Tobi Lütke - The Observer Effect
My favorite excerpts
We ended up labeling my product-related things red, investor/Board of Director-related things some kind of teal color, et cetera. And the thing I’m looking for is a balanced week; a week where, ideally, I manage to devote about 30% of the time—at least—to the product and then as much as possible to things like recruiting, bigger picture projects, and one-on-ones.
When you're discussing an idea or a decision, I want to know what has been considered. To be honest, I find myself more interested in the inputs of an idea than the actual decision
when I have my own ideas, the first thing I tend to do is just try to falsify them, to figure out why what I'm thinking about is probably incorrect
One of my biggest beefs with engineers, in general, is that they love determinism - everything becomes unpredictable and you have to write code that's resilient to the unknown
People have a love for the predictable, but there is value in being able to build systems that can absorb whatever is being thrown at them and still have good outcomes
I find that going wide and learning the best lessons from the people who have dedicated their entire lives to a certain pursuit gets you really, really close to mastery
We want to make it so that for $29, for our basic plan, you get most of the things that Amazon built for itself, right off the bat. It's a democracy natively
A business can take the value it saves on not having to build out their own technology platform and invest it to strengthen other parts of their business, whether that’s product, marketing, et cetera.
Every decision you make is a balancing act between the needs of right now and the long term benefits
But the major reason why video games are valuable is because of this concept of transfer learning. For instance, people who are good at chess understand when it's time to perform tactics, and when it's time to focus on positional development. Not just in chess, but also in life.
Trust - It plays a role like that. That said, it's not useful to talk about trust as a binary thing. People are quick to say, “You don't trust me!” And it's actually more, “Well, no, I trust you to a certain level, but you would like more trust; you want trust at a completely different level.”
We only take inputs, but we transform them via contextualization
Author: Sriram Krishnan