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Lenny Rachitsky: belief

14 Apr 2024 Lenny's Podcast The GitLab way: Kindness, transparency, and short toes | David DeSanto (CPO)

“Going a totally different direction, Hila also said that you're a leader with a great sense of humor and you often use your humor to navigate very high stakes conversations and executive negotiations. And I think a lot of people would love to have the skill.”

— Lenny Rachitsky

Source trail

Everything needed to verify it.

Speaker
Lenny Rachitsky
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
belief
Recorded
14 Apr 2024
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

Transcript context

…Well, it is also about meeting those tenants, right? And so our partners at their commercial, they need to meet that same requirement and that same vision. And both Google, as in Google Cloud and Anthropic, were able to meet the privacy requirements we had, and those are really important to us. And so not every company that we could partner with could do that, and so we had to be very careful as to who we partnered with. And so there's nothing about the companies we're not partnered with. Maybe we just haven't gone to that point yet. But that's part of being a partner is you have to meet those same values for lack of a better, to put it that we have base of our customer base, especially being trusted by more than 50% of the Fortune 100. Makes sense. Okay. Going a totally different direction, Hila also said that you're a leader with a great sense of humor and you often use your humor to navigate very high stakes conversations and executive negotiations. And I think a lot of people would love to have the skill. Do you have any advice or lessons other than just being David and being who you are, I guess any lessons for leveraging the skill, building the skill, how you apply it? I'll take the compliment from Hila. What I learned early in my career is that tension, especially very high, very tension driven conversations can really kill productivity, kill morale. And that I found that if I can deflate that a little bit and re-add some, I don't want to say humanity to the conversation, but really disarm the topic, that people are able to move forward. And I think that's what she's talking about. I will say that it probably is partially David being David to a degree. Maybe I'm the class clown experience of my elementary and high school experience and harnessing it for good now. But I think people can also do that. And leaders who have seen me do that, like Hila have learned that there's ways to do that if you can read the room and the nuance and know whether or not it's okay to try to add a little bit of levity, but I consider it a value part of my tool belt now, like a tool in my tool belt and I'm glad she appreciates it. Not every joke lands, which I'm sure you're not surprised by that, right? But yeah, I think it's been good to help keep people moving forward.…

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