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

The Future Of Work Runs On Loops

12 Sept 2026 · 1 min

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1:14

In this interview, Lenny Rachitsky and a co‑speaker explore how the future of company building will increasingly rely on automated "loops" that operate at multiple scales—from individual employees to entire business units and whole enterprises. These loops continuously generate, prioritize, build, ship, and measure experiment variants, allowing organizations to quickly converge on statistically significant solutions and climb toward local performance maxima. The conversation emphasizes that, despite the power of such automated systems, human intuition remains essential because current models struggle with out‑of‑distribution thinking. Humans are needed to recognize when a loop has plateaued, to formulate new strategic directions, and to guide the organization to the next “hill.” A concrete illustration is provided through the growth team model used at Airbnb, showing how loops can systematize experiment cycles but still require human insight to move beyond local optima.

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You have this interesting take that company building more and more is going to become this series of creating loops.
I think we're going to see this sort of cascading set of everything from a loop per person, loop per job function, loop across entire business units to loops that can run large parts of the company. With that said, I think humans are a critical ingredient. I just don't think that most work in the organization can be done fully autonomously. The ability for models to do new thinking out of distribution thinking is still really limited. You're still going to need a person to say, hey, here's the thing I think we should make and have them be right about it. I mean, a great example is a growth team. You worked on the growth team at Airbnb. I don't know how you ran your team, but I'm guessing it was something like you got everyone together, you built a list of possible experiments, you prioritize them, you built them, you ship them, you measure them. The Loop version of that should be that every variant gets generated. Every variant gets measured. Once you get to stat sig with a high enough p-value, you converge and ship that variant. You start working on the next experiment, and then you're going to hit some local maxima. The loop will help you climb to the local maxima, but then it plateaus and you need some sort of out-of-distribution thinking. You need human intuition. You need somebody to actually help you land at the base of the next hill.