Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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.
01:24:16 · Lenny Rachitsky, Elena Verna
[01:24:16] S0: I'll give the URL for She Builds. I pulled it up while you're talking. Shebuilds.lovable.app. [01:24:22] S1: And We bytecoded on Lovable. They're a minimum viable product. [01:24:27] S0: Minimal lovable product. [01:24:28] S1: Minimal lovable [01:24:29] S0: There it is. So when is this happening? Is this December fifteenth, eighteenth? So [01:24:33] S1: it's Yeah. We have it. We're running it constantly. So our next cohort starts December 15, but we're gonna have more. We're planning a massive one on International Women's Day. So that's the one that if you can come join us. [01:24:48] S0: Awesome. I don't know if you... Okay. So some glimmer of hope. I don't know if you saw this tweet where I tagged you the other day or maybe it was this today. I was looking at my most recent podcast video performance, and the top four are all women, and they're all AI oriented. And they're above Stewart Butterfield, founder of Slack, above Gamma's CEO Grant. So maybe a glimmer of hope. [01:25:10] S1: Yeah, absolutely. I think there's lots of glimmers of hope. I think we can just all lean in and make sure that nobody's left behind in this wave. And that's not to stop people that are marching ahead. This is just to open up opportunities for everybody around us. [01:25:24] S0: Awesome. And we'll link to that post if people wanna get a deeper perspective of what you're saying. Elena, is there anything else that you wanted to share? Is there anything else you wanna remind people of before we get to our one question lightning round?
01:25:38 · Elena Verna
[01:25:38] S1: I guess the only other thing that I will share is for AI companies when it comes to hiring. It's really interesting also the kind of the shift in the type of personas that end up being hired that I see for me at least it's quite different compared to anywhere that I've worked before. And that is there's this narrative going in the market always that like new hires, sorry, new grads have no jobs in the market left because all of the entry level jobs are automated. I actually think that's quite false because new grads, especially AI native new grads. So it's very important for kids that are entering into the, I shouldn't say kids, young adults that are entering into the workforce that they really know AI, which is there's another like really big issue that our schools are not teaching AI students. So this is like something else that we need to fix as a category because otherwise we're literally setting up our young for a complete failure. But I think it's incredible to see some of those new graduates come in and what they're capable of doing. I have we have multiple new graduates at Lovable that are working and I learned so much from them. And you need to obviously have the right atmosphere where people with experience like old guard like me that can look at the new guard and take really hear them and see them and really change the way that I operate based on how they do things. So make sure that you bring some of that fresh talent that doesn't understand any of the baggage that we came from and that can really look at the future in technology and what can unlock from a completely new lens. So, highly recommend putting those into your team as little fireballs that are going to be sometimes hard to contain. We can start the best initiatives for you forward. And then it's also interesting that there's really high demand for ex founders now, for those people that truly have a lot of agency and high autonomy. So instead of just having people that have been working in the corporate world, the failed startup founders are now hot demand for a lot of these AI companies. So like these personas that we traditionally would not prioritize in companies to to hire are now becoming the hottest commodity and the highest going talent, which is I think is fascinating and it's like the wonderful thing that is changing the how the culture inside operates.