Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Yes. I want to ask your insight on this idea that people might be listening to this and feeling like, "Oh, we need to build a team that just builds great product and is not constrained by metrics and driving growth. " Short-term thinking, long-term thinking, 100 years. This is inspiring I think to a lot of companies because the sounds great. What do you think it takes to make something like that work? Because in a bad case, this team just sits around and builds whatever they want, and the rest of the company's like, "God damn, this sucks. I have to show success in metrics and moving a metric in this team, over there just build beautiful things." Is it like you need a founder like Tobi, that prioritizes this and values it and has a very good taste and intuition? What do you think are important elements of something like that, of this approach working at a company based on what you've seen? Yeah, I think it needs to have a very opinionated founder set of people who are driving what good looks like. And I think Shopify a few years ago and before maybe sometimes drifted into the mode of, "We are just going to build stuff and each kind of team is just going to build stuff not really accountable for it," and that is a very, very bad state to end up. So I think you either have to use, my sense is metrics as accountability, which is the most common kind of way to drive accountability and focus. Or extremely strong founder or set of folks who have extremely strong opinions on what good is and what taste is. If you have one of those two, you can make it work, but the worst case is let's just go build a bunch of cool stuff in kind of a haphazard way. That I don't think would work.…

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