Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…[inaudible 01:08:36]. And so clearly, things are going well, at least as far as I can tell. Something that I think is, Faire definitely has, and a lot of companies have, is a very product minded visionary founder. And CPOs classically last a year or two, and then they're like, ah, this sucks. The founder just tells me what to do and what's the point of this role? And it's so frustrating. I'm curious just what you've learned about, at least so far, about working with someone like that as a CPO and not just being this middle person between what the founder wants to do with the team, this building. Yeah, I mean, this is going to sound so naive, but I literally didn't know how important it was for me to have such a great relationship with the CEO, because I always had great relation, I was lucky, I had great relationships with a lot of people at my previous jobs. I was like, oh, of course it's going to be fine, everyone's going to let me do what I want, whatever. And I think I just got really lucky because Max is an amazing CEO, who's also super growth mindset and super open to talking over ideas, even when they involve a lot of change. So when I was onboarding, one of the things I always like to do is write a list of observations. I go out and talk to, I have one-on-ones with a lot of people, and I write, here's the themes that I'm hearing. Here's what's going well, here's what's not going well. And that's a way for me to both share what I'm seeing and build some credibility and trust that way, but also for people to give me feedback and be like, oh, you're wrong about this, just so I can correct my starting point of knowledge. And with Max, I also wrote a parallel document of hot takes. So once a quarter or so for the first year, I'd write a document that was just like, hey, for sake of provocation, if we wanted to fundamentally change a few things, here's ideas on what we could fundamentally change. And Max, very, very well could have just been like, hey, can you please just run product? That's you're job, can you please do that? And instead, he and the entire rest of the executive team were like, yeah, let's step through these. Let's talk about which of these we should try, let's talk about maybe context you don't have for why these don't make sense or why we don't do these. And that was such a gift because I was able to build such a great relationship, a trusting and complimentary relationship with Max and the rest of the exec team, and also that he took seriously things that he really didn't have to that I have so much respect for that, and I think I got really lucky in just finding a great CEO and exec team.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.