YouSaid · the spoken record

Hugo Barra

lines on the record: 49
first: 2022-11-09
most recent: 2022-11-09
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

“I've been super impressed with nothing, which is a new consumer electronics brand. I'm actually wearing the Nothing earbuds for this interview. And I absolutely love the design language that they created, their new smartphone, which just came out. I'm quite biased since I'm a friend of Carl's and also a proud investor, but I'm a huge fan of what they're doing.”
2022-11-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Product: Hugo Barra on Lessons Building Hardware Products at Android, Xiaomi, Oculus, and Detect; Feature Kings vs. Budget Kings; 996 Work Culture in China; There Are No MVPs in Hardware; The 3.5-Hour Recruiting Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Jack has been a wonderful friend over 10 years. And as you know, he has the most insane mind for connecting people across industries and across the globe just because he loves doing it. And I think that is what's so special about him is the fact that he just loves to do that. Every four-year job that I made in the last 12 years was the result of some introduction made by Shaq. And I agree with you completely. We should productize Shaq. Shaq as a service would be the world's most delightful product.”
2022-11-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Product: Hugo Barra on Lessons Building Hardware Products at Android, Xiaomi, Oculus, and Detect; Feature Kings vs. Budget Kings; 996 Work Culture in China; There Are No MVPs in Hardware; The 3.5-Hour Recruiting Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Usually, it's my last product release, so for me, that was the unveiling of Detect back in December 21. But I would say my all-time favorite product release was the Xiaomi Redmy Note 3 in India in 2016.”
2022-11-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Product: Hugo Barra on Lessons Building Hardware Products at Android, Xiaomi, Oculus, and Detect; Feature Kings vs. Budget Kings; 996 Work Culture in China; There Are No MVPs in Hardware; The 3.5-Hour Recruiting Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would love to create a new type of engineer, full stack hardware engineers. They don't exist like you have in the software world. You always have to have a team with three or four types of engineers. And I wish there were more full stack hardware engineers in the world. They exist, but they're hard to find, mostly because universities don't train them.”
2022-11-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Product: Hugo Barra on Lessons Building Hardware Products at Android, Xiaomi, Oculus, and Detect; Feature Kings vs. Budget Kings; 996 Work Culture in China; There Are No MVPs in Hardware; The 3.5-Hour Recruiting Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Steve Jobs always, and I would say Tony Fidel is a big mentor over the last many years. And I always come back to understanding the need to uncover these sort of emotional requirements from people, which they'll never tell you about. So you have to find a way in.”
2022-11-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Product: Hugo Barra on Lessons Building Hardware Products at Android, Xiaomi, Oculus, and Detect; Feature Kings vs. Budget Kings; 996 Work Culture in China; There Are No MVPs in Hardware; The 3.5-Hour Recruiting Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That a lot of product managers fail to have. They want to stay in their box working with design and engineering, not caring as much about the rest of the business as they need to, or otherwise they can't become these mini GMs. That's a huge challenge, and it's something that you have to think about when you're hiring people because maybe in two years you might need someone pretty different from the person that you're hiring right now if you're expecting that scale to come in that time frame.”
2022-11-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Product: Hugo Barra on Lessons Building Hardware Products at Android, Xiaomi, Oculus, and Detect; Feature Kings vs. Budget Kings; 996 Work Culture in China; There Are No MVPs in Hardware; The 3.5-Hour Recruiting Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think product works begin to break when the product manager job starts to morph into more of a general manager GM job as companies grow in product teams are forced to scale with that growth. Product managers need to fill in a lot of gaps that the CEO, the senior team can no longer fill because there's so much going on in the company, right? So the product managers then become the people who have kind of stitched together, not just design and engineering in maybe some part of manufacturing, but they actually have to go deeper into the supply chain or they have to be much more well connected to sales or customer experience teams. And they have to have this kind of much bigger 360 view of the product, not just before it's built and while it's being built and launched, but also how it's doing in the market, how it's performing so you can tweak it and you can improve it not only on an ongoing basis if you're building a service. But as every new version comes out when you're building physical products. So it's a sudden push for maturity.”
2022-11-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Product: Hugo Barra on Lessons Building Hardware Products at Android, Xiaomi, Oculus, and Detect; Feature Kings vs. Budget Kings; 996 Work Culture in China; There Are No MVPs in Hardware; The 3.5-Hour Recruiting Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I think, first of all, to me, leaders, as I said earlier, have to have gone through big struggles in their career. They have to have survived times when she got really tough. We out of their comfort zone. And I think I always, always look for stories like that. People who never got out of their comfort zone can't handle bad times crisis, sort of battle moments, as well as those who have those battles cars. So I really, really do look for that. I rarely will hire someone who hasn't who hasn't gone through something that was a big struggle in their careers and can tell their story. I think personal life struggles are often good too. Like they can build that resilience that you look for in a leader. And there's a lot of cases amongst people that I know and that I've hired where that played a pretty big role because I could tell the person became incredibly resilient as a result of that. And I would only build teams with people that know how to behave, how to act.”
2022-11-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Product: Hugo Barra on Lessons Building Hardware Products at Android, Xiaomi, Oculus, and Detect; Feature Kings vs. Budget Kings; 996 Work Culture in China; There Are No MVPs in Hardware; The 3.5-Hour Recruiting Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think I've always over indexed on product nerdiness. So I have to really, really check myself to not become sort of overly seduced by product nerds when I'm interviewing them because they may not be the great leader that I'm looking for who's going to build a team and be an inspiring person that everybody else follows, even though maybe they are an incredible product person. There's sort of all these other dimensions that you have to care about. And it's tough to keep checking myself on this. And sometimes you do fall in that trap.”
2022-11-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Product: Hugo Barra on Lessons Building Hardware Products at Android, Xiaomi, Oculus, and Detect; Feature Kings vs. Budget Kings; 996 Work Culture in China; There Are No MVPs in Hardware; The 3.5-Hour Recruiting Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lot of it has to do with leadership values, right, and how you build teams and how you help people recover from failures. A lot of it has to do with culture and how someone really, really is at work when shit gets tough. It's a simulator, right? It's getting somebody into a position where you can watch them at work without really doing it because you're talking it at such a deep level of detail.”
2022-11-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Product: Hugo Barra on Lessons Building Hardware Products at Android, Xiaomi, Oculus, and Detect; Feature Kings vs. Budget Kings; 996 Work Culture in China; There Are No MVPs in Hardware; The 3.5-Hour Recruiting Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of course, you only do this marathon interview towards the end of the process once sort of the panel interview has given you their thumbs up.”
2022-11-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Product: Hugo Barra on Lessons Building Hardware Products at Android, Xiaomi, Oculus, and Detect; Feature Kings vs. Budget Kings; 996 Work Culture in China; There Are No MVPs in Hardware; The 3.5-Hour Recruiting Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you spend enough time with a person and you take a little bit of time to talk about yourself and try to build that relationship, you will eventually find an entry point. And honestly, if they don't open up in that three and a half hour interview, then I don't know if they're like real humans or more like robots. It's never, ever happened to me that I couldn't fully dress someone down in a three and a half hour interview. It's extremely time consuming. It's up half of your day, but it is, in my opinion, the absolute best way to get to the core of it. Then what I do after that three and a half year interview, I go think for two days and then I do a follow-up one and a half hour where I go back to my notes. I think through carefully and I figure out kind of the missing dots that connect to a full story. And then we do usually about one hour and a half as a follow up. And then at the end of that, I usually have a pretty high confidence decision either for someone that I'm trying to hire or for a startup CEO, a founder who's a friend who's trying to decide if they want to hire someone.”
2022-11-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Product: Hugo Barra on Lessons Building Hardware Products at Android, Xiaomi, Oculus, and Detect; Feature Kings vs. Budget Kings; 996 Work Culture in China; There Are No MVPs in Hardware; The 3.5-Hour Recruiting Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is absolutely the five whys. The five whys are the secret of getting to the depth, to the reality to who someone really is and how they think. You have to just go infinitely deep, pull out a layer, pull out the next layer, pull out the next layer. You have to go far beyond what they've sort of thought through in interviews and comment situations. So the five Y's is absolutely the framework that I love.”
2022-11-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Product: Hugo Barra on Lessons Building Hardware Products at Android, Xiaomi, Oculus, and Detect; Feature Kings vs. Budget Kings; 996 Work Culture in China; There Are No MVPs in Hardware; The 3.5-Hour Recruiting Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When talking about interviews and hiring people, I'm a really big fan of diverse interview panels where everyone is assigned a specific hat. I think it's really important when you're putting a panel together to make sure that you have live problem solving interviews as well as interviews that test for culture flags really, really deeply. This applies for every position in any job ladder. Problem solving interviews are not just for technical roles. It's for everything. I've always relied on panel interviews where each interview is a maximum level an hour and so on. But in the last eight years or so, as I've had to hire a lot more senior folks, I've started to take a pretty different approach. I do continue to rely on interview panels for sort of getting diverse feedback, but I also invest a considerable amount of time myself in getting to know the person. And I've been applying this method, which I'm about to describe for interviews in my own teams, but I also do this for a number of startups like”
2022-11-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Product: Hugo Barra on Lessons Building Hardware Products at Android, Xiaomi, Oculus, and Detect; Feature Kings vs. Budget Kings; 996 Work Culture in China; There Are No MVPs in Hardware; The 3.5-Hour Recruiting Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Incredible ROI, right? And you can think about that for everything. You can think about that for clothes, right? You can think about that for shoes and all of these things. They have to earn their place. Cost per use”
2022-11-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Product: Hugo Barra on Lessons Building Hardware Products at Android, Xiaomi, Oculus, and Detect; Feature Kings vs. Budget Kings; 996 Work Culture in China; There Are No MVPs in Hardware; The 3.5-Hour Recruiting Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Product market fit in the hardware world means earning that physical place in someone's life day after day, week after week, whether it's on their desk or kitchen counter or in their backpack or wherever it might be. I like to think about this as, look, you force someone to pay money for a product that they then have to carry with them every day. And then if they use it every time, every day, every week, you can almost calculate a cost per use. Did you manage to give somebody a product that costs them 10 cents every time they use it? If so, that's fantastic and absolutely used product market because it means they're using pretty often. If, however, they don't use it very often, you're essentially selling a product to someone that maybe costs 10 bucks every time they use it. That's a terrible deal. And that I don't think naturally leads you to product market. Physical products are challenging because they have to be chosen by the person every day because they're carrying it. It's occupying space as opposed to an app that may be on their 10th screen. It's not really bothering them. Physical products are way harder.”
2022-11-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Product: Hugo Barra on Lessons Building Hardware Products at Android, Xiaomi, Oculus, and Detect; Feature Kings vs. Budget Kings; 996 Work Culture in China; There Are No MVPs in Hardware; The 3.5-Hour Recruiting Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, in the beginning, you need to choose who your product ambassadors are going to be. Who are those customers most likely to love your product, to talk about it to their friends, and to sort of carry it through that product lifecycle? So you really have to focus. You have to choose your audience. You know, oftentimes because if there are sort of power users in that audience, if there are people who really care, those people are going to want to think that you're really focused on them. I would say choose your best ambassadors, those people who are likely to become your biggest champions and tell a story that's tailored to them first and foremost. And then, of course, when you do your press outreach, when you do your targeted paid marketing and so on and so forth, then you can tailor the story. Try to focus it to begin with over time, of course, once you're a thing, you can then afford to dilute your message a little bit more. But because, you know, I really like that kind of one to 10 space when the product is still hasn't massively taken off. I'm a huge fan of choosing your champions.”
2022-11-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Product: Hugo Barra on Lessons Building Hardware Products at Android, Xiaomi, Oculus, and Detect; Feature Kings vs. Budget Kings; 996 Work Culture in China; There Are No MVPs in Hardware; The 3.5-Hour Recruiting Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Easily visualize a short film that would convey the product and its emotional benefits in the way that gives you goosebumps. That's a great press release.”
2022-11-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Product: Hugo Barra on Lessons Building Hardware Products at Android, Xiaomi, Oculus, and Detect; Feature Kings vs. Budget Kings; 996 Work Culture in China; There Are No MVPs in Hardware; The 3.5-Hour Recruiting Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You start, like you said, your product creation journey with a press release because a press release, writing the press release will force you to create that storyline, that narrative early on that can really cause somebody to imagine what that product would look like in their lives. Sometimes as the product marketing manager, you're going to have to do a lot of homework to be able to write that press release in a way that can be convincing, even to yourself. It's a terrific and very, very productive exercise to go through. It really pays off. A good press release has all the important details, the features, the benefits, the pricing. Why should you buy this? But a great press release speaks to your customers emotional needs, that thing we've been talking about. One way that I like to think about it is you could imagine handing this press release, the great press release, to a film director, and they would be able to take that story that they're getting from your press release. And in their creative mind,”
2022-11-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Product: Hugo Barra on Lessons Building Hardware Products at Android, Xiaomi, Oculus, and Detect; Feature Kings vs. Budget Kings; 996 Work Culture in China; There Are No MVPs in Hardware; The 3.5-Hour Recruiting Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Brand marketing is all about sort of aspiration, right? It's creating an aura, an ethos around your brand, which of course does interweave with product stories, but it's more of a long, long-term journey, right? Your brand is built based on the products that you make over time. And a brand is not made or destroyed overnight. Well, sometimes it is destroyed overnight, but it's definitely never made overnight. So it's a long journey and it takes time. Product marketing really is about telling the story about making someone imagine what that product could look like in their daily lives.”
2022-11-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Product: Hugo Barra on Lessons Building Hardware Products at Android, Xiaomi, Oculus, and Detect; Feature Kings vs. Budget Kings; 996 Work Culture in China; There Are No MVPs in Hardware; The 3.5-Hour Recruiting Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Massively failed in the market. It was Snapdragon 615, and they were launching a Snapdragon 616. And 615 just had a terrible reputation, right? So I said to Qualcomm, look, guys, we cannot tell a story for this product, right? This product will be received as the same stinky deadfish as Snapdragon 615 was. So we have to somehow change this game. If you allow me to change its name, then I think we can tell a good story. So Cristiano, who's a good friend at the time, he wasn't yet CEO of Qualcomm, but he led.”
2022-11-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Product: Hugo Barra on Lessons Building Hardware Products at Android, Xiaomi, Oculus, and Detect; Feature Kings vs. Budget Kings; 996 Work Culture in China; There Are No MVPs in Hardware; The 3.5-Hour Recruiting Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Storytelling, as I think Tony would also say, is the soul of product marketing. It's what gets customers to imagine what your product will do for them in their actual lives. You tell a story on your website, keynote launch event, in an ad and even in an Amazon product page. You need to be able to tell a story. I've some examples in my career where I had to tell a story about a product that I didn't get to build, which is challenging because you always think about this story first. You always write the press release first. But I had to try to figure out a way to do it in the reverse order and tell the story without having built the product. And it's possible. It's harder, but it's possible. You have a lot more constraints. An example that comes to mind, the launch of the Redminote 3 smartphone product in India, which I mentioned earlier, we were launching with a new Qualcomm chip. And it was a really astounding Qualcomm chip, but they made a mistake in how they named it because they named it as a successor to a chip that had.”
2022-11-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Product: Hugo Barra on Lessons Building Hardware Products at Android, Xiaomi, Oculus, and Detect; Feature Kings vs. Budget Kings; 996 Work Culture in China; There Are No MVPs in Hardware; The 3.5-Hour Recruiting Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Paid marketing, sales collateral, social media, press releases, press interviews, review briefs, et cetera, et cetera. Those two functions are what makes product marketing and the PMM function is incredibly critical and a product cannot come to life successfully without it.”
2022-11-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Product: Hugo Barra on Lessons Building Hardware Products at Android, Xiaomi, Oculus, and Detect; Feature Kings vs. Budget Kings; 996 Work Culture in China; There Are No MVPs in Hardware; The 3.5-Hour Recruiting Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Marketing for me is pretty neatly divided into two separate subdisciplines, which are different but very intimately related. Inbound product marketing and outbound product marketing. Inbound product marketing is very interwoven with product management at the beginning of the journey of creating a product. This is the part where you have to be the voice of the customer, understand their emotional needs, and the jobs that your product will do. The quote unquote deliverable here is what we classically used to call market requirements document kind of a boring name, which today is more commonly replaced by that press release or the pre-press release, as some people like to call it. Outbound product marketing is the foundation to all go-to-market activities. The quote-unquote deliverable here is the product messaging document that describes the what and the why, the product features, benefits, who should buy it, pricing, and so on based on this core messaging document, you can then build your website.”
2022-11-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Product: Hugo Barra on Lessons Building Hardware Products at Android, Xiaomi, Oculus, and Detect; Feature Kings vs. Budget Kings; 996 Work Culture in China; There Are No MVPs in Hardware; The 3.5-Hour Recruiting Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You don't ask direct questions. You kind of dance around the topic, right? And you ask, how do you feel when this, how do you feel when that? When was the last time you thought about this? Never ask about what do you think of a product that does this. Just kind of dance around the question and try to get them to talk about it.”
2022-11-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Product: Hugo Barra on Lessons Building Hardware Products at Android, Xiaomi, Oculus, and Detect; Feature Kings vs. Budget Kings; 996 Work Culture in China; There Are No MVPs in Hardware; The 3.5-Hour Recruiting Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When entering a new category, you have to rely on intuition more than data. As a product manager, you have to do your homework. You have to be the voice of the customer, and you have to validate your intuition to some degree. And a big part of this, as Tony says in his book, which I love, is about understanding their emotional needs, which is very different from asking customers what they want because they don't know what they want. So they won't tell you that. It's really sort of that voice of the customer at play. It's intuition to validation and do that time and time again until you're confident and you can build your product.”
2022-11-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Product: Hugo Barra on Lessons Building Hardware Products at Android, Xiaomi, Oculus, and Detect; Feature Kings vs. Budget Kings; 996 Work Culture in China; There Are No MVPs in Hardware; The 3.5-Hour Recruiting Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I completely agree with Gustav, of course. There is no such a thing as MVP in the hardware world. In the hardware world, your V1 must be a delightful product for the audiences that you choose to sell it to and the job that it needs to do. You cannot half asset. You have to make sure that your product does the job that your product has to do and it has to do it very, very crisply. If your V1 fails, your audience may give you another shot. Like I said earlier, your V2 then has to be sensational. So the best way to avoid this problem is don't MVP your V1 and just don't think about MVPs, not in the hardware world.”
2022-11-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Product: Hugo Barra on Lessons Building Hardware Products at Android, Xiaomi, Oculus, and Detect; Feature Kings vs. Budget Kings; 996 Work Culture in China; There Are No MVPs in Hardware; The 3.5-Hour Recruiting Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think Bing is to feature is not tougher. It's a really, really hard thing to sustain. It typically requires a tremendous amount of investment because being Feature King is very related to innovation and new technologies. So being feature king is possible, but it really, really requires team that can stay on top of their game year after year after year. I don't want to say that Budget King PMs are not as capable. I think they are actually more capable than feature king PMs who tend to have amazing technology teams behind them. Budgeting product managers really, really have to find the careful trade-off when deciding what component to keep, what component to pass on so that the whole package ends up still being very magical.”
2022-11-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Product: Hugo Barra on Lessons Building Hardware Products at Android, Xiaomi, Oculus, and Detect; Feature Kings vs. Budget Kings; 996 Work Culture in China; There Are No MVPs in Hardware; The 3.5-Hour Recruiting Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In a couple of years, but your competitors are going to be on your tail, so enjoy that window while you can. This actually happened once in my career. It was astounding. It was a product at Xiaomi that we first launched in India in 2016, I believe. And it was called the Red Me Note 3, a product of many, many firsts in like a single smartphone, which is why it landed as a feature king in the market. It was the first smartphone with metallic body, the first with”
2022-11-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Product: Hugo Barra on Lessons Building Hardware Products at Android, Xiaomi, Oculus, and Detect; Feature Kings vs. Budget Kings; 996 Work Culture in China; There Are No MVPs in Hardware; The 3.5-Hour Recruiting Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the middle. Now, there's a lot of factors that go into making this decision. Is this a new product category or an existing one? What products already exist in the market? What do they do? Do you have a technological advantage that could justify a big price premium, for example? I am a big fan of Budget King products. I am Mr. Cheap. And that's where I spent my entire career. Budget King products are actually harder to build than feature king products because they can't just be cheap. They of course have to be good. Otherwise, people won't buy them or won't keep using them. However, once you get really good at being a budget king, you can occasionally spot a finite market window where you can be feature king and price king at the same time. And you'll be lucky if that happens even once in your career and if it does, it's usually a massive jackpot and your company can hundreds.”
2022-11-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Product: Hugo Barra on Lessons Building Hardware Products at Android, Xiaomi, Oculus, and Detect; Feature Kings vs. Budget Kings; 996 Work Culture in China; There Are No MVPs in Hardware; The 3.5-Hour Recruiting Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, when you're building a consumer hardware product, you have to make one important decision for V1. You either go for customers who are willing to pay a high price for a full feature product that does the job they expect without cutting in corners, or you focus on value customers who won't even consider your product if the price isn't right. I call these two different approaches feature king and budget king. Feature king are products that have all the features and are, for that reason, more expensive. Budget King products are built under a cost constraint that requires the product people to make really, really hard choices. And you need to choose where you're going to play. If you fall somewhere in the middle, you fail to make either of these customer types happy. Your product is a stinky deadfish. Your brand suffers, and you probably are going to die. And Harry, it's unbelievable how many companies make this mistake to this day of falling.”
2022-11-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Product: Hugo Barra on Lessons Building Hardware Products at Android, Xiaomi, Oculus, and Detect; Feature Kings vs. Budget Kings; 996 Work Culture in China; There Are No MVPs in Hardware; The 3.5-Hour Recruiting Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To launch a product with those features, and instead of taking the time to build them, we rushed an MVP outdoor. And it was a disaster. If we were a startup, we would have been dead. One year later, after Oculus Go, we launched Oculus Quest, which was our second product. And that product delivered perfectly on those two user needs and had a terrific launch library. It was an instant success, absolutely phenomenal retention. Retention like almost nothing I've ever seen. Did we learn from Oculus Go? Yes, we sure did. But honestly, we didn't need to launch the product to learn what we learned. It was my decision to launch it, and I was completely wrong.”
2022-11-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Product: Hugo Barra on Lessons Building Hardware Products at Android, Xiaomi, Oculus, and Detect; Feature Kings vs. Budget Kings; 996 Work Culture in China; There Are No MVPs in Hardware; The 3.5-Hour Recruiting Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I have a few stories of the ones that failed. And basically, if your V1 fails, you have no choice but to follow up with a sensational V2 that just has to more than make for the failure of V1. So a V1 failure is salvageable. You can still have money in the bank to do a V2, but then you have to really heat it out of the park. So the story that comes to mind was my first new product after I took over the Oculus team. That product was called Oculus Go. It was a $200 VR headset that was built to be kind of your everyday VR device and it sold really well but had absolutely atrocious retention which means it obviously failed. It was basically an MVP, but it wasn't particularly compelling for anything other than watching videos to simplify the technology we kind of ignored the two most important needs of VR immersion which are the ability to physically walk around and to see your hands in VR. The reality is that we weren't ready”
2022-11-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Product: Hugo Barra on Lessons Building Hardware Products at Android, Xiaomi, Oculus, and Detect; Feature Kings vs. Budget Kings; 996 Work Culture in China; There Are No MVPs in Hardware; The 3.5-Hour Recruiting Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the most important difference is that building hardware requires having a lot more conviction early on before you even build your V1. If you're wrong in software, you take feedback and iterate quickly and move on. If you're wrong in hardware, you could end up with millions of dollars in inventory that you can't do anything with. And as a hardware startup, you basically cannot fail in your view one because if you do, it might just cost you your life.”
2022-11-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Product: Hugo Barra on Lessons Building Hardware Products at Android, Xiaomi, Oculus, and Detect; Feature Kings vs. Budget Kings; 996 Work Culture in China; There Are No MVPs in Hardware; The 3.5-Hour Recruiting Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really, really bad. So, in practice, what this means is that if you need to have a difficult conversation or give someone strong feedback, do that in private. And if it's serious enough that it would cause them to leave the project, leave the team, then try to give them an out. And never, ever call them out in public because that degrades their dignity. That's, of course, an exaggerated basic human principle that Chinese culture really amplifies, but it has really, really influenced my leadership style. I don't avoid hard conversations. but I prefer to have them in primary.”
2022-11-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Product: Hugo Barra on Lessons Building Hardware Products at Android, Xiaomi, Oculus, and Detect; Feature Kings vs. Budget Kings; 996 Work Culture in China; There Are No MVPs in Hardware; The 3.5-Hour Recruiting Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll mention one thing that was a really big takeaway for me that I think has a lot to do with leadership. Chinese culture is incredibly rich in its wisdom and depth of meanings compared to the relative superficiality of Western cultures. A big thing I learned from Chinese culture is to really, really go out of your way to make sure people always feel respected. In China, you have this age-old concept of face, which is essentially a person's social dignity to be a little dramatic. It's really important in China to always be thinking about giving face, getting face, saving face, and not letting a person lose face, for example, through acts of public humiliation, again, to be dramatic. It's kind of like a social bank account. You spend it, you save it, you invest. If you make someone feel like they've given, for example, a wrong answer or offered a silly ID in a meeting, you could cause them to lose face.”
2022-11-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Product: Hugo Barra on Lessons Building Hardware Products at Android, Xiaomi, Oculus, and Detect; Feature Kings vs. Budget Kings; 996 Work Culture in China; There Are No MVPs in Hardware; The 3.5-Hour Recruiting Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was a really tough transition for me. I think I tried to transplant some of this to the West and it really didn't work. The story that I remember most vividly was after I called a strategy meeting for my leadership at Oculus on a Sunday morning, which seemed like a reasonable thing to do because then you have a large block of time. And then I got a call from Facebook HR the next day. And that was the first and last time. I called a strategy meeting on a Sunday.”
2022-11-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Product: Hugo Barra on Lessons Building Hardware Products at Android, Xiaomi, Oculus, and Detect; Feature Kings vs. Budget Kings; 996 Work Culture in China; There Are No MVPs in Hardware; The 3.5-Hour Recruiting Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it works for them this 996 culture, this brutal work ethic is a direct derivative of Chinese culture, of how things are, of how parents build expectations for the kids in school. It's kind of innate. It works for them. It wouldn't work for us.”
2022-11-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Product: Hugo Barra on Lessons Building Hardware Products at Android, Xiaomi, Oculus, and Detect; Feature Kings vs. Budget Kings; 996 Work Culture in China; There Are No MVPs in Hardware; The 3.5-Hour Recruiting Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“996 was the standard work week in most Chinese tech companies back when I lived in Beijing. And it was actually written in my Chinese contract. 996 means 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. six days a week. You're in the office all day on Saturday. But for some teams in practice, it was actually worse. I, for instance, had weekly strategy working sessions with our CEO at Xiaomi at least every other Saturday night. And these things went on for like six hours, you know, well into the night. And I knew that the hardware team at Xiaomi also worked half days on most Sundays. So it's a brutal work ethic, like I said. And this work ethic is partly what makes Chinese companies so competitive, but it's also true that Chinese companies are generally not as well run and sometimes are really messy. So a lot of the time on the ground is wasted by poor communication, lack of clarity, lack of goals, bad habits. So there's kind of two sides to this story.”
2022-11-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Product: Hugo Barra on Lessons Building Hardware Products at Android, Xiaomi, Oculus, and Detect; Feature Kings vs. Budget Kings; 996 Work Culture in China; There Are No MVPs in Hardware; The 3.5-Hour Recruiting Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It made who you are today to go through that struggle. Tony has been on the show so many times. He's a huge mentor to me. Tony's version of this was working at General Magic at such a young age alongside these incredible people. And he had to teach himself or he would be out of a job the next day. My version of going outside the comfort zone was living in Beijing and working for a Chinese company for four years with a P&L and a level of responsibility that I had never had up until then. And on top of that, deal with Chinese language, culture, politics, and absolutely brutal work ethic that really, really kicked my ass. And my point, you have to be resilient to be a strong leader, and that requires the struggle to be real. I think this is something we really, really have to teach our kids.”
2022-11-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Product: Hugo Barra on Lessons Building Hardware Products at Android, Xiaomi, Oculus, and Detect; Feature Kings vs. Budget Kings; 996 Work Culture in China; There Are No MVPs in Hardware; The 3.5-Hour Recruiting Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I fundamentally believe that people who hustle put themselves through struggle early in their career become much more resilient and tend to do way better later in leadership roles or leading their own companies. And just working really hard isn't really enough. You need to put yourself way outside of your conflict zone to really learn and to really build resilience. Your version of this Harry, of course, is starting this podcast, which I know was a really uncomfortable thing to do early on. You're a natural idiot today, but it wasn't always this way.”
2022-11-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Product: Hugo Barra on Lessons Building Hardware Products at Android, Xiaomi, Oculus, and Detect; Feature Kings vs. Budget Kings; 996 Work Culture in China; There Are No MVPs in Hardware; The 3.5-Hour Recruiting Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At Google learning all of the fundamentals of product management and product marketing, that was my school, at Xiaomi, the main takeaway price is a feature and pricing can really, really make or break you entirely as a brand. And then the other takeaway was this, the immense value of creating and cultivating a loyal base of true fans of your brand. That was part of our secret sauce there. And it was a huge learning for me. At Meta, I learned to be a better manager and adopted a completely different management style from what I had been using up until then and especially in China. I really do think that Facebook does an outstanding job of building manager culture better than anything I've seen or heard of in any company. And then at Detect, which is, as you mentioned, is the health technology company that I co-founded a couple of years ago, I learned the power of having KCAS co-founders and not being alone when making big decisions.”
2022-11-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Product: Hugo Barra on Lessons Building Hardware Products at Android, Xiaomi, Oculus, and Detect; Feature Kings vs. Budget Kings; 996 Work Culture in China; There Are No MVPs in Hardware; The 3.5-Hour Recruiting Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“After four years in Asia, I came back to the US and accepted an invite from Mark Zuckerberg to run the Oculus team inside of Facebook. It was a great four-year run during which we rebooted virtual reality, made it much more mainstream. Oculus became the metaverse business unit, and that was sort of when Zuck decided to rename the entire company to Meta, of course the rest is history. And during my days at Meta to bring us sort of back to present time, I was introduced by Shaq, of course, to an incredible scientist, his guy, Jonathan Rothberg, who was a serial entrepreneur in the medical devices space. And at the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, Jonathan and I started to start a company together. And this is how Detective was born.”
2022-11-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Product: Hugo Barra on Lessons Building Hardware Products at Android, Xiaomi, Oculus, and Detect; Feature Kings vs. Budget Kings; 996 Work Culture in China; There Are No MVPs in Hardware; The 3.5-Hour Recruiting Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really worked. My job was to expand sort of that recipe, that direct-to-consumer recipe outside of China. And we expanded to like 20 markets in about four years and became either number one or number two in each of these markets. And our biggest win was becoming the number one phone brand in India. Today's Xiaomi is the second largest smartphone brand globally behind Samsung. If you exclude the US market,”
2022-11-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Product: Hugo Barra on Lessons Building Hardware Products at Android, Xiaomi, Oculus, and Detect; Feature Kings vs. Budget Kings; 996 Work Culture in China; There Are No MVPs in Hardware; The 3.5-Hour Recruiting Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Android was sort of this crazy hyper growth story, the biggest, I think, we've ever seen in the tech world. Working for Andy Rubin was a really big school for me. And that's where my obsession for consumer hardware began. In 2013, I accepted an offer from a former Googler to join his small startup in China, a company nobody had ever heard of that was, of course, Xiaomi. This was the first of many times that our friend, our good friend Shaq, was involved behind the scenes in my career jumps. And I'm sure we'll get to talk about that. Long story short, Xiaomi wanted to challenge Samsung and Apple in the smartphone market by making incredibly, incredibly good smartphones, selling them direct to consumers online without any middleman. We didn't spend money on marketing. We made relative lifting margins on the hardware, but then use software revenues to kind of make up for the difference. It was a really cool business model. It was completely new in the industry then, and it really”
2022-11-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Product: Hugo Barra on Lessons Building Hardware Products at Android, Xiaomi, Oculus, and Detect; Feature Kings vs. Budget Kings; 996 Work Culture in China; There Are No MVPs in Hardware; The 3.5-Hour Recruiting Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The best way to describe working with Stevie's perfection, he would call us at crazy hours of the night or super early in the morning to tell us that there was something off with some piece of the UI which no one had possibly caught or catched. But Steve saw it. And for him, it just had to be changed and had to be changed immediately. So perfection really is the word that I would use to describe Steven. And what made him so wonderful, really.”
2022-11-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Product: Hugo Barra on Lessons Building Hardware Products at Android, Xiaomi, Oculus, and Detect; Feature Kings vs. Budget Kings; 996 Work Culture in China; There Are No MVPs in Hardware; The 3.5-Hour Recruiting Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Years of Siri before Apple finally figured it out and built everything in house. Years before Siri actually even launched, I joined Google as a product manager. And we're talking 2008 here, right after the first generation iPhone launched. Back then, Google CEO Eric Schmidt sat on Apple's border directors, which is a crazy thing to think these days. And it was like having a crystal ball. Eric knew that over multiple generations, the iPhone was going to be this massive transformational force for the world. So he did two really clever things. One was funding a team with 100.”
2022-11-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Product: Hugo Barra on Lessons Building Hardware Products at Android, Xiaomi, Oculus, and Detect; Feature Kings vs. Budget Kings; 996 Work Culture in China; There Are No MVPs in Hardware; The 3.5-Hour Recruiting Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, similar story for me coming to Massachusetts, minus the Bob's led team. I graduated from MIT in the year 2000, so that was three months after the dot com bubble burst, which was just about the worst time in the world to start a company because nobody wanted to bunge you. We did start a company and we were building voice recognition software for mobile computers. Our vision was that speech would play a central role in this new mobile UI paradigm, and people would be able to talk instead of type into these pocket computers, which later, of course, became what we now know as smartphones. We weren't wrong, but we were definitely about 10 years too early with that vision. Our company ran out of money and we ended up getting actually hired by a big software company called Nuance. And in the end, I'm a tech became the foundation for Apple's Siri voice assistant and nuance got paid a ton of money for basically processing everything that people spoke into their iPhones for the first PV.”
2022-11-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Product: Hugo Barra on Lessons Building Hardware Products at Android, Xiaomi, Oculus, and Detect; Feature Kings vs. Budget Kings; 996 Work Culture in China; There Are No MVPs in Hardware; The 3.5-Hour Recruiting Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was born And after that, in an autocat. Mummy's an architect and a builder. So I On. I came to the US as an immigrant. Boston. I don't know if you've ever watched a movie Goal Rennings, which is about four Jamaicans who formed a Bob's led team to compete in the winter Olympics despite never having seen snowing their before.”
2022-11-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Product: Hugo Barra on Lessons Building Hardware Products at Android, Xiaomi, Oculus, and Detect; Feature Kings vs. Budget Kings; 996 Work Culture in China; There Are No MVPs in Hardware; The 3.5-Hour Recruiting Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source