Lenny's Podcast

"The capabilities of foundation models or companies like Lovable are just improving at such a rapid rate"

"I was still using Cursor for most of my code."

"you need to be using Claude"

"We use Workday"

"we use Figma a ton"

"It used to be you just chat GPT for some code and it would spit out some code"

"Slack is like a it's a it's a whole maze. There's so many things that play out on Slack"

"The tools like Claude Code and OpenAI Codex, they take that step for you. They can generate the code and then they can run the code themselves and see if it works"

"The tools like Claude Code and OpenAI Codex, they take that step for you. They can generate the code and then they can run the code themselves and see if it works"

"I can fire up like four agents in parallel and have them work on four different problems and by 11:00 a.m. I am wiped out for the day"

"You can go into the code, open up deep wiki, and ask, how does it schedule tasks? What's the security?"

"I manage context windows even more efficiently by sectioning off which tasks go to which agent"

"So I decided I'm going to move to Substack. I'm gonna write every week I tweeted I'm going to experiment with a newsletter, weekly newsletter, see how it goes."

"The first thing I wrote on the internet did very well is this post on what I learned at Airbnb. Like Medium featured it. It went all over the place."

"That was actually pretty transformative. I took this online course at University of Pennsylvania about uh the psychology of happiness and it was basically all the science of what makes you happier and how to be happier and that really had a big impact on me"

"that was the during AdWords when Google Adwords was a way to monetize your site and so all the ads on the site because most of the articles were about religion were all these religious dating sites."

"I've become a huge I have a Tesla and the self I just use self-driving all the time now."

"Everything important you need to learn about humans was written by Shakespeare. Just read Shakespeare. Like that's better than all the customer research."

"movie is probably Marty Supreme. I thought it was great. I thought it was just insane"

"The first is a book called Joy of Living by a Buddhist monk. I've recommended to people and they've really really enjoyed it"

"thinking in bets by Annie Duke. Those types of things I think are just so tactically helpful in product"

"another one is awareness by Anthony De Mello. Those two I consistently recommend to people"

"this pillow is like it kind of it's full of beads and so you can like naturally shift the height of the pillow while you're sleeping. I think that has changed my life in like the last week"

"he's been sharing everything he's learning in real time through his incredible blog, simonwillson.net."

"I think the book The Overstory is an example of that. It's the story of a family over many generations and around a tree."

"Both Anthropic and OpenAI spent the whole of 2025 focusing all of their training efforts on coding"

"If you look at anyone who's talking from Anthropic, we always talk about the exponential."

"I had to work with Stripe and Substack to just like shut them down."

"When you talk about speed, I think about ramp uh for sure. Uh when Jeff was on the podcast, their CPO, he just like our title was velocity, velocity, velocity."

"you think Facebook or Uber or DoorDash early on, they understand this viscerally where scaling this much just brings a lot of challenges"

"you think Facebook or Uber or DoorDash early on, they understand this viscerally where scaling this much just brings a lot of challenges"

"You hear prompt injection and think, 'Oh, I can solve SQL injection. I'll use the same thing.' That doesn't work."

"GPT-5.1 and Claude Opus 4.5 came along, but in a way that crossed a threshold"

"GPT-5.1 and Claude Opus 4.5 came along, but in a way that crossed a threshold"

"He co-created Django, the web framework that powers Instagram, Pinterest, Spotify, and thousands of other platforms."

"I launched you get a free year of cursor and lovable and bolt and replet and vzero."

"He co-created Django, the web framework that powers Instagram, Pinterest, Spotify, and thousands of other platforms."

"Claire Vo, the incredible host of our sister podcast, How I AI"

"LinkedIn profile and your resume is a snapshot of what you've been in the past, but it doesn't help you negotiate in the forward. The things you say on LinkedIn serve as a perception."

"I launched you get a free year of cursor and lovable and bolt and replet and vzero."

"I launched you get a free year of cursor and lovable and bolt and replet and vzero."

"So you have this first book here called Am I Overthinking This which a lot of people identify with has sold many copies."

"There's some great videos which are like trying to get Gemini to understand what a cup is by just holding it upside down."

"Michael Pollan has a new book out about consciousness and his take is it's not just more intelligence, it's actually emotions that led to the consciousness."

"Companies like Perplexity, DBT, and Buzzfeed use Omni to ship analytics their customers can trust."

"I don't know if you all are allowed to use Granola, something like that, like meeting transcripts."

"the engineer that was newer on the team just had Quad do it and it was like hey Quad it seems like there's a leak. Can you figure it out? Quad did exactly the same thing that I was doing. It found the issue and put up a request faster than I could."

"One was Opus 4 and then in November it inflected and it just keeps inflecting. The growth just keeps getting steeper and steeper and steeper every day."

"And this is a thing that we first started seeing with Opus 4 and Sonnet 4."

"I switched to Mercury from Chase over a year ago."

"I switched to Mercury from Chase over a year ago. And it is such a profoundly better experience."

"Literally, every startup that I'm an investor in that starts to expand up market ends up working with WorkOS. And that's because they are the best."

"Vanta helps over 15,000 companies like Cursor, Ramp, Duolingo, Snowflake, and Atlassian earn and prove trust with their customers."

"If you want AI analytics in your product without building the whole stack from scratch, check out omni.co/lenny"

"Don't forget to check out Lenny's productpass.com for an incredible set of deals available exclusively to Lenny's newsletter subscribers."

"What do OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, Vercel, Replit, Sierra, Clay, and hundreds of other winning companies all have in common?"

"Vanta helps over 15,000 companies like Cursor, Ramp, Duolingo, Snowflake, and Atlassian"

"What do OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, Vercel, Replit, Sierra, Clay, and hundreds of other winning companies all have in common?"

"What do OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, Vercel, Replit, Sierra, Clay, and hundreds of other winning companies all have in common?"

"Vanta helps over 15,000 companies like Cursor, Ramp, Duolingo, Snowflake, and Atlassian"

"Vanta helps over 15,000 companies like Cursor, Ramp, Duolingo, Snowflake, and Atlassian"

"This episode is brought to you by Orcus, the company behind Open Source Conductor, the orchestration platform powering modern enterprise applications."

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"Orcus Conductor provides a production grade orchestration layer for coordinating microservices, APIs, data pipelines, human tasks, and agentic workflows."

"Sentry catches it all. See what happened where and why down to the commit that introduced the error"

"Framer, the website builder that turns your.com from a formality into a tool for growth"

"Samsara is building products for the physical world. First responders racing to emergencies, truck drivers carrying critical supplies"