How 80,000 companies build with AI: Products as organisms and the death of org charts | Asha Sharma

Lenny Rachitsky:You said that we're just starting to scratch the surface of what an agentic society actually looks like

Asha Sharma:We're approaching this world in which the marginal cost of the good output is approaching zero we're going to see exponential demand for productivity and outputs the way that you scale to that is with agents when all of that happens the org chart starts to become the org chart you just don't need as many layers

Lenny Rachitsky:We were chatting about this concept you have that we're moving from product as artifact to product as organism

Asha Sharma:Because these models are so effective at this point you want to start to tune them to certain types of outcomes all of a sudden these are these living organisms that just get better with the more interactions that happen i think this is the new ip of every single company products that think and live and learn

Lenny Rachitsky:Planning right now is just crazy how does anyone plan a road map when there's just like okay gpt five's out

Asha Sharma:We think about it as what season are we in season one might have been prototyping of ai and then it was all around models and reasoning models and now it's the advent of agents

Lenny Rachitsky:Today my guest is Asha Sharma. Asha's chief vice president of product for Microsoft's AI platform where she oversees their AI infrastructure foundation models and agent tool chains while also leading applied engineering responsible AI and growth for the core AI division. She was previously COO at Instacart and VP of product at Meta where she ran Messenger, Instagram Direct, Messenger Kids, and Remote Presence. She also sits on the boards of The Home Depot and Coupang and she's a second degree black belt in Taekwondo. Asha has a really unique and rare role that allows her to see more than most anyone else in the world where things are heading with AI and what works and doesn't work for companies that are building large scale AI products. In our conversation, Asha shares a bunch of trends and predictions that she's seeing that I haven't heard anyone else talk about: why we're moving from a product as artifact to product as organism world, why GUIs are being replaced by code native interfaces, why post training is the new pre training, the coming agentic society, what it takes to be a successful builder today and going forward, and also her single biggest leadership lesson that she learned from Satya who she works closely with. If you enjoy this podcast don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. Also if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter you get a year free of 15 incredible products including Lovable, Replit, Bold, N8N, Linear, Superhuman, Descript, Whisperflow, Gamma, Perplexity, Warp, Granola, Magic Patterns, Raycast, Chappy RD, and Maven. Check it out at Lenny'sNewsletter.com and click product pass. With that I bring you Asha Sharma. This episode is brought to you by Interpret. Interpret is a customer intelligence platform used by leading CX and product orgs like Canva, Notion, Perplexity, Strava, Hinge, and Linear to leverage the voice of the customer and build best in class products. Interpret unifies all customer conversations in real time from Gong recordings to Zendesk tickets to Twitter threads and makes it available for your team for analysis and for action. What makes Interpret unique is its ability to build and update a customer specific knowledge graph that provides the most granular and accurate categorization of all customer feedback and connects that customer feedback to critical metrics like revenue and CSAT. If modernizing your voice of customer program to a generational upgrade is a 2025 priority like customer centric industry leaders like Canva, Notion, Perplexity, and Linear, reach out to the team at interpret.com/leni that's interpret.com/leni. 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:Asha thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast

Asha Sharma:Thanks for having me

Lenny Rachitsky:I want to start with something that we were chatting about before this that I've never heard about as a concept that I think is going be really helpful for people to think about which is this concept you have that we're moving from product as artifact to product as organism talk about what that means and what people need to understand here

Asha Sharma:It's been a pretty interesting shift especially over the last year or so because when I got to Microsoft it was kind of right after OpenAI and the large foundation models happened and then immediately after there was this explosion of models proprietary open frontier models that were pushing the frontier curve and so they were both more efficient and then we're starting to see domain level expertise in a bunch of them and then you know even more recently models now can you know tool call and they can function call and they can take action and I think that's just giving way to a new type of products that are starting to see some success and so all of a sudden products aren't just like these static artifacts that we start to ship that's not just like hey come up with an idea or an insight go solve a problem ship it into the world maybe make it a little bit better and then have a dashboard all of a sudden the whole KPI is what is the metabolism of a product team to be able to ingest data and then digest the rewards model and then create some sort of outcome because these models are so effective at this point you want to start to tune them to certain types of outcomes whether it's price or performance or quality and so it's pretty exciting because all of a sudden these are these living organisms that just get better with the more interactions that happen and in many ways I think this is the new IP of every single company and it's a completely different way to build product and to even think about you know products that think and live and learn which is kind of exciting

Lenny Rachitsky:So when I hear this what I'm thinking about is when I had Michael Terrell on the podcast the Cursor CEO he talked a lot about how their big mode is the data that they capture from people using Cursor selecting accepting certain suggestions not accepting other suggestions is that what you're talking about here just like the proprietary data that companies gather from people using their product or is there something beyond that even

Asha Sharma:I think why we're seeing like the rise of post training happen is just that the models themselves like are so powerful as of this year Nathan Lambert did this study that I thought was pretty interesting of all of the top leaderboards and it showed that you know once a model hits 30,000,000,000 parameters the capex to actually train a model and put you know billions of tokens into kind of pre run kind of doesn't economically make sense and you can kind of start to optimize on the loop and so yeah in many ways I think using your own data is the best way to do that but you can synthetically generate data you have to come up with a rewards design you have to actually roll it out you have to AB test it rigorously you have to find the job to be done or the use case that it makes the most sense for and then yes like that generates data that you can learn from I haven't ever seen it be one loop for any sort of product I think it's multiple tracks running in parallel that are kind of like assembly lines if you will and kind of producing that

Lenny Rachitsky:And so is this kind of thesis that we're moving towards product as organism is this basically for model companies or is this also true for I don't know SaaS businesses and tools end user tools

Asha Sharma:Look I think that software as a primitive is changing and kind of the artifact inside of it is a model alongside the software components itself and so in many ways I think that you know software products will all be model for products if you will.

Lenny Rachitsky:This reminds me why I just had Nick Turley on the podcast who we were talking about before we started recording head of ChatGPT and I was asking just like how much does ChatGPT change with GPT-five coming out and he's just like it's the same thing they're the same product it's just like the model tells us what to do in the product of ChatGPT and and it makes me think about something else of just like you would think why can't just GPT-five build its own user interface just like as you use it it just evolved it's sort of what it's doing with canvas and all these things but like that's like another way I think about when you talk about this idea of product as organism is the product the UX can shift based on how you're using it and evolve automatically without having product teams have to do it.

Asha Sharma:I 100% believe that's where the world is going and that my experience should look and feel different than yours I mean that's kind of been the advent and personalization but now you can do it on the fly in the future so I think that'll be a pretty fun world I also think it will look different for agents and it will look different for kind of power users and new users and all of those things too.

Lenny Rachitsky:Let me kind of zoom out a little bit and ask you this question you work with a bunch of companies that are building AI products on your platform other platforms imagine some just do an awesome job and are killing it some are struggling what do you find are kind of common patterns across the companies that do really well and have a lot of success building really successful AI products and ones that don't.

Asha Sharma:Yeah so I think there's things that are kind of more broadly applying to the organization themselves and then there's things that are applying to the people who are building the AI products too so more broadly I think there's a pattern that's starting to emerge for successful companies like one is they are embracing AI and everybody becomes AI fluent so I think everybody's using some sort of copilot or some sort of AI in their day to day workflows like job one so everyone's not afraid of it understands how we can raise the ceiling and kind of lower the floor for like all sorts of skills tasks number two from there they start to say okay how can I take a process that already exists and apply AI to making it better that might be something like customer support or taking fraud down from fifteen days to kinda cure to ten days and like going through that entire loop of mapping out the process applying AI to it seeing some sort of impact and then feeling the P and L or the kind of intrinsic benefits that that looks like the third thing then is like okay great now that you've seen impact is using it how do you actually use it to inflect growth and that can be something like improving the customer experience so your LTV or retention improves it could be co creating a new kind of set of concepts or categories it could be you know going from agents that are embedded to agents that are embodied and then being able to take on you know exponential number of tasks I think that where companies fail is that they're doing AI for AI's sake they have a ton of projects that they're kicking off at the same time without a blueprint to understand how it actually works from what their stack looks like and they aren't treating it like a real investment and so they don't have the measurement and the observability and the evals all kind of set up it's gonna do that end to end I think the tricky thing is for enterprises is the technology is changing there's something like 70,000 enterprise tools like in the AI space launched last year it's really hard to know which one you should use for what outcome and so you really need to bet on a platform or some sort of app server type layer that allows you to swap things in and out and not really be beholden to anything any one technology or any one tool because the reality is is the whole thing is going to change feel like you have to actually build for the slope instead of the snapshot of where you are so that's kind of what I see at the enterprise level I think the builders themselves are actually changing pretty fundamentally too right every single advent like change of technology has invented like a changing set of roles like mainframes to PCs like the whole garage engineers and then when we went from you know server to cloud and mobile there was like SEO specialists and CDNs and you know growth PMs and UXR and you know front end back end and yada yada and now I think we're seeing this advent of the polymath and where I think that full stack builders are kind of having their renaissance where if you take like an average organization it takes probably 10 steps to launch a product it could be security review it could be spec it could be you know user research and there's what five plus functions maybe six or seven I'm being generous for a normal organization and then you have like six or seven layers so all of a sudden you have 500 different touch points that have to happen to get a product out and when there are 500 models available a week or 500 new technologies that is just insufficient and so I really believe in the concept of a full stack builder you're seeing it with a bunch of the AI native companies that are coming up I'm even seeing it in enterprises that have been around for fifty years starting to operate in that way and I think that gives you velocity and throughput and then gives you the whole loop to start to actually metabolize and go through that much faster.

Lenny Rachitsky:That's definitely a recurring theme in these conversations is just kind of the Venn diagrams of PM engineering design are starting to converge and more and more of other disciplines within your role so PM needs to level up on design and or engineering.

Asha Sharma:Yeah I completely agree I think it's all about the loop not the lane here and so I think that whatever function you are you have to be obsessed with trying to understand like the efficiency or the cost of the product the actual rewards like you know system design that you're going after the actual UI UX how that actually manifests for agents or people you have to start to get really good at that really quickly.

Lenny Rachitsky:I like this phrase you just use the loop and not the lane can you say more about that.

Asha Sharma:Oh it's just going back to our previous discussion on you know the signals loop and products evolving and becoming these living organisms and not these artifacts and if you think about getting really good at that loop I think that is the product that is the IP that is the future of every organization and I think feedback becomes continuous and observability becomes the culture and I think that functions start to blur in future workforces.

Lenny Rachitsky:To make this even more real is there an example of a product or a company that is a really good example of doing this well living this kind of loop life.

Asha Sharma:I think most companies that we're seeing in the space from an AI perspective are doing this I can tell you about a couple that we're working on obviously in the coding space mentioned Cursor GitHub has very similar features that we're using kind of an ensemble of models that have been fine tuned across 30 different countries all of the languages to actually then go iterate in a loop for next set of suggestions or code completions and things like that we've got an AI product called Dragon that's for physicians and we saw a massive difference from when we used synthetic fine tuning to when we annotated 600,000 patient physician interactions by experts and actually fed that into the model and continuously optimized it to then produce like you know I think we're sitting between thirty and sixty character acceptance rate depending on the run to something like 83% and so that required a small group of individuals not a large organization that were able to actually iterate in this loop across functions and kind of all of those lines dissolving.

Lenny Rachitsky:That's super interesting so kind of what I'm hearing here is if you can gather data on how things are going and then spend a lot of time creating high quality labeling to feed back into it to fine tune it is basically the big advantage is how you win in a lot of this stuff okay along these lines something else that you told me that you've been noticing that I want to hear more about is the shift from GUIs and you kind of referenced this from GUIs to code native interfaces yeah talk about what that means what that looks like and what this means for folks building products.

Asha Sharma:I think it kind of goes back to what does it mean to kind of be a product maker in the future I think that everybody's instinct is like is a GUI but if you kind of think back in history like databases kind of went from the desktop kind of down into SQL I think cloud was all about consoles and now it's about Terraform and so I think we're literally just seeing the same pattern that's played out in history start to play out in AI and like everything else in AI it's like Moore's law and it's getting faster so I think that's just accelerating and if you think about like a stream of texts just connects better with LLMs and so I think that there's a bunch of trends that are kind of working in the favor for like the future of products being about composability and not the canvas and I think that product makers really need to rewire their mindset around this because I think we spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about the UI of something rather than how something composes how an agent's going to be able to read something how do you actually get infinite scale how does that collaboration start to work and so I think it's just a new way of thinking even though it's long been a trend that's happened in these changes.

Lenny Rachitsky:So is the prediction here that it's terminals like Claude code sort of experiences or is it that it's agents that are taking or is it both is that kinda what you're

Asha Sharma:No just yeah it's a good mean look if any of us in the area that would be amazing i just think that the reason why terminals are great and it feels really great when you code is because of the way it can interact with an llm with the text stream and i think that both can be true that humans will continue to commit code and we'll find you know new ways to actually do that whether it's in the ide whether it's in github copilot whether it's in you know some new development environment and i think that we'll do that with agents and agents will do that with each other and we'll continue to kind of evolve from there

Lenny Rachitsky:We had brett taylor and the podcast founder of sierra and he had a similar prediction that all software companies are going to become agent companies and it's essentially what you're saying here is that like your software will just be this thing that's running in the background and there's much less of a gui do you think it still becomes like this chat interface the way we're kind of getting used to is that like the primary interface with agents or is there anything something else happening

Asha Sharma:Look like i think that conversation is a really powerful interface i worked on messaging i think it's great for lots of forms of communication but it's not the only form of communication i mean we use email today to collaborate with each other we use docs like everybody uses word and powerpoint you know there's a billion people living in places of artifacts that i think can become really important composable pieces of the picture and i think they should be so i'm excited about that i think that chat will be important but certainly not sufficient

Lenny Rachitsky:What's interesting is chatgpt the number one fastest growing product of all time maybe the most important consequential product of all time is chat

Asha Sharma:Yeah it's great it works i think the question we have to ask ourselves is will it only always be chat

Lenny Rachitsky:Yeah yeah the way nick described it is we're in the ms dos era of chatgpt and there's a which is interesting it's like the reverse of what you're saying so it's like maybe if you start as that and then you have to move to gui and then maybe it'll go back but he said there's going be like a windows version where it's much easier to understand what the hell is going on

Asha Sharma:Yeah i mean look like i think that it's smart every company should be bringing ai to where their users are and chatgpt has all of their users using chat and it's a phenomenal product and we've got lots of people around the world that do work in many different ways and we should be thinking about how we use ai to enable that

Lenny Rachitsky:So let's talk about agents you spent a lot of time working with agents building agents helping companies build agents you have this really great quote that i love you said that we're just starting to scratch the surface of what an agentic society actually looks like i just love this idea of an agentic society what does that actually look like in the future

Asha Sharma:Oh gosh i mean it's funny you were telling me about your two year old and i have my son where i'm just turned one and i can't even imagine life at two because i'm just like that is so far away and what will it then develop look like i think that in the future work will look really different i think that we're approaching this world in which the marginal cost of a good output is approaching zero and i think when that happens we're going to see exponential demand for productivity and outputs and i think that the way that you scale to that is with agents and it's agents that are embedded and their tools and their pieces of software and i think there's going to be a ton of those far more than the software that we use today and then i think there could be a set of embodied agents that are developed and we start to see that now right you can assign a pull request to copilot you can create a software development rep that's agentic that can kind of do some of the lead generation and mining for you and so i think that when all of that happens the org chart starts to become the work chart i think that tasks and throughput become more important than they have been before i also think that you just don't need as many layers like i think the whole kind of organizational construct might start to look different in a few years and so i'm pretty excited about it i think meetings will still be meetings and they'll be weird but i think they will be a bit better and i think there'll be lots of changes i think that for the average employee my hope and kind of my optimistic view is that they will be able to expand their skillset because now they have their own agent stack that they can bring with them to work just like you can kind of bring your own device and you can start to have access to a set of skills that you never had before and so if you think about you know the 20,000,000 people that maybe sit in that space across america and they get 20% more skilled that's like pretty exponential for gdp and so it's pretty fun

Lenny Rachitsky:This comment you made about the becomes work the org chart is such a profound concept because i don't know if this is what you meant but what imagining is you build these teams and here's your mission and goal and kpis and it's humans and like oh cool go do this first and what i'm recognizing as you're talking is like okay but if you have agents doing that that is their prompt go drive conversion and then you have all these agents and that's the org portion this is the conversion onboarding team and that's like a bunch of agents off doing their work is that what you mean

Asha Sharma:Yeah i mean yeah i think like today we think in terms of hey who reports to who in the org chart and who's responsible for these areas and i think at the end of the day when you have a set of capable agents and people are capable of more things you're not gonna start to think in hierarchy and communicating upward you're gonna start to figure out like kind of outward task based type of opportunities i think that humans will always decide in organizations how ai is used and what we want to apply it to but yeah it's kind of exciting when a new issue comes up or a new task comes up how do you actually automatically decide where to route it who's working on that task how do you actually go work on it how do you observe if the agent's doing the right thing how do you fine tune it if they're not like all of those things so i think that i'm just speculating right yeah that there's a world in which that could be pretty exciting and i think that's great because we can just accomplish more

Lenny Rachitsky:You touched on this point that reviewing the work is gonna be increasingly important if you have like a thousand agents off doing work it's just like holy moly that's a lot to look at and make sure they're doing the right thing how do you think that evolves just like being able to scale your ability to review the work that's being done

Asha Sharma:Yeah i think that the same kind of loop that we talked about becomes increasingly important like fine tuning and self healing observability really good evals all of that i mean the good news is that there are systems that manage this for billions of people today that already exist and so i think that you know we don't have to reinvent the wheel there's certainly going to be a bunch of new things to learn if that world ever plays out but i think you know managing devices and policies and group access all those things are solved problems which is good

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Asha Sharma:At this point we have AI and agents in many of our workflows like one of my favorite ones so right now are my engineering partners out so I jump on the live site bridges when something goes down and you know as something as simple as like you can automatically get a summary of everything that just happened because usually there's 15 people talking you don't actually know where the incident started where it's going to end and everything and then all of a sudden I have that and I can kind of figure out and ask questions and get updates like awesome like I think that kind of the entire kind of devops areas is changing we use spark to create prototypes so everybody on the team is expected to code but like you know sometimes just chatting in and like talking in real words actually gets you to a prototype that's more interesting and like more expressive and reflective of your creativity so we use that I mean I think everybody's using AI to write everybody's using AI to kind of find ways to have efficiencies and like coming up with documentation and things like that and so I think it's everywhere which is cool I think that we're just scratching the surface though for kind of like what's possible in terms of working with agents

Lenny Rachitsky:That's how I always feel when people ask me how I use AI I'm just like it's just like everywhere it's just like in every little sprinkled in everything I do now I don't even know how to describe it

Asha Sharma:Yeah it's hard to remember a world where it didn't really exist

Lenny Rachitsky:Yeah there's there's a product manager that I collab with Peter Yang who talks about how he just doesn't I don't even know how to do a strategy doc anymore without AI how did people do this without having someone

Asha Sharma:You think there will do be strategy docs in the future that's going to be interesting

Lenny Rachitsky:I have this like I wrote this post once of like which skills of a PM job will be most replaced by AI and strategy is the one that people are the most have the biggest debate on like you could argue I don't know if like let's get into it briefly you would think if some AI had all of the information you had about where the market's going your metrics your product today it would be so good at developing a strategy for you many people think that's the one thing AI will be really not good at for a long time because that's where we need all this human judgment stuff I don't know do you have any thoughts

Asha Sharma:I think that some of the most consequential products in the world required a bunch of kind of deterministic like logical sets of inputs and like sparks of creativity and imagination and judgment and vision that could not be achieved without humans like Microsoft is like the vision of a software factory and creating what Microsoft did wasn't inevitable Instacart you know there was web bands and web bands didn't work but Instacart did work because of a different way of thinking about it that came through judgment and iteration and a bunch of things that you couldn't have learned unless you actually went through the process you know the iPod like you go forward so I think it's there I think docs themselves like for every idea for every you know need will just start to kind of fade into you know applications and different artifacts in the productivity suite which you know is just a different way of working

Lenny Rachitsky:Yeah like your original question which I didn't quite answer but I think is important you're asking like do we even need strategy docs and I guess it's just like somehow everyone needs to be aligned on the strategy maybe it's not a different yeah it could be some other

Asha Sharma:I mean if you architect an organization the right way to keep up with AI a you different alignment mechanisms than traditional ways of actually working

Lenny Rachitsky:So let me ask you actually about that so planning right now is just crazy how does anyone plan a roadmap when there's just like okay GPT-five's out okay great

Lenny Rachitsky:What works for you for setting an actual roadmap and a strategy for your team like how far out do you plan how often do you have to rethink everything

Asha Sharma:I mean I'll caveat this by saying like everyone's just figuring it out and it's a lot harder to figure it out when you're a larger organization than when you're you know much smaller and you get to kind of you know run something yourself and there's pros and cons to both so here's what we do the company historically at least in our product teams had kind of semesters that they planned again so think of that as every six months there's kind of a strategy look back look forward all of those things I think that's very valuable I think like the idea of six months though and really understanding what's changing out in front is truly challenging to kind of have a overbaked situation and so we kind of think about it as you know what season are we in and so a season which is very uncomfortable can be denoted by a set of secular changes that are happening in the industry or that are happening from customers and so you know you can think about season one might've been like you know the prototyping of AI and kind of the early GPT work and then it was all around models and reasoning models and now it's the advent of agents and so that can last a year that can last six months that can last three months but like grounding everybody on the ethos of what are the secular changes what are the customer problems we need to solve what does winning look like so everybody has that shared sense what is the north star metric is something that we do the second thing that we do is that we have kind of loose quarterly OKRs so like okay if we believe that what do we need to do next quarter to actually put ourselves on a path to that and then from there you know teams are operating in squads and they're kind of setting out you know four to six week goals that they're trying to go after for problem areas to go ladder up to that you know and especially as the platform for the company and the platform for our Azure customers with AI I will say we go through lots of changes to that all the time and I think we have to just have an openness that that is the business that we're in I think the other thing is just like we try to leave slack in the system not just for the unplanned but for the slope I think that we have to continuously be thinking about how we're going to disrupt the platform in our thinking and what we need to be investing in to make that possible and so we try to do a little bit of both

Lenny Rachitsky:This is awesome so what I'm hearing here is there's this concept of seasons and everyone's aligned okay this is time for agents this is what's happening right now we're going to center around our strategy around agents and then there's these loose quarterly OKRs you plan for three months roughly and then you leave some slack in the system for things to change

Asha Sharma:Yes

Lenny Rachitsky:Is the current season agents how would you describe what season we're in right now

Asha Sharma:Yeah okay it's agents the rise of agents

Lenny Rachitsky:The rise of agents that sounds like a terminator movie do you have a sense of what the next season might be is there any like oh this might be coming next

Asha Sharma:Gosh I don't but I think that look like we have you know more than 15,000 agents that are deployed on our service today at least at the Azure service there's a bunch of other platforms in the company and I would just say that I think that we should really focus on making sure that we have all of the alignment accountability observability evals to making those agents like great I think that Manus' breakthrough in this space was that they could like do these tool calling loops and have agents kind of do longer running tasks that really no other platform was able to do I think stuff like that is critical memory is critical like there's still a bunch of building blocks that I think like are leaving agents incomplete in the wild that I think we have to really sweat the details on before we move on

Lenny Rachitsky:So it's just like agents till the end of time until super intelligence and then we're just on beaches chilling

Asha Sharma:Yes agents until dank memes look like yeah I think the cool thing is is like something new could come in three months something new could come in thirteen months I think like we kind of have this conviction on a set of building blocks that we wanna provide to enable these agents to endure and have high endurance and so that's what workbooks do

Lenny Rachitsky:When you said there's 15,000 agents what does that mean is that 15,000 types of agents you can use or is it like that's how many

Asha Sharma:Processes no that's are you know customers 15,000 I think I should re reference the numbers 15,000 customers who have produced agents I think the number of agents is actually like millions

Lenny Rachitsky:15,000 customers that are building a specific kind of agent on your platform and they're running and the number of agents is in the millions just running okay in the how it's wild some crazy numbers here okay so let me just kind of go in a slightly different direction you're kind of in this you're kind of in the center of the storm of a lot of AI just like seeing everything that's going on is there something you wish you'd known before stepping into this role that you're just like okay I see I didn't expect this

Asha Sharma:When I first took the role it was kind of described as like the belly of the beast and I had spent most of my career building products at the center of machine learning and applications or businesses and I think that to my surprise a lot of the learnings have translated in terms of what makes a great platform is what makes a great product and like the thing for me is like it's often in the invisible work or the like not the pixels that actually drives that so like for example one of the first companies that I worked at was a company called Porch Group I was employee seven and we knew we wanted to help people take care of their home and I think we invented so many features like the home report or like a way to manage your home or like house style inspiration where you could like see all of the houses and map every single room and the single most important thing that we could have done and did during my time there was create a matching platform that matched the 6,000,000 professionals with the 1,300 service types the 37,000 zip codes and all of the homeowners in North America to actually take care of their home and that was just the game of inches and kind of optimizing that engine in order to create higher quality leads essentially that's what got us to the first $5,000,000 valuation that's eventually what we built on to actually have other vertical services and software platforms that IPO ed the company same with messaging the number one learning that I had was look like WhatsApp didn't win because it had stickers or stories or dark mode in fact I don't even think it had all of those things when it won it won on a few premises because one was the phone book like you knew that when you use WhatsApp you could reach every single person because you had their phone number and those are the people that you care about when you're using messaging it was the reliability and how fast it was like I could text my grandmother in India and know that she would get my text message all the time and and then it was the privacy like when you are sending 200 messages a day to the four people you care about most you wanna make sure no one else can read the messages and so the end to end encryption really mattered and so it wasn't the hundreds of features it was all in the kind of the infrastructure and the platform and same with Instacart right like there are so many loved features of Instacart but at the end of the day it's a billion items that updates 3,000 times every single minute to get homeowners their groceries from the store that they love and so I think I wish I had known that because I think it would've curtailed my learning curve to say that it's not all the features for the platform that matters it's the data residency so the hospital in Germany that's fine tuning a model can do so in confidence and the data isn't going to leave the region it's the availability it's the reliability it's you know making sure you have the right selection of the tools that enterprises need and the right way to retrieve the knowledge and that's kind of the platform that we've built but just didn't fully have that picture that those learnings would translate

Lenny Rachitsky:That's really interesting so what I'm hearing is people kind of undervalue just have the simple bottom of the Maslow hierarchy of that help you win in platforms especially in messaging platforms including so it's like reliability privacy I don't know availability

Asha Sharma:Yeah performance reliability privacy safety all of those things

Lenny Rachitsky:Let me ask you kind of a totally different question when we were gonna record this previously and you're like oh I have a big meeting with Satya I gotta do instead and so we moved to a different time very few people get to work with Satya he's quite a successful leader what's something you've learned from him about I don't know leadership or product building

Asha Sharma:I've learned that optimism is a renewable resource like this company for fifty years has had you know every reason not to succeed and it has and even as it's had early success in the AI era and challenges and other successes and the space is developing so quickly I think that his ability to generate energy and to use his optimism to kind of renew everybody's dedication to the mission is unbelievable and I think it's such an important part of the culture everybody talks about the growth mindset that's real huge part of the culture but I think the ability to generate energy and clarity on what we need to go do and use optimism to renew the commitment every single day for every single person in an entirely competitive talent space is like is pretty amazing

Lenny Rachitsky:Is that something you think that was just innate to him or it's something that he's worked on to just generate this optimism on behalf of everyone

Asha Sharma:I have no idea we should ask him but I am like deeply impressed by it

Lenny Rachitsky:It's interesting that a lot of this comes down to just vibes it's just like this vibe of you know like imagine it's not him just the words he uses it's just like this energy that he exudes optimism and energy

Asha Sharma:I mean think about it we all choose to know someone just said this to me and I thought it was great we all choose to close the door on our kids every single day to go work on something and so you have to work on something that is like deeply moving to you and is like you know you have a deep belief that is going to make the world a better place and like I think that's why it's vibes like I think you have to follow and have a sense of duty towards a mission that is bigger than yourself

Lenny Rachitsky:Makes me think of a line that I've referenced a couple of times on this podcast that really hits people really hard that the only people that'll remember you working late are your kids

Asha Sharma:Okay don't know where we're going with that but that was like know

Lenny Rachitsky:Not it's too your much we've gone too far oh man okay well me ask you this what's we driving

Asha Sharma:Can upset our customers we could have gone a different route on that one

Lenny Rachitsky:This is the real stuff

Lenny Rachitsky:What's driving you what's driving you what's keeping you excited about the work that you're doing

Asha Sharma:What AI will help us do from a workforce perspective what it will help us do from a healthcare perspective like you know my mom has cancer and I think a lot about how wow we might find a way to solve the form of cancer she has in my lifetime and I never thought that was possible three years ago like all of that's deeply profound and the thing that like I personally think a lot about now that we know that we're living in this time working with such powerful technology is the effects of it and how I can best build a platform where people can make use of it so like the reason why I work at Microsoft is because like the whole ethos of the company is like how do I help people and businesses achieve more and like more for me and the thing like I think about at night outside of you know GPUs is you know I think about like will my son have classmates in the future and that's not because agents are going to replace them it's because the fertility rates are declining right like the average birth rate in the nineties when we were growing up was like three and now it's 2.3 and in 2050 it's estimated to be you know below replacement and I think that AI can have such a big effect on it and already is like I was just reading about a hospital in London that's you know able to improve pregnancy rates by using AI to match you know eggs and sperms and they're cutting costs at the same time you saw with the ChatGPT five launch yesterday such an amazing story about how ChatGPT is helping in healthcare Stanford's one of our big customers with the platform that I build and they're working on using AI for tumor reviews it's just like it is these sets of things that will like move humanity forward and expand our lifetime and give us the privilege to solve a hundred year problems and so that's why I'm excited and that's why I do what I do

Lenny Rachitsky:Yeah especially in your role where you're building the platform that enables all of this I could see how impactful that could be Asha is there anything else that you wanted to touch on or share or double down on of anything we've talked about before we get to our very exciting lightning round

Asha Sharma:We touched on it a little bit but I think that with the advent of agents and products that think and can act and reason there's going to be this kind of new wave around RL and I have a deep belief that that will become one of the most important product techniques kind of of the next season or at least the next few seasons

Lenny Rachitsky:And RL is reinforcement learning

Asha Sharma:Yes yes exactly like I believe we will see just as much money spent on post training as we will on pre training and in the future more on post training we talked a little bit about Nathan Lambert's study where his review was that when a model hits 30,000,000,000 parameters it makes more sense to kind of fine tune and optimize that you know 50% of developers according to surveys are now fine tuning and we know fine tuning is good but like if you actually go through the full loop you can get better results so I think there's a bunch there and I think there's a whole new set of infrastructure and platforms and companies that will be created that are all around this part of the stack and so I think it's an exciting time to be in the platform space but it's also an exciting time to be starting companies and be thinking about those problems

Lenny Rachitsky:I want to make sure people truly understand what you're saying here because not everyone truly understands post training pre training what's the simplest way to understand the difference there and just why it's such a big deal investment is moving to post training

Asha Sharma:The way that I think about it is you know to create a foundation model creates a it requires a tremendous amount of compute a tremendous amount of science expertise as we're seeing the cost for scientists the average value is raising dramatically and I think you know an expertise that we've seen like isn't everywhere in the world right now and so it's just a big capex investment to do that and with this explosion of models that we talked about in the beginning there's a lot of good models to choose from for different domains and so I think that you just get more leverage economically you get more leverage from a taste perspective of how you actually want to steer a model if you're actually doing reinforcement learning or some sort of fine tuning to actually start to optimize what's off the shelf for some outcome like price performance quality if you think about that that's not crazy right like you know ranking is an age old optimization problem where you don't wanna just take what's off the shelf because there's like amazing frameworks and UI and kind of components that you know the world is react components that are out there you still want to tailor the experience to a set of use cases or a set of people I think it's just the same kind of industrial logic

Lenny Rachitsky:So in practice what this means is there's like a GPT-five model you're saying there's a lot of opportunity and a much more efficient way to spend money which is take something like that and then train that on additional custom data that you have whether it's data or just reinforcement learning maybe even with humans to align it with what you wanted to achieve

Asha Sharma:Yep and it could be your own data it could be data that you buy it could be synthetic data it could be something else but I think that we're kind of going to start to see more and more companies and organizations kind of start to think about how do I adapt a model rather than how do I take something off the shelf as is or invest a bunch of money in building my own models

Lenny Rachitsky:Yeah I forget I know Cursor when he was on the podcast he shared that they have a bunch of models that support your experience with Cursor and over time they're just going to have their own thing I forget who was Winsorf or one of those guys just uses their own model now they don't just plug into Claude

Asha Sharma:I'm much more in the model system camp like I believe in model diversity I think that inexperience like Claude like Sonnet four is awesome for a set of use cases versus GPT-five is different for different use cases I think that there's some tasks where you care about the latency of the model you're like cool with the thinking time or you kind of want a quick retrieval and things like that I think the beauty is there's a lot of models that can kind of help you achieve that and so I'm much more in the like model system rather than one model to rule them all I think about an ensemble of models as a set of multiple models that then you can you know fine tune and deploy independently but you know at this point we're all making up different terminology to define things that we like have deep beliefs on that have like you know limited sets of data points because everything is moving so fast

Lenny Rachitsky:Yeah with that we've reached our very exciting lightning round I'm

Asha Sharma:Very excited for our lightning round and I'm like turning down the lights

Lenny Rachitsky:And then it'll come back on I imagine in one second okay first question what are two or three books you find yourself recommending most to other people

Asha Sharma:At work it's probably Thinking Machine so it's all about treating the cause not the symptoms prototypical example is like if you wanna solve traffic you don't actually put up speed bumps or speed limits you actually have to like solve walkability and mobility and kind of like why people actually use cars outside of that I kind of personally the CMO of Instacart recommended to me Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and I read it like last month and last year and the year before because I love it so much it's like this like beautiful story over ten years

Lenny Rachitsky:What are some favorite recent movie or TV shows you really enjoyed

Asha Sharma:Formula One saw twice for All Mankind for All Mankind I like season four I don't know I I like kinda playing out alternative theories to kinda how the space race might have looked

Lenny Rachitsky:Do you have a favorite product you recently discovered they really love could be tech could be gadgets could be clothing

Asha Sharma:So I just joined the board of the Home Depot and we're doing a little renovation project and so there's this new kind of new to me Dewalt kind of power pack and they use pouch cells and so it's like 50% like lighter but with all the power and it's like awesome for drills and like things that you know I need to lift up with one hand that feel heavy so I love that we also are testing out this new Brilliance smart home kind of system so it's like kind of four inches of like high res middleware that allows you to kind of connect to everything and I've like reached peak kind of the sat with like the explosion of all the technology required to actually use your home so it just might be the middleware that like sticks but we'll see

Lenny Rachitsky:Did you say dissat is that short for dissatisfaction yes

Asha Sharma:Sorry I'm speaking in acronyms

Lenny Rachitsky:Woah I've never heard that dissat it's like I love that by the way love that you're on the board of the Home Depot what a different part of the spectrum of work

Asha Sharma:Yeah it's been awesome the very first board meeting the head of philanthropy has been at the company for decades and she said welcome to the greatest company on the planet it's pretty special

Lenny Rachitsky:You're like Microsoft is there something you've learned from working with them that you've brought to Microsoft

Asha Sharma:Like it's new it's this year but I've long worked on products that kind of had that impact so like when I was at Porch it was pros at Instacart we had 600,000 shoppers and obviously the Home Depot has associates one of my favorite things about the company culturally is they have this inverted pyramid where instead of having like executives at the top the associates are at the top and the stores themselves are headquarters and then the kind of traditional HQ is kind of support and so it's just like it's so customer centric and when I think about amazing execution and creating these durable long term institutions and kind of how culture and ideology and kind of leadership is formed like I think about that and I think about at the end of the day you know AI is going to have an impact on every single person and every single job and it's like amazing to kind of just spend time with people outside of our bubble and kind of really try and learn what their real pain and problems and how they think about AI and how they think about technology and kind of what we need to do

Lenny Rachitsky:Okay two more questions do you have a favorite life motto that you find yourself coming back to sharing with friends or family

Asha Sharma:I used to use the kind of minimize regret framework it's great and I've used that for a long time I think that probably once I got into my adult years and started to kind of have a family and things like that my kind of just worldview changed a little bit and it was all about maximizing kind of option value and it just gave the things that I naturally cared about like family and health and trust and relationships like it was just kind of like a new level of like value associated with those because all of a sudden learning rest on the weekend can like compound in the future or you know having good health can compound in the future you don't know you kept to trade that off of working extra hours or you know the importance of family and all of those things and so I think that like my worldview is like when I'm 70 it's not about what do I look back on in my life and count the number of regrets it's really about like looking forward in the number of adventures I will still have because I have like accumulated this wealth of skills and trust and you know people and family and impact and things like that

Lenny Rachitsky:Speaking of skills the internet tells me that you're a second degree black belt in taekwondo why oh gosh is this true and then I have a question about it

Asha Sharma:This is true

Lenny Rachitsky:Okay that's incredible why is this embarrassing that's an incredible thing

Asha Sharma:I'm generally embarrassed anytime anything is discussed about okay

Lenny Rachitsky:Great no problem what's something that you learned from taekwondo that has helped you with life or work

Asha Sharma:Taekwondo is more mental than it is physical and so I think that's the same with kind of like all of our jobs and making products like I think it's like mental clarity it's courage it's kind of the ambition to kind of see things through and be unwavering and so I think that's literally you know what it taught me outside of meditating which probably took me the entire time to like actually learn to meditate and clear my head but yeah I think it's awesome like think everybody imagines like you know flying psychics or running up a wall and like you can do those things too but the real value is like the mental pursuit of it all you know

Lenny Rachitsky:And you can do those things too wow okay I'm good I gotta get into this Asha this was awesome is there or actually two final questions where can folks find you online if they wanna maybe follow-up on anything if you want people to reach up and how can listeners be useful to you

Asha Sharma:You can hit me up on LinkedIn

Asha Sharma:Or email or text I think all of those are traceable look like how can you be helpful to me is I think like we're all early in this journey and great platforms are built on great use cases and built on great customers and so like if you have feedback you have ideas you have like things you want AI to be able to do to help you achieve more I'd love to hear it I think the thing about all of these changes is that all of these new products and use cases will be developed everywhere and so I'm always just thinking about how can we be the platform to support that

Lenny Rachitsky:Amazing Asha thank you so much for being here

Asha Sharma:Thanks for having me

Lenny Rachitsky:Bye everyone 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 see you in the next episode