Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, right about 13. 13 years. I imagine there've been a lot of ups and a lot of downs. I want to talk about all those things. I want to talk about a lot of the lessons that you've learned along the way. I want to start with what I imagine was a very surprising down moment in the history of Airtable. This is something that, unfortunately, something I think about when I think of Airtable. I feel other people may feel this way, is there's this tweet that went super viral, maybe a couple of years ago at this point where someone just shared all this data and they're like, Airtable is dead. They've raised way more money than they're worth. They're not making enough to get from underwater. Yeah, Airtable RIP. What happened there? How much of that was true? How did that go? Yeah, so basically none of it was true. I mean, the surprising thing to me was how viral this tweet went when ... Frankly, I actually look back at this person's other tweets. I think they worked at CB Insights, and the irony is the whole point of that business is to have good data, good data quality around private company data. And they just literally had incorrect numbers by a strong multiple on what our revenue scale was, what our growth rate was. And if it gave me some consolation, I look back and this person had also tweeted about other companies, like Flexport was the last take-down tweet. They have like, "Oh, Flexport's dead" and their evaluation is too high, and blah, blah, blah. And so, I think that the more surprising thing was just like this person has been tweeting a bunch of spicy takes that are not substantiated by real data or correct data, and yet this particular tweet went super viral and that was the perplexing part to me. And then, actually, I think what really gave it legs was on the All In podcast, which is obviously super popular. And I listened to it. They covered it. They were like, "Oh, latest on this week's news, this tweet about Airtable. What do we think about this?" And it almost, I think became a way to talk about a broader theme of what happens to this last generation of highly valued companies, maybe decacorn companies in this new ... And at that point, it was the recent moment for both public and private markets. They did also issue a correction though. All In, did a follow-up episode, a few, I think weeks later saying, "Hey, we got the numbers wrong. We are revising our case and a view on Airtable."…

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