Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
01:11:22 · Elena Verna, Lenny Rachitsky
But if you know that your superpower is in more structure and more definition and really high specialty of things, because in the AI companies, they're all fairly small. So you'll have to generalize quite a bit and have a lot of ownership, all of areas that you usually maybe not have ownership over, then you shouldn't join it because AI companies will evolve to be more stable too. So it's just a matter of time on where you can join. So I would just urge people to look at their superpowers and the type of environments that really speak to them so they can feel happy because this can lead to burnout for wrong type of personalities very quickly. [01:12:00] S0: Yeah. My sense is if you want work life balance, don't join one of these companies because that's just not the way they work.
01:12:00 · Lenny Rachitsky, Elena Verna
[01:12:00] S0: Yeah. My sense is if you want work life balance, don't join one of these companies because that's just not the way they work. [01:12:06] S1: I don't know if I'd go that far. Mean, I have family. I have two kids. I feel like I have a very good work life balance, but I put in boundaries for myself. Like I know when I need time off I need because I know when my brain starts to overheat, so to speak. But I also know that work is my hobby and it's my passion. And I will. This is the best work of my life that I'm doing right now. There's no other place that I'd rather be than to be here. So I think that you just need to be more careful about setting your own boundaries that you know you need. But I mean, let's face it. I don't think anybody has work life balance regardless of a company that they work at, even at Google or Microsoft or any of the others, think everybody's freaking out and running as fast as they can. It's just they're running it in different structures. [01:12:57] S0: I'm really glad you said that and corrected me there, that it is possible to work at a company, one of, if not the fastest growing company in history, and actually have work life balance to get sleep, to spend time with your kids and family.
01:12:57 · Lenny Rachitsky, Elena Verna
[01:12:57] S0: I'm really glad you said that and corrected me there, that it is possible to work at a company, one of, if not the fastest growing company in history, and actually have work life balance to get sleep, to spend time with your kids and family. [01:13:11] S1: You just have to protect it ruthlessly, but you also need to be realistic with how much is expected out of you, and you need to feel confident that you'll be able to deliver it. And by the way, you won't be able to deliver it unless you use AI in many aspects of your work life. So that's like the piece that helps you actually get to hit those expectations of outcomes that you need to do and the velocity. But I'm very protective of my personal time with kids. Like, why did I have children if I'm not gonna spend time with them? So, like, those are part of the non negotiables that I bring along with me in every single work. [01:13:47] S0: For people that maybe have trouble setting boundaries or just not good at this, anything, what do you... What works for you? Is it just is it as easy as just telling people, here's where I need to leave? What do you what advice do you have for people to set boundaries like that?
01:13:58 · Elena Verna
[01:13:58] S1: So, first of all, I would not think about it as a work life balance. There's no such thing as balance. A balance feels like, oh, I have enough time for everything. I don't have enough time for anything. But I prioritize my family in some moments. I prioritize work in other moments. And I don't try to balance the two. I go where I'm needed and where I go. And I feel like I'm not going to regret the choices that I'm making today. So I'm constantly trying to put myself in the future and say, well, I resent myself if I make this choice right now. And if the answer is yes, I don't make that choice. And sometimes I have to say no to Anton and say like, I can't make it or I won't be there. I need to be here with my family. Like today, I need to cancel my day. My kid is sick and he needs me and I need to be I need to take him to the doctor. So I think that just making in the moment, like in every day, even sometimes in the hour decisions to me works better than trying to balance something that is completely unachievable and it feels overwhelming to even think about. But I prioritise this in my sleep, my health, my workout schedule, my kids, my family, my husband and just my downtime, because I know that I'm most creative once I have separation from work, because then I come in with like all cylinders firing and I have so many more ideas about it. So to me, it's actually part of doing my best work is to take time off.
01:15:18 · Lenny Rachitsky
[01:15:18] S0: That is really great advice. I want to touch on what it's like to work at Lovable because it feels like Lovable is at the cutting edge of what working at... In product is gonna be. So you mentioned a little bit about how you're always talking to AI, asking questions. Is there any any other kind of anecdotes of just how people operate at Lovable that is really unique or weird or funny or interesting that might be helpful for people to try in their company?
01:15:43 · Elena Verna
[01:15:43] S1: Yeah, mean, we use Lovable at Lovable a lot. Like all of our internal tools are built on Lovable. We actually have our first hackathon on Lovable happening next week where we're gonna... Entire company is just gonna take full day to pipe code and see what we actually have happened. We prototype everything on Lovable. So our specs, yeah, we do still have a written spec, but it always accompanied by a Lovable prototype that everybody can interact with and to click around with and provide feedback. And everybody bunches in and also like does some edits if they have any better ideas. So I create blocks on Lovable. So for example, we need to make some pricing changes or pricing page changes. I take a screenshot of our pricing page. I go to Lovable, say recreate this pricing page, make these changes. And then I send that to my engineering team saying, Hey, this is what I want to happen. And then like they take it from there. So we just, and chat GPT, I use a lot for brainstorming, especially the deep thinking mode. I love it. It takes a long time, but it's so worth it. Sometimes it has crazy ideas. Sometimes it does. Like sometimes I was like, yeah, is like nothing new to me. So it's not interesting, but it like it gets me thinking and it gets me look at the different angles. And lots of I use Granola a lot, for example, because to me, it's super helpful to get AI summaries of the meetings. And it's very powerful for me. I use Wispr Flow a lot because I feel like I have no time to type anymore. So I just like talk to my phone and talk to my laptop all the time in order to do it. But we're even thinking about all of the customer support automations that are done through AI. How do we... Every single aspect of what we do is question is asked, what can AI do here first? And then how we can add ourselves into the equation. But Lovable for us, having unlimited credits at Lovable is a pretty awesome perk, I have to say. Like, I sometimes have to pinch myself. I'm like, I get paged to BypeCode. It looks so fun.