Anthropic's Explosive Growth and AI-Driven Growth Automation with Amol Avasare

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Transcript

A lot of companies claim to be the fastest growing companies of all time.

And the topic actually is, you guys were at a billion ARR at the start of 2025.

The last number I've seen is 19 billion ARR.

That's one to 19 billion dollars in 14 months.

Historically, we were very much a small list, least well funded playout in this space.

We didn't have the free cash flow or the distribution of a metal or Google.

We didn't have the first mover advantage of an open AI.

It's a complete miracle that we've gotten to the stage that we have.

Give us just a glimpse of what is like to be leading growth inside of Anthropics.

The hottest job I've had in my life to come into Anthropics, you need to understand that 50, 60, 70% of how you operate in the past, just throw it out the door.

One of the cleverest growth moves the all made was this idea of importing memory from CHAPT.

Activation is a really big challenge in AI.

We are starting to look at how do we automate growth?

Our growth platform team is driving this effort.

Cash, which is called Accelerate Sustainable Hypergrowth, how can we use called to automate growth experimentation?

And it's delivering results.

You're basically living in the future.

We always talk about the exponential.

The product value that we will deliver in two years' time is probably like a thousand x, what it is today.

The funniest thing is I've noticed in term of linear charts.

I just not cool.

Everything is log linear.

It's just show me a log linear scale.

Today my guest is a mole ever sorry.

A mole is head of growth at Anthropics, which is on the most unprecedented growth run in history.

In the past 14 months, they grew from 1 billion to over 19 billion in annual recurring revenue.

Just in the past few months, the revenue doubled.

They've been growing 10x year over year.

This is unheard of at the scale.

By the time this episode comes out, the revenue will be even higher to put the scale in perspective.

Companies like Atlassian and Palantia and Snowflake, which have been around for 15 to 20 years, each due something like 4.5 to 6 billion in ARR.

Anthropics is adding this much ARR every few months.

And if that is an interesting enough to you, a mole who leads growth at Anthropics is an incredible human.

He previously like growth at Mercury and Masterclass before that he was a founder and an investment banker.

And most interestingly, something that most people don't know about him is that a mole suffered a severe brain injury.

He had to spend 9 months relearning how to walk and work and just not be nauseous all the time.

He shared this story in a guest post in my newsletter a number of years ago.

We actually chat about this during the conversation.

These are my favorite kind of conversations, because a mole and his team aren't living in the future.

And he's come to tell us where things are heading and what's going to change.

And in this episode, a mole shares an unprecedented look at how a company like Anthropics operates in grows, including how they think about growth, what parts of the job they've automated, the future of the product in growth roles, how mole got the job in the first place by cold emailing my Krieger, and so much more.

A mole is wonderful and just try to count the number of times that he blew my mind during this conversation.

Before we get into it, don't forget to check out Lenny's productpast.com for an incredible set of deals available exclusively to Lenny's newsletter subscribers with that I bring you a mole of a sorry.

A mole, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

Pleasure to be here.

Head of growth at Anthropics, no big deal.

I've had a lot of people come on this podcast from companies that claim to be the fastest growing companies of all time.

And Anthropics actually is, if you look at the trajectory, I just have some of the numbers here, just so people understand how absurd this is.

So you guys were at a billion AR at the start of 2025, then hit something like 4 billion mid 2025, then 9 billion AR at the end of 2025.

And the last number I've seen is you guys are at 19 billion AR, which just to put a couple pieces of context here.

One is that's from $1 to $19 billion in 14 months.

I have so many questions.

First of all, the story of how you actually landed the thrill is really interesting.

Talk about how you got the thrill.

Yeah, it's a little unorthodox.

So as funny, when I did my onboarding, they walked through what percentage of the curve, what came through referrals, what percentage came through playing on the website, what percentage came through a sourcing.

And I was on none of those.

And I was like, okay, it was interesting.

And basically the way that I got changed, I think it was that I was actually a user of Claude.

And I was using a lot of like, and these guys, like, great product, great company, but they really, like, obviously don't have a growth team.

And what I did was I just sent my Krieger a code emails.

He was a chief product officer.

I sent him a code email saying, like, hey, love what you guys do, love the product.

I think you guys badly need a growth team.

One chat.

And I didn't expect you would respond.

And, you know, he responds and says, hey, yeah, I'm interested.

Let's talk.

And it's funny.

I didn't know.

I mean, I wouldn't have known.

They were not hiring for a growth team.

They were no growth EM roles listed.

But they were just at that time starting to think about hiring a growth team.

So it was very good timing.

But, yeah, one, one, one, it was spoke to Mike and one thing led to another.

He said, I'm the only PM that he's hired from, from cold email.

And I, I feel very lucky that he decided to respond to my email.

I did not know the story that is another absurd fact.

Clearly, you're good at cold email.

What did you do in this cold email to get as attention?

I would say, like, I'd basically perfected cold email over the years.

So I was, when I was a founder, I had to get really, really good at this.

So I sent a lot of cold emails out.

And just honed the subject line, the message, and the tone.

And so basically, I've, in the subject line, the first thing is, like, from a conversion standpoint, someone sees that you know, they need to click on it.

And so I have a copy that I've tested that is, like, very, very high open rate.

And so, where, what does this copy?

Or is this a secret?

It's a secret.

I think it will keep it in the book.

It keeps it in the secret.

So that's one, getting into open.

I think the second is then the tactics of, you need to understand, like, where are people getting out reach?

And if you, if everyone's getting out reach in one area, and then you reach out to them there, then you're not going to get a higher response rate.

So you can think about, like, LinkedIn, you can think about, like, work email.

These are things that everyone is emailing.

So there's, there's ways to get people's personal emails out there.

And so, like, that's one thing that I did.

And so, okay, I've got this personal email.

I know the copy that works.

And then it's just keeping it very short.

And here's why I add, here's why I'd be a good fit, and we should chat.

And, and then you, these things typically don't work.

And then, yeah, you should always follow up a few times.

I think my role of thumb is, like, if I really care about it, I should just keep, keep reaching out to them.

And until they tell me, like, please stop.

And so, I would have, I would have kept doing that, but you responded the best time.

It makes sense that a talented, growth person would be very good at cold email and getting people's attention.

So that's almost like an interview.

Step is just, did I want to read the email?

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Okay, so give us just like a glimpse of what is like to be leading growth inside of Anthropic right now.

The most by far fastest growing company in history, just what is it like?

Yeah, I take very much a company wide effort, right?

So like, yes, we are the growth team.

We have done great.

I think we've driven a lot of impact.

But honestly, man, we can't claim too much credit for the success of the company.

We we as Anthropic are really a model company and an intelligence company first and foremost.

And so the lion's share of what has driven our success is our research team.

We have the best research team in the world.

We have great teams on inference and compute.

And then there's many other teams like Claude Code, DotaMarket, et cetera, who I think deserve much more credit than us.

I think just zooming out, going to something for what you said earlier, the growth project was just being insane.

That that 10x year or a year revenue growth trend has been less.

It's the beginning.

I think 2023 was 0 to 100 mil.

2024 was 100 to 1 last year was 1 to roughly 10.

And I like, I look back to when I joined in 2024.

Revenue was in the hundreds of millions.

And just that trajectory to the end of 2020 for 2025, like, week two of when I joined, we're going into 2025 revenue planning.

And we have these like base case and aggressive case scenarios.

And Darius pushing the aggressive case scenario.

And people are freaking out being like, how the hell are we going to get that?

And Darius, like, I think we can actually go much higher than that.

And I'm coming in like, this place is crazy.

Like, there's absolutely no way.

And that happened, right?

And then you get to the end of 2025.

And it's like, okay, law of large numbers, there's going to be a pretty big slowdown here, based on, you know, Europe baseline rate of 10 billion, how you're going to keep growing at this rate.

And like, it just like has not slowed down.

And there's numbers of public, the 19 billion number you quoted is from the end of Fed.

So that is also out of date.

And it's, look, it's absolutely insane.

Like, the funniest thing is something that I've noticed internally is like, linear charts are just like not cool.

Like no one cares about linear charts.

Everything is log linear.

So show me it, log linear scale.

And that's, that's a lot of scale we think.

And I think overall we're just, you know, really hanging on by the seat of our pan.

So we're trying to manage the growth.

And do, do the best that we can for our users.

And I was talking to somebody at Anthropic about you.

And they said that basically any time they want something to grow, they ask you to help.

And it works.

So you talked about just like things are magical and amazing.

And they, like, a cloud and all the tools you all built are amazing.

And they, and that's a big part of the reason they grow.

I think many people listening to this will be like, what do you act even do a model with, like, a magical micro god that just can do anything for you?

Why do we need a growth person?

What do you even do?

Talk about just the stuff that you focus on.

And maybe like a couple of the wins that you're a team of ship that has helped accelerate growth.

I would say like the not fully wrong, right?

Like we're very, very lucky to have the best models in the world.

We're very lucky to have products like cloud code and co-worker.

It certainly makes life a lot easier.

Having said that, I would say this is like the hottest job I've had in my life.

And that's, you know, having been a founder, having been an investment banker and other things like that.

It's, it's tough.

And if I look at what do we do as a growth team here?

I think it's, it's ultimately it's the same categories of things that you would think about over normal companies.

So we care about acquisition, how we getting more and more people in the door, the intent of the people coming through the door.

We care about activation, the sign-up flow, funneling people to the right products, making them successful.

You know, we care about things like monetization for your paid conversion, pricing and packaging.

All of that stuff that we, the, the categories of work is the same.

I think then the, the, the probably the big differences I would say that like roughly 70% of what I spend my time on is what we internally refer to as success disasters.

And that is where like things have gone so well that other things are breaking.

Now, and, and I think anyone has worked at companies that have gone through rapid growth.

You seem like Facebook or Uber or DoorDash early on.

Like the understanders, if you're really, we're scaling this month's just brings a lot of challenges.

So if you think about each of those categories on acquisition, on on activation, on monetization, there's just a ton of firefighting jumping from like one edge and thing to another.

And it's often like extremely painful and, and like, it's funny because you look at all the charts, all the charts are like green, like fully up into the right, and everyone's just like, it's, it can be quite tough, emotionally still.

And so you need to sort of step back and just realize like we're very lucky to have these problems.

But that's sort of 70% of my time, I'd say, is just these like firefighting of success disasters.

And I think the 30% remaining is just much more standard, bread and butter growth work, where it's like more proactive.

So you think about, okay, if we have limited resources, which, which are the products, we have many different products, which are the products we want to put some juice behind, what is our long-term pricing and packaging look like, especially given that the technologies changing a lot and behavior and engagement trends are shifting.

And then, you know, things like with a lot of new products coming up, like, okay, you ship co-work.

Now what, like, when is the right time that we should lean in as a growth team to start optimizing the core adoption funnel for co-work?

So it's very 70%, 70%, just crazy firefighting 30% more, more bread and butter stuff.

Okay, I'm going to dig into a lot of that stuff.

One of the cleverest growth moves the all-made recently was this idea of importing memory from chatGPT, where you just made it really easy and kind of jumped on this trend of people getting really excited about their topic.

Is there anything you could share about the, the behind-the-scenes story of that feature?

Who's thinking about what can we do to improve the, the cold start problem and improve the new user experience?

I think that activation is a really big challenge in AI and so, you know, that's like one, one example of something that, that we ship that was very, you know, specific to a moment in time.

But ultimately, that you zoom out, it's like, okay, how do you really, how do you really make it easier for people who are signing up to have Claude understand who they are and understand how Claude can help them and get them to the right place?

I want to follow that thread activation.

There's something that comes up a time when I talk to people leading driving growth on AI products.

It's just like, like, there's so much stuff trying to get your attention these days for people to get to a place where they, okay, wow, this is really going to be something I want to keep using.

It proves to be really hard and it's also just unreliable.

Sometimes it's not going to be magical if they act and non-deterministic.

I guess one is just like, how important is focusing on activation, getting people to that aha moment with AI products and to what are some things you've learned about how to do that well with, with Claude or AI in general?

Yeah, it's a good question.

I think that activation, it's, it's critical, right?

And, and defining that is like early activation, call it day zero day one product experience.

I think that historically anyone who's being in growth or being in product understands that that's, that's, that's usually one of the highest levers that you have to actually even increase like longer-term retention.

And I think that, that the importance of that has just got an exponentially higher now.

Zooming out, I feel like one of the biggest problems in the industry is capability overhang, whether the models are just getting better so quickly.

And, and it, the real challenge is on the product side of how do we start to diffuse those benefits to people?

Even internally, like, there's new models coming internally and you're sitting there, you're so busy and when when a new model is available, you need to like really carve out time to be like, what can this do?

How do I need to update my prayers?

And, and if you think about more broadly for most people, you may have a model that is like, yeah, you may have AGI or some, you know, a model that can do all sorts of crazy things.

But if people's instinct is to come there and be like, hey, what's the weather in SF?

Then, you know, they're not going to get the most out of the product.

And then, so, I think that it's, it's, it's tough because the model capabilities are rising so much.

So, like, if I, if I think about, okay, back when we had, I don't know what I'm saying, like, Opus 4, at that, there's a series of things that the model can do at that point and, and Opus 4, we're in fact unlocked at whole bunch of new things.

You can think about, okay, we sit there, we've got this new model Opus 4, that the time to then go and run a bunch of tests, figure out, okay, there's the capabilities from this new model.

What are the right on rounds to guide people to those features?

You know, you're on, you're on tests to get the learnings, you then ship a new flow.

By then, you may already have the next model, which unlocks new capabilities that makes all these learnings irrelevant, right?

So, like, it's actually just like a really difficult problem to stay on top of.

I think that many of the same things, same old trends in, in gross and activation remain, I think, accurate, where to me, it's like, ultimately, the some of the highest leverage is from finding the right product or the right feature for the right user.

And I think that one learning, you know, seeing this time and time again across companies, actually, like, the right friction helps and adding more friction usually works.

If you do it the right way, I think that's something I've consistently seen that we've seen here as well.

So to me, I think it's really undist being able to identify which, what are the characteristics of the user that allows you to then recommend them to the right feature of product and not being shy about adding friction to do that.

I think is probably like the single biggest thing that's important here.

When I asked Ben Mann, one of the co-founders former podcast guests, what to ask you about, and this is what he highlighted is your experience, especially at Mercury, redoing onboarding and making it magical.

And basically, he's in the same places you've just how important it is for people to understand what the AI tools keep up below to help people decide to use it and stick with it.

Is there an example of some you changed in onboarding that helped significantly improve activation?

Yeah, it's a great question.

And I like that he brings up my career.

I talk about their product a lot.

So worked on the growth unit Mercury.

I think it's a fantastic product.

It's something many people use in the reason they use it is because the better banking experience than you.

Yeah, I'm a very happy customer just to with that out there.

Right.

I highly recommend it.

They have a personal banking, everyone's going to go and use it.

Right, they just launch them.

And so I think the interesting thing about Mercury is like the cool value is that it's a better experience.

Right.

But that's the reason you use it.

You're not getting like better other things.

It's just it's a better product experience.

And so that ethos is very, very deeply held within the company.

It comes from a number of the founders.

And I think that we had a big push one quarter when I was there on the onboarding flows.

So onboarding flows for banking institutions and regulated entities are extremely complex.

The amount of time I spent on the difference between like a registered agent address and a legal address and a physical address.

Like these things are very, very complex.

And we basically looked at the onboarding flow.

We were like, okay, we invested so much in quality and the rest of the product.

But we haven't really done it here.

And this is the first experience that people have.

And so we said forget metrics to get growth, to get everything else as the growth team on conversion.

We're going to spend a whole quarter fixing quality in this flow.

And so that's all we need to forget the metrics.

We're just going to make this as good of an experience as we can and fix all these like you go back from one field to the other field and adding in your benefit, your ownership details.

And it actually ended out being like, probably until I joined, he like the the single most impactful quarter that I've ever had as a growth.

The end in terms of the impact that it had.

And so we saw a significant uplift from basically our like onboarding started to completion from just focusing on quality.

And so that to me is like a broader learning around quality drives growth that I think I've tried to to bring to an throttle pick.

I think for us at an throttle pick, some of the things that we've done in the onboarding flow is basically like we we ask users questions around who they are, what they interest areas are.

And we then use that to recommend different products and features.

Number of people look at the flow and they're like, you have so much friction, it's such a long flow.

And I'm like, we have the data.

We're kind of happy with how that's performing.

What is your kind of a philosophy on friction, good friction versus bad friction?

I've just seen time and time again at every job I've been in and gross that adding friction and adding the right steps leads to higher conversion and higher funnel completion.

So you want to get rid of and especially if you have high volume, you should test the majority of this and just learn and see like does this apply to your business as well.

But you want to you want to get rid of annoying friction that doesn't add value.

But the like I think the most simple understanding people have is like just get just just just solve time to die, cut all the steps and just get him into the product.

And like that doesn't work most times.

Like I think if you're if you're if you're really thoroughly tested your flows, I look at the companies I've been at masterclass.

If you go through masterclasses, purchase flow right now, you'll go through all these steps in this this quiz when you land on when you're trying to buy and it's like you're like, I came here to buy and it's taking me through all these questions, what are you here for, etc.

I think it's easy to look at that and be like, why do they have this?

This is like a terrible thing, just cut it all and it's like, no, like that's been thoroughly tested and and actually there's like a significant revenue because it helps users feel that the product is for them by understanding what their interests are and then recommending the content and in classes there.

One of the the both PMs on our team left to join Calm, Calm.

Calm the meditation out.

If you go to Calm's, you know, their landing page and go through their purchase flow, their login flow, you'll see a quiz.

It's like not a not a coincidence that at Mercury we also tested I think I think you might post it on Twitter like we broke out some steps in onboarding and just having one screen, if you have like five or six different form inputs and you often break that into two screens and reduce the cognitive load.

People are that that is something that that performs well.

We added steps into the flow there that that actually performed well, same it and then dropped it.

So I think that the takeaway to me is like cut friction when it doesn't add to the experience of helping a user understand why the product is for them.

But if you can help users understand a product why product is for them and like how to use it and what's what's most relevant to them and it's going to add friction.

Don't shy away from it.

Test it.

Confirm that it works for you but I think this is like something that like most growth practitioners deeply understand.

And the for them is really important there which you described as adding friction to better understand who they are so that you know how to recommend the right thing for them.

Correct.

Yes.

And like that that like done right that just he just flows through right.

So it helps you with activation but then it helps you with life cycle you know more about those users and why they're here and like you know most sophisticated businesses you can then even if someone drops off you can do like look alike targeting and you can get you can get them at the add layer as well.

So that initial piece of how you understand the who the user is is just like it's a juice that just keeps hearing.

You see you then use it right that's at the down funnel.

Everyone's about to go to do a bunch of tear downs of clubs onboarding master class onboarding mercury onboarding.

Kind of as a tangent I was at this PM dinner recently and I was asking all the PM's how is your role as a PM changed most with AI like where is AI most impacted what you do?

And one of the PM's answer that is actually doing competitive analysis doing a bunch of like tear downs of what other people are doing for pricing pages and onboarding.

So it's easy to do now just hey hey co-work I don't know would you co-work for this or cloud?

What would you use for that?

Okay this is good help people pick which tool to use.

If you want to go do a bunch of tear downs of other competitors onboarding flows, what would you use?

You can use co-work for this right?

So if you have co-work with the Chrome extension so if you task co-work with the Chrome extension go and look for these these flows and show me give me a view of what's working what's not that's definitely something that that co-work can do.

Cool I think the engine that's one of the challenges is just like give all these tools now just which ones for me.

By the way the Chrome extension I use it all the time.

That's amazing.

I want to drill a little bit further into the growth org.

There's this whole meme on Twitter the other day I've just like you have one growth market or driving all growth it and drop it and it's like okay that's crazy.

What's like how many growth people are there?

What's kind of the rough org structure of the growth team?

We're roughly maybe 40 people now and so we uh it's a structured very much like a traditional growth team in that we have sort of horizontal sort of growth platform and monetization we think about the the the the the sphere of growth across the the entirety of our products and then we we have more sort of audience focused growth pods you can think about like the to be grows you can think about chord code grows knowledge work at grows API growth.

So really like these audiences to to keep an hour focus which is the thing you have to do when you have so many different products and then these these horizontal tools that that sort of think about things across across the board and is it across a team of engineers designers pms what's kind of like the functions within the growth org.

Yeah it's engineers designers pms data I think that overall the shape of the org is quite similar to I'd say a traditional growth team probably the things that are maybe different is that we I think that we index a lot more towards larger swings as opposed to small optimizations like if I think about a traditional growth team I would have probably done maybe 60 70% of my time on small to medium that's 20 to 30% on on larger swings and I think that for us we we we we we we flip it a lot like we we do much more the other way where it's sort of 70 30 or more like 50 50 rather than than then then indexing towards smaller bets that's for me like one of the the biggest changes I think just to highlight that what's interesting there is at the scale you guys are at like a 1% win is massive in the scheme of things so it's interesting that even at the scale you're at you're not focusing on these up my crop optimizations it is easy like you could easily focus on these small optimizations and then you tell you them up at the end of the quarter and you're like look how much impact we made and like you could do another billion no big yeah but the thing is like we're we've been tracking it 10x year on year and we we you know that's like the the thing that we we sort of keep in mind and I think it like ultimately comes down to our fixed fixation of this company about the exponential I think if you look at anyone is talking about talking from anthropic about basically anything we always talk about the exponential like it's is effectively as model capabilities continue to grow on an exponential and and the tools around them enable a better job of diffusing that into useful use cases you basically just keep unlocking new markets that with with a value of those markets significantly dwarfs with the value of of the previous markets were and like agente coatings a great example like it didn't exist you know a year a year and a half ago and then now just a value of agente coatings is bigger than the like previous market yeah coating use and and so and I think that is like the core thing here which is that the future product values in order of magnitude higher than it is today and I think about I don't know like the normal business like a number of companies that I mean mentioned or like being like a trading app or like a grocery delivery product like there are many of the like the leading companies are great businesses but if I think about what is the product of value that the company like a standard like a grocery delivery app like what is the product value you get as an end user today versus two years from now I look at it as like again two years from now even if you're you're shipping all these new products as an end user the value you get from that product maybe goes up like 30 to 50 percent if the company's done a really good job of shipping new features it's not exponential though and and so if I think about okay you're here today in two years you're going to have 30 to 50 percent more product value then as a growth team that like relative differential of the product value two years from now relative to today I can actually capture like a decent percentage of that with the small to medium optimizations that typically have higher conviction as opposed to like larger bets but for and throughout they get it's not really that way where where the because of the exponential and and our product being like very very very the the product value coming from AI the the product value that we will deliver in two years time is probably like a thousand x a hundred to a thousand x what it is today and so if I think about that and it's like there's so much value on offer you need to shift more towards okay we need to take larger bets and we need to not not sort of miss the the forests for the trees and and so that's why we we do we still do all the small optimizations it really matters and like no one else is going to do some of these things and so we we need to do with the compounding values not immaterial but we we do take on much larger core product the type of swings as well so you mentioned it the Chrome extension like that is now the thing that underpin is a number of use cases on co-work and and and quadcode as well and that's something that the birth team built that's like a very like AI build product that is like a very recent heavy product that we we would just bullish on it we had an engineer that's very bullish on it and we were just like hey no one else is doing it but we're going to do it and and so that's sort of thing that I wouldn't have done it at another company oh wow that's I didn't know that so the takeaway one takeaway here is like you know there's like stuff to extract from your advice that is like only true and graphic and then there's what can other companies learn from the experience that you've had so one is is your sense that if you're working in AI shift more of the pie chart towards bigger bets because in the future the opportunity is so large you want to get find those as soon as possible versus micro optimized and to be more specific than it's I'll tell that it's if the primary value that your product delivers is underpinned by AI as as like a central element of it then I think you should operate this way so I don't know companies like love of all kursa you know all these like great businesses that are like it's as the exponential rises that their value props are also going to continue to rise significantly like if you're building a product or it's like it's an AI first product then I would definitely operate in this way I think if you're building a product where you're it's not necessarily an AI first product and you have some AI features that are on the side but it's not the core of your value I don't know that I would operate this way it would need to depend on how is the rest of the product or stuff and how is it growth stuff due relation to that okay awesome and then in terms of the way you're structured I thought that was really interesting it's like a combination of different sorts of things so there's like the API growth there's cloud code growth but then there's also like personas like a vertical of like knowledge workers and B2B as that intentional like some specific bets and one just kind of like broad market opportunity when you have like one product it's easy added to have a growth team that's more like purely on the funnel right it's like you have the conversion you have activation you have monetization but as you start to getting to having multiple products I think that's hard up because if you do that then you know if you just have like one activation team for example but then you have code code you have code work you have all the other things they're very different audiences and and they're very different sets of cross-functional stakeholders internally so we're kind of looking at what what is the thing and all of all structures are like not perfect and they're like right for a point in time but we're looking for what is the structure that allows us to have as much focus like focuses a really big thing and on on audience and and and problems and and and also the times across functional partners is really really important like out that the folks in our cloud code growth team like they were extremely closely with cat and virus and the others on on that team and so that that tie-in is is is really important as well so you've done growth at a lot of different companies a lot of basically let's call it traditional growth before hand-throbbing how else is growth as a function and as a skill set changing with the rise of AI products and AI startups I think if your your core product value is very backed by AI then it is it is shifting where you're you're skewing more towards larger bets as opposed to smaller medium experiments I think in other things it moved me big big thing related to this that I think will accelerate this which I am really interested to see how it will play out is we are starting to look at how do we automate growth which I think is like a really interesting area so our growth platform team we have we're very lucky we have like Alexa commissaroka teachers growth engineering at reforge and he's just like the guy on the team and and so he is driving this effort that it's it's the name is it's a little cringy I didn't come up with it and it's like it's called cash which is clawed accelerates sustainable hyper growth I didn't come up with that but really it's an effort to to look at how can we use clawed to automate growth experimentation and it is still very very small it's still very very early we we we kicked off only I think a couple of months ago I think before Opus 4.5 it wasn't really possible we were just like not seeing the results and more recently we don't post up on six we're like okay this is like headed in the right direction and so this I think is it will happen more and more across the the industry where basically if you think about okay I think this can happen all across product the growth teams in particular because this is whole body of work that is very small optimizations I think I just more inherently suited to like tackle this earlier I think if you think about like the life cycle of shipping there's this sort of four parts to one is there's identifying opportunities like how good is clawed actually identifying opportunities based on different trends based on previous trends that they've clawed a scene in the past second is then building the actual feature and and getting it ready to ship um third is is testing and ensuring that it needs your your quality by and your brand bar and then fourth is then once you've actually shipped the thing analyzing the data get gathering the learnings if you think about that it's like the the the loop of okay these are four things that you can evow and he'll clamber each of these areas and understand how good is a model doing for you there and we we we we basically think about it in that like the four four four ways and and we are scoring how good is clawed doing in each of those areas and so we've been testing this with pretty small scale right now it's been a lot of copy changes and some like very minor UI tweaks it's it's it's it's delivering results right like and it's like you can push it press play with it and it's like it ultimately prints money where I'd say that the win rate is like I would expect a senior PM to do better like I would say like this is like a junior PM like two three years in I would say this is like the the win rate that I would expect from from a junior PM but it's not quite at the senior PM level although I think like you look at the exponential this wasn't available at all a couple of months ago so it's it's getting better you know rapidly and I think that the it's going to change where you'll be able to do this for larger and larger types of experiments but but then you know you think about the largest types of experiments I think that that I mentioned that the four pieces around sort of identifying opportunities building testing and shipping the one I didn't mention there Lenny is cross-functional stakeholder management there's still need for human brains yes there is and and like I think that that that one is is going to mean that like in my eyes the work of PMs is like not going away actually in any time soon and that that piece especially for larger products you don't need to do as much of it for smaller stuff right you can you can you can you can skip it but for larger stuff that that piece is not not not going away until there were the other stakeholders are their only agents running around I think that's right I think that can be the Whitman of Changs it's funny we had a we had a difficult meeting a couple weeks ago and being my our head of design joe we were debriefing afterwards and he thinks he's just like I'm all we will have AGI and it will still be impossible to get six people whatever room to get to a line and I like yeah I think that's I can see that that's a like what's the harder alignment problem okay this is so interesting and this is exactly where I feel like things are going so just to be clear which you shared here there's basically this tool that comes up with experiments to run to help grow cloud and all the tools so it comes up with a idea somebody looks at them proves cool let's do these things build it ships it tests the results yeah it's doing and then it comes back like here's things that are working is that roughly right it's roughly right and like we right now we have human in the loop approving but like the amount of time I kind of think about scaling this way of just like we couldn't week or things getting better in each of the areas people spending less time on each of the areas I other results getting better into the areas and as long as like week on week that's getting better than you're like okay this whole initiative is like scaling and and so that that's roughly right but you can think about it as I think a lot of this can be automated with human reviews not needed so we care a lot about our brand right so that is something that we we do look at right now we don't want to be shipping something that goes against the brand but then you know you can have a skill that a skill that that you can contain your your brand guidelines and and very clear yet do's endurance on on brand and and so all of these types of like accompaniments I think are going to get better the model's going to get better understanding how to use them and so over time I think that the need to like human review this really really decreases significantly yeah and you could always unshipp it if it's like oh yeah that was actually not a great idea and that's a chicken point that we like we think we need people to do these things forever and it turns out okay a skill can do this really well here's our brand guidelines here's our vision here's our mission here's our goals here's what matters to us okay let's not ship that thing so the reason I think this is so interesting this is like I've just been watching the expansion of AI doing more of the product development process in this case the growth process of just okay it went from helping you write code to like writing all your code to reviewing your code now it it feels like what are the other end of this the two ends around this it's kind of going from the middle out the the top of that is coming up with what to do and then there's like the alignment stuff still very hard and then on the other end it's uh reviewing the code and then shipping it uh and then get distributions that's like a whole other thing I want to talk to you about so what I'm hearing here and this is exactly what I thought was going to start happening is AI is not getting really good at telling us what to do not just taking our orders and building it and it feels like the growth version of this is where it starts because it's so much simpler just not that growth is easy but just like it's data driven there's a slew that you talk about so I think this is such an interesting sign of things to come across just generally product yeah things just putting that out there okay so something that I'm constantly thinking about along these lines is just a future of product PM engineering how those rolls shift over time based on the stuff we're talking about how how are you working together is it as a triad and where do you see these rolls going what's most going to change do you think across these three rolls this is like something that we talk about and think about frequently and the the picture changes rapidly so sometimes when when things break and you know execution like the bottlenecks break historically in the past it's like okay now you need to hire more engineers you know how more design is et cetera and it's more just like a life cycle thing of like where is a life cycle of your team and that specific pod to identify with the bottleneck is but now when when when things break you need to still look at it of like okay is it like that to a ratio or is that also underlying technological shifts that are also causing this to break and so that's like an interesting thing I think the smaller companies if I'm like a 15 or 20 person company I might be only PM there working with some designers and engineers I think I think in the smaller companies you'll see probably like the biggest blend where like the PM will be doing all sorts of the ways you know designing shipping et cetera and I think you just have extreme bifurcation you know larger organizations more scale organizations I think the jury is still very much out like you you speak to people even internally here and different people and different teams have different views of like okay how much of these roles coming together versus how much of these roles going to be separate I think that it's not to say like even the PM's a number of PM's are shipping and and themselves shipping and and pushing kia's et cetera but I if I if I look at a pair across what I'm seeing I think that it's it's clear that while PM's and designers are getting more leverage from AI engineering is getting the most leverage right now I look at tools like quad code and like they the amount of leverage engineers are getting from them is higher than I think the amount of engineers the leverage that designers and PM's are getting from them today now that this like rapidly also changing but that that to me is like my view today and so if you think about okay default team which is say five engineers one designer one PM with core code that that that five engineers is like two to three acts right and and the PM's and designers have also increased that that now they're managing what is effectively a much larger group of and engineers and so even though like the head count and the org structure hasn't changed you're now you're now just dealing with a situation of maybe 15 to 20 engineers in the old world one and a half to two PM's and like maybe one and a half to two designers and so we're seeing that that's putting like a lot of strain on on PM and and design and it's it's not everywhere like a look at teams like Claude code and I think that or because it product is so technical like it's probably like just the the right thing where you the PM's are like all basically engineers themselves anyway but you know we had a product like a PM lead onsite the other week and we were all just like talking about this we're across the border feeling this we're PM and design is just squeezed it's just absolutely squeezed and we're like is there is a right thing here we just need to actually hire like a ton more more PM's and and that that could it could actually be where we we we land you know on growth how I think about it is like one we are hiring a number of growth PM's we desperately need people who are very very good and we are we're hiring so if you if you are excited by what we're doing and you know growth please please feel free to apply uh would love to love to chat and um let's be correcta maybe correct an amazing cold email to you yeah yeah yeah feel free to clap crap craft that email um so so that's one is that we are going to be hiring in a number of PM's but then the second thing that we do is we we we very much hire product-minded engineers I think this is always been the best thing to do in growth that you always want to have the engineers coming up with ideas etc and so we especially especially people who can really like step in as many PM's if people are if the PM is absent and so we're like basically more formally leveraging that right now because we are so stretched so the the frame that we have is that if a project is less than is two weeks of engineering time or less then the the uh engineer is on the hook to effectively get a PM for that and so that means things like talking to security talking to legal talking to cross-function stakeholders and the engineer is very much driving that the PM will get looped in and they'll advise if needed and if something is like like wildly going off track then they'll step in but they're much more in an advisory capacity versus execution if a project is more than two engineering weeks then the default is that the PM should continue to to be on the hook for for making that go well I'm just so delegate more to end but they're like squarely accountable it's not like fully clean kind of it's like easier head like if this is a one week thing but it's extremely controversial like the PM should probably still drive it but that that I think is like the approach that I expect more companies will start to do which is just deputize the engineers to be mini PM's now not everyone can do it right so that the PM's the the engineers who are more product-minded suddenly their value goes up significantly like like an order of magnitude and then I think we will probably still be hiring a lot of PM's there is so much interesting stuff follow up on here okay so one is this idea of two weeks just briefly I always joke as a PM you can go on vacation and be away for like a couple weeks from your team and things are going to be all right like well you know there's like a momentum there's a plan people keep operating and it feels like that's kind of this rule thumb you use of just okay but it's two week project you'll be all right without a PM you can handle it I love that those two connect okay the other here is so interesting so you're staying here that because engineers are so accelerated in the salt PM's in design are kind of just like whole which does like hard to keep up with this pace of engineering and what you're saying is you need more and more PM's to keep up that's one route or it's engineers that can PM essentially which is so funny it's just like okay great use for product managers until more of the PM's stuff can be done by AI but that's really interesting trend I don't know is there anything else there just like oh wow we actually may need more PM's the more PM's if your engineers might be the future yeah I think this is like it just like really depends on the industry the the size of company like any company where you're building something that's like much more develop a focus like you're gonna rely on the engineers a lot more earlier companies you don't don't have as much of this like cross-functional coordination stakeholder alignment nonsense that you need all these guns policy you can like get by with less but then as a company scales and like if I think about okay now you have this ratio where maybe the one PM became two PM's from like productivity that the like five engineers became like 20 engineers that one designer maybe became like three designers if you think about like what is the best use of time for that PM I think this is like a really interesting thing of like how much should PM's be actually shipping things themselves versus everything else I think like in the in the world where you're like limited on engineering the PM should definitely be shipping things I think in in today's world it's a good way to like get an understanding of the tools which is really important so PM should be shipping for that reason but if I'm one one PM or two PM's and there's 20 engineers think about what is the incremental value I can add with with my time and is it actually shipping like the 21st PM feature or is it saying how am I getting a little bit better at guiding the team on what the right opportunities are and and and so that's where I think like in this world you may have all these engineers who are like many PM's and the better that happens like that's like where I would love to be doing more of but still like that if you then get a really good PM who can come in and can like improve that the like why in the what and why in the what particularly by like five percent that is like such a high leverage higher this is such an interesting insight you're making it's like so counter to have a lot of people are thinking PM is evolving like what I'm hearing here is because PM's are so behind because engineers are just getting so much done there's like many people here okay need to be prototyping you to be shipping PRs is a PM what you're saying which I completely agree with is your time is much better spent helping PM basically and helping the engineers become better PM's themselves and in the leverage there's a lot higher than you spending time coding shipping PRs in most cases I think that's true in certain circumstances I think that as a smaller company I don't know that that's the case in a small company where it's all hands-on-back I think you you you you you probably need to be shipping I think if you're in a company where like budgets are very tight and engineers are very tight and you know you're not able to just hire because money's unlimited then like you need to do what that what is needed to to accelerate the impact of teams gonna have right so there's gonna be a number of cases where like as a PM the right thing to do is to be like screw it I'm shipping and like I am I'm going it the whole way but if I'm talking here more about the like larger companies more scaled businesses yeah if you have 20 20 engineers is is is is it the highest use leverage of your time to ship an extra feature or figure out how do I up level everything that we're doing get the user insights better etc yeah and I think there's also an element of shipping to learn building a prototype so that you can have a better opinion like a lot of people talking about just just gonna try to try three things see how it goes and that'll help inform the roadmap this is now the PRD is looking at it instead of talking about it so there's a lot of value there still that's that's that's very true I think that's a great that's a great point so like even for me now we've got number of PMs we've got many engineers there are certain times and I'm like I want to articulate the idea of my head it's just better for me to prototype it and show it right so I think that that is really important and then you know we we are very scrappy so like we're like a big company by name valuation but we're like extremely scrappy and just the focus internally just like minimized bureaucracy just like just go and so probably 70 70% maybe 60 70 80% of what we what we ship does not have a PRD I have like a verse to PRD is I think I just like I just like hate documentation I was like go go go go just like cut cut the blockers um 2030% of stuff for it's like it's important it's really important to get right like the documentation should be really good and like that people spit should spend a lot of time on it but by and large I think PRD's are just outdated at this point and you can just kick things off with a good team without without needing to do that sort of thing say more about that what do you do to help make sure because people can build so fast or spend a lot of time going in the wrong direction ship things that are not what you're asking how do you kick off a project and clarify here's what we're doing is it just a conversation or is there anything beyond that it really depends on the size of it and this kind of goes back to like the two weeks things so that well why we have that two weeks it's more like a how do I have some filter to say if we're investing heavily into something we should apply more thinking behind it versus if it's a smaller set of investments just go for it and as a growth team again you do have a decent amount of these smaller things that you do so for for very small changes you know like out is a thing coming we need to have an upsell for it what is the thing we're doing like this is just on slack right this is just purely on slack it's just a message is back and forth and we'll you think it also depends on having a good caliber of engineer in there but engineers can can understand like hey I know you said this but like what about that for the audience and so like we're lucky we have good product minded engineers in that sense but all these smaller things are very much just on on slack back and forth and and that's what you do for the larger things I think I very firmly believe in like a proper kickoff so we we still do just this so much going on at this place no one's got time no one knows what's going on and so doing a cross-function kickoff get legal get safeguards get everyone in the room and just be like this all clans to do what do you care about what do you care about like that that 30 minute meeting for larger things is just I think still so important to just streamline all the mess that may happen later if you don't do that work early on what's your approach to crafting that parody in those cases is it like ramble into cloud is it do you have a template even in those cases there are times I don't craft the TV like because we're just everything's being so quickly right so there's still some of those cases where I just set up the meeting and then like five minutes before I'll put it into code like you know some of my thoughts what create it like here are the things that I need to think about spin up like a basic dock and and we use it to talk other times I won't even have a dock but if I am creating a PRD I have basically skill like a skill that I've you they've created and then there's projects with all the previous PRDs in there and then I will it is pretty simple like I'll has the format down so I'll just say here are the things I care about here's the why here's the problem and flesh out the key considerations fresh it flesh out there across functional stakeholders those types of things but again my my default is like if I can avoid the dock and if we can just just jump to action then then that's what we should do and increasingly just just jump to prototyping the thing yeah that's that's very I think it'll get so interesting once we can automate more of that just like your assistant talking to the legal assistant just like ironing out all these little you know it's important to you it's important to the yes and it's coming and I think a legal team has done like good enablement around this like we work in versions of like how do you you can think about like how can you mimic what someone might say and like set up you know like a corpse lot right so this things like that that I think that we have now and then as plot gets more and more context and gets better at passing long context I think these are things that Claude will just get better at knowing one of the one of the things when he's like a slight tangent but one of the I think most effective ways I use Claude or most interesting ways I use Claude is it's just a number of people doing internally so like help you identify misalignment um this is like I think something that's for I found really really helpful so with with Claude you have as the Slack mcp then you can you can tell Claude work you can tell Claude to say basically look across Slack you know the projects that I'm working on these are the things that are top of mind go and find me areas of potential misalignment right now and it does a really really good job so this is something that I have schedule runs every week Claude's like looking at things and coming back to me and saying like hey I think these things you should be aware of and so you can think about in that shipping context it's a similar thing where Claude can basically be looking at what's what's happening across the company MZ you're thinking about shipping this thing here's what you need to talk to here's what you need to give in mind that is so cool I am so excited to tell you about this season supporting sponsor Vanta Vanta helps over 15,000 companies like cursor ramp do a lingo snowflake and it last year earn and prove trust with their customers teams are building and shipping products faster than ever things to AI but as a result the amount of risk being introduced into your product and your business is higher than it's ever been every security leader that I talk to is feeling the increasing weight of protecting their organization their business and not to mention their customer data because things are moving so fast they are constantly reacting having to guess at priorities and having to make do without data solutions Vanta automates compliance and risk management with over 35 security and privacy frameworks including sock 2 ISO 27,01 and hip-hop this helps companies get compliant fast and stay compliant more than ever before trust has the power to make or break your business learn more at vanta.com slash lany and as a listener of this podcast you get $1,000 off Vanta that's vanta.com slash lany I feel like there's this like what are the jobs of a product manager and then how are they slowly going to be supported slash done by AI so there's this misalignment just like flying misalignment and then maybe one day it'll be like a lying people initially you talked about this cash automation for growing like how do I grow this product that's starting to happen another that I I've my use myself when I'm building stuff is just asking how do I make this product better how do I make this a better user experience and ask you may I just you may have a bunch of ideas and they're actually really good so it's interesting on these little pieces are starting to you put into place to do more and more of this role.

I'm curious what other automations you have and your team have that are effective what I love about these conversations is you're basically living in the future you're working and like the most bleeding edge company with the most talented people with the most cutting edge tools and you can like see where things are going and start to actually live in the future built things that nobody else has even thought about or can do.

I'm curious just what else is working what else your team has done to help save you time people productive.

We use it pretty extensively the crust of all right so there's a standard PM stuff like writing docs brainstorming looking at data for data I personally have like a coworker runs on a schedule and looks at sort of 20 25 different charts every morning and then so when I when I come in the morning is there's so many charts so many products to track cowork will tell me okay here are the things that you should pay attention through here's like what is concerning and here are just some like interesting insights and it sends you the update and slacker what how does what's kind of the workflow.

I it for me it just shows it it comes up in co-workers it co-workers has a skill in the desktop app you can have a scheduled task that you create and so I have a bunch of hex links that it will go and look at it uses the chrome extension for some things and it uses MCP for other things and then it will just give me a summary and then I know like I saw this a few charts that I just like to look at because I just like I mean I'm this guy just like charts like I'll open to the right too so yeah I like to see the chart but then there's like a long tail of things and even the medium tower it's like you don't have time to look at it every day that if Claude is is proactively looking at it and you start to feel good over time of okay it's like the the false positive rate is going down the like false negative rate is going down of things that Claude brings to you then you you just get a little bit more confidence in piece of mind that touches on an idea I've always had that teams will have is a strategy bot which just imagine an agent that's just constantly watching metrics the market the road map with working it's not in just like camel here's what I think we should do now here's the pivot we should take here's where we're going to win like it feels like we're very close to that I think we're close I think we'll get that later this year to to like the point where that's very very effective that's my my god I think that that level of like proactive that he and getting looking across a bunch of context and and distilling insights I think is it's it's like you know the the thing I mentioned earlier learning about the alignment piece like that's like a version of it right now you're just looking at across more more data sources this is something that I use so I talked about like this some of the standard PM stuff that you know brainstorming data UXR there's a lot of like admin stuff I just hate like life admin and like paperwork I just hate it and so I get called to book my media rooms I got on book meetings rooms Claude archives sort of my email first pass at clearing out my inbox I I don't do any of my reimbursements and and expenses Claude will go to better pass and like file the reimbursements who go to Brex and file the expenses so all of that side of things I'm just like just hand it hand it to coerpe just get get rid of it and then the the stuff that's quite interesting I think is like the manager lens where where I talked about alignment is one thing so I look also across my director reports like Claude can look into what what have they done this week you look at sort of our team goals and okay as look at the transcripts from out of discussions and understand like it can basically ask what what are what are the key takeaways and observations I should keep in mind and like what feedback using I should give them and that's something that is like again you can just set that up weekly the quality is like hit or missed right now it's like it's decent on something sometimes you're like holy shit like I am so glad that I caught this and and um that's very very helpful and then I do that for myself as well so I basically um near one of my manager army for I was I think of podcast guest of you all right so I say hey based on what you know of army you both publicly she's written extensively about product and then internally and then our discussions what what is everything that I've done or not done this week what feedback do you have for me as army and like I get that every week right so like a lot of these things can already be done today I think that that as as as um the models improve I think it's just like the accuracy and the signal of these things is going to continue to improve rapidly and I don't think you're realized just how much awesomeness you're sharing here this is just like everyone of these is like what okay so okay so this army example so you you have one of ones with her you're you ask that you is this so you ask cloud co-work to go through all of her writing the basically build like a model of her and you ask what should I be doing differently based on what you know about I mean is that yeah it's effectively there's a number of ways you can do this I think with if someone has um a public profile with her written extensively it's it's helpful because you can cloud can just get all that information otherwise you can have a project or you can have a skill but increasingly cloud is better at just understanding because you can tell cloud like look on on co-work you can say using the slack mcv look at everything that this person has said in the last you know week etc and based on that like one of their top priorities what a priorities my manager has based on how to spending the time that I don't know and so all of this this layer of stuff which is like that I think about it as like soft coaching I think that that is like unlocked in my opinion already I think it's just that you're like working with the coaches like kind of like drunk at times like you know like sometimes like says something you're like like why would you bring that up like that's clearly wrong but you're the other times you're like wow like that has there's like one of um one of the the guys Scott who leads out enterprise team and then he there's a few cases like he'd found like major areas of misalignment that would have caused teams to sort of spin their wheels significantly or or um do overlapping work and you think about that the impact of that like you're you're you're shipping in this world is a bigger company is going to be constrained at often by all the cross-functional coordination right and I think we're now starting to see at this cross-functional coordination layer some of that work AI is really being able to be used to to reduce that toil and and I think that six months ago that was impossible and I'm like shit like six months from now what what is is going to be possible there oh man and I think the fact that all this data is there slack there's granola or whatever people use like all these notes from conversations and and discussions are really key to this working yes so for someone that wants to do something like this what how do you set this up what's kind of the steps yeah you go on to co-work download the the desktop app on co-work uh connect the slack mcp that's where you you need to um depending on how big the organization is you you you you may need to get sort of team or enterprise admin permissions to you know someone with those permissions to to enable that but once you have this slack mcp connected and on co-work you just ask called that's it amazing okay I'm going to go to kind of a different direction and we'll talk about the focus that anthropic has had over the years so if you look at the numbers um that they are all putting up what's really incredible about it is the focus that you all have had and I think this is the reason that has worked so well there's a certain competitor in the market that is realizing they should have done this and are starting to shift to a similar approach as an external observer feels like anthropic has been very good at doing very few things but doing super deep so be to be for example just going deep on be to be and then going really deep on coding use cases cloud code being an example and it's worked out really well where who's been driving that focus who has helped keep that focus from the beginning yeah I mean I think it's I think it's a foundational part of of the the the company I think it's been there from the very very early days and it really comes from leadership and and I think they have just done a phenomenal job of distilling that I think that you know I saw this doc come up recently is I don't know where it was shared it was something that then man is one of our founders yet on on the podcast had written it's a dated in 2021 I think a few months after they started the company and it was like here's why we should just focus on AI coding and this is like you know this is like five years ago this is long before anyone knew what the actual market opportunities were around this and I think this is just like deep focus that we have had internally from the start on the importance of coding and and B to B you know it's it's a I think there's like two lenses to it's like maybe a viewer okay that this is going to be commercially beneficial to tackle and then also the the side of it around accelerating research so I'd say it's a pretty mainstream view now of now heard people from various labs talking about this the the importance of coding to accelerate research but that is just being like a very firm view that we have been laser focused on internally of okay if you have the best models that's going to accelerate your research isn't that's going to accelerate the research loop and I think that's something that like Dario has has seen very clearly for a number of years so I would say that that that's probably one of it a lot I think a lot comes from Dario I think a lot comes from from leadership and and just our DNA I think the second though is is probably just like necessity where if you're if you're you know it's now changed with more well-known company raised lots of money blah blah blah but you know historically we were very much like the smallest least well-funded playout in this space again many ways it's a complete miracle that I think we've like gotten into the stage that we have like we we didn't have the free cash flow or the distribution of the meta or Google we didn't have the first mover advantage of an open AI and so like what do you do right I think there's I think there's like his broader principle I have just around life of like the freedom through constraints that when you when you have a bunch of constraints of buy on you whether that's in personal life or work I think that that that can just help it can bring a lot of freedom because it just frees up all these excess choice you're like okay like this is this is clearly the path and I think for us it's like okay you don't you don't have a ton of funding you're a small player you don't have distribution you just have to to really take a very narrow focus and even for a very generalizable technology to maximize your chances of getting to escape velocity and I think that that's also just related to like how industry played out right so you know it was it was well before my time but and Thropic had a version of Claude we had a chat bot before chat GPT was was launched and we we're ultimately chosen not to launch it for safety reasons I think the team didn't want to kick off effectively like an AI global arms race and you know chat GPT launched and like they got like insane traction right and and that just naturally sort of pulled them towards consumer you know there's another world where philanthropic had launched Claude first like maybe the other way around even with all that focus stuff so it's you know it's it's hard it's always hard to say looking back at some of these things wow and I know that I think also people just don't realize how far behind and Thropic was like right now it's like of course they're amazing but like I just remember when people are talking about anthropic we were raising money it was like there's no way they're going to compete with opening it at this point it's like so over just like they're so far ahead and it shows the power of focus and just I guess I don't know all the things y'all did like it it is absurd how far y'all have come and how successful and how things have changed so quickly yeah and I would say I very much agree I think a lot of that like we I think a lot of that comes down to our leadership team we have the number of people who've worked at like cool like the best companies you know in the world very senior people and in almost uniformly everyone's like this is the strongest leadership team out of any of this companies and so I think a lot comes from them and then we're just very lucky to have incredible people I think that that helps a lot as well on the coding piece just to make sure that part is is clear I never thought about this that the reason that the bet was so deep on coding is not just that's a huge term but it's that this will excel this is a feedback loop that will accelerate us further and further so if we get the best at coding coding will help us to research all of this build better models and it'll accelerate faster and faster yeah that's correct and and this is something I checked earlier has talked about these publicly so I'm fine to find that like it makes sense um the safety piece is really interesting so I want to spend a little time here so famously anthropic I think the official name of anthropic is anthropic in AI safety research company as a growth person there's this balance I imagine you strike between growing and just and not and the mission being don't grow at all costs or goals AI safety and alignment how do you balance those two things how does that impact your job look I think it's something we take very very seriously and it is it's the whole reason the configs is and and if you think it's it's all the way from it's why they they they they left to start the company it's deep in our corporate structure itself so you know historically um everyone raising money is like go go create a Delo S E Corp and and that's like you have the structure you do and with it with a corporation um you have a fidgetry duty to maximize returns for shared shareholders maximum shareholder value and from the beginning they they're when a different way or we went to we're in credit a public benefit corporation PVC which allows you to legally say that maximizing shareholder value is not the like overarching umbrella goal of this of this company and you can optimize for public benefit so really I think it it starts from there and it ladders down from there for us you know our our purpose our mission ultimately is to make sure that the transition to powerful AI goes well and is is net beneficial for for humanity um you know we I think internally like we we are like very excited and I think honestly there's a lot of like very very optimistic about where this can go but we also understand what the risks are and so for us that top line objective of this just like this needs to go well for humanity this just needs to go well for humanity that is something that we are happy to take a significant commercial hit for and and we've done that time and time again right so like we have it you know like it back then again you had bored but you don't release it because you're like busy safety risk and so there's time and time again that I've seen we've been happy to take that hit and it's it's actually worked out well for us in other ways from like a growth lens you know I look at it as like growth teams can often push the boundaries of what is like a good user x ux et cetera because they're trying to very very much like e-cout metrics at times when I think about if a controversial test is is bought to me I sort of look at it as like this this two types of tests that are controversial one is when that test is so controversial that you just should not run the thing because the results don't matter because you would not ship it for a combination of you know brand and sort of customer friendliness and values and then the second is where it's like it's controversial I don't like it I certainly don't love it but it's it's like it's not like a red line and so you're like you know if someone comes to you with conviction and is like however really good hypothesis around this and you're like I don't love it but like you can run the test and see what impact it has and if it's like if it's like a high level of like cringe or yic then I want to see a high level of return for the result for that I kind of think about everything in like what is it isn't is it in one or is it in two and for every company that one and two is is different I think for us the AI safety is like very much in in one I think that it's like yeah that's why we exist like yeah it's fine we're just not gonna not gonna do this thing I think there's other things that fall into two where you're like heightened sensitivity but we can we can we can try it and see what happens I think zooming out there then one of the biggest mistakes I feel like I see growth teams make and particularly like hardcore growth practitioners is is just trying to squeeze every last dollar it's just like I think it's like a general principle also in life like if you're a founder raising money you just trying to squeeze that like to last dollar like you don't you don't want to do that because you want people to come back next time as well as is my view and I think in growth like it's it's I think it's really important that you you usually need to be okay leaving money on the table and that's a core principle for us as a growth team where we are very comfortable for going metric impact in order to prioritize safety in order to protect our brand in order to hold a high quality bar and to maintain a great user experience and if you like look beyond the short term and like what are the numbers for this quarter and you zoom out and you think about what are the very best products out there you realize this is how they all operate and that's actually the thing that's going to drive more growth long term as well and and so I think that that actually ties back to safety where as the risks get higher and the stakes get higher I think the fact that we are taking a stance and safety is like critical to what we do is actually going to become a significant it's going to be a significant competitive advantage for us that I think is going to help us in the long run yeah and what's as you as you share all this like clearly it's working and their office killing it so I love in those example when someone doing something on the one approaching problem that way you it actually works out the same way I think about when my newsletter there's so much more I can do to grow it I just my philosophy is just like just focus on creating good content nothing like all these micro optimizations are not going to matter in the end it'll grow through people sharing it if it's useful to them so uh and a very small scale similar philosophy one of the things that people are probably thinking about as we talk so you know we joke about like AI replacing parts of jobs here and there like you know it is pretty scary to a lot of people just like what is the future of my job will I have a job how do I stay relevant in this future so for there's a couple of questions here one is just like for folks that want to be to thrive in this approaching AI future as a PM as a growth person do you have any advice things that they should be doing right now to me a couple of things come up but one thing that everyone says is like use the tools you need to be on top of the tools I think you need to be using cloud code you need to be using code and understanding just each model release what is the new things you can do with this how can you apply this to your job it'll work well and some things that will work terribly in other things and one model launch later it's like oh shit that other thing worked but if you didn't go back to try it you would not have known and now many months have passed so you didn't know that that was possible and so I think that that that being on top of the tools is really important both for improving your own productivity but also for getting product sense around AI products which I think is just going to become increasing important I think then zooming out beyond that I kind of look at it as like just leaning into where you have a competitive advantage and an unfair advantage and so to me it's like you know there are some people some PMs who are really good at craft for example and as others who you throw them into a situation with all these stakeholders who have all these strong opinions and there's no way they're going to media piss and they come out and it's like everyone's kind of zooming in the right direction and so if you think about like what is the major skill set that you have where you spike in the that that can be tied to delivering driving impact for a company and product role I would just double down on that and like always forget the weaknesses just what can you do to become like the best person at that thing because that's like very very valuable and I think that ties to the notion of just leaning into being into disciplinary so going back to some of what we mentioned earlier on where it's like okay in this world of engineers and minipians that the engineer who is like highly product rendered is a unicorn is an absolute unicorn I think the same thing is true for PMs where it's like okay now you know that this in this ratio of the designers really stressed and your PM who can design you are also a unicorn now like the chances of a company letting you go has gone down dramatically because you are now just so much more more useful and so I think that is just like really really important I think if I look at what's benefited me it's probably version of this I think that to me it came from a founder background so like the mix of that the founder background the like finance was an innocent bank so like the finance background numbers and then sales like I was I almost became an account exact instead of going into product I was right on the edge of should I go into sales of product and I think like a combination of those along with with growth is probably what's led to like there are certain areas in situations where I can just have outsized impact other people and and so understanding what that is for you is really important I look at our financial services product you know launch like court for sheets called for Excel they got to like take the market by the way ever going to encourage I know but like the guy running that Nick Lynn like he came from investment banking he came from private equity and it says such a competitive advantage where he's building that product and he's like I know this I know this like he's like built for this and so I think just understanding what what are those interdisciplinary areas you can lean into to to make yourself more just like higher higher higher impact is is really important and then the last one is just being adaptable anyone who you're trying to just keep applying old playbooks I think you're you're going to make life a lot harder for yourself so with the biggest things you come into and profit is you need to understand that probably yeah 50 60 70% of how you operate in the past just throw it out the door it's it's not going to be relevant and if you try to stick to that you're going to have a lot of friction and it's not going to be helpful so just being adaptable and understanding okay the jobs change this way I'm going to go that way is is I think like it's it's so it's important that is awesome advice it matches a lot of what Jenny shared when she came on the podcast the design design leader on Claude and Claude work and all these things I would just like like the idea of going deep becoming the best or one of the best at a very specific thing and that not every company will need and you don't need all time but just going deep and on something if you get what have she described it market and Jason said the same thing just like I think we call it a sideways e instead of just like t-shaped of one thing if you could have a couple of things you're really really good at there's a lot of power to that oh man okay before I get into something that I think will blow a lot of people's minds about how we actually met and kind of a big part of your journey let me just ask you this is there anything else about anthropic that might be worth sharing might be worth talking about the thing that maybe comes to mind is it's just like I'll coach up and the people that we have here I really think it's our secret source I think it's the thing that is the most defensive all the thing that no one else is going to be able to replicate and I don't think it's an accident like leadership has has really invested in this a lot and Daniel and Dario they really believe in this in this a lot and in just credit very special culture so I would say that you know this is like truly a mission driven company and I was not 100% sure of that when I joined like I was like I think this is an exciting company it I like very much agree with their principles but I didn't know anyone at the company I didn't have any references on what I was like inside so I was a little skeptical when I joined I'm like at least they're talking about it but like I don't know are they are they serious about this and then I came in very early I was like oh oh shit okay like they they are maybe they even more serious about this in town they're talking externally and so it's just like the it's it's a mission driven company where people we viscerally viscerally understand both the upsides and the downsides of the technology and therefore understand the the divergent ranges of how this may go for humanity and and how different of the future that could be and I think like when you understand that of how different this could be as a future for all of us and like our children and our grandchildren etc I think it it leads to a lot of passion for what we do and they just leads to a lot of belief in in what we're doing and so I kind of look at every other job I've had in the past and there's some degree of people at the company who has just checked out where it's like you know I'm I'm here I'm sick of this but I don't have a better option or I'm getting paid too much to leave etc that is just like not the case here I have not met a single person I'm saying like my own single person who's checked out everyone is putting everything they have on the table everyone is pouring it out and like leaving nothing behind and it's just fully fully in it and so I think that leads to like this this is energy that is just like very very hard to to describe I think you have that energy you have that mission driven nature and then it's it's such an open culture so leadership is very very transparent with us on things we uh slack is like it's it it's a whole maze everything there's so many things that plowed on slack with very open everyone has these notebook channels where you kind of have like your own like Twitter feed in a way where you're just talking about your thoughts about things and so you can go and like join the slack channel the notebook channels of people on research and all these other areas and like you'll you can learn whatever you want and and you can spend so much time making lost in that as well but that that openness where we've been encouraged like people can just argue with Dario those at all hands yeah it said something where someone didn't agree and then the person goes on to Dario's notebook channel it just says like hey I didn't appreciate how you said this and this and that and then it sparked a whole big debate um but like that sort of thing we're like it's encouraged like go to leadership and disagree with them challenge them publicly and like that I think that just leads to a level of trust and all of that together I think it just means that we have this very very deep sense of togetherness that um um man I have just like never I've never experienced anything like it and and then you get to the talent right that I think that is the thing where the talent density is like I feel like I'm playing for like real Madrid at times I look around them like I'm playing from Madrid or it's like you just like have the best people in the world I think it's most I think it's most the case on research we have like the very very best researchers in the world but even you look on like product we have honey for like she's phenomenal we have Mike Kriger you're like okay casually started Instagram he's here um you know on growth we have Johnny again who is my engineering counterpart is like the O.G.

and growth engineering he's he's he's great we have Alexa he's like guy teachers growth engineering at reforge he's just like another dude on the team um and all of that I think is just very special they met my favorite here is like in the linear couple of months ago we had our onsite company white onsite and you know turbo and I'm walking around I see these guys just walking around eating popcorn by himself I go up to him and I'm like you're Jeff right and he's like I am and I'm like you are literally the US ambassador to my country is straightly up and you're just an employee here up like this is you know like talking to your prime ministers about country and all these things and it's just the talent combined with that culture I think is just this secret source that is is is the reason that I think we are a success was we are that's no book channel is so interesting just like as a tactical thing so the idea there is Daria just shares it's like a little Twitter like internal Twitter feed where folks just share what they're thinking about and whether whether priorities aren't things like that yeah that's basically it way so it's an internal feed where everyone has one and you basically you share your internal thoughts it's a way to like keep people updated on things on what's working it's a way where people share provocative things I think from like a leadership level and we also think about that as it's a way to scale your beliefs and views across an org as it grows quickly right so like if you're not adding a lot of people in the organization you need to think about okay what are the like behaviors that we want to model what are the principles at a top of mind to us and if you think about like yeah you can have a bunch of these meetings where you talk about it you can you can model that behavior but if you have a channel which is like here's my top of mind and you you say these things right like if I am opposed which I did the other week of like this is the importance of being comfortable leaving money on the table now all the new engineers on growth who joined have seen that and they're like oh okay with this is like different to what we had we've known before right so I think it's like good for the openness but it's also good as a leader of how you can scale your views as an organization to like get people more up to speed on the way that things are done which is I think really important to like avoid that drift which we have so many new people signing up that drift can lead to a lot of drift in strategy and sort of perception so it just helps run it run a tighta ship in that way and more importantly it's data for the agents everyone's got running to help them work with all these humans yes that is that is very very correct like it is it is something that goes to Claude you know that there are certain documents in onboarding where it's like the HR team is written before editing anything on this document please check with this person because this is the document that Claude references as like a key thing right and so more and more these types of things of okay how to subvert team think about this how to safeguard think about this you are I mean Claude with that context to get better and better at it and helping in the future it's interesting it feels like that's something that every company is going to have to start doing is just sharing their thoughts in a structured way so that all these agents that we all got running have what they need to know another interesting side note here is just Slack okay so like there's always talk of SaaS tools being replaced by AI and you guys you Slack I think there is this famous tweet of you guys still use work day and all these tools all these SaaS tools everyone's like what like they're all going to be vibecoded out of existence the fact that you all at the cutting edge of what could be built with code still you Slack and all these other tools to me that's a good sign that maybe SaaS companies will will be alright in the future I don't know if you have anything there to share yeah it's a really I think it's a really complicated picture right like there's a number of things that we just build internally ourselves as time goes on that you know your the ability for code to do that better increases and at the same time like we use Figma time we use Slack a time we use Workday we use a lot of these products and I don't see that changing in the immediate future and so yeah I think like there's there's probably some truths to some of this I think the other parts are like it's overgrown and many of these products still like the customers of ours we we guide you to them a lot of this customers and we use the products very very heavily and I don't see that changing and any of the better things to do like I don't who's going to spend time building a slack at the thought like that is not where value is going to crew and I think it also helps you see how much how sophisticated these things are they're not just like you know like there's been teams thinking about these products for a long time anyway that's a whole other tangent just coming back to the values thing I just want to highlight something here that's really important a lot of people criticize anthropic for talking about the dangers to humanity throwing out all these numbers about jobs going away just like creating all this fear but like and people think it's over trying to raise money you know we got to get people's attention or we just yeah we're just trying to like create headlines but everything I've ever seen internally is always just this is what we believe and we want people to know what it might be coming even if it isn't bad we want people to understand here's what might happen and we are trying to avoid it and you might say why doesn't why is anthropic even building a I though it's if it's so dangerous and you know the understanding Ben shared is just like we think it's better that we go at this and try to build it the right way versus just the state of it and just hope that nothing that happens yeah I think I think three three things that come to mind there first is I go back to something I said earlier which is that we we very much think about things from an exponential lens and if you are thinking about things from a linear lens you'll see the world very very differently right because you look at where we are today and you're like okay but like how much better can it be in two three years I think if you're looking at it from an exponential lens and you understand how exponential's work then you just realize that like a lot of this stuff is actually going to be happening not that then people think if you're looking at it from a linear lens and and then if you understand that the like that that could be upsides and downsides and the range of outcomes here you need to like I think we we very much like need to be talking about the downsides so we can avoid them and push towards the upsides I think most people of the company are optimists where we're very optimistic about the future I think it's just we understand the risk is like it is not a guarantee that we we end up in a good place and not enough people are talking about the risks I think in productive ways and and who have the know the know how of the risk so I think there's people who might talk about the risk but I'm not in the game and so they don't actually know fully like they're not like surgical and what the specific risks are but we're in the game we understand what's happening and so that's one piece I think the second is like I think we actually believe in the stuff more strongly than we we say externally like it is just such a key part of how we think internally that sometimes like we these like re-reward your statements because it's like people might just think we're being like too over the top but internally that's how we think and and what we're putting out is is a software version of that at times and then I think the the third piece is that is going to what Ben said where we we think a lot about driving the race to the top and so it's like if you're not in the game and you're shouting from the sidelines no one cares there's just the reality of of how the world works like no one no one really cares if you're in the game and you're a leading player and what you're doing is working you can influence people who are also in the game to take the right actions and so that is like the core of it like if we just pack up into a home you have no influence on this thing and if you stay in the game and you're like commercially you're doing great and then you have ways to influence that okay these are the principles and put that into the conversation and make more people sort of believe in those things I could talk to you forever I'm all but um two more questions just around out the conversation and touch on some stuff that I've hinted at a number of times one is I want to take us actually to failure corner because someone listening to this may be like all right look at this guy just worked it all these amazing companies cold email the CPO and throw up a got a job join this rocket ship it's all been up into the right just kill in it constantly what's the story from your career where things didn't work out when you failed and what did you learn from that experience I have a couple actually very much not that way I feel like it was a lot of squeaky lines to to get here the biggest I'd say is just you know founding a company raising a bunch of money having employees and then having to shut it down and tell you investors that you've lost the money and that you know you had a vision of what you're going to do and that it's not it's not going to happen and so that I think is probably the biggest one you know we spent three years on it it was not like a girl we tried something part time there's like no we went we went for it we spent three years raised a couple of mill we had you know maybe seven to ten employees are biggest and it was something that we really believed in it was around mental health and how you can quantify mental health to help understand I'll get early predictors of things like generalized generalized anxiety major depression so like it's stuff that we really really believed in but ultimately you know we were like you know early 20s we had no idea what we're doing at the time and many things that are differently but that was just a very very very painful process I think the good thing was like we kept down investors in the loop the whole time so 20 founders who are struggling out there like send those monthly investor updates it's really easy to send those when you when things are great it's really hard to send those like when when things are bad you just bad it down you sit down and send it update your investors about why everything you talked about last month like did not go go to plan but this is just the right thing to do and it keeps people in the loop and it avoids surprises but it's still so tough for you then calling up the investors to be like a like we are we're shutting down or making that decision ever and it believed in you and it becomes such a big part of the identity it's very very tough so man that was just brutal like it's brutal and it took me I think like a number of years to truly get over I think that it's it's it's a tough thing but you get so much from that experience that is hard to see in the moment and I think without doing that I would not have gone into this I was not a PM before I didn't have any of these skills that never worked on products I didn't know how to call to email really and so it was the through that job that I learned a ton of the skills that made this career path viable for me and it's just really hard to see that in the moment when you're looking at a point in time it's much easier to like draw the line looking back but I think that it be my like takeaway is just keep in mind that it's a long game and some of those things like I'm so grateful for that experience now I'm so grateful that if failed and went that way actually it's very painful because it wouldn't have led to what I'm doing now and so it's just it's a tough thing but the you know positives can come from it when I love about this there's a lot of people have these times in their career where they're like it's all over like I'm such a I fail in such a big way in my reputation screwed and people are counting on me and now they see I'm an imposter I've never knew what I was doing after all and now they finally see and just seeing that and this was three years yet I'm looking at your LinkedIn yet seven employees some like that and and then it's like master class mercury andthropic I think it's inspiring to hear a story like that and know that you can have a big failure like that and things can work out that is not the end okay so at 2023 I was I was going to go on pat leave because my wife's brightening and I was just like wait what do I do with a newsletter I need to take some time off that would be really nice to take a month or two off and so my plan was okay I'm going to do a bunch of guest posts where people line up I put out a call for guest posts people apply I pick a few and then I kind of slot them in ahead of time so I could take time off so I put out this call hey who wants to write a guest post for my newsletter I got 500 plus applications one of those applications was from you and the pitch was essentially how a traumatic brain injury made me a better product manager and I still remember reading the first draft you send me and I was just like a holy shit the story is incredible it's just like like you feel such feelings and it was just so tactically interesting and useful like oh wow this is actually going to make me a better product manager share the story of this of the brain injury that you went through and just the journey that you went on there because this is going to blow people's minds.

It was the toughest time in my life it made shutting down a company and like oh hell it's nothing actually just funny how perspective works that way back in early 2022 I had a traumatic brain injury so I'd done MMA for many years I'd done Muay Thai which is a type of martial arts for many years never had a problem and just it's just like one of the things that happens like the wrong session the wrong it's just a normal day of sparring nothing crazy you get the wrong hit to the head in the wrong way and my whole life changed and and basically I spent nine months I was off work for nine months the first couple of months were brutal it took me roughly half a year till I was comfortable walking again it was very very difficult the first two three months beyond just showering and going to the bathroom my wife did everything for me like including like texting my friends I would listen to music for maybe like 20 seconds and feel like I needed to vomit I couldn't look at screens at all and it was a very very long recovery it was not clear to me that I would ever work again for awhile actually and it was like we even discussed my wife like what would you do in that case etc and we had we had to think even on on those those levels and through a lot of pushing and and really working through myself and and you have to just slowly increase your tolerance to things it's a brutal process be you slowly expose yourself to different things and just get better and better at each little thing actively work on that don't push it too far otherwise you have a big setback but you basically got to the point then where I went over nine months and then after that return to work and and then it's slowly got better and the part Lenny you don't know is yeah we we in mid twenty twenty three we posted that newsletter and a month later I got re-injured actually and because and when you have a brain injury until your 100% healed your your risk of another concussion or brain injury is elevated when your 100% healed your your risk falls down to that of a non-concussed population but until that time and like you need to like 95% healed you're not 100% healed and it was just an innocuous sort of in in everyday life getting off a plane at bags of hit me on the head type things and and I was off work for two months when I like one month into joining Mercury like one month in I'm like sorry guys we need to piece out a few months and and that then it was a very very long recovery from that and I'm actually still not 100% healed so I'm like I'm like mostly good but I have times when I have like dizziness and headaches and other things that I need to work around overall I feel like it's one of the best things that could have happened to me and and I think that keeping that mindset helps and as a point when you can like take that too far when your that view is devoid is detached from reality but I think it's just made me so much better and effective more effective as a person a lot of the same habits like I don't drink alcohol, I don't drink caffeine I have to do a bunch of these things so my physical health I just have to do them so I keep doing them I take breaks this is like a really big one you might think even replace like anthropic like how do you survive in this way it's like even on the craziest days, any between the start of the day and lunch and between lunch and the end of the day I take a short break um even on the craziest days like model launches etc lucky we have like a meditation area in the office that I'll go to and uh and in the whole the whole side of things around meditation that I talked about in that that post I think both you and I have done a retreat at spirit rock and doing a you know meditation retreat changed my life and it's something that I do at least once a year now I have one coming up relatively soon as well and and just I think all of that has helped with better managing the physical side of it because this job is very taxing and then emotionally having a little bit of space to what happens like you have you have sort of awareness on one side you have the reality on the other side and realities crazy here and the realities insane like it's so much happening every day that is so much noise it's it's mind blowing and so that relationship between awareness and reality that's where you have choice that you sort of learn from from deep meditation on how to to shift that and apply your choice there I think that that is the thing that has helped me significantly with just keeping a more level head um being a lot of staying in this game at this at the in this level of intensity you just keep your head just don't lose your head in like the crazy times and I think all of that that I'm going through has like helped me do this without resorting to like unhealthy coping mechanisms wow I'm all you're such an inspiration in so many ways just like there's so many reasons that you would not have been successful and things have would not have worked out and there's so many lessons to learn from just the stories you've shared in the journey been on to help people overcome challenges they're having like if you can like come back from an insane was it like a kick to the head is that what what happens it was a kick to the head that's correct yes just like feeling like you may not be able to want like not want being able to listen to music uh to just like leading growth at the fastest growing company in history there's also just like a lesson here of constraints again you mentioned this idea of just like the power of constraints like you're forced to take breaks you're forced to go meditate like in a way that's really helpful and it's like a lesson for us all this is actually really good for us all yeah I think that freedom through constraints is is like of one of the big takeaways I've had during that time and it because you mean you have these constraints you're forced to adapt and it it creates you mitt gives you in a business setting you have to focus more in a personal setting and like if the constraint is I can't do anything and I'm injured I don't know what's going to happen it I don't know I'm gonna get better you have two choices you're like one are you going to let that are you just going to resist and like fight with reality and and let and really suffer from that or are you going to accept the situation and and like not let that affect you emotionally it's not to say like I did everything man I was like every single thing I could do diet exercise like I'm on it every action I can take I'm on it but then you have a choice of are you gonna let the impact of that define your happiness or not and and I think that that's the thing when you when the impacts maybe are not coming you have to then adapt to the okay what are one of my happiness to be and one of the meditations he just said like the true freedom in life is learning how to be content when you don't get what you want and it's not to say you shouldn't do something when you don't get what you want but I think that that that take away of just can you be content and like not have your happiness rely on on getting something I think is it's a challenge and not perfect edit but I think it's it's probably one of the biggest takeaways from that whole thing incredible and we'll link to the post if folks want to read this before we get there very exciting lightning round is there anything else you wanted to share or should we just jump right in sing with we can jump in oh he covered a lot of ground okay here we go I've got five questions for you first question what are two or three books you recommend most to other people probably ties to a lot of what I just talked about I think a lot about meditation and my emotional state I sort of what has been most of my time thinking and like reading and researching and working on outside of of work so my recommendations very related to that the first is a book called Joy of Living by a Buddhist monk named Yonge Mingi Rinpoche it's just really about how you can start to think about your life experience in a different way and and you and have tactics of what to do to kind of change just how you think about things this is one where like I've recommended the people it's not like yeah I've recommend a lot of people and they they've really really enjoyed it I think another one is awareness by Anthony DeMelo which is a kind of similar thing but from a different angle those two like I consistently recommend to people and then the third one is more relevant to product in many ways is thinking in bets by Annie Duke I think just being able to break down situation and songs like I don't know it'll get done in time okay like he put a number to that like what what to send you to likelihood is it those types of things I think are just so tactically helpful in in in in product favorite recent movie or TV show I think movie is probably Maddie Supreme it's one of the only ones I watched recently I thought it was great I thought it was just insane absolutely insane movie is ridiculous but I loved it TV show I have not watched TV you know why I think it's probably the Olympics would be the one if that means that counts they're product that you love just like and and I when you discovered recently or just when you have in your life that's like oh this is very cool people might want to know about it yeah so I this is a funny one I was in Japan last week and I was on this so being this hotel and I I should really love the pillow that I had in so it was very random I've had just had at times had like neck and upper trap pain and and sometimes I've been frustrated my pillow because it's sometimes sleek facing up sometimes sideways and like the hides not quite right and I was just like this pillow is just great and it basically this pillow is like it kind of it's full of beans and so you can like actually shift the height of the pillow while you you're sleeping like even like unconsciously without thinking and and so I like looked at the tag or like what is this I ordered it to invite Amazon Japan and I bought it back with me on the plane and so I have the name here it's it's called the Maruhachi Shinsui Maruhachi for a pillow and you can only get it in Japan but they shipped to the US not affiliation and I think that has changed my life you know like the last week not an awesome pick the other favorite like motto that you often come back to in work or in life main one it says just she'll be right this is a this is a very common Aussie saying it's like she will be right she'll be right it's a common Aussie saying when we're faced with like a tougher difficult situation you're kind of like dismissing the severity of it in a way by saying like yeah it'll be fine and I think that that's just like such a good metaphor it's such a good like tactic in many many cases and then I think the other one is just like sometimes in life you just have to go for it and that is something that there's guy Eros Resmini who is the the CMO of discord who is a very close advisor to me as a founder he would push me on this and that was something that he would often say he's just like just go for it and I think that's it's a very helpful thing of you can sit there thinking should I do this should I know it and sometimes in life you just have to go for it and love the combo of those two just sometimes just go for it and she'll be right so good okay final question okay so I'm curious used to be into martial arts that didn't go great uh do you have a new hobby that you find yourself loving do you make time for hobbies I think I'm just like quite tight on time for hobbies I would say I think it's largely just like work and have my body function and then like you know take care of the most important relationships around me I think maybe the the one hobby I'd say is just I'm really into sports and I've gotten more into sports football in particular I'm watching watching certainly not playing I like wise for Michigan and and she took me to a game at the big house and it just changed my life from then on I was like I'm a Wolverine fan and big Wolverine fan big 49est fan I just love football so that's that's probably the the one that comes to mind I'm all this was incredible and on so many levels I'm so thankful that you may time for this considering how much you got going on working folks find your line say they want to play for a job maybe on your team work can they find that and how can listeners be useful to you you can find me and my link again is just I'm all of us are a I'm boring that's that's it you can look online to apply on our jobs page is it rolls across growth engineering growth product growth design we are looking for great people on on the growth team so please come and join us and I think being being helpful to me is just two things trying our products giving us feedback giving us harsh feedback in particular and welcome you better and then please send a great people our way we are looking for the best of the best to join the team and we would love to to hear from anyone you know of as well who could be one of our roles dream job for so many people I'm all thank you so much for being here thanks learning bye everyone thank you so much for listening if you found this valuable you can subscribe to the show on Apple podcast Spotify or your favorite podcast app also please consider giving us a rating or leaving review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast you can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny's podcast.com see you in the next episode