Heidi Helfand: belief

Transcript context

…It reminds me of advice Sheryl Sandberg shared when she came to the Airbnb offices. Someone asked her: "What advice do you have to deal with all this constant change?" Like the quote I shared at the top of the episode of every six months, there's a massive reorg. Our culture's changing. Teams keep changing. It's constant flux. What is your advice to deal with that? And her advice was: That is good. The fact that you're growing so fast and having to change is the best case scenario because the alternative is you are not growing and it's much harder and much more painful because the changes are much harder. People get let go. Your business may go away. So her advice is just, this is good. Change means things are... And growth leads to change, especially hypergrowth, and that you should appreciate this time versus be afraid of it and think that it's a negative. And it seems like she had such a wide vantage point and could see the forest through the trees of the fact that, well, this company's doing well and this is why we're growing and changing. And I remember one of my leaders, CTO Jon Walker, AppFolio, he told me that once too. He was like... I'd be having a problem or something and I'd come to him and he'd always say to me, "It's always great to be at a successful company, Heidi." And it's like, well, yeah, sometimes you don't think about the finances when you're in your day to day and you have a problem with another person or they come to you and they have a problem with this other person. But in the grand scheme of it, how is the company doing? It's really a critical vantage point that we need to remind ourselves of. But yeah, I wouldn't say all change is always good. Your mileage may vary there, but the general idea that the company is doing well, you're growing and changing, you're trying to make things happen, I think is definitely the space I'd rather be in than the opposite. And I think it's especially true for people that haven't worked at a company that didn't work out where they think this sucks when really this is pretty good compared to all the things that could be happening.…

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