Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…No. This is the one thing that has no trade, truly no trade-offs at all. I mean, maybe you'll meet an investor who's suspicious about or doesn't like it. But again, the only situation that would ever become relevant is if the investor is trying to force you to sell the company and you don't want to. So you could just tell them, "Are you telling me that in that situation you believe you should get to decide instead of me?" Is that what you're saying? And then you can ask yourself, "Is this really the right partner for you?" Someone who would say yes to that, "What are we doing here?" All these feces are like, "I'm founder friendly. I believe in your vision." Do you? Do you? Or what's going on here? So that's really important. The other downside, the main downside of almost every technique in this book is that people will waste your time trying to talk you out of it. You have to be ready for that. The book actually has a whole section called how to talk to your investors and a whole separate section about how to talk to your lawyers, detailed exactly what to say, what are the questions you're likely to get because in the years I've been... I worked in the book for years. I have been writing down all the objections I've heard from all the companies I've helped. I always tell me, if someone objects, please call me and tell me what they said. I just wrote them all down. So all the answers are there. But if you talk to your lawyers, they'll say something like, "Well, you might want to just keep your options open. You don't want to prematurely commit to your purpose." And I remember if I hear that, I'm like, "Really? Keep my options open? That's how you get maximum value? What about the option to convert my customers into Soylent Green and eat them? Do I have to keep that option open?" You ask your lawyers this question, they will say something like, "You never know what you might need to do." And then we're like, "Why does nobody trust me?" Well, because you won't even take that off the table. Come on, man. No, if this one has no downside, absolutely, absolute no-brainer. This sounds like a great single takeaway. If there's anything you take away with this conversation, you should do this. The fact that Anthropic did this is such a huge deal because I think a criticism of all of this that people probably hear is this is going to limit our growth, this is going to hurt our potential. We want to be this touchy-feely business. Capitalism has worked in creating a lot of very successful companies and value and innovation. Capitalism has worked in many ways. Why would we need to do this? And Anthropic being the fastest growing company of all time, just like absurd, breaking all records is a Public Benefits Corporation should make you feel okay about doing this. Oh, yeah. Anthropic has helped so much because they do many of the things in the book, including this, what they have. We can talk about the long-term benefit trust. They had that two-tiered governance structure that we were talking about before. But it's so funny, even now, even with Anthropic having such success, people still say stuff like this like, "Oh, I'm worried that I'm not going to be able to raise money." I'm like, "Anthropic's been able to raise some money." That has not been an obstacle. In fact, if you ask people, why is Anthropic winning? They will often cite some surface characteristic. Anthropic very famously has lower inference costs than their competitors. They have faster product velocity than their competitors. What do I hear? Sometimes they say that they have more focus, better focus than their competitors. Those are the most common ones I hear. And for each of those, if you say, "Well, why?" Well, they have lower inference costs. They have better technical infrastructure. Why? Well, because they had some kind of internal breakthrough. Why? If you keep asking why eventually something like, "Well, because they have the best talent." Why? Because people want to work there. Why? And you [inaudible 01:07:52] because people very much want to work. They want to work for the good guys. They think these people, they have the mission to save the world. Why do they have that mission? Because that was the ethos. But why have they been able to protect it? Because they paired the ethos with the integrity. This is at the heart of almost every breakthrough success story you've ever heard. You will find this lurking there as the thing that gave them the competitive advantage to drive that differentiation.…

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