Lenny Rachitsky: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Yeah. So it's surprisingly profound. I don't know where I came up with it, but when I see people who are great at surfing, they're almost always on good waves. And my son who surfs a lot, I have noticed, passes up waves that other people might take waiting for the right wave because he knows he will be able to surf it better. So when you think about which company you're signing up to bring software from, which people you're willing to put on the key roles, are you willing to wait for the superstar who's going to change things or are you in so much of a hurry to make an imaginary deadline that you're going to ship mediocre work? Because all mediocre means is average. And so if you don't want to be mediocre, you better do something different than the other people are doing. Otherwise, you're going to get what the other people are getting. As you talk about this, I'm thinking about, I don't know if you saw Jaguar's rebrand and their whole launch. And it feels like it's been rejected by the system. Any thoughts on that? Maybe what they got wrong or maybe it was genius? Okay, so you've picked a topic that I really like to talk about. Jaguar did not rebrand, Jaguar re-logo-ed. And the logo might be a sign that they're trying to rebrand and make a different promise, and they're switching to all electric, which I'm in favor of. But they made, I think, a very significant error, which is if you're going to start a car company, a hundred million or a billion dollars are going to get spent earning trust from people who never heard of you. If you're starting with one of the most iconic and beautiful and beloved car brands that has the luxury of having almost no cars in the world that could undermine what you want it to stand for going forward, it's perfect. Own that, that's brilliant. And to walk away from that so that you could please some art director, I don't understand why you think you're rebranding when you just put a logo on that undermines many of the awareness assets you already had going for you.…

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