Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Lenny, I'm so excited to be here. It's been awesome to see how you've built this, and just how far it's gone. Thank you for inviting me. Really appreciate that. I'm more excited to have you on the podcast. And I know you just came off hosting a massive event somewhere in Latin America, I think you had 5,000-something people. You had Ben Horowitz keynoting. And I wanted to start with the talk you gave. I think you described it as people having this A-side and B-side to their life, kind of like a record as an A-side and B-side. So could you just share what it was this conference? And then two, kind of just briefly share this concept as much as you can For sure, and thanks for that Lenny. Look, I think for those of us here in the US, I became an American last year. I love the US. I've been here for 19 years. It's hard to imagine just how much is going on south of the border. There's actually 660 million people living across Latin America, and it's an economy of $6 trillion. And Brazil is a huge market, just in terms of sheer size, over 200 million people. And also in terms of where the ecosystem is. I am Brazilian, so I am Latin American, even though sometimes Brazilians are not sure if they are Latin American because we speak Portuguese. And so the future of the region really matters to me. And helping people get the opportunities that I've had, in terms of access to information and resources that could help them build scalable, very successful startups, can really change the economy across the board. I believe in that much more than I believe in government, and whether we're going to vote this guy or that guy next. And so that's sort of the impetus for the company. The conference was a conference put together by my company. I'm a co-founder. We're three, Brian, Yuri, and I. We put this conference together to bring together the top entrepreneurs, operators and investors across Latin America, but also people who are interested in investing in the region, of which there are more and more here in the US and abroad. More than 5,000 people came. We had over 70 speakers. It was across two days. We had amazing people like Ben Horowitz, who never gave a talk, or did a fireside specifically for and about Latin America and the opportunity. But we also had incredible founders who you, in terms of US operators, may not be as familiar with. But if you've ever heard of Rappi, it's a really important delivery company in Latin America. So the founder of Rappi flew down from Miami for that. And then we had VCs from a lot of the top names that you've heard here in the region as well. And then a lot of unicorns. We've had a lot of unicorns in the region. So they were all there. And the idea was to share learnings along the way, successes and failures, so that people can skip by not making the same mistakes as others. And I was asked to open both days. And then the first day, the opening talk that I ended up giving was this concept that I really like, which is the A-side and the B-side of a story. Which is that if you are old like me, and maybe you Lenny, I think we're similar age, you remember what a CD or what a mixtape was like. And we had the A and the B-side. We are very encouraged in our lives, especially professionally, to talk about our A-sides all the time. Because that's what impresses people, that's what opens doors, that's what allows us to keep growing and it's so important. It means that a lot of what you hear in podcasts and on stage ends up being the Instagramable version of someone, or a company, or a country's trajectory. It's just the highlights.…

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