YouSaid · the spoken record

Alex Komoroske

lines on the record: 91
first: 2024-10-03
most recent: 2024-10-03
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Komarowski.com is where it's my I link to all the different posts there. If you click, there's a Google group now where you can subscribe to my updates whenever I post on the bits and bobs or any media article. That's a good way of taking touch as I publish stuff. And then the way the code can be useful to me is I have office hours on my site that are open to anybody to join in. I am continually booked off in a few weeks in advance. But if you find something that resonated with you or that didn't or you think is interesting or, oh, here's a parallel. I don't know if you've thought of before. Just reach out to me. I love, love, love talking to people, interesting people, especially who have life experiences and backgrounds are different from mine. At one point, a magician showed up in my office hours and described and said, hey, this tactic you're talking about, your bits and bobs, that's actually cold reading. That's what psychics use. And it's like, I find all these crazy connections that never occurred to me before. And so people just reaching out and sharing ideas. And I love.”
2024-10-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking like a gardener not a builder, organizing teams like slime mold, the adjacent possible, and other unconventional product advice | Alex Komoroske (Stripe, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the past decade, we've become convinced that all of this potential should be squeezed into about a dozen little boxes on your phone. And now with the power of AI, everyone just is default assuming that what's going to happen is we're all going to be locked inside of a box with a super god AI clippy. And the only thing that people disagree about is which clippy is it going to be? Whose clippy is it going to be? That to me is bonker. I don't want that word at all. I want a world where we use this magical duct tape to escape the box, to allow software and humans using it to lean into their agency. And I think arrogators are amazing in an environment where you have a safe environment to have all kinds of interesting stuff that can't be fully open-ended because the irrigator can't allow it to escape the possibility that ecosystem. And so for me, one of the reasons I'm excited about LLMs being a disruptive technology is I think that it allows us to get out of this monolithic sense of like whatever, we're all just beholden to a decreasing number of very powerful organizations.”
2024-10-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking like a gardener not a builder, organizing teams like slime mold, the adjacent possible, and other unconventional product advice | Alex Komoroske (Stripe, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just by random reflections, I don't even remember what conversation that came from originally, but of the power of, I'm just so obsessed with the idea that we are in the late stage of this current technical paradigm that we're in. And so many things we feel like if you get them all out and nothing could be any different. And I kind of don't love this outcome that we're in. Like the idea of like, you know, just one quick framing. To me, if you ask somebody on the street to tell you what the canonical piece of software is, the answer they'll give you is something like Instagram, which is to say an app, which I think is a shame because an app is monolithic. It's one size fits all. It's noncomposable. It doesn't meaningfully interact with anything else in the broader ecosystem. And it's also only allowed to exist if some of the largest companies of the world say it may exist, which is insane to me. To me, software is alchemy. It's the ability to extend human agency beyond ourselves, to create something that can then combine with what others have created in unexpected and unforeseen ways to create this commentary of possibility of human agency. And somehow.”
2024-10-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking like a gardener not a builder, organizing teams like slime mold, the adjacent possible, and other unconventional product advice | Alex Komoroske (Stripe, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so this is the, I'll just read this off. We've forgotten this is written a year ago. We've forgotten a world without irrigators. Non-arrigator ecosystems make it so participants don't have to fear empowering their overlord, like where you have to worry about each bit of action you're doing the aggregator is getting it more and more harmful. MySpace was the Wild West. Facebook, so you can't change the CSS, which was better for users, containing some freedom. Aggregators make sense in the late stage of an era, but at the beginning they curtail too much exploration.”
2024-10-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking like a gardener not a builder, organizing teams like slime mold, the adjacent possible, and other unconventional product advice | Alex Komoroske (Stripe, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I guess I've said too. This is cheating, but I said to the do things that give you energy that you're proud of. And the happiness is reality minus expectations, I think, are really simple clarifying words look like.”
2024-10-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking like a gardener not a builder, organizing teams like slime mold, the adjacent possible, and other unconventional product advice | Alex Komoroske (Stripe, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Elms are really good. One of the things we played around with is having a thing that generates fake data of arbitrary schemas and just gave it a short backstory of a person and then generate data that fits in this fictional user person's world. And it's just amazing the kinds of stuff, like the coherence it has with, yeah, it's weird and it's very specific to that story, but like elms are just so they're they're like these little holograms of all this information of humanity is like interesting sort of informational pack in this little thing and all kinds of it's like a mirror that different things reflect back out of it at you and it just it's shocking sometimes to see humanity like Reflected back at you like a”
2024-10-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking like a gardener not a builder, organizing teams like slime mold, the adjacent possible, and other unconventional product advice | Alex Komoroske (Stripe, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To me, I think the answer for me is WebSim, it's the one that I like playing around with a lot, and I've said it before, I use Claude 20 times a day. I find that it's almost impossible for you to imagine doing work. I mean, of course, now I've got to use strawberry and see how that feels.”
2024-10-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking like a gardener not a builder, organizing teams like slime mold, the adjacent possible, and other unconventional product advice | Alex Komoroske (Stripe, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For me, I was thinking about this it's the Green Knight, which I watched. It's, I think, a few years old. It's about the Arthurian legend. It's a challenging movie. In fact, when I watched it, I was like, I dislike this. I do not find this interesting. And then I couldn't stop thinking about it. And it helped me. I think this is one of the reasons I like to write in parable is a parable is open-ended. It encourages and requires the listener to engage into the idea and play with it and see how it affects them and how they affect it. And so for me, the Green Knight Again, I'm not excited to watch it again, but I found it to be the most impactful movie I've seen in the last couple of years in terms of amount of thinking that I kind of caused me to do afterwards.”
2024-10-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking like a gardener not a builder, organizing teams like slime mold, the adjacent possible, and other unconventional product advice | Alex Komoroske (Stripe, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Origin of Wealth by Eric Beinharker, which is great. It's about complexity economics, why the traditional economic model doesn't work, and also why it takes an evolutionary lens on what kinds of business plans work and how companies execute them that I found my entree into a lot of systems thinking. And I thought it was just absolutely brilliant. And the other one is that I meet those thinking in systems, which is short, easy to read, very approachable. In fact, if anything people think of it is not serious enough, it's too easy to read. It's one of those books that when you read at the beginning, you'll say, this sounds right. And then later, years later, if you read it again, you'll go, oh my God, that was so, like, I didn't, I wasn't ready for that yet, but that is a totally the way. So she's one of the people who talks about dancing with systems. Let go and dance with the system as one of her lines. And I think it's just a phenomenal work.”
2024-10-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking like a gardener not a builder, organizing teams like slime mold, the adjacent possible, and other unconventional product advice | Alex Komoroske (Stripe, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think we covered it. I think we covered a lot of that. And again, we could go on for hours and hours and hours and hours. I could just do a random, I got feature in the compendium where I can pull up a random idea and like, but let's not do that.”
2024-10-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking like a gardener not a builder, organizing teams like slime mold, the adjacent possible, and other unconventional product advice | Alex Komoroske (Stripe, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so it was like a trap. Like, you change diaper. And like, what are you going to do in that situation? And then they just like, it's going to be a funny story in a few years. So let's see the humor in it now, even though, God, I really wish this year. And I think that that kind of perspective is really people sometimes hear this as, oh, you're saying Don't dream big. Don't set high expectations. Don't expect more and be okay with mediocrity. That is not what I'm saying. I'm saying hold those expectations lightly. Allow them to change. Be willing to be convinced by different things and seek something great. Seek something that you can be truly proud of and that feel very authentic to yourself if you achieved”
2024-10-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking like a gardener not a builder, organizing teams like slime mold, the adjacent possible, and other unconventional product advice | Alex Komoroske (Stripe, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know, hold it lightly and don't say, Oh my gosh, this is going to be my kid's birthday, she's going to remember it, it's going to be a best birthday I've ever had, and we're all going to be perfect. Because then what doesn't go perfect, it starts raining that day, you get all worked up. She just say, no, I want to make this day in a way that I can look back on and remember fondly. And that will include, yeah, change. One other piece of advice someone gave me that really like is try to feel the emotion about the story that'll make you feel in 10 years. So if it's funny in 10 years, try to see the humor in it now. And this one in particular was a friend who their newborn. Every time you change your diaper, would poop. That was only the other. And when they did it, it would often be projectile.”
2024-10-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking like a gardener not a builder, organizing teams like slime mold, the adjacent possible, and other unconventional product advice | Alex Komoroske (Stripe, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Happiness is reality minus expectations. And this is Tim Urban. I was from Wait But Y. And I think it's a very simple distilled distillation of it, of like, if you set your expectations super high and it comes in and it's amazing, but it's below it, then it's a net negative. So the easiest thing, reality is hard to change. It's not impossible. It's hard to change. Your expectations are super easy. So just change your expectations.”
2024-10-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking like a gardener not a builder, organizing teams like slime mold, the adjacent possible, and other unconventional product advice | Alex Komoroske (Stripe, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, this time I was not writing, I did something down. I was checking a thing I thought you might say that I was going to reference Tim Urban's Happiness is the reality minus expectations. I always get that backwards, but have you heard this frame? Let's get in.”
2024-10-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking like a gardener not a builder, organizing teams like slime mold, the adjacent possible, and other unconventional product advice | Alex Komoroske (Stripe, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's like, I don't know, and it doesn't matter either. If it's going to be that order of magnitude, it doesn't matter. And we don't have to do that analysis. If we believe that the order of magnitude is of that thing, it'll actually be, we had spent all the time to get the illusion of precision, which at great expense. And then it's the people say, oh, I'm data driven. I want to really run the analysis to ground. There's tons of stuff you can't know ahead of time. So if you're getting a false precision at the beginner, that's a comfort blanket. That's just helping you feel like there isn't uncertainty. There's uncertainty everywhere, all the time, you know, and trying to ignore it by trying to pin it down with fake numbers that you just made up for yourself at great expense is a really bad idea. And that's why if the ideas are strong enough, like things have a compounding return don't give you, oh, we'll either get 93 or 95. It's like, we'll either get zero or we'll get a thousand, you know, great. It doesn't really matter if it's a thousand or a thousand one. Who cares? Or is a magnitude larger than the alternative?”
2024-10-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking like a gardener not a builder, organizing teams like slime mold, the adjacent possible, and other unconventional product advice | Alex Komoroske (Stripe, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you'll know after the fact, you'll say, Oh, you know, I curved a little bit or I had this little jog in there. And you'll say, it would have been more efficient. But we're so focused on efficiency of not wasting effort that we end up doing nothing at all or doing very dangerous things that don't work. So I'm not sure that I have a path that's slightly inefficient because we're navigating unknowns that we couldn't know up front. Like I can't tell you the number of times I find where people say I need to know for this strategy that someone was trying to get me to look at and then say is this number in five years is it going to be 93 or 95?”
2024-10-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking like a gardener not a builder, organizing teams like slime mold, the adjacent possible, and other unconventional product advice | Alex Komoroske (Stripe, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it's because it's far off in the distance, it will update, it will slide across the sky a little bit. It won't be kind of jerking around. You'll be kind of like arcing slightly differently. And then what you do is you look at your JSON possible and you look for the thing that has the steepest gradient that pulls you towards your North Star. So you just want to go in that direction and you want to go in this direction. This one is second most in demand from what you think, but it's pulling you the direction that you believe will pull you there. Go in that one. And then they keep on repeating. That's it. But you need both because if you don't do, if you only do incremental, then you'll end up randomly walking into a corner. And if you only do the long, you end up dreaming big and designing castles in the sky that are impossible to actually manifest.”
2024-10-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking like a gardener not a builder, organizing teams like slime mold, the adjacent possible, and other unconventional product advice | Alex Komoroske (Stripe, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You need both. So if you only do incremental, you will follow the shortest, like the steepest gradient in front of you. So UX hour says a user wants to do this and wants to do exactly that. And you will end up randomly walking through the thing. So you need coherence about where you're going. And the way you get that is by creating a kind of North Star for yourself. It should be in three to five years in the future. It should be very low resolution. It should describe a thing that every single person who reads it who has any kind of knowledge that might be useful or relevant agrees that it is plausible. If this happens, I would not say, well, a miracle happened. I could see how that could work. And lawyers say, I can see how it could work. And someone who's worked on this 30 years ago at a similar product that Microsoft said, I can see how that could work, and that if you got to the endpoint, everyone would hi-five. Because if it's going to be a thing, I guess that could work. At the end, oh, yeah, neat. Like, that's not worth it. You want a northern be like, yeah, you know, like, great. Like, wow, we kick off. We changed the way it is. Our industry works or whatever. And now this is your North Star. North Star should up.”
2024-10-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking like a gardener not a builder, organizing teams like slime mold, the adjacent possible, and other unconventional product advice | Alex Komoroske (Stripe, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A principled approach. You can arc to wildly different outcomes than look like they were possible. While at each point, each individual action is safe and reasonable. And so you can combine both of these things. I think so many times we try to jump and we jump to the end state of the thing. And actually, you don't need to make that decision. Like if you can slice up your decisions into smaller and smaller decisions and like this next step definitely makes sense. It will almost certainly pay for itself or at the very least won't be too expensive and then it might allow these other things to happen and you take it. And if those other things don't happen, okay, don't take another step on that path. That's fine. Go another directions for a while. If it does, then take another step in another, in another, another. And this allows you to get rid of a lot of the risk and still be exposed to all the upside. And so the risk comes from trying to jump too far ahead in an unknown environment.”
2024-10-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking like a gardener not a builder, organizing teams like slime mold, the adjacent possible, and other unconventional product advice | Alex Komoroske (Stripe, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure, yeah. So the frame is the adjacent possible, which I believe comes from design thinking. I've found it from Designers of My Life for the ones who introduced me to it. And Jacint Possible is a set of actions that you do that you can do that are right in front of you that if you do them, they would work, almost certainly work. And in the tech industry in particular, we kind of default assume that the Jason Post was like this. And like flying leap to something. And in reality, the adjacent possible is quite small. It's like very within his arm's reach. And people kind of say, oh, you're being nihilist. You're limiting your potential. You're saying don't do big things. But when you recognize that your adjacent possible is relatively small, you realize that you actually have full agency to pick within the subset that is within your reach. And your actions matter because you take an action and now the world reconfigures and now you get a next set of actions. And it's based partially on the action you just took. And so if you slice this thing up and you have a coherent worldview and you have...”
2024-10-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking like a gardener not a builder, organizing teams like slime mold, the adjacent possible, and other unconventional product advice | Alex Komoroske (Stripe, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And part of it is just coming in terms of the fact of early in my career, someone called me Kuki. I'd be like, oh, man, I should be embarrassed. I'm like, okay, fine. Yeah, I'm Kookie. Whatever. I'm totally at peace with the idea that some people track me as cookie and not particularly serious. I think people who watch the work that I do and the kind of indirect impact it has realize that I'm doing something that is working even if they don't fully understand how it works.”
2024-10-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking like a gardener not a builder, organizing teams like slime mold, the adjacent possible, and other unconventional product advice | Alex Komoroske (Stripe, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Your ego gets hurt when you get disconfirming evidence. You won't want to hear it. And so you'll construct the world around yourself to not get that disconfirming evidence. But this confirming evidence is what makes systems strong. It's what makes you strong. And so how do you put yourself in a situation to get that kind of information and to really receive it?”
2024-10-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking like a gardener not a builder, organizing teams like slime mold, the adjacent possible, and other unconventional product advice | Alex Komoroske (Stripe, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, do you just do such good LA's? Yeah. It's funny. I have a lot of folks in my broader space who obviously have used. I never personally have myself. But I find there's various ways, like the transcendent mindset is this feeling of being part of something much, much, much larger than yourself and kind of losing your ego in this thing. There's different ways of doing it. Some people find it in hiking and being out in the wilderness alone. Some people find it being at a concert. And thousands of people perfectly in sync to this thing. Some people find it in religious experience. Some people find it using psychedelics and others to help get there. But a lot of it, it's that same just being willing to be in awe. There's so many times that people feel the feeling of awe or wonder or curiosity is treated as a not very serious or a childlike thing. And I just don't get that because that is how you are open to disconfirming evidence. It's how you see beyond the current limits of what you're, you know.”
2024-10-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking like a gardener not a builder, organizing teams like slime mold, the adjacent possible, and other unconventional product advice | Alex Komoroske (Stripe, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of racky or croggy at some point in the future, if there's a little, you know, something goes through there, it opens up a crack that's sitting there to grow into an idea. One of the things that makes me the happiest is when someone I've mentored years and the years in the past, they go, they search me out years later and say, Alex, I just want to let you know, you probably don't remember talking to me. But that Tuesday at the building, you know, the Notame Cafe or whatever on Google Campus, you said something I frustrated to hear in the moment. I didn't understand it. And I just want to tell you thank you because I finally understand what you were trying to tell me. And I realized that that influenced me in decisions. That to me is one of those meaningful things I can hear. And so I just find that like.”
2024-10-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking like a gardener not a builder, organizing teams like slime mold, the adjacent possible, and other unconventional product advice | Alex Komoroske (Stripe, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Point of life is the friends we made along the way. And people go, Ed's from a homework card, man. And because, and to you, you now possess the knowledge, the emotional intelligence to understand why that phrase has been shared so many times before you heard it when you weren't ready and now it becomes a trite duh. Everyone says that. It can't possibly be a meaningful statement. The reason people clip on saying it is because it's meaningful. And so I think that having that space of recognizing it, when you have these epiphanies that come from different leaps and sort of vertical development or the ability to, when you stare into the abyss and make it through the other side, you realize and learn a bunch of amazing things that you want to pass on to others and it's just really hard to get them to find it. I find that that's one of the reasons I try to write things that are or share ideas that are kind of like little seeds that you can kind of shoot into someone's brain even if the soil is not ready for it.”
2024-10-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking like a gardener not a builder, organizing teams like slime mold, the adjacent possible, and other unconventional product advice | Alex Komoroske (Stripe, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this is what I call kind of the hallmark card fallacy, which is you discover at great effort some deep insight that resonates with you and makes you see the world differently and you want to share it. Insights are naturally viral. You want to share them. And you go tell us them. It's like”
2024-10-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking like a gardener not a builder, organizing teams like slime mold, the adjacent possible, and other unconventional product advice | Alex Komoroske (Stripe, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Your role models, would you be proud is a good sign of that you're taking a broadened up perspective. When you're busy and in the moment, it's so easy to say, I just got to do this one thing that's probably not great to get this thing done. And once I do it, it's going to suck. But once I do it, it'll be fine. And then you find yourself doing it again and again and again and again. And before you know it, you've lost who you want to be. And you're now kind of a husk of yourself. And so I think those two pieces lean into where you find energy where you specifically find energy, your superpower, the thing that you intrinsically enjoy doing. And just make sure it's something that you are actively proud of, you know, and that helped make sure you don't take a bunch of shortcuts.”
2024-10-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking like a gardener not a builder, organizing teams like slime mold, the adjacent possible, and other unconventional product advice | Alex Komoroske (Stripe, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So to me, it's the combination of when you're doing something you believe in and that gives you energy, you are 10 times more productive, and you also, the effort that you are doing is its own reward. And so you are indefatigable on that topic and go for much longer. So finding the subset of things that align that you give you energy, then just it's kind of like infinite energy. It's like negative opportunity cost because it energizes you more than the sort of opportunity costs of the time to like go spend to other things. And two, there are ways to give yourself energy like for example playing an addictive video game or is any kind of mind altering substance that might give you that kind of like this gives me energy those are not things that like that's I'm not saying do those I'm saying what are the things that you'll look back and say I'm glad I did that I'm proud that I did that and if you take the perspective of a 10 years on looking back on each decision and thing that you're doing and imagine seeing this decision played in front of a thousand people whose opinion you care about your family”
2024-10-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking like a gardener not a builder, organizing teams like slime mold, the adjacent possible, and other unconventional product advice | Alex Komoroske (Stripe, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's gone. And so I just try to capture the interesting insights. It's like a butterfly collector. The butterflies are going by and try to collect them and put them in my collection as quickly as possible.”
2024-10-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking like a gardener not a builder, organizing teams like slime mold, the adjacent possible, and other unconventional product advice | Alex Komoroske (Stripe, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Productive, you're unstoppable. And so just how can you be in your flow state as much as possible? And there's things that absolutely completely grind me to a halt. And I just make sure I invest my time in situations that don't have that characteristic. But like, so when I work on something that I believe could work and have a big impact, I just, I can't stop. Sometimes I'll wake up at four in the morning as I'm typically an early riser. And I'll just write this thing, right? The meeting starts at seven. And I think there's an idea that's really cool here. And I let myself lean into those kinds of when I have the moment. I also find that often if I have an idea and I just have, itching to write it down, if I can write down 30 minutes and get a very rough of it in one place, now it's easier to clean it up later. But like that first act of creation, I do it whenever the muse hits because it's 10 million times. If it's like, oh, write that idea down later. You keep on delaying it, delaying it. Now it's a month later.”
2024-10-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking like a gardener not a builder, organizing teams like slime mold, the adjacent possible, and other unconventional product advice | Alex Komoroske (Stripe, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I just realized later that I could take really good, really fast. I could just pipe it straight through to my fingers and it worked. And I don't know. I don't know if I hadn't written my thesis, would I have discovered that? I don't know.”
2024-10-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking like a gardener not a builder, organizing teams like slime mold, the adjacent possible, and other unconventional product advice | Alex Komoroske (Stripe, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By the way, the reason I can do it, I can type insanely quickly. And undergrad, I wrote my thesis on the emergent power dynamics of Wikipedia's user community, and I did 150 hours of interviews with different editors in Wikipedia. And I transcribed them myself. And so I got really, really, really good at like, I can just pipe an idea straight into my fingertips and still listen to other stuff. So that's another superpower is I'm just constantly, I'm able to capture a very, very quickly. I've written notes that are at least good enough for me to clean up within the next day or two into something that's more stable.”
2024-10-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking like a gardener not a builder, organizing teams like slime mold, the adjacent possible, and other unconventional product advice | Alex Komoroske (Stripe, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wrote down, and the reason I wrote down is I've never, and the way I collect everything, even ones I think are maybe onto something, so I wrote down a community with zero people speaking is dead and a community with one person speaking doesn't yet realize it's dead. That's what I wrote down.”
2024-10-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking like a gardener not a builder, organizing teams like slime mold, the adjacent possible, and other unconventional product advice | Alex Komoroske (Stripe, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I think people don't give those kinds of tactics enough credit because there's lots of little social tricks to yourself and others. When you have other people who are depending on you for something and will know that you didn't do the thing, we're so much better. So like just little tricks like this that help you get be wildly more productive.”
2024-10-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking like a gardener not a builder, organizing teams like slime mold, the adjacent possible, and other unconventional product advice | Alex Komoroske (Stripe, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And once I do start going back into the office, if I had to compute into the office, I would sometimes do a meditation to protect the box for that. But if I'm not commuting, I've done a full and I'm not deathly sick. I've done a full workout since then. And the idea each day of like, is today the day of all the hundreds of days in this streak that is the worst or the hardest for me to do this thing? Is this the day? Yeah, of course it's not. I will do it. And so that keeps you in this sort of streak that makes it harder and harder to get out of it. In some ways, kind of force you contort yourself in an unproductive way. Like at a certain point, maybe you should stop that streak. But I think those kinds of structuring help you get the things done you need to get done?”
2024-10-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking like a gardener not a builder, organizing teams like slime mold, the adjacent possible, and other unconventional product advice | Alex Komoroske (Stripe, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Always rules are better than sometimes rules for self control. And so if you're going to diet, you're like, I'm going to eat, I'm never going to eat, I'm going to skip lunch every day. Like, holy, you're going to fall flat on that at some point. Like a meal will be a day with a big executive. I really need to make sure I'm well fed before I go into this review or something. And now you've broken the streak and now it's over. Whereas if you say a thing you know you can do, I will not have a dessert unless it is it would be socially awkward for me to not eat it. For example, in a small environment where somebody made homemade dessert and all of us are eating it, I'm going to like, so very clear black and white rule that you can hold on forever. So like, for example, since the pandemic started, I have done a Peloton workout every single day since the pandemic started.”
2024-10-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking like a gardener not a builder, organizing teams like slime mold, the adjacent possible, and other unconventional product advice | Alex Komoroske (Stripe, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think a lot of the trick to productivity is to play yourself like a fiddle and figure out how you work and what gives you energy and set up your day to structure it that way. So like I find every time you start a task, there's an activation energy, especially tasks you don't really want to do. And then when you complete it, there's a little burst of energy. So if you do this properly, you can get small things that are extremely easy to knock out in like 10 seconds of effort. And then you do one that takes 30 seconds of effort. And then you do one that takes a longer bit of effort. But if you give it too much space, it's hard to do. So like you almost want to find, okay, listen, I got 10 minutes. I got to do this thing where I figure out how to add, you know, do this thing in gusto that I've been putting off like 10 minutes should be enough time to do it and structure it so like, okay, right now is the only time I have to do this right to do it. And another trick is I use as like a, I have one of my original media messages actually, one of the original public ones, is about sometimes rules.”
2024-10-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking like a gardener not a builder, organizing teams like slime mold, the adjacent possible, and other unconventional product advice | Alex Komoroske (Stripe, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a long essay. It's just not. You can see it in bits and bobs. Like, if you asked, if you gave the bits and bobs to Claude and said, please write a thing about nerdclubs and essay and the style, it would do it because a lot of the pieces are in there. It's just not factored out.”
2024-10-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking like a gardener not a builder, organizing teams like slime mold, the adjacent possible, and other unconventional product advice | Alex Komoroske (Stripe, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Building on and yes ending. And that kind of gives a sort of foundation that you want to grow. But like, look for the people who already roughly want it. Don't try to convince somebody who doesn't want it to want it. They'll ruin the whole thing.”
2024-10-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking like a gardener not a builder, organizing teams like slime mold, the adjacent possible, and other unconventional product advice | Alex Komoroske (Stripe, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Come if I did one? Oh, yeah, I would. Okay, great. So now I say, Hey, a few of us were talking. We're just going to do an experiment, we're going to have an hour long conversation over lunch on Wednesday. Anyone in the group is free to come. And then what you do is you make sure it always has quorum because if it doesn't have quorum, then the thing, you know, it looks like the Canadian is dead. And then what you do is you send FOMO stuff afterwards. So you say, here's my notes from the thing or thanks, you know, Sarah and Jeff, blah, blah, blah, for an amazing conversation. I thought the insight about blah, blah, blah was so ridiculously amazing. So you want people who were in the group that didn't come to feel like they missed out and to come to the next one. And so you're constantly creating these kinds of like vibes to do it. You can't do it if you don't have somebody with a lot of energy. I am typically the kind of like seed crystal for a lot of the groups I'm in to start them off because I have a lot of energy and I like anything that people have to say that I think is open-minded or interesting. I like”
2024-10-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking like a gardener not a builder, organizing teams like slime mold, the adjacent possible, and other unconventional product advice | Alex Komoroske (Stripe, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just so you know, I think that came out a little bit strong to Sarah's idea, and maybe next time I wonder to the front of that statement or whatever. The other thing that you do is when people reach out to you and ping you, they go, hey, stand out of this thing. And you go, that's a really interesting idea. You should share that in the group. And then they do. And then you engage in the group and say, that was really interesting. You have a little emoji response. And people who didn't watch the interaction assume that Sarah just decided proactively to stick her neck out and share that and that it worked. And so this becomes a self-sustaining norm in the community. And it's not a secret. It's not like a, you're not like if someone asks, Leah, I told Sarah Roche that. The people watching don't realize that. And so it becomes a place that people do take risks and feel comfortable sharing. The other thing you do is once a week or so, you want to make sure that you never propose something in the group that people go. You always want to do a thing to go, yeah. So what you do is you see that you're talking to other people. You say, you know, I wonder, we should have like a live conversation every so often, right? Like the chats were so fun, but like.”
2024-10-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking like a gardener not a builder, organizing teams like slime mold, the adjacent possible, and other unconventional product advice | Alex Komoroske (Stripe, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Communities are all about momentum. You want to have a space too small, a time too short. Like if you have a big cavernous space, if a lot of people in it and no one's talking, people go, I guess this is the place where we don't talk for whatever reason. So what you're doing is you want the smallest seed of people that you know are going to be actively engaged. So maybe there's four of you that already talk over lunch and you talk about whatever topic. And it's always really interesting and generative. Cool, get that group together into a thing.”
2024-10-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking like a gardener not a builder, organizing teams like slime mold, the adjacent possible, and other unconventional product advice | Alex Komoroske (Stripe, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sort of strategy secrets they've been doing now for probably 10 years ago is when the first one started and there's now I can count like eight or nine I've started over the years some have emerged many of them are still at Google and I think it's like they're just wonders environments that I think create a lot of value”
2024-10-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking like a gardener not a builder, organizing teams like slime mold, the adjacent possible, and other unconventional product advice | Alex Komoroske (Stripe, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You get something magical, you get a group that people find intrinsically valuable for its own sake and just enjoy participating in and find meaning in that also sarcastically spins off game-changing insights for the surrounding context because you're searching through these ideas in a low stakes environment where the ideas that lots of people build on they go, oh, you should write that down. And so this is like an idea lab, what Timber McConaude lab. And this creates amazingly interesting insights. You just can't force it to do anything. It has to be a bottom-up and emergent, which means if you try to steer it towards an outcome, it won't go. And so, but if you do these, they are amazing places to riff and to share ideas and half-formed ideas. And this is anywhere I go, I terraform the culture around me and create these because I need it as a place to have, to experiment in a try out different half-formed ideas and build on them and be inspired by other people. And that is one of my secrets.”
2024-10-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking like a gardener not a builder, organizing teams like slime mold, the adjacent possible, and other unconventional product advice | Alex Komoroske (Stripe, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're like, ah, how can you possibly get rigorous thinking? It turns out there's limited amounts of time. And so people will choose to build on the things they find most interesting. This is things interesting things are surprising and potentially valuable. And so if lots of different people in the group are building on the same idea, that's a good sign there is something very interesting going on. And the third thing you do is you dribble in new perspectives. So every one to three a week, you put in lots of new perspectives all at once, the norms can all scramble. If you have one, five people who have a very particular kind of personality can mess up the norms. And so you're trying to minimize the chance you add a jerk. It takes one person to poop a party and go, what are they even doing here? Like you want to minimize the chance that happens. But second door daily and more importantly, you want to have people with as different a perspective as possible added into the group. And so this is what Ken Stanley might call, for example, novelty search. You're novelty searching through the different perspectives in the overall thing. When you do this properly,”
2024-10-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking like a gardener not a builder, organizing teams like slime mold, the adjacent possible, and other unconventional product advice | Alex Komoroske (Stripe, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wanted people when they hear about it. I want people when they go, like, that sounds like a club for nerds. Like, yeah, do you want in? And so this means that only people who intrinsically want to be in it for its own sake come in. So you get only a kind of positive yes and kind of energy. So then within these groups, you say you set the norms very explicitly and say this is a collaborative debate environment. It says only yes they have. Somebody says a thing in this group that is optional in secret and completely off the side of anything that matters. If they say something that you think is an actively dumb idea, you are free to not engage. Just leave it. That's fine, right? Because that thing's going to happen that we're deciding anything interesting or important here. And if you want to engage and you don't like it, a productive way of doing that is saying, oh, that's so interesting. I would never have thought to apply that lens. I typically would apply this lens to that kind of problem. I wonder if that applies here. And by saying, I wonder, you make it about you, not them. And so that person can choose if that's an interesting thing to build on or not. This sounds, by the way, very non-rigging.”
2024-10-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking like a gardener not a builder, organizing teams like slime mold, the adjacent possible, and other unconventional product advice | Alex Komoroske (Stripe, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So these I also call now like nerd clubs, and these are my secret weapon. And I have a blog post. I started writing right before my second kid was born. And then he was born three weeks early and I just lost the plot. And now it's like a 40-page draft of a thing they'll probably never finish. But I've used this tactic. I discovered it many years ago as I strengthened some of the techniques I'd use in open source community organizing. And the situation was I was just joined a new team at Google for many years. And there was like at the time 12 different groups work on different aspects of this overall problem domain. And in classic Google fashion, they added up to significantly less than some of their parts. As in not like, oh, we'll see which one works, but like these two things directly undermine each other if you execute both of these strategies, neither can work. And I knew that if you try to do pairwise executive reviews on this very complex, ambiguous, open-ended problem, you would get really expensive pageantry that would obscure more than clarified. So what I did was I created a secret group that I called navelgazers with the original one.”
2024-10-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking like a gardener not a builder, organizing teams like slime mold, the adjacent possible, and other unconventional product advice | Alex Komoroske (Stripe, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Picked that. But to counteract this, because now it's less obvious to people that's correct, you have to make the metaphor evocative and interesting. One of the reasons a slime mold deck got so much traction is partially because Slime is gross. It's bad. And yet it's talking about why Slime is good. And so that has this kind of instantly subversive thing. I only know this after the fact of trying to figure out why did that deck get so much attention for all the things I've written.”
2024-10-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking like a gardener not a builder, organizing teams like slime mold, the adjacent possible, and other unconventional product advice | Alex Komoroske (Stripe, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then once you find them each time you get a signal like that, you invest a little more time in it and you think a little bit more about framing it. The next time I haven't done this during this chat, but in most conversations, you will see me as I'm talking, writing down stuff like, ooh, that was the best formulation of that one so far. And so you keep on coming back to it. You keep on tightening it and seeing how and watching how it's responding and referencing with different people. So like, where did you get these from? It's like, I don't know. I got like thousands and thousands and thousands of little examples or metaphors or whatever that's sick. One of the benefits of metaphorical thinking is you connect nine of the ten dots and you allow, you invite the listener to engage with the argument to connect that last dot. This allows you, by the way, to say very controversial things. Because if you say, if you connect all the 10 dots and it's like, oh, then it's the official strategy, then you are instantly a dangerous thing. Whereas if you leave one dot unconnected, people can go connect the dot and go, oh my God, I think that applies to us. You're like, oh my God, what? Like, yes, if that's why I.”
2024-10-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking like a gardener not a builder, organizing teams like slime mold, the adjacent possible, and other unconventional product advice | Alex Komoroske (Stripe, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think by talking, I'm an external processor. I literally can't think if I'm not talking. Something that the person goes like they go, aha, that's a win. That's a mark that's a good one. Just randomly casting about a fine one. And then if a different person also has a similar response, if a person in sales and a person engineering both find the same idea interesting, that's a very good sign that lots of people find it interesting. How diverse in terms of background skill sets, you know, perspectives are that people who resonate with the thing you're saying, the intuition of this is If you find in a social network, you want to see what's going to go viral. If something is shared and it's shared within a set of people who were at the beginning are all highly densely interconnected in the social graph, then the implied ceiling is relatively small. You only know it works with that audience. But if people that are very different subgraphs and very little overlap, they both find it interesting. That implies a much larger max audience. So you're looking for ideas that resonate with the diversity of people.”
2024-10-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking like a gardener not a builder, organizing teams like slime mold, the adjacent possible, and other unconventional product advice | Alex Komoroske (Stripe, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source