Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. I'll share a little numbers of my cushy tech job at Uber. I was in Europe, and European tech salaries, or I'll say total compensation, will be lower than for example the U.S., but it'll be higher than let's say regions like India or Indonesia. There's regional differences, and this is true for big tech as well. Uber was a good example on this. But in my best year at Uber, I made about 320 or $330,000 in total compensation. This was after Uber went public, so it includes the stock, the base salary, the bonus, which was very, very good in Europe. And when I quit my job, I was actually thinking, "Am I crazy? Because I'm leaving..." Especially in Europe, this is a lot of money [inaudible 00:09:53] this will be similar to something... Someone in a similar position would've made five or 600 K in total in the U.S. So I walked away from that, and I was pretty sure that I'll just [inaudible 00:10:04] a lot less, but I'll enjoy what I'm doing, or I'll have... I'll just give it a go. But now I am making more in compensation that I made at Uber. And the difference is that now my compensation, my earnings, keep going up as long as the newsletter is growing, so there's no theoretical cap on this. Of course there is an actual cap, there's churn, growth is slowing over time, but it's very, very strange, because I felt that I was in a really privileged position, just honestly making tons of money, doing a job that I loved. And this was at Uber or as a software engineer. And I'm now doing stuff that I love, and in some strange way, I guess it even pays better. Part of it is just luck, part of this is situational. I think we're going to talk a bit more about this. But this was very, very surprising and very unexpected for me. Awesome. That's a great segue to the first thing I want to talk about, but just to frame what I want to spend our time on today, there's these four areas I want to explore. One is your decision to leave and start this life of writing, which is a very non-traditional life. Two is what the life of a paid newsletter person is like. What do you do all day? How do you find time to do this? How do you produce so much content? Three, what it takes to be successful at this. A lot of people... I always say it's easy to start a newsletter, hard to keep it going, and I'm curious what you find is important to be successful. And then four, how do you get started if you want to start your own newsletter? But before I get into that, I just wanted to add a thought that I had. The way I think about this life in terms of comparing to the old job is, one, it feels instead of one boss, I have thousands of micro bosses, and one of them can fire me and many do every day, but it feels safer than at a tech job where one person can decide. And then the other piece is, assuming it keeps growing, you're getting a raise almost every day, every week, depending on the growth rate, and that's cool. That is really cool. I had a spreadsheet that I maintained for the first year of the publication, where I listed, for every article, how much did my annual revenue go up a week later. So tracking what was the impact. And the crazy thing was that, when I wrote a really good article that resonated with people, sometimes it was an article that I thought was mediocre and people still loved it [inaudible 00:12:20] it was a really good article that I put tons of work in, I saw myself getting a raise. And this is just something you just don't get in corporate. I mean, it's by design, and there's a lot of good stuff about it, but I feel that this life, and we'll touch more on this, but there's a lot of surprising things, both good and bad, but this is a really good one. So for doing something awesome, you can just give yourself a raise, especially because this is just like you, mine is also a one person business right now.…

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