Lenny Distilled
Strategy → Vision & Mission
I want to work on a project that if successful makes everything we do as a company today feel like it's not that important because we did something that was 10 times bigger than everything we're doing today. And what we're doing now is just 10% of the company.
We're not trying to be incrementally better, we are trying to be fundamentally different. We want our customers to love us fanatically.
If you really want to have huge breakthrough innovation, you need to be able to try, you need to be able to fail. You need to be able to shoot for the moon is where this 10X comes from.
The job of an entrepreneur at the beginning is just to find out something that's 10X better. Delight is trying to work in that magnitude.
Instead of incrementally going, doing a jump to make it a little better, a little better, a little better, you can never get there. How do we take two years, and end up at the theoretical minimum cost for moving money into a market?
Sometimes, exceptions are the rule when it comes to doing something truly transformative and nothing extraordinary is ever achieved through ordinary means.
We have this mental metaphor that we talk a lot about, getting to the next hill. The actual wording is 'Take bigger boulder bets.' I think teams can often get lost crawling up that hill, not realizing that there's a huge, incredibly beautiful range behind it.
Sometimes ignorance is sort of bliss and you just discover new things. We decided to fund a whole bunch at once, and then the plan was to go to asynchronous investing like normal investors, but we realized that there was something magical about this batch thing.
If we had voted for whether we should do Gutenberg or not, everyone would've voted against it. It was really a few core people that said, 'This is the future and it's going to take 10 years to do and it's going to suck for the first three or four years.'
What most people do is forecasting... What's true is one company wins and everybody else gets fucked. That's what's true.
I think the biggest thing that a lot of entrepreneurs miss. They say, 'I don't want to do that for the rest of my life. I don't want to be in the back of a dry cleaner dry cleaning clothes.' And to me it's just a question of scale.
If you want to achieve a 10x outcome, hiring someone that's an expert in the field, it's maybe unlikely you're going to achieve that 10x outcome, because they're likely to do things the way things have always been done. So you might achieve incremental benefits, but the odds of completely reinventing the system and doing something that's vastly superior to others is much lower.
My take is that your scope is the world. Nothing should ever perceive as being out of bounds.
Where I dropped the ball was more about what I should have realized about that feature. So automation, it's super useful. It can be used by a whole slew of people who aren't just developers. It could be used in every single product. It's more than just moving things to a new status. And so I should have realized that we could have built this amazing service that every product could have moved themselves forward with.
When I see a new idea, I'm always asking myself, 'How do we push this further? Is there something there that we can 10X? Can we apply it more broadly to more types of users, more products? Is there some bigger opportunity that we can really take advantage of?'
At our scale we got to hunt for bigger elephants... take a minute at the beginning to say, could this be bigger? Could this be a bigger thing and more impactful than the initial idea, even if the initial idea sounds big?
Every new idea looks dumb at first. Unfortunately, the dumb ideas also look dumb at first. It's not a perfect [filter]. But the more disruptive they are, the more dumb you're going to feel they are. You always listen for stuff like if they say it's a toy or if it's practical or it's stupid or I don't get it or whatever, those are often... Toy is a good keyword. If you hear people saying something's a toy, that's often a really good signifier that it's actually something real and threatening.
And that bifurcation of love it, hate it, is really how you have an idea of whether you have impact in what you're building. If you get more of the bell curve of modern indifference and maybe mild like and mild dislike, that's an incremental product. That's not really disrupting anything. But if you look at something like ChatGPT where the entire world is like, 'This is amazing.' Or, 'This is terrible.' And there's not a whole lot in between, that's a very good signifier of it being truly impactful and disruptive.
Crazy ideas are ideas that we shouldn't, obviously, do. There's a 90% chance that they make no sense. But in the 10% chance that they do, they will make a 10x to 100x difference for the retail business.
You don't need very many good ideas to be seen as tremendously inventive. Like Elon Musk, Tesla, he can kind of dust off his hands and be like, 'I am now an Edison-like inventor.'
Look, I'm not going to write you a check for $200,000. I'll write you a check for $10 million because this company, you need to build a company. You need to really go for it if you're going to do this, otherwise you guys should stay in school.
People think invention takes all this time, but you only need two hours once a month. The thing is, once you have one good idea, it often takes years to express that.
It's very unlikely the first thing that you believe you should go work on is going to be the right thing. You need to kill the beliefs that you had. You should never be too in love with your ideas.