Gaurav Misra: How Captions ships a marketable feature weekly

1. 0:00 – 4:47

   Gaurav’s background

   1. GMGaurav Misra0:00

      There's rarely a time like this where so much is possible. Even like five, seven years ago, it's so hard to start a company. Everything feels like it's done, someone else is working on it. Suddenly, it's a time right now which I've never even experienced, where everything you try just works.

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky0:14

      With people constantly hearing about all the things happening, is there any tools or processes or approaches you figured out to help stay focused?

   3. GMGaurav Misra0:21

      Our engineering goal is every engineer should ship a marketable product every week.

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky0:27

      I love just how wild that sounds. How do you maintain quality and make it all cohesive?

   5. GMGaurav Misra0:31

      I- I actually think, as a startup, your job is to take on technical debt, because that is how you operate faster than a bigger company. Bigger companies don't take on technical debt, they pay it usually right away, or they're paying back technical debt from the days when they were a startup.

   6. LRLenny Rachitsky0:45

      Is there anything else that, in how you operate and the way you build product, that you think is really unique and interesting?

   7. GMGaurav Misra0:50

      We have what we think of as the public roadmap. This is basically what people have asked us for. There's all these surface areas where we receive user feedback, but these are all features that every competitor knows about. If a user's asking us for it, they're asking everybody for it. It's not going to be a game changer in terms of winning against your competition, so we have a second roadmap which we think of as a secret roadmap.

   8. LRLenny Rachitsky1:13

      (instrumental music) Today, my guest is Gaurav Misra. Gaurav was an early employee at Snap, where he led the design engineering team, which he explains in the conversation. He was also an engineer at Microsoft and a couple other companies. Most recently, he's the co-founder and CEO of Captions, one of the most successful and cutting-edge consumer AI products, which lets you generate and edit talking videos with AI. They have over 10 million users and have raised over $100 million. In our conversation, we essentially do an archeology of how a modern AI-oriented startup operates, including how every single engineer at their company ships a marketable product or feature every single week, why they have a secret roadmap in addition to a regular roadmap. We also get in depth about how Snap as a product team operated, what he's learned about what it takes to build a successful consumer and social app, why they had no PMs and how designers ran the show, which may or may not have been a great idea, and also what happens in a world where AI video is so good that you have no idea if it's real or not. This episode is for anyone that is building a product on top of AI. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app. And also, I just launched an insane deal for subscribers of my newsletter. Every yearly subscriber now gets a year free of Notion, Perplexity, Superhuman, Linear, and Granola. Learn more at lennysnewsletter.com. With that, I bring you Gaurav Misra. This episode is brought to you by Brex, the financial stack used by one in every three US venture-backed startups. Brex knows that nearly 40% of startups fail because they run out of cash, so they built a banking experience that focuses on helping founders get more from every dollar. It's a stark difference from traditional banking options that leave a startup's cash sitting idle while chipping away at it with fees. To help founders protect cash and extend runway, Brex combined the best things about checking, treasury, and FDIC insurance in one powerhouse account. You can send and receive money worldwide at lightning speed. You can get 20X the standard FDIC protection through program banks, and you can earn industry-leading yield from your first dollar while still being able to access your funds anytime. To learn more, check out Brex at brex.com/banking-solutions. That's brex.com/bankingsolutions. This episode is brought to you by Paragon, the integration infrastructure for B2B SaaS companies. Is AI on your 2025 product roadmap? Whether you need to enable RAG with your users' external data like Google Drive files, Gong transcripts, or Jira tickets, or build AI agents that can automate work across your users' other tools, integrations are the foundation. But building all these integrations in-house will cost you years of engineering, time you don't have given the fast pace of AI. That's where Paragon's all-in-one integration platform comes in. Build scalable workflows to ingest all of your users' external data into your RAG pipelines and leverage Action Kit, their latest product, to instantly give your AI agents access to over 100 integrations and thousands of third-party actions with a single API call. Leading AI companies like AI21, You.com, 11X, and Coffee.ai are already shipping new integrations seven times faster with Paragon, keeping their engineers focused on core product development. Ready to accelerate your AI roadmap this year? Visit useparagon.com/lenny to get a free MVP of your next product integration.

2. 4:47 – 9:30

   The exciting era of AI and startups

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky4:48

      (instrumental music) Gaurav, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

   2. GMGaurav Misra4:53

      Thank you. Yeah, thanks for having me. Excited.

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky4:55

      I very rarely have early-stage founders on the podcast, but I wanted to chat with you because you're at the center of so much of what is top of mind for a lot of builders these days. Uh, AI and video and just consumer and social apps. Also, going viral and finding new marketing channels. So, I think there's a lot that people can learn from the way you approach product, the way you build product, and the way you just think about where things are going. So again, thank you for being here.

   4. GMGaurav Misra5:26

      Appreciate it. Honestly, it's an exciting time. Like, I got to say, like, there's rarely a time like this where, you know, where so much is possible. Like, in normal times, if you think about, like, even like five, seven years ago, it's so hard to start a company. It's so, so hard to come up with an idea, right? Like, it's just, like, everything feels like it's done. Someone else is working on it, right? Like, oh, it's been tried three times and failed three times. And like, suddenly, it's a time right now which is like, I've never even experienced honestly in my career, right, where everything you try just works. There's so many possibilities. There's not enough people in the world to work on them. Like, honestly, right? Like, there's more things that can be done than there's people available to do them, right? It's just such a rare thing. And honestly, it's not gonna last forever, right? Like, we are gonna catch up to this, but just feels lucky to be, you know, part of that movement. It's awesome.

   5. LRLenny Rachitsky6:17

      When you said everything is working, I think what's an important distinction there is, like, the building of the tool works. Like, the, the tech is now there to build all these things that have not been possible before. The thing that is increasingly difficult, and, um, I want to get your take on this, is getting anyone to pay attention and stick with your thing. Because it's so easy to build stuff and everything is just awesome and interesting, uh, it's harder to get people to pay attention and stick with your product. So I guess, is there anything there you've learned? You've built a, a number of successful products. We'll talk about Snap and what you're doing now, about just, I don't know, what you need to think about these days to get anyone to pay attention and then stick around.

   6. GMGaurav Misra6:54

      Yeah. I mean, honestly, it's a great point, and I think there is a lot of hype, obviously, right? And part of it, that's kind of what's driving a lot of this growth for a lot of companies, right? And I think from, like, a user acquisition/marketing perspective, right, like, in a world five or seven years ago, if you were making something novel and you went to users and you was like, "Oh, we got something better," right? Like, people are gonna be like, "Oh, whatever. Everybody says they got something better," right? "I don't care." Right? But today, and this is not, you know, uh, probably the way you should do it, but you can go and just say, like, "We've rethought this thing with AI," right?

   7. LRLenny Rachitsky7:29

      (laughs)

   8. GMGaurav Misra7:29

      And a bunch of people will just be like, "Well, how?" Or, "Maybe I should check this out," right? They'll just try it. Obviously, you have to deliver on the promises, right? Like, if you don't deliver, people will come in, they'll, like, play around a bunch and then just leave, right? But if you can truly deliver on the promises, you know, there's great opportunities to acquire users at scale. So, I think that's slightly different, and I don't know how long that lasts, but it is definitely a different time from that perspective. I do think also, you know, at the core of building products is solving problems. I think a lot of people sort of get caught up in this, um, you know, "Well, it's cool," and people will come for the cool right now. Right? Like, people will come in and be like, "Well, let me check it out. It's cool." But at the end of the day, like, if you're just building a playground and people play around in the playground and then they leave after playing around, it's not a business, right? Um, so I think that is still key, right? You have to be solving real problems.

   9. LRLenny Rachitsky8:25

      As, as you were talking, I'm thinking about, like, every day there's something, like, something that would maybe a few years ago be, like, news for a year. Holy shit, this is now possible. Now it's like every day something like that happens, and then we're like, "All right." So what I think about is, like, we'll have AGI one of these days, or superintelligence, and everyone's going to be like, "Oh, amazing." And then, "Okay, what's for dinner?"

   10. GMGaurav Misra8:46

       Isn't that already happening? Like, think about, like, um, in a way, like, I kind of self-reflect on this sometimes of, like, you've seen Iron Man and stuff, like, they have the J.A.R.V.I.S. thing, and you've seen, like, um, Interstellar, and they have, like, the TARS machine, right? And you- they're talking back and forth with these things, like, bouncing ideas, and that is science fiction. That's literally science fiction. Okay, it's not perfect, but it exists in a way that nobody could have imagined. That s- science fiction has become reality. And I feel like nobody cares, right? In a way, like, you would have expected the world to be turned upside down. But it feels like almost in a way so slow and, like, people are like, "Yes, there's, adoption is happening," but, like, I feel like it's almost a shocking development

3. 9:30 – 11:26

   Staying top of mind

   1. GMGaurav Misra9:30

      in a way.

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky9:30

      It feels like you guys have done a good job staying top of mind and continuing to get people excited, because to your point, there's so much happening. How do you get people to continue to be like, "Oh, okay, wow, what they're building is actually... It's interesting and continues to be interesting"? Anything you've learned about just what it takes to stay top of mind and continue to pull people back and get people re-excited over and over?

   3. GMGaurav Misra9:51

      100%. I mean, I think honestly, it just comes down to, like, not just AI for the sake of AI or AI for the sake of excitement or hype or novelty or whatever that is, right? It's actually effective AI, like AI that solves real problems, practical problems, right? And, you know, the fundamentals haven't changed, right? In a way, there's three steps to building products. You identify a user problem, you apply some technology to solve that problem, but then finally, you have some mechanism to find people who have that problem, right? If you can do all three of those things, then in any environment, you can create great products. But I think right now, what's different is so much is changing on the technology side that you can create products that could not have been created before and solve problems that could not have been solved before. And that's what's creating the opportunity, right? And for us, especially in the video space, it's truly endless, right? Like, we've just begun, and, like, our goal specifically for video is not to build professional tools, right? We're not building for professionals at all. We're building for the person who could not have created video before, right? They didn't have the tools, the skills, the means to be able to create video, and now they can because they're able to jump over that skill gap, right, or that time gap. Maybe they're business owners, so they don't have time, right? They want results. And honestly, a lot to solve there, right? Just tons.

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky11:20

      Solve people's problems. We've, uh... Easier said than done, but, uh, it's a good reminder that-

   5. GMGaurav Misra11:25

      Yes.

   6. LRLenny Rachitsky11:25

      ... like, in the end,

4. 11:26 – 13:14

   Tips for staying focused

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky11:26

      that's all that matters. Something that I always think about with people in your shoes is just, how do you not get overwhelmed, and how do you know what to pay attention to? How do you stay focused? Any tips there for folks that are just reading every day a new announcement and they're just like, "I just, how do I, how do I, what do I do? There's too much"?

   2. GMGaurav Misra11:44

      It is the, the new problem of product development in a way, right? There's too many possible paths you can go down. There's too many ideas, there's too many, you know, things you could do. And I mean, obviously prioritization is always an important skill set and has always been, but it's become an even more important skill set right now, because you have to figure out what not to pay attention to. Our general framework for it is to look for user demand, right? And actually, the easiest way to check for user demand is to just see what has virality, right? Usually what has virality, what people want to share and talk about, there's something at the core of it that actually is interesting. Now-It may not always be interesting in a way that's like, you know, maybe it's not ... Maybe it's a one-time use case. Maybe it's not something that people would do repeatedly. Maybe it's not something you could build like a subscription business off of. But oftentimes there's something, some core sort of element of it that has resonated with people and if you can identify that core and then, you know, mold it into fitting into your business, it's actually a great way to identify like what actually works. And we have these tools right now. We don't have to build anything. You can just kinda talk about it and people will share it, share the idea, right? And you can kinda measure how well the product might be received even before you've d- built anything, right? So, it's a great tool we use for like prioritization. We spend a lot of time on social media. Obviously, like our app is often used for social media, so a lot of our employees will spend a lot of time on social media. We look at what the trends are, what's happening, and based on that we can get a pretty good read of what might resonate

5. 13:14 – 19:03

   Shipping marketable features weekly

   1. GMGaurav Misra13:14

      well with people.

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky13:15

      So as a leader of a company with people constantly hearing about all the things happening, is there any tools or processes or approaches you've figured out to help people continue? Like stay focused, not get excited about every shiny new object and, you know, actually ship things?

   3. GMGaurav Misra13:30

      I mean, honestly, it's all about incrementality in a way, right? Like I think we do aim to ship every week, right? So like our engineering goal is every engineer should ship a marketable product every week. And so what's a marketable product? It's a product that you can show to users and a user might subscribe or pay for the app just for that, or come, come to the app essentially just for that. And that's why like table stakes features like, you know, let's say we're talking about like a word processor or something. You know, if you had like auto format or, you know, just table stakes stuff like justify alignment or something, no one's gonna come to your word processor for justify alignment, right? Like, you can't market that, right, because it's obvious, right? It- of course it exists. But if you did something unique that nobody else has done, you can go and show that to people and people will come to your app just for that. And even if your app doesn't have a lot of the obvious stuff, maybe it doesn't have justify alignment, right? (laughs) People will jump over that just to kind of use for these new tools and new abilities that you might be building and marketing. So, we try to do every engineer one marketable feature per week. And yeah, a lot of that stuff may not work, right? But a lot of it does work and we can figure out obviously where to put in more effort. Things that start to work, we double down on those things, build more. People often complain because think about it, like in one week what we're shipping, it's not complete. It's MVP, truly. And we, we slice the hell out of it, right? Like we take the design and we cut, cut, cut until we can really say that it's gonna be useless if we cut any more. We get that out and people come in and if things are going well, people will use it despite all the problems that it might have. And now people will complain and we'll have a list of problems and we know what to do next. So, that's a starting point essentially. So, as long as we're shipping one a week, we get a ton of volume of like features and products and directions we're releasing, cut a lot of that. What remains, expand from there, right? So, it's- it works really well and it keeps people focused.

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky15:37

      I love the simplicity of that. I love just how wild that sounds for a lot of companies, I imagine. Every engineer ships a sh- marketable feature or product every week.

   5. GMGaurav Misra15:46

      Yes.

   6. LRLenny Rachitsky15:48

      There's some people listening to this and they're just like completely stressed out by this idea, and there's some people listening and they're like, "This is exactly how I want to work. This is how every company should build."

   7. GMGaurav Misra15:57

      Yep.

   8. LRLenny Rachitsky15:57

      Uh, how do you maintain quality and make it all cohesive? I, I imagine that's the big trade-off. Just any tricks there for folks that want to maybe start operating this way?

   9. GMGaurav Misra16:06

      Quality is not something you compromise on most of the time, right? I think, um, yes, there's strategic compromises in quality, but most of the time what you want to do is have a bar for quality where people should come in and if they're using the feature, like it should work, right? Of course. Right? And the way to cut down on time, and I think this is a mistake people make a lot of the time, is when time is being pressured downward, a lot of times engineers, PMs, designers, they will cut on quality rather than cutting on scope. And actually, you can cut on scope. It's actually, you know, the, the method that we use is we look at every element that's gonna take any time to build and we just say, "What if we remove this? Is the product still useful?" And we keep repeating that until we remove whatever's left and we say it's gonna be useless at this point. And that becomes the one-week project, right? Yeah, it actually really works, right? It kinda narrows down to the core of what you're really trying to ask. So for example, let's say we wanted to build something to add an image, you know, on your video or something like that, right? And this is like, you know, a really basic idea. I kind of just made it up right now. And you might imagine a design in which you import your image from your camera roll i- uh, but before it lands, uh, in your video you might want to remove the background, right? You might wanna, you know, um, change the hue and saturation or something like that. And you might expect like a designer to like buil- design all those features, right? And you kind of learn a design, but you really quickly realize that you can cut all that stuff, right? You can cut the background or you can cut the hue/saturation. All you really need is pic- and then there might be a picker. We need a picker with a library with a lot of different ty- you know, what if you want to pull from the cloud? What if you want to pull from, you know, the drive or something like that? Cut all that, right, and essentially come to the core which is just like, you know, native picker from the camera lands straight in the video. No UI. And that is already ... That should be useful. If that's not useful, then anything else built on top of that is also useless, right? (laughs) So, that's kinda how we might go about it.

   10. LRLenny Rachitsky18:12

       That last sentence is so key to this. Like it's the core idea of ship small iterative features before you invest a lot in something to first figure out is there anything there? Is this worth spending weeks on?

   11. GMGaurav Misra18:24

       Totally. And I think, like, the coolest part of this method is, like, the first thing that the users will... Users will come in, they'll use the thing, they'll import images, and the first thing they'll complain about is what kind of bothers them the most. Is it human saturation? Is it background removal? Is it, like, picking from the cloud, right? Like, you'll just get the most complaints about that thing. People will be like... And people will be honest about it. They'll be like, "This sucks." Right? "It doesn't even have background removal. What kind of image thing is this?" Right? And you kind of have to take that feedback and just next week you can ship in a single week all the things that the user's complaining about, right?

   12. LRLenny Rachitsky18:58

       Right, and then they're like, "Wow, this team is-"

   13. GMGaurav Misra19:00

       Yes.

   14. LRLenny Rachitsky19:00

       "... shipping, like, crazy-"

   15. GMGaurav Misra19:01

       Exactly.

   16. LRLenny Rachitsky19:01

       "... solving all my problems. So responsive."

6. 19:03 – 25:31

   Managing technical debt in startups

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky19:04

      This connects a, kind of a common sign of product market fit, which is when people are complaining about the thing.

   2. GMGaurav Misra19:09

      Yeah.

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky19:09

      That means they actually care enough to complain, and that's a really good sign if they're complaining about something.

   4. GMGaurav Misra19:13

      It's very true. Very true. If nobody complains, it's almost a red flag, you know?

   5. LRLenny Rachitsky19:16

      Hmm. I love that this is turning into kind of an archeology of a modern, uh, product team and startup. So I wanna keep digging. This is not where I was planning to go, but this is awesome.

   6. GMGaurav Misra19:26

      (laughs)

   7. LRLenny Rachitsky19:27

      I love that this, uh, approach of every engineer shipping something every week that's marketable connects directly to the... where I started this conversation, which is how do you stay above the noise? And part of the answer is just ship stuff constantly and just continue to impress people. Like, here's a new amazing video feature. Hey, look at this thing.

   8. GMGaurav Misra19:43

      Exactly, yep. I, I think it's definitely key, right? And there's enough area and enough scope for that to happen, right? Like, I think truly in normal times, it may not be possible to create that much roadmap that quickly. But I think because there's so much innovation under- underlying all this, there is that scope available, right? Like, the, the roadmap almost seems unlimited, right? Like, just truly.

   9. LRLenny Rachitsky20:07

      Okay. The other question I imagine people would be wondering is how do you work on longer term projects that take many weeks? There's also infrastructure, I guess, backend stuff.

   10. GMGaurav Misra20:16

       Yeah.

   11. LRLenny Rachitsky20:16

       So maybe answer those questions. How do you think about long-term stuff, and then how do you deal with backend stuff that isn't a feature that anyone would care about?

   12. GMGaurav Misra20:22

       Yep. So usually, we'll dedicate time to that separately. So for example, usually Q4 for us is infrastructure quarter, right? We just, like, go and build all the infrastructure. Q4 is generally, you know, we've already delivered a ton of products and stuff. We're feeling pretty good about the rest of the year. Uh, things are winding down, you know, obviously holidays and stuff coming up. And so we spend all that time paying the technical debt, right? I, I actually think there's a unique thing to think here about, like, technical debt in general. And, you know, as a startup, your job is to take on technical debt, right? Because that is how you operate faster than a bigger company, right? Bigger companies don't take on technical debt. They pay it usually right away, or they're paying back technical debt from the days when they were a startup, right? And they took on a lot of it, right? Uh, I mean, Snap's... I used to work at Snap, and there was a lot of examples of that over there, right? So, uh, and I'm sure it happens at every other company, right? And we think about it as, like, well, is this a problem we need to solve today, or is this a problem that the 50th engineer or the 100th engineer or the 500th engineer can solve, right? And if it is a problem that a future engineer can solve, we should use that future engineer now. Essentially, that's what we're doing. And we're saying we're gonna push this to somebody in the future. And by the way, if the company fails, that engineer will never be hired, right? And all this won't matter anyways, right? (laughs) So it's kind of like financial debt in many ways. Financial debt is taken on to create leverage. It can be a good thing, right? Like, if you're buying a house, you take on debt, and you can create... buy something probably more than you can afford without taking on debt, right? And it's the same thing. You can create products that you wouldn't be able to build with a small team that you have by taking on strategic technical debt. It's very positive, actually.

   13. LRLenny Rachitsky22:13

       Wow. This is such a cool idea. And where my mind goes is that future engineer may be an AI agent engineer-

   14. GMGaurav Misra22:19

       Exactly, right? Yeah. (laughs)

   15. LRLenny Rachitsky22:21

       ... just solving problems, just-

   16. GMGaurav Misra22:22

       Exactly.

   17. LRLenny Rachitsky22:22

       ... untechnical debting you.

   18. GMGaurav Misra22:24

       Exactly. Some engineer in the future, you know-

   19. LRLenny Rachitsky22:27

       Yeah.

   20. GMGaurav Misra22:27

       ... 500th engineer many years from now will get a promotion because they solved this big problem that those really bad, you know, early engineers created.

   21. LRLenny Rachitsky22:36

       So obviously, there's a line to this. Like, you don't wanna, you know... There's, like, only so much debt you can take on before you become... become a big problem. Is there any thoughts on just that balance of just, like, how much is too much and how you know if it's enough or not for your engineer or just like...

   22. GMGaurav Misra22:50

       Yeah, I mean, I think generally the rule of thumb is, you know, every piece of debt that you take on, you have to pay interest on, right? So i- if there is debt that you've taken on, there's 1% or 2% of your time that is gonna be taken away every day in maintaining bugs and issues and restarts and crashes and things that are happening with that. Because you did it the fast way, something's gonna go wrong with it. Every day, 1% of your time will be taken away. If you take on enough debt, you'll be paying 80 or 90% interest, and you'll not have any time to do anything new. You'll just be paying interest. That's all. And that's when you get into mode of like, oh, we're just keeping the lights on. We don't have any engineers to do anything. We're just keeping the lights on. That's the failure case for a startup, right? So in a way, you have a technical debt runway, right? Once you run out, once you've taken on too much debt, and if you haven't delivered value in that time, enough value to hire the engineers to pay the interest or just pay off the debt, you will get in trouble.

   23. LRLenny Rachitsky23:46

       I, I love that. That's such a nice heuristic of how to think about when to invest in something. I don't wanna go down this too far, but just a thought I have is, you know, sometimes there's big technical decisions you gotta make that-

   24. GMGaurav Misra23:56

       Yeah.

   25. LRLenny Rachitsky23:56

       ... impact the way everything builds or is built in the future. I imagine those you spend more time on and take really seriously.

   26. GMGaurav Misra24:02

       Definitely. Yeah, I mean, I think as long as it's possible for wherever, it's like a two-way door, you can kind of do whatever you want. I mean, this is a classic methodology, right? If it's a one-day, one-way door, it's worth thinking about and sort of doing, uh, correctly, at least as much as the one-way door would matter to you in the future.

   27. LRLenny Rachitsky24:22

       How much do your engineers use Cursor and tools like that to build? Like, how much is AI helping your team move faster?

   28. GMGaurav Misra24:28

       100%. Yeah, I mean-... everybody's using it. It's super helpful. I mean, uh, even I'm using it, honestly. Um, yeah. There's... It's a huge multiplier for the team, no doubt.

   29. LRLenny Rachitsky24:40

       And is it Cursor specifically? Is there anything else that you guys find useful?

   30. GMGaurav Misra24:42

       Yeah, we are using Cursor. Yep. Uh, we've tried all the different tools. We've... We were using Devin as well, which is another. You know, that's more advanced, I guess. You know, it's kinda solving bugs for you.
7. 25:31 – 32:09

   Snap’s unique product development approach

   1. GMGaurav Misra25:31

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky25:31

      Um, is there anything else that, uh... in how you operate and build the way you build product, or set up the way you build product that you think is really unique and interesting that other people might be able to learn from?

   3. GMGaurav Misra25:42

      Our process is a bit, uh, interesting in that way. Like, we have a design team, we have a PM team. Uh, and we're very early on those teams right now. Uh, and obviously, we have, uh, engineering and we have all the different surface areas, so iOS, Android, web, right? Uh, there's backend team, machine learning team, research team. So, generally, like, when we're developing products, we may start off with, like, a PM first approach, where we're kind of, you know, finding some sort of overall issue that we wanna take on, some new area or pillar we wanna take on, and then creating sort of product specs from there. But a lot of times, we'll also start the opposite way, where we'll first design something, right? Without even having any idea of what or why we're doing it. But we'll design a bunch of different things, and then we'll sit down with the PMs and look at the designs and just, you know, go over one and the next and the next, until we find interesting things and ideas that kinda pop out of that. And a lot of times, that leads to us discovering, right, like, things that we wouldn't have discovered if we were just, like, too focused on the metrics and the numbers and, you know, things like that. So, it's like almost reversing the process a little bit and starting with design first. But it can often result in, like, finding unique ideas, basically. I also think that we have a unique setup in how we create our roadmap. So normally, you have a single roadmap, right? And we actually divide our roadmap into two different roadmaps. So we have what we think of as the public roadmap. This is basically what people have asked us for, right? So like, there's all these surface areas where we receive user feedback, and we look at all that feedback, and people will ask for features. Like, they'll ask for, like, "I want background removal," "I want, like, to undo and redo," "I want to, like, upload longer videos," whatever it is, right? A bunch of different features. And we'll just make a list of that. And just, like anything else, we'll prioritize it, and we'll look at how many people it affects and what the possible markets are, and, like, just get it done basically, right? One at a time. But these are all features that every competitor knows about, right? Like, these are public. Like, if a user's asking us for it, they're asking everybody for it. And every team has essentially more or less the same list, and everybody's prioritizing it. And yeah, sure, you can win a little by, like, extra nicely prioritizing it or winning a little in prioritization or execution or something. But it's not gonna be a game changer in terms of winning against your competition. So, we have a second roadmap, which we think of as a secret roadmap. So, this is the roadmap that nobody asked for anything on this. Like, literally nobody has ever asked for it. And if a user were shown something on it, they might be like, "I don't need this. I don't know what this is." But given our unique vantage point, our unique understanding of the problem set, the user space, and the technology, we've come up with some special ideas that we think will completely revolutionize how something is used, right? Where we can truly change the behavior of the user. And I think that's what it... uh, is at the core of it, right? Is like people are doing things one way. If we're able to show them another way, and once they try it, they never go back, that's what a product is, right? That's success, right? And those are the types of ideas we put on the secret roadmap. These are things we never talk about publicly, never tell anybody about, and we announce them and just give them to users, right? And, and see the effects. A lot of this we come up with through brainstorming. So we do... actually do quarterly brainstorming company-wide. Everybody's included, like everybody from... not... it's not just a product team thing. It's, like, engineering, recruiting. Everybody's included in it. And we all come up with marketing, obviously. Like, everybody comes up with ideas. We vote on the ideas, rank the ideas, and then the product team takes over from there and thinks about, like, feasibility and technology and what the different things could be. So, this is a way where we can take all that noise that people are getting. Like, everybody's browsing social media, seeing all these, like, different things that are blowing up, you know, these models and advancements. And we can get all that information together and provide sort of a unique internal roadmap, right? Where... how are we gonna approach and, uh, create value out of so- all these different, uh, advancements that are happening? So, that's our general, uh, methodology. And a lot of times, the biggest wins will come from the secret roadmap, right? That's the game-changing stuff, right? It's not gonna be the user requests, usually, that are gonna do that.

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky30:02

      I love just how calling it the secret roadmap makes it a special... like, extra interesting. Just what's on this secret roadmap? (laughs)

   5. GMGaurav Misra30:06

      Exactly. Right. It's a secret.

   6. LRLenny Rachitsky30:10

      Uh, it's a secret. Yeah. I'm not even gonna ask you what's on-

   7. GMGaurav Misra30:12

      Yeah. (laughs)

   8. LRLenny Rachitsky30:12

      ... that secret roadmap. You can't tell me. Uh, what's an example of a feature that came out of that secret roadmap that's been a big deal for you guys?

   9. GMGaurav Misra30:18

      Tons. I mean, I'll give you an example from a long time ago. Uh, one of the first sort of AI features we added after sort of the app initially took off was this feature called Eye Contact. So, this was a feature where...... if, um, you're recording something. Oftentimes, like, you know, people who are new to recording a video might read from a script or a teleprompter or something like that, and they might have that, like, off-screen so it kind of looks like you're reading and, you know, it's not, uh, great from, like, the perspective of the video itself or the viewer of the video. So, we have this feature where it basically shifts your eyes to look at the camera. And, we were actually the first company to build this. Uh, we worked with NVIDIA on this. It's actually really, uh, interesting because when we originally reached out to NVIDIA about this, they, they were kind of not sure why we needed this, right? And they actually gave it to us, uh, pretty openly and were excited about some sort of partnership of, like, how, how can we get this technology into, like, something that could be useful. But we saw sort of this creator use case, which was unique and, you know, it was one of the ideas that came out of the brainstorm and we threw it on there. We launched it. It was a huge success. I mean, I'll be honest, like, the video, uh, the ad that we made, like a social media post that demonstrates this was so viral. It was made in basically every language around the world. It w- it still, 'til today, like, gets millions of views. Like, we find re-posts and re-posts of that thing that other people have created that get millions and millions and millions of views because people are like, "Wow, this is like... This is a great idea." And now it's been, like, copied the hell out of. Like, I think it's available basically on every, uh, you know, every app you can imagine. For a good reason, of course. But, uh, that's one of

8. 32:09 – 35:09

   Brainstorming with AI

   1. GMGaurav Misra32:09

      the ideas that came out of it.

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky32:10

      You talked about how you come up with these secret order map ideas. I'm just intrigued by this, so I'm gonna spend a little more time here. Does your team ever work with an AI LM to help brainstorm? I imagine that's where things will go, where you're actually jamming... Like, the AI agent is brainstorming along with you.

   3. GMGaurav Misra32:25

      Honestly, I would like for it to go there. Uh, it hasn't gone there yet. Like, we haven't done that exactly because the problem is context, and I think just the context of, you know, understanding the user, the use case, it's so abstract even right now. Like, I feel like I understand our users, obviously, but I can't exactly verbalize why that is or how that is. It's a little bit abstract, right? And I spend a lot of time with RPNs and designers, like, imparting anything that I understand and I've learned over the many years, you know, I've been working on this. How do I impart this to them, right? But then it's a challenge, because I can't even verbalize it myself. And so, it's an extra hard challenge to figure out how do I put this context... M- how do I make it available to an LLM when I can't even put it into words exactly? And honestly, this is probably my own failing, but... And I need to work on this, but there is something to it. I do remember at Snap, for example, right? Um, I think one of the most unique things about Snap and the CEO, Evan Spiegel, was that he had an unmatched understanding of the user. I think years and years and years of the company's existence passed, right? Like, almost a decade. And nobody understood the user like he did, right? Like, he would come up with ideas that everybody would disagree with and we would launch them and they would be hits. Just hits after hits, right? And nobody would understand why. Everyone would line up and be like, "Great." Like, r-round of applause for everyone, right? But no one knew why. And, you know, a great example of that is, like... And a lot of this was figured out in retrospect, too. Like, I think there was a point at which Snap declared that they're a camera company. And a lot of people laughed at that and was like, "Camera... Like, what are we making, like, digital cameras or something?" Or like, "Why is it a camera company?" But I think at the core of it was this idea that Snapchat opens to the camera, and that was actually the differentiator, right? That was actually... That small decision was holding the entire company against all competition, because when the moment passes where your friend is doing something funny and you need to capture it, you're not gonna open Instagram or anything else because it doesn't open to the camera. You're gonna open Snapchat, right? Because you can capture it right away. And Instagram can never copy that because all their metrics are gonna go down as soon as they do that. So, you know, that is a fundamental understanding, right? Is... And I figured this out much later, actually (laughs) , you know? But it's such a powerful idea.

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky35:08

      I'm glad you talked about

9. 35:09 – 41:06

   What Snap got right

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky35:09

      Snap. That's where I definitely wanted to go. This is where I was gonna start, so I'm glad we circled back to, uh, your experience at Snap. So, the reason I- I'm interested in this is if you think about social networks, and you know this, like, Snap was basically the last social network to have launched and stuck around other than TikTok, which I don't think is a social network. I think it's just kind of this, like, content platform. I don't think you're really interacting with people, really. And that was 2011 when it launched, so it's been like 15 years-

   2. GMGaurav Misra35:35

      Yeah.

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky35:35

      ... since the last social network launch that has worked. And I think it's interesting also because there's rarely been, uh, a lot of, uh, insight into just how Snap operates. You were there really early. You're a big deal at Snap. You built a lot of really important features. So, I wanted to spend a little time here. And it feels like you... A lot of the things you learned from Snap you're bringing to your company now. So, let me just ask you. I think you may have answered this, but I'm curious if there's something else here of just broadly, uh, maybe other than Ev's brain, what do you think was core to Snap being a successful consumer social product?

   4. GMGaurav Misra36:12

      There were a couple of different things that went well. Uh, I do think for a company like Snapchat or a social network, the core product market fit can be extremely strong, right? Like, essentially the reason that people are downloading it, the way that it's spreading, the way that it's distributing, the way that it's inviting friends or sending Snaps or whatever it is, right? That product market fit can be so strong sometimes that...... it can be hard to actually build something, because you actually can't tell if what you're building is what's responsible for growing the thing or if it's actually hurting it and, you know, this, it's growing despite what, what you're doing basically, right? And I think because of that, it actually sometimes teaches people the wrong things. It teaches people that the, you know, contrarian thing that they were doing was right when it was actually just wrong, and their company just grew despite it, right? And I think some of the things that Snap did well, and it needed to do really, you know, was to continue innovating, right? Because for a company like Snap, it has a ton of competition. Social networks are monopolies by nature, and there's a lot of reasons for Facebook or any other social network to stop the growth of Snapchat, and they tried. They tried really, really hard. And the way that Snap was avoiding that was by innovating. I think at the core of it was the setup that they had, which was very unique. Like, I've never seen anything like it. I've worked at a bunch of different companies, but obviously there's a CEO, and the CEO was very product-led. He was a designer himself, right? But he surrounded himself with the design team, right? That was sort of the central team in the company. And the design team was, like, 10, 12 people, basically pretty small, even at, you know, five, 6000 employees, uh, it was that small still.

   5. LRLenny Rachitsky38:02

      Oh, wow. At five or 6000 employees, the design team was, you said how many? Five or six people?

   6. GMGaurav Misra38:07

      Uh, 10, 12 people-

   7. LRLenny Rachitsky38:08

      10, 12.

   8. GMGaurav Misra38:09

      ... I think. Yeah.

   9. LRLenny Rachitsky38:09

      And, uh, I'll... To add to that, there's no PMs really, like, for a long time. That was before.

   10. GMGaurav Misra38:13

       For a long time, yeah.

   11. LRLenny Rachitsky38:14

       A big difference, yeah.

   12. GMGaurav Misra38:14

       Initially there were no PMs at all. PMs were introduced with monetization. Once monetization was a big sort of element, that's kind of where PMs came in. Today, I think there's a ton of or there's, you know, an adequate number of PMs across the company, but there was a long period of time, especially when the innovation was happening, when, yeah, there were a much, much smaller number of PMs and it was very designer-led. But at the same time, like, I think that's slightly misleading in the way that these weren't your sort of average designers, right? These were designers who were actually PMs as well. That's kind of what the secret sauce was. They were able to not just design, but also do the PM part, and which is a big responsibility. It's a lot of work, especially for that many employees, right? But it gives the CEO a way to sort of have granular control over what exactly was being launched in which part of the app at all times, right? Because he could meet with a set of 10 or 12 people and know every change that was happening that was user impacting. A lot of changes were wor- being worked on that were, like, infrastructure and, like, you know, types of things that kind of keep going on in the background were improving ranking and whatever that might be, right? And performance and things like that. And those were not usually his concern. He was concerned with, "What UI are we adding where?" And if you needed to add UI to the app, you needed it designed, and if there's no designers in the company except for a handful who tralk- talk directly to the CEO, you kind of create a very granular control over what's being launched in the company, right? So everything needed to be approved by Evan. If you hadn't approved it, it's not going out. So, uh, the design team actually held a lot of power in that.

   13. LRLenny Rachitsky39:50

       This is awesome. So what I'm hearing partly is, like, I don't know if this is true, but it feels true, that to make a consumer app that is successful and, and breaks through, you almost need, like, a singular mind that continues to stay in the weeds on everything, and the way Evan did that is, is stay very close to the design team who basically ran the product.

   14. GMGaurav Misra40:10

       That's very true, yeah. It's very true. And he was able to keep the context of the entire app, right, in his head at the same time. He knew the interdependencies and what we're doing and why we're doing it. And so, that gave him just very granular control over the company's product roadmap.

   15. LRLenny Rachitsky40:26

       It's... It makes me think about Brian Chesky and... Like, Airbnb is a consumer product. It's not a social network. But I wonder if that's just an interesting insight, just for consumer products, they will generally do better if there's one per- person with a really, uh, the right sort of combination of experiences, insights, and just they continue to run and own every detail.

   16. GMGaurav Misra40:47

       Definitely. And also the ability to bring about change, right? The ability to truly, you know, energize an entire organization to do something that's not just incremental but fundamental, right?

   17. LRLenny Rachitsky40:59

       Founder mode. Founder mode.

   18. GMGaurav Misra41:00

       Exactly.

   19. LRLenny Rachitsky41:01

       I mean, that's... (laughs)

   20. GMGaurav Misra41:02

       That's what we're getting to, basically. (laughs)

   21. LRLenny Rachitsky41:04

       Yeah. Ever heard of it?

10. 41:06 – 49:33

    Scaling with a small, agile team

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky41:06

       Okay, and then you said that these designers... So I know it's, like, famous that Snap had no PMs for a long time. Designers were PMs. This point you made about the designers were PM-y is really important, 'cause I think a lot of people look at this, they're like, "Amazing. We're just gonna hire designers. We don't need all these damn PMs. Just slow everything down. Just tell us what not to build." Can you just talk about, like, the level of these designers? Like, what allowed them to be as successful as they were without any PMs?

    2. GMGaurav Misra41:32

       Yeah. I mean, I think what was expected from the designer at Snap was not just the ability to design, like, you know, the skillset of designing, which all of them were IC designers, by the way, right? And there were no reports, right? So they weren't allowed to have reports actually. And so they were designing every- everything themselves, but they also had to have the leadership skills, right? To go, you know, figure out the roadmap, write all the documents, work with the different teams, figure out shipping schedules and, you know, just know everything. Not just sort of the technical and the engineering part, but, you know, the, the UX and the UI and the product needs and why are we doing this? You know, uh, the roadmap. There's just a ton to keep in, in mind, and that means that it was a job that was, um, you know, just highly... It was a very high workload, no doubt. Very high workload, right? These people work really hard and they were paid highly too, I mean, for what it's worth. They were paid way higher than you would expect designers or PMs or engineers to be paid, right? With quarterly bonuses and-... um, all kinds of things.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky42:43

       That's interesting. I know, it reminds... You know, people always say, "Why do we need PMs?" There's like, someone has to do the work that a PM does. They're not sitting around, you know, doing nothing. And, uh, it's important to note, the person that will take on the PM work, they have to be good at it and enjoy it. And a lot of designers don't want to be doing... writing docs and organizing stakeholders and getting alignment and...

    4. GMGaurav Misra43:03

       100%. 100%. But it's, that's why it was so hard to find those people who were, like, able to do two things. I actually think there's a insight in, there is innovation between, you know, when you're kind of merging craft, right, between two different functions. And I do think there's something special about one person doing two different functions, or at least being able to do. And I think a lot of, like, unique insight and innovation can come from that. I actually think... So, on sort of my personal side, like, I eventually joined the design team. I started at Snap as a, on the engineering team. I eventually joined the design team, um, you know, over the last two years that I was at Snap. And a big part of what I did there was create this function called design engineering. And that was actually a different combination, right? It wasn't the designer PM, it was the designer engineer, right? Uh, the person who can think of the UX, design it, and also build it and launch it, all of those things. And we saw both the ability to take designers and teach them engineering, and take engineers and teach them design as part of that, right? Obviously, uh, you know, the reason that we created that function was very different. It was actually to continue innovating as the company got bigger. One of the problems that we identified was that as the company got bigger and bigger, and there's like 500 engineers, 1,000 engineers, 2,000 engineers, 3,000, right? Suddenly, it just becomes very difficult to do everything. Like, everything is a six-month project or a one-year project. Every product is a massive investment of, like, 500 engineers and, you know, a lot of time. And so you really had to pick your bets, right? If you get it wrong, if you are innovating and trying to create new products and you spend 500 engineers for a year and it doesn't work, it's a big problem, right? You're gonna be in trouble. Especially for a company like Snap where everybody was copying what they're doing so they had to constantly innovate, create new stuff and push the bounds, right? I think Evan's philosophy was always like, he didn't fight the things that were getting copied, right? Stories got copied pretty much straight up. Uh, a lot of, like, a lot of things that Snap created got copied. But he was more of the mindset of like, "Let's expla- expand the pie, do something new and push the boundaries," right? "We'll, we'll, we'll keep, keep innovating basically." And so to do that with that scale of a company becomes really hard. And so, we had this idea of like, let's create a small team where we can go and pre-test a lot of these ideas because we had a lot of ideas and, you know, we can't go and build all of these things. So, the idea was create a small team of these design engineers, people who are able to do the entire sort of product design engineering process in their head and can put together earlier versions of the product, which we would actually bake into the Snapchat app itself. And we were able to, like, even test, for example, run a test in Australia, see how it's performing. You know, run a test in a couple of high schools, just a couple of high schools, see what's, you know, uh, how people behave. And that way we already have data on how this might perform in a real world environment but we haven't built it to production level, right? It's like, it's a prototype essentially, right? It's what, how a startup might build something. The same idea of, you know, what we're doing at our company now, right? Build fast, get it out there, right? Get feedback, understand whether it works or not and then work with the engineering team to build it at scale. You know? Once we understand the product and the dynamics, then, then it makes sense to put on 500 engineers for, for six months to build it, right? So, that was like a big part of it. I think the nice thing that came out of it that was completely unexpected but actually kind of transformational for me in a way was, you know, obviously in big organizations, alignment is a big issue, right? How do you get everybody on the same page? And a big part of a PM's job is actually to create alignment, right? And it can be a lot of work because you've got to talk to all these stakeholders and make, get them on the same page. But one of the insights that we had, which was unique, was as the company gets bigger, you can actually create alignment by causing internal virality. If there's enough people in the company, it actually starts acting like a, like a consumer base might. If you share something interesting with someone, they will share it with somebody else because they think it's interesting. And you can actually create virality inside a company. So, one thing that we would do is we would create these prototype products, right? We would just go into an area, redo a bunch of stuff, create these prototype products that didn't exist in Snapchat normally, and then we would just share the build, right? And it would explode. Like, it would just go viral inside the company. Like, day after day, we would hear from, you know, engineers, then managers, then VPs, then eventually from Evan being like, "Oh my God. Like, everyone's talking about this. Why am, why am I the last one to hear about it?" Right? (laughs) And so it would create, like, instant alignment across the company of like, this is exciting, right? This is something that we want to get behind. And everyone would be asking like, "When are we doing this? Like, when is this happening? I see someone's already working on it." Right? (laughs) so, it was a great way to do that. And once we really understood that the product actually had good sort of dynamics and we had tested it, it was a great way to sort of get it out in front of everybody and create this idea of like, "Hey, we're all working on this. This is sort of the future," right?

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky48:17

       (instrumental music) Today's episode is brought to you by Coda. I personally use Coda every single day to manage my podcast and also to manage my community. It's where I put the questions that I plan to ask every guest that's coming on the podcast. It's where I put my community resources. It's how I manage my workflows. Here's how Coda can help you. Imagine starting a project at work and your vision is clear, you know exactly who's doing what and where to find the data that you need to do your part.In fact, you don't have to waste time searching for anything, because everything your team needs from project trackers and OKRs, to documents and spreadsheets, lives in one tab, all in Coda. With Coda's collaborative all-in-one workspace, you get the flexibility of docs, the structure of spreadsheets, the power of applications, and the intelligence of AI, all in one easy to organize tab. Like I mentioned earlier, I use Coda every single day, and more than 50,000 teams trust Coda to keep them more aligned and focused. If you're a startup team looking to increase alignment and agility, Coda can help you move from planning to execution in record time. To try it for yourself, go to coda.io/lenny today and get six months free of the team plan for startups. That's coda.io/lenny to get started for free, and get six months of the team plan. coda.io/lenny.

11. 49:33 – 51:47

    The shift toward prototyping in product management

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky49:33

       Another thread I want to follow up on is, is prototyping. Uh, it feels like that is where a lot of PM work is going, is getting straight to a prototype versus design, or versus PRDs, and it feels like that's something that you did and worked super well. Like here's a, like basically it's a team to prototype ideas that, in theory now, you can just build really quickly with AI. So, I think that's a really interesting, uh, scene where the future's going just...

    2. GMGaurav Misra50:00

       100%, right? Like getting things in people's hands, trying it out. Oftentimes, like unless you truly try it out, like, you know, in design it can, in theory, look good with, like, all the perfect conditions, right? But when you actually use it you realize it's actually not that useful, for example, right? Or when you give it to users. And some of this is like intuition, honestly, right? Like, just like anything else. But there's nothing like getting something in the hands of users at the end of the day.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky50:23

       I love how many of these things you brought over to your current company, and I'm trying to think about, one is this idea of just constantly innovating. Feels like that's informed, and tell me what I'm missing, but that feels like that's informed the ship of marketable feature every single week. This idea of, of getting, like, design starting almost with design versus PM a lot of times. Uh, I'm curious to why you don't even go straight to prototype in those cases. Is it just the tools aren't there yet, or...

    4. GMGaurav Misra50:47

       I mean, I think our shipping process is fast enough that within a week we can get it out anyways, right? So, that way we just get user feedback, which is even better.

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky50:55

       Okay. And then the other really interesting thing, I'm trying to visualize like that triangle of a product team, the triad of PM engineer design. Feels like you guys at Snap took like the corners, not the corners, the line of that triangle, and, like, you have design engineers-

    6. GMGaurav Misra51:08

       Yep.

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky51:08

       ... and you have design PMs.

    8. GMGaurav Misra51:10

       Yep.

    9. LRLenny Rachitsky51:11

       Uh, I imagine engineers were sort of PM-y already, they're like very product oriented PMs.

    10. GMGaurav Misra51:16

        Yep.

    11. LRLenny Rachitsky51:16

        Did you have a function called design PMs? Probably not.

    12. GMGaurav Misra51:20

        I mean, honestly, it-

    13. LRLenny Rachitsky51:21

        Sorry, yeah. Sorry, engineer PMs.

    14. GMGaurav Misra51:23

        ... it did

    15. NANarrator51:23

        (laughs)

    16. GMGaurav Misra51:23

        Yeah. I mean, engineer PMs should be a thing, I feel like.

    17. LRLenny Rachitsky51:26

        Yeah.

    18. GMGaurav Misra51:26

        Like, uh, or every engineer should strive to understand the product, right?

    19. LRLenny Rachitsky51:29

        Yeah. A lot of companies operate that way, like Stripe, I think they had-

    20. GMGaurav Misra51:32

        Right.

    21. LRLenny Rachitsky51:32

        ... hundreds of engineers before they hired the first PM, because I think the engineers were doing what they did at Snap-

    22. GMGaurav Misra51:36

        Right.

    23. LRLenny Rachitsky51:37

        ... did the PM work. So, it feels like at your company you don't operate that way. Uh, it feels like you have PMs, engineers, designers. Talk about why you decided not to approach things that way.

12. 51:47 – 55:40

    The product manager role

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky51:48

    2. GMGaurav Misra51:48

       I do think PM is a very valuable function, right? I think it may be actually, and, you know, maybe I'll get roasted for this, but I think at the end of the day, not hiring PMs at Snap might have been one of those decisions where it actually succeeded despite that. Uh, and because, like, someone needs to do that work, right? If you don't have enough people to do it, then nobody truly owns it, and then it kind of doesn't really happen. Or if it doesn't happen, no one's responsible, which is not the right structure you want in an organization. So, I think, though that being said, there was something unique to be said about what if a designer had the PM mindset, right? It's actually the same idea as what if an engineer had the PM mindset? And then you get, you know, even crazier, what if the PM had a design and engineering mindset? I think all we're talking about is everybody truly understanding all the functions that they're working with, right? Having a fundamental broad understanding of the functions they're working with. At, at Captions, we're actually saying going even one step further than that, right? Why shouldn't the PM understand marketing? I think that's actually the biggest, you know, opportunity for PMs to understand, is like, how, how do we actually find the users who have this problem, right? I think that's the big part of solving the problem. I have a unique take on this in terms of, you know, I actually think PMs should own all the way to marketing, in a way. And the reason is that if you think about marketing, it's expanding the surface area of the product, right? It's like search marketing is just placing a button to your product in Google. Facebook Ads is just placing a button to your app in Facebook, right? It's almost like you work at Facebook, right? You work at Facebook, you have a button in the app somewhere, you make its specific thing, and people show up. The funnel begins there, right? And you have all the metrics all the way from the beginning, right? All the way from when the user tapped on the button in Facebook, and, and then they went down all the steps, and then they landed on some onboarding screen, and, right, they did the thing, they used the application. That's where the journey begins. And all of that is like, in a way, it's all product. Like, it's the same skill set. Understanding users from that point on is like, I think that's fundamental, right? How, how do we not do that today? It, it, we should be. So, that's kind of how we think about stuff, right? But I think, uh, the core idea is that every function should understand every other function deeply as much as possible, and maybe even to the level where they can operate in that function. And that just g- just increases the likelihood that all decisions being made in the company at the micro level will be optimized for, you know, all possible, you know, parts of the funnel that different people are essentially looking after, right? So, that's something we think about quite a bit.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky54:44

       I completely agree with that take. Uh, I, it's interesting that, uh, at, at Airbnb, Brian was famous for changing the titles of all product managers to product marketing manager-

    4. GMGaurav Misra54:53

       Yep.

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky54:54

       ... for, for exactly this point. Because he's like-

    6. GMGaurav Misra54:56

       Makes sense.

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky54:57

       ... "You, you should be doing the marketing. You shouldn't just be building the thing."

    8. GMGaurav Misra54:59

       Right.

    9. LRLenny Rachitsky55:00

       And, like, to me it's always, uh, that has alw- I've always assumed as a PM your job is to, for this thing to grow and to get adopted and be loved.

    10. GMGaurav Misra55:07

        Of course.

    11. LRLenny Rachitsky55:07

        So it's interesting people don't already think of it that way.

    12. GMGaurav Misra55:10

        I agree.

    13. LRLenny Rachitsky55:11

        But obviously it's hard to learn the skills of being awesome at paid growth and SEO and product marketing, messaging, positioning. But I completely agree. That's such an important element of building a product. You're not just building a thing and hope it works and goodbye. Uh, so I love that that's how you think about it. And so I guess when you hire PMs, it sounds like you look for marketing instinct and some experience there.

    14. GMGaurav Misra55:31

        100% right. And at, at, at least the ability and, um, instinct to be able to learn, right.

    15. LRLenny Rachitsky55:38

        Yeah. Okay.

13. 55:40 – 1:02:13

    Snap’s mission and product decisions

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky55:40

       So I'm gonna share one other thing that I thought as you were talking that I think is really interesting, and it comes up a bunch on this podcast, and this connects back to Ev and what we can learn from his, uh, his, uh, success. Uh, so Patrick Allison once tweeted this tweet that has really stuck with me, which is, it was around user research. And the way he described it is user research isn't go do user research that informs what you build, and then you build that. It's instead you, you do user research that informs the mental model you have as a leader, a product builder, of what your customers need and what pains they have. And you adjust that model in your head, and then that's how you decide what to build. And it feels like Ev is very much that. Like, his head was un- learning what people need, teens (laughs) in particular, and it just worked.

    2. GMGaurav Misra56:28

       Yeah. I, I think it's very spot on. I would say though, Snap didn't like user research as a function for the longest time. Like, I think there was one user researcher in the company until, again, 5,000 employees. Like, post-IPO basically. Um, but I think the people that were making a lot of the product decisions and the CEO himself of course were very steeped in sort of the how the user behaves and how they operate. Like, they, they understood that. I, I do think, like, Snap also had a unique way of thinking about how to determine if a product is within scope or out of scope of what their mission was, right? And I think a lot of companies use this type of framework and, and we try, try to as well. But essentially the idea at the core was that they want to enable, like, private sharing and in a safe way, right? So if... So I think that kind of makes it clear that certain things just are out of scope for Snap. Uh, it's actually one of the reasons why Snap wasn't the company to discover, quote, short form video TikTok style stuff, because it was just against the nature of the company to even try something. It was against the mission of the company. Public sharing means possibly bullying and bad behaviors, right? Which is e- exactly what Snap was trying to avoid. We, we don't want those behaviors to develop on the app. So for example, you know, on Instagram Stories you can share somebody else's stories to your followers, right? You could take... I can take your story and share it to my followers. You can't do that on Snap. And there was a discussion about like, "Should we do this?" S- No. Because it can enable bullying, right? I can, I can... Essentially I don't... You know, you're not consenting to your thing being shared to my followers, right? And that's essentially bad, right? So a lot of it was done based on these, this type of pillar-based thinking of like, you know, "This is our mission. This is what we're trying to do. Does it fit within or is it outside? If it's outside, we don't do it no matter what the, the cost of it is, no matter how exciting it is." So... And even on Spotlight, the big challenge was like, how do you take something like that and put that inside the Snap mission? So that was w- something we worked on quite a bit. Yeah. I mean, I think there's... Yeah. There's tons of stories about earlier versions... I mean, Snap almost had essentially what is TikTok earlier than TikTok existed, uh, wi- and it kinda died out because it didn't align, align with the mission essentially, right? But happy to get into it.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky58:56

       Yeah, that'd actually be really interesting. 'Cause it's interesting that it... These things are important. It's important to have these clear values and the mission of the company and to not focus on things that are outside that, and then you hear these stories of like they had... Like, they had TikTok potentially. So yeah, whatever you can share there, that's, that'd be awesome.

    4. GMGaurav Misra59:12

       Yeah. I mean, I think... I don't know if you remember this, but there was this product called Our Stories, um, and-

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky59:18

       Mm-hmm.

    6. GMGaurav Misra59:18

       ... essentially it was like My Story but it was a public story. And it started off with this idea of campus stories where you can post to your campus and other people can see it, and that actually started creating a lot of virality, right? Because essentially people would post... There, there was, like, you know, viral moments truly where people would post stuff like, "Oh," like, you know, "I think two people fell in love on it," or something like that. Like, those types of things, like, really went viral, and it had really good engagement. But at the end of the day, the problem was that we were against, like, algorithmic essentially, uh, ranking of those types of things. So there was a curation team that was looking through every single one so that there's no, you know, negative behaviors happening essentially on the app, and that was just not scalable. Even though it had really high engagement and was doing well, it just wasn't feasible to have a person looking at every single thing posted to determine whether it's appropriate or not, and so it kinda ended up dying out. But it looked like what was an early version of TikTok, uh, you know, before it had launched. So I think in a way though it was a good thing, because I think Snap does have a mission and I think it is solving a problem. I do think, you know, there is a bifurcation of social media at this point. There is what you traditionally think of as, like, social networking where you share things with your friends. And by the way, like...Remember the days where that used to be the way that apps would go viral? You would share things with your friends, and then they would share with their friends, right? And everybody was worried about, like, friend sharing and how do you send to a friend and, you know, "Can I text message my friend?" Or whatever, right? That w- that time is over. Virality now happens for a completely different mechanism. It happens through essentially algorithms, right, that are deciding whether your piece of content is worth showing to an arbitrary number of people. And this is the new age of social media, right? It's TikTok, it's, um, you know, YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels and so on. And I think actually it's changing the fundamental nature of how people interact, fundamental nature of how things go viral, and I think these- I actually think from a regulatory perspective, we should be thinking of these as differently. On one side, you have, you know, something where you're deciding, uh, you know, where- who sees something, and then on the other side, you have something where the company is deciding, which means that it's kind of semi-curated, right? It's actually the company's voice. And so, yeah, I don't know. Like, should Section 230 apply to that? I have no idea. Or maybe not. Maybe we're thinking about this the wrong way. Uh, so should- should be interesting.

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky1:02:02

       Wow. All right. Well, I'm out of my depth on the qual- on the legal- legality decisions, so I'm gonna not follow that thread.

    8. GMGaurav Misra1:02:10

       (laughs)

    9. LRLenny Rachitsky1:02:10

       Uh, but I imagine there's something really interesting there. Actually,

14. 1:02:13 – 1:10:20

    The future of AI-generated video

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky1:02:13

       so you're ta- been talking about this, uh, just like how much things are changing.

    2. GMGaurav Misra1:02:16

       Yeah.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky1:02:17

       And I just wanted to follow that thread, and specifically, you guys are at the cutting edge of what is possible with AI video.

    4. GMGaurav Misra1:02:25

       Yes.

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky1:02:25

       It feels like we're approaching, and maybe we're there, this world where you have no idea if it's real or AI. I'm curious, first of all, just how far you think we are from that, and second of all, the implications on the world where you can just generate any video that you want.

    6. GMGaurav Misra1:02:40

       It's fundamental. At the end of the day, like, a time where video, images, audio can't be trusted actually hasn't existed for a while. Like, if you think about... I mean, there was a world in the 1800s where there was no video or audio or- or images, right? And everything was proven by he said/she said, for the most part, and it's possible that if everything can be generated and anything can be created and it looks just as real as if it were real and there's no way to tell, then we might actually return to that world, right? Where there's no way to prove anything besides, you know, physical evidence or he said/she said. And I think that's kind of scary, but also possibly opens a bunch of new opportunity for someone to figure out how to solve this problem, right? I think it's gonna be a big problem. I do think today, we're- we are almost there in terms of, like, creating absolutely photorealistic video. I mean, the very recent models, they're very cutting edge, is just about, like, it feels like a few centimeters away from achieving it, but I do think to fully get there to the point where it cannot be differentiated at all, it's still a couple years away. I also think that it is use-case-driven in a way. Like, I think, thinking about captions for a second, like, we take a unique view on what type of video we wanna focus on. Video generation and text-to-video generation. If you think- look at it today, it's all silent video, right? There's no audio. And it's often what you think of as, like, stock video or B-roll, right? You can't, like, actually make a movie with B-roll, right? And a lot of a movie or a TV show or a social media post or an ad actually is dialogue or monologue. That's actually what it is, is people talking to each other, to the camera, right? Interacting. That's actually what makes true story. B-roll is sort of, like, supportive elements, you know, that are showing up to, you know, set the scene or something. Like, maybe, you know, before the scene opens, you see a few shots of New York City or LA or something, right? And then you jump into the room and, you know, now two people are talking. So our goal is to solve the talking video problem, right? How do we create video where people are delivering dialogue or monologue or, you know, things like that? And that's what we focus on, purely. And there actually isn't a lot of work happening in that area today, right? And it's not a solved problem. We're getting there, we're getting closer and closer, but today's models actually bifurcate a little bit. So there's a set of companies today that are able to create these types of, what we're talking about is, like, avatar videos. They're using this technology called neural rendering. It's actually not a technology that's affected by sort of the transformer and diffusion model revolution or the large model revolution, essentially. This is a technology that existed separately, and it doesn't have anything to do with the AI, uh, sort of growth happening right now. It just happens to produce semi-realistic outputs. Um, but it actually kind of stops at some point because it's not clear how it becomes generalizable in every situation, right? You can't, you know... it has to be trained on people individually. So you might ingest a little bit of video of you, and then you can generate you. And so it's a different technology and different outcome, essentially, and a bunch of companies are using this type of model. A bunch of companies are doing t- general text-to-video with no audio today. These are large sort of generative models, and they have the capability to do more, but that frontier just hasn't been reached yet. I think there's no doubt in anybody's mind on the research side that it- it is 100% solvable. It's just, like, somebody has to go do it, and we haven't gotten there yet. Some... you know, nobody has had the time to go and do that yet. So that's kind of where we're at, essentially. We're working purely on large generative models for talking videos, right? So that's like our core focus. I do think, though, from a safety perspective, we have, uh, a unique framework of how we think about it. So-Generally, videos divide into two categories, right? So for us, we think on one side of what is, like, documentation. So this is the type of video that it could be a personal video where you're taking a video with your friends and you're hanging out, you're at a restaurant, right? Like, it's documenting what happened. You had fun, whatever it was. It's for your memories, right? And there's, like, a non-personal version of this, which is like, oh, it's like a reporter, like, documenting a, you know, a, a crime or, you know, something that happened or whatever it is, right? And who, who was involved? What, you know, where was it? Maybe it was a, a natural disaster or something, right? And this is for history. Like, we, we wanna see what happened, right? And there's actually no benefit to AI-generated video in any of this, right? Like, actually, all of this is... It's just negative. It's all negative, right? Like, if we are generating fake versions of reality to fool people, like, there's just nothing good about that, right? And we wanna stay away from that, essentially, right? Our... We wanna design products and build products that make it difficult to use for that particular use case, right? For anything that falls within that. And on the other side, you have what we think of as, like, storytelling. Now, this could be ads, it could be social media posts, it could be TV, movies. Like, all of these things are storytelling. They're designed for entertainment, they're designed for fun, and nobody believes... Like, if you watch a GEICO commercial, right? Like, you're not thinking that the gecko is real, selling insurance somewhere out there, right? Like, you know that this is fabricated and it's for entertainment. And same with reality TV, even, right? It's called reality TV. It's definitely not reality. And, uh, you know, social media ads, you know, a-all this stuff kind of falls in the category. And if we can enable more people to tell stories and entertain other people and get their message out there, like, that is pure positive. Like, this is where we want to focus. And a lot of our effort in the product and design process goes into, how do we design products and build products that specifically make it really hard to use on one side and really easy to use on the other side, right? And that's the real challenge.

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky1:08:52

       Hmm. That's really helpful. Something that I'm really curious about as you're chatting is, uh, ByteDance just released a really amazing model. I was actually just looking at it, where you put a photo in, I think, and it just creates a video of this person talking in all these different ways. Where does that fall, uh, amongst the buckets you just described?

    8. GMGaurav Misra1:09:09

       I think that falls exactly in the area that we're in, right? Which is talking people, and that's what they're going after as well there. So, that's actually one of the first examples of a large model that, you know, a larger company has released where it's able to do, sort of, these dialog or monologue videos, right? And I mean, you yourself, I mean, you've seen it, so I'm not gonna, you know, describe it too much. But as you know, it's, like, highly expressive, right? Like, it, it doesn't look like an avatar video, right? It looks like-

    9. LRLenny Rachitsky1:09:37

       Yeah, it's wild.

    10. GMGaurav Misra1:09:37

        And that's because of the technology that's used is, is fundamentally different. It's just like, this is using a true large diffusion model, is what they use. Whereas, like, most companies that are working on avatar technology are actually using, like, you know, something pretty basic in comparison.

    11. LRLenny Rachitsky1:09:53

        How long has it been since that Will Smith spaghetti video? Just to give us a reference of how fast things are moving.

    12. GMGaurav Misra1:09:58

        Oh my God. It's been so fast, right?

    13. LRLenny Rachitsky1:09:59

        (laughs) Like, is that-

    14. GMGaurav Misra1:10:00

        Amazing.

    15. LRLenny Rachitsky1:10:00

        ... a year? Or is it, like, two years?

    16. GMGaurav Misra1:10:02

        I think it's probably, like, about a year and a half, two years, right?

    17. LRLenny Rachitsky1:10:04

        Wow. Well, we'll link to that video, and then you can tell basically, that video is the state of the art of AI video one to two years ago. And then we'll link to the, this other Omni something, I forget what it's called-

    18. GMGaurav Misra1:10:15

        Yes.

    19. LRLenny Rachitsky1:10:15

        ... after showing what it's like today. Geez Louise.

15. 1:10:20 – 1:14:37

    Leveraging AI for marketing

    1. GMGaurav Misra1:10:20

       (laughs) .

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky1:10:20

       Okay, final question. And, uh, and this is around something that I know you, uh, have a really interesting insight on, which is that you see marketing using AI video basically as a... As kind of the final frontier of how people will experience AI, is, is marketing, is seeing it in marketing channels. Talk about why you think that's the case and just what that looks like.

    3. GMGaurav Misra1:10:42

       It kind of comes back to what we were talking about before, where, you know, the reality is that no matter how interesting, advanced, and amazing a technology is, like, you know, science fiction has become reality. We were talking about this, right? Like, what was literally science fiction on TV is real now, and most people still don't even know about it, to be honest, right? Like, my parents live in India, and they are the only ones in the neighborhood that know about ChatGPT, and they write these, like, amazing, like, notes to the community that're just like... With all these words and, you know, people are just like, "Oh, how did you... Like, how did you get so good at writing?" Right? And they're, they're not telling anybody, but (laughs) , you know, there's still a ton of people who don't even know that these advancements have happened. And so, adoption is actually much slower, even for the most exciting things, right? Of course, in tech circles, everybody's talking about it, but the reality is, like, it takes a while to get out there. And I think for companies that are gonna succeed, they're gonna have to figure out how to market these products so that they can be one- the ones to reach, you know, all these people that have the problems that they're now able to solve. And we think about that every day. So, on that note, like, as a consumer product, we spend a bunch of time and money on marketing our products, and we often use, like, performance channels and all kinds of things, but about a year ago, we would run AI video in ads and things like that, and we would get all these comments of people being like, "Oh my God, this is so fake." Like, you know, "Don't show me this." And around that time, the technology got just about good enough that suddenly, those comments stopped happening, right? And suddenly, you could, you know, get performance that was even better than actually recording with a person, because you could just try more things, right? You could just generate 30, 40 possibilities, and you know, one of them would win, and it would win more than the one creative you can get from a person. And more interestingly, when you think about localization, you're gonna go do that in every language. Like, once you discover winning creative, right? Now you have to go localize that in ev- every market and rebuild it from scratch. It's just, uh, a ton and oftentimes it doesn't perform as well because it's been, like, rethought, essentially. But we found that...... just translating it, uh, with AI, was able to get performance almost as good as the original, in the original language, right? So this is gonna flood the entire market, right? I think wherever there's dollars to be made, saved, right? Like, it- it will... I- it's inevitable, right? It will be consumed, and it will very quickly be a lot of social media. I mean, you could imagine a social network of the future where... and this is dystopian, by the way, so watch out. (laughs) You could imagine a social network of the future where all content is generated, none of the people are real. It's... I mean, the algorithm isn't tailoring whose content to show you, but it's tr- purely generating content that, you know, is completely catered to you, right? With people and everything completely catered to you. I don't think it's out of the question. You know? It almost seems, seems inevitable in a way. But that's not... you know, that's not too far away, I think. Like that's actually very possibly real in five years or something like that.

    4. LRLenny Rachitsky1:14:00

       What I'm imagining it... Like 'cause it, it's hard to imagine like a social network where it's people... 'cause you usually wanna know who these people are. Like I don't care if random's-

    5. GMGaurav Misra1:14:08

       Yes.

    6. LRLenny Rachitsky1:14:08

       ... sharing status updates. But I can see a TikTok that is all AI generated.

    7. GMGaurav Misra1:14:12

       Exactly. Exactly.

    8. LRLenny Rachitsky1:14:13

       Wow.

    9. GMGaurav Misra1:14:13

       Yep.

    10. LRLenny Rachitsky1:14:13

        Just like content tuned to your loves and interests.

    11. GMGaurav Misra1:14:16

        Exactly.

    12. LRLenny Rachitsky1:14:17

        And just random videos. Wow.

    13. GMGaurav Misra1:14:20

        Yep. Because I... Do you know, like you see a TikTok feed, like, you don't even know who's real or not today, right? It's not like we-

    14. LRLenny Rachitsky1:14:27

        Right. That, that's how I would approach it. I would just join TikTok and start uploading videos that are AI generated.

    15. GMGaurav Misra1:14:32

        Exactly. Yeah. (laughs)

    16. LRLenny Rachitsky1:14:33

        And then you... and then build a whole network of that. Oh my God, the future is wild.

16. 1:14:37 – 1:20:21

    Failure corner

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky1:14:37

       Let's go to Failure Corner. Something that I try to do with this podcast is share moments where things didn't go well. There's all these stories of everything's going great all the time, all those founders killing it, building a billion dollar company. Oh, so awesome. Uh, but they don't know when thing... all the things that go wrong. So let me ask you, is there a story you can share of when things didn't work out, when you failed?

Episode duration: 1:25:49