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Aravind Srinivas - Building An Answer Engine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.363]
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Don't spend time on strategy before you have product market fit
Avoid spending too much time on strategy at the beginning of a company. Focus on iterating and learning from mistakes. Charging based on consumption rather than creating new queries is more profitable. Building companies through iteration and stumbling upon successful ideas is more common than planning on paper. Develop execution skills first, gain traction, and then focus on strategizing. According to Snowflake CEO, Frank Slootman, one should only strategize after proving a track record of successful execution.
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Speaker 1
just don't be so naive in the way you think about strategy and modes. And don't spend so much time in the beginning of the company thinking about strategy. Try to iterate. We made a lot of mistakes. We built Texas SQL. It's the dumbest idea you can work on, honestly. Because nobody even writes SQL. 80% of the SQL that actually makes money for Snowflake or Databricks is not even being written. It's just Power BI generated or already written queries that are constantly periodically running. When you start thinking about these, charging someone based on consumption rather than writing new queries, TextoSQL is such a bad idea because once the same SQL is being written, you're not making any money out of it. So usually when you try to think on white paper, a great idea or a whiteboard, it doesn't happen. Very few people have built companies of that nature. And I would say probably all the existing big players were all built with iteration and trying out things and stumbling upon something awesome, and then building the strategy around it. Build the execution muscle first. Don't try to be a great strategist right away. Build something, make sure it has some traction, get the muscle that you can keep iterating, and then you deserve the right to strategize. This has actually been said by this other guy called Frank Slootman as well, the Snowflake CEO. He has this whole line in his book, Amp It Up, where you only deserve the right to strategize once you have earned the track record of execution. And I strongly believe in that.
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