Lenny Rachitsky: evaluation

Transcript context

…I mean, it's really good to hear that because in a lot of ways, that's what we're trying to do. If you think about the entire impetus behind why Linear was started, it's because Karri was sitting at Coinbase and Airbnb and these places and just watching everyone around him struggle using the tools that they had available and always incumbent tools and just seeing that it made people hate their day-to-day a little bit, and we all got into technology and design and engineering, all this kind of stuff because it was fun. All of us started off building stupid MySpace pages and all of these side projects when we were young, and it started off as this fun thing that we do, and we're like, "Wow, we get to do this for a career," and then to have all of this kind of stuff put these big speed bumps into our day-to-day workflow, it just was really sad. So, that's why we started Linear. This really bust through all of that. What I love about Linear, I feel like it's an inspirational business because many people want to, "I'm going to build just a much better version of something," and often that doesn't actually work out. Often nobody cares enough. There's all these barriers and reasons. People don't switch to something that's better, and Linear is an amazing example of building an excellent product and actually succeeding, and there's a lot more to it maybe than just building an awesome product. So, that's what I'm excited to dig into and understand how you all operate, and I guess just based on these results, to me, this is the ultimate sign of product market fit. People being sad they can't use a product in B2B enterprise software especially, so let's get into it. First question I want to get into is something that I think you see and the team at Linear sees that a lot of people don't see, which is that there's not actually a trade-off between speed and quality. I think a lot of people think this is just an innate fact and something I've heard you talk about is that's not actually true. I actually saw Patrick Collison tweet this exact point that I'll read after you... I want to hear your thoughts, but talk about what you've learned about how there's maybe not actually this trade-off between speed and quality. People talk about this as if there were a trade-off almost in a naive way because when they think about speed, the thing they over index on is rushing or being sloppy, and what they should be indexing on is being really competent or being like an expert. So, if you look at people who are at the pinnacle of their craft, it could be anything. It could be like a chef or a programmer or someone building houses or something. You can basically tell how good the output is going to be of their work product by how fast they're going. If they're going really fast, and they're obviously not being sloppy and then leaving a mess all over the place, it's like, "Yeah. Well, they got there because this is just second nature to them," and they're able to go at a really rapid pace and try stuff. And when we're building software, that's such a big component of how good the product is on the other side of it, which is like, "How many iterations were you able to do?" So, the only way you're going to get a bunch of iterations done and try different things and really feel out these different variations is by just going very fast.…

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