Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
01:10:33 · Lenny Rachitsky, Anish Acharya
[01:10:33] S0: What's a good heuristic if you're doing this enough? Is it build something once a month? Is it some number of hours per day sitting, talking, building? Anything that you think might help people be like, "Okay, you're doing a good job"? [01:10:46] S1: I mean, just ship something once a week, and it doesn't have to be crazy. For example, when I was playing around with Codex I had it build a slide deck for Mother's Day for my wife that pulled from my text messages. It looked at my photo gallery, it set some music to it, created a 20 slide deck of our relationship and pulled some cool old texts from when I first asked her out. It was a really nice Mother's Day. I mean, it wasn't important, it wasn't something that we might come back to, but it was shipping something. So, it can be that small. [01:11:18] S0: I know that you're our mutual friend, Nikhyl Singhal, you worked at Credit Karma with him, he had a really good way of thinking about this. He finds that people flip on AI and how they feel about it once they find some moment of joy that it had created for them, and this Mother's Day idea is such a good example. And so, I think that's kind of a tip I always think about is just what's something that just will bring you joy if this works. [01:11:44] S1: What's something you can do for someone else? Maybe that's a good starting point as well. [01:11:47] S0: I love that. Anish, before we get to our very exciting lightning round, is there anything else that you want to share? Anything else you want to double down on before we get into the lightning round?
01:11:47 · Lenny Rachitsky, Anish Acharya
[01:11:47] S0: I love that. Anish, before we get to our very exciting lightning round, is there anything else that you want to share? Anything else you want to double down on before we get into the lightning round? [01:11:58] S1: I don't think so, I've loved the conversation so far. [01:12:01] S0: Me too. And with that, we've reached our very exciting lightning round. I've got five questions for you. Are you ready? [01:12:06] S1: Okay. [01:12:07] S0: Here we go. What are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people?
01:12:12 · Anish Acharya, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:12:12] S1: Yeah, so okay. Conquest and Cultures is my very favorite book. It's Thomas Sowell, and it just talks about how conquests have led to culture change in different societies around the world, sometimes positive, sometimes negative. I think to me, it's just the best historic view of culture as the biggest driver of outcomes, and I've experienced a lot of that as somebody who was born in Canada and moved here to America, which has a very different culture of ambition. There's that word again. So, Conquest and Cultures is great. 7 Powers you mentioned is actually just an awesome book. I think it's a very intellectual distillation about moats and business theory and compounding advantages. I really like it. Maybe the third is the one that Mark ... I actually thought that he was maybe punking me when he sent this to me before I started. I said, "Mark, are there any books that I should read?" And he sent me a couple. And one was a book, a textbook called Increasing Returns to Scale, which I think is Brian Arthur is the author. It's an awesome book. It's a slightly dense study of why things like software have such outlier economic effects, but it really helps put things in perspective, or it helped me in terms of why does our industry work in the way that it does? Why does our culture work in the way that it does? Why are we so positive some? I'd love to say that we're better people, but I think it may be a sort of better system and structure we work with it. [01:13:33] S0: Favorite recent movie or TV show you have really enjoyed?
01:13:33 · Lenny Rachitsky, Anish Acharya
[01:13:33] S0: Favorite recent movie or TV show you have really enjoyed? [01:13:37] S1: Oh man, I watch trashy movies and TV. I mean, we- [01:13:39] S0: Acceptable. [01:13:40] S1: ... watched House of Dragon, which is pretty cool. [01:13:43] S0: That's not trashy. Yeah, that's great. [01:13:45] S1: I don't know. Yeah, maybe. It's not highbrow. It's not important with a capital I, but it was awesome. We loved that. And then I did see Odyssey. I saw it in London. I was there for a board meeting in an IMAX theater packed with people drinking pints and having fun. [01:13:45] S0: Amazing. [01:14:02] S1: And it was cool because it was just a whole ... The movie was great, but it was just like a theater experience, like a weird social experience kind of alone together. Those are two recent ones. [01:14:12] S0: I have not been able to get tickets to The Odyssey at an IMAX. I actually have a Grok Bot just watching the site constantly and- [01:14:12] S1: Perfect. [01:14:20] S0: ... finding me good seats. [01:14:21] S1: Perfect. [01:14:22] S0: Perfect. They've got the dumb CAPTCHA though on AMC website that it hasn't been able to get through. [01:14:27] S1: Really? [01:14:28] S0: It's like a tricky one. It's a really tricky one. [01:14:31] S1: Is it the select the fruits? Anyways.
01:14:31 · Anish Acharya, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:14:31] S1: Is it the select the fruits? Anyways. [01:14:33] S0: Yeah, it's like you have to click three different matching shapes, which come on, you can't do that? Hopefully by the time this comes out I've seen it. I think it's a few podcasts in a row I'm like, "I haven't seen it yet." Oh, man. Okay. Favorite new AI product? I don't know, favorite AI product recently that they've given you joy. [01:14:54] S1: Oh man, I've spent a lot of time with the personal agents. I think Grok's okay, I'm going to give it to Grok Bots only because it's just so unhinged for it to be so ambitious about caching credentials and getting work done on your behalf. I love it and I expect it from a startup, but they actually are doing things that I think no other sort of big company would do. It's really, really well done. It's a really thoughtful UI. It's got a really powerful foundation model. I think it also is like, okay, wait, maybe this is not a two-horse race on the sort of model side. So, I just think the product is fun and ambitious, and is sort of taking risks that other products like that wouldn't take. [01:15:31] S0: Two more questions. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to in work or in life?
01:15:31 · Lenny Rachitsky, Anish Acharya
[01:15:31] S0: Two more questions. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to in work or in life? [01:15:37] S1: Oh man, I've got one. I learned this or this is from my founder days but it also is something that's very true of parenting, which is don't discover things through painful experience that somebody can just tell you. And I unfortunately have had a bad habit of discovery versus learning from somebody who's just a few steps ahead of me, and I find my children have that habit too. [01:15:59] S0: What's one example of something that you wish someone had told you? [01:16:02] S1: I mean, for my kids it's don't touch the hot stove. For my startup, it was like- [01:16:02] S0: Like literally. [01:16:08] S1: Literally. For my startup, it was don't build a product and a platform at the same time. If you're going to be a platform company, build one. Our first company we tried to build a social platform for mobile games and be a gaming studio, and somebody wise told me right away, "Look, being a studio is so hard, much less being a studio and a platform. Pick one." And we did, and it took us years to figure out we were wrong. [01:16:30] S0: Final question. I asked Ben Horowitz what to ask you about, and he just said, "Ask him about his DJing. He's very good." And I found your DJ site. I don't know if that's you call it on SoundCloud/illscience. [01:16:43] S1: That's very good. Thank you.