“We had a couple of outages that I caused very, very early days for me at OpenAI. I took production down like day three. ... I was still employed after that. And I learned my lesson.”
Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth · Product & Design · October 2026
Sottiaux had been describing how much autonomy people get at OpenAI, and how they are expected to own what goes wrong. Rachitsky asks whether he ever messed up with that much trust.
Transcript
You get a lot of autonomy and then you have to just own up to it. So we just kind of trust people to make great choices. And then when things go wrong, fix it quickly or learn from the mistake. So far, so good. It's just really worked as a very empowering environment. It is true that I can press the reset button whenever it's necessary, whenever it feels right. And that's a privilege. And also it allows me to just really be close to the community in ways that I think would not be otherwise possible. I don't have to run it through an echelon of approvals.
said sometimes people screw up. Is there something you screwed up in that in that, I don't know, the amount of autonomy and trust you have you messed up?
Yes, I think at times I could have made teams like, you know, more inspired to build things that are less complex and just really continue to strive towards complexity. I think we, you know, we early days in Codex, like, you know, we had a couple of like outages that I caused very, very early days for me at OpenAI. I took production down like day three. You know, I was just, 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 in the next, I don't know, month or week?
Depends how many times we break things.
Okay. So that's the philosophy. Break something, you reset. That's kind of the
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