#121 - David Lieb and Gustaf Alströmer
Y Combinator Startup Podcast - A podcast by Y Combinator
Categories:
David Lieb is the Product Lead for Google Photos. Prior to working on Google Photos, David was the cofounder and CEO of Bump, which was in the Summer 2009 batch of YC.
Gustaf Alströmer is a Partner at YC.
David is on Twitter @dflieb and Gustaf is @gustaf.
The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.
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Topics
00:00 - Intro
00:42 - How Bump became one of the biggest apps on the App Store
3:56 - Bump was the billionth app downloaded on iOS
6:14 - David's YC interview
8:17 - Bump's goal during YC
10:12 - Experiments at Bump before working on photos
11:17 - How Bump grew
12:32 - How David thinks about product market fit
13:32 - Flock and talking with the top users of Bump
18:02 - Going upstream in photo sharing, becoming the camera roll
19:32 - Being a photo sharing power user and how that helped when building a product
22:12 - Fundraising
26:12 - Deciding that Photo Roll would work better within a big company and building it at Google
29:42 - When building a product, pretend there's a person doing that task for you in the best possible way then try to build that
31:52 - How David spends his time running Google Photos
33:47 - How David feels about his work at Google after being a startup founder
35:17 - When to apply AI
37:22 - Attention to the user vs the technology
38:02 - Talking to users at scale
41:02 - Lamide Akomolafe asks - What did David focus on too much as a rookie product lead that he thinks was a mistake now?
42:47 - Getting confidence to ship features to a billion users
45:17 - Generating support for a project within a big company
47:02 - In 5-10 years will David be working for a large or small company?
48:27 - When thinking about an acquisition, can you execute your vision in a larger way within the company?
50:12 - Larger truths about people learned by paying so much attention to photos and memories
51:47 - Giving everyone a photographic memory and deciding which photos are important
52:57 - Products David likes and the importance of solving a durable human need
