Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
01:01:57 · Lenny Rachitsky, Hector Serrano
[01:01:57] S0: You had a couple of awesome tweets along these lines. One is that everyone looking for a marketer with the best resume is gonna end up hiring a bot. [01:02:04] S1: Yeah. [01:02:07] S0: And then the other is this really important tweet that the most successful founders, investors, creators I've met aren't the most talented. They're delusionally confident. They outwork everyone, and they love what they do.
01:02:18 · Hector Serrano
[01:02:18] S1: Yeah. I think that pretty much sums it up. And also another one that I that I resonate with a lot that I that I put out recently was, like, the sports outlook on hiring. Sports teams, like, I come from a very competitive sports background. I played over in Spain. I played for the and La Liga Academy. I played the MLS Next in The US. I played division one in college. And, like, we have all these structures for sports teams where it's like, you scout young talent, you bring them in, you coach them, you develop them for ten years. And then, like, if you're over in Spain or over in Europe, you eventually, like, get them as part of your academy, maybe the second team, and then maybe you sell them to a top club, or maybe they end up becoming a homegrown contract or... And they join, like, your first team. And it's like, I think a lot of startups should kind of adopt that mentality. Think there's a lot of companies that actually don't do internship anymore. They don't think they're valuable and I think they're one of the most valuable things and if you can find the right people, it's not a very expensive thing to do. It's not very time consuming and yeah, I think like taking a chance on young on young people and giving them some money to to test things with and giving them some freedom to test things with, and like allowing them to fail and continue learning. I was like one of the best models I think you can pick up from sports and like, obviously, it works. Like, I don't know if you're very familiar with soccer, but I mean, like, look at, like, won the World Cup at what? 19 years old, 18 years old? And, like, I think that same approach can be applied to to the startup world. Like, find young talent, invest in them, let them get real reps in the real world, and then eventually, they'll might become one of your a players.
01:03:47 · Lenny Rachitsky, Hector Serrano
[01:03:47] S0: I love that. And I love that also part of this is giving them time to figure it out. [01:03:51] S1: Yeah. 100%. [01:03:53] S0: What's really interesting about this conversation so far I'm realizing is I don't think we've once mentioned AI as part of this work that you do, which is really interesting because it's, you know, it's it's all anyone talks about these days. And you actually had this tweet the other day, the best marketers are allergic to AI. Talk about just what you what you think with how AI plays into this and how AI should not play into this.
01:04:15 · Hector Serrano
[01:04:15] S1: I just think, like, overall, when you look at a lot of the work done, like, even, like, looking at the top labs, like, they are some of the people that have the most amount of humans actually working on a specific asset. And, like, maybe, yes, they have a lot of the research automated or a lot of different steps like internally automated, but the actual production of the asset, whether it comes to the video, the design in Figma, the editing, the post production, etcetera. It's all done by teams of a lot of humans. And I think there's not gonna be a real way to get around that, at least not anytime soon. And especially in, like, the environment we're in now where a lot of people are very, I guess, turned off by AI and it can be a scary, like, thing to talk about. If you're an AI company like Wispr, who, in theory, we enable humans to do better work, we don't wanna replace anyone's job. We wanna give them, I guess, the tools to be able to be more productive, to do more work, and to sound more naturally... And to sound like themselves more naturally. If we, on the other side, go out and start making AI slop ads and videos with AI influencers and, I don't know, AI designs and AI statics, it's probably not gonna be received really well, and it just... It looks off. And, like, when I say that, I think it goes more towards not automating the work that's gonna be the final product that people are looking at because I think you see it a lot of times, like, it'll it'll end up blowing back on on the companies where whether it's like an animation that they made with Claude or some sort of asset that they made and maybe there's typos or maybe the writing is like all jumbled up like what happens when you do it with with open... With ChatGPT or whatever. And, yeah, I think it's it's not worth it. Like, the risk versus reward is not worth it.
01:05:55 · Lenny Rachitsky, Hector Serrano
[01:05:55] S0: So the alpha, what I'm hearing here is, like, don't use AI for this work. [01:06:00] S1: Yeah. For for the final output, especially on the creative side, like, what other people are gonna see, I I don't think AI should should touch yet. [01:06:07] S0: That is really interesting. Like, you [01:06:09] S1: know Yeah. [01:06:09] S0: People... It feels like everyone's hearing lean into AI. Yeah. Use AI watch videos all
01:06:13 · Hector Serrano
[01:06:13] S1: the Even one of the most bullish people on AI that I know, Matt, who is now at Viktor or at set of growth, he has the most automations I've ever seen in the whole wide world. But even then, like, that last, like, 10% that's the most important always has a human on the endpoint because you can't sacrifice as a brand having something blow up because you had something screw up or come out wrong or or whatever. And, you know, I think with everyone I think with everyone also just shipping so much volume and, like, whether it be on X, on LinkedIn, on Instagram, on YouTube, Like, you're able now to make videos with Claude. You're able to to have the edited them. You're able to make... What's it called? They wanna make, like, a doppelganger of yourself with AI and and all these different things and get content out faster and have these automations for tweets and have it, like, post news articles and whatever and retweet it in whatever way. There's so much noise, like, you're saying that if you actually focus more on the quality and less on the quantity and less on building all these crazy automations and hitting volume for just hitting volume's sake, it gets so easy to cut through the noise. And, like, if you actually have real value, you package it well, and you post, like, not a lot. You post with with purpose and for actual reason, you can cut through really easily as a brand or as a company. I think another good example of this is also Tanay's YouTube channel. We started it around, like, what, three months ago, and five YouTube videos in were, like, millions and millions of views, 20,000 or 21,000 subscribers on YouTube, which is one of the hardest platforms to grow. And, like, a lot of people think, oh, we're starting a YouTube channel. We need to post three videos a week. And it's like, no. Like, if you actually put in the time and effort and you tell a really good story and you do everything with purpose and you package it really well and you have a really good team of humans actually touching everything in there, you get really good end product and people actually can see the effort you put into it.