Patrick O'Shaughnessy

What advice would you give someone that's trying to pick the thing around which the company is going to optimize?

There's these two ideas that we talked about when we first met.

One was the need for the very best software companies to stand alone in the sense that someone can just go use it without talking to a human and it just works for their problems.

So like fully, fully self-serve.

So I'd love to hear you talk about that.

And a related idea was that's sort of on the builder side.

On the investor side, you mentioned to me that all the great investments that you've had, the companies that have really had explosive growth,

have had a high number of one of four qualities, which I think was gross margins, low cost to acquire the customer, high retention, and a tight sales cycle, which maybe maxed back onto the self-serve thing.

Talk about the relationship between those two things.

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One of the other dimensions that's changing fast is careers.

I'm curious what you think about the sorts of people that will thrive best in this new era.

So if you're a person hiring someone, what are the sorts of things that you would place extra emphasis on now in the AI era?

What is your favorite way to assess whether or not someone is that, interviewing them or learning about them?

Is there any other advice that you would give the person building the career?

We talked about evaluating and be a builder and all these sorts of things.