Jason Garcia

Explorer // Dog Lover // Sr. Product Manager at @Patagonia

[Nike Basketball @nikebasketball]

Greetings, @NBA Finals.

[Adam Grenier @AKGrenier]

The hard part of a “Let Them Cook” culture: You have to lower the bar.
- Lower the bar for what people are allowed to make.
- Raise the bar for what gets in front of the experts/customer.

Most teams gate the front door, bury experts in approvals, and call it quality control.

It’s not. It’s a hallway with a stressed-out senior person at the end.

The better model:
1. Let more people prototype, draft, query, and test.
2. Use AI to catch, score, reshape, and route the work before it wastes expert time.

Wider sandbox.
Smarter filter.

That’s the org design shift.

[scott belsky @scottbelsky]

great makers are liable to become managers/leaders. but the legendary leaders figure out how to remain (or once again become) makers.

AI unlocks the era of “leader makers.” Watching teams emerge w/ superior alignment, collapsed talent stacks, and unfathomable potential to build.

[Lenny Rachitsky @lennysan]

Great advice

[Garry Tan @garrytan]

Some people think "leadership" is meetings, graduating from building.

True leadership in every organization from 2026 on out *is* building, and it won't be anything other than that into the future.

Either you're building or you're leting your org die slowly. Your choice

[Jane Manchun Wong @wongmjane]

Claude Status Page vs Whole Foods Three Pepper Blend

Who wore it better?

[David Senra @FoundersPodcast]

Steve Jobs on Microsoft:

“I have no problem with their success. I have a problem that they make really third-rate products. Their products have no spirit to them. They are very pedestrian. They are McDonald's."

[David Senra @FoundersPodcast]

What Tony Xu does to make his product better:

Q: What do you do when the data and anecdotes conflict?

A: Thats tough. I think there’s always an element of truth in what customers are saying.

The reason why it’s a tough decision is because it’s so easy to always just veer on the side of the data.

Because almost always when a customer notices something that’s wrong it’s an edge case —it’s usually at some tail of a distribution.

A distribution of the wait times for customer support, a distribution of how friendly we were when we took the call, a distribution of how on time we were, or how late we were, or how accurate we were.

It’s always some tail example.

And so the data is probably always going to win when it comes to a prioritization discussion.

But when you actually think about how to make a product better it’s going to almost always —by definition— be in improving the edges.

That’s why I like to spend time with a lot of our power users.

Whether it’s the top dashers, or the consumers who order the most often, or the merchants who we’ve been doing business with for a very long period of time.

They’re at the tails of the distribution of almost every outcome.

A power user sees all the issues because they’ve had the most shots on goal for some chaotic event to happen in the real world that we couldn’t capture.

And so those edges of the distribution are almost always where the anecdotes are that are the most valuable— that you have to pay the most attention to, because they almost always will disagree with the data.

And they are worth the most in terms of improving your product

[David Senra @FoundersPodcast]

Sage advice from Charlie Munger:

[Lenny Rachitsky @lennysan]

Can't stop staring at this image and thinking about what it means for the future

[Ejaaz @cryptopunk7213]

yo so just to recap the week:

- google released gemini 3.1 but it disappointed tf out of people who claimed its not as good as they advertise

- BUT THEN google dropped an AI song generation model which kinda slaps (Lyria 3) AND a new feature that 1-shots product photoshoots putting photographers (and fashion models) out of a job (Google Pomelli)

- Microsoft pioneered a way to STORE DATA ON GLASS - stores data for up to 10,000 fucking years (🤯) and way cheaper than using silica.

- Taalus fused an ai model DIRECTLY into silicon processing 17,000 tokens PER SECOND which is 17X faster than openai’s quickest model but 10 TIMES CHEAPER than nvidia blackwell gpus. (smaller models tho)

- Apple is releasing 3 new AI devices: glasses, airpods with cameras and a pendant.

- anthropic wiped $10B off the stock market after launching an ai that finds and help fixes security flaws in your code. cybersecurity stocks dumped <1 hour after launch.

- BUT THEN Pentagon threatened to blacklist anthropic for failing to provide them uncensored access to claude.

- xAI dropped grok 4.20 spawning 16 specialised ai agents that work together to solve any prompt. the model self-improves EVERY WEEK.

- scientists discovered dna in meteorites suggesting humans could’ve originated from outer space (what)

- Meta dropped Manus Agents going head-to-head with OpenClaw.

- a cardiologist won 3rd-place in anthropic’s hackathon after vibe coding an app that helps his patients understand and act on their medical results. fucking hero.

- china announced a cure for diabetes 1 & 2 after creating stem cells that make insulin

- Moonshot labs is raising $500M immediately after raising $700M LAST WEEK.

- ex-Deepmind researcher raised europes LARGEST ever seed round $1B at $4B back right as europe announces $13B new fund to catch up with america.

- Stripe’s ai agents autonomously merged 1300 pull requests (up 30% from last week) suggesting top companies are now recursively improving using AI.

dear f*cking goodness GOODNIGHT

[Lenny Rachitsky @lennysan]

Marc Andreessen: "AI is going to take people who are good at doing things and make them very good at doing things. And it's going to make the people who are great at doing things and make them spectacularly great."

[Lenny Rachitsky @lennysan]

So cool!

https://t.co/IlvT9y7ttk

[Lenny Rachitsky @lennysan]

Here are the full transcripts from all 320 of my podcast episodes.

It's been super fun for me to play with AI to extract insights from this data. Now you can to.

My only ask is that if you do something cool with it, just let me know.

I'll keep this folder updated with as each new episode comes out.

Have fun.
https://t.co/DwBhryFF7d

[Jason Garcia @jasontx]

@MarkDank @evansilva @EstablishTheRun @JackMiller02 @notJDaigle Like a natural!

[Kirsten Green @kirstenagreen]

Every great consumer tech company eventually becomes a commerce company.

And, there is always room to build massive, verticalized businesses by being excellent at the edge.

Plenty of unclaimed whitespace in the missing infrastructure.

Next wave of commerce is underway...

[Jason Garcia @jasontx]

@andyholloway @jasonmoore What round should he be drafted?

[Deedy @deedydas]

ChatGPT's product retention curves is a product manager's wet dream.

Their 1 month retention has skyrocketed from &lt;60% 2yrs ago to an unprecedented ~90%! Youtube was best-in-class with ~85%.

6mo retention is trending to ~80%. Rapidly rising smile curve.

Generational product.

[Dani Grant @thedanigrant]

Best hiring advice I’ve received:

Hire people who love what they do so much, they listen to podcasts about it.

Getting to build with these people will make your day. Their obsession, their love for the craft, it’s infectious and awesome 🤩

[Jason Garcia @jasontx]

@lennysan