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Published · transcript-backed

Lenny Rachitsky: belief

4 Aug 2024 Lenny's Podcast Lessons from scaling Uber and Opendoor | Brian Tolkin (Head of Product at Opendoor, ex-Uber)

“I think that's awesome advice. I agree with everything you're saying. You mentioned this word humility, and it is a good segue to something I want to talk about, which is Zillow.”

— Lenny Rachitsky

Source trail

Everything needed to verify it.

Speaker
Lenny Rachitsky
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
belief
Recorded
4 Aug 2024
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

Transcript context

…All the time. And so I think there's definitely a humility to say if you can, if it's relatively easy to test your assumptions or test your hypotheses. That is always better to gut check yourself. And that takes a little bit of humility to say that, but we've all been wrong plenty of times. But if that's just not on the table, I think the reality is you can't pretend it is. And sometimes you got to use taste and judgment and then you say, okay, what is my conviction level and do I have just medium, low or high conviction? And if I have anything low or medium conviction and it's a decision of consequence, I should talk to more customers, check it with another person and see if their intuition matches. Something that gets me personally to the high bucket category. And then I think the last part, which is some part of experimentation is if you just ship something because it's your intuition or it's where you want to see the product go, do you have a reasonable feedback loop to understand whether or not you are correct? So that could be customer support or ticket volume or feature adoption, whatever the case is, it may not be an output metric in the traditional A/B test, but some more rigorous system that says, hey, I had this hypothesis, we just shipped it for x, y, z constraint reason for red. I think that's awesome advice. I agree with everything you're saying. You mentioned this word humility, and it is a good segue to something I want to talk about, which is Zillow. One of the most interesting things that's happened in your space is Zillow basically decided, hey, we're just going to do what Opendoor is doing, they launched it, you're basically frenemies for a while, and then they're like, no, it's not working. Now you partner and now you work with Zillow on this stuff. So are you able to share what went down there with the story of what happened, how it went, and where things are at now? Yeah, I mean we do partner with Zillow. Zillow's been a fantastic partner for us and we've really enjoyed a working relationship with them. I think when you think about it, they have tremendous amount of reach and audience and all these online platforms have tremendous reach and audience. And we happen to have a fairly unique selling solution. And so there's a nice, not to use a business school word, but there's a nice synergy so to speak, between a high intended audience who's doing a lot of browsing and searching and discovery and starting their process on one of these online platforms and what we offer, which is transaction services that allow people to actually move particularly on the seller side. And so there's just a pretty nice symbiotic relationship there with the Zillow's and the regimens of the world. And so both of those have been great partners for us.…

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