Hot takes and techno-optimism from tech’s top power couple | Sriram and Aarthi

[00:00] I hate jobs to be done. I think it's a terrible framework. I think no successful company has ever been built on top of JDBD. And if you pick JDBD, you're probably doomed. And I'll give you an example. When you sign up for Instagram right now, when you sign up for Facebook for many, many years, Facebook knew that it needed to get you to 10 friends in 14 days. If you got your 10 friends in 14 days, you're probably going to use Facebook. So it'd be like, well, if you're going to throw every tool we have at our disposal, get you to 10 friends in 14 days. So if you sign up for Facebook for many, many years, you'll get this little thing called people you may know. And it'll show you. [00:30] sign up on Facebook. Why are you missing this person? It's not because you need a friend, [00:33] It was very different. So what Facebook did was it made your experience slightly worse to make that person's experience slightly better. This was performing no job for you. It was trying to perform a job for them. Welcome to Lenny's Podcast, where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and growing today's most successful products. [00:58] Today, for the first time ever, I've got two guests. [01:01] Arthi Ramamurthy and Sriram Krishnan [01:03] Both [01:04] former product managers who, between them, worked at basically every major tech company, including Netflix, Meta, Snap, Twitter, Microsoft, even Clubhouse. [01:12] Sriram is now a partner at A16Z [01:15] They're actually married. [01:17] and both individually amazing. Together they host the Arthi and Sriram Goodtimes show, which started on Clubhouse, is now on YouTube, [01:25] And famously, they had Elon Musk on, [01:27] back in the day which led to Clubhouse's crazy rocket ship growth

[01:30] which we definitely touch on. This episode is definitely the most fun conversation I've had yet on this podcast. [01:36] We cover all kinds of areas [01:38] including this trend of techno-optimism, [01:41] building your network, creating content online and how to go about doing that, [01:45] becoming a product leader, community building, and a hilarious rant at the end about why the jobs-to-be-done framework does not work. I had such a good time chatting with these two, and I know you will enjoy this episode. With that, I bring you Arthi and Sriram, after a short word from our select sponsors. [02:01] This episode is brought to you by Vanta, helping you streamline your security compliance to accelerate growth. If your business stores any data in the cloud, then you've likely been asked or you're going to be asked about your SOC [redacted address] to prove your company's taking proper security measures to protect customer data and builds trust with customers and partners, especially those with serious security requirements. Also, if you want to sell to the enterprise, proving security is essential. [02:31] Sock 2 can either open the door for bigger and better deals, or it can put your business on hold. If you don't have a Sock 2, there's a good chance you won't even get a seat at the table. [02:41] But getting a SOC 2 report can be a huge burden, especially for startups. It's time-consuming, tedious, and expensive. Enter Vanta. Over 3,000 fast-growing companies use Vanta to automate up to 90% of the work involved with SOC 2. Vanta can get you ready for security audits in weeks instead of months, less than a third of the time that it usually takes. For a limited time, Lenny's podcast listeners get $1,000 off Vanta.

[03:11] That's V-A-N-T-A dot com slash Lenny to learn more and to claim your discount. Get started today. [03:19] This episode is brought to you by Dovetail, the customer insights platform for teams that gets you from data to insights fast, no matter the method. There's so much customer data to get through, from user interviews to NPS, sales calls, usability tests, support tickets, app reviews. It's a lot. And you know that if you're building something hidden in that data are the insights that will lead you to building better products. And that's where Dovetail can help. [03:49] Thank you. [04:10] dot com slash Lenny. [04:16] arty and sriram welcome to the podcast [04:20] Thank you. Thanks so much for having us, Lenny. You know, this is [04:24] bucket list thing because you know we are on Lenny's [04:27] podcast i know long time subscriber listener uh and you know now here wow this feels like i don't want to screw this up first time caller yeah let's not screw this up you guys are hilarious i appreciate it and feel very flattered you two are the first duo on this podcast and i couldn't think of a better two people to start this podcast with i have so much stuff i want to dig into i think we're gonna have a lot of fun so again thanks for joining me here

[04:54] It's awesome. Big fan. Honestly, yeah, this is I'm excited. So I don't know if you remember this. I was thinking about the story back when you were doing the Good Times show. You invited me on the Good Times show and I was like thinking, hesitating. I don't know. It's kind of scary. And then the next day, Elon came on and then it just blew up. And I was like, shit, I missed my chance. And then became really fancy people. I was like, I'm not ever going to make it back on there. And so I kind of look back at that as like, I hesitated too long. That's a lesson. [05:22] Well, the way you should interpret that is they couldn't get me on. So their backup choice was Elon. Like I would have been the main event. And they were like, well, we couldn't get money. No, but seriously, I've been a huge fan and those are like just, you know, [05:37] the fun times we used to do the show obviously on uh just clubhouse and now we do the show on youtube every every about where you can listen to our podcast and a lot of people remember us for the elon episode but i will tell you this it is often the folks uh who were working technology who are not as famous you're obviously very famous now uh but uh but who really connected with the audience and uh but yeah you know what you should that's why we you know we have you back on the show now [06:07] Speaking of Elon, I was always curious, how did you actually get him on the show? I remember that was back before he was like very vocal in the world and he was like hard to learn from and hear from. How did you actually pull that off? [06:17] Well, I think it's actually kind of similar to how a lot of good things in my career have happened, which is I just...

[06:25] had a conversation on the internet. Like I have this whole thing where I do think a lot of people trying to get, you know, you get ahead in their career, especially in technology, should just write cold emails, cold DMs, notes, put out content, et cetera. And that leads to good things. In Elon's case, actually, what wound up happening was a few years ago, he DM'd me out of the blue. At the time, I was working at Twitter. And I think he saw something I'd written and wanted [06:55] And I was like, well, I'm allowed to help you. And he sent me his phone number and I called him and I was like, this is Saryl. And we had a conversation and we sort of built up a relationship after that. And when, you know, this was when Clubhouse first came on the scene and I was like, well, who do we get on? And Nealon hadn't done a lot of press appearances. I think he's done a lot more since then, obviously. And I texted him and he was like, I'm Gim and, you know, the rest is history. [07:20] Amazing. I love that Elon just DMed you. Slid into his DM. [07:25] You know, the crazy part of that story was I texted him saying you should come on the show. And he said, sure. And then he tweeted about it. And I will tell you that when Elon tweets about you and even more, maybe now, more so now, your phone just melts. And then for the entire afternoon, I had like hundreds of people asking me what's going to happen.

[07:50] rooms that were trying to collect questions for us and help us prepare. And it was just like, there was so much pressure just scrolling through the hallway and trying to like, look through. It's like, oh my God, is this real? Like we are the people that they're talking about here. This is crazy. I don't know if you've listened to the actual thing, but it was pretty cool because we got to ask him questions. We've always wanted to ask on like, [08:12] when do we get to Mars? Like, you know, it was kind of fun. And then after that, again, it was this, like, we got a bunch of people reaching out and being like, you should have asked this question. You guys are not professional journalists. And we're like, no, we're not like, what gave it away? You know, we're just like random two people who are just talking to this guy. So it was really fun. Yeah, I remember that. I remember journalists were like, they're not actually asking hard questions. How dare they have them on, give them a platform to share things without any criticism. [08:39] And we were like, we are not those people that you think we are. Like, you know, that's just never been our job. Yeah. I have so many questions that spiral from this discussion, but I want to ask one quick clubhouse question. So, Arthi, you worked at Clubhouse for a while. That's right. Very tactically, I feel like they're really smart initially with their growth strategy of just getting fancy, smart people in there talking and pontificating. They had Naval and Marc Andreessen and eventually a lot of other people.

[09:09] there to listen to them to engage with them what's your take on that as just like a growth strategy to get a social network bootstrapped and then just generally i guess any thoughts on the journey of clubhouse you know it's had a big rise it's kind of you know yeah yeah i mean all good questions here i think growth strategy that's a great like way to acquire people right at the top of the funnel right like you kind of treat like once you've done this a few times you kind of see everything as a funnel [09:33] And you're like, well, are you like retaining people? Are you not? Are you? Is it like top of the funnel impressions or do they stick around? So I think having, you know, people like Marc Andreessen and people like Nawal and they were not doing this out of like any, you know, they were really, really interested. Like when we got invited by Marc and Marc was like, check out like this is way before they like in the A16 even invested in it was like. [09:55] This product is amazing. These, you know, these folks are like doing something really cool. This is going to be the future. It's amazing. So it gave them a platform to go speak out. [10:04] and live social audio just made a ton of sense right [10:09] I will say Clubhouse, you know, I feel like they get this unfair attention and criticism. It's a, what, three-year-old startup? And, you know, I've done two startups. The second one I did, like, three years in, we still kind of sort of were, like, struggling and trying to figure out, like, what we were doing. So, I mean, I feel like founders just need some time to, like, breathe in and kind of figure out what to go do. So, I'm bullish on Clubhouse. I think they'll

[10:39] social stuff for a decade plus. And so they're going to figure it out. And I know that it's like, they get this thing on like, oh, they were really hot during the pandemic. Is this a pandemic fad versus not? [10:50] I don't know. It's a product at the end of the day. And you're going to have to find product market fit. And I think they'll figure it out. I think the broader question of how do social products acquire users is super interesting. One of my favorite pieces written on this is Eugene Waze's status of service. Eugene should absolutely be on your podcast someday. [11:20] the high status people and high status mean they're interesting people want to be where they are in some shape or form because they have money, they're smart, they're cool, they're good looking, whatever it may be. And you want to get them onto your network. And there's actually an interesting corollary that they're often underserved by other existing platforms. And because if they're already well served, they wouldn't want to move to you. And Eugene doesn't talk about it. But if I look at, say, the history of all the three, four large social media companies, you've seen this pattern.

[12:20] different set of skill sets you know people who are uh really good on video people who could dance be funny and so you saw the rise of charlie d'amelio and addison and you know so many others who are different so you every single time i think you need to go after a set of people who are high status who are also underserved so kind of tying back club club i think one of the interesting things is like i think these celebrities are super interesting uh but what is more interesting for me is all the homegrown folks i actually consider us as a part of that we would not be here doing the [12:50] for clubhouse there are many folks who kind of had that original launch using the platform so i think for folks here who are thinking about social platforms it's kind of interesting about okay you need interesting people from elsewhere but you also need homegrown talent and by the way you are a perfect example of this phenomenon because you know you are substack's homegrown talent uh and uh and i think you bring a lot of value to substack and it ends a lot of people with [13:20] your popularity is so tight to Substack now. And that's a great example of all of this. [13:25] Yeah, it reminds me of the founder of Musical.ly, who turned into TikTok, had a great story. I think you've heard him talk about this, how the way he thought about it is like there's all these successful people on Instagram, like that's Europe, and the people you can convince to come to America are not like the kings of Europe, but they're like the peasants that are like, oh, you have a new opportunity to rise and become a king or queen. And so those are the people you pull in, the people not doing well on other platforms that want to do well versus like the people already killing it. Let me just call them the king of Substack.

[13:55] No, you're the king. You're the king of America. I'm just trying to give you clippable moments on video. I did just find out that I think I have the fourth largest Substack newsletter on all of Substack, which is ridiculous. That's amazing. Wow. That's amazing. Number three, number two, number one. Lenny's coming after you. Better watch out. Take them out. They're up there. So you mentioned the chat with Elon and how you're very tech positive. And I think that's something that you two are at the forefront of is this kind of trend. [14:25] And I'd love to hear just like why, because I know that's important to you too, why that's important to you. And just what is this kind of movement of tech optimism, techno-optimism? Look, I think it's also very personal to our context and our upbringing, right? Like, you know, for us, Faram and I came from a fairly middle-class family in India, like this city in India that most people here won't probably know. And we kind of grew up really liking computers, but didn't have access to a computer for the longest time, right? [14:55] My parents bought us our first computers, like saving money for it. And it was like a hard thing. And, you know, when we eventually got onto it and started learning to write code, we met each other online. We met on we're dating ourselves now, but we met on Yahoo Messenger back in the day. And we worked on this like nerdy coding project. That's kind of how we connected. So like technology and computers have given us everything. Our first jobs were at Microsoft. We built developer tools and platforms.

[15:25] coming from if you were in our shoes, you would feel the same way too. Tech has given us so much. And so for us to come here all the way from India through like multiple cities, we lived in Seattle and then here the Bay Area, I've started tech companies. It is a bit frustrating to see the other viewpoint because you can kind of see how much it is like uplifted people, careers, lives, but also just from like what we have been able to work on, what we've seen our friends work on [15:55] dramatically move the needle. And so for us, like we are the living testament of like tech actually helping us and help us do better. So I don't even see the other viewpoint, right? Like from like, why wouldn't you be optimistic about technology? I don't get it. Yeah, I think the personal part was really core. I think there's generally two schools of thought. One school of thought I would broadly put, you know, right off as you know, things are [16:18] Getting worse? [16:19] technology is making things worse and we should all do less, build less. And then the other school of thought, which I think I subscribe to is technology is not perfect. You know, the impact technology is definitely uneven, but pretty much most of the good things in the world over the last 100, 200 years are responsible for it. And we can have a whole long discussion about the evidence why and we have lots of very fancy sounding intellectual theories as to why, but at the heart of it is what Artie said. If it wasn't for tech, we wouldn't be here, we wouldn't be doing this. I suspect a lot of

[16:49] wouldn't have the opportunities they have or have the opportunities we have. It is a great level of my dad pretty much had the same job for his entire life, essentially from age 25 to the time he retired. And there was really no easy path out for him. And I'm just like, hey, if it's one 40 years later and he had a laptop and an internet connection and could get on GitHub, here are opportunities that would be just impossible even like 30, 40 years ago. And that's all from [17:19] thing we have of getting ahead. [17:21] It's such a refreshing perspective on tech. In traditional media, all you ever hear about is all the problems that tech is causing and all the dangers and how we're all screwed. And so it's like you almost forget that there could be really positive stories about what's happening with tech. And it feels like there's a small number of people that are doing this at scale. [17:51] would use or rich person would use who would be so different from what a peasant would use but you know what like i suspect the phone that you and i have it's probably the same phone that actually i know it's the same phone that you know elon musk uses the richest person in the world it's probably the same phone i know a lot of folks in india who have like very high-end android device they have actually same internet you go to google.com google.com doesn't know your network it gives you the same results chat gpt doesn't know how rich you are it may not like you but uh you know it doesn't know how rich you are and that is you know that just if you just think of all these uh

[18:21] possible technology. But anyway, that's a whole other conversation. Yeah, I love that the richest people have the same phone as me and nothing they can do about it. Something else you two are really good at is building a network, building community, building personal brands. [18:35] I know a lot of people listening are either often told you need to build an audience online, you build a brand, you got to build a network and all these things. So I guess I'd love to know just like what advice do you give people [18:45] that come to you like, hey, I want to build a personal brand. I want to build a network. Just like how to go about doing that. What's worked well for you, too? Sherham has like way more structured thoughts on this. And honestly, he's like way better at this than I've ever been. He's basically slowly corrupted me and brought me to the dark side. But, you know, what I have come to believe and what this differs from what I used to believe is, you know, especially if you're working in a big company, [19:11] you are one of the many thousands of employees in there generally what you get told is like hey you know just ship really good products put your head down go to work the products will speak for themselves [19:22] that's just how it's going to work. Don't do this like whole personal branding and all of that stuff. It's such a distraction. And, you know, that's generally what you're told. And, you know, [19:32] I, you know, most of my career, I was like, yeah, of course, that makes sense. You know, that's kind of what you do. But I've come to realize that that is just not true. And this might be a controversial opinion, but you have to get out there and build your own brand. You have to figure out what you stand for, what your core values are, what you believe in, what you think you want to do, what your next career trajectory is going to look like. All of that is just up to

[20:02] It's not up to anybody else. It's just up to you. And, uh, [20:06] I think building a personal brand is looked upon, looked down upon so much that people think of it as like a dirty word. It's like, no, you can't do that. Oh, look at this person who's like branding themselves kind of thing. But I almost see it as like what distinguishes you from everybody else. And that is not so much like saying something that you're not good at or touting yourself more. It's really about like highlighting. I'm really good at this thing. [20:36] write about it or tweet about it, like whatever is your forum, [20:40] You have to put yourself out there. [20:42] I mean, this is probably one of the most important things that somebody can do. And I spent, you know, we spent years slowly climbing the corporate ranks, right? Like we were, you know, junior product managers, IC product managers, senior product managers, you know, kind of like slowly climbed the ranks and ran teams, etc. And I spent years just thinking that all I need to do is kind of put my head down. [21:01] you know do with my job arrival and that was that but then i looked around and i suspect a lot of listeners here probably have the same feeling that some sort of people were getting way more opportunities some sort of people were way farther ahead even though i was demonstrably sure that somebody else was doing a better job and i was trying to understand why and i think building a network which i can't try and define because i think a lot of people have assumptions what it is is at the heart of this so [21:22] Building a network is very simply having relationships with human beings. And let's start off by saying, first of all, these have to be authentic, genuine relationships. You know, one of the things that drives me crazy is somebody will come and say, like, I'm here to network. I'm like, I don't know what that word means. Right? Like, you know, so all you're trying to do is have authentic, genuine relationship with people and expecting nothing in return. So that's great. And then people are like, oh, well, that's awesome. But I'm a senior. For example, I was a senior PM at Microsoft for a bunch of time and then kind of similar at Facebook for a bunch of time. You're like, well, what does it mean?

[21:52] day, like so many hours, I'll be like, well, let's start off with, you know, go and meet every single peer that you have. You don't directly meet with, go get coffee with them and ask them, Hey, and you know, you know, have no agenda. Just ask them what's going on in their life. Who are they? What their life story is. And then who are a couple of interesting people that you should meet with, right? Go talk to your boss, your manager and go talk to their peers. Super important by that. Your manager, peer relations are super important. Go have a coffee with them. And they'd be like, great. I'd love to meet this person. [22:22] notorious for being the person who sent a cold email to every single Facebook leader. And I'll be like, Hey, I'm new here. I want to meet, let's grab coffee. And everybody will say, as everyone's a new person and always asking the same thing, which I'd like, I show up. I'll tell them my story. I'll ask for their story. I'd be like, what are you folks focused on? How can I have, again, no expectation of anything in return? So, and then I'll be like, who else should I talk to? [22:42] You do this, you do two coffees a week. I literally just have two hours a week. Everyone has two hours a week. It'll start compounding over time and time. And then as the years go by, you keep in touch with the people you used to work with. These folks will go to other places. Five years, six years go by. You start in your mid-20s or late-20s, and you know hundreds of people all over. And the important thing about this is that it is a resource in so many different ways. For example, one, if you ever need help, right, you're trying to look for a new role,

[23:12] person who knows something about this person or how do I, or I want a new role, like who's looking for something that network kind of becomes your key resource. Now, what I think a lot of people don't do is just simple things. Number one is often people just have a great meeting with a peer and then they will never ever follow up. I'm sure a lot of us have the amazing first introduction email, they never followed up. Don't do that. I try and make it a point to make sure like I always meet them once a year, once every six months, I just have no take what's up. And the other key part [23:42] Like you really have to go and generally people, people are very good at treating other people. And if you go and being like, Hey, I just want to meet you because I want a job or, you know, I'm here to network, whatever that means. They don't want to meet you. Like just go and be very curious about who they are and try and help them. And you'll be surprised if you, you know, wherever you start within a year, two years, you will know hundreds of people who you can tap into. So I think that is super powerful. That's just. [24:04] building relationship. The other part is brand building. Both are different points in our career have gotten feedback, you know, in our job saying, oh, see, I'm at the exit, brand build too much, etc. I have learned that that is terrible feedback and totally ignore that. And if anybody here is in this video, I just totally ignore that. Like, the things that work well for me, and a lot of others is putting yourself out there. And that can be anything that can be like you make a presentation internally, you write tweets, you do you write your [24:28] uh you know you're prolific on github you make a youtube it doesn't really matter but put yourself out there because the internet rewards people being out there and what happens when you put yourself out there it's a bad signal it's telling people that hey i i'm here this is my body of work and you know what the internet does it will send amazing people to you i'll you'll be amazed how often like somebody just have a random great twitter thread with no followers and somebody super interesting will email them and that leads to amazing things happening it encourages serendipity

[24:58] do this and listen more to the people who said I should do this more. I also think, you know, Shredem keeps saying expect nothing in return. I think the other way I see it is, [25:07] This is again an extension of optimism for us. Generally, we think people like to help each other out. That is just in their true nature. It's just, it's not meant to be transactional. It's not meant to be, if I know them, they will somehow like do something for me down the road. It's not that. Just the way we are all building communities and are a part of this like broader community, the way we work is we all want to help each other and help them be successful. And if that is like in your nature, [25:37] of course I want to reach out to them. I want to see what I can do to help them. Maybe, you know, something good will happen. We'll collaborate on a project together, like whatever, right? So it's not the core tenet being like, don't expect stuff in return. Don't do it on a transactional basis. I think it's really important. Yep. [25:52] What this reminds me of is Naval has this tweet that proved to be so true, which is don't network. Instead, create amazing things, create value, do good work, and then people want to network with you. And that's really stuck with me. And it kind of saves you from... [26:08] going to network events like instead just go work hard do awesome stuff and people are going to want to meet you i mean you will not believe the number of times they've shown up to like some meetup or some founder thing or something and then somebody would come up and be like i'm here to network what's your name and i'm like what [26:22] No, you can't do that. It's just not how that works. I actually disagree with Nawal on this because often when you're part of a large organization,

[26:32] like it's really hard to do great work and get recognized for it uh you know you're part of a team which is great but it's it's not the same as saying having a newsletter by yourself or having a piece of content by yourself so you know when i was younger i'd be like great i'm part of a large i don't know i mean you guys are saying the same thing it's just like saying great value and put it out there like i don't think it's yeah i think the putting it out there part is super interesting yeah and uh also i would just say like you know don't wait to create amazing things like often just [27:02] yourself out there can just put amazing things in itself yeah i think that and i think especially early in your career you're not going to create amazing things immediately so there's a lot of value to reaching out and meeting people there's a couple of directions i want to go here one is so you gave this i don't know just mini master class on building a network and networking and things like that i think what i'll get people to rewind and listen to that again is i don't think people realize just how connected you two are like you're at the center of so many micro communities [27:32] but you kind of run all these micro communities of incredible people in like, I don't know, creator land and investors and product people and all these people. And so like it actually has worked. Like you may be the most network person there is. I don't know if people know that. Oh, wow. Is that a good thing? I don't know. It's a good thing. It's a good thing. Well, I like that. I'll go with that. I think the thing that [27:54] At least with Friram, like outside of all of the masterclass stuff, which I think he's like particularly good at. I think the thing that people don't realize about him is he's just inherently incredibly curious about people. Like he's just really just wants to know what somebody else does, who they are, what their story is. And this is not some like, I'm going to spend 10 minutes letting them talk. I'm going to spend 10. He often never lets the other person talk. But when he does.

[28:24] But he is truly curious about who they are, what their story is. And he will ask these like, and I've seen them, you know, by now we've known each other for like 20 years, years. And this is every dinner, every event. This is just how he's wired. And so you just can't like fake that in like building out a network. He's just, he truly, he builds a network by just wanting to know who these people are. [28:54] marry the right person, everything else becomes. I haven't talked about this before, but I'll keep some of this slightly hidden. But I think the heart of it is, I've just [29:04] curious about people i'm just dumb about a lot of things and i don't mean sort of this false modesty way i'm like i know a lot of folks are smarter than me like linney obviously is so much smarter than me at writing a subsection letter right it's just evident andrew huberman is created like you know brand armstrong building a crypto company all these books just evident and what i but what i realized is a lot of folks sometimes just want to be with other amazing peers and one sort of hack i you know i built over the years i was like all right let me just bring interesting [29:34] So I bring them in, let's just say various kinds of online communities. They're probably over like a hundred at this point. And I say, okay, you know, I, I'm, you trust me, you trust me. And you know, I make the rules. I have no one's, you know, everyone kind of keeps some level of confidence. Everyone's a peer, they're all accomplished in their own way. No one's rude or mean or goes off the rails. And so I can, I'm a party host. I'm like, okay, listen, nobody's going to get super crazy over here. But I'm also curating.

[30:04] I need somebody who is a little controversial. I need somebody who's funny. I need somebody who's like a celebrity. I'm trying to put together engineer and the right vibe or the right atmosphere, but digitally, I'm very anti-social in person. And then, you know, and some of these just happen over time, right? You put in a group of people and they hang out online and over times, you know, you have, you know, you have, you know, [30:25] a very famous CEO getting becoming best friends with somebody in their early 20s who's like, you know, just getting started just because they are in the same space together. So I love creating those online spaces. And it just it and I think it's kind of like something that anybody here listening can do, right? They just take some of your favorite people, you know, stick them in a WhatsApp group or a telegram group or a Slack channel, which is by the way, [30:47] Lenny slack highly, highly recommended. And then he's great at that. But yours has, [30:52] hundreds of thousands of people. And I think sometimes there's an intimacy from having smaller groups, like five people, 10 people, like a shared space, and then kick it off. And you'll be amazed of after a year or two of how much intimacy and how much connection where I, you know, sometimes people open up about, you know, like losing the jobs or having a divorce or something really personal and intense. That's because of the shared trust. And, you know, and I think there's something very heartwarming and fulfilling about being able to facilitate some of that. [31:21] Yeah. [31:21] I want to dig into that a little bit more. You've built these incredible communities and you talked about a couple. And, Arti, I know you also built Facebook's early community products and Clubhouse, obviously. If you had to pick one or two things, you've got to get right with a new community that you're just forming.

[31:35] What do you think those two things are or one or two things? Find the niche, like start really small and find the niche. I think oftentimes I've seen founders, other startup founders, and I invest in advice in a lot of early stage companies. I went through Y Combinator, so I go back to YCE as much as I can and go help out folks. But oftentimes I'll see people starting companies or founders coming in and being like, I'm going to build this product that is going to cater to this community. [32:05] largest community of this kind of thing. And it almost like starts at this [32:10] super scaled version, and then they set themselves up for failure. You're almost better off doing these small niche [32:18] you know non-scalable things to go find these like oddball set of people who are doing this or really interested in this one thing and kind of scale from there and grow from there and i think that's like one big thing that when you're starting to build a community don't start to build this super scale community start with like few people who are passionate about a particular problem and want to get together kind of thing start there too i think and this might be like a controversial thing but i often think people don't think through monetization if you're like [32:48] early on, start thinking about if you're like truly focused on this as a business, how would you actually make money off of it? Oftentimes they like hit some sort of scale and be like, [32:57] crap, now what do I do? And then they like try all these options, they will have some churn and then they're like, Oh, no, that but I thought this was a very sticky community. Like, yes, but it's not as sticky as this particular price tag. And so you have to kind of start thinking through, if we hit a particular velocity, what is that going to look like? What are the things that I'm going to unlock and think through monetization a little bit ahead of time, before it comes in and becomes a crutch rather than a weapon that you can go leverage. But I want to say, Arati, you know, it's kind of

[33:27] much of the thinking there and I can see it go super deep on this. I have like a, I co-sign everything she said. I have a slightly different framework. First of all, I really don't like the word community because the word community, like the word networking, like the word platform is a little abstract and it can mean a lot of things. And I like to think of things like a dinner party. [33:44] or church or things which seem like more tangible and people know, okay, I know exactly what that is. So when I think of community or starting one, I think first of all, it's like a party and you're first starting off like, all right, [33:54] What is the vibe? All right. In the sense of, you know, for example, it is also every social media platform where if you can be a crazy people are dancing on bars, you know, having a great time getting really drunk party, or you can have a really formal dinner where everyone's seated. There is plates with name tags. And, you know, there's a clinking of glasses and you have to dress up and they're both fine. They're both, you know, fun in their own way, but you need to tell people as a host, which one it is. [34:24] days with some of the other apps did it never told people what kind of party it was it was like are we going to uh michelin star restaurant where it's a sports bar after the soup bowl and you can go crazy and if you don't do that people make up their own rules that's number one the second part is as the host you have to curate the original set of people and you need a mix this is super important i think sometimes people do this thing where they either optimize for quote unquote interesting famous people or they get you know the most talkative loud people you know and i actually read a bunch [34:54] like hosting great dinner parties actually have some interesting suggestions there and it'll say like well you need a mix right you need

[35:00] For example, in any organization, let's say you're the VP that everyone knows about, right? But that VP doesn't have the time to maybe participate on a WhatsApp channel or Slack channel and chit chat all the time or show up everything. [35:11] And then maybe you need the really boisterous young BD exec who's out and about and meeting everybody. You need that person. You need somebody who's quiet and thoughtful. You need to merge different kinds of energy. And that's almost an alchemy. And that's more art than science. You have to start there. Third, I think is as the host. [35:29] you have to have a sixth sense of how is a community feeling at any given point in time are two people dominating the conversation that person hasn't said anything in a while the one things i like to when somebody joins a group or one of these places i'm like i try and get them into a question which they will feel happy about because you know what happens the very first time you walk into a party you look around you're like i don't know anybody here oh gosh okay i know this one person and uh you know i'm gonna go like talk to them and you just feel nervous so i'm like i'm trying to break that i'm like hey you know for example if you walk in a place and nobody you [35:59] social but i'll be like hey lenny has one of the most popular things on stuff like i need just i'm just giving you an opening to you to feel comfortable and that's another part the third part i love is like rituals and you know liturgians do a great job of this which is do something every month i used to like there's a little group i hosted some of my friends and during all of covid we did a zoom meeting every tuesday evening and that was a ritual it had nothing it's just zoom meeting with a bunch of friends people and people would just bring like their glass of wine

[36:29] people started looking forward to it through the pandemic and stuff. And we would be, if you'd be like, Oh my God, it's Tuesday. Like, you know, this evening we are going to go do this thing. And it was a really great way to go build that community. And I totally agree with that. Yeah. Well, Lenny's done an amazing job on it on his Slack. I see it. The other interesting tension and challenge is how to grow it. Because I think that are interesting, like a four person dinner, very different from an eight person dinner, you know, [36:59] very different from once you start getting the hundreds of thousands, like the things you're willing to share, worrying about being judged. So I'm always trying to create more intimate, different spaces. And that's a whole other topic. So I think, you know, if you're trying to start a community though, I would say picking the right people, setting the tone, being really part of it yourself. Like that's most of it. [37:20] Amazing. There's so many little nuggets of advice there. I feel like we could do a whole other episode on just community building strategy. Today's episode is brought to you by Element. I just recently discovered this stuff actually from another podcast, and it is such sweet, salty goodness. Element is a tasty electrolyte drink mix with a science-backed electrolyte ratio, and unlike most electrolyte drinks, there's no sugar, coloring, artificial ingredients, gluten, [37:50] fatigue, sleeplessness, and other common symptoms of electrolyte deficiency. Element is the exclusive hydration partner to Team USA Weightlifting and many other Olympic athletes. Also, dozens of NBA and NFL teams and players rely on Element to stay hydrated, along with Navy SEAL teams, FBI sniper teams, and the Marines. You can try Element totally risk-free. If you don't like it, you can share it with a salty friend, and they'll give you your money back, no questions asked. To give it a shot,

[38:20] and you'll get a free sample pack with any purchase, which includes one packet of every flavor. My favorite is watermelon salt. You won't find this offer publicly available, so you have to head to drinklmnt.com slash lenny to take advantage of this offer. [38:34] Stay salty. [38:36] I want to go back to a topic we touched on that I think is really interesting, which is [38:40] building a brand and putting content out and that kind of thing. I think a lot of times people hear that like a first year PM and they're like, yes, I'm going to start tweeting. And then it's like. [38:48] such cringy, useless stuff and nobody needs to hear from them because they haven't done anything. And I guess I'd be curious for your take on like, what is your, at what point should people start to put things out? How do you know if like this is cringy and like nobody wants to hear this stuff? Like great PM ship, like these very cliche things come out, you know, there's like hundreds of Twitter accounts, people are just tweeting these things like, all right, like, how do you think about that? [39:13] I actually disagree with you. [39:15] Right. And I actually think everyone should. Well, disclaimer, I work for a firm as an investor in Twitter, but I swear that's not why I'm seeing this. People have heard me say this for years. And so everyone should tweet or everyone should post on YouTube or post on Instagram or pick your. And it doesn't matter how young you are, because I actually disagree with a few things which is a great point, which I think a lot of people do this one. [39:35] is that you need to have hit a certain bar [39:38] of accomplishment or interestingness to say something. Strongly disagree with that. Second, that things are cringy. [39:46] I don't think anything is cringy. I strongly disagree. Right. And I think these are both interesting. Earthy space is great. I feel like Faram's bar is so low.

[39:57] This is really important because I think what stops a lot of people [40:00] is I'll... [40:02] I've had probably 100 plus conversations where somebody who's interviewer comes to come to me and they be like, hey, [40:07] I want to do get on Twitter. I want to, you know, write content, or I want to start a sub stack, or I want to do a podcast. I'm like, great. But I don't know what to say. I look dumb. I don't, I don't want to get judged. And you know, I, but I'm like, no, you're so accomplished. And it is the fear of being judged that so often stops people. So whenever I hear that word cringe, I'm like, no, no, no, that's actually fine. You're fine. You'll figure it out. And here's why I say that. Number one is what the most important thing. And if, if you just remember one thing from this whole thing is just get started. [40:37] and do something every single day and this sounds so basic like athina have this running joke where somebody it's like it's like diet and exercise is what we say it's like we know you are talking to people about how do you get healthy and you have like you know so many like you know the hundred different you know things you can do or podcast you can listen to but most of it's like well that next and i said so and with creating content that makes you just write a piece of content every single day right because what's going to happen is it builds muscle it gets you familiar with the

[41:07] building reps you know who never works out in my opinion opinion is somebody who like who think for weeks build up an amazing tweet strong blog post newsletter whatever it may be and then stops because you know the effort is so high so i'm like one do something every single day the second part of it is i actually think there's not that you don't have to talk about what you accomplish you only have to talk about you and by the way this is going from a very frou-frou but you are the best [41:37] 21-year-old PM, fresh out of school, first year. By the way, we were all that, right? I was a 21-year-old PM at one time. And, you know, Lennie would have been to lots of others. First, there's a lot of people who have been to Journey and there are others like you. Second is you just talk about your journey, talk about what you're doing, talk about what you're learning, because what often you're trying to do when you're creating content is to build a relationship with people. So when Charli D'Amelio dances on TikTok, she's not saying she's a professional dancer. She's saying, like, I'm relatable. I'm like, just like, you know, somebody you would be friends with next door. [42:07] like you and so then people start connecting with you on that front if you're authentic and you're doing a good job and so [42:15] Everybody listening to this should be able to create content. Okay, so the only place where I disagree, I think this is all right, but [42:22] This is a bit like, you know, you know, we we are Asian. We are, you know, we have this very Asian parent thinking. There are no participation trophies. So if it is cringy, you should at least acknowledge that it is cringy. It's okay. Like, I think at the end of the day, you have to persevere. Like, I think I give a lot more votes to like people who are just persevering and showing up every day. But I do think there should be a level of self-awareness for people where it's like, man, this is not great. I'm not getting any traction. Like, I need to improve on things and keep building on it.

[42:52] like I am the best me ever and just keep putting out garbage. Like don't do that, like improve on stuff because there is such a thing as bad content. - I agree with you, I agree with you, but I think when people mean cringy, okay, I see this, right? What people think when they say cringy is like our peer group [43:10] thinks that this content is too basic. Everybody has that whether you say it out loud or not. Well, I'll illustrate it. So I spent years, I'd be like, I'm a PM leader, right? I run organization, I should write smart PM things, right? Like I should write the kinds of things that Lenny writes. For example, I'll say that Lenny's post the other week from Duolingo's VP, I was like, so jealous. I was like, man, like this is the kind of content I would do. It's amazing. Banger post, right? And, but the problem was when you start doing that, you start censoring yourself. And I would [43:40] I have a great intellectual framework and some of this work, but you know what my most popular post and tweet from of all time is, it is how to write a cold email. [43:48] And you know, when I wrote that tweet, Tom, I, I was like, man, I'm going to sound so dumb because everyone literally doesn't need to know how to write a cold email and neither does the VCs I work with. Everyone knows that. But the thing is, what is obvious to you and may seem cringy to your peers is definitely not obvious to a lot of people and they will connect to you. They will relate to you. So whenever, you know, when somebody says like, well, I might think this is too basic. How do I get started with my job? I'm like, no, there's a lot of people who this is not obvious to. And I just put myself out there. And what's the worst thing? Somebody thinks you're a moron. [44:18] fine. You know, you just put some new piece of content out there the next day and they'll fix it. Or you can just ignore them.

[44:23] I think there's a lot of really good nuggets here. I think the only area, maybe we disagree and we should move on, but this is some good spicy stuff. Come on, your podcast is too friendly otherwise. [44:33] My feeling is I think for like helping you do better work kind of content, like entertainment, anyone can do, no problem. You know, you can be awesome at it. I feel like you need to do something in your career first before you can start speaking to here's things I've learned and here's what works and here's what doesn't work. I think there's a lot. [44:48] I think I wouldn't spend a lot of time sharing all your wisdom before you've done a thing and been successful in some way. [44:53] Yeah, I actually think you make a very interesting point, which is I think a lot of people online LARP, live action role play as somebody else. Right. Which is and this is very which is like you trying to project a persona or a career point that you're not at. And you know it. We know it. You probably mean. But and also for that kind of content, you can you everyone can tell. Right. Like I think it just comes off as like not authentic. And so, I mean, I feel like the universe figures itself out over time. [45:23] Thank you. [45:24] the [45:24] Just because Sriram thinks no content is cringy does not mean people all feel that way. Like, you know, you can't just magically just wipe that out. I feel like everyone just feels that way whether or not you say it out loud. I do think there is a process of iteration and acknowledging that, yeah, okay, this is bad, but I'm going to put this out there anyway. And, you know, we'll just keep working on this and coming back to it. I really appreciate people who would just do that and just like keep coming back to it every day and like Rocky style, like chip away at things.

[45:54] for those folks because it's hard. [45:57] I've realized over time that everyone is deeply feeling [46:01] as if they're imposters, and we talked about this, right? You know, imposter syndrome is so real. It is so gut-wrenchingly real that it's not just like, [46:09] every like one person is like most people, I think. So to be able to overcome that threshold, and kind of look at your amazing peers and your seniors and everybody else and then still be able to put yourself out there. I think we have to like really appreciate that and kind of help them go iterate and just get better over time. Yeah. [46:28] I'll give you one final story before we wrap on this topic, which is I was talking to somebody who sort of, you know, four or five years into their career as a PM. And they did this post on LinkedIn, which is full of cringey content, by the way. Okay, let me say LinkedIn has a lot of cringey content. Sorry, LinkedIn folks. And it was one of the things like, how do you set product strategy as an organization? And I was like, I called him, I was like, [46:47] dude, come on. Right? Like, you're four years into your role, right? Like, nobody believes that you actually are writing this from a place of actually really knowing it. And that is fine if you're learning, but you know, you're trying to project this person, you're not. But the thing which I was talking to him, I was like, I know you've done this amazing deep dive on this other niche topic. You've gone out, you read all the posts, go right about that, because you are an expert legitimately in something you think is niche, as opposed to a fake expert on this other thing you want to be. [47:17] wrote this follow-up post on something very niche and that went [47:21] really popular because the truth is there's, there's not a lot of great content out there, especially great content from people who actually done the thing. You'd be surprised how niche you can be, but you've actually done the work, talk to a people, aggregated some posts, you know, you, people come seek you out and you don't have to do it. So, uh, anyway, so yeah, lots of LARPing, lots of cringy LinkedIn content. Just to close this out, I 100% agree with the idea that people

[47:51] out of there. Don't be afraid because that's how you start down this road. I was going to go in a different direction, but you mentioned imposter syndrome. And I'm curious, have you two... [47:59] dealt with imposter syndrome oh yeah we we have and yeah i still i don't know about sharam sharam comes off as so much more confidence and confident and has so much gravitas that nobody ever thinks of it but yeah we both do we both deeply have imposter syndrome we still like every single day you know anything we do like you know we look at ourselves we are creators we have the show on youtube and then we look around at everybody else who have like you know millions of subscribers [48:29] thing like we should not be doing this stuff I just think people haven't been honest with us on how much we suck you know it's like you have these like loops in your head and then every once in a while you see a comment being like this was amazing I just had to like stop doing what I was doing to listen to this whole thing it was so valuable for me and you're like oh okay like you're not all the bad that's I think okay so yeah we go through this a lot I particularly had [48:51] for the longest time, like I had like really severe imposter syndrome through like school, college, you know, getting into like Microsoft, like even after I got through the Microsoft, which is like we were like one of the youngest product managers there. [49:05] we i still was like oh you know someday they're going to figure out that this was all like they'll they'll know the real me and they'll be like oh man we made this mistake with her and it was just such a real crippling thing for me it took a very very long time to feel like even now i feel like maybe it's not 100 true but i can kind of see the the gradients there so yeah very real thing yeah it's so true i have a hack or a technique of how to get over imposter syndrome but i'll just say

[49:35] And every new job I've been in, I always felt that I didn't deserve to be there. And I mean it generally. When I was at John Microsoft, I was a young student. I was like, I don't know anything. These folks are professionals. They've been doing this job for years. [49:45] When I moved to the U.S., [49:46] I said, look, my accent is super intense. I'm Indian. These folks have been doing this for many years. They have very different lifestyles. I don't know what I'm doing here. When I moved to Silicon Valley. [49:55] I got no hired by probably four or five different companies. And one of them told me you work for Microsoft, so you don't like you can't really cut it in Silicon Valley because you're from Seattle, which I'll never forget. And, you know, I look at the person from LinkedIn from time to time. I'm very tempted to be like, well, I've got it now. [50:13] I'm very petty that way. And then, of course, and then, you know, when I start running large organizations, you know, like several hundred people or more, I've never done this before. [50:25] that I've not done this before? Like, you know, like, I haven't done this before. And I can tell, and it's every step of the way. So it is, it's every step of the way. And in the beginning, it was quite crippling, but over time you build things to help you. And I think for those listening, if you feel this way, the thing I've learned to do is, [50:42] you have to kind of retreat to a place where you feel real mastery of. So for example, when I was at Microsoft, I was like, well, I don't speak the language very well, English and I had an accent, etc. But I knew that I was the most online developer person out there. I knew every single online community. I was very plugged into open source. So in every meeting, when the topic would come to like, hey, what is happening Ruby on Rails? I was like, I know this better than everybody else. So I learned to put together a presentation, because then you start with the base of something

[51:12] comfortable in and you build from that. And what you realize when you build from that is you're like, oh, actually, you know what? People really respect that and they react to that. And I also learned not to do other things. Like for example, for them for years where I would listen to people from like a certain academic background or I wish I could do slide decks like they could, or I wish I could like, you know, have these intentional, but I was like, that doesn't really matter. You just need to come from a place where you are confident you've done the work. So if [51:42] walking to a meeting, just think about, okay, this is a place where I know I spent so many nights and weekends and can be super tiny. It can be like one little button, one, one customer, but you've done the work. You've had multiple conversations. It is protein, right? And you start from there, you talk about that and you build up from that and you will feel comfortable. So I've done that in like pretty much every role now. And I still catch myself. [52:12] at that time were like founders, like it's not our friend circle. They all worked in like medium to big companies. My family, nobody has ever been a founder or entrepreneur. It's not a thing. And so when I started this, I was like, oh, my God, I'm making a mistake. But then you read all these people tweeting or writing posts being like, if you're a founder, you'll be really good at like fundraising. This is like, you know, best founders learn how to. I sucked at fundraising. I was so bad at it. It is like it was just like, oh, you know, you have to be able to tell your story. [52:41] I tried like, you know, I think we had like I've emailed like 250 founders, took 85 meetings and like 50 plus second meetings and then got like 30 checks. Like this was like my seed round, which took like eight months to close or something. And I was like, oh, my God, I'm so bad at this. I should just give up right now. And then I was like, I started building this this startup and I was like.

[53:04] Actually, I'm really, really good at understanding customer acquisition and like really trying to find creative ways to cheaply acquire customers. And I kind of started like putting together. [53:15] playbooks on like what I can go do there and I tried this I tried this and I started talking to few of our own investors and I'm like I don't know if your portfolio companies you are finding this useful but I tried these tactics and they were like oh my god I'd never heard of that and so I realized that that's the one place I could be really good at and I can grow my business in a really profitable way very quickly and then like investors started like talking to me about like other companies and all of that stuff and it became like a thing and that helped me get more [53:45] other things. I can do these few things. And this is really, really important to like build a sustainable business. And I think I can do that. And that for me, like kind of helped me get over it. It's not anyone telling me, don't worry, you'll be good at it. Like that never helped. It was just, I had to do it myself to figure it out. It's interesting. Both of your pieces of advice is find the thing you're actually good at. And then just lean into that as much as possible. That's something I learned from an executive coach I worked with once that you have strengths, you have weaknesses, you can accomplish almost all the things you want to accomplish through [54:15] through the lens of the strengths, [54:17] without using those weaknesses as much. Right. And that really was pretty transformative. That's actually such a profound point. And I wish somebody had told me that earlier in my career, because I would get early to make it, I would get all these advice like, oh, she comes too loud and too boisterous. And the thing is, nobody I know has ever become successful by trying to fix their weaknesses. It's just impossible. The only way you, you know, you succeed is one, you might need to mitigate some of them, especially if they're really, really holding you back, but you have to lean into your strengths. So which is kind of a weird thing, because I think when we

[54:47] do performance feedback, it's feedback and so much time. We're like, well, these are all the good things. And then let's talk about the ways you can improve. It's almost a flip time. And I think if you're doing performance feedback, you're like, well, these are things you're really good at. Let's make you even much better at that, right? Like, let's make you fly faster, run harder, right? Close the deal, write better code. Oh yeah. And some people are mad at you for these things. You should watch it and maybe fix some of it really bad, but that's not what's going to pull you ahead. It's the superpowers that's going to really pull your heads. Let's focus on that. [55:17] you want to like... [55:18] The weaknesses can't be liabilities. You can't just get on stage and melt and explode. But you don't have to be amazing as long as you can email really well, write documents really well, communicate in other ways if that's a strength. One last trick while we're on this topic, I was just reading Hunter Walk's blog and [55:32] He shared a cool trick for imposter syndrome where you just have to ask yourself, am I so good at pretending that people don't see like what's actually happening? Like, am I actually that good to being this imposter? Like, probably not. People can tell. And it's really unlikely you're actually an imposter. [55:46] Also, by the way, the reality is, and it's a cliche, is people are just not thinking about you, right? That's true. Yeah, you're giving yourself, you're giving other people too much credit that they are, everyone's focused on somebody else. Everyone's so busy focusing on themselves and their own insecurities and fear and just like living life. And like, you know, like think about ourselves. Like when's the last time we thought about somebody else and be like, that person is. [56:09] probably an imposter like we just don't have the time for it i've been thinking about me this whole time i am not surprised it is hilarious this um there's something i will actually along these lines i was gonna ask about i remember shriam when you were just getting out of the companies you worked at you kind of made this point that you you were like an ic and you were in these meetings where people are reviewing your work and they're like making decisions and you're the person presenting and then all of a sudden you're the person reviewing all the work and making the

[56:39] where you're like, "Oh my God, I'm that person they're looking for for all these answers." [56:43] and [56:44] I'm curious just how you work through that and what advice you'd have for people that are maybe going through that transition. [56:49] Yeah, it's a good question. First of all, it's kind of a jarring change because you realize, well, I have power, but I'm also like called upon to do a bunch of things because no meeting let's, let's call it an executive. Let's say, and you are the executive presenting, right? It doesn't really matter what your title is. You know, all of a sudden you're having to do a bunch of things. You're making decisions, but you're also providing feedback sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly. You might piss off somebody by naming somebody and not naming the other person. You might piss off somebody by not inviting them to the meeting. You might have to feel like, well, I really want to overrule this. [57:18] person but if i do they might get mad at me and there are so many different things which you have to you know keep in your head as well as like is this the right path for the team for the company or whatever the situation is and it can be really overwhelming and you know i learned a lot of how to do great exec reviews from my time at facebook from zuck and from andrew bosworth andrew bosworth boss has some great posts on the site boss.com about how to do reviews and i'm trying to get him on this podcast by the way he's great he's fantastic uh let me know when you have some

[57:48] had a few ways of thinking first of all let's talk with zock i think i loved about zock's executive use was that [57:54] Thank you. [57:55] it was clear when you walk in the room that you are talking to one of the most powerful people on the planet right but what he did which not a lot of other people in his position do is he would tell you what the rules of engagement were for every meeting or invitation he'd be like look i'm going to give you a spectrum of a how much i care about this topic everything from i don't care i don't know why you're talking to me do i kind of care a little i kind of care so i'm happy you're getting this update do i really want you to do this but you know what if you overrule me that's fine all the way to like [58:22] I'm the founder, I'm the CEO, just do this. Right. But he will make it clear where he stood on the spectrum. The second thing he would make clear is why he believed the things he did. Like, for example, you know, the very first time I pitched him on what is the Facebook audience network, and which grew into like probably one of the largest ad networks on mobile, he had all these stuff, you know, ideas. He was like, well, I don't, I was like, I wish you to do an ad network because and he had all these opinions on, well, mobile ads look terrible. They are spammy x, y, and z. [58:52] those to you and also saying like, well, if you can prove me wrong on these legs of my logic tree, I will let you overrule me unless, you know, I have a strong opinion. So you could, when you walk to the meeting, you're like, well, I know the framework. I know what the dance is to convince him or maybe there's no shot of convincing, but that's fine. Now his name, he's a CEO and that's fine too. So I didn't know that. So it's so important to clarify for your [59:13] team, the framework you're operating in with you. And it also may be a clarifying function for yourself. So how do you actually feel about this and why do you feel that? That's number one. The second part of it is.

[59:22] Uh, inside a meeting is, there's a few things I think you need to do, which is like clarify what kind of meeting is it? Is it just an update? Great. We're just going to get an update. I'm going to listen to you. I'm going to applaud you for a job well done. I'm going to send you on your way. Or is it a decision in which case, what are the pros cons, uh, et cetera. The, there's some real big failure modes where one kind of meeting slides into another kind of meeting where somebody's like, why are we doing that? You know, is that a thing? And then somebody else starts fighting on and people are like, oh gosh, like we should have brought this topic at all. [59:52] meetings. There's also something else which teams sometimes like to do, which is, hey, we have a hard problem. You don't know what to do. And they'd be like, they're trying to kind of push the responsibility of the nation from them to you, which may be fine. But if you want to, you want to be like, yeah, you should be like, hey, are you saying that you can't make up your mind and you want me to make up your mind for you? You're really explicit, right? Because often you like, I've seen this when they're hard decisions, teams are like, ah, the exec feels wrongly, [1:00:22] watch out for that a lot uh there are a lot of hygiene things we think are very important for example send out a pre-read before make sure the right kind of people the right people in the room not everybody but not missing out key people make sure you're paying complete attention make sure everyone gets a chance to talk which i believe i was really bad at um and uh you know those things go a really long way oh and one final thing have a regular rhythm to those so you're doing this

[1:00:52] meetings. [1:00:53] right all of us have been this right which is like there's a big thing there's a big review it's probably a go no go maybe it's career limiting maybe it'll get our team funded and everyone's stressed out you spend two weeks working on a deck and the first 20 minutes the condition goes totally sideways because that exact thought of something every one of us has been one of those [1:01:09] Those are bad, right? Like the way to fix that is to have like a regular checking. So you have meeting every single week and becomes like you're not spending weeks. It's a muscle. It's the rhythm of what you do. And those are. All right. Sorry, I went on a bit of a speech. But I was thinking about is you two have worked at basically all the big consumer companies. And coming back to imposter syndrome briefly, what's like the worst product you've built or the biggest failure you've each built? And what did you learn? Oh, man. [1:01:36] startup style uh start for you at a startup [1:01:39] I tried all kinds of things, right? Like we just kind of grasped at straws and build whatever. So I remember, and also I think you, I felt kind of victim to, you know, [1:01:50] Like a lot of startups do this where they'll see some theme that has become a meme with investors and they'll be like, I'm going to go build that company. Like, I'm just going to like take the technology, adopt it. And now like you're kind of start off seeing that with like AI now, where it's like everything's now an AI company. Of course, like everyone's incorporated AI. Part of it is like, you get it, like you kind of sort of like want to be in the game and be cool. But if it doesn't really fit with your product hypothesis and thesis and what your customers are asking for, don't fall for that fad. [1:02:20] for the fad. I think I had like a consumer electronics e-commerce, you know, like a

[1:02:26] machine learning model where we like rent and then recommend the right things to go by. But then we were like, Oh, Uber is like doing this whole like, Uber x thing where it was like people having their cars and they could like do this thing. And I was like, Well, and at that time, I think this whole like, shared ownership of stuff became such a big thing. And I was like, Oh, I'm going to do that exact thing. [1:02:56] own stuff that they could like put up on the side. Total disaster because there is a lot totally different company logistics everything that you could build it out as like a different business, but we had a small team. [1:03:09] which was heavily focused on this business, was already doing pretty well. And then we had to fork all of that effort to go build this other thing, which required different skill set, different fulfillment technology and all of that. And so we were like, okay, disaster. So we pulled the plug on it many months in, but we should have done it a lot sooner. What'd you learn from that experience, other than pulling the plug sooner? Yeah, don't fall for fads. It's like, do the thing that your customers are asking for and are willing to pay for, [1:03:39] that is working don't get distracted and it just it's very easy to be like I'm gonna build this five other things and it's all going to like accrue value and I literally talked to another founder last week where they're like but I'm I'm building this consumer thing but I'm also going to do this SDK so I can go partner with these other companies and do this B2B thing and I'm like I'm

[1:03:59] But you are four people. Why are you doing that? That's crazy. Like, but imagine catering to 10x the market. Like, well, but you're going from, you know, a consumer payments thing to something like Stripe. And that's like a very different business. So do you want to go do that and go have that like trade off conversation? So yeah, that was one big learning at Netflix. We tried this out. We knew it was an experiment. This was like before Netflix was cool. Like 10, 11 years ago, where like DVD phase? [1:04:28] Yeah, so my job was to build like the streaming player software. That goes, yeah, it was my job was to go partner with like Samsung and Sony and Panasonic and build a software, the SDK that goes into like TVs and set up boxes and Blu-ray players. This is before like international Netflix and original content like House of Cards and all of that. But one of the experiments we tried back then was Netflix 3D. [1:04:54] Total disaster. Like on 3D TVs? That was another fat issue. Exactly. Yeah. But we had a lot of OEMs who were like, 3D is going to be really big and you have to go invest in that. So I spent months trying to do this, like left eye, right eye codec and trying to make this whole thing work with these odd glasses, sitting in your living room, trying to do 3D content. [1:05:24] such a great experience and we ended up like pulling the plug on it that one was like we knew it was an experiment going in we knew there was like a good exit criteria but it did like it was kind of a failure sure i bet you're gonna have a really good one

[1:05:37] All my products were huge successes, so I have nothing. The other way is going to go. Yeah, what are you talking about? No, I'll say... [1:05:44] Part of the very first thing I worked on, and it's complicated because I love the team and I think we did some great work, was we worked on something called Visual Studio for Devices. And the idea was... What was it? Wishlist for what? [1:05:54] Oh, sorry. Visual Studio for devices. Oh, coding on your phone. Yeah. Well, no, no. And the idea was this was before iPhone. This was the era of Windows Mobile Pocket PCs and Windows Mobile smartphones. [1:06:24] slimmed on version of the.net framework, and you would run apps on these small phones and the small pocket PCs. And the team was fantastic. They're all still friends. And without that, we don't have our jobs or carriers. So that's not the point. The point is, we all knew these phones were terrible and slow and awful. But what we're told all the time was, listen, nobody can change this because the carriers control this market. They determine what software goes on a phone, goes on a device. [1:06:54] The code name for Windows Mobile 5.0 was Crossbow and kind of a little secret, which I think kind of public now, Crossbow was a weed killer. It killed Blackberries. And so the whole idea was how do you kill enterprise? How do you kind of go after the enterprise market Blackberry and work with the carriers, right?

[1:07:12] And then in 2007, C-Draws comes out and says, I have three launches for you. Actually, it's one thing. Right. And that I remember texting my manager that I was like, you have to see this keynote, right? Because it was so obvious that this thing was going to change everybody. And everyone in Microsoft was like, no, you know, it's the, it's the carriers of all the control. Like they will never let these devices, but actually it turns out that's not true. I learned two lessons from that. [1:07:35] One is [1:07:37] you know, the market is bigger than all of you. You can work with the amazing team, you can work with the A plus team, A plus company, but if the market shifts, you can't overcome a bad market or a bad space. The second part is at the heart of it, if you feel some product is bad, and if you feel like this new thing, it's just better to use, and you can just feel it instantly, you have to follow the instinct. Because I remember like, yeah, the iPhone is cool, it feels so much better, but okay, maybe they're right. Maybe, you know, it is the, you know. All these people are so much more [1:08:07] like put so much more thought into this. [1:08:09] clearly like what do I know kind of thing. And you kind of realize that like now I think over the you know what we've done product for 15, 16 years now. And we look at it and go like we now have these patterns to go match against. We know when something's like better, when something is working, when something feels like it's intuitive. [1:08:29] you kind of follow that intuition now then and not try and fight it and be like but here are all these things where [1:08:35] this is not going to get there kind of thing. Like it just doesn't work that way. The market ultimately wins. [1:08:40] And I think when you're younger, you should really trust your instincts. And instincts can mean, I just hear people talking about this thing, this other thing a lot. Right. Or I hear that other companies name come up a lot. Or I tried this thing and and you may not have the framework to articulate it and you may not trust your instincts, but there's something there. And you should learn to listen to that. Why? Why is that? What we're talking about? Maybe they're doing better marketing. Right. Maybe their CEO is better on Twitter or, you know, they have Lenny Ratchitsky as an angel investor.

[1:09:10] And, you know, all the other things on your podcast. There we go. I try to get a plug in there, Danny. And you have to sort of listen to your instinct because you don't know there's usually something there to follow. I only have two more questions. One is you mentioned framework. I know you have strong opinions on a very specific framework, jobs to be done. And I know you're not a fan. What do you want to share about why you don't like jobs to be done as a framework? [1:09:36] All right. [1:09:37] I knew you were gonna ask me this. And I thought, you know, I was thinking like, how do I be, you know, kind of balanced, bombastic, no, no, no, balanced and give like a measured answer. And, you know, say, well, every framework is good and bad ways. And, you know, there are good things and bad things. And, you know, I could probably give one of those answers. No, I actually think the more fun thing to do is I'm going to say, I hate jobs to be done. I think it's a terrible framework. I think no successful company has ever been built on top of JDBD. [1:10:07] jdbd are probably doomed and here's why because jdbd assumes that uh let's go back to the canonical example right and there's nothing including who was a legend you know amazing what the milkshake right what is the idea of being the milkshake you you are a person you go into a commute and you're like hey i'm going to you know i'm going to get this milkshake because it's the exact right uh quantity and you save me on my commute but they changed it up and all of a sudden boom like you

[1:10:37] Actually, it is serving the customer for. [1:10:39] I'll tell you that's not how actual real companies work, right? Because in real companies, there are so many different parameters. For example, maybe it is really, really hard to go build that milkshake, right? Maybe there's another person who opens up across the street who builds a better milkshake than you do. Maybe the cup configuration in the car changes. Maybe the supply chain for milkshake changes, right? But in my world, let me make this more concrete. When you work in social media, there are often so many other agents in the system where you can't focus on one person's equation. I'll give you an example. [1:11:09] up on Facebook for many, many years, Facebook knew that it needed to get you to 10 friends in 14 days. If you got your 10 friends in 14 days, you're probably going to use Facebook. So it'd be like, well, if you're going to throw every tool we have at our disposal, get you to 10 friends in 14 days. So if you sign up on Facebook for many, many years, you'll get this little thing called people you may know. And it'll show you. Then you have this person who just signed up on Facebook. Why are you not seeing this person? It's not because you need a friend. It's not because you need a friend. [1:11:31] It was very different. So what Facebook did was it made your experience slightly worse to make that person's experience slightly better. This was performing no job for you. It was trying to perform a job for them. Was it right trade off or not? I don't know. We had this problem at Twitter. The single best product launch for the last five years at Twitter was the introduction of the algorithmic ranking. Um, uh, algorithmic ranking. God hearsay. Oh my God. And, uh, it saved the company and power users hated it.

[1:12:01] I know who to follow, et cetera, et cetera. It turns out though, this is not built for power users. It was really built to get for a regular person when they sign up for Twitter, to be able to give them a great experience because we didn't have the power users they already have. And by the TikTok, it's a great example of that. So how do you make a trade-off? Do you pick power users or do you pick a regular person? What is the trade-off between them? Jobs we done does not tell you that, right? In fact, that even worse, if you go sign up for, let me tell you this. If you go look at, if you go order a package from Amazon right now, you know, five years ago or three years ago, you [1:12:31] and it's been showing up during the last couple of years, it doesn't. Why? Because Amazon doesn't want Google to have that data inside Gmail's system. So it is, you know, for very, very valid competitive reasons, trying to make your experience worse, because that's the right thing to do for a company. So real life and real product is all about these trade-offs. And whenever I've seen people trot out JTBD, it's a tell that they actually haven't dealt with a trade-off, where you have to make one person's life slightly worse in one situation for some other interesting dynamic. Okay, I'll stop with my mini speech. [1:13:01] This is my favorite part of the podcast so far. I'm hoping people listen to the end here because this is a lot of fun.

[1:13:19] especially product building at scale. I think it might work for like the V1 or just like a hypothesis that you're trying to go test out where it's like, what is the core value that we're trying to serve for this user kind of thing. But really, like, you know, V2, V3, it kind of falls apart because you have these super hard trade offs that you have to make and every company goes through that. So it's almost a little too idealistic in its thinking. I think that's like the [1:13:42] biggest problem with it yeah look i was i was being a bit bombastic obviously you know and it does have some we're gonna edit this part out this is we know blah blah blah blah right you know it may be useful in some niche case which nobody's ever heard about right for milkshakes yeah if you're starting a milkshake company go for it but i i'll say so people have a good following like what is the [1:14:02] right if not jdbd like how do we actually figure this out and i think a much better way and i really want to the early facebook years which is systems thinking right think of all the players in the system think of all of their incentives and how they interact with each other so in that milkshake example your car the person the competitor across the road the supply chain the margin profit margin of each person the podcast they have to listen to what is each person's incentives that you're trying to drive and look at how they all work together so in the [1:14:32] with a rankings case, sure, it kind of [1:14:34] deprioritize a certain set of people, but it priorities other set of people. And you could then have a much more rational discussion about whether that trade off is worth it, right? Maybe it is, maybe it is not, but it's a much better discussion that, well, that person want to make sure we're not giving them a little sick. Like, what do we do? That doesn't help you at all. And yes, it may be a good tool in ways that I absolutely have not seen so far, but.

[1:14:54] Also, the other tool I think I really like is first principles thinking, you know, it's it's it's everyone throws it out there. It's kind of become this cliche now, but really think about it as if your product didn't exist. And if you had to start over from scratch, would you build it the exact same way for these set of customers? How would you think about it? Oftentimes people focus hyper focused on competition and what other companies doing. [1:15:17] that almost never matters. Like, you know, companies like other companies are probably looking at you and going, what are these guys doing? And you kind of have to look at it as, you know, all of these systems as Sridharam said, but also really think about it as [1:15:30] If you had to do this all over again, what, how would you do this? Like, is this the right way? Or are you kind of just inheriting decisions over time and just trying to make incremental changes and trade offs and stuff like that? Yeah, like I like that way more than like trying to think of it as a job that the customer hires you to go do. It just sounds like really naive. It just it just makes you feel it makes you sound smart, I think. But I'll give you an example, right? Sorry, I have to stop. Samples is good. Let's see what I'm going to do. Okay. [1:16:00] One of my favorite posts from Lenny in the recent times, I don't know when this episode is going to go out, is a Duolingo growth post. I have been sharing it all the time. It's actually one of the best posts I've seen recently on the product. [1:16:10] What is the job that people are hiring Duolingo to go to? Help teach them a new language, right? That sounds about right, some version of that. But if you look at the post, what actually saved the company? So they tried dozens of different things, found their North Star metric, you know, the current user retention rate. Then they tried leaderboards, realized why leaderboards don't work. Then ultimately it is tricks that worked out, right? Tell me where, how do you use jobs to be done to get to a world where like,

[1:16:40] emojis and you need to kind of get that fire emoji every day because what it's really getting at is the sense of motivation right so you know there is no jpbd brainstorming off-site that will ever get you there and one of my what i've seen typically is almost always when you get a great product breakthrough like that it comes from some one person usually having a product intuition about something about the psychological thing the product delivers and systems thinking those are the only [1:17:10] going to talk about how I've actually found it a little useful in my life but I think that's just going to keep us I was just going to ask you are you now convinced Lenny because freedom has spent 45,000 minutes just trying to tell you why you should not be I'm just going to get cancelled by Lenny's audience and Lenny's audience like this is a reasonable podcast like I don't hate this guy right like you know I'm ready to get it I think the uh JTBD uh industrial complex is going to come after you it's all mafia I think if you see a bunch of mass unsubscribes I just want to say [1:17:40] This is unfair. Okay, great. I'll just get from your podcast. Yeah, I'm going to get attacked by a bunch of, you know, people who are really good at holding offsites and, you know, framework. Yeah. Like, I think I find it useful in, like, specific cases, not, like, as a scaled product development process, which I think what you've run into, or just a whole company is run by job to be done, right? Every one paper is, like, what is the job? And you're like, the job is to get them to open it up three times more each day. It's not a problem. [1:18:06] Yeah. Okay. I know you guys have to run, so I have one more question.

[1:18:10] I have this kind of saying in my family that whenever we do something well, I'm like, we're making it in America because we also immigrated from the Ukraine. And as immigrants, you talked about your story. [1:18:19] of coming to America and clearly making it. You're kind of both at the center of, I don't know, what's happening in tech, which is also at the center of the world in many ways. [1:18:29] I'm curious what advice you would give to immigrants and people that have moved here recently or even a while ago, just like how to make it and be successful in the U.S., especially in tech. [1:18:37] some of it sure i'm covered before it's like put yourself out there don't be afraid to put yourself out there oftentimes like for us it took us a decade plus to kind of feel comfortable doing that because we came in we look different we sound different we have strong accents you the number of times i got told at both startups and before then like oh my god your accent is so like it's so difficult i can't hear you you know or i don't understand what you're saying i got told uh i'm [1:19:05] before fundraising that, you know, nobody will be able to invest in my company because the accent is too strong. Like there are all these like, [1:19:13] you already have these barriers in like virtual barriers in your own head and then it's then you have like people coming and telling you actively that you are different and you can succeed i almost now if i had to do it all over again i almost think these differences are kind of what sets us apart and makes us unique and uh you can do really interesting things with them because [1:19:32] you are you are going to a place where you are rare and uh and that's i think a really good thing so you should kind of like sharpen that rareness and do really interesting things with it whatever that might be we have this show called good time show it's arithian shuram's good time show and we focus a lot on outsiders being insiders or how you started out as like for us you know

[1:20:02] being in this world and we kind of made it quote unquote to being here. And we often talk about like what it takes to like do that and whatever your version of being outsider and becoming an insider means. Right. And for us, you know, part of it is like not being afraid to put yourself out there out of cold emails. [1:20:19] networking and being really proactive about that. [1:20:23] What would you add to that? Or how do you think about it? I think everything I said, I don't have much to add. I'll just say, if you're listening to this and you're a immigrant, A, you're the right place. B, you're listening to this podcast, leading this newsletter, which is probably not your day-to-day job. So you're already doing something right. So you're going to make it. You're already putting yourself out. You're doing the right things. You're going to make it. What a beautiful way to end it. Two final questions. Where can folks find you online, the Good Times show and you're on Twitter or wherever? And then how can listeners be useful to you? [1:20:50] too they can find us online jdbd sucks no no uh sorry uh that's my all uh no no the the uh day well uh we are on pretty much every platform we are arty and sriram.com so go uh that's kind of a home for our podcast uh uh our show but to go subscribe there but uh you know you can find us everywhere we are on youtube at again arty and sriram you can find us on spotify podcast matter

[1:21:20] Also on Twitter and RDR and Sriramke. [1:21:24] Amazing. How can people be useful? Yeah, yeah, yeah. [1:21:27] Uh, I would say, you know, this is going to sound like a cliche, but my job is fantastic in a way where if people are building amazing things, I benefit because if you build amazing things, odds are you're going to build a great company or, and then odds are that I'll have the chance to maybe invest or one of my partners will have a chance to invest and hopefully you make a bunch of money out of it. So just go out there and build things. Tell me about the things you're building [1:21:57] If you listen to this, send me a DM, send us a DM and send us an email and we will respond. If it is JTBD, just send it to him, not me. Just keep me out of it. But for everything else, if it's a nice note, especially send it to me. I will read it. [1:22:13] all right yeah we'll be ready for some dms both of you thank you again for being here set the bar high for our first duo guest thank you again and uh goodbye everyone [1:22:24] Thank you. [1:22:46] See you in the next episode.