Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, for sure. So, as much as I'm a techno optimist, I'm also realist, and with that being said, I genuinely believe Web3 is in the strongest position that it's ever been in. I think it's important to remember that the term Web3 has barely existed in kind of popular lexicon for barely a year. We've definitely had crypto for more than a decade now as technology, arguably as a financial instrument of some sort, but specifically the number of companies that I'm seeing be formed, the number of products that are starting to actually achieve some form of early product market fit, some products that are starting to scale. There's definitely been obviously a huge drop in price. There's definitely been some huge scandals in terms of financial mismanagement and the contagion from that. But I think it's been my experience that a lot of new technologies don't move up in a straight line, and Web3 is especially challenging here because so many things have been financialized from the outset, whereas generally speaking, you'll see startups or new technologies mature over many years, whether it's the internet itself, artificial intelligence, QR codes, all sorts of things that kind of have gone through different periods of adoption, and so, I think we're seeing things kind of record Ethereum transactions happening, new Layer 2 technologies launching all the time that are going to help scale Layer 1 Blockchains, Solana has announced its phone that's going to be the first sort of Web3 native phone out there. So, there's so many new exciting product developments and users entering the space that as much as prices have come down, I'm really optimistic about the state of Web3. I think about a little bit is going through this shift in excitement about Web3 as a PM within a company working in this space, I imagine it tests some of the core skills of a PM, like keeping people focused, prioritizing effectively, keeping morale up. If people are getting like, "Oh man, all my cryptos going down," I'm curious how you've been able to leverage those skills and what you've learned going through this experience, keeping people focused, morale up, prioritizing effectively, those sorts of things. Yeah, it's a great question. It's really important, right, because we've seen in this space that there are these cycles, and I think that morale and ability to keep building are the determinants of long-term success, and if everybody kind of takes the ball and goes home, that uncertain future won't necessarily materialize. So, in my opinion, I think that the only way to maintain moral is to make progress. I think that no speech, no sort of extrinsic motivators like we're going to give everybody some free crypto to keep motivated about it or something like that really works. I think people get really excited when they see progress. So, for example, at Alchemy, we see more developers than we've ever had on the platform today, and then we're shipping, we just launched Solana support and people are like, "This is real." We're actually doing things, building things. We just had our team out at EthCC which is a big conference in Paris for the Ethereum community, and it was wild the number of people that were there, products being built. Pretty much every crypto conference has a hackathon, and so, it keeps the spirit of building so alive. And so, I think it at Alchemy and just in other situations that I've been in as a leader over time, I think it's all about a focus on progress and moving forward. We saw this at Airbnb when the business had a draw down in revenue, and I know you'd covered this with Sanchan recently, right? It was 85, 90% revenue and you didn't know when it was going to turn around, right? It's not just like, "Oh yeah, this will come back in six months and we can just keep plowing forward." But I think what worked was making progress and actually focusing on product and your customers, and ultimately if you hire the right people who are motivated for the right reasons, I think that recipe keeps people highly motivated and highly effective at building for when things do eventually turn around.…

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