Lenny Distilled
Strategy → Vision & Mission
I think there's this really deep thing that people have where if something is disruptive of your worldview, it feels threatening, and you have this very stark choice to make that's either you're wrong or it's wrong. And humans are storytellers. It's very easy for us to tell stories about why something is right or wrong if we're motivated to.
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.
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.
Tension is at the heart of every art form and every innovation. What we do when we launch a new product, we say, we have this thing that can do X, and now the person is imagining what their life might be like if that were true. If they fall in love with that possibility, now there's tension.
To me, wealth is nothing but information asymmetry. All the best companies in the world have unfair information asymmetry.
Every company succeeds on the foundations of the idiosyncrasies of the founder. The idiosyncrasies of the founder. Rippling succeeds for almost the polar opposite reasons that Notion succeeds, but in both cases, the companies succeed on the idiosyncrasies of the founder.
Sometimes, exceptions are the rule when it comes to doing something truly transformative and nothing extraordinary is ever achieved through ordinary means.
AGI is just necessary but not sufficient. A lot of the value is still going to require a bunch of hustle from a lot of builders to really turn that new source of energy and channel it into something that we humans want to use.