Lenny Rachitsky: preference

Transcript context

…e if we understood how hard the collaboration piece would've been first without understanding that value, we might've been like, "Eh, it's not worth it. It's going to be so hard to solve that problem. It's probably not a useful app." So I think it's a good little counter example of that optimistic, pessimistic perspective we were talking about. We could easily have missed that idea, easily have missed that idea. And we just got lucky I think in the order it got presented to us. That is really interesting actually, that you need to be pulled to the what if getting you so excited that you're going to spend however many years it took you to solve that problem, because you are so excited about this what if. I think that's a really good- Yeah, yeah, I mean I've spent a lot of time. It's kind of funny, I keep expecting people to just be like, "All right, grandpa, stop talking about G Docs. It's been a long time." Right? So it has been a long time. It's been 17 years, but it's still very relevant. It's got a couple billion users now I think, it's a big thing. But I've spent a lot of the last 10 or 15 years just thinking about, why did that work? What worked about that? What lessons can I draw from it? There was a lot of energy around it, positive and negative. The first week I was at Google, an executive there refused to give me hardware, because he thought that Google was an app company not a... It was a search company, not an app company. And literally the guy in charge of hardware at the time refused to give me hardware for this service. And I had to threaten to either sue him or haul him in front of Eric Schmidt, because I had a contract and I had contracted earnouts. So that was another one of these interesting lessons of sometimes the opposition is enormous. And if I had just been a random Google employee with this idea and no legal protection, and the CEO wasn't a fan of the project, it would've died. There's no way it would've made it through that negativity and that pessimism and that person being either challenged or afraid of the idea, or just not able to imagine it, or what. I'm not sure what. But we'll keep coming back to this idea of optimism, but I have this very strong feeling about that most of the reason people don't do really innovative good products is this kind of mindset. You're just not seeing the opportunities. There's a lot of hard work for sure. There's a lot of stuff that you can read about and best practices of doing iteration and user testing and user interviews and really listening and all the engineering best practices. That stuff is pretty mechanical. Once you know where you're going, you can do that. It's not that hard to learn and to master it. I think the hard stuff is this mindset of being open in the right ways and understanding that some kinds of pushback are good pushback. Some are bad. I always think that product builders and entrepreneurs, you have this really hard problem of you have to be very rigid about your mission. I know where I'm going. I know what my mission is, and I'm going to go there because the world doesn't care, it's going to push back. But you also have to be really flexible about feedback. You're probably aren't going to be right about a bunch of it. And so you have to blend these two things together somehow. It's like a samurai sword that's hard on the back, but softer on the edge so it doesn't break. Or the other way around I think. But there's this hard thing you have to do as an entrepreneur, and I think it's the real core of building really great products is finding that balance and really listening to those signals, being open to it.…

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