Lenny's Podcast / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
20 published records
01 / evaluation
“Now I have a car that works like a car that solves some problems that's way cheaper to operate, because the fuel is cheaper.”
02 / uncertainty
“A really fun fact about you is that apparently you have the very first Google Doc file. I don't know what you call it.”
03 / belief
“If you made the NFT of it, that would be more authentic, I think, than the document almost.”
04 / belief
“" Then grind away at that for a week and see how close I can get. See what I learned about why it's hard.”
05 / belief
“I think that's just the right mindset for something that's obviously this disruptive, right or wrong.”
06 / uncertainty
“In the early days, we had, I don't know, a couple of million users, five million users, and there were still executives at Google telling me that it was a stupid idea and that it should stop and we shouldn't be doing it.”
07 / belief
“I'll share a couple of quotes that you put out somewhere that I have here that I think are cool.”
08 / belief
“What I think of as you're describing this is, Microsoft Excel had a billion toolbars and buttons and options, which allowed Google Docs essentially to come in with a much simpler experience.”
09 / belief
“I think a lot of people hear this advice and they're like, "Yeah, okay, I need to fail more.”
10 / belief
“I think there's a lot of, probably a quarter at least, if not a half of what I just said is wrong in some way.”
11 / commitment
“Well, I've been writing letters to my engineering team on Sunday since I was the head of engineering at Box, and I think that's 12 years now or something.”
12 / recommendation
“I love that advice. And I love it connects to everything else that you've been talking about is, find some problem someone has, find some value you could provide, and then think about, how can AI potentially provide that?”
13 / recommendation
“The other one I recommend to people with some caution is this very intense and disturbing book called The Wasp Factory by Ian Banks, which is probably the creepiest and hardest book I've ever read, but it's a very interesting psychological deep dive.”
14 / preference
“I just drive Japanese cars, because I grew up in Detroit and just hated that culture. And so recently we bought a Ford Mustang Mach-E, the electric Ford Mustang, and I just love the shit out of that car.”
15 / preference
“Now, lots of people have said that before, but I think all those pieces connect for me in this idea of being optimistic and open to trying stuff.”
16 / preference
“I think a lot of the good product ideas, most of the good product ideas actually come up from engineering. So I think there's a lot to be said for, get familiar with tools, particularly weird esoteric combinations of tools can often be useful.”
17 / evaluation
“He believes very strongly that a leader's job is to raise the energy of the organization and he really lives that. And I watch him in meetings where I'm a domain expert and I cannot believe how engaged he is in stuff and how much he understands about something that I know he's not as deep an expert as some of the people in the room are and he's fully in there.”
18 / preference
“That is really interesting actually, that you need to be pulled to the what if getting you so excited that you're going to spend however many years it took you to solve that problem, because you are so excited about this what if.”
19 / evaluation
“I think ChatGPT is a great recent example of something that was just added a ton of new value to the world and got this explosive growth, and then you see lots of other AI stuff that people are doing that's just not bad, but not great, and it's sort of kind of adding a little bit of value and slowly lumbering along, or maybe it's going to collapse under its weight.”
20 / recommendation
“Plus you get this one new feature that's really, really useful, which is collaborating with each other and not having to send attachments around the old file servers, but we're going to take away most of the features, because we don't care about them that much.”