Lenny Rachitsky: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah. And there were so many layers of like we validated one thing and then the next thing we got stuck on. Like, okay, people send a lot of messages. Cool, great. The next thing was will it spread within a school? That took us a while to get right. Will it hop schools? Each of those was a very, very challenging problem in light of the new climate that we were operating in. And I always do things by the book when it comes to operating legally within the compliance framework. And that's something when I meet founders and they tell me some growth thing that they're doing, and I'm like, "You can't do that. That's going to cause way more trouble down the line. It's going to burn users too." And so we always wanted to make it abundantly clear how our growth system, how you are inviting friends and all that. You can kind of go on a whole diatribe on that because the thing that I see a lot of founders do is they in the background use user data in ways that it shouldn't be used. They invite people on your behalf and all that. And I have this kind of crazy view that the internet is this living and breathing thing. There's Wikipedia article called the Gaia Hypothesis, which is about biology. And it's basically like the earth is kind of living and breathing and can respond to threats. Okay? And when you enter the rainforest too deep, Ebola virus will be released. Okay? So I think the internet operates on a similar paradigm here where if you do the wrong thing by users, the internet will come back and get even and defend itself. And so whenever I design products, I try to do right by users because it'll always come back much worse and I think you should always operate above board with how you design your growth systems. And with Gas, we had to do things the right way and we had to figure out at each particular moment or problem that we solve, will it spread within schools? Will it hop schools? Will people pay for it? All of these things was a whole reinvention of the original product. I love that you shared that because I think a lot of people see you from the outside and they think you're doing all kinds of these skeezy growth hacks and making teens do things that aren't really mentally healthy for them. But it's clear that that's the opposite of how you think about it, that you're trying to stay very positive, like you only allow positive communication. You do things that as you just said, are going to be good long-term, the internet's not going to come and try to shut you down. The point you bring up here about wanting to build a positive thing, some people, sometimes I get criticism. It's not actually that often, but they say, "Oh, you're building an app that makes teens feeling insecure or anything." But with Gas, I think we received a message every single day from a user telling us that they reconsidered suicide or other forms of self-harm. The app sent you positive messages and affirmations. It made teens feel really good. And I think that is lost on a lot of people. Instagram can make you feel jealousy and a lot of other social networks are a mixed bag in terms of impact. But we were entirely focused on making teens feel better. And some people might say, "Oh, what if someone doesn't get voted for something?" We actually built a system to ensure everyone got a vote. And what we did was we put your name in polls at a higher frequency if you weren't being voted on recently. So we wanted to spread the love in every way possible, and that's what really motivated me to grow this thing was watching how it was impacting 10 million kids in such a short period of time.…

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