Scaling to stack with Jing Wang and Karl Floersch

Transcript

[Music] we're super lucky to have two ethereum ogs with us today and uh full disclosure you know Jing Carl and I have spent an enormous amount of time uh together and sometimes our conversations get a little bit spicy we were just in the in the Green Room doing uh group yawning and push-ups together to get in the right mindset for this and so so our goal in this conversation is to uh bring bring some of some of the spiciness to uh to all of you and uh and uh we'll get right into it so let's set the stage so it's

um 2014 uh you're at Welsley uh you've decided that college isn't for you College decided that I wasn't for it uh and so your plan is you're going to become a hardcore bitcoiner yep um and that doesn't go as plan what happens next yeah it's funny because there's someone from my Bitcoin past year nates I just saw him out there he was like oh my God Jan he's like whoa it's been like seven years and last time I saw you you were complaining about ethereum scaling and I never connected the dots with optimism so yeah I mean I went into to the Bitcoin Community I think one big

thing I learned is that at the end of the day it's all just a bunch of humans trying to build something together and I think something that was missing for me in the Bitcoin experience was the sense of culture values um like you're striving towards something together with people it's not just the technology um and I was really attracted to ethereum for that reason I knew vitalic already we were bitcoiners together and he he so he he he had moved on from Bitcoin magazine and was like launch it was the year he launched ethereum and uh you know he he was the Talk of the Town there was another project colored coins it was like basically the Bitcoin version of an erc20 um but um you know he said hey I

wear unicorn t-shirts for a reason it's to keep out a particular type of toxicity and this is a very intentional choice you should come and check out ethereum and I was like well gee I really don't know anything about ethereum and everything I know is Bitcoin he goes no worries let me introduce you to a man named Carl Flur who at the time was also onboarding another Noob into ethereum and uh you know vitalik's offer was essentially to take us around to all these conferences around the world and basically teach us what was ungoogleable about ethereum and onboard us and so you know Carl was the Jason Rosenthal of ethereum at the time and he basically I

only wish I could be that handsome and that young keep going um he had two projects at the time he said I've got a textbook writing project and I've got a coding project what would you guys like to do and because I'd been kicked out of University I wanted to write the textbook and his other friend had been fired from his mechanical engineering job and so wanted to learn coding and so Carl said okay Jing you write about plasma and Hayden you code Unis Swap and so that's literally how it all began right so when the when the history of of uh like the great blockchain Revolution is written that like that that meeting in that

conversation but you you came away with the big prize which was Hayden had to go off by himself and figure out learn how to and figure out Unis Swap and you got Carl well Hayden built Unis Swap and there came a time where Hayden and I had a little fight because you know I was getting ready to start an organization to build out plasma beyond the textbook and Hayden was doing the same with Unis swap to build out an organization beyond the first 100 lines of code and the first iteration of Unis Swap and yeah so we fought over who would get Carl as the co-founder and ultimately you know I was like you want to you want to build defi or you want to

build the [ __ ] internet future bro and Hayden was like you want some something that already has product Market fit and definite upside or you want to embark on some risky ass adventure and Carl was like you know what can I say this Carl was like you know what I'm already rich let me go take a risk let me go build the thing that is longer lasting and see where that takes us nice I love that and and sorry I should have said a friend so uh so jing a CEO of the optimism Foundation uh Carl is CEO of optimism Labs uh or op labs uh and uh one thing I'll say about these guys is they have done I think a better job than uh any team in terms of

figuring out uh the role of labs the role of foundation how to structure it so uh if if you all have questions on that these are uh great people to uh to talk to um you know one one thing that uh I think anyone who spends any time in the space here is like again and again is that is that optimism is ethereum aligned uh Layer Two out there and and I'm wondering like was that a was that core to your thinking from the beginning was that something that you like B based on your background that the ethereum foundation that you locked into like how how did that all work and how's that evolved throughout your now sevenish years together holy [ __ ] that's a long

ass time really is I mean I yeah I'll I'll I can take a take a stab definitely it it was a natural thing which emerged from the fact that we were a part of the ethereum community the you know original name for the you know op what is now known as op main net or like the the network was optimistic ethereum um this is really just a kind of mentality that I think especially was prevalent in the early days of ethereum where it's like ethereum is not a particular thing that is other like you are ethereum and really bringing ethereum to scale even if you are a layer 2

protocol you can embody ethereum and you can kind of be be almost one with it in some ways um but I will say that on a technical front we were not always very ethereum align to be honest the uh uh original implementation we you know made tons of changes to the the ethereum kind of evm and that ended up causing in massive pain for Integrations and tooling and all this kind of stuff which we then realized was a terrible mistake and that was like the ovm days um and we kind of re you know reinvented the the the whole stack threw away 100 thousand lines of code um so that not only can we be

ethereum from a cultural standpoint and really like embody what we thought were the ethereum values but also be ethereum from a technical standpoint and you know be fully compatible with all of the different you know tooling that that's out there to clarify we thought we were being ethereum aligned but we also realized like 90% compatibility isn't isn't equivalent like it's either oneclick deploy or it's not even if you're missing a couple op codes the the like amount of friction and lift that is required to deploy on your L2 is I it's like a zero to1 kind of um decision so we're like 90% compatible through away all that code and now it's

all about um ethereum equivalence well and I think and actually taking a step back even further like the uh if if you go back to when you guys started working together and what you were building uh like you were originally building plasma right and the the idea of an optimistic rollup came later talk about how that evolved and and what um what sort of drove the change in thinking um no one was using what we built and that helps uh it was early in the days of crypto and there like product Market fit isn't it's something we understood theoretically and at the time anytime

you announced something or published a paper you would get thousands and thousands of likes because every single person was thinking about scaling um and to illustrate how archaic this thinking was most people talked in terms of transactions per second so if you went to any random crypto conference there's like always some dude say like deploying this new blockchain and the differentiators of that blockchain were always framed in terms of transactions per second um but you know we developed plasma which is like theoretically infinite TPS and no one was using it we had this uh convoluted plasma predicate

system this like new programming language so that you could you know create applications with plasma and no one was using it um and this shocked us because we had so many likes on Twitter surely someone would take this literally thousands um and so we were introduced to the concept of a user interview for the very first time and realized that no one gave a [ __ ] about transactions per second it was all about uh cost and latency and so how like I mean how many times did you have to get punched in the face without realization to know that you had to change was it like still getting punched um yeah so it took like it

wasn't it wasn't like you know you did one interview and then the light bulb went off it was like you had to Ram your head against the wall again and again and then sort of finally it sunk in yep um and actually I mean one one thing we've talked about is that uh I mean you you're you're I would say you are uh you know Jedi Master Level at uh wait pleas me at uh at seeking out and signing up mentors uh and and people to give you advice and um like tell tell us about you know was that advice like did you always follow the advice was it spoton yeah I think sometimes the advice is hard to follow because what is an MVP if

you've never created an MVP before what is an MVP and I remember staring at this drawing of like a skateboard turning into a scooter turning into a car as like iterative value driven product development and a lot of our disagreements have been what is the skateboard how do we Define the skateboard even today like how do you define this skateboard what is it what is an MVP what does it mean to do things that don't scale like what do all these you know all these like like entrepreneurial platitudes what do they mean yeah yeah yeah yeah everyone says it's really good these really successful entrepreneurs these bigwig mentors are saying them and how you actually interpret the English words that

comprise the advice can vary very wrongly and so yeah talk about what you what's been your pro I mean like like I think I think we can all agree I will say something really nice you guys have gotten to a pretty good place like due to uh I think both of your hard work and Leadership and determination so how how did you uh over time and I know this is still a work in progress but how do you ultimately decode the words to figure out to code the words to code the examples to figure out you know do they apply to optimism in what you're building and if so how do they uniquely apply how do you figure that out I mean I I think we've we've gotten

much better like for example on the MVP uh ex you know scenario we are often faced with design decisions or directions we need to figure out okay what is the next step and often times where we get really really locked up is when we both are just describing what we think is the next step in greater and greater detail and not actually taking a step back and saying okay what is the like common objective that we are trying to achieve here um you know an example recently we were you know figuring out okay what should the you know okrs be for this uh this quarter and it was inste we could not agree on what the

actual objective could be for the life of us it just like spiraled way you know way crazy but then there was a moment where we were like okay wait what are we what is for all of these objectives what are what is our top priority in terms of like doing you know what are we trying to achieve and we we're like okay we want to execute we want to be able to chip something incrementally this quarter and like see some results and then it was like okay now the conversation is diffused quite a bit because we are you know we have established that Common Ground we can like slightly move forward but sometimes I don't know why it's so hard to like detach from a particular like near-term worldview and like zoom out I don't know that we're it's still work in progress

hopefully we get faster at it I think also like you know um I don't know how many of you resonate with this but you know like when you first leave your family and you go to college and you realize for the first time the way you communicate is different from the way that other people communicate what you think is normal in terms of like volume it could be like considered aggressive by somebody else all these tiny things that come together and so I think over the years we've worked through for like first our like frontal cortex has fully formed and so like at least I'm making fewer risky impulsive decisions I think the um understanding of how to communicate in

general with other humans has also gotten better sometimes it's not that we necessarily disagree with the path on what we we want to accomplish but I might say something like if we do this it's it's going to be another 12 months without a single line ship to production and you know what I really mean is the way that we're thinking about this is too complex we need to simplify but what Carl might hear is that's a dumb idea and I do not believe in that product vision and we need to radically Pivot and so then he'll respond as though that is what I've said and so what could be a simple conversation could take there's one particular conversation I'm thinking about that took nine [ __ ]

hours just going back and forth and we ended up hiring a co-founder coach to teach us how to speak well I think I mean you I we've talked a lot about this but I mean like stylistically temperamentally you guys are like could not be more different but I think but but you amazingly always find a way to um not not always agree but like you find a way through the toughest issues and do you think is that like just a lot of mileage together a lot of repetitions like how how do you how does that work I would say it's our third Cod founder Ben

yes shout out to Ben tell us more yeah like who who like so Ben Ben Ben's head of research uh for at uh at the op Foundation like what what role does he play in the in the process I think he is able to decode my abstract uh my flavor of abstractness as well as Carl's flavor of abstractness in a way that we're not able to do for each other and he's like this like communication uh layer recently um you know for just like a funny example but very relevant we were trying to create

um you know the super chain SDK and um I was trying to like whiteboard us through this example and I just wasn't picking up what Carl was putting down and I got super frustrated and then Ste in and he goes give me the marker Jing you sound hungry go down make some pizza Bagels let me work with Carl to clarify his thinking and then come back up and then we'll reconvene and so um it's really helpful to have that all three of us have spent an insane amount of time investing in each other and the way that we communicate I think in this like next stage of optimism we've basically gotten to the extent of what we can do through sheer force of will and it's time to

bring in like some professional Firepower with like the co-founder coaching with like business coaching um things like that that's actually I think you you touch on a really important point which is that uh you guys have done you you've done a really nice job this is a real compliment there's no but coming like you you've um you've gone through uh multiple iterations of uh the Org the team the product and I think have gotten better every time and what I've noticed in the time that we've worked together is it sort of always uh starts with you having this uh like spidey sense tingle uh that something

like some something or someone or some structure or some decision is like not working right and then you become uh I'd say hellbent on understanding that and fixing it like talk about we actually haven't talked about this ever like what what goes on like in your in your brain and your body when you're sensing that and then how do you how do you turn those Sensations into action and a plan I think um when I was younger back in my day um I just assumed everyone was really smart around me and like I'm an impostor whatever and so if something didn't make sense I didn't always push because I figured well of course it

makes sense I should trust my teammates but the the reality is even if you're not the smartest person in the room as the founders you have the best Birds I view and the best decisions come from having the best context and so you certainly do have the best context and so if something doesn't make sense to you and you push a little bit um you're you're right to and early on when I encountered discomfort from the people that I was pushing I would immediately back off because I felt really uncomfortable creating discomfort I think part of my journey is like learning how to push without creating that discomfort in other people and uh having the conviction to like endure other people's discomfort when

necessary um this is you know something that Carl has paid the price I was say he's been the guinea pig uh on this for through multiple car both yes um and what I mean uh like when you when you you've had actually a couple iter of the um executive team within you know across labs and Foundation um you know how have you known when someone just wasn't right and how have you made the hard decision that you're better parting ways and finding someone new than trying to make the person that you have work I actually think Carl you've done a really good job making Swift decisions on this front do

you want to it's taken me a while I only have uh the the only thing that I can say there is there's a kind of General sense that something is up and then I start investigating that sense and I'm like okay you know what what's actually happening kind of writing down what this what what is working what is not working what I should what I really do expect talking to people like Jason like others saying like what should I expect in this context is this weird am I crazy because first it's all just like doubting myself and then and at some point there's a moment where I'm like okay I need to write down what would happen if if if I

if if this if this happens then I'm happy and we're just going to keep going and if this other thing happens then I'm going to have to make the hard decision and then I just put that put that down and then I say okay I'm not going to think about it anymore we're going to play it out and see what goes down and I'm going to make the decision because I think the worst part personally is just the constant anxiety of thinking about oh my gosh you know is this is this you know going to pan out the way that I want it to pan out is this you know not going to be the right fit all these kinds of things and then just like living with that and not being able to think about anything else that is what I try to avoid and so I just write it down

see what happens and make the tough decision and move on because there's going to be a lot more uncomfortable things to come so I'm saving my energy for those yeah I mean I would say you're you're a person who uh who who would prefer to live your life without a ton of conflict um and when you and when you um you know stepped into the role of you sure pretty sure uh of lab CEO like about a year ago like you you you you knowingly put yourself in a position uh where you where you were going to have to deal with like a lot more conflict than you had or or might have wanted to like how did you rewire your brain and your body to be able to deal with that

or or or have you I mean I definitely still in the process of rewiring I think that um Moment by moment conflict is the hardest for me because I just freeze up and I start saying things that make no sense um so that is what I try to avoid even in this position but the cold calculated conflict that one is like a little bit more manageable because I can just like take time and if I go on a you know two-hour walk and I you know come off that walk with an idea then I just like am ready to execute on it and I think that's like the main thing it's like need to make the hard decisions and then need to live with and measure the

consequences so that I can update my you know priors and do it better next time and that's just the role and you know it's fun it's a great growth experience and I am incredibly grateful um even for the the craziness of it amazing um we'll we'll uh move on from inspecting each of your psyches onto more um mundan topics but so one of the things that I think that is amazing about optimism and you guys have just done a great job on is the I think the um the strength of the the strength the excitement the momentum of the community around uh almost everything that you guys do is pretty uh pretty unique in the space you haven't put uh as much effort eort into doing that as as one

might think you needed to to like achieve the results that you have what what do you think has been the the secret to your success I feel like we have put it put an effort well I guess you make it you make it look effortless so yeah so I mean it's that like so from the from the get-go where you're like okay we gotta like we got to be the People's Choice or or how did you how did you do what you've done it's funny because the way this comes up in our coaching conversations with Jason is I'll be like this is a problem and Jason will be like and he'll like just put his face in his hands and we'll be like oh [ __ ] he's like I don't get it how has optimism

done the things that I typically consider difficult and still have these [ __ ] problems well I I would put it yeah so I I would actually put it slightly different that I I would say um all all the things that uh that in my experience in startups and Tech are the um you know once in a lifetime lightning in a bottle like you're you know unbelievably hard to achieve like these guys have it in Spades but like the you know the blocking and tackling of how do you to find a product road map and like ship it in the time uh that you said you were going to do is like it's like that's inventing you know new Quantum

science for uh for them we definitely we it's definitely figure so and so but on the community so I would I would say like the community thing is uh hard for like like to do it right to do it authentically organically not many people do that well you guys have what have you like how's that worked I don't want to downplay it but I also think the bar is in hell like we genuinely give a [ __ ] about the humans that we interact with and I think that goes a really long way I think people can potentially tell yeah yeah and I think I like we were authentic we were we were in the we were

students of the game I don't know I was a stand and have been a stand for ethereum since day one like dedicating everything to making this thing happen stand for open source like actually kind of like believing that this thing could happen and so I don't know it's just it's I think that there's there's a level of just if you love it exude it and people will vibe also I think you know people say optimism has Vibes but what what is Vibes I think Vibes is like people are having fun and so you know like let's be real like nobody needs technology like we could just be on a

farm like there's like you you know life is potentially fundamentally meaningless we're like mostly water and so if you're not waking up and having a good time getting up each day then what are you doing the second thing is like I think we put our money where our mouth is and so we didn't just say we wanted decentralization and built a completely vote purchasable plutocratic system we actually tried to build the decentralized system we incorporate it as a public benefit Corporation I don't know these small things they add up over time we've had a long history plasma groups started as a not for-profit and so um you know over time I think it feels intangible but it's really just

the outcome of a bunch of decisions that have genuinely stay true to our values that give the perception of vibe yeah no I think that's well so I think you I think you guys also um so if I were to rephrase what you said uh you guys live your values and you have fun together doing it and I think one uh pretty impressive stat is like what's your amongst your your team like over the seven years what's your rate of like regretted attrition like like people who have left that you didn't want to leave I think it's like zero right is it zero Harper I mean we you know maybe one one yeah so like PE people people come and they say uh and

they contribute and they generally enjoy the experience which is pretty like that that's not you know that like the the the normal attrition rate in any uh tech company is like you know 15 plus per a year founding team is six people and every single co-founder is still here no that's super impressive you guys are definitely definitely doing a few things right in that regard and I will say though that this is a there there are certain opportunities that are just incredible and so just got to be very grateful that the the values and the impact and all the things aligned and the Stars aligned and we're here now cool all right let's do uh let's do a

quick uh lightning round of questions to close and you you guys can pick uh who answer it so one um like as you think about you know crypto and blockchain broadly what are the biggest challenges that you would like to see solv that you think people should be solving uh like if you could wave your magic one what should exist in the space that doesn't today scaling ethereum yeah exactly scaling eum you're but you're working on that yes Fair working on that user onboarding please users should not know that they're using crypto they just like use it and benefit from all the benefits that's amazing and then eventually we also are going to eventually need to be able to build you know private experiences think you know users have

their own information that not everyone sees publicly but um we just got to get to the point where we can at least replicate web 2 before we have any chance of superseding it what is something that you wish people asked you about more that they don't jobs. optimism. come contribute these guys are building their own things they're not going to come for you last one then we'll turn it over to these guys what uh is you guys are failing this part of the what is what's one thing that you wish you knew when you were at the stage of optimism that uh that the CSX cohort is at now

that you know like sort of sage words that you can pass on to this group every like genuinely I don't know how old you guys are but everything changes when your brain finishes developing and until then it is incredibly [ __ ] useful and helpful to have someone on the team with their brain fully developed and like it it it's like maybe a funny way to frame it but you definitely know don't know jack [ __ ] when you're 23 you think you know everything so you want to redefine and reinvent everything we had like Carl re like Reinventing JavaScript Frameworks because he thought there was a better way to organize whatever it doesn't matter or like Reinventing the wheel

with the hubris that only a young engineer can have and I think you over complicate things you burn a lot of time and energy um going in the wrong direction or in the right direction really ineffectively and I think sometimes at least I see I saw this in early optimism and in our peers there's maybe like a trepidation or a stranger danger suspicion of bringing on the more seasoned folks but as Josh Stein higher number the first hire outside of the cor founding team hire number seven um you know said he was like kid I'm not here

to burn myself out I'm here to tell you how to burn you out more effectively and he was the first COO of uh optimism and so I think it's people like that are worth their weight in gold and so don't be afraid to Shell out the big bucks um especially early on uh I think that was the best decision A6 he ever made on my behalf for early optimism all right that that is a good place to pause this we'll we'll uh open it up to you guys and and and hopefully as you've seen like Jen and Carl are unafraid to answer any question so uh don't uh don't hold back hey first of

all thank you for that really cool um so just one I guess could be quick question or not um how do you guys look at um decentralizing your product like how do you think about that internally to go from something like where you started and what the end product is um and then slightly second question is um where on the road map does sort of multi prooof potentially including ZK I think decentralization comes in many forms there's like governance decentralization decentralization of the protocol and then the decentralization of work I think with protocol level decentralization we first think about

just building it incredibly modularly so that we can punt some of these design decisions into the future for uh governance decentralization the launch of our governance system included a blog post entitled this governance system will self-destruct we hadn't really seen other teams build their governance systems iteratively and that we knew we would get it wrong on the first try and so I guess long story short you just deploy something anything and then be unafraid to delete the whole thing and keep iterating is that what you were trying to ask um yeah sure so basically deploy something get traction

and then worry about everything else but having have sort of an infrastructure to be able to it out entirely um decentralization should serve a purpose and so at the protocol level like what is the purpose of decentralization is it for liveness is it for security and then form a hypothesis about how your design will actually achieve the end goal that you desire and see if it does you'll probably get it wrong because there's no playbook for this and then iterate from there um multi prooof oh yes multi prooof so we are already actually getting you know pretty close to finishing up a uh second fallproof uh VM with risk five so that we're you know we'll start having some form of multi

proofs very soon which is very very sick um we already have multiple clients um and so the whole fault proof multi- prooof system I think that's going to move very quickly on ZK we actually well also have um the beginnings of a multipro system where uh risk zero is able to prove 180 interesting optimism mainnet or op mainnet blocks so that means that in theory one could already provide a validity proof for the entire you know latest state of the op main net chain however you would unfortunately need to burn probably hundreds of millions of dollars so don't do that 400k a day yeah so yeah so don't do that but you he it here first you're just we

just don't have enough compute to uh make op Manet a a ZK uh proving proof system but anyway we're going to reduce the cost and eventually we can have uh validity proofs for for all the op chains we had a mo from aptose in here earlier I asked him a similar flavor of the same question which is um do you guys see the world as eth and l2s like op and everything else kind of just Falls away um or do you view a more uh a world with many different l1s and l2s playing nicely with one another I mean I can I'll answer this in a philosophical way um I believe that there's probably some value to having a

canonical ordering of events for Humanity and this implies that there is one shelling point for a single like quote unquote layer one or a single ordering of events that we all organize around whether or not that is actually you know ethereum main net as it you know is instantiated today or some other kind of hybrid system or something along those lines I do think that these systems unless they're really like siloed then they can exist really in a silo they don't need to you know connect back to this larger thing I do think that most systems will connect back to the larger thing and therefore we will only have one universal L1 but this is more of a religious point of view than a

you know near-term practical I think for all practical purposes you let all the ships raise rise or whatever you know make everyone happy use use what you want and I'm not super concerned a single set of Standards yes yes sh there is definitely Network effect around standards so I do expect a majority of usage will be on the standard version thank you if I understood correctly the core team has changed over the years um how do you go about parting ways with one of the core team members the found the founding team has stayed the same yes the founding hum stay the same um yeah so all six initial members all still here um roles have

changed and that's you know like they say don't hire your friends and you're like but my friends are really [ __ ] smart and you hire your friends and then that becomes a difficult conversation down the line sorry what was your question again how how have you did you hire your friends yeah hired my friends and uh didn't part ways but roles changed and ultimately I think you know um be generous with compensation if you don't think that the people are worth it then they probably shouldn't be on the team that early anyways if you're not excited and if you wouldn't rehire that person

again and again then you know why have the stress of the you know trying to balance the equity and things like that you know I think that made all the conversations after that easier and also I think I lucked out I found a bunch of co-founders that were all pretty low ego and um down to have difficult conversations and so it's you know a two-way street sometimes you can try to have a heart tohe heart and try to lay out a way to build trust to make these difficult decisions but it doesn't always work out um one of the members of the founding team didn't speak to me for a full year and so you know we like

recently reconnected and like things are great we've like had our heart-to- heart there but it's not always easy however at the end of the day even if your teammates hate you as long as they can trust you that's all either of you really need thanks again guys it's been awesome to hear from me and learn from you guys um once you run out of smart friends to hire how do you find evaluate phenomenal developer Talent uh past just the interview um and getting just a good sense of how good they are how unique they are in their SC I mean you [ __ ] it up first yeah yeah it's and then you're like we should probably get a professional which Harper raise your hand yes definitely ask Harper that

question for sure if you have specific questions on how to evaluate engineering talent I think Harper is you know among the best in the world some of it is just learned you develop an intuition for it but hiring on boarding and firing are the most expensive things you could possibly do with your time at this stage and so uh just be intentional about it the same way that you iterate on your product you should also iterate on your hiring and onboarding process um we used to just look at the resume talk to the person spend a couple weeks with them and then feel bad if they weren't missing the mark and let them take up everyone else's time for a really long time before we made a painful parting of ways and now we have a process we have a panel we have things that we're

evaluating for we have values and values are actually quite important you should read um what you do as who you are you know okay never mind sorry that's tangent you mentioned that um the roads across the founders ofam kind of have changed how did you guys recognize that you guys need to do so so you change roles have you guys naate kind of conversations I think the these kinds of things become clear with time when you know it it's honestly a lot of the times it's better for everyone when people can kind of find their own you know place where they can be high leverage and it really

is not fun to watch someone in a role that doesn't make a lot of sense and like constantly struggling and there's a you know I think you know honestly Jin should talk about this but I think there is a way to come at it with a you know from a teamwork perspective from an empathetic perspective cuz we're all just trying to make this thing happen happen and being able to see where someone's career path makes the most sense is like part of that process um and and that also goes for everyone who you know if if you're on that side like I would hope to be you know in the same boat where like we can all work together to be our highest leverage selves yeah I mean if someone has the the courage and

conviction to actually start a company which you know already puts you in a rarified eror um like it it's miserable to be failing at whatever role you're playing so I mean what I've found and I think this worked well for you guys is that if you if you have um you know someone who's committed who is good at a set of things but just not the set of things they need to do in that particular role they will uh in most cases like if you have something better for them to do that's a closer fit to what they're good at they will be even though you might feel it it's like a very awkward conversation uh they'll be pretty grateful that you see that you know the current thing isn't

working out and and even more grateful if you have a better a better thing for them to do I guess I just feel hesitant to answer this and give advice on it as though to posture that I have done it well I think uh something that um a piece of advice I've gotten is that it is fundamentally a selfish act to optimize for how you feel and make a decision based on you not wanting to feel a certain flavor of discomfort if you're feeling nervous about having for example a leveling conversation with a close friend then like what do you need to build conviction that that is the correct decision because what a and this

has taken time for me to learn but on the other side of the difficult conversation and like the emotional pain whatever if it's actually the right decision with time Everything feels better for everybody sometimes it takes a week and sometimes it's instantaneous and sometimes it takes a year for the other person to also feel that but at the end of the day as a Founder as a leader you're not evaluated based on how much people like you and people you know people base how they like you on how they feel the company is going and so if you're making the right decisions and your team is winning

regardless of how they felt about you three weeks ago they're going to love you now because the team is winning and so I think about our series B Rays uh quite frequently people on the team were really upset said I was selling out called me all kind of names one person said I reminded her of her ex-husband which you know sounds like a great guy um and but I had conviction that it was the right thing to do and so powered through it and when the bar Market hit we had a fat [ __ ] treasury we were able to hire the best talent build the team during the bare market and all the people who had called me names had like

completely [ __ ] forgot about the idea that they had ever been against that decision or against the raise or had ever said those things they were just like they were like yeah like our compensation like criticizing the comp and leveling asking for bonuses [ __ ] like that you know so I don't know if that answers your question all right I think we drained the queue thank you guys amazing to have you thank you [Music]