How a Meta PM ships products without ever writing code | Zevi Arnovitz

Lenny Rachitsky:You are a product manager shipping product without knowing how to write code barely knowing how to review code.

Zevi Arnovitz:I have zero technical background did music in high school when sonnet 3.5 came out I remember watching a YouTube video building apps using Bolt or Lovable it basically felt like someone came up to me and said you have superpowers now.

Lenny Rachitsky:These days you're using Cursor with Claude Code.

Zevi Arnovitz:If you're nontechnical like me code is terrifying but AI just makes so much possible in the next coming years I think everyone's gonna become a builder titles are gonna collapse and responsibilities are gonna collapse.

Lenny Rachitsky:The main challenge people have is reviewing the code that AI has written.

Zevi Arnovitz:It's very difficult for me to catch mistakes what I'll do is basically slash review this tells Claude to start reviewing its own code but what's even cooler is I have Codex as well as Cursor open I will have each of them review the code.

Lenny Rachitsky:This comes back to this quote I think everyone's always hearing it's not that you will be replaced by AI you'll be replaced by someone who's better at using AI than you.

Zevi Arnovitz:It's the best time to be a junior contrary to what a lot of people are saying how there's no more junior roles out there yeah that's true but also when else in history could you get out of school and just build a startup on your own.

Lenny Rachitsky:Today my guest is Zevi Arnovitz Zevi's a PM at Meta prior to that was a PM at Wix and this is a truly remarkable conversation that every nontechnical product person needs to hear Zevi is super young and has no technical background but as a smart young ambitious person has learned how to use Cursor and Claude Code to build significant and real products completely on his own and he's created his own very clever and effective workflow that everyone listening can copy to make that copying even easier at the top of the show notes of this episode you can download all of the prompts and slash commands and start doing all of this yourself Zevi shows you how to work with Cursor to quickly add your ideas to Linear to explore your idea with AI how to develop your plan how to then build the thing and then have different LLMs review your code and update your documentation and then use all of this as a learning opportunity to develop your own sense of how things work I haven't stopped thinking about this conversation since we had it and everyone needs to pay attention to what AI is unlocking for nontechnical people a huge thank you to Tal Raviv for encouraging me to meet Zevi if you enjoy this podcast don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube it helps tremendously and if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter you get 19 premium products for free for an entire year including Lovable Replit Bold Gamma N8M Linear Devon Posthawk Superhuman Descript Whisper Flow Perplexity Warp Granola Magic Pattern Drakehouse Chappy RD Mobbin and Stripe Atlas head on over to Lenny'snewsletter.com and click product pass with that I bring you Zevi Arnovitz after a short word from our sponsors this episode is brought to you by Ten Web the company that pioneered AI website building before ChatGPT in the last three years over 2,000,000 websites have been generated with Ten Web's Vibe coding platform Ten Web's Vibe coding platform is a powerful way to build websites think of it as Lovable for WordPress front end and back end users can build any website at any complexity ecommerce portfolios information websites blogs and it comes with a WordPress admin panel and thousands of ready to use plugins 10Web also offers website generation as an API as a service for SaaS companies marketplaces hosting providers MSPs and agencies SaaS companies can embed it via API so that users can launch AI generated sites directly inside of their platform connected to their own data agencies and MSPs can get a white label dashboard to manage clients and resell under their brand hosting providers can self host the API builder on their own infrastructure check it out at 10web.io/lenny and use code Lenny for exclusive free credits and 30% off API or white labeled solutions that's the number 10web.io/lenny Vibe coding platform as an API today's episode is brought to you by DX the developer intelligence platform designed by leading researchers to thrive in the AI era organizations need to adapt quickly but many organization leaders struggle to answer pressing questions like which tools are working how are they being used what's actually driving value DX provides the data and insights that leaders need to navigate this shift with DX companies like Dropbox Booking.com Adyen and Intercom get a deep understanding of how AI is providing value to their developers and what impact AI is having on engineering productivity to learn more visit DX's website at getdx.com/lenny that's getdx.com/lenny.

Lenny Rachitsky:Zevi thank you so much for being here and

Zevi Arnovitz:Welcome to the podcast thanks for having me Lenny I'm a huge fan of the show and tons of people that I've admired most and learned the most from have been on here so it's a crazy moment for me I'm really excited for this.

Lenny Rachitsky:I really appreciate that I wanna start by reading actually a note I got about you from Tal Raviv who is a previous podcast guest many time newsletter collaborator one of the most AI forward product managers that I know I've learned a ton from him so here's what he said about you when he introduced us Zevi is the most hands on vibe coding PM I know and I personally learned so much from him his engineers at Meta ask him to teach them how to do what he does every time we get coffee I repeatedly get this feeling of everyone needs to be hearing this.

Zevi Arnovitz:That's so nice.

Lenny Rachitsky:And so that's the goal that's the goal of this conversation is to help more people hear what you figured out we're gonna get very hands on we're gonna do a lot of show versus tell showing people what you've figured out about how to be a PM a nontechnical PM building stuff I wanna give people a little bit of background on you because I think this is gonna inspire a lot of listeners to feel like they can also do what we're about to show you it's gonna look very advanced but just give people a little bit of sense of just your background.

Zevi Arnovitz:I'm very nontechnical I have zero technical background did music in high school a lot of Israelis do technology units in the army I was not in a tech unit and basically a year ago I was traveling with my wife for three months in Asia and we were in Japan and that was around when sonnet 3.5 came out and I remember watching a YouTube video I think it was either Greg Eisenberg or Riley Brown and they were basically building apps using it was either Bolt or Lovable just using AI and it was like a crazy moment for me because I was watching this and it basically felt like someone came up to me and said hey Zevi there's this cool new technology you should check out you should really give it a try oh and by the way you have superpowers now and the second I got home from Japan I didn't even unpack my bags ran to my computer opened Bolt opened an account and for the past year I've been building and the last thing I'll say on that is we talked about this a bit before we started recording but I was prepping with Claude for the episode and I was trying to clarify what my goal is for this episode and Claude said if people walk away thinking how amazing you are you failed if people walk away and open their computer and start building you've succeeded I really hope that we can inspire some people to do the same.

Lenny Rachitsky:I love that so much. I feel like that should be the goal for my podcast. If you're like, I love that guest, it's less of a win if it's just like I'm so inspired to do the thing that they figured out. That is the real win. I love Claude. It's the best.

Zevi Arnovitz:I agree.

Lenny Rachitsky:Okay, so let's dive in and give people, let's start with kind of a high level overview of how you operate and use AI in your job. What are the core tools and just what's kinda like the frame of reference for the workflow that you figured out and how you operate?

Zevi Arnovitz:This all started where I was a projects power user. I love projects GPT projects.

Lenny Rachitsky:BC projects.

Zevi Arnovitz:Yeah, exactly GPT projects and cloud projects which are basically a shared folder of chats which share both custom instructions and a shared knowledge base. And I think it was around when GPT started using memory where I thought it was interesting but it really annoyed me because I do a bunch of different things like I'm a terrible runner, I'm a PM, I was a student psychology student, so I had all these different facets of life. And what happened was the memory feature was mixing stuff up. So like I talked to GPT about running and it would say, oh yeah, after this 5K you're gonna crush all your next product reviews. And it's like, I mean, okay, I understand that you have that in your memory but it's just not relevant. And projects basically allows you to compartmentalize and have things within the right context. So tracking back to the story I told, when we came back from Japan I started building this app. The first thing I noticed was that these products were built in a way where, and these when I say these products I mean Bolt and Lovable, were built in a way where they were super eager to write code. So their system prompt was you're a coding agent, so when you write something they'd straight away start coding. So at the beginning of a project this was super fun and exciting because they just go and start building your app but later on when things got more complex this created much more problems because planning is really important when you're implementing something technical and let's say you're implementing payments or something that's gonna be a change to your database. If the coding agent is just like alright I got it and just starts writing code this always results in terrible things, some really gnarly bugs that I had. And to mitigate this what I did was I created sort of a CTO. So again I'm not technical, I have been in product for a while but I know zero zero stuff about code. So basically what I did was I created a CTO with the custom prompt of it being the complete technical owner of the project. So I told it I own the problem, I own how we want the users to feel, you're the complete owner of how this is gonna be built, I want you to challenge me, I don't want you to be a people pleaser, all these things that kinda mitigate the regular chattypityisms. I always think about this where for some reason the easiest way for me to think about AI is to imagine it as people and I think chattypity would probably be the worst CTO because it's such a people pleaser and it's so sycophantic where I mean just a short story I had a few weeks ago I was trying to learn about Bun JavaScript which was acquired by Anthropic and I was trying to understand what they do so I was talking to GPT and this wasn't within my cofounder CTO project and I asked it if it's similar to a different framework that I have in my app called Zoosestend which nothing to do at all with what Bun JavaScript does and basically GPT goes oh yeah it's exactly the same and then it started talking about what it meant and I was like wait no these are not the same at all and it said like the most terrifying and hilarious thing he goes oh I'm sorry I thought you were just making this up and I was riffing with you and I was like oh no no no this is terrible. So basically if regular ChatGPT was a CTO that would be the CTO who like goes along with your dumbest ideas. So creating the project allowed me to mitigate that.

Lenny Rachitsky:So this is just to be super clear you have a ChatGPT project that you've given a prompt to be your CTO of your product and being a nontechnical person this is kinda like the thing you talk to when you don't when and we'll get to what you're actually using to build when you have questions about architecture and decisions that are technical.

Zevi Arnovitz:Yeah so now I'll show, I'll show my full workflow and I don't involve GPT anymore but I definitely would recommend even though the technology has gone so when I started this there was no plan mode or ask mode it was just build on these products on Lovable and Bolt and they've progressed a ton. A lot of what I had as workflows have become ingrained in these products which is really interesting. I would still recommend start with a project for first of all the reason that I said and also it kinda puts you in a place where you're in a chatbot and not writing code so you take the time to converse and to learn which I think is critical. And the second thing is if you're nontechnical like me code is terrifying. It's the scariest thing in the world to look at and I look at it as kinda like exposure therapy. I think if you see this where I'm working like in Claude or in Cursor you might be excited to start using those but I would really recommend starting slow with a GPT project, beautiful UI, super simple then maybe graduate to like a Bolt or a Lovable and then go to Cursor in light mode slowly slowly gradually ease in until you like open a terminal, you know go full dark mode go full dev so I would really recommend doing this gradually.

Lenny Rachitsky:That is awesome advice and so just to be clear these days you're using Cursor with Claude code powering it and what I love about that is that you're not you've never written code you don't even the way you put it you're afraid of even looking at code.

Zevi Arnovitz:You have, yeah.

Lenny Rachitsky:You have to do exposure therapy and I love that Cursor is useful to you and what you're telling us is that graduating from a ChatGPT project that is kind of your technical cofounder kind of taught you enough to feel more comfortable going straight to Cursor. You said that you actually went to Bolt and Lovable kind of in the interim and then you went to just straight to Cursor. What's the reason to just go straight to Cursor? Just Cursor? Is it just Cursor? Cursor can do everything and once you get the hang of it it's actually the most powerful tool.

Zevi Arnovitz:Yeah I think I graduated from each tool when I kind of outgrew it. So Bolt was awesome until I was trying to connect payments to my app and it kinda started losing it and then I graduated to Cursor and I've actually fallen in love with Claude so I'm using Claude code but that also runs within Cursor and I think this is Tal who told me this I'm not sure who he's quoting but code is just words at the end of the day so it's just files on your computer so basically you can be working on the same project and carry it from app to app and especially now I can work on with multiple models and apps on my project. So start slow but definitely there's a lot of places you can graduate to.

Lenny Rachitsky:Awesome okay should we dive into screen share showing how you operate?

Zevi Arnovitz:Awesome I pulled up Cursor can you see it? Mhmm perfect. So within my codebase what you can see here on the left these are all my code files here on the right is Cursor so this is basically like having AI which has access to all the code and here in the middle I have Claude code running and what you can see here I'm gonna close Cursor for a second what you can see here are all my slash commands. Basically what slash commands are they are reusable prompts that I save within the code base that I can run by writing slash and then the name of the file. So here you can see create issue which is the first command that I'm gonna use and basically what this tells Claude it says the user is mid development and thought of a bug or a feature in improvement capture it fast so they can keep working and then it basically says this is the format that I want you to capture the linear issue in and it explains a bunch of things what exactly Claude needs to do to get there. So the way I invoke this is basically I'll do slash create issue and this injects this prompt into Claude so it says I'm ready to help you to capture this issue what's on your mind. So basically I'll do this is if I'm working on a big project and I suddenly come across a bug or have an idea that I don't wanna work on right now but I wanna work on later I'll do this really quick and Claude's main goal is to quickly capture what I'm thinking about so quickly to run through my full workflow. So basically it starts with creating an issue so this is the create issue slash command which basically tells Claude that I'm in development and it should quickly capture what I'm thinking about and create an issue within Linear. Then later on when I wanna pick this up I have the exploration phase. Exploration phase is basically telling Claude we're gonna only explore what we wanna solve here it could either pull from Linear or I can just speak freely to it and what it will do is it will analyze and understand the issue and just ask clarifying questions. The next phase after we've done finished exploration phase is we're gonna create a plan so you can see create plan this basically has a template that I love for creating a plans and the output of this at the end of the day will be a markdown file with our plan that we can end up building along with code. After creating the plan we have execute plan after execution we have review and then we have peer review which is really cool and we'll get into later on and at the end we update the docs so this is updating documentation and everything so that agents can write better code later on. So I think what we'll do is we're gonna build a feature live for my app which I think is really cool but first what I'd like to do is show you the app so you have some context. So this is StudyMate it's a platform for students which allows them to upload study materials and create interactive tests based on their own materials. So here we can go to the top let's upload a PDF.

Zevi Arnovitz:We can decide what pages we wanna be quizzed on we can decide the number of questions the difficulty level and basically what happens behind the scenes is we send the information the user uploaded along with the system prompt and any other augmentations the user's decided to Gemini and we create a quiz these are challenging questions that are meant to assess comprehension you even have some hints and once we do a few of these we can submit I got them right.

Lenny Rachitsky:Terrible results yeah love it and so just to be really clear about this this is like a side business that you have an app that you that's do that's making just like a thing you vibe coded having no

Zevi Arnovitz:Yeah technical assistance my weekend project yeah this is what I do amazing on weekends yeah so you get basically deep explanations into why each question was wrong or each question was right and at the moment studymate only has multiple choice questions and I was doing some competitor research over over the last weekend and I saw competitors who had true or false questions and also fill in the blank questions which I loved so I think that'd be really cool if we could build that live I

Lenny Rachitsky:Love it I'm crossing crossing your fingers this will work I just want I I just wanna highlight the stuff you shared right before this in cursor so this is a huge deal what you described here this is essentially what you've figured out as a way as a non a person that has no idea how to write any code how to build a product in cursor as a product manager using this series of slash commands that you've concocted that you're gonna be sharing with listeners they can download all these and just use them directly they don't have to figure out all these prompts that you've you've figured out

Zevi Arnovitz:Yeah 100% basically happened was I formulated the backbone of this with the CTO and it was basically within the system prompt of the CTO project that I had within GPT so it said step one we do this step two we do this and now I'll keep building and if I see something that happens over and over again I'll just create a slash command and then it will be automated within the workflow

Lenny Rachitsky:Amazing so just to summarize the slash command so one is create an issue in linear which I love linear is awesome shout out

Zevi Arnovitz:To also from yeah the product task

Lenny Rachitsky:From the product task there oh my god what value okay so step one is create the issue in linear so it's a command so this prompt slash slash command you've created just create issue then it's explorer which is explore the idea help me ideate on what this could be and this is Claude helping you think through the feature and product then it's actually create the plan and so it's like the AI helping you build the plan to build the product then it's actually execute which is just build the thing yeah and then there's this review peer review step which is awesome that you'll share then there's document update documentation based on the speech exactly feature that we're

Zevi Arnovitz:Sweet yeah cool so let's go ahead and start building so I'm gonna use WhisperFlow to dictate and basically this starts with slash create issue so this basically sends that prompt and I love this because I usually do this during when I'm building something else so basically it tells Claude that I'm mid building something and I don't have a lot of time to to to waste time on this so just ask some brief questions so that you have enough to capture within linear so I wanna add fill in the blank questions to studymate I want this to be 30% of tests to be generated as fill in the blank questions I want there to be six potential answers for two blank spots and of course there's only gonna be two correct answers so one correct answer and two incorrect answers for each spot and I want the interface to be drag and drop so that's just basically a quick think of of of how I want this to work so it's gonna ask me a few questions quizzes are a 100% multiple choice question structure single sentence pass through two blanks and priority so one and two are correct and this is not high priority it's a nice to have feature so now basically what cloud is gonna do is it's gonna use MCP which is basically a technology that was created by Anthropic which gives AI the ability to use tools so this is connected to my linear what so it's gonna do now is it's gonna use everything we've said and create an issue within linear

Lenny Rachitsky:And by the way as as this is loading I just love the way the way you describe this especially doing voice mode it's like exactly how you would talk to an engineer describing a feature here's what I want and then they ask you questions here's the clarification

Zevi Arnovitz:Yeah so at first when I was doing this with the CTO I would do it with Chattypiti voice mode and that was crazy that was like literally felt like ideating with a person it would push back ask questions and maybe one day you know the coding tools will get there too but that was exactly it really felt like sitting with my CTO great so created STU 88 so if we open up linear now we should be able to see

Zevi Arnovitz:Let's see where STU 88 there it is fill in the blank questions with drag and drop interface so it has a TLDR it has the current state it did a little bit of research on the code base I think expected outcomes some context so yeah so this is basically ready for me to pick up when I'm interested in building so now let's say a few days go by I finished the current project I'm working on I can pick it up so when I pick it up I do slash exploration phase which is what we said and then instead of pressing enter I'll press tab and I'll show you this so basically exploration phase what it does is it will take an argument this is basically a placeholder within the prompt which allows me to enter something that is extra context for the for the AI so I can say here linear STU 88 which is referencing the ticket and now what it's gonna do is it's gonna go it's gonna fetch the linear ticket

Lenny Rachitsky:And what's the idea what's the goal of the exploration phase this is kinda ideate on the idea

Zevi Arnovitz:Is that the exactly

Lenny Rachitsky:Idea okay

Zevi Arnovitz:So it's it's both for the CTO to deeply understand the problem that we're trying to solve and also understand the current state of the code base what files need to be affected and how is the best way to implement this technically and usually what happens is right now Claude's just basically reading a bunch of files understanding the basic structure of the code and then it's gonna come back with a bunch of clarifying questions as that will decide how we end up implementing this

Lenny Rachitsky:So it's like it it feels like it's talking to your engineering manager.

Zevi Arnovitz:Exactly exactly a 100% this is this is how I think about it.

Lenny Rachitsky:And you said that your CTO so you used to use ChatGPT prompt to have a CTO in there now the CTO's living inside here in Cursor.

Zevi Arnovitz:Yeah because of the way the tools have developed and they've become so good at both exploration and code execution so now it's I it's just a kind of a habit that I call it a CTO but it's basically all in one the the same agent will will both do the exploration and write the plan and end up executing the code.

Lenny Rachitsky:Got it so it's basically it's Claude code is there like a prompt you gave it to act like that to act like the right kind of CTO?

Zevi Arnovitz:Yeah so within the Claude MD which is basically the system prompt that's loaded within Claude's context in every conversation I have some basic stuff like this is our workflow this is how we work within exploration phase I want you to challenge my thinking all kinds of stuff like that that can be loaded yeah within the clotmd file.

Lenny Rachitsky:Cool one last question before before we move on here just because it's I'm thinking about it as this happens the Linear issue that you generated how often is it is it actually great and ready how often do you have to edit it what's like the quality of the Linear ticket that it generates because you know a lot of people are like probably wondering just like all these terrible Linear issues are being created by AI are they actually any good?

Zevi Arnovitz:It's completely different because I'm a company of one so a lot of the context is within here and there's no need for me to like talk to other teams and understand it's basically very accessible and also I can easily see when Claude understood something wrong I don't wanna say that I would create Linear issues at work like this but definitely if you're building your own side project it's they're they're pretty quality and also it just kicks off the the when I wanna start working on it it's not I wouldn't say it's ready to be built it's ready to start being explored.

Lenny Rachitsky:Got it so it's just the beginning of an idea actually let's come back after we go through this flow of how you would approach this if you were at say Meta or another maybe a smaller company how this workflow might work at a larger company that isn't just your own startup.

Zevi Arnovitz:Yeah interesting.

Lenny Rachitsky:Let's come back to.

Zevi Arnovitz:That cool alright so this is Claude coming back I have a comprehensive understanding of the codebase I thoroughly analyzed StudyMate live codebase and understand the current system feature request and key areas that it's identified usually I'd spend a lot of time going over this because this is super super important but just for the sake of development right now we're gonna brush through this now Claude basically comes back after it's gone through the code base and understood the way it currently works it's basically telling me what the current understanding is so it's talking about how the app is set up at the moment how the data is structured what it understood from the feature request and what's is that what it's it has identified as key areas and then it asked me some questions so it's asking about the scope it's asking about the data model the UX UI of the feature how it should be validated how it should be graded what changes need to be happened to the AI system prompt and all kinds of questions about the app I've prepared answers to all these questions beforehand because I don't think we all wanna sit through this so I'm just gonna paste that in and we'll see what Claude says.

Lenny Rachitsky:Awesome I love it and I love just just scanning those questions he was asking it's like such smart sophisticated important questions instead of just cool here I go I'm gonna build it.

Zevi Arnovitz:Yeah and I think this is the big difference between like just vibe coding and going along with the vibes and really building serious apps I spend a lot a lot of time going back and forth and understanding also a very cool slash command that I haven't showed yet is learning opportunity which basically when something is really difficult for me to understand I'll do slash learning opportunity and then talk about what I wanna learn and this basically primes Claude and says I am a technical PM in the making I have mid level engineering knowledge I understand architect architecture and basically I want you to explain what we're currently working on using the eighty twenty rule so this is a great way to learn I would definitely take this and every time you kind of see something that you don't fully understand I would definitely use this to learn great so Claude basically comes back and says how it understands the current data model and how it's gonna implement yeah so it's ready to create the plan so basically what I'm gonna do now is I'm gonna go and do slash create plan and while Todd's doing this I'm gonna show really quick what this looks like so basically these plans are from a template that I found on Twitter I forgot who it was but it was just a template that really resonated with me and it's basically saying based on our exchange create a markdown file that will be the plan include clear minimal concise steps track the status so this basically has like status trackers on each task that Claude updates as it's going through and it will have a TLDR some critical decisions that we've made and the plan itself so Claude's finished writing the plan so we'll be able to look and see exactly what the plan is so it has a TLDR it has the critical decisions we've made and the tasks broken down and this is a perfect plan and it's also a really good way to write this because a lot of times I'll use different models to execute certain stuff so Cursor has an amazing model called Composer which is super fast so a lot of things that are not that complex I'll use Composer Gemini three that just came out is unbelievable at UI so a lot of times I'll split the plan into back end and front end and then I'll have Gemini just read the plan and do the front end so having this as a markdown file is really good and also going forward it's really good to have within the app so that later on if an agent is writing code in a certain area I can see what's already been done there so what we're gonna do now is we're gonna execute the plan so now I think we're gonna do this with Cursor just because Composer's so freaking fast so what we can do is basically just say execute and then we can tag the file and Composer is ridiculously fast so that's it it's off it basically understands what the plan is and it's gonna go ahead and start writing the code.

Lenny Rachitsky:Let me ask you a question while this is happening awesome I have many questions so this is good time to ask a few of them you said that Lovable and Bolt are and other you know other apps in that space are are just not enough to build really serious apps and you had to move to Cursor to do that what tell us more about that just like how far what's kind of limitation you ran into with those products and why you switched to Cursor.

Zevi Arnovitz:I started using Cursor and Claude Code a few months ago and I haven't looked back but at that time these teams have been moving like crazy so I don't wanna say I wouldn't trust them I don't know what the current state is but for me it was basically the issue of I felt that that Bolt was being very opinionated on how I should do things and I felt like my knowledge has gotten to a point where I can graduate and be more in control. By the way I think that the main difference between all these tools is basically the harness so the models are all the same models you know I'll run Claude within Cursor I'll run it within Claude Code and it's also the models that Claude is also the model that is underlying Bolt and Lovable but basically Bolt and Lovable will add a bunch of levels in the middle that will take all kind of guesswork and hard decisions out for the user so the user doesn't have to make these hard decisions so it's also very easy to build but the flip side of that is that you have less control and basically Claude Code is just taking Claude and shoving it straight in your code system and giving it full tools to do whatever it wants but also with that comes a lot of decisions that you need to make so I don't know if you can't build really amazing production apps using Bolt or Lovable now but I think basically if you want the most cutting edge abilities of the models and you wanna be able to make all the decisions on your own it's probably best to be on one of these tools.

Lenny Rachitsky:What I'm feeling and hearing is that planning work that you did that's the stuff that Lovable, Bolt, and would you put Replit in that bucket too?

Zevi Arnovitz:Yeah for sure Lovable, Bolt, Replit, Base44.

Lenny Rachitsky:V zero.

Zevi Arnovitz:Yeah V zero all same bucket.

Lenny Rachitsky:So essentially they're kind of doing that planning for you and as you said they're very opinionated they try to make it easy so it's just like here's how to do it we're not gonna like here's the way we wanna we think is best for people and what you're saying is once you're trying to get a little more serious about it or wanna go in a different direction you don't have the power to change how they plan so Cursor lets you do that.

Zevi Arnovitz:Yeah I don't want this to come out like I'm bad mouthing them Base44 does an amazing job at basically taking all the complex guesswork out of building product and just allows you to just go with the vibes and build but it will do sign in with Google for you and it will do a database but then you don't have decisions on what database am I using do I need to sign in with Google this way or another way it would just do it out of the box so that's basically the trade off there.

Lenny Rachitsky:Awesome shout out Maor the founder of Base44.

Zevi Arnovitz:Yeah I'll jump.

Lenny Rachitsky:Back here.

Zevi Arnovitz:Yeah he's amazing.

Lenny Rachitsky:Just love how this is like the way you're like flinging what's the word slinging slinging models like Gemini 3 for front end like I love that you have you've never written any code and you're just like cool use Gemini for this and Claude for this and I'm just working on Cursor talking to this CTO helping you build stuff and build significant product.

Zevi Arnovitz:Yeah I mean we just live in the craziest of times where basically the world changes once a week it feels like and there is just no boundaries you can use all of these just on your regular MacBook or regular laptop and I have these moments I call them time machine moments which is basically this week for instance I was prepping for the podcast using Claude with a project I was building I was fully localizing StudyMate from Hebrew to English which I did in two days which would probably take a dev team weeks and I was building a personal site which went from no domain no nothing to live on a domain within an hour and a half and I was doing all three of these in parallel and there was a point where basically all three of the agents were running so I didn't have anything to do I just had to let them think and these are like the time machine moments where I feel like I was in the future and I just stick my head out of the time machine and whoever's next to me like at the moment it was my wife I'll just say we live in the future and she'll be like what then I'll be like no no don't worry about it but it's just basically so crazy that all these things are just you know an API away you can use anything so I think it's an awesome time to be curious and optimistic and hardworking.

Lenny Rachitsky:These are my favorite kinds of podcast guests people that are living in the future figuring out all these things and then are just kinda come back as you said poke your head out of the rocket ship and just like hey here's this thing that I figured out here's where we're going.

Zevi Arnovitz:Yeah best time to be alive so awesome so it looks like it's finished so now what we're gonna do is we're gonna run the app locally and we'll be able to see what Composer ended up building and we're gonna see if anything else is needed on our end to maybe do some manual review does that sound good?

Lenny Rachitsky:Sounds great and I love that was like I don't know few minutes where if it was a human engineer it'd be like days maybe a week for work.

Zevi Arnovitz:Yeah for now a a composer like the one thing is it's just so so blazing fast keeps you in flow so yeah full features take minutes.

Lenny Rachitsky:And that probably cost like a couple bucks in AI credits.

Zevi Arnovitz:I don't even look I mean I used to be so stingy about paying for products and now I'm just basically I look at it all as tuition you know as like stuff that I'm paying for learning so I don't know how much it costs but it's definitely worth it.

Lenny Rachitsky:That explains why they're the fastest growing products in history.

Zevi Arnovitz:100%.

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Zevi Arnovitz:So now we have this feature which basically we built and I can ask it to make some changes because it's running locally and once it's ready I'll be able to ship it to users so now the next phase after I've QA'ed it and basically tested it manually I'll have Claude review its own work so what I'll do is I'll reopen Claude Code.

Lenny Rachitsky:I love this because this is one of the things that comes up a lot on this podcast is writing code is now so easy the main challenge people have is reviewing the code that AI has written and what you're doing here is you're having Claude review its own code.

Zevi Arnovitz:Yeah so this is another thing where it's very difficult for me to catch mistakes so my review process has gone through a bunch of iterations to really be as good as possible and to catch as many things as possible so I'll always manual QA it first to make sure if I can see any mistakes that Claude made and then what I'll do is basically slash review and this tells Claude to start reviewing its own code but what's even cooler and something that I'm really proud of is I will usually do multiple reviews and I'll have Codex which is ChatGPT's competitor to Claude Code as well as Cursor open and I will have each of them review the code and then what what I do is I have a slash command called peer review which is really interesting and basically what it does is it's gonna take Claude which is usually the agent who I'm working with and just to put this in a mental model this is basically my my dev lead that I'm working with I will take the the slash command is basically saying you're the dev lead on this project other team leads within the company have looked at your code and reviewed it and found these issues don't take what they're what they said at face value the reason is you have more context than them and you led this project you need to either explain why the stuff they found are not real issues and wrong or fix them yourself and it's really cool because the way I look at these things is I look at the models I try to imagine them as people and I can I can really tell you how each one of these would be as as a real human because they have yeah each model has such distinct characteristics so let's say Claude she would be the perfect CTO like she's very communicative she's very smart she she doesn't just go with the flow and do whatever you tell her she's very opinionated but also super collaborative which is I think why I'm always drawn to Claude because I I need to do so much learning and and like it's it's your dream a very communicative but very opinionated dev lead but then there's also Codex so I use Codex 5.1 max whatever at another not the best at naming models but GPT's model I always imagine it as like a the best coder within the company who comes to the office like with a hoodie and sandals and sits in a dark room and you basically only bother him when you have the worst bugs and you say listen we have this bug and it will just close the door for two hours and come out and say I fixed it and you're like wait what you're gonna tell us what happened or what happened he's like don't worry about it I fixed it it's like really not communicative but it solves all the worst problems and let's say Gemini is like a crazy scientist who's super artsy super talented at designing but if you sit next to it and watch it work it's terrifying like you would fire that person instantly this might be just my experience but when I'm using Gemini within Antigravity which is Google's new competitor to Cursor when it's writing code you can see the steps it's taking and it's terrifying like you'll say I want you to redesign the top of the dashboard and and you're looking at its thought process and it will say oh first things first I'll delete the dashboard and then it'll be like nope that was a mistake I'll bring it back and then it will say oh can I edit the database and you're like no do not edit the database you're just doing a redesign and then it will end up designing something beautiful so the like the way there is like a roller coaster and very scary but at the end of the day Gemini is very good at design so I think that using all these models and basically playing to their strengths and mitigating their weaknesses by using other models is is a game changer for me so I'll do peer review a bunch of times and and I'll have other models review other models' code and kind of have them like fight it out basically like sometimes a a Claude Code will get really sassy and be like this has been raised for the third time and for the third time I'm telling you this is not an issue this is by design so it's just a really cool cool thing that I've added and I haven't seen many people doing it.

Lenny Rachitsky:That is such an incredible rant slash way to understand what's going on okay awesome so we just ran the review so show us what we saw there and let's actually try this peer review I'm really excited to see what what you learned there.

Zevi Arnovitz:Yeah so basically Claude has reviewed its code and it's found a bunch of bugs a critical bug it found in the prompt some high bugs some medium bugs and now what I'll do is I'll do the same thing with the other models so Codex has a built in code review that you can do or I just like to say review all the code in this branch of course branch is referring to the GitHub branch that we're working on we're not working on the live code base and then I'll do this with Composer say with we can do let's do it with with Composer one so I'll do slash review here as well and basically these are both gonna run and do a in-depth review similar to what Claude does but again because of the differences between the models they're all gonna catch different things and they're all gonna look differently and this is a really cool way to work it's basically if you had other team leads within the company review the code here you can see how fast Composer is I think GPT probably will take a bunch of time like I said it's in its own dark room right now reviewing code and we'll come back in a few minutes.

Lenny Rachitsky:Okay cool so we can we can let these run and we don't actually have to go through the whole process but is the idea once you get these results you run peer review and you you copy and paste kind of these results is that the idea?

Zevi Arnovitz:Exactly I'll copy and paste the results I'll do peer review and then I'll say dev lead one and then paste from one of the models and then I'll say dev lead two and paste from the other model and basically have them fight it out until I feel like we have no more issues incredible for me this is super important because I'm not a I'm not technical and I'm not a developer and I'll also use slash learning opportunity a bunch during this to learn about stuff that I don't understand or or don't fully grasp.

Lenny Rachitsky:Incredible what a what a clever solution to solving this code review problem where it's like I don't know what you're I don't I don't know how to recode so what am I gonna even

Zevi Arnovitz:Yeah yeah.

Lenny Rachitsky:Okay incredible let's let's wrap up this kind of this workflow is there anything else that's important in this workflow and again all this stuff is gonna be available where people could just plug this stuff into their cursor account and and use it themselves.

Zevi Arnovitz:A 100%. The one thing I'll say is that I think just like working in general with AI and even just like working on any product doing constant postmortems is critical. So a lot of times we'll find all these kind of bugs or maybe Claude will fail to execute something correctly and at the beginning when I started vibe coding I would basically just keep running at it like running at the wall and until it worked and once it worked I was like alright awesome this works let's keep going but I've learned over time that updating documentation and tooling is one of the biggest hacks for productivity. So when Claude will fail to do something or I'll see this really bad bug that shows that Claude really didn't understand something I'll ask it what in your system prompt or tooling made you make this mistake and Claude will kinda like go introspective and think of what made it do create that mistake and then I'll say okay great let's update your tooling and documentation so that this mistake never occurs again and I do this every time I'm either building an internal tool or anything and I think this is just like working you know if you've you end up doing a bunch of mistakes and then end up releasing the feature to users so you're like alright it's a big success but going back and even when you've succeeded looking and understanding what you did and what you could have done better is critical and also using AI this is probably one of the biggest unlocks going back to your prompts understanding what was not good enough iterating on them and then seeing how AI's responses get better I think that's probably one of the most important things and one of the things that divides between people who are like okay with using AI and the people who actually know how to use it.

Lenny Rachitsky:That is such good advice so what I'm hearing is when you run-in when the models do something dumb make a mistake you ask it to reflect on what the mistake it made was and then you update the slash command prompts with that knowledge so that in the future it's not making that same mistake and it just keeps getting better these things just keep getting smarter and smarter so you're building up this really incredible prompt that just gets better and better.

Zevi Arnovitz:Exactly not always the slash commands it will sometimes update different documentation or its tooling but basically it's it's understanding what the root cause of the of the mistake that the AI made and fixing it.

Lenny Rachitsky:Awesome so it's not so like the models are getting smarter then there's also the other parts of your workflow can get smarter as you as you find flaws in the way it does stuff.

Zevi Arnovitz:A 100%.

Lenny Rachitsky:Yep amazing okay is there anything else there before I move in a couple other directions.

Zevi Arnovitz:I think that's it I think we covered pretty much everything basically just to wrap this up what I do is I do a bunch of code review and then update the documentation so that everything is documented so the next time I try to build a feature in this area there won't be any mistakes and then I'll do a bunch of testing I'll do some user testing as well before I release this to general availability obviously we're not gonna release this this was just a show but hopefully maybe by the time the podcast comes out I'll have done this correctly and release the feature.

Lenny Rachitsky:It's incredible that this was not possible like I don't know two years ago maybe a year ago like you are a product manager shipping a product without knowing how to write code barely knowing how to review code you said you're afraid of looking at code as a product manager you're building a product in cursor using all of these different AI models you're making money with this product this is like we're so used to this now but it's insane what is now possible.

Zevi Arnovitz:It's the best time to be alive a 100% I think that I understand the fear but AI just makes so much possible just a quick side note here my brother who I'm building one of the apps with is an entrepreneur he has a beautiful business that helps old people and seniors understand to use technology and AI better and he's basically doing the same kind of learning as me and he's replaced all of the tools he was paying for I think he was paying for Zapier and Airtable and he's basically built like a full fledged CRM system and automation system for his business completely alone so I mean for the people who are curious optimistic hardworking this is the best time to be to be a builder.

Lenny Rachitsky:And what I love about this conversation we're having here is it feels like the biggest barrier for a lot of people is like how do I get started what exactly do I do I open up cursor looks very intimidating I don't know how to write code I don't know how to build stuff I don't know about databases and so you're gonna be sharing all these slash commands and basically this whole workflow with the audience.

Zevi Arnovitz:Yeah okay and like I said just start at GPT start on GPT tell it what your idea is tell it to explain to you what are even the first steps of thinking what are the decisions you need to make and just be like be inquisitive learn don't rush things it's very important to just dive in and and really spend the time to learn.

Lenny Rachitsky:And you shared this one of your slash commands is learning opportunity and it's how you learn a lot of these things just like teach me this thing of how this database issue works.

Zevi Arnovitz:Exactly, okay.

Lenny Rachitsky:There's a couple directions I wanna make sure we touch on. One is coming back to a question asked earlier about how this might work at a larger company, say it's not like Meta but just like I don't know, thousand person company, 500 people. How much of this can you plug and play into a workflow as a PM at a larger company? What would be your advice for someone that may wanna start trying to ship code at least showing people what's possible?

Zevi Arnovitz:I think that first making your code base AI native is a really important step and I think this needs to be done by technical people. So basically my code base has a ton of just plain text in it, so it will have a bunch of markdown files that explain to agents how to work in certain areas of the code base and high level structure so that the agents navigate through the code base easier. And I think that if this is set up in a really good way, I still don't think like PMs should be shipping heavy database chain migrations or any like big project, but you know, contained UI projects, especially if you just build it, create the PR and send it to a dev to like do the final finishes, I think that's definitely something that's possible. And I think we're gonna see that a lot in the next coming years. I think basically everyone's gonna become a builder so it should be really interesting.

Lenny Rachitsky:Okay so your advice here is as a PM don't maybe don't go rinse a cursor start building shipping trying to ship features to production especially complicated features. Do you think we'll get there? Do think like in a couple years PMs will be doing this and it'll feel less scary and crazy?

Zevi Arnovitz:If there are PMs, yeah I think titles are gonna collapse and responsibilities are gonna collapse and everyone's just gonna be building. I definitely think that the models, the context window is getting bigger, the models are getting smarter and I definitely see how PMs or any other background can be writing at the moment. I wouldn't wait for that. I would use this as a collaborative learning opportunity to work with your dev team. It's gonna be difficult, a lot of developers are very very skeptic about the current state and I think that it's gonna be a lot of sales work on your end to convince but if you're able to convince and I think teams that are really sold on this and wanna take the time to work on their workflow about how can our team become more AI native, think that these teams are gonna probably be a few years in the future and they're gonna look back at the few weeks they spent setting this up as the best time they spent.

Lenny Rachitsky:Let me ask you another question around just the job of a PM. One of the biggest fears people have with these AI tools for PMs, for every function I imagine, is just they start to rely on these things, your skills start to atrophy, you're producing all this slop that looks great, cool, amazing strategy document, now it's actually not at all good. Are these linear tickets or just products that are like half baked? What's your take on kind of these two parts of just like how has this impacted your craft as a PM? Do you feel like this is weakening your skills because you're so reliant on these tools and just how do you keep the quality of this stuff up and not just like meh, it's just a bunch of AI generated slop?

Zevi Arnovitz:I have a very strong disagree to this and I've heard it a bunch. I remember when I started using Tal Raviv's like this whole course on building a PM copilot using projects which is probably one of the best courses that you can take and when I started working with my own copilot I remember people at work looking and saying like oh so you're basically outsourcing your thinking and to me that's just the worst way to look at it. And I think for some reason these people usually have a high correlation with the kind of person who doesn't like to show their presentation when it's only 10% done or doesn't want to ask for help a lot. I think that there's a misconception with a lot of PMs that the job is always having the right answers and being the smartest person in the room and at least how I was trained and how I believe the role of the PM is, it's the exact opposite. It's basically harnessing anything that can get us as quick as possible to delivering the right solution to users. And I just think this is like that really smart person that has context or your mentor or whatever but is just always available and doesn't judge you and can really help you. So if you're using it to just create your outputs and then putting them out there, I mean yeah that's AI slop but it's also human error. I think it's really important that you own your own outputs. If you put anything out there or show something in a product review and you say oh sorry that was built by AI, that's your mistake. I think if you use these intentionally and really take the time to understand how to use AI in the correct way it's one of the biggest game changers that will make you much better as a PM. And another thing here is that especially for more junior PMs it allows you to play at such a higher level than you would normally. Like I think that at Wix I wasn't thinking of what's the marketing strategy of the company and how will the onboarding be completely revamped within the whole product but I mean on my side product I can just do whatever decisions I want and think of the strategy and marketing and the messaging and this is basically just getting me reps which is one of the most important things at the beginning of your career. So I understand the fear that you outsource certain stuff and you're not owning a 100% of everything but I think the upside is so much more valuable and I think the only way that AI makes you worse at your job is if you're using it wrong.

Lenny Rachitsky:Is there anything that you've learned about reducing the sloppiness of the output just like a tip for keeping the quality high of the stuff that it produces?

Zevi Arnovitz:Similar to people setting up AI for success for the task at hand. So like if I just brought in a junior to write a deck or something and I didn't give it any guideline, I just said give a strategy deck, he would probably just go online and find top strategy decks and just reproduce that which is basically what AI is doing. It's basically just fed all of the internet. So instead of that guiding it and giving it context on what your style of writing is and what you're trying to solve and all these different things, I think that's probably one of the biggest unlocks. So that's just a quick tip. And also Cursor has a slash command called d slop which is basically going back over the code. I don't know if this is integrated into the product yet but it's on Twitter, their founders have been talking about this. So definitely something I would run after just to make sure that no slop is left behind.

Lenny Rachitsky:That is so funny, the slop. Okay one more question which may lead to something else kinda going in a whole different direction. You used AI to help you actually interview for the job that you got at Meta. Talk about how you did that because a lot of people right now are struggling to find a job reading about all these people using AI to help them interview. You actually did it. What did you use? What worked?

Zevi Arnovitz:I feel like the analogy here is I have 12 nieces and nephews and you can see how people who have grown up in a different world, how their mind is formed differently. So if you ask me how do you answer a phone, I'll do this, but a child now when you say how do you answer the phone, they'll do this, you know, they'll do the iPhone answer. And I feel like people who are growing up now in their professional lives were the same just with AI. So every time I'm faced with a new challenge or problem I think AI first how to solve it. So Meta reached out and said they'd like me to interview straight away. I opened up a project within Claude, I started looking online for all the best information out there, things that I resonated with. I took a ton of frameworks and stuff from Ben Erez who's written a guest post for you who I think is one of the best minds out there right now and basically I created a project which was my coach which I would come and consult what to do at each phase. I would mock interview with and this was amazing. Also I created a game in Base44 which helped me. I was really struggling with segmentation within the product questions, so thinking of the correct segments. So I basically just created a quiz game which creates questions and different segmentations and I have to choose. So this was like I spun this up, it's a web app that I would play sometimes when I was on the bus to work. So basically I think Ben talks about this a bunch so I don't like just go read Ben's stuff but just creating a project and feeding it with all the best information on the internet and then mocking a bunch. I will say that the biggest game changer for me was doing human mocks so cold outreaching to people on LinkedIn and having them do actual mocks for me. I think that at the end of the day especially for the Meta PM prep is super competitive and difficult I think there's no way to get around that.

Lenny Rachitsky:That is so cool. They used that post I wasn't aware. We're gonna link to it and in that post Ben shares all these prompts you can feed ChatGPT to help you prepare for interviews, do mocks online. It's a really important point to say that those take you to a point but it's actually better to use humans. I actually have a post coming out soon in collaboration with Noam Segal about how everyone's using AI to interview and one of the most interesting ways I've heard people and that we found in this research was that people use it to get feedback. They record the interview and then it gives them feedback. Here's where you could have done better, here's what you missed because the feedback loop is so missing. No one ever tells you here's what you did badly in this interview, no one tells you and AI can do that.

Zevi Arnovitz:So I'll add two things to that one which is exactly this. So I'll mock with AI also did something really cool where there's a question bank online free by Lewis Lin which basically is an always updating bank of questions that people are asked in real interviews and I basically used Comet which is the Perplexity's browser and I had the agent run all kinds of analyses on like what the most asked questions are and that's how I knew how to prioritize what questions I would mock. And then at the end of these mocks I would tell Claude within the project you're my coach and I don't want you to make me feel good I want you to make me as ready as possible for these interviews so give me feedback like you said. And the other thing that I did was really cool was some questions where I didn't have time to mock I would ask Claude to play the candidate and then it would just give me a really good answer and I could also learn from that like learning from someone who does a perfect answer.

Lenny Rachitsky:Oh man, I really love the way you phrased it that people kind of in your generation the default is I have something I need to do let's go to AI immediately and help me prepare for this thing help me figure it out yeah and this comes back to this quote that I always think about which I think everyone's always hearing but I just it's such an important quote that it's not that you will be replaced by AI at least for a long time it's you'll be replaced by someone who's better at using AI than you.

Zevi Arnovitz:I agree.

Lenny Rachitsky:And that's what these conversations are for to help people keep up with all that and to learn some of these skills and again see where the future's going and start to learn how to get there yourself okay Zevi before we get to our very exciting lightning round I'm gonna take us to a recurring segment on this podcast I call failure corner and why I love this segment is people come on this you know just even this conversation it's like all these amazing things you figured out everything's going so well people rarely hear the things that don't go well and those are often the most interesting and impactful stories so the question is just what's a what's a story of a time you failed in your career and what did you learn from that experience.

Zevi Arnovitz:Yeah I love this I love this I love failure corner big big fan so I'll tell a story about when I started at Wix so basically I started within Wix's student program and straight out of the student program you get put into a certain team so I was in the editor which is the core product of Wix and the other PMs were just the best PMs almost at Wix like these four other people had much more experience than me and they were ridiculously good I remember coming in and thinking like my first product review I'm gonna blow these people's socks off they're not gonna believe how good of a PM I am and I basically didn't really share what I was thinking I would work tons of hours alone and I was like I'm gonna kill this product review they're gonna be so impressed and I ended up failing miserably my product review was not good it wasn't the format they expected they had a ton of questions that I missed and I felt awful when it was when it was over I was like ugh you're such an idiot and I saw that everyone was like alright cool yeah just come back in two weeks and and we'll keep we'll keep getting at this and I I understood in that moment that they had zero expectation of me being a 10x PM but the expectation of me was being a 10x learner and the second I understood that my whole mindset switch shifted and I think this is probably the best tip that I give now to junior PMs is basically be the best learner you can be at the beginning no one expects you to know all the answers and no one expects you to be good so basically what I did was I took each person on the PM team there was four other PMs and I assessed what their strength is and use them as a mentor for that so Neri was still my mentor till today he has the best product sense of anyone I've met Oya is super she's like a methodology export expert she just thinks in frameworks Yara who is head of product basically can look at a product and then instantly understand like the third and fourth order effects of them system thinking so every time I had an issue with one of these areas I would come to one of them and consult them and this does two things first of all I learned a ton and the second thing is that when the next time the next product review my success felt to them like their success because it wasn't this kid who's trying to show us up how cool he is it was like our mentee kind of making us all proud and it was such a great shift for me and basically at the end of the day I I really excelled through this.

Lenny Rachitsky:That is an awesome story and it this connect this idea of learning is such a good thread throughout this whole conversation that AI is is good at getting stuff done but it's also really good at helping you learn how to do the thing and to be this partner this thought partner the way you talked about the interview process you went through and this learning learning opportunity slash command so awesome great story Zevi okay before we get to our very exciting lighting round is there anything else that you wanted to share anything you wanna leave listeners with.

Zevi Arnovitz:Yeah so kinda to tie back into the first thing I said where if people walk away thinking Zevi's so cool then then then I've failed here I think that it's just the best time to be alive I think it's the best time to be a junior contra contrary to what a lot of people are saying how you know there's no more junior roles out there and people get out of school and you you can't find a role yeah that's true but also when else in history could you get out of school and just build a start up you know on your own with a couple of friends completely bootstrapped and I see more and more people towards my end the end of the time at my time at Wix I was interviewing and I saw more and more people building their own stuff with AI and I think contrary to what a lot of people think it's the best time to be a junior it's the best time to be a learner and I think if any listener is listening to this and you're a curious person you're a hardworking person I I wanna say kind I'm not sure but if you're a kind person and a good communicator you have such an unfair advantage and you can give more value to companies than most people who have twenty years of experience so I really hope people get inspired by this and start killing it with their projects.

Lenny Rachitsky:Amazing so many ways to be inspired from this conversation Zevi with that we've reached our very exciting lightning round I've got five questions for you are you ready.

Zevi Arnovitz:Yep let's do it.

Lenny Rachitsky:What are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people.

Zevi Arnovitz:So I'll I'll take one from each kind of genre so in like fiction I love The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand one of my favorite books really makes you think really makes you feel business books I'm a big fan of Shoe Dog the Nike story I just finished reading that so funny amazing.

Lenny Rachitsky:It was great it was great.

Zevi Arnovitz:Yeah I love Shoe Dog and then more on like the psychology side Mindset by Carol Dweck who coined the term growth mindset just such an amazing book it kind of sounds like a how self help book but then you you understand that it's completely psychological and and is based on research and that book completely changed my life really was always with a fixed mindset and then after reading that I kinda understood that it was something holding me back and since then I've been really really trying to cultivate a growth mindset so I really recommend everyone reading that.

Lenny Rachitsky:Again connects to that thread of the way you described it being a 10x learner versus a 10x doer okay next question favorite recent movie or TV show you have really enjoyed.

Zevi Arnovitz:Yeah actually my my wife is really into film so we watch a lot of TV it's probably our our favorite together time I just finished watching The Pit which was amazing it was really good and the my first recommendation to everyone is if you haven't seen Severance run to see Severance one of my favorite shows.

Lenny Rachitsky:Is there a favorite product that you have recently discovered that you really love?

Zevi Arnovitz:It's a good question. I'm always trying new products like I'll always have three or four browsers installed on my computer and all this different kind of stuff and I recently discovered a Loom alternative. I was kinda disappointed with Loom—they were taking so much money and the product I don't know I just didn't love it and there's an open source alternative called Cap which is just really well crafted. You can see that the person was like really sweating the details and it's just a really really great alternative so I've been using that recently.

Lenny Rachitsky:There's also a product called Supercut that I love that's also a Loom alternative shout out. Okay two more questions do you have a favorite life motto that you find yourself coming back to in work or in life?

Zevi Arnovitz:Yeah I'm kinda between two right now. One which is like become a Twitter meme basically which is you can just do things. I feel like that is basically going always in my head every time I do something that I'm just shocked at the speed and ability to do things now so you can just do things. And the second one I stole from my brother his motto is nobody knows what the fuck they're doing and I just love that and I think it kinda makes you take life more lightly so yeah nobody knows what the fuck they're doing.

Lenny Rachitsky:I think people see these companies on the outside and it feels like everything they've got all figured out and if you're ever on the inside of a company that's doing really well you're like how is this staying on the rails how is this still a thing that is working does it make any sense it's all about the yeah fall okay last question you've been you've had a long entrepreneurial thread throughout your career there's a couple other real world businesses you've started in the past you did a thermal clothing business and then like a hummus delivery thing so maybe pick one of those and just tell the story of what that's about.

Zevi Arnovitz:Yeah I'd love to really fun that you asked about this so I'll tell the thermal clothing because I think it's really cool. So in high school I was selling thermal clothes in tenth grade for one of my sister's friends or something and basically it was just packs of thermal clothing shirt and pants. I grew up in Jerusalem so it's a bit chillier there so it was perfect for the weather and in tenth grade when I was selling them they were like $20-$25 apiece and I was making like $4 a sale and if you look in the food chain I was like sixth or seventh down the line so this was like crazy margins. So during the summer I thought about it like I should just go straight to the importer so throughout the summer I called the importer and at first he was really really mad he was like no you have to work for me for years to get to this state and I said listen man I'm finishing school soon this is not gonna be my career either do it or not and we basically negotiated throughout the whole summer and this was also like how I did things before ChatGPT so he would like throw out something he'd say oh the import tax has gone up and I'll just search Google like import tax Israel and like start reading and I'll be on the phone with him I'll be like hey I would just basically stall and then I'd somehow come back with a challenge and I ended up getting a really great price like 12 and a half dollars a piece so I was making like a 100% profit and I spread throughout a bunch of different schools each school I had the coolest people in school selling for me and then the cool a really fun thing that I did was we had a really awesome basketball team and like our basketball team would basically be 30 points up within the first half and it kinda got boring for the crowd so I wrote a song like a basketball chant about thermal clothes that basically has my number within it and like the end of it was if you join in now we'll give you a discount and it like it was with drums and everything and still when I go to Jerusalem I know like some people who I don't even know like know my number by heart because they know it by the tune and sometimes when I walk in Jerusalem people stop me and say like hey it's thermal's heavy so that was just a really cool experience as a kid.

Lenny Rachitsky:This explains so much such a just the marketing genius of that move oh man okay Zevi this was incredible two final questions where can folks find you if they wanna reach out and maybe follow-up on some of the stuff we'll link to the scripts and prompts and all that in the show notes so so you don't have to read that and then how can listeners be useful to you?

Zevi Arnovitz:Awesome so I've been helped throughout my whole career a ton so I love helping any way I can so reach out on LinkedIn or on X I really love to help whoever I can. How can you use listeners be useful to me? So if you're a student try StudyMate tell me what you think. If you're in Israel and you are not using dictation yet try DvorotText tell me what you think.

Lenny Rachitsky:Amazing I just love how much you're giving away and how useful this can be to so many people so again we'll link to that in the show notes Zevi you're awesome thank you so much for being here thank you so much for sharing so much this is gonna help I think a lot of people and I think it's gonna help people get over the hump on okay I see all these people doing cool stuff here's how I can actually do this stuff so thank you so much for being here and for sharing so much.

Zevi Arnovitz:Thank you for having me and if you build something cool with some stuff that I learned here hit me up send me I'd love to see.

Lenny Rachitsky:Amazing Zevi thank you so much for being here.

Zevi Arnovitz:Thank you bye everyone.

Lenny Rachitsky:Thank you so much for listening if you found this valuable you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts Spotify or your favorite podcast app also please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast you can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com.

Zevi Arnovitz:See you in the next episode.