From one piece How to win when software is not a moat | Evan Spiegel (Snapchat CEO) 22 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
I think technology leaders think that folks will just blindly adopt uh new technology as it comes out and I think we're going to enter a period of time where there's going to be a huge amount of societal pushback on a lot of the changes that are coming uh with AI.
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Their words
humanity is far more important, uh you know, than than the technological developments largely because humanity dictates how technology is adopted
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Their words
by listing out all these jobs to be done, you know, really for the for the community journey and for advertisers as well, it became very clear where we could use agents, where we needed to be very focused in terms of building cross-functional teams around those jobs supported by AI tools.
+ 19 more
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Their words
when you're creating a thousand new ideas, who cares if most of them are not great ideas? That's totally fine, right? What we want to get rid of is that sense of, you know, preciousness that people have around ideas
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Their words
Design is really about, you know, empathizing with your customer, empathizing with your audience, your viewer, whoever it is, and then building something that will really resonates with them. And And that means you need to have a an extraordinary amount of range.
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Their words
staying close to your customer, staying close to the product and the way that it's serving your customer is the fundamentally most important thing you could possibly do.
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Their words
for us design actually has always operated as like a bottleneck at the company, which is incredibly important, right? It's intentional that things need to be approved by design to ship.
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Their words
in the early days, my view was not that we don't need PMs. My view was that designers should do that work.
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korrents.com
Listening to customers is invaluable, but you should not build the thing they asked you for.Their words
All of those insights that we you know, received just from listening to folks made a huge difference in the product design process, but we didn't build exactly what they asked for. We we empathized and then you know, came up with something new.
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Their words
I would say uh, you have to talk to customers. You have to share your idea. You should share your ideas quickly as possible, as frequently as possible. Uh, it doesn't mean you need to take people's advice or feedback, but it's really important, I think, to listen.
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Their words
the velocity of work uh, you know, is really important because our favorite saying is, you know, if you want to have a good idea, you have to have lots of ideas.
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Their words
the companies that are very successful actually have both types of organizations inside their company. And that the leaders of the organization are the ones who are responsible for creating a healthy, functioning relationship between the two types of organizations.
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korrents.com
Large, structured organizations become risk-averse because everyone inside them is optimizing for the next promotion.Their words
as soon as you have an organization that's very large and very structured like that, uh people become very focused on getting a promotion, right? Getting, you know, into the next step of the hierarchy. And that means that all of a sudden, uh they become a lot more risk-averse.
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Their words
I don't think receiving phone notifications on your face is like, you know, a a valuable, you know, proposition for most folks.
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korrents.com
The time is right for a new kind of computer, because people are already frustrated with what phones cost them.Their words
I think the time is right for a new a new type of computer. I think people are frustrated um, you know, with the cost of using phones and computers today.
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korrents.com
Computers and phones isolate people from one another, and the point of the next computer is to reverse that.Their words
one of the things that I noticed about computers and I think today with mobile phones, uh is that in many ways they isolate us from one another, right? They actually take us out of our social interactions.
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korrents.com
Network effects are not a sufficient moat, because software features get copied however many patents you hold.Their words
network effects are certainly an important piece of the puzzle for sure, um but I don't think they're enough when it comes to these sorts of software uh you know, software cloning.
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korrents.com
A platform of creators and developers is a durable moat, because an ecosystem, unlike a feature, cannot be cloned.Their words
the more that we could build a platform uh around our business, the more that we could build an ecosystem with creators and developers, the harder it would be for folks uh to to just copy that.
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korrents.com
Software is not a moat, and the AI industry is only now discovering what Snap learned fifteen years ago.Their words
15 years ago we essentially learned that software is not a moat, right? Which is something that everyone is discovering today with AI, right?
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Their words
as we look forward to, you know, sort of these next generation form factors, things like glasses, there's going to be a whole new set of opportunities and a whole new surface for people to build generational consumer companies.
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Their words
what really mattered was connecting you to the right people. And so, if you could just connect someone not to all their friends, but to their best friend, to their partner, to their spouse, the people that they cared most about in the world, that that that's where the majority of the value is in the network.
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Their words
And I think people don't spend nearly enough time thinking about, you know, distribution and figuring out distribution. And that seems to me uh to be a huge differentiator.