AI summary
The speaker argues that building a technology does not guarantee people will adopt it; users ultimately influence which ideas succeed and shape society’s direction. They say it is better to trust people’s judgment than assume technology builders know what is best for them.
The interviewer asks a challenging question about how a technology leader can know whether their convictions are best for everyone, setting up a debate about who should guide technology’s future.
Key points
- People can choose from many options, so building something does not mean they will use it.
- Some of the speaker’s projects work and others do not; the company’s success may come from having a higher hit rate.
- When a product does not work for people, they generally do not use it, and the future does not move in that direction.
- The speaker believes people are smart and can make good decisions for themselves.
- The speaker says people ultimately drive the direction society takes.
Quotes
Just because I build something doesn't mean that people are going to use it.
It's always served me well to generally have faith in people and believe that people are smart and can make good decisions for themselves.
I think ultimately drive the direction that society goes in.
Caption and hashtags to share with
Building a technology doesn’t mean people will use it. The speaker says users—not builders who assume they know best—ultimately shape the future.
- #technology
- #innovation
- #technologyleadership
- #userchoice
- #productadoption
- #society
- #trust
Written by gpt-6-luna from the transcript. Check the transcript for anything important.
Transcript
- Since you're kind of like a leader in innovation and technology in our world, how do you know what your convictions are? How do you gauge whether your convictions are the best for everybody? It seems like such a challenge.
- At the end of the day, there are still a lot of options for things that people can do. Just because I build something doesn't mean that people are going to use it. A lot of the things that I build, some of them work and some of them don't.
- I think part of the reason why the company has been successful is because maybe we have a slightly higher hit rate of things working than others. But if we do something that doesn't work, then in general, people aren't going to use it, and the future doesn't go in that direction.
- So you're saying it's up to the user more? Yeah, I mean, it's always served me well to generally have faith in people and believe that people are smart and can make good decisions for themselves. Whenever we try to adopt some sort of attitude of, “Oh, we must know better than them. We're the people building technology,” that's when you lose.
- I tend to think that, at the end of the day, people are smarter than a lot of people think, and I think ultimately drive the direction that society goes in.
Clean adds punctuation and paragraphs and drops filler words. Switch to Original for the words exactly as transcribed.