Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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.
01:30:20 · Lenny Rachitsky, Amol Avasare
[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. [01:30:58] S1: Yeah, I think it's a really complicated picture. There's a number of things that we just build internally ourselves. As time goes on, the ability for Claude to do that better increases. And at the same time, we use Figma a ton, we use Slack a ton, we use Workday, we use a lot of these products, and I don't see that changing in the immediate future. And so yeah, I think there's probably some truth to some of this. I think the other parts are like it's overblown. And many of these products, they're customers of ours. We value them a lot as customers and we use their products very, very heavily, and I don't see that changing in there.
01:31:37 · Lenny Rachitsky
[01:31:37] S0: And you have better things to do. Who's going to spend time building Slack at a... That is not where value is going to accrue. And I think it also helps you see how sophisticated these things are. There's been teams thinking about these problems for a long time. Anyway, that's a whole other tangent. Just coming back to the values thing, I just want to highlight something here that's really important. A lot of people criticize Anthropic for talking about the dangers to humanity, throwing out all these numbers about jobs going away, just creating all this fear. And people think it's, "Oh, we're trying to raise money or we got to get people's attention or we're just trying to create headlines." But everything I've ever seen internally is always just this is what we believe in. We want people to know what it might be coming. Even if it isn't bad, we want people to understand, "Here's what might happen and we are trying to avoid it." And you might say, "Why is Anthropic even building AI if it's so dangerous?" And the understanding Ben shared is just like we think it's better that we go at this and try to build it the right way versus just stay out of it and just hope that nothing bad happens.
01:32:48 · Amol Avasare
[01:32:48] S1: Yeah. I think three things that come to mind there. First is I go back to something I said earlier, which is that we very much think about things from an exponential lens. And if you are thinking about things from a linear lens, you'll see the world very, very differently, right, because you look at where we are today and you're like, "Okay, but how much better can it be in two, three years?" I think if you're looking at it from an exponential lens and you understand how exponentials work, then you just realize that a lot of this stuff is actually going to be happening sooner than people think if you're looking at it from a linear lens. And then if you understand that there could be upsides and downsides and the range of outcomes here, I think we very much need to be talking about the downsides so we can avoid them and push towards the upsides. I think most people at the company are optimists. We're very optimistic about the future. I think it's just we understand the risk is like it is not a guaranteed that we end up in a good place. And not enough people are talking about the risks, I think, in productive ways and who have the know-how of the risks. I think there's people who may talk about the risks but are not in the game. And so they don't actually know fully. They're not surgical on what the specific risks are, but we're in the game, we understand what's happening. And so that's one piece. I think the second is, I think, we actually believe in this stuff more strongly than we say externally. So it is just such a key part of how we think internally that sometimes we just reword your statements because it's like people might just think we're being too over the top, but internally, that's how we think, and what we're putting out is a softer version of that at times. And then I think the third piece is going to what Ben said where we think a lot about driving the race to the top. And so it's like if you're not in the game and you're shouting from the sidelines, no one cares. It's just the reality of how the world works. No one really cares. If you're in the game and you're a leading player and what you're doing is working, you can influence people who are also in the game to take the right actions. And so that is the core of it. If we just pack up and go home, you have no influence on this thing.
01:34:58 · Amol Avasare, Lenny Rachitsky
And if you stay in the game and you're like, commercially, you're doing great, and then you have ways to influence that, okay, these are the principles and put that into the conversation and make more people sort of believe in those things. [01:35:12] S0: I could talk to you forever, Amol, but two more questions just to round out the conversation and touch on some stuff that I've hinted at a number of times. One is I want to take us actually to failure corner because someone listening to this may be like, "All right, look at this guy just worked at all these amazing companies, cold email, the CPO at Anthropic, got a job, joined this rocket ship. It's all been up and to the right, just killing it constantly." What's a story from your career where things didn't work out when you failed and what did you learn from that experience?
01:35:45 · Amol Avasare
[01:35:45] S1: I have a couple. I think it's very much not that way. I feel like it was a lot of squiggly lines to get here. The biggest I'd say is just founding a company, raising a bunch of money, having employees, and then having to shut it down and tell your investors that you've lost the money and that you had a vision of what you're going to do and that it's not going to happen. And so that I think is probably the biggest one. We spent three years on it. It was not like a, "Oh, we tried something part-time." It was like, "No, we went for it." We had spent three years, raised a couple of mil. We had maybe seven, 10 employees at our biggest. And it was something that we really believed in. It was around mental health and how you can quantify mental health to help understand or get early predictors of things like generalized anxiety, major depression. So it's stuff that we really, really believed in. But ultimately, in our early 20s, we had no idea what we're doing at the time and many things I do differently, but that was just a very, very, very painful process. I think the good thing was we kept our investors in the loop the whole time, so 20 founders who are struggling out there. Send those monthly investor updates. It's really easy to send those when things are great. It's really hard to send those when things are bad. You just bat it down. You sit down and send an update to your investors about why everything you talked about last month did not go to plan, but it's just the right thing to do, and it keeps people in the loop, and it avoids surprises. But it's still so tough when you're then calling up the investors to be like, "Hey, we're shutting down or making that decision," everyone who believed in you and it becomes such a big part of the identity. It's very, very tough. So man, that was just brutal. It's brutal. And it took me, I think, a number of years to truly get over. I think that it's a tough thing, but you get so much from that experience that it's hard to see in the moment. And I think without doing that, I would not have gone into this. I was not a PM before. I didn't have any of these skills. I'd never worked on products. I didn't know how to cold email really. And so it was through that job that I learned a ton of the skills that made this career path viable for me.