Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:24:31 · Lenny Rachitsky, Cat Wu
[00:24:31] S1: What I'm imagining is there's that GIF. I think it's maybe from Pirates of the Caribbean where it's this guy walking down a pair of stairs on a ship and the whole ship is just being demolished around him and he's so chill, just strolling down the staircases as everything's falling apart. And that's interesting because everyone I've met from Anthropic is just so chill and just so optimistic. Yeah, I think that's a really interesting insight is just like having this calmness and optimism versus just like, "Oh my God, everything's crazy and going nuts." [00:25:00] S0: Yeah, I think if you don't have it, you'll get pretty burnt out. I think we also tend to hire people who have been in the industry for a while and have experienced lots of ups and downs and have a good sense for what gives them energy and how to maintain their energy over time, and I think that's helped us a lot. [00:25:20] S1: So interesting. Something that I wanted to ask about is, so there's these roles blurring, engineers are becoming PMs, everyone's dogs are cats, everyone's everyone. What do we lose in that world? Do we lose career ladders and clear career paths? Do we lose design consistency, code quality? There's probably some downsides. What are some things you find are just like, okay, that's something we're sacrificing for the greater good?
00:25:42 · Cat Wu
[00:25:42] S0: We're sacrificing product consistency. Historically, when code was expensive to write, you would carefully plan out everything in your product suite, how every product relates to each other, what the use case for every single one is, how they integrate, and you would pretty much have one product for each use case, and now with AI moving so quickly and with so many ideas that we need to test out, we do sometimes have features that overlap with each other. A lot of the times it's because there's two form factors that we love internally and we want the external audience to tell us which one is better. What that means for someone who's a new user though is a new user might not know, okay, what is the best path to accomplish X? There is more education we need to do to help people understand what the core features are and what the best practices are for using them. I think this is the cost of launching a lot of features. I think users also feel like it's hard to keep up with the latest. Usually in traditional PM, you ship a feature every month or quarter, and so it's really easy for a user to understand, okay, I just need to check in on this once a month and I'll learn some new things, and if I ignore it for six months, it's fine, I don't feel like I'm missing out. I think with these agentic tools, not just Claude Code and Cowork, but across the whole ecosystem, people feel this need to check Twitter every single day to see what the absolute latest thing is, and I think there's more we can do to help people feel less like they're on this ever increasingly fast treadmill and that they feel like... I would love people to feel like they can just open these tools, the tools will educate them or teach them what they want to know, and that they can just feel more bought along.
00:27:48 · Lenny Rachitsky, Cat Wu
[00:27:48] S1: Yeah. I saw you launch this really interesting feature the other day. I think it's /powerup where it basically walks you through all the cool ways and basically all the best practices to use Claude Code. Is that kind of along these lines? [00:27:57] S0: Yeah, exactly. So in the past, we didn't actually want to do something like powerup, because we felt like the product should be intuitive enough that you don't actually need to go through any tutorial, and over time, we've just realized that there's just so many features and there's so much demand for a built-in onboarding experience that we diverged a bit from our original principle saying no onboarding flow and added this because there's just so many users who wanted to know there's a hundred features, what are the 10 that I absolutely need to use? And so we put that together.
00:27:57 · Cat Wu, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:27:57] S0: Yeah, exactly. So in the past, we didn't actually want to do something like powerup, because we felt like the product should be intuitive enough that you don't actually need to go through any tutorial, and over time, we've just realized that there's just so many features and there's so much demand for a built-in onboarding experience that we diverged a bit from our original principle saying no onboarding flow and added this because there's just so many users who wanted to know there's a hundred features, what are the 10 that I absolutely need to use? And so we put that together. [00:28:32] S1: Yeah, it's such a bizarre world. So Anthropic has been really successful with B2B enterprises where traditionally you don't launch a bunch of stuff, you just kind of have quarterly release maybe, and it's like the opposite of every day we got some new... So just maybe following that thread, the run Anthropic has been on as just otherworldly. Anthropic was way behind when it started. It was, Amol shared this, just like one of the least funded companies, didn't have distribution, wasn't the first to go, OpenAI was way ahead and it was just like no way Anthropic has any chance to compete significantly long-term. Now it's just killing it, just beating the biggest companies, teams. So much just like the growth is just... $11 billion in ARR in one month growth. By the time this comes out, it'd probably be even higher. Just being on the inside, what are some ingredients that have allowed Anthropic to be this successful and kind of come from behind and do this well?
00:28:32 · Lenny Rachitsky, Cat Wu
[00:28:32] S1: Yeah, it's such a bizarre world. So Anthropic has been really successful with B2B enterprises where traditionally you don't launch a bunch of stuff, you just kind of have quarterly release maybe, and it's like the opposite of every day we got some new... So just maybe following that thread, the run Anthropic has been on as just otherworldly. Anthropic was way behind when it started. It was, Amol shared this, just like one of the least funded companies, didn't have distribution, wasn't the first to go, OpenAI was way ahead and it was just like no way Anthropic has any chance to compete significantly long-term. Now it's just killing it, just beating the biggest companies, teams. So much just like the growth is just... $11 billion in ARR in one month growth. By the time this comes out, it'd probably be even higher. Just being on the inside, what are some ingredients that have allowed Anthropic to be this successful and kind of come from behind and do this well? [00:29:29] S0: The two most important things are, one, this unifying mission. It's hard to state how important this is. We hire people who care most about bringing safe AGI to all of humanity, and this is actually something that we reference frequently in our decisions about what our entire product org should focus on shipping. And because we put this mission above any individual product line, we're able to make Make very fast decisions that cut across the entire org and execute on them in a unified way. So I think this is something that I've never seen at a company of our scale.
00:29:29 · Cat Wu, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:29:29] S0: The two most important things are, one, this unifying mission. It's hard to state how important this is. We hire people who care most about bringing safe AGI to all of humanity, and this is actually something that we reference frequently in our decisions about what our entire product org should focus on shipping. And because we put this mission above any individual product line, we're able to make Make very fast decisions that cut across the entire org and execute on them in a unified way. So I think this is something that I've never seen at a company of our scale. [00:30:12] S1: And so just to make sure that's clear, so essentially having the number one mission is safety, alignment, making sure AI is good for the world, and you're saying just having that as a clear mission makes decisions a lot easier to make. [00:30:24] S0: If there's two competing priorities, we'll talk about which one is more important for Anthropic's mission, and it makes it a lot easier to decide which of the two we prioritize and then everyone will stand behind the one that we decide. And so sometimes that means that, hey, we want to ship something on Claude Code, but this other thing is more important, and so we deprioritize shipping this and we just wait until later.