Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:45:14 · Roman Ugarte, Lenny Rachitsky
In a lot of ways, the product form factor and the ways of solving those problems is pretty much the same. And so my instinct is that I think one product will be the best form factor for both of those things, and that's really what we want to build. [00:45:30] S1: Bam, that's a big TAM right there. I love to hear. It makes so much sense. Obviously the question is how do you avoid cross-contamination, personal stuff somehow infiltrating, ex-filtrating stuff from work, but it feels like that's kind of okay. So what I'm hearing is that's the direction. The question is just how to do that and make people feel super safe, have the SOC 2 stuff in place and also just feel really fun.
00:47:33 · Roman Ugarte
[00:47:33] S0: Yeah, I think to go back to the teammate frame of the product, to extend the analogy even further, if we were on a team together, you and me, I think the number of times that you would have to manually take over my computer and start clicking on things and you're doing this wrong, you should go here instead and type in manually, hopefully it's pretty close to zero. Hopefully that is not something you have to really do with a colleague or a teammate. And so similarly, I think right now we're in a place where computer use is good, it's getting much better, and in very short order, I think the computer concept will be completely abstracted away from the user. You should never be clicking into a remote virtual machine. You should never have to take control if there's a wasteful path and you have to steer it into the correct path. So in the medium term, I think the computer concept will be an important concept for users to have, but will not actually be something that they're interacting with. So I think the right way of thinking about Grok Bot is it's a team of bots, it's a team of agents that do work for you. And in terms of what they have access to, they have access to a very long memory set of your past interactions with them. And so I think there's a current paradigm if you create a new chat for each discrete unit of work, I think there are a lot of problems with that. I find myself copying and pasting between chats all the time. I think it's just not a great way of grouping categories of work. Instead, the same way on a team, you have a good way of grouping categories of work of roles. You should have roles of different swim lanes of work that you do, and it should learn from you and it should get smarter over time. So I think that's one very critical thing is these are long-lived agents. These are not individual one-off sessions, and these agents get smarter over time. And then the second thing is those agents have access to all of the tools that you would expect a human colleague to have, which is the APIs, the MCPs, that's great, but then access to its own computer, which it can freely manipulate the way that you would.
00:49:44 · Lenny Rachitsky, Roman Ugarte
[00:49:44] S1: At this meetup that I went to, Shab, who's on the, I think, go to market team, demoed something that blew everyone's mind. Because you have a computer within each agent, you can run a lot of different things on the computer. He was running Grok Bot within Grok Bot. The bot can run its own Grok Bots, and I know he was using it for testing and watching regressions and things like that, but that's just a mind-expanding idea. And I'm curious how many levels you can go before the universe collapses on itself. [00:50:14] S0: I do that one too. That one's actually a very useful thing to do is you download Grok Bot for one of your bots, mine is like a QA tester bot. And that way if there's ever bug report or if we're testing out a new build, for example, of the desktop app, I can just say, "Hey, here are 10 workflows that we need to make sure are getting better release after release. I want you to test it. I want you to write it to this notion document that has an extensive list of all of the past tests that we've done of past client versions and compare them." And so I think once you start breaking out of this is AI chat with a set of connections, which is I think where most people are conceptually now, instead to this is a colleague with a computer and anything I would ask a colleague to do on a computer, I can ask Grok Bot to do. It just raises the ceiling, I think, of what you would think to give to AI. [00:51:05] S1: Are there any other mind-expanding use cases or ways to use Grok Bot that you've seen or you use?
00:51:13 · Roman Ugarte
[00:51:13] S0: One pattern that I've seen from many users that is simple, but I think there's a lot of depth if you keep investing in making it better, and this is where I can get kind of nerdy about optimizing my setup, is Grok Bot as an infovore in some ways of just consuming huge quantities of information, removing that from your own cognitive load, giving you peace, and then coming to you with the stuff that's important. And I think the V1 implementation of that, which many people do, is Grok Bot sits on top of Slack and it sits on top of email, and I tell it high level, "Here's my role at the company, here's kind of what I care about. I want you to notify me in these cases. In these cases, you don't need to ping me directly, but you should include this in your daily roundup that I read every day." I think that's the V1 implementation. I'm not sure what the V10 implementation is, but maybe I'm at V3 or four, which is you can give these bots a complete fire hose of information. So I have mine hooked up to every mention of Grok Bot ever on X, and it's interacting with our internal context. It's interacting with the QA tester to see if it can repro any bugs or feedback that we're getting. I'm hooked up to my own messaging services to quickly act on feedback and reach out to people. And I think there's this just always on chief of staff entity that can preserve your focus on the things that actually matter, but is always kind of surveilling to see if there's anything that should get your attention. And we've seen some funny cases of people actually giving their Grok Bots, which I have not done this yet, but maybe soon, giving their Grok Bots access, the ability to page them. And so if something super urgent happens and they're at a coffee or whatever, they get paged by Grok Bot, which is the type of thing that you only want to do if it's urgent and you really want to trust that Grok Bot does not have false positives. So far, those people have reported that it's been very helpful and successful. But I think we're going to see more of that type of stuff where the agent or the bot should actually be more proactive to you than you reaching out to it. And I think that will be the next shift in AI.
00:53:36 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:53:36] S1: There's a number of things that I've been very impressed with watching your team operate. One is speed, which I want to talk about, but the other is how you are. There's awareness that this is a moment in time to capture a lot of market share and really take as much of the market as you can before somebody comes around and they're like, okay, now we got something awesome, especially one of the foundation labs. So watching just how many free accounts you guys are giving out. Also, the focus on use case is so smart because it's such a novel thing and you open it up and it's like, what do I do with this? And there's such a focus on, okay, here's a bunch of things people do with it. And then there's all this talk on Twitter and just all the ways people are using a template. It makes so much sense. Just these two kind of focuses, from what I can tell, get as many people on as possible, as fast as possible until somebody's like, okay, because someone's going to come around and be like, all right, here's the next thing. Super smart and also the use case focus. I know you were a go-to-market person at Cursor before this. Anything you want to share there about just the approach to go-to-market right now for getting this out there?
00:54:43 · Roman Ugarte
[00:54:43] S0: I think the pattern we saw for coding will be somewhat similar to what we see for general knowledge work. And I think we've learned a lot from that on the go-to-market side and more generally just building practical AI that people use. And I think we as a company have culturally really cared about not building demoware, building actually useful stuff in the world and kind of obsessing over that. And there are so many shiny objects and fun prototypes to build, but ultimately that's a very different problem than getting this in the hands of millions of people and having it transform companies. So that's really, I think, culturally where we've always been focused. And so I think on the go-to-market side, what we saw for coding was a very simple pattern, which was there was an early adopter crowd. The early adopter crowd would use these coding tools and really push them to the limits, and they would mostly push them to the limits on individual projects. On nights and weekends, I'm thinking 2023 earlier, people would go home from work. At work, they were using a basic IDE, this is pre-AI, and then at home they'd work on a side project and they'd be using Cursor or they'd be using the latest and greatest AI coding tool. And that would give them an extreme amount of acceleration. It would feel like they were experiencing the future, and then they would come back to work and they would demand it. And they would say, "I cannot picture working any other way than this. I feel like I'm completely walking through molasses right now. This needs to change." And I think for knowledge work, we're going to see a similar pattern of people really feeling the aha moment, sometimes in a personal capacity. And I think we're certainly seeing a lot of this on X right now. You see all these examples of Grok Bot controlling their home robot computer, home robot vacuum cleaner or Grok Bot helping them save money on their Tesla charger negotiation, all of these fun use cases. But I think the next step is going to be, this is not a consumer product. We think this is going to transform businesses, we think this is going to transform teams, and it will be bots coming into teams and contributing really economically valuable work, especially as they get much smarter.