Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, so we hit over a billion of revenue last year with under 100 people. And I think we're going to see companies with even crazier ratios, like 100 billion per employee in the next few years. AI is just going to get better and better and make things more efficient so that ratio just becomes inevitable. I used to work at a bunch of the big tech companies and I always felt that we could fire 90% of people and we would move faster because the best people wouldn't have all these distractions. And so when we started Surge, we wanted to build it completely differently with a super small, super elite team, and yeah, what's crazy is that we actually succeeded. And so I think two things are colliding. One is that people are realizing that you don't have to build giant organizations in order to win. And two, yeah, all these efficiencies from AI. And they're just going to lead to a really amazing time in company building. The thing I'm excited about is that the types of companies are going to change too. It won't just be that they're smaller, we're going to see fundamentally different companies emerging. If you think about it, fewer employees means less capital. Less capital means you don't need a raise. So instead of companies started by founders who are great at pitching and great at hyping, you'll get founders who are really great at technology and product. And instead of products optimized for revenue and what VCs want to see, you'll get more interesting ones built by these tiny obsessed teams. So people building things they actually care about, real technology and real innovation. So I'm actually really hoping that the slick on [inaudible 00:07:06], it'll go back to being updates for hackers again. You guys have done a lot of things in a very contrarian way, and one was actually just not being on LinkedIn, posting viral posts, not on Twitter, constantly promoting Surge. I think most people hadn't heard of Surge until just recently, and then you just came out, and like, okay, the fastest growing company at a billion dollars. Why would you do that? I imagine that was very intentional. We basically never wanted to play the Silicon Valley game. And like I always thought it was ridiculous. What did you dream of doing when you were a kid? Was it building a company from scratch yourself and getting in the weeds of your code and your product every day? Or was it explaining all your decisions to VCs and getting on this giant PR and fundraising hamster wheel? And it definitely made things more difficult for us, because yeah, when you fundraise, you just naturally get part of this kind of Silicon Valley industrial complex where people will, your VCs will tweet about you. You'll get the tech runs outlines, you'll get announced in all of the newspapers because you raised at this massive valuation. And so it made things more difficult us because the only way we were going to succeed was by building a 10 times better product and getting word of mouth from researchers. But I think it also meant that our customers were people who really understood data and really cared about it. I always thought it was really important for us to have early customers who were really aligned with what we were building, and who really cared about having really high quality data, and really understood how that data would make their AI models so much better because they were the ones helping us. They were the ones giving us feedback on what we're producing. And so just having that kind of very close mission alignment with our customers actually helped us early on. So these are people who basically just buying our product because they knew how different it was and because it was helping them rather than because they saw something in that current [inaudible 00:08:52]. So it made things harder for us, but I think in a really good way.…

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