Alex Komoroske: preference

Transcript context

…Please. That would be incredible. I think by talking, I'm an external processor, I literally can't think if I'm not talking. And so I make sure I have as many interesting meetings as I can, and that's where I discover what I think, by talking to people. And the test is if I say a frame, something that the person goes, "Ooh," or like, "Ooh," they go, "Aha," that's a win. That's a mark that's a good one. You're just randomly casting about. I find one. And then if a different person also has a similar response, if a person in sales and a person in engineering both find the same idea interesting, that's a very good sign that lots of people will find it interesting, how diverse in terms of background skill sets, perspectives are the people who resonate with the thing you're saying. The intuition of this is if you find in a social network, you want to see what's going to go viral, if something is shared and it's shared within, so the people who are at the beginning are all highly densely interconnected in the social graph, then the implied ceiling is relatively small. You only know it works with that audience. But if it's people that are very different subclass and very little overlap, they both find it interesting, that implies a much larger max audience. So you're looking for ideas that resonate with the diversity of people. And then once you find them, each time you get something like that, you invest a little more time in it and you think a little bit more about framing it the next time. I haven't done this during this chat, but in most conversations, you'll see me as I'm talking writing down stuff like, "Ooh, that was the best formulation of that one so far." And so you keep on coming back to it. You keep on tightening it and seeing how, watching how it's responding and referring with different people through like, "Where do you get these from?" It's like I got thousands and thousands and thousands of little examples or metaphors or whatever that's sick. One of the benefits of metaphorical thinking is you connect nine of the 10 dots and you invite the listener to engage with the argument to connect that last dot. This allows you by the way to say very controversial things, because if you say connect all the 10 dots and it's like, "Oh, that's the official strategy," then you are instantly a dangerous thing. Whereas if you leave one dot unconnected, people can go connect the dot and go, "Oh my god, I think that applies to us." You're like, "Oh my god, what?" "Yes, that's why I picked that." But to counteract this because now it's less obvious to people that's correct, you have to make the metaphor evocative and interesting. One of the reasons that slime mold deck got so much traction is partially because slime is gross, it's bad, and yet it's talking about why slime is good. And so that has this instantly subversive thing. I only know this after the fact of trying to figure out why did that deck get so much attention of all the things I've written. It also is all emojis basically, which is not how you often read a deck. It's very beautifully made. I love that you've been talking about the way you think and come up with ideas is by talking to people and having conversations. We also talked about how you write in this Bits and Bobs approach. I asked someone that you worked with at Stripe what to ask you, and she said to ask you about strategy salons, which feels like a good avenue for this sort of thing. Can you talk about what these are and how you set these up?…

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