YouSaid · the spoken record

Jason Shah

lines on the record: 79
first: 2022-09-18
most recent: 2022-09-18
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Yeah, definitely. So if you're interested in Alchemy and Web3, go to alchemy.com and click through to our jobs page from there. I'm online at 0x Shaw. That is my crypto pseudonymous handle and happy to engage with folks there. And in terms of being helpful to me, I would love any feedback on anything that came up. I would love any products that people are working on. I also invest, and we also partner with a lot of products and teams at Alchemy. And I would love to meet anybody that's listening on the podcast too, because I know Lenny is all about community and has kind of given so much back over the years that I would love to meet folks that are out there and get a chance to spend time talking about the products that you're all building.”
2022-09-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the biggest thing I look for is a growth mindset to be able to reflect on an experience like that and be vocally self-critical without unproductively being hard on oneself. And I think that the dimension of asking about risk gets at their psychology and how do they think about not only their career, but if they were to work with me, how would they approach problem solving and taking bets on the business?”
2022-09-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Ken Burns Vietnam War series. I'm really into documentaries and history, and it's a really kind of compelling version of history that I've never seen before.”
2022-09-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would suggest polygon, salon, or moonpei. I know it's three, but I want to give some breath in the Web3 space that might be exciting to people.”
2022-09-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it teaches product managers to chew glass and hear about outcomes the way that a CEO has to. And I think that's a really useful mindset to have.”
2022-09-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just a brief kind of additional what you showed there. I mean, I completely agree. I think it's very true in life, right? It's like, what matters? And it's like, well, your health, your family, your sense of purpose. It's like nobody's unfamiliar with the answer, but like most things, it's about the application of it and about the nuance of it. And I think that's what product is ultimately sort of all about too.”
2022-09-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“College Readiness Program plant, then you focus maniacally on the pedagogy and the curriculum and so on and so forth, rather than, say, the business model and an initial product that you think can work. So that's what I found to be the most useful. And I can give other examples if it's helpful, but understanding what problem we're actually trying to solve and really getting crystal clear about it, I think, has been incredibly useful to me and energizing as well.”
2022-09-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At a place like Alchemy, where, yeah, we're a developer platform, but should we build an SDK so there's abstraction that is easier for developers to use? Should we build an NFT API because we think that's a really important stack to move into and an important use case to support? The question is, what problem are we solving? It's not this versus that, just in a vacuum. Is the problem did all the experience? And we want to make things easier to develop. Is the problem that an NFT marketplace, a whole suite of them are trying to grow and need more support from us? And not understanding these problems clearly, and it goes back to my first company. I was an education company, and the problem was that low-income students didn't have access to the same resources to get into college as other students. And that guided everything, that guided the pricing model, which was basically free for a long time. And then we monetized on sponsorships from colleges, right? Because the problem matter. Whereas the problem solved was there's not a different problem. There's just no good.”
2022-09-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, this is a really important question. Like the others, but I think that understanding and defining what problem matters. The most important skill that I think I've taken away, and it applies to so many things, it can apply to a specific product we're building. It can apply to what a company's mission is. And I think I've found it really effective because it affects pretty much everything. It affects, you know, what we're going to build. It affects is the team motivated by what we're doing. So specifically, for example,”
2022-09-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Based on the cannabis group meeting, the needs of the business. So this kind of marketing sales product combination has been what I found to be really effective at getting people excited, understanding who they are and what they need, and then crafting a role that actually makes the person successful rather than just checks a box and your recruiting software as some new headcount that was hired.”
2022-09-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What's really funny about that is that product is very iterative, but somehow we just write a job description and then it's faked, it's done, it's posted, and nobody thinks about it again until the person's hired, and then they take it down. And I think taking a product mindset where I meet people all the time now where I don't really know exactly what role they're necessarily going to fill, who I'm not really sure about exactly their seniority. Maybe they don't have a lot of experience, but maybe they would just totally be a rock star on our product team. And looking at like a product that we can mold flexibly and think of the same way of, you know, at Airbnb, if we were going to build Airbnb, if we just kind of came back to the Amazon working package, just wrote a document and it was over. That's one thing. But we didn't do that, right? We went and actually built rooms and homes that were supposed to be Airbnb Plus. And then we iterated on it and we changed the pillows and we changed the entrance and we changed the scent that you feel when you walk in. We coach hosts and learn about that. So I think product mindset on hiring and iterating on it.”
2022-09-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then lastly, I think there's a product angle to it that not a lot of people think about or talk about a lot because I think the product is, it's one of those rare cases where job descriptions are almost like product specs, right? Here's what the responsibilities are. Here's what we need you to do. Here's what the qualifications we're looking for.”
2022-09-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then if you're past that threshold, I feel like there's a sort of a sales process, and we were talking about how bad of a sales project I am, for example, because I didn't listen to people's pain points and understand one or two things that were most important to them. And I think similarly in this context, do they want to work if they're an engineer? Do they want to work in the world-class engineering organization? If they're five person, are they just really excited about crypto and they want to find a way in? And that's, and a place like Alpha is the best place for them to learn that is, you know, how to think about it. And it's not about, you know, misdirecting on or matching whatever they say, it's but it's about really understanding who they are and what motivates them and what they're excited about because I'm as concerned about the kind of post hiring step as I am the pre-hiring and want them to work out and be happy and be effective.”
2022-09-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I was reflecting what do I think works the best? And I like to think of it in very similar motions to a business where I think there is a marketing aspect to it. There is a sales aspect and there is a product aspect to it. And what I mean by that is that on a marketing level, I think, you know, what has a person heard about your company? Do they know anybody who works there? Do they read your LinkedIn posts about things and already know that you're a known quantity before they even step in the door to interview? Are they even willing to interview based on what they know about the company? And so I think that the marketing aspect in it, and I mean it sort of lowercase marketing in this sense, of course, because I think a hard sell of any sort or, you know, anything that's not authentic is probably going to fail ultimately. But it's about developing a really positive kind of brand and reputation for a company, but also as an individual.”
2022-09-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that for me personally, I was reflecting ahead of the podcast on how I approach things now after different stages of hiring. And for context for what it's worth, right? I've been at the zero person startup, it's just me, and I'm trying to convince some Google engineer to come join us, which is incredibly hard and has a low hit rate to a place like Amazon or Airbnb where you have a large world-class recruiting organization that is effectively doing sourcing for you and setting up interviews and such things like this. And there's formal calibrations and interview panels to a place like Alchemy where it's very sort of scrappy. We need to figure out who we even want.”
2022-09-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Appreciate that. And I get a lot of value right out of meeting some really talented people from the collective. I think hiring, it's funny, it reminds me of sort of pushback in a sense of like what you call it has such an impact on how people think about it, hiring, recruiting. But if people reframe it as like the people you are going to work with every day or the people who make the company what it is, it shifts the mindset. It's like, how is that not the most important thing to be thinking about as a leader or as a founder? A lot of people have benchmarks. I think maybe on the GoGO podcast, talk about 30%, 40% of a founder's time maybe spent on recruiting. Because I think deep down everybody understands that that's incredibly valuable”
2022-09-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's how I had the first angel investors in my next company. That's how I hire, I still hire people maybe much through their sugar and they still get LinkedIn messages from me trying to send them for the next thing. So I totally agree that those early days are really formative and there's maybe a balance between nobody wants to be a job hopper, but at the same time maybe there's ways to also not just be a career person who spends kind of 30 years working up the ladder or is fixated on. I need to be CPO, but is willing to give up a director title to go be a hustler at some startup because I really believe in it and they want to take a bet or risk in their career.”
2022-09-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I totally agree with that. For example, I think for, let's say, a new grad, right? Who's thinking about a product career? And let's say on the spectrum, there is maybe like Goldman Sachs, because that's what a lot of people are doing. They're like, yeah, I want to do product, but I also feel like I need this Gold Star or whatever. And then in between is you could join a hypergrowth company of some sort where they definitely have good product people you can learn from, but definitely still room for you to do more than what a very junior person would be assigned to be doing. And on the other end of the spectrum is, you know, I'm going to have no job. I'm just going to completely bounce around from my own projects or just, you know, work with a new startup every two months. Personally in that spectrum, I tend to be more towards the middle of that where build a track record, build a network. I mean, it's crazy even just this week, next week. I'm seeing maybe five people that I know from my Yammer days. And to your point on formative nature, some of those people, that's how I learned how to do product. That's how I learned things like A-B testing.”
2022-09-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolute sort of like gems, if you will, in Silicon Valley and tech are the teammates that are willing to stay around for four, five, six, seven years, right? And they have institutional knowledge that nobody has. They have a positive impact on the culture that is impossible if there's constant employee turnover. So to me, I think that you could simultaneously be somebody who's committed to companies, stays for a very meaningful amount of time, but zooms out and looks at their career. Actually, I think maybe this was even more right. You're now a famous podcast. You're a successful startup founder. You were a product leader, all these things form a map and I think a really interesting career and life, frankly, that's pretty full with a lot of really interesting milestones and learnings and networks and people that you get to interact with.”
2022-09-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There you go. So I think that there's a balance, right? For example, I want to be in Web3 for more than a decade. I want to stay at alchemy for a very long time and help build the company. So I guess when I think of Matt, maybe an important way to think about it is, you know, maybe when somebody is 50 or 60 or 70 and they might choose to stop working, a lot of people when they start their career actually have 30 years to play with or 40 years or 50 if they're lucky. That's a lot of chips you can play. You could do five, 10 year runs, right? And so I think that in terms of like sticking it out, maybe I'm biased. I think that some of the”
2022-09-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My hope is that there's a balance here, right? In the sense that the map shouldn't give the impression of 180 countries and therefore let's do 180 tech companies and shorten the tenure from two years down to a month, right? And we've just created a generation of jobs, which is even easier because we're all on Zoom. It's a good point. And I really respect people like you who have stuck it out through the ups and the downs and somebody sees seven years on paper, but I mean, seven years, I don't know how many chapters of Airbnb, how many crises moments”
2022-09-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think you're totally right. And the only brief thing I would add to the way that you put it, which I think captures the essence here, is I think we all have a lot of false precision about what we think a given career move is going to lead to or what it's going to be like. And we forget that, you know, a lot of career decisions are made out of maybe 10 hours cumulatively, like talking to a team and getting signal. So I think that that false precision sometimes gives us comfort in making certain decisions and folds us back from a bolder decision that might be better, but maybe the latter is just hidden behind some fog if you really want that. And you can get both. Maybe you can go to the most interesting place in the world and like have the success in life and progress and so on and so forth. It's just that I think a lot of people think it's totally either or they think that they've already figured out the precise outcome that's going to happen. And to your point, the latter often does fall over. And that's what all your hopes are pinned on.”
2022-09-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But using the map analogy, that's like getting lost in Grisha and having to find your way out or getting lost on your hotel in Australia or getting bitten by a dog in Thailand, which actually did happen to me. But these are interesting experiences that I think build characters. So I'll pause there, but I think there are a lot of career decisions I've made. And do I have regrets at times for sure, right? Because you see what would have happened if you had joined a different company at that time. And it would have been like, oh, I would have met so many great people. I would have worked on these products in my equity would have been worth more, whatever. But I think you only live once and I think that these rare experiences have been very true to me and taught me things that I wouldn't learn otherwise.”
2022-09-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Structure. But I was poorer and I had been talking to a couple angel investors who were willing to put money into whatever the thing was going to be. And I felt like raising money is actually going to be really hard for me. I should take this is going to make my life a lot easier and I can focus on product and so on and so forth. That was a really hard four years. Things like an M&A offer falling through the day before your wedding or chewing glass and submitting to the Apple iStore and being a featured app and then resubmitting because we wanted to fix a bug and then actually now it crashes 90% of the time as Memorial Day weekend and you can't get in touch with the Apple business development manager who can help you out to reapprove something. It was a really stressful four years, right?”
2022-09-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fortunate to not shove me to the side and he listened to me for a minute. And then I emailed him after. And these are random things that happen that over time, I think, make us who we are. Are you the sort of person who's going to hustle and do that? You know, when I was building that education company, I went and put flyers in people's cars in various high schools. I was trying to get things started. And coming back to leadership, right? That would be below most people. It's like, wait, you want a company and you're sticking flyers in people's windshield. It's like, what's wrong with you? And so anyway, I think that was an example of time where it was like, okay, if I'm on the ladder, I'm like, I got to get the best entry-level job or whatever, even if I had been an entrepreneur before that, I would have thought about my structure in my career. And I was more like, this is going to be interesting. I'll figure it out. I believe in myself enough that I'll figure it out. So I did that Yammer and leaving Yammer was similar where I could have stayed, my equity was finally worth something and there was a lot of, I could have learned a lot, even I'm sure, from the mic.”
2022-09-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A few concrete examples, actually. I'll keep them brief though. One is when I first moved to San Francisco and I mentioned I did a small sale of that education company and I could have done a lot of more productive things with my career in the short term. I had all my peers from college who had gone off to their great jobs at Google or whatever. I said, I just want to, I'm just going to move to San Francisco and work at my dining table. And I have a little bit of savings from this. So why not? Let's see. It's going to be super interesting. I mean, it was also very boring at times. And so I didn't learn a lot on the sort of micro level, but I built five or six products. I became much better at programming as a result. I remember one time it's kind of a goofy story, but I was working out my dining table and I saw Ron Conway on the street. And I like, I was disheveled because I was just working for my apartment and I wanted to go pitch Ron Conway on this terrible idea for a startup. And so people who were just”
2022-09-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In good ways, too. I think about the team that they're going to work on next with. They're very unintentional about the macro. What's the big picture? What do I care about as an individual? There's not a lot of classes for that. There's not a lot of blog posts in the product management field about the touchy feely side of this and who are you as a person and where do you get energy from? For me, I found that really clarifying, and it makes career decisions that have seemed risky to other people seem inevitable to me.”
2022-09-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll remember the most. And so when I think about product and when I'm on my deathbed, I'm going to care about the products I built and how they affected people. Nobody's really going to be looking at my LinkedIn, hopefully for their sake and mine at my funeral. And so that's what I think, sorry, it's a very morbid analogy. But I think thinking of the future provides a lot of clarity about what am I going to care about a long time from now. And I think that applies to all facets of life. That's how I thought about my life partner. That's how I think about my career. That's how I think about where I want to live. San Francisco, San Francisco, a lot of people like to talk negatively about it, but I believe in the community. I believe in the place. I'm interested in the long term, even if, you know, the short term has some challenges to it. So I personally believe really strongly in this kind of ladder versus map distinction. And I think a lot of people are very intentional in the micro. They think about their next job, their next title, how much salary and equity there is.”
2022-09-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the framework I like is ladder versus map. And I think that you can be either person at any point in your life. Sometimes there's a bit of a set mindset that somebody might have one way or another. But I like ladder versus map. Ladder is about moving up, more influence, more power, a higher title, things like this. Whereas map is, I just want to go wherever's interesting. I literally think of it. I think of my career very similar to travel. I want to go to Greece. I want to be hungry walking around in India sweating in a hundred degree weather. I want to go to Australia and kind of get locked out of my hotel and see what that's like. Like I'm okay with discomfort because it's interesting. Sometimes, for better or worse, maybe this is a privilege. It's certainly a privilege thing to say, but I care more about living in a really interesting life than, let's say, good or comfortable life. I think that's where the growth comes from. That's where the stories come from. That's, to me, the things.”
2022-09-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think we all forget that we're all just humans, right? And at the end of the day, we all are busy, et cetera. It reminds me a lot of sales, right? Like I was very unsuccessful when I was trying to outbound sales in the early days of my last startup, Dew.com, because I didn't understand this. I'm a product person. I'm not a salesperson. I didn't listen to what people cared about. I didn't kind of work backwards from what a CRO or a head of people that we might have been selling to cared about. I was just about features. And here's what we can do for you and this and that. But all they care about were one or two things, right? Maybe the CRO's growing revenue. Maybe the head of people is worried about culture or scaling their talent organization. And we were nowhere near that list. And so I think it's similar for CEOs and there's a huge disconnect when say a PM walks into a meeting with the CEO and they're talking about something that the CEO is 10 miles away from thinking about and certainly even the mindset that they're bringing to the conversation.”
2022-09-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Awesome. This is the way to do it, and that's how we're going to actually become the generational company we want to be. Again, a reframing in this case around, yeah, we might disagree or squabble about certain things at a detail level, but I understand what we all came here to do. And let's focus on that and how this is a part of that versus just focusing on maybe the means to an end versus the end itself. And the end always brings a lot of clarity in my experience.”
2022-09-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, for sure. So a recent example at Alchemy, actually, right? We're growing, we're hiring, but there are a lot of roles that, especially being in Web3, that are not yet created, for example, we've created a, you know, there's traditionally growth product, growth marketing. We've created around growth operations, which I'd be happy to talk about if we want to get into it. But it's a really interesting area. And we were going back and forth on like, should we hire for this role? It's not even a real thing. Maybe, you know, we've looked at some candidates. We're not so sure about them. And when I realized with our founders who were incredibly smart, very talented and built the company over so many years now, they want to win. That's what they care about at the end of the day. They are so driven to win at the end of the day. And so ultimately, it wasn't like, let me make some rational argument about the role of growth operations or let me, you know, defend some issues with this person's resume that maybe you're spotting when we make this hiring decision. But oh, you want to win? Oh, we want to grow faster.”
2022-09-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a great point. I think it was a big idea, right? With a good reframing. And I think it's like many things where there's the substance of something and then there's the communication of it. And so this is true often if, for example, if a company is changing strategy, oftentimes people might walk away feeling like, yeah, I guess I kind of agree with the strategy, but the way it was communicated was really poor or vice versa. Like, yeah, they told us in advance and they sat us down all hands. I really disagree with this strategy and I'm going to be dug in on my heels and not disagree and commit now. So in this case, I think you're totally right. Like if it was just window dressing of founders are too smart, especially at all these companies we've talked about, to be fooled with a simple renaming of something. But I think the combination of a bigger idea, more exciting idea that was at the heart of what we were all going after together combined with a simple way of communicating it, because I've also seen big ideas that are poorly communicated fall flat on their face and not achieve the intended outcome. Those two.”
2022-09-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is actually going to elevate things. We're not telling you we want to pair back scope. We're not saying we want to settle for less. We're actually just not only going to call it something different, but also envision a simpler experience, which is more elegance, more on brand with luxury. Boom. All of a sudden everybody gets what they want. They have to better customer experience, less scope. And it wasn't about saying no. It was about understanding what we're all actually sharing as a goal, which was a great simple customer experience and then actually building that. So I saw that to be really effective. And I think that's something I try to bring into my career. I have a couple other examples. If it's useful, but that was the big one that I learned from at Airbnb.”
2022-09-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And as a result, it was just this sort of a mess as a result, and there was a very low morale because everybody, you're taking on too much scope, people weren't sure was the right product. It was being built up as one giant launch as opposed to an iterative thing. And what was really interesting was that this leader was very effective at understanding that the goal wasn't about building a bunch of features. It was about, as often discussed at Airbnb, a magical experience. And so when we took a step back, it was reimagined as trip designers, not concierges. And their goal is to design your trip. And part of that meant a very elegant, simple chat experience so that you could have an efficient, fast, positive experience with that trip designer and move on. And it shifted the pushback of like, we can't build this thing. It's too many features. We don't have enough time. We don't have enough resources to, oh, we all want a really elegant, really smooth, slick experience for our customers. How do we do that? Let's a trip design or a new content.”
2022-09-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And coming back to Airbnb, I remember Airbnb had bought a company, luxury retreats. There was a goal to integrate that business and that product into the full Airbnb suite. And there was a lot of potential with that. But I remember that there was part of the product experience that was oriented around chatting with somebody and the idea that the business that had a very large team of wonderful people who helped you as concierge is basically for your trip. And so this was a team that I was on that to be honest had fairly low morale. It's always difficult to integrate an acquisition with a company, especially when we were based in different places, et cetera. And I remember hearing from a leader who had been at Airbnb for a while who's very effective at persuading senior leadership. And they understood why this was a problem, because this chat product was growing in complexity. You have to build all these features into it. And nobody could successfully shift the direction.”
2022-09-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ends up defining, I think, 90% of what people understand about a concept, right? And so pushback is, you know, I couldn't imagine a word more viscerally that makes you feel like you're sort of physically going against what somebody else wants. And it gears people into a mindset of then, well, how should I perspect? It starts from a place of I need to disagree. I need to say no. It's a very negative mindset purely based on the word that has come to label a behavior that alternatively could be about how do I shift the direction on something or how do I help the business actually succeed when I disagree with somebody about something? And that's a very different mindset. And so the two things that I've seen be most successful would be, I think number one is actually understanding what a goal is or what somebody's kind of issue is with something and then actually aligning those things in some way.”
2022-09-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think this is one of the, I actually think it's one of the most misunderstood terms in a sense, because I think language, like we were talking about earlier, are so important. And yet what you call something”
2022-09-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fix something at 3 a.m. because they feel committed to the code base and it's not a thousand person engineering organization where my only job is to make the iOS app 2% more effective at engaging users.”
2022-09-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I feel like you're totally right, especially. I mean, this is the natural progression, but it doesn't have to be that way, right? And I think to your point, I think a lot of leaders focus on accountability in an organization once they get large. And so you see things like performance reviews and things like this. It's a very top-down approach to trying to drive results. But as opposed to a sense of accountability, if you have a sense of responsibility, if people felt like this is my company too, this is my product. This is my office floor. I don't want trash on the floor. I'm going to pick it up and throw it there, even if we have somebody whose job it supposedly is to clean that up. It's like I take pride of ownership in this and I'm connected to it. And I think that makes all the difference in terms of, you know, at Airbnb, I think people who felt that way were willing to push back on certain things or they're willing to propose new ideas because they felt invested in the company. I see it at alchemy all the time. I see an engineer hop in and”
2022-09-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is or a person not being above things. I think the biggest thing I take away from that is humility, right? Is that nothing is not my job? Anything could be picking up paper off the floor and putting in the trash or it could be reviewing a product spec, whatever it is. And then begin the details, in my opinion, is about craft, right? And really understanding things at a low level such that you're able to reason about it and make good decisions like Brian with the homepage or Bezos in some cases with customer processes that he got in the weeds on. I think the two together, humility and being excellent at craft, I think is a very potent combination, especially when you throw in the last thing of being able to adapt to any situation.”
2022-09-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're absolutely right. There were no, there wasn't no slides, right? None of this. They brought in the prototypes for each of those reviews and things like how to do typing on a tiny screen, right? And those early keyboards and how to do autocomplete. And Jobs was totally in those details from, you know, Ken's telling in this book. So I couldn't agree with you more. And it's something that people miss because most of their exposure to leaders is on a YouTube video or at all hands. And so they don't really get to see that side of leaders, I think. And it's also not what I think from an ego perspective is kind of what people want it to be about. They want it to be about making big decisions or commanding a large group of people. And I think it's hard to do that without these pieces. One of the things I just wanted to briefly touch on to your point on how they're connected. It's a really good point. And at the surface, it almost seems like they could potentially be the same thing. One thing worth calling out, though, I think, is the idea of something not being above somebody. I think”
2022-09-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's such a great point. And you mentioned the jobs example, and there's a great book that you've probably read in your community. I believe it's called Creative Selection by Ken Cocienda about the early days of the iPhone. And I think it was Project Purple or something like that.”
2022-09-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Watching Joe Nikhil now through this particular crypto winter shift gears and figure out exactly like we're still building the core business, but how else can we lean into this and adapt to the unique opportunities that are in front of us? I think that's really powerful. So what I've seen is nothing is above them. They're in the details and they adapt to new information and new situations. That's what I've seen the most that I've appreciated in the best leaders that I've gotten to either observe or work closely with.”
2022-09-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Them. They were forced involved, and there were things to delegate and activate around, but Sachs was in all of those details and ran those proper reviews himself and would talk to the product managers directly. And I think that was really impactful. And it also, I think, from an accountability and culture perspective, when you're a PM and you talk to the CEO and you feel like you're presenting something at product review, it's totally different. And it creates a certain amount of responsibility and quality, frankly, that I think is really important. And it's a way to coach, obviously, as well for those leaders to really make a mark on the organization. And then lastly, I think they adapt, right? I think that there are a lot of leaders who are like, I've worked 20 years to become a leader in this way and I have a playbook either based on past experience or based on some sort of philosophy that they've developed over time that they feel committed to in some way. And I think coming back to some of these examples of watching Brian lead through COVID or”
2022-09-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thereof, but nothing's above them, right? And a lot of founders or a lot of CEOs or even CPOs and leaders think you get to a certain point and then I'm above a product spec. I'm above looking at the data running a SQL query. And I think that that is a mistake in a lot of ways, especially from a standpoint of who people come to respect, as well as efficacy at one's job. And then the other two things would be, I think they're in the detail. So it's less about being above something, but this is kind of Amazon's famous for auditing the details, for example, and leaders are, you know, for example, if one were going to launch Prime, order a bunch of prime things and see what happens and really test things out and write up a long feedback email on a Saturday or something like that and make sure that things are moving forward. So I think in my opinion, some of the best leaders, David Sachs would do this too. He actually ran the product reviews. It was the CEO of the company doing product reviews, not some kind of middle tier of director of product who was just running.”
2022-09-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whether it's Jeff Bezos who famously would receive customer emails, read many of them, forward them. And he's famous for question mark emails where for his time's sake, he would just forward an email to a leader with a question mark and he would just have to figure it out and then report back in 24 hours with the.”
2022-09-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a great question. And to briefly recap, right, I've gotten to see somebody like David Sachs, who had been the CEO of PayPal and then the founder of Yammer and gone to do many more things since then. I've gotten to see sort of Jeff Bezos at a distance. I was never that close to him, obviously, and never got to work with him. But got to observe his impact on the organization. Obviously, I've gotten to witness Brian Chesky and his leadership in sort of the pre-IPO days, as well as through the ups and downs of COVID. And then also now that Alchemy, our co-founders, Joe and Nikhil are leaders that have really had an impact on me as well. And I would encounter myself, but I've also seen myself as a bad leader in the start of that brand and learn from that. And so I think, you know, I think it's a really important thing to reflect on. And I think for me, there are three things that have stood out the most. I think number one, nothing is above them. I've seen, you know, whether it's Brian caring about the full bleed image on the homepage.”
2022-09-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think people tend to when they hear that both companies have some sort of working backwards process of thought, let's say working backwards on one hand and then 11 star experience on the other, listening to how you describe it, I want to almost frame it as working backwards from sort of like a moment in time or a launch, like you said with the Amazon versus working backwards from a quality standard in some sense of an 11 star experience”
2022-09-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. So the structure of the PRFA2 docs was generally an introduction where you're not the product, problem, solution, customer quote, leadership quote, and a call to action”
2022-09-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source