Lenny's Podcast
Themes across episodes
1. Taste, judgment, and craft are the new scarce resource
As AI collapses the cost of building and writing code, nearly every guest converges on the same inversion: implementation stops being the bottleneck and knowing what's worth building becomes the differentiator. The synthesis holds across founders, PMs, and platform leads alike, though guests disagree on whether taste is innate (Fadell leans toward a small accountable team of taste-makers) or fully trainable through reps (Schoening's explicit position).
Curation replaces creation as the hard part
Several guests independently land on the same phrase: implementation used to be the
constraint, now judging and curating what's been built is.
- Ambrosino: "implementation is not the expensive part anymore, it's taste" - curating 90
parallel prototypes is harder than building any one of them. (2026-06-28)
- Wu: product taste, not raw technical skill, is becoming the scarcest and most valuable
skill as code gets cheap. (2026-04-23)
- Schoening: AI has made the first 10% of any project free, but the last 10% is still 90% of
the real work. (2026-05-02)
- Fadell: for true 1.0 products, decisions must be opinion-based, not data-based, because
there's no comparable data yet. (2026-06-07)
Judgment concentrates in vision and strategy as execution automates
- Mosseri: human judgment is concentrating in vision and strategy, not execution; AI
strategy output stays mediocre unless heavily steered. (
2026-07-09) - Penn: durable human value sits in judgment and a defended point of view; she forms her own
view before bringing Claude into high-stakes writing. (
2026-07-26) - Singhal: as mechanical execution gets automated, judgment becomes the paramount PM skill
because proposed-change volume is about to jump 10-100x. (
2026-04-19) - Cohen: LinkedIn keeps only five traits strictly human - vision, empathy, communication,
creativity, and judgment - and is trying to automate everything else, with judgment as the
single most important trait. (
2025-12-04)
Taste is trainable, not a fixed gift
- Schoening: taste is a trainable skill, built the same way a model is trained - through
reps and feedback. (
2026-05-02) - Fadell: as AI makes building trivially easy, craft and taste (e.g. "luxury" software like
Flighty) become the actual differentiator over disposable "H&M" apps. (
2026-06-07) - Rabois: intellectual curiosity, not just longer hours, is what future-proofs a career
against AI. (
2026-04-12)
Comprehension, not friction, is the deeper design problem
- Butterfield: product value follows a utility curve (an S-curve of effort versus payoff), so
the real question for any feature is where on that curve it sits, not whether you have it.
(
2025-11-20) - Butterfield: reducing friction is usually the wrong default goal - for most products, most
of the time, the actual obstacle is comprehension, not the number of steps.
(
2025-11-20) - Butterfield: user quality expectations keep rising even for parts of the product you never
touch ("divine discontent"), because users' bar is set by the best experience they've had
anywhere. (
2025-11-20) - Butterfield: positioning a product around the outcome it enables, not its features ("we
don't sell saddles here"), means you're creating a market, not just a product.
(
2025-11-20)
2. The collapse of specialist roles into generalist builders
Meta, OpenAI's Codex team, Netflix, Whatnot, and Snap all describe the same structural shift: specialist PM/design/data-science teams give way to small generalist pods where role is defined by where someone spends their time, not a fixed title. Guests split sharply on how far to take it - Ambrosino and Verrilli both explicitly warn against eliminating the product role outright even as their own orgs blur its lanes, while design keeps showing up as the one function that resists the trend.
Generalist pods replace specialist team structures
- Mosseri: Meta replaced ~13-person specialist teams with 4-6-person generalist pods
anchored by a new "product staff" role. (
2026-07-09) - Ambrosino: on the Codex team, designers write code and PMs write code; role is "the
average" of what someone works on, organized via "zone defense." (
2026-06-28) - Stone: Netflix is hiring fewer narrow specialists and more generalists who can move across
the stack, though deep specialists still matter in a few domains. (
2026-07-19) - Spiegel: designers are now shipping code directly, and even the CEO builds his own agents
rather than relying on staff synthesis. (
2026-04-26) - Cohen: LinkedIn scrapped its APM program for a formal "Full Stack Builder" title and career
ladder, open to any function, organized into small pods that reassemble every quarter
instead of fixed large teams. (
2025-12-04)
Tools alone don't drive adoption; change management does
- Cohen: only a small minority of employees (Cohen estimates ~5%) adopt new AI tools purely
because they exist; the rest require deliberate change management - incentive shifts,
visible pilot pods, and celebrated success stories - modeled on LinkedIn's earlier
desktop-to-mobile transition. (
2025-12-04) - Cohen: LinkedIn folded AI fluency directly into performance calibration and hiring, not
just tooling access, to make the shift stick. (
2025-12-04)
The PM role is bifurcating and shrinking to provable need
- Singhal: roughly half of PMs - those whose core skill was moving information between
stakeholders - are structurally at risk, while builder PMs are having their best years.
(
2026-04-19) - Verrilli: Whatnot's PM philosophy is to not assume a team needs a PM by default; hire one
only where there is a specific, provable need. (
2026-08-02) - Avasare: Anthropic's response to PM scarcity is a formal two-week rule - engineers act as
de facto PM on anything under two engineering-weeks. (
2026-04-05) - Ambrosino: calls eliminating the product role entirely "a terrible idea" that discards
accumulated discipline-specific practice. (
2026-06-28) - Singhal: despite fears AI makes PMs obsolete, open PM roles hit their highest level in
three-plus years. (
2026-04-19)
Design is the outlier, resisting the generalist trend
- Singhal: design is the clear outlier in an otherwise AI-augmented org; design headcount is
plateauing and AI doesn't yet make someone a good designer the way it makes someone a
better PM. (
2026-04-19) - Wen: the discovery-diverge-converge design process is largely dead because designers no
longer have time to make polished mocks before engineers ship a working version.
(
2026-03-01) - Segal: designers, researchers, and data/analytics workers report the worst AI-era
sentiment of any function. (
2026-07-12)
Engineers shift from writing code to managing and verifying agents
- Sherwin Wu: the engineer's job is shifting from writing code to managing parallel fleets
of AI agents, like a tech lead managing many reports at once. (
2026-02-12) - Fung: Anthropic engineers now ship roughly 8x more code per quarter than in 2025, which
shifted the bottleneck from writing code to verifying it. (
2026-06-21) - Cherny: the software engineer title is starting to dissolve into "builder" as the
underlying skill democratizes. (
2026-02-19)
3. Building AI-native products: new practices replace old artifacts
As models compress timelines from months to days, teams are inventing new rituals to replace PRDs, long roadmaps, and manual code review - evals, just-in-time planning, and automated verification at scale. The consistent warning across Wu, Fung, and Willison: an automation only counts once it clears close to 100% reliability, and the last mile of accuracy is disproportionately valuable and disproportionately hard.
Evals and specs replace PRDs as the unit of product work
- Penn: evals have replaced PRDs as the core artifact of user value for Anthropic's research
PMs. (
2026-07-26) - Avasare: Anthropic ships roughly 70-80% of its work with no written PRD at all.
(
2026-04-05) - Fung: automated code review works best when it validates against an explicit written spec
checked into the repo, not vague notions of quality. (
2026-06-21) - Ambrosino: PRDs and prototypes are not obsolete, they are situational - picking the wrong
medium anchors people prematurely. (
2026-06-28)
Off-the-shelf AI tools fail without deep internal customization
- Cohen: vendor coding and design tools (Cursor, Copilot, Windsurf, Figma) consistently
failed to work directly on LinkedIn's stack; each required LinkedIn to re-architect its own
platform and work in "alpha mode" with the vendor before the tool became useful.
(
2025-12-04) - Cohen: giving an agent unrestricted access to a company's full knowledge base backfires -
it hallucinates and can't weight what matters; curated "golden examples" are what actually
make an agent work. (
2025-12-04) - Cohen: LinkedIn builds narrow, single-purpose internal agents scoped to one domain (trust,
growth, research, graph analysis) owned by that domain's expert, rather than one
general-purpose assistant. (
2025-12-04)
Build for the model's trajectory, then strip the scaffolding
- Sherwin Wu: AI product scaffolding keeps getting "eaten" by improving base models, so
build for where models are heading, not where they are. (
2026-02-12) - Wu: Anthropic strips prompt scaffolding out every time a model gets smarter, treating
features like the to-do list as a crutch to eventually remove. (
2026-04-23) - Cherny: the bitter lesson applies directly to building AI products - bet on the more
general model over fine-tuning or heavy scaffolding. (
2026-02-19) - Ambrosino: teams should build things the current model can't quite do yet and revisit them
each model generation, instead of killing a feature after one failed attempt. (
2026-06-28)
Verification, not code-writing, is the new bottleneck
- Willison: the "dark factory" pattern means engineers stop reading the code agents write,
replacing manual review with automated verification at scale. (
2026-04-02) - Fung: a simple two-tier severity framework, "bad" versus "sad," scales quality triage
better than raw performance dashboards. (
2026-06-21) - Wu: an automation that isn't reliable close to 100% of the time doesn't count as a real
automation, and the last 5-10% of accuracy is disproportionately valuable. (
2026-04-23)
Long roadmaps give way to just-in-time planning
- Fung: long-range roadmaps stopped working, so planning shrank to JIT monthly cycles
re-verified weekly. (
2026-06-21) - Ambrosino: long-range roadmaps are mostly false precision right now; only near-term plans
deserve real detail. (
2026-06-28) - Wu: AI-native product timelines have compressed from six months to as little as a day,
flipping the PM's job toward finding the fastest path to ship. (
2026-04-23)
4. AI safety, security, and governance
Two distinct threads recur across the show: technical security (agentic systems open new attack surfaces that resist filtering) and corporate governance (structures that stop a mission-driven company's own success from being extracted by shareholders). Both threads share Ries's underlying claim - whose values get encoded structurally, decided before the pressure arrives, determines the outcome either way.
Agentic security can't be solved by better filtering
- Willison: the "lethal trifecta" explains exactly when an agent becomes dangerous - private
data access, exposure to untrusted instructions, and a path to exfiltrate data. (
2026-04-02) - Willison: prompt injection cannot be filtered away, and 97% detection accuracy is a
failing grade, not a success. (
2026-04-02) - Willison predicts a "Challenger disaster" for AI: normalized risk-taking with agentic
systems will eventually cause a major, headline-grabbing breach. (
2026-04-02) - Vo: physically or logically separating agents by machine enforces trust boundaries that
soft permissions alone don't. (
2026-03-29)
Corporate structures that protect mission from a company's own success
- Ries: the thing that destroys great companies is almost never competition - it's their own
success becoming a liability that invites extraction. (
2026-05-10) - Ries: Public Benefit Corporation status is a near-costless legal filing that gives cover to
reject profit-maximizing pressure, and it's already the norm among major AI labs.
(
2026-05-10) - Ries: Anthropic's Long-Term Benefit Trust - safety experts with board-appointment power but
no equity - is the structural reason it can make costly mission-aligned decisions without
being overruled. (
2026-05-10) - Avasare: Anthropic has repeatedly taken commercial hits for safety, including declining to
launch an early chatbot before ChatGPT existed. (
2026-04-05)
AI's societal stakes and the coming backlash
- Patel: AI's success may be an existential requirement, not a convenience, because of
collapsing birth rates. (
2026-02-26) - Spiegel: humanity, not technology, will determine how AI actually gets adopted, and the
industry is underestimating coming societal pushback. (
2026-04-26) - Evans: the much-discussed AI water-usage backlash isn't supported by the data; other
concerns (energy, job loss) are more grounded but still unproven at scale. (
2026-05-31) - Cherny: Claude Code was released as a research preview specifically to study safety in the
wild, not just readiness. (
2026-02-19)
5. The workforce under AI: bifurcation, burnout, and reinvention
Segal's survey data and individual accounts converge on a split workforce, not a uniformly disrupted one - roughly half report AI improved their professional identity, half don't, and that split predicts almost every other wellbeing measure. Evans and Shipper directly counter the doom framing: cheaper labor historically expands output (Jevons Paradox) rather than shrinking headcount, and hiring for AI-adjacent roles is up, not down - a real tension the show never fully resolves against Segal's burnout numbers from the same period.
Sentiment is genuinely split, and burnout is rising
- Segal: significant burnout jumped from 44.7% to 54.7% year over year, while career
optimism fell from 54.8% to 48.7%. (
2026-07-12) - Segal: the dominant fear in tech right now is being expected to do more for the same pay,
not job loss to AI. (
2026-07-12) - Segal: founders and people at smaller companies remain the happiest across nearly every
measure, for the second year running, but even they aren't fully positive. (
2026-07-12) - Segal: no functional group in tech would recommend their own role to someone entering the
industry now, not even founders. (
2026-07-12)
Whether a job survives depends on task-vs-job, not raw exposure
- Evans: the right question for job impact is not "can AI do this task" but "is the task the
job." (
2026-05-31) - Evans: cheaper labor does not mechanically shrink headcount; historically it has expanded
total output and value, per the Jevons Paradox. (
2026-05-31) - Evans: you cannot reliably predict in advance which jobs are exposed to AI disruption;
task-percentage automation scores are fundamentally flawed. (
2026-05-31) - Shipper: the AI job apocalypse is not happening; models make yesterday's human competence
cheap, which pushes humans to keep finding the next frontier. (
2026-05-24) - Shipper: a new "forward deployed engineer" role - someone who babysits and maintains
internal agents - is a durable new job created by automation. (
2026-05-24)
Reinvention is personal, not top-down, and old mastery can become a trap
- Singhal: the single biggest predictor of who struggles to adapt is not skill but "shadow
superpower" - the more someone mastered the old system, the harder it is to recognize the
new one is real. (
2026-04-19) - Singhal: the practical unlock for reinvention is a personal moment of joy using AI tools,
not a top-down mandate. (
2026-04-19) - Singhal: top tactical advice is to "swallow your ego" - accept a smaller title or role if
it keeps you on the technology's current edge. (
2026-04-19) - Segal: concrete advice for employees - go deep on a few AI use cases instead of trying to
be a generalist, and protect your relationship with your manager. (
2026-07-12) - Cohen: a LinkedIn UX researcher used internal AI agent tooling to move directly into an
open growth-PM role, a career jump Cohen says wasn't realistically available before.
(
2025-12-04) - Cohen: AI tooling amplified LinkedIn's top performers first - they adopted fastest and gave
the most detailed feedback - suggesting AI compounds existing craft more than it levels the
playing field. (
2025-12-04)
The pace of AI adoption carries equity costs
- Singhal: the accelerating pace of AI-driven work is quietly eroding industry diversity,
concentrating hiring around Bay Area networks and hitting people with the least slack -
disproportionately women in child-rearing years - hardest. (
2026-04-19) - Segal: early-career workers report "AI guilt," feeling like using AI is a form of
cheating, and that guilt declines with seniority. (
2026-07-12)
6. Distribution, moats, and the next economic frontier
As AI commoditizes both code and foundation-model output, guests agree the durable moat moved elsewhere - to distribution (Spiegel, Evans), to proven-but-improved product patterns (Pincus), and physically outside software altogether (Younis, Kalinowski). Shipper's contrarian data point complicates the simplest doom narrative for SaaS specifically: agents are found to increase software usage, not replace it.
Software is not a moat; distribution is
- Spiegel: software is not a moat; distribution is what actually separates winners in
consumer tech, a lesson from Snap's early days that AI-era companies are relearning.
(
2026-04-26) - Evans: distribution, not product quality, is becoming the dominant competitive moat as AI
products commoditize. (
2026-05-31) - Evans: foundation model labs may not have durable pricing power, because there's no
winner-take-all dynamic among 3-6+ competing frontier labs. (
2026-05-31) - Pincus: distribution must be designed into the product and strategy from day one, not
treated as an afterthought. (
2026-06-14)
Proven patterns, not novelty, drive most successful products
- Pincus: the Proven Better New framework - most successful products are proven ideas, made
unambiguously better, plus one new element; copying proven patterns is undervalued because
ambitious founders feel morally resistant to it. (
2026-06-14) - Pincus: "kill hope before hope kills you" - distinguish belief, grounded in data and lived
product experience, from hope, which is confidence without basis. (
2026-06-14) - Shipper: the SaaS apocalypse narrative is wrong; agents actually increase SaaS usage, and
buying SaaS stocks is a good bet. (
2026-05-24)
Physical AI is the next frontier once software saturates
- Younis: the biggest AI impact over the next 5-10 years will be physical, not software -
specifically farming, mining, construction, and trucking. (
2026-03-08) - Kalinowski: AI progress behind a keyboard is expected to saturate, pushing the next
frontier of value creation into the physical world. (
2026-05-17) - Kalinowski: humanoid robots today are advanced prototypes, not mass-deployable products,
largely because safety data for strong robots near humans doesn't yet exist. (
2026-05-17) - Younis: autonomy is converging on two competing architectures - Tesla's cheap-sensor L2++
approach versus Waymo's sensor-and-map-heavy L4 approach - and Qasar expects both to
become globally ubiquitous within five to seven years. (
2026-03-08)
Hardware supply chains and design discipline matter again
- Kalinowski: the US hardware supply chain has been offshored to Asia for 25 years across
every layer and needs reindustrialization for both economic and military resilience.
(
2026-05-17) - Kalinowski: hardware only "compiles" into final form a handful of times ever, so teams must
design the riskiest, least-proven part of the system first. (
2026-05-17) - Fadell: hardware is regaining strategic importance because AI is commoditizing pure
software. (
2026-06-07)
7. Founder and leadership craft
Across hiring, compensation, influence, and governance, the leadership guests converge on a few unfashionable disciplines: trust reference checks over interviews, protect mission structurally before you need to, and treat comp negotiation and executive influence as learnable tactics rather than personality traits. On management style itself the show disagrees openly - Rabois argues psychological safety isn't the goal and teams should be criticized in public, while Wen and Patel (elsewhere in the show) treat psychological safety and personal warmth as load-bearing for good management.
Hiring signal beats headcount and interview performance
- Rabois: the number of people who can independently drive an initiative from inception to
success ("barrels") is the real constraint on a company's output, not headcount. (
2026-04-12) - Halligan: reference checks beat interviews for spotting who will actually work out, but
only if the questions are sharp. (
2026-02-15) - Rabois: ruthless, well-framed reference checks beat interviews for assessing senior
talent. (
2026-04-12) - Halligan: interview panels systematically pick the safest candidate over the
highest-ceiling one. (
2026-02-15) - Stone: the Keeper Test remains a core, ongoing talent-management ritual at Netflix, used
more often as praise than as a firing tool. (
2026-07-19)
Executive influence is a learnable, tactical skill
- Fain: influence is the highest-leverage skill for product builders because great ideas
only become great products with executive buy-in and resourcing. (
2026-03-22) - Fain: an executive's calendar functions like a strobe light, so you cannot assume they
remember or have thought about your problem since the last meeting. (
2026-03-22) - Fain: one of the strongest trust-building moves a product leader can make is voluntarily
killing or deprioritizing their own work. (
2026-03-22) - Patel: leaders should personally own the company's storytelling rather than delegate it,
to prevent "lossiness." (
2026-02-26)
Compensation is negotiated, not awarded
- Warwick: a simple, non-confrontational pushback wins real money almost every time.
(
2026-03-15) - Warwick: product, engineering, and design people negotiate worse than sales and marketing
people, despite driving more company value. (
2026-03-15) - Warwick: what you tell recruiters and post publicly becomes the price you're stamped at
for years. (
2026-03-15) - Warwick: the real cost of underpaying top talent dwarfs the cost of overpaying them.
(
2026-03-15)
Organizational bloat is a structural incentive problem, not a people problem
- Butterfield: headcount grows independent of real work demand because career incentives
reward managing more people, not because managers are lazy or evil (Parkinson's Law
applied to organizations). (
2025-11-20) - Butterfield: as known-valuable work runs out, organizations backfill with "hyper-realistic
work-like activities" - meetings and analyses that look like real work but return almost
nothing. (
2025-11-20) - Butterfield: if a problem involving a large organization looks simple to solve, you
probably don't understand it ("Butterfield's Law"), which is why budgets rarely shrink.
(
2025-11-20)
Generosity and pivoting are both strategic, deliberate decisions
- Butterfield: generosity toward employees and customers functions as a cooperative move in
an iterated prisoner's dilemma, inviting reciprocal loyalty - though it carries real cost
(an automatic ~$8M SLA credit after a post-IPO outage). (
2025-11-20) - Butterfield: a real pivot requires exhausting every realistic option and deciding with
deliberate emotional distance, since staying in a failing venture out of pride is the more
common failure mode. (
2025-11-20)
Founder psychology and where the show disagrees on management style
- Rachitsky: Lenny didn't plan the newsletter into existence; he followed a "pull" he
noticed and kept re-validating it in small moments rather than committing to a grand plan.
(
2026-03-12) - Halligan: a near-fatal accident forced Halligan to confront mortality and step down as
HubSpot CEO. (
2026-02-15) - Rabois: high-performing teams should be criticized in public, not coddled with
private-only feedback, and psychological safety is not the goal. (
2026-04-12) - Verrilli: "hire great people and get out of their way" is wrong in Tom's experience; the
better model is verify-then-trust. (
2026-08-02)
Reading list
- A Fire Upon the Deep - Vernor Vinge recommended to Lenny live on the show for its take on AI and AGI (2026-02-19, 2026-01-11, 2025-12-14)
- The Hard Thing About Hard Things - Ben Horowitz Tom's pick for best book written about product management, for its breadth of what you have to go through and screw up. (2026-08-02, 2026-02-26)
- The Power Broker - Robert Caro Dan's ongoing obsession, a history of New York and Robert Moses. (2026-05-24, 2026-03-01)
- Creativity, Inc. - Ed Catmull Lenny cites its 'ugly baby' concept - every great idea looks bad at first - as a parallel to Keith's investing heuristic (2026-04-12, 2026-02-01)
- Radical Candor - Kim Scott Credited with giving Jacob the confidence to be assertive; he calls Kim Scott phenomenal. (2026-03-15, 2025-12-14)
- High Output Management - Andy Grove Lenny notes it as the most-mentioned book on his podcast, ahead of Radical Candor; Jacob has not read it. (2026-03-15, 2026-03-08)
- The Purpose Driven Church - Rick Warren Recommended to Tom by Emmett Shear (Twitch CEO); a 90s pastor's guidebook on engineering emotional investment in a community, which Tom applies to community product work. (2026-08-02)
- Babel - R.F. Kuang Tom's fiction/fantasy pick for evening reading. (2026-08-02)
- How to Raise an Adult - Julie Lythcott-Haims Penn's go-to personal recommendation on what it actually means to raise capable adults rather than sheltered children. (2026-07-26)
- Incorruptible - Eric Ries Recent Audible listen; Penn liked its framing of how great companies sustain their values through the metrics they choose, not just revenue. (2026-07-26)
- Crucial Conversations - Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, Al Switzler Penn built a Claude skill around this book's framework to help her prep for difficult management conversations in the moment. (2026-07-26)
- Into Thin Air - Jon Krakauer one of two books Elizabeth recommends most often, in the lightning round (2026-07-19)
- Liar's Poker - Michael Lewis the other lightning-round book recommendation; she cites her own Wall Street trading background as the reason it resonates (2026-07-19)
- Thinking in Systems: A Primer - Donella Meadows referenced by Lenny as 'the book everyone references with a slinky on the front' when asking how people build systems-thinking skill (2026-07-19)
- Remarkably Bright Creatures - Shelby Van Pelt the most recent story that moved her, read on her mom's recommendation; called it 'a tear jerker' (2026-07-19)
- The Gruffalo - Julia Donaldson Andrew's kid is obsessed with it as part of their bedtime routine; comes up in the lightning round book question (2026-06-28)
- The Big Orange Splot - Daniel Pinkwater Andrew's favorite children's book of all time - a man repaints his conformist house wild colors and inspires his neighbors to do the same; he ties it to agency and 'just do things' (2026-06-28)
- The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupery book she rereads at least once a year to remember what is truly important (2026-06-21)
- (works of Margaret Atwood, unspecified) - Margaret Atwood recommends her speculative fiction broadly, no single title named (2026-06-21)
- (works of Haruki Murakami, unspecified) - Haruki Murakami recommends his magical realism style broadly, no single title named (2026-06-21)
- Life at the Speed of Play: Launch Products People Love! - Mark Pincus Pincus's new book, released around the time of this episode, synthesizing his product philosophy including the Proven Better New framework. (2026-06-14)
- Build - Tony Fadell Fadell's own book on product building; referenced throughout for its frameworks on opinion-based decisions, the three-generations rule, and the customer journey graphic (2026-06-07)
- Working Backwards - Colin Bryar and Bill Carr Referenced when discussing Amazon's press-release-first method as a parallel to Fadell's own product-then-marketing discipline (2026-06-07)
- Three Men in a Boat - Jerome K. Jerome Benedict's go-to comic reference book, calls it 'my I Ching' - has a passage for every situation (2026-05-31)
- Nature's Metropolis - William Cronon economic history of 19th-century Chicago; Benedict cites its standardization, logistics, and network-dynamics themes as directly relevant to tech and AI business models (2026-05-31)
- The Writing Life - Annie Dillard Required reading for every new hire at Every; Dan says the last chapter captures the intersection of writing, technology, and time that defines the company. (2026-05-24)
- The Second World War - Winston Churchill Dan is partway through Churchill's history/memoir and admires the kinship of someone who both did the thing and wrote about it. (2026-05-24)
- The Riddle of Angels - unspecified A book relating Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, Borges, and Kant that Dan calls mind-blowing and full of overlaps with AI. (2026-05-24)
- The Book of the New Sun - Gene Wolfe One of the books Kalinowski recommends most, mentioned in the lightning round. (2026-05-17)
- Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf A favorite post-war novel about transitions, cited in the lightning round. (2026-05-17)
- Histories - Herodotus Cited as the first history book, valuable despite its inaccuracies, for its firsthand accounts of the ancient world. (2026-05-17)
- The Lean Startup - Eric Ries Eric's prior book from 15 years earlier; framed as the companion to Incorruptible - Lean Startup helps you build a successful company, Incorruptible helps you protect what you built. (2026-05-10)
- Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Companies Stay Great - Eric Ries Eric's new book (out May 26), the subject of the whole episode; covers historical case studies and governance structures that prevent founders from losing control of their companies. (2026-05-10)
- The Principles of Scientific Management - Frederick Winslow Taylor Cited as the 1911 origin of Taylorism, contrasted with Mary Parker Follett's contemporaneous but long-erased ideas about shared power and the 'invisible leader.' (2026-05-10)
- Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software - Charles Petzold Recommended in the lightning round as a book that explains how computers actually work, which Max says surprisingly few professional programmers understand. (2026-05-02)
- Tools for Conviviality - Ivan Illich Recommended for its contrast between tools that let users exercise ingenuity and autonomy versus industrial-scale tools that erode human autonomy. (2026-05-02)
- Seeing Like a State - James C. Scott Recommended for executives who build systems; about how designing for legibility can neglect the reality of a system on the ground. (2026-05-02)
- The Timeless Way of Building - Christopher Alexander Cited alongside 'How Buildings Learn' on the idea that the best homes are not designed by an architect but adapt over time to how people actually live. (2026-05-02)
- How Buildings Learn - Stewart Brand Cited on the same theme of buildings and software both improving through long, adaptive iteration rather than upfront design. (2026-05-02)
- Project Hail Mary - Andy Weir Named as a favorite recent read/adaptation; Max says it makes him excited about a future where Notion-like tools could organize small crews exploring space. (2026-05-02)
- The First 50 Years of Apple - David Pogue Evan's most recent read; he recommends the first half for its interviews with roughly 150 early Apple team members. (2026-04-26)
- The End of the World Is Just the Beginning - Peter Zeihan Evan's other current recommendation; on the fragility of global shipping and what a harder-to-secure global economy means for how societies organize themselves. (2026-04-26)
- Loonshots - Safi Bahcall Evan calls this the best academic explanation of Snap's innovation model: large organizations need hierarchy and become risk-averse, small flat teams can experiment freely, and leadership's job is managing the dialogue between the two. (2026-04-26)
- How Asia Works - Joe Studwell One of Wu's most-recommended books, about the government and economic-development policies behind Asia's successful economies. (2026-04-23)
- The Technology Trap - Carl Benedikt Frey Wu's pick for understanding how the industrial revolution and the computer revolution affected workers, and what lessons apply to the AI transition. (2026-04-23)
- The Paper Menagerie - Ken Liu Wu's 'fun' recommendation, a short-story collection about coming of age, AI, and self-discovery. (2026-04-23)
- James - Percival Everett Nikhyl's one book pick - a retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from Jim's point of view; he found it haunting to revisit a childhood classic from another character's angle as an adult. (2026-04-19)
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain Discussed alongside James as the original novel Nikhyl re-read through James's retelling; he notes reading it as a kid feels different from seeing it as an adult. (2026-04-19)
- The Upside of Stress - Kelly McGonigal Keith's top book recommendation - argues more stress, not less, is required for health and happiness (2026-04-12)
- Jordan Rules - Sam Smith recommended alongside The Last Dance as the reference for how a high-performance, low-psychological-safety team operates (2026-04-12)
- Joy of Living - Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche Amol's top book recommendation, on reframing how you experience your life (2026-04-05)
- Awareness - Anthony de Mello second recommendation, a similar theme from a different angle (2026-04-05)
- Thinking in Bets - Annie Duke recommended as the most tactically useful book for product work, on putting probabilities on uncertain outcomes (2026-04-05)
- Treasure Island - Robert Louis Stevenson One of the classic children's books Claire now reads with her kids instead of modern graphic-novel slop. (2026-03-29)
- Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll Another classic she's reading with her kids, alongside Shakespearean comedies, because the language holds up and kids still find it funny. (2026-03-29)
- Pachinko - Min Jin Lee Jessica's favorite example of multi-generational historical fiction; follows a Korean family over generations, used later as a metaphor for how much simpler and slower human daily life used to be. (2026-03-22)
- Homegoing - Yaa Gyasi Historical fiction Jessica recommends about the West Coast of Africa and the impact of the slave trade on two split branches of one family. (2026-03-22)
- A History of Burning - Janika Oza Historical fiction Jessica recommends about Indian indentured servants brought to Uganda to build the British railroad. (2026-03-22)
- The Overstory - Richard Powers Historical fiction Jessica recommends, a multi-generational family story built around a tree. (2026-03-22)
- Switch - Chip Heath and Dan Heath One of the only business books Jessica says she has liked; source of the 'shrinking the change' technique for building trust through small, low-risk proof points. (2026-03-22)
- Influence - Robert Cialdini Jacob's top recommendation; the anchoring and reciprocity principles underpin his negotiation approach. (2026-03-15)
- You Can Negotiate Anything - Herb Cohen Dated but valued for reducing negotiation to simple, non-corporate examples like negotiating a dishwasher. (2026-03-15)
- Negotiation Made Simple - John Lowry Jacob read it after planning to write his own book and felt Lowry had already written it; recommends it as an easy breakdown of negotiation fundamentals. (2026-03-15)
- How to Win Friends and Influence People - Dale Carnegie Referenced alongside Cialdini as the source of Jacob's give-first networking philosophy. (2026-03-15)
- Predetermined - Jacob Warwick Jacob's forthcoming book, which will cover his son's cystic fibrosis diagnosis and the family's response to it. (2026-03-15)
- Am I Overthinking This? - Michelle Rial Michelle's first book of charts distilling everyday feelings; discussed as the model for how her charts get made and go viral. (2026-03-12)
- Charts for Babies - Michelle Rial Michelle's third book, a children's book of charts for ages roughly 0-4, releasing April 7; the episode doubles as a launch conversation for it. (2026-03-12)
- I Want My Hat Back - Jon Klassen Referenced as their son Jude's favorite bedtime books, noted for being deceptively dark ('they all end in death'). (2026-03-12)
- House of Huawei: The Secret History of China's Most Powerful Company - Eva Dou Applied Intuition read this as a company; Qasar cites it as evidence Huawei isn't a normal profit-driven company but an extension of the Chinese state (about a quarter of its ~200,000 employees are Communist Party members). (2026-03-08)
- Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One - Stewart Brand Referenced by Lenny on the undervalued importance of maintenance work; Qasar ties it directly to his own obsession with operational hygiene (cleaning the office, well-tuned systems) as a founder discipline. (2026-03-08)
- The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley - Malcolm X and Alex Haley Qasar's example of a 'wacky' recommendation that changed his framing on life, illustrating his read-old-books-outside-your-domain philosophy. (2026-03-08)
- The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer - Siddhartha Mukherjee A book Qasar was reading at the time that he says changed how he thinks - his bar for what makes reading worthwhile. (2026-03-08)
- Made in America - Sam Walton Qasar's pick for most influential founder book, written by Walton on his deathbed. (2026-03-08)
- My American Journey - Colin Powell Named alongside Walton's book as a formative read, though not on Qasar's public reading list. (2026-03-08)
- Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies - Jared Diamond Cited as part of Qasar's interest in connecting human history from 'cave people' to the present tech industry. (2026-03-08)
- Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond Companion pick to Guns, Germs, and Steel, same author, on the same reading list. (2026-03-08)
- SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome - Mary Beard Example of how Qasar picks his next book: identify a whole area of history he knows little about (Roman history) and find the best book in it. (2026-03-08)
- A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness - Michael Pollan Raised by Lenny in the context of a trend that emotions, not just intelligence, may be what produces consciousness - discussed alongside whether AI/LLMs could become conscious. (2026-03-08)
- Insomniac City - Bill Hayes a favorite memoir about Hayes's relationship with neurologist Oliver Sacks near the end of Sacks's life; Jenny says it makes her think about mortality and love (2026-03-01)
- The Innovator's Dilemma / The Innovator's Solution - Clayton Christensen Jeetu calls this his tech 'Bible,' recommending people reread it every few years (2026-02-26)
- Be Useful - Arnold Schwarzenegger Lenny cites its title as the simplest distillation of Jeetu's career advice (2026-02-26)
- Functional Programming in Scala - unspecified the technical book Boris recommends most; credits it with shaping how he still thinks about programming and type systems (2026-02-19)
- Accelerando - Charles Stross sci-fi novel he says captures the accelerating pace of the current AI moment better than anything else he has read (2026-02-19)
- The Wandering Earth - Liu Cixin short story collection by the Three-Body Problem author; he says he likes Liu Cixin's short fiction even more than the novels (2026-02-19)
- A Deepness in the Sky - Vernor Vinge companion novel to A Fire Upon the Deep, mentioned as a favorite (2026-02-19)
- Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead - David Meerman Scott and Brian Halligan Halligan's own book, referenced when comparing the Grateful Dead's disintermediation and first-principles thinking to Silicon Valley startups (2026-02-15)
- There Is No Antimemetics Division - qntm Wu's top fiction recommendation, read in two days; sci-fi about a government agency fighting things that erase memory of themselves. (2026-02-12)
- Breakneck - Dan Wang Nonfiction pick on US-China dynamics; Wu cites its framing of the US as a 'lawyerly society' versus China as an 'engineering society.' (2026-02-12)
- Apple in China - Patrick McGee Second nonfiction pick, praised for inside detail on Apple's manufacturing relationship with China. (2026-02-12)
- Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs - Harold Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman College textbook Wu calls 'the wizard book'; its 1980 metaphor of programmers as sorcerers issuing incantations frames his whole discussion of AI coding agents. (2026-02-12)
- The Mythical Man-Month - Fred Brooks Source of the 'software engineer as surgeon' analogy Wu adapts as his management philosophy for supporting top performers. (2026-02-12)
- The Power of Moments - Chip Heath and Dan Heath one of two or three books she recommends most often, named in the lightning round (2026-02-01)
- The Messy Middle - Scott Belsky another of her most-recommended books, named in the lightning round (2026-02-01)
- Leave Me Alone: A Good Inside Story About Deeply Feeling Kids - Dr. Becky Kennedy her second children's book, releasing February 2026 and open for pre-order; about kids whose core fear is being 'too much' (2026-02-01)
- On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction - William Zinsser Cohen's most-recommended writing book; he cites Zinsser's line 'I never knew writing could be easy' as summing up the craft. (2026-01-25)
- Crossing the Chasm - Geoffrey Moore Cohen's top product recommendation - he argues most people have only seen a summary blog post, not read the actual model for defining a market. (2026-01-25)
- Hidden Multipliers - Jason Cohen Cohen's forthcoming first book (pre-order at hiddenmultipliers.com), about small decisions - like moving churn from 5% to 4% - that have outsized impact on revenue and profit. (2026-01-25)
- The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand his favorite fiction book, named in the lightning round (2026-01-18)
- Shoe Dog - Phil Knight business book he just finished, the Nike founding story (2026-01-18)
- Mindset - Carol Dweck psychology book that he says changed his life by moving him from a fixed to a growth mindset (2026-01-18)
- The Ancient City - Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges Sam is reading it now on a recommendation from Marc Andreessen (2026-01-15)
- Man's Search for Meaning - Viktor Frankl listed among books Sam recommends most (2026-01-15)
- Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base - Annie Jacobsen a recent read Sam calls a great book, if not highbrow (2026-01-15)
- The Lessons of History - Will Durant Sam's top recommendation - short, high return on time invested, he did it on Audible (2026-01-15)
- The Fish That Ate the Whale - Rich Cohen referenced by its nickname 'the Banana King' as an amazing story-driven book (2026-01-15)
- The Last Kings of Shanghai - Jonathan Kaufman grouped with The Fish That Ate the Whale as a favorite narrative nonfiction book (2026-01-15)
- When Breath Becomes Air - Paul Kalanithi Aishwarya's most-recommended book; she cites Kalanithi's inversion of Socrates - 'if the unexamined life is not worth living, was the unlived life worth examining' - as a check against over-optimizing life the way you'd optimize a product. (2026-01-11)
- The Three-Body Problem (series) - Liu Cixin Kiriti's favorite sci-fi series; he ties its themes of abstract science quietly compounding into civilization-scale effects to how AI's value can be invisible day to day. (2026-01-11)
- Atomic Habits - James Clear Molly quotes Clear's line 'winners and losers have the same goal' to argue that setting a goal is not enough - you need a process to follow up on it. (2026-01-04)
- Scaling People - Claire Hughes Johnson Source of the 'strategy should hurt' line Molly uses to explain that real prioritization requires painful tradeoffs. (2026-01-04)
- Conscious Business - Fred Kofman Matt calls it a user manual for human beings and runs a reading club on it with his product leadership team at Rippling; recommended to him years earlier by Bryan Schreier at Sequoia. (2025-12-28)
- Thinking in Systems - Donella Meadows Matt's pick for the best generic framework for understanding how systems work, applicable to nearly every area of life. (2025-12-28)
- The Effective Executive - Peter Drucker A 1960s classic Matt still recommends for its enduring, simple advice on leading teams despite dated language. (2025-12-28)
- The Culture (series) - Iain M. Banks Embiricos's top recommendation - optimistic, 'gay space communist utopia' sci-fi about a future where AI abundance is used well, unlike most dystopian AI fiction. (2025-12-14)
- The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien Embiricos mentions he is currently reading it. (2025-12-14)
- Story of Your Life - Ted Chiang Edwin's all-time favorite short story, about a linguist deciphering an alien language; he rereads it every couple of years and it is the basis for the movie Arrival. (2025-12-07)
- The Myth of Sisyphus - Albert Camus Edwin says he can't fully explain why, but the final chapter has always struck him as inspiring. (2025-12-07)
- Le Ton beau de Marot - Douglas Hofstadter Edwin's favorite Hofstadter book, ahead of the more famous Godel, Escher, Bach. It translates a single French poem 89 different ways and argues translation isn't robotic, an idea Edwin says maps directly onto how he thinks about data quality. (2025-12-07)
- Why Nations Fail - Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson Cohen's first pick in his book trio; on why nations succeed or fail based on extractive vs. inclusive institutions, which he ties to how LinkedIn thinks about opportunity. (2025-12-04)
- Outlive - Peter Attia Cohen's second pick; on personalized medicine ("Medicine 3.0") and optimizing health across fitness, diet, and longevity. (2025-12-04)
- The Beginning of Infinity - David Deutsch Cohen's third pick; on the idea that clear explanations of cause and effect, not just data, are the precondition for real breakthroughs. (2025-12-04)
- Nonviolent Communication - Marshall Rosenberg source of the observation-feelings-needs-request framework Lockett teaches for difficult conversations (2025-11-23)
- The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership - Jim Dethmer, Diana Chapman, Kaley Klemp Lockett's recommended book on taking full responsibility instead of blame or victimhood; also one of her top book recommendations (2025-11-23)
- Designing Your Life - Bill Burnett one of Lockett's most-recommended books (2025-11-23)
- Witches, Matilda, and other Roald Dahl books - Roald Dahl Lockett's favorite books to read with her kids (2025-11-23)
- Don't Make Me Think - Steve Krug Source of Butterfield's core mantra - reduce the thinking a product demands, not just the number of clicks or amount of friction. (2025-11-20)
- Positioning - Al Ries and Jack Trout Cited as the classic on why it is easier to combine two existing ideas in someone's head ("Uber for pets") than to create a genuinely new one. (2025-11-20)
- Why Nothing Works Recent book Butterfield calls repetitive but substantively important, on the accumulating veto points that make anything hard to build or ship. (2025-11-20)
- Principles - Ray Dalio Source of the Michael Jordan ski-lesson story Butterfield uses to argue criticism should be treated as a gift, not an insult. (2025-11-20)
- Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away - Annie Duke Duke uses Glitch's pivot to Slack as her example of a 'smart fold' - abandoning a venture once its expected value has dropped below the next best alternative. (2025-11-20)
- The Worlds I See - Fei-Fei Li Referenced only as 'my book' when Fei-Fei says she wrote about the many researchers who inspired her; not named on air, but this is her 2023 memoir covering her ImageNet years. (2025-11-16)
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- Her movie (2026-06-07, 2026-02-12)
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- The Pit show (2026-03-22, 2026-01-25)
- Star City show (2026-08-02)
- For All Mankind show (2026-08-02)
- Eric Ries episode of Lenny's Podcast podcast (2026-07-26)
- Fiona Fung episode of Lenny's Podcast podcast (2026-07-26)
- Ben Mann's episode of Lenny's Podcast podcast (2026-07-26)
- Andrew Ambrosino episode of Lenny's Podcast podcast (2026-07-26)
- Fallout show (2026-07-26)
- Elizabeth Stone's first Lenny's Podcast episode (as Netflix CTO) podcast (2026-07-19)
- Tech Sentiment Survey 2026 report (Noam Segal / Lenny's Newsletter) article (2026-07-12)
- Elena Verna's post on 'AI confidence theater' article (2026-07-12)
- Conversation with Scott Wu (Cognition/Devin) on Lenny's Podcast podcast (2026-07-12)
- Conversation with Jeff (Ramp) on Lenny's Podcast podcast (2026-07-12)
- Conversation with Simon Willison on Lenny's Podcast podcast (2026-07-12)
- Conversation with Nikhyl Singhal on Lenny's Podcast podcast (2026-07-12)
- The Terminator (film franchise) movie (2026-07-12)
- What happens after coding is solved? | Fiona Fung (Manager of the Claude Code and Cowork Teams) podcast (2026-07-09)
- Head of Claude Code: What happens after coding is solved | Boris Cherny podcast (2026-07-09)
- A rational conversation on where AI is actually going | Benedict Evans podcast (2026-07-09)
- OpenAI's CPO on how AI changes must-have skills, moats, coding, startup playbooks, more | Kevin Weil (CPO at OpenAI, ex-Instagram, Twitter) podcast (2026-07-09)
- Pluralistic: The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to Criticizing AI article (2026-07-09)
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- Jenny's episode on Lenny's Podcast (head of design, Claude Code and Cowork, Anthropic) podcast (2026-06-28)
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- Amelie movie (2026-06-21)
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- How I AI podcast (2026-05-02)
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- Drive to Survive show (2026-04-23)
- Free Solo movie (2026-04-23)
- Boris Cherny episode of Lenny's Podcast podcast (2026-04-23)
- Ben Mann episode of Lenny's Podcast podcast (2026-04-23)
- Andrej Karpathy tweet on AI skeptics vs. believers article (2026-04-23)
- Paradise show (2026-04-19)
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- 24 show (2026-04-19)
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- The Last Dance show (2026-04-12)
- Nuremberg movie (2026-04-12)
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- Secrets We Keep show (2026-02-01)
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