Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…100% thank you. GPT wrappers are amazing and they've been much maligned for absolutely no reason and people don't understand how absolutely valuable they are. I think there's also just you guys raised a sip seed round. This is a good time to maybe talk about that. Just these products don't have to become some mega-billion dollar hits. You kind of have this portfolio of companies, you have the content business. So I think there's a really interesting approach to how big these need to get to be successful. Maybe just talk about that. Yeah. I really want Every to be an institution that teaches people how to live a better, more human life with technology, particularly with AI. And both teaches them how to do it with writing and the content we make and then builds tools for them to do that. But I think fundamental to building an institution is, at least for me, the way I would like to do it is I want internally it to feel like this creative playground where we have the opportunity to take risk and do stuff and do weird stuff that just doesn't make any sense. We can't justify anyone, but we just feel like it would be fun. And so I think I'm always playing with that dynamic tension between institution serious, we want this to be lasting and important and it should just be fun. Let's play around. And I think having that tension is really valuable. And so I've always been sort of hesitant to raise a lot of money because I think it locks you into having to be that serious thing that's totally going for it. And there's lots of companies that figure out that balance. But just for me personally as a founder, I'm like, I want to keep the optionality alive and I want to keep the kind of playful feeling alive. And I think part of that comes from I know I have the control to do what I want more or less. There's probably also some deeper psychological things going on there, which I'm happy to talk about if you want to get into it. But I think there's also just... That's what I want. And so when we started Every, we raised a very small 700K pre-seed round, and this was at the height of the creator economy. So we both started our newsletters. He and I started our newsletters around the same time. It was the hypest, craziest thing. People were throwing money around. It was wild. But we raised 700K because it was like, I want to raise enough for us to be able to experiment, have a little cash cushion, but not so much that it locks us into anything. And we sent an email to all of our investors being like, and you're one of our investors, so you've probably got this email.…

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