Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…We have a three-person storytelling team. It's run by a woman named Nash. There is a gentleman named Ellis, who is a ... Background, started as a reporter at The Verge. Maybe there was a publication before that. But I met him when he was a reporter at The Verge covering social media. And then he ran marketing strategy for Snapchat for seven years. And then we have a person named Josh Lee, who I actually met as an intern. He was an intern at Facebook as a designer, that an intern for me at the White House when I worked at the White House, and then decided that he was over product design and over design, and totally just jumped and be like, "I'm going to be a filmmaker," and has been making really fascinating indie films for a few years now. And he's our video editor on the team. And it's so interesting. Nash's background, she had a brief stint at NBC. But again, you get to know her and she writes poems after hours and her dream is to write a fictional book. I mean, anyone that knows Nash, especially [inaudible 01:00:00] is just a force. A force. And the three of them, what's so interesting about them, which also relates to our design team ... One of the things I also found at Facebook is there was a tendency toward homogeneity. As you know, there's a stereotype of a Facebook PM for example, or a Google PM, the contrast between them and the way they work. And one of the things we also have purposely done on the storytelling team and otherwise, let's hire radically different archetypes. Ellis cannot be more different than Nash. Nash cannot be more different than Josh. There's some shared values, there's some shared beliefs, but they're very different. Ditto on the design team. Our design team? They are all over the place in terms of who they are, what they've done, their sensibilities, their aspirations. And whether it's the storytelling team or the design team, that can be hard sometimes, just to be honest. It's a lot easier to say, "Hey, we're the Acme Co storytelling team, we're Acme Co design team. We hire designers like this and storytellers that." We hire people all over the place. We have an extremely diverse team, but in all senses of the word. But again, the no PM thing, it's not without flaws. I can see why a lot of large companies over time tend are like, "It's the Facebook way or no way," or "You're not good for here." Yeah. It's actually I think, exact makeup of Airbnb video team. I forget what they were called. They didn't have a cool name, the storytelling team I think. But it was a videographer, an editor and then their producer, basically. Yeah. I mean, I remember going to Airbnb's offices early in my career and seeing the storyboards lining the walls and just being like, "I want to work here." So, I'm actually not familiar with the ... I mean, I'm familiar with Airbnb's videos and brand marketing, fucking fantastic, excuse my language. But, yeah. I remember just walking around that office being like, "Oh, my goodness! Are they making a movie or something? I want to [inaudible 01:01:53] here."…

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