Lenny Rachitsky: uncertainty

Transcript context

…There's a segment in our industry that believes this very intensely, which is there's this belief that everybody needs to be a founder. And I think in some ways our industry would be much better off if there were fewer founders. I use an entire category of smart, creative, hardworking, talented, borderline visionary people who can raise that $2 million seed and go off and build some stupid company that's never going to go anywhere, that would be so much better off finding a team that needs their skillset and working on a problem that has, as I described, the mathematical formula that's going to win, that has the market opportunity that's the right size, that has the 10X thinking that can really... And I'm a little biased here because while I am a CEO for the first time now, I've never been a founder and I've been lucky enough to find a bunch of young teams that could benefit from my skills and enthusiasms, and sometimes to some success and sometimes to some embarrassment, but always really, really interesting. Yeah. If you're out there and you think that the only possible way you can be successful in this industry on any metric, whatever metric you care about: you want the acclaim of your peers, you want financial reward, you want any of the things that people aspire to, outside impact on culture, whatever the thing is that gets you out of bed every morning, you can achieve that in collaboration with others. You don't have to be the person that raises the seed round. I 100% agree with that. I'm always telling people, "Don't start a company. It's super painful, very rarely works out. It's so hard. " I don't know what's harder, being a product manager or being a founder, probably being a founder. They're both very hard. Yeah, it is quite hard too. Yeah. Yeah. And just to be perfectly clear, there's something really special about founders. At both Pandora and now at Zero, the actual founders have from time to time said, "Well, you're like a founder." And I'm like, "I'm nothing like a founder. You took all the risk. When I showed up, there was a team and there was momentum and there was money in the bank. I appreciate your desire to say complimentary things, but 'You're like a founder' is not one that I'll take."…

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