The Exchanges

Q This reminds me, I wanted to close it, but, uh, there's a tweet once about how in Sweden, when you go to someone's house, they don't feed you. It's like not expected that you will have food. You have to kind of bring your own food. Is that true? And what's that about?

A It's absolutely true. I actually gave an unconference talk about this topic. Uh, and the conference talk was all of the, the strange things that Swedish people do and why. And if it would summarize it like, yes, we do that. I actually experienced that. I went to a friend's house, and they had dinner, and I waited in my friend's room while they had dinner, and that was just normal. And why did that happen? I think There's a strong sense of individual responsibility in Sweden, which kind of like reaches over to unfriendliness, or, or from an American or foreign lens, because this is so crazy. But in Sweden, it's just like, well, you take care of your kids, I'll take care of my kids. And it's not really a question. And I think that a lot of the motivations of, of why Swedes are, are strange, one of them is, is We don't want to be indebted to someone else, right? So we never want to feel like, which is why, like, you wouldn't, for example, if you go to a bar in Sweden, like, you don't buy a round, you buy your own beer, because, like, maybe you have to, like, figure out the money at the end of the day, things like that. And I think it's just, it's actually quite individualistic society, but it's individualistic with heart, I would say. There's a warmth to it, but it will definitely be appeared strange to people who don't really understand, understand this. They think people are, Co…

AI assessment note: “It's absolutely true. I actually gave an unconference talk about this topic.”

Q If you kind of zoomed out a little bit and thought about the startups you've worked with, What would you say are the most common mistakes that early stage startups make broadly?

A There's so many. I mean, like this is, uh, how I initially learned about startups by going, searching for that, that on Google and landing on Paul Graham's articles because he kept, I think I've written many articles about this topic because it is so, it is so common. So this topic can go on forever. But if I take like the most recent experience of how to NYC, I would say, Startups fail, one, because they don't talk to customers. And if you don't talk to customers or users, you don't actually know what's important. And if you don't know what's important, it doesn't matter what you build. It doesn't matter kind of what ideas you have in your head if you don't actually know what it is that you need to build and you don't validate with customers. That's where a lot of the failure stems from. And a lot of early YC for us, or early part of the program is us Pushing and probing founders to be like, tell us about the conversations you've had with the customers. What did you learn? Can you show us the organizations or like all these questions? Like what other software are they using? What are they paying for? What problems do they have? How are they describing the intensity of that problem? So that's what we spend a lot of time early on, on NYC. After that, I would say one of the common mistakes in twice, I'm not talking about generally startups here. I'm talking inside YC. The second …

AI assessment note: “Startups fail, one, because they don't talk to customers.”

Q That's pando.com slash Lenny. I want to zoom out a little bit and ask another big question and see if you have what answer you have for this. If you just think about the most successful startups, NYC, or even just the companies you worked with, if you had to pick just like one or two attributes of what's most common across successful companies, what would, what would that be?

A I would say the most common reason that I've seen founders succeed or companies succeed, it comes down to the founders and characteristics of those individuals. The most important characteristics of those individuals are They're really determined to win, and they don't give up when things are hard, and they have an internal motivation that's just really infectious to people around them, which is how they end up building really good teams around them. People are actually going to want to go and work for them. And I have numerous examples of people like this, where they, the CEO or one of the founders are just like, just really inspirational people. The second thing I would say is they are technical. So like, like that's kind of like they're technical enough. And like, if I would grade companies on a scale of like technical to less technical, more technical founders are more successful, are more likely to succeed, I would say. And then I would say they figure out how to talk to users and move fast early on. So they don't wait for permission from their investors or from YC or from someone else to, to make progress. They're like every day or every week, there's continuous progress. And they're not doing this for someone else. They're doing this for the customers. There's no one else that's like actually the, they're not doing this for the investors. That's for sure. The investors a…

AI assessment note: “I would say the most common reason that I've seen founders succeed or companies succeed”

Q Okay. So the first is speed versus quality. Is there an end of the spectrum where you find that most successful founders are either speed focused or quality focused?

A Sometimes founders ask us this question. What should I focus on growth or retention? And the answer is they're asking us for permission to not do one or the other. The truth is you, to succeed, you have to do both. I would argue that speed versus quality, there's different level of speed and different level of quality, different stages of the company. But the truth is that you always have to move fast. And you have to understand what the meaning of quality is, right? So I think, I actually don't see that as a spectrum, but I would say, if you move fast with talking to customers, you'll build something that have potential having quality because you know a lot about the problem. I think when people think about quality, they often think about what is my personal definition of quality. I have a bar of quality, but quality to me of a good product idea, a good startup idea has more to do with what the customer think is valuable. And if you move fast by talking to customers and having customer learnings and know the problems, then you will actually come up with something that's high quality. So they're not at a spectrum.

AI assessment note: “I actually don't see that as a spectrum... you have to do both.”

Q need. Like there's a lot of people already at the company that are experts in the science. And like, that's okay. If you have no experience, they just need the business experience, how to operate, how to execute, like standard stuff that PMs learn. And so would you agree with that? That like, you don't need to have this deep background in science and climate to move into the space.

A Yeah. I would say if you were working on a, a software company and even some of the hardware companies, that's, that's probably generally true. Absolutely. And it's much more valuable to have that background than to have this specific domain expertise background. Like, those are complimentary, but as a PM, having the solid PM background is the more valuable piece, I would say. Being a competitive PM, coming from a really good culture of product management, knowing what good looks like, like, that's invaluable to some of these companies, because they haven't, in the past, they weren't able to hire these people. So that's, that's, I agree with that a hundred percent. In terms of founders, I've seen everything, right? I've seen people Having some domain expertise, starting a company and really succeeding. I've seen people who had no domain expertise and learned everything they need to know. Maybe they partnered up with someone who had a domain expertise and then succeeded. I've seen all of it. And I actually think that you can succeed in either of these categories. You don't need the deep expertise. It depends really on the area you're in, but you like someone like Pachama, like Diego and Tomas did not have Expertise in forests besides a personal experience. He just had a willingness to solve the problem and it really worked out for them.

AI assessment note: “Yeah. I would say if you were working on a, a software company... that's probably generally true.”

Q another place that's as special. They just like that bar has been set too high. And so my first question is just like, what do you think it was that made Airbnb so special? Why was it such a important experience for you and other people? And even more importantly, just what is it that you take from that experience that you bring to startups that you work with now?

A Yeah, it's funny. Like, I think this year in a couple of months, it'll be 10 years ago since UNME started Airbnb. And, uh, it was 2012. And the reason I tweeted that was I asked everyone that I met after me, because I had this experience of like, this was the highlight of my career up until then, at least being in a team like that. And I asked everyone, have you found anything better? And like, I haven't heard, besides maybe one or two people, I haven't heard anybody say that I found something better. And they all missed that dearly. And I thought a lot about why that was the case, but I would say, Airbnb did not feel like a normal job. It felt like more like a group of friends trying to just do something together. And we were friends and we weren't like, at least in the beginning, it did not feel like this was a job. It was sort of like a, an ongoing project and an assembly of amazing people. And I think in the end, we managed to build two things, like a really successful company. Thanks to Joe and Nate and Brian for starting this, like without them, like there would be nothing to build. And we also, I think people don't like to use the word family, but I feel like that way because when I go and meet with MB alumni from that team, we have a very special bond that reminds me of close social connections more than anything else. Does not remind me of coworkers. And I've asked mys…

AI assessment note: “Airbnb did not feel like a normal job. It felt like more like a group of friends”