Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:42:04 · Caitlin Kalinowski
[00:42:04] S0: I mean, I left over a decade ago, so I don't know what they're doing now in terms of user feedback. I think this one gets misinterpreted though, Lenny. I think that what is being said is if you want to build something new, customers don't know what they want, because they haven't seen it. So a good example is the iPhone, which I didn't work on, but when you build a new iPhone with a touchscreen, you can't really go ask a hundred people what they want, because they're going to say a keyboard on their screen. And this is, I think, the ethos that you're getting at, which is, and this is true for anybody building a new product with a new feature. And I've tried to build, as much as I can, teams that work on products that have something new about them. Either they're a new category, or there's a new manufacturing process, or something that hasn't been done before. And when you're thinking about this, you can't really use what you learned from the same field and the same product class. It just doesn't work, because you actually won't get the answer right. And I think this is actually what Steve was talking about, which is, you can't get intuition if you're changing something fundamentally. Your customers won't know what they want because they haven't seen it. But if you show it to them, they will absolutely know that it's awesome and that is what they want. But if you get stuck in an iterative feedback cycle with your customers, it's very hard to go zero to one with something new. And so in my view, and I don't know for sure, I didn't talk to him about this, but that's my view of what that means.
00:43:38 · Lenny Rachitsky, Caitlin Kalinowski
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00:45:06 · Caitlin Kalinowski, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:45:06] S0: I have two, and I've purchased two more for friends. [00:45:10] S1: Oh, yeah. What an endorsement. Yeah. Basically, it's like this amazing robot vacuum that just works. So his question, so he wanted to ask you, and so he suggested to ask you this, is about memory prices. The way he described it is there's a meteor called memory prices that are coming for consumer hardware, and robotics, and physical AI. What's going on there?
00:45:30 · Caitlin Kalinowski, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:45:30] S0: Yeah, we are in trouble as an industry. And I'm not an expert on this, but I think that AI has to do with why. And I also think that the supply chain is constrained. I have been advising startups and companies to pre-buy memory, and to have enough memory in stock, if they can afford it, to ride out price spikes. Like anything in this category, let's see, this happened in COVID too. So we had so many supply chain disruptions, and getting enough memory was one of the challenges. So we had to pre-buy as well. I won't say who, but the company I was working with had to pre-buy memory as well. And so this is part of what I wanted to talk to you about today, is these supply chain disruptions. And if a key component that goes into a lot of tech, like memory or silicon, is constrained, there's not much you can do. You either pay, or you have already pre-bought enough that you can ride things out. And so those are the only real options. Obviously there's a risk to pre-buying, and the price might go down. And so the challenge is, I think, there's a latency with supply chain in something like memory, where it can't adapt fast enough, often, to demand, or there's a new category of product, or, in this case, maybe data centers, that are just eating up so much and are actually not as cost-sensitive as somebody in consumer electronics like Matic might be. And so they'll just pay for these higher costs. This is tricky and something we have to deal with all the time. [00:47:09] S1: How much have prices gone up? How bad is this problem, and where do you think it'll go?
00:47:09 · Lenny Rachitsky, Caitlin Kalinowski
[00:47:09] S1: How much have prices gone up? How bad is this problem, and where do you think it'll go? [00:47:14] S0: Actually, this is a great question, Lenny. I don't know what's going to happen. I think prices are going to double, probably. I don't know on what timeline. If I knew what timeline the prices were going to double on, I'd be trading, which I'm not very good at. I'd really be, I'd be doing a different job if I could predict these things, but certainly we're going to have a supply chain shock. [00:47:34] S1: And it's already gone up a lot. If you're saying it'll double, but it's already gone up. I don't know. I saw numbers like 6x and some like that. [00:47:39] S0: Oh, really? I didn't realize it was that bad. [00:47:41] S1: That's a number I saw, let's not quote that. And you're saying, yeah, from what I hear, it's AI-driven, just like you need ... And when you talk about memory, it's like DRAM and things. What is memory, when we talk about memory? What's going on there?
00:47:41 · Lenny Rachitsky, Caitlin Kalinowski
[00:47:41] S1: That's a number I saw, let's not quote that. And you're saying, yeah, from what I hear, it's AI-driven, just like you need ... And when you talk about memory, it's like DRAM and things. What is memory, when we talk about memory? What's going on there? [00:47:55] S0: Processing. So the way to think about it is processing memory. You think about memory on your hard drive or your solid state drive, where you're keeping files that you're not using, essentially, in many cases or that you're dealing with maybe documents or pictures that you have. Maybe that's in cold storage on a server, maybe that's using a hard drive somewhere. This is usually things that you don't need really, really fast access on. But if you're running a program, some of that program is actually going to be run in RAM. And so there's different kinds, obviously, for servers. There's different kinds of server racks. Some server racks are actually focused on this type of memory, and some server racks are focused more on what we consider like a cold storage or a slower ... Now, this isn't my area of expertise, but certainly most of the products that I built, maybe all of them have had RAM, and we've had to figure out how to ... For me, mostly it's a packaging issue. Where do you put it? Does it need to be accessible? Which RAM do you pick? How fast does it need to be, and what is the cost? Is usually our trade-offs. [00:49:10] S1: And what is the bottleneck with more RAM? Is it just the companies that make memory are just not able to produce at this rate, because there's so much demand?