Deep Nishar’s Lessons From Building Products at Google and LinkedIn

Village Global Podcast

Deep Nishar (@deepnishar), Managing Director at General Catalyst and formerly of LinkedIn and Google, joins Anne Dwane on this episode. Takeaways:
- The best product hires have the brain of an engineer, the heart of a designer, and the speech of a diplomat.
- When you’re interviewing people for product roles at startups, don’t ask people what they would do but rather what they have done in the past. You want people who have a sense of adventure and can work without a lot of structure.
- The first fifty hires at a company completely define the company culture.
- Tech debt is a fact of life. Don’t worry about it until you get to MVP.
- When you’re a founder, consider whether you want a poet or a librarian as a product leader. A poet will take on product strategy as well as execution, while a librarian will take product direction from you and implement it.
- Truly world-class product leaders can build not just a product, but a product operating system — the product that builds more products.
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