Lenny Rachitsky: commitment

Transcript context

…There you go. So, I think there's a balance, right? For example, I want to be in Web3 for more than a decade. I want to stay at Alchemy for a very long time and help build the company. So, I guess when I think of map, maybe an important way to think about it is maybe when somebody is 50 or 60 or 70 and they might choose to stop working, a lot of people when they start their career actually have 30 years to play with or 40 years or 50 if they're lucky. That's a lot of chips you can play. You could do five, 10 year rounds, right? And so, I think that in terms of sticking it out, maybe I'm biased, I think that some of the absolute sort gems, if you will, in Silicon Valley and tech are the teammates that are willing to stay around for 4, 5, 6, 7 years, and they have institutional knowledge that nobody has. They have a positive impact on the culture that is impossible if there's constant employee turnover. So, to me, I think that you could simultaneously be somebody who's committed to companies, stays for a very meaningful amount of time, but zooms out and looks at their career. Actually, I think maybe this was even more, right? You're now a famous podcaster. You were a successful startup founder. You were a product leader. All these things form a map and I think a really interesting career and life, frankly, that's pretty full with a lot of really interesting milestones and learnings and networks and people that you get to interact with. Yeah. To your point about how long a career is, when I thought about it recently, this is my fourth career. First it was an engineer, then it was a founder, then a product manager when I got to Airbnb, and now this weird thing that I do, and there's so much time to explore and try new things. I will say though, I feel like the early things you do seem really important. Airbnb for me was not early, so maybe I'm wrong, but it feels like you want to work at a company where people look at that on your resume and are like, "Oh, okay, this person's probably good." So, I feel like there's that piece you got to get right at some point. Yeah, I totally agree with that. For example, I think for let's say a new grad who's thinking about a product career, and let's say on the spectrum there is maybe Goldman Sachs because that's what a lot of people are doing. They're like, "Yeah, I want to do product, but I also feel like I need this gold star or whatever." And then in between is you could join a hypergrowth company of some sort where they definitely have good product people you can learn from, but definitely still room for you to do more than what a very junior person would be assigned to be doing. And then on the other end of the spectrum is I'm going to have no job, I'm just going to completely bounce around from my own projects or just work with a new startup every two months. Personally in that spectrum, I tend to be more towards the middle of that where build a track record, build a network. I mean, it's crazy. Even just this week, next week I'm seeing maybe five people that I know from my Yammer days, and to your point on formative nature, some of those people, that's how I learned how to do product. That's how I learned things like AB testing. It's how I had the first angel investors in my next company. That's how I hire. I still hire people, maybe much to their chagrin, they still get LinkedIn messages for me trying to push them for the next thing. So, I totally agree that those early days are really formative, and there's maybe a balance between nobody wants to be a job hopper, but at the same time maybe there's ways to also not just be a career person who spends kind of 30 years working up the ladder or is fixated on I need to be CPO but is willing to give up a director title to go be a hustler at some startup because they really believe in it and they want to take a bet or risk in their career.…

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