Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
01:16:30 · Lenny Rachitsky, Cat Wu
[01:16:30] S1: Favorite recent movie or TV show you have really enjoyed? [01:16:34] S0: I really like Drive to Survive. There's no deeper meaning to it. There's just something very satisfying about people being so obsessed with a singular engineering goal and just the purity of the pursuit. And I also really love Free Solo, which is about Alex Honnold climbing El Capitan without a harness, and I think similarly, it's just such a pure achievement to be able to climb this extremely challenging, dangerous route and to be able to have the mental focus to do it knowing that if you make a single mistake, you die. [01:17:17] S1: It's insane. Yeah, that movie's out of control. And it's interesting how these relate in some way to the work you do. [01:17:22] S0: I actually am a rock climber, but I first watched Free Solo before I climbed rocks. And so I thought it was impressive, but I didn't understand how impressive it was. It's one of the rare movies where the more you know about it, the more you're blown away by how insane this is. The kinds of moves doing on the wall are things that I don't think I will ever be able to do in my lifetime if it were set in a gym one feet off the ground. [01:17:47] S1: With a rope. [01:17:48] S0: With a rope. [01:17:50] S1: Did you see the documentary in that other guy, the younger one that went on ice mountains? [01:17:54] S0: I did. That one was very sad. [01:17:56] S1: But that was wild. Okay, favorite product you've recently discovered that you really love.
01:17:56 · Lenny Rachitsky, Cat Wu
[01:17:56] S1: But that was wild. Okay, favorite product you've recently discovered that you really love. [01:18:01] S0: The product that has most changed my life outside of Claude products is probably Waymo. I'm a diehard Waymo user, use it twice a day, get to and from work. So the two things that I really like about it are, one, I don't feel bad if a Waymo is waiting for me, and so I feel less pressure to be right at the curbside the moment it arrives, and the second thing is I feel like it lets me be a bit more productive. When I'm in the car with another human, I typically try not to do any work calls. I feel a little rude if I'm on my laptop the whole time. But one thing I really appreciate about the Waymo is I can call into a work call. I'm not worried about someone overhearing me. I'm not worried about, "Hey, is this rude? Am I talking too loud? Do I need to ask someone to change the music?" And so I feel like this has given me back 30 minutes every day. [01:18:55] S1: All these second order effects of technology, it's so interesting. [01:18:59] S0: Yeah. I always saw Waymo needed to be priced lower than Uber and Lyft to succeed, but actually I'm very happy to pay a 2X premium for it. [01:19:07] S1: I love Waymo. It's just like once you see it, you're just like, "This is insane." And then you get used to it. You get in there, you're like, "This is crazy," and then you forget about it.
01:19:07 · Lenny Rachitsky, Cat Wu
[01:19:07] S1: I love Waymo. It's just like once you see it, you're just like, "This is insane." And then you get used to it. You get in there, you're like, "This is crazy," and then you forget about it. [01:19:18] S0: Totally. And I think it's also changed the vernacular. A lot of people at Anthropic love Waymo, and I think in the past you'd be like, "Hey, let's call our rideshare app," and now everyone's just like, "Okay, is Waymo here?" [01:19:30] S1: Okay, two more questions. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to in work or in life? [01:19:35] S0: Just do things. [01:19:36] S1: That tracks. That tracks. [01:19:38] S0: I think there's a lot of value in first principles thinking, and if you know what you're optimizing for and you have strong first principles, then you can normally deduce what the right course of action is and be able to clearly articulate that to all the stakeholders, and then you should just do it. I think jobs are fake. If you understand the constraints, you can figure out what you can do and then just try to do it quickly, learn from the mistakes and apologize or fix them if you did something wrong. [01:20:08] S1: You could just do things, whoever said that.
01:20:08 · Lenny Rachitsky, Cat Wu
[01:20:08] S1: You could just do things, whoever said that. [01:20:10] S0: I think it's liberating actually to tell people this. I think in a lot of companies, roles are very strictly defined like, okay, this is what the PM does, is what the designer does, this is what an engineer does, and then even team scopes are very rigidly defined. So hey, this corner of the code base we touch and this corner, we're not allowed to touch, and I think what just do things lets people do is they feel empowered to make these decisions, empowered to operate across team boundaries just to get something done. [01:20:38] S1: That feels like a big important skill to be good at. People call it agency, just do the things they need to do. [01:20:45] S0: Bias towards action. [01:20:46] S1: Bias towards action, all these ways of describing just don't wait for permission. [01:20:50] S0: Yeah. I think this is my favorite reason to work at a startup at some point in your life because one thing that was very life-changing for me was actually working at scale when we were 20 people, and so there was just no process and we had really big problems that we needed to solve. And I really appreciate Alex and the rest of the team for empowering me and the rest of the team to just figure things out without any boundaries for what sales supposed to do, what ops supposed to do, what engineer is supposed to do. Just like you have all the tools at your disposal, you have some ambitious hairy problem statement and you can do whatever you need to get to a good solution.
01:20:50 · Cat Wu, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:20:50] S0: Yeah. I think this is my favorite reason to work at a startup at some point in your life because one thing that was very life-changing for me was actually working at scale when we were 20 people, and so there was just no process and we had really big problems that we needed to solve. And I really appreciate Alex and the rest of the team for empowering me and the rest of the team to just figure things out without any boundaries for what sales supposed to do, what ops supposed to do, what engineer is supposed to do. Just like you have all the tools at your disposal, you have some ambitious hairy problem statement and you can do whatever you need to get to a good solution. [01:21:28] S1: You almost need that experience to build that skill to feel comfortable doing that because a lot of people, they go through school or in college and all these do the thing we tell you to do and then you will get a good grade, and you have to kind of unlearn that of like, okay, I'm just going to do the thing that needs to be done, and even if people think it's dumb, I think it's the right thing to do. [01:21:46] S0: Yeah, exactly. [01:21:47] S1: Okay. I actually have two more quick questions, two more final questions. One is when Claude thinks there's all these, I don't know if you call them verbs, what's the term for these things? [01:21:56] S0: Thinking words. [01:21:57] S1: Thinking words. And interestingly, these all leaked in the source code. Do you have a favorite thinking word?
01:21:57 · Lenny Rachitsky, Cat Wu
[01:21:57] S1: Thinking words. And interestingly, these all leaked in the source code. Do you have a favorite thinking word? [01:22:03] S0: I really like manifesting. It's also like the sticker that I have on my laptop. It's my favorite. [01:22:10] S1: Clearly the winner. Okay. Final question. Asked Forest this too, with AGI potentially arriving in our lifetime, when you don't potentially have to work, what are you going to do? What are you going to do with all your time? [01:22:23] S0: I think it will take a long time for AGI to diffuse across society. So I think the immediate thing is actually just helping bring the world along. I think my non-serious answer for it after this happens is I'll probably just do a lot of rock climbing. I'll probably just live in some... I'll probably move to Fontainebleau and just live amongst 10,000 boulders and climb for a bit. There's also so many books I want to read that... My goal is to be able to read one or two books a week, and I'm currently at probably 0.5. The backlog is pretty big. I think there's just so much we can learn from history and so much that I don't understand as well as I would love to. I don't know anything about physics or robotics or any hardware or aerospace or... There's just so many interesting topics. So I'm excited to learn, even knowing that the AGI will already know it. [01:23:26] S1: Cat, this was amazing. You're awesome. Two follow-up questions. Where can folks find you online if they want to reach out and just follow what you're up to, and how can listeners be useful to you?