Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Oh my God, it's such a weird ... I don't think about win versus fail. I feel like every day I fail a lot. What are big ones that annoy me? Culturally, I think in running teams, I think a mistake that I made is at some point because hiring ... Now, it's easy, but at the time hiring designers that can code was quite challenging. And so then if you loosen that requirement, I did not predict how quickly that becomes like a slippery slope. And I would rather have had fewer designers that are more polymath. So I think that's one on organizational side. On product, oh my God, I mean GitHub Actions and they're the ... I don't know, it's very technical, but the fact that we also thought we didn't need good package management for the actions. I don't know. I think the world would be better off if we had thought about that slightly harder. This is maybe like I started a competitor to Notion in 2014 and I didn't think of it as ... In fact, it wasn't a competitor of Notion because the week that we were going to get a term sheet from True Ventures, Notion pivoted from website building to document collaboration. And so True Ventures was like, "Hey, sorry, we have a conflict." And we're like, "Yep, no worries." And we spent so much time polishing the editing experience. We did markdown folding, all the stuff that you now have in Obsidian, we did that back in 2014, and we thought that's the thing that really matters. And then Notion, by comparison, the first version of the Notion editor was terrible. It was all blocks. You couldn't even select between two blocks, but it turns out it didn't matter. And so I think that is just working diligently on the wrong thing for way too long, huge fail. That's so interesting. Just coming back to your insight of when a product works, there's just this tiny core thing that is the thing that makes it amazing and what people want to come back to no matter how bad everything else is. I think that's a really interesting takeaway. We actually kept adding new features. At some point you go down to the death spiral, so we kept adding yet another feature of like, "Okay, is it good now? Is it good now?" And it's just, nope, the core wasn't good.…

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