Lenny Rachitsky: uncertainty

Transcript context

…So if you're a pragmatist, the first thing is if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Which makes you totally different than a visionary. A visionary's like, "Yeah, no, come on, break it. Come on, let's move on." It ain't broke, don't fix it. If it is broke, who has fixed it? Is there fix in production? Does the fix work? I want that. In other words, basically to April's point, it is a risk reduction buying strategy. And by the way, you go as slowly as you can normally, but when you're under duress, you have to go faster. So the compelling reason to buy is putting you under duress. Are there any examples of these compelling reasons to buy that come to mind that give people a sense of here's a really good compelling reason to buy? I don't know if it's a pitch. Well, there's a ton. Well, how about ransomware? I mean, all of a sudden the cybersecurity thing is like holy smoke because it used to be, "Well, they wouldn't attack my company. Or if they did, I mean, I have no assets." Yeah, well, actually... Because it used to be what they did is they would only attack companies that had data that they could resell in the dark web. Then God bless cryptocurrency, people are saying, "Is it cross the chasm yet? Well, their first use case is criminals." It's not a very good use case, I'm sorry to say. But the point is, now ransomware with cryptocurrency can be a monetization, so that means everybody is vulnerable. So that's one kind of compelling reason to buy. But if you look around kids who are struggling with school, the parent has a compelling reason. Anything with healthcare, compelling reason to buy. Anything if you're in a legal problem, you have a compelling risk to buy. So I mean, there's always these situations where you say, "Okay, that's on a personal basis." On a company-wide basis, it may be things like, "Well, what am I supposed to do my office space? Can I get my company to come back to the office or do I have to dump the space? What am I supposed to do? And by the way, I know I'm going to have some kind of space, but do I want to design it the way we used? I'm getting into some space by the way, I got a great deal if it was a fire sale, right? Cool space, what do I put in it? Is it supposed to have offices? Do they have doors, do they not have doors do?" So in other words, there's a bunch of stuff where you get people going, "Okay, how can we help? How can we help?" "I need help. And I've gone to my standard solutions and no, I don't believe that, so I need help."…

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