Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
How to fire people with grace, work through fear, and nurture innovation | Matt Mochary (CEO coach)
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The biggest marker that I've seen between a botched layoff and a successful layoff is at the moment someone hears that they no longer have a job, did they hear it from their manager in a one-on-one? If that's when they heard it, it'll be OK. But if they heard it in an email, in a group chat, in any kind of thing where they were sitting next to, or they were hearing it along with other people, it wasn't personalized, it wasn't one-on-one, that is terrible. And that's when people get really angry, and that's when they start going on to Twitter and going to newspapers and etc. Because it feels dehumanizing, it feels like you didn't give a shit about me, you didn't even have the courtesy to tell me to my face. And of course, there's no way to allow that person to express their emotions because they're in a group. So that's the most important thing. Welcome to Lenny's podcast. I'm Lenny, and my aim here is to help you get better at the craft of building and growing products. Lenny might guess does Matt Moshari, Matt is a full-time executive coach, but not just any coach. He's worked with folks like Naval, the CEOs of OpenAI, Coinbase, Reddit, Rippling, Fair Front, Notion. The list goes on. He's also coach partners at VCs like Sequoia, YC, Benchmark, many others. We are so fortunate that Matt agreed to join me on this podcast, and in our conversation, we cover a lot of ground. We talk about why learning to fire people is one of the most important skills as a leader and how to do it well, why anger and fear often point you in the exact opposite direction you should be going, how to innovate within a larger company, how his coaching has evolved over the years, where the most successful founders still struggle, and so much more. This may be my new favorite episode, and I bet it will be yours too. There's so much real talk with tactics, templates, all kind of goodness. Enjoy this conversation with Matt Moshari. This episode is brought to you by Assembly AI. If you're looking to build powerful AI-powered features in your audio or video products, then you need to know about Assembly AI. Assembly AI is the API platform for state-of-the-art AI models that thousands of product-led growth companies like Spotify, Loom, and CallRail are using to infuse AI into their products. With simple APIs, developers and PMs can get access to powerful AI models for transcription, summarization, and dozens of other tasks that are fast, secure, and production-ready. All other models have researched and trained in-house and continuously updated by their team of AI experts, which, for a PM, makes it easy to build and ship new AI-powered features. Product teams at the startups and enterprises are using Assembly AI to automatically transcribe and summarize phone calls and virtual meetings, detect topics and podcasts, pinpoint when sensitive content is spoken, redact PII from audio videos, and way more. Visit assemblyai.com to try Assembly AI's API for free and start testing their models in their no-code playground. This episode is brought to you by Lemon.io. You've achieved product market fit, you're able to activate, engage, and retain your customers, but you don't have the engineers that you need to move as fast as you want to because it's hard to find great engineers quickly, especially if you're trying to protect
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