Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…We didn't have a formal program, but I love hiring veterans, either veterans of intelligence, so they're citizens, so they're not veterans from a military perspective, but people who had worked in Intel or people who were actual veterans of different military branches. There's a lot of reasons for this, but I think that the intelligence folks, it's a way of thinking. Now you ought to be careful, and this is just purely my opinion, because depending on how long they were in... the reason I left is because it's the government, it's super bureaucratic. It was one of the most fulfilling jobs I will ever have, and I was only there for a short amount of time. But it's just one of those things where it's just so bureaucratic. So the 15-year person there is not thriving, they're not trying to change the world necessarily. They have a job. So you've got to be careful with that. But yeah, I think there's these really smart people that just think in a different way. And a broader point is I think it's just really, really good to go to different industries. All this customer development stuff, you go to any major retailer or any major e-commerce company, they have entire teams just dedicated to this stuff. Hallmark was one of our first pricing customers back in the day before we went subscription focused. They had 119 people in customer insights and research. And this was one of the reason we were like, "Well, you guys don't need our help, you've got enough people." But those are great people to hire, even though they don't necessarily have the actual industry knowledge, they have a lot of domain expertise. In terms of things I learned, I'll put it this way, not to get political, if I was in charge of budget, I would give so much more money into the intel community. I saw conflicts or heard about conflicts being stopped just because of intelligence that didn't go hot in terms of war fighting. I think it's one of those things where I would put so much more money there than the actual other side of the defense budget. And also everyone asks me about Snowden. So again, not to get political, it's a lot more complicated, I think, than a lot of people think. It's one of those things that the issues that were brought up, obviously they got really sensationalized, but they're really important conversations to have, but it's not as simple as, "Oh, stop doing this, start doing that." You don't have to worry about the NSA, the NSA's all outward-looking. You should worry about the FBI. The FBI are the ones who get a little testy with certain things, and you're seeing that in the court cases and stuff like that. But just know there's a lot of really hardworking, very well-intentioned people who you might disagree in terms of trade-offs, in terms of safety and things like that. They're also some of the most privacy orientated people on the planet, so that's worth a whole conversation. So hopefully I didn't throw too many grenades in this part. No, we need more grenades. That's the first time Snowden was brought up on this podcast, so that's cool. There you go. And this is actually a good segue to the next topic, which is around local strategies like FBI versus NSA. I think you have a strong perspective that local strategies are much more likely to [inaudible 00:54:19] so we'll just get into that one. Yeah, yeah. Just to give you a tease, I'll tell you what I think of Snowden after the podcast. So the world doesn't get to know except that I'll tell you what my opinion is afterwards.…

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