Lenny Rachitsky: evaluation

Transcript context

…For sure. Okay. I want to go in a completely different direction, something that I'm really excited to talk to you about, which is this very emerging trend that I've noticed that I feel like you're at the forefront of CEOs becoming ICs again. It's kind of this move of, IC CEOs. CEOs getting their hands dirty again, building again, getting in the weeds, coating again. I feel like you're again at the forefront of this. Talk about just why you've done this, why you think this is important, and just what that looks like day to day to you versus what your life was like a few years ago. The underlying reason for this shift, at least for me, is that, as we started the company, I was very much in this mode. I was literally writing code both on the backend, thinking about the real time data architecture of our platform, also the front end, the UX. And I would argue that in that founding moment, the initial product market fit finding, and especially for a product that is pure software, we weren't building an operationally heavy business like a dog walking marketplace where the tech is only an afterthought. The tech was the product, right? And in a very Meta sense, Airtable is the platform for other people to build their own apps. So it's all about the attack, like the very intimate design decisions, again, both architecturally and on the front end and the product UX choices. That is the product's value prop. You can't separate those two. You can't say, "Okay, I researched the jobs to be done. Here's the workflow, here's the process, and then, okay, some engineer can just build it as an afterthought." It's those little decisions and really be able to be at the bleeding edge of what's possible both in the browser and with the real-time data architecture. That made the product what it was. I think the same is true for Figma, which actually had a very parallel timeline to us. We both were founded around the same time, both spent two and a half years building the product, hands-on that early team before launching. And when I think now to both the era in between that founding moment and then now as well as now the new gen AI moment, I think there was a maturing era of both SaaS overall and Airtable specifically. Where, as you scale up and you learn how to build teams and organizations and you have to scale up stuff that's not actually those intimate details, but process and people and so on, you kind of get by default further and further away from those details, right? And maybe for some businesses that's fine because no longer is it about finding the details that make for a magical new product market fit. And it is really just about scaling up an existing thing that works and using what I would call more blunt instruments to scale it up, like a more blunt roadmap, a more blunt go-to market execution strategy. Regardless, I think that now, we're entering this moment where ... Certainly every software product in my opinion, has to be refounded because AI is such a paradigm shift, it's not even just like the shift from desktop to mobile or on-prem to cloud where that was more like a very one time and somewhat predictable change in form factor. I think AI is so rapidly evolving that with every evolution, every new model release and every new type of capability that's released, it actually implies novel form factors and novel UX patterns to be invented to fully capitalize on those capabilities. And so to be continuously relevant and to refine product market fit in this era, I think you have to be of the details.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.