Hot takes and techno-optimism from tech’s top power couple | Sriram and Aarthi

**Sriram Krishnan** (0:00)
I hate jobs to be done. I think it's a terrible framework. I think no successful company has ever been built on top of JDBD. And if you pick JDBD, you're probably doomed. And I'll give you an example.
When you sign up for Instagram right now, when you sign up for Facebook for many, many years, Facebook knew that it needed to get you to 10 friends in 14 days. If you got your 10 friends in 14 days, you're probably going to use Facebook. So it would be like, well, if you want to throw every tool we have at our disposal, it will get you to 10 friends in 14 days. So if you sign up Facebook for many, many years, you'll get this little thing called People You May Know, and you have this person who just signed up on Facebook. Why don't you see this person? It's not because you need a friend, because they need a friend. So what Facebook did was it made your experience slightly worse to make that person's experience slightly better.
This was performing no job for you. It was trying to perform a job for them.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:48)
Welcome to Lenny's Podcast, where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and growing today's most successful products. Today, for the first time ever, I've got two guests, Aarthi Ramamurthy and Sriram Krishnan, both former product managers who between them worked at basically every major tech company, including Netflix, Meta, Snap, Twitter, Microsoft, even Clubhouse. Sriram is now a partner at A16Z. They're actually married and both individually amazing. Together, they host the Aarthi and Sriram Good Time Show, which started on Clubhouse, it's now on YouTube, and famously they had Elon Musk on back in the day, which led to Clubhouse's crazy rocket ship growth, which we definitely touch on.
This episode is definitely the most fun conversation I've had yet on this podcast. We cover all kinds of areas, including this trend of techno-optimism, building your network, creating content online and how to go about doing that, becoming a product leader, community building, and a hilarious rant at the end about why the jobs to be done framework does not work.
I had such a good time chatting with these two and I know you will enjoy this episode. With that, I bring you Aarthi and Sriram after a short word from our select sponsors.
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Aarthi and Sriram, welcome to the podcast.

**Aarthi Ramamurthy** (4:20)
Thank you. Thanks so much for having us, Lenny. This is a bucket list thing because we are on Lenny's Podcast.