Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. I'm kind of between two right now. One, which has become a Twitter meme basically, which is you can just do things. I feel like that is basically going always in my head every time I do something that I'm just shocked at the speed and ability to do things now so you can just do things, and the second one I stole from my brother. His motto is nobody knows what the fuck they're doing. And I just love that. And I think it kind of makes you take life more lightly. So yeah, nobody knows what the they're doing. I think people see these companies on the outside and it feels like everything they've got all figured out. And if you're ever on the inside of a company that's doing really well, you're like, how is this staying on the rails? How is this still a thing that is working? Doesn't make any sense. It's all about to fall apart. Yeah. Okay. Last question. You've had a long entrepreneurial thread throughout your career. There's a couple other real world businesses you've started in the past. You did a thermal clothing business and then like a hummus delivery thing. So maybe pick one of those and just tell the story of what that's about. Yeah, I'd love to. Really fun that you asked about this. So I'll tell the thermal clothing because I think it's really cool. So in high school, I was selling thermal clothes in 10th grade for one of my sister's friends or something, and basically it was just packs of thermal clothing, shirt and pants. I grew up in Jerusalem, so it's a bit chillier there. So it was perfect for the weather. And in 10th grade, when I was selling them, they were like 20, $25 a piece and I was making like $4 a sale, and if you look in the food chain, I was like sixth or seventh down the line. So this was like crazy margins. So during the summer I thought about it like I should just go straight to the importer. So throughout the summer I called the importer and at first he was really, really mad. He was like, no, you have to work for me for years to get to this state. And I said, listen, man, I'm finishing school soon. This is not going to be my career. Either do it or not. And we basically negotiated throughout the whole summer. And this was also like how I did things before ChatGPT. So he would throw out something, he'd say, "Oh, the import tax has gone up." And I'll just search Google, like Import Tax Israel and start reading. And I'll be on the phone with him and I'll be like, "Hey, I would just basically stall." And then I'd somehow come back with a challenge. And I ended up getting a really great price, like 12 and a half dollars a piece. So I was making 100% profit and I spread throughout a bunch of different schools. Each school, I had the coolest people in school selling for me. And then a really fun thing that I did was we had a really awesome basketball team and our basketball team would basically be 30 points up within the first half and it kind of got boring for the crowd. So I wrote a song, like a basketball chant about Thermal Clothes that basically has my number within it. And the end of it was if you join in now, we'll give you a discount. And it was with drums and everything. And still when I go to Jerusalem, I know some people who I don't even know my number by heart because they know it by the tune. And sometimes when I walk in Jerusalem, people stop me and say like, "Hey, it's Thermal Zevi." So that was just a really cool experience as a kid.…

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