm not the founder of the company and Peter's not the co-founder. It's just a generic company. The ideal situation with a generic company is one that you can put in lots of different competing ideas. The culture is one where you'll shake those ideas out. There's not an emotion in it. Whoever brings the idea, the best idea wins. So why can't companies do that? Frankly speaking, a lot of times it's the founders. And the founders are told by popular media and the way that human beings experience life and our tribal kind of outlook, that you have to have this hard view. And everyone has, if they're not following you, then maybe you're a weak leader or something like that. And I think we just don't believe that. We don't just believe in that philosophy. And I think we believe that what maybe a more tactical way of saying that is we take inputs of the environment, our customers, specifically, our employees, our competitors, of our investors, and of what's happening in society write large, and that impacts our strategy. And I think it's one of the reasons we've been very, very successful. We're not so arrogant to think that we just have the answers because we had the ambition to start a company. And I think that permeates into a very specific culture. And I think the culture that we've built is one, it's also not being contrarian for contrarian's sake. Well, one view I do have is emotions are generally not helpful in making rational decisions. They're almost like the opposite of it. And sometimes passion and leadership are supposed to be about... They're supposed to be, again, magnanimous or emotional. And we just don't believe that. And that's, I think, a bit more of our kind of Midwest roots showing for Peter and I. And so, I think it's not that we disagree with everything in the room. What we specifically say is speak up, speak up. Everyone has to speak up because that one person with their one experience, because they worked at Zoox, or Waymo, or wherever, Tesla, or they worked at a Chinese company, whatever it is. That one idea they have in their head when the debate is happening about what we should do in space, literally the space of space, and something maybe we don't know much about. That one person's one idea, they have to feel comfortable sharing it. Even if they're the most junior person or they feel that they didn't get their way in the last debate or they feel whatever anxiety that they might have, they have to share that opinion that, guys, this is actually the right idea or this is the wrong idea. And if you can create that environment where the best idea wins. Gandhi has this line, truth is what stands as the test of time. And I think there's become a little bit of a meme in the Bay Area like truth seeking as a culture, but it kind of is like that. We're trying to find the best idea. Maybe truth is the wrong word, maybe it's the best idea. Find the best idea and then let's go full bore against the best idea. culture, but it kind of is like that. We're trying to find the best idea. Maybe truth is the wrong word, maybe it's the best idea. Find the best idea and then let's go full bore against the best idea. Let's maybe use a counterfactual. Why do companies fail when they have great talent and they have seemingly all the same components that an Applied Intuition have? It's because maybe the best ideas are not being surfaced and certainly maybe they're not actually being adopted. Or more often than not, when I think about companies that have been very successful is they have momentum going in a specific direction and that wall of sound overwhelms any new sound that's emerging which is, "Hey, the market's changing, the market's changing. " You just can't even hear that because there's all this momentum going in a particular direction. A good example, I had front row seats for this when I worked at Google, it was the era where Facebook was emerging. And here's Google, and people don't remember Google in the late 00s and early teens. Google wasn't just a company. It was the apex predator of Silicon Valley. Apple was just the MacBook Air had just come out. Steve Jobs was getting in the right direction, but nothing like Apple is today. Amazon, AWS was still a young thing. Nvidia was teetering off of bankruptcy. All these giant companies that you think of, Microsoft was run by Balmer, Twitter was a small thing. But Google was this already larger than life, number one company. Everybody wanted to work at Google, and there were not many companies with that stature. And then in the periphery, this little company Facebook starts emerging. And Google, who has the best engineers on the planet, is making a billion in cash flow a month, tries to fight this little company. And I remember Facebook at that time maybe had 1,000 people, and Google was like 15X, 20X the size with a lot of cashflow. And why couldn't Google fight Facebook? It's because Google is not Facebook. It's like the Confucian saying, how does a gorilla learn how to fly? By not being a gorilla. The way that Google would've won the social media wars by being a social media company, it's just fundamentally not. And so this happens in companies all the time, which is you're just going in one direction with momentum consciously or unconsciously because that's where all the employees are, that's what the culture is, that's what they work on. And then something changes in the market and you just can't even move there. And I think that also can happen or surprisingly at really small companies. So where founders have a view and it's like that view is the view it's going to be. And actually that can be just 10 degrees off from what was the correct path. And the whole company's kind of led astray. They were in the right market. They might've even been solving the right problem, but they were just a little off. And so we're so scared of failing and so scared of losing that I will humble myself and listen to other people and they say, "Hey, we're five degrees off course here." And it's like, okay, let's maybe fix the course. scared of failing and so scared of losing that I will humble myself and listen to other people and they say, "Hey, we're five degrees off course here." And it's like, okay, let's maybe fix the course. And then once that becomes your culture, then it's really hard to lose because everybody's not about fulfilling a preset path. They're just about finding how to win.…

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