Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…What I saw that was interesting about Uber was there was a core that was very monolithic about, this is the culture and you hired people from all walks of life that live and breathe that culture, but there was a lot of magic that came out of a culture that also had the city at the core. So celebrate cities was one of the core things, and customer obsessed was another value. So if you're customer obsessed and the culture says celebrate cities, then you know what? Maybe when we do ice cream in Nigeria, we're going to put this spin on it. We do Uber ice cream in San Francisco, we're going to put that spin on it. So there's also this element of like, I could... Nice isn't the word I would use, but it was very accessible to anyone because it met them where they were. The product met them where they were. And I think that opened the roads for... No other company has been able to create ride sharing at that kind of scale. It's very region by region and I think it's because of that. I think one of the other interesting things about culture is every team also has its own culture and part of PM and a PM leader's job is to create that culture and create good vibes and be a recent guest, put it, you're the emotional center of the team. Is there anything you do on your teams to create that culture to make sure everyone's feeling good and excited and create good vibes? So I actually spent time with both my VP and my peers, my engineering and design partners, and we have a little acronym called BEM, because it's Brian, Ebi, Matilde. And I kind joke, I'm like, "BEM." So BEM got together and created a cult. We discussed the culture that we wanted to have on the team because indeed, it's how do you work? And by the way, just fun fact, the reason I ended up at Netflix and got obsessed about Netflix actually, was when I was at Uber and we started all this evolving beyond this what we call Uber 1.0... So I'm very Uber 1.0. I joined Uber as employee number 1024. It's a very different Uber. As the culture was going out and in a way, in my mind, losing a little bit of the conviction that the other one had and becoming kind of like a catchall. It's pivoted in the right way now, but it kind of swung the other way. I actually had my product marketing partner, his wife worked at Netflix and so he sends me the Netflix culture memo. To your point, I created a culture of Netflix within my team at Uber. And so the values that actually I have carried through, kind of go back to those. I do believe in this freedom or responsibility. I will give you freedom, but with that comes responsibility. That means the buck stops with you. We had a similar one at Uber, which was, owner, not a renter.…

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