YouSaid · the spoken record

Peter Deng

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2025-06-22
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2025-06-22
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  1. “Yeah, I mean, just to go further on the Instagram part, like, it's the idea was super simple. It was showing photos and visual sharing. But the craft that Mike and Kevin had in putting in the hard work to get the product just right, that's what made it really take off, right? That's a great example. I'd forgotten about Instagram, but how could I? But, you know, it wasn't anything that any other company couldn't have done, but it was that product taste that Kevin and Mike had. And the conviction that there's a certain sort of vibe, if you will, that people wanted and building that and iterating, I mean, and look at it now. It's a core part of our lives. Visual sharing, they really solved it.”

    2025-06-22 · Lenny's Podcast · From ChatGPT to Instagram to Uber: The quiet architect behind the world’s most popular products | Peter Deng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “And there's a human need, and they just put the connected the dots and put everything together. And eventually built a ton of tech to predict the right marketplace and pricing, et cetera. But largely, like that's a very valuable tech company, but it's largely an operations company. And I want to give a huge shout out to my colleagues there who run, you know, kind of Uber Eats and Uber rides from an operations perspective, because truly, like, that was one of the biggest kind of business model hacks that I've seen, right? And so I think that's, you know, Silicon Valley gets lost a lot. It's like, oh, this is a new tech company. Oftentimes some of the most valuable ones are just the ones that are just building what people need on top of existing tech.”

    2025-06-22 · Lenny's Podcast · From ChatGPT to Instagram to Uber: The quiet architect behind the world’s most popular products | Peter Deng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “They were built on some kind of technological breakthrough, and they ended up building a lot more technology. But really, a lot of these companies like Facebook, for example, just put in the hard work, right? The elbow grease, especially in the early stages, to take essentially a database of human connections and build something valuable on top of it and keep on polishing and iterating that product and coming up with new ones like newsfeed and photo tagging were just kind of came out of just really paying attention to what people wanted. And some of the ideas are super simple. And it's not something that came out of the lab, right? So Uber, for example, took the fact that everyone had these GPS devices in their pockets. And they didn't invent the GPS device, but they were able to take that. And the fact that people had cars and people wanted to kind of, you know, get around.”

    2025-06-22 · Lenny's Podcast · From ChatGPT to Instagram to Uber: The quiet architect behind the world’s most popular products | Peter Deng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Where it's not just about how it's great that your product is well loved by its end users, but does it make good business sense is one of those hard lessons I learned as a very bright-eyed bushy-tailed sort of design-based product manager going into Uber. I think the other insight that I had or rather thought I had the other day was just the idea that so many of the tech companies So many of the tech companies that are most valuable today didn't really start with any technological breakthrough”

    2025-06-22 · Lenny's Podcast · From ChatGPT to Instagram to Uber: The quiet architect behind the world’s most popular products | Peter Deng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Think one thing that it's a really hard lesson that I learned at Uber, which is sometimes your product actually doesn't matter And by product, I mean, kind of the pixels you put on the screen or things that you build in your mobile app. And at Uber, I learned this because it pains me to say this. But really, the price and the ETA at Uber was the product. And I think a lot of times, you know, people at tech companies think of the product as just this digital manifestation. But looking at it from a holistic perspective, you know, we humans consumed the entirety of the product. And I think that was one of the things that I learned, the lessons that I learned that was like really kind of hard hitting, right? That sometimes the pixels don't matter as much as you think, right? And you fix a certain bug. It's not to say that you shouldn't fix the bug, but it doesn't have as much of an impact as something that is more important to people like a price or NTA. And this happens a lot in B2B products.”

    2025-06-22 · Lenny's Podcast · From ChatGPT to Instagram to Uber: The quiet architect behind the world’s most popular products | Peter Deng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Actually, speaking of AI, I actually, that's a really interesting point. I think it's really interesting and kind of poetic and fitting that the breakthrough in artificial intelligence came from large language models, it's interesting to me because with every word and every sentence, so much of the knowledge is encapsulated and shaped. And when ChatGPT does something really interesting, I tell people it's oftentimes just writing Python code and interpreting it. And Python is a language yet again. right so i think that there's something really interesting where like the condensation of human thought in language has is related to the lms and the advancement scenario that we have today”

    2025-06-22 · Lenny's Podcast · From ChatGPT to Instagram to Uber: The quiet architect behind the world’s most popular products | Peter Deng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Of what I was trying to say. And I think that crafting is really important when you're working in product because if you're sitting down and you're writing a vision doc or you're writing a PRD and if you don't pay attention to the words you use and you're not intentional about it, those have downstream effects. Like people might misinterpret things. The connotations may not actually come through. And so I really am very careful about it because I think that there's a multiplicative effect and a downstream effect for using the wrong word. And I really believe in that kind of language affecting thought thesis, which is why I've just really, really paid attention to that.”

    2025-06-22 · Lenny's Podcast · From ChatGPT to Instagram to Uber: The quiet architect behind the world’s most popular products | Peter Deng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Well, I mean, so then this is great. So I need to get a way to validate this. But from what I remember, because there were these two different words for this different shades of blue, Russian speakers who then learned English had an easier time distinguishing between these two shades of blue than and a faster time doing so than people who had just grown up speaking English. So I read some studies on there. And also there's some other languages that don't actually have a word for blue, I think. And then that's actually really hard for them to distinguish over time. So that really stuck with me. And I think that it's kind of rings true. So when I, you know, how I put it in practice is that when I make slide decks, I gave a presentation to a class a couple weeks ago. And there were probably a total of 20 words on the entire slide deck. And I spent hours obsessing over them because I really wanted to make sure I captured the right essence.”

    2025-06-22 · Lenny's Podcast · From ChatGPT to Instagram to Uber: The quiet architect behind the world’s most popular products | Peter Deng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “I remember taking this class that really stuck with me in college. It was called Language and Thought. And it was taught by Herbert Clark. And he had this thesis that kind of blew my mind, which is that, you know, language actually affects the way you think. That's one of the parts of the thesis. And once I heard that and read that in his book and listened to the lecture, I couldn't stop thinking about that because it just rang so true, right? I grew up speaking Chinese and I think that there's a lot of things of just the Chinese language that, you know, I feel like I noticed I thought differently when I learned English, right? And there were some studies around this too. I think that there's, I think in, I'm not sure exactly if this draft to go check up on this, but I think in Russian, there are two different words for like a blue. There's like a greenish blue and a bright blue or something.”

    2025-06-22 · Lenny's Podcast · From ChatGPT to Instagram to Uber: The quiet architect behind the world’s most popular products | Peter Deng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “But it's also interesting because then that goes further that, like, you know. The whole system has to change, right? Because again, I still believe that human brains are inherently inquisitive and that we still need development in some way. But how that's going to develop, I'm fascinated to watch how that plays out.”

    2025-06-22 · Lenny's Podcast · From ChatGPT to Instagram to Uber: The quiet architect behind the world’s most popular products | Peter Deng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Code will just appear if you summon it. So what are the things that, you know, people will think about and the skills that develop that are at the next level of abstraction, right? That tap into our creativity, that tap into our curiosity, that's going to be really interesting. So I think education is going to change dramatically, just like how progressive education in the past switched from memorization of like multiplication tables into something that's a little bit more kind of higher level, higher level thinking. And I think that's going to be one of those big areas.”

    2025-06-22 · Lenny's Podcast · From ChatGPT to Instagram to Uber: The quiet architect behind the world’s most popular products | Peter Deng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “I'll draw when the calculator was invented, you know, people didn't stop doing math, right? They just did higher level math. And it frees the mind up to do other things and think more at a higher level of abstraction. And I think we got to prepare our kids on thinking about, oh, how do you think at a higher level of abstraction? And this has happened before, right? I think Google has made memory kind of obsolete. Like you don't have to memorize facts anymore.”

    2025-06-22 · Lenny's Podcast · From ChatGPT to Instagram to Uber: The quiet architect behind the world’s most popular products | Peter Deng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Like, isn't that mind blowing? It's like that he can now, at age nine, he could think about that. Whereas being at age nine, I was playing with Legos and like maybe Q Basic, right? And so this idea of how young humans' brains will evolve because of this new tool we have is going to change the way I think we're going to do education, right? And I'll be very honest. I'm not an expert in education, but I just thought a lot about it. One thing I'm going to be, I think it's going to be really important in the future is being able to figure out how to ask the right questions. You know, we humans are inherently inquisitive. But, you know, being inquisitive and turning that into the right questions to, you know, prompt or ask AI, which is going to be, again, something that everyone's going to have access to, is going to be a differentiator for sort of what kind of work can be done, right? And the analysis.”

    2025-06-22 · Lenny's Podcast · From ChatGPT to Instagram to Uber: The quiet architect behind the world’s most popular products | Peter Deng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “You can't say in Python, like, oh, write a function that goes and formulate, I mean, it's a really difficult function to write. But for him to be able to think of that prompt, which is really cool because he built a custom GPT that you can type in any topic and it would give you a sentence that had every letter of the English alphabet, kind of like the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog, right?”

    2025-06-22 · Lenny's Podcast · From ChatGPT to Instagram to Uber: The quiet architect behind the world’s most popular products | Peter Deng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Specific example of what I mean here, you know, he goes to Python class, right? And he's coding. Now, I don't actually think he's going to have to code when he grows up. I think that's going to be a solved problem. But it's a very valuable skill because I think learning to program is learning how to think in a structured way, right? In a very semantic way, a systematic way. you know he was he he he was prompting uh chat gpt with some really crazy things that i never even thought of and one of the things was hey chat gpt can you give me a sentence that has every letter in the alphabet along the theme of oceans or along the theme of space and the reason this kind of blew my mind is because in traditional programming you couldn't write that program”

    2025-06-22 · Lenny's Podcast · From ChatGPT to Instagram to Uber: The quiet architect behind the world’s most popular products | Peter Deng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “I think education is going to change in a big way. And I think a lot about this because I'm involved in my kids' school quite a bit. And that's something I've done after I left OpenAI. And what's fascinating to me is that watching my son who got to dog food a bunch of the open AI stuff before it was public. I think that was, I think I can safely say that. That seems okay. And when he was playing with like, you know, ChatGPT and some of the latest models and he's, he was nine at the time. I can already see his brain rewiring, right? He was starting to ask questions and he never heard the word prompt before, but his, like, just this is how awesome the human mind is. Because he was exposed to this technology at an early age, some things just are unlocked. And I think that you're able to think differently. And I'll give you a”

    2025-06-22 · Lenny's Podcast · From ChatGPT to Instagram to Uber: The quiet architect behind the world’s most popular products | Peter Deng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Right? And just over 18 months, I would say we look back and there's been an attitude shift, right? And so I guess part of my optimism comes from, if you look back 18 months and you look forward 18 months, like might it be the same thing for something that we're chasing now?”

    2025-06-22 · Lenny's Podcast · From ChatGPT to Instagram to Uber: The quiet architect behind the world’s most popular products | Peter Deng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Right? Because you're like bicycles, really. But then if you put yourself in the context and the mindset of previous generation, which the next generation will be looking back at this podcast in that previous generation, I think that, you know, again, I think optimistically things are going to be okay. We're going to adapt. And this was actually one of the things that I talked about with my friend Josh Konstein at South by Southwest is this idea that humans will always co-evolve with technology. And I think that that co-evolution is already happening. If you take a look at sort of, there was a lot of fear of AI just when ChatGPT came out. But, you know, when you start to get familiar with it, things, that kind of things change. And then you are able to evolve from being fearful to familiar and go all the way to having this mastery of this thing of like, oh my goodness, like, look at all the startups that are happening now, all the things that we can build.”

    2025-06-22 · Lenny's Podcast · From ChatGPT to Instagram to Uber: The quiet architect behind the world’s most popular products | Peter Deng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “I think that's exactly what I'm trying to say. And I think that, again, every technology people have this fear, right? And I remember reading, or watching a documentary once, and they were talking about how when the bicycle came out, people were like, oh my goodness, this is going to be the end of all things. And again, it sounds silly today.”

    2025-06-22 · Lenny's Podcast · From ChatGPT to Instagram to Uber: The quiet architect behind the world’s most popular products | Peter Deng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “I Claim to be an expert on this at all. But I just think that with every technology that has come out, we've been able to harness it and it takes a lot of harnessing. I think I'm going to use that word very deliberately, right? I'll use something really basic, what seems obvious today, is that there was a time when databases were all the rage. It's like, oh my goodness, you can store a bunch of data and you can query it really quickly and like imagine all the possibilities. And I think that a lot of amazing entrepreneurs and builders built some really great products on top of databases, right? In fact, that's kind of the basis of all the stuff that we're seeing today. And it seems so obvious today, but I don't know. Maybe in 10 years, 15 years, when we look back, it's like, of course, it made sense that we have this super intelligent thinking machine, but it requires product builders to be able to go in there and say, how do we channel this energy to make it?”

    2025-06-22 · Lenny's Podcast · From ChatGPT to Instagram to Uber: The quiet architect behind the world’s most popular products | Peter Deng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “AGI is just necessary but not sufficient. A lot of the value is still going to require a bunch of hustle from a lot of builders to really turn that new source of energy and channel it into something that we humans want to use, that solves some of our problems. And that hustle is going to be required, that elbow grease is going to be required to really make AGI something useful.”

    2025-06-22 · Lenny's Podcast · From ChatGPT to Instagram to Uber: The quiet architect behind the world’s most popular products | Peter Deng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Mean, always get this question around sort of, you know, AGI, is it coming? Is it going to solve everything? What have you seen? I mean, it's so interesting because, you know, when I was at OpenAI, it was around the time that people were really scared of AI and, oh, it's going to get rid of humans or it's going to just do all these things. But with every technology, I think everyone's been just kind of taking some time to acclimate to it. And I think with AGI, it's a similar thing, which is so far out.”

    2025-06-22 · Lenny's Podcast · From ChatGPT to Instagram to Uber: The quiet architect behind the world’s most popular products | Peter Deng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Well, it feels really good. So let me ask, I love it that you're starting with a spicy question here. And let me share some more context behind it. It's, you know, I'm here to speak more freely, but it's not really what you think. I'm not here to divulge any secrets from the companies. But naturally, I'm kind of a storyteller. I'm kind of an introvert. So this podcast, I feel like I have the ability to go deeper with you on any topic and kind of add the context. Because I think the new, without some of the context, some of my spicy takes or whatnot might be taken out of context and just not having the time pressure, not feeling like there's some PR message I have to hit is just really freeing. So it feels awesome, really anything that is on your mind that you would find interesting to your listeners. I'm here for it. And yeah, excited.”

    2025-06-22 · Lenny's Podcast · From ChatGPT to Instagram to Uber: The quiet architect behind the world’s most popular products | Peter Deng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “In six months, if I'm telling you what to do, I've hired the wrong person. It helps me in the person operate on a different level, where the goal is not did you hit this OKR, the medical goal becomes, are we calibrating enough? Are we actually getting into a spot where in six months you're the one telling me what needs to be done?”

    2025-06-22 · Lenny's Podcast · From ChatGPT to Instagram to Uber: The quiet architect behind the world’s most popular products | Peter Deng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Education is going to change. My son, he was nine at the time, built a custom GPT that you can type in any topic and it would give you a sentence that had every letter of the English alphabet. Isn't that mind-blowing? I can already see his brain rewiring.”

    2025-06-22 · Lenny's Podcast · From ChatGPT to Instagram to Uber: The quiet architect behind the world’s most popular products | Peter Deng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Sometimes your product actually doesn't matter. At Uber, I learned this because really the price and the ETA at Uber was the product. Looking at it from a holistic perspective, we humans consumed the entirety of the product. It's not to say that you shouldn't fix the bug, but it doesn't have as much of an impact as something that is more important to people.”

    2025-06-22 · Lenny's Podcast · From ChatGPT to Instagram to Uber: The quiet architect behind the world’s most popular products | Peter Deng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “You have to plan your chest moves out in advance. You have to really think before you act and build systems that are going to let you go sustainably faster.”

    2025-06-22 · Lenny's Podcast · From ChatGPT to Instagram to Uber: The quiet architect behind the world’s most popular products | Peter Deng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source