Insider Tactics Top Tech Founders Aren't Tweeting About

Here’s an earned secret: Podcasts have the highest time ROI for the reader of any content piece in the startup/tech world.

Most elite founders and operators don’t have time/motivation to pen long-form notes from the field. Podcasts reduce their content generation effort as a good podcast host curates their questions and unlocks founder insights, packing a log of punches in 60-ish minutes.

Here are 5 of the most interesting snippets for founders from all the podcasts I read in the last 10 days feat Sebastian Siemiatkowski , Logan Bartlett , Lenny Rachitsky , Dylan Field , Jimmy Daly , Jim Collins, Erik Torenberg , Byrne Hobart, CFA , and Shreyas Doshi .

Internal Momentum as the Leading Indicator of Product Success

Klarna's founder and CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski spoke on the Logan Bartlett Show about internal momentum as the leading indicator of product success.

Siemiatkowski says that internal momentum is the most important indicator of success. He suggests that P&L results and market perception are the downstream results of internal momentum.

"It started off as, you know, probably more like of an observation of mine, that I just realized that I could come to work every day and I could feel that when I looked at what we were doing and what people were accomplishing and the work and the culture and the speed of decision making, or if we were shipping good or bad products and all these things that you kind of observe on a day to day basis, that you could be very proud of it and feel very excited about it, and you could feel more depressed and feel like, oh, my God, nothing's really going the way I wanted it to."

"...but in general, still, I remember on a whiteboard, let's sign, like, here's the list of the merchants we need to sign. And then we were like, what if we sign only one of them? It's going to accelerate the business amazingly. And then a few months later, we signed all of them and you were celebrating, like, how did we do? That's amazing. So you had this great momentum and you realize that that's going to eventually show up in the p and L, but then it takes time to go live to make sure that the product works as intended and all that kind of stuff, but it's going to show up."

Embracing Your Product Intuition

Figma's founder and CEO Dylan Field spoke on Lenny's Podcast about the role of intuition in product development.

As Figma grew, Dylan says he developed a nuanced view of product intuition that contrasts with the idea of an innate "product sense" often attributed to successful founders.

"Here's my framework for it. I think intuition is like a hypothesis generator and you're constantly generating these hypotheses and others are generating hypotheses as well. And you then take these hypotheses and you put them forward and you debate them and you try to find data to support them or negate them. And then you winnow it down into what is our working hypothesis? And from that you move forward."

This insight invites founders to view their instincts as starting points for investigation rather than definitive answers, encouraging a more data-driven and collaborative decision-making process.

Embracing Your Product Intuition

Figma's founder and CEO Dylan Field spoke on Lenny's Podcast about the role of intuition in product development.

As Figma grew, Dylan says he developed a nuanced view of product intuition that contrasts with the idea of an innate "product sense" often attributed to successful founders.

"Here's my framework for it. I think intuition is like a hypothesis generator and you're constantly generating these hypotheses and others are generating hypotheses as well. And you then take these hypotheses and you put them forward and you debate them and you try to find data to support them or negate them. And then you winnow it down into what is our working hypothesis? And from that you move forward."

This insight invites founders to view their instincts as starting points for investigation rather than definitive answers, encouraging a more data-driven and collaborative decision-making process.

Your Readers Decide Who Writes Your Content

Jimmy Daly of Superpath hosted John Collins on the Content Briefly Podcast, discussing contrasting approaches to building content teams at Intercom and Ramp.

At Intercom, they focused on channeling insights from experts into their content, eschewing traditional content writers:

"...for a long time, for a period, we actually changed every job title to, like, editor. Like senior editor or like just, yeah, content editor. But purely because like, we wanted, wanted to make sure that people were clear that this was the job was much more like working with subject matter experts, you know, trying to get their, their views out on the blog."

At Ramp, they created content for search, as their core insight was that users were already searching for solutions to their pain points:

"you know, people are going to, like, they're going to be frustrated with the current solution and they're literally going to start looking for something else. So, like, it was much more about searching from day one, an SEO strategy and a lot of customer evidence, like getting, making sure that we were showing the success that customers were having with ramp and a certain amount of editorial and really making it clear how ramp approach things differently than, say, Brex or other competitors."

This led to building a team with more in-house subject-matter expertise:

"Probably a little bit more traditional content marketers. I think a big thing for us as well was we kind of felt like we needed probably a little bit more subject matter expertise on the content team, rather than like, the content team being the facilitators of bringing that subject matter expertise in from around the company."

AI Layoffs: A Shift from Consumer-Facing to Internal Optimization?

Erik Torenberg of Media Empires podcast and Turpentine Media discusses media evolution with Byrne Hobart, who writes the popular 'The Diff' newsletter.

Byrne offers a fresh perspective on the recent wave of AI-related layoffs in the tech industry. Rather than simply being a cost-cutting measure or a sign of market contraction, these layoffs might be the result of companies pivoting their AI efforts from consumer-facing products to internal optimization. He elaborates:

"So what I suspect has happened is that a number of companies have made the, the big fixed AI investment. Like they made their big push in that direction, and that perhaps their original plan was something consumer facing, something user facing. But they have concluded that that's actually a really tough market. The consumer facing AI stuff, a lot of it is really impressive, but you have this small cohort of products that have just totally changed the way people do certain things, like chat. GPT has changed a lot about my research process and my programming, and then code, code completion tools, copilots, readable AI, things like that have changed the way that I write programs. But it's a lot of the other user facing AI products, they were a cool gimmick for a while, and then people forgot about them. The churn rates on these are insane, and the fixed cost is non trivial. So you really can't sustain very high churn plus low margins, plus high fixed costs for very long. But a lot of companies, a lot of their proprietary unique data is internal. It's what are the emails they've sent internally, what are the metrics that they track within their business, and how can they optimize those?"

Product Thinking vs. Project Thinking

Finally, is a masterclass from Shreyas on building your 'product sense.'

Shreyas says that there are two types of mindsets - Project Thinking and Product Thinking.

Project thinkers ask:

??When: When does this need to be done? Focuses on deadlines and schedules to ensure timely delivery.

??Who: Who will do it? Assigns responsibilities to team members to streamline execution.

In contrast, product thinkers ask:

? Why: Why is this important? Explores the underlying reasons and motivations for undertaking the project.

? What: What are our goals? What does it look like? Defines the end objectives and envisions the final product’s impact and appearance.

Not to say that a project mindset is not needed, but in high-pressure, high-velocity environments, product thinking can unblock more situations and improve the effectiveness of teams, rather than just project thinking. Here's an example Shreyas shared.

In the artifact below, Dan is showing only project thinking, thus frustrating the CEO Eve.

Here's how a product thinker, Pat, approaches the same situation.

By asking the right questions - Why is this important; what is our goal; what else can be done - Pat is able to offer a useful solution to the CEO and, at the same time, articulate the resources needed to meet the goals.

That's it for this edition.

Rohit