Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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.
01:21:15 · Lenny Rachitsky, Amol Avasare
[01:21:15] S0: They kind of like, tanked the market, by the way. Everyone went crazy. [01:21:18] S1: I know. But the guy running that, Nick Lin, he came from investment banking, he came from private equity, and he just has such a competitive advantage where he is building that product and he's like, "I know this, I know this." He's built for this. And so I think just understanding what are those interdisciplinary areas you can lean into, to make yourself more just higher impact is really important. And then the last one is just being adaptable. Anyone who is trying to just keep applying old playbooks, I think you're going to make life a lot harder for yourself. So one of the biggest things you come into Anthropic, is you need to understand that probably 50, 60, 70% of how you operate in the past, just throw it out the door. It's not going to be relevant. And if you try to stick to that, you're going to have a lot of friction and it's not going to be helpful. So just being adaptable and understanding, "Okay, the job's changed this way, I'm going to go that way," is I think like, it's so, so important.
01:22:17 · Lenny Rachitsky
[01:22:17] S0: That is awesome advice. It matches a lot of what Jenny shared when she came on the podcast, the design leader on Claude and Cowork and all these things, of just the idea of going deep, becoming the best or one of the best at a very specific thing, and that not every company will need and you don't need all 10, but just going deep on something. I forget how she described it. Marc Andreessen said the same thing. I think we called it a sideways E, instead of just T-shaped of one thing. If you could have a couple of things you're really, really good at, there's a lot of power to that. Oh, man. Okay. Before I get into something that I think will blow a lot of people's minds about how we actually met and kind of a big part of your journey, let me just ask you this. Is there anything else about Anthropic that might be worth sharing, might be worth talking about?
01:23:09 · Amol Avasare
[01:23:09] S1: The thing that maybe comes to mind is just our culture and the people that we have here. I really think it's our secret sauce. I think it's the thing that is the most defensible, the thing that no one else is going to be able to replicate. And I don't think it's an accident. Leadership has really invested in this a lot. And Daniela and Dario, they really believe in this a lot, and I think they've just created a very special culture. So I would say that this is truly a mission-driven company and I was not 100% sure of that when I joined. I was like, I think that this is an exciting company. I very much agree with their principles, but I didn't know anyone at the company. I didn't have any references on what it was like inside. So I was a little skeptical when I joined. I'm like, "At least they're talking about it, but I don't know. Are they serious about this?" And then I came in very early on, and I was like, "Oh, oh shit. Okay. Maybe they're even more serious about this internally. They talk externally." And so it's a mission-driven company where people viscerally, viscerally understand both the upsides and the downsides of the technology, and therefore, understand the divergent ranges of how this may go for humanity and how different of a future that could be. And I think when you understand that, of how different this could be as a future for all of us and our children and our grandchildren, et cetera, I think it leads to a lot of passion for what we do and it just leads to a lot of belief in what we're doing. And so I look at every other job I've had in the past, and there's some degree of people at the company who are just checked out, where it's like, "I'm here, I'm sick of this, but I don't have a better option or I'm getting paid too much to leave, et cetera." That is just not the case here. I have not met a single person. I'm saying a single person, who has checked out. Everyone is putting everything they have on the table. Everyone is pouring it out and leaving nothing behind and is just fully, fully in it. And so I think that leads to like, releases energy that is just very, very hard to describe. I think you have that energy, you have that mission-driven nature, and then it's such an open culture. So leadership is very, very transparent with us on things. Slack, it's a whole maze. There's so many things that play out on Slack.
01:25:35 · Amol Avasare
We're very open. Everyone has these notebook channels where you have your own Twitter feed in a way, where you're just talking about your thoughts about things. And so you can go and join the Slack channel, the notebook channels of people on research and all these other areas, and you can learn whatever you want and you can spend so much time getting lost in that as well. But that openness where we even encouraged people can just argue with Dario. There was an all hands. You said something where someone didn't agree, and the person goes onto Dario's notebook channel and just says, "Hey, I didn't appreciate how you said this and this and that." And then it sparked a whole big debate. But that sort of thing where it's encouraged like, "Go to leadership and disagree with them, challenge them publicly," I think that just leads to a level of trust. And all of that together, I think it just means that we have this very, very deep sense of togetherness that, man, I've never experienced anything like it. And then you get to the talent, right? I think that is the thing where the talent density is like, I feel like I'm playing for Real Madrid at times. I look around, I'm like, "Man, I'm playing for Madrid," where it's like, you just have the best people in the world. I think it's most the case on research. We have the very, very best... ... the case on research. We have the very, very best researchers in the world. But even you look on product, we have Ami Vora, she is phenomenal. We have Mike Krieger. You're like, okay, casually started Instagram. He's here. On growth, we have John Egan, who's my engineering counterpart, who's the OG in growth engineering. He's great. We have Alexey, he's a guy who teaches growth engineering at Reforge. He's just another dude on the team. And all of that I think is just very special. I think my favorite here is in the [inaudible 01:27:33] a couple of months ago we had our onsite, company-wide onsite in October, and I'm walking around, I see this guy, he's just walking around eating popcorn by himself. I go up to him and I'm like, "You're Jeff, right?" And he's like, "I am." And I'm like, "You are literally the US ambassador to my country, Australia, and you are just an employee here." I'm talking to our prime ministers of our country and all these things.