Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…So much of the way that we tackle problems and build products is this builder mindset. It's like, "I have a plan, I then manipulate things to match my plan and make it happen." And this is a way you can create tons of value. Part of the problem though is it can't possibly create more value than the effort that you put into it. And so what I look for instead are things that can be gardened, things that can grow on their own and that you can direct or maybe give a little bit of extra energy to or curate over, and is a totally different mindset for it. So it's like a lead by gardening vibe. I don't try to pick the things in the system. I try to work with what I've actually got and I try to lean in on the ones that turn, I think are going in the direction that I believe is valuable based on constantly seeking disconfirming evidence. And if you do this properly, it looks like magic. It looks like a thing. It looks like getting lucky because what you're doing is you're farming for miracles. And so on a systemic basis, I can't tell you which of these things will work, but I can tell you there's a very high likelihood that one of these will work in a way that is interesting and transformative. And so if you're looking and finding these seeds that have the compounding potential of if they work, they would start working at an accelerating rate, then you don't have to know ahead of time. To me this is, I've been told that this is completely against all the advice that people get building products nowadays, but I think it's a very powerful approach that works in a lot of different contexts. Is there an example that you can give from either from something you worked on or something someone worked on that came or true miss? Because I think people hearing this might be like, "But I got to ship stuff. I got to hit some goals. I don't have time to sit around and garden and plant seeds. I got to actually build." If there's an ecosystem approach, if there's something that if it works, it'll be self-accelerating. So okay, what you're going to do this thing, we aren't entirely sure what's going to work, but if a developer writes a thing and somebody uses it, it'll attract more developers, more users, and then this would grow on its own. Then and it's cheap to do the little example of the thing. It's cheap to build a little open source, tinker the little thing and just put it there. And if nobody uses it, it's fine. It was fun to build. It took you three hours. It's fine. If someone does use it, then you just invest in incremental bit of unit each time that you find a signal that somebody is finding it useful and then you stop if you ever cease getting that information. So I would use this. Anything that is shaped like an ecosystem that has some kind of network effect, and many things have network effects, have some kind of compounding loop. Compounding loops are not rare. They are, "Look." It's like truffle hunting. You have to know what you're looking for and find the dynamics of a thing that if it worked would work at an accelerating rate. Lots and lots and lots of things intrinsically have this shape. Anything with a network effect, anything where the power goes up with a number of users, but it shows up in all kinds of problems that we don't normally apply it to.…

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