Suchit Dash: Scaling Dubsmash to 43M Users, Battling TikTok & Joining Reddit | E1060

Reddit is a anonymous network. People actually weigh in and it's become so trusted because the aggregation of the community, and the community actually giving it weight on what is valuable and not, is more trustworthy than necessarily what your friends think about something. (instrumental music plays)

Suchit, I am so excited for this. We have so many mutual friends before this, I had so many great chats, usually it's a Jack at Snap for the intro, Danny Ryman, Nico at GC, but thank you so much for joining me today.

Yeah, really excited to be here, Harry.

Now, I would love to start, I always think there's this kind of realization moment for one's love of product in particular. When did you first realize that you had this love for product, Suchit?

You know, I first started my career actually at PayPal right after college, and started directly in product management, which is actually a bit rare. Usually people find their way kind of to product. So I was incredibly young, and actually PayPal was a magnet of talent. Uh, the people around me were incredible and they've gone on to do amazing things. And my first product actually I worked on was the yellow button you see on merchant sites. eBay at the time owned PayPal, uh, and we were a small group trying to just build outside of the ecosystem of, of eBay. After that, I, I learned a bunch there and joined a few folks building a, a digital rewards startup, uh, that rewarded customers when you checked out on (laughs) e-commerce sites, and a few things early on that really stuck out to me in which I loved, uh, why I loved product. The first is, I, I loved the decision-making. Uh, I love validating whether you're right or wrong. And I think product puts you at the epicenter of that. The second is I love the leadership aspect of product. Um, leading a group of people, even if they may not directly report into you, at a very young age was incredibly empowering. While my friends were working on decks for other people, people would look to me as like a 23-year-old and say, you know, "How do we go to the promised land?" That was amazing. And the final thing is I love the act of getting things over the line. You know, I think many people have ideas, few execute on them, and even fewer are greater at doing them with speed and quality. And openly, every single day is, I try and get better at those three areas. And so I think this continuous learning process of getting better at product is why I fell in love with it.

Can I be really blunt? N- I told you we'd go off schedule, but I just have to ask. I had someone on the show say the other day, "It's sad that some of our brightest young talent, technical and non-technical, goes into big companies like your PayPals, and works on the color of a button."