Stripe founder John Collison: “People underestimate anecdotes”

People have realized that data is important, but sometimes they underestimate anecdotes because it surfaces the questions that you should be asking. You know, data is good if you have a specific question and you want the answer to it. But our dad for a while ran a small hotel on the shores of Lought Erg in Ireland. And what I found funny is, like, you do not need to run a complex user research study to know if you're doing a good or a bad job in a hotel. You can do that. You can just walk around and like, oh, my God, you know, this waiter is terrible, because, like, these people have been waiting half an hour for their food. You just walk around and kind of the questions you should be asking will slap you in the face. And I think sometimes literally. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. Depending on how bad things have gotten. But, you know, in the tech case, again, people talk about management by walking around, but they talk about it in an internal management context. You got to do the management by walking around with the customers, and in the actual market.