Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Absolutely. What I particularly love, so a lot of my product thinking and my product chops and craft, I really owe to Uber. So when I think about things, there's something really magical there. And one of our values at the time was making magic. So I met the word magic all the time, but so mission, push a button, get a ride, transportation as reliable as running water. I used to be in Nigeria, that tagline did not scale because water was not that reliable in Nigeria. So they went for a slightly more inclusive version, which is reliable transport, sanitation everywhere and for everyone, right? So that's the mission. That doesn't really tell me what the image looks like when I get there, but that's like when I wake up every day, I'm like, "Why do I work in this company?" It's that make transportation reliable everywhere for everyone. And I'll talk maybe later about how that came to... We were able to use that to actually challenge the then CEO Travis Kalanick. The vision was a world where you get to this continuous trip so that you do not need parking. Because cities, 25% of the average city is parking spaces. You're in San Francisco, you'll see buildings, just floors just for parking, right? You'll have basements just for parking. In a world where we have housing problems, we have ridiculous prices for rents. Just imagine if you could free up all of those spaces for all kinds of things, right? Homes, restaurants, you name it. Parties, warehouse parties especially, they have the best. That was the vision. You could kind of see it, right? You're like, "Oh, I could see a world." I mean, I live in Amsterdam, I have a bicycle, I can see it every other day. They're getting rid of cars and actually converting the parking lots on the street into communal gardens, right? So it's not crazy. It's attainable. But now doing that for the whole world, what does that look like? And that's how things like Uber Pool came in where in a world where the average car has 1.5 people in it, we can maximize that and then we can get this connected trip where the car is just moving and then maybe the car is autonomous, so you don't actually have to drive that car, and so it just doesn't need to stop. I guess, it needs to charge at some point. But so that's it. I think that's a really good vision. I think one that's lofty and I dance between whether it's attainable or not, is Elon Musk saying, "We're going to get to Mars." He believes it. He believes it so much that sometimes I'm like, "I guess, we're going to Mars." But then there was the other one of, oh, we want a car that's electric and we want that car to be beautiful so that we will get to a car that's accessible to everyone. And that's kind of followed through. So yeah, I mean, the beautiful things about visions is that it helps you decide it. Is that a work... Do I care about this problem? Is it something I want to do? And then you can take it or leave it. I think with the lofty slash attainable balance, I think that Elon Musk is an interesting example where it may feel impossible, but as an inspirational leader, you almost convince people that it is possible through your confidence and your being in the details, helping people see maybe there's a path. So I think there's an interesting opportunity there to be a leader. Yeah. Absolutely.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.