Zac

Building a media company at 🇳🇿🇺🇸

[Drew Moxon @moxon]

Progress in the mind of Ryan Petersen

Episode 2 gets into wild territory 🍿

[Lenny Rachitsky @lennysan]

I rarely do interviews or talk about my personal life, but I made an exception for the team at @firstround.

Their writer spent hours at my house. We talked about why I started Lenny's Newsletter, what motivates me to keep building it, and a lot of things I don't usually share publicly.

It's an intimate look at what my life is actually like outside of what most people see on the podcast.

Check it out: https://t.co/eNvWu269H0

[Brian Armstrong @brian_armstrong]

New podcast dropped - great conversation on progress with @Keller and @fuelfive - they didn't sugar coat it

Nice editing also, taking out the umms and pauses

[Hiten Shah @hnshah]

Forget EVs. Tesla’s endgame is turning every car into a revenue stream.

[Todd Jackson @tjack]

10 years ago, @paraga and I were working together to introduce ranking to Twitter’s timeline for hundreds of millions of consumers. Now he’s started @p0 to build infrastructure for a very different kind of user: AI agents. And in a full circle moment, we’re able to work together again, as @firstround invested in his seed round last year alongside @khoslaventures and @indexventures.

Parag and I had a chance to sit down for a great conversation last week (his first interview since leaving Twitter!). It was a fascinating reflection on what he learned and what he’s doing differently.

We dig into:
- The transition from CTO → CEO → Founder
- What he was *really* thinking when all the Twitter drama was going down
- Why he chose to be a founder (vs. take another big role)
- How he landed on the idea for Parallel
- What fundamentally changes when you’re designing for AIs vs. humans
- How he thought about fundraising and building his early team
- How working with customers like Clay shaped Parallel’s earliest products
- The case for building “slow” APIs, and the advice he got from @patrickc
- His takes on the modern agent stack and how evals need to evolve

And much more!

Immensely proud to be able to partner with Parag and the entire Parallel team. They’ve made incredible progress in a short amount of time and I can’t wait for more folks to start playing around with the APIs they’ve built.

The full conversation is below, as well as more details on what Parallel is up to.

[Lenny Rachitsky @lennysan]

Guys

[Brett Berson @brettberson]

After 12+ years of publishing tactical company building playbooks on The Review, we’ve decided to start a brand-new publication, dedicated to AI actually working in production. We're calling it Applied Intelligence.

The aim is to close a gap we’ve spotted: Everyone's talking about AI transformation, but few are sharing the actual mechanics of how it’s unfolding inside companies.

We’re incredibly fortunate that our first piece is with @fnthawar from @Shopify, going deep on how they turned @tobi’s famous memo into reality. There’s lots of interesting real-world workflows, behind-the-scenes demos, and non-obvious insights that they’ve picked up as they’ve pushed everyone to build with AI first. (You can read it in full below.)

We’ll be sharing detailed new stories every week, so make sure you’re subscribed.

And if your company’s using AI in an interesting way internally that you think readers would find, feel free to DM me or email ai at firstround dot com.

[Zac @zactypes]

@hnshah Talk to me for more than 10minutes

[Lenny Rachitsky @lennysan]

Three pods in the top 25 🎖️

[Lenny Rachitsky @lennysan]

The final surprise of AI April...

I'm excited to announce the launch of Lenny's Reads—an audio podcast edition of Lenny’s Newsletter.

Many of you have told me that you’d prefer to listen to my newsletter instead of read it. I’m excited to share that now you can.

Every newsletter post will now be transformed into an audio podcast, read to you by the soothing voice of Lennybot.

We’ll ship the podcast version of each post within 48 hours after it's published. Paid subscribers will hear the full post, and just like with the newsletter, free subscribers will get everything up to the paywall.

For a limited time, the first five episodes of this new podcast will be completely unpaywalled and available to all listeners. Get on it.

Listen now (and subscribe) here:
- Spotify: https://t.co/H3q1DcZVs4
- Apple: https://t.co/iFaonLd5xN
- YouTube: https://t.co/2mdeH9PxWQ

I’m excited to hear what you think.

[Lenny Rachitsky @lennysan]

AI April is in full swing.

Surprise #1: Unbelievable product bundle ✅

Surprise #2 (next week): ████████

Surprise #3 (week after): ████████

[Zac @zactypes]

@hnshah You… followed by deep research

[Cleo Abram @cleoabram]

Are you an animator who is optimistic, loves technology, and is excited about explainer journalism? (Or do you know one?)

Huge If True is looking for an experienced animator to help with short and long form videos.

Apply here! https://t.co/WFlZozHGuH

[Hiten Shah @hnshah]

Most teams think they're blocked by resources. But they're usually blocked by assumptions. Challenge your constraints before adding more people.

[Lenny Rachitsky @lennysan]

The impact of doing a podcast

[Lenny Rachitsky @lennysan]

Big year for the podcast! Spotify Wrapped stats:
- #1 most listened to podcast for 25,000 people
- Rating staying strong at 4.9 stars (and 5.0 on Apple!)
- Subscribers grew 100% YoY
- Listeners in 134 countries
- It's still a lot of fun!

Thanks for listening. It's only going to get better from here.

[Hiten Shah @hnshah]

The origins of Uber's "Greyball Program" controversy.

It ended in a DoJ investigation.

But it started with innocent intentions.

[Hiten Shah @hnshah]

Uber's Greyball program was wild.

Says a lot about the culture that employees across countries were willing to go to these lengths.

They dodged city regulators at the same time they were lobbying them to change the rules.

[Meka Asonye @BigMekaStyle]

Borrowed the mic for a very special episode of In Depth with the legendary @sgblank.

He dropped a can’t-miss playbook for founders building for the government buyer. “When you’re selling into government, everything you know about commercial sales you need to throw out.” 😬

[Lenny Rachitsky @lennysan]

Upcoming podcast guests 🔥

- Seth Godin (@ThisIsSethsBlog), marketing legend
- Raaz Herzberg (@RaazHerzberg), CMO/VP of Product Strategy at Wiz
- Tobi Lutke (@tobi), CEO of Shopify
- Susan Cain (@susancain), author of Quiet
- Nan Yu (@thenanyu), Head of Product at Linear
- Amjad Masad (@amasad), CEO of Replit
- Asha Sharma, Head of product for Microsoft's AI Platform
- Drew Houston (@drewhouston), CEO of Dropbox
- Elena Verna (@ElenaVerna), growth 🐐
- Eilon Reshef (@eilonreshef), CPO of Gong
- Jen Abel (@jjen_abel), B2B sales advisor
- Farhan Thawar (@fnthawar), Head of Eng at Shopify
- Graham Weaver (@GrahamCWeaver), Stanford GSB writing professor