Monetizing passions, scaling marketplaces, and stories from a creator economy vet | Camille Hearst

Camille Hearst is Head of Fan Monetization at Spotify, where she finds new ways for fans to connect and for artists to monetize. Previously she was Head of Product for Creators at Patreon, Product Marketing Manager at YouTube, the second Product Manager at iTunes, and VP of Product at Hailo. She also co-founded a company called Kit, which was acquired by Patreon in 2018. In today’s podcast, we discuss: • Advice on building a successful career as a creator • Her take on the future of the creator economy • The best and worst parts of building products for music artists • What Apple product teams do differently • The story of meeting Steve Jobs • Advice for founders going through acquisitions — Brought to you by Merge—A single API to add hundreds of integrations into your app: https://merge.dev/sponsorships/lennys-podcast?utm_campaign=Lennys_Podcast | Coda—Meet the evolution of docs: https://coda.io/lenny | Vanta—Automate compliance. Simplify security: https://vanta.com/lenny Find the full transcript at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/monetizing-passions-scaling-marketplaces Where to find Camille Hearst: • Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/camillionz • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chearst/ Where to find Lenny: • Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com • Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/lennysan • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/ In this episode, we cover: (00:00) Camille’s background (04:24) Camille’s role as Head of Fan Monetization at Spotify (07:40) The best and worst parts of working with artists (14:15) Trends in the content creation world (19:29) Advice on building a successful career as a creator (21:32) The importance of content curators (22:30) Camille’s startup, Kit (24:49) Advice on selling your startup (28:28) The supply side of marketplaces (34:37) How Camille became the second PM at iTunes (35:43) The story of meeting Steve Jobs (43:01) Apple’s style of product management (45:54) Opportunities on the platform side of content creation (48:34) Camille’s early years growing up in a creative tech family (53:45) Favorite frameworks (52:32) Lightning round Referenced: • Adam Fishman on Lenny’s Podcast: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/how-to-build-a-high-performing-growth-team-adam-fishman-patreon-lyft-imperfect-foods/ • The Federal Reserve says Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour boosted the economy. One market research firm estimates she could add $5 billion: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/taylor-swift-eras-tour-boosted-economy-tourism-federal-reserve-how-much-money-made/ • Yelp coins the “Beyoncé bump” for the economic halo created by the pop star’s Renaissance Tour: https://fortune.com/2023/07/19/beyonce-renaissance-tour-economic-impact/ • Lenny Bot: https://www.lennybot.com/ • YouTube streamer faces riot charge after Union Square Park erupts in chaos: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/04/nyregion/union-square-kai-cenat-twitch-giveaway.html • Michelle Phan on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/MICHELLEPHA • Rover: https://www.rover.com/ • Airbnb’s product management shift: the view from product leaders: https://www.mindtheproduct.com/airbnbs-product-management-shift-the-viewpoint-of-product-leaders/# • Hiroki Asai on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hiroki-asai-a44137110/ • The Really Good Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-really-good-podcast/id1697794816 • Nichiren Buddhism: https://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/buddhism/subdivisions/nichiren_1.shtml • What’s Love Got to Do with It on Hulu: https://www.hulu.com/movie/whats-love-got-to-do-with-it-f996a307-ee91-4550-8829-3694f55e0189 • Marty Cagan on Lenny’s Podcast: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/the-nature-of-product-marty-cagan-silicon-valley-product-group/ • Why you should eat the frog first: https://asana.com/resources/eat-the-frog • Draw the owl: https://review.firstround.com/draw-the-owl-and-other-company-values-you-didnt-know-you-should-have • The Three-Body Problem: https://www.amazon.com/Three-Body-Problem-Cixin-Liu/dp/0765382032 • Kindred: https://www.amazon.com/Kindred-Octavia-Butler/dp/0807083690 • A Wrinkle in Time: https://www.amazon.com/Wrinkle-Time-Quintet/dp/0312367546/ • Foundation on AppleTV+: https://tv.apple.com/us/show/foundation/umc.cmc.5983fipzqbicvrve6jdfep4x3 • Battlestar Galactica on SyFy: https://www.syfy.com/battlestar-galactica • Hijack on AppleTV+: https://tv.apple.com/us/show/hijack/umc.cmc.1dg08zn0g3zx52hs8npoj5qe3 • Shadow and Bone on Netflix: https://www.netflix.com/title/80236319 • Afrobeats playlist on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1EQqFPe2ux3rbj • “Calm Down” by Rema on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/37iaWiKMa9YBbEDlw5c3Qh Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected]. Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Though Steve Jobs lore was that if you were in an elevator with him, you better be prepared to talk about what you do at the company. Because he had a habit of getting in the elevator and looking at you and saying, what do you do? What do you do here? And there were also rumors that people had not given him a good answer. That ended up being their last day at Apple.

• 0:23Speaker 00

  So there was someone I who I didn't know personally, but worked in my department before I got there, who got in an elevator and looked up and Steve was approaching him. And so he went to press the button to open the door and accidentally press the one to close the door.

• 0:42Speaker 00

  And it was like doing this. Press, you can't see me if you're listening on podcast, but like frantically pressing the button, trying to open the door, but accidentally pressing the closed door button. And the elevator going to its destination. And apparently he got off and just bolted like right straight up ran down the hallway.

• 1:00Lenny Rachitsky?

  He'll never remember my face.

• 1:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:07Lenny Rachitsky?

  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, my guest is Camille Hurst. Camille is Head of Fan Monetization at Spotify. Before that, she was Head of Product for creators at Patreon. She was Product Marketing Manager at YouTube and the second PM on iTunes. She's also a former founder. She started a company called Kit that she sold to Patreon. And this episode is for anyone who's curious about the creator space, either from the creator side or the platform side, or if you just like to hear a bunch of fun stories from an awesome product leader. We chat about the future of creator platforms, how to be successful as a creator, and also as a new creator platform, the downsides of creator life,

• 1:50Lenny Rachitsky?

  plus frameworks, stories from Steve Jobs, ways to monetize being a creator, and so much more. Enjoy this episode with Camille Hurst after a short word from our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by Merge. Every product manager knows how slow product development can get when developers have to build and maintain integrations with other platforms. Merge's unified API can fully remove this blocker from your roadmap. With one API, your team can add over 180 HR, accounting, ATS, ticketing, CRM, file storage, and marketing automation integrations into your product. You can get your first integration into production in a matter of days and save countless weeks

• 2:32Lenny Rachitsky?

  building custom integrations, letting you get back to building your core product. Merge's integrations speed up the product development process for customers like Ramp, Drata, and many of their fast-growing and established companies, allowing them to test their features at scale without having to worry about a never-ending integrations roadmap. Save your engineers countless hours, hit your growth targets, and expedite your sales cycle by making integration offerings your competitive advantage with Merge. Visit merge.dev/lenny to get started and integrate up to three customers for free. This episode is brought to you by Coda. You've heard me talk about how Coda is the doc that brings it all together and how it can help your team run smoother and be more efficient. I know this firsthand because Coda does that for me.

• 3:17Lenny Rachitsky?

  I use Coda every day to wrangle my newsletter content calendar, my interview notes for podcasts, and to coordinate my sponsors. More recently, I actually wrote a whole post on how Coda's product team operates, and within that post, they shared a dozen templates that they use internally to run their product team, including managing the roadmap, their OKR process, getting internal feedback, and essentially their whole product development process is done within Coda. If your team's work is spread out across different documents and spreadsheets and a stack of workflow tools, that's why you need Coda. Coda puts data in one centralized location regardless of format, eliminating roadblocks that can slow your team down. Coda allows your team to operate on the same information and collaborate in one place.

• 4:01Lenny Rachitsky?

  Take advantage of this special limited time offer just for startups. Sign up today at coda.io/lenny and get $1,000 startup credit on your first statement. That's c-o-d-a dot i-o slash lenny to sign up and get a startup credit of $1,000. Coda.io slash lenny.

• 4:24Lenny Rachitsky?

  Camille, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.

• 4:27Speaker 00

  Thank you so much for having me, Lenny.

• 4:29Lenny Rachitsky?

  I first wanted to just give a big thank you to Adam Fishman for introducing us, who had just so many nice things to say about you. And so I'm really excited to be chatting. I want to start with talking about your current role at Spotify, and I believe your role is Head of Fan Monetization. What does that actually entail and what are you responsible for within Spotify?

• 4:48Speaker 00

  As Head of Fan Monetization, I have a team of folks who are really passionate about figuring out new ways to help artists and fans connect. And also figure out ways to make those connections result in new monetization opportunities for the artists. So one of the things that we all know and we've seen is how passionate fans are about the artists that they love. If you've been following any of the latest bits about the Taylor Swift tour, the Beyonce tour that's been happening this summer, and their effect on local economies, it's been pretty, pretty impressive.

• 5:28Speaker 00

  But one of the things that we also know is it's not just the big, huge superstars who have those kind of rabid and super engaged fanbases. People are really passionate just about supporting the artists that they love in general. And on Spotify, we want to figure out ways we can help that result in more money that goes directly to the artist.

• 5:48Lenny Rachitsky?

  What are some of those ways, just to give people a sense of what might be happening?

• 5:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, so one of the ones that most mature is merch, which is funny to say because most people probably don't realize that you can purchase merch on Spotify. That's one that's been around for a bit of time, and my team's recently been working on making it more prominent, giving artists more ways to offer that merch in the form of like a reward for fans. So things like an exclusive discount or an exclusive design or early access because you're a top listener on Spotify. Really thinking about thank yous and rewards for your Spotify listenership and fandom. And then other things we've been looking at have been listening parties.

• 6:31Speaker 00

  We ran a few of those over the past year. I think I talked about it actually on a, on a Spotify event a few years ago. We were like running, sorry, it wasn't a few years ago, it was last year. But listening parties is another way. And then we've got some new ideas we're exploring.

• 6:50Lenny Rachitsky?

  I've heard people do listening parties with this podcast, actually, and I'm, I hope that you roll that out to podcasts too, because that would be very cool.

• 6:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, we have all kinds of ideas of really interesting ways we can bring groups of people together and get the monetization going, so.

• 7:08Lenny Rachitsky?

  All right, mysterious but exciting. Speaking of Taylor Swift, I was watching a TikTok the other day and they showed a video of someone inside the concert, showing the whole concert, and then they pan to the parking lot. And there's just like tens of thousands of people just standing around in the parking lot, listening to the the second order music out at the stadium. And I wonder how, how can you monetize that? There's an opportunity.

• 7:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think they often have the merch trucks in those parking lots, so.

• 7:38Lenny Rachitsky?

  Probably unofficial merch.

• 7:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:40Lenny Rachitsky?

  So you work with artists and I actually wanted to ask this question. What's the best part about working with artists, musical artists? And what's, what's the worst part?

• 7:48Speaker 00

  I think the best part is working with people who really lean into their creativity and their passion, so much so that they do it for a living. And I think a lot of us have creative pursuits and passions and things we love to do. And like if we made millions of dollars and could retire, like what would you do full time? Usually it's one of these pursuits. But I think it takes an element of bravery, not to mention talent, but you know, you really have to go out on a limb. And so that's just a quality that exists in this group of people. And it's fun to be around and feel that rub off on you and think, oh, maybe I could take the dive one day and I don't know, go do my calligraphy or learn my ukulele and do it full time.

• 8:33Speaker 00

  But that's, that's the best part. And you know, the thing I'm really, I grew up in a musical household. My dad's a drummer, although his joke when we were growing up was. Real musicians have day jobs. Because he had to actually have a job with benefit to support the family and couldn't just be gigging full time. Which actually brings me to the flip side of the question which you asked, like, what is the hardest part? I do think we saw this a lot at Patreon and I think you see it especially with musicians and and artists, this kind of feeling that, you know, you want to give your fans everything that you create and you want to do it for free.

• 9:14Speaker 00

  Because you're so like enamored with this idea that people really love you and want to support you and they're really responding to your creativity and everything that you're making. You don't want to charge them. But what comes with that is, well, how are you going to make a living? Like, to some degree, there has to be a value exchange that happens in order for a creative person to live from their art. And I've found that that's much more pronounced with musicians, kind of this starving artist ethos. Which makes what I'm trying to do actually quite difficult because a lot of the feedback we get is, oh, that's awesome. I want to have a listening party, have everything be free and just have everyone show up and don't sell anything.

• 9:57Speaker 00

  And we're really looking at it as a way to, fans want to support the artists they love. They want to open up their wallets. I mean, you've seen nothing else from a Substack and then Patreons that people are actually really happy to be a patron of the arts and they look at it as like a badge of honor. But musicians in particular, I think, kind of tend to shy away from that, which makes the kind of thing that I'm working on more difficult.

• 10:20Lenny Rachitsky?

  This is a great segue to an area I want to spend time on is kind of the creator economy and creators and artists and things like that. And along these lines, I think, like, I have this issue too. I feel bad charging people, but there's also, I don't think my stuff is worth enough to charge for and why would anyone ever pay anything for it? And so I imagine you see that too, it's just like, no one's going to pay for this. It's crazy.

• 10:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's funny because we live in a very capitalist and like, uh, market dictate the price kind of society, but on an individual level, particularly when the commodity, so to speak, is art. There's so many emotions and feelings involved in that, that it's hard for someone who's the creator to kind of disassociate themselves from it and like, see what the market will bear. Which is why I actually think it- It's great that there's platforms who have stepped in and said, hey, we see an opportunity. Let us insert ourselves in the center, let us aggregate and let us do the hard work of pricing

• 11:20Speaker 00

  and payment and tax and finance and actually create value where it would be really hard for an individual person who's a creator to do all of this work and facilitate that connection. It's almost like the perfect marketplace solution. But again, it's hard because if the supplier doesn't actually make money, in some cases, or shies away from optimizing for making money. And then, you know, there's the creative process, right? Like sometimes you're in a flow mode and you're producing a lot. And then other times you're in a drought spell and it's kind of like these things ebb and flow, which is why I think companies like Patreon and Substack are really cool because

• 12:03Speaker 00

  what they try to do is smooth out that revenue and make it so an artist can actually have a predictable, they're not even an artist, a creator can have a predictable, sustainable paycheck so that they aren't, you know, bouncing around from job to job and like losing the ability to have that burst of creativity because they're worried about their bill.

• 12:22Lenny Rachitsky?

  I have that experience myself with Substack, which is a subscription newsletter. And one of the big downsides people don't think about with this life is once you start charging, people start buying, say, an annual subscription. And that means I have to at least go for another year. And in reality, I never really want to stop it because the revenue would just stop and that would be really sad. So you kind of get on this treadmill where you don't really have an exit path. And I'm not sure exactly where this all goes, but yeah, it's been great. But that's something people don't think a lot about is like this never ending, keep creating, keep creating life.

• 12:52Speaker 00

  We call it internally the hamster wheel of content creation. I like get on because you love it and then how do you get off? So it's actually an interesting challenge again for platforms to think about where can they add value? Are there ways to either make the content creation process that much easier? And I don't want to say less of a burden, it's not a burden, but sometimes if you don't have time, you're just at a point in life where you can't do it. Are there services or things that can be offered? Are there things like financing that makes sense for creators? That banks or traditional institutions wouldn't offer because of just the difference in the type of work that's being produced?

• 13:34Speaker 00

  Or another potential solution is, are there ways that platforms can create content? Maybe it's automated so that the creator can take a break. Um, so maybe they're not AI necessarily. Maybe it's more just like aggregating data or doing summaries. Or, you know, maybe there's just other ideas that haven't been explored out there. But it's a real problem.

• 13:56Lenny Rachitsky?

  So I have this lennybot.com site, which is an AI chatbot based on all my content, including the podcast episodes. And actually, an engineer who was listening to this podcast reached out and offered to help me build it and he did, and it's awesome. And I'm curious if that becomes my retirement plan as this bot ends up just doing this and learns enough. I, I highly doubt it, but, uh, but it's fun to experiment with.

• 14:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, use your own content as your large language model, right?

• 14:22Lenny Rachitsky?

  Exactly. That's exactly what it is. And I'm curious where this goes. I want to follow the thread of the creator economy. It feels like there's this like huge wave of the creator economy is the future of work. And all these platforms launched to allow creators to make money. But it feels like over the past couple of years, it faded. It feels like it faded away and these like very small number of platforms essentially want YouTube, Spotify, Instagram, Tik Tok, Patreon, maybe Substack. And, and there was also the sense that like the future of work is freelance. Everyone's going to be working for themselves, creating stuff. And it feels like people are still working regular jobs. The, a lot of these startups haven't done great. So I guess I'm just curious what you think happens maybe in the next

• 15:04Lenny Rachitsky?

  five or 10 years from a perspective of platforms emerging and also just from creators. What do you, do you think things stay the same? Do you think there's another wave? Where do you think things go?

• 15:14Speaker 00

  I think it was probably predictable to some degree that platforms would win because just of the nature of aggregation. Once you have either all of the supply or you've aggregated the demand, it's really a strong network effect. So investors love to invest in these types of businesses. It's hard to, to break out. I wouldn't underestimate. The strategic ability either of some of the big platforms, like they were definitely thinking ahead and building features and thinking about, you know, whether or not they saw it as a monetization opportunity. It certainly is a great strategic play

• 15:54Speaker 00

  to make sure that creators felt like they were on the platform that made the most sense for them and they weren't gonna churn or leave or try too many other places out. So I think the the rush and the funding was to figure out, is there room for any other new platforms? Are there specific verticals that maybe there's an opportunity to create vertical specific features and tooling? And actually, I think we saw a huge, massive creation there in Twitch, right? Twitch did not exist and they are just a juggernaut. I think TikTok's another one that came out of this era. Maybe they weren't positioned as creator economy type startups, but effectively, did you see what happened in Union Square here with Kai, the gaming streamer?

• 16:39Speaker 00

  Um, so I'm in New York and last week there was a mob and a riot because a Twitch streamer announced that he was gonna be giving away PlayStations and computer gear in Union Square. And something like a million teenage boys showed up. They had, I'm making this up, and they had to shut down the center of New York City to clear what turned into protests, riot, mob of teenagers who came for this one creator that probably no one listening to me right now has even heard of.

• 17:15Lenny Rachitsky?

  Yeah.

• 17:16Speaker 00

  So, so I do think a lot of the predictions have have come to bear. There are tons of people making money and making a living from creating content on the internet. There have been studies too, where they ask young people what they want to do and what they want to be when they grow up. We quote these at spot at, uh, excuse me, Patreon. And, um, you know, over 60% want to create content for a living. So those trends I don't think are are going anywhere. Maybe it'll be supplemental income. Maybe it'll be something you do for a period of your life. But I do think that this area continues to be untapped. I just don't see a world where I think of like Michelle Fan, right?

• 17:59Speaker 00

  She's basically a mini Disney. And when you think of it like that, she's created IP. What can you do with IP? Comic books, movies, TV shows, plushies, merch. Like, how many millions of Michelle fans are we going to have seen? Look at like what's happening in China. There's tons of creators like this. So whether or not, you know, the VCs have won or the startups have succeeded. Uh, there's no way that you can lower the costs of content creation and increase the scale of distribution and not see this emerge. This creator economy, I think, emerge. Um, but I just, I think that maybe

• 18:42Speaker 00

  there's still opportunity for more companies to blossom and to grow, and certainly for more individuals. Maybe to just figure it out on their own and do it without too many big platforms getting paid off of their creative pursuit.

• 18:58Lenny Rachitsky?

  Have you seen the NPC trend on TikTok slash maybe Instagram reels where people pretend to be NPCs, non-playable characters from a video game?

• 19:06Speaker 00

  I have not.

• 19:07Lenny Rachitsky?

  Okay, it's uh, it's crazy. People just pretend to be a computer character and people pay them little gifts to like do a thing.

• 19:15Speaker 00

  Oh, is this the, uh, yes, I have seen it for Stufly. Ice cream, ice cream.

• 19:21Lenny Rachitsky?

  Yeah.

• 19:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yes. I didn't, I didn't realize.

• 19:24Lenny Rachitsky?

  They're making like tens of thousands of dollars a day. Just, uh, so that's one, that's one way to make a living.

• 19:30Lenny Rachitsky?

  On the, on the thread of becoming a creator, you've seen a lot of creators try to do this on Patreon. Back at Apple, even with iTunes, I went chat about that at Spotify now and even your startup. I'm curious what you've seen is important to success in the creator life, especially things that are maybe not obvious to people. What do people need to get right if they want to pursue that path?

• 19:54Speaker 00

  One of the things that I've seen that I don't know if people realize is consistency and predictability of content creation, which is where this idea that we were talking about earlier of a hamster wheel kind of comes on. But there is something to churning out consistent quality work and putting it out there for your audience to consume and respond and react to. That goes a long way. It's almost like the 10,000 hours. The, you know, you have to do 10,000 hours of something in order to truly master it. But I've seen that time and again, you know, I started at YouTube in, let's see, how old am I? It must have been 2010.

• 20:37Speaker 00

  And that was when I really think this, this whole thing kind of was just first getting going. And we used to put together these playbook of what made a creator successful. So a lot of the effort there was trying to support this burgeoning economy. And I remember even back then in 2010, and to this day, that continues to be like one of the top pieces of advice. Another one is collaboration. So working with other great creators, sharing audience, exposing one another to those audiences. And then this was something we tried to employ at my startup kit. We would actually host events for creators to get together to facilitate meeting and cross pollination.

• 21:21Speaker 00

  And, you know, in the hopes that it would just benefit their careers if they were doing YouTube videos with someone they met at the party, then it would be great for all parties all around. So those are two things. And then I do think in a world with all of this content, there continues to be a need and a space for the curator.

• 21:42Speaker 00

  And you know, curator is as creator is kind of an interesting concept, but a curator is almost like what the role at book publishing company plays, or a music record label plays, or a radio station plays, right? There is a degree of having a brand, having something you stand for, having a vibe or an ethos. And that person being almost not a gatekeeper in a bad way, but like, I Camille can't consume anywhere near all this content. You, I trust your vibe. Tell me what I should be listening to. And so that would be the third thing I would say is like, figure out who are those curators who you really can associate your content with, who are on the same page as you have an audience who

• 22:26Speaker 00

  you think would like your stuff and just try and get associated with them.

• 22:30Lenny Rachitsky?

  Yeah, the last piece is so, I totally see that all the time. If there's someone I super respect and they recommend something, I'm obviously gonna value that recommendation highly. That's like we're influencing your merchant organically, right? People just, there's something you should check out and then, oh, let's pay you to share things so that people try our product.

• 22:48Speaker 00

  That was the exact concept behind my startup kit. It was all about curating, finding people who are great recommenders for gear, having them curate that gear. And then you could follow the curators you love. You, who wants to go look on Amazon and see reviews from people you've never heard of? Oftentimes, if it's your brother in law who's a great cyclist and they say buy this, you just buy it. You don't even care what the reviews say because you trust that person.

• 23:13Lenny Rachitsky?

  What happened with the startup and what did you learn from that experience?

• 23:17Speaker 00

  I started working on the startup in 2015. We managed to raise some money, raised over $2 million, which is a huge accomplishment, especially if you know anything about venture capital. They have a horrible track record when it comes to funding people of color, women, people who are non cisgender, white male, just kind of the track record. And we had an amazing experience building this company. Over several years, grew a bunch of the like key metrics up and to the right. And got to a point where we were trying to figure out what the next move was. And should we get a bridge round? We were trying to raise Series A.

• 24:02Speaker 00

  We were, I think, early on the creator economy trend. Probably about a year and a half later, it would have been, I think, I hope, a snap to raise money. But anyway, we were battling a bunch of like different choices, different options. And I actually did this startup accelerator called StarDebt that's run out of Stanford, which is my alma mater. And we learned a lot about how to sell a company and what M and A looks like. So we started exploring that path. And in the end, it made the most sense for us to have an exit and join forces with Patreon. And so that's what we ended up doing, sold the company in 2018, joined Patreon,

• 24:46Speaker 00

  worked there a couple of years, and that's where I met Adam.

• 24:49Lenny Rachitsky?

  Amazing. And I wanted to ask Ashley about that experience of selling a company. There's a lot of people listening right now who are thinking about selling their company or maybe hope to sell their company someday. And I think there's like a reality of it. And then there's like the idea of how how it might go. I'm curious what you've taken away from that experience. And I guess specifically, is there any advice you could share with folks that are thinking about selling their company someday? What you think maybe you could have done earlier? Or or also just share a glimpse of the reality of acquisitions?

• 25:20Speaker 00

  I think it's different for every company, for sure. Some companies get swooped in and get bought and other companies actively sell themselves. Uh, we were definitely in the in the latter camp, which means that we managed a process. Uh, similar to how you manage a process for fundraising, right? Like, not every company just meets the B C and raises money on the first try. They go through a process and meet tons of B Cs and put them through the funnel and end up on the other side, hopefully with a successful round. So I think that's one takeaway is treat it like a process and manage it like a process if it is something you're interested in. It doesn't really just, for most, most companies, I would say it doesn't just happen.

• 26:04Speaker 00

  And then the second piece of advice I would give, I think we should have been talking to potential acquirers from the beginning and sharing our vision and what we were trying to accomplish. Because we started those quite late in our journey as a company and it just meant it took, you know, when I met a potential CPO who would acquire the company, who would end up being my boss or a CEO. It was like their first time meeting me, whereas if it had been their fifth time, we would have had a relationship established and they would have known more about the vision and what we were trying to do and hopefully would have had some more time to think about it. So those would be my two pieces of advice. Start preparing to sell your company from the moment you found it,

• 26:48Speaker 00

  which is kind of a weird thing because obviously if you're starting a company, for most founders, they want it to be the next big thing. They're not starting it in order to sell it. But it's just a good thing to have, have on your radar because you never know what the future holds. And then two is to treat it like a process.

• 27:07Lenny Rachitsky?

  Yeah, on that piece of knowing people who may acquire you, I found that to be a thousand percent true. We sold our company to Airbnb and that's how we got to Airbnb. And what I realized is you just need people who may buy you in the future to have you in their head when they have a problem. So that they could be like, oh, Camille and her team could solve this problem for us. Let's go chat with her and see if we could, if they're interested in acquisition. And on a process piece too, one thousand percent resonates. We basically, when we started chatting with a company, we're just like, hey, who else, who else could potentially acquire us? Let's make a big list and who we can talk to at that company as soon as possible and then just explore. But it's more challenging there because it's you reaching out to them. Being like, hey, you want to chat about buying our company versus them reaching out to you. So it's your point.

• 27:51Lenny Rachitsky?

  Always goes better if they reach out to you, but you can't always control that.

• 27:54Speaker 00

  Right. Or if the meeting is not under the context of buying at all, it's like, we're working on something cool. We have a great vision. It aligns with what you're doing. Maybe there's a partnership here.

• 28:05Lenny Rachitsky?

  Yeah.

• 28:05Speaker 00

  We'll just tell you what we're doing and then when I contact you in 12 months about buying me, you've heard of me before.

• 28:12Lenny Rachitsky?

  I find even when you're starting to chat about acquisitions, you never want to say directly, "Hey, you want to buy us?" It's like, "Hey, you want to have a strategic partnership of some kind?"

• 28:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 28:20Lenny Rachitsky?

  You want to explore partnership? So funny.

• 28:23Speaker 00

  Like dating.

• 28:24Lenny Rachitsky?

  Yeah, yeah, you can't just be too direct sometimes. So when you got to Patreon, I don't know if it was immediate or eventually you ended up leading the creator side of the marketplace. And I find that, looking at your background, you basically stayed on the supply side of marketplaces through your career mostly. And I actually did the same thing. All I worked on at Airbnb especially, or mostly was the host side. And I think it takes a specific kind of mindset in person to be excited about that side of the marketplace versus the consumer side, which is where everyone always generally wants to go, to like the customer side. So I'm curious what it is that's drawing you to that side of the business across all the places you work? And then just what you found to be important to be successful in that role and on that side?

• 29:09Speaker 00

  What drew me to that side of the business probably was kind of, I don't, maybe accidental at the beginning, just again, coming from this kind of musical family and background. I always had like a natural interest in helping artists make a living. So I think that interest was there. At Apple, I did, there were only two PMs there. We did everything. At YouTube, I accidentally ended up in Creator. But where I started understanding deeply the dynamics of a marketplace was actually my experience in the one job I've had that like not been in Creator or these big consumer

• 29:50Speaker 00

  platforms or Creator Economy, which was at a startup called Halo, based out of London. And at the time was a huge competitor to Uber and Lyft in the ride-hailing, ride-sharing and ride-hailing space. And I worked on the supply side. Making sure that there were enough cars to fuel the demand. And in a marketplace like that, where it's real time, people trying to get a cab to go from uptown to downtown, you see firsthand, the inexperienced firsthand, the impact to your business.

• 30:32Speaker 00

  If you don't have suppliers, if your suppliers are unhappy, if they go on strike, if there's regulations, that mean you can't use your service. And there, I think I was, so one of the projects that I worked on that I launched was the US Uber competitor. Because Halo in Europe was all about getting taxi cabs and did not play in the, the livery is what it's called in New York, or the private, private rides, basically. It's like your uncle, or your, your aunt, or your cousin, who can switch on Lyft and go pick it up, whoever. Like, that just was not a thing in Europe. And so, we had to figure out how to launch that in the US, how to get drivers on, how to create this supply.

• 31:16Speaker 00

  And it was like, it doesn't matter how nice the user experience is, how great the marketing is, how much demand you can generate, if when someone opens that app, there are no cars available. So, you know, a lot of people talk about marketplaces as chicken and egg. I actually just think they're two-sided. And you start with the supply. And at the end of the day, you can kind of optimize for the demand side, or choose who you're going to prioritize in terms of if there's a conflict, we're going to pick this side or the other. And yes, you won't be successful with one side or the other. But I just experienced and like lived firsthand,

• 32:00Speaker 00

  the pain of having built this great operations backend that fed into this great UI. And then you open that app and you can't get a ride because there aren't enough cars available. So I think that kind of solidified my feeling that with marketplaces, it's, you just can't lose sight of the solving real pain points and needs for the supply side in order to make sure the entire business can operate.

• 32:26Lenny Rachitsky?

  I've done a bunch of research into marketplaces and I found basically the same thing that supply is almost always where you need to focus almost all your time, especially at the beginning. The way I think about it is that's like, if you have a store, that's the stuff on your shelves and you're not going to have a business if you don't have anything on the shelves.

• 32:41Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 32:42Lenny Rachitsky?

  There's a few rare cases, I forget exactly which they were, where demand was actually the bigger challenge and supply is really easy. You know what it was? Rover. Rover had no problem, it turns out, with supply because who wouldn't want to make fifty bucks watching a dog for a few hours? Like, it was a really easy sell. And a lot of people could do it and wanted to do it. So they actually found supply was not an issue. But, but in most cases, exactly how you said, most of the times, supply is what people are looking for.

• 33:05Speaker 00

  Totally. I find that the, the counter example I hear a lot is eBay, right? How they were, were so good at aggregating demand, they were basically able to force suppliers to the terms that they like. But I can't imagine, I mean, it'd be interesting to talk to some folks who were at eBay in their early days, that the whole thing didn't start up without them going out, figuring out who are the key suppliers we need to get on this thing so that we can begin aggregating demand.

• 33:32Lenny Rachitsky?

  Yeah, you gotta have some good stuff on eBay. I wonder if Beanie Babies or whatever they started with.

• 33:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly.

• 33:39Lenny Rachitsky?

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• 34:21Lenny Rachitsky?

  SOC 2 and these other frameworks. For a limited time, Lenny's podcast listeners get $1,000 off Vanta. Go to vanta.com/Lenny. That's V-A-N-T-A.com/Lenny to learn more and to claim your discounts. Get started today.

• 34:37Lenny Rachitsky?

  You mentioned Apple and I want to spend a little time there. So you were, you said you were the second PM on iTunes back in the day. And I'm curious what you learned from the experience you had working at Apple. I think I read somewhere you worked maybe closely with Steve Jobs and Johnny Ive. I don't know if that's true. But I'm curious, just, no, okay. But you do have a Steve Jobs story.

• 34:56Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 34:58Lenny Rachitsky?

  Okay.

• 34:59Speaker 00

  Yes, so I was very early on in the iTunes days. I started interning there when I came out of grad school. And my internship was actually in label relation. And then I started a full-time job doing product marketing. And at Apple, at the time, I think even to this day, they didn't have a product manager title. They had product marketing managers. And so one of my colleagues who remains good friends to this day, Steve was the first, also named Steve, not Steve Jobs, that was the first PMM working on iTunes. And he primarily was doing all the client stuff. He launched the store and everything. But I think I was the second person in the iTunes group with that title. So that was really cool.

• 35:43Speaker 00

  And then as far as the Steve Jobs story, I would think I mentioned to you. People like hearing this story. Nothing happened. I just went up to him and said, hi, I'll tell the story. But I think the context of why people find it interesting is because of other stories about Steve. So let me give a little context. Though Steve Jobs lore was that if you were in an elevator with him, you better be prepared to talk about what you do at the company. Because he had a habit of getting in the elevator and looking at you and saying, what do you do? What do you do here? And there were also rumors that people had not given him a good answer. That ended up being their last day at Apple.

• 36:24Speaker 00

  So there was someone who I didn't know personally, but worked in my department before I got there, who got in an elevator and looked up and Steve was approaching him. And so he went to press the button to open the door and accidentally pressed the one to close the door.

• 36:44Speaker 00

  And it's like doing this. Pressed. You can't see me if you're listening on podcast, but like frantically pressing the button, trying to open the door, but accidentally pressing the closed door button. And the elevator going to its destination. And apparently he got off and just bolted like right straight up ran down the hallway.

• 37:02Lenny Rachitsky?

  Never remember my face.

• 37:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly.

• 37:06Speaker 00

  So that's the context. So in 2005, it's my first day of my internship at Apple. And I had this situation where I attended graduation because I only had one semester left to go back to. So I just decided to attend the graduation that happened basically the week before. And if for those of you who are the Jobs fans, this is when he gave his really inspiring and famous Stanford commencement speech and an awesome, awesome thing to listen to.

• 37:41Lenny Rachitsky?

  Wait, you were at that? You were at that speech?

• 37:42Speaker 00

  I was there. Yeah.

• 37:44Lenny Rachitsky?

  Whoa. People, people love that speech.

• 37:47Speaker 00

  It's a good one. It's.

• 37:48Lenny Rachitsky?

  What did you feel being there, listening to it in the moment?

• 37:51Speaker 00

  Totally inspired. Um, I mean, Apple was not quite what it is today in terms of brand and influence and just like it's at the peak, you know, like it's really come a long way. It was still, when I met the recruiter at a conference, I was like, Apple, what do they do again? Like my roommate had a Mac, but what's iTunes? Oh yeah, I think I've heard of that. I think, you know, the, I, the dancing iPod silhouette ads, which really sent Apple over the top. Those hadn't even really dropped yet. But it was starting, right? It was starting to percolate and bubble and you heard more and more about it. And just the association with music was making Apple more cool.

• 38:35Speaker 00

  But that speech is like, talk about a commencement speech like that is is top notch. And and Steve's great at those. He's he was phenomenal storyteller. So graduation is what Saturday, I go home Sunday, the Monday I started my internship. And here we are at Cafe Max with my new coworkers. And Steve is sitting literally at the table next to me. And so I was like, oh my gosh, there's Steve. I would love to say hi and introduce myself. And everyone at the table, now, mind you, I hadn't heard this story about the elevator button in the that yet because it was my first day. But they're all looking at each other. They're like, I mean, yeah, go say hi to him if you want.

• 39:18Speaker 00

  But like, you're an intern. Let's say hopefully he doesn't fire you on your day, first day. But um, I've always, you know, in my family and in my life, have always had this um, encouragement to say hi to people when you see them and let them know that you appreciate what they do and just like, thank them. Because it doesn't happen often. A lot of times people go and they ask for a picture or an autograph. But this idea of just like introducing yourself, saying hello and thanking someone for something that they've done that impacted you to something that's kind of been a way that my parents have encouraged me to behave in the world and something that I saw them do and saw them model. Probably again, coming from my dad being a musician and being fans of other musicians of like a thing

• 40:02Speaker 00

  in in music, the artist culture that like talk to one another about how something you created influenced you or whatnot. So I went up to him and I just, I got up from my lunch table and walked over and I said, hi, my name's Camille. I'm interning here this summer. It's my first day. I was at graduation at Stanford on Saturday on Saturday. And your speech was amazing. I was really inspired. I'm so excited to be here and so excited to work on this company. And I just wanted to say thank you for spending your time doing that speech for us on Saturday. And he was like, who are you? What? What? You're an intern? Well, what are you doing here?

• 40:43Speaker 00

  It was a little like, we had a little bit of an exchange. I'd like terrified like, yeah, I graduated, but I'm interning and I have another semester left. And he was like, oh, okay. Well, you know, welcome to Apple and good luck. And I hope you have a really great experience this summer. And that was it. I didn't get fired and I said hello to Steve. And after that, I felt like I knew him. Like every time I'd see him around campus, I'd wave hi. And I think he had no idea who I was, but he would look at me kind of confused and then wave back hello.

• 41:12Lenny Rachitsky?

  She's so friendly. Who's this person?

• 41:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 41:15Lenny Rachitsky?

  Do you still remember how you would have described what you do? I have a feeling it's like seared in your head, but if not, then nevermind.

• 41:21Speaker 00

  Oh, my statement if he had asked me.

• 41:23Lenny Rachitsky?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 41:24Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, I was lucky because one of the things that I did, he would actually know exactly what it is, which is I would manage press rooms whenever there was an iTunes watch. So this is like very much grunt work, but like when there would be a press event for one of the like the new iTunes six launch or whatever, they would have interviews with Walter Isaacson or I don't know if Kara Swisher was working back then, but like whoever the journalist. And Steve would have a room set up with an iMac computer with an iTunes library full of track. There would be whatever the new iPod was synced to that computer and all of the track. And after every interview, everything would have to be reset.

• 42:09Speaker 00

  Um, also the library was crafted. So he would give feedback for months on the content of the library because he would do demos. And so he wanted to know, you know, make sure all my favorite tracks are in there, my favorite Beatles records, my favorite Bob Dylan records. And who's this artist? Let me check them out. Okay. They don't cross the bar. Oh, what's this song? Oh, I love this song. Oh, add this. So he was like very involved in the entire presentation. And someone had to go do all that. So who better than the, you know, fresh out of Masters of Engineering and Stanford graduate student to go do all the grunt work of making library. But like, those are the kinds of details that he paid attention to. And so

• 42:52Speaker 00

  I would have just told him that I did product marketing and one of my main responsibilities was fixing the press room for him. He was like, oh, okay.

• 43:01Lenny Rachitsky?

  You mentioned that your title is Product Marketing Manager and there is a recent kind of hubbub on Twitter where Brian Chesky at Airbnb shared that they shifted the role of Product Manager to essentially the Apple model. And I'm curious what your perspective is on that approach to product, the Apple kind of way versus a traditional product manager?

• 43:21Speaker 00

  They have done this very intentionally from what I've seen. I know they hired Hiroki, actually, from Apple.

• 43:30Lenny Rachitsky?

  A lot of Apple people.

• 43:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, and actually, one of the new leaders they've hired, I don't know if you know Judson Copeland, dear friend of mine, we interned that same summer at Apple. And he worked there for like 15 years before heading over to Airbnb. But yeah, I mean, the Apple construct, it's much more of like design and engineering kind of led organizations, craftspeople, I would say, more so than strategy people. So that was one of the stark differences I saw in my transition from Apple to Google. There are a lot more like people from Coca-Cola and McKinsey and Bain at Google. I don't think any of those people even existed at

• 44:14Speaker 00

  Apple. And it was very much like, let's 3D chess our way into what our next move is gonna be. Whereas at Apple, it was let tinker and let craft and let's build and let's see what feels right. It's different approaches. As a result, the approach to product management was quite different. So I think it makes sense. Brian Chesky's background is a designer, so probably resonates a bit more within the Apple way. And then in terms of what it means for product managers on an individual level, so again, there weren't product managers. The closest thing would have been TPNs, Technical Program Managers, who kind of helped manage the sprints. And managed to schedule and listing out what features would be, would happen.

• 44:59Speaker 00

  I spent a lot of my time with the incredibly talented design team and would, if I had ideas of product features, or, you know, we would think months ahead of time, like, what's the anchor story? Or what are the three key messages for the launch of iTunes 10 or whatever? And you might, we might have ideas for new features that would go in that. But because we had that moment in time, we knew well ahead, we were planning for. And you were working on the messaging and working on the consumer positioning, again, well in advance of anything actually being live or built, like, that kind of was what framed what features you wanted to build and what problems you would put on the table to be solved.

• 45:41Speaker 00

  As opposed to as clear cut metric, you're trying to drive forward, which is how product management is kind of evolved in another capacity.

• 45:51Lenny Rachitsky?

  Yeah, and that's how it works at most companies.

• 45:53Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 45:54Lenny Rachitsky?

  I want to come back actually to the creator economy stuff. I feel like you've worked in the creator economy longer than most anyone. And so I wanted to use our time to spend a little more time there. What about on the platform side? If someone was thinking about starting a company to cater to creators, to build a new platform, maybe for creators to make a living? Do you have any advice for them? Where do you think maybe there's opportunity? Where do you think it's like, no, probably you don't want to spend time here?

• 46:23Speaker 00

  I think with any company, solving a real problem is the most important thing. So creators have lots of challenges and things that can be solved. Some, some painful things are more acutely felt than others. I think at the core, every creator needs two things. They need to grow an audience and they need to get paid so that they can make a living. And in some ways, I do think that growing an audience is more important because with that audience, it opens up opportunities in ways that you can monetize. But there are all kinds of other things, like we were talking about financing, health insurance. You know, the list goes on.

• 47:06Speaker 00

  Things we face as human beings trying to be freelancers in the world often apply equally to people who are creative for a living. And then there are unique things about the creator space, like.

• 47:19Speaker 00

  The spurts of energy, right? The spurts of creative flow that maybe don't apply in a salary job or an hourly hourly job. So there are lots of problems out there still to be solved for creators. I don't think that this space is nearly solved, done, stick a fork in it. So my advice would be to look at the problems that exist and pick a real one and go for it.

• 47:47Lenny Rachitsky?

  Wise advice.

• 47:48Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 47:49Lenny Rachitsky?

  Have you seen this podcaster Bobby? I forget her last name. She rocketed up to like the fourth biggest podcast in in America with a few episodes of her podcast. She interviews like Drake and a few comedians. Have you seen this person?

• 48:05Speaker 00

  I feel like I should, but as we said at the beginning, I'm such a music head, I don't listen to any podcast.

• 48:11Lenny Rachitsky?

  The reason I thought of her, she, I was watching a clip of her on an interview show and she hasn't made any money from this, even though she's got like the hottest podcast in America right now. And, uh, and we're going to link to her in the show notes, but she's hilarious. There's something about her that just is really fun to watch, but okay.

• 48:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 48:28Lenny Rachitsky?

  Podcast for you right now. We'll, we'll get you on a podcast. We'll get you on the podcast.

• 48:32Speaker 00

  I'm on a podcast.

• 48:34Lenny Rachitsky?

  There we go. You've mentioned your parents and I was reading your Wikipedia page and the way your parents are described on there is uh, radical Buddhist artist technologists.

• 48:46Lenny Rachitsky?

  I'm curious what is, what that means maybe? And then also just like, is there a memory or moment of growing up that is a highlight? That highlights that aspect of of them.

• 48:56Speaker 00

  What's funny about this is I had no idea I had a Wikipedia page until he's done that. I don't know where it came from.

• 49:06Lenny Rachitsky?

  Who made this?

• 49:07Speaker 00

  Exactly. Like what? I'm on Wikipedia, so that was funny.

• 49:11Lenny Rachitsky?

  That's crazy.

• 49:12Speaker 00

  Yeah. So let's see, I grew up in San Francisco in the eighties and nineties. Um, my parents started practicing Buddhism on the East Coast uh, in the seventies. And my dad was, I mentioned, he's a drummer and a musician. And he also had a studio. We have like this closet under the stairs that he turned into a production studio. And You know, he was an artist. He worked for the city. My mom worked for the city. Wouldn't have a ton of money growing up. And so a lot of the computer equipment came from the street. He would find somebody, put a PC out, like we were, he was building PCs before, like the gamers were doing it.

• 49:56Speaker 00

  And I remember he would come home with boxes and, and boards and chips. And would literally go get a book from the library or the store and would figure out how to assemble these computers. Keyboards that were broken, he would just fix them. Probably should have been a mechanical engineer, super talented at this stuff. But basically he had this entire production studio with drum machines and all the equipment. And I was his helper. So I would help him solder stuff together and tinker and actually put these computers together. So that's probably, I don't know where that quote came from. I have to go click the link. What, what the reference is from, but that's, that's some of the background there.

• 50:42Speaker 00

  And the other thing that happened back in San Francisco in the eighties and nineties, we used to host Buddhist meetings in our house. And, you know, back then, there was a lot of, um, what was called street propagation. Like the Hare Krishna used to be up and down Haight Street, right around the corner from me. The, um, Nation of Islam, which my brother joined for a period of time, would be selling Final Calls and Bean Pie Brothers on the, on the corner. So Final Calls, the, the newspaper at the time for the Nation of Islam. And so it was just a different era, completely different from today. And us being practicing Nichiren Buddhism, we had pamphlet that said Nam Myo Ho Ringe Kyo on them.

• 51:25Speaker 00

  And I would stand on the steps of our house and we had a gate. So I would stand behind the gate and I was probably like seven or eight years old. Just ask people walking by, hey, have you heard of Nam Myo Ho Ringe Kyo? Here's a pamphlet. Learn a little more. We're having a meeting at our house. I'd laugh with my mom now. She's like, I can't believe we're doing that. It seems totally crazy now, but at the time it was just like, yeah, like. Coming off of the seventies, it was a very different era. If you've ever seen What's Love Got To Do With It, Tina Turner is probably, who recently passed away. Probably one of the more famous, more well-known practitioners of Nichiren Buddhism. And she actually started practicing in the same kind of era, seventies and, and eighties. Seventies, probably. So that's what that means. And those are a couple of memories that illustrate that that moment.

• 52:10Speaker 00

  But you know, you can kind of see music, technology, helping creators get paid. It's certainly influenced everything about how I am today.

• 52:20Lenny Rachitsky?

  That was a perfect description of your parents, based on those stories. And it feels inevitable that you would have ended up doing what you're doing now. Product, technology, music, artists, creators. So that's amazing. I'm gonna ask one more question before we get to our very exciting lightning round. And the question is just around frameworks. Is there just like a favorite framework or process or system or approach to building product? Or teams that you come back to or and or like to share often? Anything might be useful to listeners?

• 52:51Speaker 00

  I had this great manager in my experience at Halo who turned me on to Marty Kagan, who I didn't befriended and learned a ton from. And I just love the way that, yeah, he's awesome. Actually, I should ask him about early days at eBay. Cause I think he was, he was there, probably one of the people who got off the ground. But, um, you know, one of the things that I learned and that we, we really emphasized during that time is this idea of having dual track agile going where you're doing discovery and delivery simultaneously. And doing it in a way that's not waterfall. It's not like, all right, the designers are gonna go over here and tinker for months.

• 53:33Speaker 00

  And then once we've figured it out, we'll lob it over the wall to the coders and like cross our fingers and hope everything works. But rather having like this continuous cycle of essentially de-risking your assumption. And getting to a point where you're able to do that with speed. So that you can chart your way to new paths and to innovation by constantly figuring out where the errors are in your, in your thinking or where, you know, things that you didn't expect to happen were gonna happen. So I think everyone knows like a, an impact effort or risk reward two by two. And can map out different opportunities and things you might do on that two by two. But one of my favorite takeaways from that is that

• 54:19Speaker 00

  from this way of working around this like dual track agile, de-risking your riskiest ideas first kind of approach. There's a concept of taking the things in the top right, the biggest swings. And actually prioritizing those first in terms of product discovery and figuring out what can you do to start de-risking? Because if you constantly put those off in favor of the lower risk or more predictable, smaller swings, how are you ever going to truly innovate and get to the next level? It's a less safe choice. So it's someone that as a leader, you kind of are in the hot seat and you can take accountability. So if some of these things don't pan out, it's on you

• 55:04Speaker 00

  and not on your team and kind of give your team permission to fail and try things and de-risk those risky assumptions and get them to a point where they become low risk and they become predictable and you can just put them in the delivery column and execute them.

• 55:18Lenny Rachitsky?

  It reminds me of this piece of advice that people call eat the frog.

• 55:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 55:22Lenny Rachitsky?

  Which is, yeah, right? Like the first thing in the morning, eat the frog, which essentially is do the hardest thing first and then the rest of the day becomes easier.

• 55:30Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 55:31Lenny Rachitsky?

  I don't know why you have to eat a frog. I don't know where that comes from.

• 55:33Speaker 00

  I don't know either. I like draw the owl. That's one of my favorite values, the Twilio one.

• 55:38Lenny Rachitsky?

  Say more. Oh, say more. What is that?

• 55:41Speaker 00

  They have a, you know, companies have their values. One of them is draw the owl. It's really draw the effing owl. And the meme is how do you draw an owl? And it, you draw some circles?

• 56:00Speaker 00

  And then you draw the fucking out.

• 56:04Speaker 00

  So it's like, just do it. At some point, you gotta just figure it out and figure out how to do it. So use my language, but it's kind of funny when you say what the value actually is, which is sometimes you gotta just go for it. You're not going to know the exact path to get there and maybe you won't have de-risked everything, but you start with some circles and then you get it done.

• 56:27Lenny Rachitsky?

  I love it. Cursing is very loud on this podcast, so I'm glad you went there. And with that, we've reached our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready?

• 56:36Speaker 00

  I hope so. I didn't prepare this. I thought I figured it out on the spot.

• 56:40Lenny Rachitsky?

  Great. Perfect. What are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people?

• 56:46Speaker 00

  Three Body Problem.

• 56:49Speaker 00

  A Wrinkle in Time and Octavia Butler's Kindred.

• 56:53Lenny Rachitsky?

  Three Body Problems come up a number of times recently and there's a show coming out actually based on the mo-

• 56:58Speaker 00

  I'm excited, yeah.

• 56:59Lenny Rachitsky?

  I'm so excited. I've been watching Foundation, which is also another series I've been excited to see, but it's like, I don't know what's going on there. It's so, so complicated.

• 57:07Speaker 00

  How is it? I've been waiting. So I'm a huge sci-fi head. I watched Battlestar Galactica. Classic, um, the expand. And so I've been waiting to see what happens with Foundation because I just don't have that kind of commitment in me these days.

• 57:23Lenny Rachitsky?

  Yeah, I don't know what to think of it. It's beautiful and there's a lot of interesting pieces, but it just kind of goes. I think they're making a lot of stuff up. I don't know if you've read Silo. Have you read Silo?

• 57:33Speaker 00

  No, but I saw the preview for the show, another one on season two.

• 57:37Lenny Rachitsky?

  That's a good one to read because in the show they're just making up stories. I don't know what they're doing. There's like, like 90% of it, they just totally invent for the show. And then there's like a little bit that's connected to the stories. I don't know what's going on.

• 57:48Speaker 00

  I didn't know it was a book. I'll read it.

• 57:51Lenny Rachitsky?

  Oh yeah, it's really good. There's three of them, but the first one's only, the only good one.

• 57:55Lenny Rachitsky?

  Anyway, moving on, speaking of this topic, actually, any favorite recent movies or TV shows that you've really enjoyed?

• 58:02Speaker 00

  I've been watching Hijack over the last week with Adreath's elbow. So that's been fun. Got a couple of episodes left there. And then movies, I mean, I'm a huge Kristin Nolan fan, so I haven't seen Oppenheimer yet, but I can't wait to see it. Most of his movies I'm like confused by, but the visuals are just so stunning. You let it go.

• 58:24Lenny Rachitsky?

  Yeah, I'm excited to see it too. I've not seen it either. I have a new child and it's harder to see movies.

• 58:30Speaker 00

  Oh, another good one, Shadow and Bone on Netflix.

• 58:34Lenny Rachitsky?

  Shadow and Bone.

• 58:35Speaker 00

  Way better than the book, I have to say. Well, I read one series, The Six of Crows. This is my like young adult sci-fi fantasy streak again coming to the fore, but the show is incredible. It is so good. So if you're into this kind of vibe, go for it.

• 58:50Lenny Rachitsky?

  Okay, I'm gonna check that out. What is a favorite interview question that you like to ask people when you're interviewing them?

• 58:58Speaker 00

  I like to ask people to tell me about something they're really proud of, that they accomplished and take me through the process and talk to me about why they're proud of it. And if I'm, you can learn so much about a person's motivations, about their work ethic, about what they care about, like what good looks like to them. And I think those are all really important things to understand about a person if you're going to work closely with them.

• 59:23Lenny Rachitsky?

  What is a favorite life motto that you just really like to share or often come back to either in work or in life?

• 59:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, so there is one, which is actually a Japanese proverb. I took Japanese in high school and college, so, but this phrase is, "A frog in a well cannot know the ocean." And so the idea is to push yourself to expand your limits and your horizons and get out of the well so that you can experience the ocean.

• 59:54Lenny Rachitsky?

  I love that.

• 59:55Speaker 00

  I got a better one, sorry.

• 59:56Lenny Rachitsky?

  Okay, great, go.

• 59:57Speaker 00

  Another one.

• 59:58Lenny Rachitsky?

  Tell me.

• 59:59Speaker 00

  I learned this one from someone at Patreon because someone was posting this around the streets of San Francisco. It's become more known recently. Apparently it's a Chinese proverb. I don't know if it's true or not, but it is that the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now. So this idea that don't delay, maybe you missed the prime opportunity, but waiting any longer is it certainly going, it certainly isn't going to help.

• 1:00:28Lenny Rachitsky?

  I heard that one, actually. I was at a, at the park in San Francisco and there was this piano

• 1:00:34Lenny Rachitsky?

  thing, I think it was called, it's like a botanical garden and people play piano all throughout once a year. And there's a guy that was just playing incredibly well. And he, I left and he left around the same time and I was standing next to him. I'm like, "Man, I wish I studied piano when I was younger." And he's like, "The best time to have studied piano is 10 years ago. The second best time is to start now."

• 1:00:51Speaker 00

  Yep, that's right.

• 1:00:53Lenny Rachitsky?

  And I couldn't get off the hook there. And he's like, "You're right."

• 1:00:55Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:00:56Lenny Rachitsky?

  And he's still not gonna do it, I guess. Final question, who's a favorite artist right now? Who do you, who are you liking?

• 1:01:05Speaker 00

  Ooh, so I've been for probably like a good three years now, really into Afrobeat. And right now there's this artist called Rema, R E M A, who I first heard a couple of years ago. He's got this track called Do Maybe, but he has a song out right now that is my opinion, Song of the Summer called Calm Down. Uh, I think Ariana Grande, is it? Came or ended a verse on it. But I've just been listening to Rema Radio, Calm Down Radio on Spotify and tons of Afrobeat artists. So that's, that's the vibe I'm on right now.

• 1:01:41Lenny Rachitsky?

  I love it. I actually, once someone suggested some music at the end of a podcast and I was just like, hey, we're gonna end the podcast with that tune. And it turned out we did that and then YouTube shut us down because it's copyrighted. And so I'm not going to offer that we're gonna do that again. So we're just ending with regular music.

• 1:01:57Speaker 00

  I think it's hard.

• 1:01:59Lenny Rachitsky?

  I know. So tough. Come on. It's just like a few seconds. Give us a break.

• 1:02:03Speaker 00

  You should have 30 seconds. Fair play, right? Well, don't, don't ask me. I'm not a lawyer.

• 1:02:09Lenny Rachitsky?

  We'll send you the bill.

• 1:02:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:02:12Lenny Rachitsky?

  Camille, this was amazing. I think we're living the creator economy here. I really appreciate you making time for this. Two final questions. Where can folks find you online if they want to reach out and maybe ask any additional questions? And then how can listeners be useful to you?

• 1:02:23Speaker 00

  I used to be real big on Twitter, but that ship has sailed. I'm still on there.

• 1:02:29Lenny Rachitsky?

  You can find me on X now.

• 1:02:31Speaker 00

  Yes, on X. Chamillons is my handle, C A M I L L I O N Z. Also on threads these days, trying that out, seeing how, if that sticks.

• 1:02:43Speaker 00

  So probably LinkedIn. You can find me on LinkedIn. I don't think anyone ever promotes that.

• 1:02:48Lenny Rachitsky?

  They do. Most people actually.

• 1:02:50Speaker 00

  Yeah. Okay. And how can listeners be useful to me? Hey, go support your favorite creator. Find out. Go to the show. Find out if they have a Patreon. I would love to see more and more people feeling like they are patrons of the arts.

• 1:03:08Lenny Rachitsky?

  Amazing. Maybe buy some merch.

• 1:03:10Speaker 00

  Buy some merch, yeah.

• 1:03:12Lenny Rachitsky?

  Camille, thank you again for being here.

• 1:03:13Speaker 00

  Thanks, Lenny.

• 1:03:15Lenny Rachitsky?

  Bye, everyone.

• 1:03:18Lenny Rachitsky?

  Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode.