00:28:13 · Guillaume Moubeche, Steven Schwartz
[00:28:13] S1: And you don't need a a villain to to find motivation? [00:28:17] S0: You don't need a villain? Yeah. I've tried to... I I don't like to look at... Like, I try to be very focused on ourselves and what we can control, and when there's other people, other platforms, other other anybody, it's like, let's do the best we can and focus on our own product and focus on our own customers and focus on our own way we build the business. And it's a lot more... If you have a high bar for all of that, it is a lot more impactful to to not get caught up in things you don't control. Because what are we gonna sit here and complain about a competitor all day? Like, that's just such a waste of time, and there's way more things to be done. It's like, let's go build a thing that we're selling to people. How about that? And how about we stop talking about this other random project that what we gonna... What do you wanna do with them? We're not gonna... This has nothing to do. I think I think if there's like a... You know, there's like some people that I think have will go online and and and they're seeing people, like, pay people to say bad things about other platforms. And that... That's just... That's that's, like, kinda crazy. So, yeah, I I just don't think there's much value in focusing on things that are out of your control.
00:29:32 · Guillaume Moubeche
[00:29:32] S1: And how do you balance, obviously, like, focusing on your road map, what you wanna build, but also, you know, like, I don't believe that ideas are, like, unique. And that's why, you know, all over the world, the same project are being built more or less at the same time by different people with zero connection because I think ideas belong, you know, to eras, to society, etcetera. So how do you balance the fact that you need to focus on what you're building and, of course, your roadmap, but also that sometimes other people, and it can be competitors or adjacencies, can have, like, really good, you know, ideas that will actually modify your road map. So how do you balance the two?
00:30:15 · Steven Schwartz
[00:30:15] S0: I love that question, honestly. That's one of best questions and the best way to look at it. I've heard, like, ideas belong to the culture, and ideas belong to the time and the society. And if if it wasn't us who came up with that idea, then likely someone else would. I think that the idea is one thing, but how the idea is actually executed is a little bit different. And the idea of letting people start businesses online is not new. Even letting people pay each other and accept payments is is not new whatsoever. But how it's implemented and how it's executed, and as you said, the people that are behind that is the differentiator. And there are thousands of platforms that that do directionally the same idea. But how many platforms are going to leave a really creative cultural taste in people's mouth when they use it. And, I mean, when you go to our site and you click the buttons, there's sounds. You know? And, like, there's really cool colors. And our marketing videos are exciting to watch, and we are playful with our brand. And we try to have fun with a lot of it and not build a a really sterile company. So I think I think it's much more differentiated in the execution and the idea. And for us, like I said, we know people are gonna be building the same stuff. We know that there's nothing always crazy about about anything that's really built. I mean, even... Every time frame has all these cool inventions, and, yeah, they would have eventually been done, but it's it's the execution details that that make it fun and keep it interesting, and I think give us perhaps more intention than other platforms with the same exact idea.
00:31:52 · Guillaume Moubeche, Steven Schwartz
[00:31:52] S1: Yeah. I agree. I think, like, execution is is basically, like, the the whole difference, and as you mentioned, like, branding. And I'm assuming, like, you've put a lot of your personality also in the in the branding. No? [00:32:04] S0: I... We... I think one thing that's been difficult as we scaled is keeping the brand consistent to the level that we want it to be. I think as we've had more people touch the brand, we have millions of people using our product, and millions of impressions of people posting things online. It's sometimes hard to, like, hey, make sure we're using the right logo, and make sure that we're talking about it in the way that we wanna talk about it. And I would say that the brand that we put forward on our primary accounts is absolutely, it does definitely... Our culture is all over it, you know? So, yeah. We have fun with marketing. It's a good outlet to express all of the the... What we want people to see and feel. [00:32:47] S1: That's cool. And you mentioned briefly, like, AI before. Like, how do you... Because you mentioned, like, okay, we're gonna be able to essentially build, like, any software with AI in a matter of, like, seconds, so we want to build something that's long lasting and has an impact globally. Like, how do you see AI for your business? Do you see it as an opportunity or a threat, and how do you apprehend it within the team?
00:33:14 · Steven Schwartz
[00:33:14] S0: Yeah. If everybody has access to AI, then it doesn't really give anybody an advantage. Right? It only advantages if you're not using it, or if you're using it, favoring the people that are using it, if it's supposed to give people leverage. And I think if you look at it like that, then we try to not only make sure that it is true that everyone has access to AI, and make sure there's AI available in our product, so that if people wanna get help figuring out what to do with their business, or figuring out ways they can they can make money on the Internet, then they can use the AI. And then internally, it's it's... If you're not using AI at this point, then there's definitely... It's probably difficult for you to to keep the pace and manage to do so much. Because if you can, if you're looking at the person next to you who's writing all this code and finishing their projects really fast, and you're not curious as to how they're doing that, then what are you doing? That's difficult, there's not much time for those people on the team, I think. I think there's also probably a lot of overuse of AI too, if you're gonna... You gotta... You can't expect the AI to tell you what to do. You can tell the AI what to do, and then have it done faster, and and fill in different details. So I think I've seen it be used, perhaps overly used maybe, in in some scenarios. So for us, give it to our customers. We give people unlimited budget to spend on on AI as as it's very effective for programming and coming up with iterations for ideas that you could have, and structuring out proposals and memos and things like that. But when it comes to the details and when it comes to the direction, it's very critical that there's thinking applied from a human brain, still at least.
00:35:02 · Guillaume Moubeche, Steven Schwartz
[00:35:02] S1: And have you seen, like... Yes. Still. I think still is the important part with how quickly things are evolving. But have you seen, like, negative aspects of leveraging AI within the team? Because to your point, like, I think it's hard to balance... Like, we work a lot in our company. I'm gonna give you an example with, like, Notion notes, etcetera. And I think in the last, yeah, year, we've seen basically, like, the amount of super long notes written mainly by AI just explodes in the company whenever someone wants to talk about, like, a specific topic, etcetera, etcetera. And do you feel sometimes some of the people are using it a little bit too much without putting, you know, like, their their touch? [00:35:53] S0: Yes. Definitely. Some people think that they're being, like, crafty with this, oh, look at this huge website I just made with all these buttons, and it's crazy. It's like, oh my god. It's so impressive. Right? And it's like, what? Like, how is anybody gonna use this? This is not yeah. Like, just because you produced something doesn't mean it's actually good, and definitely doesn't mean it's useful. So I think the AI can fool people that there's being... That there's work being done, even though it's not particularly helpful work being done. [00:36:23] S1: Okay. And right now, like, what would you say is the the project that excites you the most for the coming year?