Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:29:54 · G2 Patel, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:29:54] S0: Dear, dear friend. [00:29:56] S1: And friend. I asked him just what should I ask you about with something that he learned from you that has stuck with him ever since working with you? And he share this concept of the right to win, which he says has informed the way he thinks about strategy ever since. Talk about what this is and how folks might use this when they're thinking about product strategy, company strategy?
00:30:18 · G2 Patel
[00:30:18] S0: One of the things that we would always talk about is in the areas that we are going to participate, do we have permission to play? Every company has to make sure that the way in which they provide points of insertion and logical entry into a market is a lot of times dependent on, do you have the permission to play in that market? Do you have an avenue to have a route to market to be able to take that product? Just by building a product that is amazing in some area, you don't end up actually getting it to mass scale distribution. And so, one of the things that we would always do is ask ourselves a question. "We're building this new category or we're building this new capability. Is it going to be logical for people that Box built it versus another company building it? Is it going to be logical for people that Cisco built it versus another company building it?" So, that's this notion of permission to play, the right to win. Do we have a right to win in that area because we have permission to play? And do we have the route to market to be able to take that product and get it to mass scale distribution? And if you can do those things right, then actually your dollars that you expend on building product actually have an outsized return. If not, then you can actually end up spending a lot of money on product. Where the product people think, "Ah, these sales guys don't get it. They don't know how to sell it, especially in enterprise software." And sales people think, "These product guys don't get it. They don't know how to build it." And so, I think in order to stop that, what you have to do is you have to actually use your scale as an advantage and you have to use the areas where you've got the ability to have permission to play where people feel like this is very logical for a company like Cisco. When we say we are going to network the GPUs and make sure that we actually have a trusted system in AI, that is not far-fetched for someone to go out and think about, because it's a very natural thing for us to do, because for the past 40 years we've been doing it for the rest of the infrastructure that was not AI. And so, that's not a far cry to say, "Okay, we'll now do it for AI." And I think that was an area that Aaron and I spent a fair ... And by the way, I'm glad that he took that out of me. There's so much I've learned from him.
00:32:44 · G2 Patel, Lenny Rachitsky
The biggest area I've learned from him is, you never give up. And persistence beats intellect, and stamina beats intellect any day of the week, twice on Sunday. And that guy is as smart as they come, but that's not the biggest reason he's successful. The biggest reason he's successful is he has an enormous amount of staying power in the game. Going back to my daughter's comment of no matter what everyone else says, his convictions and belief, he will actually stick by them and actually get through the hardest times. [00:33:17] S1: I totally believe that. I feel like I'm not the smartest person in the room usually, and I succeed in large part because I just work really hard. [00:33:24] S0: You're pretty smart though. I've been watching your podcast for a while. You've done a pretty amazing job. [00:33:30] S1: I appreciate it. In this permission to win concept, the reason I think it's so important is it's so easy to build stuff now. Everyone's just building, building, building, launching, launching, launching. It feels like this is an increasingly important lever is why will we win in this space? I'm curious if there's an example you can share either from Box or Cisco where it's just like, "Okay, this is like we're going to do this because we have the permission to play here."
00:33:57 · G2 Patel
[00:33:57] S0: I agree with you in the sense that if generating code is something that becomes abundant, that doesn't mean you're going to have better technology just because you can generate a lot of code. You still need human judgment, you still need a level of intuition on what problems are the right ones to solve. And yes, AI can help you with all of that, but it's not something that ... That's where humans have a superpower, they have instinct, and they can actually make sure that they can fulfill out a vision that says, "This is what I think this could be in the fullness of time." And so, that I think is pretty important. So, the easier it gets for us to get the bottlenecks out to generate code, the harder it gets for us to make sure that there's not AI slop in the market and that we actually are very selective on what are the things that are going to be the most important things that solve the most important problems moving forward? Example of permission to play is, I mean, there's so many ideas that a company the size of Cisco, we have constantly new ideas that keep coming up. And then in those new ideas that keep coming up, people will always say, "Oh my goodness, this company is doing so well. We should just go into that market, or we should just go into this market." And 90% of the times, 99% of the times, I find myself saying no. And the reason for that is you have to be extremely selective of where you expend your calories. And that caloric expenditure is where if you expend your calories in a very focused way, the results you'll get from that focus area tend to be outsized and disproportionate. If you dissipate that caloric burn across multitude of different areas, nothing gets enough girth to be able to go out and drive it all the way through. And so, why are we not in business-to-consumer tech at Cisco? Why are we not going out and building things that are very very B2C? Because I don't think we have a distribution channel that actually is within our DNA. I don't think that we've got permission to play there. That's an area where it would be extremely hard for people to growth that Cisco should be the one who's participating in that. Now can we do it? Of course we can do it.
00:36:32 · G2 Patel, Lenny Rachitsky
Is that where we want to go or do we want to go where there's so much opportunity in the areas where we can actually prosecute with the ability to operate from a position of strength that you'll just get a much better return for the dollar that you invest. [00:36:51] S1: You mentioned Aaron as a CEO that you learned a lot from. I'm curious what other CEOs you've learned a lot from and what's something you learned from them?
00:36:59 · G2 Patel
[00:36:59] S0: Chuck Robbins is one of my favorite humans. And not just because I work for him, I work for him because he's one of my favorite humans. And what I've learned from him, he had this kind of great line. There was this piece of press that our media is very sensationalist by definition. They will try to create a very polarized view about the world where there actually isn't one. And most things in my life, things are not as extreme as you hear of the headlines of the media. It's somewhere in the middle. And there was one time that there was this article that ran, and it was about giving me an unnecessary amount of credit, and frankly, not giving Chuck as much credit about something that he has actually done. A lot of the movements that we've had internally wouldn't have happened if he had not hired me and given me agency to go do the things that I needed to get done. And he was very much completely in sync with me on what needed to happen. And so, when I saw this article, I had no idea who the report, I reached out, I'm like, "Hey, I just want to let you know, this was not me saying it's someone." And she said, "Don't worry about it, man." What I've learned in life is, if you don't care about who gets the credit, you just go a lot farther in life." And it's so profound in so many ways that he's just way too confident to let anything. And so, the thing I've learned from Chuck is the importance of confidence and the importance of knowing what you're good at and where you're not good at. And where you're not good, you're going to assemble a team of people around you. He's just masterful at that, and it happens-