Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…o the kind of transited property of bullshit is going to override. And so it's really important that we have at least one society. And as flawed as we are, as flawed as the US is, it's still the best. And you can see it by the number of new company creations, the number of new ideas that come out of here and so forth. It's really, really important that the US stays important and powerful in the world. We know from the last century, if you look at the last century, who were the countries that had economic power, military power, cultural power? They were the ones that industrialized, and the ones that industrialized first and best. And the ones that did became Communists, like Russia, China. They were slow on industrialization and they fell into this very fucking dangerous system. Looking forward, that's going to happen again, but it's going to be AI. And so it is fundamentally important, not just to America, but to humanity, that America succeed at that. We don't have to be the one winner or this or that, but we do have to be in that tier. And as I go around the world and travel, I can't tell you, everybody ... and then everybody was getting, by the way, very, very worried about us earlier. And they say, "Look, we need you to succeed. Don't destroy the dollar. Don't fall behind in AI. Don't over-regulate it too early. Don't do these things, please, because we need you to win, because we're all counting on that." And I think it's the most important work that we do. It's why we're so involved in policy and so forth. I think this is also going to be very, very true with crypto, which ends up being an incredibly important networking technology that complements AI. That work is, I would say, beyond for the money. Although we will end up making a lot of money with the right policies, so I don't want to seem totally philanthropic on this, but it's more important than that. It's certainly more important than us succeeding or anything like that, that the country succeed. Speaking of philanthropic and other passions of yours, something that I don't think most people know about you, and I think will give them another insight into how interesting you are, you run an organization called Paid in Full, which is incredibly cool. Talk about what that's about, why this is so important to you. Our ethos as a firm is kind of what I'd say is something from nothing. This is the greatness of entrepreneurship. You start with nothing and then you make something really important. That is also how Hip-hop started, where you have a bunch of kids who didn't even have instruments, and they created something out of nothing. And the people in that world always talk about that. And one of the really unfortunate things that happens is, the people who invent the art form, and certainly in the case of Hip-hop, don't get anywhere near the kind of proportional benefit of their invention. And a lot of the guys, people have forgotten about, or are struggling to make ends meet, and so forth. So what we created was this thing called the Paid in Full Foundation, named after the Rakim, Eric B. song, which I did call Rakim and ask him for permission to use the name, so we didn't just take it. What we do is, we give essentially pensions to the old rappers, that enable them to kind of continue their work. And then we have a big event go to paidinfullfoundation.org for tickets, which is amazing, where they get the award and they're celebrated by all their peers and so forth. And it's really phenomenal. Some of the awardees have been Rakim, Scarface from the Geto Boys, Roxanne Shante, Grandmaster Caz, Kool Moe Dee. This year we're honoring George Clinton for being sampled, Kool G Rap and Grand Puba, and also Jalil from Whodini. I can't even describe how high impact it is on these guys. I think Rakim was touring close to 200 nights a year, and he got his award, and came out with his first album in 15 years and is doing amazingly well. All of a sudden everybody's going, "Oh yeah, that's the greatest rapper of all time." They're finally going back and remembering all the things he did. Roxanne Shante, nobody had mentioned her in years and years and years. I think six months after we gave her the award, the Grammys gave her a lifetime achievement award, which is amazing. It's super high impact. It's a great thing. As a Hip-hop fan, I say dream come true. It's my only guilt.…

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