Ray Cao

Silent document reading at the start of meetings ensures everyone has the same context before discussion begins.

"We are using a reading format of meeting. So it's a doc reading. We just read in comments and understanding the context again. It is the doc, bring everybody together, and then we discuss the things t..."

Look for candidates who possess natural curiosity, high discipline, and the ability to prioritize in a chaotic environment.

"Curiosity is a very important quality when I'm actually talking to my interviewers because I want to see that they are naturally curious to new things. They want to learn more about the new things and..."

Never compromise hiring standards for the sake of speed, as the wrong hires will eventually slow the team down.

"The first mistake I made was... we're trying to grow too fast and sometimes as a hiring manager I have to compromise the standard we're trying to hire. So that's the mistakes I think I made first and..."

Maintain a 'Day One' startup mentality to avoid complacency and drive continuous growth.

"We always have this mentality we are a startup, we're a young company, we're always hungry for growth. And a very wacky way is like, 'How can I run my second half of my marathon faster than the first..."

Extreme cross-functional closeness between sales, engineering, and product is a competitive advantage.

"I have never seen a company, the engineering team and the product team and the sales team are so close... our sellers and our engineering team and our product team and also data scientist team, we're..."

Empower employees by providing full context and treating them as business owners rather than giving specific instructions.

"The number one thing is context, no control. That's the reason why we're always encouraging people to see themselves as a business owner."

Breaking down organizational silos requires giving employees the context to see the full business picture.

"Context, no control. That means you actually can go above and beyond to really think about your whole business problem as your own problem and your piece is maybe one part of it to solve the puzzle, b..."

Effective delegation requires situational leadership—knowing when to dive into details and when to stay high-level.

"It is very important that the leader at any level needs to be situational. You cannot always down to the wheat and you cannot really distance yourself from the reality. So you need to find the balance..."

High-velocity creative testing is essential for success on content-graph-based platforms.

"I would say at least 10 different ad creatives will be ideal per week and the more the better."

Start with broad targeting to allow the algorithm to discover your audience rather than over-constraining it with niche parameters.

"A broader targeting approach is actually recommended at the very early stage... I can see for the first two years in the business... they want to do a very small niche targeting on the platform becaus..."

Authenticity and 'unfiltered' content perform better on modern social platforms than polished, perfect production.

"Number one thing is that you have to really be unfiltered. I mean, you don't really need to be perfect on this platform. I mean that's the beauty of it. You can be yourself, you can really share the t..."

OKRs should be used primarily for cross-functional alignment rather than just as a tracking mechanism.

"We don't take OKR as a shell, but we take OKR as its core is cross-functional alignment, cross-functional goal silo... The things that we can improve is the input and output. The output is very clear,..."