Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…[inaudible 01:06:32]. It seems like Anthropic is also hiring a lot to get it done. Yeah. Everyone is. So I think that's really promising. I think if you're in college still, makes sense to get into engineering at this point. Okay. Let me ask you this question as kind of a final question maybe. What's maybe the most counterintuitive thing you've learned about building AI products, building Windsurf and just being in a space? I think one of the weird things is online, everyone is very excited about the short-term wins that we are making, right? Like what we're putting out maybe weekly. We do these waves every couple of weeks. But actually a lot of the bets we're making inside the company are for things that are not three, four weeks, maybe three, six months, nine months away. That's what we're working on internally. Because I think this is kind of, Lenny, what I was mentioning to you before. One of the goals that I tell everyone at our company is we should be cannibalizing the existing state of our product every six to 12 months. Every six to 12 months, it should make our existing product look silly. It should almost make the form factor of our existing product look dumb. So there's this weird tension where you want to have a product in market and you want to incrementally iterate and listen to users and keep making it better and better. But I would say we were the first identical IDE product out there. That's what we landed with. And I think the value of that is going to depreciate very quickly unless we continue to re-prove ourselves. And we will need to re-prove ourselves in ways in which our users are not even asking. So there's this tension here, where incremental feels very safe, right? Add this one more button. Users say, "Hey, I would like to be able to have this drop down to do X." But that is not the reason why we're going to win. That's almost table sticks. Yeah, we'll decide to do some of these. We might not decide to do a lot of these things. But it's these longer term efforts inside the company that almost disrupt the existing product that are ultimately the reason why we're going to succeed. It's this weird tension that you need to have in your head of, you can't also not listen to your users at all because they're the reason you exist.…

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