"If you were literally founding a new company from scratch with the same mission, how would you execute on that mission using a fully AI native approach? If you can't, then you should find a buyer and ..."

"chappd, and mobin. Check it out lennisnewsletter.com and click product pass. With that, I bring you Howie Lou. This episode is brought to you by LucidLink, the storage collaboration platform. You've b..."

"Howie, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast. I'm so excited. Thank you, Lenny. I've I've been a listener from afar for a while now. I'm I'm really flattered to hear that. I'm also ..."

"around the world some number of times before truth has even has time to get out of bed. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I I think I learned about um uh memes and morality very quickly in uh in that experience..."

"think the same is true for Figma which um you know actually like had a very parallel timeline to us like we both were founded around the same time both spent two and a half years building the product ..."

"capabilities in our product domain. You have this phrase somewhere where you you talk about being the chief taste maker. Yeah. And to do that you have to do exactly what you're describing. That's righ..."

"I'm still the um I I just checked this recently, but like uh I take pride in being the number one most expensive in inference cost user of Air Table AI. Uh not just within our own company, but I think..."

"really really smart chief of staff has gone through and read every single sales call like transcript that we've had in the past year and giving me like you know you know kind of very uh astute product..."

"it's it's a crazy ratio and like more people should be like aggressively throwing comput cycles at these very high value problems until somebody tweets how you're eating uh costing the company so much..."

"more timely topics, right? Like I like to think of um you know, the best types of meetings as like very um urgency driven and like, you know, there's some timely topic like you know, you've you've dis..."

"way like go for a longer lunch or coffee walk or whatever um in person when you can uh maybe that's like a once every month or two kind of thing and then like the the inetweens are either topical So w..."

"Yeah, so I mean we did do a reorg uh of uh the EPO or so. So before we had we've gone through a few different um kind of reorgs over the past call it four years. The the you know kind of original stat..."

"reorged um initially to basically different um business units effectively right so uh I know Airbnb has done like kind of the the functional to GM you know back etc this was more like saying look we h..."

"it still felt like it wasn't, especially as as we started to execute more on AI stuff, like it wasn't, you know, allowing us to aggressively and quickly move as a AI native company would, right? Like ..."

"use this new capability in in Air Table and then separately we have the slow thinking group that's not me meant to be like better or worse like it's it's literally like you need fast and slow thinking..."

"like really final mile very bespoke functionality or like uh visuals right so you could say like hey generate me a very very specific type of map view with like this kind of like uh heat mapping and t..."

"capabilities are right like I mean Chach obviously like you know extremely successful product so not knocking it at all but like you come in and you just get this like completely blank chat box right ..."

"instance at a law firm. Um, and yet like to me the the best way to get AI value out there is experientially, right? And so like you can kind of get that in a sales motion. You can like, you know, show..."

"still really uh important for our business. But I also think like me personally like one of my goals is to shift my attention back into that kind of like you know builderled adoption and like literall..."

"software creation context was GitHub copilot, right? It's like autocomplete a few lines of code at a time, right? But you know, you couldn't chat to it and tell it like build me this entire app from s..."

"then by the way, like do you have useful building blocks? um you know that you can leverage from your existing product uh and your existing business or are you literally worse off having this legacy a..."

"And by the way, here's all these other view types and a layout engine for a custom interface, you know, uh a layout, right? Or automations and business logic. And so it's almost like um in programming..."

"thinking team. I love that metaphor and framing. And then there's the point you made about just talking to AI regularly as the founder feels like an important element just like to truly be this ICEO t..."

"chach and pull together the results have it composed like you know kind of a little Did you actually do this? Is there something like that? That's literally an example of some like just you know a fun..."

"entertainment value to just using AI period because like a it's it's it's not it's not like perfectly predictable. So I think the element of like you're not quite sure what you're going to get, you kn..."

"all. And combining this with our point earlier of like a lot of this has to be experience, not just like read. Like you can't just read like the write up on TechCrunch or or you know even a tweet abou..."

"AI/ Lenny for people that work for you across Air say the product team PMs maybe engineers designers how have you adjusted what you expect of them to help them be successful in this new world. one is,..."

"care about and maybe even like ask it to like okay summarize this all into like a final, you know, kind of like memo output and then intentionally share that rather than expose the fact that like I'm ..."

"experimentation and iteration driven. Of the different functions on a product team, PM, engineering, design, who has had the most success being more productive with these tools and how do you think th..."

"getting hands-on rather than seeing their role as you know kind of writing documents writing PRDS. Do you see one of these roles uh I don't know being more in trouble than others just like you need fe..."

"right and I'm always telling the team like look like the great news is like we have it's like we have all these fruit trees and Like there's so many crazy lowhanging fruit, right? Like and you got lit..."

"looking more like a hybrid PM prototyper who has some good design sensibilities and by the way like I think some of the best edge PM and design cultures respectively over the past even few decades hav..."

"you know you could be a designer who's really good at thinking about UX and interaction design and then just like good enough to be dangerous on thinking about like what's technically possible and lik..."

"then going and trying to build like my own weekend project ideas, right? Oh, I want to build like a Yelp style app with a map view and then also a list view. And I want it so that when when you pan ar..."

"right? I mean like I am basically telling our teams on the AI platform um uh group especially like look like you know in that that lowh hanging fruit metaphor it's like I'm not being prescriptive with..."

"functionality. I actually tried to do exactly that. The problem I ran into, I wonder if it's changed, is there's no API for uh for chat GPT deep research yet. There is now there is now ends up being u..."

"like the prompt or the model or like the the agentic workflow used to generate the these outputs and you have to define like you know what does good look like right by definition for the eval like I w..."

"like the the uh the the output for that, right? Um, but like by that point, you've probably already scoped the product and maybe the way we would merchandise it in the the in air table is not like a c..."

"I think just to really really try to break down ro silos like and I think that's true certainly for EPD um in the typical like um you know EPD triangle but I also think it's it's probably true even fo..."

"wants to compete in this new arena. That is that is a great addition. It almost feels like you go back to startup times when everyone's doing a bunch of stuff. There's no like here's the head of produ..."

"first place. And then I think as you scale up you know the default guidance that you often get from you know like operational experts and and you know kind of like larger scale you know kind of uh uh ..."

"actually is very uh informative. It's interesting how this idea founder mode is not so different from this ICE trend that you're following and it's Yeah. Yeah, it's like being in the weeds, being in t..."

"I think um like the really cool thing about uh you know CEOs as IC's and frankly any leader playing more of an IC like role and being in the details is I think for the right type of person it's it's a..."

"guess I'm just more and more skeptical that that like hands-off, you know, pure delegation, uh, you know, and process management role ever works as a CEO. Like maybe maybe you just like you go through..."

"to keep doing this for for a long time. I I I think that's so true. And to me, that's why there's always been a difference between entrepreneurs who love the the act of building a product or, you know..."

"empowering way to end it. And I just to double down on that, it's never been easier to learn these things. Like there are super intelligences that you can talk to that do a lot like as they're buildin..."

"builder. You remember spacer.gif. Uh, it's like to create like to line stuff you just know I remember invisible one pixel thing that you just stick in places. Yeah. Yeah. No, I don't. Oh my god, what ..."

"inception where every book, every subsequent book was like you dropped into another like you you incepted into like another layer, right? Awesome. Okay. What's a favorite recent movie or TV show you'v..."

"Do you have a favorite product you recently discovered they really love? Could be an app, could be a gadget, could be a clothing. So, okay. So, I I'll give uh two uh because I feel like I have to I ha..."

"awesome you know uh video experiences right so that's the software And then a very very uh kind of nerdy um uh real world uh answer on product is I kind of just recently got into like this whole um co..."

"to be really good stuff. Is there is there a brand you want to share that is that or is this like you want to keep it under the radar? Um actually so Self Edge which actually has a a storefront like t..."

"clothes. I feel like we just tapped into what could be a whole other podcast conversation about clothing and craftsmanship, but let's I'm going to pull us out of that the next uh franchise or just How..."

"maybe even for like you know the the whole uh lifetime that uh super resonates that is really powerful advice that's hard to internalize but important yeah um easily said hard to uh practice yeah uh w..."