# The 4 Phases of Effective Decision-Making The No 1 Quality of Good Decisions, How To Approach Effective OKR Setting, & How To Optimise and Improve Your Operating Cadence with Shishir Mehrotra, Founder & CEO @ Coda 20VC · Sep 25, 2020 · 50 min · 13,499 words Speakers: Harry Stebbings, Shishir Mehrotra Source: https://www.996.fm/episodes/20vc--ep-9a6c8d60/ ## Cold open **Harry Stebbings** [0:00]: Welcome back to the twenty minute VC with me Harry Stebbings and today's episode is slightly longer than twenty minutes but what can I say, rules are made to be broken and so with that I'm thrilled to welcome Shishir Mehrotra, founder and CEO at Coda, the startup that brings all of your words and data into a flexible all in one doc? To date, Shishir has raised over 140,000,000 from some great names including Greylock, Kleiner Perkins, General Catalyst, NEA, and Homebrew to name a few. Prior to founding Coda, Shishir spent an incredible 6 years at Google in a couple of different roles. First as director of product for YouTube Monetisation and then moving to YouTube VP of Engineering, Product and UX. Before Google, Shishir was with Microsoft for six years as a director of program management and Shishir also serves on the board of Spotify. With that, I do wanna say huge thank you to Daniel at Spotify, Quentin Clark at GC, and and Trainer at Intercom for some fantastic questions, suggestions today. Really was a team effort on the schedule. But before we dive into the show today, ## Sponsor read **Harry Stebbings** [0:53]: I'm sure you've heard me talk about it before, but I love Carter. Carter simplifies how startups investors manage equity, track cap tables, and get valuations. Go to carter.com/20vc to get 10% off. 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Companies who leverage the Lattice platform see improvements in retention, engagement, and productivity. And Lattice is the only solution that connects performance management, employee management, and now very excitingly with the launch of brand new Lattice Grow career development in one unified platform for people strategy. Our remote teams need more support as we all navigate to find our new normal, so head over to lattice.comforward20vc to find out more. But enough from me, so now I'm very excited to hand over to Shishir Mehrotra, founder and CEO at Coda. Three two one zero. You have now arrived at your destination. ## Conversation **Harry Stebbings** [2:35]: Shishir, it is such a joy to do this one. I've become the biggest fan of your writing over the last few weeks, I have to admit, but I've also heard many, many good things from Daniel at Spotify and from Quentin at General Catalyst. So thank you so much for joining me today. **Shishir Mehrotra** [2:46]: Hi, thanks for having me. Really excited to be here and similarly heard many great things about you and I think we got like three different introductions. So it's great to finally get to chat. **Harry Stebbings** [2:53]: It is always a good sign, but I do wanna start today on you really though and ask really the question which is like, I'll pretend I haven't stalked you for the last few days and listened to everything you've done before, but how did you make your way into the world of tech and how did you come to found Coda? **Shishir Mehrotra** [3:05]: See, I grew up mostly in Virginia, went to school at MIT. Out of my grad program there, started a company called Centrata. And that was mostly because myself and a friend of mine, we were both obsessed with the idea and neither of us really wanted to go get a job. So we turned our grad work into a company. Then after that, I spent about six years at Microsoft. I worked on Office, Windows, and then SQL Server at a wide variety of different projects in lots of different spaces. And then through a set of sort of odd circumstances, I thought I would start a company again after that. I ended up joining Google and working initially on a project called Mosaic, which became a Google TV and then Chromecast and then the Google Home team. But I spent most of my time at Google working on YouTube. I'm responsible for sort of the tech side of YouTube. Myself and a guy named Robert Kinzel ran the day to day operations for YouTube. Has an amazing journey, six years of taking a company from really what most people would have called a joke into something that was obviously a big property. And then I got my itch in 2014 and decided I wanted to do something different. And actually starting a company was the last thing on my mind, but I had this friend and an ex colleague, Alex Nye, who is busy starting a company. And thankfully, that company wasn't going particularly well. And so in the process of brainstorming for him what he should pivot into, we ended up coming up with the idea for Coda, and I just couldn't think about anything else. And so I didn't, that's what I've been doing for the past few **Harry Stebbings** [4:17]: It's always the best time when you can't think about anything else. But I do have to ask, you mentioned Google there, you're also at Microsoft, and you saw so much value creation take place in the years that you were there. A big thing that I thought when kind of writing your schedule was like, what were the single biggest management takeaways for you from each? And how do you think it changed how you think about operating? **Shishir Mehrotra** [4:34]: Microsoft, I view almost like, for me, was almost like business school. I learned a lot of fundamentals of how do you build teams? How do you build products? How do you we'll talk a little bit about Quentin. I'm sure Quentin was my boss at Microsoft through that time period and just learned a lot of the basics, what makes for good product, what makes a good product design, what makes for good team culture, lots of things there. I mean, I think Google, the biggest thing Google taught me was the power of a really clear thesis. And I think the benefits of that have stuck with me throughout everything I've done. What I mean by that is when you think about great products, they tend to have one simple idea that really forms the essence of what they're working on. Take easy examples, Google search was a fairly simple idea that search simply wasn't relevant and fast enough. And in a sea of different search engines at the time, they managed to break through with that one perspective, really caring for a long time. Gmail was all about you shouldn't have to delete your email and talk about a really simple idea. YouTube, it took us a little while to figure out exactly what it was, but for YouTube, the thesis was that online video will do the cable, what cable did the broadcast. And we'll go from three channels to 300 channels to 3,000,000 channels. And the interesting thing is the first time I made that statement, I was giving a talk at a conference in 2009, and I made the statement in front of a group of industry executives in New York, and I almost got lapped out of the road. People's view of it was the time YouTube was compared with Flickr and Myspace, and it seemed kind of ridiculous to compare YouTube to Disney and ESPN. But that view that online video will do to cable, what cable did to broadcast, obviously in the last decade that turned out to be true. But we deeply believed it, and that sort of shaped our direction, our strategy, kept the team motivated, it kept everybody understanding why we're doing what we were doing. And so I think that that's something I think Google is very good at, having a really sharp perspective on a simple idea and carrying it all the way to its natural conclusion. It's fascinating **Harry Stebbings** [6:05]: to hear kind of a time when it wasn't believed because actually for so much of my lifetime, it's just been so inherently obvious. So it's funny for me to hear about that time. **Shishir Mehrotra** [6:12]: People that don't remember this, 2008 when I joined YouTube, every press article was what a big mistake. And every meeting I had with Patrick was the CFO at the time and he had just joined Google. Every meeting we had was, should we keep this property or should we get rid of it? It was far from obvious that it was gonna work. **Harry Stebbings** [6:25]: Can I ask, when you get given advice I'm sorry? It's totally off schedule. When you get given advice, like, oh, that's a terrible career move or, like, don't do this or don't do that. It could have been about kind of YouTube in the direction now or something else. How do you determine between the advice to take versus the advice to disregard? **Shishir Mehrotra** [6:38]: The hardest questions in life is knowing who to listen to. The truth is that 99% of people that you can talk to will give you advice that you should probably ignore. And I think that's really tricky, especially on the very hardest decisions. I mean, joining YouTube at that time, every email I got from everybody, including my parents and phone was, why are doing this? This is a dead end product in the dead end space, even people very close to the industry. Over time, you develop a two things, you develop a network that you trust. And in spite of everything else, these are the people that give me clear and good advice. And then you develop your own convictions. And I'm a pretty big believer in the go take your time away and let your own heart and head tell you where you're headed. Pick a narrow group of advisors that you actually tend to listen to and then follow what that says. You know, I've been quite lucky in my career that most things have in the hand worked out well, but some of the things I worked on clearly were not successes. And you have to be willing to take some risks in order to get to the things that are really big wins. **Harry Stebbings** [7:24]: Speaking of those that you listen to, we heard Quentin saying that quite a few times. And I spoke to Quentin before the show, and he mentioned a very specific love of yours when it comes to operations being whiteboards. Now I love whiteboards too, but I want to dig in here. Why are whiteboards so important to you? And how do you use specific pan colors deliberately? **Shishir Mehrotra** [7:41]: Yeah, it's a little bit of a weird quirk of mine that has worked very well for me. My whiteboard obsession is fairly deep. Every office I'm in, I spend more time designing the whiteboard layouts than often any other part of the office design. It was probably one of my hardest things, not being able to go to the office was retrofitting my own office and then slowly discovering that that didn't work and I had to switch to digital whiteboards. And probably one of my best moments was when I figured out how to use Miro really well. And so I'm a big huge digital whiteboard fan now and just changed my perspective on it. But to answer your question, I'd say there's really two things about why whiteboarding is so meaningful to me. The first is obvious, the power of a great diagram. It's a somewhat trite saying that a picture is worth a thousand words. And I feel like that's just really important. And the ability to take an idea and lots of ideas and synthesize them down into a very digestible diagram or digestible picture is just really helpful and amazing how much you can unblock a discussion and really clarify an idea and so on. And the second one is the power of this term we call eigenquestions. And this is a good write up on eigenquestions people can go find on the internet. Eigenquestions is a word we made up to describe a mix between a mathematical concept called eigenvectors and a decision making process. For people that don't know the math side of it, it's not actually that important, but eigenvectors in linear algebra and machine learning and principal component analysis, it represents in a multi dimensional space, it represents the vector of most information. So the vector that most describes that space of points. Get So to use a lot of machine learning and so on. Again, that's not that relevant. In decision making speak, eigen question really represents the most important question of a set or more precisely, the question when when answered answers 10 other questions as well. And that process honing questions is something we've cultivated over the years and gotten better and better at. The pen colors are interesting. This is when we started Coda, actually code name of the project in the early days was called Krypton. And so one of the people founding team was a long time colleague of mine, Matt Hudson. Matt now runs go to market for Coda. And he was in those early days, he was basically running product for us. And we had this office, we outfitted the whole thing with whiteboards. Mean, like everywhere you could see there was a whiteboard. And we started doing some drawings and sketches for some of the different things we were doing. And we quickly discovered that if we use the same colors to mean the same things, it was just really easy to digest what stage each of us were at. And then the other thing it did was it really clarified our thought process. And so that same eigen questions write up has a section on the pen colors we use. And what they actually are sort of matters, sort of doesn't. I think some consistency matters more than anything else. We use the black pen for the question, we use the blue pen for the options, we use the gray pen or the brown pen, whichever is available to you for drawing the example, the purple pen for the highlights, the green and red do the obvious thing, pros and cons, and orange is for the conclusion. And you sort of take those different things and what would happen is we'd walk into a room and Matt and I would quickly glance at the whiteboard and we'd say, oh, you're at blue pen stage. You're still enumerating options. Let me help. Or you're at the orange pen stage. Okay. So you have a recommendation. Let's hear about recommendation. The other thing we can quickly do is we could pick up for each other. We could say, alright, well, you did the blue part. I'll do the gray, green, and red parts, then we can come back and talk about the orange. And it became a little shorthand for us in how to think about things. But back to the concept of hiding questions, it allowed us to isolate the question. The blue pen is the option spectrum, and so we'll often use blue as that color of like which dimension is most meaningful. And it's a little hard to describe over a podcast without a picture and without a whiteboard, so you're making me cringe a little bit. You know, I think that that ability to find that one question that really describes the space is very connected to being able to be good with a whiteboard. And so that's the heart of where whiteboards come from. Great diagrams and eigenquestions. **Harry Stebbings** [10:56]: You mentioned decisions there quite a few times. And like a question that I just have to ask, it is striking for me. And it's like the best leaders make very strong decisions with imperfect data and feel comfortable doing so. How do you get comfortable making decisions at speed with such imperfect data? **Shishir Mehrotra** [11:11]: You implied a lot of things about decisions there. So maybe to break a couple of them apart, I get asked a lot about what makes for good decisions. And there's lot of qualities people describe. They say that they're fast, they'll say they're strong, they'll say they're well informed. My view, the number one quality of a good decision is a decision that And there's a now pretty famous saying from Amazon and Jeff Bezos is about one way doors and two way doors that I think is well used. And so there's clearly a time for what people will refer to as two way door decisions, the goal is speed is the main objective, and it's really important to designate between the two, where it's one way doors and two way doors. But I think when people really struggle with decision making processes, it's you have these one way doors and they forget to switch modes. And they forget that actually at this point speed is not the most important thing. The most important thing is a decision that sticks because the worst thing you can do is decide fast and feel really proud of yourself and then come back a week later and to change it. And so this concept of eigen questions has been really helpful in that I think most people will skip the process. There's a really good book, I think you're gonna ask me later about books, but I'm gonna talk about the Heath brothers because I love every one of their books. They wrote a book called Decisive, is all about how to make great decisions and it talks a lot about the power of options and how if you look at decision making processes, one of the biggest mistakes people make is they skip that option stage and they jump right to I just need to decide. And you almost end up in a if I'll use an easy example of like, hey, we want to buy this company and they use this example of the book a lot and somebody comes to the executive team or the board and says, want buy this company and your only option at that point as a board or as an executive is either you say yes and support your team or you say no and you look like a chicken. Those are like really crappy decisions to make. It's clearly not the only options you have at this point. On the other hand, if you come like, well, are the three companies we could buy, these are the two product strategies we could take, we could ignore this market, here's a different realistic option for what we can do, I think that's really important and leads to really good decisions. So they walked through in that book a bunch of really good case studies on that. The old boss of mine gave me the sequencing for decision making that think about it in four phases, wallow, frame, propose, close, and each phase has a distinct purpose. Wallow is all about generating ideas, getting people sentiments out. Frame is about establishing the questions. I think about it as the eigen question stage. It's when you decide what is the most important question. Propose is when you have in pen color speak. You have an orange highlight. You have a thing that you can look at as a proposal. Enclosed is about commitment. It's about, are we all on the same page? Do we know what we need to do next? And so I think when you think about decision making, one way door versus two way doors is very helpful. When you get to those one way doors, wallow frame, propose, close, identify the right eigen questions, spend enough time there to know that you have the right question before you're forced into a up down vote on a option that may not even be an option on the right spectrum of questions you should be answering. **Harry Stebbings** [13:30]: You spoke about the the kind of the importance of optionality. I'm super intrigued because I always believe in the paradox of choice. And I don't know if you read Dan Ariatti's book there, but I always kind of believe that refined and constrained options that is optimal often with no options at all, actually. How do you think about the paradox of choice given that? **Shishir Mehrotra** [13:45]: Yeah. Dan was a consultant for us at YouTube, so we spent a lot of time with him, and there's a lot to be said for that. Just to be really clear on I actually think enumerating extra options isn't really the point. It's identifying the right eigen question. I'll tell a quick story so you get a sense of it. When I joined YouTube, one of the hardest questions facing the team at the time was what we called the link out question. At the time, this was back 2008, YouTube was already second biggest search engine on the planet. People would come to YouTube and they would search for all sorts of different things and the example that was used a lot was people would come search for Modern Family, very popular show on ABC at the time. We didn't have Modern Family on YouTube, so they'd come, they'd search for it, get they a bunch of really crappy results. Sometimes it's safer something else, sometimes they'd leave, but we were clearly under delivering on a quite popular query. And the team basically divided. One side of team basically came to the conclusion that we should just link out to the right place to find this content. We don't have it on YouTube, we should just point to the place it was on abc.com and let people go find it. This is mostly the product and engineering team. And their viewpoint on it was, we now work for Google, Google's whole ethos is give people the answer to the question that they're asking. So let's just give them the answer, serve the user, that seems like the right thing to do. And then on the other side was a group of people mostly in the business development and content teams said, wait a second, if you do that, then we're never going to get anybody to put real content on YouTube and we need people to put that content on YouTube in order for the rest of the business model to work. And so please don't do that because you're to ruin all the business prospects. And so this is how this was painted, right? These were the two options, you either link out or don't link out. And really implied in that was kind of a good versus evil. It was like, do you do the right thing by the user or do you not and do the right thing by the business, which just sounds terrible. Was a kind of no win situation. This went on for like a year. As we kept talking about this, we couldn't come to a real conclusion and we had a list of decisions to make and this is one of the topics. So we're going make a decision at this off-site, and I took the baton on framing that question. And as I spent the night before thinking about how to frame it, I came to a conclusion that actually this is the wrong question. We're looking at this whole problem the wrong way. And the inspiration came from another discussion that was happening at Google was about Amazon. Google had a product called Google Shopping, actually it started under the name Frugal, and there was a lot of question about the competitive battle that was happening between Amazon and Google Shopping. And if you step back and look at it, everybody's viewpoint was Google Shopping should clearly have beaten Amazon, and for a very simple reason, it was simply more comprehensive. Everything on Amazon was on Google Shopping plus the rest of the web. Why would you ever go to Amazon when you could go to Google Shopping and see everything? And so this got framed as a question we call consistency versus comprehensiveness. And what it turned out, even at that time, Amazon was kicking Google Shopping's butt. And when we would talk to users and customers about it, what they would say is, well, I go to Amazon, I know it doesn't have everything, but I feel a very consistent experience. I understand how the product pages work, understand how the reviews work, I understand how the shipping works, how the return works, and I'd rather have a consistent experience rather than necessarily a comprehensible. So we found this off-site and we asked this question for YouTube is rather than thinking good versus evil, serve the user versus serve the business, how about we frame this as consistency versus comprehensiveness? Do we believe that the online video market is going to play out where comprehensiveness matters more or where consistency matters And when framed that way, it became very clear to us that consistency mattered more. Was one of the main things that people got out of our experience and comprehensiveness, as long as you had enough content, it was actually far from necessary to have every piece of content. And so, we leaned into it and we said, okay, consistency matters more than comprehensiveness. And we had our sort of 10 principles of YouTube and this was one of them, think it was number two. And we made our decision, we're not going link out. But more importantly, when we made that decision, we also ended up making 10 other decisions. So for example, at the time, we embedded players from all sorts of different video properties on YouTube, we stopped doing that. Couldn't we keep the same level of consistency across those experiences? Probably the most famous example is when the iPhone came out, there was no App Store and development model and so Apple built the first YouTube app on the iPhone and they just kept doing it, they kept building the YouTube app. So we actually didn't control the YouTube experience on the iPhone and over time, it had just fallen out of date. Apple developers couldn't keep up with what we were doing at YouTube and so it was like way behind on the feature set to the point where it only supported about half the content corpus of YouTube. And so we had a discussion, what should we do about this? Should we be comprehensive as in we should be present on every iOS device or would we rather be consistent and risk that we're going to have less deployment? And so I went down to Cupertino and talked to Scott and Phil and told them, hey, I'd like to take back the YouTube app. And they asked like, you really willing to give up default distribution in order to maintain this level of control? And I said, is one of our principles, consistent over comprehensive. So back to your question on optionality and fun. The problem here, it wasn't that we didn't have options, it was that we had the wrong question. And so if you back up and say, What's the eigen question as we call it? You'll often find that by asking that right question, A, that decision can become easier. And B, you might end up making a decision that makes the next ten decisions easier as well. And so I think that idea and that frame for decision making is very deep in my ethos for how to run teams. **Harry Stebbings** [18:04]: In terms of kind of those seminal decisions, a lot of startup founders asked me the cool thing, which is like, how do I think about product market fit, and then how do I think about, like, the milestones and changes around product market fit and MVP and all the acronyms that we have today? And when I spoke to Quentin again, he told me about the onion. And he told me about the onion, and I was like, what what is Quentin talking about? And then he said, you have the onion as a way to think through product evolution. And so my question to you is, how do you align onions to building products? And what's that mentality for you? **Shishir Mehrotra** [18:34]: Yeah. So the onion, it's an exercise that generally run with founders. And what we'll do is we'll sit down a group of founders and everybody takes out a sheet of paper, do it on a whiteboard, whatever. And you draw kind of a quarter of an onion. And the idea is there's a center and then there's a set of rings. You have kind of two axes, and one is generally something like features or capabilities, things you build, things you deliver, so on. And then the other one is the value proposition, and like why does that matter? And everybody sits down and the rules are the center of the onion has to be an existing product, service, solution, so on. And then in every ring, can add a series of features and capabilities that then lead to a certain set of value propositions, and the rings have to be in order, meaning they can't depend on something further out, it's sort of a way to think about a roadmap. So that's kind of a fancy visual for a road mapping tool, but what will happen is, I'll run this exercise, all the founders will do their piece and then we'll staple them up on a wall and we'll compare. And generally, a couple of things happen. So number one, if you take the union of everybody's ranks, they're generally about the same. What you'll find is that in a startup, the yes and mentality is very high. We can do this and we can do that and we can do this and we can do that, and that's good. Like, that's very positive. It's one of reasons we all get so excited by it, it's very energizing. But the order of the rings will be different. One person thinks we should do A before B, the other person thinks we should do B before A, another another person thinks that we should do C before all of it. So the order is different. That's not that big a deal, but that's important to see. But more importantly, what you'll find is that the center is different. And so you'll look at this onion and you'll say, okay, what is the thing that we're replacing at the heart of it? And that can have really massive consequences on the alignment of a team and how they think about where they're headed in the market. Maybe to give you some examples, one of the most fun ones I did was with Ben Silverman at Pinterest where we went through thinking through what different ordering you could come up with for Pinterest and his first one was, what's the center of the onion for Pinterest? Well, it's a scrapbook. Right? And it's like a very, very reasonable description. What's the first thing you add to it? Well, you make it digital. Why does making a scrapbook digital? Why does that matter? Well, it makes it have infinite pages, it means you can take it anywhere, it means you can refer, means you can throw parts away, you can organize it, it's all sorts of things that happen just out of making a scrapbook digital. And then what's the next step? You make it collaborative. And then what does making collaborative do? Well, it means that you and I can see each other's scrapbooks, but it means you can now curate each other's ideas and we can build on each other's and you kind of like work your way out of this onion and you see lots of different things that come out of it. We did another version of the Pinterest onion that started with Wikipedia at the center, which was like a really interesting one. And then the one that really stuck was to put a catalog at the center. And Ben tells great stories about this you can read more about that are all about how he thinks about Pinterest as the catalog of the future, the catalogs of the future, and all these great memories and Sears catalog and so on, how that influences the product direction. And as you think about the subtle differences between those things, it can be really important. I'm gonna give a different example with YouTube, I think one of the hardest things for YouTube was there was a set of other Google executives that whose center of the onion for YouTube was different than our center of the onion for YouTube and that led to all sorts of trouble. Like for me, I described earlier, the thesis for YouTube is online video will do to cable, cable did to broadcast. So what's at the center of the onion for YouTube? It's cable TV and that leads to all sorts of things and how you frame the product and so forth. For many people, the center of the onion for YouTube was Facebook, social a network. Like what we've actually designed was a social network that happened to just be about video. And so you get to these really interesting conversations where you'd say things like, hey, I think we should work on subscription model, which we're going to talk more about in a bit. And for me that was like really high priority because it's like very hard to build a platform that is going to do to cable or cable to the broadcast if you weren't prepared to handle all the monetization models. But for others, the priority was very heavily on things like the commenting and trending experience. And that would just like form their view of the product. And it wasn't that that was unimportant to me, was just at rings ten, eleven, and 12 as opposed to being at rings two and three. And when difference happens and you see slightly different centers, centers of the onion, then you get vastly different alignment in direction. So that's what the tool is. What I would mostly take away from it is it's just a tool and a language for driving clarity. And when you get your group, your leadership team together, your board together, and so on, it's a helpful way to think about what's the center of our onion. It's just helpful for what's the true north of our business. **Harry Stebbings** [22:09]: I love it in terms of driving the alignment, and I'm sorry if we're getting totally off schedule with a lot of this, didn't you? But it's Yeah. **Shishir Mehrotra** [22:13]: No. **Harry Stebbings** [22:13]: No. I love I love the the kind of natural chat. Descent is also important in terms of widening one's aperture both internally, but also from a, like, strategy perspective and having kind of those open debates. Like, what does it take to create an environment of open debate, dissent, discussion internally, and how do you think about doing that effectively? **Shishir Mehrotra** [22:31]: Couple different things in terms of open debate. The first is you have to establish trust in other ways. You know, there's a phrase that gets used a lot that is don't make it personal, don't take it personally. What do people mean by that? And one thing that I think happens is a rule I actually use with my kids a lot is what I call the implied sentence. And sometimes when you say something to someone, there's a sentence that comes with it that really is what's being expressed in the rest of your past history, body language, so on. You know, somebody walks into work and you say, that's a great sweat. And depending on your relationship, the next sentence might be, That's a great sweater and I admire your taste so much both in your clothing and in your products and, Boy, I really wish I could be more like that. And that could be the invite sentence. Or it could be, That's a great sweater. I have really nothing else good to say about about you. And thankfully, now checked it off my list. Like that's the one thing I can say. And so, sentences are really important. As you build trust, you have to help people actually say those things. You have to help people get past them, say them. And that's what I think of as trust development is you need people to be comfortable that the implied sentences are that either they aren't any or they're not attacking someone personally. Now you can really talk about the ideas. And if we can get that, you know, a great sweater out of the way, now we can really talk about whether that's good idea or not. So, number one, I think it's great trust building. The second thing I think is you have to build the environment that allows ideas to not be labeled too early. And I have this phrase I call great ideas take time to grow. And you have to establish this in many ways. And I think as a company culture, the way people learn it is they see it happen over long periods of time and then they get more and more comfortable with it. One of the things we do at Coda is our hackathons are really big piece of our culture. We do it three or four times a year. I would not be exaggerating to say that 90% of the best ideas in Coda have come out of hackathons. But interestingly, many of them have come out of hackathons. Like years later, like we'll do it, we'll talk about the idea, oh, that's great, we'll vote on it, we'll give out a prize, and then we'll stick it on the shelf, and then we won't work on it again for two more years. And in doing so, we give the idea time, we give it space, we give it the ability to germinate a bit, and that then makes it okay that this idea is out there. Now you focus on the good elements instead of the bad elements, you focus on building it up instead of knocking it down. Steelman versus strawman is a term that gets used a lot for that process. But you just have to give it time. You have to create an environment where that's true. You build trust, you build a culture of great ideas take time to grow. And then maybe the last thing I'd say about a third thing I'd say is giving the frame can often be helpful in idea generation. That's sort back to hiding questions and how you think about framing problems is sometimes you really want the best ideas, you really want their input, you have to find the tools to be able to do that well. One thing we do, and obviously we use Coda, Coda for just about everything, but one of my favorite ones is a tool we call a sentiment tracker, which if you go into Coda and just type slash sentiment, you'll see ones. There's actually a whole bunch of them now in the set of templates inside the document. The basic idea is, say, we're about to make a decision and we're looking at these different options and I wanna know, like, what does everybody think? The And way it works is it gives everybody a row in this module and there's a little button that hides everybody else. And so everybody fills it out silently and says, here's what I really think. And then you click the button and you show everybody. And so it's not meant to be permanently private, it's just meant to be, let's remove the group think, let's get everybody to give their real ideas, and then let's come back and see what you think. And it's like a very small trick, but it dramatically shifts people's willingness to be open and honest and so on, so you'll get people's real experiences rather than having a conversation move where the group thinks x and then in order for you to defend a different position, you now have to be more aggressive about it than you'd like, and then you're more curt than you'd like, and then you leave out your implied sentences, and you don't give that idea time to grow, and all these bad things happen. So, three different things I'd say is I think you have to establish trust, how people either say or ignore their implied sentences, You create a culture where great ideas can thrive over a long period of time, not just over a short period of time, and create the tools and environments where people can actually express those things and remove all the natural incentives for group thinking, ganging up, and so on that lead to ideas being squashed too early. **Harry Stebbings** [26:01]: In terms of that kind of maturation phase of ideas, I'm really interested because I totally understand that that's important, but it also seems to kind of go in the face of, like, fast decision making and, like, speed and iteration. And I spoke to Daniel at Spotify before the show, and he mentioned his or your operating cadence. And he asked, like, how do you fundamentally think about your own operating cadence, and what does that look like? **Shishir Mehrotra** [26:21]: I think and Daniel and spend lots of time geeking out on this, and I think there's a lot of things that Spotify does well that I've learned a ton from in that process. And I think it's important to note that your operating cadence is often the backbone of your culture, and so designing it and taking ownership of it is really important. I think there's probably three main elements of cadence that I think are important, what I'll call the macro, the micro, and the personal. I'll give you the sort of quick view of each of them. I'll try not to be comprehensive. So macro cadence. And generally, when people say macro cadence, what they're generally referring to is planning cycles. How often do you take a step back, decide what you should be working on, take a look at the big picture, and so on. One of the key choices we made at YouTube, so Google has a process called OKRs, which is fairly famous at this point, objectives and key results run on a quarterly basis. We made a key decision to not run our process quarterly and instead we did what was called a six and twenty six week process. We basically follow the same thing at Coda Now. And instead of running a quarterly planning cycle, we ran a cycle that was every twenty six weeks or twice a year, you would do what we call h one and h two planning and you'd spend some time looking far out and where should we really be headed and so on. And then you do your smaller planning cycle on a six week basis, and we sometimes call them sprints. At Coda, we call them semi quarters. The reason for that is I think thirteen weeks is an awkward planning time frame. It's not long enough that you can really make long term bets. It's just too short for that. But it's too long for making commitments. And Google had one really famous thing about OKRs is that you're expected to only hit 70% of your OKRs, which in the early days was really helpful. It was really a symbol of think big. In the later days, it became a passive aggressive way to avoid commit. Oh, I'm supposed to only hit 70% of these things, so hey, partner team, you'd like me to make sure features A gets completed in time. And I'd say, I'll stick it on my OKRs, but 30% of my OKRs are throw away anyway. It actually doesn't mean anything for them to be on my OKRs. And I have this whole second list of things I'm actually gonna do. So thirteen weeks in my mind was sort of neither here nor there. So we do six and twenty six weeks. Twenty six weeks, think big, six weeks, commit. In a six week timeframe, you should know exactly what's gonna happen. It's hard to do anything in six weeks that you didn't already have a pretty good perspective on. So that's macro cadence. Lots more to be said about that, but I'd say that's the most distinctive thing. Micro cadence. And what I mean by micro cadence is generally to make it very tangible is your weekly schedule. You have a thing that's operating and every company has some rhythm. Every team has some rhythm that generally has maybe a weekly, maybe it's a biweekly schedule, but it's fairly regular. When's your staff meeting? When's your all hands? Do you have a review forum? How often does that meet? Who's invited? And you kind of work your way through each of these things and you design that system. And every company has one, either implicitly or not. And actually one thing I'd suggest is you should write it down. A fancy term for it is a meeting operating system, but you write it down, you say this is how we're going to operate. In that space, I think the main advice I'd give is design your meetings and design your cadence like you design your apps. And what I mean by that is, if you're designing your app, would say, hey, I want people to come back at this frequency, I'd want this type of engagement, how should the notifications work, should we do a drip campaign, should there be enough, should there be onboarding, we think through all that. There's a really good book on this topic called GameStorming, and GameStorming is sort of a compendium of meeting games, and they kind of pulled all these things together. And it starts with this really fun story of these two kids playing ball and one kid throws the ball to the other and they start throwing it back and forth and then at some point one of the kids says, hey, how about we keep score? How about we keep track of how many times we can do it without dropping the ball? And then the other kid says, great, how about I take a step back every time we get a successful catch? The authors of this book, one of their points is, in that process, we just saw a group of people turn from what started as play and all of a sudden became a game. And we've all seen this. We show up in a meeting and it feels like play. We're just screwing around, there's no agenda, there's no clear rules and so on. And then sometimes we go to meetings and they really feel like they're structured. What happens when play becomes a game? Well, games have rules, they have boundaries, they have objectives, they have time limits, they have materials. Like you can't play ball without a ball and you can't do a Post It brainstorm without Post It. And so if you start thinking about your micro cadence that way, you say, okay, this is how I'm gonna design the cadence, this is what I want each of these forms to feel like, and then you design that into your process, it can be very effective. The sentiment tracker one is a good example. Another good example we do, most Coda meetings will have a thing we call a Dory. A Dory, it's actually the name that was developed at Google for a question answer tool we use for big all hands. And, basically, it's a tool where anybody can have a question and everybody else can vote it up and down. And so at Google, we used to do this for a meeting called TGI apps. This is how Larry and Sergey got up in front of the company every Friday, answered questions from everybody. Tens of thousands of employees, you had to have this voting process. At Coda, we take that same idea and we apply it to meetings even when there's like five people in a meeting, 10 people in a meeting, sometimes even when there's like two or three people in a meeting. And what do we do in that process? Well, we're equalizing and democratizing our audience. So rather than the questions get asked by whoever is the loudest person in the room or whoever is the most senior person in the room, now anybody can ask a question. That means that you bring everybody into a discussion. It also means it ranks your discussion. So you leave this room and you feel like, hey, we didn't answer every question, but we answered every question that had at least three up codes. That's pretty good. Now we all feel better about it. So macro, pick the right planning time frames. Micro, design your meetings and design your cadence like you design your apps, figure out those incentives and build in your process. And the last thing I'd say about operating cadence is personal. And I think every person, but certainly every executive knows that the team's ability to execute is upper bounded by your own personal ability to execute and the nature of how things work. If you're not available either physically like you're too busy or mentally like you're just not mentally available to be able to understand people's issues, help them solve their problems and so on, then you're never going to be able to have rest of the team be successful. And so I think being in control of your personal cadence is really important. I think everybody has a different approach to this. Mine is heavily driven by a thing I read from do know Des Trainer over at Intercom? **Harry Stebbings** [31:23]: Of course. Yeah. I've had him on the show, a big fan of his. **Shishir Mehrotra** [31:26]: Okay, so Des has a tweet, about a year old, you can easily go find it. The phrase he says is thinking about productivity and its tools, your email is what others think you should work on, your to do list is what you think you should work on, and your calendar is usually what you actually work on, how much do they overlap in your world. And he's got these like little Venn diagrams in his tweet, it's pretty good. You should go like his tweet. **Harry Stebbings** [31:43]: I can see why that one did well. **Shishir Mehrotra** [31:44]: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it's good. So he took that and he actually turned it into, if you search for it, there's a good quota doc that he made with it, but he turned it into a method of like how do you preempt that process and how do you organize those things, your email, your to do list, your calendar such that at the end of the week, actually worked on the things that you thought you should work on. I've taken that method and that point my own personal cadence and have a little code doc for it and at the end of every week, I have a score that says what portion of my time was spent on things that were on my to do list at the beginning of the week. By the way, for me, if I hit 50% like this week, I'm at like 40 ish percent. If I hit 50% on that, I'm doing really well. If 50% of my time in a week is spent on things that I thought were important at the beginning of the week, that's my high watermark. Sometimes I tell people that, and it's like, that seems crazy. Boy, I'll tell you, you could do this for most executives, I doubt they would cross 25 because it's just so hard to do. So anyway, back to operating cadence, sort of three different levels. Macro, how do think about your planning boundaries? I think picking the right time frame is very important. Micro, design your meetings, design your apps. And personal, I think the main message out of that is just take control of your time. Use a technique or not, but just take control of your time so you're actually spending time on what's important. **Harry Stebbings** [32:41]: Can I ask you, you mentioned there at Google, like, the fact that actually if you only hit 70% of your OKRs, that's kind of expected? A question that I constantly think of today with management teams is like, how do you set goals which are a stretch and are ambitious, but also not a stretch too far and are disincentive or discouraging if they don't hit them? How do you think about that balance? **Shishir Mehrotra** [32:59]: There's a lot of art to that. And I think the spirit of how OKRs started at Google were a really good attempt at it. I mean, rules for doing it aren't really the important part. A lot of it comes out of the example that gets set. And I think the thing that Larry and Sergey are amazingly good at is challenging you to think bigger. And almost in a like Socratic way. Like, can't tell you how many meetings I was in with them where you would say something, they'd say, why not? And coming up with goals that hit that mark between inspirational and practical, besides team building, it's the second most important thing that an executive does. And so I don't think it's easy to prescribe how to do it. I mean, Doerr wrote a book called Measure What Matters, all about OKRs and some of the techniques he picked up from Intel and brought to Google. There's a chapter in the book about YouTube and about a really famous bet we made called the billion hour bet. And this turned out very well, but it was very risky at the time. Basically, in 2012, I set a goal for YouTube that we would get to a billion hours a day of watch time by the end of twenty sixteen. It was a four year goal. And it was a really interesting bet because just maybe as some context for this example, at the time, we had kind of won. As an online video property, every other online video property you can think of was kind of like didn't really exist anymore. And you would think that would feel great, but really what was happening was the team was lost. We were just all over the place. It was impossible to make decisions, it was impossible to have aspirations, every launch we had to do had a 100 metrics we were looking at and would all get questioned. And so we ended up picking this goal, this billion hour goal, and there were a couple stories told before this that helped inspire. So I was supposed to give this talk at our leadership off-site and he's like, okay, gotta set a goal ostensibly for the next six months because that was our planning cycle. And I was having this inkling of like, maybe we should do something a little bit longer term, like maybe we should come up with something a little more inspirational. And as we were doing our pre meetings for this, two stories got told that were really interesting. One was a story, and both maybe folklore, don't know. One was a story about Coke, and apparently there's a really famous Coca Cola board meeting where somebody, I don't know who, said, hey, we come into every one of these meetings and some quarters we're 52% share versus Pepsi and some were 48% share. Is this like the whole game? Like, are we just gonna go back and forth with these guys forever or is there something bigger we're playing for? Someone else said, well, what if we thought about it differently? What about if we thought about it as percentage of Rather than percentage of the cola market, what if we thought about it as what percentage of the way they framed it was what percentage of liquid that people drink every day is coming from our company? And that led to a much broadening of the market and they went and bought a bunch of water companies, they make lemonade, they make all these other things now and they kind of got out of that narrower frame. The other story got told was about the British British rowing team and the way the story is told is the team hadn't been as successful as they would have liked and so they decided on an ethos. They said before every decision, they're gonna ask themselves, will it make the boat go faster? And they made every decision that way. So they went through all their prep and saying, who should sit in the front of the boat versus the back of the boat? Well, will it make the boat go faster? Should we go to this for Gada? Well, will it make the boat go faster? Should we have Italian for dinner? Will it make the boat go faster? I was very clarifying to every decision to be anchored back to this one thing. So for YouTube, to get up in November 2012 and I made the statement that our goal will be to get to a billion hours a day of watch time in a four year period. So, first thing I had do was explain what how watch time was. The company was all about views at the time. If you came to the property, everything about it was, this is how many video views there were every day. And so watch time was not a metric that everyone was really that familiar with and so I had to explain it. I said, okay, you know, at the time we were at around a hundred million hours stay at watch time, just give some comparables. Google was about the same, it was about a 100,000,000 at the time, but that's kind of a dumb metric because Google is all about getting you on and off the property as fast as possible. So So there's sort of no reason to think about it in terms of time spent. Gmail, Google Maps, one were all about a fifth of YouTube. We were already much bigger than the others. Facebook was roughly double where we were at. They're at a couple hundred million hours a day. But the big bogey was television was watched for about five billion hours a day. So in stating this, we're gonna get to a billion hours a day watch time, what I was really doing was saying our version of Coke was we're not gonna measure ourselves against online properties, we're gonna measure ourselves against one of the most successful mediums of all time and measure against television. And also, the way we're gonna measure it, our method for will it make the bot go faster was gonna be watch time. The other thing I had to do is I had to contextualize this for each person. So I went through each of the teams and described what would it mean for them and one of the most memorable ones was the infrastructure team. And the infrastructure team would not naturally have a goal that goes with this, but at the time, YouTube accounted for something like 20% of the world's bandwidth. That's at least what the ISPs reported to us. And so very quick math says that if we're going to get from a hundred million hours to a billion hours of watch time in that four year period, we're gonna use up more bandwidth than the entire Internet times two. And so now, hey, team, your job isn't just to make us more efficient, it's to grow the entire Internet. And it greatly expanded their scope of what they were thinking about. We went through every team to kind of describe their goals this way. There's a few different lessons out of that, and it turned out well. The team hit the goal, which was not at all expected. Our best projections at the time were that we would get to four or 500,000,000 hours in four years. It's sort hard to believe we would get to a billion, but the team hit the goal and so it's good from that perspective. But probably more importantly, it was incredibly motivational inside the company and outside. I mean, we'd walk around Google and say, what are those YouTube guys up to? And inevitably somebody would say, I don't know, but they're on this crazy billion hour mission. It was like very clear what the team was focused on and it worked. Anyways, I think that's long answer to simple question. Think how to pick goals that are inspirational, that articulate what really matters, articulate the size of the prize that you're going after, are aspirational enough to motivate, but practical enough that you're actually going to hit them. Lots and lots of art to that, but that's maybe one example of where it worked well. **Harry Stebbings** [38:07]: I do wanna ask one final element though before the quick fire, and it's something that actually Daniel again mentioned to me. And he mentioned about kind of your relationship with Bill Campbell. And so I wanted to ask, what do you think are the core differences between your style and his? And I guess, what were some of the biggest takeaways from your time with Bill being such an incredible legend that he was? **Shishir Mehrotra** [38:24]: Truly one of a kind. I think if people read the book, I think it probably understates his level of impact on everyone he worked with. His funeral was simultaneously one of the saddest and one of the happiest memories I have. I mean, it was one of those cases where he showed up. It was at Sacred Heart, a high school here that he was very close to. And speech after speech of everyone there had the same observation that despite this person being so incredibly busy and helping all these other people, as far as I could tell, he always had time for me. And I think that scale of people that he impacted, I mean, I think all of us could only dream to get to where he did. So very sad that he was gone, it was just amazing to see the level of impact he had. When I think about Bill and meaningful stories, I mean, there's couple that come to mind. Probably one of the best ones is, Bill was one of my advisors at Centrata since I was 21 year old founder. Actually, I'll tell you a funny one and I'll tell you a different one a second. So, a 21 year old founder, Penelope Post was my primary investor. Anyone who's worked with Notion those days especially, very active investor, you know, I get the term sheet and immediately he starts sending me email, you need to meet this person, you need this person, and most of them were engineers. Like you need to hire this person, you to hire this person, you need hire this person. It's like a constant recruiting flow. So I get into my first meeting with Bill and I think that I'm there to interview an engineer. Remember, time it was like there's no LinkedIn, no way to really know who Bill Campbell is. Even when he passed, he kept an incredibly low profile. At that time, he kept an insanely low profile. Nobody had any idea who he was. So I sit down with this guy and start describing the business and here's what we're working on and so on. At some point, he asked me about the team. And he says, you know, tell me about the team and who are the founders and ask all these details about it. And then at some point, he asked me about my co founder David, and he says, do you trust him? And I said, yeah, of course, I trust him. And I just kept going on with whatever I was talking about. He said, no. I'll go back for a second. Look me in the eye and say that again. Do you trust him? And it was just such an interesting dynamic of, like, all okay, realize that I'm not interviewing an engineer. Guess it's clearly a different dynamic that's happening here. And I started getting a sense for the way that Bill thought about people was just completely different. You know, we spend so much of our career in facts and what seem like black and white type things. And Bills knew the whole world started with getting the right people in the right spots with the right motivation and building the right level of trust. And I just learned a ton from that. Every interaction, he would just spot through an issue to what is the people dynamics that are causing this to be a problem or causes to be an opportunity. The other story I'll tell about Bill is when, this was probably a few months in, and Bill was very active. He was basically Kleiner Perkins led the round in Centrata and Bill was very close with Kleiner. And so, he was fairly active. He'd show up at staff meetings and so on and putting a lot of time into the company. So, at one point, a few months in, I said, hey, Bill, I just realized we've never actually inked an official agreement with you and been so helpful here. I'd absolutely be happy to give you advisory shares or how would you like to handle this? I want to make sure that you have an official And he said, Shishir, don't worry about it. And I said, Really? That's a little bit odd. And he says, Look, if you really want to give me shares, go ahead. I'm just going give it directly to a charity. So, you can give it direct, you can give it to me and I'll do it, whatever. I said, Okay, that's interesting. Mean, you know, I'm 21 years old. It was actually kind of new to me to interact with people that were at that stage of their lives. And I just asked him and I said, everyone else I'm working with seems to care a lot about this stuff and like equity and investment and people looking for returns. So, you're one of the few people that doesn't think that way. I'm just curious, what motivates you now? What keeps you moving? And he said, Oh, it hasn't really changed that much. Okay, what is it? And he said, well, I just look back at all the people I've mentored, coached, worked for me, so on, and I just count how many of them are Fortune five hundred CEOs or prominent executives. And then he started listing them off. I mean, the list of people, this is before he became like really close coach with Larry and Steve Jobs and so on, he was already close with them. But even then, his list was enormous. I mean, this like list of people that he had impacted. And I think his ability to view other people's success as his success is something that was so obvious to him. And that's just not how most people think. And it completely changed how I thought about why I help people when I help people. What are you really doing is you're really trying to make sure that other people's success is not a detraction from your success and more importantly reflects back on your own. So I thought that was really impactful. In terms of differences in his style, I mean, don't know, thousands of them. His ability to read people, second to none, his ability to read a group, his ability to tell the blunt truth when people really need to hear it was incredibly high. So in many ways, I aspire to fill as many of those gaps as possible. But the main takeaway I would have is the way he looked at the world and the way he looked at his sense of accomplishment was inspirational and guides how I think about it. **Harry Stebbings** [42:26]: I mean, I love that. And it's very special to hear for me not having known him, but having obviously heard many, many good things and having loved the book. I do wanna discuss the the quick fire answer. It's a short statement. You give your immediate answer in about sixty seconds or less. Are you ready to dive in? **Shishir Mehrotra** [42:39]: I'm ready. **Harry Stebbings** [42:40]: Okay. So we mentioned Trillion Dollar Coach there. What's your favorite book and why? **Shishir Mehrotra** [42:43]: If I have five slots for favorite books, I would give two slots to a single one. It's a book called Switch by the Heath Brothers. It's about how to change things when change is hard. Easily the most impactful book I've read, I constantly go back, reread it, re reference it. I'll give one piece of advice as people read it. Pick a list of things and actually make a list as you read the book of things you're trying to change. And I would pick a wide variety in your business, in your personal life, and so on, and they have nine techniques in the book. Just catalog how much you're using at each technique as you go through them, and you'll be shocked at how much you don't stretch the different techniques you can use to change behavior. Very powerful book. Love that. **Harry Stebbings** [43:15]: Tell me, what's the biggest challenge in making a transition from application to platform? **Shishir Mehrotra** [43:19]: I think it's being open to being surprised. I sometimes describe founders in two ways, people that like to create products and people that like to create platforms, and I've had the pleasure of having worked on some of the biggest platforms out there, whether it's YouTube or Windows or Coda. And I think if you think about the people that are the classic product folks, and I think Steve Jobs is probably the most iconic of them, his view of designing a product was he had to control every piece of the experience. And in his view, there should be no gap between what the user experiences and things that his own team designed and, you know, use special screws to make sure you couldn't open the box and ship the iPhone without an App Store and so on. On the flip side, you work in a property like YouTube, you walk in every day and you are completely surprised at what people do on the platform and you have to realize that for a consumer, that platform, the product is not the bits that we build for streaming video and so on. The product is the platform, the content, and so that is what it represents and being comfortable with that is really important because sometimes you're gonna be surprised in a very positive way. You know, I can't imagine that Sal Khan was able to build an entire new model for education on top of our platform. And sometimes you're incredibly disappointed with humanity. Like people do some really depraved things and you have to be open to that range of how things can work when you're building a platform. Tell me, what's been the biggest challenge in scaling Coda? Two answers come to mind. The most obvious one is balancing power with simplicity. And our promise is we allow anyone to make a doc as powerful as an app. And you can take both sides of that as hard objectives. Like, product has to deliver for the very simplest cases. You need to open up Coda instead of your notepad, instead of Word, instead of your Google Doc, and take your meeting notes in it and have it be a delightful, thrilling experience. And on the other side, our view of the world is that anyone can make docs as powerful as apps and they're going to stretch what you want to do in the product. Balancing that is incredibly hard and we spend a lot of energy on it. The second answer I'd say is biggest challenge in scaling code is I think anyone who wants to answer that question for you should probably be talking about something with team because I think the hardest part of building any product is getting the right team on board, keeping them aligned, keeping them headed the same direction, the right balance of motivated and inspired, but also rewarded and sense of accomplishment and so on. So I think the macro one, balancing power simplicity, but developing that perfect team is I think what you spend most of your day doing. **Harry Stebbings** [45:15]: And then I wanted to do penultimate one, how has having kids impacted your operating mentality? **Shishir Mehrotra** [45:19]: Yeah, have two kids, a 14 year old and 11 year old daughter who are both absolutely amazing. I think having kids does two things. One, it forces structure in your life and I get asked a lot by employees and so on, like, I'm about to have kids or advice you have. I'd say kids are just gonna force you to set boundaries. And for me, example, it's from 06:00 to 10:00, I try as hard as I can to not use the phone, not be on electronics, not have meetings and so on. It just forces boundaries, which could seem like it's taking four hours out of your day, but it also is what it's doing. It's giving you time to think, it's giving you time to decompress. It means when you come back to it after that, you're back in that correct mindset. It's a clear structure. And then the other thing I think you learn from kids is you remember what a beginner's mindset is like and what it's like to learn a new thing. And any parent who's ever taught their kid how to ride a bike or how to work their kid through a hard math problem or how to throw a frisbee or whatever it might be, you just remember what it's like to learn. And I think that's just super helpful as you learn yourself, as you challenge yourself, like to continue to learn yourself, as you work with your team and help them stretch, it reminds you what it feels like in that process of, I don't get it yet, but I will. And then, you what is that gonna feel like when I do? And I think that's really helpful. My daughter and I are both learning guitar together. I've never been the most musical person and she's like racing ahead of me and is playing all these different songs. It's just such a good humble reminder of what it feels like to learn something new. So help structure your time and keep that beginner's mindset. Think her beyond all the other amazing advantages of having kids. Those are two that I would call out. **Harry Stebbings** [46:37]: And then the final one, what do the next five years hold for you and for Coda? **Shishir Mehrotra** [46:41]: We're just getting started. So I'm pretty excited about where we're headed here. We shipped coda1.o last February. So it took a while for us to build the base product for Coda, but we've only been in market for about a year and half and it's scaling super well, it just cost 25,000 teams using Coda and it's a product that's kind of built to spread, so perhaps not surprising that way. But I think we're just getting to the exciting part. For me, this is like we now have a, to use your last question's analogy, like we now have a kid and now the kid's ready to grow. And we have all these theories of what should happen as we allow anyone to make docs as powerful as apps. We work on reinventing a set of paradigms that really haven't changed in forty, fifty years. So for me personally, I expect to be working on Coda for at least that long, if not much, much longer, hopefully. And then for Coda, I think we'll see more and more of that vision go from that crazy to that believable. Like I said, YouTube used to use this phrase that online video is going do to cable, cable to the broadcast. I get asked a lot about how I went from YouTube to Coda, they seem so different, one's in media, one's in productivity. In my mind, it's a very straight shot. The people that didn't understand that statement ten years ago were mostly people that underestimated human ingenuity and they viewed it as you can't possibly be a great video creator if you don't live in LA and didn't go to the USC film school. And clearly YouTube proved that to be false. Similarly, I think that what we're trying to do with Coda is do the software where YouTube did the video and changing the types and breadth of people that can develop their own solutions to their own problems. And that's a mission we're just getting started on. I think the interesting parts of that are still to **Harry Stebbings** [47:59]: As I said before the show, I had so many good things both from Daniel and from Quentin. This has been so much fun to do, so thank you so much for joining me today. **Shishir Mehrotra** [48:06]: Alright. Thanks, Harry. **Harry Stebbings** [48:09]: I mean, as you can tell from that running on, I so enjoyed that discussion, and you must check out Shishir's writing. It really is some standout content. I absolutely love it and always a must read for me there. If you'd like to see more from us behind the scenes, you can on Instagram at h dubbings nineteen ninety six with two b's. 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