Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…I'm fortunate at this stage of my career that I usually get to interview with the CEO or the founders or something like that. What I'm usually looking for is do they have a story as to why they believe in design? Really in their heart and soul, do they care about design? Because if I go into a company that doesn't really value the thing that I do, I'm just not going to have a great time and I'm going to be constantly buffeting up against all sorts of people. I want to make sure I've got air cover from the highest people in the company setting the culture. In the case of, again, my most recent job was with a company called ThoughtSpot. And ThoughtSpot was founded by a gentleman named Ajeet Singh, and Ajeet grew up in rural India, but he tells this really great story about he studied chemical engineering, he moves to the United States. Early in his career, he's working for Honeywell and they did a couple of engagements with IDEO. As a very young person, he got to see what IDEO did and he realized the power of design and he's taken that to all of his companies. He started Nutanix before he came to ThoughtSpot, before he started ThoughtSpot. And so when I heard that, I'm like, oh, this is a guy that gets design right from the very beginning. I've also come to believe that I actually have never seen a company that grafted design on after the founding. I could name lots of companies that I think are kind of design led, not always designer led, but design led or design centric. But I've never seen somebody grafted on after the fact. It's there at the beginning in the root DNA or doesn't exist. And so the thing that I'm looking for when I interview is, is it there at the beginning? Can I get a credible story that tracks it back to that? And if that's the case, then I think I can find a way to navigate in that culture. We have a shared value system in a way that as an American, I could immigrate to Australia and the culture would be slightly different, but we'd have a shared value system that I could relate to. If I moved to, I don't know, Burma or China or something, it would be wildly more challenging because the base view of the world, the base understanding of the world's just different and it'd be much harder for me to adapt to that. I think a way to extrapolate that insight is just whatever function you're in, get a sense of how important that function is to that business. Do the founders value engineering? Do they value product? Do they value design? Depending on who you are. Why would you want to work in a place that doesn't value the thing that you do? God, that would suck.…

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