Lenny Rachitsky
@lennysan • 364,460 subscribers
Deeply researched product, growth, and career advice
Shorts
Videos
.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 Rachitsky274,367 次观看 • 11 天前
"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 Rachitsky1,927,173 次观看 • 2 个月前
"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 Rachitsky377,189 次观看 • 1 个月前
Claude Code's Head of Product: "The PM role is changing a lot. And it's changing really quickly. The most important thing for building AI-native products is iterating quickly and finding a way to launch features every single week. Putting less emphasis on making sure that you are aligning multi-quarter roadmaps with your partner teams, and more emphasis on, okay, how can we figure out the fastest way to get something out the door."
Lenny Rachitsky322,119 次观看 • 1 个月前
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 Rachitsky770,516 次观看 • 4 个月前
Narrative violation: Anthropic's Head of Growth says we'll need more PMs, not fewer. "While PMs and designers are getting leverage from AI, engineering is getting the most leverage right now. If you think about a default team with 5 engineers, 1 designer, 1 PM—with Claude Code, that five engineers is like 2 to 3x'd, and the PMs and designers have also increased, but now they're managing what is effectively a much larger group of engineers. So though the head count and the org structure hasn't changed, you're now just dealing with a situation of maybe 15-20 engineers, 2 PMs, and 2 designers across the board. We're feeling PM and design is just being squeezed. Just absolutely squeezed. We just need to actually hire a ton more PMs."
Lenny Rachitsky274,614 次观看 • 1 个月前
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 Rachitsky1,228,801 次观看 • 10 个月前
“I like being scared” Molly Graham (Molly Graham) has worked for some of tech’s most effective leaders, including Mark Zuckerberg, Chamath Palihapitiya, Sheryl Sandberg, and Bret Taylor. She’s best known for her “Give away your Legos” framework and her collection of practical mental models for leading through hypergrowth. Today she leads a community for leaders navigating rapid scale, growth, and change. In our conversation, we dig into: 🔸 Why the best careers look like J-curves, not stairs. 🔸 “The waterline model” for diagnosing team problems (and why you should “snorkel before you scuba”) 🔸 “Give away your Legos”: her framework for scaling yourself as a leader 🔸 Six rules for creating effective goals 🔸 Three rules of thumb for leading through rapid scale 🔸 So much more Listen now 👇 • YouTube: • Spotify: • Apple: Thank you to our wonderful sponsors for supporting the podcast: 🏆 DX — The developer intelligence platform designed by leading researchers: 🏆 Brex — The banking solution for startups: 🏆 GoFundMe Giving Funds — Make helping a habit:
Lenny Rachitsky578,851 次观看 • 5 个月前
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 Rachitsky1,211,619 次观看 • 10 个月前
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 Rachitsky811,752 次观看 • 7 个月前
People don't understand executive calendars. I describe an executive's calendar as like a strobe light going off. You wake up at 8AM, you've already got a huge list of urgent things going on. You go from a meeting with finance on a budget, to an interview for another executive, to a people problem, to a legal problem, to a product review. And the product manager coming to that product review, who's trying to make a pitch thinks I've been prepping for this meeting for two weeks. But the executive coming into that session hasn't thought about you since.
Lenny Rachitsky232,728 次观看 • 2 个月前
“Extraordinary results demand extraordinary effort” A powerful conversation with Matt MacInnis (Matt MacInnis), long-time COO and newly minted CPO at Rippling We discuss: 🔸 Matt’s transition from COO to CPO and what surprised him about leading product 🔸 The “high alpha, low beta” framework for evaluating people, processes, and products 🔸 Why you should deliberately understaff projects 🔸 Why you should treat escalations as gifts 🔸 Why processes exist to reduce volatility—and why it will also suppress creativity 🔸 When founders should quit their startups (hint: much earlier than VCs want you to) 🔸 Much more Listen now 👇 • YouTube: • Spotify: • Apple: Thank you to our wonderful sponsors for supporting the podcast: 🏆 Google Gemini — Your everyday AI assistant: 🏆 Datadog, Inc. — Now home to Eppo, the leading experimentation and feature flagging platform: 🏆 GoFundMe Giving Funds — Make year-end giving easy:
Lenny Rachitsky461,152 次观看 • 5 个月前
The fastest company in history to $1B did it with no VC money and fewer than 100 people. Surge AI has become the secret weapon behind Anthropic and Google's best models. Founder Edwin Chen (echen) built it without playing the Silicon Valley game—no viral posts, no fundraising treadmill. In my powerful conversation with Edwin Chen, we discuss: 🔸 How Claude got so good at coding and writing 🔸 Why the AI industry is optimizing for "dopamine instead of truth"—and delaying AGI 🔸 The problems with AI benchmarks and leaderboards 🔸 Why RL environments are the next frontier in AI training 🔸 Why taste and human judgment determine which AI models win 🔸 Why Edwin believes we’re still a decade away from AGI Listen now 👇 • YouTube: • Spotify: • Apple: Thank you to our wonderful sponsors for supporting the podcast: 🏆 Vanta — Automate compliance. Simplify security: 🏆 WorkOS — Modern identity platform for B2B SaaS, free up to 1 million MAUs: 🏆 Coda — The all-in-one collaborative workspace:
Lenny Rachitsky480,707 次观看 • 5 个月前