Lenny Rachitsky: evaluation

Transcript context

…Gustaf Alströmer It's a tricky one because I would like to say that all the things that we did were the cost of the outcome of this, but that's not really how the world works. Some of the things we did work, some of the things that we did did not work. It's hard for us to actually disentangle what those things are, but I think we can talk about the things that we did. First of all, we made sure we hired people that were really excited to be there, right? They wanted to build Airbnb and they were really excited to work on Airbnb. That was the most important thing. Of course people had other offers, but I think you can figure out from those offers are you excited to be here or not. So that was probably the first thing. The second thing I think is trying to understand the true motivations of the people that were there, like lower, "Why are you here?" We did something we call culture interviews that I think the founders have written about or there's probably content online about this. We did a lot of culture interviews early on to try to figure out we got the people that were there that mapped our core values and were really excited to work on Airbnb. I think finally, I don't know how this happened, we did pick people from diverse backgrounds. Most startups don't have most of the PMs being former founders, but I believe that was the case for the first 10 or 12 or 15 PMs at Airbnb. A lot of us were former founders. I think that that made a big difference for how you make decisions and how you get started on things. I think I actually see this a lot in the Airbnb founders. They really care about the time at YC and they tried to recreate YC inside Airbnb a couple of times with demo day and with so new products completely isolated from the rest, starting with doing things that don't scale and talking to customers. So I think that that experience had made a big impact on them, but it's hard to say just these two things go and apply these things. It's actually kind of hard to say, "Well that will work at it as Airbnb." I think that's a really tricky question to answer. The last thing I would say is Airbnb had an incredible business model, an incredible business from early on and it was hard to fail. What I mean by that is it's hard to fail with a company. You can fail with individual things inside the company, but a company was still going to succeed. I think we all felt that. A lot of companies don't have the ability to take risks like Airbnb did early on because they don't have something that's so obviously great. Gustaf Alströmer Yeah. Yeah, that's interesting. So you mentioned YC and this kind of is a good segue to where I want to focus most of our time. You mentioned that you've worked with over 600 companies at this point, which is absurd. It feels like it's you get some statistical significance on takeaways at this point of what works and doesn't work. So I have just a bunch of questions about your experience working at YC and with all these companies. The first is I think about this quote that Elad Gill tweeted once and he wrote, I think, a post about it. Elad Gill is a legendary angel investor. He said that starting a company is an act of desperation. You're either desperate to change the trajectory of your career or you're desperate to make a bunch of money, you're desperate to achieve some kind of mission or build a specific product that you're just like, "I need this to exist." I'm curious if you agree with that sentiment and then I have a follow-up question around that. Gustaf Alströmer Yeah, actually I haven't heard it before, but you know me, I'm an optimistic person. I think it probably reflects on my view of this question, but I would say desperation sounds like a negative place that you're starting at. I actually think that most people to start companies start from a positive place. But the motivations, I agree with what he said, can be very diverse for successful founders, right? So we actually asked this in one of the early Group Office Hours sessions. We asked them, "Why are you doing this?" And we don't want to hear an answer like, "I found this niche of the market.' That's not the why. The why is like, "Why will you come in and work late after four years when you have no money left and everything's going to shit?" ", right? Then the niche market is not the answer. There's something deeper than that. We've learned that it varies a lot for people's motivations to start companies. Some of them just want to solve some technical problem that they feel are passionate about solving. Some of them want to prove themselves in front of others or prove themselves towards themselves. Some have grand really important motivations to change the world and they will say things like, "I want to give everyone water or I want to solve climate change or I want to democratize publishing." You can imagine any number of large ideas. Some people just want to start a big company and just want to be successful. It doesn't matter, in my experience, what your motivation is. I don't think either of these motivations. It sounds like some of them will be better than others. In my experience, it's not the case. The motivation will change over time to just running this thing, right? Like once something becomes big, it's hard to think every day about exactly why you got started because the motivation is just like it can be fun and work on boring things because it's fun to build something big. Everything doesn't have to be shiny and big and grandiose because there are many ideas that are "boring," but just the idea of running the company becomes the motivation eventually.…

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