Rahul Vohra

Candidates and investors are looking for the storyline of differentiation

sometimes just for differentiation because they're in the business of finding different things.

So let's talk about the product market fit engine because we talked a little bit about net promoter scores and about having people who want to talk about it and drive word of mouth.

But another sort of...

What looks in retrospect like a great decision but an odd decision is you spent almost three years working on the product before you launched it broadly.

And so I want to start with how you would advise founders to think about their decision of when to launch a product versus continuing to iterate and improve with a small set of users.

Well, it was a different world back then.

Everything took 100 times longer, and I didn't feel like the market was moving at all.

Yes, email clients are a dime a dozen and they come and go, but they're also all terrible.

And so I'd just be like, you know, that there was never going to be an email app that would ever displace us.

I think if we were to fail, we'd either have to, like Paul Graham says, it would be a self-inflicted wound.

It would be running out of cash, hope, or what's the other one he says?

Oh, co-founder breakups.

Those are the top three reasons.

You run out of money, you run out of hope, or your co-founder partnership falls apart.

So I always thought that's the risk here.

It's not competition.

I think what I would do, if I was starting something right now, I would have a crystal clear set of ideas as to why the company strategy would succeed.

And this is one thing I used to be really bad at strategy.

Like for my first company report, I've had zero strategy.