Lenny Rachitsky: commitment

Transcript context

…Just tons of stories and all this had done in three months and truly phenomenal. And Uber wasn't in China for very long, so in some ways you're like, we did all that just a leave? But they left with a nice stake of Didi Kuaidi and not a bad outcome overall. But I think that strategy, we run everything in data centers. We don't use the cloud, meant we were able to move in and out of different geopolitical constraints and companies that relied on cloud presence simply can't. There are fully constrained by where AWS or Google Cloud or Azure have built out. So that's one good example. Another good example at Stripe was this idea of we run a Ruby monolith and that's what we did and that's evolved a bit since then. There's more Java and the Stripe of 2023 than there was in the stripe of 2016 or the 2012 or whatnot. But that policy really focused the engineers on building innovative features for our users rather than building different tooling to support different programming languages. And so in both cases, both the Uber policy around running our own data centers and the Stripe policy around Ruby monoliths, a lot of engineers hated these. But the goal of good strategy is not to appease everyone. The goal of good strategy is to dictate how we invest the limited capacities we have or the limited capabilities we have into the problems we care about. And I think both of them were really effective towards that end. A common theme across all these examples is essentially constraint, deciding we will constrain our options to move faster and focus on the things that really matter. In solving the constraints is to me, I think the most interesting thing that strategy really does, and I think when we talk about bad strategy usually is because the diagnosis is bad and it's usually because people are exerting what they want to be true on constraints where it's like, "Hey, we can do all of these projects at once." And often that's just not true, but it's hard to convince people that when they're the CEO or they are really committed to believing it, but almost all bad strategies basically come down from a willful disbelief of what an accurate diagnosis is, which means then your guiding policies are kind of incoherent to begin with.…

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