Lenny Rachitsky: evaluation

Transcript context

…Don't step away from the details that both you love. I mean, first of all, if your passion is building product and product design, even if it feels like at times the company needs to do all this other stuff like scale up, go to market, and operations and just have like a large people organization, that itself creates a lot of need to do things and manage. There becomes a new job invented just to manage a larger group of people, and obviously you're going to have to do some of that. You can't just completely eschew all your responsibility as an at-scale CEO, but don't lose the essence of the thing that you love doing and that really made this product happen and gives this company as many companies that were founded on a magical product market fit finding insight. Don't step too far away from that, and always make sure that is still your number one, even if other stuff has to also add to your plate. I think people don't talk enough about this how if someone starts a company that's an idea they have they're excited about, it takes off and then you're stuck on that for a long time, and then even if things are pushed in a direction you're not as excited about. This point about just remembering what you actually love about it and coming back to that is so important because that's the only way to keep doing this for a long time. I think that's so true, and to me that's why there's always been a difference between entrepreneurs who love the act of building a product or the business, too, versus those who saw a just purely business or financial opportunity that they felt like they couldn't pass up exploiting or going after. Look, no knock on people who are more the latter, and there's entire industries where it's all just about alpha generation. You can go into the private equity business and so on, and it's just purely it's rationally about how do I find the alpha? I think that some of the best companies, product central companies, at least in my opinion, are run by those people who actually just love the product. I think you get a feel for that from some of the AI companies like Sam, I think genuinely just loves working on AI. If he could spend a hundred percent of his time on just being close to the AI and the research, I mean, he would and he's even said as much. Ranging to like Brian's with Airbnb, it's pretty clear that people like this are not motivated like... Airbnb was not founded because like, "Oh my God, we want to make a lot of money off this arbitrage opportunity against hotels."…

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