Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Maybe my best advice here is for founders to put themselves in the shoes of investors and just imagine what their life is like and how if you are in their shoes you would make decisions. And so given this framework, a lot of investors just don't make that many investments and as per what we talked about earlier, life is short. And so there's lots of things that an investor that in their hearts thinks it is pretty good and they're like, "Oh, I like this person and I like their pitch, but I only am going to do a few investments. And so even though I really like a lot about this, I'm going to say no." And I often think that founders think that there's some secret truth that's being held from them on why someone says no or they want more feedback. "I need feedback." That's like, well, the feedback is we didn't want to invest and it really is just that. And so I think if you put yourself in the shoes of an investor of like, "Hey, I only could do a few of these a year, I have very limited budget." They're really just trying to pick the things that they're either personally most excited about or things that they think can be truly phenomenally big in some way. Or again, I know you do investments too, so it's that you only get so many shots as an investor. And so anything that doesn't seem like this is the one, this is the one I want to do is a no. And that that's actually why they're saying no versus, "Oh, you had a bad zoom setup or something. Oh, we didn't like what color your shirt was. We said no." I don't think that's how this actually works. I think that's such a good piece of advice that it's not necessarily they don't believe in what you're doing, it's they have better options and they're waiting for something that hits the higher bar because they have a lot of options. Yeah. Because again, if you ask someone or put yourself in the investor's shoes, wouldn't you be making decisions the same way? Usually founders are like, "Yeah." If you do that exercise, a lot of this starts to make way more sense.…

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