Lenny Rachitsky: prediction

Transcript context

…Here's the thing about FinTech, which is probably the most interesting is, FinTech, you have two customers. You have your usual customers and you have your regulator, and you need to keep both of them happy. And usually, what makes one happy, it makes the other one less happy, right? So, you are constantly dealing with trade-offs. In most PMs, in most companies you have some trade-offs, but they're not existential. Whereas in FinTech, every trade-off is existential. When you found a company, every trade-off is existential. You may not exist as a business if you make a wrong decision. In FinTech, a lot of the PMs see that day in day out, and that probably kind of conditions them to a whole different level of juggling balls than you would be a PM at other company. Yeah, that's such a good point. Just really good stakeholder management influence dealing with all these trade-offs. I think that's a really good point. I'm going to come back to the strength stuff because that's really important and I've been meaning to come back to it. So, just to reflect back, the four things you pointed out are really what you want to look for to accelerate your career. Companies that are growing really fast, working on things that you're good at, and finding a role that leverages your strengths versus things that you're not good at. Not optimizing for comp really is such a good point there. Your point essentially is you'll make most of your comp later, probably the 50%. The second half of your career, you probably make, I don't know, 10 times more than you make the first part of your career. And so, optimize for the future cop, not today's comp. And then this idea of making sure, ask yourself, do you want to be CPO? Do you want to go down the C-suite route or do you want to maybe probably plan to start a company, something else? And that informs the role you're in. Coming back to the strength stuff, how do people figure out their strengths? Do you have any advice for someone sitting around, they're like, "What am I actually good at? I don't know." So, there's several ways to do it. I remember I read this book, this was, I don't think it shaped my understanding of it because I was already operating in that mode, but it used to be called Now Discover Your Strengths. I think now it's called Strength Finder 2.0. It's still 20 years old now, but there's a lot more newer ways to do it. There are two things I have done and they're both kind of, I'm not sure how accessible they are, but I'll give you the examples. So, at a Agoda, we used to pay a psychologist $5,000 for every single PM we interview, right? So, after you finish your PM rounds, we would send you to this psych assessment. It would be a six-hour psych assessment and they would tell me what your strengths are, not just that it would be an IQ component. So, we would know what percentile you are, and not just like an IQ score like Einstein or not, but IQ score across different, across pattern recognition or structured thinking, across numerical ability, verbal ability, right? So, a lot of people say they hire the smartest people. At Agoda, we literally hired the smartest people because we paid the psychologist a lot of money to tell whether they're smart or not. But other than that, they also give you your strengths and weaknesses. It used to be called, I know the company still around, it's called Q4, and it's called Q4 because they had this four quadrants on two axes, one is on dominance and one is on warmth, right? So, you want people who are high dominance, high warmth in the 4 quadrant, and that as you can realize, if you also want smart people, to find those who land in that quadrant is literally looking through a needle through a haystack. But when I, I almost didn't do it. I was like, this is like I've been doing products for 15 years, this is insulting that I need to go do a six hour... The only reason I did it at that time was my son was four and a half years old and I was teaching him, because you're going to go to kindergarten, I was starting do some math with him, and then in six months he knew all the math that I knew. He was solving quadratic equations and stuff. And we thought, oh, we have a genius in the house. We got to get him tested. So, we were testing him, and that's the only reason I took this test because I thought it would be interesting to understand what this process looks like. But then when I got the results, I was like, it was so spot on. It was incredibly spot on in saying areas where I would do well, areas where I would struggle and need help. So, that's one way to do it. It's super extreme. A little bit a year, two years ago, we had the [inaudible 00:38:40]. CZ is good friends with Ray Dalio. So, we had Ray Dalio come to our executive offsite, and he walked us through how he and his company does strengths assessment. So he has a, that one is lot more accessible. I think it costs like $50.…

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