Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, it is that. I have an example for you Lenny. The one that my mind goes to is when Kamala Harris was running for Senate. Put aside what anyone thinks of Kamala Harris as a politician or if you agree with her politics, it doesn't matter. When she was running for Senate, she had this example where not enough people care about K-12 education. It's not a sexy topic and only moms care about it, whereas people cared a lot and still do about national defense, national security. And so she said the way to get their attention is you go to people who care about national security and you tell them, "Did you know that in order to enlist for the army you have to have a 10th grade reading level?" If you can't read at that level, you're not going to be able to read the army field manual. And so if you care about the future of national defense and being able to maintain a standing army, you need to care about middle grade reading standards. So that's a perfect example, and in fact it stuck with me such that many years later I'm still repeating it to you. Something else that I think what you teach helps with is underdogs coming up against incumbent companies, giving them a chance to stand out. Like Substack I think is a good example where you just helped elevate Substack on the world stage in a lot of ways. What have you found works best for underdog startups and companies trying to get attention? First, you have to acknowledge that you're the underdog, and you're not going to use the GE playbook from the 1980s or whatever. So acknowledging that means knowing that you're not going to play the game that requires you to have more resources, more and deeper relationships, and institutional backings, and to be able to draft off of the current narrative. So all of those things are going to be not in your favor. If you're a startup for example, by definition you're trying to disrupt something, you're trying to do something differently, you're fighting the status quo. And if that's the case then you can't rely on maybe the government, maybe mainstream media to support what you're doing. And so you should assume that you want to go with an approach that doesn't require a lot of money or people, that doesn't require that institutional backing and those relationships. That means building your own distribution, which you can do starting from day one. You can start doing that before you even have the company. It means taking your story and winning hearts and minds. Number one, by making it a story that you shape to fit people's cultural erogenous zones of your audience. And number two, by finding the centers of gravity in society, like the influencers that are going to help spread it for you. Because you're not going to on day one call up the New York Times and get them to print the story that you want them to. So you need to figure out who are the influencers and the way to do that, I'll cut off the rabbit hole after this because you can just go deeper and deeper, but the way to do that is in concentric circles. There's a general who said if there's a problem I look for it in concentric circles going back to my own desk. If you want to spread something you go out in concentric circles starting from your own desk. So you need to get first really clear with yourself about what your message is and just get really crisp with it. This is hard to do because you know too much, so out of the 1,000 facts in your head you're going to have to pick just between one and three. And then the next circle is going to be your co-founders, your executives, your employees, your investors, you go to your power users, and you go out from there, and it has to be in that sequence. But once you get the sequence and you identify who the people are and you know who your audience is, and then you're able to hone in on what their cultural erogenous zones are, then you're able to craft the message, have the delivery mechanisms, and then know your target, and then you're off. But you just need to do that exercise upfront, so you don't have a lot of wasted motion.…

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