Lenny Rachitsky: uncertainty

Transcript context

…The point you bring up here about wanting to build a positive thing, some people, sometimes I get criticism. It's not actually that often, but they say, "Oh, you're building an app that makes teens feeling insecure or anything." But with Gas, I think we received a message every single day from a user telling us that they reconsidered suicide or other forms of self-harm. The app sent you positive messages and affirmations. It made teens feel really good. And I think that is lost on a lot of people. Instagram can make you feel jealousy and a lot of other social networks are a mixed bag in terms of impact. But we were entirely focused on making teens feel better. And some people might say, "Oh, what if someone doesn't get voted for something?" We actually built a system to ensure everyone got a vote. And what we did was we put your name in polls at a higher frequency if you weren't being voted on recently. So we wanted to spread the love in every way possible, and that's what really motivated me to grow this thing was watching how it was impacting 10 million kids in such a short period of time. I really appreciate you adding that. I didn't know all those things about the way you thought about these apps. Interestingly, I don't know how much you can go into this, but there is a lot of stuff going on with Gas around human trafficking and all this stuff where people thought people were being kidnapped through Gas, which is yeah, talk about that whatever you can because that's pretty crazy. We had this hoax started where people were saying the app was used for human trafficking. And I was like, "This is so strange." This is a anonymous polling app without messaging and the only thing you could do is send compliments to your friends. And I researched into it and I saw that this is actually plaguing a lot of apps and any app that has gone viral in any way has actually had this hoax started. And part of the reason it happens is it gets you attention if you say that about an app. As a teenager, if you say, "Oh, this app is dangerous," and then you get a bunch of followers and who doesn't love followers? So it's actually a really viral piece of content if you put it out. And so we had this hoax started and we were like, "This could kill the company." And I talked to a bunch of founders that it happened to them and they said, "Yeah, we had to shut down because of that."…

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