Growing a consumer product from scratch to 1 billion users - Google Photos' David Lieb

[00:00:00] We tried to just probe on all the possible dimensions that might matter to these people in these specific moments that they were facing. It's hard to ask people for generalized answers, like, Hey, tell me about your life. What are some of your pain points in your life? Nobody's going to give you a good answer to that problem.

They'll tell you about macro problems that they've got, but nothing you can actually go solve. But if you try to dig into very specific questions that they'll be like, well, that's a very precise question you're asking me. I can actually tell you the answer. If you ask enough of those, you can paint a picture that I think ultimately lets you understand deeply that person's life and therefore have a good chance of solving the problems that they're facing.

[00:00:45] Welcome to. In-depth a new show that surfaces tactical advice, founders and startup leaders need to grow their teams, their companies, and themselves. I'm Brett Berson, a partner at first round. And we're a venture capital firm that helps startups, like notion, roadblocks, Uber, and square tackle company building firsts through over 400 interviews on the review.

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for today's episode of in-depth, I'm really excited to be joined by David Lieb. David is the director of Google photos, and he arrived at Google in 2013 via its acquisition of his startup bump. You might remember bump. It was an app in the early days of the iPhone that allowed people to share contact info by physically bumping their phones together.

It was a really big hit bump was downloaded 150 million times. Hit number two in the app store and was even featured in an apple commercial. But as David describes in our interview, the journey wasn't always up into the right user acquisition was through the roof, but retention was a real problem spot when they distilled down what power users loved about the app David and his co-founder realized they'd been building the wrong product, unfortunately, attempts to course correct with their second app flopped running out of runway.

He and his co-founder decided to sell to Google. It was their unreleased third app that formed the basis of the design of Google photos, which launched in 2015 and passed the billion user mark only four years later in 2019. In our conversation, David sketches out the consumer product building journey from zero to a billion in a ton of detail, we unpack the decision to sell to Google and their initial struggles to find their footing in the Google plus org, including the lessons he learned on convincing stakeholders inside of a big company.

And as David puts it, he got fired from the team twice by ruffling the wrong feathers. I really loved all the product insights in this episode, especially around how they uncovered this problem in the photo sharing space. We hear a lot about the importance of talking to users, but David gets super tactical here from the questions they ask and user interviews to the techniques they use to sip through conflicting feedback.

And for more of his thoughts, be sure to read his article in the first round review on the dangers of cognitive overhead and product building. We'll put a link in the show notes. There are some really great stories of scaling in here from how a random Google photos feature in an early release became the bedrock for the product's recent redesign to why he writes a state of the union style address during the annual planning process.

David also shares why he looks for credible confidence when hiring as well as how his thoughts on product org structure have evolved and what he thinks makes for an exceptional product leader. It's a great listen for product builders, of course, but I think there are also so many interesting insights on building from scratch for all types of leaders.

I hope you enjoy this episode. And now my conversation with David. All right, David. Thanks so much for joining us. My pleasure. So a place that I wanted to start was talking about the underpinnings of Google photo success, something that you came in and created and got off the ground. And I think when you look across large cap tech, it's very rare that a company with an existing core product or some adjacent product launches, something from scratch that gets to massive scale and becomes another pillar of the business.

I think the dominant way that that happens is they acquire something. Or the one thing is just the one thing kind of forever, maybe in like the eBay use case. And so I'm curious why you think. It worked or what are the underpinnings that made it work, maybe other than what people tend to talk about, which is, you know, company X hires someone entrepreneurial and just leaves them alone and then it works.

[00:05:14] Yeah, it's a great question. You mentioned the build in-house versus acquire the two paths. Interestingly, Google photos is kind of both of those paths because they did acquire our startup bump and it was very clear. We had built a prototype of a product in the photo management and sharing space that we were really excited about.

That was certainly an area that we wanted to go build on at Google. But at the same time, Google had internally built a lot of great technology and some interesting product interactions in the Google plus product. And so when we came in, we were able to graft on to a. Portion of that Google plus team, and then eventually sliver off and create our own team to go build Google photos.

So it was both of those things to answer the question about the underpinnings. Why was Google photos successful? I think it's a combination of a lot of things that have to line up for any product really first and foremost is it's got to solve a problem. That's real for real people. And I think for us at the time, this was 2013, so it's kind of a long time ago.

Now we had the advantage working at the startup that we were on the cutting edge of mobile. Y'all had iPhones. We were all using our I-phones probably 10 times more than normal people were at the time. And I think we just got a few insights into how the world was going to go, that other people didn't yet have.

So my example is I was taking a lot of photos to test bump, cause you could share photos with bumps. And I found that I had all these photos on my iPhone and my iPhone kept running out of space. And so I, every month I had plugged my iPhone to my Mac book and drag the photos over and organize them and I just realized, oh yeah, Everybody's going to have this problem soon, but I'm the only one really having it now.

So that was some of the unique insight that allowed us to get excited about this problem. So I think you've got to have the real solution to a real problem, which I think we did, but you also have to have a bunch of other things to make it successful. You've got to have the ability to acquire a team, to go build it with you.

You've got to have a way to get funding somehow, to go hire those people and build it. You've got to have distribution, like, how are you going to actually get the word out about this product? How are you going to mechanically find ways for users to get the product? And then ultimately you've got to have a way to turn it into a business model that can sustain itself.

At some level in the long run, when we were getting acquired, we were very excited about building this product and we really wanted to bring it to the world. And we had a few options and looking at those options, it was very clear to me, at least that Google was the place that would allow us to do this in the best way, the product aligned.

Very well with the core mission of the company to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. You think about photos, that's like exactly what we are doing, but just on a personal level, instead of a public level, you look at the DNA of the company. Like what types of people work at Google versus some of the other companies that we could have gone to.

And it was just like a perfect match for the stuff that we care about. You look at the brand of the company, who will you trust to store all of your life's most personal memories? And the answer was very clear on that one, that it's a very limited set of companies that you might trust. So I think all those things have to line up.

And I think we were just fortunate Google photos, that we were able to line them up in a timeframe that made sense that allowed us to build this product and grow it in the way that we did. How did 

[00:08:24] work in terms of you get acquired? And there was alignment around you're going to launch this, what happened organizationally, that made it work and.

Short-term long-term success metrics. How does that tie into the level of funding that I guess you ultimately get in milestones, which I'm sure has grown exponentially over time, but what are the mechanics or mechanisms once you 

[00:08:48] joined? Yeah, kind of laugh because the way it should have gone down, we had a little brief interruption, which was super stressful to me and almost made the whole thing fall apart.

We showed this prototype to some folks at Google and it was very clear like, oh, this should be the Google photos product. And we should put it on our operating system on Android and we should build it for iOS. This is great. So there's very clear strategic alignment, the individual people, the leaders that we would be working for, it was very clear.

Everybody was very happy and we shake hands on the deal. The lawyers go and paper the deal up. And before the lawyers finished papering, the deal get a little notification like, Hey, by the way, there was a little reorg at Google. So there's this other person you're going to report to. That's different than the person you thought.

And I was like, oh, that's. That's interesting. And it turns out it was a massive reorg. They basically moved where we were going to be into this Google plus organization. And the mission of that Google plus organization at the time was very different than the mission that we had in our head. The product that we wanted to build did not align at all in core philosophy with where that team wanted to go at the time.

So. The first nine months of time at Google was very stressful for me. I felt a major bait and switch, and also it was just really hard to get anything done. I would show people here's what we want to build. And everybody around me would say like, well, but that doesn't make any sense for Google. Plus why would we build that?

And I had to be really stubborn, I guess, is the simple way to put it. I had to just stick to my guns and say, no, I'm pretty sure this product is going to be a winner and I'm not going to take no for an answer. So if you guys are telling me no, I'm going to go talk to some other people around the company.

And that in combination with luckily the person that we did report to in the Google plus team, he got it. He saw the vision, it's this guy named Neil. So we were able to use his organizational credibility to at least not get killed right away. And then I think over time, a few things were shifting and we persisted.

We just didn't take no for an answer. And ultimately the whole Google plus mission fell apart. And there we were with a product that was ready to be built. It was clear, everybody in the world was going to want it. And then we were let off to the races to go build it. 

[00:10:54] Execution standpoint. Do you pitch here's the product, here's what we're doing and get funded for some period of time with some head count and it's done almost like you would have a board meeting at a startup or the dynamic is quite different.

[00:11:07] It approximates that, but it's not as clean as that. It's a much less longer process. There's not single meeting where it's decided in. There are people at the company that own head count and they have to decide how they utilize that headcount in pursuit of which products or missions. And yeah, we had to convince people that, Hey, you should take, I think at the time, like at the beginning of the project, I think it was something like a hundred or 120 people.

You should apply them to build this product instead of building these other things. That was a massive change. Yeah, we had to convince them to do it. And I think that was pretty hard. Let alone the massive org shifts and the personalities involved. It was quite a interesting time. But the thing that really pulled it through to be honest is that we just decided, okay, even though you're telling us, we can't really build this thing right now, instead of we have to work on Google plus, we're going to just design it anyway, on the side, I remember very clearly in those very early days, the lead designer, and I would just escape our desks and go to a different floor in our building at Google.

And we would just spend like entire days designing the product. And so by the end of the first three or four months that our team was at Google, we had the full thing written down. I wrote a product spec that exists today at Google and it's 50 pages long it's every single possible detail about the product.

We were just so excited. And so believing in what this could be, that we just decided to do it. And so there was one. Moment. I do remember very clearly that I would say is one of the shifting points there probably too. I'll tell about these stories. One was getting the buy-in of the immediate Google plus team.

And so through some machination, we got the chance to present our idea to the all hands meeting of Google plus. And I knew that this was a pretty important meeting because I knew the leaders. It might not necessarily agree, but if I could get all the engineers in the room to say, oh, actually I want that product we'd have a lot better shot.

So we didn't obviously have anything built yet, but this designer and I won, we basically prototype the whole product in a series of screenshots. And instead of presenting it on a projector in this conference room, I went and got a big 80 inch LCD TV and I turned it on its side. So it was a portrait mode.

So it kind of looked like an iPhone. And we faked this demo where we were really just clicking through slides that we had pre-prepared. But at the same time that we would click, I would touch this fake giant touch screen iPhone with my hand in front of the building, in front of the group. So it looked like I was actually using.

The app on a giant iPhone. And I think that demo alone really made a big difference because it let everybody in the room see, oh, I see what they're talking about. Now. This is like a real product. I can see myself using that. So I think that was a pretty monumental shift. And again, you're like really at a big company like Google a transformational moment is that they decided to take a TV and turn it into portrait mode and fake a touchscreen demo on it.

Is that really how it works with these big companies? And the answer is, yes, these companies aren't as like sophisticated and mature, as you might think they are on the outside Ching 

[00:14:01] on this. But I assume from time to time, you have friends that reach out to you that maybe you were at Google or Amazon or Facebook, or what have you.

They have a vision for a product and they don't quite have buy-in. And they're asking maybe your perspective on how to do it. Are there other things that you would suggest or lessons that you've learned? One of the things I'm hearing is you saying, make it real, don't talk for 30 seconds about this idea, put the effort and kind of go above and beyond to crystallize the vision is maybe one piece, but I'm curious if there's anything else that comes.

[00:14:32] think another one that we took for granted was alignment with the core mission of the company. Had we been pitching something that I didn't think was obviously within the scope of the company mission? I think that would have been a lot harder. That's not to say that everybody around us immediately understood that, but it was there and it was real.

And so it was easy to actually explain, this is a product that Google should build. It's within our scope. It's not like proposing some massive change for the company. It's just another product that really fulfills our mission. I think that's a thing that people should think about. And if you don't see that alignment, you either need to find it or you need to change the idea in some form.

So that's one, I think the other one. Which again I took for granted is just really confidence that you're right, that users or customers or whomever your, your stakeholder is that they really are going to want this product. That the problem that it solves is real for them and tangible enough that you're going to be able to convince them to want to use it.

I do think that is another thing that people, especially product managers tend to take for granted, they think in their head, oh yeah, this is a great product. Everybody's going to want it. But then when you go out and talk to real customers and say, Hey, tell me about your day. You don't actually find that the problem is large enough for them to care.

That's like a very common failure mode, especially for startups where you have this clever idea. And you're like, oh, this would be a great product. And then you don't understand that people's lives are busy and your product has to be solving such a real pain point for them to actually give any amount of notice to it.

So I think that's the thing that people take for granted as well. So those are two things, especially inside a big company that you got to make sure you have, right. 

[00:16:10] Before we move on to an adjacent topic, anything around the people side, if ultimately you have to get an executive to fund this thing or back this thing, there's this managing up element of for him or her, what do they care about?

What are their incentives in the organization? Is there anything you've learned or picked up around 

[00:16:28] that? It's a great observation. Honestly, I don't know if I did this very well with Google photos. My strategy was more just people headed and wait for those people to get kicked out. And it was successful.

I think by chance, I think the better way to do it would be to see how this thing that you want to get done helps that executive or that leader or that decision maker achieve the objectives that they've got. Even if they aren't quite aligned. In hindsight, what I think would have probably worked quite well is gotten those leaders to the point where they admit, okay, Google plus is not going to work for its original stated goal, but I can save.

Your face by taking this product, which is a clear derivative of the original Google plus vision and make that successful. That can be your win. I think that approach probably would have worked, but we honestly didn't approach it that way. You know, honestly, I got fired from the team twice through this process because I ruffled the wrong feathers and I had to call in some favors to get reinstated 

Does it shape the way that you think about leading your org? Right, because there's a young David that has this idea for this new feature or product. Then maybe it's easy for you to squash as an educated you or change the way you behave in 

[00:17:39] some way. Absolutely. One very tangible thing is I very much value bringing people into the team either via acquisition or via other means where they have a different.

Perspective or a different background and the rest of us, because that was what I experienced. And I saw the, in my opinion, the immense value of having somebody who believed other things than what the rest of the team believed and putting them in a position where they can actually say it in hindsight, if I'm ever running a very large company, I think acquisitions.

Specifically, because they bring people in, in a way that they are able to speak their mind without risk of financial repercussions. I think it's actually very valuable because they'll actually speak the truth. The fact that I knew when I was at Google, well, if they fire me from Google, they'll have to accelerate my vesting.

So I'll get my money and I can just move on with my life because I knew that I was able to push way harder, I think, than people who were on the traditional Google career path, where if they pissed off their manager, it was going to be a big problem for them. So that's one learning. And I think it applies not just to acquisitions, but also to who you hire and also deliberately hiring people who disagree with your vision or have different ideas.

I can think of one example of a guy that we hired. And he just had a very different opinion on what we should build in the sharing part of the Google photos product. And he and I butted heads for a year on it. And he eventually left the team and we eventually built some stuff, but now three or four years later, I realized, oh, a lot of the stuff he was saying was kind of right.

And a lot of the things I was pushing back on were kind of right. And it's actually really great for our team that that debate happened. Do you think 

[00:19:16] to leave the team? No, I don't. We weren't going to build exactly the thing that he wanted and he was very much like me where he wanted to build the thing he wanted to build.

And it probably would not have been a great fit in that way, but he remains a close friend and I'm actually very happy that he pushed in the ways that he did. And it wasn't comfortable at the time for either of us. But I think for Google and for the team, it was really beneficial. 

[00:19:38] If I was sort of sit and watch you interview someone or potentially assess if you're going to Aqua hire, hire a team, and you're trying to assess this right amount of disagreeableness is like one dimension, but it might just be different worldview, different preferences, different ideas.

What are you looking for? Or, or how are you assessing that? And, and to your point, there's also some extreme where I would assume that there's some philosophies or values. If there's not alignment, it's just going to be a nightmare. If somebody philosophically disagrees with your stance on privacy or something, that's going to turn into something where you're just smacking your head against the wall every day.

And so is there a way you think about this questions you're asking or something you're looking for? 

[00:20:18] It's a great question. There's a set of non-negotiables. I would classify those as values. You've got to make sure that your values are aligned and values are trade offs about what you care about and what you choose to sacrifice in order to get those things.

This is something I learned from Todd Jackson, actually. And as part of that, the next level up is mission alignment. Why do we want to build the things that we're building? Why do we come to work every day? What's the essence of what we want to accomplish in the world. I think that needs to be quite aligned as well.

Otherwise things are going to not work very well, but after that, you actually do want some cacophony in your symphony, right? You want some discord. And so two of the things that I look for when I'm talking to somebody, number one is I want to see confidence. I want them to have an opinion. I want them to have a worldview about what the world looks like and what products or things should we change to make our.

Product or service successful in that world. And that confidence can come from many different sources. It can come from talking to users. It can come from doing research. It can come from building things and learning and iterating, but I want to see people that have confidence, but number two, paired with that confidence is it's gotta be credible confidence and often you'll see one and not the other.

And that's a danger zone for me. I hate to see people who are really confident about something, but it's not actually backed up by a credible set of learnings for me to believe that it's real and vice versa. I often see people who have a lot of learnings, but don't really know what they want to do with them.

They don't have a confident plan of what to build. So I think confidence plus credibility is a really good formula for people who will push the envelope in your approach. 

[00:21:55] What's an example of the types of questions you're asking to elicit 

[00:22:00] that maybe what we should do, let's say you own Google photos tomorrow.

What would you change? Sometimes they're flummoxed by that question. They're like, whoa, I don't mean a lot of it's good. That means that they don't actually have strong opinions, which I think are less useful. So I put them in those hypothetical situations and I asked, tell me what you would do. You're in charge.

Do it, tell me what you do the confidence bit. I get at by poking up their answers. And I say, oh, interesting. Why do you believe that? Why are you so confident about that? And the dangerous people to hire are the people who can't articulate, why they're confident, but they're really confident. That's a very dangerous position to be in.

It doesn't make for good interactions on a team. I think. So I just try to poke and I just keep going one level deeper, one level deeper. Oh, why did you do that? And, oh, you said you tried that in that product. What did you learn specifically that makes you feel that way? And you can kind of separate the bullshitters from the ones who actually have taken those learnings to heart and actually believe them shifting 

[00:22:55] gears a little bit back to product and product strategy.

Do you think this product could have been successful as a standalone business outside of Google? Or it was the unique combination of the product insight you had combined with either Google technology, resources, distribution that ultimately made it the success that it is. This 

[00:23:15] was question that we literally contemplated because we had built bump.

We were getting towards the end of our series B runway. We had built a photo sharing app next, and then we built this prototype. We called it photo roll, which is basically like the cheap non-technical version of Google photos. And we had this app, we were about to launch it on the app store. This was summer of 2013, and we had to make the literal decision of, do we go try to raise some more money and pivot the company to this and try to make it successful?

Or should we sell and go build it inside somebody else's company and. We decided at the time, even though we believe this product is going to work, it's real, we looked at what we would need to do to make it really successful and what we would need to build, what people we would need to hire, how much money we would need to offer some free storage at the beginning to get people, to use it and think about a business model.

And it was just so beyond the realm of possibility, at least at the time, it was like, oh, we would need to raise another a hundred million dollars to get it to any reasonable scale that we just decided that's not going to be the best path forward in today's world. Could you do it if Google photos didn't exist today?

I think it would be hard if you look at the. Amount of energy that went into the Google photos product beyond just the product that we built. It was built on years, like decades of research around face grouping and face recognition, decades of research around object identification and classification and search technologies.

I tell the story of like, yeah, we got acquired in the fall of 2013 and then we launched it in spring of 2015. So it was, took us like 18 months to build this product. And then it ramped up to a billion users in four years. It feels like it was a really fast thing and something we built quickly. But the truth of it is that people at Google had been building this product.

They didn't know it, but they had been building the backbone of this product for more than a decade. So I think it would have been very difficult to do this at a company that didn't take a very long-term view. And also I think had related projects where they could invest real resources in solving some of these core underlying problems that we could then cherry pick and used for a really great product just 

But what did the experience building bomp teach you about building great 

[00:25:34] products? Well, we learned the lesson of retention and talking to your users. Bump was a fascinating story. The long and short of it is bump was one of the most popular initial iPhone apps that existed. I think we were number three in the U S overall after two or three years of the app store.

So we were super popular, 150 million people downloaded the product when there were only 300 million iPhones at the time, something like that we've had huge penetration, but it was one of these products where it was so cool that our user acquisition was just through the roof and people used it, but they didn't use it frequently enough for us to figure out eventually a business model that would work for it.

And. We didn't really realize that problem until far too late, because all the numbers were going up. We had these dashboards and it was our first go of ever building a real product. We were straight out of school. We didn't really know what we were doing. And we would refresh the dashboards every day and it's like, oh wow.

An extra 3 million people used bump yesterday. Then the day before. Awesome high fives. But in truth, we were getting a bunch of people to try it and then keep it on their phone, but they didn't really use it that much afterwards. And so we kind of learned the hard way. One day, those graphs slowed down and then they started to go down and we were like, whoa, but what happened?

Where are the hot startup? Why, why is this happening? And it forced us to really understand the data and think about cohort retention. And we realized, oh wow, we're kind of screwed. This isn't going to work. And that was the point where we had to learn the second lesson, which is what do you do when you don't know what to do?

Today's episode is with David Lieb, the Director of Google Photos and former founder/CEO of Bump. He unpacks the underpinnings of Google Photos' success and walks us through how product builders can focus on solving real problems. From how annual planning and org design evolve with scale, to what makes for an exceptional product leader, David shares plenty of insights for leaders at every startup stage.