Gaurav Misra: evaluation

Transcript context

…I'm glad you talked about Snap. That's where I definitely wanted to go. This is where I was going to start. So I'm glad we circled back to your experience at Snap. So the reason I am interested in this is if you think about social networks like Snap is basically the last social network to have launched and stuck around other than TikTok, which I don't think is a social network. I think it's just this content platform. I don't think you're really interacting with people really. And that was 2011 when it launched. So it's been like 15 years since the last social network launch that has worked. And I think it's interesting also because there's rarely been a lot of insight into just how Snap operates. You were there really early. You're a big deal at Snap. You built a lot of really important features. So I wanted to spend a little time here, and it feels like a lot of things you learn from Snap you're bringing to your company now. So let me just ask, I think you may have answered this, but I'm curious if there's something else here just broadly maybe other than Ev's brain, what do you think was core to Snap being a successful consumer social product? There were a couple of different things that went well. I do think for a company like Snapchat or Social Network, the core product market fit can be extremely strong. 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, 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. And I think because of that, it actually sometimes teaches people the wrong things. It teaches people that the contrarian thing that they were doing was right when it was actually just wrong and the company just grew despite it. And I think some of the things that Snap did well and it needed to do really was 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 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, but obviously there's a CEO and the CEO was very product-led, his designer himself, but he surrounded himself with the design team. That was sort of the central team in the company. And the design team was like 10, 12 people. Basically, pretty small, even at 5, 6,000 employees it was that small still. Oh wow. At 6 or 6,000 employees. The design team was, you said how many, five or six people?…

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