Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Books, apps, and tools
book / built
“So we wrote Building Rocketships to help people figure out how to build not only great products, but companies that build great products to make sure that people who have the knowledge not to be one hit wonders and the book is divided into two.”
book / recommends
“There's one business book that I recommend, I think it's called The Halo Effect. It's basically a book that lets you call on all these business books that tell you all kinds of stupid shit. It is how to deconstruct what is important in a business and self-help book and what is not important and what is just circumstantial storytelling with random facts and form-fitting evidence. It's called The Halo Effect. Read it. Why do you need to read it? Because garbage in, garbage Out. People were amazed at the Outlier Effect, Malcolm Gladwell, and then people have been tearing it down for 15 years now. But everyone ingested it and thought it was the most important thing. But how do you know what's important to take away from them and what's not? The Halo Effect will help you. And then the other thing is, I read for pleasure because I read a lot for work. And so science fiction is the thing. There's lots to recommend, but I would say that people should either read Dune, Frank Herbert or Foundation by Asimov. If you haven't read those two things and you're a science fiction person, you really should. The world building is incredible. I understand Tolkien and fantasy, but the science fiction side of it is those two books.”
book / recommends
“There's one business book that I recommend, I think it's called The Halo Effect. It's basically a book that lets you call on all these business books that tell you all kinds of stupid shit. It is how to deconstruct what is important in a business and self-help book and what is not important and what is just circumstantial storytelling with random facts and form-fitting evidence. It's called The Halo Effect. Read it. Why do you need to read it? Because garbage in, garbage Out. People were amazed at the Outlier Effect, Malcolm Gladwell, and then people have been tearing it down for 15 years now. But everyone ingested it and thought it was the most important thing. But how do you know what's important to take away from them and what's not? The Halo Effect will help you. And then the other thing is, I read for pleasure because I read a lot for work. And so science fiction is the thing. There's lots to recommend, but I would say that people should either read Dune, Frank Herbert or Foundation by Asimov. If you haven't read those two things and you're a science fiction person, you really should. The world building is incredible. I understand Tolkien and fantasy, but the science fiction side of it is those two books.”
book / recommends
“There's one business book that I recommend, I think it's called The Halo Effect. It's basically a book that lets you call on all these business books that tell you all kinds of stupid shit. It is how to deconstruct what is important in a business and self-help book and what is not important and what is just circumstantial storytelling with random facts and form-fitting evidence. It's called The Halo Effect. Read it. Why do you need to read it? Because garbage in, garbage Out. People were amazed at the Outlier Effect, Malcolm Gladwell, and then people have been tearing it down for 15 years now. But everyone ingested it and thought it was the most important thing. But how do you know what's important to take away from them and what's not? The Halo Effect will help you. And then the other thing is, I read for pleasure because I read a lot for work. And so science fiction is the thing. There's lots to recommend, but I would say that people should either read Dune, Frank Herbert or Foundation by Asimov. If you haven't read those two things and you're a science fiction person, you really should. The world building is incredible. I understand Tolkien and fantasy, but the science fiction side of it is those two books.”
Claim ledger
7 transcript-backed records
01 / evaluation
“One of the things I learned from failing a lot at building companies is that sometimes the way that YCO, the people pitch it, is that you build something and if it doesn't work, you pivot, da-da-da, stuff like that.”
02 / evaluation
“If you really think about it, that's one essence of what we're trying to do. So the zone of benefit works as a framework because people will not pay for things that don't either really shrink the workflow that they're doing or doesn't give them superpower.”
03 / evaluation
“We talk about the lean approach, we talk about fail fast, [inaudible 00:04:28] and so on and so forth. And I think that that was a necessary phase for us because a lot of innovation was just the ideas of founders unvalidated by customers, and we needed this inflection point in our discipline.”
04 / evaluation
“Well, as is my style, I want people to understand what virality is in the first place because I think people have misconceptions about it.”
05 / evaluation
“In fact, when you work on sharp problems, it's hard to fail because you can make mistakes and the customer's obsession will carry you, but if you work on something that doesn't have a sharp problem, mistakes can kill you because essentially you're having to pay a lot for marketing, you're having to pay a lot for word of mouth.”
06 / evaluation
“One is I believe PLG is, I have maybe a different definition of PLG, but I think the way that we are basically adapting products to the consumer or to the business professional and using the product itself to sell the value proposition is really key to transitioning from what we used to do 20 years ago to today.”
07 / evaluation
“When you take a problem and you share it with someone who it's going to affect their workflow, and I use the word workflow a ton because I don't use specs anymore or use cases, I think workflows are the unit of productivity.”