When to zoom in, when to zoom out, w/Josh Silverman (Etsy/eBay/Skype/Evite)
Masters of Scale
WaitWhat
4.6 • 4.4K Ratings
🗓️ 23 January 2020
⏱️ 45 minutes
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Summary
When do you see the forest? And when do you see the trees? Building a company to scale requires a delicate balance of macro and micro focus – and the skill to know where to focus when. Josh Silverman has built that skill in leadership roles at Evite, eBay, Skype, and now Etsy. What he’s learned: Success isn’t just about zooming in on the details or taking the long view – but about knowing when to switch between perspectives.
Read Nik Money's book The Selfish Ape: Human Nature and Our Path to Extinction.
Watch Scott Suko topple dominoes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IuUp-rI0VU&feature=youtu.be
Read a transcript of this interview at: https://mastersofscale.com/josh-silverman-when-to-zoom-in-when-to-zoom-out/
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, it's Bob Safian. You've been hearing me as the host of rapid response in this feed for a few years now, |
| 0:07.8 | with short newsy interviews alongside the deeper dives of Masters of Scale. Well, I'm excited to share that rapid response is expanding into its own feed. |
| 0:17.0 | We'll be putting out shows twice a week, focusing on the urgent issues that business leaders are dealing with in real time. |
| 0:24.8 | So search for rapid response in your podcast player |
| 0:28.0 | and subscribe to make sure you get all our episodes. |
| 0:31.2 | I'll see you on the other side. |
| 0:32.8 | We built a four foot by four foot image of the earth, |
| 0:39.6 | completely solved filled with dominoes. |
| 0:43.0 | That's Scott Suco, engineer by day, |
| 0:46.0 | Domino artist by Passion. |
| 0:48.0 | He founded the Maryland Science Center Domino team, |
| 0:51.0 | and his team creates enormous, intricate domino art displays |
| 0:55.9 | like the one he's describing. |
| 0:58.3 | It showed the moment the dinosaurs went extinct. We had a comet destroy the earth right under the nose of a real T-Rex. |
| 1:10.0 | I feel I must point out that it was the skeleton of a real T-Rex on display at the museum and forced to reenact the trauma that had killed it 65 million years ago. |
| 1:25.7 | With tens of thousands of tiles, the display took a week to build. |
| 1:30.6 | The scene was expansive and unexpected. |
| 1:35.0 | We had these white and red, larger and larger pieces of dominoes that would spread out and recombine that looked like comets. |
| 1:44.0 | And then finally the last one smashed right into the earth and it fell down right |
| 1:47.6 | underneath the nose, the dinosaur. So that was my favorite one ever. |
| 1:52.1 | As any domino artist knows That was my favorite one ever. |
| 1:53.0 | As any domino artist knows, creating a display of galactic proportions |
... |
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