Alex Komoroske
Co-founder & CEO, Common Tools. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveoperator@komorama ↗LinkedIn ↗komoroske.com ↗
Komoroske spent 13 years at Google leading Chrome's Open Web Platform and Maps AR initiatives before serving as Head of Corporate Strategy at Stripe. Today, he builds human-AI collaboration software as co-founder and CEO at Common Tools.
1shows
1appearances
28statements
1resolved
1supported
0contradicted
100%fully supported
6said about them ↓ Everything Alex Komoroske said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Komoroske: Advertising cannot cover high inference costs for AI consumer startups
“And so if you're going to do a consumer startup, it can't be based on advertising. It's just too expensive. Advertising cannot clear the inference cost even with it with inference costs declining.”
Komoroske: The fear of making your manager look dumb drives organizational dysfunction
“The underlying dynamic that must be true in any organization on a fundamental basis is you can't make your boss look dumb. Because if you do, they're the person who decides, oh, this person's not performing or whatever, and that one little asymmetry, that one …”
Komoroske: LLMs will break monolithic aggregator dominance over software agency
“One of the reasons I'm excited about LLMs being a disruptive technology is I think that it allows us to get out of this monolithic sense of like, whatever, we're all just beholden to a decreasing number of very powerful organizations and lead into Everybody be…”
Komoroske: LLMs break assumptions that software is expensive to write
“So much of how the industry is built presupposes the idea that software is expensive to write and cheap to run. And LLMs undermine both of these.”
Komoroske: Vertical SaaS playbook does not work for AI-native problems
“Vertical SaaS, I think is not the right model of how you would attack a problem that is sort of an AI native style problem.”
Komoroske: Taste is most critical skill as AI cheapens content production
“We've seen a vast reduction in the cost of distribution of information. And now we're seeing a reduction in the cost of information production. And most of it is slop. And so in this cacophony, How do you stand out? You stand out by having good taste. I think …”
Komoroske: Plant cheap idea seeds instead of analyzing which will succeed beforehand
“Don't try to analyze beforehand which seed is going to turn into an oak tree. If it's super simple to plant the seeds, then plant the seeds, and if it starts growing, then keep watering it.”
Komoroske: The builder mindset cannot create more value than direct effort
“So much of the way that we tackle problems and build products is this builder mindset. It's like, I have a plan. I then manipulate things to match my plan and make it happen. And this is a way you can create tons of value. Part of the problem though is it can'…”
Komoroske: Leaving the final dot unconnected lets you share controversial ideas
“One of the benefits of metaphorical thinking is you connect nine of the 10 dots. And you allow, you invite the listener to engage with the argument to connect that last dot. This allows you, by the way, to say very controversial things. Because if you say, if …”
Komoroske: Fabricating precise numbers upfront is a comfort blanket against uncertainty
“There's tons of stuff you can't know ahead of time. So if you're getting a false precision at the beginner, that's a comfort blanket. That's just helping you feel like there isn't uncertainty. There's uncertainty everywhere all the time, you know, and trying t…”
Komoroske: Builders should focus on weird disruptive tools over existing playbooks
“Websim to me is in a disruptive thing, things that look alien and weird and yet are compelling. Those are what we should be paying more attention to as opposed to, you know, take an existing playbook and like slap some AI on it, you know?”
Komoroske: AI adoption happens in long-tail tasks below enterprise visibility
“And so, if this stuff is magical duct tape, It's very hard to make scaled, repeatable, large scale things out of it. It's very easy to jury the shit out of anything. And so you'll see it being used in the small, in a way that's almost entirely below the level …”
Komoroske: Moderate organizational kayfabe is a necessary lubricant for ambition
“Kayfabe in the small is optimism. Enthusiasm. When someone says, we're going to do this thing, you say, yeah, we're going to do that. Even if like, I think this thing is going to work. If you say, I know this thing is going to work, everyone loses hope and it …”
Komoroske: Compounding loops in products are common if you hunt for them
“Compounding loops are not rare. They are, look, there's like truffle hunting. You have to know what you're looking for and find the dynamics of a thing that if it worked, would work at an accelerating rate.”
Komoroske: Teams should spend 70% of their bandwidth on legible work
“Typically what I would advise for PM's approach at Google was, 70% of my effort and my team's effort should go on things that everybody acknowledges are important and useful and create value. Maybe it's boring linear value, but some kind of value. You're tryin…”
Komoroske: Organizational coordination costs scale quadratically with headcount
“The core dynamic that makes organizations hard to navigate as they get larger, even if you assume everybody's actively good at what they do, actively collaborative and actively hardworking is this emergent force of coordination of finding the like subset of pr…”
Komoroske: Apple executes marvelously by prioritizing product coherence
“Apple has chosen the former. It is very important to them to have the illusion of perfect coherence in their products. It works very well for them. They execute it marvelously.”
Komoroske: AWS's decentralized swarm makes its product suite antifragile
“AWS has picked the exact opposite thing. AWS is like, yeah, there's like 15 different ways of doing everything. They clearly don't, they don't talk to each other, but it allows the overall swarm of the AWS product suite to be very powerful and anti-fragile or …”
Komoroske: Bottom-up idea labs fail if steered toward predetermined outcomes
“This creates amazingly interesting insights. You just can't force it to do anything. It has to be a bottom up and emergent, which means if you try to steer it towards the outcome, it won't go.”
Komoroske: Any community where only one person talks is already dead
“And the community that has only one person talking is a community with no people talking is definitely dead. A community with one person talking is already dead. You don't realize it yet.”
Komoroske explains the 'Hallmark Card fallacy' of profound life insights
“This, I call kind of the hallmark card fallacy, which is you discover at great effort. Some deep insight that resonates with you and makes you see the world differently, and you want to share it. Insights are naturally viral. You want to share them, and you go…”
Komoroske: Pure incrementalism leads to dead ends, while vision builds impossible castles
“Cause if you don't do, if you only do incremental, then you'll end up random walking into a corner. And if you only do the longterm, you end up dreaming big and designing castles in the sky that are impossible.”
Komoroske: Aggregators make sense late-stage but curtail early exploration
“Aggregators make sense in the late stage of an era. At the beginning, they curtail too much exploration.”
Komoroske: Mundane tasks expand to consume unprotected deep thinking time
“Deep thinking takes time and space and you gotta create that space. Like, you know, the mundane pointless bullshit will cut, take every square inch you give it. So you gotta make that space to sit back and reflect And luxuriate in these ideas.”
The other half of the tape: Alex Komoroske's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 6 times in 3 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Lenny Rachitsky 6
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Lenny's Podcast 6
2025 3 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Alex's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| LENNY'S PODCASTLEDGER | Co-founder & CEO, Common Tools | 1 | 28 | 100% 1/1 | full record on Lenny's Podcast → |