Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
01:13:53 · Lenny Rachitsky, Benedict Evans
[01:13:53] S1: Kind of along those lines, you have a favorite recent movie or TV show you've really enjoyed? [01:13:57] S0: I don't know. I've dropped so badly off the current media treadmill, and I just spend most of my time watching classics, which are always the ones that you're supposed to have seen and that all seem intimidating. And then you watch them and you're like, "Oh, that was actually really good." I watched The Seventh Seal recently, which is one of those Woody Allen, terrifying boring movies, and it was brilliant. It was really interesting, and it's like it's only like an hour. So, go watch one of those movies that you are supposed to have seen, or hadn't seen. [01:14:26] S1: Favorite recent product that you recently discovered that I really love. Could be a gadget, could be an app. [01:14:33] S0: I was speaking at a partner meeting for a company earlier this week. Monday, no, last week, and met the founder of the company who has a very famous... The CEO of the company has a famous name and admired his shoes, and didn't say anything, but then went in Google half an hour later. "Yeah, okay, I'll buy a pair of this." [01:14:51] S1: Do you want to share the brand or you want to keep it secret? Okay, we'll keep it secret.
01:14:51 · Lenny Rachitsky, Benedict Evans
[01:14:51] S1: Do you want to share the brand or you want to keep it secret? Okay, we'll keep it secret. [01:14:56] S0: I don't know. I think one comes in waves of new products, and you get into waves of new things. And when's the last time there was a cool app, iPhone apps, all that white space went. I mean, it's partly a function of product ships, a platform chips. All the white space went for cool new apps, and now we haven't quite got... Actually, this is to the earlier point, we don't have breakout a consumer AI apps yet, but I think because of marginal cost more than anything else, you can't make it free and get 50 million users and then have a revenue bottle. But we don't have those breakout things yet. [01:15:29] S1: For consumer. [01:15:30] S0: For consumer, no. I keep getting these ads for voice recorders. Somebody's selling a business card size hardware voice recorder. But I didn't get it. I've got the voice recorder on my phone. [01:15:43] S1: Yeah. All kinds of cool stuff coming. Okay. Two more questions. Do you have a favorite life motto that you find yourself coming back to often in work or in life? [01:15:51] S0: I suppose both mentioned earlier, apparently, I mostly say it depends. [01:15:57] S1: That's going to be the title. [01:16:00] S0: It'll probably be okay. [01:16:01] S1: Yeah. Okay. That's the vibe I get. I like that. I like that. It's probably going to be okay. Not for sure. Okay. Final question. I saw someone that you'll own a lot of old phones. Is that true?
01:16:01 · Lenny Rachitsky, Benedict Evans
[01:16:01] S1: Yeah. Okay. That's the vibe I get. I like that. I like that. It's probably going to be okay. Not for sure. Okay. Final question. I saw someone that you'll own a lot of old phones. Is that true? [01:16:13] S0: It is, yes. I mean, I was a telecoms analyst and mobile analyst and I kept all my phones up to a point. Now they're kind of uninteresting. But as you may remember, before the iPhone, particularly outside the USA, there was this huge creativity and expansion in what phones looked like, because everyone was basically innovating around a little teeny, tiny gray square. So everyone was trying to differentiate from everything else, before it kind of resulted. It's kind of like cars, actually. It's like cars before street, before wind tunnels, cars all look different. And everyone's trying to innovate around, because you've got the same four wheels, and the same engine, and everyone's trying to differentiate based on the shape. And then everything converges on one shape, and it's kind of the same with phones. Everything converged on one shape. Before that, there was all this innovation. So yeah, I have a whole bunch of PDAs, and smartphones, and things like that. [01:16:59] S1: How many phones are we talking about? [01:17:02] S0: I don't know, like 20 or 30. [01:17:03] S1: Okay. Okay. It's not so crazy. What's the oldest one? What's the oldest one you got?
01:17:03 · Lenny Rachitsky, Benedict Evans
[01:17:03] S1: Okay. Okay. It's not so crazy. What's the oldest one? What's the oldest one you got? [01:17:07] S0: So I have one of those, I should have usually told me I'd have got the box down, I have one of those Ericsson shark fin flip phones from '98 or something, which is very vogue. Again, hardware design, visual design, trying to differentiate. I've got an iMade phone from 2001, and a J-Phone phone from 2001 that has a camera. So I came back from Japan in 2001 and my phone had a color screen and a camera. And I just had endless client meetings and people just wanted to see the phone with a color screen. It's mind-blowing. Didn't work outside Japan. So, I plugged it in the other day. It still charges up. I mean, clearly I can't do anything with it. I mean, there's a little bit of an analogy in there as well in that we thought there'd be all these different shapes and sizes. And before the iPhone, people kind of imagined, "Well, some people will have a little pocket PC, and some people have a keyboard, and you have folding..." There were all these different ideas for what it would look like. And we didn't realize it was all going to converge on one device. [01:18:03] S1: Benedict, this was amazing. I learned a ton. I feel better after this conversation. Two final questions. Where can folks find you online? Where do they find this presentation? And how can listeners be useful to you?
01:18:03 · Lenny Rachitsky, Benedict Evans
[01:18:03] S1: Benedict, this was amazing. I learned a ton. I feel better after this conversation. Two final questions. Where can folks find you online? Where do they find this presentation? And how can listeners be useful to you? [01:18:13] S0: If you can Google me, as I always say, my parents had good SEO. So, Google Benedict Evans. And so there's a website where I publish all the presentations that I've done. And sign up for my newsletter, which comes out every week. Otherwise, how can they be useful to me? I'm always trying to understand stuff and I'm always trying to ask different questions. The worst thing in tech is to carry on talking about the same stuff. It's like the moment you really understand something, it's the moment you have to push onto something else. And so I'm always trying to think like, "No, am I just talking about the same thing over and over again?" Last year I just spent probably too much time saying, "But these models still hallucinate. Stop telling me they don't hallucinate." And they do. They still hallucinate. You push them, push them a little bit further, any question and you'll still get like, "No, that's not true," but that doesn't mean they're not useful. So you have to keep pushing myself. So that's always that the challenge for me, is how do I push? And then yes, if you want me to come and present to your board in the Caribbean, then let me know. [01:19:15] S1: And by the way, the domain is bend-evans.com if folks who want to check you out. And evans.com. Benedict, thank you so much for being here. [01:19:24] S0: Thanks a lot.
01:19:24 · Benedict Evans, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:19:24] S0: Thanks a lot. [01:19:26] S1: Bye, everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode.