Lenny Rachitsky: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah. It's like thinking deeply and quietly about it yourself and then seeing what everybody else comes up with when they are able to also think deeply and quietly about it. Then ideally, if they're working with us in character labs, having somebody who's a bit external to push them and say, try harder, dig deeper. What really makes you special here? How are you really going to beat OpenAI? How are you really going to beat Google at this. This whole idea of noting and voting and working in silence. Such a recurring theme on this podcast of not doing brainstorms in large groups with a lot of people. It feels like that's just dead in every way. I just had this naming expert on the podcast who names some of the biggest companies in the world, Pentium, Powerbook, Sonos, Purcell, and that's their approach is they used to do brainstorms. He's like, that doesn't work. And now they just have small teams sitting quietly in a room working together on ideas and then thinking on their own. So that's such an interesting trend and I feel like IDEO just created this whole, we need to brainstorm post-its, and then everyone's like, that's not actually working. Let's stop doing that. The other thing that I feel as you're talking through this, what I'm feeling this is for founders, there's not a manual for starting a company. It feels like this dark art of like, I guess I got to find product market fit. And this idea, it feels like this is almost a manual of everything you need to do to just get the basics of is this even worth doing? Yeah. And that's why we created it because we still are investing in founders who are... They're incredibly talented and they're smart and they have a background that is going to give them an advantage in building some particular product. But you're right, there's no manual and we were just kind of solving our own problem and we believe in this so much and we see the ROI as being so great that this is the first thing we do when we make an investment. We invest in a company and then we run a foundation sprint with them right away. We run more foundation sprints with startups than we do design sprints at this point. And I don't think we can ever encapsulate every single thing that you need to know or that you need to do to start a company, but this is our best take at what you should do in the early days to set yourself up for success and maximize the chances that you're going to reach product market fit.…

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