Pod Insights Lenny's Podcast How to become a category pirate | Christopher Lochhead (Author of Play Bigger, Niche Down, more) About this episode Christopher Lochhead is a 14-time #1 bestselling author, top podcaster, and former 3x public tech company CMO and has been an advisor to over 50 VC-backed tech startups. He is best known as a “godfather” of category design, and Adobe named his book Play Bigger one of “the five greatest marketing books of all time.” In this episode, we discuss:• What exactly category design is
• The “Frame It, Name It, Claim It” framework
• How to go about designing your category
• Why “languaging” is so powerful
• Rating yourself on the category design scorecard
• Why Chris considers “product-market fit” a dangerous concept
• Chris’s spicy take on positioning
• The “better trap” and why it’s crucial to avoid it
• The magic triangle of product, company, and category
• How to embrace negative feedback
• Why the greatest time in the history of innovation is now
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Find the transcript and references at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-become-a-category-pirate-christopher
Where to find Christopher Lochhead:
• Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/lochhead
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christopherlochhead/
• Website: https://www.categorypirates.com/
Where to find Lenny:
• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com
• Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/lennysan
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/
In this episode, we cover:
(00:00) Chris’s background
(05:08) Why Chris shares his negative criticism on his website
(11:58) A simple explanation of category design
(18:00) How Purell mastered category design
(23:07) What Gong got right (and wrong)
(29:01) The “better trap” and why it’s crucial to avoid it
(38:51) Reflective thinking vs. reflexive thinking
(44:45) How Lomi created a revolutionary solution for food waste
(48:50) The “Frame It, Name It, Claim It” framework
(49:08) The concept of “languaging”
(54:00) Examples of languaging
(59:19) Spend more time on the problem than the solution
(1:01:37) The power of “backcasting”
(1:07:33) The truth behind building legendary brands
(1:10:39) The problem with product-market fit
(1:16:11) Chris’s spicy take on positioning
(1:19:20) “Damming the demand”
(1:24:49) Laws from Chris’s book The 22 Laws of Category Design
(1:29:46) Word of mouth: the most powerful form of marketing
(1:34:05) Chris’s closing message to listeners
(1:39:01) Lightning round
Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected] .
Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed.
Transcript 16,498 words · 2 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 The point being now is the greatest time in history to be a creator, to be an entrepreneur, to be a marketer. I've been a marketer for my entire adult life. It's never been greater than it is right now. And so here's the big thing that I would share. If you're somebody for whom you want to make an exponential difference, you want to innovate, you want to create new value where there wasn't, you want to have a legendary career where you can look back on your career and go, you know what, I was part of this and that, and I was on this team. And now's the greatest time in history. And what I would say to you is the future needs you.
0:35 Lenny Rachitsky? Welcome to Lenny's Podcast, where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and growing today's most successful products. Today, my guest is Christopher Lochhead. Christopher is a 13-time number one bestselling co-author, including books like Play Bigger and Niche Down. He's also a popular podcaster, co-creator of the excellent Substack category Pirates, and is best known as the godfather of category design. He's also an advisor to over 50 venture-backed startups and a former three-time public company CMO. In our conversation, we dig deep into all things category design, including what exactly is category design? Why, in order to build a legendary business, it's so essential to build your own category versus trying to
1:19 Lenny Rachitsky? become the best in an existing category? Also, how to actually go about creating your own category, a ton of examples of companies that did this well and didn't do this well, what we could learn from them, plus a ton of practical frameworks, including something Chris calls the better trap. Also, why he thinks product-market fit is a very dangerous idea. Chris is such a character and I had such a blast speaking with Chris. With that, I bring you Christopher Lockhead after a short word from our sponsors.
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3:37 Lenny Rachitsky? Christopher, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.
3:40 Speaker 00 Lenny, it is my absolute joy. And let me say in case my ADHD brain forgets, I love all things Lenny. You're doing a great job, buddy. I'm honored to be here. And there's so many people in the entrepreneur startup marketing world who are scam artists, shysters, pieces of shit, idiotic porn hustle porn stars yelling stupidities. There's a lot of idiocy in the world in which you travel and I travel and you, sir.
4:17 Speaker 00 Stand out. You're making a difference. The conversations you're driving, the content you're creating. You're fucking awesome, Lenny, and I'm really stoked to be here with you.
4:27 Lenny Rachitsky? Damn, what an intro to my own podcast. I'm bad at accepting compliments. I'm just gonna accept that and I appreciate that, man.
4:34 Speaker 00 No, you need to get it. You are a beacon in an ocean of crapola. You are incredible.
4:41 Lenny Rachitsky? Well, enough about me. I really appreciate it. I was preparing for our conversation and usually what I try to do when I prepare for conversations is I read everything the person has written. And it was very challenging with you. You have two podcasts, you have at least six books. There's probably more I missed. You have a newsletter, you tweet a lot. There's probably a lot of other stuff I didn't get to, and so you made my job very difficult preparing for this podcast, but also very worthwhile. So I'm excited to begin.
5:06 Speaker 00 I apologize for that.
5:08 Lenny Rachitsky? The other thing I noticed is I was browsing your website and it was hilarious because you have all these testimonials of your book and podcast and you have a lot of negative reviews like off-putting or very disappointing or absolute crap. I'm curious why you chose to do that as your website testimonial wall.
5:29 Speaker 00 Well, and I believe I'd have to check with Steve Ossler, the founder and publisher of Podcast Magazine. But I believe I'm the only podcaster in history to run a full-page ad in Podcast Magazine with just negative quotes in it. So a couple of reasons. Number one, can we all just have a sense of humor about this stuff? Right? So it's my way and you know, the name of our team, yeah, we're sort of a company, but we're more of a band, is category pirates. I mean, clearly if you're called category pirates, you're probably trying to have a little bit of fun with this stuff. And so part of it is just trying to have a sense of humor with people.
6:09 Lenny Rachitsky? Yeah.
6:10 Speaker 00 The second piece of it is for a lot of entrepreneurs, marketers, creators, innovators of any kind, we live in this fear that when we launch our thing, whatever our thing is, that we will be criticized by the world and that we will be made fun of. And if you've ever authored a book or done a podcast or done anything, built a product, a software product, built any kind of a product, that you feel is part of you and most innovators, creators, software developers, artists, of course entrepreneurs feel that way because they put themselves into this stuff.
6:47 Speaker 00 And when somebody criticizes us, you know, many of us are devastated and I have been in the past too. I'm a person just like anybody else. And what I realized is, uh, fuck them.
6:59 Speaker 00 Anybody who's trying to do anything exponential, anybody who's trying to break and take new ground, anybody who's trying to radically innovate, anybody who's trying to, uh, design and dominate new categories of the way we live, work and play, gets criticized. Picasso was called stupid. The Beatles were called terrible. Elvis was called terrible. Uh, I just wrote recently, uh, a little bit about hip hop. I was listening to Rick Rubin on, uh, Barry Weiss's podcast. Excellent episode. Excellent. She does a great job with them. And he was talking about how ridiculed hip hop was in the beginning and it got banned and, and it's the number one category of music in America today. Anyway, so, so that's also part of it is to just sort of say, hey, look, this is some of the shit people have
7:43 Speaker 00 said about our work and my work. And I'm going to just put it on display because this is going to happen to all of us. And then I guess Lenny, the third reason is in the creator world broadly, there's a lot of people who are breaking their arms, patting themselves on the back. And look, I understand why we have to tell people about why they should pay attention to us. And so we use our credentials or our awards or our downloads or our books. I understand that and I do a little bit of that too. However, come on, let's just not take ourselves so seriously.
8:16 Lenny Rachitsky? Amazing. I could definitely use more of that skill of not taking negative feedback, uh, seriously. And I love the idea of just embracing it and showing people what people don't like.
8:27 Speaker 00 Why not? I mean, look, you're incredibly successful. And if somebody says something negative about you, okay, great. Fuck them. They're not your, they're not your people.
8:38 Lenny Rachitsky? Fuck them. There we go.
8:40 Speaker 00 I didn't know who you were until Substack and I saw your logo, the fiery logo, and there was something endearing about your logo. And the other thing that's great about you from a radical differentiation kind of marketing perspective is you call yourself Lenny. And when I talk about you, I I don't know your fucking last name. I mean, I sort of know it, but I don't really. You know what I mean?
9:03 Lenny Rachitsky? Yeah.
9:03 Speaker 00 I was actually, I was telling, I was at the gym this morning and I was telling my buddy that we were doing this and I said, oh, I'm going on Lenny's podcast. He says, Lenny who? And I said, it begins with an R. I don't know. Everybody just calls him Lenny.
9:16 Speaker 00 And so the fact that you are yourself, you don't play a character, you're not a douchebag, you know, you're just a person being, trying to be successful in the world and help others, right?
9:27 Lenny Rachitsky? Yeah.
9:28 Speaker 00 That's a very powerful thing. And I think one of the things that is insidious about influencers, hustle porn stars, part of the business model
9:39 Speaker 00 is creating the perception of superiority.
9:45 Speaker 00 Right? The reason Grant Cardone and Ty Lopez and all these douchebags pose in front of planes and all this garbage, right? Is they want you, Kardashians are the queens of this, right? They want you to look at them and go, oh, wow. Don't I wish that I was them? And so these folks are in the create and monetize envy business. And you're the opposite of that. And I think the legendary educators in the native digital world are the opposite of that. Anybody who's creating separation, anybody who's putting themselves above, anybody for whom there must be, I must be the leader and you must be the follower. You know, that's the business model of a massive amount of people in the native digital world,
10:29 Speaker 00 right? And we reject that. And I know you do.
10:34 Lenny Rachitsky? Absolutely. We've already gone way off track, but I love it. I'll just say one thing and then we'll get back on track. The reason I called my newsletter Lenny's newsletter is because that was the default recommendation Substack gave me when I signed up. They're just like, call it, call it this. And I'm like, okay, because I don't know, I didn't have no plans to actually be doing this long term. And then it just stuck. And then I brainstormed for weeks. I'm like, I need a real name on this thing. And I just couldn't think of anything that I liked. So I'm just saying, all right, I'll just roll with it. And then when the podcast launched, I tried so many ways to call it something else, so that it would push the whole naming in a different direction was about me. But I couldn't think of anything better. So I'm just rolling with it at this point.
11:12 Speaker 00 Well, and the interesting thing is, even though the branded, the branding of the shit has your name in it, it's not about you. That's the irony.
11:25 Speaker 00 Right? Meghan Markle gets canceled. Why? Because it's about her and it turns out she's infinitely uninteresting. I've consumed enough of your content to know that the, the cool thing is, yeah, it's called Lenny, but it's actually, you know, you, you are not trying to impress all of us with how awesome you are in front of a fucking plane or a bunch of, you know, scantily clad people or, or I don't know what.
11:53 Lenny Rachitsky? It's true. Well, I'm enjoying this podcast. You're very kind to me. Let's talk about the, kind of the meat of what I want to chat about, which is your bread and butter, category creation. It goes without saying, you're a big fan of creating your own category versus what most people try to do, which is try to compete in an existing category. So just to kind of lay a little foundation, can you just explain what this actually means, this idea of category creation for people that have heard this idea and this term, but don't really know what it means?
12:22 Speaker 00 It turns out that in business, most people, and in life for that matter, make a unquestioned, unconsidered, undialogued, unthought of decision that they don't know they made.
12:39 Speaker 00 And the decision they make is, what I'm going to do is I am going to compete in a market with demand, with a better product slash service slash brand, maybe a better business model, maybe a, a better set of growth hacking ideas that I learned on the Lenny podcast. And when the world gets
13:11 Speaker 00 my better,
13:13 Speaker 00 the world will beat a path to my door.
13:16 Speaker 00 And if you go on to Amazon right now, Lenny, there's roughly a hundred thousand marketing books. And I think I'd have to double check, but I think there's about 60 or 80,000 business strategy books.
13:30 Speaker 00 And of course, me and my collaborators, we haven't read all of them, but like you and like many of us in business, we've read many of the kind of the, the tomes, the bibles out there. And there's an interesting thing about virtually all of them. That's what they're about. It's about how to compete and win.
13:53 Speaker 00 Well, here's the aha. Nobody legendary ever did that.
13:59 Speaker 00 Not a one. We all know who Bob Marley is. We don't know who the 17th greatest reggae musician or band in the world is.
14:12 Speaker 00 We all know who Pablo Picasso is. We don't know who the fifth greatest cubist artist is. And so wherever you look in life, whether it's in the business world, people who drive social change, artists, creators of any kind, the people that we tend to admire the most are the people who broke and took new ground.
14:39 Speaker 00 And the aha here is the category makes the product. The category makes the brand. The category makes the company.
14:51 Speaker 00 So I'll give you the data and then I'll fully answer your question. So here's the data. We did an analysis for our first book where we studied every venture backed tech company in the US from 2000 to 2015. And we asked a question that, to the best of our knowledge, had never been asked before. And we went to Stanford and we asked a bunch of professors this question and they said, "We don't know this. You're going to have to do it yourselves." So we did and incidentally had it peer reviewed and published in the HBR. And if you've ever gotten data published in the HBR, then you know what it's like to have a journalistic proctology exam. Anyway, here's the net of it.
15:34 Speaker 00 In tech market categories, on average, one company earns 2/3, 76% to be exact, of the total value created as measured by market cap and/or valuation. So not market share, which is important. Market cap as measured by the value of all the companies in the category. So you take a category, you add all the company's value together, and you say what percent goes to the leader, the category queen or king, and what percent goes to everybody else. One company, 2/3 of the economics.
16:12 Speaker 00 So the aha here, Lenny, is when we make the unquestioned, unconsidered, undialogue decision that we didn't know that we made to compete, we have unwittingly said, "We're going to fight for the 24%." And it's the distinction or delta between create demand and capture demand. So, we prefer the term category design, and I can explain why design instead of creation. We don't have anything against creation, but creation creates a confusion in people's mind.
16:54 Speaker 00 When people hear category creation, because most people in business, most people in tech are strongly oriented to product, what they think you said is first to ship a product that has X features. So when most people say category creation, that's what they think. They say, "Ah, Facebook didn't create the social media category, MySpace did." Or if you've been around for a little while longer, GeoCities did, right? And so, category creation, category design does not equal first to ship a product with a set of features. Okay, so what does it equal? Here's the aha.
17:34 Speaker 00 Just like you can design a product, just like you can design a company, culture, or business model, you can actually design a market. And in so doing, you create a new distinction in value for people that didn't exist before. I'll give you a simple example. If I could own any product in the world right now, I think I'd probably want to own Purell.
18:08 Speaker 00 And there's a great thing about the company that makes Purell. The company's been around for a very, very long time. And they're owned by the original family that created the company.
18:23 Speaker 00 And their original problem they were solving is it was a husband and wife team. And they were working in a factory. This was 80 plus years ago. The company, by the way, is called Gojo Industries. Gojo and Gojo is a portmanteau putting their two names together. I think it was, maybe it was Gloria and Joseph, or I'd have to double check the husband and wife team's email. Excuse me, but the company's called Gojo Industries. And I think the granddaughter runs it today, if I'm not mistaken. Anyway. So the gal, the wife said, this bar soap is disgusting. It's full of crapola, it's hairy, it's full of man nastiness. So
19:08 Speaker 00 the solution to washing your hands called a bar of soap was a disgusting, inappropriate solution for her. So she reimagined the problem, not as how do I wash my hands? But as how do I wash my hands without a disgusting bar soap? And Gojo Industries created a whole new category called liquid soap. And in most restaurants, most corporate bathrooms, most airport bathrooms, if you start paying attention, you'll see the Gojo logo on the squeezy thing that you pull when you go to get the soap.
19:53 Speaker 00 So unlike most innovators and entrepreneurs who get obsessed with the solution, and I understand why. We all love our shit. We all love our product. If you want to talk to me about our shit, I want to talk all about it. We could do a 12 hour deep dive on all your content and how you built the newsletter and the pot, right? And you'd love it. It'd be great. We all do, because if you're a creator of any kind, entrepreneur, innovator of any kind, you love the thing you're creating, of course. However, Gojo.
20:21 Speaker 00 Focus on the problem, not just the solution. So they say obsessed with the problem. And then they ask a different question, which is, how do I wash quote unquote, "my hands in the absence of water?" And of course, the answer to that question is a new category called hand sanitizer. And the dominant brand, of course, is Purell. And so the aha here is the company that designs the space and gets it to Tippett scale. And when I say designs the space, what I mean is specifically gets a meaningful percentage
21:03 Speaker 00 of the world to agree with their definition of a problem set, which then leads to their definition of a solution set. The company that does that at any kind of scale wins. And so the number one question for any entrepreneur or any creator at all is, do I want to compete for 24% of an existing market category? Or do I want to create my own where if I can execute, I will earn 2/3rds of the economics? That's the decision that most entrepreneurs make that they don't know that they made.
21:44 Speaker 00 And at its heart, category design is about the most radical kind of differentiation. So most companies actively seek comparison. If you go to, well, most, if you go to many software companies' website right now on their homepage, you'll see a Gartner report or a Forrester report on their homepage.
22:13 Speaker 00 You'll see ads and/or content that say, "Here are three competitors and a list of features," and there'll be 25 features. And then there's us, and there'll be 125 features. And they're actively inviting comparison. You even hear it in ads. If you listen to what marketers say, Lenny, we say the stupidest shit. Don't take our work for it. Anyway. And so the legendary innovators over time, they did not compare their innovation to the past. They broke and took new ground. They wanted to be irreplaceable.
22:55 Speaker 00 They wanted to be so much value in the minds of customers that not only were the switching costs horrible, switched to what?
23:07 Lenny Rachitsky? To kind of follow this thread a little bit. Companies that you're pretty familiar with, maybe just like a rapid-fire sharing of their category to give people kind of a concrete sense of what does even mean to like have a category.
23:20 Speaker 00 Okay, let's go.
23:21 Lenny Rachitsky? It's becoming obvious that they basically all came up with a different category that they wanted to win. And so Gong comes up as an example. I don't know if you know about Gong. It's like a, I think they do. So it's basically like, sales analytics is what they pitch is like, "This is the first thing you can ever do to understand how your sales team is doing." Is there anything you know more about their approach?
23:42 Speaker 00 Yeah, I know the space very, very well. And they did something incredibly smart. So they were a little later in the space than some others. And so there were a whole bunch of companies in today, which you could broadly refer to as the revenue space. Right? And, you know, in the spirit of full disclosure, I'm familiar with Clary, I'm good friends with Andy, I know the team. I've done some work with them. So, you know, all disclosure. Clary and a handful of others in the beginning started to create the space that ultimately became RevOps.
24:18 Speaker 00 And the interesting thing that Gong did, very smart, was as RevOps started to emerge, they were smart enough to realize that revenue was going to be a big, new, important space. That CRM didn't actually do it, that ERP didn't actually do it, BI didn't actually do it. And so there was this sort of emerging set of thinking around, we need a different approach to revenue. They were smart enough to realize that if they went for the whole enchilada, it's not credible from a startup that you're going to go build, that you're going to show up and say, we have a suite that's equivalent to that of SAP, just for this other area.
24:57 Speaker 00 So they picked off a very tight part of a broader emerging category, and they executed incredibly, and they dominated that part. But here's the mistake they made. In all new mega categories, they start like this. This is exactly what happened in CRM. I could walk you through the history if it matters. But there were companies in support, there were companies in help desk, there were companies in sales, there were companies in marketing, and there were a whole bunch of sub-niches underneath that. There was a point in time in the Salesforce automation category, when that was a standalone category, that some of the hottest companies in that category
25:39 Speaker 00 were sales configurator companies, a further down niche. And so as these mega spaces emerge over time, no one company can fulfill the needs of a customer, and so there's all these niches. The mistake that Gong made, as well as the vast majority of others in that space, is they stayed in their micro niche. So the strategy in the beginning that was genius, and exactly what you should do as a startup, all of a sudden, when they didn't expand and set the agenda, the design for the big category, they got fucked.
26:24 Speaker 00 Because now they're niched. And there's a big learning in this, Lenny, which is, if you're a company that's already up and running, and you're winning, and let's say you're becoming the category queen in your space.
26:39 Speaker 00 Every entrepreneur, every CEO faces a fascinating moment if they become successful in the first five years or so, which is they realize their biggest barrier to growth going forward is their current category.
26:56 Speaker 00 Because you can only be as big and successful as your market category.
27:02 Speaker 00 And so you have to continuously expand the vision for the category and continuously build on that. And if you don't, and somebody else frames, claims and names the bigger agenda, as has been the case, and look, I'm biased, as has been the case with Clary. Clary's crushing everybody in this space right now. And
27:28 Speaker 00 the gongs and all the other players are now in this horrible position.
27:34 Speaker 00 Which is they basically only have two choices. One, they can stay in their niche, which is what most players do, and they argue best of breed. Oh, well, we're the best, you know, revenue carb dingulator, and you could go buy an end-to-end revenue platform, but, but if you do that, you won't get the best functionality in the carb dingulator space, so buy our revenue carb dingulator. That doesn't work. Microsoft proved it over 30 years ago, and we can talk about that if you want. So you either stay in your niche and get diminished over time, or you up-level and you go to play for the whole enchilada.
28:14 Speaker 00 The problem is for them and all the others in the space who didn't do that, if they were to do it today, well over a year after Clary did, they're just a Clary copycat.
28:30 Speaker 00 And so basically, you either go compete with Clary for who can be the category king, or you stay in your niche and get diminished over time. And if you're gonna go compete with the company that is laying down the category design that's picking up the most momentum for the overall market, you better know how to do. You know, a sort of fifth Dan Black Belt category wars.
28:58 Lenny Rachitsky? Kind of following that thread. There's like a bunch of threads I'd love to follow, but something I definitely wanted to touch on is you have this concept of the better trap, which is where most people go, where they try to be the better solution in an existing category. And just to kind of reinforce that point, what have you seen? What have you learned about just why that is often and maybe always the wrong approach?
29:19 Speaker 00 Okay, so let's take a very current example. Threads. We just wrote about this. When Threads came out,
29:28 Speaker 00 and I can show you all the headlines if you want to see them. New York Times, never mind TechCrunch, you know, all these places. Twitter killer, Twitter killer, Twitter killer, Twitter killer, right? And at the time, there's all this discussion of Musk and Zuck having a UFC cage fight and da, da, da, da, da, da. All right, so there's all this buildup into the launch of Threads. And there's all this supposed Twitter hate and everyone, oh, quote unquote, everybody's leaving Twitter. All right. So Threads comes out. What happens? Threads surpasses. GPT is the fastest growing app ever. Oh, now the headlines, Lenny, are coming. This is it. Zuck's a genius. It's incredible.
30:14 Speaker 00 And oh, by the way, this sits inside one of the newer stupid axioms in Silicon Valley.
30:24 Speaker 00 So this is a side note. But when somebody says something in Silicon Valley that enough people think, oh, yes, that's smart. They just parrot it. They don't actually think about it. So there's a, there's a current thinking in Silicon Valley, and this was real loud as Threads was coming out. This was the reason why Threads was the Twitter killer.
30:46 Speaker 00 What you need, Lenny, is brand and distribution. That's what you need. Especially distribution. Well, I would assert to you that Threads had the greatest distribution advantage of any new piece of software ever launched. If there's another one that has a greater distribution advantage, I'd like to know what it is.
31:10 Lenny Rachitsky? No, that seems right. Seems right.
31:13 Speaker 00 Okay. So massive distribution. Incredible. Easy up and on. Incredible. Free product, not even freemium. Free. Awesome. And Facebook Meta. You tell me, one of the 10 most powerful brands in tech?
31:31 Lenny Rachitsky? Absolutely.
31:32 Speaker 00 How many, how many users does Facebook have today, Lenny? Do you know?
31:35 Lenny Rachitsky? Over a billion. Might be more.
31:37 Speaker 00 Okay. So how many billion person apps have there been in the history of apps?
31:42 Lenny Rachitsky? None.
31:43 Speaker 00 Right.
31:43 Lenny Rachitsky? I think.
31:44 Speaker 00 Legendary brand. The greatest distribution advantage in history.
31:49 Lenny Rachitsky? Yeah.
31:50 Speaker 00 What happened? It cratered. It's gone. I mean, it's still there, but nobody's there.
31:59 Lenny Rachitsky? They're launching their web client soon, so they have another shot.
32:02 Speaker 00 Oh, yeah. Now, why? Why did that happen? Why did one of the richest people in the history of the world, who's potentially one of the smartest people in the history of entrepreneurship in tech, fail so miserably when the entire world said he was going to kill, quote unquote, Twitter? And after the initial, quote, "success" of Threads, everybody said that's exactly what was going to happen. And now all those experts are surprisingly quiet. So the legendary Kevin Maney said that category design is a new lens on business. It's a different lens. It sits next to the product lens. It sits next to the competition lens.
32:47 Speaker 00 But it is equally important. So here's what happened with Threads.
32:54 Speaker 00 They attacked an existing, well-known, well-understood, incredibly well-defined problem with a direct copy. They even were celebrating that it was Twitter just better. I mean, they said virtually those words. So, known existing problem with a known existing solution that was "better" and integrated with the rest of the meta shit.
33:26 Speaker 00 Quote, "Everybody checked it out and everybody went away." Why? Here's the aha. Problems create categories.
33:40 Speaker 00 And you either have to, A, solve a new problem, or B,
33:49 Speaker 00 reframe, name, and claim an existing problem in a, and I'm going to use these words on purpose, very different way. And if you reframe the existing problem such that people see it in a different way, that's when they'll be open to a new solution. But the mistake is, the emphasis is on the wrong slable. The emphasis is on the product. Because we live in a world where, just like the availability of oxygen, we believe the best product wins. Zuckerberg is going to blow in excess of a billion dollars on Threads, and it will fail.
34:29 Speaker 00 It already has failed. Because you can't take an existing problem with an existing solution, launch exactly the same shit, tell the world it's better, and have the world embrace it. Because the problem makes the solution the other way around.
34:51 Lenny Rachitsky? So classic advice along these lines is if you're say 10 times better than the existing product, you have a good chance at getting people to care and having success. Is there a line of just like it's the same thing, but 10 times better? Or do you have to, in your experience, reframe? And I want to talk about that, but.
35:07 Speaker 00 Let's just look at the evidence. So we could agree that Jeff Bezos is not a dumb person. Yes?
35:13 Lenny Rachitsky? Yes.
35:15 Speaker 00 So do you have an Amazon Fire phone?
35:18 Lenny Rachitsky? I don't.
35:20 Speaker 00 Neither do I. Why not?
35:23 Lenny Rachitsky? I'm very happy with my iPhone.
35:25 Speaker 00 Right. And so Bezos launched a better product and nobody bought it. And the reason nobody bought it is the problem. And therefore, the solution that you think you're solving with your iPhone is solved with your iPhone.
35:44 Speaker 00 Uh, when was the last time you enjoyed a Red Bull Cola?
35:47 Lenny Rachitsky? Hmm, not once.
35:49 Speaker 00 Yeah. So Red Bull made exactly the same mistake that, uh, Zuck just made with Threads.
35:56 Speaker 00 What Red Bull believed was we built one of the greatest brands in the world, which they have, but they didn't understand why. The category made the brand, not the other way around. Energy drink made the category, right? So they go, oh, great. We can put our brand on anything and it'll sell. So let's make cola.
36:16 Speaker 00 They lost a bazillion dollars.
36:19 Speaker 00 Um, it's reported that Microsoft lost somewhere between 400 and a billion dollars in Microsoft stores. Did you ever go to a Microsoft store, Lenny?
36:28 Lenny Rachitsky? I've walked by them in the mall and I don't think I've ever entered.
36:32 Speaker 00 Well, they look exactly, if you, if you remember, they look exactly like an Apple store.
36:36 Lenny Rachitsky? Yeah.
36:37 Speaker 00 And Bomber famously told the team, when the Apple stores took off, he famously told the team, go to the Apple stores, study everything they're doing, and let's copy it exactly. It's Google that shit. It's out there. Well, it didn't work. Why?
36:56 Speaker 00 Because you can't attack an incumbent category queen unless you frame, name and claim a new or different problem. Because when the existing problem is well understood and the existing solution is well understood, there's no need for a new solution. Even if people, quote unquote, hate Twitter, didn't do anything to Twitter. And now Zuck's gonna have to write off probably over a billion dollars on threads. And the funny thing is, Lenny, this just keeps happening over and over and over.
37:37 Speaker 00 Venture capitalists in the next five years will blow at least half a trillion dollars in the AI space alone on Me Too, demand chasing, existing category competing startups that have a 10x better product. No one cares. And we're all gonna, look, we're all gonna sit here and watch them do it. And we, category pirates and those of us in the category design world, will say, told you. And they're just gonna keep doing it. More importantly, you know, because the big companies in many cases can afford to continue
38:21 Speaker 00 to fail and make this mistake. The tragedy in this is how many legendary innovative products never got to see the light of day. Because the inventor, the creator, the entrepreneur, believed in the product, but didn't know that every solution has to fit into a problem of value for people.
38:47 Speaker 00 And so their innovation went nowhere.
38:51 Lenny Rachitsky? Let's talk about how to actually go about designing a category. You've used this phrase a few times and that may be the best lens to approach it. If not, we can go at it from a different direction. But this idea of framing, naming and claiming.
39:05 Lenny Rachitsky? How do you do that? What's that process like?
39:07 Speaker 00 Great question. So it starts somewhere where most people don't want to start. And that is the first law of category design is thinking about thinking is the most important kind of thinking. Thinking about thinking is the most important kind of thinking. So if you're going to think about thinking, we have to sort of define thinking. Now, the minute I start down this path, there's a meaningful percentage of people whose eyes roll and go, here comes some bullshit, right? Just tell, tell me how to do the SEO, Lenny. Where's the SEO or where's the whatever the fucking tactical thing is, right? Okay. So the first thing we have to do is break down thinking.
39:50 Speaker 00 So Roger Martin is considered to be the greatest management thinker, or certainly one of them alive today. We were lucky enough to have him on the podcast when his last, most recent book came out, which I, if I'm remembering correctly, is called The New Way to Think. People call him the new Peter Drucker. And here, he describes it as effectively as anyone I've ever heard. And he, at a high level, and this is me paraphrasing, so give me some license, but he's the source. At a high level, there's two kinds of thinking. Reflective and reflexive.
40:23 Speaker 00 And now this is my editorializing. What most people think is reflective thinking is actually reflexive thinking. So what's reflex versus reflective? Reflex is simple. You go for an annual checkup, yes?
40:40 Lenny Rachitsky? I should be.
40:43 Speaker 00 Well, have you ever had a doctor whack your knee with the little pink?
40:45 Lenny Rachitsky? Oh, yeah.
40:46 Speaker 00 And, and your knee goes whoop?
40:48 Lenny Rachitsky? I do.
40:49 Speaker 00 And, and she's testing your reflexes. And that's an involuntary thing. When you're sitting on the doctor's table and your legs are hanging like a little kid and she goes whack, your knee just, your leg just does this twitch, right? So that's a reflex.
41:05 Speaker 00 And reflexive thinking is very, very powerful. You have a driver's license, I'm guessing?
41:10 Lenny Rachitsky? I do.
41:12 Speaker 00 And when was the last time you were in a vehicle, driving?
41:15 Lenny Rachitsky? Uh, yesterday.
41:17 Speaker 00 And if you're out on the road, driving and somebody cuts you off, what are you likely to do?
41:24 Lenny Rachitsky? I get a little, a little upset and then I, I keep driving.
41:29 Speaker 00 But I would assert, Lenny, you do something before you get upset.
41:31 Lenny Rachitsky? I guess I try to avoid, uh, I try to avoid hitting this car.
41:34 Speaker 00 Yes. And maybe you swerve, maybe you hit the brakes, maybe you do both.
41:38 Lenny Rachitsky? Yeah.
41:39 Speaker 00 My point is this, the car cuts you off. And we instantly, no thinking, react in order to save our lives, not damage our vehicles, not hurt anybody else. We didn't think about that. We literally just reacted.
42:00 Speaker 00 Well, that's the way people think about most things.
42:07 Speaker 00 So I say to you, hey, Lenny, let's talk about guns and abortion and immigration rights in America.
42:14 Lenny Rachitsky? No thanks.
42:14 Speaker 00 Now, you have opinions about those things, right?
42:17 Lenny Rachitsky? I do.
42:18 Speaker 00 As do I. Most people don't challenge their own thinking. Most people say, don't go, now, why do I think what I think about abortion? Where did I learn that? What do I really think about abortion? What do others think about abortion? Are there smart people in the world that I, that I admire, who are more educated and experienced in this field that have meaningfully different opinions than my own? Oh, there are. Okay. Well, why is that? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. We don't fucking do that. We say, our opinion on abortion is the opinion on abortion. And in the United States of America, in the political domain, we say, and anybody who thinks differently is trying to kill America. Right?
43:01 Speaker 00 That's not thinking. So reflexive thinking is, hmm, what do I really think? Why do I think that?
43:11 Speaker 00 And in the business world.
43:16 Speaker 00 Most people unconsciously assume the future is a continuation of the past.
43:27 Speaker 00 That's not what legendary entrepreneurs do. Legendary entrepreneurs don't just think, they know the future is going to be different.
43:39 Speaker 00 Because they're designing that different future. And the problem they are focused on matters to them so much that the fact that the problem continues to persist makes them batshit crazy.
43:54 Speaker 00 Right? RJ at, or is it RJ or JR? I can't remember now. At the founder of Rivian, obviously Musk at Tesla. These guys are obsessed. They're like, it drives them insane. They don't understand why we're not all in EVs already.
44:12 Speaker 00 And so, my friend Mike Maples, the legendary venture capitalist from Floodgate, says, "The greatest entrepreneurs are visitors from the future telling us how it's going to be." And the reason many of them are so irascible is because the fact that the present is not already at the future that they see makes them insane. And so, the point being, legendary entrepreneurs and creators make the future different. They literally are in the design different futures business.
44:45 Speaker 00 So, can I tell you a story?
44:46 Lenny Rachitsky? Please.
44:48 Speaker 00 So, we're friends and we've done some work with the guys who created Lomi. And Lomi is the first kitchen appliance in 20 years to earn a spot on the kitchen counter.
45:08 Speaker 00 So, A, it's one of the fastest growing new consumer items in the last 20 years. And B, if you think about your kitchen counter...
45:17 Speaker 00 Do you have a toaster?
45:19 Lenny Rachitsky? Yep.
45:21 Speaker 00 Coffee maker?
45:22 Lenny Rachitsky? Yeah, I don't drink too much coffee, but we do have one.
45:25 Speaker 00 Any other devices on the kitchen counter?
45:27 Lenny Rachitsky? We got a rice cooker.
45:30 Speaker 00 Okay.
45:30 Lenny Rachitsky? And the rest is hidden, hidden away.
45:33 Speaker 00 Perfect. So what's Lomi? Lomi is the category designer of the smart home compost, composter.
45:42 Speaker 00 So imagine a device that's sort of one and a half or twice the size of a, of a good sized toaster. And what Lomi does is you take your food scraps. And it turns out that depending on whose numbers you want to believe in America, we throw away somewhere between 40 to 60% of our food.
46:02 Speaker 00 And it turns out that food garbage, food waste is some of the most damaging to the environment.
46:10 Speaker 00 Okay, so what does Lomi do? You take your food scraps, you dump it into Lomi, you fill that shit up. Lomi's got a button on the front, you press that button. And what used to take three to six months to compost gets composted in three to six hours.
46:28 Speaker 00 And it even, this is weird, it smells good to me.
46:34 Speaker 00 Okay, so Lomi did not say that we're better garbage, that we're different garbage, that we're better recycling. What they said was, we are a different way of solving this huge problem.
46:53 Speaker 00 And they use both personal motivation, nobody likes throwing out garbage, nobody likes a big mess in their kitchen, et cetera. And an altruistic vision, which is, and oh, by the way, if we do this, we will do something that governments heretofore have not been able to do, which is take a massive amount of environment hurting gases out of the atmosphere. And it turns out because of global climate change that we're creating more and more sand and we have a dirt crisis. Well, Lomi dirt has been shown to be amongst the most nutrient rich dirt in the world.
47:37 Speaker 00 So here is a company with a breakthrough technology that truly makes a difference in the world with a business model that allows them to build a highly profitable, high-growth business. And the way they got there was by designing a new category and showing the world why by making room in your tight kitchen for this new device, you'll make a difference for your family and the world. And if all they had done was what by way of example Dean Kamen did when he launched the Segway, which is, isn't this cool? Nothing would have happened.
48:17 Speaker 00 So my point is, the Lomi guys designed a product, a company, and a new market category. They created demand out of nothing for a, I think the average price is around 400 bucks. The sum total of the market for smart home composters when they launched was fucking zero. And their vision for the new category was so compelling, Jay-Z was one of their first investors.
48:49 Lenny Rachitsky? Wow. Okay, so I have their site up. So thinking about this framework of frame it, name it, claim it, they framed the problem in this unique way of like, is it the framing of the problem or framing of a solution? How do you, that framing step was the best way to think about that?
49:07 Speaker 00 So there's something in category design called languaging, which is the strategic use of language to change thinking. And a mistake that a lot of entrepreneurs make is they use old language to describe their new thing. And we can't use so much new language that nobody knows what the fuck we're talking about. So we have to meet the category where it is and bring them forward.
49:34 Speaker 00 But we have to create new language. And can I share with you one of my favorite, most recent favorite category design stories in this regard?
49:41 Lenny Rachitsky? Please.
49:43 Speaker 00 So you've been on an elevator, yes?
49:46 Lenny Rachitsky? Yes.
49:47 Speaker 00 Have you ever looked at the floor and seen a logo on the floor of the elevator?
49:51 Lenny Rachitsky? Hmm, I, I can't recall. I imagine it.
49:55 Speaker 00 Well, if you do, you will more than likely see than this name, Otis.
50:00 Lenny Rachitsky? Hmm, yeah.
50:01 Speaker 00 Otis Elevator.
50:02 Lenny Rachitsky? Yeah.
50:02 Speaker 00 Most people don't know why Otis is the category queen of elevators. Well, here's why. Alicia Otis invented the elevator.
50:14 Speaker 00 Now, pre Alicia, there were no skyscrapers.
50:21 Speaker 00 Because how could you get to the top floor? How could you build the top floor? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
50:28 Speaker 00 So when he creates the elevator,
50:33 Speaker 00 there's no known problem for it to solve. So he demonstrates it. People think it's cool. He shows it at like fairs and shit because the big problem with prior elevators was they would crash. And so he built this safety system to catch them if the wiring would crash. And the category name he actually used, Lenny, he called it the safety elevator to address the current problem in the space, which is, I don't know. People still went, okay, that's interesting, but like, why do I need a safety elevator? It's a solution with no problem.
51:14 Speaker 00 So what does he do? Linguaging. And in category design, one of the breakthroughs is this thing called a point of view, which helps you frame, claim and name a problem and educate the world on why they should move from the way it is to, we call them Frodo's, from to, a new and different way. So Alicia has to make the market. There's zero demand. It's what, you know, many of our smart VC friends call a zero billion dollar market. Right? Which is what you want. So what does Alicia call it? The vertical?
51:53 Speaker 00 Railway.
51:57 Lenny Rachitsky? Beautiful.
51:58 Speaker 00 And people understand what a railway does. It moves people and shit this way. And he said, well, great. We've now got a vertical elevator that moves people and shit this way. And if you have a vertical elevator.
52:11 Lenny Rachitsky? Vertical railway?
52:12 Speaker 00 A vertical railway, thank you.
52:15 Speaker 00 You can have a new category of building.
52:21 Speaker 00 This is no different than anybody today, for example, in the technology space who's building a new part of the technology stack for AI. So if you've got a new important security layer for AI that enables a new kind of highly secure AI application. From a languaging perspective, if you just use existing languaging, you'll be like Alicia in the beginning where people go, eh, it's really cool, man. Fucking A didn't think that was technically possible. Wow. It's like you're you've broken gravity, dude. Incredible. Eh, don't know why we'd ever need this. See ya. And he goes, wait a minute, wait a minute. What if it was a vertical railway? Oh, well, what could we do with a vertical railway?
53:07 Speaker 00 And so
53:09 Speaker 00 this is why thinking matters. The way you think about the problem,
53:14 Speaker 00 the way you frame, claim and name the problem. One of the core tenants Lenny in category design is listen to the words. Listen to the words.
53:27 Speaker 00 And when you listen to the words, you will hear things that you don't normally. Right? And so he created new languaging, what in category design is called a point of view, to frame, claim and name a problem, which is how do I move shit up and down versus across land? And in so doing, open people's, the aperture of people's minds created what you could think of as new mental scaffolding for a whole new kind of innovation. And thanks to Alicia Otis, we have tall buildings.
54:00 Lenny Rachitsky? I really like this idea of languaging. Are there any other examples come to mind of awesome examples of languaging in action that worked out?
54:07 Speaker 00 I got a bazillion of them. Okay, another one of my favorites. When Starbucks first starts, a coffee is 10 cents.
54:17 Speaker 00 So you sit there and you go, well, we can't make money at 10 cents. That doesn't make sense, right? Unit economics don't work for what we're trying to get done. If the ASP in the industry is 10 cents, we want to have an ASP of 3 bucks. Fuck. Well, here's the aha. It's very hard to charge 3 bucks for a thing that everybody currently pays a quarter for if you call it the same thing. So they create new languaging. They teach, they literally teach consumers new language.
55:00 Speaker 00 That's why you and I walk into Starbucks and say, I'd like a double grande latte, please. Well, 25 years ago, that was not languaging that you and I used. And they use it as a mechanism for radical differentiation and radical value slash price differentiation. And they made up the fucking word. It sounds kind of Italian, venti, you know? But the truth is, by the way, it's a milkshake, but that's a whole other conversation. They're the number one milk seller in the country. They're a milk company, not a coffee company, but that's again, a whole other conversation.
55:42 Speaker 00 The point being, if you want to charge 3 bucks for something that heretofore has been 10 cents or a quarter, change the language. And you know it's Starbucks language. If you, like where I live, there's a shit ton of new hipster independent coffee shop type places where they, you know, paint the Mona Lisa in your latte before they give it to you and all that shit. If you walk into one of those hipster places and ask for a double grande latte, the super hipster gal or guy behind the counter with the nose ring and shit is going to give you a bit of a drizzle because you're using Starbucks languaging in their location. And that's the other breakthrough.
56:25 Speaker 00 And this is really important in the technology industry. The company that creates the languaging for the category wins.
56:39 Speaker 00 Oh, you see that today, OpenAI.
56:44 Speaker 00 Not that long ago, you did not hear the term large language model. Correct?
56:51 Lenny Rachitsky? Correct.
56:51 Speaker 00 That was not a term we were talking about?
56:53 Lenny Rachitsky? That's right.
56:55 Speaker 00 And today, the entire industry is talking about LLMs.
57:00 Lenny Rachitsky? Yeah.
57:01 Speaker 00 Here's another thing that they created.
57:05 Speaker 00 Training data.
57:08 Speaker 00 Well, those of us who've been around for a long time, we understand what data is. We know what a database is. We know what data in motion is. We know what data at rest is. We know what structured data is. We know what unstructured data is, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. We know, even if I'm not a data expert by any stretch, but I've been in the industry for 37 years, I know some shit about data. We'd never heard the term training data.
57:29 Speaker 00 And I'm still frankly looking for a breakthrough in languaging to describe it to people. Because I think when most people realize the difference between data slash content and training data,
57:45 Speaker 00 there's a massive breakthrough that can occur there. The languaging is still not sufficient, but we're getting there. New languaging creates new thinking. And a demarcation point in language creates a demarcation point in thinking, which can create a demarcation point in perceived value. And she who changes and or creates net new value perceptions wins.
58:19 Lenny Rachitsky? This episode is brought to you by Round. Round is the private network built by tech leaders for tech leaders. Round combines the best of coaching, learning, and authentic relationships to help you identify where you want to go and accelerate your path to get there, which is why their waitlist tops thousands of tech execs. Round is on a mission to shape the future of technology and its impact on society. Leading in tech is uniquely challenging and doing it well is easiest when surrounded by leaders who understand your day to day experiences. When we're meeting and building relationships with the right people, we're more likely to learn, find new opportunities, be dynamic in our thinking, and achieve our goals. Building and managing your network doesn't have to feel like networking.
59:03 Lenny Rachitsky? Join Round to surround yourself with leaders from tech's most innovative companies. Build relationships, be inspired, take action. Visit round.tech/apply and use promo code Lenny to skip the waitlist. That's round.tech/apply. I think you've made a very compelling case for why people should design a new category to give people one more tactical tool for coming up with and figuring out the category they want to go after and framing it and even naming it. You mentioned this idea of having a point of view. Maybe that's the best way to approach this question, or maybe there's another framework of just like, how can people best think through and spend time thinking about what this new category
59:47 Lenny Rachitsky? they should be creating ends up being?
59:50 Speaker 00 Great question, Lenny. So, two things, at least. So first, spend more time on the problem than the solution.
1:00:03 Speaker 00 So there's a very early-stage security startup I'm working with right now in the AI space that's doing absolutely mind-boggling things. And the founders have incredible backgrounds with large transaction systems and deep security and just an incredible company. And I had a call yesterday with the founder and some folks on the product team, just getting an update on where they're at and this and the other. And we're sort of starting to want to talk to people externally. We raised a seed round, VCs are coming, they're very interested. So anyway, we're sort of slowly starting to want to come into the world and begin to have a conversation.
1:00:46 Speaker 00 So the founder, CEO, sends me a text yesterday and says, "I'd like you to, if you're open to it, have a call with so-and-so." And he's a very important person, knows a lot about our space, blah, blah, known him for a long time, da, da, da, da, da. Great. And so I said, "Well, what's the purpose of my..." It sounds wonderful, but why? What's the purpose of my conversation with so-and-so? And the founder literally said to me, "I would love it if you would be willing to invest some time in listening to some of our customers to hear from their perspective, what the problem is and what the solution could be, not just from me and our team."
1:01:27 Speaker 00 That is a founder who's obsessed with the problem.
1:01:35 Speaker 00 So that's the first piece. The second piece of advice I'll give you comes, I mentioned Mike Maples. So he's got a very powerful way of kind of framing this. He calls it backcasting as distinct from forecasting. You're nodding your head, you're familiar with this.
1:01:53 Lenny Rachitsky? Yeah, I've read this in Wellington, the show notes, it's amazing.
1:01:56 Speaker 00 Yeah. So here's the idea. What most people do is you and I are entrepreneurs. We have this idea for a product, this problem we can solve. We think we're going to be bazillionaires. We think we're going to help a lot of people. We think we're going to have a lot of fun. And so we have at it. And whether we realize it or not, the mental scaffolding we use goes like this.
1:02:22 Speaker 00 Lenny and Christopher are sitting here now. We have these big dreams. We think, let's say, five years out into the future. What do we want to, oh, we want to, why don't we go through all the dreams, right? Great. And then we ask ourselves, most of this is subconscious, and then it shows up in business plans and other things. What do we need to do to get from here to there?
1:02:48 Speaker 00 Right? Have you ever done any backcountry hiking, Lenny?
1:02:51 Lenny Rachitsky? Yeah, I have.
1:02:52 Speaker 00 Yeah. So if you and I were going to go on a four or five day trip in the Sierras, we would have a start point, right?
1:03:00 Lenny Rachitsky? Yeah, absolutely.
1:03:01 Speaker 00 And we'd know where we were coming out, right? And we'd have waypoints along the way, yes?
1:03:06 Lenny Rachitsky? Yeah.
1:03:07 Speaker 00 And we'd, we'd, because we knew we were going to be out four days or six days or whatever, we would try to plan our food appropriately.
1:03:13 Lenny Rachitsky? Absolutely.
1:03:14 Speaker 00 And the whole plan. Would be predicated on, we're gonna start here and we're gonna end here. And what do we need to do to get from where we start to where we end? Yes? Now, when going on a backcountry hike, that's a very smart fucking thing to do. Cause if you've ever been on a backcountry hike and you're four days in only to realize you don't have enough food, that's an experience you don't want to recreate. Okay.
1:03:40 Speaker 00 Turns out that while that's highly effective for a hike, it is intergalactic disaster for a startup.
1:03:49 Speaker 00 Here's why.
1:03:52 Speaker 00 Your point of reference is everything. Thinking about thinking is the most important kind of thinking. So when we do it that way, mentally, we are standing in the present, which is an extension of the past. And we're saying, what do we need to do to go from this present to the different future we want? And what are the obstacles in the way?
1:04:19 Speaker 00 Here's the mental scaffolding. So that's forecasting. Here's backcasting. We do an exercise. We abandon everything. In category design, you get taught to what's called reject the premise. So I reject everything about the way that it is, all of it.
1:04:41 Speaker 00 You and I now envision this future five years out and everything's gone incredibly. It's exceeded our expectations. We make that true in our minds. We write out, we brainstorm out, what's it gonna be like? What kind of technology are we selling? What are we doing for customers? How big's our company? How many people will hire?
1:05:01 Speaker 00 And then we say, okay. Standing in that future, five years out, looking back to the present, what did we do to make this different future happen?
1:05:15 Speaker 00 That's category design. That's how you unshackle yourself from the past. See, one of the biggest disservices in our industry is this word disrupt. Oh, that's gonna go disrupt the insurance industry.
1:05:30 Speaker 00 Well, if you're disrupting something, by definition, your reference point is the something.
1:05:40 Speaker 00 And when your reference point is an existing thing, your reference point is the past. If we want to be able to think in unconstrained ways about a radically different future, the more we drag the past forward, the worse off we are. So what Reject the Premise teaches us is, let's forget everything we know and start fresh. My friend, a legendary designer, John Beelenberg, does this course on innovation and design with kids in university. And he does this multi-week exercise. And the objective of the exercise, Lenny, is, "Design a bicycle." That's the objective. And there's only one design point. It cannot be ridable.
1:06:24 Speaker 00 And the reason John makes them do that, his philosophy, he calls it thinking wrong. That's his sort of version, if you will, of Reject the Premise. The reason for it is, when you take away the premise, "It must be ridable," you open up the aperture for legendary new thinking. Radically different possibilities, radically different futures, right? And so this is the mistake that many, many entrepreneurs make, is they, whether they realize it or not, what they're doing is incremental better, and they're fighting for market share, fighting for existing demand with something that's incrementally better.
1:07:05 Speaker 00 And the reality is, that's why most entrepreneurs fail. Now, you can fail doing the exponentially different. It sounds medically insane to say, "What you want is a $0 billion market." However, as crazy as it sounds, it's the only thing that leads to meaningful success. And the proof is in the data.
1:07:34 Lenny Rachitsky? Yeah, you talk about this in your writing that on the surface, it feels very hard and expensive to design a category, build a category, convince everyone this is a new problem. But your point is there's no other option, really, if you want to build a large business. Is that right?
1:07:49 Speaker 00 Correct. And the other thing is people say, oh, it's really expensive and it takes a lot of time.
1:07:54 Speaker 00 As compared to what?
1:07:57 Speaker 00 So you've lived a lot of your life in the product world, yes? As have I.
1:08:04 Speaker 00 Well, if you ask smart VCs, if you ask Brian Roberts at Venrock, the number one healthcare tech investor in the world, I believe he says it's eight to 10 years for a product to really have have some maturity and be really stable and da, da, da, da.
1:08:22 Speaker 00 I don't know whether he's right or not, but he's a super smart guy. Right? We know, how long does it take to create a legendary culture? How long does it take to get a legendary innovative business model to really hum? You know, so, so, ah, it's really hard. Well, so is building a product. So is building a company. So is raising VC. So is doing sales. So is doing marketing. So is doing HR. So you, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like, well, if you want to be easy, go work at the fucking DMV. That's kind of point A. Point B is the reality, Lenny. When you look at it, the vast majority of innovation comes from startups. So it feels like only big companies can do this.
1:09:05 Speaker 00 Listen, my collaborator, partner, Eddie Yun, is the Obi-Wan Kenobi of category design in the global 2000 arena, and particularly on the consumer side. And he will tell you that most of these major companies, and he's worked for, you name a big food company, you name a big beverage company, he's worked for many of them.
1:09:29 Speaker 00 They fail miserably. And so the reality is six people
1:09:36 Speaker 00 with a small investment from a rich uncle can stand something up
1:09:43 Speaker 00 that has the potential.
1:09:46 Speaker 00 To be worth $3 trillion because that's what Apple is.
1:09:52 Speaker 00 And I sat there with Don Valentine and asked him about why he signed the check to Steve and Steve. And he said, it was the stupidest use case he ever saw. The use case was a stay at home mom, keeping track of her recipes on the Apple personal computer. This is the stupidest use case ever. However, Don could see the potential in the category.
1:10:19 Speaker 00 And in the guy's willingness to go get after it.
1:10:23 Speaker 00 And so for a VC, if you're going to raise money.
1:10:28 Speaker 00 The VCs who invest in early stage mass potential companies are the ones who see your different future.
1:10:40 Lenny Rachitsky? Kind of along those lines. I had this note that you had this quote around product market fit. And it's kind of this hot take that product market fit is a, is a very dangerous idea. I'd love for you to speak to that because I think most people are in the opposite camp that it's the only thing that matters. Why do you think it's such a dangerous idea?
1:10:59 Speaker 00 So, and there's a bunch of these product myths. Product led growth is another one.
1:11:06 Speaker 00 But let's go to product market fit. And God bless Marc Andreessen. He's the guy that framed it and Kevin just wrote a really super thoughtful piece on why it's backwards and I'm happy to send that to you if you want. Kevin Maney, genius. Here's the aha.
1:11:24 Speaker 00 Again, category design principles, listen to the words product. Market.
1:11:31 Speaker 00 Fit.
1:11:33 Speaker 00 Product market fit. Now let's think.
1:11:38 Speaker 00 Okay, so what there is for me to do is find a way to fit my product into a market.
1:11:48 Speaker 00 Pretty
1:11:50 Speaker 00 simple way to determine or to distill product market fit, right? And what product market fit has come to mean is we're gonna, we're a brew pub. You and I want to start a craft beer place like everybody else on the West Coast. And we're going to make a bunch of samples and shit. And we're going to feed those samples to our friends and to our ideal customer profile that I learned from Lenny. Right? And if enough people amongst my friend group and I, my ideal customer group say, that's a yummy IPA. I like it. Then we're going to build it.
1:12:30 Speaker 00 And then if people start buying that IPA, we have quote unquote, and these are the terms, these are the words people use. Achieved product market fit.
1:12:43 Speaker 00 Okay. Well, threads achieve product market fit faster than any product in the history of the world.
1:12:49 Speaker 00 Here's the aha.
1:12:53 Speaker 00 Categories make products, not the other way around.
1:12:58 Speaker 00 And so what you want is you want to design a market category for your product, not fit your product into a market category.
1:13:14 Speaker 00 And the problem is our industry, like many others, but the tech industry is full of product bigots.
1:13:23 Speaker 00 Because they really, really, really, really, really believe like they believe in the availability of oxygen. The best product wins. They really believe it. And they believe what marketing's job is, is could you go put a demo on our website? Let's get a demo. Can we get a viral video that's a demo? Right? Cause once people see how much better, faster, cheaper, smaller, bigger, whatever, our thing is they're going to buy it. And they don't. What they buy. Is a new insight around a problem slash opportunity that requires a different solution. That's what they buy. Here's another simple example. This is what I want to hear right now a lot. What we need now is a story. We need a story brand. We need a, oh, we need
1:14:07 Speaker 00 a, we need, the number one thing you can do in marketing as a startup founder is to share your startup founder journey. Share your journey. Right? This is all this shit we're hearing, right? We've been hearing this bullshit for a while. Well, guess what? No one gives a fuck about your journey. They really don't. You know what they care about? Themselves. Their problems, their needs, their opportunities. For our book, Snow Leopard, we did the first ever comprehensive data science research ever done, using Nielsen data to study nonfiction books. And we know that because that's what Nielsen told us. And we had to sign an NDA
1:14:49 Speaker 00 that would choke a horse in terms of what we can say and can't say about the data. But one of the things we wanted to understand is what categories of business books sold, and which categories didn't, and why. We can get into all that if you want, but here's the aha. Guess what the number one category of business books, nonfiction books is by a mile?
1:15:12 Lenny Rachitsky? Hmm. Oh, my God. Sales, marketing, marketing, sales. No.
1:15:18 Speaker 00 Personal growth.
1:15:19 Lenny Rachitsky? Okay, that makes sense. Self-help.
1:15:21 Speaker 00 And self-help. And number two, personal finance. Biographies are like way down on the list. So, the point being, no one cares about our product. No one cares that it's 25 mega flips faster, cheaper, whatever than the net. They don't care. You know what they care about? Them.
1:15:44 Speaker 00 Their needs, their wants, their problems. And categories are about customers and their wants, needs, problems and opportunities. Branding and marketing is about our product. And the greatest innovators in the world don't stop at innovating product or technology. They design a new innovative market category where they stand alone.
1:16:10 Lenny Rachitsky? We're definitely going long, which I expected. And we've actually gone through most of the questions I had, but I have just a few more to kind of close out the conversation. One is positioning. That's something you hear a lot about. How do you think about positioning versus category? Are they essentially the same thing? Is positioning just a way to phrase and describe your category? How should people think about that?
1:16:30 Speaker 00 What positioning today is, or has become, is essentially, how do I tell a story about my shit in a unique way, in a compelling way? That's really what people mean when they say positioning. The part they never stop to consider, again, listen to the words. Positioning, as it relates to what? Because you quote unquote, again, listen to the words and fucking think.
1:17:10 Speaker 00 You position against competitors, right? How do we position against the competitors? That's a phrase people use. So the question is, what are you positioning against? And the answer to that question, almost all of the time, is competition. And so if you're doing positioning in that context, you just decided you're fighting for 24% of the demand designed by somebody else. And we think in the tech space where one company earns two thirds of the economics,
1:17:50 Speaker 00 if that's your starting point, you fuck yourself from the start. And so, to put it simply, positioning in the modern context is for losers. That is to say, people who are fighting over the 24%.
1:18:12 Speaker 00 So that's positioning.
1:18:15 Lenny Rachitsky? I love it getting spicy over here.
1:18:17 Speaker 00 Well, it's factually correct. People go, oh, okay. So you mean to tell me that in tech, one company doesn't take two thirds of the economics?
1:18:29 Speaker 00 Okay, believe that. And you can believe gravity doesn't exist. It does. But you can believe whatever. You can believe that Bigfoots are installing misters on 5G towers to make us all sick. If you want, you can believe anything you want. It doesn't make it true. Right? What's true is one company wins and everybody else gets fucked. That's what's true.
1:18:55 Speaker 00 Look at any space you want. You want to go back to your list? We can go through the list. Right? And so positioning has become sort of category design for the cowards. Right? It's like, well, I don't know that we could really be as radical as to create our own space. So let's just see if we can carve off our little niche over here. Okay, great.
1:19:20 Lenny Rachitsky? A big part of positioning, just to kind of expand on this a little bit, is differentiation, differentiating yourself. People always talk about the importance of differentiation. Do you see that as the same kind of potential pitfall? Or is that also, or how do you think about differentiation?
1:19:33 Speaker 00 Okay, so this is really, really powerful. So in category design, we don't compete, period, full stop.
1:19:42 Speaker 00 At the brand to brand or product to product level. Category designers do compete.
1:19:50 Speaker 00 But not against the product, not against the company, not against the brand. Category designers compete against the status quo.
1:20:00 Speaker 00 So here, let me be specific. There's a category called cycling.
1:20:06 Speaker 00 You look like you might be a biker, Lenny, are you?
1:20:09 Lenny Rachitsky? Very, very casually, mostly an e-bike.
1:20:12 Speaker 00 Those are really fun, aren't they?
1:20:14 Lenny Rachitsky? They're so fun. Mountain bike, yeah.
1:20:15 Speaker 00 So, but you've been on a mountain bike, you've been on a road bike, you've gone out with friends, done this, right?
1:20:20 Lenny Rachitsky? Yeah.
1:20:20 Speaker 00 Anybody who bikes on any kind of a regular basis has been in an accident. And if you bike on a real regular basis, you've been in an accident with a vehicle that was not caused by you. That's true for every person I know that rides a bike on any kind of regular basis, myself included. So, all of a sudden, a new category shows up.
1:20:43 Speaker 00 And that new category is called indoor biking classes. And the category designer is a company called Spinning.
1:20:53 Speaker 00 And they say, hey, biking's great. It's an incredible source of exercise, but you don't want to get killed doing it, so come take a class.
1:21:01 Speaker 00 And what they're doing when they do that, they're competing category to category, not brand or product to brand. And that's a strategy that's called damming the demand. So, what does a dam do? There's a bunch of water running in a direction. A dam takes that water, stops it, and moves it, does something to it, interrupts it, and changes it. So, here's what Spinning does. They say, "Why risk your life on a bike when you can take a wonderful class and not have to worry about it and get your exercise?" So, what dam the demand, Lenny, is, is you thought
1:21:46 Speaker 00 you wanted this, but what you really need is that.
1:21:52 Speaker 00 Then what happens? The next iteration in that space comes from Peloton. Again, when Peloton launches, they don't say, "Hey, our bikes are better than Spinning bikes. Our bikes are 12 mega flips faster, cheaper."
1:22:09 Speaker 00 They don't do any of that shit. They don't shit on spinning. They don't attack spinning. They don't attack road biking, mountain. They don't do any of that stuff. They say, "Why drive to the gym when you could do it at home?"
1:22:24 Speaker 00 They dam the demand for spinning. They don't compete against it. And they reframe the problem called, "How do I get a great workout in a group environment without getting killed?" And they achieve that massive success. And I can give you many other examples. The mistake is competing directly product to product. The enemy is the status quo. That is to say, the way it is now. So if you go back to Lomi, the enemy, the way it is now, the status quo is, A, nasty garbage in your kitchen that stinks and smells and gets all over the floor that you have to drag to the green bin and then, and then, and then the squirrels and the fucking raccoons eat it. That's the personal upset.
1:23:09 Speaker 00 And the environmental one is we're destroying the planet. No, by the way, rather than destroy the planet, why not create this super awesome compost dirt, right? And that's in category design, we call that a from to, a Frodo. And so category designers are leading the world from the way it is to a new and different way. They're not saying my carbon angulator is better than their carbon angulator. Here's a simple example. This is another reason the word disrupt doesn't work. So Les Paul is the innovator of the electric guitar.
1:23:41 Speaker 00 Today, most guitar players have an electric guitar and an acoustic guitar. Matter of fact, most guitar players have more than one. Very few guitar players, some, but very few said, "Oh, now that the electric guitar is invented, fuck the acoustic guitar." Very, very rare. So the net new category called electric guitar, as opposed to the prior category acoustic guitar, actually increases the overall guitar TAM. Doesn't disrupt shit.
1:24:16 Speaker 00 So in that case, you're actually creating net new demand. In the Peloton example, you're both creating net new demand and you're getting your start. And this is where I think a lot of the discussion that you have and a lot of your work, Lenny, around growth is really powerful because what's really going on when growth works is effective digital damming of demand. That's what's really going on when it works.
1:24:41 Lenny Rachitsky? I think somewhere maybe you wrote this damn the TAM, this awesome phrase. If you haven't, that's a, you should use that. Damming the TAM, adding, increasing the TAM. So you have a number of books you put out. I will link to all these. Play Bigger, I think was your first, Niche Down is the other, and your newest book, I believe is your newest book, is the Law, the 22 Laws of Category Design. So maybe just as a last question, can you just share a few of these laws, maybe two or three of your favorite laws from the book, just to give people a sense of the book?
1:25:09 Speaker 00 I think we talked about law number one, which in a lot of ways is, you know, probably the most important. Another one to think about is something we call the magic triangle, which we've touched on, but maybe not explicitly, which is, in order to build a legendary company, you've got to get product, company, and category right at the right time.
1:25:30 Speaker 00 And so some people hear the category design discussion, and they think it's like somehow pejorative to product, as if product doesn't matter. The reason for category design is because we love the products. Products fail because they don't get category designed. And so I think the aha of the magic triangle is product, company, and category are equal in importance. And so getting that right, I think, is very powerful. Another, and I'm just riffing off the top of my head, and I don't have it in front of me. Another example
1:26:10 Speaker 00 is lightning strikes versus peanut butter. Right? So what most marketers do is they take their marketing budget for the year, they quarterize it, and you know, maybe there's slight variance in the quarters, but essentially it's a similar amount of spend. And they do campaigns, and they do quote unquote, keep the lights on, and maybe they launch a product, and maybe they have a big push around the product, and, and they're trying to drive the funnel, and they're trying to, you know, deliver sales, or deliver leads, or, you know, B2B or B2C, doesn't matter. And that's what they do. And what they don't realize, Lenny, is that approach, that peanut butter approach is predicated on a almost 100-year-old mental
1:26:51 Speaker 00 scaffolding and marketing called a reach and frequency. And what reach and frequency was about, which was, I want to get my shit in front of the most amount of people, the most often possible. And if you listen to sort of a lot of the shysters and hustle porn stars, the Gary Vides and this is the world, "Oh, you're gonna release 400 pieces of content a day on every platform." All this stupidity, right? That's just a reswizzle of reach and frequency from over 50 years ago in the new medium, right? Well, it turns out, reach and frequency doesn't work.
1:27:31 Speaker 00 And so, because the number of marketing messages we get is massive, there are experts who say we get up to 60,000 a day, whether it's logos on coffee cups or ads on the internet and everything in between. And so, it's virtually impossible to stand out in a reach and frequency mode. Now, I'm not saying you shouldn't be doing "keep the lights on" marketing. Of course, you need to do "keep the lights on" marketing. But here's what the lightning strike model in category design teaches us. I'd rather matter for one week a year than be irrelevant for the rest of the year. And so, what we did, candidly, Lenny, was we ripped off Hollywood's model for launching movies.
1:28:15 Speaker 00 We said, "Hmm, what if you did that as a software company? What if you launched a thing, be it a product or something else, the way Hollywood launches a movie?" And so, what a lightning strike is about is getting very, very clear. If you go back to your IPC thing or ICP thing, who's our ideal customer? Where is that customer? Where does she hang out? Ideally, in the digital world first. One of your recent episodes, I was listening to your, the Growth Hacker Gala, how she went on to Reddit and stuff. That's a well-known strategy, and I love that strategy. Go hang out where they are, put something provocative and engaging in front of them, and matter in that moment.
1:28:59 Speaker 00 So, the idea of a lightning strike is, if you're in our target audience for that day or that two days, we're gonna be all over you. We're gonna be undeniable. And so we, we put a disproportionate amount of our effort. If we're in B to B, probably one to two lightning strikes a year. If we're in B to C, two to three, one a quarter. If you're like a really big company, it's, it's hard to pull off one a quarter. If you're a smaller company and much more than that, it's not a lightning strike. It starts to blur back into peanut butter. But that is a very powerful concept on the execution side for marketers. That's different.
1:29:42 Speaker 00 The other thing I'd say, and probably should have started here. So I'm a three time public company CMO. I've advised over 50 venture backed companies in, in category design and marketing. Guess what I've never seen in a marketing plan ever?
1:29:58 Lenny Rachitsky? What's that?
1:29:59 Speaker 00 Word of mouth. This boggles our minds, those of us in category design, because WAM is, was and always will be the most powerful form of marketing. And in the native digital world, WAM can spread in a way that was never possible on the analog world, for all the reasons we all understand. So if you take the concept of a lightning strike, then you take the concept of a category point of view that is all about frame naming and claiming a problem. And then there's one other concept I'll introduce. It sits next to your ideal customer profile. It's what in category design we call super consumers.
1:30:38 Speaker 00 So it turns out that in most categories, roughly eight to 10% of the buyers are responsible for the vast majority of the profits. And more importantly, they are the zeitgeist. They are the thought leaders in the industry. They are the customers, the users, the purveyors of whatever the thing is that others look up to as sort of being the ones to admire, the ones to aspire to, the best practices, et cetera, et cetera. That's a super consumer. Okay. So in category design, when you understand who your supers are, i.e. your ideal customer profile, you understand where they are, primarily in the native digital world. How do we go hang out? And remind me what that gal's name was? I thought she was awesome.
1:31:22 Lenny Rachitsky? Meltem, Meltem Koran Berkowitz.
1:31:25 Speaker 00 Mel, Melsum?
1:31:26 Lenny Rachitsky? Meltem, M E L T E M.
1:31:29 Speaker 00 What a name. That's a great name. Anyway, I thought Meltem was awesome. She's absolutely on, on, on point. So we know who our ideal customer, AKA super consumers are.
1:31:40 Speaker 00 We know where they hang out in the native digital world. We have a radically compelling, different point of view about framing, claiming, and naming a problem that if we do effectively, will resonate with them. That's why we spent time crafting that POV, right? So we evangelize the problem. We participate in a native digital community where they already are. And we do it from the perspective of not a marketer, not a seller, an educator. We're teaching people about a new and different way to think about an existing problem or a problem they hadn't thought of that when they have an aha moment because we articulate it well with our point of view. They go, oh, tell me more about that problem, right?
1:32:21 Speaker 00 As they do that, we take an education standpoint, mental kind of framework to it. We open them up, we participate, and sooner or later, somebody says, huh, tell me again what you do, and bam, away that we go. And here's the aha. When you understand supers, you understand the targeting, you understand a radically different point of view, reframing the problem, presenting a radically different solution. Well, guess what? It's the ultimate growth engine. And you can grow for a very small amount of money. You could send email to 300 people and drive a breakthrough in sales. Why?
1:33:05 Speaker 00 Because when you take this approach, you're not just driving near-term revenue, very, very important, you're driving WAM. A big part of why you want to have a point of view that can be articulated very quickly is marketing's job is to put the right words in the right mouths and to get that WAM to scale. And so when we have a category POV that's about them, not us. Remember, brands are about us. Categories are about customers, right? We care about what they care about. And so when you have a powerful category POV... That drives WAM. And when you do that in the native digital world,
1:33:50 Speaker 00 you get a tremendous amount of uplift from native digital viral WAM. And category design is the only business strategy whose primary execution focus starts with WAM.
1:34:06 Lenny Rachitsky? What an awesome way to wrap up our conversations. Basically, a very tight go-to-market strategy is what kind of what you just shared. For folks that want to dig further, I'll just share a few of the places they could learn more and then you'll, at the end, I'll ask you where to point people. But you have an awesome Substack, categorypirates.substack.com. You have your books, which I think maybe the best way to, I guess you tell me is to find them is go to yourlastname.com, lochhead.com. L-O-C-H-head.com. Is that right?
1:34:33 Speaker 00 Yeah, and of course, you can go to categorypirates.com.
1:34:36 Lenny Rachitsky? Okay, even easier. Amazing. So we have the lightning round coming up. Is there anything else you want to share as closing words or advice before we get to our very exciting lightning round?
1:34:47 Speaker 00 Yes, I do.
1:34:48 Lenny Rachitsky? Okay, let's do it.
1:34:51 Speaker 00 So I'm 55 years old, Lenny. I started my first company when I was 18. I got thrown out of school. I don't have a GED. And I've been in the tech industry the whole time. And the first thing I would share is anything's possible. Don't, don't listen to anybody who shits on you. I have a chat on as much as you could possibly imagine. I have four or five different learning differences, ADHD, dyslexia, dyscalculia, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I was told I couldn't read. I was certainly told I couldn't write. I've written 14 number one fucking bestsellers, et cetera, et cetera. And so my, my point is if you're somebody for whom
1:35:35 Speaker 00 you want to spend your professional time.
1:35:40 Speaker 00 Working on the exponential different as opposed to the incremental better, which I gotta believe is a meaningful percentage of the people who consume your shit. If you want to work on the incremental better, incremental better is important. I want the Boeing engineers working on the incremental better. I don't want the air traffic control system that's the exponential different. No, and a lot of incremental improvement over time can be exponential. So I don't, you know, if you're, if you're a product manager and you're running a highly successful product with a massive install base and you're looking at your next rev and you're trying to figure out of the 472 features that you could build, you know, what are the 26 that really matter? And you want to go talk to your customers to find out what those incremental improvements
1:36:25 Speaker 00 are and to stack rank them and do all that good, you know, PRD, MRD, IUD, all that shit. There's a big place in the world for all of that. It's incredibly important. That's not category design.
1:36:38 Speaker 00 So with that said,
1:36:42 Speaker 00 I think, Lenny, we are at the greatest time in history for our industry. I think all the indicators show that the amount of innovation that is going to happen in the next five years will eclipse the amount of innovation that happened in the last 20 years. It's accelerating. AI is insanely exciting, dangerous, concerning. Do we need to focus on the downside? Do we need to be smart? Do we need to be thoughtful? Do we need to learn? Do we need to work with regulators and legislators? Absolutely. Could it go horribly? Sure, but that's always true. AI feels a little bit different, but it's always true. And for the record, the Luddites are always wrong.
1:37:26 Speaker 00 The point being now is the greatest time in history to be a creator, to be an entrepreneur, to be a marketer. I've been a marketer for my entire adult life. It's never been greater than it is right now. And so here's sort of the big thing that I would share. If you're somebody for whom you want to make an exponential difference, you want to innovate, you want to create new value where there wasn't, you want to have a legendary career where you can look back on your career and go, you know what? I was part of this and that, and I was on this team.
1:38:00 Speaker 00 Now's the greatest time in history. And what I would say to you is the future needs you. Most people are not working on the exponential different. And so the future of our world requires that the innovative people, that the entrepreneurial people stand up, take advantage of these incredible technologies. And, and a lot of people, particularly in my age group, Lenny, shit on millennials, Gen Z, what are lovingly referred to as native digitals. Absolutely not. I'm inspired by them. And I think the next generation of our entrepreneurs will be our greatest generation of entrepreneurs.
1:38:46 Speaker 00 So my point is now's the time. The future needs you. Don't listen to any of the bullshit. I don't care what the boo birds say. Absolutely go for it because there's never been a greater time to design and dominate new categories of innovation than right now.
1:39:02 Lenny Rachitsky? I love that message. Your just passion and energy for creating and inspiring is comes through really clearly in all your writing. And so I love hearing it in person. With that, we reached our very exciting lightning round. What are two or three books you've recommended most to other people?
1:39:21 Speaker 00 Richard Bach, Illusions. And then in terms of business books, I'll share with you one because I know people recommend all the same shit. I'll share with you one that I think it's may still be in print, but if not, it's easy to get. Mark McCormick's What They Don't Teach You At The Harvard Business School.
1:39:42 Speaker 00 So on the personal side, Richard Bach, Illusions. And for one that you may not have heard of, Mark McCormick, What They Don't Teach You At The Harvard Business School.
1:39:55 Lenny Rachitsky? What is a favorite recent movie or TV show that you really enjoyed?
1:39:59 Speaker 00 Oh, right now we're watching Designing Anna or Inventing Anna or whatever that's called. So that's been fascinating to watch. I think it's been incredibly well done.
1:40:10 Lenny Rachitsky? What a wild story, that one. What is a favorite interview question you like to ask candidates when you're hiring people?
1:40:18 Speaker 00 So there's actually two, and I'll start with the second most important interview question, which I think is the most important question, but in a job interview setting, for me, it's the second most important. And that is, is there anything else?
1:40:35 Speaker 00 And you know, this is a podcaster. I end every single one of my podcasts with, is there anything else? And the interesting thing about that question, you can spend three hours with somebody talking about very important shit. You can think you got all the detail. You could have asked all the questions about the technical architecture and the campaign and the distribution, and I don't know what, right? And at the very end, you say, hey, Susan, you know, before we wrap, is there anything else? And often, Lenny, the most important thing for that person to communicate comes out then. Like, it happens so often, it's bizarre. I use that in medical situations. Family members in the hospital going for an operation. Okay,
1:41:19 Speaker 00 doc, tell me. I tell you all this shit. Is there anything else? I will tell you that eight times out of 10, the most important thing about the surgery with your loved one will come after that question. I will even use it during a conversation as we transition from various different points. So in an interview situation, maybe you're asking somebody about their background, you might say, well, is there anything else about your background? I think you think I should know. It's the most powerful open question. But in an interview, job interview situation, it's my second favorite. My first favorite is, so Lenny, are you legendary?
1:42:01 Lenny Rachitsky? You want me to answer that?
1:42:03 Speaker 00 You can, if you like or not.
1:42:04 Lenny Rachitsky? No, I will.
1:42:06 Speaker 00 But the answer to that question
1:42:08 Lenny Rachitsky? What are you looking for?
1:42:09 Speaker 00 is always radically illustrative. I'm not looking for anything. I'm looking for your answer. Some people will say yes, and they'll tell you why. Some people will say, well, you know, that's a big word, and or whatever they're going to say. But it is a purposely provocative question with one of, I think, the most powerful words in the English language, because I want to get a read on that person and how they respond to a purposely provocative question about themselves.
1:42:41 Lenny Rachitsky? Amazing. Okay, just a couple more questions. What's a favorite life motto that you like to repeat to yourself or share with other people?
1:42:50 Speaker 00 If you're lucky enough to make it to the top of a mountain, throw down a fucking rope.
1:42:57 Speaker 00 And you know, for me on that, Lenny, I'm somebody who has had and continues to have a radical amount of love and support in my life.
1:43:08 Speaker 00 You know, when I was young, I started with nothing and I got thrown out of school and I didn't know until I was 21, because when I was young, learning differences weren't a thing. And by the way, the way most of the world and education system deals with learning differences is completely fucked. But that's a different conversation. It's definitely improved, but it's nowhere near what it needs to be. And so I just think that we should never be held back by those views of others.
1:43:38 Speaker 00 Right? And so we need to be unencumbered.
1:43:42 Lenny Rachitsky? I love it. Final question, kind of a dumb question, maybe to lead to something fun. You're a category pirate. Do you have a favorite real pirate?
1:43:51 Speaker 00 I have actually a lot of favorite pirates. I'll tell you about one of them.
1:43:59 Speaker 00 His name is Tony Etherington, but virtually nobody calls him Tony. Virtually, everybody calls him Doris. And Doris is a legendary surfer and surf explorer from the Gold Coast of Australia. And I went on my first ever boat tour surf adventure in Indonesia with Tony. And
1:44:29 Lenny Rachitsky? I like to giggle.
1:44:30 Speaker 00 There's a horrible story I'm thinking of telling you. Anyway, you haven't been with a real pirate until you've been in stormy seas at night with Doris, smoking cigarettes, drinking Jack Daniels in the in the bridge, thinking maybe we're gonna die, but this guy's probably not gonna let that happen. And so Doris Etherington would be one of my top pirates of all time. And he's got the voice and he's got the attitude. When I was having problems surfing, he would say to me, "All right, this is what you do, mate," always smoking a cigarette. He's like, "I'd smoke longer before I could have ciggies up there."
1:45:11 Speaker 00 He goes, "You paddle out, wait for the biggest wave, paddle into it, and get right up on it."
1:45:21 Speaker 00 And so in our world, get right up on it is has become an expression for, you know, kind of go for it. So I think we can all heed the words of Doris and get right up on it.
1:45:36 Lenny Rachitsky? I love that this question led to something fun and interesting. Chris, thank you so much for being here. This conversation was entertaining, insightful, spicy, fun, funny, everything I hoped it would be. Two final questions. Where can folks find you online if they want to learn more and keep reading? And then two, how can listeners be useful to you?
1:45:54 Speaker 00 Probably categorypirates.com is the simplest spot to go. How listeners can be useful to me?
1:46:02 Lenny Rachitsky? Yeah.
1:46:04 Speaker 00 It's what we talked about a moment ago. The future needs you. And the future needs the people
1:46:13 Speaker 00 who have the courage to make a difference. Because the people who are different are the ones who have made the biggest difference every time. And we live in a world where we are rewarded for our sameness, for fitting in. Our education system teaches us what we're trying to do is find our place in the world. And listen, some of us do. I know people who wanted to be a vet from the time they were kids, and that's the path they chose, and they became vets, and they love it, and they're wonderful people, and they have great careers, and they make a giant difference, and they've always known. And fucking A. And so if you're somebody for whom you have found your place in the world, congratulations, that's awesome.
1:47:00 Speaker 00 And we also know, particularly in the innovator, entrepreneur, creator, marketer world, many of us, there was no place.
1:47:13 Speaker 00 And so my hope is that you either find your place, or if you realize there's no place for you, that you further realize that you can make your place in the world. And fundamentally, that's what category design is about. It's about making a distinct, unique place in the world for yourself, for your product, and for your company, because the people who are different make the biggest difference. And so the great thing that people can do for me is to go into the world and make a
1:47:54 Speaker 00 different place for themselves in a way that delivers massive value to others. Beautiful. Chris, thank you again so much for being here. Lenny, bless you. I love all things Lenny. Thank you. Thanks, Chris. Bye, everyone.
1:48:11 Lenny Rachitsky? Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode.
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