Lenny Rachitsky: evaluation

Transcript context

…r ideal role is, and I want to help you create it or land it." I did that with him. Turns out, what he wanted to do was go start a company and create a new product so he could just start that day one. But, the litmus for me is that everybody I've let go, I believe anyway, that I continue to be friends with. That shows me that the process by which I let people go is a humane one. Here's the crazy thing, after letting this guy go, after about 30 days, I was like, ugh, did I do the wrong thing? Was that too much? But then after about two to three months, I realized, no, that actually was the right thing because my number two was able to absorb the things that he was doing and here's the crazy part, with fewer people in the organization, things work better. That's the big realization that most people never discover. they hit product market fit, they get tons of money from investors, just higher, higher, higher, higher, but every additional human you have in your organization causes extra overhead and geometrically so, because now you have to keep all those people informed, give them all context, make them all feel heard, because unless they feel like they're contributing and you understand what they're saying, then they feel ignored and they feel passed over and they feel disrespected and grumpy. There's this morale problem that exists. There's this friction of information flow and a morale problem that grows and grows and grows. Really, the only answer is, I mean, that's why people bring me in because they're growing, growing, growing, and things are breaking. I have a system that keeps things together, but it doesn't make it perfect. It just makes it so that the company doesn't fall apart. But really the ideal is just to keep the team super small. That's what WhatsApp did, that's what Instagram did, that's what Linear is doing right now. That's what Notion has been doing for a while. Those, to me, are the real success stories. This reminds me of a story I just listened to on Lex Fridman's podcast. They were interviewing the head of AI at Tesla, or former head of AI, and Lex was asking him, "Why did you get rid of LiDAR on your cars? Like aren't more sensors good so that you can be better at self-driving?" And he's like, "If you have LiDAR, you got to think about the supply chain and getting all those parts. You got to think about all the additional data that it brings and adds more chaos to your data, and you have to think about that. Think about if that one part is gone, everything slows down, and in theory it is better, but then all these other factors end up making it worse. " Talking about how Elon's philosophy is the best part is no part. It feels like that's exactly what you're saying. That's right.…

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