Lenny Rachitsky: evaluation

Transcript context

…Truly was a research preview. And I remember Sam Altman just launched, "Here, check out this chat thing that we are trying with," and then the fastest product growth in history. No big deal. I want to come back to this point you made about this playbook, anti-playbook kind of a thinking. You kind of pointed out that with ChatGPT and OpenAI, there was no playbook, and you find that often people following playbooks don't work. Talk about that insight. In my current role in my career, I've spoken with a lot of founders, and typically, the founders reach out because I've worked at companies that they look up to and they're looking for that playbook. They're looking for, "Hey, just tell me how Stripe did it. Tell me how Retool did it. Tell me how OpenAI did it." And I really hesitate to share any such detail because there was a combination of context, competitive landscape, and the overall sort of zeitgeist of when the company's operating, how the company's operating, that really adds a lot of nuance to what works in the market. And so doing the same things, like if you're just kind of copying the outcomes or the outputs of the strategy and trying to follow in the footsteps of the tactics, you're not paying enough attention to the inputs and, what were the variables and the deciding factors which led to that strategy in the first place? So what I like to do is try to unpack more of a framework for how do you get to become more of a diagnostician to understand the right strategy or tactic in the first place, rather than saying, "How do you copy something that led someone else to success?" Because those criteria may not apply to you at all.…

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