Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:57:50 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:57:50] S0: So this begs the question, when does it make sense to bet on something new and try new things? Because it doesn't always make sense to just continue refining and refining the one piece of product market fit that's worked. Any guidance to folks, and this is for consumer in particular, any guidance for when it makes sense to still make bets outside that core?
00:58:09 · Peter Sellis, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:58:09] S1: Yeah, I think there are two really incremental ways to think about it. One is if you boil down the core things about your product that are really, really great that people come to it for. So for Snap, maybe it's the camera, for Discord it's voice, and then you look to other niches, other cohorts for which that could be useful. It's a very like MBA-style, 2x2 type of thing. That's I think one method to do that and you should, honestly, always be assessing that because that's an easy one. And then, I think the second thing is one of the greatest gifts is when people use your product in a way that you didn't expect or didn't ordain because they're going through extra hoops to do what they want to do with the product. So whatever you're offering is so good that they're going through hoops to do that. For Discord, for example, a lot of it centered around communities and how people were using it to organize larger and larger communities as opposed to the 20-person gaming friend group. And when people are doing that, they're essentially voting with their feet. They're telling you, "I want to use this product for this. What can you do to make it a little bit easier for me?" So it kind of is a version of that, but it's like expanding to the next thing. And that's more like thinking about concentric circles. It's like, "Okay, we got it at the core. How do we expand, expand?" I feel like I'm doing something with my hands here that's going to be memed, but it works. [00:59:36] S0: Oh, it is. We got it.
00:59:36 · Lenny Rachitsky, Peter Sellis
[00:59:36] S0: Oh, it is. We got it. [00:59:40] S1: Okay, I'll stop. But I think then the more Snapchat, the more innovative way to think about it is more to look at your company's philosophy around why it was built and then think about the future totally unencumbered by the present. No incrementality from the present, more like future casting, like back casting instead of forecasting and be like, "Okay, right now, the best way to share a moment is to pull out your phone and aim the camera at it and record." That's very constrained by the existing technology. If we were to envision a future of what's the future look like to be the best way, something just happened or my child just took its first steps, I'm at a concert, I just saw something really funny on the street, what's the best way to share that moment with my friends, I think that's what leads to you to something like, "Oh, probably glasses," or things like that. So this back casting method, I think, is what everybody wants to do. In my experience, there are very few people that have this type of blank sheet creativity to think about the future totally unencumbered from the present. Most people like to, even really creative people, remix versions of the present or I think these days most product managers go on an ayahuasca journey or travel to Japan or something and then come back and they're like, "I've solved it." But very few people, I think, are very good at this version of it.
01:01:05 · Lenny Rachitsky, Peter Sellis
[01:01:05] S0: And I think a big part of this is you found product market fit, something's working, you almost take for granted how lucky you are that you found something that works. And it may be easy to think, "Oh, we'll find the next thing now," and very few people do. Airbnb is actually a really good example of this. Nothing beyond the original idea has worked in a big way. It's still basically the same core idea. I've worked there for a long time and nothing has significantly impacted the growth trajectory, other than just exactly what you just described, continuing to make the core experience better, more supply, more demand. So I think this is a really profound point for people to take in. [01:01:43] S1: It's also like you can keep teams leaner this way, things like that. The biggest risk is its kind of like that, I think it's a Nassim Taleb meme of "1,001 days in the life of a Thanksgiving turkey-" [01:01:55] S0: Turkey. [01:01:56] S1: ... where it's just like, yeah, everything's getting better and better and better until something comes along that's literally 10X better than what you're doing and it takes you to zero overnight. And guarding against that, I don't have any. If I knew how to guard against Black Swan events like that, yeah, I think- [01:02:11] S0: You'd be in finance. [01:02:13] S1: Yeah, I'd definitely be in finance. I actually think this... We were talking a little bit, like SpaceX is probably a good example actually of a company that guards itself against this in some ways.
01:02:13 · Peter Sellis, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:02:13] S1: Yeah, I'd definitely be in finance. I actually think this... We were talking a little bit, like SpaceX is probably a good example actually of a company that guards itself against this in some ways. [01:02:25] S0: Okay. Say more. I know your wife works at SpaceX, so you have a really unique insight into how SpaceX works and what has worked there.
01:02:33 · Peter Sellis
[01:02:33] S1: Yeah, no inside information. I'm like a second party. I'm not first party, but I sleep next to a SpaceX engineer every night, so that helps. Yeah, that's all you have to do. But no, I think SpaceX is the greatest American company right now, greatest company in the world, truly phenomenal on every single level. And I'm talking more about SpaceX, like XAI is also doing insane stuff, but like just that. And I think the best example, what I mean by guarding us a future, I don't think any company does anything close to what SpaceX does here. And there's a recent example, literally, I think in the last week of this perfectly, where they essentially announced some version of they are taking the Falcon 9, which is their primary launch system, the greatest launch system in the world ever by far, reusable, most cost-effective kilograms to lower earth orbit, to geostationary orbit, every country on the planet would give up their GDP to have this technology to be able to launch or reuse rides, and they're sun-setting the Falcon 9. And this is like Cortés-level "burn the ships upon arriving" because they're essentially saying like in order to reach our vision in the future, we need a heavier lift launch vehicle, that is Starship. So starting in a few years, because they have customers and things like that, you'll no longer be able to buy rides on the Falcon 9. I don't think it's for everything, but they're gradually basically telegraphing that the Falcon 9 is the past. By the way, the Falcon 9 would be the future for literally every other country, nation state on the planet. It's incredible machine. Elon has built this culture that Clayton Christensen is dead, but he probably would shed a tear over how happy it would make him about avoiding the innovator's dilemma versus just because we have the thing that is the best, we're completely willing to build the thing that will compete against ourselves and make the thing that we built irrelevant. I wish I had more insight into what drives that beyond maybe just Elon or that whole organization, but what I've witnessed top to bottom is everybody you talk to there is like, "Yeah, it's going to be awesome. Yeah, we're going to do this." It's definitely part of the culture, maybe the cult, that they can do this even though on paper and now as a public company, it kind of looks insane.