Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:38:58 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:38:58] S1: And by the way, he's the CEO of Cisco, in case people-
00:39:03 · G2 Patel
[00:39:03] S0: That's right. He's the CEO of Cisco. He is the chair of the business round table. He's very dear friend of mine. And I feel like there's a lot to learn from that kind of mental model and mindset. And I've been lucky enough, Lenny, that, and this is just dumb luck. The people that I've worked with and for are all very, very close to me, and I just don't let them go from my life. And so, one of the things, for example, is I worked with Aaron and then when I was leaving, it was very emotional, but I wanted to do something different. But we committed to each other that we are going to have dinner every six weeks. And Aaron, and there's another co-founder, Jeff Kweiser, and I, three of us. Every six weeks in Palo Alto we have dinner. And it's one of the most special things that I still do, and it's a tradition now, it's been going on for six years, and I love it. You look at someone like Chuck, I start with my day with talking to him in the morning, we text each other. And then I end the day talking to them in the evening. And we probably touch base at least four or five times a day. They're not long conversations at all points in time, but we're constantly in contact with each other. And I feel like that only happens when you've established enough trust. My first post when I moved to California is this guy named Rick Devenuti and then another guy named Jeremy Burton. Rick Devenuti is still my coach. I see him every two weeks. Jeremy is someone that's a very dear friend of mine, and we're neighbors and be moved and bought a place next to his just so that we could be close to him. And these are special people in your life that have enriched your life in very different ways that I think you just have to make sure that you treasure. We have about 30,000, but-
00:42:11 · Lenny Rachitsky, G2 Patel
[00:42:11] S1: 30,000 people. Okay. [00:42:13] S0: Yeah. [00:42:14] S1: What's something that you wish you'd known before taking on this role?
00:42:18 · G2 Patel
[00:42:18] S0: I don't know if it was ... I mean, I instinctively kind of knew it, but it was very, very accentuated at Cisco, because when people say, "Oh, is scale hard?" And my perspective has always been that the absence of scale is way harder than scale. What do I mean by that? If I have a startup with three people and we need to prosecute another idea, and that idea requires five people working on it, I have to go raise money, or I have to pivot my entire business. If you have 30,000 people and you have an idea that requires five people, you just figure out a way that you allocate the dollars internally and say, "Let's go prosecute this idea." So, in my mind, I always felt like absence of scale was way harder than the presence of scale. And operating within scale seemed like it was like, yeah, you have more opportunity to do it. What I found over the years, not just at Cisco, but even when I ... Because I ran a small startup in Chicago for 17 years before I moved over to the Valley, what I found in the large companies is, the communication framework and the lossiness of communication, the telephone game, so to say, has a profoundly negative effect if you're not intentional about it and if you're not careful of it. And there was this board member that we had, there's a couple board members, our lead director, Michael Capellas is amazing. There's this other board member, Kevin is amazing, and then there's this one board member, Wes Bush, who we recently rolled off, but he used to be on our board. And when I got this job, he pulled me aside, said, "Jeetu, I'm going to tell you something. I'm going to give you some advice, and take it or leave it, but I think it's going to be important for you to keep it in mind." I'm like, "What's that?" And he goes, "Whatever you do, don't think about your story of the company as a marketing exercise. Think about it as the most intrinsic foundational exercise of the company. And always be the custodian of the message. Don't delegate that to someone else to give.
00:44:36 · G2 Patel
Because if you have 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 layers between you and the person who's actually doing the job in the front line, what you don't want to do is play the telephone game and assume that people will just cascade it when you go to your team and then say, 'Okay, that team will cascade to the next team, cascade to the next team, cascade to the next team.' Every one of them will add a flavor with well-intentioned, and then by the time it gets to the end, people won't know what it is. So always own telling the story." And I'm like, "That seems like it's a lot because we have a very broad portfolio. We do all of these events. It's like, I'm going to have to stand on stage for 90 minutes and just talk about it." He's like, "Please do that. Make sure you don't." And initially, the hidden benefit that came out of it that I did not realize is it massively, Lenny, simplified our business. And you know why? Because we have such a broad business with so many different industries, it's impossible for someone to be a deep expert in every single one of them across the board. There's just way too much surface area. But the things that we want to convey to the market that the market should take away from us, if that story is not something that I understand well enough to be able to convey it, how do I first expect 20,000 of my sellers to be able to go tell it to the market? And how do I expect my customers to be able to digest that story? There's zero chance that would happen. And so, that was my big takeaway from this, which is don't delegate the storytelling. And the storytelling is not a marketing exercise after you built the product. The story is why you build the product to make the story come real. And so, make sure that the story is there first, and then that story has evidence and proof based on the products that you're building.
00:46:44 · Lenny Rachitsky, G2 Patel
[00:46:44] S1: I had a conversation with Matt MacInnis, who's COO now CPO at Rippling, and hit a similar piece of advice, which I think is also, it's like adjacent advice, which is "The intensity of an idea or a plan drops at every level that it goes from CO to the next layer and layer. And your job as a leader is to maintain that intensity, not to buffer it from the employees, but to maintain exactly the same intensity."" And it feels like that's in addition to also just keep the story the same. Like don't filter it, don't change it. Although your advice is even different, just like you actually go to the team working on it and tell the story yourself. Don't even let- [00:47:23] S0: I want to make sure that they hear it from me directly so that there's no lossiness. We have this concept in networking called packet loss. When you actually send packets over a wire and you have a loss of packet, then actually there's loss of data. You don't want to have packet loss in your storytelling from you to the person on the front line because- [00:47:43] S1: The direct ethernet Cat 5 connection.