Gaurav Misra: evaluation

Transcript context

…You talked about how you come up with these secret roadmap ideas. I'm just intrigued by this. I'm going to spend a little more time here. Does your team ever work with an AI LLM to help brainstorm? I imagine that's where things will go, where you're actually jamming. The AI agent is brainstorming along with you. Honestly, I would like for it to go there. It hasn't gone there yet. We haven't done that exactly, because the problem is context. And I think just the context of 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. And I spend a lot of time with RPMs and designers imparting anything that I understand and I've learned over the many years 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't even put it into words exactly. And honestly, this is probably my own feeling but, and I need to work on this, but there is something to it. I do remember at Snap for example, I think one of the most unique things about Snap and the CEO Evan Spiegel was that he had an unmatched understanding of the user. I think years and years and years of the company's existence past, almost a decade. And nobody understood the user like he did. 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. And nobody would understand why. Everyone would line up and be like, "Great." Round of applause for everyone, but no one knew why. A great example of that is a lot of this was figured out in retrospect too. I think there was a point at which Snap declared that they're a camera company and a lot of people laugh at them and said, "Camera. What are we making digital cameras or something?" Or, "Why is it a camera company? " But I think at the core of it was this idea that Snapchat opens to the camera and that was actually the differentiator. That 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 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. And I figured this out much later, actually, but it's such a powerful idea. 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?…

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