Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search)

0:00 It feels like something has changed internally at Google. Just last week, Google Gemini hit the number one app in the app store. I feel like nobody saw this coming Google's mission around have any information be universally accessible. It's a very enduring, very motivating thing. And it feels like with the AI moment, we can actually achieve that more than ever before. What I'm feeling now is just an incredible sense of focus and urgency. Things have hit a tipping point where these models are now truly able to deliver. For consumers. As ChatGPT emerged over the past couple years as perplexity emerged, a lot of people were just like Google is dead. Nobody wants to sit through search results and click links. The core Google search isn't really changing, in my opinion, not seeing that. People come to search for just ridiculously wide set of things. They want Specific phone number. They want a price for something. They want to get directions. I think the vastness of that is underappreciated by many people. AI is expansionary. There's actually just more and more questions being asked and curiosity that can be fulfilled now with AI. We've built a lot of very successful products to use this phrase embodying relentless improvement. You need to be the physical manifestation of two pieces of One is just relentlessness, like just complete effort that is always exerted in a direction of positive productivity. And then the second is make things better. You have to always make things better. You're never content. You build and launch stories at Instagram. Back in the day it was quite controversial because it basically took what Snapchat was doing really well. And then like, hey, let's bring it to Instagram. Not every great

1:22 thing is gonna be invented by you. Facebook probably created the modern feed, but There's a feed for every single product. At the end of the day, you're kind of just robbing your user base of the opportunity to have a better product. Today my guest is Robbie Stein, Robbie's VPN product for Google search, and is responsible for essentially the entire Google search experience, including the new AI overviews, AI mode, multimodal AI experiences like Google Lens, the ranking algorithm, and a lot more. He's at the forefront of one of the biggest shifts in Google's history, and has already made a massive dent in Google's trajectory. He's also made a massive dent in the trajectory of Instagram, where he was head of product and led the launch of Instagram stories and reels and close friends, and through that grew Instagram to half a billion daily active users.

2:07 He's also on the founding team of Artifact with Mike Krieger and Kevin Sistrom, started two companies of his own. Very few people have had this level of impact on two global consumer products at this scale. And Robbie shares all of the biggest lessons that he's learned about building great and successful consumer products. Along with a bunch of insights into where Google is headed in the world of AI. A huge thank you to Bart Stein for suggesting topics for this conversation. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube.

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4:49 Robbie, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much for having me. This is such a cool week to be recording this podcast, so just last week. Gemini, Google Gemini hit the number one app in the app store. I have it right here. It's still number one in the app store. It's above Chat GPT.

5:06 Uh I feel like nobody saw this coming. I feel like everyone's always like, Google, what have you guys been doing? You guys build all this amazing tech. And where does why isn't why didn't you have anything working consumer? Why is JetGPT wing? Why are all these amazing companies doing better than Google? So first of all, let me just say congrats. Congrats on I know this isn't all you, but I imagine you had some part in this, so just congrats. Many, many more people. Yes. It feels like something has changed internally at Google. Feels like things are starting to really work, especially on the AI consumer side.

5:35 So in terms of the growth, is nanobanana the a source of a lot of this recent growth or is there something like that. People are really excited about nanobanana, to be clear. Very much so. Um but I think also people are recognizing that Yeah, there's just so many cool things that you could do um across the Google set of products. and and they become quite po powerful. And so I

5:53 I'm always shocked even for you know things in search people Like we think they're very obvious because they sit right in the core search experience. And then on on X, I'll go look and like, Oh, I just found out about this AI thing. And it it seems very obvious, but I think a lot of people are just discovering. Um quite how powerful these tools are now. Yeah, so to go one level deeper, to your point, there's been all this incredible tech. You guys wrote the original Transformers paper that have powered so much of the innovation, and it's just like, Where's Google been actually Wh why aren't they building the thing that's winning?

6:20 What has changed? Is it just like, okay, we need a Has there been like major reorgs? Has there been new leaders put in place? Is there just like a new philosophy? in the past couple years that have led to this moment where Gemini is now the top app in the world. Yeah, I mean look, I've been at Google now, this is you know, my second time at Google. So I started Google in two thousand seven. Done a bunch of things in between, and I've been back at Google now. So I can't speak to that whole period, you know, from many, many years back to today. But what I can tell you about how I'm what I'm feeling now is just.

6:46 An incredible sense of focus and urgency. to deliver great products quickly. And I think that that is in part leadership for sure. Um, I think the people who are We work very closely with our partners at DeepMind, we Google DeepMind, we work very closely, obviously, with cross the the organization. And it's just an incredible group of people and also an incredible group of

7:06 you know, researchers and technicers who can think about this for a while. And so when you have that Energy. And I think the product teams and the tech The research groups are working really closely together.

7:17 We're able to move and we're getting a lot done. And so I don't think there's any like one thing that has happened. I think that a lot of times people ascribe you know, a lot of momentum to to to a one time change or a single person. But I find a lot of this is actually this compounding effect.

7:31 When you think about Just every month. like ruthlessly improving the product or the models. And just in every day getting better. And then it kinda just hits this tipping point where people just like it, they use it more, they enjoy it. And I that's more of the feeling that I've had is just you know, we've had kind of I think the right investment and focus and then it it just hit a moment where

7:50 Yeah, we're people are seeing the effects of that now. As ChatGPT emerged over the past couple of years, as perplexity emerged in all these other chat bots. A lot of people were just like Google is dead. Nobody wants to sit through search results and click links. Why not just get your answer right there?

8:06 And it feels like that's not ac all happening. It feels like you guys are doing just fine. What can you share about just the I don't know the state of Google search specifically and then we'll talk about AI mode? Just like how is traffic going, how is search going, considering all these things are out there. And just what are you seeing in the data since the launch of Sage At GPT? Yeah. Well what's interesting is people come to search for just ridiculously wide set of things.

8:28 Like all kinds of things. They want specific phone number. They want a price for something. They want a Get directions. They want to find a Yeah. payment webpage for their taxes. Like every possible thing you can imagine. I think the vastness of that is underappreciated by many people.

8:43 What we see is that that doesn't it's not changing. Like AI hasn't really changed those those foundational needs in many ways. And what we're finding is that AI is expansionary. And so there's actually just more and more. questions being asked and curiosity that can be fulfilled now with AI.

8:58 And so that's that's where you get the growth. And so all like the core Google search isn't really changing, in my opinion. We're not seeing that. But you're getting this expansion moment. And so what we're seeing is a few examples is you can now take a picture of something and ask about anything you see. And Google Lens, one of the fastest growing products out there. It's growing seventy percent

9:16 um year over year increase in visual searches, which is already at like a massive scale. It's like billions and billions and billi of of searching in that way. But you can you take a picture of your shoes and say, Where can I buy this? Or take a picture of your homework, say, I am stuck on question two. And then just take a picture of your bookshelf and say, What are the books I should get based on these books? And AI and it can help you with those things now. It's just an example.

9:37 of I think why there's so much growth left and you know why we're so excited. Okay. So you're seeing uh you're not seeing a the death of search. No. And along the same lines, you guys recently launched AI mode, which I don't think enough people are talking about. I think you can get there google.com slash AI. Is that is that the right, Ultra. Okay, cool. Yep. So I've been playing with it uh as we were prepping for this conversation. It's really incredible. I asked it, uh what is the best newsletter on Product and growth and uh.

10:03 It's a Lenny's newsletter, so that's my email. Fantastic. Okay, one of one perfect email. It's perfect. Uh also just if you go to it, you should There's these recommendations for things to ask it that are just like Wait, how did you know I care about this stuff? So it's like help me switch to product management just like on the front page. I'm like how

10:22 How did you know? And it uh it tells you that it's based on your Google activity. Talk about just what people should know about AI mode, maybe what they don't. really understand about the power of this thing. I can tell you there's there's kind of three big components to what how we can think about AI search and kind of the next generation of search experiences. You know, one is obviously AI overviews, which are the the quick and fast AI you get at the top of the page, and many people have seen.

10:43 Um and that's obviously been a something growing very, very quickly. It's just when you ask a natural question, you just put it into Google, you get this AI now. It's really helpful for people. The second is around multimodal. So is visual search and lens. That's the other big piece. You go to the camera and Google app. and not seeing a bunch of growth. And then really with AI mode.

11:00 It really brings it all together. It creates an end to end frontier. uh search experience on state of the art models. to really truly let you ask anything of Google search. Um, you can go back and forth, you can have a conversation. And it taps into and is specially designed for search. So so what does that mean?

11:16 And one of the cool things that I think it does is It's able to understand all of this incredibly rich information. That's within Google. So there's fifty billion products in the Google shopping graph, for example. They're updated two billion times an hour by merchants with live prices. Right? You have 250 million places and maps.

11:31 You have all of the you know finance information. I mean just And then not not to mention, you have the entire context of the web and how to connect to it. So that you can get context but then go deeper. And you kinda like put all of that into this, um into this brain.

11:45 um that is effectively this way to talk to Google and get at this knowledge. And and that's really what what you can do now. And so you can ask anything. um on your mind and it'll use all of this information to hopeful give you super high quality and informed information um as best as we can. And and And and you can use it directly at this google.com slash AI. But it's also been integrated into our core experiences too.

12:07 So, you know, we announced you can get to it really easily. you know, if you actually f you can ask follow up questions of AI overviews right into AI mode now. Same for the uh lens stuff, take a picture. Takes it to AI modes, you can have this back. You can ask follow up questions and go there too. Um so it's increasingly in integrated experience into the core part of the product.

12:23 I imagine much of this is Wait and see how people use it. But What's the vision of how all these things connect is the idea. continue having this AI mode on the side.

12:33 Yeah, overviews at the top and then this when multi modal experience. Or is there a vision of somehow? pushing these together even more over time. I think there's an opportunity for these to come closer together. I think that's what AI mode represents, at least for the core AI experiences. But I I think of them as very complimentary to the core search. Product.

12:49 And so you should be able to not have to think about where you're asking a question ultimately. You just go to Google. And y today, if you put in whatever you want, we're actually starting to use um much of the power behind AI mode right in AI overviews. So you can just ask really hard. You could put a five sentence question right into Google search. You can try it. Um and then it should trigger

13:09 AI at the top, it's a preview, and you can go deeper into AI mode and have this back and forth. So that's how these things connect. Same for your your camera. So if you take a picture of something, like what's this plant? Or how do I buy these shoes? It should take you to an AI little preview. And then if you go deeper, again, it's powered by AI mode. You can have that back and forth. So You shouldn't have to like Think about that. It should feel like a consistent

13:29 Simple product experience, ultimately. Um, but obviously this is a new thing for us and so we wanted to start it in a way that people could use and give us feedback. you know, with with something like a direct uh entry point like Google.com slash AI. I recently had uh Brian Balfour in the podcast and he shared this quote that's really stuck with me that I think about as you talk about all this. Uh it was by Alex Rampel.

13:49 This idea that startups is a game of Getting distribution before incumbents can innovate fast enough. And it feels like you guys are finally there where it's like, Oh man, now here comes Google. I don't know if I have a question here, but it just feels like this is uh there's been almost time for people to find distribution and now it's like okay, now it's Google is coming. What we found is that people

14:08 are asking these questions in Google. Like they're trying to get this out of Google. And so if you can just have an AI that's powerful enough to answer a really hard calculation someone's trying to figure out. Or like take a picture of like multiple choice homework question for a chemistry question. People are doing this. Um, and so now that you have this really sophisticated AI that's based on our frontier models

14:26 We can just handle it. increasingly look more and more stuff for people. Um and so hopefully that's like A more natural. On ramp here.

14:34 And then we just need to make it easy enough for people to use'cause these are new products and People are used to using Google in a specific way. They type in keywords, which we call sometimes keyword E's. But you can actually use natural language in Google. That's the biggest shift we're seeing. People asking real long, hard, complex questions. You just don't think oh I can go to Google and type in like What's a great place for a date night? I already went to these four restaurants. I'm looking for outdoor dining and my friend has this allergy. You could put that into Google.

14:59 And and I think that's the kind of thing that we're excited to to continue to to make easy for people. It's interesting, we've come around to back in the day there was Ask Jeeves, which was this whole just ask a question as if you're asking a human and then it'll give you a really good answer. And then we moved into Google just no, no, just type the thing you want and figure out how Google likes it. And now we're back to okay, just ask your question and it'll give you a really good answer. Yeah, Jeeves was surprisingly prescient on that, huh? It's like they like had to really they had something like way before it's time um that we have books have rallied around now. Oh man. What's your take on uh this whole uh rise of AEO, GEO, which is kind of this evolution of SEO? I'm guessing your answer is gonna be just create awesome stuff and

15:40 Don't worry about it, but You know, there's a whole skill of getting to show up in these answers. Thoughts on what people should be thinking about here. Sure. I mean I can give you a little bit of under the hood like how this stuff works, because I do think that helps people understand what to do.

15:53 But you know when our AI constructs a response Um it's actually trying to it does something called Query Fan out. where the model uses Google search as a tool to find out to do other querying. So maybe you're asking about specific shoes, it'll add up and append all these other queries and like maybe dozens of queries and start Start searching basically in the background.

16:11 And and and it'll make requests to our data kind of back end. So if it needs real time information, it'll go do that. And so The end of the day, actually something's searching. It's it's not a person. But there's searches happening and then each search is paired with with content.

16:24 And so if for a given search your web page is designed to be extremely helpful. And then you can look up you know, Google's um human r uh rater guidelines. And read, you know, it's a very long document that's been thoughtfully crafted for decades now around you know, what makes great information. This is something Google has studied more than anyone. And it's like, do you satisfy the user intent of what they're trying to get? Do you have sources? Do you cite your information?

16:47 Um like is it original or is it repeating things that have been repeated five hundred times? And there's these best practices that I think still do largely apply. uh because it's gonna ultimately come down to in AI is doing research.

17:00 And finding information. and a lot of the core signals, is this a good piece of information for the question? They're still valid. They're still extremely valid and extremely useful and that will produce response where you're more likely to show up in those experiences now.

17:14 I think the only thing I would give advice to would be Think about what people are using AI for. I mentioned this as an expansionary moment, right? Like seems to be that people are asking a lot more questions now, particularly around things like advice or how to or more complex needs. Versus maybe You know, more simple things. And so

17:30 If I were a creator, I would be thinking, what kind of content is someone using AI for? And then how can my content be the best? For that given set of needs now. And I think that's a great thing.

17:41 That's a that's a s a really tangible way of thinking about it. It's interesting your point about how it goes in searches. When you use it, it's like searching a thousand pages or something like that. Uh, is that just a different core mechanic to how other popular chatbots work because the others don't Go search a bunch of websites as you're asking.

18:00 Yeah, this is something that we've done uniquely for our AI. Um it obviously has the ability to use parametric memory and and you know thinking and reasoning and all the things a model does. But one of the things that makes it unique for you know, designing it specifically for informational tasks. Like we wanted to be the best at informational needs, right? It's what Google's all about.

18:18 Um and so how does it find information? How does it know if information is right? How does it check its work? These are all things that we built into the model. And so there is a unique access to Google, Google's obviously it's part of Google search. So it's Google search signals. Everything from spam, like what's content that could be spam and we don't wanna Probably use in a response.

18:36 all the way to wow, this is like the most authoritative, helpful piece of information, we're gonna link to it and we're gonna explain hey according to This website. you know, check out that information and you're gonna go, you know, probably go see that yourself. So that's how we thought about designing this.

18:50 You worked on a lot of AI products at this point. Uh and it wasn't it's not just Google Artifact and Instagram. You did a lot of AI stuff. What's something you've learned about building AI products that you find maybe people don't truly stand maybe something that's surprised you by building successful AI products. I think the m the most recent one, and this is true the Something even within the last week or two.

19:12 Is that like It's so obvious how human like the interface is becoming with how you can communicate and steer AI. I think it used to be even just months back. That you had to do a lot of work. Like

19:25 Get the AI to do the thing you're trying to get it to do, right? You had to do these incantations, you had to prompt in a really specific way. Like people have all these hacks, like, hey, act like you're in a You know, you're a coach and you do these things and You have to really push it. Or to use a tool, um, you know, more on the technical side, you had to do Post training. Like you had to take this foundational model and you had to show it data, you had to train it and actually update its weights.

19:48 to do more sophisticated things.'Cause it just you you tell it Hey, here's like documentation for an API if you ever have a problem. Yeah. Ping this API, here's the date. Like as if it's like an engineer that you had that you could talk to. And it would have no idea what to do with that. Or it would have some idea on really

20:04 Wouldn't really do it. But increasingly you can just Use language. Like almost if you were to write up an order. You know, you could be like

20:12 Wow, like I here's a I'm I'm a new startup. Here's my data internally, here are the APIs to it, here's the schema and the URL, here's when to use it. By the way, make sure that if you get this kind of a question You like really make sure to get it right. And like that'll end up doing a lot in the model. Like the model's been now encoded to

20:30 to be able to say, Okay, I'm gonna like use more reasoning or thinking budget. for that kind of a question or I'm gonna use tools or code to code use, code execution. um in order to connect to this API I'm I'm told about. And that's a relatively new thing. So I think it's gonna

20:45 Open up. A lot of this democratization of accessing these models and building incredible things, because you don't even need to do a lot to to get the most sophisticated outcomes increasingly. I don't think you need to do a lot of this heavy duty fine tuning. Makes me think about I had this recent guest, Nasreen Shengel, on the podcast. She was a PM at Google. She worked on Google Meet. She was a delight PM working on and making products more delightful.

21:07 And she talked about the reason Google Meet Did so well and is now feels like it's killing Zoom. Is they compared the experience of Google Meet to a a human meeting. versus making it the best possible video conference. It's let's make this as good as a human experience. And that's interesting what you're talking about, how that's almost the goal here with the AI is just make it feel like you're just talking to a person.

21:27 Exactly. Might be obvious, but it's think about that. Okay. Let me uh let me zoom out and talk about just And let's talk about just broader

21:36 lessons you've learned over the course of your career. You've built a lot of Very successful products, which I I've shared in the intro at this point. Many, many not um also on the other side of the spectrum. We got the whole portfolio. Okay, perfect. We'll we'll talk about some of that. So I asked you as we were getting ready for this conversation, what's one thing you wanted to get across in this conversation? What's something you think would be really helpful for product builders to hear to help them build more successful products?

22:01 And he used this phrase embodying relentless improvement. Can you just talk about that? What does that mean? Why is this so important? Of course. I mean, I think that you need to be the physical manifestation. of two pieces of things. One is just relentlessness, like just complete effort, but is always exerted in a direction of positive productivity. And then the second is make things better. You have to always make things better. You're never content.

22:23 And I think this actually came out of a story, a little bit of a funny story where Um, I was at Instagram at the time doing a big um you know, all team meeting on my first. And they had this icebreaker. It's like what's one word to describe yourself? And so in the backstage area, I like texted my wife really quick. Like, hey, just one word to describe me, first thing that comes to your mind.

22:41 And she just wrote back Dissatisfied. And I was kinda chuckling in the in the back room,'cause I was first of all kind of offended'cause I was like it's not like Loving, caring, like like something good. And then she and then I saw like her little bubble thing, like she's like, Okay, there's more.

22:58 And then she wrote me this like really thoughtful thing that was like You know, it's not that um you're just unhappy. It's like you're you want the world to be better. You're driven out of a deep desire. It's it's that you feel the sense of dissatisfaction with what the world gives you. You wanna make it better. And you're pushed and motivated to do that.

23:17 And I thought about that after and it wasn't until we built a bunch of, you know, products, you know, some that didn't do well, some that have had a lot of really large success. Now billions of people use them. Where it felt like one of the big differences Um, obviously a lot of it is just the conditions of the product and the you know, a little bit of luck here and there too, but For the things that went well, there was always the spirit of just We're gonna get it eventually if we just make two more moves to make it

23:39 To make it better. And then eventually as I talked about before earlier in our conversation, you get this tipping point. where it just kinda tips over into being net useful to people because of just that amount of compounding effort that you put into something. 'Cause you're just always so You're the harshest critic and the most dissatisfied person in the room about your own work, basically.

23:56 And I think that's really meaningful. And And there's this other other incredible story that Tony Fidel told. um at at on a TED talk like ten years ago. Um you can look it up. Um I think it's something around think younger the um as a title.

24:10 And he talks about what it means that that as we grow up and age. And become grown ups. I have two little kids, so That's something I think about a lot. We habituate to everything, like we accept and we tolerate.

24:21 What the world gives us everywhere. And we just go, Oh, that kinda sucks. Oh well, we shrug our shoulders and we move on. But if you don't do that and you ask why? Like this sucks. Like why am I like tolerating this? And how do I make it better? He has this incredible story.

24:35 about going grocery shopping. And he goes on for like ten minutes about the story almost, it felt like, where He talks about getting a piece of fruit. like a plum or a peach, and how it has that sticker on it. Yeah, and it's got that sticker.

24:48 And while who put that sticker there? And then how you when you get home. You take your fruit out of your bag. You're ready to eat it. You're all excited. You stick your thumb under the sticker, it punctures the flesh. He goes into just incredible detail about how

25:03 It punctures the flesh of the of the fruit. It the sticker comes off. Now the fruit's bleeding. Then you like Flick the sticker. The sticker like misses the garbage.

25:14 You like bend over and pick it up. You like put the sticker back in and I was like wow, like that is embodying this. mentality, right? Of like Just why is this here? How can this be better? And I think the best product people, the best thinkers in the space. That's

25:28 That's how they think. Um, in my opinion. I imagine there are many examples of you doing this in the many products you worked on. Is there one that comes to mind as a good example of this? Uh in action of this actually.

25:41 working really well and delivering something really huge. I mean, honestly, like a big thing is working on AI mode. Like I think a lot of it was, you know, we um We saw in um AI overviews. That people were trying to ask harder questions. And we weren't able to answer a bunch of them or AI overviews just didn't show up.

25:59 And so, you know, a bunch of us sat around like, Why can't you just do this for everything? Like, like why can't we use You know, instead of saying, Oh, we we don't need to to to solve for that. Or you know, um, that's not something that's like in the most addressable next thing. It's like we actually saw people in the query stream. putting the words AI at the end of their queries because they're trying to like get the AI to like do the thing.

26:21 And so we would look at that and just be like this is ridiculous. We need to build something. Uh here. And um that was a big motive that was one of the big motivations was actually identifying that like user problem. Being very disgruntled.

26:35 On behalf of the user. Like I'm we're just failing the user every day. We are not helping them actually get their thing. And like kind of better understood. And we're gonna go build a whole thing because of it. Um because that's hard to do, by the way, to build all of that. Um but

26:49 It just was so obvious that that's what we needed to do. There's kinda two buckets of people, let's say. Uh hypothetically. One bucket is. Just make things better, make amazing experiences, you're gonna do great. There's another bucket that's like drive metrics, drive goals, hit our KPIs. I know what you're you're not saying is just work like work on things making th

27:07 Just make things better, relentlessly make things better. How do you just think about, I guess, that overlap of okay, makes things better, but also here's what we really here's the strategy, here's the vision. How do you think that's the thing that you're I don't think of them as an or like I think they have to be the like intersected. Because basically the way to think way I think about it is You actually start with

27:26 you know, a problem or the inverse of that, which is a vision. uh but it they're connected. It's like people most great companies, most great products come out of a problem. But out of the problem becomes like here's a better way. What if you Instead of this. Crappy thing.

27:39 or way of living or thing that we all tolerate and accept. you know, some entrepreneur comes up and says What if we did this other thing? And then it's what comes out of this dissatisfaction and this this sense of better that you need to make things better. But then you're gonna build.

27:53 At the end of the day, you need your instrumentation. to know if you're on the right track. And that's where you bring tools. Like, okay, you build your first version of the product. Do people like it? It's like and then each product goes through its journey. So

28:06 the way to but understand people like it is you you scrutinize Typically, um you talk to people. Um, but you also add some analytical tools there. You might look at something like a J curve. So this is the retention. The percentage of people still using the product. Day seven.

28:20 Day thirty, day ninety. And does it flatten? Or do people just drip out of there. Like over time it's it's just not inside exciting people and that would go to zero if on a long enough timeline No one's gonna use it.

28:32 You don't get past that, your toast. Right. Then okay, some people are doing it. Okay, great. Um We need more people to do it and it needs to be good enough that people talk about it.

28:41 And then it grows. And to like another Okay. And then there's another one, which is like, Well, how big can this get, actually? Is it a small thing? Is it a medium thing? And I think most companies like you have like an aspiration of being big.

28:52 But you can't start big. Everyone's gotta go through that journey. No product. has started big. Even once that get big really quickly. Even after even like a week quickly. They had something and then even internally they started small. They started small with a hundred, two to one hundred people. And so you have to be metrics focused, I think, in order to know if you're doing the right thing.

29:09 And then the other thing is on the other side of the spectrum, you're running a big thing. And they're You need metrics to be your guide. Like if your product let's say Okay, let's say our core metric's down. Five percent this week.

29:19 It's like, Well, what's going on? Right. And so you be really close to root cause analysis there and say, Well, actually it turns out that it's an issue. Is it in a region? Is it on a device? Is it in a demographic? Is it in a use case? Where does my problem lie? And then when you get to it You understand the problem and then you can this improvement thing comes back where it's like

29:38 Okay, I'm gonna make that. I'm gonna fix that thing. I'm gonna What's the treatment for that? That disease. Um and you get and then you're back to growth again.

29:45 And so you kinda need this and you always are looking at What's the s what's the system that I'm working on. And what what are my instruments? I'm a pilot. To know if this thing is going and flying correctly.

29:57 But then it doesn't tell you exactly what to do. You have to think for yourself how to make it better. I mean, can just show you a little bit of the way. I love that you just gave a master class on just how to prioritize and pick what to work on. I want to go on a quick tangent. Speaking of products that have done really well and become really big, uh, stories, you build and launch stories at Instagram.

30:17 It's a quite an infamous product launch back in the day, it was quite controversial because Uh It basically took what Snapchat was doing really well and then like, Hey, let's bring it to Instagram and it Was not great for Snapchat. Now that it was

30:32 So long ago. And just it's so far in the past. Uh I'm so curious just to hear About that time. uh reflecting on just that decision, what you guys talked about, how you decided to go ahead with that, and anything just I don't know, you think about looking back at that.

30:47 I think there's a couple of really important lessons from that launch. Um and I mean we went on afterwards to launch reels, um, a bunch of updates to direct messaging, we had feed ranking. I mean, there was just a huge error. There when I was there between Yeah, two thousand sixteen and twenty twenty one or so. where just so many products got built. And I think An interesting lesson in all of those and particularly in stories was you have to really understand

31:10 Why someone uses your product. And know when something is Actually an existential question. because there's just a better format or a different way of doing something. That has

31:23 worked and works and you need to figure out what that might mean for you. 'Cause not every great thing is gonna be invented by you, but I think that A lot of these things are You know, they're rel that they can become formats that you can make your own. And you need to learn from the world and what's happening out there in order for your product to always give the best thing to its users. And so for stories,

31:42 Yeah, we looked at Instagram, like what's the point of Instagram? It's it is sharing your life and connecting with people ultimately. And if there's a way to do that, that you know, lowers the pressure because it doesn't have likes. Or it's this ephemeral format and it's optimized well for for mobile because it's this full screen experience. Like

32:00 It's it's a really Great format, and kudos to Snapchat for inventing it. You know, we didn't think of that as a uh like a deterrent that we had to go make like You know, Instagram Photo.

32:13 clock. And actually there were early versions of this idea. Where you try to take the core Instagram feed and make it ephemeral. And whenever you try to mix a core product that's very cemented in someone's mind. and physically looks a specific way and you're trying to make contort it. To do something new.

32:28 It's usually a bad recipe. Uh, and so we knew we needed to do something um new. And then it it was so clearly was critical to the core essence of what the product could do, it could fit in naturally. But the question was How do we make it our own? And how would we how do we build on this? And so if you think there were a bunch of things that we did that made it Instagram.

32:46 Um and so For example It had different creative tools and it had things like Neon Drawing and these like really sophisticated filters that people loved. you know, we also looked at this talk about being dissatisfied. Like people took A lot of times they would they want their main camera to take a picture of something.

33:01 And then they wanna upload it to Instagram because they wanna save it and they want to be in a very high quality, high resolution photo because it's a memory. And Snapchat at the time didn't allow you to upload photos. It was like you have to use a Snap camera. And so we made a bunch of decisions like that. Or why don't you just let people upload their can their photo? Like what like why Like this is the dis back to the dissatisfied point. Like that's frustrating.

33:22 You know, or there's another example where You couldn't pause. Um if you like were consuming a story. You couldn't pause it. It just would like go through and be done. Cause it was like this ephemeral thing and you wanted to create safety. Like, why can't you just pause like it's it goes by too fast. So we added this pause. It's such a small thing, but you

33:38 Put your finger down to pause the story now. And so there were a whole set of those things that were shipped. That made stories feel Instagram wasn't like you just Had some other thing. And then it turns out that worked incredibly well. And so so much to the

33:50 The fact that someone on the team mentioned that They always felt like At the time. Didn't realize it, but it was almost like it was missing the story sized holes at the top of the page. And it like completed the product in some weird way for them.

34:03 And so that was an I think an important lesson. Instagram definitely got a lot of hate for that moment to sp for a lot of from a lot of founders. It's just like hey, you guys just stole this idea and that sucks. How did you guys just deal with that internally? It was just this is, you know, we gotta do this, we gotta focus on our shell holders and grow this thing and that's how it goes sometimes. I mean, I think it's more that we're focused on our our people our users and and the people who are loving Instagram and it's denying them the opportunity to have an easy way to just share a photo and like have the thing go away. You know, I mean That's ultimately what we were trying to add.

34:32 At the end of the day, that is a format that people adopt. In the same way that think about feeds, you know, I think we talked about this at the time too when we shipped it. Like you know, Facebook. Probably created the modern feed. But There's a feed for every single product, right? And there's a LinkedIn feed and there's a

34:48 There's a feed for um DoorDash. Core primitives quickly. And formats and then at the end of the day, you're kind of just robbing your user base of an opportunity to have a better product. If you're not

35:04 making the best possible product for your use cases and for Instagram is used differently. Like people use Instagram differently than they use other products. Um, it turns out that there were these experiences in WhatsApp. And in Messenger. And in many other social products over time. And they all were used differently, actually. Um, which is which is fascinating. So something else I wanna talk about is you you came into two products that were already doing really well. Instagram,

35:27 And Google. And on the Instagram side of transformative growth and and improvement. Google is it's happening. We're in the middle of the improvement and growth you're you're driving. Uh Not a lot of people get to do this where they go into an existing product, make it

35:41 grow significantly. lot of people want to do this. They have a product that's been around for a long time. Hey, how do we make this grow and be more successful? Is there anything specifically that you've learned about just coming into an existing product. figure out where the big opportunities are and then just like hockey sticking growth because this is what everyone wants to do.

35:57 There's a couple lessons here. And I think by the way, the first lesson is to be humble always, because it's extremely incredible your work on products that have such impact on people. And I I I view product like golf. Like you're always one stroke away from shanking. Yeah. And like as soon as you think you're good.

36:14 You're not. Like you don't know anything, right? The world changes quickly. You have to always be a servant to your user base and the people that are out there and and learn from them and and So the first thing I always do and think about is you get in touch in terms of like why are people using this product. Um and where are the areas of growth. And so usually even in a in a big product or a mature in a complex system.

36:34 There's an a there's a part of it that's growing. There's part of it that's mature. There could be a part of it that's that's that's declining or or isn't growing as much. Yeah, I I certainly in Instagram there's been a big shift. over the years of sharing into p public very large broadcast. posts and feed into these more lightweight formats like stories and DM, actually private sharing as well.

36:53 And so you have to observe that and can't because the Every every month, every year. The world changes, people's needs change. And so first thing you do is you you kind of get a sense of what do people want out of this product? What's its true essence. you know, I think a lot about this jobs to be done framework, which is one of the things that

37:09 You know I'm I'm A big fan of and and you know, Clayton Christensen's book on competing against luck. um is one of my favorite books on this topic. where you have to really be a student of causation. Why is someone

37:21 using this product. Like what what are they doing with it? Um, and what are they trying to get done with it? And that usually leads you to Kind of bigger next stage ideas. And it it it it it removes this belief that you need to solve the problem with the current

37:36 Tools. So in the Instagram equ uh version it was like You have to make a square photo. do more for people, right? Like that would be like how you increment the product. Um or in Google's example.

37:47 There's like something very specific with the core search experience that needs to change. It's like a subtle tweak. you know, you have to kinda think well, what's the bing someone's trying like someone's trying to ask a really hard question out of Google. Like what's the best way to do that for them? And so it makes you think more first principled. And that's the first basis of this.

38:04 And then once from first principles, you're like, Oh, this newer thing. And it could be a shift, it could be a new form in many ways. the AI version of Google and stories and Reels, they're they're all kind of similar in that they're new formats in the world that people are expecting and wanting more of. And by adding them. It becomes complimentary, not replacement.

38:22 And in both cases, like stories didn't replace Instagram. It became it expanded. in the same way we're seeing for AI. And so what's interesting is Then you think, well, how do I bring that into my world, right? You have this big mature product. And the best way I've seen is by making it complimentary.

38:37 having it be a core part of the experience, but clearly defined as a distinctive thing that has its own attributes associated with it. Because people think spatially. So You have a feed and you have holes with pictures. They expect those holes to do things. And so if you'd make one of those holes with a little clock and that one goes away the next day, or you can't like it, or it ha it operates differently than the other parts of your feed.

38:57 It's gonna be super confusing for people. It sucks. Um and so you have to add product carefully. But it needs to feel coherent, but different. So stories, you know, it has similar aesthetic. It obviously uses your camera roll in the same way. It works, you can share it in DM, it works in the system. But it has a different primitive in the same way Google AI

39:14 you know, it's a full page experience that you can pop out now. You can have follow up conversation with it, right? People have a set of expectations you need to snap to for those use cases. And then you were constantly learning. make these new products work within your world.

39:30 And you never just want to snap in something that's working. You have to make it work for your users, your expectations. And um what people are trying to do with your product. It's actually one of the things I see people fail on the most is they assume Something working for one system will work in your world. But Someone else's system

39:47 is on totally like the types of users they have, w they're the consumer expectation of their product that's a totally different set of expectations. So you have to Kind of respect that. And and say what can we learn from that and bring it here. So That was I guess you were to talk about the kind of the method that I've seen now twice, I guess.

40:06 That's kind of how these have these products have developed. I l I love this topic. It makes me think about just this balance people always try to find between optimizing something they've already got. versus trying to take a big bet on something. And you've done you've had so many examples where you've taken a big bet on something totally new and it's worked out incredibly well. You have kind of just a heuristic and how you structure teams and prioritize across okay, we have all amazing Google sort experience today.

40:31 What percentage resources go into improving that versus trying something totally new? That's one where I actually do feel like the s the more analytical systematic thinking helps a lot. Because you kind of if you're trying to produce um value in the world. You're try you you want to quantify it some way. And so if you're seeing this growth curve. And you're trying to understand why people are using it more and more to liken this product. And when products are young, they grow. And then eventually things mature.

40:53 And that you can break out product suites and different features of products all along the same way. Certain features that are going fast, other features that are not. You get to these points of just diminishing marginal return in every system. Where it feels like you could put fifty people on this project. Like in it, it's just not gonna dramatically move the needle.

41:11 And so Part of it is this bottoms up thing with your own team. being really thoughtful about What is the expected value? of that investment.

41:19 And knowing when it's starting to approach Zero, like diminishing marginal return. And then when that happens, these are these moments that usually coincide with something fundamental changing. Either people's expectations externally, market saturation. There's something happening.

41:33 Where you need to adjust. And you then find your next growth driver or set of drivers. And that's where you need to go more first principle and try these new things more.

41:44 And then when you land a new thing, that creates this new little growth engine. And then you put people on it and you optimize it because you get the you're getting big like each change is like ten percent win, twenty percent win, four percent win. And it's clearly like still has so much value and headroom and pe and to make it better for people. And you can see that in the data. And and so that's becoming and I talked about this instrumentation.

42:06 It becomes your b your guide for for knowing if you're making good calls. Otherwise if you don't know where you're headed and you don't have a goal of where you're trying to do it more quantitatively. It's really hard to know if the thing you're doing is is mattering. To anyone? 'Cause you'll just I mean, they kind of made the product better, but like

42:23 Does anyone using it? Does anyone care? Or we just Congratulating ourselves. Like ultimately you want to have impact on people and that's what matters. So it's essentially tracking S curves on every product and Understanding if you're in the plateau and if it's time to invest heavily somewhere else. Yes.

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43:36 That's O R K E S dot IO slash Lenny. Maybe it would be helpful to talk about the journey of AI mode. Just like how it emerged and the steps that you took to Now it's just such a big part of the Google search experience. When did this start? How did you decide this is worth betting on?

43:52 And then what were kind of the steps to get it? Further and further ruled out. I mean, I think it it probably started earlier on with AI overviews, actually, which was the first way we brought kind of generative AI. To search. And in that world, we noticed that people are asking these these questions. And many people were actually trying to put natural language questions into search. And so how can you

44:11 provide humful context, links to go deeper, and make an AI that made sense for Google. And so that was our first version of these models that could do this for people. And then By building into that and seeing kind of this observation.

44:24 around people wanting more of it, direct access to it, and then being able to ask follow up questions, like you kinda need a new modality. Like it's not gonna be really hard to build all of that within the construct of the core search experience. And so That led us to have a form a small team. uh folks, a few people

44:42 that were like technical leaders. Um a couple of designers, very small. To just prove out like what if there was on the almost like Blank screen. Like delete. Uh like like make a little like like a fresh dock with a blinker. Like what if there's a new

44:54 A new page. And you can ask the question. You can ask whatever you want of it. You can tap right into the AI. that you know was originally powering powering um you know this top of the experience In search, but we

45:06 invested in making it uh much more uh more powerful in the ways I described before. It was in it it could it could search for you, it had reasoning. as a part of its model capability. It had multi turn contact. So if you had a conversation with it, it could keep track of that. Context. So it had some unique pieces to it.

45:23 And what would happen if we tried that quickly? And we basically got I mean, this was probably like five to ten people worth of people originally. And how long ago was this team formed? This was probably over the last last year. Like last summer. Wow. Oh, until about a year ago. Yeah, maybe about a year ago. Was where maybe it's it it started.

45:40 And and we were really kind of plugging away on it. And then we we kinda saw this little version of it emerge. That Wasn't very good. But it had this moments of brilliance. And it's actually again, it's kinda like golf, where like You hit the perfect shot.

45:56 And you're like, Oh my God, like you get that feeling where it's just everything worked. And like I asked it a question about I forget I was like I was doing something with my daughter and I was planning an experience and it found all this like incredibly useful information about park information. It had site it had links to like go to the site and confirm a bunch of things. Um it had Google Maps information that like for my daughter you could You know, walk up it had like it was walkable.

46:19 Like there was early examples like this. Where It was just it blew me away what it could do what it could find and how helpful it was. And so it gave us conviction that we sh we should go.

46:31 And and and go go further. And obviously there's lots of people involved in this. type of a decision, tons of support from leaders across the organization. But it just has like a little working team Yeah. That initi you gotta you gotta build something.

46:44 And then you have to feel it yourself. And it's very entrepreneurial in that way. And then when you see it tangibly, you're like We need like What's what's a version of that that's good? And that could work.

46:55 And that gave you gave you hope and so then we we basically built it out and and built the first version that was that launched in labs, basically. So the the first big milestone was this is working. It was just a qualitative experience of like oh wow, this has Really inter this there's magic here. Yes, it's it's working. And then we did bring it before labs actually to trusted tester group. There were maybe like five hundred people externally that we added on to it and we had things with them. Some of them were fr actually had friends and family. We tried to treat it a little more like a startup. Where is we want we feel like you gotta have people test it that tell you the truth.

47:24 And tell you when it sucks,'cause it probably does. And then they message you. So I had a friend who was loving it, um, but also hating it for lots of good reasons. And would just be messaging me all the time, screenshots. This broke, this broke, this makes no sense. And so we kinda had that for a while. And then we got to a point where it was feeling good.

47:43 you know, the trusted testers were liking it, reporting good stuff. And then we brought it to this labs moment where anyone could turn it on. And then we used that to make it better with real query data. Like we could actually see what people were using it for and more scale. And so that could tune it to make it better. And then we launched it. I owe to everyone, um, well, at least in the US. And then we've now been on this journey to

48:01 expand it to all countries and languages and Um have more people be able to access it. It's incredible that Google went Roughly in a year from idea to a a significant change to the search experience that's AI powered.

48:14 I think this is not what people imagine Google is like and it feels like things are different and things have changed in how you guys operate. Uh What what has allowed this to happen so quickly? Yeah, wha what's changed? Is it just like top down leadership? We need to get shit done or is is there something more? No, I mean I think it's interesting how how organizations change. I think

48:34 I think when you feel like there is an A moment in time. That is clearly critical to deliver for people. Like people are trying to get information from Google. We are not. able to answer certain things or help people in certain ways. And there's this technology that can do it. That creates urgency.

48:50 Um, and obviously there's lots of people building lots of things and and the market's crazy and there's lots of things shipping all the time. And so there's a there's a really exciting and healthy Moment. for us to build and build quickly. And I think

49:02 It's just exciting to be able to capture that opportunity. People believe, and I certainly believe. that the next years or so of product is gonna kind of establish how people use the next wave of products from for many years. And so at least

49:17 I mean I can only speak for myself, like I feel this obligation to our users to give them the best version of Google that's powered by AI and that gives them the full knowledge of everything Google knows about the world and information. To people and accessible with AI. So that's that's that's driving a lot of the the excitement.

49:34 Yeah, it's such a good point that Uh, people are building their new habits. Like it's wild how many people just now rely on Chat GPT and how quickly that happened and I could see Google being a worried that oh shit, everyone's changing their habit from searching Google to searching chat GPT. And the fact that now Gemini is number one. I was actually looking at the list of top so in the top 15 apps, Google is I think five of them.

49:56 A third. That's out of control. Killing it. When people look at AI mode versus a chat GPT or Claude or P What's even say perplexity. What's the way you think about the positioning of AI mode versus these other tools? Is it like trying to be a direct competitor or is it just like no, it's actually pretty different and here's what it's for?

50:15 Yeah, I mean AI mode's a way to ask search anything you want. It's for inf it's designed and specially created for information. And so really it's it's it should give incredible helmful responses for the things that people come to Google for. So think about Yeah, you're planning um a trip. You're

50:31 trying to buy something, you're working through a question for uh Your research project. Like it needs information and and that's really it's it's less focused on things like creativity. Although there's things it can do that are nice there. It can help you with just like any any kind of um core AI product. Like you can ask it to rewrite something for you, it'll do that. But we are less focused on

50:51 you know, creativity, productivity, like upload a spreadsheet and like output graphs for me. Like we're not focused on that. Like we're really focused on what people use Google for. and making an AI for that. So that you can come to Google, ask whatever you want. And get. Everless information about that.

51:05 Um and context and links to then also verify, dig in, and go to the to the authoritative sources ultimately that people want and when we hear from people. So those are ends up becoming the distinct qualities of this product versus Yeah, more of like a chat bot, maybe you would talk to it, like you maybe even have like a bit of like a hey, how are you doing today with that chat bot that Yeah, we have some of that. We see that a little bit, but people are usually coming for information. They're trying to learn something.

51:28 And that we we focused our product on that. Got it. Okay. AI mode is not your therapist. Yeah. Maybe zooming out again a little bit. And reflecting on all the amazing products you've worked on, all the places you've worked, if you had to

51:42 Pick. Two or three just core product principles or philosophies. That of helps you build such amazing and successful products.

51:51 What would those be? What comes to mind? I mean there's there's typically Three things I think about. Um Like if I already read a book.

51:58 About like How to how to build great products. There'd be like three chapters. I mean probably more than that, but three chapters. I love that. I love the how shirt that would be. I that's the idea. I mean I thought I th I've thought about these three areas now for a while and it's like They're they're always consistently the three things. The first is deeply understand people.

52:15 And I think We talked about this a little bit with the jobs to be done point and you know, Clayton Christensen's book I would which I loved around competing against luck. It really helps you on to be a student of why someone ends up In his words, hiring a product. Like

52:30 Don't think of users as using your product. Think of users as hiring you to do something for them. Yeah, there's this famous quote, I think it's Theodore Levitt had you know, people don't want a quarter people don't want a quarter inch drill. They want a quarter inch hole.

52:45 So What is someone trying to do? You have to understand that deeply. And then you can build an amazing product. And also, by the way, how do you

52:53 Um when you go back. Like why someone not using your product, right? Like And so it it focuses on these techniques to extract causation. So the he actually talks a lot about um this interview he calls it like an interrogation, we talk to a user like, Hey, why do you use my product?

53:08 Where were you? Were you were you in bed? Were you like At work, what were you doing? Oh, I was talking to my you know wife in the morning. Okay, well w brought it up. Well, I guess I was reading the newspaper, okay, well why? And then You have this like aha moment. Like that when they first decide to use your product, he calls the big hire.

53:23 that is information that you obtain ends up becoming the most critical because that is what caused someone to use your product. If you can study that and understand it. you will be much more on your way than just building things that sound cool. And so that's the first chapter is like deep to understand people. Second is really around analytical rigor and understanding your problems. You have to understand your problems. And this got

53:42 About um Yeah, root cause analysis. And understanding okay, the metrics are dropping. Like why? Someone's not using your product, why? and really being able to dissect that to get to true root causes.

53:55 It's like, well, they went all the way to the end and then bailed. And you talk to and then you understand it turns out that it was most we actually learned about this and There's a s there's a story in in uh close friends on Instagram where It just totally failed at first on on a in in a in a bunch of just when we shipped it. And it turned out that we looked at the data and people were only adding one close friend to their list. because it was mistranated as best friend in many markets.

54:21 So people just put one person. And then the probability that person saw it and wrote back to you was like zero. The procrastination is broken. So it's like you gotta understand your problems. And then the third one's around really designing for

54:34 Clarity. Instead of cleverness. Like a lot of people are like, Oh, we're gonna differentiate the design and you know we talked about this a little bit with stories. Like we're gonna make a new version of something. But If something's a standard and people understand it, if you lean into it.

54:48 You're gonna get so much leverage than if you reinvent it. And you have to be really thoughtful around when you reinvent and where you don't. And I think on this one there's this great book, Don Norman's book, obviously Design of Everyday Things is a is a big one. But he has this incredible chapter in there about doors.

55:03 And how why is it that After all of these years. You walk up to a door. And Based on how they're designed at times.

55:11 People still don't know if you should pull or push that door. Because if you try to build the most beautiful symmetric two handles on each side on a glass door. It like doesn't communicate in for any information to you. And There's lots of

55:22 I've seen all the time. we've designed new icons when we could have used global icons, like Oh, wouldn't it be so cool if we used You know, like a camera that's like kind of a camera, but is mostly an AI looking thing and then is most but then has this dots in it that connects it to this other product and you're like people just just It's camera. Just just put the camera in. Maybe you could add like a little thing to it.

55:43 And that's how you get people to use your products. And if you do those three things. I think you typically can do well. And then I'm sorry, the fourth one which me more of the coda is be humble. Like constantly and always. question yourself, listen to others, listen to users, and be open to being wrong. I love these. Uh uh on that third point, I I feel like AI mode as the name is such a good example of clarity. What is this? This is AI mode. We talked about it internally. Like it's like you if you look at it in the tab, it's like everyone knows it's like you see it and you'll know what it is.

56:13 Or we could call it something like random. But Then what is that? You know, and and now you're working against yourself. So if I were to reflect back these three pieces of basically this is the this is the book you would write to help people build more successful products. It's understand the

56:29 Problem you're solving for people deeply. What's the job they're hiring you to do? Uh I love the I love the it's like lowercase j jobs to be done. It's not like the The rigorous whole thing that you know everyone's lowercase for sure. Okay, this is just like why are people

56:44 hiring your product to solve a problem for them, what problem are they solving? So it's like basically figure out. Why they What what problem they're having. Then uh very uh Through data understand.

56:55 The problem and whether you are solving it. And then it's just keep it really simple. Like Clarity over cleverness, essentially. Exactly. Yes. Is there.

57:05 And be humble. Yeah, it's okay. Is there an example that we haven't talked about that shows this in action of just like cool here's the problem we found, here's how we figured out this is the solution and if we're succeeding and then here's A very simple way of solving it. I mean honestly the this close friends example I'll I can give you more from Instagram days was really wild. It took

57:24 Two or three years to get close friends to work. And I think people it it totally failed. originally. This is the product that lets you add a a private list of people and then you can post to your story and then only those people see it. It's like this very exclusive. private space that you can feel really comfortable sharing.

57:40 Green circles, yes. Um it's one of the most popular was w at least when I was there, one was one of the most popular features of stories and did really well. But it totally failed. And I think You know, what we what we found out was that Um

57:53 Yeah, you actually used a bunch of these These techniques here. So One was um We

57:59 First. thought about it as an overall system problem. And You could add a close friends post for anything. So you could do a feed post or a stories post. And you also had a close friends profile. So you could see like like if

58:11 when he went to Robbie's page, we were close friends, you would just be like Oh, you get to see extra Stuff from me on my profile too. So we shipped it, we thought it'd be great. This is the be humble part. Wasn't great.

58:21 Um had a bunch of it's just super confusing. Like you would see this really beautiful photo. And then in the feed right after it, this blurry, very vulnerable moment someone's trying to share with their friends. Just felt so out of place and weird, uh for the the you know, the reason people use feed.

58:36 And then it was just confusing'cause you didn't It had like an extra little green thing on it, but it was like that got a green thing and the stories one didn't. If you open the story, it had a green thing. Inside the story. And it people were just so confused. And they had this other issue with the list. Where you're like, Okay, the list

58:52 doesn't work because it's mistranated and People don't get it. 'Cause I think it was actually called originally Favorites. I wanna say. And that encouraged people to just do like two people on it.

59:03 But then the way that it worked was so this gets to the framework, I guess. So deeply understand people like what are people trying to do with this? What they're trying to do is share a vulnerable thing and be like, Hey, I'm lonely. Hey, what's going on? Like are people up? And it feels very much like a friend group thing. And if you only have two people on it.

59:20 The job that we're doing is actually connecting you to your friends. And if you don't get a DM back. It's broken. And so really what we're doing is getting you a DM. And we're getting you connection, we're getting you a sense of being connected to your close friends.

59:33 That is the job. It's actually the other thing Clayton Christians talk talked about in the book is There are utility jobs and there are emotional jobs. People usually discount the emotional ones a lot. This was really an emotional thing, as much as it was utility one. And so Procts broken.

59:48 Right. And people don't even know that you can it's a close friend story, they just see the little head. 'Cause you have to click on it to see the thing. And so it just people stop using it. So we went through and we did these revs where we would like simplify it and we would updated and we would go through this change list. Okay, take this out, take this out, change the name here.

1:00:04 And then we saw was that it was working really well for people who added twenty to thirty people to their list. 'Cause what would happen is you put thirty people on your list. And then two of them would write back to you on DM. And now you have closed the loop and you feel connected to those people, it's a winning thing. And so we designed the whole system around that and also only worked in stories.

1:00:23 So we were looking at the data, we were trying to understand where it was working and where it was failing. And then we we we updated the name to close friends. So it didn't feel like favorites. So it wasn't like three people, it's like twenty. in the list we made but we built this list builder where we recommended a set of people based on some data, some some cool algo that was created by an engineer. And then we and then we updated the design to put the green ring on the outside of the story. So that this was the kind of the design for clarity.

1:00:49 It wasn't we were being cute, like oh if you We thought I think at the time it was like, Oh, it's like a secret story or something and if you open it, you see it. It just was not clear to people. And so We put the green ring on the outside so that users would see it in the tray and be like, Ooh, what's that little green guy? And then they'd click on it and be like, Oh, this is like a private story for me.

1:01:08 That system worked. And did incredibly well. And that was the process we followed. From like a total flop. To something that was very successful.

1:01:16 That is an awesome example. And this took two or three years, you said this. That was actually one of the longest projects we worked on. Um But that actually came the ri reason we did it was when we we asked people to for deeply understand people. Um like what why aren't you posting to your stories? Like what's preventing you from doing it? And it Everyone had some version of well, my ex is on it. I have a teacher on it.

1:01:36 Um oh a friend that kind of is judgy is on it. It was like this this kind of like Common commonality was audience problems. Someone had an issue with people watching them. And so that gave us conviction to go this hard at it.

1:01:47 for so long because we knew that that was a core problem with the product. Was this connected to the Finsta, Rinsta trend also? It was. Actually, I think that informed us. Like everyone had a Finsta and there was a Binsta Best friend. It's like this layering of like people have like twenty fences down to like your

1:02:06 Partner. Pinster. Um And then it's basically like I made that up, I don't know if it's true, but I'm sure the prince was out there somewhere. Um

1:02:15 And and we were like about people clearly trying to hack Instagram, basically, to create these private smaller group settings. And so we should just make a product. How did you actually do this testing? Was it rolled out the same percentage? Was it rolled out like in New Zealand or whatever? Yeah, we rolled it out in a few other countries. Exactly. Okay. We we had like a basket of countries that we we tried it in. And then we would uh do research. I think it was Australia was one of the first ones for that one. Okay. I was gonna ask if you can share the countries, so Australia. I think that was one of the earlier ones, yeah. But it's it's a always yeah, every time you ship something is a slightly different reason why.

1:02:45 Um interesting. So it's not always Australia gets all the new stuff. No. Although it it sometimes is is Australia and Canada get a lot of stuff. Uh, just because easier for the teams to like see feedback from them and

1:02:57 Um speak English. Yeah, exactly. Awesome. Okay. Let me go in a different direction and talk about something that uh you have a hot take on. There's a lot of talk these days about lean teams, small teams, just creating

1:03:09 Uh Limited resources, not hiring at all. Uh you kind of have an opposite perspective of you actually need a lot of resources to build really big breakthroughs. Talk about your experience there. Yeah, I mean I think there's obviously

1:03:21 depends on what you're trying to build and there's been famously small teams building big impact products. But I think Um there's kind of this Yeah. cult of lean, scrappy, fast. Throw away your product quickly, keep moving.

1:03:34 And I think at some level it's true for internal conviction. But to build a a product that works for a lot of people that is based on a technol technological breakthrough. A lot of times I see teams just give up too early or underinvest in the product. And obviously the space matters and if you're building You know, like a a single product that

1:03:52 is a way to I don't know, uh do something with a digital app that's fairly straightforward. That's gonna be different than building a robotics company, right? So what you're building does does change. But even for software, I mean and think for really hard technical problems, think about the amount of time and effort it took for teams to build a foundational model. And how many years and hundreds and hundreds of people that were needed.

1:04:14 For that to happen. And you think about these large Um companies that have had huge impacts on people. And I think particularly for bigger companies internally.

1:04:24 Something I've seen is it's almost like too scrappy because it never gets enough momentum. If the proc never gets good enough internally. And then It kinda just dies on the vine. Whereas if you put more people on it.

1:04:36 You have to be careful not to put too many too soon. Well. I see the opposite more true where people hold on to small teams too long. And then you kinda like Either takes forever to get to the thing you're looking for, like this close friends example I mentioned, this is actually was a small team. One of the reasons it took us forever was it kept the team so small.

1:04:52 And scrappy, the like loop cycle was so short. And by a startup age, you'd be dead probably. So you can maybe do that in a bigger company, but as a startup, I don't know if you have that. Yeah, that leisure. And so I think you need to actually think What is the group I need? to build a version that's great.

1:05:09 And from first principles, really think about it. Instead of just embracing blindly Okay, we're gonna be the two of us until this thing has escaped velocity and market fit. Which it's not always true. This is definitely counter to the narrative we see on Twitter.

1:05:22 W anything you can share about just like the heuristic you use to decide. Here's when how long to keep it small. I know it's you know, there's not gonna be this step one, two, three. But just like What I'm hearing is start small to prove out the concept, designer PM engineer, maybe. When do you find that make sense to go big?

1:05:40 Yeah, I think that it's mostly when you have can you've hit the conviction moment. Like I think there's two there's two big milestones. There's like internal conviction, like for yourself, do you believe in it? And you believe in it because there's some external validation, like your friends Yeah, you put you put twenty friends on it. And by the way I've I found out very quickly building startups that if you put twenty friends on something

1:06:00 They're not gonna do you that many favors. Like they're not gonna use a product every single day'cause they're your friend. Like thirty days in. Sixty days in, ninety days in. They're not using your product. Unless you're

1:06:10 doing something that's useful to them. And so you get like all this feedback and you're seeing people really enjoy it. You get to that moment. And then I think that's not a product that would win externally because if you're to ship it, it's like broken, doesn't work great.

1:06:22 And then you need to, I think, invest enough to make the best version of it or as good a version as you can. to get it out the door and to ship it. And I think that that Kind of like you wanna Uh

1:06:33 build the right product eventually is the mentality. And you can only really do that with the right with the right group. I'm gonna take us to a recurring segment on the podcast that I call AI Corner. Okay. What's some way that you've

1:06:46 found uh use for AI. in your work in your life that is really interesting, really helpful, and maybe other people can be inspired by I think one of the coolest trends ever is how AI is affecting um multimodal visual and inspirational needs for people. And it's we're early on this.

1:07:03 And I think this is something that I'm actually working on as a project as well. But right now, if you think about what AI has done, you know, in large part, it it it was born and grew up in this text modality as chat. And so, you know, for a long time if you were to ask it to help you You know What's what are what's a cool way to redecorate your bookshelf behind you?

1:07:21 It's gonna describe that to you. In text. That's what it knows. But increasingly AI is gonna be liberated to to help in every possible modality. And you know, this is something that we've seen a lot with

1:07:31 this explosive use of Google Lens and our image search and image features and with this deep in understanding. And what I'm actually starting to use internally and some things that we're excited about more coming up that we actually uh announced at IO that we're gonna be we're gonna be building more of was How AI can help with inspiration. how AI can help with uh shopping.

1:07:51 And helping you Uh really get things done that are more in the like inspiring bucket of needs versus these like Core utilities, like code, math, homework kind of side of th of things. And I'm really excited for

1:08:06 You know, things that are coming where you can Ask it. For inspirational tasks. And it's starting to do really fascinating things. In terms of what I'm seeing and

1:08:16 Hopefully we'll share more on that soon. But I think the one thing I can share is Yeah, th there's there's a visual version of AI mode that basically we talked about For um um at IO. And so you can you can reference some of those uh those keynotes, but that that's in the process of being rolled out.

1:08:34 And so you're gonna be able to now ask like You know, what's a what's a mid century modern beautiful office design with dark themes. It'll be able to produce this image board that's inspirational.

1:08:46 And you can do multi turn with it. And so you'll be able to go and say Actually I want more of like a light theme. uh more creamy, more California, more coastal vibe. And it'll do that and it'll understand that and it'll actually

1:08:58 see the images and be able to turn with you in the way that text works. Which is It's gonna be really cool. So I think that's gonna be one of the More exciting things that that will be new to AI, uh soon.

1:09:10 What I'm hearing is nanobanana integrated into AI mode. Uh recipe for nano banana because nano banana is is is like a image editor. Um this is more like helping you find Um images on the web. So it's a little bit more like AI inspiration.

1:09:26 Um AI image search. And allowing you to then Talk with. to effectively like visual responses with natural language. So That's gonna I think be a little bit different than

1:09:37 Yep. edit this photo so that it it it changes it. Although Potentially an interesting idea too, to have an ab ability to like take a picture of your living room. Um, and I think AI will help with that too. Ultimately. Pinterest is in trouble. Feels like this is what people use Pinterest for. Here's all the inspiration.

1:09:53 Uh now it's just AI doing it all. By the way, uh Nano Banana. Where where did this name come from? I don't actually I I forget that there's a story somewhere. Um I forget it now, honestly. Um but the team I think came from a scrappy fun group of people building this and um

1:10:09 Yeah, they they wanted to go for for something fun for folks. Yeah, it feels like that's a part of the reason things have started to work. There's just like more fun and delight and random crazy stuff happen. coming out just like it does feel like it feels a little more like when I was at Google the first time through right now, where you kinda just have so much stuff and then this kind of like fun curiosity happening where people want to try things and ship things. Um and yeah, hopefully that continues. Yeah. Feels like V O three would be uh even more successful if it had a wacky name. And I like that this is the opposite of your advice of clarity. Like I don't know what nanobanana is, but but it works.

1:10:42 Yeah, just that's the other thing. No no advice is right universally, right? It's like Um but yeah, Nana Banana. Uh Robbie, is there anything else that you wanted to share? Anything else you want to leave listeners with as a final Nugget of wisdom before we get to our very exciting lightning round.

1:10:57 this concept be curious. Like I think I think of embodying everything as like It's it's really about curiosity it's about n wanting to know why. everything is the way it is. Why is someone doing something? Why does someone have a different agree uh opinion than I do? Why might this not be working? And the people who really have that level of intense curiosity and and they chase things down until they know.

1:11:17 I think you're well served by that. That'll be my only parting thought. Let me follow that thread actually because it's maybe the most trending term on the podcast over the past few months is curiosity. It comes up a lot when I ask people what are you teaching your kids? And then embracing with the rise of AI and curiosity comes up all the time.

1:11:33 Is there anything that helps you? Is it just like I'm good at this and I'm Uh. Valuable. Is there anything you can share that helps you or others around you?

1:11:45 And actually be curious. Well, I mean AI is obviously like the ultimate curiosity engine and that's what's so cool is you can now ask anything and and just get information. And so I find that people just under appreciate just how much they can learn about whatever they want. But also I think that A lot of this also comes down to

1:12:06 studying what you want to know about. And knowing where the branches of knowledge live there. Like a lot of times I'll read like old papers and PDFs that are free online on like a statistics thing if I wanna learn about that. And I think people underappreciate those. There's like analog old school great learning.

1:12:22 And AI can help you discover them. I'm using AI, actually at Google, to help discover all these cool links and things to read. But I find that that is an interesting hybrid where it's not just AI, but really going to original sources more. And I find that like these books I mentioned on the on the on the chat here.

1:12:39 Um I find that you need a blend of all of those things to ultimately really uh get to the bottom of things ultimately. Like actually reading the thing, not just reading the summary of the thing. Yes. Let me actually ask you this question I've been asking all these

1:12:52 People that are at the cutting edge of AI. You have kids. Is there anything you're thinking about and leaning into helping them learn develop as so as AI, you know, emerges and becomes a big part of the world.

1:13:04 the the biggest thing I'm doing, I have younger kids, so the biggest thing I'm doing is they're using live versions of AI that they just talked to now, much more. And so, you know, injury funnily enough, we actually just launched Search Live actually out of labs this week. And so you can talk to search in a live AI setting, which is conversational voice. voice on. when you're driving, you can just talk all the knowledge I talked about, what you can do with Google.

1:13:25 You can talk to it. In a normal conversation with your voice. And I found that to be incredibly accessible for kids. And I hear all the t my kids come home like I talk to Google about something. What do you need? What do you need to say? And then they go to my app, they hit the live button and they just start talking to it.

1:13:39 They want to know about animals, they wanna know about You know, um Certain I don't know, history things. Um, they learn about something in school. And it's so natural to learn in that way.

1:13:51 that I think that that's helping them become much more AI native. than any other thing I'm doing. Life as a parent is gonna be way too easy now. Whenever kids have questions, just go talk to the guy. Go talk to the AI. But I don't think that's bad. So this is within the Google search app, there's a live How do you how do you access this? Yeah, that's exactly right. You go to Google app. So there's one of the apps in the app stream you mentioned. Um you open Google and there's a a button now that's live. On it, right on the home screen.

1:14:16 And if you tap on it. Um it's a live version of AI mode that you can just talk to. It's a full screen experience and we'll say like start talking. In the show notes, I'm gonna link to this project that somebody build uh Eric Antonow. Which I I I love. It's um it basically shows you how to put A little speaker into a little stuffed animal. And you connect the speaker to

1:14:35 It could be uh Google Live or it could be Chat GPT, whatever you like. In voice mode. And you put on your shoulder you get a little magnet that Tatches. And uh

1:14:44 Your kids could talk to this pir this uh parrot, for example, and you could tell it talk in a pirate voice. And so they're talking about it. That's really funny. Okay, that's really cute. It takes like fifteen minutes. You like get an exact knife and sew it and stuff, and it's kinda fun. I made one for my Nephew and He was looking for treasure with this parrot. That's really adorable. I'm definitely gonna look into that. Robbie, with that we've reached our very exciting lightning round. I've got five questions for you. Are you ready?

1:15:06 All right, I'm ready. What are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people? I mean, definitely the t two I mentioned, you know, here, uh Clayton Christensen, Convening Against Luck, Don Norman. uh design of everyday things. But also really love this th for um fiction Aurora. Which is his book, David Coke.

1:15:25 I wrote it's about uh It's like electromagnetic pulse in the sun that like knocks out it's like Fiction for just fun. And it was like a really fun beach read and It didn't work out. I don't know, I was sad to see that uh fall apart. But so it's a really fun book.

1:15:39 There's a book along those lines that I love. They're making a movie of it right now called Hail Mary. Oh, I'm in the middle of reading that right now. Okay, awesome. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, they're making a movie of it. How about that? In the middle of reading it, it's a little it's it's getting wacky where I am right now, but it's uh I'm excited to see it. Oh really?

1:15:56 Just prepare yourself. Okay. Yeah. What is a recent movie or TV show you've really enjoyed? Um, I love

1:16:03 Uh the bear. I think that's just absolutely awesome. Joe Uh Dune, of course. And I thought the new Top Gun is a little old now, but I think the new Top Gun was so fun and awesome. Is there a product you've recently discovered that you really love it cannot be AI mode?

1:16:17 I'm gonna use a non digital product. Perfect. Um, I'm super into this new pillow that I got. Called Purple Pillow. And I've been recommending it to everyone, like at work. We're on like a pillow chat now. It's like a thing. It's like

1:16:32 You talk about like what pillows we're getting. But it's this really cool thing where it's got this like new technology that of like There's a honeycomb polymer that's inside and so it like supports you and it As these little micro holes so it doesn't get hot. It's really cool. Big fan.

1:16:48 Strongly recommend Purple Pillow. I've never heard of this thing. I I'm excited. I I recently got an avocado pillow. Uh focusing on low toxins. Uh Oh, those are good. I've heard good things about those too. Okay. I I I I gotta join this pillow. Pillow talk is a great thing for you, but I don't know. I know you're into p you're into you're into pillows too. That's great. I love bedding. But I did upgrade my pillow. Uh it's this is not Mr. Pillar, whatever that guy is, right? The uh Is that guy that like is there's like a

1:17:15 No, guy, okay. No. Okay, purple pillow I'm gonna ask AI mode. Uh Definitely. Next question. Diva

1:17:24 Favorite life motto that you find yourself coming back to in work or in life. And this is be curious. I think I almost named it company Curious. I just think it's a really awesome There's one thing.

1:17:35 In life, it's that, in terms of getting things done, in terms of Understanding the world, people, your kids, your family. Like you always just want to know. More and question things outside yourself, not feel like you have all the answers. I think it's really important.

1:17:49 I love that. Final question. Okay. So speaking of startups, you started a company called Stamp Stamped. Back in the day it got acquired by Yahoo. Uh, I hear there's a story where you got Justin Bieber on your app and that was a big deal. And a big inflection in in the success of the app. Can you just tell that story?

1:18:06 Yeah, it's kind of a wild story, so I was just a like scene set a little bit. It was twenty five. Right after Google being an I C PM. um in New York with some Google friends building this company. So Um very early on and maybe in a good way, had no idea what I was doing.

1:18:22 But um Basically we decided that the the concept of stamp was to put your stamp on your favorite things, get recommendations from friends and from People that you trust. And so you can give like a Twitter feed, but it's all stuff that people think is cool. It's like books, restaurants, movies, food, products, exactly. Pillows possible. Billows could be on there. I would totally stamp this billow and then you could discover it. And

1:18:41 Yep. One of the cold star problems was obviously like you want a group of people that are on it that are already using it that could have some t like taste maker type folks. And so we had a bunch of people that were like chefs and we had You know, people who are like kind of literary folks. And then we wanted to get a a couple of people that were more musicians, artists, and these kind of influential folks.

1:18:59 And so my co founder and I just Basically got the contact of um Scooter Braun, who's Justin's manager. And we just sent out an email and we were like, Hey, we're gonna we were in New York, like we're gonna be in LA tomorrow. Think we said something. I don't remember the all the details, but it was something like tomorrow.

1:19:14 And you were not gonna be in LA tomorrow. No. No. Okay. Uh do you happen to be there? And He he just like wrote back some one line thing like meet me at this hotel like for breakfast at some thing. And we're like

1:19:27 Okay. So we literally went immediately to the airport. I just remember Like Just Basically going straight to the airport. Um, flying to LA.

1:19:35 meeting with him, we gave him the whole pitch, we showed him the product. And then he was like, Okay, I think this would be super cool. We can be helped be involved and maybe you can help you an advisor and We ended up uh going back and meeting with Justin and showing him the product and Even filming some little clips with him. It was actually really funny.

1:19:52 Uh and and it was a really fun moment. And he obviously like He would he was using it to to stamp his favorite stuff. And so people go, Oh, Justin's into this song or he's into this stuff. And would post that and there's one of the ways that we got lots of people to try out and see Uh what we were doing. So that's a little

1:20:07 extra scrappy moment in time, but I think it embodies a good lesson. Just like Do it now, be strappy, be immediate. Like intense urgency usually wins over Uh thinking about it for a long time and That certainly proved to be true on that one.

1:20:20 Incredible story. Thank you for sharing that. So many lessons to take away. Two final questions. Where can folks find you online if they want to reach out, maybe learn more about what you're doing, and how can listeners be useful to you? Yeah, I think um on X at R M Stein is probably the best uh single place. And then to be helpful, send me feedback. DM me.

1:20:39 Just mention me, ping me, let me know problems with Google products, with with AI in general, but also just anything. Um, as I said before, you have to always listen to people, understand their experiences. So Ping ideas and feedback, that's the best way to be helpful. Wow, what an onslaught you're about to receive of feedback on the search experience.

1:20:57 Yes, please do. Why is this link second? Why is my site not at the top? I can only imagine the kind of stuff people complain about. Uh Robbie, thank you so much for being here.

1:21:08 Thank you. It was great. It's great. Bye, everyone. Take care. 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.

1:21:20 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. See you in the next episode.

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