Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:52:18 · Andrew Ambrosino
[00:52:18] S0: We had Codex as a CLI and then we decided to build this app. And we were a little uncertain about the app but had a lot of conviction in what it could be as to start a developer tool. And it wasn't going to be an ITE, it was going to be this right sized surface. Where it was sort of a chatbot but it was more than that and you could see the code but we weren't going to let you edit the code. There's a really interesting thing that happened at OpenAI in January and February. And it was before we actually released the Codex app, which is that we'd started to dog food the Codex app. And what we were finding, we were converging on some pretty clear internal PMF on engineering and research workflows. They were thrilled. They were loving it. We were like, "All right, we just got to get the quality bar up before we release it to the world. We're convinced that this will be a thing." But then at the company, we spun up a few other workflows to say, "Hey, this Codex effort is onto something with these coding agents." And we have people from marketing, from comms, from finance, from legal, from basically every discipline, who are using this Codex app, even though it is actively hostile to these people. It is trying to show them code. It's trying to ask for approval to run RG on the... It's doing all of these things that are actively not the right product surface for them. So why don't we take our other surfaces and add Codex to them? Let's add it to the ChatGPT desktop app. Let's add it to the Atlas browser. And let's essentially take the lessons of Codex and make it more general for a general knowledge work tool. And those efforts went for a little bit. And the most annoying problem happened, which is nobody would leave the Codex app for the apps that were allegedly for these other personas. I think the lesson in all of this was just that the whole developer tool versus general knowledge work tool, there's a lot of nuance here that isn't just one or the other. I think we believe really strongly in this. And that there are certainly, in the same way that we talk about the average of your role as what your role is now, this is true on the product side too. People who are doing Excel work don't want to see Git repository information. We know that, but we also know that we can tell a lot from what they're doing about what kind of work they do.
00:54:52 · Andrew Ambrosino, S1
And we can start simple, grow the product to complex as we feel is needed. It doesn't mean we don't have modes. You might want some modes for organizing your stuff and to sort of be legible about the ways that you enter the experience. But we really believe strongly that what we've built here is the right shape to take on really deep, vertically focused things. We work deeply with our finance team, with our team working on science, team working on legal. And we say, "If we can build the right extensibility primitives in the right general model, then you can do anything with this." And then our challenge is, well, how do you generalize it? But this is kind of going back to the best desktop app that we can build. What does that look like? And so it was Codex the developer tool, ChatGPT, where's this going? This is how we think about it. [00:55:47] S1: It is so interesting, the point you made that the Codex app was so, you did such a good job getting people to be aware it existed. And so good to use and fun to use that everyone's starting to use that versus the ChatGPT app. So clearly the direction is combining them so that you're not creating this confusion, which I know is things people have been talking about, this idea of come bringing them together. [00:56:06] S0: Somebody called it a super app and wish they hadn't said that because now I have to hear about the super app all day, every day. We'll get past it. Great.
00:56:06 · Andrew Ambrosino, S1
[00:56:06] S0: Somebody called it a super app and wish they hadn't said that because now I have to hear about the super app all day, every day. We'll get past it. Great. [00:56:17] S1: Okay. But is that kind of the... Let's not call it a super app, but the idea is one place people go to do all the things. Is that the general idea? Or TBD?
00:56:23 · Andrew Ambrosino
[00:56:23] S0: Yeah. I think what we see here is that it's a great home base. It's a great place to keep track of all of the things that you have to do across different surfaces. And some of those things, you do all of it in the app. Some of those things the app opens other apps to do. The app can connect to Excel so that yes, it has a spreadsheet editor inside the app. Is that good enough for people doing financial modeling at OpenAI for raising billions of dollars? Probably not. And so the app talks directly to the add-in Microsoft Excel on your desktop. When it's done, you can close Excel. And so it's not just about, "Hey, we're drawing a rectangle on the screen and everything needs to happen in that rectangle." It's, "This thing should be a home for you where you start work, you end work, you automate work, and it uses whatever you need to do." There's a great story about, we had some videos that we shot in this room for the original launch of the Codex app. And our in-house DX videographer, Brent, then was tasked with editing all these videos. And he edited all the videos with Codex, which was one of the early like, "Whoa, what are people doing with this thing?" And the process for why he decided to start using Codex was really interesting. He started just because he was curious if Codex could edit videos. And so Codex is not a video editor per se. It doesn't have any of that UI in it, but it was able to understand that he used Premiere Pro. It could do some edits by editing the files that were backing what was on-screen in Premiere Pro, but it couldn't do everything. So naturally what Codex then did was built itself an extension that could be installed into Premiere Pro. That it could then talk to and say, "Hey, Premiere Pro extension, can you please change this marker inside of the Premiere Pro app?" That was pretty nuts when we saw that happening. It's a great model. There are these specialty tools that specialize in things. And so we're trying to do two things at once with Codex and with now with ChatGPT. One is how can we seamlessly interact with these tools that you're already using? And say, "We don't need to build a better video editor for you." But Codex and ChatGPT can use that video editor. It can interact again, can hand stuff off to it. So how can we do that?
00:58:51 · Andrew Ambrosino, S1
And that's often through connectors or computer use or even extensions in this case. And then there is Dan Shipper's thing, which is, "Hey, I have these web apps that you can click around and use, but I want to be able to open these in Codex and have Codex do extra stuff with it." And so those are kind of like two models that are almost inverse of each other that we're doing a lot with both at the same time. [00:59:18] S1: This Premiere story is interesting to me because it's another example of just be more ambitious with these AI jobs. You may not know, maybe they could do this thing. It's almost just like, "Go try, go try out, see if it figures it out." I'm going to take us to a recurring corner on the podcast that I call Fail Corner. And so the question for you is people see people like you just killing it, just growing. Everything's winning. Codex is doing so great, this crazy career, everything's up and to the right. People may not see the times that things didn't work out and things that you launched that were failures. And so these stories are really important for people to hear, that it's not all just win all the time. What's a story of a time you failed in your career that taught you something really important?
01:00:03 · Andrew Ambrosino, S1
[01:00:03] S0: It's funny to hear that description played back at me. And this is perhaps the first time I've not felt like I was failing. I mean, I was a startup founder for a long time. I ended up selling the company for parts essentially. It was years, it was a slog, it was heavily regulated spaces. The whole thing felt like a constant failure. I went to this other startup and we were trying to do some AI tools in this also pretty locked down, regulated industry. And that felt like just time after time of trying things and it not working. So to me it's been like, "Oh, I've failed actually quite a lot." And sometimes it's just a point in time where things line up like skillset, passion, point in the market, line up. With this project to bring what we've learned with the Codex app and marry it with ChatGPT, there have been, I don't know how many micro failures on this. Where we're like, "This is the shape it should look like." And then throw that in Slack and there's like a 2,000 message thread about how stupid we are. This is the thing I love about OpenAI, is people will just tell us that. There's no holding back on when we fail with product things internally. It's why the external product has been pretty great is because it goes through these cycles of- [01:01:27] S1: 2,000, this sucks. [01:01:28] S0: I failed for, I don't know, somewhere between 10 and 15 years before getting to this point. So I'm still surprised every day that things are going well. And I know it.