Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:16:32 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:16:32] S1: Going back to the conversation around CEOs, a lot of people listening to this podcast, just a lot of people in the world want to be founders, they want to be CEOs. At the same time, you look at Elon, you look at Jensen, you look at Steve Jobs, you look at you, a lot of people are like, I can't. I'm not this person, I'm not going to be as good as them. There's no world where I'm this good. Do you feel like there are specific profiles or just traits that you have to be born with to be a successful CEO, or do you think it's earnable, anybody can be successful if they really work hard?
00:17:02 · Brian Halligan
[00:17:02] S0: Go ahead and meet all these CEOs coming in, and I have a little algorithm in my head, and I look for four things. I call it my LOCK algorithm. L is for lovable, and Steve Jobs you would say is kind of rough and maybe not lovable, but he would inspire followership. You would want to follow him. And so, could I envision a 28-year-old me, graduating from business school, going to work for this person? Would I crawl across broken glass? That's question one. Two is just obsession. Are they deeply obsessed with this problem? I'm a little negative on people who came up with this problem to solve six months ago and started a company, I like people with deep founder market fit, who've been thinking about it for a long time, and have evidence in their lives of going deep down, obsessively down a rabbit hole because that's kind of what it takes to be a founder/CEO. The C is something I wouldn't have thought of, but this is a Sequoia thing, like chip on the shoulder. Pretty much all of them have a boulder on their shoulder, and I have a bit of a chip on my shoulder too. And the K is just for deeply knowledgeable about the domain. And so, I look for that. If I were to stick an S on it, I would say student. I look at Winston Weinberg from Harvey, or James from Profound, or Gabe from Rogo, some of these new very fast growing companies, they're students of the game. They're not just learn it alls, they're deep, deep, deep students of the game. And they're like LLMs, they're constantly, constantly learning, and it's not just learning stuff for me and their peers, but they go way back in time, and have a lot of history on stuff. So, those are some of the, kind of my little criteria I use when I'm evaluating CEOs. What do you look for, by the way, you've interviewed a ton of folks like me, what do you think is in common?
00:19:11 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:19:11] S1: Of what successful founders? Oh my god. I wish I had the... My succinct answer, I would go to Lennybot.com, and be like, what is the common pattern across these folks? One that you didn't mention that I think is interesting, I did some research on this recently, with Terence Rohan, one is just extremely ambitious. Just trying to do something really wild that most people are like, that's crazy. You're not going to get a subscription service for all music in the world, that's just... What are you doing? [inaudible 00:19:38]-
00:19:40 · Brian Halligan, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:19:40] S0: [inaudible 00:19:40]. Is it learnable? I notice some of, a lot of the CEOs struggling with a couple of things. Like let's say you're Winston, you're late 20s, you've never managed a team, you're probably never even captain of a sports team before, and in order to scale, you have to give people feedback constantly. It's very unnatural. It's like, I'm going to give this VP I hired a bunch of feedback, positive and negative. And if you don't get good at that, you really pay the price later. That's something I think they have to learn. They all have to learn to get a good bullshit detector. They're constantly being spun, everyone's trying to sell to them, the org is always trying to sell to them. So, that's sort of something they have to develop over time. They have to all get good at the inspiration thing over time. Like, you're Winston, you've never had to inspire anyone in your entire life. You went to school, and you're a lawyer for a few years, and you started this thing... Inspiration wasn't your thing. So, there's certain things you have to learn on that startup to scale up path, and the best ones learn it very fast. [00:20:50] S1: This is extremely interesting and useful. So, LOCK, with an S at the end, just to kind of mirror back what you're sharing. And when you were saying you evaluate CEOs, is this for investing as a- [00:21:00] S0: Yes. Yes.
00:21:00 · Brian Halligan, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:21:00] S0: Yes. Yes. [00:21:01] S1: Okay, so when you're helping Sequoia decide should we invest in this company, what you look for is, LOCK... I like the S, I'm going to include it there. So, are they lovable? Are they inspiring? O, are they obsessed with this problem they're going after? Do they have a chip on their shoulder? Are they extremely knowledgeable about the problem they're going after? And it sounds like not just the problem but just the studying company's business strategy, things like that. And then, S was a student. I guess that's what S is, student is studying, being a founder, being a CEO. Okay. So, I guess going back just to the question, do you think, just to put it very simply, do you think CEOs are born, or do you think they're made? Can anyone turn into an amazing CEO?
00:21:44 · Brian Halligan, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:21:44] S0: I don't think anyone can do it, I don't think it's just anyone. I will say, I've noticed... So, another little rubric I have, and I don't see a lot of these, but Bret Taylor's one, there's a few out there that are in Sequoia's portfolio. I call them back to the baseball thing, a five tool player. In baseball when you rank a player it's, can they hit? Can they hit with power? Can they run? Can they catch a ball? Can they throw the ball? And they rate them one to 10 at each. And it's very rare that you have a five tool player, extremely rare. And the thing that's kind of new now, are there are five tools CEOs, like Bret Taylor's one. You can code, you have taste, you have vision, you can sell the product, you can convince employees. This kind super CEO. And there's a bunch of them now. And I don't know, I didn't see a lot of those. That certainly wasn't Steve Jobs, he wasn't programming. It wasn't Jeff Bezos. I think there's kind of a new breed that's quite impressive. [00:22:49] S1: These folks you mentioned were this good before AI became a thing, I imagine AI helps more CEOs fill the gaps that they have.