David Lieb: How I Founded Google Photos & Bump; Why I Left Google | 20VC #927

(beeping) Three, two, one, zero. You have now arrived at your destination. Dave, I'm so excited for this. I feel like I know you so well. I spoke to so many people on your team from, you know, Juan to Jamie to James. So, thank you so much for joining me today.

You bet. It's my pleasure.

Now, I wanna start, you know, you've had the most incredible tenure with Google. Tell me, how did you make your way into the world of startups and products and come to, you know, lead Google Photos for the last seven or eight years?

Yeah, I would say it's largely accidental is the- is the true answer. Um, I was an engineer by training in school and I worked as an engineer at Texas Instruments, uh, early in my career. And then, I think like a lot of smart engineers of my era, um, the thing you do next is you leave and you go to business school to learn, quote, "Business," uh, which I did. And, uh, the first week of business school, I was faced with a personal problem, which was I was meeting all of my new classmates and we were trying to share our phone numbers with each other. And I just would like, like five times a day, I would like type in somebody's phone number and then ask them how to spell their name and then I would call them and they would like dismiss the call and add my number to their address book. And it was right when the iPhone had come out and they had just opened up the App Store. And I thought like, "Oh, why hasn't anybody solved this problem?" Like, this should be a solved problem in the world. Like, maybe I can make a side app that would like make it work. Uh, so I started building that as kind of like a side project in school with the aspiration of like maybe making enough money to pay for my business school, which would like, be like on the order of tens of thousands of dollars. And, uh, we launched it and people started using it, like way more than we thought. And so we decided like, "Okay, we should work on it next weekend too." Uh, (laughs) and we said that, you know, for ten successive weekends. And then we decided, "Okay, well maybe we should like try to make this bigger than what we thought it could be." And we had heard of this thing called Y Combinator, uh, which was like this nascent like startup incubator thing. Uh, only we applied to it on a whim and w- we got in and we came out to California that summer to like work on our startup and then we never went back to school and, uh, and I've been doing that. Um, and then, of course, like we pivoted a few times with Bump and ultimately decided to work on photo sharing and then got acquired by Google and then I was there for nine years. (laughs)