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Tomer Cohen: How LinkedIn turned cringe feeds into signal

Through a two-million-member carved-out cohort and AI as matchmaker; clarity over confused beat hedging, and mountain-peak ambition revived the LinkedIn feed.

Lenny RachitskyhostTomer Cohenguest
Sep 8, 20241h 9mWatch on YouTube ↗

EVERY SPOKEN WORD

  1. 0:00 – 2:28

    Introduction to Tomer Cohen and his role at LinkedIn

    1. LR

      I think it's so underappreciated, the turnaround that has happened within LinkedIn. Like, I check it at least 10 times a day. What was the strategy behind it?

    2. TC

      I started backwards and was like, "What is the potential here?" If you start from the premise that LinkedIn ultimately is a platform for economic opportunity that sits on top of a very strong social graph, almost every aspect of economic transaction is possible.

    3. LR

      Is there anything tactically that would just like, wow, that really made a big dent in people wanting to come here and post your interesting content?

    4. TC

      To really set the new purpose for it, which was this is not a springboard for other products. This is not a traffic jumpstart. It's not an upsell feed. It's really about people that matter, talking about things that I care about professionally. The first thing we did was really making it AI-first.

    5. LR

      How do you actually, like, on the ground help people shift their perspective and think AI-first?

    6. TC

      So it wasn't like, "Oh, we have this cool technology. What can we do with it?" It was like, "Let go of what you've built. Go back to the objectives you were trying to solve. And now with this technology, how can you do that objective better?"

    7. LR

      There's so much I want to dig into here. Is there anything else that you think would be interesting or useful for folks?

    8. TC

      AI is the ultimate matchmaker. It's underutilized. It's misunderstood. It's really about... (instrumental music)

    9. LR

      Today, my guest is Tomer Cohen. Tomer is chief product officer at LinkedIn, overseeing all teams responsible for building and creating LinkedIn products and experiences, including product development, design, business development, content creation, and customer operations. During his tenure at LinkedIn, Tomer was head of the mobile team, led the effort to revamp the LinkedIn feed, and to many people's surprise, made it extremely interesting and a place I check regularly. And he was also at the center of shifting LinkedIn to an AI-first mindset, which started way before AI became cool. In our conversation, Tomer goes inside the strategy behind the transformation of LinkedIn's feed and how they approached making it a place that people wanted to check and make it much more social. We also get into the one mindset that Tomer credits for helping him rise so quickly within LinkedIn. Also, why Tomer's most repeated mantra is, "We might be wrong, but we are not confused," and so much more. This episode is for anyone wanting to see what great product leadership looks like and wants to be inspired to think bigger. A big thank you to Shira Gasarch, Dan Roth, Josh Redfern, and Sparsh Agarwal for question suggestions that made this episode so interesting. With that, I bring you Tomer Cohen. (instrumental music) Tomer, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

    10. TC

      Thank you for having

  2. 2:28 – 6:45

    The mantra “We might be wrong, but we are not confused”

    1. TC

      me.

    2. LR

      Absolutely my pleasure. Uh, so as I was preparing for this podcast, I reached out to a bunch of people that have worked with you and asked them what I should ask you on this podcast. And interestingly, every single one of them said this one thing that I need to ask you, which is about this phrase that apparently you use all the time. So first of all, can you guess what this phrase might be?

    3. TC

      I have a few. Sometimes people call them Tomerisms, but...

    4. LR

      (laughs) Tomerisms.

    5. TC

      But, uh, I would be, I would be, uh, probably is, "I might be wrong, but not confused."

    6. LR

      That's the one. Amazing. Okay.

    7. TC

      Yeah.

    8. LR

      So let's talk about this phrase.

    9. TC

      They don't say it so much anymore.

    10. LR

      Okay. Maybe...

    11. TC

      But, uh, I think it's ingrained into the culture.

    12. LR

      I was gonna say that.

    13. TC

      When people think of me, they think of this sentence already.

    14. LR

      That's... Those are the ultimate things, where they've... You don't need to say them as much anymore. Okay, so the phrase, again, is, "We might be wrong, but we're not confused."

    15. TC

      Exactly.

    16. LR

      Let's talk about this. So what does this phrase mean and why do you find it so powerful and important to say often?

    17. TC

      Yeah, but it's like, it's a simple phrase, but it has, in my opinion, so much depth into that, and ultimately something I really believe in. It's rooted in clarity and principles that ultimately lead to leadership. And the first time I got the inspiration from it was from a, a startup founder I met many, many years ago. Their company was on the brink of failure. They had their last attempt, and they decided on a path forward. And after they started on the path forward, he was still seeing people hedging in different directions, you know, and it kind of led into this confusion in the system where we decided people are still hedging, they're still trying out things they thought could work. And he realized that unless they basically all pull through in the same direction, there's no chance they'll be able to be successful. Now, pulling through in the same direction doesn't mean you're gonna be successful, but at least it gives you a chance of success, and that confusion in the system, only luck can save you. So, uh, that was... When he shared that, that was very impactful for me. I think it's a good one for life as well. And for me, it kind of comes down to two main parts. One is clarity of thought and clarity of execution, and they're both equally important.

    18. LR

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  3. 6:45 – 13:03

    Clarity of thought and focus

    1. LR

    2. TC

      On the clarity of thought, what I find people to be attached to, especially when you build an environment with a lot of, uh, kind of alpha types, is that they get attached to being right or wrong, and that really creates a lot of lingering in the system, a lot of confusion, and they're still stuck to their ideas. And for me, I get attached to clarity and focus. I think that's much more important. I... That's why I think when I say I don't mind being wrong, it really comes from a humble place. I would rather go forward with everybody in the same direction than necessarily try to hedge all the time, which will give me no chance of success. And the way we start, we do this in our product jams right now, is we start, we actually spend some significant time on what is the problem we're trying to solve for. But not high level. Not like, "Hey, we wanna launch this product. We wanna launch a video product." It's exactly what type of video you're trying to launch, for which audience, what is your unique criteria, what are you trying... What is very nuanced about what you're trying to solve for? Ideally, once the time you see the problem, you know exactly the problem you're try... You actually can imagine that mountain. It's not just a mountain. You can see exactly the road. You can see exactly then of the base camp. But then when you move to solution, uh, I love solutions that are based on fir- first principles. That they have... There's a principle thinking about it, there's opinions about it. If you talk to folks who work with me they'll tell you, I push a lot for, like, like, what is actually your opinion? What is your potentially, in a controversial opinion? And the best principles have teeth. So saying that we should build a simple product, for me, is useless. Who doesn't want to build a simple product? But saying that I'm willing to sacrifice or trade off this, that's when you s- that's where I get excited. I'm like, "Okay, like, that's a very strong opinion. Let's go into that." Why were you willing to trade off those type of vectors to make it happen? And, you know, one thing that I saw also in clarity of thought was... This is... I came to the US in 2008. I came t- from Israel. You know, our hobby in Israel is to argue, so we, we argue a lot as like a... It's our love language in many ways. And I, I come to the US and I notice people say a lot, like, "I don't exactly understand," or, you know, "I'm not exactly clear on this," and it took me a long time to realize they're actually disagreeing. They're just masking it with a, a layer of misunderstanding. And a good mentor of mine said, "Hey, just push back. Are you disagreeing or misunderstanding? If you're misunderstanding, let's spend the night. Let's get to a point where you can articulate, m- uh, my point of view in your words, and I can do the same. But if we're disagreeing, let's stop. Why are we spending... Why are we wasting time just arguing it through?" So those became really powerful. That's on the clarity of thought. Clarity of execution is even more important, because many organizations actually reach a decision, they don't act on it. Which is, it's one of those, like, shocking things. They decide this is a top priority, but it doesn't make its way into the organization, and I'll give you an example. Uh, like if somebody will say, "Hey, my top priority for, you know, you know, like for my business is this initiative." And then I'll say, "But most of your engineers are working on this migration." And they'll say, "Yeah, we have to finish that." I'm like, "So why don't you say, 'My- the migration is my number one priority?' " And he's like, "Yeah..." It's like, "But that's exactly what you're doing. You have to, like, make sure that what you're sharing as a priority is actually manifested in your resourcing." Then I'm like, "Hey, this is your top talent. Why is your top talent working some moon shots that are not in your number one priority?" And they're like, "Yeah." Like, this is where you start finding that really, it doesn't really translate into, uh, execution as well, and you can solve so much by just making that sure that focus is there.

    3. LR

      So the, the big lesson here is to push for clarity and push out anything that is unclear, confusion, either in thought and also in execution. One of the folks that I talked to that worked with you about this phrase, Josh Redfern, he said that this phrase became really liberating for him, which is really interesting to hear because it forces you to make a call and to be aligned and make sure everyone is, is on the same page. I guess, yeah, thoughts on just, like, why this concept is so liberating?

    4. TC

      It goes back to, like, kind of little alpha types or type A folks who are, like, just so attached to not getting it wrong, even you need to move forward, and it's not about being right or wrong. It's really about not being confused and making sure everybody's pulling in the same direction. That is actually really liberating. And when you know that, like, the whole idea is to have a Socratic conversation about what you're trying to do, then coming to the table with some kind of half-baked ideas or, uh, or actually, like, not an opinion I think actually brings into a conversation of feedback. But you have to manifest it through. If you just play this through, but then you potentially playing the right or wrong game, that's, that's really poor. Uh, I also think it's the best way to learn. Like, if you don't know exactly what you're doing, how can you learn back from why you made that decision? So if you had a clear understanding, 'cause ultimately, like, it's a growing an organization. This is not a one-off project. We're gonna build many projects in the future, so if you're not sure about what we're trying to accomplish, how can you know what you learn from it?

    5. LR

      I love that. So the idea here is make it very okay to be wrong, but make it not okay to be, uh, be confused and not clear about, "Here's what we're doing. Here's why we're doing it. Everyone's aligned exactly on the same..."

    6. TC

      ... how can I have a product conversation if I'm not sure what you stand for?

    7. LR

      Mm-hmm.

    8. TC

      It's really hard to, it's har- uh, really hard to have a Socratic conversation. Really hard to have... I mean, if you ask folks, "How many time you left a meeting and kind of corporate..." eh, could be a start-up or, like, larger companies, and you're not sure exactly what was the problem discussed or what are the next steps, more often than not, they'll raise their hand. That, for me, is a waste of building time. So that actually, that agitates me in a, in a not a great way. But when we had a str... When I come in and I'm proven, uh, wrong or there's a strong challenge or argument, again, that's a little bit my love language, I actually enjoy those. I think we leave

  4. 13:03 – 16:18

    Setting ambitious goals and overdelivering

    1. TC

      the conversation much better.

    2. LR

      Mm-hmm. You said there's some other tomer- tos- tomarisms? What are some others just, uh, that you can share?

    3. TC

      This is, again, this is classic to, uh, uh, building in large organizations but I actually believe in, especially when it comes to products to really set ambitious goals but then try to over-deliver on them. Like, really set, like, what are you trying to, like in the z- the almost like the opposite, where people are like under, you know, underplaying it and over-delivering, I don't understand what you're trying to do. For me, it's like, we are here to make an impact, we're here to make, to really set our goals to something really massive and I'm trying, when I'm trying to visualize is that like I see a mountain, you see the peak and you know the peak exactly how it looks like, you see base camp, you know how to start, and maybe the middle of the mountain is kind of blurry but you'll figure this out, but at least you know the peak you're trying to share. Share the peak. Share where you're headed to. And I think it's just mu- a much more exciting way to build product. It's a much more inspirational way for folks to be part of the prod- the, the, the product process kind of thing.

    4. LR

      I was just, uh, chatting with Vlad who worked at Airbnb for many years. He was actually my former manager at Airbnb and he reported to Brian for a long time, and we talked about this trait that Brian also is really good at, is just setting crazy high goals, like 10X the goal that you thought you had and what would it take, and it worked really well for Airbnb. So I love that you're kind of double down- doubling down on the same idea. Is there an example that comes to mind of one that you s- like a, some ambitious goal you set internally at LinkedIn that people are like, "No way," and then it ended up being effective?

    5. TC

      Actually, there's a lot.

    6. LR

      Mm-hmm.

    7. TC

      Like, I, I, when I think about our LinkedIn feed and thinking about, like, you know, when you started off, it was hard to (laughs) imagine what that product could be because it was more of a promotionally nature product and I was like, "No, this is gonna be a place where, like, millions of people, and not, like, just tens of millions, like, will come daily." And they're like, "That's insane. That makes no sense based on the numbers today." But, like, I don't, I don't start building from the numbers today. I start from wha- like, I start backwards. I'm just like, "Well, what this could be? What is the potential here?" So how many professionals exist in their role? How many of them would love to find a place to sharing and, and engage with content? This is my starting point. I start from there. Uh, so I don't start from the existence to set my ambition. I start from, like, what this could be like based on really inspiration and excitement. Again, it's, it's, it's, it's not detached from reality completely but it's also not hooked to it. But then base camp could be a good start. Like, you know, you're not, I'm not asking you to make it the next day but if you don't have that ambition, there is no (laughs) way you're gonna hit that. There's just no way. And there's so many products across LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a 20-plus-year-old company that many folks, uh, did not give it a chance in almost every phase of it, and I think if anything, it's one of those that just keeps getting better and better every year, and part of it is you keep the landmark on this is, this (laughs) really has the potential to do so much for me- so many people. Uh, it's really an eco- an economic pro- platform. So if you play from that, like, one billion members? That's actually pretty small where we can actually go.

    8. LR

      Mm-hmm. I'm so happy

  5. 16:18 – 22:03

    Transforming LinkedIn’s feed: strategy and execution

    1. LR

      you went to this example. This is exactly where I wanted to take the conversation. Uh, I was very much in, like, s- the camp you described of, uh, LinkedIn, how could LinkedIn possibly become a place that I want to go and browse a feed and post content? As you probably know, for the longest time, it was felt like this cringey place, as you said, where everyone comes and promotes themselves. "Hey, I got a promotion," or, "Here's my company's new launch." And it's, I think it's so underappreciated, the turnaround that has happened within LinkedIn. Like, I use it... I'm a multi-day, multi-Dow user. Like, I check it at least 10 times a day. Most of my traffic to my newsletter comes from LinkedIn, not Twitter where people think. It's absurdly underappreciated and it's, I think, underappreciated what it took to make this happen and when it, I saw you guys starting to try to make it a place people post content, I was like, "No way. This is not gonna work. Why would (laughs) people want to share stuff that on LinkedIn that..." And it's working. It's amazing. So, uh, I wanna spend some time here and just-

    2. TC

      Yeah.

    3. LR

      ... kind of try to go inside the strategy that you guys put together to here's how we're gonna make this happen come... You shared you had this peak of, like, here's what we could become. How did you actually turn this around? How did, what was the strategy behind it?

    4. TC

      Yeah. By the way, I'm glad you're finding great, um-

    5. LR

      Absolutely.

    6. TC

      ... kind of audience and traffic on LinkedIn. I think your content hi- actually your content is exactly what we're trying-

    7. LR

      Mm-hmm.

    8. TC

      ... to build for. It's expertise, it's advice, it's people you can learn from and it's also the views that really matter, not just the volume that matters. I, I think, like, you know, if you take a step back, there's so much conversation about zero to run products or scaling products but you don't have much conversations about minus one to run products, like turnaround products. And I think there's a, there's obviously the perception of the market you have to deal with but people, I think in minus to run products, at least from my experience, it's, and we had a few at LinkedIn. Pages is another one, helping businesses build their presence on LinkedIn. What you find is it's actually mo- most of the time it's internally harder to do because there's so much entrenched flows and processes and metrics that people are using on that, uh, on that specific area so you almost have to, like, change the inner workings of the system to make it work.You know, going back to the analogy of the mountain, if you start from the premise that I deeply believe in is that LinkedIn ultimately is a platform for economic opportunity that has... That sits on top of a very strong social graph, then really almost every aspect of economic transaction is possible. And knowledge transaction is one of the most powerful economic transactions you can have. It's the biggest accelerant for, uh, for an experience. And we were always very strong at helping people, you know, uh, get a job. We have seven hires per minute. But as we were building more and more knowledge, and part of it was we bought LinkedIn Learn- we bought LinkedIn, uh, to make it LinkedIn Learning a while back. Today we have 140, uh, hours of learning every minute on LinkedIn happening across the feed and LinkedIn Learning. It's pretty, it's pretty powerful and the transformation to the LinkedIn feed, uh, was exactly like you said. We, we actually were the first company to have a social feed, uh, but I think we started wrong. (laughs) So it, we, we started with basically activity feed. So it was like who changed what, who changed the job, who connected to who. It was more of like a tracking your network feed and it became more promotional in nature. So in a way, just l- letting that be, just naturally just moved into more of a professional type of feed. And, uh, what we've done is, we've shifted dramatically into building... Actually this was one of the things I was excited about, so after I was leading the mobile team, uh, there was no feed team. There was no unified feed team. There was no feed PM to an extent. I asked to do this role. Nobody cared about it. I really believed in it. Uh, I have strong conviction about what I could do there and I asked to do this role and we assembled the team around it, and, uh, one of the main things we've done was to really set the new purpose for it, which was this is not a, a springboard for other products. This is not a traffic kind of, uh, uh, you know, a traffic jumpstart, uh, for... It's not an upsell feed. It's really about people that matter talking about things that I care about professionally. It's about knowledge exchange. It's about, how can I get the right views to the right, uh, experts in a way that actually helps them build a reputation and build their business? And then we started from there, backwards. So it was basically setting that ground for that mountain peak that was nowhere to be imagined at the beginning and making our way backwards. The first thing we did was really making it AI, AI first. So the F- AI team back then was completely centralized. It was not part of, uh, uh, of any product team. And we brought it together with like one unified AI f- AI first team and we... The belief I had was ultimately the engine of the car was AI and that was almost like deprioritized or delegated to a team that was not unified in objectives. So bring that in. And then I spent most of my time on objectives and, and algorithm features and data training which kind of led me into my passion about training product people to be AI first product people. And that was a big transformation there, really shifting e- and we had incredible AI team, but they were completely... They were conf- actually, it was a confused operation. They were building something for a whole different purpose and we were trying to aim to that mountain peak and they were pulling in different direction. Not... No bad intent. It was... That was they were... Tha- that's what they were told to do. So bring it together into kind of this like SWAT team, uh, was the first thing that actually was, uh, extremely powerful.

  6. 22:03 – 26:24

    Running experiments at scale

    1. TC

      But then began, then came the hard work. You have a product that works in a certain way and you almost want to change its DNA altogether. And it was very hard because whene- whenever we're trying to run experiments that were mass in scale, I told you everybody was relying on the feed for their traffic. It just scared the whole system because numbers were shifting up and down and teams were freaking out about meeting their goals. (laughs) And, uh, then I realized I was just spending my time in escalations instead of actually building a great product. So what I did was I carved out two million members and I said, "Those are my members. I'm gonna focus on building the few... That mountain peak, I'm gonna build for them." Full liberty in doing whatever, it doesn't hurt numbers giving the scale and really focus on building a great experience for them. And it wasn't overnight and it wasn't over a week, but over the course of months we've seen dramatic behavior change for those members. Almost like secluded like a country of people that were seeing a different, uh, experience of LinkedIn. And once we saw that, you actually had strong evidence that wow, if I bring this in, we don't need to spend time talking about how does this pie get slotted between different teams. We can actually grow the pie. The experience just manifests itself in a whole different way. And that was, that was a big change internally. It took... It didn't... It wasn't overnight and... But it was really powerful in getting everybody around to see, wow, we have this cohort that is doing extremely well which was a randomized cohort, and then how we can bring it out. I've also done some, you know, crazy things. We've done some negative tests to prove some stuff out. Tests for the sake of learning, when you run something that you can show that, you know, if it's just a promotional feed and you play that out organically over time, engagement deteriorates. We ran some really important ad tests as well. But we're really shown separa- almost like we carved out a different product and we showed that this could work and then we brought it out, uh, to the main experience for everybody else. And then that was kind of the, I would say, the inner workings of like minus one to one. Then the scaling part really became when we started to focus on professional opportunities. So when people actually share, how do they get the right views into the experience? We don't compete for volume. Like it's not... We're not in the same kind of category of Meta in terms of the scale there but we will compete all day long for the right people seeing your content.... in fact, I think in many ways that's the most powerful part of LinkedIn. How do we make sure that it's professionally productive and safe conversations? How do we, we trade off bad engagement all day long. In fact, one of the thing, when we started shifting the AI objective from, you know, click-through into more downstream conversations, spammers actually took notice as well. So they were jumping over to LinkedIn bandwagon, so we had to spend a lot of time (laughs) at removing bad activity from LinkedIn. But that's been the evolution of this process.

    2. LR

      That is amazing. There's so much I want to dig into here. Okay, so this two million user carve out that you did, basically everyone was just like, "What the hell are you doing to our metrics and goals? You're causing all this trouble for the business. Why is this team causing, hurting our metrics?" So that was basically a, a group that, uh, those are the two million users are the only ones that saw this new updated feed. And they, were they removed from everyone else's metrics so they wouldn't fluctuate as much or was it just...

    3. TC

      They, they could be kept in the overall because it wasn't-

    4. LR

      It was a small percentage.

    5. TC

      ... wasn't as, as important. Exactly.

    6. LR

      Yeah, got it.

    7. TC

      But for us they were like the world-

    8. LR

      (laughs)

    9. TC

      ... we were basically able to prove with them.

    10. LR

      Got it. Okay, that's so smart. Okay, so basically you just decided, "We're not, we're only gonna move your metrics a little bit, worst case, if we

    11. TC

      I tried for, uh, this, I failed, but I tried for a few months to, you know, play on the overall experience with everybody, but it was, uh, you know, it was really hard. Almost like impossible, because you have an organization that is so tied into how things work-

    12. LR

      Right.

    13. TC

      ... that I was just hitting walls after walls after escalations and it was just unproductive.

    14. LR

      And this is before you were chief product officer where you could have just said, "We will take this bet. We know this might hurt metrics short term."

    15. TC

      Yes.

    16. LR

      Okay, got it. That makes sense. Okay, the other piece, so, just like lessons I'm taking away from trying something like this that's an ambitious bet within a company is, put a PM and a team on it with a goal. That feels like a core part of the success of just like somebody's ass is on the line to doing this thing.

    17. TC

      Always.

  7. 26:24 – 30:58

    Goal setting and identifying opportunities

    1. TC

    2. LR

      Always, with focus on this one problem. And then, there's the way kind of you described, there's this goal for this feed, but how did you actually try to turn that into like a, a goal or metric or a KPI? What was that in the end? Was there something there?

    3. TC

      Yeah, this is, this is an interesting one. So one thing we've done actually where, 'cause the feed is the first thing you land on. I can't just count how many folks engage with the feed because then I'm counting kind of bypassers kind of thing, and, uh, bystanders that actually coming into the experience. So we actually started to look at the more of a, we go a lot into like, you know, active engaged and kind of high value engagement. So we go downstream. We kind of put the onus on looking at more downstream engagement there, and we build that as the feed engagement. So really trying to show like we're not just counting some overall, you know, whether it's page views or sessions at the top level, that's not really helpful because any shifts can help there. But really setting targets for that. You know, there's obviously, it's a marketplace, so there's the creation side, there's the consumption side, is making sure that's healthy, uh, and engaging. Uh, there's so much we went into that. But I think that the, the best thing was, it's almost like you carve out, I think when you do minus one to one, it's really hard unless the CEO says, "I don't care about, you know, how the company performs for the next two years. We're gonna go for it." Uh, if you wanna keep the site keep growing and the experience keep growing, carving out and almost like setting very specific unique metrics, that then could easily be extended out once you show it, uh, was, was in retrospect the right way to do it.

    4. LR

      And then to give people a glimpse into the way your brain works to identify this is a big opportunity, so you talk about just like, "I see there's a lever that we're not investing enough in, and I see a huge, this big opportunity to grow off LinkedIn." How did you decide, "I need to go and bet on this thing and lead this team and I think feed is a huge opportunity"?

    5. TC

      I, I start from beliefs a lot. So I start from like what do I believe this could be? Or where, like, I actually came to LinkedIn this way. In fact, my biggest change in my career was when I moved here and I shifted to more like, what do I care about? What am I excited about? What do I have conviction on? I think it's really hard to be a strong product leader without having strong conviction about something. Um, so I start there. And in fact coming to LinkedIn as an example when I came in to lead mobile, LinkedIn was a desktop first company. Their mobile team was kind of a, an offshoot of entrepreneurs. I came from a startup that I ran. And it wasn't, it wasn't a big a-, like it wasn't, it was like, "Okay, want to do mobile. Okay, it's fine." Like, it's like noise at this point. Same with feed and same when I moved, shifted into ads, 'cause I felt really strong about the ability to flip that into a great way for companies to grow. Uh, so for me it starts with a conviction of where things could go. Like where, where that, like what do I believe in? I believe LinkedIn can be an incredible superpower and daily use case for every professional in the role. I believe knowledge sharing and knowledge exchange is the most amazing way to grow your career and to grow your business. So that needs to be a strong pillar of the experience that didn't exist before. And what is better than the field experience, the ... home feed is to actually build it. So I don't get attached to what have, did not work in the past. That's not, um, I don't know, maybe it's a mistake sometimes. But I don't, that doesn't stop me from thinking about the future.

    6. LR

      How do you actually make time to think like this? You know, a lot of people who are listening to this are just like, "Okay, I want to think about what could this become." Do you just, is this just the way your brain works? I'm always think, you're always thinking how big, what could this be? Do you set time aside to think like quarterly or yearly, "What could this be if we really made this amazing?"

    7. TC

      It's a good question. I haven't thought about it, uh, as a, it's like a process I do. I don't set time aside for this, but I'm, I am, I'm very reflective. I try to focus a lot of the conversations on like the dream, like what, what ultimately are we trying to achieve? I think LinkedIn has a great process, uh, called vision to values that started from our former CEO Jeff Weiner which is, like if you said this is for company or for a product, which is, if you're successful, what change would happen in the world? Which I love. It's just a great phrase, it's just a great empowering phrase. So I actually get to spend a lot of my time there.... um, I'm also very optimistic in nature. Again, sometimes it's, probably I'm not best for any role (laughs) in that perspective. You want somebody who's a bit more, more pessimistic about the future. But I, I tend to lead with beliefs versus evidence. I try to prove my beliefs with evidence, but I

  8. 30:58 – 35:38

    AI’s role in LinkedIn’s evolution

    1. TC

      don't lead with evidence.

    2. LR

      Mm-hmm. Awesome, okay. And then maybe, maybe just one more tactical question about this shift that I wish I could spend like hours on 'cause it's so interesting, the success you had making the feed so engaging. Is there anything tactically that would just like, "Wow, that really made a big dent in people wanting to come here, and post, and share interesting content." Like a feature or part of the strategy that really made the feed social?

    3. TC

      I think the lesson would be... Uh, for me, that was the biggest learning going into AI first. That gave me the why is AI so core, and why I got to make it a priority all the way to my role today to make sure the rest of the organization thinks AI first. The understanding is, is that in a marketplace if you're- if I'm able to satisfy your need on the other side, I- then I have, then it's magic. So ultimately, it came down to AI is the ultimate matchmaker. It's under-utilized, it's un- misunderstood, it's run separate from the team. And in a marketplace, it's all about value exchange. And if I'm able to do value exchange really well, then people will come back, and they do, and they engage, and they actually, they come back even more and they spend more time. Uh, so for me it was that... Is that depth into AI first as the engine that moves the whole organization forward.

    4. LR

      Got it. So essentially making sure the content you're seeing is the most engaging you could see based on using AI to make the algorithm really smart.

    5. TC

      On both sides. If you play- if you're the creator, if you're the person sharing, remember like this was a while back, I think it was the former Olympics, and, uh, a person shared like, you know, uh, shared like an article on LinkedIn about how they should not call it Olympics, they should call it like the Commercial, uh, Olympics because it's all about commercials and that's Olympics. And then they, they sent me this amazing screenshot about how, you know, NBC execs who were covering the, uh, the Olympics were viewing the post. This first time was gold. It was like, "Oh my God, my content is influencing people. People are seeing it, people that matter." So that's- that's what's really key. Making sure that when you share something, you share your expertise, the right people on the other side are relevant to your content and they see it. You know, that could make your day or your week, or actually it could make your, a, you know, it could make your living in many ways. And then on the receiving side, when I come in, it's the, it's the things I'm excited about seeing, it's the things that are rel- I can actually... The, the reason I- your content resonates so much with other people, I can actually take your podcast and I can apply them at work. What could be a better way to learn? I'll give you another example, which was very, very recent.

    6. LR

      Mm-hmm.

    7. TC

      I met with a known professor in this field, um, and he shared with me how over the last year and a half he started using LinkedIn 'cause somebody told him, "You have great content. Why don't you just post it?" He's like, "Ah, I don't want to post on social media." I'm like, "Oh, LinkedIn is different. Share on LinkedIn." And he was like, "I post daily, have so much content over the years, I, I post daily." And he's like, he basically told me, "This is unbelievable in terms of economic opportunity I'm getting." He's like, "I'm getting speaking engagements that are roughly half the salary I make in a year here at the university just by people seeing this content and building it, getting to the right people. I was invited to advise prime ministers on their investment, uh, strategy for the country." And he's like, "And they... And I've been teaching for 20 years, but this platform just completely elevated my ability to reach and influence people." That's the magic and that's the value exchange and that's the kind of matchmaking at scale.

    8. LR

      Amazing. That's an awesome story. (instrumental music) This episode is brought to you by Merge. Product leaders, yes, like you, cringe when they hear the word integration. They're not fun for you to scope, build, launch, or maintain. And integrations probably aren't what led you to product work in the first place. Lucky for you, the folks at Merge are obsessed with integrations. Their single API helps SaaS companies launch over 200 product integrations in weeks, not quarters. Think of Merge like Plaid, but for everything B2B SaaS. Organizations like Ramp, Dorada, and Electric use Merge to access their customer's accounting data to reconcile bill payments, file storage data to create searchable databases in their product, or HRIS data to auto-provision and de-provision access for their customer's employees. And yes, if you need AI ready data for your SaaS product, then Merge is the fastest way to get it. So, want to solve your organization's integration dilemma once and for all? Book and attend a meeting at merge.dev/lenny and receive a $50 Amazon gift card. That's merge.dev/lenny.

  9. 35:38 – 44:49

    The AI-first mindset at LinkedIn

    1. LR

      I want to shift a little bit in talking about this AI first mindset that you've touched on a lot. So you talked about how at the beginning of this investment you've already been like focused on AI before it was really... Before it was as hot as it is today. And I've heard from many people that you're really big on getting people to shift to this mindset of being very AI first. Clearly, it's worked really well at LinkedIn. I'm curious just what that actually looks like. Like I know you could be like, "Hey guys, we got to be AI first. AI, AI, AI." What... But it's different to actually make people really think differently. How do you actually like on the ground help people shift their perspective and think AI first?

    2. TC

      Uh, well, I can spend, uh, days on this. This is so, so- it's actually so important for me. It's a key focus for me. Actually, and to your point, long before it became cool to talk about AI in the last two years. And in fact, I think I've learned this on my- on myself. So when it comes to the feed, I took the role of the AI product leader. This didn't exist in the company. There was no person that was ever, from a product perspective, thinking about AI. I think you start with a belief, like I- like we talked about before. I think every technological revolution has dramatically changed the way we build.... and AI arguably is the biggest one in our lifetimes. And when I say AI first, it's not about a tech, it's a mindset. It's a start with strategy. Like, you know, it's rare. I mean, maybe now you'll see it, but it was rare two years ago to see anybody in their strategy talk about the role of AI and how they build with AI. Then it goes to the te- to the product and then the talent itself you hire. Do they actually think this way? The analogy I would give to people is imagine a river rafting boat, and you have like, you know, everybody on the sides holding the pedals and adding accuracy, adding speed, but there's the guide on the back and they're holding those two pedals. Those two pedals navigate pretty much the boat and those pedals are AI and the guide better be you. And in most cases in companies, the guide was, uh, somebody else. It wasn't the product leader. So then the question is, if AI actually is directing your product towards success and it's the biggest factor, and you as the product leader is not the one holding those two pedals, what are you doing? And then I realized that it was a la- bit of a lack of education in that. Like there was mo- actually most product leaders used to think of AI as this like black box, magic spells, that they don't know how it's working so they're delegating. And obviously that's further, as further from the truth as possible, but there's so many ways to unpack it. Like when it came to the feed where I push for example more specifically for the teams, it doesn't stay as an AI first, like, there is the objective. I would ask him, "What is the objective of the algorithm?" I would challenge you to ask folks, you know, more in the focus or like leaning products specifically with algorithms, uh, inherited built into them, what is the objective of the algorithm and can you actually, can you write it down for me on a board? They should be able to do so. Ultimately it's a mathematical formula. And then it's like, what features have you added to, to the algorithm? And this is not user features. This is specifically what parameters to learn on. And then what investment do you have in data collections and fine tuning? Now everybody talks a big game about fine tuning, but again, two years ago, fine tuning was something that the product folks thought the engineering team was supposed to do. No, it's the whole organization. In fact, you can build a whole strategy just on, uh, data collection and fine tuning, and your product will see tremendous success. Or you can delegate it and it will never happen. So, eh, in many ways that was bringing to the fold, in, in our phase one which really started around 2016 for me, in every team I went to, uh, AI, the AI component was the fa- the area I spent most of my time on. I hired people for that, product leaders. I spent most of my... Back to like how do I spend my resources, most of my resources there. And it was my top priority all the way from strategy to talent. And ultimately with the last couple of years we've seen this metamorphous of AI and this incredible new wave and we've done pretty big change there as well over the last two years.

    3. LR

      I, I love this. So I took some notes on what you're talking about. So kind of the big message that I'm taking away so far is, as a product leader, you need to think about things that you thought the engineering leader had to think about or the ML engineer was thinking about. Things like what is the objective of our algorithm? What are the features that we're building into it? What is the data collection strategy? What- how are we fine tuning it? Like as a PM, you should be asking these questions.

    4. TC

      In fact, you should go all the way to infrastructure.

    5. LR

      Mm-hmm.

    6. TC

      Like you can have massive lifts in, in, in your product outcomes and goals if you probably enhance your infrastructure. How many product people talk about the infrastructure they have?

    7. LR

      Right.

    8. TC

      Not, not many. Uh, inferences. Like (laughs) those are things ultimately your goal is to j- you know, your goal is to win with your products and build a much better experience to your members and customers. Literally just changing the infrastructure on top of it you build it could be the biggest lever than you building another button-

    9. LR

      Mm-hmm.

    10. TC

      ... or experience for your, for your members on the top of it.

    11. LR

      So like say the PMs at LinkedIn, are you encouraging them all to... Like is it like how is AI integrating into what you're doing? How do you just like set this up so that teams do this well within LinkedIn?

    12. TC

      Yeah, so coming into this role in early 2- 2020 we basically established an AI academy, every PM had to go through training just like we did mobile in 2014. We kind of moved the whole organization to be mobile first so everybody had to go through this process. I spent a lot of time in my reviews on the AI strategy, the objectives. Uh, we make sure there's actually AI practitioners on the product side who are strong who can teach. So we kind of like, you know, in waves started to build more of like expertise and kind of distinguished, uh, leaders across that can actually bring this learning acro- across the board. And then, you know, in fall 2022 when we all know what happened, uh, at least a few months after but we started early, we completely changed our entire, uh, almost like product operations and portfolio so we can focus on this new wave of AI with LLMs in the front. So LinkedIn has been working with AI, uh, very closely, uh, since the early days. Uh, but mostly as an, as a matchmaker. So it was the matchmaker for our marketplaces. Somebody looks to hire this dream candidate and then you have a candidate looking for a dream job and AI would be the one doing the matchmaking. We talked about the knowledge sharing on the feed, it happens in our, in our commerce platform as well. So but the ISO... When I was kind of in the background so I never saw it, it was kind of making those matches and then with, uh, the new leve- new wave of AI, we actually brought AI from the back of our marketplaces really as the matchmaker to the front.... and the goal there was let go of what you've built, let go of your road map, go back to the drawing board with, "What are you trying to solve for?" Back to that idea of, like, clarity on your problem statement, and, "Now tell me what's the solution." That's very much AI first.

    13. LR

      It reminds me, so one of the folks I pinged about you, uh, Shira Gasarch, she used this quote about you, "Maybe you were made for such a time as this," and it connects to a lot what you're talking about where you've been thinking a lot about- And back then it was called machine learning, right? Like, it wasn't called-

    14. TC

      Yeah.

    15. LR

      ... AI for a long time (laughs) and now it's AI. The fact that you've been on this so long is just, like, a perfect synergy for now it's working its way into everything.

    16. TC

      Here's, like, an example that I think sometimes to bring it, uh, to people in a more kind of visceral way if you've been building products, product leaders are used to very much dictate the experience they're building. Like, "I want this experience to be exactly like this. Like, I want the member to come from here and this is the options they have and I want them to be able to select this and this will be my default and I want the onboarding to progress this way." And I think this is one of the biggest shifts with this when you become an AI first kind of leader is that there's a realization that you don't control the experience anymore. You control the ingredients. It's like almost like being a chef at a restaurant and you're used to, like, deciding every part of the, of the dish, right? You're, like, deciding everything from the ambiance to the temperature of the broccoli, and then, you know, this new technology comes in and say, "Just give me the ingredients. Give me the o-, you know, the, the guidelines of how you cook and I'll, I'll take care of it. I'll take care of it for you." It's a... For many folks this is a very, uh, scary feeling. They're not used to kind of letting go of the control. Obviously you build safety guards and responsible AI around it and that's super critical, but at the essence of it, AI is not deterministic. So giving that, giving it the rope to learn and do that experience for you ultimately will become much, much better. You have to have that belief

  10. 44:49 – 49:12

    Letting go of your roadmaps and allowing room for exploration

    1. TC

      going into it.

    2. LR

      So s- along those lines, I'm curious if there's anything you do to avoid... You know, everyone's like, "Cool, AI into everything," and then they, all these stupid things ship that no one wants. I saw this hilarious meme of like, "Oh wait, we built like a kind of dumb, uh, artificial person. Let's integrate it into everything." Now it's everywhere. Is there anything you've learned about just how not to ship stuff that, like, isn't great, you know?

    3. TC

      I can tell what you've done here and I've been-

    4. LR

      Yeah.

    5. TC

      ... we've, we failed a lot but we learned so much along the way. Uh, when we started it in fall 2022, literally it started with me calling out, uh, calling the leaders coming to the room and we, we talked about, "Okay, let go of your road maps." Like, "What we've done, great, but I want to let go of the road maps and I want to instead go back to what are you trying to solve for and let's meet in a couple of weeks and tell me how you're thinking differently about what you're trying to solve for, knowing we have this technology, uh, in, in a role for us." So that was like a starting point around just setting out some ground, some ground and, and principles around it. But we didn't start with, like, new objectives to solve. So it wasn't like, "Oh, we have this cool technology. What can we do with it?" It was like, "Go back to the objectives you were trying to solve and now with this technology how can you do that objective better?" The second part is we actually allowed teams to run to really inspire creativity. They didn't want to contain them. We wanted to get them really excited about the potential here and, uh, even some things we're building duplicates for, uh, for a while of, like, you know, similar ideas but done differently 'cause part of it was I was learning. I was very excited to see what people would come up with and see how they can do it and there was no playbook for building this really, really well. And in many ways we were writing the playbook. Like, prompt engineering became a playbook internally for us, which every day was amazing. Like, how do you cognitively, in a way, reverse engineer the brain a little bit? That was incredible. In fact, a lot of things we've learned so much ahead of the market and even shared, uh, with OpenAI and shared with Microsoft. But then after that period of, like, just everybody getting excited and building, we, we basically brought it down and we did, like, top down guidance. So we basically picked the... Back to the objectives we had, out of everything that we've seen, those for us look like the best kind of four, uh, biggest bets we wanna, we wanna aim for and then we wanna con- we wanna converge resourcing across it. So no more everybody's building whatever they want. We also, you know, capacity is also a constraint, cost is a constraint. We wanna start bringing them together. So we really much allowed people to, uh, I would say in many ways diverge, but then I would say like several weeks after, converge. But we had a lot more excitement and understanding about how this thing works and what we can actually do with it.

    6. LR

      I love that advice. Basically give people a bunch of time and space to explore, experiment, R&D, and then, like, as a top down, uh, stra- strategy pick things.

    7. TC

      When we did top down, we were like-

    8. LR

      Yeah. Yeah.

    9. TC

      ... there was... Uh, literally, usually I do product jams for every multiple topics we have throughout the quarter. I just did every week I just reviewed the five kind of bets we had on a repeated basis, nothing else-

    10. LR

      Mm-hmm.

    11. TC

      ... 'cause it was so important for them to understand that this is what I care about and, and we had to be focused about it.

    12. LR

      It feels like that space to explore and go crazy is important because otherwise people at the company are gonna be like, "Oh, I wish. There's so many co- this thing I want to try with AI. We should try it." Like, and then they'll just be pissed 'cause they don't have time to work on it, so-

    13. TC

      It's, it's a great point. It wasn't my intention but I love that-

    14. LR

      (laughs)

    15. TC

      ... you're saying it. Uh, it's a great point 'cause I think it gives them that... But I was actually... For me sometimes almost in a, a, maybe too much but I try to focus on learnings. I was trying... I knew just going like this we weren't gonna learn a lot, but having people come back and, like, trying different things and slightly going crazy and going, you know, pushing the boundaries, we would learn so much. So for me it was learning, but I love the motivation around also allowing them to have the energy.

    16. LR

      It relates, uh, another point that, uh, a recent podcast episode had with Brian Chesky where he introduces chaos sometimes when things are feeling too comfortable, when road maps, everything's calm, everything's on schedule. He's just like, "How do we, like, how do we do this in one day versus in two weeks? Let's just ch- see what happens."

    17. TC

      ... yeah, 'cause I think people get, like there is just inertia, right? People get into their ... It's, it's human behavior. People get into their lanes. They start to feel really comfortable when they're in their lanes and then they don't know that there's a different way to do things.

    18. LR

      Yeah.

    19. TC

      And you have to, like, almost, like externally invoke that or trigger

  11. 49:12 – 55:01

    Career growth and personal insights

    1. TC

      that.

    2. LR

      So if we think about just your career arc, I'm zooming out a little bit, you, uh, helped create the mobile experience on LinkedIn. You helped, you built the feed initially, now you're in front of AI. Uh, I could see why you're so successful at LinkedIn. I was talking to folks about your career arc at LinkedIn and you basically went from senior PM, to senior PM number two, to group PM, to director, to senior director, to VP, to CPO in, like, not that many years. It's a pretty meteoric rise. I wanted to spend a little time here and I want to maybe start with a question of just, like, if you could give one specific piece of advice with someone looking to advance in their career based on what you found to be really effective, wha- what would that be?

    3. TC

      I realize everybody's in their right, every stage in their career and they have different ways to think about the role and what they need. Maybe I'll just share about my journey, what worked for me-

    4. LR

      Perfect.

    5. TC

      ... instead of giving, kind of, uh, kind of more of a general advice. First of all, I, I feel super fortunate. Like, I'm building, that's what I love doing. I love building, I love working with builders. Uh, you know, sometimes I'm like, "I get paid for this. This is insane." Uh, but I love, I love my craft and I love getting deep into it. So in many ways, I think, like, in, in ma- like, the, the things I'm excited about is the things I'm doing. When people are starting off, I usually, like, really focus on learning from great people. Like, people you talk to or have, like, amazing mentors and managers. Some of them don't even know they were my mentors. Like, it's not like I mentor officially. Like, I try to, like, pick up things from people all the time and, uh, that's been just a remarkable experience, like, working with great people. And in many ways, a lot of those great people actually allowed me or empowered me to take on some b- bigger challenges. So I could, you know, I can see forks in the road where if it wasn't for that person saying something very specific, probably would've done something differently and it just made me think a lot. So I really tried to absorb learning from great people. But by far for me personally, again, this is very personal versus generic advice, it was when I moved here, I was an engineer for many years before I moved here for graduate school in 2008. And I always loved building. Uh, that was all there, I was there from a young age. But when I moved here, I realized my career path was very much dictated by one thing. It was, like, what's most in demand? What's most challenging? And how do I do that? (laughs) It was very childish in many ways. It was not dictated by me, it was in a way dictated by society. So what's the toughest engineering role? What's the best company to go into? Uh, what's the best army unit to serve in? And I, I failed along, a lot along the way but always kept going. And then when I came here, uh, there was a really big challenging for me personally around, like, what do I care about? What matters most to me? And that was, again, it's very personal in many ways. I- it was very much for me an impact on learning and actually how do I create impact more broadly? And I shifted 180 in how my thought process used to go. I was, it was less about what was out there and exciting and in demand and challenging, and it was more about, like, where did I have strong conviction on? What was I passionate about? And what, where did I feel I could make a dent and learn? And that was my path forward. So, uh, after school with a student visa and massive school debt, I decided to start a company which was not, you know, a very intelligent kind of, uh, decision based on my, uh, economic c- circumstances. But I didn't care. I was like, "This is my new path." And then, uh, I got into LinkedIn, I didn't apply for a job. I met with who wa- who was in my role today, Dipneshwar at that time, and we talked and I said, "This is how I think we should, you know, this is how LinkedIn Mobile should be built." And he was like, "Okay, how about you come and build it?" And I was like, "Amazing." So I, I did an apply to LinkedIn and then at LinkedIn I was always kind of like, "This is what I want to do. This is what's exciting for me and this is the dent I think I can make and this is my plan for it." So I don't know if I, this is a recommendation for everybody, but it, for me, it's worked really, really well. It was really pursuing the conviction I had, uh, and my excitement and kind of bring that to the fold with people. I do think that in products, in, in building product, if you're not genuinely excited about what you want to build, you don't have conviction about it, it's going to be very hard for you to make a big impact.

    6. LR

      That's, uh, also a similar theme from my (laughs) most recent podcast with Vlad, of just if you don't actually buy into the mission of the place you're working on, you're not going to have a good time.

    7. TC

      Yeah. There's a, there's a... For, for product people, it's a very fortunate position. I always tell people, like, if you're in one of the most fortunate positions you can have because if you just measure thing for you, just measure based on your career and so on, people are gonna evaluate you based on your actual work. It's a very special place. It's not... Nobody cares about your title. Who cares? No one... Like, it's not... Maybe the company name for some people matters, but for the most part, it's about the impact you created with the products you've built. If I think about somebody's resume, I think if this was a product resume, it would be, it would be the products you built and the impact you had with it. I don't care about the companies you worked at. I don't care about the logos. I don't care about the titles. Slightly, like, again, not to kind of overextend but sometimes it's almost like an artist, right? It's like when you're a musician, it's the albums you took out and how well they did. And I think for product people, it's a very fortunate place to be that you get measured based on the impact you had.

    8. LR

      It sounds like a LinkedIn, a feature, uh, idea right there.

    9. TC

      Indeed.

    10. LR

      I feel like if there's any company that can make that, that happen, it'd be you

  12. 55:01 – 56:39

    Takeaways

    1. LR

      guys.So kind of the, uh, some of the takeaways here essentially is try to index towards what are you actually excited about, and motivated to work on, and, uh, driven by, versus where it's the most amazing company to work at, or the most challenging problem.

    2. TC

      Yeah, I think sometimes, you know, great companies have great opportunities for you to have dent at scale, but you need, you need to be the one doing it. Like it's, if you are thinking about, I don't know, a title or, that, that did not... Again, you know, for, like once I did the change into my excitement around impact, that's been at least my, my yardstick. And when I look at people that I talk to or interview internally, I, the first thing to remind to me is like, "What did you build, and what did you learn, and how well did it do?"

    3. LR

      Hmm. Yeah.

    4. TC

      That's what I care about.

    5. LR

      I imagine there's also people on the other side where all they do is work on things that are really exciting to them, and they could use a little pushing towards the other direction of what's actually important in the world.

    6. TC

      100%. If you tell me, again, everybody has their different... If you tell me, like, "Hey, you can work on something super exciting, but it's on the kind of the fringes of the company," or you can work on something which is a bit more grindy, but it's on the core of the company, the latter would, like, no, no doubt. Uh, like for me, impact first.

    7. LR

      Yeah. So and, and, and just listening to the story you've told of the things you j- decided to focus on is a clear example that like you saw, "Hey, there's this huge opportunity in the feed, I'm gonna go take, tackle that, or mobile, or AI." So I think there's a lot of, it's kind of this Venn diagram is what I'm taking away of just what's important, what am I excited about?

    8. TC

      Yeah.

    9. LR

      Awesome.

    10. TC

      At least for me. Yeah.

    11. LR

      Awesome. Okay,

  13. 56:39 – 1:09:00

    Lightning round and final thoughts

    1. LR

      so I know, uh, you gotta run relatively soon, uh, so we're gonna get to our very exciting lightning round. But before we do that, is there anything else that you think would be interesting or useful for folks to know or leave them with? I know we covered a bunch of things already.

    2. TC

      Yeah, you know, one thing that actually, um, I've now built it into a podcast, but something I, I'm really excited about is, I don't think there's one way of building. Remember like when the Steve Jobs biography came out?

    3. LR

      Mm-hmm.

    4. TC

      Everybody read it.

    5. LR

      Oh, yeah.

    6. TC

      And they went, "Oh, that's the way to build." And like that was unique to him. And, uh, one of the things I love a lot is when I look at like great builders, they're all very distinct. They're all different. And I used to do this thing internally, I used to invite kind of product builders, uh, of different disciplines and, and have a fireside chat with them, and I saw people across the company join, not just PMs or designers, but folks across, and I built that into a podcast. It's, it's, I love your podcast. Mine is very different. It's more around like what is their edge a little bit? Like what i- what would, uh, this is from the co-founder of Pixar, Ed Catmull, to the CPO of Canva or Spotify, Roblox, but all the way to like a chef, Dan Barber, who's like the number one chef in the US, uh, for many years. And it's just, everybody has their craft and they do it differently. Uh, it's called Building 1. I'm excited about it. It's a little bit of a plug right now, Lenny.

    7. LR

      Please, yeah. Where do people find it?

    8. TC

      Uh-

    9. LR

      Let's blow it up. What's, uh, it's called Building 1?

    10. TC

      Yeah, so it's, uh, app, Building 1 on Apple or Spotify.

    11. LR

      Perfect.

    12. TC

      It's, it's short, and it's really about showing you different disciplines from a chef to an animation director. And really the main learning there is like everybody builds differently, and you can be very successful, but it's very authentic to how they are personally, and it's how they push their craft to the limit. It's how well they've done their craft.

    13. LR

      I love that. And it's something I super believe is just the power of focusing in on your strengths and the things that make you a little different, versus trying to become good at everything.

    14. TC

      100%.

    15. LR

      That's so cool. Okay, Build 1. Uh, we'll link to it in the show notes.

    16. TC

      Building 1, yes.

    17. LR

      Building 1. Building 1. Okay, amazing. And it's on all the podcasting platforms. Okay, great. With that, we've reached our very exciting lightning round. Uh, are you ready?

    18. TC

      Yes.

    19. LR

      All right. First question is, what are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people?

    20. TC

      So I have this close continuously... Actually, it's these three. Let me see.

    21. LR

      I love that you have them right there.

    22. TC

      I, I can just tell you about them but like-

    23. LR

      Yeah. They look very pretty back there. Don't, don't mess them up.

    24. TC

      ... I'm not gonna destroy my study.

    25. LR

      Yeah. (laughs)

    26. TC

      Uh, so I love fundamentals. I love studying from the fundamentals. So if you're somebody who's starting your career, my fundamental books is, one, Mindset. It's about growth mindset. It's about basically the ability to continuously grow over time. You know, in one sentence is, the whole idea is our, uh, skills, our abilities are malleable. We can completely develop them. We can build expertise, and craft, and, and mastery, and it's really a mindset change. And Carol Dweck who wrote the book, uh, was also my wife's manager, and that's how we got into that. So I'm-

    27. LR

      Wow. That's awesome.

    28. TC

      ... that's kind of like our second religion at home. Uh, second book is Thinking, Fast and Slow, um, by, uh, Daniel Kahneman. I'm, m- I love, uh, behavior economics. When I think about products, I think a lot, I always start from people, like, "What is the member expectation? What are they trying to do?" And this is like the Bible for behavior. So if you're building front end products or even like you're thinking about how you route your organization, uh, it's an incredible book. Every page is like a stop, or you have to stop and think. And then lastly, and on the fundamental side is High Output Management, uh, by Andy Grove. It's like there's so much basics to doing good manageri- it's like, uh, I think after you read this book, your managerial skills should start from a B, and then you can, you know, over time become an A. But like beginning to a B is just a level of like putting the effort in and knowing the best practices. So I think like there's a, those are all fundamentally, uh, great books that I really like to give to people.

    29. LR

      That's awesome. I love that they're right there behind you. Is there a favorite recent movie or TV show you really enjoyed?

    30. TC

      Yesterday I saw Bluey. You know Bluey?

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