Ramesh Johari

The highest leverage for data science in product is moving from simple prediction (correlation) to causal inference that informs business decisions.

"Predicting is about picking up patterns, but making decisions, it's about thinking about these differences... the first and most important thing that I feel very strongly about in what would I get a d..."

AI expands the volume of possible hypotheses and creatives, making the human role of 'funneling' and prioritization more critical than ever.

"What AI has done for us is it's massively expanded the frontier of things we could think about our problem, hypotheses we could have, maybe things we could test... I really think actually what that do..."

Kickstart a marketplace flywheel by using scaled liquidity on one side to subsidize and attract the other side.

"The choice you're facing is, how do I take advantage of having that one side scaled to attract the other side? ... Uber... would just hand out coupons for free rides at events, parties, things like th..."

Initial pricing models must account for the long-term risk of disintermediation as trust between participants grows and the platform's relative value decreases.

"Early commitments in this case to a particular pricing scheme, particular monetization, can really tie your hands as you then realize later you actually are a platform. A great example of this is when..."

The guest provides deep, specific insights into managing the 'whac-a-mole' nature of supply and demand, scaled liquidity, and the reallocation of attention that goes beyond general growth loops.

"Marketplaces are a little bit like a game of whac-a-mole... a lot of marketplace management is moving attention and inventory around."

Asking candidates to visualize total success reveals their long-term strategic thinking and their understanding of the broader impact of their work.

"I like to ask people is, 'Okay, now imagine everything works out, all the challenges you're facing work out, all your plans work out, everything hits the top end of your vision for what this could be...."

A healthy experimentation culture values learning from 'failed' risky bets more than safe, incremental 'wins.'

"Experimentation was never historically in science about winners and losers... Experimentation is always very hypothesis driven. It's about, what are you learning? And that's really an important distin..."

Bayesian experimentation allows teams to incorporate historical knowledge into new tests, preventing the 'wasted' effort of ignoring past learnings.

"There's ways to take the past into account, to build what's called a prior belief before I run an experiment, and now take the data from the experiment, connect it with the prior, to come up with a co..."

Learning is not free; the cost of an experiment is the lost opportunity of not having the 'winning' treatment applied to the control group during the test.

"What I find so interesting about experiments is that when you don't know something, it seems not even a question that you would allocate some of your samples to all options... After the fact you're li..."

Marketplace management is a zero-sum game of attention and inventory; success is defined by choosing the 'right' winners and losers.

"Marketplaces are a little bit like a game of whac-a-mole... Many of the changes that are most consequential create winners and losers. And rolling with those changes is about recognizing whether the w..."

Marketplaces should be defined by the specific transaction costs and frictions they remove rather than the goods or services they facilitate.

"Uber and Airbnb are selling you the taking away of something, which is a weird thing to think about. What they're taking away is the friction of finding a place to stay. They're taking away the fricti..."

Most modern tech businesses eventually face the choice of becoming a platform or marketplace, so founders should view 'marketplace' as a scale-up strategy rather than an initial identity.

"Maybe we shouldn't talk about the concept of a marketplace founder. Really there's founders. And I think every entrepreneur... it means literally any founder is a marketplace founder. It'll be a choic..."

The absence of a rating is often a strong signal of a mediocre or poor experience that users are too polite to report.

"There's a great concept in the literature on rating systems called the sound of silence, which is this idea that there's a lot of information in ratings that are not left... this was much more predict..."