Gokul Rajaram on designing your product development process, when and how to hire your first PM, a playbook for hiring leaders, getting ahead in you career, how to get started angel investing, more

Lenny's Podcast: Product | Growth | Career

Lenny Rachitsky

Technology, Business, Entrepreneurship

5 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 13 June 2022

⏱️ 62 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Gokul Rajaram serves on the executive team at DoorDash, where he leads the Caviar product line. Previously he worked at Square, where he was also on the executive team and led a number of key product lines, and as a product director at Facebook, where he helped the company transition its advertising business to become mobile-first. Earlier in his career, Gokul was a product director for Google AdSense, where he helped launch the product and grow it into a substantial portion of Google’s business.

Gokul also serves on the boards of Coinbase, Pinterest, and The Trade Desk and is a prolific angel investor, having invested in companies like Airtable, Khatabook, and 100+ more.

In this episode, you will learn:

1. How to navigate your next career

- What should you focus on in order to improve your optionality?

- What should you consider as you look for your next career adventure?

- Why join winners in a space?

- Why should people entering the workforce join mid-stage companies?

- Why there are many paths to success.

2. How to build a product development process at early-stage companies

- What does the best product development process typically look like at different company stages?

- What are some common pitfalls when building these processes?

3. Hiring PMs

- When should you hire your first PM? What should you look for?

- When should you wait longer to hire a PM?

- What’s the number one secret for hiring a product leader, regardless of industry?

- How much time should you allocate for hiring as a founder?

- How might job titles impact your company’s work culture?

4. How to start angel investing

- How did Gokul start investing in startups? What would he have done differently?

- What does he look for in a startup pitch?

- How much time should you spend as a part-time investor?

- How do you find deals as a new investor?

Where to find Gokul:

- Twitter: https://twitter.com/gokulr

References:

- Gokul’s current favorite app, Coinbase Wallet: https://www.coinbase.com/wallet

- Favorite book, Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works: https://rogerlmartin.com/lets-read/playing-to-win

- TED talk: TEDxConcordia - Lenny Rachitsky - Losing Serendipity

—

Thank you to our sponsors for making this episode possible:

• Amplitude: https://amplitude.com/

• Flatfile: https://flatfile.com/Lenny

• Productboard: https://Productboard.com/

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Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	I sometimes wonder how someone like go cool Rachiram can exist. He has an intense full-time
0:09.5	Java door dash where he leads a significant part of the product in business.
0:13.0	He also served as a board member at the Trade Desk, Coinbase, and Pinterest, all public companies.
0:18.0	He's also a prolific investor and a seemingly on the cap table of every successful startup that I come across,
0:23.0	and at the same time, he's one of the most humble and nicest people you'll ever meet.
0:27.0	If you look him up, you'll notice he always calls himself a startup helper,
0:30.0	and I know that he makes a lot of time to mentor and help a lot of founders.
0:34.0	We cover a lot of ground in our conversation, including picking where to work, how to do product
0:38.1	development startups, structuring your product teams, hiring and angel investing.
0:42.4	I hope that you enjoy our chat.
0:44.0	This episode is brought to you by Amplitude, the number one product analytics solution.
0:52.9	Amplitude helps product teams, growth teams, marketing and data teams,
0:57.3	build winning products faster and turn products into revenue.
1:00.7	Amplitude has everything you need including an integrated CDP,
1:04.5	self-service analytics,
1:06.0	and even an experimentation platform
1:08.0	to help you better understand your users,
1:10.1	drive conversions, and increase engagement, growth, and revenue.
1:13.5	Amplitude is built for teams that want to learn as fast as they ship and ship as fast as they learn.
1:18.6	Did your vanity metrics, trust your data, work smarter, and grow your business.
1:22.9	With over 1,700 customers,
1:25.1	like Atlassian, Instacart, and HBO,
	...

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