Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, absolutely, it's crazy. I was part of a pretty small team within Palantir, I think it was 20 to 25 people when I joined, and I think at least six of them now are either unicorn or just pre-unicorn founders from that group of 25 people, which is actually a crazy ratio. And then a bunch more have become founders recently at an earlier stage, so yeah, there's all these little pockets of excellence and it's been really interesting to see. I think the other thing that's driving that a little bit is when you leave, it's just such an interesting company to work at that I think the retention numbers were actually very high for that company. People would often stay a lot longer than maybe the average Valley tenure. And so when you left, it was really this decision of just something very specific is pulling you and you want to kind of play the next level of the game, and so it was very unusual for someone to leave and then join maybe a more traditional tech company. It's sort of like you're either going to go become a founder or why would you leave when there's so many interesting different things to work on? And I know that sounds a little culty, but that's what everyone thinks. I could totally see that. A lot of people that left Airbnb have never found something more meaningful, it's just hard, especially if you're early. There's a stat that I didn't share that I think is really interesting, and when you look at YC founders and where they've come from, I think you maybe shared in your post that there's more YC ex-Palantir founders than there are ex-Google founders in spite of Google being something like 50 times bigger sample size. Yeah, yeah.…

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