Will Wu: Top Five Product Lessons from Creating Snapchat "Discover" and "Chat" | E1111

What are the single best qualities you look for in a product designer?

I specifically look at (beep) . I think it speaks volumes.

This is Will Wu. He's the CTO of Match Group and former VP of Product at Snap. He was responsible for shipping some of Snap's most successful features, including the Discover page, chat feature, and Snap Games.

When you are creating a novel product, something that's truly innovative and new, simplicity is paramount towards making it easy to use and easy to grok.

What would you say is the biggest mistake founders make when hiring product teams?

Not getting rid of poor culture fits fast enough.

How does product culture go bad?

Again, I can only speak to my experience.

Will, I am so excited for this. I heard so many good things from many different people, but especially the incredibly good-looking Jack Brodie. So thank yous first so much for joining me.

Thanks so much for having me. It's really a- a privilege to be here.

Uh, it's very, very kind of you. But I wanted to start with your entry into tech first. I like a bit of context. So how did you first get interested in tech and product? Let's start there.

Okay. So we'll go way back. I was very lucky to grow up in a household just surrounded by tech and science. My dad was an electrical engineer working in the semiconductor business in Silicon Valley. My mom was a PhD in chemistry. So growing up, my dad would always bring home the latest computer gadgets. And actually, for whatever reason, I was just always so curious about how these computers and technology worked. So much to his chagrin, I would, like, tear them apart. I would get out my tool set and, like, start unscrewing everything and literally tear apart these computers, and then I would never put them back together, which just, like, drove him insane. Um, but I just grew up around computers. And I had a really formative experience when I was around 12 years old. Um, so sort of starting in my, when I was 12 and going through my early teenage years, where I discovered on my computer on the internet what's called IRC. Do you know what IRC is?

No, I don't. But please keep going-

Okay. All right. So-

... because this moment is fascinating.

So IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat, and it is essentially... I think it was invented in the late '80s, but it's essentially the first ever form of internet chat rooms. So as a 12-year-old kid, I would log on to IRC in my childhood bedroom every single night, literally, and connect with str- (laughs) strangers online. And it sounds like a little bit weird, but I met some of the most brilliant people you could possibly imagine. Because if you, if you think about the types of people that are on IRC, and this is in the early 2000s, um, I can only imagine they were these, like, middle-aged computer scientists who had literally invented computers and- and the internet and everything. So they mentored me, and I learned from these strangers on the internet. I literally have no idea who they are. Uh, I learned from them just so much about computers and technology. I learned about cybersecurity and cryptography and computer networking and video encoding. And I- actually, I- one of my- my parents' favorite stories to tell is that, um, when I was 13 years old, I went out on Craigslist and I bought a used satellite dish. And I was, like, taking guidance, mentorship from the people that I was talking to online. And I ended up taking this used satellite dish, crawling up onto the roof of my parents' home, and literally drilling holes into the roof to mount this satellite dish. And then I figured out how to point it at a TV provider's satellite up in, up in the sky. And then I ran the cable into the back of my computer to see if I could decrypt the signal. And it was sort of- so technology was like my playground growing up. I was just constantly exploring different facets of what was possible. And it was just, like, out of a pure intellectual curiosity to see- to understand how technology computers worked, because it's just magical to me. It's like, how is it possible that we've created these devices that can just do so many things?