Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
evaluation 7belief 6recommendation 3preference 2uncertainty 1
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
The useful parts, with receipts.
19 published records
“There is a set of books, I think one that is the starter one is, I think it's called, right now, the Ideal Executive. People don't really know it, it's sort of a management book, how to run a team and whatnot. I think the original version is, funnily enough, I think it was called Mismanagement, but nobody wants to buy a book called Mismanagement, you'd much rather buy a book that's called Ideal Executive. Because you, of course, are not mismanaging, you're the ideal executive altogether, so you're just reinforcing your self. But jokes aside, it basically gives you the... It tried to define people by four characteristics, I think misnamed, but are you an administrator? Are you, he calls it a producer, basically get the job done? Integrator, which brings people together, and the fourth one, it's basically change agent, do a lot of mess and change stuff. Usually entrepreneurs kind of include that part, of course. And basically, his claim is that nobody does the whole four, maybe you're good at one, maybe okay at the other, and personally I'm horrible in administration. I obviously acknowledge that, and I try to sort of compliment myself. So, I think there's two things in it, firstly, just those, I thought there was the four good ways of looking at people, as a manager, as a leader, of course, that's one, but I think even if you disagree with those four, just understanding that you want to look at the people in the organization, yourself included [inaudible 00:48:20] key characteristics, and you can select the different framework, helps you a lot with creating high-velocity discussions with others. Because I can talk with somebody and say, hey, you're a P. He's going be like, well, I'm not P, an I, whatever the thing is, and that makes a discussion that is much, much faster, and more comprehensive than just trying to explain this from scratch. Like, hey, you tend to do this, and you might want to do this, and you might want to strengthen that. So, I'd recommend starting from this, but there's probably other methodologies you can pick, and maybe some of the listeners here have already had one, but that's one I like because I found it useful.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“I like Crucial Conversation, that's going to, in the beating path, it's like how to conduct conversations with people in your organization.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“When you start hearing the same thing, you're like, okay, I kind of got to where I need to be, now I can make decisions, I can always do another spiral and get one level deeper, which is, I don't know, do some user research, go all in, but at least at the conversation level, I've got where I need to be.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“I would say very close to 100% of the features we build end up being used by a significant number of people.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“I think something that's probably necessary for that to work out well is having a deep experience in that space.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“Of course we had to give them resources at some stage, but it wasn't like a top down, let's do this, it was more like, hey, we're trying it out, hey, we need a couple of more resources, we're trying out more. And at some stage we realized it's super important and then we "funded it" completely.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“One of the maybe unique things we've done, at some stage it just became, I think we got like 25 pods right now, maybe 30, it depends what you call a pod.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“I think the taste change because you kind of eat more healthy and less oil these days.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“I think somebody made a mistake and gave you the name, and now it's like ubiquitous.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“I call it the spiral because it's going in circles around the target, and eventually you feel like, well, I'm hearing the same thing again and again, and you're like, well, if I heard it from three people, I didn't learn anything new, I'm at the bullseye.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“Because today, like I said at the very top of this conversation, you're just so ubiquitous, everybody seems to be using Gong. And I love that you started with something, where there was seven, I don't know, different constraints to narrow down who you're going after, and it's such a good example of the power of starting very focused and then expanding from that, which is what you've done.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“I love that detail, because as you said, coordinating 12 companies and people at these companies and timing is really stressful and complicated and could suck the PMs life up.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“I think Figma calls their AI feature like First Draft, which is a term I like because they realize it's not best, it's not great, but it's a good first draft.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“Give him more autonomy, essentially, bring yourself to the game, be yourself, don't try to put yourself in a box, I truly believe you're going to get much better results, short, and even more importantly, long-term, because it keeps people thinking, it keeps them being motivated, and they're like, how do I contribute in the way I think is the right way?”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“When we founded Gong, I was in sabbatical, and I actually went to this deep learning course because I was bored, in all fairness, and after that course I ended up buying Nvidia stock, which I wish I had kept up until now.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“We worked on a post back in the day on how you all got your first 10 customers, and I remember the story was you got, I think, 12 design partners when you first designed Gong, and then you told them, okay, we're going to start charging now, and 11 out of 12 are like, we will buy this now, please charge us, and we love it.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“It may be they're not as willing to pay for it, although that's a little bit of a different process, like real product launch. It could be the quality is not good enough because we're focusing on, is it providing value, is it understandable versus did you find a bug when you used, I don't know, Safari, on this kind of computer.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“Now, we all knew we need one salesperson, one SE and [inaudible 00:45:59] what's now called product market fit, I don't know that the term even existed there, and we're like, nah, you know what, investors told us you got to hire more people. So, we hired, I don't know, 20 salespeople, all of them failing miserably, because A, we didn't have a true product market fit, but even what's worse, we didn't have a true focused ICP with a very, very repeatable product market fit.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“I never installed any piece of software on my kids' devices. So, not firewall protection, I don't know, antivirus, error tag, nothing, because I'm like this is your problem, and if you want to protect yourself, it's your responsibility.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast