Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Well, I can't go too much into detail about customer work, but I think that it's this trend of reinforcement learning and being very thoughtful about defining the right rewards that we're really seeing across the board and how we can you know, mitigate reward hacking, set up the right rewards, that's super impactful. Evals, again, evals is all you need. Back to evals. One of my favorite quotes from customers is that models are only as good as their evals, which has always held true. I think Greg Brockman tweeted this once, evals are all you need. Yeah, no, truly. Let's talk about Mercor a little bit more. One of the maybe... Not even maybe, I believe the data tells us it's the fastest growing company in history. Yeah. I want to understand what you did to make this happen. So let me just ask, what do you think are some of the core tenets of how you built Mercord that most contributed to being this successful? I think the most important thing is looking at the leading indicators in fast moving markets. Like I remember when I used to think everyone in venture talks about the why now. And I used to think about the why now of how from a product standpoint, less from a market standpoint of like now we can automate the way that we review resumes or the way that we conduct interviews, et cetera. But ultimately, like there is this legacy market that's, you know, has all these incumbents and is relatively stagnant. What matters a ton is actually figuring out what are the new markets, the new pockets of demand that are changing very quickly, where the wealthiest customers in the world are willing to pay whatever it takes to improve model capabilities. And how do we focus on the leading indicators of those markets to make sure that we have the best solution for the flagship customers in the market and optimize everything around that? And that's what I found has been most impactful in building the business. I think that's maybe that's one thing is like leading indicators and markets. If I had to choose another, it's customer obsession like we have had for the last we're starting to like have a couple of product managers help out with go to market. But like for the last year and a half of the business, we've had no one in sales and marketing. And so we're sort of like immature from a sales and marketing standpoint because we focused 100 percent of company resources on how do we build great products and experiences for our customers. um you know just getting word of mouth that the people that have worked with us at other businesses want to keep working with us um and leaning into creating those great experiences and so that's where i spend all my time and i think that some founders can get caught up and like how do they get really good at marketing before they've figured out the thing that really drives um a lot of customer love um and creates the six star experiences that um you're used to building…

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