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

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

“You read it, do you feel like you would actually? Well, this product, would you use it? So I found that really helpful as a structure.”
2022-09-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I found that really helpful and it also helps force out of this box that product managers, product leaders tend to get into of thinking that they are always the customer and being a little sort of intellectually lazy where I'm like, yeah, I would like Prime. So let me write the quote what I would like. But maybe I'm only, you know, a small segment within our total customer addressable market. So anyhow, there's a customer quote, then there's one leadership quote. Similarly, this achieves a complementary goal. Like, how does this fit into our strategy in a way that you would express to the public, but is still true to what the internal sensitivities and mechanisms would be? And then a call to action towards the end, and not just download here, right, but this will be available to customers next month. They can go access these portals within these whole food stores at this date. And it, again, forces clarity of thought with respect to not only the rollout plan, but taking a step back.”
2022-09-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, if gray is one of your favorite words, maybe you could stretch it. But I think if you were in a room with your peers at Amazon, they might put some red pen through any grates that are used there.”
2022-09-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Either don't have customer data or don't have quotes from customers, things like this. And so there's a customer quote, and you have to literally put yourself into the shoes of, let's say you were launching Prime, you know, put yourself in the shoes of Lenny from San Francisco. What exactly is he going to say when he has access to this? And how is it different than his life today? And what are the words that he's going to use?”
2022-09-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, definitely. That's a great question. So there definitely is a template, and so it's a combination of an internal training where you have to write one of these documents, you review kind of good, bad, medium versions of this. It's generally used if there's, let's say, a proposal for a new product or even a proposal to buy a company. This helps really simulate what it's going to be like. With respect to a template, what I recall is it was often sort of an introduction where you get kind of right to the point. You say what you're announcing. Then usually you would describe the problem in one paragraph and in very clear language, again, all the writing is this way. Then the solution, you briefly describe the product. After that, there's always a customer quote. And this is an example of this customer obsession that Amazon is so famous for that many companies like to say or emulate, but I think it really kind of may not be true if you evaluate the mechanisms that they use. For example, product specs that”
2022-09-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wide. The implications on strategy are completely different. And so that's one of the benefits of being very specific and very concrete in language.”
2022-09-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's a good question. In addition to not using the word great and words like it that are either subjective in what they mean or unclear in what they actually mean, definitely using numbers more than adjectives, strict concision, I would go over these documents countless times. And there's a phrase, I can't remember, it's either Mark Twain or another famous writer who said, kill your darlings, right? Cut, cut, cut, and just remove. I think I found that really useful in emails I write or documents I write to this day is just going over because not because you're saving ink by cutting words, but because it forces clarity of thought. Fewer words means every word is 10 pounds in weight instead of one. And that means that the decisions you're making, the trade-offs are far more intentional. And in the case of great, if you say something is great because we're going to deliver something in two hours versus Amazon's great because the selection is very”
2022-09-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“User friendly in XYZ way, and we'll save customers time 20 minutes each day through this. It's intended to be very concrete in a way that avoids some of the fluffiness that, frankly, is funny when people try to move from slides to docs, they really just import the same mindsets that they use in slides, but just with more words. And so I think the working backwards process of establishing the long-term goal using a mechanism like a press release where in the FAQs where every word matters. And even the FAQs for what it's worth, there's a section for external FAQs that you would include, for example, as an appendix, but also internal FAQs that are meant to de-risk launch or raise the elephant in the room or dogs not barking as Amazon likes to call it often. So that was a really helpful process that felt very true to me as a way I like to live my life as well. And then also very applicable.”
2022-09-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think one that Amazon is well known for is the working backwards process. And for those that don't know, the idea is try to define effectively an ideal end state, which funny enough is very similar to some of what we both experience at Airbnb and took away. And usually the mechanism for doing this is what's called a PRFAQ. And that's a press release and frequently asked questions. And it forces a certain degree of clarity to have to actually write a press release about the product that you're going to eventually launch. Every employee goes through actually like a business writing class after they start at Amazon. They give you a little card with five tips that you're supposed to keep on your desk about concision and specificity in the words you use. For example, you should never write the word great in an Amazon press.”
2022-09-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is that Yammer was already past 100 people at root of 500 by the time of the acquisition? And it felt almost like the culture was so tight in it. It felt like a seed stage company at some points, even though eventually it kind of felt like, well, once it was acquired from Microsoft, let's just say it didn't feel like a CH company anymore. But it felt smaller than a lot of the actual smaller companies that I was at. So I think that's something I've noticed a lot is that a lot of the proxies don't necessarily match the internal realities in certain cases.”
2022-09-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In general, like I certainly had a positive experience, but I think that as you know, and as I'm sure you've advised countless people, it's so context dependent. Are you learning the zero to one? Are you learning the one to scale? What's your aspiration? You know, somebody trying to start a company eventually, or are they trying to work the ranks of the product leadership trajectory? And so I definitely enjoyed it a lot. And I think to your point, there's often a nonlinear sort of correlation between factors that we traditionally think are linked, right? So my time there was one of the shortest, but my learnings were some of the greatest because I was really intentional and maybe because of the sort of moment in time and what I wanted to get out of it. The same way for what it's worth while we're talking about this disconnect. When I went to Yammer, I also interviewed with kind of, this was the era of like task grabbit. I talked to Square. And I remember people always say, well, what stage do you want to join C, Series A, Series B? And the crazy thing.”
2022-09-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Product another minute. I could be figuring out, oh, we need to hire our first lawyer, right? Onboarding plans for employees the next minute. And it wasn't as siloed as sometimes a product rule can be. So I think Amazon, I went there to learn and understand that was my biggest goal was this is an incredible company that's gone into the Whole Foods acquisition happened when I was there. And I was wondering, how does the same company kind of within retail win with AWS, go create studios? And I think the Amazon culture ultimately more than anything else around ownership, being vocally self-critical is right a lot is one of the leadership principles. All these things combined, I think, created a really unique culture. So I would say Amazon's had the biggest impact on me, and there have been certain lessons that I've taken from, like you said, all these places, but Amazon was by far the place that I think left the biggest mark on my view on product and leadership.”
2022-09-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's definitely a combination, but I would say if I had to pick Amazon, even though I was only there for about a year after the acquisition, I say that because of this blend between product and business thinking that is especially present there. And so people say Google is an engineering culture. People said Facebook is a product culture, Airbnb, or Pinterest, sometimes a design culture or things like this. And I think that Amazon was a place where you couldn't divorce business and product. You couldn't be a product manager without thinking about revenue growth, without thinking about go-to-market. And I really like that because as a startup founder doing product in a bigger company, it gave me the chance to exercise a lot of those skills. And it's very similar actually to how I feel at Alchemy now, where I remember my first month there. I was like, people ask me, how's it going? I'm like, I feel like an athlete. I feel live again. I can do M&A one day. I can be doing.”
2022-09-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On that product as well, but there's a ton of progress being made without some of the traditional product structure or individuals. So again, I think PMs play a really strong role, but it's been incredibly surprising to see how far products can get without the product, playbooks, and resources that somebody who's worked in the internet space from the last 10 or 20 years is so used to.”
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 that the biggest surprise to me, despite what we were just talking about, was how big some products have gotten without kind of the traditional either product manager role or without the playbooks that we're so used to from the last 20 years of the internet. And so, for example, Uniswap has done more daily volume on certain days than Coinbase. And Uniswap is about 100 people versus 5,000 plus at Coinbase, right? So that's astounding to me. I think a lot of these NFT collections and communities that have grown, you know, I met with a lot of these at NFT NYC recently. And a lot of them, aside from the price speculation and things like this, have actually built the Board AB Club is actually building a metaverse project that does look better than some of the digital games that I've used in the past at Second Life and things like this, like obviously a lot of time has passed. And so there's a greater foundation of technology to build off of. And they're working with a partner.”
2022-09-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's a great observation. I think that combination of having a direct need for something that emerges, as well as if somebody's had either a bad experience or not even had any experience with somebody who can play this role, which is quite common in Web3, especially because a lot of folks are relatively early in their career given the kind of accessibility of the space and the, I think, frankly the more adept understanding of the space naturally that a lot of people have when they're earlier in their career and less set in their ways. And so that's a great point. And as a result, the better PMS we see in Web3, hopefully the value will prove itself out over time.”
2022-09-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I'm definitely seeing it shift. It's definitely making a huge positive difference in the cases that I have observed. And my hunch is rolling to continue to observe this because with more user adoption comes new challenges. And for all these players that are growing and getting some form of adoption, the product complexity is only going to grow and having somebody to help lead teams, help prioritize between all the different products that they could build or strategies they could pursue is going to only increase in importance.”
2022-09-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Happening because you're seeing a maturation of products, right? And so maybe you can start early with a few engineers, a community manager, get the ball rolling, but eventually the product is more mature, the complexity has grown, the role of the product manager is far more useful, and they can differentiate. I also think the market is getting increasingly competitive. So there's many NFT marketplaces. There's many layer one and layer two blockchains. As a result, I think product is always a competitive advantage, right? If it's working, it improves strategy, it improves execution, and improves team collaboration. And so maybe that was less of a difference maker before where these teams didn't need that competitive advantage as much because maybe they launched a token and the token was mooning and so a bunch of people were adopting the product, but that only lasts so long and first principles still come into focus, whether it's one day or one month from now. And so”
2022-09-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, I am seeing things change a lot. And one thing in Web3, if one learns nothing, is the ability to admit when they're wrong or when things change. And so I think that that's exactly what I'm saying. So basically, I'm specifically noticing a lot of teams hiring product leaders, more product managers, those product managers are actually now working kind of in increasingly in sort of more traditional product management fashion in addition to some of the differences that we discussed in the post around community management and a role in marketing and things like this, but specifically Uniswap just made a big hire out of meta. I saw that Gemini also did the same. We're seeing OpenSea hire a lot of talent along these lines too, even through the ups and downs that their business has seen. So, and at all levels, whether it's kind of product manager or senior product manager, director, VP, or CPO, you're seeing it across the board. And so I think that's partially.”
2022-09-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was wild. The number of people that were there products being built, like pretty much every crypto conference has a hackathon. And so it keeps the spirit of building so alive. And so I think at alchemy and just in other situations that I've been in as a leader over time, I think it's all about a focus on progress and moving forward. And we saw this at Airbnb when the business had a drawdown in revenue. And I know you covered this with Sunchin recently, right? Like it was 85, 90% revenue. And he didn't know when it was going to turn around, right? It's not just like, oh, yeah, this will come back in six months and we can just keep plowing forward. But I think what worked was making progress and actually focusing on product and your customers. And ultimately, if you hire the right people who are motivated for the right reasons, I think that recipe keeps people highly motivated and highly effective at building for when things do eventually turn around.”
2022-09-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's a great question. It's really important, right? Because we've seen in this space that there are these cycles. And I think that morale and ability to keep building are the determinants of long-term success. And if everybody kind of takes the ball and goes home, that uncertain future won't necessarily materialize. So in my opinion, I think that the only way to maintain morale is to make progress. I think that no speech, no sort of extrinsic, you know, motivators like we're going to give everybody some free crypto to keep them motivated about it or something like that really works. I think people get really excited when they see progress. So for example, at Alchemy, we see more developers than we've ever had on the platform today. And then we're shipping. We just launched Solana support. People are like, this is real. We're like actually doing things, building things. We just had our team out at ETHC, which is a big conference in Paris for the Ethereum community.”
2022-09-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whereas generally speaking, you'll see startups or new technologies mature over many years, whether it's the internet itself, artificial intelligence, QR codes, all sorts of things that kind of have gone through different periods of adoption. And so I think we're seeing things like kind of record Ethereum transactions happening, new layer two technologies launching all the time that are going to help scale layer one blockchains. Lana has announced its phone that's going to be the first sort of Web3 native phone out there. There's so many new exciting product developments and users entering the space that as much as prices have come down, I'm really optimistic about the state of Web3.”
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, as much as I'm a techno-optimist, I'm also a realist. And with that being said, I genuinely believe Web3 is in the strongest position that it's ever been in. I think it's important to remember that the term Web3 has fairly existed in kind of popular lexicon for barely a year. We've definitely had crypto for more than a decade now as technology arguably as a financial instrument of some sort. But specifically, the number of companies that I'm seeing be formed, the number of products that are starting to actually achieve some form of early product market fit, some products that are starting to scale, there's definitely been obviously a huge drop in price. There's definitely been some huge scandals in terms of financial mismanagement and the contagion from that. But I think it's been my experience that a lot of new technologies don't move up in a straight line. And Web3 is especially challenging here because so many things have been financialized from the outset.”
2022-09-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I hope so. That would be a new, I'll add that to my second podcast achievement is if I got Lenny to use a product that I worked on, especially a startup.”
2022-09-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is a blockchain infrastructure company for the last year and really excited about all the opportunities I've gotten to work on products that have been part of. I'm hopeful that we'll get to do that with Web3 and Alchemy as well.”
2022-09-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I wasn't shipping a lot. I got the itch again. So started another company called do.com and ran that for about four years. And then eventually we found a better fit with Amazon. They were growing their AWS offering SaaS products. So we partnered with them to kind of do a small AquaHire and help build the team out and the product there for a little over a year. And then again, to be honest, I got bored and excited about what Airbnb was doing and the mission around belonging. That's where I was lucky to meet you and so many other really wonderful product leaders and just human beings in general at their core. And then to keep things brief for now, you know, I got to work on a lot of really exciting products and businesses there, but eventually got the itch for Web3 after being a kind of observer from afar investor. And I wanted to be a builder. And so in Web3 specifically, and to me, it's a new vision of a better version of the internet. And I'm really excited about that. So I've been with Alchemy.”
2022-09-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I actually got started in a sense in tech when I was 15. I started my first company, much like a lot of teenagers. It was around test prep and getting people ready for college. And it was my first exposure to using technology at scale to help people. And I just found it addictive ever since. And so I ran that company for seven years through school. Was lucky to do a small acquisition to a partner of ours that we had worked with throughout. And then I was just hooked. And I moved to San Francisco without a job. I was really arrogant. I said, I'll never work for anybody else. And then lo and behold, he ever comes along. I'm super excited about it. I've been working on a product actually in the same space. And so that was actually my first formal product management role. And I stayed at Yammer. I stayed through the Microsoft acquisition back in 2012. Lo and behold, I was at the world's largest productivity company at Microsoft. And most people there, in my opinion, were wildly unproductive.”
2022-09-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, for sure. Thanks again for having me, Lenny. So, my career has all been about solving important problems in a unique way. I think the latter part is the youngest child in me who has to be special and do things different than other people. And the former is about making sure that my time is spent well since we're all limited there.”
2022-09-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Appreciate that, Lenny. I'm honored that you would have me back. I'm going to count it as the personal record of two times on Lenny's podcast, even if the world. Only knows it as one.”
2022-09-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a meaningful career | Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source