Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…t it." He's like, "Please do that. Make sure you don't." And initially, the hidden benefit that came out of it that I did not realize is it massively, Lenny, simplified our business. And you know why? Because we have such a broad business with so many different industries, it's impossible for someone to be a deep expert in every single one of them across the board. There's just way too much surface area. But the things that we want to convey to the market that the market should take away from us, if that story is not something that I understand well enough to be able to convey it, how do I first expect 20,000 of my sellers to be able to go tell it to the market? And how do I expect my customers to be able to digest that story? There's zero chance that would happen. And so, that was my big takeaway from this, which is don't delegate the storytelling. And the storytelling is not a marketing exercise after you built the product. The story is why you build the product to make the story come real. And so, make sure that the story is there first, and then that story has evidence and proof based on the products that you're building. I had a conversation with Matt MacInnis, who's COO now CPO at Rippling, and hit a similar piece of advice, which I think is also, it's like adjacent advice, which is "The intensity of an idea or a plan drops at every level that it goes from CO to the next layer and layer. And your job as a leader is to maintain that intensity, not to buffer it from the employees, but to maintain exactly the same intensity."" And it feels like that's in addition to also just keep the story the same. Like don't filter it, don't change it. Although your advice is even different, just like you actually go to the team working on it and tell the story yourself. Don't even let- I want to make sure that they hear it from me directly so that there's no lossiness. We have this concept in networking called packet loss. When you actually send packets over a wire and you have a loss of packet, then actually there's loss of data. You don't want to have packet loss in your storytelling from you to the person on the front line because-…

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