YouSaid · the spoken record

Dhanji R. Prasanna

lines on the record: 98
first: 2025-10-26
most recent: 2025-10-26
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

“And I would say the way people can be useful is, you know, again, going back to this era we're in of a lot of change and uncertainty, I think people that demand more of their companies, of their employers, of their teams, demand something better. At Block, we always ask, can we default to making this open source? Can we build this for people that are not just us or our customers? Can everyone benefit? And I think that's particularly important in this era of AI where everyone's kind of locking themselves in walled gardens and trying to capture parts of the platform that are emerging. So yeah, just demand more of people, you know, like the internet was created as a promise for open sharing of information to the benefit of all. And I think that. AI should realize that for us. And so, yeah, just demand that of people”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, check out our GitHub pages for Goose and all of the other open source projects we have at Block. So there's a lot that's useful there. We do a lot on Android open source as well. So check that stuff out. You can always find me on LinkedIn. So feel free to connect. I'm very happy to be contacted”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's an interesting one. I think the image that always comes to my mind is Doc Brown from Back to the Future. I feel like he's the canonical mad scientist of my generation anyway. But there have been a lot in video games and stuff too. But he was the one that was like, I'm just going to do this crazy thing because I almost have this burning desire need to do it and whether I want to or not, I must build this time machine. And he spends the entire movie trying to fix the problems that it creates. But yeah, he's always been like a really fun character for me.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The main thing is Telling yourself that a year from now, you're going to look back on what looks like a monumental problem, a life-changing thing, and you're going to be like, oh, that was so trivial. You know, like a lot of times we get into these traps where we're overthinking something or really nervous about making. But in hindsight, those don't seem that big. And, you know, all the time that's passed since and all the events that have happened teach you that there's more to the world. And it's never too late to do something useful or never too late to do something that's for yourself and improving yourself. So yeah, I think just kind of remembering that things are not as big or bleak or decisive as they seem in the moment is always important.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you're not waking up in the morning feeling energized about what you're going to do that day in your professional life, Then change something like. Quit if that's what it comes down to, or find a new way of doing what you're doing, you know, just don't accept what's meted out to you. Yeah. So that's how I've tried to do things. And sometimes it works, sometimes not. But yeah, it's a good thing to ask yourself.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'm a gamer. I love playing games. So for me, it's the Steam Deck, the Steam Deck Go-led, which is our latest version. It's like this gorgeous piece of hardware that lets you play the best games out there, but it's totally extensible and customizable. And in this era where we're constantly told by big tech companies that we need to lock everything down, we need to lock down the user experience and customizability in order to have things work for people. I think Valve showed that's totally unnecessary and totally wrong. And you can build the Steam Deck. You can install competing app stores, you can install Windows on it. You can treat it like a computer, write programs, which I have done to run on it. So yeah, I think it's an incredible thing and it looks beautiful and it works great. So big fan.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I just love the aesthetic and they captured something essential about like the original alien. And yeah, and they do it every scene in alien Earth feels like you're watching a painting or something or, you know, someone's reading a novel to you. It's like really unfolds very thoughtfully.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Alien Earth, I think, is pretty awesome. It's by Noah Hawley who did the Fargo TV series. And so it's a kind of, you know, it's someone with all of these incredible skills and high art filmmaking who's doing like a pulp sci-fi show. And it just looks stunning and it feels stunning and it captures all of that essential alien pulpiness that makes it so interesting and fun. So I really like that. And I'm also watching Slow Horses, which I think is one of the better shows on TV.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I'm very much of the opinion that you shouldn't read books that are about your daily work or your professional life. I read fiction. I read classics. I read poetry, philosophy, history. These are the books I really enjoy. And I think it expands your mind and gives you creative ideas and helps you question things about human condition. And that's much more valuable than like some self-help book or some get good at being an engineering manager book. So yeah, having said that, the master and margarita by Mikhail Bulgako is one that I really love. It's a masterpiece of Russian literature. And then I've always been drawn to Tennyson's poetry. And I find that in the times when I'm most Uncertain or grieving Tennyson's poetry has always kind of resonated with me and helped me find a center.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On the back of that. So I think it's really look at the things that are important to you and optimize for them. It's not really that important that the technology trends are going in a certain way because technology is here to serve us. And if we have an important reason for being and an important purpose, then we can make that technology serve us. And that's much more important than being deep with the technology or being at the forefront of every trend.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say, you know, I think that we're in this era of a lot of change and people are scared or reticent or uncertain about where things are going. And I think that look at the things that matter to you. You know, for us, it's open source, open protocols, improving access for everyone. You know, I've been very lucky in my career to only work on products that are either free or almost free to anyone, you know, or they have a free tier and then you kind of pay for some premium services and that are usable by everyone. So like anyone can become a square seller, you know, I remember even in the early days, people used it to pay each other as a peer-to-peer money transfer system. And that's why we built Cash App and that was really successful.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Worked at this social networking startup called Secret, which burned hot for a bright minute and then blew up. And then there was an email startup that we did. And that was, again, very promising. And then that sort of fizzled. So the co-founder of Canva and I worked on that one. So there's been a whole string of failures. But at each point I think I learned something and I learned that I need to never make that class of failures or errors again. And so Cash App was probably like the big success for me, that a product that I worked on that was very early on and grew to be this sort of giant business and product that people love. And so, yeah, that's been my career is essentially taking the learnings from all these failures, getting some humility out of it in the process too, coming into things, willing to listen to other people.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a very valuable point. I mean, my career has basically been a string of failed product on top of failed product. And I think that, yeah, the Google Wave example is there. I work for Hot Minute on Google+, which was another epic failure.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, IO's one of the best product people I've ever worked with. And one of my closest friends actually. So absolutely with him and you're on that one. Yeah.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Those two are the big ones, but I would also say question base assumptions on everything, you know, sometimes we get into traps where we are as professionals hyper focused on what we're building that day, that week, that month. And we don't stop to think, should we even build this at all? Or what's the purpose of building this? Could we build something completely different that would matter more to our core reason for being so I would say yeah question the sort of base assumptions it's somewhat of a cliche but you really need to remind yourself to apply it over and over and over again”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, absolutely. And I've been part of teams like that too. So in my career, I worked at Google on this product called Google Wave, which was trying to be everything to everyone. And, you know, we were 70, 80 engineers building this thing before it even really had any users outside Google. And so I think that's an example of something that started big, tried to go big on day one and probably lacked some of that meeting the Earth where reality lies and adapting accordingly.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But yeah, it's an example of how you get to a working, useful product to people if you focus on a small thing first and then build.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And yeah, and it was great. We went and bought a cup of coffee, a blue bottle, and it was bought using Bitcoin over Cashcard. And I'll tell you those in hindsight, probably the most expensive cup of coffee.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Projects start with these small experiments that we try to then build on top of. We became the very first company that was a public company to launch a Bitcoin product. And that was, again, a hackweek idea that actually Jack and me and another engineer worked on. That was the”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, Goose started small. It was just an engineer working on their own time trying to build something that was useful and that satisfied a thesis that they had. So Brad, our creator of Goose, believed very early on, I think long before we heard the buzzword going around, that agents would be how we unlock value from LLMs. He built a proof concept and he shared it with a bunch of people. He shared it with Databricks and Anthropic, got them excited and learned a lot from them. And so it just sort of built momentum from there. And even internally, it was quite a similar thing. Cash App itself was like that. And Cash App started more or less as a hack week sort of idea and grew into a bigger and bigger and bigger thing. So a lot of our”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think there's another one of, I think Carl Sagan said, if you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you have to first invent the universe. So it's like. Narrow your scope to the thing that's in front of you and that's achievable. And so that I think is really important. And that's one of our core tenets and always has been even when we were just square in the early days. Start small.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think start small with everything. Like, if you try to boil the ocean to make a cup of tea, I don't know who said that, but it's really a useful phrase that I keep coming back to, you'll never get there. So if you're making a cup of tea, just make the cup of tea. You don't need to boil all the water that there is.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that was a time when I was working part-time mostly because I had very young kids with lots of additional needs. Was a consultant on various different projects, and I was trying to help sort of some wacky things get off the ground. And yeah, I just, I'm really grateful to block that they afforded me the freedom to have that role in my career as well.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Engineers can really go off into rabbit holes if you let them. But yeah, there's a certain amount of creativity that Chaos breeds and you have to know how to build controlled chaos in some way. So you have to create a foundation that isn't liable to rupture like you have major reliability problems or something like that. Are you going to lose money in our case? And so as long as those things are bedded down and you allow your engineers to have the freedom to experiment and iterate and do the things that energizes them, like that's the ideal.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There was a very similar thing there. It's like from the outside, it looked like everything was really chaotic. It's like people would build random experiments and ship them. And it just didn't look like we were following strict policies on things like software lifecycle and stuff like that. And it was kind of true. And my philosophy was always we have all these brilliant engineers. And I'm going to do more harm than good by trying to harness them into very strict sort of blinkered areas if they want to spin their wheels, building something that is a complete waste of time for a little bit. But at the same time, if they're delivering these amazing things on the flip side, then I'll almost allow that. Like I'll be okay with that. And, you know, it's a fine balance because.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. I think on Cash App, we had that as well. So in the early days of Cash App, I was head of engineering from when we were about 10 engineers to 200 plus and took us to about 10 plus or 20 million users thereabouts.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, this is what I mean. I didn't actually look at the code, so I couldn't verify it. But this was the sort of common wisdom. And then they had an entirely Python stack that was incredibly slow compared to the state-of-the-art sort of C++ and Java servers that we had hyper-optimized at Google back in those days.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, our Android platform performs unless it's serving that need. And so I think that's been a really hard one for me over my career. And I continually encounter engineers who think we need to refactor, we need to do this in a better way. And then I'm like, no, all this code could be thrown away tomorrow. So just focus on what we're trying to build and whom we're trying to build for.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How well it was architected because the flip side of that, Google video, which is a product that I don't know if people remember, it existed before YouTube. It supported more formats. It supported higher resolution. You could upload hour-long videos. YouTube had none of this. It just had the like one or two minute quick video thing. And it's far and away blown away its competition. And so I think just keeping that front and center is why are we building these tools or these apps or these products? They're for people to solve a specific problem. So in our case, it's for a square merchant to make a sale, to sell coffee to you, or to sell something they've made. And that's really what's important. It's not really important how”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think code quality is one, like being an engineer. I learned this kind of very early on and it keeps coming true over and over and over again. A lot of engineers think that code quality is important to building a successful product. The two have nothing to do with each other. My favorite example is YouTube. I was working at Google around the time YouTube was acquired and I just remember there was this whole wash of angst about how horrible the YouTube code base is and how terrible their architecture is and their storing videos as blobs in MySQL and whatnot. And you could argue that YouTube's the most successful product at Google by a long way, right? Like maybe more successful than many of their others combined. And so it really has very little to do with”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we have square afterpay cash app and title are four major brands. And then we also have BitKey and Proto that are focused on Bitcoin for us. And we ship hardware. In those two brands.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think maybe two different things. One is just the power of Conway's law, like we talked about before. It's like, how difficult it is to change outcomes without changing the structure. And I think I always kind of knew that at some level, but really appreciating it in a visceral way is big. The other thing that I really learned the hard way maybe is you only hear about it when things are going wrong. So when things are going well, you kind of have this eerie silence and you're like, well, am I doing the right things here? Are you focusing on the right problems? Having a bit of judgment, having a bit of time to step back and look at things holistically, those are things that you really need to make time for and do on a regular basis, which I wish I had known when I took up the role.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's a bit different than Cloud Code because at its core, Goose is a platform that implements MCPs. And so MCPs give it this dynamically extensible nature so it can do all of these things for you, whether it's automating things like we were talking about with Google Docs and Notes and things like that. Or it can do straight up programming tasks for you using other MCPs. So it can index code and do it that way. So it's really more of like an extensible platform. So I would say it sits somewhere between your classic AI assistant where you just ask it, you know, what's the weather today? Can you calculate how many months it's been since this date or whatever it is to the more focused cursors and claudes? Codes of the world”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. You can just download it from our URL. We can share it in the show notes for you. And yeah, you can install it. It comes for Mac and Windows and Linux, I believe it's an Electron app, so it'll work on all of them. It also has a command line. So for people who are more comfortable using that, we have that UI as well.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That so, yeah, it's surprising what these tools can do and allowing them the kind of flexibility to do that is a big part of learning how to use them.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, pretty much. I said, I have all these receipts there in Google Drive. So we have similar origin problem there. And I need to get them into a single form. I need to collate the totals and do all this. So it tried a few approaches first. It tried to download them and it tried to read them using a PDF reader and this and that. And then the thing about Goose that I think a lot of the other AI agents learn from us as well is if it tries a few things and fails, it'll back up and it'll try a different route and it'll just keep going until it makes some progress. And that's what it did. And then it picked Apple script as a way to do it because it had the MCP extension to control my computer. And this is the same thing that our engineer we were talking about the other day uses to watch his screen and things like that. But this was a very focused problem and it managed to do it.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Me in the background. And yeah, so these are like surprising ways in which these tools help us. And the more you use them to solve real problems to your point, the more you understand what their strengths are and where you can deploy them.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do some crazy stuff. Yeah, great example. I did something like this a couple months ago as well where my son has a whole bunch of therapies. He has additional needs. And so I was trying to gather the receipts for all these therapies and share them with my wife and she will claim it from her insurer. And I was really struggling to do this because they're in various forms or screenshots in some cases or PDFs or whatever. So I asked Goose to do this and it was all sitting on my laptop. And Goose figured out that it could put all of these receipts into my Apple Notes app into a single note. It converted it to HTML so it would sync seamlessly to my phone and then I could email it or share it with her from there. And that's just something I just never would have thought of. And it did this using AppleScript. So it just controlled my computer for me.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say really try and use these tools yourself so the way in which I think we've been able to drive most of the adoption is Jack uses goose I use goose our executive team all have used goose and use it regularly and use other other AI programming tools and assistance as well And we do it every single day. And so we learn a lot about how our own workflow can change. And that's going to tell you so much more about how you're going to change your organization's workflow than if you're reading a bunch of think pieces on LinkedIn or Harvard Business Review or whatever it is, and then trying to get your teams to follow suit. So I think we do this with everything. It's feel it, like use the product yourself, feel it, understand. Strengths and weaknesses and its ergonomics, and then figure out how to apply it to your teams.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But then things like offloading test to the cloud or simply just deleting tests that don't make sense anymore probably save you two to three times that. So there is still a portfolio approach that you need to take for lack of a better term. It's like that example I told you earlier about should we buy a vendor tool or should we build this in-house? It's like, well, do we even need to do this process at all? So in some ways, structure matters more than the efficacy of the tools you have.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not wrong in some ways. So here's another really interesting example where we are trying to improve our build times and we're using goose and a lot of other tools to help us with this too. And they've done remarkable things. So we have this really cool tool that analyzes our test suites and selects the right test to run for changes that were made. So we cut down basically 50% of test runs this way, which is pretty great and like we're not warming the planet as much with all these unnecessary.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're being more thoughtful about it, so like I said, we were looking at it as a commodity in the GM era. And now that we're functional, it's much less about how many engineers we need as a function of the number of features we have in Square or Cash App and in the functional org structure, we think of it much more as what are the areas of optimization, where can we build depth, and what really accelerates our priorities through things like modularization, reuse, and going deep into platforms.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is massive, although I think that it's a little bit like the analogy of if you build a bigger highway, you'll just get more cars on the road. So I think the fact that everyone's building software means that there's more software to be built, more coordination to happen, and everyone's more eager to ship things faster and with greater results. And so we're just seeing an overall uptick in velocity and the ask for more features, if that makes sense.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think there's that. But I think the non technical people using AI agents and programming tools to build things is really what's been surprising and really amazing. And I think that speaks to how these roles are going to evolve in the future. The lines are going to be blurred between whether you're in legal or in risk or in engineering and design even. And so I think that the people that are able to embrace it to optimize for their particular workday and their particular set of tasks are really who are showing the most impact from these tools.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so two answers to that. One is you're definitely right that the more senior and the more junior they are, the more comfortable or the more eager they are to adopt these AI tools. And I think that's for a variety of reasons, including some of them that you named. Like, I think the senior people really understand in great depth how everything works. And so they're almost relieved that this tool exists that can go and do all these things that they've done a million times before and couldn't be bothered. And then the junior people are like my niece and nephew on a BlackBerry or something. They're just blitzing through things, not BlackBerry in the early days and iPhones now. They're blitzing through a text message when I'm still sort of seeking destroying through my keyboard. Shows you how old I am.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we're starting to do that now. So traditionally, we would just use CoderPad or something like that to wipeboards through a problem and even program it in pseudocode or near pseudocode. But now we're looking at can you use Vibe Code to build something? How are you, how comfortable are you with these tools or how are you thinking about evolving with them as well? But it's early days yet, I would say that it's not clear to me that necessarily how someone knows how to use, you know, be it goose or cursor or any of these other tools matters that much to whether they're a good engineer. I still think that things that we interviewed for in the past, a critical mindset, the ability to really understand deeply The technical nature of a problem is still much more important than whether you're a fully AI native programmer.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, a learning mindset is how I would put it. This is something that Jack, our CEO, talks about a lot, is he wants us to be a learning first company. So everything we do, every experiment that we ship, what can we learn from it? And did we feel that we gave it our best shot? And I think that that's more important to him than even sort of coming up with the right business answer every time.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But on the AI side, we're very much looking for people that are embracing these tools and that are eager to try and learn from it. We're not looking for people who are amazing AI practitioners on the get-go. I think we have those people and we're interested in those people if they ever want to work with us. But I'm much more keen on looking for that college grad who just really is eager to learn about these tools and like open to it or even the veteran who has embraced these tools and figured it out. And that's kind of where we're optimizing for who we look for rather than sort of a specific set of skills.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We can bring in experts from across the company to advise us on how better to do this. And so those kinds of things, I think, have made it much different in how we hire. And we no longer see engineers as a commodity to just sort of add 100 people to go and build the next product in Cash App.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think that things have progressed far enough that it's really impacted in a fundamental way how you would how many people you would need to sort of build an app of the scale of cash app, for example. I think what's changed for us is much different and it has nothing to do with AI. It's that what we talked about earlier is moving from our GM structure to a functional structure. And in our GM structure, our incentives were always to think of engineering headcount as a commodity. And so we would just add more engineers if we wanted to build more features. And the classic mythical man person month trap or whatever it's called. And I think that moving to a functional structure completely changes that. And you're like, well, we can leverage common platforms, common modules.”
2025-10-26 · Lenny's Podcast · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source