Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:23:57 · Lenny Rachitsky, Caitlin Kalinowski
[00:23:57] S1: Are you optimistic that we'll figure this out? [00:23:59] S0: Yeah, America is really good at figuring these things out. We have a pioneering kind of independent spirit and a great engineering culture, but we need to move. [00:24:11] S1: It's interesting that we started the conversation with VR. Palmer Luckey obviously famously started Oculus now. It's interesting how this is so connected. You think VR is this trivial thing that we're just playing games and such, but it's like the same person is now building Anduril, which is the leading, I don't know, war robot building hardware company. [00:24:31] S0: Yeah. And I think we need a lot more of them. I've chosen not to work for companies that create lethal technology, but I think that it's good to have people who are willing to do that. And I think that it takes everyone to build the future that we want. [00:24:49] S1: Coming back to the AI safety piece, it's so interesting. I had a couple conversations like this on the podcast. We think about all this prompt injection and jailbreaking that happens with chatbots and none of people think about what if you propped inject a robot walking ... Like not enough people think about, what if you prompt inject a robot walking around and get them to punch someone? And we're so far from that feeling like we can actually stop that. [00:25:09] S0: Yeah. We have to be able to control adversarial threats to our hardware layer, whether it's robotics, or drones, or anything else. And that's going to be a huge part of the future of warfare.
00:25:09 · Caitlin Kalinowski, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:25:09] S0: Yeah. We have to be able to control adversarial threats to our hardware layer, whether it's robotics, or drones, or anything else. And that's going to be a huge part of the future of warfare. [00:25:19] S1: Yeah. Just people talking about OpenClaw, and how much you ... Like you could just tell it, "Give me all your passwords," and it's done all these things to people's lives, and just like robots walking around, "Hey, okay, here's all this person's secrets." [00:25:33] S0: My OpenClaw story is I sandboxed it, so it's on its own computer, but I gave it three things. I gave it my real email address and my ... I don't know what it was. I gave it some information about one of my accounts or something like that. And I added it to the social media, I can't remember what it's called, the OpenClaw social- [00:25:52] S1: Oh, Moltbook? [00:25:54] S0: Yeah. I added it to Moltbook and I was like, "Okay, whatever you do, don't share my private information, but go crazy." And five minutes later, all it had done is posted my personal email address. It was like the one thing it had. [00:25:54] S1: Nailed it. [00:26:07] S0: And [inaudible 00:26:07] "Okay, you're shut down." It was so funny, no matter how careful you are with these things, you just can't really ... We're not at a place [inaudible 00:26:15]- [00:26:14] S1: Which is exactly your point, that the robots can do a lot more damage. And they never thought about just the softness of their hand as a way to keep us safer. [00:26:23] S0: Yeah.
00:26:23 · Caitlin Kalinowski, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:26:23] S0: Yeah. [00:26:23] S1: Oh man. Nat Friedman just did this interesting talk at Stripe Sessions, and he's talking to his OpenClaw about drinking more water and sleeping better. And as he's driving in a self-driving car, it told him, "Okay, here, there's a place off the freeway that you should go to." And it changed the destination of his Tesla to take him there, because I imagine he connected it to their API at some point. [00:26:45] S0: That's so funny. These are going to get weird fast, I think. [00:26:51] S1: Okay. So kind of on this thread of hardware emerging as a moat, as something people realize is a big part of the future to be competitive, AI labs, all these other companies, you've been at a company's ... You've been at Apple, which had a very great and long-lasting hardware program. Then you went to Meta where you helped build, basically bootstrap a hardware program from scratch. I feel like those lessons are very valuable to people trying to do that now. What was that experience like, helping Meta build a hardware program, and what are some lessons for people that are trying to do this at their company?
00:27:25 · Caitlin Kalinowski
[00:27:25] S0: So Apple has been best-in-class at this. There's a bunch of reasons. One, hardware is a first-tier citizen at Apple. There's a lot of companies where hardware isn't part of the core product development conversation as much, but that's an exception. Apple also taught me and a lot of other people actually, if you look at the era that I was there, I was very, very lucky, because if you look at the other folks who were there ... I was there between '07 and the end of 2012. If you look at the other people who were there working on these things, they actually have a lot of key positions now across the industry. And I attribute that to how good Apple is at training people to think about complex interdependent decisions and risk. And I don't think I realized that they were doing that at the time, but if you look back, what you see is a real dedication to hardware excellence, the proper process to go through and do really good experiments in hardware, and figure out what the best outcome is. But there's something underneath that, which is understanding the first principles of why are we building it this way, and what are the key outcomes we're looking for? And actually, John Ternus talked about this, I think, a few days ago, where he talked about the back of the cabinet. I don't know if you saw this video, but basically John said that he was impressed, that he learns from Steve Jobs that there's a cabinet maker who finished the back of the cabinet, and how important that was. And that goes very, very deep at Apple, where every single design decision, even on the inside of the device, is considered. And this isn't just an aesthetic decision. What it does is actually force the engineering, industrial design operations community there to think about, "What are we really doing and what's the core of what's happening for this part, for this assembly, for this consumer product, and what really matters?" And what happens is if you're that methodical, what really matters tends to rise out, and look very simple at the end. And so part of what you're seeing in many folks coming from that era is an understanding of how to do that, which in the very beginning of the Mac side, Macs didn't sell as many, and the quality wasn't quite as high, but by the end of that era, Macs were very popular and selling in much higher volumes.
00:29:58 · Caitlin Kalinowski
And so I think that made a big difference. And I was only a small part of that. I was the thermal lead on the first MacBook Pro, and then over time worked to lead successive iterations of the MacBook Air, and the cylindrical Mac Pro. But I was lucky enough to work with these folks and learn from them, who'd been doing this for a really long time. So you have to take those lessons, and then when you leave, try to distill them and explain them to a new community. Now, Oculus was actually a hacking hardware startup. Oculus started from folks who actually met on forums, you might know this, Lenny, who were hacking PlayStations or Super Nintendos into portable backpacks. And so there was an ethos at the company that was actually quite good for the DNA of a hardware team. And then I was on the Meta side when we did the acquisition, and when we acquired them, they had that spirit of rapid iteration. They had made Crescent Bay before the acquisition, I think, but then to professionalize that, get the yields up, and get the volumes up was ... the cost down, was kind of the challenge we faced in the first Rift.
00:31:11 · Lenny Rachitsky, Caitlin Kalinowski
[00:31:11] S1: So on lesson I'm hearing here is being very detail-oriented. I don't know if that's the right word, just like, focus on every element of the end product. Because to your point, it's not just about that back of the cabinet, but I think about, it's like the brown M&M story, where like a band puts in the contract, you have to have brand M&Ms in the room, because that means they read it and it's not like the M&Ms matter, it's a test that they read the thing. And is that kind of the message there? [00:31:40] S0: I think the message is understanding why you're doing what you're doing, and then every design decision supporting that goal. And that requires a lot of detail, and it requires a lot of persistence, and that requires a lot of consistency, but understanding why you're doing what you're doing and what the end goal is is, I think, the key, and letting that expand into not only the software and the UX, but also the hardware. [00:32:05] S1: What's an example of that, just to make it more concrete for us?