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
23 published records
01 / recommendation
“I have read High Output Management probably 20 times in the past 10 years. I read it at least once a year now. I commissioned a bronze bust of Andy Grove, so that's being done. I'm a big Andy Grove fan.”
02 / belief
“I appreciate that. And it's actually cool because I think for us, because the fact that product teams don't really think about this stuff, we stumbled into this whole thesis that could be a whole episode, which is all the product features are done for you.”
03 / commitment
“I think what I will say is this is all still hard. So I'm giving some heuristics, I'm giving some benchmarks, but your mileage is going to vary.”
04 / belief
“I think you have a strong perspective that local strategies are much more likely to [inaudible 00:54:19] so we'll just get into that one.”
05 / belief
“I don't care if you're a marketer or a product person, engineer, ops person, people ops, real professional ship, and they ship at a pretty high frequency for whatever they're doing. In my opinion, your tempo framework is more important than your org design.”
06 / uncertainty
“You go up market and you pretty much become a data product with a UI or you go super niche. And even super niche, it's super hard and it's just because, I don't know, everyone's trying to kill a spreadsheet, and it's like, "You're not going to kill a spreadsheet.”
07 / belief
“Just to give you a tease, I'll tell you what I think of Snowden after the podcast. So the world doesn't get to know except that I'll tell you what my opinion is afterwards.”
08 / belief
“I think the other reason typically people haven't had to do this is because there's a lot of brute forcing that's done in startup land and it only lasts so long.”
09 / uncertainty
“I think that alone is a really interesting story, and I don't know if we should get too deep, but just to highlight what you just said, so many startups build an analytics product that it's just a better way to measure and track all the stuff that's going on.”
10 / belief
“I don't care what if you're a marketer or product person, engineer, ops person, people ops, real professional ship, and they ship it a pretty high frequency for whatever they're doing. And so the thing that we thought a lot about is, in my opinion, your tempo framework, and I'll explain a little bit more of what that means in a second, is more important than your org design.”
11 / belief
“You 20%, come talk to me, I've got a whole framework for you," that type of a thing because I think people just nod their heads and they tweet it, and they just don't end up doing it.”
12 / uncertainty
“We're onto our eighth topic, we've got three to go, and it's on competitive intelligence. And this touches on a really interesting part of your background that I don't know a lot of people know.”
13 / uncertainty
“There you go. I don't know if that's going to sell well, but I will buy one, so.”
14 / evaluation
“I really like that very concrete stat you shared and that's exactly how we think about it, that if you don't think you can get to a billion dollars in revenue a year eventually that it probably is not a venture-scale business.”
15 / evaluation
“This was actually a big mistake because we got hooked on the efficiency and that was great, but we could have moved even quicker than we were. And hindsight is 20/20, and I'm obviously not crying over this, but it's one of those things that I think that you have to know who you are and you have to know what your goals are for a company.”
16 / prediction
“All these things are better. And the thing that, I think, 20 years ago or 10 years ago you didn't have to do customer development because, and this is where Keith [inaudible 00:42:30] is just like customer research is dumb or whatever his famous quote is, but you didn't have to do it because there just wasn't a lot of stuff out there and we all were riding the wave of the internet.”
17 / evaluation
“" And I think in tech we had the opportunity to do that, but we haven't really focused on our team as much. So I don't know if I answered your question, but that's the scope of that problem I think, is we don't actually focus on our team, we don't actually focus on our team in the context of the mission.”
18 / evaluation
“But as an overall missive, don't focus on your competitors is terrible advice. And if I'm being charitable, it's just outdated because some fun facts, and I alluded to some of them before, over the past decade, if you're building in tech, particularly in SaaS or subscriptions, you now have 16 times the number of competitors if you started a business today, than if you did 10 years ago, and this is because everyone and their mother can spin up a website, a server, they can drive traffic to that site.”
19 / recommendation
“We're not better than you, you're not better than us, it's just this is how we do things here." And I think a lot of times we're scared to do that because we have that founder, that exact fear of, "Hey, we have to get this thing done and the only way to do that is to do X, Y or Z Z when in reality that's actually going to make your deadline go out further than actually focusing on alignment as much as humanly possible.”
20 / evaluation
“'" It seems super trivial, but when you have over 20 people, all of a sudden these things start to come up. And I think most of the time we infantilize our teams where we let them run to HR, we have different policies or all of these different things, when at the end of the day you're paying an exorbitant amount of money for very smart human beings to basically do stuff and you want them basically working together and not having to go in this runaround with policies and people to push things forward.”
21 / preference
“The reason I started writing about retention and publishing data on it is because I didn't want to be the pricing guy.”
22 / recommendation
“" And most of them quote Elon Musk about rockets and breaking down the different parts. So what I kind of found is there's the five whys, which I think someone's talked before or at least I've read it in the newsletter before, which is just you keep asking why.”
23 / recommendation
“I use ProfitWell for my newsletters. I just plug it into my Stripe account and it's the most amazing free product because it just tells me everything I want to know.”