Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. Well, there's different companies. There's companies where brand is literally everything, where they're doing something that's not crazy innovative in the first place and the brand is the thing that is the whole company, and that's fine. That's a completely valid way to do stuff. It's like people that can take in information and recommunicate it in a way to another audience or whatever that they hit that audience in a way that the original information couldn't do. Think about all of the people who write books on psychology, and medicine, and all kinds of stuff that write it for a broader popular audience. They're the ones reading the medical papers, they're the ones digesting all of this really huge complicated data, and turning it into something that normal people can read. I think that there are companies that are doing that. They're taking a thing that is not innovative or isn't like they're not the only ones doing it, but they're repackaging it in a way that takes that and makes it so accessible to so many people. In that case, brand can matter immensely, where the brand really is the thing that shows people that the thing that you're doing has value. But for a lot of people, the brand should be somewhat invisible so that the thing itself becomes the star. If we think about the experiences that we have using products, sometimes there's products where there's a ton of fun and delight built into how you use it, and that can happen through brand through design choices and things like that. Sometimes the delight is the fact that nothing is getting in your way as you're using that product. You just figure out what's your ethos of your company. Is the whole thing about doing a thing well, doing it simply, and making sure that everything gets out of the way of that experience, or is it like we're trying to generate this delightful thing or we're trying to open it up to a new audience or whatever? Depending on whatever that goal is, brand can have a different place in that equation. I think some of this unique perspective on the power brand and the need for it in tech companies comes from you're not like a tech person. You work with tech people, you work with tech companies. Do you feel like that has an impact on the way you think and the value that you bring to companies to give them this very outside perspective? I mean, most of the folks that I know that work in brand or traditional graphic design, print design, they don't necessarily have a lot of insight into how building companies works. They're not friends with a ton of startup founders and things like that. I've just had been in this very fun position being like everyone's token creative person in The Bay for a while, and this been for a long time. I remember speaking at a Silicon Valley event that was women in Silicon Valley in 2009 or 2010, something like that. It's interesting to be a person that has never actually, themselves, worked at a tech company but felt so involved and understanding about how all of that works. My partner, the reason why we're in The Bay is because he got hired by Facebook back in 2011. We were olds at the time. Take that with a grain of salt, don't judge me. Because we were 28, 29 coming over to work at Facebook and everybody there was 23, 24, and so all the people that we ended up meeting in The Bay were more people our age that were moving on to start companies and things like that. We just got to see that perspective so clearly of what it is to branch out on your own, to fundraise, to do all this stuff, to pivot, to do little experimental apps and see where that goes to get acquired as a team versus getting acquired as a technology or whatever. I've been able to see that in a way that I feel like a lot of people that do my job don't get to see. That makes me very sympathetic and towards what it is to want to build a brand as a founder. I understand that you have limited resources and those resources aren't necessarily going to get devoted to doing a $200,000 brand exploration, because when you have $500,000 of money at all for a year to try to get things going, you certainly should not spend half of that money on branding. That's my opinion, but that's not to say that brand can't be important and can't come in at some level or can't be thought of as a partnership between you and someone else where... There's this whole idea of fractional leadership now, which I feel like hasn't really infiltrated my world as much, but I don't know why it hasn't, because most people don't have internal comms teams, internal brand teams, until the company is very mature. The idea that you could bring someone in who is a real expert in whatever it's that they do, just as you need them, and they just get consultant equity kind of thing, that should be more present because people don't necessarily need to have internal brand teams for the first six months to a year of when they're doing stuff unless they grow really significantly.…

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