Lenny Rachitsky: evaluation

Transcript context

…Appreciate it. Honestly, it's an exciting time. I got to say like there's rarely a time like this where so much is possible. In normal times, if you think about even five, seven years ago, it's so hard to start a company. It's so hard to come up with an idea. It's just like everything feels like it's done, someone else is working on it. Or it's like, oh it's been tried three times and failed three times. And suddenly, it's a time, right now, which I've never even experienced honestly in my career, where everything you try just works. There's so many possibilities. There's not enough people in the world to work on them. Honestly. There's more things that can be done than there's people available to do them. It is just such a rare thing. And honestly, it's not going to last forever. We are going to catch up to this, but just feels lucky to be part of that movement. It's awesome. When you said everything is working, I think what's an important distinction there is the building of the tool works. The tech is now there to build all these things that have not been possible before. The thing that is increasingly, difficult, and I want to get your take on this, is getting anyone to pay attention and stick with your thing because it's so easy to build stuff and everything is just awesome and interesting. It's harder to get people to pay attention and stick with your product. So I guess is there anything there, you've learned that you've built a number of successful products. We'll talk about Snap and what you're doing now, about just, I don't know, what you need to think about these days to get anyone to pay attention and then stick around. Yeah, I mean honestly it's a great point and I think there is a lot of hype obviously, and part of it, that's what's driving a lot of this growth for a lot of companies. And I think from a user acquisition/marketing perspective, in a world five or seven years ago, if you were making something novel and you went to users and it was like, "Oh, we got something better." People are going to be like, "Well, whatever. Everybody says they got something better. I don't care." But today, and this is not probably the way you should do it, but you can go and just say, "We've rethought this thing with AI." And a bunch of people will just be like, "Well, how?" Or "Maybe I should check this out." They'll just try it. Obviously, you have to deliver on the promises. If you don't deliver, people will come in, they'll play around a bunch and then just leave. But if you can truly deliver on the promises, there's great opportunities to require users at scale. So I think that's slightly different. And I don't know how long that lasts, but it is definitely a different time from that perspective. I do think also at the core of building products is solving problems. I think a lot of people sort of get caught up in this, well, it's cool and people will come for the cool right now. People will come in and be like, "Well, let me check it out. It's cool." But at the end of the day, if you're just building a playground and people play around in the playground and then they leave after playing around, it's not a business. So I think that is still key. You have to be solving real problems.…

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