Lenny's Podcast

12 episodes scanned. 31% of ad slots promote the show's own products.

Recent Episodes

1. How a 19-year-old intern built the growth engine behind this $2B AI company | Hector Serrano

   Nov 1, 2026

   Hector Serrano, a content creator who joined Wispr Flow at 19 and now leads its paid user-generated content (UGC) program, explains how the company built a roster of creators paid partly on ad performance to produce hundreds of ads a month. The conversation covers when to start paid acquisition, how creator compensation works (percent of ad spend versus GMV, plus a "smart retainer"), what to look for in a young marketing hire, and why YouTube is an underrated long-term growth channel for SaaS. Lenny and Hector also discuss his favorite books and tools in a closing lightning round.

2. An 86-minute guide to finding PMF | Rob Snyder (Author, The Power of Pull)

   Oct 25, 2026

   Rob Snyder, author of The Power of Pull and writer of the Physics of Startups newsletter, walks through his PULL framework (Project, Unavoidable, List of options, Limitations) for finding product-market fit. The conversation covers generating startup ideas through firsthand experience, running cold outreach and first sales calls, why he advises against design partners and pilots, and the case study factory model for early go-to-market. It also touches on applying the framework inside larger companies.

3. Inside the black box of AI: How AI models actually think | Emmanuel Ameisen (Anthropic)

   Oct 18, 2026

   Emmanuel Ameisen, an interpretability researcher at Anthropic, explains how his team studies the internal computations of large language models like Claude by decoding intermediate numeric representations. The conversation covers why models are "grown" rather than built, why the next-token-prediction framing undersells their planning and conceptual representations, and what interpretability findings suggest about model behavior. It also touches on consciousness, the history of scaling bets, and the emerging field of interpretability research.

4. Why every company now needs to think and operate like a lab team | Josh Woodward (Google Labs, Gemini, AI Studio)

   Oct 11, 2026

   Josh Woodward, head of Google Labs, the Gemini app, and AI Studio, discusses why companies need to operate like a labs team to keep up with rapidly changing AI capabilities. The conversation covers where good ideas come from, his "almost possible" framework for spotting new opportunities, and how product-market fit and signs of a failing idea show up in practice. He also addresses how to structure and staff an internal labs team, skills he is hiring for, and Google's approach to products like NotebookLM, Flow, and Gemini.

5. OpenAI’s Head of ChatGPT: We’re entering a new era of AI (again) | Tibo Sottiaux

   Oct 4, 2026

   Tibo Sottiaux, Head of ChatGPT and Codex at OpenAI, discusses the launch of Dots, OpenAI's new personal AI agent platform, and the future of AI-powered work. He explains how agents will handle the majority of internet actions, the evolution from manual workflow configuration to self-learning systems, and OpenAI's commitment to building an open ecosystem with revenue sharing for plugin developers. Sottiaux also addresses AI safety, the changing skill requirements in the AI era, and the vision of seamless, always-on AI assistants that augment human creativity rather than replace it.

6. The grief, loneliness, and burnout sweeping through the tech industry right now | Molly Graham

   Sep 27, 2026

   Molly Graham returns to discuss how her famous 'Give Away Your Legos' career advice applies in an AI world. The conversation explores the grief, loneliness, and burnout sweeping through tech as AI transforms roles—particularly engineering—and examines which responsibilities should remain human versus be delegated to AI. Graham argues that while change remains scary and hard, the fear narrative around job displacement is overblown, and that great managers are the strongest lever for employee happiness during this transition.

7. 90 minutes of unfiltered product advice from Snap and Discord’s product chief | Peter Sellis

   Sep 20, 2026

   Peter Sellis, the first product manager at Snapchat and former Head of Product at Discord, discusses his unconventional approach to product leadership and team design. He shares insights on why most product managers are mediocre, the structural challenges that prevented Snapchat's ads business from reaching its potential despite massive user engagement, and his philosophy on building high-performing teams with strong ideological alignment and clear decision-making authority.

8. How we built Grok Bot in a month | Roman Ugarte (SpaceXAI)

   Sep 8, 2026

   Roman Ugarte, who led Growth at Cursor before its acquisition by SpaceX, discusses building Grok Bot—a knowledge-work AI agent product—from scratch in one month with a small, isolated team at SpaceXAI. The conversation covers the strategic decision to build Grok Bot as a separate product rather than extend Cursor, the manual onboarding of nearly 300 early users, and the two critical design decisions (hiding internal mechanics and adopting a "colleague-pilled" philosophy) that drove its rapid success post-launch. Roman shares insights on product velocity, ruthless simplification, and how to build defensible moats through obsessive focus on useful capabilities rather than abstract strategy.

9. Why companies are becoming a series of loops | Anish Acharya (a16z)

   Sep 6, 2026

   Anish Acharya, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, discusses why fears of an AI-driven permanent underclass are overblown, the emerging paradigm of company building around loops and agents, and why the biggest consumer opportunity lies in making people happier rather than just more productive. He explores how AI will reshape work across functions, the split between frontier and open-weight models, and how humans remain critical for out-of-distribution thinking and strategy.

10. AI’s third era: the rise of persistent AI coworkers | Tara Seshan (Product Lead ChatGPT Work)

    Aug 30, 2026

    Tara Seshan, Product Lead for ChatGPT Work and Codex at OpenAI, discusses the evolution of AI products from chat interfaces to persistent AI coworkers. She explores how product management is shifting from grand strategy to rapid hypothesis testing, the importance of ambition as a differentiator in an AI-enabled world, and OpenAI's internal culture and product philosophy around building for model capabilities 2-3 months ahead.