Google Docs
also referred to as: google doc
part of Google Docs Editors
16 statements across 7 episodes · 3 bullish · 2 bearish · 8 people on the record · first statement Jul 28, 2022 by Melissa Perri · said 71 times in 52 episodes since 2022 · across every show →
Mentions by year
brought up most by Lenny Rachitsky (28), Shishir Mehrotra (4), Pete Kazanjy (3), Maggie Crowley (3), Lulu Cheng Meservey (3), Alex Komoroske (3), Zoelle Egner (2), Paul Adams (2)
tap a year for its mentions
2026 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
2025 14 mentions in 12 episodes 1 per episode
- Naming expert shares process for creating billion-dollar brands: Vercel, Azure, Windsurf, Sonos
- How Palantir built the ultimate founder factory | Nabeel S. Qureshi (founder, writer, ex-Palantir)
- “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (co-founder)
- Why experts writing AI evals is creating the fastest-growing companies in history | Brendan Foody
- How Intercom rose from the ashes by betting everything on AI | Eoghan McCabe (founder and CEO)
- Inside ChatGPT: The fastest growing product in history | Nick Turley (OpenAI)
- Brian Chesky's secret mentor who scaled Airbnb (after dying 9 times & building a hotel empire)
- How to build a team that can “take a punch” | Hilary Gridley (Head of Core Product, Whoop)
- 4 more episodes that year, every mention in 2025 →
2024 18 mentions in 15 episodes 1 per episode
- Thinking like a gardener, slime mold, the adjacent possible: Product advice from Alex Komoroske
- Rituals of Great Decision-Making | Lenny & Friends Summit 2024
- Identify your bullseye customer in one day | Michael Margolis (UX Research Partner at GV)
- Behind the product: Replit | Amjad Masad (co-founder and CEO)
- Building Wiz: the fastest-growing startup in history | Raaz Herzberg (CMO and VP Product Strategy)
- Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups | Alistair Croll
- 4 questions Shreyas wishes he’d asked himself sooner | Former PM leader at Stripe, Twitter, Google
- Behind the product: NotebookLM | Raiza Martin (Senior Product Manager, AI @ Google Labs)
- 7 more episodes that year, every mention in 2024 →
2023 23 mentions in 15 episodes 2 per episode
- Mastering product strategy and growing as a PM | Maggie Crowley (Toast, Drift, TripAdvisor)
- Navigating comms and PR | Lulu Cheng Meservey (Substack, Activision Blizzard)
- What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom)
- An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire)
- Behind the scenes of Calendly’s rapid growth | Annie Pearl (CPO)
- Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner
- Crafting a compelling product vision | Ebi Atawodi (YouTube, Netflix, Uber)
- The ultimate guide to product operations | Melissa Perri and Denise Tilles
- 7 more episodes that year, every mention in 2023 →
2022 14 mentions in 8 episodes 2 per episode
- Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium)
- The art of building legendary brands | Arielle Jackson (Google, Square, First Round Capital)
- The rituals of great teams | Shishir Mehrotra, Coda, YouTube, Microsoft
- How to create a winning product strategy | Melissa Perri
- How to unlock your product leadership skills | Ken Norton, Ex-Google
- Launching and growing a podcast | Chris Hutchins (All the Hacks, Wealthfront, Google)
- How to be the best coach to product people | Petra Wille (Strong Product People)
- How to work through fear, give hard feedback, and doing layoffs with grace | Matt Mochary
- every mention in 2022, scene by scene →
Everything said about Google Docs, oldest first
Jul 28, 2022 positive
Perri: Product strategy belongs in two-page memos, not 20-page PRDs
“And it's not like a product requirements document that's 20 pages. It's like a two pager just explaining what we're doing and why. And that context we usually throw into Google docs or a wiki or something like that, link them all together so that you can go fr…”
Jan 11, 2024
Schillace: Writely co-founders initially rejected building Google Docs in browsers
“When I had the idea for Rightly, like, my two co-founders, who were both deep domain experts in both app building and word processors, were like, the browser's never going to support this. It's a bad idea. Let's not do this.”
Jan 11, 2024 positive
Schillace: Testing candidates with seemingly impossible problems reveals builder resilience
“The reason I ask is not to get to the answer, it's because I just want to see how people react when I give them something that seems impossible and unreasonable. And some people just like back off and, you know, refuse to engage with it. And some people are ju…”
Jan 11, 2024
Schillace: Writely originally ran on C# on three rented Windows servers
“We started off, in, in C Sharp, which is little known, in, you know, our own, there's, like, pre-cloud, so we, like, had three file servers that we rented that were Windows machines in a data center in Texas with a sysadmin in the Philippines running them. So …”
Jan 11, 2024
Schillace: Google Docs would have died without legal protections and Schmidt's support
“If I had just been, like, a random Google employee with this idea, and no legal protection, and the CEO wasn't, you know, a fan of the project, it would have died. Like, there's no way it would have made it through that, that negativity, and that pessimism”
Jan 11, 2024 negative
Schillace: Google executives wanted to kill Google Docs despite millions of users
“Like in the early days, like we had like, I don't know, a couple million users, five million users. And there were still executives at Google telling me that it was a stupid idea and that it should stop. And like, we shouldn't be doing it.”
Jan 11, 2024
Schillace: Writely initially let users edit documents without an account or email
“When we did rightly at the beginning, we didn't even ask for an email address because it was such a novel thing. We didn't want any friction at all in the onboarding process. So you could just come in and make a document and start using it without telling us a…”
Jan 11, 2024
Schillace: Writely might not exist if founders knew collaboration's difficulty first
“Because if we understood how hard the collaboration piece would have been first, Without understanding that value might have been like, eh, it's not worth it. Like, it's gonna be so hard to solve that problem. It's probably not a, you know, useful absence.”
Jan 11, 2024 neutral
Schillace: Google Docs won market share, but Microsoft kept the money
“In retrospect, they did fine. Like, we took a bunch of market share, but they kept all the money, basically. So, you know, we being Google, like, you know, so, like, they survived it. Like, you know, they survived. They did a good job surviving the challenge. …”
Jan 11, 2024
Schillace: Google Docs collaboration began as an accident before locking was built
“And like, the fact that you could collaborate on them was kind of an accident. Like, they're just like these things on the server. We hadn't built the thing. That would lock somebody out yet. So there was just like, here's a document, like you can edit these t…”
Aug 18, 2024
Yien: Easiest decision log setup tags decisions and schedules future reviews
“This is not what I do, but I think it's the easiest place to start. Spin up a Google doc or a notion page, just call it daily log and then bullet point out like the date of today. And then as you're going through your day, you have a meeting, just type in the …”
Feb 27, 2025 negative
Baxter: Google Docs beats Asana by letting irrelevant tasks fade naturally
“My memory of it is that it spent, you spent more time in the meeting grooming a backlog of irrelevant stuff than actually, you know, talking about the proper priorities. So I think it's nice in the Google doc that if something becomes irrelevant, it can kind o…”
Feb 27, 2025
Coleman: Community Notes runs off a single long-running Google Doc
“There is a very long running doc that has had to be chopped and purged because it was breaking Google Docs and Chrome at various points in time. It's sort of like a note taking doc. It's really where we coordinate what we're doing.”
Mar 13, 2025 bullish
Client-side compute is the only web model scaling to a billion users
“If you look at the other productivity apps that have really worked on the web, they've all had this compute model, right? Figma, when you open a Figma document, there's not like some cloud VM that gets spun up for you to render the documents you're dragging th…”
Aug 3, 2025 neutral
Feb 12, 2026 neutral
Wu: OpenAI managers use internal ChatGPT for employee performance reviews
“We're doing performance reviews right now, and it's actually really easy to use ChatGPT with internal knowledge, hooked up to GitHub and like our Notion docs and Google docs. To give a, get a really good sense of what this person has done over the last 12, 12 …”