Lenny Rachitsky: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Yeah, it was called machine learning still. And so in shutting it down, you know it when you see it in terms of user growth and traction. And I wasn't expecting Instagram growth, but I was expecting or hoping for or looking for something that felt like at its own legs under it and it could continue to compound. I was really positively surprised by how supportive people were when we announced it. There was a bit of like I told you so which sure anything launching you could be like, "This is not going to work." And you're right, most of the time most things don't work. There was actually very little of that. And most people, the universal reception, at least as I received it, was kudos for calling it when you saw it and not protracted doing this for a long time. And I've talked to founders since then that have been like, "Yeah, I probably would've taken this thing on for another six months, but saw what you guys did, realized we were barking up the wrong tree, made the call." And I was like, "If that frees up people to go work on a more interesting things, I feel like that's a good legacy for Artifact to have." But for sure there was an ego bruise of is it true that you're only as good as your last game if I am a huge sports fan, right? So is that true or is there something more over a time? I'm very competitive, but primarily with myself and so I'm always trying to find the next thing that I want to go and do that's hard. And unfortunately that probably means that more often than not I'll feel dissatisfied, but the most recent thing that I did, but hopefully that yields good stuff in the end. Yeah, I think just the trajectory you went on after shows that it's okay to shut down things that you were working on. Okay, so you mentioned ChatGPT. I wanted to chat about this a bit. So there's something really interesting happening. So on the one hand you guys are doing some of the most innovative work in AI. You guys launched MCP, which is just, I don't know, the fastest growing standard of any time in history that everyone's adopting Claude powered and unlocked centrally the fastest growing companies in the world, Cursor, Lovable, and Bolt, and all these guys. I had them on the podcast and they're all like, "When Claude, I think 3.5 came out, Sonnet, was just like that's made this work finally." On the other hand, it feels like ChatGPT is just winning in consumer mind share. When people think AI, especially outside tech, it's just like ChatGPT in their mind. So let me just ask you this, I guess first of all, do you agree with that sentiment and then two, as a challenger brand in the AI space, just how does that inform the way you think about product strategy and mission and things like that? Yeah, I mean you look at the sort of public adoption or if you ask people, oh, if you Jimmy Kimmel man on the street kind of thing, name an AI company, I bet they would name and actually I'm not even sure they name open AI, they'd probably name ChatGPT because that brand is the lead brand there as well. And I think that's just the reality of it. I think that when I reflect on my year, I think maybe two things are true. One is consumer adoption is really lightning in a bottle and we saw it at Instagram. So almost maybe more than anybody, I can look internally and say, "Look, we'll keep building interesting products. One of them may hit." But to craft an entire product strategy around trying to find that hit is probably not wise, we could do it and maybe Claude can help come up with a fullness of things, but I think we'd miss out an opportunity in the meantime. And then instead look yourself in the mirror and embrace who you are and what you could be rather than who others are is maybe the way I've been looking at it, which is we have a super strong developer brand, people build on top of us all the time, and I think we also have a builder brand. The people who I've seen react really well to Claude externally. Maybe the Rick Rubin connection has some resonance here as well. Can we lean into the fact that builders love using Claude? And those builders aren't all just engineers and they're not just all entrepreneurs starting their companies, but they're people that like to be at the forefront of AI and are creating things. Maybe they didn't think of those as engineers, but they're building... I got this really nice note from somebody internal on Anthropic who's on the legal team and he was building bespoke software for his family and connected to them in a new way. And I was like, "This is a glimmer of something that we should lean into a lot more." And so I think what, and this is actually connecting back to us saying like Claude being helpful here. A lot of what I've been thinking about going into the second half of the year and beyond is how do we figure out what we want to be when we grow up versus what we currently aren't or wish that we were or see other players in the space being. I think there's room for several generationally important companies to be built in AI right now. That's almost a truism given the adoption and growth that we've seen at Anthropic, but also across OpenAI and also places like Google and Gemini. So let's figure out what we can be uniquely good at that place to the personality of the founder. All the things come together, the personality of the founders, the quality of the models, the things the models tend to excel at, which is agentic behavior and coding. Great. There's a lot to be done there. How do we help people get work done? How do we let people delegate hours of work to Claude? And maybe there's fewer direct consumer applications on day one.…

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