Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:31:33 · Lenny Rachitsky, Keith Rabois
[00:31:33] S1: I definitely saw this with Brian Chesky. He just felt like things were going great. And we just shipped amazing products and growth is up and he's just always pedal to the metal no matter what. Just like, "Come on, when are we going to take a little break?" And it's interesting because when we did have little breaks here and there, morales actually went down because people are like, "What am I working on? I don't know. It's not that exciting." [00:31:53] S0: Yeah. Brian and I are usually in sync a lot. There's a really good interview when I interviewed him also at the same conference of how to hire, when he talks mostly about founder mode. But I generally subscribe to virtually all of Brian's views. He even taught me some of these things himself. But the more important point I think you identified, which is very subtle, is really talented people are like superb athletes. And when things are going well and people are really coasting, they're not happy. They have an internal clock tempo. They just want to create things and create value and drive, drive. And the morale actually does go down for the best people in the world when people are skating.
00:31:53 · Keith Rabois, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:31:53] S0: Yeah. Brian and I are usually in sync a lot. There's a really good interview when I interviewed him also at the same conference of how to hire, when he talks mostly about founder mode. But I generally subscribe to virtually all of Brian's views. He even taught me some of these things himself. But the more important point I think you identified, which is very subtle, is really talented people are like superb athletes. And when things are going well and people are really coasting, they're not happy. They have an internal clock tempo. They just want to create things and create value and drive, drive. And the morale actually does go down for the best people in the world when people are skating. [00:32:37] S1: Okay. So actually along those lines, there's a lot of anxiety in the market, in the job market about the future of careers. Am I going to have a job? Where are things going? And it just feels like people are working very, very hard. They're just putting in a lot of hours, especially the most AI people. It just feels like they're working harder than ever. I don't know if you saw this thing Tyler Cowen put out of just work harder. Now is the time to work harder because AI is eating away at your value. You probably talked to a lot of people looking for career advice of just like, "This feels scary and I feel like I'm working too hard and what should I do?" I don't know. Do you have any just advice for folks from-
00:32:37 · Lenny Rachitsky, Keith Rabois
[00:32:37] S1: Okay. So actually along those lines, there's a lot of anxiety in the market, in the job market about the future of careers. Am I going to have a job? Where are things going? And it just feels like people are working very, very hard. They're just putting in a lot of hours, especially the most AI people. It just feels like they're working harder than ever. I don't know if you saw this thing Tyler Cowen put out of just work harder. Now is the time to work harder because AI is eating away at your value. You probably talked to a lot of people looking for career advice of just like, "This feels scary and I feel like I'm working too hard and what should I do?" I don't know. Do you have any just advice for folks from- [00:33:15] S0: Well, I do think AI is going to radically reorient lots of people's careers, maybe including mine. So I think that's actually true. And I think the way to thrive in a rapidly emerging technology world is to be intellectually curious. So for example, I'm a business person historically. I did actually code when I was really young, but basically professionally, just a business person. What I've noticed in some of the best organizations is the number one consumer of tokens is the CMO- [00:33:15] S1: CMO.
00:33:15 · Lenny Rachitsky, Keith Rabois
[00:33:15] S1: CMO. [00:33:49] S0: ... because these people are intellectually curious. And so they're like, "Wow, there's all these cool things I can do now with my hands. Either I had to rely on other teams or never got access the way I wanted and blah, blah, blah or lag." And they just do it. This is actually true at Opendoor. It's true at another great company that I'm on the board of that's incredible. And so I think you can be intellectually curious and future-proof yourself more than just, yes, you can work harder and a big subscriber to no days off and working all the time and all that stuff. But fundamentally, the intellectual curiosity is, "I want to learn new things," and that is how you embrace the future. [00:34:29] S1: And you said CMO is who's the most- [00:34:31] S0: CMO. In both of these two companies- [00:34:31] S1: So interesting. [00:34:33] S0: ... both massive, awesome companies with lots of engineers. And I think that's very encouraging. For the executive particularly, like, "This is definitely the best executive in the company." [00:34:47] S1: And what are they building? Is it landing pages and paid tests? [00:34:51] S0: Well, sometimes it's more like what we would've thought of analytics. Sometimes it's actually campaigns, actual campaigns. It's just like they don't need to rely upon deputies and deputies and deputies to get actual work product. And so they're just shipping things or shipping drafts of things or giving the CEO insights into things themselves.
00:34:51 · Keith Rabois, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:34:51] S0: Well, sometimes it's more like what we would've thought of analytics. Sometimes it's actually campaigns, actual campaigns. It's just like they don't need to rely upon deputies and deputies and deputies to get actual work product. And so they're just shipping things or shipping drafts of things or giving the CEO insights into things themselves. [00:35:15] S1: I want to get your take on the future of specifically the product triad. You work with a lot of product people, engineers, designers. Everyone's always wondering, what the hell is going to happen in my career? Thoughts on just the future of those three specific roles?
00:35:30 · Keith Rabois
[00:35:30] S0: Well, I saw this podcast or I listened to this podcast that Peter Fenton did. And he convinced me that the idea of a PM makes no sense basically in the future. If you think about decomposing the logic is what does PM usually do? They take these inputs from customers, they create this sequential roadmap that's well organized over the next year, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That world is ridiculous. Right now, the capabilities of foundation models or companies like Lovable and things like that are just so improving such a rapid rate that it makes no sense to have a year-long roadmap. And they're just incoherent. There are things that were impossible to do in November that are actually pretty easy to do right now in March. And so I think you need to build an organization that's incredibly adept at, people say nimble and all that stuff, but incredibly adept at changing the roadmap almost on the fly. And I think intermediaries like conventional PMs don't make a lot of sense versus being prepared intellectually, embracing and exploding, noticing. So someone needs to notice that, "Oh, wow, we can actually do this." But then exploiting it this week is the future of a high growth stellar startup. We'll notice that something's now possible this week and create new features and new value for customers next week.