Alex Komoroske
Transcript
Alex Komoroske[00:00:00)]So much of the way that we tackle problems and build products is this builder mindset. It's like I have a plan. I then manipulate things to match my plan and make it happen. And this is a way you can create tons of value. Part of the problem though is it can't possibly create more value than the effort that you put into it. What I look for instead are things that can be gardened, things that can grow on their own and that you can direct or maybe give a little bit of extra energy to or curate over, and is a totally different mindset for it. If you do this properly, it looks like magic. I've been told that this is completely against all the advice that people get, including products nowadays,
but I think it's a very powerful approach that works in a lot of different contexts. Lenny Rachitsky[00:00:40)]Today, my guest is Alex Komoroske. Alex is one of the most original, articulate, and first principle thinkers on the future of product and tech that I've ever come across. This conversation will get your brain buzzing in all kinds of ways. Alex spent 13 years at Google where he worked on Search, DoubleClick. He led Chrome's Open Web Platform team for eight years, led augmented reality within Google Maps, and developed a new toolkit to align company-wide strategy from the bottom up. After a stint at Stripe as head of corporate strategy,
he's currently founding a startup that aims to reimagine the web for the AI era.[00:01:13)]In our wide-ranging conversation, we cover how LLMs and gen AI will impact how we build product in the coming years, what skills will matter most as AI becomes a bigger part of our lives, what companies can learn from slime mold, organizational kayfabe, the adjacent possible, strategy salons, why you should be thinking more like a gardener than a builder, plus a bunch of productivity tips, life advice, and so much more. This was such a fun episode,
and I'm sure this is going to get your mind thinking in completely new ways.[00:01:42)]If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing feature episodes and it helps the podcast tremendously. With that,
I bring you Alex Komoroske.[00:01:57)]Alex, thank you so much for being here,
Thanks for having me. Lenny Rachitsky[00:02:02)]I love the way your brain works. My brain immediately starts buzzing anytime I start reading some of your stuff. And one of the more interesting things that you write and do and a really interesting habit you have is you actually have this doc that you keep called Bits and Bobs that I love, and we're going to be touching on a lot of the things that you share in this doc, Bits and Bobs, and we'll link to it. First of all, can you just explain this doc, Bits and Bobs, what's it about?
Alex Komoroske[00:02:27)]Yeah. I think it's like 600 pages now. It's this one Google Doc. Every so often, almost every day, someone will accidentally add a suggestion like add a space or something because it takes so long to load that while they're waiting, they'll tap on the screen and then it'll turn into taps on adding a comment or something. And I take a lot of notes. And people, I tell people when I'm in meetings with them of like, "If you see me on my phone or typing, that means I think you said something very interesting and I'm writing it down. It's not that I'm just that I'm disengaged. I try to collect all these ideas." And then once a week, I go through, I take a few hours and I just reflect to myself and try to find patterns and unpack and find meaning and things. And I write those down and I started sometime in the past sharing those publicly,
and it's now become a thing I literally can't stop doing.[00:03:17)]I just find someone who was like, "Oh, if you get more exposure for this, if you broke these up into tweets that you sent out once throughout the day," it's like, I did this for me. I'm happy to let other people see and peek into my weird mental process if they want, but this is 100% about my own self-reflection. And it's not designed. I don't want anyone to feel compelled to read it or... In fact, it's designed a little bit to be, I allow myself to be a little bit illegible. I want people to have to work a little bit with it. And it's not going to lay it out on a platter. It's going to jump between different things. I'll use terminology sometimes that is, what are you talking about? And I do that specifically. I don't want anyone to read and be like, "Oh, it sucks. It wasn't worth my time." It's like, "Cool." It's a 600-
page Google Doc of my just unspooled insights. It's okay for you to not want to dive into that. Lenny Rachitsky[00:04:09)]This episode is brought to you by Eppo. Eppo is a next generation A/B testing and feature management platform built by alums of Airbnb and Snowflake for modern growth teams, companies like Twitch, Meero,
ClickUp and DraftKings rely on Eppo to power their experiments. Experimentation is increasingly essential for driving growth and for understanding the performance of new features. And Eppo helps you increase experimentation velocity while unlocking rigorous deep analysis in a way that no other commercial tool does.[00:04:40)]When I was at Airbnb, one of the things that I loved most was our experimentation platform where I could set up experiments easily, troubleshoot issues, and analyze performance all on my own. Eppo does all that and more with advanced statistical methods that can help you shape weeks off experiment time, and accessible UI for diving deeper into performance, and out-of-the-box reporting that helps you avoid annoying prolonged analytic cycles. Eppo also makes it easy for you to share experiment insights with your team, sparking new ideas for the A/B testing flywheel. Eppo powers experimentation across every use case, including product, growth, machine learning, monetization, and email marketing. Check out Eppo at geteppo.com/lenny and 10
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off Vanta when you go to vanta.com/lenny. That's vanta.com/lenny. Alex Komoroske[00:06:21)]I started it many years ago in the same conceptual thing, taking a bunch of notes. I have a thing called The Compendium, which is an open source tool. If you look at it currently, it looks like I haven't touched it in years, but that's actually incorrect. I built this about five years ago. I use it every day. And so I have, I think let's see, I currently have 17,248 unpublished working notes. And so what I do during the week is I'm taking notes very quickly in meetings, and then every day or two, I go through and I process them and put them in as working notes in The Compendium,
and this is where I correct misspellings. I add just a little bit more context so that it will make sense to me if I were to read it in a year.[00:06:58)]And also, I built a feature into it that uses embeddings to find similar cards. I find similar ideas from the past. And then what I do on Friday afternoons is I sit down and I go through all the notes I added that week and I just click and check the ones that still resonate with me, they still seem interesting in some way. And then I have a little export thing. I put it into a Google Doc, and while the kids are napping on the weekends, I just go through them and try to distill them a little bit more in a more long-term format. And then on Monday mornings, I publish them. And again, it's a deep... For me,
it's like I can't imagine not doing this. It is the place where I find most of my most interesting insights is by reflecting on interesting conversations from the week before. Lenny Rachitsky[00:07:39)]As we get into the conversation, people get to see how deeply you think about stuff. Part of the reason you're able to think so deeply about stuff is you have this practice where you take time to reflect and share and crystallize. There's so much power in just forcing yourself to write it out, I imagine versus,
just not. Alex Komoroske[00:07:54)]100%. I find that when you're busy, you're constantly just go, go, go, go. There's no time to do any deep thinking. Deep thinking takes time and space, and you got to create that space. The mundane, pointless bullshit will take every square inch you give it. So you got to make that space to sit back and reflect and luxuriate in these ideas. And when you do, you're often like, "Oh my God. Oh wow, that's one I'll keep." (00:08:18): And I told people, back at the very beginning of my career, I used to work from home on Fridays. And people gave me so much shit for this and they'd say, "Oh, you're working from home on Fridays." First of all, I will line up my output any day of the week. I'm very proud of the impact I've had. Second of all, Monday through Thursday, I'm in meetings from 8:00 to 6:00 or whatever. I'm just running between. I'm singing, pinging people and scheduling things and flinging action items. And the one day I don't take meetings is on Friday, and that's the day I read documents carefully that people had sent me or reflect. And I think to myself, what is the thing that if I had done it before the week started would've saved me tons of time and effort that week? (00:08:58): So for example, maybe in 10 different one-on-ones with people on the team, I had to explain to them a strategic thing that we were doing or a change that we were making. And the idea and the way I framed it worked for everybody. Well, you know what? That should probably be a document, right? If the same idea worked for 10 different people and now in the future there's probably 10 other people that need to hear it, and now I'll write that document in 30
minutes and now I have it as a memorialized thing that other people can read on their own time without having to involve me.[00:09:24)]And you also find these interesting ideas sometimes where you look at this problem that you're banging your head against, you go, "Oh wait, if I will like that, that would've a wildly different dynamic." And you can only find those when you take a step back. And I find that people, I told someone, I mentored someone, I've mentored hundreds of PMs over the years and I told someone that at one point and they go, "Oh, I wish I had the time." And it's like,
you got to make the time. All of us are busy and we will always be busy. And so this to me is not something I do to just for the enjoyment of all. I do deeply enjoy it intrinsically. It's something I do because I think it makes me more productive and effective. Lenny Rachitsky[00:10:01)]I'm very tempted to go down a whole direction of just how you structure your time and your productivity calendar and all this stuff,
I do for that for hours. Lenny Rachitsky[00:10:10)]What I want to do instead is pick on some of the Bits and Bobs that you've been focusing on noodling on that I think are going to be really helpful to listeners in how they think about product and the future of AI and all these things that I think are emerging. And the first one is actually that I want to get your thoughts on how AI and LLMs are likely to impact product development. A lot of the listeners of this podcast are PMs, engineers, founders, people building software, and you're spending a lot of time thinking about AI and product development. A lot of your Bits and Bobs have been just like, "Here's what's happening. Holy shit. This is how things are going to be." So let me just ask you this how do you anticipate LLMs and gen AI are going to change how products are built in the next three to five years?
Alex Komoroske[00:10:56)]I think they change a lot. I think LLMs are truly a disruptive technology. In fact, I would argue that what we're seeing in the industry is us trying to use mature playbooks from the end stage of the last tech era in one that doesn't really fit yet. To me, LLMs are magical duct tape. They're formed principally by the distilled intuition of all of society into a thing that operates between, a cost structure between human and plain old computing. So much of how the industry is built presupposes the idea that software is expensive to write and cheap to run, and LLMs undermine both of these. So it makes it LLMs allow writing shitty software to be significantly cheaper, not necessarily good software,
but good enough in certain contexts. And also it means that there's certain software now that isn't plain old computing that can be run cheaply. It's relatively expensive marginal cost.[00:11:49)]And so if you're going to do a consumer startup, it can't be based on advertising. It's just too expensive. Advertising cannot clear the inference costs even with inference costs declining. So I think the way to me, a disruptive technology changes tons of stuff,
all these assumptions you didn't even realize you were making because you didn't realize it could be any different.[00:12:07)]Imagine if you were locked in a room for your entire career, no windows, and you have all these experiences. You're going all this know how. You're getting this sense of how things work, what will happen. And then imagine that room tilts on its axis by five degrees. Everything looks roughly the same, and yet now the dynamics of the force of gravity is pulling in a different direction than it was before. You didn't even think about the force of gravity before because it was so omnipresent. It never changed that it's just a blank in your head. And now gravity has changed effectively for your perspective and all kinds of intuition is now wrong. I put this thing on the table, it's going to stay there,
and then it slides off and falls into the wall. All kinds of weird stuff will happen.[00:12:44)]And I think LLMs to me feel like that. I can't tell you the number of people who are... At some point at a year or two, someone came to me, they're like, "I just built a prototype, product that would've taken me three months. And I can believe it's going to start up." I was like, "How differentiated do you think that is?" Everybody can do that now. It changes the basis of competition. I think today I see a lot of folks using LLMs, and LLMs are like a squishy computer. We're used to computers doing exactly what we told them to do, which is not necessarily what we meant. And only some people have learned the skill of programming,
the arcane magical incantations to make computers do exactly what you meant.[00:13:24)]Now, LLMs can do all kinds of stuff. And they don't do exactly what you told them, but they do typically do roughly what you meant. I see all these places where people will build products and they'll say 80% of the time, 90% percent of the time, it's great. 5% of the time it punches the user in the face and they're like, "Oh, we're going to reduce the number of times it punches us in the face." It's like even if you get it down to 99% of the time, it's fine. If it punches in the face, that's not a viable product. And so how do you design your products assuming that this thing will be squishy and not fully accurate and fully work? (00:13:53): People use these things a lot as oracles. "I'm going to have it. I'm going to formulate the answer and it's going to be a fully fledged answer." And of course, strawberry has been really stabbed at. Gotten a chance to play with it. They are getting better at some of these kinds of behaviors at great expense. But in a lot of cases, I instead would rather say, "How can you take LLMs for granted? How can you assume that you now have this magical duct tape? Don't assume it's going to solve all your problems. Don't assume it's going to do autonomously be able to give high quality results of every case. But what can you now build now that you have magical duct tape?"
Lenny Rachitsky[00:14:24)]You're a product manager for most of your career. Now, you're a founder. I'm curious what your advice would be to product managers and people building products in terms of what skills they should lean into, what you think is going to be matter most. There's hard skills. There's soft skills. There's getting more technical. There's getting more product business-oriented. Just what do you think people should work on more and becomes more valuable and what do you think becomes less valuable from a product builder perspective?
Alex Komoroske[00:14:52)]I think in this early stage, we're in the community gardening phase, not the factory farming phase of this technology. And so I think what people need most is curiosity and play. You should be playing with these things and trying out different things and seeing what weird things are possible now. One of my favorite things, to be honest, right now, it's using AI is WebSim. WebSim is so weird. What a weird idea, like why? And then you play with it and you realize, "Oh, this is a thing that could only exist in a world where LLMs exist." And I think these kinds of odd, interesting, weird, provocative, generative things will be where a lot of the interesting patterns are found because right now we're so used to... If the playbook, if the cost structures have changed, the kinds of things are now possible,
the playbook is wrong and we should throw it out or at least ignore it to some degree. So it will feel like we are navigating through a whole new industry that it has in the past.[00:15:47)]Anytime that an industry gets really, really, really, really, really good at like vertical SaaS, we know how to execute the crap out of that. We know exactly what to do. It doesn't require that much. It requires consumption and execution velocity and all this. But vertical SaaS, I think, is not the right model of how you would attack a problem that is an AI native style problem. And I think that those are where all the interesting things will be. And again, I think a lot of the tactics that we're trying out at the beginning, they won't work. It'll turn out that they only work 95% of the time, and 5%
of the time they punch you in the face or something. And that means that you have to be more adaptable and you have to assume that a scrappy thing will be more important.[00:16:28)]One of the ways I put this is we've seen a vast reduction in the cost of distribution of information, and now we're seeing a reduction in the cost of information production. And most of it is slop. And so in this cacophony, how do you stand out? You stand out by having good taste. I think taste is the most important thing. You have a perspective that is different from the background noise, different from the average and that people find compelling. How do you find your own taste and how do you lean into that taste is, I think,
much more important than just generically executing in the way that everybody else could do. Lenny Rachitsky[00:17:01)]There's so many threads I want to follow here, but maybe on just this last one, when you say taste, what do you mean by that? What should people think when they're like, "Okay, I got to work in my taste"?
Alex Komoroske[00:17:09)]Taste, one way of looking at this is differentiate from what the LLM would've written if given the same prompt. How different, how distinctive is what you have to say. And I think so much in large industry, in large organizations is about fitting into the role. How can you be a better and more efficient cog in that particular kind of machine? And I think in this new world, what you want to do is how can I become the best version of myself? How can I lean into the things that I have an interesting perspective on that make me different? Those are the kinds of things. And now of course, if you lean into something and you're doing something out there and nobody resonates with it,
then it doesn't count. Good taste is something that is individual and also compelling to others. And so find what things you say that resonate with other people and lean into that. Lenny Rachitsky[00:17:53)]I love that. Back to the WebSim example, we're going to link to this, but definitely play with WebSim. I was interviewing Dylan Field at Figma Config and this was his... Asked him like, "What's the number one thing you think people are going to get more excited about in the future that you're playing with now?" Because he's really good at identifying things that are going to be bigger in the future,
and that was his choice. And it's very hard to understand exactly what it is if you just go there. But basically it's like you type a URL and it invents what that website is using just AI LLMs. Alex Komoroske[00:18:22)]That's insane, as in. And you can get it to do, you realize as you play with it more, you can get it to do all kinds of specific things and you can steer it based on the way it uses the context of the last few pages. It creates a coherent world that's coherent with the things that you have recently seen, because you can steer it directly and you can watch fascinating people. They'll cover all kinds of wacky little techniques to get to generate, like generate a game for your kid that's on a specific type. You can do all kinds of stuff. And I'm not saying necessarily WebSim to me is a disruptive thing. Things that look alien and weird and yet are compelling,
those are what we should be paying more attention to as opposed to take an existing playbook and slap something on it. Lenny Rachitsky[00:19:03)]I love that. Another point that I saw you make about AI and the way it's different from other things we've done is most of the tools that we adopt in the workplace are collaborative where it helps your team be better, helps you collaborate better, and AI is the opposite. It makes you individually better. Can you talk about that insight?
Alex Komoroske[00:19:18)]100%. I think this is one of the reasons is that the question right now of, okay, everyone's talking about AI and yet nobody's doing... There's no interesting breakout success obviously other than OpenAI and Anthropic obviously. So is there any value being created? I think it's entirely possible. And Ethan Malik who's a good friend, who has an amazing blog who's absolutely worth reading, has pointed out, too, that this is a thing that make individuals better in a way they might not want to tell their manager about. I can now do my job twice as fast. And if the organization sees that, they might go, "Wait a second. We should pay you half this much." They're like, "What if we get rid of some extra people or something?" (00:19:56): And so if this stuff is magical duct tape, it's very hard to make scaled, repeatable, large scale things out of it. It's very easy to do rig the shit out of anything. And so you'll see it being used in the small in a way that's almost entirely below the level of awareness of the seeing at the organization. The organization almost won't see it or sense it, and yet it could be adding significant value or just being used quite heavily. And I think this is one of the things that makes it if everything is happening in the long tail of usage, then you could conclude, "Oh, it's not being used for anything in the industry," but it's being used all over the place. I talked to Claude 20 times a day. I just have long conversations with it. I have tons of projects loaded up with all kinds of contexts on different topics,
and I literally could not do the job I do now without having a conversation partner like Claude. Lenny Rachitsky[00:20:48)]Let me follow that thread real quick because a lot of people are like, "Okay," people keep telling me, "Play with AI. Use ChatGPT." Sometimes it's hard to see exactly what they can do with it. Can you give one example of how you found it really helpful or how you use Claude or another tool in your day-to-day?
Alex Komoroske[00:21:02)]I use it to think through problems. And so like when I'm trying to name a concept or get a handle on a few different ways of looking at something, just saying, "Here's what's in my brain about this topic right now. Here's some relevant context." I have a number of projects that just stuff as much of the Bits and Bobs into the context as I can, which is very helpful. And I just say, "Just play with it. Just give me 10 examples of that thing," or then, "Critique these ones," or, "It feels like this one's the best one for me. What works about this? Why is this one the best?" Or, "I want to work at an angle now that has something about know Helen Nissenbaum's concept of contextual integrity. How would I layer that in?"
It's just think of it as having a extremely well-read but slightly naive friend who is will never make you feel dumb and is willing to engage you in any particular topic you want to go down.[00:21:49)]So when you talk to an expert like a lawyer or a doctor or something, you know that that time is extremely valuable. You have a very small slice of time, and so there's tons of questions you don't even bother to ask. "That's a dumb question. I'm not going to spend $1,000 to answer that question." Whereas if you can have that conversation, now this is not saying use it for legal advice, but it can allow you to explore through a problem domain and then later check it with experts and say, "I believe this is a coherent outcome or a thing that should happen." And they can go, "Oh yeah, that works." So I use LLMs to help me. It's like getting a,
it's like an electric bike for idea spaces. You can just cover so much more ground so much more quickly in them. Lenny Rachitsky[00:22:26)]I love that metaphor because it builds on Steve Jobs's that computers are a bicycle for the mind. And that's really a beautiful way of thinking about it,
that LLMs are like the electric bicycle for the mind. Alex Komoroske[00:22:37)]I don't think if that's someone else's,
the... Lenny Rachitsky[00:22:38)]Oh,
okay. Alex Komoroske[00:22:39)]I don't know where it came from. Part of my job is a collector of ideas, and so I try to put myself in the most interesting information streams with interesting people that I've found to have taste, have a perspective on something. Maybe I disagree with it, but they definitely have a coherent idea. And then I just allow myself to like, "Oh, that's a really good idea and let me build on that or let me..." I don't even know where that particular one came, but I'm 95%
sure that somebody else said that. Lenny Rachitsky[00:23:05)]I want to get to this idea of gardening versus building that is central to a lot of the way you think about it. But before we get there, I want to touch on another bit and bob that I love that you come back to occasionally,
which is this idea of organizational kayfabe. Talk about what this idea of kayfabe is on its own and then how this applies to organizations in your experience. Alex Komoroske[00:23:26)]One thing I should flag before I dive into any this stuff, sometimes when people hear me talk about how organizations work and systems, they think I'm being cynical. And I want to be very clear, I'm hyper-optimistic and I also believe that one of the moral precepts is how do you maximize the agency of real humans as ends in and of themselves? And so sometimes when I get excited about this, people go, "Wow, that is so cynical." No, I'm just trying to describe the system as it actually exists. Once we know how it exists,
we can figure out how to make it do great things and how we as members of this system can tweak and nudge it.[00:23:56)]So I just want to flag that before I dive into this. I have this slime mold deck which has gotten a ton of traction over the years, and part of the reason for that is because it feels like people tell me it feels like they think they're crazy and it feels like giving a big hug saying, "You are not crazy. Here's why this thing shows up." And once you acknowledge it, it feels like a bummer to acknowledge it, but once you do, now there's all kinds of options that pop up. "Oh, given that this thing is way more expensive than it looks, I can now do this instead. That one's 10 times cheaper. These two options, this one is way cheaper, way more likely to succeed." So once you see these forces,
you see them more clearly.[00:24:28)]So kayfabe is I think a lens that's useful to understand how organizations actually work. Kayfabe is a word that comes, I believe is a carny word that is used and applied to professional wrestling and it means a thing that everybody knows is fake and yet everybody acts like is real. And I think it's one of the defining forces within an organization, any organization. So kayfabe in the small is optimism, enthusiasm. When someone says, "We're going to do this thing," you say, "Yeah, we're going to do that," even if I think this isn't going to work. If you say, "I don't think this think is going to work,"
everyone loses hope and it definitely doesn't work. So having a little bit of this is extremely valuable. It's the lubricant that allows organizations to believe they can do something and to attempt to do it.[00:25:09)]The problem that you get is as organizations get larger, imagine you are five levels down or something and you have this project you're working on and you're trying to give a status update to be rolled up to leadership. And it's currently a yellow, and your manager asks it and you know it's not going to be presented to leadership and enrolled up until next week. "It's yellow, but I've got my arms around the problem. I know how to fix it. I'm going to go talk to Sarah. I think we have a solution. By the time this is reported up the chain, it's going to be green." So if I make it yellow, there's a non-trivial chance that someone's going to swoop down and say, "Well, what's going on? We have a review," and it will be way harder to fix,
so I'm just going to... A little white lie.[00:25:46)]This is a totally reasonable thing to do. It's a self-defensive thing to do. And it's probably the right thing for the organization too. The problem is this happens up multiple layers and it compounds. So then your layer above you does the same, and the same, and the same, and levels up you can be many orders of magnitude off of the ground truth. And so the kayfabe, the thing that everyone pretends to believe is true, is obviously incorrect. And the dangerous part about this is it can lead you to make very bad decisions. And if you as someone who sees this can see that wait a second, the official strategy is definitely not going to work, you're like, "I got to tell somebody. We're doing work that's going in a bad direction. It's not going to work." And you go and say, "I think that it's actually not going to work for these reasons." (00:26:27): And what someone will say to you, this happens by the way, I'm not substituting any particular organization, this happens literally in all organizations to some degree, is the senior person will say, "Alex, I agree with you. It's not perfect, but if you hit the ground truth button, if you share that and everybody, the whole thing will shatter and we can't do anything. And so help me fix it. Don't say the ground truth. Just help nudge it and fix it." That's a good point. Okay, so you help working on it and then you realize a month later, wait a second, it's getting worse. We're doing things that's not good for the company. It's not creating user value. It's not good for the employees. They're burning out. It's just not good for anybody and it's getting worse. And so if you think you're going to go and hit the ground truth button, before you do,
you'll be flying tackled to the ground by somebody and stabbed in the dark because you will destroy everything.[00:27:13)]And so it becomes correct to hold onto this idea of if you acknowledge the kayfabe is false, then you are in danger of getting knocked out of the game. And so how do you do good things despite the fact that you're pulled in two different directions? And this increasingly in the limit, it can be good to a point where the easiest way is if I do, if I hold on this idea, we might create significant value for the company. If I let go of this idea, I die. So the easiest way to maintain this split-brain thing is to just turn this part off and just earnestly believe the kayfabe. This has been organizations become zombies, and anyone individually you talk to behind the scenes will agree yes, it could not possibly work. That turns out that these things work this way,
and yet the entire organization lumbers on.[00:27:56)]And this is a death state for large organizations. It happens all over the place in any number of different conditions, and this is one of the reasons it shows up. And I think acknowledging that is an important way to help navigate and still make good grounded things happen. How can you allow disconfirming evidence to show up that doesn't kill you, that helps make you stronger? And if it all has to come in one massive moment that could ruin everything,
then you aren't going to hear it. And then it will build up and build up and build up and build up into a super critical state that could shatter. Lenny Rachitsky[00:28:27)]I was just listening to a couple podcasts, and a thread that came up in a number of them is some of the most successful leaders, their instruction to their reports is, "As soon as there's bad news, I need to know as soon as possible. Do not shield me. I just want to know all the bad news as soon as possible."
Feels like that's one solution to what you're describing. Alex Komoroske[00:28:44)]Disconfirming evidence hurts, and so you won't realize it because it hurts at any given moment. It's like, "Ugh, it's a distraction. We're just trying to get this thing done." And so it comes from a good place to not get it, but if you're busy, that's one of the reason you need to take a step back. We take a step back, you're a little bit calmer. You can absorb this as confirming evidence. It doesn't feel like an existential threat. It's really easy to get surrounded. If you are very powerful, you will find all the confirming evidence you need. And if it doesn't exist,
it will be created for you without your knowledge.[00:29:12)]And so this is one of the reasons that large companies are radically different than smaller companies. And one of the traps that you can get into of not realizing this dynamic is happening, and you can make very bad decisions if you don't understand that it's inherently what's happening because they're all, "Oh, we'll have some bad actors." No, no, no. If people don't play this game, this game is emergent. It shows up even though everybody hates it. And if you don't play the game, you are knocked out of the game. The underlying dynamic that must be true in any organization on a fundamental basis is you can't make your boss look dumb because if you do, they're the person who decides, "Oh, this person's not performing," or whatever. And that one little asymmetry, that one little fact, in most cases it does not matter. That one little asymmetry is what leads to the systemic compounding thing where you get these really weird dysfunctional emergent things that everybody hates, nobody wants,
and yet nobody is in the position to change per se. Lenny Rachitsky[00:30:05)]I love your caveat at the beginning that continues to resonate in my head as you say this. You're not cynical about, "This sucks." It's more, "Here's what I'm observing. We need to think about ways to get around this."
Alex Komoroske[00:30:16)]Yeah. Because I think so much pain and misery is caused by us being not acknowledging these fundamental, inescapable things. It's almost impossible. Entropy is one of those things. Entropy emerges because there's more ways to go away from a point than towards a point. It fundamentally must be true in really any universe you can possibly imagine. And so if you're going to fight entropy, you're going to lose at a certain point. It's like if you are aware of these things, you can find subsets of ideas that do work despite these challenges. And that's some of the stuff, the tactics I advise are often things that look playful. They look unserious. They look like, "Oh, you're saying you don't know the answer?" No,
I'm admitting I don't know the answer.[00:30:55)]And I'm saying it doesn't matter if I don't know the answer because this thing, this very small seed I am planting is so cheap that yes, I can't tell you for sure this will work, but I could tell you there is a chance that it'll work. And the downside of this is basically the opportunity cost of planting the seed in this one moment, and the person who's planting it enjoys planting it so that an opportunity cost really isn't that much because they get energy from doing it. So who cares? Plant a bunch of these suckers. If one of these grows into an oak tree, that's great. Don't try to analyze beforehand which seed is going to turn into an oak tree. If it's super simple to plant the seeds, then plant the seeds. And if it starts growing,
then keep watering it. That's it. That's the thing.[00:31:30)]And people sometimes will see this as like, I've been called in my list before because they said, "Well, you're saying that you don't know the answer to the thing." It's like no, I'm saying I don't have to know the answer to the thing. If on a systemic basis I let these ideas and then you respond to the ones that are working that are viable,
it doesn't really matter if you didn't know ahead of time which ones were going to work. Lenny Rachitsky[00:31:48)]It's a great segue to talking about this core idea that again informs a lot of the way you think, which is this idea of building versus gardening,
the magic of acorns. Talk about this general idea and then I want to follow some threads. Alex Komoroske[00:32:02)]So much of the way that we tackle problems and build products is this builder mindset. It's like, "I have a plan, I then manipulate things to match my plan and make it happen." And this is a way you can create tons of value. Part of the problem though is it can't possibly create more value than the effort that you put into it. And so what I look for instead are things that can be gardened, things that can grow on their own and that you can direct or maybe give a little bit of extra energy to or curate over, and is a totally different mindset for it. So it's like a lead by gardening vibe. I don't try to pick the things in the system. I try to work with what I've actually got and I try to lean in on the ones that turn,
I think are going in the direction that I believe is valuable based on constantly seeking disconfirming evidence.[00:32:44)]And if you do this properly, it looks like magic. It looks like a thing. It looks like getting lucky because what you're doing is you're farming for miracles. And so on a systemic basis, I can't tell you which of these things will work, but I can tell you there's a very high likelihood that one of these will work in a way that is interesting and transformative. And so if you're looking and finding these seeds that have the compounding potential of if they work, they would start working at an accelerating rate, then you don't have to know ahead of time. To me this is, I've been told that this is completely against all the advice that people get building products nowadays,
but I think it's a very powerful approach that works in a lot of different contexts. Lenny Rachitsky[00:33:26)]Is there an example that you can give from either from something you worked on or something someone worked on that came or true miss? Because I think people hearing this might be like, "But I got to ship stuff. I got to hit some goals. I don't have time to sit around and garden and plant seeds. I got to actually build."
Alex Komoroske[00:33:41)]If there's an ecosystem approach, if there's something that if it works, it'll be self-accelerating. So okay, what you're going to do this thing, we aren't entirely sure what's going to work, but if a developer writes a thing and somebody uses it, it'll attract more developers, more users, and then this would grow on its own. Then and it's cheap to do the little example of the thing. It's cheap to build a little open source, tinker the little thing and just put it there. And if nobody uses it, it's fine. It was fun to build. It took you three hours. It's fine. If someone does use it,
then you just invest in incremental bit of unit each time that you find a signal that somebody is finding it useful and then you stop if you ever cease getting that information.[00:34:16)]So I would use this. Anything that is shaped like an ecosystem that has some kind of network effect, and many things have network effects, have some kind of compounding loop. Compounding loops are not rare. They are, "Look." It's like truffle hunting. You have to know what you're looking for and find the dynamics of a thing that if it worked would work at an accelerating rate. Lots and lots and lots of things intrinsically have this shape. Anything with a network effect, anything where the power goes up with a number of users,
but it shows up in all kinds of problems that we don't normally apply it to. Lenny Rachitsky[00:34:47)]Along the same lines, you also advise people to think more emergence-oriented versus top-down, kind of what you were just saying. But I think that's another really interesting way of thinking about the same idea, create opportunities for emergence,
bottom-up versus top-down control. You just chat about that. Alex Komoroske[00:35:03)]100%. I think the emergence is one of the most powerful forces if you know how to marshal it and you know how to work with it. And the only thing that's hard about it in my opinion is you're going to look like you aren't very serious. You're going to look like a weirdo. You're going to look like a cook. And one of the downsides, if you're working on something and you're doing the normal top-down approach where you make the plan, you execute the plan, even if the plan turns out to not be useful, you produce a thing and nothing interesting happens, no one can say you didn't work hard. But if you try doing this designing for emergence and something amazing happens, even once it happens, people go, "Ah, it's luck. Where was the miraculous moment, the heroic moment where you made that happen? So therefore you had nothing to do with it." (00:35:42): And this was the biggest unlock in my career actually was when I stopped my guts. I was promoted to director at Google. I was like, "Cool, I never want to be promoted inside of a large organization ever again." And the freedom to now do the highest impact work, even if I can't make it legible to the organization, was so powerful and I was able to 10X my impact for the organization because I didn't have to worry about making it measurable specifically in a way that would show individual work effort. And I think that's the hardest part. And you have to have, typically what I would advise for PMs, my approach at Google was 70% of my effort and my team's effort should go on things that everybody acknowledges are important and useful and create value. Maybe it's boring, linear value, but some kind of value. You're trying to minimize the chance that any other person in a company will say, "What does that team do anyway?" (00:36:32): This, if someone says this about your team, your team is on the verge of death. And so you're trying to minimize the chance that anybody wants to say that or thinks that it's appropriate to say that by clearly and unambiguously adding value. You're not saying this is the best team in the entire world, but clearly they're doing something useful. They're executing well. They're working hard. And of course that team should exist. Think about it, of course they should. But now once you do this, you have 30%
of your extra time that you can plant all these seeds.[00:36:55)]You can find interesting little things where maybe a junior PM on the team has an idea you think it's kind of silly, but they're really into it. And the there is this thing, it could work out great actually. If you tweak it like this, there is a potential. I could see how that could work. If that PM is going to work on that anyway, they want to do it anyway. Instead of saying, "No, no, no, we don't have time for that. Be a little bit more productive over here," say, "Go for it. Here's my concerns. I imagine this part might not work, but this part is really cool right here." And then if it doesn't work, then they've stretched their agency. They've executed. They've exercised their agency. They've learned. They've gotten stronger. They've grown. It has the upside if it turns out to actually work. And worst case scenario,
the opportunity cost to doing the thing that helped them grow and they learn and they liked. So I don't know. Don't try to force it. Don't try to stop it. Lenny Rachitsky[00:37:40)]That's a really good example of actually how to go about doing that on your team. The way I've always thought about this is the visual I share with people is like, you want to create cover fire for your team where your team's just hitting goals, moving metrics, and then while with that cover fire, you're building the doomsday bomb inside,
protected where no one's going to come and stop you. Alex Komoroske[00:37:58)]Yeah, because one of the hardest parts about an acorn when you plant it is making sure a squirrel doesn't dig that fucker up. There's so many things that can destroy it, and just keeping it, allowing it some space and allowing it some time is the most important thing. And it's challenging to do, but that's why it's important as a leader to have enough credibility in the organization that people can see that you are doing useful work to give you the space, to give your team the space to do this truly great work. If you want to get your team to do good work, there's a million different paths to do that. If you want to get your team to do great work, there's no shortcut other than to have an extremely high-trust environment where people lean into their superpowers in a way that adds up to something greater than some of its parts. That takes time. It takes effort. It's very difficult to make legible up to the rest of the organization,
but that is where great things come from. Lenny Rachitsky[00:38:46)]It reminds me of something Ed Catmull shared in Creativity, Inc., this idea of the ugly baby, that every new idea is an ugly baby and nobody wants this ugly baby. Everyone's just like, "Get this out of here,"
because every new idea is bad initially. Alex Komoroske[00:39:00)]Yeah, it sucks. They're just like this ugly thing that barely works or... But this is why what I try to do is I try to see the greatness, the seeds of greatness in everything. Everyone and everything around me, I look for, I try to find and see, man, what is the most compelling part of this? And let me lean into that. And so one of the things I try to do when I meet with people, when I mentor them, I try with it within the first session or two, whenever I can get a hypothesis, I say, "I think your superpower is..."
And I describe to them what I think I can see them being truly exceptional at.[00:39:31)]And sometimes I get it wrong, especially if I try to do it earlier, but when people feel very seen and they feel acknowledged for that, they now are willing, they're going to stretch farther and they're going to respond to nudging feedback even better because they know that you're not trying to tell them be different. You're trying to tell them be more, and you now the nudges will feel less like a stop energy and more like someone who gets me and can help me grow even more. And you can get some amazing things out of people when you just treat them with the respect. I assume that everyone I talk to, everyone I talk to is interesting, has seeds of greatness in them,
even if they don't recognize necessarily where they are.[00:40:08)]Someone described to me actually this morning in one of my little dirt clubs I run about they help facilitate about treat everybody like the Buddha. I think is I'm messing this up, but this notion of imagine everyone you talk to is the Buddha, in a Buddhist mindset, and how do you see and find those seeds of greatness and treat everyone with respect intrinsically as an end of themselves. This is one of those things that you do to be a compassionate human. It's also, I believe, a way to maximize the amount of value, direct and indirect value, that's created. So it's one of those win-win-win-win-wins where just it's the right thing to do as a person and a member of society,
and it's also the thing that can create a lot of business value and create real value in the world. Lenny Rachitsky[00:40:49)]This episode is brought to you by Coda. I use Coda every day to coordinate my podcasting and newsletter workflows. From collecting questions for guests, to storing all my research, to managing my newsletter content calendar, Coda is my go-to app and has been for years. Coda combines the best of documents, spreadsheets, and apps to help me get more done, and Coda can help your team to stay aligned and ship faster by managing your planning cycle in just one location, set and measure OKR's with full visibility across teams and stakeholders, map dependencies, create progress visualizations, and identify risk areas. You can also access hundreds of pressure-tested templates for everything from roadmap strategy to final decision-making frameworks. See for yourself why companies like DoorDash, Figma, and Qualtrics run on Coda. Take advantage of this special limited-time offer just for startups. Head over to coda.io/lenny and sign up to get six free months of the team plan. That's coda.io/lenny to sign up and get six months of the team plan,
coda.io/lenny.[00:41:57)]Coming back to a phrase that you used earlier, slime molds, I want to spend a little time here. So interestingly enough, the first time I heard about you and what got me interested in your stuff is I did a newsletter post with the company Perplexity about how they build product. And as they were describing how they organized their team, the co-founders described they organized like slime mold, and he linked to your deck about slime molds and I was like, "What the heck is this?" Can you just briefly describe what you mean when you talk about slime molds and how slime molds are related to the way companies are organized and how they should think of the organization?
Alex Komoroske[00:42:32)]Yeah. The main thesis of the slime mold deck is that the core dynamic that makes organizations hard to navigate as they get larger, even if you assume everyone is actively good at what they do, actively collaborative and actively hardworking,
is this emergent force or coordination of finding the subset of projects to work on when everyone's super busy that everyone agrees and commits to and actually works on together. And finding this coordination cost grows with the square of the number of people who are working on that thing. And so what companies typically try to do is fight this or ignore that it exists.[00:43:06)]If you're going to fight it, the one way to look at this is think of a company like a vehicle. When the company is very small, you can drive it, you can steer it like a sports car. As a founder, you are allowed to steer. Everyone acknowledges you are allowed to steer. They're never, "Why is he steering it that way?" So you, a founder, can help navigate an organization around an obstacle the organization cannot see or comprehend itself. The problem is as you steer, as you grow into the size, your organization goes from a sports car and you grow into the size of a big rig, if you drive a big rig like a sports car,
you're going to be a danger to yourself and others on the road and you're going to grind the engine. And so you got to drive the car that you actually have.[00:43:41)]So what I see a lot of things happen in large organizations, that people are just trying to ignore this fact. And when you drive, by the way, a car, your vehicle, like a big rig, when it is a big rig, people go, "Oh, it means to go slow." No, no, no. It means pivot less. It means have a little bit more... Be more intentional about the times that you adjust the steering, invest more in program management, invest more in processes,
give a little bit more slack in the planning process to absorb any kind of surprising things that you can still all reach the product launch at the same time.[00:44:13)]The other option you can do is you can split your thing up into a series a swarm of sports cars, individual sports cars. And the downside of this, you'll get the autonomy and strengths of the bottom-up, the downside is other people will externally will look at it and go, "Well, that team and that team clearly didn't talk." You'll say, "Yep, yep." You have to decide how bad that is for you. Apple has chosen the former. It's very important to them to have the illusion of perfect coherence in their products. It worked very well for them. They executed marvelously. And if you also picked the exact opposite thing, everyone else is like, "Yeah. There are like 15 different ways of doing everything. They clearly don't talk to each other."
But it allows the overall swarm of the AWS product suite to be very powerful and anti-fragile or whatever you want to say.[00:44:52)]And so slime molds, I think, is acknowledging that organizations are, especially ones that focus on autonomy and agency of their individual employees, which is a lot of tech companies, they are more like slime molds than we realize. And if you fight that fact, you're going to have a bad time. And if you embrace it,
then you can start realizing slime molds are actually kind of amazing. They can find solutions to problems you didn't even know you were searching for. Lenny Rachitsky[00:45:15)]Alex, you have the best metaphors. I don't know how you do this,
Please. That would be incredible. Alex Komoroske[00:45:25)]I think by talking, I'm an external processor, I literally can't think if I'm not talking. And so I make sure I have as many interesting meetings as I can, and that's where I discover what I think, by talking to people. And the test is if I say a frame, something that the person goes, "Ooh," or like, "Ooh," they go, "Aha," that's a win. That's a mark that's a good one. You're just randomly casting about. I find one. And then if a different person also has a similar response, if a person in sales and a person in engineering both find the same idea interesting, that's a very good sign that lots of people will find it interesting, how diverse in terms of background skill sets,
perspectives are the people who resonate with the thing you're saying.[00:46:08)]The intuition of this is if you find in a social network, you want to see what's going to go viral, if something is shared and it's shared within, so the people who are at the beginning are all highly densely interconnected in the social graph, then the implied ceiling is relatively small. You only know it works with that audience. But if it's people that are very different subclass and very little overlap, they both find it interesting, that implies a much larger max audience. So you're looking for ideas that resonate with the diversity of people. And then once you find them, each time you get something like that,
you invest a little more time in it and you think a little bit more about framing it the next time.[00:46:42)]I haven't done this during this chat, but in most conversations, you'll see me as I'm talking writing down stuff like, "Ooh, that was the best formulation of that one so far." And so you keep on coming back to it. You keep on tightening it and seeing how, watching how it's responding and referring with different people through like, "Where do you get these from?"
It's like I got thousands and thousands and thousands of little examples or metaphors or whatever that's sick.[00:47:03)]One of the benefits of metaphorical thinking is you connect nine of the 10 dots and you invite the listener to engage with the argument to connect that last dot. This allows you by the way to say very controversial things, because if you say connect all the 10 dots and it's like, "Oh, that's the official strategy," then you are instantly a dangerous thing. Whereas if you leave one dot unconnected, people can go connect the dot and go, "Oh my god, I think that applies to us." You're like, "Oh my god, what?" "Yes, that's why I picked that." But to counteract this because now it's less obvious to people that's correct,
you have to make the metaphor evocative and interesting.[00:47:39)]One of the reasons that slime mold deck got so much traction is partially because slime is gross, it's bad,
and yet it's talking about why slime is good. And so that has this instantly subversive thing. I only know this after the fact of trying to figure out why did that deck get so much attention of all the things I've written. Lenny Rachitsky[00:47:56)]It also is all emojis basically, which is not how you often read a deck. It's very beautifully made. I love that you've been talking about the way you think and come up with ideas is by talking to people and having conversations. We also talked about how you write in this Bits and Bobs approach. I asked someone that you worked with at Stripe what to ask you, and she said to ask you about strategy salons, which feels like a good avenue for this sort of thing. Can you talk about what these are and how you set these up?
Alex Komoroske[00:48:26)]So these I also call now nerd clubs, and these are my secret weapon. And I have a blog post. I started writing right before my second kid was born, and then he was born three weeks early and I just lost the plot and now it's like a 40-page draft of a thing that I'll probably never finish. But I've used this tactic. I discovered it many years ago as they strengthen some of the techniques I'd used in open source community organizing. And the situation was I was just joining a new team at Google. I've been there for many years, and there was at the time 12 different groups working in different aspects of this overall problem domain. And in classic Google fashion, they added up to significantly less than the sum of their parts, as in not like, "Oh, we'll see which one works," but, "These two things directly undermine each other. If you execute both of these strategies, neither can work." And I knew that if you try to do pairwise executive reviews on this very complex, ambiguous, open-ended problem,
you would get really expensive pageantry that would obscure more than clarified.[00:49:17)]So what I did was I created a secret group that I called Navel Gazers was the original one, and I wanted people when they hear about it, I want people to go, "That will be a club for nerds." They're like, "Yeah, do you want in?" And so this means that only people who intrinsically want to be in it for its own sake come in. So you get only a positive "yes, and" kind of energy. So then within these groups, you say, you set the norms very explicitly and say, "This is a collaborative debate environment. This is only 'yes, and'." If somebody says a thing in this group that is optional and secret and completely off the side of anything that matters, if they say something that you think is an actively dumb idea,
you are free to not engage. Just leave it. That's fine. Because nothing's going to happen. We're deciding anything interesting or important here.[00:49:57)]And if you want to engage and you don't like it, a productive way of doing that is saying, "Oh, that's so interesting. I would never would've thought to apply that lens. I typically would apply this lens to that kind of problem. I wonder if that applies here." And by saying, "I wonder," you make it about you, not them. And so that person can choose if that's an interesting thing to build on or not. This sounds by the way very non-rigorous feel like, "Ah, how can you possibly get rigorous thinking in the 'yes, and'?" It turns out there's limited amounts of time and so people will choose to build on the things they find most interesting. This is interesting things are surprising and potentially valuable. And so if lots of different people in the group are building on the same idea,
that's a good sign there is something very interesting going on.[00:50:35)]The third thing you do is you dribble in new perspectives. Every one to three a week, if you put in lots of new perspectives, once the norms can all scramble, if you have one in five people who all have a very particular kind of personality can mess up the norms, and so you're trying to minimize the chance you add a jerk. It takes one person to poop a party and go, "What are we even doing here?" You want to minimize the chance that happens. But second or thirdly and more importantly, you want to have as people with as different perspective as possible added into the group. And so this is what Ken Stanley might call, for example,
novelty search. You're novelty-searching through the different perspectives in the overall thing.[00:51:10)]When you do this properly, you get something magical. You get a group that people find intrinsically valuable for its own sake and just enjoy participating in and find meaning in, that also stochastically spins off changing insights for the surrounding context because you're searching through these ideas in a low stakes environment where the ideas that lots people build on, they go, "Oh, you should write that down." And this is like an idea lab, what everyone will call an idea lab. And this creates amazingly interesting insights. You just can't force it to do anything. It has to be a bottom-up and emergent, which means if you try to steer it towards an outcome, it won't go. But if you do these, they are amazing places to riff and to share ideas and half-formed ideas. And this is anywhere I go, I terraform the culture around me and create these,
because I need it as a place to experiment and try out different half-formed ideas and build on them and be inspired by other people.[00:52:03)]And that is one of my secrets, strategy secrets that I've been doing now for probably 10
years ago is when the first one started. And there's now I can count eight or nine of I've started over the years. Some of them emerged. So many of them are still at Google. And I think it's like they're just wondrous environments that I think create a lot of value. Lenny Rachitsky[00:52:21)]And I love it's a perfect example of your approach of emergent properties, letting things emerge versus a top-down, "Here's what we're doing and here's what we're talking about here." If someone wanted to set this up within their company or within friends, any advice? What are some constraints and ways of setting it up for success?
Alex Komoroske[00:52:37)]Communities are all about momentum. You want to have a space too small, a time too short. If you have a big cabinet space of a lot of people in it and no one's talking, people go, "I guess this is the place where we don't talk," for whatever reason. So what you're doing is you want the smallest seed of people that you know are going to be actively engaged. So maybe there's four of you that already talk over lunch and you talk about whatever topic and it's always really interesting and generative. Cool,
get that group together and do a thing. And then incrementally add people who you think are going to like that already as it currently exists. And then you need to feed it so you want to make sure that it never dies.[00:53:09)]And a community with no people talking is definitely dead. A community with one person talking is already dead. You don't realize it yet. And so you're trying to maximize the chance that there's an interesting conversation even when you as the facilitator are not there. This takes some active policing by the... Like a garden has a gardener, there's somebody pruning back and saying, "Hey Jeff, just so you know, I think that came out a little bit strong to Sarah's idea and maybe next time add 'I wonder' to the front of that statement,"
or whatever.[00:53:35)]The other thing that you do is when people reach out to you and ping you, they go, "Hey, let's think about this thing," and you go, "That's a really interesting idea. You should share that in the group." And then they do. And then you engage in the group and say, "That was really interesting," little emoji response. And people who didn't watch the interaction assume that Sarah just decided proactively to stick her neck out and share that and that it worked. And so this becomes a self-sustaining norm in the community. And it's not a secret. It's not if someone asks, "Yeah, I told Sarah to share that,"
but people watching don't realize that. And so it becomes a place that people do take risks and feel comfortable sharing.[00:54:07)]The other thing you do is once a week or so, you want to make sure that you never propose something in the group that people go, "Eh." You always want to do a thing people go, "Yeah." So what you do is you see that if you're talking to other people, you say, "I wonder if we should have a live conversation every so often, right?" The chats were so fun, but it goes, "Would you come if I did one?" "Oh yeah, I would." "Okay, great." So now I say, "Hey, a few of us are talking. We're just going to do an experiment. We're going to have an hour-long conversation over lunch on Wednesday. Anyone in the group is free to come." (00:54:33): And then what you do is you make sure it always has quorum because if it doesn't have quorum, then the thing, it looks like the community's dead. And then what you do is you send FOMO stuff afterwards. So you say, "Here's my notes from the thing," or, "Thanks Sarah, Jeff," blah, blah, blah, blah, "or an amazing conversation. I thought the insight about," blah blah blah, "was so ridiculously amazing."
So you want people who were in the group who didn't come to feel like they missed out and to come to the next one.[00:54:57)]And so you're constantly creating these kinds of vibes to how to do it. You can't do it if you don't have somebody with a lot of energy. I'm typically the seed crystal for a lot of the groups I'm in to start them off because I have a lot of energy, and I like, anything that people have to say that I think is open-minded or interesting, I like building on and "yes, and"-
ing and that kind of gives the foundation that it can grow. But look for the people who already roughly want it. Don't try to convince somebody who doesn't want it to want it. They will not. They will ruin the whole thing. Lenny Rachitsky[00:55:30)]I just love this playbook for starting to build a little bit of community within a company. Have you written about this by the way? And if not,
you should write a whole post about this. Alex Komoroske[00:55:37)]I have. It's a long essay and it's just not, you can see it in Bits and Bobs. If you gave the Bits and Bobs to Claude and said, "Please write a thing about nerd clubs and essay and the style," it would do it because there's a lot of the pieces are in there,
it's just not factored out. Lenny Rachitsky[00:55:52)]I see you writing something down right now,
which tells me you just articulated something in a new way that you want to say. Alex Komoroske[00:55:52)]Yeah,
that's right. That's right. Lenny Rachitsky[00:55:59)]You mentioned this idea of constraints of time, and it reminds me of something that you shared in one of your Bits and Bobs around productivity. You say that if you have two hours to do a five-minute task, the effort to do that is impossible and instead you should flip that. Can you talk about this insight and how to be a little more productive?
Alex Komoroske[00:56:15)]Yeah, I think a lot of the trick to productivity is to play yourself like a fiddle and figure out how you work and what gives you energy and set up your day to structure it that way. So I find every time you start a task, there's an activation energy, especially a task you don't really want to do. And then when you complete it, there's a boop. There's a little burst of energy. So if you do this properly, you can get small things that are extremely easy to knock out in 10 seconds of effort, and then you do one that takes 30 seconds of effort, and then you do one that takes a longer bit of effort. But if you give it too much space, it's harder to do. So you almost want to find, "Okay, listen, I got 10 minutes. I got to do this thing where I figure out how to add, do this thing in gusto that I've been putting off. Ten minutes should be enough time to do it and structure it. So okay, right now is the only time I have to do this, to do it." (00:57:01): And another trick is I use one of my original media messages actually, one of the original public ones is about always rules are better than sometimes rules for self-control. And so if you're going to diet, "I'm going to skip lunch every day." Like holy, you haven't full thought on that at some point like a day with a big executive review, "I really need to make sure I'm well-fed before I go into this review," or something. And now you've broken the streak and now it's over. Whereas if you say a thing you know can do, "I will not have a dessert unless it would be socially awkward for me to not eat it. For example, in a small environment where somebody made homemade dessert and all of us are eating it, I'm going to..."
So very clear black and white rule that you can hold on forever.[00:57:50)]So for example, since the pandemic started,
Wow. Alex Komoroske[00:57:56)]And now once I do start going back into the office, if I had to commute into the office, I would sometimes do a meditation to check the box for that. But if I'm not commuting and I'm not deathly sick, I've done a full workout since then. And the idea each day of is today the day of all the hundreds of days in this streak that is the worst or the hardest for me to do this thing? Is this the day? No, of course it's not. I will do it. And so that keeps you in this streak that makes it harder and harder to get out of it. And in some ways, of course you can torture yourself in an unproductive way like at a certain point maybe you should stop that streak,
It's like the Seinfeld trick of productivity where you just keep track of how many days in where you've done something essentially. Alex Komoroske[00:58:45)]Yeah, exactly. And I think people don't give those kinds of tactics enough credit because there's lots of little social tricks to yourself and others. This is when you have other people who are depending on you for something and will know that you didn't do the thing,
that were so much better. So just little tricks like this help you be wildly more productive. Lenny Rachitsky[00:59:02)]Actually, I want to go back a little bit. I'm curious what you wrote down when we were chatting earlier that you thought was a good articulation if you're able to share, if it's interesting,
Alex Komoroske[00:59:11)]I wrote down, and the reason I wrote it down is I've never... And by the way, I collect everything even once I think are maybe onto something. So I wrote down, "A community with zero people speaking is dead and a community with one person speaking doesn't yet realize it's dead,"
So fun. I love this practice that you have. Alex Komoroske[00:59:28)]By the way, the reason I can do it, I can type insanely quickly. And in undergrad, I wrote my thesis on the emergent power dynamics in Wikipedia's user community and I did 150 hours of interviews with different editors in Wikipedia, and I transcribed them myself. And so I got really, really, really good at I can just pipe an idea straight into my fingertips and still listen to other stuff. So that's another superpower is I've just constantly, I'm able to capture it very,
very quickly. I've written notes that are at least good enough for me to clean up within the next day or two into something that's more stable. Lenny Rachitsky[01:00:04)]Is there a way you built this other than... Was it just you did it and you had to do it and you just figured out how to move fast?
Alex Komoroske[01:00:08)]I just realized later that I could type really good, really fast. I could just pipe it straight through to my fingers and it worked. And, I don't know, I don't know if I hadn't written my thesis, would I have discovered that?
I don't know. Lenny Rachitsky[01:00:22)]I feel like everything you do is on super speed, the way you think,
I just realized when- Lenny Rachitsky[01:00:31)]...
a lot of compute. Alex Komoroske[01:00:32)]... when you're feeling productive, you're unstoppable. And so just how can you be in your flow state as much as possible? And there's things that absolutely completely grind me to a halt, and I just make sure I invest my time in situations that don't have that characteristic. So when I work on something that I believe could work and have a big impact, I can't stop. Sometimes I'll wake up at 4:00 in the morning as I'm typically an early riser and I'm just like, "I'll write this thing." The meeting starts at 7:00
and I just think there's an idea that's really cool here and I let myself lean into those kinds of when I have the moment.[01:01:05)]I also find that often if I have an idea and I just have itching to write it down, if I can write down 30 minutes and get a very rough of it in one place, now it's easier to clean it up later. But that first act of creation, I do it whenever the muse hits because it's 10 million times if it's like, "Oh, write that idea down later," you keep on delaying it, delaying it, now it's a month later. "What was the idea? How did that work again?" It's gone. And so I just try to capture the interesting insights. It's like a butterfly collector. The butterflies are going by,
Yeah. Lenny Rachitsky[01:01:43)]This touches on a quote I wanted to talk to you about. I think you described it as your life philosophy. "Do things that give you energy that you are proud of."
Talk about that. Alex Komoroske[01:01:54)]So to me, it's the combination of when you're doing something you believe in and that gives you energy, you are 10 times more productive. And you also, the effort that you are doing is its own reward. And so you are indefatigable on that topic and you go for much longer. So finding the substance of things that align with you that give you energy,
then just it's like infinite energy. It's like they give an opportunity cost because it energizes you more than the opportunity cost of the time to go spend to other things.[01:02:21)]And two, there are ways to give yourself energy, like for example, playing a video game, or there's any kind of mind-altering substance that might give you that like, "This gives me energy." Those are not things that I'm not saying do those. I'm saying what are the things that you'll look back and say, "I'm glad I did that. I'm proud that I did that." And if you take the perspective of a 10 years on looking back on each decision and thing that you're doing, and imagine seeing this decision played in front of 1,000 people whose opinion you care about, your family, your friends, your role models,
would you be proud is a good sign of life that you're taking a broad enough perspective.[01:02:55)]When you're busy and in the moment, it's so easy to say, "I just got to do this one thing that's probably not great to get this thing done. And once I do it, it's going to suck. But once I do it, it'll be fine." And then you find yourself doing it again and again and again and again and before you know it, you've lost who you want to be and you're now a husk of yourself. And so I think those two pieces lean into where you find energy, where you specifically find energy, your superpower, the thing that you intrinsically enjoy doing,
and just make sure it's something that you are actively proud of and that helped make sure you don't take a bunch of shortcuts. Lenny Rachitsky[01:03:29)]Along those same lines, I think a lot of people have heard a version of this quote, which is, "New things that give you energy." So one, I love the additional piece of it is, "and that you're proud of." Two, you have another quote that I love that makes you think deeply about stuff, which is, "The secrets of life is things you've heard a million times already, you just weren't ready to hear them."
Talk about that insight. Alex Komoroske[01:03:53)]So this I call the Hallmark card fallacy, which is you discover at great effort some deep insight that resonates with you and makes you see the world differently, and you want to share it. Insights are naturally viral. You want to share them and you go tell someone, it's like, "Guys, guys, the point of life is the friends we made along the way." And people go, "That's from a Hallmark card, man." And to you, it is you now possess the knowledge, the emotional intelligence to understand why that phrase has been shared so many times. Before, you heard it when you weren't ready and now it becomes a trite, "Duh, everyone says that. That can't possibly be a meaningful statement." (01:04:30): The reason people keep on saying it is because it's meaningful. And so I think that having that space of recognizing it, that when you have these epiphanies that come from different leaps in vertical development or the ability to, when you stare into the abyss and make it through the other side, you realize and learn a bunch of amazing things that you want to pass on others,
and it's just really hard to get them to find it.[01:04:53)]I find that that's one of the reasons I try to write things that are or share ideas that are like little seeds that you can shoot into someone's brain even if the soil's not ready for it, it's rocky or craggy, at some point in the future, if something goes through there and opens up a crack, that's sitting there to grow into an idea. One of the things that makes me the happiest is when someone I've mentored years and the years in the past, they go search me out years later and say, "Alex, I just want to let you know, you probably don't even remember talking to me, but that Tuesday at the building, the no-name cafe or whatever, on Google campus, you said something I was frustrated to hear in the moment I didn't understand it. And I just want to tell you, thank you because I finally understand what you were trying to tell me. And I realized that that influenced me in the decisions."
And so I just find that you can't force it before people are ready to hear certain topics. Lenny Rachitsky[01:05:48)]Man, that must feel so good to hear those sorts of closing the loop on something long ago. The point you make about cliches that you've heard a million times actually finally feeling right and profound, I had this very experience. I did a psychedelic trip with some friends a while ago, and at the end of it I was just like, "Man, love is all you need. Love is all you need." I felt that so deeply through the experience and I was telling people, they're like, "Shut up."
Alex Komoroske[01:06:16)]You telling, oh, do you just do psychedelics? Yeah,
Yeah. Alex Komoroske[01:06:19)]I have a lot of folks in my broader space who obviously have used it. So I never personally have myself, but I find there's various ways. The transcendent mindset is this feeling of being part of something much, much, much larger than yourself and losing your ego in this thing. There's different ways of doing it. Some people will find it in hiking and being out in the wilderness alone. Some people find it being at a concert and thousands of people perfectly in sync to this thing. Some people find it in religious experience. Some people find it using psychedelics and others to help get there. But a lot of it,
it's that same just being willing to be in awe.[01:06:53)]There's so many times that people feel the feeling of awe or wonder or curiosity is treated as a not very serious or childlike thing. And I just don't get that because that is how you are open to disconfirming evidence. It's how you see beyond the current limits of what you... Your ego gets hurt when you get disconfirming evidence. You don't want to hear it. And so you'll construct the world around yourself to not get that disconfirming evidence. But disconfirming evidence is what makes systems strong. It's what makes you strong. And so how do you put yourself in the situation to get that information and really receive it? (01:07:28): And part of it is just coming in terms of the fact of early in my career, someone called me kooky a bit. Oh, man. I must be embarrassed. I'm like, "Okay, fine. Yeah, I'm kooky, whatever."
I'm totally at peace with the idea that some people track me as kooky and not particularly serious. I think people who watch the work that I do and the indirect impact it has realize that I'm doing something that is working even if they don't fully understand how it works. Lenny Rachitsky[01:07:53)]To start to close our conversation, I want to throw out one more seed that might land with someone in the right time. You have this concept of the adjacent possible, which I think is a really powerful concept. And it's basically argues that a lot of people jump to big bold ideas, and instead the better approach is think about what's a constraint you have and lean into the constraints and use that as a guide. Can you just talk about this and how this might inform how people think about product and strategy?
Alex Komoroske[01:08:20)]Sure, yeah. The frame is the adjacent possible, which is I believe comes from design thinking. I've found it from designers in my life who are the ones who would just speak to it. And the adjacent possible is a set of actions that you do, that you can do. They are right in front of you that if you do them, they would work, almost certainly work. And in the tech industry in particular, we default assume that the adjacent possible is like this and then flying leap to something. And in reality, the adjacent possible is quite small. It's within arm's reach. And people will say, "Oh, you're being nihilist. You're limiting your potential. You're saying don't do big things." But when you recognize that your adjacent possible is relatively small, you realize that you actually have full agency to pick within the subset that is within your reach,
and your actions matter because you take an action and now the world reconfigures and now you get a next set of actions and it's based partially on the action you just took.[01:09:11)]And so if you slice this thing up and you have a coherent worldview and you have a principled approach, you can arc to wildly different outcomes than look like they were possible while at each point, each individual action is safe and reasonable. And so you can combine both of these things. I think so many times we try to jump and we jump to the end state of the thing. And actually you don't need to make that decision. If you can slice up your decisions into smaller and smaller decisions, I'm like, "This next step definitely makes sense." It will almost certainly pay for itself or the very least won't be too expensive. And then it might allow these other things to happen and you take it. And if those other things don't happen, okay, don't take another step on that path. That's fine. Go in other directions for a while. If it does,
And this allows you to get rid of a lot of the risk and still be exposed to all the upside. And so the risk comes from trying to jump too far ahead in an unknown environment. Lenny Rachitsky[01:10:02)]Is the general advice if someone's working on trying to figure out the roadmap, trying to think about what products to build is the advice, don't be scared to go a little incremental versus what people are always pushed,
to do bigger. Alex Komoroske[01:10:13)]You need both. So if you only do incremental, you will follow the shortest, the steepest gradient in front of you. So UXR says a user wants to do this and you'll do exactly that and you'll end up random walking through the thing. So you need coherence about where you're going and the way you get that is by creating a North Star for yourself. It should be in three to five years in the future, it should be very low resolution. It should describe a thing that every single person who reads it who has any kind of knowledge that might be useful or relevant agrees that it is plausible. If this happens, I would not say, "Well, a miracle happened." It'd say, "I could see how that could work." And lawyers say, "I could see how that could work." And someone who's worked on this 30 years ago at a similar product that Microsoft says, "I can see how that could work." (01:10:51): And that if you got to the end point, everyone would high five because if it's going to be a thing, they're like, "I guess that could work." At the end we'd be like, "Oh yeah, neat." That's not worth it. You want another story would be like, "Yeah, great. Wow, we kick off. We changed the way this entire industry works," or whatever. And now this is your North Star. North Star should update, but it's because it's far off in the distance. It will update. It will slide up across the sky a little bit. It won't be jerking around. You'll be arcing slightly differently. And then what you do is you look in your adjacent possible and you look for the thing that has the steepest gradient that pulls you towards your North Star. So you just want to go in that direction and you want to go in this direction. This one is second most in demand from what you think,
but it's pulling you the direction that you believe will pull you there. Go in that one.[01:11:31)]And then they keep on repeating. That's it. But you need both. Because if you only do incremental, then you'll end up random walking into a corner. And if you only do the long-term,
you end up dreaming big and designing castles in the sky that are impossible to actually manifest. Lenny Rachitsky[01:11:45)]To give you a metaphor from an experience I had, I did this silent meditation retreat once, and a big part of Buddhism is to not cling to a specific outcome and not have a plan in mind and be sad if it doesn't work out. And so I asked them just how do you achieve success and want to be successful while not doing that? And their metaphor is point your card in a specific direction that you want to go. Just point your card in that direction, essentially in your example of North Star,
and just start walking. Don't figure out this is exactly the path I'm going to take to get to this end destination. Alex Komoroske[01:12:19)]Yeah. And you'll know after the fact, you'll say, "Oh, I curved a little bit or I had this little jog than there." And you'll say, "Ah, it would've been more efficient." But we're so focused on efficiency of not wasting effort that we ended up doing nothing at all or doing very dangerous things that don't work. So I'm much sure that I have a path that's slightly inefficient because we're navigating unknowns and we couldn't know no point. I think I've seen the number of times I find where people say, "I need to know for this strategy," that someone was trying to get me to look at and then say, "is this number in five years, is it going to be 93 or 95?" And it's like,
I don't know. And it doesn't matter either if it's going to be that order of magnitude.[01:12:56)]It doesn't matter, and we don't have to do that analysis if we believe that the order of magnitude is of that thing. It'd actually be we had spent all the time to get the illusion of precision, which at great expense, and then it's the people say, "Oh, I'm data-driven. I want to really run the analysis to ground." There's tons of stuff you can't know ahead of time. So if you're getting a false precision at the beginner, that's a comfort blanket. That's just helping you feel like there isn't uncertainty. There's uncertainty everywhere all the time. And trying to ignore it by trying to pin it down with fake numbers that you just made up for yourself at great expense is a really bad idea. And that's why if the ideas are strong enough, things that have a compounding return don't give you, "Oh, we'll either get 93 or 95." It's like, "We'll either get zero or we'll get 1,000." Great. It doesn't really matter if it's 1,000 or 1,001, who cares? It orders a magnitude larger than the alternative,
and so it is better. Lenny Rachitsky[01:13:48)]That's really freeing. I noticed again,
you were writing something. I'm again curious which you wrote down that you thought was insightful. Alex Komoroske[01:13:54)]I actually this time I was not writing did something down. I was checking a thing I thought you might say that was going to reference was Tim Urban's, "Happiness is the reality minus expectations." I always get that backwards, but have you heard this frame,
that happiness- Lenny Rachitsky[01:14:07)]Let's get into it. Yeah,
we're not going to get this. This is great. Alex Komoroske[01:14:09)]"Happiness is reality minus expectations," and this is Tim Urban. It was from Wait But Why. And I think it's a very simple distillation of it, of if you set your expectations super high and it comes in and it's amazing, but it's below it, then it's a net negative. So the easiest thing, reality is hard to change. It's not impossible. It's hard to change. Your expectations are super easy. So just change your expectations. Hold it lightly and don't say, "Oh my gosh, this is going to be my kid's birthday. She's going to remember it. It's going to be the best birthday that she ever had and we're all it's going to be perfect." Because then when it doesn't go perfect and it starts raining that day, you're like, "Gosh." You get all worked up. Just say, "No, I want spend this day in a way that I can look back on and remember fondly." And that will include, yeah,
it changed.[01:14:54)]One other piece of advice someone gave me that I really like is try to feel the emotion about the story that'll make you feel in 10 years. So if it's funny in 10 years, try to see the humor in it now. And this one in particular was a friend, their newborn would, every time you changed her diaper, would poop. That was only... And when they did it, it would often be projectile. And so it was like a trap. You change the diaper. And it was like, what are you going to do in that situation? And then they're just like, "It's going to be a funny story in a few years, so let's see the humor in it now." Even though, God,
That's funny. Alex Komoroske[01:15:29)]... you're not spraying poop on her. And I think that that kind of perspective is really, people sometimes hear this as, "Oh, you're saying don't dream big. Don't set high expectations. Don't expect more and be okay with mediocrity." That is not what I'm saying. I'm saying hold those expectations lightly. Allow them to change. Be willing to be convinced by different things,
and seek something great. Seek something that you can be truly proud of and that feel very authentic to yourself if you achieved. Lenny Rachitsky[01:15:57)]Alex, I feel like I could talk to you for hours. I can't believe it's already been almost an hour and a half. So just to wrap things up, is there anything else that you thought would be fun to share or maybe a piece of wisdom you want to leave listeners with before we get to a very exciting lightning round?
Alex Komoroske[01:16:13)]I think we covered it. I think we covered a lot of that. And again, we could go on for hours and hours and hours and hours. I could just do a random... I can feature The Compendium where I can pull up a random idea,
and let's not do that. Lenny Rachitsky[01:16:24)]Okay, amazing. Well, Alex, with that, we've reached the very exciting lightning round. Are you ready?
I am ready. Lenny Rachitsky[01:16:30)]First question, what are two or three books you've recommended most to other people?
Alex Komoroske[01:16:33)]Origin of Wealth by Eric Beinhocker, which is great. It's about a complexity economics, why the traditional economic model doesn't work, and also why it takes an evolutionary lens on what kinds of business plans work and how companies execute them. That I found my entree into a lot of the systems thinking and I thought it was just absolutely brilliant. And the other one is The Elements of Thinking in Systems, which is short, easy to read, very approachable. In fact, if anything, people think of it as not serious enough because it's too easy to read. It's one of those books that when you read at the beginning you'll say, "This sounds right." And then later, years later, if you read it again you'll go, "Oh my God, that was so... I wasn't ready for that yet, but that is totally the way." So she's one of the people who talks about dancing the systems. Let go and dance with the system is one of her lines,
and I think it's just a phenomenal book. Lenny Rachitsky[01:17:21)]Next question. Do you have a favorite recent movie or TV show you really enjoyed?
Alex Komoroske[01:17:24)]For me, I was thinking about this, it's The Green Knight, which I watched I think a few years old. It's about the Arthurian legend. It's a challenging movie. In fact, when I watched it, I was like, "I dislike this. I do not find this interesting." And then I couldn't stop thinking about it and it helped me. I think this is one of the reasons I like to write in parable is a parable is open-ended. It encourages and requires the listener to engage into the idea and play with it and see how it affects them and how they affect it. And so for me, The Green Knight, again, I'm not excited to watch it again,
but I found it to be the most impactful movie I've seen in the last couple of years in terms of amount of thinking that it caused me to do afterwards. Lenny Rachitsky[01:18:04)]Wow, that says a lot. Next question, do you have a favorite product you've recently discovered that you really like?
Alex Komoroske[01:18:10)]To me, I think the answer for me is WebSim. It's the one that I like playing around with a lot. And I've said it before, I use Claude 20 times a day. I find that it's almost impossible for me to imagine doing work. I mean of course now I've got to use Strawberry and see how that feels,
but yeah. Lenny Rachitsky[01:18:28)]One use case of WebSim that I found really fun that I used with Dylan is if you do Gmail, if you give it gmail.com/someone's name, it just comes up with what their email looks like. And could do it for famous people, like for Patrick Allison or whoever, and it's like, "Wow, that's really good."
Alex Komoroske[01:18:45)]The elements are really good. One of the things we played around with is having a thing that generates fake data of arbitrary schemas, and I just write a short backstory of a person and then have it generate data that fits in this fictional user person's world. And it's just amazing the kinds of stuff, the coherence it has with, it's weird and it's very specific to that story, but elements are just so, they're like these little holograms of all this information of humanity is interesting informational package, this little thing. And all kinds,
It's like a zip file of all human knowledge. Alex Komoroske[01:19:31)]Yeah,
yeah. Lenny Rachitsky[01:19:32)]Amazing. And it's because it's trained on all the things we've written, right?
Yep. Lenny Rachitsky[01:19:36)]All right, two more questions. You have a favorite life motto that you often come back to find useful in work or in life?
Alex Komoroske[01:19:43)]I guess I've said too, this is cheating, but I said too, the do things that give you energy that you're proud of,
and the happiness is reality minus expectations I think are really simple clarifying words to look like. Lenny Rachitsky[01:19:56)]All right. Final question. You can go in one of two directions. One is what's something that you are going to add to this week's Bits and Bobs that you're thinking about right now that we haven't talked about?
Or just go to your Compendium and pick a random thing and see what comes up and share. Alex Komoroske[01:20:11)]Okay,
This is written a year ago.[01:20:18)]"We've forgotten a world without aggregators. Non-aggregator ecosystems make it so participants don't have to fear empowering their overlord, where that you have to worry about each bit of action you're doing, the aggregator is getting it more and more powerful. MySpace was the Wild West. Facebook made it so you can't change the CSS, which was better for users, containing some freedom. Aggregators make sense in the late stage of an era. At the beginning, they curtail too much exploration." (01:20:42): That's just my random reflections. I don't even remember what conversation that came from originally, but of the power of... I am just so obsessed with the idea that we are in the late stage of this current technical paradigm that we're in and so many things we feel like we figured them all out and nothing can be any different, and I don't love this outcome that we're in, the idea of you're... Just one quick framing. To me, if you ask somebody on the street to tell you what the canonical piece of software is, the answer they'll give you is something like Instagram, which is to say an app, which I think is a shame because an app is monolithic. It's one size fits all. It's not decomposable. It doesn't meaningfully interact with anything else in the broader ecosystem. And it's also only allowed to exist if some of the largest companies in the world say it may exist,
which is insane to me.[01:21:26)]To me, software is alchemy. It's the ability to extend human agency beyond ourselves to create something that can then combine with what others have created in unexpected and unforeseen ways to create this commentary of possibility of human agency. And somehow in the past decade, we've become convinced that all of this potential should be squeezed into about a dozen little boxes on your phone. And now with the power of AI, everyone just is default assuming that what's going to happen is we're all going to be locked inside of a box with a super God AI Clippy. And the only thing that people disagree about is which Clippy is it going to be? Whose Clippy is it going to be? (01:21:57): That to me is bonkers. I don't want that world at all. I want a world where we use this magical duct tape to escape the box, to allow software and humans using it to lean into their agency. And I think aggregators are amazing in an environment where you have a safe environment to have all kinds of interesting stuff that can't be fully open-ended because the aggregator can't allow it to escape the possibility of that ecosystem. And so for me, one of the reasons I'm excited about LLMs being a disruptive technology is I think that it allows us to get out of this monolithic sense of whatever. We're all just beholden to a decreasing number, very powerful organizations,
and lean into everybody being able to be creative and collaborative and exercise their agency in a pro-social way. Lenny Rachitsky[01:22:41)]Wow. Well, you blew our mind as a final element of this conversation. Alex, thank you so much for being here. Two final questions. Where can folks find you online? Where do they find stuff you're working on if they want to read more and follow the stuff you're thinking about? And then how can listeners be useful to you?
Alex Komoroske[01:22:58)]Komoroske.com is where. My husband gives me so much shit for it because it looks like it was designed in the early 2000s, which it was. I link to all the different posts there. If you click, there's a Google group, but now where you can subscribe to my updates whenever I post in the Bits and Bobs or any medium article,
that's a good way of taking touch as I publish stuff.[01:23:16)]And then the way that Google can be useful to me is I have office hours on my site that are open to anybody to join in. I am continually, they're booked off in a few weeks in advance, but if you find something that resonated with you or that didn't, or you think is interesting or, "Oh, here's a parallel. I don't know if you've thought of it before," just reach out to me. And I love, love, love talking to people, interesting people especially who have life experiences and backgrounds that are different from mine. At one point, a magician showed up in my office hours and described and said, "Hey, this tactic you're talking about in your Bits and Bobs, that's actually cold reading. That's what psychics use."
And I would find all these crazy connections they'd never occurred to me before. And so people just reaching out and sharing ideas and I love. Lenny Rachitsky[01:23:59)]Alex,
Thank you so much for having me. Lenny Rachitsky[01:24:12)]Bye,
everyone.[01:24:15)]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 leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode.