OpenAI’s CPO on how AI changes must-have skills, moats, coding, startup playbooks, more | Kevin Weil (CPO at OpenAI, ex-Instagram, Twitter)

**Kevin Weil** (0:00)
The AI models that you're using today is the worst AI model you will ever use for the rest of your life. And when you actually get that in your head, it's kind of wild. Everywhere I've ever worked before this, you kind of know what technology you're building on, but that's not true at all with AI. Every two months, computers can do something they've never been able to do before, and you need to completely think differently about what you're doing.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:21)
You're Chief Product Officer of maybe the most important company in the world right now. I want to chat about what it's just like to be inside the center of the storm.

**Kevin Weil** (0:29)
Our general mindset is in two months, there's going to be a better model and it's going to blow away whatever the current set of limitations are, and we say this to developers, too. If you're building and the product that you're building is kind of right on the edge of the capabilities of the models, keep going because you're doing something right, give it another couple months and the models are going to be great, and suddenly the product that you have that just barely worked is really going to sing.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:51)
Famously, you led this project at Facebook called Libra.

**Kevin Weil** (0:55)
Libra is probably the biggest disappointment of my career. It fundamentally disappoints me that this doesn't exist in the world today because the world would be a better place if we'd been able to ship that product. We tried to launch a new blockchain. It was a basket of currencies originally. It was integration into WhatsApp and Messenger. I would be able to send you 50 cents in WhatsApp for free. It should exist. To be honest, the current administration is super friendly to crypto. Facebook's reputation is in a very different place. Maybe they should go build it now.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:27)
Today, my guest is Kevin Weil. Kevin is Chief Product Officer at OpenAI, which is maybe the most important and most impactful company in the world right now, being at the forefront of AI and AGI and maybe someday super intelligence. He was previously head of product at Instagram and Twitter. He was co-creator of the Libra cryptocurrency at Facebook, which we chat about. But he's also on the boards of Planet and Strava and the Black Product Managers Network and The Nature Conservancy. He's also just a really good guy and he has so much wisdom to share. We chat about how OpenAI operates, implications of AI and how we will all work and build product, which markets within the AI ecosystem companies like OpenAI won't likely go after and thus are good places for startups to own. Also why learning the craft of writing evals is quickly becoming a core skill for product builders. What skills will matter most in an AI era and what he's teaching his kids to focus on and so much more. This is a very special episode and I am so excited to bring it to you. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. If you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year free of Perplexity Pro, Linear, Notion, Superhuman and Renola. Check it out at lennysnewsletter.com and click bundle. With that I bring you Kevin Weil. This episode is brought to you by Epo. Epo is a next-generation A-B testing and feature management platform built by alums of Airbnb and Snowflake for modern growth teams. Companies like Twitch, Miro, ClickUp and DraftKings rely on Epo to power their experiments. Experimentation is increasingly essential for driving growth and for understanding the performance of new features. And Epo helps you increase experimentation velocity while unlocking rigorous deep analysis in a way that no other commercial tool does. When I was at Airbnb, one of the things that I loved most was our experimentation platform, where I could set up experiments easily, troubleshoot issues, and analyze performance all on my own. Epo does all that and more, with advanced statistical methods that can help you shave weeks off experiment time, an accessible UI for diving deeper into performance, and out-of-the-box reporting that helps you avoid annoying, prolonged analytics cycles. Epo also makes it easy for you to share experiment insights with your team, sparking new ideas for the A-B testing flywheel. Epo powers experimentation across every use case, including product, growth, machine learning, monetization, and email marketing. Check out Epo at getepo.com/lenny, and 10x your experiment velocity. That's geteppo.com/lenny.
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