Wednesday, Sep 21, 2022 • 57min
20 Product: The No 1 Metric You Need To Look at When Building Product | Why the Best in Product Have No Domain Experience | Why You Should Not Hire From Incumbents & The Difference Between Good vs Great PMs with David Lieb, Visiting Group Partner @ Y Comb
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David Lieb https://twitter.com/dflieb is one of the product OGs of the last decade. As the founder of Bump David pioneered how over 150M users shared data, contacts and more before the company was acquired by Google. At Google, David took this one step further by creating Google Photos, which he has led with immense success for the last 9 years. In the last few weeks, David announced his latest move, to join Y Combinator, one of the world's leading accelerators as a Visiting Group Partner. If that was not enough, David also has a stellar angel portfolio with the likes of Rippling, Flexport, Tally, Maven and many more. In Today's Episode with David Lieb We Discuss: 1.) Entry into Product: How did an idea at business school turn into Bump and ultimately the creation of Google Photos? What are the single biggest mistakes David made with the early Bump product? What does David know now that he wishes he had known at the start of Bump? 2.) Scaling the Team Alongside the Product: What is product-market fit to David? What is it not? What are the single biggest mistakes founders make when they think they have it? What should founders do first and most importantly, when they do have it? Why does David believe individual user data is more important than relying on data? 3.) Product: Art or Science: Why does the description we have for product managers need to change? How does David determine when to act on customer feedback vs stick to the current product plan? What is the right way to do customer discovery? What questions are best to ask? Where do founders make the biggest mistakes in customer discovery? Ultimately, is product more art or science? Is this changing with ever-increasing data? 4.) Product: The Process: How does David conduct product reviews? What are the biggest mistakes founders and product leaders make when managing product reviews? Who is invited? Who sets the agenda? Who determines who is accountable for what? How do product reviews change in a world of Zoom? What is better? What is worse? What can product leaders do to build culture in remote worlds? How can product leaders make everyone feel safe and comfortable to share how they feel, regardless of seniority, in product reviews? Items Mentioned in Today's Episode: David's Best Performing Investment: Flexport
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David Lieb
Harry Stebbings
Transcript
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Harry Stebbings
00:00
Welcome back, this is 20 product with me, Harry Stebbings. This is the monthly episode where we sit down with the best product leaders in the world to discuss scaling products the teams around them what works and what does not.
Share
00:11
And I wanted to have this guest on the show for a long time following this guest very recent move to become a partner at
Y Combinator
Paul Graham
tweeted an incredible tweet about them saying they are both formidable and benevolent. I love that as a description and I'm so thrilled to welcome with that David Lieb, one of the product O. G. s of the last decade.Share
00:28
As the founder Bump, David pioneered how over 150 million people use and share data contacts and more. Before the company was acquired by
Google.
At Google
, David took this one step further by creating Google Photos
which he's led with immense success for the last nine years.Share
00:44
And in the last few weeks as I mentioned, David announced his latest move to join
Y Combinator
, one of the world's leading accelerators as a partner. If that wasn't enough, David's also a stellar angel investor with investments in the likes of Rippling, Flexport
, Tally, Maven and many more incredible companies.Share
01:00
But before we dive into the show state we need to talk about the game-changing tool that is Miro Are you and your product team still going from tab to tab tool to tool, looking for the most accurate information but losing out on brilliant ideas. Well you may not just be a PM. In that case I'm a podcast host and I need to constantly be balancing the deliverables from multiple different stakeholders, whether it's my team locking down interviews, voting on potential topics for future shows or directing feedback from guests.
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01:28
I need to manage a show like a
product manager
as a product and loss of information causes real inefficiency.Share
01:34
So I keep track of it all using Miro, the collaborative visual whiteboard that brings your product teams great work together in one place online. Miro acts as this infinite canvas where ideas and projects can be shared across the team and across the tools they use. So how do I use mirrors a podcaster with every episode?
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01:51
Well, with every show that we do, we create a new Miro board might team takes 10 reference calls before each episode for every guest and they compile all of their cool notes on a Miro whiteboard, then I can jump into it, see all the cool notes in one place and then write the schedule for the show with all of them in front of me, easy to access and at the same time, total game changer.
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02:11
And that's why over a million new users join Miro every month. Get started today with your first three boards. Absolutely free.
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02:18
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02:28
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03:03
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03:08
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03:20
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03:43
But now I'm so excited to hand over to the one and only David Lieb partner at
Y Combinator.
Share
03:54
You have now arrived at your destination.
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Harry Stebbings
03:57
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 Twan, to Jamie to James. So thank you so much for joining me today.
Share
David Lieb
04:06
You bet it's my pleasure.
Share
Harry Stebbings
04:07
Now I want to 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 lead Google Photos
for the last seven or eight years?Share
David Lieb
04:17
Yeah, I would say it's largely accidental is the true answer. I was an engineer by training in school and I worked as an engineer at
Texas Instruments
early in my career, I think like a lot of smart engineers of my era, the thing you do next is you leave and you go to business school to learn quote business, which I did.Share
04:34
And 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 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.
Share
04:52
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 isn't anybody solved this problem? Like this should be a solved problem in the world, maybe I can make a side app that would like make it work.Share
05:03
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 be like on the order of tens of thousands of dollars - we launched it and people started using it like way more than we thought.
Share
05:16
And so we decided like, "Okay we should work on it next weekend, too". And we said that you know, for 10 successive weekends and then we decided, "Okay, well maybe we should like try to make this bigger than what we thought it could be."
Share
05:27
And we had heard of this thing called
Y Combinator
, which was like this nascent startup incubator thing when we applied to it on a whim and 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 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.Share
Harry Stebbings
05:47
There's bits of your career which I want to kind of unpack. But I do have to ask wanna ask this one as well? He said, what are the ones two biggest lessons for you from your time founding Bump and the transition to
Google Photos
for startups.Share
David Lieb
05:58
Like when you've done a startup, you realize that kind of, the definition of a startup is you start with absolutely nothing and you have this big vision for like what it could be one day in the future. But to get from there to there requires like you to do basically everything at least the very beginning.
Share
06:12
So the number one takeaway from the startup is just this like ownership mentality that you have, which is like, "We have nothing, there's no one else. It's just me. I must make it work somehow. I must do everything that's required."
Share
06:23
So in the early days of Bump like myself and my two co-founders, we wrote all the code, we did all the designs, we thought about all the marketing strategy or hacks or ploys we could use to get anybody to hear about it every pr every press interview. Like that was all just us. We had to learn it on our own.
Share
06:38
And I think that's a skill this like generalist skill that generally people don't have that big companies because they don't need to, there's experts at big companies that do everything. I think magic happens when you bring all that stuff together in a very small number of people's heads and they can do like pretty amazing things.
Share
Harry Stebbings
06:53
Do you know what I find the hardest thing? Letting go, which is like moving from founder-led sales to extreme lead sales and I still have this today. Well, I'm, I know I can do it better than anyone else. I May be able to better than anyone else. I don't mean that arrogant me, but I still shouldn't be doing it.
Share
David Lieb
07:08
Yeah.
Share
Harry Stebbings
07:08
Do you have any advice on that for me?
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David Lieb
07:10
You certainly need to make that trade off at some point. But I think most founders do it too early. They think like, "Oh, we have a product that like shows some glimmers of, you know,
product market fit
. Let's go hire a sales team. And that will be the thing that makes us succeed."Share
07:23
Usually that's the wrong answer. Like usually you are the person who knows the product and the customer the best. And so you should probably be the one doing all of those important jobs for longer than you think it's reasonable should be a point. I think where you're like, "I can't believe I'm spending all of my time doing this. If only I could spend my time on these other really important things, but I can't because this is still the most important thing". Then it's the time to like go bring somebody in who really knows what they're doing and can shadow you and kind of take it from where you are right now and take it further.
Share
Harry Stebbings
07:51
You have full license to end this cool with this next question. But you mentioned some notion of
product market fit
. There's so many different notions and I have so many founders, like, I didn't know if I've got it or not. Some people are somewhat disappointed. Someone not, I don't know how do you advise the founder to know when something is hitting and there is the first signs of product market fit.Share
David Lieb
08:13
If you don't know if you've got it or not, you don't is the simplest answer.
Share
Harry Stebbings
08:17
Right.
Share
David Lieb
08:17
It is a thing where something clicks, people just use your product or demand your products so much more than you could have ever fathomed. That is generally when you've got some initial glimmers of
product market fit
. You have no time in your day to do anything but satisfied those customers, whether it's keeping your servers up, if you're a software company, whether it's like fielding inbound queries from customers who really have heard about your thing and they really, really need it. Those are the signs that you probably have some glimmers of product market fit
.Share
08:45
But I think most of the time people find, "I built something that has some resonance with some small set of people and oh, I must have
product market fit
now!". And generally you might be on the right track, but you probably don't have it if it's unclear whether you've got it or not.Share
Harry Stebbings
08:60
I love the way I have these articulate schedules and then I just get too interested. What were the top one or two decisions that you think made
Google Photos
the success that it was?Share
David Lieb
09:08
Probably the number one. The meta decision that we made early on was around what our mission would be. And I think this is a thing that often gets overlooked or not enough time is spent in bigger companies, it's probably more critical at small companies that you figure this out.
Share
09:21
But we decided that we would have a very clear mission which was to be the home of the world's memories and that was like the only thing we were going to work on. And we were quite explicit at the beginning about what things we would not go into and we said internally at
Google
, like, "We're not going to build a social tool, this isn't a social network, it's about storing your life's memories."Share
09:39
I think by being really clear about that mission early on, it did a few things for us that I think propagate to this day now, 10 years later, one is it really helped us select who should be on the team and who shouldn't be on the team.
Share
09:50
We kind of spun the team out of the
Google
+ team and there's a bunch of folks who signed up to build social, right? They were very excited about social and that's awesome, but we were very clear like that's not what we're doing and those folks decided to move on and I think it's great for them and great for us.Share
10:03
And it also helped us attract the right people to the team. We said, "If you're not like all in on this mission, if you don't want to spend the next 10 years of your life, like solving this problem in the world, you shouldn't come work on this team." I think that really set us up for success and to this day, like everybody on the team, that mission by heart.
Share
Harry Stebbings
10:18
Do you think incumbent products, when you look across the incumbent set, do you think their new products suit and new products themselves teams, do they have those missions, do you think?
Share
David Lieb
10:28
I think at best they have something written down. I really doubt they think about it on a daily basis and reaffirm with everybody on the team like this is our mission, here's why we're doing it.
Share
Harry Stebbings
10:37
Here's why you woke up today and came to work and we just decided we would really phone when I spoke to so many of your team, what really shone through was just what are incredibly kind of loyal and really bought in Google you are. And I think the thing that kind of shocked me and we chatted about it a little bit before the show is, why did you decide to leave
Google
most recently and what was behind that thinking?Share
David Lieb
10:58
Had been at
Google
nine years I left last week and I would say the trigger for me, finally. Last year I was diagnosed with surprised leukemia and so I was out for a year doing chemo and fighting that, and so the team, like all the folks who reported up to me, like on a random Thursday, they just had nobody anymore, they had to step up and do it all themselves. And for an entire year they did it, they did it great. And so when I came back it was kind of like, "Oh, it works like it's okay without me!" It made me feel good about being able to one day step away.Share
11:27
And then I think the second thing that changed is, you know, I had, like, a near-death experience that there was a random Thursday, the first night I went into the hospital, I was in the ER and I thought there was a very good chance I would die and when I got through that quite difficult year, I just decided like, "Wow, life is indeed short."
Share
11:42
Like everyone tells you, "Life is short, do what you care about". But I've, like, actually felt it now and I decided like, I should do what I really love doing and for me, I love startups, I love helping founders, I loved being a founder when I was one and I just want to do that with all of my time, so I decided to leave and join
YC
.Share
Harry Stebbings
11:59
You must mention the team being brilliantly self sustaining without you. I spoke to so many of them before the show and they mentioned that you are a product visionary and everyone said you're a product visionary and I thought that was a good entry point because there's often this tension between art and science in product. So as a starting point is product more art and science. How do you answer that one?
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David Lieb
12:16
What a question. My opinion is. It's more art than science. And so let me explain maybe why I believe that. If you look at truly great products, pick any product that you use, that you're like that product is just really well done. Generally there are a very small set of people behind that product that really love it, that obsess over every single thing about it.
Share
12:37
It could be one person, it could be a team of five people, but usually it's a quite small number of people who make that thing great. And how do they make it great? It's because they love it. They love the customer, maybe they are the customer, maybe the customers, their friends or their family member and they just want to make something great for that person.
Share
12:52
I think that the core of almost all great products and I think in order to do that, you have to treat it as more of an art. You have to put yourself into it.
Share
12:60
You have to obsess and you can't do that with science like you can't just do experiments, you have to understand the customer and really feel what they feel. And I think that is much more art than science.
Share
Harry Stebbings
13:09
But working with early stage founders, do you have a preference? The founders that do have that I felt the pain? I was working at X Company and I did it versus people who are actually more objective and anil I often hear this we're actually we can make analytical decisions with a lot less irrational guards because we are not feeling the pain.
Share
David Lieb
13:29
Sure, I agree with both of those statements. Like I think if you're being very analytical you will avoid large mistakes because your data or your analytics will tell you like what you should do and what you should not do.
Share
13:39
But what they also will avoid is the like big unexpected wins. If you think of maybe in like a scientific way using science bounds your variants of your outcomes, it make sure you don't totally blow it. But it also makes sure that you don't like find something that no one else would have found because you would never try it. And that's where I think doing it more of an art is the way that you get those big upside outcomes now of course you also get big downside outcomes. So you have to be okay with that.
Share
14:04
But as a startup founder as an example, like what are you in the business of, you're in the business of finding big upside anomalies that you found that the rest of the world hadn't yet found. And so that's why I think going with your gut and understanding the customer personally and then building what you think they need, what that's what they're saying or not - usually it's not what they're saying - that's the way you find these big upside outcomes.
Share
Harry Stebbings
14:23
Do you find serial founders or older founders more aligned to that gut instinct willingness to have the high variables versus maybe more younger insecure who don't want...
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David Lieb
14:35
You know, repeat founders often they know more about how the game works. And so they alter their behavior to some extent, both for the good, but also for the bad, they don't let themselves run crazy on some wild idea that everyone around them thinks is stupid. They generally feel some peer pressure to not do that.
Share
14:52
Whereas very young founders like naive founders to some extent, they will go off on crazy pursuits because they think it's the right thing to do and everyone around them will be like, "I don't know what that kid is doing, that's insane!". And then they build something that people really love.
Share
15:04
And so I think to some extent as a startup founder, you want to be a little irrational when it comes to how you solve your problem. But the thing you've got to be very rational about is is there a person that actually has some problem that I can solve. And understanding that customer very deeply.
Share
Harry Stebbings
15:19
Jamie Aspinall on your team said, "When gut instinct is the primary tool, Dave is the master, he wins". My question is how do you think about using your own gut instinct? How do you think about downside protection given that you know, you are willing to have the variables and how do you think about that?
Share
David Lieb
15:35
Yeah. So people often refer to like "using your gut" or "trusting your gut" and I think often they say it in kind of like a derogatory way or like oh your gut is just like this thing on a whim that you should be careful.
Share
15:46
I have a different view, I think your gut is the world's most sophisticated machine learning model ever created. It is like the best supercomputer we've got and there's billions of them on the planet and they've been trained over like tens of thousands of years with tons of training data, the people who wrote the code, there's like generations of people before you that have been tweaking this code for you, and it's now yours, you can now use it. What an amazing thing! And I think we discount it, but instead we should leverage it.
Share
16:11
My God! What I try to do is put as many in, puts into this machine learning model that you can learn as much as you can about your customer, try as many experiments as possible, put it all into your brain and then see what your gut says you should do next. And I think that is actually like quite analytical way to approach the world, you're just using a tool that people aren't used to using.
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Harry Stebbings
16:30
So I love that as a statement as "the most sophisticated machine learning model". But it kind of goes in the face of other things that I heard about you, which is that you're an incredible perfectionist, you're really granular and so in the detail, but that kind of goes against fast iteration, learn, learn, learn how do you think about the balance between like speed of ship, learn, learn learn but also ensuring quality and perfection.
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David Lieb
16:53
Yeah, I think it really depends on your context. So like in the context of
Google Photos
at Google
, we were planning to launch this new product, Google Photos
, we kind of knew that like the world would hear about it, we would get some trial users on day one, right?Share
17:06
So we decided in that context we better make that product pretty great for those people because otherwise they're going to try and they're gonna be disappointed especially so because the products goal was to store the most important digital asset that you have, which is like your life's memories.
Share
17:22
So in that context we decided the bar's got to be reasonably high, at least for the core parts of the product that convey that trust to people. As an example, the main grid of
Google Photos
, like you're scrolling your photos and has all the squares with all your photos.Share
17:34
We very early on that maybe there's an answer to your previous question, decided that thing has to be very fast, very reliable. It has to work and all network conditions, there can be like no instance where you don't see your child's photo and that was really hard.
Share
17:47
Like from a technical perspective, we had to do a lot of things to make that true and it took us months to get that right. But I think that was the right tradeoff for that context. Now switching gears to like the beginning of Bump, let's say there's another thing that I worked on the first version of Bump, I look at it and I'm like very embarrassed by it.
Share
18:03
It was horrible. It was terribly designed like who designed it? Like somebody who's never done a design before. Yes, me and I, you just got to understand your context and what risks you're willing to take for most startups.
Share
18:15
The answer is you should probably ship something and learn something from someone and then you can make it better if you're a big company, you might need to make something like quite good before you want to launch it in terms of learning and making it better?
Share
Harry Stebbings
18:26
I think the really hard thing is often the people who you hear feedback from are the most vocal and they May not be representative of the entire customer base. How do you think about the feedback to ingest and act on versus the feedback too always listen to but not necessarily act on.
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David Lieb
18:42
I think there's two bits in there. One bit is who are you talking to? And are they representative of your desired user base in the future? It's really great if the answer is you are representative of your desired user base. The second bit though is like what are they saying to you and what are you taking away from it?
Share
18:58
I think too often people listen to what customers say and they think like oh we better just go build the solution that they said right I don't I'm confused by the screen. Why don't you put this? But and they just go do that and I think that's the total wrong way to do it.
Share
19:11
You should listen to all the words that they say and all the expressions they make on their face and every piece of data you can when you're talking to a customer and then use that to understand why why did they say that to me?
Share
19:21
Are they really confused by this or maybe this thing? Like doesn't matter to them and they haven't like put in any effort to understand it. Like maybe I'm just not solving a big enough problem for them. So you have to understand the why behind what they're saying, not what they're saying?
Share
Harry Stebbings
19:33
How do you get to that layer deeper? I find customer discovery one of the hardest often people ask leading questions what's the right way to get the truth from that process?
Share
David Lieb
19:41
It is some form of repeatedly asking why, why do you care about that? In what context do you do this? When was the last time that you had this problem? What did you do without our product when you had this problem?
Share
19:51
These are the types of questions that give you the context to really understand what's going on for that person because I think another thing that we forget about when we're being PMS is these are real human beings with real lives.
Share
20:02
Like they had to go take their kids to school in the morning and then they had to come home and like figure out what they're going to eat for lunch. And we often like forget about all that and just ask very pointed questions like when you see this screen, what do you think and the answer might depend on what they did this morning trying to get their kids out the door to school.
Share
20:18
And so I think we got to go a lot deeper on who these people are and what are their problems holistically to understand how your product can solve something in their life?
Share
Harry Stebbings
20:26
When does one rely on that gut intuition? More human incentive? Versus, "Let's look at the numbers, let's look at the data and let's go to the cohorts". I'm sure there's a time for both. When is the point of data?
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David Lieb
20:37
Data is a fantastic tool. It tells you a lot of information all at once. That can be very useful directionally about where to go. I dislike most aggregated statistics yesterday we had this many users upload a photo or there were this many comments on this post yesterday because they can be very misleading about what's actually happening for individual users.
Share
20:57
I much prefer looking at data around individual users in a large scale way. So like let me explain what I'm talking about.
Share
21:05
You mentioned
cohort graphs
like I think that's the number one thing you should look at when you're building a new product is what is your cohort
retention curve look like if 100 people start using your product today, who's using it tomorrow, who is using it the next day, who's using it the next day and what you want to find is those cohort
grass get flat, you want the same set of people eventually to keep using it over time.Share
21:23
Once the other folks who've decided it's not for you have left because that tells you about individual users, the other tool that I really like and there's a variety of...
Share
Harry Stebbings
21:30
Just dive in that. Sorry, I'm by you on that point. When you said about that
cohort
retention graphic, you said about the people who decided it wasn't for you left. When you think about the total audience population that makes that graph, some could say, well they are not qualified leads and so they shouldn't be in that cohort
anyway. And so actually you're naturally going to have a low retention rate because you haven't qualified leads.Share
21:51
Should you have unqualified leads in your retention cohort or should it only be the most qualified? And then naturally you can kind of alter the data to fit the way he wanted to be?
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David Lieb
22:01
Yeah, I certainly see people do this where they say "The population isn't anyone who signed up for our product. It's only people who have like gone past some part of the funnel to qualify them as like, you know, real users". I think that's fine. Inevitably you're going to have some folks in your funnel that should not be your customer.
Share
22:17
You think they shouldn't be your customer. And they think so too. And so it's okay for that graph to have like a quite steep step down in the first time period. But what you want to find is that after that for whatever the granularity of your time period for your product is, it might be a daily use type of product, it might be weekly used product, it might be an annual product.
Share
22:34
Who knows, you want to see in that time period, the people who did stick with it and understand it, they are satisfied and they keep using it over time and potentially they use it more as the product gets better or more people in the world use it or whatever. Network effects might exist happens.
Share
Harry Stebbings
22:46
What do you think the biggest mistakes that founders make when they construct and then examine their cohorts and retentions?
Share
David Lieb
22:52
Number one mistake is they don't do it to be honest. Like so many companies I talked to, I ask like, what's your
cohort
retention curve look like and they don't know. Do I blame them? No, because I did exactly the same thing. When I was a founder, we were raising money for Bump. We were like sitting in the sequoia office and somebody asked like, what's your cohort
retention look like? And I'm like, "It's good!" And then after the meeting, I like went and looked it up and I'm like, "Oh sh it, I have no idea what they were talking about. Like I should know these things".Share
Harry Stebbings
23:17
So for me, I always look at 30 day, I find like anything below 30 days actually not indicative of like true habit-forming behavior and it's very different depending on product. I completely understand and know, but save for a product like
Google Photos
or for BeReal
, which I'm an investor in, 30 days is really where I gain and same for gaming as well. Is that the same for you, number one, and then when you think about good in the consumer social photo utility space, which is aligned enough, what is good? I find founders often, I feel really sorry for they don't know what good is for a product like Google Photos
let's say.Share
David Lieb
23:51
I think a good user of
Google Photos
is using it almost every day, most days of the week you should be doing something with your photo library and so we would look at cohort
retention with either a daily or a weekly time period.Share
24:03
You count as a user if you used it in the last seven days, you don't count if you didn't use it in the last seven days. I think that is the best way to see like what's actually going on. What you normally find however, is people wanna show charts that look good. So they show like number of users in the last 30 days. This is our monthly active users.
Share
24:20
It makes you feel great. But like did those users really love your product in that month that you measured it like maybe, but I bet a huge chunk of them used it for one accidental reason or another and then didn't actually want to use it again.
Share
24:31
This is a fun anecdote from Bump. In the Bump kind of heyday, we had 100 and 50 million installs on phones when the market for phones was only a billion phones in the world. So we were on like 20% of all phones in the world. We were a big blue icon on the home screen.
Share
24:48
And what we found in our data, we saw a huge number of sessions were less than one second long and we were like how the heck why would you open Bump for less than one second? Like it's the thing you have to intentionally decided to do, you have to Bump another person, there has to be a person there with you.
Share
25:01
And what we found when we then examined our own usage, we were like, "You know sometimes I accidentally opened the Bump app because it's blue and I was trying to open the
Facebook
app because it's blue". And we then looked at our data and we're like, "That's what it is".Share
25:12
You have a one in 100 chance of accidentally tapping the wrong icon multiply that by 100 50 million users like you're gonna get some users doing that so you gotta be really careful with aggregate data like this. We thought we were like hot shit because everybody's using our app but turns out like 20% of the time it was accident.
Share
Harry Stebbings
25:27
What is good retention? Is it 30%? I remember
Jeremy Liew
told me I think it was 36% Snapchat
on 30-day retention. What is good?Share
David Lieb
25:36
All that matters to me is that your graph gets flat. It can get flat at 5% of your initial
cohort
of users so long as that 5% is flat and consistent and valuable. I remember at one point seeing a curve of Airbnbs
either 30 or maybe 90-day period cohort
retention, and it's pretty steep, it gets pretty low, but it's flat. And each time they use it, Airbnb makes $100. So that's totally great. It's $100 billion company.Share
26:04
So you've got to understand the context of like what are those people doing? How frequently are they doing it and how valuable is it to you and to them to use your product?
Share
Harry Stebbings
26:12
Are there any other mistakes that founders make? Number one, they don't set them up and they don't actually have the foundations. Are there any others that they have the wrong kind of, they have attraction metrics like MAS, which...
Share
David Lieb
26:21
Things that make you feel good. But actually...
Share
Harry Stebbings
26:24
I'm a
YC
company and I'm coming to you.Share
David Lieb
26:26
Well, I would say like another meta problem is over reliance on the graphs and the numbers. Like you can look at graphs and you can slice and dice and make some like very interesting observation, but it doesn't tell you why, it just tells you what is true. And there are many reasons behind the same truth in the world and they might lead you in completely different directions about what to do next in your product.
Share
26:46
And so I think it's very naive to look at some graphs and then decide your product roadmap based on some graph that you make, It might inform areas of exploration, but it should not tell you what to do.
Share
26:56
Instead, you should go talk to users. Ask them, "Hey, have you ever opened Bump for like a second and not used it?" And they may tell you like, "Oh yeah, sometimes accidentally open it. Whoops. Sorry." And then you've like learned something real in the world as opposed to the effect of something real in the world.
Share
Harry Stebbings
27:12
When you're a startup, often you are told that actually the logo, people from
Google
or Salesforce
or any of these places, they are two in the metrics, they're not close enough to customers because they've been with these incumbents too long.Share
27:25
If you're advising again me as a
YC
founder, early stage, would you say that's fair and you shouldn't get these people to join your team because they're not used to the early startup days. Would you say actually...Share
David Lieb
27:35
You should be careful. There's a set of people at all these big companies that I think are really great. I've tried to hire them all and they get it and they really want to do all the things needed to be successful.
Share
27:44
But there's another set of people at the companies that are there for different reasons. They're there for their career, they're there because they want a good paycheck. They're there for the status that these companies bring. They've never had to solve these problems themselves.
Share
27:58
This is a double-edged sword that you get at some of these big companies is there's an expert on the team for every possible thing you could imagine. You have a legal issue in Estonia? Great, we'll go bring in the Estonian lawyer and he'll like tell you what's going on there. The problem is none of those experts is responsible for the holistic success of your product without that. Who really feels ownership to make your thing great.
Share
28:20
Is it the product lead? Is it the design lead? Is it the engineering lead? Who really feels like their personal credibility is on the line to make this product successful? And I think that is a common failure mode for large companies is you lose that at some scale and at some size. It scares me, it worries me for a lot of these big companies.
Share
Harry Stebbings
28:37
We spoke about kind of obsession and sweating the detail again. So many people said this about you even to the fact that on your last day at lunch apparently you were like moaning about a feature that you still hate. I heard this, I did my research and my question to you is how do you create a culture of product obsession and granularity within your team?
Share
David Lieb
28:58
I think you just have to show it yourself. It has to be authentic. Like you have to personally be obsessed with the success of your product, be obsessed with the product experience, be obsessed with the customers and then people will see that it's true.
Share
29:10
And what's great and hard is that it's really hard to fake real obsession, obsession is a form of love and love is a very hard thing to fake.
Share
29:18
I would argue like it's probably the hardest thing to fake in the world. You can't just pretend to be obsessed about a thing that you're not actually obsessed about. So step one. It's very simple work on something that you're obsessed with or you could become obsessed with, then just let it show. Be yourself, be authentic.
Share
29:32
Like I remember so many times in the early days of
Google Photos
, I would like walk over with my phone to the engineer who was building the main grid of the iPhone
app and I'd sit next to him and I'd be like, "This doesn't feel right to me, doesn't feel right to you. Like see how when I scroll there's like a little glitch and I saw it. Did you see it?"Share
29:49
I would record things with my Slomo camera, like on my other phone, I'd record the grid scrolling and I play it back in slow-mo for these people. And I'd be like, "Did you see that little glitch there?" By me just doing that, a) the people who didn't like that. Maybe decided to leave the team and b) the people who also felt that, but maybe were a little scared to like talk about it, like to raise their hand and say, "Hey, I'm, I'm not sure we're ready to ship this because I'm not, I don't think it's quite good enough yet". It makes that okay.
Share
30:16
It makes them see like, oh if the lead here, the person who started this thing, if he obsesses over this, maybe I can voice my opinion on the things that I'm obsessed about and it creates this culture where everybody is on the same page about success and they're willing to kind of like be themselves and say what they bring to the table to everyone, and that's where magic happen, I think.
Share
Harry Stebbings
30:35
Fundamentally you have to have the right product team together is probably one of the most crucial things you can do. I'm an early stage founder again, at YC, seed series A, you are my mentor. I've never hired a product team before. How do you structure your hiring process for a product team? What is the process?
Share
David Lieb
30:52
Well, if you're early stage, your product team maybe is one person, maybe you're hiring one PM. This is another meta mistake is people think like, "I've raised my seed round, I have $4 million. Like let's go high a team of 20 people". That's what I see all my
cohort
members doing. That's probably the wrong thing to do unless you really have product market fit
already.Share
31:11
But let's assume things are on fire. Like, "Oh my God, we've got to build all these things", like great news. I would say at the early stage, the number one thing I would filter for initially for product people and product people at an early stage company is a very broad set of skills, like you're kind of looking for people who can kind of do anything decently well.
Share
31:29
I would say the number one thing you're looking for is ambition. People who really want to be part of this thing and want to have it succeed and that is very different than what you might hire for in many other areas or other stages of a company. But ambition at the early stage, you can take a reasonably smart person who has the right ambition and they can do incredible things for you if you give them the right environment.
Share
Harry Stebbings
31:51
They need to have the foundational product talent. So I guess my question to you is how do I assess that? I'm literally a sale CEO, what's the process for assessing if they're good at product?
Share
David Lieb
32:01
So, I would find some products that you think are good and some products that you think are bad, and I would ask them about them. See if they've ever gotten to the point of thinking about why a product they love is great versus why a product that they don't love is bad and can they explain it to you? Do they have an opinion on it?
Share
32:17
These are things that are very squishy. It's very hard to like, how would you, like, write a multiple choice test that would test that it's very difficult.
Share
32:23
But these are the things you're looking for because they show that the person has like thought from first principles about why a thing that they see is true in the world is true. And the "why" is what matters and the skill of asking why and learning why are figuring out why is the number one skill for building early-stage companies?
Share
32:40
Because that's what you're doing all day long. Why is this working? Why is this not working? How do we do more of the thing that is working?
Share
Harry Stebbings
32:44
When do you think about bringing in cpos if we're scaling company? I often see the transition required. When would you advise founders on now you need a CPO slash head of product, not just jack of all trades?
Share
David Lieb
32:55
Again, most people do this probably too early. So that's like the common theme here. So I made this mistake myself at Bump, we got to like, maybe it was 30 employees and all of our vanity metric graphs were like going way up, we were feeling really good and I thought "Our company is gonna need to like figure out our business model eventually we're gonna need to keep scaling and hiring. I'm gonna have to do more fundraising, I better hire a product lead to take over from me and I'll go focus on those other things."
Share
33:20
And I did. He was awesome. And then we realized, "Oh, actually we have not really solved
product market fit
". Sure, we have a lot of people who use our product, but like we can't figure out a way for them to pay us. We can't figure out anybody else in the world who will pay us for access to those users in some way. So really we don't have product market fit
, whoops.Share
33:38
And I realized the success or failure of my company actually has to do with what this person I just hired is going to go figure out for me. Generally, that is a very dangerous place to be where the founders or the CEO of the company is not working on the most important problem for the company's success. And I just found at some point that I need to be doing that. It's my responsibility for this company to be successful. I better be working on this.
Share
33:59
And now all of a sudden we have two people who want to be the top person on product, they've made a mistake, I was wrong about when to hire this thing and we parted ways and that was the right call for the company. And for him to be honest.
Share
Harry Stebbings
34:10
He said there's kind of a mistake Annie Pearl from
Calendly
the CPO of Calendly said on the show the other day, the biggest mistake that founders made when hiring cpos is actually they have misaligned expectations and they bring someone in but they still kind of want to own it and...Share
David Lieb
34:23
That's exactly that, that's the same answer basically.
Share
Harry Stebbings
34:26
You see that often?
Share
David Lieb
34:27
Oh for sure. I think the other piece of it is people want to hire people like them when you're hiring the top product lead for your team. If you plan to be around for a long time, you probably don't want to hire someone exactly like you with the same set of skills.
Share
34:41
So as an example on
Google Photos
when we grew enough to where I needed to hire someone to run the product team, I very explicitly wanted someone who had a complimentary set of skills. What are the things that I'm uniquely bad at that? Like the team suffers because I'm bad at those things.Share
34:56
Let's find someone who's world class at all of those things. And they will like really a big gap in our team. That's the way you should do these things unless you're planning to leave, in which case like you need to hire someone who has the skill sets to be the singular lead.
Share
Harry Stebbings
35:09
I had [...] on the show as well and he categorized three different product leaders. He said there's craftsmen and women as visionaries and there's operators. And I think the most damaging one that I see is the operators and what I mean by the operators is the series C professional CPOs who come in and put a lot of process in place and actually do very little and they like talking to other CPOs and they like talking to the board and feeling important.
Share
35:34
Do you agree with that? How do you prevent getting that operator, which actually just brings process and delays?
Share
David Lieb
35:40
Yeah. 100% agree. I would say like the number one failure mode when people hire product leaders is they over index on previous scale? How big of a team have you previously managed? Or tenure: like how long have you been doing this? What experience do you have? Do you have experience in our domain? It turns out that if you're the median PM in the world, you're like middle of the stack. Not good, not bad. Here's medium. If you stay in the game long enough you will be that person by definition almost right. If you last long enough you will eventually lead a team of 25 PMs. But you're not actually good necessarily your medium and it's very dangerous to hire those people.
Share
36:15
You've heard this saying before. But like A players hire A players and B players hire C players. It's totally true. It happens like literally all the time I watch it happen once you hire that B player to be your lead like, bye bye: your team is gone. Like the best people on your team are not gonna want to work with that person. So how do you avoid it? I think you got to retain this ability to be either a craftsman or a visionary. Hopefully both because those are the people that people want to follow.
Share
36:39
They want to listen to what they're saying, they want to work with that person, they want to work with the people who want to work with that person. I think it's incredibly valuable. Yet founders think, "I better hire this experienced person who knows how to do this". But turns out they don't actually know how to do it no more than you do.
Share
Harry Stebbings
36:53
Is there ever a time for an operator when you are a smart sheep and a plan or a name you're kind of quite non-creative SAS enterprise product, respectfully. Is there time for that?
Share
David Lieb
37:06
Yes, but they're still must be a product visionary and a craft person. You've got to have somebody on the team who's doing that role. It's totally fine if that person is the founder, CEO or the co-founder who's focusing on product and if you're hiring an operator to like run your team, which those people are incredibly valuable, you can't really operate at scale without somebody who's good at that.
Share
37:26
But you should not confuse that with who is the visionary? Who is the person leading the charge on? What we're going to build next? Who's the person that reinforces the culture that we want at the company day to day. That person must exist. It's fine. If it's not the chief product officer, it just needs to be somebody.
Share
Harry Stebbings
37:41
Final one on the hiring process. Do we need to hire people who've built products like the product we're building before. So say if you're doing
Google Photos
, consumer social, visual creative sharing, can it be PM from Airtable
, from do you name your SAS company? Yeah.Share
David Lieb
37:58
In my experience, most of the really strong PMs that have emerged say on the
Google Photos
team came from backgrounds with no experience in this domain, really at all. In fact, I would probably go so far as to say that it's anti-correlated with the top performers. The top performers tend to come from some strange background.Share
38:15
I think one of the folks you talk to on our team joined
Google
as like a salesperson and now they're PMs running like a big chunk of Google Photos
. And again, I think it gets down to this like self-selection for ambition, like a chip on your shoulder.Share
38:26
These people want to prove that they can do this, they can win. And those people tend to work harder. They tend to like understand the customer more, they go the extra mile, and these are the things that separate success from losing.
Share
Harry Stebbings
38:37
What's the difference between good and great, in those PMs?
Share
David Lieb
38:41
I guess it comes down to two things: the ability to really understand the user very deeply and then the ability to craft creative solutions to those problems that you find. Those I think are the two core parts of the job of being a PM.
Share
38:54
On the first one: how do you like understand the user? You've got to be open to and willing to go out and make yourself look like a fool talking to other human beings, understanding how they use your product. Most humans don't like feeling like a fool, do you? No! Do I? No! But that is how...
Share
Harry Stebbings
39:09
I'm used to as a VC, so...
Share
David Lieb
39:10
That is how you learn what's happening in the real world. You have to put yourself out there and say, "Hey guys, I want you to look at my product". And they'll look at it and they'll be like, "Who the heck are you? Like get out of my face". And that's a tough feeling. It's a feeling of rejection that's very difficult for people but you have to be okay with that.
Share
39:25
And so I again that's why folks who come from non-traditional backgrounds, they probably had that happen to them quite a bit in their lives whether they went to some like no-name school and all their peers now at
Google
like went to Harvard
or Stanford
or whatever. They felt that before and they are okay with it and they're willing to like plow through it. So I think that's a very important skill set.Share
39:43
The second piece is knowing enough about how to build a product: the engineering involved, the design involved, like all the pieces that are required to build a great product. Knowing enough about that to be the ringleader or the champion to take the insight from the customer and actually build something that will solve that customers problems.
Share
40:01
As an example in
Google Photos
, you have to understand enough about how AI
works to know like what is conceivable that we could build to solve this customer problem versus what is like inconceivable, "we can't, there's no known solution right now."Share
40:14
Understanding that and being able to kind of go down the right path based on what you've learned from the customer. That is a very valuable skill as well. And how do you develop that? You do it and it doesn't have to be in the same same context or the same domain. You just have to be credible. One thing that for me was valuable when I joined
Google
, like I didn't write any code at Bump, but I was like an engineer in my last job. So I was like in the code, I understood all the engineering. I just didn't write it.Share
40:37
And I carry that to Google and yeah, when an engineer would show me like this thing and it wasn't quite right. I would say, "It can be right. I know it's possible. We just have to do it." And I think that helped push a lot of folks on our team to like build excellent versions of what they were building as opposed to the version that maybe was like as good as they thought it was possible to build.
Share
Harry Stebbings
40:56
I do want to just touch on product reviews because I think they're quite misunderstood and there's a lot of confusion around them, especially for founders. And so when we think about product reviews for you today, how do you do product reviews? How often do you do them? Who's invited? Again, think of me as like a early-stage
YC
company. How would you advise me on how to do them right?Share
David Lieb
41:14
So first of all, like often people have these standing product reviews like, "Every two weeks, I want to hear what that team is doing". I don't like doing it that way. I think it's personal preference, but I prefer to have it be about specific things or plans or projects that are being done or decisions that need to get made where the team has like spent a bunch of time on it. They have an opinion on what they want to do and they either want like feedback on that plan or they want somebody to make a decision that they don't feel capable of making themselves.
Share
41:41
And they bring it to a group of people that are the experts on this project, basically the leads of every important part of the project, design, engineering, product sales, whatever it is and you sit in a room and you don't spend all your time like talking about the plan because you probably made a deck or a dock or something about it. So everyone should know what the plan is already. In fact, you should know what it is before the meeting because you should be in the details enough to like know what's going on in your company.
Share
Harry Stebbings
42:03
Who created that doc?
Share
David Lieb
42:04
I would say the PM responsible for the thing if it's a product-centric review.
Share
Harry Stebbings
42:08
Okay. And I send it out, I share it three days beforehand, a week beforehand? Do I ask for feedback? Do I ask for commentary?
Share
David Lieb
42:13
I prefer doing it in that form or you send a doc that's very like succinct and you ask for either general feedback or you ask for directed feedback on this specific set of questions that you want to get people's inputs on.
Share
42:26
And people can do it all largely asynchronously and then I do like getting the group together in person to talk about the most important bits. But it should be talking about what hasn't been said yet, bouncing ideas off of each other as opposed to just rereading the doc or presenting the deck, which I would say 90% of the time. That's what happens. Because humans want to feel validated in their work. They want to feel good. Their bosses in the room, yada, yada. That's a big waste of time.
Share
Harry Stebbings
42:49
How do you ensure everyone feels safe to speak? You are a product OG, you're very young. Dave, you know, you've been doing this for a while, you can't just say what you think often, how do you ensure that everyone has an equal share of voice and it's a free discussion?
Share
David Lieb
43:03
My approach to try to just be my authentic self all the time and then people in the room will realize even though I look like important on paper or whatever. I'm just a regular person. I'm just like you and I think if leaders who approach leadership that way with like a real authenticity, they're just being their normal self. It's the same person that you saw in that meeting that you would have seen on a Saturday morning at my house.
Share
43:25
I think that is the best tool that a leader can use to make everyone feel comfortable and able to say what they think because again, when have I been most scared in the meeting? It's when I think all the people around me are better and smarter and more important than me and then I'm like really careful what I say and that's dangerous for products. You want people to say like all the things that they're feeling.
Share
43:45
So how do you avoid that? You make sure the room doesn't feel like a bunch of important people. It's just normal people. Right? And so I think that that's like the tool I use.
Share
Harry Stebbings
43:52
Do you think Zoom helps that it removes the fear actually when you're sitting in a room and you feel that I think helps you're just a square now I can say what I want. I'm in my home.
Share
David Lieb
44:02
Right. There's a bunch of reasons that virtual makes improvements. The one you mentioned, which is like everybody gets their own square, that alone is a big deal now, everyone literally is on equal footing to everyone else and some people interact or bring their best selves in different contexts.
Share
44:17
So having like time to be on mute and like maybe have a dock open and like type your thoughts down and then present. Like maybe that works better for some people. I think that's great. But I think there are tradeoffs.
Share
44:26
On zoom often you just sit there and there's all these squares. Nobody says a word until like the person running the meeting joins and then everyone on mute. I think you lose a lot of culture building by not having those awkward down times when
COVID
first hit and we had to like abruptly switched to all remote and everybody was brainstorming. Like how do you keep your team culture? How do you keep people knowing each other? All that.Share
44:47
The technique that I found most successful, it's the simplest thing I could think of is for every meeting that I was kind of like the top person in, I would just intentionally show up like 5 to 7 minutes late.
Share
44:56
It creates this awkward silence where everyone's sitting there and after some number of minutes somebody unmutes and says like, "Well this is awkward like where's Dave?" And then they talk to each other and they like say what they were doing, what they're working on what they did on the weekend and that alone I think is like the best thing that we ever found to drive culture in a remote environment.
Share
Harry Stebbings
45:13
I mean if you had any talk about the weather from the first minute.
Share
David Lieb
45:17
But that's valuable. Right?
Share
Harry Stebbings
45:20
Totally. Is you should hire me, I can chat shit for days.
Share
45:22
Final one on product reviews. Where do you think product leads most go wrong with product reviews?
Share
David Lieb
45:28
Mostly it is spending time on things that you could have done outside of the room or aren't actually even relevant at all. It's really cutting to the meat of why are we in this room? And again, it's really hard. Like you've got some person they're presenting, they've spent obviously like so much time getting ready for this big review.
Share
45:44
It's hard as a leader to say, "Stop talking. I've already read your doc. I don't need to hear this. What I do want to know is what do you think we should do about this question." Talk to me about it. That is a skill that's very hard to master again. You're kind of being rude to a person and that's difficult, but it's the best way to make it an efficient use of time.
Share
45:59
So I like product reviews where it's really a debate about what we should do and people bring like different perspectives on that debate and you fight it out. The best product of views I can remember on
Google Photos
were ones where I had like heated debate - and if you talk to some of the folks on the team - like my boss in the early days, he and I like had heated debates about what to do. But we often got to a better answer as a result. If everybody just is the yes man and says, "Yes, we'll do that thing you said, we should do." You will miss big valuable opportunities.Share
Harry Stebbings
46:26
Final, final one on product reviews. You don't want it just to be like a great discussion and then what, what's the right post-meeting process to ensure that the discussion items are implemented in some way?
Share
David Lieb
46:37
I think the simple thing is whatever you decide to do in that room, somebody needs to be the singular owner of each of those things happening. And again, this is probably broader than product reviews. It's more like how do you run a larger scale team? And what I have found again is you lose a lot of value.
Share
46:51
The minute responsibility gets charted across multiple people, if there are like three people who say they're going to clean up the floor who's gonna actually do it? It's less likely that the floor gets clean when there are three people responsible than when there's one person responsible.
Share
47:04
I always loved operating in this model. You know, Apple calls it "the directly responsible individual". Which is just a person and it's not necessarily the boss of all the people. Just a person who's designated as like your job is to make sure this thing succeeds.
Share
47:16
If there are any roadblocks, you escalate it to whoever you need to escalate to so they can help fix the problem. I think that's the way you should come out of all these reviews like who's responsible for each piece of this when you're going to get it done by, and getting them to sign up for that.
Share
Harry Stebbings
47:28
I think that singular accountability is so key.
Share
47:30
Final one before the quick fire and you invest in some of the most unbelievable companies. Your track on the angel side is astonishing when you think to the incredible companies you invest in, how has your mindset on product changed through those angel investments and through that portfolio building?
Share
David Lieb
47:47
I guess the biggest learning is companies are very different. I've invested in such a broad scale of companies that like things that I thought were like, "That was the reason like we succeeded on
Google Photos
". I then look at another company, I'm like, "Well they didn't do any of that."Share
48:00
And yet there are companies worth billions of dollars. Like there's different ways to solve these problems. That's probably number one learning is like, there's so many different ways to do this. The things that I found our common across all the successful companies that I've invested in. Like that's an interesting question. What is it about these companies?
Share
48:15
Generally, I would categorize it as there's a person with a chip on their shoulder that wants to prove to the world that they can succeed at something or prove all the haters in the world wrong. That's one.
Share
48:24
Number two is that person usually the same person has to be like incredibly charismatic because they need to get really smart, discerning people to choose to work for them when it probably doesn't make any sense for those people to work for them. That's got to be true.
Share
48:36
They have to approach the world with this mindset that they will succeed. The best founders I've invested in our people that when I met them, I was like, "I don't know anything about your business. I really have no business investing in this company. Like what am I thinking? But there's something about you that I just think you're gonna win at whatever you do."
Share
48:53
Best example, my first angel investment ever was for export. I met Ryan Peterson at a wedding, I was friends with the bride, he was friends with the groom. We both showed up. We were like, "Oh, hey, how's it going? You do something in tech?" Like we talked.
Share
49:03
And I left that wedding just thinking like I would not want to be on the other side of a competition with Ryan, he will eat you alive. So when he was raising money, I said like, "Well I don't have any money, but I want to invest."
Share
49:14
So I put it like the most, I could possibly put it in because I thought he would win at whatever he did is flat export, your best-performing investment from a multiple perspective that will be, who knows, until the cash is in the bank, but I didn't have any money is probably the smallest check.
Share
Harry Stebbings
49:27
Did you write the same check size, every single company?
Share
David Lieb
49:29
Well, at the time it was, there's one company I could invest in and I have no money because like we hadn't yet really gotten any liquidity from Bump, so that was like the only company I could invest in.
Share
49:38
Later on yeah, I've generally tried to keep my check size reasonably static because it's very hard to know front which companies are going to be successful and in fact often your gut will tell you the opposite of what actually will happen, the companies that seem the stupidest or the craziest and you're just like, "I don't know, but I like the founder, I'll invest".
Share
49:57
Those are the ones that turn out to be big wins. If you modulate your check size based on like probability of success or like how big the market is or whatever, you'll probably be doing the exact opposite of what you should do.
Share
Harry Stebbings
50:07
That's where the transition from angel to venture is fucking hard because you don't write those checks when it's like, "Ah, it doesn't make sense, but good people, cool". You can't do that or you can and the best do, but it's very difficult to do.
Share
50:19
I want to move into a quick fire round, so I say a short statement Dave and you give me your immediate thoughts. That sound okay?
Share
David Lieb
50:24
Okay, well let's see.
Share
Harry Stebbings
50:25
Did you really get fired from
Google
twice?Share
David Lieb
50:28
This is the first question to the quick fire round? My God. I didn't get fired from
Google
, I did get asked to leave the team twice. I'll give the shortest possible version of this story as I can.Share
50:38
In the early days, right after we got acquired, there was a vigorous internal debate about whether
Google
should build a private, non-social photo management tool which is what we got acquired to do, or should we continue on the Google
+ building a social network track. There was vigorous debate.Share
50:54
It turns out the person that we reported up through cited on the, "Yeah, we're doing the social thing, that's what we're doing". I felt so much conviction about
Google Photos
and that it would be successful. The Google Photos
that we ended up ultimately building, that I just decided to not take "no" for an answer.Share
51:08
Like in big companies there's this phrase disagree and commit when like your bosses tell you to do something you don't want to do if you talk to anybody I worked with, I'm very bad at doing that, it's very hard for me to do something that I don't believe in.
Share
51:17
And so I just decided I'm not going to do that and I basically just told everyone like, no, I'm gonna keep building this with these people on the team, so... sorry. And I did that because I like had a unique situation, we got acquired, I didn't care about my
Google
career, I wasn't there to like make l whatever on the job ladder. I just want to build Google Photos
. So I decided to take a big risk and go for it. And yeah, they told me like, "Okay, well then you need to leave, like you're not on the team anymore".Share
51:40
And again, I just didn't take no for an answer. I called up a bunch of people that I knew in the valley who had the ear of
Larry
and other folks on the board. That I think was at least part of the reason why ultimately we changed our minds as Google
and decided to build Google Photos
.Share
Harry Stebbings
51:54
You still have a chip on your shoulder, you said multiple times about it. Do you stil today?
Share
David Lieb
51:58
It's a great question? I don't feel it anymore. I don't feel like I need to prove that maybe our startup was worthwhile. It was good that people invested millions of dollars in our startup. I don't feel that I need to prove that I could build a product that people love. Like I've done it. There probably other domains where I do have a chip on my shoulder. Like I'm about to join
YC
, right? And try to help, very early stage startups, try to pick very early stage startups. I don't feel yet that I have proven that I'm good at that... And I want...Share
Harry Stebbings
52:23
What are you most nervous about that?
Share
David Lieb
52:25
What I'm most nervous about? What you like highlight my track record as an angel investor, but the dance is still going, the game is still on, so who knows if I will actually end up being a good angel investor or not?
Share
52:34
You don't know for decades, right? I think that's probably one of the things I'm most nervous about. YC Is really good at picking the best companies and I feel a little bit of imposter syndrome going in where it's like, "Am I actually any good at this?" And I want to learn that'll be fun.
Share
Harry Stebbings
52:47
Which product leader outside of
Google Photos
do you most admire and why?Share
David Lieb
52:52
I really like Kevin Wheel, he's at Planet now, he was at
Instagram
before that on Twitter
before that. The reason I like him is I think he's got this authentic feeling combined with the ability to really push a team hard and get excellent results.Share
Harry Stebbings
53:04
Actually I have him on the show on Friday.
Share
53:07
One piece of advice would you give to a product leader, starting a new role today?
Share
David Lieb
53:11
Get into the details as much as possible as quickly as possible. Go to all the people that you now lead that, that report to you really start to understand all the stuff they're working on pretty deeply. That's what I would do.
Share
Harry Stebbings
53:22
What would you most like to change about the world of products?
Share
David Lieb
53:25
I think the product manager role as defined by the world is way too pigeonholed. We should broaden the responsibilities of the PM role. I think they should be much more responsible for design, much more responsible for engineeringm for analytics. Like I think we box them into like a very small box and the result is they don't feel this unreasonable ownership over a product and I think they should.
Share
Harry Stebbings
53:48
Final one: what recent company product strategy other than
Google
or Google Photos
have you been most impressed by?Share
David Lieb
53:55
The first one that comes to mind is not recent at all. But I'll say it anyway is the
Tesla
master plan was written in like 2006 when Elon
just decided to write down the master plan for how Tesla
would be successful and then he did the master plan part two I think like 10 years later there might be a new one coming.Share
54:10
I love that he can articulate like the set of things that might become true that if true yield like a big change to the world in a positive way. I think that's what every product leader needs to do is articulate, if we succeed and some things have to fall in our favor, how can this be so important and so big in the world because that's what gets people excited.
Share
Harry Stebbings
54:28
Dave, I absolutely love this. Thank you so much for my prying questions. Thank you so much for letting me harass your team for a week or so. This has been a joy and I so appreciate you joining me.
Share
David Lieb
54:38
My pleasure. Thanks to everyone for listening.
Share
Harry Stebbings
54:42
I so love doing that episode. David is one of the most humble but authentic leaders I've had the chance to have on the show, such a brilliant product mind and huge thanks to him for giving up the time today.
Share
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Harry Stebbings
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