How to win in the AI era: Ship a feature every week, embrace technical debt, ruthlessly cut scope, and create magic your competitors can't copy | Gaurav Misra (CEO and co-founder of Captions)

23:46I love that. That's such a nice heuristic of how to think about when to invest in something. I don't want to go down this too far, but just a thought I have is, you know, sometimes there's big technical decisions you got to make that you act the way everything builds or is built in the future. 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 -way door, it's worth thinking about and and sort of doing correctly, at least as much as the one way door would matter to you in the future.

24:22How much do your engineers use cursor and tools like that to build? How much is AI helping your team move faster? 100%. Yeah, I mean, everybody's using it. It's super helpful. I mean, even I'm using it, honestly. Yeah, it's a huge multiplier for the team, no doubt. And is a cursor specifically? Is there anything else that you guys can use for? We are using cursor. Yep. We've tried all the different tools. we were using Devon as well, which is another, you know, that's more advanced, I guess, you know, it's kind of solving bugs for you. Yeah, Devon's basically, I think it's 500 bucks a month and it's like an AI engineer that you just chat with and slack.

24:57Exactly. Yeah. And you know, 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, you know, they can't just pull in Devon, right? They have to, you know, get 30 liras in the room first before that happens. Yeah, and they're all called Devon, right? These like agents, like, Everyone's gonna have like hundreds of devins where you can't exactly you can have multiple devins I actually heard you can have a manager of devins who's managing devins I left that managers are all getting layer like unlayered and then they're gonna have yeah I manage That's the ultimate the ultimate bit and switch okay Is there anything else that in how you operate and build the way you build product?

25:36We're 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 Our process is a bit interesting in that way. We have a design team, we have a PM team. We're very early on those teams right now. Obviously we have engineering and we have all the different surface areas. iOS, Android, Web, there's back end team, machine learning team, research team. Generally when we're developing products, we may start off with 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.

26:14We want to take on and then creating sort of products from there. But a lot of times we'll also start the opposite way. 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, right? Like things that we wouldn't have discovered if we were just like to focus on the metrics and the numbers and, you know, things like that.

26:45So it's like almost reversing the process a little bit and starting with design first, but it can often result in like finding unique ideas, basically. I also think that we have a unique setup in how we create our roadmap. So normally you have a single roadmap, right? And we actually divide our roadmap into two different road maps. So we have what we think of as the public road map. This is basically what people have asked us for. Right. So like there's all these surface areas where we receive user feedback. And we look at all that feedback. And people will ask for features. Like they'll ask for like, I want back on removal.

27:20I want like to undo and redo. I want to like 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 will prioritize it. And we'll look at how many people it affects and what the possible market. it's R and just get it done basically, right? One at a time. But these are all features that every competitor knows about. Like these are public. Like if a user is 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 yeah, sure you can win a little by like extra nicely prioritizing it or winning a little in prioritization or execution or something, but it's not gonna be a game changer in terms of winning against your competition.

28:02So we have a second roadmap, which we think of as a secret roadmap. So this is a roadmap 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, right? where we can truly change the behavior of the user. I think that's what is at the core of it.

28:36It's like 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. Those are the types of ideas we put on the secret roadmap. These are things we never talked about publicly, never tell anybody about, and we announced them and just give them to users and see the effects. A lot of this we come up with through brainstorming. So we do actually do quarterly brainstorming, company wide, everybody's included, like everybody from, it's not just a product team thing, it's like engineering, recruiting, everybody's included in.

29:13And 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 things about like 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. Like everybody's browsing social media, seeing all these like different things are blowing up, you know, these models and advancements and we can get all that information together and provide sort of a unique internal roadmap, right, where how are we going to approach and create value out of all these different advancements that are happening.

29:49So that's our general methodology. And a lot of times the biggest wins will come from the secret roadmap, right? That's the game -changing stuff, right? It's not going to be the user requests. Usually they're going to do that. And let me just how calling the secret roadmap makes it especially like extra interesting. Exactly. Right. It's a secret. It's a secret. Not a good thing you're going to ask you what's on the secret roadmap. He can tell me. What's an example feature that came out of that secret roadmap that's been a big deal for you guys? Tons. I mean, I'll give you an example from a long time ago.

30:20So one of the first AI features we added after the app initially took off was a feature called iContact. So this was a feature where if you're recording something, oftentimes 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 off screen. So it 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 I basically shister eyes 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, right?

31:09And they actually gave it to us pretty openly. And we're excited about some sort of partnership of like how can we get this technology into like something that could be useful. But we saw sort of 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 still till today gets millions of views. We find repost and repost of that thing that other people have created that get millions and millions and millions of views because people are like, wow, this is a great idea.

31:59And now it's been copied the hell out of like 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 or 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 or you're actually jamming like 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.

32:43I 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. And I've learned over the many years, 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 we make it available to an LLM when I can't even put it into words exactly? And honestly, this is probably my own feeling, but and I need to work on this.

33:25But 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, right? And nobody would understand why. Everyone would line up and be like, great, like Brian Rappel -Plaus for everyone, right?

34:04but 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 them, that was a camera, like what are we making like digital cameras or something? Or like why is it a camera company? But I think of 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 going to open Instagram or anything else because it doesn't open to the camera.

34:48You're going to open Snapchat, right? Because 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? is and I figured this is how 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 am interested in this is if you think about social networks, 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.

35:27I think it's just kind of this like content platform. I don't think you're interacting with people really. And that's 2011 when it launched. So it's been like 15 years 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're a big deal. It's Snap. You built a lot of really important features. So I wanted to spend a little time here and it feels like you a lot of things you learn 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 Eves' brain, what do you think was core to snap being a successful consumer social product?

36:12There 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, right? Like, 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 us now, so whatever it is, right. 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, you know, it's growing despite what you're doing basically, right?

36:52And I think because of that, it actually sometimes teaches people the wrong things. It teaches people that the, you know, contrarian thing that they were doing was right when it was actually just wrong. And the company just grew divided, 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.

37:32And 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 a bunch of different companies. But obviously there's a CEO, and the CEO was very product -led. He was a designer himself, right? But he surrounded himself with the design team, right? That was sort of the central team in the company and the design team was Like 10 12 people. This is pretty small even at, you know, five six thousand employees It was that small still wow at five or six thousand employees the design team was you said how many five or six people?

38:0710 12 people 10 12 and It's a fact that there's no p .m .s really like for a long time that was a long time Yeah, initially there were no p .m .s 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 an adequate number of PMs across the company, but there was a long period of time, especially when the innovation was happening, when yeah, there were much, much smaller number of PMs and it was very design or 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?

38:43These were designers who were actually PMs as well. 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 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, we're improving ranking and whatever that might be, right?

39:21And performance and things like that. And those were not usually his concern. He was concerned with what UI are we adding where? 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 truck talked directly to the CEO, you kind of create a very granular control over what's being launched in the company, right? So everything needed to be approved by Evan. 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 like a singular mind that continues to stay in the weeds on everything.

40:05and the way Evan did that is they very close to the design team who basically ran products. This is very true. Yeah, it's very true. And he was able to keep the context of the entire app 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 every music 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 a really the right sort of combination of experiences, insights, and just they continue to run in own every detail.

40:46Definitely. And also the ability to bring about change, right? The ability to truly, you know, energize an entire organization to do something that's not just incremental, but fundamental, right? Founder mode. Exactly. That's what we're getting to, you have basically never 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 they think a lot of people look at this are like amazing. We're just going to hire designers. We don't need all these damn PMs.

41:22Just love earth and down. Just tell us what not to build. Can you just talk about like the level of these designers like what allowed them to be a successful as they were without any PMs? Yeah. I mean, I think what was expected from the designerist now was not just the ability to design like, you know, the skill set of designing, which all of them were IC designers, by the way, right? And there were no reports, right? So 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, you know, figure out the roadmap, write all the documents, work with the different and teams, figure out shipping schedules, and just know everything, not just sort of the technical and the engineering card, but the UX and the UI, and the product needs, and why are we doing this?

42:14The roadmap, there's just a ton to keep in mind. And that means that it was a job that was 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 remember 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 and it reminds you know people always say why don't EPMs? 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 note the person that will take on the PM work They have to be good at it and enjoy it.

42:57A lot of designers don't want to be doing writing docs and organizing stakeholders and getting a line man and 100 % 100 % or so. That's why it was so hard to find those people who were able to do two things. I have to think there's an insight in, there is innovation between, you know, when you're kind of merging craft 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 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 as on the engineering team.

43:39I eventually joined the design team, over the last two years that 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. The person who can think of the UX design it and also build it and launch it, all those things. And we saw both the ability to take designers and TSM engineering and take engineers and teach them design as part of that. Obviously, the reason that we created that function was very different. It was actually to continue innovating as the company got bigger.

44:20One of the problems that we identified was that as the company got bigger and bigger and there's like 500 engineers, 1 ,000 engineers, 2 ,000 engineers, 3 ,000, right? 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 in a lot of time. And so you really have to pick your bets, right? If you get it wrong, if you are innovating and 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, right?

44:59I 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 created got copied, but he was more of the mindset of like, let's expand the pie, do something new, and push the boundaries, right? We'll keep innovating basically. And so to do that, would that scale if a company it becomes really hard. And so we had this idea of like, 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.

45:35People were able to do the entire server 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, will 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 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 like, it's a prototype essentially. It's how a startup might build something.

46:08The same idea of what we're doing at our company now, go to fast, get it out there, get feedback, understand whether it works or not, and then work with the engineering team into ability to scale. Yeah, once we understand the product and the dynamics, then it makes sense to put on 500 engineers for six months to build it, right? So that was like a big part of it. 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 obviously in big organizations, alignment is a big issue, right? How do you get everybody on the same page?

46:41A big part of a PM's job is actually to create alignment, right? And it can be a lot of work because you've got to talk to all these stakeholders and get with 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 with somebody else because they think it's interesting. And you can actually create virality inside a company.

47:16So 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, then eventually from Evan being like, oh my god, like everyone's talking about this. is why I lied the last one to hear about it. And so it would create like instant alignment across the company of like, this is exciting, right?

47:51This is something that we wanna get behind and everyone was be asking like, when are we doing this? Like 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 sort of dynamics and we had tested it, it was a great way to sort of get it out in front of everybody and create this idea of like, hey, We're all working on this. This is sort of the future, right? Today's episode is brought to you by Coda. I personally use Coda every single day to manage my podcast and also to manage my community.

48:25So I put the questions that I plan to ask every guest that's coming on the podcast. So I put my community resources. It's how I manage my workflows. Here's how Coda can help you. Imagine starting a project that work and your vision is clear. You know exactly who's doing what and where to find the data that you need to do your part. In fact, you don't have to waste time searching for anything because everything your team needs from project trackers and OKRs to documents and spreadsheets lives in one tab all in Coda. With Coda's collaborative all -in -one workspace, you get the flexibility of docs, the structure of spreadsheets, the power of applications, and the intelligence of AI, all in one easy to organize tab.

49:04Like I mentioned earlier, I use Coda every single day and more than 50 ,000 teams trust Coda to keep them more aligned and focused. If your startup team looking to increase alignment and agility, Coda can help you move from planning to execution in record time. To try it for yourself, go to Coda .io slash Lenny today and get 6 months free of the team plan for startups. That's C -O -D -A .io slash Lenny to get started for free and get 6 months of the team plan. Coda .io slash Lenny. 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.

49:48And it feels like that's something that you did and worked super well. Like here's 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 a really interesting scene where the future is going just 100%. 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 intuition, honestly, where it's just like anything else.

50:19But 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 the ship of marketable 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. Is it just the tools or interior yet or? I mean, I think our shipping process is fast enough that within a week we can get it out anyways, right?

50:51So that way we just get user feedback, which is even better. Okay. And then the other really interesting thing, I'm trying to visualize like that triangle of or product team that try out of PM engineer design. Feels like you guys that snap took like the corners, not the corners, the line of that triangle and like you have design engineers. If you have design PMs, imagine engineers were sort of PM -y already, they're like very product oriented PMs. Did you have a function called design PMs? Probably not. I mean, I see it. It's the engineer PMs. Engineer PMs. Yeah, I mean engineer PMs should be a thing, I feel.

51:25Yeah, or every engineer should strive to understand the product. Yeah, a lot of companies operate that way. Like Stripe, I think they had hundreds of engineers before they hired the first PM because I think the engineers were doing it. They did it snap, right? Do the PM work? So it feels like at your company, you don't operate that way. It feels like a 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 have been one of those decisions where it actually succeeded despite that.

52:04And because like someone needs to do that work, right? 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, right? It's actually the same idea as what if an engineer had the PM mindset. And then you get, you know, even crazier, what are the PM had a design and engineering mindset? I think all we're talking about is everybody truly understanding all the functions that they're working with, right?

52:43Having a fundamental, broad understanding of the functions that working with. And at captions, we're actually saying, going even once they're further than that, right? 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? Right? 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, right?

53:20It'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, right? It's almost like you work at Facebook, right? 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, right? And you have all the metrics all the way from the beginning, right? All the way from when the user tapped on the button in Facebook. And then they went down all the steps and then they landed on some onboarding screen and right, they did the thing, they used the application.

53:56That's where the journey begins. And all of that is like, in a way, it's all product. It's the same skill set. Understanding users from that point on is like, I think that's fundamental, right? How do we not do that today? We should be. So that's kind of how we think about stuff, right? 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, right?

54:41So that's something we think about quite a bit. I completely agree with that, Tick. It's interesting that at Airbnb, Brian is famous for changing the titles of all product managers to product marketing manager. Yep. For exactly this point, because he's like, you should be doing the marketing mission, just be building the thing. Right. And like to me, it's always, I've always assumed as a PM your job is to for this thing to to grow and get adopted and be loved. So it's interesting. People don't already think of it that way. I agree. But obviously it's hard to learn the skills of being awesome at paid growth in SEO and product marketing, messaging, positioning.

55:18But 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 in some experience. 100 % right? And at least the ability and instant to be able to learn it. Right. Yeah. Okay. So I'm going to share one other thing that I thought as you were talking that I think is really interesting. It comes up with a bunch on this podcast. And this can expect of and what we could learn from his his success. So Patrick Hall said once tweeted this tweet that's really stuck with me, which is it was around user research.

55:57And the way he described it is, use a research, isn't, go to use a research that informs what you build, and then you build that. It's instead, you do use a research that informs the mental model you have as a leader, a product builder of what your customers need and what pains they have. And you adjust that model in your head, and then that's how you decide what to build. And it feels like EVE is very much that. like his head was learning what people need, teens in particular, and it just worked. Yeah, I think it's very fun. I would say though, Samp didn't like user research as a function for the longest time.

56:34Like I think there was one user researcher in the company until, again, 5 ,000 employees, the post IPO basically.

56:42But I think the people that were making a lot of the product decisions and the CEO himself, of course, were very steep to insert the how the user behaves and how they operate. Like they understood that. I do think like Snap 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 of the core was that they want to enable like private sharing and in a safe way, right? So if so I think that kind of makes it clear that certain things just are out of scope for Snap.

57:28It'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. You can take your story and share it to my followers. You can't do that as Snap. And there was a discussion where like, should we do this?

58:05No, because it can enable bullying. I can, essentially, I don't, you know, 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 this type of pillar based thinking of like, you know, 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 that worked on quite a bit.

58:39Yeah, I mean, I think 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 actually would be really interesting. Because it's interesting that these things are important. It's important to have these clear values and 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, like they had TikTok potentially. So yeah, whatever you can share there, that'd be awesome.

59:12Yeah. I mean, I think I don't know if you remember this, but there was this for our 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, right? Because essentially people 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, like, really went viral. And it had really good engagement.

59:47But at the end of the day, the problem was that we were against like 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, you know, 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 kind of ended up dying out, but it looked like what was an early version of TikTok before it had launched.

1:00:22So 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, you know, there is a bifurcation of social media at this point. There is what you traditionally think of as like social networking where you share things with your friends. And by the way, like, 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, right? And everybody was worried about like friend sharing and how do you send to a friend and you know can I text message my friend or whatever right that was that time is over By reality now happens for completely different mechanism.

1:01:03It happens through essentially algorithms right 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 you know YouTube shores and Instagram Reels and so on and And I think actually is changing the fundamental nature of how people interact, fundamental nature of how things go viral. And I think these, I actually think from a regulatory perspective, we should be thinking these as differently. On one side, you have something where you're deciding, you know, where who sees something. And then on the other side, you have something where the company is deciding, which means that is kind of semi -accurated, right?

1:01:51It's actually the company's voice. And so, yeah, I don't know. Like should section 230 apply to that? I have no idea. Or maybe not. Maybe we're thinking what is wrong with it. So, should be interesting. Well, all right. Well, I'm out of my depth on the poll, 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 this, just like how much things are changing. And I just wanted to follow about the red. And specifically, you guys are at the cutting edge of what is possible with AI video. Yes.

1:02:25It 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.

1:03:12Then we might actually return to that world 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. I think it's going to be a big problem. I do think today we are almost there in terms of creating absolutely photorealistic video. I mean, the very recent models of very cutting edge is just about like, 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.

1:03:52I also think that it is use case driven in a way. Like, I think thinking about captions for a second, like 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 as like stop video or B -roll, right? You can like actually make a movie with B -roll, right? And a lot of a movie or a T -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, interacting, that's actually what makes true story.

1:04:35B -roll is 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 LA or something, right? And then you jump into the room and now two people are talking. So our goal is to solve the talking video problem, right? How do we create video where people are delivering dialogue or monologue or 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 solid problem. We're getting there, we're getting closer and closer. But today's models actually bifurcate a little bit.

1:05:15So there's a set of companies today that are able to create these types of what we're talking about as like avatar videos. They're using this technology, cloud neural rendering. It's actually not a technology that's affected by a transformer and diffusion model revolution or the large model revolution essentially. This is the 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.

1:05:53right? 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 companies using this type of model, a bunch of companies 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 I think there's no doubt in anybody's mind on the research side that it is 100 % solvable. It's just like somebody has to go do it and we haven't gotten there yet.

1:06:29Some, you know, nobody has had the time to go and do that yet. So that's kind of where we're at, essentially. We're working purely on large, generative models for talking videos, right? So that's like our core focus. I do think though, from a safety perspective, we have a unique framework or how we think about it. So generally videos divide into two categories, right? 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, right? Like it's documenting what happened, you had fun, whatever it was, it's free of memories, right?

1:07:09And there's like a non -personal version of this, which is like, oh, it's like a reporter like documenting a crime or something that happened or whatever it is, right? and who was involved, where was it? Maybe it was a national disaster or something, right? And this is for history, we want to see what happened, right? And there's actually no benefit to Azure and in any of this, right? Like actually, all of this is just negative. It's all negative, right? Like if we are generating fake versions of reality to fool people, this just nothing good about that, right? And we want to stay away from that essentially, right?

1:07:43Are we want to design products and build products that make it difficult to use for that particular use case, right, 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, like all of these things are storytelling. They're designed for entertainment, they're designed for fun, and nobody believes, like if you watch a guy co -commercial, right, like 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.

1:08:19Same with reality TV, you've been right, it's called reality TV, it's definitely not reality. Social media, ads, all this stuff falls into the category. 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. 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, right? And that's the real challenge. That's really helpful. Something that I'm really curious about as you're chatting is by dance just released a really 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.

1:09:05Where does that fall amongst then 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 a larger company has released where it's able to do these dialogue or monologue videos, right? And I mean, you yourself, I mean, you've seen it. So I'm not going to describe it too much. But as you know, it's like highly expressive, right? Like it doesn't look like an Appetite video, right? It looks like. Yeah, that's why and that's because the technology that's used is fundamentally different.

1:09:40It'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 reference of how fast things are moving Oh my god. It's been so fast, right? Like amazing. There are like two years He's probably like a buddy year and a half two years, right? Wow I will link to that video and you could tell basically that video is the state of the art of AI video one to two years ago. And then we'll link to the this other omnie something every year.

1:10:15It's called yes, what it's like today. G's Louise. Okay, final question. And this is around something that I know you haven't really interesting inside on, which is that you see marketing using AI video basically is a is kind of the final frontier of how people will 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 the reality is that no matter how interesting, advanced, and amazing in technology is science fiction has become reality. We were talking about this.

1:10:55What was literally science fiction on TV is real now. Most people still don't even know about it to be honest. My parents live in India and they are the only ones in the neighborhood that know about chat GPT and they write these like amazing like notes to the community which is like with all these words and you know people are just like how did you like how did you get so good at writing right 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 right of course in tech circles everybody is talking about it but the reality is like it takes a while to get out there.

1:11:33And 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 what 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.

1:12:06Like, you know, don't show me this. And around that time, the technology got just about good enough that suddenly those comments stopped happening. Right. And suddenly you could get performance that was even better than actually recording with a person, because you could just try more things, but you could just generate 30, 40 possibilities, and one of them would win, and it would win more than the one created 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, is just a ton, and oftentimes it doesn't perform as well because it's been like rethought essentially.

1:12:57But 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 fly at the entire market, right? I think wherever there's dollars to be made saved, right? Like it will, it's inevitable, right? 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 just dope in 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. It's, I mean, the algorithm is in tailoring who's content to show you, but it's purely generating content that is completely catered to you, right?

1:13:43With people and everything completely catered to you, I don't think it's out of the question. It almost seems inevitable in a way, but that's not But that's not too far away, I think. That's actually very possibly real in five years to something like that. When I'm imagining it, because it's such a magic like a social network where it's people, because you usually want to know who these people are, I don't care. Random sharing status updates, but I can see a TikTok that is all in it. Exactly. Exactly. Just like content tuned to your loves and interests. Exactly. And just random videos. Wow. Yeah, because I do you know like you see a TikTok fee like you don't even know who's real or not today Right, this not like we right that that's how I would approach it I would just join TikTok and start uploading videos that are AI generated exactly And then and then build a whole network of that.

1:14:35Oh 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 time I'm all those founders, killing a 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 failed? At the beginning of the company, we actually had a bunch of time where we spent figuring out what we wanted to do. And I think it's like kind of an unconventional story almost in a way, because we started off the company.

1:15:12The first thing we did was build the captions app, right? like we launched the app, there was the first thing we did. Took two days to build, we put it out there, and it immediately took off, right? It was absolutely shocking because I built it on a weekend, we put it out there. I called my coach on around 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 anticlimactic in a way because we thought it would be a lot more time spent figuring out the product before that would happen.

1:15:49And so it felt like, wait, this can't be it, right? This can't be this fast, right? How did this happen? Right? So we got distracted because of that, because we were like, oh, okay. Well, maybe this is cool. It will kind of work. That's great. But we got to 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 were working on other projects and stuff I went back to my personal account just opened it and I saw that there was like $500 ,000 in there And I looked at a chart and it was just like growing the revenue was just growing completely on its own.

1:16:44No employees, no releases, no bug fixes, no customer support. There was like 2000 open support tickets that were unanswered for a year and a half. And the great review is just 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 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 would invest so much time in other things as well. But reset and we kind of got back on the track with captions. And literally, as soon as we started releasing the first features into it, it blew up.

1:17:23Like what looked like a vertical line at that time 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 continuous and it's just crazy. So we basically wasted about a year and a half. I love that. When you weigh 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 at the beginning and willing to and stuff.

1:17:56But basically, like the reason you thought it was nothing is it just adds captions to a video that you report it. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so I think you know we wanted like our thought was like we're gonna build a social network But first we got to 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 solid problem at the time What was funny is that that one's GPT and stuff start coming out.

1:18:31Like a lot of the things that were unsolved became solved very quickly, right? So timing was almost perfect. And that aligns to something you shit 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 have 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 my high schools and things like that. But as we've seen, it's very difficult to build a new social network. So let me just get your sense.

1:19:02Do 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 stores. It's not available anymore. more. 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 like, you know, the power of the social network in a way, right? It is hard to create and hard to kill.

1:19:37I mean, I think X is actually a great example of that too, right? A lot of movement and kind of happened there and it continues to work, I guess, somehow. So, you know, testament to that. My power of network effects, especially someone who wants to describe this so well, they're like Twitter slash X, they took, they changed the brand, they changed the team building it, they changed the VRL, like everything changed about it, except the network effect of the people in it. It's true. And now it's true. I just saw a story that they're making billions of dollars. Like he's actually turned it around and it's actually becoming a really profitable company.

1:20:16Wow. Yeah, I 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 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 so I do yeah, but I didn't read their bath there That's funny.

1:21:03Okay, cool. I like that. I want to ask more questions, but I'm going to keep going. Lighting round. Do you have a favor speaking of watching and listening to your favorite recent movie or TV show? You 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. There are sucks to watch the show because you know all the tricks that are about to happen. I'm there's not and I'm just like, why am I watching this? I know we're still going. I mean, for Otis Worth, it does seem like the show is going on a slightly different path.

1:21:31It is. It was also what annoyed me. And just like, what the hell? The made up, all is made up shit. I don't like that when I watch shows. I'm two reasons I'm not watching it. Don't worry about it. I didn't actually read the book, my wife read the book, and then she told me the story. Okay. I was worried. I was worried. Okay. Cool. Yeah. And Severance. Okay. Great. Love Severance. Next question. Do you have a favorite product you've recently discovered? that you really like. My favorite product honestly is linear, not gonna lie, just because it's so well designed, and it's so easy to use. I also like superhuman.

1:22:03I mean, these are obvious answers, but I do use these things every day, and 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 where I was 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 AI app for note -taking and perplexity. Perplexity, for a little. That's $2000 in value for the price of my newsletter, $200. Dallying to that.

1:22:40That's real value. 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 going back to sharing with friends or family and work during the 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, right? 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.

1:23:22And that actually is key. And so is the motto the easiest way is that the is that that's it. Yeah, because it's way to be the best is to be first. It's the first interesting. Okay. I have to resist following threats here because I want to make this lightning round. Okay. Final question. Just for fun. What's like the coolest, most wild AI video you've seen recently? Is there one that comes to mind of like, wow, that was something. I mean, honestly, I gotta say the omnium of stuff 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.

1:23:57There was like a little broccoli, like kind of delivering a little speech. Yeah, it was, it was animated by like an animator, you know? Just to 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. Mm -hmm. It's just like, we were saying, hey, G .I. is just going to come around. All right, cool. Cool. That's great. Yeah. Amazing. Go Rob, this was incredible. So insightful and so many levels. Two final questions. Where can folks find you and which are building if they want to learn more? And then how can listeners be useful to you?

1:24:30Awesome. 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's the time to join. We're really small early. We work together across the team. So there's going to 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. The PM's dream. Yeah.

1:25:07Like, yeah, like, I like that. That's a filter. Like, if 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 .com.

1:25:44See you in the next episode!