Lenny Rachitsky: preference

Transcript context

…it harder, but it's very important to understand what else is going on at the company. What else people are working on? And just keep talking to people and build relationships with the company because those are what will lead to the next set of opportunities. I think many opportunities don't come linearly. Just working in your job and making sure you get promoted. That's not how I think great careers are built. I think great careers are built by knowing a lot of people, doing great work so they know and want you on their teams and just waiting for serendipity and then seizing it and jumping. Another example is I had advised a company which was acquired by Square and the fundraisers were Google. And Jack, the CEO of Square, asked the founder, who's one of the best product people he knows, my name was mentioned. So then they reached out to me. And I would never have really, I mean, informal advising. I didn't have any equity or something in the company. I just helped them out because they reached out to me because it was a former colleague. And I said, sure, I'll help you out. And then that resulted in him saying good things about me. And that led to the inbound from Square. So I think you've got to prioritize this stuff. I mean, you've got to be careful it doesn't take up your life. I think it's very important to be curious and open to serendipity. I realize in today's world, there are lots of crazy serendipity things that happen. If you take inbound from smart people and you just chat with them and you help them out, paying it forward is the other thing. Paying it forward, and Lenny, you're a great example of this. You paid forward so much, your articles, the stuff you write. Good things happen in ways that you don't even realize. You've built up a reservoir of goodwill that comes back to help you in different ways. I love this advice. I don't know if you know this already, but I actually did a TEDx talk once about serendipity. It's called losing your serendipity. It's out there on the internet in case people want to check it out a long time ago. But I love, love, love that concept. And it's such a good story. Just kind of pulling that thread a little bit. I'm curious, when you're looking for opportunities, would you suggest people focus on things they're excited about and kind of like passion that's pulling them in or more, I just think this is a big opportunity and maybe I'm not so excited about doing the work, but I'm just going to follow it because it may lead somewhere or some right in the middle. How do you think about that? I think it's, you've got to think about the day to day. In many cases, I feel people don't realize whether they're passionate about something or not until they actually start doing the work. I could never have imagined that I could be passionate payments ever in a million years. But the environment of the company square was so infectious and great. And the culture was so good that even made working on payments and you're serving these small businesses. I always think of not what you're working on, but what problem you're solving. In many cases, I get more energy from the problem I'm solving and who I'm solving it for. And I realize that I get much more energy from personally solving problems that affect either small business or long tail, basically people or small business that I can relate to. It is harder for me to get energy solving problems of big enterprises and companies. So I've always somehow ended up working at companies like DoorDash or Square or even Facebook, building ad products for small businesses, Google AdSense for small publishers, and so consumers of small businesses. is what I've seen. And so I think it's important to know what kind of problems you get energy from and really think about the problem versus the customer segment, maybe even. So maybe even more than the problem, because I've solved different kinds of problems, but I realize that it's those kinds of customers I enjoy because you can meet them in the day-to-day, you can see them on the street, or you read their articles, a small blogger, for example. I remember I used to go to a lot of blog conferences when I was a PM for AdSense. It was great to meet these bloggers. There would be hundreds of thousands of them back then. It's probably a different medium and so on now, Substack. But back then it was blogger. I think the word doesn't even exist today, but it's amazing to meet them. And they literally, till today, I have people emailing me, Gokul, I know you, right? We used to make $100,000 a year based on purely ads, some AdSense. And that was our living. And that's how we built this other company on that. So big companies, you don't ever get to hear something like that. So I got energy from things like that. The other one is founder. I think it's very important if you're talking about company is to have a founder. When you talk to them, you don't get the sense that they're in it for the money. I think it's very important for founders to really live and be the mission themselves in an authentic way. And if people are smart, and I think you've got to really honestly think if this person is constantly talking about revenue and trying to convince you that you're going to get wealthy or they're going to get whatever the case is, that's not the kind of founder that's going to build a really large company. And so if you look at everyone, whether it's, you've worked with Brian Chesky, I'm sure he embodies that. Jack at Square, Tony at DoorDash, Larry at Google,…

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