Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…It is funny. I have said to a friend before that asking someone who was at Twitter in the 2015, '16 era is a little bit like a therapist asking somebody to tell them about their childhood. It's like you know the trauma that you're bringing up. For those who are not familiar with that lore, I think we had nine heads of product in the two years that I was there. It was that level of kind of chaos. I think my favorite quote was from someone on the partnerships team who said it felt like Kara Swisher lived in the air vents. That was how often drama was going on about the place. I think, Lenny, I probably took two overwhelming things away from my time at Twitter. And other than some incredible friends, and I will say that the product diaspora from that era of Twitter is pretty incredible and everywhere. The first one is if you truly find product market fit, if you manage to bottle lightning, doesn't matter how badly you screw up the organization of it. It's huge. And Twitter genuinely had that level of product market fit that you could emotionally feel how much people loved your product. And it's a really powerful litmus test to learn relatively early in your career that that's what PMF is. Not like, hey, the graphs look okay. There's a level of fervor that goes in. I think maybe on the flip side of less positive is what it definitely learned is most of the time you hear it's really complex, it isn't. Leadership's just weak. So the two years that I was there, everyone knew we were going to have to lift the 140 character limit. There was working group after working group. The project beyond 140 was everywhere. Because we knew, for example, that people in Japan Tweeted six times more often than people in Western markets. And it was largely when we spoke to them because Kanji lets you say heaps more in the same number of characters than a romance language did. We knew that was the inevitable end state, but there's obviously a bunch of work that was needed and trade-offs, and just no one wanted to make the call. And so there was just yet another design sprint, yet another cycle. And it was another year and a half after I left, I think it was maybe even almost two years after I left, before someone actually did it. And it turns out nobody died. The soul of the place didn't fall apart. I imagine the same discussion went on for editing Tweets, which took another two and a half years. Sometimes things aren't actually that complicated. It's just weak leadership. Yeah, it's funny how far it's come. Now you can write entire blog posts on Twitter. Articles is a big bet. On the product market fit piece, I think even more important there is the network effects of a Twitter, which you spend a lot of time thinking about building marketplaces. To me, watching Elon basically change everything, I forget who Tweeted this, but just everything changed. The brand, the name, the website. Number of people working there, everything.…

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