Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Right. And it can also be at different points in your life, right? So right now at this particular moment in my life, I'm probably not going to go hard at a super early stage startup because I believe that you probably need to be in person and working really hard together for long periods of time. And not everyone feel this way, I know that. I've had these conversations with lots of friends and colleagues. So personally for me, that's probably not the decision I would make at this moment in my life. I get that. Another area I wanted to touch on is remote work and distributed work. I believe most of your career, you were remote or you worked with remote teams and distributed teams and that's such a on-trend thing now where a lot of teams are working hybrid, working remotely, working with distributed teams. What have you learned about being successful working with distributed and remote teams? Yes. My entire career has been with remote or distributed teams. That's right. When I started early my career, I lived abroad for a while. I lived in Shanghai. I had a core team there, but also worked for the distributed team in Europe and Latin America, which meant all kinds of crazy hours and lots of sprints like we just talked about. Things that worked well, one, documentation. It's a thing. Asynchronous communication, everyone just has to get used to it and better at it, so increasingly just being better communicators, whether it's on a video or written. I think that's just really important, and everyone building up that muscle is really important. For all of the roles I've been in, this notion of what does it mean to have really meaningful and valuable in-person time that can sustain you for the remote and distributed time is a really important. I think a lot of what's happened now in COVID and even now, a lot of teams have never met their coworkers. They don't onboard in person, they don't have events or offsites as frequently. And I think flexibility is really great, but I think that really, that makes it really hard, and to me, what I've figured out I think is that it especially makes it hard to solve hard problems. Solving a hard problem remotely with folks that you haven't spent in-person time with, that you haven't broken bread with, that you haven't disagreed with in person and built that trust is just really hard. In fact, it's much harder. So some of the things I've done even here at The Knot Worldwide is periodically when there's a really gnarly problem, I wave the flag and I say, "Hey everyone, why don't we try and get together for two days and hash some of this stuff out, and then we can go back to our remote lives?" And I think folks have been maybe unsurprisingly very open to that because I think they see not only the efficiency but the camaraderie that can happen there as opposed to what was happening potentially on a Hangouts or a Zoom call.…

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