シャドーイング練習: 24 Hours Inside a YC AI Startup - 動画で英語スピーキングを学ぶ

レッスンを作成中...
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We have a thing that is extremely useful and is used by a lot of companies, a lot of enterprises, and it's growing quickly.
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The question is, there's this window where AI is taking over the world of research
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and we are kind of at the forefront.
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We need to take advantage of that and grow extraordinarily quickly.
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We are not happy with little amount of growth in this stage.
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We need to be having massive growth.
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In the world of startups, most people think raising venture capital is the hardest part, but in reality, it's not.
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The hardest part is what happens after.
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When the money is in the bank, the headcount doubles overnight and every investor is watching to see if you can actually scale.
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How do you actually talk to enough people to get a compelling answer to your question?
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And there is just no way to do that.
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And so this ability for AI to actually run these interviews, talk to users for you, connect those dots for you, across thousands of people, is just infinitely more powerful.
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With pre-seed and seed investing, VCs are betting on the founder, the idea, and their conviction.
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But by Series A+, they're betting on a machine.
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It's a little frantic.
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It's a big design question, design problem that we don't have yet a solution for.
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Kind of the core point of this is that this feedback has been coming up over and over and over again.
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This is the defining moment of a company like
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that where VCs are determining whether there's enough conviction in the market for their product.
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They've raised the capital, but now the hardest part comes to light.
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And the real question is, can they scale fast enough?
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Today, we're actually catching up with Michael Hess and his co-founder Aaron from Outset AI.
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They are an AI moderated research platform.
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They actually just raised a $30 million Series B.
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They've gone from roughly seven people to 45 in the last 12 months, which is an absolutely insane headcount change.
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And they're currently dealing with the aftermath of that, which is finding new office space and moving into that new office.
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So I'm gonna go check them out and hang out with them at a really crucial time.
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Hey, if you have any forover tips, drop your X in the comments.
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Adam Adam hi.
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Will, lovely to meet you.
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Adam is our most tenured account exec and core part of the team.
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The average tenure of an outside employee right now is like two months, something like that.
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We've had a lot of people in the last three, four months.
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I think we were 20 people in December.
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Yes, I think I was 12.
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You were 12, yeah.
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And now my third office, which is crazy.
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Yeah, that is crazy.
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You've been here eight months and you've been through three offices.
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Yeah, we outgrew this office way faster than we thought we would.
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This was our revenue thermometer in YC.
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We did the summer 23 batch.
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Goal is 150k by end of batch.
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So I drew this very crude thermometer that we had hanging in our first office.
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You can see first deal eight and a half thousand plus ten thousand plus two and a half thousand.
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I mean tiny deal sizes, but we filled it up and then Jessica, our office manager, had the idea to frame it.
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And so we put it up.
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It's kind of like art gallery style, like with the light above.
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Yeah, literally. So cool.
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If you were to give the audience like a sum up in one sentence of actually what Outset is, could you run me through it?
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We're a qualitative research platform, so we serve market research and user research teams primarily at enterprise companies and help them better understand their customers.
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We have an AI moderator that will actually conduct user research interviews, dig in deeper, ask follow-up questions.
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A big thing for us is we're not replacing humans.
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You'll see that in like our out-of-home advertising.
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The tagline was Listen to humans, don't replace them.
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We're away from the team now.
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What's actually going on for you guys?
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You've grown exponentially.
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You're moving into a new office.
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Tell me about it.
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of software is infinitely scalable, right?
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You can write code and build a product that's useful to people.
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And if you are lucky, you can scale up to hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue almost overnight, tens of thousands, millions of users.
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But you can't scale physical office spaces infinitely.
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We are bursting at the seams in our current office, which is why we're moving to this new one.
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It's about double the size.
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We have enough desk space, but the meeting rooms end up being really crowded.
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So, actually, that's our ad.
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I see you there.
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Were you a firefighter before?
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Yeah.
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Right after college, I went to Fire Academy and then started working as a volunteer firefighter up in Lake County.
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And I did that for three or four years while I was at another tech startup, actually.
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The plan originally was to go be a full-time firefighter, but I kind of got pulled into this startup, worked there for a number of years, did firefighting on the side.
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I'll never be the guy to post on LinkedIn five things firefighting taught me about how to start a company.
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B2B SAS.
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There's a thing called ICS, which is the Incident Command System.
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It's just like scientifically developed to be a highly efficient way to run an incident.
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And so we draw from that in like how we treat incidents in our code base or at our company.
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There's a clear incident commander.
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We have clear roles and responsibilities, clear channels of communication.
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There's an old joke that's like, how do you, how can you tell us when it's a firefighter?
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They tell you.
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I feel like as an investor, like I would say there's certain qualities and discipline that come with something like that.
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Like you're in extreme environments all of the time.
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You must have such a high level of emotional intelligence to be able to deal with people in those situations too, right?
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Like it's high pressure all the time.
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Yeah.
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Yeah, this is the new office.
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It's about twice the size, so we're pretty excited to move in.
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What are the challenges for you guys right now as you're growing?
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There's two main buckets of challenges.
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There's kind of the standard hyper-growth challenges.
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Any company is going to go through growing pains when you add as many people as we're adding.
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The other bucket is maybe unique to AI companies, which is just staying on the bleeding edge and pushing forward with product and making sure that,
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you know, we are doing things that were never possible before.
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I think that's the only way to win in this market, right?
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If you look at any AI company, like there's no software emote anymore because you can write software in a matter of hours with cloud code and whatnot.
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I use this analogy all the time.
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Like what it feels like right now is we're on a boat where someone's broken the throttle off
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and it's jammed at 100 and there's no way we can slow down.
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All we can do is steer around the icebergs.
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If you look on X or whatever, right?
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VCs, but also aspiring founders and all the rest, right?
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They're seeing so much noise on social media platforms about what's changing with AI.
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How are you staying focused during this period while the shiny ball syndrome is literally everywhere?
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Stay off Twitter.
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Stay off X.
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I'm quite good at compartmentalizing, and so is Aaron.
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You have to be able to take in the data around you.
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And remember what really matters is do our customers find our product useful?
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Are we able to market the product, and are we able to close new customers?
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That's really what matters.
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Nothing else matters.
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Fundraising doesn't matter.
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And if we're not doing those things, then we shouldn't be a company.
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Just went over to the new office.
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It's fully painted.
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Wi-Fi is installed.
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We are good to go for Monday. So, woohoo!
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Super exciting.
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Yeah.
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Yeah, go to the office.
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Before we get a normal stand-up.
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So as some of you know, we're calling another Code Purple.
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For those who don't remember what that is, Code Purple is like we have enough data that we want to go focus on something, and even at the expense of other things.
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So it's like extreme focus for a couple of weeks.
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What's the purpose of the Code Purple meeting after?
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Give it a reminder, we had conversations last night.
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Right.
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My take is that in the stand-up, we talk about the Code Purple.
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Maybe I'll take it.
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The important part is that we are framing it in a motivating way.
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This is an exciting thing.
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It's a little frantic.
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In that kind of spirit, we got a few bits of data
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that came in around the same time last week about some opportunities for us to improve a certain price of our product.
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We're still scoping out exactly what we're going to do, but there was a lot of talk late night in the office last night, in the morning, on Slack,
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and so we are going to go heads down on that for a little bit.
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Thanks, everyone.
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Let's have a great day.
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It's just nice having everyone together, you know?
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And it's fun to get to see everyone's faces and then it's just easy to disseminate this stuff.
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Instead of over Slack, it's just so much better to be able to say it to everybody.
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Hell yeah.
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Our jobs to some degree are leading this group of very exceptional people.
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So that means having the right leaders, giving them the right kind of opportunities, pushing people in the right direction.
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We're doing a really intense sprint on a subset of features because,
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hey, we have enough data now that we can like really focus in on like two or three features.
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So we're going to drop everything and just focus on that.
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Right.
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And so like that's us having enough understanding and context
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and finger on the pulse of the market that we can like make
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that call and focus our resources on a couple of things.
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We need to be doing that.
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We should talk about what we want to build and making sure
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that the things we are building have the most disproportionate impact.
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Kind of the core point of this is that this feedback has been coming up over and over and over again.
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And so I would love for none of us to ever hear this again.
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And so whatever we do, hopefully we do it with that in mind.
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So we are doing a sprint, and we're doing it fast.
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As we identify the points, we will obviously scope to what are we going to ship in the next n weeks.
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But the end result must be a coherent user experience.
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Yeah, I think what I want to use this exact meeting
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for is there's these kind of two main work streams in my, like maybe three main work streams, and just what do we actually want to do in these and discuss.
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I think very broadly, what we started just circling around yesterday.
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It seems like there are kind of three big areas that we can improve and like the problems.
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Latency, speed, guide creation, and editing.
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We've just stepped out of this code purple meeting
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and Michael earlier in the day had a fair bit to say about the general team culture here.
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It's one thing to say, but it's another thing to see in action.
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One of the key points I've just seen is we're in this morning standup and they're talking about this code purple, which is essentially like a sprint briefing.
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It's urgent for them.
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They're going to knock off a bunch of resources from the dev team to actually pull this all together.
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But the important part was how they addressed the team and how they positioned what this was about.
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And it was really cool to see.
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So Aaron said, this is an opportunity.
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We've gotten some amazing feedback here and we can now innovate on the product.
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Essentially, it's product improvements that they're trying to implement here.
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But he could have taken that in a very different direction.
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He shaped it in a way for the team to go, wow, okay, that's so cool we're growing and let's innovate on the existing product and let's make this better
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one of the reasons that I love working at outset
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and working at a startup is having those types of meetings
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where we have a roadmap for this quarter right like sometimes information comes in
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that changes that and we have to adjust on the fly.
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But I think the core tension is how much do we want to be band-aiding
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and fixing something versus how much do we take a beat, take even a day, and just like think about okay where does this get us to where we want to be in three months, six months, nine months down the line.
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That's in our DNA as a startup, as a research startup, and as a startup just in general is okay how do
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we figure out who we need to actually go talk to and get feedback on this.
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Launch the best version of this.
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The reason that we win is how insanely, not just customer obsessed we are, but research obsessed we are within the community, how we show up in the community,
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how we engage people in the community, how we build for them.
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That's why we show up very authentically in the way that we go to market and people really resonate with that, especially with this audience.
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I've loved working in the research space because they're such authentic people.
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Okay, here's my favorite advice for Young Founders is if you want to start a company, just decide you're going to start a company quit your job and then figure out what to build.
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You don't need to, the number one thing I hear from people who are thinking about it are like, I'm waiting for the right idea.
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I think the right idea is never gonna just like hit you.
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You're going to like spend all day obsessing over interesting ideas and then go build something.
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But you gotta have all day to do that.
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So quit your job and go do it.
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It's a hard journey, but if you do a good job
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and you're lucky enough to build a company where people choose to plant their flag with you and join the journey, have fun on it.
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The problem is if you want the 20K, that's a bad idea.
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You have to catch all 20K.
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We're putting the camera off.
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What are we doing this all for
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if not to build something really cool with a bunch of really great people
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and produce a company and a product we're really proud of?

背景と状況

このビデオでは、YCに所属するAIスタートアップ「Outset AI」のメンバーたちが、急速な成長に伴う課題や日々の営業活動、チームの変化について語っています。7人から45人へと増員し、3度もオフィスを移転するなど、スタートアップの激動する日常が描かれています。彼らの会話には、ビジネスシーンでよく使われる表現や、急速な変化に対応するための考え方が詰まっています。

日常会話で使える注目の5フレーズ

  • "the hardest part is what happens after":「最も難しいのはその後の展開だ」。成果物や目標達成後の課題を指す時に使えます。
  • "scale fast enough":「十分な速さで拡大する」。ビジネスの成長速度について話す際の定番フレーズです。
  • "average tenure":「平均在籍期間」。チームの人員構成を説明する時に便利です。
  • "outgrew this office":「このオフィスが狭くなった」。物理的なスペースや能力が追いつかなくなる状況を表します。
  • "tiny deal sizes":「小さな取引規模」。ビジネスの初期段階の取引を説明する時に使えます。

shadowspeakで効果的に学ぶステップ

このビデオはビジネス英語の中でも、スタートアップ特有の早口でダイナミックな会話が多いので、shadow speak(シャドーイング)には少し工夫が必要です。まず、動画で英語学習を始める前に、1.5倍速で一度全体を聴いて流れを把握しましょう。次に、重要なフレーズ(上記5つなど)を選び、1文ずつ繰り返し聴き、即座に真似て発音します。IELTS スピーキング対策にも役立つのは、イントネーションとリズムを真似ることです。例えば、"It's a little frantic"のような表現は、抑揚をつけて話すことでニュアンスが伝わります。最後に、自分で同じ内容を日本語から英語に翻訳して話してみることで、実践的な応用力がつきます。shadowspeaksの練習を続けると、自然な英語表現が身につき、会話のスピードにも慣れていきますよ!

シャドーイングとは?英語上達に効果的な理由

シャドーイング(Shadowing)は、もともとプロの通訳者養成プログラムで開発された言語学習法で、多言語習得者として知られるDr. Alexander Arguelles によって広く普及されました。方法はシンプルですが非常に効果的:ネイティブスピーカーの英語を聞きながら、1〜2秒の遅延で声に出してすぐに繰り返す——まるで「影(shadow)」のように話者を追いかけます。文法ドリルや受動的なリスニングと異なり、シャドーイングは脳と口の筋肉が同時にリアルタイムで英語を処理・再現することを強制します。研究により、発音精度、抑揚、リズム、連音、リスニング力、そして会話の流暢さが大幅に向上することが確認されています。IELTSスピーキング対策や自然な英語コミュニケーションを目指す方に特におすすめです。

シャドーイングのやり方: ステップ別の完全ガイドを読む →