Lenny Rachitsky: uncertainty

Transcript context

…So I'll start with Sam, because most recently, Sam is really good at saying, "Why not more? Why not 100X or 10,000X? You are thinking too small. Why not think about this bigger?" And every time we talked about something important, he talked about that. And what I realized is I was thinking too small in certain areas and he was thinking globally, and having that nudge from a leader who's ambitious is really helpful, I think. So that was a big thing that I learned from him about he's willing to go for it at high volume and invest depending on ... Meaning hitting a lot of people. He's willing to think in very big numbers. That was really, really foundationally important. I think for Steve Jobs it's just the bar he held for the company and for technical talent and for excellence was not wavering. It was up here, and you were either going to meet it or you weren't. And that was something that kind of washed through the whole company. When you are a young, ambitious person and you hear that something's not good enough, that can be extremely motivating actually. And it doesn't quite hit the way you would think. And if you tell somebody, "Hey, this needs to be better. You need to spend more time on this. You need to be more thoughtful about this," or, "This is not hitting our quality bar in [inaudible 01:25:35]," or something, that's impactful. And I think you never want to hear that again. So it's very, very motivating. And then Mark Zuckerberg, I think that he ... I have to say he ran a company very, very well. So the way that the technical side of the company operated, the way that we had reviews, that decisions were made, the decisions were made to the lowest level possible in the company to maintain speed. I underappreciated how clean and well run ... The way that the hardware organization interacted with the rest of the company, it was very clear, "This is what we're going for. We're going to have this review. We're going to make a decision in this review. If you can make the decision without the review, you will do that. Here's the objectives for this project." It was really well executed. And I think that's hard to do at a fast growing company. It's very hard to do at that level. And having him and Andrew Bosworth, the CTO, involved in the technical decisions, able to read reports that were maybe 20 pages long, [inaudible 01:26:52] the trade-offs, understand them and be able to contribute to the technical discussion, and that's just on my thing that week and they're doing that a hundred times that month, was impressive and definitely something I learned from them. What an incredible set of experiences and different types of places to work. I don't know if they could be more different, all these places. I know. And I think that that's why I'm looking for this zero to one. And so when you're looking for a zero to one opportunity, it's always going to be in some place different generally.…

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