Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
01:23:27 · Peter Sellis
[01:23:27] S1: Yeah, maybe cringe is it. Yeah, let it go. My spiciest one, and we'll bring it back here to the start of the podcast. Why am I doing this podcast now? You and I have known each other, been in group chats, chatted all the time for a long time. This one's probably a take where I don't even know if I'd be super comfortable saying it depending on my employer. I think that to truly create great consumer products for certain cohorts of humans, of users, the product managers and designers that you put on some of those products, there are certain inalienable traits about those product managers that cannot be learned, cannot be acquired, that are essential to creating truly great consumer products. And by that I mean literally gender, race, ethnicity, socioeconomic background. And what I mean by this is not like, oh, if you want to create a product for young Black men, you need to hire young Black men. I don't mean stuff like that. I just mean, I don't know how comfortable I'm giving examples, but I do think that we are not comfortable as a society admitting this, but there are certain things about how people are brought up, who they are biologically, things like that, that suit them to better working on certain consumer products because at their core, most consumer products are, and Nikita talks about this too, are hitting against certain parts of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. And in order to understand those needs really well, I think there are certain people with backgrounds, upbringings, et cetera, that make them better at that. That doesn't mean you can hire for it. That doesn't mean you can judge a book by its cover, things like that. And that's why it's such a spicy take is it's not necessarily even actionable in many situations, but yeah, maybe I'll leave it at that before I get myself-
01:25:51 · Lenny Rachitsky, Peter Sellis
[01:25:51] S0: Yeah, the real spicy version would be that grid of here's who you need for this type of product, but we're not going to go there. Before we get to our very exciting lightning round, is there anything else that we haven't touched on? Anything else you wanted to share? Anything you want to double down on before we get to exciting lightning rounds? We covered a lot of ground, so there might not be. [01:26:16] S1: No, I think we covered a ton of ground. It's really great. [01:26:21] S0: Well, Peter, with that, we reached our very exciting lightning round. I've got five questions for you. Are you ready? [01:26:27] S1: All right. I will admit to our viewers and listeners that I have not prepared for these, which I guess is the point of the lightning round. [01:26:36] S0: That is the point, except they're the same questions to everybody except the last one. [01:26:40] S1: Oh, okay, cool. [01:26:41] S0: So it's not too much of a surprise. [01:26:41] S1: Okay. Then I know these questions. All right. [01:26:45] S0: Okay. And I love it when people aren't prepared. Okay. Two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people? [01:26:51] S1: I'm going to butcher the title of it. How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia and When Genius Failed. [01:27:02] S0: Oh, I haven't heard of these. Amazing.
01:27:02 · Lenny Rachitsky, Peter Sellis
[01:27:02] S0: Oh, I haven't heard of these. Amazing. [01:27:05] S1: And then the third one, so How to Get Filthy Rich Rising Asia. When Genius Failed is about the rise and fall of long-term capital management in late 1998, caused one of the crashes or nearly averted crashes. And then my third one, which I actually give to a lot of consumer PMs, is Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman, the physicist from MIT. [01:27:25] S0: Very unique picks. I haven't heard these on the podcast before. Favorite recent movie or TV show you've really enjoyed? [01:27:31] S1: I do not consume TV, and I haven't watched as many movies as I used to. I used to be a big movie buff. So if I could flip this to something that was closer to my heart, gaming, I think if you don't play games, video games, you should give last year's game of the year, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 a shot. Just a wonderful indie studio out of France that constructed a story with music and sound that is just like Louvre level beauty and really reminds you that games are a form of art that maybe we still as a society haven't yet realized how to appreciate. And I think the people behind it are phenomenal and I think what they produce is amazing. [01:28:27] S0: Wow. I want to watch a Twitch stream of you playing it. How fun would that be? That could be your follow-up. Is that on desktop or is that a console thing? [01:28:38] S1: It's available on console as well, but I think probably best experience on desktop. I think it works on Mac and PC.
01:28:38 · Peter Sellis, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:28:38] S1: It's available on console as well, but I think probably best experience on desktop. I think it works on Mac and PC. [01:28:43] S0: So cool. I think that's the first game recommended. I like how different this round is than most. Favorite, interesting AI product right now. [01:28:52] S1: In general, a lot of the AI products still feel like we're throwing spaghetti at the wall. I'll take a more, and I've heard a couple people actually mention, reference this on the pod. The one that I found that changed my workflow the most at work was Hex. It was the first time that I just markedly found myself doing something differently immediately, and it was one of the only multiplayer AI experiences that worked. Literally me and the co-founder of Discord, Stan, in a meeting in a Hex thread, interacting with Hex as we were having discussions in the meeting and getting data back and things like that. Obviously latency and inference time and stuff like that is still an issue, but I find that product to be really, really great and really changed, really just enabled me to feel like a superhuman. [01:29:45] S0: I love how every one of these answers, I don't think anyone's ever said. Two final questions. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often find useful in work or in life?
01:29:54 · Peter Sellis
[01:29:54] S1: There's this quote that I'm going to butcher because I don't have it in front of me that is from John Steinbeck in East of Eden, I think, about the passage of time. And I'm just generally obsessed with the passage of time because the people in my life, whether it's been personal or professional who I've just always been literally infatuated by, like I've just wanted to spend more time, I've fallen in love with these people, they oftentimes seem to float through time and perceive time very differently than normal people. And this quote from Steinbeck, it's about how time passes differently when you experience more or less. And essentially the quote is that duration has no signposts. Sorry, "Time has no signposts upon which to drape duration. From nothing to nothing is no time at all." And I really want to get the full quote for you because it's literally one of those things where you're like, how could a human write this? It's so beautiful. But yeah, from nothing to nothing is no time at all. And so a time, a life that is even scarred with tragedy or, essentially just do it. Just get out there, meet new people, experience things because the best way to slow the passage of time is essentially to do something with it. And so I'm pretty generous, I think, with my time and how I spend it with people and just trying to do things that I want to do as soon as possible because yeah, you just never know. And those time periods that really seem to pass slowly in a good way are the ones where you've just experienced a lot. And so yeah, this idea that from nothing to nothing is no time at all is so scary and motivating to me.
01:31:53 · Lenny Rachitsky, Peter Sellis
[01:31:53] S0: That is beautiful. Again, a quote nobody has shared before. Final question. Okay. So I was looking at your LinkedIn, looking at your career history. Funny enough, you were head of product immediately. That was your first product role at a company called- [01:32:07] S1: I was a product manager for a little bit, but yeah. [01:32:08] S0: Okay. Okay. You've overlooked that in your LinkedIn. So it was a company called Ustream, and you described your role as product leader for the Shiba Inu puppy cam. We need to hear more.