Moving fast and navigating uncertainty

We need to launch in six countries and these are six super different countries that we want to look at... we're going to make a system that works for those countries... adding a country is, it's not easy, but it's a lot easier than it would've been if you had to continue to stamp out and replicate.

When you design a minimum viable product, you're optimizing for speed. And in that set of optimizations, you are minimizing the deeper product thinking about what can fully differentiate our product... but worse, it leads to building the wrong thing technically.

Small teams with clear missions. If there's 300 people trying to work on one thing, the just sheer communication challenges, Dunbar's number, all of those things come into play and it's really, really hard to act quickly.

Being a product person means that by definition you're living in a world where no one knows the right answer yet because if somebody did, they would've already built it... having that humility is one of the biggest differentiators in early career leaders.

Let's not schedule a meeting for next week or tomorrow or later today. We're in the middle of a meeting, we need to make a decision. Let's either make the decision or if we can't, let's Slack call in the person that we need in order to make that decision. And we'll be done with the decision today.

Every country is unique. You can't just take your US-based approach and drop it into another country. Other countries find it insulting. It doesn't matter how much success you've had here. Everyone always believes rightly or wrongly that their local context is special. And you have to respect that.

We find a single engineer who is extremely entrepreneurial, understands what it means to operate at tempo, understands what it means to make decisions with low information, understands how to work very, very quickly with a design partner... And during this intervening time, they're also recruiting a team of usually 2, 3, 4 other engineers who kind of have that same zero-to-one mentality and they start building.