Lenny Rachitsky: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Yes. And by the way, the opposite of that is we look for polarization. We look for tension in a team about arguing about these things, because we think that polarization is a sign of strength in the word. And interesting story, the person who taught me that, honestly, was Andy Grove over the Pentium name, because... And I learned a lot from him. I always say this, I just was very fortunate to work with him on Pentium, and Xeon, and a few other things. But when we went to an executive committee to present Pentium... And by the way, internally, one of the names that... And makes sense here, descriptive, bunch of engineers, ProChip. "Hey, it's professional, it's premium, and it's chipped. So, it should be Prochip." So Andy had me give a presentation about the strengths of this thing, and he said, "Now, let me tell you why I think this is the right name." He said, "Because I see the polarization here in it amongst people. There's this ProChip over here, there's the Pentium thing." He said, "That tells me there's energy for Pentium here." And he said, "That's why I think we should go with it." And I've never forgotten that. And so, we do look for that. And when we tell that story, people say, "You're right. There is... I mean, we are arguing about this, and there is an intensity with the name." And that's what you want. You don't want to go out in the marketplace, into this very competitive marketplace, regardless of the category, with something that doesn't have a level of boldness or intensity. That was an amazing story. Just again, so kind of a tip here is if half of your team or, I don't know, some percent of your team hates it, some percent of your team loves it, that's a good sign. Yeah, it is. It is. Look for that polarization. That's what we look for.…

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