Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…I'm all in for multimodal experiences in 2026. I think we have done quite some progress in 2025, and not just in terms of generation, but also understanding. Until now, I think LLMs have been our most commonly used modules, but as humans, we are multimodal creatures, I would say. Language is probably one of our last forms of evolution. As the three of us are talking, I think we're constantly getting so many signals. I'm like, "Oh, Lenny's nodding his head, so probably I would go in this direction or Lenny's bored, so let me stop talking." So there's a chain of thought behind your chain of thought and you're constantly altering it with language that dimension of expression is not explored as well. So if we could build better multimodal experiences that would get us closer to human-like conversation richness. And you will also, just given the kind of models, there's a bunch of boring tasks as well, which are ripe for AI. If multimodal understanding gets better, there are so many handwritten documents and really messy PDFs that cannot be passed even by the best of the models as of today. And if it's possible, there'll be so much data that we can tap into. Awesome. I just saw Demis from DeepMind, AI, Google, whatever they call the whole org, talking about this where he thinks that's going to be a big part of where they're going, combining the image model work, the LLM, and also their world model stuff, Genie, I think is what it's called. Yes. So that's going to be a wild, wild time. Okay. Last question. If someone wants to just get better at building AI products, what's just maybe one skill or maybe two skills that you think they should lean into and develop? I think we did cover a bunch of best practices for AI products, which is start small, try to get your iteration going well and build a flywheel and all of that. But again, if you kind of look at it at a 10,000 feet level for anybody building today, like I was saying, implementation is going to be ridiculously cheap in the next few years. So really nail down your design, your judgment, your taste and all of that. And in general, if you're building a career as well, I feel for the past few years, your former years, say the first two, three years of building your career is always focused on execution, mechanics and all of that. And now we have AI that could help you ramp pretty quickly and post that. I mean, after a few years, I think everybody's job becomes about your taste, your judgment and kind of what is uniquely you. I think nail down on that part and try to figure out how you can bring in that kind of a perspective. It doesn't have to mean that you should be significantly old, have years of experience. We recently hired someone and we use this very popular app for tracking our tasks and we've been using it for years and we pay a high subscription fee for it. And this guy just came with his own vibe coded app to the meeting. He onboarded us to all of it and he's like, "Okay, let's start using this." And I think that kind of agency and that kind of ownership to really rethink experiences is what will set people apart. And I'm not being blind to the fact that vibe coded apps have high maintenance costs. And maybe as we scale as a company, we have to replace it or we have to think of better approaches. But given that we are a small size company now and just ... I was really shocked because I never thought of it. If you've been used to working in a certain way, you associate a cost with building. And I feel like folks who grew up in this age have a much lower cost associated in their mind. They just don't mind building something and going ahead with it. And they're also very enthusiastic to try out new tools. That's also probably why AI products have this retention problem because everybody's so excited about trying out these new tools and all of that. But essentially having the agency and ownership, and I think it's also the going to be the end of the busy work era. You can't be sitting in a corner doing something that doesn't move the needle for a company. You really need to be thinking about end-to-end workflows, how you can bring in more impact. I think all of that will be super important.…

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