AI is critical for humanity’s survival: Cisco president on the AI revolution | Jeetu Patel

Birth rates are going down if you have

60% of your population where you don't have enough people who take care of them. That could cause a lot of human suffering when I got this new job. There is zero chance. I would have been able to do it if AI wasn't there. Because I didn't know anything about so many domains that we were in.

A lot of companies are trying to adjust to this new world.

“You have to know the difference between a mega trend and a hype cycle.”

When there's a mega trend, don't fight it. AI is a mega trend. One of the most foundational movements that we have seen in human history. To turn Cisco from an older, slower, more traditional enterprise to a very AI forward company. This is very difficult to do.

AI is moving so fast. One of the things that tell my team is fast forward six months from now. Get prepared for that world. E-managed 30,000 people. Every management book that you read will tell you praise in public criticize in private.

I fundamentally disagree with that notion. What you have to do is establish enough trust among the team. So that you are comfortable critiquing and debating in public. What's something that you wish you'd known before taking on this role? Stamina Trump's intellect.

It's very important to have smart people, but you can become smart if you have curiosity

“and hunger and staying power and persistence.”

You can't teach hunger. Today my guest is G2 Patel, Chief Product Officer and President at Cisco. Cisco is not a brand that mostly people think about when they think about AI. But not only are they a massive part of the AI infrastructure build up that is happening right now all over the world.

What G2 has achieved internally at Cisco in terms of transforming their culture and waves of working to be AI first is something that most big company leaders only dream about.

G2 is also an incredible human with so much warmth and wisdom to share.

I am very excited to be sharing his story. Don't forget to check out Lenny's productpast.com for an incredible set of deals available exclusively to Lenny's newsletter subscribers. Let's get into it after a short word from our wonderful sponsors. Applications break in all kinds of waves, crashes, slowdowns, regressions, and the stuff

that you only see once real users show up. Century catches it all.

“See what happened where and why, down to the commit that introduced the air, the developer”

who shipped it, in the exact line of code all in one connected view. I've definitely tried the five tabs and slack thread approach to debugging this is better. Century shows you how the request moved, what ran, what slowed down, and what user saw. Seeer sentry's AI debugging agent takes it from there. It uses all of that century context to tell you the root cause, suggest a fix, and even

opens a PR for you. It also reviews your PRs and flags any breaking changes with fixes ready to go. Buy Century and seeer for free at centree.io/lany and use code Lenny for $100 in Century credits. That's S-E-N-T-R-Y.io/Lenny.

Your marketing website sets the tone for your brand and is the one touch point that every single one of your customer sees. In today's age, if you're still having a hard time making small changes and simple updates to it, you're doing something wrong. That is why so many companies from early stage startups to Fortune 500s, including companies

like DoorDash, Zapier Proplexity, and 11 Labs turn to Framer. The website builder that turns your dot com from a formality into a tool for growth. Framer works like your team's favorite design tool, and comes with real-time collaboration, a robust CMS with everything you need for great SEO, and advanced analytics that includes integrated AD testing.

Just your Framer site go live to the web in seconds with a single click and without any help from engineering. Whether you want to launch a new site, test a few landing pages, or migrate your full.com. Framer has programs for startups, scaleups, and large enterprises to make going for my idea to life site as easy and fast as possible.

Learn how to turn your website into a growth engine from a Framer expert or just get started building for free today at Framer.com/lany and if you're a Lenny's product pass subscriber, you get an entire year, a Framer Pro, or free. Check it out at Framer.com/lany rules and restrictions may apply. G2, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

Lenny, I'm excited, can see you.

The timing in this conversation is so amazing, you're just coming off running the most

insane assembling of AI thought leaders and tech leaders I've ever seen. Let me just read a few of the names that you guys had at the summit that just happened a couple of days ago. You had Jensen, you had Sam Alman, you had Mark and Dreson, you had Fei Fei Lee, you had the CEO of Intel, AWS, my Krieger Kevin Wheel, like that's just like a third of the guest

you guys had. I don't know. I didn't do this. But it feels like you had this fire hose of information coming at you, you interviewed a lot of these people on stage.

And so while it's fresh in your mind, I want to ask you, after doing this summit, after

just like an insight that has been lodged in your head ever since doing the summit?

It was an amazing thing to pull off because I'd never thought we'd be able to do it and

we would really worry going into it, thinking, well, we're trying to do far side chats for 12 hours, and there's a capacity of human absorption that we're trying to challenge. And so we tried to put a lot of breaks in there, we started at 9 a.m. and we ended at 9 p.m. and we had a couple of hour break in the middle. But everyone stayed and everyone was engaged and we could have gone until 11 and it would

have been fine. And it's because the quality of the conversations and the caliber of the guests that were there made a world of a difference. What was the takeaway from it? I'd say a few things, one is the capabilities overhang is real.

“I think there's more functionality on one end, there's kind of this paradox of progress on”

one end, we are solving all these amazing problems with science and the other end you talk to the enterprise, they're like we're struggling with adoption. And I feel like there's a, there's help that's going to be needed with an organization and the reason I, we pull this thing together, the goal was, what is happening in the industry and how can we help customers make sure that they can make the most of it because

we are in one of the most foundational movements that we have seen in human history. And it's, we got to make sure that we make the most of it. So that was one is the capabilities overhang is real, the second area is I'd say that it's harder when you go beyond some of the most more obvious use cases. Like for example, coding is a very, very good use case that you know, you're starting

to get a lot of success and I mean, we just had our first product that we think we will be in the next two weeks, 100% written with, with AI, right. I don't think that's as easy when you go into every other function of the business and that was actually very apparent that, hey, this is, this is going to require some nuance and understanding of our business works.

And then the third one, which is the, a really interesting takeaway in more countries and talk about this in your podcast a few days ago, in fact, when I talked to him, I actually started with your podcast because it was so interesting. And then we dug into it a little bit more, but then Kevin Scott was also talking about this. But this notion of the fact that birth rates are going down and we have a demographic shift that's happening in the world and there's going to be more people that are in the older age bracket than the younger age bracket.

And those older people are going to need folks to take care of them.

And historically in society, that's actually always been the case, but we might be at a point where that might not be the case.

And when that's not the case, you know, we worry about AI taking our jobs.

“I think that survival of humanity depends on us successfully, AI, because at some point, if you have, you know, 60% of your population that's in a, in a demographic where you don't have enough people who take care of them.”

That, that could cause a lot of human suffering. So I don't think people talk about this enough. And that's something that we have to take a moment and digest that this is so important for our collective success, moving forward. Something I was going to say during that, my chat with Mark and when he talked about that, AI's basically coming just in time to save us, because there aren't going to be enough people to do the jobs. I was in my head of thinking, this is like another signal that we are in a simulation.

The things that are working out just right for us, what are the chances? The older I get, the more I believe that we are actually in a simulation. You know, the first time I heard that concept, I thought it was such an absurd concept, now I'm like, you know, this is, might actually be happening, there we go. Following this thread, a lot of companies are trying to adjust to this new world. You are doing an incredible job at actually doing this.

We got connected through Kevin Wheel, who is former CPO at OpenAI now ahead of science at OpenAI.

“And the way he described it is the work that you have done to turn Cisco the way he described it from an older, slower, more traditional.”

Enterprise to a very AI forward company. How many employees do you guys have? You said 45,000. We have 90,000 employees, 43,000 watched this for him. So the big question for you is, like, this is, it feels like it's really working. And this is very difficult to do at a company of that scale.

A lot of leaders are trying to make it work. What are two or three things that you've done that you think have been most impactful and effective in helping Cisco lean into AI not be scared of it. And actually embrace the future. Innovation in my mind is a choice.

I always find it interesting for people to say, well, you know, your large company, you can innovate, your small company, you can innovate.

It's just a choice. Every day you come into work and you can choose to be thinking about being creative or you can choose to not be creative. It's like a little binary choice you can make every hour every minute of every day.

Very eloquently, he's like, I want Cisco not just to be an iconic company. I want Cisco to also be an iconic and innovative company. And so we got to make sure that we are actually innovating with the set of constraints that we are dealt with. You know, like every company has their own set of constraints and we have our own set of constraints. And we have to make sure that given those constraints, we have to actually innovate really well.

Now, what has, what are the two or three things that have happened that have really helped this out? One was being very clear on what is up for debate and what is not up for debate.

Because what can end up happening is you can always have a pocket video in a large company where if you ask enough number of people people say,

no, if you're a large company, ask enough number of people, someone's going to say no. Right?

“And so when you have conviction about something that's happening that is going to be a bet that you need to place.”

They, you know, what what most people think in large companies is large companies don't experiment. That is in fact not true. Large companies experiment a lot. What large companies don't do is when an experiment works, they don't go all in and double down. They try to keep hedging.

We didn't hedge on AI. We said we're going to go all in. That was number one. What that meant was we had to get people to understand that their personal success and the success of the company are very aligned in us getting dexterous with the use of AI. That means that if they feel like for some reason AI is going to take their job or AI is going to be negative for them.

“We had to reassure them that that was not the case, but the reverse was guaranteed to be the case.”

That if you didn't use AI, if you weren't going to be dexterous in whatever job function you're doing, then your job is probably not going to be that relevant over here in the long run.

So that was the first thing that we did.

That was a, I'm not a big fan of top down hierarchy of going out and doing things. In fact, I deep down inside, I don't respect hierarchy as much. I feel like it can constrain you at times, but I wanted to make sure, on this one, we were very, very deliberate. The entire company is on the same page. We are an AI for a company.

Right. And this happened. We were kind of working towards it even prior to Chad GPT, but Chad GPT became that seminal moment in November of 22 that we actually did that. So that was one. Number two was we had to make sure that we defined what success looked like.

The way that individual success was defined was everyone wanted to be a GM at Cisco. They wanted to own their own fiefdom, be a general manager, because they felt like that in order for me to move up the ranks, I need to be a general manager. Which means I need to have my own sales team, I need to have my own marketing team, I need to have my own product, I need to have my own engineering team, I'm going to make sure I run my own silo.

And if you're a 40 billion dollar business in product revenues, 45 billion whatever, we were at the time.

And then all of a sudden your goal is that you're going to just run a bunch of 40 million dollar businesses and break it up into a series of 40 million dollar businesses. That's actually not a good thing for the company. So the thing we did was we said we have to become not a holding company of 251 acquisitions and thousands of different products. We have to become a platform company.

“And the characteristic of the platform is you have to be tightly integrated where the customer feels the same emotion, no matter what product of ours they use, right?”

There's the same set of expectations that can be served reliability, trust, elegance and design, solving a problem in the most efficient way. Those are the things we want to strive to do. But you don't have to buy everything all at once because we also want to be realistic about the fact that not every customer only uses Cisco talked about. There's an ecosystem. So loosely coupled, but tightly integrated.

You don't have to buy everything all at once. But boy, when you do buy two things together, they work like magic. So that was the second big thing we did. And then the third one we did was we said let's make sure that we have a mental model shift in the company and we did this about five and a half years ago. When I first joined, this was a very deliberate decision which was, we cannot operate in a wall garden.

We have to make sure that we operate in an open ecosystem, which means we have to be completely comfortable with having a competitor that we're going to partner with. And that's okay. You know, we don't have to think about this in a zero sum manner in order for me to win someone as lose. We can partner because if we, if a customer has made a choice of going with company A and company B and we happen to be one of those two companies.

Because if the customer succeeds, that success has a flow through rate to you. That's going to be pretty high.

“And so that's what we did. And I think that's been those principles of building great products, but making sure that operates like a platform and having an open ecosystem.”

I think has been kind of central and then not being confused about the fact that we'll be AI first from the top down. I want to take a tangent and make sure people understand what Cisco even does these days. I think as a lay person, you'll think about Cisco and you're like, okay, they are way back. Yes, they make maybe some routers. You guys are key to this massive AI infrastructure build that that's happening right now. You're a major player in this. I don't think people realize this people listening to this podcast.

Give us just like a quick glimpse into how Cisco fits into this massive build that and just like what does Cisco these days.

Cisco is a critical infrastructure company for the AI era.

What does that mean?

“Well, if you think about where the constraints are right now, if you think that AI is going to be one of the biggest movements and then you ask yourself the question, what could hold AI back?”

There's three things where we feel like we can have a direct impact that can hold AI back. Number one is there's an infrastructure constraint. There's just not enough power compute network bandwidth in the world to go out and say, share the needs of AI. Number two is there's a trust deficit. If people don't trust these systems, they're not going to use them and right now there's a lot of mistrust in these systems. You know, hallucination is a feature when you're writing poetry, but when you're trying to go out and run predictable systems, hallucination can be a bad thing.

And these models are unpredictable. They're non-deterministic. And so they have to make sure that they have safety and security kind of factor into them. And then the third area is a data gap. Like so far, we've trained these models with, you know, human generated data publicly available on the internet, but we are running out of human generated data publicly available on the internet to train the models. And every company is going to differentiate based on their own proprietary enterprise data being used to train the models synthetic data and machine data, which is really the most amount of growth is.

And the third category of machine data, we can play a massive role in, let's just go. So what does Cisco do then? If you think about a GPU, which is what everyone now has is very clear because of the great job that Jensen has done that here is what a GPU's core contribution is to AI. If these GPUs aren't networked together, you don't have AI. Because it used to be that you could train a model on a single GPU, but then what happened was the model got you big to be put on a single GPUs, then you had a server with eight GPUs that got connected together. So you could train a model with eight GPUs. But then that wasn't good enough. So then what happened was you said I'm going to have a rack of servers that I'm going to network together.

That at some point wasn't big enough. And so then they said I'm going to have a cluster of racks that I connected together. And those that connected together as the operative word, that's what we end up doing is, and video makes the GPUs, and we connect those GPUs together. AMD makes the GPUs, we connect them together, and now what's happened 90 is you have these data centers that might be hundreds of kilometers apart. That need to operate like one coherent cluster, which means that they're completely in sync every GPUs and sync with each other.

When you're doing a training run, and that requires a very sophisticated set of technologies that we build to make sure that you could have two data centers, 800 kilometers apart, but before they run like completely in sync with each other.

“And that's what Cisco does. We provide the networking. We provide the optics technology. We provide the safety and security technology. We provide the observability.”

You provide, you know, the data platform, all of those things together for making sure that we provide critical infrastructure for the AIR.

So being on the inside of this massive investment that is happening across the world, what do you think isn't being priced into where things are heading into how much life will change? Or just like the scale of this, of this build-out? Years ago, I'd have a chance to meet with Ray Kurzweil. You know, it was a chief scientist at Google for a while. I think he still is. And he had talked about, he was writing this book called "Live Long Enough to Live Forever."

And so I was talking to him, I'm like, what is the impact as human population if all of a sudden you can have 15 generations living simultaneously because we have an indefinite span of life? Because now all of a sudden, you know, everything has to change. Like, how does housing work, how does agricultural work, how does transportation work, how does everything changes?

And he looked at me and he had the most profound answer and he said, you know, most people can't think exponentially because they always think exponentially maybe on a single dimension.

So if you do have an indefinite span of life, you have to assume that humans are creative enough that they're going to find a way to have a 3-day crop cycle.

And they probably will have 5,000 story, you know, skyscrapers. And there will be a bunch of things in society that we have assumed are not solvable that will now be solvable.

“So when you go back to your question and say, what changes in this entire equation that has not been factored and well?”

I think today AI is looked at largely as a productivity tool and an aggregation mechanism. I have data all over and I'm going to be able to make sure that language can be used to compose the data in a way that I can give you, or any of the questions you're looking for. That I think is like the 0.001% of the tip of the iceberg, right? The reality is is we will have original insights generated that don't exist in the human corpus of knowledge, and we will have the physical world get augmented to language, where capacity is augmented to humans.

And what we have to be careful of is that that capacity is working on behalf of humans. But if that capacity is augmented to humans, you can now do things that you really care to do, and not do things that you don't care to do. And so our biggest realization that we had when we were using Codex, for example, we were writing code with OpenAI's model and development tool was the first three months we were screwing around with this.

And then there was this light bulb that ran off. And in fact, there was a forward deployed engineer from OpenAI that told us about this, which is a, hey, stop trying to think of this as a tool.

Think of this as a teammate that got added to your team, and your framing will change, and the way in which you actually use the technology will change. And that essentially, if you compound that to house society operates, that's going to be pretty profound as an implication. While keeping in mind that the safety and security risks are non-trivial, and they're real, and you can't be completely flippin' about them, because how an AI identifies its own success and its own ambition will really matter, and we have to make sure the reaction to keep guardrails around that, because it is in service of humans, it is not to go out and build a society by itself.

“And I do think that those are important kind of checks that you have, checks and balances you have to keep in mind.”

But the thing that people sometimes miss out in this very polarized narrative, which is we are either going to have nothing to do in society, or this is going to be completely useless as a piece of technology.

I think that's not a helpful narrative. In fact, what is helpful is saying, as we reconstruct society for the next phase, how can we make sure that life gets infinitely better?

How can we make sure that diseases get solved? How can we make sure that poverty gets eradicated? How can we make sure that how people learn and find excitement and joy out of life gets compounded meaningfully?

“That happens. I think there's goodness that comes out of this.”

A line that I often think about as Elon has had this thought that the best case scenario with AI, because he was a very like AI domer for a long time. And I think the reason he got lenient AI is like, I need to help steer this in a direction that isn't going to harm the world. The way he described it is the best case scenario for humanity is where the house cat, whereas just like, okay, nice just keep sitting here with me and I'll take care of you. By the way, the things that he is doing right now are nothing short of extraordinary. And for all the critique that one can have, the level of deep thinking that's going on with his company, it's just crazy.

So as you've been thinking about where things are heading, I've been liking to ask this question with people with kids, is there anything you're kind of shifting and how you raise your your daughter, keeping in mind where things are heading. Like other skills you're trying to instill in her values you're trying to instill in her that help her help her thrive in this future. We made a choice and I didn't know how that choice was going to go. That was actually not even an active choice. It was a passive choice. Frankly, even might have been slightly intellectually lazy in the way that we did it, but it actually worked out pretty well.

You know, I think it's an important skill in humans to have and preserve over time. And in fact, as AI does more for us, we should be able to have more of this time, but I don't have to worry about every notification that's coming on my phone every minute of the day because maybe I can be more present in the moment that I'm in.

“She just turned 15 and the night before she was turning 15, what I realized is she is so emotionally mature. We were sitting down one night and she's okay to add just to you know, I feel really good right now about having a very strong value system.”

Okay, now what does that mean and say more? And she's like, well, can you name five things that you feel so convicted about that if the entire world disagreed with you?

This is the day before she's turning 15, okay? The entire world disagreed with you. You would still feel like you were right on that and that would not waver you. She's like, I have a certain core set of things that I believe in where I am completely confident that if everyone disagreed with me, I'm still good. Now, by the way, I have to kind of coach her on the even you get new data, be open-minded to changing your mind, but it was actually a very interesting dynamic, which is, you know, if we can have them be exposed to technology but have the right value system, you might actually have the best of both worlds.

“And you know, it's the day and over yet, she's 15, there's a lot of chances for getting influenced by external factors and all of that, but what you have to do is make sure that you instill the right values,”

but then also expose them to the reality of what the world is today and not completely insulate them from that.

And so the way that it worked out, it did end up working well, and we were lucky for no credit to us. She was, she was able to use technology to get her EQ higher and higher. And we were lucky on that front and we know it can go sideways the other way too, but I do feel like right now, at least for my one dollar, what we try to do is get her exposed to the technology, but make sure that we focus a lot more on the level. And the focus a lot more on the values that we need to have that govern us on a day-to-day basis.

You know, kindness, you know, not being arrogant, hard work, work ethic, those things matter and I don't think, those are timeless in my mind.

I don't think those change because, you know, take risks, be creative, that kind of stuff. G2, these are parenting goals. As I hear this, I have a two and a half year old. That sounds like you've done an amazing job praising your daughter. I would take zero credit for it. I think she deserves a lot of credit for growing up to be who she's become and her mother. What's interesting is that, I know anthropic is really big, like this idea of values and just like how you operate, anthropic has this constitution they released of how the values essentially of cloud.

And it's so interesting how much similarity there is to how to raise a great person and to how to steer any eye correctly. And by the way, it's some of your beliefs and your system around you might change, but values tend to be pretty long lasting and culture and a company tends to be pretty long lasting. You know, and me, Ben Horowitz talks about this very eloquently. The culture is just to set our norms that a company actually. It's not, it's not a set of beliefs, it's a set of behaviors that you exude within the company.

It's actually very, very true because when things aren't going right, how do people behave to go solve problems and come together.

“And that actually forms your cultural norms and I think those cultural norms are, it's very important to be intentional about it.”

And as you have more automation in the world, being intentional, not just with humans, but also with machines and what you want to do to create the guardrails, I think is pretty important. I'm going to take this in a different direction. I talked to Erin Levy, your former boss at the box. And friend, so I asked him just what should I ask you about with something that he learned from you that I stuck with him ever since working with you. And he sure this concept of the right to win, which he says has informed the way he thinks about strategy ever since.

One of the things that we would always talk about is in the areas that we're going to participate.

Do we have permission to play every company, you know, has to make sure that the way in which they provide points of insertion and logical entry into a market is a lot of times dependent on. Do you have the permission to play in that market? Do you have an avenue to get to your to have a route to market to be able to take that product just by building a product that is amazing in in some area. You don't end up actually getting it to mass scale distribution. And so one of the things that we would always do is ask ourselves a question, we're building this new category, we're building this new capability.

Is it going to be logical for people that box built it versus another company building it, you know, is it going to be logical for people that Cisco built it versus another company building it. So that's this notion of permission to play the right to win, do we have a right to win in that area because we have permission to play. And do we have the route to market to be able to take that product and get it to mass scale distribution. Do those things right then actually your dollars that you expand on building product actually have an outsized return.

If not, then you can actually spend up spend end up spending a lot of money on product. Where the product people think are these sales guys don't get it, they don't know how to sell it, especially in enterprise software and the sales people think these product guys don't get it, they don't know how to build it. I think in order to stop that what you have to do is you have to actually use your scale as an advantage and you have to use the areas where you've got the ability to have permission to play where people feel like this is very logical for a company like Cisco.

When we say we're going to network the GPUs and make sure that we actually have a trusted system in AI, that is not far fetch for someone to go out and think about because it's a very natural thing for us to do because for the past 40 years. We've been doing it for the rest of the infrastructure that was not AI and so that's not a far cry to say okay we'll not do it for AI.

“And I think that was an area that Aaron and I spent on by the way, you know, I'm glad that he took that out of me there's so much I've learned from him.”

The biggest area I've learned from him is you never give up in persistence beats intellect and stamina beats intellect any day of the week twice and suddenly end up that guy is as smart as they come.

But that is not the why that's not the biggest reason he's successful he's the biggest reason he's successful as he has an enormous amount of staying power in the game. You know, moving back to my daughter's comment of no matter what everyone else says his convictions and belief. He will actually stick by them and actually get through the hardest times. I totally believe that I feel like I'm not the smartest person in the room usually and a succeed in large part because I just work really hard. Pretty amazing job.

I appreciate it.

“So in this this permission to win concept the reason I think it's so important is it's so easy to build stuff now everyone's just building building building launching launching launching launching.”

And if it feels like this is an increasingly important lever is why will we win in the space. I'm curious if there's an example you can share either from box or Cisco or is just like okay this is like. We're going to do this because we because we have the permission to play here. I agree with you in the sense that if if generating code is something that becomes abundant. You're going to have better technology just because you can generate a lot of code.

You still need human judgment. You still need a level of intuition and what problems are the right ones to solve. You still and yes, I can help you with all of that but it's not something that. Like bats where humans have a superpower they have instinct and they can actually make sure that they can you know full fill out a vision that says this is what I think this could be. And the fullness of time.

“And so that that I think is pretty important.”

So the more the easier it gets for us to get the bottlenecks out to generate code.

The harder it gets for us to make sure that there's not AI slot in the market and that we actually are very selective on what are the things that are going to be the most important things.

That's all the most important problems moving forward. Example of permission to play is I mean there's so many ideas that the company decides the Cisco we have constantly new ideas that keep coming up.

And then in those new ideas that keep coming up people will always say oh my goodness this company is doing so well we should just go into that market or we should just go into this market.

And 90% of the times 99% of the times I find myself saying no.

“And the reason for that is you have to be extremely selective of where you expend your calories.”

And that caloric expenditure is is where you know if you expend your calories in a very focused way. The results you'll get from that focus area tend to be outsizing disproportionate. If you dissipate that caloric burn across multitude of different areas nothing gets enough girth to be able to go out and drive it all the way through and so like you know. Why are we not in business to consumer tech at Cisco right why are we not going out and building things that are very, very B to C because I don't think we have a distribution channel that actually is within our DNA.

I don't think that we've got permission to play there. That's an area where it would be extremely hard for people to grow that Cisco should be the one who's participating that now can we do it of course we can do it. Is that where we want to go or do we want to go where there's so much opportunity in the areas where we can actually prosecute with with the with the ability to have you know operate from a position of strength.

That you've just got a much better return for the dollar that you invest mentioned Aaron as CEO that you learned a lot from.

I'm curious what other CEOs you've learned a lot from and what's something you learned from them. Chuck Robbins is one of my. Favorite humans and not just because I work for him. I work for him because he's one of my favorite heroes. And what I've learned from him he had this kind of great line there was this.

You know piece of press that I our media is very sensationalist and by by definition right they will try to create a very polarized view about the world where there actually isn't one. And most things in my life things are not as extreme as you hear of the headlines of the media. You know it's somewhere in the middle right and there was one time that there was this. Article that ran and.

It was about like you know giving me an unnecessary amount of credit.

And frankly not giving Chuck is much credit about something that he has actually done like a lot of the movements that we've had internally. Wouldn't have happened if he had not hired me and given me agency to go do the things that I needed to get done. He was very much completely in sync with me and what needed to happen. And so you know when I saw this article I had no idea what the report I reached out. I'm like hey I just want to let you know this was not me saying it's someone.

I don't worry about it man.

“What I've learned in life is if you don't care about who gets the credit you just go a lot farther.”

And life and it's so profound. Right and so many ways that. He's just way too confident to let. Anything and so the thing I've learned from Chuck is the importance of confidence. And the importance of knowing what you're good at.

And really not good at. I mean not good. You're going to assemble the team of people around you. He's just he's just masterful of that. And it happens by the way he's the he's the see off Cisco in case people.

That's right he's the see off Cisco. He's a chair of the business roundtable. He's a very dear friend of mine.

“And and I feel like there's a lot to learn from.”

That kind of mental model in mindset. And I've been lucky enough when either. And this is just dumb luck. The people that I've worked with and for. Or all.

Very, very close to me. And I just don't let them go from my life. And so one of the things for example is. I worked with Aaron and then when I was leaving it was very emotional. But I wanted to do something different.

But we committed to each other that we're going to have dinner every six weeks. And Aaron and there's another co-founder Jeff Quiser and I three of us. Every six weeks in Paul Alto we have dinner. You know and it's one of the most. Special things that I still do and it's a tradition now.

It's been going on for six years. And and I love it, you know. You you look at someone like Chuck. We have I start with my day with talking to him in the morning. We text each other.

And then I end the day. Talk to him in the evening and we probably touch base at least four or five times a day.

And I feel like that only happens when you've established enough trust. My first boss that I moved to California is this guy named Rick Devenuti. And then another guy named Jeremy Burton. You know Rick Devenuti is still my coach. I see him every two weeks.

Jeremy is someone that's a very dear friend of mine and your neighbors and it'll be moved. He's got a lot of place next to his just so that we could be close to him. And these are like special people in your life that have enriched your life in very different ways.

“That I think you just have to make sure that you treasure.”

Today's episode is brought to you by some sorrow. If you listen to this podcast, you know that we spend a lot of time talking about building things that sit on a screen. On boarding funnels, mobile apps and check out flows. Some sorrow is building products for the physical world.

First responders racing to emergencies, truck drivers, caring critical supplies, construction workers building our cities and data centers.

These are people who put everything on the line every single day and some sorrow's technology protects them. Some sorrow solving complex problems at the intersection of hardware, software and AJI. And their AI doesn't just detect events. It reasons about the intent and answers questions like, "Do that truck driver break abruptly because they were distracted or was that a heroic act?"

If you want to ground LLMs in messy real-world telemetry or solved AJI constraints at a planetary scale, some sorrow wants to talk to you. If you like playing with enormous data sets, moving fast and working in small teams, come help build the technology that makes the physical world safer and more efficient. Visit somesara.com/lany to learn more. That's s-a-m-s-a-r-a.com/lany.

“So you're currently CPL at Cisco U. I think the team under use of 25,000 people, is that the right number?”

We're about 30,000, but 30,000 people are connected. What's something that you wish you'd known before taking on this role? I don't know if it was instinctively kind of new it, but it was very, very accentuated at Cisco because when people say,

"Oh, is scale hard, and my perspective has always been that the absence of scale is way harder than scale."

What do I mean by that? Like if I have a startup with three people, and we need to prosecute another idea, and that idea requires five people working on it, I have to go raise money. Right? It's an end to, or I have to pivot my entire business. If you have 30,000 people, then you have an idea that requires five people. You just figure out a way that you allocate the dollars internally, and say, "Let's go prosecute this idea."

So in my mind, I always felt like absence of scale was way harder than the presence of scale. And operating within scale, seemed like it was like, "Yeah, you have more opportunity to do it." What I found over the years, not just at Cisco, but even when I, because I ran a small startup in Chicago for like 17 years before I moved over to the Valley. What I found in the large companies is the communication framework, and the lossiness of communication, the telephone game, so to say, has a profoundly negative effect if you're not intentional about it, and if you're not careful of it.

And there was this board member that we had. There's a couple board members. Our lead director, Michael Capellis, is amazing. There's another board member. Kevin is amazing, and then there's this one board member, West Bush, who recently enrolled off, but he used to be on our board. And when I got this job, he told me I said, "I'm going to tell you something. I'm going to give you some advice."

“And take it or leave it, but I think it's going to be important for you to keep it in mind.”

Like what's that, and he goes, "Whatever you do, don't think about your story of the company as a marketing exercise." Think about it as the most intrinsic foundational exercise of the company.

And always be the custodian of the message.

Don't delegate that to someone else to give it, because if you have three, four, five, six, seven layers between you and the person who's actually doing the job in the front line, what you don't want to do is play the telephone game, and assume that people will just cascade it when you go to your team, and then circuit that team will cascade to the next team, cascade to the next team, cascade to the next team. Every one of them will add a flavor with well-intentioned.

And then by the time it gets to the end, people won't know what it is. So always own telling the story. And that seems like it's a lot, because if we have a very broad portfolio, we do all of these events.

Make sure you don't. And initially, the hidden benefit that came out of it that I did not realize is, it massively lanye simplified our business.

And you know why? Because we have such a broad business with so many different industries. It's impossible for someone to be a deep expert in every single one of them across the board, like there's just way too much surface area. But the things that we want to convey to the market that the market should take away from us.

“If that story is not something that I understand well enough to be able to convey it, how do I first expect 20,000 of my sellers to be able to go tell it to the market?”

And how do I expect my customers to be able to digest that story? There's zero chance that would happen. Right? And so that was my kind of big takeaway from this, which is, don't delegate the story telling. And the story telling is not a marketing exercise after you built the product. The story is why you build the product to make the story come real.

And so make sure that the story is there first. And then that story has evidence and proof based on the products that you're building.

I had a conversation with Matt McGinnis, who's CEO and now CPO at Ripling and hit a similar piece of advice, which I think is also.

“It's like a Jason advice, which is the intensity of an idea or plan drops at every level that it goes from CO to the next layer and layer.”

And your job is a leader is to maintain that intensity, not to buffer it from the employees, but to maintain exactly the same intensity. And it feels like that's in addition to also just keep the story the same, like don't filter it, don't change it. Although your advice is even different, just like you actually go to the team working on and tell the story yourself, don't let it go. I want to make sure that they hear it for me directly, so that there's no more seen us. You know, like we have this concept and networking called pack of loss, when you actually send packets over a wire and you have a loss of packet, then it actually does.

There's loss of data that you don't want to have pack of loss in your story telling from you to the person on the front line, because the direct ethernet cat 5 connection. This is this a direct connection and there's no pack of loss of this one. You got to make sure it gets to the end of the audience. And I think the reason for that is, as companies get large, they can lose touch with the front lines, like everyone gets really good with the math of the business, but they don't really always preserve the soul of the business.

And there's a lossiness that happens because, you know, if you have seven eight layers between you and the front line, even the message that's coming back to you from them is actually getting lossy. And so what you have to do is just preserve and I think what was said earlier about the intensities the same way, which is, you got to preserve the intensity, you got to preserve the sanctity of the message and you got to preserve the clarity of the message. So that everyone is clear on the direction we're going down and if you can stay clear and stay motivated about that direction and make sure that everyone's on the same page and what needs to be done to execute, you will have success.

If not, you will actually have guaranteed failure. How do you actually operationalize this without just being overloaded with the work and constantly having to, you know, meet with every team and remind them of the story?

“The first thing I feel is you have to have very clear thinking because the clarity of thought is what brings clarity of communication.”

So you have to spend the time with your team in sweating the details on what it is that you want to do and why you want to do it. The context of why is so lost and constantly reminding people why it's important and having the least amount of asymmetry between the topmost layer and the organization and the bottommost layer is super. Now by the way, you know, I'm a section 16 officer, there are certain things that for example, you're in a quiet beard, you can go talk about to someone else during that time period.

Like, you know, but that's not loud.

However, the most amount of context that you can provide them in the way that you can because you're allowed to, the better off you are and always treat people like adults.

You know, like what I've found is oftentimes when you go into corporate environments like people start becoming very sterile in the facts that they provide and sometimes it's okay to just say, hey, we screwed up here. This was really bad. That's not meant to, you know, like, one of the things that I found to be very counterintuitive because every management book that you read will tell you otherwise. What do they say? Praise in public and criticize in private.

I think what you have to do is establish enough trust among the team so that you are comfortable critiquing and debating in public.

But when you're in private, take that moment to build a trust because if you build that trust and you tell them that you've got their back and you create a level of safety there. In public, you don't want to be in a mode of posturing, you want to be in a mode of problem solving. When you're just giving people perfunctory compliments all the time, and everything's just hunky-dory, gross car glasses great, all your dashboards look green, but you're growing the business at like one and a half percent.

Like, there's, there's an asymmetry there. Something's broken, you know, it's like, what do we need to do over here? And so what I tend to do is use the exact opposite approach. I tend to be very, very direct in public.

You know, be respectful. But be direct in public. This is not working. Let me tell you why it's not working. We got to face the facts.

And then the very, very kind of clear with people that you got their back and private. And don't be stingy with words on that front, you know, because I feel like there are times when people are very stingy with words with people in private. You can't be stingy with words over there, and don't be stingy with critique in public, because I think people need to make sure there is resolving problems together. And if we don't know the play that we're executing, if we don't know the things that we're going to need to do, then I'm not really certain if you're making collective progress.

And I think it's not going to be fulfilling to either you or the recipient at some point. And those, those compliments will feel hollow because you didn't mean them, because you, you were trying to put it in between, you know, like Ben Horowitz says in hard things about hard things that you have a shit sandwich, you say something really nice to someone. Then you say something that's not really nice and then you put, no, just treat people like adults. Tell them the facts, what you're tone, I still have to work on that. There are times when I get very passionate people think like, you know, but what you're tone.

And make sure that you debate conflict is a necessary condition of business.

“But the only way that you can have productive conflict is if you've established trust.”

And the only way that you can establish trust is by making sure that you spend the time to establish the trust. So spend the time to establish the trust, but then focus on the best idea winning and actually having the debate. Is there maybe one more lesson that you learned from this, or I guess it's something you wish you'd known before getting into this role? Is there anything else that comes to mind? I was an apps guy, you know, I operated in the apps layer, I worked at Bolks. And even when I was at EMC, I was building apps that, you know, you built for the end user.

Infrastructure is a different game.

And the thing that I learned about infrastructure is you don't always get the glory, but you always get the blame.

Perfect.

“And you have to be comfortable with the fact that you are working in a way that other people get the glory.”

Great infrastructure companies, the application companies get the glory when they're running on that infrastructure. And so you have to be hardwired in infrastructure to orient on your ecosystem success, not just your own success. And that is probably one of the lessons that I learned at Cisco in a very stark way, which I then fully appreciated until I got into the details of the infrastructure. Well, if this thing doesn't work, you know, like we were every single time our infrastructure doesn't work.

This morning I was with a medical institution, I was with the healthcare company this morning. And they were telling me that they were very complimentary, they were thanking us on the partnership. But I asked them, why do you, why are you doubling down with us? And then like because when the infrastructure doesn't work, people die. Someone doesn't get dialysis.

Someone doesn't get a surgery done. And we need to make sure that we're working with someone with the infrastructure working. And so I feel like at that point in time, you can't be navel gazing too much about look how cool you are because you did something.

“You have to just make sure that you're really immediately shifting your focus to what does the customer do and what does the ecosystem do with your infrastructure so that the outcome is achieved.”

And you have to get very outcome oriented.

You are not talking about yourself, you're talking about the system just working.

No one will come and tell you, hey, G2, thank you so much, my network work today. Right, but the moment it doesn't work, they're going to call you and say, you know what, my network's not working and my people, cat work and patients are dying in the hospital. And I think you just have to be comfortable with that. It's interesting how this lesson connects so directly to the lesson you learned from Chuck, the CEO of Cisco, which is don't don't expect the praise and the credit.

“You need to be comfortable with other people getting credit for your work.”

By the way, it's not surprising given that he spent like, I don't know, twenty six twenty eight years over here. Like, you know, why that, you know, he's he's conditioned with the fact that he's focused on other people succeeding from it. From here, put what you work, you know. I feel like there's so many metaphors and core lyrics to networking as a way to think about leadership and living life. Yes.

Man, but you guys have all kinds of examples. It's a good exercise to actually go through and create the corollary of parallelism between life and networks. I'm thinking about just like how many friends like Dunbar's number, like how many notes can you have in a network before it starts to slow down. Yeah, maybe 150.

“Oh, man, okay, anyway, I was, I like that your mind spinning.”

I think more than 150 sure. I was thinking about Intel, the whole Intel and side move with such a clever way to break through that where, you know, No one's right now until, so they're just like still aposticker Intel and side. And by the way, they are, you know, Lippu is a, is a very dear friend Pat Gelsinger used to be my mentor at EMC. And so both those people that have had such a profound contribution to that industry in general.

Like when you start thinking about them, they are very, very much on that mode. Make it see how you pull together this insane collection of humans. If you're just feels like you're just friends with everybody. I feel like it's life's too short not to be. And I'm only friends with people that I feel a good human being.

Like what I try not to do is I try to minimize my time no matter how successful they are. With people who is energy I don't vibe with because I think life's too short, you know. And in my mind, one of the most off-putting things is, look, all of us have a healthy ego. There are times when ego gets manifested within security. And you have to make sure that you're at least self aware enough to know when your ego is start to take over your behavior in a way that's counterproductive.

“And all those things are super important. But what I think is extremely important is that you, like life is just fun to live when when you love the people you are around.”

Can I digress for a second in this one story that I'll tell you the story that was.

So my mother was, you know, she passed away two and a half years ago, but she was extremely sick on the hospital for like. Eight weeks before she passed away. And I was very close to my mom, like that she was my everything, you know. And you only child, like grew up with a rough childhood. I had to, you know, my dad was a high stakes kind of.

Con man, like Bernie made it off. I didn't want to be any part of that. So I had actually left India, come over here, hadn't gone hadn't seen him. And so he was very abusive for my mom. So there was a bunch of that that had happened. And so we had had a very, you know, kind of difficult early childhood life for me. And her and I had bonded during that that time very, very, you know, at a very deep level.

And so when she came to America, you know, we kind of, she always wanted to have her own place, but she kind of lived very close by and she was very dependent on me on emotionally and in every way.

And so I had almost become a parent to her. And at the last eight weeks, things flipped. And she was, she became a parent again. And so we were, you know, kind of, we were getting to the point where she was ending her journey. And I was sitting, like, one in the morning at the, at the bedside by her in the hospital, I was living in the hospital at the time. And she was sleeping and I was just crying, profusely.

And she looks at me, and she's like, all perplexed. And she's like, I had no idea that you loved me so much.

“Now, by the way, this is like the most abnormal thing for me to hear, because I'm like, what are you talking about, mom?”

Like, like, you're one of the most important people in my life. And I was, like, everything that I did was to make sure that my mum was okay.

Why did I, why did it feel that way to her? Because she didn't know how I was thinking. And that kind of notion of people don't know what's going on in your mind is so important that my biggest lesson from that was don't be stingy with words. Because even my mother that knows me inside and out didn't know how much I loved her. That there's no chance that people in the business world are going to know how you feel if you're not explicit with them. So I'm actually very clear with people.

When I find them and when I find them rewarding, I let them know how much they mean. Because I genuinely find a lot of energy coming out of that and be the circle of friends just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And I found that to be like a super rewarding thing in life. And you're right, most of the people that were at the AI Summit are dear friends.

You know, and isn't that just a better way to live life?

“I think we have uncovered one of the secrets of your success, which is just tell people how you feel and help them see that you appreciate them.”

I appreciate them make it clear that you appreciate them that you value them, which is a lot of people down to you. They're just going to assume they know that they'd like you. And don't make a fake. And don't make a fake. Don't make a fake. You know, if you don't love someone, don't tell them you love them.

That's the other thing that I have. It's so interesting. I just, um, we just did a little interview kind of thing with my mother-in-law. She meant for our, our son, just like for him to have when he's older. They just like interviewed her about her story and stuff and they asked her at the end of it. What's something you want, Jude, which is his name to, to know, at less than to learn from you.

And it's to just, if you love someone, tell them you love them as much as you can. Yeah, that's so true. You're so intentional about the way in which you do these things. I wish I had done like, uh, I should do that now. No, I think about it. You're a podcast for my daughter that's only for her when she gets older.

I'll send you these, the script. They do this. I think they're in the Bay Area, but it's incredible.

It's like a whole documentary thing where they interview you, film a year life for a little bit and then make a whole documentary. Oh, really? Oh, I'd love that, actually. Yes, no, man. They're going to get a lot of business right now. There you go. Let me end with, end with a question around just your journey.

So today you lead product at a 90,000 person company, you manage 30,000 people. Like you said, you, you were grew up in, in Indian Bombay, very far outside Silicon Valley. A lot of people hearing this today are, and I'm in a similar about their way outside of the valley. There's maybe don't have a lot of obvious way to break in to that. They don't have a lot of opportunity.

And they see someone like you, and that's their dream. What would your advice be to someone in that place right now? The platform that you choose, and the quality of problems that you pick to solve, actually determine a lot of the path of success for you. And typically, like harder problems, have a higher likelihood of success,

because the harder problems are the ones that attract better people to that problem, and business as a team sport, and if you attract people to the problems that are hard, and important enough to solve, then you get the best team. And we could, the best team, your odds of winning just go up exponentially. So most people think I'm going to go out and pick a easy enough problem to solve.

And it's like, you don't get the best team attracted to you to start up 11/8 stand. Very important job, but that might not be the thing that actually gets the best team to come to you, but if you actually pick a hard enough problem to solve, you'll get the best team to come. So that's one. Number two, I'd say that you can teach and learn a lot of things in life. I don't think you can learn hunger, where you can't teach hunger.

So find what you intrinsically hungry about, and make sure that you try to pursue that area. And that's different from passion about something.

“It's like, in everything that you do in work, you have to just understand the formula that”

there's going to be 30% of the stuff that you do at work that you're just going to hate. And you have to get used to things that you hate that you have to do.

because the mission is worth the expenditure of energy that you're putting into it.

And I'll leave you with a story which was like, I hadn't gone to India in a long time, when I left India, I didn't go back. I left in 91, and I hadn't gone back in any kind of meaningful way until 2017. You know, because all the trauma in childhood I was like, you know, I was for whatever reason I hadn't gone back. I took my daughter and we went to Olga to see the Taj Mahal and we went there, and there was a tour guide, his name was Raj. And the tour guide was like, he understood so much about the product that he was selling, which was the tour of the Taj Mahal.

I don't know if you was making this shit up or not, but it sounded really good, and he seemed like he was kind of really on it. But when we were walking back, all these people, and he would just start talking to them and he'd bust out in different languages. You talked to someone in German, talked to someone in French, someone in Spanish, someone in Hindi, someone in...

“You know, at some point in time in Mandarin, and at some point in time I kind of started doing how many languages do you speak?”

Oh, I speak, like, I don't know, 12 or 14 of some ridiculous number. But I tried to learn a new language every year. I'm like, oh, what is that? And he goes, well, I just want to honor the people that come here and not be presumptuous that they will speak the language that I know. I want to speak in their language. And I'm thinking to myself, if I was a box at the time, I'm like, this guy is smarter than every person on the executive team, and probably just as smart as every salesperson we have, but he's making $10 a day,

and all of us are enjoying this amazing life, and it's because we have access to a platform and he doesn't. So when people start confusing life, thinking that everything that I've earned is because of my amazing abilities,

I always kind of question that because there's a lot of luck in this thing.

But when luck does present itself, be extremely prepared to capitalize on it, and make sure that you pick the platform that can actually give you that springboard, because platforms really matter. And if we, like, I had the platform and benefit of America, of education, of being in, in tech, of having great friends and mentors, all of those things created compounding value, right? But I intentionally sought out those platforms. Seek out the platform, be obsessed about being extremely prepared, and don't be intellectually lazy.

Lazyness is not a good trait. So do the preparation that's needed. And then, you know, just make sure that during that time period that you're doing, if you build a community around you of people that are vested in your success,

“I think it's just, life is just a more fun way to live it, rather than being the lone wolf that's going out of by themselves.”

And that's why I always feel like making sure that you are expressive and communicative and don't try to carry the entire world's burden on your shoulders,

but actually share it with people with you. The people that you share it with actually appreciate that you're sharing it with them, and most people in the world love to help. So ask for the help, but make sure that that help is not transactional, and don't just go to them when you need something. Actually, try to add value first for a long enough amount of time, not because at some point you might need something from them. Just hardwired yourself into adding value to others, and then eventually that value starts showing up.

“And life is just a better way to live life, and I do feel like right now it's hard for kids getting into the workforce and all that.”

So don't lose hope and stay persistent and have stamina because these things go up and down, but if you kind of stick with it, the people that have the most amount of persistence, it's very seldom that they don't end up winning. Something that comes to me as you share this advice are not for teenagers, has this book that he put up, and I feel like the title of the book is the best piece of advice, and the simplest way to describe how to be successful in life, which is be useful. That is so good.

I think there's a framework that I use for great companies that might be worth sharing with people.

In descending order of importance and on how to build great companies. This is amazing. You get it for free.

“You get what you pay for it, so that you take over the grain of salt, but here's the way I think about it. The most important thing is timing.”

The six things you need in the company, if you don't have all these six you don't win, but they're stacked ranked and descending order of importance, but you have to have all six. Number one is timing. It's the most important. It's the thing that you control the least, and there's a lot of companies that are built amazing products, amazing services at the wrong time in the right market and not one, right? If you don't have timing, really matters, you don't control timing, but if you don't have timing, you don't win. Number two is the market. You have to be able to go after a large enough market a chunk at a time.

And if you don't, if you're not able to go out and prosecute a market a chunk at a time, but make sure that that keeps getting bigger and bigger, it's very hard to win.

The market tends to be the second most important thing in my mind after timing. The third one then is team. You know, after the right team and the team does not mean just people liking each other.

But it is actually well-rounded. That means the things that you suck at. Someone else is really good at. And you've both accepted that of each other. For example, I have a person that I never go to another job without. And she is my partner and crime and the reason I have her is because she is so good at things that I'm not good at. She's able to reap any job I've taken since I've been working with her. It's always a combined deal. If you don't have two offers, we don't go. And so team is really important, a well-rounded team, or people understand how to compliment each other. And by the way, in the team sometimes people say, "Well, isn't team more important than market?" No. If you have a great market mediocre team, the market pulls you up.

You have a shitty market and a great team. The market drags you down. The market always wins. So no, timing, market team. Number four is product. I think product is a soul of a company. That's the place where people seek value is what are you delivering to me? What problem are you solving to me?

“Get manifested through the delivery of a product. So you have to make sure that you build a great product. I actually think it's unethical to have a mediocre product sold in the market. Timing, market team, product. Number five is brand.”

I had a mentor one time that told me, Mark Lewis, he said, "Jethe, don't ever go to a company whose lost their brand logo because very hard to resurrect it back." If they lost their product and you can fix the product. But do you think side-bass is coming back? No. Once you lose your brand, once you lose the trust, people don't come back to you that much. It's very hard to do. And the number six is distribution. Just because you build it, they will not come. You have to make sure that you figure out a scaled mechanism of getting that offering to many, many people.

And so timing, Trump's market, market, Trump's team, team, Trump's product, product, Trump's brand, brand, Trump's distribution. You don't have all six. You don't run. What market do we start with? How do you actually operationalize it? Actually, exactly. I will ask myself the question on, is this the right time for us to go out and double triple, triple down? You might still be an experimentation mode. But do I need to double down on this right now? Because this might not manifest for another seven years. And then we're going to be too early.

And by the way, you have to know the difference between a mega trend and hype cycle. When there's a mega trend, don't fight it. And don't succumb to the temptation of trying to go out and do vanity work for a hype cycle. And there's a big difference between the two. And I think having that judgment, the older you get, the better that judgment gets, it's just miles. But having that judgment is really important because you see a pattern recognition at some point. I imagine AI mega trend.

AI is a mega trend in my mind. And there's a bunch of hype cycles we've had where I don't, but I've never particularly subscribed to them.

And the easiest way for me to tell is, the way it's described is it easy to understand what this could do in its ultimate form for most people.

“Do you need to have a PhD to understand what someone's saying?”

When you feel like you need a PhD to understand what someone's saying, chances are it ain't going to be a mega trend because by definition a mega trend is it's going to impact a large population of the world.

That's an awesome heuristic. I imagine you're thinking Web3 is a classic example. Yes, Web3 was the one that I actually cite all the time. I couldn't understand what it did. And all of these people were kind of like, oh Web3, Web3, I'm like, I couldn't make a heads of tails out of a use case. But if they are, it's like you go to chatGPT, you ask it a question and go down. So I get this, it's easy, you know. So going back to your framework just to kind of close loop there's it's really interesting by timing is the first variable you look at.

This could be an amazing idea. You got the right team, amazing product that works really well.

But the timing mean just not be right. And no matter how awesome it is, it's not, it's not going to work. Steve Jobs put away the iPad because he thought that the iPhone was a better idea. And timing wise, he actually made exactly the right call. You know, the iPad became successful because of the iPhone success. The reverse order might have not had the same effect. But he had to make sure that he focused on one thing and he actually puts the other keys at the timing is not right, but I'm going to get back to it.

By the way, when timing is wrong, doesn't mean that you scrapped the idea, it just means that you might put it on ice for it. There's a lot of that happening right now where people try to do a thing and now AI actually makes it possible in now they're like, oh shit. Yeah. I was way too early.

“And the other thing you have to keep in mind is, you have to also be good enough to know that when something is going to be ready in six months, you can't think about where it's got what it's doing today.”

Like AI is moving so fast right now, like one of the things that tell my team is fast forward six months from now and anticipate what that's going to do and get prepared for that world, don't get prepared for the world of today. Thinking that you're not going to be able to get there because in six months, you know, some shinsets are going to be different. And please don't actually then bias yourself with the assumption sets you have right now to not move forward. Like one of the worst things I think companies do sometimes is, they put too much emphasis only on solely on experience.

And I think experience is good, but experience can actually be meaningfully bad in some areas where you get too biased. And so you almost have to say that I have to have the ability to unlearn and combination of experience with complete inexperience is what creates the magic.

Because the inexperience allows you to ask questions that you might have never had with experience in the combo of those two gives you the best of the pattern recognition.

Plus the charting new territory that's never been kind of worked on before. Yeah, this is a trend I've been hearing on this podcast that people worry about young people and people graduating at a college right now and jobs and AI. But there are the people that are most open-minded about what AI can do for them and how to harness AI and not code in the way people have always coded it's just like, okay, this is the way it works now. There is Lenny can jade us, right? And I always said when people say, oh, entry level people who never be hired again, that's the stupidest thing a company can do because now what you've done is you have completely shot the door to new fresh ideas.

Like, I cannot think today the way I thought when I was 19 there is just no way that I can do that. But what I can try to do is I can try to make sure I surround myself for enough amount of my time to get exposed to that thinking and then couple it with what I know. And maybe have something better than what either of those two could have had by themselves. Yes, you know. Well, with that G2 we have reached our very exciting lightning round. I've got five questions for you.

All right.

First question, what are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people?

“The Bible and tech in my mind is innovators dilemma and innovators solutions from Clayton Christians and I think you have to read that book and I'd say I'd recommend to people that read it every few years.”

And then the other one that I love is Ben Horowitz's book card thing about hard things. Really talks about how you manage your psychology and things get hard. I think those are the ones. I'm not a big believer that you keep reading the thousands of books all the time because I think like to me retention really matters. And my brain's just not that big that I can retain that much, so I tend to distill the essence of a few things quite a bit more.

And at least the older I've gotten I've actually used that pattern more. Favorite recent movie or TV show that you ever enjoyed. I don't remember the name of it, but the Bradford movie that I saw that was pretty cool. The way it was a recent Bradford movie. Yeah.

Was it F1? It was F1 I think. I think it's called F1. It was pretty cool. Yeah.

I think that one. That brown is a good friend of mine and it would be a big supporters of McLaren. And so it was actually pretty cool to watch that movie. Oh, man. I bet so many stories I haven't tapped into.

Okay.

“Favorite product you recently discovered that you really love?”

I mean it's cliche, but I feel like what?

It's changed my life in the way that I learn in some ridiculous ways.

“So I actually feel like when I got this new job to run all product for Cisco, there is zero chance.”

I would have been able to do it if AI wasn't there. Because I didn't know anything about so many domains that we were in. And I had to get an accelerated training course with a matter of three months. I mean I worked around the clock during that time, but I could have worked around the clock without the tooling. And I would have been nowhere near as effective, so I feel like those three have done an amazing thing.

And I grew up even, I could, you know, what you're seeing with Grok tied to Twitter is pretty amazing. Wow, that's a profound statement.

I've never heard that before someone at your level that you feel like you wouldn't be able to have done this job without AI.

Sure. Especially for someone without the background in networking and hardware. Yeah. That is so interesting. It's amazing how just like at every level AI is helping.

Like at the most bottom end and also in your level. Most people don't really realize that I fundamentally believe this is the reason that I'm able to enjoy some of the experiences I have. I was lucky enough that I'd made enough money before this job. That was not the thing that was actually holding us back. But the reason I'm able to experience some of the things that this job afforded me to experience.

Would have not even been remotely possible without AI. Like no chance that would have happened. Unreal.

Okay, two more questions.

Yeah. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to your work in life? You're already sure, a couple, but is there anything else? Or do you want to double down on when you've already shared? Stamina, Trump's intellect.

I feel like it's very important to have smart people. But you can become smart. If you have curiosity and hunger and staying power and persistence.

“And so I think that trait of like learning to learn and constantly being hungry and having the stamina and persistence is far more important.”

Then the absolute measure of intellect that you might have because that is very, very trainable and you learnable over time and improveable over time. But hunger is very, it's not teachable is what I've found. I 100% agree with that. Interestingly, when you watch AI work, it's just like, partly the reason it's so good is it just keeps trying. It's just okay.

Let's didn't work. Let me keep going. Just keep trying.

I'll just give me half an hour.

I'll figure this out. Okay. Last question. So when you were younger, you worked at Sizzler Stakehouse making $4 an hour. Is it what I read?

$2.25. Not four. It was below minimum wage. $2.25. But we got tips, we got tips though.

So that was nice. Okay. I see. The geomorphic dish at Sizzler is my question. Yes.

They used to have this Malibu chicken dish. It was like magic. But, um, and then, um, it was, it was probably, I don't know if people know this and I know this is rapid fire. But I used to stutter when I started working at Sizzler and Sizzler is what allowed me to.

Break out of my shell and not stutter because. You know, something changed from my brain, but I'm like, I have to entertain people. And if I don't, then they're not going to give me a good tip. And so you, the stuttering runaway at Sizzler. So I have an immense debt of gratitude.

“And I think everyone should work in hospitality for a while in the young years.”

And I'm kind of sad that my daughter has no interest in doing that because I'm like, I wish she just worked as a writer somewhere for a bit. And it's just so important to just, there's so many lessons on, you know, I, I, I clean toilets of the restaurant. I actually watched dishes.

I actually rated our tables. And it was, it was the best experience I had. It shaped me for what was to come in the most profound way. And you two, you're just endlessly full of wisdom. Two final questions, where can folks find you, where do you want to point people to to learn more about you, which are up to you?

And how can listeners be useful to you? Where you can find me is I tend to, a lot of people will ask, you know, the more success you encounter or the more people. Want to get mentored by you and learn from the experiences you've had. And I, I have run out of cycles to be able to do that on a one on one basis.

So what I try to do is do a lot of that on LinkedIn. And so find me on LinkedIn. I tend to be very open about not just the work stuff,

How can people be useful to me?

“Was that the question? Was the last question?”

That is, that can listeners be useful to you. How can listeners be useful to me?

If there is, I would say that if you got something out of this session,

and if you get something out of whatever you learn from social media,

“just pay it forward and help the next person out a little bit more.”

Yesterday, I was at a talk and someone pulled me aside and said, hey, I saw your LinkedIn post about this. Don't be stingy with words. And G2 since then, I've been going to see my parents once every two months or so in India. And when I see them, I tell them that I love them all the time.

“Literally, what could be more rewarding to me than that?”

It was amazing that they were able to go out and have joy brought to their lives.

As a result of something, they got inspired by something that I learned in my life. That's like paid forward. I'm excited to hear the stories that come out of this conversation. G2, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me.

It was great, 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 a leaving review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lenniespodcast.com.

See you in the next episode.