The high-growth handbook: Molly Graham’s frameworks for leading through chaos, change, and scale

Lenny Rachitsky:You've worked with many very high performing founder CEOs Zuck, Sheryl Sandberg, Larry and Sergey at Google, Bret Taylor.

Molly Graham:Google when I was there felt like two PhD students' paradise. Facebook felt like 19 year old hacker's dorm room. 80% of the culture of a company is literally defined by the personality of the founder. Our job as operators or as leaders is to help articulate the culture that they're creating.

Lenny Rachitsky:When a lot of people think Molly Graham, a lot of people think of giving away your Legos.

Molly Graham:You have to grow as fast as your company is growing if you really wanna take advantage both learning to give away what you've gotten good at and move on to the next shiny pile of Legos.

Lenny Rachitsky:Sarah Caldwell, she told me that the framework that helped her most in her career is something that you call the J curve versus stairs.

Molly Graham:So Chamath, when he pitched me on this job, actually drew me a picture on a whiteboard. He said the way a lot of people do careers is a set of stairs. Just walk up the stairs, you'll be promoted every two years, but that is boring. The much more fun careers are like jumping off cliffs and you do fall but then you climb out way beyond where the stairs could ever get you.

Lenny Rachitsky:Today my guest is Molly Graham. Molly was an early employee at Google, also at Facebook where she worked closely with Zuck on building the Jan Zuckerberg Initiative. She also worked with Brett Taylor on scaling Quip which she sold to Salesforce. She's also worked with hundreds of companies and founders helping them grow into the leaders that they want to become. Today she leads Glue Club which is a community for leaders operating in changing, growing environments who wanna develop themselves as quickly as their companies. Molly is maybe most known for her advice to give away your Legos which we chat about along with basically all of her favorite frameworks and mindsets and pieces of advice that she's developed and collected over time for leaders who are going through rapid scale and growth and are just struggling to keep up. I think of this episode as a high growth handbook for leaders who are experiencing rapid scale. We cover the J curves versus stairs approach to career growth, the line model and why you wanna snorkel before you scuba, her six rules for creating goals and building alignment, her rules of thumb for dealing with rapid scale and lots of change, the biggest lessons she's learned from Zuck and Sergey and Larry and Cheryl and Brett Taylor and so much more. Molly is incredible and you will be a better leader after listening to this episode. A huge thank you to Eric Antineau, Ashley Murphy and Sarah Caldwell for suggesting topics and questions for this conversation. If you enjoy this podcast don't forget subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It helps tremendously and if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter you get 19 incredible products for free for an entire year including Lovable, Replit, Bold Gamma, N8N, Linear, Devon, Posthawk, Superhuman, Descript, Whisperflow, Perplexity, Vorp, Granolah, Magic Patterns, Raycast, Chappyrd, Mobbin and Stripe Atlas. Head on over to Lenny'sNewsletter.com and click product pass. With that I bring you Molly Graham after a short word from our sponsors.

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Lenny Rachitsky:Molly, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

Molly Graham:Thanks Lenny, I'm excited to be here.

Lenny Rachitsky:I feel like this conversation was an inevitability. I feel like you're the kind of guest where it's like we will do this someday. I'm such a fan of your stuff. I've read all the stuff you've put out there over the years. We're gonna be talking about the best frameworks and mindsets that you've developed over the years that have been really helpful to you, to founders, to companies that you've worked with to help them with growth and scale and change and all the stuff that comes with success. The way I think about this, I wanna make this the greatest hits of Molly Graham.

Molly Graham:Love it.

Lenny Rachitsky:And so I sourced what I think are the greatest hits from a lot of colleagues that you've worked with, lot of people you've worked with. We've chatted about the stuff that you find other people find most helpful. So we're gonna be going through all that stuff. But let's help people understand why they need, why they should listen to this advice. What's kind of the back story on these frameworks? Where did they come from? Where did you develop them? Tell us that story.

Molly Graham:So first of all Ami Vora, who you have had on your podcast once, said to me that all advice is just someone telling you what they did and I always think about that because I really think that basically what I tell people is I've made every single mistake in the book and then I got to the end of the book and I started inventing new mistakes. So mostly what I feel is that I like sharing my stories because I wanna help people. I wanna help people not make the same mistakes I did and I also wanna help people make sense of what they're experiencing. But I started in tech in 2007. I actually started at Google the week the iPhone launched and a lot of my scaling battle scars come from a couple of experiences. They come from a year and a half at Google which is not very long and Google was pretty big when I was there. It was thousands of employees but my department which was the communications department was 25 people when I joined and it grew in nine months to 125 people and that was really my first experience with just all the sort of things that I still talk about today in terms of what it feels like to grow really, really fast and you know sort of all the tools that I started developing from there. After Google I left and followed Sheryl Sandberg and Elliot Schrage to Facebook and I spent five years at Facebook and I joined Facebook in 2008 and it's important context because it was 80 million users at the time. We were smaller than Myspace. It was 270 million in revenue, 500 employees. It did not feel inevitable. Most people thought we were gonna sell it to Microsoft. When I told people I was going there they were like is Myspace just like a site for college kids? And so I was there for five years and it was a crazy five years. When I left it was 5,500 employees, 5 billion in revenue, over a billion users. So you know a huge amount of what I experienced, what I write about, what I talk about in Glue Club which is the community that I run is comes from you know sort of that rapid scale like Google and Facebook. But I also, I left Facebook right after we went public about six months after we went public and I only like doing jobs that I'm highly unqualified for. I like being on learning curves so steep that I'm scared I'm gonna fall off. And so I left and I wanted to learn what it took to build something from nothing and so I joined this little startup founded by Brett Taylor, a startup called Quip. I joined a couple months before we launched and ran everything that wasn't product and engineering there for him. And that was such a valuable experience to me because the experience of building something from nothing is actually quite different than the experience of you know sort of like holding on for dear life while things are scaling so fast around you. And it really taught me about all the tools and skills you need to go from zero to one and then from one to two and how lonely it can be to build something. And we eventually sold that company to Salesforce. And then again only take jobs I'm highly unqualified for but the last really chaotic scaling experience I had was actually helping Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan start their philanthropy, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. And I basically helped them for the first two years of its existence or its sort of like first full existence. And it's philanthropy sounds calm, you know what I mean? We're like oh giving money away must be so peaceful over there. And CZI grew from I think the week I joined it was 30 people and we like bought two companies that week and it grew to 250 people that year and it was like using every single tool in my toolkit that I had you know taken from every other job that I'd had. So my advice and frameworks like I said come from having made a lot of mistakes but I've also sort of made a personal study over the last eighteen years believe it or not of essentially like what does it take to thrive inside growing and changing companies not just to hang on for dear life you know what does it take to lead in the face of constant change. And really like the other piece that I find truly fascinating is what genuinely makes the difference between something that business that grows but then plateaus versus these generational businesses, the ones that go on forever, sort of the difference between a Twitter or a Myspace and a Facebook, billions in revenue versus hundreds of billions in revenue. So what I like to do is take my experience and use it to help other leaders. I wanna give people tools that work and I also wanna be honest about how hard all of this stuff really is.

Lenny Rachitsky:Amazing. I say this a lot on this podcast. I just love the ROI that listeners of this podcast get. You spent twenty years toiling, struggling, working so hard, learning so much and you're just here, here's all the answers that I've learned and obviously not all the answers but so many things that will help people avoid the pain and suffering that you've gone through.

Molly Graham:That's the goal.

Lenny Rachitsky:Also a couple quick threads I wanna follow here. One is Ami Vora who you mentioned she's now I think head of product at Anthropic, yes, amazing former podcast guest also speaker at the Lenny and Friends summit last two years ago. This other point you just made about how you've always gone to places that have been way beyond kind of your, I forget how you phrased it, but just like beyond your current capabilities almost and like were very difficult. I just had Matt McGinnis on the podcast, he's CEO at Rippling now, CP at Rippling, and he was just, just recorded an episode with him. He had this really powerful quote that if you're ever comfortable at work and feel like oh I got this, you're making a huge mistake, something's going terribly wrong. Yeah, that's not where you wanna be.

Molly Graham:Yeah, I always say I get bored really easily which is both a strength and probably my greatest weakness so I like being scared.

Lenny Rachitsky:Okay so let's actually dive into some of your greatest hits of frameworks and the greatest of all greats when a lot of people think Molly Graham a lot of people think of giving away your legos some people haven't heard of this many people have so let's cover this what is what is this advice of giving away your legos.

Molly Graham:So this definitely started in my experience at Google and then Facebook was like a masterclass in giving away the legos but the way I like to talk about it is basically when I watch leaders and employees go through rapid scale I like to think of like somebody putting down a giant pile of legos in front of like a bunch of kindergartners and then just being like build something and that's sort of what it feels like when you start it's like woah there are so many legos and it's so fun there's a lot of opportunity but it's also kind of scary and overwhelming and you're like there's so many legos what do I do like isn't there an instruction manual hidden under this pile somewhere and but then you like start building and you're like oh okay like you know you build something then you take it apart and then you put it back together and then eventually you start to get momentum and you're like okay it's like I'm building a house I got this it's a house alright great and then you're like I'm good at I'm good at building houses like I was put on earth to build houses and almost like assuredly inside of scaling companies as soon as you're like I feel good at this and I like am I should do this forever somebody's gonna show up and be like be like Kaye it's not a house it's a neighborhood like and you need to like take this house that's kind of half built and you're gonna pass it off to this other person that we just hired and you are going to go build you know dog parks and streets and these other things that are entirely unhouse like and what happens when someone does that to you is you're like wait a minute first of all I've oh I'm not done with this house and I'm I'm worried that this person's gonna screw it up I'm also worried that like building houses is actually the most fun thing and that I'm gonna give the legos to that person and they're gonna have all the fun work and I'm gonna hate building dog parks or you know the dog parks are irrelevant eventually and it's gonna turn out we're in the house building business so you're just like there's this like incredible set of emotions that come territorialistic paired with excitement you know fear paired with joy but but eventually you pass the house off and then you go work on neighborhoods and you're sort of like okay like dog parks I'm good at dog parks I got this and then you know again you get to the like I'm great I was put on earth to build neighborhoods and immediately someone shows up and says it's not a neighborhood it's a country or a city or a world or and it just goes on and on and on and for me the learning this muscle of both learning to give away what you've gotten good at and move on to the next shiny pile of legos and learning that the emotions associated with that are inevitable right like there's no I've been doing this for eighteen twenty years like I still get attacked by these emotions all the time but that doesn't mean that you shouldn't give them away and move on to the next thing that is both the torment of scaling companies which is that the ground is moving under your feet and as soon as you're comfortable someone will make sure that you are uncomfortable but it's also the opportunity which is that you can go from being someone that's good at building houses to someone that knows how to build entire worlds and that is where the legos metaphor came from.

Lenny Rachitsky:That is such a good metaphor and like if you've gone through this you so understand what this is like and what and also just the legos metaphor so good for the different things you build.

Molly Graham:I have a very weird brain that for some odd reason just always thinks in metaphors so it it showed up when I was at Facebook in particular I would find that like every so often I would have to have what I called a legos talk with someone where I would just see them start to ask these questions like why why are we hiring that person or like why what's that team even do and I was like okay we need to have the chat about the legos and then eventually it turned into an article and a whole whole thing.

Lenny Rachitsky:The whole thing and just to be clear the advice is give away your legos this is actually the path to a successful career.

Molly Graham:You know I have watched a lot of people over many years struggle with feeling like they you know they should hang on to the thing that they've been good at and it almost always because you know essentially the nature of a scaling company is that the lego pile is just getting bigger and bigger and bigger however fast that graph is going up into the right I always say that's the graph of how fast your business is growing it's the graph of how fast your company is expanding and it's the graph of how fast your job is getting bigger that means that if you actually just stay and build houses eventually you're literally buried under a pile of legos do you know what I mean you held on to something that's down here and the opportunity is actually to stay on top of that pile and to learn to just give away your job every so often at Facebook I got to a place where I was literally giving away my job every three weeks I was constantly rehiring myself essentially because you have to sort of grow as fast as your company is growing if you really wanna take advantage of the opportunity that comes with companies that are growing and changing quickly.

Lenny Rachitsky:So people are hearing this they're like okay like my rational brain's like I should give away my legos it'll help me it'll be good for my career in real life it's very hard to actually do to like give away this empire that you've built this team that you've built this project that you're like oh this is gonna be my thing I know you have a really fun useful tool to help people deal with that kind of irrational part of their brain talk about that.

Molly Graham:So like I said my brain works in weird metaphors it's a weird brain I was raised on the Muppets and I like to think that this one came from I guess growing up watching weird animals but basically at some point I realized that this emotional roller coaster that comes with scaling with growing with going through change any kind of change people feel that was never gonna go away and that no matter how good I got sometimes I think it gets worse the more senior you get actually cause you sort of feel like you're supposed to know what you're doing and then you just get attacked by this monster that's like who even gave you this job in the first place so basically I externalized all these emotions that come with change into this little tiny monster I named my monster Bob your monster can be named whatever you want him to be named or her or them and Bob is you know Bob's job I like to think his job is basically to make me the worst version of myself he he's the one that's like you know oh that person took all the fun legos and you should go push them over and grab them back Bob's job is you know Bob's the one that wants to send the rage emails at 9pm and you know burn the house down and the thing to learn about Bob is that like I said Bob never goes away Bob is not Bob is someone that you have to learn to deal with but Bob's job is to make you the worst version of yourself so your job is to let Bob do his thing but not act on the emotions like basically all these emotions are normal and they are not useful they are not the compass that should be telling you what to do but the other role I have for managing Bob is you know a lot of people are like oh you're feeling pissed off or tired or whatever like go to bed and wake up tomorrow morning and you'll feel better and the truth is that like you know you're like I wanna send the rage email at 9pm like you still wanna send it at 8am and a lot of these emotions just like do not go away in twenty four hours so my rule of thumb from Facebook was give it two weeks and you know these the emotional the sort of Bob Bob is like these waves and they just roll through so you know you made a new hire or somebody came in or you got layered or whatever you'll have a set of reactions and those reactions again they're normal but they're not useful they're not the ones that you should listen to they are Bob and typically they go away in a couple days you get something new you know some new wave but anything that lasts longer than two weeks is actually something you should pay attention to it's something that you know if it if it's been around for two weeks it's something you should go talk to someone about whether it's a manager or a friend or a coach or someone like that that's the real stuff everything else is just Bob.

Lenny Rachitsky:Is there a rule of thumb for when it actually when you shouldn't give away your legos when it's like okay maybe you should fight back on this on this layering or you know whatever.

Molly Graham:No rule of thumb in general I would actually say embracing change is far better than fighting it and almost invariably you cannot see what is around the corner you know but it is almost always the thing to focus on like a lot of times I think inside of change we get focused on the past and one of the most valuable things you can do as a manager and a leader is help people focus on the future.

Molly Graham:I think I'm sure there are times when people have done it and regretted it and it has led them somewhere you know I think being layered for example you know is one of the hardest things for people inside these experiences where someone brings in a manager above you and I've also seen so many stories of that ending up being a great thing for someone even though they couldn't see it at the time so in general I would just say step into the future and let the past go and see what you're gonna learn and sometimes you'll learn that you know it's time to leave or that it's not this isn't the right pile of legos for you but it'll end up taking you somewhere that's worth exploring holding on to things almost always leads us to the worst version of ourselves

Lenny Rachitsky:It's a very buddhist way of thinking too of just don't don't cling

Molly Graham:There you go

Lenny Rachitsky:Yeah and then I think another part of this metaphor I don't know if you think of it this way is the legos aren't even your legos right they're like the CEO's legos the shareholder's legos so you think they're your legos but no

Molly Graham:It is you know I will say one of the hard earned things is it can feel very like emotional and it can feel very personal it can feel like your work I don't know it can feel like your life is on the line sometimes just your work life you know oh gosh like every this matters so much and one of the things that you learn as you get more senior and just have seen stuff is it's gonna be okay you know like a friend of mine says careers are long and nobody tells you that but like they're long and this moment feels so dire and it feels so hard and it feels scary and it's gonna be okay so yeah it's it is hard to know in the moment and I think like the story is gonna be long and this is gonna be one chapter or maybe even a part of a chapter not a whole chapter so embrace the length

Lenny Rachitsky:To build on that point I've realized this is my fourth career doing what I do now whatever the hell this is I was a engineer then I was a product then I was a founder then I was a product manager and then what the hell I do now whatever this is that's a whole different path

Molly Graham:You don't have a name for it yet Lonnie

Lenny Rachitsky:I don't I hate I hate all the terms people use for this this world

Molly Graham:Somebody called me an influencer and I almost ripped their face off yeah yeah

Molly Graham:Yeah man the most interesting careers are winding and they have starts and stops and failures and successes and control anybody that's you know been through a lot of this stuff control is usually not the the name of the game it's usually just like let's see what happens you know what we're gonna try this and we're gonna see what happens next

Lenny Rachitsky:This is a great segue to another framework that I've heard from folks you've worked with that have been really impactful on them so Sarah Caldwell who's a big deal at OpenAI she told me that the framework that helped her most in her career is something that you call the J curve versus stairs career growth framework talk about what that's about

Molly Graham:I actually gave a TED talk about this one a couple of years ago because I am so passionate about it but I'll tell I'll I that's like you can listen to the like very packaged like eight minute version of this but I will tell you the real story because it's very relevant to a lot of folks that listen to your podcast so I was at Facebook for five years like I said I spent two years the first two years I was in HR and I was doing sort of employment branding and culture work and I was like ready to stay there you know I think I had in my head I was gonna stay there till we went public like that was my plan just because I wanted to like help the company through that moment again in my head so this guy that many people know Chamath Palihapitiya came to me and Chamath ran growth and mobile at the time and he came to me we had lunch and he said in his very Chamath way like you're useless what are you doing in HR like this is stupid like you should come work for me and I and this anybody that knows Chamath is like yes that is actually what he said he manages to like insult you and compliment you in one one sentence so so he you know he gave me all these options on his team and then the last one he said to me was like I'm gonna go build a mobile phone do you wanna come do you wanna come do that with me and I had like four simultaneous reactions the first was like that is incredibly stupid why are we doing that and then it was like is that actually a thing that we're doing and then it was like woah I think that sounds kind of fun and so I left the conversation to Chamath and I went and asked my boss Laurie Gohler who's the head of people at Facebook for a very long time like is this actually something we're doing and she was like I can't believe he offered you that whatever and I and you know I I basically just like could not get it out of my head but it was like didn't make any sense a that Chamath had asked me because I was in HR like what am I doing I know absolutely jack shit about mobile and but you know I had worked on a project with him and he I guess thought I was smart and I I talked to like Cheryl and she was like well that project will be dead in two months but you can do it because you'll still have a job here you know a lot of my dad was like well don't do that you know and anyway a lot of very wise people being like don't do that but I kinda couldn't get it out of my head and my friend said to me you know you've proven you're really good at this sort of like company wide project management and HR why don't you go show yourself how actually good you are like is this transferable so I took the job and I spent the next six months feeling like an absolute idiot like I basically felt like a total jackass all the time I was sitting in rooms with these like brilliant people you know asking the dumbest questions of my life and at the end of the six months Shmoth I think took a lot of pride in giving me like the lowest performance rating I've ever gotten in my life and you know it just felt like falling off a cliff and he you know then slowly I remember I had been doing all these trips to Taiwan because we were actually working on hardware and I at some point came back from Taiwan and I like drew on a whiteboard for him the layout of a mobile phone and trying to explain to him kind of why something he wanted to do was not possible and I so vividly remember walking out of that meeting being like oh like I actually know things and slowly then over the following three years I became an expert in mobile and I basically you know the the phone itself was a giant failure like massive costly failure for Facebook but it let me it was it was not a failure for me it was a huge job that taught me that I was capable of things that I never could have dreamed of if I had stayed in HR it set me up to be capable of taking on things that I didn't know about and so Chamath when he pitched me on this job actually drew me a picture on a whiteboard he said you know look you can stay the the the way a lot of people do careers is a set of stairs you can be boring to use Chamath and stay on these stairs just walk up the stairs and you'll get promoted every two years and your title will change from manager to senior manager to director to senior director whatever and he was like but that is boring and he's like the much more fun careers are like jumping off cliffs basically that you jump off this thing and you do fall you know for a period of time I always like to say it's about six to nine months but then this thing happens where you climb out and you know the picture he drew had this J curve sort of like basically leading you to places that are way beyond where the stairs could ever get you and to be totally honest that has been my experience you know I that taking risks accepting the sort of like terrible fall and that experience of of falling has been more than worth it and I you know part of reason why Sarah mentions it is that I do give this sort of talk to people that are inside of really fast growing companies because it's such an important place to let go of legos and jump off cliffs because there's so much opportunity and it is a place where if you prove to people that you're actually good if they believe that you are the kind of person that they can use to do lots of things you can get these opportunities that you are just so deeply unqualified for but they can take you to places that you could never have imagined you can come out of those companies with skills that you you know no one would ever have reasonably hired you to do but I ended my time at Facebook in product and you know did business development and hardware and a whole bunch of stuff along the way and again nobody would have hired me to do that at the beginning but it's just cause I kept saying yes to things

Lenny Rachitsky:Molly I got tingles listening to the story

Molly Graham:Wow does it sound familiar Lenny

Lenny Rachitsky:It it does and let me I wanna ask is you know jumping off a cliff sometimes you fall and you fall and you keep falling are there any kind of traits of like okay this is one that might be a J curve and worth the risk of falling and this is when you should probably just not let's not do this

Molly Graham:Yeah so you know I just think there are different kinds of fear and you know we talk a lot about this in Glue Club because one of the thing know there's there is like a financial fear right like leaving a job and taking a job that has financial risk associated with it or leaving a job and taking time off is which something I spend a lot of time talking to people about you gotta do the math you know and you gotta sometimes there is the type of fear that is telling you like this is not the right time or I don't wanna be financially anxious for months and months and months I use finances because it's the most concrete example of like a type of fear that you should actually listen to and sometimes you can do the math and you know I always counsel people through that I'm like what is the number that you need to hit so that you're not constantly terrified financially and that number is you know wildly different for people based on their background and their life can you do that you know can you consult can you whatever in order to to to take this leap but a lot of times fear is just you saying I'm scared I can't do this I'm scared I'm not capable of it I'm scared that I yeah I'm scared I'll fail and that's the kind of fear that I think of as like a flashing green light because I'm like that in it sounds like Matt McGinniss said this too where it's like that's the kind of fear that's saying why don't you go prove to yourself that you are actually capable of this or if you fail you'll have learned something too you know what I mean you'll have learned like I took this job in product at Facebook you know as my last chapter there and let me tell you things that people should never fucking hire me to do it's like I am not a good product manager but I would never I'm a I've got a great product mindset I can sit you know in a bunch of chairs and and and hang with the product folks but like I'm not the person that cares about the button do you know what I mean and I would never have learned that I wouldn't have known kind of who I was if I hadn't taken that risk and you know failed or or at least learned that it's not something I wanted to do again so there's many different lessons that come from facing down those fears and and jumping off the cliff you know but mostly what it is is knowing yourself better and knowing where you go next from there

Lenny Rachitsky:That is such helpful advice I also love how you frame this of prove it to yourself that you can do this it's not I'm gonna show them that I can do this because the way you describe this usually it's an opportunity given to you hey can you do this thing we want you to lead this new thing and the fear is like I don't think I can do that and what you're saying here is prove it to yourself that you can or I guess it's also okay maybe I can't and then I'll learn that and then I'll know more about myself

Molly Graham:Yeah exactly I mean one of the greatest gifts in a career is knowing yourself you know and that's a that's a lifelong journey because who you are and what you want changes but that knowledge and that gift like nothing accelerates your self knowledge faster than trying to do something that you don't know how to do and that you're scared of

Lenny Rachitsky:There's this probably the quote I use most on this podcast comes up again in my mind as you talk about this this line that the cave you fear contains the treasure you seek

Molly Graham:Hell yes exactly well said

Lenny Rachitsky:There it is

Lenny Rachitsky:That's great I'm glad I don't overuse it it just feels like it comes up again and again yeah and I think your point about the runway and the finances is such an important one like because that's a very real practical question one thing I did when I took time off I took a year off after I left my job what helped me was I just created a runway goal for myself I'm just like okay here's what it's gonna cost me for six months or a year to live without any income am I comfortable just burning through these tens of thousands of dollars to explore and see something new emerge and so that you just have to feel good okay yes I'm gonna burn all that money

Molly Graham:I haven't heard that one from you so clearly I need to listen

Molly Graham:That's part exactly the exercise you know I you're you're saying runway I say burn rate so like we both were raised inside of companies of tech but but I think it is do the math right what can you afford what and it's both what can you afford and still feel safe because sometime I mean again I think that that is different for everyone but it is such an important set of math to do because a a lot of times that number is smaller than you think it is like then your brain makes it out to be if you have this sort of like existential financial anxiety versus like the it's I always say like specific financial anxiety is much more useful than existential financial anxiety and and you know you know some friends are leaving jobs and I'll be like hey you know your number is 5 k or 10 k a month you have to believe that you can get a consulting gig that will pay you that do you believe that you know and and it's like either yes or no and then okay either we're doing it or we're not you know

Lenny Rachitsky:The other part of this J curve that I think is really important to touch on is this idea of for the first six or nine months you're gonna be at the bottom of the J curve falling still falling

Molly Graham:Yeah

Lenny Rachitsky:And some projects don't last that long and then you're like okay total failure I never emerged from this fall so is there any advice there of just like how do you create that enough space to give you a chance to start to unfold

Molly Graham:Know what I mean like turns out that everyone had that question in their mind but no one was brave enough to ask it so from a skills perspective again regardless of outcome being the person that sort of takes their learning in their own hands learning no matter what and learning to sort of like ask those dumb questions it's a superpower I always say that like actually my superpower is being a professional moron because I'm the one that shows up in a room and is like do we have goals like what what are we doing what why are we talking about this why are we having this meeting and most of the time it's actually what I was hired to do which is bring clarity

Molly Graham:I mean the the most valuable thing that happens as you fall is learning and even on the other side of failure you've learned a shit ton like I always say like most important thing to do in the falling phase and the risk taking land is to learn to embrace being a professional idiot you know basically being the one that shows up at the meeting and is like what are we talking about like what does that word mean because for a bunch of reasons number one you can learn so much and again even in the face of failure no one can take away your learning do you know what I mean but the other thing is that like it turns out that a lot of the questions in the world that you you're sitting in the meeting and you're like this is a dumb question like I'm everyone's gonna think I'm an idiot but then you get brave and you ask it and it turns out it wasn't a dumb question

Lenny Rachitsky:It's so funny I just recorded a a podcast episode with a pm named Zevi who joined Wix and he had this thought he's like a very young pm just getting started and he's like okay I need to be at 10 x pm because that's what they expect of me that's what everyone that is really good that's how I think about ten x pm and then he went into his first meeting and he just failed and he just felt so bad he's like I guess I'm not that 10 x pm they're all gonna see that they're all gonna they think I'm terrible and then he did another presentation a little bit later and people were so impressed with how he learned and evolved and improved and he realized that he needs to be not a 10pm but a 10x learner and that's what people actually expect from someone especially a junior person

Molly Graham:Yeah well and I was having a conversation last night with a friend of mine who has a senior in high school and I was like what what is the plan like what are we telling this senior in high school like to think about relative to their career given everything that's going on with AI and we talked about it a bunch but what we both circled back to was this idea of soft skills and that that actually like the only thing you can really anchor on right now is that you know teaching kids grit teaching them hard work teaching them learning right like learning how to learn loving learning being able to fall in in a world that's changing this fast and and I say this inside of companies too right I always say like what you know today is way less valuable than what you can learn by tomorrow if you're inside of a company where the growth curve is like this what you know today is like irrelevant somebody once told me they rewrote I'm sure this is faster now but they rewrote the entire code base at Google every eight years which means that like if you're not learning if you're not evolving then you become irrelevant and extinct it's actually the whole sort of like underlying point of the legos stuff is that like evolution is the way you stay on top and I think that's more true today than it's ever been

Lenny Rachitsky:And luckily AI is really good at helping us learn totally so that's good thank you AI yeah and this this actually comes up a bunch in the podcast I ask a lot of AI forward people what they're teaching their kids and curiosity is one of the main things people talk a lot about just to like make them help them develop curiosity about the world and yeah yeah okay I feel like I could be talking about this specific topic for a whole podcast episode but I wanna move on to a couple other frameworks that you've developed one is something called the waterline model and another former colleague of yours said this is the most impact impactful thing that was that they've learned from you on their career so talk about the waterline model

Molly Graham:Okay yeah well first of all the waterline model is not mine it's something it's from some business book somewhere but I actually learned it so my first job out of college was leading wilderness trips I led 75 wilderness trips in Patagonia and Alaska for a school called Knowles the National Outdoor Leadership School and Knowles basically teaches essentially leadership and communication skills to students mostly I was mostly leading like college age kids through wilderness expeditions so by having to lead a group of your peers that you don't know anyway the waterline model is something that we taught on Knowles and it's a really really helpful model for understanding how to diagnose when something is not working on a team and so I teach it inside of Glue Club and I'll just quickly explain it so basically the way to think about the waterline model is that a team is a boat and it's a boat on an ocean trying to get somewhere getting somewhere is goals right where what are we trying to build or ship or do and essentially that is going to be harder easier based on whatever the shape of the ocean is right if it's really choppy it's harder it's smooth and calm it's gonna be easy to get to your goals so the the waterline basically asked the question like what is going on under the water what is going on that's making it harder or easier to get to your goals and there's essentially four things underneath the water and they are in a descending order so the surface level is what's called structural things and basically structural things are like goal setting vision roles expectations like kind of the structures you put in place to make a team and a company and a business make sense that touch every single member of the team right below that is something called dynamics which is essentially like how the team works together it's culture it's decision making it's how we resolve conflict all the sort of like interwoven pieces of how teams work together and then below that is interpersonal so basically relationships between two people and all the things that come with us being humans and then the bottom is intrapersonal meaning within one person challenges and issues there and the interesting thing about this model is that most people when we when something's going wrong on a team a lot of

Molly Graham:Times we always go to the bottom we go to the people we're like the people aren't getting along that person's having a rough moment we go to the humans but the rule with the waterline model which is very memorable memorable is you snorkel before you scuba so 80% of problems on teams actually happen because of structural issues or dynamics issues so when there are problems on your team where you start is at the top you start structural issues and one of my biggest things that I say all the time over and over again inside of Glue Club is your only goal as a manager if you do nothing else is clear roles and clear expectations that's it because honestly like I've taken over a lot of teams in my life and almost always I show up and it turns out that no one knows what their job is and no one knows what success looks like and if you can make those two things clear which again is at the snorkel level it will fix you know a huge percentage of other issues on a team but the main thing is like where you start and just always sort of starting at that structural level or the dynamics level and not sort of immediately going to the people and and all that because yes people cause all sorts of problems but a lot of times they the problems are happening because they're existing inside of a structure that's confusing

Lenny Rachitsky:Another very vivid metaphor and just I love how it builds on it with this the snorkeling okay so just to be super clear about this the takeaway here is you have a problem with your team with the company many people think it's they jump to like the people are the problem they're not good enough they're not working hard enough really what you're saying is most often the issue is not the person it's the situation whether it's the structure of how they're set up to work or the dynamics amongst the people and specifically what you're saying is it like the role maybe isn't clear or what success means in for that role is not clear

Molly Graham:You know every company I've worked with or advised like I often start with like what are the goals and usually what you get back is not clear and that in and of itself is a structural issue right how can someone show up and decide what they're gonna do with their day all day if the goals aren't clear if they don't actually know what the priorities are and then it goes to like okay role right like do I know what my job is do I know what number I'm was hired to own and drive and then like do I know what success looks like how does my role tie to that overall goal that the company has just literally right there you got like probably 80% of problems inside of companies because this is the hard work of company building like it's the stuff that's not intuitive how do you organize a group of people to know which direction to row you know and that equation again I would say 80% of problems that I see performance issues like always start with does this person actually know what you expect of them if not go back to step one do you know what I mean clarify expectations so the waterline model is just helpful for reminding us like start at the top

Lenny Rachitsky:So what would you do there say you're a manager you're having an issue with team member would you go and ask hey let's just make sure we're aligned on goals and roles is that is that how you approach it is there a different approach

Molly Graham:So a lot of times what I do is two sided right so it's like hey tell me here's what I'm seeing and tell me what's going on for you like do you know do you know x y you know what tell me what you know when I when I take over a team when I'm doing my sort of like listening tour part of what I'm asking is what do you think your job is what do you what number were you hired to drive because what you'll find is often like their picture is different than your picture you think you've been clear they somehow got you know you described an elephant and they spat out a tiger and you that coming back to like okay no we're building an elephant you're in charge of the trunk will you know in some percentage of cases actually make a huge difference to the person's work and time and performance and you know in plenty of cases it doesn't but that's always where I would start because it so often is just like a more fundamental problem that then would lead you to to look at other things across the team but yeah that's I I would say two way dialogue but reclarifying roles and expectations redescribing the elephant over and over and over again is one of the hardest parts about being a leader because you feel like a broken record right you feel like an idiot you're like I've said this 45 times turns out no one heard you the first 43 and you have to you have to redescribe it in order for people to hear you and to reunderstand their sort of role and what they're doing

Lenny Rachitsky:I love how you reframe the way I approach it by starting with here's what I'm seeing what are you seeing what what what do you think your role is the very like nonviolent communication oriented which is a clear pattern on this podcast just the power of that specific framework

Molly Graham:Yeah totally well like I said work is about humans and it's the art of sort of like organizing humans to get something done and build something that's great greater than the sum of its parts and that is an art of sort of the humanness in all of us how do we get people to hear us how do we people aligned

Lenny Rachitsky:Work for a lifetime totally

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Molly Graham:Yeah, totally. I feel like there should be less than six but it's where we're at. I would say at a high level two things before I get to the six. One is that I definitely have a bone to pick with OKRs. I feel like it's, you know, it's obviously been a really helpful framework for Google and others, and a lot of times when I show up inside a company or I'm talking to a leader and I'm like, you know, what are your goals? What I get back is this like spreadsheet that has like 100 lines and feels like it's written in Greek. And when I look at it, I'm like, this doesn't create clarity for anyone. And it brings me back to sort of like, what is the point of goals? Why do we have them? And at the end of the day, goals are a communication tool. That's what they are. They are a communication tool designed to create clarity to help people know, I'm gonna show up at my desk, what should I work on? What's the most important thing? And your 100 line spreadsheet doesn't help anybody. And the second thing I would just say is like, you really have to ask the question, what is right for me at my company and this stage? What is right for a seed stage company if not what is right for, you know, a company that's got an established business and a clear go to market machine? So, you know, when I'm building in seed stage, I'm setting goals every two months in a very iterative way. When I have an established business, I can actually set annual goals, but annual goals for early stage companies is just like a waste of time. So anyway, a lot of my goal setting stuff actually comes from Facebook, which I think was very, very good at this. So the first rule is that no company needs more than three company goals. And the point of company goals is to help people know what the most important things are to success. So Facebook basically had three goals for the entire time I was there. It was five years and we did, you know, six month goal setting, I think we did annual goal setting that ended up getting reset every six months, but whatever. So the three goals were this: there was growth, which was measured as monthly active users, that was the externally reported number, eventually MAUs. The second goal was engagement, meaning how often do people come back and use the site. And the third was revenue. And we literally had three goals for the five years that I was there. If you can govern that business with three goals, you can govern literally any business with three goals. So no company needs more than three goals. The second thing is that one goal needs to win in a fight. So if I'm sitting down and asking, how do I prioritize my time on a given day, I need to know what is the most important thing. You know, at Facebook we had growth, right? And there's a lot of different ways you can add monthly active users to a social media site, including you can go buy a whole bunch of bots in Indonesia, and that would add to your MAU number, but it would not add to your engagement number. And it was very clear for the entire time that I was there that engagement was the most important thing. Acquiring users that were gonna use the site all the time, that's what drives revenue. It's also what drove, you know, sort of the heart of that site. So if you had to prioritize something, you prioritized engagement. That goal won in the fight. The third, I'll say, is I call it the explain it to me like I'm five goal, but like an intern that started on Monday should be able to look at your goals and understand them. And if they can't, then you are failing because they are not a communication tool that's effective. You have to be able to understand the goals. You have to explain the acronyms. You have to have numbers that make sense to average people. Otherwise, again, it fails as a communication tool. The fourth one is actually I stole a phrase from Claire Hughes Johnson, who you've had on your podcast but wrote a book called Scaling People, and in it she says this sentence that I love, which is strategy, strategy should hurt. And, you know, my role used to be like set non-goals, basically make it as clear what you're not gonna do as what you are gonna do. But strategy should hurt is a much better way to explain it to people, which is if you're not making trade-offs that are painful, you are not actually helping people prioritize their time because the nature of work is that people will show up every day and do something. And either you are very clear with them about what the priorities are or they're gonna prioritize for you because they're gonna choose what they work on every day. And we see this so much with founders where they can't cut things off the list. They just have to have the 10 goals. And I'm like, cool, six of these goals are not gonna get done. So either you pick which four it is or other people are gonna pick for you. So strategy should hurt. If your goal setting process is not painful, then you're not prioritizing heavily enough. Okay, ready? We're on number five. This is more of an organizational point, but it's really important for the waterline model too, which is that one goal has one owner. You have a number. That number has a name next to it. If you cannot do that work, you haven't done the most important work to actually make sure that these goals get accomplished. And it's organizational work and it's very painful because, you know, sometimes it feels like, oh, this person's gonna own it or this maybe I'll just own it together. Two people owning a goal is no one owning a goal. One person owns the goal. Who is it? It's not you as the CEO. It's someone that works for you. So one goal, one owner. And then the last, which is the hardest, is that goals by themselves are not enough. I have spent a lot of time with founders that are like, I did it. I set the goals. Why is, why, why not working? I don't understand. And I'm like, what did you do after you set the goals? And they're like, I don't know. I set the goals. Goals, you know, James Clear, who wrote Atomic Habits, has this really lovely sentence which is winners and losers have the same goal. Goals by themselves are not enough. You have to have a process by which you follow-up on the goals and you hold people accountable to the goals and you learn from the goals because so much of goal setting, particularly, you know, if you're earlier in building your company, is about learning from trying to do something. You set a goal. Can we do it? How hard is it to move this number? You know, that is the learn. You might be wrong all the time, but you're learning what it takes to move the number. So the setting the goal by itself not enough. You have to build a process in the system to like actually learn from the goal.

Lenny Rachitsky:Wow, this list is, there's so much power in this list. It's such a succinct long.

Molly Graham:No, I don't think it is because each of these has so much depth and power to them that saves you so much headache and just like wasted time and resources. Just like the idea of one owner, one goal, something I've personally discovered to have such power because, and correct me if I'm missing something here, but just if you feel like someone else may be doing the thing or feels like it's not just fully responsibility, there's so much less energy and just like mental, I don't know, you just don't care as much about hitting that goal if it's, and if it's you. Yeah, if it's like Lenny, this goal is your goal and if you hit it, it's you've done it. If you don't, you've done a bad job like that. Yeah, such motivating, so motivating. If it's like me and Molly, okay, well, we'll figure it out.

Molly Graham:It creates a flood of clarity that seeps down from the person too. And, and, you know, to go back to the waterline model, I would say so often you'll actually find companies that have set goals but they everyone, no one owns the goals, everyone owns the goals, multiple people own the goal and it's like that you didn't actually get all the way to the answer, you know. And I will say that the ownership thing is hard. Like it can feel painful but it's really important. You know, there's only one owner and that means that that person come hell or high water owns that number.

Lenny Rachitsky:Yeah, the way we I described it at Airbnb was just like someone asks, someone's ass has to be on the line for this and that just works. That's such a powerful lever to drive things to have one person responsible. The other is just this idea of strategy hurting. I love that. I love that phrase. I forgot Claire had that. So true.

Molly Graham:So good.

Lenny Rachitsky:Because the whole idea is you need to not do things. You need to decide what you're not. Like the whole strategy is a big part of it is what we're not doing.

Molly Graham:Yeah, absolutely. If you're not making painful choices, then you're not actually doing it.

Lenny Rachitsky:And this idea of three goals, so is that just like, so do you go into a company and just like go through a checklist essentially of here's the six things I look at to tell me if you what where there's opportunity to improve?

Molly Graham:When I work with founders and I see their goals, what I do, I use it as a way to get to know the business and I'm just gonna be like literally like what is this? Like what are you trying to explain? And I can usually through, you know, asking a lot of really dumb questions, which like I said one of my superpowers, get them to explain to me, you know, the one sentence and the one number that they're actually trying to get across. But it takes work and that's part of, you know, it's almost like easier to write the 100 line spreadsheet than it is to say wait, what are the three drivers of this business, genuinely like what are they and how do they relate to each other? And, and, you know, there can be things underneath them, but there's three at the top that matter. So yeah, it's, it's not a, I'm not like a scientific person about it, but a lot of it is just by asking people to explain their businesses to me, you can basically find the drivers.

Lenny Rachitsky:And the story about Facebook having these same three goals for five years, considering their success, you may think they're not as complicated as your business, but I am confident they are just as if not more complicated. Their marketplace, social network, their ad business, just they're like there's a lot going on and if they can work with three goals, you can do that too. Yeah, and to your point, it needs like if it's not hurting, then you're doing something wrong.

Molly Graham:The list is probably long but you know I always say to people don't come to me for like management one zero one I'm not the person to ask on like how to run the most effective one zero one that with your people what what I think is not talked about enough is what it takes to manage and lead through change and that is a very particular set of feelings and the first thing you know I learned when someone makes you a manager or when you take a job as a leader inside a company you really do feel like like uh-oh like who gave me this job you know and you sort of feel like you're supposed to know the answer to things like people come to you and ask questions and you're like I'm I'm supposed to know right I'm a leader I am supposed to have answers and I think particularly inside of rapid change and and scale and growth it's really important to understand that your job as a manager and a leader is not to have all the answers it is not to have all the answers it is to get good at finding them it is to get good at bringing people together to find the answers and that is hard because it requires saying I don't know let's go figure it out a whole bunch and it's scary as a leader to say I don't know because you think oh gosh people are gonna see through me but you know again the more you travel in life the more you realize that the most experienced leaders are the ones that say I don't know all the time

Molly Graham:Yeah, exactly. I love how this is very much what I wanted this chat to be. It feels like every little segment is like its own could be its own podcast where we could talk about this for hours. So, so I'm really excited how this is going.

Lenny Rachitsky:Kind of moving on to another topic, you have not necessarily rules but rules of thumb that you find really helpful for people to have in their head as they're dealing with change and scale and growth and all that kind of stuff. So let's just walk through that.

Molly Graham:Yeah, so for for leaders that are that are leading through change and growth like I...

Lenny Rachitsky:I think this is a good reminder of this Bob the monster concept because hearing this okay I don't need to have all the answers as a leader in real life being in a meeting people are like hey Molly what do you think of this like you're like oh shit I should have a good answer and so I think that's a good reminder of this idea of this Bob the monster is gonna tell you oh you don't know anything you're not ready for this you stick at this you're gonna fail everyone's they're regretting hiring you yeah exactly

Molly Graham:Everyone's gonna see through you imposter imposter imposter yeah

Lenny Rachitsky:Yeah just remembering there's just gonna be this part of your head and that's okay it's there but it doesn't mean it's true

Molly Graham:And these things are muscles you know like dealing with Bob is a muscle right learning to like not react to all those things that attack you but also learning like oh in this moment when someone asks me a question and I'm like oh actually I should be like but I don't actually know let's go who should

Lenny Rachitsky:We ask like how can

Molly Graham:We learn this how can we explore this together what do you think like those are all actually very powerful questions and they're terrifying you know to particularly earlier in your career as a leader and a manager

Lenny Rachitsky:Awesome so yeah so the lesson there is no one expects you to have all the answers as a leader

Molly Graham:No and and it's particularly in this world right the one that's changing as fast as it is like nobody nobody knows you know nobody knows what the answers are in a lot of cases the the war will be won by the people that are good exploring and figuring it out

Lenny Rachitsky:I love that phrase

Molly Graham:So the second one is and everyone that has learned this has learned it the hard way do not promise things that you can't control right it's so tempting like particularly when you're hiring people to be like oh yeah like your onboarding will be smooth and calm and everything's clear and like we've figured it out let us tell you our vision and how obvious and clear and smart and blah blah blah and then they show up and it's like oh shit you know what I mean like they there's no manual no one knows what they're doing it's all ambiguity and chaos right it's so easy when someone says I wanna know that I'm gonna be your CMO forever to be like sure you can be my CMO you don't know that do you know what I mean so being really careful with promises of things that are out of your control like stability or titles or never hiring over someone is like a flashing red light because there is literally no faster way to demoralize high performers than going back on a promise right you everyone that has been through it knows that feeling of like I they told me this when I joined and then they don't do it and you're like well fuck this place you know so no faster way to demoralize people or to hire the wrong people than promising things that are actually out of your control being honest and upfront about who you are as a company about what you're able to promise like all of that is actually it's very hard work but it's so important because so much is out of your control and you need to hire people that are cool with that

Lenny Rachitsky:Love that such a I I I learned this the hard way once I had a one of my early projects I we were late and had a product was just so pissed he's like because I've been telling the CEO it's gonna be on time because you've been telling me it's gonna be on time and then it wasn't and why didn't you tell me that and he's and I was just like okay it'll never happen again and he's like you can't don't tell me that because that's not true that may not you can't guarantee that and so that taught me that lesson of just like yeah you're right like you want to say that like it feels so good okay this will never happen again you you just can't and they know they they know you can't promise things like that

Molly Graham:Yeah and sorry I'm gonna quote Claire Hughes Johnson again but she has this really fun phrase that she said in a talk at Glue Club that I've now latched onto and stolen from her which is she was like promises like that are like letter bombs that you mail yourself that are gonna explode in your face in like a year and I was like that is the perfect metaphor it's because it's like short term pain right like you wanna make this person feel good right now so you like promise them something but in one year you're gonna make them feel terrible so don't do it

Lenny Rachitsky:Great advice alright keep going

Molly Graham:Yeah so again could probably go on the like topic of what it takes to manage and lead forever inside this stuff but I'll give you two more that I yell about a lot in Glue Club. The first is that we spend huge amounts of time talking about hiring like how do you get good at hiring like who like how do I who's the right interview how do I find the right people. Firing people is as important as hiring people. Getting good at identifying when someone does not belong or someone is not gonna work out is actually a skill and being good at it as a company and as a leader is as important as identifying the right talent because eventually if you're not good at firing people what you have is essentially barnacles on a ship really going for it with the ship metaphor anyway but like

Molly Graham:the you know it's drag people that are sitting around not sort of pushing the team forward so it's painful and it's horrible because it is humans right but but when someone doesn't fit you act no one is right all the time when it comes to hiring I actually say most people are wrong half the time like the best people in the world at hiring will tell you they have about a 50% average in terms of being right that means half the hires don't work out that means half the time you're gonna need to fire the person so it is it's such an important skill to get good at particularly when you're going through a lot of change and the last one is humans are messy and it's very emotional and when you're a leader particularly if you have any kind of enneagram two or just if you like to make people happy and you wanna be liked it can be so hard to lead teams because you get tangled in the people right firing people is a painful experience reorganizing things layering people all these things are emotionally painful for the people and they're emotionally painful for you as manager but my mantra that almost always leads in a in the best direction is serve the business not the people meaning everyone is better off if this company is wildly successful everyone looks smart and you know makes lots of money or whatever if this company grows and does what we all dream it can so at the end of the day the best decisions the ones that are always gonna be right are the ones that are like how do we make the how do we do the right thing for this business and it also helps in political situations right like someone's acting weird or their bob is raging all over the the company like technically everyone has the same goal the goal is to build the biggest business possible that's the answer the answer is always like what's the right thing for the business and the people stuff can fall away when you actually focus on like what's the right thing for the business

Lenny Rachitsky:A really useful tool to do that that I learned from my manager is to think about when you're trying to decide like whether to fire someone or change a project even though it's gonna upset someone is is to say okay if there were no emotions involved if this person had no negative reaction to this what would I do totally and then that's the thing you should do and then you just do it and then the question is how do I communicate this to them where their least know their pain is lowest essentially

Molly Graham:In the kindest way possible

Lenny Rachitsky:In the kindest way possible and because to your point if you optimize for the other thing of making people feel good like everything just falls apart like everything they're gonna suffer even more down

Molly Graham:The absolutely direct is kind and it you know it feels kind or really honestly easy to avoid these things or to work around them or to not but at the end of the day it's basically just a drag right the barnacle saying like drags on your company on your time on your energy etcetera

Lenny Rachitsky:Yeah but again very hard to do in real life to do the thing that's hard and makes you know cause someone to be sad and and upset and frustrated and and maybe

Molly Graham:So hard and all these things are muscles you know you get better at they don't become easy it's not like anybody's like oh it's so I like I enjoy firing people no but you you recognize it faster and you are like oh like I need to go do this you know and that is actually it's a practice and something that you need to practice to sort of become the kind of leader that leads these like long enduring companies

Lenny Rachitsky:Yeah and this tool of thinking asking what would I do if there were no emotions involved and this person wouldn't be upset it helps you like realize okay I see this actually doesn't make sense to just do it the easy way right now because it yeah it doesn't make sense

Molly Graham:Yeah it strips away strips away the the emotions

Lenny Rachitsky:Mhmm something else I wanted to make sure we spend a little time on is you have another tidbit along these lines which is around putting out most of your energy into high performers versus spending all your time people that need help talk about that

Molly Graham:You know as a leader as a manager like you're running these teams and someone's struggling and it's very easy to get dragged into that and to to sort of end up spending a huge amount of energy on it but high performers are actually the future of your company and if you think about it and if you've spent time on it those are the folks where if you invest your time and energy in them you're gonna get the sort of like 10x return that people talk about all the time in Silicon Valley but what I've witnessed is that most people have like a high performer and they just like leave them alone they're like that person's doing well so I'm just gonna let them do their thing and what what I do when I have a high performer that's like my favorite thing in the world is invest time and energy in them and basically build a whole system of working with them that is designed to kind of draw out potential and I would say there's there's two two things here one is it's really important to realize that like our tendency is to actually spend time on low performers and it is not a good use of your time see the point about firing people but the other thing is that actively investing in and developing high performers is something that's important to get good at as a leader because that is how you kind of create these little rocket ships that end up you know you'll manage someone who's just like a project manager and all of a sudden they're running a whole function inside the company eventually but it's because you took time and energy to invest in them and my basic way of doing that not to like I could go I could spend a long time on this but I would just say is I run experiments I basically develop a theory about someone I think this person is capable of this kind of thing and then piece by piece it doesn't have to be like a whole job or whole project it can just be like you know an incremental experiment I'm gonna see if they can do this without you know with less guidance or support from me I'm gonna give them a bigger project I'm gonna give them something with more visibility I'm gonna manage them less oversee them less whatever all of those are experiments to basically test your theory and deepen your theory in terms of like this person's potential and their ability to help the company and you're basically for me what I'm doing is kind of deeply getting to know that person and then trying to pair them with company needs what do we need what where where do we kind of like you know this person's great at zebra farming where do we need zebra farming you know so like how do I get them working on bigger and bigger and more and more critical things and to be honest this is what people have done for me like you know at Facebook in particular I I benefited from people being like oh like come help me with this thing they saw potential in me and they asked me to help with something and it unlocked a huge amount for me and so it's it it is such a powerful tool for getting more out of people that might be a little bit stuck if you leave them in this box but if you start to expand the box you can see you can really unlock people

Lenny Rachitsky:Okay so speaking of high performers you've worked with many very high performing founder CEOs you worked really closely with Zuck with Sheryl Sandberg with Larry and Sergey at Google with Bret Taylor who I just like just like you try to read his resume it's like it takes like three lines of things he's done over the course of his career and so I just wanna spend a little time on what are some things you've learned like maybe a few things you've learned from them that group that you find yourself sharing with other people most

Molly Graham:That list is very long but I'll give you a couple the first one that I think is kind of counterintuitive is so I said I worked at Facebook I worked on culture which is one of those words that doesn't really mean anything so I define it as sort of like the way that the way we do things around here and I thought my job was to like shape the culture I thought it was to like push the culture and the most humbling lesson I learned is 80% of the culture of a company is literally defined by the personality of the founder like Facebook is Mark Google is Larry and Sergei like Google when I was there felt like it felt like a university you know it's where ideas are more important in a lot of ways than what's shipped and it's like you know there's a campus and they basically wanted people to live there when I was there you know it was it was designed to basically be a two PhD students paradise Facebook felt like 19 year old hacker's dorm room when I was there like that and it was you know shipping above all in all else and that it just it seeped with Mark's DNA and you know I spent ages trying to create various changes inside the company or trying to kinda push a point and Mark would say like literally one thing in an all hands and it was like somebody threw a boulder into the pond so our job as operators or as leaders around founders is to help articulate the culture that they're creating and to help you know extend it my version of founder mode which I know you've spent some time on on this podcast is your job is to build a company that would make a decision the way the founder would when they're not in the room right that is the work of building a company around a founder but your job is not to shape culture that is mostly defined by the literal personality strengths and weaknesses of the person at the top and that's been true of Mark and it's been true of Brett everywhere I go that's who it is you don't need a consulting firm to tell you just go do a personality diagnosis on your founder and the weaknesses thing is real you know like I've seen I've seen and and watched friends like try to ship a set of values at a company where and it just doesn't match who the founder is you say move fast and break things or whatever your version of that is and your founder loves ambiguity and is perfectly happy with not making decisions all that leads to is cultural dissonance you know it leads to people being like wait what I thought we said you know we care about moving fast and making making aggressive decisions and it turns out you know so being really careful about what you say because what people actually feel when it comes to culture is what you do and how you act every day that is you can never write anything down and you will still have a culture it will be created through the actions and the decisions that you make and that your founder makes so that would be a huge one

Lenny Rachitsky:Let me spend a little more time on this because this is so good so the all this advice on culture and it's it feels so true based on everything I've seen so tip one there is just you you can't really change the culture maybe there's like a little bit on the edges you could adjust it will come down and trickle down from the the founder CEO probably mostly but just the founders in general

Molly Graham:And CEO founder CEO is probably the single biggest like cofounder is like it depends a lot on the company like I think I think Stripe you know is probably very much like Patrick and Don you know but it's not every cofounder that has that level of power

Lenny Rachitsky:And then the the way you describe culture I think it's the way Seth Godin talks about it too he's also been on the podcast how cool is that he he said culture is and what you said culture is the way we do things around here

Molly Graham:Yeah

Lenny Rachitsky:That's that that's what culture is is how we is just like that's how people describe your culture is the way we do things around here

Molly Graham:Yeah I you know I like ran culture whatever the hell that means at Facebook for a hot second I literally haven't done a values exercise since and it sounds crazy right because like in theory I like know how to do this stuff I don't really know how to do this stuff but for me the point is process and systems and how do we make decisions like that's where culture actually lives it is what you do it's how you hire it's how you fire it's who you don't hire it's all of those decisions that is culture so whenever I'm working with a company or building a company that's what I'm focused on not on like what's the shiny word that we're putting on the wall you know what I mean

Lenny Rachitsky:Yeah so the way you're describing is it's as you said it's it's what you do it's not what you say yeah awesome okay keep going

Molly Graham:Okay okay I'll give you two more that are helpful the this one is Mark with a word classic but he has this like very strong feeling that people don't escalate enough and he was like very adamant about it at Facebook and he brought it to CZI too where he was like escalation is a tool and he's like people get stuck you know they get stuck with two people with equal power trying to solve a problem you can spend so much time bashing heads going back and forth and actually what you just need to do is go up right you need to go the problem is that we think of escalation as like I'm A and B and I are disagreeing and so I'm gonna go up to C and tell on B right like I'm gonna go tattle to the teacher that is not what escalation is what escalation is is we we disagree neither one of us has enough power to make this decision let's go to someone who does my my boss my boss's boss whoever it is as soon as you are stuck escalate go together go make your case to whoever it is go together up that is unlocking right it's saving you a whole bunch of time and it's something that I've found as I've worked with companies and leaders in Klu Klub like it's not a muscle that's very comfortable for people but it's it's so smart and you know Mark has a lot of these but like that one I really took away because again I think so many people think of escalation as bad like a failure like I failed so I had to escalate no it's a tool it's what management is for like they're there to unblock you let them unblock you stop like arguing over something you can't decide

Lenny Rachitsky:And they'll be so happy knowing you did not waste a week debating this and then just arguing and just looking at data it's like okay I can just tell you exactly what we should do let's go do that

Molly Graham:Exactly you lack context or you lack power and then the last one actually is from Sheryl Sandberg who I learned an enormous amount from huge it was like going to business school without going to business school working with her but I say it a lot right now so

Molly Graham:Gonna say it on your podcast so maybe some people will hear me growing more than 100% every year is a bad idea a 100 per the happiest growth rate is 50% a 100% is manageable anything more than doubling and you are signing yourself up for a world of pain and I have seen this over and over and over again I had to scream way louder about it five years ago than I do now because we've been through collectively a lot of pain and a lot of layoffs and you know obviously this the combination of like 2021 and then AI has led us to sort of talk about unit economics and scaling with tools not people but I still see companies and I'm still talking to founders that are like yeah we're gonna you know we're 50 people we're gonna be a 150 people next year and I'm like could you possibly do that with a 100 people you know but here's what basically happens if you grow up more than a 100% which is you're growing too fast to dedup all the issues so like you somebody posts this role it actually turns out that role is also being hired for on this other team so you're hiring two people who more or less have the same job description and are assigned to the same number or the same problem but nobody talked to each other and those two people both show up and they're like I am doing this and the person's like wait I thought I was doing that anyway so then you've got all this and think about all the time and all the energy and all the money that goes into deduping that if you slow down if you hire for quality and for real need versus sort of the panic hiring whatever your sales model spits out or whatever you'll actually find leverage you find oh I didn't need that person or I didn't need this whole team or I didn't need this whole function or I can wait for that so slow down and again these are all just guidelines in terms of like the 50% is happy and a 100% is manageable but like having seen enough of this I can tell you like these are good rules and you should pay attention to them and sometimes you're like I have to double or I have to more than double or I to triple or whatever I'm like okay just ask a whole lot of questions as you open roles ask a whole lot of questions as you hire because you will find duplication you will find chaos coming in the front door more people does not actually make you faster do you know what I mean we think it does it does not it makes it harder it makes it harder to get work done it makes it slower so you should be scared of adding people not like oh this is the answer to all my problems

Lenny Rachitsky:I'm

Lenny Rachitsky:Amazing and just to be clear you're talking about the growth of the the company so doubling in a year bad idea like it it's possible but you're saying it's gonna be very hard and painful and and probably a bad a really bad idea

Molly Graham:Yeah, more than doubling headcount growth, great.

Lenny Rachitsky:Yep, yes, awesome.

Molly Graham:Please feel free to do whatever you want with your business, just

Lenny Rachitsky:Advice, I just, this is top of mind because I just had the interview with Matt McGinnis but so much of what he talked about is, is this resonates with what you're talking about. He talked a lot about under resourcing your team.

Molly Graham:Totally.

Lenny Rachitsky:Leads to much better outcomes because yeah, people don't work on the low priority stuff, they focus on only high priority stuff.

Molly Graham:Yeah.

Lenny Rachitsky:And the other is this idea of escalating. He's talked a lot about that just like escalation is good. Tell me when there's something I can help with please. I'm here waiting constantly to help.

Molly Graham:Yeah, a 100%.

Lenny Rachitsky:Yeah, amazing. So maybe for a final question, one of your former colleagues Eric Antinau, who's just like this epic dude that few people know about that I've chatted with over the last few months because he knows so many people that come on this podcast, he's a former Facebook person out at OpenAI. I asked him what I should ask you about and he told me something really insightful about you. He said that you had this really massive growth spurt at Facebook which you shared and talked about and then after you're leaving you had this like huge ambition to become COO, become this huge big deal boss person just like take over the world and then he noticed your ambitions significantly pivot to kind of working on community building and helping people with their careers and you turn down really big C-level role opportunities and the way he described it is you were a dog that once thought you were a cat and the other metaphor I use is you change from AC current to DC current which I don't know exactly what that means but so how does this resonate and if so just what happened there?

Molly Graham:Eric is actually better at metaphors than I am and I regularly rip his metaphors but yes, Eric Antinau, the least well known but most brilliant person in my life.

Molly Graham:Yeah, so somebody I, I gave a talk

Molly Graham:At a company recently and somebody asked the question what's something you've changed your mind about and I was like woof but I actually talked about this because so I'm my brain is like developing this model that is not done yet but it's basically this idea that like everybody has sort of a proving phase to their career where you're like proving to yourself and probably to your parents and some other people you know that you're like good at stuff you're like I'm I'm gonna I'm gonna prove you know and and it's an important phase because you're you need to learn you know all the stuff we talked about you need to learn what you're good at you need to learn that you are good at things and that people should hire you for things and what are those things but part of that phase is also kind of like doing what you think matters like what you think you should do you know family programming or career books tell you this is what you should do titles and and all that stuff and then I think everybody has a moment and I think that moment varies wildly in terms of when it hits people where you hit some sort of wall or I don't know what it is speed bump something and the world forces you to say okay I've proven myself and I'm good at this thing what do I wanna do with it you know and for me like I spent you know ten or fifteen years proving to myself and to others that I was really good at this thing you know basically working with brilliant founders to help bring their vision to life that's what you should hire me to do right that's what I was known for and it turned out that that wasn't what I love doing anymore and it was really really hard to walk away from because there was a lot of shoulds it was like you should take this job with this fancy title people are gonna think you're so cool and you know you get to the like I call it a LinkedIn crush where you're like really excited to post the job on LinkedIn but you're deeply unexcited about doing the job so you have all these LinkedIn crushes and you're like and I sort of vividly remember this one job that I turned down where I had to go for many walks and what I was repeating over and over again to myself was what does this get you that you don't already have what does this get you that you don't already have and I think for me it was this realization that these things that fed me early in my career just didn't feed me anymore that I didn't get joy and excitement out of you know doing these jobs anymore and I wasn't scared so it led me to actually on a very long windy journey a founder journey even though I have trouble with that title just like the influencer title to figure out what I wanted to build and you know what I would have told you I wanted to build three years ago is actually not what I'm doing today but through a lot of really fun experiments and a journey that never ends what I've discovered is that what I love doing is building safe spaces for leaders to learn and grow but also to find sanity and connection in a world that's kind of insane whether it's you know working in a startup or or some other kind of insanity but that that feed me and that there's nothing I love more than that and I could not have told you that three years ago but it was to Eric's point it really took a lot of work to switch currents or switch myself from a dog to a cat or whatever his metaphor is and I think it's you know it's the work of it's ongoing work but it it it's that thing of like what do I want versus what do I think people expect of me

Lenny Rachitsky:There's so much depth there this could be another entire podcast conversation talking through this journey but I'm gonna close with a note from your partner Sarah. She told me that she has this sticker on her notebook with three pieces of advice that you gave her when she started at OpenAI: get to know your customer, they have the answer, be patient because everything is gonna change, and just keep trying. So just as a final question, is there anything along those lines that you think might be helpful for people to hear or is there anything else you wanna share or leave listeners with?

Molly Graham:Part of what I think is so important to realize inside of scaling and changing companies and you know the world is like some things will always be true and part of what I was saying to Sarah in the like get to know the customer they have the answer is like whatever bullshit is going on around you and whatever walls and ceiling are being rearranged you know this week the customer is never gonna change that's a thing that will never change and I think finding those like immovable objects those compasses in the face of a storm you know which being inside of a scaling company and a startup like feels like a tornado you know and I think OpenAI is extra special on that front you have to find these guiding lights that get you through that storm and I think it's sort of the same thing as like serve the business not the people like what are the things that will always be true we are here to do this we are here to do you know we are here to serve the customer and then the other piece of the the sort of like the three things that she wrote down is like I think that we as humans we seek stability you know like our brains like would like things to stop changing we would like things to stay the same and that is just not a reality inside of companies that are growing and changing as fast as OpenAI or you know a lot of the companies today that are being built so actually you need to start to expect instability you need to start to like just assume things are gonna change assume you're gonna have a new boss in six months right I talk about this a lot when I talk to folks at OpenAI like you need to stop expecting that anything's gonna be the same in six months or a year like you will have a different job you will have a different boss how do you prepare for that do you know what I mean how do you almost see the instability as stability because it's the only thing that is definitely gonna be true and part of that is to just keep going you know what I mean to just find these these lights and these compasses or whatever metaphor sticks with you and focus on those because whatever is happening around you like you just gotta keep moving forward and keep learning as much as you can because that's the real opportunity like whatever happens to the company however successful it is like all that you take away from it I always say all that you take away from it is people that like working with you and wanna work with you again and what you learned that's it you might hopefully take a bunch of money but you might not so like people and what you learned that's it focus on that

Lenny Rachitsky:It's all about the friends you made along the way yeah I appreciate that old line is true oh man Molly I feel like we've gone for so long and we've just scratched the surface I'd love to have you back to go deeper on a lot of this stuff I'm gonna skip the lightning round because we've gone long and I wanna keep people from having to listen to more so I'm just gonna end with what are what should people know about what you're working on where can people go find you online and how can listeners be useful to you

Molly Graham:You can find me on LinkedIn and you can find me on Substack I have a Substack called Lessons that I'm slowly trying to turn into a community where we can talk about things the real stuff and you can find me at Glue Club which if you're a leader inside of one of these crazy companies that's changing all the time we we can be a great home for you

Lenny Rachitsky:What's the URL there just for folks to check out

Molly Graham:It's glueclub.com

Lenny Rachitsky:Glue glue

Molly Graham:Glue

Lenny Rachitsky:Club.com great

Molly Graham:Yeah exactly and in terms of people what people can do to be useful to me I love helping people helping leaders with problems like I I really get a lot of energy out of unsticking people and and helping people feel supported and seen and helping them grow I do that through Glue Club so if you're a leader that feels like you want some sanity and some support in the face of whatever tornado you're in that's a great place to come but the the same is true of Substack so if Glue Club isn't for you like come on over to Substack I've opened up a bunch of channels to just like talk about stuff listen to people's problems answer questions because I love helping people and I think it's a complicated moment right now to be a leader and to figure out which way is up so come on over

Lenny Rachitsky:Amazing Molly thank you so much for being here

Molly Graham:Thank you Lenny this was really fun

Lenny Rachitsky:Bye everyone thank you so much for listening

Lenny Rachitsky: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

Lenny Rachitsky:Doctor