Lenny Distilled
Strategy → Prioritization
I'm a big believer in big bets, high risk, high reward. I don't get as excited about incremental things. But, I get excited about big bets. And if you make big bets, you're going to get a lot of it wrong.
You either decide to pay the price or get out. Don't half-ass it. You see all these companies saying, we do AI and they've just sprinkle a little bit of crappy AI and they've got the same cultures. It won't work.
Most of the time CEOs want options. They want to hedge their bets, but what you really want to do in these strategic inflection points is go all in one thing.
Concentration is what builds wealth, diversification is what preserves wealth. And you're a startup. You're not trying to preserve anything. You're trying to build something. It requires concentrated bets, not hedging.
Not taking bold risks, not making bold moves, it's a risk for itself. Many times people want the inertia, people want just the incremental value. But if you want to do leaps many times you need to let go of things that were successful for you in the past.
I would really love it if more people were like, 'Screw it. I'm going to do something that's probably going to fail. It's important and it's worth doing and I'm going to do it well.'
You don't want to walk into the gym on day one and try and deadlift 300 pounds. So when someone comes to me and they're a first time entrepreneur and they say, 'I'm going to make the next great AI company,' I think that is the equivalent.
If a software project could get built in two to three weeks, what does that really mean about the true complexity and differentiation of what you built? It's probably not very high, unless you believe you are way smarter than everyone else. But I think that's hubris.