startupschool
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 7 months, 2010–2015
28:13 · 15K views · Jan 30, 2009
Paul Buchheit, creator of Gmail and founder of FriendFeed, speaks at Startup School 08 about listening to users. He covers feedback, features, aiming for 100 happy users, and treating "that's impossible" as a statement of limited experience.
HN commenters cite it for its memorable lines on advice, limited experience and early user focus, and rewatch it as a reminder not to be prescriptive.
7 comments from Hacker News
Paul Buchheit said something similar at startup school years ago and I watch the video every once in a while to remind myself not to be similarly prescriptive when I meet new people. His key takeaway slide was a simple equation: Limited Life Experience + Overgeneralization = Advice The full video has more info on how to get past the advice you hear and actually process feedback: this video
Paul Buchheit had a good quote at the 08 startup school. If someone says: "That's impossible." You should understand it as: "According to my very limited experience and narrow understanding of reality, that's very unlikely." Video: this video Slides: [LINK]
If someone says "that's impossible", you can interpret it as: "According to my limited experience and very narrow understanding of reality, it's very unlikely." An oldie but goodie - this video
I'd love to see the study broken out by people who are listening for confidence vs. content . I recall showing my mom Paul Buchheit's Startup School 08 talk: this video I thought it was great, and I remember listening very intently to parse out exactly what he was saying and figure out what he was saying. I showed it to my mom, and her first reaction was "Why are you listening to him? He seems kinda nebbishy." Notice how many pauses, umms, y'knows, and other filler words are in that speech. I ignored them because I already knew what he had accomplished; my assumption was that he knew what he was talking about, and so I should pay close attention. My mom, who knows nothing about tech and didn't start using GMail until 2012, came away with the impression that he was unconfident, rambling, and didn't really know what he was talking about. The advice to eliminate filler words may be a consequence of a world where people make snap judgments about the credibility of a person in seconds, and usually are not qualified to judge the content of the speech at all. Notice how the article says that this advice first caught on in the 20th century, right as mass communication and soundbite messages caught on. The studies they cite, however, all featured listeners from the same field as the speaker who already cared about the content.
Love his answer to #7 on what advice he'd give to a new developer: "7. What advice would you give to a beginner server-side developer and what to an open-source author / contributor? Meh, advice-shmadvice. Who am I to give advice? What’s experience good for in our field? I used to know how to write a keyboard driver and floppy disc formatters with non-standard densities. I’d be all but obsolete today if I hadn’t learned continuously. Oh, so maybe this would be one piece of advice: learn how to learn, and stick with principles; mastering individual technologies will follow. Technology is a great servant but a terrible master. The best people in our métier are those who know how to quickly become experts in some particular field." Reminds me of Paul B's video from startup school: this video