Lenny Distilled
Strategy → Vision & Mission
There is just a stubborn, strongly held belief that is then balanced with their ability to have the loosely held thing...a core belief in the power of products.
A/B testing at Airbnb is a bad word. You don't go to Brian and say, 'Hey Brian, here's my Excel spreadsheet. I want to run some 10 A/B tests and come back and tell you whether we are heading in the right direction.' You're going to get thrown out of the window.
When you're selling to a leader, you need to vision cast, you need to sell to a gap, don't sell to a problem. When you're selling to a leader, you need to be selling an opportunity.
Don't pivot. Don't put scale. Don't hire that Stanford grad who simply wants to add a hot company to your resume, just build the one thing only you could build, a thing that wouldn't exist without the insight and expertise that only you have.
It's some combination of being stubborn with respect to your thesis around how the world will change, but also very open-minded with respect to exactly what form that takes and how the market's developing.
We have another value of, start by asking, 'What could be?', which is pushing ourselves to be as aspirational, ambitious as possible.
If you and your team do your job correctly, what does the world look like?
From an entrepreneurship standpoint, it truly is about what insight do I have? Why am I so lucky to have this insight? Why in a world of a million entrepreneurs who are thinking, who are smart, who are trying everything, why am I in the position where I likely have an insight that others do not?
For me, the hill climb is all about the difference between a local optimum and a global optimum... the thing that gets me through the valley is remembering what the summit feels like.
I start backwards. It's like what is the potential here? If you start from the premise that LinkedIn ultimately is a platform for economic opportunity that sits on top of a very strong social graph. Almost every aspect of economic transaction is possible.
Life has to be about more than just solving problems. There needs to be an aspirational and cool component to strategy.
Everyone's talking about, 'We got to make the product better. We got to optimize this button, and improve conversion, and product, product, product.' Isn't the product the homes and the apartments?
What we do at The Browser Company is we talk about optimizing feelings. How do we want to make someone feel on the other end of our software? Do we want to make them feel joy? Do we want to make them feel fast? Do we want to make them feel organized? Do we want to make them feel focused? What is it the feeling we are trying to evoke in whatever we're doing on a specific project, or a specific feature, or a specific piece of storytelling content?
Every mind based on personality has different lived experience, so the more experience you have, the more believed you have. An idea that totally makes sense to Uri, he's probably been in a thousand meetings where other people are like, 'That'll never work.'
You want user. You want revenue. That's the product business. And building for something you want the world to have is building for your value. You have some taste. You have some aesthetic. There are different energy. You need to create a balance. Too much of yourself. Then there's no users. Then you're just doing our project. And too much for business, you're building a commodity.
Fall in love, fall in love, fall in love, fall in love with the problem, and then actually what you're trying to do is engage everyone else to fall in love with the same problem, to go into this journey, into this path and follow your leadership there.
Before we even talk about the technology, so we're skipping to the part where you're trying to apply the most interesting models or technology to solve some problem. Start with solving the problem you actually care about.