Lenny Rachitsky: evaluation

Transcript context

…Got to try that. Yeah. There's something along these lines that I've also seen you talk about, which is how to go zero-to-one with something, just a little framework for helping you know if this is the right time for this idea. How do you think about that? Yeah. And when you think about the solved mode, and this is again sticking with my whole living in one year in the future, I gravitated towards the zero-to-one and solved mode products completely thinking about new category of products. And what I've found, both the hard way I would say, is that you do want to look for at least two out of these three factors, inflection points here if you want to make a really good product. Number one is there a... Shift is a step function in the tech. That's somewhat obvious I would say. Deep learning was one for Google lens. Back then, speech recognition was a step function for conversational search. I would say for Robinhood, the generational shift was very clearly, and the fact that phones were a primary means for you could actually have mobile app for finance that you could use. So look for that inflection. What is the tech inflection? And right now, of course, like LLMs and reasoning models are that step function, but that's not enough. I would say the second factor that we should look for is, what is the consumer behavior shift? So to give you an example, when we started working on Google Lens, what we said is, "Look, people were taking mostly pictures for sharing, selfies and sunsets and so on. And suddenly, when storage became free, mostly free, and everybody had phones everywhere all the time, you took pictures of everything. And then you had enough of pictures or you use the camera as the keyboard for your world, for the real world. And so how do you then say, "Oh, this consumer shift is big, and so therefore, as you go order of magnitude more photos, then you want more to come out of them and you can apply AI to that." And I'd say the third inflection point, particularly I would say in enterprise but also in consumer, is the business model shift. Is there an inflection natural inflection point in the business model? So any great products, if you think about all the way from search, again, the second price option and the fact that you had CPCs, same thing with SaaS and the fact that you could actually charge or monetize enterprise products in a different way. And with AI, of course the monetization is a whole different... We've just barely scratched the surface of whether you do seat monetization, usage like on tap, and then of course outcome-based stuff, outcome-based monetization. Hey, have you solved the problem for me and then I will pay you some fees. So all three to me are kind of like, great, but at least two out of three for a good product.…

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