Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:01:15 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:01:15] S1: Today, my guest is Jeetu Patel, chief product officer and president at Cisco. Cisco is not a brand that mostly people think about when they think about AI, but not only are they a massive part of the AI infrastructure build-out that is happening right now all over the world. What Jeetu has achieved internally at Cisco in terms of transforming their culture and ways of working to be AI-first is something that most big company leaders only dream about. Jeetu is also an incredible human with so much warmth and wisdom to share. I am very excited to be sharing his story. Don't forget to check out lennysproductpass.com for an incredible set of deals available exclusively to Lenny's Newsletter subscribers. Let's get into it after a short word from our wonderful sponsors. Applications break in all kinds of ways. Crashes, slowdowns, regressions, and the stuff that you only see once real users show up. Sentry catches it all. See what happened, where and why, down to the commit that introduced the error, the developer who shipped it, and the exact line of code, all in one connected view. I've definitely tried the five tabs and Slack thread approach to debugging. This is better. Sentry shows you how the request moved, what ran, what slowed down, and what users saw. Seer, Sentry's AI debugging agent takes it from there. It uses all of that Sentry context to tell you the root cause, to adjust a fix, and even opens a PR for you. It also reviews your PRs and flags any breaking changes with fixes ready to go. Try Sentry and Seer for free at sentry.io/lenny, and use code Lenny for $100 in Sentry credits. That's S-E-N-T-R-Y.io/Lenny. Your marketing website sets the tone for your brand. It is the one touchpoint that every single one of your customers sees. In today's age, if you're still having a hard time making small changes and simple updates to it, you are doing something wrong. That is why so many companies from early-stage startups to Fortune 500s, including companies like DoorDash, Zapier, Perplexity, and ElevenLabs turn to Framer, the website builder that turns your .com from a formality into a tool for growth. Framer works like your team's favorite design tool and comes with real-time collaboration, a robust CMS with everything you need for great SEO, and advanced analytics that includes integrated A/B testing.
00:03:38 · Lenny Rachitsky, G2 Patel
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00:04:22 · G2 Patel, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:04:22] S0: Lenny, I'm excited. Good to see you. [00:04:24] S1: The timing of this conversation is so amazing. You're just coming off running the most insane assembling of AI thought leaders and tech leaders I've ever seen. Let me just read a few of the names that you guys had at the summit that just happened a couple of days ago. You had Jensen, you had Sam Altman, and you had Marc Andreessen, you had Fei-Fei Li, you had the CEO of Intel, AWS, Mike Krieger, Kevin Weil. That's just like a third of the guests you guys had. I don't know how you did this, but it feels like you have this fire hose of information coming at you. You interviewed a lot of these people on stage, and so while it's fresh in your mind, I want to ask you, after doing this summit, after hearing from these folks, what's something that you've changed your mind about, or what's just like an insight that has been lodged in your head ever since doing the summit?
00:05:13 · G2 Patel
[00:05:13] S0: It was an amazing thing to pull off, because we never thought we'd be able to do it, and we were really worried going into it, thinking, "Well, we're trying to do fireside chats for 12 hours, and there's a capacity of human absorption that we're trying to challenge." And so, we tried to put a lot of breaks in there and we started at nine a.m and we ended at nine p.m., and we had a couple hour break in the middle, but everyone stayed and everyone was engaged and we could have gone until 11 and it would've been fine. And it's because the quality of the conversations and the caliber of the guests that were there made a world of a difference. What was the takeaway from it? I'd say a few things. One is the capabilities overhang is real. I think there's more functionality, on one end there's kind of this paradox of progress. On one end we are solving all these amazing problems with science, on the other end you talk to the enterprise, they're like, "We're struggling with adoption." And I feel like there's help that's going to be needed within organizations. And the reason we pulled this thing together, the goal was, what is happening in the industry and how can we help customers make sure that they can make the most of it? Because we are in one of the most foundational movements that we have seen in human history, and it's we got to make sure that we make the most of it. So, that was one is, the capabilities overhang is real. The second area is, I'd say that it's harder when you go beyond some of the more obvious use cases. For example, coding is a very, very good use case that you're starting to get a lot of success in. I mean, we just had our first product that we think we'll be in the next two weeks, 100% written with AI. I don't think that's as easy when you go into every other function of the business. And that was actually very apparent that hey, this is going to require some nuance and understanding of how every business works. And then the third one, which is a really interesting takeaway, and Marc Andreessen talked about this in your podcast a few days ago. In fact, when I talked to him, I actually started with your podcast, because it was so interesting, and then we dug into it a little bit more.
00:07:21 · G2 Patel, Lenny Rachitsky
And then Kevin Scott was also talking about this, but this notion of the fact that birth rates are going down and we have a demographic shift that's happening in the world and there's going to be more people that are in the older age bracket than the younger age bracket, and those older people are going to need folks to take care of them. And historically in society, that's actually always been the case, but we might be at a point where that might not be the case. And when that's not the case, we worry about AI taking our jobs, I think that survival of humanity depends on a successful AI. Because at some point if you have 60% of your population that's in a demographic where you don't have enough people who take care of them, that could cause a lot of human suffering. So, I don't think people talk about this enough, and that's something that we have to take a moment and digest, that this is so important for our collective success moving forward. [00:08:16] S1: Something I was going to say during my chat with Marc and when he talked about that AI is basically coming just in time to save us, because there aren't going to be enough people to do the jobs. In my head I was thinking, "This is like another signal that we are in a simulation that things are working out just right for us." What are the chances? [00:08:34] S0: The older I get, the more I believe that we are actually in a simulation. The first time I heard that concept, I thought it was such an absurd concept. Now I'm like, "This might actually be happening." You never know.
00:08:34 · G2 Patel, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:08:34] S0: The older I get, the more I believe that we are actually in a simulation. The first time I heard that concept, I thought it was such an absurd concept. Now I'm like, "This might actually be happening." You never know. [00:08:47] S1: Following this thread, a lot of companies are trying to adjust to this new world. You are doing an incredible job at actually doing this. We got connected through Kevin Weil, who is former CPO at OpenAI, now head of science at OpenAI. And the way he described it is the work that you have done to turn Cisco the way he described it from an older, slower, more traditional enterprise to a very AI-forward company. How many employees do you guys have? You said 45,000. [00:09:15] S0: We have 90,000 employees, 43,000 watch the stream. [00:09:18] S1: So, the big question for you is, it feels like it's really working, and this is very difficult to do at a company of that scale. A lot of leaders are trying to make it work. What are two or three things that you've done that you think have been most impactful and effective in helping Cisco lean into AI, not be scared of it, and actually embrace the future?