Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
01:03:38 · Lenny Rachitsky, Tom Verrilli
[01:03:38] S1: Yeah, that is such a fun analogy because even though you make music expanding it, it's like inward or it's like learning from the compression. [01:03:49] S0: What do we learn? How do you communicate to everyone [inaudible 01:03:51] back to shipping? [01:03:52] S1: It's a different kind of music. Internal music, external experiment. [01:03:55] S0: Yeah. Because genuinely there are people who are really big on roadmaps and there are people who are really big on iteration. I think the honest answer is you've got to do both. You can't over-index on either. [01:04:05] S1: So the lesson here is run experiments, but then make sure you think about the implication of the result at the bigger picture. And then with that [inaudible 01:04:15]. [01:04:14] S0: What are we trying to do? Have a plan. I think the system works this way. I have this belief that if we change the way that discovery algorithms work for XYZ reasons, it will have this impact. What's the smallest thing I can do to prove that? Okay, it worked. Great. No change to plan. V2. Oh shit, that didn't work. V3 is going to have to be different. And you just want to always be going through that motion. [01:04:36] S1: People not watching on YouTube, Tom is moving his hands. [01:04:39] S0: Gesticulating wildly. [01:04:42] S1: What's a context where you have said to someone, "Hey, go play the accordion," or, "We're playing the accordion." What are they usually doing wrong?
01:04:50 · Tom Verrilli
[01:04:50] S0: It tends to be that you're shipping something in a very local sense without necessarily understanding impact. So an example right now is the core of most marketplaces is listings. If you try and think about Amazon.com, without listings, there's basically nothing there. It's a left rail or right rail and some videos. In video commerce and live commerce at Whatnot, you don't really historically need listings. If I want to sell you a pair of AirPods, I could literally hold them up to screen and show you them and describe them and say they're AirPods. I'm going to start them at a dollar. And as a buyer, you now have all the information you need in order to make a purchase decision, which is great. And so you may not have to invest in making listings the way that someone else does. And that's probably net good for a seller because it takes three and a half minutes to make a listing and it takes zero minutes to describe a thing and hold it up. But you then zoom out, and say, "Oh shit, new buyers are going to come to live commerce and expect search to function. If I don't know what you're selling until after you've sold it, there's no possible way that I can put somebody in the right stream for AirPods because we didn't know you have them and I therefore can't direct people to it." And so you go through this exercise of like, "We don't need to fix it. It works." And then you're like, "Okay, great. What does that have implications for other things?" Okay, then what would we do? Oh, we're going to make everyone make listings. And you're like, "Zoom back out again. If every seller is now spending three minutes for every listing that they're making, the number of things they can sell per hour is now dramatically, dramatically lower, which means it's bad for sellers. Okay, shit, we can't do that again." And so you have to keep stretching through the what are the longer term implications or what are the knock-on effects of things we're building?
01:06:36 · Lenny Rachitsky
[01:06:36] S1: That is extremely helpful. What's interesting about Whatnot is there's this spectrum of Whatnot, and then there's this whole trend of agentic commerce where agents are going to be buying the things for you and just working with each other, create a whole new agentic economy. And this is the opposite. Humans live talking to each other, buying from each other. Thoughts on that trend and how that might impact you guys?
01:07:00 · Tom Verrilli
[01:07:00] S0: Listen, I, for one, welcome our agentic overlords for things like I don't want to have to think about light bulbs, air filters, any of the programmatic stuff that I need to run my life. I'm also pretty great with it for really high intent things. I need a particular cable for my computer. I'm looking for outdoor lights for my house. Things where there are really taxing searches. I think about this, you got to go to a wedding, which means I need black shoes, but delivered by Thursday because if they don't get here before Thursday, they're no good for me kind of things. Absolutely. But most of commerce in America isn't actually high intent. How many years are we into e-comm now? 30 years into e-comm. And e-commerce has never exceeded 20% of retail spend in America. The vast, vast, vast majority of retail shopping in the United States is still people going in person and buying things. In the UK, it's similar. It's like 75-25. And it turns out actually that a lot of shopping is low intent. I'm going to the mall because I've got a wedding coming up, and I don't have anything to wear and I'm going to wander around and see what people have available because I don't actually know specifically what I want. And actually the value of stores is that that person who runs that shoe store has agency and taste, and she curates a selection of shoes. She has a level of customer service. She has a window display, which can show me the types of things she has. And I can wander around the mall and actually work out what it is I want to buy or be educated by it. And as it turns out, it's quite pleasant. There's a reason that the mall is a social thing. And so I think that agentic is going to be huge. Retail is a $7.5 trillion industry in the US though, so I don't think it's a winner takes all thing. What I think Live Commerce does is it's the first time that we've ever managed to bring together scale and convenience of the internet and also that same social cultural experience of physical shopping. Because at Twitch, we used to basically assume that if it's less than 1,000 people in a stream, it's non-economic because you're operating on CPMs. But you can go into a stream on Whatnot and see 30, 50 people in that stream. And you imagine for a moment that you're running a shoe store at a mall and you had 50 people in your store. You'd never close.
01:09:23 · Tom Verrilli, Lenny Rachitsky
You would literally never shut down the store because that's so much more foot traffic than you can ever imagine being in a store because commerce has totally different economics to entertainment, and CPMs aren't the thing that you have to worry about. So I think it's not really in competition with agentic. I think it's a completely different customer need. [01:09:45] S1: Amazing. There's room for everyone. I want to end maybe with a question about Twitter. So you were a Twitter. [01:09:51] S0: Yes, sir. [01:09:51] S1: A PM at Twitter working on growth. I feel like everybody that worked at Twitter as a PM was just scarred from the experience of Twitter. Everyone said, "Do not do things this way." What's something that stuck with you from that experience? What did you learn? What did you unlearn?
01:10:05 · Tom Verrilli
[01:10:05] S0: It is funny. I have said to a friend before that asking someone who was at Twitter in the 2015, '16 era is a little bit like a therapist asking somebody to tell them about their childhood. It's like you know the trauma that you're bringing up. For those who are not familiar with that lore, I think we had nine heads of product in the two years that I was there. It was that level of kind of chaos. I think my favorite quote was from someone on the partnerships team who said it felt like Kara Swisher lived in the air vents. That was how often drama was going on about the place. I think, Lenny, I probably took two overwhelming things away from my time at Twitter. And other than some incredible friends, and I will say that the product diaspora from that era of Twitter is pretty incredible and everywhere. The first one is if you truly find product market fit, if you manage to bottle lightning, doesn't matter how badly you screw up the organization of it. It's huge. And Twitter genuinely had that level of product market fit that you could emotionally feel how much people loved your product. And it's a really powerful litmus test to learn relatively early in your career that that's what PMF is. Not like, hey, the graphs look okay. There's a level of fervor that goes in. I think maybe on the flip side of less positive is what it definitely learned is most of the time you hear it's really complex, it isn't. Leadership's just weak. So the two years that I was there, everyone knew we were going to have to lift the 140 character limit. There was working group after working group. The project beyond 140 was everywhere. Because we knew, for example, that people in Japan Tweeted six times more often than people in Western markets. And it was largely when we spoke to them because Kanji lets you say heaps more in the same number of characters than a romance language did. We knew that was the inevitable end state, but there's obviously a bunch of work that was needed and trade-offs, and just no one wanted to make the call. And so there was just yet another design sprint, yet another cycle. And it was another year and a half after I left, I think it was maybe even almost two years after I left, before someone actually did it. And it turns out nobody died. The soul of the place didn't fall apart.