Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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.
00:14:17 · Molly Graham
And I think that was a lot of why I first started talking about Legos at Facebook and on my teams was I just wanted to normalize for people what it felt like. That you might feel all these feelings and that that was what everyone around you was feeling, that it didn't make you crazy and it didn't make you broken or something like that. It also didn't mean anything was wrong, it actually meant that all the right things were happening. And I think that is very real today. When I travel around and I'm talking to leaders, and I know you and I are going to talk about this, but a lot of what I'm hearing is grief and all these different emotions. There's obviously excitement and joy in this moment of chaos and change with AI, but there is a lot of sadness. There's a lot of overwhelm that all manifests, some of it manifests in burnout. But it's like there is just a lot going on for people right now, and you really can't lead right now without talking about that and without normalizing that. And I think that's such a big part of the give away your Legos today is just helping people understand that these emotions are just part of your body and your identity reacting to change. The other two things I would say that really do still feel true to me, that I both talk about in the article and have talked about a lot since is one of the things I say to people that are inside of a really rapidly growing company is the future will be defined by the people that learn, not the people that know. I always say, what you can learn by tomorrow matters way more than what you know today. And never has a truer sentence been said than about the age of AI. Do you know what I mean? Whatever we though we knew six months ago, toss it out the window, something new is true today. But what I used to say to people, and I still say, I guess when I do these speeches is you go look at that graph of how fast your company is growing. You go look at that curve... And at Facebook it felt like we were falling off of it. That is the graph of how fast your company is growing, yes, but it is also the graph of how fast your job is growing, how fast every single thing around you is growing and changing, which means it's also the graph of how fast you need to grow.
00:16:46 · Molly Graham, Lenny Rachitsky
And I think that is such an important thing to understand inside of a world of change, which is that standing still, it feels safe, it feels like to hold onto what you know, because at least it's not scary and unknown. But actually standing still is the least safe thing you can do. It's basically you're guaranteed to fall behind. And I saw this viscerally at Facebook because the first two years I was in HR, and you could literally see the highest performer one year, if they didn't grow and change and if they didn't involve their team fast enough, they were underwater less than a year later because it was a different company. And I think this is happening with AI as well, which is that we do have these instincts to hold on to what we know, and to defend what we know, and to fight for what we know for a bunch of different reasons, many of them good, but the future is going to be defined by the people that are willing to just take the stance of learning and to throw themselves into this change, scary and unknown as it is. And that message again remains true in this wild, wild world. [00:17:59] S0: Before we get into just how the advice is different, which when you go back to your summary of the two kind of items that summarize the idea, one is become redundant and then two, what was the second sentence? [00:18:11] S1: The second one is basically don't worry, it's all going to be okay.