Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…It's so interesting when I think back to my 10 years, things that I actually remember the most are these moments with other people and not some project or some product launch that's going super well or us doing really well with metrics. The things that really made I think Airbnb special, and now that I think back to those 10 years of my experience that I deeply just resonate with are those little moments. And one example, and this is why culture is just so important because these things don't just happen organically. You have to be thoughtful about building culture, and then I think you create a place where these little things can happen. So for me, I don't know if you remember your experience when you first joined the company, my most memorable experience at Airbnb is the human tunnel. And it was just this thing where I remember it was my first day and I was standing behind this giant wall and there was silence in, I think, it was a cafeteria. I was like this huge huge room and then somebody like this engineer runs up to me and says, "Hey, go around to the other side of the wall," and I turn and suddenly the room just explodes in cheering and clapping and everyone yelling my name. And everyone is basically doing a human tunnel with their hands. Literally every single person at the company at HQ, including the founders. And then I run through under everyone's cheering and I jump into this beanbag while everyone's chanting my name. That was my first day, and here I am, I don't know, 12 years later, 13 years later. I still remember that as one of the most amazing moments of the entire journey and I immediately felt accepted. And I wanted to contribute to the team, and a lot of the reasons why... There were many moments like that throughout my 10 years and it was a result of how we hired people for certain core values and were very intentional about just helping people integrate into this crazy company that was growing superfast. That was an amazing story. I feel exactly the same way. I went through a similar experience when I joined. And obviously, the human tunnel eventually didn't scale and people started doing it per team versus the entire company. We could do a whole episode on Airbnb culture and learnings from that. Interestingly with the human tunnel, it started I think with the founders, but it ended up being they had no involvement in these tunnels. It was just employees knew that this is the thing we're going to do for every new employee, and so I think it's interesting. I guess just spending a little time on culture and learnings from Airbnb about the value and power of culture, is there anything there you take away with two other companies you work with now of just how to set up a great culture, how to do this well? I would say there's no single playbook. I would say the one thing that comes to mind just being really intentional and thoughtful about it and actually dedicating energy to it. Just as much as you spend time building product, hiring people, is you got to spend just as much energy actually thinking about culture and your core values. And so core values are very, I would say, indicative of what the culture will be. So those two are very linked and once you think about core values, I remember what worked really well was you don't just write your core values in the document somewhere and then no one ever opens it. The key is, regardless of what the core values are, you want to make sure that those core values are prominent in just about every single thing that you do. So when you hire people, you hire for certain core values, and at Airbnb, we had core value interviewers up until, I mean, my entire tenure basically. Even when we had thousands of people already at the company, when we were hiring people, everybody had to pass core values interviews, so it was very ingrained in how we hired and what we looked for. Then even performance reviews and promotions, no matter how much impact you made, no matter what you did, if you were not also exemplifying core, you didn't get promoted. You didn't get to the next level, and so even in our performance conversations, those core values were very present in the day to day. And then of course they were also printed everywhere. They were just physically everywhere all the time, so I felt like every single person around me always knew what the core values work, and so that's my biggest advice. It's like, don't copy some other company's core values. Instead, just be intentional about what matters to your organization and then make sure that those core values are freaking everywhere, part of every single process. Otherwise, no one's going to care.…

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