Lenny Rachitsky: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Every single career decisions I ever made, including my first one out of college, was just figuring out who are the smartest people I know that I want to hang out with and learn from, and can I work with them? And I don't know how to vet companies, I don't know how to really logically think through what space is going to take off or something like that, but I just do feel like I have a sense on people. And for Dropbox, I followed the head teaching assistant for a class that I was TA-ing. And for Instacart, I followed some of the smartest product people I knew. And for OpenAI, the person who recruited me, Joanne, I had messaged her about getting off the DALL·E waitlist and she said, "Only if you interview here." So she turned it into a reverse recruiting thing. And initially, honestly, I didn't know what I would do here because it was a research lab and I was a product person and they said, "Don't worry, we'll figure it out." And they were sort of being cagey. And I thought they were being cagey because it's OpenAI and they can't share anything, but they were being cagey because we actually just didn't know yet at the time. So I showed up and I did everything under the sun and it definitely wasn't product. It was like, I think my first task was fix the blinds or something like that. And then I started sending out NDAs for people because they needed some operational help. And then I started asking, "Wait, why am I sending out NDAs? Oh, so we could talk to users." And I was like, "Talking to users, that sounds like the thing I know how to do." And I quickly stumbled into doing product work, and then eventually leading a bunch of product work. But it was organic by just showing up and doing what had to be done because, again, the company I joined was not a product company by any. Wow. This is such a good example of, I don't know if you think of it this way, but when someone offers you a seat on a rocket ship, don't ask which seat. [inaudible 01:26:07]. Yeah, so I didn't know it was a rocket ship. I kind of got nerd sniped is what I would describe it as. Where as I prepared for the conversation to get off the DALL·E waitlist really, I just started reading about the space and that piqued the philosophy brain and then also actually the computer science brain. I was like, "Wait, this is cool." Then I started reading all the academic papers of that era. So it was intellectual itch and the people, but then I stayed for the product opportunity, obviously. Post ChatGPT, when that took off, realized that we'd built a rocket ship where we'd launched it while building it, maybe is the analogy. But I can't say that it felt like a hyped job or anything like that when I applied.…

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