Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Books, apps, and tools
app / uses
“And so I have this folder, basically, of local notes that I have that I use IA writer for. And I basically just write whatever, and over the years have collected it with a bunch of different notes, and they span all different things like one-on-one notes, random thoughts, tiny memos, interview notes, et cetera.”
app / uses
“When I use Figma, I'm like, "Yes, this is what I should be using." And it still fills a very good gap for me.”
book / recommends
“The second one that I recommend to a lot of people is a book called Insomniac City, which is written by Bill Hayes”
book / recommends
“The first one is The Power Broker by Robert Caro, which is an incredibly aggressive recommendation, given that it's like 1100 pages. But I think, in this era, when our attention spans are so short, I think this is actually worth reading end to end, because I think there are very few collections or memoirs where it spans through someone's entire life, and you sort of see how somebody changes throughout those decades. And it's also somebody who's really controversial too. And it's nice to read a really nuanced view of somebody, Robert Moses. And I think we just lose out on some of this long arc thinking, because we're thinking so much about right now. So it's just an important reminder that careers are long, and is also really good for understanding how somebody just gets things done really well. So Power Broker. The second one that I recommend to a lot of people is a book called Insomniac City, which is written by Bill Hayes, who was the partner of the scientist, Oliver Sacks, around the time that Oliver Sacks died. And it's just this really beautiful, ethereal memoir of Oliver Sacks' last days, and their sort of love story. I think this has very little to do with the stuff on your podcast, Lenny, but it's just a book that I really love, and just makes you think about mortality, but also love and life and stuff like that. So that's one of my favorite books.”
Claim ledger
11 transcript-backed records
01 / belief
“I think for some reason that became the viral thing that got taken away from all of the cowork announcements, is that it only took 10 days, but I think there have just been so many different explorations, and people that have worked on different pieces of cowork, that it was not just 10 days, and there was a lot of different people involved.”
02 / belief
“I think so. And I think traditionally, at least what I've seen, a lot of the engineering disciplines, when they hire EMs or even sometimes directors there, they actually make the EMs take a rotation for a few months and pick up a few tasks, and really understand how the technology works before they become a full-time manager.”
03 / belief
“With Cowork specifically, we have had a bunch of different prototypes internally of what that could look like. And it's one of those things where we tried a lot of things, and then I think we weren't really sure when it was actually going to be ready to ship.”
04 / belief
“Yeah. Because I think people who often gravitate towards these early ideas, they can't always articulate why.”
05 / belief
“I think that that is not a thing as much anymore, but I think somebody who can really function as giving the team direction, as well as doing some of the people management stuff, that tied together, I think is the future of what managing looks like, at least for now.”
06 / belief
“I think that sometimes they're actually unburdened by that, because we have expectations of ourselves after being in the industry for so long, but they actually don't and they sort of feel like anything is possible.”
07 / belief
“I think I just want to call out the Anthropic design team and shout them out, just because it's a team of folks that are just really humble, and they're not always [inaudible 01:07:49] on social, but they're doing a lot of really great work.”
08 / belief
“I wonder though, as the models, both the models and the products get better, I mean, we probably will continue to move up the abstraction layers and you won't have to actually know how each single line of code will work. But I think what I would say is start to bring that into your toolkit, the coding tools, whether or not it's like you're actually becoming technical, I think any designer should just be really aware, and know how to use the tools that are at hand, as opposed to maybe learning and going off and learning React or et cetera, et cetera.”
09 / belief
“I think just given how much stuff is going on in the world right now, and especially with the industry and whatnot, you can't control everything.”
10 / belief
“At the max, I probably had, I think, 12, 15 designers or so, and I had a few managers as well.”
11 / belief
“Seeing that prototype and seeing the kinds of information that people found really helpful, seeing Claude's plan and to-dos, seeing Claude's context and the files that it was going through, those kinds of things are things that I ended up pulling out of that prototype into Claude cowork. So yeah, I think about how can designers almost be more like VCs in this way, internally when we're looking at prototypes.”