Lenny Rachitsky(@lennysan)

Still processing from yesterday's event (one of the most meaningful days of my life)— more to come—b...

Lenny Rachitsky (@lennysan) — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 18:24:21 GMT

Still processing from yesterday's event (one of the most meaningful days of my life)— more to come—but a few quick things for now:

1. Thank you to everyone who came. You are what made it special.

2. There's so much need for IRL community. I've rarely felt this kind of pull for anything I've done. Wow.

3. All of the talks will be posted to my YT channel in the coming weeks. Get excited.

4. An unbelievable thank-you to the @Stripe team for helping me put this event on. It takes something special to create an event with 1,000+ PMs that has such great vibes. If you think they're great at payments infra, they might be even better at design and event production. High talent density over there. It's no coincidence that I've had more people from Stripe on my podcast than any other company. Thank you, Stripe.

(A few photos from the event, more to come.)

💬31🔄5❤️202👀9375📊45

❤️

Lenny Rachitsky (@lennysan) — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 02:25:35 GMT

❤️

Bruno Teixeira 🇵🇹🇪🇺@bmfteixeira

And that’s a wrap of @lennysan’ summit.

What a fantastic experience. I feel like I’m walking of the future and going back to the present but immensely pilled and excited to BUILD. Let’s go!

And to all speakers, sponsors, and @lennysan - thank you! Everything was great!

💬7🔄0❤️38👀12249📊7

Behind the scenes with Summit guitar guy

Lenny Rachitsky (@lennysan) — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 23:38:25 GMT

Behind the scenes with Summit guitar guy

Your browser does not support the video tag.

💬17🔄0❤️64👀13159📊19

Cute

Lenny Rachitsky (@lennysan) — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 23:37:41 GMT

Cute

💬1🔄0❤️51👀13100📊6

Standing room only for Mike Krieger & Ami Vora

Lenny Rachitsky (@lennysan) — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 20:57:10 GMT

Standing room only for Mike Krieger & Ami Vora

💬6🔄5❤️165👀21970📊20

Behind the scenes vibes @danshipper @clairevo

Lenny Rachitsky (@lennysan) — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 20:08:42 GMT

Behind the scenes vibes @danshipper@clairevo

💬13🔄4❤️225👀18432📊32

👀

Lenny Rachitsky (@lennysan) — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 21:33:07 GMT

👀

💬14🔄5❤️222👀14542📊31

👀

Lenny Rachitsky (@lennysan) — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 19:51:36 GMT

👀

💬18🔄2❤️175👀14293📊30

Love this framework from @romanugarte_: Instead of working backwards from "Our product now has..." ...

Lenny Rachitsky (@lennysan) — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 17:42:44 GMT

Love this framework from @romanugarte_:

Instead of working backwards from "Our product now has..."

Optimize for "Our product can now..."

Your browser does not support the video tag.

Lenny Rachitsky@lennysan

Grok @Bot is the hottest new AI product in the world right now. I'm absolutely hooked.

It all started a few months ago as a tiny team holed up in a separate part of the office, building from scratch.

Four weeks after the first line of code, the whole company was obsessed. Three weeks later, it launched to the world. Less than a month in, millions of Grok Bots are already helping people get work done.

Roman Ugarte (@romanugarte_) incubated, launched, and now leads product for Grok Bot. This is the first time he's told the story:
🔸 Why they started fresh instead of building it into Cursor
🔸 The two non-obvious bets that made it such a success
🔸 What they learned from manually onboarding the first 200–300 users
🔸 Why they spent the weeks before launch *unshipping* features
🔸 The first prompt to try when you open it

Watch the full episode right here on X 👇

Your browser does not support the video tag.

💬15🔄8❤️67👀14712📊20

"An AI that does 100% of the job feels categorically different from one that gets you 90% there."

Lenny Rachitsky (@lennysan) — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 17:03:49 GMT

"An AI that does 100% of the job feels categorically different from one that gets you 90% there."

Your browser does not support the video tag.

Lenny Rachitsky@lennysan

Grok @Bot is the hottest new AI product in the world right now. I'm absolutely hooked.

It all started a few months ago as a tiny team holed up in a separate part of the office, building from scratch.

Four weeks after the first line of code, the whole company was obsessed. Three weeks later, it launched to the world. Less than a month in, millions of Grok Bots are already helping people get work done.

Roman Ugarte (@romanugarte_) incubated, launched, and now leads product for Grok Bot. This is the first time he's told the story:
🔸 Why they started fresh instead of building it into Cursor
🔸 The two non-obvious bets that made it such a success
🔸 What they learned from manually onboarding the first 200–300 users
🔸 Why they spent the weeks before launch *unshipping* features
🔸 The first prompt to try when you open it

Watch the full episode right here on X 👇

Your browser does not support the video tag.

💬15🔄4❤️59👀14221📊16

I asked Grok Bot product lead @romanugarte_ why they built a new stand-alone app vs. building it int...

Lenny Rachitsky (@lennysan) — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 15:54:21 GMT

I asked Grok Bot product lead @romanugarte_ why they built a new stand-alone app vs. building it into Cursor 

"It was not obvious at all. We saw what some of our competitors doing this, adding new tabs for each new form factor. People can feel that this was not a single, consistent vision of the way that work should work. It's kind of a shipping your org chart style thing that users are reacting negatively to. And so we decided, let's just start completely from scratch."

Your browser does not support the video tag.

Lenny Rachitsky@lennysan

Grok @Bot is the hottest new AI product in the world right now. I'm absolutely hooked.

It all started a few months ago as a tiny team holed up in a separate part of the office, building from scratch.

Four weeks after the first line of code, the whole company was obsessed. Three weeks later, it launched to the world. Less than a month in, millions of Grok Bots are already helping people get work done.

Roman Ugarte (@romanugarte_) incubated, launched, and now leads product for Grok Bot. This is the first time he's told the story:
🔸 Why they started fresh instead of building it into Cursor
🔸 The two non-obvious bets that made it such a success
🔸 What they learned from manually onboarding the first 200–300 users
🔸 Why they spent the weeks before launch *unshipping* features
🔸 The first prompt to try when you open it

Watch the full episode right here on X 👇

Your browser does not support the video tag.

💬11🔄1❤️57👀14106📊14

Lenny Rachitsky (@lennysan) — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 15:00:00 GMT

Your browser does not support the video tag.

💬3🔄1❤️61👀14381📊9

"The scarce PM skill right now is elevating other people's ambition." — @tarstarr

Lenny Rachitsky (@lennysan) — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 23:21:58 GMT

"The scarce PM skill right now is elevating other people's ambition."  — @tarstarr

💬18🔄5❤️142👀15068📊34

@bot @romanugarte_ Listen to the episode here https://t.co/mSjUm339Rf

Lenny Rachitsky (@lennysan) — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 18:33:12 GMT

@bot@romanugarte_ Listen to the episode here youtube.com/watch?v=maSdsT…

💬0🔄0❤️13👀4327📊3

My biggest takeaways from Grok @Bot product lead @RomanUgarte_: 1. Two key early product decisions ...

Lenny Rachitsky (@lennysan) — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 18:32:53 GMT

My biggest takeaways from Grok @Bot product lead @RomanUgarte_:

Two key early product decisions made Grok Bot the success it has become. First, everything runs in the cloud. This means bots can be kicked off from a phone and run while the user sleeps. Second, each bot has access to its own computer. This allows it to operate on tools that have no API because they can simply use the computer the way a human would. 

“Unshipping” is a big opportunity in product right now. One of the most counterintuitive things the Grok Bot team did in the weeks between internal beta and public launch was remove features. They initially exposed internal model thinking, memory traces, and developer-style observability tools inside the product. They decided to cut all that out. Their mental model for the product is a colleague: you wouldn't ask a teammate for second-by-second updates on every button they're pressing, so the bot shouldn't either.

The decision to make it a separate app (vs. inside Cursor) was not at all obvious. The team had the option to build Grok Bot inside Cursor, the way some competitors added knowledge-work tabs to their existing coding surfaces. Roman says the decision not to do that gave them complete control over every pixel and allowed them to build around a single, coherent vision of how an AI assistant should feel. The alternative, he argues, is "shipping your org chart"— and users can feel it.

Grok Bot went from the first line of code to a viral internal beta in four weeks. The team moved into a separate part of the office, set up private Slack channels, and made dozens of micro-decisions every day without needing buy-in from the larger org. This allowed them to go from internal beta to global launch in 3 weeks.

Roman and his team onboarded 200 to 300 people personally. This was one of the highest-leverage investments they made. When something broke or confused a user, the team felt it and fixed it the next day. Beyond the product improvements, the onboarding surfaced non-obvious use cases the internal team would never have imagined. A coffee shop owner found through a friend of a friend became one of Grok Bot’s most active users and a rich source of Shopify-integration feedback.

The Grok Bot team is “colleague-pilled” (vs. AGI-pilled). When the Grok Bot team hits a product decision with good arguments on both sides, they use a test: how would you want a human teammate to behave in this exact situation? Roman says the answer is almost always unanimous and clarifying. This is how Grok Bot landed on hiding internal mechanics from users, on building automations through natural language rather than UI, and on the huddle-style voice experience they’re building toward.

Grok Bot’s GTM team became one of its most enthusiastic internal user groups. Sales work depends on tools that often lack reliable integrations. Giving the bot a computer meant it could interact with those products the same way employees do. The resulting feedback forced them to level up Grok Bot’s computer use: the mouse needed finer control to click a particular part of a Salesforce dashboard. The infrastructure team would fix that invisible capability and hear the next day that the whole workflow finally worked.

Moats are discovered, not engineered. Roman said that if Cursor had tried to work backward from a moat strategy, it would not have created the product or the outcome it did. What worked was an obsession with building something genuinely useful today, pulling future capabilities forward even when they required significant engineering to stabilize, and then deleting that scaffolding as the models improved. The distribution advantages and data advantages followed from that.

Innovating requires the cultural willingness to abandon sunk costs. Roman’s explanation for why competitors haven’t made the same cloud-first, bot-gets-its-own-computer bets isn’t that they missed the insight. It’s that they’re stuck in an existing paradigm with real sunk costs. Most companies can see where the market is going; fewer have the stomach to act on it when acting means deprecating their current product. The advantage of building something new is that you get to be right about the future without the weight of having been right about the past.

Roman's advice for new users: connect Slack and email, then ask Grok Bot to go through them and suggest five things it could take off your plate. When he did this himself, two of the five were things no previous AI tool could have done, and he spun off two bots to handle them on the spot.

Lenny Rachitsky@lennysan

Grok @Bot is the hottest new AI product in the world right now. I'm absolutely hooked.

It all started a few months ago as a tiny team holed up in a separate part of the office, building from scratch.

Four weeks after the first line of code, the whole company was obsessed. Three weeks later, it launched to the world. Less than a month in, millions of Grok Bots are already helping people get work done.

Roman Ugarte (@romanugarte_) incubated, launched, and now leads product for Grok Bot. This is the first time he's told the story:
🔸 Why they started fresh instead of building it into Cursor
🔸 The two non-obvious bets that made it such a success
🔸 What they learned from manually onboarding the first 200–300 users
🔸 Why they spent the weeks before launch *unshipping* features
🔸 The first prompt to try when you open it

Watch the full episode right here on X 👇

Your browser does not support the video tag.

💬36🔄26❤️319👀53712📊90

From the outside, Cursor shouldn't have worked. They compete against the most well-funded and faste...

Lenny Rachitsky (@lennysan) — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 17:00:32 GMT

From the outside, Cursor shouldn't have worked.

They compete against the most well-funded and fastest-growing companies of all time, and *sit on top* of those same competitors to power their product. WAT.

I asked @romanugarte_ (employee #15 at @cursor_ai) how Cursor pulled it off.

Roman's answer: They didn't focus on moats. They obsessed over building something useful today. 👇

Your browser does not support the video tag.

Lenny Rachitsky@lennysan

Grok @Bot is the hottest new AI product in the world right now. I'm absolutely hooked.

It all started a few months ago as a tiny team holed up in a separate part of the office, building from scratch.

Four weeks after the first line of code, the whole company was obsessed. Three weeks later, it launched to the world. Less than a month in, millions of Grok Bots are already helping people get work done.

Roman Ugarte (@romanugarte_) incubated, launched, and now leads product for Grok Bot. This is the first time he's told the story:
🔸 Why they started fresh instead of building it into Cursor
🔸 The two non-obvious bets that made it such a success
🔸 What they learned from manually onboarding the first 200–300 users
🔸 Why they spent the weeks before launch *unshipping* features
🔸 The first prompt to try when you open it

Watch the full episode right here on X 👇

Your browser does not support the video tag.

💬14🔄11❤️137👀19010📊26

@bot Also available on YouTube https://t.co/mSjUm339Rf

Lenny Rachitsky (@lennysan) — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 15:11:25 GMT

@bot Also available on YouTube youtube.com/watch?v=maSdsT…

💬0🔄0❤️17👀5411📊4

@bot @romanugarte_ And it's live! https://t.co/KreuohtYae

Lenny Rachitsky (@lennysan) — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 15:07:40 GMT

@bot@romanugarte_ And it's live!

x.com/lennysan/statu…

Lenny Rachitsky@lennysan

Grok @Bot is the hottest new AI product in the world right now. I'm absolutely hooked.

It all started a few months ago as a tiny team holed up in a separate part of the office, building from scratch.

Four weeks after the first line of code, the whole company was obsessed. Three weeks later, it launched to the world. Less than a month in, millions of Grok Bots are already helping people get work done.

Roman Ugarte (@romanugarte_) incubated, launched, and now leads product for Grok Bot. This is the first time he's told the story:
🔸 Why they started fresh instead of building it into Cursor
🔸 The two non-obvious bets that made it such a success
🔸 What they learned from manually onboarding the first 200–300 users
🔸 Why they spent the weeks before launch *unshipping* features
🔸 The first prompt to try when you open it

Watch the full episode right here on X 👇

Your browser does not support the video tag.

💬0🔄0❤️5👀3236📊1

Thank you to our wonderful sponsors @WorkOS and @Mercury for supporting the podcast: 🏆 @WorkOS — Ma...

Lenny Rachitsky (@lennysan) — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 15:06:33 GMT

Thank you to our wonderful sponsors @WorkOS and @Mercury for supporting the podcast:
🏆 @WorkOS — Make your app Enterprise Ready, with SSO, SCIM, RBAC, and more:workos.com/lennyH
🏆 @Mercury — Radically different banking, now with Commandmercury.comwR

Also available on:
• Spotifyopen.spotify.com/episode/1VWSuR…Z7
• Applepodcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how…jn

💬0🔄2❤️13👀3745📊4

Grok @Bot is the hottest new AI product in the world right now. I'm absolutely hooked. It all start...

Lenny Rachitsky (@lennysan) — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 15:06:32 GMT

Grok @Bot is the hottest new AI product in the world right now. I'm absolutely hooked.

It all started a few months ago as a tiny team holed up in a separate part of the office, building from scratch.

Four weeks after the first line of code, the whole company was obsessed. Three weeks later, it launched to the world. Less than a month in, millions of Grok Bots are already helping people get work done.

Roman Ugarte (@romanugarte_) incubated, launched, and now leads product for Grok Bot. This is the first time he's told the story:
🔸 Why they started fresh instead of building it into Cursor
🔸 The two non-obvious bets that made it such a success
🔸 What they learned from manually onboarding the first 200–300 users
🔸 Why they spent the weeks before launch *unshipping* features
🔸 The first prompt to try when you open it

Watch the full episode right here on X 👇

Your browser does not support the video tag.

💬84🔄73❤️829👀542248📊293

Wild stuff happening

Lenny Rachitsky (@lennysan) — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 00:50:28 GMT

Wild stuff happening

Alex Komoroske@komorama

I just published my weekly reflections: docs.google.com/document/d/1xR…
Automatic schelling points. Auto-hive-minds. Multiplayer finds a way. Hive temperature.  Seatbelts on a motorcycle. Concreteness vs magnitude.  Self-evident coordination. Complexification factor. Concentrated gains vs diffuse losses. Minum viable ecosystem threshold. The Uni-Context. Zero-sum event horizon. Worldview refactoring. Mentoring as reflection.

💬14🔄24❤️405👀77980📊96

So cool to see so many great community events spring up around the Summit

Lenny Rachitsky (@lennysan) — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 22:30:00 GMT

So cool to see so many great community events spring up around the Summit

💬5🔄0❤️64👀14366📊11

@bot @romanugarte_ You'll find it here https://t.co/EHsNABXzkD

Lenny Rachitsky (@lennysan) — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 19:34:22 GMT

@bot@romanugarte_ You'll find it here youtube.com/c/LennysPodcast

💬2🔄0❤️10👀5764📊3

Dropping tomorrow: Exclusive interview with Grok @Bot product lead @romanugarte_ on how it all start...

Lenny Rachitsky (@lennysan) — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 19:03:25 GMT

Dropping tomorrow: Exclusive interview with Grok @Bot product lead @romanugarte_ on how it all started, and where it's all going

💬36🔄32❤️785👀47909📊133

.@illscience: "Moats are discovered, not designed."

Lenny Rachitsky (@lennysan) — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 17:11:09 GMT

.@illscience: "Moats are discovered, not designed."

Your browser does not support the video tag.

Lenny Rachitsky@lennysan

The "permanent underclass" is a dark fantasy Silicon Valley keeps telling itself. 

@illscience (GP at @a16z) points out that by almost every measure, things have never been better, and the job-loss story hasn’t played out as people thought. Radiologists have been “cooked” for 20 years and demand keeps rising. Open engineering roles are at all-time highs. And unlike the mobile era’s winner-take-all markets, every layer of the AI stack has ~20 strong competitors.

We discuss:
🔸 Why you don’t need to be chronically online to keep up
🔸 The "/loop make me happier" opportunity in AI
🔸 Why every company is becoming a series of loops
🔸 Why moats are discovered, not designed
🔸 What's the Birkin bag version of your product?

Listen nyoutube.com/watch?v=LdIyXi…8pfsoQ

💬14🔄10❤️108👀27731📊26

Making headlines @illscience

Lenny Rachitsky (@lennysan) — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 16:20:45 GMT

Making headlines @illscience

Lenny Rachitsky@lennysan

The "permanent underclass" is a dark fantasy Silicon Valley keeps telling itself. 

@illscience (GP at @a16z) points out that by almost every measure, things have never been better, and the job-loss story hasn’t played out as people thought. Radiologists have been “cooked” for 20 years and demand keeps rising. Open engineering roles are at all-time highs. And unlike the mobile era’s winner-take-all markets, every layer of the AI stack has ~20 strong competitors.

We discuss:
🔸 Why you don’t need to be chronically online to keep up
🔸 The "/loop make me happier" opportunity in AI
🔸 Why every company is becoming a series of loops
🔸 Why moats are discovered, not designed
🔸 What's the Birkin bag version of your product?

Listen nyoutube.com/watch?v=LdIyXi…8pfsoQ

💬3🔄2❤️46👀17048📊8

My biggest takeaways from @illscience: 1. Company building will now be creating a series of loops. ...

Lenny Rachitsky (@lennysan) — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 14:19:10 GMT

My biggest takeaways from @illscience:

Company building will now be creating a series of loops. A coding loop turns a bug report into a fix and a low-risk production release in five minutes. Anish expects similar loops to spread from individuals to functions, business units, and eventually large parts of a company—from growth experiments to sales demos to legal and support. The key is to figure out what the agent doesn’t know and give it that context so it can complete the loop.

Moats are discovered, not designed. Anish uses Cursor as an example: it began as a high-engagement DAU product, then captured reasoning traces and trained its own models over time. A founder does not need a fully formed moat story on day one if the product has momentum, craft, and growing engagement. The classic moats—like network effects, scale advantages, brand, and proprietary data—still matter, but the small product decisions that create them often become visible only after the product is in the world.

We appear to be on the slow takeoff timeline. The case for fast takeoff always follows the same structure: everything up until now is OK, then something no one can articulate happens, then runaway acceleration. Anish doesn’t buy it. Model progress is real and faster than ever, but most problems aren’t intelligence-bound. A data center of PhDs doesn’t exponentially improve pizza supply chains.

The “permanent underclass” fears are a Silicon Valley dark fantasy. By almost every empirical measure, things have never been more distributed or opportunity-rich. Job postings for radiologists and programmers are at historic highs, despite years of “they’re cooked” predictions. And within the AI stack itself, rather than one winner-take-all platform, there are 20 credible players at every layer.

The biggest opportunity in consumer AI right now is “/loop make me happier” (not “/loop make me more productive”). Most people want to spend time, not save it. The biggest products in the world are entertainment and social, not productivity tools. Anish sees a spiritual hunger, particularly outside major urban centers where cultural institutions have thinned out. The opportunity: How do we feel more connected, more loved? How do we have fun? “We built a technology that extends our intellect and nothing to extend our soul.”

Three things have held consumer AI back, and all three are now improving. First, model costs were too high for free-to-use consumer products. Second, chat is a high-agency interface that works for Elon and Sam but not for the average consumer, who needs something between chat and TikTok. Third, the technology has been aimed almost entirely at productivity rather than connection and entertainment. The consumer moment is coming; Anish puts us at iPhone 2010, pre-Airbnb, pre-WhatsApp, pre-Uber.

Humans will remain critical for identifying the next opportunity. Agents are excellent at climbing to a local maximum, but then they plateau. They aren’t great at picking which hill to climb next. That’s where humans come in. Anish illustrates this with a chart he uses in conversations: agents hill-climb, then a human steps in to set the direction for the next climb, and the cycle repeats.

The most important attribute for teams is now ambition. Three years ago, Anish and his colleagues would pass on companies that seemed too crazy or complex. Today the opposite is true: an idea that’s too small isn’t worth engaging with. The firm’s internal posture with every founder: “We’re here to help you build the strongest form of your vision.”

There’s a big opportunity in creating very expensive consumer software. The old wisdom was that consumer products have to be free. Anish is taking the opposite position—that consumer discretionary spend is entirely up for grabs, and price is a measure of product-market fit. His product exercise for founders: what would the Birkin bag version of your product, at $1,000 or $10,000 a month, have to do to justify that price?

Become a model sommelier. Models are not interchangeable; Anish experiences different models as suited to different kinds of work. His way to learn their shape is to build something with every release, ideally using one or two low-stakes projects as a recurring test bed. His minimum heuristic is to ship once a week.

Lenny Rachitsky@lennysan

The "permanent underclass" is a dark fantasy Silicon Valley keeps telling itself. 

@illscience (GP at @a16z) points out that by almost every measure, things have never been better, and the job-loss story hasn’t played out as people thought. Radiologists have been “cooked” for 20 years and demand keeps rising. Open engineering roles are at all-time highs. And unlike the mobile era’s winner-take-all markets, every layer of the AI stack has ~20 strong competitors.

We discuss:
🔸 Why you don’t need to be chronically online to keep up
🔸 The "/loop make me happier" opportunity in AI
🔸 Why every company is becoming a series of loops
🔸 Why moats are discovered, not designed
🔸 What's the Birkin bag version of your product?

Listen nyoutube.com/watch?v=LdIyXi…8pfsoQ

💬37🔄15❤️196👀30999📊70

Amazing gift @sriramkri 🤣🙏

Lenny Rachitsky (@lennysan) — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 22:10:00 GMT

Amazing gift @sriramkri 🤣🙏

Lenny Rachitsky@lennysan

I f***ing finished it

💬22🔄1❤️192👀27805📊30

The people love what you've got to say @illscience

Lenny Rachitsky (@lennysan) — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 20:04:54 GMT

The people love what you've got to say @illscience

Lenny Rachitsky@lennysan

The "permanent underclass" is a dark fantasy Silicon Valley keeps telling itself. 

@illscience (GP at @a16z) points out that by almost every measure, things have never been better, and the job-loss story hasn’t played out as people thought. Radiologists have been “cooked” for 20 years and demand keeps rising. Open engineering roles are at all-time highs. And unlike the mobile era’s winner-take-all markets, every layer of the AI stack has ~20 strong competitors.

We discuss:
🔸 Why you don’t need to be chronically online to keep up
🔸 The "/loop make me happier" opportunity in AI
🔸 Why every company is becoming a series of loops
🔸 Why moats are discovered, not designed
🔸 What's the Birkin bag version of your product?

Listen nyoutube.com/watch?v=LdIyXi…8pfsoQ

💬5🔄5❤️81👀19487📊13

.@illscience: "Company building will now be creating a series of loops"

Lenny Rachitsky (@lennysan) — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 17:01:30 GMT

.@illscience: "Company building will now be creating a series of loops"

Your browser does not support the video tag.

Lenny Rachitsky@lennysan

The "permanent underclass" is a dark fantasy Silicon Valley keeps telling itself. 

@illscience (GP at @a16z) points out that by almost every measure, things have never been better, and the job-loss story hasn’t played out as people thought. Radiologists have been “cooked” for 20 years and demand keeps rising. Open engineering roles are at all-time highs. And unlike the mobile era’s winner-take-all markets, every layer of the AI stack has ~20 strong competitors.

We discuss:
🔸 Why you don’t need to be chronically online to keep up
🔸 The "/loop make me happier" opportunity in AI
🔸 Why every company is becoming a series of loops
🔸 Why moats are discovered, not designed
🔸 What's the Birkin bag version of your product?

Listen nyoutube.com/watch?v=LdIyXi…8pfsoQ

💬7🔄13❤️143👀22729📊28

"We built a technology that extends our intellect, but nothing to extend our soul."

Lenny Rachitsky (@lennysan) — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 15:57:10 GMT

"We built a technology that extends our intellect, but nothing to extend our soul."

Your browser does not support the video tag.

Lenny Rachitsky@lennysan

The "permanent underclass" is a dark fantasy Silicon Valley keeps telling itself. 

@illscience (GP at @a16z) points out that by almost every measure, things have never been better, and the job-loss story hasn’t played out as people thought. Radiologists have been “cooked” for 20 years and demand keeps rising. Open engineering roles are at all-time highs. And unlike the mobile era’s winner-take-all markets, every layer of the AI stack has ~20 strong competitors.

We discuss:
🔸 Why you don’t need to be chronically online to keep up
🔸 The "/loop make me happier" opportunity in AI
🔸 Why every company is becoming a series of loops
🔸 Why moats are discovered, not designed
🔸 What's the Birkin bag version of your product?

Listen nyoutube.com/watch?v=LdIyXi…8pfsoQ

💬16🔄8❤️75👀21332📊23

Thank you to our wonderful sponsors @WorkOS and @Mercury for supporting the podcast: 🏆 @WorkOS — Ma...

Lenny Rachitsky (@lennysan) — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 15:14:20 GMT

Thank you to our wonderful sponsors @WorkOS and @Mercury for supporting the podcast:
🏆 @WorkOS — Make your app Enterprise Ready, with SSO, SCIM, RBAC, and more:workos.com/lennyH
🏆 @Mercury — Radically different banking, now with Commandmercury.comwR

Also available on:
• Spotifyopen.spotify.com/episode/5hwKI9…bd
• Applepodcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/why…6x

💬0🔄1❤️5👀4762📊1

The "permanent underclass" is a dark fantasy Silicon Valley keeps telling itself. @illscience (GP ...

Lenny Rachitsky (@lennysan) — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 15:14:19 GMT

The "permanent underclass" is a dark fantasy Silicon Valley keeps telling itself. 

@illscience (GP at @a16z) points out that by almost every measure, things have never been better, and the job-loss story hasn’t played out as people thought. Radiologists have been “cooked” for 20 years and demand keeps rising. Open engineering roles are at all-time highs. And unlike the mobile era’s winner-take-all markets, every layer of the AI stack has ~20 strong competitors.

We discuss:
🔸 Why you don’t need to be chronically online to keep up
🔸 The "/loop make me happier" opportunity in AI
🔸 Why every company is becoming a series of loops
🔸 Why moats are discovered, not designed
🔸 What's the Birkin bag version of your product?

Listen nyoutube.com/watch?v=LdIyXi…8pfsoQ

💬37🔄18❤️220👀409415📊89

Folks coming to the Summit: make sure to register for the workshops and roundtables you're most exci...

Lenny Rachitsky (@lennysan) — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 18:11:53 GMT

Folks coming to the Summit: make sure to register for the workshops and roundtables you're most excited about. They're filling up fast.

Lenny Rachitsky@lennysan

Your browser does not support the video tag.

💬6🔄2❤️30👀17297📊7

Tired: Google Alerts Wired: Overheard @bot

Lenny Rachitsky (@lennysan) — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 20:40:50 GMT

Tired: Google Alerts

Wired: Overheard @bot

💬25🔄7❤️477👀96369📊144

That's one sexy credit card @immad

Lenny Rachitsky (@lennysan) — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 19:41:43 GMT

That's one sexy credit card @immad

💬24🔄4❤️253👀73616📊47

This post is on track to my most popular newsletter post of all time Nice work @anshuc 👏👏👏

Lenny Rachitsky (@lennysan) — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 18:48:13 GMT

This post is on track to my most popular newsletter post of all time 

Nice work @anshuc 👏👏👏

Lenny Rachitsky@lennysan

I'd always thought AI was terrible at design, but after reading today's 🤯 post by @anshuc, I realized I was just doing it wrong.

"AI models are capable of amazing creativity, but that creativity gets stifled. LLMs are trained to be next-token predictors: they look at a sequence of text and predict what typically comes next. Great design is exactly the opposite of this. Great design bends the rules and delights users with memorable, unexpected choices."

@anshuc led design and engineering teams at Apple for 12 years. In his words: "Most people only see 1% of AI's creative potential. I want to show you how to tap into the other 99%."

His 8 techniques for breaking out of the 1%:
1. Use seed strings to inject variety
2. Be much more ambitious with your prompts
3. Create positive feedback loops with subagents
4. Use image generation to enrich designs
5. Use video generation
6. Cut out elements that don’t add value
7. Remove AI tells
8. Rewrite copy by hand

Read the post here:lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-turn-…K

P.S. This design was made by AI 👇

💬12🔄9❤️170👀62351📊38

There are over 8,000 open PM roles right now https://t.co/3WDqoOfUky

Lenny Rachitsky (@lennysan) — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 15:35:04 GMT

There are over 8,000 open PM roles right now lennysjobs.com

💬31🔄41❤️558👀59691📊186

Probably nothing

Lenny Rachitsky (@lennysan) — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 02:44:35 GMT

Probably nothing

Sunita Rao@sunrao

line around the block for our @grok@bot build night for women at @a16z 900+ women RSVP’d for our gathering with @poteto@clairevo@stuffyokodraws 💛

Your browser does not support the video tag.

💬5🔄0❤️139👀33365📊14

Ok that’s 🔥

Lenny Rachitsky (@lennysan) — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 19:57:05 GMT

Ok that’s 🔥

OpenAI@OpenAI

This is GPT-6 Astra.

Anything you can do on a computer, Astra can do for you. Fast.

Your browser does not support the video tag.

💬24🔄27❤️937👀373578📊136

Lenny Rachitsky (@lennysan) — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 15:27:59 GMT

Your browser does not support the video tag.

💬5🔄2❤️54👀33842📊12

Recurring advice from my recent podcast guests: Be more ambitious.

Lenny Rachitsky (@lennysan) — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 21:28:12 GMT

Recurring advice from my recent podcast guests: Be more ambitious.

💬76🔄93❤️1416👀95417📊244

Claire's Tradbot is legit my fav bot right now. Amongst other things it creates a daily newspaper of...

Lenny Rachitsky (@lennysan) — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 20:39:54 GMT

Claire's Tradbot is legit my fav bot right now. Amongst other things it creates a daily newspaper of your family's plans that day + kid-friendly news from the neighborhood.

Get it: x.ai/bot/uY_7s1TZIL…

💬18🔄11❤️330👀66369📊125

Sounds like we'll need a round 4

Lenny Rachitsky (@lennysan) — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 19:44:07 GMT

Sounds like we'll need a round 4

Alex Danilowicz@alexdanilowicz

jen abel might be @lennysan's best recurring guest. 

i've listened to all three of her episodes. first was founder-led sales (0 to $1m). second was 1-10. the latest one's about the playbook on how to sell into enterprises ($100k+ acv deals). one of the more useful ~90 mins i've spent on a podcast this year.

jen's whole framework reiterates how people try to reduce sales down to a science when it's clearly not one. it deals with actual humans, actual psychology, actual variance. it's closer to an art than a process.

another compelling point she made: when someone brings your tool into their org, they're spending real political capital to do it. that changes how you should think about the relationship; it's someone vouching for you internally.

sales might be one of the few things that survives the ai era mostly untouched. it's also why fde roles are exploding right now. the same instinct with a different (fancy) label - still fundamentally about a human building trust with another human.

also @jjen_abel's twitter is genuinely funny, worth following independent of the sales content. rare combo of being both one of the sharpest people on enterprise gtm and one of the funniest follows.

💬12🔄2❤️74👀19554📊16

ChatGPT Work vs. Codex vs. ChatGPT...what the hell is going on? @tarstarr explains. Also, ChatGPT...

Lenny Rachitsky (@lennysan) — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 16:22:35 GMT

ChatGPT Work vs. Codex vs. ChatGPT...what the hell is going on?

@tarstarr explains. 

Also, ChatGPT Work == Codex.

Your browser does not support the video tag.

Lenny Rachitsky@lennysan

"Are you mainlining it yet?"

This is one of the key internal memes at @OpenAI, and a big part of the reason there's been a vibe shift toward Codex over the past few months.

It asks: are you using the product all day, every day? Are you depending on it? Are you bringing all your taste to bear on whether this is something people actually want?

Tara Seshan (@tarstarr) leads product for Codex and ChatGPT work at OpenAI (alongside her EM @ajambrosino). When I asked her what changed internally to shift the vibes toward Codex, her answer was: nothing. People just started noticing.

In our conversation, we also discuss:
🔸 Her rule for building on top of frontier models: build for where they'll be in 2-3 months—building for today fails, building for a year out fails
🔸 Why PMs are now in the business of elevating everyone's ambition
🔸 Why the future of knowledge work is steering, not rowing
🔸 Why OpenAI is "founders-led," not founder-led (and why there's no secret strategy room)
🔸 The one type of writing she will never let AI touch

Listen nyoutu.be/zMvBMfj4cSQ0v0kT1

💬18🔄6❤️81👀20703📊26

Watch the full conversation with product lead @tarstarr 👇 https://t.co/d2rmmXgM9A

Lenny Rachitsky (@lennysan) — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 15:15:48 GMT

Watch the full conversation with product lead @tarstarr 👇youtube.com/watch?v=zMvBMf…A

💬3🔄0❤️3👀4077📊3

OpenAI's top 3 internal memes: 1. Is this maximally accelerated? 2. Are you mainlining it yet? 3. Ar...

Lenny Rachitsky (@lennysan) — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 15:14:19 GMT

OpenAI's top 3 internal memes:
Is this maximally accelerated?
Are you mainlining it yet?
Are we being as ambitious as possible?

Your browser does not support the video tag.

Lenny Rachitsky@lennysan

"Are you mainlining it yet?"

This is one of the key internal memes at @OpenAI, and a big part of the reason there's been a vibe shift toward Codex over the past few months.

It asks: are you using the product all day, every day? Are you depending on it? Are you bringing all your taste to bear on whether this is something people actually want?

Tara Seshan (@tarstarr) leads product for Codex and ChatGPT work at OpenAI (alongside her EM @ajambrosino). When I asked her what changed internally to shift the vibes toward Codex, her answer was: nothing. People just started noticing.

In our conversation, we also discuss:
🔸 Her rule for building on top of frontier models: build for where they'll be in 2-3 months—building for today fails, building for a year out fails
🔸 Why PMs are now in the business of elevating everyone's ambition
🔸 Why the future of knowledge work is steering, not rowing
🔸 Why OpenAI is "founders-led," not founder-led (and why there's no secret strategy room)
🔸 The one type of writing she will never let AI touch

Listen nyoutu.be/zMvBMfj4cSQ0v0kT1

💬18🔄5❤️55👀17544📊20

Full house at the Grok @Bot meetup

Lenny Rachitsky (@lennysan) — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 02:15:11 GMT

Full house at the Grok @Bot meetup

💬39🔄15❤️401👀48633📊73