Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:49:05 · Lenny Rachitsky, Tara Seshan
[00:49:05] S1: I haven't talk about Sites. [00:49:06] S0: Sites is a really fun, amazing product. You can basically build a site, certainly in Work as a presentational artifact, but I also build sites for literally anything. I built a site for the team as a game where we all played a game together using a site because Sites have a database. I actually built a site because I went on a backpacking trip recently. I built a site of the route that tracked the elevation of everywhere we were going. Everyone on our trip inputted all their food. It was superfast and effective. Sites realized the dream of malleable personal software that Alan Kay flagged in the '60s of the true personal computer is one that has personal software. In some ways, Sites are the tangible way to make that possible. We had all once dreamed of making personal software, and certainly people with tools like Notion, et cetera, try with all these blocks to configure what that could be. But with the Site, it is literally a prompt. I literally with a prompt say, "Build me this exact tool that I need to get this thing done," and it just does it. They're shareable. They can auto update. You can use internal data to build a dashboard, for example, with lots of metrics. And rather than painstakingly laboring over some sort of slide deck, a site is just a way more dynamic surface for presentation. [00:50:33] S1: How do you use a site? Do you have to do anything special or you tell it, create a site? [00:50:33] S0: In Codex be like, "Create a site that- [00:50:35] S1: Create a site.
00:50:35 · Lenny Rachitsky, Tara Seshan
[00:50:35] S1: Create a site. [00:50:36] S0: ... is a, I don't know, is a mafia game for my team," and it will just do it. [00:50:40] S1: And I'm thinking capital S site, but it doesn't matter, I imagine. [00:50:44] S0: Yeah. [00:50:44] S1: It just knows what sites are? [00:50:45] S0: Mm-hmm. [00:50:46] S1: Yeah, because it used to be, "Here's some source code, go figure out where to deploy it." [00:50:50] S0: Yeah. [00:50:51] S1: And you're saying here is it just hosted for you and immediately you can use it. [00:50:53] S0: Host it for you. You choose whether it's public. You can choose whether it's with your team- [00:50:57] S1: Awesome. [00:50:57] S0: ... or choose whether it's private to you. They're great. The easy reach of building a site all the time has changed what my day-to-day looks like, which often in previous worlds used to look like creating lots of artifacts like docs and sheets and whatever it might be. Now I just make sites all the time. [00:51:16] S1: And you could do that through, I imagine, Work or... Can you do it through all the surfaces, Codex, Work, ChatGPT Chat? [00:51:23] S0: You can do it through Work. You can do it- [00:51:23] S1: Okay, cool. [00:51:25] S0: ... through Codex. You can do it in the web. You can do it on mobile. You can do it anywhere. [00:51:27] S1: Okay. I just kicked off create a site about Tara Seshan. [00:51:30] S0: Great. [00:51:31] S1: Is that how you pronounce your last name, by the way? I haven't asked you. [00:51:35] S0: Tara Seshan, like station.
00:51:35 · Tara Seshan, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:51:35] S0: Tara Seshan, like station. [00:51:37] S1: Seshan. Okay, cool. Okay, cool. Sites. Okay. Any other quick tips, while we're on this- [00:51:37] S0: I think that- [00:51:44] S1: ... topic, for people? Because that was a great tip, because I don't think a lot of people know about Sites, so it's very useful. [00:51:47] S0: Yeah, Sites are awesome. The other thing I really love is using Visualize in Codex. Have you used /visualize? [00:51:53] S1: No. [00:51:54] S0: Oh, /visualize is incredibly exciting. You can just do /visualize, visualize my ChatGPT usage until now, or something like that, and it will pull in all the things that you've done and create an amazing visualization for it. The number of times that I've been thinking about, how do I not only pull in a bunch of charts and data, but present them in a way that is understandable and useful for the story I'm trying to tell has been infinite. And Visualize makes that incredibly simple. It is surprisingly delightful to use Visualize. [00:52:26] S1: These are such good examples of there's so much power here we don't even know about or understand, and that's the challenge you have here. Help us- [00:52:26] S0: For sure, for sure.
00:52:26 · Tara Seshan, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:52:26] S0: For sure, for sure. [00:52:34] S1: Help us know all these things. That's why podcasts like this are also useful. Can't put it all in the product. I'm going to go in a totally different direction. I'm going to talk about writing. I asked Brie Wolfson, who knows you well, what to ask you. Funny enough, she suggested questions for the previous podcast conversation I did with Adam Ward from Cursor. So she said, "Okay, you should ask her about writing/thinking. A Tara brief is iconic." Help us understand just what makes your writing your briefs iconic and any tips that might be helpful for people that are maybe trying to get better at writing and writing documents.
00:53:13 · Tara Seshan
[00:53:13] S0: I really strongly believe that I do two types of writing at work. One is writing as thinking, and the other is writing as reporting. Writing as thinking is me writing a brief about why we should build a certain product or why we should take a certain strategy or why maybe a spicy take. But writing as reporting is things like, oh, I'm summarizing the status of what our team has been up to this week and I'm sending over a report about it, or this is our plan for this particular launch or announcement or something like that. Writing as reporting, I happily automate or I use the models all the time to make that as simple as it can be. But writing as thinking is something I never will automate. I really strongly believe that, at least for me, the act of going through and outlining something, turning it into some level of pros, cutting it and editing it, continuing to iterate on it is one of the most important steps for me to get my ideas in line. I think most people actually will paint with a really broad brush, like, "I will never use the models for writing," or, "I always use the models for writing." And actually to me, both those broad brushes are wrong. I think you should use the models as much as possible for writing as reporting. And in as much as you think with writing, as I really do and I think a lot of people do, you should not use it. You shouldn't replace your thinking with it. But my briefs in the past, because I write so much as a way of thinking, is that I will go into a hole, write a brief for a new idea or a product, spend a ton of time refining that particular idea, shop it around with people and have them attack the ideas in it as much as possible and poke holes, make it stronger, and then take it to the next person and do the same thing. And so at Stripe, this is something I did many, many, many, many times over, whether that was to kick off a new product area or to suggest a big change in direction or to analyze a problem and suggest a path forward. And Stripe is incredibly oriented as a writing culture. And there are many people, like Jeff Weinstein, who are also very into writing and sharing briefs at Stripe. Stripe is one of the few places where a brief will go viral inside the company. And so writing as thinking there is really prized, and that's where I did the majority of that writing work.
00:55:47 · Tara Seshan
At OpenAI, I think I still write as thinking all the time. But the shareable artifact here is not really a long doc or a proof of work in that way, partially because times have changed and a long doc is not a signal that you thought through something. Because you could easily produce a long doc that indicates that you haven't. Maybe one of the biggest changes I've experienced personally in my day-to-day, which has been a big, maybe jarring change, is I used to think in a document and then do some translation of that into a presentational artifact, and that would be my indication that I thought through a problem and this is what we're going to do and the team moves in that direction. And now I am way more on mocks not docs, or prototypes not docs. And if I have something that people can try and interact with, or even better, I have results where we tried this, we ran an AB, here's the results, this is why I think we should go in this direction, that is a way better communication tool than the doc itself. And so I still write hundreds of docs all the time, but I do it for me and I no longer do it for other people really. That no longer is the best way to talk and communicate. That is probably the biggest change I've experienced personally in this era versus the previous era.