Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Well, I love that we're talking about things that Joanne are telling you, because Joanne's really special. I got to just take a moment to give her a giant shout out. She is the only person that I've worked with that has as much technical depth as she does have product taste. And I just want to pause there. It's just truly special. I feel entirely privileged to have the chance to cross paths with her at OpenAI. I learned so much from her. Again, talk about not telling you what to do after six months. She was telling me what to do from day two, and I loved it, because she was so technical, and she has this taste and those two things are very rare to find together. And with Joanne, because she was so special in that way, and I spotted that, I was like, "Wow, I've worked with so many PMs and just like, this is very unique." It felt like we had to find a way to craft this. And sure enough, I was like, "Hey, can you just write up a job description of what is this thing? Because there's something magical here, but I don't fully understand it." I don't think any other person really thinks of things this way, and think this might be a big superpower for OpenAI. Let's codify it." And again, going back to my language being a really important thing, I think the exercise sometimes of writing things down, of things that you intuitively feel, give you an artifact that can kind of communicate with somebody else. So in this case, Joanne writing down some of the things that she got really excited about, helped me really understand that. And I was luckily in a position where I can basically say, "Look, let's create this role. Let's create this role and have you lead it. And I think this is going to be great for the product if we're able to codify it." So I don't think I did anything special. I was just following my instincts, and just following her lead. Again, I'll be clear, I did not author that document. My recollection, she did that. So she did all the hard work in all of this thing, and I don't want to take any credit for it. The only thing I did was just gave her a little nudge of, " I think there's something here. Can you just take a moment to go and write this down?" And when she did, it was just like, "Okay, this has got to be a role and you have to be the leader for this function." What is the actual role she ended up in? I think that'd be really interesting to share. The role was model designer, and it was just a really interesting way that she framed it. And I know this role probably exists in some incarnation in other foundational model companies, but the way that she described it, and the things that she found to be the spikes required, led us to hire our first two model designers after running a search. And they were just perfect fits for the team. And that, I think, is largely a big secret as to why, at least, I'm biased. I love ChatGPT so much, and the way the model comes off, and the vibe of the model, is largely because of this technical plus taste role that she has created and she's leading.…

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