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Lenny Rachitsky: preference

24 Sept 2023 Lenny's Podcast How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise)

“Something I learned at Airbnb is this idea of working backwards from the ideal, instead of working forwards from how do we iterate and make this better, and better, and better.”

— Lenny Rachitsky

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Everything needed to verify it.

Speaker
Lenny Rachitsky
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
preference
Recorded
24 Sept 2023
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

Transcript context

…It's this thing around growth rate. So, especially product net growth, which is what we're talking about. So you can imagine, we're going to open a new market to Indonesia, and the fastest way to do it is to take... Someone else has figured out how to move to Indonesia. We take that infrastructure, and we'll plug it into Wise, You know what? We can do this, we'll get some users. But it doesn't grow like a hockey stick. It doesn't grow like a hockey stick because we haven't fundamentally changed the problems in moving money internationally. So, got this mantra, you've got to build a 10x better product than what's there. And if it's 10x product better, basically it doesn't exist already. So if you're plugging in something else, that's kind of a misstep. So it comes from a very logical place, how do I get users quickly? I can take a shortcut in doing this, but that, you kind of realize is wasted effort. So the step then becomes this much harder question of these types of questions. Like what is the theoretical minimum cost for moving money into a market? What is the theoretical maximum speed? Not just make it instant, make it cheap, but what actually is the lowest it could possibly be? And instead of incrementally going, doing a jump to make it a little better, a little better, a little better, you can never get there. How do we take two years, and end up there? I love that. It's something that I talk about a lot. Something I learned at Airbnb is this idea of working backwards from the ideal, instead of working forwards from how do we iterate and make this better, and better, and better. It's like, okay, if we could start again, and we could create the ideal experience, what would that look like? And then work backwards from what would it take to get there? And what's an example of that at Airbnb? What was an ideal that you guys went for and then built?…

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