Lenny Rachitsky: prediction

Transcript context

…I would take that free. I don't know. There's pros and cons. They even sent this whole PDF, a TV in your pocket, NewTV. Amazing. All right. I'm going to read through this and see what they pitched back in the day. Okay, let's move on to things that worked out really well, let's call it notable successes, other products you worked on that worked out great. So I'll list a few of them. And maybe what might be helpful is just we'll just go through each one and share what you took away from that experience, a lesson you learned from working on those products. The ones that come to mind for me are Snap, Pandora, Apple if we want to go there. Also, you built, I don't know exactly what you did there, but you worked on You Don't Know Jack, this game that I loved. I think if you're an elder millennial, you're just going to like, "Oh my God, I love that game. " I don't even remember it exactly, but I just remember the visceral feeling of playing that game and it was so much fun. So that's cool. I didn't know that you worked on that. And then there's also Sonos, which you're on the board. So whatever order you think might be most interesting, just going through those and what did you learn from that experience? I worked at Apple in the interval where Steve was gone, John Skelly, that kind of period, so System 7, System 8, Power Macintosh, that whole era. And we were doing a lot. We shipped a bunch of great hardware. We transitioned the company from Motorola 68,000 CPUs to the Power PC architecture. But, particularly in that transition, we really struggled to ship consumer software features. I mentioned that I wrote three LAN folders and some other consumer features in my first six months at Apple, and they shipped four years later, actually after I'd left the company. I was a little surprised they were still in the software repository even, candidly. But I'll tell you that one of the things culturally about Apple in that moment was, at least I felt like, a person was really rewarded if they could make a kind of broad contribution across functions. So if you were a talented software engineer, but also a thoughtful product designer, and maybe also had interesting input on product marketing, that you could build a really great reputation inside the company by playing all of those positions a little bit day to day. And so when I left Apple after four years, I look back on my time, I didn't ship as much software as I had hoped, and I felt like a little bit like a professional gadfly. I was six miles wide and a centimeter deep. And I went to work for this company called Berkeley Systems. In addition to You Don't Know Jack, they made a flying toaster screensaver, if you remember. You remember the nineties?…

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