Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. One of the artifacts of that chapter of life. So good. Okay. So that was your Facebook journey, those four years. That's wild. You left Facebook. At some point, you started, I remember this, you started tweeting like, "Hey, I'm working on new app." Everyone was going nuts. "What are you working on?" And at this point, I think you probably in your mind thought, I am this one-hit wonder, I haven't shown that I can do this again and again. And so I think you probably have this motivation. Maybe talk about that, just like this drive of like, hey, I want to do this again. Is that where your mind was at? When that meme started, my intent was to start a venture-backed company and build something that would scale to be a big team and this durable thing that lasted many years and everything. And so I just made post that I was leaving Facebook and looking for some teammates. And I shared a couple of ideas with some people privately and there were some really crazy ideas that I shared. I'm not going to get into them, but then people started posting, "Oh my God, I just saw Nikita's app. It's crazy." And what happened was others saw that and then they started memeing it and it became this massive meme where they're like, "Oh, I just tried Nikita's app, it saved my marriage. Oh, I just quit drinking. My kids returned home after all these like," and it turned into this massive meme. And at the time, I didn't even have an app or anything. I wasn't even planning to launch it. It wasn't even an app, some of the ideas I was looking at. And so it just turned into this viral moment. I wasn't even committed to starting another company at that point. This was an exploration process. But what happened was the market had crashed shortly thereafter, there was kind of the end of the Zerb era. The Fed started hiking rates. I think my portfolio was down like 30% or something and I was like, "Damn, this sucks. Maybe I should think about how to make money today." That's the reason we're in startups is to make money. And so there was always in the back of my head this question that I had, which was what if we had monetized tbh? Because the number one support message we received was can I pay to reveal who sent me polls? It was the number one question. And it was like, would it have made even more than the acquisition if we just monetized it? And I'm like, we could probably build this pretty fast, like probably in a month, month or two. Ended up being a lot longer, but we started rebuilding it. It was a new team. It was one of the engineers from a company called Paparazzi. His name's Zay Turner, and he started building it in my house and we had tested it to see would this new version of tbh actually resonate with kids five years later? That was actually the thing I wanted to know most of all was like would an anonymous polling app actually still be relevant five years later? And so we dropped it into the school just the same way I've always done it in-…

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