Lenny Rachitsky: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Yeah, Andrey, he's now a founder. He started a company called OPTIC, basically building content ID for NFTs, which is a much needed thing in the Web3 world. But yeah, I mean the team building it, I mean, that meeting I brought my partnerships lead and I brought the ENCH lead that was covering the area too. And yeah, I think that some of it is, if I had to be honest, some of it is like they really wanted to come and meet with Apple. Some of it is like, for my own sake, I kind of wanted some backup. I'm about to make this kind of bold ass... And to Apple's credit, I mean they could have been pretty bad about it. I mean they could have not allowed us on the store and so on. And they said, "Okay, well we don't like it, but we understand your choice. You have to know that you're going to start from zero. We're not giving you a single download for free. You're going to have to start from zero and we will brick the current app right on the agreed upon date." And the negotiation was can you please just tell those people that there's a new app? And so that's what we negotiated out of it and they eventually did that and that was fine. And in the end, YouTube is now one of the top downloaded apps on iPhones I think. I mean, it was like six months after launch, we had like 80% share. Everybody downloaded the app. And so it kind of ended up not being that much of a comprehensiveness choice, but it was a clearly hard decision made much easier by asking the right eigenquestion first. Wow. Speaking of eigenquestions, are there other examples of eigenquestions that come to mind to make this even more concrete in people's minds? I don't know if that's the right way to frame it or is it more just when you have a list of questions, look for the one that'll answer the most. How do you operationalize this concept? There's lots of them. I mean for Coda, the sort of most conceptual eigenquestion for Coda was, we use a line a lot for Coda, that Coda allows anyone to make a doc as powerful as an app. You can reverse that statement and say, allow anyone to make an app as easily as a doc. And those two sound similar, but they're not. They're actually quite different statements. And so our most commonly debated eigenquestion is, are we more committed to being a doc or being an app? And which way do we want people, if people are going to misunderstand Coda, would we rather them perceive it as a document or perceive it as an app? And we decided on doc, which is actually... And the way I cemented that decision when we made it was I named the company that way, where Coda is a doc backwards. I said, "Well, we're definitely not revisiting this one. Coda is a doc first." That's a good example. I mean, another one, by the way, I would say eigenquestions is a term that a guy could resonance itself, but it's a hard technique. It's not always easy to know how to do it. And one of the things I get asked a lot it's like, is it a skill you can learn? I absolutely think it's a skill you can learn. It's a thing that once you observe it, you get better at it, you can learn it, but it's not easy to learn it. And one of my observations by learning skills like these is, you want to learn them in non-pressure filled environment. To use an analogy, if you were trying to learn a sport or learn an instrument or so on, imagine if you never did practice, every time you played basketball was in a real basketball game and every time you played the piano was in a recital, you probably would never get better. And I think one of the troubles with the concept like eigenquestions is, we tend to only practice it in real world scenarios that are high stakes. And so one of the things I encourage people to do is to practice eigenquestion in completely almost frivolous situations. So I have an interview question I ask, which I think, and maybe we'll get to this a little bit later as well, but it's a very simple question and it's a coded eigenquestion test. And the question is, a group of scientists have invented a teleportation device. They've hired you, Lenny, to be their sort of business counterpart, bring this to market product... Well, this question actually worked well for any role. But say you could be a product manager for this thing, bring it to market and what do you do? That's the whole question. Usually people will start asking a bunch of questions and say, "Well, tell me more about this device. What does it do? How does it work? And is it big? Is it small? Is it vast? Does it disintegrate things or not? Does it need a receiver and a sender? It's safe?" And all these different questions come out and at some point I'll just let those questions come out and at some point I'll say, " Okay, nice job generating all the questions."…

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