Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:53:07 · Lenny Rachitsky, G2 Patel
[00:53:07] S1: Is there maybe one more lesson that you've learned from this? Or I guess it's something you wish you'd known before getting into this role? Is there anything else that comes to mind? [00:53:15] S0: I was an apps guy. I operated in the apps layer. I worked at Box. And even when I was at EMC, I was building apps that you built for the end user. Infrastructure is a different game. And the thing that I learned about infrastructure is, you don't always get the glory, but you always get the blame. [00:53:41] S1: Perfect.
00:53:42 · G2 Patel
[00:53:42] S0: And you have to be comfortable with the fact that you are working in a way that other people get the glory. Great infrastructure companies, the application companies get the glory when they're running on that infrastructure. So, you have to be hardwired in infrastructure to orient on your ecosystem success, not just your own success. And that is probably one of the lessons that I learned at Cisco in a very stark way, which I didn't fully appreciate it until I got into the details of the infrastructure going, "Wow, if this thing doesn't work," we were ... Every single time, our infrastructure doesn't work. This morning I was with a medical institution, I was with a healthcare company this morning, and they were telling me they were very complimentary. They were thanking us on the partnership. I asked them, "Why are you doubling down with us?" And they're like, "Because when the infrastructure doesn't work, people die. Someone doesn't get dialysis, someone doesn't get a surgery done, and we need to make sure that we're working with someone with the infrastructure is working." And so, I feel like at that point in time, you can't be navel-gazing too much about, "Look how cool you are, because you did something." You have to just make sure that you're really immediately shifting your focus to, what does the customer do and what does the ecosystem do with your infrastructure so that the outcome is achieved? And you have to get very outcome oriented. And I feel like that was something that I always intellectually knew, but I didn't fully realize it until I came here on how important of a mindset shift that is. You are not talking about yourself, you're talking about the system just working. No one will come and tell you, "Hey, Jeetu, thank you so much. My network worked today." But the moment it doesn't work, they're going to call you and say, "You know what? My network's not working, and my people can't work and patients are dying in the hospital." I think you just have to be comfortable with that.
00:56:00 · Lenny Rachitsky, G2 Patel
[00:56:00] S1: It's so interesting how this lesson connects so directly to the lesson you learned from Chuck, the CEO of Cisco, which is, "Don't expect the praise and the credit. You need to be comfortable with other people getting credit for your work." [00:56:14] S0: That's right. By the way, it's not surprising given that he spent, I don't know, 26, 28 years over here, you know why that he's conditioned with the fact that he's focused on other people succeeding from it. From your work. [00:56:35] S1: It feels like there's so many metaphors corollaries to networking as a way to think about leadership and living life. [00:56:42] S0: It really is. [00:56:44] S1: Oh man, I bet you guys have all kinds of examples. [00:56:49] S0: It's a good exercise to actually go through and create the corollary of parallelism between life and networks. [00:56:57] S1: I'm thinking about just how many friends, like Dunbar's number, how many notes can you have in a network before it starts to slow down? Maybe 150. Oh, man. Okay. Anyway, I like that your mind's spinning. [00:57:16] S0: I'm thinking how many can you have? I think more than 150, for sure. [00:57:17] S1: I also was thinking about Intel. The whole Intel Inside move was such a clever way to break through that where no one would know Intel and so they're just like, slap a sticker of Intel Inside.
00:57:17 · Lenny Rachitsky, G2 Patel
[00:57:17] S1: I also was thinking about Intel. The whole Intel Inside move was such a clever way to break through that where no one would know Intel and so they're just like, slap a sticker of Intel Inside. [00:57:27] S0: And by the way, they are. Lip-Bu Tan is a very dear friend. Pat Gelsinger used to be my mentor at EMC. And so both those people that have had such a profound contribution to that industry in general. When you start thinking about them, they're very, very much on that mode. [00:57:46] S1: I could see how you pull together this insane collection of humans, just feels like you're just friends with everybody.
00:57:51 · G2 Patel
[00:57:51] S0: I feel like it's, life's too short not to be, and I'm only friends with people that I feel are good human beings. What I try not to do is I try to minimize my time no matter how successful they are with people whose energy I don't vibe with, because I think life's too short. And in my mind, one of the most off-putting things is, look, all of us have a healthy ego. There are times when ego gets manifested with insecurity and you have to make sure that you're at least self-aware enough to know when your ego is starting to take over your behavior in a way that's counterproductive. And all of those things are super important. But what I think is extremely important is that you ... Life is just fun to live when you love the people you are around. Can I digress for a second in this one story that ... I'll tell you the story that was ... So my mother was, she passed away two and a half years ago, but she was extremely sick in the hospital for eight weeks before she passed away. And I was very close to my mom. She was my everything and we were only child. I grew up with a rough childhood. My dad was a high-stakes kind of conn man, like Bernie Madoff. I didn't want to be any part of that. So I had actually left India, come over here, hadn't seen him. And so he was very abusive to my mom. So there was a bunch of that that had happened. And so, we had had a very difficult early childhood life for me, and her and I had bonded during that time at a very deep level. And so when she came to America, she always wanted to have her own place, but she lived very close by and she was very dependent on me emotionally in every way. And so, I had almost become a parent to her. And at the last eight weeks things flipped and she became a parent again. And so we were getting to the point where she was ending her journey. And I was sitting one in the morning at the bedside by her in the hospital. I was living in the hospital at the time. And she was sleeping and I was just crying profusely. And she wakes up, and she knows why I'm crying, because she's going to be gone soon. And she looks at me, Lenny, and she's like all perplexed and she's like, "I had no idea that you loved me so much." Now, by the way, this is the most abnormal thing for me to hear, because I'm like, "What are you talking about mom?
01:00:44 · G2 Patel, Lenny Rachitsky
Like you're one of the most important people in my life." And everything that I did was to make sure that my mom was okay. Why did it feel that way to her? Because she didn't know how I was thinking. And that kind of notion of people don't know what's going on in your mind is so important that my biggest lesson from that was, "Don't be stingy with words." Because even my mother that knows me inside and out didn't know how much I loved her, that there's no chance that people in the business world are going to know how you feel if you're not explicit with them. And so, I'm actually very clear with people, when I find them and when I find them rewarding, I let them know how much they mean, because I genuinely find a lot of energy coming out of that. And B, the circle of friends just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And I found that to be a super rewarding thing in life. And you're right, most of the people that were at the AI Summit are dear friends, and isn't that just a better way to live life? [01:02:01] S1: I think we've uncovered one of the secrets of your success, which is just tell people how you feel and help them see that you appreciate them. Make it clear that you appreciate them, that you value them, which is a lot of people don't do, they just assume they know that they like you. [01:02:16] S0: And don't make it fake. [01:02:18] S1: And don't make it fake. [01:02:19] S0: Don't make it fake. If you don't love someone, don't tell them you love them. That's the other thing that I have.