There's rarely a time like this where so much is possible.
Even like five, seven years ago, it's so hard to start a company.
Everything feels like it's done.
Someone else is working on it.
Suddenly, it's a time right now, which I've never even experienced where everything you try just works.
With people constantly hearing about all the things happening.
Is there any tools or processes or approaches you've figured out to help stay focused?
Our engineering goal is every engineer should ship a marketable product every week.
I love just how wild that sounds.
How do you maintain quality and make it all cohesive?
I actually think as a startup your job is to take on technical debt because that is how you operate faster than a bigger company.
Bigger companies don't take on technical debt.
They pay it usually right away.
Or they're paying back technical debt from the days when they were a startup.
Is there anything else that, in how you operate and the way you build product, that you think is really unique and interesting?
We have what we think of as the public roadmap.
This is basically what people have asked us for.
There's all these surface areas where we receive user feedback, But these are all features that every competitor knows about.
If a user is asking us for it, they're asking everybody for it.
It's not gonna be a game -changer in terms of winning against your competition.
So we have a second roadmap which we think of as a secret roadmap.
Today my guest is Gaurav Misra.
Gaurav was an early employee at Snap where he led the design engineering team which he explains in the conversation.
He's also an engineer at Microsoft and a couple other companies.
Most recently, he's the co -founder and CEO of Captions, one of the most successful and cutting -edge consumer AI products, which lets you generate and edit talking videos with AI.
They have over 10 million users and have raised over $100 million dollars.
In our conversation we essentially do an archaeology of how a modern AI -oriented startup operates, including how every single engineer at their company ships a marketable product or feature every single week, why they have a secret roadmap in addition to a regular roadmap.
We also get in -depth about how Snap has a product team operated, what he's learned about what it takes to build a successful consumer and social app, why they had no PMs, and how designers ran the show which may or may not have been a great idea, and also what happens in a world where AI video is so good that you have no idea if it's real or not.
This episode is for anyone that is building a product on top of AI.
If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app.
And also, I just launched an insane deal for subscribers of my newsletter.
Every yearly subscriber now gets a year free of Notion, Perplexity, Superhuman, Linear, and Granola.
Learn more at lennysnewsletter .com.
With that, I bring you Gaurav Mishra.
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Gaurav, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast. Thank you.
Thanks for having me.
Excited. I very rarely have early -stage founders on the podcast, but I wanted to chat with you because you're at the center of so much of what is top of mind for a lot of builders these days.
AI and video and just consumer and social apps also going viral and finding new marketing channels.
So I think there's a lot that people can learn from the way you approach product, the way you build product, and the way you just think about where things are going.
So again, thank you for being here.
Appreciate it. Honestly, it's an exciting time, like I gotta say.
Like there's rarely a time like this where you know where so much is possible.
Like in normal times, if you think about like even like five, seven years ago, it's so hard to start a company.
It's so, so hard to come up with an idea.
Right. Like it's just like everything feels like it's done.
Someone else is working on it.
Right. Like, oh, it's been tried three times and failed three times.
And like suddenly it's that time right now, which like I've never even experienced in my career, right.
Where everything you try just works.
There's so many possibilities.
There's not enough people in the world to work on them.
Like, honestly, right.
Like, there's more things that can be done than there's people available to do them, right?
It's just such a rare thing.
And honestly, it's not gonna last forever, right?
Like we are gonna catch after this, but just feels lucky to be part of that movement.
It's awesome. When you said everything is working, I think what's an important distinction there is the building of the tool works.
Like the tech is now there to build all these things that have not been possible before.
The thing that is increasingly difficult, and I want to get your take on this is getting anyone to pay attention and stick with your thing because it's so easy to build stuff and everything is just awesome and interesting it's harder to get people to pay attention and stick with your product so I guess is there anything there you've learned, that you've built a number of successful products we'll talk about Snap and what you're doing now about just I don't know what you need to think about these days to get anyone to pay attention and then stick around yeah I mean honestly it's a great point and I
think there is a lot of hype obviously right?
That's kinda what's driving a lot of this growth for a lot of companies, right?
And I think, from a user acquisition, such marketing perspective, in a world five or seven years ago, if you were making something novel and you went to users and it was like, oh, we got something better, right?
Like people are gonna be like, well, whatever, everybody says they got something better, right?
I don't care. But today, and this is not probably the way you should do it, but you can go and just say we've rethought this thing with AI.
And a bunch of people will just be like, well, how?
Or maybe I should check this out.
They'll just try it.
Obviously, you have to deliver on the promises, like if you don't deliver, people will come in, they'll play around a bunch, and then just leave. But if you can truly deliver on the promises, there's great opportunities to require users at scale.
So I think that's slightly different.
And I don't know how long that lasts, But it is definitely a different time from that perspective I do think also at the core of building products is solving problems I think a lot of people get caught up in this Well it's cool and people will come for the cool right now Like people will come in and be like Well let me check it out.
It's cool But at the end of the day if you're just building a playground And people play around in the playground and then they leave after playing around It's not a business right?
So, I think that is still key, right?
You have to be solving real problems. As you were talking I'm thinking about like every day there's something like, something that would maybe a few years ago be like news for a year.
Holy shit, this is now possible.
Now it's like every day, something like that happens.
And then we're like, all right, so what I think about is like we'll have AGI one of these days, or super intelligence, and everyone's amazing and then, okay, what's for dinner?
Isn't that already happening like think about like in a way like I kind of self reflect on this sometimes if like you've seen Iron Man and stuff like they have the Jarvis thing and you've seen like Interstellar and they have like the Tars machine, right?
And they're talking back and forth with these things like bouncing ideas and that is science fiction.
That's literally science fiction Okay it's not perfect but it exists in a way that nobody could have imagined that science fiction has become reality and And I feel like nobody cares, right?
In a way, like he would have expected the world to be turned upside down, but it feels almost in a way so slow and people are like yes, adoption is happening.
But I feel like it's almost a shocking development in a way.
Feels like you guys have done a good job staying top of mind and continuing to get people excited, because to your point, there's so much happening, how do you get people to continue to be like, oh okay, wow, what their building's actually, It's interesting and continues to be interesting.
Anything you've learned about just what it takes to stay top of mind and continue to pull people back and get people re -excited over and over?
100 percent. I mean I think honestly it just comes down to like not just AI for the sake of AI or AI for the sake of excitement or hype or novelty or whatever that is right?
It's actually effective AI.
Like AI that solves real problems, practical problems, right?
And the fundamentals haven't changed.
In a way, there's three steps to building products.
You identify a user problem.
You apply some technology to solve that problem.
But then, finally, you have some mechanism to find people who have that problem.
If you can do all three of those things, then in any environment you can create great products.
But I think right now what's different is so much is changing on the technology side that you can create products that could not have been created before and solve problems that could not have been solved before.
And that's what's creating the opportunity, right?
And for us, especially in the video space, it's truly endless, right?
Like we've just begun and like our goal specifically for video is not to build professional tools, right?
We're not building for professionals at all.
We're building for the person who could not have created video before, right?
They didn't have the tools, their skills, the means to be able to create video.
And now they can't because they're able to jump over that skill gap, right?
Or that time gap. Maybe they're business owners.
They don't have time, right?
They want results. And honestly, a lot to solve there, right?
Just tons. Solve people's problems. We've, easier said than done, but it's a good reminder of that.
Like in the end that's all that matters.
Something that I always think about with people in your shoes, is just how do you not get overwhelmed?
And how do you know what to pay attention to you?
How do you stay focused?
Any tips there for folks that are just reading every day a new announcement?
And then just like, I just, how do I?
What do I do? There's too much. It is the new problem of product development in a way, right.
There's too many possible paths you can go down.
There's too many ideas.
There's too many things you could do.
And I mean, obviously prioritization is always an important skill set and has always been.
But it's becoming even more important skill set right now because you have to figure out what not to pay attention to.
Our general framework for it is to look for user demand.
Actually the easiest way to check for user demand is to just see what has virality.
Usually what has virality, what people wanna share and talk about.
There's something at the core of it that actually is interesting.
Now, it may not always be interesting in a way that's like, maybe it's a one -time use case, maybe it's not something that people would do repeatedly, maybe it's not something you build like a subscription business off of.
but oftentimes there's some core element of it that has resonated with people, and if you can identify that core and then mold it into fitting into your business, it's actually a great way to identify what actually works.
And we have these tools right now, we don't have to build anything.
You can just talk about it and people will share it, share the idea, and you can measure how well the product might be received even before you build anything, right?
So it's a great tool we use for prioritization.
We spend a lot of time on social media.
Obviously, our app is often used for social media.
So a lot of our employees will spend a lot of time on social media.
We look at what the trends are, what's happening.
And based on that, we can get a pretty good read of what might resonate well with people.
So as a leader of a company with people constantly hearing about all the things happening, is there any tools or processes or approaches you've figured out to help people continue, stay focused, not get excited about every shiny new object and you know actually ship things.
I mean honestly it's all about incrementality in a way.
Right? I think we do aim to ship every week.
Right? So like our engineering goal is every engineer should ship a marketable product every week.
And so what's a marketable product is a product that you can show to users and the And that's why table stakes features, like let's say we're talking about a word processor or something, if you have auto -format or table stakes stuff like Justify alignment or something, no one's going to come to your word processor for Justify alignment.
You can market that.
Because it's obvious.
Of course it exists.
But if you did something unique that nobody else has done, you can go and show that to people, and people will come to your app just for that.
even if your app doesn't have a lot of the obvious stuff, maybe it doesn't have justify alignment, right?
People will jump over that just to kind of use these new tools and new abilities that you might be building in marketing.
So we try to do every engineer one marketable feature per week.
And yeah, a lot of that stuff may not work, but a lot of it does work, and we can figure out obviously where to put in more effort.
Things that start to work, we double down on those things, build more.
People often complain, because think about it, in one week when we're shipping it's not complete.
It's MVP, truly. And we slice the hell out of it.
We take the design and we cut, cut, cut until we can really say that it's going to be useless if we cut anymore.
We get that out and people come in and if things are going well, people will use it despite all the problems that it might have. And now people will complain, and we'll have a list of problems, and we know what to do next, so that's a starting point essentially.
So as long as we're shipping one a week, we get a ton of volume of like features and products and directions we're releasing.
A lot of that, what remains expand from there, right.
So it's, it works really well and it keeps people focused.
I love the simplicity of that.
I love just how wild that sounds for a lot of companies, I imagine.
Every engineer ships a marketable feature or product every week.
Yes. There's some people who listening to this and they're just like completely stressed out by this idea and there's some people listening are like this is exactly how I want to work.
This is how every company should build.
How do you maintain quality and make it all cohesive?
I imagine that's the big trade off.
Just any tricks there for folks that want to maybe start operating this way.
Quality's not something to compromise on, most of the time, right.
I think yes, there's strategic compromises in quality, but most of the time what you want to do is have a bar for quality where people should come in and if they're feature like it should work right of course right, and the way to cut down on time and I think this is a mistake people make a lot of the time is when time is being pressured downward a lot of times engineers, pm's, designers they will cut on quality rather than cutting on scope and actually you can cut on scope is actually you know the the method that we use is we look at every element that's going to take any time to build and we
just say what if we remove this, is the product is still useful.
And we keep repeating that until we remove whatever's left and we say it's gonna be useless at this point.
And that becomes the One Week Project, right?
Yeah, it actually really works, right?
It kinda narrows down to the core of what you're really trying to ask.
So for example, let's say we wanted to build something to add an image on your video or something like that.
And this is a really basic idea, I just made it up right now.
And you might imagine a design in which you import your image from your camera roll.
But before it lands in your video you might want to remove the background, you might want to change the hue and saturation or something like that.
And you might expect a designer to design all of those features, and you kind of add a design, but you really quickly realize that you can cut all of that stuff, you can cut the background roll, you can cut the hue saturation.
All you really need is pick.
And then there might picker.
We need a picker with a library with a lot of different.
What if you want to pull from the cloud?
What if you want to pull from the drive or something like that?
Cut all of that, right?
And essentially come to the core, which is just native picker from the camera, lens straight in the video, no UI.
And that is already, that should be useful.
If that's not useful, then anything else built on top of that is also useless.
So that's how we might go about it.
That last sentence is so key to this like it's the core idea of Ship small iterative features before you invest a lot in something to first figure out.
Is there anything there?
Is this worth spending weeks on totally and I think like the coolest part of this method is like The first thing that the users will usually come in.
They'll use the thing They'll import images and the first thing they'll complain about is what kind of bothers them the most. Is it human saturation?
Is a background removal?
Is it like picking from the cloud right like you'll just get the most complaints about that thing people will like and people will Be honest about it.
They'll be like this sucks right it doesn't even have Background -removal what kind of image thing is this right and you kind of have to take that feedback and just next week You can ship in a single week all the things of the users complaining about right?
And then they're like wow this team shipping like crazy solve the how my problems so responsive this connects a kind of a common sign of product market fit, which is when people are complaining about the thing that means they actually care enough to complain, and that's a really good sign if they're complaining.
It's very true, very true.
If nobody complains, almost red flag, you know.
A little those turning into kind of an archeology of a modern product team and startups.
So, I want to keep digging.
This is not where I was planning to go.
But this is awesome.
And I love that this approach of every engineer shipping something every week that's marketable connects directly to where I started this conversation, which is how do you stay above the noise?
And part of the answer is just ship stuff constantly and just continue to impress people like here's a new amazing video feature, hey look at this thing.
Exactly, yeah. I think it's definitely key, right?
And there is enough area and enough scope for that to happen, right?
Like I think truly, in normal times, it may not be possible to create that much roadmap that quickly.
But I think because there's so much innovation underlying all this, there is that scope available, right?
Like the roadmap almost seems unlimited, right?
Like just truly. Okay, the other question I imagine people would be wondering is how do you work on longer -term projects that would take many weeks?
There's also infrastructure, I guess, back -end stuff, so maybe answer those questions, how do you think about long -term stuff, and then how do you deal with back -end stuff that isn't a feature that any would care.
Yeah, so usually we'll dedicate time to that separately.
So for example, usually Q4 for us is infrastructure quarter, we just like go and build all the infrastructure.
Q4 is generally, we've already delivered a ton of products and stuff, we're feeling pretty good about the rest of the year.
Things are winding down.
Obviously holidays and stuff coming up and so we spend all that time paying the technical debt.
I actually think there's a unique thing think here about technical debt in general.
And as a startup, your job is to take on technical debt.
Because that is how you operate faster than a bigger company.
Bigger companies don't take on technical debt.
They pay it usually right away or they're paying back technical debt from the days when they were a startup.
And they took on a lot of it.
I used to work at Snap and there was a lot of examples of that over there.
And I'm sure it happens at every other company.
right? And we think about it as like, well, is this a problem we need to solve today?
Or is this a problem that the 50th engineer, or the 100th engineer, or the 500th engineer can solve?
Right? And if it is a problem that a future engineer can solve, we should use that future engineer now.
Essentially, that's what we're doing.
And we're saying we're going to push this to somebody in the future.
And by the way, if the company fails, that engineer will never be hired, and all this won't matter anyways.
So it's kind of like financial debt in many ways.
Financial debt is taken on to create leverage.
It can be a good thing, right?
Like if you're buying a house, you take on debt and you can buy something, probably more than you can afford, without taking on debt, right?
I think it's the same thing.
You can create products that you wouldn't be able to build with the small team that you have by taking on strategic technical debt.
It's very positive actually.
Wow, this is such a cool idea.
And where my mind goes is that future engineer may be an AI agent engineer.
Just solving problems. Just technical debting you.
Exactly, some engineer in the future, 500th engineer many years from now, will get a promotion because they solve this big problem that does really bad early engineers created.
So obviously there's a line to this.
There's only so much debt you can take on before you become a big problem, is there any thoughts on just that balance of just how much is too much and how you know if it's enough for a future engineer or just that?
Yeah, I mean I think generally the rule of thumb is every piece of debt that you take on, you have to pay interest on, right?
So if there is debt that you've taken on, there's 1 % or 2 % of your time that is gonna be taken away every day in maintaining bugs and issues and restarts and crashes and things that are happening with that because you did it the fast way.
Something's going to go wrong with it.
Every day, 1 % of your time will be taken away.
If you take on enough debt, you'll be paying 80 or 90 % interest and you'll not have any time to do anything new.
You'll just be paying interest, that's all.
And that's when you get into the mode of like, oh, we're just keeping the lights on.
We don't have any interest to do anything.
We're just keeping the lights on.
That's the failure case for a startup, right?
So in a way you have a technical debt runway, right?
Once you run out, once you've taken on too much debt, and if you haven't delivered value in that time, enough value to hire the engineers to pay the interest or just pay off the debt, you will get in trouble.
I love that. That's such a nice heuristic of how to think about when to invest in something.
I don't wanna go down this too far, but just a thought I have is sometimes there's big technical decisions you gotta make that impact the way everything builds or is built in the future.
I imagine those you spend more time on and take really seriously.
Definitely, yeah. I mean, I think as long as it's possible for wherever it's like a two way door, you can kind of do whatever you want.
I mean, this is a classic methodology, right?
If it's a one day one way door, it's worth thinking about and sort of doing correctly.
At least as much as the one way door would matter to you in the future.
How much your engineers use cursor and tools like that to build like how much is AI helping your team move 100 %?
Yeah, I mean everybody is using it.
It's super helpful.
I mean, even I'm using it honestly.
There's a huge multiplier for the team, no doubt.
Is it Cursor specifically, is there anything else that you guys find useful?
We are using Cursor.
We've tried all the different tools.
We were using Devan as well, which is another.
That's more advanced I guess.
It's solving bugs for you.
Yeah, Devan's basically I think is 500 bucks a month and it's like an AI engineer that you just chat with in Slack.
Exactly. In a way, These are the types of things that us as a startup can do with that.
Bigger companies can't just, you know, they can't just pull in Devin, right?
They have to, you know, get 30 lawyers in the room first before that happens.
Yeah. And they're all called Devin right?
These like agents like, everyone's gonna have like hundreds of Devins.
Exactly. You can have multiple Devins.
I actually heard you can have a manager of Devins.
Who's managing Devins.
I love that managers are all getting layer like unlayered and then they're gonna have AI managers.
That's the ultimate The ultimate bait and switch. Is there anything else in how you operate and build the way you set up the way you build product that you think is really unique and interesting that other people might be able to learn from?
Our process is a bit interesting in that way.
We have a design team.
We have a PM team. I mean, we're very early on those teams right now and obviously we have engineering and we have all the different surface areas.
So iOS, Android, web, right?
There's backend team, machine learning team, research team.
So generally like when we're developing products we may start off with like a PM first approach where we're kind of finding some sort of overall issue that we want to take on some new area or pillar we want to take on and then creating sort of product specs from there.
But a lot of times we'll also start the opposite way where we'll first design something, right?
without even having any idea of what or why we're doing it.
But we'll design a bunch of different things.
And then we'll sit down with the PMs and look at the designs and just go over one and the next and the next until we find interesting things and ideas that kind of pop out of that.
And a lot of times that leads to us discovering things that we wouldn't have discovered if we were just too focused on the metrics and the numbers and things like that.
So it's like almost reversing the process a little bit and starting with design first. but it can often result in finding unique ideas, basically.
I also think that we have a unique setup in how we create our roadmap.
Normally, you have a single roadmap, and we actually divide our roadmap into two different roadmaps.
So we have what we think of as the public roadmap.
This is basically what people have asked us for.
There are surface areas where we receive user feedback.
We look at all that feedback, and people ask for features.
They'll ask for, like, I want background removal.
I want to undo and redo.
I want to upload longer videos, whatever it is, right?
A bunch of different features.
And we'll just make a list of that.
And just like anything else, we'll prioritize it, and we'll look at how many people it affects, and what the possible markets are, and, like, just get it done, basically, one at a time.
But these are all features that every competitor knows about.
Or these are public.
Like if a user's asking us for it, they're asking everybody for it.
and every team has essentially more or less the same list and everybody is prioritizing it.
And yes, sure, you can win a little bit, like extra nicely prioritizing it or winning a little in prioritization or execution or something, but it's not going to be a game changer in terms of winning against your competition.
So we have a second road map which we think of as a secret road map.
This is a road map that nobody asked for anything on this, like literally nobody has ever asked for it.
And if a user were shown something on it, they might be like, I don't need this.
I don't know what this is.
But given our unique vantage point, our unique understanding of the problem set, the user space, and the technology, we've come up with some special ideas that we think will completely revolutionize how something is used.
Where we can truly change the behavior of the user.
I think that's what is at the core of it.
People are doing things one way, if we're able to show them another way and once they try it, they never go back, that's what a product is, that's success.
And those are the types of ideas we put on the secret roadmap.
These are things we never talk about publicly, never tell anybody about and we announce them and just give them to users and see the effects.
A lot of this we come up with through brainstorming.
So we actually do quarterly brainstorming, company -wide, everybody's included, everybody from, it's not just a product team thing, it's like engineering, recruiting, everybody's included it in.
And we all come up with marketing obviously.
Everybody comes up with ideas.
We vote on the ideas, rank the ideas, and then the product team takes over from there and thinks about feasibility and technology and what the different things could be.
So this is a way where we can take all that noise that people are getting, everybody's browsing social media, seeing all these different things are blowing up, these models and advancements and we can get all that information together and provide sort of a unique internal roadmap.
Where how are we gonna approach and create value out of all of these different advancements that are happening?
So that's our general methodology.
And a lot of times the biggest wins will come from the secret roadmap.
That's the game changing stuff, right?
It's not gonna be the user requests usually they're gonna do that.
I love just how calling the secret roadmap it a special extra interesting.
So exactly. It's a secret secret.
I'm not even going to ask you what's on.
My secret road map.
You can't tell me what's an example of feature that came out of that secret roadmap.
That's been a big deal for years.
Tons. I mean, I'll give you an example from a long time ago, one of the first sort of AI features we added after sort of the app initially took off was this feature called I contact.
So this was a feature where if you're recording something, oftentimes like, you know, people who are new to recording a video might read from a script or a teleprompter or something like that.
And they might have that, like, off screen, so it kind of looks like you're reading and it's not great from the perspective of the video itself or the viewer of the video.
So we had this feature where it basically shifts your eyes to look at the camera.
And we were actually the first company to build this.
We worked with NVIDIA on this.
It's actually really interesting because when we originally reached out to NVIDIA about this, they were kind of not sure why we needed this.
And they actually gave it to us pretty openly, and were excited about some sort of partnership of how can we get this technology into something that could be useful.
But we saw this creator use case which was unique.
And it was one of the ideas that came out of the brainstorm, and we threw it on there.
We launched it. It was a huge success.
I mean, I'll be honest, like, the video, the ad that we made, like a social media post, that demonstrates this was so viral.
It was made in basically every language around the world.
It's still, till today, like, gets millions of views.
Like, we find reposts and reposts of that thing that other people have created that get millions and millions and millions of views because people are like, wow, this is like, this is a great idea.
and now it's been copied are out of.
I think it's available basically on every app you can imagine, for good reason, of course.
But that's one of the ideas that came out of it.
You talked about how you come up with these secret order map ideas.
I'm just intrigued by this.
I'm going to spend a little more time here.
Does your team ever work with an AI LM to help brainstorm?
I imagine that's where things will go where you're actually jamming.
The AI Agent is brainstorming along with you.
Honestly, I would like for it to go there.
It hasn't gone there yet like we haven't done that exactly because the problem is context and I think just the context of You know understanding the user the use case.
It's so abstract even right now like I Feel like I understand our users, obviously, but I can't exactly verbalize why that is or how that is a little bit abstract right and I spend a lot of time with rpns and designers like imparting anything that I understand.
I've learned over the many years, you know, I've been working on this.
How do I impart this to them, right, but then it's a challenge because I can't even verbalize it myself, and so it's an extra hard challenge to figure out how do I put this context, how do I make it available to an llm when I can't even put into words exactly, and honestly this is probably my own failing, but and I need to work on this, but there is something to it.
I do remember, at Snap for example, right, I think one of the most unique things about Snap and the CEO, Evan Spiegel, was that he had an unmatched understanding of the user.
I think years and years and years of the company's existence passed, right?
Like almost a decade, and nobody understood the user like he did, right?
Like, he would come up with ideas that everybody would disagree with.
And we would launch them and there would be hits.
Just hits after hits.
And nobody would understand why.
Everyone would line up and be like, great.
Like a round of applause for everyone, right?
But no one knew why.
And a great example of that is like—and a lot of this was figured out in retrospect, too.
Like, I think there was a point in which Snap declared that they're a camera company.
And a lot of people laugh at that as a camera.
Like, what are we making?
Like, digital cameras or something?
or why is it a camera company?
But I think at the core of it was this idea that Snapchat opens to the camera and that was actually the differentiator, right?
That was actually, that small decision was holding the entire company against all competition because when the moment passes where your friend is doing something funny and you need to capture it, you're not gonna open Instagram or anything else because it doesn't open to the camera, you're gonna open Snapchat, right?
you can capture it right away and Instagram can never copy that because all their metrics are going to go down as soon as they do that.
So you know that is a fundamental understanding right and I figure this out much later actually you know?
But it's such a powerful idea.
I'm glad you talked about Snap.
That's where I definitely wanted to go, this is where I was going to start so I'm glad we circled back to your experience at Snap.
So the reason I I'm interested in this is if you think about social network scene, you know This like snap is basically the last social network to have launched and stuck around other than tiktok Which I don't think is a social network.
I think it's just kind of like content platform I don't think you're really interacting with people really and that's 2011 when it launched so it's been like 15 years yeah, since the last social network launch that has worked and I think it's interesting also because there's rarely been a lot of Insight into just how snap operates you were there really early.
You were a big deal at Snap, you built a lot of really important features.
So I wanted to spend a little time here and it feels like a lot of things you learned from Snap you're bringing to your company now.
So let me just ask, I think you may have answered this, but I'm curious if there's something else here just broadly, maybe other than Ev's brain.
What do you think was core to Snap being a successful consumer social product?
There were a couple of different things that went well.
I do think for a company like Snapchat or a social network the core product market fit can be extremely strong.
Essentially the reason that people are downloading it, the way that it's spreading, the way that it's distributing, the way that it's inviting friends or sending snaps or whatever it is, that product market fit can be so strong sometimes that it can be hard to actually build something Because you actually can't tell if what you're building is what's responsible for growing the thing, or if it's actually hurting it, and is growing despite what you're doing basically.
And I think because of that, it actually sometimes teaches people the wrong things.
It teaches people that the contrarian thing that they were doing was right when it was actually just wrong, and the company just grew despite it, right.
And I think some of the things that Snap did well and it needed to do, really, you know, was to continue innovating, right.
Because for a company like Snap, it has a ton of competition.
Social networks are monopolies by nature, and there's a lot of reasons for Facebook or any other social network to stop the growth of Snapchat.
And they tried, they tried really, really hard. And the way that Snap was avoiding that was by innovating.
I think at the core of it was the setup that they had, which was very unique.
I've never seen anything like it.
I've worked at a bunch of different companies, but obviously there's a CEO and the CEO was very product -led.
He was a designer himself, but he surrounded himself with the design team.
That was sort of the central team in the company, and the design team was 10, 12 people, basically pretty small.
Even at 5 ,000, 6 ,000 employees, it was that small still.
Wow, at 5 ,000 or 6 ,000 employees, the design team was, you said how many five or six people?
10 -12 people. And to add to that, there's no PMs really, like for a long time.
For a long time, yeah.
Initially there were no PMs at all.
PMs were introduced with monetization.
Once monetization was a big sort of element, that's kind of where PMs came in.
Today I think there's a ton of, or there's you know an adequate number of PMs across the company, but there was a long period of time, especially when the innovation was happening when And yeah, there were a much, much smaller number of fans that was very designer led.
But at the same time, like, I think that's slightly misleading in the way that these weren't your sort of average designers, right?
These were designers who were actually PMs as well.
That's kind of what the secret sauce was.
They were able to not just design, but also do the PM part, which is a big responsibility.
It's a lot of work, especially for that many employees, right?
But it gave the CEO a way to sort of have granular control over what exactly was being launched in which part of the app at all times, right.
Because he could meet with a set of 10 or 12 people and know every change that was happening that was user impacting.
A lot of changes were being worked on that were like infrastructure and like, you know, types of things that kind of keep going on in the back end were improving ranking and whatever that might be, right, and performance and things like that.
And those were not usually his concern.
He was concerned with what UI are we adding And if you needed to add UI to the app, you needed it designed.
And if there's no designers in the company, except for a handful who talk directly to the CEO, you create a very granular control over what's being launched in the company.
So everything needed to be approved.
If you hadn't approved it, it's not going out.
So the design team actually held a lot of power in that.
This is awesome. So what I'm hearing partly is.
Like, I don't know if this is true, but it feels true that to make a consumer app that is successful and breaks through, you almost need a singular mind that continues to stay in the weeds on everything.
And the way Evan did that is, stay very close to the design team who basically ran the product.
That's very true, yeah.
It's very true, and he was able to keep the context of the entire app right in his head at the same time.
He knew the interdependencies and what we're doing and why we're doing it, and so, that gave him just very granular control over the company's product roadmap.
It makes me think about Brian Chesky and like Airbnb is a consumer product, it's not a social network.
But I wonder if that's just an interesting insight.
Just for consumer products, they will generally do better if there's one person with the right sort of combination of experiences, insights and they just continue to run and own every detail.
Definitely. And also, the ability to bring about change, right, the ability to truly energize an entire organization to do something that's not just incremental but fundamental.
Foundr mode. Exactly.
That's what we're getting to basically.
Ever heard of it? Okay, and then you said that these designers, so I know it's like famous that Snap had no PMs for a long time.
Designers were PMs. This point you made about the designers were PME is really important because I think a lot of people look at this and they're like, amazing.
We're just gonna hire designers, we all these damn PMs, slow everything down, just tell us what not to build.
Can you just talk about the level of these designers?
What allowed them to be as successful as they were without any PMs?
Yeah, I think what was expected from the designerist now was not just the ability to design the skill set of designing, which all of them were IC designers by the way, right?
And there were no reports.
They weren't allowed to have reports actually.
And so they were designing everything themselves, but they also had to have the leadership skills, right, to go figure out the roadmap, write all the documents, work with the different teams, figure out shipping schedules, and just know everything, not just sort of the technical and the engineering part, but the UX and the UI and the product needs and why are we doing this, the roadmap, There's just a ton to keep in mind and that means that it was a job that was You know, just highly it was very high workload.
No doubt. Very high workload, right?
These people work really hard and They were paid highly too.
I mean for what it's worth.
They were paid way higher than you would expect designers or PMS or engineers to be paid right with quarterly bonuses and All kinds of things that's interesting It reminds, you know, people always say, why do we need PMs?
There's like someone has to do the work that a PM does.
They're not sitting around, you know, doing nothing, and it's important to know the person that will take on the PM -y work, they have to be good at it and enjoy it, and a lot of designers don't want to be doing, writing docs and organizing stakeholders and getting alignment and...
Hundred percent. Hundred percent.
That's why it was so hard to find those people who were like able to do two things.
I actually think there's a insight in there is innovation between, you know, when you're kind of merging craft, right, between two different functions.
And I do think there's something special about one person doing two different functions.
Or at least being able to do.
And I think a lot of like unique insight and innovation can come from that.
I actually think so on sort of my personal side, like I eventually joined the design team.
I started at Snap on the engineering team.
I eventually joined the design team, you know, over the last two years that I was at Snap.
And a big part of what I did there was create this function called design engineering.
And that was actually a different combination, right?
It wasn't the designer PM.
It was a designer engineer, right?
The person who can think of the UX, design it, and also build it and launch it.
All of those things.
And we saw both the ability to take designers and teach them engineering, and take engineers and teach them design as part of that right.
Obviously you know the reason that we created that function was very different.
It was actually to continue innovating as the company got bigger.
One of the problems that we identified was that as the company got bigger and bigger and there's like 500 engineers, 1000 engineers, 2000 engineers, 3000 engineers, suddenly it just becomes very difficult to do everything.
Like everything is a six month project or a one -year project.
Every product is a massive investment of like 500 engineers and a lot of time.
And so you really have to pick your bets.
If you get it wrong, if you are innovating in trying to create new products and you spend 500 engineers for a year and it doesn't work, it's a big problem, right?
You're gonna be in trouble.
Especially if you're coming like Snap, where everybody was copying what they're doing so they had to constantly innovate, create new stuff and push the bounds.
I think Evan's philosophy was always like, he didn't fight the things that were getting copied right.
Stories got copied pretty much straight up, a lot of things that Snap Creator got copied.
But he was more of the mindset of, let's expand the pie, do something new, and push the boundaries.
We'll keep innovating, basically.
And so to do that with that skill of a company becomes really hard. And so we had this idea of, let's create a small team, where we can go and pre -test a lot of these ideas.
Because we had a lot of ideas.
And we can't go and build all of these things, So the idea was create a small team of these design engineers, people who are able to do the entire sort of product design engineering process in their head and can put together earlier versions of the product, which we would actually bake into the Snapchat app itself.
And we were able to like even test, for example, run a test in Australia, see how it's performing, run a test in a couple of high schools, just a couple of high schools, see what's, how people behave. And that way we already have data on how this might perform in a real -world environment, but we haven't built it to production level.
It's a prototype, essentially.
It's how a startup might build something.
The same idea of what we're doing at our company now.
Build it fast, get it out there, get feedback, understand whether it works or not, and then work with the engineering team to build it at a scale.
Once we understand the product and the dynamics, then it makes sense to put on 500 engineers for six months to build it.
So that was a big part of it.
So I think the nice thing that came out of it that was completely unexpected, but actually kind of transformational for me in a way, was, you know, obviously in big organizations, alignment is a big issue, right?
How do you get everybody on the same page?
And a big part of a PM's job is actually to create alignment, right?
And it can be a lot of work because you've gotta talk to all these stakeholders and get them on the same page.
But one of the insights that we had, which was unique, was as the company gets bigger, you can actually create alignment by causing internal virality.
If there's enough people in the company, it actually starts acting like a consumer base might.
If you share something interesting with someone, they will share it with somebody else because they think it's interesting.
And you can actually create virality inside a company.
So one thing that we would do is we would create these prototype products, right?
We would just go into an area, redo a bunch of stuff, create these prototype products that didn't exist in Snapchat normally.
And then we would just share the build, right?
And it would explode like it would just go viral inside the company.
Like day after day we would hear from, you know, engineers, then managers, then VPs and eventually from Evan being like, oh my God, like everyone's talking about this.
Why why am I the last one to hear about it?
Right? And so it would create like instant alignment across the company of like, this is exciting, right?
this is something that we wanna get behind and everyone would be asking, when are we doing this, when is this happening?
I see someone's already working on it, right?
So it was a great way to do that and once we really understood that the product actually had good dynamics and we had tested it, it was a great way to get it out in front of everybody and create this idea of like, hey, we're all working on this.
This is the future, right?
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Another thread I want to follow up on is prototyping.
It feels like that is where a lot of PM work is going, is getting straight to a prototype versus design or versus PRDs.
And it feels like that's something that you did and worked super well.
Like basically, it's a team to prototype ideas that, in theory now, you can just build really quickly with AI.
So I think that's really interesting, seeing where the future is going.
100%. Right, like getting things in people's hands trying it out.
Oftentimes, unless you truly try it out, like, in design, it can, in theory, look good with all the perfect conditions, but when you actually use it, you realize it's actually not that useful for example, or when you give it to users, and some of this is like intuition, honestly, just like anything else, but there's nothing like getting something in the hands of users at the end of the day.
I love how many of these things you brought over to your current company and I'm trying to think about, one is this idea of just constantly innovating.
It feels like that's informed.
And tell me what I'm missing, but that feels like that's informed.
ship of market will feature every single week.
This idea of getting like design starting almost with design versus pm a lot of times.
I'm curious why you don't even go straight to prototype in those cases it's just the tools aren't there yet?
I mean I think our shipping process is fast enough that within a week we can get it out anyway.
So that way we just get user feedback which is even better.
And then the other really interesting thing i'm trying to visualize like that triangle of a product team the triad of pm engineer design feels like you guys at snap took like the corners.
Not the corners, the line of that triangle.
And like, you have design engineers.
Yep, you have design PMS. Yeah.
Imagine engineers were sort of PM me already.
They're like very product oriented PMs. Did you have a function called design?
PMs? Probably not. I mean, engineer PMS. Yeah, I mean, engineer PMS should be a thing.
I feel like like, or every engineer should strive to understand the product.
Right? Yeah, a lot of companies operate that way.
Like I think they had hundreds of engineers before they hired their first PM, because I think the engineers were doing what they did at Snap.
Did you do the PM work?
So it feels like at your company, you don't operate that way.
It feels like you're PM's engineers, designers.
Talk about why you decided not to approach things that way.
I do think PM is a very valuable function, right?
I think it may be actually, and you know, maybe I'll get roasted for this, but I think at the end of the day, not hiring PMs at Snap might've been of those decisions where it actually succeeded despite that and because someone needs to do that work.
If you don't have enough people to do it, then nobody truly owns it and then it kind of doesn't really happen.
Or if it doesn't happen, no one's responsible, which is not the right structure you want in an organization.
So, I think, though that being said, there was something unique to be said about what if a designer had the PM mindset...
It's actually the same idea as what if an engineer had the PM mindset and then you get even crazier.
What if the PM had a design and engineering mindset?
I think all we're talking about is everybody truly understanding all the functions they're working with, having a fundamental broad understanding of the functions they're working with.
At captions, we're actually going even one step further than that.
Why shouldn't the PM understand marketing?
I think that's actually the biggest opportunity for PMs to understand, is like how do we actually find the users who have this problem.
I think that's a big part of solving the problem.
I have a unique take on this in terms of you know, I actually think PMs should own all the way to marketing in a way.
And the reason is that if you think about marketing, it's expanding the surface area of the product.
It's like Search Marketing is just placing a button to your product in Google.
Facebook Ads is just placing a button to your app in Facebook.
It's almost like you work at Facebook.
You work at Facebook, you have a button in the app somewhere, you make a specific thing, and people show up.
The funnel begins there, and you have all the metrics all the way from the beginning, all the way from when the user tapped on the button in Facebook and then they went down on all the steps and then they landed on some onboarding screen and they did the thing, they used the application.
That's where the journey begins.
And all of that is like, in a way, it's our product.
It's the same skillset.
Understanding users from that point on is like, I think that's fundamental.
How do we not do that today?
We should be. So that's kinda how we think about stuff.
But I think the core idea is that every function should understand every other function deeply, as much as possible.
And maybe even to the level where they can operate in that function.
And that just increases the likelihood that all decisions being made in the company at the micro level will be optimized for all possible parts of the funnel that different people are essentially looking after.
So that's something we think about quite a bit.
I completely agree with that, Tick.
It's interesting that a baby Brian is famous for Changing the titles of all product managers to product marketing manager Yep for exactly this point because he's like sense.
You should be doing the marketing You shouldn't just be building the thing right and like to me It's always I don't know I've always assumed as a PM your job is to for this thing to Grow in and get adopted and be loved so interesting people don't already think of it that way I agree but obviously it's hard to learn the skills of being awesome and paid growth and SEO and product marketing, messaging, positioning, but I completely agree.
That's such an important element of building a product.
You're not just building a thing, hope it works, goodbye.
So I love that that's how you think about it.
And so I guess when you hire PMs, it sounds like you look for marketing instinct and some experiences.
100 % right. And at least the ability and instinct to be able to learn Yeah, right.
Yeah, OK, so I'm going to share one other thing that I thought as you were talking that I think is really interesting and it comes up a bunch on this podcast, and this connects back to Ev and what we can learn from his.
His success. So Patrick Carlson wants to we did this tweet that's really stuck with me, which is it was around user research and the way he described it as user research isn't.
Go do user research that informs what you build and then you build that.
it's instead you do user research and forms the mental model you have as a leader, a product builder of what your customers need and what pains they have. And you're just that model in your head and then that's how you decide what to build.
It feels like it was very much that like his head was learning what people need teens in particular.
And it just worked.
Yeah, I think it's very spot on.
I would say though snap didn't like user research as a function for the longest time.
I think there was one user researcher in the company until, again, 5 ,000 employees, post -IPO, basically.
But I think the people that were making a lot of the product decisions and the CEO himself, of course, were very steeped in how the user behaves and how they operate.
They understood that.
I do think like, Snappa also had a unique way of thinking about how to determine if a product is within scope or out of scope of what their mission was right, and I think a lot of companies use this type of framework, and we try to try to as well, but essentially the idea at the core was that they want to enable like private sharing and in a safe way right, so I think You know, that kind of makes it clear that certain things just are out of scope for Snap.
It's actually one of the reasons why Snap wasn't the company to discover, quote, short form video TikTok -style stuff.
Because it was just against the nature of the company to even try something.
It was against the mission of the company.
Public sharing means possibly bullying and bad behaviors, which is exactly what Snap was trying to avoid.
We don't want those behaviors to develop on the app.
So for example, on Instagram stories, you can share somebody else's stories to your followers.
I can take your story and share it to my followers.
You can't do that on Snap.
And there was a discussion where like should we do this?
No, because it can enable bullying.
Essentially, you're not consenting to your thing being shared to my followers, right?
And that's essentially bad, right?
So, a lot of it was done based on these types of pillar -based thinking of like, this is our mission, this is what we're trying to do, does it fit within or is it outside?
If it's outside, we don't do it.
No matter what the cost of it is, no matter how exciting it is, so.
And even on Spotlight, the big challenge was like, how do you take something like that and put that inside the Snap mission?
So that was something we worked on quite a bit.
Yeah, I mean, I think there's, yeah, there's tons of stories about earlier versions.
I mean, Snap almost had essentially what is TikTok earlier than TikTok existed.
and it kind of died out because it didn't align with the mission, essentially, right?
But happy to get into it.
Yeah, that'd actually be really interesting because it's interesting that these things are important.
It's important to have these clear values in the mission of the company and to not focus on things that are outside that.
And then you hear these stories of, like, they had TikTok, potentially, so yeah, whatever you can share there, that'd be awesome.
Yeah, I mean, I think, I don't know if you remember this, but there was this product called Our Stories, and essentially it was like my story but it was a public story and it started off with this idea of Campus Stories where you can post to your campus and other people can see it and that actually started creating a lot of virality because essentially people would post there was like you know viral moments truly where people would post stuff like oh like you know I think two people fell in love on it or something like that like those types of things I really went viral, and it had really good
engagement. But at the end of the day, the problem was that we were against algorithmic, essentially, ranking of those types of things.
So there was a curation team that was looking through every single one so that there's no negative behaviors happening, essentially, on the app.
And that was just not scalable.
Even though it had really high engagement and was doing well, it just wasn't feasible to have a person looking at every single thing posted to determine whether it's appropriate or not.
And so it ended up dying out.
But it looked like what was an early version of TikTok before it had launched.
So I think in a way, though, it was a good thing because I think Snap does have a mission.
And I think it is solving a problem.
I do think there is a bifurcation of social media at this point.
There is what you traditionally think of it like as social networking, where you share things with your friends.
And by the way, remember the days where that used to be the way that apps would go viral, you would share things with your friends, and then they would share with their friends, and everybody was worried about friend sharing and how do you send to a friend and, you know, can I text message my friend or whatever.
That time is over. Virality now happens through a completely different mechanism.
It happens through essentially algorithms that are deciding whether your piece of content is worth showing to an arbitrary number of people.
And this is the new age of social media, right?
It's TikTok. It's YouTube Shores, and Instagram Reels and so on.
And I think, actually, is changing the fundamental nature of how people interact, fundamental nature of how things go viral.
And I actually think, from a regulatory perspective, we should be thinking these as differently.
On one side, you have something where you're deciding who sees something.
And then on the other side, you have something where the company is deciding.
Which means that it's kind of semi -curated.
It's actually the company's voice.
And so, yeah, I don't know, should section 230 apply to that?
I have no idea, maybe not.
Maybe we were thinking about it the wrong way.
So, it should be interesting.
Wow all right well I'm out of my depth on the legal legality decisions so I'm going to not follow that thread.
But I imagine there's something really interesting there.
Actually so you're talking about how much things are changing, and I just wanted to follow that thread.
And specifically, you guys were at the cutting edge of what is possible with AI video.
Yes It feels like we're approaching, and maybe we're there, this world where you have no idea if it's real or AI.
I'm curious, first of all, just how far you think we are from that?
And second of all the implications on the world where you can just generate any video that you want.
It's fundamental. At the end of the day, like a time where video, images, audio can't be trusted, actually hasn't existed for a while.
Like if you think about, I mean there was a world in the 1800s where there was no video or audio or images, right?
And everything was proven by he said, she said, for the most part.
And it's possible that if everything can be generated and anything can be created, and it looks just as real as if it were real, and there's no way to tell, then we might actually return to that world, right?
Where there's no way to prove anything besides physical evidence or he said, she said.
And I think that's kind of scary, but also, possibly opens a bunch of new opportunity for someone to figure out how to solve this problem, right?
I think it's gonna be a big problem.
I do think today, we are almost there in terms of creating absolutely photorealistic video.
I mean, the very recent model is a very cutting edge, is just about, it feels like a few centimeters away from achieving it.
But I do think to fully get there to the point where it cannot be differentiated at all, It's still a couple of years away.
I also think that it is use -case driven in a way.
I think, thinking about captions for a second, we take a unique view on what type of video we want to focus on.
Video generation and text to video generation, if you look at it today, it's all silent video, right?
There's no audio. And it's often, what you think of it as like stopped video or b -roll, right?
You can actually make a movie with b -roll, right?
And a lot of a movie or a TV show or a social media post or an ad actually is dialogue or monologue.
That's actually what it is.
It's people talking to each other, to the camera, right?
Interacting. That's actually what makes true story.
B -roll is sort of like supportive elements that are showing up to set the scene or something like maybe before the scene opens you see a few shots of New York City or L .A.
or something, And then you jump into the room and you know, now few people are talking.
So our goal is to solve the talking video problem.
How do we create video, where people are delivering dialogue or monologue or you know, things like that.
And that's what we focus on purely.
And there actually isn't a lot of work happening in that area today, right?
And it's not a solved problem.
We're getting there, we're getting closer and closer.
But today's models actually bifurcate a little bit.
So there's a set of companies today that are able to create these types of, what we're talking about is like avatar videos.
They're using this technology called neural rendering.
It's actually not a technology that's affected by the transformer and diffusion model revolution or the large -model revolution essentially.
This is a technology that exists separately.
And it doesn't have anything to do with the AI growth happening right now.
it just happens to produce semi -realistic outputs but it actually kind of stops at some point because it's not clear how it becomes generalizable in every situation.
You can't, you know, it has to be trained on people individually so you might ingest a little bit of video of you and then you can generate you and so it's a different technology and different outcome essentially and a bunch of are doing general text to video with no audio today.
These are large sort of generative models and they have the capability to do more, but that frontier just hasn't been reached yet.
I think there's no doubt in anybody's mind on the research side that it is a hundred percent solvable.
It's just like somebody has to go do it and we haven't gotten there yet.
Nobody has had the time to go and do that yet.
So that's kinda where we're at essentially.
We're working purely on large generative models for talking videos.
So that's like our core focus.
I do think though, from a safety perspective, we have a unique framework of how we think about it.
So generally, videos divide into two categories.
So for us, we think on one side of what is like documentation.
So this is the type of video that it could be a personal video where you're taking a video with your friends and you're hanging out you're at a restaurant, and it's documenting what happened, you had fun whatever it was it's for your memories.
There's like a non -personal version of this which is like oh, it's like a reporter documenting a crime, or something that happened, or whatever it is, and who was involved what where was it maybe it was a national disaster or something.
This is for history we want to see what happened and there's actually no benefit to AI genre video in any of this.
Actually all of this is just negative.
It's all negative, right?
Like if we are generating fake versions of reality to fool people, there's just nothing good about that, right?
And we want to stay away from that essentially.
We want to design products and build products that make it difficult to use for that particular use case for anything that falls within that.
And on the other side, you have what we think of as storytelling.
Now, this could be ads, it could be social media posts, it could be TV, movies.
All of these things are storytelling.
They're designed for entertainment, they're designed for fun, and nobody believes if you watch a Geico commercial, you're not thinking that the Gecko is real selling insurance somewhere out there.
You know that this is fabricated and it's for entertainment.
Same with reality TV, right?
It's called reality TV, it's definitely not reality.
And social media, ads, all this stuff kind of falls into the category.
And if we can enable more people to tell stories and entertain other people and get their message out there.
That is pure positive.
This is where we want to focus.
And a lot of our effort in the product and design process goes into how do we design products, and build products that specifically make it really hard to use on one side and really easy to use on the other side.
And that's the real challenge.
That's really helpful.
Something that I'm amazing model is actually just looking at it where you put a photo in, I think, and it just creates a video of this person talking in all these different ways.
Where does that fall amongst the buckets you just described?
I think that falls exactly in the area that we're in, right, which is talking people.
And that's what they're going after as well there.
So that's actually one of the first examples of a large model that, you know, a larger company has released where it's able to do sort of these dialog or monologue videos, right.
And I mean you yourself.
I mean you've seen it, so I'm not gonna, you know, describe it too much, but as you know, it's like highly expressive, right?
Like it doesn't look like an Avatar video, right?
It looks like... and that's because the technology that's used is fundamentally different.
It's just like this is using a true large diffusion model, is what they use, whereas like most companies that are working on Avatar technology are actually using like, you know, something pretty basic in comparison.
How long has it been since that Will Smith spaghetti video?
Just to give us a reference of how fast things are moving.
Oh my God, it's been so fast right like it's amazing.
Is it like 2 years?
He's probably like about a year and a half.
2 years, right wow will link to that video and you could tell basically that video is the state of the art of AI video 1 to 2 years ago and then will link to the this other Omni something I forget what it's called, just showing what it's like today.
Geez Louise OK, final question and.
Uh, and this is around something that I know you have a really interesting insight on, which is that you see marketing using AI video basically as a is kind of the final frontier of how people.
We'll experience AI is marketing is seeing it in marketing channels.
Talk about why you think that's the case and just what that looks like.
It kind of comes back to what we were talking about before, where, you know, the reality is that no matter how interesting, advanced, and amazing a technology is, Like, science fiction has become reality.
We were talking about this.
Like, what was literally science fiction on TV is real now.
And most people still don't even know about it, to be honest, right?
My parents live in India and they are the only ones in the neighborhood that know about chat GPT and they write these amazing notes to the community with all these words and people are just like, how did you get so good at writing?
And they're not telling anybody.
But, you know, there's still a ton of people who don't even know that these advancements have happened.
And so adoption is actually much slower even for the most exciting things.
Of course in tech circles everybody's talking about it.
But the reality is like it takes a while to get out there.
And I think for companies that are going to succeed they're going to have to figure out how to market these products so that they can be the ones to reach. You know, all these people that have the problems that they're now able to solve.
And we think about that every day.
So on that note, like as a consumer product, we spend a bunch of time and money on marketing our products and we often use like performance channels and all kinds of things.
But about a year ago, we would run AI video in ads and things like that.
And we would get all these comments of people being like, oh my God, this is so fake.
Like, you know, don't show me this.
And around that time, the technology got just about good enough that suddenly those comments stopped happening.
And suddenly you could get performance that was even better than actually recording with a person because you could just try more things.
You could just generate 30, 40 possibilities and one of them would win and it would win more than the one creator you can get from a person.
And more interestingly, when you think about localization You're gonna go do that in every language like once you discover winning creative right now You have to go localize that in every market and rebuild it from scratch It's just a ton and oftentimes it doesn't perform as well because it's been like rethought essentially, but we found that Just translating it with AI was able to get performance almost as good as the original in the original language, right?
So This is gonna flood the entire market, right?
I think wherever there are dollars to be made saved, it's inevitable, it will be consumed and it will very quickly be a lot of social media, I mean, you could imagine a social network of the future where—and this is dystopian, by the way, so watch out—you could imagine a social network of the future where all content is generated.
None of the people are real.
The algorithm isn't tailoring whose content to show you but it's purely generating content that you know is Completely catered to you right with people and everything completely catered to you I don't think it's out of the question, you know almost seems seems inevitable in a way, but that's not You know that's not too far away I think that's actually very possibly real in five years or something like that What I'm imagining it because it's hard to imagine like a social network where it's People because usually want to know who these people are you like I don't care of randoms Yes, sharing status
updates, but I can see a tick tock.
That is all exactly exactly.
Just like content tuned to your loves and interests exactly.
And just random videos yeah, because I do you know like you see a take talk feed like you don't even know who's real or not today, right?
This is not like right, that's how I would approach it.
I would just join tick tock and start uploading videos that are AI generated exactly and then and then build a whole network of that.
Oh my God. The future is wild.
Let's go to failure corner.
Something that I try to do with this podcast is share moments where things didn't go well.
There's all these stories of everything's going great.
All the time. All those foundries.
Killing it. Building a billion dollar company.
So awesome. But they don't know when all the things that go wrong.
So let me ask you, is there a story you can share of when things didn't work out when you failed?
At the beginning of the company, we actually had a bunch of time where we spend figuring out what we wanted to do.
and I think it's like kind of a unconventional story almost in a way because we started off the company.
The first thing we did was build the Captions app, right?
Like we launched the app.
That was the first thing we did.
Took two days to build it.
We put it out there and it immediately took off, right?
It was absolutely shocking because I built it on the weekend.
We put it out there.
I called my co -founder on Monday and like it's at the top of the app store.
We're getting like 600 videos a day.
Top of the app store.
Yeah. And we didn't do anything to enable that.
It just kind of happened on its own.
It was almost anti -climactic in a way.
Because we thought it would be a lot more time spent figuring out the product before that would happen.
And so it felt like, wait, this can't be it.
It can't be this fast. How did this happen?
So we got distracted because of that.
because we were like, oh, okay, well maybe this is cool, it'll kinda work, that's great, but we gotta figure out what the product is, right?
And so we spent at least like a year, year and a half thinking about building social networks and all kinds of things when we should have been working on captions, right?
Because there was product market fit there.
And how we figured that out is captions was sitting on my personal account, so I wasn't checking that a lot.
And about a year and a half into the company, as we're working on other projects and stuff, I went back to a personal account, just opened it, and I saw that there was $500 ,000 in there, and I looked at a chart, and it was just growing, the revenue was just growing completely on its own, no employees, no releases, no bug fixes, no customer support.
There was 2 ,000 open support tickets that were unanswered for a year and a half, and great reviews, it's just growing, completely on its own.
And so, that was like a clear sign to me, it was like, oh my God, you should have been working on that, right like that product works.
And so we immediately had a meeting.
I mean, it was tough to kind of figure out what the right path was at that point because we had invested so much time in other things as well, but reset and we kinda got back on the track with captions.
And literally, as soon as we started releasing the first features into it, it blew up.
Like what looked like a vertical line at that time and became a horizontal line.
And the vertical, the new vertical line was so vertical that the old vertical line became a horizontal line.
Essentially. And so, and that's kind of, you know, it's continued since then, which is crazy.
So, we basically wasted about a year and a half.
I love that when new way of thinking about a hockey stick moment where not only is it going vertical, but the rest of the chart is now just flat along the bottom of the axis.
For people that may not know what captions is, we'll all try to describe it the beginning and will link to it and stuff, but basically like the reason you thought it was nothing is it just adds captions to a video they You know yeah, exactly.
Yeah, so I think you know we Wanted like our thought was like we're going to build a social network but first we gotta build a creation tool for the social network right and we knew that we wanted to use AI to create video and It seemed obvious that oh speech to text a solid problem.
We should start with that, right?
So that's why we decided to start with you know captions because it was a solved problem at the time.
What was funny is that once GPT and stuff started coming out, like a lot of the things that were unsolved became solved very quickly, right?
So timing was almost perfect.
And that aligns to something you shared earlier, just so many of these problems that were not yet solved are now possible, and the companies that are in the right place at the right time benefit greatly.
I've been just waiting for this part.
The other thing that I think is interesting about that story is you try to build a social network.
I think it was around like high schools and things like that.
As we've seen, it's very difficult to build a new social network, so let me just get your sense.
Do you think it's possible for somebody to come around and build a new, the next Facebook, the next Snap, the next whatever?
I think it's definitely possible.
I do think, let me tell you something kind of crazy, actually.
The social network that we had at the time, we actually removed it from the App Store, so it's not available anymore.
But till today there are people there are thousands of people that are using it posting on it and all the different things which actually kind of speaks to the power of the social network in a way right it is hard to create and hard to kill I mean I think Axe is actually a great example of that too right a lot of movement kind of happened there and it continues to You know work, I guess somehow.
So you know testament to that.
My power of network effects, specially so many ones described this so well.
They're like like Twitter slash X.
They took the change of the brand.
They changed the team building it.
They changed the virl like everything changed about it, except the network effect of the people in it.
It's true. And now I just saw a story that they're like making billions of dollars like he's actually turned around.
It's actually becoming a really profitable company.
Wow. Yeah, it just came out the other day, so Elon did it.
Well, with that, we've reached our very exciting lightning round.
Are you ready? I'm ready.
Let's do it. What are two or three books that you have recommended most to other people?
I have to say here that I actually don't read books.
It's actually something that I decided on purpose where I decided I don't want to build my skill in reading and I want to build it in listening and watching instead.
Because I think that's the future.
I love how intentional that is and I love how it's like a really cool way of saying I don't read books.
The future isn't reading.
But I love that you have books behind you.
I do. The ones that I didn't read, they're back there.
That's funny. Okay, cool.
I want to ask more questions, but I'm going to keep going.
Do you have a favorite, speaking of watching and listening, do you have a favorite recent movie or TV show you've really enjoyed?
I like Silo and Severance.
I mean, obviously I think everyone's watching these.
There's a book around Silo, too.
I read that, I read all of them, there's three of them, and it sucks to watch the show because you know all the tricks that are about to happen, and I'm just like, why am watching this?
I know where it's all going.
Yup, I mean, for what it's worth, it does seem like the show is going on a slightly different path.
It is, it was, that also would've annoyed me, and just like, what the heck, this is made up, All is made up shit.
I don't like that when I watch shows.
So two reasons I'm not watching it.
Don't worry, by the way, I didn't actually read the book.
My wife read the book, and then she told me the story.
I won't. I was worried.
OK, cool. Yeah, and severance.
OK, great. I love severance.
Next question. Do you have a favorite product you've recently discovered that you really like?
My favorite product, honestly, is linear.
I'm not going to lie.
Just because it's so well designed, and it's so easy to use.
I also like superhuman.
I mean, these are obvious answers.
but I do use these things every day and you know it's hard to create products that you use every day and don't hate, so props to them.
Cool. I haven't announced this on the podcast yet, but this is a good time, whoever's listening right now, as I just launched a bundle where if you become a paid subscriber to my newsletter you get, listen to this, a year free of linear and superhuman and notion and granola which is incredible a I have for note -taking and perplexity perplexing row nine thousand dollars in value for the price of my newsletter 200 bucks dabbling to that that's real value it's it's it's an unbelievable deal and it's a no -brainer at this point to buy a subscription but this isn't an ad for my newsletter I'll keep
going next question do you have a favorite life motto that you often find yourself coming back to you sharing with friends or family, work or life.
I actually learned this because someone else told me that I keep repeating this thing.
But I have this sort of framework of how I want to operate at work, basically.
I think I love to compete and to win at the end of the day.
And I think that to win you have to be the best. But I also think the easiest way to be the best is to be the first. And that actually is key.
And so it's the motto, the easiest way.
Is that the, is that The easiest way to be the best is to be first, first. Okay.
I, I have to resist following threads here.
Cause I want to make this the lightning round.
Okay. Final question just for fun.
Is there, what's like the coolest, most wild AI video you've seen recently?
Is there a one that comes to mind of like, oh wow.
Something. I mean, honestly, I gotta say the Omni human stuff was pretty, it was pretty cool.
The bike dance video that we talked about.
Yeah, exactly. I mean the broccoli talking.
I don't know if you saw that one.
There was like a little broccoli like kind of delivering a little speech. Yeah it was.
It looked like it was animated by like an animator, you know?
Just imagine being a kid these days and just seeing stuff like that.
I think you probably just used to it, right?
You're just like this is just normal.
It's just like we're saying a G is just gonna come around.
Exactly all right. What's for dinner?
Cool, that's great.
Yep, amazing. Gaurab this was incredible.
are so insightful in so many levels.
Two final questions.
Where can folks find you and which building if they want to learn more?
And then how can listeners be useful to you?
Awesome. Yeah, I mean definitely find me on LinkedIn.
That's where I live most of the time.
My DMs are open, et cetera et cetera.
So feel free to send me a message.
And I think what would be useful, I mean we're building out our early product and design team.
So if AI video is interesting, if consumer apps are interesting, now is the time to join.
We're really small early.
We work together across the team so There's gonna be no better time to join basically and you get to ship a marketable feature every week exactly I mean, that's a PM's dream think about it, right?
Yeah, like like yeah It's like I like that That's a filter like the people that get excited about that great fit the people that are stressed out by that Not the place to be exactly So awesome.
All right, Gaurav. Thank you so much for being here.
No, thank you Appreciate it.
Bye everyone Thank you so much for listening if you found this valuable you can subscribe to the show on Apple podcasts Spotify or your favorite podcast app Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny's podcast calm.
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