Lenny's Podcast · 2026-08-30 · 1h 22m
Tara Seshan leads product for Codex and ChatGPT Work at OpenAI (alongside previous podcast guest Andrew Ambrosino, who’s her engineering manager). Before OpenAI, Tara spent over six years at Stripe, where she joined as one of the first five product managers. She went on to lead product for Watershed, which Time magazine named one of the best inventions of 2022, and she is also a founder and Thiel Fellow. Most personally meaningful to me: Tara is one of the three inaugural Lenny’s Newsletter Fellows, a program I ran a couple of years ago to spotlight the most exciting up-and-coming product leaders. In our in-depth conversation, we discuss: 1. The shift from “rowing” to “steering,” and why human judgment and ambition will become differentiators as AI takes on execution 2. How OpenAI thinks about building for model capabilities two to three months out 3. OpenAI’s best internal memes, such as “Is this maximally accelerated?” and “Are you mainlining it yet?” 4. Why ambition is the new bottleneck for companies, and why elevating others’ ambitions is now the key part of the PM job 5. Writing as thinking vs. writing as reporting -
How we built Grok Bot in a month | Roman Ugarte (SpaceXAI)90 / 100
This CPO regrets that product management exists | Tom Verrilli (CPO of Whatnot)100 / 100
Adam Mosseri: AI is a tailwind for authenticity80 / 100
What happens after coding is solved? | Fiona Fung (Manager of the Claude Code and Cowork Teams)82 / 100
Why companies are becoming a series of loops | Anish Acharya (a16z)