Lenny's Podcast / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
24 published records
01 / evaluation
“And almost by definition somebody who goes to work for McKinsey is very conservative in their outlook. And so, I think that almost always fails.”
02 / evaluation
“On the references piece, the toughest part is getting people to be honest because there's very little upside to them to say negative things about people.”
03 / recommendation
“I love my Delphi clone, I teach a course called Scaling Entrepreneurial Ventures, and I don't do office hours, I have Delphi do my office hours.”
04 / belief
“I think you can, I think the blind references are key, I think doing real interactive, working on a project together is key.”
05 / belief
“I think you land on an avatar and have a conversation with them, versus you're going through all the pages on your site.”
06 / evaluation
“The way I always thought about this is just having someone's ass on the line for something makes them so motivated to get it done, versus spreading the responsibility and the upside and the downside, it just doesn't work.”
07 / uncertainty
“I had Marc Andreessen on recently, and I don't know if you've heard his whole thing on what he consumes, he talks about he has a very barbell strategy to media.”
08 / belief
“One that you didn't mention that I think is interesting, I did some research on this recently, with Terence Rohan, one is just extremely ambitious.”
09 / belief
“I think people underrate their homegrown talent, almost across the board they underrate it.”
10 / belief
“The founders are seven days a week, they're always on, I [inaudible 00:48:40] on Sunday nights, it's full contact. And I think what's going on there, particularly now, is people just see this massive platform change, massive opportunity, they don't want to waste the opportunity.”
11 / belief
“What's interesting to me, Lenny, is Brian Chesky sort of rethought a lot of this stuff, and he's like everyone's over-rotating to the homegrown to the experienced talent and management teams and delegation, I think he's mostly right about that.”
12 / belief
“I think people think they're going to live forever and they're not. As somebody who's 58, yeah, life's very short, and I'm much more intentional about the decisions I make, much more intentional about the people I hang out with today than I was before that.”
13 / belief
“Something that I've seen that a lot of companies is there's phases of like, okay, now it's the McKinsey, a cohort comes in, and we think that's going to be the answer, and then it's the Apple group, and then that didn't work out, then the Amazon group.”
14 / evaluation
“Steve Jobs had an interesting line, he says, "You don't work for your boss, you work for Apple.”
15 / evaluation
“I think CEOs and everyone dramatically overrates their ability to interview, and overrates their gut feeling, and underrates a really high quality blind reference.”
16 / evaluation
“Baseball's also deeply flawed, it doesn't have a salary cap. And so, you've got the Dodgers, who I take my hat off to, have a $400 million payroll, and then Miami Marlins with a 100 million dollars payroll, and in other leagues that all kind of balances out pretty well, baseball, it's set up incorrectly.”
17 / evaluation
“I'll just follow on to, most of the good things that happened in HubSpot came out of a crisis because we would take pretty drastic measures to fix it and make sure we didn't do the same thing again.”
18 / preference
“I don't know any of the founders I work with that have work-life balance. By the way, this is not something I recommend.”
19 / evaluation
“Let's say you found your beachhead market, and that beachhead market is really good, and it's very deep, there's a lot of work to do, I think what's dangerous for companies is they hop to that second act too quickly, and they lose focus on that first act.”
20 / preference
“Okay, another Halliganism, I don't know if you put it this way, the way I think about it is this idea of, "There's no such thing as a silver bullet, it just takes a lot of lead bullets to get something done.”
21 / preference
“I think me as a knowledge worker, what I really want as a homo sapien is I have a Delphi clone that I really like.”
22 / preference
“Before he's got a C-level interview, CFO, chief product officer, whatever, he has some sign an NDA, and sends them the last board deck, or the board memo, or some important doc, and he schedules a half hour interview with them, and he just has a chat about the decks. And if they're just very complimentary, and it's so great, and you're doing this amazing thing, it's a major red flag to him because he wants someone that will challenge him and not a yes person.”
23 / recommendation
“Well, I would say if you are a CEO and you're interested in scaling, I think the Halliganism posts is all the mistakes I made in my 15 years of being CEO, I tried to summarize them there, to help you avoid them.”
24 / preference
“I'm a little negative on people who came up with this problem to solve six months ago and started a company, I like people with deep founder market fit, who've been thinking about it for a long time, and have evidence in their lives of going deep down, obsessively down a rabbit hole because that's kind of what it takes to be a founder/CEO.”