Lenny Rachitsky: uncertainty

Transcript context

…We can go quick. Yeah, we can [inaudible 02:03:08]. Make it 2X speed. So Atlas is basically a zero to one product. I know you didn't start initially, it was there, but you took it from, I don't know, maybe you took it from 0. 5 or something to one in 100 now, and a lot of people struggle with starting things like this within larger companies. Like Stripe's a large company, right? It's like a very innovative, well run company, but it's also a large company. And clearly you made shit happen, you and your team. What kind of things have you learned? Actually, let me read a quote. Here's a quote that kind of describes you being good at this from one of your former colleagues who will go unnamed. "Jeff is really good at cutting through the BS. You hear so much about frameworks and all this complicated stuff that people talk about, NPM circles, one of the most straightforward, obvious things probably right. I get so annoyed after calls with Jeff sometimes because I know he's right about something. I banged my head against the wall for months." And so talk about just what you've done, what you've learned about getting stuff done. Talk about what you've done, what you've learned about getting stuff done at a large company. What do you need to do? Not having things be your idea I think is really powerful. I just talked to 50 customers who all yelled the same thing. Here they are in varieties of quotes and forms and the rest of it, and you put some three bullet points of strategy around why it's important, it's going to help you win more market share, and the rest of it and how you can do it well. Cool. What else could we want to do? Maybe somebody has something where 51 people have the same burning thing, but the majority failure mode is we do nothing. That's the majority failure mode. So one, aligning people with deep customer stories story boarding some solution visually with a Sharpie and not a pencil, not Figma initially, not high or low fidelity. I can never remember which one is the detailed one, but Sharpie. What is the unconstrained perfect solution to this burning problem? That's Pixar-style storyboard. You don't need to be a designer. You can just draw stick figures on a piece of paper or whimsical or whatever you want to do. And with those things, if you're not asking for the sun and the moon on headcount and team size to make some forward progress, who could stop you? Let's get some first version working. It was very motivating to get that single piece of paper in the mail, which was blank, to kick us off on the 83(b) election. Again, by the time this podcast airs, we'll have crossed 10,000 83(b) elections filed, and we will have done them all 100.00% on time. With the burning use case, why customers are going to need it, why we can do it cheaply, effectively, safely over a long period of time, and here's the way to get tangible, forward progress quickly against the stick figure vision, but with something in the browser or one version of it. Let's just get one thing working one time. I find proof of existence to be an incredibly powerful proof, rather than proof by theory or proof by debate. It's like, "Look, we did it one time. Hey, I'm holding the piece of paper." Pretty motivating. If we just printed out the right information, we'd be done. You're like, "Okay, actually there's a lot to do other than just that," but it really pushed us forward. Cutting through a little bit of the red tape is about momentum and making each step not such a big deal and asking for less permission. Then of course, once you have a little bit of that under your belt, you're going to naturally be trusted with taking more of those kinds of bets. Paired with some of the things we talked about earlier of everyone's looking at the same place about the metrics, everyone can watch the success. We don't need to do big, internal updates with long-winded PowerPoint presentations and scrambles the night before. You can just go to the metrics page and see how we're doing. That brings so much trust to the group that people start going from, "Why do we have this Atlas thing that doesn't really produce so much money. It's charging companies when they don't have money. We're a big payments business.…

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