Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
01:22:26 · Lenny Rachitsky, Caitlin Kalinowski
[01:22:26] S1: So what I heard here is just look for a generalist that can flex based on whatever needs to be done, some mixture of specialists in scaling versus zero to one. And then the best term I've heard for this is cracked new grads that are AI native essentially, that are just doing everything AI first. [01:22:45] S0: Yep. And then what we didn't talk about, of course, is mission alignment, which actually unifies a team. So if everyone coming in is aligned to the mission, that helps a lot because especially in the world of AI researchers and hardware folks, there's a lot of miscommunication because we're coming from such different worlds. And so having a sense of we're all pulling in the same direction is really important. And then I rely a lot, Lenny, on my gut feel for people, assuming everything else that I'm looking for has been checked. It's hard to talk about what that means, but usually it's that spark that you're looking for in someone, that they're genuinely motivated. They're motivated by a desire to learn and by excellence, they're motivated to learn from the people around them. They're open to updating their point of view based on new information and they want to win. I mean, these are the things that really matter when you're building a team.
01:22:45 · Caitlin Kalinowski, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:22:45] S0: Yep. And then what we didn't talk about, of course, is mission alignment, which actually unifies a team. So if everyone coming in is aligned to the mission, that helps a lot because especially in the world of AI researchers and hardware folks, there's a lot of miscommunication because we're coming from such different worlds. And so having a sense of we're all pulling in the same direction is really important. And then I rely a lot, Lenny, on my gut feel for people, assuming everything else that I'm looking for has been checked. It's hard to talk about what that means, but usually it's that spark that you're looking for in someone, that they're genuinely motivated. They're motivated by a desire to learn and by excellence, they're motivated to learn from the people around them. They're open to updating their point of view based on new information and they want to win. I mean, these are the things that really matter when you're building a team. [01:23:43] S1: Awesome. Okay. Just a couple more questions. Something I've been wanting to ask for a long time is you worked with some of the most legendary, successful builders, Steve Jobs, Jony Ive, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman. You don't have to go through all four, but just what's a lesson you learned from as many of these folks that come to mind?
01:24:01 · Caitlin Kalinowski
[01:24:01] S0: So I'll start with Sam, because most recently, Sam is really good at saying, "Why not more? Why not 100X or 10,000X? You are thinking too small. Why not think about this bigger?" And every time we talked about something important, he talked about that. And what I realized is I was thinking too small in certain areas and he was thinking globally, and having that nudge from a leader who's ambitious is really helpful, I think. So that was a big thing that I learned from him about he's willing to go for it at high volume and invest depending on ... Meaning hitting a lot of people. He's willing to think in very big numbers. That was really, really foundationally important. I think for Steve Jobs it's just the bar he held for the company and for technical talent and for excellence was not wavering. It was up here, and you were either going to meet it or you weren't. And that was something that kind of washed through the whole company. When you are a young, ambitious person and you hear that something's not good enough, that can be extremely motivating actually. And it doesn't quite hit the way you would think. And if you tell somebody, "Hey, this needs to be better. You need to spend more time on this. You need to be more thoughtful about this," or, "This is not hitting our quality bar in [inaudible 01:25:35]," or something, that's impactful. And I think you never want to hear that again. So it's very, very motivating. And then Mark Zuckerberg, I think that he ... I have to say he ran a company very, very well. So the way that the technical side of the company operated, the way that we had reviews, that decisions were made, the decisions were made to the lowest level possible in the company to maintain speed. I underappreciated how clean and well run ... The way that the hardware organization interacted with the rest of the company, it was very clear, "This is what we're going for. We're going to have this review. We're going to make a decision in this review. If you can make the decision without the review, you will do that. Here's the objectives for this project." It was really well executed. And I think that's hard to do at a fast growing company. It's very hard to do at that level.
01:26:37 · Caitlin Kalinowski, Lenny Rachitsky
And having him and Andrew Bosworth, the CTO, involved in the technical decisions, able to read reports that were maybe 20 pages long, [inaudible 01:26:52] the trade-offs, understand them and be able to contribute to the technical discussion, and that's just on my thing that week and they're doing that a hundred times that month, was impressive and definitely something I learned from them. [01:27:05] S1: What an incredible set of experiences and different types of places to work. I don't know if they could be more different, all these places. [01:27:13] S0: I know. And I think that that's why I'm looking for this zero to one. And so when you're looking for a zero to one opportunity, it's always going to be in some place different generally. [01:27:24] S1: You're going to be a hot commodity in this market now that you're a free agent, but on the flip side of that, I want to take us to Fail Corner. I feel like someone building hardware physical things has some great fail stories. Is there one story of something you built, something you worked on that failed and something you learned from that experience?
01:27:44 · Caitlin Kalinowski, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:27:44] S0: This is a great question and not a comfortable one. One of my favorite failures was actually on the Quest 2. It was around EVT, so halfway through the Quest 2, and we found out that we had gone from five cameras to four for cost reduction. We talked a little about this. We needed to reduce the price so more people could buy them. And what happened was it was right before Christmas and I heard from the lead on the team that does computer vision and he said, "Oh my gosh, the data from the cameras isn't working and we can't get a lock on where the person is using the headset." And so we looked into it and we realized that their interpretation of our spec and our interpretation of our spec was different. So in engineering, we usually use a plus or minus, like it can go up or down by, in this case I think it was 0.15mm or something like that. And in his world, he was used to having a global, it's within 0.15mm. And so we had a different interpretation of the spec. Now the problem is that our interpretation of the spec meant that he couldn't meet his goals of being able to understand where the headset was in space. And so we had to do a redesign and this is at EVT. So this is pretty much when you want the engineering to be done. [01:29:09] S1: What does EVT stand for?
01:29:09 · Lenny Rachitsky, Caitlin Kalinowski
[01:29:09] S1: What does EVT stand for? [01:29:11] S0: It stands for when we compile the hardware for the first time with everything that's supposed to be done. So final components, final materials, you're making the components on the tools, you're going to make them for mass production instead of just machining them. So it's a big deal. And so what we had to do was favor or prioritize. We had four floating cameras. We had to lock the bottom two to each other and put them on a bracket so that the relative distance from them met the spec that he needed and then let the other two float. So this was an architectural change. And this was a failure. I mean, it was a failure in understanding the spec. It was a failure in essentially the product design, but it was because of a misunderstanding of the spec. And so we were able to adapt. We actually kept the build on time and we actually shipped the product on time, but it was really stressful. And it turned out that actually the new design was better because with a favored pair, you have source of truth for the space and then the other two cameras overlap onto that source of truth. And so it worked well. I thought it was a good outcome, but it was a scramble and certainly wish that we caught it four months earlier. [01:30:30] S1: Another example of just how hard hardware is, just like you mess up a spec and like, all right, here, we wasted a week building something that didn't work and now it's like four months later still having to redo the hardware supply chain. [01:30:41] S0: Yeah. It was tricky.