The Wisdom Wall

“when you give people feedback negative, uh, individually, you're optimizing for the atomic unit, not the system. The reason why to do it in public is it's more important for all the colleagues to understand that there's an issue it's being addressed.”

“No, no, I don't believe in that at all. Like high performance machines don't have psychological safety. They're about winning.”

“But if you ask the most sophisticated individuals at the labs, it's not actually RSI that's occurring, which could lead to some sort of runaway winner because they were an epsilon ahead of the others. It's auto catalytic effects, which just means you're using the new technology to improve your process, but it's not…”

“Well, I, you know, here's the one thing I would say that here's the hopeful point, which is I always say that nobody has a growth problem these days. They have a product problem.”

“wherever possible, it's kind of optimal to not have a product manager, uh, and instead have design and engineering going through those, those kinds of steps and making sure that their muscles are well repped.”

“hiring so many PMs infantilizers The engineers and the designers who are perfectly capable of making good decisions, but just never had to, because there was always a PM to babysit them.”

“actually top down is pretty good because folks at the top, generally speaking, can make quick decisions and remove all of this alignment debate. They have probably more macro context than most folks and assuming that they are genuinely in touch with ground truth and are good enough. It's actually a really efficient…”

“at least on the writing side, every time there is an intervention, a human intervention, it should feel a little bit like a bug.”

“I don't, I think network effects are certainly an important piece of the puzzle for sure. Um, but I don't think they're enough when it comes to these sorts of software, uh, you know, software cloning.”

“Like one of the reasons why, you know, sometimes it's controversial to say this, but one of the reasons why the net impact of by higher undiscovered talent is you wind up skewing younger. It's not because you need young people. It's that younger people have by definition, less data. It's like, you know, we use credit…”

“Customers don't know what They want, and they're very bad because it's a subconscious decision, especially for consumers. Like what I purchased, what I wear is not a conscious decision. And when you're consciously trying to answer a subconscious decision, you actually give misleading information.”

“I don't want to deter people from taking ambitious shots on goal. And if you overemphasize failures and, you know, really people think they're going to get criticized. This is where the psychological safety maybe has some validity, which is be ambitious, be bold. Don't worry about the failing part, unless there's…”

“What do they say? Praise in public and criticize in private. I fundamentally disagree with that notion. I think what you have to do is establish enough trust among the team so that you are comfortable critiquing and debating in public. But when you're in private, Take that moment to build the trust because if you build…”

“Like wanting to be liked, I don't think is a good feature of a CEO and wanting to be the best place to work probably isn't the right way to go.”

“Because the field is changing so much at any point in time, you know, a lot of people are kind of in this local, local maximum. And if you just blindly listen to your customers, they'll, they'll be like, yeah, I want a better vector store. Like I want a better, uh, I want a better, you know, agent framework for this.…”

“You can't AB test the important things and the details are mostly false positives. So it's an enormous waste of time unless you're incredibly sophisticated.”

“the bar for good enough for AI GTM, it's not as high as we think. It's just like, uh, you know, a, a facsimile of your best person reproduced as best we can. It's going to beat your mid pack person. It's going to beat the person that literally knows nothing about your product.”

“We talk in Silicon Valley about never quit, but that is complete absolute venture capital bullshit. The incentive of venture capitalist is to put money into your company and milk you dry. They never get their money back. There is no way for them to take that investment back. And so the only logical desire that they…”

“every time you see a bug, every time you see a bug, not most of the time, every time you go and you drop it at the feet of the product manager or the engineering manager, every time. In public, preferably.”

“Your job is not to be one of those buffers. Your job is to preserve that intensity at its highest possible level and let the buffering happen somewhere else.”

“Don't work for a chill boss. Don't be a chill boss. It's the most pejorative label I could give you. Chill boss or chill PM. Don't be chill. Chill doesn't accomplish shit. Be intense, be good, be respectful, be intense. Don't be chill.”

“guardrails don't work. They just don't work. They really don't work. Um, and, uh, they're quite likely to make you overconfident in your security posture, which is, uh, which is a really big, big problem.”

“So I say the mid-market doesn't exist, because what is a mid-market hire? It's either low, it's either low end enterprise or upper end SMB. And if you bleed those two games, you're going to lose. They're so distinctly different.”

“Early adopters are those logos because they have to continue to stay at the number one spot. So they'll take, they'll take tons of, you know, uh, swings to continue to stay in the number one, staying in the number one spots, the hardest part, right?”

“selling them as service, even though the technology is powering it on the back end, is the fastest way to get your foot in the door. It's, it's what they know how to buy.”

“A lot of engineers think that code quality is important to building a successful product. The two have nothing to do with each other.”

“all the things that you perceive that are happening to you that are bad, you know, be it like the systems against you or somebody undercut you or racism or sexism or this or that or the other is very small compared to like, it means a lot if you believe it, you know, if you believe what people say about you, if you…”

“And it's my strong belief that great employees and great companies want and are constructed out of a very clear and strong hierarchy. Where it is the responsibility of the CEO to make brave and hard decisions unilaterally. Yes, using their experts as inputs and be responsible for the outcome.”

“But I would say that less than 10% of companies we see are taking this hard stance, but I would say they are probably the ones that are farthest along getting the most adoption and are seeing the most results of the ones that are taking those hard stances.”

“there are some things that I don't believe in is like MVPs first and foremost is like, if you're building something that people will not be able to use or is not good enough, especially these days where it's It's so much easier to build software, so the attention span for people to actually try out new software…”

“There's one, uh, controversial take, uh, for me working with LLMs is, uh, don't use TypeScript. Use plain JavaScript. Use JSX. Uh, it's easier for models to write code this way.”

“And the, the kind of heuristic I have is if I ever think, should I fire this person even once I should fire them immediately. Uh, it has always been a signal, at least for me, that when someone's a superstar, I can't imagine firing them.”

“So I'd say like the lesson really is hire for what you need. Don't hire just for potential, which is counter to what a lot of people say. A lot of people say hire for potential and coach them into being whatever you need. I just haven't found that. I think you kind of need to have hire someone who already is fully…”

“In my experience, I think that design is most successful at impacting what ships at the end if design is considered phase zero of the engineering process rather than a byproduct or a part of the product process.”

“The right calculus that JP Morgan Chase or any of these companies will make is the ROI of building technology has actually gone up. So the opportunity costs of not investing more into technology has gone up, which means that you should just invest even more. And maybe in the short term, you have even more engineers…”

“if you are unable to convince your existing investors to re to reinvest in the company in order to build the new part of the journey, the new, um, the new journey, then you know what? Shut down the company and restart a new company that is doing exactly that. Uh, and that's a bigger threat for investors, right? Because…”

“full-time jobs are not the best way to monetize the skills that you have. It's one of the packages that everybody should evaluate and take advantage of, but too many people blindly default to that package and don't explore other options that are, uh, both available on the market as well as best suited for their…”

“I'm not very much a fan of actually watching yourself on camera, on video, because again, this is an inner game, not an outer game. So when I watch myself on video, I see the outside, which can be useful for certain things, but the fundamentals are inside”

“what I've seen is when a company isn't well-run, like IT isn't working, marketing is broken, there are not enough people in HR, there's a lot of turnover, all of these things. I've seen that they're not correlated to the company being successful.”

“So product sometimes is on this list. Uh, so one of the companies I worked at, like I mentioned, you know, product design product, um, if, if that department does 10 X, uh, impact, then the company will succeed 10 X in the market. Uh, but it's, in my career, it mostly hasn't been product. Product has to do a good job,…”

“if you're, if you're a product manager on a standalone app inside of a large, like, you should be designing the hierarchy, the pixels, the flows, everything, like, and then, yeah, it should be cleaned up, prototyped by a technical designer, but that's your idea, and products live and die in the pixels, like consumer…”

“Life is not homeostatic at all. That life is actually self-fulfillment. If I believe you're powerful, you will become more powerful. If I believe you have no power, you will wind up with almost no power. And that therefore, it is all forgotten and forgiven.”

“So once a company figure out product market feed, they don't change their product anymore. Because this is the value that they create to the customers, and you don't want to change that.”

“I am a sales led product apologist unabashedly, which is, I think that it is okay to listen to the market and to be commercially oriented in products in ways that probably would make some folks in some types of product organizations Squirm a little bit. And the reason why I believe this is I think there are tremendous…”

“it is your fault. A hundred percent your fault. If any of your hires fail, don't blame them.”

“So they yield results, which are interesting, but sometimes hard to operationalize. Um, they trigger the post hoc bias really, really, really well, where like a lot of people can say confidently like, oh, that was kind of obvious. We knew that already. And they fulfill this kind of need for us to feel and be customer…”

“Customer satisfaction, a simple CSAT metric is better. It has better data properties. It is more precise. It is more correlated to business outcomes.”

“Promises are the downfall of every business. Like every time we've made a promise to get something out in a certain period of time, like, and we, we kind of inevitably seem to miss, miss it.”

“I don't like to look back on, on things. I'm not much of a fan of looking back on failures and trying to figure out what went wrong so we don't do it again, because I don't think we know what went wrong.”

“the moment you go out and take money, or have these big obligations, you end up working for someone else, and I don't really understand, I, I do understand why some companies do it, but I don't understand why a lot of people do it, Uh, who probably shouldn't do it.”

“Most experiments should be thought experiments. They should not even be tried out, because they're obviously going to fail. Which is contrary to, let's try it out, and then let's see. I think that it's a lot of company time. If you had, ah, if you had smart people who could do mental thinking, a lot of experiments…”

“I think the CEO should be basically the chief product officer of a product or tech company. And the CEO is not the chief product officer. Then I don't know if they're a product or tech led company.”

“I think there's a difference between micromanagement, which is like telling people exactly what to do and being in the details, being the details is what every responsible company's board does to the CEO. It doesn't mean the board is telling them what to do, but if you don't know the details, how do you know people are…”

“I think that every leader should be an expert in what they're leading. There should be no people managers in the entire company. And when I say people managers, meaning your only responsibility is people, not the work or not the domain, because you can't manage people the void of their work.”

“If you decide to be in the details and get very, very hands on, like I did, it might be a lot more work for about one to two years. And so for one to two years, it was way more work than the old way. But once we turned the corner, suddenly everyone started rowing the same direction. Suddenly I didn't have to be in…”

“Obviously creating a category is not the only way to create a legendary business because the vast majority of legendary businesses did not create the categories that they're in. So Google did not create search. Facebook did not create social network. Like, I mean, there's, there's so many of them. It's actually more of…”

“In fact, most category creators lose the market. Like what happened to MySpace? What happened to Ask Jeeves? It didn't work out so good for them. Most category creators actually get overtaken by fast followers.”

“It sounds medically insane to say what you want is a zero billion dollar market. However, as crazy as it sounds, it's the only thing that leads to meaningful success. And the proof is in the data.”

“And so there are definitely times where I will advocate for and I will push for and I will myself use. Lower, lower confidence intervals than 95%, especially if that, like, doubles the amount of experiments that you can run in a year, right? End of the day, these are all methods that we use to try to validate the…”

“The basic idea is bootstrapping is for lifestyle businesses that want to cash flow. Funding is for companies trying to create a billion dollars in annual revenue.”

“If you want to achieve a 10 X outcome, hiring someone that's an expert in the field It's maybe unlikely you're gonna achieve that 10 X outcome because they're likely to do things the way things have always been done. So you might achieve incremental benefits, but the odds of completely reinventing the system and doing…”

“Take your best salespeople and make them see a sense. There's no point. There's no point in having your best salespeople sell. Well, what's the point? People aren't going to buy anyway. I mean, and if they do, they're going to buy in onesie twosies, not in these big enterprise deals.”

“well, then you don't know what the bar is because the bar of where you should be letting people go is here. And the bar that you've let people go is here. So until you get close to that line, You don't know what that line is.”

“Even if it's handled incredibly poorly, the company ends up performing better. It just takes a little longer for people to recover who the state team to recover emotionally, but the worst case scenario, it's handled terribly. Within two months, the company will be performing better.”

“The product manager is responsible for making sure that the solution is valuable and viable. And that is hard. That is hard. That takes real work. And that's part of the how that's a pretty damn integral part of the how as well. Now you don't tell the engineers how to code. You don't tell the designer how to design,…”

“functional ops roles, whether it's product ops or marketing ops or You know, whatever they're a hack to deal with some sort of functional issue on your team.”

“It's actually really important that these bots have their own computer. And part of it is what I described earlier of there are a bunch of tasks that don't have well-supported MCPs and APIs. We as humans don't do our jobs by MCPs and APIs. Like we use a computer and we click on pixels and we kind of type things in…”

“I think the other thing that's under discussed Lenny is, you know, how many problems are truly intelligence bound? Like if you add a, you know, a data center of PhDs working at FedEx or Domino's pizza, are they going to be like exponentially dominating supply chain and pizzas? Like, I don't think so. So I think we…”

“the loop will help you climb to the local maxima, but then it plateaus, and you need some sort of out-of-distribution thinking, you need human intuition, you need somebody to actually help you land at the base of the next hill.”

“I think that we believe that people want to be more productive, but they don't. I think more people want to spend time than save time.”

“chat makes sense if you're the highest agency person in the world, which is Elon and Sam. But for the average consumer, like their ideal interface is TikTok. So we need to find something between chat and, uh, TikTok.”

“the sort of concept of the model that's too dangerous to release it, it kind of conflates marketing, um, inference capacity, and then also economic considerations, like, do you want to externalize your competitive advantage or use it to make yourself better?”

“moats are most often discovered, not designed.”

“because price is a measure of product market fit, a really useful product exercise is what is the Birkin bag, 10,000 a month, thousand a month version of our product.”

“You fail if you build for where the models are now. You fail if you build for where you think the models will be in a year. Like, both outcomes are equally wrong, and I'm sure many people have talked about this, but both outcomes are really equally wrong. If you're too early, you're wrong. If you build something that…”

“at previous companies, like, polish was king. Uh, getting every UI interaction or getting every little thing completely right was way more important than shipping something early, because time didn't make as much of a difference in terms of the outcome. And so, as such, like, if every corner wasn't, like, perfectly…”

“a long dock is not a signal that you thought through something because you can easily produce a long dock That indicates that you haven't, and so actually the, the point, maybe one of the biggest changes I've experienced personally in my day-to-day, which has been a big, maybe jarring change, is I used to think in a…”

“start yourself and yourself with a piece of writing and that doesn't deteriorate your thinking.”

“And there's only two entry points starting at the very, very tippy top, meaning going direct to the decision maker, the chief legal officer, or finding the individual that would be maybe one step removed. Okay. I personally, other people would argue with this. I personally would not be targeting anybody else. It is the…”

“The most successful salespeople are not trained salespeople. That's why founders are so good at this.”

“a enterprise organization might reach out to you because they're going through a due diligence process to say, Hey, we'd love to see what you guys have built. Will you present this to four or five people? Don't do it. If you're either a checkbox and you don't want, you want to remove yourself from being a checkbox or…”

“The whole game is expansion. If you're not going from a hundred K or 250 K to three 50 or 500 the following year, it's not an enterprise motion.”

“Time box it to two or three days. Don't make it two weeks. Okay. I've done this enough times to say people will go in usually for half a day and get what they need out of it. Okay. Shorten your sales cycle by two weeks by doing two to 48 or 72 hours.”

“If you're selling a 100,000 dollar deal and you're pulling a Ford deploy, like your economics are, it's going to get messy.”

“Those are buckets to understand how to understand a weighted forecast, right? Like a proposal or something mid funnel might be weighted at 50% of the deal value for the, for the, um, for the pipeline. Something in contracting might be weighted at 80% and something in intro might be weighted at 10%. That's what those…”

“90%. Yeah. Because like enterprise sales is, it's, it's, it's mirroring their buying process. It's trying to control their buying process. It's not plopping these people into your sales process.”

“The win rate for enterprise, a good, healthy win rate. It's actually probably going to surprise you. It's not. Meaning of all sales qualified leads or opportunities with a healthy win rate is usually around 30 to 35%... 25 to somewhere between 25 and 35%.”

“If, if it's, if you, if your win rate is higher than that, your price is too low.”

“And eventually what we want, what we, what we know, and we think about this a lot in design is like, it will true, like, Things will truly become like for billions of users when they don't have to like think about a switch or a mode or anything like that. And so we know that like eventually it has to kind of get…”

“I think a lot of companies, um, recruiting owns the hiring goal. And I've yet to be in a company where recruiters are making hiring decisions. So these things are in conflict. Hiring managers or leaders or committees are making hiring decisions. And I feel like the recruiter's goal is really about helping provide…”

“folks who spend a lot of the time in their interviews talking about those like alignment meetings and driving alignment and stakeholder management and, and those pieces, because, uh, There's definitely a group of PMs and I certainly used to be one of them earlier in my career whose specialty wasn't technical or…”

“go and take the, uh, comp required to have five L fives reporting to one L seven and then four L sevens reporting to one VP. And now total the comp of that product org and turn around and say, what if I had three people? Why can't I pay them all? You know, D two VP money, particularly if they're having the level of…”

“as you add in more compute and data, what's called loss, aka the loss from next token prediction, uh, goes down. And so it's a very smooth linear curve of, like, the models get more intelligent as you scale them up. What's actually also interesting Uh, in that paper is there are these like very, uh, different emerging…”

“we actually have a saying on the team of evals are the new PRDs. Cause in order to deliver that user value, uh, it's not that exact artifact that people used to write in the last like one to two decades. It's a new way of working.”

“as we ship faster than ever, as we move from shipping, you know, a couple of PRs a day to 30 PRs a day, or, or just doing so much more in some ways that might be fun, but we are burning out more than, than we did before. And, and we're not working any less hard clearly, right? We, we, we're just taking on more stuff,…”

“It's a lot easier to build products these days, but a lot harder to maintain them.”

“Every time you, you, not the AI, solve a problem and get over a barrier, it increases, it raises your baseline of self-efficacy, of self-confidence, of self-belief, and every time you offload that to your favorite AI model, you're lowering that baseline, and your thinking and your judgment is rotting, and that's a…”

“having the most advanced AI and the access to the best models in the world won't, won't determine whether your organization succeeds.”

“I think people assume that there's a much more detailed semantic understanding of everybody's interests and preferences in the algorithm than there is. Most of what's really driven the progress in the world of recommenders over the last five, 10 years have been You know, these large embedding models and these other…”

“It's not that management is going away. It's not that everyone's an IC, but like everyone's kind of both now, right? If you're an IC, you're not typing code out character by character, right? Like you are managing something. You're managing agents. You're managing, you know, like you're managing work that is happening,…”

“It basically had to be like, let's list out all of the things that we think we are interested in doing for the next year or two. Let's prototype all of them, decide which things are ready now, and then just let the others sit and bake. And then every time there's like a new leap in models, let's try that thing again…”

“In the Peter Thiel sense, it's almost a moral arbitrage because there's something in our gut as a product maker. You, you became a founder, an entrepreneur because you wanted to go be an innovator. And so it can feel like a beat down that your path to innovation starts with copying other people's work. And we were…”

“if, if we're, if we're too ambitious and we're at the outset and too ambitious and visionary about the product we want to build, then we will probably miss product market fit because we won't start at a small enough, humble enough place because it, it's, it might, Usually that the starting point for these products is…”

“it almost gives a new founder an advantage over a multi time successful founder because we have too much rope to hang ourselves. It's too easy to raise money and recruit teams against a big vision before we've gotten to product market fit, but the world doesn't care about your resume.”

“that's to me the real founder mode is, can you have the courage to, to, to tell your team and your investors that this isn't it?”

“The viable is the, the word we gotta kill along with hope. Because viable is where hope comes from. Right? If it's viable, it might make it.”

“people don't want to be creative, they want to feel creative.”

“If you're asking whether or not your product is an A, it's not an A.”

“When you're doing a one point O of anything, When you're doing, if you're doing anything that matters, and it's a one point on, it's a new category, or it's a new device the world hasn't seen before. You have very few analogs that you can use to make data driven decisions. And so if most of your decisions are gonna be…”

“Because if you try to do data-driven decisions all the way along, You're, you're either not doing a differentiated product because you're taking data from another thing, or you're just getting just bullshit data, right?”

“We got fast software, but software, if you're going to build a real company, can't be throwaway. Maybe it can, but I don't think it can be, if you're really going to do this because you get just technical debt and you've got to start over again.”

“Because an opinion based thing on highly innovative, differentiated stuff, it doesn't have a model for that. There's not that stuff in there. You gotta, you still need the very version one to be done.”

“We need to flip it. We need to absolutely flip it, and we have to say, and this is what I always wanted to do at Nest, which is, I want to remove displays, and we need to have voice as the number one primary feature, and you build around voice. Then we have keyboard if necessary, and then we have tapping and swiping.…”

“And so then you can kind of get into calling those races where, again, it's like being in 1997 and saying, well, is it going to be Excite or Yahoo? And the answer was no, generally.”

“So distribution of an adequate product when the field is basically commodity distribution on brand become a big deal.”

“When I run the agent on that website, I'm using my tokens. I'm not using the vendors tokens. I'm not using the apps tokens. And so it puts SAS back in this place where, yeah, you want to make it friendly for an agent and everyone's got a CLI.”

“My experience is that your company is only going to go as far as your CEO goes in AI, and it's not something you can delegate.”

“structurally, because of the way the models work, because of the financial incentives of model of model companies to like make them, um, uh, compliant and aligned structurally, they're always going to be trailing behind those people who are taking, taking the models and using them to make new expertise or, or make new…”

“I think people think of the edge of AI as being in San Francisco, and I actually don't think that that's where it is. I think the edge of AI is wherever AI meets like a real human doing something, because the people in San Francisco, they're making it, but they don't actually know a lot about how to use it. They don't…”

“These LLMs and even video models, they don't know how to do that. They don't have the ability to understand friction or weight or contact, uh, pressure, uh, friction, surface texture. Like they're just not able to do these things. And this is the core of what we need. And engineering to be able to understand to build…”

“There's a big difference between a car that is safer, that drives itself versus a car that a human drives, because you have an existence proof of the human driving car and you have the data. When you talk about homes, what is the delta? You have now a thing that you didn't have before doing things. So if it's like bad…”

“Google report its quarterly report on time because there is a massive, unbelievably expensive apparatus to make sure it happens every time. And don't be evil was just a slogan. So if someone tells you I'm serious about something, great. Now show me the apparatus. Show me the commitments you've made to make sure that…”

“If you don't know what that is, you need to Ask an LLM to explain it to you and just say, Eric said founders preferred shares could potentially make me like personally an extra billion dollars someday.”

“Right now, we kind of have this dichotomy between what I call investor controlled companies and founder controlled companies. And everyone's like, you got to pick one or the other, but neither alternative is very good. What we want to create are what I call mission controlled companies.”

“I think the only way that you can actually get to understanding agent loops is if you build them in the material that they're made of, which is currently code.”

“I think people who have true agency and they understand that the world around them is malleable will do great. And the folks who stick to what, tell me really, what does it mean to be a PM? What does it mean to be a designer? And like, what's my job as an engineer? I think that will be much harder and yeah, cultivate…”

“And that to me, I think is very absent right now from most of the discourse in software, which is, it's all about how many tokens can we spend and how many features can we ship? I'm like, okay, but where's the engineering part? And the engineering part is the, you make sure that this thing works for a hundred million…”

“In my past life I worked at Heroku and like Kubernetes was much more successful than, than Heroku. Uh, even though I think from a user experience perspective, it was much worse, but the Delta was Heroku was saying, Hey, we're going to, uh, uh, replace your ops team. And Kubernetes was, we're going to make your ops team…”

“if I really look at the, the truly great products, they all have one tiny core that is so exceptionally good.”

“Inclusivity isn't always all that great. Um, um, I think I, I very much believe in small group theory. Like I think the world is run by group chats of eight people or fewer. Uh, and so sometimes it's great to be exclusive.”

“And what Snapchat figured out that was, I think, different was that, you know, despite the fact that there were much bigger networks that connected more people, what really mattered was connecting you to the right people. And so if you could just connect someone, not to all their friends, but to their best friend, To…”

“Uh, so it's, it's very easy to copy hardware, you know, software features. It's very hard, uh, to, to copy or to, to replicate a full ecosystem or a platform.”

“Well, I think for us, design actually has always operated as like a bottleneck at the company, which is incredibly important, right? It's intentional, uh, that things need to be approved by design to ship, and sometimes that really annoys people, uh, you know, and it does slow down the shipping process. Sometimes it…”

“I still think it comes back to product taste. Like as code becomes much cheaper to write, the thing that becomes more valuable is deciding what to write.”

“You don't need to build hundreds of evals for them to be useful. Just building 10 great evals is important for helping the team quantify what the goal is and what their progress towards it is and what they're missing.”

“your brands don't matter as much as how modern you are in your ability to deliver product. In, in the past, I think for the last 10 years, it's like, have you seen the movie before? ... But now if every way of building software and how we deliver product is completely alien to how it was in the last You know, 10 years,…”

“the team you build is the company you build. And that adage is the most important thing when you're creating a startup. People get distracted with the market, with customers, with the product, with technology, ultimately it's a team. If you have the right people, everything else will be easy, and if you have the wrong…”

“if a founder shows the ability early in his or her career to assess talent ruthlessly and accurately, he or she can go very far with no other abilities whatsoever.”

“the number of people that can Independently drive an initiative from beginning, from inception to success is very limited with any, within any company. And if you hire more people without expanding the number of what I call barrels that can drive from inception to success, all you're doing is stacking people behind…”

“You know, my more important arc in this is I think you have to build a company on undiscovered talent. Like I don't think you really want to compete for the people that everybody else wants. Right. And, you know, I learned this at PayPal. Peter taught me this literally the first day, the first week of my job at PayPal,…”

“The more success you have, the more complacent the organization tends to get in the single role for the CEO is offsetting that complacency. So, to the point, the more success you have, the better you're doing, the more complacency naturally kicks in. And unless you've erected a network effect, you do not want to get…”

“When a company's struggling, I'm actually usually very non-critical and more like a coach and supporter because the company, the founder knows they're struggling. Being critical doesn't really help them solve their problems. That's when being supportive can actually somewhat counterintuitively be more important, but…”

“whether you talk about someone who used to be a PM or someone who used to be a designer or called an engineer, the skill is more like being a CEO now, which is what are we building and why? And to be a successful engineer, that trait's critical to be a successful designer because the tools and the, The ability to…”

“Like I use this prism as an investor, which is when I make a seed investment or shares a investment, let's say I want half of my friends who are VCs to laugh at me, like literally laugh. Cause I, I know most of the people I compete with pretty well. And so I'm running this algorithm through my brain. Are these people…”

“most of the companies I work with that are thriving have basically skipped hiring senior people, senior experienced people, mostly internally grown talent. And I think that model has worked really well. It's definitely true of ramp, definitely true of trade Republic.”

“Are you hiring for value creation or value preservation? If you're hiring for value preservation, typically some experience is useful on the value creation side. It's probably not.”

“one of the biggest things you come into Anthropic is you need to understand that probably, yeah, 50, 60, 70% of how you operate in the past, just throw it out the door. It's, it's not going to be relevant.”

“If you're in the game and you're a leading player and what you're doing is working, you can influence people in, who are also in the game to, to take the right actions. And so that is like the core of it. Like if we just pack up and go home, you have no influence on this thing.”

“in November, we had what I call the inflection point where GPT, 5.1 and Claude Opus 4.5 came along and they were both just, they were incrementally better than the previous models, but in a way that crossed a threshold where previously, if you had these coding agents, you could get them to write you some code. And most…”

“Like code is easier than almost every other problem that you pose these agents because code is obviously right or wrong. Like it produces code. You run the code. Either it works or it doesn't work. There might be a few subtle hidden hidden bugs, but generally you can tell if the thing actually works.”

“Like, like, like it used to be, if you looked at software and it had high quality tests and documentation and everything, it meant it was good. And now that signal is gone.”

“I think a lot of people who haven't got on board with coding agents yet, haven't tried them in the unsafe mode. They're using coding agent where it's like, oh, can I run this piece of code? Can I edit this file? And that means you have to pay complete attention to it the whole time. And it's like working with a really…”

“If you look at a repo and there's huge amounts of tests that aren't really doing anything interesting, that's really expensive because now when you change the code, you've got to update a thousand lines of tests and all of that. It turns out I don't care anymore because updating a thousand lines of tests is now the job…”

“agents fundamentally, like LLMs, can't tell the difference between texts that you give them and texts that you copy and paste in from other people. They're all the same thing. So instructions in that input text can always override the earlier instructions.”

“Use, use the good models. One, because they're really, um, hardened against prompt injection and some security risks out of the box. And two, you're just going to get a better experience. So I use a lot of Opus four, six, Sonnet four, six, and GPT five, four.”

“I think any good product manager has felt this experience of launching a product And it's just hot garbage. Like it's buggy. It doesn't look great. And somehow, and your biggest complaints from customers are not, I don't think this is useful. It's that it's broken or doesn't work as good as I want. That's when you know…”

“You get the offer, you say, what's the chance there's a little bit more, almost always see a 20% improvement on that. And that is across the board from earlier stage positions. Let's say they gave you a 100,000 dollar offer, a 120 could be there just from a simple pushback”

“Oftentimes we also try to negotiate through recruiters, right? You could do that. I, Jake, I did the thing, Jacob. I talked to a recruiter. I spent a half an hour explaining it. The problem with that is you're playing a game of telephone. So the same thing happens. I explain it to the recruiter. I get the tone right.…”

“we used to go off and say, you know, we're gonna do this design vision. We're gonna go off and make this like two year, five year, whatever, 10 year vision even. And we're gonna like point us towards something. But the way that the technology is changing now, like we actually don't know, we don't know what's gonna…”

“You can't, you just can't, we can't mock up all the states, you know, and you can't theorize and you can't even make Uh, like a clickable prototype where that you sort of have to use the actual models underneath and you have to sort of see people try it out with their use cases because with these models, like you…”

“I think as a designer a few years ago, I would say, like, maybe 60 to 70% of it was, like, mocking and prototyping stuff up, and then spending, you know, the last 20 years, some of the last 20 or so, like, doing the sort of, like, jamming with engineers, consulting with them, and the last, like, 10% maybe doing, you…”

“timing trumps market, market trumps team, team trumps product, product trumps brand, brand trumps distribution. You don't have all six. You don't win.”

“we were building the models in this way that kind of fit our mental model of the way that we built SafeHEI, where the model starts by being really good at coding, then it gets really good at tool use, then it gets really good at computer use. Roughly, this is like the trajectory.”

“The modern framing that I've been seeing in the last six months is a little bit different, and it's look at what the model is trying to do and make that a little bit easier.”

“And in general, what we see is maybe scaffolding can improve performance, maybe 10, 20%, something like this. But often these gains just get wiped out with the next model. So it's almost better to just wait for the next one.”

“The thing that happens is sometimes people try to use a less expensive model like Sonnet or something like this, but because it's less intelligent, it actually takes more tokens in the end to do the same task. Um, and so it's actually not obvious that it's cheaper if you use a less expensive model. Often it's actually…”

“it's never been easier to start. There's never been more competition. It's never been harder to scale.”

“Honestly, the only thing that's different today, it's exactly the same as it's been for a hundred years, except they call their SCEs or their system consultants For deployed engineers. The rest of it is the same. I thought it would be totally different in AI. I'm working with all these companies. They're hiring like…”

“I was someone who always valued optionality. I think there's a massive tax on optionality when you can move this fast and try a lot of things.”

“Codex really empowers, like, top performers to, to get a lot, like, to be a lot more productive, and so it really, like, and I think this may be true for AI more broadly, like, across society, which is, like, the people who really lean in, or, like, the people who have high agency, or, like, will really get, get, get…”

“My general advice, and I've been giving this to people for a while, and I think it's still true today, is make sure you're building for where the models are going and not where they are today. Um, uh, you know, the, the, it's, it's clearly a moving target, and I think a lot of the companies that I've seen, startups…”

“So I think that's the advantage that we have over people that are technical. We, we just come into this completely unbiased and very positively delusional, which I think you have to have when working with AI tools, you have to come with this delusion that absolutely everything is possible until proven wrong.”

“If there's a good quote I've read, I can't, I apologize to the author cause I can't attribute it off the top of my head, but it's like the ceiling on the AI isn't the model intelligence. It's what the model sees before it acts. So that's the ceiling right now. Like what do you, what are you exposing? We talk about…”

“What's the layer that we are adding on top of code where people don't need to worry about code anymore. And at that point, it was like a year ago that we chatted, and it feels like this is the layer Is the agent conversation of what it is, what it's thinking and then what you tell it back. So essentially it's English…”

“where the really great people are becoming like spectacularly great, right? Um, and so you, you, you, you just, you kind of use it, use the term you think about like the super empowered individual, right? So the individual who is like really good, um, at coding or really good at making movies or really good at making…”

“The, the, the most common thing in the world, which is sand, converted into the most rare thing in the world, which is thought. Right. And, and so AI is, it is, it is the, it is the philosopher's stone. Like, it, it, it is that. It, it actually is that. And it's just this incredibly powerful tool.”

“The consequence of massive productivity growth, what that literally means mechanically is more output requiring less input, right? So you get more economic output for less input, right? So you're substituting in AI for human workers or whatever, and as a consequence, you get like this massive boom in output with much…”

“If, if, if the goal is I want to be one of the best software people in the world and I want to build new software Products and technologies that like really matter, then yeah, you, 100% want to still be, you want to go all the way down. You want your skill set to go all the way down to the assembly, to assembly and…”

“people who really want to, like, improve themselves and, like, develop their career should be spending every, every spare hour, in my view, at this point, talking to an AI, being like, all right, train me up. Like, tell me, super-empower me. Tell me how to, you know, train me. Train me how to be, you know, I'm a coder.…”

“The history in the last three years has been everything that looks like it's like the fundamental breakthrough gets, gets basically replicated in lab very quickly. Like, many of the smartest people I know in the field, when I, when I really kind of talk to them, kind of, you know, get a couple drinks in them, they're…”

“I think anyone who's looked at cancellation data at any company We'll agree that too expensive is often the number one, or at least like top three reason in one form or another. And that is never, ever, ever the reason. How do I know? Because they already looked at your homepage, read all the stuff, saw what you…”

“So what usually ha what often happens is you raise prices and signups don't change. When I say signups, I mean, they're like size per month, you know, the rate at sign or signups go up. This happens all the time.”

“What happens is it starts with an S curve and then starts sagging. It's butt starts sagging down. So I wrote an article about this called the elephant curve, which is what I named it.”

“where you want to, you, you want to use probability and expected value. It's unlikely that dot, dot, dot. Right. But the truth is we don't know what the probability is. We don't know what the probability curves look like. We actually can't use expected value. And anyway, even if you could have expected value, I am a…”

“To replace any critical workflow or to, um, build something that can give you significant ROI easily takes four to six months of work, even if you have the best data layer and infrastructure layer.”

“When you go to complex use cases, it's incredibly hard to build LLM judges because you see a lot of emerging patterns. If you build a judge that would, um, you know, test for verbosity or something like that, it turns out that you're seeing newer patterns that your LLM judge is not able to catch, and then you're just,…”

“Chamath, when he pitched me on this job, actually drew me a picture on a whiteboard. He said, you know, look, you can stay the, the, the way a lot of people do careers is a set of stairs. You can be boring to use Chamath and stay on these stairs. Just walk up the stairs and you'll get promoted every two years and your…”

“80% of problems on teams actually happen because of structural issues or dynamics issues. So when there are problems on your team, where you start is at the top. You start structural issues.”

“Growing more than 100% every year is a bad idea. A hundred percent, the happiest growth rate is 50%. A hundred percent is manageable. Anything more than doubling and you are signing yourself up for a world of pain.”

“The pro, the net productivity is about the same. It's not better. It's not worse. Um, but it's so much more efficient and it scales because software scales.”

“AI is replacing the jobs people don't want to do today. And it is displacing The media, the mid pack and the mediocre. They are, their jobs are at risk. They are at risk. The best humans, it is true that they will get superpowers from AI, but I'm not sure the rest will.”

“We do more work with AI. I'm working the hardest I've ever worked. That's with all these agents and all the output they create and Amelia does a lot of it, but even I am working the hardest, but, but, but it's better, but it's not less work. It's the, it's more work. The agents are so productive. You have to keep up.”

“the agent will fail without training and onboarding this product. It, it, it will fail. Like it will never, it will never work. So it becomes an imperative if you want to win. Like you need, I, I, you, this term has been bandied about too much, but you need a team of humans. We can call them forward deployed engineers…”

“I just usually think the best startup as fat for founders, not necessarily for everybody else is the one you're already working at. And if you're not happy, turn that into your a hot AI startup. It's not, here's the thing. It's not too late, Lenny.”

“there's more to glean from seeing how it's done right than there is to glean from I'm seeing how it's done wrong.”

“When I jumped in, I was like, man, you know, we need to establish some, some basic standards for test coverage. We need to establish some basic standards For how we do what I call a factory inspection on a product once it's ready to roll off the assembly line. Do we have a checklist for what we call product quality?…”

“Processes in a business exist for the sole purpose of lowering beta. Processes are for decreasing volatility in the output of the system. The, the, the downside of a process is that it suppresses alpha.”

“And so I rely a lot on my intuition, which of course HR people say you're not supposed to do. That's complete bullshit. If you have a good intuition, you should absolutely rely on your intuition.”

“don't ask people for advice. Ask people for relevant experience. If you ask them for advice, they will always give it. But if you ask them for relevant experience, they rarely have any to offer. And if they don't have any to offer, then don't ask for their advice.”

“Teams will sadly, but because we are all human, teams will always optimize for local comfort over company outcomes.”

“there's two ways to make money in software, bundling and unbundling. And, um, you just gotta get the timing right, so this is a, this is a period of bundling. Points, so here's the problem. Point solutions don't have enough data in the age of AI to be useful.”

“And because all, uh, I guess for the most part, all currently deployed chatbots are based on transformers or transformer adjacent technologies. They're all vulnerable to Prompt injection, jailbreaking, forms of adversarial attacks.”

“you can patch a bug, but you can't patch a brain. Uh, and what I mean by that is if you find some bug in your software and you go and patch it, you can be 99% sure, maybe 99.99% sure that bug is solved. Not a problem. If you go and try to do that in your AI system, uh, the model, let's say, you can be 99.99% sure that…”

“any data that AI has access to, the user can make it leak it. Any actions that it can possibly take, the user can make it take them.”

“And then they'd be like, oh, you know, they, you know, they'd realize we can just dockerize that code run, um, put it in a container. So it's running on a different system and take a look at the sanitized output. And now we're completely secure. So in that case, prompt injection completely solved. No problem.”

“when I'm thinking about the patterns here and what I have to unlearn, I feel like only 30 to 40% of what I've learned in the last 15 to 20 years of being in growth transfers here.”

“And that noise in the market happens by us shipping every day, every other day, multiple times per day, and just talking about it constantly. Interestingly enough, it's actually works with fantastic resurrection strategy because people are like, oh, there's more things here. Like I need to go check it out. It also…”

“If you ask me what's your organic marketing strategy right now, to me, it's all about social, which is what is my CEO posting? What is my team posting? What is my LinkedIn? What is my creator economy doing? Influencer marketing. And, um, across all of the social platforms. That is my organic, which is, that one's kind…”

“And I think that we're actually moving to the new era of software that needs to feel human, that people want to interact with, not just utility of it. Because cost of software is coming down so much to develop that we now can actually invest into emotional feel of that software, as opposed to only just focus on…”

“honestly, it's more efficient way to do paid marketing almost in a sense, uh, because of the cost per eyeball that we get there is quite a bit lower compared to if we were trying to compute it on the Google. So yes and no to your statement, because it actually does not deteriorate margin profile. We're just. Shifting…”

“The tricky piece here is that it's not enough to just wait for that technology to get better and then start building on top. You have to build beforehand to like make a bet and then that's the LLM to catch up because when that model releases, you already need to have that functionality available.”

“every three months, I feel like we have to recapture our product market fit and not just recapture on the same technology and with same customers. It's both of those pieces of the equation change every three months.”

“And the issue right now, which I'm actually quite worried about us like as a category is that we're constantly focusing on recapturing the pioneers. We don't have time to go after adjacent users. And I'm worried of whether there's going to be a gap in the space where we actually going to alienate the latent majority…”

“it turns out the best way for models to use computers is simply to write code.”

“A lot of work is done in the web, and if we could build a browser, then we could be contextual for you, but in a much more first class way. We weren't hacking like other desktop software, which have like very varied support for, for like what content they're rendering to the accessibility tree. Uh, we wouldn't be…”

“I think that the current limiting factor, I mean, there's many, but I think a current underappreciated limiting factor is like literally human typing speed or human multitasking speed on like writing prompts. And like, you know, you were talking about, it's like, you can have an agent, like watch all the work you're…”

“one of the things I often think about is that there's a, it's almost like there's an art to post training. It's not purely a science. Like when you were deciding what kind of model you're trying to create and what it's good at. There's this notion of taste and sophistication.”

“the remove friction, um, kind of orientation is so deep in people. Again, it really makes a difference in, in those cases where people do have an intent and they do know what they're trying to do. Um, it is a poor approach when the challenge is really comprehension.”

“the overwhelming majority of people you hire want to hire more people who report to them. And it's not because they're evil and it's not because they're stupid. In fact, they're smart because everyone knows that the number of people who report to you correlates with like your career trajectory, your, the amount of…”

“every budget process No head of engineering, no head of sales, no CFO, no GC, is ever going to come back and say like, oh, I actually think like next year we can just hire fewer people, or we're going to keep it flat, or we're going to like shrink through attrition, because we don't need any more people to do what…”

“if you hire 17 product marketers, you're going to have 17 product marketers worth of demand for work to do. And if you don't have sufficient supply of product marketing work to do, they're just going to do other stuff.”

“And self-driving cars are much simpler robots. They're just metal boxes running on two D surfaces. And the goal is not to touch anything. Robot is three D things running in three D world. And the goal is to touch things.”

“You need to vision cast. You need to sell to a gap. Don't sell to a problem. There's a very big difference between problem selling and gap selling. Problem selling is highly specific, more technical than not. And it's the, it's the way that every salesperson is going to go about it. Find the problem and anchor to it.…”

“And that's why founders are so good at selling because they, they're, they naturally go to vision selling and vision casting versus a typical trained salesperson is find the problem. Um, uh, you know, ask these questions and it just kills the vibe. It just feels like you're talking to a salesperson, right? It's like,…”

“If you're venture backed, you can't be selling 10,000 dollar deals to the enterprise. You'll get killed. Or, or you've already lost the game because you're playing a small business game in, in the wrong sector.”

“enterprise companies are very used to a land. When I say like the first initial contract, this is somewhere between 75 K and a 150 K. Very used to that. In fact, that's probably where you want to start”

“Design partners are incredible. They are the hardest logos to upsell, meaning go from design partner to full rollout customer. So like, don't expect these people to be your million dollar pipeline.”

“Um, so that's why the hundred K is such a safe zone because even for 10 K, you might have to go through procurement. So, um, this is like the surest way to make sure that like you don't, um, listen, I've seen 10 K take nine months to close.”

“A VP of sales at a large company, I would say, Uh, they're, they're best suited for a large company because one to 10, you're running through walls, right? You have to figure out, you know, you're doing a lot of convincing. You're doing a lot of educating. You're doing a lot of creative deal crafting, a lot of owning…”

“I still think that things that we interviewed for in the past, a critical mindset, the ability to really understand deeply the technical nature of a problem. Is still much more important than, um, whether you're a fully AI native programmer.”

“Although I think that it's a little bit like the analogy of if you build a bigger highway, you'll just get more cars on the road. So I think the fact that everyone's building software means that there's more software to be built, more coordination to happen, and everyone's more eager to ship things faster and, and, um,…”

“would you rather have access, uh, could you rather have, give everyone on the team, like very expensive. Coding agent, um, subscriptions, or you get an extra head count, right? Let's say it's like maybe like, um, and almost everyone could say the managers could say head count, but if you ask VP level, or like someone…”

“If that's all you're looking at, it's, it's not going to be sufficient anymore because AI has now changed the way we think about feedback loops.”

“Essentially everyone, every engineer is turning into an EM, engineering manager, coordinating all of these junior AI engineers.”

“I think for a second product, it's very hard to go from one to two. Going from two to N is much easier, but going one to two is hard.”

“I think this is happening now too, even more in the age of AI, and the value is moving up the stack even more. That's why the design is the differentiator more than ever, because it's not just dev tools are a little better. It's, wow, you can create a lot of code really fast now.”

“It really changes the process once you have the ability to explore this option space in a bigger way, and PMs are no longer saying to the designer, hey, can you draw this thing out for me? That frees up designer time to go explore more deeply the stuff they need to go into, and it allows anyone to kind of add to that…”

“Facebook probably created the modern feed, but there's a feed for every single product, right? And there's a LinkedIn feed and there's a, there's a feed for, um, DoorDash. You know, it's, it's not like, like these things become core primitives quickly and formats. And then at the end of the day, you're kind of just…”

“we're starting to see the labeling move into enterprises, um, and into governments because you can only get so far with off the shelf plus rag, plus some fine tuning based on recorded data.”

“Duolingo, even though the product they're providing is around language learning, I think the original ethos of how to start the company was really around motivation, right? The hardest thing to its habits, right? How do you build that daily habit? And I actually, in many ways, see language learning as like their first…”

“over and over and over, like I saw some of the highest performers just being people that had very high agency, had that clock speed, had that energy. Um, yes, they, they cared about the mission, but they didn't necessarily need to have deep experience on that matter. And in fact, sometimes that experience could be a…”

“coding agents are fundamentally very different than other AI products because the developer is the domain expert. So you can short circuit a lot of things, and also the developer is using it all day long.”

“Up until now, a lot of the big labs understandably focused on general benchmarks, like MMLU score, human eval, things like that, which are very important for foundation models. And, you know, those not very related to product specific evals, like the ones we talked about today, but like handoff and Stuff like that.…”

“And so in many ways, the barrier to applying agents to the entire economy To automate every workflow is how do we measure success? How do we eval it and write the PRDs for everything that we want agents to do, which Mercore is obviously a huge part of doing.”

“If everybody agrees with the decision, then you didn't add any value because they would have done that without you. So the only value you ever add is when you make a decision that most people don't like, um, and that's where leadership comes in.”

“the idea that you're going to take somebody who doesn't, who isn't world-class at marketing and make them world-class, and you don't know anything about marketing is a dumb idea. It just doesn't work.”

“founders, Can get to the next product. And that's something that, you know, almost no professional CEO is able to do. Like there have been rare cases, but very rare.”

“So the, the first idea that was wrong was like, okay, build a team of like senior executives, you know, as soon as you get product market fit as fast as possible and they can scale the thing. And I think that you got to build that team slowly and deliberately kind of pace to your ability to man integrate and then…”

“The job is fundamentally a leadership job, and it's a tricky leadership job because nobody is actually reporting to you. So, it's like this influence, how do I get people to do what I want, you know, even though I'm not paying them, I can't fire them, I can't promote them, and so forth. And, which is kind of the…”

“And one of the things we emphasize inside the firm is to look like we're investing in strength. Not lack of weakness. Like, I want to know, like, how good, like, are they world-class? Do they have a world-class strength? And, you know, can that beat anybody? And, like, everybody's flawed. And so, like, let's help them…”

“the one thing about bubbles is anytime everybody thinks it's a bubble, it's not a bubble because in order for it to bubble, you need capitulation in that you need kind of everybody to believe it's not a bubble because then the prices really go out of control. But as long as there's people who think it's a bubble, then…”

“Regardless, I think that now we're, we're entering this moment where like every, I mean, certainly every software product, in my opinion, has to be refounded because like AI is such a paradigm shift It's not even like, just like the shift from desktop to mobile or on-prem to cloud, where that was more like a, a very…”

“a lot of the challenge for many of the AI native companies I've seen Is that they could have, like, a very wide top of funnel, like, get all of this AI tourist traffic, you know, a lot of interest, a lot of, like, kind of, like, you know, early usage, but then, you know, sometimes the challenge is, how do you, like,…”

“And if you can't really introspect and say like, look, I think I'm better off doing this with the pieces that I have for my existing business and product, then I think you should sell, right? Like you should find a buyer. For that company and then go and, and like, you know, if you really care about this mission, like…”

“And yet if you have an agent that has to generate every single bit of that app from scratch from code, it's going to be very unreliable. There's going to be bugs. There's going to be data and security issues. And then you're also going to have a context collapse as it just cannot manage all of the code that it's…”

“The, the whole KPI is what is the, the metabolism of a product team to be able to ingest data and then digest the rewards model and then create some sort of outcome? Because these models are so effective at this point, you want to start to tune them to certain types of outcomes. So there's price or performance or…”

“the future of products being about composability and not the canvas. And I think that product makers really need to rewire their mindset around this because I think we spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about the, the UI of something rather than how something composes, how an agent's going to be able to read…”

“We, we like to say like the only, the only moat in human data is access to an audience.”

“in this market, there's, there's essentially like unlimited demand. Like if you can produce high quality volumes of data, uh, you most likely will be able to sell whatever you produce.”

“And what's going to happen is that if you don't do it, your competitors are going to certainly go to the new platform and your customer expectations change and you have to rise to those customers' expectations. Like they're going to start expecting you to be in these new experiences and all these things. And so it ends…”

“my hypothesis, and I think there's a lot more consensus around this now than there might have even been three months ago, is that the moat is really about, is about context and memory. You know, these models, uh, you know, by themselves, if you compare them side by side, uh, you know, they, they kind of generate the…”

“I think the way I've come to think about it is that the product manager is responsible for the whole team thinking like a CEO, if that makes sense. So if the product manager takes that on as their sole responsibility and says, I'm the mini CEO, I think about the business, that's a missed opportunity.”

“at the end of the day, money is how the impact of most teams is going to be measured. And if you don't have a point of view on why your team is a good investment, either in the money return it brings or in another return that is equally or more important to the business, then again, that feels like a tenuous and risky…”

“the way that that third step manifests itself the most frequently tactically is, are we estimating and measuring impact in the same unit of measure as our goals? Because if we're doing that, then we're keeping ourselves honest and we're saying, does this actually have a chance of contributing? Whereas again, if we get…”

“I think it's been really important to separate out, you know, the product development velocity, which has to be super high, from, okay, for things like frontier models, there actually needs to be a rigorous process where you red team, you work on the system card, you get external input, um, and then you put things out…”

“the one thing we've learned with ChatGPT is that there really is no distinction between the model and the product, like the model is the product, um, and therefore you need to iterate on it like a product.”

“I, I still feel like ChatGPT feels a little bit like MS-DOS. Uh, we haven't built Windows yet, and it will be obvious once we do, but, you know, there, there, there's something that feels a little bit like, like, imagine MS-DOS, like, gone viral, and you were just trying to, like, hack, like, little conversation…”

“Like if, you know, we're shipping a feature and it doesn't get two X better as the model gets two X smarter. It's probably not a feature we should be shipping.”

“The benchmarks are increasingly saturated. So really you need real world scenarios where your product or model is not actually doing the thing it was supposed to do. And the only way you get that is by shipping because you get back to sort of use case distribution and you can make those things good.”

“the way to appeal to an AI model ideally is the same way that you would appeal to a, um, real user because the model is supposed to proxy the interest of the user and nothing else.”

“I'm super excited about vibe coding, but I don't know, like generating a prototype has been the limiting factor in software ever. Um, it's actually like building increasingly complex systems and actually changing them with agility. Uh, you know, if you look at the famous, like Netscape one to Netscape two rewrite, they…”

“And also the models deteriorate in value fairly quickly as an asset class. And so you need just a lot of scale to make a return on the investment for a model that deteriorates in value so quickly.”

“I don't think, I think there's a huge difference between outcomes based pricing and usage based pricing, because, uh, especially in AI, they're not necessarily even correlated and you could have a long phone call, not solve the customer's problem. And they give you a negative review online and call the call center…”

“In the classic SaaS situation, we used to say if you can charge 10 to 20% of the value, that's actually great. But in AI, you can actually charge 25 to 50% because it is autonomous.”

“Instead, I like the term transformative AI because it's less about like, can it do as much as people do? Can it do literally everything and more about objectively, is it causing transformation in society and the economy? And a very concrete way of measuring that is the economic Turing test. I didn't come up with this,…”

“So initially we thought that it would be, uh, sort of one or the other, but I think since then we've realized that it's actually kind of convex in the sense that like working on one helps us with the other thing.”

“And so I think a good definition of AGI is when does it become economically profitable for people to run agents indefinitely? So it just never turns off. It's a cloud code. That's always running. It's always doing something. You just never turn it off and you don't need to, because like, you know, that it's worthwhile…”

“I think the, the number one predictor is does the CEO use ChatGPT or insert your own chat bot? If the CEO is in it all the time being like, this is the coolest thing. Everybody else is going to start doing it. If the CEO is like, I don't know, this is for someone else. Like no one else is going to be able to lead that…”

“One phenomenon we've seen when teams are building things really quickly with AI is that the more AI generated or assisted they are, the more generic they tend to turn out, which makes sense if you think about how LLMs were developed, you know, they're all basically pre-trained on the same data. And so in this…”

“If you end up vibe coding this prototype, but you start off with a very clear plan about this is what the thing needs to look at, look like rather than going immediately into a conversational mode where you're sort of co-designing with the LLM and going back and forth via chat conversation. This is much likelier to…”

“Claude for, for example, does a really nice job with first the initial prompt, like writing the app from scratch. Then everything that has to do with UI is just fantastic. Like design is great. But then for example, Gemini is really good when, when you get to a very complex, uh, or like very complex problem, or we need…”

“AGI is just necessary, but not sufficient. A lot of the value is still gonna 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…”

“really like the price and the ETA at Uber was the product.”

“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,…”

“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…”

“in six months, if I'm telling you what to do, I've hired the wrong person.”

“I think that if to anyone out there who's like doing user interviews and then saying, Hey, chat GPT, 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.”

“My perspective, and this has been validated over and over again, is that people will kind of always be saying it's dead or it's going to be dead with the next model version, but then it comes out and it's not.”

“Giving a role really helps for expressive tasks, uh, writing tasks, uh, summarizing tasks. And so with those things where it's more about, you know, style, uh, that's a great, great place to use roles. But my perspective is that roles do not help with any accuracy based tasks whatsoever.”

“And most of the Problem rejection media out there and, like, news about, oh, you know, someone tricked AI into doing this, are not, like, real. And I say that in the sense that some of these, there were actual vulnerabilities and systems got breached, but these are almost always as a result of poor classical…”

“The, the next step, uh, for defending, uh, is using some kind of AI guardrail. So you go out and you find or make, I mean, there's thousands of options out there, uh, an AI that looks at the user input and says, is this malicious or not? This is A very limited effect against a motivated hacker or AI red teamer because…”

“It is not a solvable problem, which I think is very difficult for a lot of people to hear... So, you know, it's, it's not solvable. It's mitigatable. Uh, you can kind of sometimes detect and track when it's happening, but it's really, really not solvable. Uh, and that's one of the things that makes it so different from…”

“when you're reporting to the CEO and like as a chief product officer, the big mistake that people make is they think that the game is all about getting what is inside their head and like influencing the CEO, influencing the people around them to make it so. And if you go into the role trying to do that, you're going to…”

“I've, I actually have never seen a company that grafted design on after the founding. So I've seen lots of, I could name lots of companies that I think are kind of design led, not always designer led, but design led or design centric, but I've never seen somebody grafted on after the fact it's there at the beginning in…”

“So if you look at the companies that have the largest design teams, they're often the companies that have the most ambiguous cultures and the most unclear design vision, right? When you, when you go to companies that really know what they're doing, You know, and they're clear that this is who we are. This is what we…”

“The thing I would say is that you should wait as long as possible to draw a picture. Like, uh, and that, I think that pushes against all the gen AI tools that help you create prototypes.”

“So if any of these partners try to operate that service themselves, it, it can definitely work, but you're going to leave either customers dissatisfied, or you're going to have under utilization.”

“If you're, if you're truly on a track to become like a, a, an executive someday or found your own company and make it successful, you will find that the compensation is so much backloaded. Uh, that you would make 90% of your compensation in the last five years of your career.”

“A full calendar is a badge of shame, not a badge of honor.”

“I have this premise that certain companies can never succeed at certain type of products, right? Like Microsoft with mobile or Google with social or Facebook with enterprise, right? It's just the DNA of the founder actively acts against you succeeding there.”

“in this day and age, if you're not prototyping and building to see what you want to build, I think you're doing it wrong. I call it the prompt steps of the new PRDs, right? Like, I really insist on folks saying, if you're building new projects, new features, of course, come with prototypes. And prompt sense.”

“And that means that you also need to be quite technical, even if you're, you're expert, you still need to often go as deep as sitting, you know, with engineers and, uh, reading code.”

“It's counterintuitive, but it works really well because first of all, teams, they talk to each other. There are formal and informal ways of communicating through meetups or just, you know, meeting in the office and they know which areas are being scrutinized right now and like which team is being scrutinized. And, uh,…”

“You know, the thing is that when you launch a scrappy version and it's not getting traction, how do you know? Is it because the underlying idea is wrong or maybe your product just sucks and you need to, to improve it? So by, you know, by, by forcing everyone to build a product that people will love by building a wow…”

“The key things that made our model work were, one, um, they were actually real engineers who could build product themselves. That's a very big difference, right? I think a lot of the time companies will say, this person's a forward-deployed engineer, but actually they're mostly there to be more of a solutions…”

“Like, I think, I think when you hire out of, especially, not to pick on them, but I think if you hire out a fan, right, it's like people, People want like a 400 K a year job. They would like to work a certain number of hours. They would like to ship some code and then go home. Like that's basically the model that you…”

“if you continue to bypass sorting out your baggage, there's going to come a day where you're going to have to pay that price. It could be in your own depression. It could be in, I've seen this a thousand times, Lenny, entrepreneurs sabotaging their successful businesses because the belief system from their childhood…”

“So if you want to create a high functioning team, do your work. And it starts with the person who has the most power in the group. If that person refuses to do their work, the entire group will become, ah, a manifestation of early dysfunction in the individual's lives.”

“You want to build a scaled leadership team. You have to be willing to have them make boneheaded decisions. And that's really, really hard, especially if we're quote in founder mode, driving all the decisions.”

“one of the, I would say the most common pieces of startup advice out there, I would say is, you know, focus on a really niche cohort, you know, do things that don't scale, you know, make, make, make one use case that's really great. And then you grow from there. And I think that's, uh, you know, I, I, I, I, I think…”

“by not understanding the details under the hood right now, you then very quickly get to a place where you're kind of limited. At a certain point where you create something that's big enough that you can't change.”

“the extensibility that existing coding environments have is so, so, so limited. So if you think that the UI is going to change a lot, if you think that the form factor program is going to change a lot, you necessarily need to have control over the entire application.”

“it's kind of a new form of product building where, um, it's very interdisciplinary in that we are something in between a normal software company, uh, and then in between a normal software company and then a, a foundation model company in that, um, you know, uh, we want to develop a, you know, we're developing a product…”

“code is this weird form of work where sometimes really the next five, 10, 20, 30 minutes of your work is entirely predictable from looking over your shoulder. And I would contrast this with writing.”

“So the, the deep seek Stream the thinking tokens moment was a very big moment for industry, I think, because open AI did have the technology, but they decided that for competitive reasons, which, you know, are, it's a reasonable thing to think, no pun intended. They were going to withhold it. And also it wasn't clear…”

“we don't spend that much time building scaffolding around the parts that don't match that because our general mindset is in two months, there's going to be a better model and it's going to blow away whatever, you know, the current set of limitations are.”

“too many PMs causes problems. You know, we'll like fill the world with decks and ideas versus execution. So I think that the, I think it's a good thing when you have a PM that has, uh, that is working with maybe slightly too many engineers, because it means that they're not going to get in and micromanage.”

“I want to kill the idea that you have to be a good prompt engineer. I think if we do our jobs, that stops being true. You know, it's just one of those, like, sharp edges of models that experts can learn, but then you just, over time, you shouldn't need to know all that.”

“Instead, we want to have a whole idea, give it to a team. So they see the whole, they really understand it. Right. And then they can come up with their tasks and they can figure out how to track that and break it into pieces so they can actually take more responsibility. And so what we see is way more engagement, you…”

“the other thing I've seen is when the team is just continuously delivering meaningful things, it doesn't have to line up. Because from the executive level, if you are CPO or CTO, or I mean, in these bigger cases, it's more like, you know, VP in some area, but you're coming to the table where you're supposed to be…”

“The thing is that, like, I would say if you have a feature factory, meaning you're continually cranking out features, you're probably quite healthy. All you need to do is feed a different input to the beginning of the factory, right? What most teams are struggling with is that they can't, they can't, they don't have…”

“as a startup, your job is to take on technical debt, right? Because that is how you operate faster than a bigger company, right? Bigger companies don't take on technical debt. They pay it usually right away, or they're paying back technical debt. From the days when they were a startup.”

“But these are all features that every competitor knows about, right? Like these are public. Like if a user is asking us for it, they're asking everybody for it. And every team has essentially more or less the same list and everybody's prioritizing it. And yeah, sure you can win a little by like extra nicely…”

“and a lot of times the biggest wins will come from the secret roadmap, right? That's the game-changing stuff, right? It's not gonna be the user requests usually that are gonna do that.”

“That product market fit can be so strong sometimes that it can be hard to actually build something because you actually can't tell if what you're building is what's responsible for growing the thing or if it's actually hurting it and, you know, this is growing despite what, what you're doing basically. And I think…”

“one of the insights that we had, which was unique, was as the company gets bigger, you can actually create alignment by causing internal virality. If there's enough people in the company, it actually starts acting like a, like a consumer base might. If you share something interesting with someone, they will share it…”

“What then is the true secret behind virality? And he said, it is word of mouth. It is the virality you can't measure that isn't a mechanic that isn't in a feature. It is when one user spontaneously tells another user About your product.”

“For all of those metrics, I think you will significantly beat your industry benchmarks if you go to the effort of one-on-one onboarding your early customers.”

“And I'd say the second thing is to get to products market fit. You have to deliberately not act on the feedback of many of your early users.”

“And that's the problem with rewards is they just massively undermine intrinsic motivation. And that's why gamification doesn't work. And when gamification does work, it's because the underlying experience was already designed like a game.”

“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 things around. It's using your CPU and your memory to do the…”

“if you think about it, as more and more of our lives are influenced and actually controlled by the software we use, um, if we don't have fundamental freedoms attached to that software, we're, we're not truly free.”

“you know, one thing if you're really open and open source, sometimes you have to stand up the bullies and you have to fight to protect your open source ideals. Otherwise people could take advantage of it in a way that ultimately can destroy everything you've created.”

“I think the key thing, uh, really that we do is we actually look for agreement from people who have disagreed in the past. Uh, and, and what we see is when people actually have that sort of surprising agreement, that's, that's what makes the notes, uh, so neutral and, and accurate and well written really overall, um,…”

“our view is it's actually, we want to have all of humanity here, because if we have all of humanity, we can, we then have the data to understand what notes will be helpful to actual humanity. You know, we can, we can better model that better or better understand and better show those notes. So it's advantageous to have…”

“People are actually more willing to cross partisan boundaries when they are anonymous or pseudonymous than when they are under their real name.”

“when you overpay people, what happens is that, that they actually become more and more scared that they they'll lose it. And then they become more and more conservative because they don't want to rock the boat and they actually don't work. They, they do what they're told as opposed to do what they should do.”

“I believe that innovation or product is, is a conflict sport. It's like a, it's, it's where you have to have arguments in order to be better. And every time you have an argument, it gets better.”

“There's a, there's an amazing amount of, uh, uh, entrepreneurs who are dyslexic. And I, I, I attribute it back to the fact is it's because we couldn't get jobs. We just went to create our own, our own thing. Cause we couldn't like, we had to figure out our own way to work.”

“product market feed in general have only one metric. Only one metric. Retention. Look, it's really simple. If you create value, they will come back. That's it. If they are not coming back, that means that you are not creating value.”

“there are only two reasons that you would like to give up. One is that your mission is wrong, right? So, so the problem disappears. And if the problem disappears, your mission is no longer relevant or no longer valid, then you might, might want to consider to give. The other one is that if the team is not right, then…”

“the scaling in post-chaining itself is not hitting the wall, and that's because Basically, we, we went from, like, raw data sets from, from pre-trained models to infinite amount of tasks that you can teach the model in the post-training world via reinforcement learning. So any task, for example, like, how to search the…”

“And the reason why I really love, like, synthetic, like, relying purely on synthetic data instead of, like, collecting Data from humans is because it's, like, much more scalable. It's cheap, less than how, like, you literally sample from the model, and you teach the core behaviors of the models, and that will…”

“I actually, like, AI research progress is bottlenecked by, like, management. Like, research management is because you have, like, constrained set of compute, and you need to, like, allocate the compute to the research path that you feel the most Commenced about. It was like, you need to, like, really, you need to have,…”

“I just think the overlap of most valuable things you can do with a product and the things that happen to be fully quantifiable is, like, maybe 20%, which leaves 80% of the value space unaddressable by the people who only look at the quantifiable things.”

“almost all of the alpha in the world is now in the, exactly the things that are unobvious, but true, and the things that people dismiss as an E or so”

“enterprise software is, uh, Overfit to the sales process, um, which is that, um, it wins the RFPs because it has every feature ever, or at least a way of putting a checkbox next to every RFP line ever, but they don't, they're not good, right? Like, it's a, it's a great, an RFP is a great example of overfitting, um, in,…”

“most of the time you end up in a bad part of a tree in a bad, in a local maxima of a path dependent environment by only making good choices. People think that like making a good choice inoculates you from ending, from, from making mistakes, um, or that the presence of a kind of downside of an idea ends up disqualifying…”

“Most CEOs, most companies can't even successfully do that and, um, just like engage in like this sort of pulling future profits forward at a discount or even defecting on partnerships that would be much more long-term valuable.”

“the best companies, I believe are sort of virtually resemble, like, I mean, from, at least from the perspective of the leader, resemble some kind of cockpit or maybe like a room full of dials, right? Like full of dials or levers for, um, you know, monetization. Like it's like my, my job is like adding as many of these…”

“the rarest thing in the world is not even creative, creativity or genius. It's, it's, it's courage. So let's lower the net amount of courage needed. Um, that, honestly, that's one of those things you can probably run a career, like an entire career on, or like reinvent an industry on.”

“speed, what it really looks like is, you know, you have some rough time budget for how long you think something's gonna take, and by the time 10% of it has passed, you have a workable solution, right? It's not like, oh, at the halfway point, we have something that is maybe a candidate that we can play around with. It's…”

“And my goal is to feel bad in the same way that customers feel bad. Right. They come to us with a request. Hey, we want X. And it's like, there's something motivating it. And it's not, you, you can do the normal analytical thing and be like, ask five Y's and like, try to figure out like, well, what are your goals? And,…”

“if, if you're, if you're leaving something on the table, right, in terms of like the kind of impact that you are having at your job, that's probably the thing that you're leaving on the table. You're probably already doing a good job of, you know, collaborating with engineering and, uh, and design, right. It's probably…”

“you do not need growth teams until you actually can start running experiments on your user base, which means that you have volume of users that you can learn from and optimize and innovate on. And that first wave of growth has to be a founder led.”

“If you have the overall business slowing down, your head of growth is destined to fail because the reason business is slowing down is much deeper than not having a growth team. Growth team can optimize growth can maybe lift It by 10, 15%.”

“to ever promise a homepage redesign or marketing site redesign in order to drive more acquisition. Is a failed promise that is going to be led by lots of agency money spending, uh, often a million dollars plus, lots of arguing about which shade of blue your, uh, brand color is going to be, and, uh, eight to 10 months…”

“However, just removing steps or yanking or simplifying things to an oblivion where you lose an identity of what you even do or what you're capable of doing, uh, is a completely failed growth tactic. So simplifying may be an initiative of a different problem that you're solving, but if you ever have a line item on your…”

“So the thing that we probably believe to be true that not that many people agree with us on is that the, the management team is really where we think all the alpha comes from. You can't get the industry wrong. Cause if you hire the best management team in the world to run a typewriter business, you're gonna lose money.…”

“And like, I think whenever I talk to any small seed stage company who's asking, should I hire a PM? I'm like, absolutely not. Until you cannot do the job anymore, you yourself should be the PM. The co-founders, the founders, they need to be that.”

“the problem is that every incumbent is gonna copy your product, they're gonna bundle it with their platforms, and then they're gonna kill the economics.”

“look, you're gonna wake up tomorrow and Gmail and Apple mail and everything is just gonna have these swipes and snoozes and it's just gonna be part of the UI is not a, um, a good, or it's not a durable source of advantage.”

“I think it's very misguided for leaders to have this notion that their most important role is to keep people happy, is to create like this, you know, high engagement workforce. High engagement workforce is great. I think what that comes from is winning culture, which means we're set up for success.”

“it must be true that if there's 10 times engineers, and I would argue there definitely are, there must be 10 times product managers too. But at the same time, those 10 times product managers, because product management is ultimately about leverage, so it's about helping other people have dramatically more impact than…”

“What will make my AI experience really great? It's definitely not going to be the models because like these models are mostly going to be somewhat replaceable and you could say, okay, well, is it going to be the prompts? Maybe, but you know, so many good prompts are better than others. And you certainly like, that's…”

“it's a data management problem. Like, it's getting access to good data, getting access to high quality data, getting access to timely data, and getting it to the LLM to get the LLM to make a smart decision. That's where 90% of the calories go.”

“The real thing, which is staring everybody in the face, is it's all about the business rules. Like, that is what drives the lock-in.”

“in the world of AI, it seems like distribution is more likely to get hard than easy. So, so like, uh, you know, if you think about, for example, diminishing returns on cold email, because cold email is getting easier and easier to send even worse spam. Like it sounds better, but it's, you know, effectively causing…”

“It's interesting because people used to talk about people who are T-shaped or whatever. I've never really loved the analogy, because it's more like people are scribble shaped, like, I mean, like, there's the really best people you've worked with, they're more like scribbles than they are, um, T-shaped, because of…”

“And the, the message is really in the medium here, which is that I am looking to try to find the winning tactic and turn it into a winning strategy. I don't know actually which one of those things is gonna be the most important thing in launching this product. So I'm trying a lot of things, you know, with that old…”

“what I want to see is GitHub Copilot deleting one million lines of code. Like that's when, you know, we're actually at this point where this is close to an engineer.”

“I think if you don't have like two or three big projects that are on fire, you're probably not pushing hard enough because you're not really trying things that are outside of your, like, if everything's going well, are you really trying, are you really taking the risks you need to be taking? So I think you kind of have…”

“we captured, you know, just what happens if we add an opt out button and adding an opt out button when you would think like as a PM, oh, I'm like, you know, now users might not engage with my feature. That's a bad thing, but it was a huge win to let them do that. And, and the learning here was that this intentionality…”

“Your phone, you know, like there being a really cool haptic pattern as you extend your streak, um, all of this stuff wins and it's cool because I think it wins There's a few reasons. One is it just makes you feel good, right? You know, you, you get some cool moment in your streak and, and, and we celebrate you and we…”

“and then finally, and I think this is the most underrated, what did we learn about the quality of each person's individual judgment? Because at the end of the day, thinking about influence is thinking about the people problem, and the people dynamics. So if your executive is making 10 decisions in a row about some…”

“every customer of any type of product, I would argue, even in the enterprise, in their early stage of using the product is lazy, vain, and selfish.”

“Second, they are way better at negotiating than you. So, any time dealing with a superior negotiator, the only thing you can do to try and even the scales is move the negotiation async. So founders repeat after me. I'm talking to you directly now. You will say to corp dev, you know, I am not alone in this decision. I…”

“In those cases, I only would want to bring on an architect if they'd been an architect before. If they'd only been an optimizer, they are going to fail because they've never written playbook from scratch.”

“And that idea of just doing five of them You hit what's called data saturation. And so this is the thing in qualitative research, um, where the kind of the, the, the common version of this is everybody after four or five is like, oh, for God's sakes, please don't let me sit through any more of these. Like, I get it.…”

“when a problem is truly being felt by the market, people will get on the call. People will respond. And there, you know, if I can compare two engagements at a time that we're running, I see one where it's a two percent interested rate, and then I'm, I'm seeing another one that's actually at 12% interested rate. And…”

“everyone can keeps coming, always comes back to like, we have the sales problem. We have the sales problem. We have, you know, an outbound problem. And yes, there could be some technical things going on that you need to look at. Like maybe you've blasted, you, you leverage clay and you blast It's at a thousand people…”

“I have this like theory that like, maybe you shouldn't hire any salespeople until series A. Right. Because seed is all about experimentation and proving out that experiment. And then obviously series A is about, you know, exploiting that learning, but I see so many people, I mean, early state hiring for early stage…”

“I would say 40 to 50% have to sell some form of service before they can sell a technology.”

“software, like agents being able to do software, Is how AI gets more general because software runs our lives, runs the internet, runs our businesses. And so the more competent AI becomes at software, the more general they are in terms of what they can do.”

“I have this that's been called, uh, not by me, dubbed as Amjad's law, which is, um, the return on investment for learning to code is doubling every six months.”

“what's the most dangerous thing in a tech company? A PM without a way to create impact. Oh no, he's toeing the line here. Maybe you know this person. Maybe you've been this person. I certainly have. Where you know you want to do something big, but you're not quite sure what the problem is, and so you go around…”

“When people get trained to be a product owner, it's usually a two-day class where they teach them, hey, this is how you break down a backlog. This is how you do stand-ups with your teams. This is how you think about prioritizing work. This is how you manage your backlog, prioritize it for the developers. This is how…”

“take Scrum away. You still need product management, right? Like product owner doesn't exist without Scrum. That's not a thing, but you still need product managers. And that's why all product owners should be product managers. They should be fundamentally product managers.”

“look at some of the experiments that you thought were your biggest winners. Look at the downstream metrics for a year, two years on that experiment, and I'll bet you'd be surprised how many times the metric is different than what you thought it would be after a year.”

“If you think about in a business case, if I give you A little less, a little monetary boost and reduce that monetary friction. I can actually causally change your ability to become successful. Cause I've given you a little bit more time to try that idea a little bit longer. I've given you that opportunity to move your…”

“orienting every team to think about the total number of people, not the rate, but the total number of people Who got to the end of their kind of part of the journey is a very powerful way to incentivize people to do the, the right thing in terms of getting people set up versus do the, I'm going to constrict the top,…”

“And a lot of teams get very nervous. Their retention rate went down. Their LTV went down. Oh my goodness. This is going to affect our ability to pay. No, your CAC also went down by probably more. And so now you have the ability to likely spend more. And you have more people through the door, um, getting to each point…”

“the how the technical architecture determines strategy in a technology company even more than the kind of what and who we're building for. If you build the right kind of technical how and set yourself up to have a platform that can be adaptable, flexible, that is incredibly valuable over the long term.”

“Education is very aspirational. And so what a lot of people missed in that, in education is, yes, we want people to actually take the course, but that's actually, in many cases, not the job to be done, that there's an emotional job that's even more important, which is I'm feeling like I'm making progress in my…”

“I think there's a very real sense in which models today are not intelligence limited. They're eval limited. They can actually do much more and be much more correct on a wider range of things than they are today, and it's really about sort of teaching them.”

“And some of these model, uh, these evals we've seen, like, even the golden answer, I'm like, I'm not sure a human would say it, or, like, I think that math is actually a little wrong, like, getting a hundred percent is gonna be really hard, because even just grading them is very challenging, so, like, I'd encourage…”

“That's another hot take of mine is I think the product market fits overrated. You have to actually think about product medium market fit.”

“if you're talking to an investor and that you don't have a zero day, go to market exploit that creates attention and turns it into sustainable, lucrative demand. You are probably going to fail.”

“Because, frankly, most doors that look like two-way doors are actually one-way doors. They are two-way doors at Bezos's level. But as a PM leader, for you, they are a one-way door. And that's what's making you busy.”

“I think the majority of the value is in the latter, is just having extreme clarity around the goal, um, and that allowed everybody to work towards optimizing the same goal. You're right, like, we did sort of just pick a point on the curve. I think it could have been any of those, and indeed, I, like, as part of…”