Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
01:30:13 · Claire Vo
[01:30:13] S1: I'll say what my personal experience was as somebody who has been thinking about AI for quite some time, so compelled by this moment in technology that I quit my fancy pants executive job to sit and marinate in this future of AI. And why I have these three Mac minis on my desk is because one Saturday I woke up and I turned to my husband, I said, "I'm having a ChatGPT moment." I'm having this, which I have not had since ChatGPT came out, which is this is going to change everything. Maybe not this specific instance of it, maybe not this specific repo, although the stars just keep going up and up and up, but I'm having this moment where my imagination has unlocked another level because of what I could predict and presume this sort of harness, this sort of product, this sort of experience can unlock if you take it as a given that things are going to improve. I'm truly having a moment with this, and I'm having that moment because it's so useful, personally useful. I'm having that moment because it's really inspiring me as an AI builder of what the next wave of products is going to look like. And I'm having a moment because this thing is not perfect, and it's open source, and it's a lot to maintain. And imagine in a year when it's not that. Whoever figures that out, I think is going to have something really special or maybe we'll all have something that we all run and lovingly craft at home, and that will be special too. So I will just say for folks, this has been one of those really intense moments where my eyes open and I think, "Wow, this is going to change my personal life and my professional life in a way I could not have predicted three years ago." And while I spend a lot of time in AI, I don't have those moments often.
01:32:10 · Lenny Rachitsky, Claire Vo
[01:32:10] S0: That's a big deal for someone being so close to all of the things to say that about this one product. [01:32:14] S1: Yeah, and I'm anti-hype guy. I was not like this when it first came out. So you can trust me, there are the receipts. I did it live. I'm not just saying this because I think it is the fashionable thing. I am saying this because I spend my entire day with an OpenClaw. [01:32:31] S0: Yeah, eight open, nine now. We just created the new one. [01:32:35] S1: Nine. [01:32:38] S0: Incredible. Okay, Claire, before we get to a very exciting lightning round, is there anything else, anything else you want to share? [01:32:42] S1: No, it's super fun. Again, if you're not ready for this, totally fine. If you're just, I'm not going to be in the terminal, totally fine. Play with Claude Code if that feels a little bit more accessible to you. Play with ChatGPT. Play with Claude. Play with any of these tools that feel accessible to you, but start to think of, "If I could employ someone in my life that I can't actually afford, if I could employ an assistant that just would make my life better, what are the things that they would do and can AI in whatever format get you there?" So a lot of the inspiration and what we do at the podcast is we just try to help you open your eyes to this can help solve a problem for you. Whether that problem is highly technical or not at all technical, I just want people to continue exploring because it's pretty incredible what these tools can do.
01:32:42 · Claire Vo, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:32:42] S1: No, it's super fun. Again, if you're not ready for this, totally fine. If you're just, I'm not going to be in the terminal, totally fine. Play with Claude Code if that feels a little bit more accessible to you. Play with ChatGPT. Play with Claude. Play with any of these tools that feel accessible to you, but start to think of, "If I could employ someone in my life that I can't actually afford, if I could employ an assistant that just would make my life better, what are the things that they would do and can AI in whatever format get you there?" So a lot of the inspiration and what we do at the podcast is we just try to help you open your eyes to this can help solve a problem for you. Whether that problem is highly technical or not at all technical, I just want people to continue exploring because it's pretty incredible what these tools can do. [01:33:40] S0: With that, Claire, we have reached our very exciting lightning round. I've got five questions for you. Are you ready? [01:33:46] S1: I'm ready. [01:33:47] S0: What are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people?
01:33:47 · Lenny Rachitsky, Claire Vo
[01:33:47] S0: What are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people? [01:33:52] S1: Yeah, I was thinking about this, and I'm going to talk about a category of books that I've started to recommend to people, which is classic children's books. If you are a parent out there, you know there's so much children's book slop out there, graphic novels with like seven words per page, the writing's atrocious. Even in the older years, it doesn't get better. And we've just started pulling off the shelf Treasure Island. We are reading Alice in Wonderland. We're reading some of the Shakespearean comedies. The language is so much more sophisticated, and my kids still get it, and they still think it's funny. And so I feel like we have dumbed down what we expect of our children, especially in what they consume from a media perspective. And so I'm just going to the classics and we're having a really good time. So I highly recommend pulling some of those classic children's books off the shelf. Even if they feel a little bit more advanced, my kids have been loving them. [01:34:51] S0: I love this tip. Speaking of children's books, my wife's got her children's book coming out in a- [01:34:55] S1: Charts for Babies. [01:34:56] S0: Charts for Babies. I don't know if you saw our episode together, but we talked a bit about it, but it's coming up soon. [01:35:01] S1: It was a 10 out of 10 adorable episode.
01:35:01 · Claire Vo, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:35:01] S1: It was a 10 out of 10 adorable episode. [01:35:04] S0: Thanks, Claire. That was a fun experiment. I had no idea how we'd come across. Oh, man. Okay, great. We'll keep moving. What is a favorite recent movie or TV show you really enjoyed? [01:35:18] S1: Oh, this is terrible. I'm actually in a group chat with your sister, I don't know if you know this, about terrible reality dating shows. So I have children. I have not watched a movie or a decent television show in nine years. If somebody wants garbage television though, this is the show that I'm talking to your sister about. Age of Attraction is out on Netflix. It's pretty terrible. I will watch the entire thing. So I'm trying to think if I've watched anything else that has been really good, but no. Again, I work 6:00 AM to 9:00 PM, and then the brain, it's completely shut off. We don't put anything challenging up there. I fall asleep in 21 minutes. I can't even make it through an episode. [01:36:12] S0: What do you use to track your sleep? [01:36:13] S1: Oura? [01:36:15] S0: Oura. Amazing. [01:36:15] S1: Yeah, aura. I say I charge my aura so it can confirm to me I'm not sleeping. It's very obvious to everybody I'm not sleeping. We're full stack Silicon Valley sleep stack. So we've got the aura, we've got the Apple Watch, and then we have the eight sleep, all of which say, "Claire, you're not getting enough sleep." [01:36:35] S0: As long as they're aligned. By the way, this reality show, that whole concept is you don't know how old somebody is, right? That's the idea.
01:36:35 · Lenny Rachitsky, Claire Vo
[01:36:35] S0: As long as they're aligned. By the way, this reality show, that whole concept is you don't know how old somebody is, right? That's the idea. [01:36:42] S1: It's a whole bunch of people, and you just don't know how old they are, and then they fall in love in Whistler. And then it's like, "He's 70 and she's 19. I wonder if it will work out." And guess what? It's not going to work out. [01:36:59] S0: What a concept. No, man. Okay. Next question. Do you have a favorite product you recently discovered that you really love? [01:37:06] S1: You know what? It failed us. It failed us. But this little gimbal style tripod, it's not actually super expensive, and we use it to record. I use it to record the podcast. It's out of battery right now, but I use it to record the podcast. And we also use it to record the kids' sports games. And there's this product called Hoopolytics where you can upload a video of your kids' sports game, and they will annotate the shots, the passing percentages, how many assists you have. And then my nine-year-old, because we stay on brand here in the Vo lawless household, my nine-year-old takes that data into Claude and makes a gamma presentation for his coach on what they should focus on for that practice. And so I think my full AI basketball stack is my favorite kind of product in the family right now. I think it's pretty cool. [01:38:10] S0: This is amazing. Holy shit. Wait, so first of all, why does this gimbal need batteries? It adjusts based on movement? [01:38:18] S1: Yeah. We have to have high quality footage of my nine-year-old.