Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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.
00:57:10 · Roman Ugarte, Lenny Rachitsky
And so on the go-to-market side, we're certainly making a big push on prioritizing businesses and thinking about not just the single player use case of working with a single bot, but how does a bot work inside of a broader team? How does a bot work inside of real company systems that are complicated and there's a lot of context and a lot of history to understand? What does memory look like in a broader organization versus a single individual you're catering to? And I think there are a lot of unanswered questions there, but I do think Grok Bot is the right primitive to create this switch to agents for the rest of the company outside of coding, and that's a place where we're quite focused right now. [00:57:56] S1: And along those lines, it's very clear you all understand the power of distribution and how you need to find both an amazing product and get distribution right because Grok Bot's amazing, but the combination of how smart you guys have been with getting it out there in all these different ways is really impressive. And I think that shows you what it takes these days to build something that's really successful. I want to ask about the brand of the different brands around this product and the company, just so people can try to understand, because I know you're going through a transition, acquisition, SpaceX, all these things. So there's Grok Bot, there's Cursors. So talk about the products and the way to think about these different brands today, and I know it'll probably continue to evolve just so we could communicate about it correctly.
00:58:42 · Roman Ugarte
[00:58:42] S0: Definitely. Yeah. I think there are three big pillars right now of SpaceXAI. So the first pillar is the coding product instead of products, and right now that's Cursor and Grok Build. And I think we're big believers that having a professional work surface for developers and for the engineering part of the organization is going to be really critical. And right now people use Grok Bot sometimes to kick off cloud agents or to merge PRs or to do QA, a bunch of engineering adjacent tasks. But ultimately when you're shipping production software, we're big believers that is going to require a product where every pixel is optimized for that end user. So we're making big investments there. The second category is general knowledge work, and we think bot is a really exciting step in that direction. I think there's a lot more work to do of making it more useful, extending it to new surfaces, it really feeling like an AI teammate that you can delegate work to, especially inside of companies and businesses. So that's kind of the second pillar. And then third is the general model effort. We want to train the smartest models in the world that are really capable. And I think one thing that somewhat distinguishes SpaceXAI from other AI labs is I think our goal is less to build, chase super intelligence or some kind of vague aspirational ideal. And the goal is actually very practical, which is to build useful AI. And we do that on the product side, we do that on the model side. And I think part of that is also just cultural of the group of people contributing to these models are engineers and people who came into the model training effort from a very applied mindset. And I think that's what gets this company going and I think is actually a slightly different direction from some of the other competitors out there.
01:00:43 · Lenny Rachitsky
[01:00:43] S1: Super interesting. Okay, there's a couple directions I want to go. One is you have this tweet that is, I think you pinned it or maybe it's your last tweet. It's up there in your timeline if people check you out. So the tweet is, "An AI that does 100% of the job feels categorically different from one that gets you 90% there. I've significantly updated what I think AI is capable of." Say more about that.
01:01:06 · Roman Ugarte
[01:01:06] S0: I think for me, what made me so excited to work on Grok Bot and contribute to it is it was the first time for non-coding tasks that I felt like I could truly delegate work to AI and not have to think about it and I would come back and it's done. And I think engineers have been feeling this for quite some time, for maybe a year, a year and a half, things have been like that. I mean, the job of a developer has completely transformed. It is unrecognizable from what it was two years ago and many, many words have been said on that topic. But I think it's underrated how different that experience is from what most people are feeling about AI right now and the way that AI has changed their lives. And it looks quite similar to the way that people would use AI two years ago where you create a new thread for a task, you type it into an input box, you hit enter, you watch all of these steps happen, you get an output, it's not quite right, you keep working on it. And Grok Bot, I think short circuits a lot of that. When you first lay eyes on the first screen, you're like, "Whoa, this is clearly different. Let's see if it actually works, but this is different." And then you give it something and it kind of works to a surprising extent. And I think we're going to do a lot to make it work much better. And so I think what I was expressing in that was when you have a teammate that you only 90% trust and you give something to, which luckily I do not have the experience of here because I work with great people, but if you delegate something to someone and you're like, "I know I'm going to have to be thinking about this while you're doing it, and I know it probably is not going to be quite there and I'm going to have to intervene and steer it slightly," that's not 90% task completion. You're still doing the thing and it feels that way and it's weighing on you in the same way versus truly throwing a no look pass to a colleague and being like, "You got this, here's the context, go off and run. I'm excited to see what you do." That's a different category. And I think that's the type of thing that people feel with Grok Bot every day are these no look passes and you just trust that it can get it done and then it does and it's just a very magical experience.
01:03:26 · Lenny Rachitsky
[01:03:26] S1: Yeah, I've had that experience consistently. Okay, so another element of how y'all operate that has really impressed me and I've not seen this before is how fast y'all move. So I got added to this Slack as I was giving feedback with some folks and it's just like, okay, how about, okay, tomorrow we're going to give you some free codes to give out. You could do it tomorrow. We'll do this tomorrow. Or we're going to launch a marketplace with templates, we're going to launch this in two days. It's just like, what? I don't have time for this. How do you guys, with all the things going on, all these things constantly shipping and also staying consistent and high quality and feeling clear that it's towards a specific vision. So there's kind of two parts of this question, just what's the secret to how fast you all have been moving and how do you stay aligned moving that fast towards a vision that you all believe in and where you want it to go versus just band-aiding it along the way?