Platform shifts are mandatory participation, not optional

It ends up being a prisoner's dilemma. Don't trick yourself into thinking that you can't play the game. There is no opting out of the game.

If you're a late-stage company, you place multiple bets. For startups, it's a totally different ballgame. You have to choose one and go all in.

Not every great thing is going to be invented by you. At the end of the day, you're just robbing your user base of the opportunity to have a better product.

You get to these points of just diminishing marginal return in every system where it feels like you could put 50 people on this project, it's just not going to dramatically move the needle. That's where you need to go more first principled and try these new things more.

"Them" refers to competitors in the growth field who focus on optimization rather than innovation.

To be ahead of them is not optimization of the problem, it's reinvention of the solution. I just feel like I usually spend maybe 5% innovating on growth in my previous roles, right now, I'm spending 95% innovating on growth, and only 5% on optimization.

Elena Verna is discussing how her company categorizes LLM (Large Language Model) AI costs for their freemium product as marketing investment rather than operational expense.

We track them over our LLM costs on freemium and giveaways as our marketing costs, and it doesn't go into our something we need to reduce to make our margins better. It goes into, this is something that we need to spend more in because this is part of our growth secret sauce.