Lenny Rachitsky: recommendation

Transcript context

…Anyway, it's pretty funny. So yeah, that's the real story. And then, yeah, I remember I was in downtown Palo Alto at the time, and some of the folks I was friends with were friends with Sean Parker, and this was actually before Sean Parker went to Facebook. He was part of Napster. And so one of my friends was like, "Oh, we need to get my friend a ride to the airport." And so I ended up giving Sean Parker a ride to the Oakland Airport. And again, what was he like? I don't know. He just basically sat in the back seat on the phone the whole time. But again, my point is I wasn't like, "Wow, these are going to be really big successful people that one day will be important in the world." It just felt like a bunch of nerds that really liked the internet and computers, doing things that they were interested in and were just obsessed with this. They weren't like, "Gee, should I move to New York?" Or, "Maybe I should go to law school." It was people that were very bought in to staying working on internet companies. And so you'll see these folks just reinvent themselves multiple eras, right? Okay, like Reid Hoffman, he worked at PayPal, right? And then he did LinkedIn and then he was a VC. He's had all these different eras where it's the same person, but it's almost like a different figure, right? There's a lot of interesting lessons there. One is that your career is long and you'll have the opportunity to do many things and you can continue to shift. In my example, this is my fourth career, I realized. I was an engineer, then a founder, then a product manager, now whatever this job is. And I think that's really common. I think the other, again, is the personality types point, which I didn't comment on, but I think it's so important that you can be super introverted and be super successful. You can be super extroverted and be very successful. And I think the key there is use your skills and strengths to achieve the same things. You don't have to be the amazing presenter on Steve Jobs type stage. You can do the same thing in a different way. And then the other point there is, again, coming back to you just need to be really excited and enjoy the work you're doing because that'll drive you forward and make you be successful. So I like that the story is a summary of so many of the things you've shared so far. There's other two other fun stories, maybe pick one. The other one is you sold your startup to MySpace and your job was basically to save MySpace. And then the other is you're the reason Andreessen Horowitz missed out on Instagram and couldn't invest. So which of those would you want to share? Well, it's the same story. And the way that it's the same story is my second company... Basically, I sold my first company to MySpace. It was the music company that I worked on. And they recruited a new CEO who was formerly the COO of Facebook called Owen Van Natta. So again, hilariously part of the same little circle of people. And Owen was like, "Okay, we need to fix MySpace. Rupert Murdoch's got the juice. He wants me to fix it. We're going to do it. So come up with some ideas." And the best idea that I could come up with at the time was doing something around mobile photo sharing, something like Twitter, but for photos. And I figured with MySpace's user base, that would work pretty well. This was in 2010, so it was right as the App Store was getting big, and I had a lot of success in the App Store with imeem. It was one of the top downloaded music apps. And so I was like, "Wow, the App Store was really good." And I was really into apps being the thing. And at this time, Facebook was a little early on. They were trying to do cross-platform mobile apps, if you recall. And their apps were not great. This was, again, ancient history. So that was my plan. And then immediately Owen Van Natta was fired, and so I didn't even really get onboarded. And so I just left. I think I worked in MySpace for a month because the person that acquired my company got fired and I think the whole word chart got fired. I didn't even know who to talk to. It was really great. It was a great experience. You know what I'm saying? I wasn't really sure who my point of contact was at that point. I don't think they knew either. It was just a mess.…

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