Scale rewards economic impact over technical difficulty

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 13:01

   competitive, which is great, and you have extreme self-belief, which is amazing, but apart from those, do you have, what else would you self-identify as kind of being your 10x spike? I think for us, the thing, I think my personal one as well as I think it's exhibited in a lot of the key people at scale, it's really sort of creative problem solving, but in the face of kind of like the least sexy problems you can imagine. So, you know, a lot of what we have to do is large-scale operations. We have, you know, hundreds of thousands of contributors all around the world. We have to coordinate this process of them producing high-quality data for models. And it's a very, very unsexy problem, but I think we treat that problem with the same level of respect that we would, you know, let's say a math Olympiad problem,

2. 13:52

   and we apply the same kinds of techniques and we're like okay like what are the most creative ways that we could solve this problem how could you break it down let's like apply a scientific method towards solving it and we think something a lot of great tech companies do um but we we hold no sort of uh we hold no sort of um elevated sense of purpose of like oh we'll only solve certain problems you know that we think about the impact of the problems and so i think with and then and then we work like hell you know we work very very hard and the combination of these things means that um that's ultimately i think the recipe that allows us to out compete all of our um all of the competition which is that we we're we're smart you know we're good at problem solving and we also will treat the sort of like most lowly problems with the utmost respect um and uh what

3. 14:41

   that means is over time i think we've devised some pretty clever operational solutions pretty clever technology, pretty clever products. And we've all these things have sort of come together in a way that it'd be very hard. You know, I think a lot of times when I look at other companies or other startups, you know, you have one or the other. Either it's an exceptional team, but they limit themselves or officially towards, you know, esoteric problems that are intellectually interesting. This is a very common pattern. There's a lot of companies where you have a brilliant team but they work on um the most useless problems and then you have and then you have teams which are like scrappy and they'll work on uh they'll work on really um any problem that that is given to them but um but they just don't uh they don't manage to solve the problems in

4. 15:31

   scalable ways or they don't figure out how to like abstract the problems into a way that enables them to solve it effectively so this sort of combination of of you know extremely strong powerful problem solving or extremely good sort of scientific process and technical ability married with sort of you know full humility about the problems to solve how did you I mean that's a that that those unsexy problems and ones that are operationally heavy so there are often this though Ones that are hard to motivate people, particularly in the Bay Area, but I would say largely in Silicon Valley, to get excited about. Have there been cultural things that you have tried to institute at scale, either in hiring or maybe onboarding or the things you talk about? How have you managed to make that a core part of your DNA? I think the main thing that we encourage people to think about

5. 16:27

   is, you know, uh, we want, we want all of our employees to think about their sort of like their, their net economic impact much more so than their sort of like, you know, the most, the difficulty of their technical problems. And so I think a lot of times like in school or, um, yeah, and particularly in school, you sort of like, you know, you feel like you gain mastery by solving more and more technical problems and that's, that's fine. But I think that, um, uh, There's an inverse correlation between technical difficulty and economic value.

6. 17:04

   And it turns out like a lot of a lot of very economically valuable problems are not super technically difficult, but they're just like there's just like a lot of hair and you just have to like sift through a lot of mess. And that's I think where most of the good startup opportunities are. And so for us, I think what we really motivated our staff on is like, you know, if you solve this problem effectively, then the net economic impact, if you just think about like net economic impact of problems that you're solving relative to just technical difficulty, that's the ladder you want to be climbing.

7. 17:40

   And that means that, you know, the unsexy but very valuable problems end up getting solved very effectively. I think Facebook did something pretty similar as far as I can understand.