Lenny's Podcast / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
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Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
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25 published records
01 / recommendation
“You know, I've been trying to read fiction more, partly because I think it's just a really nice mental reset. I will say like Three-Body Problem for anyone who hasn't read it, it's a mind-expanding book. I like sci-fi and fiction that kind of opens your brain, so maybe this is my cheat card, but it's a three-book series. Those are three great books.”
02 / uncertainty
“I don't know where the name came from, but basically it's a bunch of like basic clothing, like t-shirts, et cetera, and this Japanese indie company, they bought the defunct basically name and now is reproducing clothes almost made to the exact shape and stack, and even with the exact recreation of the graphic packaging on these tees, but like today.”
03 / belief
“Even if I'm going through a tough moment and I had to fire somebody today, or maybe I get disappointed because we lost a customer deal or something broke or whatever, but to still try to look at the entire situation from overall a feeling of humility and gratitude I think just really does shift your like...”
04 / belief
“I think that's so true, and to me that's why there's always been a difference between entrepreneurs who love the act of building a product or the business, too, versus those who saw a just purely business or financial opportunity that they felt like they couldn't pass up exploiting or going after.”
05 / belief
“To your point, when I think back to the earliest era that I experienced of building apps, first I learned C++, then I learned PHP and JavaScript and even building kind of JavaScript single-page apps in the early days like '08 through 2010.”
06 / belief
“I mean, I think that, and I would also say it's actually now also hard to taste the soup without participating in at least some part of creating the soup.”
07 / belief
“Obviously that's the only way, in my opinion, to create that magical product market fit in the first place.”
08 / belief
“The point there is that sometimes I think we treat these disciplines like hard, hard skills that if you're already halfway into your career and you're not already an engineer, if you're not already a designer, okay, well, you can never be one.”
09 / 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.”
10 / 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.”
11 / belief
“You can A/B test, especially if you have the scale of a really large product like Anthropic or OpenAI, you can just test everything and see like, oh, this model actually performs better than this one, this prompt performs better than this one, but I think early on you don't have that luxury and you're in a much more open-ended discovery process.”
12 / belief
“There's clearly an incredible magic to vibe coding and app building with AI. And this is actually a prime illustration in my view of that concept we talked about a second ago, which is as capabilities of these underlying models evolve, the form factor in the product UX also needs to evolve with it.”
13 / 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.”
14 / belief
“Maybe you can do a POC, but it's so much more powerful when you just open up the doors and say, "Anyone who wants to come and sign up and trial this product can." And I think to me, it's a real proof point that ChatGPT is arguably the most successful kind of PLG product of all time, just in terms of sheer scale of users.”
15 / belief
“Go prototype that and see how it feels and looks like. So I think some of this stuff can also be in your daytime job, especially if that daytime job is literally to go and build AI functionality.”
16 / evaluation
“Because the fast execution, the AI stuff, that creates the top of funnel excitement that also inspires new use cases and new users to come to Airtable, including in large enterprise, right?”
17 / 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.”
18 / recommendation
“There's a strong advantage to any of those three roles who can kind of cross over into the other two, like the hybrid unicorn types. So if you're a designer who can be just technical enough to kind of be dangerous and understand a little bit of how these models work and how does tool calling work and all of this stuff, then you can actually design a concept or even prototype a concept, including in these prototyping tools that's much more interesting and maybe realistic than if you're just stuck in the flat like let me put something in a static design concept because I think designs have to be more interactive.”
19 / evaluation
“I think that is a big part of it because on the point about the pace of the world moving so much faster in AI than any other landscape in SaaS, in the mature SaaS era, it was important to study your competition.”
20 / preference
“I would say, I like the post Elon Twitter more than the pre Elon Twitter because it is just bolder, and I guess I really admire bold product execution where you're not just stuck to the current laurels and they've made so many changes, but I do feel like I get injected into my feed very sensational content all the time, and I mean, it works on me.”
21 / evaluation
“The people giving this advice are not incompetent. They had some reason for giving it and in certain contexts that is the right thing to do, but I think my meta learning is it's not enough to just trust the recommendation, like, here's the action you should take from a lot of people, 'cause everybody has different priors and it's almost like we're all our own LLMs, and we all have different training from a different corpus of data informed by our own experiences.”
22 / prediction
“Certainly every software product in my opinion, has to be refounded because AI is such a paradigm shift, it's not even just like the shift from desktop to mobile or on-prem to cloud where that was more like a very one time and somewhat predictable change in form factor.”
23 / preference
“Or instead of me writing a perfect memo on a topic, I'll actually just prompt my way into getting a chat thread or a chat output that basically covers all the content that I care about and maybe even ask it to, "Okay, summarize this all into a final memo output," and then intentionally share that rather than expose the fact that I'm using AI in this way and here's literally how I'm prompting it so you can follow along as well.”
24 / commitment
“I just checked this recently, but I take pride in being the number one most expensive in inference cost user of Airtable AI, not just within our own company, but I think for a long time I was globally across all our customers vault.”
25 / belief
“" What that means is that if we can build this culture, and I do think it's a learnable way of operating, I really like to believe in the growth potential of any human and any individual.”