Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
01:17:45 · Lenny Rachitsky, Elena Verna
[01:17:45] S0: Feel like that engineer or that BypeCode engineer, he's he's, like, actually [01:17:48] S1: getting paid by job. I want his job. I feel like I... Yeah. I I got into the wrong line of fashion here. [01:17:54] S0: Oh, man. Okay. Is there anything else about Lovable? Cause the... What I think about actually, I interviewed the Perplexity founders back in the day, years ago, and they shared like, before we talked to anyone for advice, we first asked ChatGPT, and I was just like, that is the most insane thing I've ever heard. How couldn't you possibly work that way? And now that's how everyone works. And so I'm curious just to... I don't know. Like how... I don't know how Anton works. Is there anyone else that's just like way in the future of here's how things might be?
01:18:19 · Elena Verna
[01:18:19] S1: So for me, especially for product and growth, and even marketing at some point, in some capacity. When I have an idea in my head, it like it sounds so freaking cool. And sometimes they can even like I put it in paper and it's like, oh, this is like like we need to do it. And then like I go and try to vibe code it and I'm like, oh, like this, I don't see the magic anymore. Like or I can't like I can't envision it anymore. Or sometimes I'm like, yeah, yeah. And like, there's more, there's more. So to me, it's actually has helped really complete the ideation process for me quite a bit, because then I actually try to go and build it and it breaks down some of the elements of what's important, what's not. So it's taking me on product development life cycle so much further down. And then it creates a much better communication vehicle with my engineers too, because I then can tell them exactly what's important and whatnot. So to me, it's been great because sometimes we envision things that are so much better than the reality. And before, until it hands it off to design, designers would do it for us and try to make it awesome versus I often stop my ideas in tracks super early on without pushing it forward versus other times I might have pushed it to for too far, too long, even through design cue or even like pitching to leadership. And I find that very powerful because it calibrates me really quickly.
01:19:43 · Lenny Rachitsky
[01:19:43] S0: Awesome. Okay. Last question. I want to talk about something that you've written about that is a really I think it's a really important topic, something that we should surface is you wrote this post called I'm Worried About Women in Tech. Talk about what you're seeing here, what you're noticing, what you think might be going in the wrong direction.
01:20:00 · Elena Verna
[01:20:00] S1: Yeah. There's actually conflicting data points about how women you're talking about women, right? Yeah. Women inside. Yeah. There's conflicting data points about how women are keeping up with AI technology and wave, because there's a bunch of reports that has been done that show massive gap between women adopting AI versus men adopting AI, which points the story that men are just widening the gap of accessibility for technology. Whoever's adopting AI right now is getting paid the most, gets the most opportunities. I mean, we're seeing like insane acqui hires right now where people are getting paid more for their talent than for the companies that they've created. And that's like a really interesting trend that is occurring. And a lot of it is fueled on on this wave of A. I. And women are not really present there. Like if you can think about like $1,000,000 acquihire that has been in the news, that is a woman. Like, I can't think of one. If you look at AI companies and their CEOs, most of it is men. If you look at the company's composition in the AI companies, it's mostly men. To me, this really came to the head of when I came to Lovable. And I'm like, it's pink, it's purple brand. It's a heart. It's lovable. I'm like, I'm sure this is where it's fiftyfifty men versus women. And although we don't collect this information, but just like the third party autofill, if we saw it's like 20% at most. And I'm like, what is happening? Not again. Why is this again not being adopted by a woman? And obviously, I don't know all of the answers. I think that this is early on that we can shortcut it. And by the way, I also don't want to put this as an indication that men are to blame because I think men are doing wonderful job really spearheading the horizons and showing us what's possible and like leading the charge. I'm just afraid that so many women are stuck in that latent majority that is just not catching up. And my worry is that it's going to affect the hireable talent. It's going to step us back again in the composition of the workplace, of the diversity. And maybe it matters, maybe it doesn't, like whichever side that you sit on. But I think that there is it needs to be built for everybody in the world. And for that, it needs to be built by a representative sample of people that are behind the product as well.
01:22:28 · Elena Verna, Lenny Rachitsky
So I I just find it fascinating that even when the barrier to building has been lowered, you don't need computer science degree, which I appreciate. There's not that many women that are getting. We're still seeing the gaping gap on the adoption between genders, which is just... I I I don't know. There's, like, something very frustrating about that. [01:22:50] S0: Yeah. The thing that struck with me with from your post is there has been a lot of progress being made in that last decade. And now AI is just kind of turning it all back, turning it all around.
01:22:50 · Lenny Rachitsky, Elena Verna
[01:22:50] S0: Yeah. The thing that struck with me with from your post is there has been a lot of progress being made in that last decade. And now AI is just kind of turning it all back, turning it all around. [01:23:00] S1: Hopefully not. I think that we're early on enough that we can bridge the gap. I think sometimes women just need space and ability to discover it. And that's what we're doing at Lovable. We have this initiative, she builds, where we have collect we have created a hackathon for women only. And we give them unlimited access to Lovable for forty eight hours and it come together as a community and they build together. And there's beautiful things that start to come out of it, which I've never anticipated before. But so many women in that hackathon for us build help for their elderly parents or with their kids or with the household or for their church group or for the kids basketball team solutions. We should have hyper local, hyper relevant, very needed for what they need in their life and something that was never been able to build before because of how expensive software was, because it would never going to become potentially $100,000,000 companies. But it also doesn't need to be anymore. So I just want to bring women to build more and vibe code more so we can have more diversity in software that is even created, because I think that we all have a unique take on what problems that we can solve, and I want everybody's voices to be heard. [01:24:16] S0: I'll give the URL for She Builds. I pulled it up while you're talking. Shebuilds.lovable.app.