Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth

Gaurav Misra is the co-founder and CEO of Captions, an AI-powered video creation company and one of the most successful consumer AI products in the world today. Previously he was a product leader at Snap, where he created the design engineering function and spent years helping develop features used by hundreds of millions of users worldwide. With a background in both engineering and design, Gaurav...

Rahul Vohra is the founder and CEO of Superhuman. Prior to Superhuman, Rahul founded Rapportive, the first Gmail plug-in to scale to millions of users, which he sold to LinkedIn in 2012. He is also a prominent angel investor, and his fund has invested $50 million in over 120 companies, including Placer, Supabase, Mercury, Zip, ClassDojo, and Writer. What you’ll learn: • The unexpected insight abou...

Susan Cain , author of the groundbreaking bestseller Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking , shares a guide for how introverts can thrive in the workplace without sacrificing their authentic selves. Drawing from her extensive research and personal experience, Cain offers a powerful reframing: success doesn’t require becoming more extroverted—it demands becoming more ful...

Eric Simons is the founder and CEO of StackBlitz, the company behind Bolt—the #1 web-based AI coding agent and one of the fastest-growing products in history. After nearly shutting down, StackBlitz launched Bolt on Twitter and exploded from zero to $40 million ARR and 1 million monthly active users in about five months. What you’ll learn: 1. How Bolt reached nearly $40M ARR and 3 million registere...

Anton Osika is the co-founder and CEO of Lovable, which is building what they call “the last piece of software”—an AI-powered tool that turns descriptions into working products without requiring any coding knowledge. Since launching three months ago, Lovable hit $4 million ARR in the first four weeks and $10 million ARR in two months with a team of just 15 people, making it Europe’s fastest-growin...

Ivan Zhao is the co-founder and CEO of Notion. Ivan shares the untold story of Notion, from nearly running out of database space during Covid to finding product-market fit after several “lost years,” and the hard-won lessons along the way. — What you’ll learn: 1. Why you sometimes need to “hide your vision” behind something people actually want—what Ivan calls “sugar-coating the broccoli” 2. How I...

Matt Mullenweg is the co-founder of WordPress, the open source platform powering a staggering 43% of the internet. He also serves as CEO of Automattic—the parent company of brands like WordPress.com, WooCommerce, and Tumblr—which is worth over $7 billion, with over 1,700 employees across 90 countries. In this episode, he discusses some of the most controversial topics surrounding WordPress, Automa...

Keith Coleman (VP of product) and Jay Baxter (founding ML engineer), the minds behind Community Notes, reveal how a small, scrappy team inside Twitter/X built the most trusted crowdsourced information system on the internet—one that’s changing the way we understand truth online. What you’ll learn: 1. How Community Notes actually works —a deep dive into the groundbreaking algorithm that rewards “br...

Bob Moesta , co-creator of the Jobs to Be Done framework, recently published a new book, Job Moves . Drawing from interviews with over 1,000 people about their career transitions, it offers a practical playbook for career development. In our conversation, we discuss: • The four different “quests” that drive career changes • Why job features (salary, title) matter less than experiences • How to ide...

Uri Levine is a co-founder of Waze (which was acquired by Google for $1.3 billion in 2013), along with nine other companies (including another company he sold for over $1 billion). He’s also been on 20 boards and has been an advisor to over 50 startups. He recently released a new chapter of his best-selling book Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution , which provides a guide to surviving...

Karina Nguyen leads research at OpenAI, where she’s been pivotal in developing groundbreaking products like Canvas, Tasks, and the o1 language model. Before OpenAI, Karina was at Anthropic, where she led post-training and evaluation work for Claude 3 models, created a document upload feature with 100,000 context windows, and contributed to numerous other innovations. With experience as an engineer...

Tobi Lütke is the founder and CEO of Shopify, a $130 billion business that powers over 10% of all U.S. e-commerce. Starting as a snowboard shop in 2004, Shopify has become the leading commerce platform by consistently approaching problems differently. Tobi remains deeply technical, frequently coding alongside his team, and is known for his unique approach to leadership, product development, and co...

Nan Yu is the head of product at Linear, one of the most beloved and fastest-growing B2B SaaS products out there today, and the gold standard for high-performing tech teams. In our conversation, we discuss: • Why speed and quality aren’t actually at odds • Linear’s unique approach to product development • Nan’s systematic approach to creativity • Linear’s philosophy on deadlines • The “double tria...

Chandra Janakiraman is the chief product officer, executive vice president, and a board member at VRChat. Previously, he was a product leader at Meta, where he led Facebook’s social experience interfaces and Reality Labs’ growth; served as CPO at Headspace, where he helped relaunch the platform, driving a 4x subscriber boost; and was a GM at Zynga, delivering massive hit games that reached hundred...

Elena Verna is one of Silicon Valley’s most sought-after growth advisors and operators. She previously led growth at companies like Amplitude, Miro, Dropbox, and SurveyMonkey and is currently doing full-time advising for high-growth tech companies. In our conversation, Elena and I discuss: • 10 growth tactics that never work • Her 3 favorite growth frameworks • How to increase your career optional...

Graham Weaver  teaches a top-rated course at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business (GSB), where he often unexpectedly ends up helping students figure out what to do with their lives. He is also the founder and CEO of Alpine Investors, a people-driven private equity firm. In our conversation, we discuss: • Why everything worthwhile requires suffering • Why most people operate on autopilot, and how...

Rohini Pandhi is a product leader at Mercury, and previously spent over seven years at Square/Block leading product work on Square payments, invoicing, and the Bitkey hardware Bitcoin wallet. She’s also the co-founder of the startup bootcamp Transparent Collective and is an active angel investor. In our conversation, we discuss: • Key indicators that it’s time to hire PMs • How to build your early...

Drew Houston is the co-founder and CEO of Dropbox. Under his leadership, Dropbox has grown from a simple idea to a service used by over 700 million registered users globally, with a valuation exceeding $9 billion. Drew has led Dropbox through multiple phases, from explosive viral growth, to battling all the tech giants at once, to reinventing the company for the future of work. In our conversation...

Alisa Cohn is an executive coach who has worked with C-suite executives at startups like Venmo, Etsy, Wirecutter, and DraftKings, and Fortune 500 companies like Microsoft, Google, Pfizer, Dell, and IBM. Inc. Magazine named Alisa one of the top 100 leadership speakers, and she was named one of the Top 50 coaches in the world by Thinkers50 and the #1 startup coach for the past four years by Global G...

Eilon Reshef is the co-founder and chief product officer at Gong, one of the most ubiquitous B2B products in the world. In our conversation, we discuss: • Gong’s unique approach to working with design partners • Their unique pod model • Why Eilon makes big decisions quickly • Lessons learned from being early in AI • The power of extreme focus • His “spiral method” for learning complex topics quick...

Shaun Clowes is the chief product officer at Confluent and former CPO at Salesforce’s MuleSoft and at Metromile. He was also the first head of growth at Atlassian, where he led product for Jira Agile and built the first-ever B2B growth team. In our conversation, we discuss: • Why most PMs are bad, and how to fix this • Why great AI products are all about the data • Why he changed his mind about be...

Marc Benioff is the co-founder and CEO of Salesforce, the second-largest software company in the world. He started programming at age 15, selling his first program for $75, and went on to build Salesforce into a company worth more than $300 billion that also owns Slack, Tableau, Quip, and MuleSoft. Marc is known as a marketing legend, and is now leading Salesforce into the era of AI agents. In our...

Farhan Thawar is the head of engineering at Shopify, where he oversees more than 1,000 engineers and a platform that powers over 10% of all U.S. e-commerce. Before Shopify, he was VP of engineering at Pivotal Labs and Xtreme Labs, and co-founder of Helpful.com. In our conversation, Farhan shares: • Why choosing the harder path leads to better outcomes • How to create intensity within your org (wit...

Jackson Shuttleworth is a Group PM at Duolingo, where he leads the retention team and the powerful streak feature. The streak feature, which gamifies consecutive days of learning, has been Duolingo’s most important and innovative growth lever and a key driver of their growth to a $14 billion business with almost 600 million users. In our conversation, we dive deep into the history and lessons of t...

Seth Godin is a legend. He’s a marketer, teacher, entrepreneur, and author of more than 20 books, including Purple Cow , Permission Marketing , and Linchpin . He also writes one of the most popular and longest-running blogs in the world (approaching publishing 10,000 in a row !) and continues to shape how we think about marketing, brand, product, and creating lasting change in the world. In our co...