Lenny Rachitsky: evaluation

Transcript context

…It sounds completely idiotic, right? Again, there's an aesthetic in the world that exists which is that business people dress in suit and tie, they are speaking much more sophisticated than I do usually without an accent, have a full head of hair. They talk about metrics, they are in front of PowerPoint presentations, they usually have a stick and show dramatically at the pie chart that is behind them. And highly charismatic, highly ... So that's our aesthetic. How much is that aesthetic overlapped with our performance? I don't know but some of them ... Some people pull it off who are like this. I think the world is sort of stacked to lead us astray based on our stories about what optimal looks like are just so incorrect in so many ways. Optimism always sounds dumb, or at least naive. Pessimism sounds extremely sophisticated. Metrics driven sounds extremely sophisticated. Talking about fun sounds like naive. Well, first of all, I've always ignored what people think generally. That came pretty natively to me somehow which I'm very lucky about. But I've now actually learned that almost all of the alpha in the world is now in the ... Exactly the things that are unobvious but true. And the things that people dismiss as naive or so. The most successful business person on planet Earth is Elon and he conforms to no idea of what the most sophisticated business person ought to be like in any which way you can imagine. I think we live in a world where the counterfactuals are winning because our ... Because aesthetics are just leading us astray. This is an awesome segue to the other theme that I wanted to spend some time on which is thinking from first principles, Elon is the classic example of that. Honestly, I think you're the other most classic example of that these days. And we'll keep talking about all the ways you operate very differently from other companies which are examples of this. But I want to read a quote from Glen Coates, he shared with me, of how he sees you that gives an interesting lens into your first principles thinking. So here's what he said about you. "Tobi is at his heart a true futurist, he's obsessed with the way things should be in the future. Being data-driven is innately being anchored in the way users and technology are behaving today. He's never really said this to me explicitly, but knowing him I think any design that is drawn primarily from the way things are or were is one that he sees as inferior to one that is skating to the puck of the way things could or should be. " Does that resonate? Yeah. I mean, I think that's correct. That's actually really interesting. Your podcast is a podcast by a- Your podcast is a podcast by a builder for other builders. Here's the most interesting question I think people can ask builders is like, "What is your energy source? Where are you getting energy from?" I think fundamentally the world exists at room temperature. Almost all companies are running at that, humming along, doesn't do anything. There are certain individuals who can inject heat into businesses. Founders do this very well. All the startups anyone's ever heard of have people who are injecting heat because if no one would inject heat into the business, at room temperature, you cannot outperform anyone else. You can't be hotter than everyone else if no one's injecting heat into the concern. So fundamentally, there is a injection of energy into companies that comes from founders and the best leaders, like all the people you've had on the podcast from Shopify have a perfect set of cast of characters of people who are just exothermic. They are just like wellsprings of energy that leads to all the amazing results that we get to enjoy. So the question is where does energy comes from? And that's another one of our discussions which very quickly goes into the emotions. Actually, there's a really... So I watched The Last Dance, the Netflix special of Michael Jordan a while ago, of course, but there was one scene where he just, I'm sure this is a super famous story and he just made up an insight that someone told him so that he would then go and just want to destroy them afterwards, which he then of course proceeded to do because it's hard to imagine anyone more exothermic than him. So we know what his energy source is. It's rivalry. It's potentially it's insight or it's anger, something like this. I am not... My energy source is dissatisfaction with status quo. My fundamental belief is all this talk about technology where all... So many books are about just technology leading to dystopia. You know what dystopia is? Today, compared to what it will be in 20 years ago or any. And you can play this for any part of human history. I'm not making a future statement. I'm making a almost totalical statement about the experience on planet Earth. No one who really thinks about this would want to be born into a world 20 years before today rather than today. And so I think today is the dystopia of future, and I think it behooves us to try to build the kinds of products that lead in towards progress in a small way or a big way. But yes, I think if someone comes to me and says, "Hey, let's go do this thing. And we've looked around and here's how people solve this problem, let's make a good version of that," I'm like, "That was not the job."…

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