Lenny Rachitsky: uncertainty

Transcript context

…I had the same experience when I first got into a Waymo, your very first ride, at least my very first ride, my first 10 seconds in a Waymo, it starts driving and you're like, "Oh my God, watch out for that bike." You're holding onto whatever you can. And then five minutes in, you've calmed down and you realize that you're getting driven around the city without a driver and it's working. You're just like, "Oh my God, I am living in the future right now." And then another 10 minutes, you're bored, you're doing email on your phone, answering Slack messages, and suddenly this miracle of human invention is just an expected part of your life from then on. And there is really something in the way that we all are adapting to AI that's kind of like that. These miraculous things happen and computers can do something they've never been able to do before and it blows our mind collectively for a week and then we're like, oh, yeah. Oh, now it's just machine learning on its way to being an algorithm. The craziest thing about what you just shared actually is, I don't know, ChatGPT, which is now feels terrible. 3.5 was a couple years ago, and imagine what life will be like in a couple years from now. We're going to get to that, where things are going, what you think is going to be the next big leap. But I want to start with the beginning of your journey at OpenAI. So you worked at Twitter, you worked at Facebook, you worked at Planet, Instagram. At some point you got recruited to go and come work at OpenAI. I'm curious just what that story was like of the recruiting process of joining OpenAI as CPO. Is there any fun stories there? If I'm remembering the timeline right, we communicated at Planet I was leaving and I was planning to just go take some time. I wasn't going to stop working, but I was also happy to take the summer. This was maybe April or something. I was like, cool, I'm going to have the summer with my kids. We're going to go to Tahoe or something and I'll actually get to hang out rather than what I usually do going up and down and all that. And then Sam and I had known each other lightly for a bunch of years and he's always involved in so many interesting things like companies building fusion and all these things. So he'd always been somebody that I would call occasionally if I was starting to think about my next thing because I like working on big tech forward, sort of next wave kind of things. And so I called him and I think Vinod also helped to put us in touch again. And this time it wasn't like, "Oh, you should go talk to these guys working on fusion." He said, "Actually, we're thinking about something, you should come talk to us." I was like, "Okay, that sounds amazing. Let's do it." And it goes really fast, really, really fast. I met most of the management team in a brief period of time, a few days, and they were telling me, 'Look, we're basically going to move as fast as we want to move. And if you talk to everyone, everyone likes you, you're ready to go." Sam came over for dinner and we had a great evening together just talking about OpenAI in the future and getting to know each other better. And at the end I was like, I was going to go in the next day for a bigger round of interviews and Sam was saying, "Hey, it's going really well. We're really excited." And I said, "Cool. So how do I think about tomorrow?" And he said, "Oh, you'll be fine. Don't worry about it. And if it goes well, we're basically there." And so I go in the next day, meet a bunch of people, have a great time. I really enjoyed everybody I met with. In any interview, you can always second guess yourself like, oh, I shouldn't have said that thing or that thing I gave a bad answer on I wish I could redo, but I came away feeling like I think that went pretty well. And I was expecting to hear that weekend basically because they sort of set expectations as soon as if this goes well, we're ready to go. And I didn't hear anything. And then it was like Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, I still didn't hear anything and I reached out to folks on the OpenAI side a couple of times, still nothing. And I was like, "Oh my God, I screwed it up. I don't know where I screwed it up, but I totally screwed it up. I can't believe it." And I was going back to Elizabeth, my wife and being like, "What did I do? Where do you think I..." Getting all crazy about it and then it's still nothing. And finally it was like nine days later, they finally got back to me and it turned out there was a bunch of stuff happening internally and this, that and the other thing, and there's just a million things happening.…

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