Lenny Rachitsky: uncertainty

Transcript context

…So we had this mantra internally, I mean even before the sort of AI launch for us, which was "Hire painfully slowly." And I think the temptation is once things start working, you just start, [inaudible 01:35:23] scaling this thing and start adding more and more headcount. And for us that always, I don't know, that didn't feel right. We wanted to build the team very thoughtfully, be lean, but also be a team that every individual feels like they have high amount of impact that they have on a daily basis. And so for us that was from sort of the very beginning. And so even as we've scaled up, I think we've been super efficient by nature of just being a very lean team. So I think a lot of people hear this advice of "Stay lean, be efficient. " You have some even more concrete pieces of advice here of just what that looks like. You have a huge, I don't know, philosophy of just huge leverage per person. You focus a lot on revenue per employee. Talk about that. So obviously we look at things like revenue per employee, but we never let that be the sort of North Star. It's not something that dictates our strategy per se. Same thing with profitability. I think by being efficient, that ends up becoming a side effect of yeah, we are profitable and growing. But I think for us more is like we care a ton about adding the right team members. So it's easy. You can almost sort of shoot yourself in the foot as a founder by just setting the wrong goals. If your goal is to double in headcount and add a hundred people to the company, then that becomes the goal. The goal is no longer to add the best people. It's no longer to maintain a high quality bar. The goal is to hit a hundred people and that's everything everyone's focused on. So then guess what? If that's the goal, then the thing that ends up dropping is, okay, maybe we will settle for employees that are good enough and we're going to make sure we get to that hundred because a hundred is going to help us get to the next phase of growth. And then the next phase of growth. And I think we've tried to resist that temptation, which is we want everybody that comes through the door and joins our team to really be the type of person that represents Gamma. Our first 10 to 12 employees, we spent so much time really getting the DNA right. I think Brian Chesky talks about this. Your goal is you get that first 10 and you want to be able to then replicate the next 10 and then replicate the next 10, but that 10 needs to be all super cohesive. You need to have the same shared values, same principles, same ambition, same vision, and if you don't, then what are you even replicating? Right? At that point you're just adding headcount and you can easily just be adding headcount because we're chasing the next shiny startup to join. And so for us, we really focused on that first 10. That allows us to really have this sort of community of teammates that basically want to stick around. A lot of founders think about not wanting to have a leaky bucket on the product side, but the same thing applies on the team side. If you have a leaky bucket, people are just constantly leaving, revolving door. That's a huge amount of cost. The continuity cost is massive and it's really hard to quantify. And I mentioned our first 10 employees, all 10 of them are still here today, five years later. And so that sort of continuity, it means that you have this tribal knowledge that sticks with you. It means that people can continue building and having that sort of cohesive feeling. So I think that's one piece that's just like, it's hard to quantify, but I do think, new startups I would advise just to really be thoughtful about that, get that to a point where you really feel confident that as you're adding the next 10 and next hundred, you're actually replicating the same DNA and not actually just adding a bunch of random people to the company.…

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