Evidence receipt / evaluation
Published · transcript-backedHilary Gridley: evaluation
15 Jun 2025 Lenny's Podcast How to build a team that can “take a punch”: A playbook for building resilient, high-performing teams | Hilary Gridley (Head of Core Product, Whoop)
“I mean I worked at Dropbox where I saw this happen all the time where we would acquire products that other teams internally had been working on and it's just like, it's heartbreaking when it happens. But I think there's an urgency that that has instilled in me that I think is actually really good and healthy, especially again working in this era where there is kind of this AI arms race and everyone's trying to move really quickly of, yeah, there's always a shot clock.”
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Hilary Gridley
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- evaluation
- Recorded
- 15 Jun 2025
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
Transcript context
…Wow, so cool. Okay, next corner, I'm going to take us to Fail Corner. And in Fail Corner, the idea here is people come on this podcast, they share all these wins and success, everything's up and to the right and amazing, but in reality things don't always go that smoothly. So the question is, is there a story you could share of failure in your career where things didn't go the way you hoped and what you learned from that experience? I mean I think the one that probably looms largest in my mind is, I mentioned this depression therapeutic that I spent about a year working on, and ultimately the company ended up acquiring a different depression therapeutic. And we kind of ended up merging the two of them. And a lot of the stuff that we had initially built that I had really loved about this product we were working on didn't really ever end up seeing the light of day beyond the kind of testing that we had done around it. And it was heartbreaking because I wish this product existed. I look at it and I'm like, "This was a great product and we put so much heart and soul into it." And I think the lesson that I learned from that is, I think there's always a shot clock. When you're working, especially on a zero to one product, I think it can be very easy to feel like you have the luxury of time, of just like, we got to take the time to figure this out and get it right and that's what's most important. But the sort of build versus buy question is always live and it's always fair. And whether you want to admit it, if you're the one working on it, and you probably don't, I didn't want to admit this, there is a point at which it makes more sense for the company. If it is taking too long to develop something and there is a solution out there that works, it is the right decision to acquire that. I mean I worked at Dropbox where I saw this happen all the time where we would acquire products that other teams internally had been working on and it's just like, it's heartbreaking when it happens. But I think there's an urgency that that has instilled in me that I think is actually really good and healthy, especially again working in this era where there is kind of this AI arms race and everyone's trying to move really quickly of, yeah, there's always a shot clock. And you might not be aware of it, but it's there, and you got to build your heart out and you got to ship and you got to get things out because at any time, that clock might run out. Speaking of shot clock, not necessarily, but I want to spend a little time on WHOOP, you guys just launched something that feels like a really big deal. I'm excited. That's the reason I got it. There's all these really cool new features. I think you call it WHOOP 5.0. What should people know? What's the newest, coolest thing that's happening with WHOOP?…
Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.