Lenny Rachitsky: evaluation

Transcript context

…I'm not sure AR is going to be the right reference. Here's what you need. You need a major account who's gone all in with you on the new technology and who is willing in some way to talk about it. The good news about visionaries is they tend to have fairly big egos and they tend to like to talk, unlike pragmatists who will not want to talk. Pragmatists, they'll have to go to legal and get permission and blah, blah, blah. But once you've got that, whatever your revenue is at that point, you should be starting to think about, "Well, what is my beachhead segment?" And the good news about Crossing the Chasm, it's not expensive. Think about it, once you've said, I'm going to stay in one geography, in one industry, one profession, think about your marketing budget. You're not buying Super Bowl ads here. There's no sock puppets. That's not what we're doing. We want to get to maybe 200 people with a message. And then do you have the domain expertise to really understand the problem? And if it's a really compelling problem, they'll take the meeting and getting that meeting is... Because if you're an entrepreneurial founder, you're probably fairly charismatic. First of all, you've convinced your spouse that you're willing to work for no money with no benefits, and maybe you pitched a venture capitalist and you fooled them, so why can't you fool these guys? Anyway, that would be the way I would go. Essentially, the advice here is if you're a new early stage startup, one of the biggest milestones you want to aim for is a big marquee customer. When I think about this and look at a startup deck, if I see something like Figma is using this product or notion or Salesforce. Clearly, I'll be like, "Wow, okay, these really sophisticated people decided this was useful to them." And so I will innately trust that. There's also often advice of don't work with big companies because they'll push you around, they'll take a long time, they'll force you to build a thing just for them and it won't apply to other people. What's your advice to avoid that downside? It has to do with the persona of the executive sponsor. Nine out of 10 executive sponsors are going to be the negative because they're going to be a company person working with company processes. They're going to send you to purchasing, nobody's going to be happy. You're looking for the 10th one. The 10th one is one who says, "I'm so tired of the status quo. I'm looking for people that are visionary like me. I like talking to you better than I like talking to my peers because you're different and I want to be different. I want to leapfrog the world, and these people just want to stay on the escalator. So they're staying on the escalator. God bless them, but I want to jump over the top." So it's a persona based choice is the key thing there.…

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