YouSaid · the spoken record

David Lieb

lines on the record: 58
first: 2022-09-21
most recent: 2022-09-21
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“The first one that comes to mind is not recent at all, but I'll say it anyway, is the Tesla master plan. I think it was written in 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. 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.”
2022-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 engineering, for analytics. I think we box them in to like a very small box. And the result is they don't feel this unreasonable ownership over a product. And I think they should.”
2022-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Get into the details as much as possible, as quickly as possible. Go to all the people that you now lead that report to you, really start to understand all the stuff they're working on pretty deeply. That's what I would do.”
2022-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I really like Kevin Wheel. He's at Planet now. He was at Instagram before that and Twitter before that. The reason I like him is I think he's got this authentic.”
2022-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What am I most nervous about? Well, 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? You don't know for decades, right? I think that's probably one of the things I'm most nervous about is 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.”
2022-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That'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. Like 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's 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 to.”
2022-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On the team. So, sorry. And I did that because I had a unique situation. We got acquired. I didn't care about my Google career. I wasn't there to make L whatever on the job ladder. I just wanted to build Google Photos. So I decided to take a bigger 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. 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.”
2022-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is the first question to the quickfire 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. 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 Plus building a social network track? There was vigorous debate. 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. Like in big companies, there's this phrase disagree and commit when your bosses tell you to do something you don't want to do. If you talk to anybody I've ever worked with, I'm very bad at doing that. It's very hard for me to do something that I don't believe in. And so I just decided I'm not going to do that. And I basically just told everyone, like, no, I'm going to keep building this with these people.”
2022-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, at the time, there's one company I could invest in, and I have no money because we hadn't yet really gotten any liquidity from pump. So that was the only company I could invest in. Later on, yeah, I've generally tried to keep my check size reasonably static because it's very hard to know up 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. 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.”
2022-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From a multiple perspective, it will be, who knows until the cash is in the bank. But I didn't have any money. It's probably my smallest check.”
2022-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are 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 going to win at whatever you do. Best example, my first angel investment ever was Flexport. 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. 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. So I put like the most I could possibly put in because I thought he would win at whatever he did.”
2022-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I guess the biggest learning is companies are very different. I've invested in such a broad scale of companies that things that I thought were, that was the reason we succeeded on Google Photos. I then look at another company and I'm like, well, they didn't do any of that. And yet their company is worth billions of dollars. Like there's different ways to solve these problems. That's probably the number one learning is like there's so many different ways to do this. The things that I found are common across all the successful companies that I've invested in, like that's an interesting question. What is it about these companies? 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. 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. They have to approach the world with this mindset that they will succeed. The best founders I've invested in.”
2022-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 the minute responsibility gets sharded across multiple people. If there are like three people who say they're going to clean up the floor, who's going to actually do it? It's less likely that the floor gets clean when there's three people responsible than when there's one person responsible. I always loved operating in this model. 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. 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.”
2022-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Silence where everyone's sitting there. And after some number of minutes, somebody unmutes and says, 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.”
2022-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 pixel footing to everyone else. And some people interact or bring their best selves in different contexts. 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 trade-offs. 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 unmutes. I think you lose a lot of culture building by not having those awkward downtimes. When COVID first hit and we had to like abruptly switch 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? 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 five to seven minutes late. It creates this awkward”
2022-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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. 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 a meeting? It's when I think all the people around me are better and smarter and more important than me. And then I'm really careful what I say. And that's dangerous for products. You want people to say like all the things that they're feeling. 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's like the tool I use.”
2022-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I prefer doing it in that form where you send a doc that's very succinct and you ask for either general feedback or you ask for directed feedback on a specific set of questions that you want to get people's inputs on. 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 boss is in the room, yada, yada. That's a big waste of time.”
2022-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, first of all, often people have these standing product reviews. Like every two weeks, I want to hear what that team's 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 feedback on that plan or they want somebody to make a decision that they don't feel capable of making themselves. 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 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 know what's going on in your company.”
2022-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, what is conceivable that we could build to solve this customer problem versus what is like inconceivable? There's no known solution right now. Understanding that and being able to kind of like go down the right path based on what you've learned from a 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 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. And I carried 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.”
2022-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 feel of rejection. That's very difficult for people. But you have to be okay with that. And so I think, 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 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. 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 customer's problems. As an example in Google Photos, you have to understand enough about how AI works to know”
2022-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. On the first one, how do you 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 it's right now.”
2022-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, but there still must be a product visionary and a craftsperson. You 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 focused on product. And if you're hiring an operator to run your team, which those people are incredibly valuable, you can't really operate at scale without somebody who's good at that. But you should not confuse that with who is the visionary, who's 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.”
2022-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or a visionary. Hopefully, both because those are the people that people want to follow. 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 it turns out they don't actually know how to do it. No more than you do.”
2022-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, 100% agree. I would say 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 median. 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 p.m.s. But you're not actually good necessarily. You're median. And it's very dangerous to hire those people. 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 going to want to work with that person. So how do you avoid it? I think you got to retain this ability to be either a crasper.”
2022-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. 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 complementary 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? Let's find someone who's world class at all of those things and they will really plug a big gap in our team. That's the way you should do these things. Unless you're planning to leave, in which case you need to hire someone who has the skill sets to be the singular lead.”
2022-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. And now all of a sudden we have two people who want to be the top person on product. Dave 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.”
2022-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just track of all trades. Again, most people do this probably too early. So that's 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 going to need to like figure out our business model eventually. We're going to need to keep scaling and hiring. I'm going to 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. 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. 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”
2022-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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? These are things that are very squishy. It's very hard to like, how would you like a multiple choice test that would test that? It's very difficult. But these are the things you're looking for because they show that the person has 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 or figuring out why is the number one skill for building early stage companies. 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?”
2022-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, if your early stage, your product team may be as one person, right? Maybe you're hiring 1 PM. This is another meta mistake is people think like, I've raised my seed round, I have four million dollars. Let's go hire a team of 20 people. That's what I see all my board members doing. That's probably the wrong thing to do unless you really have product market fit already. 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. 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.”
2022-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd record the grid scrolling and then I'd 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 and B, the people who also felt that, but maybe were a little scared to talk about it, like to raise their hand and say, hey, I'm not sure we're ready to ship this because I'm not sure. I don't think it's quite good enough yet. It makes that okay. 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.”
2022-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 customer. And then people will see that it's true. 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. I would argue 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 is 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. 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. Does it feel right to you? Like, see how when I scroll, there's like a little glitch and I saw it. Did you see it? I would record things with my slow-mo camera, like on my other phone.”
2022-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think that is a common failure mode for large companies you lose that at some scale and at some size. It scares me. It worries me for a lot of these big companies.”
2022-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. But there's another set of people at those 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. 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? 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?”
2022-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I would say 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 very interesting observations, 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. And so I think it's very naive to look at some graph 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. 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 I accidentally open it. Whoops, sorry. And then, aha, you've learned something real in the world as opposed to the effect of something real in the world.”
2022-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 and it gets pretty low, but it's flat. And each time they use it, Airbnb makes $100. So that's totally great. It's a hundred billion dollar company. So you've got to understand the context of what are those people doing, how frequently are they doing it, and how valuable is it to you and them to use your product.”
2022-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Phones in the world. We were a big blue icon on the home screen, and what we found in our data, we saw a huge number of sessions where 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 a thing you have to intentionally decide to do. You have to bump another person. There has to be a person there with you. 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. You have a one in a hundred chance of accidentally tapping the wrong icon. Multiply that by 150 million users. Like you're going to get some users doing that. So you've got to be really careful with aggregate data like this. We thought we were like hot shit because everybody's using our app. But it turns out like 20% of the time it was accident.”
2022-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For a product like Google Photos, let's say, 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. 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 what's actually going on. What you normally find, however, is people want to show charts that look good. So they show number of users in the last 30 days. This is our Mao, monthly active users. 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. This is a fun anecdote from Bump. In the bump kind of heyday, we had 150 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”
2022-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Number one mistake is they don't do it, to be honest. Like so many companies I talk to, I ask, what's your cohort retention curve look like? And they don't”
2022-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, 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've gone past some part of the funnel to qualify them as real users. I think that's fine. Inevitably, you're going to have some folks in your funnel that should not be your customer. 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 a weekly use product, it might be an annual product, 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 effect might exist happens.”
2022-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. I much prefer looking at data around individual users in a large scale way. So let me explain what I'm talking about. 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's using it the next day? Who's using it the next day? And what you want to find is those cohort graphs get flat. You want the same set of people eventually to keep using it over time 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...”
2022-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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? 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. Like they had to go take their kid 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 like 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 kid out the door to school. 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.”
2022-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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? 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'm confused by this screen. Why don't you put this button there? And they just go do that. And I think that's the total wrong way to do it. 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? Are they really confused by this or maybe this thing doesn't matter to them and they haven't put in any effort to understand it? 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.”
2022-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 trade-off for that context. Now, switching gears to like the beginning of bump, let's say, that's another thing that I worked on. The first version of Bump I look at it and I'm like very embarrassed by it. It was horrible. It was terribly designed. Like who designed it? Like somebody who's never done a design before? Yes, me. And I think you just got to understand your context and what risks you're willing to take. For most startups, 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.”
2022-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 the world would hear about it. We would get some trial users on day one, right? So we decided in that context, we better make that product pretty great for those people because otherwise they're going to try it and they're going to be disappointed, especially so because the product's goal was to store the most important digital asset that you have, which is like your life's memories. 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 it has all the squares with all your photos. We very early on, this maybe is an answer to your previous question, decided that thing has to be very fast, very, reliable. It has to work in all network conditions. There can be like no instance where you don't see your child's photo. And that was really hard, like from a technical perspective.”
2022-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 about. 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. My God, what I try to do is put as many inputs 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 quite analytical way to approach the world. You're just using a tool that people aren't used to.”
2022-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 pure pressure to not do that. 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. 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 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”
2022-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I agree with both of those statements. I think if you're being very analytical, you will avoid large mistakes because your data or your analytics will tell you what you should do and what you should not do. But what they also will avoid is the big unexpected wins. If you think of maybe in a scientific way, using science bounds your variance of your outcomes. It makes sure you don't totally blow it, but it also makes sure that you don't 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. 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, whether it'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.”
2022-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. 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 customer is their friend or their family member. And they just want to make something great for that person. I think that is 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. 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.”
2022-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I 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 surprise 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 and they did it great. 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. And then I think the second thing that changed is, you know, I had like a near-death experience. 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. Like everyone tells you life is short. Do what you care about. But I've 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.”
2022-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, here's why you woke up today and came to work. And we just decided we would really focus on that.”
2022-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source