you built and led Facebook news feeds you shipped the messenger app as its own app you launched Chad GPT enterprise what's an important lesson you've learned about what it takes to succeed building something from idea to one to billions you have to plan your chess moves out in advance you have to really think before you act and build systems that are going to let you go sustainably faster what's the most counterintuitive lesson you've learned sometimes your product actually doesn't matter at Uber I learned this because really the price and the ETA at Uber was the product looking at it from a holistic perspective we humans consume the entirety of the product it's not to say that you shouldn't fix the bug but it doesn't have as much of an impact as something that is more important to people what's one specific thing you think will change in a big way with AI that people don't think enough about education is going to change my son he was nine at the time built a custom GPT that you can type in any topic and it would give you a sentence that had every letter of the English alphabet isn't that mind-blowing i can already see his brain rewiring what's one thing you look for in people you hire in 6 months if I'm telling you what to do I've hired the wrong person it helps me and the person operate on a different level where the goal is not did you hit this OKR the meta goal becomes are we calibrating enough are we actually getting to a spot where in 6 months you're the one telling me what needs to be done what's something you've learned about what it takes to be a great product person i think there are five different types of product managers number one is today my guest is Peter Deng peter is maybe the most under the radar impactful product leader that you have never heard of i often say that the best product people are not the people on Twitter and LinkedIn sharing advice but the people who don't have time to do that because they are too busy doing the work peter is the epitome of this he was VP of product at OpenAI where he oversaw product design and engineering for chat GBT and helped ship chat GPT enterprise voice memory desktop custom GBTs and more he also oversaw and built their first growth team he was the first head of product at Instagram where he worked closely with Mike and Kevin and oversaw all product development including on content sharing ads growth even helped build out their design and user research functions he was also head of the rider product team at Uber where he oversaw everything in the rider app including big improvements to pickups and drop offs in Uber pool and airports he also helped the team launch new products including Uber Reserve which is now approaching a $5 billion a year business he also spent nearly 10 years at Facebook as their fourth ever product manager where he built and led the team behind the current newsfeed product the standalone messenger app also photos and groups and homepage and profiles he was also chief product officer at Air Table where he helped the company systemize how they built products and transitioned to enterprise he also led product management at Oculus these days he is a general partner at Felicus where he's able to bring everything he's learned to more founders as an investor he has never done a podcast before or shared any of these lessons or stories publicly so you are in for a real treat a huge thank you to Eric Antinau Nick Turley Lauren Motomedi Joan Jen and Sundeep Jane for contributing questions and topics to this conversation if you enjoy this podcast don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube also if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter you get a year free of a bunch of amazing products including Bolt Linear Superhuman Notion Perplexia and Granola check it out lenniesnewsletter.com and click bundle with that I bring you Peter Deng many of you are building AI products which is why I'm very excited to chat with Brandon Fu founder and CEO of Paragon hey Brandon hey Lenny thanks for having me so integrations have become a big deal for AI products why is that integrations are missionritical for AI for two reasons first AI products need contacts from their customers business data such as Google Drive files Slack messages or CRM records second for AI products to automate work on behalf of users AI agents need to be able to take action across these different third party tools so where does Paragon fit into all this well these integrations are a pain to build and that's why Paragon provides an embedded platform that enables engineers to ship these product integrations in just days instead of months across every use case from rag data ingestion to agentic actions and I know from firsthand experience that maintenance is even harder than just building it for the first time exactly we believe product teams should focus engineering efforts on competitive advantages not integrations that's why companies like you.com AI21 and hundreds of others use Paragon to accelerate their integration strategy if you want to avoid wasting months of engineering on integrations that your customers need check out Paragon at useparagon.com/lenny this episode is brought to you by Pragmatic Institute the trusted leader in product expertise pragmatic Institute helps product professionals turn ideas into impact through proven courses workshops and certifications designed for real world success for over 30 years they've trained more than 250,000 product leaders at companies like Google Microsoft and Salesforce equipping them with practical strategies to build and scale marketwinning products pragmatic full-time instructors each bring over 25 years of hands-on leadership experience teaching strategies proven to deliver realworld results and it's not just about what you learn it's also about who you learn it with completing a course connects you to an active community of over 40,000 product professionals you'll engage in meaningful conversations collaborate with peers and mentors and gain direct instructor access to refine your strategies and stay ahead of trends get 20% off with code lenny 20 at pragmaticinstitute.com/lenny peter thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast thank you i'm so thrilled to be here really honored looking forward to having a great time here as we were preparing for this conversation we were jamming on what we should focus on there's so much that we're going to talk about but something that you said was really interesting and I'm really excited to start with this which is that you've uh you've always felt that you haven't been able to say all the things you really think and feel because you've been within corporations PR people keeping on message and this is the first time that you feel free to share first time okay so first of all just how does that feel second of all tell us something that you've been wanting to share that you can finally talk about well it it feels really good so I let me ask I love it that you're starting with a spicy question here um and um let me share some more context behind it um it's you know I'm here to speak more freely but it's not really what you think i'm not here to divulge any secrets uh from the companies but naturally I'm kind of a storyteller i'm kind of an introvert so this podcast I feel like I have the ability to go deeper with you on uh any topic and kind of add the context because I think the new without some of the context some of my spicy takes or whatnot might be taken out of context and just not having the time pressure not feeling like there's some you know PR message I have to hit is just really freeing so it feels awesome really anything that is on your mind that you would find interesting to your to your listeners I'm here for it and yeah excited something I always tell guests and I don't want people to take this out of context also but I always describe myself as a a reverse journalist where I want the guest to be the best version of themselves i never want to catch people off guard or just say something they never meant to say so that's a safe space okay okay but still is there anything that you want to share or that might be interesting to share that you've been wanting to share that you haven't been able to is there anything along those lines i mean always get this question around sort of you know AGI is it coming is it going to is it going to solve everything i mean it's so interesting because you know when I was at OpenAI it was around the time that people were really scared of AI and you know oh it's going to you know get rid of humans or it's going to just you know do all these things but with every technology I think everyone's been just kind of taking some time to acclimate to it and I think with AGI it's a similar thing which is it's so far out that everyone's like well is it is it what's what's our world going to be like and the real answer is like none of us really know but in terms of solving problems I think some people believe AGI is going to solve everything but I don't think so um AGI is just necessary but not sufficient a lot of the value is still going to require a bunch of hustle from a lot of builders to really turn that new source of energy and channel it into something that we humans want to use that solves some of our problems and that hustle is going to be required that elbow grease is going to be required to really make AGI something useful your point is that people think AGI hits all of a sudden all jobs are gone agi is doing everything because I think this is a a optimistic message that things will be okay if AGI basically uh AGI being uh and I'm curious if you have a clearer definition but AGI being uh AI being just basically as smart as humans look I'm I won't claim to be an expert on this at all um but I I just I think that with every technology that's come out we've been able to harness it and it takes a lot of harnessing i think I'm going to use that word very deliberately right i'll I'll use something really basic what seems obvious today is that you know there was a time when databases were all the rage it's like oh my goodness you can store a bunch of data and you can query it really quickly and like imagine all the possibilities and I think that a lot of amazing entrepreneurs and builders you know build some really great products on top of databases right in fact that's kind of the basis of all the stuff that we're seeing today and it seems so obvious today but I I don't know maybe in in you know 10 years 15 years when we look back it's like of course it made sense that we have this super intelligent you know thinking machine but it requires uh product builders to be able to go in there and say how do we channel this energy to make it something that we as humans love to use and want to use i love the optimism around this it's just like things will not go crazy once uh computers are as generally intelligent as as humans i I I think that's that's exactly the the the what I'm trying to say and I think that again every technology people uh have this fear right and I remember reading or sorry watching a documentary once and they were talking about how when the bicycle came out people were like oh my goodness this is going to be the end of all things and it again it sounds silly today right because you're like bicycles really but then if you put yourself in the context in the mindset of a previous generation which you know are the next gener generation will be looking back at this podcast in that previous generation i think that you know again I think optimistically things are going to be okay we're going to adapt um and this was actually one of the things that I talked about with my fresh friend Josh Constein at South by Southwest is this idea that humans will always co-evolve with technology and I think that that co-evolution is already happening if you take a look at sort of um there was a lot of uh a fear of AI just when Chachi BT came out but you know when you start to get familiar with it things that kind of things change and then you are able to to evolve from being you know fearful to uh familiar and to go all the way to having this this mastery of this thing of like oh my goodness like look at all the startups that are happening now all the things that we can build right and just over 18 months I would say we look back and there's been an attitude shift Right and so I guess part of my optimism comes from if you look back 18 months and you look forward 18 months like might it be the same thing for something that we're we're chasing now let me follow this AI thread a little bit more and then we can move on to other things i feel like every conversation there's like a time to AI conversation and then it's like okay there's other things that also matter so let me ask you this the question what's what's one specific thing you think will change in a big way with AI that people don't think enough about i think education is going to change in a big way and I think a lot about this because um I'm involved in my kids school uh quite a bit and that's something I've done after I I left OpenAI and what's fascinating to me is that you know watching my son who got to you know dog food a bunch of the Open AI stuff before it was public i think that was uh I think I can saf safely say that that seems okay and uh when he was was playing with like you know Chachi PT and some of the the latest models and he's he's uh he was nine at the time i can already see his brain rewiring right he was starting to ask questions and he never heard the word prompt before but his like just this is how awesome the human mind is because he was exposed to this technology at an early age some things just are unlocked um and I think that you're able to think differently and I I'll give you a specific example of of what I mean here you know he you know he goes to Python class right and he's he's coding now I don't actually think he's going to have to code when he grows up i think that's going to be a solved problem but it's a very very valuable skill because I think learning to program is learning how to think structure in a structured way right in very semantic way um a systematic way and you know he was he he was prompting uh Chachi BT with some really crazy things that I never even thought of and one of the things was hey Chachi PT can you give me a sentence that has every letter in the alphabet along the theme of oceans or along the theme of space and the reason this kind of blew my mind is because in traditional programming you couldn't write that program you can't say to you know in in Python like oh write a function that goes and and formulate i mean it's a really difficult function to write but for you know him to be able to think of that prompt which is really cool because he built a custom GPT that you can type in any topic and it would give you a sentence that had every letter of the English alphabet kind of like the uh the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog right like isn't that mind-blowing it's like that that he can now at age nine he could think about that whereas me at age nine I was playing with Legos and like maybe Q basic right and so this idea of how young humans brains will evolve because of this new tool we have is going to change the way I think we're going to do education right and I'll be very honest I'm not an expert in education but I just thought a lot about it and you know one one thing I'm going to be I think it's going to be really important in the future is being able to figure out how ask the right questions you know we humans are in inherently inquisitive but you know being inquisitive and turning that into the right questions to you know prompt or ask AI which is going to be again something that everyone's going to have access to is going to be a a differentiator for sort of what kind of work can be done right and I I I I um the the analogy I'll draw is when when the calculator was invented you know people didn't stop doing math right they just did higher level math and it frees the mind up to do other things and think more at a at a higher level of abstraction and I think we got to prepare our kids on thinking about well how do you think at a higher level of abstraction and this has happened before right I think Google has made memory kind of obsolete like you don't have to memorize facts anymore you can just Google it right and the next phase will be something around well code will just appear if you summon it so what are the things that you know people will think about and the skills that develop that are at the next level of abstraction right that tap into our creativity that tap into our curiosity that's going to be really interesting so I think education is going to change dramatically just like how progressive education in the past switch from memorization of like multiplication tables into something that's a little bit more you know kind of higher level um higher level thinking and I think that's going to that's going to be one of those big areas m this makes me think about an NPR story I was just listening to where they were following professors using chat GPT to create their curriculum there's a lot of talk of students using chat GPT cheating you know having chat GBT write their essays but teachers are using chatg in a big way and and then uh students are rating professors uh badly because they notice they're using chat GBT for their curriculum so it's kind of this like arms race well well but it's also interesting because then that's that goes further show further that like you know the whole system has to change right because again I still believe that human brains are in inherently inquisitive and that we still need development in some way but how that's going to develop I'm I'm fascinated to watch how that plays out i want to get back to product but first of all I know something that uh you think a lot about along these lines this came up in many conversations I had with folks that you worked with is your uh emphasis on the power and importance of language being really good at thinking about the words you use both in writing and speaking just talk about how you think about that just the importance and power of language as a leader i remember taking this class that really stuck with me in college it was called language and thought um and it was taught by Herbert Clark and he had this thesis that kind of blew my mind which is that you know language actually affects the way you think that's one of the parts of the thesis and I once I heard that and read that in his book and listened to the lecture I couldn't stop thinking about that because it just rang so true right i grew up speaking Chinese and I think that there's a lot of things of just the Chinese language that you know I feel like I noticed I thought differently when I learned English right and there were some studies around this too i think that there's I think in in in I I'm not sure exactly i have to go check up on this but I think in Russian there there are two different words for like a blue there's like a greenish blue and a bright blue or something i speak Russian uh and I my but it's like uh I was I I moved to the US when I was six and so my Russian is not great so I'm trying to think of this as you say it but keep keep going well I mean I So So then this is great so I I I need to get a way to to to to validate this but you know from what I remember because there were these two different words for this different shades of blue russian speakers who then learned English had an easier time distinguishing between these two shades of blue than and a faster time doing so than people who had just grown up speaking English um so I read some studies on also there's some other languages that don't actually have a word for blue I think and then that's actually really hard for them to distinguish over time so that really stuck with me and and I think that it's kind of rings true so when I you know how I put it in practice is that when I make slide decks I gave a presentation to a class a couple weeks ago and there were probably a total of 20 words on the entire slide deck and I spent hours obsessing over them because I really wanted to make sure I captured the right essence of what I was trying to say and I think that crafting is really important when you're working in product because if you're sitting down and you're writing a vision doc or you're writing a PRD and you if you don't pay attention to the words you use and you're not intentional about it those have downstream effects like people might misinterpret things the connotations may not actually come through and so I I really am very careful about it because I think that the there's a multiplicative effect and a downstream effect for using the wrong word um and I I I really believe in that kind of language affecting thought um thesis which is why I've just really really paid attention to that yeah and I I feel like AI can help you with that too yes well actually speaking of AI actually that's a really interesting point i think it's really interesting and kind of poetic that and and and fitting that uh the breakthrough in artificial intelligence came from large language models right like that's it's interesting to me because you know there's with every word in every sentence so much of the knowledge is encapsulated and shaped and when chatbt does something really interesting I I tell people it's often times just writing Python code and interpreting it and Python is a language yet again right so I think that there's something really interesting where like the condensation of human thought in language has is related to the LLMs and the advancements in area that we have today i think it was Ilia on Dorash's podcast where he was talking about how you may think LLMs are just like oh just predicting the next word what's the big deal but in order to do that it has to understand the universe and everything in the world that has ever happened and existed and everything anyone's ever written to predict the next word yeah love it yeah okay so let me let me zoom out a little bit and shift a little bit to just product in general sure you've worked on at and built some of the most iconic products in history you worked at OpenAI Facebook Uber had a product at Instagram so let me just ask you this question and see where this goes what's the most counterintuitive lesson you've learned about building products or leading teams that goes against common wisdom i think one thing that it's a really hard lesson that I learned at Uber uh which is sometimes your product actually doesn't matter and by product I mean kind of the pixels you put on the screen or things that you build in your in your in your um uh mobile app um and at Uber I learned this because you know it it it pains me to say this but really like the price and the ETA at Uber was the product and I think a lot of times you know people at tech companies think of the product as just this digital manifestation but looking at it from a holistic perspective you know we humans consume the entirety of the product and I think that's that was one of the things that I I learned the lessons I learned that was like really kind of hard-hitting right that um sometimes the pixels don't matter as much as you think right and you fix a certain bug um it's not to say that you shouldn't fix the bug but it doesn't have as much of an impact as something that is more important to people like a price or in TA this happens a lot in you know B2B products where it's uh not just about you know how uh it's great that your product is is well-loved by its end users but you know does it make good business sense is one of those those hard lessons I learned as a very uh brighteyed bushy tailed sort of designbased uh product manager uh going into Uber i think the other insight that I had or rather other thought I had the other day was just the idea that like so many of the tech companies today this is kind of counterintuitive so many of the tech companies that are most valuable today didn't really start with any technological breakthrough they were built on some kind of technological breakthrough and they ended up building a lot more technology but really a lot of these companies like Facebook for example just put in the hard work right the elbow grease to especially in the early stages to take you know essentially a database of human connections and build something valuable on top of it and that keep on polishing and iterating that product and and coming up with new ones like newsfeed and photo tagging were just you know kind of came out of just really paying attention to what people wanted and some of the ideas are super simple and it's not something that came out of the lab right so Uber for example took the fact that everyone had these GPS devices in their pockets and they didn't invent the GPS device but they were able to take that and the fact that people had cars and people wanted to kind of um you know get around and there was a human need and they just put the connected the dots and put everything together um and eventually built a ton of tech to predict the right marketplace and pricing etc but largely like that's a very valuable tech company but it's largely an operations company and I I want to give a huge shout out to my colleagues there who run you know kind of Uber Eats and and Uber uh rides from a from a operations perspective because truly like that was one of the biggest kind of business model hacks that I've seen right and so I I think that's you know Silicon Valley gets lost a thought it's like oh this is a new tech company often times some of the most valuable ones are just the ones that are just building what people need on top of existing tech this is such there's so much to say here i I love it uh and this is coming from someone that led the Uber writer product team uh and worked at Facebook and head of product Instagram you know it's like it means a lot coming from someone like you not someone you know that's like not in product especially yeah i mean I'm just to go further on the Instagram part like it's the the idea was super simple it was it was showing photos and and visual sharing but the craft that Mike and Kevin had in putting in the hard work to get the product just right that's what made it really take off right that's a great example i I'd forgotten about Instagram um but uh how could I but you know it wasn't anything that any other company couldn't have done but it was that product taste that Kevin and Mike had and conviction that there's a certain sort of vibe if you will uh that people wanted and building that and iterating i mean and look at it now it's it's a it's a core part of our lives visual sharing they really solved it yeah i just had Mike Greger on the podcast um so it's interesting there's two tensions here one is just like the product doesn't matter in a lot of really successful companies it's secondary to the cars the drivers the the GPS and the phone and then on the other hand uh techn there doesn't need to be a technological breakthrough for to build a huge business is there it's almost like if the uh if there's no technological breakthrough then the product matters like Facebook as an example basically it's like a database of connections but what allowed and Instagram what allowed them to be breakthrough and there's you know classically competitors at the time uh was the experience was a lot better and then maybe on the flip side if the if the experience doesn't matter then it's the breakthrough is on the operations and other does that resonate is that kind of what you're saying it does resonate I think I think both have to be true but also I would say that like even if you did found a company that has a huge technological breakthrough uh very shortly I think that you know kind of the the product experience will start mattering right because you know how long does that technological advantage last right before humans wisen up to be like well this is not the product I want to use I want to use it a little bit differently and this is more ergonomic for me etc so I think I think that that's what you said is is is a beautiful summary i I also think that a point in time in a company's history will also determine what is going to be more important this this is especially interesting for companies building on top of LLMs and AI infrastructure where you're essentially saying you don't need to have some kind of technological breakthrough to build something valuable if you can create a really special unique experience that unlocks the potential of this super intelligence i think that's right and and I have some more thoughts on just sort of the companies that are building on top of LLMs that are just you know that's a slightly different thing I would say I think that for them you know having the right data and the right data flywheels is so important like proprietary data especially exactly um and the flywheel part is is is just you know you can start with proprietary data but the flywheel is really just sort of how do you continue to maintain that and generate that and the second thing is again it's it's the workflow so it's the it's the ergonomics of how does it actually integrate into people's lives and that is going to be more and more important let's actually spend more time there because a lot of people are thinking about this feels like feels like everybody's trying to start a company these days with you know AI enabling so much more and so I think a lot of people are just curious where should they spend time and so I think this is actually really interesting so what I'm hearing here is two things to think about to create any kind of mo defensibility against say foundational models coming to eat your lunch or other companies uh what sort of data can you uh acquire that is proprietary and create a flywheel to generate more of that data and then um the other piece is how do you fit into a very specific like basically vertical that you understand really well that fits into their existing workflow is that right well it's again this is this is something we can unpack for a long time right because um you know with any product that you want to build there's going to be incumbents that have distribution advantages but I do have this thesis that there are certain products that will be able to break through those advantages of the distribution of the other companies uh but you have to kind of overcome a pretty high bar of your product has to be so much better right that's I think that's that's one thing but yeah I think the data flywheel thing is really interesting because you know the the the models will get really good at whatever data you show it and that's that's one of the things that people just think that AI is such a magic wand but no it's like if it's been trained on the right data it's going to do the thing that it's been trained on um it's very malleable um so being very mindful of the data that you have access to to start your flywheel going and what you can do to keep on going with that flywheel is going to be a a critical thing for for anyone who's starting a company today so let's make that even more specific when you talk about this I think about this the CEO of Windsurf was on the podcast and he talked a lot about how they have all this really unique data about which recommendations of code uh snippets people accept and reject and they actually launched their own model I think based on that is that is that an example any other examples to make this work that's a perfect example um there's some companies I've invested in that aren't public yet that have their own sort of take on that which is um really interesting to be able to uh to take um sort of whatever activity is in their product to get smarter at the thing that they are doing again which is why I think the data flywheel and the the the workflow go so handinand together right because if you are solving something actually valuable for businesses for people and there's a lot of that um uh attention that's being paid to a lot of work is being done through it you're going to have that edge and you know this is where I see again startups in very different uh markets who have this insight who understand this very deeply and are not just trying to zero everything and be like no no no like this is how we're going to build it to make the product genuinely useful so that it can get genuinely more useful over time and that is going to be amazing because you know as a consumer of any of these products we're going to benefit what I'm hearing here is also if you don't have proprietary data or unique data you can still have a chance by building this flywheel where you collect that data through your usage for example windsurf they all built on claude 3.5 and then now they have all this unique data and now they're miles yeah that's exactly right and this goes back to sort of something I might have mentioned briefly but you got to have grit when you're building anything right you got to be able to like have that vision have that clear direction and be able to really go chase that i think that's really important the and to make uh your example of distribution being overcomeable uh a a great example I think a lot about and we had the CPO a a CPO turns out there's many CPOs at Microsoft I didn't realize how many CPOs they had yeah uh and she she t I asked her about like why didn't co-pilot like the fastest growing companies in the world cursor winer lovable bold all these guys like co-pilot was so ahead of these these companies and and these companies broke through uh while Microsoft has distribution amazing talent infrastructure all the things early first mover advantage and it's to your point they were just building products that were much better cursor winds surf all these like lovable whole I I do believe there is a a level of product craft that will make it so that it's just worth it to switch or try something else and there are a few products out there that I see with that with this I think granola is one of them there's so many distribution advantages that Google meet has that Google uh Facebook start off uh Microsoft Teams has uh Zoom has but they're just these tiny little product craft delightful things that I really appreciate myself of like yeah they got it they have these little edges sanded down just right and they've really figured out a way to really make it so delightful that it's like yeah I will ex I will install this piece of software yes 100% i will talk to my friends about this because it is so life-changing right and that we're starting to see that now again before I would say 18 months ago it's like oh well who has the best model but think going forward it's like really who has the best workflow and who has the best product and we humans are just demanding we want the best and so when that when someone is going to come out and produce something that's so wellcrafted I think people are going to pay attention so a couple takeaways here is if you're trying to build an AI startup a few uh things you should be thinking about that gives you a better chance of breaking through and winning is what are your data flywheels where you collect proprietary unique data how do you build something that's in the craft is comes through and people are like wowed and want to tell their friends about it granola is a great example clearly cursor lovable bolt rep all these guys did that and then it feels like there's just like a understand a vertical workflow really well and then someone's problem and solve that in a really unique way yeah you couldn't have put it better myself awesome uh let me ask you this because this came up in my chat with Mike at Enthropic uh and it's along these lines so I I was thinking about just what is what is product doing at Anthropic so there's building this basically a gigabrain super intelligence thing that's going to know everything and maybe build its own experience in the future and then there's this like product team building this layer on top to interact with this super intelligent gigabrain what is the point what is the value of that layer you spoke to it a bit here of just like there's value in the experience and it feeling native but I guess let me just ask you that just where do you think product goes at a company like Anthropic OpenAI where there's just the super intelligence that the team is working on and there's this like UX on top i think those companies have just such an advantage because you get to work in the same building as the researchers and I think that you know uh there there's that really kind of symbiotic relationship close partnership between post training and and um and product where uh you know again more and more it's going to be less about the raw intelligence it's going to be about the fine-tuning of of what the model can do that that really resonates with people and what people want and also what the product trajectory is is going to be right so I think that's going to you're going to see that more and more i mean I think I think uh you know this is less about anthropic but more about openi i think open made a great move uh I am a huge Fiji fan as soon as that news leaked that she was going to join I texted her I was like this is great amazing congratulations i'm thrilled for her for the company for all of my friends still at opening high because it's just going to be this amazing leader coming in i'm also thrilled as a consumer because some great products are going to come out i think that really that close tight-knit relationship between at any of these large model companies between post- training and and product is going to produce some really incredible stuff first of all Mike actually said very similar things that the more I did not I promise you I did not watch that even come out yet so I believe you uh yeah they they he had this interesting finding where he he put product people on like UX product experience frontf facing product and then he put PMs on the research teams and building models helping models get better helping researchers build uh things and he found that all all the leverage and wins came from the PMs working with the researchers much less so on the product experience and so he puts more and more PMs with that with that with that team i I'm so thrilled to hear that because it's a little bit of it's very validating because that's what we did at Open AI 2 like we were very closely tied to the post trading team and so it was because of that tight collaboration that you see some of the advances of of of Chacht getting better at so many things right so uh it's great it's it's awesome that we independently came to the same conclusion yes it's a good sign okay uh so we're talking about startups building new companies I want to follow this thread a little bit I feel like you've built more products that from zero to one to scale than may maybe most anyone else across all the companies that you worked at i'm gonna do a quick rundown of some of the things you've done and uh I'm I'm going to miss a bunch but let's see you built and led the Facebook newsfeed the current version of it you built the new groups experience chat and messages you shipped the messenger app as its own app that was that was one of your projects you uh led Uber Pool lowcost rides uh you launched Chad GPT enterprise you shipped voice and vision memory custom GPTs just refreshing the whole design of chat GPT uh many more things a lot of work at air table obviously also uh Oculus uh these are just some examples in the intro I'm going to try to go through all these things so all that to say I feel like you've seen a lot of what works and doesn't work building from idea from zero essentially to one to scale so let me just ask you this question what's uh what's an important lesson you've learned about what it takes to succeed building something from idea to one to billions yeah um thank you and that was a good trip down memory lane too um uh when you read that off so I think the first thing I would say and you know going from zero to one is different than going from one to 100 and when you are in the one to 100 phase which is a lot of the time that I spent you know is is in the one to 100 phase um we you know were able to we quadrupled Instagram usage in two years that was very much a fun ride and there's a bunch of other examples at other uh at other companies but when you go to one to 100 I I think one of the things that you really got to take into account is that you have to plan your chess moves out in advance you have to really think before you act and build systems that are going to let you go sustainably faster because the 0ero to one is you're trying to find that product market fit and then when you get to one to 100 you're trying to make sure you can get to hypers scale and and as fast as you can right and I've been very fortunate to be along the ride of of many of these products as they were going through that hypers scale and the analogy I always like to use is that when you do that you feel the G-forces right and you know some people are like "Oh yeah I'm a pilot i can fly at you know 35,000 ft." But like the the you know feeling the G-forces of takeoff of a rocket is very different right and the thing that I've learned there doing that a few times is you got to build the systems that help you move sustainably faster right and sometimes you have to go slow to go fast um and here's an example so in building the newsfeed the current version that we have today it really hasn't changed much from the time that we uh built it i don't even know it was like 12 years ago or something i don't know the reason why it hasn't changed much but I like to think that it's because we put a lot of time and craft into thinking about the whole sharing loop and what are what is the uh what is the what are the key pieces of it and how is it architected what's the information architecture and what does that whole flow look like how does it go from posting something at the top of the page to showing up in the newsfeed to someone clicking like and then that notifications thing lighting up red and then that repeating over and over again and I like to think that newsfeed has stood the test of time uh the current version of it because we thought very carefully about how people wanted to interact and how people wanted to consume information and also that whole loop um and so when when that happens then I think things are built to last right and I think the this I think this is the case at a lot of different companies so when I was at Uber we we had a bit of a spaghetti string code situation on the writer app but you know taking a step back and rearchitecting things of like what are the core components and how do you actually make it so that the product selector can scale around the world and here's a little known fact like you know talk about grit and elbow grease like Uber is not just as simple as like finding a ride if you've ever been to another country like in India sometimes there are no street signs so you have to like pick up in front of this you know mini mart or whatever it might be so there's a whole team that worked on pickup and drop offs this was a large effort and it sounds so boring but it was so critical to Uber being able to scale because pickup and drop offs team thought about well how do you do it for venues and that venues and finding that right abstraction means that you can have uh a scalable way to to do pickups at airports and you know configure different venues and those systems when you take the time to build them in the one to 100 phase help you speed up massively and that's how you get 4x you users in two years or on messenger we put a lot of thought into the infrastructure around push notifications etc we grew that product from zero to 4.7 billion messages sent per day uh in about two and a half years um and I think it really is requires that that forethought in in building the right systems well let me follow that the red quickly because that's really interesting so essentially what you're saying is once there's like a phase of once you find product market fit and I want to actually ask you this uh before you start planning when you're starting to scale going from one to 100 your advice here is basically don't move fast and break things don't ship MVPs this is the time to really think many chess moves ahead about what you're going to need to get this to say a billion users yeah yeah it's building the systems and then that that systems thinking will will carry you really far at least that's been my experience and hopefully hopefully you can find the same way but you know um your mileage may vary but yeah that's exactly right what's your guidance on just like when to do that because you know you can't you know you build something okay well it's working there's also this just like okay let's just keep it going let's scale it as far as we can there in your experience is it just like what's the guidance on when to really step back and really think years and years ahead great question i'll say the first thing I'll say is that it's not a binary switch it's actually a ramp rate um and so when I've led teams I've always believed strongly in this portfolio approach right and so you know famously Google had the 702010 portfolio approach that may be the right thing for a more mature company uh maybe it's 50/50 if you're a startup right but you have to think about this in a non-binary way and in in a way that's about scaling up and when do you need to put more resources behind uh behind that so every startup is going to be different right every product uh that you're launching is going to be different and then thinking about your portfolio approach and how much you allocate your time that would be my my advice and it's you're you know it's it is really dependent on the stage that you're in i think that actually is a nice dovetail to my second thing if I if I may um which is uh you know when you're going from that stage of of uh maybe you know one to five or one to 10 so not just fully one to 100 one thing I found to be very helpful is to measure everything and this sounds again very simple but you know just like how you wouldn't fly a plane without instruments like why would you run your product without understanding the instrumentation and uh how it's doing right and so one of the things I did in pretty much all the teams that I led whether it was Instagram Uber air table was all about and chat GPT2 uh the one of the first things I did was always to build a growth team and building a growth team is really interesting because it actually is a simple razor it's a simple thing to think about it's like I'm going to build a growth team but then you're going to uncover a lot of things right you're going to uncover how much stuff you have not yet logged and how non-rigorous you've been looking at your entire product and it's it's so funny because I've seen this movie so many times the same movie so many times at every one of these companies where I remember walking into Instagram and I think asking Kevin Lex like "So how many users do we have?" It's like "Well we don't really know." and and so it's like well there a lot and we don't really know and so when you build a growth team and you hire the right growth leader I've had the pleasure uh the the pleasure of working with George Lee at Instagram um you know some early growth folks at at Facebook Andrew Chen air at um at Uber uh Air Table um I had the privilege of working with uh Lauren um who is currently now leading growth at at Notion so I've I've been very fortunate to work with some really amazing people on my team and when you hire the right person they start asking all the right questions because when you know the archetype of person who is a a growth PM will be like well wait why is this happening and let's get the data on X Y and Z thing and that's when you realize you don't have X Y and Z thing logged and after you have X Y and Z thing logged you look at the data you're like wait well why is that happening and then you're you're forcing yourself to go deeper into the analysis of doing some analysis of like well you know what's correlated with what and what are some hypotheses And because growth leaders growth product leaders are so into this experimentation side it actually is this really easy thing to do is when you start building a growth team it just begets all of the right questions being asked and then it starts uh you know kind of turning into all the right behaviors of of of taking something you've been building which is seems like it's working into a more rigorous system so that's like the zero sorry the the 1 to 10 phase I would say that really sets you up for the 10 to 100 what what I like about this growth team advice is that a lot of people think of a time to hire a growth team to we need to drive growth what you're saying is there's a lot of second order benefits which is they help you figure out what the hell's going on and inform a lot of uh of other things that are happening people just actually understanding how things are going and totally and I think that the reason why growth team is is is the advice I would go with rather than to build an analytics team is because if you build an analytics team or a data science team it's possible that no one's going to listen to them right it's like oh I have these insights it's like well no one really cares but if you have a if you hire a growth leader they are now tied to outcomes of driving growth so they're going to be the ones who are listening and asking you know more questions and really partnering with that data science team to make your entire product and business more rigorous and that just changes the DNA of of your entire team i want to talk about hiring but is there anything else along these lines that you want to share of building new product scaling products i guess the last thing I would say is like I I I want to make sure that you know sometimes in the um in the pursuit of numbers product folks lose sight of the importance of taste and craft so uh maybe this is actually the dovetail into kind of building teams but like you got to have the counterbalances right and it's really important to give two people on your team different charges one is like go grow the product and the other one is wait maintain that design that beautiful aesthetic that that that uh the the the craft that your that your product is known for and that tension is extremely healthy right and so I I've saw I've seen this at at at at Facebook i've seen this at Instagram i I helped create this at Instagram this kind of healthy tension air table same thing but just having chatbt same exact thing you have to have that push and pull on both sides to really stretch the gamut that begs the question how do you actually do that you know a lot you could talk about it you could be like okay we need to make sure the experience is awesome but also grow this number here's your goal how do you operationalize that as like a performance review attribute thing is it culture something else as a leader you have to set up your team the right way you have to really think about your team as a product and what are the various pieces you need to really stretch the gamut of what you're what you're thinking about um and the teams that I've helped build are the most successful ones are a team of Avengers that are just like very different have very different superpowers but together you as the leader are the one who's helping adjudicate any differences or uh any any disagreements but you're you know you're getting the best outcome when everyone's pulling and obsessing over a different thing right and that's important it's important to to create your balance and and really kind of increase the space that you're looking at and create those healthy debates and I think a lot of people overlook that i think some people think of you know people on a team as like warm bodies to do a job but my philosophy has always been to think about what is the what does the company need to be successful and who's the best person who spikes at that one thing and how do I make sure that that we get that person and how do we make sure we get the other person and the other person it's almost like you're playing an RPG where everyone has different sliders and you have to create this super team where everyone actually spikes in different in different ways and that is some thing that I've had a lot of success with in terms of when you create that environment and you create that uh vibe you're going to get a lot of mileage out of that team that is a really interesting answer it's not one I've heard before essentially you're it's not like create the right incentives it's hire people that naturally want us see the world in a certain way and that creates a balance and tension a healthy tension between say a PM and a designer and an engineer that is really interesting because that feels a lot more sustainable than like here's your goal okay but also when your goal is make sure uh the experience is great and people support tickets are down it's just like naturally they need to want this to happen totally and actually there was a I I I have a a a sort of a a framework around like I think there are five different types of product managers that has kind of held true so this is a a framework that just came out of a random jam at Uber when I was talking to some some of my my colleagues there and we formulated this in terms of helping uh with hiring practices everywhere I've gone I've also been like best friends with the recruiters because honestly my whole thing is like got to build the right team so we have to really partner very deeply and at Uber we developed this uh this this this five archetypes of a PM um and I've to this day I still think it's like actually exactly true and it still holds true to this day but is that interesting you want me to kind of go into that absolutely i'm so excited to hear with you there these are the five that I found to be most enduring and actually the most like kind of different right and and when you talk about I love the way you put this Lenny which is when you hire the right people and like how they're naturally motivated by different things right and so these are the five that that we came up with number one is the consumer PM so this is the person that's like half designer half product person really obsessed over the details is it delightful is it crafted enough oh my goodness this is three pixels off i can't stand it this is like making driving me nuts like why is this so complex I mean these are the people that you think of as like you know you know sometimes the quintessential PM is the consumer PM but that's just one type right and um another type just kind of on the side we've talked about before is the growth PM these people are like half data scientist half product person they are kind of wired to think numbers first and they have this kind of air about them that's like the best ones do which is like I'm really skep skeptical show me the data let's run a test and prove it i don't believe you right and it's and and I start with these two in the framework because they're actually really different right one it's like I have vibe i feel the vibe this is better and the other one's like no I don't believe you we should test this and prove it and that's like a really healthy tension i love you know having two people in a room like debating that like great we are going to get some good things done and we're going to we're going to move the product forward the third type is um you know kind of what I call the GMP PM or the business PM right these are like kind of half MBA half product person these are folks that are kind of naturally wired to start with the business model and think about what are the margins like what are the opportunities where's the value being created and we had a lot of these at at at um at Uber and they were the marketplace PMs and they're just like I loved working with them because their their minds just work differently they just thought about problems from like well what is the incentive here right and you this is a fascinating type of mind to to work with um another one I I found this is it's it's actually more nuanced than you think is like there's a certain sort of archetype that I I call the platform PM which is someone who's like really deeply wired to kind of build tools for other people and at Uber we had like internal platforms for like messaging or for you know building internal tools and often times s these folks are overlooked but it's like actually a really deep wiring because these are the people that are going to build the systems that are going to make you go faster right and that's what they love doing um and the last one I would say I used to call an algorithms PM but now in the in the uh in the uh the the the world of of AI I'm going to rename this to research PM and these are like half researcher half engineer half product person and these these minds are amazing so like basically they think you know you know traditional Google search algorithm PM right but nowadays it's like who are the people who really have that product taste but deeply understand the tech and the you know the way the models are trained to go and affect that and build the most amazing product so those are the five I still think I to this day these hold true and we might have been on to something the day that we brainstormed this at Uber but uh yeah I'm curious to hear your feedback this is great as you're talking I'm just like here's that person here's that person okay they fit here uh this super resonates this episode is brought to you by Content Square the analytics platform that helps companies build better digital experiences ever wonder why customers drop off before converting or why some pages perform better than others content Square takes the guesswork out of digital experiences giving you real-time insights into how users interact with your site or app with AI powered analytics automatic frustration detection and clear visualizations you'll know exactly what's working and what's holding your customers back whether you're optimizing an e-commerce checkout refining a B2B lead flow or improving a mobile app experience Content Square pinpoints exactly what needs fixing and why contentsquare powers better customer journeys across 1.3 million websites and apps discover the insights you've been missing at contentsquare.com/lenny so just to summarize there's consumer PMs growth PMs business/GMPs platform PMs and sort of research PMs uh a lot of people call them AIP PMs now i feel like that's the term that's really popular you have to evolve with the times yeah but also the other part of the framework I find uh kind of interesting is that everyone's like a primary has a primary one and a secondary one it's kind of like one of those like personality tests right and maybe we kind of did this just because it was hard to pigeon hole people and I I myself don't think I was pigeonholeable but I I do think that people like you know kind of lead with one type of thinking and then also have the secondary thing that keeps them in balance and so if you believe that and you apply it to your team I'm curious to hear you know from your listeners like sort of if this does resonate or not and you know maybe this framework will help you realize that you're missing someone that that you should be not missing what was your archetype when you were a PM this is and and that's the other thing with personality types is the ones you hear you're like "This is me this is I I own this right there's no doubt about it i am a consumer PM uh and also a growth PM that's that's my primarily consumer i just I I can't I mean this is what I told you about you know the other products I've loved i've see the I can see the details that people put into it and I so appreciate that but at the end of the day it's like you got to measure things right so that's what I am but you know again everyone's different i love your point about how a lot of people think of PM like they hear that first example like oh I guess that's what I need to be because that's what everyone talks about when they're amazing product managers but you're saying there's many other ways to be a successful PM we did a personality test uh at Airbnb when I was there and one of the biggest takeaways was it's like this color test and you get a color green or yellow or red and like the team was all over the spectrum and so it was a really good reminder just you can be a different type of person and still be really successful in this role of PM and it's probably because of these different archetypes and different needs and roles of PMs like there's this word product manager but there's many things that PMs do and also as an investor now it's really important to see the fit of the founder to the market because if you put a consumer PM into like a really you know boring regulated industry they're probably going to get frustrated and they're probably not going to see it through whereas like there's people that you look at you know the pitch and you're like "Wow this is you are really passionate about this problem and you really care about building tools for others and this is exactly this is the Twilio PM or you know whatever it might be you're a perfect fit for this business and like that's awesome right so I think that yeah I I love that what you just said in in the summary because I think there's no one way to be a PM and I think this is sort of the hopefully this framework will get give people a little bit more space to be you know express who they really are i'm curious if other functions also have these sort of archetypes like designers and engineers but we don't need to get into that how about if you're listening to this on YouTube leave a comment of which of these archetypes you think you might be what's your primary and secondary i'll read them again consumer PM growth PM business GMP platform PM research PM love it okay uh I want to talk about hiring so this actually came up a lot when I was chatting with folks that you've worked with especially uh Nick Turley who's head of product at Chad GPT who were trying to get on the podcast because that's an uh what he's awesome that's what I've heard uh so he told me that the current head of engineering the lead product engineer the head of design and head of marketing at chat GPT are people that you hired uh also many of the people that you hired have gone on to do incredible things you've shared a few of those names many of them have been on the podcast which is the ultimate measure of success so let me just ask you this what's what's one thing you look for in people you hire that you think are that you think people sleep on that you think people aren't paying enough attention to that helps you find amazing stars that's really flattering to hear that from Nick um Nick is one of the best people I've worked with period in fact I want to just do a quick shout out like folks at OpenAI I are are pretty much the best people I've ever worked with in my career when I took the job I told the team this is going to be my last operating role and I'm going to leave it all on the field and I'm just going to go all out and basically I spent probably as much time if not more time on recruiting and building the team um than I as I did sort of thinking about the product and this is going back to sort of what I said earlier about I think you got to bring the right people together to have a huge impact and often times leaders overlook this and they're like ah just a warm body but truly you know people who have strengths in certain areas complement others with strengths in other areas and when you build that team amazing things happen it's the mo it's the best investment you can make it's going to pay off so many dividends so I think that's my opening salvo in terms of like you know you got to get the everyone who's listening out there you got to make sure you look at everyone in your team you look at what you need and you have to get the best in each and uh truly like you know in in in in my farewell dinner at OpenAI I think I I I close with just that that like look I don't even know what I would do after this because all the best people I've worked with are here we have Ian Silber running design there thomas Dimpson you know Joey Flynn Ryan Oor Nick Turley was amazing person I met there joanne I mean just I have so many people I'm missing but you know Coley on product marketing Eric Antinau on the marketing comm side on engineer you you you the name the list goes on product operations is is is stellar i'm so proud of like honestly the pr the team that I built there more than than the products um so I just wanted to say that like it's it's a it's a big thing that I really care about and I hope more leaders think about that too is like really be mindful of putting your team together and and think about that as a product and you have to really craft that you have to really care about the team right just to double down on that point actually before you get to the next tip here is I just love this answer which is in you know if I were to ask someone here's hire what's your hiring advice what do you look for that people may not be looking for enough uh I love that most of it would be like in that person here's what you need to focus on and here's the interview question and but uh the kind of your broad answer so far is it's not actually about the person so much as what is the team going to look like and where do we need spikes where do we need to balance out the composition of this Avengers that we're building totally totally that's exactly right and so so that being said I I guess I have uh I guess on brand I have two things I want to share about about sort of hiring the right team um I have this saying um I actually have this like doc that I've taken around various companies called the PXD API which is like here's how to work with me and in it there's there's um there's a saying that I have which is what I really optimize for for everyone that I support and everyone I hire which is in six months if I'm telling you what to do I've hired the wrong person and it's just kind of served me really well as on three different levels right number one it's a reminder for myself when I'm either hiring or looking for the person is to keep my bar super high and just not settle because if I do most likely in 6 months it would not be true that I that I would be able to let this person run and I would still be telling them what to do which is not what I want that is not my desire the second sort of effect of that is that it's I say that to people you know when they come on the team or as we're making the fire hire because you know it communicates to them that that's my bar and that's how they know they'll be successful right and something to kind of work towards right and the third thing is kind of a joint thing for the both of us which is it kind of gives us it it helps me and the person operate on a different level where it's not the goal is not like did you hit this OKR did you hit this goal the the meta goal becomes hey are we building you know are we calibrating enough are we actually getting to a spot where in six months like you're the one telling me what needs to be done like like that are we are we getting there right Because then if if that's the framing every you know mistake that you know is made or whatever on either of our our parts is becomes a learning opportunity in terms of like well how do we grow to to from this to where we want to be in six months right and how is it possible that you know I as a as a manager can do the right things to set this person up for success so that I don't have to be involved in six months right and I think that those those three things like and and and being able to have that second order effect of this simple razor in 6 months I'm telling what to do I've hired the wrong person it puts pressure on me it puts pressure on the person and it creates this really interesting environment and and this kind of safe space to really think about are we heading towards that goal and again every place I've been at as much as I've loved building the product I've taken so much pride in building the team and it's just been so much of a pleasure and I think this is my one of the two secrets that I have here this is so good i want to I have a follow-up question but just to point out why I think this is so genius is it there's kind of a assumption here of this person uh you can trust them so there's like a do I trust this person do I feel like they're going to be proactive do I feel like they're going to have uh correct insights essentially taste and gut feeling uh it's like the layer below this question which is great and also just this like autonomy it feels like you autonomy almost implies so many important traits of somebody that you want to hire and I love just how simple this question is for both you and them thank you and and really without autonomy I love what you said about autonomy because truly if without as as a leader as a manager your goal is to scale and if you don't have if this thing this simple statement is not true how are you able to build the best company the best product so here's the followup question is this mostly for leaders like say head of product at GPT say someone's not a CPO they're just like I don't know a manager of a PM team do you find is there a version of this that you think might be useful to them or is this mostly for leaders i think this is for everyone i think it's for everyone who is a manager right because you know if you're going to be a successful manager at any company um or a leader at any company and if you're if you're kind of starting as a line manager or whatnot and you're kind of you know wanting to grow or even just wanting to you know if you're early at a company you have so much institutional knowledge and so getting more uh sort of leverage in terms of being able to pass on the wisdom that you've learned is so crucial uh into being successful that I think every manager should should approach their you know their their reports with this because truly like that's it's just good for everyone it's good for the company to have more kind of leverage and and scale it's good for uh the the person who's being brought onto the team because they know what success looks like and it gives them a path to kind of keep on growing and it's great for you as a leader as a manager to be able to basically scale up the entire uh uh sort of expertise of your team and I imagine you don't even need to plan to not tell them what to do like it's just a good lens into are they going to be amazing even if you plan to be telling them sort of what to do yeah exactly and the other thing is like again in your interview process you kind of end up looking for these insights right and you look for like the behaviors of like oh are they actually going to be potentially able to to achieve this in six months and that's going to give you a really good lens on the picking side not just the development side as well peter what's your second secret this is uh one for one yeah okay the second one I'd say is I I feel really strongly about this which is um you know the area that I look for most is growth mindset um and I actually came to this um you know some point in my managing career at Facebook where I real you know I did make a mistake and hired someone who just didn't quite have that growth mindset and it was really difficult because you know the way I say is like I don't have time to sugar coat any feedback right and frankly like the best people I've worked with are the people who come into one ones with me and yell at me and telling them I'm I'm messing up like that's I love that cuz that's there's no nothing left unsaid and we're able to kind of move the ball forward of like hey like how do we get better from this and I feel like growth mindset's one of those things Lenny that feels really hard to teach at a certain age and this is really important to me and my family I expect growth mindset of myself of my kids you know my my colleagues at work because I think it just like creates this environment where everyone is open to like what's the one thing I can can get better at and you know that whole get 1% better every day can become true and it's it's funny because like I whenever I go to teams like TGBT or Uber when I'm al always the final interview for someone in my org and I partner with recruiting on developing that uh the rubric I always insist on doing the last interview and I do not product sense i don't do design i don't do execution i don't do metrics i only do growth mindset and it's kind of like well that's crazy like what about all of these other attributes i'm like well I'm pretty sure I can trust the other people to assess the other attributes but I think the growth mindset thing is so important to me that that we build an org where people are self-reflective and want to get better and take that feedback and give that feedback and it just is this meta unlock that I found to be true and really if you don't have growth mindset then and you're not open to feedback you're not open to learning then that's like the the the meta blocker right at that point you know it's hard to give feedback it's hard to you know onboard to a new skill it's hard to kind of uh develop in any sort of meaningful way and so I found that to be like the the really critical piece that's a big deal what you just said there that essentially as the CPO head of product big product leader at a company your interview is not like are you an amazing product manager are you do you have products ta taste uh things like that it's growth mindset and and I just want to clarify it's because everyone that has been you know all the other things have been interviewed by the designer by the engineering lead etc and that's where that you know kind of the previous principle comes into play as well in terms of I I do trust my team to go and assess those people right but the one thing that I care so much about is growth mindset and that's kind of the the thing and and to be honest I do do a little bit of a sweep so if some we got weak signal on one of those areas I'll do it but the the pure sort of uh focus of my last interview is going to be on growth mindset okay well I need to ask you what that looks like but before I do uh when you talk about growth mindset I have this uh image of Mark Beni off on the podcast and I asked them just like there's so much changing all the time it's such a crazy world to be leading a company in this world where just everyone's disrupting each other ai's changing everything it's just like moving so fast every day there's a new you know breakthrough and you have to keep track and just like how do you deal with that and he's like you should be thinking good this is amazing this is the best time to be building there's so much opportunity so exciting this is what we want exactly good i just remember seeing like good i love that i feel like that's the epitome of growth mindset yeah absolutely okay so let me ask you just what do you how do you tease out a strong growth mindset what are some ways well good thing I'm not an operator anymore because I'm going to give away my interview questions so no one can like cheat on this so I feel like this another reason why this is such a great time to do this podcast uh the question I asked is it's been the same one I've asked for years and you can really you know kind of sus it out from this which is I I asked them think about the one of the biggest mistakes you've made like truly the most the more painful the better and tell me what the mistake was describe to me the situation and tell me actually how you actually think differently now work differently as a result like how has that turned into a corporate principle of yours etc and I give them a moment to think about it sometimes I even share some of my mistakes if need be and uh it's interesting because because I've asked this question so many times I can smell the BS if they're not being authentic right it's like you know kind of like oh I've worked too hard or I you know did this thing and they're really not being that you can tell the vulnerability that people are willing to express and I reciprocate with that because if they ask me what mine is I will tell them what it is right and then that's the vibe and then what ends up happening is like there's multiple reasons why this is really interesting one you get to get a sense of how reflective they are and there were some there's one woman I I I um was was chatting with and we actually went on for like an hour because she was just like educating me on this like amazing problem that she had made this mistake on and like how it changed the way that she worked and the company worked it was just incredible right and you can you can sense the passion you can sense what's genuine right and then there always once in a while those those those things where people are like just very a little bit more defensive and not willing to open up um and I think that's uh and it's safe it's a it's a one-on-one setting so it's a safe space and I'm you know it's also it's I don't think it actually selects for or against introverts or extroverts i think at that point it's really genuine and the second sort of order effect there is if they end up coming on the team you've already had that moment you've already had that moment where you've just already said like "Hey like this is where I really messed up." And guess what it's all okay it's not a loss it's a lesson right and so it just sets a different tone for your working relationship so again I've never AB tested this so I can't tell you if this is actually you it works or not but I found it to be very helpful in the style that I work in to be able to have that level of connection whether it's with a direct report or somebody in the or what I love about this answer is it's very much like fail Corner which is a recurring segment on this podcast and I might tweak Fail Corner to be even closer to this question okay so let me summarize these two essentially two questions that you've found to be really helpful in finding these superstars that you've hired over the years one is you ask people in six months if I'm telling you what to do I've hired the wrong person or I guess how do you say it when you say it to someone just like you're probably the right wrong person uh well it's it's actually framed a little bit differently it's in so there's there's five different sort of part of my API or just how to work best with me there's like five attributes of people that um uh that are most successful who who who work with me and I love working with and and one of them is framed as sort of like you know that that you know there you're telling me what to do not the other way around six months after joining right right and then I I follow up with in six months if I'm still telling what to do I've hired the wrong person right and think that is that's that's how I frame it okay uh by the way you should open source this uh p PXD API doc i would love to i think now I got nothing to hide i'm just like here I'm an open book so maybe we'll do that at some point you'll you'll you'll make me brave enough to do that maybe after this podcast so you may find a link in the show notes for this podcast to that doc if I'm brave enough okay and then the the other question you ask is tell me essentially a a story of when you failed a product that you launched failed and how that changed how you behave how you think about product how you operate yeah amazing okay great okay let's talk about management sure so this came up so I talked to a bunch of people that have worked with you and interestingly one of the most recurring themes it wasn't about like AI or uh hiring came up a bit but it's actually mo mostly about how skilled you are as a manager and this has already come through in a lot of the things we've talked about so I want to talk about a couple things here sure one is uh someone that you worked with at at OpenAI Joanna Jen or is it Joanne joanne joanne joanne Jen or Yang yeah Jen jen okay cool you worked with her at OpenAI and she shared a couple things that I think are really interesting one is that you had a profound impact on her career by teaching her how to manage up more effectively and you did that by teaching her a really simple phrase that she just says and uses first of all do you remember what that phrase is i've said a lot of stuff and I've kind of forgotten i tend to forget what I say so you might have to remind me okay so she said say you'll do the thing do the thing say you did the thing mhm as a skill of managing up so sure just talk about that just the power of that and what that's all about i mean look I I I I learned this from uh my time at Uber from Jill who runs uh PR comms and policy there and she used to have the saying which is like repetition doesn't spoil the prayer it's just a a natural thing where people are busy so whether you know if you think about managing up or even managing you know the entire org if you don't repeat what your goals are if you don't repeat what your vision is if you don't repeat the thing that you feel strongly about that what you're doing what you're you know you whether it's maybe it's your manager one I think you might lose sight of the thing that's important and I think this is where it's a little bit of a behavior this is another language affecting thought thing right by uh by by by giving this this phrase to Joanne maybe it was just like hey let's just be very intentional about what we build that's like that becomes a a constant reminder right and uh and it's also has this other effect where uh if you're saying this is what I'm doing and then that's a thing that your manager is like wait we don't need to do that anymore you can have a conversation about that as opposed to just like doing the thing and not saying that you're doing it so let me take a step back so one say what you're going to do and then in that in that exercise you're going to be able to calibrate with your manager again with anyone right what is it that we're going to do and it's I think the words are really important here going back to what I said earlier so figuring out what is that goal and crafting that to really pack the most punch and the densest of uh of of uh concepts right and then you're telling them that you're doing it which that's the second phase which is like well in your 101 ones or in your in your your your your team all hands you're saying this is what we're doing right it's a great time to reaffirm what you're doing or invite the conversation that this is no longer the thing to do and you got to tell them that you did it so just close the loop just be like "Okay great this is now done." Um and I think that's again it's one of those like really piffy phrases that has so many secondord effects that are behavioral almost and this is a little bit of a hack in terms of helping people you know it's funny that Joanne thought of it as managing up which is which it is but in my mind it's almost like this is how we operate and this is how we're successful to stay on stay on task stay on goal and be able to revisit the goals that we've set when they no longer are relevant okay so the phrase again is say you'll do the thing do the thing and then say that you did the thing it's actually Sorry one more time it's it's it's say it's the way I would say it is say you're going to do the thing say that you're doing the thing and then say that you did it this reminds me of uh this also works for presentation advice so this came up i I don't know if it was Guy Kawasaki or someone had a very similar phrase that was for how to present well which is tell them what you're going to tell them tell them and then tell them what you just told them that you know it's possible that I might have you know incepted it from there so I take no ownership over this phrase i will just say that yes I did I did repeat it this is great and I love that this isn't just managing up advice it's just like operating advice for everyone and there's an implication of uh the last part is just like take like make sure people know what you did like almost like make sure you get some credit and people understand the impact you've had which is which is important i think there's a lot of people who are kind of introverted and don't want to draw attention and don't have the hero complex and I think that those people tend to get lost in in organizations so if that describes you just remember to to say what you did there's another management trait that Joanne shared that I want to spend a little time on which is you're very good at helping people understand that they can lean into their strengths and not feel like they need to fit into a certain box she shared that you basically helped her create almost a new role within OpenAI that wasn't even a thing before so just maybe share that example and then just talk about why this is important how you think about this well I I love that we're talking about things that Joan are telling you because Joanne's really special i I got to just take a moment to give her a giant shout out she is uh the only person that I've worked with that has as much technical depth as she does have product taste and I just want to pause there like it's it's just truly special i I feel entirely privileged to have the chance to cross paths with her at opening eye i learned so much from her like again t talk about like not telling you what to do after 6 months like she was telling me what to do from like day two and I loved it because she was she's so technical and she has this taste and that those two things are very rare to find together and with Joanne because she was so special in that way and I spotted that I was like wow like I've worked with so many PMs and it just like this is very unique it just it feel felt like we had to find a way to craft this right and sure enough she was I was like "Hey can you just write up a job description of like what is this thing?" Because there's something magical here but I don't fully understand it i don't think any other person really thinks of things this way and think this might be a big superpower for OpenAI like let's codify it right and again going back to my language being a really important thing I think the exercise sometimes of writing things down of like things that you intuitively feel give you an artifact that can kind of communicate with somebody else so like in this case Joanne writing down like kind of some of the things that she got really excited about helped me really understand that and you know I was luckily in a in a position where I can basically say like let's let's create this role let's let's let's create this role and have you lead it and I think this is going to be great for the product if we're able to codify it so I don't think I did anything special i was just following my instincts and just like following her lead again I will be clear i did not author that document i my recollection she did that so she did all the hard work and all of this thing and I don't want to take any credit for it the only thing I did was just gave her a little nudge of like I think there's something here like can you just take a moment to go and write this down and when she did it was just like okay this has got to be a role and you have to be the leader for this function what is the actual role she ended up in i think that'd be really interesting to share yeah the role was model designer um and it was just a really interesting way that she framed it and and I know this role probably exists in some incarnation in other uh uh foundational model companies but the way that she described it and the things that she found to be the spikes required led us to hire our first two model designers after running a search and they were just perfect fits for the team right um and that I think is is largely a big secret as to why I'm biased i love Chachi Piti so much in the way the model design comes off um and and the vibe of the model is largely because of this like technical plus taste role that she has created and she is leading i love one of the interesting takeaways from this is as a leader is just pay attention to some to what people are really really excited about and then take the step of let them try to describe it very clearly in a dock coming back to your point about the the power of language and words is just like okay tell me exactly what you're thinking and let's jam on it because maybe there's something here yeah is there anything broader here about just like leaning into strength that you find just like you know there's a lot of people there's all this debate of like should I just work on the things I'm terrible at and that'll make me better or should I find the things I'm amazing at and just get better at those things any thoughts there i genuinely believe that fit is a two-way street and so what you are passionate about what your strengths are you got to really find the right company the right role for you and I think there's a lot of force-fitting that people want to do is to fit into a certain archetype i'm glad we talked about the PM archetypes hopefully that frees people up to kind of really lean into what they love right because you know life's pretty short it would be it'd be great if everyone would find the thing that they really wanted to do and be able to lean in and do that and I think the optimist in me is also why this is I'm so excited about the time and age that we're in right now because there's so many different companies popping up so there's like there's there's something that really resonates with people right i mean take a look at just the the you know we're doing here it's like podcasting was not a thing 20 years ago like we there's there was it was not a thing but now we're able to like have these amazing tools and platforms that allow people to really express themselves and really what really truly brings them joy and and makes them happy uh and also brings a ton of value uh to the world right so I think that yeah I definitely believe in leaning in strengths and I think that you know as hard as it may be sometimes you got to look at sort of where you are right now and is this the thing that you really want to do or is there something else that's kind of like kind of uh drawing your attention and and drawing you towards that there's another managementoriented question I want to ask you this came from Eric Antel who uh apparently has worked with you for 17 years across a bunch of off and on for 17 years one of my my biggest uh mentors and friends like he's amazing okay so he's he he he's like you need to ask this question so the way he put it is you've hired managed mentored many many many product people some junior some senior across so many different cultures and he's just like we need to learn something from your experience doing that uh in terms of what you've learned about what it takes to be a really successful product person whether it's being successful in building product or career-wise what's just like a nugget that you learn from seeing so many different types of people and cultures and seniority i think for a product person specifically it's really important to obsess over the details of craft because you're ultimately you're crafting a product it's important to obsess about the details of craft while simultaneously having the perspective and wisdom of which details don't actually matter i'm going to pause there and just kind of try to unpack this a little bit because at the core of being a product person you're like "Oh like I want to build something that people love right?" And that's the job and that's that's what draws people to be product people is that you have this desire to build and I think that I've been involved in enough teams where I myself and when I was really young and and coming up as a product person I would just get obsessed over these little little details and I've I realized afterwards that we just wasted a bunch of time on something that didn't actually matter so I think that dichotomy is somewhat interesting and beautiful to me because it encapsulates both the core of what the ethos of a successful product person is which is you really have to care and you have to to give a crap about the product that you're building but you also have to have the perspective and business knowhow to understand where do you apply your time and where do you apply the care there and I myself feel like I've gone through cycles you know like everything that I've done I've gone super deep and really obsessed and then I take a step back and I'm like wait actually I was missing something and this other thing was was more important right i I'll give you an example i'll use the Uber example here as as um as you know what I said that you know that the digital product didn't really matter right and it was all about the price the ETA one of the proudest products I've built at Uber which is Uber Reserve right it's the simplest of thing going back to what I said before sometimes the best products are the simplest of things but the problem that we were trying to solve is that you know everyone has this you have a 6 a.m flight and are you really going to wake up at 4:00 a.m and request an Uber and hope that there's enough Ubers and the person is going to come right because if you do that you're not going to sleep well and you're going to like you know wake up every two hours and you're you're probably going to miss your flight anyway because you're going to fall asleep or whatever and so there was this insight of like okay there's a whole mismatch between what people really want which is the the peace of mind that their car is going to be there and guess what i'm willing to pay for that right and so we built Uber Reserve which was like it was the simplest thing which is like oh just like go ahead and say what time your flight is and we'll work backwards or even just like tell us when you want to get picked up and everything about that product we crafted what really mattered for the user which was the peace of mind so if you go there and you say what time your flight is and you you pick up your your pickup time or whatever I think that the product is it hasn't changed that much since I was since I was there it would tell you oh this is cutting it really close you may not make your flight it's like wow again that was put in there because of the principle of peace of mind right and and on the other side it's like well what do drivers need they need to they need to know you're not going to cancel and all this other stuff so you got to think about the driver incentives too so it was a simple idea uh really proud of the team for figuring out all the intricate details did some testing and last I heard from folks internally this is like a $5 billion a year business now and one of the highest margin ones and I'm really proud of this because it's like it came from the idea of like let's focus on what actually matters right which is this that peace of mind and how many people really need it in that moment so so that I think that's a story that the best the best story I can tell that's an awesome story uh it connects so many of the things you've talked about one is just uh it may not be the product that really matters and microoptimizing the experience is not going to move the needle when there's something else that's more operationally oriented but you know there's always going to be a product component if you're building it for for users the other piece that I think is interesting here is it's uh well there's two one is just it connects back to your point about the importance of autonomy of product people is just like I feel like you're like here's the team here's what I'm told to work on and then you're like oh but this thing is actually the problem we need to solve and let's just build a new product around it and then there's a whole story imagine of you getting buying and all that stuff the other thing this connects to we just had the CPO of the of Uber the current CPO of Uber on the podcast and he talked that'll be out a few episodes before this one and he's it was all about dog fooding and basically exactly discovering these problems he he's done 7 to 800 rides as an Uber driver to do to discover these problems he had this great quote about uh it's like one thing to watch to build an app for drivers sitting in your office making it look really pretty it's another to be driving 60 miles an hour with this phone a few feet away from you trying to figure things out 100% oh I remember that I I took um two weeks off before I joined Uber and in that time I've I've been obsessed with kind of like user research for the the longest of times and this is like more relevant back then when you wanted to really understand how you know you the wide uh mass of uh users were using your product um and I remember I actually leased a car to to drive for Uber those two weeks um so it was a little white uh uh VW something or another i put an Uber sticker on it i turn on the app and I just started driving it's like there's no better way to learn than to dog food and I'll just build on what what Sachin Sachin right this is the person you had on on the podcast yeah it's amazing amazing guy and and so I'll just build on sort of what he said there i think that you know what really stuck with me in terms of framework that I learned back in school was cuz I was brought up at with the ideo way of design thinking um and I was at the design school at Stanford where before you know we literally were in uh trailers uh that's that's that's how early it was but I remember the the framework that really stuck with me is what IDO preached which is like there are five stages to great design thinking number one is empathize two is to define three is to ideulate four is to prototype and and five is to test and what I love about this framework and I really hope this doesn't get lost because I I don't know how much it's being preached nowadays in in design thinking is that it really it has the right words associated with it you know like the first thing is empathizing like it's not just about you got to really feel the pain of your customers right it's not just about kind of theoretically understanding what the problems are it's like really empathizing which is why you know user research was so important to me right is to understand that or even you know like Sachin said just taking those rides but also you know flying around the world and and when I was working at Uber to figure out well what are the various conditions and so empathize is like a really powerful word the define is a also a really powerful word because it forces you to articulate what the problem is and this is again going back to the language thing of you have to be very intentional about defining the um the the the problems that you want to solve and then ID8 we all know it's brainstorming and prototyping and tests are self-explanatory but the first two stages I think are really insightful um and it talks directly to what Sachin was saying it's like you got a dog food because you really have to empathize and the great products are when you really feel the pain and you really empath empathize with the with with what people are are experiencing this is a great connection to another podcast episode that I I came to mind as you were talking uh the head of product at linear naan had this really great concept that's exactly what you're just saying which is as a product person you want to feel the pain of your customer the same way they do you shouldn't stop asking questions to understand what they're telling you until you feel the pain that they feel and that'll help you empath that basically that's like how to operationalize empathizing it's just do you feel the suffering yeah and I really do hope um product people still do this to this day because I think there's so many shortcuts that if people take you're going to miss the point right i still remember distinctly flying down to LA with Kevin Cyester to go do a user research study uh and it was a one-way glass thing where we listened to pe uh people talk about Instagram and how they use Instagram and it was there's no substitute for that right i think that if to anyone out there who's like doing user interviews and then saying "Hey Chachi PT summarize the takeaways." You're missing the point you can't empathize with the summary you have to be in the room fully immersed no phones just actually hearing the words and the intonation that's how you're going to get the full color so yeah it makes me think of Jeff Bezos has this great quote if you're trying to if you have an anecdote and data and they're telling you different things trust the anecdote oh man so many lessons okay so to start to kind of wrap up our conversation we covered a lot of ground i want to ask you about Facebook real quick so you joined Facebook very early uh Eric Antinau who I've mentioned previously told me that it was very strange that you left Google to join Facebook at that stage google was killing it on top of the world you had such a strong career path things were going great but you decided to take a big leap joining Facebook what made what did you see because I think there's something interesting here that we can learn about what you saw that helps that may help other people decide where to go work i've always been enamored with this idea of understanding us as fundamentally human and how we're wired and I remember at the time you know talking to the folks at Facebook and seeing it and this is back when like people like "Oh this is just a college site you know and and that's that was the the vibe back then." But what I saw was that the team and Mark and and others really understood the fundamental human sort of desires that people had to connect and feel lonely and to to share and they really got the right articulation of the problem they were trying to solve which was to to to make the world more open and connected and this really resonated with me because I again I studied a lot in college like psychology and just I was really enamored with this idea of like how are we as humans fundamentally wired and it felt to me like a a no-brainer to go work at Facebook because they saw how people were wired and how to actually build products that complement how people are wired right and it wasn't that they were trying to force fit something into something that was unnatural it was almost like you know how do we build technologies and and products that actually um augment our our fundamental desire to kind of stay connected and this goes back to sort of why I think the power of wars is so important is because you know you take a look at some of the mission statements for like Fster or or MySpace i don't even know if they had mission statements or what they were they were kind of vapid and they didn't really speak to the fundamental humanity of what Facebook was striving to build and that just deeply resonated with me right and so it's I remember spending time with Eric being like "Hey what should I do should I take this offer from Facebook or should I stay at Google?" But ultimately it was just like that deep resonance with my values of building things that were fundamentally human and ultimately I think that for any startup out there anyone building product the more that you can get a good impedance match between what you're building and what humans fundamentally want and need the more successful you're going to be right um so that's that's like my my my big answer i think the the second an secondary answer um I've always optimized for learning like in my career and this is a huge thing that I say to a lot of people because they look at sort of like oh you've been at all these companies like what's your secret like well I've just figured out that I want to go to the place where I can learn the most and for me that wasn't really Google but I had so much I wanted to learn from operating at Facebook um and at Facebook I would say yeah I was there for nine and a half years but I always jumped around every two and a half or so when I feel like there was something new to learn and that's it that's I mean I don't know if it's a secret or not it just it just I got lucky and I just was able to have opportunities to learn different things and different skills um and that served me quite well and regardless of any outcome I would say that's just a great way to live your life um personally is just to kind of optimize for learning and those experiences and and for me you know moving to Facebook was that I saw so much learning that that that could have happened and it ultimately did happen so I feel like that it was a good outcome too boy did it so a couple takeaways here for folks that are maybe trying to decide between a couple roles maybe deciding if they should leave and do something new is uh one are you feeling like you're learning enough slash is the new place you're thinking about going to help you learn a lot more too is this uh is what they're building aligned with human behavior almost this impotent impetence match that you described feels like there's another element you uh shared which is do they have a really unique insight about how things work and also do you really care about this is this also how you see the world so you're talking about a Facebook like they had this really unique insight about human behavior and that was really important to you and so it's a really good fit 100% yeah I think the insight thing thank you for summarizing that and drawing that out because that is um that's also what I look for and when I you know want to partner with companies and startups now is like do you have that unique insight are you teaching me something that I I really don't know um and that usually is a good indicator of a strong point of view um and uh having a strong point of view is really important because like you know there's a saying that Mike and Kevin had at at Instagram which is um uh we may not be right but at least we're not confused i think that just it was it's a beautiful phrase I thought because like you know sometimes you just got to go and do the thing that you think is right um and the indecision is going to be one of the things that really kind of gets you and bites you right so that that that for me is is something is I look for folks who have a strong conviction uh whether it's the the founders I support uh you know when I go join and and be an operator at the company or the founders I support in my current role that's so interesting tor Cohen the CPO of LinkedIn uses that's that's a famous phrase that he often uses too so I wonder if you borrowed it from those guys yeah that was that was one of his mottos uh we may not be right but we're not confused wow i didn't know that so I I did talk to him at one point i don't remember if that's something we talked about but again it could just be like you know great minds think alike and we just had different uh different great folks from Mike and Kevin and and Tor feeling feeling the same vibes i love just how many episodes this conversation has referenced okay so speaking of learning final question before we get to our very exciting lightning round i'm going to take us to fail corner right which very aligned with uh your growth mindset question so the idea of this segment is people come on this podcast they share all these amazing stories of everything's working out i had so much success worked at all these incredible companies everything worked but in reality things don't often work out most people go through a lot of failed uh initiatives projects career uh hits so the question is just what's a product that you built and launch that was just a big failure and I'll ask it the way you ask it what's how did that change the way you think and operate you know one one example is you know since we're talking about Instagram before um you know we tried to build a kind of camera first app at Instagram it was called Bolt and it didn't work and the great you know kind of levels of craft and design and and the premise was essentially like you know can we make it so it's just reduces the pressure to share right and you can open to a camera you can you can just kind of like send some things to folks and you get some good feedback and you kind of uh go from there and uh it was and obviously the Instagram design team so it was top-notch like the app was designed really well it was really fast because it was Instagram you know engineering team and they were just really good at making performant mobile apps right it had all of the advantages that we had talked about uh that we valued at Instagram but we launched it and I believe it was New Zealand or Australia and it didn't work um and I remember the the reason we we we knew this is we're looking at sort of the the retention graphs and retention is the key indicator in any product that you build uh it's not the number of users it's not the volume it's actually retention and cohorted retention you can you can draw the you plot the line and and if it asmmptotes then you're in a good spot um because that means that people over uh x period of time will continue to stay on the app and that just didn't happen and I think the learning here was that you can really have the best team in the world with the best product taste um and you can't really predict what's going to hit on the first go and failure is okay you're just going to up and learn from that right and nobody wallowed over that we actually had some technology that we built there that we were able to port over to the main app which was really really helpful but you know to quote the great American poet Sean Carter it ain't a loss it's a lesson right and I think it's really important that you see that as a product person is that you don't you don't see it as failure you see it as like kind of great now I now I'm that much smarter right um and this is something that I've just collected there's other examples as well um but I think this is one of a good example of sort of uh something that's somewhat counterintuitive that you have the best team you're going to provide those hits over and over but sometimes you you can't predict those hits and you just have to have the wisdom to be like "Okay let's let's let's uh see what we can learn here see what we can save here and then move on." I absolutely remember that product and launch or heard about it and uh but I also don't ever think about it and so I think it's a good reminder because that's a you know Instagram launching a new product that's trying to rethink the way you do social your camera that's a big deal and so I could see that being a really big deal for it not to work out at the same time nobody remembers that really exactly yeah peter we've we've gone for two hours at this point i feel like we could do it two hours more uh we'll save that for another conversation great before we get to our very exciting lightning round is there anything else you either wanted to share or want to leave listeners with to maybe double down on a point you made that you think might be helpful otherwise we'll just jump right in i think we should jump right in because I I I feel like you've uh you've extracted every little ounce of what wisdom I had here um and you did a great job here just helping me uh remember these stories and uh recounting stuff so I'm I'm ready to jump in that's my goal uh although I know there uh is much more that I haven't even started to tap uh but with that we reached our very exciting lightning round are you ready uh I'm ready question one what are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people this is easy for me um number one is Sapiens um you if you're a product person you have to understand uh our own humanity if you want to build products for people straight up that's that's that's a beautiful book i read it before it was called Sapiens it was called uh from animals to gods uh and it was just republished a different name but it has really stuck with me and I remember it's a very short easy read so I I'd recommend that uh the second book I think for product folks is is a classic one which is the design of everyday things by Don Norman this may seem outdated and old but it's I promise you it's not it really helps you understand you know physical product design which is again things that mold and shape to humanity i think it gives you a good sense of that third book is something I'm reading right now it's recommended by a a friend of mine and I can't put it down it's called The Silk Roads um uh by Peter Franco and basically this is a recounting of history through the lens of the Silk Road and and sort and the Middle East and how how that's evolved it's so fascinating because one of the things I love Lenny is seeing things from different perspectives this is why travel's fun this is why like you know user research is fun for me and it really helps you see the events of world history that we've all been experiencing through a very western view uh viewpoint in a in a different way and it kind of connects a bunch of things that are like you know there's western thought there's eastern thought but if you see the connection between them it's super fascinating i'm only two chap three or maybe four chapters in but definitely something I would recommend off the bat what is a favorite recent movie or TV show that you've really enjoyed i have to go maybe it's not as recent but I the one that always comes back to me is The Wire uh HBO's The Wire and And I just I guess there's just so many TV shows now that are I'm still processing do I want to put it in my all-time great but the storytelling there and the v the various different sort of consistent characters but the fact that there's the beautiful writing of The Wire is something that's unparalleled i'm now curious what's in your all-time great list but I'm not going to go there we're going to keep going uh what's a favorite product you've recently discovered that you really love um I I I'm just going to go with Cornola because I think that we talked about this before but this has been a superpower for me and I have a lot of commute time now what I do is I just do a single player mode i go up and I I start thinking about and brainstorming about sort of ideas or thesis I have for investing or whatnot and I get to where I'm going and boom it's there organized in a more cogent way and oftentimes ways that I didn't even think about articulating them so it it goes through the process of of forming words but it also helps that assistance and I think it's a beautiful product um on many different levels wow Granola's killing it at this category recently and I'll give a shout out you get a year free of Granola if you become yearly subscriber of my newsletter which is the not just for you but your entire team they're just they gave an incredible deal is that true i didn't know that 100% true okay well I tell you I was not compensated for that little pitch there that was that's that's genuine right there i'm also not compensated yeah if you go to lenniesnewsletter.com and click bundle you'll see a way to get it uh love the product use it all the time i should be using it for these interviews and then I could have a whole summary ready to go uh okay next question do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to in work or in life yes this actually something that my dad taught me uh it's it's a it's a saying that is in Chinese that it actually rhymes in Chinese but you know kind of almost rhymes in in English and it's uh it goes something like this in English which is if you move a tree it dies but if you move a person he thrives and I think it's a really interesting thing I keep on coming back to and this goes back to why you know for me it's just the the joy of learning and trying new experiences and trying you know being at different companies that I've been very fortunate to be at i really think that that's how you should live life is just to kind of experience these different experiences and it's kind of poetic to be like yeah like something as you know unfortunately for trees like you can't really move them after a while but for humans I think that you move them around and you know we get different travel experiences and we get different life experiences when we go to different jobs and I think that's that's makes life really worth living there's a I always think about what I would answer to this question and there's a few but one is uh something I always come back to when my wife and I are deciding to do something is choose adventure similar sentiment final question okay so you've now be you moved from product leader to investor so I just want to give you a chance to share tell people what kind of stuff you're looking for so you moved you're felicus now investing in startups yep what sort of startups are you looking for who should reach out if they're interested in Well I I I appreciate that uh opportunity look for me um I just I think it's been very clear like I just love working with great people um and uh you know it's it's for me investing is just the ability to support uh more amazing founders i've always been drawn to the founder archetype right like working closely with Zuck or you know with Travis or Howie um Brendan at Oculus and uh you know folks at OpenAI i think there's this amazing sort of visionary person that I just I love supporting in one way or another and I've supported them from uh mainly from the inside as a product leader but uh for me it's just finding those amazing founders and in this current role I get to work with many founders at the same time right and and just two days ago I was on had meaningful calls product jams with like three different founders in three different industries and that kind of keeps my mind super alive so you know that's that's kind of why I'm doing what I'm doing now and and I I I would love to find some more of those those amazing thought partners and people that I can just help out if I can okay then uh stage and uh market anything there for folks of like okay he's a fit not a fit absolutely so I would say um early stage uh seed seed plus and a uh is where I really get excited i feel like I I'm able to help folks see the next stage i've seen a lot of movies in my life in my career so it's like oh great i can definitely see this extrapolating out you don't have to convince me of the future and then it's really fun to be able to jam and and and help support if I can and how you scale from the uh the one to 10 and 10 to 100 so that's that's really big uh and in terms of what I look for it's the two things I said before it's like in this day and age there's so many amazing things going to be built one is do you have unique data and do you have a data flywheel two uh do you have a really crafted workflow that you can really get after and I guess third it's it's like do you have that insight of what product things actually matter and also which ones don't and then how do you actually go and expand upon that so yeah really excited to meet a bunch more founders whether it comes from here or somewhere else okay so final question then is how do folks reach out if they want to actually talk to you about this and how can listeners be useful to you thank you for the question i am an introvert so I I'm really kind of silent on a lot of social media i have accounts on on on on X and you know threads but uh really I think LinkedIn is the the the network of choice for me is just like I I really uh I want to be able to passively kind of consume and learn about what what's what's happening how you listeners can be helpful i just want to learn like what what what's what are you all thinking about what are some of the insights you're you're seeing one of the analogies I have about AI in this day and age is that it's this really interesting new element that humanity has discovered and what's awesome is that humanity is also very creative and so what humanity does with this new element I'm fascinated by right and you can tell the founders who've actually played with this element because they have this innate sense of what this thing can do and can't do and I I'm just looking to be inspired by the creativity of of all y'all out there wow that's such a cool way of thinking about it it's going to change my perspective on AI a little bit peter this was incredible i really appreciate you taking the time to share so much wisdom i know this is the first time you've done anything like this uh I feel like this is going to help a lot of people in a lot of different ways feel like we covered everything I wanted to cover so just again thank you for Well thank you for having me this has been a real pleasure and it's hopefully you know some folks out there can get some some learnings from this and find it useful but that's that was my goal is to be able to share some things and hopefully it will be helpful to some uh folks out there so thank you thank you for the opportunity thank you Peter bye everyone thank you so much for listening if you found this valuable you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts Spotify or your favorite podcast app also please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast you can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennispodcast.com see you in the next episode