Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, and I really do hope product people still do this to this day because I think there's so many shortcuts that if people take, you're going to miss the point, right? I still remember distinctly flying down to LA with Kevin Systrom to go do a user research study, and it was a one-way glass thing where we listened to people talk about Instagram and how they use Instagram, and there's no substitute for that. I think that to anyone out there who's doing user interviews and then saying, hey ChatGPT, summarize the takeaways, you're missing the point. You can't empathize with the summary. You have to be in the room fully immersed, no phones, just actually hearing the words and the intonation. That's how you're going to get the full color. It makes me think Jeff Bezos has this great quote, if you have an anecdote and data and they're telling you different things, trust the anecdote. Oh, man. So many lessons. Okay, so to start to kind of wrap up our conversation, we covered a lot of ground, I want to ask you about Facebook real quick. So you joined Facebook very early. Eric Antonow, who I've mentioned previously, told me that it was very strange that you left Google to join Facebook at that stage. Google was killing it, on top of the world. You had such a strong career path, things were going great, but you decided to take a big leap joining Facebook. What did you see? Because I think there's something interesting here that we can learn about what you saw that may help other people decide where to go work. I've always been enamored with this idea of understanding us as fundamentally human and how we're wired. And I remember at the time talking to the folks at Facebook and seeing it, and this was back when people were like, oh, this is just a college site, and that was the vibe back then. But what I saw was that the team and Mark and others really understood the fundamental human desires that people had to connect and feel lonely and to share, and they really got the right articulation of the problem they were trying to solve, which was to make the world more open and connected. And this really resonated with me because again, I study a lot in college like psychology, and I was really enamored with this idea of how are we as humans fundamentally wired? And it felt to me like a no-brainer to go work at Facebook because they saw how people were wired and how to actually build products that complement how people are wired. And it wasn't that they were trying to force fit something into something that was unnatural. It was almost like how do we build technologies and products that actually augment our fundamental desire to stay connected? And this goes back to why I think the power of wars is so important is because you take a look at some of the mission statements for Friendster or MySpace, I don't even know if they had mission statements or what they were, they were kind of vapid and they didn't really speak to the fundamental humanity of what Facebook was striving to build and that just deeply resonated with me. And so I remember spending time with Eric being like, "Hey, what should I do? Should I take this offer from Facebook or should I stay at Google?" But ultimately it was just that deep resonance with my values of building things that were fundamentally human. And ultimately I think that for any startup out there, anyone building product, the more that you can get a good impedance match between what you're building and what humans fundamentally want and need, the more successful you're going to be. So that's my big answer. I think the secondary answer, I've always optimized for learning in my career, and this is a huge thing that I say to a lot of people because they look at sort of like, oh, you've been at all these companies, what's your secret? I'm like, well, I've just figured out that I want to go to the place where I can learn the most. And for me, that wasn't really Google, but I had so much I wanted to learn from operating at Facebook. And at Facebook I would say, yeah, I was there for nine and a half years, but I always jumped around every two and a half or so when I feel like there was something new to learn. And that's it. I mean, I don't know if it's a secret or not, I got lucky and I was able to have opportunities to learn different things and different skills, and that served me quite well.…

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