“We were smaller than MySpace.”
MySpace
0 recommend/use · 6 sourced episodes
Every sourced reference
Short attributed excerpts only. Timestamps are approximate.
“Myspace was the Wild West Facebook made it so you can't change the CSS”
“look at companies like Myspace well they died because their product got too slow”
“basically I sold my first company in Myspace”
“MySpace did. Or if you've been around for a little while longer, GeoCities did.”
“she was a product leader at LinkedIn, MySpace, Zynga, and Yahoo”
Related frameworks
Backcasting & Reject the Premise
Stand in the future you designed and look back — don't forecast forward from today's constraints.
Bob the Monster and the Two-Week Rule
Externalize the emotions of change into a monster, let it rage, and only act on what survives two weeks.
Category Design: Create Demand vs. Capture Demand
Design your own market category instead of competing for a slice of someone else's.
Commit-and-Celebrate Weekly Cadence
Bookend every week with Monday commitments and Friday celebrations, tracked by a short weekly status.
Copy Comps' Zero-to-One, Not Their Growth Hacking
Ignore late-stage growth tactics with no users — study what your archetype did to get its first 1,000
Cross-Subgraph Resonance Testing (Metaphor Forging)
Test framings live across unconnected audiences; the ones that land in distant subgraphs will travel.
Damming the Demand
Compete category-to-category against the status quo, never product-to-product against a rival.
Design For Tomorrow's Majority, Not The Vocal Minority
Optimize for the far larger future user base, then manage the unhappy few with authentic listening.
Differentiate Above The Model, Not Around Its Gaps
Build your moat outside the LLM so your product gets better as the models get better.
Earn The Next Role By Driving Impact In This One
Stop eyeing the next promotion; be judged on impact delivered in the job you already hold.
Follow People, Not Plans
Choose jobs by who you'll learn from, not by a five-year plan or a financial bet.
Frame, Name, Claim the Problem (Languaging & Point of View)
Use new language to reframe a problem so people see it differently and want a new solution.
Gardening Over Building (Farming for Miracles)
Plant many cheap compounding seeds instead of manufacturing outcomes with brute effort.
Give Away Your Legos
In a scaling company, repeatedly hand off what you're good at to keep climbing the growing pile.
Grade for Learning, Not Precision
Hand-wave the OKR score; spend your energy on the retrospective 'why' behind it.
Hook-Middle-End Story Structure
Package your message as a story with a hook, a middle that hides the message, and a celebratory end — then ask how to make it better.
Information-Diet Idea Divergence
Same inputs produce same ideas — mine your unique experience and starve the herd feed
Invest in High Performers by Running Experiments
Stop babysitting low performers; grow your best people by testing theories about their potential.
J-Curve vs. Stairs Career Growth
Jump off career cliffs into jobs you're unqualified for; fall for 6-9 months, then climb far beyond the stairs.
Lightning Strike Go-to-Market (Supers, POV & Word of Mouth)
Concentrate firepower on super consumers with a reframing POV to ignite word of mouth.
Organizational Kayfabe
Diagnose the shared fiction everyone knows is false — then route around it without detonating it.
Pilot-With-Your-Best-Team Rollout
Don't roll OKRs out company-wide; hand the book to your strongest team, let them adapt it, then spread by twos.
Play Yourself Like a Fiddle (Activation Energy + Always-Rules)
Beat activation energy with tight time boxes and an escalating task ladder; hold habits with always-rules.
Pre-Sell Before You Build
Do customer validation and line up buyers before writing code or raising money
Serve the Business, Not the People
Strip emotion out of hard calls by asking what you'd do if the person had no negative reaction.
Six Rules for Goals and Alignment
Goals are a communication tool: three max, one that wins, intern-legible, painful, single-owned, and followed up.
Slime Mold Org Design (Sports Car vs Big Rig)
Coordination cost grows with the square of headcount — drive the vehicle you actually have.
Strategy Salons (Nerd Clubs)
Seed a small, opt-in, yes-and idea group that spins off strategy insights as a side effect.
Superpower Naming (Be More, Not Different)
Name someone's superpower early, then frame every nudge as 'be more' rather than 'be different'.
Tar Pit Idea Detection
Spot the seductive ideas that draw everyone in and trap them — they validate but never work
The 70/30 Cover Fire Allocation
Spend 70% earning the right to exist so the other 30% can plant seeds nobody will kill.
The Adjacent Possible + Low-Resolution North Star
Take only safe next steps — but always the one with the steepest gradient toward a 3-5 year North Star.
The Better Trap
A 'better' copy of an existing solution to a well-understood problem almost always fails.
The Bits and Bobs Idea Distillation Loop
Capture everything, filter weekly by resonance, distil, publish — a compounding personal insight engine.
The Calendar Customer-Contact Audit
20-30% of your calendar should say 'customer meeting' — in person, not behind a keyboard
The Collison Install (Last-Mile Close)
A 'yes' isn't a sale — hand-hold implementation until the customer is fully live
The Don't-Die Keep-Going / Give-Up Decision
Deciding whether to persist or shut down by testing love, energy, and remaining moves
The 'Going Home' Pivot
A good pivot moves warmer — toward your existing expertise and what your last idea taught you
The Hated-Incumbent Idea Prompt
Find a big incumbent customers hate with terrible software, then build the replacement
The Ideas-Left Pivot Timing Test
Pivot when you're out of credible growth ideas, not just because growth is slow
The Mission-to-Monday Cascade
Translate a 5-year mission down through strategy and quarterly OKRs into what you actually do this week.
The PM-Engineering Alignment Operating System
Run product and engineering as one leadership unit with clear ownership and async, iterated reviews.
The Three-Peer 24-Hour Approval
Replace slow top-down OKR sign-off with three peers who sanity-check your goals in a 24-hour turnaround.
The Waterline Model (Snorkel Before You Scuba)
Diagnose team problems from the top down: structure and dynamics, not the people, cause 80% of issues.
Throwaway Prototyping To Discover The Product
Build disposable prototypes on real data to feel what works before writing any production code.
Triangulated Key Results
Measure one quarterly objective from three angles — a hard number, a squishy quality metric, and a dollar figure.
Use AI As Leverage On Your PM Time
Assign the model a role, feed it more context than you could read, and iterate the prompt until it works.
People in these episodes
Related resources
- Airbnb
- Amazon
- Amazon Web Services
- Andreessen Horowitz
- Anthropic
- Apple
- Apple App Store
- Apple Podcasts
- Apple Store
- Apple Watch
- Atomic Habits
- AWS
- Ben's Bites
- Beso Chocolate
- Brex
- Category Pirates
- CategoryPirates.com
- ChatGPT
- ChatPRD
- Claude
- Cloud Atlas
- Coda
- Columbo
- Compendium
- Config
- Creativity, Inc.
- Cursor
- Discord
- DoorDash
- DoubleClick
- Dovetail
- Dreamforce
- Eppo
- Figma
- Flexport
- Floodgate
- Forrester
- Founding Sales
- Foursquare
- Gartner
- Gemini
- Getting to Yes
- GitHub Copilot
- Glean
- Glue Club
- Gmail
- Gong
- Google Analytics
- Google Chrome
- Google Docs
- Google Maps
- Google Search
- Google Workspace
- GPT
- GPT-3
- Gusto
- Hacker News
- Harvard Business Review
- Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child
- How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk
- Illusions
- Inventing Anna
- iPhone
- LaunchDarkly
- Lenny's Newsletter
- Lenny's Podcast
- LennyPodcast.com
- lennyspodcast.com
- Listen
- Localmind
- Lomi
- Magpie Murders
- Medium
- Meta
- Microsoft
- Minto Pyramid Principle
- Miro
- Mixpanel
- Napster
- National Outdoor Leadership School
- Netflix
- Nielsen
- No Priors
- Notion
- OpenAI
- Oura Ring
- PayPal
- Peloton
- Perplexity
- PostHog
- Radical Focus
- Retool
- Rippling
- Rivian
- Salesforce
- SAP
- Scaling People
- Segment
- ServiceNow
- Sidebar
- SiPhox Health
- Slack
- Slack Clips
- Slack Huddles
- Snyk
- SpaceX
- Spotify
- Sprig
- Stanford University
- Starbucks
- Stripe
- Substack
- Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard
- Team of Rivals
- TechCrunch
- TED
- Tesla
- The Back of the Napkin
- The Cognitive Revolution
- The Everything Store
- The Fearless Organization
- The Five Dysfunctions of a Team
- The Green Knight
- The Neuron
- The New York Times
- The Origin of Wealth
- The Overstory
- The Sopranos
- The Wire
- Thinking in Systems
- Threads
- Vanta
- Websim
- What They Don't Teach You at Harvard Business School
- Whatnot
- Wikipedia
- Working Backwards
- Writer
- Y Combinator
- Yahoo
- Zip
- Zoom
- Zynga
Spot an error or want this page removed? Request a correction or removal.