Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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."
01:21:43 · Mark Pincus
[01:21:43] S0: I believe that, and I did that building Zynga to a fault. We got to a point that I had all the way to 50 employees. We had a standup call that would go on for two hours, and I had everyone's name on a spreadsheet, and I had what they were supposed to do yesterday and what they're going to do today. And I go through name by name and say, "Okay, did you get that done? Can everyone else verify they got that done? Okay, what are you going to do today?" And I completely micromanaged, but we were much more effective. And then I kept micromanaging things as... I'm like, "If you can be in the room, be in the room assuming that you are the best player." So yeah, I think it's less contrarian saying it now than it was 20 years ago. But when I was building Zynga, we had to apologize for things like micromanaging, or expecting massive results from our teams. And I think I'm happy to see that that's becoming accepted as more... It's closer to best practices today, I think. But my point about that management is get people to do the right thing when you're not in the room. The first principle is be in the room if you can be, as much as you can be. And then only delegate when you get to the point that you can't possibly be in all these rooms at the same time. And then all these management principles are just different strategies to try to get people to do the right thing when you're not there. And I love these non-scalable ideas that actually scale what you're trying to do as a product maker in the right way, and one of the ones I love is this idea of tech assistance, and this idea of a teaching hospital. How do you pass the vampire blood of you to other people? You have this burning mission and passion around your product. How do you spread that to other people and have them spread in the organization? The first thing is put them in the room with you. So the idea of this teaching hospital was, "Okay, I'm just going to put as many people as I can in the room while I'm doing these product management meetings, and have my passion, and ideas, and approach spread to all of them too." And that worked. And then grab someone from the ranks and make them your tech assistant. Have them just follow you around for six months, or 12 months. And make it the mini me. The person who is you in your 20s who was the expert witness, a little bit of a know it all.
01:24:32 · Mark Pincus, Lenny Rachitsky
And start having them follow you around to pick up, learn, and absorb everything you do. And give them projects to test them. And then hopefully, you've created a mini me that you can now put in in a much bigger role somewhere else. And in fact, Andy Jassy at Amazon, everyone on the C staff used to be someone who'd been the tech assistant to Bezos. So that idea actually scales, and you get it for free. [01:25:01] S1: I love this phrase of transferring your vampire blood. Oh, man. Maybe one last nugget from the book along these lines is you have this line of just the number one job of a CEO is to be right. Talk about that. [01:25:14] S0: Well, that's another one that I stole from Bezos. But if I get to pick one thing that you do as CEO, I'm going to pick that you're right. Even if you don't operate the ship or the factory that well, I'd rather that you picked the right product, the right strategy than your phenomenal execution, or inspiring people or managing. Because being in the right body of water matters more than the right boat, and a great boat in a dead lake bed isn't going anywhere. And so I look for that in people, like, "Are they right?" That's the best resume, I could see that you were right about something. And I look for that in the team, and it's less do I like your style, or approach, or your personality fit? I'm like, "I'll take misfits who are right." I'm like, "I want those really smart expert witnesses who are intellectually honest." And the more people you have around you who are right, they're putting balls in the net.
01:25:14 · Mark Pincus, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:25:14] S0: Well, that's another one that I stole from Bezos. But if I get to pick one thing that you do as CEO, I'm going to pick that you're right. Even if you don't operate the ship or the factory that well, I'd rather that you picked the right product, the right strategy than your phenomenal execution, or inspiring people or managing. Because being in the right body of water matters more than the right boat, and a great boat in a dead lake bed isn't going anywhere. And so I look for that in people, like, "Are they right?" That's the best resume, I could see that you were right about something. And I look for that in the team, and it's less do I like your style, or approach, or your personality fit? I'm like, "I'll take misfits who are right." I'm like, "I want those really smart expert witnesses who are intellectually honest." And the more people you have around you who are right, they're putting balls in the net. [01:26:34] S1: I want to maybe end with a question about your kids and parenting. I talked to a bunch of people that know you well in preparation for this conversation, and every single person commented on just how wonderful a dad you are, and how much time you put into that part of your life. And a question I've been trying to ask folks that are parents and great parents. In this AI era, and there's a lot of stuff I want to ask about, but let me start here. It's just what's something that you are teaching them or helping them to develop that you think is going to be important to them in this crazy world we're entering of AI?
01:27:06 · Mark Pincus
[01:27:06] S0: Thank you for asking about this. I think my greatest role, and job, and service to the world is trying to grow good humans. So I really, really put a lot into it and take it seriously, and I get so much out of it. I like to say, "I'm growing my best friends." And so far, it's true. So there's a couple of principles that have come in. Philosophies that have been important to me as a parent that I've just seen... I do them naturally, and I see that they work over time. The first one for me is I have five kids, they're... Every one of them is just such a different version of a human. And I have a special needs son who's fairly extreme special needs. Our new one-year-old baby has a gene mutation, and she actually may also end up being very neurodivergent. So I used to have this wide range. My 15-year-old girls are... They're twins, and they're completely divergent from each other. This first principle that I've found is meeting them where they are. And it's with kids I find we can talk down to them, we can talk to them as kids, or, we can treat them like adults and neither of those are right. And it's like, "We got to engage with them at the altitude that they're at. But as human to human, and find the way to do that." And then once we do that and meet them where they are, I think we can bring them to surprisingly sophisticated places that may be way beyond where they're supposed to be in that moment. Like my twins, I started playing with math with them when they were really, really little. And then during the pandemic, I taught daddy math because I saw that their school was not equipped to do online homeschooling. So I taught them and their friends daddy math. And I just tried to teach them a math brain, and I didn't know where they were supposed to be, they were in fifth grade. But I just started for them and their friends just trying to teach them how to approach math in a way that's fun and curious. And then we found out later I'd taught them all the way through eighth grade math. And I didn't know it, and they didn't know it and that was cool. And then I'd say in the... How does this apply in the age of AI and where we are?
01:29:49 · Mark Pincus
I feel like we're at the end of this 100-year cycle of mass-produced education, which was get the most knowledge in, get everyone's averages up to the best place we can, educate 20 million graduates a year or whatever number. But it was factory produced, and it was for a certain kind of work. First factories, then knowledge workers. Knowledge working is going away, it's changing. But we're still teaching knowledge education, and I feel badly about it with my kids. And what I've tried to do with my older kids is teach them to have critical thinking more than... And I say, "I don't care if you go to college," which is a little hard for them because they're achievers. And like, "I don't care if you go to college. What I care about is that you develop critical thinking, and you find a way to be useful to people in the world." And my one daughter, Carmen, she's also neurodivergent. She has ADHD and dyslexia, and she's created a brand of sweatshirts called Comfy Fancy. And she also has created a group for neurodivergent middle school kids called Neurosparkly. And it's taking this thing which should be a problem and a deficit, and it's making it a way that she can connect and help a lot of other kids. So I'm proud to see that. The dissonance that I feel in this moment as a parent is that my kids are in this educational system that is trying to prep them to get into a good college and to be a knowledge worker, and I know that game is over. So what do I want my kids doing? I try to teach them to... Look at the meta of what's going on. When an adult is trying to convince you of something. When a teacher has a point of view that you don't agree with, try to understand why. What's their agenda? What's their lived experience, and how has that impacted it? So I'm trying to teach them to ask better questions, not know more answers. And I'd say in terms of how that spills into their online use and what I try to promote and discourage, I try to promote how can you be generative in what you're doing and not consumptive? So what can you do online or offline that is generative, that is actually putting something new out in the world, because that's how you're going to get something back? And not consuming, not being a passive consumer of content and experiences. And sometimes it works, and I see them doing that, and then sometimes it doesn't.