Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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.
01:10:19 · Peter Sellis, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:10:19] S1: That's more ancient history. We like to move past these things, Lenny, come on. [01:10:22] S0: I feel like there's trauma there we need to get in, we need to uncover. Okay. Final topic. When we were starting this podcast, you told me there's some cellicisms out there, things that you, how do you, what's the word you use? What's the phrase cellicisms? Cellicisms. [01:10:38] S1: I use cellicisms. [01:10:42] S0: Cellicisms, things that you often share with folks that kind of become a thing that people that work with you know. Are there any that we haven't covered, things that you think are kind of recurring pieces of advice or frameworks or even lessons you've learned that you think are important for people to hear that might be helpful?
01:10:57 · Peter Sellis
[01:10:57] S1: I don't think there's too many. I mean, I think a few of them came up. I think when we were talking about ads, and I think I might have, I don't know if I deserve original credit for this, but I've used it quite a bit, is this idea that ads is such a cutthroat hand-to-hand combat, very revenue goal driven product area that it's very easy to become very short-term oriented. And one of the things, and this hearkens back to the ideological stuff from building the type of organization you want, that we really focused on over the years both at Snap, Discord, and even some of the companies I've advised on the ad stuff, is like with ads, you really want to be long-term greedy. And that was a phrase we used. And long-term greedy is a funny phrase, but it was actually backed by essentially the mathematical realization that, which again it's not rocket science, but revenue tomorrow for advertising is essentially causally related to the ROI you drive for advertisers today. So you need to focus, your focus should be on driving advertiser ROI. The issue is that the easiest way to drive ROI is actually to decrease the denominator, the I, so you could lower prices, right? Now, in modern auctions, price is an output, not an input. But the powerful learning there is that the way I will grow this business long-term, the way I will hit my goals long-term, the way I'll see compounding growth because of retention and increasing budgets, net revenue retention for some of these SaaS products is essentially by delivering ROI for people today, even at the cost of potentially short-term revenue. And so this type of phrase allowed for, gave space for a type of thinking that was otherwise, like it can get pretty tough. And people say like, "Oh yeah, it's thinking long-term." Again, I'll take it back to you are going to encounter times in your career where thinking long-term is actually really, really fucking tough. And a lot of this time will be when you are a public company, when you are missing numbers, when like you may have to do a layoff if certain things don't happen, and to be able to have an ideological setup for which you can use it as cover to think long-term. And that was what long-term greedy was, it's like, "We're not a charity. We're not giving this stuff away because we want to make people happy.