Defining success and goals

`0:14:14`

Then there's one more. "You don't need to outdo the competition, it's expensive and defensive. Underdo your competition. We need more simplicity and clarity." I think a lot of these things point to, there's a few paths to success and goals for people. One is build a massively scaled, everyone's using a product like Figma and Notion, and build a venture scale, $100 billion company. Then there's this path which is, we're just going to make a bunch of profit we're going to make individually. We're going to take home a bunch of cash. We're not trying to have everyone in the world use it. I know your focus is, you call it, the Fortune 5 million versus the Fortune 500. So maybe just whatever you want to share about what success means to you, how you think about what success is for you, for the company your building. For me, it's really about, would I want to do this again?

`0:15:00`

If the answer is, "Yeah, that was enjoyable. I enjoyed that. That was worthwhile. I'm glad I did that. I'd like to do that again," then it was successful. Now you could carve out some extremes there. I'm sure someone who's addicted to drugs might go, "That felt great, I should do that again." So you got to be careful with that, in a sense. Obviously, I'm not talking about that. Addiction's a whole different story. But in general, with this stuff, "That was fun. Let's do that again. That worked. Let's do that again." Or, "That didn't work. I didn't like that. That was a pain in the ass. That was too complicated. That took too long. Let's not do that again." So it really is about, do you want to do that again? That's what success is to us at a root level. Now, on the business side of things, we have to be profitable. That doesn't mean that everything we do needs to be profitable. I am not driven by data, or I don't have different P&Ls for each product in a way where we're

`0:15:51`

looking at them very carefully. It's in total, collectively, are we making more money than we spend? That's the only thing we ultimately look at, whether or not this product is more profitable than that product, and this is behind that, it's all the things we do. It's all the things we do. I don't even think you can actually draw lines back to everything and go, "That was worth it. That wasn't worth it." What is the value of saying thank you to somebody? Would you want to A/B test that and, if it turned out that it was worse to say thank you to somebody, would you not do that? No, you would do it because it's still the right thing to do. So a lot of our things are, what feels right? What seems like the decent thing to do? What things do we enjoy making?

`0:16:38`

As long as we can, at the end of the year, look back and go, "Well, collectively, more worked then didn't work," then we're okay. That's how we look at it. We don't have financial goals. We don't have OKRs or KPIs. I don't have revenue targets. I don't have growth targets, in terms of the number of customers we need to pick up this year versus last year. I don't look at any of those things. It's just, at the end, "Did we make more than we spend? We did. Then the things we did this year were worth it." That's how it goes. You also have no investors. You have no board. You have no plans to go public. You have no plans to sell the business. Right. There's this book, I don't know if you've read this book called, Finite and Infinite Games. No, I've not. Okay. I think you would love it. The whole premise of this book, it's like a terse, tricky, philosophical book, but it's