YouSaid · the spoken record

Jesse Zhang

lines on the record: 84
first: 2025-10-06
most recent: 2025-10-06
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“We don't necessarily want that as much. And you want full rigor, right? If it's a regulated use case, you cannot afford for it to ever deviate. These three steps always have to be followed in this order and you can't go to step three until something has happened already. So you need to design a system that can be anywhere along that spectrum. And back to your question of what could go wrong. Well, the worst thing that's happened would be it just says something that's not supposed to say. And so you need to design an AI that's really robust to that and you can choose like, okay, for this use case, we really need it to be over here. That's a lot more robust. But for other use cases where if you're just asking basic questions on their account, we don't want it to be like that. We don't want it to be super freeform. And that's how we get the customer satisfaction up.”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Things like that are just like, okay, I will not expect that to happen. So those are just like tuning you have to do over time. And generally it's in the spirit of that where you're trying to find the right level of guardrail and flexibility. I think that's the name of the game with our space at least. And that's sort of the way we've designed our product and why probably number one reason we've been successful so far is that what Gen AI really unlocks is super flexible, super personalized. One way you can think about it is like in the old days to map out a conversation, you just build like gigantic tree decisions. And that's very hard because no one likes that experience and you ask something that's not quite one of the branches and just forces you down that branch and there's no way to go back. And what ALM does is it extracts a lot of that tree into the neurons of a language model. So that's really powerful. On one end of spectrum, you're just looking for flexibility and root power and being able to sound really human-like. But with the enterprise, there are a lot of things.”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It ranges all sorts of different things. Sometimes it's obviously like both sides, like us and the customer, we take everything very seriously. But there's a lot of things you wouldn't expect in the early days. We have a customer that is essentially like a large ticketing platform. And one of the things that would happen was someone came in, they couldn't find their ticket. I looked into their account. It's like, hey, there's no tickets here. And then they were just like, okay, well, what I'm going to do is I'm going to show up to the events and I'm going to find eight homeless people from the city and bring them with me. And the agent was like, oh my God, that's so awesome that you're thinking about doing something nice for the community.”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very fast. I would say even for the large enterprises within weeks. Everyone wants to just go live to everything, but the reason why you staged it out is so you can make sure nothing's going wrong. And you can tell if something's going wrong almost immediately because you have these metrics. So even within a week, you have 500 person or I would probably estimate mid to high, six figures of conversations a year, maybe slightly higher. What you're doing there is making sure that things are going well. So within a week, you can see like, okay, what is the resolution rates? Is that what we expect? Okay, great. What is the customer satisfaction? People have those scores as well. And then they'll probably have some sort of accuracy metric based on like human review. If those all check out, there's really no reason why you shouldn't roll it out. And again, the business case is so obvious there, right? It's like, hey, we're both generating a ton of operational efficiency and our customers are happier. So yeah, let's just send it out to everything.”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's an interesting way to think about it. And it doesn't have the reinforcement learning in the pure sense of training a model. It can just be reinforcement learning and making the agent improve. And that could be compiling more evals. That could be compiling just like more guardrails guidelines around what it can and can't do.”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Company if you're going to be replacing human labor, you need to know what good human labor is. So what we found is like, okay, well, can someone just tell us what are the answers to all these questions? And most people don't actually know because these are large complex organizations. No one is like the person where like, hey, I know how to answer all these questions. And so you have to design a process where it's very easy to extract these answers from all the people that do know. So maybe it's all the CX leaders or people who lead different areas of the product. And so you have to get them all together and get them to align on like, okay, here is what the eval is, essentially. If you can do that well, then it makes everything a lot easier because now you're just building, building, building. You have this like quantifiable score that's like, hey, here's how well the AI is performing. And then once you're done building and the score is high, then you can go live.”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I would say the biggest learning we had is that oftentimes a long pole in the tent, and again, if by never, if you can solve this well, it just makes things go a lot easier, is aligning on what does good look like. And you would think that in our space, it's pretty easy because it's like, okay, maybe you just have a bunch of questions and answers. And that's what good looks like. But unfortunately, it's a lot more nuanced than that. What good looks like could be in the sense of like tone and brand guidelines or how conversational you are. And even for the actual answers, like we work with a lot of enterprises where obviously their scope is broad. And so one of the things you need to set up beforehand is what's good look like. So we have in our product essentially like a testing or simulation suite of like, hey, we're going to build out 10,000 tests and each one is going to be constantly running like five times and then you can get a sense of how well things are performing. And that's actually pretty difficult. And I do think that is broadly true for anyone that's trying to build in this style.”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because now I have coding agents. There's infinite engineering work to do, so you're just augmenting them. On the other end, it is more of the replacement sense. You have a large BPO and that's costing you a ton of money. And it's also like a really high operational thing to maintain because you have to hire people all the time. There's a ton of turn. You need to train them. You need to QA them. You need to make sure that nothing goes wrong. So AI is really valuable there as well because the work is easier for the AI to do. It can fully replace. And I think that goes into the conversation of I think it's a little bit overblown of like, oh, AI is replacing jobs and so on. Even the BPOs we talk to, they're not really that concerned because what typically happens anyways is that there's already very high turnover in these BPOs. People are just hopping around and doing all sorts of different things. Kind of just naturally let it decrease. And then they just go on to do sort of the next level of task that they can't do yet, right? And so maybe that's like data labeling or something. That's generally what we're seeing from the BPOs. But yeah, anyways, I think.”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, they're very different. Maybe one framework to think about this is that at the end of the day, what AI agents are there for is to essentially replace human labor. That's why it's exciting. That's why everyone's so focused on it. One thing you can do then is you can just mac out the spectrum of like how much that human labor currently costs. So with customer service, it's generally outsourced already, especially for the tier one, tier two type inquiries that AI is now handling. It's generally not folks that are super highly paid. And then on the other end, it's engineers, which is the most highly paid people. The one way to think about it is that AI use case will start eating the spectrum from both ends. And the reason why is that because engineers are the highest paid, they have the sophistication to really leverage it well and AI just gives them so much leverage. I mean, there's other factors as well. It just happens that coding is tokenizable and the models are really good at it. That's one way to think about it. I don't know any company that's like, hey, I would like to let go of a bunch of my engineers.”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Enough comfort to go for it. Those two things, I think, are one of the big reasons why it's probably the use case with the most traction at the enterprise. Coding is another one. Coding is a little different. It's a lot more bottoms up.”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something could go wrong for them when they release your product. Leadership's gonna get mad at them. It's like, you know, why'd you do this? So that is a big deal with NAI. I think that is one of the reasons why there's been difficult for a lot of use cases to really take off because at the end of the day, there is always going to be risk because the models are non-deterministic. And so something could always happen. But the nice thing with customer service is that you have a escalation path just naturally built in to the way the product works. The agent's having the conversation if for any reason it needs to exit, it'll just escalate to a human. And that infrastructure is already set up. You already have your call center. You already have your telephony stack or whatever. So you just connect to it. I think that property alone just makes things way easier because these big enterprises that we work with, they're like, okay, great. We test it internally. And then to go live, we're just going to choose this one surface area and release it to 5% of the user base. And even for that 5%, if anything goes wrong, it just escalates. And so that gives our people.”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I would say customer service has a bunch of nice properties that I think are very hard to reason through ahead of time, which is why I think I feel so strongly about this process of discovery, just really staying customer-centric. One of the properties is that the ROI is really easy to justify internally. You have these numbers already tracked. It's like, hey, we have so much conversation volume. Right now, we have a simple chatbot or a simple IVR phone tree. resolving, so to speak, like 15 to 20% of that. If you're able to take that to 50, 60, 70, 80, like that's huge ROI and it's very easy to quantify. It's like, okay, well, I'm going to take the total cost. I'm going to chop off 60% of it. And that's what I'm saving. The other property, which I think is a little underrated, is that it's very easy to go live. I think a lot of gen AI use cases are struggling with that right now, especially at the enterprise level because there's risk involved. People don't want to feel like.”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Struggle to it's like how much you pay for that. I don't know. This is like really exciting, but our budgets are tight right now. And also, it'd be hard to measure how well this is doing and so on. So yeah, that gave us enough conviction. And then you just kind of take a step by step from there.”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was clearly the thing because if you just kind of tallied up, even just the amounts that people said and added them together per idea, this was probably like an automatitude more than anything else. So very specifically what Dekan does is it's an AI customer service agent. So that's the simplest way to think about it. And you're building a conversational AI that can just be almost like a front end for a brand. Anytime someone wants to talk to the brand or anytime the brand wants to talk to them, you can kind of initiate these conversations. And of course, long term, this is not specific to customer service, but I think, again, going back to this exercise, customer service is where we felt like the most urgent need. And in hindsight, I can dissect why we think that is, but that's basically what we felt. And what gave us conviction is that, hey, we had all these folks that were lined up. They were like very willing to invest six figures in a random two-person team. They didn't even know that well because it was actually like a very top of mind initiative for them. Everything else, it was just like.”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At the right time. And so, yeah, by the definition, it's going to be like pretty non obvious and pretty difficult. And so if you can do this process well, it'll give you the most signal.”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And there's a lot of opportunity there. And we be like, okay, great, tell us more, right? And then you kind of dig into it. And I think this just goes to show that as a founder, you kind of have to build your own conviction and kind of do this process yourself. Because at the time, essentially what everyone told us, including like very smart older founders that we knew and so on, was that excuse case is super obvious. There's probably just going to be incumbents that are just hacking onto the product. And because it's so obvious, there's probably a reason why like no one's super big right now or there's going to be someone that's ahead. But no one really knows. And even for me right now and other founders talk to me about other spaces, it's like, yeah, I have my own opinions, but I don't really know the details of the space. And the only way you can really know is by talking to customers and getting that signal. And in hindsight, it turns out that in any sort of wave at any time, I would say like a very small number of good ideas. And your job is to ideally find one of those.”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you just do this exercise. And the nice thing about this exercise as well is that it puts the customer in the same frame of mind as you. And so then they can tell you other things. Essentially, what happened with our company is like we were talking about all these use cases and they're like, okay, great. Yeah, if you did this, you know, we have five people over here. But by the way, we have a 500-person support organization.”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We'd be able to get rid of one of them, assign one other one, and then as a result, I'd pay you like 20K a year or something like that. And then your head, you're like, okay, cool. So now at least you have a general order of magnitude. 20k, of course, isn't amazing. But if it's like, I could quickly turn out a ton of these, like maybe that's interesting. But most of the time, that's not the case because there's not that many good ideas out there, honestly. Most of the time at the end of this exercise, you're like, okay, great. I'm glad I didn't pursue this further, you know, because that would have been a waste of time. And at the end, people are paying you like $100 subscription per month. And it's like a big company.”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That you can take away, so they're like, Oh, yeah, yeah, that'd be great. Now you've kind of solidified at least the potential product ideas. They might adjust it a little bit. They'll be like, yeah, no, actually, no, it should work like this and so on. I remember we talked to a lot of ops leaders like Matt McGuinness from Rippling is like a great friend of Dekagon and telling us about all the different things that happen on his team because there's like so many. And similar with other ops leaders, we would talk to it was kind of a range of companies as well. people like Our Ring and so on. And you get down to it and you're like, okay, great. So now we have these use cases. How much would you pay for it? And that kind of forces them to think, because most people are not thinking about that as they're talking about ideas. There's like, oh yeah, this would be cool. As soon as you force them to think about how much you pay for something, it kind of is a forcing function for finding some order of magnitude, some level of scale. And so then they're like, okay, well, yeah, you have five people doing this full time. If the AI agent could do this well, maybe.”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, yeah, let's say we get into the call and you start by just doing very high level discovery, like, hey, what are the sorts of projects that are ongoing right now? How do you spend your time? What is kind of like stressful for you right now, et cetera? And then you can kind of get a sense for the types of use cases. And then very quickly, you can just form hypotheses like literally on the fly of like, okay, what would a product be that makes sense here? And so then you're kind of explaining like, okay, yeah, so what if something like an AI agent could do XYZ? Would that be helpful? And most likely they will say yes, because there's this thing that happens where if someone's on a call with you, they almost feel like they owe you like”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have to target it based on what that person owns. If that person is very senior, you can ask about multiple. So if you talk to like a COO, for example, you can talk about a bunch of different use cases. That gives you some signal too. And then if you're talking to more of a VP of a certain area, you're probably focusing on one use case.”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we kept digging in. We had a bunch of different ideas, right? At the time, we're not tied to any idea, and it's just kind of open exploration. We were looking at things ranging from data analysis to security to pre-sales to ops stuff. And that process was very helpful. It just shows you that there's a lot more signal to gain than just talking to customers, which is the general advice, or building something that customers want, building something that people want. Like, yes, that is true, but it's very hard to just know that. They'll just tell you what they want. But then it turns out that that's not useful.”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You need whatever you work on, it has to be something that people will really invest in. And how do you tell if that's the case? You can just go really deep asking them. And I think people are usually a little bit almost embarrassed or not comfortable going super deep in these questions. When you talk to a potential customer, they actually don't mind answering questions such as, okay, if we built this for you, like exactly how much would you pay for it? Like would your boss need to approve it or your boss's boss? Who needs to approve it? How would entire organization think about ROI? How would you present ROI to leadership to protect yourself and also like make you look good? And I think if you really go deep there, it's almost like you basically asking like classic sales qualification questions when in founder form and because you're a founder, it's like it just feels a lot less salesy for you to go deeper. That process is what gives you a lot more signal. When we first started, we fortunately were able to get in front of a lot of large companies, mostly digital native ones. And we just ask these questions.”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think this is probably true of starting companies. I think the first stage is by far the hardest because you're kind of just like finding direction. And finding direction is very difficult because by definition it's not something where you can just like you have like a goal and you're just like grinding towards it and you can get there. Your goal could be finding a direction, but it's more exploratory. So I think what we actually are quite good at now, and Ashwin, my co-founder, who's amazing, he also has similar background. He started a company before that got acquired. I think when you started a company the first time, you often share the same experiences, which is like finding direction is very difficult. So I think this time we were a lot more thoughtful about it. And again, it goes back to what your strengths are. I think we view our strengths as like, hey, we're very good at problem solving. We're very just rational about things. We're just good at like execution. And so if that's the case, then I think we just try to systematize the ideation process. And it just comes down to, okay.”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it really varies this week in York, it's probably like four to five hours, and it's not good because, like, I'm not someone whose brain functions that well on less than eight hours.”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You work on to be a failure, essentially. So I think that was much tougher from like a psychological point of view. Nowadays, I think it's tough just like a sheer amount of stuff to do. We're not getting much sleep. But in the grand scheme of things, you got to be really grateful even be in this position to have enough work to do, have enough interesting problems to have a team that you're really excited to work with every day.”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the company was called low key. We basically built high performance video capture software for video games. So when people are playing games, you can really easily capture video clips and edit them and share them. And the whole goal of the product is just like you just get as many users as possible. And again, I think we exited at like a very fortunate time was 2021. But throughout the journey, like at the beginning, we didn't really know what we were building and then trying a bunch of things. And we were like a new grad. You don't really have good intuition like what idea is good or not. So we just worked really hard for three months. And so then you realize that obviously you had no market. So that's tough. And then about a year and a half in, I had two of my good friends from school where my co-founders, they both got burnt out and then decided to leave. So it was just me after that trying to figure out what to do. And so that's, I think, when you, I think that's way tougher than anything we're doing right now. It's like the way you put it, like emotional thing, you don't really know if there is any future or not. There's a lot of pressure because you don't want like the first.”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Emotional, I think I'm a bit older now, so it's not really that emotional. I started a company before this that was, I would say, way tougher than the current one. I think just like mentally makes you feel a lot more calm and appreciative of when things are going well. And timing matters a lot. I think when I first started, I graduated year early to try to start it. And I would say we had a very fortunate outcome, but the whole journey was like very bumpy.”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One is the competitive nature that we just talked about. The other is just like the problem solving. So I think one thing that I believe very strongly is that one of the best things you can do when you're building a company or anything is just have pretty good introspection on where your strengths are. And at least for this group, it's more on the problem solving side, just like, and the problem can be very vague. Problem could be like, how do I build a successful company? And you kind of break down the problem. You can like think really critically and just from first principles of a lot of these markets. Of course, that's not the only way to build a company. Other people, I think some people just have like very good intuition, especially on these PLG type things. But in general, I think just the problem solving capability, like what these contests really teach you is like you're just solving problems and those problems, of course, are not really.”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's constant motivation to improve. I think that's quite nice. One of my big theses is that this audience of people or this sort of community of people, there's a lot of untapped potential there into actually like turning them into people that want to do business or companies and things like that. A lot of them have historically gone into trading or academia. I mean, those are perfectly awesome jobs. A lot of the folks here, this background is correlated to one where it's a little bit more like risk averse and kind of just get your good grades and follow a track. And if you can kind of divert some of that talent into like company building, I think there's just a lot that can be done.”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of like an interesting experience, I would say. I think when you look back now that we're all grown up, it is kind of like a pretty intense way to grow up. But I look back on my childhood with very fond memories. You get a really nice community, a lot of people that are doing the same thing. I grew up in Colorado in Boulder. Boulder is a pretty academic town, but there's not very many people that are like super gunning for these contests. A lot of my friends had just kind of grew up in, not the places you would think, right? Like California, Texas, New York. And so it gives you some level of community of like, okay, there's, yeah, there's a lot of other people out there that are doing the same things as you and you meet a lot of them. And then now that we're all grown up, those relationships have lasted for a long time. But yeah, the environment is one where it's similar to company building. You're like how well you're doing is fairly objective. There's a lot that has to go into it. There's a lot of preparation, a lot of having the feeling of it is like a long-term thing, but because your results are fairly objective.”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hard and having some level of intensity, it can go a long way. So I think to your point of a lot of companies adopting similar mindsets, I do think from my observation, this generation of company building has attracted almost like my demographic of person where it's just like people that grew up in fairly competitive environments, academics or whatever. And a lot of these founders have done well, did a lot of math contests and coding contests growing up. A lot of the people around my age are doing startups now and people are doing quite well. And I think there is some element of if you really embrace this hardcore lifestyle or environment growing up, then yeah, I think a lends itself pretty well to the current situation because there's a lot of parallels.”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Our whole view is that any space that's worth going after, like any large hot market, it's going to be competitive. It's not really specific to AI, right? If you think about Databricks versus Snowflake or Ramp versus BRICS, and anytime there's these big, massive growth opportunities, people are rationally want to go after it. So I think in this generation, it's just, I think it almost attracts like a specific demographic of founder and people that want to build because it is exciting, but of course everyone knows it is competitive because if there is market, then everyone's trying to build it. It's quite easy to start a company these days. You can raise funding really easily. And so when you go out there, you have to at a certain point, like have a pretty deep understanding of like what your competitive advantages are. And one of those could be the culture. And if you build a good culture, that's pretty hard to replicate. It also lasts quite a long time. And to your point, if you have a culture where everyone is really geared towards succeeding and working.”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, for sure. So in our wall, in the SF office, and we just did it in the New York office as well, we have this quote. It basically goes along the lines of there's no challenge that can't be overcome and there's no enemy that can't be defeated. And we just like it. I think it really fits our culture. People there are, we have a very competitive team. Everyone wants to win. We have a lot of energy when we're trying to go out and build because it just feels like there's all this stuff happening in the industry. Like we have such a strong team, let's just go and win. Motivated by my dad told me this. I don't know if this is actually validated or not at Huawei in China as obviously massive company, but they're known for just having like killer culture. And they have some version of this written Chinese, of course, in just big red letters across the back of the big hall. So yeah, really like that. It's kind of interesting. Any time that someone walks in, it like stands out, the coast stands out.”
2025-10-06 · Invest Like the Best · Jesse Zhang - Building Decagon - [Invest Like the Best, EP.443] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source