Making an impact through authenticity and curiosity | Ami Vora (CPO at Faire, ex-WhatsApp, FB, IG)

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:00)
Boz, the CTO of Meta, said something about you. Working with Ami, she could have the most profound disagreement in the world, and she would respond, fascinating, you have to tell me more, why you think that?

**Ami Vora** (0:09)
I really enjoy being right. And then it turns out, in the working world, that did not serve me so great. I think the hard part is sublimating your ego a little bit and saying it's more important to get to the outcome than to be right.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:19)
I love this very tactical piece of advice. When you're trying to come up with a metaphor or analogy, think about what you want your users to feel when you're using the product.

**Ami Vora** (0:27)
If we all agree that the feeling of something should be, I'm sitting in Dolores Park with my friends on a sunny Saturday, then people will just naturally build something that feels more consistent.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:36)
There's also this metaphor about the hill climb.

**Ami Vora** (0:38)
For me, the hill climb is all about the difference between a local optimum and a global optimum. You're standing on top of the hill, you're looking down, you can see rolling hills, the sheep, the grass, whatever. But then, way off in the distance, you can see like a mountain. And the thing that gets me through the valley is remembering what the summit feels like.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:59)
Today, my guest is Ami Vora. Ami is Chief Product Officer at Faire, which connects independent retailers and brands around the world, and I believe is the most successful and biggest B2B marketplace startup out there. Prior to Faire, Ami was employee 150 at Facebook, where she launched the first Facebook developer platform and was later head of product for the $55 billion global Facebook ads business.
She also oversaw the introduction of ads on the Instagram platform, and most recently, she led product and design for the largest messaging app in the world, WhatsApp. In our conversation, we cover a lot of ground, including building your strategy skills, how to disagree with people skillfully, being a successful woman in tech, using metaphors and imagery to rally your team and get your point across, setting up effective goals, plus a bunch of jokes in the lightning round that you don't wanna miss. This was a really special and authentic conversation that I'm very excited to bring to you. With that, I bring you Ami Vora.
Ami, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast. Oh, thank you.

**Ami Vora** (2:07)
I was not having beer.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (2:08)
So when I asked you about your goal for our conversation today, you said the most amazing thing, which I love. You said that your goal is to be as authentic as possible and to show that people can be pretty messy and imperfect at times, yet still be very successful. I love that so much. Let's definitely try to do this.
Is there anything else you want to add on that?

**Ami Vora** (2:27)
Yeah, I mean, maybe I'll just say like a couple more words on that. Actually, I feel like when I was kind of coming up, like when I looked at people who were successful, they seemed to have everything figured out, especially the women. They were all like super women where they like respond to every email in 10 seconds. They didn't seem to sleep. They like always wore high heels. They were just like perfect.
And I was just like, oh, I guess I'm never gonna be successful.
Like that is not me. I love to sleep. I like waste time doing absurd things all the time. And like, I'll tell you how glamorous my lifestyle is. I'm currently working out of my bathroom. Like I'm talking to you from my bathroom, which is where I work from, because I love my house. This great house wasn't meant for work from home, three kids, two parents, remote work.
And it was just the place with the most closing doors between me and my children when the pandemic started.
And so it just like took me a while to realize that actually it's all fine. Like no one's got it fully figured out. You never know how someone else is living. Like most of us are winging it and learning as we're going and like learning through trial and error. And like, it's all normal. It's all fine and I can do it and you can do it never.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:43)
I so love hearing this. This is something people often want to hear more of on this podcast because there's all these stories of here's all these successes, here's all these things I did and everything just always seems to work out. And we try to, we have this failure corner on the podcast where people share a story of failure.