How we restructured Airtable’s entire org for AI | Howie Liu (co-founder and CEO)

25:45But we're also giving it the ability to actually do code jet to extend those apps with really final mile, very bespoke functionality or visuals. So you could say, hey, generate me a very, very specific type of map view with this kind of like heat mapping and this kind of icons. And when you click it, do this. And that's a capability that there's so much ambiguity in some of the design decisions around it. And you have to blend that design thinking with some of the technical constraints of like, what can the AI models actually one shot effectively? And if not, how do you add in the right human workflow for approval and review and the reprofting and so on.

26:28So just so many different design decisions and you need somebody who can really think full stack about that kind of product in a shot, overwhelmed by that, you know, kind of open -ended in this, but like relishes in it. I was actually playing with it before we started chatting. I made a really cute startup CRM. Oh, it's awesome. Yeah, I started talking omnivore here. It's like the colors are beautiful. That's outstanding. That's a beer right now. I mean, I won't say like just as a note, you know, I consider myself like at my core, like a product UX person, right? Like that's my like passion. and everything else I've had to learn to run this company is almost like what was a necessary part of the jury?

27:09But my real passion is thinking about Product UX, right? I think of UX in a deeper sense than just the cosmetic design, what you could put into a framework, prototype. I think of it as literally, what should this product do and how should it represent that and behave for the user? That is the product, in my opinion, right? And of course, then you have to figure out, like, technically what's possible and how to implement it. But like, I think to me, what's under executed today in the world of AI products is like, there's so many awesome capabilities of AI and most of them are really under -merchandise and there's like very poor actually visual or otherwise metaphors or affordances given to users to help represent or understand what those underlying capabilities are.

28:01I mean, touch of T, obviously, extremely successful products, so not knocking it at all, but you come in and you just get this completely blank chat box, by default. Now they have suggestions underneath it and so on. But the product UX part of me is just craving more visual metaphors or colors, or some kind of like use the canvas of a web interface and all the richness, you know, if it actually you create there, to better represent or show all the different things that you can do with the underlying model, right? And so that's something we've tried to do with AirTable is like show like all of the different states and like use colors even to play those off.

28:44It's interesting how much of this connects with, I just had Nick Turley on the podcast. he's head of chat GPT at OpenAI. And he had these two really interesting insights that resonate directly with what you're describing. One is he has this concept of whenever something is being worked on, he's always asking, is this maximally accelerated? How do we move faster? If this is important, what would allow us to move faster? And I love that that's one of the themes that's coming up as you talk is just this creating is this very clear sense of speed and you even call at the fast thinking team, like, you're going to move fast.

29:15Yeah. And then the other one is just this, I insight that with AI, you often don't know what people, what it can do and what people want to do with it until it's out. So there's this need to get it out and that'll tell you what it should be. I couldn't agree more with both of those and particularly on the second point, I think it's interesting, like clearly there have been companies that have both been successful one PLG and more sales led, a distribution for AI products. The most notable ones I could think of are like Palantir with their AIP deployments. That's obviously very sales led. You're not PLGing into a Palantir deployment, but even companies like Harvey and so on.

29:55They're doing very well and it's primarily from what I understand, sales led. You're not self -serving into a Harvey instance that will offer. And yet, to me, the best way to get AI value out there is experientially. And so you can kind of get that in a sales motion. You can show a demo, maybe you can do a POC. But it's so much more powerful when you just open up the doors and say, anyone who wants to come and sign up and trial this product can't. And I think to me, it's kind of a real proof point that ChatGbT is arguably the most successful PLG product of all time. Just in terms of sheer scale of users, they announced 700 million, like is it M .A .U .S.

30:40or weekly active users, 10 % of humans on Earth use it weekly. That's insane. In how many years? Like a few years. Three years, 103 years. Yeah, and so literally, that is just the most insane rev curve. And I don't think they would have gotten there if you couldn't just come in and literally try the product out. And you know, kind of as a little bit of a bottle of the point I made earlier where, like I think Chatchity doesn't do a ton right now. And even earlier, like they did even less to like expose all the different ways you could use it. But they just made it so frictionless to just try it for yourself, that you as a user could commit and just literally ask at anything and see how it did.

31:19And of course, like, you know, people in the early days tried to stump it and showed like, oh, I love to see it's not that smart. Like it doesn't answer this, this hard question really well. But clearly, the magical nature of it still appealed to you enough. You're like, everybody used it. And so I do have a view. We've gone through that whole arc of, we started PLG. I'd like to think AirTable was one of the PLG darlings of our era. And I know I started moving up market and doing more sales execution, although that was still always on top of usually PLG within an enterprise. But we started doing more and more sales execution.

31:59We still have that. That's still really important for our business. But I also think like me personally, like one of my goals is to shift my attention back into that kind of like, you know, builder led adoption and like literally showing in the product experientially, not telling in like a deck the value that you can get from AI and RT. Like I think that's so key and it's, you know, it's nox but it's also more than that. It's not just like literally how do you onboard somebody into the product. It's like literally thinking about the entire product experience itself, right? And in our case, we just made the entire product experience AI -centric, right?

32:36It used to be that we had this secondary thing that you can ask questions to, the assistant sidebar. We now made our agent the default way of doing everything in our table. And now the air table app, as you know, it is almost like an artifact that's manipulated by, you know, and kind of like can be tool used by the agent. Well, let me follow that thread. So if you go to airtable .com today, it looks, it looks like basically all the other AI app building sites. Now, it's just tell me which you want to build. Thoughts on that as just like a thing everyone's starting to do is there, what do you think comes next?

33:12Is this, is it working well? Well, there's clearly an incredible magic to vibe coding and app building with AI, right? And this is actually a prime illustration, in my view, of that comes from a second ago, which is, as capabilities of these underlying models evolve, the form factor in the product UX also needs to evolve with it, right? And so the earliest models, like the original Chaturty, like GP3 .5 era models, were not nearly as smart as the current models. And so you couldn't really ask it to one shot, a more complicated chunk of code, or we're certainly not a full stack app and expected to work.

33:56And so the right form factor for leveraging those models in a software creation context was GitHub Copilot. It's like, autocomplete a few lines of code out of time. But you couldn't chat to it and tell it like, build me this entire app from scratch, right? And I think that like, as the models got better and better, you saw that the new form factors emerged. Like I think cursor did a great job of like being an early pioneer of this more agentic way of leveraging the models to do more complex things and generate more, you know, kind of larger chunks of code. And now with Composer, you can literally just go into cursor and build an app from scratch.

34:30Like, build me a 3D shooter game from scratch and just watch it go and like create all the files that fill out each file and then like, you know, like the thing actually runs some of the time. And so to me, this is, you know, where the world is going, the models are clearly getting smarter. And, you know, if you think about the original vision of air table, it was always about democratizing self -creation, like we just strongly believe that, you know, the number of people who use apps far outweighs the number of people who can actually like build their own or manipulate apps and like harness like custom software to their advantage.

35:08That sounds very familiar. Very familiar these days. Yeah, exactly. And so like I think this is like it's a different means to the same end. And so like it's almost like we have to lean into this because if we started airtable today, like this is what we would be all in on. Now I think that the advantage that we have and like I do think you have to be realistic to yourself, especially as as a company that predates Genii and now has to kind of find your new footing in the AI landscape. Like, you can't fool yourself or just say, like, okay, I'm going to throw in some AI stuff on the landing on the marketing site, you know, put in a couple AI features and call it a day.

35:43Like, I think you actually have to take a clean slate approach to saying, like, how would our mission best be expressed? Like, if you were literally founding a new company from scratch with the same mission, How would you execute on that mission using a fully AI native approach? Then by the way, do you have useful building blocks that you can leverage from your existing product and your existing business? Or are you literally worse off having this legacy asset versus starting something from scratch? I don't think the answer is always yes or no. I think it just depends on the product. If you can't really introspect and say, look, I think I'm better off doing this with the pieces that I have for my existing business and product.

36:27Then I think you should sell. You should find a buyer for that company and then go and if you really care about this mission, go and start the next carnation of it. In my case, I really thought of this and really feel strongly that the building blocks that we have, these no -code components actually do allow us to execute better on this vision than if I had to start this patch. Meaning the problem with vibe coding, especially for building business apps. I should clarify that we want to democratize software creation, but specifically, we are focused on business apps. We're not trying to be the platform where you create a cool viral consumer game.

37:05This is for your CRM. Or if you want to build an inventory management system as a small restaurant or a lawyer trying to build a case management system, that's what we've always been, been focused on. And I think in this AI native world, clearly you should be able to generate those apps agently. And yet, if you have an agent that has to generate every single bit of that app from scratch, from code, it's going to be very unreliable. There's going to be bugs. There's going to be data and security issues. And then you're also going to have a context collapse as it just cannot manage all of the code that it's written basically as the app gets more and more complex.

37:42Right? And what we actually have are basically these primitives that the agent can manipulate and use without having to literally write the code from scratch to represent, like, here's a beautiful crud interface on top of the data layer, right? Like R is real -time collaborative and really rich and has collaboration on it. And by the way, here's all these other view types and a layout engine for a custom interface, you know, a layout, right? Or automations and business logic. And so it's almost like in programming terms, like the air table pieces in our Lego kit today can be used by this agent as almost like a more expressive DSL, like a domain specific language, to build business apps instead of literally having to write everything down to like the sequel and HTML and JavaScript to build every part of that app from scratch.

38:31And so like if we can combine the best of both worlds, like we have these very reliable high quality Lego pieces, now an agent can go and like assemble them for you instead of you just using the GUI to do that. By the way, if you do want to fall back to the GUI, there's a really great way for the non -technical user to still understand and participate in what's going on. Whereas if you're not technical, you can't inspect the code underneath a V0 or a lovable or revelant app. It's just kind of opaque to you. And if you can't reproft it to get what you want, you're kind of stuck. This is much more akin to a developer using cursor can generate lots of code, but then can still drop back the IDE to add it and manipulate it to the final production ready state.

39:14So that's kind of the play that we're making. And if I didn't fully and truly believe, we have a better shot at doing it with our existing product. I wouldn't be running this company in its form today. I'm talking to a lot of founders that are going through the journey are going on, which is we've had a business for a decade, AI emerged, and wow, we got to figure out something that could work even better. and so I'm trying to pull out the threads that are consistently working across these journeys because I think a lot of companies are trying to figure this out. So one that you just touched on is just if you were to start today, what will you do?

39:48What would that business be? Plus, how can do we have an unfair advantage with the thing we've done in the past? That feels like an important ingredient. And then the other circling back to stuff you've shared already, there's just like creating a sense of urgency and pace and getting people to understand this is how things move in AI. And we need to create this fast thinking team. I love that metaphor and framing. And then there's the point you made about just talking to AI regularly as the founder feels like an important element just like to truly be this I see CEO talking to AI working with AI regularly.

40:21Just on that note a little bit more. What just to give people a sense of what this looks like day to So you're talking to Omni all day, trying to under -tool flex the power of what you can do and iterate on it. So anything else you're doing day to day that helps you figure out what to do for the business. One, I try to use as many different AI products, including not AirTable, right, like as I can't. And both literally for the novelty factor and just like, you know, some new cool demo comes out, like runway release, they're like immersive world, you know, kind of engine, right? And so I'm gonna go try that out.

40:57When a Sesame AI put out there, they're cool, the interactive voice chat demo, I tried that out because even though we don't have a direct and near term need for really realistic and interruptible voice mode, where it's not as core to our capabilities. I just wanna understand and get a feel for everything that's out there. And I try to invent little like, kind of almost like side projects of my own to have a real reason to use these products. Like, you know, oh, cool. What if I were to take like a, what if I were to like try to create like a funny little like, you know, like a short, a funny video short, right?

41:43Using a combination of like, Hey, Jen Amtars with like a script, like a comical script generated by AI, right? And maybe it'll be on like an interesting topic. So I'll do like deep research on the topic which I'll teach T and pull together results have a compose like you know kind of the I'll actually do this is there something like that's literally an example of something like I'm just you know a fun Weekend project and like to be honest like these things only take you like an hour right if you become kind of pretty Pretty proficient with using the products like they're all so easy to use like you can literally do the deep research thing You know kick off quarry make a coffee come back in 20 minutes.

42:15Okay. Like let me let me prompt it to like generate need some dialogue. It's a little bit like what notebook LM does for you out of the box, but sometimes I like to just like do it myself, right? And then okay, let me take the script and like cut it up and like, you know, turn it into a hajan avatar and then download the video and like play it, right? Like, and just for fun, right? I'm not like trying to make, make that into an actual like, you know, kind of YouTube, like video business. But, but I think like coming up with like these different like fun weekend projects is a really useful construct to like force myself to actually try these products in a more than just like a Twitch click way.

42:52What it gives me is like, A, it's not just understanding the models, which is also very, very important. Like, Juby 5 came out yesterday, playing around with it a bunch, just on a variety of different personal use cases. But there's a difference between just understanding the model, but then also understanding the product form factors in which they can be placed. Meaning, like when you apply the model in a more structured way, right? When you apply the model with different tool calling than maybe what Chatch Fee has in its kind of like out of the box form, when you apply it with like kind of a more agentic workflow, again, that might be different from what Chatch Fee gives you out of the box.

43:36That's when you kind of learn, you really get to inspire yourself on what are the product form factors that these new models can take. So like and plus by the way like I find it to be really fun like there is a to me like a delight and entertainment value To just using AI period because like a it's it's it's not It's not like perfectly predictable So I think the element of like you're not quite sure what you're gonna get You know it's like a box of chocolates, uh, you know and and be like It always blows my mind just to think about like wow like you know five years ago So we didn't have any of this stuff, right?

44:11Like, AI was like, okay, like it's like, we can do predictive analytics. It's like, you know, there's some like, basically very advanced, you know, kind of regressions that we could run with AI, but like, it looked nothing like this, right? And it's in its current form. And it's just like actually super fun, in my opinion, to get to play around with all the different types of products that come out. So I think that is a big part of it. You know, because on the point about like the pace of the world moving so much faster in AI than any other landscape, it's like, you know, in SaaS, you know, in the mature SaaS era, like it was important to study your competition, right?

44:49Like if you were building a SaaS company, you'd be crazy not to follow Salesforce, right? Every like year and see what the, you know, the major releases that they're putting out are or service now or, you know, so on. And this is the equivalent of that, but there's major new releases and products, and so on, every week, not every year. And so I just think you have to say a breast of all of it all, and combining this with our point earlier of like, a lot of this has to be experienced, not just like red. Like you can't just read the write up on TechCrunch or even a tweet about a new capability, like you kind of have to try it to really get a sense of like what it is.

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46:47That's clod .ai slash Lenny. For people that work for you across the air table, say the product team, PMs, maybe engineers, designers, how have you adjusted what you expect of them to help them be successful in this new world? One is really, really, really stressing this idea of like, go play with this stuff. And I mean, when I say play, I really mean play like in the psychological sense of like, you know, there's a difference when like you go in and you're kind of just trying to check the box and like get a job dot, right? There's a difference when you come in with a curiosity and you're kind of like Exploring right and it's both more fun and energizing, but also I think like you learn more through that right and so like I've really tried to stress the value of play with these AI products and I kind of you know Try to lead by example by like literally going and like sharing out links or or screenshots like you know of the things That I'm doing in these various products.

47:46So like you know as an example you know, like I will go into, you know, like one of the prototyping tools and show like, hey, like, you know, I built a marketing landing page for, you know, this new capability we're launching, I kind of created like a landing page for it in Replet, let's say. And now I'm sharing that link. Instead of, you know, what typically like we would have done in the past is like, okay, we're gonna write a doc about it and then share the doc. I'm just gonna share you like an actual landing page with like visuals and everything in there, right? Or like I'll share like, you know, the actual link to my deep research reports or like instead of me writing a perfect memo on a topic, like I'll actually just like prompt my way into getting like a chat thread or a chat output that basically covers all the content that I care about and maybe even like ask it to like, okay, summarizes all into like a final, you know, kind of like memo output and then intentionally share that rather than expose the fact that like, I'm using AI in this way and here's literally how I'm prompting it, so you can follow along as well.

48:49But really trying to encourage everyone to go and just play with these products. And I've even said, look, if anyone wants to just literally block out a day, or frankly, even a week, and have the ultimate excuse, you can use, you can say that I told you to do it, right? If you want to cancel all your meetings for a day or for an entire week, and just go play around with every product AI product that you can find that you think could be relevant to air table, go do it, like period. So I think that's the most important thing is like this play, this experimentation. I think there's also a lot of other, you know, kind of shifts in how we execute prototypes over decks, you know, like I want to see like actual interactive demos because like, again, like it's hard to, you know, in a deck or in a PRD, you could say like, okay, well, we're gonna make Omni really good at handling this kind of app building.

49:43Okay, those are just words. the real proof is in the pudding of like, okay, let me try it out on a few like realistic props that I can imagine. And in a demo in a real prototype, you can like instantly, you know, try it out on unrealistic rather than golden pathy scenarios and see how it feels, too. Like, does it feel too slow? Like, do we need to expose more of the reasoning or steps, you know, kind of, you know, that are happening behind the scenes, create a progress bar or something like that? But like, it's really hard to get that feel of the product with anything but like a functional prototype that really does in an open and way, you know, like use the AI to do whatever, you know, you put it.

50:24So, you know, I think it's more like a like experimentation playground, it feels like how we need to execute versus I think at the past it sometimes felt like a more like like deterministic, resourcing, and kind of timelines view of execution, right? We're going to put this many people on this problem, and this is the eight -week timeline to this milestone, and we're going to ship in a quarter from now. I think now the whole thing is just like a lot more experimentation and iteration driven. Of the different functions on a product to NPM, engineering design, who has had the most success being more productive with these tools?

51:04and how do you think this will impact each of these three functions over time? What I found is that it really does become more about individual attitude and maybe some like, you know, polymathism, like, you know, there's a strong advantage to any of those three roles who can kind of cross over into the other two, right? Like kind of the hybrid unicorn types, right? So if you're a designer who can be just technical enough to kind of be dangerous and understand a little bit of like how these models work and, you know, like how does tool calling work and all of this stuff. Like, then you can actually design a concept or even prototype a concept, including in these prototyping tools, that's much more interesting and maybe realistic than if you're just stuck in kind of the flat, like, let me put something in a static design, right?

51:55Concept, right? Because I think, you know, designs have to be more interactive. the value of the product and the product functionality is in the interaction of it. Think about the design of Chat2PT. Again, it's the most basic design you can possibly imagine. The real design actually is happening underneath the hood in how it responds to different queries. And what happens after you fire off a prompt. So I think I found that there are people within each of these functions like their engineers who are very good at thinking about product and experience and like you know kind of can go and prototype out like the whole thing.

52:35They're designers who can kind of do do the same even if they can't literally code they can prototype something out like literally using a prototyping tool. And I think that's where like AI tooling is also giving more advantage to people who can think in this way by equipping them with an alternative to actually having to go through the long hoops of learning CS right. And at PMs as well, I think like there are some PMs who are like really getting into the technical details and studying up on like, you know, how does the stuff work and actually getting hands on, rather than seeing the role as, you know, kind of writing documents, writing PRDs.

53:08Do you see one of these roles, I don't know, being more in trouble than others, just like you need fewer of these people in the future potentially? I think overall, you can get more done with fewer people. And that's not to say like, you know, we want to go and make the team smaller, but rather the really cool thing for Austin, I think a lot of other companies is it's not like you have a finite set of things you need to do and execute on from a products endpoint. And okay, now I can do that with a tenth of the people. You could do that in a lot of cases, but for us, maybe it's also because we're a very meta product.

53:46We are the app platform with which you can build now any AI app with AI, the apps themselves leverage AI capabilities at runtime, whether it's to generate imagery for a creative production workflow, or leveraging deep research, or AI -based crawling of the web to search for companies that match a certain criteria for your deal flow app, or something like that. We can effectively leverage all of these AI capabilities in this app platform, because by definition, we're enabling our customers to build apps that have this wide range of AI capabilities. But because of that, it's like we have a almost infinite set of possible AI capabilities that we could execute on.

54:31I'm always telling the team, look, the great news is, we have all these fruit trees and there's so many crazy low -hanging fruit. You've got literally massive watermelons literally sitting on the ground. All you have to do is walk over 20 feet and pick it up. Instead of having to climb the really tall coconut tree to grab a hard coconut from 50 feet up. And so, there's so many watermelons on the ground just go out and start finding the biggest ones and attacking those. And what that means is that if we can build this culture, and I do think it's a learnable way of operating, I really like to believe in the growth potential of any human, right?

55:15like any individual, I think if you really have a growth mindset, that's why one of our most important core values is growth mindset. If you really have that growth mindset, I think especially if you're willing to put in the nights and weekends hours, or in my case, I'm literally telling people, take a full day off, take a full week off and learn this stuff, you can become more fluent in this way. And I think that what we get is like a team that can just go and work on more things in a much more leveraged and fast way, right? So I like to think like, you know, people who are willing to jump on the train are just gonna become more and more effective and it's not like, oh, like as a PM, my role is becoming entirely irrelevant, right?

55:59Like no, it means that as a PM, you need to start looking more like a hybrid PM, prototype, or who has some good design sensibilities. And by the way, I think some of the best NGPM and design cultures respectively over the past few decades have always been multidisciplinary in nature. The original PM stack at Google required the PMs to actually be somewhat technical so they could understand the engineering limitations of the product designs they wanted to make. And they had to be designing. I remember my co -founder Andrew, but he was in the APM program. was like always reading books about like design, like even down to like visual design and color theory and that kind of thing, right?

56:43And so I think it's just a reminder that, you know, like designers as well, like the, you know, some of the best designers, if you're a designer in Apple, like, you know, including hardware designer, like you have to understand some of the technical capabilities of how this stuff works, right? And if you're an engineer, like, I think some of the best engineers and maybe Stripe always had a very good engineering culture of engineers who could think about the product and business requirements. And in fact, on any given product group, at Shripe, my understanding is that the DRI isn't always the PM, right?

57:15Like as is traditionally the case in that triangle, it's like sometimes it's actually the engineer who's taking the product lead and saying, like, this is what we need to build. So what I'm hearing is, essentially, if you want, like the trend across product engineering design is each of those functions needs to get good but one of the other functions at least. Yeah, ideally you can do them all, but if you can just do one additional, so if PM becomes better design and engineer becomes better at product management. Well, I would actually go further and say, like I think you need to get like, decently good at all three.

57:48Like there's just a minimum baseline of like, if you're any one of those roles, you need to be like, minimally good at the other two, and then you can go deeper into your own kind of specialty, right? Like, you know, you could be a designer who's really good at thinking about UX and interaction design, and then just good enough to be dangerous on thinking about what's technically possible, and what is the product kind of story around this feature. I love that. And to do that, one piece of advice that comes up again again in what you've been describing is using the tools constantly to see what's possible, and that will teach you a lot of these things.

58:28I think use, well use the tools gives you exposure to what's possible, right? It's kind of like if you want it to be a great industrial designer and let's say like I mean the chair is kind of the ultimate like hello world of like industrial design, right? It's like the like canonical design object. Like you want to just sit there in a vacuum and with no familiarity with like the materials that you can use plywood, steel, whatever or like existing form backers of chairs trying to invent the world's best chair in a vacuum, right? Like you should go and first do a study of like all of the best chairs out there today Like go look at an Easter sit in it like try to examine it to kind of reverse engineer how it was made, right?

59:05and like you know and and just look at the prior art for that type of product like that's how I see the go out and play with these products and Also, I think like actually going and designing or implementing or executing is the best practice So you can't just only go and look at other people's shares. Like eventually you have to go and actually try building your own and then try building another one and another one and another one. And so I think that's where when I think about how I hone my own ProductUX sensibilities, I never, I mean, at that time that I was in school and learning about this stuff, there wasn't really any good curriculum for UX, right?

59:44It's not like there were great college classes to learn ProductUX. I mean, even CS was like very academic in nature at that time. It wasn't applied, software engineering, like, build an app or whatever. Maybe now at like some of the schools like Stanford, MIT, they have like actually UX -y type courses, but it's still a rarity for most people to have access to that. And so like the way I learned, like all of my product sensibilities was just like trial and error and like also using and studying other products, right? And then going and trying to build like my own weekend project ideas, right? I want to build a Yelp style app with a map view and then also a list view.

1:00:21I want it so that when you pan around in the map for it to automatically update the list view, and maybe there's some UX improvements that can make up top of that. I can also test my technical skills to figure out which parts of this are hard to implement and how do you make it work and what are some of the design changes or affordances that you can use to map to the technical possibilities. to do that, I love your piece of advice, which I forgot to double down on, which I also find really powerful. The best tip there is find something to actually build that is useful to you and fun. Like, pick a project that's like, okay, this would be fun to do, have a problem you're solving that forces you to actually do this thing.

1:00:59For sure. And look, I think that can be like night and weekend projects. It can also be like the daytime job projects, right? I mean, like, I am basically telling our teams on the AI platform group, especially like look like, you know, in that low -hinging fruit metaphor, it's like, I'm not being prescripted with you on like which watermelons you should pick. But like, you should go and like, and we do have different like pods within that group. But one of them, for instance, is what we call the field agents team. And they're responsible for the agents that work within your app. So this is not the agent that builds your app, but these agents that run on a customer's behalf to do like web research on your customers or they can, you know, go and analyze a document And like in the future maybe do things like actually generate a prototype of a feature from a PRD or from a feature idea.

1:01:50And I'm telling them like look, there's a almost infinite number of things you could, like superpowers you can give these field agents. I'm not going to tell you which specifically to do. Now you can ask me to weigh in for sure, but you should go and just experiment and prototype like a few different versions of like a few different directions we could go like what if you prototype what it would look like to have a Deep research implementation in field agents so that like for any given row of data Let's say in your case it's podcast guests. You can just click a button or click a button on mass across the entire like every Speaker you have lined up to do deep research like powered by chapchipate's own deep research on each of the speakers and have them all laid out side by side in this table, right?

1:02:34like go prototype that and see how it, you know, see how it feels and looks like. And so, I think some of the stuff can also be like in your daytime job, especially if that daytime job is literally to go and build AI functionality. I actually tried to do exactly that. The problem I ran into, I wonder if it's changed, is there's no API for, uh, open for chat to PTT research yet? There is now. There is. There is. There is. There we go. It's a being, uh, and I think they only recently exposed it. It ends up being like something on the order of like a dollar plus per research call, which... What a deal.

1:03:05I mean, again, it's actually, I mean, some people would say, oh my God, that's so expensive and you rack up 50 of those, you've cost $50 a month. I think it's like, well, it just saved you like hours of research by human. Not only that, I actually have a researcher that I pay to give me background guests that was like four, 500 bucks. And the dollar sounds great. And I've been doing this. He's been doing this manually. You start using deeper search. I just collected the R1. They might just be. Oh man. Okay, there's one more skill I wanted to talk about real quick. This comes up a lot in these conversations is evals.

1:03:42The power of getting good at evals. I know there's something you value highly. Talk about just why you think this is something people need to get good at. Yeah, I mean, and I listened to your episodes with Mike who talked about this. I think it's interesting that like, like both heads of OpenAI and Anthropic, I've converged on this point. I mean, look, I think I would add a slightly different or additive take though, which is like, I think for a completely novel product experience or form factor, you should actually not start with evals and you start with vibes, right? Meaning like, you need to go and just kind of test in a much more open -ended way.

1:04:23like does this even work like in kind of like a broad sense. So like as an example, for our custom code generation capability, like instead of defining evals that get repeatedly tested, you know, as you vary like the prompt or the model or like the the agentic workflow used to generate these outputs, and you have to define like, you know, what does good look like, right? by definition for the e -vow. I would first start with a much more open -ended and add Hawks style of just throw stuff against the wall, try different props and see how it does. To me, e -vows are more useful, once you've converged on the basic scaffold of the form factor, and you know what are the use cases you want it to work well for and what you want to test against it.

1:05:14Whereas in the early days, especially if your product market sits finding either for an entirely new company or for a new, pretty dramatically newer bold new capability that doesn't really have, like, it's not an incremental improvement of something that exists in our table today. Like, I think you have to just be a little bit more creative initially and like, throwing stuff at it, seeing what works to understand, okay, like, let's use an example, you know, we're implementing this new capability that can use, is basically a long -running AI crawler agent that goes and researches the web for a specific type of object or entity, right?

1:05:55So it's a little bit different from deep research, similar to deep research, but what it actually does is instead of outputting like a kind of a report, it's actually going and compiling a list of things. The things could be companies or people, or anything else, right? Like find me every Marvel movie, right? Ever made. Find me every, like kind of DC comics, makes like spin off, right? Like a series, right? Literally anything. And, you know, you have to go in and first just try out a bunch of random, like, you know, use your own brain to think of like, what are all the, like, what's the range of use cases like and test this against, right?

1:06:31And then you get back some results and you're like, okay, well, like, it's clear that like where it does really well are these types of searches, right? Like, people on companies with this kind of parameter. And I think to me, like, like e -vals are useful once you have a sense of what is that cluster of useful use cases you can start then more programmatically measuring the changes that you're making to improve the output for that. But by that point, you've probably already scope the product and maybe the way we would merchandise it in our table is not a completely open -ended capability. But hey, here is a specific capability that can research one of these X number of entity types, including people and companies.

1:07:17And here's even the filter conditions or criteria that are more explicit that you can define to give it the prompting to search for that thing. But I kind of think it's more useful as a way to iterate your way to improvement. And you can start really testing stuff empirically. You can maybe test, especially if you have the scale of a really large product like Anthropocuro open AI, you can just test everything and see, this model I should perform certain this one, this product performs certain to this one. But I think early on, you don't have that luxury and you're in a much more open -ended discovery process.

1:07:50That is very wise. Evels can strain you too early. I think about just the double diamond, I don't know, I do kind of framework of the divergent first and then conversion. Maybe that's the last start. I haven't heard that before, but that completely resonates. Okay, let me try to reflect back some of the advice I've been hearing about how to shift a company to be successful in this new world. And let me see if I'm missing anything that you think is really important. So one is there's this sense of just like reset expectations on pace and urgency and help people understand in AI things move incredibly fast.

1:08:26This is how we need to operate. And then there's also a piece of get stuff out so that you can learn how people use it and what it's capable of versus polishing it endlessly. Forcing people almost, I don't know, forcing the right word, but encouraging people to play with the blade of stuff and like giving them chance to take days off to block a calendar's cancel meetings just like stay on top of the stuff, to play as you talked about it and then sharing things they've learned, get the vibes of what's possible. There's also this idea of just rethink, okay, if we were to start today in this world, what would we do to achieve the same mission and we have achieved, we are trying to achieve, and ideally leverages this unfair advantage we have with things we've been working on for a long time.

1:09:10And then there's just like, talk to AI constantly every hour. I see you describe. Yeah, multiple times an hour. Multiple times an hour. Just going up. Is there anything else that I missed there that you're like, this is, you need to do this too, to be really, to have a chance? I think just to really, really try to break down role silos. And I think that's true, certainly for EP and DE, in the typical EP, D triangle. But I also think it's probably true, even for like non -product roles, right? Like I think it's true in marketing, right? Like I'm seeing something I'm really pushing for in marketing, I think a marketing team is like, really leading into actually is like, if you can just do all of the thing yourself.

1:09:55Like traditionally, how a marketing team might operate is like, okay, one person who's kind of responsible for executing the performance marketing, you know, kind of part of the campaign, right? Like, they literally go into the Google AdWords interface and they're like tweaking the parameters of targeting and, you know, budget and like, you know, kind of a conversion, tracking, et cetera. And then somebody else is actually responsible for like, coming up with a specific ad copy, right? And somebody else yet was responsible for coming up with like the seed content or positioning, you know, guide, written by a PMM that feeds into the ad creative.

1:10:28And so on and so forth, maybe they're promoting some new demo asset that somebody else yet created. And I just think that in the same way that you can collapse the roles in EPD and the ideal person, maybe they're very specialised and deep in one dimension engineering, but they're well -rounded enough to be dangerous on the other two. I think that's true in all of every other function. Like, you know, like sales as well. Like I think you should, you know, start to be able to play more of an SE role. Like traditionally salespeople didn't necessarily know the product that well. And like, you know, kind of relied on the SE to comment and be the product experts.

1:11:08Like I think it's really hard to sell any kind of the I product now without actually being fluent in the product and be able to demo the product, right? So like, you know, in the AEs need to be like SE fluent as well. So I just think that that concept of collapsing roles, everybody needs to become more full stack to do the, like being more outcome oriented, right? Your outcome as an AE is to show customers, convince customers of the value of your product and close deals, right? In order to do that, you used to have dependencies on having assets created by marketing and an SE to help you demo, can you collapse more of those dependencies so that if you had to, you could do it all yourself.

1:11:54I just think that's a new way, it's a new operating mentality overall for every AI -native company that I want to compete in this new arena. That is a great addition. It almost feels like you go back to startup times when everyone's doing a bunch of stuff. There's no like, here's the head of product. There's the head of engineering, we're just doing stuff. Totally. done. Holy. Yeah. I'm kind of seeing it as this is like upside down T where there's like the thing you're really strong at and then you just have to the as you describe the minimum of being good at engineering design or an SC by the way sales engineering imagine is what that sounds were.

1:12:31They just like they're adjacent roles you need to start having a baseline. The baseline is increasing of how much you need to understand that everyone's vent diagrams are kind of converging is exactly amazing. Okay, let me take a step back and kind of zoom out and think about the broader journey you've been on over the past decade plus. Let me just ask you this, what's the most counterintuitive lesson you've learned about building, air table building, company building teams that maybe goes against common startup wisdom? You know, I've heard, you know, you're interview with with Brad Chestia and then later you talk about founder mode in that kind of Y -Sphere tree.

1:13:10And the points they're really, really resonated with me. You know, and I feel like maybe less eloquently, I'd kind of like deduced, you know, some of the same principles, just in my own experience, which is like I think when you're scaling up, and this relates also to what we talked about before around like the early days of building a company you're like in the details, you're finding product market fit, you kind of have to be like, you know, pretty versatile, right? Like, you know, all these decisions from a technical standpoint to design, to even commercial, and what's the freemium model gonna be like, and how are we gonna market this product?

1:13:43What does the website look like? They're all very intertwined, right? You can't compartmentalize and then almost factory -produce each of these things separately. They're all intertwined, right? And you have a very small tight -knit team that's a tight -knit team that's thinking full -stack about all of this combined. And obviously, that's the only way, in my opinion, to create that magical product market fit in the first place. And then I think guys who scale up, the default guidance that you often get from operational experts and larger scale company investors is like, OK, you got to industrialize the process of all of this stuff, right?

1:14:27It's kind of going from a bespoke artisanal, like one person made an entire item of clothing to like we got to like factory produce this thing, right? And you know what that means in a organizational context is like you then create these different fiefdoms and you hire all these execs and like, you know each exec kind of like just manages their own swim lane and there's relatively looser coupling between all of those different groups, right? So that you got sales, kind of executing on its own thing, marketing is executing on its own thing, products executing on its own thing, rather and able within product, there's different product groups in the surface areas that are each kind of executing on their own thing.

1:15:04And using the factory metaphor, there's an argument that that's actually kind of an efficient way to scale up production for each of these different swindlings. Each one can operate in a more autonomous and purely scale up focus. Wait, how do we produce more of this thing? If the thing happens to be within one product group and proving search, that's our main focus. We're just gonna go and ship, ship, ship, more stuff to improve search. And it's not completely crazy. Like why people give this advice. But I think what you lose is the magical integrative value of holistic thinking, right? And making the bigger picture bets, right?

1:15:48And I think Brian talked a lot about this on his episode with you, which is like, look, like in a company that is really serious about product. First of all, the CEO has to play a CPO role. You have to care about the product. Ultimately, the product is the thing. You can't just coast on scaling up, go to market around the product forever. You've got to keep innovating in the product. By the way, the best way to innovate on the product is not incrementally split over all these different little service areas, but actually to have a bigger, more step -function vision of how this product needs to make a leap, right?

1:16:26Or what's the next big, like, you know, kind of either act of the product or new capability of the product or reinvention of the product, right? And so, like I think if you really care about doing that from a product execution standpoint and almost like refinding new product market fit on a regular basis, like I think it necessitates a completely different operating and leadership model throughout the organization. All of the stuff we just talked about in terms of how to operate in the AI need of era, I think it's actually exactly the same as how you need to operate in this constant product market refinding of fit.

1:17:02So, I could not agree more with that concept of, you got to think ambitiously and move the organization holistically toward these bigger outcomes, but also ship and learn and experiment a lot more in this era. And then maybe the meta learning I had from all of the above, is that like, the specific advice obviously was like, okay, go scale up in this way or go hire these types of people, experience operators, Sarah. Now obviously there's some truth to that, right? Like people giving this advice are not incompetent. They had some reason for getting it and in certain contexts, that is the right thing to do.

1:17:40But I think like my meta learning is, because it's not enough to just trust the recommendation. Here's the action you should take from a lot of people, because everybody has different priors, and it's almost like we're all our own LLams, right? We all have different training from a different corpus of data informed by our own experiences, and maybe you're trained on the service now or the kind of a Oracle training corpus, right? And this person's trained on the Facebook corpus, and I'm trained on the air table one. And I think what I've tried to do more and more is not to just ignore advice from smart people.

1:18:21Obviously, that's not the right answer. But to take their, it's almost like in an LLM, you can now with a reason amount to actually inspect the chain of thought, right? And see how it's thinking, why did it come up with this answer? And to me, that chain of thought, why did you recommend this? is actually more informative than the actual, just do this recommendation. So the answer might be like, hey, at So -and -So Company, this is how we eliminated the PM role entirely, for Brian at Airbnb, made sense, we're no longer having PMs in their traditional form. Now we have program managers and product marketers, but more than the actual decision, because I don't think it's a one size fits all, everybody should do the same.

1:19:05Why did you do that? right? And the why actually was very informative and then be able to take that and say like, okay, like, how would I apply that and maybe it yields a different outcome? But the reasoning actually is very informative. It's interesting how this idea found our mode is not so different from this ICCO trend that you're following and it's it's yeah yeah yeah it's like being in the weeds being in the details trying things yourself not delegating to execs. Yeah. You know and like um I think anything taking to an extreme can be problematic, right? So like there is a world where like, you know, you are so in the details and in every detail that you're basically just micromanaging and you're kind of creating like, you know, the euphemism for that.

1:19:51And that's not really what founder mode is about, right? Like that's not like the Brian Concentral founder mode is like micromanage everything and like not trust anyone. But I think it's more about like finding that right balance of being unabashed about caring about the details that do matter and where the tying together of details across different groups or departments actually is the only way to yield a non incremental outcome because otherwise each person is just optimizing within their own domain, right? But you'll never get to the global maximum or the global breakthrough. And I think the really cool thing about CEOs as I see in frankly any leader you're playing more of an icy roll being in the details is, I think for the right type of person, it's actually more fun that way, right?

1:20:38To be honest, for me, the times where I felt most disintermediated from what I felt was the substance of this company was when I thought that I was almost forcing myself to step away from the details, because I thought that's what at scale CEO was supposed to do, right? I mean, there's some famous CEOs who have talked about the less decisions I can make, the better. The less details I'm exposed to, the better. I just want to inspect at the top most layer how this business is running. And if everything underneath it is going smoothly, then I'm able to do that, and everything looks good. And I just think that's a maybe again, it works in a certain type of very mature type of business.

1:21:25Even then, though, I can't imagine that like at a CPG company like Iprocure Gamble, you wouldn't want to have a CEO who still actually goes and tastes the soup and tries the products and sees literally the details of what the new product innovation pipeline looks like as well as how it's being experienced on the shelves and so on. So I don't know, I guess I'm just more and more skeptical that that hands off pure delegation and process management role ever works as a CEO. Like maybe you just like, you go through a long enough period of like where the business is coasting that like nobody notices.

1:22:03But I gotta say like for me, like it's just much more invigorating to get to play that role. And I think for the types of operators and leaders that I most admire, like that's what makes the job interesting. Like they don't wanna have like a automated away you kind of role as a leader. If you could go back in time and whisper something in a decade ago, how is it here that would have saved you a lot of pain and suffering for the last decade, what would that be? Don't stop away from the details that both you love. First of all, if your passion is building product and product design, even if it feels like at times the company needs to do all this other stuff, scale up, go to market and operations and just have a large people organization that itself creates a lot of need to do things and manage.

1:23:01There becomes a new job invented just to manage a larger group of people. And obviously, you're going to have to do some of that. You can't just completely astute all your responsibility as an outscale CEO. So, but don't lose the essence of the thing that you love doing and that really made this product happen and give this company as many companies that we're founded on a magical product market finding insight, don't step too far away from that. Always make sure that is still your number one, even if other stuff has to also add to your plate. I think people don't talk enough about this. How someone starts a company, that's an idea they have they're excited about.

1:23:50It takes off and then you're stuck on that for a long time and then even if things are pushed into direction, you're not as excited about. And so this point about just remembering what you actually love about it and coming back to that, is so important because that's the only way to keep doing this for a long time. I think that's so true. And to me, that's why there's always been a difference between entrepreneurs who love the act of building a product or the business too versus those who saw a purely business or financial opportunity that they felt like they couldn't pass up, exploiting or going after.

1:24:29Look, no knock on people who are more the latter and there's entire industries where it's all just about alpha generation. You can go into private equity business and so on. and it's just purely, it's rationally about, how do I find the alpha? And I think that the, some of the best product central companies, at least in my opinion, are like run by those people who actually just love the product, right? I think you get a feel for that from some of the AI companies like Sam, I think genuinely just loves working on AI, right? Like if he could spend 100 % of his time on just being close to the AI and the research, which I mean he won and he's even said as much, right?

1:25:10But ranging to the Brian's with Airbnb, it's pretty clear that people like this are not motivated. Airbnb was not founded because like, oh my God, we want to make a lot of money off this arbitrage opportunity against hotels. They just needed to pay their rent. Yeah, well that, and I think they loved the product. And I think they also loved the way in which they built the product. Like the design -centric nature of that product and company and culture, are like, you know, and that's what gives you like the continued joy of working on, you know, what could be the same company for a very long time.

1:25:44How is there anything else that you wanted to touch on or leave listeners with before we get to our very exciting lightning round? I just want to reiterate, you know, especially for listeners here who are in, you know, an EEP or D role and especially in the P role, like, you know, I really do believe that this This is not a either have or you duck in terms of the skill set needed to be relevant any I needed. But I do think it's a call to action to go and bolster your skill sets where they may be less refined right now. I really believe everyone could learn how to be a self -reinjuer if they wanted to.

1:26:25Now, like obviously, some people just as with like writers are never gonna be like, you know, a published author, right? Or like, you know, the, the handing way, right? But like, everyone can gain a good enough proficiency of software engineering if they really wanted to. You could take that bootcamp, you could do like some like, you know, coding, you know, kind of extra places on all the side, et cetera. And the point there is that like, you know, sometimes I think we treat these disciplines like, hard, hard skills that if you're not already halfway into your career and you're not already an engineer, if you're not already a designer, okay, well you can never be one.

1:27:01And I just think our brains are malleable and there's a lot of great curriculum out there to learn. And a lot of it, like I said, just comes out to also trial and error and building projects, maybe nights and weekends projects, even to learn this stuff. but like everyone can learn how to be a versatile, you know, kind of unicorn, like product engineer, designer hybrid in the AI and the only thing stopping you is like just going out and doing it. That is a really empowering way to end it and I just to double down on that. It's never been easier to learn these things. Like there are super intelligences that you can talk to that do a lot like as their building can help you under learn.

1:27:43I mean, like I literally, I mean, I go into to chat to you sometimes, and I ask it, just like, hey, how would you build this app? I'm just curious. I'm like, how would you build Manus, like the agent open at an agent? Literally, how would you build it? You can ask questions, and it's like having an amazing brilliant software architect, software engineer, product manager, designer, expert, tutor, that you can literally, there's no dumb question. They have infinite patience. They're literally on and awake 24 -7. and it is the most incredible time to learn this stuff to your point. And then of course, the interactive tools to go and actually build stuff, like anyone can download cursor and just start asking composer to generate some code for you.

1:28:27And then looking at the code and trying to figure out what it does. And to your point, when I think back to the earliest era, the eye experience of building apps, first I learned C++, Plus that I learned PHP and JavaScript and even building JavaScript, single page apps in the early days, like, oh, wait, through 2010. It was a dark, dark art. I mean, there were some, you just had to go and learn some of these things. There wasn't great tutorial for it. You had to reverse engineer certain things. There were just weird things. If you wanted rounded corners in your UI, you literally took Photoshop, opened it up, created a rounded corner and pixels.

1:29:09and then you can get that pixel up into an image that you dropped out to the page. That is exactly the right position to be at the edge of a box. Like crazy stuff, right? I mean, everything was so much more arcane at the time. And now it feels so much more fluid and accessible and the gap between the arcane tech that you have to wade through to build something has just been minimized so much. It's like the effort and abstraction between you and the magical, delightful, actual building of the thing that you want has been so minimize. So, it's never been a more exciting time to be a builder. You remember spacer .gif?

1:29:50Like to create like that line stuff, you just, I remember, invisible one pixel thing that you just stick in places. Yeah, no, I don't know. Oh my God. What a time to be alive. How are you with that? We've reached our very exciting lightning round. I've got five questions for you. Are you ready? Yes. Here we go. What are two or three books you find yourself are committing most to other people? You know, I've been trying to read fiction more partly because I think it's just a really nice mental reset. I will say like three -body problem like for anyone who hasn't read it. It's a mind -extending book.

1:30:21I like sci -fi and fiction that kind of opens your brain. So, there's my cheat card, but it's a three -book series. Those are three great books. I love that series and my tip there is it gets good. One and a half books in is my tips. So just keep reading. That's where it's like, okay. I like even the first one. Okay. But I do like it. I felt like it was like inception where every book, every subsequent book was like you dropped into another, like you, you, you accepted into like another layer. Right. Awesome. Okay. What's a favorite recent movie or TV show? You've really enjoyed. TV show, I just started watching the studio.

1:31:00It's like the Seth Rogen, Rogan, Rogan. Yeah, so stressful. Yeah, it's very stressful. And, you know, I just kind of, I mean, Silicon Valley was like too close to home when it came out. So, like, I watched it, but it was like just cringey. The studio is going to fun to watch because it's a little bit of that inside baseball of Hollywood. And yet, like, I'm not in Hollywood, so it's like entertaining to watch. and it's just, you know, it's a, I thought smart and funny show and because I split time between Elliot and Seth, like, I also feel like it's, it's very real to me. I see a lot of the like literal characters out there in the world that it's characterizing.

1:31:42Do you have a favorite product you recently discovered they really love? Could be an app, could be gadget, could be a clothing? So, okay, so I'll give two, because I feel like I I have to say some kind of software product, right? I mean, I'm a really big fan of runway, the product and the company. I just think like, every new model they come out with, they just came out with a new one, just I think like two days ago, that gives even more controls and refinement on, like creating exactly the video scene that you want. And so, I think just the photo realism in what you can generate now. and they also built this cool demo thing that's an immersive world generator I mentioned before.

1:32:24I think it's just cool to see. I also like the Underdog story. I'm clearly like Google's gunning in this phase, has VO3 and so on. And as is opening I, but I love the Underdog story of this sub -hundred -person company still punching above their weight and building really awesome video experiences, right? So that's the stop for one. And then a very, very kind of nerdy real world answer on product is I kind of just recently got into like this whole cottage industry of artisanally produced, you know, basically clothing, you know, by like small scale, like Japanese manufacturers that use like literally like 100 year old looms to make clothes like the old fashioned way, like, you know, or the old fashioned industrial way, right?

1:33:13They have these loopwheeler machines and they spin that the cloth in a very slow case. So it's completely impractical from production scale standpoint. But I've gotten some of these T -shirts. And I just love the, I guess, in a world where it feels like everything is becoming so much faster moving. And even tech from five years ago is obsolete. like I love a little bit of the throwback to like, you know, old things sometimes can be even more cherishable in this new era, right? So like, maybe that makes me a hipster, but like I love the, you know, the vintage, the retro increasingly these days.

1:33:56I feel like anything that starts with artisanal small batch Japanese is going to be really good stuff. Is there is there a brand you want to share that is that or is it like you want to keep it? Yeah, actually so self edge, which actually is a storefront, like the main storefront is on Valencia Street in SF. They carry a lot of these items, like that's kind of their whole M .O. and they have like jeans and like t -shirts. So I've gotten a lot of, I mean they basically curate a really good selection of different actual makers. Like one of them is called Studio Dardazon. Another one's called, actually it's cool.

1:34:28There's this company called, I think the Umbraille company is actually just Toyo, T -O -Y -O manufacturing, which sounds like it's a big, like, you know, kind of, like, large scale conglomerate, but it's anything but it's like a really small scale Japanese, you know, kind of, like, vintage manufacturer of clothing, and, but they have a few sub -brands. They actually bought the rights to this, like, American Coast War brand. That was kind of like Haynes, like, one of the, like, big, like, four or five, like, you know, kind of, uh, menswear, like, you know, kind of undershirts and athletic wear brands called White's Bill.

1:35:06I don't know where the name came from, but it's a bunch of basic clothing, like T -shirts, etc. And this Japanese indie company, McSleepbot, the defunct, basically name. And now is reproducing clothes almost made to the exact shape and stack. And even with the exact recreation of the graphic packaging on these teas, but like, you know, today, right? So I just think there's something really funny and ironic about like, you know, they've taken like an American postwar aesthetic and literal brand, but like it's actually like a indie, a small scale Japanese manufacturing approach to to to make it as close.

1:35:50I feel like we just tapped into what could be a whole other podcast conversation about like clothing and craftsmanship, but I'm gonna pull us out of that. So the next hot spot is franchise. Or just how we in Lanyard talking about clothing. Okay, two more questions. You have a life motto that you often find useful in worker and life share with friends or family. I stumbled on this guy, Paul Conti, who I think is an MD, but also like a psychologist, and he has a book, but also he did this long form podcast with Andrew Hooperman. And he actually ends up talking a lot about just how to think about your life outlook and your framework for thinking about life, but grounded in a scientific and neurological and cognitive science -based And I found one particular point really, really powerful.

1:36:53It's with me, which is like, if you live your life in a way that's foundationally built around humility and gratitude, right? And look, everybody has different circumstances. Like I think I fully own that. Even though I didn't come from money, like my family was very, very financially modest, like growing up. I still had incredible resources and opportunities is, you know, afforded to me, even just by virtue of growing up in the U .S., where I'd be warring up in the U .S., like, you know, but also like having access to a computer and the internet and like even all the free resources I could then access and learn about from there.

1:37:32But, you know, like, I still feel like, you know, whatever you have or don't have to start with, like, if you kind of approach the world and, you know, kind of the future with a spirit of humility and gratitude rather than I guess the opposite of that. You know, it just, I think I felt like it makes, like it kind of like becomes a self -fulfilling prophecy, right? Like, you're open -minded, you're kind of grateful, and then like more opportunities actually come your way, right? And maybe it's because of the energy you're putting out into the world and, you know, and other people and like you're kind of attracting, like, you know, good opportunities and good people and good things.

1:38:11But I think there's a lot of other parts of his framework, but the one that is easiest to remember is just like, how do I approach each day? Even if I'm going through a tough moment, and I mean, I have to fire somebody today, or maybe I got disappointed because we lost a customer deal or something broke or whatever. But to still try to look at the entire situation from overall feeling of humility and gratitude, I think just really does shift your like, it stills over into everything else for that day and maybe even for the whole lifetime. That super resonates that is really powerful advice that's hard to internalize but it important.

1:38:56Yeah, it easily said hard to practice. here. Where can folks find you? What should they know about air table and how can listeners be useful to you? Okay. So I am on Twitter, howeytale, I don't post that much, but I am a lurker. So I listen and watch and you go as DM me there. You can also email me directly howeyatairtable .com anytime you can have ideas, feedback, et cetera. You know, on air table, like just go try it. Like the whole point is we want to make this an experiential product, right? Like, you know, that's why we're where we're really leaning into the PLG routes. We talked about the homepage literally says, just start building right now.

1:39:34What do you wanna build? Go, it starts building. And so use the product, give me feedback. And you know, if you have ideas of your own and you wanna rip on them, I love, because my passion is thinking of a product and product UX, especially in the AI era, if you're working on or thinking of something interesting in that space. And even if it's just purely to rip on a concept, that's something I enjoy doing. and maybe I get to learn and sharpen my own skill set from. So feel free to reach out. And yeah, I mean, tell your friends and family to try our people as well. Like that's the, I mean thing.

1:40:07Sounds like you're looking for people to nerds night view. And yes. Howie, thank you so much for being here. Awesome. Thank you, Lenny. 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'sPodcast .com. See you in the next episode!