Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
01:11:41 · Lenny Rachitsky, Amol Avasare
[01:11:41] S0: On the coding piece, just to make sure that part is clear, I never thought about this, that the reason that the bet was so deep on coding is not just that's a huge TAM, but it's that this is a feedback loop that will accelerate us further and further. So if we get the best at coding, coding will help us do research, it'll help us build better models and it'll accelerate faster and faster. [01:12:02] S1: Yeah, that's correct. And this is something I checked. Dario has talked about this publicly, so I'm fine to [inaudible 01:12:07]. [01:12:08] S0: Okay, it makes sense. The safety piece is really interesting. So I want to spend a little time here. So famously, Anthropic, I think the official name of Anthropic is Anthropic, an AI safety research company. As a growth person, there's this balance I imagine you strike between growing and the mission being, don't grow at all costs. Our goal is AI safety and alignment. How do you balance those two things? How does that impact your job?
01:12:37 · Amol Avasare
[01:12:37] S1: Look, I think it's something we take very, very seriously, and it is the whole reason the company exists. And if you think about, it's all the way from... It's why they left to start the company. It's deep in our corporate structure itself. So historically, everyone raising money is like, "Go create a Delaware C Corp." And that's the structure you do. And with a corporation, you have a fiduciary duty to maximize returns for shareholders, maximize shareholder value. And from the beginning, they went a different way. We then created a public benefit corporation, PBC, which allows you to legally say that maximizing shareholder value is not the overarching umbrella goal of this company and you can optimize for public benefits. So really, I think it starts from there and it ladders down from there. For us, our purpose, our mission ultimately, is just to make sure that the transition to powerful AI goes well and is net beneficial for humanity. I think internally, we are very excited and I think, honestly, we're very, very optimistic about where this can go, but we also understand what the risks are. And so for us, that top line objective of, " This needs to go well for humanity. This just needs to go well for humanity," that is something that we are happy to take a significant commercial hit for. And we've done that time and time again, right? So we have it like back then, okay, you had Claude, but you don't want to release it because you're like, there's these safety risks. And so there's time and time again that I've seen, we've been happy to take that hit and it's actually worked out well for us in other ways. From like a growth lens, I look at it as like, growth teams can often push the boundaries of what is good user X, UX, et cetera, because they're trying to very, very much eke out metrics at times. When I think about if a controversial test is brought to me, I sort of look at it as like, there's two types of tests that are controversial. One is when that test is so controversial that you just should not run the thing, because the results don't matter because you would not ship it for a combination of brand and sort of customer friendliness and values. And then the second is where it's like, it's controversial. I don't like it. I certainly don't love it, but it's not like a red line.
01:15:02 · Amol Avasare
And so you're like, if someone comes to you with conviction and is like, "I have a really good hypothesis around this," and you're like, "I don't love it, but you can run the test and see what impact it has." And if it's a high level of cringe or ick, then I want to see a high level of return for the result for that. I kind of think about everything and like, is it in one or is it in two? And for every company, that one and two is different. I think for us, AI safety is very much in one. I think that it's like, "Yeah, that's why we exist. Yeah, it's fine. We're just not going to do this thing." I think then, there's other things that fall into two, where you're like, heightened sensitivity, but we can try it and see what happens. I think zooming out though, Lenny, one of the biggest mistakes I feel like I see growth teams make, and particularly just hardcore growth practitioners, is just trying to squeeze every last dollar. I think this is like a general principle also in life. If you're a founder raising money, you're just trying to squeeze that last dollar. You don't want to do that because you want people to come back next time as well, is my view. And I think in growth, I think it's really important that you just need to be okay leaving money on the table. And that's a core principle for us as a growth team, where we are very comfortable for going metric impact in order to prioritize safety, in order to protect our brand, in order to hold a high quality bar and to maintain a great user experience. And if you look beyond the short term and like, "Okay, what are the numbers for this quarter?" And you zoom out and you think about what are the very best products out there, you realize this is how they all operate. And that's actually the thing that's going to drive more growth long-term as well. And so I think that actually ties back to safety, where as the risks get higher and the stakes get higher, I think the fact that we are taking a stance and safety is critical to what we do, is actually going to become a significant, it's going to be a significant competitive advantage for us that I think is going to help us in the long run.
01:17:19 · Lenny Rachitsky
[01:17:19] S0: Yeah. And as you share all this, clearly it's working. Anthropic is killing it. So I love when someone doing something, someone approaching the problem that way, it actually works out. It's the same way I think about with my newsletter. There's so much more I can do to grow it. My philosophy is just focus on creating good content, nothing else. All these micro optimizations are not going to matter in the end. It'll grow through people sharing it if it's useful to them. And a very small scale, I have similar philosophy. One of the things that people are probably thinking about as we talk, we joke about AI replacing parts of jobs here and there. It is pretty scary to a lot of people, just like, "What is the future of my job? Will I have a job? How do I stay relevant in this future?" So there's a couple of questions here. One is just like, for folks that want to thrive in this approaching AI future, as a PM, as a growth person, do you have any advice, things that they should be doing right now?
01:18:19 · Amol Avasare
[01:18:19] S1: To me, a couple of things come up. One thing that everyone says, is use the tools, you need to be on top of the tools. I think you need to be using Claude Code, you need to be using Cowork and understanding just each model release. What is the new things you can do with this? How can you apply this to your job? It'll work well in some things, it'll work terribly in other things. And then the model launched later, it's like, "Oh shit, that other thing worked." But if you didn't go back to try it, you would not have known. And now, many months have passed and you didn't know that that was possible. And so I think that being on top of the tools is really important, both for improving your own productivity, but also for getting product sense around AI products, which I think is just going to become increasingly important. I think then, zooming out beyond that, I look at it as like, just leaning into where you'll have a competitive advantage and an unfair advantage. And so to me, there are some people, some PMs who are really good at like, craft, for example. And there's others who you'll throw them into a situation with all these stakeholders who have all these strong opinions and there's no way they're going to mediate this. And they come out and it's like, everyone's swimming in the right direction. And so if you think about like, what is the major skillset that you have where you spike that can be tied to delivering, driving impact for a company in a product role, I would just double down on that and almost forget the weaknesses. Just what can you do to become the best person at that thing, because that's very, very valuable. And I think that ties to the notion of just leaning into being interdisciplinary. So going back to some of what we mentioned earlier on where it's like, "Okay, in this world of engineers are mini PMs, that the engineer who is highly product-minded is a unicorn, is an absolute unicorn." I think the same thing is true for PMs, where it's like, "Okay, now, in this ratio, if the designer's really stretched and you're a PM who can design, you are also a unicorn now." The chances of a company letting you go has gone down dramatically because you are now just so much more useful. And so I think that is just really, really important. I think if I look at what's benefited me, it's probably a version of this.
01:20:36 · Amol Avasare, Lenny Rachitsky
I think that for me, I came from a founder background. So the mix of the founder background, the finance. I was an investment banker, so the finance background and numbers. And then sales, I almost became an account exec, instead of going into product. I was right on the edge of, "Should I go into sales or product?" And I think a combination of those, along with growth is probably what's led to like, there are certain areas and situations where I can just have outsized impact to other people. And so, understanding what that is for you is really important. I look at our financial services product. We've launched Claude for Sheets, Claude for Excel- [01:21:15] S0: They kind of like, tanked the market, by the way. Everyone went crazy.