Lenny Rachitsky: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Yeah, it's real. I moved to Canada pretty late, 16 years old, and what I learned is in China you can learn English but it's typically just grammar and doing exams. What you're missing is the context, the culture. So you have to watch SpongeBob or Simpsons to get a sense of humor essentially. You can understand jokes. Watching cartoons, it's probably the easiest way to do that. That's amazing. And there's another seminal moment in your path. I don't know if it was this point or later, but the Douglas Engelbart paper ended up being a very meaningful moment for you. So while I was in Canada in last year of school working on trying to building website from our friends and building a creative tool for them, and then you just look into the history of a creative tool for software, for computing. Eventually arrived at 1960 and '70s. So you realize the first generation of computing pioneers, which is around San Francisco, Stanford areas, South Bay, they actually had the best ideas. For them, people like Douglas Engelbart, Alan Kay, Ted Nelson, those first generation pioneers, for them computing, there shouldn't be a separation between builders and users. It's the same medium. Engelbart's original paper called Augmenting Human Intellect, when I read that paper, it's like holy shit. If you are making software, if you know how to code or design, this is the highest leverage thing you can do for other people. So giving them the ability to use computing to augment their problem-solving ability or their intellect, that just got me obsessed with this problem and I want to start a company like Notion.…

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