#026 "Hiten Shah - Billion Dollar Mistakes and Separating the Forest from the Trees"

The Brandon Zhang Show

Today, I am speaking with Hiten Shah, the co-founder of FYI, a company that helps you find your documents in 3 clicks or less. He previously co-founded CrazyEgg and KISSmetrics as well. In our conversation today we talk about how his upbringing shaped his entrepreneurial spirit, how to separate the forest from the weeds, and finding the definition of success.

Links:
1. Hiten's Twitter
2. Hiten's Website
3. Brandon's Twitter
4. Brandon's Website
Show Notes:
My Billion Dollar Mistake (Blog Post)
Hiten's Never-Ending Twitter thread for startup resources.
5 Key Takeaways

1. I really love to dig in and feel like I have the ability to learn something I didn't know anything about really fast, just by asking the right questions, digging, obviously googling around, and things like that. And I think that that like that's like something that I would want to be instilled in as many people as possible so that they can kind of achieve, you know, the most that they possibly can while they're alive.
2. I would recommend this to almost everybody, which is throwing the mental models away and start with basically first principles or what I would prefer to call basics. And if you start with the basics, then the mental models are very obvious, because you started with kind of the core.
3. Reddit created fake accounts early on and kind of seeded the communities, or the whole community at the time, through those fake accounts and the content that was posted on them, in order to kickstart the community. Right, that is a classic kind of example of what we would put as some somebody who was doing growth, hacker type responsibilities. While all these things around conversion optimization, those are just like marketing tactics. Those are not growth hacks.
4. The crux of no code is just the fact that more people can build things faster. Okay. I think I think the speed part is what people don't talk about. If you're doing no code, it better be faster than writing code. If you're doing the no code, and it's not faster than writing code, then are you really doing no code?
5. That realization, that self-awareness, once you hit about a dozen employees, or a dozen team members, you're gonna get it. And if you don't get it, like it's gonna take you years to figure that out. And by that time, you'll realize that you screwed a whole bunch of stuff up and you wish you were different. This is the consistent pattern I've seen, even for people who run organizations differently than I do.