YouSaid · the spoken record

David Lieb

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2022-09-21
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2022-09-21
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  1. “Us attract the right people to the team. We said if you're not all in on this mission, if you don't want to spend the next 10 years of your life solving this problem in the world, you shouldn't come work on this team. I think that really set us up for success. And to this day, everybody on the team knows that mission by heart.”

    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

  2. “Probably the number one meta decision that we made early on was around what our mission would be. And I think this is a thing that often gets overlooked or not enough time is spent in bigger companies. It's probably more critical at small companies that you figure this out. But we decided that we would have a very clear mission, which was to be the home of the world's memories. And that was like the only thing we were going to work on. And we were quite explicit at the beginning about what things we would not go into. And we said internally at Google, like, we're not going to build a social tool. This isn't a social network. It's about storing your life's memories. I think by being really clear about that mission early on, it did a few things for us that I think propagate to this day, now 10 years later. One is it really helped us select who should be on the team and who shouldn't be on the team. We kind of spun the team out of the Google Plus team. And there were a bunch of folks who signed up to build social, right? They were very excited about social, and that's awesome. But we were very clear, like, that's not what we're doing. And those folks decided to move on. And I think it was great for them and great for us. And it also helped.”

    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

  3. “If you don't know if you've got it or not, you don't, is the simplest answer, right? It is a thing where something clicks, people just use your product or demand your product so much more than you could have ever fathomed. That is generally when you've got some initial glimmers of product market fit. You have no time in your day to do anything but satisfy those customers, whether it's keeping your servers up, if you're a software company, whether it's like fielding inbound queries from customers who really have heard about your thing and they really, really need it. Those are the signs that you probably have some glimmers of product market fit. But I think most of the time, people find I built something that has some resonance with some small set of people. And oh, I must have product market fit now. And generally, you might be on the right track, but you probably don't have it if it's unclear whether you've got it or not.”

    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

  4. “Me. Yeah, you certainly need to make that trade-off at some point, but I think most founders do it too early. They think like, oh, we have a product that shows some glimmers of product market fit. Let's go hire a sales team and that will be the thing that makes us succeed. Usually that's the wrong answer. Like usually you are the person who knows the product and the customer the best. And so you should probably be the one doing all of those important jobs for longer than you think it's reasonable. There should be a point, I think, where you're like, I can't believe I'm spending all of my time doing this. If only I could spend my time on these other really important things, but I can't because this is still the most important thing. Then it's the time to go bring somebody in who really knows what they're doing and can shadow you and kind of take it from where you are right now and take it further. You have full license to end this call with this next question, but you mentioned some notion of product market fit. There's so many different notions, and I have so many founders I”

    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

  5. “Do you know what I find the hardest thing letting go? Which is like moving from founder-led sales to extreme LED sales. And I still have this today where I can do it better than anyone else. I may be able to do it better than anyone else. I didn't mean that arrogantly, but I still shouldn't be doing it. Yeah.”

    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

  6. “Two biggest lessons for you from your time founding bump and the transition For startups, like when you've done a startup, you realize that kind of the definition of a startup is you start with absolutely nothing and you have this big vision for what it could be one day in the future. But to get from there to there requires you to do basically everything, at least at the very beginning. So the number one takeaway from the startup is just this ownership mentality that you have, which is like we have nothing. There's no one else. It's just me. I must make it work somehow. I must do everything that's required. So in the early days of Bump, like myself and my two co-founders, we wrote all the code, we did all the designs. We thought about all the marketing strategy or hacks or ploys we could use to get anybody to hear about it. Every PR, every press interview, like that was all just us. We had to learn it on our own. And I think that's a skill, this like generalist skill that generally people don't have at big companies because they don't need to. There's experts at big companies that do everything. I think magic happens when you bring all that stuff together in a very small number of people's heads and they can do pretty big.”

    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

  7. “We launched it and people started using it like way more than we thought. And so we decided, okay, we should work on it next weekend too. And we said that for 10 successive weekends. And then we decided, okay, well, maybe we should like try to make this bigger than what we thought it could be. And we had heard of this thing called Y combinator, which was like this nascent startup incubator thing. When we applied to it on a whim and we got in and we came out to California that summer to like work on our startup and then we never went back to school. And then of course like we pivoted a few times with Bump and ultimately decided to work on photo sharing and then got acquired by Google and then I was there for nine years. There's bits of your career which I want to kind of unpack, but I do have to ask, and Juan asked this one as well.”

    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

  8. “I would say it's largely accidental is the true answer. I was an engineer by training in school and I worked as an engineer at Texas Instruments early in my career. I think like a lot of smart engineers of my era, the thing you do next is you leave and you go to business school to learn quote business, which I did. And the first week of business school, I was faced with a personal problem, which was I was meeting all of my new classmates and we were trying to share our phone numbers with each other. And I just would like five times a day, I would like type in somebody's phone number and then ask them how to spell their name and then I would call them and they would like dismiss the call and add my number to their address book. And it was right when the iPhone had come out and they had just opened up the app store. And I thought like, oh, why isn't anybody solve this problem? Like this should be a solved problem in the world. Maybe I can make a side app that would like make it work. So I started building that as kind of like a side project in school with the aspiration of like maybe making enough money to pay for my business school, which would like be like one order of tens of thousands of dollars.”

    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