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

“A long time, yeah, big difference. Initially, there were no PMs at all. PMs were introduced with monetization. Once monetization was a big sort of element, that's kind of where PMs came in. Today, I think there's a ton of there's an adequate number of PMs across the company, but there was a long period of time, especially when the innovation was happening, when, yeah, there were a much, much smaller number of PMs and was very designer-led. But at the same time, I think that slightly misleading in the way that these weren't your sort of average designers, right? These were designers who were actually PMs as well. That's kind of what the secret sauce was. They were able to not just design, but also do the PM part, which is a big responsibility. It's a lot of work, especially for that many employees, right? But it gave the CEO a way to sort of have granular control over what exactly was being launched in which part of the app at all times, right? Because he could meet with a set of 10 or 12 people and 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
“To continue innovating, right? Because for a company like Snap, it has a ton of competition. Social networks are monopolies by nature. And there's a lot of reasons for Facebook or any other social network to stop the growth of Snapchat. And they tried. They tried really, really hard. And the way that Snap was avoiding that was by innovating. I think at the core of it was the setup that they had, which was very unique. I've never seen anything like it. I've worked at a bunch of different companies. Obviously, there's a CEO and the CEO was very product-led. He was designer himself, right? But he surrounded himself with the design team, right? That was sort of the central team in the company. And the design team was like 10, 12 people, basically pretty small, even at, you know, five, six thousand.”
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 were a couple of different things that went well. I do think for a company like Snapchat or social network. Core product market fit can be extremely strong, right? Like essentially, the reason that people are downloading it, the way that it's spreading, the way that it's distributing, the way that it's inviting friends or sending snaps or whatever it is, right, that product market fit can be so strong sometimes that it can be hard to actually build something because you actually can't tell if what you're building is what's responsible for growing the thing or if it's actually hurting it and it's growing despite what you're doing basically, right? And I think because of that, it actually sometimes teaches people the wrong things. It teaches people that contrarian thing that they were doing was right when it was actually just wrong and the company just grew despite it, right? And I think some of the things that SNAF did well and it needed to do really 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
“And a lot of people laugh at that. I was like, camera, like, what are we making like digital cameras or something? Why is it a camera company? But I think the core of it was this idea that Snapchat opens to the camera. And that was actually the differentiator, right? That was actually that small decision was holding the entire company against all competition. Because when the moment passes where your friend is doing something funny and you need to capture it, you're not going to open Instagram or anything else because it doesn't open to the camera. You're going to open Snapchat, right? Because you can capture it right away. And Instagram can never copy that because all their metrics are going to go down as soon as they do that. So that is a fundamental understanding, right? And I figured this out much later, actually.”
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 honestly, this is probably my own failing, and I need to work on this. But there is something to it. I do remember at Snap, for example, right? I think one of the most unique things about Snap and the CEO, Evan Spiegel, was that he had an unmashed understanding of the user. I think years and years and years of the company's existence passed, right? Like almost a decade. And nobody understood the user like he did, right? Like he would come up with ideas that everybody would disagree with. And we would launch them and there would be hits, just hits after hits, right? And nobody would understand why. Everyone would line up and be like, great. Like a round of applause for everyone, right? But no one knew why. And, you know, a great example of that is like, and a lot of this was figured out in retrospect too. I think there was a point at which Snap declared that a camera company.”
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
“Honestly, I would like for it to go there. It hasn't gone there yet. Like, we haven't done that exactly because the problem is context. And I think just the context of, you know, understanding the user, the use case, it's so abstract even right now. I feel like I understand our users, obviously, but I can't exactly verbalize why that is or how that is a little bit abstract, right? I spend a lot of time with RPNs and designers imparting anything that I understand I've learned over the many years. You know, I've been working on this. How do I impart this to them? But then it's a challenge because I can't even verbalize it myself. And so it's an extra hard challenge to figure out how do I put this context, how do I make it available to an LLM when I can even put it into words exactly?”
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 hell out of like, I think it's available basically on every app you can imagine for good reason, of course. But that's one of the ideas that came out 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
“They were kind of not sure why we needed this, right? And they actually gave it to us pretty openly. And we're excited about some sort of partnership of how can we get this technology into something that could be useful. But we saw sort of this creator use case, which was unique. And it was one of the ideas that came out of the brainstorm. And we threw it on there. We launched it. It was a huge success. I'll be honest. the video the ad that we made, like a social media post that demonstrates this was so viral. It was made in basically every language around the world. It still till today gets millions of views. We find reposts and reposts of that thing that other people have created that get millions and millions and millions of views because people are like, wow, this is like, this is a great idea. And now it's been like copied.”
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
“Tons. I mean, I'll give you an example from a long time ago. One of the first sort of AI features we added after sort of the app initially took off was this feature called eye contact. So this was a feature where Reached out to Nvidia about this.”
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 thinks about feasibility and technology and what the different things could be. So, this is a way where we can take all that noise that people are getting. Everybody's browsing social media, seeing all these different things are blowing up, these models and advancements. And we can get all that information together and provide sort of a unique internal roadmap where how are we going to approach and create value out of all of these different advancements that are happening. methodology. And a lot of times the biggest wins will come from the secret roadmap, right? That's the game changing stuff, right? It's not going to be the user requests usually that are going to do 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
“We think will completely revolutionize how something is used, where we can truly change the behavior of the user. I think that's what is at the core of it, right? It's like people are doing things one way if we're able to show them another way. And once they try it, they never go back. That's what a product is, right? That's success, right? And those are the types of ideas we put on the secret roadmap. These are things we never talked about publicly, never tell anybody about. And we announced them and just give them to users, right? And see the effects. A lot of this we come up with through brainstorming. So we do actually do quarterly brainstorming company-wide. Everybody's included, like everybody from, it's not just product team thing. It's like engineering, recruiting, everybody's included in. And we all come up with marketing, obviously. Like everybody comes up with ideas. We vote on the ideas, rank the ideas, and then the prior team takes over from 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
“It affects and what the possible markets are, and like just get it done basically, right? One at a time. But these are all features that every competitor knows about. These are public. Like if a user is asking us for it, they're asking everybody for it. And every team has essentially more or less the same list and everybody's prioritizing it. And yeah, sure, you can win a little by like extra nicely prioritizing it or winning a little in prioritization or execution or something. It's not going to be a game changer in terms of winning against your competition. So we have a second roadmap which we think of as a secret roadmap. So this is a roadmap that nobody asked for anything on this. Literally nobody has ever asked for it. And if a user were shown something on it, they might be like, I don't need this. I don't know what this is. But given our unique vantage point, our unique understanding of the problem set, the user space, and the technology, we've come up with some special ideas.”
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
“Leads to us discovering, right? Like things that we wouldn't have discovered if we were just too focused on the metrics and the numbers and things like that. So it's like almost reversing the process a little bit and starting with design first, but it can often result in like finding unique ideas, basically. I also think that we have a unique setup in how we create our roadmap. Normally, you have a single roadmap, right? And we actually divide our roadmap into two different roadmaps. So what we think of as the public roadmap, this is basically what people have asked us for, right? So like there's all these surface areas, we receive user feedback. And we look at all that feedback. And people will ask for features. Like they'll ask for like, I want background removal. I want like to undo and redo. I want to upload longer videos, whatever it is, right? A bunch of different features. And we'll just make a list of that and just like anything else will prioritize it and we'll look at how many people.”
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
“Our process is a bit interesting in that way. We have a design team, we have a PM team. We're very early on those teams right now. And obviously we have engineering and we have all the different surface areas. So iOS, Android, Web, right? There's backend team, machine learning team, research team. So generally when we're developing products, we may start off with a PM first approach where we're kind of finding some sort of overall issue that we want to take on some new area or pillar we want to take on and then creating sort of product specs from there. But a lot of times we'll also start the opposite way where we'll first design something, right? Without even having any idea of what or why we're doing it, but we'll design a bunch of different things. And then we'll sit down with the PMs and look at the designs and just, you know, go over one and the next and the next until we find interesting things and ideas that kind of pop out of that. And a lot of times 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
“Exactly. In a way, these are the types of things that us as a startup can do that bigger companies can't just pull in Devon, right? They have to, you know, get 30 lawyers in the room first before that happens.”
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
“We are using cursor. Yep. We've tried all the different tools. We're using Devon as well, which is another that's more advanced, I guess. It's kind of solving bugs for 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
“100%. Yeah. I mean, everybody's using it. It's super helpful. I mean, even I'm using it, honestly. Yeah, it's a huge multiplier for the team, no doubt.”
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. Yeah. I mean, I think as long as it's possible for wherever it's like a two-way door, you can kind of do whatever you want. I mean, this is a classic methodology, right? If it's a one-way door, it's worth thinking about and sort of doing correctly, at least as much as the one-way door would matter to you in 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
“Yeah. I mean, I think generally the rule of thumb is every piece of debt that you take on, you have to pay interest on, right? So if there is debt that you've taken on, there's one You will get in trouble”
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
“Technical debt in you. Exactly. Some engineer in the future, you know, 500 engineer many years from now will get a promotion because they solve this big problem that does really bad early engineers created.”
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 other company, right? And we think about it as like, well, is this a problem we need to solve today? Or is this a problem that the 50th engineer or the 100th engineer or the 500th engineer can solve, right? And if it is a problem that a future engineer can solve, we should use that future engineer now. Essentially, that's what we're doing. And we're saying we're going to push this to somebody in the future. And by the way, if the company fails, that engineer will never be hired, right? And all this won't matter anyways, right? So it's kind of like financial in many ways. Financial debt is taken on to create leverage. It can be a good thing, right? Like if you're buying a house, you take on debt and you can create, buy something probably more than you can afford without taking on debt, right? I think it's the same thing. You can create products that you wouldn't be able to build with a small team that you have by taking on strategic technical debt. It's very positive, actually.”
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
“Yep. So usually we'll dedicate time to that separately. So, for example, usually Q4 for us is infrastructure quarter, right? We just like go and build all the infrastructure. Q4 is generally, you know, we've already delivered a ton of products and stuff. We're feeling pretty good about the rest of the year. Things are winding down. Obviously holidays and stuff coming up. And so we spend all that time paying the technical debt, right? I actually think there's a unique thing to think here about like technical debt in general. And as a startup, your job is to take on technical debt, right? Because that is how you operate faster than a bigger company, right? Bigger companies don't take contextical debt. They operate usually right away or they're paying back technical debt from the days when they were a startup, right? And they took on a lot of it, right? I mean, Snaps, I used to work as SNAP and there was a lot of examples of that over there. And I'm sure it happens at.”
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
“Exactly. Yep. I think it's definitely key, right? And there's enough area and enough scope for that to happen, right? Like I think truly in normal times, it may not be possible to create that much roadmap that quickly, but I think because there's so much innovation underlying all this, there is that scope available, right? Like the roadmap almost seems unlimited, right? Like just truly.”
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
“Totally. And I think the coolest part of this method is the first thing that the users will come in, they'll use the thing, they'll import images. And the first thing they'll complain about is what kind of bothers them the most. Is it hue and saturation? Is it background removal? Is it like picking from the cloud, right? Like you'll just get the most complaints about that thing. People will be like, and people will be honest about it. They'll be like, this sucks, right? It doesn't even have background removal. What kind of image thing is this, right? And you kind of take that feedback and just next week you can ship in a single week all the things that the user is complaining about, 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
“You know, native picker from the camera lands straight in the video. No UI. And that is already, that should be useful. If that's not useful, then anything else built on top of that is also useless, right? So that's kind of how we might go about 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
“What you're really trying to ask. So, for example, let's say we wanted to build something to add an image on your video or something like that, right? And this is a really basic idea. I kind of just made it up right now. And you might imagine a design in which you import your image from your camera roll. But before it lands in your video, you might want to remove the background, right? You might want to change the hue and saturation or something like that. And you might expect a designer to design all those features, right? And you kind of land a design, but you really quickly realize that you can cut all of that stuff, right? You can cut the background rule. You can cut the hue saturation. All you really need is pick and then there might be a picker. We need a picker with a library, with a lot of different, you know, or if you want to pull from the cloud, what if you want to pull from the drive or something like that? Cut all of that, right? And essentially come down the core, which is just 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
“Quality is not something you compromise on most of the time, right? I think, yes, there's strategic compromises on quality, but most of the time what you want to do is have a bar for quality where people should come in. And if they're using the feature, like it should work, right? Of course, right. And the way to cut down on time, and I think this is a mistake people make a lot of the time, is when time is being pressured downward, a lot of times engineers, PMs, designers, they will cut on quality rather than cutting on scope. And actually, you can cut on scope. It's actually, you know, the method that we use is we look at every element that's going to take any time to build. And we just say, what if we remove this? Is the product still useful? And we keep repeating that until we remove whatever's left and we say it's going to be useless at this point. And that becomes the one week project, right? Yeah, I actually really works, right? It kind of narrows down to the core.”
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
“A starting point essentially. So as long as we're shipping one a week, we get a ton of volume of like features and products and directions we're releasing. What remains expand from there, right? So it works really well and it keeps people focused.”
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 justify alignment, right? People will jump over that just to kind of use sort of these new tools and new abilities that you might be building and marketing. So we try to do every engineer one marketable feature per week. And yeah, a lot of that stuff may not work, right? But a lot of it does work. And we can figure out obviously where to put in more effort. Things that start to work, we double down on those things, build more. People often complain because think about it. Like in one week where we're shipping, it's not complete. It's MVP. Truly. And we slice the hell out of it, right? Like we take the design and we cut, cut, cut until we can really say that it's going to be useless if we cut anymore. We get that out and people come in and if things are going well, people will use it despite all the problems that it might have. And now people will complain and we'll have a list of problems and we know what to do next.”
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, honestly, it's all about incrementality in a way, right? Like, I think we do aim to ship every week, right? So our engineering goal is every engineer should ship a marketable product every week. And so what's a marketable product is a product that you can show to users. And the user might subscribe or pay for the app just for that or come to the app essentially just for that. And that's why table stakes features like, you know, let's say we're talking about word processor or something, you know, if you have like auto format or, you know, just table stake stuff like justify alignment or something, no one's going to come to your Word processor for justify alignment, right? Like you can market that, right? Because it's obvious, right? Of course it exists. But if you did something unique that nobody else has done, you can go and show that to people. And people will come to your app just for that. And even if your app doesn't have a lot of the obvious stuff, maybe it doesn't.”
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
“Your business, it's actually a great way to identify what actually works. And we have these tools right now. We don't have to build anything. You can just kind of talk about it. And people will share it, share the idea, right? And you can kind of measure how well the product might be received even before you've built anything. So it's a great tool we use for prioritization. We spend a lot of time on social media. Obviously, our app is often used for social media. So a lot of our employees will spend a lot of time on social media. We look at what the trends are, what's happening. And based on that, we can get a pretty good read of what might resonate well with people.”
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 is the new problem of product development in a way, right? There's too many possible paths you can go down. There's too many ideas. There's too many things you could do. And I mean, obviously prioritization is always an important skill set and has always been, but it's becoming even more important skill set right now because you have to figure out what not to pay attention to. Our general framework for it is to look for user demand, right? And actually the easiest way to check for user demand is to just see what has virality, right? Usually what has virality, what people want to share and talk about, there's something at the core of it that actually is interesting. Now, it may not always be interesting in a way that's like, you know, maybe it's not, maybe it's a one-time use case. Maybe it's not something that people would do repeatedly. Maybe it's not something you could build like a subscription business off of. But oftentimes there's some things, some core sort of element of it that has resonated with people. And if you can identify that core and then mold it into fitting into your”
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 video space is truly endless, right? Like we've just begun, and our goal specifically for video is not to build professional tools. We're not building for professionals at all. We're building for the person who could not have created video before, right? They didn't have the tools, the skills, the means to be able to create video, and now they can't because they're able to jump over that skill gap, right? Or that time gap. Maybe they're business owners. They don't have time, right? They want results. And honestly, a lot to solve there, right? Just tons.”
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%. I mean, I think honestly, it just comes down to not just AI for the sake of AI or AI for the sake of excitement or hype or novelty or whatever that is, right? It's actually effective AI, like AI that solves real problems, practical problems, right? And, you know, the fundamentals haven't changed, right? In a way, there's three steps to building products. You identify a user problem. you apply some technology to solve that problem. But then finally, you have some mechanism to find people who have that problem, right? If you can do all three of those things, then in any environment, you can create great products. But I think right now what's different is so much is changing on the technology side that you can create products that could not have been created before and solve problems that could not have been solved before. And that's what's creating the opportunity, right? And for us, especially.”
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
“Isn't that already happening? Like, think about, in a way, I kind of self reflect on this sometimes of like, you've seen Iron Man and stuff, like they have the Jarvis thing and you've seen interstellar and they have like the Tars machine, right? And they're talking back and forth with these things, like bouncing ideas. And that is science fiction. That's literally science fiction. Okay, it's not perfect, but it exists in a way that nobody could have imagined. That's science fiction has become reality. And I feel like nobody cares, right? In a way, like he would have expected the world to return upside down, but it feels like almost in a way so slow. And like people are like, yes, there's adoption is happening. But I feel like it's almost a shocking development in a way.”
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's slightly different. And I don't know how long that lasts, but it is definitely a different time from that perspective. I do think also, you know, at the core of building products is solving problems.”
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, honestly, it's a great point. And I think there is a lot of hype, obviously, right? And part of it that's kind of what's driving a lot of this growth for a lot of companies, right? And I think from user acquisition, such marketing perspective, right, like in a world five or seven years ago, if you were making something novel and you went to users and you was like, oh, we got something better, right? Like people are going to be like, well, whatever. Everybody says they got something better, right? I don't care, right? But today, and this is not probably the way you should do it, but you can go and just say like we've rethought this thing with AI, right? And a bunch of people will just be like, well, how? Or maybe I should check this out, right? They'll just try it. Obviously, you have to deliver on the promises, right? Like if you don't deliver, people will come in. They'll play around a bunch and then just leave, right? But if you can truly deliver on the promises, you know, there's great opportunities to acquire users at scale.”
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
“Appreciate it. Honestly, it's an exciting time. Like, I got to say, there's rarely a time like this where so much is possible. Like in normal times, if you think about like even like five, seven years ago, it's so hard to start a company. It's so hard to come up with an idea, right? Like it's just like everything feels like it's done, someone else is working on it, right? Like, oh, it's been tried three times and failed three times. And like suddenly, it's a time right now, which like I've never even experienced, honestly, in my career, right? everything you try just works there's so many possibilities there's not enough people in the world to work on them like honestly right like there's more things that can be done than there's people available to do them right it's just such a rare thing and honestly it's not going to last forever right like we are going to catch up to this but just feels lucky to be you know part of that movement is awesome”
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 we think of as the public roadmap. This is basically what people have asked us for. There's all these surface areas we receive user feedback. But these are all features that every competitor knows about. If a user is asking us for it, they're asking everybody for it. It's not going to be a game changer in terms of winning against your competition. So we have a second roadmap, which we think of as a secret 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
“I actually think as a startup, your job is to take on technical debt because that is how you operate faster than a bigger company. Bigger companies don't take on technical debt. They pay it usually right away. Or they're paying back technical debt from the days when they were a startup.”
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's rarely a time like this where so much is possible, even like five, seven years ago, it's so hard to start a company. Everything feels like it's done, someone else is working on it. Suddenly, it's a time right now, which I've never even experienced, where everything you try just works.”
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