Elad Gil: “Things that work tend to work pretty fast”

In general, and there's undoubtedly a few counterexamples. The things that I've seen work have worked very fast and they've worked very fast after launch. And so if somebody talks about grinding for many, many years after the product has been in the market, it could be consumer, it could be enterprise, it could be whatever. It usually means there's no market pull, which means the thing isn't going to work. The trap that founders fall into is saying, well, just one more thing I need to try and one more thing I need to ship. And one more, one, one more more. And. And then suddenly four years have passed and you haven't made much progress and you could have told two years ago that it wasn't going to work. And so I do think that there's a little bit of a myth in Silicon Valley that you should keep grinding no matter what. And it's just about the grind and it's just about the perseverance. And I think that's really bad advice because it's the best years of your life, right? And you're kind of burning them away grinding on something that's never going to work. Now there are counterexample stories to that around the company that for five years was trying something and then changed direction and then suddenly started working and you're like, yeah, change direction, right? It's not the same company or the same product or the same whatever. And so I think most of those things are actually proof points back to the same point, but they're kind of positioned as like an insight. So, yeah, so I think in general, things at work tend to work pretty fast and usually that's within the first year of launch. Now, work is an interesting word. Like, what does work mean? Usually when somebody hasn't had product market fit before and then suddenly they have it, they really can feel it. And that's things like the product is half broken and your customers are still using it, right? It's like Twitter during the fail whale days, but it's also all sorts of enterprise software or open source tools or other things where it's just kind of half broken but you're using it. Right? That's usually a very good sign. Or your customers are constantly complaining about your product, but they keep sending you feature requests or just feature requests, like how many asks are you getting from your customers in a given moment? And they may feel like, oh my gosh, I haven't built anything. This is awful. But the reality is that's great. It means people care. You kind of want to look for signs that people care. And one of the mistakes people make is that they try to build something that's very, very broad up front and then nobody cares. And I actually do believe this sort of ycism of like just focus on something that a small number of people really love and expand from there versus try to please everybody. When people pivot, they tend to pivot locally. They don't tend to pivot across markets. And that's a huge mistake because basically you're stuck in some local maxima. You're kind of on this fitness landscape and you're not able to find anything that really allows you to climb. And so I think usually if the thing isn't working and you decide to pivot, it's often wise to rethink everything from the ground up. And it's hard if you raise a lot of money if you have a big team like you get kind of stuck because then you want to stick around the local maxima of where you landed.