Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…n it's probably not a great idea to work at a defense company. So it's a shifting landscape but I kind of felt pretty strongly that a lot of people in tech just didn't want to think about this at all. So you have engineers now who are working on optimizing short form videos for higher engagement, and you sort of want to say to them like, "Hey, are you thinking about what this is doing to the brains of young children?" Or "Have you seen an 11-year-old kind of scrolling something for five hours and do you think this is a good thing?" And I think people don't want to think about this stuff too much. I'm not saying I know the answer, but there was almost this refusal to look at what tech was doing from a political lens for a very long time. It was just like, "Hey, let us play with our toys, let us sit in our little park, and don't bother us, and we're just going to build cool stuff and launch it." And 2025, we're in a very, very different state of the world, tech is involved in politics now, and politics basically came to tech. There's this famous image of Mark Zuckerberg, he's sitting in Congress and he kind of looks very pale, and he's like, "Why have they dragged me in here again?" But I think tech went through this journey of, oh, we're suddenly becoming important now, oh, we're really, really important now, oh, we better stop playing this game of politics. And so I think what I'm saying now is a lot more consensus than it was 10 years ago, but at the time, the feeling was just like, "Look what we are doing is political, so you better engage with that." I think when this became really real for a lot of people is with the Ukraine War, the government's running out of certain vehicles and ammunition, we're just not able to produce it, and then we're like, "Oh, thank God for a company like Anduril and all these other tech companies that are actually ahead and keeping us ahead." I think the only reason the US is ahead of that... And keeping us ahead. I think the only reason the US is ahead of China and the space race is because SpaceX just is one company that just has been doing this for a long time. So I think a lot of people have kind of realized, okay, maybe we need these things. Right. And I would make this argument as well, it's like people are like, well, how can you feel good about working in defense? And it's like, well, you're not going to feel great if China invades Taiwan, actually, you're not going to. I think you are probably also not going to like that outcome. So we do just live in this world where you do need to build up deterrents to these things and they better be good. So to me, it didn't feel that difficult of a question. I think when you zoom into particular things, they can be very difficult questions and there have been a bunch of those in the last couple of years. But yeah, again, disengagement isn't the answer.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.