Lenny Rachitsky: prediction

Transcript context

…Oh, that's exciting. Yeah. Maybe the fourth order effect is distribution becomes increasingly important because there are so many freaking things trying to get your attention. So people with an audience and platform I think become more and more valuable, which is good stuff. Okay. I wanted to come back actually to your management stuff. So I really loved your insight about spending more time with top performers has been really successful to you. Just thinking about you as a manager of a team that is building the platform that powers basically the entire AI economy, like every AI startup is building on your API. Clearly you're doing a great job. What other kind of core management lessons have you learned? What do you find is really important and key to your success as a manager of engineers and just people? Yeah. I think a lot of the lessons that I've learned here, I don't know how specific it is to the OpenAI API or some of our enterprise products in particular. I think my management philosophy has obviously changed over time, but I think it's probably stayed the same more than it's changed over time. One of these principles is what I talked to you about before, which is spending a lot of time with top performers, like actually spending... And to be very concrete, it's like more than 50% of your time with your top performers, with maybe your top 10% performers, and really, really trying your best to empower them. The way that I think about it is kind of come back to this analogy of software engineer as a surgeon, which comes from The Mythical Man-Month. So actually, it's funny. So I pull it from the book, but in the book, they actually described this world where I think they were predicting the future because I think the book was written in the '70s or something. They said that software engineering might end up moving into a world where that software engineers are like surgeons or in a surgery room, there's one person doing the work and there's the one person cutting or whatever and doing all the surgery, and everyone else in the room is there to just support them. It's like the nurse and the assistant and the resident and the fellow and then the surgeon's like, "I need a scalpel," and they give them scalpel and then they're like, "I need this tool and this machine," and they'll bring it over." Everyone's there to just support the one surgeon. A. Nd so The Mythical Man-Month actually predicted that that is kind of the direction that software engineering's going to go. I don't think that's exactly played out where it's much more collaborative and it's not only one person doing the work, but I've always really liked that analogy. And that analogy is actually what I strive to emulate in my own management philosophy, which is software engineering isn't really like surgery where it's not just one person doing the work, but the way in which I like treating the people on my team and the way that I act as a manager is I want to empower them, make them feel like they're a surgeon. And insofar as making sure that I'm supporting them and making sure they have everything that they need to do their work, and it feels like they have an army of people kind of supporting them and looking around corners and giving them everything that they need when it's really just me as the manager. And so the example that I give is looking around corners and unblocking people, especially from an organizational perspective, is extremely, extremely useful. And again, going back to the AI conversations, even more important nowadays, right? If people are just cranking PR after PR, the main thing bottlenecking progress and shipping something tends to be organizational or process oriented.…

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