Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Well, and here's the thing. The reason they build a sales team eventually is they need to get enterprise deals. And obviously you need a sales team to get enterprise deals. And one of the mistakes you could make is hiring an enterprise salesperson when you're trying to cross the chasm. Enterprise salespeople are not good chasm crossers because they're used to doing horizontal coverage model. This is like no, domain expert narrow model. You want somebody that looks more like a sales engineer than a salesperson. You want somebody very diagnostic, very committed to the integrity of the problem solution framework. So it's just different. Okay. Just a couple more questions. You had this very public exchange with Martin Casado, he's a partner at Andreessen Horowitz. And just to summarize briefly, essentially he was arguing that I think some people believe once you've crossed the chasm, life's good. It's all downhill. People are going to start pulling your product out of you. It's going to be so easy. And his argument is he doesn't see that, it's endless pain and suffering and hardships. And I know you went back and forth trying to correct this, but what's a way to think about what happens? So actually, Martin and I had a couple of this... By the way, his biggest point... I'll come back to your point in a second, but his biggest point is, "Jeff..." The venture community at least, and certainly Andreessen Horowitz doesn't deal with the level of granularity of Crossing the Chasm anymore. There's too much money that wants to be put to work. By the way, there's so much software already out there that the notion that your software is going to be that disruptive is increasingly improbable because you're not standing on the shoulders of giants, you're standing on the shoulders of people standing on the shoulders of people standing on the shoulders of people standing on the shoulders of giants. So he was making a bunch of those points, which I thought were pretty interesting. But his other point about, does life ever become easy? No, life never becomes easy. The problems change. The challenge with software is... Well, there's a lot of challenges with it, but software that people use, the application software, we all have different minds. We all have different contexts. To make a product that would work, that would solve what I want and solve what you want and solve what the listener wants. I mean, the margin, no. We're going to have different expectations. So there's always... And then of course there's competition, and then there's funding, and then there's technological shifts, and just about the time it really works well, they say, "No, we got to put it... No, no, no. You put it in the data center. We got to put it in the cloud." "Oh, no, no, you got in the cloud, you got to put it in Kubernetes." "Oh, no, no, no. You don't understand. It's edge AI, it's not cloud." It just goes on and on and on. So I think if you're going to play this game, you got to be up for... Yeah, there's going to be a new headache every week.…

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