Lenny Rachitsky: preference

Transcript context

…I started my career in corporate retail at the Gap headquarters in San Francisco. So I did a rotational training program, rotating between Old Navy, Banana Republic, Gap, and it was a great foundation in business fundamentals. A lot of people talk about, should I out of school go to a bigger company, or should I go to a startup? So I went to a bigger company and gradually have gone to smaller companies since then until finally starting my own in the past 15 years. So I think that getting to see inside what a company that's been around for 40 plus years was like was really, really fantastic training and set me up for success for jumping into tech and other roles since then. After Gap, I went to a beauty company that was acquired by Shiseido and then was at an ad tech company that was acquired by Snap. And then moved cross country from SF to New York to work with bestselling author, Seth Godin. And that just changed my trajectory completely. It was just such a transformative experience getting to learn and work directly with for three years, one of the best marketing minds and just most creative minds, I think on the planet right now. And together we co-founded the altMBA, which I grew from just an idea between me and Seth, to thousands of students, 45 countries, 500 cities, grew our team from just us two to 60 plus people all over the world. So it was just an amazing, amazing experience. And then after that, I consulted for a couple of years working directly with other course creators who wanted to create their mini versions of the altMBA, and from doing that, really proved out the idea that the format of cohort-based courses was something that was really special, that other experts in other industries, other functions could really leverage. And then that led to starting Maven because when I was consulting and when I was doing altMBA, during those six, seven years, I realized how janky the tech stack was that everyone was using. And I was shocked that no one had tackled this problem of all of us course creators needing to toggle between half a dozen different tools just to make a live plus async course be able to work. And so when my co-founder Gagan Biyani and I got together, we were brainstorming what's the future of education and catching up. And we were just shocked that, hey, why hasn't anyone tackled this yet? We should do this because we both really believe that cohort-based courses are the future that [inaudible 00:07:02] want to teach these courses, but it's just too hard from a technical perspective now, but it doesn't have to be that way. Awesome. I definitely want to chat a bit about Seth Godin. I've been such a huge fan of his for, I don't know, a decade. I used to subscribe to his newsletter and I don't anymore, because it's an email every day and it's overwhelming, even though he pointed out in one of his newsletters, okay, just ignore it. Why would you be sad that I have so much content? But yeah, anyway I unsubscribed recently, but I'm such a fan. And so I'm so curious, one, how did you connect with him and how did that even happen? And then two, what is he like to work with? Both very, very juicy questions. So the way that we connected was Seth had put out a blog post saying that he was looking for a special projects lead to help him figure out what to do next. So this was in 2014 when he had just sold off his last company Squidoo that he had been working on for I think, eight years or so before that. So he was ready for something new, at a crossroads, wanted some fresh inspiration, and I saw this blog post on a whim. And at that time I was at that ad tech company in San Francisco and I thought there are probably thousands of people who are going to be applying to this, so I don't want to get my hopes up. I did want to move to New York. I feel like everyone in SF and California at some time wants to move to New York. And so I thought, all right, I'm going to toss my hat in the ring and not overthink it. And so the application required a video, so there was a written application and then there was a video. So Seth said, "Take three minutes to talk about what you want to build, what you want to contribute, and what you want to learn," something along those lines. And I did my video in one take. Normally I would've done multiple takes for sure, but here I just thought there's a very little chance I'm going to get this. And a couple days later to my surprise, I get an email from Seth Godin. He's in my inbox and I'm just jumping up and down in my living room because he's asked, "Hey, loved your video. Let's hop on a call for an interview." And of course I write a very calm professional response and we did a couple rounds of interviews and I get the role. So I pack my life into six suitcases, get an apartment sight unseen in this little town right outside of New York City, where Seth's office is, it's called Hastings-on-Hudson. And what initially started off as a six month role eventually led to over three years working together and starting the altMBA together. So that's how we got connected, very serendipitous. But my lesson there is don't take yourself out of the running before you get rejected. Don't reject yourself, basically. I think a lot of us have high standards and high expectations of ourselves and it's almost like, oh, if I can't do the best application, then I just shouldn't apply. If I don't have time to take five takes of this video, it won't be good enough, and so I just shouldn't do it. So for me, that was a great lesson in putting your best foot forward, but putting your foot forward.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.