Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Nice. ... hoping for more examples. Yeah. Okay. Third topic, final topic is around company selection and evaluating where to work. And you have this really cool framework that I think you call PMF for candidates. Can you talk about what that is and then we'll get into it a little bit? Yeah. I somehow stumbled on that name and it just made sense because of the acronym. But I think I was really motivated to revisit this because as we know in tech there's been a ton of layoffs and very public layoffs because of the economy, the state of funding, things like that. And I don't think we're done yet. I think we're pretty far from being done. But it's really important, and I've been burned by this a few times, to put some power back in the hands of the people who are actually seeking the jobs to understand what are some criteria that are important and these are the criteria that are important to me that help you make decisions about which company I should join, assuming they'll have me. And so the PMF acronym, and we're all familiar with product-market fit, right? So in a way it's both the product-market fit for as a candidate with the company, but then also PMF stands for people, mission and financials. And these are my three criteria. They may not be yours, Lenny, or they might not be the average person on the street, but the point is that you should have a set of criteria that you are unapologetically rigorous around and you should learn how to evaluate companies against that set of criteria. First, I guess I'll tell you what by people, mission and financials. So people are these folks that I am going to enjoy working with everyday that I'm going to be able to have hard conversations with, that I'm going to be able to disagree with and work through those disagreements and feel better on the other side of that productive disagreement, for example, and get to resolutions. What do I think about my peer set, the leaders, the people below me, if that's the role I'm stepping into, et cetera. So that's the people dimension. Mission, which is critically important for me, is that if I join a company and I do my job, which often involves growing that company really big, getting a lot of customers, generating a lot of demand and retention and stuff, I want to make sure that a lot of people have a better outcome in life because of that company's existence. And I don't just mean employees and founders having a good financial outcome, which I think is important. But I also mean in the case of creators on Patreon, we were building a new way for creators to make money, which they could then use to hire people, create more jobs, make better content, and live their life in a sustainable way so that they weren't a starving artist and they weren't living paycheck to paycheck. So that's really important, the mission aspect, that's got to exist. And then the third one is, and I think really important now is this idea of financials or fiscal discipline. You've got a lot of companies who raised boatloads of money or did financial planning during the peak of the pandemic and assumed that their business was going to continue operating at the pace that it was operating forever.…

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