Lenny Rachitsky: preference

Transcript context

…Yeah, adoption is a great one. I think there's a bunch of metrics around revenue, number of developers that are building on our platform, all those things. And a lot of these, and I don't want to dive... I'll let Sam or someone else on our leadership team go more into details, but I think a lot of these are actual abstractions towards something else. Even if revenue is a goal, it's like revenue is not actually the goal. Revenue is a proxy for getting more compute, which is then actually what helps us get towards getting more GPUs so that we can train better models and actually get to the goal. So there's all these intermediate layers where even if we say something is the goal, and you hear that in a vacuum and you're like, "Oh, well OpenAI just wants to make money," and it's like, "Well, really money is the mechanism to get better models so that we can achieve our mission." And I think there's a bunch of interesting angles like that as well. I don't know if I've heard of a more ambitious vision for a company, to build artificial general intelligence. I love that. I imagine many companies are like, "What's our version of that?" Before we leave this topic, is there anything else that you've seen OpenAI do really well that allows it to move this fast and be this successful? You talked about hiring people with higher agency and high urgency. Is there anything else that's just like, "Oh wow, that's a really good way of operating?" I imagine part of it's just hiring incredibly smart people. I think that's probably an unsaid thing, but yeah, anything else? I think there's a non-trivial benefit to using Slack, and I think maybe that's controversial and maybe some people don't like Slack, but OpenAI has such a slack heavy culture and it really... The instantaneous real time communication on Slack is so crucial. And I just love being able to tag in different people from different teams and get everybody coalesced. So everybody is always on Slack, so even if you're remote or you're on a different team or in a different office, so much of the company culture is ingrained in Slack, and it allows us to really quickly coordinate where it's actually faster to send someone a Slack message sometimes than it would be to walk over to their desk because they're on Slack and they're going to be using it. And I saw, if you saw, the recent Sam and Bill Gates interview, but Sam was talking about how Slack is his number one most used app on his phone and, "I don't even look at the time thing on my phone anymore because I don't want to know how long I'm using Slack," but I'm sure the Salesforce people are looking at the numbers and they're like, "This is exactly what we wanted."…

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