Lenny Rachitsky: recommendation

Transcript context

…hard time. It's hard for professionals even. I think you just have to read a lot. You have to think a lot. You have to play with stuff. You have to choose your battles. You have to pick good targets. Pick a goal in your domain that would matter to you if you can get to it, and then go try to solve that problem with some specific technology and get to know that technology. Maybe pick the technology based on how popular it seems, if you want to learn something lots of people [inaudible 01:12:44]. Those are all good. I think you just have these kind of mundane... I don't think it's really a secret, I don't think. They're kind of mundane strategies, but you just have to pick some stuff and do some homework. And there's no magic single bullet to learning this stuff. You just have to run. It's like, "How do I run this sprint without getting out of breath?" You don't. You're going to be out of breath, run hard. It's just what it is. I love that advice. And I love it connects to everything else that you've been talking about is, find some problem someone has, find some value you could provide, and then think about, how can AI potentially provide that? I think that's really practical. Great advice. Maybe a last question just around Microsoft. It feels like Microsoft is firing on all cylinders. It feels like it's become one of the most innovative companies out there. It feels like Satya is known now as the most innovative, best executing CEO out there potentially. That's just what it feels like. Being on the inside, I'm just curious, what is it that you think Microsoft is doing so right or how they think that enables them to be so innovative and continue to be such a behemoth as so much has changed in tech? There's a couple of things. First of all, I think very, very highly of Satya, or I wouldn't be there. I really, really like Satya. He is very much what he appears to be from the outside. I've had plenty of candid private conversations with him and watched him in meetings and stuff like that. He's a very decent, genuine, honest, high energy, caring individual with a ton of empathy. He's really motivational in a way that is not destructive. He believes very strongly that a leader's job is to raise the energy of the organization and he really lives that. And I watch him in meetings where I'm a domain expert and I cannot believe how engaged he is in stuff and how much he understands about something that I know he's not as deep an expert as some of the people in the room are and he's fully in there. So he is a really incredible leader in many ways. That's one thing. I think another is that culture is very humble, honestly. I mean, it's interesting going from Google to Microsoft. And I don't want to draw comparisons or anything like that, but I think there are definitely similarities and differences between the companies. And I think one thing that stands out with Microsoft is it's a humble culture. It does unglamorous work all the time to make businesses be successful. So it's got that sort of mindset of just hard work and humility, which I value a lot. And then I think there's just, I mean honestly, there's just a fantastic number of really talented people working there. It's kind of funny, this year I've been writing a lot of patents, because there's just a lot of stuff going on in the world. And I've written more patents this year by a lot than the rest of my career combined. And I commented on the number. I'm like, "I've written 15 patents this year." I commented to the patent attorney that I work with. He's like, "Ah, that's nothing. The chief science officer wrote 700 of them one year during the mobile boom." It's like, whatever you feel about patents, and I don't necessarily love patents, although it's part of my job to write them, but that's the kind of people that are there, these just fantastically talented people with just really deep experience at a lot of different levels. I think that's part of it too. There's just a lot of really good folks there. Kevin Scott, who I work for, is one of the smartest... He's probably the smartest person I've ever been fortunate to work directly with. He's definitely one of the smartest I've ever met. He's pretty fantastic. And the group around him is pretty fantastic, and the leadership in Windows and Office is pretty fantastic. So it's just a lot of good people and a lot of good attitude, and a good leader I think is the answer. And luck. It's always luck too, right? Kevin and Satya made a bet on OpenAI a few years back, and they're doing some extraordinary things with capital raise and the support of that technology and stuff like that. That doesn't happen by accident either.…

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