Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:17:50 · Keith Rabois, Lenny Rachitsky
So the key is to me is if you want to do more or need to do more, your market requires you to do more, your business model requires you to do more, VCs require you to do more, you need to have more barrels. Now, the question is how and when and all this. There's a lot of details there, but fundamentally, the ratio of barrels to ammunition is what dictates the number of important initiatives that can be pursued simultaneously. [00:18:15] S1: And you're not saying you don't want ammunition. It's valuable. To make an impact, you need ammunition in addition to the barrel. [00:18:20] S0: Yeah, you definitely need ammunition. And it depends on what kind of project. There are types of projects where an individual barrel may be able to succeed with very limited or no ammunition. Sometimes you may need a designer, an engineering team, a PM, a data analysis, blah, blah, blah. Depends on what the project is, what the problem you're trying to solve is, what's the proper amount of ammunition? But once you think about the ratios of ammunition to the problem, you can be much more constructive and deliberate and intentional about the team construction. [00:18:53] S1: Most people hearing this assume they are barrels. What helps you understand if someone's truly a barrel?
00:18:53 · Lenny Rachitsky, Keith Rabois
[00:18:53] S1: Most people hearing this assume they are barrels. What helps you understand if someone's truly a barrel? [00:18:59] S0: Can they take an idea and make it happen? Basically, we're going up that, there's a hill over there, that's the hill. Get us over that hill. And one way or the other, they will motivate people if they need to, they will accumulate resources if they need to, they will measure what they need to, and they're going to get your company across that hill. That's a barrel. Anything less than that is not a barrel. [00:19:27] S1: And so this is skills like internal org stuff, resource. It's the collection of all the things to get something done.
00:19:27 · Lenny Rachitsky, Keith Rabois
[00:19:27] S1: And so this is skills like internal org stuff, resource. It's the collection of all the things to get something done. [00:19:36] S0: A collection of all those things, so it's basically there's an outcome. CEO, founder wants an outcome and come hell or high water, this person is going to deliver that outcome. Then the outcome can be fairly narrow and not that difficult in the beginning. And then you expand the scope, the complexity, the difficulty that you basically entrust to your barrels. And sometimes they have no line of sight of how to solve it when you start. Sometimes you have a preliminary idea. So it ranges, but ultimately it's that skill of, I'm going to take this off your plate, you can fire and forget, and this is going to happen. And if it's not going to happen, I'm going to come back to you proactively with the issues I'm confronting, what I've already tried, the diagnosis of the root causes and ask for your help with sufficient time for you to intervene and try to brainstorm with me to get us to the right answer. [00:20:29] S1: Agency is the word that comes to mind when you talk about this role. [00:20:32] S0: Yeah, I think agency is accurate. The problem I have with terms like agency is it's a little bit like strategy. It goes in one ear, a lot of people and out the other ear and they don't really process the meaning. [00:20:42] S1: Yeah. Who are some examples of barrels that make this real so people can understand what you're talking about?
00:20:47 · Keith Rabois
[00:20:47] S0: I talked to my YC lecturer in 2014 about how to operate. They can be as simple as the now somewhat famous in technology smoothie test, which is, we used to have engineers work pretty hard at Square and pretty late. And I always wanted them to have food so they wouldn't be famished, they wouldn't be distracted. And I didn't really want them to eat junk food because I actually think junk food's bad for you, bad for your brain, et cetera. So settled on delivery and really wanted to provide a 9:00 PM cold smoothies. And we had, at that time, a pretty substantial team at Square, office team, EAs, this was not a lean, mean organization. And so I tried through the office team EAs and nothing ... We never got healthy, delicious, and cold smoothies delivered at 9:00 PM. Just kept that one. I was getting frustrating because if the smoothies aren't cold, then no one's going to eat them. If they don't arrive at 9:00, then no one can really bank on their refreshments. Everything went wrong. And then I had this intern named Taylor Francis, and I was explaining just my frustration. It was his second day at work. And he's like, "I'll solve it." And I was like, "Okay, kid, good luck with that." I was like, "Sure, keep trying." Anyway, day goes by, 9 o'clock arrives. And lo and behold, smoothies show up at 9:00 PM, delivered on the standing desk table where the engineers would congregate. I sample them, they're cold, they taste great. And I'm like, "Oh my God, I found a barrel." And I later gave him almost everything to do.
00:22:37 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:22:37] S1: I want to go back to actually the first question. You shared some amazing advice for how to identify great talent, but I'm still curious, when you find that barrel, for example, when everyone's throwing money at them, there's all these amazing teams to join. What are some things that companies do to attract and convince them to join their team?
00:22:56 · Keith Rabois
[00:22:56] S0: The standard of stuff is still true. Mission, selling the vision to mission is indispensable. Most people who have proven talent anyway, at least in the current world, are going to attract offers from multiple opportunities. And so you've got to convince them that your opportunity is very special. I think one way to do that that's a little bit more nuanced is convince them that their particular skill overlaps with the critical blockers to the current company, meaning they're betting on themselves. So for example, if they are superb at, let's say marketing, if the biggest blocker of the company in the company's current success is not technology, not the product, but we believe it's marketing, it's really easy to go to a world-class marketing person and say, "Not only is this great company building something really cool and interesting that you'll be proud of, but your particular ability is very unique and differentiated and you can solve this." This is actually how I wound up at Square. Back in 2010, I was actually, I'd just been acquihired into Google and was planning on being a VC actually next after I was investing whenever Google is going to compensate us. And then the investors in Square called me up and they said, "Hey, we've been looking for almost a year now for someone who knows something about financial services yet is still an entrepreneurial." And they're like, "Hey, there's only three of these." At the time, 2010, it was like, "There's only really two or three of you in the world, so would you be interested?" And I said, "Well, maybe." But that was the argument to me that made me leave Google early after two weeks and infuriate everybody. And bypass Venture for another three years, which had been my plan, was because they made the argument that, hey, I was one of three people in the world that could actually do this job.