Lenny Rachitsky: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, that's really fun. Favorite placement of all time has got to be the VP of engineering that I placed at IRL, which is, to be completely honest, a big reason that I joined that company. Alex Strand is his name, and he is just the most incredible, atypical, high emotional intelligent engineering leader. Still super technical, but has managed teams in the hundreds, built out Amazon Prime Day, then went on to build the core messaging platform at Snapchat, called him and he was like, "Why would I ever leave? There's a ton of financial incentive and a team that I've built that all loves me." And we got him to ultimately make a move in two weeks, which is just kind of unheard of, although it ended up being like a seven month push for a start date, but that was a big reason why I went and joined IRL was to work side by side him and help build out his team and learn to get more deep on the technical side of things. Because oftentimes, on the executive level, as mentioned before, can be sometimes more of that people management type role. And so he just felt like this unique hybrid of an individual, and yeah, you close searches and you cross your fingers and hope for the best and feel very good about it, but he was one where I had all the confidence in the world that I could not have done better. You know? I just felt so great about that. So, that was a good one. I don't know how much more confidence you could instill in a candidate joining a company than the recruiter also then joining the company. Yeah, I did say that to him. I kept saying, "And if I were to go in house, I swear this is probably the company I would do it for." And then about four weeks after he signed, I'd texted him and I said, "Well, you'll never guess."…

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