Boris Cherny: belief

Transcript context

…Can you talk about that actually? Because I was going to go there. Explain what this principle is and just what happens when you unlock this latent demand. Latent demand is this idea that if you build a product in a way that can be hacked, or can be misused by people in a way it wasn't really designed for to do something that they want to do, then this helps you as the product builder learn where to take the product next. So, an example of this is Facebook Marketplace. So, the manager for the team Fiona, she was actually the founding manager for the Marketplace team and she talks about this a lot. Facebook Marketplace is based on the observation back in ... This must have been, like, 2016 or something like this. That 40% of posts in Facebook groups are buying and selling stuff. So, this is crazy. It's, like, people are abusing the Facebook groups product to buy and sell, and it's not abuse in a security sense. It's abuse in that no one designed the product for this, but they're figuring it out, because it's just so useful for this. And so, it's pretty obvious. If you build a better product to let people buy and sell, they're going to like it. And it was just very obvious that Marketplace would be a hit from this. And so, the first thing was buy and sell groups, so, special purpose groups to let people do that, and the second product was Marketplace. Facebook Dating I think started in a pretty similar place. And I think the observation was if you look at profile views, so, people looking at each other's profiles on Facebook, 60% of profile views were people that are not friends with each other that are opposite gender. And so, this traditional dating setup, people are just creeping on each other. So, maybe if you can build a product for this, it might work. And so, this idea of latent demand I think is just so powerful. And, for example, this is also where Cowork came from. We saw that for the last six months or so, a lot of people using Claude Code were not using it to code. There was someone on Twitter that was using it to grow tomato plants. There was someone else using it to analyze their genome. Someone was using it to recover photos from a corrupted hard drive that was, like, wedding photos. There was someone that was using it for I think ... They were using it to analyze an MRI. So, there's just all these different use cases that are not technical at all, and it was just really obvious. Like, people are jumping through hoops to use a terminal to do this thing. Maybe we should just build a product for them. And we saw this actually pretty early. Back in maybe May of last year, I remember walking into the office and our data scientist Brendan had a Claude Code on his computer. He just had a terminal up. And I was shocked. I was like, "Brendan, what are you doing?" He figured out how to open the terminal, which is ... It's a very engineer-y product. Even a lot of engineers don't want to use a terminal. It's just the lowest level way to do your work. Just really, really in the weeds of the computer. And so, he figured out how to use the terminal. He downloaded [inaudible 00:50:28]. to use a terminal. It's just the lowest level way to do your work. Just really, really in the weeds of the computer. And so, he figured out how to use the terminal. He downloaded [inaudible 00:50:28]. He downloaded Claude Code. And he was doing SQL analysis in the terminal. It was crazy. And then the next week all of the data scientists were doing the same thing. So, when you see people abusing the product in this way, using it in a way that it wasn't designed in order to do something that is useful for them, it's just such a strong indicator that you should just build a product and people are going to like that. It's something that's special purpose for that. I think now there's also this interesting second dimension to latent demand. This is the traditional framing is look at what people are doing, make that a little bit easier, empower them. The modern framing that I've been seeing in the last six months is a little bit different. And it's look at what the model is trying to do, and make that a little bit easier. And so, when we first started building Claude Code, I think a lot of the way that people approached designing things with LLMs is they put the model in a box, and they were like, "Here's this application that I want to build. Here's the thing that I wanted to do, a model, you're going to do this one component of it. Here's the way that you're going to interact with these tools and APIs," and whatever. And for Claude Code, we inverted that. We said, "The product is the model. We want to expose it. We want to put the minimal scaffolding around it. Give it the minimal set of tools. So, it can do the things, it can decide which tools to run. It can decide in what order to run them in," and so on. And I think a lot of this was just based on latent demand of what the model wanted to do. And so, in research we call this being on distribution. You want to see what the model is trying to do. In product terms, latent demand is just the same exact concept but applied to a model.…

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