Lenny Rachitsky: evaluation

Transcript context

…In 2024, we shipped four models in the whole year or four series of models. And I think we did more than that volume in just Q2 of this year. I think I've been really lucky with the team that we've grown and built, both the stakeholders on the research side and within our research product management team. I think that one of the magical parts about approaching all of this is that it's not an individual sport. There's a sense of radical ownership and team collaboration that, I think sometimes it does feel like a high performance sport because you're in very critical decisions. There's new information about users, about training, and you have to make recommendations and judgments and decisions very quickly. And nobody can do that sustainably by themselves. And so I think what's really helped is having a team that is incredible, who looks out for each other, who the night before a launch, even if they're not the core DRI on that model, will stay up and help the DRI to review the blog post and make edits and come up with better demos and knowing to be each other's extra hand. I think it's very easy, if you take all of this change on your own shoulders, to feel like you're alone and to feel like you have to do everything. But I think one of the magical parts of Anthropic is this ability for us to figure out what are those opportunities to help each other and actually then taking the next smile of mind melding. We called it entering the hive mind. There was an article about this. And I think part of that is just that allows the team to replenish. I was just on PTO in June. It's not just that you can take PTO and you come back to 3X the amount of things to do. It's actually that you can take PTO and know the team can figure out the right things to do and that we individually can watch out for each other. So I think that's a big part. I'm really lucky, just personally. Also, my partner is really supportive. This is year six of me working in AI, so Amazon and then Anthropic. And so he sees how much I just love the technology and what this can do. And that really helps, I think, also from a personal perspective as well. I love how many of these answers connect. So what I'm hearing here is just working with other people, relying on other people, helping each other out when things get crazy, which is a similar answer you had for just how to find the joy and fun in this work. Just be inspired by other people, see what they're doing, work together. Yeah.…

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