A question I had during an interview was “what does a perfect day look like to you?”.
I responded talking about working with the perfect team, a variation on a post that I had put up on LinkedIn.
The best team I was a part of made meetings fun. I loved hearing what others are working on and which bits are blockers for me, and sharing what I’m working on to learn which bits are blockers for them. Without prompting from managers, team members would regularly share scripts, documentation and resources to help each other level up and move faster.
After the interview I thought about the question a bit more, and followed up by e-mail with a note of thanks and a quick postscript - coming up with a elegant solution after meditating on the problem for a few days (a la Hammock-Driven Development).
Having slept on it, I lean back towards the team. This is one of my favorite excerpts from Sam Altman’s advice when he turned 30.
Go out of your way to be around smart, interesting, ambitious people. Work for them and hire them (in fact, one of the most satisfying parts of work is forging deep relationships with really good people). Try to spend time with people who are either among the best in the world at what they do or extremely promising but totally unknown. It really is true that you become an average of the people you spend the most time with.
It’s tempting to think about my own path on the back of some design, but this desire to be around smart, interesting, ambitious people has been a recurring theme.
I studied math in college partly because I thought I’d get into a better school vs a more practical subject. I went to law school because my friends who did law seem to ‘know how the system works’, making me realize that knowing the grey areas in life is an effective complement to being good with numbers.
Today I work with software. In terms of unique aspects, there is a level of objectivity (it’s pretty clear when your code runs fast) as well as value capture from network effects. The aspect that I like the most can perhaps be best explained through a story.
Cash App came out of a hack week at Square, yet the buyer-facing Cash App now processes more volume than the seller-facing side of the company. There’s no amount of of top-down effort that gets people excited to build something that eventually overtakes the original idea. That happens through getting smart, interesting, ambitious people in the same room and having them believe the have the agency to make magic happen.