Question 1

What are the key takeaways from Gokul Rajaram's episode on Lenny's Podcast?

Accepted Answer

1. Be open to serendipity and curiosity - great careers aren't built linearly through promotions, they're built by wandering around at 6pm, asking what people are working on, and jumping on opportunities (like how AdSense was born) 2. Work at winning companies over better titles - better to be an IC PM at Google than VP Product at Yahoo; winners attract talent, create unfair brand halo, and teach you what excellence looks like 3. Hire your first PM at 8-10 engineers by converting an internal engineer/analyst/designer - external PMs often get rejected like foreign organs; first PM needs founder and eng team trust to be the liaison 4. Hire lieutenants from best-in-class companies, not the heads - find companies excellent at the function you need, map their org chart on LinkedIn, and recruit the person reporting to the leader (Square's payments team got raided this way) 5. Avoid feature factories by empowering teams with problems not features - biggest founder mistake is becoming too tactical and telling engineers what to build instead of presenting problems and letting teams brainstorm solutions

Question 2

What does Gokul Rajaram say about serendipity and career?

Accepted Answer

"I basically became a part-time PM for them nights and weekends. Within three months this thing grew big enough and that became Google AdSense. It's very important to do a core job really well at any company, but it's equally important to have curiosity and be open to serendipity. Great careers are built by knowing a lot of people doing great work so they know and want you on their teams, and just waiting for serendipity and then seizing it and jumping." - Gokul Rajaram "I could never ever imagine that I could be passionate about payments ever in a million years, but the environment of the company Square was so infectious and great and the culture was so good that we even made working on payments... I always think of, not what you're working on but what problem you're solving. I get much more energy from personally solving problems that affected a small business or basically people or small business that I can relate to." - Gokul Rajaram "It's very important for founders to really live and breathe the mission themselves in an authentic way. If people are smart, and I think you've got to really honestly think if this person is constantly talking about revenue and trying to convince you that you're going to get wealthy or they're going to get... That's not the kind of founder that's going build a really large company. They care about winning. They will win and money will come, but it's a side product." - Gokul Rajaram

Question 3

What are Gokul Rajaram's views on serendipity, career, curiosity?

Accepted Answer

Gokul Rajaram: "I basically became a part-time PM for them nights and weekends. Within three months this thing grew big enough and that became Google AdSense. It's very important to do a core job really well at any company, but it's equally important to have curiosity and be open to serendipity. Great careers are built by knowing a lot of people doing great work so they know and want you on their teams, and just waiting for serendipity and then seizing it and jumping." Gokul Rajaram: "I would much rather be the number two or number three person at the leader in a space, than the top person. Google versus Yahoo. I saw even if you're the VP of product at Yahoo or the head of product at Yahoo versus a ICPM at Google, you probably want to be the ICPM at Google. I bet you all day long. Yahoo is a great company, but Google is just a different caliber and different class."

Gokul Rajaram

Gokul Rajaram on designing your product development process, when and how to hire your first PM, a playbook for hiring leaders, getting ahead in your career, how to get started angel investing, and more

TRANSCRIPT

Gokul Rajaram

Gokul Rajaram on designing your product development process, when and how to hire your first PM, a playbook for hiring leaders, getting ahead in your career, how to get started angel investing, and more

Gokul Rajaram

Gokul Rajaram on designing your product development process, when and how to hire your first PM, a playbook for hiring leaders, getting ahead in your career, how to get started angel investing, and more

TRANSCRIPT

Gokul Rajaram

Gokul Rajaram on designing your product development process, when and how to hire your first PM, a playbook for hiring leaders, getting ahead in your career, how to get started angel investing, and more