Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…The last little skill, and I know you, you've talked about this, but I think it's something that I was fortunate enough to not care about. Which I think is, when you focus too much at a company about like, "Ooh, I want the promotion" you get caught up in this world where you're like, "If I want the promotion, I need to do what my boss wants." And I had this fortunate benefit of... Like my last job, I was the CEO. I didn't care about my title, I didn't care about leveling up. I came in and I was like, "I want to continue trying to execute on this vision of this thing that I wanted to do." What that actually meant was my only metric I cared about was impact and trying to build a product that would work. And I think in any job in any company, it turns out you think that doing what your boss wants is actually what's going to get you promoted. But the people that I've had work for me or I've worked alongside that seem to always be the outperformers, are always the people that are just solely focused on having the most impact on the company. I think the thing I learned, which I thanks to Andy Rachleff for teaching me this is when you push so hard for your ideas and you have really strong beliefs, you have to also make sure you state your intent. Because sometimes people think you're acting out of self-interest. I'd be like, "Oh, we should delete this feature and build this crazy thing. It's going to be amazing." And people are like, "Oh, Chris just thinks his idea is better than everyone." And so he taught me, he's like, "It would go a long way before you said that, you said, "Hey guys, I've got some crazy ideas, but before I say them, I just want you to know that all I care about is that the company is successful. And I think this idea will make the company successful. And that's why I'm so excited about it. I don't need to own it. I don't care who owns it, I'm just really excited about it."" And when you state your intent, you give people a little bit of ease in thinking you know what it might be. And even though I'm sure half the people listening work at a company where their culture is like assume best intent is one of the pillars, it's still our nature to assume that if someone's shooting down an idea we have that maybe it's out of their own self-interest. And I've learned that when you have crazy ideas and when you're pushing back against a lot of people, if you can make sure you constantly remind them why you're doing it and what you care about, it goes a lot further than if you just kind of come in there with sharp elbows and try to push for crazy things. Reminds me, I think Andy is the person who on a podcast once said that every year he picks like a, "We're going to bet the company on this idea. " Kind of project, is that? I would say we've done that a few times. I think the thing that I always told people that I wanted to work on is like, "I want to work on a project that if successful makes everything we do as a company today feel like it's not that important because we did something that was 10 times bigger than everything we're doing today. And what we're doing now is just 10% of the company." Those are the kind of crazy ideas I like to work on. They're very hard sometimes you're like, "Ooh, I've got one." And then it just doesn't work. Sometimes you do one and it takes a turn. But I think that when companies find those things, they're so powerful. But if you don't have the buy-in for management that that's your goal... Andy, he always talks about slugging average, not batting average. He's like, "I don't care if you hit the ball every time. If one in 10 times you hit a home run that's better than someone who hits it every three out of 10 times but gets out a lot." He thought about that and the balance. He's written a lot internally about the balance between working on iterative improvements to current features and then taking big bets and trying to find the balance amongst it all. But I think he does believe there is always exploration necessary for taking big bets and trying to take swings that could have outsized impact. You got to balance it because you're often wrong. And I think that's something that I was like, "That's the thing I want to work on." As someone who is kind of running a company, when you get to go to a big company and you're like, "Now I can solely focus just on this big product bet. I don't have to worry about hiring and recruiting and all these other things." So that was fun.…

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