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)

0:00 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.

1:12 Today my guest is Gorov Misra. Gorov 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.

1:29 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 a hundred 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?

1:54 We also get in depth about how Snap as 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.

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4:43 to get a free MVP of your next product integration. Gorov, 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.

5:06 uh AI. And video. And just consumer and social apps. Also Going viral.

5:13 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.

5:26 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.

5:38 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 a 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

5:59 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? is just such a rare thing. And honestly, it's not gonna last forever, right? Like we are gonna catch up to this. But Just feels lucky to be, you know.

6:14 Movement. Awesome. When you said everything is working, I think what's an important distinction there is like The Building of the tool works.

6:23 Like the the tech is now there to build all these things that have not been possible before. The thing that is increasingly difficult. And um 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. Uh it's harder to get people to pay attention and stick with your product.

6:42 So I guess is there anything there you've learned? You've built a a a number of successful products. We'll talk about Snap and what you're doing now. If I 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. And part of it that's kind of what's driving a lot of this growth for a lot of companies, right? And

7:03 I think from like a user acquisition slash marketing perspective, right? Like In a world five or seven years ago. If you were making something novel And you went to users and you was like

7:14 Oh, if we got something better, right? Like people are gonna be like, Well, whatever, everybody says they got something better, right? I don't care. Right. But today And this is not, you know, uh probably the way you should do it, but You can go and just say like we've rethought this thing with AI.

7:28 Right. And a bunch of people will just be like, Well, how? Or maybe I should check this out, right? They'll just try it. Obviously you have to deliver on the promises, right? Like If you don't deliver. People will come in, they'll like play around a bunch and then just leave. Right.

7:42 But if you can truly deliver on the promises You know, 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 it.

7:54 A different time from that perspective. I do think also, you know, at the core of building products is solving problems. I think a lot of people sort of get caught up in this uh You know.

8:05 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, like if you're just building a playground and People play around in the playground and Than to leave after playing around.

8:18 It's not a business, right? Um so I think that is still key, right? You have to be solving real problems. I th as we were talking, I'm thinking about Like every day there's something like Something that would

8:31 Maybe a few years ago would 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 A G I one of these days or Superintelligence and everyone's gonna go Oh amazing and then okay, what's for dinner?

8:46 Isn't that already happening? Like think about like uh 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 um

8:57 Interstellar and they have like the TARS machine, right? And You're 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.

9:10 In a way that nobody could have imagined. That's science fiction has become reality. And I feel like nobody cares, right? In a way, like you would have expected the world to be turned upside down. But It feels like almost in a way so slow and like people are like yes, there's adoption is happening, but

9:26 Like 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 buildings actually

9:43 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? Hundred 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

10:03 effective AI like AI that solves real problems practical problems right and You know, the fundamentals haven't changed, right? In a way There's three steps to building products. You identify a user problem. You apply some technology to solve that problem.

10:20 But then finally you have some mechanism to find people who have that problem, right? 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

10:39 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 really endless, right? Like We've just begun and like our goal

10:52 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, the skills. the means to be able to create video and now they can't because

11:09 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 Yeah.

11:22 Uh easier said than done, but uh it's a good reminder that's 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? 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 how do I What do I do? It's too much.

11:44 it it is the 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 You know, things you could do and I mean, obviously prioritization is always an important skill set and has always been. But it's becoming an 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, right? And actually the easiest way to check for user demand.

12:08 is to just see what has virality, right? Usually what has virality what people want to 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 You know.

12:21 Maybe it's not maybe it's a one time use case, maybe it's not something that people would do repeatedly. Maybe it's not something you could build like a subscription business off of, but Oftentimes there's something, some core sort of element of it that has resonated with people. And if you can identify that core and then, you know, mold it into fitting into your business, it's actually a great way to identify like what actually works. And we have these tools right now. We don't have to build anything.

12:45 You can just kinda talk about it. And People will share it, share the idea. Right. And You can kinda Measure How

12:53 Well the product might be received. Even before we built anything, right? So It's a great tool we use for like prioritization. We spend a lot of time on social media. Obviously like our app is often used for social media. So

13:04 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

13:18 With people constantly hearing about all the things happening. Is there any Tools or processes or approaches you figured out to help people continue like stay focused, not get excited about every shiny new object and You know, actually ship things.

13:30 I mean, honestly, it's all about incrementality in a way, right? Like I think We do aim to ship every week, right? Engineering goal is every engineer should ship A marketable product. Every week.

13:44 And so what's a marketable product is a product that you can show to users. And a user might subscribe or pay for the app. just for that, or come come to the app essentially just for that. And that's why like table stakes features like you know. Let's say we're talking about like um

14:00 word processor or something. You know, if you had like auto format or you know, just table stake stuff like Justify Alignment or something. No one's gonna come to your word processor for justify alignment, right? Like You can market that, right.

14:13 Because it's obvious, right? 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. And 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 kinda use sort of these new tools and new abilities and marketing. So

14:34 We try to do every engineer One marketable feature per week. And yeah, a lot of that stuff may not work. Right, but a lot of it does work. And

14:43 We can figure out Obviously Where to put in more effort. Things that start to work. We double down on those things, build more.

14:51 People often complain because think about it, like in one week where we're shipping It's not complete. It's MVP. Truly. And we We slice

14:59 the hell out of it, right? Like we take the design and we cut, cut, cut until we can really say That it's gonna be useless if we cut any more. We get that out. And people come in and

15:10 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

15:20 That's a 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.

15:29 Cut 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.

15:41 Every engineer ships a sh marketable. feature or product every week. Yes.

15:48 There's some people listening to this and are 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. Yep. How do you maintain quality and make it all cohesive? I I imagine that's the big trade off. Just any tricks there for folks that wanna maybe start operating this way.

16:06 Quality is not something to compromise on most of the time, right? I think uh yes, there's strategic compromises on quality. But most of the time what you wanna do is have a bar for quality where people should come in and if they're using the feature, like it should work, right, of course, right. And The way to cut down on time And I think this is the mistake people make a lot of the time is

16:24 When Time is being pressured downward. A lot of times engineers, PMs, designers They will cut on quality. Rather than cutting on scope.

16:33 And actually you can cut on scope. It's actually You know? The the method that we use is We look at every element that's gonna take any time to build. And we just say, What if we remove this?

16:46 Is the product 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

17:03 Let's say We wanted to build something to Add an image, you know, on your video or something like that, right. And this is like, you know, a really basic idea. I kinda just made it up right now. And

17:15 You might imagine a design in which You import your image from your camera roll. But before it lands. uh in your video you might want to remove the background, right? You might wanna You know.

17:26 um change the hue and saturation or something like that. And you might expect like a designer to like build Design all of those features, right? And you kinda land a design. But you really quickly that You can cut all of that stuff, right? You can cut the background rule, you can cut the hue saturation.

17:41 All you really need is pick and then There might be a picker. We need a picker with a library with a lot of different you know, what if you want to pull from the cloud? What if you want to pull from you know, to the drive or something like that. Cut all that, right?

17:54 And essentially come down the core, which is just like You know. Native picker from the camera. Lands Straight in the video, no UI.

18:02 And that is already that should be useful. If that's not useful, then anything else built on top of that is also useless, right? So That's kinda how we might go about it. That last sentence is so key to this.

18:14 Like it's the core idea of Uh ship small i iterative. Features. before you invest a lot in something to first figure out is there anything there? Is this worth spending weeks on?

18:24 Totally. Coolest part of this method is like The first thing that the users will users will come in, they'll use the thing, they'll import images, and the first thing they'll complain about is what kinda bothers him the most. Is it human saturation? Is it background removal?

18:39 Is it like picking from the cloud, right? Like You'll just get the most complaints about that thing, people will be like And people will be Honest about it or they'll be like This subs, right? It doesn't even have

18:48 background removal. What kind of Image thing is this, right? And You can have to take that feedback and Just next week you can ship in a single week. All the things that the user's complaining about. Right. And then they're like, wow, this team is shipping like crazy so my problems so responsive.

19:04 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 at something. Very true. Very true. If nobody complains almost red flag, you know. A lot of those turning into kind of an archaeology of a modern uh product team and startup. So I I wanna keep digging. This is not where I was planning to go, but this is awesome. I love that this uh f approach of every engineer shipping something every week that's marketable.

19:32 connects directly to the 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. Look at this thing. Exactly. Yep. I I think it's definitely key. Right. And there's enough Area enough scope.

19:50 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 under underlying all this there is that scope available, right? Like the the roadmap almost seems unlimited, right? Like Just truly.

20:07 Okay, the other question I imagine People would be wondering is how do you work on longer term projects that take many weeks. There's also infrastructure, I guess, backend 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 anyone would care? Yep. So usually we'll dedicate time to that separately. So for example, usually Q four for us is infrastructure quarter.

20:30 Right. We just like Go and build all the infrastructure. Q four is generally You know, we've already delivered a ton of products and stuff. We're feeling pretty good about the rest of the year. Uh

20:40 Things are winding down. You know, obviously holidays and stuff coming up. And so we spend all that time pay the technical debt, right? I I actually think there's a unique thing to think here about like technical debt in general.

20:53 And You know? As a startup, your job is to take on technical debt. Right. Because That is how you operate faster.

21:00 than a bigger company, right? Bigger companies don't take on technical event. They pay it usually right away. Or they're paying back technical debt. From the days when they were a startup, right. And they took on a lot of it, right. Uh I mean Snaps I used to work at Snap and there was a lot of examples of that over there, right?

21:15 So Uh 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

21:26 the fiftieth engineer or the hundredth engineer or the five hundredth engineer can solve. Right. And if It is a problem that a future engineer can solve. We should

21:35 Use that future engineer now. Essentially that's what we're doing. And We're saying we're gonna Push this to somebody in the future.

21:43 And by the way. If the company fails. That engineer will never be hired, right? And all this won't matter anyways, right. So It's kinda like financial in many ways.

21:53 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 that and you can Create Buy something.

22:02 Probably more than you can afford without taking on debt, right? And it's the same thing. You can create products. that you wouldn't be able to build with a smaller team that you have by taking on strategic technical debt. It's very positive, actually. Wow, this is such a cool idea.

22:15 And where my mind goes is that future engineer may be an AI agent engineer. Exactly. Just solving problems. Just technical debting you. Exactly. Some engineer in the future. Yeah, five five hundredth engineer many years from now. will get a promotion because they solve this big problem that those Really bad.

22:34 You know, early engineers created it. So obviously there's a line to this. Like you don't wanna you know, there's like only so much debt you can take on before you become a core a big problem. Is there any thoughts on just that balance of just like how much is too much and how you know if it's enough for net future engineering just like Yeah. I mean I think generally the rule of thumb is, you know, every piece of debt that you take on, you have to pay interest on. Right. So

22:57 If there is debt that you've taken on, there's one percent or two percent 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.

23:11 Something's gonna go wrong with it. Every day one percent of your time will be taken away. If you take on enough debt. You'll be paying eighty or ninety percent 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

23:25 Oh, we're just keeping the lights on. We don't have any engines 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 runway. Right.

23:35 once you run out, once you've y 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 I love that. That's such a

23:48 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 you know, th 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

24:04 As long as it's possible. Two way door. You can kinda do whatever you want. I mean this is a classic. Methodology, right?

24:13 If it's a one day one way door, it's worth thinking about and sort of doing Uh Correctly. At least as much as the one way door would matter to you in the future. How much do your engineers use

24:24 cursor and tools like that to build like how much is AI? Helping your team move. A hundred percent. Yeah. I mean Everybody's using it. It's super helpful. I mean, uh even I'm using it honestly.

24:35 Um Yeah. There's It's a huge multiplier for the team, no doubt. And as a cursor specifically, is there anything else that you guys find useful? We are using cursor. Yep.

24:44 Uh we've tried all the different tools. We we're using Devon as well, which is another You know that's more advanced, I guess. You know, it's kinda Solving bugs. Yeah, Devin's basically I think it's five hundred bucks a month and it's like an AI engineer they just chat with and Slack. Exactly. Yep. And you know, in a way, these are the types of things that us as a startup can do that bigger companies can't just, you know.

25:04 Yeah. They can't just pull in Devin, right? They have few. You know get thirty lawyers 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 Devons working at three. Exactly. You can have multiple Devons. I I actually heard you can have a manager of Devons who's managing the Devons. I love the managers are all getting s layered like unlayered and then they're gonna have AI managers.

25:26 That's the ultimate. The ultimate bit in switch. Okay. Um Is there anything else that Uh in how you operate and build the way you build product.

25:37 Or 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 uh interesting in that way. Like we have a design team, we have a PM team. Uh I mean we're very early on those teams right now. Uh and obviously we have uh Engineering. And we have all the different surface areas, so

25:56 iOS, Android Web Right. Uh 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

26:09 You know, finding some sort of overall issue that we wanna take on, some new area or pillar we wanna 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.

26:25 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 You know, go over one and the next and the next, until we find interesting things and ideas that kinda 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

26:42 to focus on the metrics and the numbers and You know, things like that. So It's like Almost reversing the process a little bit.

26:49 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

26:59 Normally You have a single roadmap, right. And we actually divide a 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, right? So like There's all these surface areas where we receive user feedback. And we look at all that feedback.

27:15 And people will ask for features. Like they'll ask for like I want background removal. I 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 we'll prioritize it and we'll look at how many people it affects and

27:33 What the possible markets are. And like just get it done basically, right? One at a time. But These are all features that every competitor knows about. These are public. Like if a user's asking us for it.

27:45 They're asking everybody for it. And every team has essentially more or less the same list. And everybody's 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.

28:00 In terms of winning Uh against your competition. So 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.

28:12 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

28:25 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 it is at the core of it, right? Is like People are doing things one way.

28:39 If we're able to show them another way. And once they try it, they never go back. That's what a product is, right? That's success. Right. And

28:49 Those are the types of ideas that we put on the secret roadmap. These are things we never talk about publicly. Never tell anybody. And we announced them. And just Give them to users, right? And and see the effects.

29:00 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 not 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 like

29:16 Everybody comes up with ideas. We vote on the ideas, rank the ideas and then the prior 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 into these models and advancements and

29:36 We can get all that information together. And provide sort of a unique internal roadmap, right, where how are we gonna approach and uh create value out of sort of all these different uh advanced that are. So

29:49 That's her general. uh 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 gonna do that. I love just how calling it the secret road map makes it especially extra interesting. Exactly. It's a secret. It's a secret. I'm not gonna even gonna ask you what's on the secret roadmap, you can't tell me. Uh, what's an example of 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. Uh

30:21 One of the first sort of AI features we added. after sort of the app initially took off. Was this feature called eye contact? So This was a feature where

30:30 If Uh 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 kinda looks like a reading.

30:43 And you know, it's not uh great from like the perspective of the video itself or the viewer of the video. So we had this feature where it basically shifts her eyes to look at the camera. And we were actually the first company to build this. Uh we worked with NVIDIA on this. It's actually really uh interesting because

31:00 when we originally Reached out to NVIDIA about this. They They were kind of not sure why we needed this, right? And they actually gave it to us Uh pretty openly.

31:12 And We're excited about some sort of partnership. Of like how How can we get this technology into like something that could be useful. But we

31:20 saw sort of this creator use case, which was unique. And You know, 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

31:31 I'll be honest, like The video Uh 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.

31:44 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

31:57 This is it. Great idea. And now it's been like copy the hell out of like I think it's available basically. on every uh you know every app you can imagine.

32:06 For good reason, of course. But uh 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, so I'm gonna spend a little more time here. Does your team ever work with N AI LM to help brainstorm. I imagine that's where things will go where you're actually jamming like the AI.

32:23 agent is brainstorming along with you. Honestly, I would like for it to go there. Uh 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

32:37 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. It's a little bit abstract, right? And

32:54 I spend a lot of time with RPMs and designers like imparting anything that I understand and 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

33:15 Context m how do we 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

33:28 At Snap, for example. Right. Um I think one of the most unique things about Snap And The CEO Evan Spiegel. was that he had

33:37 And Unmatched understanding of the user. I think Years and years and years. of the company's existence past, right? Like almost a decade.

33:47 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.

33:58 Just hits after hits, right? And nobody would understand why. Everyone would line up and be like Great, like round of applause for everyone, right? But no one knew why. And You know, a great example of that is like

34:09 And a lot of this was figured out in retrospect too, like I think there was a point at which Snap declared that they're a camera company. And a lot of people laugh at that. It's like camera like what are we making, like digital cameras or something? Like, why is it a camera company? But

34:22 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

34:35 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.

34:45 Or anything else because it doesn't open to the camera. you're gonna open Snapchat, right, because you can capture it right away. And Instagram can never copy that because all their metrics are gonna go Down. As soon as they do that.

34:58 So You know, that is a Fundamental understanding, right. I figured this out much later, actually. You know.

35:05 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 gonna start, so I'm glad we circled back to uh your experience at Snap. So there isn't a I'm interested in this as If you think about social networks, you know this like Snap is basically the last social network.

35:23 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 this like a content platform. I don't think you're really interacting with people really. And that was twenty eleven when it launched. So it's been like fifteen years since the last social network. launch that has worked. And I think it's interesting also because there's rarely been

35:43 Uh a lot of uh insight into just how Snap operates. You were there really early. You're 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 you a lot of things you learn from Snap you're bringing to your company now. So let me just ask you I think you may have answered this, but I'm curious if there's something else here of just

36:01 Broadly. Uh maybe other than Ev's brain. What do you think was core to snap. being a successful consumer social

36:11 Right. There were a couple of different things that went well. I do think for a company like Snapchat or social network. The core product market fit. can be extremely strong, right? Like

36:23 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, right? That product market fit can be so strong sometimes.

36:37 That It can be hard to actually build something. Because you actually can't tell. If What you're building

36:44 Is what's responsible for growing the thing, or if it's actually hurting it. And you know, the studing despite what what you're doing basically, right. And I think because of that It actually sometimes. Teaches people the wrong things. It teaches people

36:58 That the You know, contrarian thing that they were doing was right when it was actually just wrong and The company just grew despite it, right? And

37:09 I think some of the things that Snap did well and it needed to do really. You know? Was to continue innovating, right? Because

37:18 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

37:33 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. Like 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. Right, but he surrounded himself with

37:51 the design team, right? That was sort of the central team in the company. And the design team was like ten, twelve people basically pretty small, even at you know five, six thousand employees, uh, it was that small. So wow. At five or six thousand employees, the design team was you said how many five or six people? Um

38:07 Ten, twelve people. Ten twelve. And uh all 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 VMs across the company. But

38:28 There was a long period of time, especially when the innovation was happening when Yeah, there were a much, much smaller number of fans and was very designer led. But At the same time, like I think that's slightly

38:39 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 kinda what the secret sauce was. they were able to not just design but also do the PM part and which is a big responsibility. It's a lot of work, especially for that many

38:54 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.

39:08 And no every change that was happening that was user impacting. A lot of changes were work being worked on that were like Infrastructure and like You know

39:16 types of things that kinda keep going on in the back end, where 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 where? And if you needed to add a UI to the app, you needed it designed.

39:32 And if there's no designers in the company except for a handful. would talk talk directly to the CEO. You kinda create a very granular control. over what's being launched in the company. Right. So everything needed to be approved by If you hadn't approved it.

39:45 It's not going out. So Oh, 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 And breaks through you almost need like a singular mind.

40:02 that continues to stay in the weeds on everything and the way Evan did that is is stay very close to the design team who basically ran 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

40:18 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 robot. It's it makes me think about Brian Cheski and like Airbnb is a consumer product. It's not a social network, but I wonder if that's just uh interesting insight just for consumer products.

40:36 They will generally do better if there's one part person with A really uh the right sort of combination of experiences, insights and just they continue to run. And own every detail.

40:46 Definitely. 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.

41:04 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 I think a lot of people look at this, they're like, Amazing, we're just gonna hire designers. We don't need all these DM PMs slow everything down, just tell us what not to build.

41:25 Can you just talk about like the level of these designers, like what allowed them to be as successful as they were without any PMs. Yeah. I mean I think What was expected from the designerists now was not just the ability to design f like, you know, the skill set of designing, which All of them were I C designers, by the way, right? And there were no reports, right? So

41:45 They weren't allowed to have reports, actually. And So they were designing everything everything themselves. But they also had to have the leadership skills Right.

41:56 you know, figure out the roadmap, write all the documents, work with the different teams. figure out s shipping schedules and You know Just know everything, not just sort of the technical and the engineering part, but you know.

42:09 the the UX and the UI And uh product needs and why are we doing this You know, uh the roadmap. There's just a ton to keep in in mind. And that means that it was a job that was uh

42:21 You know, just highly It was a very high workload. No doubt. Very high workload. Right. These people work really hard. And

42:29 They were paid highly too, I mean for what it's worth. They were paid. Wait. Higher Then

42:35 You would expect. designers or PMs or engineers to be paid. Right. With quarterly bonuses and Um All kinds of things.

42:43 That's interesting. And it reminds You know, people always say, Why don't E PMs? There's like someone has to do the work that a PM does. They're not sitting around. You know, doing nothing and Yeah. It's important to note the person that will take on the PME work. They have to be good at it and enjoy it. And a lot of designers don't want to be doing

42:59 writing docs and organizing stakeholders and getting at languages 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

43:22 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

43:35 I eventually joined the design team. I started at Snap as it on the engineering team. I eventually joined the design team. Um You know, over the last two years that was at Snap.

43:45 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.

43:56 Uh 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 do some engineering.

44:07 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

44:17 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 Five hundred engineers, a thousand engineers, two thousand engineers, three thousand right. Suddenly it just becomes very difficult to do everything. Like everything is a six month project or a one year project.

44:35 Every product is a Massive investment of like five hundred engineers and You know, 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 five hundred engineers for a year.

44:48 And it doesn't work, it's a big problem, right? You're gonna be in trouble. Especially for a company like Snap, where Everybody was copying what they're doing, so they had to constantly innovate. Create new stuff. And push the bounds, right? I think Evan's philosophy was always like he didn't fight the things that were getting copy, right? Stories got copied pretty much straight up.

45:05 Uh a lot of like a lot of things that Snap created got copied. But he was more of the mindset of like let's expand expand the pie. do something new and push the boundaries, right? We'll we'll we'll keep keep innovating, basically. And so to do that with that scale of a company becomes really hard. And so

45:21 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 You know, we can't go and build all these things. The idea was

45:33 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

45:47 Even test, for example, run a test in Australia. See how it's performing. You know, run a fest in a couple of high schools, just a couple of high schools, see what's you know, uh 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, right? It's like it's a prototype, essentially, right? It's what how a startup might build something. The same idea of

46:09 You know, what we're doing at our company now, right? Build it fast, get it out there. Right, get feedback, understand whether it works or not. And then work with the engineering team to build a scale. Yeah, once we understand the product and the dynamics. Then it makes sense to put on five hundred engineers for for six months to build it, right?

46:25 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 You know.

46:36 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 go talk to all these stakeholders and make get them on the same page. But one of the insights that we had which was unique was As the company gets bigger

46:54 You can actually create alignment. by causing internal virality. If there's enough people in the company It actually starts. Acting like a like a

47:06 Consumer based 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

47:19 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.

47:30 Right. And it would explode. Like it would just go viral inside the company. Like day after day we'd hear from You know. Engineers, then managers, then VPs, then eventually from heaven being like Oh my God, like everyone's talking about this. Why why am I the last one to hear about it, right?

47:47 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 it. 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

48:00 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?

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49:31 Coda.io slash Lenny. Another thread I want to follow up on is Is prototyping. Uh it feels like That is where a lot of PM

49:42 work is going is getting straight to a prototype versus design. Versus PRDs. And it feels like that's something that you did and worked super well. Like here's a 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 uh seeing where the feature's going just

50:00 Hundred percent. Right. Like getting things in people's hands, trying it out. Oftentimes like Unless you truly out, like Yeah, in design it can in theory look good with like All the perfect conditions, right? But when you actually use it, you realize it's actually not that useful, for example, right? Or when you give it to users

50:15 And some of this is like intuition, honestly, where like 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.

50:30 Feels like that's informed and tell me what I'm missing, but that feels like that's informed the ship a marketable feature every single week. This idea of Of getting Like design starting almost with design versus PM a lot of times. Uh

50:43 I'm curious why you don't even go straight to prototype in those cases. It just the tools aren't there yet or I mean, I think our shipping process is fast enough that Within a week we can get it out anyways, right. So 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 the triangle of a product team, the triad of PM engineer design.

51:01 Feels like you guys at Snap took like the corners. Not the corners, the line of that triangle and like You have design engineers. Yeah. Design PMs. Yeah.

51:11 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, sorry, engineer engineer PMs. Yeah. I mean engineering PMs should be a thing, I feel like

51:26 Or every engineer should strive to understand the product, right? Yeah. A lot of companies operate that way, like Stripe, I think they have hundreds of engineers before they hired the first PM because I think the engineers were doing what they did at Snap. Right. So it feels like at your company, you don't operate that way.

51:41 Uh he feels like FPM'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.

51:55 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.

52:04 And 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

52:14 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

52:26 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 if 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? Having a fundamental

52:45 broad understanding of the functions they're working with. And Captions We're actually Saying

52:51 Going even one step further than that, right. Why shouldn't the PM understand marketing? I think that's actually The biggest You know, opportunity.

52:59 For PMs to understand is like How 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.

53:13 Two marketing. In a way. And the reason is that if you think about marketing It's expanding the surface area of the product, right? It's like Search marketing is just

53:23 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.

53:36 You have a button in the app somewhere. You make it specific thing. And people show up. The funn 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.

53:49 Um 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. That's where The journey begins.

53:59 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 how do we Not do that today. It we should be. So

54:11 That's kinda how we think about stuff, right? But I think uh the core idea is that every function should understand every other function. Deeply. As much as possible.

54:20 And Maybe even to the level where they can operate in that function. And that just g Just increases

54:28 the likelihood that all decisions being made in the company at the micro level Will be optimized. Four. You know? All possible

54:37 You know, parts of the funnel that different people are essentially looking after, right? So That's something we think about quite a bit. I completely agree with that take. Uh it's interesting that it uh Irene B. Bryan is famous for

54:50 Changing the titles of all product managers to product marketing manager. Yep. For exactly this point. You should be doing the marketing, you shouldn't just be building the thing. Right. And like to me it's always that is always I've always assumed as a PM your job is to for this thing to

55:05 grow and get adopted and be loved. 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 and paid growth and SEO and Product marketing, messaging, positioning.

55:18 But I completely agree. That's such an important element of building a product. You're not just Building the thing, hope it works. Goodbye. Uh 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.

55:30 instinct and some experience. And At least the ability and um Instant to be able to learn it. Right. Yeah. Okay.

55:40 So I'm gonna share one other thing that I thought as you were talking that I think is really interesting. It comes up a bunch on this podcast. And this connects back to Ev and what we can learn from his Yep. His uh success.

55:51 Uh so Patrick Allson once tweeted this. Tweet that's really stuck with me. Which is it was around user research. And the way he described it is user research isn't Go to use the research that informs what you build.

56:04 And then you build that. It's instead You you do use a research and informs the mental model you have as a leader. A product builder. What

56:12 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 Eva's very much that like his head was And

56:22 learning what people need. Teens in particular. And it just worked. Yeah. I I think it's very spot on. I would say though Snap didn't like user research as a function for the longest time.

56:34 Like I think there was one user researcher in the company until Again, five thousand employees, like post IPO basically. Um But I think the people

56:45 that were making a lot of the product decisions and the CEO himself, of course. were very Steeped in sort of the how the user behaves and how they operate. Like they they understood that. I I do think like Snap also had a unique way of

57:00 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 and we try to try to as well. But

57:15 Essentially the idea at 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, but it's actually one of the reasons why Snap wasn't the company to discover

57:32 quote short form video, TikTok. Style stuff. 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 behavior, so which is

57:46 Exactly what Snap. was trying to avoid. We we don't want those behaviors to develop on the air. So For example you know, on Instagram stories you can share somebody else's stories to your followers, right? You could take

57:58 I can take your story and share it to my followers. You can't do that on staff. And there was a discussion where like should we do this? No, because It can enable bullying.

58:08 Right. I can Essentially I don't you know. You're not consenting to your thing being shared to my followers, right? And That's

58:16 Essentially bad, right? So A lot of it was done based on these 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 The cost of it is no matter How exciting it is. So

58:30 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 we something we worked on quite a bit.

58:39 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.

58:50 It w and it kinda died out because it didn't align align with the mission, essentially, right? But Happy to get into it. Yeah, that'd actually be really interesting.

58:59 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's that'd be awesome.

59:12 Yeah. I mean I think I don't know if you remember this, but There was this product called Our Stories. Um, 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.

59:28 And that actually started creating a lot of virality, right? Because Essentially people were post the 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.

59:44 And It had really good engagement. But At the end of the day, the problem was that We were against like algorithmic. Essentially uh ranking of those types of things. So there was a curation team that was looking through every single one.

59:56 So that there's no, you know, negative behaviors happen essentially. On the app. And that was just Not scalable. Even though it had really high engagement.

1:00:05 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 kinda ended up dying out.

1:00:16 But it look like what was an early version of TikTok, uh you know, before it had launched. So I think In a way though, it was a good thing because

1:00:27 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.

1:00:38 There is what you traditionally think of as like social networking where You share things with your friends. And by the way, like

1:00:45 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 I That one that time is over.

1:01:01 Virality now happens through a completely different mechanism. It happens through Essentially algorithms, right? that are deciding whether your piece of content is worth showing to an arbitrary number of people.

1:01:13 And This is the new age of social media, right? It's TikTok. It's um you know, YouTube shorts and Instagram reels and so on. And I think

1:01:23 Actually is changing the fundamental nature. of how people interact. Fundamental nature of how things go viral. And I think these

1:01:32 I actually think from a regulatory perspective we should be thinking these As differently. On one side you have You know, something where you're deciding Um you know, where

1:01:43 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, right? It's actually the company's voice. And so

1:01:53 Yeah, I don't know. Like should section two thirty apply to that? I have no idea. Maybe not. Maybe we're thinking about it the wrong way. Uh so Yeah.

1:02:01 Sho should be interesting. Well, all right. Well I'm out of my depth on the Paul on the legal legality decisions. So I'm gonna not Follow that thread. Uh, but I imagine there's something really interesting there. Actually, so you're talking about

1:02:14 This uh just like how much things are changing. Yeah. And I just wanted to follow that thread. And Specifically. You guys are at the cutting edge of

1:02:22 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. I'm curious, first of all, just how far you think we are from that, and second of all

1:02:36 implications on The world. Where you can just generate any video you want. It's fundamental. At the end of the day, like a time where Video.

1:02:46 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 eighteen hundreds Where There was no video or audio. Or or images, right.

1:02:58 And Everything was proven by he said, she said, for the most part. And It's possible that If

1:03:05 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 you know physical evidence

1:03:18 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.

1:03:26 How to solve this problem, right? I think it's gonna be a big problem. I do think today We're Almost there in terms of like Creating

1:03:35 Absolutely photo realistic video. I mean the very recent model is a 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.

1:03:50 It's still a couple years away. I also think that it is use case driven in a way. Like I think Thinking about Captions for a second.

1:03:59 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 think look at it today, it's all silent video, right? There's no Audio. And

1:04:11 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

1:04:24 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, you know, that are showing up.

1:04:39 to you know, set the scene or something like maybe You know, 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 You know, now two people are talking.

1:04:50 So Our goal is to solve the talking video problem, right? How do we create video? Where people are Delivering dialogue or monologue or yeah, things like that. And that's what we focus on.

1:05:01 Purely. And they're 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

1:05:11 Today's models Actually bifurcat 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.

1:05:25 It's actually На a technology that's affected by a sort of the transformer and diffusion model. Revolution or the large model revolution, essentially. This is a technology that exists separately.

1:05:35 And It It doesn't have anything to do with the AI. uh sort of growth happening right now. It just happens to produce semi realistic outputs.

1:05:44 Um But it actually kinda stops at some point because It's not clear how it becomes generalizable in every situation, right? You can't You know?

1:05:55 It has to be trained on people individually. So you might ingest a little bit of video view. And then you can generate you. And so It's a different technology and different

1:06:05 Outcome essentially. And a bunch of companies using this type of model. A bunch of companies are doing t general text to video with no audio today. These are large sort of generative models. And they have the capability to do more.

1:06:17 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 it is a hundred percent solvable. It's just like Somebody has to go do it and we haven't gotten there yet. Some you know, nobody has had the time to go and do that yet.

1:06:32 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.

1:06:45 We have uh 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.

1:07:05 What happened? You had fun. Whatever it was, it's for your memories, right? And there's like a non personal version of this, which is like oh, it's like a reporter like documenting You know, a a crime or, you know, something that happened or whatever it is, right? And who

1:07:18 Who was involved, what you know. Where was it? Maybe it was a a national disaster or something, right? And This is For history, like we we wanna see what happened, right?

1:07:27 And There's actually no benefit to Azure Video in any of this, right? Like actually All of this is it's just negative. It's all negative, right? Like if we are generating fake versions of reality to fool people. Like there's just nothing good about that, right? And We wanna stay away from that essentially.

1:07:44 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 then on the other side you have what we think of as like storytelling. Now, this could be ads, it could be social media posts, it could be T V movies like

1:08:02 All of these things are storytelling. They're designed for entertainment. They're designed for fun. And nobody believes like if you watch A Gyico commercial. Right, like You're not thinking that

1:08:12 The Gecko. is real selling insurance somewhere out there, right? Like you know that this is fabricated and it's for entertainment. And Same with reality TV, you've been right. It's called reality TV. It's definitely not reality. And you know. Social media

1:08:26 Ads, you know, all all this stuff kinda falls into the category. And If we can enable more people to tell stories. And entertain other people. And get their message out there, like That is pure positive. Like this is where we want to focus. And

1:08:39 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. Mm.

1:08:53 That's really helpful. Something that I'm really curious about as you're chatting is uh Byte 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. Where does that fall uh amongst the buckets you just described?

1:09:09 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.

1:09:22 where it's able to do sort of these dialogue 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

1:09:32 As you know, it's like highly expressive, right? Like it It doesn't look like an Aped Heart 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

1:09:50 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 it's amazing.

1:10:02 I think it's probably like about a year and a half, two years, right? Wow. We'll link to that video and then 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 the Southern Omni something, I forget what it's called.

1:10:15 I've just showing what it's like today. Jeez Louise. Okay. Final question and uh

1:10:24 And this is around something that I know you uh have a really interesting insight on which is that You see marketing using AI video basically as a It's kinda the final frontier of how people will experience AI is is marketing, is seeing it in marketing channels.

1:10:39 Talk about why you think that's the case and just what that looks like. It kinda 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.

1:10:51 Like You know, science fiction has become reality. We were talking about this, right? 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? Like My parents live in India.

1:11:03 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 and just like with all these words and you know, people are just like, How did you Like how did you get so good at writing?

1:11:16 Right, and they're 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.

1:11:26 Even for the most exciting things, right? 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 gonna succeed, they're gonna have to figure out how to market these products so that they can be what the ones to reach You know, all these people

1:11:42 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

1:11:51 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

1:12:07 You know, don't show me this. And Around that time the technology got just about good enough. That suddenly Those comments stop happening.

1:12:17 Right. And suddenly You could You know. Get performance that was even better.

1:12:24 than actually recording with a person. Because you could just try more things, but you could just Generate thirty, forty possibilities and you know, one of them would win. And it would win more than the one creative you can get from a person.

1:12:38 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 ev every market and rebuild it from scratch.

1:12:51 It's just Uh a ton. And oftentimes it doesn't perform as well because it's been like retention. But we found that Just translating it. uh with AI was able to get performance almost as good as the original in the original language, right? So

1:13:07 This is gonna be flawed the entire market, right? I think Wherever there's dollars to be made, it's saved, right? Like It will it's inevitable, right? It will be consumed and It will very quickly be

1:13:20 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. Okay.

1:13:29 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 isn't tailoring who's content to show you. But it's purely generating content. That you know

1:13:41 Is completely catered to you, right? With people And everything completely catered to you. I don't think it's out of the question. It al almost seems seems inevitable in a way. But

1:13:52 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 like is it it's hard to imagine like a social network where it's people'cause you usually want to know who these people are. Like I don't care randoms sharing status updates, but I can see a TikTok that is all I think.

1:14:12 Exactly. Just like content tuned to your loves and interests. Exactly. And just random Videos. Wow. Yeah. Because I mean, do you know like you see a TikTok feed like you don't even know who's real or not today, right? It's 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. Oh my god, the future is wild.

1:14:37 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 these founders killing it, building a billion dollar company.

1:14:49 Oh so awesome. Uh but they don't know when thing 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 Yeah.

1:14:59 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 a unconventional story almost.

1:15:10 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 a weekend, we put it out there.

1:15:26 I call my co founder on Monday and like It's at the top of the app store. We're getting like six hundred videos a day. Top of the app store. Yeah. And we didn't do anything. to enable that. It just kinda happened on its own. It was almost anticlimactic in a way because you know We thought it would be a lot.

1:15:45 more time spent figuring out the product before that would happen. And so it felt like wait. This can't be it, right? It can't be This fast, right? How how did this happen, right? So

1:15:57 We got distracted because of that, because we were like Oh, okay. Well Maybe d you know, this is cool. It it'll kinda work. That's great. But you know, we gotta figure out what the product is, right? And so we spent at least like a year, year and a half.

1:16:10 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 figure that out is captions was sitting on my personal account, so I wasn't checking that a lot.

1:16:25 And About a year and a half into the company. As we're working on other Projects and stuff. I went back to my personal account, just opened it and I saw that there was like

1:16:35 Five hundred thousand dollars in there. And I looked at a chart and it was just like growing. The revenue was just growing completely on its own. No employees, no releases, no bug fixes, no customer support. There was like two thousand open support tickets that were unanswered for a year and a half.

1:16:53 And Great review is just it's just going completely on its own. And so That was like a clear sign to me, it was like Oh my God. You

1:17:02 You should have been working on that, right? Like that product works. And so we Immediately had a meeting. You sp I mean it was tough to kinda figure out what the right path was at that point because we'd invest so much time in other things as well.

1:17:13 But Reset and we kinda You know, got back on the track of captions. And literally as soon as we started releasing the first features into it. it blew up. Like what look like a vertical line.

1:17:25 At that time. became a horizontal line. And the vertical the new vertical line was so vertical. that the or the the old vertical line became a horizontal line. Essentially.

1:17:35 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 w 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. Exactly. Yeah. For people that may not know what captions is, we'll I'll uh try to describe it at the beginning and we'll link to it and stuff, but

1:17:56 Uh basically like the reason you thought it was nothing. Is it just adds captions to a video that you recorded. Automatic caption. Exactly. Yeah. So I think You know, we wanted like our thought was like we're gonna 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.

1:18:15 And it seemed obvious that oh Speech to text, a solved problem. We should start with that. Right. So that's why we decided to start with, you know, captions. Because

1:18:25 It was a solved problem at the time. What was funny is that Um once GPT and stuff started camp coming out, like A lot of the things that were unsolved became solved very quickly, right. So Timing was almost perfect.

1:18:37 And that alliance is something you shared earlier, just so many of these problems that were not yet solved are now s possible. And the companies that are in The right place at the right time. benefit greatly. I've been just waiting for this part.

1:18:49 The other thing that I think is interesting about that story is you tried to build a social network. I think it was around like high schools and things like that. Uh 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?

1:19:04 for somebody to come around and build a new The next Facebook, the next Snap. Next whatever. I think it's definitely possible. I I do think let me tell you something.

1:19:12 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

1:19:23 people, there are thousands of people that are using it. Posting on it. And all the different things. Which actually kinda speaks to like You know?

1:19:32 the power of the social network in a way, right? It is Hard to create and hard to kill. I mean I think X is actually a great example of that too, right? A lot.

1:19:41 Movement. Kinda happened there and it continues to You know, work, I guess, somehow. So You know, testament to that. The power of network effects, especially. Someone he once described this so well they're like

1:19:53 Like Twitter slash X. They took they changed the brand, they changed the team building it. They changed the the URL. Like everything changed. About it. Except the network effect.

1:20:05 Of the people in it. It's true. And I I just saw a story that they're

1:20:11 Like making billions of dollars. Like he's actually turned it around and actually Becoming a really profitable company. Wow. Yeah, I just came out the other day. So Elon did it. Yeah. Well, with that we've reached our very exciting lightning round.

1:20:24 Okay. 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

1:20:35 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.

1:20:49 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. Uh but I love that you have books behind you. So I do. Yeah. That's funny. Okay, cool. I f I like there I wanna ask more questions, but I'm gonna keep going. Lightning round. Do you have a favor, 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 obvious I think everyone's watching these. There's a book

1:21:16 Uh or on Silo too. I read that. I read all of them. There's three of them. It sucks to watch the show'cause you know all the tricks that are about to happen. And there's no and I'm just like, why am I watching this? I know where people go. I mean, for what it's worth, it does seem like the show is going on a slightly different path. It is. It was all that was also what annoyed me. And just like what the h this is made up. All is made up shit. I don't like I don't like that when I watch the show. So two reasons I'm not watching it. Yeah, but don't worry about it. I didn't actually read the book. Uh my wife read the book and then she told me the story. Okay, okay. Well I was worried, I was worried.

1:21:47 Ha Okay, cool. Yeah, and separates. Okay, great. I love severance. Uh Next question. Do you have a favorite product? You've recently discovered that you really like?

1:21:55 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. I mean, these are obvious answers, but I do use these things every day. And

1:22:07 You know. It's hard to create products that You use every day and don't hate. So Props to them.

1:22:13 Cool. The I haven't announced this on the podcast yet, but this is a good time. Whoever's listening right now is I just launched a bundle. Or if you become a paid subscriber to my newsletter. You get Listen to this.

1:22:24 A year free. of linear And superhuman and notion. And granola, which is an incredible AI app for note taking. And perplexity. Perplexity grow.

1:22:35 Two thousand dollars in value for the price of my newsletter two hundred bucks. Deling to that. That'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.

1:22:49 I'll keep going. Next question. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often find yourself coming back to sharing with friends or family and work your life? I actually learnt this because someone else told me that I keep repeating this thing. But I have this sort of framework of

1:23:05 How I want to operate. Yeah, at work, basically, right. I I think I love To compete and to win. At the end of the day.

1:23:14 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.

1:23:22 And that Actually is key. And so is the motto the easiest way is that the is that the Okay, easiest way to be the best is to be first. First. Interesting. Okay. I I can I have to resist following threads here'cause I wanna make this lightning round.

1:23:37 Okay, final question, just for fun, is there 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 Omni Human stuff was pretty

1:23:50 was pretty cool. The bite dance video that we talked about. Yeah, exactly. I mean the broccoli Talk. I don't know if you saw that one. Little broccoli. Like kinda delivering a little speech. Oh.

1:24:03 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're probably just used to it, right? You're just like this is just normal. It's just like we were saying AGI is just gonna come around. Exactly. All right, cool. What's for dinner? Cool. That's great. Yep. Amazing.

1:24:21 Gorov, this was incredible. So insightful in so many levels. Two final questions. Where can folks find you and what you're 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.

1:24:37 So feel free to send me a message. And I think will be useful. I mean, we're building out our early product and design team, so If

1:24:46 A I video. Is interesting if consumer apps are interesting. Now's the time to join. We're really small. Early.

1:24:54 We work together. Uh across the team. So uh It is there's gonna be no better time to join, basically. And you get to ship a marketable feature every week.

1:25:03 Exactly. I mean that's a PM's dream. Think about it, right? The PM stream, yeah, like Like yeah, it 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.

1:25:15 Exactly. So awesome. All right, Gorov, thank you so much for being here. No, thank you. Appreciate it.

1:25:21 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 dot com.

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

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