Lenny Rachitsky: recommendation

Transcript context

…Yeah. Well, before we get to ChatGPT, I think the natural reaction when you first realize this is, "Screw them, I'm not playing that game." That's what I feel like most people, how they react. Because the unfortunate truth is that a lot of companies don't predict that last stage and end up in a really hard position. So many companies got completely killed during the crash of the Facebook social platform. Apple's 30% tax basically destroyed a bunch of types of applications and business models because you feel like it just wasn't margin-effective. So many companies built on SEO loops that are in serious, serious trouble right now if that's their only channel. So all these things. I think the natural reaction is, why would I play this game if I'm a startup or a company? You can even see this with ChatGPT, as an example. They just launched these deep research connectors. One of them was my former company, HubSpot. If you sat inside HubSpot and you were just thinking in isolation, you would be like, well, why would I want to make all of my data accessible through ChatGPT and have all of the usage you start to accrue there? That doesn't really make sense in isolation. But we don't operate in isolation. Once again, we operate in a competitive environment. What's going to happen is that if you don't do it, your competitors are going to certainly go to the new platform and your customer expectations change, and you have to rise to those customers' expectations. They're going to start expecting you to be in these new experiences and all these things. It ends up being a prisoner's dilemma, which is, there is no opting out of the game. You have to play the game. So it's better to be early than to be super late to this game, especially, especially if you are a startup. That's the key opportunity. We will talk a little bit more about how to play the game more, but it's better to be early as well as, then the key, the harder part about it is anticipating that last stage of the cycle and figuring out how to sequence away from something before that last cycle comes. I think that's the key part, but let me pause there and then I'll talk a little bit about ChatGPT and some of my reasoning behind that. Cool. So what you're saying is not only is there going to be this big opportunity to grow, if you don't take advantage of it, somebody in your space will. It's not only there's an opportunity, but this is something you need to do because you might miss the boat. I think about companies like Zynga that grew on Facebook and then became massive companies. If they didn't do that, they would've missed the boat, someone else would've eaten that lunch. I don't know, I'm thinking about the Technology Bros podcast on Twitter right now, TBPN, where they basically figured out on Twitter you can create this livestream and you see it all day in your Twitter feed just like, hey, they're broadcasting, and it's a really cool distribution channel. I think there's a big call to arms here almost of just the opportunities emerging and you basically need to pay attention. You can't opt out. That's right. That's right.…

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