Lenny Rachitsky: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Sure. The other pieces is for folks listening that want to pursue this direction, what could they do to set themselves up? So the first piece is just like, what are the downsides? I'll share a few already. So in this life that I lead now, I get no health insurance benefits. I get no time off. I get no 401(k) matching. None of that. I have to basically pay an absurd amount of money for health insurance and find ways to take time off, invent PTO policies for myself, and all these sorts of things. I've gotten used to it, but it is weird. My wife is also an independent self-employed person, so we both don't have... If we have a child, we have no mat leave, pat leave. We just have to figure that out. I don't know how I would do that. So that comes to mind for me. What else have you seen as the downside of this path? Yeah, the second is it's unclear what the longevity is. How far can you be removed from your full-time experience and still be valuable? This is why I actually think this is a better path than what used to happen, which is all the great operators turned into VCs, venture capitalists. Right? In there, you're pretty disconnected from the ops. I think this advisory type path, I'll leave the creator piece alone because I'm not as familiar with it. But in the advisor path, you are still maybe spending a day a week with these companies. You are still doing. You are helping grow the next generation. I don't like to say generation, but next crop of up and coming leaders. So the question mark for me is longevity. Is it possible to build more and more amazing companies if more and more amazing operators are leaving the full-time workforce? I don't know, but I hope that it's better than what it's been because actually, they're building and doing, et cetera. So I think that's the other question mark and downside, and I think we think about this as part of our ecosystem. I think as long as people are doing, and generalizing, and executing, as I talked about it at the beginning, I think they can still be valuable in a meaningful way and maybe provide access to that kind of knowledge for a broader range of companies. The other is just like if everybody does it, then maybe it's not so unique anymore. So I think there's a question there as well.…

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