Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:57:08 · Lenny Rachitsky, Claire Vo
[00:57:08] S0: Show us a couple other examples. I know you have a family planning one. [00:57:11] S1: Yeah, so those are my work ones. Fin is my favorite. So again, my personal life might be busier than my work life in that I've got these three boys and a husband and we're all over the city. We're city living. And so we had one car and we're finally at the tipping point where we have two cars. That's how complicated our life is. And there's so many things that come in ad hoc throughout the day that you just have to remember an action. And so a good example is, I don't know why we did this, but my oldest is on a basketball team. And the basketball team will not tell you when the game is until Thursday before the weekend. So it's like a mystery until Thursday. And then Thursday, you may have between zero and three basketball games somewhere in the Bay Area. So we are living very free right now. And what would happen in past life is we get an email from the basketball team and they'd say, "Here's the link to the tournament we're playing this week." That's where the schedule is. And the schedule is this long and it has 50 teams in it and I don't know which team my kid is in and I don't know where the gyms are and all that stuff. And so I'm in a group chat with my husband, that email hit my husband and he just texted Fin. He said, "Here's the page, put it on the calendar so we know where to go." And it had a little hard time browsing web. I know you've had some hard time- [00:58:40] S0: Yeah, let's talk about that.
00:58:40 · Lenny Rachitsky, Claire Vo
[00:58:40] S0: Yeah, let's talk about that. [00:58:40] S1: Browsing web. But instead he just select all, pasted the page and pasted it in and then Fin dropped it on the calendar and then said, "Hey, oldest kid has a conflict with middle kids soccer game. How are you guys going to split up duties here?" And so it's not just doing that functional, like put it on my calendar, it's going that next step because we've put it in its instructions to help us solve logistics challenges. And again, force the humans in the loop, my husband and I, to come together and confirm to it that we solved this problem. And so my favorite use case of Fin is every Thursday, or sorry, every afternoon at about three o'clock, it pings in this group chat and it says, "Which of you are picking up which kids?" It sounds so simple, but it's a conversation that my husband and I should be having live every day, but sometimes we forget and then we get to 4:45 and we say, "Well, are you getting him? Am I getting him? Can we get them together? Do they have soccer?" And so again, it's just this really useful, makes me feel like a winner mom use case. [00:59:48] S0: Something that it does for me is when I have a meeting somewhere, I don't know how it knows this, but it's like, "You should leave now." Or "Have you left yet for this meeting because it's like traffic is a little higher right now." [00:59:57] S1: Yeah. [00:59:58] S0: And that's the heartbeat in action, right? It's just like every half hour it's just like, hmm, let's see what's going on. And then fires off some messages and then goes back to sleep.
00:59:58 · Lenny Rachitsky, Claire Vo
[00:59:58] S0: And that's the heartbeat in action, right? It's just like every half hour it's just like, hmm, let's see what's going on. And then fires off some messages and then goes back to sleep. [01:00:05] S1: Yep. [01:00:06] S0: Okay. Any other examples that are worth showing or should we go a little deeper?
01:00:10 · Claire Vo
[01:00:10] S1: We can just again show... What I would say is it has helped me not just get my feet underneath me from a personal work perspective. It's also allowing me to take on new projects that I would've felt really overwhelmed to take on before. And so I am doing this Maven course for executives trying to transform their engineering product and design organizations. They've been asking me to do this for a long time. I'm like, "I'm too busy to do this." Finally, I was like, I actually think "I can pull this off because I have agentic support." So my co-course teacher, Zach and I have built the entire course in Claude Code, and then we recently built Sage the course bot now that we're about a month off from the course and Sage is project managing us to make sure that we are prepped for this course on time. So it knows when the course is launching. It knows that Zach and I are, believe it or not, very introverted engineers that don't want to market and don't really want to talk to humans. And so every Monday it's like, "Claire and Zach, have you remembered to post on LinkedIn about your course? Here's a nice little post for you to copy and paste so you don't have to think of something." And then whenever I do research or come across something maybe on the timeline that would be good for the course, I just paste it to Sage and I say, "I think this would be interesting for the course." She downloads it using the API, the Twitter API, puts it in our repo, takes notes, figures out where it needs to go into the syllabus. And again, it's like we would never be able to afford for this first version of a course hiring an ops person, or hiring a content manager, or hiring a software engineer. And we probably need it. We need somebody to project manage us. We need somebody to help us manage all the course content and the students. And so this has allowed me to spin up a business with a quote, unquote employee that will eventually maybe be big enough that we can hire other people, but to get it off the ground, it's been really efficient.
01:02:18 · Lenny Rachitsky, Claire Vo
[01:02:18] S0: What a time to be alive. [01:02:19] S1: What a time. [01:02:19] S0: What a time. This is crazy. Okay. So there's also just challenges that people run into with OpenClaw. A few I've run into is just using the browser is very unreliable. I wanted it to just add things to my DoorDash cart and it works and then it stops working. And then other people run into memory issues where it's like forgetting stuff. Some people just complain. It's just so much work just to keep it going. Let's talk about just the issues you run into and that people run into and any advice you might share. Maybe the browser stuff first, just like any advice for the browser.
01:02:52 · Claire Vo
[01:02:52] S1: Yeah. Again, going back to that gnarly feeling of product market fit is it has so many sharp edges. I won't sugarcoat it. It's a pain to set up. You got to feed and maintain your Claws. It is not hands-off, but the value is so high, I am willing to go through the pain. And I think any good product manager has felt this experience of launching a product and it's just hot garbage. It's buggy, it doesn't look great. And your biggest complaints from customers are not, "I don't think this is useful." It's that, "It's broken or doesn't work as good as I want." That's when you know you have product market fit. So I like the complaints of like, "It's buggy. It doesn't remember. I want it to do X, but it can't." That's not, not product market fit. That's a product that hasn't caught up to its product market fit. And so again, I think this is just a really interesting one for people who are our product thinkers. But going back to the actual problems I've experienced, I think you outlined them pretty well. One, I don't think anybody has really unlocked browser use. That is not just an OpenClaw thing. I think we look at ChatGPT Atlas, you look at Perplexity, Comet, you look at all of these kind of browser use. Claude has a browser use component. I don't think any of them are great. And the reason why they're not great is technically I think it's a complicated problem to solve, so I'm empathetic to that. And two, the open web has been so hardened against bots. And so the way websites are architected are actually anti-bot. And so there are all these hard walls where bots can't access sites. There are all these bot identifying mechanisms. For example, trying to browse X with a bot, there's like a lot of punishments being doled out when people are found out they're doing that. And so I just think the web is hostile to agents right now. And we're going to have to rethink what is the interface of the web to be more agent friendly because I think we skip ahead a couple years and the number one user of websites are going to be people's agents. And so we can either say not allowed, you're not allowed to use websites or think of a new way to open up the web. Practically what I have done is, you might laugh at this because we've been talking about it a lot. I read the docs.