Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, I totally agree with that. For example, I think for let's say a new grad who's thinking about a product career, and let's say on the spectrum there is maybe Goldman Sachs because that's what a lot of people are doing. They're like, "Yeah, I want to do product, but I also feel like I need this gold star or whatever." And then in between is you could join a hypergrowth company of some sort where they definitely have good product people you can learn from, but definitely still room for you to do more than what a very junior person would be assigned to be doing. And then on the other end of the spectrum is I'm going to have no job, I'm just going to completely bounce around from my own projects or just work with a new startup every two months. Personally in that spectrum, I tend to be more towards the middle of that where build a track record, build a network. I mean, it's crazy. Even just this week, next week I'm seeing maybe five people that I know from my Yammer days, and to your point on formative nature, some of those people, that's how I learned how to do product. That's how I learned things like AB testing. It's how I had the first angel investors in my next company. That's how I hire. I still hire people, maybe much to their chagrin, they still get LinkedIn messages for me trying to push them for the next thing. So, I totally agree that those early days are really formative, and there's maybe a balance between nobody wants to be a job hopper, but at the same time maybe there's ways to also not just be a career person who spends kind of 30 years working up the ladder or is fixated on I need to be CPO but is willing to give up a director title to go be a hustler at some startup because they really believe in it and they want to take a bet or risk in their career. You touched on hiring, and that's something I wanted to ask you. So, you're in my Talent Collective. You're a company that's hiring, Alchemy, and I was looking at the stats recently, and you're one of the most successful companies at getting candidates to talk to you, and generally I think you're just really good at hiring. So, I'm curious what you can share with folks about hiring. I appreciate that, and I get a lot of value out of meeting some really talented people from the Collective. I think hiring, it's funny, it reminds me of sort of push back in a sense of what you call it has such an impact on how people think about it. It's hiring, recruiting, but if people reframe it as the people you are going to work with every day or the people who make the company what it is, it shifts the mindset. It's like how is that not the most important thing to be thinking about as a leader or as a founder. A lot of people have benchmarks. I think maybe on the Google podcast I talk about 30%, 40% of a founder's time maybe spent on recruiting because I think deep down everybody understands that that's incredibly valuable. I think that for me personally, I was reflecting ahead of the podcast on how I approach things now after different stages of hiring, and for context, for what it's worth, I've been at the zero person startup. It's just me and I'm trying to convince some Google engineer to come join us which is incredibly hard and has a low hit rate, to a place like Amazon or Airbnb where you have a large world-class recruiting organization that is effectively doing sourcing for you and setting up interviews and such things like this, and there's formal calibrations and interview panels, to a place like Alchemy where it's very sort of scrappy. We need to figure out who we even want to hire. The founders still meet with every candidate. It's a really different environment. So, this is kind of the spectrum that I've seen, and I was reflecting what do I think works the best, and I like to think of it in very similar motions to a business where I think there is a marketing aspect to it, there was a sales aspect, and there is a product aspect to it. What I mean by that is that on a marketing level, I think what has a person heard about your company. Do they know anybody who works there? Do they read your LinkedIn post about things and already know that you're a known quantity before they even step in the door to interview? Are they even willing to interview based on what they know about the company? And so, I think that the marketing aspect in it, and I mean it's sort of lower case marketing in this sense of course because I think a hard sell of any sort or anything that's not authentic is probably going to fail ultimately, but it's about developing a really positive kind of brand and reputation for a company but also as an individual. And then if you pass that threshold, I feel like there's a sort of a sales process, and we were talking about how bad of a salesperson I am, for example, because I didn't listen to people's pain points and understand the one or two things that were most important to them. I think similarly in this context, if they're an engineer, do they want to work in a world-class engineering organization?…

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