Sanchan Saxena (VP of Product at Coinbase) on the inside story of how Airbnb made it through Covid; what he’s learned from Brian Chesky, Brian Armstrong, and Kevin Systrom; much more

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:02)
I feel incredibly lucky to have gotten to work with Sanchan while I was at Airbnb. He joined Airbnb as a Director of Product and quickly moved up the ranks to Head of Product for all of Airbnb. Before Airbnb, he spent almost four years at Instagram as Head of Product for Instagram ads, and then he created and led the Instagram shopping product and team. Before that, he was Director of Product at Yahoo and a PM at Microsoft, and today he's the VP of Product at Coinbase. I don't think I've worked with a harder working PM, particularly someone who's incredibly kind and nice and generous. In my conversation with Sanchan, we cover what he's learned from working with some of today's best CEOs, including Brian Chesky, Brian Armstrong, Zuck and Kevin Systrom, what it was like inside Airbnb when COVID hit, and how they made it through travel completely stopping, how to set up your product development process at a startup, tips for hiring amazing product managers, when to hire your first PM, when to A-B test and when not to, and so much more. I hope you enjoy this episode as much as I did.
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Sanchan, welcome. Thank you so much for being here.

**Sanchan Saxena** (3:26)
Thank you, Lenny, for inviting me. Excited to be here and chat with you today.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:29)
Absolutely, my pleasure. So I was really lucky to work with you at Airbnb for many years, where you were a beloved product leader.
And then you went on to do bigger and better things now at Coinbase. And I love to just hear how you first got into product, and then just a little bit of your journey of how you got to where you are today, where you basically had a product at Coinbase.

**Sanchan Saxena** (3:49)
Yeah, happy to answer. Maybe I'll go back in time and start from my first job. So I was in my third year of engineering where the entrepreneurial bug caught me, so to say, you know, bit me.
And I took a little bit of sabbatical from my engineering, which by the way, was in aerospace engineering. I wanted to be an astronaut, go to space. You know, unfortunately, back then, there wasn't an Elon Musk for SpaceX. You know, if you wanted to go to space, you got to work for a government agency, which I didn't like. So fast forward that to my third year of engineering. And I started my company, raised a bunch of money, hired some people, didn't go as planned. So I shut shops, came back and finished my engineering and got a job at Microsoft, which made my mom very happy.