Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, because I think people get, there is just inertia, people get into their, it's human behavior, people get into their lanes, they start to feel really comfortable within the lanes, and then they don't know that there's a different way to do things and you have to almost externally invoke that or trigger that. If we think about just your career arc, I'm zooming out a little bit. You helped create the mobile experience on LinkedIn. You built the feed initially and now you're in front of AI. I could see why you're so successful at LinkedIn. I was talking to folks about your career arc at LinkedIn and you basically went from senior PM to senior PM number two, to group PM to director, to senior director to VP, to CPO in not that many years, it's a pretty meteoric rise. I wanted to spend a little time here and I want to maybe start with the question of just if you could give one specific piece of advice for someone looking to advance in their career based on what you found to be really effective, what would that be? I realized everybody's in every stage in their career and they have different ways to think about the role then what they need. Maybe I'll just share about my journey, what worked for me instead of giving more of a general advice. First of all, I feel super fortunate I'm building. That's what I love doing. I love building, I love working with builders. Sometimes I'm like, I get paid for this, this is insane. But I love my craft and I love getting deep into it. So in many ways I think the things I'm excited about is the things I'm doing. When people are starting off, I usually really focus on learning from great people. People you talk to or have amazing mentors and managers. Some of them don't even know there were every mentors. It's not like a mentor officially. I try to pick up things from people all the time, and that's been just a remarkable experience working with great people. And in many ways, a lot of those great people actually allowed me or empowered me to take on some bigger challenges. So I can see forks in the road where if it wasn't for that person saying something very specific, probably would've done something differently. And it just made me think a lot. So I really tried to absorb learning from great people. But by far, for me personally, again, this is very personal versus generic advice, it was when I moved here, I was an engineer for many years before I moved here for graduate school in 2008. And I always loved building, that was there from a young age but when I moved here, I realized my career path was very much dictated by one thing. It was like, what's most in demand? What's most challenging? And how do I do that? It was very childish in many ways. It was not dictated by me, it was in a way dictated by society. So what's the toughest engineering role? What's the best company to go into? What's the best army unit to serve in? And I fell a lot along the way, but I always kept going. And then when I came here, there was a really big challenging for me personally around what do I care about? What matters most to me? And that was, again, it's very personal in many ways. It was very much for me, an impact on learning and actually how do I create impact more broadly? And I shifted 180 in how my thought process used to go. It was less about what was out there and exciting and in demand and challenging and it was more about where did I have strong conviction on, what was I passionate about and where did I feel I could make a dent and learn? And that was my path forward. So after school with a student visa and massive school debt, I decided to start a company which was not a very intelligent decision based on my economic circumstances, but I didn't care. I was like, this is my new path. And then I got into LinkedIn. I didn't apply for a job. I met with who was in my role today, Deep Nishar, at that time and we talked and I said, "This is how I think this is how LinkedIn mobile should be built."…

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