Lenny Rachitsky: uncertainty

Transcript context

…So anyway, this all happened, and in the end we executed the market. We sold HipChat and Stride to Slack and basically exited the enterprise communications market. Just to double down that, but you sold that to Slack and now Salesforce basically, that's the word ended. I don't know if people know that. Yeah, actually, it was noticed by the market in that as soon as we did that, our stock price went up. I think it was $60 back then and it went up to 70. I mean, that really sucked for us, the team working on it. First, no one tells you, but failure, everyone tells you failure is great because you learn so many things, but failure to start with really sucks. None of us here were really happy about this on the team because we had spent years, on my part, it was three years, but the people who were before that on HipChat was longer than that. Obsessing over it, obsessing over every detail, every customer conversation, every solution, should we rewrite, should we this, should we do that? So many intense conversations, and from one day to the next, it didn't matter anymore. We had worked on something and that's it, that's the end. I'm sure many startups have been through that before. For me it was the first time it felt that personal, and the market the next day went, "Oh, you're stopping doing what you're doing? Awesome. Yes, 10 more dollars to your stock price." So yeah, there's a personal side to all the stories. For us, there was a bit like the seven stages of grief after we shut down HipChat.…

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