Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Welcome to Lenny's Podcast where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard one experiences building and growing today's most successful products. Today my guest is Gustaf Alstromer. Gustaf is a group partner at Y Combinator where he's been for almost six years. Prior to that, Gustaf was at Airbnb for over four years where he started the original Airbnb growth team and where I was very lucky to get to work alongside him for a number of years. Gustaf is also at the heart of YC's increased focus on climate tech, and in my opinion is one of a handful of people who've had an incredible impact on the increasing amount of investment and people flowing into climate tech. We chat in depth about what's happening in climate tech, why things have shifted so much recently, what's new and exciting, and how to think about the space if you're hoping to make the jump. We also get deep into Gustaf's experience working with over 600 startups over his time at YC. We talk about what are the most common mistakes that early stage startups and founders make, what advice YC partners give founders most often, the most common attributes of successful founders, the importance of having a technical co-founder and why that's the case, so much more. I guarantee you will leave this episode smarter and more inspired and I can't wait for you to hear it. With that, I bring you Gustaf Alstromer after a short word from our wonderful sponsors. This episode is brought to you by Linear. Let's be honest, the issue tracker that you're using today isn't very helpful. Why is it that always seems to be working against you instead of working for you? What does it feel like such a chore to use? Well, Linear is different. It's incredibly fast, beautifully designed, and it comes with powerful workflows that streamline your entire product development process from issue tracking all the way to managing product roadmaps. Linear is designed for the way modern software teams work. What users love about Linear are the powerful keyboard shortcuts, efficient GitHub integrations, cycles that actually create progress, and built-in project updates that keep everyone in sync. In short, it just works. Linear is the default tool of choice among startups and it powers a wide range of large established companies such as Vercel, Retool and Cash App. See for yourself why product teams describe using Linear as magical visit linear.app/lenny to try Linear for free with your team and get 25% off when you upgrade. That's linear.app/lenny. This episode is brought to you by Eppo. Eppo is a next generation A/B testing platform built by Airbnb alums for modern growth teams. Companies like Netlify, Contentful, and Cameo rely on Eppo to power their experiments. Wherever you work, running experiments is increasingly essential, but there are no commercial tools that integrate with a modern grow team stack. This leads to wasted time building internal tools while trying to run your unning experiments is increasingly essential, but there are no commercial tools that integrate with a modern grow team stack. This leads to wasted time building internal tools while trying to run your experiments through a clunky marketing tool. When I was at Airbnb, one of the things that I loved about our experimentation platform was being able to easily slice results by device, by country, and by user stage. Eppo does all that and more, delivering results quickly, avoiding annoying prolonged analytics cycles, and helping you easily get to the root cause of any issue you discover. Eppo lets you go beyond basic clickthrough metrics and instead you turn north star metrics like activation, retention, subscriptions, and payments. Eppo supports test on the front end, the back end, email marketing and even machine learning clients. Check out Eppo at getepo.com. Get, E-P-P-O.com, and 10X your experiment velocity. Gustaf, welcome to the podcast. Gustaf Alströmer Thank you, Lenny. Honestly, it's so great to see you. I'm excited to be talking to you. I've been looking forward to this conversation for a while ever since we booked this. We worked together at Airbnb for many years. I was really lucky to get to work with you before you moved on to bigger and better things at YC. Speaking of Airbnb, you once tweeted about how special an experience that was for you, and I think even more interestingly, how many of the people that have left Airbnb can't find another place that's as special that just like that bar has been set too high. And so my first question is just like, what do you think it was that made Airbnb so special? Why was it such an important experience for you and other people? And even more importantly, just what is it that you take from that experience that you bring to startups that you work with now? Gustaf Alströmer Yeah, it's funny. I think this year in a couple of months it'll be 10 years ago since you and me started Airbnb. Wow. Gustaf Alströmer It was 2012. The reason I treated that was I asked everyone that I'd met after Airbnb, because I had this experience of like, this was the highlight of my career up until then, at least being in the team like that and I asked everyone, "Have you found anything better?" Besides maybe one or two people, I haven't heard anybody say that they found something better. And they all missed that dearly. I thought a lot about why that was the case, but I would say Airbnb did not feel like a normal job. It felt like more like a group of friends trying to just do something together and we were friends. At least in the beginning it did not feel like this was a job. It was sort of like an ongoing project and an assembly of amazing people. I think in the end we managed to build two things, like a really successful company, thanks to Joe and Nate and Brian just for starting this. Without them there would be nothing to build. I think people don't like to use the word family, but I feel like that way because when I go and meet with Airbnb alumnis from that team. We have a very special bond that reminds me of close social connections more than anything else. It does not remind me of coworkers. I asked myself why this was the case. The best answer I have is probably we brought in a special type of people. We had very diverse backgrounds. A lot of us was former founders. Not many of us were career people from the technology industry of the early days, not many of us. I think that bar that we set, the first, I believe when I joined there was probably five or seven PMs and there was 30 engineers or something and you joined a little bit before me, those people set the bar or set the standard of what we were looking for afterwards. I think it took a long time to change that narrative. I mean, eventually you have to hire people that only had big corporation careers, but I don't remember we did that for a long time. When I actually read my goodbye note recently, my words there still means a lot to me and it means sort of like you're trying to reflect on exactly these things on like, building a great company that became successful and being part of this sort of family of really close friends.…

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