Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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.
01:38:18 · Claire Vo, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:38:18] S1: Yeah. We have to have high quality footage of my nine-year-old. [01:38:22] S0: No shaky cameras. [01:38:24] S1: It's like a little handheld steady cam. It's very nice. [01:38:29] S0: And what's that? Is there a brand, by the way, in case people want to look it up? [01:38:31] S1: Yeah, I'll share with it. It's got some M on it. I don't even know what it's called. [01:38:36] S0: We'll link to it. [01:38:37] S1: Yeah, we'll find it. But it's very nice except when you use it to record a podcast and it dies and your camera falls on the floor. [01:38:43] S0: Incredible. I love that whole stack. And is he getting better? Is this working, this flow?
01:38:43 · Lenny Rachitsky, Claire Vo
[01:38:43] S0: Incredible. I love that whole stack. And is he getting better? Is this working, this flow? [01:38:49] S1: He is getting better. Actually, I'll add one more favorite product to the list. This is actually at the top of the list, which is there are these things called silent basketballs and silent soccer balls. So as I said, I am living this city mom life. And so we don't have a very big backyard, but I have kids that want to bounce a basketball all the time in the house, 24 hours a day. And they're basically foam basketballs. They're the same size as a basketball, but they're foam. And so you can bounce them inside the house, and they don't make any noise. And so they make them for soccer, and they make them for basketball. And we have so many of them. And then because I have three boys and this is my life, we have painter's tape on one of our taller ceilings, and my kid just shoots basketballs inside the house. But what an innovation, right? What a niche problem to solve, which is sports oriented kids who don't have enough space to play outside with parents who don't want to hear. It's a silent basketball. [01:38:50] S0: And these feel like real basketballs, right? I assume they're close enough to a basketball. [01:40:02] S1: They make some that are just as heavy as a basketball, but they're the same size. You can dribble. They're fun to play with. So again, these niche products that solve little things in my life, as a product person, those are the ones that I think, how do they do market discovery here? Because they found customer of me, and I'm very happy.
01:40:02 · Claire Vo, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:40:02] S1: They make some that are just as heavy as a basketball, but they're the same size. You can dribble. They're fun to play with. So again, these niche products that solve little things in my life, as a product person, those are the ones that I think, how do they do market discovery here? Because they found customer of me, and I'm very happy. [01:40:27] S0: Okay. Two more questions. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to in work or in life?
01:40:33 · Claire Vo
[01:40:33] S1: I've said this before maybe, but fast beats right is the one that I go to on work. You can probably see I optimize for efficiency. I like to go fast. And so I often think first out of the gate is a real advantage. And I think if you were to parse Lenny's data, which I know just went live and you were to connect to the MCP and query, "What does Claire Vo care about?" I care about speed. And so I think this moment in particular with AI is such a fun one for me as a builder because my speed ambition is met by the capacity of the tools, and it feels very fun. And then the one personally that I say a lot, which is most people you work with won't be at your funeral. And I say this from a real place of experience. I've had colleagues who have had family members pass away or they passed away, and so few, the people that they worked with on a day-to-day basis, really sad, but so few of them are at the funeral. And so when I think about how much mental energy I'm going to give to somebody at work or how much I'm going to allow somebody to keep me up at night or how much I'm going to worry about, did I ship this code or get that PR out or respond to that email, I think literally none of the people in this stack will be at my funeral. Who will? My children. And so I use that as a clarifying lens by which I decide what really matters, not what I take seriously or not who I show up with respect to. But when it's starting to impact me, I think that's a very effective lens to have everything fall away and really focus on what's important. And my vibe coding tools will probably not be at my funeral, so I will not give them sleepless nights.