Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Obviously Tony Fadell would be one with Nest and he'd be an outlier. I think the people that... I went to Pinterest and did not have a successful time in my year and a half at Pinterest. I think my own particular mistake, and I've seen this with some other Apple executives as well as we went directly from Apple, I left Apple on a Friday and I started Pinterest on a Monday. I didn't give myself time to recalibrate to the Pinterest culture. I think at some level, a lot of the challenge is that Apple, and it's not just Apple, I think every major tech company, they have really powerful cultures. You get indoctrinated into all those standards and it's really deep. It fuses all of your behavior and how you conduct yourself in the company, away from the company. I think it's pretty hard to immigrate successfully from one of those environments to another. Apple is one of the strongest cultures and there's not many other cultures that natively operate like that. Airbnb is one exception. And so you have guys like Hiroki Asai who leads all of marketing and all of product and Hiroki is crushing at Airbnb. He was incredibly successful at Apple. It also should be noted that he had, it was a multi-year gap between the time he left Apple and the time he started Airbnb. He gave himself a little bit of time to get through the... At Apple, I think it was Tim or Steve used to talk about the Apple car wash. Then when you started Apple, they kind of had to take you through the car wash and get off all that stuff that you'd accumulated at other places. It turns out there's a car wash you need to go through when you leave Apple as well. And so I think Hiroki gave himself time to do that and I think that's probably a lot of why he's been so successful at Airbnb. The thing I took away from Apple, and I think this is true for anybody changing from one major culture to another is most likely the new place hires you because of the values of the organization you left, but not the behaviors. And so I think it's important to recalibrate and say, well, I want to hold onto these values. So at Apple, attention to detail, product excellence, doing everything you can for the customer and the user so try to hold onto those values but then think, okay, how are those values best expressed in this culture? I was more successful at expressing those values in the culture of ThoughtSpot, which was my last job than I was in the culture of Pinterest. If I had to do it again, I could probably do better at Pinterest. I think that's useful for anybody leaving one very specific culture and going someplace else, try to hold onto the values but not the behaviors. This is so interesting and I appreciate you sharing that, the way you described it that it wasn't a successful stint at Pinterest. A lot of people don't share that sort of story and don't put it that way. They see on their LinkedIn, oh, a head of design at Pinterest. Oh, amazing so cool. And then if you're like, oh, okay, but it didn't work out that well, I think that's really interesting. Is there anything more you can share there about what you learned for other people to maybe avoid that sort of situation? Anything you took away from that experience? One of my friends that was at Pinterest, I'm still friends with, he said, "I just thought of it as you bounced off the culture." I think that's kind of the way to think of it. I came in thinking I was supposed to behave the way I behaved at Apple, which is very direct, fighting hard. Everybody cares about each other. It's never insulting, but it's intense. That's not really where Pinterest was at the time. Again, all this is a decade ago, so I don't know what any of these companies are like today, but at least when I was there, Pinterest had posters in every conference room that said, big poster that said, say the hard thing. Well, that's where Pinterest was at the time, and I can assure you nobody at Apple was having to remind you to say the hard thing. And so I probably could have picked up on that better than I did. I'll say these careers are really hard and the higher up you go, people think of it like you're climbing a pyramid. I think of it more like you're going out on a branch on a tree and the branch gets a lot more flimsy and can break and you can fall and you get buffeted about by the wind. It's often at a time in your life when there's a lot going on with your family, there could be things going on with your parents' health. I lost my mother when I was at Pinterest. My kids were starting high school, so we're struggling with the teenage years. I had a long commute. It's a lot going on and these jobs are super demanding. Everything around you is changing really rapidly and you're under tremendous pressure because the financial and success stakes are super high. I think the people falling off of these jobs is the common use case. That is the common story. We have a bias towards survivors and we all talk about how it looks like they made it to the top, but everybody that makes it to the top, there's hundreds of people that don't. One of the things I took away when I was at Pinterest was I came to think that the job of a startup was to grow the founder so they could continue to lead the startup. I think what's true for founders, also true for a lot of the other folks in the executive staff, it's very hard to grow emotionally and developmentally at the rate that the company grows. A lot of times I think people get outgrown by the role, and I saw that across Apple. I've experienced that myself at different times in my career. I see that happening with my friends and it feels like a failure. I mean, that is the human experience, that's what happens. It's very hard to grow as fast as some of these companies are growing and we could debate the merits of Mark Zuckerberg for example. But when you think about the trajectory from being a kid in a dorm room to within five years, Facebook's a big thing. I mean, think of your own life. Can you process that level of evolution and change? I don't know, I think that's really super hard to do that and stay balanced.…

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