Speakers in the public record
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belief 8recommendation 5evaluation 5preference 4uncertainty 3commitment 1
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The useful parts, with receipts.
26 published records
“There's one. So Toby has an annoyingly long set of books that he recommends, and they're all, not all, they're usually good, depends because we're not totally in sync on fiction, for example. But he recommended one to me that I think everyone should read right now called Manna, M-A-N-N-A, from Marshall Brain. It is a book, it's a book about AI. And I think the most interesting thing about it though is about a future in which the AI tells the humans what to do. So it's this idea of, imagine in the future you came into work and the AI would tell you what emails to pay attention to or what dashboard to look at because something weird is going on. It takes that to an interesting level. So I would recommend reading that book. It's not long. That's fun. I think another book that I recommend to people, and it's a weird one to recommend, but it's Business Adventures from John Brooks, the famous, if you ask, I think it's Bill Gates, what his famous book of all time is, it's this book. And the cool thing about the book is that it is not easy to digest for anyone with focus problems. Paul Graham wrote the post How to Do Great Work, and it's super long. The best part about that post is that you have to be able to read the whole thing. And so the same thing with Business Adventures. I think each chapter is, it's 12 chapters, 12 stories, no breaks in between. It's just each one is super long. But it just goes into a problem at such depth that if you can maintain your focus to get through the depths of each problem, you will just learn something, just like that post by Paul Graham. I loved that it was so long because I sent it to people and I said, the test here is can you read it? Can you just get to the end? And not in a pejorative way, like in a... If you can get to the end, you will extract the alpha from this post if you can read it all. So those are... Manna is like the opposite. It's very easy and easy read.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“" And, either delete the code, because you have inspiration and write it yourself, or just take the suggestion and move it forward. But, I love today's world of AI copilots, because you never have to code loan on your own right?”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“If you choose the hard thing and it works great, you did more work, but if it doesn't work and you chose the easy thing, you've actually not learned anything because you chose the...”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“I mean, I kind of grew up working in retail and people come into the store, and then I would say, "Hey," and you're working on commission, and they're not always buying stuff, and if they don't buy it, you don't make any money.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“For example, joining a terrible company that's extremely frustrating to work at or building, I don't know, a house in a really dumb way, but it's just really hard.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“I don't know if you were at Zuck's interview at the Chase center that the Acquired podcast did, and he talked about this where their market cap dropped 80%.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“I have been through the six-month reorgs. And, I think that context you just shared of, "We're at a volatile company, we're changing things.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“I think the personality of the leadership team is quite intense. We have a lot of founders on the exec team, which are impatient, intense people by design.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“I don't know if I want to be in the zeitgeist right now, but the Meta Ray-Bans are amazing. And the biggest thing about the Meta Ray-Bans was just that I think I never got into it and I saw people around me wearing it, but I only got into it when somebody said I'd never take my AirPods with me anymore.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“I think one of the big parts of it is just interview skills because I interviewed for 10 plus jobs every four months, and I did that six times.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“" I don't want to overuse the pairing paradigm, but it is really much like, "Can I pair with you?" And I learned this actually very early in my Shopify tenure, because Toby would have these one-on-ones with me and I'd be like, "Toby, you don't have to waste your time, man.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“Another kind of bucket is just the engineering environment, engineers working with engineers, pair programming, things like that. There's a tool you mentioned for pair programming, Tuple, I think.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“If you do the hard path and it doesn't work, actually you still win because you've now done something hard.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“I'm going to find someone to merge with, and connect your APIs together and be the person that builds it, not the person that envisions what to build. I think that's awesome because a lot of people...”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“There's probably 10,000 right options, but everybody stops at the first right one, instead of what you should be spending all your time on, because the options that don't work, you're not going to spend time on.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“If everything's going well, are you really taking the risks you need to be taking? So I think you have to over-rotate a bit and there should be a few things on fire at all times, not because you should create that, but it should just happen because you're stretching into new things that potentially or you're going faster than you should have, or there's a new leader you've counted on early because all these things that should create this thing of it might work.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“Yeah, I mean one thing about my career as well is I don't really do anything halfway. And when I started looking into React Native, it was never just that I'm going, oh, let me look at the docs and read and build a thing.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“One, I had a lot of direct reports, and two, I did not do any scheduled one-on-ones because you can't have 120 direct reports and do a scheduled one-on-ones because you're never doing anything but one-on-ones.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“One is, the more context you can fit in your head around a code base. And you can never really fit all of Shopify in your head, because it's a big complicated set of tools we give to merchants.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“I get confused all the time, by the way, by things that are not on my framework. So for example, a good one, title, company, money, all these things can confuse you because you could have somebody say recruiter messages you and says, "Hey, by the way, here's a new job and here's the compensation.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“I'll say one thing by the way, because I think I read this in Tim Ferriss's book or in the podcast where he said, create a failure resume and write everything down.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“f joining Shopify, and Toby, when I went to Toby and I told him, I go, hey man, I think I made this mistake and we have to do this and it's going to cost us a hundred engineers, another six, whatever.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“Yeah, so again, I think there's nothing, I would say again, start from the beginning, there's nothing more than pair programming, because literally you can't do anything else but be on your computer.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“I actually found it, you being the famous Lenny podcaster, but the old days, maybe the Lenny, the PM. And I remember reading this a long time ago and just copying, there's a Google link in there to a Google Doc link with a template for a performance review framework that I've been using for years.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“We got to work on mobile apps for the biggest brands in the world, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Vine, the NFL, NBA, Bloomberg, Slack, you name it we worked on those mobile apps, and this is right when the iPhone and Android were really gaining steam in '09 to 2013 era.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“Once a year at a random time, we will delete all recurring meetings that have more than two people, so not one-on- ones, and are internal people only, so not interviews or external partner meetings.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast