LR

Lenny Rachitsky

Deeply researched product, growth, and career advice

United States

Education

Work Experience

  • Author, Lenny’s Newsletter and Lenny’s Podcast

    2019

  • Angel Investor

    2019

    Investor in 150+ companies including Figma, Linear, Substack, Vanta, Anduril, Whatnot, Webflow, Descript, Levels, Mindbloom, Reforge, Zip, Stytch, Runway, Census, Pachama, and many more: https://www.lennyrachitsky.com/investing

2012 - 2019

  • Product Lead, Supply Growth

    2016 - 2019

    Led the team responsible for driving consumer supply growth. This included: * Performance marketing * Conversion * Referrals * Awareness and consideration * Re-engagement * Retention * Core host products Previously, led three teams driving Instant Book Growth (grew usage from 5% to over 80%), guest booking conversion, and building new tools for hosts (e.g. dashboards, calendar, guest controls, publishing, messaging). Also supported strategy of the Anti-Discrimination team, and helped on a few side-projects including work with The Malala Fund.

  • Product Lead, Guest Conversion and Host Quality

    2012 - 2016

    Drove growth through improvements to guest booking conversion, host experience (acceptance rate, response rate, more), and Instant Book. Drove host quality through launching programs such as Superhost, Mentors, Host Dashboard, host quality standards, revamp of reviews system, and more. Built Airbnb's first host community platform. Built the first attempt at extending Airbnb beyond the home (now Airbnb Experiences).

2010 - 2012

  • Co-Founder, CEO

    2010 - 2012

    Acquired by Airbnb in 2012. Localmind was an early location-based consumer app. We leveraged location data from Foursquare, Facebook, and Gowalla to capture location expertise of locals, enabling Localmind users to get real-time answers to questions about places they are thinking about visiting. https://angel.co/localmind http://ireport.cnn.com/docs/DOC-574061 https://techcrunch.com/2012/12/13/airbnb-acquires-localmind/

2004 - 2010

  • Engineer, Head of R&D

    2009 - 2010

    Focused on innovations in web performance, cloud, and web operations, looking 2-5 years down the road. Prototype, research, and build. Also included business development with partners.

  • Sr. Manager of Engineering

    2004 - 2009

    Managed the entire engineering department of Webmetrics. This included building the team, building the product, and maintaining a 24/7 operations culture. During this period we were acquired by Neustar, and the team grew 10x.

2001 - 2004

  • Lead Engineer

    2001 - 2004

    Built the core product offering for Webmetrics, a website monitoring and load testing product. Acquired by NeuStar

1998 - 1999

  • Web Developer

    1998 - 1999

    Basic web development for all the LA.com and sister properties (e.g. hawaii.com, texas.com, more)

Latest Articles

SubstackJul. 2024

Taking the week off

SubstackMay 2024

Taking the week off

SubstackMay 2024

On saying no