Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…icon is there. Building something that becomes a verb, taking some of the pain out of technology, things like that. So really reorienting. Yeah, it's not about just the external scoreboard just much. It's more about the craft of being a great CEO and building things I'm really proud of or really making a difference. And so those kinds of things, none of them all coalesce. It's like this lens that slowly and stubbornly comes into focus, but making the time to have some of that reflection was super important. So much of what you're describing makes me think about founder mode in a lot of different ways. One is your point about how you didn't have a lot of time to think about where things might be going and how the markets are shifting, and that has to happen, basically, no one else is going to do that if it's not you. Also, just this idea of how much of the solution was you understanding yourself better, reflecting on where you have strengths and weaknesses. Also, I'll mention, so before I had Brian Chesky on the podcast, I asked you, "What should I ask Brian?" And you asked me to ask him basically about founder mode, which was the first time I think you talked about it, and now it's like this whole thing. So you've been in the middle of all that for a long time. I guess just any thoughts on the importance of that and how you think about that as a founder? So founder mode means a lot of things to a lot of people. So it's a bit of a Rorschach test, but I think parts of it that really resonate with me are, there's this evolution you go on as a founder where you don't know what you're doing and everything is new and unfamiliar. And then you're also very involved in all the details because there's no one else to be involved in the details. It's not like someone else is coding for you if you're just in your room at home. But then over time, you have to, there's this, Ben Horowitz calls it the Product-CEO Paradox, where the first way that companies die is from founders not letting go. And so you need to learn to scale yourself and hand off your responsibilities and operate at a higher level of abstraction. But then the second way that companies kill themselves is the founders get too far away. And I felt like I had done that. That's a big part of the problem that led to a lot of this chaos at the end of chapter two, where I was like, oh, man, I'm on this treadmill. I'm doing stuff, but I'm clearly not setting the right direction. Or people are confused or it's not working, and I was too distant from the product. And then there's all kinds of issues you can get into as you hire an executive team and get that to function well. And so I think there's a debate to what extent founder mode is a mindset or a destination. To me, I think the destination part is pretty important. I think it's like after that learning journey, suddenly you have this conviction from actually knowing, from having lived experience and navigating a lot of these things where suddenly it's a lot clearer. You don't have the same kind of confusion or learning curve problem. And then if you start out being too far leaned in, then you lean out too far. And I think a lot of that founder mode flip is when you're like, hey, this is not the company I want to be running. I need to be more involved. I need to stop making excuses. And basically, I also don't want to apologize or negotiate all the time for the kind of company that I want to be part of and run. So I had that too over time, maybe more towards a chapter three, some of those elements of... And I don't know if there's a way to get to this destination without some level of pain. Certainly the Elons and Steve Jobs of the world had big spans of wandering in the desert where they were not as cool as they are- ... spans of wandering in the desert where they were not as cool as they are today. The things they were doing weren't working, and they managed things very differently in that sort of post wandering phase. Suddenly had this level of conviction, and intuition that they might not have had before, or they sanded down some of their more counterproductive instincts. Again, there's a lot of surface area. I don't know if anybody has a common definition of founder mode, but certainly that evolution, the way I think about is it is very difficult.…

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