Lenny Rachitsky: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Gustaf Alströmer So this one actually I have a strong opinion about. I think that the reason that we talk about strategy a lot is because it goes back to business school. The origin of business school was to teach people to join the corporate world. And in the corporate world, strategy matters, right? So when you join a big company, you're employee number 2,010 or something, then you probably might have a business school job where thinking about corporate strategy is an important thing. When you are a small startup, strategy does not matter because there's not that much a strategy as about. Maybe later on you might be fruitful to think about strategy, but strategy kind of assumes that you can do multiple things at the same time, which small startups cannot. They can just do one thing at the same time. So execution is the thing that matters for companies. Whenever someone wants to have a strategy conversation, it assumes that they don't understand their priorities. The priorities is always a list from top to bottom where there's one thing that's more important than the others. You can't really have a strategy session about the other things because there's only one thing to work on. So to me, a clear answer here is the good founders are execution-oriented and they just continually have one priority of what they're trying to go for. And then they're just hitting that priority all the time and then new priorities will come up and you don't really have time to have a discussion about company strategy. Company strategy also assumes that you have product market fit because you already have something that's working. If you don't have that, then getting to people wanting your product, that is your strategy. You don't have any other strategy. Awesome. Okay. We found one that's quite different one on the spectrum or the other. How about autocratic and kind of like, I don't know, I think of Steve Jobs-like versus kind of consensus, collaborative driven, if this is a spectrum at all. And then where do you find founders might fit that are most successful? Gustaf Alströmer I don't know if I have an answer to that question because I think when you work at early stage, you might look different than when you work at late stage. I don't spend a lot of time with founders that have thousands of employees and hearing how they are in the... When I talk to those founders, I talk to them one-one-one and I only hear from their perspective. So I don't actually know how they're peering in a large corporate setting. But when you're a small company, you're three people or five people or 10 people, you cannot be an autocratic decision maker. The founding team have a founding team decision making dynamic that could look different. Sometimes it's like everybody decides together on everything and sometimes you say, "I have my area of expertise and you have yours. We split it up, the decision making." Either of those things are fine. I think you just have to have a process so you don't rehash every decision after you made them a million times. I would say the thing that matters the most at that point is to be willing to adhere to the process that you and your founding team have come up with. Your individual nature could be different in a different role in a different company. But for a startup to work out, you have to have a specific process on how you make decisions. Those are on a very short sprints, like weekly or biweekly. And everyone needs to feel good about decisions after the fact. At least they feel good about the process. I don't think that you can just decide... You can't also be fully collaborative, everyone gets decided about everything. So small startups agree on how they decide together. So after that, everyone just follow the process. That's usually how things work out.…

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