Lenny Rachitsky: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Exactly. And it was more just like if you understood... Again, this is what my point around unit economics, there are things where I think you have magical thinking around unit economics. You're like, "When we get to the scale of X, it's all going to work out. We can make these things happen." I think you actually need to really make sure that unit economics work quite at the beginning. That is definitely one lesson. And I think the other thing is, and going back to spirit of what are you trying to achieve. If you're trying to achieve this idea of really knowing the quality of the place, and for a platform like Airbnb, the right way to go about doing is through our reviews, through our guest reviews, which are essentially free as opposed to literally sending out inspectors. And I think that the other things are if you can get signal on what are the things around quality that people care about, is it cleaning? Is it, "Hey, I'm locked out"? And I think that there are other solutions besides inspection that then get at that. So for example, it is actually cheaper to go send everyone a lockbox than to deploy an inspector and go look at your property. It is actually cheaper to maybe do a partnership with a bunch of cleaners in different local areas and then get that as part of the fee, as opposed to doing the inspection. So again, it's really about what are you really trying to achieve? What is the user problem in each of these areas and can you target that problem with the particular listing that you're looking at? And so I personally don't believe the unit economics ever would've really worked out. I think we should have known that or we should have dug into that more at the very beginning and then to get very tailored instead of one blunt instrument to solve it all, "Hey, we're going to go inspect." It's like what is the problem for this listing and what's the best solution to fix that problem? There's a couple things that I think are important product leadership lessons here. One is Airbnb and Brian and many great leaders are famous for imagining the ideal situation, imagining the great end result and then working backwards. And often that leads to great results when you're being really ambitious and "I don't know how we're going to get there, we're just going to shoot big and hopefully we figure it out. " Sometimes it works out. In this case it didn't work out. And what you're finding, maybe you even knew this early on, is just like there's no possible world where this could have worked in this approach. Is there anything you've learned about just when to think big and not even like "Forget it. We're going to figure it out. I know this seems impossible, but we're just going to try it anyway"? Do you have any kind of framework of when to think big, then just go for it? Versus, "Oh, let's just work out the math today," is this ever possible? I think it's really important for every company to be dreaming big. If you don't have a big vision, it's really hard for you to innovate, but you got to couple that really big vision with thoughtfulness around your execution. And so I think that one of the biggest tips I have is how do to be clear about the phase that you're in? So I think it's totally fine to be like, "Hey, we are going to try X for six months, three months, whatever it is, and we're explicitly going to go learn these types of things. We're going to learn why are people? Are there signals that we would that would indicate that again, the communication with host isn't great or this type of listing, if it's hosted by a person with multiple property?" I think there are factors we can be like, "Hey, we can learn this very explicit thing in a given period of time." And you can do what I call unscalable things in that prototyping phase, in that early phase to go learn those lessons. But you just have to be very, very clear with your team on what phase you're in. "Hey, we're in the learning phase and we explicitly are trying to learn these things" versus, "Hey, we have this really big vision and we're just going to go at it." That is not recommended in my mind. It's breaking it down into these smaller chunks. That I think gets you the balance of thinking really, really big, but also being able to be like, "Okay, we are still going to be able to say, 'Okay, this path is not going to work out. We ran at it for a short period of time. We got these learnings, now let's go down this other path.'"…

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