Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
01:10:58 · Lenny Rachitsky, Molly Graham
[01:10:58] S0: You're coming in underclass. [01:10:58] S1: You're already too late. You know what I mean? If you're not automating every single part of your life and managing 26 agents, then I don't even know that you're behind. And every single conversation I have with every leader, every manager at all of the big labs, every company is like, "We are early. This is whatever sports ball game you want to be in, this is inning one, period one, yard one. We're early, and the future is ours to shape. It's yours." My friend Max Mullen said the distance from beginner to expert is really short. And I think that goes again to the fear narrative where I'm just like, "We need to be encouraging people to be part of shaping the future, not just making them terrified of it." And I feel like that is on all of us to some extent, but it is a slow takeoff, and it isn't like the future is next day. ... the slow takeoff, and it isn't like the future is next day, next month. It's going to take years to really understand what this new tool, this new technology, all these fun interns can actually do, and also what they're best at. I think that is a really powerful message because it helps people feel like, "Oh, okay, I am part of this," not holding on for dear life while being dragged by a plane that's taking off at a hundred miles an hour.
01:12:31 · Lenny Rachitsky, Molly Graham
[01:12:31] S0: I completely agree. In my last podcast conversation, I don't know when will come out when, is about this fear of the permanent underclass that if you don't catch up, if you're not on top of this, you're going to be left behind. I think there is definitely a part of that in a sense of many companies are doing extremely well and people that have joined those companies are going to be very successful and some companies aren't, and there's this whole other discussion around the socioeconomic divide growing significantly in the world and just what that causes in a world where there are many wealthy people, many more than there have ever existed. That's its own thing. We don't need to get all into that. [01:13:05] S1: Well, I hope you do many episodes on that someday, Lenny. But it is another area where I'm like, "I'm not sure we know what's real yet." I think it's obviously one of the most important conversations, but what is real and what is the future actually going to look like? To me, the stories out in the world, they're not real yet. We don't know, and I think that's important to name.
01:13:29 · Lenny Rachitsky
[01:13:29] S0: Oh, man. That's a big topic. The interesting part you mentioned that I wanted to follow thread on is this idea of you're not behind. What really helped me see this is Ian Silber, head of design at OpenAI was on the podcast recently and he made this really good point. He's like, "This is the best time in history to be a designer. If you just came in fresh as a new grad into design and just become really... You just start with all these tools that designers have now, you can accelerate so quickly and learn to do design faster than anyone's ever learned to do design." And I feel that with Clawdbot recently came out. There's all these skills people have built over time with Codex and Claude Code. I'm such a pro with all these tools and now it's just the tools are getting so much smarter you don't need a lot of the scaffolding that people have built over time. If someone were to start fresh today and try Clawdbot or even in Codex, you don't need to have spent years being on top of all of the news and all of the updates to it. You could just dive right in and build as much as people that have been on it for a long time could build. I feel like the actual main skill to build, something I've been thinking about... I tweeted this, but I feel like I didn't get enough traction because I think it's very important. I feel like the biggest skill to build right now is when you're about to do something to ask yourself, "Can AI help me with this thing?" Because once you get good at that, and I've been getting... I think about the stimulus and response kind of thing of meditation, you create more space between stimulus and response if you learn to be aware of what's [inaudible 01:15:05]. I feel like you need to insert, "Can AI help me with this?" Which sounds like dirty and what the hell? Why would you want AI? But I feel like that's a really new skill because then you can start... As these AI tools get better, you can start to leverage them in all these different ways that I think is what separates a lot of people right now.
01:15:23 · Molly Graham, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:15:23] S1: No, totally. And it goes to that point about the walls. I think those of us that have been around a long time and there's a way that things were done, there's a way that product was built, there's all these ways, those are walls. They're walls, they're old. And part of what we need to do, and I think part of what you're saying is you're actually little bit at an advantage if you don't know those walls exist. If you approach the world as if engineers didn't have a different role from X or Y or Z, or this is the way things are done, there is an advantage to being able to say, "What if? What if I just did it?" And to just try. And to your point to always think, "Hey, what's the best use of my time? And then what could an agent or a robot do for me?" And I think that's partially the point about the learners. If you're able to shed the sort of things you think you know and lean into the possibility and the first principles thinking, which I know you have a great article about too, that I think is going to define the future. Those are going to be the people that are going to shape what this thing looks like. [01:16:36] S0: Yeah. There's also a thread here around ambition that's been coming up a lot on the podcast. [01:16:42] S1: Oh, interesting.
01:16:42 · Molly Graham, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:16:42] S1: Oh, interesting. [01:16:43] S0: Yeah. This idea that now that it's so easy to do whatever you want, just describe it and it's built. The thing that we need to... In addition to asking ourselves, can AI help me with this thing is how do we be more ambitious with this idea? Because the tools can now just do so much and they're just waiting for you to tell me something more ambitious than that. That's all you got for me? And human nature doesn't... We're not used to end product teams and business just thinking about the most ambitious version of a thing. We're thinking about the MVP and what's the quickest way to get this out, and now it feels like the push is how do we think big? What's the hardest thing we can ask this AI to do because it may actually just achieve it out of one ask. [01:17:25] S1: Yeah. And I'd also nudge on the idea that, yeah, you can just type something into existence, but one of the other questions you need to ask yourself is it good? Do you know what I mean? This is the slop and the accountability thing, which is like... And if ambition is wrapped up in how do I build something phenomenal that's going to endure, that I'm interested in. If it's just like, how do I make more shit and put it out in the world? One of my questions, this is really frontier, Lenny, is what is the AI slop version of startups? Are we about to see a shit-ton of companies just shipping stuff out into the world that's going to last for six or 12 months and then just disappear or get irrelevant? [01:18:10] S0: Definitely.
01:18:10 · Lenny Rachitsky, Molly Graham
[01:18:10] S0: Definitely. [01:18:11] S1: So okay, great. That doesn't sound fun. How can you be the pioneer of the enduring thing, the thing that's going to still be around in five years, that's going to matter, that's going to be great, not just exist? And again, it goes to the difference between just productivity, like I built a thing, and what is good? What is actually worth it? What's worth other people's time? [01:18:34] S0: Yeah. I think that's a big differentiating opportunity right now instead of just shipping the thing fast, it's what's a very good version of this thing. And people see that. They're like, "Oh, wow. This is different." [01:18:44] S1: Yeah, exactly. I think this goes to the point of what will matter when it comes to human touch, and I think a lot of that is going to come down to the question of what is good and what is worth it and what endures. [01:18:58] S0: Is there anything that we haven't touched on that we should before we try to summarize maybe some key lessons from this freewheeling conversation?