Gokul Rajaram has a stellar history of helping build several generational technology companies, including Alphabet, Block, Coinbase, Meta, and Pinterest. Recorded during our Surge 09 US immersion in February 2024, Gokul dives into the essentials of company building and talks about why it's important for founders to delegate control and adopt an outcome and experimentbased approach.

00:00 Introduction
01:26 The elements for a startup essentials pack
03:29 Scaling up: Changing the generalist to specialist ratio
04:35 Aim for outcomeoriented goals
13:02 Solving backwards to an outcome
14:04 Effective customer dialogue: Go beyond yes/no questions
15:32 Experiment mindset versus feature mindset
18:37 Surveys: Helping pinpoint worthwhile problems
19:20 Innovation is vital, but don’t forget your core product
21:51 The musthave for innovation
23:42 When to start building your second product
24:05 Managing teams: privilege, not a right
25:56 Organize around initiatives, not functions
27:22 The need for goalspecific leadership
30:00 Build enduring teams and review initiatives
33:48 Institute ‘weather reports’ to help achieve goals
36:15 Rethink performance metrics & identify top performers
38:43 Build a ladder: Simplify career progression at scale
39:16 Strategize your communication
40:39 Generalists make good team leaders
44:48 The secret to incentivizing teams
47:08 How to define & take ownership of goals
48:57 Harness first principles to shape frameworks