Y Combinator

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