Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…It can't always be war time. I find that those end up being the most memorable, meaningful moments is when you're working really, really hard on something that you're excited about. And it has to be something you're excited about and are proud of. Last question. I saw on Twitter, you shared this photo of your home office, and it was this incredible view out the window, and then you took a photo facing your desk and it was an ironing board. And two questions there. One is just how did that all happen? And then two, I think you mentioned somewhere that you didn't even meet a lot of your coworkers for a year and a half after joining Deel, it was very remote forward. So, I'm curious also just how you made remote work work for you in that environment? Yeah, so I'll explain the ironing board first. So that was because I was actually visiting my family in Istanbul, and in the setup that we have, there's one desk. So my husband and I go rock, paper, scissors, and we'll see who gets the desk and who gets to come up with a secondary solution. And he won the desk, so I had to come up with a creative solution. And because the view behind me was stunning, of the Bosporus, every meeting I joined, people were like, "Wow, I love your view, this is amazing." And I was like, "Oh, no, no, you guys, I'm sitting on an ironing board right now." And to me that was both funny, and I wanted to do a reality check with people to be like, "Come on, this is not as glorious as it looks." But at the same time, it really in that moment I was like, "This is awesome, I work at Deel." Previously when I wanted to go visit my family in Istanbul, and I live in Canada, I would have to use my days off to go. And for me it just meant a lot to be able to do my work regardless of where I am. I had a full day of work and meetings and everything. And my work just continued and I was also be able to be with my family. So it was a moment of Deel's promise coming true in a very real way in my life. And I thought it was hilarious. My dad thought it was so unprofessional that I shared that with the public then. He hasn't fully wrapped his head around the startup world. So it was just one of those moments of sharing that, yeah, work can be remote and it can be whatever you want it to be. So that's the the story behind it. In this moment as we're recording this, I am in a proper home office with a desk and a back supported chair. It changes all the time. And in terms of, going back to your second question of, early days not meeting the team members. As I said, I joined Deel in July, 2020, pandemic was at its peak, me being based in Canada, Canada had very strict restrictions of, you can't leave the country, we won't let you back in. So I had to stay put. And I worked for a year and a half at Deel before for the first time where I met our team members was at a conference in Lisbon. And I showed up and it was this surreal moment because I've worked with them for a year and a half, we'd accomplished so much. Our revenue was already way past $50 million and I was seeing these people for the first time. So that was very funny. But if I look at the early days of Deel, there's a lot of little stories like that, where we forgot to create swag until we reached a billion dollars. And it was actually when our photo was going to be on the NASDAQ and we wanted to take a team picture that we were like, "Guys, we need to have t-shirts. Can someone please run to a store in New York and print our logo on something?" So a lot of those things just by the nature of being a pandemic business came a little bit later.…

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