Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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.
01:42:19 · Lenny Rachitsky, Claire Vo
[01:42:19] S0: Polly might be, by the time robotics gets there. [01:42:19] S1: Polly might be. [01:42:19] S0: And just, "What do you need?" [01:42:23] S1: Polly might be, but no one else. [01:42:25] S0: Maybe Sage. There's a line along those lines I've shared a couple times on this podcast. Once you hear it, you'll never forget it. It's very heartbreaking. The only people that will remember that you stayed late at work are your kids. [01:42:37] S1: I mean, 100%. 100%. I mean, part of why I like OpenClaw real talk is I'm not on my laptop all the time. And I really hate at this moment, one of the things that is a downside is my kids see me all the time on my laptop. And in some ways I've heard this advice. When you're ever feeling guilty about that, write down all the reasons why you working hard is good for your kids. Keep a list by your computer of like, it's good for my kids to see what hard work looks like. I can provide for my kids, all those things. Keep that list down to remind yourself of that. But I hate that my kids see me hunched over an 18 inch MacBook Air all the time. I don't want that. And so being able to be unleashed from just your laptop and being able to pop in when they're on the swing to a quick work thing and take care of it and then put it away or have the peace of mind, honestly, that my agent team is working on things so I don't have to think about it, it really lets me come closer to my kids versus being chained to the terminal on my laptop.