On starting and scaling one of the biggest iOS apps

random. So we, I was in business school. I had been an engineer, and I kind of went to the dark side and went to business school in the February. This was right when the iPhone had come out a year earlier. They had just opened up the app store to third party developers that summer.

So I showed up to business school and I like met a couple people in the computer science department who had built like apps over the summer. And, this one guy I met, he had built an app that looked for open WiFi networks, and it just like told you which ones were open and which ones had a had like a pay or whatever it's called, a password. And, he made $200,000 that summer selling that app.

And I was like, okay, we should we should build an app here. Was really fun. And at the same time I was in business school and I was meeting all my new business school classmates and we were doing that thing that like we still honestly do today, which was, hey, tell me your phone number. I'll type it in. Then I'll call your phone. You just missed the call and then you asked me how to spell my name.

And I've done that like one day I did that 10 times and I was like, okay, somebody should solve this and oh, there's apps now. I could probably solve it. So I emailed a guy I met. I didn't really even work with him directly, but I had met at my previous job at Texas Instruments. And I said, hey, Andy, like any interest in building an iPhone app?

And at the time he was like, think Android is gonna be bigger. And I said, ah, let's start with iPhone. I think it'll get there sooner. And so we just started hacking away and trying to build this app to make it easier to share your phone number with people that you met. And it was a total side project. I was like a full time business school student. He was doing his own thing.

He was in California. We just kinda worked on it for a while. We met I met my third co founder Jake Mintz at business school. He was also just a random classmate of mine. Met we both had worked at Texas Instruments.

We like started to talk about that and we brought him on board and the three of us just kind of did the whole thing ourselves in our spare time And we put it onto the App Store and people started using it and we were like, oh. And this was in 02/2008 to 02/2009? We we launched 03/27/2009 is when it got out to the Got it. And at that time, it was very non obvious that apps are gonna be big.

I remember watching the apps for the first six months. Were like fart apps. Yeah. You know, like silly trivial things. And I think a lot of people viewed bump as a silly trivial thing too. Right? It was like this kind of novelty of the iPhone. Like, oh, yeah.

It's got an accelerometer. You can bump your phones together and it does something. But that actually was like the engine that made it grow. So like we launched it in March. We got a few you know, people started using it. It was growing slowly.

But then because of that like novelty and the fact that the iPhone was a thing in the news around that time, every reporter wanted to talk about the coolest apps on the iPhone. And so I remember I I met one reporter from the, Chicago Tribune at like a random business school conference Yeah. Once. And I emailed him and I'm like, hey, I've got this cool app. You might wanna write about it.

And he wrote about it. And then I did this little hack where I took his article and I forwarded it to like the next highest person on the like journalism rank. And I think I I mailed it to David Pogue at the New York Times. I was like, hey, the Chicago Tribune's got this already, but you could still write about it. And then he wrote about it. And then I took that and I, like, went up the notch.

And eventually, it just got pretty popular. And I think we were we were like the maybe on the, like, 200 on the top app chart, at the time that the billionth app was going to be downloaded from the app store. Okay. And because we we were the top 200 app, we were getting a lot of downloads that day.

So the probability of us being the billionth download was like 2%, I think, on the day that it happened and it was us. And so I got a call in Chicago. I was in Chicago. I got a call from, the woman who runs all of developer relations from Apple and she's like, hey, good morning. You were the billionth app downloaded yesterday.

We'd like to, you know, tell the world about it, but I wanted to call you to make sure that your servers are gonna be able to handle it. And I was like, oh, yeah. Let me let me call you back. So I call Andy. I'm like, Andy, are we gonna be able to do this? He's like, I don't know. And I said, okay. That sounds like a yes.

So we just we we said, yeah, go for it. And, and that then put us on the map. Like that was the thing that got us globally, like everybody heard about us. So Apple promoting you or what what happened as far Yeah. I mean, like did a marketing little effort little marketing effort around it.

But then later, like after we joined YC that summer, they actually put us into an international TV commercial that this was the like, there's an app for it campaign, people might remember. And we were part of that. And we didn't really know we were gonna be a part of it. The way Apple works is they're very secretive.

They say like, would you please sign this waiver that says we can use your brand in various things? And I'm like, okay, sure. And, yeah, one day during YC, our cert we were looking at our graphs and our servers just went like it it like was a factor of a thousand in ten minutes. And we were like, what's going on? There must be a bug.

And then our friends started pinging us saying, hey, wait, I just saw you during dancing with the stars. And I'm like, oh, wow. And that's the point where our servers like totally melted down, everything broke. And this is the first moment where I realized the value of the YC network.

I sent an email out to, you know, YC founders and I said, hey, does anybody know how to, I think we were using a patch there was like an Apache web server in our stack at the time. And I said, does anybody like is anybody an expert at this? They came over to our office and just sat in our desks and they said like, step away from the keyboards, we'll fix it. And they just totally fixed it for us.

And so that was the first moment where I was like, oh, YC is really valuable. I didn't like, I remember when I was talking to Paul Graham about how we should do this and he said, I won't be able to explain it a priori why it's really valuable, but I guarantee you'll see that it's very valuable. And that was the first moment where I was like, yep, he was right. I'm curious about how you got into YC.

So like, did you you know about it before? How was the interview like? Yeah. No. We didn't know anything about it honestly. Jake and I were in business school. We were trying to like learn about tech because we were like everybody in business school, you're supposed to go get an internship for the summer. And so we were like, oh, where should we get our internships?

So we were like reading tech crunch a bunch and we like kept seeing this thing called Y Combinator. And I was like, what is that? And then it turns out we knew a couple people who had gone through it already. And so we went and talked to those people. I knew Savaraj who had done, Watt Vision I think was his first one.

And like I went and talked to him and he's like, yeah, you should totally do And so we ended up, applying and, got in. The interview process was fascinating to me as an outsider in this world. Who's interviewing you? Our interview was, PG, Jessica, Robert Morris, and.

Trevor? Trevor. Yeah. Yeah. Four of them. I can only imagine. What were their responses when you're like, okay. So this is an app that you share your content information.

It was fascinating. We walked in and we sat down and literally before I could open my mouth,.

Paul said, give us your phones. We wanna try it. And I was like, okay. So we hand our phones over to him and they just start playing around like, RTM was like, oh, I'm gonna try to hack it and break it. Like, let's all bump at the same time and see if we can break it. Right? And then and I I do distinctly remember Jessica being like, so how do guys know each other? Like, tell me about that.

And then, like, that was the moment where I was like, oh, okay. She's interested in understanding, like, how the founders know each other, what our backgrounds are, like, what type of people are we? Whereas, like, Trevor and Robert were just like hacking away at the tech. Right? Nerding. So it was a it was a fascinating moment.

And the the most surprising sentence that was spoken in our interview was, at some point, PG just kinda like detached and like put his head down and was kind of just thinking and he said, how does this become bigger than Google? And I was like, dude, are you crazy?

But that just showed that like how he thinks that like you can take something that seems so frivolous at the beginning and turn it into something potentially that would be really big. Mhmm. So that was that was cool to see. That's so cool. And so were did you establish a metric early on during YC? Like, what was your goal before demo day?

We were really anchored on how many people used it and how many times they used it. That's like the the main thing that we were focused on. In hindsight, that probably was not the right thing to be focused on, but I think especially for us as total newbies to this space, we didn't know anything better. And so this was actually one of the big learnings that we had at bump that we we grew like crazy.

Like we we got up to a 50,000,000 downloads, of our app and I think at the peak we were at like 10,000,000 monthly active users. So it was like a Wow. Very big property especially ten years ago on the Internet. That was like really big.

But the the thing we were looking at was like how many people use it and how many bumps were happening per day and per month and what we weren't tracking as precisely as we should have was do the people who use it today like when do they keep using it? How frequently do they use it and what is the retention curve?

So I remember we were raising money and all the VCs would ask like what's your cohort retention curve look like? And I would be like oh it's good and then I go and like Google cohort retention curve like what is that? And I was trying to learn like what is this metric that people keep talking about and in hindsight now I realize it's like the single most important thing.

And with with bump, the actual dynamic was that our long term cohort retention was really good actually if you measured it on a wide enough time period. Basically people kept it on their phone and they would definitely use it at some point in the future. The problem was the frequency of use was very long.

And so we thought that we were gonna be able to build a business off of a large user base using this product, But if your large user base uses your product infrequently, you have to figure out a way to extract a lot of value each time they use it. And for bump, the value was marginal. It was like, yeah, it's nice. It's convenient. I could solve my problem in another way and it's not that hard.

So ultimately that was the thing that kind of killed it as a business for us. But.

surely you tried things. Right? Like what you try to push into before you ultimately decided to do something with photos. Yeah.

We thought about a bunch of ideas like, should we just charge for the app or should we have a freemium model where there's certain feature set that you would get if you would pay? We tried like in app purchases for different like stickers and things like that. We tested all these things as like tiny 1% tests.

We tried ads in the product also as a little test and I we basically concluded we could basically get like maybe 1,000,000 oh sorry, $1 for every user of the product per year on average. And then we realized like, oh, we've got 10,000,000 monthly active users. Like that's a nice business, but it's not a business that you go raise huge amounts of VC funding to go build. So that was the point.

I think this was in like beginning of twenty twelve maybe where we realized, oh, we need a better plan. Because our our plan all to that point was just grow. Grow, grow, grow. Facebook did it. Twitter's doing it. We'll just do it too and it'll be great. And I think we didn't understand the fundamental differences between our business and those businesses. What made the product grow?

Like what made bumpy so big? It was a % word-of-mouth distribution. So we spent no money on customer acquisition, no money on marketing. I used to tell the story that the amount of money we ever spent on marketing I think was like $42 and it was for me to buy a videotape to put into a borrowed camcorder and a black piece of felt to put behind so I can make the demo video for bump in my apartment.

That was it. But yeah it was all word-of-mouth. People who got the app thought it was cool enough that they wanted to be like hey Gustaf try it. Like I want to show you this cool app I just downloaded.

And what we thought was going to be an inhibitor to growth which is this chicken and egg problem like I you can't use it unless I have it, actually turned out to be the driving force behind our distribution because it was like novel and cool enough that people were willing to like take that investment to say, oh, just download it. I'll wait. And you know, that worked.

And you thought about product market fit quite a bit. You mentioned that in one of the talks you did with YC. So.

we'll come to Flock in a second, but but there's three different products you worked on the last couple of years. And and, like, what's your like, when you think about the word product market fit for the in in terms of bump, like what how do you analyze that today? Like, after the fact? Yeah. Product market fit, I still it's it's a very,.

subjective concept. I don't think you can really measure it because you can have very great product market fit with some customer base, but as you try to expand your customer base, you might find like, oh, yeah, there's not product market fit for these other people over here. And so saying that like you've reached product market fit, I think is really like it's a staged question.

And ultimately like if you wanna be huge in a consumer space, you've got to get to a large group of people. And the question is do you have product market fit for that large group of people? Even with Google photos today, like my answer would be we certainly have product market fit for a large group of people in the world.

But there's another group of people who use our product that I wouldn't say is product market fit necessarily. There's a whole lot more things that we need to understand and build for that. You know, when you get to like a billion or more users, there's the the next person who joins your product like they're very different than the first person who joined your product.

And so you've got to really understand that. Got it. So after.

bump you guys tried another product.

So flock came out came around. So tell us about that. Yeah. So we built bump to share the contact sharing problem and people started using it for that. Apple eventually added an API to access photos on the on the phone and we thought, okay, let's just add that. Let's see what happens. It's pretty cheap to do.

So we added that feature and people started using that and it turned out that turned into the biggest single use case of bump sharing photos. And so one day in, I guess beginning of twenty twelve when I was looking at our dashboards and I'm like, oh, I think it's not going to keep growing. What are we going to do?

I thought back to the advice that I heard PG give us back in YC, which was when you're stuck, go talk to your users. They will always tell you what they want. So I said, okay, guys, give me a list of the top 100 users of Bump in the world. I'm gonna like try to go have phone calls with them.

So Jake and I, that day went into a conference room and just tried to call as many of those people on the phone as we could. And we said, hey, we're the founders of Bump. We just wanted to hear like what you think of it, why do you use it? That sort of thing. And what we heard was basically most of those people said, oh, I don't use it for contact sharing. I use it to share photos with my husband.

And we're like, wait, what? You can just email the photos to your husband. Why do you do it? And you know, these people would tell us, well, it's just easier and they get the full resolution file and I don't have to worry about attachments and emails bouncing like it's just easy.

And we thought, oh, and that then led us to, okay, so there's clearly a problem in the photo sharing space amongst your like friends or family. But the product we built is like kind of the most hard product to use to solve that problem because both people have to download this app. You have to stop what you're doing and like both decide, okay, we're gonna do this bump thing now.

Physically You have to physically touch each other. Right? It's like when you're building product, you try to minimize friction of using your product and with bump, it was almost like we maximize the friction. So we were like, okay, let's try to build a product that minimizes the friction rather than maximizes it. And so that led us to this product called flock that we built and launched.

It was really a very convenient turn of events where at the same time that Jake and I were sitting in that conference room roughly having that learning or that insight, our engineering team was developing the bump algorithm which was really like a a pattern matching early type of AI system that would use a bunch of signals to predict whether you bumped with another phone because it was all server based.

There's no Right. There's no like NFC. Yeah. You're okay. So it's all kind of like a magic trick. Yeah. But our engineers said, hey, Dave, I can tell you who's gonna bump with whom tomorrow. And I'm like, how can you do that?

And the answer was they would go look at where and when people took photos on their phones. So they look at the metadata of their camera roll and they could say like, I'm pretty sure Gustaf's gonna bump with Craig tomorrow. There's an 80% probability that they do and I'm like, no way.

And what they did is they figured out that like today, you two were at the YC office and you took a photo and you took a photo at the same time. And they're like, probably they are gonna bump those photos to each other. And so that was the key insight on the tech side that allowed us to kind of marry those two insights and create this product Flock.

So Flock looked at your Facebook friends and figured out when you took a photo at the same time as when your other friend was there. And then it basically did a suggested sharing prompt to you to say, hey, it looks like you might want to share this photo and just press this one button and we'll share the photo to the other person. And we built that app. We used it ourselves.

We used it with our friends and family before we launched and we realized like, this is really great. Like, it just makes my life so much easier. I'm getting all these photos from my friends that I was never gonna get otherwise. And then we launched it and nobody downloaded it. And we were like, oh, shucks. This is terrible.

And what we didn't really understand, which we learned through this experience was this a Chris Dixon blog post, which is the like come for the tool, stay for the network idea, which is that the first users of your product have to have some core utility that makes it useful for them even when no one else in the world has the product.

And with Flock, it was like, download Flock and it says, great, go convince your friends to download this app so that you can get some value out of it. And 99% of people were like, cool, home screen and they never used it again. So that was the key insight there.

And what we learned was that if we wanted to solve this like automated photo sharing problem, we had to upstream ourselves and get one stack one step higher in the stack and actually be the camera roll. And if we were the camera roll, then everybody's gonna be using the product anyway and then all this sharing stuff would actually work. And so that led us to the third product that we built.

What what gave you that insight though that you needed to go upstream? Basically, none of our friends were using it. And we and then so like, so just user conversations? Yeah. I would like talk to, you know, like a lot of the Weissy network. I'd go talk to them. I'm like, hey, I see that like, I looked in our logs. I see that you downloaded the app, you're not using it.

Like, how come? And people would say, you know, and you have to interpret what they say, but they would say like, oh, you know what? None of my friends have it yet. So once they get it, then it's gonna be awesome. Gotcha. Yeah. And that led us to see like, okay, but you're not you're not driving your friend to get it. Whereas in bump, you were driving your friend to get it.

What's the difference? And the difference was this novelty factor of like, it's this cool thing that you wanna show off. Gotcha. For flock, the world had moved a little bit. There were a lot of photo sharing apps. People felt this, like, burden to convince their friend like, hey, I want you to download another photo sharing app. It'll be really cool.

And there's something about the physical virality, the physical bumpingness that people see. There are some apps that you sort of like Pokemon Go, you run around the street, like, holding up your phone. Like, people are gonna take notice,.

but that's not really the case with most apps. You just look at your phone and no one have no idea what you're doing. Yeah. Exactly. The the physical.

nature of bump, I think, made a big difference. I I remember the first time I saw someone in the wild do, like, bump that wasn't my friend. Yeah. And it was like a really visceral feeling. I'm like, what it woah. They just use bump. Crazy.

So I think that was a big part of it as well. And this is a kind of a magical time, a critical time for photo sharing. Like 2012, Instagram was, a year in. Yeah. Could you Color had had just I don't remember if I Color, of course. Yeah. Could could you anticipate at the time where photo sharing was going to go? Like, it's very easy in hindsight to always say, oh, yeah.

Of course, any photo sharing is gonna be a billion, $2,000,000,000 thing. But I I like to think that we intellectually.

understood it, but I don't think we did. I think we more, emotionally understood it or personally understood it. And I think we we really use this technique that PG talks about which is if you wanna, like, come up with great startup ideas, just try to live at the edge of the future, like be the the power user of whatever thing you're interested in.

And then things will just be obvious to you and you won't even, like, intellectually understand them. You'll just be like, this is useful and cool. I'm gonna go build it. And I think that's what happened to us. Yeah. We were, like, in hindsight looking back, it's now obvious to me.

But like growing up, I was always the the person in my family that would like organize the photos and like make sure the photos were taken. I was the person who always asked my parents like, hey, can we do a slideshow night? And like you tell me like who these people in these photos were. So looking backwards, it's obvious that I was interested in this space.

But at the time, we were all using iPhones pretty a lot and we were taking a bunch of photos. We were seeing these problems of like, oh, my iPhone's almost full. I better offload it to my Mac and we were doing the cable connection. But normal people were just like, yeah, my phone's getting full. I'm gonna delete some photos. And we were like, oh, that's unfortunate.

Like you shouldn't have to do that. And I think that kind of led us from flock. It made us realize there were there was this whole other set of problems when it comes to photos that nobody was really solving yet. And we were personally experienced them. And so that combined with the failure of flock and the success of it for people who did get it made us realize we should build this third product.

So the third product we built was this product we called photo roll. It was really like a better photo gallery app. This was right on the heels of when inbox launched. I don't know if people remember this. Yeah. But it was like a better email client.

And so we were gonna try to pull an inbox and build a better photo product and and just, you know, distribute it on the app store and people could download it, replace their default app with it. And we we built a prototype of it like we I was using it on my phone and it was really great and it had flock built into it on the side.

And so that made it so that people could just download this better photo gallery app and then all of a sudden as as their friends started to get it, it just started to light up for this photo sharing behavior. Unfortunately, we had this great insight like kind of at the end of our runway from our $20,000,000 that we had raised.

And we realized, okay, this photo product is a winner if we can figure out a way to like have a long runway and build it. But oh, we're gonna have to go raise a series c on bump to try to do it. And we're not we're not even raising that money to go work on this 50,000,000.

user product that we've got. And it was just a very like, we looked at it and we said, I wouldn't invest in that. Got it. Let's talk about fund fundraising a bit. We haven't mentioned that at all. So after, you guys raised from some of the absolute top VCs in the world, talk us how that went and sort of like how it feels like from the outside.

Like, from the inside, like, obviously, everyone thinks that, wow. You must be the most successful company ever out of YC. Right. Right. How does that feel? Yeah. We were very fortunate. We raised from Sequoia.

for our series a. Our our bridge round before that was Ron Conway and then our series b was Marc Andreessen and Andreessen Horowitz. So we had the cream of the crop in terms of investors. It was it felt really great. And I think we were ignorant to to the to the truths of the world about like, were we actually gonna be a really successful company or not? We didn't know.

And and honestly, don't think any of the investors knew at the beginning. What we saw was mobile is this huge wave that we all knew was gonna be really big and bump was the most popular app on mobile. So like and it solved some of these core problems that we all believed would be real. So I think that was the investment thesis.

That's like that was our kind of like investment thesis for dropping out of business school and doing this is it's working. Mobile's gonna be big. We gotta give it a shot. Mhmm. And I think that was the same way that Yeah. Looked at it. How was the fundraising experience like? It was very easy.

Like, I feel I feel guilty saying it, but it was super easy. You know, in YC, I think we got to like either I think it was either four or 8,000,000 users during YC Wow. Which at the time was just unheard of. So everybody wanted to invest. And we met Sequoia folks and we thought, they're they're pretty good. We'll let them know.

And then we raised that round and then I think it was six months later, Mark emailed me and he's like, hey, wanna invest. I'm like, Mark, I just raised my series a. Like, I've got $2,000,000 left. Like, what are you talking about? And he said, I think it's gonna be big. I wanna invest.

And so we took the meeting and I think we delayed it like another six months, but then we raised 17,000,000 from them. And it was again on this thesis that we don't know where this is gonna go, but it's gonna go somewhere very interesting. So let's just plow ahead.

In hindsight, I wish I had raised a little bit less money in that series b because it would have forced us to have some of these existential.

questions or discussions a little bit earlier. Like, because we had so much runway, we could just say like, well, we'll figure it out. And we just kinda kept going for maybe an extra year in there. So that question comes up with funders a lot that I am talking to. So if they're doing really well at fundraising and they're like, well, there's more investors who wanna give me another $3,000,000 now.

Should I take it with that extra dilution? Right. And my advice is typically, well, if you have discipline and you can put half of the money in a different bank account, don't touch it for twelve or eighteen months, then you should take it. But most people actually don't have the discipline. It's true. And and investors.

want you to use the money. Like, no investor wants to say like, oh yeah, I've moved some capital from my LP account into a different bank account, but it's just gonna sit there. Don't worry. It's earning 1% interest. Like nobody wants to hear that. So it's very difficult to do that. What I would the advice I give entrepreneurs is raise more money if you know how you're gonna use that money today.

Like if you have no idea how you're gonna raise it, you're just like, I I need some more money. You should only do that if you already have a very proven business model and there's risks that you want to mitigate. Right? Like I'm an investor in Flexport.

They just raised a big round and I think, I doubt he knows exactly how he's gonna use that money today, but he knows like, I've got a thing that's working. There's existential risks that I want to mitigate and so you raise that round. But at the early stage, yeah, I I'm very skeptical of raising money when you don't know why you need it.

So in retrospect, do you think you could have like pulled it out of the tailspin and turned a profitable product out of all the work you put in? Oh, I think we totally could have made bump profitable. I don't I just didn't But not at the scale. Yeah. Like, I don't think we could have made it profitable at the scale that, you know, a Sequoia or an injuries in Horowitz needs it to be. Okay.

So had we not raised VC funding, I think it would have been a great Yeah. We would have we would have made a a freemium model where, like, 1% of users bought the app for a dollar or something like that and it would have been great. Right. But then it's also tricky going in thinking about raising series c for a product that also might not be profitable at all. Right. Yeah.

So we looked at photo roll and we were like, people are gonna love this. It's gonna be big. If we could get it to be like distributed or part of an operating system like either Apple or Google, we think it would be pretty big. And but then we were like, and that would cost a lot of money if we were gonna do it because we wanted to store all the photos in the cloud.

And so we like did the math and we're like, okay, storing all the photos of the world is going to be expensive in the future. And so we kind of decided to do this right. You've got to do it in a big environment where you can have very long term horizons.

And so when we were getting acquired, we had a number of options and with Google, it really just clicked in terms of like how we would fit into the the mission of the company. Like the mission of Google is to organize the world's information, make it universally accessible and useful.

And for photos, now Google photos, our mission was store all your photos, be a home for your photos, make them as useful as possible to you and then get them to the people that want them, which is like exactly mirroring the Google mission. So that that felt really well, really good. The the DNA or the cultures of the companies were very much aligned.

Like we were at Bump, we were kind of like nerdy, quirky, people and we were like into physics and into math and that sort of thing. And at Google, we felt at home Yeah. Compared to, you know, when we would talk to Facebook or talk to Apple, the DNA fit just wasn't quite as good, I think. So it was another reason that Google was What was there? Do you join the Android team? Was there a photos team?

Do you join? It was a photos app Picasa back in the days. Right? So, yeah, Google has been on the photos trajectory for a while beginning with with Picasa. There was an acquisition, I think it was in 02/2005 to acquire Picasa. And then Picasa turned into Picasa web and then when Google plus launched, it got rolled into Google plus.

And so we showed up, in the fall of twenty thirteen and Google was full speed ahead on Google plus and they were starting to build more and more photo related features into Google plus with the goal of getting you to share them on the social network.

We our conversation with Google began with the Android team and it was in the context of like the gallery app on Android could be a lot better and smarter and here's a here's an app that could do it. And so the acquisition was really to take photo roll and turn it into something that would be useful at the Google scale. And it was really convenient.

We joined Google and we like started to ask around about who's working on what and we actually were now moved over as part of this photos team inside of Google plus. And I showed up and I'm like, hey, I've got this idea that I think is gonna work around building a photo gallery app, like a private photo management tool that allows you to share and have this cool like AI stuff in it.

And I was kinda like, but I don't have any AI. Like, we're just we're just like posers here. And we showed up and we looked around and we're like, oh, wow. They've got like this huge team working on face face recognition, face grouping technology. They've got this other huge team working on understanding the content of images and being able to search images.

They got this other team around, scalably backing up photos at that like a huge scale. And I just saw this and I'm like, oh, this is a this is gonna be good. It's a great fit. It's a perfect fit. And and what I think we brought to the table as as photo roll was this insight around like how do people think about their photos? What is the right design of a product?

How do you build these sorts of features in a way that would would fit into their lives really well? And so the combination of those two things turned into Google Photos and And that that that vision of actually uploading every single photo for every single Yeah. Album is actually there right now. That's what you do. Yeah. We do. Yeah. We we upload a lot of photos every day.

Yeah. What what was the insight that led you to create? I understand the sharing between people, the facial recognition. That's awesome. Searching is so cool. What was the insight that led you to start doing the animations and stuff like that? A lot of that stuff was actually already being done inside of Google plus. Oh, okay.

And they did it to try to give you something interesting that would be post worthy, that would make you wanna post it on g plus.

The the process that we took when we when we were designing Google Photos, was to use this technique that I like to use a lot, which is pretend that there's a human being doing the thing that your product is going to do and pretend that human being like doesn't have to sleep, is really smart, has access to all the computing power and brain power in the world. What could that human being do for you?

And so we were talking about this earlier this morning, but for for photos, I thought, okay, if my co founder Andy was my photo assistant and all he did all day long was like help me with my photos, what would he do? And we just started brainstorming like what were the things he would do that would be useful to me? Things were like make sure that he backed up a copy of every photo.

So if I lost my phone, didn't lose my photos. Cool. He would look at all the photos and he would know who's important to me in my life. He'd know who's my mom, who's my dad, who's my sister, who's my girlfriend. And he would like write on the back of each of those photos metaphorically, like this one contains mom and dad. Yeah. This one contains Jenna. This one, you know.

And then we're like, well, what else could he do? And then I'd say, oh, I kinda asked him to go learn like Final Cut Pro and I'd want him to make me like cool montage movies of my life when there's something interesting. I'd want him to like remind me when it's like the one year anniversary of something cool that happened in my life or something meaningful. I'd want him to like go edit my photos.

If I have a photo that's like too dark or messed up, I'd want him to edit it. If I have photos that are like blurry or crappy, I'd want him to suggest that I get rid of those. And so we just made this laundry list of things that would actually be really useful to me but no one was doing because we didn't have that Andy doing it for me.

And that was the insight that kind of led us to how we designed Google Photos, which was it's your home for your photos, but then it's basically like this really helpful assistant that would just do all this other stuff for you. And that that persists to this day and it's it's working very well, that model.

What's your day day to day look like today when you come into work at Google? Like, how does it like to to run one of the 17,000,000,000 user apps in the world? Right.

It's great. It's very diverse. Like how I spend my time is very diverse. I would say, I'll I'll answer it on a monthly basis rather than Okay. Basis just because every day is very different. On a monthly basis, I think I spend, you know a quarter of my time maybe thinking about the strategy aspects like where should we take the team? Where should we take the product?

What is changing about the world or our user base that we need to understand and kind of move in one direction or another. Maybe another quarter is like working with our team and helping our team, whether that be like developing managers on our team, figuring out how to structure the team, which leaders should we put in charge of which things that's like another quarter.

Another quarter, which is like probably my most pleasurable quarter is like actually working with people on our team directly to think about what we should do with the product. Like thinking about, okay, how what should we change for our sharing model? Like how can we make it better? Or, you know, one that I'm working on right now is this, like, photo assistant capability that we have.

Like, what's the next step? How do we, like, do something more with that? That's like another quarter. Then the last quarter is like stuff that you've gotta do if you're running a team, and it's, you know, help people with their with feedback. How do they get better as a as a team? How do they get better as an individual?

Kind of the the stuff that you don't think about when you're a start up with 10 people, but when you're a company with hundreds of people, you're like, okay, I need to come up with a good system where we can give feedback to people on our team. We can help develop them. We can make them better. So this was the next thing I wanted to talk to you about. Yeah.

Like, how do you think about your work now coming from, you know, basically three people Yeah. To a small start up Yeah. To now a very big team. Like, obviously, like the management strategies are different. How you spend your time is different. But like how do you actually feel about it? It's very different. Yeah.

People ask me this question all the time. They're like, what was it like? Like, what was the culture shock like going from a startup to a big company? And I think I might be lucky, but it doesn't feel like that at all to me. It feels like our startup acquired a multi hundred person team. Really does.

And it it it I think it just says it speaks volumes to the fact that our DNA match with Google was really good and that when we joined, we we eventually were given the autonomy and authority to actually, like, chart the path for this product. And that was a rocky road, but like eventually we got there. So yeah, I think that's how it feels to me and it's really it's a luxury. It feels great.

And this is actually after after kind of having that insight at Google, when I invest in companies, this is a question I explicitly ask them is if you could go acquire a big company with the purpose of furthering your vision, which big company would you acquire?

And hearing the answer to that question help helps me understand a their ambition and b how do they think about where they wanna take this thing long term. And so I I often ask this question and they're like, wait, we don't have any money. We can't acquire a company. What are you talking about? I'm like, no. No. It's a thought experiment. Just tell me.

And I think it's really fascinating to hear those answers.

So one one thing I'm curious about. So I would argue that Google Photos is, like, one of the magical AI experiences where, like, you actually take a great product and you add machine learning and AI and make it magical. Yep. And there are lots of startups that come to YC and apply with ideas that relates to AI.

But how do you think about like, how how would you advise them to say, I have this product and then I have this, like, machine learning capability that I'm adding to it? Like, what do you typically when you see those companies, what do you ask them and what do you advise them?

I think the thing that really worked about Google Photos is it was one of the first examples of AI solving real problems that people could resonate with. A lot of the AI stuff I see is does not do that. And you're like, how does the AI actually uniquely make this better? So in in thinking about how you could apply AI, I kinda think about it in two different vectors.

One vector is is there a thing that human beings can do either with skill or time or resources that they don't do at scale today but we could bring a computer in to do that job? That's kind of like what Google Photos that's our approach in many ways.

And I think there's a lot of problems that could be solved in the world that today you could solve easily with a good human being but you just don't have that many good human beings at the right price to do that. Right. So that's one vector that I love to see and that one I fully believe in. The other vector is problems that human beings cannot solve today.

Things like how do you optimize the power usage of a data center? Like a human being could never solve that problem. It's way too it's beyond our brains. That's the other vector where AI can do really fascinating things. And I think that one is a lot harder to know a priori whether it's going to work or not.

And so those ones are riskier bets, but in many cases they're much bigger payoffs if you can get it right. So that's how I think about it. So my advice to people who are like an AI startup is tell me which of those two are you? Like are you trying to solve this unsolvable human problem? Are you just trying to scale a very solvable human problem to a whole lot of people, or at a much cheaper price?

And when you're doing that, what are the things you're gonna go build? Like, what is the solution that you're gonna try to show to your users? And if your answer is something that the solution, even though the AI tech is super cool, if the solution is like, yeah, that's nice, but Right. Whatever,.

then it's not gonna work. Right. So And and so it seems like this this attention to the user and attention to product is like a core belief of yours. It's not about the technology. Absolutely. Yeah. Right. And this was a thing,.

that I noticed at Google when I joined and I think since that period, like in the five years that have passed, Google has really made a transformation to focus much more on the user. But at the time there was still a lot of like cool tech being developed and everybody at Google is a technologist and they're like, oh, yes, it's really cool.

But they're they weren't asking the question as much about how does it solve a user problem and is it really a core user problem that we should solve? And so I think, you know, as Sundar has taken over at Google, he's really tried to focus the company on the user and how can we be helpful to users. And I think that has just really played out in the form of Google Photos.

Is it different to talking to users at scale when you run a Oh yeah. Billing user app versus when you're in a startup? Like how is that Yeah. I've got a tab open in my Chrome browser for each of our platforms for iOS, Android and web that is the raw stream of feedback that you can send in the app. And like every day we get like thousands of reports and so I can't even read them all anymore.

Whereas at the startup, I can read every single email. In fact, at bump until I think through the through the acquisition, I was the only customer support person. Like I wrote back to every single email and it I I blocked like an hour or an hour and a half every day doing it And it was it was kind of one of these things that like can't scale and it was probably a bad use of my time at some point.

But it taught me that like you listen to people and generally they will tell you what you should do. You just need to understand how to interpret what they're saying. It's a great practice. I think that's something we should recommend all early startups to do because it gives you just direct collection connection with the users. Yeah. Yeah.

One thing we did at bump, which I really enjoyed is we would take our team and go to bars and and do user testing and like talk to people. And one reason we did it at bars is that people are like in a more social environment. So like bumping was something that you would actually do there whereas like managing your photos maybe it's harder to find the moment when people are in that in that mode.

But the other thing is when people have a couple drinks, they like actually tell you what they think. Whereas when you bring someone into a lab and like set them down behind the mirrored glass, they know they're being studied and so they behave differently. And so this is a thing that I think is challenging at scale is how do you how do you do that?

You can't just tell Google employees like, yeah, go to bars and ask people what they think. It's not gonna work. So, you know, I would say it's an area that that in general could probably be improved, is how do you create these learnings and this empathy with users at scale for a team that's large and for a user base that's very large. Right.

I mean, so do you have like a system that's just parsing the text and looking for keywords? We do. Yeah. We we have some AI systems that like read the feedback, try to cluster it into different clusters and then some humans look at that and try to understand if there's interesting insights. Yeah.

We've got a user research team that goes out into the world and asks people we do trips like couple summers ago, I spent two weeks in India just living in India trying to understand what about Indian people is different than what is about, you know, people in Mountain View. Yeah. There's a whole lot of differences. So we try to do stuff like that.

We bring people into our office also, but again, like that has its own challenges in terms of knowing that you're being tested. But yeah, we we try to do as much of this as possible. And I think I honestly, I put a lot of weight into what you what what intuition you can build by just talking to your users.

I think we we overlook the fact that we've got the best computing platform that has ever been built and it's our brains and we can use it to give it inputs and then let it do its magic and pattern match and then output our intuition. And I think that that is really what your gut is. And it really is like a sophisticated machine learning system that we should actually utilize.

So I I'm a big believer in building what you think is right. Yeah. Absolutely. So a question from Twitter related to products.

Lamede Aka Aka Mo Lafe, hopefully I got that right, asks, what did David focus on too much that he thinks was a mistake now, when you were a rookie product lead? Oh, great question. What did we focus on too much?

One one thing at bump that we focused on a lot was like how good the system was, like how performant was it measuring, you know, obsessed over like microseconds here and milliseconds there and I I love that culture and it's a culture that we try to really push on Google Photos as well.

But I think if you focus on that a little too much early on, you might be missing the much bigger picture which is like, yeah, even if you made it like super awesome, people aren't gonna care. And I think that that is an insight that, is hard to really have when you're in the moment in the details, your system is running and you're like crap, it like it's really slow right now.

All the users are complaining. It's so easy to just to be like great, let's go fix that. And it's very hard to pull back and say maybe that's not the problem we should be fixing. Maybe there's some other problem that we need to understand. And I think that is the trap that a lot of companies fall into. This is the this is the Sam Altman.

It's like one of my favorite quotes from Sam is I think it's like he says, the the meta problem that kills most startups is working on the wrong thing. It's not like screwing up whatever you're working on. It's not your competitors. It's that you were just focused on the wrong thing.

And I think that in in the product world, it's this trap that you can fall in which is like, oh, this is not as good as it could be. We should make it better. Where even if you made it perfect, it doesn't matter. And actually you needed to work on this other thing. So that's that's probably my number one advice.

Yeah. And so now that you're working on it at large scale this like these product insights, what degree of buy in do you have to feel before you ship it out to a billion people? Like when you're testing some new thing? Yeah. Great question.

We do a number of things to to get confidence in some product that we're gonna build or some feature that we're gonna build. The first thing we do is use it ourselves. And if if we think it's not working, then it's very likely it's not going to work in the market. And this is a luxury that we have because we build Google photos.

It's a product that we're building for ourselves and for a lot of other people who are not like us but we are at least somewhat representative of the user base compared to, you know, if we were building a product for like, you know, kids that are under eight years old.

Like I personally don't have a ton of intuition about that and I wouldn't be able to know innately whether this is gonna work or not. So that's a whole lot more challenging problem and I have so much respect for people who can solve problems that are where they are not the user. For us, we are the user. So first step is do we like it?

And often, you know, I challenge our team where we've we've like done experiments, we've run stuff, we we were like about to launch something and I just asked the team, I'm like, what do you guys think about it? Do you like it? Do you use it? What's your most annoying part of this product?

And often they're like, well, I'm not the target user but like this is kind of annoying to me and I'm like, we should get that right. Like, come on. So that's number one. Number two is do a bunch of testing with users before we actually launch even in an experiment.

We like make prototypes, we bring it out to people and you can learn a lot of usability things like whether the actual flows will work, but you can't really test do they care by doing those sorts of tests. We also do experiments. We roll things out to 1%.

We've got like a, I won't talk about it, but we've got a pretty big product in experiment right now that we're excited about and we're watching how people are using it. We're trying to keep it on the download. And that's another thing that we do and and we learn a lot from that.

And I think the combination of all these things give us gives us confidence that, yep, this is a thing that we at least have high enough confidence that we should roll it out and see what happens.

Yeah. So so Lameda Akomolafe is asking you, did you make any early mistakes when you joined Google? So, like, like, ask them practically, what kind of is it a new large organizations to you? Like, what kind mistakes were you doing? My bosses would certainly say yes.

I think let's see. There are two problems and they're wrapped together. The the the meta problem that I made or meta mistake I made was, I really believed in this vision for what we could build in the photo space so much that like I was just determined to solve it.

And I think the skill that I needed to develop inside of a big company, is very different than what I had at the startup was I now had like three or four bosses above me that I needed to convince. And at the startup I just had to like have a board meeting and say, hey, Mark, I'm gonna do this. And he's like, cool, do it.

Whereas here it was like, hey, gotta convince this person and then I've gotta use their support to garner support from this other group of people and then I've got to take that and create support from the CEO, right?

And it's it's a very different process and I was not very adept at doing that and I just kind of I I used the modality of being the startup founder and just saying like, we need to do this. Come on everybody. Let's go. And I'm gonna convince you. And whereas at Google, I needed to be much more delicate and I don't think I did a great job of that.

One of the sub components of that was, how can you do that at a big company? And I have learned now is you can really get a lot of support at the grassroots level.

So what when I ran into these problems going up the stack at Google, I kind of retrenched and said, let me go talk to the people on the ground actually talking to customers, actually building the product as opposed to the people managing big teams doing it. And when I would go talk to those people, a lot of them said like, oh yeah, I get it. Let's do it. This makes a lot of sense.

And by building some support there, we could then go in mass to the leader and say, hey, we all think it's right. Here's all the perspectives. Here's all the diverse opinions. This is what we think we should do. And that is a much better sell at company. Especially if you can have evidence in the market in some way that like this this stuff is working, this other stuff is not working.

Let's look at it objectively and decide what we should do. In five or ten years, do you see yourself working for a large company or a startup? That's a great question. I love startups. I love the rawness of startups, the purity that like every problem you face is like there's no layers of abstraction. You're just in it and you're seeing the true problem. I love that.

It's a thing I try to keep doing at Google. The challenge I guess is when I look at like what I could go start next or what whether I want to join a startup or or start a new startup. I kind of have have the luxury of thinking about it in two dimensions. One is what reach will I have? How many people in the world can I affect with this thing I wanna build?

And the other dimension is to what degree can I affect their lives in a positive way? And looking at Google Photos, it's like we have a path to affect billions of users like the majority of people on the planet. We have a path to get there. That's pretty amazing. Not many products can do that.

And then on the importance or depth of the of the experience, I believe there's not a lot of things more valuable to you than the record of your life, your your memories. Right? Maybe the only things on top of that are like being alive, like your health,.

and maybe connections in the moment to the people around you. Like, otherwise, it's one of the most essential parts of the human experience. So I look at that and I'm like, I think this is like probably the most impactful thing I can be doing right now. I actually give that advice when I when the companies ask me, hey. I got this acquisition offer from this large company. Yeah.

I always try to put like all the financial stuff aside and sort of like everything else aside. And the the main question to me is always, can you execute your vision towards a much larger audience in a better way inside this company or not? Yeah.

And if you really believe that being part of this other large company is the way for you to get to your users and execute your vision, then that is the most important question to answer. Yeah. Yeah. And, a corollary is if you don't have that alignment and you do go to that company, it's going to be a disaster. Yeah. And I think that's and statistically, acquisitions don't turn out well.

And and it's fascinating.

You make this big decision for your company that we're gonna go get acquired by blank. But then if you look at like how many minutes or hours did I spend with the people I will be spending my entire work life with, it's usually really really small, like laughably small. And most of the discussions is on the financial outcome. It's not actually about sort of like the product outcome.

Should be where most So a lot of the challenges I faced when I got to Google were misalignments of vision around what Google should do in the photo space. And it I wish we had had those conversations beforehand. Mhmm.

The problem is the conversations need to be with these like senior level people at Google and they don't have time to spend like an entire weekend like spitballing with me about some some random startup entrepreneur like the future of what we should do. Might or might not get acquired. If they might acquire. Right. Yeah.

So it's it's this like asymmetric problem and now that I'm on the other side at Google, like I try to empathize with my former self. Yeah. And and like, know, we've done acquisitions at at photos and I try to just like spend a lot of time with people and make sure that we're aligned on like what we wanna build.

Because inevitably when you join, something's going to change and you're gonna like have to tweak your plan in some way. And if you don't have that fundamental alignment,.

it's gonna be a disaster. So that's the other thing I think is really important. You said something really interesting about humans and their attachment to photos. I I wanted to kind of touch on this at some point. Yeah. So have you learned any kind of larger truths about humanity by paying attention to all of this stuff all the time for years?

Probably. I don't know if I'm great at articulating them. Let's see. Yeah. I think one probably the number one truth I've I've seen is the power of nostalgia. I think we all feel it and we all know that feeling, but, seeing it from the perspective that I get to see it, it's it's one of the most powerful things in the human experience, think.

And and we've tapped into it in a variety of little ways, but I think there's a much larger thing that we're we're still trying to go learn and figure out. But yeah, I think we each think about important moments in our lives and they can be important from like a grandiose perspective or just like little moments in our lives that stick with us.

And usually in that moment, there's like an image that you have in your brain or like a song that you associate with that moment or like a smell. There's something that like triggers you. Mhmm. And people love thinking about the past. It's just an innate thing.

I think it's it's an evolutionary thing that those of us who had that trait are better at understanding where we've been and better at like surviving in the future. So I think it is baked into us as as humans, but it is a really powerful phenomenon. Have you you read Thinking Fast and Slow? Yeah. Where he talks about sort of like how important photographic memories are for happiness? Yeah.

I I have and I totally believe it. One of our goals with Google Photos is to basically give everyone a photographic memory. Mhmm. The challenge is our brains aren't act like most of us at least don't have this like perfectly linear, evenly distributed photographic memory.

The way our brains work is we pick important moments and really like write a lot to the disc during those moments and then we kind of don't don't worry about the rest. Mhmm. And so one of the challenges we have with Google Photos is we now have all the photos that you've taken in your life.

How do we decide which ones are the important ones that we should like really focus on and try to help you relive and engage with? Which ones are like not important even though they may seem important to our algorithms? And then on the other side, which ones are like not memories that you want to reengage with? And this is a big challenge and it's it's a very difficult problem.

But we all have moments in our lives or people in our lives that were part of our life before and it was an experience we had, but going forward, it's not a thing that we want to dwell And that's a really difficult challenge. I'm like, I would say we're getting it okay, but not great. And I wanna that's an area I wanna improve. Yeah. So I have one final question.

As a product lead, I was we had similar role at Airbnb. I spent a lot of time looking at other products and new products. Mhmm. What are your top, like, other new apps that you are pretty excited about? In photo space? Oh, in general. Like, that just just you feel now, like, these are important to me. Yeah.

Oh, consumer products. Yeah. Or just apps generally, like Well, in in terms of, like, categories.

that I see that I'm interested in Mhmm. Spanning, like, everything. One category that I think is fascinating is basically taking, like, mundane systems that humans have created and replacing them with smart technology. So Flexport is one example of that. I just invested last YC batch in this company Canary Technologies building software for hotels.

Like seems so mundane and like who cares about that, but it's a big problem. There's a lot of people go to hotels and we need to make the experiences better. And one way to do it is to make the software better. So that's like one category that I'm very interested in.

Another category that I'm interested in is taking things that we all take for granted like eating food or having health care and applying some of these technologies or things to make those things better. So one I just invested in also in the last batch is Seattle FoodTech. They're making a meatless chicken nugget. I just ate them the other day, the newest version of it, and they're delicious.

And it's like obvious to me that, oh, yeah, we're gonna this will be a thing. Some form of this will be a thing. So applying technology to these like very mundane physical parts of our lives is another category that's interesting. On the consumer social yada yada side, it's really tough. Like you I see lots of cool stuff where I'm like, there's something cool in there, but this thing's gonna fail.

And I see like I think that all the time and I try to invest in them because some fraction of them will become really cool.

Different different world today than we were, like Oh, definitely. Seven years ago. Yeah. It's.

we've like, developers have gone and, like, figured out all the obvious wins already in the consumer space. And the ones that emerge are the ones that seem, like, totally off off the cut. Like, who would have known 10 ago that Snapchat would have been, a popular thing or that the stories format would have been a popular thing.

It's very hard to predict until you build it and see it and then you're like, oh, yeah, that's gonna work. Well, let alone a lip syncing product becomes massive. Okay. And I think, you know, one thing on the consumer side that I've come to understand is there is a difference between something that is really popular for awhile and something that is a durable essential human need.

Through the Instagram phase, given where I am in photos, like I got to see all the like Instagram competitors where they have like some new cool format. Right? It it like turns your photos into art or it makes this part of the photo move or it's this cool looping effect. And all of them have the thesis like we're gonna take this and turn it into Instagram.

And I my feedback was always like, but Instagram already exists. So you're not solving a durable human need. What was it the timing or was it a specific thing that they did that made them succeed? I think had those things happened before Instagram happened, they could have pulled the same thing off. I mean, pulled the same playbook, right?

It's, yeah, we let you filter your photos, they look slightly different. And but then they were able to translate that into a network that was durable and and a human need that was durable, which is I want to interact with other people. Mhmm. Basically, like that's basically what Instagram is.

And so I when I look at consumer stuff, I try to understand what is the fundamental human need that your product is either scaling across time and space or changing or or amping up in some critical dimension. And if I don't see that, then I'm much more skeptical. Right?

So that's it's kind of my my rubric for consumer stuff is tell me the thing that humans already do today in a limited, not as great way that you are gonna somehow amplify times 10 or times a hundred. That's what Facebook was. That's what Twitter is. That's what Snapchat is. All these things are exactly that playbook.

executed really well. Right on. Alright. Thanks so much for coming in. Thank you so much. Thanks, Chad. This is great.