YouSaid · the spoken record

Gaurav Misra

lines on the record: 91
first: 2025-03-27
most recent: 2025-03-27
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

“Awesome. Yeah, I mean, definitely find me on LinkedIn. That's where I live most of the time. My DMs are open, et cetera, et cetera. So feel free to send me a message. And I think what would be useful, I mean, we're building out our early product and design team. So if AI video is interesting, if consumer apps are interesting, now's the time to join. We're really small early. We work together across the team. There's going to be no better time to join basically.”
2025-03-27 · Lenny's Podcast · How to win in the AI era: Ship a feature every week, embrace technical debt, ruthlessly cut scope, and create magic your competitors can't copy | Gaurav Misra (CEO and co-founder of Captions) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly. I mean, the broccoli talking, I don't know if you saw that one. There was like a little broccoli, like kind of delivering a little speech. Yeah, it was. It looked like it was animated by like an animator, you know.”
2025-03-27 · Lenny's Podcast · How to win in the AI era: Ship a feature every week, embrace technical debt, ruthlessly cut scope, and create magic your competitors can't copy | Gaurav Misra (CEO and co-founder of Captions) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, I learned this because someone else told me that I keep repeating Have this sort of framework of how I want to operate at work, basically, right? I think I love to compete and to win at the end of the day. And I think that to win, you have to be the best. But I also think the easiest way to be the best is to be the first. And that actually is key.”
2025-03-27 · Lenny's Podcast · How to win in the AI era: Ship a feature every week, embrace technical debt, ruthlessly cut scope, and create magic your competitors can't copy | Gaurav Misra (CEO and co-founder of Captions) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My favorite product honestly is linear. I'm not gonna lie just because it's so well designed and it's so easy to use. I also like superhuman. I mean, these are obvious answers, but I do use these things every day. And it's hard to create products that you use every day and don't hate. So props for them.”
2025-03-27 · Lenny's Podcast · How to win in the AI era: Ship a feature every week, embrace technical debt, ruthlessly cut scope, and create magic your competitors can't copy | Gaurav Misra (CEO and co-founder of Captions) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I like silo and severance. I mean, obviously, I think everyone's watching these. There's a book around Silo, too. I read.”
2025-03-27 · Lenny's Podcast · How to win in the AI era: Ship a feature every week, embrace technical debt, ruthlessly cut scope, and create magic your competitors can't copy | Gaurav Misra (CEO and co-founder of Captions) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have to say here that I actually don't read books. It's actually something that I decided on purpose where I decided I don't want to build my skill in reading and I want to build it in listening and watching instead because I think that's the future.”
2025-03-27 · Lenny's Podcast · How to win in the AI era: Ship a feature every week, embrace technical debt, ruthlessly cut scope, and create magic your competitors can't copy | Gaurav Misra (CEO and co-founder of Captions) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it's definitely possible. I do think, let me tell you something kind of crazy actually. The social network that we had at the time, we actually removed it from the app store. So it's not available anymore. But till today, there are people, there are thousands of people that are using it, posting on it, and all the different things, which actually kind of speaks to like, you know, the power of the social network in a way, right? It is hard to create and hard to kill. I mean, I think X is actually a great example of that too, right? A lot of movement kind of happened there and it continues to work, I guess, somehow. So, you know, testament to that.”
2025-03-27 · Lenny's Podcast · How to win in the AI era: Ship a feature every week, embrace technical debt, ruthlessly cut scope, and create magic your competitors can't copy | Gaurav Misra (CEO and co-founder of Captions) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What was funny is that once GPT and stuff started coming out, a lot of the things that were unsolved became solved very quickly, right? So timing was almost perfect.”
2025-03-27 · Lenny's Podcast · How to win in the AI era: Ship a feature every week, embrace technical debt, ruthlessly cut scope, and create magic your competitors can't copy | Gaurav Misra (CEO and co-founder of Captions) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Does automatic capture exactly. Yep. So I think we wanted, like our thought was like we're going to build a social network, but first we got to build a creation tool for the social network, right? And we knew that we wanted to use AI to create video. And it seemed obvious that, oh, speech to text, a solved problem, we should start with that, right? So that's why we decided to start with captions because it was a solved problem at the time.”
2025-03-27 · Lenny's Podcast · How to win in the AI era: Ship a feature every week, embrace technical debt, ruthlessly cut scope, and create magic your competitors can't copy | Gaurav Misra (CEO and co-founder of Captions) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Line essentially, and so and that's kind of, you know, it's continued since then. It's just crazy. So we basically wasted about a year and a half.”
2025-03-27 · Lenny's Podcast · How to win in the AI era: Ship a feature every week, embrace technical debt, ruthlessly cut scope, and create magic your competitors can't copy | Gaurav Misra (CEO and co-founder of Captions) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I looked at a chart and it was just like growing. The revenue was just growing completely on its own. No employees, no releases, no bug fixes, no customer support. There was like 2,000 open support tickets that were unanswered for a year and a half. And great reviews just growing completely on its own. And so that was like a clear sign to me. It was like, oh my God, you should have been working on that, right? Like that product works. And so we immediately had a meeting, I mean, it was tough to kind of figure out what the right path was at that point because we'd invested so much time in other things as well. But reset and we kind of, you know, got back on the track of captions. And literally, as soon as we started releasing the first features into it, it blew up. Like what looked like a vertical line at that time became a horizontal line. And the vertical, the new vertical line was so vertical that the old vertical line became horizontal.”
2025-03-27 · Lenny's Podcast · How to win in the AI era: Ship a feature every week, embrace technical debt, ruthlessly cut scope, and create magic your competitors can't copy | Gaurav Misra (CEO and co-founder of Captions) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and we didn't do anything to enable that, it just kind of happened on its own. It was almost anticlimactic in a way because, you know, We thought it would be a lot more time spent figuring out the product before that would happen. And so it felt like, wait, this can't be it, right? It can be this fast, right? How did this happen? So we got distracted because of that because we were like, oh, okay, well, maybe this is cool. It will kind of work. That's great. But we got to figure out what the product is, right? And so we spent at least like a year, year and a half thinking about building social networks and all kinds of things when we should have been working on captions, right? Because there was product market fit there. And how we figured that out is captions was sitting on my personal account. So I wasn't checking that a lot. And about a year and a half into the company as we're working on other projects and stuff, I went back to my personal account, just opened it, and I saw that there was like $500,000 in there.”
2025-03-27 · Lenny's Podcast · How to win in the AI era: Ship a feature every week, embrace technical debt, ruthlessly cut scope, and create magic your competitors can't copy | Gaurav Misra (CEO and co-founder of Captions) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The beginning of the company, we actually had a bunch of time where we spent figuring out what we wanted to do. And I think it's like kind of a unconventional story almost in a way because we started off the company. The first thing we did was build the captions app, right? Like we launched the app. That was the first thing we did. Took two days to build. We put it out there. And it immediately took off, right? It was absolutely shocking because I built it on a weekend. We put it out there. I called my co-founder on Monday and I'm like, It's at the top of the app store. We're getting like.”
2025-03-27 · Lenny's Podcast · How to win in the AI era: Ship a feature every week, embrace technical debt, ruthlessly cut scope, and create magic your competitors can't copy | Gaurav Misra (CEO and co-founder of Captions) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You could imagine the social network of the future where all content is generated. None of the people are real. The algorithm isn't tailoring whose content to show you, but it's purely generating content that is completely catered to you, right? With people and everything completely catered to you, I don't think it's out of the question. It almost seems inevitable in a way. But that's not too far away, I think. That's actually very positively real in five years or something like that.”
2025-03-27 · Lenny's Podcast · How to win in the AI era: Ship a feature every week, embrace technical debt, ruthlessly cut scope, and create magic your competitors can't copy | Gaurav Misra (CEO and co-founder of Captions) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And one of them would win, and it would win more than the one creative you can get from a person. And more interestingly, when you think about localization, you're going to go do that in every language. Like once you discover winning creative, right? Now you have to go localize that in every market and rebuild it from scratch is just a ton. And oftentimes it doesn't perform as well because it's been like rethought essentially. But we found that just translating it with AI was able to get performance almost as good as the original in the original language, right? So this is going to flood the entire market. I think wherever there's dollars to be made saved, it's inevitable, right? It will be consumed and it will very quickly be a lot of social media. I mean, you could imagine a social network of the future where, and this is dystopian, by the way, so watch out.”
2025-03-27 · Lenny's Podcast · How to win in the AI era: Ship a feature every week, embrace technical debt, ruthlessly cut scope, and create magic your competitors can't copy | Gaurav Misra (CEO and co-founder of Captions) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Market these products so that they can be the ones to reach all these people that have the problems that they're now able to solve. And we think about that every day. So on that note, as a consumer product, we spend a bunch of time and money on marketing our products. And we often use like performance channels and all kinds of things. But about a year ago, we would run AI video and ads and things like that. We would get all these comments of people being like, oh my God, this is so fake. you know, don't show me this. And around that time, the technology got just about good enough that suddenly those comments stopped happening, right? And suddenly you could, you know, get performance that was even better than actually recording with a person because you could just try more things. You could just generate 30, 40 possibilities.”
2025-03-27 · Lenny's Podcast · How to win in the AI era: Ship a feature every week, embrace technical debt, ruthlessly cut scope, and create magic your competitors can't copy | Gaurav Misra (CEO and co-founder of Captions) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of comes back to what we were talking about before, where the reality is that no matter how interesting, advanced, and amazing a technology is, like, you know, science fiction has become reality. We were talking about this, right? Like what was literally science fiction on TV is real now. And most people still don't even know about it, to be honest, right? Like my parents live in India and they are the only ones in the neighborhood that know about ChatGPT. And they write these like amazing notes to the community with all these words. And people are just like, how did you get so good at writing? And they're not telling anybody. But, you know, there's still a ton of people who don't even know that these advancements have happened. And so adoption is actually much slower even for the most exciting things, right? Of course, in tech circles, everybody's talking about it. But the reality is like it takes a while to get out there. And I think for companies that are going to succeed, they're going to have to figure out how.”
2025-03-27 · Lenny's Podcast · How to win in the AI era: Ship a feature every week, embrace technical debt, ruthlessly cut scope, and create magic your competitors can't copy | Gaurav Misra (CEO and co-founder of Captions) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that follows exactly in the area that we're in, right? Which is talking people. And that's what they're going after as well there. So that's actually one of the first examples of a large model that a larger company has released where it's able to do sort of these dialogue or monologue videos, right? And I mean, you yourself, I mean, you've seen it. So I'm not going to describe it too much, but as you know, it's highly expressive, right? It doesn't look like an avatar video, right? It looks like. And that's because the technology that's used is fundamentally different. It's just like this is using a true large diffusion model is what they use. Whereas most companies that are working on avatar technology are actually using something pretty basic in comparison.”
2025-03-27 · Lenny's Podcast · How to win in the AI era: Ship a feature every week, embrace technical debt, ruthlessly cut scope, and create magic your competitors can't copy | Gaurav Misra (CEO and co-founder of Captions) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Within that. And on the other side, you have what we think of as like storytelling. Now, this could be ads, it could be social media posts, it could be. Entertain other people and get their message out there, like that is pure positive. This is where we want to focus. And a lot of our effort in the product and design process goes into how do we design products and build products that specifically make it really hard to use on one side and really easy to use on the other side, right? And that's the real challenge.”
2025-03-27 · Lenny's Podcast · How to win in the AI era: Ship a feature every week, embrace technical debt, ruthlessly cut scope, and create magic your competitors can't copy | Gaurav Misra (CEO and co-founder of Captions) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is the type of video that it could be a personal video where you're taking a video with your friends and you're hanging out, you're at a restaurant, right? Like it's documenting what happened, you had fun, whatever it was, it's for your memories, right? And there's like a non-personal version of this, which is like, oh, it's like a reporter documenting a crime or something that happened or whatever it is, right? And who was involved? Where was it? Maybe it was a natural disaster or something, right? And this is for history. We want to see what happened, right? And there's actually no benefit to AI general video in any of this, right? Like actually all of this is just negative. It's all negative, right? Like if we are generating fake versions of reality to full people, like there's just nothing good about that, right? And we want to stay away from that, essentially, right? We want to design products and build products that make it difficult to use for that particular use case, right? For anything that”
2025-03-27 · Lenny's Podcast · How to win in the AI era: Ship a feature every week, embrace technical debt, ruthlessly cut scope, and create magic your competitors can't copy | Gaurav Misra (CEO and co-founder of Captions) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so it's a different technology and different outcome, essentially. And a bunch of companies using this type of model, a bunch of companies are doing general text to video with no audio today. These are large sort of generative models, and they have the capability to do more, but that frontier just hasn't been reached yet. I think there's no doubt in anybody's mind on the research side that it is 100% solvable. It's just like somebody has to go do it and we haven't gotten there yet. Nobody has had the time to go and do that yet. So that's kind of where we're at, essentially. We're working purely on large generative models for talking videos, right? So that's like our core focus. I do think, though, from a safety perspective, we have a unique framework of how we think about it. So generally, videos divide into two categories, right? So for us, we think on one side of what is like documentation.”
2025-03-27 · Lenny's Podcast · How to win in the AI era: Ship a feature every week, embrace technical debt, ruthlessly cut scope, and create magic your competitors can't copy | Gaurav Misra (CEO and co-founder of Captions) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To solve the problem. We're getting there. We're getting closer and closer. But today's models actually bifurcate a little bit. So there's a set of companies today that are able to create these types of, what we're talking about is like avatar videos. They're using this technology called neural rendering. It's actually not a technology that's affected by a sort of the transformer and diffusion model revolution or the large model revolution essentially. This is a technology that exists separately and it doesn't have anything to do with the AI sort of growth happening right now. It just happens to produce semi-realistic outputs, but it actually kind of stops at some point because it's not clear how it becomes generalizable in every situation, right? You can't, you know, it has to be trained on people individually. So you might ingest a little bit of video of you and then you can generate you.”
2025-03-27 · Lenny's Podcast · How to win in the AI era: Ship a feature every week, embrace technical debt, ruthlessly cut scope, and create magic your competitors can't copy | Gaurav Misra (CEO and co-founder of Captions) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's often what you think of as like stop video or b-roll, right? You can actually make a movie with B-roll, right? And a lot of a movie or a TV show or a social media post or an ad actually is dialogue or monologue. That's actually what it is. It's people talking to each other, to the camera, right? Interacting. That's actually what makes true story. B-roll is sort of like supportive elements that are showing up to set the scene or something like maybe before the scene opens, you see a few shots of New York City or LA or something, right? And then you jump into the room and now two people are talking. So our goal is to solve the talking video problem, right? How do we create video where people are delivering dialogue or monologue or things like that? And that's what we focus on purely. And there actually isn't a lot of work happening in that area today, right?”
2025-03-27 · Lenny's Podcast · How to win in the AI era: Ship a feature every week, embrace technical debt, ruthlessly cut scope, and create magic your competitors can't copy | Gaurav Misra (CEO and co-founder of Captions) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Photorealistic video. I mean, the very recent model is a very cutting edge is just about, it feels like a few centimeters away from achieving it. But I do think to fully get there to the point where it cannot be differentiated at all, it's still a couple of years away. I also think that it is use case driven in a way. I think thinking about captions for a second, like we take a unique view on what type of video we want to focus on. Video generation and text to video generation, if you think look at it today, it's all silent video, right? There's no audio.”
2025-03-27 · Lenny's Podcast · How to win in the AI era: Ship a feature every week, embrace technical debt, ruthlessly cut scope, and create magic your competitors can't copy | Gaurav Misra (CEO and co-founder of Captions) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's fundamental. At the end of the day, like a time where video images, audio can't be trusted actually hasn't existed for a while. Like if you think about, I mean, there was a world in the 1800s where there was no video or audio or images, right? And everything was proven by he said she said for the most part. And it's possible that if everything can be generated and anything can be created and it looks just as real as if it were real, and there's no way to tell, then we might actually return to that world, right? Where there's no way to prove anything besides physical evidence or he said she said. And I think that's kind of scary, but also possibly opens a bunch of new opportunity for someone to figure out how to solve this problem, right? I think it's going to be a big problem. I do think today we are almost there in terms of creating absolutely.”
2025-03-27 · Lenny's Podcast · How to win in the AI era: Ship a feature every week, embrace technical debt, ruthlessly cut scope, and create magic your competitors can't copy | Gaurav Misra (CEO and co-founder of Captions) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think these, I actually think from a regulatory perspective, we should be thinking these as differently. On one side, you have something where you're deciding who sees something. And then on the other side, you have something where the company is deciding, which means that it's kind of semi-curated, right? It's actually the company's voice. And so, yeah, I don't know, like, should Section 230 apply to that? I have no idea, right? Maybe not. Maybe we're thinking about this wrong way. So should be interesting.”
2025-03-27 · Lenny's Podcast · How to win in the AI era: Ship a feature every week, embrace technical debt, ruthlessly cut scope, and create magic your competitors can't copy | Gaurav Misra (CEO and co-founder of Captions) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is a bifurcation of social media at this point. There is what you traditionally think of as social networking where you share things with your friends. And by the way, remember the days where that used to be the way that apps would go viral? You would share things with your friends and then they would share with their friends, right? And everybody was worried about like friend sharing and how do you send to a friend and can I text message my friend or whatever? That time is over. Virality now happens through a completely different mechanism. It happens through essentially algorithms, right, that are deciding whether your piece of content is worth showing to an arbitrary number of people. And this is the new age of social media, right? It's TikTok. It's, you know, YouTube shores and Instagram reels and so on. And I think actually it's changing the fundamental nature of how people interact, fundamental nature of how things go viral.”
2025-03-27 · Lenny's Podcast · How to win in the AI era: Ship a feature every week, embrace technical debt, ruthlessly cut scope, and create magic your competitors can't copy | Gaurav Misra (CEO and co-founder of Captions) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wasn't feasible to have a person looking at every single thing posted to determine whether it's appropriate or not. And so it kind of ended up dying out, but it looked like what was an early version of TikTok before it had launched. So I think in a way, though, it was a good thing because I think Snap does.”
2025-03-27 · Lenny's Podcast · How to win in the AI era: Ship a feature every week, embrace technical debt, ruthlessly cut scope, and create magic your competitors can't copy | Gaurav Misra (CEO and co-founder of Captions) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I think, I don't know if you remember this, but there was this product called Our Stories. And essentially it was like my story, but it was a public story. And it started off with this idea of campus stories where you can post your campus and other people can see it. And that actually started creating a lot of virality, right? Because essentially people would post, there was like, you know, viral moments truly where people would post stuff like, oh, like, you know, I think two people fell in love on it or something like that. Those types of things really went viral. And it had really good engagement. But at the end of the day, the problem was that we were against like algorithmic essentially ranking of those types of things. So there was a curation team that was looking through every single one so that there's no negative behaviors happening essentially on the app. And that was just not scalable, even though it had really high engagement and was doing well. It just”
2025-03-27 · Lenny's Podcast · How to win in the AI era: Ship a feature every week, embrace technical debt, ruthlessly cut scope, and create magic your competitors can't copy | Gaurav Misra (CEO and co-founder of Captions) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Somebody else's stories to your followers, right? You could take your story and share it to my followers. You can't do that in a set. And there was a discussion where, should we do this? No, because it can enable bullying, right? Essentially, I don't, you know, you're not consenting to your thing being shared to my followers, right? And that's essentially bad, right? A lot of it was done based on this type of pillar-based thinking of like, you know, this is our mission. This is what we're trying to do. Does it fit within or is it outside? If it's outside, we don't do it. No matter what the cost of it is, no matter how exciting it is. And even on spotlight, the big challenge was like, how do you take something like that and put that inside the Snap mission? So that was something we worked on quite a bit. Yeah, I mean, I think there's tons of stories about earlier versions. I mean, Snap almost had essentially what his TikTok earlier than TikTok existed.”
2025-03-27 · Lenny's Podcast · How to win in the AI era: Ship a feature every week, embrace technical debt, ruthlessly cut scope, and create magic your competitors can't copy | Gaurav Misra (CEO and co-founder of Captions) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thinking about how to determine if a product is within scope or out of scope of what their mission was, right? And I think a lot of companies use this type of framework, and we try to as well. But essentially the idea at the core was that they want to enable like private sharing and in a safe way, right? So I think that kind of makes it clear that certain things just are out of scope for Snapchat. It's actually one of the reasons why Snap wasn't the company to discover, quote, short form video TikTok style stuff because it was just against the nature of the company to even try something. It was against the mission of the company. Public sharing means possibly bullying and bad behavior, which is exactly what Snap was trying to avoid. We don't want those behaviors to develop on the app. So, for example, on Instagram stories, you can share.”
2025-03-27 · Lenny's Podcast · How to win in the AI era: Ship a feature every week, embrace technical debt, ruthlessly cut scope, and create magic your competitors can't copy | Gaurav Misra (CEO and co-founder of Captions) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think it's very spot on. I would say, though, Snap didn't like user research as a function for the longest time. I think there was one user researcher in the company until, again, 5,000 employees, like post IPO, basically. I think the people that were making a lot of the product decisions and the CEO himself, of course, were very steeped in sort of the how the user behaves and how they operate. They understood that. I do think Snap also had a unique way of.”
2025-03-27 · Lenny's Podcast · How to win in the AI era: Ship a feature every week, embrace technical debt, ruthlessly cut scope, and create magic your competitors can't copy | Gaurav Misra (CEO and co-founder of Captions) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Point on is like, I think that's fundamental, right? How do we not do that today? We should be. So that's kind of how we think about stuff, right? But I think the core idea is that every function should understand every other function deeply as much as possible. And maybe even to the level where they can operate in that function. And that just increases the likelihood that all decisions being made in the company at the micro level will be optimized for all possible parts of the funnel that different people are essentially looking after, right? So that's something we think about quite a bit.”
2025-03-27 · Lenny's Podcast · How to win in the AI era: Ship a feature every week, embrace technical debt, ruthlessly cut scope, and create magic your competitors can't copy | Gaurav Misra (CEO and co-founder of Captions) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I actually think PMs should own all the way to marketing in a way. And the reason is that if you think about marketing, it's expanding the surface area of the product, right? It's like search marketing is just placing a button to your product in Google. Facebook ads is just placing a button to your app in Facebook, right? It's almost like you work at Facebook, right? You work at Facebook. You have a button in the app somewhere. You make a specific thing and people show up. The funnel begins there, right? And you have all the metrics all the way from the beginning, right? All the way from when the user tapped on the button in Facebook. And then they went down all the steps and then they landed on some onboarding screen. And they did the thing. They used the application. That's where the journey begins. And all of that is like, in a way, it's a product. It's the same skill set. Understanding users from that.”
2025-03-27 · Lenny's Podcast · How to win in the AI era: Ship a feature every week, embrace technical debt, ruthlessly cut scope, and create magic your competitors can't copy | Gaurav Misra (CEO and co-founder of Captions) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Working with having a fundamental broad understanding of the functions that we're working with. At captions, we're actually saying going even one step further than that, right? Why shouldn't the PM understand marketing? I think that's actually the biggest opportunity for”
2025-03-27 · Lenny's Podcast · How to win in the AI era: Ship a feature every week, embrace technical debt, ruthlessly cut scope, and create magic your competitors can't copy | Gaurav Misra (CEO and co-founder of Captions) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do think PM is a very valuable function, right? I think it may be actually, and maybe I'll get roasted for this, but I think at the end of the day, not hiring PMs at Snap might have been one of those decisions where it actually succeeded despite that. And because someone needs to do that work, right? If you don't have enough people to do it, then nobody truly owns it. And then it kind of doesn't really happen. Or if it doesn't happen, no one's responsible. Which is not the right structure you want in an organization. So I think though that being said, there was something unique to be said about what if a designer had the PM mindset, right? It's actually the same idea as what if an engineer had the PM mindset. And then you get even crazier, what are the PM had a design and engineering mindset? I think all we're talking about is everybody truly understanding all the functions that they're”
2025-03-27 · Lenny's Podcast · How to win in the AI era: Ship a feature every week, embrace technical debt, ruthlessly cut scope, and create magic your competitors can't copy | Gaurav Misra (CEO and co-founder of Captions) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think our shipping process is fast enough that within a week we can get it out, anyways, right? So that way we just get user feedback, which is even better.”
2025-03-27 · Lenny's Podcast · How to win in the AI era: Ship a feature every week, embrace technical debt, ruthlessly cut scope, and create magic your competitors can't copy | Gaurav Misra (CEO and co-founder of Captions) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“100% right. Like getting things in people's hands, trying it out, oftentimes unless you truly try it out in design, it can, in theory, look good with all the perfect conditions, right? But when you actually use your realize it's actually not that useful, for example, right? Or when you give it to users. And some of this is like intuition, honestly, right? just like anything else but there's nothing like getting something in the hands of users at the end of the day”
2025-03-27 · Lenny's Podcast · How to win in the AI era: Ship a feature every week, embrace technical debt, ruthlessly cut scope, and create magic your competitors can't copy | Gaurav Misra (CEO and co-founder of Captions) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like instant alignment across the company of like this is exciting, right? This is something that we want to get behind. And everyone will be asking when are we doing this? Like, when is this happening? I see someone's already working on it, right? So it was a great way to do that. And once we really understood that the product actually had good sort of dynamics and we had tested it, it was a great way to sort of get it out in front of everybody and create this idea of like, hey, we're all working on this. This is sort of the future, right?”
2025-03-27 · Lenny's Podcast · How to win in the AI era: Ship a feature every week, embrace technical debt, ruthlessly cut scope, and create magic your competitors can't copy | Gaurav Misra (CEO and co-founder of Captions) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As the company gets bigger, you can actually create alignment by causing internal virality. If there is enough people in the company, it actually starts acting like a consumer-based might. If you share something interesting with someone, they will share it with somebody else because they think it's interesting. And you can actually create virality inside a company. So one thing that we would do is we would create these prototype products, right? We would just go into an area, redo a bunch of stuff, create these prototype products that didn't exist in Snapchat normally. And then we would just share the build, right? And it would explode. Like it would just go viral inside the company. Day after day, we would hear from engineers, then managers, then VPs, then eventually from Evan being like, oh my God, like everyone's talking about this. Why am I the last one to hear about it? And so it were crazy.”
2025-03-27 · Lenny's Podcast · How to win in the AI era: Ship a feature every week, embrace technical debt, ruthlessly cut scope, and create magic your competitors can't copy | Gaurav Misra (CEO and co-founder of Captions) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The nice thing that came out of it that was completely unexpected, but Ashley kind of transformational for me in a way was obviously in big organizations alignment is a big issue, right? How do you get everybody on the same page? And a big part of a PM's job is actually to create alignment, right? And it can be a lot of work because we've got to talk to all these stakeholders and get them on the same page. But one of the insights that we had, which was unique, was”
2025-03-27 · Lenny's Podcast · How to win in the AI era: Ship a feature every week, embrace technical debt, ruthlessly cut scope, and create magic your competitors can't copy | Gaurav Misra (CEO and co-founder of Captions) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Create a small team of these design engineers people who are able to do the entire sort of product design engineering process in their head and can put together early versions of the product, which we would actually bake into the Snapchat app itself. And we were able to even test, for example, run a test in Australia, see how it's performing, you know, run a test in a couple of high schools, just a couple high schools, see what's, you know, how people behave. And that way we already have data on how this might perform in a real world environment, but we haven't built it to production level, right? It's like, it's a prototype, essentially, right? It's how a startup might build something. The same idea of what we're doing at our company now, right? Build fast, get it out there, right? Get feedback, understand whether it works or not. And then work with the engineering team to build it at a scale. Once we understand the product and the dynamics, then it makes sense to put on 500 engineers for six months to build it, right? So that was like a big part of it.”
2025-03-27 · Lenny's Podcast · How to win in the AI era: Ship a feature every week, embrace technical debt, ruthlessly cut scope, and create magic your competitors can't copy | Gaurav Misra (CEO and co-founder of Captions) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everybody was copying what they're doing, so they had to constantly innovate, create new stuff, and push the bounds, right? I think Evans' philosophy was always like he didn't fight the things that were getting copied, right? Stories got copied pretty much straight up. A lot of things that SnapCreat got copied. But he was more of the mindset of like, let's expand the pie, do something new, and push the boundaries. We'll keep innovating, basically. And so to do that with that scale of a company becomes really hard. And so we had this idea of like, let's create a small team where we can go and pre-test a lot of these ideas because we had a lot of ideas and, you know, we can't go.”
2025-03-27 · Lenny's Podcast · How to win in the AI era: Ship a feature every week, embrace technical debt, ruthlessly cut scope, and create magic your competitors can't copy | Gaurav Misra (CEO and co-founder of Captions) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Design it and also build it and launch it, all those things. And we saw both the ability to take designers and do some engineering and take engineers and teach them design as part of that, right? Obviously, the reason that we created that function was very different. It was actually to continue innovating as the company got bigger. One of the problems that we identified was that as the company got bigger and bigger and there's like 500 engineers, a thousand engineers, 2,000 engineers, 3,000, right? Suddenly, it just becomes very difficult to do everything. Like everything is a six-month project or a one-year project. Every product is a massive investment of like 500 engineers and, you know, a lot of time. And so you really have to pick your bets, right? If you get it wrong, if you are innovating and trying to create new products and you spend 500 engineers for a year and it doesn't work, it's a big problem, right? You're going to be in trouble, especially if it comes like Snap, where.”
2025-03-27 · Lenny's Podcast · How to win in the AI era: Ship a feature every week, embrace technical debt, ruthlessly cut scope, and create magic your competitors can't copy | Gaurav Misra (CEO and co-founder of Captions) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“100% 100% that's why it was so hard to find those people who were like able to do two things i actually think there's a insight in there is innovation between you know when you're kind of merging craft right between two different functions and i do think there's something special about one person doing two different functions or at least being able to do and i think a lot of like unique insight and innovation can come from that i actually think so on sort of my personal side like i eventually joined the design team i started at snap as it on the engineering team i eventually joined the design team um you know over the last two years that i was at snap and a big part of what i did there was create this function called design engineering and that was actually a different combination right it wasn't the designer pm it was the designer engineer right uh the person who can think of the us”
2025-03-27 · Lenny's Podcast · How to win in the AI era: Ship a feature every week, embrace technical debt, ruthlessly cut scope, and create magic your competitors can't copy | Gaurav Misra (CEO and co-founder of Captions) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really hard, and they were paid highly too. I mean, for what it's worth, they were paid way higher than you would expect designers or PMs or engineers to be paid, right? With quarterly bonuses and all kinds of things.”
2025-03-27 · Lenny's Podcast · How to win in the AI era: Ship a feature every week, embrace technical debt, ruthlessly cut scope, and create magic your competitors can't copy | Gaurav Misra (CEO and co-founder of Captions) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. I mean, I think what was expected from the designerists now was not just the ability to design the skill set of designing, which all of them were IC designers, by the way, right? And there were no reports, right? So they weren't allowed to have reports, actually. And so they were designing everything themselves, but they also had to have the leadership skills to go figure out the roadmap, write all the documents, work with the different teams, figure out shipping schedules and just know everything, not just sort of the technical and the engineering part, but the UX and the UI and the product needs and why are we doing this, the roadmap, there's just a ton to keep in mind. And that means that it was a job that was just highly, it was a very high workload, no doubt, very high workload, right? These people were.”
2025-03-27 · Lenny's Podcast · How to win in the AI era: Ship a feature every week, embrace technical debt, ruthlessly cut scope, and create magic your competitors can't copy | Gaurav Misra (CEO and co-founder of Captions) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Definitely, and also the ability to bring about change, right? The ability to truly energize an entire organization to do something that's not just incremental, but fundamental, right?”
2025-03-27 · Lenny's Podcast · How to win in the AI era: Ship a feature every week, embrace technical debt, ruthlessly cut scope, and create magic your competitors can't copy | Gaurav Misra (CEO and co-founder of Captions) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is very true, yeah. It's very true. And he was able to keep the context of the entire app in his head at the same time. He knew the interdependencies and what we're doing and why we're doing it. And so that gave him just very granular control over the company's product roadmap”
2025-03-27 · Lenny's Podcast · How to win in the AI era: Ship a feature every week, embrace technical debt, ruthlessly cut scope, and create magic your competitors can't copy | Gaurav Misra (CEO and co-founder of Captions) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Every change that was happening that was user impacting. A lot of changes were being worked on that were like infrastructure and like types of things that kind of keep going on in the back end. We're improving ranking and whatever that might be, right? Performance and things like that. And those were not usually his concern. He was concerned with what UI are we adding where. And if you needed to add UI to the app, you needed it designed. And if there's no designers in the company except for a handful who would talk directly to the CEO, you kind of create a very granular control over what's being launched in the company, right? So everything needed to be approved by Evan. If you hadn't approved it, it's not going out. So the design team actually held a lot of power in that.”
2025-03-27 · Lenny's Podcast · How to win in the AI era: Ship a feature every week, embrace technical debt, ruthlessly cut scope, and create magic your competitors can't copy | Gaurav Misra (CEO and co-founder of Captions) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source