Eilon Reshef: Why Gong pods use dozens of design partners

1. 0:00 – 4:20

   Eilon’s background

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky0:00

      I want to start with talking about your pod model, which is a really unique way of building and organizing your product teams.

   2. EREilon Reshef0:06

      That was probably 2016. We're trying to figure out how does the operating model look like for our product and engineering. The first bunch of people we had was essentially a pod. It was one product manager, a user experience designer, backend engineers, couple of frontend engineers. But at some stage, we're starting to scale. We are kind of contemplating, do we go like traditional, the old school of frontend engineers, backend engineers? And then we said, "Let's try to replicate what we have."

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky0:28

      Let's talk about how these pods work with design partners. From what I've heard, it's very unlike how any other company works.

   4. EREilon Reshef0:34

      We just took the pod concept to an extreme where every pod is working with sometimes a dozen design partners, sometimes two dozen design partners.

   5. LRLenny Rachitsky0:41

      This feels like a cheat code of how to build new product lines. What are the, like the percentage of success rate you have with new products?

   6. EREilon Reshef0:49

      I would say very close to 100% of the features we build end up being used by a significant number of people.

   7. LRLenny Rachitsky0:54

      Does it feel crazy for companies not to operate this way?

   8. EREilon Reshef0:56

      I, I wouldn't go back. I, I hate terms such as risks. That's a very ambiguous term, but just the risk of building something you're not going to know if it's gonna get used.

   9. LRLenny Rachitsky1:03

      So when I asked people at Gong what to ask you, the most often term that came up was autonomy and trust.

   10. EREilon Reshef1:09

       It's a very selfish thing. It's a very personal thing. I, I just think... (music)

   11. LRLenny Rachitsky1:16

       Today my guest is Alon Reshef. Alon is co-founder and chief product officer at Gong. He was also the longtime chief technology officer at Gong. As I shared at the top of our conversation, it feels like basically every company that has a sales team uses Gong, and it's really rare to build a product that is so ubiquitous and so loved across the tech ecosystem. In our conversation, Alon shares some of the secrets of what makes Gong so consistently successful, including how their product teams work with six to 12 design partners on every new product and feature that they invest in, how he creates a culture of autonomy and trust, why and also how he optimizes for making decisions quickly, even large one-way door decisions, what he and his team have learned about building AI-based products since they've been building AI-based products longer than most other companies, and so much more. If you're building a B2B SaaS company or product, you will learn a lot from this conversation. 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 future episodes, and it helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Alon Reshef. This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're building a SaaS app, at some point, your customers will start asking for enterprise features like SAML authentication and SCIM provisioning. That's where WorkOS comes in, making it fast and painless to add enterprise features to your app. Their APIs are easy to understand so that you can ship quickly and get back to building other features. Today, hundreds of companies are already powered by WorkOS, including ones you probably know, like Vercel, Webflow, and Loom. WorkOS also recently acquired Warrant, the fine-grained authorization service. Warrant's product is based on a groundbreaking authorization system called Zanzibar, which was originally designed for Google to power Google Docs and YouTube. This enables fast authorization checks at enormous scale while maintaining a flexible model that can be adapted to even the most complex use cases. If you're currently looking to build role-based access control or other enterprise features like single sign-on, SCIM, or user management, you should consider WorkOS. It's a drop-in replacement for Auth0 and supports up to one million monthly active users for free. Check it out at workos.com to learn more. That's workos.com. Hey, it's Lenny. If you want to boost your clarity and confidence, I want to recommend a podcast called Think Fast, Talk Smart. One of the most essential ingredients to success in business and in life is effective communication. Every Tuesday, host and Stanford Graduate School of Business lecturer Matt Abrahams sits down with experts to discuss the best tips and techniques that enhance your professional development. Hone your small talk, influence, presentation skills, and so much more on Think Fast, Talk Smart. So what are you waiting for? Listen every Tuesday wherever you get your podcasts and find additional content to level up your communication at fastersmarter.io.

2. 4:20 – 6:33

   The pod model

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky4:21

      (music) Alon, thank you so much for being here, and welcome to the podcast.

   2. EREilon Reshef4:27

      Thank you for having me.

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky4:28

      So it feels like on this podcast, every guest that I've had mentions Gong as a product they use. It feels like it's just like in the ether of tech companies these days. Also, I've heard so many times how unique it is that you all operate, how you all build your product teams and operate, which is, I especially love hearing on this podcast, there're just different ways of o- operating. So I'm really excited to dig into this, to hear about the journey and things you've learned along the way of building Gong. And essentially building something that is so ubiquitous and so loved, which is very rare. I want to start with talking about your pod model, which is a really unique way of building and organizing your product teams, and in particular how you work with design partners. But let's start with the pod model. Can you just talk about what this pod model is and how you organize your product teams?

   4. EREilon Reshef5:13

      Sure. And, uh, when we started the pod model, that was probably 2016, before it became m- popular. I, I think that might have been even before the Marty Cagan, uh, uh, set of books. I don't remember exactly. But at some stage, we're starting to scale. I mean, scaling is maybe from 50 people to 60 people, however, in the whole company or whatever. And we're trying to figure out how does the operating model look like for product and engineering. And the first bunch of people we had was essentially a pod. It was one product manager, yours truly, a user experience designer, a couple of maybe backend engineers, couple of frontend engineers and whatnot. And we were kind of contemplating, do we go like traditional, the old school of like, you know, frontend engineers, backend engineers or however it is? And then we said, "Let's try to replicate what we have." Um, so what we essentially did is, is, is really kind of replicated that. So up until now, we have this pod structure, product manager, UX...... fraction of that writing, fraction on analyst and then a team leader from an engineering standpoint, five to like, say, seven en- engineers. They get an agenda, think like, we launched a forecast product, there was a pod working on that. And then they get to be pretty autonomous, uh, in identifying how to solve the problems and also working with enough customers so I can go to sleep knowing that they're not like, hallucinating is the term that everybody uses now in different context, uh, but going in a very reasonable

3. 6:33 – 9:13

   Working with design partners

   1. EREilon Reshef6:33

      direction.

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky6:34

      Okay. So I want to talk about the autonomy piece, that's a really important point. But before we get there, let's talk about how these pods work with design partners. From what I've heard, it's very unlike how any other company works and I think it's something a lot of people can learn from. So talk about kind of the scale of how these pods work with design partners.

   3. EREilon Reshef6:51

      So I, I think we just took the pod concept to an extreme, where every pod, uh, is working with sometimes a dozen design partners, sometimes two dozen design partners, maybe sometimes five if it's a very niche or fringe, uh, capability. And, uh, they work with them hand in hand. So an interesting story, the same forecast product I just mentioned, the product manager comes to me one day and he's like, "Hey, I just cannot play with the design partner on the product." And we kind of know what's going on and they don't build it yet. So I asked the product manager, "But we don't have that working." So he said, "No, no, we don't." But I showed him this, sort of the half built stuff. I asked him to hit save. He hit save and got an error message and I told him, "Let's meet again in a week and that save button was gonna work." Um, so it's very extreme in terms of working hand in hand with, with the customer. Customers appreciate it. I later got feedback that they appreciate how kind of the thing was going, making progress according to their feedback. Not what they said, uh, but kind of interpreting what they said, digesting it and, and building something that makes sense. Um, so every pod has this set of design partners.

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky7:52

      So these pods essentially are cross functional product teams. Each one has... Do you organize it around like an outcome? How do you describe how, what each pod is responsible for? Is it like move this metric or build this product or something else?

   5. EREilon Reshef8:04

      We tend to be less metric driven maybe than your average-

   6. LRLenny Rachitsky8:07

      Mm-hmm.

   7. EREilon Reshef8:07

      ... especially B2C but even like other maybe B2B companies. Usually it's more around some sort of a job to be done. In our case it could be sales engagement. How do you kind of prospect? Or, um, conversation intelligence. How do you create a summ- summaries? How do you make it easier for people to remove drudgery and consume information fast? And once you get this agenda, you kind of pretty much have a lot of kind of, you know, you mentioned economy, a lot of kind of control over how, how you kind of progress. Ideally design partners guide, you know what I mean?

   8. LRLenny Rachitsky8:35

      Awesome. Okay. So it's like here's the outcome we want this pod to achieve. They have autonomy to work with design partners to design this new product. So maybe let'll stay on this example of this forecasting tool. Can you just briefly describe what this tool, what it da- what it gives you, what it does?

   9. EREilon Reshef8:49

      Yeah. It's a product we launched a couple years ago and it helps organization forecast where they land in terms of the sales organization. So every sales organization, B2B sales organization, has a bottoms up forecast process. People submit numbers, people up kinda override that, AI helps you kinda, in our case, AI helps you predict the right number. Usually there's an analytics component on top of it that kinda helps you assess it at scale. Uh, so that's the product

4. 9:13 – 13:12

   Finding and coordinating design partners

   1. EREilon Reshef9:13

      itself.

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky9:14

      Awesome. So you created this pod here, built this forecast product, make it successful. How do they find these design partners? Is it like reach into existing customer base and figure out who would be most interested in this?

   3. EREilon Reshef9:24

      Usually, usually it's, uh, uh, existing customers. Very, very rarely it would be a non-existing customers. But customers with at some stage expressed interest in, in this capability. Not, not to over like, you know, kind of give a plug to Gong, but of course we can listen, all of our conversations are recorded so I can kind of always like look up our kind of conversation database and like which customers express a need for X, Y and D. You can very easily kinda, uh, reach out to them. One of the maybe unique things we've done, at some stage just became as you can... We got, I think we got like 25 pods right now, maybe 30. I'd like depends what you call a pod but the, um, it's a lot of effort, like this whole management. At some, (laughs) at some stage I borrowed an idea that comes from, uh, talent acquisition. And in, in talent acquisition recruiting there is, there is a person called a recruiting coordinator. If, if you do it at scale which we had done over the years, and- and that person, all they do is just set up the meetings for the recruiter who then sets up the meeting for the hiring manager. Um, so in our, in our product team, there's one person who's basically a research coordinator and she's responsible for reaching out and she basically talks with the PMs like, "What's your target market, ICP," whatever you want to call that. "Give me some... What do you want to learn from them?" She reaches us, we have a micro CRM for that, and then sets up the meeting and the PM comes in, they have like a, already like a meeting in- in their calendar.

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky10:41

      And these are the design people at these companies that are gonna be their design partners?

   5. EREilon Reshef10:45

      Exactly. So I might say, "Hey, what I want to speak is with head of rev ops at, I don't know, mid-size companies or an IC seller at an enterprise company." And then she can kind of course sift through our customer base, slice and dice it, run a micro email campaign and get those kind to come in.

   6. LRLenny Rachitsky11:01

      I love that detail 'cause as you said, coordinating 12 companies and people at these companies and timing is really stressful and complicated and gets like the PM's life up. So, uh, that's really helpful. It's interesting. There are some companies where product teams aren't even allowed to talk to customers. Salespeople are like, "No, don't mess with these people." Uh, customer success is like, "No, we got this." You were like the complete opposite as each pod is working directly with say a dozen customers, helping build a new product for them.

   7. EREilon Reshef11:31

      Exactly. And in the early days we didn't even like, um, tightly coordinate with customer success. Nowadays we do it much better 'cause there's always gonna be this customer who's like frustrated about something or in a negotiation about something that's probably not the right time to ask them about to be a design partner. Uh, so we kind of double check, um, but it's not like a process where we have to get sign off by three customer success managers to-

   8. LRLenny Rachitsky11:53

      (laughs)

   9. EREilon Reshef11:53

      ... uh, talk with the customer.

   10. LRLenny Rachitsky11:54

       That makes sense. Obvious- yeah. You, you don't want to surprise people and mess up relationships. So is there any structure to the design partner process or is it just teams have these people available and they talk with them when they want? Or is there more structure to like how to effectively build a product with design partners?

   11. EREilon Reshef12:10

       It depends on the context. So when you build a new product, there's... it's a more linear path, right? It's... Ideally, you want it to be launched sometime. Ideally, you want to measure some progress, so usually what we've done in this case is like some sort of a weekly meeting where we kind of s-... kind of show them progress and, you know, sometimes bi-weekly, depending on our own cadence. And some other capabilities that we build might be more, um, I would say, freeform. Maybe it's an enhancement, maybe it's tweak, maybe it's an extension of the... Uh, let me give you an example, right? One of the things we do right now is we let customers ask a question about an account. So come into Gong like, "What's new with Cisco?" Like, Cisco is a customer. And at some stage, you do it... We're, we're doing it in all languages, right? So you want to recruit the specific design partner, set of design partners who are non-English speakers. So that doesn't have like a strict timeline. You want to get enough of them so you see the thing works, gets you reasonable quality results. You're not gonna get to all languages in the one hand, but at the same time, you don't want to have like just Spanish. Um, so that might be less, less structured. Maybe it's a couple of meetings with each one, and then when you move on, you launch the feature and you move to the next kind of, quote-unquote, project or

5. 13:12 – 15:10

   Balancing customer feedback and vision

   1. EREilon Reshef13:12

      feature.

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky13:13

      So one thing that people might be thinking as they hear this is how do you... All these customers are telling you, "Here's what I need to be... to use this forecasting tool," for example. And as a PM, it's always this balance of doing what customers ask you to do versus like a way of this vision, and here's how we keep it simple. Do you have... What guidance do you give your teams for what to do with this feedback, essentially?

   3. EREilon Reshef13:34

      Yeah, I think this is kind of core skill that I expect PMs to have around kind of this... This is exactly your, your, your kind of job, right? Try to, try to figure out what request is like must-have versus not must-have. Uh, we... Typically, they ask the customer, you know, "What, what do you have right now? How happy are you between 0 and 10, or whatever?" So if you're at the six, we want to get you to an eight or a nine, so that's maybe a high-level principle. But at the same time, I expect them to say, "Hey, this is unique. I didn't hear it from anybody else. Maybe I'm going to proactively reach out to more customers," but that might be a one customer thing. And we still do one customer things if, if... in, in a different context, right? So if, if we have a, I don't know, seven or eight-figure deal that they have like one customization that they really, really need and, and we know that they can't work without it, I mean, like every enterprise-facing company, we're gonna do that. But from a design partner perspective, it's the opposite. It's more like let's try to build something that works across our customer base versus for a specific customer.

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky14:25

      Which is why a dozen is, is probably smarter than one or two or three.

   5. EREilon Reshef14:30

      Yeah, I think at some stage, I guess you get like seven or eight or nine at some stage.

   6. LRLenny Rachitsky14:33

      Mm-hmm. Yeah.

   7. EREilon Reshef14:34

      Based on my experience, the request starts to converge. There might be one outlier, but generally, you're gonna hear the same things.

   8. LRLenny Rachitsky14:40

      I imagine this approach is rooted in how you all started. We worked on a post back in the day on how you all got your first 10 customers, and I remember the story was you got, I think, 12 design partners when you first designed Gong. And then like you told them, "We're gonna start charging now," and 11 out of 12 are like, "We will buy this now. Please charge us, and we love it." Uh-

   9. EREilon Reshef14:59

      Exactly, exactly. So, so it's... it's... in a way, it's replicating this, but it was successful at the time. It wasn't... It was like maybe 80% intentional at the time, and at some point, you take the stuff that works and you make it 100% intentional.

6. 15:10 – 17:05

   Gong's 95% feature adoption

   1. EREilon Reshef15:10

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky15:10

      What are the, like the, uh, percentage of success rate you have with new products? Because you would think this approach is the best way to consistently build products people will end up buying and using. Is it like 100% of the time you end up building things that people will buy and use? Is it something below that? What do you find?

   3. EREilon Reshef15:27

      I, I think it does increase significantly, the, um, utility of the, uh, of, of the, of the products. Um, I would say very close to 100% of the features we build end up being used by a significant number of people. We don't charge for all of them. For most of them, we don't charge, which doesn't mean other things couldn't happen. Maybe people use it, but, you know, the value is not huge. So it's like, yeah, design partner likes it, like it, but it's like applicable... ends up being applicable to a smaller fragment or sec- segment of our customer base than what we had hoped. And maybe they don't... not as willing to pay for it, although that's a little bit of a different process. Like real product launch, it could be the quality is not good enough 'cause we're kind of focusing on, you know, is it providing value? Is it understandable versus like, you know, did you find a bug when you used, I don't know, Safari on this kind of computer? 'Cause e- e- we're not building the design partner program to kind of solve for this. Maybe we should, but we are not doing it right now. But generally speaking, I would say better than... more than 95% of our... the capabilities we build are being, you know, kind of used in a, in a very kind of significant way.

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky16:28

      Which I think is probably higher than most companies. And this feels like a cheat code of how to build nu- new product lines, expand, product expansion, TAM expansion, like ways to add new ways to charge your existing customers, and it feels like a cheat code basically. Just like tell us what you need, we'll work with you and build it, and then we'll sell it to you. It'll be great.

   5. EREilon Reshef16:48

      Yeah. Respectfully, you know, yours truly, I, I, I do believe customers k- know much better than what they need. And then myself or my colleagues in the executive team, whoever else, it's... You talk to a customer and they kind of describe their pain. They might not know how to build it or what's the right way to implement it, but the pain, the pain

7. 17:05 – 23:30

   The importance of autonomy and trust

   1. EREilon Reshef17:05

      should be there.

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky17:06

      Coming back to something else you mentioned, this word autonomy. So when I ask people at Gong, uh, what to ask you and what stands out about you to them as a product leader, the most often term that came up is autonomy and trust. How much autonomy you give teams, how much you put... how much you trust teams to do the right thing. Can you talk about that way of working, where that came from, and why you think that is, uh, uh, the way to operate?

   3. EREilon Reshef17:30

      It's a very selfish thing. It's a very personal thing. So I, I think even beyond trust, it's just for me, it's selfish. I'll tell you why. I, I just think you get more from everybody, uh, if, if you kind of let them be themselves and, and do things in the way that they believe is the right way, of course, within limits, right? They're not gonna like develop, um, I don't know what it is, software in different... for a different business. But the story I always like to take... to tell is I was... when, when my son was in, in, in primary school, which was a while back, uh, one of the parents, um, told me... and we had like this picnic where all the parents and the kids were gonna meet. And usually, there's like a list of ingredients that people need to bring in, so you know, bring in a bottle of water, whatever the thing is. And what usually happened, there's even like people are joking about it, is people run through the list 'cause it's usually like a physical list and then... or maybe not. Probably now it's already in Google Sheets always, but... And people run to just like mark the item that is as easy to get as possible, like, I don't know, a bottle of water, and then, "I'm done."And then you always get, like, the lowest common denominator because everybody brings that sort of, I don't want to even say cheapest, like the easiest thing that you can bring to such a picnic. And then this late me- lady told me, "Here's a different method. Just tell everybody, bring your own thing." I'm like, "Are you crazy? You know, people are just gonna not bring anything or, I mean, whatever you want, right? Um, or people are gonna bring the same thing. Like, multiple people are gonna, I don't know, bake some pie or do something, right?" And, and she's like, "No. That's not gonna happen." So I trusted her. That's maybe a trust word but we tried it out and what happened was really kind of fascinating. People were going out to the specialty stores and bringing, like specialties where raised... I'm based in Israel so they were going to this hummus place which is like, you know, an Israeli thing and she's like driving 30 miles to your favorite thing. People are like baking and making stuff so we had like literally a feast.

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky19:11

      (laughs)

   5. EREilon Reshef19:11

      And the funny thing, two things happened. Everybody was much, much happier, right? They were happier because of course they got better food. And then you're like, and also most people kind of just their personality they brought it to the table. It's like, "I really like hummus. I don't like the, whatever the other thing I would have to bring." And we did it every year afterwards because we did this thing at least annually and it worked every single time so... If you take it in the software world he can't tell everybody, you know, just develop your own thing but if you can guide them towards, "Hey, do the thing that, you know, give you more autonomy essentially, bring yourself to the game, be yourself, don't try to sort of put yourself in a box," I be- I truly believe you are gonna get much better results short and even more importantly long term because it keeps people thinking, it keeps them being motivated and, and they're like, uh, "H- how do I kind of contribute in the way I think is the right way?"

   6. LRLenny Rachitsky19:58

      Reminds me, I'm looking for, uh, daycares for our son. He's like 17 months, almost 17 months now and...

   7. EREilon Reshef20:03

      Nice.

   8. LRLenny Rachitsky20:03

      There's this Montessori, uh, approach to, to teaching kids and it's a very similar approach which is just let them, if they're ever busy with anything, don't even make eye contact. (laughs) Do- don't interrupt them, let them keep doing the thing and let them choose what they want to work on.

   9. EREilon Reshef20:18

      Yeah. There's many, many obviously education systems or principles that, that, uh, are, are along those lines. I mean, the, the person who taught me that I don't get, I don't assume she's invented it but, um, e- we all err on the side of like wanting more control but I do the same thing with my kids so, uh, I would never, I never install any piece of software to m- on, on my kids' devices so not like firework protection, I don't know, antivirus, air tag, nothing 'cause I'm like, "This is your problem and, and you know if you wanna, if, if you wanna like protect yourself it's y- it's your responsibility so this is autonomy." And there was one time where I had negotiated with my daughter. She, she was like, I told her, "I think you're kind of using your computer too much," and we negotiated. She said maybe an hour is enough. I told her maybe more. I think we agreed on the two-hour thing and then she came to me three days in a row, said, "Could you please install this software on my machine so I can help me like control my limits?" And I love it when it's the other way around because now she's responsible, I'm helping her versus the other way around so absolutely I take it to my personal life as well.

   10. LRLenny Rachitsky21:19

       So how does this look day to day at Gong on the product team? Like, when someone hears, "Oh, you give them a lot of autonomy," what does that actually look like? Help people understand what that actually means.

   11. EREilon Reshef21:29

       It means that if you're, um, working with design partners and you get like a, um, uh, an idea from the customer, uh, it's your responsibility to decide are you gonna do it or are you gonna talk to your manager or to me. You know, now I have of course work managers um, but it's your responsibility so we're not going to quote unquote "punish you" if you decided that, you know, you kind of took it, a, a, an opinion from a customer and then went ahead and did it. Um, it's your responsibility to decide, you know, do I know enough? Do I need more input? Uh, how, how, how up do I go? Um, so it's, uh, that, that's, a- and that requires them to think, you know, how confident am I in my, in my decisions?

   12. LRLenny Rachitsky22:06

       So is the way, is the culture basically you give them feedback and advice and the teams can operate the way they want, they can build the features they think are important, work with design partners that they think are important?

   13. EREilon Reshef22:18

       Yes and of course you know e- e- you are expected to solicit feedback right? So if you're going to build your own thing for six months and it's going to be... Well we're gonna have re- we're gonna review it along the way of course but we expect you to initiate the review. You have like a, we have like a weekly, um, session where you can bring up your reviews but it's not us forcing you to do it. It's you have to bring it, you have to solicit it and you have to sort of drive the process.

   14. LRLenny Rachitsky22:39

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8. 23:30 – 27:15

   How to implement this unique way of working

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky23:30

      Is there an example of a product or a really important feature that came out of this way of working where a team just like "I, I, you don't think that's a good idea, I'm just gonna do it anyway?"

   2. EREilon Reshef23:38

      (laughs) I don't think it goes up to a, to a whole product. It's, it's kind of very hard to, uh, 'cause you gotta have resources to build a, a whole product but I do think there are substantial features that, that, that came out of it even sort of the, um, kind of the AI fine tuning example I gave you before is like something came up in a hackathon and people were like let's start to build it, let's incubate it and then they kind of moved forward. Of course we had to give them resources at some stage but it wasn't like a top down, "Let's do this." It was more like, "Hey, we trying it out. Hey, we need a couple of more resources. We're trying out more," and at some stage we realized it's super important and then we kind of quote unquote "funded it completely."

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky24:16

      So when people listen to this and some product leaders might be thinking oh I want to work this way, I want to give my teams more freedom, more trust. What do you, what needs to be true in your org for this to work well versus it become chaos?

   4. EREilon Reshef24:30

      Firstly, you as a leader need to sign up to like-... sort of let go a little bit, not control everything. Uh, willing to sort of make some more mistakes than maybe you'd make otherwise. And so that's the one thing. I think the harder thing is sort of, um, at- at least for me is you also have to sort of get your peers (laughs) in- in the same, eh, eh, on- on the same boat, right? 'Cause, you know, the- the- the, uh, head of sales is gonna ask you, "Hey, what's happening? How do I know what's happening if- if you don't have a control over every fea- feature?" And the CFO is gonna ask you, "Hey, what's the... I don't know what it is, the ROI of this? Or how do you d- justify those type of decisions?" Um, so there has to be some fundamental trust within y- you know, you and your team, you and your colleagues, um, to, uh, to at least experiment that way. And of course, if you do it on an ongoing basis, you lose some visibility and I think that's maybe one thing you can acknowledge, right? 'Cause if you give people more control, (laughs) by definition you're gonna have less visibility into what you're doing. So give up a little bit of visibility. Hopefully, um, get the benefit of higher velocity and higher, quote unquote, morale or, you know, sort of like engagement from people. And that should result in better products as well.

   5. LRLenny Rachitsky25:38

      I love that. That's a really good example. With the sales example, which is great, do you encourage the sales folks to talk directly to the pod to ask about these sorts of things or do you discourage that sort of communication?

   6. EREilon Reshef25:51

      Oh, yeah. I think sales from my perspective are part of the, uh, virtual pod, right? So the core pod is, as I mentioned, you know, product engineering. But part of the virtual pod is there's product marketing, customer success, sales. In all fairness, you know, sales people are usually busy doing their work versus actually sitting with us and helping us kinda, oh, is this gonna sell? Did you hear from customers? The type of questions that product managers usually wanna get. Um, but if they're happy to spend time, they- they will be very involved.

   7. LRLenny Rachitsky26:20

      Coming back to the design partner way of working, does it feel crazy for companies not to operate this way, to not work this closely with design partners on new products and features they're building?

   8. EREilon Reshef26:31

      I- I wouldn't go back, right? So I think it's just like, uh, even like, I- I hate terms such as risks 'cause that's a very like, uh, I don't know, like a ambiguous term. But just the risk of building something you're not gonna know if it's gonna get used. And I- I was asked by a sort of a very senior product manager of a very successful big SaaS company is like, "Why do you even do this?" I'm like, "What do you mean?" He's like, "Hey, we launch products and then we (laughs) see if they, if- if people like them." It's like, "Well, I don't think that's a great idea." Because, and that company's successful and bigger than Gong, but at the same time I- I just think it's- it's leaving too much in the hands of I would even call it luck, right? 'Cause h- how do you know?

   9. LRLenny Rachitsky27:08

      Yeah. Like, I was thinking, it just feels like a cheat code and just feels like something a lot of companies can learn from how y'all o- operate

9. 27:15 – 31:47

   Speed and decision-making

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky27:15

      there. Something that has come up a bunch so far in our conversation is your focus on speed and optimizing for velocity. Something that I've heard about you is that you're really big on just making really quick decisions, even like one-way door decisions that are really big. Your, uh, philosophy is just make it quickly before you have all the information necessarily. Talk about that approach.

   2. EREilon Reshef27:36

      That's maybe a per- a little bit of a personal thing, but I would encourage people to look up, uh, in Google there's- there's, um, maybe I'll do a spoiler for, uh, it's Isaac Asimov. He's a science fiction writer, I think beginning of last century, and he has this like, uh, short story that The Machine That Won the War. So you can look it up. It's a fun story, pretty short, but it's basically the computer, the big computer at the time supposedly won the war, but the only reason it won the war is because like, the, they wanted like the people to trust this su- superhuman machine. But what they realized, the machine was just giving crap, just like our LLM hallucinations. So the head person, president, whatever it is, basically ended up saying, you know, "I end up tossing a coin." But people wanted this like really believe that this is like a smart machine thing is gonna w- help us win the war. So i- it's kind of obviously a funny kinda story, uh, but I think there is truth to it. So many, many decisions when it c- when it, when it's not a close call, it's like should go, should Gong open an office in China right now? Well, probably not. There's so many reasons why not. We don't really debate it. But like should- should we develop feature A and feature B? And if you look at them, they're kind of the same, I don't know, call it same value or same cost or whatever. However, whatever kind of mental framework you have for deciding, you end up being like 51, 40, 49. No decision is gonna be like super wrong. So yes, you can try to bring in more data and you can try to sort of like bring more people, but like both decisions are okay. So just go ahead with one. Hopefully it's not like a huge, uh, a- a- a- a huge mistake. I'll tell you, I had this discussion with my co-founder, Amit, who is the CEO, and a few years ago we were considering buying a company and, you know, it's like pretty strategic decisions, right? And we're like, "Oh, we don't know. There's pros and cons." We're like on the fence there and we- we end up not buying the company. We can kind of look up Gong and we haven't bought like big companies. And I asked him, maybe it was a couple of months ago, it's like, "What if we had bought that company? Do you think we're, we would have been in a radically different position?" He was like, "No." So it's like he... I mean, it could have been better, it could have been worse, but it would not have like made a huge difference. And the reason is it was a 51/49 decision, wasn't a 70/30 decision. So it's hard for humans to make decision. You probably know there's like, it's like there's like experiments that show it's- it's almost like running or- or jogging or doing something that is a physical, uh, requires your physical capacity to make decisions. So just make the... I know it's hard and you want to postpone it, but just- just- just do it.

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky29:59

      (laughs) It's such a freeing way of thinking about it. It's interesting 'cause there's been recent conversations on this podcast where Spotify has this kind of value they call talk is cheap and it's meant to be a virtue. W- talk is cheap, so let's just talk a lot before we make a decision. But it's specific to Spotify because there's like a lot of regulatory challenges and if they make it a big decision, it's a long term... It's like they put a lot of effort into it. So it's interesting there's such different ways of operating. (laughs) There's like, let's just talk for months and make a decision versus we're just gonna make it and then it'll be fine.

   4. EREilon Reshef30:31

      Yeah. Of course, like big, big one- one door, they, uh, sort of, uh, yeah. I mean, this is of course you- you're gonna spend more time on, but people tend to s- over- overthink, I think, decisions. I also found out that personally the quality of my decisions, if you sort of kind of wake me up in the middle of the night and ask me, "You know, what do you think about X?" And I'm gonna be like, "I-"I have no idea, I'm sleeping. And then you're like, you know, "You got to force me into a decision, I'm going to make a decision. Now you're going to give me two weeks to ponder over it." I, I don't think the quality of the decision is going to be much, much higher, which is maybe person- could be personal, um, but that's at least what I found over my too many years of existence, so.

   5. LRLenny Rachitsky31:08

      I think something that's probably necessary for that to work out well is having a deep experience in that space. Like you've been at this for a long time, so I imagine your instinct often is trained based on your past experience of the market and customers. You feel like that's a necessary component of trusting your gut and instinct on these sorts of decisions?

   6. EREilon Reshef31:25

      Yeah, yeah, of course. You've got to at some stage know what you're doing, yeah. If I were now to sort of make a decision around, I don't know, entering a different space, there's no way I would be like, "Yeah, let's flip a coin," like the Asimov story and, and go for it. I'd take a, I go to a conference, learn it, whatever the thing is, and then make that decision. But most of the decisions all of us make on a day to day basis is our, our domain of expertise versus like totally new set of things.

10. 31:47 – 35:50

    Early AI adoption and lessons learned

    1. EREilon Reshef31:47

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky31:47

       Awesome. Okay, let's talk about AI for a bit. You guys were very early on AI, you were working on... Basically AI was like your product was built on machine learning back then is what it was called. Uh, before it was cool and everyone probably thought it was like a waste of time and like, "No, it's never gonna work." Now everyone's building AI, building AI into their product. What have you learned about working with AI over the years that you think people maybe are not yet aware of or that will likely cause them pain that you can help solve and avoid for them?

    3. EREilon Reshef32:18

       Yeah. Uh, funny, you know, when we launched Gong, we didn't use the term AI 'cause people thought it was a bad thing, it makes wrong decisions or, or they just thought it was an action item, an acronym. When, when we founded Gong, I was, I was in sabbatical and I actually went to this, uh, deep learning course 'cause I was, I was bored, in, in all fairness. And, and after that course, I ended up buying Nvidia stock, which I wish I'd kept up until now.

    4. LRLenny Rachitsky32:41

       (laughs)

    5. EREilon Reshef32:42

       Uh, but I did send an email saying, "Hey, this is the next thing." But so we understood it's the next thing, of course we didn't know it's going to be LLM and GPT and, and you know, other acronyms that evolved over the years. And probably in, in now that we're talking kind of end of 2024-ish, I, I think people should not go from one extreme which is, "Hey, we need a bunch of data scientists for every small project," which was the case five years ago or three years ago, um, to an ex- the other extreme which is, "Hey, LLM is going to solve everything." Because LLMs don't solve everything. They have huge utility. We use LLMs all over the place, most companies that develop AI kind of stuff use LLMs, it's a great thing. Uh, but at the same time, don't, don't assume it does, it does everything. You still some- need some of the core competencies of, uh, of AI. So you do want to have expertise, um, people who actually know what they're doing, um, and help guide us PMs around, you know, can... Is this something that can be built or, or no? 'Cause if you're going to spend many, many hours on asking an LLM to do I don't know what, like, um, in the case of Gong for example, you know, um, tell me what a good sales cycle look like, looks like. LLMs don't do that, you know, just like maybe something else does, but we have a deal prediction model. LLMs cannot predict deals 'cause it's like very, very specialized. So I think you, you still need to have expertise, you still want to have some measurements. So yes, version one you can just go to an LLM and say, you know, "Create something," I don't know, whatever. But if you don't have measurements, like in the old machine learning, whatever metrics you use, you're not gonna advance. You're gonna have V1 and then you're gonna have V2 and you have no way to know if you've made a progress. So we kind of pay a lot of attention to, uh, we have people who are going to specialize in how you measure... We use Elo system, which is kind of the one used in chess as well and, and, and we do have experts who, who kind of help us make the right decisions. You can make a very, uh, very good progress without these, um, but I think there's a glass ceiling if y- if you don't like figure out how to kind of create a more operational rigor around this whole AI thing.

    6. LRLenny Rachitsky34:44

       So what I'm hearing is don't assume you can just outsource all your AI magic model building to the foundational model companies. You need to have your own AI expertise, ML expertise.

    7. EREilon Reshef34:55

       Yeah, or even if you end up outsourcing the core work, at least you have to have the expertise to understand what is doable, what is not doable, what's the right way to approach it? What's the input you give to the LLM? How... Is this gonna be good quality or bad quality? There's even like if you just take the product management aspect, if the LLM gives you something that is 90% accurate or I don't know, people are going to think is good, the product's going to look different than if it's, if it's 50% good. So just the way you even think about it, the, the way you... I, I think Figma calls their AI feature like First Draft-

    8. LRLenny Rachitsky35:27

       Mm-hmm.

    9. EREilon Reshef35:28

       Which is a term I like 'cause they kind of realize it's not best, it's not great, but it's a good first draft. So if you know what it is, it's easier not just to name, but how to conceptualize, how to build a workflow around it, and what to train users to assume for it. And I think there is an expertise there that comes on top of LLMs even if you just use LLMs and you don't... you can't afford or you, you don't want

11. 35:50 – 38:16

    Building effective AI teams

    1. EREilon Reshef35:50

       to go deeper.

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky35:51

       For folks that want to do this at their company, what are the functions that you have that help you do this/skills of people you hire that you think are important?

    3. EREilon Reshef36:03

       So I think you still have to have this kind of "data scientist" uh, role. Um, and data scientists could be in the company, could be advisors as well, right? Doesn't... Not everything has to be a full time in the company. And the role of a data scientist is, is help this, help guide, um, a company, right? Deal prediction model, is this an LLM thing? Do you need to build a model? If you need, w- what input do you need? How long it's gonna take? Da, da, da. Also in our world at least data scientists are the people who know how to measure these things. Um, is this model better or is this model better? Is this prompt better or is this prompt not better? And the judge, then there's the judgment, right? So when Gong creates, um, an account brief, the data scientist is not gonna know if that brief or this brief is, is the right one, but they can kind of guide us through what's the right tool set you need to sort of put it in front of customers and, you know, how do you measure this and whatnot? And then I think at the end of the day, you also need like this myt- you know, kind of now it's becoming a common, you know, sort of the prompt engineer, the person who's actually working with the LLMs and guiding them. That, that is like, uh, it's a bit of a technical skill but yo- you got to have it and, and, and it doesn't have to be a full-time person, um, but needs to be, th- there needs to be that expertise of somebody who's actually optimizing things. Many, many customers, um, tell us that, you know, "Gong.AI is, well, it's more accurate than others." Yes, there is some combination of models we built from scratch, fine-tuned 'cause we have AI expertise, but some of it is also how we kind of, the prompts we give to the LLMs, how much rigor we put into optimizing them and kind of finding the edge cases and, and ranking them and improving them over time. Um, if you want to get really good AI, uh, you have to invest in it as well.

    4. LRLenny Rachitsky37:39

       As you're talking, I'm thinking about how the, your pod model matches really well with this world of things moving so quickly, AI changing constantly. Just giving teams autonomy feels like a huge advantage in this world where things are just changing weekly.

    5. EREilon Reshef37:54

       Yeah, so we have a couple of maybe, you know, it's three different pods. We have like an embedded AI specialist team, te- either a, a specialist or a team or, I don't know, a couple of people and then they kind of can iterate very, very quickly on using LLMs or using non-LLMs, you know, SLMs people now say, the small language models. But whatever the thing is, they can iterate very, very quickly.

    6. LRLenny Rachitsky38:15

       Awesome, okay.

12. 38:16 – 41:36

    The spiral method for learning

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky38:16

       Couple more things I want to touch on. One is the spiral model. So you mentioned that you just went to learn deep learning on your own. You like went off to the side, "I'm going to understand this new thing that everyone's talking about, deep learning." And, and you got really smart and machine learning basically really quickly, and you have this thing you call the spiral model or the spiral method for how to learn something complex quickly. You wrote a Medium post about this, or blog post. (laughs) What is the spiral method? How does it work? How do people learn things really quickly that are really complicated?

    2. EREilon Reshef38:47

       Yeah. I think it's even, uh, beyond just the speed but also like how do you even know that you learned, th- that you actually learned it? So i- it's, it's kind of there is a mathematical kind of, or no, I'm sorry, physical concept called, uh, annealing which is how certain kind of material kind of becomes the way it is, and it's sort of the temperature goes li- slightly down, eventually become a crystal or whatnot. There is an element to this I think in learning as well, which is y- you want to know what deep learning is, like you know nothing. You go find the person next to you and you're like, "What is deep learning?" They tell you something. Of course you don't know anything 'cause you just heard it from one person, and the next question you should ask like, "Who else would I be speaking with?" They give you three other names. I think in tech we all tend to be told like this very, very kind of cool ecosystem of people who are willing to help as long as you don't ask too much of them. So then you speak with three other people and then they give you like other names and you sort of go around. And ideally, at some stage, you feel like, you know, first person, you have no idea what they're talking about, you probably didn't even understand what they're saying. The fifth person, you might understand 50% and 50% is like new. At some stage, you're going to feel like, well, new stuff is 10% or 5% or 0%. I call it the spiral because it's kind of going in circles around the target and eventually you feel like, well, I'm hearing the same thing again and again. And you're like, "Well, if I heard it from three people I didn't learn anything new, I'm sort of at the bullseye." Of course, at the level I am so I'm never... I'm, I'm never going to be like a deep learning specialist in the same way that, you know, true data scientists are. Uh, but as a product manager, I know it probably as well as I can given that, you know, everybody I, I'd spoken with at the time was not giving me anything new at the level that I had desired at the time.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky40:22

       I love that. Is there anything you've been studying recently that you've either used this method for or something else you're excited about learning that's, uh, new or on the cutting edge?

    4. EREilon Reshef40:32

       Usually, I kind of do this for, um, uh, for kind of use cases within, uh, wi- within our customer base. So for example, if I wanted to sort of, if I wanted to go after a certain persona or a certain use case for the product, um, so we had this, uh, uh, notion of can we do a better job for a specific persona within sales, people who are account managers? So I would use a similar method just like, "Hey, talk to one account manager, talk to an a- analyst," or whatever the thing is, and eventually when you start hearing the same things like what do they care about is different and say salespeople like selling new business or different than, I don't know, contact center centers. Um, when you start hearing the same thing, you're like, "Okay, I kind of got to where I need to be. Now I can make decisions." Uh, I can always do another spiral and get de- one level deeper which is, I don't know, do some user research, go all in. Um, but at least at the sort of the conversation level, I've got it, I've got where I need to be.

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky41:24

       I love how simple this is, is you just start talking. Just find somebody to talk to, ask about this. No pressure and then just, "Okay, who else should I talk to?" You just keep having conversations, spiraling de- deeper and deeper into knowledge and

13. 41:36 – 44:24

    Narrowing down the initial customer profile

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky41:36

       wisdom. Okay, uh, one thing I wanted to touch on which has always stuck with me about your approach initially when you were starting Gong is your, how you found your initial ICP, who to go after, and it's, it's really funny how narrow you got when you all decided here's who we're focusing on for our first dozen customers. So I have the list here. So when you decided here's who we're targeting, here's the list of constraints. We're gonna target people selling their product in the US in English over video conference, uh, using WebEx which was the big one at the time, selling software that is worth 1,000 to $100,000 and, and there was only 5,000 companies in this bucket. Can you just talk about like why you found it was so important to get so narrow and just the power of getting really narrow which is very counterintuitive to a lot of people where they're like, "Oh, well, it's just gonna be for everyone. It's a huge market."

    2. EREilon Reshef42:35

       I think it's sort of the traditional, um, um, sort of I call it the bowling alley or however wanna, you wanna kinda, uh, form that-

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky42:42

       Crossing the Chasm?

    4. EREilon Reshef42:43

       Yeah, the Crossing the Chasm kinda, uh, methodology which you want to start narrow, you want to, uh, create this, this kind of small pond where people talk about each other and, and you can kinda light the fire in there. If... And, and my previous company, I, I, I, by the way I did read Crossing the Chasm, uh-... and I told myself, "Nah, I can do way better than that." So we had one customer in, uh, I think it was L'Oreal or, I don't know, one of the cosmetics companies, an American Express, and Cisco, like different industries. And there was no way we could scale it because everybody had their own lingo, the way they thought about the technology and whatnot. So by having a smaller set of kind of customers or IC kind of definition of, of customers, you can develop like much more focused and then it's easier to light the fire because people move, right? At some stage, I think it was year one into the business, we heard from a company that they interviewed a salesperson and the salesperson asked, "Are you using Gong?" And they said, "We are thinking about using Gong, but we're not." Like, well, I'm only going to work for companies that use Gong. And that, that's the sort of the power of a small pond with like, you know, companies that are like each other because you get this viral effect that is not common in B2B, but it's as close as you can because of those conversations. That other customer became a Gong customer literally because they interviewed a person who told them he's not going to come unless they bought Gong. You can't do this if you have a wide market where people don't even talk to each other, and there is an assumption that you're not like burying yourself in this market.

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky44:06

       I love Kaz because today, like I said at the very top of this conversation, you're just so ubiquitous, like everybody seems to be using Gong. And I love that you started with something where there's like seven, I don't know, different constraints to narrow down who you're going after. And it's such a good example of the power of starting very focused and then expanding from that, which is what

14. 44:24 – 46:35

    Failure corner

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky44:24

       you've done. Okay, last question before we get to a very exciting lightning round. We have a segment on this podcast called Fail Corner, where so many of these podcast conversations, everyone's always sharing all the successes. Everything's always going great. We never... No- nothing ever goes wrong. When in reality it does. Things often go wrong. Can you share a story from your career or just the journey of Gong when things didn't go well, when there's maybe a failure? And if you learned something from that time, what you learned?

    2. EREilon Reshef44:54

       Yeah, I always kind of joke that in my previous company we'd done so many mistakes that if life limited you to a certain number of mistakes, I wouldn't, wouldn't have any left, I think. I, I still do mistakes, but just so many. So every one of them probably done twice or, a- and then it's like okay, some stage is like, you know, third time's a charm. So, uh, the one I just gave you is like probably the worst, is, you know, crossing the chasm. You start a company, you have this like technology, I was thinking it's go- let's go horizontal. And that technology was whatever, web integration something. Eventually ended up being an e-commerce content syndication or, or con management SaaS software, which is the right way to go because you want to specialize in a certain market, but initially just going all in was, was like just ridiculously, uh, uh, and not smart. And the other thing we did together was like... That was... The previous company started year 2000. So that was like the bubble, one of those very, very nice bubbles. Um, so we're like, "You know what? We actually got three customers admittedly in totally three different segments. Now let's go and scale." Now we all knew we get like- we need like one salesperson, one is E and C kind of do what's now called product market fit. I don't know that the term even existed there. And then we're like, "Nah, you know what the investors told us? You got to hire more people." So we hired, I don't know, 20 salespeople. All of them failing miserably, uh, because, A, we didn't have a true product market fit but even what's worse, we didn't have a t- true focused ICP with like a very, very repeatable, uh, uh, product market fit. So if you sort of f- hear me talk about sort of how we started Gong, Amit kind of is the CEO and he kind of drove a lot of that business strategy. But so me being sort of a co-pilot there, it definitely bringing the same... I'm not going to make that mistake again. I might do new and fun ones, uh, but not that same

15. 46:35 – 56:42

    Lightning round

    1. EREilon Reshef46:35

       ext- mistake again.

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky46:36

       Awesome. Thank you for sharing that. With that, we reached our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready?

    3. EREilon Reshef46:42

       Sure.

    4. LRLenny Rachitsky46:43

       Let's do it. First question, what are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people?

    5. EREilon Reshef46:49

       Uh, there is a set of books, um, I think one that is sort of the starter one is, I think it's called right now The Ideal Executive. Um, people don't really know it's of a management book, how to run a team and, and whatnot. I think the original version is funnily enough, I think it was called Mismanagement, but nobody wants-

    6. LRLenny Rachitsky47:07

       Mm-hmm.

    7. EREilon Reshef47:07

       ... to buy a book called Mismanagement. You'd much rather buy a book that's called Ideal Executive because you, of course, are not mismanaging. You're the ideal executive altogether, so you're just reinforcing yourself. Uh, but jokes aside, it's basically kind of gives you the... It, it try to sort of, um, define people by four characteristics, I think misnamed, but like, are you a, um, an administrator? Can you like, uh, um, how you, he calls it a producer, basically get the job done, integrated, which kind of brings people together. And the fourth one i- it's basically kind of change agent, you know, kind of, uh, do, do a lot of mess and change stuff. Usually entrepreneurs kind of include that part of course. And basically his claim is like nobody does the all four. You can maybe you're good at one, maybe okay at the other. And personally I'm horrible in administration. So I, I obviously acknowledge that and I try to sort of compliment myself. But, so I think there's two things in it. Firstly, just those... I, I thought there was like the four good ways of looking at people as a manager, as a leader, of course. Um, that's one. But I think even if you disagree with those four, uh, just reco- just like understanding that you want to look at the people in the organization, yourself included, and it's through the prism of, you know, key characteristics and you can, you can select a different framework, helps you a lot with creating high velocity discussions with others. Because I can talk with somebody and say, "Hey, you're a P." (laughs) He's going to be like, "Well, I'm not a P, I'm an I," whatever the thing is. And that makes a discussion that is like much, much faster and more comprehensive, uh, than just like trying to explain this from scratch. Like, "Hey, you tend to do this and you might want to do this and you might want to strengthen that." So I'd re- I'd recommend starting from this, but I... There's probably other methodologies you can pick and maybe kind of some of the listeners here have already had one. Um, but that's one I like because kind of found it useful.

    8. LRLenny Rachitsky48:57

       And that's, uh, it's called The Ideal Executive?

    9. EREilon Reshef48:59

       I, I think so. I'm pretty sure. Yeah.

    10. LRLenny Rachitsky49:01

        Great. Uh, any other books before we move on?

    11. EREilon Reshef49:04

        ... yeah, that one's gonna, is probably more That's the one.

    12. LRLenny Rachitsky49:06

        Right.

    13. EREilon Reshef49:07

        I like Crucial Conversation, that's kind of in the beaten path.

    14. LRLenny Rachitsky49:09

        Mm-hmm.

    15. EREilon Reshef49:09

        It's like how to conduct conversations with people in your organization. I think it's never bad to sort of re- immerse yourself into...

    16. LRLenny Rachitsky49:16

        It's a better read.

    17. EREilon Reshef49:16

        ... how to, uh, speak properly with other people, so.

    18. LRLenny Rachitsky49:20

        We have an episode coming up where we're gonna share, uh, scripts and phrases to use to have, uh, better hard conversations.

    19. EREilon Reshef49:27

        Ah, that's good.

    20. LRLenny Rachitsky49:28

        Yeah, I'm excited for that, slash scared. Okay, next question. Do you have a recent movie or TV show you've really enjoyed?

    21. EREilon Reshef49:35

        I didn't have TV, like broadcast TV for many, many years. So nowadays there's Netflix where you can find stuff, but I'm, in my case in, in sort of a, um, TV and movie tend to be pretty esoteric, fringe. Um, so I've recently watched this British TV series, uh, called Slow Horses, uh, with Gary Oldman and it's, it's a really kind of fun, you know, sort of funny spy thing which I found amusing and intelligent at the same time. So some kind of comedies tend to be pretty kind of, uh, lowest common denominator. That one seems still fun and, and witty at the same time. So that's my latest that I kind of really kind of enjoyed watching even the third season, so.

    22. LRLenny Rachitsky50:14

        I love Slow Horses. Uh, it's, it's like, I don't think it's that d- uh, obscure. I think it's like one of the ones Apple promotes often. Uh, I will say this last season was not, not my favorite, but the other two are awesome.

    23. EREilon Reshef50:25

        Yeah. I 100% agree with what you said. Even the third season was okay, but the first two were really, really good and they're Yeah. It's super fun. ... waiting for the fourth season.

    24. LRLenny Rachitsky50:32

        It took me like three tries to actually get into this show initially 'cause people kept telling me, "It's so good." And I started watching and it's just like, "Who's this old messed up guy just complaining endlessly?" But you gotta keep watching. Okay, uh, do you have a favorite product you've recently discovered that you really like?

    25. EREilon Reshef50:47

        I assume you have, um, a silverware caddy in your dishwasher, right?

    26. LRLenny Rachitsky50:53

        Oh yeah, to put like forks and knives. Yeah.

    27. EREilon Reshef50:55

        The cutlery... So that's my favorite product as of lately, and I'll tell you why. It's a funny story. Um, I lost mine, and you can ask yourself, how can you, you know, freaking lose a c- like one of those baskets? And it was in the, in- in the, uh, dishwasher of course, and for some reason I couldn't find it. That's like you have to be really kind of out- out of your mind to not find. Anyway, so I go to some Amazon or Ebay, wherever, I just buy a new one. And then, of course, a day later, I find it's like it fell somewhere within the, uh, dishwasher. Now I have two. So this is my latest invention. If you have two of those baskets, you could put one of them in the sink and you can just like continuously load your cutlery or silverware while the thing is working or you haven't vacated it. So it kind of changed how we organize our kitchen with something that probably costs ten bucks. No product manager has ever thought about offering two of those with your dishwasher. Uh, I don't think they even tried to upsell anything of, any- any of that. And I told it to some people and actually ended up buying a second one and suddenly it was successful, which is the most ridiculous thing is like spend 10, 15 bucks, get something organized in a completely obscure and- and unintentional way.

    28. LRLenny Rachitsky51:59

        I'll give you an even crazier idea that, uh, a previous guest ha- uh, suggests. Rory Sutherland has this pitch that you should have two dishwashers. Everyone should have two dishwashers because one could, is your clean and one as dirty and you just take your st- uh, plates and things out of the clean one, use it, and put it straight into the dirty dishwasher. And why are we just putting things away constantly? Just like go from one to the other and one to the other. So there you go.

    29. EREilon Reshef52:27

        (laughs) Sounds like similar idea, um...

    30. LRLenny Rachitsky52:28

        Similar idea, next level.

Episode duration: 56:42