Christopher Lochhead: observation

Transcript context

…This episode is brought to you by Round. Round is the private network built by tech leaders for tech leaders. Round combines the best of coaching, learning, and authentic relationships to help you identify where you want to go and accelerate your path to get there, which is why their wait list tops thousands of tech execs. Round is on a mission to shape the future of technology and its impact on society. Leading in tech is uniquely challenging, and doing it well is easiest when surrounded by leaders who understand your day-to-day experiences. When we're meeting and building relationships with the right people, we're more likely to learn, find new opportunities, be dynamic in our thinking and achieve our goals. Building and managing your network doesn't have to feel like networking. Join Round to surround yourself with leaders from tech's most innovative companies, build relationships, be inspired, take action. Visit round.tech/apply and use promo code Lenny to skip the wait list. That's round.tech/apply. I think you've made a very compelling case for why people should design a new category. To give people one more tactical tool for coming up with and figuring out the category they want to go after and framing it and even naming it, you mentioned this idea of having a point of view. Maybe that's the best way to approach this question, or maybe there's another framework of just how can people best think through and spend time thinking about what this new category they should be creating ends up being? Great question, Lenny. Two things, at least. First, spend more time on the problem than the solution. There's a very early stage, security startup I'm working with right now in the AI space that's doing absolutely mind-boggling things, and the founders have incredible backgrounds with large transaction systems and deep security, just an incredible company. I had a call yesterday with the founder and some folks on the product team just getting an update on where they're at and this and that and the other, and we're sort of starting to want to talk to people externally. We've raised a seed round, VCs are coming, they're very ... Anyway, we're sort of slowly starting to want to come into the world and begin to have a conversation. The founder CEO sends me a text yesterday and says, "I'd like you to, if you're open to it, have a call with so-and-so. He's a very important person, knows a lot about our space, blah blah. Known him for a long time," dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. Great. I said, "It sounds wonderful, but why? What's the purpose of my conversation with so-and-so? " The founder literally said to me, "I would love it if you would be willing to invest some time in listening to some of our customers to hear from their perspective what the problem is and what the solution could be, not just from me and our team. " That is a founder who's obsessed with the problem. That's the first piece. The second piece of advice I'll give you, I mentioned Mike Maples, he's got a very powerful way of framing this. He calls it backcasting as distinct from forecasting. You're nodding your head, you're familiar with this. Yeah, I've read this in length in the show notes, it's amazing.…

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