Meta’s Muse: How we launched the most successful consumer product this year | Mona Sarantakos

Muse is the #1 app in the App Store and arguably the fastest-growing AI consumer product of all time. Mona Sarantakos has led product on it since day one. She’s VP of Product at Meta Superintelligence Labs and a 10-year Meta veteran with over 20 years of experience as a PM. This is her first podcast interview.

Listen on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts

We discuss:

1. How a weekend with OpenClaw on a Raspberry Pi turned into Muse

2. Why Muse waited seven months to launch, despite getting started before most of its competitors

3. How Nat Friedman, Alex Wang, and Mark Zuckerberg each left their imprint on the product

4. How the team uses “agent swarms” to surface user insights at scale

5. The use case nobody on the team predicted

6. How Jolly, a placeholder avatar, became an icon

7. The two levers that actually move activation for an AI agent

8. The #1 thing Mona looks for in PMs today

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Where to find Mona Sarantakos:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mona-sarantakos-a85873

• Threads: https://www.threads.com/@monachaudhuri

Referenced:

• Muse: https://muse.ai

• Introducing Muse Spark: MSL’s First Model, Purpose-Built to Prioritize People: https://about.fb.com/news/2026/04/introducing-muse-spark-meta-superintelligence-labs

• Nat Friedman’s website: https://nat.org

• OpenClaw: https://openclaw.ai

• From skeptic to true believer: How OpenClaw changed my life | Claire Vo: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-openclaw-changed-my-life-claire-vo

• Personal Superintelligence: https://www.meta.com/superintelligence

• The Future is for Everyone: https://www.meta.com/thefutureisforeveryone

• Grok Bot: https://x.ai/bot

• How we built Grok Bot in a month | Roman Ugarte (SpaceXAI): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-we-built-grok-bot-in-a-month

• Claude Duet: https://claude.com/product/claude-duet

• Dots: https://openai.com/index/introducing-dots

• Alex Wang on X: https://x.com/alexandr_wang

• Alex Cornell’s website: https://www.alexcornell.com

• How I AI: How Meta designed Muse with Alex Cornell: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-i-ai-how-meta-designed-muse-with

• Christine Awad on X: https://x.com/christinesed

• Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/linears-secret-to-building-beloved-b2b-products-nan-yu

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Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].

Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed.

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My biggest takeaways from this conversation: