Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…And this was funny, because I was working at Regis McKenna, which was this marketing agency that was sort of the premier high-tech marketing agency in the eighties. And we had all these really successful launches, and then covers of front page articles on Fortune magazine and Wall Street Journal. And then a couple of years later it's like, "Well, what happened to these guys?" So that's where the chasm was like... That's what caused the investigation. What we learned was visionaries make their own buying decisions, and they do not consult their peers. In fact, if their peers are doing it, they're probably not going to do it because they want to be different. So basically these companies were having success capturing the imagination of the visionary, and they thought, "Well, I'll use the visionaries as a reference to get the pragmatist." The pragmatist looks at the visionary and goes, "That's not my guy. First of all, he thinks I'm dumb. He thinks he's smarter than I am. Second of all, he does stuff that I would never do, and he makes decisions in a way that I would never make them. So that's not... No. So but I am interested in talking to my peers, but the problem now is, well, which of the peers are going to go first?" And it was kind of like the junior high dance problem. How do you get the party started? So that was the chasm. That was what created the chasm. The pragmatists need references and they will not accept a visionary as a reference, and they don't have any peers that have tried it yet. So that was what was happening. I think that's such an important point that I think people don't quite always get that that reference, marques customer needs to be a pragmatist. It can't be one of these early adopters that are just trying stuff. And these other pragmatists need to feel that this is my person, this is just like me. And they love it. By the way, one of the reasons that pragmatists have a certain... It's not contempt for visionaries, but it's definitely wariness, it's because often they have to clean up the messes that these guys leave behind because when you're a visionary, you leave a lot of messes in your wake. And then the pragmatist has to come in and clean it up. So they're going, "Oh, that's another mark against these people."…

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