Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…The podcast that really sticks with me is the Parker Conrad episode, of Rippling, but we spent a lot of time on Zenefits because if you didn't follow that story years ago, the press annihilated him. And in talking to him, I learned why. There was a smear campaign paid for by someone still at Zenefits. There were legal threats made to force him to sign this legal document that would allow them to have a non-compete in California so that he couldn't another company, basically making his life miserable, disparaging him. Stories planted in the press. And I had him come on and I had him tell what really happened. And even I, who have seen so much shit behind the scenes with startups in Silicon Valley over the years, stuff you just couldn't believe. This was unbelievable. And the thing that really sticks with me is that no reporter ever, maybe no reporters listened to it, but no one said, "Hey, I got that wrong years ago. I shouldn't have written that. That wasn't true. Let me set the record straight." So he doesn't care. Parker's moved on, he's successful with Rippling, he doesn't think about this stuff. But I do. I care about justice. And it was a horrible thing that was done to him and it affected his health, it affected his life, and I just am glad to have sort of been a conduit to set the record straight. That's an awesome episode maybe for people to start with if they want to check out the podcast. And then generally, I just love this rise of ways for tech people to share their story without this drive to create clicks and create gotcha moments and things like that. Just this, I think people call it techno optimism, this idea of just like tech is great, technology is doing great things for us, let's just tell these stories in a really positive way versus look at all the harm they're causing, technology stop, slow it down. And I just want to have conversations that I personally find interesting. I'm very selfish about it, Lenny. As long as I have an interesting conversation, I tell Carolyn this all the time, as long as we have 20 listeners, that's all I need. 20 really interested listeners, we'll keep doing it.…

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