Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…We had mockups of it, and every time I looked at the mockup, I laughed, but ultimately we had so much to explain on that page, like, what is this thing and how does it work? Ultimately, we're like, "Okay, this is probably going to distract from the point." So we pulled it. I wish maybe it had seen the light of day at one point, but yeah, ultimately we kept it simple and we focused that page on explaining what was going on here. But again, as has happened many times with the project, we put the pilot out there and the notes were good. They weren't all good. It was a mixed bag, but there was gold in there. And from the very early days with just 1000 contributors, it was obvious that people could write notes that were informative, that were neutral, that spoke to controversial challenging topics, and that if we could just identify those from the rest, this was going to work. It was going to work as well as the very first mockups we had made. So that became the focus that is, how do we sift out the gold from the rest? I think you may have shared with this with me, when someone noticed you guys were testing this and they took screenshots and tweeted it, and I think Elon replied, "This is cool. " Yeah. Yeah. So in the very early days when it was just a Figma prototype, we were running these usertesting.com on moderated studies. I guess one of the participants sent one to an NBC reporter who wrote a bunch of stories on it. Anyway, that day, there was a lot of chatter about it on the service, and Elon... To put this back in time perspective, this is, I think, 2020, so two years before any acquisition stuff happened, Elon is just a Twitter user building rockets and electric cars and other cool stuff and stumbles on this thing that depicts the prototype that we've been testing. And he writes back, "Definitely worth trying, IMO." And I remember thinking that was cool back then and it's interesting to see, he's obviously had a very consistent point on it. I think the idea was appealing and he has obviously been a big fan of it in the product and had been a big supporter proponent. So yeah, it was cool that it came from... that support has been from the very early days before he was ever involved in the company.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.