Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…That sounds about right. I think what's really interesting to me is that from all of that experience, the biggest startup lesson you seem to have taken out of that is to fall in love with the problem. It's what your book is called. You have a T-shirt that you're wearing right now that you wear on every podcast that says that exactly. Clearly this lesson has struck a big chord with you. I'm curious if there's a moment where you realize that that's the core and that's something that every founder needs to get right. Is there an aha moment or is it kind of this progressive like, "Oh, wow, maybe this is the secret." I'm not sure that this is a certain moment. I think that that was evolving over time and realizing that, look, at the end of the day, the entrepreneurship journey is about value creation. The simplest way to create value is solve a problem. That's the simplest way. And in my background, I'm an engineer always looking for the simplest way, and solve a problem is the simplest way, and so this is where fall in love with the problem coming from, and people occasionally would confuse the T-shirt with the book, and now the T-shirt is about 10 or even more years old and the book is only two years old, and so I was wearing those T-shirts for a long while before I wrote the book and when I wrote the book that was obvious that this is going to be the name of the book, but they are way more into that, right? So when you fall in love with the problem, then what happened is that the problem is going to serve as the North Star of your journey, and when you have a North Star, you're going to make less deviation from the course and you are way more likely to become successful. But also the story that you are about to tell is way more compelling. Just imagine that we will be here in 2007, just before I started Waze, and I will tell you I'm going to build an AI crowd-source based navigation system and you're going to say, "Oh, yeah, very interesting," but you don't care. If I will tell you I'm going to help you to avoid traffic jams, then you do care, and when your customer cares, they want you to be successful, and when they want you to be successful, they are going to help you to become successful. And so in that sense, fall in love with the problem is really a key to increase the likelihood of being successful. So in general, all of my startups start with a problem. Think of a problem, a big problem, something that it's worth solving, something that the world will become a better place if you solve that and then ask yourself, so who has this problem? If you happen to be the only person on the planet with this problem, I can recommend you a therapist. Don't build a startup. It's way more expensive and takes way longer period of time to build a startup. But if a lot of people actually have this problem, what you really want to do next is go and speak with those people and understand their perception of the problem and only then start to build the solution. If you follow this path and your solution works, it's guaranteed that you're creating value. If you start with a solution, you might be building something that no one cares and that's really frustrating. So fall in love with the problem. This is where you want to start. Now this is really hard because I am getting tons of emails every week from entrepreneurs and they all start with what we are doing and I don't really care what you're doing. What I really care about is why you are doing that, and this is the problem that you solve or the value that you create or the value that you create for me.…

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