Public evidence record
Host · Lenny's Newsletter
Books, apps, and tools
other / uses
“I continue to be astounded by how much engineering has transformed in two years. It's like a completely different dropdown. We used to sit there in NID and write code, and now you're just talking to agents and reviewing code and shipping 100 PRs a day.”
service / likes
“I love Waymo. It's just like, once you see it, you're just like, This is insane.”
other / likes
“They don't have to raise money. They can just kind of go heads down and build, so I love so much about the story of Surge.”
app / uses
“Yeah, let's do it. I use Discover Weekly all the time.”
other / built
“The Superhost example is actually really interesting because I built the Superhost program.”
app / uses
“As an example, I use Claude and ChatGPT for coming up with title suggestions for these podcast episodes. And I give it examples of just examples of titles that have done well, and then it's 10 different examples, just bullet points.”
app / uses
“Yeah. For me when I use Claude for coming up with interview questions and just suggestions of... It's actually really good.”
app / likes
“Okay. By the way, I want to make it clear, I love Claude. I use Claude and ChatGPT equally, roughly.”
app / likes
“Speaking of apps, I was doing research on you in preparation for this and I didn't realize you built Quitter back in the day. I love Quitter.”
app / built
“Fun fact, I built an app once called Savorable that helped you savor the moment, it was called Savorable and it sent you a text every few hours, I don't know, maybe once a day with a little reminder of way to savor the moment.”
hardware / likes
“I love Sonos. I love the name. I have many Sonos products. How often does this happen where the client is just, "No, this is not the name.”
other / likes
“I love Ender's Game. I've read them all.”
Claim ledger
500 transcript-backed records
01 / recommendation
“It's such a point I've never heard before, this idea of when you're demoing, demo as narrow a slice of the product as you can that addresses their priorities and needs. Because to your point, they may feel like, "Why do we need all this stuff?”
02 / evaluation
“I love how this whole process, a lot of listeners of these podcasts are product managers, product people, it just feels very product-y and product manager-y in terms of the organization and the step by step and just staying on top of all these little things.”
03 / uncertainty
“Steak dinner, champagne. I don't know what salespeople do when they close a deal.”
04 / belief
“I think the Palantir people called FDEs at most companies sparkling sales engineers.”
05 / evaluation
“Amazing. I love just how much alpha, not only you're sharing with us. It feels like the theme of this is alpha, just like the alpha we're getting from this conversation.”
06 / recommendation
“You want to pitch them two or three sentences in a text or an email or at a conference. And the key is to focus on the alpha, what your product will unlock for them.”
07 / prediction
“You believe this is the best time in history to be a designer.”
08 / belief
“If we come back to just my take on why designers are kind of frustrated and stressed right now is just there's less time to do design, the traditional design process.”
09 / uncertainty
“Elena Verna had this really great post. I don't know if you know her. She's head of growth at Lovable right now.”
10 / belief
“Also point people to your website, which I have here now, and I think my face is probably changing colors because the site has all these crazy colors.”
11 / evaluation
“And kind of surprisingly, designers and user researchers are just the most unhappy on every dimension, every actual dimension. They're the most overwhelmed, the most anxious, the least optimistic, the most worried, the most tired, also the least likely to recommend their role to people entering the workforce.”
12 / recommendation
“Yeah, Eli's book is still useful. I don't know how many years later? Amazing.”
13 / evaluation
“I love this, especially hearing this. This is how hiring has been forever. And just hear you describe it, it's clear this is not optimal.”
14 / evaluation
“Cursor is actually such a great example of exactly what you're describing because it feels like throughout the entire history of Cursor, it was always just like, how are they going to survive?”
15 / evaluation
“I just remembered actually, I had a friend applying for a job at Cursor and he said it was the best candidate experience he's ever had.”
16 / recommendation
“It is better to not assume we need a PM in every place.”
17 / preference
“I love that. So it's essentially don't just focus on, will this be an impactful experiment?”
18 / preference
“I love when books have never been mentioned before get added to the canon of recommended books.”
19 / belief
“On the product market fit piece, I think even more important there is the network effects of a Twitter, which you spend a lot of time thinking about building marketplaces.”
20 / belief
“Awesome. So a couple things you've learned here for building, and I think in consumer, this is especially important, is counterintuitively to how maybe people think things should work, you're finding that the best teams, companies, products end up coming from top-down, founder-led, almost micromanagement is a dirty word to a lot of people, but it's basically being in the weeds is, in spite of how people may feel, this actually ends up being leading to better stuff, better [inaudible 00:55:56].”
21 / belief
“I think about Netflix where they invest in Live Now, and that's just all you've done for 10 years and how big a deal that was for them.”
22 / belief
“Two and a half years ago, I had this post I put out where I said, "Why PMs are the best positioned role in tech to thrive in an AI world." And I feel like, even though the beginning of our conversation was like we should live in a world where we regret PM exists, I feel like we agree on this idea that the skills that seem to matter most and are going to be most valuable, whether it's a PM doing them or an engineer or designer, is very PM-y skills.”
23 / belief
“I want to start with something that you wrote online that surprised a lot of people, and I think will surprise a lot of people coming from a long-time chief product officer, long-time product builder, someone that's built a lot of very successful products and teams.”
24 / evaluation
“Yeah. I think some people are like, "What's the big deal?" The fact that everyone at Anthropic is raving about it tells me something important is going on here.”
25 / evaluation
“It used to be the way founders push people like, what if we 10X this? And I love what I keep hearing is it's like, how do we go 1,000X from this idea?”
26 / evaluation
“I love how many of these answers connect. So what I'm hearing here is just working with other people, relying on other people, helping each other out when things get crazy, which is a similar answer you had for just how to find the joy and fun in this work.”
27 / evaluation
“I love just this meme of just be more ambitious comes up so often now, which is so hard.”
28 / evaluation
“That is interesting. And I love how all this connects judgment, persistence, a point of view of your own.”
29 / uncertainty
“I'm glad. And also it was going to be interesting once AI is so good, we're like, "I don't know who wrote that.”
30 / uncertainty
“I remember when Anthropic first launched, this was, I don't know, the first model when it launched years ago, three years ago, something like that.”
31 / belief
“The way I think about it, and I want to help people understand, help me understand just what are researchers doing all day.”
32 / belief
“I think that's also why Twitter is so useful for a lot of this is you see other people sharing what they've done, and it inspires you to come up with your own little ideas.”
33 / uncertainty
“The latest number I saw was Anthropic was making, I don't know, $50 billion in ARR.”
34 / evaluation
“Here's what they're talking about computer use; here's what they're talking about with this limitation of this UX situation. And you made this really interesting point that you have to have fun with it, which is not easy for a lot of people because they're pushed to use AI or they just don't know exactly what to do with it.”
35 / commitment
“I love it. I'm going to go do that. Elizabeth, thank you so much for being here and being here again.”
36 / evaluation
“Yeah. And I love that back then it was called machine learning and AI was like, no, no, it's not AI.”
37 / prediction
“I wonder if another reason for this becoming more valuable is because agents are now doing a lot of work.”
38 / prediction
“How much different do you think this will be in, I don't know, five years, the way we entertain ourselves?”
39 / evaluation
“I love this concept. Excellence as an operating system. It's very systems thinking you might say for how to set up a company.”
40 / uncertainty
“I don't know anything about this, but you mentioned you're doing some kind of cycling event.”
41 / commitment
“What you're saying here is you believe we will continue to have specialties, product person, engineer, data science, designer.”
42 / belief
“There's a quote that I think is misattributed to Salman Rushdie, which is, "When a child is born, they first ask for food and water and protection and then they ask for, tell me a story.”
43 / belief
“I think of this book that everyone always references with the slinky on the front, Thinking in Systems.”
44 / uncertainty
“I don't know if you know this, but your first visit to the podcast, your episode ended up being my second most popular episode.”
45 / observation
“I continue to be astounded by how much engineering has transformed in two years. It's like a completely different dropdown. We used to sit there in NID and write code, and now you're just talking to agents and reviewing code and shipping 100 PRs a day.”
46 / belief
“What's it going to be? But if you actually look at the losing my job to AI bucket, there's actually a role that is even more worried about losing their job and I believe that is data analytics.”
47 / uncertainty
“I don't know if we have the audience to do that, but that'd be really interesting.”
48 / uncertainty
“We talked about this earlier. I don't know how much more there's to add here. Basically again, it's not that this function is in big trouble necessarily.”
49 / uncertainty
“I don't know how many innings. I don't know if there's innings in cricket, but it's definitely baseball.”
50 / uncertainty
“I don't know if you have this in this deck, but a glimmer of hope that you pointed out is that enjoyment of work is actually still very high, that it's burnout, but also people still at the same levels last year actually, really enjoying their work.”
51 / evaluation
“There are many people that are having a really good time, a lot of people that are having a really bad time, and it's just a good way to remember and basically have empathy for the other half, especially the folks not doing as well, because not everyone is as energized.”
52 / belief
“Something I think about along these lines is just AI is still very bad at actual design.”
53 / evaluation
“I want to talk about this browser use piece a little bit because I think people don't realize how powerful this is and what it could be used for.”
54 / belief
“Speaking of that, to help people build their own internet treasure, your book is coming out very soon, I think around the time this episode comes out.”
55 / evaluation
“So just to summarize how I think about this framework, which is so good, if you start to really think through all the products that have succeeded and how many of them actually follow this, whether they were conscious or not, it's wild.”
56 / preference
“One of your insights along these lines is that this is your advantage as a startup is to be less ambitious because a Zuck needs to go really big because the revenue is already so high.”
57 / observation
“When Evan Spiegel's on the podcast, Snapchat founder, he said exactly this. This is why they've spent so much money on these specs, and he's just like, "This is the only way to survive in software is you need to have a hardware component now.”
58 / belief
“I think that's a really important takeaway for people, just how obsessed you are with that piece of building that I think a lot of builders don't think about at all.”
59 / uncertainty
“I think everyone knows about it. I don't know if everyone's read it. So highly encourage you to read it.”
60 / belief
“You are so into marketing that piece of building that I think a lot of builders don't think about at all.”
61 / uncertainty
“I got to ask about maybe the most famous, I don't know, tagline of all time when a product was launched, "1,000 songs in your pocket.”
62 / belief
“Yeah. And I think what you may also be saying here, which I think is really, really important, is that because it's so easy to build, people can just build all these features and additions and the value accrues to build something awesome and the product mind becomes more important to help push this stuff from just a sloppy every feature, every checkbox to something awesome that people actually use.”
63 / belief
“Benedict, this was amazing. I learned a ton. I feel better after this conversation.”
64 / uncertainty
“Just to support this kind of general theme you have of it's like we don't know what is going to happen, this is unprecedented, if you're to zoom out a few years ago, maybe three years ago, four years ago, the last profession you think would be automated is engineering and coding.”
65 / belief
“I think that is actually very actionable and very consistent advice on the podcast, is just, do stuff, build it, don't just sit around and pontificate and be pissed at what's happening.”
66 / uncertainty
“I went to a standup comedy show of Pete Holmes, I don't know if you know him. And he made this joke that we want AI to clean the poop off the street and do all these hard things that nobody wants to do, but instead it's like, "Oh, let me help you write.”
67 / belief
“I think Eric Schmidt just did a commencement speech and people were booing him every time he mentioned AI.”
68 / evaluation
“There's this thread that's been happening across a bunch of guests, which is around distribution becoming a bigger and bigger moat, because as software is easier to build, everyone's launching products, everyone's trying to compete for attention, it's getting harder and harder.”
69 / evaluation
“Because things are moving so fast, they are constantly reacting, having to guess at priorities, and having to make do with outdated solutions.”
70 / commitment
“Dan makes a lot of bold predictions and many quite contrarian takes that I was not expecting him to say. And we are going to revisit this conversation exactly a year from today to see how much he got right.”
71 / evaluation
“We don't currently have an AI that we talk to regularly in Slack, and we also don't work currently mostly in Codex or Claude Code.”
72 / uncertainty
“I don't know about you, but I'm so excited to have a robot at home doing things.”
73 / uncertainty
“If you're saying it'll double, but it's already gone up. I don't know. I saw numbers like 6x and some like that.”
74 / belief
“What I imagine, what I think about now is watching the war in Ukraine and Russia, just like drones, just like how crazy and different the world is now that you can build these little drones that go and blow people up.”
75 / evaluation
“There's this idea with when you build product, there's always this question when something doesn't work.”
76 / uncertainty
“You tweeted that you're leaving with your brief explanation and got seven million views, 50, I don't know, 8,000 likes.”
77 / uncertainty
“What an incredible set of experiences and different types of places to work. I don't know if they could be more different, all these places.”
78 / belief
“What I think about as you talk about this is it feels like there's going to be this big moment when a robot can build other robots, and this CAD point you make about where once AI can develop full designs for hardware, that's going to be a big moment.”
79 / evaluation
“I have to convince all these people this is not going to limit us and not hurt us down the road." But just let's remind people again just why this is important, why this is so painful if they don't do it right.”
80 / uncertainty
“I think about vital eggs as a great example of this. It was in the news, I don't know, on Twitter, TikTok a while ago.”
81 / belief
“I think there's a lot of just like, "Oh wow, I should really think about this and take this seriously.”
82 / belief
“The fact that Anthropic did this is such a huge deal because I think a criticism of all of this that people probably hear is this is going to limit our growth, this is going to hurt our potential.”
83 / uncertainty
“I don't know if you saw this, but everyone's complaining of how they've gotten worse and they have all the highest level of toxins and then they're owned by BlackRock now, it turns out.”
84 / commitment
“People have always joked, we get paid so much just to sit in front of a computer and put the right sorts of words and letters into this thing and we get paid a lot of money to do it. And now it's like, oh shit, maybe I won't be paid this much in the future because AI is going to be taking over.”
85 / uncertainty
“I think there's this big, I don't know, milestone of when does token spend exceed someone's salary.”
86 / belief
“I've gone in the meetings the same way I've done it. I think that makes a lot of sense.”
87 / belief
“I think just the fact that you're as head of product are not on top of that means that it's just, let's not worry about this.”
88 / commitment
“I want to come back to this idea of malleable software from a perspective of SaaS and the SaaS apocalypse. There's all this talk about, we will not need SaaS tools any longer.”
89 / belief
“Just coming back to your insight of when a product works, there's just this tiny core thing that is the thing that makes it amazing and what people want to come back to no matter how bad everything else is. I think that's a really interesting takeaway.”
90 / commitment
“OpenCloud's such a good example. It's just like, I will build a skill for myself and now I know how to do this thing.”
91 / uncertainty
“The TPPN guys have a really good way of describing this exact concept, which is they had like, I don't know, 8,000 listeners and a conversation.”
92 / belief
“I think people think about just the, okay, I'll create something that's pretty cool and close and then they don't think about exactly as you described.”
93 / evaluation
“I heard you've also talk about just being first doesn't matter that much either.”
94 / belief
“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.”
95 / prediction
“It's going up, I don't know, the funnel or the timeline of building a product. And I feel like distribution is where it ends up being, what ends up being the new moat and the new biggest challenge because AI is not going to really help you there.”
96 / uncertainty
“I have a friend who works at a big tech company and you just said all the design team, they're required to ship like, I don't know, 10 PRs a month or something like that or a quarter, which is such a new world.”
97 / belief
“I put plants all over my house drawing all over the place and there's multiplayer features, which is very cool, which I think is part of the idea, is you're connecting with people versus sitting in a VR environment on your own.”
98 / evaluation
“It's more of like a media platform might say. And then maybe threads, which I think is cheating because it just sits on top of Instagram.”
99 / evaluation
“Yeah. And just so we don't need to go too down this path, but it's so hard for the AI labs, I think, to on the one hand be like, okay, this is really dangerous if it gets much smarter and we need people to know this because this is happening and moving quickly.”
100 / recommendation
“I love Waymo. It's just like, once you see it, you're just like, This is insane.”
101 / uncertainty
“One is when Claude thinks there's all these I don't know if you call them verbs.”
102 / belief
“I think the big question for a lot of people is if you're coming from engineering or product or design, which of those core skills is going to be most valuable.”
103 / belief
“I think people don't give you enough credit for the success that CloudCode has had and co-work and all the things you all are building.”
104 / belief
“Another advantage of working Anthropic, I believe you guys have basically unlimited tokens.”
105 / evaluation
“You almost need that experience to build that skill to feel comfortable doing that because a lot of people, you know, they go through school or in college and all these like do the thing we tell you to do and then you will get a good grade.”
106 / prediction
“One thing I want to throw out, it's kind of a hot take, and this came from a chat I just had with Amol, a Head of Growth at Anthropic. So he's Head of Growth, he's a PM and he had this really interesting point that as engineers can do so much more, PMs are getting squeezed because they have to stay on top of so many things, so many features, so many ideas, so much talk, so many things being said at them.”
107 / belief
“Nikhyl is, in my opinion, right now, the number one best source of career advice for product managers and for tech people in general.”
108 / uncertainty
“I think the other, I don't know, the good, again, just to remind people, it sucks to have to change.”
109 / belief
“Just like if you look at your pie chart today of how happy you are during the day, you can actually be much happier in this future. And I think that's hard for people to really think, just realize, "Oh, wow, okay.”
110 / prediction
“What I think about as you talk about this is, I don't know if you saw this, they asked all the heads of the AI labs like Demis, and Sam Altman, and Dario, just like, "Okay, if everybody agreed to slow down and stop this stuff, would you do it?”
111 / uncertainty
“You would think though, I don't know if it was Hemmingway of just like, "If I had more time, I would've made it shorter.”
112 / uncertainty
“Along these lines, actually, you have this, I don't know if you call it a hot take that AI content is going to surpass human content and that's just the future.”
113 / belief
“I think that's the ultimate unicorn is an engineer that is also very business-minded.”
114 / uncertainty
“We interviewed, this is me and Terrence Rohan. I don't know if you know him, VC.”
115 / belief
“Keith, thank you so much for doing this. I learned so much. This is going to help a lot of founders, a lot of people building stuff.”
116 / uncertainty
“Interestingly on that line, there's a few companies that are launching, Simile is one, that is simulating humans. I don't know if you heard about this company.”
117 / belief
“Oh, man. And I think the fact that all this data is there, Slack, there's Granola, or whatever people use, all these notes from conversations and discussions are really key to this working.”
118 / belief
“Before I get into something that I think will blow a lot of people's minds about how we actually met and kind of a big part of your journey, let me just ask you this.”
119 / belief
“I think there was this famous tweet of you guys still use Workday and all these tools, all these SaaS tools.”
120 / uncertainty
“" Just like, "They're so far ahead." And it shows the power of focus and just, I guess, I don't know, all the things you all did.”
121 / recommendation
“" Share the story of the brain injury that you went through and just the journey that you went on there because this is going to blow people's minds.”
122 / uncertainty
“I don't know if you saw our episode together, but we talked a bit about it, but it's coming up soon.”
123 / uncertainty
“I don't know, probably your metaphor of the assistant, multiple assistants using the same computer, maybe not as helpful, but in theory it's like, "Okay, if they could just be in the same place and use the same computer and share, that's fine.”
124 / belief
“I think also, by the way, the reason it was called Clawdbot, I'm guessing is, like what makes this special is it gives hands to the AI versus just a chat where you talk, you can actually do stuff.”
125 / belief
“Just like I think the fun of it is so important. I think people don't get just like you try it and it's actually fun.”
126 / evaluation
“Maybe just as a final motivation to people that are like, "Okay, this all sounds wonderful, I got to go eat some dinner," Just to give people a sense of why this is important and worth their time in spite of all these other products launching, Jensen, the founder of Nvidia, just like the other day, he's just like, "Every company in the world needs to have a Claw strategy.”
127 / commitment
“Claude clearly is trying to, instead of acquiring OpenClaw, they're just like, "We will build it.”
128 / belief
“You have ChatPRD, a product company you're building. And I think there's something else even.”
129 / uncertainty
“Something that it does for me is when I have a meeting somewhere, I don't know how it knows this, but it's like, "You should leave now.”
130 / preference
“I actually didn't give it access to even read my email because in theory, somebody could trick it to tell them everything about the email that it sees.”
131 / belief
“The way I think about this right now is just where humans are still necessary and great product thinkers are still necessary is on the front end deciding what to prioritize and build, on the back end, determining if this is good and ready, essentially judgment and taste. And then there's distribution I think is such an underappreciated new bottleneck, because as you said, there's so much shit out there.”
132 / belief
“Something that we hear a lot on this podcast, is as a product leader, as a leader of any kind, you want to have a point of view, you want to come into a discussion with, "Here's our options, here's what I think is the right solution.”
133 / belief
“I think. I might be getting it wrong, but it's called Overstory, which is a concept of when you have a big tree, like the overstory is the branches that kind of sit on top, that kind of create a shade.”
134 / observation
“Your job is to help them see how massive an opportunity this is and not just give you what you want, but just like, wow, okay, here's the way to unblock this thing.”
135 / belief
“I think that's the book I'm thinking about, and it's the story of a family over many generations and around a tree.”
136 / recommendation
“Then there's your advice of ask people that know them, what is top of mind for them right now? Because they may be like, "This is the big bet we're making right now.”
137 / recommendation
“Just to make it very clear for people, because it's easy to just like, "Yeah, okay, I'll just expand my horizon," basically, the advice here is just think on behalf of the entire business, not just your feature, not just your little goal.”
138 / belief
“I think Radical Candor is the second most mentioned book on this podcast, behind High Output Management.”
139 / commitment
“Along these lines, I want to touch on, it feels like maybe the core approach you take, kind of the core to your philosophy, which is to kind of break out of this idea of some benchmark for a specific role and instead make it very clear to the company, "Here's the pain I will solve for you that is really important to you, and here's why it's worth paying me this much more because it's such a big problem for you.”
140 / commitment
“The core to your philosophy is make it very clear to the company, "Here's the pain I will solve for you, and here's why it's worth paying me this much more.”
141 / belief
“As I was exploring the startup ideas, as you remember, I was just tinkering and prototyping and building stuff. And then on the side I was writing things that I learned and things I wanted to share.”
142 / recommendation
“I love John Klassen books. They're so beautiful and just sweet, so those have been really great.”
143 / recommendation
“It's like he decides what his favorite are. I love John Klassen books. They're so beautiful and just sweet, so those have been really great.”
144 / belief
“People don't do that. I think people have been generally very conscious. There could be a moment of just like, "We're getting somewhere and I can't talk for too long and I don't want to be rude.”
145 / belief
“Anything else? This is really interesting, I think, just the idea of what creates creativity.”
146 / belief
“I think communication maybe is just how to succinctly communicate points so that people grasp them.”
147 / belief
“" I think there's a bit of I'm probably more stressed than it looks like and that I even feel, but I think I'm probably less stressed than the average person.”
148 / recommendation
“AI handles the recruiting toil and gives you a real source of truth. That means hours saved for hire and a team focused on what matters most: winning the right candidates.”
149 / recommendation
“I think the way I describe it is your job as a product manager is to deliver business impact by prioritizing and solving the most impactful business problems.”
150 / observation
“I think David Sedaris had this story where he just has to say yes to everything he's invited to just because he needs to have experiences because he just has to keep pumping out stories.”
151 / evaluation
“I love your point about like the way you know a chart is done is intrinsically you feeling like this is hilarious, this makes you laugh, makes you feel something.”
152 / preference
“I'm trying to keep things really simple because it's so easy to build this thing into this whole thing that's complicated that I'm like, "What have I done?”
153 / commitment
“I could stay in my little hole. But just to follow through on these things you pointed out that I did earlier, because I don't think I've ever talked about these things, I had all these different side projects before, like through college, I guess.”
154 / uncertainty
“Because someday, whether it's at a seven years old or 100 years old or 60 years old, I don't know, maybe I won't be able to do this every single week.”
155 / prediction
“" The jobs piece is really interesting. And a thread that has emerged on this podcast recently is that people are afraid AI will take their jobs, but in reality, AI is coming just in time to save us because populations are declining, people are aging, and we need something to help us there.”
156 / evaluation
“Marc Andreessen quote tweeted it and said, "This is the best AI CEO nobody knows.”
157 / belief
“What's really cool about you is you see the hardware side of this, and I think one of the biggest changes to our lives will probably be robots walking around doing things for us.”
158 / belief
“Your point about emotions was extremely interesting, and I want to make sure people don't take away the wrong takeaway here. So what I actually found really helpful, which I think is aligned with what you were suggesting is taking emotions out of it.”
159 / uncertainty
“Another, I don't know, ritual and way of running teams that I heard about you, is you encourage team members roasting each other, which on the surface doesn't sound like a wonderful environment, but on the other hand, I hear constantly that the teams that you've built are just the happiest, the highest performing teams.”
160 / uncertainty
“Coming back to cowork, is there, I don't know, mind-blowing use case, something just like, wow, that's so cool that cowork can do that.”
161 / evaluation
“Even an example you've shared, it could give these two people trying to make a decision, "Here's all of the data you need to make a decision and here's why this is the right answer and just press yes, press one, and I'll go ahead and build this.”
162 / uncertainty
“Interestingly, I saw Julie Zhuo, famed design leader, was reading The Power Broker recently. I don't know what's going on over here.”
163 / uncertainty
“There's a couple management, I don't know, rituals or takes you have that I've heard from folks that you work with, that I want to touch on.”
164 / belief
“A lot of designers I think are in this boat right now, just like, "Oh my God, I can't keep up with all these engineers shipping stuff all day.”
165 / uncertainty
“I don't know how you did this, but it feels like you have this fire hose of information coming at you.”
166 / belief
“A line that I often think about is, Huang has had this thought that the best case scenario with AI, because he was a very AI doomer for a long time, and I think the reason he got leaned into AI is like, "I need to help steer this in a direction that isn't going to harm the world.”
167 / belief
“I think we've uncovered one of the secrets of your success, which is just tell people how you feel and help them see that you appreciate them.”
168 / belief
“I had a conversation with Matt MacInnis, who's COO now CPO at Rippling, and hit a similar piece of advice, which I think is also, it's like adjacent advice, which is "The intensity of an idea or a plan drops at every level that it goes from CO to the next layer and layer.”
169 / belief
“I think as a lay person, you'll think about Cisco and you're like, "Okay, they WebEx, yes.”
170 / uncertainty
“About six months ago, I don't know if people even remember this, you actually left Anthropic.”
171 / commitment
“I definitely want to spend more time on that. I will follow up with this suggestion.”
172 / belief
“Anthropic, I think the number you guys put out, you're making $15 billion in revenue.”
173 / evaluation
“On the references piece, the toughest part is getting people to be honest because there's very little upside to them to say negative things about people.”
174 / evaluation
“The way I always thought about this is just having someone's ass on the line for something makes them so motivated to get it done, versus spreading the responsibility and the upside and the downside, it just doesn't work.”
175 / uncertainty
“I had Marc Andreessen on recently, and I don't know if you've heard his whole thing on what he consumes, he talks about he has a very barbell strategy to media.”
176 / belief
“One that you didn't mention that I think is interesting, I did some research on this recently, with Terence Rohan, one is just extremely ambitious.”
177 / belief
“Something that I've seen that a lot of companies is there's phases of like, okay, now it's the McKinsey, a cohort comes in, and we think that's going to be the answer, and then it's the Apple group, and then that didn't work out, then the Amazon group.”
178 / preference
“Okay, another Halliganism, I don't know if you put it this way, the way I think about it is this idea of, "There's no such thing as a silver bullet, it just takes a lot of lead bullets to get something done.”
179 / belief
“OpenAI's mission was to make AI available to all of humanity. And I think some people diss that, they're like, "Oh, it costs money.”
180 / prediction
“I don't know what job has changed more in the past couple years, like job that we didn't expect to change this much where just like the job of an engineer is so different in the entire lifespan of an engineer.”
181 / prediction
“Maybe the fourth order effect is distribution becomes increasingly important because there are so many freaking things trying to get your attention.”
182 / belief
“There's something I've seen other people. Ben Tossell, who I think is at factory now, shared this recently.”
183 / belief
“The other point you made here that I think is really important is that over time, these tools will do more and more of what you do manually.”
184 / belief
“I think to your point, there's definitely going to be, people need to keep building the machines that power all this stuff.”
185 / belief
“What a unique conversation. We touched topics on every level of humanity, I think.”
186 / evaluation
“What I think about as you're talking about this is the best people I've worked with that are most effective at work are the people that are really good at this, that you feel like really listen, really care, just aren't rushed.”
187 / belief
“I have people are like, "What the hell is going on here?" I learned a ton myself and I know people will too.”
188 / uncertainty
“I think about just people that don't have parents that are there and always seek someone as their partner that's more, I don't know, that gives them that later.”
189 / belief
“If there's anything you take away from this conversation, this is useful with kids, with partners, I think in work too, just this idea of I believe you and that makes sense.”
190 / prediction
“He's like, " Pick it up." So with that, I think understanding how babies think and toddlers think and operate is helpful in the corporate environment where we think we're working adults, but a lot of times they're more like babies.”
191 / belief
“I think people aren't fully grasping just, specifically, software engineering and how much that is changing. It's pretty clear we're going to be in a world soon where engineers are not actually writing code, which I think, a year ago, we would not have thought.”
192 / belief
“I think you used the term smoke stack or something where it's like PM over here, engineer design, and what I'm hearing here is you need to get good at at least two of these skills.”
193 / uncertainty
“I'm picturing an F sideways or an E where there's three, two or three, I don't know, downward parts.”
194 / belief
“My take is you could always get some percentage of win from all these different channels.”
195 / belief
“I think about AG1, which has all these new... I'm doing their sleep supplement, and there it goes.”
196 / belief
“I think an important element of this is also the product you're currently working on, maybe it's okay for it just to not grow.”
197 / belief
“I think what's also interesting is some of your advice is the value, you may be picking the wrong customer, the wrong market, you may be positioning it wrong.”
198 / preference
“I always used to tell people the key to being successful writing stuff online and just content in general is quality and consistency, but I've just more and more realized quality is actually the only thing that matters and the consistency doesn't matter.”
199 / uncertainty
“Say it's not like Meta, but just like, I don't know, a thousand person company, 500 people.”
200 / belief
“I think people see these companies on the outside and it feels like everything they've got all figured out.”
201 / belief
“I think people will find this extremely interesting and useful, as I thought, and also fun.”
202 / uncertainty
“I don't know if I told you I was going to ask you these questions, but I'm going to go for it.”
203 / belief
“I suspect this is actually going to be really, really useful and really, really interesting to a lot of people.”
204 / uncertainty
“I don't know if you saw this on Twitter. Someone described small talk as the TCP/IP act handshake.”
205 / belief
“I'm so bad at remembering names. I think I have a medical issue, so I just can't remember names.”
206 / belief
“I think actually at the end you say that whenever anyone joins you for meal, whether it's a man or woman, you stand up as a modern way of thinking about that.”
207 / belief
“I think people don't realize just it could be a pretty cheap thing that if you get tailored in some small way, it just looks so much better even if it's not the highest quality item.”
208 / evaluation
“And there's so many other benefits to limiting autonomy because there's just danger also of the thing doing too much for you and just messing up your, I don't know, your database, sending out all these emails you never expected.”
209 / belief
“I just saw Demis from DeepMind, AI, Google, whatever they call the whole org, talking about this where he thinks that's going to be a big part of where they're going, combining the image model work, the LLM, and also their world model stuff, Genie, I think is what it's called.”
210 / belief
“Just one more line of questioning here that I think that's on my mind is the reason this became kind of a big debate is Cloud Code.”
211 / belief
“One is Ami Vora, who you mentioned. She's now, I think, head of product at Anthropic.”
212 / uncertainty
“Yeah. And I think another part of this metaphor, I don't know if you think of it this way.”
213 / belief
“The other part of this J- Curve that I think is really important to touch on is this idea of for the first six or nine months, you're going to be at the bottom of the J curve falling, still falling.”
214 / uncertainty
“Jason, I don't know if you know this, but you're the perfect podcast guest because you have such deep experience in the space that you just have answers to everything I ask.”
215 / commitment
“Don't just like, "We have software, go try using it." It's like we will have someone on our team helping you figure this out and maybe there's not even software yet to do all these things, but we'll have them do it for you.”
216 / evaluation
“Then all these playbooks that she's used over the last 20 years in growth just don't work anymore at AI companies.”
217 / belief
“I think what might be helpful here actually is to do a tour, kind of a quick tour of the agents that you've built and what they do, which ones have been most impactful.”
218 / belief
“Also, very counterintuitively, and maybe the more optimistic perspective here is when you do give your team space to just twiddle their thumbs, bad things start to happen. Morale actually dips in my experience.”
219 / uncertainty
“I don't know if you've played with Claude much, but I actually find Claude is better at writing and words and language.”
220 / belief
“There's always this idea, "I'm going to build a side business, I'm going to make recurring income, it's going to be amazing," and in my experience, anytime there's a market or something shows up that's juicy and there's ways to make money, somebody's going to come at you and work harder, raise more money, and there's only so long you can maintain that.”
221 / evaluation
“The hope the model just does a good enough job and not being tricked is fundamentally insufficient. And the only reason there hasn't been a massive attack yet is how early the adoption is, not because it's secured.”
222 / evaluation
“The way he put it, the only reason there hasn't been a massive attack yet is how early the adoption is, not because it's secured.”
223 / belief
“I think that's a really interesting point, even though it could... It's not great if you help support agents like Hitler is great, but your point is that that sucks.”
224 / belief
“What makes this very real is just this week, apparently OpenAI had this whole code red moment where even though OpenAI by far the leading AI assistant over almost a billion, I think monthly active users, basically synonymous with AI around the world, with Gemini 3 launching, their market share just started to dip really quickly.”
225 / uncertainty
“I don't know if you saw this tweet where I tagged you the other day, or maybe it was today.”
226 / uncertainty
“I don't know what this is. I don't know what I'm doing with it. So I could see how this loop goes faster and faster by giving it away.”
227 / belief
“I think people are getting used to these insane numbers, and not long ago is like, okay, if you hit a million ARR in a year, you're doing pretty well.”
228 / belief
“The way I think about it, the way what you're describing is it's almost table stakes have increased, and now it's so easy to build.”
229 / uncertainty
“I know this isn't what you work on, but there's a lot of opinions, a lot of, I don't know, timelines.”
230 / uncertainty
“Built, you said, in 28 days and I don't know, 10 days, 18 days just to get the core of it working.”
231 / uncertainty
“I always love meeting people working on AI because it always feels like this very, I don't know, sterile, scary, mysterious thing.”
232 / observation
“We're not going to have exactly a plan of where it's going in the next few months." The key is you all hire the best people in the world.”
233 / evaluation
“Probably looking at it and just making sure this is the right thing to do, yeah.”
234 / belief
“I think the tweet was the gnarliest bugs that he runs into that he just spends hours trying to figure out nothing else has solved, he gives it to Codex, lets it run for an hour and it solves it.”
235 / recommendation
“What I'm hearing is this ready, fire, aim is the approach more than ready, aim, fire. And there's something, and as you process that, because that may not come across well, but I actually have heard this a lot at AI companies is because you don't know, and Nick Turley shared I think the same sentiment, because you don't know how people will use it it doesn't make sense to spend a lot of time making it perfect.”
236 / recommendation
“They don't have to raise money. They can just kind of go heads down and build, so I love so much about the story of Surge.”
237 / belief
“Something we haven't gotten into that I think is really interesting is just the story of how you got to starting Surge.”
238 / belief
“I think most people hadn't heard of Surge until just recently, and then you just came out, and like, okay, the fastest growing company at a billion dollars.”
239 / belief
“As you'll hear in this conversation, Edwin has a very different take on how to build an important company, and how to build AI that is truly good and useful to humanity. I absolutely love this conversation and I learned a ton.”
240 / uncertainty
“Essentially, it's like a virtual machine with, I don't know, a browser or a spreadsheet or something in it with like, I don't know, surge.”
241 / belief
“I think we're going to help a lot of people start their own companies, help their companies become more aligned with their values and just building better things.”
242 / belief
“Along these lines, something that's really unique to Surge that I learned is you guys have your own research team, which I think is pretty rare, talk about just why that's something you guys have invested in and what has come out of that investment.”
243 / uncertainty
“Are there any functions you think are especially successful at this? Not to play any favorites, but I don't know.”
244 / belief
“There's a podcast called Song Exploder, I believe, that is a similar concept that's not in Hebrew, in English, that I'll point people to if you love that one.”
245 / preference
“Naval's always talking about that last book. I think I bought it and it was just hard reading this.”
246 / preference
“I don't use it that much, to be honest, but I should. My wife just doesn't love Grok.”
247 / evaluation
“Because it's all in Figma, you can use your team's existing design building blocks, making it easy to create outputs that look good and feel real and are connected to how your team builds.”
248 / belief
“I think we're going to help a lot of people improve their lives and their careers.”
249 / belief
“Something that you are in many ways known for is helping co-founders build better relationships. And in my experience one of the most challenging parts of starting a company is the co-founder relationship.”
250 / evaluation
“Oh, I didn't realize this made you upset or that you have this need. And now that I know that, okay, now I see why this is important to you.”
251 / belief
“Along this topic, I chatted with a number of clients that have worked with you over the years, and one of the most common themes that they said you help them with is having difficult conversations. And I think we covered actually much of this in what we just talked about, but I'm curious if there's any other advice you have for helping people have difficult conversations.”
252 / belief
“I think there's just so much power in different words, repeating back what they said.”
253 / commitment
“I hear everyone talking about it. I am going to try to avoid it, I think. Next question.”
254 / uncertainty
“What this makes me think about is there's this famous Harvard Business Review piece. I don't know.”
255 / evaluation
“I love that story because I think most people when they hear this advice and this topic of, "Okay, I am feeling depleted, I'm feeling burnt out," I feel like most people jump to, "Okay, but I can't actually do anything about it.”
256 / recommendation
“I think one is at least skip a week or two of the newsletter and just actually stick to that plan.”
257 / commitment
“I feel like this newsletter, I started this newsletter six, seven years ago at this point, and originally it was like, I'm just going to build this chill newsletter, do this on the side.”
258 / recommendation
“And then now I can't live without Slack. And essentially this is a lens you use to figure out where to spend product resources because if you don't get up that curve to I get it and I can't live without it, nothing else matters.”
259 / belief
“Slack leaned into delight and experience and craft and a great experience. And you just as a product leader, I'd say are known as very taste forward, very craft oriented leader, which is pretty rare and I think continues to be rare.”
260 / preference
“Just the specific example of, "We don't sell saddles here," just to quickly communicate this to folks, and correct me if I'm missing anything, is just instead of, "Hey, look at this amazing saddle we've bought," which you want to communicate as, "Here, go horseback riding.”
261 / evaluation
“Figma Make is a different kind of vibe coding tool. Because it's all in Figma, you can use your team's existing design building blocks, making it easy to create outputs that look good and feel real and are connected to how your team builds.”
262 / belief
“We're going to talk about a bunch of the history that I think a lot of people don't even know about how this whole thing started, but let me first read a quote from Wired about you just so people get a sense, and in the intro I'll share all of the other epic things you've done.”
263 / uncertainty
“Most people started hearing and caring about AI, as what it's called today, just like, I don't know, a few years ago when ChatGPT came out.”
264 / belief
“There's this line, I think, this was when you were presenting to Congress, "There's nothing artificial about AI.”
265 / belief
“There's this line, I think, this was when you were presenting to Congress. There's nothing artificial about AI.”
266 / evaluation
“I love that. And now it's, I don't know, hundreds of thousands, right, that are orders of magnitude more powerful.”
267 / commitment
“How bad must this investor feel at this point. We won't name names. Just to share some stats, I know this is going to be by the time this launches, this will be out, but you guys are at over 100 million ARR now, worth over $2 billion.”
268 / belief
“Check out my amazing products." Like, "Here's a thing I learned. You might find it useful.”
269 / uncertainty
“" You have some even more concrete pieces of advice here of just what that looks like. You have a huge, I don't know, philosophy of just huge leverage per person.”
270 / belief
“Just to highlight this point you made that I think is really powerful, I haven't heard it described this way before, just the power of testing prototypes very, very, very early, using these platforms that make it super easy.”
271 / belief
“You also built a business in a category that I think most people never imagined there was this big of an opportunity.”
272 / uncertainty
“Oh, what a, that survey man, what a, and not only just that survey being the slick, I'm imagining that XKCD comic with the open source little, I don't know, block holding up the entire world, like this one little piece of code.”
273 / uncertainty
“I see your face all the time in my LinkedIn feed. I don't know if you know this is a thing.”
274 / uncertainty
“I don't know, is there anything surprising about, "Oh wow, this model's actually really good at this and this is really bad at that.”
275 / belief
“The book I always point people to when they're struggling with this sort of thing and like, "Okay, I did this and no one cared, didn't do any good," is there's a book by Scott Pressfield, I think is his name, called Nobody Wants to Read Your Shit, which is exactly what is right.”
276 / uncertainty
“Just like, most of what limits people it feels like now is just, I don't know what idea I have.”
277 / uncertainty
“I don't know, imagining some kind of a storyboard and then it's figure out the model and level of model and prompt for that model to achieve each of these steps as best as possible.”
278 / uncertainty
“Let's talk about the next phase and maybe, I don't know, tell us kind of the ARR at that point through 100 million.”
279 / evaluation
“Because everyone's like, "Oh sure, I'll block off time. And then, I don't know, okay, but I actually got to do all this other stuff so I'm not going to use it this time or maybe next week.”
280 / belief
“One of the biggest fears I think founders have is having a company pull, basically build just for their use case and then it ends up not being used by a lot of people.”
281 / belief
“There's the obvious companies that everyone is always trying to get these days, OpenAI and Anthropic and Stripe I think is one.”
282 / belief
“Either pick SMB small company, which I know you said there's a million ways to differentiate what this means, but I guess I think of employee numbers under some number over a thousand is maybe enterprise.”
283 / evaluation
“I think about linear, which started very startup-ey and my take is they did that because changing the way you work is really hard and their bet was like, "Let's start with companies and grow with them and over time that becomes the default.”
284 / uncertainty
“I wonder what that metaphor is for figure skating. I don't know. Anyway, Melanie, this was incredible.”
285 / belief
“I think a lot of people hearing this might feel like, "I do this. Yeah, I have a vision.”
286 / belief
“I think there's something like $240 million monthly active users, one of the hottest private companies in the world.”
287 / uncertainty
“I don't know how that works. Yeah, I don't know how you did that, but it worked.”
288 / uncertainty
“Just was the mood really, I don't know, sad internally? Two years, that's a long time not to ship anything.”
289 / uncertainty
“I don't know if you want to name names of products or anything like that, but it's something that you find helpful or useful.”
290 / evaluation
“I think a lot of people think of Canva as a design graphics for social media and marketing and things like that, but you also have spreadsheets, docs, whiteboards, charts, code, AI coding tool.”
291 / commitment
“I will say the ending, I was just like, it felt like it kind of slowed down a bit.”
292 / belief
“I want to start with a letter that I hear you wrote to Jack Dorsey to convince him that he and that Block needed to take AI a lot more seriously. I think you called it your AI manifesto and it seems like it really worked.”
293 / evaluation
“Like, "Okay, cool, we built it in a weekend and now it's years of endless maintenance and requests and support.”
294 / evaluation
“Because people listening to this hear all these amazing successful people come on the podcast, share all these stories of success, endless success, but they don't hear the stories when things don't work out.”
295 / evaluation
“That's amazing. And whenever I hear a stat like this, I think an important element that people need to think about is this is the worst it will ever be.”
296 / uncertainty
“Something that Hamel and Shreya shared is that people need just, I don't know, five or seven evals for the most important elements of their product.”
297 / belief
“Wow. I learned a lot more there than I thought. That was awesome. Really good example.”
298 / prediction
“We won't have any more in 10, 20 years. There'll be no more engineers because no one's hiring junior engineers.”
299 / prediction
“I think people have felt exactly what you're describing every time they open up one of these vibe coding tools where you could just describe anything you want.”
300 / belief
“Let me get to this quite a core question that I think on is a lot of people's minds.”
301 / uncertainty
“There's the common ones, Copilot, Cursor. I don't know. Is there anything that stands out that you want to share, just like, "Hey, you should check this tool out.”
302 / belief
“Within DevEx is productivity, and I think the key insight that you had and other folks in the space of that is not just productivity, but there's also engineering happiness.”
303 / belief
“You have so many products now. You have FigJam, you have Slides, Sites is a separate product I believe.”
304 / uncertainty
“I don't know a single product team that doesn't use and love Figma, which is extremely rare.”
305 / belief
“There's not another hardcore Dylan that just everyone hates. That's what I think Akshay's quote tells us.”
306 / belief
“I asked it to just clone Figma at the app and it's very good. I'm going to launch a competitor I think later today.”
307 / belief
“I'll share the one that I learned from that that I believe still works and which made it very clear, and I think we were working on, is if you want it to tell you how to build a bomb, you tell, I have a grandma who used to work in a bomb factory and she used to tell me stories of how she built bombs at her factory.”
308 / uncertainty
“Not to put you on the spot, but is there someone that comes to mind when you think of, this person has great taste, that maybe isn't an obvious, like a Steve Jobs, maybe another leader? I don't know.”
309 / evaluation
“I was like, update the branding to look more like Figma, and it worked. Then, I made a, make a landing page for a Dylan and Lenny podcast episode.”
310 / recommendation
“I love that you are the person being like, "Guys, I think we should make FigJam.”
311 / commitment
“You'd get a year free of Warp if you become an annual subscriber for Lenney's Newsletter, check it out, LanneysNewsletter.”
312 / evaluation
“My understanding is it fell through because the UK government regulatory boards just didn't want it to happen.”
313 / preference
“Because I use it for not building, I use it for just all the shell stuff. I'm like, "I want to install some package.”
314 / belief
“I was actually looking at the list of top, so in the top 15 apps, Google is I think five of them, a third.”
315 / evaluation
“Yeah, it feels like Veo 3 would be even more successful if it had a wacky name. And I like that this is the opposite of your advice of clarity.”
316 / recommendation
“It's flexible, so it adapts to the way your team works and helps you build a roadmap that drives alignment, not questions. And because it's built on Jira, you can track ideas from strategy to delivery all in one place.”
317 / prediction
“I recently had Brian Balfour on the podcast and he showed this quote that's really stuck with me that I think about as you talk about all this, it was by Alex Rampell, this idea that startups is a game of getting distribution before incumbents can innovate fast enough.”
318 / evaluation
“There's this MIT study that just showed that there's all these pilots that people are excited about and then they don't work and companies aren't adopting these tools.”
319 / uncertainty
“I don't know if anyone's ever mentioned, it was one of the most influential books for me too.”
320 / belief
“I think about when you say this, I did an interview with the founders of Perplexity a few years ago asking about how they work at Perplexity, and the founders said that before, they were ruled, before they ask a question of anyone on the team, they have to ask AI first.”
321 / uncertainty
“Where can folks find you online if they want to maybe reach out, learn more about what you're, I don't know, maybe join Scale.”
322 / belief
“As I was researching your background and prepping for this podcast, I learned a really interesting fun fact about you that I don't think a lot of people know.”
323 / uncertainty
“What's crazy about that book, you look at all the companies they talk about, I haven't read in a while, but just the whole book is about companies that last, I believe, or maybe that's the other book, I don't know.”
324 / belief
“I think people would not have expected AI and cannot beat every human alive ever.”
325 / belief
“One is here's an insight, it can apply to other parts of the product. "Hey teams, here's something we learned unexpected.”
326 / belief
“I think another takeaway here/something that I think about when I hear what you're saying is there's often a lot more wins in an area than people expect that you can continue to find wins and growth in something for a long time.”
327 / belief
“I want to go back to this phrase right at the beginning of this answer that you shared that I think is really helpful that you see growth as simply your job is to connect users to the value of your product.”
328 / uncertainty
“You've worked at a bunch of different sizes of companies from startup to Grammarly, I don't know, you call it a big company, bigger company.”
329 / commitment
“" Just like this part is wrong. I will fix it. Yeah, I'm very much a pick and choose.”
330 / belief
“Wow, what a genius move. So essentially, it's here's a bunch of improvements, but you get three, I think max, and then it's like, "Okay, now you get upgrade.”
331 / belief
“What is the difference between how these three operate? I think there's many ways to be successful.”
332 / belief
“I was going to ask, so it's not like a full trial, it's like a capped trial where you get a certain number of things and then you run out and then they get refreshed. I think once a day or something like that is what I found.”
333 / belief
“There's a very specific framework that as we were chatting that I think would be really helpful for people to hear and learn from you.”
334 / recommendation
“The Superhost example is actually really interesting because I built the Superhost program.”
335 / belief
“There's going to be exceeding expectations is a part of it, and then I forget the other piece, but I think that's an important element.”
336 / belief
“I think about Linear as we're talking, just like they are winning in a very crowded space because they invested in making it much more delightful.”
337 / preference
“I started using Arc. I don't know if you've used Arc before, which is built on Chromium.”
338 / recommendation
“Yeah, let's do it. I use Discover Weekly all the time.”
339 / belief
“Just to make clear exactly what you're talking about there, one of the heads, I think maybe the head engineer of Claude Code, went on a podcast and he's like, "We don't do evals, we just vibe.”
340 / belief
“The fact that your course on Maven is the number one highest grossing course in Maven, clearly there's demand and interest, and there's more people I think on your side.”
341 / belief
“A question I didn't ask, but this is I think something people are thinking about.”
342 / commitment
“I feel like everyone goes through that. Eventually in their life they decide, I will watch The Wire.”
343 / belief
“I think when people think A-B tests, it's like we're changing something in the product, we're going to see if this improves some metric we care about.”
344 / evaluation
“The way I think about evals, and tell me if this is wrong, just simply is like unit tests for code.”
345 / belief
“Like, it will only get weirder. And I think giving people that sense of like, okay, just enjoy this normal because this is going to be only weirder will at least give people an expectation, real expectation, where things might be going.”
346 / uncertainty
“I don't know, classically, designers aren't the biggest fans of experiments and data and making decisions based on data.”
347 / belief
“I was going to say exactly what you just said, which is every great designer that I've worked with was obsessed with data and the most leaning into the data versus designers that are just like, nah, I think I'm going to have a sense of what's right.”
348 / belief
“I think about things like clarity communication, just like what comes to mind when you think about like, here's the things you want to double down on as you're learning to be manager that will also help you be really good at AI tooling and working with agents.”
349 / belief
“Not even maybe, I believe the data tells us it's the fastest growing company in history.”
350 / belief
“Brandon, this was incredible. I learned so much. I have a billion more questions, but you got shit to do.”
351 / prediction
“skill, but it's being good with AI, using AI to become more, become better at what you're already doing. This reminds me of Elon's whole thing with Neuralink, which if I don't know if this is how he put it, but the way I've always heard it is he wanted to build Neuralink because in the future, when AGI and super intelligence is around, we need a way to compete.”
352 / recommendation
“Okay. By the way, I want to make it clear, I love Claude. I use Claude and ChatGPT equally, roughly.”
353 / uncertainty
“Such a good point, because I don't know if I have competitors in this exact space, but basically they would show up instead and then I lose all that traffic.”
354 / belief
“We did a podcast episode just over two and a half years ago. I think of it as the definitive guide on how to win at SEO.”
355 / belief
“Wow, did not know this. As you talk, I think about if you go to Google, no offense, Mr.”
356 / evaluation
“I didn't even think about this side of it when we started talking about this, but I think that's an important thing to note, is just this has nothing to do with the training data.”
357 / recommendation
“I love Claude. I use Claude and ChatGPT equally, roughly. I didn't want to make it sound like ChatGPT is the only product people use”
358 / observation
“The thought that the way to win in this space and to build a moat is, as you said, "Build your own model slash have proprietary data that you build through people using your product.”
359 / belief
“Speaking of philanthropic and other passions of yours, something that I don't think most people know about you, and I think will give them another insight into how interesting you are, you run an organization called Paid in Full, which is incredibly cool.”
360 / uncertainty
“Yeah, I think about I was at Airbnb for a long time and just thinking of Brian, who I don't know even know if he had a job before Airbnb now.”
361 / belief
“I think some of these lessons, especially that last one, is the kind of lesson that you can hear it and be like, "Yeah, yeah, I get it.”
362 / evaluation
“There's talk recently of just PMs are almost becoming the bottleneck for teams because engineers are moving so much faster and PMs are the same, just like sitting or maybe docs are easier to write.”
363 / recommendation
“What I love about this is this is something that I've seen a bunch is having a very specific problem to solve for yourself is a really good way to build and get into these tools because you're motivated to solve a problem and it's a specific thing that you're doing versus just generally, "I'm going to go sit around and play with Lovable.”
364 / uncertainty
“I don't know if forcing's the right word, but encouraging people to play with the latest stuff and giving them a chance to take days off or block out calendars, cancel meetings, just stay on top of this stuff to play as you talked about it.”
365 / belief
“I want to start with what I imagine was a very surprising down moment in the history of Airtable. This is something that, unfortunately, something I think about when I think of Airtable.”
366 / evaluation
“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.”
367 / evaluation
“I think people don't talk enough about this how if someone starts a company that's an idea they have they're excited about, it takes off and then you're stuck on that for a long time, and then even if things are pushed in a direction you're not as excited about.”
368 / prediction
“" And it makes me think about something else of just you would think why can't just GPT-5 build its own user interface just like as you use it, it just evolve. It's sort of what it's doing with Canvas and all these things, but that's another way I think about when you talk about this idea of product as organism is the product, the UX can shift based on how you're using it and evolve automatically without having product teams have to do anything.”
369 / prediction
“I want to start with something that we were chatting about before this that I've never heard about as a concept that I think is going to be really helpful for people to think about, which is this concept you have that we're moving from product as artifact to product as organism.”
370 / prediction
“Okay, so before we get into the insane trajectory that your data labeling business is on, which is just an amazing story that I think a lot of founders and product teams that are trying to navigate this AI disruption that's happening will have a lot to learn from.”
371 / uncertainty
“I don't know how much time you'll have for the hundreds of thousands of people coming your way, but I appreciate the offer.”
372 / uncertainty
“Don't watch it before you go to bed, I don't know how many gruesome scenes you've seen already.”
373 / prediction
“This has come up a couple of times this point that I think is really good, that younger people coming out of school are actually going to be much more likely to be successful because they're growing up with these tools, and are much more native to all these advanced tools and so they just come in as beasts just doing so much more.”
374 / recommendation
“Fun fact, I built an app once called Savorable that helped you savor the moment, it was called Savorable and it sent you a text every few hours, I don't know, maybe once a day with a little reminder of way to savor the moment.”
375 / recommendation
“Speaking of apps, I was doing research on you in preparation for this and I didn't realize you built Quitter back in the day. I love Quitter.”
376 / belief
“I think data has shown people often prefer not to talk to humans just to solve problems that can just be solved.”
377 / belief
“You had a business that was working, people used it, loved it, over 100 million ARR I believe.”
378 / belief
“I want to show you something that I randomly have in my office, my wife just got me that I think you're going to love.”
379 / uncertainty
“I don't know if you've seen this, but I've been doing research on which companies produce the best product leaders.”
380 / belief
“Essentially, you've uncovered a really important trend or insight about how products are going to grow differently in the future, how growth is changing, and this is something that I think a lot of people need to hear, so I asked you to come on to share what you're seeing.”
381 / uncertainty
“If you've seen the revenue recently, they're making, I don't know, approaching 10 billion a year or some crazy amount of money.”
382 / uncertainty
“What you're saying here is this is the opportunity for startups to disrupt an incumbent. This is the opportunity for someone to disrupt Salesforce, I don't know, ServiceNow, all these guys that have been around for a long time.”
383 / belief
“I am excited for you guys to keep seeing these insights into companies and sharing more of this because this is I think what a lot of people are looking for, just like things aren't quite clicking at our company.”
384 / uncertainty
“Even though it's not, I don't know, Google or Facebook or whatever, it's still incredibly valuable for this specific thing that I do.”
385 / recommendation
“I don't know, I'm thinking about the Technology Bros podcast on Twitter right now, TBPN, where they basically figured out on Twitter you can create this livestream and you see it all day in your Twitter feed just like, hey, they're broadcasting, and it's a really cool distribution channel.”
386 / observation
“There's actually products for product teams, so maybe just explain that briefly, but the thing that I think is really interesting here is you work with a lot of companies now selling them AI tools, and you have noticed a very big difference between the companies that are really good at adopting AI tools and seeing gains from them from those that don't.”
387 / belief
“I think a lot of this comes from just PMs naturally are trained to deflect credit and to include, say 'we' in everything and just this person did that.”
388 / belief
“I feel like people might miss that nuance, in the way we talked about it, so I think that's a really important point to make there.”
389 / belief
“I think an important part of this is just, if you believe what you're building is not helping the business grow and succeed, either, they'll let you go someday, because you're not doing something that matters.”
390 / uncertainty
“I don't know where it is today, but it was the most influential music review site.”
391 / evaluation
“In my mind, the PM is 100% the mini CEO, in terms of they think like the CE or they should within the team.”
392 / evaluation
“Whether it was right or wrong, it is now the fastest-growing, insane revenue generating business in the world.”
393 / uncertainty
“I don't know, is there a philosophy book you're like, "Here's the one to read if you're getting into this.”
394 / belief
“I think you were planning to do this as your main thing and then you somehow took the side quest.”
395 / uncertainty
“Wow. This is such a good example of, I don't know if you think of it this way, but when someone offers you a seat on a rocket ship, don't ask which seat.”
396 / belief
“There's two acronyms people have been using for this specific skill of AI driven SEO. I think one is AEO, which is answer engine optimization.”
397 / uncertainty
“There was a recent study actually, I don't know if you saw, where they showed engineers were less productive with AI because it was just putting them in different directions.”
398 / belief
“I saw someone using I think VO 3 to create their own Inception videos where the worlds wrapping in on each other.”
399 / uncertainty
“I have a two-year-old and it feels like there's a new milestone of, there's like when to give them a phone, when to give them, I don't know, Snapchat, whatever kids use these days and then it's like when to give them their first ChatGPT account.”
400 / belief
“I think that's the first time someone's actually mentioned Cursor in this answer, so might be the beginning of a trend.”
401 / belief
“I think what you're saying here is the retention may not work for some of these companies.”
402 / belief
“Fin, actually, they're a new sponsor of the podcast, and I learned... I didn't know this.”
403 / preference
“I love people like you that do the work for, I don't know, decades at this point, learn from real life experiences over and over and over, and then just share all this stuff with people.”
404 / uncertainty
“There's a lot of stuff here that's scary and I don't know how to think about it exactly.”
405 / uncertainty
“Along these lines, Dario, your CO recently talked about how AI is going to take a huge part of, I don't know, half of white-collar jobs, that unemployment might go up to something like 20%.”
406 / belief
“I've got Good Strategy, Bad Strategy right behind me. I think I'm going to point to it.”
407 / uncertainty
“In terms of the offers do you think, is this a real number that you're seeing this $100 million signing bonus, is that a real thing? I don't know if you've actually seen that.”
408 / uncertainty
“Most people probably don't actually feel this yet or see this happening and so there's always this, I guess, I don't know, maybe, but I don't know it's hard to believe, my job seems fine.”
409 / belief
“How does that actually work? I think the core here is just this is baked into the model.”
410 / belief
“There we go. I think we've solved alignment problems right here. Get those writers on this, ASAP.”
411 / uncertainty
“I don't know if you want people to know this, but I was browsing through your Medium posts and you have a post called Five Tips to Poop like a Champion.”
412 / uncertainty
“Today there's over 1,000, I don't know what the latest number is, but I know it's over 1,000.”
413 / recommendation
“I like optimistic takes about AI, so this is great. And to your point, TBD if this is good for other countries, but good for the US.”
414 / recommendation
“I love how everything connects to how tech works and how AI came to be. I love this.”
415 / belief
“Excellent list. I think nobody's mentioned any of these, so that's always a good sign.”
416 / belief
“You kind of have this portfolio of companies, you have the content business. So I think there's a really interesting approach to how big these need to get to be successful.”
417 / belief
“If I understand it correctly, we've been in this knowledge economy, where people get paid to do a thing, and your thesis is that we're moving to this allocation economy, where the manager skills become more important, and we're going to be spending more of our time managing. And I think what's amazing about this is it also tells you which skills will matter more in the future, which is something I think a lot of people are thinking about.”
418 / belief
“I remember when they stopped it for some reason. I think he had to go do something else at HBO.”
419 / belief
“I think that's really reassuring to a lot of people. Basically what you're seeing is AI just supercharges people who have a skill and allows them to do a lot more.”
420 / evaluation
“You shared this in my newsletter and I was just looking at it, and that excerpt, that post is amongst the top 10 most popular posts of all time in my newsletter, which is especially special because it's not an AI-oriented, it's one of the few non-AI posts that are near the top 10, which just tells me how valuable this is to people.”
421 / uncertainty
“Maybe a last nugget or something you want to, I don't know, just double down on to leave folks with before we wrap up.”
422 / belief
“We haven't finished actually going through the process. I think we're towards the tail end of it.”
423 / uncertainty
“Anything more you can add here for helping people start to think about ways to differentiate beyond the obvious price and speed. And I don't know, a couple more.”
424 / belief
“Before you do that actually, let me ask you a question here. Because I think people seeing this could think, "Oh, this is like...”
425 / belief
“I feel like it's actually more helpful to engineers, like non-product people, because I think a PM my brain would be like, I want to do this intuitively.”
426 / belief
“Obviously you could also read the book. That goes through a lot of this process, but I think the template is just like a plug and play.”
427 / belief
“Something that is a common question I think for founders is price as a differentiator.”
428 / evaluation
“I just had this naming expert on the podcast who names some of the biggest companies in the world, Pentium, Powerbook, Sonos, Purcell, and that's their approach is they used to do brainstorms. He's like, that doesn't work.”
429 / recommendation
“Essentially his feedback is, wait as long as possible to start any sort of sketch or prototype, because as soon as you start drawing what you're building, now everything you do will be a response to that.”
430 / preference
“I love that the term hypothesis is a part of this because it's not telling you this will work.”
431 / belief
“Thank you for sharing that. That's actually something that I think will help a lot of people.”
432 / belief
“I think some of those people should remember the tool you're building is a specific kind of tool that helps you build things and so these lessons don't necessarily apply.”
433 / belief
“The point you made about starting to share it in public, I think, is really interesting.”
434 / recommendation
“The first is right at the beginning, coming back to a lesson you shared at the beginning, which is build for specific people. So initially it was build for yourself, build for your girlfriend, build for the Scouts program, and then it was built for these three friends, just building it, sitting with them, building the things they need to use it, which is really interesting because a lot of times the advice you get is look for pull, look for people with problems to solve.”
435 / commitment
“I'm going to live in, I don't know, Fiji and just code it, make 100, 300, 500K a year from this thing.”
436 / recommendation
“I love Sonos. I love the name. I have many Sonos products. How often does this happen where the client is just, "No, this is not the name.”
437 / uncertainty
“Just again, so kind of a tip here is if half of your team or, I don't know, some percent of your team hates it, some percent of your team loves it, that's a good sign.”
438 / recommendation
“replacement for Auth0 and supports up to 1 million monthly active users for free. Check it out at workos.”
439 / preference
“I love that offer. I think a lot of people are going to take advantage of that.”
440 / belief
“What is the actual role she ended up in? I think that'd be really interesting to share.”
441 / belief
“You worked with her at OpenAI, and she shared a couple things that I think are really interesting.”
442 / belief
“The CEO of Windsurf was on the podcast and we talked a lot about how they've all this really unique data about which recommendations of code snippets people accept and reject and they actually launched their model I think based on that.”
443 / belief
“What did you see? Because I think there's something interesting here that we can learn about what you saw that may help other people decide where to go work.”
444 / evaluation
“All that to say, I feel like you've seen a lot of what works and doesn't work, building from idea from zero essentially to one to scale.”
445 / evaluation
“I often say that the best product people are not the people on Twitter and LinkedIn sharing advice, but the people who don't have time to do that because they're too busy doing the work.”
446 / recommendation
“I love Ender's Game. I've read them all.”
447 / belief
“I think to a lot of people, they think of prompt engineering as just getting better at when you use Claude or ChatGPT, but there's actually more.”
448 / belief
“One that comes to mind, I think recently Anthropic released an example of where they were trying to shut it down and the LLM was attempting to blackmail one of the engineers into not shutting it down.”
449 / preference
“Talk about maybe, as we go through them, which one this is most helpful for because it's not just like, "Oh, cool, I'm just going to get a better answer from ChatGPT.”
450 / commitment
“I'm very excited because I think I'm going to learn a ton in this conversation. What I want to do with this chat is essentially give people very tangible and also just very up-to-date prompt engineering techniques that they can start putting into practice immediately.”
451 / recommendation
“Yeah. For me when I use Claude for coming up with interview questions and just suggestions of... It's actually really good.”
452 / recommendation
“As an example, I use Claude and ChatGPT for coming up with title suggestions for these podcast episodes. And I give it examples of just examples of titles that have done well, and then it's 10 different examples, just bullet points.”
453 / recommendation
“I love the reward loop of Emily getting this shout-out right now. This is so meta.”
454 / uncertainty
“I'm thinking about how to use that, I don't know, mode for other use cases, like the ghost version of something to motivate you essentially.”
455 / belief
“I think that's, tell me, correct me if I'm wrong, but it feels like that's an element of this.”
456 / uncertainty
“I don't know if you saw his previous thing that he did, I forget what it's called.”
457 / belief
“There's two really interesting thoughts that I have as you're talking that I think will even further crystallize what you're saying.”
458 / uncertainty
“I don't know, maybe you could keep it anonymous just to make this a little reel of the kind of mental model you might want to build around someone.”
459 / belief
“One is people feel like they're aware of what's happening. That's one of the most common, I think, piece of feedback people have with big companies.”
460 / belief
“I wanted to actually follow this thread, which is kind of a different direction, but I think a lot of people are always struggling with this as a leader.”
461 / recommendation
“One of them is like, "I joined Whoop just to work with Hilary and to report to her." And of that, there's this theme that emerged that I think is a good overarching theme for our conversation, and it's something that you spend a lot of time thinking about, and it's how to help your team and how to help people within your company learn to take a punch.”
462 / belief
“Share that story because I think there's something really powerful here for people building products.”
463 / belief
“Great. I think that's really powerful advice. It's just when you're starting something new.”
464 / evaluation
“An important element of what you're describing here, which I think maybe people miss, is that you're talking about just any software, not your own product, in order to start building your sense of taste and gut feeling for what- Building your sense of taste and gut feeling for what works and doesn't work.”
465 / belief
“I think what you're describing, which I completely agree with is new stuff for sure you want to keep the team small and tight, but as things grow and scale, what's your take on just, okay, actually it's okay to have a lot of people on this.”
466 / belief
“There's a few more questions I would ask, but I want to come back to something that I asked earlier, that I think is on the minds of a lot of say founders and product managers listening to this.”
467 / belief
“Oh, amazing so cool. And then if you're like, oh, okay, but it didn't work out that well, I think that's really interesting.”
468 / belief
“I think a way to extrapolate that insight is just whatever function you're in, get a sense of how important that function is to that business.”
469 / belief
“I was going to ask how you use this insight, that software is kind of the most powerful medium media more than even than TV and movies, and you shared it, which I think is really important.”
470 / evaluation
“Clearly you're doing A okay and having a place that doesn't work out, doesn't destroy your career, which I think a lot of people feel like if they're not doing well in their current job, it's over.”
471 / evaluation
“I think your experience here, I think Apple is a very different kind of company where design actually leads a lot of this.”
472 / uncertainty
“You guys launched MCP, which is just, I don't know, the fastest growing standard of any time in history that everyone's adopting Claude powered and unlocked centrally the fastest growing companies in the world, Cursor, Lovable, and Bolt, and all these guys.”
473 / evaluation
“There was an engineer lead that shared 90% of your code roughly is written by AI now, which first of all is just insane that it went from zero to 90%, I don't know, a few years, something like that.”
474 / recommendation
“There's a book that I loved that is for writing and the title is Nobody Wants to Read Your Shit.”
475 / belief
“I remember Dara meant tweeting or sharing this insight during COVID I think of just investors and public markets are now valuing cash flow profitability.”
476 / belief
“A few things I heard that you do that you didn't mention that I think helped with this, one is that there was a period where you ran daily stand-ups with cross-functional teams during COVID just to keep things moving.”
477 / belief
“I think there's a few that a lot of people think about when they think of Uber today.”
478 / uncertainty
“I'm dogfooding like crazy." But a lot of people work at Oracle and Snowflake and I don't know, Fivetran, all these companies where it's much less, non-consumer product essentially where it's more difficult to dogfood.”
479 / belief
“Essentially it's a thought partner on strategy and helping you find gaps in your thinking. And I think for Uber, it's easier because these crawlers can learn a lot about what Uber is.”
480 / uncertainty
“I want to talk about how you operationalize this in the culture of it at Uber, but just as a CPO, I don't know of many that go draw people off hundreds of times deliver food to people's houses hundreds of times.”
481 / belief
“Also on the docs, I think you're also underselling yourself when your colleagues or Ricky told me that you write 40-page reports on what's broken with screenshots and suggested fixes.”
482 / uncertainty
“Sort of along those lines, there's a question I got from, I don't know if he's the CTO of Uber, CTO of part of Uber, Praveen who I believe you work with at Uber.”
483 / belief
“One is you both have non-marketing backgrounds, you went from another function. And I think, you tell me, it gives you a whole new perspective on marketing, not just the traditional education of marketing.”
484 / evaluation
“You kind of pointed out that with ChatGPT and OpenAI, there was no playbook, and you find that often people following playbooks don't work.”
485 / uncertainty
“We're not going to be obsessed with perfect quality of our, I don't know, websites and emails.”
486 / belief
“Let's shift to talking about Thrive, which is where you work now, and talk about what your role is. And what's interesting, I think, about this role is you get to work now with a bunch of different startups instead of go really deep with one.”
487 / belief
“You were the first marketing hire at OpenAI. I believe ChatGPT is the fastest-growing product in history.”
488 / commitment
“I will say, though, in terms of pricing, it feels like ChatGP, it works. It's just like a monthly fee, talk to it up to a certain limit.”
489 / belief
“Things seem to have gone really well over there. I believe ChatGPT is the fastest-growing product in history.”
490 / belief
“I think along these lines, there's a reason Brian at Airbnb merged marketing, or product marketing and product management.”
491 / preference
“There's a concept that I love that recently I learned from Guillermo at Vercel. He calls it exposure hours.”
492 / evaluation
“I love that this isn't, because I think when people first hear that it's about your own happiness, but I love that it's about other people perceiving how a something did and setting their expectations correctly.”
493 / belief
“There's so much there. There's I think an important point that I'll add, and I'm curious if you agree.”
494 / belief
“As you were talking, I realized that a lot of these companies that produce the best PMs are to your point, non-US based, but incredibly successful in their location.”
495 / uncertainty
“I don't know if he'd called himself the product manager 'cause I don't think he loved product managers.”
496 / uncertainty
“What are these results telling you?" I'm like, I don't know. She's like, this tells me you should start your own company and work on your own.”
497 / prediction
“The second half of your career, you probably make, I don't know, 10 times more than you make the first part of your career.”
498 / recommendation
“I am a huge fan of Granola. I'll give a quick picture here. If you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year free of Granola for your entire company.”
499 / evaluation
“There's something along these lines that I've also seen you talk about, which is how to go zero-to-one with something, just a little framework for helping you know if this is the right time for this idea.”
500 / belief
“I think that last point is so important that we've tried these tools over the years.”