Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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.
01:01:28 · Andrew Ambrosino, S1
[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. [01:01:38] S1: I think this is really important for people to hear. That you can have a lot of things not work out and then things start to work out super well and it's just keep going and keep learning. I imagine is a lesson. Well, with that, we reached our very exciting lightning round. I've got five questions for you. Are you ready? [01:01:53] S0: Great. [01:01:54] S1: [inaudible 01:01:54]. What are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people? [01:01:59] S0: See, man, I'm a parent now. I'm a parent of young kids. [01:02:02] S1: Nice. [01:02:04] S0: I don't know. There's one called The Gruffalo, I read to my kids. [01:02:07] S1: Oh, my God. Our kid just got obsessed with The Gruffalo. [01:02:10] S0: Yes. [01:02:11] S1: We have a bedtime chart and now it's like pajamas, brush teeth, books, Gruffalo, on blankie. [01:02:18] S0: Yeah. [01:02:18] S1: Yeah. It's so good. [01:02:19] S0: So other books I'm reading right now are that style. [01:02:23] S1: Okay, the soft stuff. [01:02:24] S0: Actually, The Gruffalo is not a terrible one. [01:02:25] S1: No. [01:02:25] S0: I feel like there's some lessons in it. [01:02:26] S1: It's so sweet. Yeah. Although every kid's book is about death. Someone's eating someone, someone's killing. There's always bad murder and destruction. [01:02:35] S0: Kids like violence. Even when it doesn't feel like violence to them, the words...
01:02:35 · Andrew Ambrosino, S1
[01:02:35] S0: Kids like violence. Even when it doesn't feel like violence to them, the words... [01:02:40] S1: It creates an arc and excitement. [01:02:42] S0: Yeah. [01:02:42] S1: Yeah. Okay. Great choice, Gruffalo. [01:02:44] S0: I currently have a book backlog. I need to read all of them. [01:02:49] S1: Any other children's books then that your kid likes? [01:02:52] S0: Okay. Yes, actually. I am well versed on children's space. My favorite children's book ever is a very old one and it's called The Big Orange Splots or something along those lines. Look it up. It's great. Go get it. If you hate HOAs, go get it. It's about this guy, Mr. Plumbean, who lives on a street where all the houses are the same. It's a very neat street. And then one day a bird drops a large can of orange paint on his house and he says, "Eff it. I'm going all in." So he goes to the store, he gets paint, hammocks, alligators, and he totally redoes his house. And the neighbors, they're up in arms, right? HOA, property value, whatever, whatever. It's not about HOAs, but I'm a very anti-HOA person. It's just really cool. And then one by one, the neighbors go talk to him, have what they refer to as lemonade, but it's a very convincing lemonade. Because one by one, they all start redoing their house. One guy does a boat. I think that's a good book. I think people need to read this when they're, especially NIMBYs. [01:03:54] S1: What I hear from this is agency. [01:03:56] S0: Agency, exactly. You can just do things.