Lenny Rachitsky: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah, I'm going to get attacked by a bunch of people who are really good at holding offsites and framework thinking. Yeah. I find it useful in specific cases, not as a scaled product development process, I think which you've run into or just the whole company is run by Job-to-be-Done. One paper was like, "What is the job?" And you're like, "The job is to get them to open that up three times more each day." Yeah. Okay, I know you guys have to run so I have one more question. I have this saying in my family that whenever we do something well, I'm like, "We're making it in America," because we also immigrated from the Ukraine. And as immigrants, you talked about your story of coming to America and clearly making it. You're both at the center of, I don't know, what's happening in tech, which is also at the center of the world in many ways. I'm curious what advice you would give to immigrants and people that have moved here recently or even a while ago, just how to make it and be successful in the US, especially in tech? Some of it Sriram covered before, it's put yourself out there, don't be afraid to put yourself out there. Oftentimes, for us, it took us a decade plus to feel comfortable doing that because we came in, we look different, we sound different, we have strong accents, the number of times I got told at both startups and before then, "Oh my God, your accent, it's so difficult, I can't hear you," or, "I don't understand what you're saying." I got told before fundraising that nobody will be able to invest in my company because the accent is too strong. You already have these virtual barriers in your own head and then you have people coming and telling you actively that you are different and you can't succeed. Now if I had to do it all over again, I almost think these differences are what sets us apart and makes us unique. And you can do really interesting things with them because you are going to a place where you are rare and that's, I think, a really good thing. So you should sharpen that rareness and do really interesting things with it, whatever that might be. We have this show called Good Time Show, it's Aarthi and Sriram's Good Time Show and we focus a lot on outsiders being insiders or how you started out as... For us, we are quintessential examples of that where we're outsiders to tech, to Silicon Valley, to being in this world and we kind of "made it" to being here. And we often talk about what it takes to do that and whatever your version of being outsider and becoming an insider means. And for us, part of it is not being afraid to put yourself out there, power of cold emails, networking and being really proactive about that. What would you add to that or how do you think about it?…

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