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

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“Is other people will externally look at and go, Well, that team and that team clearly didn't talk. It'll say, yep You have to decide how bad that is for you. Apple has chosen the former. Is it very important to them that the illusion of perfect coherence in the products? It worked very well for them. They executed marvelously. And they also picked the exact opposite thing. AWS, like, yeah, there's like 15 different ways of doing everything that clearly don't talk to each other, but it allows the overall swarm of the AWS product suite to be very powerful and anti-fragile or whatever you want to say. And so Slime Molds, I think, is acknowledging that organizations are, especially ones that focus on autonomy and agency of their individual employees, which is a lot of tech companies, they are more like slime molds than we realize. And if you fight that fact, you're going to have a bad time. And if you embrace it, then you can start realizing Sime molds are actually kind of amazing. They can find solutions or problems you didn't even know you were searching for.”
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
“As you steer, as you grow into the size, your organization goes from a sports car and you grow into the size of a big rig, if you drive a big rig like a sports car, you're going to be a danger to yourself and others on the road and you're going to grind the engine. And so you got to drive the car that you actually have. So what I see a lot of things happen in large organizations that people are just trying to ignore this fact. And when you drive, by the way, a car, your vehicle, like a big rig, when it is a big rig, people go, oh, it means go slow. No, no, no. That means pivot less. It means have a little bit more, be more intentional about the times that you adjust the steering, invest more in program management, invest more in processes, give a little bit more slack in the planning process to absorb any kind of surprising things that you can still all reach the product launch at the same time. The other option you can do is you can split your thing up into a series as swarm of sports cars, individual sports cars. And the downside of this, you'll get the autonomy and strength of the bottom 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
“Yeah, so the main thesis of the Slime mold deck is that the core dynamic that makes organizations hard to navigate as they get larger, even if you assume everybody is actively good at what they do, actively collaborative, and actively hardworking, is this emergent force of coordination, of finding the subset of projects to work on when everyone's super busy, that everyone agrees and commits to and actually works on together. And finding this coordination cost is, you know, grows kind of with the square of the number of people who are working on that thing. And so what companies typically try to do is fight this or ignore that it exists. If you're going to fight it, one way of looking at this is think of a company like a vehicle. When the company is very small, you can drive it, you can steer it like a sports car. As a founder, you're allowed to steer. Everyone acknowledges you are allowed to steer. They never gave me why is they steering it that way. So a founder can help navigate an organization around an obstacle the organization cannot see or comprehend itself. The problem is”
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
“Someone described to me after this morning in one of my little dirt clubs I run about that I helped facilitate about treat everybody like the Buddha I think is I'm messing this up but like this notion of like imagine everyone you talk to is the Buddha in a Buddhist mindset and how do you see and find that those seeds of greatness and treat everyone with respect intrinsically as an end of themselves this is one of those things that you do to like be like a compassionate human it's also I believe a way to maximize the amount of value direct and indirect value that's created. So it's like one of those win-win win-win wins where just it's the right thing to do as a person and a member of society and it's also the thing that can create a lot of business value and create real value in the world.”
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 try to find in Steel Man what is the most compelling part of this, and let me lean into that. And so one of the things I try to do when I meet with people, when I mention them, I try with it within the first session or two, whenever I can sort of get a hypothesis, I say, I think your superpower is, and I describe to them what I think I can see them being truly exceptional at. And sometimes I get it wrong, especially if I try to do it earlier. But when people feel very seen and they feel acknowledged for that, they now are willing, they're going to stretch farther and they're going to respond to nudging feedback even better because they know that you're not trying to tell them, be different. You're trying to tell them be more and you can, and now the nudges will feel less like a stop energy and more like someone who gets me and can help me grow even more. And you can get some amazing things out of people when you just treat them with the respect. I take assume that everyone I talk to, everyone I talk to is an interesting seeds of greatness in them, even if they don't recognize necessarily where they are.”
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
“They're just like this ugly thing that barely works or kind of, but if this is why what I try to do is I try to see the greatness, the seeds of greatness and everything. Everyone and everything around me, I look for”
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
“That you can plant all these seeds. You can find interesting little things where maybe a junior PM on the team has an idea you think is kind of silly, but they're really into it. And the reason it could work out great, actually, if you tweak it like this, there is a potential, like I guess I could see how that could work. If that PM is going to work on that anyway, they want to do it anyway. Instead of saying, no, no, no, we don't have time for that. Be a little bit more productive over here. I say, go for it. I hear my concerns. But this part is really cool right here. And then if it works, if it doesn't work, then they've stretched their agency. They've executed, they've exercised their agency. They've learned, they've gotten stronger, they've gotten, they've grown. It has the upside if it turns out to actually work. And worst case scenario, the opportunity got us to do that thing that helped them grow and they learn and they liked. So like, I don't know, don't try to force it. Don't try to stop 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
“Position was so powerful, and I was able to 10x my impact for the organization because I didn't have to worry about making it measurable specifically in a way that would show individual heroic effort. And I think that's the hardest part. And you have to have, like typically what I would advise for PMs and my approach at Google was 70% of my effort and my team's effort should go on things that everybody acknowledges are important and useful and create value. Maybe it's boring linear value, but some kind of value. You're trying to minimize the chance that any other person in a company will say, what does that team do anyway? If someone says about your team, your team is on the verge of death. So you're trying to minimize the chance that anybody wants to say that or thinks that it's appropriate to say that by clearly and unambiguously adding value. You're not saying this is the best team in the entire world, but clearly they're doing something useful. They're executing well, they're working hard. And like, of course, that team should exist. I think about it. Of course they should. But now once you do this, you have like 30% of your extra time.”
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
“100%. I think the emergence is one of the most powerful forces if you know how to marshal it and you know how to work with it. And the only thing that's hard about it, in my opinion, is you're going to look like you aren't very serious. You're going to look like a weirdo. You're going to look like a cook. And one of the downsides, if you're working on something and you're doing the normal top-down approach where you make the plan, you execute the plan, even if the plan turns out to not be useful, you produce a thing and nothing interesting happens. No one can say you didn't work hard. But if you try doing this kind of designing for emergence and something amazing happens, even once it happens, people go, ah, it was luck. Where was the miraculous moment where you, the heroic moment where you made that happen? So therefore, you had nothing to do with it. And this was the biggest unlock in my career, actually, was when I stopped, when I got to, was promoted director at Google. I was like, cool, I never want to be promoted inside of a large organization ever again. And the freedom to now do the highest impact work, even if I can't make it legible to the organization.”
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
“This shape, anything with a network effect, anything with where the power goes up with the number of users, but it shows up in all kinds of problems that we don't normally apply it to.”
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
“If there's an ecosystem approach, if there's something that, if it works, it'll sort of be self-accelerating. So, okay, we're going to do this thing. We aren't entirely sure it's going to work. But if a developer writes a thing and somebody uses it, it'll attract more developers, more users, and then this would grow on its own. And it's cheap to do the little example of the thing. It's cheap to build a little open source, like tinkery little thing and just put it there. And if nobody uses, it's fine. It was fun to build. It took you three hours. It's fine. If someone does use it, then you just invest an incremental bit of unit each time that you find a signal that somebody's finding it useful. And then you stop if you ever cease getting that information. So like I would use is anything that is shaped like an ecosystem that has some kind of network effect and many things have network effects, have some kind of compounding loop. Compounding loops are not rare. They are like truffle hunting. You have to know what you're looking for and find the dynamics of a thing that if it worked would work at an accelerating rate. Lots and lots and lots of things intrinsically 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
“Will work. But I can tell you there's a very high likelihood that one of these will work in a way that is interesting and transformative. And so if you're looking and finding these seeds that have the compounding potential of like if they work, they would start working at accelerating rate. Then you don't have to know ahead of time. It's like this is just, it's, to me, this is, I've been told that this is completely against all the advice that people get building products nowadays. But I think it's a very powerful approach that works in a lot of different contexts.”
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 much of the way that we tackle problems and build products is this builder mindset. It's like I have a plan. I then manipulate things to match my plan and make it happen. And this is a way you can create tons of value. Part of the problem, though, is it can't possibly create more value than the effort that you put into it. And so what I look for instead are things that can be gardened, things that can grow on their own and that you can sort of direct or maybe give a little bit of extra energy to or curate over. And is a totally different mindset for it. So it's like a lead by gardening kind of vibe. I don't try to pick the things in the system. I try to work with what I've actually got and I try to lean in on the ones that turn, I think, are going in the direction that I believe is valuable based on constantly seeking disconfirming evidence. And if you do this properly, it looks like magic. It looks like a thing. It looks like getting lucky. Because what you're doing is you're farming for miracles. And so on a systemic basis, I can't tell you which of these things.”
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. Because, I mean, I think so much pain and misery is caused by us not acknowledging these fundamental, inescapable things. I can almost, it's almost impossible. Like entropy is one of those things. Entropy emerges because there's more ways to go away from a point than.”
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 any organization on a fundamental basis is you can't make your boss look dumb. Because if you do, they're the person who decides, oh, this person's not performing or whatever. And that one little asymmetry, that one little fact. In most cases, it does not matter. That one little asymmetry is what leads to the systemic compounding thing where you get these really weird dysfunctional emergent things that everybody hates. Nobody wants, and yet nobody is in the position to change per se.”
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
“Like disconfirming evidence hurts. And so you won't realize it because it hurts at any given moment. It's a distraction. We're just trying to get this thing done. And so it comes from a good place to not get it. But if you're busy, that's one of the reasons you need to take a step back. We take a step back. You're a little bit calmer. You can absorb this confirming evidence. It doesn't feel like an existential threat. It's really easy to get surrounded. If you are very powerful, you will find all the confirming evidence you need. And if it doesn't exist, it will be created for you without your knowledge. And so this is one of the reasons that large companies are radically different than smaller companies. And one of the traps that you can get into of not realizing this dynamic is happening. And you can make very bad decisions if you don't understand that is inherently what's happening. Oh, well, there's some bad actors. No, no, no. If people don't play this game, this game is emergent. It shows up even though everybody hates it. And if you don't play the game, you are knocked out of the game. The underlying dynamic that must be true.”
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 any number of different conditions, and this is one of the reasons it shows up. And I think acknowledging that is an important way to help navigate and still make good, grounded things happen. Like, how can you allow this confirming evidence to show up that doesn't kill you, that helps make you stronger? And if it all has to come in one massive moment that could ruin everything, then you aren't going to hear it. And then it will build up and build up and build up and build up into a super critical state that could shatter.”
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
“Before you do, you'll be flying tackled to the ground by somebody and stabbed in the dark because you will destroy everything. And so it becomes correct to hold on to this idea of if you acknowledge the K-fab is false, then you are in danger of getting knocked out of the game. And so how do you do good things despite the fact that you're pulled in two different directions? And this increasingly in the limit, it can be good to a point where the easiest way is if I let go of this idea If I hold on this idea, we might create significant value for the company. If I let go of this idea, I die. So the easiest way to maintain this split brain thing is to just turn this part off and just earnestly believe the KFAP. And this has been organizations become zombies. And anyone individually you talk to behind the scenes will agree that I think it cannot possibly work. It turns out that these things work this way. And yet the entire organization lumbers on. And this is a kind of death state for large organizations. It happens all over the place.”
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
“Decisions. And if you, as someone who sees this, can see that, wait a second, the official strategy is definitely not going to work. You're like, I gotta tell somebody. We're doing work that's going in a bad direction. It's not going to work. And you go and say, I think that it's actually not going to work for these reasons. And what someone will say to you, and this happens, by the way, I'm not sub-tweeting any particular organization. This happens literally in all organizations to some degree, is the senior person will say, Alex, I agree with you. It's not perfect. But if you hit the ground truth button, if you share that and everybody, the whole thing will shatter and we can't do anything. And so help me fix it. Like, don't say the ground truth. Just help nudge it and fix it. Like, that's a good point. Okay. So you help working on it. And then you realize, you know, a month later, wait a second, it's getting worse. We're doing things that's not good for the company. It's not creating user value. It's not good for the employees. They're burning out. It's just not good for anybody. And it's getting worse. And so if you think you're going to go and hit the ground.”
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
“This project you're working on, and you're trying to give a status update to be rolled up to leadership. And it's currently a yellow. And your manager asks it, and you know it's not going to be presented to leadership and rolled up until next week. It's yellow, but I've got my arms around the problem. I know how to fix it. I'm going to go talk to Sarah. I think we have a solution. By the time this is reported up, the chain, it's going to be green. So if I make it yellow, there's a non-trivial chance that someone's going to swoop down and say, well, what's going on? We have a review and it will be way harder to fix. So I'm just going to little white light. It's great. This is a totally reasonable thing to do and it's a self-defensive thing to do. It's probably the right thing for the organization too. The problem is this happens up multiple layers and it compounds. So then your layer above you does the same and levels up. You can be many orders of magnitude off of the ground truth. And so the K-fabe, the thing that everyone pretends to believe is true is obviously incorrect. And the dangerous part about this is it can lead you to make very bad.”
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
“Now do this instead, that one's 10 times cheap of these two options. This one is way cheaper and way more likely to succeed. So once you see these forces, you see them more clearly. So KFAB is, I think, a lens that's useful to understand how organizations actually work. KFAB is a word that comes, I believe, is a Carney word that is used and applied to professional wrestling. And it means a thing that everybody knows is fake, and yet everybody acts like is real. And I think it's one of the defining forces within an organization, any organization. KFABE in this small is optimism, enthusiasm. When someone says, we're going to do this thing, you say, yeah, we're going to do that. Even if I think it's going to work. If you say all this thing is going to work, everyone loses hope and it definitely doesn't work. So having a little bit of this is extremely valuable. It's the lubricant that allows organizations to believe they can do something and to attempt to do it. The problem that you get is as organizations get larger, imagine you are five levels down or something 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
“So, one thing I should flag before I dive into this stuff, sometimes when people hear me talk about how organizations work and systems, they think I'm being cynical. And I want to be very clear, I'm hyper optimistic, and I also believe that one of the moral precepts is how you maximize the agency of real humans as ends in and of themselves. And so sometimes when I get excited about this, people go, wow, that is so cynical. I'm just trying to describe the system as it actually exists. Once we know how it exists, we can figure out how to make it do great things and how we as members of this system can tweak and nudge it. So I just want to flag that before I dive into this. I have this slime mold deck, which has gotten a ton of traction over the years. And part of the reason for that is because it feels like people tell me getting a big, like they think they're crazy. It feels like giving the big hug saying, you are not crazy. Here's why this thing shows up. And once you acknowledge it, it feels like a bummer to acknowledge it. But once you do, now there's all kinds of options that pop up. Oh, given that this thing is way more expensive than it looks, I could.”
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 someone else's I don't know where it came from. Part of my job as a collector of ideas, right? And so I try to put myself in the most interesting information streams with interesting people that I've found to have taste, have a perspective on something. Maybe I disagree with it, but they definitely have a coherent idea. And then I just kind of allowed myself to like, oh, that's a really good idea. And let me build on that or let me. So I don't even know where this.”
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 there's tons of questions you don't even bother to ask. That's a dumb question. I'm not going to spend $1,000 to answer that question. Whereas if you can have that conversation, this is not saying use it for legal advice, but can they allow you to explore through a problem domain and then later check it with experts and say, I believe this is a coherent outcome or thing that should happen. And they can go, oh, yeah, that works. So I use LLMs to help me. It's like getting an electric bike for idea spaces kind of. You can just cover so much more ground so much more quickly in them.”
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 used to think through problems. And so when I'm trying to name a concept or get a handle on a few different ways of looking at something, just saying, here's what's in my brain about this topic right now. Here's some relevant context. I have a number of projects that just stuff as much of the bits and bobs into the context as I can, which is very helpful. And I just say, you know, just play with, give me 10 examples of that thing or then critique these ones or it kind of feels like this one's the best one for me. What works about this? Why is this one the best? Or I want to work at an angle now that has something about Helenes and Baum's concept of contextual integrity. How would I layer that in? It's just think of it as having an extremely well read but slightly naive friend who is willing to never make you feel dumb and is willing to engage you in any particular topic you want to go down. So like, you know, when you talk to an expert, like a lawyer or a doctor or something, you know that that time is extremely valuable. You have a very small slice of time.”
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
“Like the state, seeming like the organization. The organization almost won't see it or sense it. And yet it could be adding significant value or doing just being used quite heavily. And I think this is one of the things that makes it, if everything is happening in the long tail of usage, then you could conclude, oh, it's not being used for anything in industry, but it's being used all over the place. I mean, I talked to Claude 20 times a day. I just have long conversations with it. I have tons of projects loaded up with all kinds of contexts on different topics. And I literally could not do the job I do now without having a conversation partner like Claude.”
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
“100% like I think this is one of the reasons there's a question right now of like okay everyone's talking about AI and yet nobody's doing like there's no interesting breakout success obviously other than open AI anthropic obviously so is it just all is there any value being created I think it's entirely possible and Ethan Mollick who's a good friend who has an amazing blog was absolutely worth reading has pointed out too that there's This is things that make individuals better in a way they might not want to tell their manager about you know I'm like, I can do my job like twice as fast and if the organization sees that they might go wait a second half this much like what if we got rid of some extra people or something and so if this stuff is magical duct tape it's very hard to make scaled repeatable large scale things out of it it's very easy to jerk the shit out of anything and so you'll see it being used in the small in a way that's almost entirely below the level of awareness of the C.”
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
“That's insane. I mean, as in, and you can get it to do, you realize as you play with it more, you can get it to do all kinds of specific things and you can sort of steer it based on the way it uses the context of the last few pages. It creates a coherent world that's coherent with the things that you have recently seen. And so you can steer it directly and you can watch fascinating people that cover all kinds of wacky little techniques to get to generate, like, generate a game for your kid that's on a specific type. You can do all kinds of stuff. And I'm not saying necessarily WebSim. WebSim to me is in a disruptive thing things that look alien and weird and yet are compelling. Those are what we should be paying more attention to as opposed to take an existing playbook and like slap some AI on it, 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
“Taste when we look at this is differentiate from what the LLM would have written if given the same prompt. How distinctive is what you have to say? And I think so much in large industry, in large organizations, is about fitting in to the role. How can you be a better and more efficient cog in that particular kind of machine? And I think in this new world, what you want to do is how can they become the best version of myself? How can I lean into the things that I have an interesting perspective on that make me different? Those are the kinds of things. And of course, if you do, if you lean into something and you're doing something sort of out there and nobody resonates with it, then like doesn't count. Good taste is something that is individual and also compelling to others. And so find what things you say that resonate with other people and lean into 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
“A lot of the tactics that we're trying out at the beginning won't work. It will turn out that they only work 95% of the time and 5% of the time they punch you in the face or something. And that means that you have to be more adaptable and you have to assume that like a scrappy thing will be more important. One of the ways I put this is we've seen a vast reduction of the cost of distribution of information. And now we're seeing a reduction in the cost of information production. And most of it is slop. And so in this cacophony, how do you stand out? You stand out by having good taste. I think taste is the most important thing. You have a perspective that is different from the background noise, different from the average, and that people find compelling. How do you find your own taste? And how do you lean into that taste is, I think, much more important than just generically executing in the way that everybody else could do.”
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 in this early stage, we're in the community gardening phase, not the factory farming phase of this technology. And so I think what people need most is curiosity and play. You should be playing with these things and trying out different things and seeing what weird things are possible now. One of my favorite things, to be honest right now, it's using AI, is WebSim. WebSIM is so weird. What a weird idea. Why? And yet you play with it and you realize, oh, this is a thing that could only exist in a world where LRMs exist. And I think these kinds of odd, interesting, weird, provocative, generative things will be where a lot of the interesting patterns are found.”
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
“If you get it down to like 99% of the time, it's fine. If it punches in the face, that's not a viable product. And so, how do you design your products assuming that this thing will be squishy and not fully accurate and fully work? People use these things a lot as like oracles. I'm going to have it. I'm going to formulate the answer and it's going to be a fully fledged answer. And of course, strawberry has been really safe. I've gotten the chance to play with it. They are getting better at some of these kinds of behaviors at great expense. But in a lot of cases, I instead would rather say, how can you take LLMs for granted? How can you assume that you now have this magical duct tape? Don't assume it's going to solve all your problems. Don't assume it's going to do it autonomously, be able to give high quality results in every case. But what can you now build now that you have magical duct tape?”
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 can't tell you the number of people who are at some point, like a year or two, someone came to me, like, I just built a prototype product that would have taken me three months. And I can't question a startup. It was like, how differentiated do you think that is? Like everybody can do that now, you know? Like it changes the basis of competition. I think today I see a lot of folks using LLMs and LMs are like a squishy computer. We're used to computers doing exactly what we told them to do, which is not necessarily what we meant. And only some people have learned the skill of programming, like the arcane magical incantations to make computers do exactly what you meant. Now, LLMs can do all kinds of stuff, and they don't do exactly what you told them, but they do typically do kind of roughly what you meant. Places where people will build products and they'll say, 80% of the time, 90% assignment, it's great. 5% of the time it punches the user in the face. And they're like, oh, we're going to reduce the number of times I punches them in the face. It's like, even”
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
“On advertising. It's just too expensive. Advertising cannot clear the inference cost even with inference costs declining. So I think the way to me a disruptive technology changes tons of stuff. All these assumptions you didn't even realize you were making because you didn't realize it could be any different. Like imagine if you were locked in a room for your entire career with no Windows and you have always experiences your getting all this know-how. You're getting this kind of sense of how things work, what will happen. And then imagine that room on its access by five degrees. Everything looks roughly the same. And yet now the dynamics of force of gravity is pulling in a different direction than it was before. You didn't even think about the force of gravity before because I was so omnipresent. It never changed that it's just a blank in your head. And now gravity has changed effectively for your perspective and all kinds of intuition is now wrong. I put this thing on the table. It's going to stay there and then it slides off and falls into the wall. You know, all kinds of weird stuff will happen. And I think LLMs to me feel like 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
“I think they change a lot. I think LLMs are truly a disruptive technology. In fact, I would argue that what we're seeing in the industry is us trying to use mature playbooks from the end stage of the last tech era in one that doesn't really fit yet. To me, LLMs are magical duct tape. They are formed principally by the distilled intuition of all of society into a thing that operates between a cost structure between a human and planet computing. So much of how the industry is built presupposes the idea that software is expensive to write and cheap to run. And LLMs undermine both of these. So it makes it LLMs allow writing shitty software to be significantly cheaper. That's really good software, but like, you know, good enough in certain contexts. And also it means that there's certain software now that isn't plain old computing that can rerun cheaply. It's relatively expensive marginal cost. And so if you're going to do a consumer startup, it can't be”
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
“100%. I mean, I find that when you're busy, you're constantly just go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go. That would have a wildly different dynamic. And you can only find those when you take a step back. And I find that people, I told someone, I mentored someone, I mentored hundreds of PMs over the years, and I told someone that at one point and they go, oh, I wish I had the time. And it's like, you got to make the time. All of us are busy and we'll always be busy. And so this to me is not something I do to just for the enjoyment of all I do, deeply enjoy it intrinsically. It's something I do because I think it makes me more productive and effective.”
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 Google Doc, and while the kids are napping on the weekends, I just kind of go through them and try to distill them a little bit more in a more long-term format. And then on Monday mornings, I publish them. And again, it's a deep, for me, it's like, I can't imagine not doing this. It is the place where I find most of my most interesting insights is by reflecting on interesting conversations from the week before.”
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 started it many years ago the same conceptual thing taking a bunch of notes. I have a thing called the compendium, which is an open source tool. If you look at it currently, it looks like I haven't touched it in years, but that's actually incorrect. I built this about five years ago. I use it every day. And so I have, I think, let's see, I currently have 17,248 unpublished working notes. And so what I do during the week is I'm taking notes very quickly in meetings. And then every day or two, I go through and I process them and put them in as working notes in the compendium. And this is where I correct misspellings. I add just a little bit more context so that will make sense to me if I were to read it in a year. And also I built a feature into it that uses embeddings to find similar cards. So I find similar ideas from the past. And then what I do on Friday afternoons is I sit down and I go through all the notes I added that week and I just click and check the ones that still resonate with me. They still seem interesting in some way. And then I put them, I have a little export 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
“Some doubt once throughout the day, it's like I did this for me. I'm like happy to let other people see and peek into my weird mental process that they want. This is 100% about my own self-reflection. And it's not designed. I don't want anyone to feel compelled to read it or like, in fact, it's designed a little bit to be. I allow myself to be a little bit illegible. I want people to have to work a little bit with it. And it's not going to lay it out on a platter. It's going to jump between different things. I'll use terminology sometimes that is, what are you talking about? And I do that specifically. I don't want anyone to read and be like, oh, it sucks. Was it worth my time? It's like, cool, like 65 page Google Doc of like by just unspooled insights. Like, you know, it's okay for you to not want to dive into 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
“Yeah, so I think it's like 600 pages now. It's just one Google Doc. Every so often, almost every day, someone will accidentally add a suggestion to like out of space or something because it takes so long to load that while they're waiting, they'll tap on the screen and then it'll turn into like taps on adding a comment or something. And I take a lot of notes. I tell people when I'm in meetings with them of like, if you see me on my phone or typing, that means I think you said something very interesting and I'm writing it down. It's not that I'm just disengaged. I try to like collect all these ideas. And then once a week I go through and I take a few hours and I just reflect to myself and try to find patterns and unpack and find meaning and things. And I write those down and I started sometime in the past sharing those publicly. And it's now become a thing. I literally can't stop doing. I just find someone was like, oh, if you get more exposure for this, if you broke these up into tweets that you”
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 much of the way that we tackle problems and build products is this builder mindset. It's like, I have a plan. I then manipulate things to match my plan and make it happen. And this is a way you can create tons of value. Part of the problem, though, is it can't possibly create more value than the effort that you put into it. What I look for instead are things that can be garden, things that can grow on their own and that you can sort of direct or maybe give a little bit of extra energy to or curate over. And is a totally different mindset for it. If you do this properly, it looks like magic. I've been told that this is completely against all the advice that people get voting products nowadays, but I think it's a very powerful approach that works in a lot of different contexts.”
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