Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…That's a great question. I don't know if I have the recipe for this, but I can just maybe share a few of the things that come to mind. I think the first thing was really treating my role in the beginning more as a facilitator than a decision maker when it comes to product. I think the team was also small enough that everyone in theory could have a good sense of what everyone else was up to. A specific problem we had I think when I joined was that we were just getting to the point where we wouldn't have one weekly meeting where Chris could be in the room, Chris is the CEO of Substack and the person you're mentioning, and decide what we're doing in the next two weeks. We were just emerging from that phase. We had this problem which was all of a sudden, Chris didn't really know what all the teams were doing and the teams didn't really know what Chris had in mind for what they should do and what the vision was. We were hiring really quickly and hiring people who might not have all of the context of being in the room with him for years and being in all of the all-hands meetings. When I first joined, I felt like my main role was actually just solving that. And if nothing else, if Chris could have a really good sense of what all the teams are doing and if the teams knew where he was coming from and could start to get better at modeling him and his vision, that would be a win. For the first couple months I'd say, that was all I tried to do. I think now Chris and I have some reps under our belt and the teams have some reps under their belts too, and that trust just starts to form. We start the week, Chris and I, we sit down for an hour. We go through what do we feel like are the big problems to focus on this week, what are the things we're worried about. We sit down at the end of the week and we check in again. There's just a lot of open communication. I think that helps a lot. Got it. It sounds like the core of this is building trust, which makes sense. The way that you've been building trust, one is just do it again and again and then Chris starts to trust, "Okay, Sachin's going to do the things that I think are probably the right things. " And then you said you have this weekly meeting. Is there anything else that either tactically you find as a really important component of this relationship or any other lessons you've learned about just how to keep this relationship healthy and constructive? One thing that I think about a little bit because like any startup, there's going to be times that are really difficult, times that are really fun. Substack is certainly going through this really transformative time, but we're really evolving in a lot of ways from a tool into a network. We're in the thick of seeing this vision through in a lot of ways Chris has had in his mind for five years. We did a thing at an all-hands a little while ago where Substack went through Y Combinator I think it was maybe now six years ago and we watched the 60 second demo they pitched from 2017. What was so cool about that was we're actually doing all those things now that Chris got up on stage and talked about like, "One day in the future, Substack is going to get into podcasting, and we're going to have this network effect that helps writers grow by virtue of there being other writers in the platform." There's all these things that we kind of couldn't do until we earned our place at the table and the right to be able to do those things that we're doing now. To go back to your question, I think a thing that I really try to be mindful of right now is, how do I catch up? Chris has been thinking about this problem for five times as long as I have. If I can get a good sense of where his vision starts from and catch up those few years and help the teams do the same, that'll go a long way. Because at the same time, everyone now is coming at it from a different perspective. We've a lot more data and evidence. It's really good to have people on the team that have come from other companies and comply that perspective. It's a lot of, again, facilitation and I view that as a big part of my role.…

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