YouSaid · the spoken record

Sanchan Saxena

lines on the record: 74
first: 2022-07-05
most recent: 2022-07-05
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

“I mean, I'm pretty active on Twitter now that you know I'm also active on TikTok, but Twitter is probably the best place to follow me. And yeah, if you have any suggestion or anything you want to chat about, send me a message on Twitter, DM me, or LinkedIn, one of those places and I'll be happy to chat with you.”
2022-07-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Sanchan Saxena (VP of Product at Coinbase) on the inside story of how Airbnb made it through Covid; what he’s learned from Brian Chesky, Brian Armstrong, and Kevin Systrom; much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Me, the story of your career and focus more on why you did what you did. And I asked this question because the resume is full of polished shit. And it's like, oh, I did this, I did this. I want to hear the story. And tell me why you did what you did. And that tells me a lot about the person when they're answering the question of not the what, because I can see that on the LinkedIn or the resume, but the why. Why they chose to do what they chose to do.”
2022-07-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Sanchan Saxena (VP of Product at Coinbase) on the inside story of how Airbnb made it through Covid; what he’s learned from Brian Chesky, Brian Armstrong, and Kevin Systrom; much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My favorite man, it was my first manager. His name is Sashi. He was at Microsoft, and he fundamentally helped change the trajectory of my life. So he believed in me. I was just out of college at that time, you know. And he invested me. The most important thing was he invested in me. If any successful person you meet in your life, one thing they will all tell you is at some point in their time, in their life, somebody believed in them and somebody invested in them. And that was that management.”
2022-07-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Sanchan Saxena (VP of Product at Coinbase) on the inside story of how Airbnb made it through Covid; what he’s learned from Brian Chesky, Brian Armstrong, and Kevin Systrom; much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would say I love TikTok. I am on TikTok all the time. I love how entertaining it is. I love how simple it is. I'm on TikTok all the time.”
2022-07-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Sanchan Saxena (VP of Product at Coinbase) on the inside story of how Airbnb made it through Covid; what he’s learned from Brian Chesky, Brian Armstrong, and Kevin Systrom; much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I think there are tons of Web3 companies and tons of other companies. I would say amongst the companies that I have worked where I can, with insight, say where it is, I think Airbnb is a great company. People should definitely look at that company. It is once in a lifetime kind of a company as well. And people will enjoy working over there.”
2022-07-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Sanchan Saxena (VP of Product at Coinbase) on the inside story of how Airbnb made it through Covid; what he’s learned from Brian Chesky, Brian Armstrong, and Kevin Systrom; much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Books come to mind. One is The Little Bets, which is how you live your life and how you build businesses with little bets. And the other thing, I would say the innovators dilemma. Those are two of my favorite books, and I highly recommend everybody reading this.”
2022-07-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Sanchan Saxena (VP of Product at Coinbase) on the inside story of how Airbnb made it through Covid; what he’s learned from Brian Chesky, Brian Armstrong, and Kevin Systrom; much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. There's a very good deck. I'll encourage your audience to watch the Netflix culture deck, and Reed Hastings talks about this at length, you know, better than I did. And it's a beautiful concept, it's a beautiful argument, and I think I will encourage every follower to start looking for that. And again, I'm not saying process shouldn't exist. You absolutely need some process. Otherwise, you can scale. You can't scale without some process as well. But process is not the answer. Content is the answer.”
2022-07-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Sanchan Saxena (VP of Product at Coinbase) on the inside story of how Airbnb made it through Covid; what he’s learned from Brian Chesky, Brian Armstrong, and Kevin Systrom; much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, that does feel good. I mean, you should have the ability to create a roadmap, and that is your creating content around that. But the thing that I want to make sure people understand is that the format of that roadmap doesn't matter. How you present, like whether you use Excel or this or that doesn't matter. That process doesn't matter. What matters is that you were able to come up with the right roadmap, which is what you're going to build and what time you're going to build. And that is a core value set of an individual or a leader that you should absolutely look for. And that's right. Otherwise, my prediction is four or five years later, you know, or whatever the time is, that company will start to attract process people. And next thing you know, everybody in the company is a process person. Nobody is a content person. And then what ends up happening is the founder ends up taking that burden or become the content person. And next thing you know, they can't scale, right? They just cannot scale. The company cannot scale.”
2022-07-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Sanchan Saxena (VP of Product at Coinbase) on the inside story of how Airbnb made it through Covid; what he’s learned from Brian Chesky, Brian Armstrong, and Kevin Systrom; much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is content, right? And I want to evaluate that. The second thing we will do is in our interview process as well, like if it's an exec, Brian will spend time and I will spend time. Anybody else will spend time, we will focus on whatever you did in the past. Tell me the role that you played in that versus telling me everything that you teamed it. Tell me precisely the role you played. And this is something I tell a lot of my folks at Coinbase as well is like you got to be able to bring things to me, escalate to me when you need my help, you know, and let me help you be successful. My role is such that I have a large team and I can't do everything. What I can do is set them up for success. How? Of course, the tactical stuff like resources, but more importantly, when we are thinking about the content, when we think about what to do, when to do, how to do it, let's sit together and think about that. Escalate to me, bring things to me. I will go into the mud with you and I will create that clay for you with you.”
2022-07-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Sanchan Saxena (VP of Product at Coinbase) on the inside story of how Airbnb made it through Covid; what he’s learned from Brian Chesky, Brian Armstrong, and Kevin Systrom; much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, one of the things we did at Airbnb, because this was the thesis that we had over there, we actually changed our interview process around that. So we will give people a work challenge. You're very familiar with that. Most people say, come and do a presentation. No, we actually gave you a work challenge. You said, this is the problem we are facing. How are you going to solve it? We're facing Airbnb Plus problem. We need to build millions of homes that are Airbnb plus quality, but we don't know how to do that. What would you do? And we want to see the depth of thinking. They don't know the right answer because they don't have the right data. That's okay, right? But they at least need to show us how they approach the problem. What are they going to do? And they need to show us the content of how they're going to do. Some people will come in and say, and I've seen slides in those presentations, they'll come in and say, here's my process. Ideation, execution, iteration. That's okay. I want to know what you're going to do inside of ideation. Some execs will come and present us saying, well, the first thing I'm going to do is go out there and figure out are there third party companies who can actually scale my operations without building it.”
2022-07-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Sanchan Saxena (VP of Product at Coinbase) on the inside story of how Airbnb made it through Covid; what he’s learned from Brian Chesky, Brian Armstrong, and Kevin Systrom; much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What the content of your customers is, how do you win in that industry that you're operating in? And make sure that you stay obsessed over there as opposed to the process. This is something that Brian Chesky was like grilled in me. Higher executives who know how to execute. And his idea was, let's say Sanchez's entire team disappears. And then I go to Brian and say, hey, Brian, you know, I got to hire this organization. I got to hire these people. And then I'll tell you what to build. Or I'll then build. No, I should be able to then roll up my sleeves if I'm a content kind of a leader. And I should do exactly what my team did maybe not with the same capacity because if I have 70 people team, I can't do 70 people's worth of work, but at least be able to tell you, this is what we should build. This is when we should build. This is how we should build, right? I shouldn't be a leader who just delegates to the extent that I forgot what content is. And that is a very important piece.”
2022-07-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Sanchan Saxena (VP of Product at Coinbase) on the inside story of how Airbnb made it through Covid; what he’s learned from Brian Chesky, Brian Armstrong, and Kevin Systrom; much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You get bigger and bigger, you start making mistakes, you're like, oh, we got to create a process so we don't make the same mistake again. And next thing you know over a period of time, the process becomes the product. Every morning you wake up. You look at your calendar. 80% of the time as an exec, you are moving the process. You're managing the process and that process becomes a product and you lose sight of what real the real product is, who your real customers are, right? So my advice to people, especially in early stage startups, is like bring in people who know content and teach them process as opposed to bringing in people who know process and trying to teach them content because that's a bloody hard thing to do. And this obsession about a lot of funders asked me when I consult with them, it's like, should we do scrum? Should we do XYZ process? I'm like, you can do whatever you want. Doesn't matter. You can try any of those things. It will not be correlated to your success. Maybe to some degree, but not a lot degree. What you really need to figure out is who do you hire, who can actually understand what the content of your product is?”
2022-07-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Sanchan Saxena (VP of Product at Coinbase) on the inside story of how Airbnb made it through Covid; what he’s learned from Brian Chesky, Brian Armstrong, and Kevin Systrom; much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Process means how you do the thing that I just said. And I think there's a very easy lure, there's a love affection towards process. And I think Reid Hastings has talked about this in the culture deck. Steve Jobs has also talked about in the past is that oftentimes we gravitate towards people who know how to avoid mistakes, who know how to create mistakes.”
2022-07-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Sanchan Saxena (VP of Product at Coinbase) on the inside story of how Airbnb made it through Covid; what he’s learned from Brian Chesky, Brian Armstrong, and Kevin Systrom; much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think maybe I can focus a little bit about what are some of the things that I believe are incredibly important for startups to get right when they're hiring. A couple of things to remember is that What really matters, what's highly correlated to a startup success isn't that they used a process like Scrum, like this, like that. What's highly correlated is that somebody bloody knew what to do when. That is the most important thing. And I call that content. Content means what you do when.”
2022-07-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Sanchan Saxena (VP of Product at Coinbase) on the inside story of how Airbnb made it through Covid; what he’s learned from Brian Chesky, Brian Armstrong, and Kevin Systrom; much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What it is today and then morph it into the idols of tomorrow. I remember I'm a history buff and I loved watching the history of technology. And there's a video on YouTube which describes someone playing with the internet back in 1986, 87, 89, right? And what you had to do was if I wanted to visit Leni's website, here's what I'll do. I'll type 192.whatever the IP address was. And then I'm going to hit enter on a blue screen. And then there'll be things coming down and I'll pay $200 to just access his website. They were nay series too, right? But if you can get past that and see that someday Lenny and I will actually have a podcast, video podcast, or it's a podcast over the internet, and we'll be able to see each other and record that shit. That is powerful. So we're looking for people at this stage who believe in that journey.”
2022-07-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Sanchan Saxena (VP of Product at Coinbase) on the inside story of how Airbnb made it through Covid; what he’s learned from Brian Chesky, Brian Armstrong, and Kevin Systrom; much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are able to understand the potential and disregard the constraints of today. And here's what I mean by that. You all have seen articles written by really influential celebrities saying Web3 sucks. And let me tell you why. Because today sucks, right? We agree with the future principles of Web3, of decentralization, this and that. But look at today, you know, everything is centralized. Everything is blah, blah, blah. I always remind those people is like the path to Web3 goes and from Web 2 to Web3 goes through Web 2.5. It doesn't go straight from Web 2 to Web3. It goes through Web 2.5. So you got to go through that journey. And a lot of stuff that's happening in Web 2 today or Web3 today is Web 2.5, 2.7 kind of there's no truly decentralized stuff that is there, but the idealism is there. The closest thing is Ethereum probably or Bitcoin. The idealism is there and we want to get towards that ore, right? So the people who will thrive most are people who understand those ideals, understand the future, and are builders.”
2022-07-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Sanchan Saxena (VP of Product at Coinbase) on the inside story of how Airbnb made it through Covid; what he’s learned from Brian Chesky, Brian Armstrong, and Kevin Systrom; much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. Star was pivoting to Web3 as well. So I feel like when I joined, I mean, just I joined very recently, I mean, not like a long time ago. When I joined, it was a very different conversation. I was still telling execs and others at Google and Facebook. This is why you should join. This is what's happening, et cetera. But now I feel like the world is slightly different. I think the people who will thrive or who thrive in Web3 are people who truly”
2022-07-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Sanchan Saxena (VP of Product at Coinbase) on the inside story of how Airbnb made it through Covid; what he’s learned from Brian Chesky, Brian Armstrong, and Kevin Systrom; much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If I look at my LinkedIn post, you know, there's somebody saying ta-da, I left X and I'm joining a Web3 company. So there's already.”
2022-07-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Sanchan Saxena (VP of Product at Coinbase) on the inside story of how Airbnb made it through Covid; what he’s learned from Brian Chesky, Brian Armstrong, and Kevin Systrom; much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, we have our own flaws. I mean, no company is perfect. We have our own flaws, but what we have figured out is how to operate just the way I described before, which is a DRI mindset culture. Instead of having 15 people have 15 different perspectives, et cetera, it should all be amalgamated into one rapid. And we trust our leaders. We trust the DRI, whoever that DRI is, to make the decision, and then we start going towards the same direction. We ignore all the noise over there.”
2022-07-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Sanchan Saxena (VP of Product at Coinbase) on the inside story of how Airbnb made it through Covid; what he’s learned from Brian Chesky, Brian Armstrong, and Kevin Systrom; much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll take that opinion and start to execute against it. But nobody knows, right? So, how do you build conviction in a highly noisy world? I mean, Web3, as you probably on Twitter, everybody has an opinion on Twitter. X should do Y and Y should do Z, and this is how it should be, right? And the thing that I would take with me everywhere is how do you build in that noise? How do you stay focused and still build what you believe is the right thing and still let the noise happen around you? And I think as Web3 advances and every company becomes a Web3 company, that's at least my prediction in this decade, just like every company became a mobile company, didn't have a mobile app, but became a mobile company. I think every company will become a Web3 company. So everybody will have to build that muscle of operating in that level of ambiguity, where there is literally no data and a lot of noise.”
2022-07-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Sanchan Saxena (VP of Product at Coinbase) on the inside story of how Airbnb made it through Covid; what he’s learned from Brian Chesky, Brian Armstrong, and Kevin Systrom; much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think decision making is one. I think just the idea of how to operate in such an ambiguous industry. When I got to Airbnb, ambiguity was a lot because it was the first time we were doing home sharing as an example. And it was not done before. But you had the overall understanding of the travel industry, the customer, the regulation, et cetera, et cetera. But I think Web3 is a very ridiculously new thing. People sometimes ask me, what is the future of NFT? I said, ta-da, I don't know. I'll experiment, figure it out. I have an opinion.”
2022-07-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Sanchan Saxena (VP of Product at Coinbase) on the inside story of how Airbnb made it through Covid; what he’s learned from Brian Chesky, Brian Armstrong, and Kevin Systrom; much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Individual people as well. So you will see PMs writing, engineers writing, and operations and legal writing are rapid. It's called rapid. It's for rapid decision making. And it's the same format that I would use if I want Brian to make a decision. It's the same format someone will use inside their team. So let's say you are working on a particular project. You will write that rap. It's the same exact format, same exact mechanism. And every team uses those mechanisms to actually scale. Otherwise, decision making can actually be the Achilles scale of hypergrowth companies.”
2022-07-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Sanchan Saxena (VP of Product at Coinbase) on the inside story of how Airbnb made it through Covid; what he’s learned from Brian Chesky, Brian Armstrong, and Kevin Systrom; much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Second, I gotta make sure we have this relationship and the decision gets dragged over two or three months because the speed of decision making is directly proportional to the strength of your relationship in those companies. Here the speed of decision making is directly proportional to the person who is directly responsible for making that decision happen. And it is, of course, incumbent upon that person to listen and get and solicit advice. But at the end of the day, they're the single next show. They're the final DRI. So it's a very different culture. Than any place I've worked in. And when you join Coinbase, we have to orient you by saying, look, this is how we operate. Very different than any other company.”
2022-07-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Sanchan Saxena (VP of Product at Coinbase) on the inside story of how Airbnb made it through Covid; what he’s learned from Brian Chesky, Brian Armstrong, and Kevin Systrom; much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not take all that input and do necessarily what's right by everybody, still do what's right by the customer, still do what's right by the business, still do what's right for the user in many regards. But take that input, inform yourself with all the right things, but it's your job to then make the final call. Whoever you might be sometimes is operation, sometimes it's engineering, sometimes it's design and product. And others then have to disagree and champion that for you. So I might go in and I might write in that rapid. I disagree with this. Here are the reasons why. But the decider or the DRI has to make that decision. And once that decision is made, I got to disagree and commit to it and champion it with the rest of the team as if it was my decision. It's not just disagree and commit, it's disagreeing champion. Go out there and evangelize that this is the right thing to do. Now, there are lots of advantages of that. It cuts all the passive aggressive behaviors and all of us have seen in different companies. It's like, I got to go talk to this head of X. I gotta be dying.”
2022-07-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Sanchan Saxena (VP of Product at Coinbase) on the inside story of how Airbnb made it through Covid; what he’s learned from Brian Chesky, Brian Armstrong, and Kevin Systrom; much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can get comfortable with that. And Brian has an allergic reaction to things like committees. It's like designing by committee. So the idea that we have, and you can read it in her blog, is the idea of a directly responsible individual or DRI. So for every project, we'll establish a DRI. It could be a person in operations, engineering, design, legal, marketing, whatever that is, depending on the nature of the project. What DRI's job is to then listen to the cross-functional partners, get their input. And we are a very written culture like Amazon, so every input is provided in writing. So you can see what your head of legal is saying. You can see what your head of operations is saying, what engineering is saying in writing. And then the DRI's job is to take all that input and make a decision.”
2022-07-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Sanchan Saxena (VP of Product at Coinbase) on the inside story of how Airbnb made it through Covid; what he’s learned from Brian Chesky, Brian Armstrong, and Kevin Systrom; much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Other tech companies, there's a saying around product engine design, marketing, all these cross-functional people need to come together to build a product. And oftentimes you will notice that the decision making process could get a little bit convoluted. Not always, but a little bit convoluted. It's like, okay, what do you like? What do you don't like? You got to align influence, align influence, align. And next thing you know, and again, I'm not saying always, but sometimes it can happen that the thing that ends up shipping is the least common denominator that annoyed everybody the least amount. Everybody said, yep, I could get comfortable.”
2022-07-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Sanchan Saxena (VP of Product at Coinbase) on the inside story of how Airbnb made it through Covid; what he’s learned from Brian Chesky, Brian Armstrong, and Kevin Systrom; much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, there are lots of people who think they are experts on Twitter, but the reality is, man, the industry is so nascent so early. You have good intentions and good intuition about where it could go, but it's very hard to be right all the time. So the culture of Coinbase is to take big bold bets, get started with very tiny teams. The Coinbase NFT marketplace that we just launched, it started with five people. One product manager, one designer and other three engineers. That's how small it started. And of course it has grown big now as we find product market fit, et cetera, et cetera. But that's the idea is take big, bold swings, but with tiny teams that can move at lightning speed and make shit happen. So that's one aspect of it. The other culture that I love about Coinbase is this idea of how we make decisions. So Emily, RCO, posted a blog. It's public. You guys can all read it. It's a very different mindset of making decisions. So let me unpack that. When I was at Facebook, Instagram and other companies.”
2022-07-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Sanchan Saxena (VP of Product at Coinbase) on the inside story of how Airbnb made it through Covid; what he’s learned from Brian Chesky, Brian Armstrong, and Kevin Systrom; much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think all different companies that I've worked at have very different product development cultures. So at Airbnb, for example, design and experience was super paramount. And you will not compromise over there. You won't cut design to ship. And other companies, you would cut design to ship sometimes because you want to find something quickly. It's slightly different as well. Every company has their nuances. So Coinbase is in an industry which is rapidly growing. It's Web3. I mean, I have not come across a Web3 expert yet. There is nobody who's an expert in Web3.”
2022-07-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Sanchan Saxena (VP of Product at Coinbase) on the inside story of how Airbnb made it through Covid; what he’s learned from Brian Chesky, Brian Armstrong, and Kevin Systrom; much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And look, it's also nothing wrong with changing your mind afterwards, right? Once you push the envelope and then you learn something new and you can pivot. And that's another beauty of founders is that they're very intentional people, very strong opinionated people. But in the face of something new, they're also the fastest to change. They don't have remorsefulness. They don't have regrets. And like, yep, all right, let's pivot, you know. And that is the culture you want to build as well as an operator.”
2022-07-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Sanchan Saxena (VP of Product at Coinbase) on the inside story of how Airbnb made it through Covid; what he’s learned from Brian Chesky, Brian Armstrong, and Kevin Systrom; much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And Kevin Sister says, No, my intentionality is that stories should be real time news. It should be the world's largest TV channel. You open that up and you see what's happening right now. That is the intentionality I'm going towards. So in the beginning, Instagram stories did not let you pick anything that was not real time. You couldn't go back in your camera and pick something a month ago because the intentionality of the product was to create the world's largest real-time network of what's happening in the world right now. If that's the intentionality, you got to ignore the other customer needs that I want to share with the world what I did a month ago. And that changes dynamics.”
2022-07-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Sanchan Saxena (VP of Product at Coinbase) on the inside story of how Airbnb made it through Covid; what he’s learned from Brian Chesky, Brian Armstrong, and Kevin Systrom; much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You are Kevin Sistram, and data science comes to you and says, Look, I looked at data, and 99% of all photos on people's phones are actually at least a week old. So please allow Instagram stories to let people select a photo that is at least a week or two old. Then user research comes back and says, you know, we talked to a bunch of people. They said, yes, I would love to share a story of my birthday about a month ago.”
2022-07-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Sanchan Saxena (VP of Product at Coinbase) on the inside story of how Airbnb made it through Covid; what he’s learned from Brian Chesky, Brian Armstrong, and Kevin Systrom; much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nobody knows everything, right? So the idea is that you can look at as much data as you want, which is still not going to feel that you know all the answers. So what is really important? The really important thing is rapid recovery. Build a culture in your team with failure of those experiments is actually celebrated. Build a culture in the team where actually people get energized when they fail because guess what? Each failure was a learning that avoid a mistake for them in the future. And I think that is the mindset and culture you want to build. Look at data. Look at all the things. But at the same time, don't just look at that and say, look, because the data said so, that is what I'm going to do. I'm going to use a very good analogy over here. And this story has been butchered many times, but I was right there when this happened. So my version is at least 80% accurate. There might be other versions as well. But this is Instagram stories. Can I imagine?”
2022-07-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Sanchan Saxena (VP of Product at Coinbase) on the inside story of how Airbnb made it through Covid; what he’s learned from Brian Chesky, Brian Armstrong, and Kevin Systrom; much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For seeing them through, right? Because in many other companies, you can actually kill a brilliant idea early on because you just didn't have the patience to see that through. So you got to start with intentionality. And then you got to iterate and test and iterate and test and iterate and test. But don't give up too early either. And last but not the least, I'll tell a secret to all your audios.”
2022-07-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Sanchan Saxena (VP of Product at Coinbase) on the inside story of how Airbnb made it through Covid; what he’s learned from Brian Chesky, Brian Armstrong, and Kevin Systrom; much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And to me, gut and intuition is data. It's just not statistically significant yet. That's all it is. You have built that intuition, that gut because you immersed yourself in a situation, you hung out with customers, you understood what was happening. You just can't prove it that it is statistically significant yet. So don't discount your gut. That's the second point. The third point that I'll say is once you have figured out what that experience looks like, yes, you gotta validate what's happening. You got to get feedback back from the community while launching it. And then you got to constantly iterate. So my advice to people is don't do that testing up front. Start with some assumptions. Start with a bunch of intuition, et cetera. Create that. And then have the appetite to actually persist through that. That's another thing I learned from Brian is that, you know, oftentimes these ideas, these crazy ideas, you need persistence. He used to say, you got to have impatience with getting started, but patience.”
2022-07-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Sanchan Saxena (VP of Product at Coinbase) on the inside story of how Airbnb made it through Covid; what he’s learned from Brian Chesky, Brian Armstrong, and Kevin Systrom; much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Build a team and build your reputation on God and intuition. But the thing is, founders do exactly that. There was no document that said 10 years later, Facebook will make billions of dollars in revenue or no document that said Coinbase one day will become $100.”
2022-07-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Sanchan Saxena (VP of Product at Coinbase) on the inside story of how Airbnb made it through Covid; what he’s learned from Brian Chesky, Brian Armstrong, and Kevin Systrom; much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At least I haven't done that. And then you use the GPS to run an A-B test. Say, look, I want to get there in the fastest way possible. So GPS then figures out the path to get there in the fastest way. Or sometimes tell the GPS, the guy I'm low on gas. Take me a gas efficient route that I can get there. Or inner roads outside. Those are AB tests, but you never say to the GPS that I don't want to go to San Francisco. Tell me where I should go. It's a similar concept around intentionality. So you got to start first and foremost with where do you want to go? What is the true customer problem that you want to solve, right? And why does that matter? The second thing I'll say is oftentimes product leaders discount gut or intuition a lot. And the reason is it's a safe thing to do, right? You can always point to data and say, look, I did this because of this. And if I fail, here's the data. And don't fire me. I'm just joking. But like, you get the extreme of it. It's very hard to.”
2022-07-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Sanchan Saxena (VP of Product at Coinbase) on the inside story of how Airbnb made it through Covid; what he’s learned from Brian Chesky, Brian Armstrong, and Kevin Systrom; much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that there are lots of things to unpack there. So, the first and foremost thing I'd say is that when you sit in your car, you tell your GPS, here's where I want to go. Never go into your car and say, Hey, GPS, tell me where I should go.”
2022-07-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Sanchan Saxena (VP of Product at Coinbase) on the inside story of how Airbnb made it through Covid; what he’s learned from Brian Chesky, Brian Armstrong, and Kevin Systrom; much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Air conditioning. You know that, right? Build the best possible, lovable product first. And then from that point on, understand what worked, what did not, and then scale the pieces that actually worked. So very different way of thinking about things, doing things that don't scale at first. So those are different things I learned at Instagram and Airbnb.”
2022-07-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Sanchan Saxena (VP of Product at Coinbase) on the inside story of how Airbnb made it through Covid; what he’s learned from Brian Chesky, Brian Armstrong, and Kevin Systrom; much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The ideal end state first. I'll give you a very concrete example of this. Let's say you're building Airbnb lounges. A customer's check-in is at 3 p.m., but they flight here at 6 a.m. What are you going to do? What are you going to build a lounge? So if you're traditionally trained in product management, this is what you will do, which is, look, I don't know how to build this in 120 countries. I don't know how to scale this stuff. So I'm going to ignore some ideas. And I'm going to build a MVP lounge, you know. And then I'm going to say, okay, if I add internet access to it, customer retention went up by Y. If I add coffee to it, this went up by Z. If I add cheers to it, it went up by X. And hence, I'm going to justify how to build a beautiful mall. That's not what you will do if you're Brian Chassis. Here's what you will do. You will pick one location because you don't know how to scale a lounge in 120 countries, right? Pick one location. But you know how to get in one location a barista who can create coffee. You know in one location how to get the best seats. You know in one location how to get the best.”
2022-07-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Sanchan Saxena (VP of Product at Coinbase) on the inside story of how Airbnb made it through Covid; what he’s learned from Brian Chesky, Brian Armstrong, and Kevin Systrom; much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At Airbnb is a bad word, you know. You don't go to Brad and say, Hey, Brian, here's my Excel expression. I want to run some 10 AV tests and come back and tell you whether we are heading in the right direction. You're going to get thrown out of the window. It's like, no, we've got to figure out what the product is. So the other thing I learned with Brian Chesky was you first want to create an ideal end state of the product without any constraint. So here's a good analogy that Brian will teach people. Let's say you want to build Airbnb. What is the 15 out of 10 experience you want to create? That's where Airbnb designers and PM start, by the way. In most companies, the designers in PM start by saying, okay, 10 is perfect. We can probably do seven. Let's start with seven, right? It's a very constrained-minded thinking. Say, I got this much time. I got this many resources. I got this much budget. I can only do so much, right? And what Brian taught us was think unconstrained first. Think about a 15 out of 10 experience.”
2022-07-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Sanchan Saxena (VP of Product at Coinbase) on the inside story of how Airbnb made it through Covid; what he’s learned from Brian Chesky, Brian Armstrong, and Kevin Systrom; much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sister was intentionality, you know. As a founder, one of the things you have to recognize, or even as a product leader, you have to recognize that every product that you build should be intentional in nature. And intentionality doesn't come just from AB testing. A-B testing maybe you can do that as a later on, but you got to have intentionality. Where do you want to go? What is the world you want to create for your customers? And then create out AB testing to get you the fastest route to that end state world. So when I talk to product managers, oftentimes I tell them, you know, you're being either too lazy or you're trying to be too risk averse by telling me, here are the assumptions you have that you're going to test. First tell me the intentionality of the product that you want to create. What do you want to see come true? And then let's talk about the A-B test we can run to measure that we are headed in the right direction. And it's a flipping of the mind. And that was something that Brian also taught me. By the way, it's a joke, but to some degree it's reality too. AB testing.”
2022-07-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Sanchan Saxena (VP of Product at Coinbase) on the inside story of how Airbnb made it through Covid; what he’s learned from Brian Chesky, Brian Armstrong, and Kevin Systrom; much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then we're going to iterate from that new baseline forward. We're going to continue to iterate on that on the Facebook side. And by the way, there's a very good article that some PM inside of Facebook wrote, why stories didn't survive at Facebook, but thrived at Instagram is because on that side, there was a mathematical modeling being created, you know, which is what are the trade-offs, right? And you have a successful business. And this is the innovator's dilemma. You have a successful business called fee that is generating billions of dollars, right? And you got to bring in this new thing, which has zero advertisers. We don't even know if the engagement will be there or not, right? And you got to put those things together. So there was a very different approach that Facebook took for stories versus Instagram. And by the way, there was no this rumor in the media, you know, there was a top-down mandate. No, these teams were just experimenting. They were just trying things out. We always want to look at our competition, be inspired by what's working, what's not. There's no harm in learning from somebody who's doing something great, right? And experiment and see if that works for you or not. So that was the story. And the thing that I learned from...”
2022-07-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Sanchan Saxena (VP of Product at Coinbase) on the inside story of how Airbnb made it through Covid; what he’s learned from Brian Chesky, Brian Armstrong, and Kevin Systrom; much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Instagram app. And stories for your audience is the stuff that Snapchat invented. All credit to them. In product management, you always debate measure, twice, cut once kind of a thinking. It's like, measure the data, get all the data, right? Get all the analysis. Ask customers, et cetera. You know, some of the successful founders don't do that. Some of the successful founders go off of gut and instincts more than they go off of data. And that to me is the superpower of a founder. It's like they have this instinct, their vision. So I'll tell you the story. On Instagram side, Kevin's sister made it a decision. We're going all in on this new format. There was no A-B testing that if you add stories at the top, I mean, there was a little bit of AB testing, but not like, okay, let's go measure. If you add stories at the top, the feed will go down as a result engagement will drop, as a result, revenue will drop. And as a result, we should not do it. There was no such thing. The founder said, we're going all in, people. This is the future. We're not going to measure and then cut. We're going to cut.”
2022-07-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Sanchan Saxena (VP of Product at Coinbase) on the inside story of how Airbnb made it through Covid; what he’s learned from Brian Chesky, Brian Armstrong, and Kevin Systrom; much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The thing that I learned from Kevin's sister was the power of simplicity. That guy can listen to everything, hear everything, hear the noise on Twitter, hear, there, you know, all the customers complaining, and then just simplify things that make sense for the team to operate on. So that's a superpower, which is simplicity. Take all the information, but simplify your strategy, your belief, who you want to be when you grow up in a way that people can then act on it. The other thing I learned from him was intentionality. This is the story of Instagram stories. When Snapchat came about, Snapchat was eating Facebook and Instagram's lunch in many regards because the Snapchat stories was crushing it. And there are lots of myths, by the way, in the media, you know, how that happened. It was a mandate from that. No, Zuck did not have a mandate. There was no such thing. It was something that people were experimenting with. So I want to tell you a story of two stories, which is stories in Facebook app and stories inside of.”
2022-07-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Sanchan Saxena (VP of Product at Coinbase) on the inside story of how Airbnb made it through Covid; what he’s learned from Brian Chesky, Brian Armstrong, and Kevin Systrom; much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think a lot of amazing things. Like, I tell people, I learned all things about building great products, building great businesses, building great companies from founders like Kevin Sister, Brian Chesky, Brian Armstrong, and others. Let me go back to Instagram days. I want to paint the picture first of what it was when I got there and the journey we were on. At that time, Instagram was a highly successful app that was growing really fast, but there were many questions. Only photos, you can't share anything outside. It's only from the camera. You can't share links. At Facebook, they allow you to share links, you know? Why don't you allow that, right? So there's an existential question that comes at those stages, which is, who do you want to be when you grow up? When you're a startup, that's a big important question for you to answer. And there were many debates, you know, do we want to be the next Facebook? Do we want to be the first Instagram? Who do we want to be when we grow up, right? And that debate is really, really important. That clarity is really important for employees.”
2022-07-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Sanchan Saxena (VP of Product at Coinbase) on the inside story of how Airbnb made it through Covid; what he’s learned from Brian Chesky, Brian Armstrong, and Kevin Systrom; much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The power of storytelling without any data. Your data is telling you, you're going to die. The data is telling you got 7%, 10% of your revenue, whatever the number was, I forget now. Like single digit number, right? And every day you're seeing the numbers go down, right? And Brian has this incredible ability to help you see a future in a way so crystal clear that when you leave chatting with him, you're like, man, it's possible. You know, we can make it happen. We can do it. So that trait was really, really important that Brian invested in. And all the three founders, by the way.”
2022-07-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Sanchan Saxena (VP of Product at Coinbase) on the inside story of how Airbnb made it through Covid; what he’s learned from Brian Chesky, Brian Armstrong, and Kevin Systrom; much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Those companies go down in flames, you know. So the second thing I would say is the founder needs to be at the front line. And Brian Chesky was on the front line. Literally 24-7 available, interacting, making decisions, holding all hands, writing emails, sending messages, and assuring people that I'm in this with you. By the way, there's a proverbial thing, right? When such situations happen, all execs take a pay cut. Every company does that, right? But then still certain companies survive, certain don't, right? It's primarily because of the founder. And then the third thing I would say is somehow getting people to believe in the future that they came here to create. You know, when situations went drastic situations like these happens, right? When I joined Airbnb, we had a vision of what it can become, right? And the reality snaps and all of a sudden like, holy shit, is that even possible, right? So that is the real art I learned from Brian is that.”
2022-07-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Sanchan Saxena (VP of Product at Coinbase) on the inside story of how Airbnb made it through Covid; what he’s learned from Brian Chesky, Brian Armstrong, and Kevin Systrom; much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you had vultures at the door, so to say, as a proverbial exercise where your top talent is getting poached, but you can't pay the stop talent the best you can't because your financial situation doesn't allow you to do that, right? But you still give them something, right? Because it's at a lower price and you start to sell the vision that if the company turns around, this will be at a higher price and you will have right compensation. But those are some of the challenges. The second challenge is you will notice that people who thrive in these situations will be the one who truly believe both in the mission but I think more importantly in the founders to make that mission come to life because you and I both know, right? There are many companies who have the similar mission and want to do something similar, but some succeed and some don't, you know. And the secret sauce of that, in my opinion, is the founder. And if the employees do not believe in the founder, if the employees do not believe that the founder can make things happen as they talk about, you know, and the founder is not able to connect with the employee.”
2022-07-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Sanchan Saxena (VP of Product at Coinbase) on the inside story of how Airbnb made it through Covid; what he’s learned from Brian Chesky, Brian Armstrong, and Kevin Systrom; much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think in these tenuous times, you will notice that you can't pay these employees better than market. So when this happened, fang companies were at our door trying to poach our engineers overnight. Every engineer was ping by Facebook, Google saying, hey, we heard Airbnbs go down. You want to come over? You know, we'll pay you X amount of money and that stock is stable.”
2022-07-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Sanchan Saxena (VP of Product at Coinbase) on the inside story of how Airbnb made it through Covid; what he’s learned from Brian Chesky, Brian Armstrong, and Kevin Systrom; much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As leaders will be very vulnerable as leaders saying this is truly once in a lifetime thing, we don't know how we're going to navigate. But here's what we believe to be true. So we had to get people from feature obsession, revenue obsession to belief obsession. What is belief obsession? Well, we all believe that when coronavirus is over, people will want to travel. We all believe that coronavirus will be over, right? So you start going into first principles, belief-based thinking, and you will bring stories that will make people believe that the future that we are working toward is actually possible. For example, there was a survey we did which said, you know, if money wasn't a consideration, what would you do for the rest of your life? 99% of the people said, I will travel the world. Travel is in human genes, you know, and so we had to pivot to actually making people believe why travel will be back, why Airbnb will survive, and why Airbnb will eventually thrive if the coronavirus crisis is over.”
2022-07-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Sanchan Saxena (VP of Product at Coinbase) on the inside story of how Airbnb made it through Covid; what he’s learned from Brian Chesky, Brian Armstrong, and Kevin Systrom; much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source