Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Thank you for having me on, Lenny, really appreciate it. Looking forward to it. I'm looking forward to it even more. So you've been at Etsy for I think over 10 years, although I did notice that you left for a year and ended up leading product at SoulCycle. So first of all, what is that about? What happened there? Yeah, at the time, I'd been at Etsy for over six years, and I just had the itch. I wanted to go work on a different product, build different things, experience different industry. Along, had a theory that working on the proactive side of healthcare, meaning fitness and wellness, is how you achieve better outcomes. And it felt like SoulCycle was a really interesting way to do that. Pretty well-known brand, high street presence in many cities. Could you affect change through that? Ultimately realized it wasn't a place that I wanted to spend a ton of time and energy. And so through a lot of soul-searching, grown, I know I found my way back to Etsy, really anchoring on three things. One, working on a product that you care about that adds value to other people's lives. And so what we do every day at Etsy is we help our sellers make sales, and that's really meaningful for the vast majority of them. It's reaching an audience that they wouldn't be able to reach. And so that feels like a really great thing to get up every morning and work on. And so that's maybe the business and the product side, and the other side is people. It might sound a little twee, but just working with people who you can learn from and who you respect, and ultimately can have fun working with, it matters a ton. We spend a lot of time of our days and our lives at work, and so doing it with people who you really value, it's awesome. I have one memory that we used to have an engineer who used to be a standup comedian, and so that really pushed the boundaries of what a standup meant every day. And it was always a little fun, a little exciting. You never quite knew what you were going to get. And so just little things like that, they make the work life really, really great.…

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