Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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.
01:27:58 · Amol Avasare, Lenny Rachitsky
And it's just the talent combined with that culture, I think, is just this secret sauce that is the reason that I think we are as successful as we are. [01:28:08] S0: This notebook channel is so interesting just as a tactical thing. So the idea there is Dario just shares... It's a little internal Twitter feed where folks just share what they're thinking about and what their priorities are and things like that.
01:28:22 · Amol Avasare
[01:28:22] S1: Yeah, that's basically where it's an internal feed where... It's not just Dario, everyone has one. And basically you share your internal thoughts. It's a way to keep people updated on things on what's working. It's a way where people share provocative things. I think from a leadership level, and we also think about that as it's a way to scale your beliefs and views across an org as it grows quickly, right? So if you're now adding a lot of people in the organization, you need to think about, "Okay, what are the behaviors that we want to model? What are the principles that are top of mind to us?" And if you think about, yeah, you can have a bunch of these meetings where you talk about it, you can model that behavior. But if you have a channel which is like, "Here's my top of mind," and you say these things, right, if I have a post, which I did the other week of this is the importance of being comfortable leaving money on the table. Now all the new engineers on growth who've joined have seen that and they're like, "Oh, okay, this is different to what we've known before." Right. So I think it's good for the openness, but it's also good as a leader of how you can scale your views as an organization to get people more up to speed on the way that things are done, which is I think really important to avoid that drift, which when you have so many new people signing up, that drift can lead to a lot of drift in strategy and sort of perception. So it just helps run a tighter ship in that way.
01:29:46 · Lenny Rachitsky, Amol Avasare
[01:29:46] S0: And more importantly, it's data for the agents everyone's got running to help them work with all these humans. [01:29:52] S1: Yes, that is very, very correct. It is something that goes to Claude. There are certain documents in onboarding where it's like the HR team has written before editing anything on this document, please check with this person because this is a document that Claude references as a key thing, right? And so more and more these types of things of, okay, how does the growth team think about this? How does safeguards think about this? You're arming Claude with that context to get better and better at helping in the future. [01:30:20] S0: That's interesting. It feels like that's something that every company's going to have to start doing is just sharing their thoughts in a structured way so that all these agents that we've all got running have what they need to know. Another interesting side note here is just Slack. Okay. So there's all this talk of SaaS tools being replaced by AI and you guys use Slack. I think there was this famous tweet of you guys still use Workday and all these tools, all these SaaS tools. They're all going to be vibe coded out of existence. The fact that you all, at the cutting edge of what could be built with code, still use Slack and all these other tools, to me, that's a good sign that maybe SaaS companies will be outright in the future. I don't know if you have anything there to share.