Good Products are Opinionated.
“Every great founder I’ve seen up close, or even from afar, is highly opinionated and they’re almost dictatorial in how they run things.
Also, early-stage teams are opinionated. And the products they build are opinionated. Opinionated means they have a strong vision for what it should and should not do.
If you don’t have a strong vision of what it should and should not do, then you end up with a giant mess of competing features.
@Jack Dorsey has a great phrase: “Limit the number of details and make every detail perfect.” And that’s especially important in consumer products. You have to be extremely opinionated. All the best products in consumer-land get there through simplicity.
You could argue the recent success of ChatGPT and similar AI chatbots is because they’re even simpler than Google.
Google looked like the simplest product you could possibly build. It was just a box. But even that box had limitations in what you could do.
You were trained not to talk to it conversationally. You would enter keywords and you had to be careful with those keywords. You couldn’t just ask a question outright and get a sensible answer. It wouldn’t do proper synonym matching, and then it would spit you back a whole bunch of results. That was complicated. You’d have to sift through and figure out which ones were ads, which ones were real, were they sorted correctly, and then you’d have to click through and read it.
ChatGPT and the chatbot simplified that even further. You just talk to it like a human—use your voice or you type and it gives you back a straight answer.
It might not always be right, but it’s good enough, and it gives you back a straight answer in text or voice or images or whatever you prefer.
So it simplifies what we looked at as the simplest product on the Internet, which was formerly Google, and makes it even simpler. And you just cannot make a product that’s simple enough.
To be simple, you have to be extremely opinionated. You have to remove everything that doesn’t match your opinion of what the product should be doing. You have to meticulously remove every single click, every single extra button, every single setting.
In fact, things in the settings menu are an indication that you’ve abdicated your responsibility to the user. Choices for the user are an abdication of your responsibility. Maybe for legal or important reasons, you can have a few of these, but you should struggle and resist against every single choice the user has to make.
In the age of TikTok and ChatGPT, that’s more obvious than ever. People don’t want to make choices. They don’t want the cognitive load. They want you to figure out what the right defaults are and what they should be doing and looking at, and they want you to present it to them.”
One of the most fun parts of OpenAI is watching people here level up so fast and do such excellent work.
We are operating at a high level across many different disciplines and many of the people doing it have never done it before, and joined us at the beginning of their career.
If you believe in people and give them a lot of responsibility and support (and pick the right people to bet on) you will be surprised on the upside more often than you think.
I would love to see more companies operate this way and think we would all benefit.
(This was also one of the most fun parts of startup investing.)
Proud to be part of delivering Send Now, Pay Later to customers in the UK. This gives more flexibility when sending money home and ensures loved ones receive support exactly when they need it.
Congratulations to team.
🔗 https://t.co/KchVmq9OId
🚀 We’ve launched Send Now, Pay Later (SNPL), the UK’s first AI-powered service that combines credit and remittances for immigrants.
With SNPL, eligible customers can access up to £1,000 in credit to send money instantly, and build their UK credit profile while supporting loved ones abroad.
#SendNowPayLater #NeverMissASend
🚀 We’ve launched Send Now, Pay Later (SNPL), the UK’s first AI-powered service that combines credit and remittances for immigrants.
With SNPL, eligible customers can access up to £1,000 in credit to send money instantly, and build their UK credit profile while supporting loved ones abroad.
#SendNowPayLater #NeverMissASend
🇳🇬 Fintech @UseLemfi (🇬🇧 HQ) just acquired UK credit card startup Pillar (which raised $~17M pre-seed in 2022).
This helps LemFi tackle a big problem immigrants face: access to credit — and will roll out a credit card product to its 2 million customers. https://t.co/AWRQdrgBlw
I love how @UseLemfi is constantly iterating their product and pushing regular updates. I saw someone mentioned online the other day that they didn’t have Apple Pay. Well, now they do. Apple Pay and more must I say
LET'S TALK ABOUT KEMI BADENOCH
In a speech at Michigan State University on 24 January 1963, revolutionary and civil-rights activist Malcom X (1925-65) drew a distinction between field and house N*groes. He called the latter the “twentieth-century Uncle Tom.”
Over six decades later, the distinction is still worth drawing. Every generation produces a new version of the house N*gro. They are the ones willing to betray the fight against imperialism to do their masters’ bidding for financial reward and privileges.
The new leader of the UK’s opposition Conservative Party - Kemi 'Adegoke' Badenoch - fits the bill perfectly. Our sister Sannario explains why.