What I Learned at Yext

Today was my last day at Yext. Starting tomorrow, I’ll be working on cofounding a new company. (More on that in a future post.)

I spent today looking through old slack messages, emails, and documents, recounting the last half decade of my life. Some lessons stood out to me:

1. Politics kills good ideas. Many of my biggest regrets were things we could have accomplished but didn’t because of internal dysfunction. There were a lot of instances of this: products and features we knew - or at least I knew - that we could deliver, but we didn’t because two teams couldn’t get on the same page, or because politics got in the way. A lot of promising projects die this way, and I am committed to not letting this happen as often at my next company.
2. You will make a lot of mistakes. It’s inevitable. You should assume that some significant percentage of the work you do will be thrown away. That’s the only way to find what does work - by doing a lot of what doesn’t work.
3. Trust your gut. For many of the projects I worked on that failed, I had an uneasy feeling about them from the very start - like we were doing them for the wrong reasons, or they had a bad technical foundation. I wish I had gone with my gut more in those instances. My instincts are certainly not perfect, but looking back I was surprised how good they turned out to be.
4. Compound interest matters a lot. Something that grows by 30% each year will be huge before long. Therefore simply staying at something and incrementally improving for enough years in a row can be a very successful strategy. But it requires patience.
5. The days are long but the years are short. Looking back on the most important contributions I made these past five years, many of them were documents or prototypes that I completed in just a day or two. A few days of intense focus and productivity can be enough to change your life. At the same time, I’m also astonished by how little actually happens in a year, how fast they go by, and how easy it is to accidentally squander them. The best way to make sure that your year is well spent is to make sure that each day within it is well spent and, importantly, that each day points you in the same direction. (See previous point about compound interest.)
6. When it comes to big, ambitious projects, the best predictor of the project’s success is its leader. There is a certain type of ambitious, energetic, and highly competent “rockstar” leader that can get these projects done. Often, when they leave or when they shift their focus elsewhere, progress not only slows, it stops completely. It’s extremely hard to make big changes without one of these rockstar leaders. Lesser managers can keep things afloat and maintain the status quo - in fact, they are often better at this than the rockstars are - but they cannot do big, ambitious, company-changing projects.
7. Most things follow a power law distribution. A tiny percentage of your customers will account for the bulk of your revenue. A tiny fraction of your ideas will deliver the bulk of the value you create. A tiny fraction of the people at a company will do the bulk of the important work. This pattern emerges again and again in life and business and technology. There seems to be no avoiding it. So you need to accept it, which means focusing on getting the most out of that small percentage of people and ideas that matter most.