Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
01:32:48 · Amol Avasare
[01:32:48] S1: Yeah. I think three things that come to mind there. First is I go back to something I said earlier, which is that we very much think about things from an exponential lens. And if you are thinking about things from a linear lens, you'll see the world very, very differently, right, because you look at where we are today and you're like, "Okay, but how much better can it be in two, three years?" I think if you're looking at it from an exponential lens and you understand how exponentials work, then you just realize that a lot of this stuff is actually going to be happening sooner than people think if you're looking at it from a linear lens. And then if you understand that there could be upsides and downsides and the range of outcomes here, I think we very much need to be talking about the downsides so we can avoid them and push towards the upsides. I think most people at the company are optimists. We're very optimistic about the future. I think it's just we understand the risk is like it is not a guaranteed that we end up in a good place. And not enough people are talking about the risks, I think, in productive ways and who have the know-how of the risks. I think there's people who may talk about the risks but are not in the game. And so they don't actually know fully. They're not surgical on what the specific risks are, but we're in the game, we understand what's happening. And so that's one piece. I think the second is, I think, we actually believe in this stuff more strongly than we say externally. So it is just such a key part of how we think internally that sometimes we just reword your statements because it's like people might just think we're being too over the top, but internally, that's how we think, and what we're putting out is a softer version of that at times. And then I think the third piece is going to what Ben said where we think a lot about driving the race to the top. And so it's like if you're not in the game and you're shouting from the sidelines, no one cares. It's just the reality of how the world works. No one really cares. If you're in the game and you're a leading player and what you're doing is working, you can influence people who are also in the game to take the right actions. And so that is the core of it. If we just pack up and go home, you have no influence on this thing.
01:34:58 · Amol Avasare, Lenny Rachitsky
And if you stay in the game and you're like, commercially, you're doing great, and then you have ways to influence that, okay, these are the principles and put that into the conversation and make more people sort of believe in those things. [01:35:12] S0: I could talk to you forever, Amol, but two more questions just to round out the conversation and touch on some stuff that I've hinted at a number of times. One is I want to take us actually to failure corner because someone listening to this may be like, "All right, look at this guy just worked at all these amazing companies, cold email, the CPO at Anthropic, got a job, joined this rocket ship. It's all been up and to the right, just killing it constantly." What's a story from your career where things didn't work out when you failed and what did you learn from that experience?
01:35:45 · Amol Avasare
[01:35:45] S1: I have a couple. I think it's very much not that way. I feel like it was a lot of squiggly lines to get here. The biggest I'd say is just founding a company, raising a bunch of money, having employees, and then having to shut it down and tell your investors that you've lost the money and that you had a vision of what you're going to do and that it's not going to happen. And so that I think is probably the biggest one. We spent three years on it. It was not like a, "Oh, we tried something part-time." It was like, "No, we went for it." We had spent three years, raised a couple of mil. We had maybe seven, 10 employees at our biggest. And it was something that we really believed in. It was around mental health and how you can quantify mental health to help understand or get early predictors of things like generalized anxiety, major depression. So it's stuff that we really, really believed in. But ultimately, in our early 20s, we had no idea what we're doing at the time and many things I do differently, but that was just a very, very, very painful process. I think the good thing was we kept our investors in the loop the whole time, so 20 founders who are struggling out there. Send those monthly investor updates. It's really easy to send those when things are great. It's really hard to send those when things are bad. You just bat it down. You sit down and send an update to your investors about why everything you talked about last month did not go to plan, but it's just the right thing to do, and it keeps people in the loop, and it avoids surprises. But it's still so tough when you're then calling up the investors to be like, "Hey, we're shutting down or making that decision," everyone who believed in you and it becomes such a big part of the identity. It's very, very tough. So man, that was just brutal. It's brutal. And it took me, I think, a number of years to truly get over. I think that it's a tough thing, but you get so much from that experience that it's hard to see in the moment. And I think without doing that, I would not have gone into this. I was not a PM before. I didn't have any of these skills. I'd never worked on products. I didn't know how to cold email really. And so it was through that job that I learned a ton of the skills that made this career path viable for me.
01:37:57 · Amol Avasare
And it's just really hard to see that in the moment when you're looking at a point in time. It's much easier to draw the line looking back. But I think that'd be my takeaway is just keep in mind that it's a long game and some of those things... I'm so grateful for that experience now. I'm so grateful that it failed and went that way, actually. It's very painful because it wouldn't have led to what I'm doing now. And so it's a tough thing, but the positives can come from it.
01:38:25 · Lenny Rachitsky
[01:38:25] S0: What I love about this is a lot of people have these times in their career where they're like, "It's all over. I failed in such a big way and my reputation's screwed and people were counting on me and now they see I'm an imposter. I never knew what I was doing. And after all, now they finally see." And just seeing that, and this was three years, I'm looking at your LinkedIn, you had seven employees, something like that, and then it's like masterclass, Mercury, Anthropic. I think it's inspiring to hear a story like that to know that you can have a big failure like that and things can work out. That is not the end. Okay. So at 2023, I was going to go on pat leave because my wife's pregnant and I was just like, "Wait, what do I do with the newsletter? I need to take some time off. That would be really nice to take a month or two off." And so my plan was, "Okay, I'm going to do a bunch of guest posts where people line up." I put out a call for guest posts, people apply, I pick a few and then I kind of slot them in ahead of time so I could take time off. So I put out this call, "Hey, who wants to write a guest post for my newsletter?" I got 500 plus applications. One of those applications was from you and the pitch was essentially how a traumatic brain injury made me a better product manager. And I still remember reading the first draft you sent me and I was just like, "Holy shit, this story is incredible." It's just like you feel such feelings and it was just so tactically interesting and useful like, "Oh wow, this is actually going to make me a better product manager." Share the story of the brain injury that you went through and just the journey that you went on there because this is going to blow people's minds.
01:40:04 · Amol Avasare
[01:40:04] S1: It was the toughest time in my life. It made shutting down a company being like, "Oh, that was nothing actually." Just funny how perspective works that way. Back in early 2022, I had a traumatic brain injury. So I'd done MMA for many years. I'd done Muay Thai, which is a type of martial arts for many years, never had a problem. And it's just one of the things that happens, the wrong session. It's just a normal day of sparring, nothing crazy. You get the wrong hit to the head in the wrong way, and my whole life changed. And basically I spent nine months. I was off work for nine months. The first couple of months were brutal. It took me roughly half a year till I was comfortable walking again. It was very, very difficult. The first two, three months beyond just showering and going to the bathroom, my wife did everything for me, including texting my friends. I would listen to music for maybe 20 seconds and feel like I needed to vomit. I couldn't look at screens at all. And it was a very, very long recovery. It was not clear to me that I would ever work again for a while actually. And it was like we'd even discussed my wife, what would we do in that case, et cetera. And we had to think even on those levels. And through a lot of pushing and really working through myself, and you have to just slowly increase your tolerance to things. It's a brutal process, but you need to slowly expose yourself to different things and just get better and better at each little thing, actively work on that, don't push it too far, otherwise you have a big setback. It basically got to the point then where over nine months and then that it returned to work and then it slowly got better. And the part, Lenny, you don't know is in mid-2023, we posted that newsletter and a month later I got re-injured actually.