Lenny Rachitsky writes Lenny’s Newsletter and hosts Lenny’s Podcast about product management, growth and careers. A former Airbnb product lead and Localmind co-founder, he combines practitioner interviews with advice for people building and leading products.[1][2]
Start with How I built a 1M+ subscriber newsletter and top 10 tech podcast →
X Career
Rachitsky co-founded and led Localmind, a location-based question-and-answer app, before working at Airbnb. Product School’s speaker biography describes him as an Airbnb product lead responsible for consumer supply growth, managing product managers and a wider cross-functional team. It also records a BS in Computer Science and Engineering from UC San Diego.[2]
Contributions
Turning product practice into a publication
Lenny’s Newsletter publishes researched answers about building products, growing them and progressing in a career. The associated podcast interviews people who have done that work. The publication pairs those resources with an archive and a private subscriber community, so its contribution is a continuing body of practitioner explanations rather than a single product-management method.[3]
Documenting the changing work of builders
His interviews extend into AI-assisted development. An episode with OpenAI’s Sherwin Wu examines software development, while Claire Vo’s episode explains specialized OpenClaw agents, practical uses and operating constraints. The Cursor guide with Zevi Arnovitz addresses product managers who want to build without a conventional engineering background. Rachitsky hosts these conversations; the guests’ tools and company work remain theirs.[5][6][7]
Ideas
In a March 2026 episode, Rachitsky becomes the interviewee and discusses the events that led to the newsletter, the decision to add a paywall, and the work of publishing a post and podcast each week. That account is a useful companion to the advice archive because it shows how he applies iteration and a deliberately small business structure to his own work.[4]
Tools, writing & talks
Writing, research & talks
Start here
How I built a 1M+ subscriber newsletter and top 10 tech podcastlennysnewsletter.comA March 2026 interview in which Rachitsky explains the development and operation of his publication.
Begin here for the person behind the archive and his approach to quality and iteration. The episode page provides a public overview; some written material requires a subscription.
Interview subject and publisher[4]- Inside the black box of AI: How AI models actually think | Emmanuel Ameisen (Anthropic)lennysnewsletter.com
Anthropic interpretability researcher Emmanuel Ameisen discusses evidence that models plan many tokens ahead, form general concept representations, and scale smoothly, and what this means for alignment and safety work.
Catalog workOriginal source - OpenAI’s Head of ChatGPT: We’re entering a new era of AI (again) | Tibo Sottiauxlennysnewsletter.com
Lenny Rachitsky interviews OpenAI's Tibo Sottiaux at DevDay about Dots, the new personal agent platform, why most internet actions will move to agents, and why workflow scaffolding such as loops and graphs is temporary.
Catalog workOriginal source - How we built Grok Bot in a month | Roman Ugarte (SpaceXAI)lennysnewsletter.com
Lenny's Newsletter interviews the engineer who took xAI's Grok Bot from first commit to public launch in about seven weeks, covering the decision to build it standalone rather than inside Cursor, the early product bets that drove adoption, and personally onboarding its first 300 users.
Catalog workOriginal source - AI’s third era: the rise of persistent AI coworkers | Tara Seshan (OpenAI’s product lead)lennysnewsletter.com
OpenAI's Codex product lead on building for model capabilities two to three months out, and what changes when agents take over execution: judgment and scoped ambition become the scarce inputs rather than throughput. A look at how a frontier lab plans product against a moving capability curve.
Catalog workOriginal source - OpenAI’s Head of Design: This is the best time in history to be a designer | Ian Silberlennysnewsletter.com
OpenAI's head of product design on the practice behind ChatGPT and Codex: why designers feel displaced while engineers got 10x'd, what OpenAI screens for when hiring, a "just do less" rule for scope, and the argument for ChatGPT as a super app.
Catalog workOriginal source - Anthropic’s first technical PM on token maxing, the jagged edge, and living in the future | Dianne Pennlennysnewsletter.com
Dianne Penn joined Anthropic as its first technical product manager when the product team was five engineers, and has shipped every model since Claude 2 while helping incubate Claude Code, MCP, Skills, computer use and reasoning.
Catalog workOriginal source - Why OpenAI is merging Codex and ChatGPT and the future of knowledge work | Andrew Ambrosinoyoutube.com
Codex lead Andrew Ambrosino explains why OpenAI is merging Codex and ChatGPT, how internal use spread across the company, and how product team roles shift as implementation gets cheap.
Catalog workOriginal source - OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosinolennysnewsletter.com
Andrew Ambrosino, who leads the Codex desktop app at OpenAI where nearly every employee now uses it weekly, on what product work looks like when the thing you are building is an agent surface.
Catalog workOriginal source - What happens after coding is solved? | Fiona Fung (Manager of the Claude Code and Cowork Teams)lennysnewsletter.com
Fiona Fung leads the Claude Code and Cowork teams at Anthropic, after 11 years at Microsoft on Visual Studio and TypeScript and a stint at Meta starting Facebook Marketplace, on what professional work looks like once coding is solved.
Catalog workOriginal source - A Rational Conversation on Where AI Is Actually Goinglennysnewsletter.com
Benedict Evans argues AI is a 1997-scale shift — real, but only as large as the internet — and works through the consequences: where value accrues across the stack, why distribution outlasts capability as a moat, and why the task-versus-job distinction matters more than automation percentages.
Catalog workOriginal source - The AI paradox: More automation, more humans, more work | Dan Shipperlennysnewsletter.com
Dan Shipper of Every, a year after correctly predicting people were sleeping on Claude Code for non-technical work, returns with the AI paradox: more automation is producing more humans doing more work, not fewer.
Catalog workOriginal source - Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion)lennysnewsletter.com
Notion's head of product Max Schoening argues agency matters more than skills in the AI era: even with every skill at your fingertips, what separates people is the willingness to act, and it is not evenly distributed.
Catalog workOriginal source - How Anthropic’s product team moves faster than anyone else | Cat Wu (Head of Product, Claude Code)lennysnewsletter.com
Cat Wu, head of product for Claude Code and Cowork, on how Anthropic's shipping cadence went from months to days, the hard problem of building for the current model rather than an imagined stronger one, and the skills PMs now need.
Catalog workOriginal source - Head of Growth (Anthropic): “Claude is growing itself at this point” | Amol Avasarelennysnewsletter.com
Amol Avasare, Anthropic's head of growth, on scaling from $1 billion to over $19 billion in ARR in 14 months, cold-emailing his way into the role, and why at this point Claude is growing itself.
Catalog workOriginal source - An AI state of the union: We’ve passed the inflection point, dark factories are coming, and automation timelines | Simon Willisonlennysnewsletter.com
Simon Willison gives an AI state of the union: the inflection point has passed, coding agents changed the daily texture of programming, and the terms he coined — prompt injection, AI slop, agentic engineering — name where things now stand.
Catalog workOriginal source - From skeptic to true believer: How OpenClaw changed my life | Claire Volennysnewsletter.com
An interview with Claire Vo about specialized agents, concrete uses and practical limits.
Host and publisher[6]Original source - The design process is dead. Here’s what’s replacing it. | Jenny Wen (head of design at Claude)lennysnewsletter.com
Jenny Wen, who leads design for Claude at Anthropic after directing design at Figma, argues the classic discovery-mock-iterate process is dead: designers no longer have time for beautiful mocks, and the role shifts to helping teams execute.
Catalog workOriginal source - Head of Claude Code: What happens after coding is solved | Boris Chernylennysnewsletter.com
Boris Cherny on Claude Code going from a terminal prototype to 4% of public GitHub commits in a year, the counterintuitive product principles behind it, and what happens to the profession once coding is solved.
Catalog workOriginal source - “Engineers are becoming sorcerers” | The future of software development with OpenAI’s Sherwin Wulennysnewsletter.com
A conversation with OpenAI’s Sherwin Wu about the future of software development.
Host and publisher[5]Original source - The rise of the professional vibe coder (a new AI-era job) | Lazar Jovanovic (Professional Vibe Coder)lennysnewsletter.com
Lazar Jovanovic builds internal tools and customer-facing products at Lovable entirely with AI and no coding background, and argues that lacking one can be an advantage rather than a handicap.
Catalog workOriginal source - The non-technical PM’s guide to building with Cursor | Zevi Arnovitz (Meta)lennysnewsletter.com
Zevi Arnovitz, a Meta product manager with no technical background, breaks down the complete Cursor workflow he uses to build and ship real products, which his own engineering team asks him to teach.
Catalog workOriginal source - Why most AI products fail: Lessons from 50+ AI deployments at OpenAI, Google, and Amazonlennysnewsletter.com
Aishwarya Naresh Reganti and Kiriti Badam distill lessons from over 50 enterprise AI deployments at OpenAI, Google, Amazon and Databricks into the practices that separate AI products that ship from those that quietly fail.
Catalog workOriginal source - The coming AI security crisis (and what to do about it) | Sander Schulhofflennysnewsletter.com
AI security researcher Sander Schulhoff, who ran the first prompt injection competition, argues the guardrails companies are buying do not work against a determined attacker, and lays out what to do instead.
Catalog workOriginal source - Why humans are AI’s biggest bottleneck (and what’s coming in 2026) | Alexander Embiricos (OpenAI Codex Product Lead)lennysnewsletter.com
Alexander Embiricos, who leads product on Codex at OpenAI, on the agent's 20x growth since August, building a software engineering teammate that spans the whole development lifecycle, and why humans are becoming the bottleneck.
Catalog workOriginal source - The 100-person AI lab that became Anthropic and Google's secret weapon | Edwin Chen (Surge AI)lennysnewsletter.com
Edwin Chen's Surge AI passed $1 billion in revenue with under 100 employees and no outside funding, supplying frontier labs with the data, environments and evaluations that teach models what counts as good.
Catalog workOriginal source - Full Stack Builder (LinkedIn)lennysnewsletter.com
LinkedIn's CPO on scrapping the associate PM track for a full-stack builder role that ships end to end, the specialized agents built to critique ideas and probe for weaknesses, why generic coding tools stalled on their enterprise code, and the change management that made it stick.
Catalog workOriginal source - The Godmother of AI (Lenny's Podcast with Dr. Fei-Fei Li)lennysnewsletter.com
Fei-Fei Li on how ImageNet set off the deep learning era and why she thinks the next one runs through spatial intelligence: what world models do that language models cannot, where Marble is already being used, and why robotics remains harder than text.
Catalog workOriginal source Chip Huyen covers AI engineering fundamentals, why many companies struggle to ship AI products, how hard coding-agent productivity is to measure, and how to improve apps via user feedback.
Catalog workOriginal source- Why AI evals are the hottest new skill for product builders | Hamel Husain & Shreya Shankaryoutube.com
Two eval experts lay out a lightweight process for evaluating AI products: open-code real traces with a single trusted domain expert, avoid committee overhead, and treat evals as an actionable improvement loop.
Catalog workOriginal source - Why experts writing AI evals is creating the fastest-growing companies in history | Brendan Foodyyoutube.com
Mercor's Brendan Foody explains why expert-authored evals and RL environments have become the lab bottleneck, and how a labor marketplace for professionals scaled around that need.
Catalog workOriginal source
