STUDY TRADES

“The trillion dollars in spend or 800,000,000,000, however you wanna cut it, is bigger than any other consumer vertical. So you take groceries, it's way bigger than that. You take gas, you take apparel, you take any of these. ... The thing you have to appreciate is our pros have typically not that much of a cost of goods sold. It's really just their time.”

“I continue to think that Silicon Valley underrates leadership, and I really care about it. I think leaders have tremendous leverage. ... Leadership to me aspire? Yeah. Well, to, set a set a vision, galvanize people towards that vision, motivate them towards that, provide the courage and moral authority to take risks and sort of venture something. That's all lead. That's the hard part. Like, how do people yeah. Organizing a meeting, like, staffing. Like, you can do that poorly or well, but that's not the hard part.”

“I think the other big thing that we're all gonna be living through is forever in building a technology business, we've been limited by the amount of software that we could create. The rate limiter was writing code, and all the apparatus was to feed that machine as a effectively and efficiently as possible. I think that's going away. Right? Not instantly, but over time, I think It's in the last, like, three months, it seems seems like there's been a huge shift. And, you know, when you kinda play that forward, you get to a world where you become sort of idea, vision, prototype, hypothesis limited.”

“What it highlights though is that this purchase is mediated by something else. It's not simply about convenience or ease of use. It's much more about certainty and peace of mind. A, because the dollars are much higher here. Two, it's the opposite of a commodity. Right? You're you're getting the floors done in your house. Like, you walk on them every day. You care about that. Also, it's your house. So if it goes wrong, you gotta live with it, and it may be super expensive.”

“The trades and things that interface with the real world, in particular, in ways that are hard to automate, are very durable. OpenAI put out a paper, I think, with Chet g b t four that came out about sort of the jobs most at risk and least at risk. And the least at risk was, like, filled with home service jobs. It was, like, oil and gas jobs and, thumbtack jobs, like, things that you gotta be there.”

“And I think one of the the just superpowers of this technology is how fast it lets you move, particularly when you lower the group size that's required to get anything done. You know? To the extreme of just one person, that's the fastest. But even taking a product team, like, at Thumbtack, historically, our pods were, like, 10 to 14 people. Now they can be, like, three to six, three to eight. I think that alone makes us faster.”

“One of the things that this technology is kind of pushing is, like, the rise of generalists at the expense of specialists. And what we see is that the really narrow roles at Thumbtack are under pressure because, like, instead of having that, you know, designer who specializes in that one part of design, it's actually you can just lever Figma make or cloud code to help you do that when you need it every every so often. You know, the hyper specialized engineer, you know, I think that is the the thing that it may change the most where we might have fewer roles that are broader and more general and have fewer kind of specialists.”

“After hiring people who are super talented, who fit with your organization, the last failure mode is that these execs don't appreciate their imperfections and are sort of stubborn or hard headed or defensive about it. And I'll tell you, like, I have hired extremely talented people exclusively, and yet they're all imperfect. And they all have, like, major blind spot. Particularly if you hire very spiky people, they often have deficiencies elsewhere. And that's fine so long as there's self awareness about it. And I care a lot about finding execs who are comfortable in their own skin and get it.”