Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:03:06 · Josh Woodward, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:03:06] S1: Yeah, yeah. Sounds good. [00:03:07] S0: ... worldview. So my thesis is that every company needs to start thinking and operating like a Labs team because the underlying tech that we're all building on is changing so fast, which means what we can do is changing so fast, which means that now everyone has to get really good at trying a bunch of stuff with the latest models and basically figuring out what is now possible before your competition does, before a startup comes and eats your lunch. And so it feels like the skills that will matter more and more now are things that you all have gotten really good at, which is finding great ideas, figuring out how to run a ton of experiments, figuring out what to double down on, building teams that can operate this way, at the same time not distracting the rest of the company from all the shiny stuff and letting them focus. So broadly, does that resonate? [00:03:58] S1: Yeah, I think your premise is spot on. I think the devil's in the details, all those things you just said. So I think what's easy for, in some ways every startup is a lab and the real question is how do you bring some of that same methodology, ideas, energy, excitement into bigger teams or even medium-sized teams? But I absolutely think it's needed. And then the question is, yeah, how do you build that environment and nurture and cultivate both ideas, but also the people that can really thrive there? [00:04:31] S0: Awesome. Okay, that's exactly what we're going to talk about.
00:04:33 · Josh Woodward
[00:04:33] S1: Yep. Yeah, it's interesting because a lot of them, I wish there was an answer in the back of the book where there was one thing. Maybe one observation, Lenny, is they come from a variety of places. So one lesson I've always felt is you always have to be watching for something that catches your eye. Maybe we come back to that in a second. They very rarely, at least in my experience, have come from design sprints or times where you set aside on a calendar, okay, we're going to go come up with our next idea. They usually come when people are swimming in the hallway, maybe on a weekend, often over a break, a lot of our Labs teams will be hacking and building on stuff and they just can't help themselves and they'll come back or they'll share a video and be like, "Look at this amazing thing." So I think one lesson is always on alert. Second lesson is they don't come in conventional places. You can't microwave good ideas. And maybe that leads to a third thing I've seen is sometimes it's about less about the idea and who are the interesting people and more importantly, what are their interesting little side projects and passion things and creating the chemistry around that. Because usually what we found, at least in Labs over the last four or five years, is that all these ideas, whether they're Notebook or Flow or AI Studio or Google Beam or any of this stuff, they get started by very small groups of people who are just obsessed and usually very curious about something and they just won't stop. And so you're like, how do you create a space where that can happen and then be on alert to catch it and try to funnel it forward?
00:07:36 · Lenny Rachitsky, Josh Woodward
[00:07:36] S0: So what I'm hearing here is interestingly not design sprints. I didn't hear brainstorm meetings in there as a place good ideas come from. [00:07:43] S1: Yeah. [00:07:44] S0: Is there an example maybe because someone listening to this, I'm trying to think about what can they take from this to help them find great ideas, say they're a startup founder or at a big company playing with the latest models. What are some of the conditions that you find most help? [00:08:00] S1: Yes, yes. I mean, one thing we try to do a lot, and I think this would apply in any of those situations, is how do you get yourself to the frontier? And that can be both with playing with the models, but also just watching what are the types of experiences that have just become possible where we have a phrase on the team, we talk about what's almost possible and we just have a list actually where we're trying to track those things. And when one crosses over, it's almost like a phase shift when something goes from solid to gas or liquid to gas or something, you're like, "Ooh, that just became possible. I saw one of these two days ago and I can't stop thinking about it." [00:08:38] S0: Are you able to tell us or it's a...
00:08:38 · Lenny Rachitsky, Josh Woodward
[00:08:38] S0: Are you able to tell us or it's a... [00:08:40] S1: Maybe soon. But if you're at the frontier playing with the models, watching what's happening and you have this list, then when you see something, whether it's on X or wherever, then you're like, "Okay, that just now has become possible." And then we try to think about how do we get a team around that and just go. And so that may be as you're in startup land, if you're thinking or maybe you're starting to pitch ideas to VCs or whatever, that's kind of how I'd be trying to think about. And then of course, tech alone isn't enough. You've got to match that to an interesting user problem. And ideally, if you can put those together in a way that's so good, people will pay for it. That's kind of the combination of things we start looking for pretty early. [00:09:25] S0: So that's an interesting tactic there is make a list of what is almost possible and then watch for, okay, wow, this is now possible. Let's explore this now. [00:09:34] S1: Yeah, that's right. [00:09:36] S0: Is there anything on that list you can share of things that are not yet possible but almost possible that you're waiting for or watching for?
00:09:36 · Lenny Rachitsky, Josh Woodward
[00:09:36] S0: Is there anything on that list you can share of things that are not yet possible but almost possible that you're waiting for or watching for? [00:09:42] S1: Well, maybe I can share a few areas because I think how we think about it in Labs is we have a bit of a thought experiment we go through where we're like, what is the future of a certain thing going to look like? So the future of software design and development or the future of creativity, the future of work or knowledge. One area we're watching very close right now is just what is the future of entertainment going to look like? And this whole idea around immersive entertainment is super interesting just at a technical level for many reasons, but also you think about just the user sort of behaviors and what does entertainment look like last year, this year versus next year, maybe in three years. And so that's one where we've got a whole list underneath that where we're like, oh, okay, well, if a model can get to this kind of latency and this amount of languages and this amount of modality, you can start to think through what would be interesting from the tech side. And then we do a lot of work in Labs around where are just behaviors and trends going. And for that, some of it of course you can study in the Bay Area, but for a lot of our teams, I'm always thinking about how do we get way outside the Bay Area and thinking about where are the other cities, the classrooms, the other places to almost mine for ideas and these behavioral changes.
00:11:05 · Lenny Rachitsky, Josh Woodward
[00:11:05] S0: So an interesting takeaway here is this, you're not just waiting for inspiration to strike, you're doing a lot of pre-work to think about here's what is almost working, here's where we think the future might be going, here's areas that are going to be ripe for disruption. [00:11:19] S1: That's right. [00:11:20] S0: Cool. [00:11:20] S1: In this doc I talked about, we have 82 predictions that all begin with, we believe the future is, or we predict. This is dangerous ever to make one prediction, let alone 82. But I think you have to almost have a point of view about the future knowing that nine out of 10 or maybe 9.9 out of 10, you're going to be wrong. But I think that's one of the things we really try to cultivate in the team is how do we chase the future? That's one of the values and sort of trying to chase it, you almost have to throw yourself out there and try to live in it a little bit. [00:11:52] S0: What are signs to you that an idea is worth pursuing when you're in the shower and you have this idea? What's the sign that, okay, that's worth betting on at least to start with? And what's often just a false signal like, okay, no, that's actually not going to work?