Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
01:14:05 · Mark Pincus, Lenny Rachitsky
But if it was specifically baked into OpenAI or Claude and gave me a real clear reason that I'm getting value from my GPT beyond ... There's a lot of generic value I get through AI chat today that I'm having more and more trouble differentiating and it's just I don't even know anymore if I'm asking a question to Claude or to GPT. And so they at some point, and that's why they're differentiating themselves right now on coding and there's real value and that's an amazing business, but they're not differentiating themselves very much at the consumer level. [01:14:52] S1: Yeah. To me, the question is, are they just going to do it or why do they need anyone to do it if they are building this AGI they could just do all the things. So I think it's going to be interesting to see if they just want to eat the entire market of everything where they- So I think it's going to be interesting to see if they just want to eat the entire market of everything where they play nice with other startups. [01:15:06] S0: Yeah, that is going to be interesting. And look, we can see past examples with Microsoft. Microsoft was a brutal monopoly. They were a brutal platform. They ate everything around them. And then with us, we saw it on Facebook. The two areas that they just didn't care about going into was music, because it was really painful with IP rights, and games, because they didn't want to hire artists. But everything else they did absorb.
01:15:06 · Mark Pincus, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:15:06] S0: Yeah, that is going to be interesting. And look, we can see past examples with Microsoft. Microsoft was a brutal monopoly. They were a brutal platform. They ate everything around them. And then with us, we saw it on Facebook. The two areas that they just didn't care about going into was music, because it was really painful with IP rights, and games, because they didn't want to hire artists. But everything else they did absorb. [01:15:38] S1: I want to go in a different direction and touch on... You have all these really amazing nuggets of advice for scaling company, managing people, hiring people, working with people. I want to just touch on a bunch of these. One is this idea of making everybody a CEO at your company. Talk about that lesson.
01:15:56 · Mark Pincus
[01:15:56] S0: All my management principles I got to through desperation. I don't like managing people. I say, "Every day you're managing people is a day of work." And it's a necessary evil for us as product makers, because we can't abdicate and just have someone else be CEO. Because all of a sudden the priorities get messed up, and teams don't have to listen to us, and we're now feedback, not direction. So that's a failing path. So we have to be a CEO. But then the question is, how do we get to spend the most time doing what we love, and the least time doing what we don't? The bigger principle to me that I started to get to was that, "Oh." I'm like, "All of management is just how do we get people to do the right thing when we are not in the room?" So I was like, "Okay, if I give them a hill to take, and if I make them a CEO." Make them a real CEO. I mean, they have operating control degrees of freedom to take that hill however they want, and they can give me a plan, a budget and then do whatever they want within that. What I found was I didn't have to manage them. So they're not coming back to me with questions. And certain kinds of people really want to be a CEO. What I also found was it was incredibly motivating for people. It's motivating to me. I always say I'm a team player as long as I'm running the team. So can I hire other people like that? And I like to say I was a frustrated expert witness when I worked for other people, and those are the best people to turn into a CEO. They're a little bit of a know it-all. They think they have the right answers, and we're going to find out if they do. And so we let them actually be a CEO, and they have all this pent-up demand to actually go and prove that they were right, and that's a beautiful thing. So yeah, I love this principle of make everyone a CEO. And we're going there in Silicon Valley with this idea of get rid of middle management. Brian Armstrong's saying, "Everyone should be an individual contributor. Everyone should be managing a lot of other people." To me, the best CEO is the best player at the position, and is doing the thing they're great at and they're not wasting their time on management.
01:18:18 · Lenny Rachitsky
[01:18:18] S1: You mentioned this idea of an expert witness, and you also have this nugget of advice of staying close to the metal. I love this general advice. Talk about what you mean there, why that's important for someone in their career.
01:18:31 · Mark Pincus
[01:18:31] S0: They go together. We start our careers in our 20s very close to the metal. Meaning we are individual contributors. And we are working on getting the primary data, and building the actual product usually. We're in the trenches. And the people in the trenches are usually closest to the data, closest to probably the right answer, but they're also usually furthest from making the decision. And that's what I call the expert witness syndrome. Because you're called to the stand by the adults, and you plead for what you passionately believe is the right answer. And then you're excused, and then they make a decision and then you have to deal with the consequences, and disagree and commit. What if I'm disagreeing because I'm fucking right, and now I'm committing to clean up your mess because you're wrong? And that's why many of us become founders, because we just are sick of being in that position. You're also closer to the metal. And when you go become a CEO, when you become a founder, part of the paradox of it that I believe we have to be careful about is that we stay close to the metal. And I believe the best product CEOs are in the minutia of the details. All the stories about Steve Jobs, I was so impressed when I heard that he insisted on picking out the carpeting in the conference rooms. And I tried to have that same mentality of micromanaging the really small pixel level details that matter. And I had a great conversation with the founders of Discord, and they came to this conclusion too that they needed to actually be an inverted pyramid. And they said, "We realized that we outsource, we delegate the most important product decisions, the UX to our least experienced people, and they are doing this every day. And we decided to turn that upside down and say, 'We as founders need to be kind of the first and last mile for the product, and we have to be the ones who bless.' Our best use of our time is making these minute decisions that change the product user experience." And so to me, that's being close to the metal. Brian Chesky believes in doing things in non-scalable ways, and doing it himself with the team by hand. There's so many stories about Jeff Bezos and Zuck of the thing that mattered most. They would go and work two days a week deeply with the team on it. And it makes sense.
01:21:20 · Mark Pincus, Lenny Rachitsky
If you were the best product maker in the company, we want you on the field. We want to put you on the ice. We don't want you to spend your time talking to investors, and managing and scaling. [01:21:34] S1: Yeah, Elon famous for this too. You have this line in the book along these lines, "Micromanagement is beautiful. You should micromanage as long as you can."