Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…What drew me to that side of the business probably was maybe accidental at the beginning. Just again, coming from this musical family and background, I always had a natural interest in helping artists make a living. So I think that interest was there. At Apple, I did... There were only two PMs there. We did everything. At YouTube, I accidentally ended up in creator. But where I started understanding deeply the dynamics of the marketplace was actually my experience and the one job I've had that not been in the creator or art or these big consumer platforms or creator economy which was at a startup called Hailo based out of London and at the time was a huge competitor to Uber and Lyft in the ride sharing and ride hailing space and I worked on the supply side making sure that there were enough cars to fuel the demand. And in a marketplace like that where it's real time people trying to get a cab to go from uptown to downtown, you see the inexperience firsthand the impact to your business if you don't have suppliers, if your suppliers aren't happy, if they go on strike, if there's regulations that mean you can't use your service. And there I think I was... So one of the projects that I worked on that I launched was the U.S. Uber competitor because Hailo in Europe was all about getting taxi cabs and did not play in the livery is what it's called in New York or the private rides. Basically, it's like your uncle or your aunt or your cousin who can switch on Lyft and go pick up whoever. That just was not a thing in Europe. And so we had to figure out how to launch that in the U.S., how to get drivers on how to create this supply and it was like it doesn't matter how nice the user experience is, how great the marketing is, how much demand you can generate if when someone opens that app, there are no cars available. So a lot of people talk about marketplaces as chicken and egg. I actually just think they're two-sided and you start with the supply and at the end of the day, you can optimize for the demand side or choose who you're going to prioritize in terms of if there's a conflict, we're going to pick this side or the other. And yes, you won't be successful with one side or the other but I just experienced and lived firsthand the pain of having built this great operations back in that fed into this gray UI and then you open that app and you can't get a ride because there aren't enough cars available. So I think that solidified my feeling that with marketplaces, you can't lose sight of the solving real pain points and needs for the supply side in order to make sure the entire business can operate. I've done a bunch of research into marketplaces and I found basically the same thing, that supply is almost always where you need to focus almost all your time especially at the beginning. The way I think about it is that's if you have a store that's stuff on your shelves and you're not going to have a business if you don't have anything on the shelves. Exactly.…

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