Lenny Rachitsky: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Yeah. Thanks for having me on. I want to start with a spicy question. About six months ago, I don't know if people even remember this, you actually left Anthropic. You joined Cursor. And then two weeks later you went back to Anthropic. What happened there? I don't think I've ever heard the actual story. It was the fastest job change that I've ever had. I joined Cursor, because I'm a big fan of the product. And, honestly, I met the team and I was just really impressed. They're an awesome team. I still think they're awesome, and they're just building really cool stuff. And they saw where AI coding was going I think before a lot of people did. So, the idea of building good product was just very exciting for me. I think as soon as I got there what I started to realize is what I really missed about Ant was the mission. And that's actually what originally drove me to Ant also, because before I joined Anthropic I was working in Big Tech, and then, at some point, I wanted to work at a lab to just help shape the future of this crazy thing that we're building in some way. And the thing that drew me to Anthropic was the mission. And it's all about safety. And when you talk to people at Anthropic, just, like, find someone in the hallway, if you ask them why they're here, the answer is always going to be, "Safety." And so, this mission-driven [inaudible 00:05:14] just really, really resonated with me. And I just know, personally, it's something I need in order to be happy. And that's just a thing that I really missed, and I found that whatever the work might be, no matter how exciting, even if it's building a really cool product, it's just not really a substitute for that. So, for me, it was pretty obvious that I was missing that pretty quick.…

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