Lenny RachitskyHost of Lenny's Podcast | Author of Lenny's Newsletter

Every Company Needs A Labs Team

16 Oct 2026 · 1 min

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1:12

In this monologue, the speaker argues that every company should maintain a dedicated "frontier" or labs team whose primary job is to stay constantly plugged into the latest trends, viral topics, and new model releases across the tech landscape. The team should be heavily subscribed to cutting‑edge tools and services, acting as the organization’s hive‑mind for emerging ideas. The speaker notes that traditional corporate labs often fizzle after three to four years because they fail to commercialize their output, becoming isolated R&D silos that produce gimmicks. To avoid this, the speaker emphasizes the need for an organizational architecture that allows the frontier team to both innovate at the edge and effectively bridge its work to the broader company, ensuring ideas are integrated and commercialized rather than remaining isolated experiments.

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I think every company definitely needs a set of people, a team, however you want to manifest it, that is their job is to be at the frontier. And they're almost like, if they haven't heard about the latest hot thing viral on X in the last 24 hours, it's like, what are you doing at your job? You want people plugged in to like the hive mind of kind of how people are building and thinking and all the model releases. They're the people who have like 8 $200 a month subscriptions on everything. Do you know what I mean? So you have to have. Kind of architect the organization where that can exist. You look at the history, if you just look at the data, a large company who starts a lab, the lab is usually ineffective and fizzles out after about 3 to 4 years, or it may have duration, but the company can never commercialize the things coming out of the lab. I think there is this interesting balance of like, can you have a team of people who live at the frontier, who are building frontier things, But can somehow bridge or connect across the bigger company in a way that it's not, oh, that's just some weird R&D group always coming up with like gimmicks and toys.