Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
Thinking like a gardener not a builder, organizing teams like slime mold, the adjacent possible, and other unconventional product advice | Alex Komoroske (Stripe, Google)
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So much of the way that we tackle problems and build products is this build or mindset. It's like, I have a plan, I then manipulate things to match my plan and make it happen, and this is a way you can create tons of value. But the problem, though, is it can't possibly create more value than the effort that you put into it. What I look for instead are things that can be guarded, things that can grow on their own, and that you can sort of direct or maybe give a little bit of extra energy to or curate over, and is a totally different mindset for it. If you do this properly, it looks like magic. I've been told that this is completely against all the advice that people get building products nowadays, but I think it's a very powerful approach that works in a lot of different contexts. Today, my guest is Alex Kamarowski. Alex is one of the most original, articulate, and first principal thinkers on the future of product and tech that I've ever come across. This conversation will get your brain buzzing in all kinds of ways. Alex spent 13 years at Google where he worked on Search, DoubleClick, he led Chrome's open web platform team for eight years, led augmented reality within Google Maps, and developed a new toolkit to line company-wide strategy from the bottom up. After a stint at Stripe as Head of Corporate Strategy, he's currently founding a startup that aims to reimagine the web for the AI era. In our wide-ranging conversation, we cover how LLMs and Gen AI will impact how we build product in the coming years, what skills will matter most as AI becomes a bigger part of our lives, what companies can learn from slime mold, organizational kayfabe, the adjacent possible, strategy salons, why you should be thinking more like a gardener than a builder, plus a bunch of productivity tips, life advice, and so much more. This was such a fun episode and I am sure this is going to get your mind thinking in completely new ways. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it on your favorite podcasting app for YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes than it helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Alex Kamarowski. Alex, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me. I love the way your brain works. My brain immediately starts buzzing. Anytime I start reading some of your stuff and one of the more interesting things that you write and do and really interesting habit you have is you actually have this doc that you keep called bits and bobs that I love and we're going to be touching on a lot of the things that you share in this doc bits and bobs and we'll link to it. First of all, can you just explain the doc bits and bobs? What's it about? Yeah, so it's I think it's like 600 pages now. It's just one Google doc. Every so often, almost every day, someone will accidentally add a suggestion like out of space or something because it takes so long to load that while they're waiting, they'll tap on the screen and then it'll turn into like taps on adding a comment or something. And it's I take a lot of notes. People tell people when I'm in meetings with them of like, if you see me on my phone or typing, that means I think you said something very interesting and I'm writing it down. It's not that I'm just disengaged. I just I try to like collect all these ideas. And then once a week I go through, I take a few hours and I just reflect to myself and try to find patterns and unpack and find meaning and things. And I write those down and I started, you know, sometime in the past sharing those publicly and it's now become the thing I literally can't stop doing. Like I just find someone was like, Oh, if you get more exposure for this, if you broke these up in the tweets that you sent out, once, you know, they all throughout the day, it's like, I do this for me. I'm like happy to let other people see and like peek into my weird mental process if they want. This is 100% about my own self reflection. And it's not designed. I don't want anyone to like feel compelled to read it or like, in fact, it's designed a little bit to be I allow myself to be a little bit illegible. I want people to have to work a little bit with it. And it's not going to lay it out on a platter. It's going to jump between different things. I'll use terminology sometimes. That is, what are you talking about? And I do that specifically. I don't want anyone to read it. Like, aw, it sucks. Was it worth my time? It's like, cool. Like it's to sit on a page of Google Doc of
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