Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:42:44 · Josh Woodward, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:42:44] S1: Yeah, we usually are thinking somewhere on the order of about six months. And usually I say that because that's that almost possible window where you assume every lab is cranking out some new pre-training model a couple times a year. There's individual points in between. So you kind of have an overall cadence of where the models are. And then I think we are almost imagining in about a hundred days usually, we always think about where can you move your product meaningfully forward? Our best Labs team, they all do that. They'll go from idea to some meaningful milestone in 50 to 100 days. And part of that is also how do you design a culture and an environment where you unblock a lot of stuff so you can just let people cook? And so that's the other part of is creating that environment. But we think about planning as kind of almost like rolling six months maybe to answer your question. [00:43:38] S0: So I had this Lenny and Friends summit, it was last week of the day we're recording this, and Dan Shipper gave this really interesting talk about how to build where the tech is just constantly changing underneath you. And his advice is to have a frontier team that's dedicated to testing out the new stuff. And basically it's their job, try all the new stuff, report on what we need to pay attention to so that the rest of the company can not have to be distracted and focus on the task at hand. How do you feel about that as a model for companies?
00:44:08 · Josh Woodward
[00:44:08] S1: I think every company definitely needs a set of people, a team, however you want to manifest it. That is, their job is to be at the frontier and they're almost like if they haven't heard about the latest hot thing viral on X in the last 24 hours is like, what are you doing at your job? So I think there's definitely an element of you want people plugged in to the hive mind of how people are building and thinking and all the model releases. They're the people who have eight, $200 a month subscriptions on everything. Do you know what I mean? So you have to architect the organization where that can exist. I think the second thing though that's just as important is the environment of which those people can build. And so that's the other maybe part of that. And then I think the third part, which is honestly where if you look at the history, and I've read a bunch of books on this because most, if you just look at the data, a large company who starts a lab, the lab is usually ineffective and fizzles out after about three to four years. Or it may have duration, but the company can never commercialize the things coming out of the lab. And so you get things like someone comes by and sees the future and then they do it as a separate company or whatever. And there's famous examples throughout history of that. And so I think there is this interesting balance of can you have a team of people who live at the frontier like Dan says, who are building frontier things but can somehow bridge or connect across the bigger company in a way that it's not, oh, that's just some weird R&D group always coming up with gimmicks and toys? Do you know what I mean? And so I think it takes a certain person or a certain set of people who can actually be like, "Hey, that thing looks like a toy right now. That's going to be essential to our future in five years." And that's actually where, at least studying history, where sometimes these frontier ideas fall short, you can get the first two things right and then fail on the third one and then the whole thing really doesn't matter. Do you know what I mean?
00:46:12 · Lenny Rachitsky, Josh Woodward
[00:46:12] S0: Yeah. It's interesting as just even Anthropic has a labs team, the most cutting edge company, they're just at the frontier already. They're like, "Okay, but we also need a labs team to actually watch the frontier frontier." [00:46:25] S1: Yeah, that's right. Well, one thing we joke about too inside as Labs has grown now and we've had a few projects thankfully have kind of hit and are lots of users now and growing, we've actually internally to this point of common language, what we started to find was a bigger project like Notebook in terms of users or Flow or AI Studio or these things that are grown out of Labs. In some ways there's a risk they crowd out the zero to one stuff. And so the terms we've started using is there's zero to one Labs, there's one to 10 Labs, and there's 10 to 100. And these may not mean anything to your audience, but to us, we actually have kind of encoded these are different stages of the Labs life cycle and we want all of these products to have this innovative energy that's common, but inside each of those stages, there's very different challenges and very different things you're optimizing for. And in zero to one, you're looking at eyeballs like we talked about. And in maybe 10 to 100, you're looking at waterfalls and CPAs and thinking about how are we actually converting people to these magic moments in the product? And it's a scaling game in a lot of way.
00:47:37 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:47:37] S0: Say someone listening is convinced they should set up a frontier team, a Labs team, and it feels like Labs teams have evolved a little bit and it used to be build the next big business unit is the idea here. It's like, okay, what's a new technology that is unlocking something or a core business? I wonder if that's true, but that's what it feels like to me. But I guess just with that in mind, what are maybe three tips for someone that wants to set up a Labs team internally?
00:48:01 · Josh Woodward
[00:48:01] S1: Yeah. I think one, you've got to try to create a space where weird things can grow and you can't just nestle this under an existing business unit. It has to have its own kind of independence is one. And in some companies that means it needs to report to the CEO or it needs to report into enough of a distance in a way. And we can go into that if you want, but that's super important. I think the second thing is a set of people, and in the case of us, this was this user's first, Google second, Labs third thinking where the job of the lab is to make users successful and make Google successful. It's not to make itself successful. And so there's a bit of maybe a humility or a collaboration or this mindset of what does success look like? And I think for us, how we've broken that down and how I would encourage companies to think about it is your goal of this labs to graduate things to existing products or is your goal to go invent new product lines and categories? And in our case, we started and it was a graduation lab and it's expanded over time as we've started to realize AI really transforms and blurs a lot of categories. But being very clear about what game you're playing and what does winning or losing look like would be the second thing. So isolated in some way, but also part of the same team. And I think the third thing, and we talk about this a little bit on Labs is, and I can imagine for maybe CEOs listening or other kind of C-suite people, use your lab not just for product development or technology exploration, but even for challenging how the company works and almost the way things happen. And that's actually the phrase we use on the team is Labs sometimes creates good trouble at Google. So there's bad trouble you don't want to create, but good trouble, give you an example. We were one of the first teams that were like, we're seeing the job roles blur. We have to have a builder job ladder and we need to think about it differently and we should use Labs as the place to pilot it before we roll it out across Google. And so that's another way you can think of the multidimensionality of a lab in a way.
00:50:20 · Lenny Rachitsky, Josh Woodward
[00:50:20] S0: You just think about the processes and ways of working, not just products necessarily. That's really interesting. [00:50:26] S1: Yeah. Yeah. [00:50:26] S0: What about the type of people that you would put on this lab team? You mentioned this unlearning rate is a really interesting way to think about. What do you look for and what's a person you want to avoid on the lab team? [00:50:35] S1: Yeah, yeah. Great one. Man, we are obsessed about finding people who just can't stop themselves from building. I mentioned that earlier. We have a whole doc on the team, Labs in a nutshell. We have one on Gemini too, Gemini in a nutshell. The first week someone joins the team, I email it to them. And most of them have seen it before as part of some of our hiring screening too. They build all the time. They're intellectually curious. They're reading, they're on X, they're listening to podcasts. They are obsessed about solving people's problems, not about their own ego or glory. They are the people when you're around them, they add energy. You leave a conversation, you're like, "I want to be with that person. I'll run through a wall with that person." Do you know what I mean? We've got 17 or 18 of them. Maybe I can send some of them to you after if you want to include in the show notes. [00:51:29] S0: I'd love that.