The One Thing a Legendary PM Optimized For | Felicis, Peter Deng

1. 0:00 – 1:07

   Intro

   1. PDPeter Deng0:00

      My name is Peter. I am an investor and a builder. I currently am a general partner here at Felicis, where I invest in early-stage companies at the seed and A. Prior to this, I've built products at companies including Facebook, Instagram, Oculus, Uber, Airtable, and OpenAI. I think it's important when you're looking at your career to really think about what you love to do. I think a lot of people talk about success in one dimension only, but I'm here talking today because I've enjoyed really every single experience I've had in my professional journey. I wanna say for each person, you kinda gotta look inside you to say, "What is the thing that I'm optimizing for? What are the experiences that I want to have?" Life is short, so be sure that you're doing something that you will be looking back at and really truly enjoy. I really enjoyed my career building things alongside some amazing founders, and I'm super thrilled to be able to back more founders as an investor.

2. 1:07 – 7:29

   Product Thinking: Subtract to the Essence

   1. PDPeter Deng1:21

      I was the fourth PM at Facebook. First day at Facebook, it was a long time ago, and I remember walking in, and the atmosphere is so electric, and this is why I love startups and supporting startups today, is that it really is an exciting time. And it was the most scrapped together onboarding you've ever seen. I think we signed some documents and did some, uh, mandatory, you know, disclosures, but it was a very loose place because I think startups select for people who are very self-driven and self-motivated, who wanna solve these problems, who are attracted by the mission, as I was to Facebook. And I remember one of the first products that I worked on was Events. This is a long time ago, back when Facebook was just a website, and I remember writing that document about how we should build Events. Abstractions should be, and what are the key concepts, and what do people need, and what do social events really mean, which is very different than calendar. How is it not calendar? And I remember meeting with Mark, and I was like, presented thoughts, like, "Hey, this is what we should build." And I was, I was new there, and he's like, "Who put this, this together? This is really good." I'm like, "I... Yeah, I, I did. Just organizing thoughts." And so at the time, if you can imagine, Facebook was full of just really passionate people. There was no process, and we just all figured it out ourselves how we wanna build product, and we got to reinvent that. About News Feed, I think it's been unchanged because we thought very carefully how to architect it and how to structure it in a way that was enduring. What was the taxonomy of a post? It involved a face of someone, their name, what they said, an attachment, photo or location, and interactions, and that's it. And I think it's the same as it is today. And that framework was something we thought really deeply about of like how do people wanna consume information in a simple way that's consistent, and that became the framework that's still used today. And that's where simplicity really shines. When you're thoughtful and edit down the ideas and not add more and more, but really get down to the essence of what is it that you're trying to build. And with the right engineering and the right definition of what is it that you're trying to accomplish, you're basically measuring twice and cutting once. And when you do that well, those products will stand the test of time. So I think when people think about product, they oftentimes think about the pixels on the screen. That's how I thought of it. Now, as I worked on many different products, I realized that it wasn't just those pixels, and in fact, sometimes it was something other than the pixels that was the most important. For any product, you need to solve a real problem for the customer. This is my new sort of definition of product, is what is the thing that solves the problem for the customer, and whatever that thing is will be the product. So for example, at Uber, the problem that I'm trying to solve is get to where I'm going quickly and pay a lower price. And so price and ETA were the product, and it's really important as a product leader to acknowledge what is the truth and not just say that the thing that you are building is the most important thing. And when you have that level of clarity, it lets you really focus on making the right changes and respecting the right parts of the process that really are satisfying the needs of the customers. With all the startups coming out now, I would just encourage founders to think about, well, what is the product that you have? What is the thing that you're actually selling? And sometimes it can be very poetic. It may be what you're selling is giving people time back. Be really, really clear what the problem is that you're solving. For any product or any company, it's easy to say, "I have a vision I wanna manifest." And I remember being at Uber, they came to a product review, and, and every problem they listed was a problem for the company. It was not a c- problem for the customer. [laughs] If you articulate the problems from the perspective of, "Oh, Uber needs to make more money," or, "We need to do this," you lose a ton of the empathy for the people that are using the actual product that you're building. Uber Reserve was a really fun product to build. I remember it starts with exactly the frameworks that we talked about, which is what is the customer problem that you're trying to solve? So it's such a simple idea, but it's a almost a $5 billion a year business and one of the highest margin businesses in the Uber Rides portfolio. As someone who traveled for work and didn't want to miss too much of my kids growing up, I would often leave early in the morning so I wouldn't miss a previous bedtime. And that is a very stressful time. If you can imagine you have a 5:00 flight, you have to be at the airport at 4:00, and there's no traffic, so that's, that's good. But you have to leave in time [laughs] to get there, and who knows, will there be an Uber available to take you at 3:30 in the morning? That's a very stressful thing. So what is the customer problem that you're solving? It's peace of mind. It's assurance that you can go to bed and not have to wake up every 30 minutes, and then not even know if you hit that Uber button if it's ... someone's gonna come. One feature that we built, I remember, is that after you booked, where we sent you a push notification, says, "Hey, you're matched to this person." We could not say that. We could just say, "The driver will arrive," but you're gonna have more confidence if we show you the picture of the person who's gonna come. Now, it may be the case that we have to hot-swap that person out later, but at least in the moment you can go to bed feeling very, uh, safe and sound that someone's gonna be there. All right. And so all these little design details all stem from the same thing, which is once you define what the user problem is that you're solving, you will design all of the features that solve that problem. That's the key to that product. I'm just really proud to see kind of where it is today. It's, it's so simple. It's one of my favorite features to this day. I might be very biased, but it is apparently a favorite feature of a lot of others as well. And when you have clarity as a product leader or founder of what your real product is, you're gonna pay attention to the details that really matter. You're still gonna pay attention to all the other details that may not matter as much, but you have clarity and your team has clarity of where you need to go drive to make your product shine.

3. 7:29 – 9:59

   It's Not a Loss, It's a Lesson

   1. PDPeter Deng7:32

      One of the values I hold very close to my heart is growth mindset. I think this is a concept that Carol Dweck wrote about in her book and she did research on. It's the growth versus fixed mindset. And a fixed mindset person will take a failure and blame somebody else and point fingers, and a growth mindset person will look at it and be like, "Well, how can I be better? And what can I do differently next time?" The growth mindset just deeply resonates because I like to say this a lot, half-jokingly, I own a lot of gadgets, but I don't own a time machine. So I can't go back in time, I can only fix things going forward. And so when there is a failure, if you are blaming others or saying the world is against you, you've really lost an opportunity to get better. And the phrase, "It's not a loss, it's a lesson," is actually a Jay-Z verse, uh, one of his songs. So I thought it was very beautiful. I think that's one of the things that I think separates people who are successful from the folks that may get stuck in a rut. When I went to Airtable, I was just reinvigorating my learning journey because that was just such a different product and industry than I was used to, and that's frankly the reason I joined. What I did every time I went into a smaller company or just any new team was listen. I did this at Instagram, I did this at Airtable, I did this at Uber, I did this at OpenAI. And it was ... It's just a bit of my playbook. You could ask me to make decisions, but I'm gonna ask you what do you think and then what are you struggling with, and it's gonna be more Socratic because I do not believe in shooting from the hip. I believe in having context and deeply understanding a company before diving in and throwing around my opinions. And it might seem really long, but this is one of those investments that you go slow to go fast. And it avoids a lot of missteps on you as a, as a senior leader going into a, a, a company. If you were to ask me, "What did you have to unlearn?" I would say almost everything. Um, the only things I didn't have to unlearn are how to build product, because the same framework exists in terms of understanding your customer. But then you have an added level of complexity, which is your customer who's paying for it is not the person who is using it sometimes, especially at enterprises. And so now when I work with startups, I can go back to my beginner's mindset when I first learned those concepts and experienced them. I do think that that has r- been a huge part of my learning journey, and that's why I was attracted to it.

4. 9:59 – 13:42

   Build a Team That Doesn't Need You

   1. PDPeter Deng10:01

      I think the critical thing that founders get wrong today is not hiring an A-plus team from day one. It is a complete blank slate once you and your co-founder have formed the company. And there's a saying that A players hire A players, B players hire C players. And I don't know if that's true or not, but I will tell you now that talent density is so important. Because what's happening now is that the world is moving faster, companies are moving faster, and if you don't start your bar off high enough with the founding team that you build, one, any compromises you make there is a sign that you're gonna make compromises down the line, and two, any compromises you make there will trickle down over time because that is now the DNA of the founding team. So especially in the world now that we are today where AI is able to make people so much more productive, if you have the right person managing those tools and using those tools to be productive, it's gonna be the difference between 100X return or a 5X return depending on who you hire in, in the beginning. Back when I was a first-time manager at Facebook, long, long time ago, the expectations of managers was to be a player coach. You would be a manager, but you'd also, uh, do your own projects. I felt I needed to oversee people on my team and do my own work at the same time, and it was very clear that was not scalable. And I think that's one of the common mistakes of a young manager is you think that you need to approve and oversee and guide everyone who's on your team. And as I was starting to get underwater, I talked to my coach, and she walked me through this framework that I found really insightful, which is there's four phases of, um, a manager and a report's relationship. It starts with telling or just kind of directing the work Second phase is coaching as you get a little bit more advanced in your relationship. Fourth phase is kind of scaffolding and helping them out a little bit more. And the, the last phase is delegation. And for me, that framework really ran true, but it was just too long to say anything. [laughs] You know, it was just too long to repeat. And so this mantra that I came up with, this axiom of, like, "If I'm still telling you what to do after six months, I've hired the wrong person." I found it to be very helpful for me as a manager because it puts the onus on me. And there are a few key dimensions to this. Number one, it's a reminder to me that when I'm hiring for a role, I need to be really thinking about the longevity and can this person fill this role and really just help the company scale. And it keeps my bar super high. The second thing is that it's something I share with people that I bring onto the team when I first kind of become their supporter, and it sets this expectation of what is... what we want to be true, which is autonomy or it's delegation in six months. And the last thing... A- and it give- it makes it so that we are... can objectively talk about are we progressing along that journey? 'Cause that is the right o- outcome, is that we're helping the company scale, we're helping you get autonomy and risk full delegation. And as a manager, you always wanna work yourself out of a job. That's, that's the gritty. And it also creates the pressure on me as the person who's supporting them because it's a constant reminder that when we face some tough times, it's easy to be like, "Well, let me just tell you how I would do it." That's completely unhelpful. That's completely unhelpful. What's more helpful is to think about how do I progress you to think more and more to be able to be independent? So every conflict, every failure is... it becomes a lesson of, um, how might we do this in a world in which I'm no longer needed?

5. 13:42 – 15:23

   Conflict Makes Great Teams

   1. PDPeter Deng13:46

      I think conflict is fantastic when done the right way. Let's use Instagram as an example. We purposefully had three different product leads that all sat around the table that led their individual initiatives. One was the growth lead, one was the consumer product lead, and then one was the monetization lead. And I intentionally set this up in this way [laughs] because you wanna make sure that everyone is optimizing for something different. So, like, traditional product team is the product person, the engineer, designer, maybe data scientist. Every one of those roles has a different perspective of what to do. The designer might say, "Make it simple. Make it super simple. Fewer features." The product manager might say, "More features. We gotta go and build these things for our customers." The engineer might say, "This is too complicated. I need a lot more time to build this." And that tension is extremely healthy because if you imagine this, people pulling in different directions, it makes the gamut bigger. My analogy for this is that what you're doing is you're stretching the gamut, and then through the discussions and debates of what should we build or how much emphasis, that's where you really tease out really important decisions that you need to be making. It makes the whole space that you're exploring, it makes the whole discussion that you're having richer. And that's, I found to be very true to, to, to the success of, of a lot of teams I've been on, which is why I've been saying a lot of, like, yeah, the... when you have a team of Avengers, when people are actually expressing unique points of view and there's no groupthink, you're able to stretch the gamut and see a much bigger picture.

6. 15:23 – 19:40

   A Builder Who Invests, A Investor Who Builds

   1. PDPeter Deng15:27

      I found my way to Felicis mainly because the values of the firm really match mine. Felicis is a very founder-friendly firm. It's founder first. In a sense, every time I'm meeting with a founder, it's almost like I'm interning at their company at their very first day. And in one morning last week, I met with three different founders and we went really deep on some thoughts on how their product could evolve, and that's really exciting to me, to be able to learn their vision, what they care about, about their market. And we almost always end up in the meetings just brainstorming products, and it's just so much fun selfishly for me. [laughs] And my hope is that it might be useful and helpful to the founder. But some people ask me, "Do you miss being an operator?" I feel like my desire to build is really kind of amplified by being an investor. And just the way that I'm wired to really be curious and want to learn new things and think about new ideas, that's energizing. You know, in some sense, I've actually been an investor all my career. I just had invested my time. And the way that I've picked the companies have primarily been around three things, and I think that's the same framework I apply to my investment role today. Number one is what's happening in the market. Is there a, a real point in time of this is being the right time for this product to come out? Uber was clear. There was GPS phones in every pocket. Instagram was clear. We had these phones that started to not suck as much [laughs] that, that you could actually produce photos. So every one of the, the timing was just right. And the second thing I would say is that they were really solving a, a real problem for people. Airtable solving the problem that non-technical people wanted to build a structured database but there's no tool to do that, and it was a real problem. And very clear with ChatGPT, the product market fit was insanely great. There was a real problem around how do I actually go deep and, like, work with AI. And the third thing I would say is the founder. I have had the privilege of working directly for or very close to some of the iconic founders of our time, and every founder has been different, but I would say every founder has a strong point of view of what the world needs to be. And I think that level of conviction is so important. So that conviction plus the market timing and what's... why now- Plus solving a real need for a problem that's really evident, whether you intuit that or there's data that supports that. But in the early stages, you just have to intuit it, see some s- signals. John and Jeff at Paraform are just really special. I remember the time that I took the pitch from them, I was actually driving to go skiing in Tahoe because that was the only time that worked. As I was on the freeway and just starting to hit the snow line, they were launching into their story, their conviction about the problem, how much they care about finding the right roles for each person. Just how much it resonated with them was just deeply moving. Like, they were really obsessed with this mission. They, they felt it in their bones. Because it wasn't about a generic business case. It was deeply, they cared about helping people find their next role and helping companies find the perfect fit, and that was really special. I remember almost pulling over 'cause I was so excited about the traction they had and the very clear reflection of the product they've built to date. Their conviction plus the product they built, plus the results that they showed, and their humility and growth mindset and wanting to learn and get better, John and Jeff are just really special in that way. And I remember we were so convinced right after that call. Like I said, I almost pulled over to just, like, talk to the team after. And we went into their offices and delivered a term sheet that night. It's the same investment thesis I've been using all my career. I'm just applying it differently now.

7. 19:40 – 23:14

   Building a More Human Future

   1. PDPeter Deng19:41

      I think through all these waves, what I love and fascinates me is just how creative humans are. That is one through line that I would say is consistent I've seen through all these waves. Every one of these waves, web, mobile, AI, whatever tools and technologies we invent for ourselves, we are always innovating and building. Feels like something almost innately human for us to be doing all the time. You actually end up solving the same problem very differently and so much better. Let's just talk about discovering a new restaurant. In the web wave, it was like, oh, Google. You can Google it and see what's there, and there's some kinda ranking. In the mobile wave, it's like, well, you know where I am, so when I say I'm craving a burger, don't show me something in another town. Show me something close by. And that's pretty magical. And now if you're craving a burger and you ask ChatGPT, it's like you can have a conversation about it. [laughs] So it's interesting that the, that we have the same problems, and they are solved so differently every single time. And every single time that the problem is solved, it's done in a way that's more magical as an experience. I am super optimistic that the companies being founded today are building products making work faster and easier and, and leveraging AI to do X, Y, Z mundane task or making X, Y, Z thing more automatable that are gonna give people more time back. And I think that's really important because that time back will end up creating more time for people to pursue their passions and kinda really live the life fully that they want to live. That's my hope. I think AI's gonna fundamentally make us more human. It's gonna let us fully express what we want to express creatively or have the time to pursue the things that we want to pursue. When you're looking at your career, to really think about what you love to do. And I think a lot of people talk about success in one dimension only, but I'm here talking today because I've enjoyed really every single experience I've had in my professional journey. And it's been incredibly intellectually stimulating. I feel like I've contributed a lot. And my biggest advice would be to really think about what you value and what you want to do. And it could be that getting promoted and making sure that you're taking care of your family financially is gonna unlock that for you, but I think it's important that you, each person think about what is gonna make their life most worth living. I got incredibly lucky that the things that I chose to pursue worked out in different ways. But at the end of the day, I can look back and say I'm just proud of everything I did because I enjoyed it. And I learned a lot. And I can say today that, yes, I did optimize for learning. And as on that metric, I did really well. I wanna make sure it's clear that each person's career journey is different, and you kinda gotta look inside you to say, "What is the thing that I'm optimizing for? What are the experiences that I want to have?" Life is short, and you're working for a lot of it, so be sure that you're doing something that you want, that you will be looking back at and really truly enjoy. [outro music]

Episode duration: 23:14