Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…I know. But the guy running that, Nick Lin, he came from investment banking, he came from private equity, and he just has such a competitive advantage where he is building that product and he's like, "I know this, I know this." He's built for this. And so I think just understanding what are those interdisciplinary areas you can lean into, to make yourself more just higher impact is really important. And then the last one is just being adaptable. Anyone who is trying to just keep applying old playbooks, I think you're going to make life a lot harder for yourself. So one of the biggest things you come into Anthropic, is you need to understand that probably 50, 60, 70% of how you operate in the past, just throw it out the door. It's not going to be relevant. And if you try to stick to that, you're going to have a lot of friction and it's not going to be helpful. So just being adaptable and understanding, "Okay, the job's changed this way, I'm going to go that way," is I think like, it's so, so important. That is awesome advice. It matches a lot of what Jenny shared when she came on the podcast, the design leader on Claude and Cowork and all these things, of just the idea of going deep, becoming the best or one of the best at a very specific thing, and that not every company will need and you don't need all 10, but just going deep on something. I forget how she described it. Marc Andreessen said the same thing. I think we called it a sideways E, instead of just T-shaped of one thing. If you could have a couple of things you're really, really good at, there's a lot of power to that. Oh, man. Okay. Before I get into something that I think will blow a lot of people's minds about how we actually met and kind of a big part of your journey, let me just ask you this. Is there anything else about Anthropic that might be worth sharing, might be worth talking about? The thing that maybe comes to mind is just our culture and the people that we have here. I really think it's our secret sauce. I think it's the thing that is the most defensible, the thing that no one else is going to be able to replicate. And I don't think it's an accident. Leadership has really invested in this a lot. And Daniela and Dario, they really believe in this a lot, and I think they've just created a very special culture. So I would say that this is truly a mission-driven company and I was not 100% sure of that when I joined. I was like, I think that this is an exciting company. I very much agree with their principles, but I didn't know anyone at the company. I didn't have any references on what it was like inside. So I was a little skeptical when I joined. I'm like, "At least they're talking about it, but I don't know. Are they serious about this?" And then I came in very early on, and I was like, "Oh, oh shit. Okay. Maybe they're even more serious about this internally. They talk externally." And so it's a mission-driven company where people viscerally, viscerally understand both the upsides and the downsides of the technology, and therefore, understand the divergent ranges of how this may go for humanity and how different of a future that could be. And I think when you understand that, of how different this could be as a future for all of us and our children and our grandchildren, et cetera, I think it leads to a lot of passion for what we do and it just leads to a lot of belief in what we're doing. And so I look at every other job I've had in the past, and there's some degree of people at the company who are just checked out, where it's like, "I'm here, I'm sick of this, but I don't have a better option or I'm getting paid too much to leave, et cetera." That is just not the case here. I have not met a single person. I'm saying a single person, who has checked out. Everyone is putting everything they have on the table. Everyone is pouring it out and leaving nothing behind and is just fully, fully in it. And so I think that leads to like, releases energy that is just very, very hard to describe. I think you have that energy, you have that mission-driven nature, and then it's such an open culture. So leadership is very, very transparent with us on things. Slack, it's a whole maze. There's so many things that play out on Slack. We're very open. Everyone has these notebook channels where you have your own Twitter feed in a way, where you're just talking about your thoughts about things. And so you can go and join the Slack channel, the notebook channels of people on research and all these other areas, and you can learn whatever you want and you can spend so much time getting lost in that as well. But that openness where we even encouraged people can just argue with Dario. There was an all hands.…

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