The first version should embarrass you

Laura is advising her product teams to ship minimal, embarrassing first versions quickly to validate ideas. "The first thing" refers to their earlier experiment of kicking users out of the onboarding flow to test a hypothesis.

If it's not embarrassing, you've gone too far. Got to be embarrassing. The first thing, that was embarrassing.

Every week, you would have a cadence where it's like Monday, you go in. You do your meetings. Monday night, you build something. Tuesday, you show it to somebody. Tuesday night, you iterate on it. So you get four of these, five of these cycles every single week.

Don't do that. Get to market faster. I wish we had.

We really resist the urge to do the big V1. Rather than design the big complex feature for V1, just do the simplest encapsulation of what that feature can be, see if it has legs, and then just add to it iteratively over time.

Nick Turley from OpenAI is referring to ChatGPT's chat interface, which they shipped in 10 days and has been widely copied by other AI companies.

Chat was the simplest way to ship at the time. I'm baffled by how much it took off, even more baffled by how many people have copied.

We set out to build a super assistant. It was supposed to be a hackathon code base.

Get it out as fast as you possibly can. Everything they tell you about making sure that you get a product out really quickly is totally true. The faster you get it out, the more feedback you get.