Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
belief 9recommendation 4preference 3evaluation 2uncertainty 1observation 1prediction 1
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
The useful parts, with receipts.
21 published records
“I will plug some books that have nothing to do with the internet or software or tech, but have been the most informative or instructive books for me I think in my career as a product person working on software, which are books about architecture and urban planning. The reason why I find this field so fascinating is because for thousands of years, people have been figuring out how to build spaces that help people interact with each other and build good spaces to occupy. We've only been doing this for, going back to the Kevin Kelly thing, for basically the blink of an eye on the internet and in the digital realm. There's one book in particular by an architect named Christopher Alexander who sadly just passed away earlier this year. He wrote this book in the '70s. It's called The Timeless Way of Building. This is the book that I recommend to the most people I have. I buy it in bulk and I just give it away to people. The basic premise of the book is that in the '70s, we had just gone through a couple of decades of just mass produced cookie cutter suburban house development in the US. His premise was like we've basically just lost the plot on this. No one likes living in these houses. If you think about why these houses all feel bad to live in, it's because the people building the houses now for the first time ever are different than the people living in the house. It's these developers, these real estate developers, these big companies, mass producing these houses. But for thousands of years, we've figured out what makes a good house. The people building the house are the people living in it and they get that, but now the incentive structure got changed and they messed everything up. I think there's a really interesting parallel there with the internet, specifically how the last decade or so has played out, where the people building the spaces that we occupy are operating under a very complicated incentive structure and it's leading to these suboptimal user experiences. This is what we work on at Substack. This is what I think is fun to work on right now. If you're working on something like this, I would highly recommend The Timeless Way of Building by Christopher Alexander.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“What's cool about that I think now with Substack and with the network effect is if there's a thousand people who are going to pay you 10 bucks a month, there's probably 2,000 and 5,000 and 10,000.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“One thing that's interesting here that I think we have a big opportunity to improve in the product is that there's going to be obviously varying levels of intent that people have when they hit that start your Substack button.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“I think there's much more we can do without getting into some of the specifics and scooping the product team that we're working on that I think could make it feel more like you've got a bunch of people who are somewhat more fluidly able to contribute to your Substack and deliver value to your audience.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“I think almost in all of those cases, and then you could imagine five more things like that, readers, especially the people that are subscribed to you who are paying you, are pretty forgiving and are really there to support you and want you to take that vacation.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“I think that there's a real risk that if your entire following is locked into one platform where you don't have a ton of control over, your ability to reach those people deterministically and certainly to monetize that in some way, it seems like it's a tenuous place to be in the current age of the internet.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“The way that you've been building trust, one is just do it again and again and then Chris starts to trust, "Okay, Sachin's going to do the things that I think are probably the right things.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“I think that's right, or at least there are different types of second order effects.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“One thing I wanted to acknowledge, I think some people worry about this feature that it drives lower intent users.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“I think my email address too, I don't know if it would get shared, but it's just Sachin, my first name, @substackinc.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“Recommendations specifically now have driven in the millions of new subscriptions for writers across the board, across I think like tens of thousands of unique writers that have received subscriptions from the recommendations feature.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“You might not spend two hours a day in there, and that's fine, but it might be the first place you go because it's where all the best stuff is and it's where your best communities are going to live too.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“Not to say that it's easy now, I know how hard it is to do what you do. But I think Substack can do more to turn this ecosystem to funnel this energy into ways for people like you to feel more like a leader of a space and a curator in a lot of ways and still deliver this really valuable service to your audience without having to do all the work yourself.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“I will say, it's easy to start a newsletter, it's hard to continue a newsletter.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“There was this virality at play now where when you recommend a bunch of people, those people will get an email that say, "Hey, Lenny's recommending you and here's all the readers that he's sending you.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“When I recommend it to people, I'm like, "Just power through it," but they really found their groove.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“I think you could be an amazing product manager at a company that is a bit more stable and consistent and get really good at what you're doing and someone who's going to be really good at a company that is on a bit of this trajectory, for folks who aren't watching the video, making a motion with my hand, that's not growing too fast, it's kind of a different job.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“There's no algorithm involved, which to your point is Substack's I think vision and mission is just avoid algorithms as much as possible.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“I think as Substack grows and expands, I'm sure we'll have more than three teams. This is where we're at right now, but I really like the focus on a customer and a timeless mission really rather than orienting around what might be a bit more of an ephemeral surface area or product de jour.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“I think we're coming to the close of this kind of one-time inflection point of becoming a product driven company and having a product process and structure and PMs and full stack product teams.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“I will plug some books that have nothing to do with the internet or software or tech, but have been the most informative or instructive books for me I think in my career as a product person working on software, which are books about architecture and urban planning.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast