Lenny Rachitsky: commitment

Transcript context

…Well, another thing that Evan taught me was that for a new launch, you got quality, features, deadline, choose two. And I think that the beautiful thing about software is you can keep iterating on it. So it's not like a physical product where you have to always have quality in there, otherwise it's never going to have quality. You can ship it with features and deadline and then improve it iteratively over time. I'm not saying you should always do that. Sometimes you need to at least have a minimum bar of quality for the things you have and you're going to ship less features maybe. So you choose quality and deadline and sometimes you say, "Actually here's the minimum feature set and we're going to have this quality bar and you're willing to push it out." But I think you have to know when you're introducing a new thing, what it's going to take and then to make that minimally awesome product. But also I think that when you're iteratively improving it, you shouldn't just be focused on the features, you have to focus on the quality too. I like this term you use, 'minimally awesome product'. Love it. So the way you got your early users for Figma is quite fascinating. I don't know how many people know this story, but you basically wrote a script to scrape Twitter and create a graph of the most influential designers on Twitter, and then you made it your mission to convince them to use Figma and make them evangelists. Is there anything more to the story there? And then I have a question along those lines. You can't do this anymore, first of all, because the Twitter API doesn't exist anymore. Rest in peace, Twitter API. But look, I was an intern at LinkedIn and when I was there I saw some really cool work people had done with Gephi, which was a network visualization tool. And based on that I thought it'd be interesting to try to, like you said, look at who the design network was, who the central nodes were, which you can just run [inaudible 00:31:31] on and see. And you could do that for other communities too, which I have done in the past just because I'm curious about social network dynamics and social network analysis. And you could just do those things back in 2012, 2013 when Figma started. So I constructed this list of, "Here are the most central designers in the graph", but also then I looked at their work. And the ones that I was really inspired by as a total fanboy, and someone who wanted to learn as much as I could about design, was inspired by these folks, the ones I was inspired by I reached out to and said, "Hey, can I buy you a coffee?" And most of them are really kind. The design community is amazing. And they said yes and then from there was able to learn from them, show them Figma, get their feedback. And I think it started honestly more as me fanboy and me getting feedback. One example is Tim Van Damme. I saw him on Dribble. Max [inaudible 00:32:35], I'm like, "Oh, my God, this guy is just genius. These icons are incredible." I think the first time I met Tim was at Dropbox and think I had this total fanboy moment. I'm like, "I've been tracing your icons." He's like, "Hi." And I had been working on vector networks with a team, and my test cases were a lot of his icons. Because they were just beautiful and I liked looking at them and studying them. And to now have Tim on the team and have him doing the icons for UI 3 is such an honor, and privileged to work with someone of that craft. So reaching out to your hero sometimes works.…

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