Early Facebook Leader: Forget Job Titles, Do This Instead | Julie Zhuo

Everything was great, and then one day it was like, whoa, whoa, whoa.

So you were at Facebook for 14 years, pretty much grew up there.

When we were 10, 20 million users, he was like, but wouldn't it be so great if like a billion people used it?

You specifically did not take on the CEO title. Your ideal world is a world where there are no titles at all.

Just think of yourself as a builder. One of the things we decided was to basically nuke all meetings, like every single recurring meeting except for one.

You wrote Making of a Manager. What skill sets do transfer over to managing agents and what do not.

I actually think this is really hard.

I'm super excited to have Julie Zhu here. Julie, you're a lot of things. She's a writer of Substack newsletter, The Looking Glass, which is— initially I thought it would just be a product newsletter, but it's also kind of like personal growth and personal development. She was the head of design of the Facebook app, author of Making of a Manager, And now the co-founder of Sundial, which is building an AI analyst. So it's great to have you here.

Yeah, thank you for having me.

So I want to start off on a contentious topic, which is the future of roles and titles. So at Sundial, you specifically did not take on the CEO title, and your ideal world is a world where there are no titles at all. So for the person out there who has kind of centered their identity around roles and the ladder and titles, how do you advise them Evolving in the AI era?

Yeah. Well, I think about titles as, look, they're like a shortcut. If you work in a very massive organization and let's say I don't know you and I'm trying to figure out what you do, it gives me this shorthand for being like, oh, you have this type of skill or this is what your job function or responsibilities are. But I also think that they can be very limiting. I think all shortcuts to some extent can be very limiting. I think especially when we were starting the company, I mean, we were like, first there was the two of us and then it was was 4 or 5 people. And at that moment, just being like, oh wait, we need to know exactly what you do, so let's give you a shorthand and that'll sort of be your box, felt like not the right way to approach the kind of company that we wanted to build. Now I get it. Eventually you become 2 people, titles make no sense. I mean, 1 person, the title makes no sense. You kind of have to do everything, right? And then with 5 people, okay, probably it still doesn't make any sense because we can talk to each other and we can kind of know what each other does. Sure, by the time you get to 10,000 people, I get the practicality. But for as long as possible, I wanted us to all think of ourselves as like, wait, what is it that our company needs us to do? What is it that I have the skills or the interest to be able to do? How can I help out? And let me go and do that and not start having people be like, well, because my role is this, that means I should do X and not Y. I think that is extremely limiting. And I think especially now with AI, Yeah. I mean, the roles are changing. What each person is capable of and what a person who maybe was trained classically in one set of skills can now be able to do with these tools at their disposal is so much more.

Yeah.

And I think more importantly than ever, I'm trying to tell everyone in my company, just think of yourself as a builder, something very, very general purpose. And sure, yes, maybe this builder, you have a little bit more of an understanding of aesthetics and customers. And this one has a little bit more of an understanding of technical architecture. But ultimately we're all just trying to build really great things and let's go out there and explore the edges of what we can do and see if we can just become better at building.

Enjoying the conversation? Got a question? You can ask Julie's Digital Mind. Just check the link in the comments or description. Yeah, is there a reverse to the argument where, okay, there are no boundaries, But just because you can doesn't mean you necessarily should. When should an engineer not design? When should a product person not code?

Yeah. And I think that every time we're going to build something or every time we engage in, let's say, anything, I think in some ways we're playing a game. And there are rules to the game to some extent. There is a sense of what does it mean to play this game well? So if we're all builders, ultimately to play this game well means we create something that other people find really valuable to use. And then of course, you dissect that a little bit more. You're like, okay, so that means, what does it mean that it's good to use? Well, like a lot of things, right? It's got a great user experience, it's fast, it's performant, I don't know, it has the right functionality. And then if you dissect those into the underlying skill, then there is such a thing as, yes, certain people are better at this particular skill, which is going to lead to this thing you're building being more successful in the marketplace. And so I do think that there is— it's important that we over time can recognize that. But the best way to recognize that, I think, is often to test it against the market or against, again, the ultimate judge of whether or not—

Let the data speak for itself.

Exactly. Whether or not we're winning the game. And so I think it's certainly cutting things short to say, well, because you have this role, you shouldn't do this and I have this role, I should do Y. Ultimately, if we both do it and one of our, I don't know, apps works better or one of our designs is more successful with customers, then let that be the proof point that, okay—

Survival of the fittest.

I should do more of that because I just happen to be better at it. And sure, you can learn and your skills are also going to grow over time, but it shouldn't be dictated by role. It should be dictated by the actual quality or execution of what that skill is and whether or not it ends up succeeding in the ultimate game.

Do you think there's an opportunity cost to maybe not dialing in your focus on one craft and depth into design versus trying to pull in multiple skills together?

I certainly think so, but I think that goes to what is each person's nature, right? I think there are some people, and I work with many of them, for whom what they want is depth and what they're better at and what they align with is to go deeper and deeper and deeper. And, that's what they're passionate about. And, I think that's amazing. And then, I think there's other people, I'm probably one of them, I find myself curious about a lot of things. And so, I don't know, maybe it's ADHD brain or whatever you wanna call it, but I find that it's very hard for me sometimes to just only focus on one thing.

Same.

And, whereas there's a lot in the world that's interesting. And so, I don't know. I think sometimes if we have enough luck, we can self-select into careers that allow us to be true to our nature. But I think everyone is different. And so part of whether somebody wants to go and finds it exciting to go deeper is like, it actually becomes fairly obvious after a while. Yeah.

I recently read your essay, I Am an Idiot, which I thought was very prescient. Tell me about what led you to writing that essay.

Yeah, this is interesting. So we had made a bunch of changes at Sundial with the way that we were working. Part of it was that we felt like with all of AI, we just needed a completely reset in terms of what the cadence of work was. And one of the things we decided was to basically nuke all meetings, every single recurring meeting except for one, which was a demo day or demo hour. 2 hours on Thursday. So it was the only meeting. And as somebody who grew the company and in some ways is a bit of a control freak and had operated with a sense of, I need to know everything that's going on or want to know everything that's going on because maybe I believe that me knowing was making me more, I guess, kind of— it made me more confident in some ways, or it made me believe that if I could then— You're in control. direct something or I could catch a mistake here or there, that that would be better for the company somehow. And I really had to sit with whether that was a true belief, whether it was actually the case that I somehow had to be involved in everything in order for it to go well. I started to get the sense that no, maybe this is actually just anxiety speaking.

Yeah.

Not actually a thing that was better for the company. And so that was what I think led us to trying this experiment. And I think the first couple weeks were tough because I felt like I no longer really understood at the detailed level that I was used to what was going on. But in other ways, I was like, actually, this could be what allows everyone else to be able to step up, take more ownership, grow in their own path as leaders. Now that we've run the experiment for a couple of weeks or months now, It's been great.

You're not going back to meetings?

I'm not going. Yes.

Really?

Yes.

Okay.

Or I mean, we would do meetings if it's 2 or 3 people because they're actually talking about a very specific task, but not in the way that we had before where again, it felt like people who were managers have to look at everything that was going on. All of us are still playing some role as ICs. And so us on the leadership team, we have certain projects that we're kind of ICing or we're very involved in. And obviously we'll have small meetings just to coordinate work or to, but with a very small number of people. It's very different than kind of the typical larger company review structure that I was used to. And I think I wrote that to try to remind myself that, you know what, actually trying to be in control of everything is not always the best thing for a company. Yeah.

You should question why you even feel that way in the first place.

Exactly. And maybe what I felt, what I want, I mean, Speaking very honestly, maybe I wanted to feel important. Maybe I wanted to feel like I had a lot to contribute. And maybe the reality is sometimes I could also be getting in the way.

Yeah. I mean, I'd imagine if people were to hear this, the fear of having no meetings would be intuition and taste diverging and things not necessarily going the way that you imagine. Is it a function of you trusting the taste of everyone in your organization or it's just a very iterative process?

So it's both, right? So I think that That first, what's important is that we have to understand what the vision is and we have to understand to some extent what good looks like or what it feels like. How will we know if something is good or not? I think everybody in the company needs to be very aligned on those things.

What great looks like.

Yeah. On how will we know if we've succeeded and where are we marching towards or where are we trying to move towards? So that's alignment on the big picture. I think the second piece is, yes, you do have to trust people. And I think that was another litmus test. It got to the point where I'm like, look, if I didn't feel like I could be gone for a week or two and positive things would happen with this person, then maybe I shouldn't be working with this person. And that was another litmus test for us to try and move our way towards what would it look like for a really great AI-native type of— startup in my conception. So I think that's a second piece. And then I think the third piece is going back to if there is a way that we understand— it goes back to ultimately whether or not I think this feature is amazing or not is not as important as whether the customer thinks so.

Yeah, it just shows up in the data.

Exactly. And again, when you are a startup like we are, there's a couple benefits. One of them is that it's okay to be more experimental. We often have a dialogue with our customers, they'll tell us if they think something isn't great or not. We can tell them, hey, you know what, this is experimental, we're not sure, and we can have that dialogue. So that makes it so that it's easier for us to just try things and then see what they feel or what their response is to that. And I think that's a lot of— and if I'm again gatekeeping everything and trying to be like, well, I don't think it's good, so we shouldn't even ship it, we're not actually getting that signal. from the market on how to help steer our direction.

Yeah. In you recognizing what great looks like and your team recognizing what great looks like, sometimes new great violates what old great used to be. So I'm curious how you recognize new kinds of excellence.

Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of the— so the way I think about it is there's things that are really, really old. And I think actually those are much less likely to change. And then there's things—

Lindy. Exactly.

things that are kind of old. So for example, we can look at a design pattern like tabs on mobile and tabs on mobile are kind of old and if you're going to go create a mobile app, okay, and maybe you shouldn't try to reinvent what the tabs look like because people are very used to this. But that's still kind of— that's not like old, old. I mean, that's still relatively, I don't know, like 20 years old, right? This paradigm. But if we go to old, old, I'll take the example of where we are now with LLMs. Speech is old, old. Talking to people is old, old. Having communication through a language is much more Lindy than tabs. And so sure, in some version of the world, people are like, oh, well, the whatever, the chat interface is so much newer than the tab menu that we used to have. But In another sense, it's actually more true to how humans have communicated for a very long time. And it's actually more intuitive.

More accurate.

And I think whenever we talk about UI, we're like, the best UI is one where just nobody has to get a lesson on how to use it because it's just so natural to the way that people already behave. And so that's why if you even look at like the iPhone when it came out, everything was very skeuomorphic because people understood, like, oh, if I tap on this or hold that, it's got a certain physics. The more you make it what people are used to, the better the user experience because they don't have to be confused about learning something new. I think we have to look at what dimension and the core principles of how humans behave is not really changing.

Yeah.

Sure, yes. If everyone in the world learns something, it's hard for them to change that because they have a behavioral pattern. But if you go back and find something that's even more fundamentally intuitive, then that will be a better experience, even if it feels new in our technological age.

So are you of the camp that everything should be a chat interface?

I would look at, like, I mean, a chat interface is great for certain things, but it sucks for other things. Like right now, for example, like speaking of design, right? Like nobody wants to talk out their design. Like if you think about, like, how do we understand if a design is good. We look at things, we look at how fashion designers work. They've got mood boards. They have very visual or very tangible representations that speak to the inspiration. And here we are being like, well, how should I create a website? Let me describe it. Nobody does that. That's not actually natural in how people who—

It's like go to the core craft of the pre-internet. Exactly.

And so I often look at, well, what's the most natural way that People have been doing it, like, put aside whether they were doing it on the web or in digital. What's the natural way that this would be done? And then how do we get closer and closer to that?

I like that. So you were at Facebook for 14 years, pretty much grew up there.

Yes.

Went through so many cycles of products and apps and experiments. I'm curious, what from that era did you learn about how companies win that still applies? And what was a tactic of winning that no longer applies?

Yeah, I think there's so many great gifts that I got from being at Facebook, Meta now. I think the first one is just kind of boldness of vision. And I think that this is hard, right? Because I think often, you know, and I experienced this as kind of like an immigrant growing up, like, you know, your dreams or how much you believe you can do is kind of limited by maybe what you've seen or what other people expect of you. And so I think it's hard. hard to sometimes keep pushing and reaching for that. And I think one of the things that was really incredible about working with Marc is that from a very early point in time, he always had this remarkable ability to be like, how do I set the vision just so much more beyond what everyone else thinks is possible or even aspirational? And so when we were, I want to say, 10, 20 million users, he was like, but wouldn't it be so great if a billion people used it? I mean, it was just so— and then when we got closer and it became clear that a billion was inevitable, then it became like, well, what about if we connected? And then it became AR. And there's just always something new that was very, very bold and ambitious. And I kind of feel like that is one of the key things that distinguishes, in my mind, great startups or great companies is you kind of have to go for something really big because you probably will get a lot of what you want and you have to kind of keep reinventing to make things because that's where you can attract really great people to work on something. That's where you can actually have the kind of, I want to say, personal growth, right? Like for me or for everyone else who was there in the team to be able to achieve that. So I think that's probably still a very durable principle that I think about.

Yeah.

I think the second thing is that I believe that Just like all of us, we have a very unique personality. I feel like that's true for companies as well. Every company has a personality. And in some ways, I think getting to top excellence is about how do you really— you can't really go against that. You kind of have to— and often, again, it's a personality of the founders or the early set of employees, but it's very hard to win going against what is, I think, a person or a company's true nature. So part of, I think, becoming excellent is you have to know what is the unique nature of—

Leading into the most authentic version.

Exactly. Right. And to the strengths. And of course, we have to, I think, dole out some of the weaknesses, but often the strengths and the weaknesses are one and the same. You know what I mean? And so it's just about how do we then create a structure that allows the company or the group to be able to bet on the things that they're really good at.

Yeah, it's the power law outcome. What is the thing that no one else can do?

Exactly. And I think that often it's tough because you're starting a company and you're like, oh, but X is doing this. That's so awesome. We should be more like X. We should be more like— and that's, I mean, I'm all about we can all learn, we can all improve, but there has to be, I think, a personal recognition of what is true for for the company and what are the things that have taken it to its successes. So I think that's an element of—

That's a great one.

Yeah. And then I think the third one is just like, look, we tried a lot of things at Facebook, right? And of course what people remember are the successes. That's the ones that dictate the history. But I was there, I saw hundreds and hundreds of things that we tried and didn't work. And nobody talks about those because they're lost in the eons of history. But that's a lot of what it takes. You don't succeed all the time. You just kind of have to fail a lot and be okay with that and then get back on. And then when you've succeeded enough and you look back, you're like, well, yeah, failure. So that's a part of the story.

Yeah.

But I think it's hard because from the outside, we just only get exposed to very successful stories. And so we kind of have this, I guess, impression that, okay, to be successful, we should just constantly have wins. But I think the real thing that probably not enough people talk about is it's actually the companies that are able to then turn the failures into something bigger that allows them to then go back onto their path of winning that actually have a story. And then too often it's just easy to give up because we're kind of stuck in a rut rather than using that as kind of a stepping stone forward.

You keep iterating.

Yeah.

Is there anything you've had to unlearn from that era? that you think no longer applies?

Absolutely. I mean, I think very— a lot of things too. Like when I started my own company, because it goes back to like, look, I'm not Marc. Like I was, you know, I grew up in that environment. So clearly a lot of principles and values like I take away, but it also required me to kind of really deeply examine what are the things that are different about like how I see the world.

Who you are, how you manage.

Yeah. And it wasn't just like we can straight up take these playbooks or tactics. And that discovery process, I think, has been a really awesome part of being a startup and being a founder.

It seems like that's why you write to begin with. You wrote Making of a Manager while you were feeling imposter syndrome to be a manager. What was that journey like?

Well, I think that writing for me has always been a kind of therapy. It's a way of trying to make sense of things I find confusing or when there's a lot of noise. And we all know there's a lot of noise. You get on Twitter, you get on wherever, and everyone just has an opinion. And being able to then be like, well, what do I really think about this without just reacting to the last thing I heard was something that I wanted to cultivate.

Yeah.

And so that was why I started writing is I wanted to get more comfortable just sitting with different things and then trying to figure out what do I really think about all of this? And And I think I felt that a lot because I was surrounded by a lot of high achievement, very excellent people.

Yeah.

And again, this is like a— and Meta culture is people are very direct. People are not afraid to— and that's kind of like the idea that you put a lot of ideas out there and you kind of, in the marketplace of ideas, figure out which ones will work or not. And again, a lot of stuff was very experimental as well. a ton of A/B testing, a ton of trying to get things in front of actual users. So there wasn't a lot of coddling. And so as a result, I was like— and also I started at Meta very young. I was 22 years old. I think at 25 they're like, hey, we're scaling the design team, go and manage the team. And I barely even knew what design was 3 years ago. And so now 3 years later, I'm being asked to manage and grow designers. And there are people on my team who had been doing design many more years than I had, who are honestly much better designers than me. And so that was where a lot of that imposter syndrome came from, was like, I've never done this. I don't feel very prepared. But part of when I look back now, I'm like, part of what I'm so grateful for is I had a chance to kind of do trial by fire.

Yeah.

Learn by doing. And I look around, I couldn't have paid for that kind of education. And I think I decided to write the book. For years, people were like, oh, you write. Publishers would reach out and they're like, have you thought about writing a book? And I was like, I don't know any of this. I'm not an expert. Shouldn't you be an expert?

It's kind of like the I am an idiot.

Exactly. Shouldn't you be a 65-year-old retired person to have the accumulated wisdom to write a book? But then when I actually spoke to a publisher and they were reacting to one of the pieces I wrote for New Managers, I realized then, that was kind of my why now moment. I was like, oh, if I wait until I'm 65, I probably will have forgotten what it's like to be a new manager. Because so much of being new is dealing with your emotions of, again, the imposter syndrome, the fact that you're doing this hard thing that's very human for the very first time, like giving hard feedback or telling someone that that they have to be let go. These are very, very difficult things, and they're not going to get any easier for anyone if that's your first time doing it. And so the why now for me was like, oh, if I write— yeah, I can probably write a better management book in some respects when I'm older and I have more experience, but I may be able to write the best one now for new managers because I'm not so far removed from that experience.

Yeah. You can just do things.

Yeah.

So you've talked about how you're not sure whether the manager role will remain in the way it is today and will be managing agents. And I'm curious what skill sets do transfer over to managing agents and what do not?

I think the most important one is what we were talking about earlier, which is having a sense of what's important and what success looks like. I actually think this is really hard. And even to this day, there are days where I'm like, Wait, I'm going, I'm going, I'm doing stuff, but hold on, why am I doing this? What's the kind of greater goal at the end? And even in my work with agents, sometimes I have, even yesterday I had this session, we need to back up. I think we've drifted. We've kind of followed the trail and then there was always a breadcrumb that was exciting. So we did that, we did that, we did. But wait a second, we've lost—

Too many breadcrumbs.

Yeah, we don't know where exactly the destination is anymore. I think that's really important. It's actually, I think, hard for a lot of people to— because often to know what really matters for the company or for the team, you have to have enough time and space to—

To be thinking.

Yeah. To think about that and to keep that bigger picture in mind. Because so much is happening in the world, those things often, they're the breadcrumbs. They're always pulling our attention so that we're reacting to this task or this ask or this email came in. to really have clarity on, like, this is what is important, this is what success looks like. Or, like, maybe— and to be able to break it down enough levels, right? Because, you know, as a founder, like, okay, well, ultimately, you know, we want to, like— we have, like, all these customers, we want to serve them well, we want to make a lot of money. Like, that's the highest order. Like, that's easy. But then the next order, which is, like, okay, so, like, what is it that is our unique strength? Like, what can we do better than anyone against a combination of, like, I guess, structural, like what does the company have or the resources, but also, as I mentioned, it's related to the DNA or the personality of the company.

Yeah.

And so then you have to kind of come up with a strategy, and then the strategy kind of has to fit in or make sense. And then from there, everything just keeps getting broken down until ultimately you have tasks. But like I said, it's very easy to get lost in the tasks and forget kind of what is the ladder or let's call it the tree back up to the higher-level goals. I think that's a lot of the reason why often at larger and larger companies or even not that big of ones, it can be hard when you have a team of people because communication is also imperfect, things change, the organization is often not in alignment on what is most important.

Yeah.

And especially, I mean, this is like very symptomatic of large companies just by nature of the beast. But often what a VP will believe matters and what a person on the ground understands to matter is totally different. And so of course there will be tensions and other inefficiencies that happen. And it doesn't get that much easier with agents unless if you're managing a bunch of them, because they also will drift and they'll pick up on a thing you said and then be like, oh, well, that's the thing that's important. oh my gosh, let's go back and realize this is what matters. And so this goes back to people talk a lot about writing good prompts, or I think a lot of that is just clarity of thought on how we think about what really matters and how we define what success is. And success often is not so measurable, right? I spent many years at Facebook, and it was one of the most data-oriented cultures. I mean, I think one of the great strengths of Facebook is its operational rigor. And a lot of that operational rigor came down to a very meticulous understanding of how to translate things into goals. But even that wasn't perfect because not everything can be quantified.

No.

And so I think as a leader, you kind of have to hold a lot of these truths at the same time. You have to try to figure out how to make it as tangible as possible because people do work. The nice thing about a tangible goal is if I say, look, If we hit this number, we're good. At least that's clear. We can all get on the same page about that. So it has the benefit of, cool, it's very good for alignment, but it has the weakness of being like, well, that's probably still a proxy goal to the true goal. And the true goal is something that is very, very difficult to capture.

More of like a statement or a vibe.

Yeah. And I mean, there's a lot of— I mean, I think Jeff Bezos used to say this all the time. and I see a number and I hear a story or I have an intuition about a customer experience and the customer experience is bad, I tend to trust that because again, the number often is a proxy for— and every number can be gamed. That's the other thing. Humans are very smart. So you tell them this is the number, we can make the number go up, but then we may have lost track of what is that—

There needs to be constraints.

Exactly. So I often— that's why we get talking to about data. I never believe it's one metric to rule them all, even though I, again, love the practicality of the alignment. I think often we have to look at a basket of things. We have to have ideally one north star that's the shorthand. Again, when you have to align hundreds or thousands of people, it serves its purpose, but often it's not enough. The people who work closest, you have to look at the basket and then you also have to have very specific, I think, guardrails, things that cannot regress or things that are explicitly trying to measure the ways I win my game. And even within that, people are creative and clever and there will be ways to—

It's always ways to game.

Yes. And agents too, right? Agents will find a way to game.

So to talk about Sundial, you guys work with companies like OpenAI, Gamma. What are some of the best AI companies doing with data that maybe everyone else is not?

Yeah, it's kind of interesting because I feel like this generation of AI companies, a lot of them, part of it, I think the reason is that we're able to get to scale much faster. It used to take a lot more time to build everything. And by the time you got to 1 million or 2 million users, you've already been at it for a while. And that means you've had enough time to, I don't know, ask and get those rounds of feedback. I think in some ways, right now there's such a pull. So a lot of companies who provide, let's say, a great service just instantly see a ton of growth. And I always used to say about data, if things are growing, everyone's like, let's pat ourselves on the back. What do we have to learn? Let's just keep doing what we're doing. And again, usually what we're doing is just going by vibes or going by what feels good. But I do think that at every single point in a company's career, again, it may not be in the first year, it may not be the second year, it could be many years down the line, there will be a point in which growth becomes harder. And for Facebook, I think that was like, I want to say, 2008 or something, right? Where everything was great. We were patting ourselves on the back. Everyone loved our thing. And then one day it was like, whoa, whoa, whoa. It started to flatten. And that's when everyone starts freaking out. Because they're like, wait, what happened? And then at that point, if you don't have the discipline, like you haven't tracked things, then you're just starting to— the first— I mean, everyone always says, when things start to not work, The question is why. And then you realize if you haven't actually tracked things and you haven't rigorously cataloged what might be all the reasons, then you don't actually have the answer. So usually what happens is when things don't go as well as they were, then everybody starts to be like, okay, we got to take this seriously. Then everything gets logged, everything gets tracked. And then from there you can start to have I guess more discipline, more operational discipline. Now what I notice is that companies by second-time founders who have kind of gone through that, they realize that this is going to happen. So then from day one, they're a lot more rigorous and disciplined. So they make sure that the logging is good from day one. They make sure that they have the telemetry and the observability to sort of understand what's going on. Maybe they don't have to optimize. They're not in that mode yet, but— They try to have all of that ready and they try to keep a greater pulse. The thing that I think data and all of that gets you is, to me, it's more information. And of course, I think about data very loosely. I think of it as anything where you're coming into contact with reality.

Yeah. Maybe social media.

Exactly. And talking to customers is amazing data because they'll very much tell you what matters, what doesn't. That's an ability. And so if you're a SaaS If you're a SaaS company, probably talking to your customers gives you even more data than what exactly are they doing and tracking their every clicks in the product. But all of that I think of as data. Specifically when we come to behavioral data on what people are doing in the product, I think obviously consumer apps or ones where you have a greater, a larger use case—

User base.

User base, it kind of matters more because you can't talk to every single one of those people. From an early period starting to get a sense of what are different cohorts doing or what are the clusters of what do behaviors look like from power users versus marginal users. All of that is just helping us as a company learn more and get better contact with reality for what our customers are truly doing or feeling or wanting. That's what it is. I think the best companies, it's not even so much like, oh, they're using this tool or they have this. It's more like it's a mindset. It's a mindset of being constantly just obsessed with contact with reality for what really matters for the customer. Yeah.

What you described literally happened to us last year. We were vibes-based for the first couple of years and then we were like, wait, we need to actually understand our data. So you wrote to your daughter about the eye and the hand, the gap between recognizing greatness and being able to produce it. And so if AI is going to get a lot better at being the hand, how are you thinking about raising your kids and whether they need to suffer through the process of learning how to do it versus just teaching them how to recognize it?

So I think that this is sort of where one of those chicken and egg problems, right? I think it— my personal belief, it's very hard for your eye to be trained without you doing a lot of this because so much of how we get better, how we learn naturally is like, I think our brains are wired to learn more when we make mistakes. So if things are going well, okay, sure, we'll learn some things, but we probably aren't as reflective. When we have a bad feeling emotionally, like we let someone down, we failed, we feel miserable, there's a lot more learning that happens. And so again, like it or not, that's, I think, just Again, how biology is. And so I do feel like such a huge part of learning is having to do something and having it maybe disappoint you or not be great or you didn't win first prize or whatever it is. And then from there, yeah, sure, you might be a little or maybe a lot unhappy, right? But that also is probably what makes you pay more attention to—

It involves your gut.

Yeah, exactly. To what happened. And the paying attention is what I think often leads to growth. And I think, again, as much as I would have liked it otherwise, I think when we're too comfortable, we just don't pay as much attention to everything. It takes a lot harder to— I don't know. It takes an amount of willpower, which I don't think most of us— it's possible.

So then how do you think about what to outsource versus what to go through so that you can build that skill?

So I think that I'm also a believer that even as technologies change, there will always— because in some ways, the greater game that we're part of is a human game. And the human game has a lot of elements where things are very zero-sum in some ways. There can only be one GOAT of basketball or soccer or whatever it is. I mean, yes, we can all have bionic limbs or whatever, but there'll probably still only be one GOAT.

Yeah.

And so I think that there always will be what is the edge? And then the edge will have, like, what does it mean to do that well or better or not, right? And it just means that maybe people aren't so focused on— like, most of us are not playing the game of, like, who can draw the most photorealistic person. Although if that's, like, the game you want to play, by all means. And I do think that, like, again, we all have hobbies. We can all get better at whatever we choose to get better at. But at least in the economic marketplace, like, maybe that's not as important of a game with the invention of photography, but there will be the next thing at the edge. And so maybe if even— let's talk about software. Maybe if software starts to become a much more competitive field, it's harder. It's not so— we can all build amazing things that probably would've been really hard 10 or 15 years ago, but now that everyone can do it, standing out still is somehow very hard. It doesn't get easier to to command attention because that is a fixed thing that we have. Not to mention nowadays, I feel like all the investors are talking about hardware and energy and all this other massive— and that's cool. It's cool that we can now extend our aspirations towards things that maybe 50 years ago would've been way too hard to attempt.

Yeah.

And I'm excited about that level of innovation. So I think for my kids, again, I want them to continue to have a thing where they're like, you could say they're sufferer. They continue to feel disappointed by maybe little by little, but that pushes them to get better. And I actually think it can be anything in some respects. I think if kids play sports and they kind of learn what it means to be very disciplined and how to get better and better relative— maybe they're never going to be the number one, but I think that— that process and the set of learnings and the pride, not to mention, because so much of also you doing something that's hard and then making some progress—

Confidence.

Yeah, it gives us a tremendous amount of pride. And that's where self-esteem is built. That's where confidence is built. So I do want my children to find the thing. I'm sure it will exist. Again, it'll be the new edge of where they are. And I hope that they will try a thing over and over. My daughter loves to draw. I don't think, again, I probably tell her, like, it's probably not going to be, like, a viable career to be, like, a hand animator. But I love that she continues to want to get better at the thing, and then she can be proud when she gets better at the thing. And maybe that can transfer, that, like, general principle can transfer to whatever then.

That she can do anything, she can get better at anything. Yeah. Speaking of games, you've written about the difference between status games and then games that you play for yourself. Are there any status games or games that you've let go of recently that you feel like are no longer worth playing?

Yeah, I think it's a really interesting question because I think a lot about, like, I think a lot about, like, why do I care, like, about excellence? Like, why do I? And, you know, maybe there's no answer, like, but I find myself, like, you know, like, one of the ways I find that, you know, like, as a maybe a leading indicator to, like, who are you really is, like, what do you find yourself inspired by? And, like, sometimes I will, read a bunch of stories or hear about somebody and I'll be really inspired. And I think that says something about maybe what I'm drawn to. But I often wonder, why do I care? Is it because I want everyone to think I'm awesome? Is it like, I mean, I want more love because I didn't get enough from my parents? Whatever it is. I don't know. I don't know that there's an answer to these things. But I do think that one of the things that I'd set as an intention for myself is like, I do remember when I was in my teens and I was in high school or middle school actually was when I first discovered the internet. We had a science teacher, Ms. Brown. Thank you, Ms. Brown.

You're welcome.

Who introduced my best friend and I to building websites in HTML. I just remember how fun it was, how excited we were at that moment in time just to build stuff. The first time we made a link appear, it was like, oh my God, it was so cool. And then I spent most of my, like, all the free time I had in high school just like doing digital illustration and creating websites and redesigning my website and redesigning it. And I, like, I feel very nostalgic for those times. I miss those times because I've realized like there was a lot of fun.

It's pure joy.

It was joy, right? It was like the discovery. And I think a lot of when we were kids, like, that happened a lot, you know. We did things because they were fun and not because it was suddenly a thing for the resume so that we could get a job, so that we could earn enough money so that people think we're cool. And then a lot of that gets, like you say, other influences come. And I don't want to say that they're good or bad. I think that they're a fact of life. But I did find myself kind of maybe wanting to go back a little bit more to that energy and that ethos. Like, how do we think about AI for fun? In fact, right now I feel like so much of the story about AI is, like, very dismal, right? It's like a very— I call it like it's a very subtractive story. It's like, hey guys, we can do the same thing that we were doing, but with, like, less people.

Efficiency.

Yeah, like with less cost.

Get rid of humans.

It's just so— like, it's such a sad story if you think about it, right? Like, that's not at all inspiring. And, like, I don't think there's enough— I mean, occasionally you'll see people on Twitter, and I love that, you know, these things get, like, viral. But, like, I don't think there's enough talk about, like, how can AI make our lives fun? How can we be playful with it? How can we do things just for me? Not because I'm going to go put it anywhere or it's going to be a cool story, but it's like, or it's going to help my company, but just because it's fun and I would want to do it with my kids or my family and no one else has to see it. And I'm all about AI for joy right now.

Yeah, me too.

As a principle.

Me too. Last question. After this episode ends, people are going to continue the conversation with your Delphi. What's one question you hope they ask?

I hope they ask questions about, like, something along the lines of, like, how can I get to better understanding myself?

Yeah, that seems to be a big theme in your life.

Yeah. I mean, I ask honestly, like, I talk to Claude all the time. I think it's very interesting.

Amazing. Thank you so much.

Yeah, this was great. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Thanks, everyone.

Thanks for tuning in. If you enjoyed today's episode and want personalized advice from Julie, head to the link in the comments or description to ask her digital mind on Delphi.