Hot takes and techno-optimism from tech’s top power couple | Sriram and Aarthi

I hate jobs to be done. I think it's a terrible framework. I think no successful company has ever been built on top of JDBD, and if you've picked JDBD, you're probably doomed. And I'll give you an example. When you sign up for Instagram right now, when you signed up for Facebook, uh, for many, many years, Facebook knew that it needed to get you to 10 friends in 14 days. If you got your 10 friends in 14 days, you were probably gonna use Facebook. So they'd be like, "Well, we want to throw every tool we have at our disposal to get you to 10 friends in 14 days." So if you signed on for Facebook for many, many years, you get this little thing called People You May Know, and it'll show you. Then you have this person who just signed up on Facebook, and you're like, "Why do I want to see this person?" It's not because you need a friend, but 'cause they need a friend.

Mm-hmm.

So what Facebook did was it made your experience slightly worse to make that person's experience slightly better.

Mm-hmm.

This was performing no job for you. It was trying to perform a job for them. (upbeat music)

Welcome to Lenny's Podcast, where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and growing today's most successful products. Today, for the first time ever, I've got two guests, Aarti Ramamurthy and Sriram Krishnan, both former product managers who between them worked at basically every major tech company, including Netflix, Meta, Snap, Twitter, Microsoft, even Clubhouse. Sriram is now a partner at a16z. They're actually married, and both individually amazing. Together, they host The Aarti & Sriram Good Times Show, which started on Clubhouse, it's now on YouTube, and famously they had Elon Musk on back in the day, which led to Clubhouse's crazy rocket ship growth, which we definitely touch on. This episode is definitely the most fun conversation I've had yet on this podcast. We cover all kinds of areas, including this trend of techno-optimism, building your network, creating content online and how to go about doing that, becoming a product leader, community building, and a hilarious rant at the end about why the jobs to be done framework does not work. I had such a good time chatting with these two, and I know you will enjoy this episode. With that, I bring you Aarti and Sriram after a short word from our select sponsors. This episode is brought to you by Vanta, helping you streamline your security compliance to accelerate growth. If your business stores any data in the cloud, then you've likely been asked or you're gonna be asked about your SOC 2 compliance. SOC 2 is a way to prove your company's taking proper security measures to protect customer data, and builds trust with customers and partners, especially those with serious security requirements. Also, if you want to sell to the enterprise, proving security is essential. SOC 2 can either open the door for bigger and better deals, or it can put your business on hold. If you don't have a SOC 2, there's a good chance you won't even get a seat at the table. But getting a SOC 2 report can be a huge burden, especially for startups. It's time-consuming, tedious, and expensive. Enter Vanta. Over 3,000 fast-growing companies use Vanta to automate up to 90% of the work involved with SOC 2. Vanta can get you ready for security audits in weeks instead of months, less than a third of the time that it usually takes. For a limited time, Lenny's Podcast listeners get $1,000 off Vanta. Just go to vanta.com/lenny. That's V-A-N-T-A .com/lenny to learn more, and to claim your discount. Get started today. This episode is brought to you by Dovetail, the customer insights platform for teams that gets you from data to insights fast, no matter the method. There's so much customer data to get through, from user interviews to NPS, sales calls, usability tests, support tickets, app reviews. It's a lot, and you know that if you're building something, hidden in that data are the insights that will lead you to building better products. And that's where Dovetail can help. Dovetail allows you to quickly analyze customer data from any source and transform it into evidence-based insights that your whole team can access. If you're a product manager who needs insights to motivate your team, a designer validating your next big feature, or a researcher who needs to analyze fast, Dovetail is the collaborative insights platform your whole team can use. Go to dovetailapp.com/lenny to get started today for free. That's dovetailapp.com/lenny. (upbeat music) Aarti and Sriram, welcome to the podcast.