Ethan Evans

I completely agree with compounding lies.

You said earlier you could talk yourself into anything.

Well, this is a company doing it at a larger scale, talking themselves into believing their own PR, talking themselves into, oh, this is a great idea.

It's manifest destiny.

i think the way jeff partly got at this was driving hard on the numbers so okay well if it's manifest s for me you know show me the numbers like what are the trends or not like what's the market research but then what are we seeing he would wait a very long time for a business to go profitable if he could see the line but if the line wasn't leading there he would be very hard like hey you know this line never gets there like it never comes into you know what's what's the plan he would drill really hard on the numbers

The second way, though, I think you figure this out is you go talk to people on the front line.

You go talk to the individual engineers or the individual people delivering services because all the managers in between are

are kind of reporting up things that make them look good.

They're not trying to lie.

Just no one wants to be the bearer of bad news.

It's unpleasant if you go all the way down.

So I always maintain some contacts with people many levels below me.

When I had a big team, I would still talk to people who were five, six levels in this giant organization.

removed from me.

And that's because they would tell me things that I, you know, just wasn't expecting or had no idea.

And you get this little bite of reality that through all these layers of filters, you know, Jeff hated PowerPoint and the famous story why it's old now.

But when the space shuttle Challenger exploded, they went and found the PowerPoint slide had been used to justify the launch.

And this PowerPoint had like seven levels of nested bullets.

And the tiniest bullet in the smallest font basically said, we have a launch risk that could make it blow up.

And every bullet going outwards, you can go find this slide, made that a little nicer.