Nikhyl Singhal On Product Management In The Ai Era

So, we’re going to have a really different type of session today. Uh the last, you know, five speakers we’ve we’ve had technical founders, then we talked about AI, we talked about context, we talked about the loop. We’re going to switch gears today, and we’re going to talk about product. And it’s this is a topic that’s changed a lot over the last 20 years in software, I’d say. And, you know, the history is like, 20 years ago, you’d have a a project manager that would build a PRD, which stands for more product requirements document, very structured, and then that person would give it to a set of engineers. And this is kind of the the classic playbook for the IBMs, the the Microsofts of the world. On the consumer side, what was interesting, it’s different. There’s not as much of a playbook. Typically, consumer companies are founded by a person that is that product person. And I saw this at Twitter, that we had some product managers in the in the company, but they were were never really effective, um just because there was always the founder who would actually drive the decision. And then you look at companies like Apple, and Apple does not have any product managers. They just have basically build all their products between having a designer and having an engineer. But what’s interesting is right now, the world’s changing radically, where a designer can now go write code a lot, and and really these roles of design, engineering, and products are merging. We’re going to talk about that today, um with Nikil Singh Hal. So, let you introduce yourself. Actually, before you introduce yourself, I wanted to tell you a fun story of how we met. So, 20 years ago, we were both starting companies, and we were both fundraising. And he was talking to Sequoia, I was talking to Sequoia, and they wanted us to combine companies. And so, we went and had coffee, and we’re like, we’re not going to combine companies. So, we ended up going and actually building our own companies on our own, but stayed in good touch, and became great friends. Yeah, if it wasn’t for Mike, I think Mike, uh Mike and I one day was like, hey, let’s go to the city, we should go to this event. And uh that event ended up being the event that uh I met my wife at. So, every time I think of Mike, I think of if it wasn’t for Mike, I wouldn’t be married. So, uh anyway, that’s that’s a that’s a different story, a different session, but uh thanks everyone for having me here. Uh I’m Nikil Singh Hal. Uh let’s see, I went to Stanford ‘90 to ‘96, which probably seems like ancient history for folks here. Uh I think you can still co-term. I co-termed in computer science. I was a course advisor, um which was the person that, you know, took your Polaroid at the time, and and allowed you to declare computer science, so there wasn’t much of a gate at the time. And uh and since then, I’ve been like helping people in two ways. One, I I I built a bunch of companies through founding, uh and then I was uh I was an executive at uh at Google, and at Meta, and at Credit Karma, kind of helping build product organizations. Uh and then for the last 15 years, I probably had I mean, without probably exaggeration, over a thousand career conversations with executives, people that are early in career, people that are looking to end their careers, uh and just trying to helping them navigate kind of the choppy waters around careers. And so, uh the combination of careers and how to get your most out of the 40, 50 years that you all are going to work, as well as what product and product management is, is sort of what occupies my time these days. So, um maybe just a show of hands, you know, how many uh folks here in the room uh plan on being a product manager in the first five years after they graduate? Yeah, I’d say maybe 5% of the room, I would say give or take. How many of you would have answered uh would have raised your hands two years ago? Yeah, it’s about twice as many. And so, I think that these days, we hear this term product management, which we’ll spend a little time defining, and what we hear is uh that function seems to be dead with AI. It’s kind of the roadkill that AI is kind of uh kind of providing here. Um how many of you feel like you don’t understand what a product manager does or is? Okay, so a big chunk of you. Okay, so maybe I’ll spend just a few minutes kind of going through kind of what is this function called product management. So, basically, in every technology company, there’s a bunch of people that build stuff, and then there’s a bunch of people that sell stuff, and then there’s the people that are in between. And people that are in between glues what you’re trying to build with how to build it, and that’s what a product manager is. And and for a variety of reasons, um it’s hard to kind of connect the dots between one side and another. Um now, for the last 10 years, product management was largely kind of defined in the following way. Um companies essentially go through what I call the sort of S curve of growth. So, at the beginning of every company, your goal, if you were in many of you, I think you’re going to found, your goal is to find product market fit. Product market fit is the equivalent of like, you know, rubbing two sticks together, hoping that you get some smoke. Product market fit means that I’m building a product, and I’m hoping that people want it, and then enough people want it that I can kind of keep doing it going forward. So, at the beginning, your founders are driving product market fit. They’re doing this rapid experimentation. The goal of the organization is to have as many shots on goal as possible. You know, when Mike and I met, that’s what we were doing. We were essentially trying to build something, and trying to get resonance with customers. Okay. Product management doesn’t exist at this phase. So, for a lot of people that are like, oh, I want to go to an early stage company, and I want to help kind of build that company out, you need to found. There is no product manager that makes sense when the company is essentially throwing whatever they’re doing away, trying to find some resonance. Okay. Some very small percentage of those companies, let’s say, 1, 2, 3, 4% of those companies, will actually find what we call product market fit. Product market fit means that you’ve got a sucking sound. Sucking sound means that you’ve built something, and all of a sudden, there’s a natural pull. People really want what you want. And for the first time, and and this is kind of the irony here, is the exact thing that got you to where you are, which is experimentation, rubbing two sticks together, finally smoke is coming, you start to feel heat, you need to stop experimenting and throwing things away. What you actually need to do is you need to take a moment and build some resilience, some consistency, because the next customer that you’re going to bring in can’t have a completely different product. And the skills of the founder are largely designed around how do I experiment as rapidly as possible. At that moment, they’re like, oh, you know what I need to do is I need to calm down. I got to now, maybe the company’s growing up, I got to go fundraise. I got to go figure out this go-to-market thing. I got to figure out the business side. I don’t have as much time to change the product. Now, product management comes in. And product management at this stage is a much quieter function, more process oriented. And this is historic. So, I’ll talk about how it’s changing in a minute. But historically, you’re going to put in predictability, process. You’re going to essentially, for the first time, have multiple teams, and they don’t talk to each other. So, you have to have a function, which is gluing not only what the customer needs and wants, but also get multiple teams on the same page. Okay. Now, of those companies, a very, very, very small percentage of those companies, again, maybe 1 or 2%, go through what we call hypergrowth. Hypergrowth didn’t really exist when I was in school. When I was in school, it took 10, 15 years for LinkedIn to get its first billion users. It took like 18 months for Uber. And now it even happens even faster. And the reason why is the App Store, Facebook ads, you know, the distribution of the internet allows companies to grow very rapidly. Well, so, there’s a point in time when the company is getting so much pull, so much of that sucking sound is happening, when your product is flying off the shelf. Again, this is a one in a hundred, one in a thousand founder situation. At that stage, when you’re getting so much pull, you need to not only scale the business rapidly, but you need to expand the business. Hey, we have a hit product, but we have so much opportunity, how do we get into an adjacent product line? Well, again, as a founder that’s going through all of this rapid growth, it’s extraordinarily hard to do both scaling and expanding. And at the same time, for the last 10 years, to do both of those, you need to hire shitloads of people. So, that’s where product management and the chief product officer really came in. And so, what you would see is companies would bring in large product management teams to essentially manage the scale of the organization to achieve two things: scale our existing products so we can get bigger, and expand the product. And so, that’s kind of the job that I have when I was at Google, where we were trying new products, because search and ads were doing so well. And when I was at Facebook, I was trying to scale feed, but then expand into things like short-form video, which is where Reels came from. And when I was at Credit Karma, we were a credit score company, and we wanted to be the money button on the phone. So, you had to build a team to essentially achieve all those. And then finally, at the very, very end, you get to big tech, the late stage, and you have to sort of start over again, because now you have so much success, whether it was Twitter, whether it’s Facebook, or whatever these companies are, your job is to sort of combat innovator’s dilemma. You need to go create something new. You need to go do zero to one, when there’s so many reasons not to do it, when you’re have small, you know, small businesses don’t compare to the large, huge businesses that exist. Okay. So, these four phases require totally different types of product managers, but they’re all product management in general. So, I’m going to pause for a second to see if this resonate. This sort of helps people understand why this function exists, and then we’ll talk a little bit about what we’re seeing with AI and how it might be impacting all of these functions. But, pause for a second. Questions on that around the sort of phases of product management. So, the question Thank you for the question. The question was that I worked on Hangouts, and Hangouts essentially didn’t get off the ground. It was a huge priority and a huge initiative from the company. Just for those of you that may not remember. So, this is before WhatsApp was acquired by Meta. Hangouts was essentially a combined effort of taking what existed in Gmail and Android and all the communication products that exist on the device and trying to build one single app, right? So, single app would be it would both text, it would do voice, and it would have video calling all in one. And it was built on a brand new stack. So, the question that was asked was, what did it teach you about founding in the sense that that company was incapable of delivering something long-term? I think that it’s it’s sort of an opposite problem of founding in some ways. I think it’s hard for large or well, maybe there’s two things. One is that I think that Google Hangouts was a problem that that users did not have, but the inside the building company had. Meaning like, when you looked at Hangouts, not a lot of you in this room are sitting there and saying, “Man, do I wish I had one app on my phone that I could use for every person I want to communicate with, whether it’s a business, an individual, whether it’s voice, whether it’s text, whether it’s video, whether it’s group?” I bet you all of you in a given day spend time in Zoom, spend time in iMessage, spend time perhaps in WhatsApp, spend time on your phone making there’s some people who haven’t done that in a long time, but that still happens. You get spam calls. Like, those are all different apps. And it turns out that our belief was we have like seven different code bases in seven different products with seven different registrations and identities. It would make sense if this was all consolidated. Well, turns out customers didn’t just didn’t care. So, maybe my first point is sometimes inside the building drama and trauma and challenge doesn’t translate to outside the building usage. And so, what WhatsApp did is WhatsApp essentially had an extraordinarily well-executed text-only play. And their focus was just to make that work in India and make that work across all rural regions and make it so that it was the most reliable text message product in the world. And it turned out that once they got the network, it was possible to layer on things like voice, things like video. But, it turns out that in and of itself, if you’re using video through FaceTime and WhatsApp your messaging, that’s still a fine usage. And so, in many ways, solving the actual customer problem versus conflating what’s outside versus inside the building, I think is probably the first thing. And the second thing is, you need to kind of stick with it. And I think large companies have trouble sticking with things that don’t look like they’re winning from day one. And maybe the third thing I would say, and this is something that Google did teach me, is that the best products of Google always start out looking very poor. They don’t look good, they don’t work well. If you ever used the Android 1 phone, it looked like a doorstop. It was freaking horrible. Turns out, what they realized is it doesn’t matter how you start, it’s how fast you improve it. And this will definitely come up with AI. It’s the speed of iteration. Their innovation with Chrome, when they delivered Chrome and they beat Firefox, which was the incumbent and eventually Internet Explorer, it was because their greatest innovation was they shipped every 6 weeks, while Firefox shipped every quarter and Internet Explorer shipped every year. Android shipped every quarter, while iOS shipped every year. It turned out that they built an organization based on iteration speed. And the faster you can improve and hit the objective, the better your product is. That’s something that I think startups have a huge advantage of. So, my note was solve a real customer problem, not one you imagine. Iterate very, very quickly and recognize that large incumbents need to see success much quicker than a small startup. Those are the three lessons I take. So, the question is around forward deploys engineers and perhaps how it juxtaposes against product management and where it might end up changing with with AI. So, I think First I’ll I’ll define what I understand about forward deployed engineers, and Mikey probably knows better than me. But,

[snorts] a forward deployed engineer is essentially this new kind of style of engineering who is technical, and yet they go into solve an actual customer’s problem with the product, and then from that they pull expertise, standards, learnings into the core product. And I think that there’s an insightful question here, which is like, “Well, that sounds on the surface a lot like what product managers do.” Product managers spend a lot of time trying to understand like, “Hey, what the heck is going on with customer use case? And then how do I turn that into a core product that many customers can use?” So, I think that the concept of actually going into the customer and delivering things is absolutely has been very beneficial to certain, you know, somewhat complex products like the Palantirs of the world, where there’s perhaps fewer enterprises, but very, very deep, complex enterprises. Mikey can speak to that at General Motors. But, I think that in the world of AI, what we’re surprised to see is how effective AI is to be able to understand nuance and detail on what’s happening at the customer level. You know, so if you’re a product person today, the way product management has now shifted, and we’ll get into a little bit of this here in a second. But, you know, you oftentimes have agents that in the morning give you a summary report of every single customer use case that has been presented in a chat session with your customer service reps. You have a summary of every sales call that took place in the past week. Okay? In the past, like, if I was to come a year ago and have this conversation, that would sound like science fiction. What you’re telling me that every day I can wake up, and whether I have two sales people or 100 sales people, whether I have 50 people that have filled out the survey on the website, whether I have 1,000 people that have complained about this feature or this product, I can get a clear summary. Not only can I get a clear summary, I can see that in prioritized order. I can see a prioritization order based on how much money that might generate for my business, how complicated this might be to implement, how inconsistent this is from the system that we are trying to build or the brand that we’re trying to create. And I can, based on that, have judgment. So, what I’m saying is that a forward deploy engineer is extremely helpful to pull out that insight. But, the reality is now we’re able to even move a step beyond that because there’s so many signals that contribute to what should we build and why should we build it. Does that make sense? That’s a good question. Do you have thoughts on that? Um well, now I’m just going to say I was thinking back in the day, a forward deployed engineer was really a services group, like professional services. So, I think Palantir has done a brilliant job of rebranding that role. But, I always saw that role really close to product management. And a lot of times at the beginning of that company, that was our product management. That’s right. Because they’re so close to the customer. Yeah. Right? So, let’s get into the AI the transition. So, you you kind of hinted at that. Um why don’t you mention about Skip first so you know that people know where you’re getting this data from? Yeah. Yeah. So, um so, as I mentioned, you know, I So, I I appreciate the questions on some of my operating experiences. So, after I left Meta, you know, I I liked thinking through You know, basically what’s going to happen is the rough the rough tenure of people that tend to work tend to be about 40 to 50 years. Right? And and that that number theoretically might grow. So, when you are 25 years old, you’re probably not going to retire at 65 cuz, unless I’m mistaken, no one in this room is going to physically labor in their jobs. They’re going to sit at a desk, and though that does have, you know, issues, it’s not going to break your body down. So, you could choose to work for 50 years. The average number of years that people typically work in a tech company tends to be about 2 to 3 years, which is a shocking small number. Most people think that they’ll work maybe 5, 8, 10, 12 years. Historically, and, you know, looking at my career and Mikey’s career, we basically spend, you know, between 2 to 4 years in most of our endeavors, including the companies that we founded. So, if you do the math, if you’re going to work for 50 years, and you’re going to, you know, on average your jobs are going to be between 2 and 3 years, math tells me that you’re going to have between 15 and 18 jobs. Okay? 15 and 18 jobs means that your career is not like periods in a hockey game, it’s like chapters in a book. So, [snorts] what I’ve realized is that the most important thing that you need to think about is how do you get the maximum value out of those 15 jobs, and how does each chapter of the book build on itself. The reason why I called my property The Skip is that I think that the best career advice is to think about the chapter after the one you’re thinking about now. So, it’s less about if all of you are thinking about, “Boy, what’s my first job going to be out of college?” My ask would be what’s your second job going to be out of college, and how do you make sure your first job sets you up to get the maximum amount of opportunity in your second job. So, I think so highly about this career calculus because, you know, the vast majority of people I talk to do a fairly poor job of managing their careers, and that is very very expensive. I mean, if you go go and have conversations with people that are that are adults, very very few of them will say that I was very intentional about the career decisions that worked out, and many of them will have five, six, seven of these jobs to be very suboptimal. So, it is my opinion that one of the most important things we need to work on is to get you to get the right jobs in the right sequence of jobs to maximize your career, maximize your impact, maximize your earning, maximize your happiness. So, so what Skip was designed to do was almost be like a talent agency for product people. And not necessarily product managers, you know, we have 12 in my group are actually founding I think product builders is kind of the direction that we’re going in, but my belief is that the top people that exist in our industry should be represented much like Hollywood is represented, much like athletes are represented, and in some ways that will get people to make better decisions in this very important endeavor. So, to build a talent agency will probably require about 30 years worth of work cuz that’s not the way our industry is it constituted today. And so, when I was about 52, I said I want to work until about 82, so I spent a 30-year career my last term was to work on this property, which includes some content so you can go to skip.show and you get some of my Substack and some of the content that I publish around careers, and it’s mostly around product leadership because that’s the area that I spend a lot of time with. We have about 125 heads of product for most of the biggest companies out there from Anthropic and OpenAI all the way to Meta and others. So, our goal is to sort of take a community of the top folks, not only get them to connect with each other and advance their career, but then build a set of properties, in this case the thing that we called Skip Coach, which helps everyone trying to advance in the sort of tech industry to get the latest learnings and the findings. And, you know, AI has had a huge impact on everything that we do in terms of building companies and building products are changing. How do you stay current? Well, that’s a lot of what our mission is is to help people understand what’s actually happening versus what’s viral on Twitter, which you know, is accurate in some cases but often times is extreme. So, anyway, that’s the the nature of what Skip is, and feel free to check it out. So, with that group, what are the trends that you’re seeing today with the impact of AI? Yeah, so I think that maybe a few things. I think that Well, I mean, maybe I’ll ask this question by show of hands and then I’ll answer mine is like, how many of you are anxious about getting a job or you know, as you leave college and as you graduate? How much I’m just trying to get an anxiety meter right now. Yeah, so basically the entire audience. That is very much in contrast I would say to when I graduated. I don’t think anyone was We weren’t We weren’t as smart as you folks are, but we definitely were not anxious per se. And I think that how maybe I’ll ask the second question is, how many of you are having a lot of fun building things using AI? Okay, same group. Okay. So, this is essentially the exact show of hands that I have with all of the executives I work with. If I asked these two questions two years ago, the anxiety in the room was very low, 20, 30% maybe two years ago is a little bit three years ago. Before we started to see the mass layoffs when interest rates were zero percent, it was like freaking great to be in the industry. There you know, every person even if they were, you know, average skilled would have six job offers and and and there was low anxiety. However, everyone disliked their jobs. I could not find anyone three years ago that literally loved their roles. And the reason why is it was all filled with responsibility without authority. Product in general was essentially a movement of information. No matter how big or small the company was, your job was to package information for some other decider. And that is a horrid job if you are a I mean, it being a bureaucrat sucks if you’re a builder. And the vast majority of product people get into product cuz they like building stuff. And then very quickly they realize like, hey, once you know how to build stuff, you ought to organize others that build stuff, and that’s when things kind of go dark. So, what I’m noticing the number one thing I’m noticing is there is more joy for the leaders and people that are in tech than ever before because they don’t have to depend on an engineer, on a designer, on a founder, on their boss in order to get something done. They can all build. And there’s nothing more empowering than being able to whip out Claude Code and build something, or more specifically to obsolete yourself from some status report that you hate having to file. If any of you have done internships and all that, the concept of a status report and writing I mean, it just feels mind-numbing. But if your job is mostly moving information, and now for the first time you’re like, let me get this straight. All the parts of my job that I dislike and hate, I can essentially obsolete myself, engineer myself out of. And then the parts that I love, judgment, decisioning, being courageous, testing things in the wild, talking to customers, working with engineers on a really hard problem, partnering with another company on expanding the pie, those are the parts of my job that exist, that is amazing. So, the first thing I would just say is the industry that you enter into if you are joining tech is more interesting and more fun than in any other time that I’ve ever experienced. And so, it is going to be an incredibly interesting job. The second thing is everybody [clears throat] at leadership is anxious. If you’re a big tech, you’re looking at somewhere between 30 and 70% layoffs this calendar year. It is rough. But you’re also looking at skyrocketing salaries and massive hiring, which I’m like, how are these two things possible to exist in the same sentence, but it does. Because the idea of someone coming in and being a movement of information, that is a dinosaur. I can hire an AI to do that. But I need a lot more people that have a lot more judgment, and they have to be paid a lot more money because we can build so much more. We just need to know is it the right thing to build? Is it working? And does it fit into our system design? And so, we have the most unusual time period that we’ve ever seen. One side is we have an amazing opportunity to build more. We have a lot more of an opportunity to be hands-on. Companies are a lot denser, meaning that there’s not 12 layers between yourself and say the CEO, and so there’s a lot more connection, there’s a lot more camaraderie, but the pace is extraordinary. Everyone in my group is working twice as hard as they ever have worked in the past, and they’re building, and they’re having a ton of fun. So, it is the most unusual time, and frankly I think the the part that’s most difficult is not represented in this room today. It’s the middle manager who was an okay builder, but during zero interest rates were promoted into like, you can talk, why don’t you manage other people? You don’t really have much of an opinion on what we should build, but you have a lot of opinion on how to move information. These are the people that, you know, Mike referred to at Twitter and others. There are a lot of people that were moving information. They then see the Claude Codes of the work. They have kids, they have, you know, aging parents, they are in their mid-30s. They’re sitting there like, I don’t have time to spend reinventing myself. Those are the people that are going to get laid off, those are the people that are very difficult to find new roles, while folks like yourself who like start their journey living in these AI tools with opinion, perhaps experiencing founding and product development from the beginning, those people are extremely well positioned. And a big change that’s happening right now is when I see high-quality employers like the Anthropics, the OpenAIs, and others, when they interview, they don’t actually care what brand of company you’ve been at. They want to know how modern you are in how you think and how you use your tools. They can tell when people are learning the tools at the same time that they’re interviewing. They can tell when people are like, look, I I’m here cuz I want to manage. It’s like, well, there’s no more management. It’s all about building, it’s all about being hands-on, and the folks that are here are actually in the better position. So, I actually think that, you know, if I was to predict, the room that is the most anxious doesn’t exist here. The room that’s most anxious of the middle managers that I think are eight to 15 years into career. The executives are the one that are driving a lot of the change, and then the folks that are starting out are getting essentially dislodging what we see in in historics. I think that’s such an interesting change. I mean, one of the things that, you know, I think is so important for everyone in their careers is to stay curious. Because if you’re curious, you will stay modern. And I think it’s these folks, to your point, that are not that will go and they won’t find another they won’t be able to find another job. That’s right. And that’s why I think that people in this room have an edge up. I mean, to get into a school of this caliber and then to stay current is kind of a requirement. I think that being in a class like this and trying to understand what’s the latest. But I think you have to translate that into being hands-on and being gritty. And I mean, that’s that’s that’s literally the skill that matters. It’s being current as well as, you know, just having that opinion on what needs to be built and why you want to build it and then being able to quickly validate it. I mean, that’s kind of the founder skill that’s essentially carrying across all these organizations. Let’s go to a question. Probably the most common question we hear nowadays and so it’s very valid. Yeah, I’ll repeat it. So, the question is, you know, in light of layoffs like we hear from Salesforce and from Block. I mean, obviously Snap did about 10% yesterday. You know, what’s the future of a function like product management when many of them are being laid off? You know, it seems like that era perhaps is over and you know, is is that you know, I think the implication is is that a function to avoid especially when engineers are sort of empowered to do everything. My my sense is that I think that this is where the data doesn’t actually match the the historic. So, right now there are more open product management roles than right now in industry than in ever before in history. Which is completely unobvious to folks. But getting hired is actually the number one like it’s it’s there’s there’s there’s more positions that are available. Salaries for the top 1% of product people have more than doubled in the last 18 months. So, it is there are four four contracts that I have been part of helping negotiate that crossed eight figures annual in terms of compensation for product leaders. So, the idea that companies will no longer need product, I have not found many successful companies that are actually suggesting that. I think that what is actually happening is most companies exploded the number of PMs in the last five years particularly during COVID. What ended up happening is there was free money. So, it was very easy to expand the business and there was a connection between if I want to expand business, I need people that can help organize that team and that is the title of product managers. So, those people came in to essentially not build but to organize and there was this conflation. I mean, there’s sort of two two words in the term product and manager and the manager got bold-faced. And so, if you look to most companies that are doing layoffs, what they’re essentially doing across the board is they’re not just targeting product but product does get hit. They’re essentially pulling themselves back to where they were five years back. And I think a lot of it is because in the last five years they’ve expanded their staff and they haven’t gotten a lot for it. And so, I think that that’s somewhat different than AI is taking their jobs. But I would say that they aren’t going to hire that type of PM anymore because they get a much better result from AI presenting the information. But they need a different class of skill, a product builder skill which is a little bit broader than just an information mover. And then we’re seeing designers who stand up in an organization and they say, well, if the idea is for me to have an opinion on what we should build, well, that’s kind of me. I mean, designers also subclass into people that build pixels and those people are struggling. And then people that actually decide on what the product should do. Engineers, you can argue everyone says, hey, engineers are essentially, you know, in the best position. Well, I mean, maybe if the models continue to improve the quality of code coming out, it’s hard to stay above that. Yes, you can leverage that and those people will be paid well. But often it’s the engineers that have an opinion on what product should do that are actually So, what we’re seeing is a merger between a different class of role that’s not so siloed as this is a PM and they only do this. This is a designer. This is an engineer. This is a data scientist. We’re seeing a lot more of a merger. But we’re seeing a huge spike because companies can build way more way faster and they desperately need people to decide on what to build. At Meta, the metaverse appears on the outside to be a failure. How did the company let this happen? And in particular, is the culture so yes-man that it has no ability to prevent such a challenge from taking place? Is that a fair characterization of the question? Horizon Worlds was shut down as evidence that the metaverse is essentially a play out. Yeah. Yeah, and I think that I think that you know, I personally can give you my opinion on how that happened. I, you know, and many others were not part of that decision and companies like Meta are quite large and I would say that I have a lot of admiration for Mark and his ability to drive belief and his balance sheet towards a degree of belief. I don’t think that Mark always gets it right and I think that he would argue that he doesn’t get it right either. But I think that Mark’s belief and I think that there’s merit to this is that he wants to essentially be the innovator of the next platform of computing. And I think that Meta as a company was not an innovator on mobile. It was a it leveraged mobile. It leveraged the web. And for Meta to get to the next level as a company, I think it needed to be the innovator of that platform as Apple and Google had historically been the innovator. It was also not the innovator of the cloud which was another big innovation. I believe that Mark felt that in order for the company to get to the next level, he wanted to be the innovator of that platform and believe very strongly that that was the metaverse. But believed he couldn’t iterate his way there. You know, unlike what I described happened at Google where they tested the market with Hangouts and then they pulled back, Mark was essentially like I’ll I’ll spend 10 years trying to get there because I believe that I can drive that next platform. I think that now that we’re what, five years in and we’re not seeing that, I think that there’s an open question as to how much does he continue to invest in his mind and how much does he look at the next platform? The next platform we could argue and the one that is kind of coming before the metaverse is AI. And so, what you see is Mark’s like, well, I want to be a leader in that next platform. I’m not in a position to perhaps drive that for the first, but I am in a position to have a strong play. So, he’s again putting a ton of his time, energy and investment into that. And again, I have tremendous admiration for that. Now, why does a company not have, you know, a ability to push back on that? I think that Mark is very founder-led and his the company is run because of the area and direction that he thinks is the correct way. That was not the culture I saw at Google. Google as example, a lot of the discussion internally was you have to first solve the inside the building problem. Make sure everyone’s aligned and then get things out. But I think at Apple, I think Mark is very different. Mike can make this point and I think at Apple and and to some extent Meta run differently. And I think that to some extent, there’s not a right or a wrong version of this. But I think to do big innovation, you can’t do it by consensus. And so, what Mark essentially did is he said, I need to do a big unobvious innovation that is essentially going to take a dramatic amount of capital. I’m going to deliver on that and if it doesn’t work, I’ll go find the next one which is kind of how it’s played out. And I think Apple probably runs closer to that. But I think Google doesn’t do that. They’re much more of a reactive organization. There’s also this term sunk cost fallacy Mhm. where and especially in big companies, but this can happen in the startup where you’ve invested the five years and you kind of have to write you rationalize in your mind, well, I have to keep going cuz I put five years into it. Where the better answer would have been just to kill it. Apple tends to do a really good job of killing things, but not always. The car, when I was at Apple, I think it was obvious like that project was never going to happen. And we kept throwing billions of dollars at it and everyone outside of the group was like, okay, we can’t hire two people, but they can hire a thousand. And it that took too long. I think that’s an example of saying, hey, we can’t do this. I I think that it’s also what what you don’t realize until you work at these larger companies is when your business is like putting out, you know, tens to hundreds of billions of dollars per quarter, if you come up with a new business that makes a billion dollars. Like if you if any of you invented a business that made a billion dollars, that would be a I mean, I mean, a life-changing moment and a career-making moment and an an amazing impossible act, right? To make an extra billion dollars at a company like Meta, it was like a four-line change into a ranking algorithm. You know, that the amount of scale that these companies have and are so large that for them to be able to say, “Well, how do I continue to grow 20, 30, 40% in a new and adjacent field?” You need to build a car. You need to step forward. You need something that doesn’t And when it And those things look terrible to begin with, see the Android phone from a company that did search and ads. I mean, those things look terrible, but sometimes, see Waymo, they work. But for 14 years, I don’t think they shipped Waymo in a way that was like consumable. Waymo was like the metaverse for the first 5 years, but all of you love driving in Waymos, my suspicion is. And maybe in 10 years, maybe maybe we’ll all love being in the metaverse. I have no idea. I don’t know if I want to be in that world, but that’s the that’s the the decision that some of these companies make, but largely because of the factor of scale. And frankly, it’s the advantage that startups have because they can go play in areas that seem way too small until they become big. What part of the modern product management do we think is the most I mean, obviously it depends a little bit on what we describe as modern, but I I think that to to be to characterize that, I would say that Well, there’s probably two answers to this question. I think one is there’s a lot of movement and packaging of information that I think 80% of product managers do. I think most of that is I think that the idea that um And and this is part of the reason why I think more and more companies are going to build agents that essentially go get all the data from the sources, kill everything in between, and essentially present it in a way that the right people can make decisions. So, I think the movement of information exists. I think that to be a little bit more salacious, cuz I think that’s kind of the nature of the question, is I think that a lot of companies build products using theatrics. I think that there is um lots of theatrics in every organization where companies go into these large formal meetings, and they have a dog and pony show where there’s a slide deck that’s been created, and that slide deck essentially was written by a bunch of VPs, but then when you go talk to the VPs, VPs are like, “Well, they came from my teams. Those teams are a bunch of directors. Those directors spent up all night basically pulling these slides together.” Then you go down to that level, and then they’re like, “It all came down to some experiment that some, you know, third-year person out of school ran.” And then a ton of VPs are essentially spending all their time working on it. These theatrics, these packaging of information, this like, “Hey, this is the greatest thing ever.” While in the end of the day, the IC4, who’s at the bottom of the organization, who came up with this experiment, doesn’t even show up in the room. That’s kind of how software gets built these days. And um I think the gig’s up. I think it’s part of the reason why I think people are having more fun is that for the first time, you know, we used to talk about uh here’s a really good example. Um a bunch of you, if you were to enter industry 5 years ago, within 3 years, 80% of your day would be spent in Zoom calls or meetings. Um almost all product people today spend the vast majority of their time in back-to-back meetings. And you know, and and they are always saying no to more meetings. You know, my job was to basically spend time reading big documents at Meta or being in back-to-back meetings. Um there’s a growing trend in industry right now, which is like no meetings at all. You know, trying to get companies to place where we gather for half a day a week. Um this trend is related to my note around theatrics of you know, look, we don’t need to have so many meetings to discuss things that are future plans, etc., when the AIs can actually explain what we’re doing much much more better. They can get it at the ground truth, and they can present the information. So, uh so it’s pretty optimistic direction because it’s a lot more fun of a function to be in. That’s right. Right. So, there’s a lot of communities that are out there. This is the question, and those communities that are out there are hard to differentiate. They’re they are supposedly uh run by operators and give advice, but as a community builder, in my case with Skip, how am I thinking about being different? Um I mean, I think that there’s a couple of different questions to that. I think the answers to that. I think one is that uh most of my community uh you know, I essentially have two, but the primary community I focus on are my 125 product leaders. Uh there’s an infinite waitlist to get into that group. It’s something that I fund myself. It’s um it’s really operators who are at the top of their game that are looking to help and benefit from each other. Um highly curated, not designed to scale, not designed to monetize. Um I do that because the people that need community the most in organizations have the least amount of time to spend. So, I need to build a property that is really valuable, but doesn’t take a ton of time, and is only filled with other people that are super valuable. The vast majority of communities that are out there are designed to either monetize and as such scale. And when you monetize and scale, you’re looking for people that are learning the craft, not practicing the craft. And so, almost all communities that exist right now are for people that are maybe not at the top of their game, that are looking to understand and connect. And those are great, but not a single person in my executive community is present in those other groups. And so, I’m always interested in what conversations are really successful people looking to have if they can’t have anywhere else, let’s have them in my area, but it comes with I can’t scale, I can’t monetize. All the other communities, I think, are interesting as social instruments and as ways to get started in the industry. Um frankly, when you see the advances happening in AI, I think that a lot of the advice that you’ll see in those communities are going to be subpar to what you’ll get from ChatGPT. Just to be very direct. I think that And that goes with almost all coaching. That goes with almost all therapy. I think that the vast majority of coaching that’s out there are from operators that are not particularly successful, and coaching seems like a more interesting and fun way to spend their time. Uh and I think ChatGPT is going to basically kill that off. So, I think we’ll see very different communities going forward, but um but I’m particularly negative on large-base communities in tech. Plus one on the comment about coaching. I think I I don’t think I’ve ever I’ve seen maybe one good coach in my entire career. And it’s usually people who are not successful going into coaching, which is like the irony. Anyway, question. What are the most important things that a college student should focus on for learning? Um through the lens of getting a tech job might be the way I might answer the question. Um versus, you know, what’s the right way for you to become a holistic human? I mean, there’s a lot of reasons for you to be at college, and it has uh I would say the university probably uh probably doesn’t even rank in the top three. This may be a controversial statement. Uh getting a job, that’s not the reason why This is not a trade school. Um this is the reason why in computer science they teach theory. Uh computer science theory is not something that I used a lot of in industry, but it was very important. That’s why we don’t teach computer programming at the time. Uh this is not a trade school. Uh however, if the question is phrased as uh you know, if I want to get a great job, what do I need to spend my time learning how to do? I mean, I think that there’s like maybe two or three things. One is you have to differentiate yourself from all of these sort of people that are in their first 10 years in how current and modern you are when it comes to building things. You find yourself in a situation where brand is at an all-time low. Um a person that’s worked at Google for 6 years might be far dramatically less relevant than the people that are in this room. Because when you’re at Google, you’re in back-to-back meetings all day long, and you’ve basically worked on one stack, which is the Google stack, and it works a certain way. You know, while everyone in here has probably got a Max Cloud Code account. You know, or maybe the university provides that, or maybe Mike is kind enough to do that. Um I think that we’re in a very unusual time when everybody that’s hiring wants the most modern people to work in their companies. So, how How you get modern is a foundational part of the answer to the question. You have to be using the tools, you have to have an opinion, you have to be pushing hard. So, that’s number one. Number two is um it’s the connect It’s what Mike started the class with. I mean, it’s the connections that matter. I think that if I uh was to think back, and this is sort of a weird uh realization I made many years after I graduated is I you know, I wasn’t a particularly social kid when I was here. I was I knew I wanted to do computer science when I was a freshman, which was odd because most people decided in their sophomore engineer year. And I just didn’t meet a lot of people when I was an undergrad. I mean, I co-termed, and I did this what they call the CS 198 program, which may be still around, the 106 section leader thing. And um and then when I graduated I started working in startups. And like even today, I stay in touch with 25 people that are undergrad classmates because we were here at Stanford in the Bay Area. It was a very big pull for tech, and I kept staying connected with those people, and those people brought me a ton of luck and a ton of opportunity. Those passive relationships can be very very valuable. Because and both directions, you can help each other, you can work for each other, you can advise each other, you can pick your pick yourselves up. I mean Mike and I are deeply close. We’ve been doing the founding thing for almost two decades. So I would say the second thing besides being current, which by the way is probably not something you’re getting in your classes, it’s very much this notion around networking and being connected to folks. I think that the third thing and maybe the skill maybe the be more direct on the answer to the question, is you have to have a systems programming mindset. I was a systems concentration as a master student. Hopefully that still exists today. I know it’s weird when you know at the time I we learned you know assembly language and graphics and compilers and operating systems. Um What you’re moving into a world is all like you can essentially anything you want to build you’ll be able to express building it to a set of instruments. Now the question is does it fit and should you build it and how do you know if it’s working becomes the entire problem set. In the past it was like well how do you construct it? Now it’s like well let’s assume that it can be constructed should you construct it? Well the mindset you need to have is well you have to sort of understand what is the system you’re building and how does it evolve? And you know the concentration that I and many others received was like every few years the platforms evolved. Assembly language became like compiled programming languages became scripting languages now is prompted languages. So every few years you see the stacks get smarter. But if you understand how these stacks work and how you can put things on top, how you can eventually obsolete, how you can work at the higher levels, that engineering abstraction, which is not necessarily a computer science requirement, it’s really an engineering skill, is the entire ballgame going forward. Because when knowledge is a service and you can essentially build anything by expression, it all comes down to like do you think it’s a good idea to build it? You know McDonald’s can’t be selling you know GPUs anytime soon. That’s a bad system design. My my point is you have to have a sense of where the company, where your product, what is the brand expression. You need to be able to understand the systems of it all and that’s to me the most important skill. Right. Yeah, so if I had a time machine to go back to my freshman year at Stanford, what would I have done differently? Um I mean that has a lot to do with like just who I was at the time. I think that I would I mean just to be very candid, I would have been I should have been a lot less stressed. Um I was like from the moment I got here I was stressed about grades. It’s like no one really gives a about your grades except for you. I mean I don’t think there’s a single employer I’ve ever met that’s ever actually cared about your grades. But in order to get into this place you need to obsess over it. So what I mean is I know that may not have been exactly the nature of the question but like I was like stressed on things that I shouldn’t have been stressed about. And then I was not stressed about things that I should have been stressed about. So I think grades are something that were not very meaningful. I think um as I sort of alluded to in the last question, I desperately wish that I made more friends. I I desperately I didn’t drink when I was in college. I I really just didn’t didn’t want to. I found that to exclude me from a lot of the social connections. Not not everyone that was dry didn’t you know kind of intermingle with folks. But I was like look if people are going to drink I don’t want to be there. That was a big scrub. I should have not drank and I should have been more social. I should have met more people. I should have um listened more to my classmates cuz they were all going to be amazing wonderful people. My closest friends, some of them are still like my sophomore college roommate, who by the way I got randomly matched with and um and we talk about all kinds of interesting things in our 50s and we didn’t when we were in our you know late teens. I guess the point I would say is that none of the the things that I learned at Stanford I used the day after I graduated in any way shape or form. The grades didn’t matter. It wasn’t like because I figured out something in compilers that turned into some great innovation at some startup that I start None of that mattered. What really mattered was and you know the teaching that was here again I don’t I haven’t been here in a long time so you know you tell me but I mean most of the teachers that I had in my first three years were graduate students from the professors who were too busy doing research. And so I don’t know if that’s changed at all but the the teachers either had books that they had published and they wanted to use this as a forum for getting feedback on the books. The teaching was not particularly great. The assignments were incredibly difficult often built like for the class at the seat of the time. And yet the students that were in the course were so good you had to learn how to take an unstructured problem and work with your peers to understand even what the hell was that was being asked let alone how to solve it and use the tools. That skill turned out to be the most important skill. It was you know when you when in work you don’t have any structure. You get you get no feedback. You’re moving into a world where managers are going to be a dirty word. Nobody’s going to want to be a manager anymore. And so now you’re not going to get any feedback. You’re not going to get any structure. You’re going to be given an impossible problem. You’re going to be told well the AI’s will figure it out and if they don’t if you can’t basically judge it then you we’re going to replace the you with an AI too. So like there’s a lot of like unstructured stuff that a very weak teaching crew from like my computer science teachers were world class I think worse than Foothill is my suspicion. Which you know I guess because I’m out here I don’t really plan on coming back that you know I can say. But boy the fact that I learned how to succeed in that unstructured environment was massively career additive. And between the people the fact that we worked nonstop, which by the way is an absolute requirement to succeed, is just an like a essentially an undying need to keep building 24/7. Even now, I mean right now I have like three agents running trying to build something and I’m about ready to launch it as soon as I get back home. Like there’s a constant push that I learned here but it had nothing to do with my grades, nothing to do with the coursework. It was all complete and it was not at all obvious for the six years that I was here. I don’t know if I answered this question. It’s great. Yeah so the question is like hey we’re seeing a lot of very seasoned very accomplished people take rather generic perhaps individual contributor roles at high quality companies. And the question is is that trend continuing? And then moreover are companies rejecting hierarchy in favor of flatter organizations. You know And we spoke a little bit about this earlier. I think that the answer is very much yes. I think that the answer to the first part which is why would a Workday or why would an Instagram founder take a role that is a rank and file position at a company like Entropic? I think that that actually isn’t as unprecedented historically as one would think. There’s a lot of cases where people identified the rocket ship and conventional career advice is if you see the rocket ship just find a seat, right? Cream rises to the top. You much rather be on the rocket ship. Growth hides a lot of problems. And so the goal is you get on there if you’re good you’ll see kind of that growth within the company. You’re better off just finding a way onto the rocket ship than saying well because I’m not senior enough, I’m not far enough in the front of the rocket ship to actually take the job, I’m going to take something that’s not as ambitious. You know three five years from now that’s not as good especially when you think about well does this set me up my next job? You obviously would rather be on the most current fastest growing company. So that’s that I think is partly what’s happening. I think the second thing is to your point I think managers just broadly speaking, you know if they’re not hands-on they’re screwed. I think that has you know in many ways this is why engineers like Mike have always been a little frustrated with product managers who perhaps are non-technical. They aren’t close to the detail. They come in and tell his team what to do. And he looks at that and he’s like but why? I our opinions are so much more grounded than yours. Just because you hold the title this is like a function. So that’s historically been a big issue. Some companies have been allergic, other companies have embraced it. All of those I think are in deep trouble. I think what’s actually happening is managers that are coming in often start as individual contributors, learn the company, learn the product, learn the user base, and then become organizers and managers. And that transition is taking place and it’s been pretty successful. As I noted, there’s more hiring going on in product management than ever before. So, the way to juxtapose this is that the the mix shift is changing. Organizations are getting flatter because, you know, you can be at the top you can put an agent that goes into every meeting that takes place and you can weigh in on the decision even at the leadership level, which means you don’t need the hierarchy of folks that are essentially moving, but you’re going to have a much wider organization, so you’re kind of squishing it, removing the people that don’t fit this mode, and then hiring on a much broader scale. That’s why it’s pretty exciting for those that are hands-on. And the good news is none of you start your careers as managers, so you’re in the best position. Think about the folks that are 8 to 10 years with a young family that are only known management as their career kind of ticket. Those are the ones that I think are in much deeper trouble. How do you know when it’s the right time to transition out of the company you’re in? And, you know, how perhaps maybe that’s changed in the future? Did I get that Did I Did I get this right? Is that the the nature of the question? Thank you. Um well, I think that I’ve I believe the answer back then and today remains the same. I think that you always want and maybe goes a little bit back to the rocket ship point, but you always want the company and the environment that’s around you to be growing slightly faster than yourself. I mean, it’s a lot of the reason why you folks joined, you know, and decided to come to Stanford. I mean, you’re wanting something that’s bigger than yourself and that’s going to pull you forward. You know, the the folks that are essentially like I want to be the smartest person in the room are the ones that are in the deepest amount of trouble. Um I think, you know, I hate to break it to you, but that there’s there’s a lot of smart people in this room right now. And so, the challenge that you face if you’re in a company, if you’re in a project, if you’re in a team, and you’re essentially at the top of your game, and you’re the one who’s pushing further, and everyone is kind of pulling behind you, at some point your learning is going to be stymied by the environment because you’re not as an organization growing quick enough. So, the goal is to always be in a place where you are not pulling forward as fast as what the environment is. You’re constantly being asked to move faster, try new things, etc. So, growth is the number one thing that all of you should think about when you enter the workforce. It’s what’s the growth of the environment I either choose or if you’re going to found, is the company I’m founding growing and and moving me forward and pulling me forward? If that is actually the case, you’re going to be fine long term. But if you’re not being pulled forward and perhaps at an alarmingly so pace, see the anthropic case, then I think that it is time to look to understand are you being held back because of your skill, because of how you’re perceived, or because you’re being less courageous? And And that’s what really helps you go forward. One thing I’d add, too, is I think when you get into a job and you get comfortable, that’s when you got to go. Right. Because that means you’re not learning. That’s right. All right. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. You’re great. Thank you, everyone.