Lenny Rachitsky (00:00:00): I generally value the reference check over interview signals. If I had to stack rank in interviews, what is the best signal? The reference check is the top of the list. Those people, they worked with this person sometimes for years, their knowledge, what you're going to get out of 30 minutes of artificial scenarios it's just like never going to compare what a good reference check will give you. (00:00:25): Shishir Mehrotra is the co-founder and CEO of Coda. Before starting Coda Shishir led the YouTube product engineering and design teams at Google, where he spent over six years. Before that, he spent six years at Microsoft. He's also on the board of Spotify. As you'll hear in this episode, Shishir is an incredibly deep and very first principles thinker on all kinds of topics. And in this episode we cover growth strategy, specifically a framework that he calls Blue Loops and Black Loops. (00:00:51): We talk about the rituals of great teams, something that Shishir has been passionate about and has been collecting from all of the best leaders in tech for the past two years, and which will soon turn into a book. We talk about Eigenquestions, which is not a German game show. He shares how he evaluates product talent and gives some really great advice on doing reference checks. We go into so many other topics, this is the longest episode that I've recorded yet, and you'll see why. Shishir is so full of wisdom and we could have kept going for at least another hour. And so with that, I bring you Shishir Mehrotra. Hey Casey Winters, what do you love about Coda? Casey (00:01:29): Coda is a company that's actually near and dear to my heart because I got to work on their launch when I was at Greylock. But in terms of what I love about it, I love loops and Coda has some of the coolest and most useful content loops I've seen. How the loop works is someone can create a coda and share it publicly for the world. This can be how you create OKRs, run ann...