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Published · transcript-backed

Lenny Rachitsky: belief

3 May 2026 Lenny's Podcast Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion)

“I think speaking of models, a good example is Anthropic, which was way behind, started after OpenAI, got less funding and now is just killing it and dominating.”

— Lenny Rachitsky

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Everything needed to verify it.

Speaker
Lenny Rachitsky
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
belief
Recorded
3 May 2026
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

Transcript context

…You have to be right, not first. I don't know. I mean, there are elements of, if you talk about network effects and perhaps now with training models, it doesn't make sense if you have a headstart, but I think it's overrated. I don't know. My favorite example is like Bluetooth headphones were crappy and then you have the AirPods and like, oh, they connect and so on. And they weren't the first. I don't know. They weren't the first MP3 player. They weren't the first. You just got to do it right. I don't think being first is all that useful. I think we're currently, because it's so hard to keep people's attention, we're like, "Oh, how do I go viral? How do I do the Cluely thing?" And I'm like, "Yep, durability matters." Think of like, how would you build Ikea like a generational company that is not concerning itself with whatever is trending on Twitter today? I think speaking of models, a good example is Anthropic, which was way behind, started after OpenAI, got less funding and now is just killing it and dominating. The thing that I find the most impressive about ... I don't know who to give credit, but obviously, you give the CEO a bunch of credit, but like Dario is that he wasn't ... Oh, he wasn't just lucky once at OpenAI. He did the same thing twice and it was successful twice. And I think that's actually really cool.…

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