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

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 JD B. And if you pick JD B, 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 to get you to 10 friends in 14 days. So if you sign up for Facebook for many, many years, you get this little thing called People youe May Know. And it'll show you. Then you have this person who just signed up for Facebook. Why do I'm seeing this person? It's not because you need a friend, because they need a friend. 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. Today, for the first time ever, I've got two guests: Arthi Rama Murthy and Sriram Krishnan, both former product managers who've, between them, worked at basically every major tech company, including Netflix, Meta, Snap, Twitter, Microsoft, even Clubhouse. Sriram is now a partner at a16z. They're actually married, and both individually amazing. Together they host the Arthi and Sriram Good Time Show, which started on Clubhouse, it's now on YouTube, and famously they had Elon Musk on back in the day, which led to Clubhouse's crazy rocket ship growth, which we definitely touch on. This episode is definitely the most fun conversation I have had yet on this podcast. We cover all kinds of areas, including this trend of techno optimism, building your network, creating content online and how to go about doing that, 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 work from our select sponsors. 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 2 compliance. SOC 2 is a way to prove your company is 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. SOC 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 SOC 2, There's a good chance you won't even get a seat at the table. But getting a SOC to your port 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. Just go to vanta.com/lenny. That's V-A-N-T-A.com/lenny to learn more and to claim your discount. Get started today. 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 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. Dovetail allows you to quickly analyze customer data from any source and transform it into evidence-based insights that your whole team can access. If you're a product manager who needs insights to motivate your team, a designer validating your next big or a researcher who needs to analyze fast. Dovetail is the collaborative insights platform your whole team can use. Go to dovetailapp.com/lenny to get started today for free. That's dovetailapp.com/lenny. Arti and Sri Ram, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you. Thanks so much for having us, Lenny. You know, this is a bucket list thing because we are on Lenny's podcast.

I know, long time subscriber, listener, and now here, wow, this feels like I don't want to screw this up. First time caller. Yeah, 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 going to have a lot of fun. So again, thanks for joining me here.

It's awesome.

Big fan.

Yeah, honestly, yeah, this is, I'm excited. So I don't know if you remember this.

I was thinking about this story back when you were doing the Good Time Show. You invited me on the Good Time Show and I was like thinking, hesitating, like, I don't know, that'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 and I was like, I'm not, I'm never gonna make it back on there. And so I kind of look back at that as like, ah, I hesitated too long.

That's a lesson. 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 let me get it. No, but seriously, we've been a huge fan. And those are like just, you know, the fun times. We used to do the show obviously on Jess Clubhouse. And now we do the show on YouTube. Every, every, every, wherever 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 who were working technology, who are not as famous, you're obviously very famous now, but who really connected with the audience. But yeah, you know what? That's why we have you back on the show now.

There you go. It all worked out. Speaking of Elon, I was always curious, how did you actually get him on the show? I remember that was back before he was very vocal. in the world and he was like hard to learn from and hear from. How did you actually pull that off?

Well, I think it's actually kind of similar to how a lot of good things in my career happened, which is I just had a conversation on the internet. I have this whole thing where I do think a lot of people trying to 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 something from the company. And I think he kind of went through the org chart and he DM'd me, and I was like, well, I'd love to help you. And he sent me his phone number. And I called him, and I was like, this is Sridhar. 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 Elon 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 game.

And, you know, the rest is history. Amazing. I love that Elon just DMed you. Shrim, split into his DMs.

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. The club was closed.

But also on Clubhouse, like if you opened the Clubhouse app that day, there were so many rooms that were trying to collect questions for us.

Yeah, I remember that.

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, 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.

And we were like, we are not those people that you think we are. 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, Arthy, you worked at clubhouse for a while. 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 Mark Andreessen and eventually Elon other people. And that was such a smart way to get people to get in there and want to get in 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, yeah, yeah. I mean, all good questions here. I think growth strategy, that's a great 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 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 Noel and they were not doing this out of like any, you know, They were really, really interested. Like when we got invited by Mark and Mark was like, check out, like this is way before they, like in a16z even invested in it. It was like, this product is amazing. These folks are like doing something really cool. This is gonna be the future. It's amazing. So it gave them a platform to go speak out and live social audio just made a ton of sense, right? I will say, Clubhouse, I feel like they get this unfair attention and criticism. It's a, what, three year old startup? And 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 what we were doing. So I feel like founders just need some time to breathe in and kind of figure out what to go do. So I'm bullish on Clubhouse. I think they'll figure it out. And Paul and Rohan are like great, great founders. They've been doing 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? 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 Wei's status of service. Eugene should absolutely be on on your podcast someday. That'd be awesome. And I know it's a 10,000 word piece, which is amazing and highly so people did it. But one of the key takeaways from the piece is the idea that when you have a new network, think of it as a new country, you want 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 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 mute 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. For example, they often each had a breakout set of stars who are unique to the platform. For example, if you look at, say, Snapchat, you had folks like Kylie Jenner who really broke out first. If you look at Instagram, I would think the rock, you know, Cristiano Ronaldo, a lot of others are organic to Instagram. But let's see, let's see you get to TikTok. One of the things you'll see is a lot of the folks from the Instagram world really moved to TikTok. And there's a couple of reasons. One, they didn't really need to because they were already popular on some of these other existing platforms. But two, TikTok actually took advantage of a different set of skill sets. You know, people who are 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 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 time by clubbers, I think one of the interesting things is like, I think the celebrities are super interesting. 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 show if it wasn't for clubbers. 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, interesting people from elsewhere, but you also need homegrown talent. And by the way, you are a perfect example of this phenomenon because you are Substack's homegrown talent. And I think you bring a lot of value to Substack and a lot of people with huge newsletters, et cetera. But I think your rise and your sort of popularity is so tied to Substack now, and that's I think a great example of all of this.

Yeah, it reminds me the founder of Musically, who, you know, 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 in 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 another platform that want to do.

Well versus like the people already killing it. Lenny just called himself the king of Substack, right?

Yes, I know. You're the king.

You're the king of America's.

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- 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 like, Tech positive. And I think that's something that you two are at the forefront of is this kind of trend. I don't know if it's called techno optimism. Maybe there's another term for it. 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? I think I can just stab at it. Look, I think it's also very personal to our context and our upbringing, right? Like, you know, for us, Sheram 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? Like in our both are in both our cases, our parents bought us our first computers of 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.

That's amazing.

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. And so it's for like 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 to 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 has like uplifted people, careers, lives, but also just from like what we've been able to work on, what we've seen our friends work on and ship and put out there, it has dramatically moved 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 right over as things are getting worse, 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. 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. 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 Aarti said. If it wasn't for tech, we wouldn't be here, we wouldn't be doing this. I suspect a lot of folks who are listening to this wouldn't be able to listen to it, 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 the age 25 to the time he retired. and there was really no easy path out for him. And I missed like, hey, if he was born 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 30-40 years ago. And that's all from technology. So I think that's at the heart of it. It's the best thing we have of getting ahead.

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. Oh yeah.

I'll give you one small example. You want to joke about kings from Europe, et cetera. If we just go back 100 years, the piece of hardware that a king or a royalty would use or a rich person would use would be so different from what a peasant would use. But you know what? I suspect the phone that you and I have is probably the same phone that I know it's the same phone that 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 very high-end Android device, they have access to the same internet. You go to google.com, google.com doesn't know your net worth. It gives you the same results. ChatGPT doesn't know how rich you are. It may not like you, but it doesn't know how rich you are. And that is, if you just think.

Of all these concepts, they're just impossible technology.

But anyway, that's a whole other conversation.

Yeah, I, I, I love that, that the richest people have the same phone as me and nothing they could do about it. Something else you two are really good at is building a network, building community, building personal brands. 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 that come to you and like, Hey, I want to build the brand, a personal brand. I want to build a network. just like how to go about doing that, what's worked well for you too.

Sheram 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, 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. That's just how it's going to work. Don't do this whole personal branding and all of that stuff. It's such a distraction. And, you know, that's generally what you're told. And 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 you. It's not up to the company to figure it out for you. It's not up to anybody else. It's just up to you. And I think building a personal brand is 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 sees it, see it as like, what distinguishes you from everybody else? And, 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 and I want to talk about this thing and I want to like, do videos about it or write about it or tweet about it. Like whatever is your forum, you have to put yourself out there.

Yep. I mean, this is probably one of the most important things that somebody can do. And I spent, we spent years slowly climbing the corporate ranks, right? Like we were junior product managers, IC product managers, senior product managers, kind of like slowly climb the ranks and run teams, et cetera. And I spent years just thinking that all I do is kind of put my head down, do my job really well, and that was it. But then I looked around and I suspect a lot of listeners here probably have the same feeling that Some set of people were getting way more opportunities. Some set of people are 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 building a network is very simply we're 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 thing that drives me crazy is when somebody comes and says, 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. Well, what does it mean? Like, I'm here, I'm going to my meetings, I'm kind of doing my day. Like, it's only 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 them. to 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 I who are a couple of interesting people that you should meet with, right? Go talk to your manager and go talk to their peers. Super important by the way, your manager peer relations are super important. Go have a coffee with them and they'll be like, great, I'm allowed to meet this person. Then when I was at, when I joined at Facebook, I was 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, is everyone's a new person? And always ask them the same thing, which I'd be like, I show up, I'll tell them my story, I'll ask for their story. I'll be like, what are you folks focused on? How can I help? Again, no expectation of anything in return. So, and then I'll be like, who else should I talk to? You do this, you do two coffees a week. I literally just ask me 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 places. For example, one, if you ever need help, you're trying to look for a new role, or you're trying to be like, Hey, I want to hire this person, who knows something about this person, or I want a new role, 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, then 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 let them know what's up. And the other key part is expecting nothing in return. Like you really have to go in 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 building relationships. The other part is brand building. Both at the end of different points in our career have gotten feedback, you know, in a job saying, oh, sir, I am the brand build too much, et cetera. I have learned that is terrible feedback and to totally ignore that. And if anybody here isn't receiving another, 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, you know, you're prolific on GitHub, you make a YouTube video, it doesn't really matter, but put yourself out there because the internet rewards people being out there. And what happens when you put it out there, it's a bad signal. It's telling people that, Hey, I'm here. This is my body of work. And you know what the internet does? It'll send amazing people to you. You'll be amazed how often 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. So over the years, I wish I had listened less to people who said.

I should not do this and listened more to the people who said I should do this more. I also think, you know, Shahram keeps saying, Expect nothing in return. I think the other way I see it is, 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 in your nature, it's hard to not feel like, yeah, of course I want to reach out to them. I want to see what I can do to help them. Maybe something good will happen. We'll collaborate on a project together, whatever. 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. 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. Yeah. And that's really stuck with me. And it kind of saves you from 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, no, you can't do that. Like, that's just. It's just doesn't.

Not how that works.

I actually say I actually disagree with Naval on this because often when you're in a, when you're part of a large organization, like it's really hard to do great work and get recognized for it. 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.

He's just like saying create value and put it out there. I don't think it's- yeah, I think putting it out there part is super interesting. And also, I would just say, don't wait to create amazing things. Often just the act of putting yourself out there can just put amazing things in itself. Yeah, 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 masterclass on building a network and networking and things like that. I think what'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 of the most incredible people. I don't know if you talk about this, but you kind of run all these micro communities of incredible people in like, I don't know, crater land and investors and product people and all these people. And so like it actually has worked. Like you may be the most networked 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. I like that. I'll go with that.

I think the thing that, at least with Shrirama, outside of all of the masterclass stuff, which I think he's particularly good at, I think the thing that Shrirama people don't realize about him is he's just inherently incredibly curious about people. He just really just wants to know what somebody else does. who they are, what their story is. And this is not some like, oh, I'm gonna spend 10 minutes letting them talk. I'm gonna spend 10. He often never lets the other person talk, but when he does, he's truly right there. 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-ish 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 builds a network by just wanting to know who these people are.

Thank you. Thank you. Beautiful. The woman I married, ladies and gentlemen, right there. You marry the right person, everything else becomes right. I haven't really talked about this before, but I'll keep some of this slightly hidden, but I think the heart of it is I just, 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 that's smart. Like, Lenny obviously is so much smarter than me at writing a substack newsletter, right? It's just evident. Andrew Huberman is great at like, you know, Brian Armstrong did building a crypto company. All these books is 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 built over the years. I was like, all right, let me just bring interesting people together. So I bring them in, let's just say various kinds of online communities that are probably over like 100 at this point. And I say, okay, you trust me, you trust me, and I make the rules. 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 kind of, I'm a party host. I'm like, okay, listen, nobody's gonna get super crazy over here, but I'm also curating. I'm like, well, I need somebody super thoughtful. I need somebody who's 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 antisocial in person. And then, you know, and some of these just happen over time, right? You put a group of people and they hang out online. And over times, you know, you have 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, 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, Lenny Slack highly, highly recommended. Lenny is great at that. But yours has 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 their jobs or having a divorce or something really personal and intense just because of the shared trust. And I think there's something very heartwarming and fulfilling about being able to facilitate some of that.

I want to dig into that a little bit more. You've built these incredible communities and you talked about a couple. And Arathy, I know you also built Facebook's early community products and Clubhouse, obviously. If you had to pick one or two things you got to get right with a new community that you're just forming, what do you think those two.

Things are or one or two things? Find the niche. 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 like early stage companies. I went through Y Combinator, so I go back to YC as much as I can and like 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 like going to cater to this community. I'm going to build this like world's largest community off this kind of thing. And it almost like starts at this super scaled version, and then they set themselves up for failure. You're almost better off doing these small niche, non scalable things to go find these oddball set of people who are doing this or really interested in this one thing and scale from there and grow from there. And I think that's one big thing that when you're starting to build a community, don't start to build this super scaled community, start with few people who are passionate about a particular problem and want to get together kind of thing. start there. Two, I think people, and this might be like a controversial thing, but I often think people don't think through monetization. If you're like a community builder 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 hit some sort of scale and be like, crap, now what do I do? And then they try all these options. They will have some children, and then they're like, oh no, but I thought this was a very sticky community. I'm 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, Arty, you know, is kind of the creator of Facebook stars and have so much of the thinking there. And I can see it goes super deep on this. I have like a, I, coaching and 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, 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 or church or things which seem like more tangible and people know, 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, what is a vibe? All right, in the sense of, you know, for example, and this is also for 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. And by the way, I think one of the things that Twitter didn't get right in the original 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 Michelin star restaurant where it's sit down or it's a sports bar after the Super 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 about people, you know, and I actually read a bunch of books on like hosting great dinner parties. I actually have some interesting suggestions there. And it'll say like, well, you need a mix, right? You need, you know, for example, in any organization, like let's say you have the VP that everyone knows about, right? But that VP doesn't have the time to maybe participate on a WhatsApp channel or a Slack channel and chit chat all the time or show up everything. 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, 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 thing I like to do 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 happened 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, you know, I'm going to go and like talk to them and you just feel nervous. So I'm like, I'm trying to pick them. I'm like, hey, you know, for example, if you walk in a place and nobody, you didn't know anybody, Lenny's actually very, you know, good at being social, but I'll be like, hey, Lenny has one of the most popular things on Substack and he just wrote blind. 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, religions do a great job of this, which is do something every month. I used to, like, there's a little group I hosted with some of my friends. And during all of COVID we did a Zoom meeting every Tuesday evening. And that was a ritual.

It has nothing. It's just Zoom meeting with a bunch of friends. People would just bring their glass of wine or bring their kids in. And there's no structured agenda, but people started looking forward to it through the pandemic and stuff. And we would be like, oh my God, it's Tuesday. Like, you know, this evening, we're 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, 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 there are interesting points. A four-person dinner, very different from an eight-person dinner, you know, very different from a 20-person thing where people hang out, very different from once you start getting 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 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.

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, or any other BS. Getting enough electrolytes helps prevent and eliminate headaches, muscle cramps, 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, go to drinklmnt.com/lenny, 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/lenny to take advantage of this offer. Stay salty. I want to go back to a topic we touched on that I think is really interesting, which is 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 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, at what point should people start to put things out? How do you know if this is cringy and nobody wants to hear this stuff? Great PM ship. These very cliche things come out. There's hundreds of Twitter accounts, people are just tweeting these things. All right, how do you think about that?

I actually disagree with you. 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 saying this. People have heard me say this for years. And such stuff. Everyone should tweet or everyone should post on YouTube or post on Instagram or, you know, and it doesn't matter how young you are because I actually disagree with a few things, which I think is a great point, which I think a lot of people feel this. One is that you need to have hit a certain bar of accomplishment or interestingness to say something. Strongly disagree with that. Second, that things are cringy. I don't think anything is cringy. I strongly disagree with that too, right? And I think these are both interesting.

Earthy space is great.

I mean, I feel like Ferrum's bar is so low.

This is really important because I think what stops a lot of people is I've had probably 100 plus conversations where somebody who's interviewer comes to come to me and they'll be like, Hey, I want to get on Twitter. I want to write content or I want to start a Substack 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 want to get judged. 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 anybody is, if you just remember one thing from this whole thing is just get started and do something every single day. and this sounds so basic, like, I think I have this running joke where somebody, it's like, it's like diet and exercise is what we say. It's like, we are talking to people about how do you get healthy? And you have, like, you know, so many, like, you know, the 100 different, you know, things you can do or podcast you can listen to. But most of it's like, well, that next. So. And with creating content, that next, 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 medium, and you start understanding what works in that medium and what doesn't and you start building preps. You know who never works out in my opinion is somebody who will think for weeks, build up an amazing tweetstorm, blog post, newsletter, whatever it may be, and then stops. Because 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, you don't have to talk about what you accomplished. You only have to talk about you. And by the way, this is going to sound very fruit-fruit, but you are the best you out there. and so for example, let us say.

You are a 21 year old PM.

Fresh out of school, first year. By the way, you were all that, right? I was a 21 year old PM at one time. Lenny would have been to lots of others. First of all, there are a lot of people who have been through 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.

People.

So when Charlie de Melo 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. I'm just 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 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 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 you, 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, as opposed to being 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.

Like, I, you know, I, I, I agree with you. I agree with you. But I think when people mean cringy, okay, I see this, right? What people mean, think when they say cringy is like, our peer group thinks.

That this content is too bad. Everybody has that, whether you say it.

Out loud or not. Well, I'll give you a straight, right? 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 does. For example, I'll say that Lenny's post the other week from dual lingo is, I was like so jealous. I was like, man, like this is the kind of content I would dream about. It's amazing. Bang on post, right? And, but the problem was when you start doing that, you start censoring yourself. And I would say, I've done a lot of posts over the years and I've clients sound smart. I have a great intellectual framework and some of this work. But you know what my most popular post and tweet storm of all time is, it is how to write a cold email. and you know when I wrote that tweet storm, I was like, man, I'm gonna sound so dumb because everyone 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'll try, I just put myself out there. And what's the worst thing? Somebody thinks you're a moron, that's 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.

I think there's a lot of really good nuggets here.

I think the only area maybe we disagree and we can, we should move on, but this is some, this is too friendly otherwise. Let's just, I just, my feeling is, I think for like helping you do better work kind of content, like entertainment, anyone could do, no problem. You know, you could 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, 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.

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 he you know it, we know it, you probably know it.

But also for that kind of content, everyone can tell, right? Like I think it just comes off as not authentic. And so, I mean, I feel like the universe figures itself out over time, but I do think there is a level of like, 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. I really have appreciation for those folks because it's hard. Like everyone's, I've realized over time that everyone is deeply feeling as if they are 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 every, like one person, it's 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. I'll give you one tiny 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 written this post on LinkedIn, which.

Is full of cringey content, by the way.

Okay, let me say LinkedIn has a lot of cringey content. Wow, look at Drew. Sorry, LinkedIn folks. And it was one of the things where they're like, how do you set product strategy as an organization? And I was like, I called him, I was like, 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. And so he went and wrote this follow-up post on something very niche and that went really popular because the truth is there's not a lot of great content out there. especially great content from people who have actually done the thing. You'd be surprised how niche you can be, but if you've actually done the work, talk to a people, aggregated some posts, people come seek you out and you don't have to do it. So anyway, so yeah, lots of flarping, lots of cringy LinkedIn content for sure.

Just to close this out, I 100% agree with the idea that people should be just trying stuff, writing, sharing stuff on Twitter, LinkedIn, just like get it out of there. Don't like 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 dealt with imposter syndrome?

Oh, yeah, we have. And I still, I don't know about Sharam. Sharam comes off as so much more confident 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 and followers and everything. And we're like, why are we creators? We should just, this is not a 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'll 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, We're not all that bad. That's, I think, okay. So yeah, we go through this a lot. I particularly had, for the longest time, like 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. 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 a hundred percent 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, and this is just, you know, if folks here feel it, every new job I've been in, I've always felt that I didn't deserve to be there. And I mean, a generally, when I was at joined Microsoft, I was, I was a young student. I was like, I don't know anything. These folks are professional. They've been doing the job for years. When I moved to the US, 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, I got no hired by probably four or five different companies. And one of them told me, you work for Microsoft, so you can't really cut it in Silicon Valley because you're from Seattle, which I'll never forget. And I look at the person from LinkedIn from time to time. I very typically be like, well, I've got it now. I'm very petty that way. And then, of course, and then, When I started running large organizations, you know, like several hundred people or more, I was like, I've never done this before. I'm in a meeting, everyone's looking to me. Do they know that I've not done this before? Like, you know, I've done this before, and can they tell? And it's every step of the way. So it just puts you every step of the way. And in the beginning, it is 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 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, et cetera. 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 with Ruby on Rails? I was like, I know this better than everybody else. So, and I learned to put together a presentation. because then you start with the base of something that you feel super comfortable in and you build from that. And what you realize when you build from that is you are 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 there for years where I would listen to people from like a certain academic background or be like, I wish I could do slide decks like they could, or I wish I could like, you know, have these interesting. 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 you folks are listening and you feel in position, right, next time you walk into a meeting, just think about, okay, this is a place where I know I spent so many nights and weekends and it can be super tiny. It can be like one little button, 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 from that and you will feel comfortable. So I've done that in like pretty much every role now and I still catch myself, you know?

Yeah, I think for me, when I was the first time founder, I definitely felt that way. And, you know, there was all this at that time, it was conventional wisdom. And look, none of nobody we knew 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 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 was just like, oh, you know, you have to be able to tell your story. I tried, like, you know, I think we had like, I Dmail 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 startup and I was like, actually, I'm really, really good at understanding customer acquisition and really trying to find creative ways to cheaply acquire customers. And I kind of started putting together playbooks on what I can go do there. And I tried this, I tried this, then I started talking to a few of our own investors and I'm like, I don't know if your portfolio companies 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 investors started talking to me about other companies and all of that stuff and it became a thing. And that helped me get more confidence over time. I was like, who cares if I can't do these other things? I can do these few things and this is really, really important to 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 the strengths, through the lens of the strengths 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 in my career, I would get all these advice like, oh, Shri Ram's 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. which is kind of a weird thing because I think when we 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. I think if you're doing performance feedback, you'll be like, well, these are things you're really good at. Let's make you even much better at that. Let's make you fly faster, run harder, 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. That's not what's going to pull you ahead. It's the superpowers that's going to really pull you ahead.

Let's focus on that. Yeah. The way I think about that is you want to like, 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 like email really well, write documents really well, communicate in other ways if that's the strength. One last trick while we're on this topic, I was just reading Hunter Walk's blog and 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. Like, people can tell, and it's really unlikely you're actually an imposter.

Also, by the way, the reality is, and this is 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're, 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 think about ourselves. When's the last time we thought about somebody else? That person, probably an imposter. 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. There's something actually along these lines I was going to ask you about. I remember Sriyansh when you were just getting out of the companies you worked at, you made this point that 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 decisions. And no one trained you to be that person where you're like, oh my God, I'm that person they're looking for, for all these answers. And I'm curious just how you worked through that and what advice you'd have.

For people that are maybe going through that transition. 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 call an executive, let's say, and you are the executive president. thing too, right? It doesn't really matter what your title is. 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 person, but if I do, they might get mad at me. And there are so many different things which you have to keep in your head as well as like, is this the right path for the team, for the company, or whatever this is. situation is and it can be really overwhelming. And you know, I learned a lot of how to do great executive views from my time at Facebook from Zach and from Andrew Bosworth. Andrew Bosworth Boss has some great posts.

On his site, boss.com about how to.

Do reviews and I'm trying to get him on this podcast by the way. He's fantastic. Let me know when you have some questions. I'll get you to ask him. But boss had a few ways of thinking. First of all, let's start with Zach. I think I loved about Zach's executive views was that It was clear when he walked 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 reputation. He'd be like, look, I'm going to give you a spectrum of how much I care about this topic. Everything from, I don't care, I don't know why you're talking to me, to I care a little, I kind of care, so I'm happy you're getting this update. I really want you to do this, but you know what? If you overrule me, that's fine. All the way to like, 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, the very first time I pitched him on what is Facebook Audience Network, which grew into probably one of the largest ad networks on mobile, he had all these ideas. He was like, well, I wish you should do an ad network because, and he had all these opinions on, well, Mobile ads look terrible, they are spammy X, Y, and Z. But he was really articulating those to you and also saying, 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 me, you're like, well, I know the framework. I know what the dance is to convince him. Or maybe there's no shadow of convincing him, but that's fine. Now his name, he's a CEO, and that's fine too. So I really don't think, so it's so important to clarify for your 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 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 gonna get an update. I'm gonna listen to you. I'm gonna applaud you for job well done. I'm gonna send you on your way. Or is it a decision, in which case, what are the pros, cons, etc. the, there are 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 shouldn't have brought this topic at all. And it's a, everyone listening to this has probably been to one of those meetings. There's also something else which teams sometimes like to do, which is they'll be like, hey, we have a hard problem. You don't know what to do. And they'll be like, they're trying to kind of push the responsibility of the decision from them to you, which may be fine, but if you want, you want to be like, 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 only very explicit, right? Because often you, like, I've seen this when it's other hard decisions, teams are like, ah, the exec feels strongly, we don't know what to do, and they kind of want to push the accountability to you. And you have to watch out for that a lot. There are a lot of hygiene things we think are very important. For example, send out a pre-read before, make sure it's 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. And those things can go a really long way. Oh, and one final thing, have a regular rhythm to those. So you're doing this like every month, et cetera. What I hate, I stole this line from Gokul Raja Ram, is the phrase hero meetings. All of us have been this, right? Which is like, there's a big thing, there's a big review. 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 of condition goes totally sideways because that exact thought of something, every one of us has been one of those. 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 rhythm of what you do. And those are reasons. Sorry, I went on a bit of a speech there, but yeah. What 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, startup style, at a startup, I tried all kinds of things, right? Like we just like kind of grasp at straws and build whatever. So I remember, and also I think you, I felt kind of victim to, 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 gonna go build that company. I'm just going to take the technology, adopt it, and now you're kind of sort of seeing that with AI now, where it's everything's now an AI company, of course, everyone's incorporated AI. Part of it is you get it, you kind of sort of 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. And I did stuff where I totally fell for the fad. I think I had Consumer Electronics, E-commerce, you know, like a machine learning model where we like rent and then recommend the right things to go buy. 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 gonna do that exact thing where it's like it's less, you know, we were at that time, we were partnering with like Best Buy and we were like, well, we should do this other side product, which is like people's own stuff that they could like put up on the site. Total disaster because it is a lot, totally different company, logistics, everything. Like you could build it out as like a different business, but we had a small team which was like heavily focused on this business, was already doing pretty well. And then we were like, had to like fork all of that effort to go build this other thing, which required like different skill set, different fulfillment technology and all of that. And so we were like, okay, disaster. So we pulled the plug on it.

Like 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, right? Like, it's like, do the thing that your customers are asking for and are willing to pay for, or even not even like what your customers are asking for. But if you have something that is working, don't get distracted. And it just, it's very easy to be like, I'm going to 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, but you are four people. Why are you doing that? That's crazy. Like, but imagine catering to 10x the market. I'm 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 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, moving from- yeah, so my job was to build the streaming player software that goes- Not a big deal. Yeah, it was like my job was to go partner with like, Samsung and Sony and Panasonic and build a software, the SDK that goes into TVs and set-top boxes and Blu-ray players. This is before 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. Total disaster.

Like on 3D TVs when 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, like, odd glasses, you know, sitting in your living room, trying to do, like, 3D content, which is really hard. Like, I think we tried, like, seven titles, movie titles over, ported it over to 3D, and I'm like, I don't think this is 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, it was kind of a failure.

If you're wrong, I bet you're going.

To have a really good one. All my products were huge successes, so I have nothing to say. That's the other way I was going to go. Yeah, what are you talking about? No, I'll say probably the very first thing I worked on, and it's complicated because I love the team and I think we've done great work, was we worked on something called Visual Studio for Devices. And the idea was- oh, was it WishList for what?

Oh, sorry, Visual Studio for Devices.

Oh, coding on your phone. Yeah, well, for your phone. And the idea was this was before iPhone. This was the era of Windows Mobile, Pocket PCs and Windows Mobile, smartphones.

And the kids listening to this, like.

What'S he talking about? What was before iPhone? There was some, and this was 2005-2006. So right before the iPhone came out, the two years, and we were fresh out of school. Both of us worked on this. And there was basically an ID Visual Studio, and they had an extension where you could write code on a slimmed down version of the.NET Framework. framework and you would run apps on these small phones and small pocket PCs. And the team was fantastic. They're all still friends and without that we wouldn't have our jobs or careers. 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. So this entire ecosystem is all about competing with Blackberry. In fact, the code name for Windows Mobile 5.0 was Crossbow. And kind of a little secret, which I think is kind of public now, Crossbow was a weed killer. It killed Blackberries. And so the whole idea was how.

Do.

You go after the enterprise market Blackberry and work with the carriers? And then in 2007, Siebel comes out and says, I have three launches for you. Actually, it's one thing. And 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 carrier, so all the control, like they will never let these devices learn. But actually it turns out that's not true. I learned two lessons from that. One is, you know, the market is bigger than all of you. You can work with the amazing team, you can work with A+ team, A+ 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 so much more senior than us, clearly they've like put so much more thought into this. 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, you kind of follow that intuition now then, and not try and fight it and be like, but here are all these things where this is not going to get there kind of thing. Like, it just doesn't work that way. The market ultimately wins.

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 voice. Like, why is that? Why are people talking about it? Maybe they're doing better marketing, right? Maybe their CEO is better on Twitter. Or they have Lenny Rachitsky as an angel investor. Or they advertise on your podcast. There we go. I try to get a plug in there, Lenny. But you have to listen to your instinct because 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?

All right. I knew you were going to 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 has good and bad ways and, you know, there are good things and bad things and, you know, I could have probably given one of those answers. no, I actually think the most 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 JD B. And if you pick JD B, you're probably doomed. And here's why. JD B assumes that let's go back to the canonical example, right? And there's nothing, including Clayton Christensen, who was a legend, you know, amazing, the milkshake, right? What is the idea of being the milkshake? 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 quantity and save me on my commute, but they changed it up and all of a sudden, boom, it was not serving the job and look into the thing that actually it is serving the customer for. 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 milk chain 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. 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 want to throw every tool we have at our disposal to get you to 10 friends in 14 days, So if you sign up Facebook for many, many years, you get this little thing called people you may know. And it'll show you. Then you have this person who just signed up for Facebook. Why do I'm seeing this person? It's not because you need a friend, because they need a friend. 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 on Twitter. The single best product launch for the last five years at Twitter was the introduction of the algorithmic ranking. And it saved the company.

And power users hated it.

They're like, I know how to control my timeline. I know who to follow, et cetera, et cetera. It turns out though, this was 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, really great example of that. How do you make the 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, they're 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, five years ago or three years ago, you got an email which tell you what is that package, what is in it and when it's showing up to your doorstep, last couple of years, it doesn't. Why? Because Amazon doesn't want Google to have that data inside Gmail system. So it is, you know, for very, very valid competitive reasons trying to made 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.

This is my favorite part of the podcast so far. I'm hoping people listen to the end.

Here because this is, I think, yeah, I think Jtbd, the problem with that is it's just too idealistic. Most frameworks are, but this one just takes it up a notch where it's like, it's almost meant for people who are so naive about product building, and 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 biggest problem with it.

Yeah, look, I was being a bit bombastic, obviously, you know, and it does.

Have some- We're gonna get these part out.

This is, we know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right? It's maybe useful in some niche case, which nobody has ever heard about.

Right?

For milkshakes. Yeah, if you're starting a milkshake company, go for it. But I'll say, so people have good followings. Like, what is the alternate, right? If not JD, like, how do we actually figure this out? And I think a much better way And I really want to see 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 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, for example, so then when you look at the algorithmic rankings case, Sure, it kind of deprioritize a certain set of people, but it prioritizes 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 wanted a milkshake. We're not giving a milkshake. 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- yeah, also the other tool I think I really like is first principles thinking. You know, 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 are doing. That almost never matters. 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 Shrey Ram said, but also really think about it is, 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 a 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 are you just you stop one Smp Francis.

Let'S see.

One of my favorite pushs from learnning.

In recent times and know when Zpso' are going to go out is a dual lingo growth push, right? I have been sharing it all the time, which's actually one of the best puss I've seen in these f products, right? What is the job that people are hiring du a linger to go to? Help teach them a new language, right? That example about right, some version of that. But if you look at that Post, what actually saved the company? So they tried dozens of different things, found their North Star metric, the current user retention rate, then they tried leaderboards, realized why leaderboards don't work, ultimately it is streaks that worked out. Tell me how do you use jobs to be done to get to a world where like, hey, we really want to show these fire emojis and you need to get that fire emoji every day because what it's really getting at is the sense of motivation, right? So there is no JWTB brainstorming offsite that will ever get you there. One of my, what I've seen quickly 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 two places I've ever seen it. Okay, I'll stop now.

No, that example is amazing. I was 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 Shriram has spent 45,000 minutes just trying to tell you why you should not be using...

I'm just trying to get cancelled by Lenny's audience. Lenny's audience, this is a reasonable podcast.

I know hate this guy. I think the JTBD industrial complex is.

Gonna come after you.

It's all mafia. I think if you see a bunch of mass unsubscribes, I just wanna say.

This is not on Lenny, this is on you. Yeah, I'm gonna get attacked by a bunch of, you know, People who are really good at holding offsites and, you know, framework thing. Yeah.

I like, I think I find it useful in like specific cases, not like as a scaled product development process, which is, I think what you've run into, or just the whole company's run by job to be done, right? Every one paper is like, what is the job? And then you're like, the job is.

To get them to open that up three times more each day. Yeah.

Okay. I know you guys have to run. So I have one more question. 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 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. 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 US, especially in tech.

Some of it Shiram 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. The number of times I got told at both startups and before then, like, oh my God, your accent is so, it's so difficult, I can't hear you, you know, or I don't understand what you're saying. I got told before fundraising that nobody will be able to invest in my company because the accent is too strong. Like there are all these like, you already have these barriers, 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 you can do really interesting things with them because you are going to a place where you are rare. 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 Aarthi and Shyam's Good Time Show. And we focus a lot on outsiders being insiders or how you started out as like for us, you know, we are quintessential examples of that where it outsiders to tech, to Silicon Valley, to being in this world, and we kind of made it quote unquote. to being here. And we often talk about what it takes to do that and whatever your version of being outsider and becoming an insider means. And for us, part of it is not being afraid to put yourself out there, power of cold emails, networking and being really proactive about that. What would you add to that or how do you think about it?

I think everything Aarti said, I don't have much to add. I'll just say if you're listening to this and you're immigrant, A, you're in the right place. B, You know, 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, right?

You're already putting us 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 Time Show and you on Twitter, wherever. And then how can listeners be useful to you, too? They can find us online. JdBD sucks. No, no, sorry. That's my alt account. No, no, the the Dave. Well, we are on pretty much every platform. We are arthyandstream.com. so go, that's kind of a home for our podcast, our show. But to go subscribe there. But, uh, you know, you can find us everywhere. We are on YouTube at, again, arthyandstream. You can find us on Spotify podcast, wherever you get your daily milkshake slash podcast and, uh, also on Twitter and RTR and Sri Ramkumar.

Amazing.

How can people be useful?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

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 the 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. And also just reach out, right? Just reach out, say hi.

Yeah.

If you're okay, let me, if you listen to this, right? Send me a DM. Send us a DM and send us an email and we will respond.

If it is JTBD hate, 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. Yeah. All right. Yeah. Hope you're ready for some DMs, both of you. Thank you again for being here. You've set the bar high for our first duo guest. Thank you again and goodbye everyone.

Thank you.

Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lenniespodcast.com. See you in the next episode.