"There's a lot of talk about productivity gains through AI. There's this camp of people are like so overhyped. Nothing's working. Nobody's actually adopting this at scale. >> We see a significant amoun..."

"all the time. They should be trying to build in anticipation of what we want. What's maybe the most counterintuitive lesson you've learned about building products or building teams? >> A lot of engine..."

"This episode is for anyone curious to see what a highly AI forward, technologydriven large company looks like and can act like. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in yo..."

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">> So, about two and a half years ago or so, uh Jack really felt like things needed to change. I think he had a sense that the industry was going in a different direction. So he got about 40 of the co..."

"person. I was uh just in fact I was part-time at the time because I had just had a kid and I was you know coming back in and I was helping out one of the engineering teams. Uh, and then Jack came over..."

"long time, we had had a little bit of I want to call it identity drift. Maybe we were talking about ourselves as a financial services company. Some people called us fintech, all of this stuff. But whe..."

"again. We're trying to push the frontier again. And that's how it started. And then there were a whole number of steps after that where we went from a GM structure to a functional org structure which ..."

"and maybe also like the top most optimal engineering team, how is the way they work today different from a couple years ago in the small certain teams that are very very AI native? or teams that are b..."

">> Okay. So let me lean into that AI piece which is I think where you guys are most ahead of a lot of other companies. You guys built your own >> uh agent I think is what is how you describe goose. So..."

"are reporting about 8 to 10 hours saved per week. Uh and this is self-reported and then we also have a number of check metrics to try and validate that. So we look at PRs, we look at throughput of fea..."

"to be able to build little software tools for themselves. So this has been one of the most surprising and energizing uses of goose within block is we'll have our enterprise risk management team build ..."

"where you have a lot of depth and a lot of like really strong people come together is where AI, I think, still underperforms humans. And that's something that's probably going to get better over time,..."

">> Holy moly, there's so much there in what you just shared. There's like five things I want to follow up on. Okay, so one is this metric you kind of alluded to, which is how you measure the impact of..."

"fields codebase or you're building a app for a new platform then we we're seeing those pretty aggressive gains but in you know very complex code bases that already exist those gains are not quite ther..."

"can do all of these tasks and the way we've been able to do this is through something called the model context protocol which or the MCP which a lot of your listeners might have heard and this is some..."

"chat GBT and a bunch of open source models. Is that right? >> Yeah, it can use any model. So we have a pluggable provider system and you can either bring your own API keys and use uh the cloud family ..."

"So essentially ad block instead of using claude or chat directly or even cursor and all these apps they use goose. Yeah we allow our engineers and our general employee population to use any tools that..."

"bootstrappable as well. >> And this is open source. And basically you've spent all its time building this thing. Any other company can now implement it and and build on all the work you've done. >> Ye..."

"and yeah, we're very excited that it's had the success it's had. What's the story with the name Goose, by the way? I can't help but ask. Goose is a Top Gun reference. Okay. >> Um, so what our engineer..."

">> That's incredible. Exactly. >> How uh how good is it? Like where's it at if you had to go zero to 100 of like okay it's gonna all you have to do is now think and talk and it'll just do your job. >>..."

"probably cutting down enormous amounts of busy work that he has to do. So, for example, one thing he'll do is he'll say, "Oh, I have a meeting conflict. I can't make it." that time or I have to go pic..."

"our creator of Goose uh who who did the same thing. So let me pull that thread a little bit. You're you're kind of seeing a glimpse of where things are going. You're very uh ahead of the curve in a lo..."

"and you have to nudge it and guide it and massage it to get where it needs to be. I think that we're going to see much more autonomy. So, we're working on a couple of experiments with Goose with the n..."

"had limited resources, limited bandwidth, and a lot of coordination overhead. So we would have to choose the best path to try in an experiment. And I don't think we need that anymore. We need instead ..."

"lot more of that way of working. And I think that you're going to see instead of us, for example, refactoring a an app to have a different UI or to evolve into its new version. We're just going to rew..."

"more of just getting you back to where it was and it's so interesting that AI now can make that possible and what you're saying is that's actually maybe the way you should be working. >> I think so. A..."

"script entirely and uh you have to sort of pull it back a bit. So I think we're we're not quite at that era where it's completely self-improving and um completely autonomous. But I do think we're in a..."

"don't go off script to be honest. And that's really where um our our design lead and our design teams are pushing us to think and and that's a differentiator that I think will push us beyond this era ..."

"this episode. One of the biggest parts of the conversation around AI is head is hiring jobs things like that. So there I have two kind of this two-part question. One is just how has the rise of all th..."

"the AI side, we're very much looking for people that are embracing these tools and that are eager to try and learn from it. We're not looking for people who are amazing AI practitioners on the get-go...."

"us to be a learning first company. So everything we do, every experiment that we ship, what can we learn from it? And did we feel that we gave it our best shot? And I think that that's more important ..."

"AI native programmer or not. Another question that I've always been thinking about, a lot of people wonder is what level of engineer is most benefiting from these tools? You could argue it's the junio..."

">> It's interesting no one talks about that element of engineering productivity which is the reduction of asks from all the other parts of the company to build random one-off things. That feels like a..."

"into platforms. >> I love this hot take of uh if you're trying to be more productive, forget AI, just reorg into a functional structure. It's not wrong in some ways. So, here's another really interest..."

"more forward thinking? I would say really try and use these tools yourself. So the way in which I think we've been able to drive most of the adoption is Jack uses goose, I use goose, our executive tea..."

"learning how to use them. >> That is cool. Uh I love the By the way, can you run Goose like as a regular person? Can you just download Goose and use that instead of >> Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, you can ..."

"so you've been CTO I'm looking at LinkedIn right now for just about two years what's something that you wish you knew before you stepped in this role if you could go back a couple years and just whisp..."

"when I took up the role. Looking back at your time at Block, I keep trying to I almost say Square because I'm so used to that over the year, but I know Block is is the name of the broader company and ..."

"very little to do with how well it was architected because the flip side of that, Google Video, which is a product that I don't know if people remember, it existed before YouTube, it supported more fo..."

"and lesson. And this YouTube story is so fun uh and such a good example. you were saying they were storing the video like uh content in a in a my SQL set like row and column as a blob data. Yeah, this..."

">> Yeah, there's some truth to that for sure. Yeah. >> And so I think again it's just there's so much more that is more important to the success of a business. And it's what you said is are you solvin..."

"breeds and you have to know how to build controlled chaos in some ways. So you have to create a foundation that isn't, you know, liable to rupture or like you have major reliability problems or someth..."

"as well. Maybe one more question before I take us to uh to fail corner which I'll explain. So you've shared a few lessons of things you've learned over the course of your career. Are there any other j..."

"shared it with a bunch of people. he shared with data bricks and anthropic got them excited and you know learned a lot from them and so it just sort of built momentum from there and even internally it..."

"cup of coffee. >> What was Bitcoin at? Like 20,000 six or 7,000 back then. >> Yeah. >> Oh no. It's like 120,000 now. Great. >> Yeah. >> Inflation. Um, but yeah, it's an example of how, you know, you y..."

"that didn't work out and what did that teach you? It's a very valuable point. I mean, my career has basically been a string of failed product on top of failed product. And I think that yeah, the Googl..."

"And so yeah, that that's been my career is essentially taking the learnings from all these failures, getting some humility out of it in the process too, coming into things. Um, willing to listen to ot..."

"products that are either free or almost free to anyone, you know, or they have a free tier and then you kind of pay for some premium services and that are usable by everyone. So, like anyone can becom..."

">> Yeah, exactly. And like if it's not meaningful and fun, then you shouldn't be doing it probably. >> With that, Dan, we've reached our very exciting lightning round. And I've got five questions for ..."

"find a center. >> Wow. >> Those two never heard these recommendations before. I'm really excited to check these out. Very cool for a CTO of of a big tech company. What is a favorite recent movie or TV..."

"like it kind of slowed down a bit. I'm just like, "All right, I guess I see where it's going now." But it was really fun to watch. Okay, next question. Do you have a favorite product you really enjoye..."

"tried to do things and sometimes it works, sometimes not. But yeah, it's a good thing to ask yourself. >> I I really love this advice. It's really hard to do that for a lot of people. Is there anythin..."

"machine. And he spends the entire movie um trying to fix the problems that it creates. But yeah, that he's always been uh like a really fun character for me. You know what I think about I think about ..."