Lenny Rachitsky
@lennysan • 436,616 subscribers
Deeply researched product, growth, and career advice
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"Using coding agents well is taking every inch of my 25 years of experience as a software engineer, and it is mentally exhausting. I can fire up four agents in parallel and have them work on four different problems, and by 11am I am wiped out for the day. There is a limit on human cognition. Even if you're not reviewing everything they're doing, how much you can hold in your head at one time. There's a sort of personal skill that we have to learn, which is finding our new limits. What is a responsible way for us to not burn out, and for us to use the time that we have?" Simon Willison
Lenny Rachitsky1,933,214 views • 5 months ago
Cursor has spent its entire existence competing with every major AI lab and incumbent in the toughest market in tech—and has continued to win. So much so that Elon Musk bought them for $60 billion to help SpaceX win the AI race. They've done this by building one of the most talent-dense teams in history. Adam Ward (Adam Ward) is Head of Talent at Cursor—who acquired his legendary recruiting firm after he spent 20+ years building the most elite teams in tech—and in our conversation he shares the entire playbook for building high talent-density teams. We discuss: 🔸 Why the traditional recruiting funnel—the "funnel of doom"—guarantees mediocre hiring 🔸 Adam's three-step playbook for hiring the top 1% 🔸 The rise of the forward-deployed engineer 🔸 Today's "tale of two cities" talent market 🔸 The biggest mistake founders make with their first recruiting hire 🔸 The worst question you can ask when sourcing talent (you've definitely asked it) Watch the full episode right here 👇
Lenny Rachitsky236,447 views • 24 days ago
Fable is really good at launch videos It essentially one-shotted this video. I told it to read my launch post and create a launch video. That's it. It ran for 46 minutes (without asking me any questions), found all the product logos, and spit this out. I then asked it to add music, so it logged into my ElevenLabs account within my Chrome, generated the music, and mixed it in. Wild.
Lenny Rachitsky347,022 views • 1 month ago
There's a very good reason Evan Spiegel is investing so heavily in hardware. Everything Snap has built over the last 15 years has been copied. His thesis is that as AI makes writing software easier and easier, hardware will be one of the only remaining durable moats.
Lenny Rachitsky340,384 views • 2 months ago
The CPO who regrets that product management exists Tom Verrilli (Tom Verrilli) is Chief Product Officer at Whatnot and a long-time product leader at Twitch and Twitter. We discuss: 🔸 How AI is exposing rampant “product theater” 🔸 The PM skill trending up fastest (hint: systems thinking) 🔸 Why AI’s biggest unlock for PMs is now in data science, not prototyping 🔸 Why you need to stop promoting your A-players out of the work they’re great at 🔸 Why “hire great people and get out of their way” is wrong Full episode for your enjoyment 👇
Lenny Rachitsky133,026 views • 1 month ago
Dianne Penn is Head of Product for Research and Labs at Anthropic. She joined in 2023 as their first technical PM (when there were just five product engineers) and has helped ship every Claude model from Claude 2 to Mythos. We discuss: 02:31 Early Anthropic 08:55 The two biggest inflections 13:50 Inside the exponential 20:02 Token maxing 23:30 Anthropic Labs and the incubation model 27:30 How the AI research role works 31:35 How to become a top AI researcher 35:18 Frontier model safeguards 39:38 Hiring in the AI era 44:16 Building evals 47:48 Evals are the new PRDs 49:55 The importance of hands-on leadership 52:46 Finding joy in AI 58:10 How Dianne uses Claude 01:01:05 Avoiding overreliance on AI 01:03:50 The constitution that makes Claude better 01:07:11 AI writing and verification 01:11:40 Where human brains will continue to be valuable 01:14:10 Navigating AI with kids 01:16:26 Alignment, the future of the PM role, and burnout 01:21:54 Lightning round and final thoughts
Lenny Rachitsky157,470 views • 1 month ago
The Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 episode Marc is a many-time founder, investor, co-creator of the web browser, co-founder of Netscape, the "a" in a16z. In this very special conversation, we dig into why we’re living through one of the most unique times in history, and what comes next. We discuss: 🔸 Why AI is arriving at the perfect moment to counter demographic collapse and declining productivity 🔸 How Marc is raising his 10yo kid to thrive in the AI future 🔸 The 3-way standoff that’s happening between PMs, designers, and engineers 🔸 What’s actually going to happen with AI and jobs (spoiler: he thinks the panic is “totally off base”) 🔸Why AI is "the philosopher’s stone" made real 🔸 Why you should still learn to code 🔸 His media diet: X and old books, nothing in between Don't miss this one. Full episode embedded here on X 👇
Lenny Rachitsky771,987 views • 7 months ago
Anthropic co-founder Ben Mann on why he chose Montessori for his daughter: "If this were 10-20 years ago, I'd be lining her up for top-tier schools and extracurriculars. But now I don't think any of it's going to matter. Learning facts is going to fade into the background. What matters is that she's happy, thoughtful, curious, and kind."
Lenny Rachitsky1,229,283 views • 1 year ago
Ben Mann (Ben Mann) left OpenAI in 2020 with the entire safety team to co-found Anthropic (now reportedly valued at over $100B). In a rare interview, Ben opens up about: 🔸 What he saw at OpenAI that convinced him to leave 🔸 The AI nightmare scenarios that concern him most 🔸 His take on Meta’s $100M talent wars 🔸 Why he believes 20% unemployment is inevitable 🔸 His “economic Turing test” for knowing when we’ve achieved AGI—and why it’s likely coming by 2027-2028 🔸 How focusing on AI safety created Claude’s beloved personality 🔸 What three skills he’s teaching his kids to thrive in an AI future 🔸 So much more Listen now 👇 • YouTube: • Spotify: • Apple: Thank you to our wonderful sponsors for supporting the podcast: 🏆 —Turn customer pain into product revenue: 🏆 LucidLink—Real-time cloud storage for teams: 🏆 Fin—The #1 AI agent for customer service:
Lenny Rachitsky1,211,828 views • 1 year ago
.Brian Chesky on how being in the details paradoxically creates less work for him
Lenny Rachitsky1,934,788 views • 2 years ago
"The ones who were the best at working in the past, the ones who mastered the old game, will find it the hardest to go through this reinvention stage." Every PM needs to listen to today's episode with Nikhyl Singhal. This is the most honest, real-talk conversation I've had about what's actually happening to PM careers right now. We discuss: 🔸 Why the next 2 years will be the most chaotic in PM history 🔸 Why half of today's PMs won't survive the shift 🔸 Why the fancy logos on your resume now matter less than ever 🔸 The 'smiling exhaustion' he's seeing across top PMs 🔸 His prediction: companies shed 30,000, rehire 8,000 — all AI-first Full episode here on X 👇 Also find it on: • YouTube: • Spotify: • Apple: Thank you to our sponsors for supporting the podcast: 🏆 WorkOS — Modern identity platform for B2B SaaS, free up to 1 million MAUs: 🏆 Vanta — automate compliance, manage risk, and accelerate trust with AI: .
Lenny Rachitsky378,762 views • 4 months ago
.Dan Shipper 📧: "The AI jobpocalypse is not a thing. The mass unemployment thing that AI lab CEOs are talking about—that's not going to happen. AI models make yesterday's human competence cheap. But what's interesting is that since everyone's using the same models, it all looks the same. So it becomes commoditized. It's not valuable anymore. And what humans do is we go in there, and we're like, yeah, we have all this frozen human competence from yesterday, how do I use this to make something new and interesting, today?"
Lenny Rachitsky276,409 views • 3 months ago
My biggest takeaways from Dhanji Prasanna, CTO of Block: 1. Block’s internal AI agent "Goose" is saving employees on average 8 to 10 hours per week. The company built an open-source tool called Goose that handles tasks from organizing files to writing code. Across the entire company, they’re seeing roughly 20% to 25% of manual work hours saved, and that number keeps climbing. 2. Non-technical teams are getting the biggest productivity boost from AI, not engineers. People in legal, risk management, and operations are now building their own software tools that previously would have required months on an engineering team’s roadmap. What used to take weeks now takes hours, and employees do it themselves without waiting. 3. Changing organizational structure unlocked more productivity than any AI tool. To transform into a truly “technology driven” company, Block reorganized from separate business units (each with their own GM and engineering teams) to a single functional structure where all engineers report to one leader. This “boring” change enabled a unified technology strategy and drove more acceleration than any AI tool. 4. Code quality has almost nothing to do with product success. YouTube became one of Google’s most successful products despite storing videos as blobs in a MySQL database with a slow Python stack. Meanwhile, Google Video had superior technology with more formats and higher resolution but failed completely. The lesson: Focus on solving real problems for people, not on perfect code. 5. AI enables teams to explore multiple paths simultaneously instead of choosing one up front. Previously, limited resources meant teams had to pick their best guess for an experiment. Now AI can build multiple different approaches overnight, allowing teams to compare five or six options and throw away entire features if they don’t feel right—a practice that was unthinkable before. 6. Most successful products start as tiny experiments, not big initiatives. Cash App began as a hack-week idea. Goose started as one engineer’s side project. Block’s Bitcoin product came from a three-person hackathon team. In contrast, Google Wave had 70 to 80 engineers before having real users and failed. Small experiments that prove value beat large up-front investments. 7. Leaders must use AI tools daily to drive real organizational adoption. Block’s CEO Jack Dorsey, the CTO, and the entire executive team use Goose every single day. This hands-on experience teaches them how workflows actually change and drives authentic adoption throughout the organization far more than reading articles or attending conferences about AI. 8. AI excels at new projects but struggles with complex legacy systems. Teams building new applications or working on greenfield platforms see aggressive productivity gains. But in existing codebases with years of accumulated complexity, the gains aren’t there yet. Deploy AI where it works best rather than everywhere at once. 9. Giving away valuable technology for free can be a winning strategy. Block open-sourced Goose even though it could have been a standalone billion-dollar business. Even their competitors actively use it. The philosophy: build things that benefit everyone and outlast your own company. This commitment to open-source technology attracts talent and builds industry goodwill while advancing everyone’s capabilities. 10. Purpose should drive your technology choices, not the other way around. Rather than chasing every AI trend or trying to be at the forefront of every technology, identify what truly matters to your company and customers. Block stays focused on economic empowerment, which guides their technology decisions and keeps them from getting distracted by every new advancement. Listen now 👇 • YouTube: • Spotify: • Apple: Thank you to our wonderful sponsors for supporting the podcast: 🏆 Sinch — Build messaging, email, and calling into your product: 🏆 Figma Make — A prompt-to-code tool for making ideas real: 🏆 — A global leader in digital identity verification: A
Lenny Rachitsky812,251 views • 10 months ago
