Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:24:12 · Mark Pincus
[00:24:12] S0: I'm in the middle of relearning that lesson myself right now. And I would say there's so many paradoxes in this and one that I've had to learn over and over again is if we're too ambitious at the outset and too ambitious and visionary about the product we want to build, then we will probably miss product market fit because we won't start at a small enough, humble enough place because it might ... Usually the starting point for these products is embarrassingly small. So many of these massive hit products or franchises started with such humble- Started with such humble non-ambitious places and The Facebook was just an app to check out girls and guys at Harvard. And the irony for me is I've found that my career has gone in these waves and maybe some of your other founders have had this experience too, that I've started in a very humble place of, "I just want to get to anything, any product market fit", had bigger success than I imagined I would have in my first two companies, Freeloader and Support.com. They both started with very small, humble premise. And then afterwards felt like now I can do anything. And I know Elon is the exception to the rule. Part of it is I think he can raise magical unlimited amounts of capital, which helps, but then he does not start in humble places at all. But for the rest of us mortals, I'd say that we tend to after success feel the need to do something bigger the next time. That's human instinct and we want to be more ambitious. And so when I got to Tribe and I saw social networking and LinkedIn was just starting and I saw how big the opportunity was, I tried to do everything with Tribe. It was really ambitious and I didn't pick one use case. And there was multiple inside Tribe that worked. The tribes, the idea of these urban tribes worked. People loved it, but it was too ambitious and so we failed. And then I was so humbled and I was in this abyss we can talk about for so long and I was so just desperate to get out of that abyss that by the time I got to Zynga, I did something that was embarrassingly small. I mean, to be 41, multi-time successful founder that could go do something important in the world and what did I do? I made a Facebook app like a poker game, not even a Facebook app, I mean a poker game. It was people thought I had no dignity.
00:27:16 · Mark Pincus, Lenny Rachitsky
I mean people were like, "Mark, there's so much you could do in the world." But I'd say my ambition came down to a 1000 ft altitude, not a 100,000 ft. And that was the key to that being successful. And I see this with, it's just so hard. I see it with so many product founders and it almost gives a new founder an advantage over a multi-time successful founder because we have too much rope to hang ourselves. It's too easy to raise money and recruit teams against a big vision before we've gotten to product market fit, but the world doesn't care about your resume. That's the good news for everyone watching. Everyone has the same chance and in a lot of ways if you're in a more humble place, you have a better opportunity. So the paradox is the more ambitious you are that the more humble you should be in the smaller place you should be willing to start. [00:28:25] S1: One of your insights along these lines is that this is your advantage as a startup is to be less ambitious because a Zuck needs to go really big because the revenue is already so high. Anything they take on needs to be many billion-dollar business opportunity. And as a startup, you don't need to do that. And this is how you end up discovering some of the biggest ideas in the end. [00:28:45] S0: Being willing to pursue these little threads when they're flaky, when they're not a business, when they're so much earlier, and so many of the successful companies today started there. [00:28:59] S1: Is there an example that comes to mind when, because what's a company or two that started very unambitious?
00:28:59 · Lenny Rachitsky, Mark Pincus
[00:28:59] S1: Is there an example that comes to mind when, because what's a company or two that started very unambitious? [00:29:05] S0: I love the story of Bolt.new that really blew up last year. I loved it so much. I coldmailed the founder because I was just so impressed with- [00:29:14] S1: [inaudible 00:29:14]? [00:29:14] S0: ... Yeah. And they toiled an obscurity on something that they were into and then they open sourced it. I think they were barely able to keep going with commercial development. And then they had this realization one day of, "Wait a second, if we take these web stacks, this virtual machine that we've been making work on the web, but we actually add that to an AI coding copilot, we now have something that's better than what anybody else has." And I think that was just a great story that they were passionate about one thing and they stuck with it. [00:30:00] S1: Eric was on the podcast. We talked about that. [00:30:02] S0: Oh, he was? I'm so impressed. In a lot of ways, Slack also was humbled. Stewart keeps trying to start game companies and those turn into unexpected bigger hit companies. We'll see what he does. And actually now has probably so much capital he could just keep doing a game company this time. [00:30:27] S1: But I think to your point, he might try again to unhumble, go big.
00:30:31 · Mark Pincus
[00:30:31] S0: But each time, so he started a big idea for the mass-market MMO, which I've also loved, but really difficult. And they were humbled in that enough to say, "Okay, wait, there's this little teeny thing that our engineers use. Let's build a product around that." And it really takes a really attuned, curious, humble founder to call the ball on that. I mean, I can imagine, I guess I've been there how hard it is when you've got investors and team and everybody going in one direction and we have to express confidence as founders. Whether or not we have actual confidence inside, that's part of, I think, the dissonance of this. How do you express confidence? How do you stay in a place of intellectual honesty? How do we stay authentic and transparent and not rattle our team? And I'm still learning. I err on the side of transparency and honesty and being authentic to a fault and I burn out people in that process and I did at Zynga and I have since because people will say, the negative critique I'm working with me is, "Oh, working for Mark is like third grade soccer and every Monday he comes in excited about a different idea." And they're not wrong. But where I can get better at this maybe is if we can build a culture with our team that says, "Okay, we are ambitious. We're so ambitious that we're not going to hold onto a B+. Even if we could get funding, even if it has some traction, we have a north star that we are not going to stop until we find product market fit against our north star and this isn't it and it's going to take courage on our part. And hey, let's look around the room. Is everyone ambitious enough to do this? Or do you want to peel off and go join someone else who's already a rocket ship?" That's a fair career choice for you to make. But I think that's to me the real founder mode is can you have the courage to tell your team and your investors that this isn't it?
00:33:17 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:33:17] S1: That's exactly where I wanted to go, which is this other piece of advice you give, which is, "Kill hope before hope kills you." Talk about just what that is because so much of your advice is, "Kill your bad ideas quickly." So just talk about that and then I'm really curious to know what it takes to realize an idea is bad. When do you decide, "Okay, this is B+. Let's move on."
00:33:38 · Mark Pincus
[00:33:38] S0: I don't know if I get credit for making up that quote, but I love it, kill hope before hope kills you. There's a difference between belief and hope. Hope is confidence without basis. Hope is just, it's a prayer, but it's not founded in anything that your lived experience. It's not founded in your experience with your product, your experience with people experiencing your product and the data. And I think that too many founders and teams keep going with the hope that this next release is going to do something magical. And I think that the best product makers, I like to say they're collecting winnings, they're not making bets. They already know. If you talk to Brian Chesky about his launches, he already knows that he has a hit. He's not launching it to find out if people like it. And I talk about the difference between launching an MVP, a minimum viable product, and a maximum launchable product. Because if we're going off hope, we're getting to this MVP, minimum viable, that the viable is the word we got to kill along with hope because viable is where hope comes from. If it's viable, it might make it. And there's a difference between get in the market early, learn. You're putting a product out that you're going to learn from and you're putting a product out that you're going to launch that you think you believe, not hope, is going to be a hit. And it's really important to be crisp and to make that distinction. And AI is a dangerous tool today. It's so powerful that it's dangerous. It's so powerful that it means we can get to a viable product in much less time and money than it took maybe three months instead of three years. And that's a dangerous drug because it means that... What I thought would happen where we'd be today is that people would be using AI to build these incredible testing machines, failure machines that are testing, I like to say more ideas in a week than your industry tests in a year. How are you testing a 100 ideas a day instead of one in three months? I think AI is being used more to build one idea in three months than a hundred ideas in a day. And what would it look like? I like to say we should build it completely wrong before we know it's the right product. So build it wrong before you know it's right. And if you could build it right, great, but don't be slowed down by that.