Lenny Rachitsky: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah. And it's a really good example, because for a lot of companies, and I assume a lot of listeners are working in tech, typical thing is you work hard, you build equity at a company or you build the value of the company, and then you can sell that company, and then you can have an exit and you can do whatever. For what we're doing, it's really tied to us. So however much or little my newsletter will make, it'll have a value let's say four or five times the annual revenue as a business, but you cannot really sell it like that and you cannot really walk away. So that makes it unique, it makes it harder to compete with, which is cool, but it does not create that much of an exit path unless you start to build a company around it, build an organization that can run without you, for example. This is what a lot of book publishing companies... So basically you build a publishing company where you start to hire people, who start to write some of the articles initially, and then later more of them, but it's not a one-person newsletter any more. Or you keep doing this, until you either stop and then the revenue stops, or you might be able to sell it, but at really under value. Yeah. I really don't want to manage people. I don't want to have employees. And so building a media company with writers, that doesn't sound too fun, but maybe that's where this goes. That is one route, for sure. The other downside I'll just add is the fact that you have to write something awesome every week, it's hard to take meaningful time off, because if you stop producing great stuff, people leave. And I invented this PTO policy for myself where I take four weeks a year off, where I don't do a newsletter, but that means I can't take more than a week off usually [inaudible 00:48:58] weeks in a row, I don't know, people probably won't care, but it feels like things start to not go great if I just don't keep producing great stuff. So that's another downside, just [inaudible 00:49:08] topic. Yeah. But a lot [inaudible 00:49:11] very early. So I think the whole concept of paying users is new, so I think we're going to do a lot of experimentation. And also a lot of it, I think you need to figure out what your needs are. So in the first year, I did not take a holiday in terms of... Or even when I [inaudible 00:49:25] I was writing, and it caused a bit of friction with my family. And now I'm solving it in a different way, so I am planning to take more time off now, and I'm doing it by working ahead with some of the less time sensitive things. But it is tough. So a downside we haven't mentioned, but I'm just going to call it out, is holiday. The great thing at... I never felt... Well, I felt a little guilty sometimes taking holiday, but when I want a holiday, I took it off. When I had my son born, at Uber, they gave me a four month paid holiday. I took the whole four months, I just logged off. It was great. It wasn't my company. I was still getting stock. The stock price was independent of mostly what I was doing, just being honest. And that was really, really good. So this might be true, by the way, if you start any business, especially while it's just yourself, it's hard to turn off. And I think most people don't mind, I don't mind, but it gets to you. We should be conscious about burnout as a whole. So you need to solve for that, and I'm starting to solve for that as well.…

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