Gokul Rajaram on designing your product development process, when and how to hire your first PM, and more

I think great careers are built by knowing a lot of people doing great work so they know and want you on their teams, and just waiting for serendipity and then seizing it and jumping.

Engineers are by far the most expensive resources in the company. And if you're not caring and feeding and not leveraging this amazing most expensive resource, well, that's a crime.

The biggest one I think is, the founder becomes too tactical and disempowers their team. I think the founder thinks they know what customers want and they basically just tell the engineers what to build.

I always think of, not what you're working on but what problem you're solving. In many cases, I get more energy from the problem I'm solving and who I'm solving it for.

A good metric is that 40 to 50% of your new customers should ideally come from organic channels and 50% from paid. If 90% come from paid, that means at some point that the music is going to stop.

I would much rather be the number two or number three person at the leader in a space, than the top person at a tier two company.