Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:49:06 · Brian Balfour
But if you only aligned to iOS, you could also be a winner. Right? So, like, that's just right. Like, you you had to have iOS as part of your betting strategy in order to win. So everybody right now, like, you're probably at the cycle in in trying to figure out... Well, y'all need to... Everybody will need to figure out where are they gonna place their chips. How how are they gonna bet? And depending on how you bet really depends on, what your current position is in the marketplace. You know, if you're a late stage startup, let's start with that, or like a late stage company, you can afford the luxury to place multiple bets and kind of spread your chips and kind of wait it out a little bit to see who the winner is and then really throw your muscle behind that winner. You have that luxury a little bit. And of course, but the risk of that, the risk of that is that sometimes the incumbents wait too long to to make that decision, and and that's, like, kind of the key key question they will need to answer. The key question for startups is totally different. You don't have the luxury to spread your chips. Like, you have to go all in. You have to choose one and go all in. You have scarce resources, scarce attention from the market. And so it's a totally different ballgame. Higher risk, higher reward for sure. That's part of the betting strategy for startups. And so that's kind of what you have to do is you kind of have to figure out your betting strategy. And then we talk a little bit about how you might evaluate and pick the right course for you. But, but that's where we're all at right now is we're we're kind of... We're... We just entered the casino. We just cashed... Put some cash in for some chips, and now we've now we've gotta figure out, you know, what tables and and where to to place those chips.
00:50:55 · Lenny Rachitsky, Brian Balfour
[00:50:55] S0: I love this analogy. Okay. So just to be crystal clear about what listeners should do, what founders should do, product teams should do, the advice here essentially is, integrate with ChatGPT, maybe Gemini, maybe if Apple has something. It's like, actually integrate with with what they launch. So it could be a a login thing, could be a search thing, could [00:51:17] S1: be a [00:51:17] S0: connect and suck up your memory in context. The advice here is is you need to do this because this is potentially the way that most companies will start to grow and your competitors may overtake you. [00:51:30] S1: Yeah. Yeah. If we had to, like, really simplify it, it's essentially play the game. Don't opt out of the game. Don't don't trick yourself into thinking that you can't play the game. That's number one. And then number two, no matter who you bet on, just make it a focused bet. Because the the... All... Like, if you look back, all the failures are the ones that tried to, you know, play multiple games at at once with scarce resources, and that just tends to never work if you're you're an early stage startup. So those two things. Play the game. Put a focused bet.
00:52:02 · Lenny Rachitsky
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00:53:30 · Brian Balfour, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:53:30] S1: Yeah. A 100%. And that's exactly what I think you see them doing. And, look, to be very clear, I have not talked to anybody at HubSpot about this. I have not talked to Dharmesh about this. But, Dharmesh, I think, has also, like, published publicly... Published about this. But that the right thing to do is essentially... Even though you don't... You you understand how the cycle plays out and you don't necessarily under what... Understand what your exit strategy is, once you get out. It's better to be early, know that you need to figure out an exit strategy and figure out that exit strategy along the way versus waiting and then being super late and and then and then know what the exit strategy is. And and I think that's essentially what... That's exact... That's exactly what you see them see them doing. They're trying to be as early to this stuff as as possible, and I think it's a I think it's a pretty smart play even though we might not necessarily see, like, what what the exit strategy is out of this cycle for them. [00:54:34] S0: So going back to that amazing quote that you shared at the beginning of the conversation by, I think it was Alex Rampell Yep. Of that startups win by finding a distribution channel before the incumbent copies of them. And what you're saying here is this is the opportunity for startups to disrupt an incumbent. This is the opportunity for someone to disrupt Salesforce, I don't know, ServiceNow, all these guys that have been around for a long time. Yeah. It's gonna be one of
00:54:34 · Lenny Rachitsky, Brian Balfour
[00:54:34] S0: So going back to that amazing quote that you shared at the beginning of the conversation by, I think it was Alex Rampell Yep. Of that startups win by finding a distribution channel before the incumbent copies of them. And what you're saying here is this is the opportunity for startups to disrupt an incumbent. This is the opportunity for someone to disrupt Salesforce, I don't know, ServiceNow, all these guys that have been around for a long time. Yeah. It's gonna be one of [00:55:00] S1: the major ones. Now look. You've already seen players that are... Have been able to hit this escape velocity, you know, the the cursors and stuff of the world. And and so there... Once again, there's multiple ways to hit that escape velocity, but this is gonna be one of... This is one of the major ways to do it is to basically hit yourself to a new platform. Look. You did it yourself, actually. You hitched yourself to sub stack super early. You took a focus bet. Yeah. Yeah. I was like, I don't know why that just hit me, but you took a focus bet, and you've benefited from it in a disproportional way than those that kinda came later. And I think that's actually a great meta example here as as I sit here and think about this. Yeah. That's actually the way [00:55:45] S0: I thought about when I was moving to substack. Just like, I feel like there's this wave rising, and I wanna ride this wave even if it... Maybe it's not the best place or may... You know, they take a cut, all that stuff. Yeah. But it worked out really well. That's right.
00:55:45 · Lenny Rachitsky, Brian Balfour
[00:55:45] S0: I thought about when I was moving to substack. Just like, I feel like there's this wave rising, and I wanna ride this wave even if it... Maybe it's not the best place or may... You know, they take a cut, all that stuff. Yeah. But it worked out really well. That's right. [00:55:56] S1: And I think it worked out very well. [00:55:57] S0: It worked out really well. And to be honest, it it felt like it was too late the... When I started When [00:56:03] S1: you when you entered? It felt [00:56:04] S0: too late? [00:56:05] S1: Yes. Oh, same work. [00:56:06] S0: What's that? It always feels too late, I think, to people that join. Like, Silicon Valley... Or sorry. Marc Andreessen has this famous quote. He's like, I came to Silicon Valley in the eighties. I thought it was over. It was too late. I missed all the opportunities. That's fair. Yeah. So... Yeah. There were just a lot of newsletters that were doing really well. Million subscribers. [00:56:23] S1: I'm like, wow. And what do you say to people now who wanna join Substack? [00:56:26] S0: Let's learn from this example. A lot of times when people think that it's too late, it's it's definitely not too late, it's always only just getting started, especially if you're, like, on Twitter all day listening to podcasts like this where we're surrounded with this bubble of everyone talking about something when in reality, like, 1% of people know anything about what you're hearing about every day. [00:56:45] S1: Yeah. Yeah. That's so interesting.