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Lenny's Podcast / episode intelligence

Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner

29 Jan 2023 25 published claims 2 attributable people
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Speakers in the public record

Zoelle EgnerLenny Rachitsky

Claim mix

belief 8recommendation 7evaluation 4commitment 2preference 2uncertainty 1prediction 1

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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.

25 published records

01 / recommendation

Recommends Computing Taste.

“Okay, I hate this question because I take pride in making highly targeted recommendations, but I will do it anyway. I'm pretty sure you mostly talk to product and growth people. Right now, obviously, AI is a big topic of conversation, so here are two books that will enrich your mental model for artificial intelligence and encourage you to think about it from different perspectives. The first one, a little bit academic, highly recommend it, though. It's a book called Computing Taste by Nick Seaver. He's a professor of anthropology and he did this study of people and companies who build music recognition algorithms. And it's a really interesting book for a bunch of reasons, including that it's a academic take on both tech culture, and more specifically, the unspoken and underlying assumptions that many workers who are building in this space have. It can be a little spicy and uncomfortable for a person in tech to read, but I think it is a fascinating perspective and very relevant to the stuff that's going on in AI right now. So go check it out. Computing Taste by Nick Seaver. The second is a fiction book, but the Ancillary Justice series by Anne Leckie, about a spaceship AI that ends up separated from its ship and trapped in a body. I'm going to leave it at that. Worth reading for a different way of thinking about AI.”
Speaker
Zoelle Egner
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

03 / belief

A lot of people think that the epitome of product marketing is creating your own category. And while I agree that it is useful to have strong differentiators, because it is, I think creating a category, getting a new thing in Gartner or whatever, is often a waste of your time.

“A lot of people think that the epitome of product marketing is creating your own category. And while I agree that it is useful to have strong differentiators, because it is, I think creating a category, getting a new thing in Gartner or whatever, is often a waste of your time.”
Speaker
Zoelle Egner
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

06 / evaluation

" I know it is important that it's on the phone and not a survey because you get way more instinct from unstructured conversation than you're going to get from sending them three things in a Google survey.

“" I know it is important that it's on the phone and not a survey because you get way more instinct from unstructured conversation than you're going to get from sending them three things in a Google survey.”
Speaker
Zoelle Egner
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

07 / belief

I think where I get excited is when the companies do this in a way that feels less self-serving, or less obviously self-serving. And that means that sometimes you have to be willing to invest in things that will not have super obviously immediate ROI for you, but they will for the community, and for building the community.

“I think where I get excited is when the companies do this in a way that feels less self-serving, or less obviously self-serving. And that means that sometimes you have to be willing to invest in things that will not have super obviously immediate ROI for you, but they will for the community, and for building the community.”
Speaker
Zoelle Egner
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

10 / belief

I would argue in retrospect, absolutely, yes, there were opportunities that were left on the table, but in early days you leave good opportunities because you have to focus on other things.

“I would argue in retrospect, absolutely, yes, there were opportunities that were left on the table, but in early days you leave good opportunities because you have to focus on other things.”
Speaker
Zoelle Egner
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

12 / evaluation

One is just what are activities that marketing, and growth, and customer success teams often do that are impactful and consistently impactful, things that you think startups should invest in that maybe they aren't, or they already aren't and they should definitely keep doing this. And on the flip side, things that don't work, things that maybe they should avoid.

“One is just what are activities that marketing, and growth, and customer success teams often do that are impactful and consistently impactful, things that you think startups should invest in that maybe they aren't, or they already aren't and they should definitely keep doing this. And on the flip side, things that don't work, things that maybe they should avoid.”
Speaker
Lenny Rachitsky
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

16 / evaluation

People talk about it a lot, but it's never been driven home to me so much, because we're talking about something that had incredibly high stakes as people's health, and we're still able to do it in that context.

“People talk about it a lot, but it's never been driven home to me so much, because we're talking about something that had incredibly high stakes as people's health, and we're still able to do it in that context.”
Speaker
Zoelle Egner
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

17 / evaluation

We built an entire insane database, and then eventually custom software on top of that, to make the people who are making the phone calls more easily get the information in.

“We built an entire insane database, and then eventually custom software on top of that, to make the people who are making the phone calls more easily get the information in.”
Speaker
Zoelle Egner
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

18 / recommendation

Number two, I would say just the importance of relentlessly repeating the exact same stuff over and over again, even if you feel like everyone definitely knows. This is something that I've seen play out in every single leadership role that I've had, but it was never more acute than here, particularly because we had this broad coalition of hundreds of people with very different backgrounds.

“Number two, I would say just the importance of relentlessly repeating the exact same stuff over and over again, even if you feel like everyone definitely knows. This is something that I've seen play out in every single leadership role that I've had, but it was never more acute than here, particularly because we had this broad coalition of hundreds of people with very different backgrounds.”
Speaker
Zoelle Egner
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

19 / prediction

I think there's a lot of opportunities we have to activate our communities and give people that sense of control that are both going to be helpful more broadly for society, but also just for those individuals as well to make them feel a little bit more safe, a little bit more like they can actually have a difference in things.

“I think there's a lot of opportunities we have to activate our communities and give people that sense of control that are both going to be helpful more broadly for society, but also just for those individuals as well to make them feel a little bit more safe, a little bit more like they can actually have a difference in things.”
Speaker
Zoelle Egner
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

20 / preference

This person is thinking about me." It's small stuff, but it tells that person, like, "The people who worked on this were thinking about me as a customer, they built it with me in mind, and that means that it is more likely that this is going to fit my needs than something generic.

“This person is thinking about me." It's small stuff, but it tells that person, like, "The people who worked on this were thinking about me as a customer, they built it with me in mind, and that means that it is more likely that this is going to fit my needs than something generic.”
Speaker
Zoelle Egner
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

22 / recommendation

Because if you take care of people and you follow up that brand experience with a product experience that is really powerful and actually does the things that says it's going to do, then your word of mouth can become a huge driver of growth for the company.

“Because if you take care of people and you follow up that brand experience with a product experience that is really powerful and actually does the things that says it's going to do, then your word of mouth can become a huge driver of growth for the company.”
Speaker
Zoelle Egner
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

23 / recommendation

The boring answer that I will caveat this with is that one of the pieces of our acquisition playbook, it was very standard, that did work quite well, was some unconventionally targeted Facebook ads.

“The boring answer that I will caveat this with is that one of the pieces of our acquisition playbook, it was very standard, that did work quite well, was some unconventionally targeted Facebook ads.”
Speaker
Zoelle Egner
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

24 / recommendation

The only other small note I would make from a process perspective is if you are going to overinvest in customer success, which I recommend, make sure that you have also set up a process to take the insights that your customer success people are coming up with and turn them into as much content as you can.

“The only other small note I would make from a process perspective is if you are going to overinvest in customer success, which I recommend, make sure that you have also set up a process to take the insights that your customer success people are coming up with and turn them into as much content as you can.”
Speaker
Zoelle Egner
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast
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