Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, it's that and also leadership. When you don't have unified leadership around these things, you end up making decisions that are in conflict with one another. They're just need a highly opinionated person at the top that avoids that kind of messiness from a. That kind of messiness from a product and engineering standpoint. You mentioned Clubhouse, so I think what's interesting is one, many people copy Periscope as a product. I don't know if you'll describe it as copying, but it feels like spaces very inspired by Clubhouse. Do you have just a current philosophy on when it makes sense to be super inspired by another product and build it into your existing product versus like, no, you should not do this? I think it's always about doing the right thing for the customer. Everyone has always been shameless to be shamelessly inspired by other people's ideas. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I think copying ideas can be done in poor taste and can be done with taste. I think some of the people who copied Periscope did so in poor taste, can't blame them. I wouldn't have done it the same way, but it worked. So you can't say it's the wrong thing. I think that it's possible to take ideas in good taste and take ideas in poor taste. And I think with Clubhouse, we actually had been working on audio. Audio was one of those bets I mentioned that we structured very separately with a team of people, many of which were the former Periscope team, that when we wound down Periscope, I felt very strongly that there was still something to the idea of synchronous conversations. Because one of the famous things that I think we botched with Periscope is that we always... Our dream and our vision for Periscope and how we talked about it was was a mechanism for teleportation. You could see through someone else's eyes and be teleported somewhere else. It was like that was the story we told ourselves. That was the thing that inspired Periscope. And to a certain extent, a lot of people did use the product for that way. You could go see what it was like someplace in the world where it was something amazing happening or civil unrest happening or some important moment happening with breaking news or otherwise. But it turns out the vast majority of our users were not using Periscope that way. It wasn't a rear-facing camera experience where you were showing someone the world, the vast majority of people were using it to just talk to other people. They were bored or they were lonely and they wanted to just have a conversation with other people. And it turns out video and audio is a very interesting way of doing that that allows for more nuance, more long-form conversation, more in-depth conversation, especially in contracts to Twitter, which has mechanics to really incentivize quick, snappy broadcasts that don't lead to much depth. And so when we shut down Periscope, we were like, man, we really need to enable a new form of conversation on Twitter that has some of those properties. And so we had a team that was working on a project that we sort of code named Hydra. Hydra because there were multiple heads on this monster and those heads are participants in a conversation. And so well before Clubhouse was on the map, we had many different iterations of both video and audio only experiences that just didn't feel right, weren't working right, but we felt like we were onto something. And when Clubhouse came on the map, it really re-centered, it put into focus a user experience that felt a lot more right and now give them complete credit for that.…

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