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
21 published records
01 / recommendation
“Shoe dog, Black Swan, Design of Everyday Things, and for a fun one, Shawn Theron.”
02 / recommendation
“I like the sports docu ones on Netflix, so Full Swing, Drive to Survive, Break Points, tennis, golf, F1, all of them.”
03 / belief
“I think the generalized version of that is customers, products, people can surprise you.”
04 / uncertainty
“X. So UberX and then the company was moving quickly enough, the product got the green light, it launched, and here we are, I don't know, 12 years later, 11 years later, whatever it is and UberX is the name that stuck.”
05 / belief
“We, I would say have oscillated over time, but in general, big subscribers of the best conversations happen when they're relatively small, so try and keep it under 10.”
06 / belief
“I think a lesson there is also don't overthink it, don't try to get too cute. Just like we're trying to make a perfect beta test versus realizing, okay, we just need a lot more people in it.”
07 / belief
“Just since you mentioned Opendoor, I think many people have heard of Opendoor. Maybe just give a quick explanation of what Opendoor does for people that aren't exactly sure.”
08 / belief
“I think when you think about it, they have tremendous amount of reach and audience and all these online platforms have tremendous reach and audience.”
09 / belief
“Boats, ice cream, puppies, kittens, I think, and all credit goes to local ideas of inspiration just being focused on trying to grow within.”
10 / belief
“I think that's awesome advice. I agree with everything you're saying. You mentioned this word humility, and it is a good segue to something I want to talk about, which is Zillow.”
11 / belief
“I have this note here that I think either someone mentioned about you or you may have mentioned that product is finding the kernel of truth in a sea of ambiguity and signals.”
12 / commitment
“I would say we're medium rigorous on template standardization or adherence. So we do have a template, the standard product review template talks about jobs to be done and has a section for what is the problem statement and what are the jobs to be done.”
13 / evaluation
“That would've been probably a little bit before my time, but that being said, one thing that is true is that surge pricing for actually quite sometimes all of 2012, certainly 2013 probably, I don't know when we necessarily switched, was very much a human in the loop system or a very manual system where GMs in every city would control basically the parameters in which surge would operate and so much of the time that would need, for example, Monday through Friday, there would be no search, it couldn't flip on, and then Friday nights and Saturday nights it would flip on from whatever you set, 7:00 PM to 3:00 AM and the cap was X, whatever the cap was.”
14 / preference
“Something that gets me personally to the high bucket category. And then I think the last part, which is some part of experimentation is if you just ship something because it's your intuition or it's where you want to see the product go, do you have a reasonable feedback loop to understand whether or not you are correct?”
15 / evaluation
“Then it was pretty stressful, right, because looking at a business that relies on going into people's homes and suddenly you can't do that anymore, what do you do?”
16 / evaluation
“The reality is operations teams, local teams, can iterate faster, can scale talking to customers really much more efficiently, have great qualitative insights, and so if it's seen more as a harmony instead of a competition, I think that's really, really helpful where it's like, okay, how do we get the insights that are happening day in and day out in the field, on the ground, whatever that may be, and help us build better products because of that, right?”
17 / recommendation
“Yeah, I mean, I think exposing yourself to other people's stories or however you may learn is really, really helpful. So again, whether it's your podcast or books or biographies or one of the podcasts that I love is Founders Podcast, which talks about historical famous entrepreneurs.”
18 / evaluation
“The reality is it's the largest asset classroom in the United States, and if we just stay super focused on, hey, who are the customers that we serve really well that we talk to every day, there's a little bit of confidence that comes from being able to stay focused on that regardless of the competitive environment, again, because it's not like the market is fully saturated.”
19 / commitment
“A second lesson here, is there certain experiments that are important enough and it's hard to triangulate signal in any other way that you may say a six-month runtime is an acceptable outcome and we are going to start it in June and we will be smarter for it for 2025 planning and we're going to set it and forget it and we're grateful we did, and that's okay.”
20 / preference
“We try to for course the framework if it's not working. But I think what I really like about it is it forces you to put yourself in the customer's shoes.”
21 / preference
“The way I like to think about this is do things that don't scale and then scale the things that you're doing.”