Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…It's early. It's really hard to say other than ... I think generally, people who do this well now feel like they can do way more work than they used to without having to hire more people, and so they're just going further faster at the same budget. I don't see a lot of people being like, "Cool. We're going to fire a bunch of people." Also, I don't really want to do consulting work like that. That sucks. But we've never had to say no. Mostly, people are like, "Cool. I'm just going to go further with the people that I have." I think also, back to kind of the first point I made about reshoring American jobs, I have seen some companies, not the ones that we worked with, but I have seen some companies of people that I'm friends with, where they're like, "We have a call center somewhere, but I think I can get the same amount done with two employees in the U.S. that use one of these customer service platforms." They're still not totally automatic. I think that Klarna CEO thing, that was bullshit. But, yeah, you can have a couple people in the U.S. that maybe you pay a little bit less to than you would for 100 people somewhere else, and obviously, that's the calculus that everyone has to make for themselves, but I've definitely seen that happen, and yeah, I think that's the get more done with the same amount of people. Maybe to close out our conversation, I want to come back to this idea that you referenced, but I want to spend a little more time on this, which is this idea of the allocation economy. If I understand it correctly, we've been in this knowledge economy, where people get paid to do a thing, and your thesis is that we're moving to this allocation economy, where the manager skills become more important, and we're going to be spending more of our time managing. And I think what's amazing about this is it also tells you which skills will matter more in the future, which is something I think a lot of people are thinking about. So maybe just answer that question and share whatever you think is important to share to give people a sense of what you're thinking. Yeah. So this is based on our article I wrote two, two and a half years ago. So this is back before agents were even thought of as viable. And I was really trying to think about, "How do I express what ... In my experience, using this every day, what skills are useful for me?," because I think that'll be the case for a lot of other people, and I think that's kind of the best method, I think, to do these sorts of predictions, is you have to be doing it all the time yourself, and then that informs your opinion about this stuff. So what I noticed using, at the time, like GPT-3 or maybe GPT-4, was that I was spending a lot of time, for example, thinking about, "How do I communicate the problem? How do I gather the right information for the problem? How do I put it in the right way so that the model that I'm working with gets it? How do I pick which model to give it to you, and how do I maybe divide up the task to be like, 'Okay, this model does this, this model does this,' based on what I know to be like, 'What's good and what's bad?'? How do I give them feedback?" "How do I have a vision for what I want and a set of criteria for whether it's good?" All that stuff is exactly how I found myself using these tools, and I was like, "Oh, that's just managing." And once that clicks for you, I think you'll start to see a lot of other things. So a really good example is there's a big complaint that it's like, "Well, how can I have AI do this? I can't trust that they're going to do it well, so I just do it myself." And I'm just like, "Yeah, that's exactly what Every first-time manager says." You always have this problem, where you're like, "Okay. Well, if I delegate it, it's not done in the way that I want it to be done. If I do it myself, I get no leverage." And so that's how a manager has to learn how to be a manager is like, "When do I lean in and maybe micromanage a little bit, and when can I delegate, and how can I trust it, and how do I divide up the task and all that kind of stuff?" And so I think there's a lot of overlap in those skills. And those skills are not broadly distributed right now, but they will be in the future because it will be so much cheaper to be a manager.…

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