How a Meta PM ships products without ever writing code | Zevi Arnovitz

You were a product manager shipping product without knowing how to write code, barely knowing how to review code. >> I have zero technical background. Did music in high school when Sonnet 3.5 came out. I remember watching a YouTube video building apps using Bolt or Lovable. It basically felt like someone came up to me and said, "You have superpowers now." >> These days, you're using cursor with claw code. >> If you're nontechnical like me, code is terrifying, but AI just makes so much possible in the next coming years. I think everyone's going to become a builder. Titles are going to collapse and responsibilities are going to collapse. >> The main challenge people have is reviewing the code that AI has written. >> It's very difficult for me to catch mistakes. What I'll do is basically / review. This tells Claude to start reviewing its own code. But what's even cooler is I have codecs as well as cursor open. I will have each of them review the code. >> This comes back to this quote which I think everyone's always hearing. It's not that you will be replaced by AI. you'll be replaced by someone who's better at using AI than you. >> It's the best time to be a junior. Contrary to what a lot of people are saying, how there's no more junior roles out there. Yeah, that's true. But also, when else in history could you get out of school and just build a startup on your own? Today, my guest is Zevy Arnowitz. Zev's a PM at Meta. Prior to that, he was a PM at Wix. And this is a truly remarkable conversation that every non-technical product person needs to hear. Zevy is super young and has no technical background, but as a smart, young, ambitious person, has learned how to use cursor and claude code to build significant and real products completely on his own. And he's created his own very clever and effective workflow that everyone listening can copy. To make that copying even easier, at the top of the show notes of this episode, you can download all the prompts and slash commands and start doing all of this yourself. Zebie shows you how to work with cursor to quickly add your ideas to linear to explore your idea with AI, how to develop your plan, how to then build a thing, and then have different LLMs review your code and update your documentation and then use all of this as a learning opportunity to develop your own sense of how things work. I haven't stopped thinking about this conversation since we had it, and everyone needs to pay attention to what AI is unlocking for non-technical people. A huge thank you to Tall Rav for encouraging me to meet Zevy. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It helps tremendously. And if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get 19 premium products for free for an entire year, including lovable, replet, bold gamma naden linear devon post talk superhuman descript whisper flow perplexity warp granola magic pattern, dray, demobin, and stripe atlas. Head on over to lenniesnewsletter.com and click product pass. With that, I bring you Zevy Arnowitz after a short word from our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by Tenweb, the company that pioneered AI website building before ChatgPT. In the last 3 years, over 2 million websites have been generated with TenWeb's VIP coding platform. Tenweb's VIP coding platform is a powerful way to build websites. Think of it as lovable for WordPress front end and back end. Users can build any website at any complexity. E-commerce portfolios, information websites, blogs, and it comes with the WordPress admin panel and thousands of readytouse plugins. Tenweb also offers website generation as an API as a service for SAS companies, marketplaces, hosting providers, MSPs, and agencies. SAS companies can embed it via API so that users can launch AI generated sites directly inside of their platform connected to their own data. Agencies and MSPs can get a white label dashboard to manage clients and resell under their brand. Hosting providers can self-host the API builder on their own infrastructure. Check it out at 10web.io/enny and use code lenny for exclusive free credits and 30% off API or whitelabeled solutions. That's the number 10 web.io/lenny vipcoding platform as an API. Today's episode is brought to you by DX, the developer intelligence platform designed by leading researchers. To thrive in the AI era, organizations need to adapt quickly. But many organization leaders struggle to answer pressing questions like which tools are working? How are they being used? What's actually driving value? DX provides the data and insights that leaders need to navigate this shift. With DX, companies like Dropbox Booking.com Adion and Intercom get a deep understanding of how AI is providing value to their developers and what impact AI is having on engineering productivity. To learn more, visit DX's website at getdx.com/lenny. That's getdx.com/lenny.

>> Zevy, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast. >> Thanks for having me, Lenny. I'm a huge fan of the show and tons of people that I've admired most and learned the most from have been on here. So, it's a crazy moment for me. I'm really excited for this. >> I really appreciate that. I want to start by reading actually a note I got about you from Tal Riv who is a previous podcast guest, many times collaborator, one of the most AI forward product managers that I know. I've learned a ton from him. So, here's what he said about you when he introduced us. Zevy is the most hands-on vibe coding PM I know, and I've personally learned so much from him. His engineers at Meta ask him to teach them how to do what he does. Every time we get coffee, I repeatedly get this feeling of everyone needs to be hearing this. >> That's so nice. >> And so, that's the goal. That's the goal of this conversation is to help more people hear what you figured out. We're going to get very hands-on. Uh we're going to do a lot of show versus tell, showing people what you've figured out about how to be a PM, uh a nontechnical PM building stuff. I want to give people a little bit of background on you because I think this is going to inspire a lot of listeners to feel like they can also do what we're about to show you. Uh this is going to look very advanced, but just give people a little bit of sense of just your background. >> I'm very non-technical. I have zero technical background. Uh did music in high school. Uh a lot of Israelis uh do technology units in the army. I was not in a tech unit. And basically a year ago, I was traveling with my wife uh for 3 months in in Asia and we were in Japan. And that was around when Sonnet 3.5 came out. And I remember watching a YouTube video uh I think it was either Greg Eisenberg or Riley Brown. And they were basically building uh apps using it was either Bolt or Lovable just using AI. And it was like a crazy moment for me cuz I was watching this and it basically felt like someone came up to me and said, "Hey, Zevie, there's this cool new technology you should check out. Um, you should really give it a try. Oh, and by the way, you have superpowers now." And the second I got home from Japan, I didn't even unpack my bags, ran to my computer, uh, opened Bolt, opened an account, and for the past year, I've been building. And the last thing I'll say on that is we talked about this a bit before we started recording, but I was prepping with Claude for the episode and I was trying to clarify what my goal is for this episode. And Claude said, "If people walk away thinking how amazing you are, you failed. And if people walk away and open their computer and start building, you've succeeded." So I really hope that uh we can inspire some people to do the same. >> Uh I love that so much. I feel like that should be the goal for my podcast. If you're like, I love that guest, it's less of a a win if it's just like, oh, I'm so inspired to do the thing that they figured out. That is the real win. I love cloud is the best. >> I agree. >> Okay, so let's let's uh dive in and give people with let's start with kind of a high level overview of how you operate and use AI in your job. What are the core tools and just what's kind of like the frame of reference for the workflow that you figured out and how you operate? This all started where I was a uh project power user. I love projects um GBD projects. >> GBD projects. >> Yeah, exactly. GBD projects and cloud projects which are basically a shared folder of chats which share both custom instructions and uh shared knowledge base. And I think it was around when GBT started using memory where I thought it was interesting, but it it really annoyed me cuz I do a bunch of different things. Like I'm a terrible runner. Uh I'm a PM. I was a student uh psychology student. So I had all these different facets of life. And what happened was uh the memory feature was mixing stuff up. So like I talked to GBT about running and it would be and it would say oh yeah after this 5K you're going to crush all your next product reviews and it's like ah I mean okay I understand that you have that in your memory but it's just not relevant and projects basically allows you to compartmentalize and and have things within the the right context. So tracking back to the story I told when we came back from Japan I started building this app. Uh the first thing I noticed was that these products were built in a way where and these when I say these products I mean bolt and lovable were built in a way where they were super eager to write code. So their system prompt was you're a coding agent. So when you'd write something they'd straight away start coding. So at the beginning of a project this was super fun and exciting because they just go and start building your app. But later on when things got more complex, this uh created much more problems cuz planning is really important when you're implementing something uh technical and let's say you're implementing payments or something that's going to be uh a change to your database. If the coding agent is just like all right, I got it. And just starts writing code, this always results in terrible things. Uh some really gnarly bugs that I had. And to mitigate this, what I did was I created sort of a CTO. Um so again I'm not technical. I have been in product for a while but I know zero uh zero stuff about code. So basically what I did was I created a CTO with the custom prompt of it. Uh being the complete technical owner of the project. So I told it I own the problem. I own how we want the users to feel. You're the complete owner um of how this is going to be built. I want you to challenge me. I don't want you to be a people pleaser. all these things that kind of mitigate the regular chatbtisms. Uh I I always think about this where for some reason the easiest way for me to think about AI is to imagine it as people and I think ChachiBT would probably be the worst CTO because it's such a people pleaser and it's so sickopantic where I mean just a short story I had uh a few weeks ago I was trying to learn about Bun JavaScript which is uh was acquired by Anthropic and I was trying to understand what they do. So I was talking to GBT and this wasn't within my uh co-founder uh CTO project and I asked it if it's similar to a different framework that I have in my app called Zustand which nothing to do at all with what bun JavaScript does and basically GPT goes oh yeah it's exactly the same and then it started talking about what it what it meant and I was like wait no these are not the same at all and it said like the most terrifying and hilarious thing he goes oh I'm Sorry, I thought you were just making this up and I was riffing with you and I was like, "Oh, no, no, no. This is terrible." So, basically, if regular Chachi PT was a CTO, that would be the CTO who like goes along with your dumbest ideas. So, creating the the project allowed me to mitigate that. >> So, this is um just to just to be super clear, you have a chat GBT project that you've given a prompt to be your CTO of your of your product. And in being a nontechnical person, this is kind of like the thing you talk to when you don't when uh and we'll get to what you're actually using to build when you have questions about architecture and decisions that are technical. >> Yeah. So now I'll show I'll show my full workflow and I don't involve GPT anymore, but I definitely would recommend even though the technology has gone. So when I started this there was no plan mode or ask mode. It was just build on these products on on lovable and bolt and they've progressed a ton. A lot of what I had as workflows have become ingrained in these products which is really interesting. I would still recommend start with a project for first of all the reason that I said and also it kind of puts you in a place where you're in a chatbot and not writing code. So you take the time to converse and to learn which I think is critical. And the second thing is if you're nontechnical like me, code is terrifying. It's the scariest thing in the world to look at. And I look at it as kind of like exposure therapy. I think if you see this where I'm working like in uh Claude or in cursor, you might be excited to start using those, but I would really recommend starting slow uh with a GPT project. Um beautiful UI, super simple. then maybe graduate to like a bolt or a lovable and then go to cursor in light mode slowly slowly gradually ease in until you like open a terminal uh you know go full dark mode go full dev um so I would really recommend doing this gradually >> that is awesome advice and so just to be uh to be clear these days you're using cursor with cloud code powering it and what I love about that is that you're not you've never written code you the way you put it you're afraid of even looking at code you have to do >> expos exposure therapy and I love that cursor is is useful to you and what you're telling us is that graduating from a chatbt project that is kind of your technical co-founder kind of taught you enough to feel more comfortable going straight to cursor. You you said that you actually went to boulder in lovable kind of in the interim uh and then you went to just straight to cursor. What's the reason to just go straight to cursor? Just curs is it just cursor has cursor can do everything and once you get the hang of it it's actually the most powerful tool. Yeah, I think I graduated from each tool when I kind of outgrew it. So, Bolt was awesome until I was trying to connect payments to my app and it kind of started losing it and then I graduated to Cursor and I've actually fallen in love with Claude. Uh, so I'm using Claude code, but that also runs within Cursor and I think this is Tal uh who told me this. I'm not sure who he's quoting. Uh, but code is just words at the end of the day. Um, so it's just files on your computer. So basically you can be working on the same project and carry it from app to app and especially now I can work on with multiple models and apps on my project. So start slow but uh definitely there's there's a lot of places you can graduate too. >> Awesome. Okay. Should we dive into u screen share showing how you operate? >> Awesome. I pulled up cursor. Can you see it? >> Perfect. So within my codebase what you can see here on the left these are all my code files. Uh here on the right is cursor. Uh so this is basically like having AI which has access to all the code. And here in the middle I have cloud code running. And what you can see here I'm going to close cursor for a second. What you can see here are all my slash commands. Basically what slash commands are they are reusable prompts that I save within the codebase that I can run by writing slash and then the name of the file. So here you can see create issue which is the first command that I'm going to use. And basically what this tells Claude, it says the user is mid development and thought of a bug or a feature and improvement. Capture it fast so they can keep working. And then it basically says this is the format that I want you to capture the the U linear issue in. And it explains a bunch of things what exactly cloud needs to do to get there. So the way I invoke this is basically I'll do slash create issue and this injects this prompt into claude. So it says, uh, I'm ready to help you to capture this issue. What's on your mind? So basically when I'll do this is if I'm working on a big project and I suddenly come across a bug or have an idea that I don't want to work on right now, but I want to work on later, I'll do this really quick. And Claude's main goal is to quickly capture what I'm thinking about. So quickly to run through my full workflow. So basically, it starts with creating an issue. So this is uh the create issue slash command which basically tells claude that I'm mid development and it should quickly capture what I'm thinking about and create an issue within linear. Then later on uh when I want to pick this up I have the exploration phase. Exploration phase is basically telling claude we're going to only explore what we want to solve here. It could either pull from linear or I can just speak freely to it. And what it will do is it will analyze and understand the issue and just ask clarifying questions. The next phase after we've done finished exploration phase is we're going to create a plan. So you can see create plan. This basically has a template that I love for creating a plans and the output of this at the end of the day will be a markdown file with our plan that we can end up building along with code. After creating the plan we have execute plan. After execution we have review and then we have peer review which is really cool and we'll get into later on. Um and at the end we update the docs. So this is updating documentation and everything so that agents can write better code later on. So I think what we'll do is we're going to build a feature live for my app which I think is really cool. But first what I'd like to do is is show you the app so you have some context. So this is Studymate. It's a platform for students which allows them to upload um study materials and create uh interactive tests based on their own materials. So here we can go to the top. Uh let's upload a PDF. We can decide what pages we want to be quizzed on. We can decide the number of questions, the difficulty level. And basically what happens behind the scenes is we send the information the user uploaded along with the system prompt and any other um augmentations the user's decided to uh Gemini and we create a quiz. These are uh challenging questions that are meant to assess comprehension. You even have some hints. And once we do a few of these, we can submit. >> I got them right. >> Terrible results. >> Yeah. >> And so and so just to be really clear about this, this is like a side business that you have, an app that you built that's making money. That's just like a thing you vibe coded having no >> technical. This is my weekend project. Yeah. This is what I do uh on weekends. Um, yeah. So, you get basically deep explanations into why each uh question was wrong or each question was right. And at the moment, Studymate only has multiple choice questions. And I was doing some competitor research over over the last weekend and I saw competitors who had true or false questions and also fill in the blank questions, which I loved. So, I think that'd be really cool if we could uh build that live. How's that? >> I love it. I'm crossing crossing our fingers. This all work. Uh I just want I I just want to highlight the stuff you shared right before this incursor. So this is a huge deal what you described here. This is essentially what you've figured out is a way as a non a person that has no idea how to write any code how to build a product in cursor as a product manager using this series of slash commands that you've concocted that you're going to be sharing with listeners. They can download all these and just use them directly. They don't have to figure out all these prompts that you've you've figured out. >> Yeah, 100%. Basically what happened was I formulated the backbone of this uh with the CTO and it was basically within the system prompt of the CTO project that I had within GBT. Uh so it said step one we do this, step two we do this and now I'll keep building and if I see something that happens over and over again I'll just create a slash command and then it will be automated within the workflow. >> Amazing. So just to summarize the slash commands. So one is create an issue in linear which uh I love. Linear is awesome. Shout out. >> That's also from uh yeah the product pass. >> From the product pass there. Oh my god, what value. Uh okay. So step one is create the issue in linear. So it's a command. So this prompt slashcomand you've created. Just create issue. Then it's explorer which is uh explore the idea. Help me ideate on what this could be. And this is Claude helping you think through the feature and product. Then it's actually create the plan. And so it's like the AI helping you build the plan to build the product. >> Then it's actually execute which is just build the thing. >> Yeah. >> And then there's this review peer review step which is awesome that uh you'll share. And then there's document update documentation based on this new feature that we're adding. >> Sweet. >> Yeah. Cool. So let's uh go ahead and start building. So I'm going to use whisperflow uh to dictate. And basically this starts with slash create issue. Um, so this basically sends that prompt and I love this because I usually do this uh during when I'm building something else. So basically it tells Claude that I'm mid building something and I don't have a lot of time to to to waste time on this. So just ask some brief questions so that you have enough to capture within linear. So I want to add fill-in- thelank questions to Studymate. Uh, I want this to be 30% of tests to be generated as fill-in- thelank questions. I want there to be six potential answers uh for two blank spots. And of course, there's only going to be two correct answers. So, one correct answer and two incorrect answers for each spot. And I want the interface to be drag and drop. So, that's just basically uh a quick think of of of how I want this to work. So, it's going to ask me a few questions. Quizzes are 100% multiple choice. Question structure, single sentence, pass through two blanks. Um, and priority. So, one and two are correct. And this is uh not high priority. Uh, it's a nice to have feature. So now basically what claude is going to do is it's going to use MCP which is basically uh uh technology that was created by anthropic which gives AI the ability to use tools. So this is connected to my linear. So what it's going to do now is it's going to use everything we've said and create an issue within linear. And by the way as as this is loading I just love the way the way you describe this especially doing voice mode. It's like exactly how you would talk to an engineer describing a feature. Here's what I want and then they ask you questions. Here's the clarification. >> Yeah. So, at first when I was doing this with the CTO, I would do it with uh chat voice mode and that was crazy. That was like literally felt like ideulating with a person. Um it would push back, ask questions and maybe one day, you know, the coding uh tools will get there too. But that was exactly it really felt like sitting with my CTO. Um great. So created STU88. So if we open up linear now we should be able to see uh let's see where SU88 there it is. Uh fill in the blank questions with drag and drop interface. So it has a TLDDR. It has the current state. It did a little bit of research on the codebase I think. Um expected outcomes some context. So yeah. So this is basically ready for me to pick up when I'm interested in building. So now let's say a few days go by. I finished the current project I'm working on. I can pick it up. So when I pick it up, I do slashexploration phase, which is what we said. And then instead of pressing enter, I'll press tab. And I'll show you this. So basically exploration phase. What it does is it will take an argument. This is basically a placeholder within the prompt which allows me to enter something that is extra context for the for the AI. So I can say here linear stu 88 which is referencing the ticket and now what it's going to do is it's going to go it's going to fetch the linear ticket >> and what's the idea what's the goal of the exploration phase this is kind of idea is that the idea >> so it's it's both for the CTO to deeply understand the problem that we're trying to solve and also understand the current state of the codebase what files need to be affected and how is the best way to implement this technically. Um, and usually what happens is right now Claude's just basically reading a bunch of files understanding the basic uh structure of the code and then it's going to come back with a bunch of clarifying questions as uh that will decide how we end up implementing this. >> So it's like it feels like it's talking to your engineering manager. >> Exactly. Exactly. 100% this is this is how I think about it. >> And you said that your CTO so you used to use JBT prompt uh to have a CTO in there. how the CTO is living inside here in cursor. >> Yeah, because of the way the tools have developed um and they've become so good at both exploration and code execution. So now it's it's just uh kind of a habit that I call it a CTO, but it's basically allin-one. The the same agent will will both do the exploration and write the plan and end up executing the code. >> Got it. So it's basically it's clock code. Is there like a prompt you gave it to act like that to act like the right kind of CTO? >> Yeah. So within uh the claude MD which is basically the system prompt that's uh loaded within claude's context in every conversation I have uh some basic stuff like this is our workflow this is how we work within exploration phase I want you to challenge my thinking all kinds of stuff like that that can be loaded yeah within the uh claude MD file >> cool one last question before before we move on here just because it's I'm thinking about it as this happens the linear issue that you generated how often is it is it actually great and ready. How often do you have to edit it? What's like the quality of the linear ticket that it generates? Cuz you know, a lot of people are like probably wondering just like all these terrible linear issues are being created by AI. Are they actually any good? It's completely different because I'm a company of one. So, uh, a lot of the context is within here and there's no need for me to like talk to other teams and understand. It's basically very accessible and also I can easily see when uh Claude understood something uh wrong. I don't want to say that I would create linear issues at work like this. Uh but definitely if you're building your own side project, it's uh they're they're pretty quality and also it just kicks off the the when I want to start working on it. It's not I wouldn't say it's ready to be built. It's ready to start being explored. >> Got it. So it's just the beginning of an idea. Actually, let's come back after we go through this flow of how you would approach this if you were at say Meta or another maybe a smaller company. how this workflow might work at a larger company that isn't just a your own startup. >> Yeah, interesting. Let's come back to that. >> Um, cool. All right, so this is Claude coming back. I have a comprehensive understanding of the codebase. Um, I thoroughly end and uh analyze studymate live codebase and understand the current system, feature quest, and key areas that it's identified. Um, usually I'd spend a lot of time going over this because this is super super important, but just for the sake of development right now, we're going to brush through this. Now, Claude basically comes back after it's gone through the codebase and and understood the way it currently works. It's basically telling me what the current understanding is. So, it's talking about how the app is set up at the moment, uh, how the data is structured, what it understood from the feature request, and what's it what it's it has identified as key areas. And then it asked me some questions. So it's asking about the scope. It's asking about the data model, the UX UI of the feature, how it should be validated, how it should be graded, what changes need to be happen to the AI system prompt, and all kinds of questions about the app. I've prepared answers to all these questions beforehand because I don't think we all want to sit through this. So I'm just going to paste that in, and we'll see what Claude says. >> Awesome. I love it. And I love just just scanning those questions I was asking. It's like such smart, sophisticated, important questions instead of just cool, here I go. I'm gonna build it. >> Yeah. And I think this is the big um difference between like just vibe coding and going along with the vibes and really building serious apps. I spend a lot a lot of time going back and forth and understanding. Also a very cool uh slash command that I haven't showed yet is uh learning opportunity which basically when something is really difficult for me to understand I'll uh do slasharning opportunity and then talk about what I want to learn. And this basically primes Claude and says I am a technical PM in the making. I have mid-level engineering knowledge. I understand architect uh architecture and basically I want you to explain what we're currently working on uh using the 8020 rule. So this is a great way to learn. I would definitely take this and every time you kind of see something that you don't fully understand, I would definitely use this uh to learn. Great. So Claude basically comes back and says uh how it understands the current uh data model and how it's going to implement. Uh yeah, so it's ready to create the plan. So basically what I'm going to do now is I'm going to go and do slashcreate plan. And while Claude's doing this, I'm going to show really quick what this looks like. So, basically, these plans are from a template that I found on Twitter. Uh, I forgot who it was, but it was just a template that really resonated with me. And it's basically saying, um, based on our exchange, create a markdown file that will be the plan. Um, include clear, minimal, concise steps. Track the status. So, this basically has like status trackers on each task that Claude updates as it's going through and it will have a TLDDR, some critical decisions that we've made and the plan itself. So, Claude's uh finished writing the plan. So, we'll be able to look and see exactly what the plan is. So, it has a TLDDR. It has the critical decisions we've made and the tasks broken down. Um, and this is a perfect plan and it's also a really good way to write this because a lot of times I'll use different models to execute certain stuff. So, cursor has an amazing model called composer which is super fast. Uh, so a lot of things that are not that um complex, I'll use uh composer. Gemini 3 that just came out is unbelievable at UI. So, a lot of times I'll split the plan into backend and front end and then I'll have Gemini just read the plan and do the front end. Um so having this as a markdown file is really good and also going forward it's really good to have within the app so that um later on if an agent is writing code in a certain area it can see what's already been done there. Um so what we're going to do now is we're going to execute the plan. So now I think we're going to do this with cursor just because uh composer is so freaking fast. So what we can do is basically just say execute and then we can tag the file and composer is ridiculously fast. So that's it. It's off. It basically understands what the plan is and it's going to go ahead and start writing the code. >> Let me ask you a question while this is happening and also I have many questions so this is a good time to ask a few of them. You said that lovable and bolt are and other you know other apps in that space are are just not enough to build really serious apps and you had to move to cursor to do that. What tell us more about that just like how far what what's kind of limitation you ran into with those products and why you switched to cursor. >> I started using cursor and cloud code a few months ago and I haven't looked back but at that time these teams have been moving like crazy. So, I don't want to say I wouldn't trust them. I don't know what the current state is, but for me, it was basically the issue of I felt that CL that Bolt was being very opinionated on how I should do things and I felt like my knowledge has gotten to a point where I can graduate and be more in control. By the way, I think that the main difference between all these tools is basically the harness. So, the models are all the same models. You know, I I'll run Claude within Cursor. I'll run it within Cloud Code. And it's also the models that claude is also the model that is underlying bolt and lovable. But basically bolt and lovable will add a bunch of levels in the middle that will take all kind of guesswork and and and hard decisions out for the user. So the user doesn't make have to make these hard decisions. So it's also very easy to build. But the flip side of that is that you have less control. And basically claude code is just taking claude and shoving it straight in your code system and giving it full tools and to do whatever it wants. But also with that comes a lot of decisions that you need to make. So I don't know if if you can't build really amazing production apps using using bolt or lovable now but I think basically if you want the most cutting edge abilities of the models and you want to be able to make all the decisions uh on your own it's probably best to be on one of these tools. What I'm feeling and hearing is that planning work that you did. That's the stuff that lovable, bold, and would you put replet in that bucket, too? >> Yeah, for sure. Lovable, bold, replet, base 44, >> v 0. >> Um, yeah, v 0 all same bucket. >> So, essentially, they're kind of they're doing that planning for you. And as you said, they're very opinionated. They they try to make it easy. So, it's just like here's how to do it. We're not going to like here's the way we want to we think is best for people. And what you're saying is once you're trying to get a more serious about it or have want to go in a different direction, you don't have the power to change the how they plan. So cursor lets you do that. >> Yeah. I don't want this to come out like I'm badmouthing them. Base 44, let's say. >> Yeah. Yeah. Base 44 does an amazing job at basically taking all the complex guesswork out of building product and just allows you to just, you know, go with the vibes and build, but it will do signin with Google for you and it will do a database, but then you don't have decisions on uh what database am I using? Do I need sign in with Google this way or the or another way? It would just do it out of the box. So, so that's basically the trade-off there. >> Awesome. Shout out Mayor, the uh founder of Basically Podcast. Yep. >> Yeah, he's amazing. >> Uh I just love how this is like the way you're like uh flinging what's the word? Slinging slinging models like Gemini 3 for front end. Like I love that you have you've never written any code and you're just like cool, we use Gemini for this and cloud for this and I'm just working on cursor talking to this uh CTO helping you build stuff and build like significant product. Yeah, I mean we just live in the craziest of times where basically there the world changes once a week. Uh it feels like and there is just no boundaries. You can you can use all of these just on your like regular MacBook or regular laptop. And I have these moments um I call them time machine moments which is basically this week for instance I was prepping for the podcast using claude with a project. I was building I was fully localizing uh studymate from Hebrew to English which I did in two days which would probably take a dev team weeks and I was building a personal site which went from no domain no nothing to live uh on a domain within an hour and a half. And I was doing all three of these in parallel. And there was a point where basically all three of the agents were running. So I didn't have anything to do. I just had to let them think. And these are like the time machine moments where I feel like I was in the future and I just stick my head out of the time machine and whoever's next to me, like at the moment it was my wife, I'll just say we we live in the future. And she'll be like, "Huh? What?" And I'll be like, "No, no, don't worry about it." But it's just basically so crazy that all these things are just, you know, an API away. you can you can use anything. So, I think it's an awesome time to be curious and uh optimistic and hardworking. >> These are my favorite kinds of podcast guests, people that are living in the future, figuring out all these things, and then are just kind of come back, as you said, pok your head out of the the rocket ship and just like, hey, here's this thing that I figured out. Here's where we're going. >> Yeah. Best time to be alive. >> Um, so awesome. So, it looks like it's finished. Um, so now what we're going to do is we're going to run the app locally and we'll be able to see uh what uh Composer ended up building and we're going to see if anything else is needed um on our end to maybe do some manual review. Does that sound good? >> Sounds great. And I love that was like I don't know few minutes where if it was a human engineer it would be like days maybe a week work. >> Yeah, for sure. No. Uh, composer like the one thing is it's just so so blazing fast. Keeps you in flow. Uh, so yeah, full features take u minutes >> and that probably cost like a couple bucks in AI credits. >> I don't even look I mean I used to be so stingy about paying for products and now I'm just basically I look at it all as tuition, you know, as like uh stuff that I'm paying for learning. Uh so I don't know how much it costs but it's definitely worth it. That explains why they're the fastest growing products in history. Oh, >> 100%. 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And what you're doing here is you're having Claude review its own code. >> Yeah. So this is another thing where it's very difficult for me to catch mistakes. So my review process has gone through a bunch of iterations to really be uh as good as possible and to catch as many things as possible. So, I'll always manual manually QA it first uh to make sure if I can see any mistakes that Claude made and then what I'll do is basically slash review. And this uh tells Claude to start reviewing its own code. But what's even cooler and something that I'm really proud of is I will usually do multiple reviews and I'll have codeex which is chat GBT's competitor to cloud code as well as cursor open and I will have each of them review the code and then what what I do is I have a slash command called peer review which is really interesting and basically what it does is it's going to take claude which is usually the agent who I'm work working with. And just to put this in a mental model, this is basically my uh my dev lead that I'm working with. I will take uh the the slash command is basically saying you're the dev lead on this project. Other team leads within the company have looked at your code and reviewed it and found these issues. Don't take what they're what they said at face value. The reason is you have more context than them and you led this project. you need to either um explain why the stuff they found are not real issues and wrong or fix them yourself. And it's really cool because the way I look at these things is I look at the models. I try to imagine them as people and I can I can really tell you how each one of these uh would be as as a real human. Um because they have yeah each model has such distinct uh characteristics. So let's say Claude, she would be the perfect CTO. like she's very communicative. She's very smart. Um she she doesn't just go with the flow and do whatever you tell her. She's very um opinionated, but also super collaborative, which is I think why I'm always drawn to Claude. Um because I I need to do so much learning and and like it's it's your dream, a very communicative but very um opinionated uh dev lead. But then there's also Codeex. So I use Codeex um 5.1 Max, whatever. had another not the best at naming uh models but GPT's model I always imagine it as like a the best coder within the company who comes to the office like with uh a hoodie and sandals and sits in a dark room and you basically only bother him when you have the worst bugs and you say listen we have this bug and it will just close the door for two hours and come out and say I fixed it and you're like wait what are you gonna tell us what happened or what he's like don't worry about it I fixed it it's like really not communicative but it solves all the worst problems. And let's say Gemini is like a crazy scientist who's super artsy, uh, super talented at designing, but if you sit next to it and watch it work, it's terrifying. Like, you would fire that person instantly. This might be just my experience, but when I'm using Gemini within anti-gravity, which is uh Google's new competitor to cursor, when it's writing code, you can see the steps it's taking, and it's terrifying. like you'll say, uh, I want you to redesign the top of the dashboard and and you're looking at its thought process and it will say, oh, first things first, I'll delete the dashboard. And then it'll be like, nope, that was a mistake. I'll bring it back. And then it will say, oh, can I edit the database? And you're like, no, do not edit the database. You're just doing a redesign. And then it will end up designing something beautiful. Um, so the like the way there is like a roller coaster and very scary, but at the end of the day, Gemini is very good at design. So I think that using all these models um and basically playing to their strengths and mitigating their weaknesses by using other models is is a game changer for me. So I'll do peer review a bunch of times and and I'll have other models review other models code and kind of have them like fight it out. Uh basically like sometimes uh cloud code will get really sassy and be like this has been raised for the third time and for the third time I'm telling you this is not an issue. This is by design. So, it's just a really cool cool uh thing that I've added and I haven't seen many people doing it. >> That is such an incredible rant slash way to understand what's going on. Okay, awesome. So, we just ran the review. So, show us what we saw there and let's actually try this peer review. I'm really excited to see what what you learned there. >> Yeah, so basically Claude has reviewed its code and it's found a bunch of bugs. A critical bug it found in the prompt. uh some high bugs, some medium bugs. And now what I'll do is I'll do the same thing with the other models. So Codeex has a built-in code review that you can do or I just like to say review uh all the code in this branch. Of course, branch is referring to the GitHub branch that we're working on. Uh we're not working on the live codebase. And then I'll do this with composer. Say with we can do let's do it with with composer one. So, I'll do uh slash review here as well. And basically, these are both going to run and do a in-depth review similar to what claw does. But again, because of the differences between the models, uh they're all going to catch different things and they're all going to look differently. And this is a really cool way to work. It's basically if you had other team leads within the company uh review the code. Here you can see how fast composer is. I think GPT probably will take a bunch of time. Like I said, it's in its own dark room right now reviewing code and we'll come back in a few minutes. >> Okay, cool. So, we could we could let these run and we don't actually have to go through the whole process. But is the idea once you get these results, you run peer review and you you copy and paste kind of these results. Is that that >> exactly? I'll copy and paste the results. I'll do peer review and then I'll say dev lead one and then paste from one of the models and then I'll say dev lead two and paste from the other model and basically have them uh fight it out until I feel like we have no more issues. Um, for me, this is super important because I'm not a I'm not technical and I'm not a developer. And I'll also use slasharning opportunity a bunch during this to learn about stuff that I don't understand or or don't fully grasp. >> Incredible. What a what a clever solution to solving this code review problem where it's like I don't know what you're I don't I don't know how to recode, so what am I going to even Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Okay. Incredible. Let's uh let's wrap up this kind of this workflow. Is there anything else that's important in this workflow? And again, all this stuff is going to be available where people can just plug this stuff into their cursor account and and use it themselves >> 100%. Um, the one thing I'll say is that I think just like working in general with AI and even just like uh working on any product doing constant post-mortems is critical. So a lot of times we'll find all these kind of bugs or maybe Claude will fail to execute something correctly. And at the beginning when I started vibe coding, I would basically just keep running at it like running at the wall and until it worked. And once it worked, I was like, "All right, awesome. This works. Let's keep going." But I've learned over time that updating documentation and tooling is one of the biggest hacks for productivity. So when Claude will fail to do something or I'll see this really bad bug that that shows that Claude really didn't understand something, I'll ask it what in your system prompt or tooling made you make this mistake and cloud will kind of like go introspective and think of what made it do create that mistake and then I'll say okay great let's update your tooling and documentation so that this mistake never occurs again and I do this every time I'm either building uh an internal tool or anything and I I think this is just like working, you know, if you've you end up doing a bunch of mistakes and then end up releasing the feature to users. So, you're like, "All right, it's a big success." But going back and even when you've succeeded, um looking and understanding what you did and what you could have done better is critical. And also using AI, this is probably one of the biggest unlocks. Going back to your prompts, understanding what was not good enough, iterating on them, and then seeing how AI's responses get better. I think that's probably one of the most important things and one of the things that divides between people who are like okay with using AI and the people who actually know how to use it. >> That is such good advice. So what I'm hearing is when you run in when the models do something dumb, make a mistake, you ask it to reflect on what the mistake it made was and then you update the slash command prompts uh with that knowledge so that in the future it's not making that same mistake and it just keeps getting better. These things just keep getting smarter and smarter. you're building up this really incredible prompt that just gets better and better. >> Exactly. Um, not always the slash commands. It will sometimes update uh different documentation or its tooling, but basically it's it's understanding what the root cause of the of the uh mistake that the AI AI made and fixing it. >> Awesome. So, it's not so like the models are getting smarter and then there's also the other parts of your workflow can get smarter as you as you find flaws in the way of stuff. >> 100%. Yep. >> Amazing. Okay. Um, is there anything else there before I move in a couple other directions? >> I think that's it. I think we covered pretty much everything. Basically, just to wrap this up, what I do is I do a bunch of code review and then update the documentation so that everything is documented so the next time I try to build a feature in this area, there won't be any mistakes. Um, and then I'll do a bunch of testing. I'll do some user testing as well before I release this to general availability. Obviously, we're not going to release this. This was just a show. Uh, but hopefully maybe by the time the podcast comes out, I'll I'll have done this correctly and and release the feature. >> It's incredible that this was not possible like I don't know two years ago, maybe a year ago. Like you are a product manager shipping a product without knowing how to write code, barely knowing how to review code. You said you're afraid of looking at code. As a product manager, you're building a product in cursor using uh all of these different AI models. You're making money with this product. Uh this is like we're so used to this now, but it's insane what is now possible. >> It's the best time to be alive 100%. Um I think that I I understand the fear, but AI just makes so much possible. Just a quick uh side note here, my brother, who I'm building one of the apps with, is an entrepreneur. He has a beautiful business that helps old people um and seniors understand to use technology and uh AI better. and he's basically doing the same kind of learning as me and he's replaced all of the tools he was paying for. I think he was paying for Zapier and Air Table and he's basically built uh like a full-fledged CRM system and automation system for his business completely alone. So, I mean for the people who are curious um optimistic, hardworking, this is the best time to be to be a builder. And what I love about this conversation we're having here is it feels like the biggest barrier for a lot of people is like how do I get started? What exactly do I do? I open up cursor. It looks very intimidating. I don't know how to write code. I don't know how to build stuff. I don't know about databases. And so you're going to be sharing all these slash commands and basically this whole workflow with the audience. >> Yeah. Okay. And like I said, just start at GPT. Start in GPT. Um tell it what your idea is. Uh tell it to explain to you what are even the first steps of thinking. what are the decisions you need to make and just be like be inquisitive learn um don't rush things uh it's very important to just dive in and and really spend the time to learn >> and you share this one of your slash commands is learning opportunity and it's how you learn a lot of these things just like teach me this thing of how this database issue works >> exactly >> okay there's a couple directions I want to make sure we touch on one is coming back to a question I asked earlier about how this might work at a larger company say it's not like Meta but just like I don't know a thousand person company, 500 people. How much of this can you plug and play into a workflow as a PM at a larger company? What would be your advice for someone that may want to start trying to ship code at least showing people what's possible? >> I think that first making your codebase AI native is a really important step and I think this needs to be done by technical people. So basically my codebase has a ton of just plain text in it. So it will have a bunch of markdown files that explain to agents how to work in certain areas of the codebase um and highle structure so that the agents uh navigate through the codebase easier. And I think that if this is set up in a really good way, I still don't think uh like PMS should be shipping heavy uh database chain migrations or any like big project. But you know, contained UI uh projects, especially if you just build it, create the PR and and send it to a dev to like do the final finishes. Uh I think that's definitely something that's possible. And I think we're going to see that a lot in the next coming years. I think basically everyone's going to become a builder. So should be really interesting. >> Okay. So your advice here is as a PM don't maybe don't go to cursor start building shipping trying to ship features to production especially complicated features. Do you think we'll get there? Do you think like in a couple years PMs will be doing this and it'll feel less scary and crazy. >> If there are PMs um >> yeah I think titles are going to collapse and responsibilities are going to collapse and everyone's just going to be building. Um, I definitely think that the models the context window is getting bigger, the models are getting smarter. Um, and I definitely see how PMS or any other background can be writing. At the moment, I wouldn't wait for that. I would use this as a collaborative learning opportunity to work with your dev team. It's going to be difficult. A lot of developers are very very skeptic about the current state and I think that it's going to be a lot of sales work on your end to convince. But if you're able to convince and I think teams that are really sold on this and want to take the time to work on their workflow about how can our a team become more AI native, I think that these teams are going to probably be a few years in the future and they're going to look back at the few weeks they spent setting this up as as the best time they spent. Let me ask you another question around just the job of a PM. One of the biggest fears people have with these AI tools for for PMs for every function I imagine is just they you start to rely on these things. Your skills start to atrophy. You're producing all this slop that looks great. Cool. Amazing strategy doc. Now it's actually not at all good. Or these linear tickets or just products that are like halfbaked. What's your take on kind of these two parts of just like how has this impacted your uh craft as a PM? Do you feel like this has weakening your skills because you're so reliant on these tools and just how do you keep the quality of this stuff up and not just like me it's just a bunch of AI generated slop? >> I have a a very strong disagree to to to this and I've heard it a bunch. I remember when I started using Talviv um has like this whole course on on building a PM co-pilot using projects uh which is probably one of the best courses uh that you can take and when I started working with my own co-pilot I remember people at work looking and saying like oh so you're basically outsourcing your thinking and to me that's just the worst way to look at it and I think for some reason these people usually have a highore relation with the kind of person who doesn't like to show their presentation when it's only 10% done or doesn't want to ask for help a lot. I think that there's a misconception with a lot of PMs that the job is always having the right answers and being the smartest person in the room. And at least how I was trained and how I believe the the role of the PM is, it's the exact opposite. It's basically harnessing anything that can get us uh as quick as possible to delivering the the right solution to users. And I just think this is like that really smart person that has context or or your mentor or whatever, but is just always available and doesn't judge you and uh can really help you. So, if you're using it to just create your outputs and then putting them out there, um I mean, yeah, that's AI slot, but it's also human error. I think it's really important that you own your own outputs. If you put anything out there or um show something in a product review and you say, "Oh, sorry, that was built by AI," that's that's your mistake. I think if you use these intentionally and and really take the time to understand how to use AI in the correct way, it's one of the biggest game changers that will make you much better as a PM. And another thing here is that especially for more junior PMs, it allows you to play at such a higher level than you would normally. Like I think that at Wix, I wasn't thinking of what's the marketing strategy uh of the company and how will the onboarding be completely revamped within the all of the whole product. But I mean on my side product, I can just do whatever decisions I want and think of the strategy and marketing and the messaging. And this is basically just getting me uh reps uh which is one of the most important things at the beginning of your career. So I understand the fear that you know how do you you outsource certain stuff and you're not owning 100% of everything but I think the upside is so much more valuable. And I think the only way that AI makes you worse at your job is if you're using it wrong. Is there anything that you've learned about reducing the the sloppiness, the slopiness of the output? Just like a tip for keeping the quality high of the stuff that it produces. >> Similar to people setting up AI for success for the task at hand. So like if I just brought in, you know, uh a junior to to write a deck or something and I didn't give it any guideline. I just said give a strategy deck. he would probably just go online and find, you know, top strategy deck and and just reproduce that, which is basically what AI is doing. It's basically just fed all of the internet. So, instead of that guiding it and giving it context on what your style of writing is and what you're trying to solve, um, and all these different things, I think that's probably one of the biggest unlocks. Um, so that's just a quick tip. And also uh cursor has a slash command called ds slop which is basically going back over the code. Um I don't know if this is integrated into the product yet but it's uh on Twitter their founders have been talking about this. So that's definitely something I would run after just to make sure that no no slop is is left behind. >> That is so funny. The slop. Okay. One more question uh which may lead to something else but um kind of going in a whole different direction. you used AI to help you actually interview for the job that you got at Meta. Talk about how you did that because a lot of people right now are struggling to find a job. Uh reading about all these people using AI to help them interview. You actually did it. Uh what did you use? What worked? >> I feel like the analogy here is I have 12 nieces and nephews and you can see how people who have grown up in a different world how their mind is is formed differently. So, if you ask me, "How do you answer a phone?" I'll do this. But a uh a child now when you say, "How do you answer the phone?" they'll they'll do this. You know, they'll do the the the iPhone answer. And I feel like people who are um growing up now in their professional lives, we're the same just with AI. So, every time I'm faced with a new challenge or problem, I think AI first how to solve it. So, uh Meta reached out and said they'd like me to interview. Straight away, I opened up a project um within Claude. I started looking online for all the best information out there, things that I resonated with. I took a ton of frameworks and and stuff from Ben Arez, who's written a guest post uh for you, who I think is one of the best minds out there right now. And basically, I created a project which was my coach uh which I would come and consult what to do at each phase. I would mock interview with and this was amazing. Also I created a game in base 44 which helped me uh I was really struggling with segmentation uh within the product questions. So thinking of the correct segments. So I basically just created a quiz game which creates questions and different segmentations and I have to choose uh so this is like I spun this up. It's a web app that I would play sometimes when I was on the bus to work. So basically, uh, I think Ben talks about this a bunch, so I don't like just go read Ben's stuff, but just creating a project and feeding it with all the best information on the internet and then mocking a bunch. I will say that the biggest game changer for me was doing uh human mocks. So cold outreaching to people uh on LinkedIn and having them uh do actual mocks for me. I think that at the end of the day, especially for the the meta PM prep, which is super competitive and difficult, uh I think there's no there's no way to to get around that. >> That is so cool. They use that post. I wasn't aware. We're going to link to it. And in that post, Ben shares all these prompts you can feed chatbt to help you prepare for interviews, do uh mocks online. Uh it's a really important point to say that those are take you to a point, but it's actually better to use humans. I actually have a post coming out soon uh in collaboration with Nome Seagal about how everyone's using AI to interview and one of the most interesting ways I've heard people and that we found in this research was that people use it to get feedback. They record the interview and then it gives them feedback. Here's where you could have done better. Here's what you here's what you missed because the feedback loop is so missing. No one ever tells you here's what you did badly in this interview. No one tells you that >> and AI can do that. >> So I'll add two things to that. one which is uh exactly this. So I'll mock with um AI. Also I did something really cool where there's a question bank online uh free uh by Lewis Lynn which basically is an always updating uh bank of questions that people are asked in real interviews and I basically uh used uh comet which is the perplexities browser and I had the agent run all kinds of analyses on like what the most asked questions are and that's how I knew how to prioritize what questions I would mock. Um, and then at the end of these mocks, I would, um, tell Claude within the project, um, you're my coach, and I don't want you to make me feel good. I want you to make me, um, as ready as possible for these interviews, so give me feedback, like you said. Um, and the other thing that I did was really cool was some questions where I didn't have time to mock, I would ask Claude to play the candidate, and then it would just give me a really good answer, and I could also learn from that. Like learning from someone who does a perfect answer. Oh man, I I really love the way you phrased it that people kind of in your generation, the default is I have something I need to do. What? Let's go to AI immediately and and help me prepare for this thing. Help me figure it out. >> Yeah. And this comes back to this quote that I always think about which I think everyone's always hearing, but I just it's such an important quote that it's not that you will be replaced by AI for a long time. It's you'll be replaced by someone who's better at using AI than you. >> I agree. And that's what these conversations are for, to help people keep up with all that and to and to learn some of these skills and again see where the future's going and and start to learn how to get there yourself. Okay, Zevy. Uh before we get to a very exciting lightning round, I'm going to take us to a recurring segment on this podcast I call failure corner. And why I love this segment is people come on this, you know, just even this conversation, it's like all these amazing things you figured out, everything's going so well. People rarely hear the things that don't go well and those are often the most interesting and impactful stories. So the question is just what's a what's a story of a time you failed in your career and what did you learn from that experience? >> Yeah, I love this. I love this uh I love failure corner. Big big fan. Um so I'll tell a story about uh when I started at Wix. So basically I started within Wix's student program and straight out of the student program you get um put into a certain team. So, I was in the editor, which is uh the core product of Wix. And the other PMs were just the best PMs almost at Wix. Like these four other people uh had much more experience than me and they were ridiculously good. And I remember coming in and thinking like my first product review, I'm going to blow these people's socks off. They're not going to believe how good of a PM I am. And I basically didn't really share what I was thinking. Uh, I would work tons of hours alone and I was like, I'm going to kill this product review. They're going to be so impressed. Uh, and I ended up failing miserably. Uh, my product review was not good. Uh, it wasn't the format they expected. They had a ton of questions that I missed. Um, and I felt awful when it was when it was over. I was like, "Ah, you're such an idiot." And I saw that everyone was like, "All right, cool. Yeah, just come back in two weeks and and we'll keep we'll keep getting at this." And I I understood in that moment that they had zero expectation of me being a 10x PM, but the expectation of me was being a 10x learner. And the second I understood that, my whole mindset sw uh shifted. And I think this is probably the best tip that I give now uh to junior PMs is basically be the best learner you can be at the beginning. No one expects you to know all the answers and no one expects you to be good. So basically what I did was I took each person on the PM team, there was four other PMs and I assessed what their strength is and use them as a mentor for that. So Ner who's still my uh mentor till today, he has the best product sense of anyone I've met. Oya is super uh she's like a methodology expo expert. She just thinks in frameworks. Um Yara who was the head of product basically can look at a product and then instantly understand like the third and fourth order effects of them system thinking. So every time I had an issue with one of these areas, I would come to one of them um and consult them. And this does two things. First of all, I learned a ton. And the second thing is that when the next time the next product review, my success felt to them like their success cuz it wasn't this kid who's trying to show us up how cool he is. It was um like our mentee kind of making us all proud. Um and it was such a great shift for me and basically at the end of the day I I really excelled through this. >> That is an awesome story and this connect this idea of learning is such a good thread throughout this whole conversation that uh AI is is good at getting stuff done but it's also really good at helping you learn how to do the thing and to be this partner this thought partner. the way he talked about the interview process you went through and this learning learning opportunity command. Um so awesome great story uh Zevy. Okay, before we get to a very exciting lighting round, is there anything else that you wanted to share? Anything you want to leave listeners with? >> Yeah, so kind of to tie back into the uh first thing I said where if people walk away thinking um Zevy's so cool then then I've failed here. I think that it's just the best time to be alive. I think it's the best time to be a junior. Uh contra contrary to what a lot of people are saying how, you know, there's no more junior roles out there and people get out of school and you you can't find a role. Yeah, that's true. But also, when else in history could you get out of school and just build a startup, you know, on your own with a couple of friends uh completely bootstrapped? And I see more and more people uh towards my end of towards the end of the time at my time at Wix, I was interviewing and I saw more and more people building their own stuff with AI. And I think uh contrary to what a lot of people think, it's the best time to be a junior. It's the best time to be a learner. And I think if any listener is listening to this and you're a curious person, you're a hardworking person, I I want to say kind, I'm not sure, but if you're a kind person and a good communicator, you have such an unfair advantage and you can give more value to companies than most people who have 20 years of experience. So, uh I really hope people get inspired by this and uh start killing it with their projects. >> Amazing. So many ways to be inspired from this conversation. See, with that, we've reached our very exciting lightning round. I've got five questions for you. Are you ready? >> Yep. Let's do it. >> What are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people? >> So, I'll I'll take one from each kind of genre. Um, so in like fiction, I love The Fountain Head uh by A Rand. One of my favorite books. Uh, really makes you think, really makes you feel. Um, business books, I'm a big fan of Shoe Dog, uh, the Nike story. One of my favorite >> just finished reading that. So funny. >> Amazing. >> It was great. It was great. >> Yeah. I love Shoe Dog. Um and then more on like the psychology side uh mindset by Carol Dick, who uh coined the term growth mindset. It's just such an amazing book. It kind of sounds like a self-help book, but then you you understand that it's completely psychological and and is based on research. Um and that book completely changed my life. uh really I was always with a fixed mindset and then after reading that I kind of understood uh that it was something holding me back and since then I've been really really trying to cultivate a growth mindset. So I really recommend everyone reading that >> again connects to that thread of uh the way you described it being a 10x learner versus a 10x uh doer. Okay, next question. Favorite recent movie or TV show you have really enjoyed. >> Yeah, actually my my wife is really into film so we watch a lot of TV. Uh it's probably our our favorite uh together time. Uh I just finished watching The Pit, which was amazing. Uh it was really good. And the my first recommendation to everyone is if you haven't seen Severance, run to see Severance, one of my favorite shows. >> Is there a favorite product that you have recently discovered that you really love? >> This is a good question. I'm always trying new products. Like I'll always have uh three or four browsers on installed on my computer and all this different kind of stuff. Um, and I recently discovered a Loom alternative. Um, I was kind of disappointed with Loom. They were taking so much money and the product, uh, I don't know, I just didn't love it. And there's an open source alternative called CAP, which is just really wellcrafted. Um, you can see that the person was like really sweating the details and, uh, it's just a really, really great alternative. So, I've been using that recently. >> There's also a product called Supercut that I love that's also a Luma alternative. a shout out. Okay, two more questions. Do you have a favorite life motto that you find yourself uh coming back to in work or in life? >> Yeah, I'm kind of between two right now. One which is like become a Twitter meme basically, which is you can just do things. I feel like that is basically going in my head every time I do something that I'm just shocked at the speed and and ability to do things now. Uh so you can just do things. And the second one I stole from my brother. His motto is nobody knows what the they're doing. And I just love that and I think it kind of makes you take life more lightly. Uh so yeah, nobody knows what the they're doing. >> I think people see these companies on the outside and it feels like everything they've got all figured out and if you're ever on the inside of a company that's doing really well, you're like, how is this staying on the rails? How is this still a thing that is working? Doesn't make any sense. It's all about to fall apart. >> Yeah. >> Okay, last question. uh you've been you've had a long entrepreneurial uh thread throughout your career. There's a couple other uh real world businesses you've started in the past. You did a thermal clothing business and then like a hummus delivery thing. So maybe pick one of those and just tell the story of what that's about. >> Yeah, I'd love to. Uh really fun that you asked about this. Um so I'll tell the thermal clothing because I think it's really cool. So, in high school, I was selling thermal clothes in 10th grade uh for for one of my sister's friends or something. And basically, it was just uh packs of thermal clothing, uh shirt and pants. Uh I grew up in Jerusalem, so it's a bit chillier there, so it was perfect for for the weather. And in 10th grade when I was selling them, they were like 20 $25 a piece and I was making like $4 a sale. And if you look in the food chain, I was like sixth or seventh down the line. So this was like crazy margins. So during the summer I thought about it like I should just go straight to the importer. So throughout the summer I called the importer and at first he was really really mad. He was like no you have to work for me for years to get to this state. And I said listen man I'm finishing school soon. This is not going to be my career. Either do it or not. And we basically negotiated uh throughout the whole summer. And this was also like how I did things before Chachi PT. So he would like throw out something. He'd say, "Oh, the import tax has gone up." And I'll just search Google like import tax Israel. And like start reading and I'll be on the phone with him and I'll be like, "Hey, uh I would just basically stall." And then I'd somehow come back with a uh with a challenge. Um and I ended up uh getting a really great price, like $125 a piece. So I was making like 100% profit. And I spread throughout a bunch of different schools. each school I had the coolest people in school uh selling for me. Um and then the cool a really fun thing that I did was we had a really awesome basketball team and like our basketball team would basically be 30 points up within the first half. Um and it kind of got boring for the crowd. So, I wrote a song like a basketball chant about thermal clothes that basically has my number within it and like the end of it was um if you join in now will give you a discount and it like it was with drums and everything and still when I go to Jerusalem I know like some people who I don't even know like know my number by heart because they know it by the tune and sometimes when I walk in Jerusalem people stop me and say like hey it's thermals heavy so that was just a really cool experience um as a kid. This explains so much. Such a just the marketing genius of that move. Oh man. Okay, Zevy, this was incredible. Two final questions. Where can folks find you if they want to reach out, maybe follow up on some of the stuff? We'll link to the scripts and prompts and all that in the show notes. So, uh, so you don't have to read that. And then, uh, how can listeners be useful to you? >> Awesome. Um, so I've been helped throughout my whole career a ton. So, I love helping any way I can. So reach out on LinkedIn uh or on X. I' I'd really love to help whoever I can. How can you use uh listeners be useful to me? So if you're a student, try Studymate. Tell me what you think. Uh if you're in Israel and you're not using dictation yet, try the vortex. Tell me what you think. >> Amazing. Uh I just love how much how much you're giving away and how useful this can be to so many people. So again, we'll link to that in the show notes. Uh Zebie, you're awesome. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for sharing so much. that's going to help I think a lot of people and I think it's going to help people get over the hump on okay I see all these people doing cool stuff here's how I can actually do this stuff so uh thank you so much for being here and for sharing so much >> thank you for having me and if you build something cool with uh some stuff that I learned here me up send me I'd love to see >> amazing Zebie thank you so much for being here >> thank you >> bye everyone thank you so much for listening if you found this valuable you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts Spotify or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennispodcast.com. See you in the next episode.