Lenny Rachitsky

Marc Andreessen put it really well when he was on the pod.

There's this kind of like three-way standoff right now between PMs, designers, engineers, where they each think they are the future and you don't need the other with AI.

And everyone's wondering, what's the more important core skill?

I imagine your sense is now AI makes designers even more powerful.

And so this is even more the way to approach.

Talk about just like how you think this shifts this triad with AI enabling people.

Yeah, what I feel like, I don't see this happening yet, but I feel like because now it's so much easier to build, people are shipping all these okay things.

And it feels like design should have its moment of glory right now as a differentiator of like, okay, this is actually awesome.

I haven't felt that yet.

And I'm curious if that's what will begin to happen.

That's a good segue to something I wanted to ask you about, which is you're famously very in the weeds on everything that is going on, all the things that are shipping.

You're very close to the pixels.

I'm curious how that's evolved for you over time.

Like, are you still in there looking at everything that's about to ship?

And what's your just philosophy on founders having to be involved in the, let's say, the pixels and the details of the product?

Do you feel like, especially for a consumer and consumer social product, this is extra important to just be like extremely in the weeds on everything that is shipping and say, having designed your design team have to approve everything.

Do you feel like that's especially important for consumer?

Is there anything special you look for in the designers you hire, knowing that they're basically running the show and just approving everything and just kind of like the right hand to Evan?

Is there anything in particular you look for when you're hiring these designers?

So as I was preparing for this chat, I talked to a bunch of people that worked at Snap over the years, and I've integrated their ideas throughout already.