Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…We are using both ChatGPT as well as Gemini quite heavily in the company. We have close relationships with both the companies. Specifically I end up using ChatGPT a lot for summarization of documents. That's one thing. All of us have too much to read and we don't have enough time. I've not used NotebookLM yet. I know a lot of people who have started using it and that is the next thing that I'm going to use just to be able to build an audio podcast based on a bunch of information that you can consume. I think that's awesome. What I've been doing is I have been using ChatGPT and Gemini to summarize long user research documents. Some of these reports, they're 50 to 100 pages long. I will never have the time to read them. That's really making me much, much better acquainted with, this is what writers in South Africa feel and this is what's happening in Brazil, this is what's happening in Korea. So that has been a huge enabler. The second thing that I've really, really started liking is the deep research feature. The deep research feature in, again, both Gemini as well as ChatGPT, where you feed them a prompt, you actually present a pretty hard ... The other day we were thinking of a driver feature. It's a driver feature that has been discussed a lot in the past. We haven't done it. I just asked ChatGPT deep research, here's the feature, this is how it would work. Can you let me know if drivers will like it or not like it? Is there anything we can change about that feature for the drivers to like it? And it presented me an answer, which I would say it's an amazing research assistant and it's absolutely a starting point for a brainstorm with my team with some really, really good ideas. So I think that that is making us not just more productive. I think it's actually going to make us better at our jobs. That is an incredible use case. Essentially it's a thought partner on strategy and helping you find gaps in your thinking. And I think for Uber, it's easier because these crawlers can learn a lot about what Uber is. For some products, they won't know as much, but clearly, there's something you could do there, whatever your product is. And by the way, it's cool that you guys give access to ChatGPT. A lot of companies don't. Look, a lot of companies only have Gemini or something like that. Okay, I'm going to take us to another corner on the podcast. I call Fail Corner. And what Fail Corner is about is people come on this podcast, they share all these wins, cool taxis worked and teens worked and safety worked. And look at this, we got profitable, everything's just going great all the time. But in reality, that's not how it goes. Is there a story you could share where something went wrong, something didn't work out the way you expected in your career and what you learned from that? I still somehow, when I think about it, I don't end up calling it a fail, but absolutely you could call it a fail because the product didn't work or the business didn't work and so on. I was at Palm a long time ago. Palm developed a Palm Pilot and then it went into the phone business. Some of your listeners may have used them, some of your listeners may be too young to remember. And then there was a period of time when it was really Blackberry and Palm or the two smartphones on the market, especially here in the US. And then Apple announced the iPhone and then soon thereafter, Android was announced by Google. And it took us a long time to respond to that. It took us maybe three, four years to respond to that. And in the end, HP bought Palm. We did not have the level of scale or the level of hardware quality that we needed to have to be able to effectively compete with the likes of Apple. When you are going through the motions, when you are actually in the moment, you don't always realize what's going to happen. You also think that, "Oh, we will be able to recover and we will be able to compete." But I think there are many, many things that I learned from that and I always keep that very close to my heart. In consumer markets, if you are player number three or player number four, it's a little hard, because the two top players are going to compete with each other so ferociously especially if they're scale players like Apple and Google, it's difficult for number three and number four to be able to keep up with that unless you have a very, very unique angle. And the way I use that now is I am, Lenny, always paranoid about the number three or the number four player or the number two player who may have an innovative idea, who may try a different strategy, who may try a different go-to-market. I just never take the status quo for granted. So that's sort of one learning. And I think the second learning is speed and hustle and resilience. After Palm, I spent time at a couple of startups. I mentioned Flywheel, which was a taxi company, which is also not able to scale. But what I learned through that period is that hustle and sense of urgency is extremely important. So when I think of my portfolio of skill sets right now, really, that's portfolio that I have developed from a lot of failures over my career. And those are, I would say sense of urgency because you need to move fast because status quo can never be taken for granted. And second is resilience because times will be hard and things will be difficult and you just have to power through them and you have to keep building for your end users through that and the times will change. So I would say those are the things that I've learned and those are my failures.…

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