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Aatish Nayak

lines on the record: 71
first: 2025-04-11
most recent: 2025-04-11
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Moment of sales. Who is responsible for that? No one really thinks about that as much when you're growing a sales team alongside a product team. And Winston put me in charge of it. So now I'm figuring that out. But I think there's just a lot of things that break that don't have owners. And so I think it's super important for the founder to provide clarity on what's important, what to prioritize, why we should do certain things at certain times. And then PM's engineering team to turn those kind of like that clarity into action plans and execution.”
2025-04-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Scale AI and Harvey Build Product | Why PMs Are Wrong: They are not the CEOs of the Product | How to do Pre and Post Mortems Effectively and How to Nail PRDs | The Future of Product Management in a World of AI with Aatish Nayak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, lots of things break. So maybe defining hypergrowth is every three to six months, let's say, your revenue is more than 1.5x, 4.2x, your employee count is more than 1.5x. Like it's a different company every single quarter, let's say, or half. And so a few things that break are, one, it becomes super hard to know what to actually prioritize. Like by definition, you're getting a lot of customers, a lot of demand, and people are asking for a lot of different things. You don't know what direction to go. This extends to engineers, accents to the founders, PMs, whatever. You just don't know. If you don't provide that clarity, then you're going to do a lot of the wrong things. That's, I think, one. And then generally, you also get either too many people making a decision or not enough people making a decision. Like, you get a lot of kind of tragedy to the commons. Like something's breaking and no one knows who should be responsible for it. Like, you know, for example, product.”
2025-04-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Scale AI and Harvey Build Product | Why PMs Are Wrong: They are not the CEOs of the Product | How to do Pre and Post Mortems Effectively and How to Nail PRDs | The Future of Product Management in a World of AI with Aatish Nayak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cult like following with Ikea. And so for us, how you can start to change this chat UX is like, how can the AI ask for more information or be like, hey, I wrote this first draft of something, give me feedback on it before I continue, like a real coworker, like a good coworker would do. So yeah, I think Chad is the very, very beginning. And I think it's going to take a lot of experimentation by folks like us and Harvey, by application layer companies, by OpenAI to figure out what is the right interface.”
2025-04-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Scale AI and Harvey Build Product | Why PMs Are Wrong: They are not the CEOs of the Product | How to do Pre and Post Mortems Effectively and How to Nail PRDs | The Future of Product Management in a World of AI with Aatish Nayak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Definitely not. It's the command line starting point of this new frontier, like the MS-DOS was way back when. I think there's a few things on how I think about it. I think one is chat is very linear and very one-shot. You put in something and then you get an answer. And then, sure, you can follow up and ask questions on top. But real work, you need to gather a lot of information to actually produce some work product, right? You may have to get data from people that you don't even know have that data or that context, whatever. And so one principle that we use when building products is something called the IKEA effect. The IKEA effect is like when IKEA started going super viral and super big, they made it super simple and nice and delightful to actually assemble the furniture. And what that did was build brand affinity of like, I put this together. I am responsible for it. You know, of course, now people hire people to assemble things. But that just created this.”
2025-04-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Scale AI and Harvey Build Product | Why PMs Are Wrong: They are not the CEOs of the Product | How to do Pre and Post Mortems Effectively and How to Nail PRDs | The Future of Product Management in a World of AI with Aatish Nayak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It depends on what you mean by product and where you focus. I don't think the foundational models are products. You're seeing this with OpenAI right now. They're more pivoting to a product company, and Satya even said this. The reason the image studio Ghibli stuff blew up is because they have a mobile app that is in everyone's hands already, and that is a product. And so I think it depends on what you focus on product. And ultimately, I think some of the, for us, especially, I mean, some of the longer-term moats are the UX that you build around product.”
2025-04-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Scale AI and Harvey Build Product | Why PMs Are Wrong: They are not the CEOs of the Product | How to do Pre and Post Mortems Effectively and How to Nail PRDs | The Future of Product Management in a World of AI with Aatish Nayak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Made, you know, you want to make sure we follow up on that as of now, hopefully democracies last very long time and are generally more stable, bring more wealth. And so product will last a really long time. Distribution can get you there really fast.”
2025-04-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Scale AI and Harvey Build Product | Why PMs Are Wrong: They are not the CEOs of the Product | How to do Pre and Post Mortems Effectively and How to Nail PRDs | The Future of Product Management in a World of AI with Aatish Nayak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I think distribution can bring a lot of early traction by sheer amount of brute force. If you look at aristocracies and kings and kingdoms, they bring in soldiers, armies, wealth, takeover and conquer lands, but just sheer brute force. Not a lot of diplomacy. I mean, in general, there's a lot of brute force involved. And you can do the same with startups. Like you can do Founder-led sales, you can do brand, you can do marketing, scale up a whole sales team, really get far and far ahead. But, you know, the problem is it can get you really far, but it doesn't ultimately last. If you don't follow that with substance, the people realize the emperor has no clothes. You know, people will see the falsehood here. And so you do have to follow it with product. And why product is present? Because presidents in democracies are for the people, by the people. And product you ultimately want to listen to your users. All the promises that we...”
2025-04-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Scale AI and Harvey Build Product | Why PMs Are Wrong: They are not the CEOs of the Product | How to do Pre and Post Mortems Effectively and How to Nail PRDs | The Future of Product Management in a World of AI with Aatish Nayak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so it was hard, I will say. I think for vision, like 3D and 2D, it was more straightforward. You know, scale was very operational. And so you would have to tweak the operations to ensure quality for warehouse robotics versus self-driving. That was like fairly different. But when we started getting to outside of vision, we had to build brand new products. I started the e-commerce team at scale where we were labeling e-commerce data like from meta, from Instacart, from Dorodor.”
2025-04-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Scale AI and Harvey Build Product | Why PMs Are Wrong: They are not the CEOs of the Product | How to do Pre and Post Mortems Effectively and How to Nail PRDs | The Future of Product Management in a World of AI with Aatish Nayak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think again what we did well was there is self driving, of course, and we started with that, sort of 3D self driving, and then we pivoted to 2D self-driving. So images, videos, all of that. And then that led to robotics, like warehouse robotics and, you know, other types of robotics. And then that pivoted to government, where if you remember back in 2019, Project Maven was a thing and the DOD was starting to gear up a lot of their AI investments. And so it was like, how do you scale really, you know, how do you keep finding these new markets where data labeling and data needs were so big?”
2025-04-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Scale AI and Harvey Build Product | Why PMs Are Wrong: They are not the CEOs of the Product | How to do Pre and Post Mortems Effectively and How to Nail PRDs | The Future of Product Management in a World of AI with Aatish Nayak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I think data labeling, any type of data intake for AI was a great market. I think what Alex and we did well was being able to pivot to different sectors at the right time when that sector was blowing up in terms of needs for data.”
2025-04-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Scale AI and Harvey Build Product | Why PMs Are Wrong: They are not the CEOs of the Product | How to do Pre and Post Mortems Effectively and How to Nail PRDs | The Future of Product Management in a World of AI with Aatish Nayak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We can get into that Yeah. So I think if you don't find a great market, you'll get killed. There's examples all over the place. Self-driving is a great example where five, six, seven years ago, you can say, oh my God, great market. Everyone's going to have Robotaxis. But extremely capital efficient or inefficient, you have to spend a lot of money up front to do it. There's a lot of regulatory hurdles. And if you actually look at the companies that did well, it was, I mean, Tesla and Waymo, basically. And they have near infinite data and near infinite capital. And there's a wake of a graveyard of a lot of companies that you end up failing. And you can't say, oh, the founders are bad. No, it's like the founders are brilliant. Every single one of them is probably somewhere either now working on LMs or at Waymore or Tesla or whatever. But I think it's really important to find a market that is huge before you are too late. So I think that's one thing.”
2025-04-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Scale AI and Harvey Build Product | Why PMs Are Wrong: They are not the CEOs of the Product | How to do Pre and Post Mortems Effectively and How to Nail PRDs | The Future of Product Management in a World of AI with Aatish Nayak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. I think this starts with coming to terms that you don't have to be the start of the show. I've made this mistake. Maybe some times still do. PMs have a main character syndrome sometimes that they have to be the CEO of the product, be this face of the product. The first thing you have to do is, is it actually the best thing for the company for me to do everything I do? It starts with that. It maybe sounds simple, maybe sounds baseline. It just give others the opportunity to shine for the skill set that they have. And then as I said, putting designers, putting engineers in front of customers, giving them room to give ideas, you know, brainstorming with everyone in the room and a lot of kind of like tactical things, but it really starts with saying, I don't have to be the main character. I just have to make the product and the company succeed.”
2025-04-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Scale AI and Harvey Build Product | Why PMs Are Wrong: They are not the CEOs of the Product | How to do Pre and Post Mortems Effectively and How to Nail PRDs | The Future of Product Management in a World of AI with Aatish Nayak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's like an industrial lubricant, right? So in the engine of a company in a hypergut startup, like if you're the glue, that's really bad because things will break down you're just a single point of failure. Your team is a single point of failure. But instead, you want to make sure everyone else can shine and be good at what they do and grease the skids or however you want to call it. And what that means maybe is putting the engineer in front of the customer because the customer wants to talk to engineers and the engineers wants to talk to customers and that gives them confidence.”
2025-04-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Scale AI and Harvey Build Product | Why PMs Are Wrong: They are not the CEOs of the Product | How to do Pre and Post Mortems Effectively and How to Nail PRDs | The Future of Product Management in a World of AI with Aatish Nayak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, great question. I get asked for PM advice a lot. And people say, hey, I'm trying to act as the glue in the organization. And I'm going to do this. I'm going to do that. From founders, I'm getting a lot of signal customers, engineers, whatever. I think the framing that you should probably have is you're not glue your WD40. Have you heard of WD4? Yeah.”
2025-04-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Scale AI and Harvey Build Product | Why PMs Are Wrong: They are not the CEOs of the Product | How to do Pre and Post Mortems Effectively and How to Nail PRDs | The Future of Product Management in a World of AI with Aatish Nayak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so another one was I think you have to reduce the distance between the customer need and the code written. What does that mean? So as companies grow, you end up adding a lot of layers between the customer and the engineer who's running the code. Like there's a product manager, there's a salesperson, there's the founder, there's a designer, you know, all these people in the way. And ultimately, by the time the customer request gets to the engineer, it's like maybe you lose a lot of nuance because information transfer between humans is very lossy. Like when you tell me something, there's no way you can capture everything that a customer said, their emotions, their enunciation, right? It was super important for us to reduce that distance. And what that meant was putting engineers right in front of customers, whether it's the customer like Neuro or the contributor is kind of the taskers who are actually doing the work. And so we would actually even fly engineers out to training centers all around the world to literally observe how people are using.”
2025-04-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Scale AI and Harvey Build Product | Why PMs Are Wrong: They are not the CEOs of the Product | How to do Pre and Post Mortems Effectively and How to Nail PRDs | The Future of Product Management in a World of AI with Aatish Nayak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I do think there's this idea of like tough customers. So tough customers who ask for the world want all this new custom.”
2025-04-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Scale AI and Harvey Build Product | Why PMs Are Wrong: They are not the CEOs of the Product | How to do Pre and Post Mortems Effectively and How to Nail PRDs | The Future of Product Management in a World of AI with Aatish Nayak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Today's world is definitely the case. Find the customers who are really good at what they do and then chase them even over a fit to them as long as you have conviction that everyone else will follow.”
2025-04-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Scale AI and Harvey Build Product | Why PMs Are Wrong: They are not the CEOs of the Product | How to do Pre and Post Mortems Effectively and How to Nail PRDs | The Future of Product Management in a World of AI with Aatish Nayak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. I think maybe a few things to touch on. So, one, I think scale was at the frontier of a lot of different AI movements over the last like five, six years. And I think one thing we did really well was listening to frontier customers, customers that are at the frontier of whatever we were pushing. And because we were just at the cusp of new markets every single time, it was super beneficial to get deep with those customers because you could have conviction that they would basically define the market and everything they wanted, you know, everyone else would follow. And so early on in self-driving, Neuro was super, super early on in a lot of LiDAR and a lot of really hard, what's called pedestrian work, like pedestrian labeling work. And so we ended up doing a lot of kind of custom things for Neuro, getting super deep with them. And then lo and behold, everyone else started asking for the same thing. I think whenever you're at these cutting edge markets and”
2025-04-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Scale AI and Harvey Build Product | Why PMs Are Wrong: They are not the CEOs of the Product | How to do Pre and Post Mortems Effectively and How to Nail PRDs | The Future of Product Management in a World of AI with Aatish Nayak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like intellectual interested in. And sure, software engineering, I had done a CS degree at CMU. I was above average probably at software engineering, but I realized I didn't really want to get better. But instead, I wanted to get better at things like commercial sense, leadership, product sense, motivating others, user discovery, things that a more traditional product manager would do. And so ended up joining Shield where I could put myself in opportunities to flex those skill sets and get better at those skill sets without the pressure of I'm a software engineer or a product manager.”
2025-04-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Scale AI and Harvey Build Product | Why PMs Are Wrong: They are not the CEOs of the Product | How to do Pre and Post Mortems Effectively and How to Nail PRDs | The Future of Product Management in a World of AI with Aatish Nayak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One big thing I was always optimizing for is like skill set growth. What are the skill sets you need to know? What are skill sets I'm good at? What are skill sets I want to get better at versus like, is my title a product manager? Is my title a software engineer? So skill set growth was super important. I think one thing back then was like you were more bucketed into a different roles than you are. So focus on skill set growth. And early on, I think I had read Sam Altman's post on how to be successful. This was before Sam Altman was Sam Altman. And one of the things I really stuck with me was working hard and focusing on something that you're good at and like getting better at will compound significantly over time. He said in that post that you want to try to strive for top 1% at what you do. And of course, not everyone's going to get that. But if you have that mindset, then you'll get there. And so I looked at myself and I was like, what do I actually want to do? What am I good at? What am I?”
2025-04-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Scale AI and Harvey Build Product | Why PMs Are Wrong: They are not the CEOs of the Product | How to do Pre and Post Mortems Effectively and How to Nail PRDs | The Future of Product Management in a World of AI with Aatish Nayak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“PMs have a main character syndrome sometimes that they have to be the CEO of the product, be this face of the product. The first thing you have to do is is it actually the best thing for the company, for me to do everything I do? Domain experts are driving more of the product decisions. You need to bridge the gap between what the model and the UX is to how you actually apply it to a certain profession. Those ideas, domain experts, will matter a lot more. We did these evals recently. Claude3.7 in particular for legal reasoning. It's better at long form legal reasoning and drafting long form outputs.”
2025-04-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Scale AI and Harvey Build Product | Why PMs Are Wrong: They are not the CEOs of the Product | How to do Pre and Post Mortems Effectively and How to Nail PRDs | The Future of Product Management in a World of AI with Aatish Nayak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source