Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…In the example of Segment, which is obviously a really big successful company, they started with something to tell your professor you were confused in class. It was software that they sold to universities. And then they ended up pivoting to something like a mixed panel competitor after two years and it's because they learned about how analytics works running their first idea, okay? And then no one wanted to adopt their mixed panel competitor. And so they were like, "We should make this JavaScript thing that you embed on your website that can send events to multiple endpoints at the same time so that way people would be willing to try our mixed panel competitor side by side with mixed panels to show that it's better." And then they were like, "Oh yeah, no one actually wants that. They just want this JavaScript to send events to different locations." And so there's no way those founders could have started with the final idea. You get what I mean? There was no universe where they would've made up the idea for Segment because they didn't know anything about how analytics worked, but because they were grinding for multiple years and became experts on these things is a side effect of their earlier ideas. They ended up with really good unique insights. I think that's a really important point there is you don't need to necessarily have that experience before you start the company, could come from trying to build the company. Exactly.…

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