Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…pills and food he eats for breakfast every morning to try to live longer. The reporter estimated that it cost him one million a year to have these habits, so I was like, "Hey, I want to make it clear. At Eventbrite, we don't have that much money. We don't have that much time. There's no framework that allows you to not use your brain at this company and just follow some sort of process for success in this profession." I adopted this thing into a public blog post that's on my blog now, but now that I've had some time outside of Eventbrite, I feel like I at least partially missed the mark on what's really going on. I see this with Whatnot, because one of the things I'm helping them with is interviewing, I see PMs again, which I haven't done in a while. It's fascinating interviewing a PM or managers early in their career because Whatnot is a startup, and you know better than most of us as a former founder of one, startups typically require us to wear lots of hats. You have to write SQL. You have to talk directly to customers. You have to prep marketing and sales. Most importantly, you have to make a lot of decisions under uncertainty, which you wouldn't necessarily expect a PM to do at, say, a Google, but it all boils down to using your brain in different ways. Lisa, who's on our legal team, she called Eventbrite a public startup because the pandemic basically erased her business and we had to build it back from scratch. Now that I'm doing these interviews, and whether they come from a small startup, a unicorn, or a public company, they all sort of look the same because there's been so much funding to all these companies. Every company's been acting like they're Google with Google margins, meaning a lot of engineering support, a lot of design support, a lot of research support, lots of analysts around them. They actually seem pretty ill-prepared for a real startup, or even a public company with some uncertainty around it like Eventbrite, so you start getting these weird responses in the interview process. You ask them to solve a problem and they'd say things like, "I can't even begin to come up with solutions until I see all the data and talk to customers." I'm like, "Yeah, I get that's something you would normally do if you took the job, but you don't have the data. You can't talk to customers. Make a decision now. What would you do? I want to see how creative you are. I want to see how much you're intuiting about the real problem and solution," and they can't really answer. Then my follow-up, which I don't ask, but what I really want to ask is like, "When's the last time you used your brain versus followed a process someone else designed at your company?" Because I want the former, not the latter. Wow. Amazing. There's a lot of things I want to dig into here. I was going to ask why you call it zero interest rate phenomenon, but I think what I'm hearing is it's when interest rates are zero, everyone's got a lot of money, things are going great. Everyone looks like they're killing it, successful. Everyone thinks they've got it all figured out, and then when that goes away, it's like, "Oh, shit. Maybe not so." Then also, I think zero interest rates allowed every startup to operate like it was a public company with billions of dollars. That's going to go away over the next five years, and it sort of takes us back to what product management used to be like, which was you didn't have all these resources around. You didn't have all this time to figure it out because if you don't figure it out now and make it work, you may run out of funding, right?…

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