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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)
Duration: 01:41:33
July 13, 2025
- The foundation sprint is a structured process that teams can use at the beginning of a project to gain clarity and alignment around their core strategy.
- A key element of the foundation sprint involves identifying differentiators that set a product apart from competitors, ensuring a unique promise is made and delivered to customers.
- Applying "magic lenses" to various implementation approaches helps teams evaluate options based on customer value, financial impact, and founder conviction, ultimately leading to a well-informed, strategic path forward.
Solo founder, $80M exit, 6 months: The Base44 bootstrapped startup success story | Maor Shlomo
Duration: 01:31:50
July 6, 2025
- Mayor scaled Base 44 from zero to an $80 million acquisition by Wix in six months by focusing on building a product he enjoyed and solving his own real-world problems.
- As a solo bootstrapped founder, Mayor prioritized deeply knowing and serving his first users, embracing virality over paid marketing, and leveraging LinkedIn for distribution through honest "building in public" content.
- Mayor integrated multiple AI models to route tasks to the most appropriate technology and created an internal application to assist in automated content creation, allowing an engineer with ADHD to move quickly and efficiently.
I’ve run 75+ businesses. Here’s why you’re probably chasing the wrong idea. | Andrew Wilkinson (co‑founder of Tiny)
Duration: 01:28:28
July 3, 2025
- Andrew Wilkinson emphasizes "fishing where the fish are" by pursuing niche markets with less competition, contrasting popular but challenging ventures like restaurants with less crowded, profitable sectors such as funeral homes or government form software.
- Wilkinson advocates for "lazy leadership," encouraging entrepreneurs to scale their businesses to delegate tasks they dislike, transitioning from a self-employed job to owning a thriving, scalable enterprise.
- Andrew Wilkinson leverages AI tools, like Lindy and Replit, to automate tasks and streamline workflows, highlighting AI's potential for job displacement and emphasizing the need to adapt to this tech-driven future.
Naming expert shares the process behind creating billion-dollar brand names like Azure, Vercel, Windsurf, Sonos, Blackberry, and Impossible Burger | David Placek (Lexicon Branding)
Duration: 01:22:43
June 29, 2025
- Naming is a crucial element of branding, providing cumulative and asymmetric advantages by ensuring distinctiveness over time, even before a product launches.
- Clients often expect to instantly recognize the perfect name, but the most impactful names are often initially uncomfortable, requiring a move toward bolder and more imaginative options.
- Lexicon Branding employs a three-step process (Identify, Invent, and Implement) that involves small creative teams, linguistic analysis, and prototype testing, emphasizing the importance of behavior and experience over traditional positioning.
From ChatGPT to Instagram to Uber: The quiet architect behind the world’s most popular products | Peter Deng
Duration: 01:55:28
June 22, 2025
- Peter Deng emphasizes the importance of having grit and a clear vision when building a company, encouraging founders to passionately chase their direction.
- A key, slightly counterintuitive lesson emphasized in the discussion is that sometimes the "product" itself is secondary, especially when operational elements like price and ETA are more critical to users.
- Deng reveals two key hiring principles: one, ensure that a new hire is driving strategy within six months rather than being micromanaged, and two, prioritize candidates who exhibit a strong growth mindset and openness to feedback.
AI prompt engineering in 2025: What works and what doesn’t | Sander Schulhoff (Learn Prompting, HackAPrompt)
Duration: 01:37:46
June 19, 2025
- Prompt engineering is still very relevant for eliciting optimal performance from LLMs.
- Few-shot prompting, decomposition, and self-criticism are just some of the techniques to make LLM conversations and product implementations more effective.
- AI red teaming is essential to counteracting prompt injection, though there is no perfect or complete solution.
35 years of product design wisdom from Apple, Disney, Pinterest and beyond | Bob Baxley
Duration: 01:41:59
June 12, 2025
- Bob emphasizes that design is a holistic mindset, not just a visual expression, and should focus on imagining and creating the desired future.
- He shares his counterintuitive view that design should report to engineering to ensure technical feasibility and foster collaboration early in the development process.
- Bob argues that building great, intuitive products is a moral obligation for product people, as frustrating software interactions detract from users' emotional energy and quality of life.
How Mercado Libre built Latin America's most valuable company: 18k engineers, 30k deploys a day, and their own fleet of planes | Sebastian Barrios
Duration: 01:19:25
June 8, 2025
- Mercado Libre operates with a unique "no PMs" culture, where engineering leaders often fill product management roles, fostering closer proximity to both technology and user needs.
- The company fosters a culture of embracing failure and independence among its teams, allowing them to take risks and innovate without fear of punishment for well-intentioned missteps.
- Sebos's personal stories reveal a childhood focused on cultivating curiosity and agency, shaping his approach to risk-taking and problem-solving in his career.
Anthropic's CPO on what comes next | Mike Krieger (co-founder of Instagram)
Duration: 01:06:22
June 5, 2025
- Despite ChatGPT's strong consumer mindshare, Anthropic is focusing on its developer and builder brand, empowering those at the forefront of AI to create and delegate tasks effectively with Claude.
- 90% of the coding at Anthropic is now AI-generated, which has shifted bottlenecks from engineering to decision-making, alignment, and the merge queue, requiring new approaches to product development and review processes.
- Mike Krieger changed his mind about AI's capabilities, observing that Claude can now offer novel and independent strategic insights, leading Anthropic to emphasize integrating product teams with research to optimize model performance at a deeper level.
Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal
Duration: 01:21:57
June 1, 2025
- Sachin Consul emphasizes extreme dogfooding at Uber, personally driving hundreds of trips and logging detailed feedback for product improvements.
- Consul advocates for a "ship, ship, ship" mentality to quickly translate insights from dogfooding into tangible product improvements.
- Consul advises early-career PMs to prioritize roles where they can ship multiple products rapidly, focusing on micro-decisions to build product sense.