Rapidly test and validate any startup idea with the 2-day Foundation Sprint (from the creators of the Design Sprint) | Jake Knapp & John Zeratsky (Character Capital)

**Jake Knapp** (0:00)
We would have a conversation with founders. You're saying like, gosh, I'm almost embarrassed to ask this question, but who exactly is your target customer? And three co-founders have three different answers.

**John Zeratsky** (0:09)
After these hundreds of teams that we've worked with, we've seen that there's one failure mode, which is they don't know what that set of basics are. Then there's this other failure mode where they never test it.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:18)
Let's talk about the Foundation Sprint. Walk us through the process. How does it start? What are the steps?

**Jake Knapp** (0:23)
The very beginning of your project, we recommend this kind of crazy idea that you clear your calendar. So the core team come together for 10 hours, roughly, and go through a sequence of activities so that we can make all of the key decisions together.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:37)
I think a lot of people wonder as they're hearing this is, why don't I just build something and launch it and learn?

**John Zeratsky** (0:42)
One phenomenon we've seen when teams are building things really quickly with AI is that the more AI generated or assisted they are, the more generic they tend to turn out. Put yourself in a situation where you can slow down and do some hard thinking, some deep thinking about what's actually going to make your product unique. Going fast can actually slow you down in the long run.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:01)
Today my guests are Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky. The framework that Jake and John share in this conversation is basically the missing manual for founders and product teams trying to refine and test their startup or product idea. It's called the Foundation Sprint, and it emerged out of the famous Design Sprint which Jake and Jay-Z co-created, and also from working with over 300 teams building both new products at startups, and also with teams at larger companies like Google, Microsoft, YouTube, Slack, Uber, and many more. They published a book with this framework at the beginning of this year called Click, and the excerpt from that book that dives into this framework is one of my most popular posts of all time, and is one of the rare non-AI posts amongst the top post rankings. In this conversation, make sure to get your pencils out, because we go through exactly how to execute this two-day sprint, where at the end of it, you have a very clear hypothesis that your entire team is aligned around that clarifies what you're building, who you're building for, how it differentiates from competitors, and how to quickly test it with real potential customers. The two days that you invest in a sprint might be the highest ROI days in the history of your product, and I highly encourage you to do this if you're in the process of baking an idea. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. Also, if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year free of a bunch of amazing products, including Bolt, Linear, Superhuman, Notion, Perplexity, Granola and more. Check it out at lennysnewsletter.com and click Bundle. With that, I bring you Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky. This episode is brought to you by Brex, the financial stack used by one in every three US venture-backed startups. Brex knows that nearly 40% of startups fail because they run out of cash. So they built a banking experience that focuses on helping founders get more from every dollar. It's a stark difference from traditional banking options that leave a startup's cash sitting idle while chipping away at it with fees. To help founders protect cash and extend runway, Brex combined the best things about checking, treasury, and FDIC insurance in one powerhouse account. You can send and receive money worldwide at lightning speed, you can get 20x the standard FDIC protection through program banks, and you can earn industry-leading yield from your first dollar while still being able to access your funds anytime. To learn more, check out Brex at brex.com/bankingdashsolutions. That's brex.com/bankingsolutions.
Many of you are building AI products, which is why I'm very excited to chat with Brandon Fu, founder and CEO of Paragon. Hey Brandon.

**Brandon Fu** (3:33)
Hey Lenny, thanks for having me.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:35)
So integrations have become a big deal for AI products. Why is that?

**Brandon Fu** (3:40)
Integrations are mission critical for AI for two reasons. First, AI products need contacts from their customers' business data such as Google Drive files, Slack messages, or CRM records. Second, for AI products to automate work on behalf of users, AI agents need to be able to take action across these different third-party tools.