Hugo Barra: How I Built Hardware for Android, Xiaomi, and Oculus | 20VC #947

Hugo, my friend, this is such a joy to do. I've wanted to do this ever since we sat by a pool in Greece and I heard the wisdom of you and Gustav. And so, thank you so much for joining me today.

Thanks for having me, Harry. And about that pool in Greece, I think you meant that time when Gustav was teaching us about Stable Diffusion, was it? And you had to step away to show the Greek bar man how to make the perfect mojito. Di- did I recall that right?

I d- do you know what I rec- I recall having a dad bod and standing next to Daniel Craig, which is Gustav, just feeling incredibly less of a man. (laughs) Um, but, uh, running to the bar was, I think, my solution to get away from that. Um, but I wanna start with, uh, a little bit on you and not Gustav's Daniel Craig, right, body. Uh, that would be an interesting start to any show. Um, (laughs) how ... So tell me, how did you make your way into the world of startups? You've led some of the best product talks in the world. How did you come to the world of startups and come to lead some of the best product talks?

Well, I was, I was born and raised, uh, completely in Brazil and when I was seven years old, my mom enrolled us together in a, in a Pascal programming course. And, uh, after that in an AutoCAD, you know, 3D design course. My mom is an architect and builder so, uh, I also grew up with, uh, you know, lots of tools and sort of fun materials around me and got into making stuff, you know, pretty early on. Um, I came to the US, um, as an immigrant when I was 19 years old, um, to go to college in Boston. Now, (laughs) I don't know if you've ever watched the movie Cool Runnings-

Yeah, I did.

... which is about four Jamaicans who formed a bobsled team to compete in the Winter Olympics despite never having seen snow in their lives before. Well-

It's when they, it's when they come out of the airport and Sanka's there with, like, no jackets on, "You're dead, man." "Yeah." (laughs)

Well, similar story for me coming to Massachusetts, minus the, the bobsled team. Although believe it or not, there's a story about a Brazilian bobsled team which I nearly got myself into, but that's for a different day.

Oh.

I, I graduated from MIT, uh, in the year 2000, so that was three months after the dot-com bubble burst which was just about the, you know, worst time in the world to start a company, because nobody wanted to fund you. Uh, we did start a company, it was called, um, Lobby7, and we were building voice recognition software for mobile computers. You know, our vision was that speech would play a central role in this new mobile UI paradigm and, and people would be able to talk instead of type into these pocket computers which later, of course, became what we now know as smartphones. Now, we weren't wrong-