Airbnb’s Vlad Loktev on embracing chaos, inquiry over advocacy, poking the bear, and “impact, impact, impact” (Partner at Index Ventures, Airbnb GM/VP Product)

25:00It's the serenity prayer. So the serenity prayer goes something like this. Grant me this serenity to accept the things that I cannot change, the courage to change the things that I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. So I actually, that prayer was so powerful for me that I actually wrote it out on the piece of paper and like, I'm posted notes and I would read that thing like every other day. And it would help me just take a step back from the day to day and just like put into context what's actually important. And again, what is in my control today and the things that I can actually do?

25:41So that highly recommend the other one which you may remember is the shit bucket. So the shit bucket was a visual analogy where I would take a piece of paper and some of it actually wasn't as visual. It was like real. I would take a piece of paper. I would write down something that wasn't going well. Perhaps a dependency, perhaps a project, perhaps a meeting of that was going to have that I knew it was gonna be frustrated, or maybe we didn't even decide to go the way that I deeply felt passionate about, right? I would write it down. I would crumble the piece of paper, and I would throw it in my like, shit bucket, basically.

26:21And the rule was, once I threw something in a shit bucket, I couldn't take anything out of the shit bucket. So I would not dwell on the things that I just needed to let go, you know? So this was a very powerful tool that, like I'm a perfectionist, like I just deeply care about many different things and I have a hard time letting go. And so for me, it was just a reminder that I need to let some things go and focus on the things that matter. And I actually remember even going into one of the ones with my direct where I would sometimes lead, like I could tell, you know, the PM is like a bit frustrated about how things are going.

27:04And one of my first questions would be, What are we throwing in the shit bucket? You know, it's actually like a very liberating thing that you can do. And did you have like a special trash can that was your shit bucket or is it the regular trash can? Every big degree always had a trash can. I would always like throw stuff into the trash can whenever I got like upset about something. It's like a different dimension trash can of your bucket. Is there something you remember throwing in the shit bucket that would be an interesting example or a story to share? I remember there was one person who I deeply wanted to hire who I felt was just phenomenal would be such an amazing addition to the team and I just I tried and tried and tried for a very long time and I just failed.

27:44I just could not get that person to join and at some point it became like counterproductive and I had to like let go and literally just like wrote like okay getting this person into the company. I'm like, this is not going to happen. I got to move on at this point. Just threw it in. I love these two pieces of advice. And it touches on how mentally challenging it is to be a leader at a hyper growth company. Yeah. Is there anything you can share there but just like that part of the world? Like people see your career like, holy shit, looking at him. He's running air being business. What an amazing life.

28:21There's a lot of pain behind it. Is there anything there that would be useful to people you think. There's a lot there, you know? It's not like it was smooth sailing for me every single year. Like I had plenty of challenges just personally, like going through that journey. Like you're not, you take a job and then you're sometimes just not prepared where it's going to take. And the reality is every three to six months, my job changed. So I would just get comfortable in the role I was in. Let's say like in the very early days, I was literally an IC growth PM with a tiny team. That's pretty comfortable.

28:56And then like a year later, everything changed. And that was suddenly like leading a team of 20. Then a few years later, things changed again. I was leading a team of a couple hundred. Then a few years later, again, everything changed. And you just, everything that you take comfort in in your current role breaks. The process breaks, how you hire breaks, how you spend your time breaks, the projects you work on, everything breaks. and you gotta reinvent yourself and that is very hard to do. So one thing that I've learned is that you gotta ask for help. Like you can't, it takes a village, right? You can't just get there by yourself.

29:33And that's actually something that Brian taught me where, I mean, this guy just grew every six months. It was a different person. And a lot of his like secret sauce is not being afraid to ask people for help who are experts and the thing that you're trying to learn. I mean, my motto is like ask for the impossible and sometimes you're gonna be surprised. Like, there are people out there that are experts in something who actually wanna help you. So, that's awesome advice. Also the serendipair, so powerful. I did not know that about you. I wanna spend time talking about things you've learned about scaling Airbnb in the org, but before we get to that, is there anything else that you think might be, that you think contributed to your success as individually as a leader, any other behaviors or mindsets.

30:22I mean, I think it's building teams and realizing that sometimes when you build the team, and this is actually often misunderstood, I think when people build teams, they try to make sure every person on the team is good at just about everything. Like you typically go through the process of like you're my friends here are my development areas and typically the development areas are Like that you basically develop you try to develop just about every single thing so that you can be good at Almost every single skill that exists, right? And I just think that's the wrong mindset instead what I've learned over time is instead of trying to find people that are good at everything You need to look for people who fight on specific things and then add them to a team with different spikes.

31:18So there's no single person that is like spikes on absolutely everything that's very rare but they spike on something that's very crucial to the team and if you assemble different spikes on a given team that team is going to do great things as long as everybody inquires and everybody starts asking question actually listens to other people versus just you know coming about that. So even now, as an investor, when I look for, when I talk to founders, the first question in my head is, what is this founder spike on? And how is that spike relevant to the problem that they're tackling today? And how well does this founder hire to bring other spikes to the team?

32:00That's literally what I think about these days. What are some examples of spikes just to make it even more real? Things that people might be good at is strategy, influence. What are some things you commonly see that are spike skills. Yeah, I mean, I think there's the very natural spikes sometimes is you get a domain expert. So there's a specific field, well, they'll take marketplaces and there is someone who just understands the mechanics of how things work and is eight and just really spikes on understanding how you can take certain drivers, what you can do with those drivers and how you translate those drivers who measurable result.

32:35There are people who spike on on sales and who spike on like just being able to package something in the way that other people cannot package it right. There are people who spike in process like there are people who will literally every day think about how to get people to work together really well and that it like they just know how to get to the essence of that how to connect the thoughts between different teams working together. Some people are really great at product design. Like, there are, I've seen quite a few founders actually who can tell you immediately about what kind of interface is going to resonate with people and what kind of why.

33:16You know? So there's just some examples, but there are many dimensions here. Awesome. Okay. As the last question along these lines, I'm going to share a few other skills that I noticed you're incredibly good at. And how about just pick one that resonates with you and share some thoughts on how to get better at that and why that's important? One is influence. You're an incredibly strong influencer. You get a lot of stuff done that I think people will be like, how did you do that? I have no idea what he just did. Another is you're very good at keeping a very high bar. That's one of the things they learn from you is just the importance of keeping a very high bar and spending more time on stuff.

33:51That's something I remember from you just like spend a little more time on this dog, make it a little bit better, We're flying it a little bit more. That's two another is just getting stuff done and focus while also avoiding the limelight You're not like you try to not be in front and center like you haven't done any other podcasts I don't think you've written a medium post. I don't know if you tweeted Like you try to just get stuff done behind the scenes and not not be Not get attention from everyone. Maybe those are a few is there one of those you want to spend a lot of time on? Yeah, I mean personal thing you were saying that some of those resonated for sure.

34:21I think the getting stuff done and being hyper focused on the job is something that's really important. I mean, it index here, we also say keep the main thing the main thing. And just like in the best thing, same thing in operating, you know, you got to focus on the actual job versus like all the other things that you could potentially be doing. So to me, I remember when I was actually hiring product leaders and there's some product leaders would do lots of different engagements outside of the company, whether it's investing, advising, speaking, attending conference, all those things. And they were huge red flags to me because it was clear that this person, there was just something missing in their day to day.

35:08They didn't try to put them like all of them into the thing that they were doing. And so for me, like, it's really important when I hired people to hire people who were incredibly mission driven and would dedicate every ounce of energy to keeping the main thing the main thing. Yeah, I talk about this on Twitter and LinkedIn. This idea that people see people like me and other PMs tweeting, sharing wisdom and they're like, oh, these are the best PMs, they know so much. But in reality, the best folks use an example like I spend zero time on Twitter or LinkedIn They're just doing the job trying to show create impact try to make a business successful try to build great products And I think it's important to remember you don't need to be tweeting and writing medium articles Yeah, I mean that I think there are you know people who find joy in Insolving hard problems and like the joy you get from working on the hard problem is fulfilling and you don't need to seek like external validation for the things you do every single day, you know?

36:10So yeah, I love hiring people like that. Let me zoom out a little bit. So we've been talking a lot about the skills that you built and the mindset that you built to be successful individually. But also you managed large teams, you helped scale our B &B massively through hypergrowth. And there's a few skills I noticed you really get at that were specifically applied to scaling and orc building and orc building teams and things like that. And so I want to spend a little time there. You touched on this one a little bit, but I think there's more here around setting priorities. You're incredibly good at setting priorities, making sure everyone's aligned, making sure the main thing is the main thing.

36:47You just talk about what else you've seen be important here as a leader of a larger growing orc around setting priorities. I have a lot of strong opinions here with setting priorities. I would say the first one is, and this was my motto for the longest time in this Deliz, you've got to let fires burn. And what that means is you can do it all. Like, you just need to let go of things that are not important. Because if you have 20 different things that you're equally engaged on, it just means you don't actually know what is most important. And so my motto has always been let fires burn. You got to be okay with some things not going well So that you can dedicate most of your energy on like the few things that actually matter in the things that are most important Um, and it's it's hard to do It doesn't feel good again many people especially PMs are perfect for this and so it like It just it hurts when things aren't going well and you just got to learn how to let things go um The what I always did was I kicked off every Monday with the leadership meeting where we would talk about our priorities for the week.

37:57We would not talk about longer term priorities. It was literally like for this week, what are we trying to get done? It could only be one to three things. And we would jointly agree on the fires that we would let burn. And so then when like my partner, my engineering counterpart or my design counterpart would like see a fire burning, they would know, like, Yep, we agreed that we're gonna keep letting the fire burn for now. And it was just really important to be aligned as a team on that. Now, the other thing that I've learned is you gotta let other people burn fires too. And it's very actually empowering.

38:32And oftentimes I remember, especially when you're leading a very large organization, there could be teams and teams and many different leaders we were working with, oftentimes people come to you and are basically like, We got to do this new thing to drive goal one and I just don't have enough resources and we need to hire more people and we need to like expand the resources of this team. My first question always was, well, what are your actual priorities and what can we let burn? Meaning, do you actually have to expand and do more things or can we maybe re -prioritize certain things and focus on fewer things and put a lot more energy behind?

39:13You know, but to have those conversations you as a leader you also have to recognize that people on your team are Eventually in a really good position to gauge what fires should be burning of which or not to be burning now The one thing I'll say though is with this it could be dangerous and there are some things They should never let burn because if you let them burn for too long That stuff's gonna happen, right? So I have a few of those examples for me that I have Like over the years learned to not let burn. First, timelines, major timelines. This is like huge product launches. Once timelines slip, you basically establish precedent that timelines are not as important and timelines can always slip.

40:00So you never wanna set the precedent that timeline slip. So that to me was when there was a major project and on timeline it was significant slipping, I'd never let that fire burn. You immediately jump in. The second is when there is disagreement on a strategic decision or maybe even part of the vision. If you feel like that exists, like for example, if not everybody buys into instant book or there's just some disagreement about what supplies should be on the platform, you've got to squash that immediately. You cannot let that fire burn because it can spread. I guess if I followed the analogy, you could become a wildfire.

40:41And then suddenly, you have a team of people who don't believe in what they're doing. They're losing meaning. They lose meaning in their work, right? Which is just really bad. So you have to bring people together immediately when you feel like people, whether it's many or a few people, do not believe in the direction that the company has had it. You got to squash that immediately. Then the third one for me and this was a bit painful to learn, but you never let a senior hire process burn. Meeting like you will always, and this is what I felt during my 10 years at Airbnb, I always felt underwater and I always felt like we just needed to bring on more people who had experiences are things that we were doing.

41:32And anytime I delayed or I was like not fully engaged with a hiring process, especially a very senior person, it just it bit me for such a long time and it set the whole team back. And so those are the three things that I would never let burn, but you got to let a whole bunch of other stuff burn for sure. Such counterintuitive and amazing advice. I am you shared a bunch of examples of things that you don't want to let burn or there are any examples you could share of things you'd let burn things that surprise people or a story that comes to mind of like, yeah, that's fine. You know, sometimes you would have examples where certain products, product launches didn't go well.

42:13And let's say it just, you know, you weren't seeing it in the numbers, the users weren't happy. Like, okay, that's sometimes you just need more time to understand what's actually wrong. You don't need to like jump on it immediately, right? So that's maybe like one example of a fire that I led Burr in quite a bit. And quite frankly, at some point, I had so many teams that I was working with that I just needed to prioritize even between the teams where like this team is the number one priority. And I know that I need to be in desire reviews with this other team. I just I can't because I have to be thoughtful about how I'm spending my time in this given moment.

42:53and so I actually have to depriortize project. And so there are certain projects that were important, but I led burn for a while because I just had to spend my energy elsewhere. And then of course, to myself, I was thinking, like, are we doing too many things? Like, this is the right way to operate. I think this is really useful for someone that say, isn't I CPM on a team that's wondering, why the hell our team is just wasting our time? We're building all this stuff, it's not working. Why isn't anyone doing anything? or anything giving resources when they're re -purchasing, it's because they know there's many other problems they're dealing with and they're letting this burn for town.

43:30Yeah and this was actually a learning for me in an area where I would say I failed over time is just general communication to the broader organization. When you rise really quickly you tend to under -appreciate or I did just how important it is to communicate. What as a leader you're spending your time on and the areas that you think are the highest priority right now. And so eventually I started doing a lot of all -hands and I started sending like the weekly thoughts from Vlad or just like my random musings with all of them, what's in my head. And I realized that sharing that context with people is just so important.

44:08People actually want to hear from you and it's good to over communicate and it can help people understand certain things about their day to day. I know that it didn't come naturally to you. I mentioned that you kind of like to be behind the scenes under the radar, not in the limelight. So I could see why that wasn't something you were doing initially. Is there anything more you can share there about what you've learned, what you learned about why that's important, like why are people, why spend time there, what happens if you don't? Everybody wants to find a meeting in their work and everybody typically wants to understand and the reasons behind a decision.

44:41And it's important to share, to take like, I've done this myself where I just like make a decision and you're like, move on and you go on to the next decision. And it's actually so, so helpful. If you take like 10 % more energy and time to now bring everyone along around why a certain thing was decided, because it's gonna help them just, themselves make better decisions, because then now they have a lot more context about how this decision was made and they can learn from that moment. So that's partly why it's important. I mean, for me, it didn't come naturally to me. I'm like a pretty, I don't know, I'm a deep introvert, like I shy away from many different things and it like it had to be a learned thing.

45:25I think you're also a really good example of something I talk about here and there is you can be really successful in very different ways. I'm also introverted, I think we're similar on the spectrum of colors or with the thing personality test. And you've been really successful. You could also be incredibly successful as a very extroverted person or someone that's very analytical. And I think you're a great example of someone that's less that's more reserved and doesn't want to and is introverted, as you said. And I think it's important for people to know you can be incredibly successful as a PM as a huge leader from that place.

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47:08Check out Apple at getepo .com slash Lenny and 10X your experiment velocity. That's getepo .com slash Lenny. Okay, so just to summarize the lesson than we just talked about mostly is let fires burn. Basically, don't feel like you need to solve every problem as you rise in the ranks. And I think this applies even if you're not the top of the, or even if you're manager of managers, even if you're manager of nobody. Yeah, maybe it's the other thing I'll mention and like as I reflect on setting priorities and just like working. And I think a big lesson for me is that chaos is good. And chaos is actually great.

47:50And sometimes you want to create chaos in an organization to push the organization to think creatively and to actually make leaps in product development. And so, I mean, I kind of, as I reflect on my life, I like cleaning up messes. I like when things are very organized. I like when there's just like, there's a lot of clarity on how things are put together, that, right? And it's very, uh, chaos is scary, right? And I think that this is very natural for a lot of people who are cast to be scary. But I've seen examples when just a bit of chaos is so, so helpful. Just to give you an example, I remember me talking to Brian one day and he was like, Hey, I just don't feel good.

48:39Like something just feels off right now. And I remember asking him, like, what do you mean? Like every, like, our numbers are up into the right, like we're we're shipping quickly. Everything's great. What do you mean? Like what are you unhappy with? And his response was things are just too calm. I don't like it. And I was like, okay, what do you mean? Like calm is great, right? Like I operate and calm. And he then picked a project that he thought was important. I think it was actually host onboarding at the time. And of course in this project, we had like three or four, I remember we had this like perfectly craft a timeline.

49:21We're going to design this for the next four weeks and then we're going to start building and we're going to deploy in certain pockets of users. We're going to learn, we're going to iterate, etc. Very like rational like timeline, right? And he said, yeah, I don't care about any of that. We're going to design this in 24 hours. And that was just like, my blown, right? Like one, how? Two, the ripples that's going to send to the organization. Because I knew like all the people that were involved on building this and we had like this the whole like neat flow. And we did design it actually in 24 hours.

49:57It took a little bit longer, but we just ended very quickly. And what I learned at that moment is that the chaos that that was actually the example of chaos that he inserted into this very calm building process. And that chaos forced us with that artificial time constraint to dial up our intuition and to think a bit more creatively than maybe we would have in the past. Now that didn't always work because there were examples of this where you were just like, I don't know what the answer is. I need more time to design and to think about this problem, right? There were definitely examples of that, but there were many examples where it was actually a great forcing function to go with your God and actually innovate.

50:43That's an amazing story. And it reminds me of something else just to take a quick tangent here is, Brian's incredible at just asking people always, okay, that's a great goal you have there. What would it take to 10x that goal? Yeah. He'd like get to the FPNA projection, he's like, great, okay, how do we 10x this? And I found that to be really scary, but also really effective in helping people think a lot, Baker. Is there something there you can share about just what you learned from Brian about thinking that big? I think it's less about hitting the goal. I think a lot of people when they see really big goals they get, they immediately like afraid of the goals because they think, oh my god, I don't know how to hit this.

51:19If we don't hit it, what happens and you start thinking about a little downstream consequences. The reality is, it's not about hitting the goal. It's about thinking how to hit the goal and going through the journey of the creative journey of like What does the world need to look like for this to be true? This like crazy goal to be true like how should we think about it? And oftentimes it pushes you to test extremes right When the whole world is gonna operate this way or nobody in the world is gonna operate this way versus like something in between And usually it's when you start testing the extremes as you begin to like realize like oh So, you know, this is the path that we should actually take.

52:00Yeah, I found exactly the same thing. Just thinking from backwards from, what is the best possible thing we could do versus incrementally forward, ends up unlocking a lot of big ideas. Something I imagine is in people's minds is they hear some of this stuff, like designing something in 24 hours or thinking 10x bigger is like, I don't wanna work that way. That sounds incredibly stressful. That sounds like what I don't wanna, why do that sounds really hard? You mentioned this that this isn't necessarily For everyone, not everyone needs to work at this company or work this way. There's part of it is hiring, is finding people that want to get lean in to work really hard.

52:33Other people don't. Is there anything there, just like this is actually really hard? It's not for everyone, but it's also ends up being successful and you end up having a good time, a lot of times afterwards. I find that those sprints were like design this in 24 hours were brought a lot of connection to the team actually. And they were like my most fun moments actually. Because you kind of like, you're forced to let go, a lot of constraints. All of these organizational dependencies disappear. All of the stuff that's kind of noise, and you can just start building, right? So for me, especially when you're not doing this by yourself and you're doing this with a team of people, it was deeply rewarding because you were all working together, just like shooting the shit and like, throwing a whole bunch of ideas out there, no idea was like too crazy, right?

53:25Now it's not for everybody. And so I actually in the interview process, when I would hire PMs, I was always, not always. In the early days, I guess, I had to learn this. But in the later days, I always set expectations about how we work. And so I think some leaders do this. It's like the anti -cell cell where I will share the worst day of what I think you will think as a candidate, what the worst day would be at Airbnb, and then still ask you if you want to join the team. And I would basically tell people, we're going to work day and night, we're going to work weekends, direction is going to change.

54:02The strategy, like out the window every three months, the projects you're working on today, we're going to kill three weeks later. The roadmap that you are right now auditing as you're deciding your offer when you actually join after you took some break from your other job is going to complete shame. And so getting people, I think the content thread there is, everything is changing all the time. You got to be cool with that if you want to join the scene. And totally fine. Like if that's not for you. I love that. It makes me think of something when a colleague used to say to every means if you haven't changed teams or you're your desk in six months, something's about to happen, something's about to change.

54:39Totally. This unsell idea, there's a recent podcast episode where someone did something similar, he called it the un -sell email where he sends the candidate. Here's all the things, based on all the things he heard from the candidate during the interview process. Here's all the things you probably won't love about working here. And the recruiter was always really mad at him for like, don't send that. My numbers are really going down because of this email, but long -term ends of being really successful for them. Yeah, I mean, you're going to probably like hire fewer people that way, but you will hire the right people.

55:06So I think then you're going to actually have a team that you can rely on for years and years and years as things change. Yeah. Just have to line incentives with recruiting on that. That is a bit. Okay, so one other area I wanted to spend time on is basically org design and hiring and people. So you were very good at building really effective teams, prioritizing them, bringing in amazing talent. What can you share about things you've learned about as a company is growing and org scaling about org design hiring? Yeah, so for me, Maybe one of the hardest things about building teams and going through hyper -growth was the fact that you're going to lose a lot of friends on that journey.

55:47You just have to be prepared to say goodbye to your friend. Meeting when you start, you build really deep relationships with people. When you're a smaller startup, you typically have one -on -one interaction and you know everybody. You have that connection with people. And the reality is most people, if the company is truly going through hyper growth, most people are not going to scale. It is very rare for somebody to scale with the company. And I mean, we actually, so at index, we wrote a book, Scaling Through Chaos. And there's this crazy stat where basically, when you look at many, many companies that reached a thousand people and were successful.

56:30When you look back to the first ten employees, you realize that only two to three of those ten first employees stayed with the company when the company reached a thousand people. And that's just so indicative of what will actually happen in practice. There are certain skills that are good for in this specific domain for a period of time. And that time is not like universal forever, right? Like it's so point everybody taps out. And so it's just having that realization is it's tough. It's tough emotionally. It was like one of the hardest things for me, like as a leader. And I would say the way to break out of that is to ask for help and to try to learn as much as you can about the next role for you is going to look like.

57:28So that's one thing that I've learned. I would say another thing is that all org charts suck. Like there is no good org chart. Every single org chart has problems. So you can be organized around business units. You can be functionally organized. You can be organized around problems. And the reality is like every single one of those constructs, suck, right? There are pros and cons to each approach. Like if you are a, if you organize yourself into business units, the problem you typically run into is silos. When people start basically advocating for their business unit with little regard for other business units, right?

58:07If you're functionally organized, sometimes you create too many dependencies across the organization and it becomes this like matrix way of working, which could be challenging. And as a result, could be slower to ship product, right? Those are just examples. These are not universal issues, but those are examples where, regardless of where you're organized, they're going to be problems. So, for me, one learning was if you're having a problem and you're trying to solve this problem, reorganizing and like a new work chart is rarely the solution. Like, it's not about the boxes and how you configure the boxes, right?

58:44it's about the people in those boxes, and it's about how those people work together. Because you just need to understand the cons of working a certain way, and then how do you design a process around your org structure to make sure that people connect and work really well together. So my advice there, also to founders who I talked to now, focus a lot less energy on actual org design, study the different types, and just pick one. And once you pick one focus on the people, the culture and how people work together. That's really interesting. So basically you think people are overthinking org design.

59:20Yes. How do you think about incentives and goals and how that kind of impacts all that stuff? Because there's people and then there's like here's your goal, here's your measure. And that's what they're going to work on in this in the stock. I mean, I think incentives come down to culture and it's what you set as like the fiber of your organization. So again, like I, I, I think you can align incentives and people will be excited to make impact on organization regardless of how organization is actually organized. That's a really interesting takeaway because I think a lot of people think about, okay, if we just org this and put this person here and create business units, things are going to start moving and not you're not saying don't think about that and don't necessarily do that, but you're probably putting too much weight on that actually solving your problems.

1:00:03Yeah, I mean, I think you want to certainly study Different ways of organizing and the pros and cons but just know that no matter which choice you make It's going to suck and they're going to be organizational problems, right? And you just need to go into it with wide open eyes and then create process To make sure that the whatever the cons are like it if people are in silos Well, then you got to have a really good way of bringing people together and creating the right incentive to make sure people collaborate, right? So there's all these other things that I would say are Much more important to folks your energy on awesome Anything else along these lines around or design or hiring they think is really important or hiring I you know, I the one thing that is universal for me and always has been is mission over domain expertise basically mission over domain expertise mission over skills.

1:00:59I think that if you have like a raw like that raw horsepower and you're deeply like you just love the mission so much you can build whatever skills are necessary for the job. And so I actually love taking like as an operator I love taking bets on people who are maybe earlier in their career who have energy who have drive and who are deeply Thoughtful and deeply resonate with the mission that we're working on because at that at the day like Strategy changes or exchange teams change everything changes all the time and the one constant I think is actually the mission and And when shit gets really, really hard, when your company almost collapses like we did during COVID, the thing that gets you through those hard times is the mission.

1:01:50If you don't have mission, you don't believe in the mission, you lose meaning in your day to day and you start to disengage from the company. So I think that's actually the most important thing. So what I'm hearing there is potentially, if you're just like hitting it at your job, or you think it's just not going anywhere, it might be that you don't actually care that much about what the company is trying to do in the mission and maybe there's not a lot that can change for you to actually be happy there because you don't actually care. Fascinating. Something that I wanted to come back to real quick, a lot of your advice comes back to impact.

1:02:22Like impact above all else, drive impact, focus is comes back to what is the most important thing to do. Something that I think about a lot is how do you be successful within a company and one of the levers is go to a place and a team that is driving impact. There's any advice there around just like where you're best suited to be successful within an org kind of coming for added from or impact is most happening. I mean, I always thought about it as like the combination or almost like this Venn diagram of like there's one circle which is like all the different priorities that are important. Then the other circle are your friends and where you fight.

1:03:04And the intersection of the two is the place where you should be, right? And sometimes you're not quite there at the intersection and you're kind of gravitating towards that intersection. You're building a specific skill that you're ready, like, naturally, like, pretty decent at. But you definitely want to double down on it as you're learning more about the priorities and there's a match there. The worst thing I think you can do is just, like, sit in a job where you're not being impactful. You're not working on a top priority and, like, you're just kind of wasting your life. You know, like our time is short on earth.

1:03:35Like you might as well wake up every day and work in the hardest thing you can where you can truly based on who you are and the spikes you have, make a dent and whatever is going to happen, right? And also have the serenity prayer ready to go and things get really hard. Yeah. Okay, so what I wanna do right now is summarize many of the things that you've shared before we get to talking about Airbnb today and Brighton Chesky's approach to product. I guess before I try to summarize stuff, is there anything else you think is important, skill wise or behavior wise that we haven't done? Oh, I think we've done a lot.

1:04:07Okay, cool. So this is like almost a Vlad's guide to being a successful product leader. I don't have it all summarized here yet. Is that a bunch of notes? But I thought it'd be fun just to try. So one is, and the way I would think about this, as you're listening to this is, how do I be more, what can I do to be more successful as a leader in a company? And this is all kinds of stuff that I 100 % agree with is effective. So one is impacted by all else. Think about what is the company prioritizing? What is important to the business? How can I drive impact there? And to do that, think about the levers in the business that move that and then find ways to work on those things?

1:04:43This idea of inquiry first, when you disagreed something, shift your mindset to asking questions. And then along those lines, when you disagree, this idea of poking the bear, sharing, here's why this might not be right. Here's why you might be wrong about this. Here's data that I found or what data wouldn't help you understand. Maybe you're wrong here Okay, what else? Saying no being really get it to say no just And this comes back to impact and focus Ledfires burn Really powerful idea. Don't feel like everything has to be solved I'm similar to you where I feel like anything's in order and clean and organized and so this would be very hard for me But such a powerful lesson of just it's okay if things aren't going great and I love your advice of Align with your team on we will lay at these things burnt for now Anything you want to add by the way as I'm going through this No, gotta let everyone be a part of maniac least at least a great things Awesome, so along those lines embrace casts let things be chaotic sometimes because some of the best things come out of that And as you shared brain sometimes just introduces a little cast to get people out of there little they're safe world a little bit This idea of a shit bucket, if things are just like, I hate this thing and it's not going well, I'm just going to throw it in the shit bucket for now and that's just how it's going to be and I'm going to move on.

1:05:59So I could focus on impacted and important things. Amazing, okay, what else do we have here? So many little notes here. Be prepared, so as you're organizing for teams, be prepared to lose friends that you had at the company as you rise and as you have to do things that maybe they're not lined with or happy about that are helping their career, all or chart suck. And that thing's gonna be amazing. Don't over focus on the org chart, focus on the people and the culture. Oh yeah, the mission above all else. Just like if things are not going well, it might be people aren't aligned with the mission of the company.

1:06:30Yeah. Okay. Is there anything else off topic? I mean, it's so interesting. Like when I think back to my 10 years, like things that I actually remember the most are these moments with other people. And not the some project or some product launch that's like going super well or you know us doing really well with metrics. It was the things that really made I think Airbnb special and I really now that I think back to those 10 years of my experience I deeply just resonate with are those little moments and like one example and this is why culture is just so important because these these things don't just happen organically.

1:07:15You have to be thoughtful about building culture, and then I think you create a place where these little things can happen. So for me, I don't know if you remember, your experience when you first joined the company, my most memorable experience of every of these, the human tunnel. And it was just this thing where, I remember it was my first day, and I was standing behind this giant wall, and there was silence, and I think it was a cafeteria. I was like this huge, huge room, right? And then somebody like this engine runs up to me and says, hey, go around to the other side of the wall. And I turn and suddenly the room just explodes in cheering and clapping and everyone yelling my name and everyone is like basically doing a human tunnel with their hands.

1:07:59Literally every single person out the company at HQ including the founders. And then I run through under everyone's cheering and I jump into this bean bag while everyone's like chanting my name. That was my first day. And here I am, like, I don't know, 12 years later, 13 years later, I still remember that as one of the most amazing moments of the entire journey. And it like, I immediately felt accepted. And I wanted to contribute to the team, you know. And a lot of the reasons why there were many moments like that throughout my 10 years. And it was a result of how we hired people for certain core values and were very intentional about helping people integrate into this crazy company that was growing super bad.

1:08:50That was an amazing story. I feel exactly the same way. I went through a similar experience when I joined. And obviously the human tunnel eventually didn't scale and people started doing it like protein versus the entire company. We could do a whole episode on Airbnb culture and learnings from that. interesting with the human tunnel. It's like, it started, I think, with the founders, but it ended up being there, no involvement in these tunnels. Like, it was just employees knew that this is the thing we're gonna do for every new employee. And so I think it's interesting. I guess just spending a little time on it, culture and learnings from Airbnb about the value and power of cultures.

1:09:20Is there anything there you take away with two other companies you work with now? I've just like, how to set up a great culture, how to do this well. I would say there's no like single playbook. I would say that the one thing that comes to mind is being really intentional and thoughtful about it and actually dedicating energy to it. Just as much as you spend time building product, hiring people, you've got to spend just as much energy actually thinking about culture and your core values. And so core values are very, I would say, indicative of what the culture will be. So those two are very linked, right?

1:09:55And once you have, once you think about core values, I remember what worked really well was, you don't just Just like, right, your core values and documents somewhere that no one ever opens it, you need to, the key is, regardless of what the core values are, you want to make sure that those core values are prominent in just about every single thing that you do, right? So when you hire people, you hire for certain core values. And that would be, we had core value interviewers up until, I mean, my entire tenure, basically, even when we had thousands of people already at the company, when we were hiring people, everybody had to pass core values interviews.

1:10:30So it was very ingrained in how we hired and what we looked for. Then even performance reviews and promotions, no matter how much impact you made, right? No matter what you did, if you were not also exemplifying core values, you didn't get promoted, right? You didn't get to the next level. And so even in our performance conversations, those core values were very present in the day to day. And then of course, they were also printed everywhere. They were just like physically everywhere all the time. So like I felt like every single person around me always knew what the core values were. And so that's my biggest advice.

1:11:07It's like don't copy some other company's core values. Instead just being touchable matters to your organization and then make sure that those core values are fricking everywhere, part of every single process. Otherwise, like no one's gonna care. Just a reinforce, which you're saying have been gone from Airbnb for five, six years now and I still 100 % remember the core values. I'll go through them real quick. Be a host, be a serial entrepreneur, which is serial as a material story. A champion in the mission. And simplify it, although they tweak that one or they cut it, right? And then embrace the adventure.

1:11:44Embrace the adventure is my favorite. I love that one the most. See, here it's later, like there's also remember. Like exactly. Every frame matters was the other one they decided to cut out. because they realized something they learned about it, if it's core values that I thought is really interesting, is they shouldn't be aspirational, they should be who you actually are. And so there's a period where the founders are like, we're not actually amazing at this thing, so let's just remove it from the core values, and reduce the ones we're focused on. Yeah. What I also really like is that they're retangible like examples always about what it meant to embody this core value in your day to day work, right?

1:12:19And so then there was like very tangible for people versus just some overarching like embrace the adventure. Like, what does that actually mean? Right. Right. And then just to make sure people get this point, you made about this core value hiring team, which is really unique. I don't know if anyone else does this. There's people trained to interview in core values. And they were like a specific volunteer team. That part of the interview process, one of these people came in and they interviewed for core values, which was meant to represent what the founders were looking for initially. I mean, it was also very telling how I remember it was an honor internally to be selected to be a core values interviewer in the first place.

1:12:53Like most people at large companies are like, I don't want to do any more interviewing. Oh my god, like interviews all the time. Here, people were like, it was a sense of like this emotional proud moment when you were basically given the keys and you were somebody said, hey, like we actually think he would be fantastic at helping us think about how to make sure every single new hire embodies these core values. I think that was so powerful. Amazing. Okay. So we again, we could spend an entire hour in the culture of Airbnb and all things we've learned there. It's actually a good segue to the last area.

1:13:24The last part I want to talk about, which I think a lot of people are probably wondering about as we have been chatting, which is about Airbnb's current ways of working. So we'd Brian Chesky on the podcast, the most popular episode of the podcast turns out. And he shared his approach to product, which a lot of people were like, huh, that's unique and different. And I don't necessarily want to work the way other people are like, this is amazing. This is exactly how I want to operate. And so I'm going to meet my company work this way. The way he described Airbnb is a kind of moved from bottom up experimentation driven to very top down.

1:13:55We're gonna have one roadmap. I'm gonna be involved in everything. Product managers and out product marketing managers and all these things that I think people like wow That's really new and interesting. You actually work through a lot of that. You went through that transition I think technically you're a product marketing manager when you left every V. Okay, so you're a really good example that you reported to Brian during this time thoughts now that you're removed from every and be on that way of working pros and cons right for everyone maybe not right for everyone how do you think about this yeah so first like it's let me zoom out of like from every week or second then we'll go into the concrete details of what Brian said I don't think you should copy another company's ways of working like the reality is it is how a company operates is so unique to the founders to the leadership team to older employees and the domain potentially moment in time because like how companies operate also evolve sometimes over time and just certain like different ways of operating might be needed, right?

1:14:58So I wouldn't just copy someone else's wave operating. Even like at Airbnb, it was just very interesting for us. It took us a long time to figure out how operate, right? And we were actually, we did it for a long time, explain and give clarity to people of how we should even operate in the first place. Because so we hire people from Facebook and Amazon and Google and Netflix, like every Apple, like every company, right? And every person would commend with their own preconceived notions of how they want its work. And oftentimes those opinions differed. And so because we never actually stayed it like the Airbnb way for a very long time, sometimes we chaotic, right?

1:15:45A lot of people just wouldn't know how to operate. And then you go from team to team, teams were just operate very, very differently. And that was a problem. So I think here, the lesson for me was not necessarily like there is one way to like every through every company to operate like this way. And it's much more about picking an explicit way to operate and then voicing it to every single person so that everyone has clarity in how to do their job. I think the worst thing is like people just don't have clarity on how to do things day to day. They don't know how to drive impact and they're just like, what am I doing with my life?

1:16:24You know? So that was kind of one lesson. Now specifically like going double clicking into Airbnb and B and where we moved. So I think one of the things that Brian mentioned was being top down, right? I actually think top down is this construct that has negative connotations associated with quite a bit. And it's often, at least in the context of Airbnb, I think misunderstood. Like what people think top down, and I've had many, by the way, many of these conversations will folks, right? So most people think, oh, there's a leader here and then every tower sitting somewhere, it's a voice from the team, making a whole bunch of disciples.

1:17:07Right? And everyone else is like powerless and can do anything. That's not actually a reality, right? Of top down. Now, in that room where we made many of the hard decisions with Brian, the reality was, he asked a shit ton of questions, right? Again, he didn't advocate in the beginning. He would come in with tons and tons of questions, and he would listen. And of course, sometimes, he would disregard certain things that he heard because he had very strong conviction in a different direction, but he listened. And oftentimes, he would also change his mind. right? And so as a leader like at Airbnb for so long, I never felt like I wasn't listened to or like he was just making these random decisions.

1:17:58I always had an ability to influence an ability to voice where I felt like the company should go. So like yes, he made a lot of decisions, but he made sure he was informed in those decisions and then many of us were contributing to all the information he needed to make of the city, which is then also why he wanted every leader to be in the details. Why did he like stress that for himself and every single leader of the team? It's because when you get into that room, right, and you start discussing many different directions you can go, if the leaders in that room can't tell you what's actually happening with the business, then why are they there in the first place, right?

1:18:39But if you can't then make a good decision with that group of people. So then suddenly, like your team of like 10, you have to blow up to a team of 30. And if those people are not in the details, then you got to like, what, bring in like 50 people. And so at some point, you need to make sure that leadership is actually in the details, understand what's happening and can help bring to light information that's going to help somebody make the right decision. Right? So that's why like top down and being in the details to me, they were actually very connected and they made a whole lot of sense Now the one thing I'll say is like at some point When you're working on many things like it is challenging to be in old detail, right?

1:19:24And if you mandate that like product Cannot ship without like you know certain people being in every single detail, sometimes you could slow it down, right? And that could be a con of that way of working. I would argue for us and for at Airbnb, the quality like of what we were releasing kind of suffered because we were just push, push, push, ship, ship, and people were shipping across the board. And I did feel as a leader like I wasn't proud of some of the things we were shipping. And so I appreciated the intentional slowdown at the expense of our goals to get to a higher quality bar and then amp up velocity again after everyone had a better understanding what quality actually was.

1:20:09So we kind of had to slow down for a bit to then speed up later. And I think a lot of it is Brian always wanted to make sure that every leader would be able to make decisions and have really good judgment and he wanted to teach with that net. And I actually really appreciated that over the years. Now, you know, like if you were to go back to semantics and say, hey, were we top down, bottom up? Those are just semantics. like I would say, we were actually like if you really think about it, we were neither. Because bottom up, you could always through certain channels voice information. Again, if you didn't self -center and you were not afraid to poke the bear, you had an ability to voice information.

1:20:55So from that sense, there's lots of information that came bottom up. But then at the same time, there was also like a lot of conviction and intuition and context that came top -down. And because for a lot of these decisions, there was so much conversation, The reality is, I think the way we operate was actually somewhere more towards the middle on a day -to -day basis, which is why for me, I thought it was great. We had a boss on the podcast, CT of Meta. And I always thought of Meta as a very bottom organization where anyone can run experiments, they're shipping things all the time. He's like, no, we're very top down.

1:21:28We tell people, here's the things we're building this year, here's our big bets, here's what we're going to prioritize. And so I think it's your point. A lot of people don't necessarily understand what that means. and see things as bottom up versus top down. Any other pros and cons, just real quick on working this way, I think a lot of people are, a lot of founders are like, maybe I should move my company this way, maybe I should just be involved in everything. Maybe we need to move PMs to product marketing managers. Is there anything else that's maybe a pro or a con in this approach that might be worth sharing?

1:21:56Yeah, I mean, I think we need to recognize, right, is which decisions and what part of the company company, do you have special, like do you spike on and where you have edge and where you can help make the best decision? And then I would argue then as a leader, then it is your job to be involved in those decisions. For Brian, he always spiked in product and design and marketing. So he was very natural. This is why he was basically the CPO. That's why he was in all those decisions because those were his spikes and that's where he helped everybody move forward in a certain direction. I think for founders, you just need to recognize what to use spike on.

1:22:41What are the specific things that you have this great insight that other people do not and immerse yourself in a lot of those decisions? And there are some things that you might need to let go of, or maybe not as important or maybe certain things that like you just, you won't add much to the conversation and you have someone who you trust who's gonna uphold like a certain quality bar or whatever, whatever. So it's just being thoughtful about where you spend your time and leverage your strengths basically. Final question along these lines, very specifically around this whole product marketing manager move.

1:23:21To me, it feels like, mostly like a rebrand of PM with some marketing work And in my eyes, PMs already should be doing marketing and thinking about adoption and growth and all these things. And so I'm curious just your take. Do you think this is like with the future for PMs in general? Do you think this is just like a funny thing that Airbnb's trying and it doesn't really make a big dent? Thoughts on just this idea of PMs should be proud of marketing managers and we don't need PMs as PMs? I kind of felt like that was reading about this in the news when it blew up. I mean, it felt a little overblown to me, to be honest.

1:23:56Like, just like you said, a lot of PMs at the company were thinking about how to talk to users about the products they were shipping. And they were basically marketers to some degree, right? So I would say the rebranding of product manager, it did do some important things like shed project management and establish an entire function that focused on making sure things are moving in their right direction from a project perspective. And it highlighted the importance of marketing, or maybe just it wasn't highlighted before, but it was already happening at the company. So, you know, for a lot of the product leaders at the company, it was very liberating, because now you actually don't need to worry as much about let's say timelines and coordinating things across teams and departments and functions, that there's a function that does that.

1:24:48And your job is a lot more like user -centric, and thinking through how to tell the world about what you're building. And so it was a welcome change broadly. Now, does that apply to every company and like PMs do things this exact way? No, it depends. I think it's actually challenging to find product managers who are also really good marketers. And so I think it's actually like a rare skill set and like the art of marketing and the art of talking, like, conveying what you're building in the compelling way to people, it's a craft on its own and you have to build that over time. And so there are many product managers that haven't exercised that craft.

1:25:33And so of course, they can't just immediately like snap their fingers and become good at it, right? It takes years to learn that skill. So it kind of, again, depends on the people, depends on the organization. There's no blanket statement, in my opinion, where it's like PMM is the way or PM plus PMM is the way like it depends. And just to clarify the function you mentioned that kind of took off some of the load of PM is program management I think is program management. Yes. And they basically took on timelines, staying on top of priorities and kind of the project manager part of the PM role. Exactly.

1:26:09That's exactly awesome. Like if you think about it this way, it's actually like the best version of the product management function, not dealing with like the project management and thinking about the product, the experience, the launch, the marketing, the growth. Yeah, I mean, we had many product managers like internally always say like, oh, we feel like we're doing very tactical work. We want to be much more strategic and like this change actually makes the job significantly more strategic. Yeah. If you've worked on that already. Awesome. Okay. I'm glad we spend time on that. One last question before we get to our very exciting lightning round.

1:26:45We've talked about so many things that have gone really well. You're an incredibly successful leader, person, PM. You've worked on so many successful projects, all these skills you've worked on that have been really helpful to you that we've been talking about. I want to take us to failure corner. I'm curious if there's a story of failure that you could share where you failed some point in your career and what that was and how that impacted you, how that helped you potentially in your career. I feel a lot. We've talked about the positives. There were also on my journey a lot of humbling moments.

1:27:19Still have them, lots of failure. I would say the one moment I remember, this was probably in 2018 -ish. This was at Airbnb. be. It was a pretty dark time for me and I felt overworked, overwhelmed and I just wasn't a happy person, you know. This was a time where we were still scaling very, very quickly and I just felt like I I don't know. I wasn't like keeping up as much as I was in like maybe the earlier days, you know. And I would say, remember, thank you to myself, like, oh my god, am I going to tap out in 2018? Like, is this it for me? Like, you know, and it was, it was just hard for me because I was also a perfectionist.

1:28:15I wanted to help as much as I could. I had great like ambitions and dreams that I like. I mean, they keep going with every view for a very long time. And I think in that moment, and I kind of hit rock bottom at some point. And I actually remember, like during that time realizing that so much of my identity was Airbnb and my job that I had trouble separating myself as a human being from my work. And was just realizing that, you know, was tough. Like I lost friends. I lost a lot of relationships. trips. I lost many of my hobbies. I didn't spend as much time as I wanted to with my family and my parents.

1:29:03And at some point, I was just like, you know, I think in order for me to be a better leader, like I just need to be a much more balanced human being. And that's where ironically, I started spending less time on work and I became way more effective. because I was just more centered like as a person. So I reached out to people who I lost touch with. I spent much more time with my wife and my parents. I started gaming again and like all the little hobbies that I lost along the way. And they just made me happier. And because I was happier, I felt like every hour as a result was much more impactful at the end of the day.

1:29:46So yeah, that's one thing that I think about quite a bit. Like you can't just, it's really great when you pour your heart and soul into something. I think it is very fulfilling, right? Also, you got to think about how to balance yourself as a person. And if you lose sight of everything else in your life, like I, the recipe for disaster. I appreciate you being really real with these. A lot of people just share something that's not as real. and so I appreciate you doing that. And I love the advice of if you're going through a really hard time right now and feeling burnt out and Sad about your career maybe just do less and maybe lean into your personal life more that will help you be more successful in both Yeah, you got to like find joy in the little thing to go and if you like if you don't find joy in little things Like I just I don't think you can show up with an open mind and the curiosity that you need to be successful in in whatever job you have I love that.

1:30:44Glad before we get to our very exciting lightning round, is there anything else that you wanted to share that's on your mind that you thought would be good to leave listeners with? We covered a lot, so there may not be anything left, but is there anything just to give you a chance? Yeah, I mean, like I'm deeply thankful for the experiences that I've had, and I've learned so much. I mean, I think, you know, I look back and there are definitely many lessons, but let's also be real. Like a lot of it is luck, right? and a lot of just stuff just happens and it happens to go your way. So when things are hard, the one thing that I just want to maybe share is, don't be too hard on yourself but cut yourself some slack.

1:31:22As long as you're waking up and you're actually pouring your heart into something, you're truly giving it your all, that's all you can really do. Amazing advice, this might come up again in our lightning round. With that, Vlad, We've reached our very exciting lightning ground. Are you ready? That was to it. It's to it. Ding ding ding. First question. What are two or three books that you recommended most to other people? So, I love sci -fi. Red Rising was one of my favorite books and in the Silo series. Highly highly recommend. What do you think of the TV show version of the Silo series? What's that?

1:31:57There's a TV show of the Silo series that I would like watch it after you read the book. I agree. I always like reading the book in way better. I agree. I don't know if you actually watched the show, but it's completely different story I think they don't it's like 90 % just a whole new story. I don't know what's going on there Like foundation is similar. I don't know what they're doing these days movies crazy amazing. Okay The favorite recent movie or TV show they really enjoyed There's a TV show that I've enjoyed for a very long part of my life. It's called Survivor and and it turned out it. Probably everyone's probably a burden survivor at this point.

1:32:31The show is not dying. It is actually very fun to watch. And there's a new twist every single season. And so I probably watched like, I think like, 35 seasons or so. That's out of control. Do you feel like you would do well in survivor? If you would do one. I think I would do well. My wife thinks I would die, so. I'm gonna find out. Okay, if I can nominate you for survivor, I'll find a way. I'll find out. As long as you don't die. Next question. Do you have a favorite product that you've recently discovered? They really enjoy. So one is actually a product that I cannot live without. It's I discovered since 2016 discord.

1:33:07I cannot live without discord. It is one of the products that I use for hours and hours every single day. I'm in all these like gaming communities and it's so much fun. I love that you use it for gaming, not for crypto. Just chatting with players and like actually like hanging out. Yeah, love discord. The product that I recently got introduced to is a game. It's actually a pseudo -bored -ish game called Gobler. It's an advanced version of Tic Tac Toe. And so me and my four and a half year old daughter played this before bedtime like every single day. She was just started schooling me at Tic Tac Toe.

1:33:41And so I needed to upgrade Gobler. If you haven't played it, it adds a new dimension where pieces can gobble other pieces. It's almost like playing in 3D a little bit. It is super fun to play. Wow, that's funny that you're schooling you to tech toe which I my understanding is you just tie all the time It's amazing that you found ways to keep eating you. Yes This is more about me that better Okay, gobbler next question. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often think about repeat back to yourself share with friends your family and work Or in life you never know and It's a very simple motto and what that means is to me even when there are things with low probability, shoot your shot, take a chance, take a leap, sometimes you're going to be surprised at how things turn out.

1:34:31Beautiful. Final question. A tradition that are being biased, ask new folks a fun fact about themselves, which is always a hard question on the spot, but I'm going to ask you anyway. Is there a fun fact about yourself that would be fun to share? Well, I kind of shared maybe a little bit of it. I absolutely love Survivor. And so I have tried to get on Survivor multiple times, and then it's actually my dream to get on that show. So if anyone out there watching who happens to cast for Survivor, like, I am here, I am available, and I will probably not do very well, but maybe I'll be entertaining. I don't know.

1:35:08So this is your casting video right here. This is it. All right, Survivor people, let's get flat on. I think you would kill it. I get to see this is all the skills we've talked about. I think would be incredibly. Just let him know what it is for fire. I don't know what it is for fire, really. Let him near the fire. Oh my God. Vlad, this was amazing. I'm so happy we did this, what a special episode. I think for everyone that listens to this episode and goes through it all is they will, and guarantee they will become a better leader in so many ways. And so I'm really happy that we did this. Two final questions.

1:35:39Working folks, find you online and who would you want to reach out to you? What kind of folks are you working with these days? And then finally, how can listeners be useful to you? Hit me up if you want to chat on LinkedIn. I'll respond and we can grab a coffee or zoom or something. I mean, I'm an investor now and I love spending time with early stage founders. A lot of those early stage founders actually happen to be product managers at some point in their career. So I just love chatting with folks about the problems they're facing, where the ideas they have, when they're thinking about starting a company.

1:36:09So yeah, for tinkering with cool things, like hit me up and we'd love to chat. And there's a segment is there segment of startups your most focused on just for folks to know I bet on people So for me like that's that was always one of my learnings like I Love meeting people that take me into a whole new dimension that I didn't think was possible Now I do love consumer because that a lot of that is my background And so I try to focus on consumer but then at the damn focus on people and so I go into many different directions where people Awesome, all right, and I can listen as be useful to you if you want to chat hit me up Cool.

1:36:42Healthy, fine, really cool startup opportunity to invest in. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Thank you, Lenny. Thank you so much. This was super fun. Thank you for having me on. It's absolutely my pleasure. Thank you, Vlad. And bye everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or a leaving review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny's podcast .com. See you in the next episode!