Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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.
01:05:10 · Peter Sellis, Lenny Rachitsky
And so yeah, I think that's actually a really underrated part about SpaceX is their ability to essentially burn the ships and focus on what's next. [01:05:20] S0: This to me comes well back to the original beginning of this conversation, building an org like a terrorist organization, in particular the mission. Clearly, the mission of SpaceX make humanity multi-planetary, get to Mars. And with that mission, I can totally see how they may be working backwards from, "In order to do this, we need this larger rocket. It makes no sense to keep investing here." So to me, it feels very clear how they go about making these decisions.
01:05:20 · Lenny Rachitsky, Peter Sellis
[01:05:20] S0: This to me comes well back to the original beginning of this conversation, building an org like a terrorist organization, in particular the mission. Clearly, the mission of SpaceX make humanity multi-planetary, get to Mars. And with that mission, I can totally see how they may be working backwards from, "In order to do this, we need this larger rocket. It makes no sense to keep investing here." So to me, it feels very clear how they go about making these decisions. [01:05:51] S1: Yeah, I think there's another thing about both of Elon's major, SpaceX and Tesla, I know less about Neuralink, The Boring Company, et cetera, but you look on the website, I mean now I don't know where it is, but they publish essentially 10-year plans. Nothing SpaceX is doing is not something that they didn't talk about 10 years ago. Like Tesla talked about exactly what they wanted to do with the initial Roadster, to fund the S, to fund the 3. In some ways, the product roadmap is published and as a product leader, I aspire to that level of swag where it's just like, "Yo, we're going to do something that's so aggressive and so ambitious that we can just tell you exactly what you're going to do because if you think you can do it better than us, you're welcome to try." That's a mission that you can publish and turn into a product roadmap, say you're going to do it, do what you're going to say, and then say, "Yeah, copy us." And in the Tesla case, "Oh, and here are the patents too." [01:06:55] S0: Right. I was just going to say they released all the patents for the Tesla electric stuff.
01:06:55 · Lenny Rachitsky, Peter Sellis
[01:06:55] S0: Right. I was just going to say they released all the patents for the Tesla electric stuff. [01:07:00] S1: Yeah, so next level. [01:07:02] S0: It's so interesting. So one meme across this podcast over the past couple months has been systems thinking. The other has actually been ambition and how much that matters now with companies and startups because AI is making it so much easier to build. You just tell it, build this thing, it does it. And what that means is the level of ambition has to keep going up and that's like a new habit people have to build because we're not naturally that ambitious. We haven't evolved to try things that seem impossible and it feels like we need to learn that skill now as builders.
01:07:34 · Peter Sellis
[01:07:34] S1: Yeah. I think the status quo is the status quo for a reason. Again, whatever framework you're using, local optima versus global optima, opportunity costs, it's all basically just trying to build a muscle to help you gain the courage to just make tomorrow not look like today. And that's actually just not natural for most human beings, and there are a lot of systems in the world designed to stop you from doing that. The world doesn't necessarily just want to change. And so yeah, it takes like a powerful nudge to beat that static friction of where you are today. It's not just the position, it's the vector. Again, Falcon 9 is up and to the right like this, but it's like, "Okay, I don't want the actual position. I don't even want the speed. I don't want the velocity. I want the acceleration. And in order to get that acceleration, I need impulse. I need the third derivative, I guess. I need to push it." And yeah, this is just not natural. And people who can do that regularly and repeatedly, but not just disruptively all the time, just always asking for more, blah-blah-blah, I think it became very trendy as Steve Jobs' ethos grew. But yeah, the type of people who can do that within an organization, especially a large organization, are pretty rare.
01:09:03 · Lenny Rachitsky, Peter Sellis
[01:09:03] S0: I just had Tara Seshan on the podcast. She's head of product for ChatGPT Work, although they're always shifting people around, I don't know what her role is these days, and she pointed out the job of PMs now actually more and more is to elevate the ambition of the team, to remind them we could go bigger, what would it take to think bigger, what would a 1000X of this idea be. [01:09:24] S1: Yeah. I mean, again, if you can do that credibly, repeatedly, not just by showing up to meetings and be like, "What if we did more?" [01:09:33] S0: What if you did it faster? [01:09:35] S1: Yeah, exactly. No, I have got white male, gray hair, fancy degrees, I can just come into any meeting and be like, "Have you thought about doing this quicker?" Okay, have you thought about punching yourself in the face? Yeah, maybe. [01:09:55] S0: Oh, man. So that's the skill of saying that, but in a way that doesn't get you punched in the face. [01:09:59] S1: Yeah. Yeah. To be fair, I've been punched in the face a couple of times. You don't get a nose like this naturally. You're punched in the face a couple of times. [01:10:06] S0: Is this for real? Was that a real thing that you get punched in the face? [01:10:08] S1: I have gotten the shit kicked out of me a couple of times because I run my mouth nonstop, but... [01:10:12] S0: Is there a story there you can share or is that off? [01:10:19] S1: That's more ancient history. We like to move past these things, Lenny, come on.