💬 Your wish is my command, zero interest rate product managers, ...
I listen to 10 hours of podcasts a week, so you don’t have to.
This is the 55th edition of Best Business Podcasts, featuring Marketing Against The Grain, Lenny’s Podcast, and My First Million.
What you need to know
👩⚖️ Bend the law to your will
0️⃣ Zero interest rate product managers
💬 Your wish is my command
👩⚖️ Bend the law to your will
🥉 Third place (2 min read vs 29 mins listening)
Ask for forgiveness, not permission. Kipp Bodnar reflects on the lessons from Uber and Napster, including why startups are best positioned to take risks, bypass copyright law, and outpace regulation.
What they say
Turn customers into lobbyists
Uber tried to get as much adoption as quickly as possible in its core markets.
The government could no longer regulate Uber because people had become so accustomed to using it that if the government were to support the taxis the citizens would lose their minds.
We’re about to have a similar situation happen now with copyright law. It’s going to be at the centre of the discussions we have around AI.
Kipp Bodnar
History is repeating itself
All the AI players are trying to move as fast as possible so they get all of us using their products.
This makes it hard for regulators to take these products away or drastically change the product experience.
This means copyright law as we know it is going to change. The perfect example of this is the music industry.
Napster came along, totally ignored copyright, then got sued and shutdown. But they paved the way for a new model with Spotify where artists get paid a royalty fee for every stream.
The future of copyright is going to be very different to today and before ChatGPT and Midjourney came out.
Kipp Bodnar
What I say
Why it matters: Startups have nothing to lose. Midjourney can take more risks with copyright law because they’re less likely to be sued. On the other hand, incumbents like Adobe have to be cautious by default.
Adobe has been forced down the wrong path due to their size. Their bank account is ready to be raided at the slightest hint of copyright infringement, so they’ve chosen legal safety over product quality.
Between the lines: Speed reigns supreme. Whoever accumulates the largest training data the fastest will build the best product. Even if that means ignoring copyright law. Time will tell if startups like Midjourney get off the hook like Uber or get shutdown like Napster. The question is, will customer love protect them from the law?
0️⃣ Zero interest rate product managers
🥈 Second place (3 min read vs 1 hour 13 mins listening)
When did startups stop being scrappy? Casey Winters, former Chief Product Officer at Eventbrite, says the days of 0% interest rates had a profoundly negative affect on PMs. He shares the importance of cultivating a risk-taking mindset and embracing our resource constrained world.
What they say
The era of abundance is over
0% interest rates allowed every startup to operate like it was a public company with billions of dollars. A lot of product managers have come up with this very distorted reality.
At Eventbrite, if there was any sort of uncertainty in a problem or a solution, the product manager would talk about all this research they have to do to learn the problems instead of shipping to learn.
My feedback would be 'No, user research is a scarce resource. We have to reserve it for the areas that have extreme uncertainty.
If you're redesigning the login page for Eventbrite, you don't need to use that resource to learn what to do.
Just look at what FAANG companies did. They probably did a good job. Even if they didn't, all of our customers also use those products so they're going to be familiar to them.
Casey Winters
Frameworks are not instruction manuals
Every new person in the product team is acting like they work at Google. It's as if they have infinite resources and infinite time to make sure everything is perfect. No one's taking any risk.
I felt 'Am I responsible for this?'
I've created a bunch of frameworks on Reforge. But at Reforge we're building frameworks that are tools in a toolkit. You pull them out when relevant. They're not a coloring book to stay inside the lines.
I got so fed up I wrote an internal blog post. I talked about how if you try to do all of the morning habits of the most successful people, it'd take you 6 hours every morning.
I wanted to make it clear at Eventbrite we didn't have much money, we didn't have much time, and there's no framework that allows you to not use your brain.
Casey Winters
What I say
Why it matters: A new era is upon us. Well funded startups need to relearn what us common folk have been practicing all along. Prudence. Agility. Grit.
Where before engineering, user research, and design was plentiful, these functions are now a scarce resource and should be treated as such.
However, don’t mistake prudence with caution. You still need to ship fast, learn, iterate, and go again. This muscle is more important than anything else.
Between the lines: Casey's insights underscore the importance of not relying solely on established frameworks but instead discerning the appropriate tools for each situation.
With that said, this is a timely opportunity to reaffirm my beliefs on how to get the most out of this newsletter:
Don’t apply every framework to your business. Pick and choose what’s right for you at any given time.
Don’t read every segment. Skim the headlines and only read the topics that you can apply right now.
Don’t sit on your hands when you’re presented with a timely idea. Take action and implement it today.
💬 Your wish is my command
🥇 First place (2 min read vs 1 hour 12 mins listening)
A new user experience is on the horizon. Dharmesh Shah's insights on chat-based interfaces will show you the direction software experiences are headed. By exploring the implications of these innovations, we can make more informed decisions about investing in AI.
What they say
The future of software
The way you use most software right now is a series of clicks, drags, and swipes. You've got the thing in your head that you want to do and then you execute the series of steps based on your knowledge of the software.
This is an imperative model - step-by-step instructions that say do this, then do this, then do this, and then I get the thing I want.
Natural language allows us to use a declarative model. Instead of describing all the steps, you describe the result you want at the end. The software does everything in between.
Dharmesh Shah
The bull case for AI
AI is the biggest tech paradigm shift we've seen since the internet. It's an order of magnitude bigger than mobile.
I personally bought chat.com for $10 million plus because I think chat as an interface is the future. I don't know what I'm going to do with it yet.
The lesson I've learned over the years is I've done my best work when I've had the courage of my convictions of something that I believe in.
Dharmesh Shah
What I say
Why it matters: Rub the lamp and a genie appears granting you three wishes. But instead of a lamp, you type in what you want, and instead of three wishes, you have unlimited requests. This is the future of software. Every SaaS will have an AI genie.
You’ll no longer need to learn new tools and follow step-by-step interactions to achieve your goal. No. By harnessing the power natural language processing, software will default to intuitive, conversation-based interfaces where AI does the work for you.
Between the lines: Will we ever see a super-app in the West? The Silicon Valley version of WeChat has never materialized. Until now. ChatGPT is becoming a one-stop-shop for everything you need.
With the release of plug-ins, we’ll use ChatGPT as our personal assistant so we can find and book whatever we need in seconds. Plug-ins are the App Store moment for AI, so if your company has an app, you should start looking at plugins now.
Shoutouts
When I find newsletters, podcasts, or books worth sharing, I’ll feature them here:
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Note, these quotes were pulled at different points of the episode. Some sentences were left out to make the narrative more concise. I am not associated or affiliated with any podcast (unless otherwise stated). All roundups are independently written and do not imply any sponsorship or endorsement by the podcast.