Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
01:08:01 · Roman Ugarte
[01:08:01] S0: I mean, a lot of this, and it's a fuzzy answer, a lot of this I think is downstream from culture and the culture that you set and the people that you bring in and the way that they approach these problems. And I think for us, exactly as you said, we have never been complacent. We've never felt like we've won, and it's always been about the next thing. And I think there's been a really deep belief across the company that AI is moving incredibly quickly. Our goal is to translate those capabilities into amazing products for customers, but those products are going to change and they need to meet the moment as the capabilities get stronger. And what met the moment two years ago is completely different than what's meeting the moment today. And if we as a company can't completely reinvent ourselves every six months, which recently it's felt even shorter than that, of complete very significant reinventions of our priorities, the core product, what users feel, we're going to lose. And I think it's that spirit of always pushing to be on the frontier, never thinking it's over or that we've won or that we've gotten it right and just constantly updating our beliefs that has gotten us to where we are now. And to your point on the competitiveness of this space, one thing that I think is important to point out is AI coding has always been competitive from when Cursor first came to be. And at the time the competitors were Microsoft and others and a handful of maybe 10 or 20 companies. And I think it's notable that none of those competitors are at the forefront of AI coding right now in large part, not because of any incorrect decisions that they made or any lack of resources on their part, but this cultural inability to move quickly and to change to meet the moment as the moment's changing. And so I think that's exactly what has led us to invest in things like Grok Bot, for example.
01:10:04 · Lenny Rachitsky, Roman Ugarte
[01:10:04] S1: Are there any core values, just specific ways you phrase this to kind of remind everyone of this is how we work? [01:10:10] S0: Yeah, two values that I find myself coming back to quite a bit. The first one is this idea of deleting the product. And I think it exactly ties back to what you're saying right now where when you look at every past iteration of Cursor, for example, but even I think when you look at every past iteration of Grok Bot, I think we will feel the same thing, is things going away, not new things getting added, but these scaffolding product overhang style things that get built in because the models have not yet gotten smart enough to just do it themselves, those things will get moved away over time and we need to feel comfortable making kind of hard decisions that might upset a small set of users or a small set of us internally to do the bigger thing of make the product simple, make the product powerful and adapt to where the future is going. So I think that's been very core. And then the second thing, which ties back to the pace of execution is just do the thing, which I find myself kind of repeating a lot even as we've kind of grown as a company is it's on you. We're all in this boat together, we want to win. And if you see something that you think needs to happen, this is not an ask for permission culture, you go out and you fix the thing and you pull in the resources that you need to make it happen. And I think that has made many people very successful here before, and I think it's something we really share with SpaceXAI as well.
01:11:39 · Lenny Rachitsky
[01:11:39] S1: Agency, as you may have heard. So interesting. One of the big questions that comes up, and this might be my final question, is around moats. And a lot of people look at Cursor as a really interesting example of they're in a market with technically maybe no moats, but they've continued to win and succeed. The two moats you think about with Cursor is the data feedback loop of people auto completing, learning what they're doing and training models based on that. So that's unique. The other is just best in class experience and being a high daily active user product and finding over time what works and what people need. What have you just learned? And I guess any thoughts on moats in this space that might be helpful for folks that are trying to figure this out for themselves?
01:12:28 · Roman Ugarte
[01:12:28] S0: Yeah, there's a lot of talk about moats and it is a pretty interesting moment in time to be starting a company. So I can understand why so many founders are kind of asking themselves that and trying to project out 12 months from now, 24 months from now, it just feels like an eternity. I will say that I think if Cursor and many other successful companies of this kind of vintage, I think if they had thought about moats/kind of tried to work backwards from some strategy diagram or a maybe more abstract notion of how a company should work, I don't think that would've created this outcome or this product. I think what really created the magic of Cursor was an obsession with building a useful thing today. And I think it was constantly this exercise of you can kind of see where the world is going three months from now, six months from now, models are going to get smarter, a thing that isn't solvable now is finally going to be solvable. And I think Cursor was a little bit this recurring prompt of how could we pull that stuff to today, even if it requires a little bit of engineering on top to make it work or a lot of engineering on top to make it work, even it requires changing the product in a specific way so a user can interact with this new capability. How can we bring that forward? And then three months from now, we should delete all that stuff because it'll just be good and basic common bare minimum of the product and then we'll build the thing for three months from then. And then it was constantly just doing that over and over again that I think led to users really trusting us and placing their time inside of our product and trusting that we were kind of bringing things to this next frontier and to the next future. And so I would really encourage many founders or people starting out today to be more grounded in that perspective of how can I make something that is not possible now possible? Users are going to come to me to use that thing. I'm going to pull them to the next impossible frontier. And then through all of that, I'm going to gain a lot of distribution advantages. I'm going to gain data advantages. There will be value there, but I think that's really the place to play.
01:14:49 · Lenny Rachitsky
[01:14:49] S1: I love that answer. Essentially, the way I'm thinking about it is just build something people are obsessed with, don't overthink the moats piece. And if you can continue to do that, you'll find something which in Cursor case ended up being a few things completely. And that came up actually recently on another podcast I did, I don't know if it'll come out before or after this, this idea that moats are discovered, not planned ahead of time a lot of times. Okay, let me actually ask you for Grok Bot tips as an actual last question. Some people are going to be like, "Oh, shit. I got to try this thing. What's all this excitement all about?" What would be some advice for folks that are trying out, let's say for people that are new to it, just like here's some keys to success and maybe some power tip for someone that's already with it and just like, "Oh wow, I didn't know that"?
01:15:31 · Roman Ugarte
[01:15:31] S0: Yeah, I want to stay away from the super hacky pro tip stuff because I think our philosophy as a team and as a company is that those things really shouldn't exist. There shouldn't be all these crazy knobs. You should be able to delegate something to Grok Bot and they should do it. And so what I would encourage for someone new who's just downloading the app, you're looking at the screen, I think the first thing is give Grok Bot the context it needs to be successful. So in a similar way as if you were onboarding someone to your team, it'd be really helpful for them to have access to Slack and your email and the company records that you use every single day. So I'd give it access to the tools and then I would actually ask Grok Bot what it can do for you and let it kind of go through those connections that you've initially set up. In my case, it might be I give it my email, I give it Slack. And I was really surprised when I was first onboarding. We didn't have any onboarding screens at this time, so this was kind of the first task I gave it, was go through my Slack, go through my email and suggest five things that you can take off of my plate and what it would take for you to do that. And it suggested five and two of them were actually really helpful and I just immediately spun off two bots to solve those two. And that was my big wow moment of feeling like no other AI tool in the past could have done those two things. It was not like draft an email, it was like do a chunk of work. And so I'd encourage people who are brand new to do it that way. And then for people who are not brand new, I kind of am constantly finding new patterns for ways that my bots can interact with each other and can collaborate with each other. And so I've been creating a bit more of a scaffold of where these artifacts that Grok Bots create should live and how it can write to a place that's very legible to me. So I have these frequent digests that I read every day and it kind of pushes to a database and I can just read it very easily. And so I would encourage power users to think about ways that Grok Bot can actually write to a single store where you can organize a lot of its outputs much easier.