I listen to startup podcasts so you don’t have to.
I wish I had... this idea of just being OK with being wrong faster... We always talk about this... what if we had made it a couple months earlier.
• Embrace the possibility of being wrong to pivot sooner. • Encourage a culture of rapid learning and adaptation. • Recognize that timely decisions can have significant impact.A lot of the bets we're making inside the company are for things that are not... 3-4 weeks away... Every 6 to 12 months it should make our existing product look silly.
• Invest in long-term innovation over short-term gains. • Disrupt your own products to stay ahead of competitors. • Balance immediate user needs with future advancements.We actually made this decision pretty early... and very quickly after that scaled a sales team... If you want to sell to the Fortune 500, it is very hard to do that purely by swiping your credit card.
• Don't underestimate the importance of enterprise sales early on. • Hiring experienced sales leaders can accelerate growth. • Tailor your approach to meet enterprise clients' unique needs.I think one of the things that's maybe a little bit undervalued is this kind of agency piece... it's really going to be important.
• Foster high agency and proactive problem-solving in your team. • Encourage employees to take initiative beyond prescribed roles. • Value skills that AI cannot easily replicate, like creativity and strategic thinking.There's this weird tension where you want to have a product in market and you want to incrementally iterate... but... the value of that is going to depreciate very quickly unless we continue to reprove ourselves.
• Prioritize groundbreaking innovation alongside incremental improvements. • Anticipate future user needs even before they express them. • Continuously challenge and disrupt your own products.We needed to build custom review flows into the IDE... So we had to build our own IDE with some of these new agentic capabilities.
• Recognize when existing tools limit your innovation. • Invest in building proprietary solutions if they offer significant benefits. • Tailor your product to better serve your users' needs.We sort of look for people that are really, really passionate about the mission... and people that are willing to work very hard.
• Seek candidates passionate about your mission. • Prioritize hard work alongside technical skill. • Build a team committed to collaboration and high standards.I want the company to almost be like this dehydrated entity... Every hire is like a little bit of water, and we only go back and hire someone when we're back to being dehydrated.
• Hire only when the team is truly overextended. • Encourage ruthless prioritization by staying lean. • Avoid overstaffing to prevent unnecessary complexity.I think what engineering kind of goes to is actually what you wanted engineers to do in the first place, which is, what are the most important business problems that we do need to solve?
• AI will handle much of the code writing, shifting focus to problem-solving. • Engineers will prioritize deciding what to solve over how to implement it. • Invest in strategic thinking and problem definition skills.We felt a lot of what we built was not as valuable... So we... vertically integrated and actually took our infrastructure... to build Codium at the time.
• Be willing to reassess your original assumptions and pivot accordingly. • Focus on building what will be valuable in the future, not just what works now. • Pivot decisively and maintain focus after changing direction.