Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:01:29 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:01:29] S0: Today my guest is Molly Graham. This is Molly's second visit to the podcast, and man, this is a powerful conversation. The frame for this conversation is her classic, "Give away your legos" career advice. But in an AI world, Molly's advice for the last 13 years has been that your career will be better off if you give away your projects and your teams and your responsibilities to other people as your company grows, versus trying to hold onto it, which is what we naturally want to do. Essentially to give away your Legos. After 13 years of giving this advice and it unlocking so much win for so many people over the past decade, Molly's realized that it is no longer true when you are giving away your Legos to AI. It's a lot more nuanced and complicated now. And so, in this conversation, we try to get to the bottom of this question, what Legos should you still be giving away and what Legos should you keep? If you're not familiar with Molly, she has spent 20 plus years helping organizations and the humans inside them navigate growth and change. She's held leadership roles at Google, and Facebook, and Quip, and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. These days, she hosts TED Work Life podcast, which she took over from Adam Grant. She also runs an incredibly important leadership community called Glue Club, and writes a newsletter called Lessons. Now, before we get into it, I noticed a lot of people don't finish our full episodes and miss some of the best stuff. So, to help you, we've just created a new Lenny's Most Replayed Moments YouTube channel that has exactly this, the most re-watched and shared segments from our long form episodes.
00:03:38 · Molly Graham, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:03:38] S1: Thanks for having me, Lenny. I'm excited to be back. [00:03:41] S0: I'm even more excited to have you back. Let me add a little context to this slightly unusual conversation we're going to have. So, we've been chatting over the past couple months about your famous, infamous give away your Legos career advice, and this question came up, and I know you're hearing this a lot from other people, this idea of how this advice applies in today's very strange AI world, where AI is taking a lot of our Legos, whether we like it or not. And we're being encouraged to give our Legos to AI, people are afraid about AI taking their Legos. And so, the question is just how this advice now applies in a world of AI. And I know this is kind of an ongoing thought process for you, but you actually have a lot of really interesting insights and takes on how to think about this advice now in today's very strange world. And so, we're going to have a conversation about it, see where it goes.
00:05:57 · Molly Graham
[00:05:57] S1: It actually started when I was at Google and Facebook, and it started as a little talk that I would give people that worked for me. And for context, Google was pretty big when I joined, it was like 10,000 employees in 2007, but my department grew from 25 people to 125 people in nine months. So, that was my first experience with really rapid scale. And then I went to Facebook, and Facebook was relatively small when I joined, it was 500 employees, and 80 million users... Smaller than MySpace, which is always good context to remember. And while I was there, obviously a huge growth curve. I left five years later, it was 5,500 employees and over a billion users. So, that experience was nuts from a scaling perspective, and what I witnessed at Google and then really witnessed at Facebook was how hard and scary that experience was for people. I watched a lot of folks go from you build a thing... You show up and you become the person that owns the blog, or owns this part of the stack, or built that product, and you sort of build an identity around it. You're the this person, whatever that is. And then the nature of scale is that everything around you changes. And so somebody shows up and your manager shows up and says, "Hey, you need to hand that thing that you built your whole identity around to someone else and go on to doing something else." And your first instinct is like, what? No, I don't want to give it away. I'm good at this, I know how to do this. I also think it's fun, and what if it's the only fun thing to do? And so, you kind of witness people would have this tendency to hold on. And so, what I started to do with people on my team was say, "Hey, this change is happening and here's how you might feel." That you might feel like all these feelings, territorial and wanting to hold on, and actually the most important thing to do is to give things away. To evolve as the company is evolving. And my brain is a really weird place. I grew up on The Muppets, so I just spits out... I always think there's just a lot of tiny monsters dancing around singing songs in my head, but that is why metaphors come out for me. And so, I always use this metaphor of just a bunch of kindergartners and somebody dumps a pile of Legos in front of you, and at first it's fun, a little overwhelming, then you start building.
00:08:29 · Molly Graham
And the give away your Legos part is that feeling when somebody else shows up, and they try to take the tower out of your hands. And the kindergartner response is like, "Get out of here." You know what I mean? It's like, shoving someone away, when actually you get multiple people, it means, oh, you can go build something new and fun. You can start from scratch and you can learn something. But the natural human instinct in the face of change is to hold onto things and to resist the change, to be territorial and all of those things. So, anyway, I started giving this talk to folks on my team to help them understand that change and what was coming, and then eventually I sent it out to my friends at First Round, who were building the First Round Review at the time... And just to be clear, this is now 13 years ago. The talk when I was at Facebook, it was over 20 years ago. And I sent it to First Round, and we published it. And I would've said I was speaking to folks going through a Facebook-like experience, I would've said, hey, this is an article that is for the Stripes or the Slacks or whoever was blowing up in 2013, to normalize, hey, this is what it feels like and this is what you have to do to grow as fast as your company is growing. But what happened when it was published is that I got emails from all over the world. I got emails from people at companies like Safeway, and this woman, I still remember this email, wrote me and was like, "This was so helpful to me. This perfectly describes what I've been going through on my team." And I got an email, again, I remember it very vividly from a founder in Nigeria, who was like, "My team went from two people to four people this year, and give away your Legos is so valuable to me. This is exactly what I've been feeling." And my first reaction was like, "I didn't write this for you, this was not meant for you." But my second one was, "Whoa, this is about something much bigger than just what it feels like to be inside of rapid scale." And fundamentally, I think the Legos message is about change, and it's about the fact that when you go through change, a lot of happens to you. You know what I mean? It just is a very specific experience, and I think that's why it ended up being so universal. And it is crazy, I still get emails about it, multiple emails a month about it to this day.
00:11:03 · Molly Graham, Lenny Rachitsky
So, it's lasted in a way that, again, I just thought I was sending out a note to the folks that are going through crazy rapid change. [00:11:12] S0: I was at a first round event, I don't know, a year ago or something, and they were talking about all the different posts people have written, and I think it's one of the, maybe the first or second most popular post on the First Round Review [00:11:22] S1: It's up there and it's traveled in ways that I don't think any of us imagined it would. [00:11:28] S0: Okay. So, let's talk about what still holds true in this advice in this today's very strange AI world. What still holds true? What's still correct about this advice based on what you're seeing?
00:11:40 · Molly Graham
[00:11:40] S1: One thing that's crazy about this article is I still get so many emails about it today. I still get asked to give speeches at every fast-growing company. So, I think for anybody that's going through rapid scale, Legos is still really relevant. But the interesting thing is what started to happen probably two years ago is I got more inbound from managers, and more inbound from leaders about Legos, just more people grappling with change inside their companies. And I think that is the thing that really holds true today and actually has just become more universal. I used to really check before I went and did a speech at some company, how fast the company was growing, I would ask about revenue growth and about headcount growth... Because that just helps me contextualize how I should speak to employees. And I still do that, but it's also become really clear that every single company in the world is going through enormous change of varying shapes and kinds right now. And that is the fundamental underlying message of Legos, is how do you deal with change and how do you be your best self in the face of change? So, I feel like the number one thing that is true today, as true as it was 10 or 15 years ago, is the change is really scary and hard. And I always say, somebody once asked me to summarize the Legos article in one sentence, they're like, "Molly, this is too long, give me the cliff notes," and I said two things. Unfortunately, they didn't get one sentence, they got two. The two sentences were, number one, your main job in the face of rapid growth and change is to make yourself irrelevant because it is the only way that you can be prepared for whatever is coming next. And the second piece of advice, or sort of second summary of it was, don't worry, it's all going to be okay. I always feel like the Legos article and the speeches I give are like a form of group therapy. They're like just a giant hug. Yes, it feels chaotic and overwhelming and stressful, but there's all this opportunity on the other side. And I think that the don't worry, it's all going to be okay is really something everybody needs to hear, that change is scary and hard, but it doesn't necessarily mean the world is ending. I think the second piece of that is that change comes with this incredible set of emotions, like this wild roller coaster that we don't talk about enough.