Interviews with world-class product leaders and growth experts to uncover concrete, actionable, and tactical advice to help you build, launch, and grow your own product.
Building successful AI products requires a different approach than traditional software development, focusing on managing non-determinism and balancing agency with control. Companies should start with high-control, low-agency systems, gradually increasing AI autonomy as trust and reliability grow, and calibrate AI beha...
In this episode of Lenny's Podcast, Lenny Rachitsky interviews Matt MacInnis, Chief Product Officer at Rippling, about achieving extraordinary results through extraordinary efforts. Matt shares insights on leadership, including the importance of understaffing projects, escalating issues, and maintaining intensity withi...
The AI security industry faces critical vulnerabilities, particularly regarding prompt injection and jailbreaking, which can lead to serious real-world consequences as AI agents and robotics become more prevalent. Sander Schulhoff, an AI researcher, highlights the ineffectiveness of AI guardrails, noting that they offe...
In this episode of Lenny's Podcast, Elena Verna, Head of Growth at Lovable, discusses the unique growth strategies employed by the company, which has seen unprecedented success in its first year. Elena shares how traditional growth playbooks have been largely discarded in favor of innovation, building in public, and pr...
In this episode of Lenny's Podcast, Lenny Rachitsky interviews Alexander Embiricos, product lead for Codex at OpenAI, about the development and future of Codex, OpenAI's coding agent. Embiricos discusses Codex's explosive growth, its architecture, and its role as a software engineering teammate, emphasizing its potenti...
In this episode of Lenny's Podcast, Lenny Rachitsky interviews Edwin Chen, the founder and CEO of Surge AI, about Surge's extraordinary success as a bootstrapped AI data company that reached $1 billion in revenue in under four years with a small team. Edwin shares his contrarian views on company building, emphasizing t...
In this episode of Lenny's Podcast, Tomer Cohen, Chief Product Officer at LinkedIn, discusses the Full Stack Builder model, a new approach to product development designed to empower individuals to take products from idea to launch, regardless of their role. Cohen explains how traditional product development processes h...
In this episode of Lenny's Podcast, Lenny interviews Jeanne Grosser, COO at Vercel and former CPO at Stripe, about building world-class go-to-market teams. Jeanne defines go-to-market as any function touching a customer or making revenue, including marketing, sales, customer success, and partnerships. She discusses the...
In this episode of Lenny's Podcast, Lenny Rachitsky interviews Rachel Lockett, an executive coach, about leadership, coaching, avoiding burnout, and building strong co-founder relationships. Lockett shares actionable strategies for leaders to coach effectively, emphasizing active listening and asking powerful questions...
In this interview, Stewart Butterfield, the founder of Flickr and Slack, discusses product development, leadership, and company building with Lenny Rachitsky. Butterfield shares insights on utility curves, the importance of taste and craftsmanship, and the concept of "hyper-realistic work-like activities." He emphasize...
In this episode of Lenny's Podcast, Lenny interviews Dr. Fei-Fei Li, often called the "godmother of AI," about the history, present, and future of artificial intelligence. Dr. Li discusses the early days of AI, the AI winter, and her work creating ImageNet, which provided the data needed to advance AI. She shares her p...
In this episode of Lenny's Podcast, host Lenny Rachitsky interviews Grant Lee, CEO and co-founder of Gamma, an AI-powered presentation and website design tool that has reached $100M ARR in just over two years. Grant shares the story of Gamma's founding, including an early investor's harsh criticism and how that motivat...
Scaling from $1M to $10M ARR requires a strategic shift toward enterprise-focused sales that prioritize vision-casting over traditional problem-solving. Startups should target tier-one logos early, as these industry leaders act as early adopters seeking a competitive edge. Rather than pursuing ill-defined mid-market se...
In this interview, Lenny interviews Melanie Perkins, the CEO and co-founder of Canva, about her journey building the company. Melanie shares insights into Canva's success, which she attributes to "column B thinking"—envisioning a desired future and working backward to create it. She discusses the importance of setting ...
In this episode of Lenny's Podcast, Lenny interviews Dhanji Prasanna, CTO at Block, about Block's AI-native transformation. Dhanji discusses the company's internal open-source AI agent, Goose, which saves employees significant work time by automating tasks and enabling non-technical teams to build their own software to...
In this episode of Lenny's Podcast, Chip Huyen, an AI expert, discusses key concepts in AI, including pre-training, post-training, fine-tuning, RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation), and RLHF (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback). She shares insights on building successful AI applications, emphasizing the importa...
In this episode of Lenny's Podcast, Lenny interviews Nicole Forsgren about measuring and improving developer productivity in the age of AI. They discuss the concept of DevEx (developer experience), the importance of flow state, and the challenges of measuring productivity gains with AI. Nicole shares insights from her ...
In this interview podcast, Lenny interviews Dylan Field, the CEO and co-founder of Figma, about Figma's journey, culture, and products. Dylan shares insights on maintaining focus and motivation after a deal fell through, keeping a startup pace, Figma's culture, and his leadership style. He discusses counterintuitive de...
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