Lenny Rachitsky: recommendation

Transcript context

…The biggest thing was taking off the operations and the management of the executive team and the rest of the company. So think of the president role in Superhuman as an operationally extremely challenging and very growthful role. It's perfect for someone who wants to go on to be a CEO in their next role. And instead of... hiring and firing that team instead of managing and setting their goals instead of the accountability conversations someone else is now doing that in addition because that's not the only job in addition they're also a very strong thought partner when it comes to corporate strategy when it comes to where do we take Act one, our email product. How far do we go down the multiplayer path? How aggressively should we lean into AI? What's a reasonable gross margin in a world with AI? Are we, from a financial perspective, okay dipping now and then coming back later? When should we start building our second product? How do we think about our R&D strategy? Should we keep on hiring in the Bay Area or as we've done for many of our recent hires, should we continue hiring in Latin America? Should we consider other time zones as well? And so on, and so on, and so on. I mean, I'm just randomly coming up with questions, but the list is truly endless. It is... Another way to think about it is it's like a... It's almost like a grown-up co-founder. The two people I co-founded the company with, Comrade and Vivek, they've long since gone from Superhuman. We're now a 10-year-old organization, and I'm one of those rare founders that is persisting and thriving, actually, 10 years in. That said... The journey never gets easier. It gets different. And you still need that co-founding energy around you. And I have a handful of people in the organization who are in their roles providing that kind of energy, that kind of input, and who thrive off doing so. And the president role is definitely one of them. Incredibly interesting. There's so much there. One, just a couple things I'll share, and then I want to move on to a different topic. One is just, it's cool the solution to helping you move faster and do the work you want to do is org design. That feels like a really doable tool. thing. If you're finding you're not spending time on things you want to spend on time on and things aren't moving as fast as you want, it's essentially you can find people to take on things that you don't want and shift the way that the org is structured and that could solve a lot of problems. That's what it did for you. And then I think it's also really interesting. There's this lesson here of as a founder, if you're just feeling like, I don't know, depleted or just like not don't have the partner you want, you could bring someone on that could be that person. Absolutely. Yeah. Okay, there's so much there. That was much more of a rich area than I even expected. I want to zoom out a little bit. And there's a couple themes that came up again and again when I talked to folks that you've worked with, investors and superhuman. And the two themes are contrarian thinking in terms of building the company and strong attention to detail. Let's spend a little time on attention to detail. And like I said, this is one of the things that came up again and again when I was asking people about you. So I have this quote from Ed Sims, maybe your first investor. Were they your first investor? Yeah, there's a bunch of people on Twitter who are going to fight for that. But to record straight, Ed Sim did actually write the first three checks into Superhuman. First three checks? Like subsequent rounds? Well, yeah. I mean, quick sidebar on that. He runs both start benches alongside his partner, Elliot Durbin. And they have a particular interest in backing second-time founders, but they'll also back first-time founders. And they love application and infrastructure areas like superhumans. So we were like the perfect investment. He also wrote a check from his previous fund into Reportive. And I think I'd made him like 5x that money. Nothing to write home about, but definitely I'm going to back this guy again, right? And so I went to him and I said, hey, listen... I think this is going to sound crazy. I want to take on Gmail. He said, do you have a deck? I was like, yeah, here it is. One slide, here it is. And there was a screenshot of Gmail with most of it scribbled out. I want to build that. And it's going to be amazing. So he said, cool, we're in. Can I wire you the money? And I said, no, I don't even have a bank account yet. I come back two days later with a bank account. And he's like, cool, I want to wire you $750K. And I said, I don't even know what I'm going to do with that money. I'm not paying myself. I won't for a while. We don't have any employees. I can't think of anything I want to spend it on. Tell you what, I'll just take 250K. He was like, what? I'm like, yeah, I'll just take 250K. We start having the conversation around venture economics. I'm like, yeah, you know, it's fine. We'll, we'll figure it out. And then a few months back, I took another 250 K and a few months back, I took another 250 K as I began inventing ways and finding channels to deploy capital properly.…

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