Lenny Rachitsky on OpenAI's culture: employees ship fast with minimal review, own their mistakes, and fix them quickly. He drafted Pro-plan changes in 30 minutes, took down production on day three and kept his job. Speed requires breaking things.
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It feels like a really unique culture at OpenAI that allows you to move faster, just that cultural philosophy. You get a lot of autonomy and then, you know, you have to just own up to it. So, you know, we just kind of trust people to make great choices and then, you know, when things go wrong, fix it quickly or, you know, learn from the mistake. I don't have to run it, you know, through an echelon of— for example, yesterday, you know, I was explaining the changes to the Pro plans. And a lot of people were like, oh, that must have been written like, you know, 3 days ago and reviewed and like 17 people must have been involved in making sure that it was like all legally approved. Like, no, I mean, I wrote this in 30 minutes and I shipped it. Very, very early days for me at OpenAI. I took production down like day 3. I was still employed after that. And I learned my lesson. One of the other questions people wanted me to ask you is how many resets should they expect? Depends how many times we break things.