Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:05:58 · Claire Vo, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:05:58] S1: It's really hard for me not to be having fun. I'm working so much and doing so much, but that's really not because I'm chasing some productivity metric or feel like I need to ship more because I can. It's because all of it feels very fun. I think vibe coding is gaming right now. I haven't felt like this since I was a teenager learning to code, and playing video games and all this kind of stuff. So it comes from a very joyous, creative place for me, not stressful. [00:06:28] S0: I feel like there's a whole other podcast we should do of just how you do all that you do. I don't know if people know all this. You have three kids. You have a podcast, weekly podcast. You have ChatPRD, a product company you're building. And I think there's something else even. [00:06:42] S1: Yeah. I just launched a course with my friend, Zach. And then my husband and I work on stuff. We invest. There's a lot going on right now. [00:06:51] S0: Okay. Well, maybe what's one tip that allows you to do this because this feels impossible. I have one kid. I don't know how you do this.
00:06:51 · Lenny Rachitsky, Claire Vo
[00:06:51] S0: Okay. Well, maybe what's one tip that allows you to do this because this feels impossible. I have one kid. I don't know how you do this. [00:06:57] S1: Well, I mean, marry good. That's what I got. Get a great co-parent, great partner. My husband is so supportive of all the things that I want to do, is an equal partner and more in the house stuff, and in the professional stuff. And that makes things a lot easier, when everybody in the household's pulling their weight. The second thing is what we just said, which is time flies when you're having fun. If the things that you center your work life around are things that you would find natural joy in anyway, it's very easy to spend the time and effort and dedication to do it. And then we'll go into this, which is I just spend more time automating the things that I do than doing them. And I take a lot of notice of the things that I'm avoiding. And when I avoid them, they either don't serve my ultimate purpose, and I need to let them go and not do them as part of my career, or I need to find a way to automate them and use some system to do it so I don't have to.
00:08:01 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:08:01] S0: An amazing segue to what we're going to be actually talking about today. So we're going to be going deep, deep, deep on OpenClaw. And why I'm excited about this timing on this, it feels like the hype cycle, like the peak hype cycle of OpenClaw has passed. And now, instead of all these just videos and posts coming out of just these breathless OpenClaw's going to change your life, install it. It's the best thing that's ever happened. It feels like we're getting now to just like, what is it actually useful for? Here's to actually use it in your life. It's been very fun to watch your journey with OpenClaw. You started off as one of the leading skeptics. You had these videos where you're just like, it just deleted my whole calendar, and it's joining my podcast. I don't even know how to get it. You're recording and it joined your podcast. And now you're a true believer, from what I can tell. To give people just a glimpse of that, how many claws do you have running right now? How many computers do you have?
00:08:52 · Claire Vo, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:08:52] S1: Yeah, I have three Mac Minis over there unboxed. Literally just unboxed one. I have another one, boxed, upstairs. I had Polly originally running on an old MacBook Air, but she got a brain transplant into a stack of Mac Minis and I'm now running eight different agents on OpenClaw. And I definitely started... I'm just so anti-hype cycle sometimes, and it doesn't come from trying to be contradictory or take a weird stance in the discourse. What it really comes from is, I show up to How I AI, show up to public, and I give you my honest opinion about where these products are now, and my personal experience as someone who doesn't claim to be an expert in every single technology, but is technically proficient enough to knock my way around a harness. And when I first heard about OpenClaw, there was enough noise around it. I thought, "It's my job to find out what this is all about." And my first install, I truly spent eight hours that first day getting OpenClaw up and running. And in return, for those eight hours, I got my personal family calendar deleted by OpenClaw. It was very thrilling. It was very, very fun. [00:10:13] S0: Great ROI.
00:10:13 · Lenny Rachitsky, Claire Vo
[00:10:13] S0: Great ROI. [00:10:14] S1: Yeah. And I had this sort of experience, two-sided experience. On one side, very unhappy that my calendar got deleted. On the other side of it was this, and you'll appreciate this as a product person, was that really ugly and apparent feeling of product market fit, which is it just hit me with enough joy and enough utility when it wasn't deleting my calendar that I knew something was there. And my advice to people, as they think about AI tools that seemingly come out three times a day, is you really have to pull the thread on these tools, and you have to spend enough time with them to see not where they are today, but where they are in a week, and where they are in a month and where they are in two weeks. And I had this experience with Claude- Cowork as well. It first came out. I was like, "Who is this for? I don't understand it." I could have walked away from that and written it off wholesale. And instead I came back to it week after week, tried it over and over and over again, and eventually found an unlock. And I would say OpenClaw, more than almost anything that I've worked with, and I would not have expected myself to say this in January, it has changed my life. I am breathless. I am a breathless OpenClaw bro now. And I think that what I hope I bring to this conversation is, and I have the receipts, I can tell you how it works. I can tell you exactly what it does for me. I can tell you exactly what it doesn't, and I can tell you why I went on my phone and bought four Mac Minis.
00:11:50 · Lenny Rachitsky, Claire Vo
[00:11:50] S0: Okay. This is incredible. We're going to get into a bunch of just how to actually do it, some of the unlocks that allowed you to be this successful with it. Give people a few examples of what this actually does for you in your life that is actually useful because you actually continue to use it. It's like a part of your life now. [00:12:05] S1: I first started with it the same way I recommend almost everybody start with it, which is every professional deserves an EA, and every family deserves a family manager. And so it started off as a general purpose, professional, sort of executive assistant, scheduling, email, personal project management, sort of that chief of staff, generalist helper. And then this is where it truly has product market fit, which is, complex schedules across a family and all the things it takes to run my household. We talked about this. I have three kids. They're in two different schools, plus a baby. We've got three basketball leagues going on right now, plus soccer, plus I'm in ballet. My husband and I have different work commitments, different social commitments. We have a house that we're trying to keep standing. We have bodies we're trying to keep healthy. All of those things I need some help with. And so the initial unlock for me were those, kind of, personal assistant use cases, both in my professional life and then just in my home life. [00:13:16] S0: By the way, you said ballet. I think it's important for people to know you're like, you're taking ballet. This is another thing [inaudible 00:13:23].