Simone Cicero 

Hello everybody and welcome back to the Boundaryless Conversations Podcast. This podcast explores the future of business models, organizations, markets, and society in our rapidly changing world. I’m joined today by my usual co-host, Shruthi Prakash. Hello Shruthi.

 

Shruthi Prakash 

Hello everybody.

 

Simone Cicero 

And we are thrilled to welcome our guest today, Pete Flint, a true pioneer in the world of digital marketplaces. Pete is a seasoned entrepreneur and a world-renowned and experienced investor. Pete is a general partner at NFX, which is an early-stage venture firm known for its focus on network effects and marketplaces. 

 

Before that, Pete was the founder and CEO of Trulia among other things, which he led through growth, IPO, and eventually a merger with Zillow. Pete’s deep expertise spans from scaling digital platforms to baking the next generation of funders. He’s also been at the forefront of understanding how network effects really evolve into this changing technological landscape, sharing constantly incredible deep advice on an effects blog.

 

Pete, it’s an absolute honor to have you here today and to learn from you directly with our community. Thanks for joining us.

 

Pete Flint 

My pleasure. Great to be here.

 

Simone Cicero

Thank you so much. Pete, so one thing that really stood out to me in your recent writing is that while much of the industry still seems to consider GenAI as a mere optimization engine, let’s say, you seem to be among the few that really acknowledge that AI will deeply transform how value is created and captured and defended in the marketplace industry. 

 

More in details, a few months ago, I was struck by one of the pieces you wrote, the one on stackable business models. Also because it really resonated with something that we at Boundaryless were already looking into, that is the evolution from single products into portfolios and generally the need for startups as well to be able to differentiate, create, modular go-to-market strategies, products. And this really resonated with AI, right? Because AI seems to emerge as some sort of universal duct tape that can patch everything together. So in the following months from the essay and the other things that you’ve wrote and the startups you invested in, how is your thinking evolved?

 

And where are you at the moment in the understanding of how the industry is going?

 

Pete Flint

Well, there’s a lot there and a lot has changed in the last couple of months, as you say. I guess the sort of thesis behind this sort of stackable business model is coming from a couple of different directions. know, firstly, you can look at from the user perspective. And I think that users are just astounded by the number of tools out there that are leveraging AI to do different functions within their personal life and then also in their in the business work. And the power of those tools is just sort of increasing exponentially. 

 

But what is the real challenge for a lot of them is the usability and integration between those platforms. So we see things like, know, MCP and other APIs and other tools that are sort of making it easier to integrate. But realistically, it’s particularly for the kind of like SMB market, you really care about ease of use primarily. 

 

So, and the differential between like one AI model versus the other is sort of, becoming sort of less distinguishable. So, in that environment, you actually just, you know, if you had one tool to perform multiple functions with a great user interface, you’ll be very sticky to that. And that’s what you want. You want to have similar, you don’t want to switch between, we’ve all seen it.

 

You know, in sort of call centers and other flipping between their kind of sales full screen and their kind of like internal system – it’s like, it’s sort of, it’s a nightmare, it’s complicated. So we see just this user experience, which is sort of integrating lots of tools. You could look at it from another vector, which is the enterprise perspective and that’s sort of the company, the startup perspective. 

 

You know, what they kind of you know, in the economics, I put my investor hat on and just say, okay, what do we look for in terms of when we see stuff and we see, know, CAC is what it is, you know, and you can optimize it, but often it’s sort of hard to change the CAC within the selling into the enterprise. And, you know, you have some of these amazing tools that create these great wedges and great killer propositions begin with. And so CAC is you know, some companies’ CAC is sort of quite minimal.

 

But really what you want to optimize is LTV and lifetime value. And you can look at this and really the drivers behind that are really churn and willingness to spend on a monthly basis. And so if you can have a client who is, you know, they’re paying you whatever, thousand bucks a month, one month. The next year they’re paying you 1500 or 2000 and its growing and growing over time and they’re moving and they’re using more tools within your portfolio, you have just a wonderful business that your kind of net revenue retention is going up, your LTV is going up and you, know, some of the best companies have this, have these sort of this profile of net revenue retention and growing LTV and they become super valuable business.

 

That’s, how we think about stackable business models, that kind of what we think about. And perhaps the third trend is that the cost to deploy software is coming down rapidly. And we’ve all seen this, whether it’s Lovable, Cursor, or many others, the cost is coming down. And so the ability to add incremental products and services into your platform is a lot easier than it used to be. 

 

There was a point of view in Silicon Valley, and I remember talking to, you know, the investors sort of 15, 20 years ago, and you want to be a single product company, you know, in the sort of early, you know, Steve Jobs kind of mandating: “okay, let’s rationalize our product line, single product company”, or at least minimal product company. And I think that’s just not true anymore. You know, and I think it’s about, yes, you want to start with a singular breakthrough product experience because you need to focus as a small startup to get that product market fit. And once you’ve got that product market fit, you can start to expand out. So that’s how we think about these stackable business models. 

 

And in a world of AI, it’s very hard to predict the future, right? It’s really hard to kind of know, what is the future going to bring and is my tour today just going to become obsolete in two years time? And one of the ways, know, the principle kind of focus for us as a firm is how do you build network effects into that? How do you build defensibility through network effects and using data and that, and that often requires a level of scale that’s important. So that’s a primary focus when we think about defensibility.

 

But there’s also defensibility in the form of embedding in organizations. And if you can provide multiple tools and multiple functions and start to kind of provide a lot of utility into organizations, then you have this embedding in an organization, which makes you very sticky and very hard to rip out. And even if there might be an incrementally better tool that launches by some new startup a year from now, you’ve got the headstart, you’ve got the embedding, you’ve got the client loyalty and it’s, you know, and it’s, it’s about, it, it, become less of less displaceable once you’ve got a lot of data and utility within that organization.

 

Shruthi Prakash

When you, let’s say, start talking about stackable business models, let’s say easy relation or correlation that people can make is to the idea of, let’s say, building super apps, right? Essentially, which was what was happening before. But these two are fundamentally sort of different in my understanding that one is sort of core asset based and then, know, ancillary sort of stacks that are built on top of it versus the other, just has a bunch of varied features that are offered to a customer. 

 

So do you think they’re in that, let’s say stackable models are new ways or new forms of a super app that is built on the infrastructure layer, essentially. And if not, then how is it different? How is it more defensible? How is it a more that organisations can have in-house?

 

Pete Flint 

Yeah, think, I don’t know if companies don’t necessarily, you know, you don’t need to be too scientific on this. And I think it’s, I would, I agree that the sort of a collection of tools may not be that defensible as opposed to a sort of integrated platform. I think some of the, some of the things that, you know, we would, we would look for is like, what is the, where is the customer pool?

 

Like it may be that there’s an important problem that you are able to solve for that user quite uniquely that they’re pulling into that direction. That can be a path and should be a path that users go down. mean, more optimally, we’d look for something, as you think about following typically the customer journey in an experience 

 

So, you ideally want to start early on in that customer journey. And so you have the right to play in the subsequent pieces of that journey. You know, as you said, I’d started my career, I started a company with Trulia and so like we started in the home buying area and you can easily see in the environment, okay, you start in the home buying area. Then that leads into the mortgage process.

 

And that goes into the maintenance process and upkeep, movings in there somewhere, and then the selling process as well many years later. 

 

So being early on in that customer journey is really beneficial and gives you the right to play in those subsequent journeys.

 

Simone Cicero

I was reflecting into this because you said something that made me think about the spectrum that seems to be emerging. And when I say a spectrum, mean, first, when you answered the first question, Pete, you made an interesting point and I think a key point that customers are looking for certain experience.

 

So when we think about, you start from using a piece of software, And as a user, what is the landscape that we can imagine happening in the coming years? In some cases, some people are advocating for what they call agent marketplaces, right? So essentially, since you cannot have maybe one product that does everything, how as a user can I integrate this product? 

 

And I can do that maybe self developing the integration. So reclaiming, let’s say the power of integrating tools. So maybe in this case, the AI, GenAI can play this middleware role, this capability for companies to be more, I would say, on top of the choices, to regain choices in terms of how they create their workflows, how they integrate the tools that they use. 

 

Then there is the agent marketplace, where maybe we can imagine that there is some sort of common elements across the several types of products that the company uses, like a lagging face or something like that. And finally, there is potentially this trajectory where, you said also, it’s becoming very cheap and easy to expand your software into other things and the super app trajectory that Shruthi was talking about. 

 

So imagine that we have a user in the center that uses a certain piece of software. We can see these three potential directions, right? Either the company regains total control and they integrate software and tools, you know, maybe through the use of AI.

 

Either we go into agent marketplaces or we go into this super app perspective, where maybe one vendor can expand gradually into many other layers in the evolution. So what is, in this spectrum, in this radar, let’s say, where do you find yourself? 

 

And I appreciate you say there’s no recipe we have to see, but what’s your feeling? Where are we most likely to evolve into?

 

Pete Flint 

It’s a good question. I don’t have sort of precision on it because it’s sort of going very quickly. think a lot of it is probably, well, firstly, I think you’re going to see all of the above. I think what you will see is going to be different at different customer types. 

 

And so, you know, if you are, let’s say a large enterprise, you probably have like a team on board which is able to kind of build proprietary agents, license third party agents, integrate those agents into a platform, and you kind of, and you perhaps less care about user experience, you more care about performance and sort of proprietary data and an edge against. 

 

You can imagine, you know, if you’re Goldman Sachs or JP Morgan building kind of, you know, financial agents, you you’re in a leverage third party stuff, you’re gonna put a lot of stuff in house and you’re gonna kind of, you’re not gonna share your data. And so that will kind of lead itself to perhaps a, will license the software, but you will not license the service offering itself and share your data. 

 

And then you can think about, you know, the local  ee shop, which is gonna be like, okay, I want someone to help me with my procurement and knowing kind of when I should, how many coffee beans I should buy in the next month. 

 

And even have a, you know, they could even have a point of view and like, okay, a coffee bean price is going up or down and should I kind of buy the next six months now? And, and so, should I finance all these sorts of things that agents are becoming more available? And you’re like, just, just do it for me, you know, because I’m, I’m busy in my coffee shop and I don’t ensure you can take all my historical sales data and you can take all this because you know I just really about caring about cheapest priced lowest friction service offering. 

 

In that case, and you probably don’t want to have accounting different from procurement, different from something else. You’ll probably want a sort of a more superapp type environment. And so you’re going to see the sort of spectrum between those different dimensions, I suspect.

 

Simone Cicero

Right. it depends depending on the intensity, let’s say of the differentiation you have to create on the market. You may have to spend more effort, energy, and intellect in creating your own stuff. That’s just.

 

Pete Flint 

Yeah. Yeah. I think it’s sort of, are you optimizing for? Is it sort of convenience and price or is it security, proprietary performance? 

 

Another, another aspect. think there was, there was a question around like an agent marketplace. How, you know, is that sort of a realistic idea? And it sort of seems like, know, you think of marketplaces and you think of agencies. And it’s not totally clear on my mind whether that’s going to be a thing. You can see MCP platforms that kind of facilitate that. I think if agents are just software, you will see things like Hugging Face that work.

 

You will see other platforms, GitHub and other, which are social software repositories. But I don’t know if you’ll see real-time agent marketplaces. I don’t know if we’ll see that, just because I think companies will want to integrate this for performance reasons into their service.

 

And I think this stuff is, know, the cost of create agents is going to go down very, very, you know, today it feels like some sort of special source. But I think that the cost of create these agents is going to go rapidly down.

 

Simone Cicero

Yeah, also think I also find very fascinating the topic on agents, marketplaces and more generally how agents are going to revamp the concept of user experience from the ground up, right? Because it’s not just that you move from interacting with the traditional UI into interacting with the chat.

 

is that moving from API-based, for example, integration into agent-mediated integrations is such a deep, transformative change in how we experience software, because it moves from, deterministic interactions with computers into undeterministic ones. 

 

So basically you move from interacting with rules into interacting with somebody that can, something that can have a nuance and opinions, let’s say, right? So it’s really a fascinating perspective and how you, maybe you have encountered some pioneering startups that are exploring this space. 

 

What is your impression into this major change in user experience because you also brought up user experience as a major point of defensibility, right? So what is your idea about this?

 

Pete Flint

Yeah, clearly I think the ability for AI to drive personalized user experience is radical. You see it first and foremost in the financial performance of Meta and others, which are just creating very personalized ads – and that’s a very hard problem. That’s almost the sort of genesis behind Llama and the investment from Meta in AI.

 

 But you can, I mean, that’s a fairly sort of easily understandable use case. But when you think about user experiences in vertical services, whether that’s traditional marketplaces that we might be familiar or kind of enterprise work use cases, then you can start to build more radical product experiences. At the end of the day, the underlying challenge and opportunities around the data and your ability to access that data, less about necessarily understanding that data, because you’ve got so many powerful models that can understand and interpret that data. It’s you know, basic LLM is really a sort of probability score on what the next word is, the large language model. And that works kind of well in that and understood and appreciated in a chat experience. 

 

But what is it that you can apply that kind of next action into other things as well and personalize user experiences, sort of, you know, what is the next action from here? And so that can manifest itself in everything from sort of simple product recommendations to generative user experiences and generative UI. 

 

So we can certainly see, you can see a lot of, you know, this path to providing user experience, but at the end of the day, it’s having access to the data.

 

And so whether that is product data, ERP data, website data, and it’s a company’s ability to kind of access that data and make that accessible to these large language models, which you’re going to see some companies figure it out, and it’s going to drive remarkable performance in their product experience and in their workflows. 

 

You know, you can imagine just a, you you pick up the phone and you’re phoning a call center about some particular problem. And it will say, oh, Mr. Flint, I hear you’re struggling to book a flight to London. And you know, and we’ve looked into it here’s what we can do. Because they’ve seen my…

 

my activity on the website. And it’s an LLM, which is live streaming information from my website activity through to the call center. I see you’re researching some product to purchase and they know your entire purchase history. 

 

There’s a whole bunch of things that you could see drive kind of massive revenue upside as well as cost reduction opportunities.

 

Shruthi Prakash 

If, yeah, I I wanted to touch on a more sort of larger topic, I guess, because I think something you were strongly or you have strongly advocated for is network effects as a topic, right? So for me, I’m curious if we can touch down on that a bit more, see how that changes with our time with more decentralization, with, let’s say, AI getting more commoditized and like a user switching cost is getting even lower. So one, is it still as simple as saying network effects is more customers means more value, or is it about extracting more value from the existing or single customers? 

 

How is that sort of network effect changing in this time?

 

Pete Flint 

Yeah, I think it’s a very good comment. think it’s, you know, the sort of principle of network effects is that a product or service becomes more valuable the more people use that product or service, or more valuable, more useful. I think the reality in this AI world is that you can provide an enormous amount of utility very quickly without having any incremental users because it’s the LLMs have done all the work in the background with data to provide the experience. 

 

So you see dozens of companies providing great user experience with limited network effects and growing incredibly quickly. And you’re, and you’re, well, there’s no network effects in this business. And it’s, but it’s like a super sort of impressive business. 

 

And I think it’s, know, and think as as a fund, which, likes network effects, we kind of have to be mindful of that, that we’re kind of not, well, where are the network effects? Where are you know, where are the network effects in this? And I think it’s, and you can get significant scale very quickly with these services. 

 

That said, this space is moving so quickly and there’s so many smart talented people and so much capital going after any idea that catches fire. You know you see whether it’s like AI and being a sort of very all kind of like AI call centers, they’re all just like racing to like, okay, that’s a good idea. I can build that very quickly. 

 

So you’re in this environment where you have multiple companies with multiple talented teams going after similar ideas and also doing great. The question comes like, well, which one is going to be the of the winning one? And you could look at, well, these are great companies. There’s no network effects, but they’re doing great because they’re providing real utility. But there will come a point where they’re like, well, how do we compete against these kind of myriad of competitors out there?

 

And I think at that point, they’re going to be like, well, we need some defensibility here because it’s, you know, all these competitors going after it. And so, you know, the classic enterprise use case, if I take these sort of AI or customer service, okay, we need to build like platform network effect or app store within that so that I can integrate into kind of like 50 different platforms that give me more data in to provide that. 

 

So I kind of provide a better service and integration. I can, you the other defensibilities around embedding that’s relevant for here, like how do I embed myself in this user experience to make it easy to transition and integrate into the platform? And once it’s integrated, it’s more sticky. 

 

So I think it’s, I think we, we are very open-minded about companies that don’t have a network effect at this point. And I think it’s in some ways you may not need a network effect to build a good starting point. But ultimately, think any good business is going to get massively competitive. And they need to have a point of view about how I add that defensibility over time. Otherwise, they could just going to be outcompeted by some other company but over time.

 

Simone Cicero 

Right, I think it’s really fascinating to see how all these trends are kind of pushing into mechanism of, for example, if you look into the market, is this shrinking into smaller niches, shrinking into faster cycles. So it’s really something that is challenging to the very idea of building a defensible business, right?

 

So building a defensible business is really about trying to defend your position and scale. So scale versus niches and defensible business long term versus short term. So I think this is really challenging from the perspective of the product designer, the company, the startup. So you also mentioned this very interesting idea of generative UX and mentioning that we may look into a future where users receive experiences that are fully personalized. 

 

So what are the other bigger changes that you can see from the perspective of the user? So if we switch the perspective, the point of view from the user’s perspective, so what is your perception in terms of what users will expect from products moving forward? 

 

Maybe both in consumer and business, but of course, these things may be different, but maybe there could be some sort of convergence in terms of expectations.

 

Pete Flint 

Yeah, think if, look, if you take the long-term view here, if you think about consumers or workplace, you sort of imagine, you can sort of go back and imagine these sort of visions of like the 1950s office, you know, and there’s, you know, it’s sort of, or even kind of industrial revolution factories. It’s, you know, it’s a lot of equipment, right? 

 

And my desk, you know, or a person’s desk sort of 30 years ago, there’s a fax machine, there’s a printer, there’s a computer, there’s a Rolodex, you know, there’s a phone, like, and they’ve all this stuff. And over the last several decades, you’ve seen just the reduction in the amount of stuff. Essentially, technology is becoming invisible. It’s becoming less and less prevalent and more invisible in our day-to-day lives, whether that’s in our home or in our workplace. It’s becoming more persistent, but it’s becoming more invisible. And I think probably the same thing is going to be the case going forward. 

 

So you can imagine that, I think voice interfaces are kind of fascinating. You see the, know, the Meta ray bands where you, you know, think the writing screens in the near future and you start to see this stuff becoming sort of more kind of ambient and pervasive rather stuff. so, and so that, you know, that’s, how that will manifest itself is, you know, from personalized recommendations, you know, less web browsing, I suspect, you know, you’ll be able to be have agents that will, you if I’m looking for flights or houses, you know, you’ll be notified by them and you’ll be able to sort of speak to, speak to computers. in, you know, much like you speak to speak to a real human. 

 

So that’s probably, that’s probably the more, more kind of obvious way things will go. And I could see that, you know, just to certainly from consumer’s perspective, think kind of voice agents are very interesting. think in the enterprise, I think you’re going to see just large elements of autonomy going into these organizations. so things will start, functions will be replaced. Just like you’ve seen in factories and in, know, or typing pools that would happen, people who were typing things like just got replaced by, by computers. So, and yeah, and, you know, there it’s somewhat, if you stretch and think it functions, will we start to be automated? 

 

You know, you could imagine these very small teams doing a large amounts of autonomous work. And it, and the agents supposed to talk to each other, which would create a kind of further fly wheel of speed. And I don’t know exactly kind of what that, what that will look like, but I think it’s, it’s potentially quite a sort of radical change in the way that things, things will evolve. And when you have computers to enter the computers, the interaction cost goes down radically.

 

Simone Cicero 

And we are seeing already, the autonomous contracting, for example. And I was thinking, well, you may mention in this distribution of autonomy in the organization, which is something that we also not only see, but actually support with our frameworks, right, decentralized teams, units. This really also changes all the purchasing and acquisition for software and solutions. 

 

So if we think about the enterprise software, what happens to enterprise software in this landscape, it will completely changed the landscape, right?

 

Pete Flint 

Yeah, think it will change. I think there will be a period of change that some of the incumbents will embrace and say, for example just being Salesforce is not sufficient anymore. 

 

I need to provide additional layers of services on top of that. You know, that the basic functionality is commoditized and I need to move up the stack essentially to provide further value that the customers want. Or there’ll be companies that, and they may need to adjust their pricing models to accommodate this change. Or there’ll be other companies that aren’t able to make that transition and they’re going to be becoming less relevant over time. 

 

Of course, this is just what we’ve seen in technology over the last 30, 40 years or longer. know, companies didn’t make the shift to mobile companies didn’t make the shift to SaaS, didn’t make the shift to personal computing. 

 

So, that, and and some do, and then, and then some don’t. And that creates a real opportunity for startups. you know, each of them, are absolutely seeing an inflection point here, which is, which, I think a lot of the incumbents are very aware of, but you know, but as always, some of them will be able to execute and then some of them won’t. 

 

But probably more importantly for startups is that the ability, there will be new markets formed that were previously, you know, unaddressable, that no incumbents go out for them. know, new markets in the form of just like in mobile, we saw things like Uber being created in a mobile environment, which just could not exist. 

 

There’ll be other examples where things are just in this AI world, things just couldn’t exist before.

 

Shruthi Prakash 

I’m curious, how do, let’s say founders prepare for all of this, because you were speaking about, let’s say, building invisible technology and there is so much more control and power that is sort of passed on to a consumer in their, you know, sort of need also for extreme, let’s say, personalization. They are, I would say, increasingly impatient and sort of have a higher control on what they can demand and at an easier switching costs like before, and also expecting zero friction and so on. 

 

So how can a founder prepare their organizations for this? What, let’s say, I don’t know, precautionary steps can they take? When do they look at stackability and so on?

 

Pete Flint 

Yeah, I guess, you know, it probably, there are two big things that I would be encouraging teams to think about. One is to be really high precision on your entry point into a category. And we’ve just seen that, and it may not happen day one, but just like really early on, find out where the super valuable entry point is into a category, into a business, into a service.

 

You know, that may be in terms of the sort of ICP, whether you’re going sort of bottoms up or, you know, or going top down, what is a specific use case that the finding that great initial entry point makes life so much easier later on. And you see companies that sort of get it wrong and the, it sort of kills them because they’re not able to, to, access it. I wrote a piece on, called killer wedges which is really about this principle of like, what is your wedge into a market? So hard for startups to win. And if you pick that right entry point, it absolutely gives you either sort of an unfair economic advantage, where this is the sort of profit pool, you know, can imagine, know, Tesla going after sort of high margin sports cars, great wedge into kind of launching the Model 3 a decade or so later.

 

Or kind of Uber going after black cars, less price sensitive, cash rich time, poor customers gave them a premium access and a premium margin that enabled them to kind of tackle the rest of the market. Or it can be like we talked about earlier around, okay, this is your entry point and there are many subsequent revenue opportunities further down the line that I can tap into once I’ve got this initial entry point. So that’s kind of number one, to be really thoughtful about that entry point. The other is just being fast. I think it’s sort of simple and obvious, but often the fastest teams are the winning teams. And we like to say that anyone can beat a grandmaster at chess if you move two moves for their one.

 

We’ve seen just the fastest teams win the market. They’re smarter teams. They haven’t raised enough money. They haven’t raised more money, but they’re just moving fast. And that’s an organizational design. That’s a cultural thing within startups. And we don’t know what the future is. I think the future has changed significantly in last three years. And it’s going to change probably more so in the next three years. You can’t necessarily predict the future.

 

But if you’re just moving incredibly quickly to invent the future and you’re listening to customers, you’re shipping very quickly, then you have the opportunity to win. And so I would, at the earliest stage, I’ve optimized for those two things.

 

Simone Cicero 

Right. mean, as a wrap up, maybe what I can say is, even the last point that you just made about being fast, it’s a testament to how much the market has changed, It’s much more about being than, being, I would say, less strategic, more tactical in terms of catching opportunities, diversifying, so being ready to spin out new products that can conquer the niche where there’s availability. 

 

So I think this is a very strong message to founders to not overthink, execute, be lean, have lean teams, necessarily learn to leverage on these AI technologies that can make it easier for you to prototype and get into new markets.

 

Which is, think all these things also are willing counter set the resistance because for example, last week I was talking to a developer and he was keeping telling me, know, it’s nice to have GenAI capabilities, but the quality is not there. You have to refactor and so on. But I guess we will get into a place where – You have to be so fast that you will have to think about refactoring your product later on and maybe first validate the business opportunity with a clunky technical solution that maybe will be masked by an excellent chat interface that will interact with your customer. 

 

So I’m wondering if in this challenge, in these times, does it even make sense to try to predict what’s going to happen? What’s your feeling? Does it even make sense to start developing this muscle or it’s much better to be fast and really as an investor? Is it an exercise that you are trying to do?

 

Pete Flint 

Yeah. Well, think it’s, look, I think you, um, you have to have a vision of the future. Um, and you have a, know, you have to know which direction you’re going. Otherwise, you know, every direction feels like the right direction. So I have, I have a, I think a very explicit vision of the future and kind of what you’re intending to achieve, but be quite ambiguous about the path there. 

 

I was talking to my partner James yesterday and we were kind of, we met a team that was sort of on paper, brilliant. And they were kind of the highest academic schools kind of in here, here, here, and these great schools. And, you know, they’re one of the concerns, you know, that is that they have been experts at being right, not necessarily experts at being fast.

 

And there’s no prizes for being right. You know, the prize is about kind of like building these things and being quick. And I think, of course, if you’re right and fast, that’s the Holy Grail, right? But if you’re, but I think you can, if you are right but slow, you lose. And so I would absolutely optimize for that speed.

 

And be sort of quite ambiguous.If you have 90 % confidence that this is the right path and that’s good enough. Um, um, and, and to ship things very quickly. And that is a sort of internal discipline and teams, you know, not to get bogged down by that stuff. And to be sort of, and to be, be okay with ambiguity, you know, not sacrificing this speed of execution is such a critical skill. And it gets harder, you know, as you kind of think about large organizations and think about they’re kind of, I’m a director at this company and want to become a VP. can’t, I don’t want to screw up. Um, you know, I, uh, I’m worried about kind of my reputation. Um, so being, you’re worried about making mistakes. 

 

And when you’re a small three-person team, because everyone’s got each other back. But when you come from big organization, so you, you know, and there were great leaders at big companies that encouraged people to embrace failure, but it’s sometimes hard to get bigger. But I think that that kind of DNA of focus on speed, experimentation, failure is never good, but at least to be rewarding experimentation, appreciating failure as part of the process.

 

Simone Cicero 

I think it’s a testament to the rate of change that we had James last year in the podcast. I think it was the last episode or so. And he was making the point that GenAI was opening an opportunity for incumbents. And so now we are discussing the topic and we are seeing a different trend, right? We are seeing the trend that tells you, you know, have to be fast, you have to be okay with clunky solutions and so it’s a little bit changing the narrative. So again, it’s a testament to how fast things are changing in this landscape. So thank you again.

 

Shruthi Prakash

Yeah, I was in fact thinking,it’s just a quick pointer, but there was this techie who moved from Singapore to India because it got really popular and viral. So he said he wants to expose his kids to chaos so that they know how to manage life better. And this was, he literally moved with his entire family because he said Singapore is let’s say way too perfect and sort of systemized in that sense. 

 

So it reminded me when you spoke about you know, having a team which is extremely successful in certain ways, but hasn’t faced, let’s say challenges and so on.

 

Pete Flint 

Yeah. And just on that point, I think it’s on location, you that’s sort of family thing. You know, we’re in Silicon Valley and San Francisco, and I think, and speed is a function of often information and culture. You know, if you’re in an organization where you’re kind of encouraging people to move quickly and make mistakes, but also you have access to all the information to make the best decisions. That’s valuable. 

 

If you expand that from a company to a city, you look at a city like San Francisco where it’s saturated by founders and engineers that have access to information and there are informal kind of information flows between people, whether that’s professionally or socially, which gives incremental advantages to kind of execution here on the great – I this thing with, you know, implemented this with this AI agent. it’s like, and that gives a marginal edge, which those marginal edges compound over time. 

 

Similarly, see a culture where there is, you know, a very strong work ethic from a bunch of people and a culture of kind of like, how do I achieve and succeed at startup success, which it’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s, that culture is, you know, creates incremental speed boosts, which for many companies can be, the difference between kind of success and failure.

 

Shruthi Prakash 

Yeah, definitely. So, thank you. Thanks for that. 

 

Towards the end of our podcast, we have this section called as the Breadcrumbs where, you know, we ask you to share some, inspiration that our listeners can gain something from. So maybe books, podcasts, anything that has shaped your journey that would really help.

 

Pete Flint

Books, podcasts, I haven’t read that many books recently, but I do listen to a of podcasts. I actually have been listening to the Diary of the CEO that’s been going off, and I recently discovered it, but it’s kind of a big thing. It’s very interesting. And it’s more about kind of like, you know,mental health and kind of personal wellbeing necessary than kind of business insights. But I found that just a really fascinating thing on my commutes and journeys in just beyond the of like, you know, the sort of echo chamber of kind of tech stuff. 

 

So that’s probably I’ve enjoyed that actually that’s kind of that’s been an interesting one for me.

 

Shruthi Prakash 

Thank you. Thanks, Pete.

 

Simone Cicero 

Thank you so much, Peter. It’s been, I think, beyond interesting, but also a good recognition that we don’t have an easy answer in this moment. Neither as developers, product developers, start-upers, or investors, or entrepreneurs, and incumbents, operators. Nobody understands what’s really happening. 

 

And I think I feel it fascinating that very often we seem to be much convinced of the power that these technologies give to the supply side of the market. But on the consumer side, on the user side, we’re really confused how these user experiences are going to change. I think this is the most important piece in my mind at the moment is really trying to figure out what does it mean for users, and not just in terms of experience, but also in terms of priorities and value that the customers will see and recognize in the products. 

 

So again, thank you for being available for challenging conversations at the start of your morning, which is also a good exercise for the brain. So I’m sure that today you will have a very, very, I would say very creative day, you because you trained your mind so early in the morning in challenging questions. So thank you. Thanks again. It was a pleasure to have you. I hope you also enjoyed a bit of the conversation.

 

Pete Flint 

Very much so. Yeah, it was great to catch up. Great conversation.

 

Simone Cicero

Thank you so much, Shruthi, for the always great questions.

 

Shruthi Prakash 

Thank you, thanks Pete and thanks Simone.

 

Simone Cicero

And for our listeners, as always, you will find the interview on our website. If you head to www.boundareless.io/resources/podcast, you will find Pete’s interview with the transcript and all the things that he mentioned. And also remember until we speak again, remember to think Boundaryless.