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

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:04)
I sometimes wonder how someone like Gokul Rajaram can exist. He has an intense full-time job at DoorDash, where he leads a significant part of the product and business. He also served as a board member at The Trade Desk, Coinbase, and Pinterest, all public companies. He's also a prolific investor and is seemingly on the cap table of every successful startup that I come across. And at the same time, he's one of the most humble and nicest people you'll ever meet. If you look him up, you'll notice he always calls himself a startup helper. And I know that he makes a lot of time to mentor and help a lot of founders. We cover a lot of ground in our conversation, including picking where to work, how to do product development startups, structuring your product teams, hiring and angel investing.
I hope that you enjoy our chat.
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Gokul, thank you so much for doing this. I know that you're an intensely busy human, and I really appreciate you being here.

**Gokul Rajaram** (2:52)
Thank you, Lenny. It's awesome to be here. Thanks for having me.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (2:54)
It's absolutely my pleasure. You're on the boards of Coinbase and Pinterest. You're a really big deal at DoorDash. You're an even bigger deal at Caviar. You worked at Square, at Facebook, at Google. Plus, you're an incredibly prolific investor. I'd probably put you in the top 1% of investors based on what I've seen.
I'm just curious, just to set context, how did you get into tech and product originally? Then just like, what was your journey like to becoming this luminary of tech?

**Gokul Rajaram** (3:23)
First of all, let's start using the word luminary. I think it's people like Elon and Mark Andresen's word luminary, I think. I've just been lucky to work at good companies and observe the creation and growth of these companies. I'll give you an interesting story. I, crazily enough, I joined Google as a PM after I applied to Cisco. This was in 2003, and I wanted to be a hardcore networking product manager in the layer three, layer two of networking. I was like, layer seven software is for wimps. I'm going to go hardcore. Cisco had a, in 2001, 2002, right after the bust, the first dot-com bust. Then Cisco actually rescinded my offer. They made me an offer, they rescinded it. And then basically that's how I ended up at Google. It was my second choice after Cisco. So literally you can see some of these decisions. You're just saved from yourself by experience, otherwise I would have been in networking probably maybe still at Cisco. But at Google, I got put on something called syndication, which is taking Google search results and ads and then syndicating it to other properties like AOL back in the day, Yahoo, et cetera. And I was working on that product. And at about 6 p.m.