Lenny Rachitsky

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.

But one that came up that I thought was interesting is I hear that you spent a lot of time developing young design talent, and that's a big focus of yours.

Can you just talk about how you develop young design talent?

I had Jenny Nguyen on the podcast.

She was head of design for Claude and co-work and she was like a director at Figma.

And then she came to Anthropic and moved to just IC Design again and asked her what's the hardest part of that move.

And she said, it's just all the crits that she has to deal with now.

Just so much criticism and constant feedback.

And she'd forgotten about that part of it.

So it's interesting that's such a core part of the way you, like the thing that people have to learn essentially and get good at.

You mentioned AI, how designers are shipping code.

I have a friend who works at a big tech company and he just said all the design team, they're required to ship like, I don't know, 10 PRs a month or something like that or a quarter, which is such a new world.