Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Well, I can just say I don't do this a lot anymore, but when people call me, I can tell if they've already decided, and when they're really just looking for... When they ask me for the strengths and weaknesses I'm like, oh, they've already decided. When they ask me something hard, like on a scale of one to 10, how likely you're to hire them again? Stuff like that, that kind of gets at the core. Or were they the top 1% of your employees? That's a good question. Oh, were they top 10? Oh. That type of question is pretty good. So, when I'm on the other side of it, I like when those types of questions come up. I tell you the other mistake everyone makes, and all the CEOs we're making now, is you're hiring for that whatever, head of engineering, and you're blown away by the resume. Like you're 50 employees and you're hiring this person, who's been at Microsoft the last 10 years, and has a fancy title, and is a fancy division in Microsoft, and you hire them, there's just a massive impedance mismatch when you hire them on what their expectations are, and what your expectations are, in the extent that you get your shit together. It's just you don't. You definitely don't, if you're 50 or 500 employees. And they expect you to have your act together. So, that is another... Avoid the big company hire. We hired so many people from Salesforce, and Google, and Microsoft, like 100% attrition rate on all those folks. Something that I've seen that a lot of companies is there's phases of like, okay, now it's the McKinsey, a cohort comes in, and we think that's going to be the answer, and then it's the Apple group, and then that didn't work out, then the Amazon group. The McKinsey one never works. It never works. It never works. By definition, they would fail on my spectrum of... Most founders are like me, they are skeptical of dimensional wisdom, they're unhappy with the world works in some way, and so they're kind of far on that spectrum of rethinking dimensional wisdom. And almost by definition somebody who goes to work for McKinsey is very conservative in their outlook. And so, I think that almost always fails.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.