The rituals of great teams | Shishir Mehrotra of Coda, YouTube, Microsoft

I generally value the reference check over interview signals. You know, if I had the stack rank in interviews, what is the best signal? The reference check is the top of the list. Those people, you know, they work with this person for, you know, sometimes for years. Like their knowledge, what you're going to get out of 30 minutes of artificial scenarios, it's just like never going to compare what a good reference check will give you.

Shashir Marotra is the co-founder and CEO of Coda. Before starting Coda, Shashir led the YouTube product engineering and design teams at Google, where he spent over six years. Before that, he spent six years at Microsoft. He's also on the board of Spotify. As you'll hear in this episode, Shashir is an incredibly deep and very first principles thinker on all kinds of topics. And in this episode, we cover growth strategy, specifically a framework that he calls blue loops and black loops. We talk about the rituals of great teams. something that Shasheer has been passionate about and has been collecting from all of the best leaders in tech for the past two years and which he'll soon turn into a book. We talk about Eigenquestions, which is not a German game show. He shares how he evaluates product talent and gives some really great advice on doing reference checks. We go into so many other topics. This is the longest episode that I've recorded yet, and you'll see why. Shasheer is so full of wisdom. and we could have kept going for at least another hour. And so with that, I bring you Shashir Narotra. Hey, Kasey winners. What do you love about Coda? Coda is a company that's actually near.

And dear to my heart because I got to work on their launch when I was at Greylock. But in terms of what I love about it, you know, I love loops and Coda has some of the coolest and most useful content loops I've seen. How the loop works is someone can create a Coda and share it publicly for the world. This can be how you create OKRs, run annual planning, build your own map. whatever. Every one of those CODAs can then be easily copied and adapted to your organization without knowing who originally even wrote it. So they're embedding the sharing of best practices of scaling companies into their core product and growth loops, which is something I'm personally passionate about.

I actually use Coda myself every day. It's kind of the center of my writing and podcasting operation. I use it for first drafts, organize my content calendar, to plan each podcast episode, and so many more things. Coda is giving listeners this podcast $1,000 in free credit off their first statement. Just go to coda.io/lenny. That's coda.io/lenny. Hey Ashley, head of marketing at Flatfile. How many B2B SaaS companies would you estimate need to import CSV files from their customers?

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If you'd like to learn more or get started, check out Flat File. at flatfile.com/lenny. Shashir, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you for having me.

I don't think I've actually shared this with you, but you're actually the very first CEO that I've had on this podcast. I actually have a rule of no founders or CEOs on the podcast, at least at this point. And you're the first person that I've let break this rule. And so how does that feel?

I've always been on Rule Breaker.

Perfect. So bio for listeners, just briefly. So you're the founder and CEO of Coda. You spent six years at Google, where you're a VP of product and engineering for YouTube, basically leading the YouTube product team. Spent six years at Microsoft. You're on Spotify's board of directors. You're also a prolific online writer, and that leads to my first question, which is, I hear that at Coda, There's a contest internally for people who actually, so maybe a little context. You encourage people to write a lot of stuff externally within Coda. You want people to be writing and you have this contest of who gets the most views and likes of people internally. And so is that true and who's winning?

By the way, yes, it's sort of true. We did a similar thing at YouTube and YouTube creators, I mean, obviously kicked our butts, but we were in a good way. to make sure we understood our tools and learned how it worked. And, you know, I think for a while at YouTube, I had one of the top videos. It was a really cute video of my daughter taking everybody's orders when she.

Was like three or four years old.

That's not fair. Yeah, super cute kid. It's an easy trick for YouTube. But I get to learn all the tools and so on. You know, here the equivalent at Coda is you can publish Coda Docs. They show up in our gallery, go to, you know, Coda gallery, you can see lots of them.

And.

At this point, thousands of documents published from lots of different people gets millions of views and like at YouTube, the most popular ones are not ours, but it is sometimes helpful for us to make sure that we understand how the whole system works in order to do it. So I think that the current winning doc at Coda is one in a pretty deep niche. It's from a guy named Kenny Wong on our data team. and it's an Orange Theory workout doc. So it turns out that Orange Theory has this like deep subculture that they all hang out together on Reddit and so on. And this doc just took off as a, I don't really understand the doc because I'm not in that subculture, but kind of it's similar to YouTube in some ways. It's like the, the, the niches are actually much bigger than, than people think, you know, of the ones that are, you know, more work related. I think Lane Stock on two-way write up still outranks all of mine. But I have a couple of good ones on there too. And I would say this competition exists in my family too. I don't usually even win with my own family. My older daughter, Annika, who also had that great video on YouTube, has two docs that do really well. One is Family Quarantine Olympics, which is a thing she put together at the beginning of COVID like a fun game for families to play. And the other one is a score tracker for a game called Ticket to Ride. I don't know if you ever played the game, but it's like the most complicated scoring system on the planet. Cause like you play the whole game and you spent 10 minutes scoring it and she built this whole scoring calculator and that turns out to be super popular too. And so anyway, but my docs do okay, but yeah, some the kind of.

Interesting variety of what people end up doing. I love that. Which of your docs has been the most successful?

Hopefully we end up talking about it. I think it goes back and forth between two docs I've written. one called Eigen Questions, which I think you intend to talk about. So we'll get to that. Yeah, absolutely. And the other one is one I wrote a while back called Four Mitzvah Bundling. That's all about how subscriptions work and it's kind of how I ended up on the board of Spotify with Daniel and I geeking out on bundling theory, which is like a super weird hobby, but, you know, I have normal hobbies.

Too, but I like to explore bundling. It's a kind of fun hobby and people enjoy that doc as well. Yeah, you've shared a lot of good thoughts on that and we're not going to cover that because you've covered that.

In depth in many places.

But just to clarify, did you write that doc and then led you to being on the board of Spotify or is that after the fact?

The conversation led to... It was a napkin sketch at YouTube that turned into a really fun lunch I had with Daniel, Daniel Ljungberg, the Spotify founder and CEO. And then he encouraged me to write it down. And for me, I mean, I don't... you write, prowlifically. And I have, writing for me is actually surprisingly hard. I feel like I have to think about it. Same. You make it seem really easy. For me, he's like, could you write that down? It's like, great, now I'm gonna take a year to write this thing down. Because you think through each part of it and you kind of come up with the right framing. I have a little review process I use for my docs that allows other people to kind of help me make it better. which is always really helpful. But yeah, so that's how that started. So it got written down after. Yeah.

So we were talking about writing and content and things like that. And that's a really good segue to the first thing I wanted to talk about, which is black loops and blue loops, which to folks that haven't heard this before, might sound like some kind of ultimate fighting nightmare scenario, but it's something that is really important to you and Coda. And so to set it up, you just talk about what black loops and blue loops are.

Yeah, and it's probably worth mentioning, I think a lot of businesses have a diagram that describes their ecosystem and how it works. Sometimes it happens a little later in a company's journey. For us, we were probably three or four years in before Matt Hudson runs our data finance teams here. He came up with this diagram and it really stuck for people, but I highly encourage drawing a diagram like this for your business. I'll flash it up on screen for a second and I'll describe it. But this is, this is what the diagram looks like. Um, black loop, blue loop, and it's basically the two different ways that our product spreads. The black loop is someone comes in, they make a doc, they share with a group of people, some subset of those people turn around and make another doc, and the process repeats itself over and over again. The blue loop is someone comes in, makes a doc, and instead of sharing it with, with the team or, or with the collaborators, They publish it to the world and in that process expose it to, they can choose how it should appear, what publishing in code is a lot like building a website. So you pick a URL, you tell us whether or not Google should be able to find it, as it should open the gallery and so on. And what ends up happening from that is they turn into broad promotion of Coda, but really it's about that person, what they're trying to get done. And I'll stop sharing so I can talk a little bit about the dynamics. So I sometimes refer to them as the, the Microsoft Loop and the YouTube Loop because those are like two inspirations for it. The black loop feels a lot like how documents naturally spread, like the viral actions of a document platform are share, create, share, create. It happens over and over and over again. You know, the best way you learn about Office or Google Docs or so on is somebody shares one with you and you're like, oh, that's pretty cool. I bet I could create one. And that loop can happen very, very quickly. And it really drives for us, a lot of how we think about how we work mostly within companies and teams, but sometimes across them as well. And so for example, it led to our pricing model. So our pricing model is a little different than most companies in the space that we do what they called maker billing. So basically all document products, all product of the document metaphor have three personas, people who can see things, people who can change things, and people who can create new things. Basically everybody charges for the top two. They charge for editors and makers. If you can make changes, then you have to pay. And that's like every document product you can think of, including ones, you know, do drawing or so on. They all, they all kind of do the same thing. And we decided that we're only going to charge for people when they make a document. So the, the, you think about it, you get a code of doc, only, you only need one, you know, if you're using any of our paid features, you only need one paid license for doing it. And the reason we do that in terms of that diagram is I wanted no friction on the share edge. I mean, the share edge For us is like, that's the moment of, Hey, look, I'm doing this thing. It's so cool. Like, and, and that's the moment where the, the, the line I gave to the teams, I want no dollar signs in the shared dial. Going into that, that's your, every product has its moment of how you, how you, how you spur growth and like, you know, mag going back to YouTube, imagine you had to pay for people you shared with, like nobody would ever share anything, but that's how basically every productivity product works is the moment they charge you is when you share with somebody. the blue loop, I often call the YouTube loop, because the emotions of publishing a doc are incredibly close to that of publishing a YouTube video. And people have all sorts of reasons why they do it. I mean, sometimes people do it, there are people who do it for money, but a lot of people do it for exposure, for brand building, they just want to get an idea out in the world, they want to get feedback. Some people do it for fun, some people do it as a charitable contribution. It's lots of reasons why people do it, but the net effect of what happens is, you know, for YouTube, the vast majority of how people found out about YouTube was through a video that was shared with them. I mean, that's sort of the, the, the, impact, but it changes the dynamic that allows everyone who publishes a codec now has a very natural incentive to go share it with the, with the right population. You know, if you're, if you're in orange theory, you share it with the orange theory population. If you're into and playing Ticket to Ride, you share it with Ticket to Ride population. But the, you know, if you're into bundling, you try to find a small group of people that care about bundling, tell them about that. But the, and what happens for us is that then becomes a loop that means that most people's exposure and almost a third of our users come through this loop. They're not actually exposed to Coda. They're exposed to a great idea for how to run an offsite or how to win ticket to ride or whatever it might be. And in that process, they learn about the product. And so then they come in through this vehicle. And one reason it's very important is because for products like ours that are very horizontal, you get different types of users. There's some users that I call the building block thinkers. They like to kind of build up from scratch. And the blank surface of Coda is really amazing for them. But for most people, that's intimidating. I don't, I don't really know what to do. Most people in the world are, are, are problem solvers. And so they start not by, do I need a new document? They start with, I've got a problem. You know, my, we don't make decisions fast enough at our company or, you know, my family can't figure out what to do on the weekend or whatever it might be. And then when they find a solution to that problem, they then pick the right tool. And so the blue loop allows us to go after that. And it kind of changes, changes how the motion of the ecosystem works as well.

But that's what BlueLabs has been working on. Awesome. I have a bunch of questions I want to ask. The first is how did you, how did, for a founder listening to this, and they're like, oh man, what am I, what are my loops? What's my flywheel? How do I think about my business? Can you talk a bit about how you kind of came upon this way of thinking about the company?

And then also, how do you structure teams to kind of work in this way if this is the way you're thinking about growth? I think on the first part, I think you just hosted Kasey Winters. He's like, pretty famous for talking about loops, not funnels. And I do think there's a, a very natural thing when you're building a product or building a business to think about your funnel. And you think about things as being linear, that somebody comes in, you know, they go up through your signup process, and then they, they see your onboarding, and then they get exposed to the first magic moment in your product and the second magic moment and so on. But the truth is, it doesn't really work that way. I mean, almost all products have some form of loop. I mean, that, that person turns around and maybe sharing is built right in your product, or maybe it's not, or maybe maybe there's a way that it happens through advocacy and so on, but understanding that the way products actually grow and spread happen through some type of loop, not funnel, is I think pretty fundamental. So the first piece of advice I'd give is you probably do have a loop. Whatever the product is, there's probably something about it that causes that loop and understanding how that works is really important. I mean, in terms of like what it is, you know, in our case, I'd say, if you take Black Loop and Blue Loop, the Black Loop is, you know, every product in our category has that. I mean, it's not, it's actually we didn't invent it. You build a document, you put a share button on it, you know, every product does that. But sometimes it's just recognizing what's there. It's not, it's not that, it's not that interesting. The Blue Loop, on the other hand, is not something that every product in our category has. It's not really a thing that you expect to do with Google Docs or Office or so on. It's a, it's kind of our unique take on, Hey, we're gonna build a publishing platform that isn't just for sharing ideas and building things with your team, therefore putting things out in the world. I mean, one of the best compliments we hear about the Coda Gallery is I had this user tell me this line I really love. He said that the Coda Gallery feels halfway between Medium and an app store. And you can come and you can read about anything interesting in the world, and you can go shopping and say, I need one of those, I need one of those, and I need one of those. And it's my view that this category, we call the all-in-one dot category, I think this is going to be critical because I don't think that there's enough people out there that are looking for like a horizontal new blinking cursor. I mean, they exist and you can get through your first million users that way, but I think to get to like the level of impact we want to have, we've got to find those problems you can, so you probably have a loop, not a funnel, and it might be hiding in plain sight or it might require invention. That's, that's the bounder dance and the, you the front of it is, but finding it, writing it down, I think is really helpful. There's a second party point, oh, how do we organize this team? Yeah, but let me ask one quick question.

So you said this, I think it was a data scientist that kind of first imagined and kind of diagrammed this out. Because I'm curious as a founder listening, they're like, oh, how do I find something like this? I imagine part of this was, oh, this person brought you this interesting way of thinking and there's kind of this process of, oh wow, this is cool. Let's think about this. what was that like? Kind of just a high level, that process?

He currently runs data in finance for us. He's actually one of the early founding members of the team, Matt Hudson. So he's kind of done every job here around the go to market team. He's been very insightful, but honestly, the idea can come from anywhere. I mean, it's, you know, it's a really famous loop diagram for Uber that I think, I think one of their.

Board members drew it or Travis drew it.

I don't, I don't know. Big bill early. Yeah, right. Like, I think, I think, yeah. yeah, the napkin sketch, you know, who knows how true that is. Probably lots of dispute on that. I think Airbnb had a similar diagram.

We tried, you know, we had some sketches.

Right, right. So they, you know, it can kind of come from anywhere. I do find that the most natural place to see it is just when you're talking about your business to someone you're pitching a customer or a candidate. I actually think candidate, I think we're gonna talk a little bit about interviewing, but I think talking to candidates is one of the best ways to hone what your business is about because those people are in some ways even more critical than investors. I mean, they're investing their time, not just their money. And so your ability to get across to them why this thing is going to be interesting and how it'll grow, and they're kind of the most discerning investors out there in a lot of ways. And they're actually not that easily confused. by metrics and so on that can be temporary and, you know, they sort of put themselves in that picture of like, can I see that happening? And so for us, the Blackwood part is pretty obviously the BlueLoom part, you had to squint a little bit to think, will people really do that? Will people come and publish these documents, like some hybrid between websites and blog posts and templates? What are they going to do and why? and so it required a little bit of creativity, which forced me to get better and better at pitching why that's going to happen and, you know, what, what that role is going to feel like. And, you know, this analogy of halfway between medium and an app store is like, that, like, helped people criticize crystallize what that, what that promise has to feel like. So I think that the additional idea can come from anywhere, but if you want to mine for your own Loops, go look at what you told the.

Last few candidates you talked. I like that. And it just takes some, take some attempts at drawing some kind of diagrams. That's kind of how I thought about that. When I was thinking about it, do you find that the quality of user is different amongst the loops? I imagine one is like 80% of the growth, but maybe the other is a different type of user, maybe higher quality. I think about a little bit with Airbnb referrals drove higher quality hosts, even though it was still a small portion of all hosts. And so it was a really lucrative and interesting channel.

Do you find anything like that? So, I mean, quality and activation are a little bit different. I mean, the, the, the blue loop definitely the, so it is actually kind of three entry points on that diagram. Those people come through the blue loop, those people get shared through the black loop, and then people come through the top of the funnel. Like they have to be like your, your, your seed population, right? That they have to, somebody starts with blinking cursor. Nobody shared anything with them. Either a blue loop or template to document or, or black blue bait and, you know, the way the team is running, you know, if you look at activation retention, so on, certainly the the highest is the black share. I mean, that, that, you kind of, somebody shares the document, said, hey, this is how we're running the SAP meeting. You're kind of, you're just going to use it. So the, the job or retention there is, is all different. And actually one, one thing that is actually, I'm going to come back to that. Second, second best is through the blue loop. And then the third, you know, the worst, the hardest is activating through the very top. And, you know, from, from there, you know, roughly one in five people make it to what we think of as our activation moment. It was just hard, right? It's like you're gonna hand somebody a new product that they didn't start with a problem on and nobody handed them a document to say, just work in. Like that's hard. Now you got, now all our Nux flows are really important and so on. But if you think about these three different dynamics from how you, how you asked about how you struck your team, they're like incredibly different mindsets, right? Because you come into the top of that diagram, we get to own the conversation. Like we, we tell you, we, we have our opportunity to tell you what the product's about, what you should do with it. Here's the, here's the minimal set of things you need to know in order to be productive and gradually reveal the other things that you might need to know, meaning the order of those things wrong, real trouble and so on. But it's actually a minority of how people get exposed to Coda because in the black glue, you know, the person who owns that conversation, the person sharing the document with you, like if that person does it and like mispositions it or doesn't like just makes a crappy document or something like, you know, we can't, we have to like help them on board, their users would become our users. And same thing in the blue loop. You know, that conversation is now owned by the publisher who's, you know, they, they, they really not that interested in teaching anybody about code. They're mostly interested in, here's this, like, really cool way to do Orange Theory, or here's this, here's this interesting way, you know, to run a meeting. And, and so one of the interesting things about building platforms, which I think is a little bit different than, than products that They get to be sort of direct. And I had this, for better or worse, most of the products I've gotten to work on are platform products. And, and I find that there's two very different kinds of people that like that challenge. So some people, and I think Steve Jobs was the quintessential example of he didn't really like being a platform. Like, you know, the iPhone shipped without an app store. You know, they locked down the screws on the back of the, on, on, on all the devices so that nobody could open them. And, you know, his viewpoint was, I'm going to control every element. of what my users see. And on the other hand, platform thinkers, you sort of assume that my connection to my eventual user is through someone else. Like YouTube, you know, regularly they come to work at YouTube and somebody say, well, here's what happened last night. And sometimes it's heartwarming, like, oh my gosh, this person, you know, this kid bit this other kid's finger and it took off like crazy. And this Korean pop star just broke through the billion view mark before everybody else did. And sometimes it was not heartwarming. And, you know, to control that because that's part of being a platform. And so it does change, you know, how you think about the way you run the team, because if you have a loop where your community ecosystem users are on, control that narrative, then you have to incorporate that. I mean, another close analogy I think is like, you know, Airbnb and the famous story of them, you know, taking pictures of people's apartments. It's like, you know, they had to.

Airbnb pricing is even more of a challenge where a lot of hosts don't really know what to price. They think their place is worth a lot more and we can't tell them the price. There's laws around that. And so it's like, hey, maybe you want to price it at this rate. You know, it's good for you. So it's a lot of encouraging. So yeah, I've seen that in action. So you talked about teams and how you think about structuring them a bit. And that's a good segue to our second topic, which is around a book that I hear you're writing called the Rituals of Great Teams. And I think what you're doing there is exploring rituals that have emerged at some of the more successful companies. And so just a question there, how'd you get interested in rituals? So much so that you decided to write a book, which is such a trudge and , endless amount of work and just like, how, yeah, how was it that? How's it going? And I'll ask you a few more questions there.

You know, the, the writing a book, so I'm writing this book, Skull Virtuals of Great Teams. And the, when I signed up to do it, I thought it was gonna take six months. I'm now almost two years in. I have my manuscript in four months and I, I'm probably half done. So there's a lot of work, ahead of us in, in, But it's one of the most fun projects I've ever done. So the history behind this was, as in many cases, is a lot of, you know, sort of odd luck and happenstance. I got hosted right at the start of the pandemic. I was interviewed for a different podcast called Masters of Scale by Reid Hoffman. And the way Reid records, which is not, I'm not sure I would recommend this, but he does it a little bit differently than, than, than you do, you sit down with, you know, no idea what you're going to talk about, and you talk for like three hours. And then he has a group of editors, the same group that actually had its head, and they come in and they take 20 minutes of it and they turn into one episode. And you have no idea what it's going to be. So he's talking, talking, talking, and gets 20 minutes out, and they're pretty good at getting to a nugget. So they picked out of this whole discussion, this part that I thought was like really small. And it was, read it. Ask me for one of my favorite quotes. I talked about this quote from a guy named Bing Gordon. People don't know Bing, Bing was one of the founders of Electronic Arts. He's a famous investor around Amazon, Zynga, so on lots of great companies. And I happened to sit on a board with Bing and he used this line. I think Bing's one of the best nonlinear thinkers in the valley. I always learned something with Bing. And he used this line that really stuck with me. He said, Great companies have a very small list of golden rituals. And there are three rules of golden rituals. Number one, they're named. Number two, every employee knows them by their first Friday. And number three, they're templated. And he has great examples. Amazon has six pagers and Google has OKRs and Salesforce has V2 mom. And there's all these different rituals that people do. And I ended up sharing on the podcast a little bit about what Coda's golden ritual is. If you were to ask a, a set of Coda employees on the first Friday, what Coda's Golden Ritual is, they would almost certainly tell you about this thing we do called Dory Pulse. It's sort of the key of how we run meetings and do write-ups and so on. It's a pretty simple idea is that in our write-ups, in our meetings, instead of going around the room and hearing what everybody thinks, we do this thing called Pulse. Everybody writes down what they think and we hide everybody else's. until you're done writing. So you kind of, you force yourself to be eloquent about your opinion on the record about it and unbiased. And then the second thing we do is called Dory, which is instead of sort of randomly asking questions, we ask people to put the questions on the table and then we take a round of upvoting and downvoting them to actually figure out what we're going to talk about. Dory is named after the fish who asks all the questions. It's a tool we use a lot at Google that we've kind of turned into this mini tool. if you were to ask a set of Coda employees on the first Friday about Coda's golden rituals with Bing's three tests, they'll almost certainly talk about Dorian Puls. And it's not because they're meeting wonks, it's because it's indicative of the culture of the team. And so the, the, you know, I'll regularly hear employees say things like, yeah, I just joined Coda. It's been a week. It's amazing. The culture is so open that I got to ask a question in a meeting and it outvoted the CEOs or they'll say, I got asked for my contribution to this, this really hard decision we're making, and it was thoughtfully presented. I had space to be able to do it well without bias, and it was actually very considered as part of the, as part of the decision making process. And so this, this, the, the podcast on, your reach podcast did pretty well. And I got all these questions about rituals. And so I decided to do a, a dinner, which turned into a dinner series, and we basically, Every third Wednesday, we would host a group of people to share the rituals with each other. And I learned a bunch of stuff in this, in this process. And I've now interviewed over a thousand people for this book and, and, you know, there's lots of really interesting rituals that come out of it. Well, first thing I learned is people love sharing their rituals. I get, I, you know, I've interviewed people from many companies that everybody's heard of, you know, Nike, Disney, New York Times, you know, so on all the way down to many that, you know, many startups that maybe people haven't heard of or, or companies and industries that people don't talk a lot about. book authors, pundits, lots of different people that come to this process. Everybody loves sharing their rituals. And everybody's little secret to how they run their business. But for some reason, the how we work part video, you know, everybody's very willing to share. People also love hearing about them. And I was kind of, I was like, is this gonna be interesting for a dinner? Like, you know, geeking out about how a team worked. And it turns out not only the people like hearing about it, it's the littlest details that matter. It's like, oh yeah, we kind of do that too, but we have this issue. How'd you get past this? And you start discovering that actually those little details are what make, would make or break a thing that, you know, you can't quite do it the exact same way. And then the other thing I realized, which is probably the most important point, is that rituals are, I like to say that they are a mirror of culture. That, I mean, one of the attendees of Dennis Dharmesh, founder of HubSpot and very thoughtful, person, he talked a lot about this thing that, that he's virtually presented as something called flash tags. which is a really cool example. But Danesh talked about how we, when we're building companies, we actually build two products. We build one for our customers and we build another one for our employees. And that's actually how we work part of it. That's the term he uses for that is culture. That's the product we build for our employees. I think it's a very interesting way to define what culture is. Interestingly, when you ask people about their culture, hey, what's the culture of Google or Airbnb or so on, the way they'll answer the question is through rituals and say, you know, here's, here's what we do. And the way you know this is what we do is through this ritual that, that, that's in place. So I, I thought that was pretty interesting. Um, started off just building a little listicle of like, here's all the great rituals. And then I started realizing that actually the comparison between them is kind of interesting. And so I started sort of filling in the gaps between them of like, when would you do X versus Y? And what did I learn through that process? publisher asked if I would turn it into a book. And I agreed without really contemplating how hard it would be. And it's become what most of my evenings end up being on this. I have a wonderful co-writer, Erin Dame, who's incredibly gracious with her time and helping me sort through the best ideas and the worst ideas. But it's a really fun project.

What are some of the more wacky or impactful rituals that you've come across that you can share?

Oh boy, I, I, it's sort of down the list. I'll, I'll tell you some that are, interesting and recognizable. One of the most fun ones, is from Ariana Huffington and she shared a, a ritual called reset. And there's a, there's a bit of background on Ariana. I mean, she's well known for Huffington Post. She now runs Thrive. The, she had an accident, a few years back and ended up going through a period of doing a lot of research on how the brain works and ended up coming to this set of conclusions about how you can affect your own brain chemistry. And one of the things she does as a sort of personal ritual is a thing called a reset. And it's basically you make a, the, the rituals, you make a one minute video that is personal and it's, they have a, they have a little template for doing it, but it's a breathing exercise. So it's like you, you're supposed to like play it while you do this breathing exercise. But it's personal. So it's like her video, you go search YouTube for Ariana's reset, you'll find it. It has, you know, it has pictures of her kids, it has, it has quotes she loves, it has, you know, videos of her hometown in Greece and so on. But the way she brought it to the team was they start meetings by randomly picking someone, they call spin the wheel, they randomly pick someone and they play their reset. And the idea is you get this like, like two for one where you, everybody gets you know, a little bit, the brain chemistry rewiring of 60 minute, 60 second breathing exercise, everybody gets back into that sort of zen state a little bit and you learn a little bit about each other. And she was saying that, you know, the pictures people pick and so on are interesting, but actually the music people pick is probably the most interesting. Like a lot of people pick con music. Some people will pick something they rock out to. Some people, but you know, everybody does their reset a little bit differently. That was a really fun one. Another really fun one that I was surprised by, Gusto does this thing in their hiring call. So you get an offer from Gusto, and apparently when you get on the offer call of, you know, congratulations, you got an offer, instead of just meeting the recruiter, which is what most companies do, they have the entire group of people that interviewed you join the call, and they all say something about why you're amazing and you should join Gusto. and like I said, it's such an interesting ritual in so many ways. I mean, what, like it's a, for the candidate, obviously, like, what an amazing experience. It's like, you know, the, to use an Airbnb term, that's like a level 11 experience of what that, what that feels like. But also for the company, it's like, hey, we're like, we're gonna get, you know, I have one of the questions I asked, what if I voted no? What if I said this person's a no hire and said, doesn't matter. You're on the call, you're gonna work with this person. You're gonna help them feel welcome and you're gonna help them understand. you know, where they stand. I just, I think it's a obviously takes a bunch of time, but it's, you know, it also is a signal to the company of how important hiring is and something that obviously we all, we all prioritize. Those are maybe a couple of the different kind of, maybe different ones that people might not have heard of before.

Those are amazing examples. Have you integrated any of these rituals from other companies doing this research into, into Coda?

Oh, all the time. And it's the cheapest form of research. I mean, I get to like borrow all these great ideas from all these companies. I mean, we just added one to our decision making process. This is like, this is a good example of a little detail that really matters is Coinbase has a ritual that's formed around, this is a decision making ritual they call, is it amazing how many companies have a decision making ritual? With a name, with a, with a burr, right? So like at, at Square, Goko called them spades. It doesn't say, it's like he, he kind of verbified it. There's a template, there's a, you know, but you use, you use Bing's three tents, right? It's got to be named every employee knows it by the first Friday and it's templated. So Coinbase does a thing they call Rapids and rapid is, you know, framing around what the, the, the roles in it are the, you know, responsible approver, participating, informed and decider. But their, their technique of doing it was really interesting. They, they have this like subtle nudge thing that we weren't doing that I've now incorporated at Coda. So we, at Coda, we have Dory and Pulse, like a very common ritual. We do it spread through a lot of different companies that use Coda. You don't really have to use Coda to do it, but, you know, I think Coda is pretty good at it. But one of the things we were facing was that you would do this pulse and so you'd have a meeting and it could, if you did it wrong, it could feel like voting and it could feel like, consensus building. And so we would get this, you know, people would talk about it and every ritual has its like pro and con, but people would look at it and say, very open culture, you're allowed to share whatever you want. But on the other side, for the person that's trying to make a decision, it can feel like, oh my God, I now have 30 pieces of feedback. Am I supposed to wait for like all 30 of them to be yes? Am I supposed to wait for it to be a majority? And like, how do I know? What am I supposed to, supposed to do here. And so Coinbase had this really simple idea that we sort of smushed together, which was at the top of their rapids, they named who all the people were. And then next to each one, they put a little box that said, what is the decision from that person? And just organize, it's very similar to Pulse, but they kind of organized them and said, yeah, everybody that's in the informed bucket can like, they can comment. That's totally fine. But we really care about the approvers. the responsible, and then of course the decider, the one that really matters. And so we just added a column to our pulse, which is what is the role? And we grouped the table by that. And the other thing that Coinbase does, which sounds really subtle and small, but really in detail it really matters, is the person running the meeting pre-fills that with what they want from that person. You are an approver. Maybe I have three approvers, because I have a budget approver and I have a marketing approver and I have a you know, I have a sales approval, whatever it might be. And I need you to give me this answer. I don't need you to comment on everything I'm doing, but I need you to tell me, do we have the budget or not? Or I need you to tell me, you know, am I, am I authorized to make this change in this part of the product that we generally don't change? Or can I change the onboarding flow or whatever, whatever it might be? And we took a process that I think was like doing a pretty good job of getting, getting rid of group think, which is really the part of what we're doing with Pulse. But had this danger of being overly leaning towards, you know, consensus building to a fault. I think consensus building is a good thing, but consensus building to a fault is not. And we sort of stole this one from Coinbase and we switched it in and it like got better. And I think that's a good, good example very recently.

I feel like you have a clear best seller on your hands here and I can't wait to read this. I almost feel like you have an unfair advantage right now having all these insights. before you share them, being able to execute so much more efficiently.

Well, yeah, it's interesting. I don't think it's, I'm obviously not trying to keep any of it a secret. So the whole point of publishing it is because I think other people will, will enjoy it and, and can get, can get benefit out of it. But, you know, if people are interested, one of the other choices I made in writing this book is I decided to do it somewhat in the open. So there's a what I call the Rituals of Great Teams Brain Trust. And so if you go, if you just search for me and Rituals of Great Teams, you'll find it. And I'm sure we can add the link to the show notes, but you can sign up and basically as I finish a chapter, I put it out to the group and there's now a few hundred people that are helping me co-edit this thing. Some of them just because they like someone come in and give me help on storytelling, grammar and so on. But a lot of them are contributing and they show up and they say, Hey, you missed this one. Like, we actually do that, but we do this other thing a little bit differently and you should really, talk about that. And, and because I kind of view it as a, you know, it started as a dinner series, right? It started with a, you know, everybody's going to give to each other. And so I kind of wanted to bring that into the writing process. It's also a cheap way to get some pretty good editors and it's pretty helpful.

I love that. That is really smart. This episode is brought to you by Eppo. Eppo is a next generation A/B testing platform built by Airbnb alums for modern growth teams. Companies like Netlify, Contentful, and Cameo rely on Eppo to power their experiments. Wherever you work, running experiments is increasingly essential, but there are no commercial tools that integrate with a modern growth team stack. This leads to wasted time building internal tools or trying to run your experiments through a clunky marketing tool. When I was at Airbnb, one of the things that I loved about our experimentation platform was being able to easily slice results by device, by country, and by user stage. Eppo does all that and more, delivering results quickly, avoiding annoying prolonged analytics cycles, and helping you easily get to the root cause of any issue you discover. Eppo lets you go beyond basic click-through metrics and instead use your North Star metrics like activation, retention, subscriptions, and payments. And Eppo supports tests on the front end, the back end, email marketing, and even machine learning clients. Check out Eppo at geteppo.com, geteppo.com, and 10x your experiment velocity. How have you found these rituals form for someone that's listening and are like, Hmm, we need some of these. We need some rituals. We need to move more effectively. How do these come up? Are they just organically kind of organized? Do they come in from other companies and they evolve? Is it founder driven? What have you found so far? I know you're still working on the book, but curious.

There's a whole section in the book on, I get this question a lot of like, well, you know, how do I find the rituals we have? How do I adjust the rituals to match? Are they supposed to change? You know, there's lots of, lots of things you see because some rituals are like, great when you're a hundred people and they're terrible when you're a thousand. And, and you should actively change those things. There's some, some are great in what sometimes people call peace time versus war times. Like this, you should, you should do this during this time, but you should like actively not do it. when you go in this other time and actually that in itself is a ritual. I mean, every company has some form of a war room ritual. That is, I guess Facebook, I was learning, we did a dinner last night. So I learned a little bit about Facebook apparently calls them lockdowns, which is a term I hadn't heard before, but apparently like it's well understood when they say lockdown, everybody knows exactly what it means. It's like we no longer do the goal setting process. We, you know, you drop this type of work and like everybody just knows this is what, this is what it means. But I would say that. you know, when we talk to people about rituals, the set of rituals that happen organically, I mean, those are the easiest. Like Dorian Pulse for us was one of the product managers running a meeting, just thought it was, we're a distributed first culture, but like, I hadn't really adapted to it properly. And this product manager are just annoyed at waiting around on Zoom for everybody to go around and say their piece. It just took forever. and by the end, it was like, everybody's like, buy a son, can we just pause? Can we just write down what you think? And they just happened to do it in this thoughtful way and it just took off. And so some rituals grow organically and just, you just gotta like wait for them to do it. But there are cases where companies actively form a ritual to drive a certain behavior. And, you know, the best advice I've given on this topic is to read one of my other favorite books. this is, it's a book called Switch. It's by Chip and Dan Heath. Um, all their books are amazing. Um, but they also wrote decisive and made to stick and moments and, and so on. But this one is my, if I could recommend five books, this would take two slots on the list. And the subtitle of the book is how to change things when change is hard. And the basic idea of the book is they use this analogy of an elephant or a rider on an elephant on a path. and when you're trying to change things, you have three options for what you can do. And actually kind of map to Bing's analogy. So you can direct the writer so you can tell people what to do. You can motivate the elephants. You can kind of give this thing a kick in the butt and it's going to move. You don't know exactly where it's going to move, but it's going to move. And you can shape the path. Shape the path is I'm going to set this way up so that you can only do these things. And so, you know, the way I think about it is, you know, direct the writer, tell people what to do. That's why, you know, if you look at Bing's tests, that's why you teach employees this before the first writing. You tell people, this is what we do. And so some rituals, like how do you get this ritual to work? You put it in your new hire onboarding and you make it work that way. Motivate the elephant. A lot of that's about branding. So what do you do with rituals? There's an amazing number of rituals where I'll tell people that seems like a great ritual. I would highly encourage you to give it a name. Give it something that lets people anchor ideas to. I mean, names are very powerful thing. if I said, oh yeah, Coda, we do voting and sentiment writing or something, I don't even know what you would say. It would sound boring. It wouldn't sound like something you could brag about, something you could form identity around. And so, so it's very important to give it a name. And then, and then finally, like, why do you shape the path? Where you like, set things up, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, Guess what? You're going to be invited to one soon. You're going to see it and then, and then you're going to have to do it. Or if you're at Square, like you're going to see the spade template and you're going to, you're going to learn how to do it. So I think Switch is, I recommend this book for lots of purposes, but.

As you're thinking about rituals for your teams, it's a particularly relevant frame. Awesome. By the way, that's a little plug for the YouTube version of this podcast, which is now a thing we do. So if you're like, Hey, I don't see what you're talking about, just search for Lenny's podcast YouTube and I think you'll find it and we'll probably link to the, yeah. That in the show notes. I'm also reminded of Airbnb's rituals, which you probably already know about, but they're kind of all hilarious and weird. One is formal Friday, where people dress up in suits and gowns on Fridays. Another is a human tunnel for all new employees, where every new employee has to run through a human tunnel and jump into like a bean bag or something.

Yeah.

And then, and then there's a new hire tea time where new hires drink some tea with some Veterans and chat about where they're from and things like that. There's a bunch more, but there's the.

Ones that are my favorite. Those are great. Then I, there's a, I also included some of the, the, the sort of level 11 thinking as well. I think that's also a good Chesky favorite. Brian also has another one that's in the book that's about how to rank your to-do list by finding leverage. That's a, that's a really fun one as well. And, like, don't rank your to-do list. A lot of people do, like, importance versus urgency or, or so on. And I guess he sorts his by which of these is most likely to create leverage, like getting rid of the rest of my list, which I thought was a very, like, you know, I started doing that in my to-do list.

And it's very interesting and impactful. So, that's actually an incredible segue to our next topic, which are Eigen questions. Oh, yes. And so Eigen questions, one of your most classic posts, you mentioned this at the top, maybe your most liked post other than maybe bundling. It sounds like some kind of German game show. Eigen questions. Can you tell us what Eigen questions are, and then I'm going to ask you a few more questions around that.

I had thought about the German game questions. Yeah, sorry. Yeah. I thought this would be a very interesting game, but we could try to create one. Okay, so I'll describe what Eigen questions are, but maybe I'll start by telling you a little bit about where the concept came from. And this is actually a YouTube-ism that maybe just a to place ourselves in history. So 2008, I joined YouTube. And many people don't remember this, but YouTube at the time was seen as a mistake. It was seen as Google's first bad acquisition. Everything else had worked, but this thing kind of seemed like a disaster. I mean, it was grainy videos. We were losing lots of money. We had billions of dollars in lawsuits. None of it really seemed that obvious. There was lots of discussion on how to reorient it, fix it, and so on. And so everybody outside, that's what they saw. If you stepped inside a YouTube staff meeting in 2008, actually one of the toughest questions we were answering was this question we called the Modern Family question. And it may sound small, but it actually was kind of very perplexing. And the question's pretty simple. The question was, if you looked at our search traffic at YouTube, one of the top five queries basically every week was for a show called Modern Family. And Modern Family was number one show on television at the time. By far the most popular. And we were, you know, second, second biggest search engine in the world behind our parent company, Google. So search traffic was very important. There was one big problem. People would come search for Modern Family, one big problem. We didn't have Modern Family on YouTube. And so we gave them some pretty crappy responses. And the question was, you know, oh, and, and, and by the way, abc.com had decided to post every episode of Modern Family live on their, on their, on their website, which nowadays is kind of typical, but in 2008, that was not typical. those is a kind of a big gamble they made and they're gonna post all these, all these shows. So the question was, you know, should we answer the query modern family by linking off to avc.com? Do we link out or not? And the company basically divided. And so there's like half the, half the company, mostly the product and design team, so on, kind of aligned around a viewpoint that was, that's what the user wants, link them off to avc.com, you know, we're now owned by Google. Google tries hard to prioritize do right by the user, the rest will follow. Like that seems like the right thing to do. So let's do that. And in the other half of the company, most of the business functions, sales, marketing, especially content partnership, said, please, please, please don't do that. If you do that, and you start linking off to all these other places, nobody's ever going to put good content on YouTube and we're just going to get the stuff that doesn't deserve to live anywhere else. And that's like not a very good path to be. And you can imagine that like, those two mindsets, it's almost like it was like good versus evil debate, which is like, do right by the user of the business. These are all like almost impossible to solve problems. And this would happen meeting after meeting after meeting. What did we make a decision? Yeah, modern family. What are we gonna do? So we had this offsite where we decided we're gonna spend the whole day and we're gonna figure this problem. And we went up to this hotel in Aventura Bay and the executive team all sat down. and I was asked to frame the discussion, go collect everybody's opinions and collect all the data and just like ground it all in facts. And then we're gonna have a discussion, we're gonna reach a decision. And so the night before I'm sitting and thinking about like, how, you know, how the hell are we gonna have this discussion, not just be like a shouting match of, of this good versus evil position. And I happened to read a analysis that was being done by a different team at Google, the Google shopping team, where they were facing this interesting challenge of they were in this deep fight with Amazon and they were getting their butts kicked and they were trying to figure out why. And the walking in theory was, the Google Shopping team's view was, why would anybody ever pick going to Amazon? You could come to Google and we had indexed all of Amazon and the entire internet. Why would you ever pick Amazon? And the feedback that was coming back from users was, they would, they'd say I picked Amazon because I value consistency over comprehensiveness. They would say things like, you know, I really value that, you know, I go to amazon.com and I understand how the reviews work and how the ratings work. And I know that the returns work the way I want and I understand how shipping is going to work. And it just felt consistent. I know it doesn't have everything, but it has enough and I value consistency over comprehensiveness. And so the night before this YouTube meeting, I decided to reframe the question and say, let's not have the discussion about linking out at all. We're going to start by having a theoretical discussion about in a decade from now, is the video market more likely, the online video market more likely to be about consistency or about comprehensiveness? And that is a question that you can have a very reasonable debate on. Like what are the reasons why a market evolves towards consistency or comprehensiveness? And we basically have this discussion and we all came to a conclusion this market is going to value consistency over comprehensiveness. And by the way, I think, I mean, now almost 15 years later, I think we're right. I mean, I think the, if you go look at the, the, the video market obviously has exploded. There's so many great video properties out there. None of them are comprehensive. There is no one stop shop for a place where all, all the video exists. And so I think we were right. But what, what happened was by answering that question, the link out question all of a sudden became super easy. Like we value consistency over comprehensiveness. We definitely don't need to link out. In fact, We should make a whole bunch of other decisions as well. So we went and, you know, at the time we used to, this was the days of flash players and so on, we embedded other people's players on YouTube. We stopped doing that as well. Probably the most famous decision we made was with the iPhone. As I mentioned earlier, the iPhone, when it first shipped, had no app store. And so they built all the first few apps, including YouTube. And so here we were a few years later, iPhone, the most popular phone on the planet, and the YouTube app on the iPhone. It was built by a team at Apple, and they had not been able to keep up with what we were doing. Almost half the catalog didn't play back on the iPhone. They were missing a bunch of features and so on. So I drove down to Cupertino and I sat down with Scott and Phil and said, Hey, we're gonna have to take back the YouTube app. And they said, I don't understand. Why would you do that? Like you have default distribution on, you know, as far as they were concerned, the most important operating system in the world. Why would you do that? You're gonna have to like rebuild all this from scratch. , you know, just seems like a really bad choice. And I said, no, no, it's like actually quite an easy choice. We value consistency over comprehensiveness. We would much rather be on fewer phones with a more consistent experience than be on all of them with an inconsistent experience. So what is the choice we're making and it worked out fairly well. So this decision, the modern family question ended up becoming named as the example for a term called item questions. So item questions, it's not a German game show. It is a made up word and it's named after a math concept called eigenvectors. And the math is not really necessary, but for people who are curious, go back to linear algebra. Eigenvectors are in a multidimensional space. They're the most discriminating vectors of the vectors in that space, the dimensions of that space. It's a concept that gets used a lot in machine learning and so on, but actually the math doesn't really matter. The eigenquestion, the simplest definition of eigenquestion, It's the question that when answered also answers the most subsequent questions. And it's a very simple idea that when you sit down and you say, Hey, here's all these questions we gotta answer. How do we all usually rank them? Like sometimes we rank them just by, you know, what order we came up with them. Sometimes we rank them by importance, like which is the most impactful decision we're gonna make. But this methodology says, don't rank 'em that way. Rank 'em, like you said to us, he's thinking about leverage, same idea, rank 'em by which ones would eliminate the most other questions from the list. So you take that list, you said, should we link out to modern family? Should we own the YouTube iPhone app? Should we do those were all like really hard questions to answer. But I turned if you answered just one question, do we value consistency over comprehensiveness? Yeah, answer all the others. They all all of a sudden become very simple. And so this idea of questions became part of our vocabulary, became a clear ritual for YouTube that is, you know, what is the question here? It's for code as well and sort of spread through other places. But that's the basic idea.

Amazing. What a baller move with Apple. And a pretty scary move.

Yeah.

But I was just gonna say, I think YouTube's probably in the top 5, 10 most downloaded apps, so it worked out.

You know, we'd go for that meeting and I bring along the product manager for the iPhone app, Andre Dron and Jeff. And he's the one like having to explain what we're gonna do and so on. And it's a hard, contentious meeting. And as we're leaving the meeting, He says, Hey, can I get a selfie with Bill and Scott? Andre, what are you doing? And this great picture of him, like with us asking for, you know, take this back. And he was clearly, he's very starstruck. There's a lot of people who view it as like Apple would do a better job of building a YouTube app than us. Like, who are we to tell them to not do that? Of course, you know, in retrospect, that was silly way to think about it.

Wow. I would do the same thing.

Yeah, that's amazing.

Who's this person? Because that's awesome. I love that as a leader, you bring the PM of the team working on it versus just, you know, the.

Big shots at the top. Yeah, Andre, he's now a founder. He started a company called OpTic, which is basically building content ID for NFTs, which is a, you know, much needed thing in the Web3 world. But yeah, I mean, the team building it, I mean, it was that meeting I brought him, I brought my partnerships lead, and I brought the eng lead that was covering the area too. yeah, I think that some of it is, you know, if I had to be honest, some of it is like they really wanted to come and meet with Apple. It's always like, you know, for my own sake, like, I kind of wanted some backup. I'm about to make this kind of bold ass and they could have been, I mean, to Apple's credit, I mean, they could have been, you know, pretty bad about it. I mean, they could have like not allowed us on the store and, and, and so on. And they said, okay, well, you know, we don't like it, but we understand your choice. you have to know that you're going to start from zero. We're not giving you a single download for free. You're going to have to start from zero and we will break the current app. Why did you agree upon date? And the negotiation was, can you please just tell those people that there's a new app? And so that's how we negotiated out of it. And they eventually did that and that was fine. And in the end, YouTube is now one of the top downloaded apps on iPhones, I think. I mean, it was like six months after launch, we had like 80% share, almost like everybody downloaded the app. visit it and said it kind of ended up not being that much of a comprehensiveness choice, but it was a, yeah, clearly hard decision made much easier by asking the right eating question first.

Wow. Speaking of eating questions, are there other examples of eating questions that come to mind to make this even more concrete in people's minds? I don't know if that's the right way to frame it, or is it more just when you have a list of questions, look for the one that'll answer the most. How do you, how do you kind of operationalize this concept?

You know, there's lots of 'em. I mean, for Coda, the Eigen question, the sort of most conceptual Eigen question for Coda was, yeah, we use a line a lot for Coda. That could allow anyone to make a doc as powerful as an app. You could reverse that statement and say, allow anyone to make an app as easily as a doc. And those two sound similar, but they're not. They're actually quite different statements. And so our, our most commonly debated Eigen question is, you know, are we more committed to being a doc or being an app? And, you know, which way do we want people, if people are going to misunderstand CODA, would we rather them perceive it as a document or perceive it as an app? And we decided on doc, which is like actually, and the way I, the way I cemented that decision when we made it was I named the company that way, CODA is a doc backwards. I said, well, it's all, it's a, this is, this is going to be a, we're definitely not revisiting this one. This is a, CODA is a doc first. that's a good example. I mean, another one, by the way, I would say, Iden questions is a, is a term that, you know, a guy could resonance at all, but it's a hard technique. It's not, it's not always easy to know how to do it. And one of the things, you know, I get asked a lot. It's like, is it a skill you can learn? I absolutely think it's a skill you can learn. It's a thing that once you observe it, you get better at it, you can learn it, but it's not, it's not easy to learn it. And one of my observations about learning skills like these is You want to learn them in non-pressure filled environments. Like to use an analogy, if you were trying to learn a sport or learn an instrument or so on, imagine if you never did practice. Every time you played basketball was in a real basketball game, and every time you played the piano was in a recital, you probably would never get better. And I think one of the troubles with concept like Eigen questions is we tend to only practice it in real world scenarios that are high stakes. And so one of the things I encourage people to do is to practice Eigen questions in completely almost frivolous situations. So I have an interview question I ask, which I think, maybe we'll get to this a little bit later as well, but it's a very simple question, and it's a coded Eigen question test. And the question is, a group of scientists have invented a teleportation device. they've hired you, Lenny, to be their sort of business counterpart, bring this to market, product kind of what, this question actually worked well for any role, but say you could be a product manager for this thing, bring it to market, and what do you do? That's the whole question, right? People, usually people will start asking a bunch of questions and say, well, tell me more about this device. Like, what does it do? How does it work? And, you know, is it, is it big? Is it small? Is it fast? Is it Does it disintegrate things or not? Does it need a receiver and a sender? Does it, you know, is it safe? All these different questions come out. And at some point, I'll just let those questions come out. And at some point, I'll say, okay, nice job generating all the questions. Turns out these scientists, they kind of hate talking to people. And they're kind of annoyed by all your questions. And so they've decided that they will answer only two of your questions. And after that, they expect a plan. What two questions do you ask? And interestingly, all of a sudden, like the sharp, you know, product managers, engineers, so basically every role, they very quickly find what are the two, one or two Eigen questions on this topic. And there's no right answer, but I'll tell you, like one of my favorite ones is, as their product manager said, okay, if I had to ask two questions, the two questions I would ask, one is, is it safe enough for humans or not? And I would say, Like a very like crisp way to get to like just safety, how reliable is it? Didn't ask how reliable it is, how many bits in the middle of this, like just tell me, is it safe enough for humans or not? And the second one is, is it more expensive CapEx or OpEx? Is it more expensive to buy them or to run them? And then he took those two questions and he said, I guess with those two questions, I can form these quadrants. You can say, oh, it's safe enough for humans and it's cheaper to, they're very cheap to buy, but expensive to run. then you probably run them like human fax machines. Like you put them everywhere you can and you say, hey, look, it's expensive to use, but you all have the ability to teleport anywhere you want and this is how we're gonna run it. If the other hand, they're very expensive to buy, but cheap to run. You probably have to place them very strategically, in which case what you probably do is replace airports. Airports are pretty strategically placed in places where people are trying to get around places. if it's not safe enough for humans, then you've got a whole different class of use cases where you go value what goods are transported in very costly ways. And, you know, people come up with like, you know, do you do the most expensive things? Or do you do like, you know, is, is teleporting, you know, people's replacement hearts? Is that like a, like a really demanding thing? So, but these two questions kind of, kind of get to the, the heart of it. The question's totally made up. Like, no teleportation device exists. At least not yet. And I find that people's ability to learn the method is significantly higher if it's low stakes. That question, by the way, if you ask a kid that question, the, you know, hey, new teleportation device, you know, you get, you get to ask two questions. Almost every kid will like quickly get to two pretty good eye in questions. Again, kids are incredibly good at simplifying these things down. It's actually a skill we like remove from ourselves. Like I'll see, all your candidates tell me things like, I guess I would ask them what, what, so size it is. And like, why would you ask them what size? What, what, what decision is that gonna allow you to make to, to know what size it is? And, you know, sometimes I can explain it, sometimes not, don't get hired. But, yeah, but actually the, the thing I'd say about it is there are iron questions kind of everywhere. I mean, it's that you could, you can take any product out there. I'll, I'll do it with my kids a lot. And they'll say, you know, I was just riding with, with my younger daughter and she said, you know, how come there's three gas stations, like in the same corner? why, why, why did, why do people do that? You know, that's a really, that's a really insightful observation. What's the question? How do you place a gas station? And it's like a break news. If you can take, you can almost take anything and say, what is the question that really drives, drives this answer?

I love that. Do you, do you actually still ask this question because you're sharing it and all the answers?

No, I don't. And I have a new one that I can't share, but it's a, and we've written about it in back. One of the big debates about publishing the I, I, I think is in order to bring this to life, I needed to answer your question. Like, how do I, how do I test this? How do I practice this? And like, as much as you're like, nobody can repeat the YouTube one. It's like, yeah, nobody has that choice sitting in front of them. So it's kind of a useless, it's, it's entertaining, but it's a teaching tool. It's kind of useless because you can't.

You can't really go reinvent history and decide versus comprehensives. And to sacrifice one, we sacrifice one.

Yeah.

To pull on that thread further and kind of dive a little deeper into evaluating talent and product talent, I hear this is one of your superpowers. And so I'd love to learn from you and what you've seen around how to evaluate talent. So you talked a little about interview questions you ask. So maybe we could either go in that direction or just like, what do you look for in people that you're hiring interviewing that maybe other people aren't.

I have a technique for it. Let me show, I'll show a quick picture and- Oh, YouTube plug. Yeah, YouTube. You can, I mentioned it before the call, you can put video on Spotify now too. But the Spotify plug, all your platforms.

That you've worked on, now you can upload my videos.

That's right. Now, so I'll talk through this diagram that has two axes, scope, this acronym PSHE and this line. So I'll stop sharing and describing and we can come back to it. But I'll tell a little bit of this technique sort of changed how I think about evaluating not only product talent, but it actually turns out you can use the same set of rules for evaluating basically every role. But I'll tell it from how you asked it about product talent. So 2011, Larry Page took over at Google and he made a bunch of changes to the company, mostly quite positive. And one of the ones he did was he, he moved us from being a functional organization to being a business unit organization. We called them product units, but roughly the same thing. And there were eight product units at, at Google, you know, YouTube and search and ads and Chrome and maps and so on. And that's very positive. It's hard to believe that we were already like, we're like 20,000 people who are still functional, like all of engineering, all of products on reported into the CEO. Just seems like totally crazy with the breadth of products that we covered. One of the downsides of it was like in any functional to business unit switch is you lose some of that, that what does the function mean? And then particular things like what is a good product manager or the question we were at risk of losing, so a group of, at the time I was running product for YouTube, the group of the eight product leaders around the company got together and said, hey, we need to keep some level of consistency amongst how we think about what's a great product manager or it's all going to diverge and it's not going to mean anything anymore. And actually as a fun aside, we did a ritual that I've repeated a few times, but it's not done often enough. We said, so who's going to drive this process? And we did an election. I don't know why we do elections in like the public world, but not in the private world, but it's actually like quite effective. We used to do them in YouTube where we would like, we would elect into certain roles and like, you got a one year term, you gave a little speech. You're like, but we, we, we, we did, we did an election. Anyway, so I got chosen to be the, the first sort of leader of this, of this, this, this challenge for keeping the, keeping the product management function together at Google. And the most obvious job we had to do was come up with a speech for the calibration committee. So Google does calibration a little bit different, or promotion a little bit different than most companies. Most companies your boss decides to get promoted or not. At Google, there's a committee that decides. It's supposed to be a committee that doesn't actually work directly with the person, so they can be a little unbiased and so on. And it gets done. The ritual was to do it in a hotel near the airport here in San Francisco, and everybody get in these different rooms. And there was always a A speech given at the beginning that used to be given by Jonathan Rosenberg, who ran product for Google for many years, and now it had to be given by somebody. It's like, okay, I'm going to give this speech. Now I got to figure out what the hell am I going to say? But like, what's a good product manager? And so as I was going through this, I just decided to run this little exercise. So this group of eight product leaders, we took the level guide. So we had a level guide for product managers, every company does. And we took it, we printed out a sheet of paper, cut it into little slices, one per level. And we cut off the title and the number and I handed them out and I said, can you reverse identify what level you're on? And turns out nobody could do it. And it's not easy to do. Like the level guide had been like, you know, kind of added to over time and not really that refined. And so it's full of all sorts of things that were, you know, whatever that at that time was the priority of the team, they stuck it in the level guide. And so it would say things like, this person can manage. A medium sized project and they interview at least three people a week and they always send the notes out on time and their expense reports are always fine. And it'd be like, oh, that's a director. And it's like a, yeah. And, and, you know, it's just whatever we were trying to send was sort of stuck in this thing. So, but we noticed that if you took all these sheets of paper and laid them out side by side, you could order them by exactly one statement, which is what was one that corresponded to scope. so there's some word in there that was an escalating adjective that mostly correlated to how big is a thing you run. And so we decided, okay, well we're going to standardize, we're just going to focus on making that clear. And so we said we're going to define scope and so that we all kind of use it the same way. And we came up with some, some stopping points and basically said, you own a feature, you own a group of features, you own a sub area of a product, you own multiple sub areas of product. You own an entire product or you own multiple products, you own a product line. And that's going to be how we think about scope, go forth and, and evaluate your teams. We had the next meeting a couple of weeks later and everybody comes back upset. Like, this didn't work at all. Like, what, what happened? And said, well, the search team is super mad at the ads team because search is like one product, but the entire thing is one product. The ads team, they went and invented all these products because there's like every little thing you do in the ad platform. has a SKU, has a P&L, has a, like, it's like, you can, you have lots of products. So that doesn't work. The second issue was they said the scope is actually an input, not an output. Like, we were, we're talking to our manager and said, well, this person should get promoted. They've managed this huge scope. And then they would say, but you gave them that scope. Like, that's good. We should be judging you, not the, not the person. How do we judge what they're doing with the scope? Like, it's actually, it's actually very different. And the third issue was in almost every team, some of our best people were working on things with odd scope that we didn't, they were risky projects. We didn't yet know, is this thing gonna work or not work? It might get canceled. And if we put in place a system that only rewarded scope, we would heavily disincent people from working on these riskier, more creative things. So they were kind of stuck. And then we ended up seven, we went through lots of frameworks. We ended up telling us one. called PSHE. And it comes from old mentor of mine, Clark, who was my boss at Microsoft for a number of years. And it stands for problem solution, how, execution, PSHE. And I will say it's a, I've tried many times to come up with a better acronym, and I have not been able to come up with one. So it's push, that's the word. That's as good as I can get. But here's how it works good enough, right? So push, that's all you have to remember. the, doesn't roll off the tongue, but that's maybe, I did better with I can questions, I think. But so here's how it works. So if you're sort of a junior product manager, what happens? You get handed a problem, you get handed a solution, you get handed the how, you know, go talk to this person, write this document, run this meeting, so on. And all you have to do is execute, run that playbook. And that's all, that's all we expect out of you. You can become a little more senior, We hand you a problem, we hand you a rough solution, you figure out the how, you figure out the, how are we going to organize this? What are the milestones? What, you know, how are we going to get it to market? You know, how are you doing meetings? What are the rituals? Like all those things show up in the H. At some point, become a little more senior, we hand you a problem and you come back with the solutions. And you come up and we judge you on the creativity and the effectiveness of the solutions. And at some point, you're senior enough that you tell us the problems. and you say, Hey, I know you told me to go work on activation, but actually I think our issue is brand, or I think our issue is quality, or I think our issue is whatever it might be. And that's sort of the pinnacle of this way of thinking about it. Now, just back to the picture for a moment. One of the interesting things that happened was the teams went and they evaluated their teams on these two axes, and they end up with this sort of curve line between them. That's not linear as you work your way through. and what happens is early in people's career, they mostly sit at that E point. You get handed a problem, handed a solution, handed a how, and you just execute and they gradually grow in scope. Later in people's careers, similarly, you're at that P level, just do bigger and bigger products. And it's like the job of being an entrepreneur, CEO, or an owner or so on is just kind of do bigger and bigger projects. But in the middle, the slope changes. And all of a sudden, it's not really about scope, it's about PSH. And there's a circle drawn here for what I like to call the trough of disillusion. And the reason, I'll, I'll stop sharing so we can talk about it, but the, the, the, what happens in that phase, and I was talking to the calibration companies about this, the reason we call the trough of disillusionment is for the, for the employee, for the person. This is a confusing time. Like everything about leading up to this moment from high school and college has been about school. And like at this point, you're all of a sudden told. We're not judging you on scope anymore. We're judging you on this PSH. I think that's very confusing. To the calibrator, to the manager, it's also very confusing because all of a sudden the difference, the way I put it is the difference between a level three and a level seven may not be scope. They may do the exact same job. It's how they do the job that matters. And here's some language for how they do the job. And so PSH became a very sticky way of thinking about it. It turns out that this way of evaluating people It's actually not that specific to product management. It's really easy to see why you do the exact same thing for engineers and designers and so on, but to pick one that may not be as obvious, I'll pick salespeople. Like a very common thing people do with salespeople is they evaluate them based on quota attainment. It's like the easiest thing to do is take the salespeople and rank them by who hit their quota and who didn't. You go ask the sales team who's the best salesperson and what you'll realize is they'll say, quota attainment is just a signal for how good you negotiate your quota and pick the right territory. And they say, really, you want to know who's the best salesperson? They say, well, you know, so and so, I mean, she can sell anything and she can be in the region that's growing or the region is shrinking or the new product or the old product or, and if you think about that terminology, it's very similar to PSHE thinking. Like this is the person who can come into a new space, identify the right problems and solve them. That's what makes a really great salesperson. So it could become my framework for evaluating talent in all sorts of ways. And you might recognize a pattern of like being a great P thinker is very correlated with being good with item questions. Like, can you spot the right problems? It's very similar to, can you spot the right questions? Can you decide what's important? And so that's been my main framework for evaluating.

Wow, there's so much there. A couple quick questions. Is this basically your calibration ladder? framework for PMs at this point. And then this is also just like your interview guide, just like interview at each of these pieces to level the person.

Yeah. So it's definitely how we do our version of leveling is, you know, BSH and the, the, we use a, a set of Radford levels. Radford has this, like, really interesting way of describing that as you grow in a profession, he uses this analogy of of someone, of like a sailor and that a junior sailor is like learning to tie knots and then you gradually can tie all the standard knots and then you can tie the advanced knots and so on. And so on, you kind of work your way up. And at some point the way you're judged is you invented nylon and there's like this list between there. It's like a way to evaluate every role. It's very similar to PSHE. And so we sort of look at a kind of similar list, but yeah, basically all of our roles are evaluated on something that corresponds with PSHE. And in terms of interviews, yeah, you look for the same thing. And so you, and by the way, I should say interviewing is one part of this. And you talk about interviewing, you talk about calibration. There's one other really important one, which is reference checking. And I think the best way to assess PSHE is actually through references. Instead of the most important guide me right isn't the interview guide, it's the one we call this person's references. What do you ask to actually get at these questions? Because people can often confuse them. Like, I said, just take product managers as an example. We all know some really amazing age level product managers. And one of the reasons, one of the hallmarks of an age level product manager is that their counterparts usually love them. And they'll say things like, oh my gosh, the person runs such efficient meetings and like everybody, all the communication is always clear, tasks are always, always buttoned up. know, exacts know what we're doing, the market knows what we're doing, sales team knows what we're doing. Like that, that's like this great age. And then you'll ask them a question of, okay, so when you're deciding which problem to solve, who is the leader of that? And are they picking the right problems? Or when there's a hard problem, who is regularly coming up with the best solutions for them? Who do you turn to? Who is the most obvious person to turn to to say like, this is a really hard problem. What's the right solution? And an amazing number of people will tell you, no, they run a great meeting. But like, actually solving the problem, the designer does that. Or like that, or the, what are the problems? None of the CEO kind of tells us what to do. That's like, not what this person is really good at. Yeah, I'm not sure we're solving the right problem, but boy, we've run a great meeting. And it's a, and it's not meant to diminish any of that. I mean, we spent a while talking about rituals, which mostly happen at that age level. So I don't think it's unimportant, but it's, it's actually quite hard to assess.

In an interview, but incredibly easy to.

Assess in a reference check. And I think getting good at that is really important.

You may have mentioned this, but what are, what's kind of the question there? Is there a question that you could comment on?

The absolute ideal case is you get to the person that you do the reference check with and you don't even tell them who you're asking about. And you just say, when you think of your teams, who is best at, and this obviously only works in cases where you have a pretty deep relationship with the person you're getting reference from and so on. But you can't always, you can't always do that. But ideally you want to kind of mimic that behavior. One of the things I think that's hard about reference checks is people have, you know, they have sort of perverse incentives in a reference check. They're not really, nobody, some of it is for good reason, some of it is for bad reason. You know, people generally don't like, you know, criticizing people. And they also like people judge themselves and they're, you know, they're, they're, they don't want, there's legal reasons that they can blow back and, and so on. And so what I try really hard to do is to draw contrast. So you try to say things. So like there's a couple techniques I've used for this. In the best case, you say, I know the person, I'm not going to even tell you who I'm asking about, but when you think about this team, who regularly identifies what problems they should focus on, who is most reliable at coming up with the solutions to the hardest problems, and you kind of work your way through it. The other way I like to do it is to provide contrast to give the person an out, to not make it obvious to them that I have this ranking. And so I'll say things like, when you think about this person, and I'll give you four different personas, someone who's regularly coming up with the problems that the team should be focused on, someone who given a set of problems is constantly solving them in this really creative way, the person that is just really good at getting a team moving, or the person who can take a playbook and execute it with high precision and high quality. I won't tell them that I have a qualitative judgment that one is better than the other, but you want them, because you just want your reference check to talk and you want them to say what's on their mind of, you know, you want to give them an opening to not feel like they're judging. Obviously, like another question I always ask people is, would you hire this person again? Or how excitedly would you hire this person again? I always ask them, what question should I have asked that I didn't? Another, another key technique for reference checks is, you know, you just need people, once they start talking, they'll reveal what they really feel and often like the little things will come out. But for this particular thing, if I want to know where they stand on this axis, don't tell people what you value. And by the way, I will say I value P over S over H over E. I've seen many companies that would have reversed that scale. And there are by the way, it's industries where it's very required. Like, You don't want a bunch of people running around and constantly telling you to solve some different problem. Like, I just need people that can do this job that we give them super, super well. And it, you know, so it depends a bit, like what your personality is and what your company's culture is and so on. So it's not actually that unbelievable that I might value the E over the P. And, you know, anybody who knows me, that's probably not true, but you can, for a reference check, you can.

Probably not give that away. Wow, that was gold. I hadn't heard these reference check insights and so I'm really happy we got to that. Maybe one last question on reference checks. How often do you find that a reference check leads to you not hiring.

Someone just like Ball Parker or does that hurt to say? Oh, all the time. And I will say, I try to do them as early in the process as practical. If it's, if it's possible, I mean, because I think it's actually the worst feeling for an interviewee to go through a process and then get dinged at the reference check stage. It's like it's a really crappy experience for the candidate. And obviously you have to be careful about not ruining anything for them. You can't always do the reference check as early as you can. When you're inside a company, when you're inside Google or Facebook or so on, you can generally do them even before you interview. It's sort of an expectation of like, we're going to hear a little bit about people in that process. And I generally value the reference check over interview signals. You know, if I had the stack rank in interviews, what is the best signal? The reference check is the top of the list. Those people, you know, they work with this person for, you know, sometimes for years, like their knowledge, what you're going to get out of 30 minutes of artificial scenarios is just like never going to compare with what a good reference check will give you. And then the second best thing I value is anything that feels like a real work exercise. And that, and, and, which is also like, and that even that is hard because some people, like their skill set doesn't naturally lead to a compressed time work exercise, but We do a thing for basically all our roles where at the start of the interview loop, the candidate presents to everyone on the loop and we invite some other people in the company to attend to. For a while, it was open to the whole company. Now we're big enough where that's not practical. But the original is very simple. At the beginning of the loop, the person presents. And generally for most roles, there's a exercise that they do, but about half the time is spent on them presenting whatever they want. They can talk about themselves. They can teach us something. and then another half is like we've given them a prompt, something that we want to direct. One of the things that I think when you're doing interviewing, one way to think about it, I call it home court away court, neutral court, you want interviews to balance in all those different spheres. So like, you know, a common mistake people make is they do all questions in home court. Hey, you know, if you're joining Airbnb, what would you do about X? And then, you know, what is the candidate going to say? Clearly can't be as thoughtful as you haven't thought about it nearly as much as you have. So really what you're testing is, did they come to the same answer that we did? Which is a pretty crappy way to judge someone. That's like 10 home court questions tend to be tough. They have to be very careful about how you do. Away court questions can also be tough. Like this person, you say, how did you solve this problem? And they say, well, we did this thing. And you don't really know. Was that problem actually hard? Was it somebody else was telling them what to do? um, or they're just like not telling you the whole story of what happened and so on. So you try really hard to make, most of our interviews are done neutral. So the Vasperderic, like teleporter question is a very neutral question. Like there's nothing, you don't know anything about Kodak. I don't have to know anything about Airbnb or wherever, wherever you might, I, I can just ask you this question. But this one thing, the presentation is the away court question. It's the, you now have an opportunity to talk about yourself in this, in this new way. And it's super interesting what people do. I mean, I've seen people. use that time. I often tell people it's the Brag session. This is like, and you know, for product managers, we do it for everyone, but it's like recruiters, salespeople, marketers. We tell them, you know, we're going to go through this whole interview process. And at most companies, you talk to six different people and six little segments. At the end of the day, you say, gosh, I really wish they had learned this about me. And I tell them, don't leave this with that feeling. What, what do you want us to know about you? Like all our questions are, are, are in some senses, like we're trying to lower bound you. Like how bad could this be? I want you to upper bound us. I want you to tell us what's, what's, what's really amazing here. And so we'll, we'll have the presenter go through that process and what they choose to talk about is very important. How they choose to present it is very important. But I do it as upper bounding. But if I had to stack rank in, in interviewing, what do I look for? Reference check at the top. you know, work product and presentation next, and then all the interviews. If one day, when they disagree, that's the order we judge in.

For sure. I feel like you have five books in you that you need to write on so many of these topics. This is such good stuff. I wish I could keep going. I know you have to run. So we have this final lightning round. So I'm gonna ask you five questions. There's one at the end I didn't tell you about ahead of time, so it's gonna be a surprise. And so I'm just gonna ask these quick questions. Let me know what comes to mind. okay, first question. Just what are, what are two, three books that you find that you recommend most to other people? Oh, pulling out the bookshelf.

Yeah. One, one, one I already said, and we talked about. So this, this would take two of the slots. The next one on my list is a switch by Chip and Dan Heath. How to Change Things and Change His Heart. The other one, this is probably a surprising one. It's called understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. Super fun book. It's a comic book about comic books, and you don't have to like comic books at all. to love this book. It's basically the sort of starting point is over time communication has drifted at two extremes. So one is we've gotten very good at written form and the other is we've gotten very good at art, single pieces of art and comics are the hybrid, right? They are drawing mixed with writing. Sometimes I think he calls it, oh God, he had a good term for that. I'm now forgetting, but he did. He describes comics really well. And he goes through the actual reasoning of why comics are structured the way they are. And one of the reasons it's so important to me is, and you could probably tell from like how we talked about different things, is often a diagram that crystallizes something. The art of storytelling, diagramming, so on, I think is so critical for basically any part of life. And this book is, it just, it's so thought provoking on how to do it. Understanding comics.

Understanding comics.

Wow.

Good choice. Okay. favorite recent movie or TV show?

Okay, a couple that come to mind, Only Murders in the Building is a really fun one. And my family got really into the Marvel series during the pandemic. And so WandaVision, if anybody hasn't seen that, if you're not into superhero stuff and so on, which I'm not really that, like, I'm actually more of a DC Comics person. I like Superman, but WandaVision is like one of the best pieces of art that I've seen done in a very long time.

Very well done show. I feel like with that show, I had to, like, I gave up initially. I'm like, what the hell is this? What is going on? I know.

And then it gets.

It gets good. It gets good.

Yeah.

And on the flip side, only murders in the building. I don't know if you've seen the.

Second season yet, but I'm just like, I'm done with it. I don't. I'm just tired of it now. I don't know what they're doing. Oh, yeah, we're.

We're only one episode into the second.

Season, so we'll see.

Okay. The first season was so good. It's no good. Yeah. Okay. And it's all about podcasters. It's like so meta around podcasters. Oh man. Okay, good segue. Okay, favorite interview question. You may have already answered this.

The teleporter one is definitely my favorite. My second favorite one, I was gonna give you a different one, is I have a series of questions around.

Let.

Me pull it here so I give you the, what the real question is. But basically around a dashboard prompt. And it's, the starting point of the question is, pick a product. I say your favorite technical product. And the constraint is it can't be something that you built, you know, worked on or competed with. It's got to be in a space that, like, you're not an expert in. And I generally ask people why, which is actually a really interesting passion test. And then I'll ask people design the one page dashboard for that product. You're the CEO, general manager, whatever. You run that product. What's on the dashboard? Why? Does that It's an interesting Eigen question type question of like, can you tell what's important for this product or not? And then I asked them to basically redesign the product. And the way I do it is you've been hired by a competitor to design a MeToo version of product. I'm going to leave you aside for a moment that why you would want to build a MeToo project version. What is the bare minimum of what you need to build? And then I tell them, you ran out of resources, you get what order the scope. and a quarter of the, of you guys, four of the time and a quarter of the, the, the team, what do you actually bill? And then I get down to the other side of like, you've decided you can differentiate in only one place. What do you do to differentiate? So a series of questions that are basically a form of PSHE, but just formed around a new problem space that gets, lets people wander a little bit. I've seen some really amazing answers to that.

There's also a lot of biking question elements to this sequence.

Yes.

Excellent. Okay. Who else in the industry do you respect as a thought leader who comes to mind?

Other than you, am I having to act, I, I have to have, I, I have a bunching company excluded. That's it. I did, by the way, your newsletter is one of my top reads. I think that yours and, and Ben Thompson from Stratechery are two of the, two of the ones that I, I think we both have a very like natural instinct for, for writing and synthesizing things that people are feeling without, you know, with a clarity that's really helpful. So I really appreciate that. I mean, I think the rituals process is exposed to me to some really amazing leaders. Talked about Ariana, I always learn a lot when I talk to Ariana. Trist Doshi has contributed a bunch. I think he's really helpful and is like, I can't believe he basically had no Twitter followers at the beginning of the pandemic and like his tweet threads are just total gold. And this is so insightful and we'll put together. Uh, Fiji Simo is someone that I, I learned a lot from. She now runs Instacart. Daniel from Spotify, Daniel Ek, I think is, is, he's got this really unique way of thinking about the world. And he's also one of the few people that can like hold a very long term view and a very short term view at the same time. Fantastic ethics. I'd also say my entire board, Reid, Reid Hoffman, Ayman Adel, Mamoon Hamid, Quinn Clark. Sarah Kuo, I think they're all amazing and I'm super lucky to have a group of people I can call with questions.

Awesome. Someone's gonna have a lot of work in these show notes. We have that list. Okay, final question. What's your go-to karaoke song or dance.

Move at a wedding? Karaoke song is if I Had a Million Dollars by the Bare Naked Ladies. And it's a, if people don't remember the song, part of the reason it's my favorite is I'm a very mediocre singer and you don't have to be that good a singer. and everybody can sing along so you can kind of bring everybody into it. And it's just such a fun song. If I had a million dollars, you're.

As thoughtful about your karaoke songs as you are about everything else you're doing. Shashank: Thank you so much for being on this podcast. You've set a really high bar for CEO guests, so we'll see who comes up next. Two file questions. Where can folks find you online if.

They want to reach out or learn more? And how can listeners be useful to you? Okay, I'll give the same answer to both. Well, you can, I'm easy to find. One of the benefits of having a not very common name is that it's easy to find me on basically every platform. So you can find me on Twitter, it's easy to DM me, shishir@go.io, get right to me. But in terms of being useful to me and also finding me, I would highly recommend joining the Richards Great Teams Brain Trust. And I think it's a pretty fun experience to get a chance to contribute to a book like that. And hopefully if you've made it this far in the episode, then you probably are interested. I think you'll find it interesting. And I'm having a lot of fun with the people in that bright trust.

Amazing.

I'm definitely going to join the deaf here. All right. Thank you so much, Lenny.

That was really fun. 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 lennyspodcast.com. see you in the next episode.