Lenny Rachitsky

Lenny Rachitsky is a writer, podcaster and angel investor who runs Lenny's Newsletter, one of the largest publications on Substack, focused on product management, growth and careers. Before becoming a creator, Rachitsky founded Localmind, a location-based Q&A startup that Airbnb acquired, and then spent about seven years at Airbnb in product and growth leadership roles.

Rachitsky left Airbnb in 2019 and started writing weekly on Substack as an experiment, turning on paid subscriptions in 2020. A handful of deeply researched tentpole posts, Twitter threads and later Substack's recommendations feature drove growth, and the newsletter passed one million subscribers in 2025.

In 2022 Rachitsky launched Lenny's Podcast, interviewing well-known product leaders and founders, and it quickly became a top business show with a large YouTube audience. In a January 2024 CNBC interview Rachitsky said the newsletter and the podcast each brought in more than $500,000 a year.

The business has since expanded around the same audience: a paid-subscriber Slack community, Lenny's Jobs board, the Product Pass bundle of free software subscriptions for annual subscribers, courses, an annual summit and additional shows such as How I AI. Rachitsky has also angel invested in well over a hundred startups, operating with a small group of contractors rather than a large staff.