Lenny Rachitsky: uncertainty

Transcript context

…That's a smart way to do it. Yeah. On a totally different topic, you're ahead of product at Foursquare. I don't know if you know this. I actually built a startup on Foursquare's API. It's a company called Localmind. For folks that don't know about it, the way it worked is basically let you talk to someone, checked in on Foursquare anywhere in the world if you're thinking about going there. You could be like, "Hey, is this bar fun right now? What's happening there?" Before you actually show up. We ended up selling the company to Airbnb. Ended up not being a big problem for enough people and that's how I ended up at Airbnb. But it was quite magical and API was amazing. I guess I just want to say thank you for building an awesome product and awesome API. Thank you for being a developer on top of the ecosystem. I mean it's interesting with Foursquare. I will talk about this I'm sure later. I feel like I have more lessons learned and more scar tissue from the crazy up and down of ... I don't know what. It was 2010 to 2015 roughly. I think there's something actually where you learn more from the things that don't fully work out or don't quite achieve what you wanted to achieve. You actually have a feedback loop where you get a lot of negative signal about like, "Okay. That didn't work. That didn't work. What can I actually learn, take away from that?" It's still great. I still love using Foursquare. I think we got caught in the death star of Instagram's ascent back in 2012, 2013. But I hope a product like that exists forever in the future and I'm glad you got to build the company, landed Airbnb through it. It's a great story.…

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