A16Z - Genius Podcast lyrics

This text is annotated! Click on the highlights to read what others are saying. If you'd like to add your own insights, comments, or questions to specific parts of the lecture, visit the transcript page on Genius, highlight the relevant text, and click the bu*ton that pops up. Your annotation will appear both here and on Genius. Michael Copeland: Welcome to the A16Z Podcast Brooklyn Edition. We're at the world headquarters of Genius.com with Tom Lehman and Ilan Zechory, co-founders. Two days ago, Genius released the Genius ISMs. It's a list of rules, concepts, feelings to live by. Tom Lehman: It's less about rules, it's more about commands... Ilan Zechory: Commandments? Tom Lehman: Commandments. There are 17 commandments. Ilan Zechory: It's an aspirational self-definition. How we work. It contains slogans and ideas you can refer to when you're working, things that tend to come up a lot over the years. We've been working together for five years and there's a lot of stuff that keeps coming up. As you're hiring and building a company, you bring in new people. This becomes a re-education in all the memes you're used to dealing with. So we tried to write them all down. When I first met Dan Gilbert, he was fascinated by how you communicate who you are to a growing company, when you have 20 people or 30 people or a thousand people. How do you communicate key ideas and do it in a way that scales, is efficient, and makes everybody work well together? He was saying some really interesting stuff. He runs this huge multi-faceted organization and it turns out that there's plenty of complexity with 25 people that you have to do this type of thing too. Michael Copeland: And in some ways, you fend off even more complexity later. Is that the hope at least? Tom Lehman: That's the hope. It's also fun to have stuff that you can say. You've got to make the individual ISMs, individual commandments, marketable. Not all of these are great. We have to improve them. But it's fun to have some shibboleths. Ilan Zechory: We really like "Run into the spike." Tom Lehman: "Run into the spike" is the idea that whenever you are trying to decide what to do, you should do the thing you don't want to do. When you are making a decision, you are like, "Well either it's this or that and I know what I want to do." Always do the thing you don't want to do, whether it is exercise or meditate or work on a hard project. The thing you do want to do is probably check your email or look at Twitter or check Genius... don't do that. Don't go to the website Genius.com. Michael Copeland: So instead "Run into the Spike." Ilan Zechory: Yeah, run away from Genius.com and into the spike. Tom Lehman: It's a way of getting yourself to do things that are hard. When I find myself procrastinating, I am rarely on Facebook for two hours. What I will do to procrastinate is go through my inbox for a long time. I trick myself into thinking that's not procrastinating because it's positive for the thing, but it's ultimately a waste of time relative to what I should be doing. So "Run into the Spike" is about getting to the really hard thing you should be doing. Don't take the easy way out and procrastinate. Ilan Zechory: We also believe that for anything valuable you do, you have to pay the toll of getting there. There's a bridge to get to doing the thing that's valuable. You have to walk across the bridge and there's someone saying "Pay the toll in pain." And so we believe in paying that toll and just embracing it. The feeling of running into the spike is not always pleasant, but if you make it have value that's explicit, then people get into it and you have the pleasure of doing something that... Tom Lehman: ABS - always be suffering. That was one of the original names for this ISM. Michael Copeland: Some of these sound like what they are. Others, I am completely baffled by. “Take the roast out of the oven." Tom Lehman: This is an interesting one. The name here is actually jacked from Dan Gilbert because we started repeating it and found it to be sticky. The idea is you can put all this work into getting a roast ready, it's in the oven, and all you have to do is take it out of the oven to serve the meal. So just take it out of the oven. It seems like a simple thing. Finish the job. But in real life, it's often harder to take it out of the oven and finish the job. What will happen is you'll get to eighty percent done on a project, but getting to the point where you can actually put something out into the world is harder than you thought it was. Push yourself through, finish, don't give up, and actually make the world different. Also be careful about what you embark upon because it's probably going to be harder than you think. You don't want to get far down the road with a project and then quit. That's a bad thing to do. Avoid that. Ilan Zechory: There are people who work extremely hard and do a lot of really quality work but have a fear of finishing, of putting themselves out there. This should make you feel like you have to. Michael Copeland: Well, in your world and in the world of software, you have no choice but to keep taking those roasts out of the oven, right? Tom Lehman: Yes. "Take the roast out of the oven" is connected to another ISM, maybe the earliest ISM, that I was banding about on the tech side for a couple of years. It's called "Worse is better." Which is this idea: one way to get the roast out of the oven is to take it out! Even if you think it's not done. Even if you think it's going to be embarra**ing. Even if you think it's definitely not ready yet, just take it out. Put it out there in the world. The worst thing is the best thing. The worse the project is, the better it is to get it out there and perfect it in public to the extent that it needs to be perfected. "Worse is better" and "take the roast out of the oven" combine to say your perfectionism, your desire to make things perfect is good and it comes from a good place, but ultimately to make progress you can't be a slave to that. You have to put stuff out there and see what happens. Ilan Zechory: There are artists who take ten years, fifteen years between projects, between albums, or between films. And then there are artists who put out thousands of songs. We think that in the art of trying to build a consumer facing internet company, you have to be more like Lil B and less like, who's a good artist who takes like twenty years, D'Angelo? Tom Lehman: Uh, Michelangelo. There is another aspect, which is don't try to plan everything out in advance. One almost ISM was don't be a le Corbusier. Am I pronouncing that right? Le Corbusier, I saw it read before I pronounced it, it's actually better that I can't say it right. Le Corbusier- Michael Copeland: French architect and designer for those of you who don't have nice furniture. Tom Lehman: He wanted to plan the city down to the door knob, to plan everything out in advance. The perfectionist impulse. The anti-"worse is better" impulse, the anti-"take the roast out of the oven" impulse is I have this grand plan and I am going to execute that plan and release it. You don't have a plan. It has to be this more organic thing. I want to recommend a book that Ilan and Mahbod actually recommended to me, so I am just jacking it from them, but I came to love it more than they ever will. It's called "Seeing like a State" by Jim Scott. It is a long argument against making a grand plan and then trying to execute it. The plan is going to go awry so don't make a grand plan. Do an incremental thing. Don't be le Corbusier. Anyone listening to this, if you find yourself literally being le Corbusier, stop. Ilan Zechory: The story is about how even "well intentioned" government schemes to improve the human condition, large-scale projects, have caused untold, unintended human suffering. Tom Lehman: No one's going on vacation in Brasilia. Except I kind of want to go. Michael Copeland: “Feel it to my face." Ilan Zechory: This is a big one. Tom and I, we were on this tip in the early days because we found that the co-founder relationship was so fraught with feelings. If you don't talk about things, if you don't hammer out the subtext, if you don't check in, if you don't admit vulnerability, you're screwed. You can't run a business or do a creative project with someone if it's totally loaded with unspoken emotional stuff. We hire really talented people with strong personalities, who feel things very deeply. Those feelings need be communicated. Often it's not clear when you're an employee of a company what is or isn't appropriate to say to other people. We believe that if you are feeling something and it's making you unhappy or uneasy, you should say it to someone. In particular, you should say it to the relevant person. If I'm feeling something about Max, who works here - Tom Lehman: Ah, come on. Everyone has always got it out for that guy. He's a musician. Ilan Zechory: He's a wonderful guy. Tom Lehman: Great guy. Great guy. Ilan Zechory: It's better for me to talk to Max, to run into that spike, rather than to talk to Tom about how Max is upsetting me and have Tom soothe me. Then Max is just blissfully unaware of the whole thing. It's about just going to people, suffering that initial discomfort, realizing it's not as bad as you think it's going to be. In fact it's actually really healthy. You'll probably feel a lot better afterwards. Tom Lehman: This also relates to feedback. Say what you actually think about something, whether it's work that someone did or it's what the company is doing. Think about if you have food on your face. Your friend tells you you have food on your face. Your non-friend doesn't tell you. The reason is your friend is down to suffer an uncomfortable conversation to help you. Your non-friend doesn't want to feel uncomfortable. So if someone has food on their face, metaphorically or literally, suffer the uncomfortable moment and tell them what's real. "Feel it to my face" is part of another thing that people under appreciate in companies and businesses, which is how big a part the emotional side of things play. Part of "Feel it to my face" is feedback, but that in some sense is obvious because we're here working on something. We are doing this work and if I think the work is bad, I probably should overcome the awkwardness and say something. But the emotional side, if I feel like, "Did we had an awkward moment? Did I say something?" I think people, and I definitely did this when I was coming out of school, think the way the world of adults works is people go to the office, check their emotions at the door, and become professionals. That's not true. The emotional side of the world is very, very real. You throw up, you cry. Ilan Zechory: No matter how well you know the people, and maybe even more so as you know the people better. Tom and I, even with all our experience and how close we are, still have the capacity to make each other feel very bad, even by accident, just by being who we are and having communication patterns. So we'll have a conversation and it might feel a little bit off, but neither one of us can diagnose it. But I will feel bad until we resolve it. Somebody's got to break through and say "Is something weird with our relationship?" Then we talk about what's really going on and feel much better. Michael Copeland: This relates to another one, "Write like a human." Why is that even necessary? Although I believe that it is and, believe me, I wish everybody did. Tom Lehman: Writing is important, and this is the most important thing about writing from a business perspective. Being a good writer is definitely important, but just "Write like a human." Write as if you were talking to someone. Trust your natural voice. Trust who you are. Don't think you have to come into a professional or business context and change who you are to be someone else because that's what's professional. This is related to the emotional side of things. I am going to check my emotions at the door and I am going to write like I am not a human, like I have no emotions. I am just going to sound professional. That's how people in the world write. The actual reality is trust your normal voice and that will make you seem more appealing. Write it like you would say it. Don't say, "Don't hesitate to ask if you have any questions." Michael Copeland: Right. "With respect to." "May I." Next, "We'll figure it out." Ilan Zechory: Tom has taught me this over the years in terms of crisis psychology. Always have the attitude of "We'll figure it out." Things can and will appear, if you are doing any startup, incredibly gloomy no matter how good your circumstances are. I am sure that in the meteoric rise of Facebook or Google, they felt at times that they were totally f**ed. Tom Lehman: Totally fu*kED!!! Can you do the beep on that one? Ilan Zechory: You can't overreact. You can't do stupid things out of an emotional impulse. You have to look at crises as opportunities. You have to be clinical when stuff is going on. Check your anger or compartmentalize your anger and say, "Ok, I am confident. We have been in these situations before. We will figure it out. We will work our way out of this hole." And even beyond that, "What are the big opportunities that are here now because we're in this crisis that might not otherwise have been there? Can we seize those opportunities?" It's having a base level of optimism even when things feel really bad. It's not taking your pessimism out on other people and trying to get credit because you're predicating doom and you might be right. Tom Lehman: What I like about "We'll figure it out" is it's name. Just start saying, "We'll figure it out." If something looks doomed, just say "We'll figure it out," which will be what you're supposed to say in that situation. You'll feel a little better. That should be your approach. Michael Copeland: Does it give people here a little bit more freedom to try stuff and maybe go in the wrong direction? And/or cause a problem for that matter? Tom Lehman: That's something probably we should add. One part of "We'll figure it out" is don't get mad at someone, don't get upset with someone for causing a problem. There are going to be problems and who knows whose fault it is. Some person may literally have caused the problem but who knows what led to it. There are going to be problems. Don't get upset with someone for solving the problem. Be solution oriented. Maybe you should get upset with someone if they aren't down to help solve problems, but problems are going to happen. We'll figure it out. Don't lose your head and don't get upset at people for doing bad stuff accidentally. Michael Copeland: "The chaos will not be minimized." Tom Lehman: This is obviously a Gil Scott-Heron reference that should be in the annotation. This is related to le Corbusier. Anything great is messy, building anything great is messy. If you look at an art studio or an operating room or, my favorite example, an army on parade versus an army in battle, if you were new to armies you might think, "God! An army on parade! That's what I want! It looks like this art project! It's so in line. Everyone is orderly." But they are not doing what they are supposed to do in that context. The army doing what it's supposed to do is in battle. From the outside it looks like a total mess and it feels like total mess from the inside, but you can accomplish things that way. We're trying to do what the army is trying to do, which is maximize results. Maximize output and do not minimize chaos or minimize comfort. Ilan Zechory: A lot of the time people feel like, "Why would you do this? Why would you do this to me? This s**s for me, to have a reorganization of how the company's management works. Now I work for someone else? I thought I worked for you?" And it's like, those are definitely your feelings and they are a consideration but "the chaos will not be minimized." We're always going to be changing. We're always going to be doing what's best for the company. It doesn't mean that too much change can't be disruptive to actual effectiveness and productivity, you still have to think about that, but we are not just going to make decisions to minimize rough change reactions. We are going to make the best decisions. Everyone has to get down with the fact that things change a lot, or else this probably isn't the place for you. You should be working in a bigger company. Michael Copeland: And it's not a function of twenty five people or fifty people or a thousand people, that's just what you are going to do? Tom Lehman: There's the Mario Andretti quote, "If you feel like you can control your car, you're going too slow." If you are feeling comfortable, you are not moving fast enough. You are not pushing hard enough. It's a corny cliché at this point but I think it's very true. If you work here, you shouldn't expect to feel comfortable. In whatever you're doing in life, if you're feeling comfortable you might want to try moving faster, pushing harder. Michael Copeland: "Don't fill up on bread." Yet another food related ISM. Ilan Zechory: What are the other food related ones? Tom Lehman: "Take the roast out of the oven." And, "Never eat gluten." Ilan Zechory: "Don't fill up on bread" is another way of saying don't work on stupid sh** that seems like it might be good. There are so many small projects you can do that seem valuable, you can have so many pieces of bread before dinner, but you have to work on big impactful opportunities as much as you can. There are lots of small projects you have to work on sometimes, but if you fill your whole work life just doing small stuff, you're just going to get fat. Tom Lehman: The challenge is when you're thinking about "Worse is better," you're thinking about doing small things. The reality is you don't want to release some huge, in the software context, feature from whole cloth. The idea of "Worse is better" is do it in small increments. However, you want to make sure your small increments are leading towards a grand vision and you're not just doing a bunch of random small stuff. It's very easy to do a bunch of random small stuff, there's plenty of stuff. If you look in your inbox someone's going to write you an email and say, “Hey, I work at blah, blah blah and maybe we could collaborate." And maybe you should, but you shouldn't do it because you happen to see it in your inbox. It should be part of your plan. Michael Copeland: Are you guys experts in anything? It says here “Be skeptical of experts." Ilan Zechory: People would think that I am an expert and would ask me questions, but they should be skeptical of my advice. Like I am an expert in SEO. I am an expert in hypnotherapy. Don't ask me questions about any of that stuff. Tom Lehman: One of my favorite annotations is in Ilan's brilliant essay about a meditation retreat he took. One of the reasons he took the retreat was some anxiety and he wrote, "I have some anxiety around my iTunes playlist." If you click the annotation, you see the playlist in question and the top thing was, "How to be a super confident Hypnotherapist." Ilan Zechory: It was a bunch of hypnosis downloads, like how to stop being lazy, how to get rid of such and such addiction, and how to be a super confident hypnotherapist. Meanwhile, all my hypnotherapy clients are reading this like, who is this guy? Tom Lehman: You go into hypnotherapy but beforehand, the hypnotherapist is playing "Pop That" to pump himself up because he's nervous. That's part of it. The other side is an experience that we had, particularly in Y Combinator. We got to Y Combinator and I was totally star struck, by Paul Graham in particular, by everyone there. These were my idols. Not only that, they gave so much access. You can talk to Paul Graham, you can talk to Sam Altman. You can talk to everyone on staff but they can hook you up with anyone else, too. So you think, "With all this access, I'm going to be able to find people who are going to be able help me solve my hard problems." Part of that is true. Talking to people inspires you. They can give you good advice and can help, but whenever we had a hard problem and we went into a meeting with a lawyer, an investor, a YC Partner or some kind of expert thinking, "This is the meeting where someone is going to tell us what to do and it's so great that we have access to this," it just didn't happen. The reason is that the idiosyncrasies of your situation are more relevant than you think. You can't truly describe your whole situation in an hour. Which is related to le Corbusier. The criticism of le Corbusier is there is so much idiosyncratic on the ground, social life in cities, that you can't just take the expert opinion. Any expert doesn't care as much as you, so you need to combine your superior knowledge and your superior amount of caring. Figure it out yourself and do not look for the mythical expert who's going to get you out of your hard problem. Michael Copeland: So you guys have these, is there some sort of ascending or descending order? Are they all equally important? Do they just depend on the situation? Ilan Zechory: There is really no implicit order here. I think it will emerge which ones get used the most.They are an equal smattering I might say. Tom Lehman: There is some order. "We'll figure it out" I definitely want to put at the end because it is a statement of hope. "It's not not your job" is a good one to start with. Michael Copeland: That's the first one. Oh and by the way, this is all up on Genius.com and people can annotate. Tom Lehman: Yeah. Put some annotations up there. Especially if you disagree with something, clap at us. Feel it to our face. Michael Copeland: So "It's not not your job," you wanted to lead with that? Tom Lehman: Yeah, I think that's an overall positive message. It's phrased somewhat negatively. Ilan Zechory: It's a double negative. Tom Lehman: It's a double negative. It works out to something good. It's related to only hire the best people, only hire A players. It's that everyone we bring in here is going to be responsible for either the success or failure of the company. That doesn't mean that everyone should be thinking about every problem every second but no one should ever be in a situation where they are thinking, "Ok I am doing my job great and that's it. If the company failed, I would still say to myself I did my job great." This is not how it is at bigger companies, where there is a lot of inertia around what's going on. You can just do your job, that's fine. But here, everyone has to be a leader. Everyone has to be looking out for the actual success of the thing. That means trusting your gut about what's good and bad. It's not a lazy thing, saying "I don't want to do this." It's more, "I'll leave that to an expert. I think something's weird in this part of the company but I am just not going to say anything." No! Say something! Speak up. Don't think you're not qualified to comment. Pick up the rock and see the creepy crawlies underneath, tell people, and try to fix the problem. Everything you think that's messed up is actually messed up. There is a tendency that if you come into a place and see everything messed up, you think, "Oh it's me. I am not seeing the real deal, I must not know what's up." No, if you think it's messed up, it is messed up. Speak up. Michael Copeland: It took a lot of thought and focus to figure out what you guys were all about. You probably knew it intuitively but to put it down, to write it down, did it teach you anything about this company and yourselves? Tom Lehman: It's taught us that our impulse is to be very verbose. I have to give props to Ilan, who is much better at saying how many ISMs you should have. I was in ISM fantasyland. Ilan Zechory: Tom hit forty or so... Tom Lehman: Twenty-seven. Ilan Zechory: We were having a good natured board meeting. The slogan, as we presented our thirty-two ISMs to them, was "More engineers, fewer ISMs." It was the basic rally cry. But that was a good rallying cry. Tom Lehman: To any engineers out there, we need you to work here so we can have more ISMs! Michael Copeland: Ratio of ISM to engineer. Ilan. Ilan Zechory: Yes. Michael Copeland: Tom. Thank you guys. Tom Lehman: That's it???!!! Michael Copeland: Well... ok, lightning round. Ilan Zechory: Great, we bought ourselves some more Podcast! Michael Copeland: You are annotating news stories now. It's happening from the outside via Genius.com, but also from the inside, from within media properties. What's that an attempt to do? I want to get your opinion on how we can have better conversations within the news flow. It can be entertainment news. Within the flow of information, how can we have better conversations and what are you guys doing to that end? Ilan Zechory: There are a bunch of levels to what annotation can bring to news. What I think is most exciting and most interesting is bringing real accountability to journalism. People can annotate a primary source, they want to annotate the State of the Union wit commentary because it's an interesting primary text. But about secondary sources, if you look at the Newsweek article about the Bitcoin founder for example, that was a case where there is this article, it's in this major publication and there is criticism flying around the internet, on Twitter and elsewhere. But if you can go directly to the article and have experts on the subject annotate and challenge the journalist's claims or have the subject of a piece. Often times there are articles about people and people get upset because they were misquoted, things were taken out of context. The internet and this technology allows you to subject all pieces of journalism to actual criticism. That criticism can come from regular people who have something to say about it or it can come from the subjects of a piece. It can come from experts on a piece. The journalist can respond to criticism on the piece itself, focused on specific aspects of the piece that are in question. So you structure a conversation around a claim, around the specific piece of reporting. We are building tools that allow these conversations to happen in interesting ways, surface these conversations to the right people, and send signals to people who might be interesting commentators on these stories. As we build out our product, which will allow people to annotate any website, not just stuff on our site, we think this is going to be a key part of how people read and write journalism. Michael Copeland: We have comments. Depending on what you read and watch, they usually devolve into pissing matches. That is the problem with comments by and large. How does this change that dynamic? Can it? Tom Lehman: A big part of it is the community and editorial structure for what happens on our site and what will soon happen on every site when the platform gets woven into the fabric of the internet. One big thing that we do on the site right now is we try to explain what is going on. If you're reading the Seven Ages of man speech, "mewling and puking like an infant," you are reading what mewling means. If you are listening to a piece of music, you want to know what that means. So we spend a lot of time developing software and social norms surrounding this community that is designed to produce the best possible interpretation. One person will take a stab at interpreting a line, another person will add a suggestion, and an editor will come in and resolve the discrepancy between the suggestion and the original thing to create a Wiki style document that's the good explanation of what's going on. It's that type of thing that we want to take to other sites. You should be able go to a site and see a Genius Editorial Board approved annotation, which we call the Genius Annotation. This is the annotation we are putting out there as the best, impartial, not too long, kind of funny annotation explanation of what is going on in this claim the author is making. But the editorial board has another function, which is finding and surfacing relevant other people's comments. One key example is the subject of a piece or someone cited in a piece. We want that person to be able to comment. Right now, if that person goes and comments on the piece in the comments below, their comment is going to get lost or, if it's not lost, someone will question if it is actually from the person. Is it real? The function of the community and the software is: who's relevant to this? How can we bring them to this piece? How can we confirm that they are real? And when they do annotate, how can we make sure that their annotations are visible and noted as such? That curatorial aspect, combined with the straight editorial function, is going to be a big part of it. Ilan Zechory: In comments at the bottom of an article, you don't have any principal of organization that surfaces the best to the top. Part of why Reddit has been so successful is that they simply have a good algorithm for sorting the top comment out. So does Hacker News. Normally you read the thing and the thread underneath the top comment, which is usually fairly interesting. Most publications don't even do that, let alone call out who is saying something, why it is interesting, or how it ties to a specific part of the article that it is referencing. We have people manually quoting things and then commenting on them, but they are lost in a wash of commentary. If you have an editorial and community infrastructure that creates interesting comments, both from a crowd perspective and from an individual perspective, and surfaces that content right there on the article, that makes for a pretty interesting reading experience. Michael Copeland: We are going to do another lightening round now. Piece of music coming out that you are excited about? Ilan Zechory: Dej Loaf. She has a song called “Try Me," she has a song called "We Good." She's a rapper out of Detroit. She's just arriving and she's going to be ma**ive, I love her. Tom Lehman: I am super slow and lame, but I love the song "Lifestyle" by Rich Gang and Young Thug. I found out about it because everyone on Twitter was like, that's the song you need Rap Genius for because it's hard to understand what he's saying. It's a great song and I can't get enough. It's not really new, I apologize. Michael Copeland: Sneakers: high-tops or low tops? Ilan Zechory: Both. Tom Lehman: Impossible to answer. Insanely complicated. Both. I think Nike Air Max is the gold standard for sneakers. I am wearing midtops now and loving every second of it. Michael Copeland: Brooklyn is getting crowded, you're moving? Ilan Zechory: We are running away from the hoards. We are in Williamsburg right now but we are moving to Gowan*s. Gowan*s, still a lot people there, but far fewer. Michael Copeland: Is that near Cuba? Ilan Zechory: It's near a Whole Foods. It's a couple of blocks from the only Whole Foods in Brooklyn. It's not totally out there. Gowan*s is like Williamsburg twenty-five years ago. Tom Lehman: The headline in the Wall Street Journal was like, Area Known For Smelly Can*l Draws Hot Startup. There's a can*l there that's smelly. Ilan Zechory: People say they throw bodies in the Gowan*s. That is what it's known for. Michael Copeland: Well, hopefully there will be no bodies thrown in the Gowan*s on your account. Tom, Ilan, thank you guys very much. Ilan Zechory: That's it? Ok alright we're done. Tom Lehman: That was good Ilan.