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
71 transcript-backed records
01 / 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.”
02 / 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.”
03 / 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.”
04 / 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.”
05 / 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?”
06 / 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.”
07 / 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.”
08 / 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?”
09 / 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.”
10 / evaluation
“I love just this meme of just be more ambitious comes up so often now, which is so hard.”
11 / evaluation
“That is interesting. And I love how all this connects judgment, persistence, a point of view of your own.”
12 / 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.”
13 / evaluation
“Yeah. And I love that back then it was called machine learning and AI was like, no, no, it's not AI.”
14 / 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.”
15 / 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.”
16 / 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.”
17 / 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.”
18 / 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.”
19 / evaluation
“Because things are moving so fast, they are constantly reacting, having to guess at priorities, and having to make do with outdated solutions.”
20 / 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.”
21 / evaluation
“There's this idea with when you build product, there's always this question when something doesn't work.”
22 / 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.”
23 / evaluation
“I heard you've also talk about just being first doesn't matter that much either.”
24 / 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.”
25 / 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.”
26 / 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.”
27 / 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.”
28 / 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.”
29 / evaluation
“Marc Andreessen quote tweeted it and said, "This is the best AI CEO nobody knows.”
30 / 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.”
31 / 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.”
32 / 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.”
33 / 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.”
34 / 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.”
35 / evaluation
“Then all these playbooks that she's used over the last 20 years in growth just don't work anymore at AI companies.”
36 / 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.”
37 / 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.”
38 / evaluation
“Probably looking at it and just making sure this is the right thing to do, yeah.”
39 / 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.”
40 / 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.”
41 / 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.”
42 / 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.”
43 / evaluation
“I love that. And now it's, I don't know, hundreds of thousands, right, that are orders of magnitude more powerful.”
44 / 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.”
45 / 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.”
46 / 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.”
47 / evaluation
“Like, "Okay, cool, we built it in a weekend and now it's years of endless maintenance and requests and support.”
48 / 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.”
49 / 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.”
50 / 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.”
51 / evaluation
“My understanding is it fell through because the UK government regulatory boards just didn't want it to happen.”
52 / 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.”
53 / 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.”
54 / evaluation
“The way I think about evals, and tell me if this is wrong, just simply is like unit tests for code.”
55 / 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.”
56 / 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.”
57 / 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.”
58 / 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.”
59 / 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.”
60 / evaluation
“Whether it was right or wrong, it is now the fastest-growing, insane revenue generating business in the world.”
61 / 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.”
62 / 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.”
63 / 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.”
64 / 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.”
65 / 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.”
66 / 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.”
67 / evaluation
“I think your experience here, I think Apple is a very different kind of company where design actually leads a lot of this.”
68 / 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.”
69 / 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.”
70 / 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.”
71 / 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.”