Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:18:09 · Josh Woodward
[00:18:09] S1: Yeah. One of the things on this one, and I talked a lot to the team about this too, is sometimes a team is looking for, "Hey, the leader makes the decision," and that's kind of where it comes from. What I've found is the opposite. The team usually knows before the leader knows, and the signs are like, "Does the passion start to run out? You've tried everything you can think of and it's just not working." And people know when a project's not working or a relationship's not working, that's something that people see. And so I think as a leader, what I try to do say in Labs or even some of our features in Gemini is how do you create an environment where people can ask those uncomfortable questions and be able to say, "Hey, I don't think this is working." And yesterday, just as an example, we had a feature we were really excited about in Gemini we were going to launch and we got some of the early data back. People went out, looked in the eyes, and it just wasn't there. And so I was so proud of the PM on the team because she was like, "I don't think we should launch this. It's not good." And so I replied all, I was like, "This is great. Thank you for doing this." And so it's like, how do you create a culture where that team can call both good things and bad things out? And I guess in that way as a leader, in my case, I trust the team a lot because they're the ones every day trying to make this thing go. And I think if they're like, "Hey, it's not going," then it's like, "All right, that's okay. Let's pivot. Let's do something different."
00:19:36 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:19:36] S0: I have to ask you this question. I was going to ask it later, but I'm so curious. It's so interesting that you oversee Labs, which is zero to one experiments, try stuff that's totally new. And then the Gemini app, which is one of the most popular apps in the world with probably a billion users. How did that come to be? Why is that the structure under your team?
00:19:56 · Josh Woodward
[00:19:56] S1: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I guess in some ways they are very different ends of the scale. You're right. Gemini over a billion users, it's global. Labs, we joke on Labs. Sometimes our early projects, zero to one stuff, we'll get so excited about 10,000 mouse and most other products dashboards don't count that low. So it's kind of the joke on the team. But I think maybe there's a few common pieces though, even though the scale is different. I think one, the type of people that are attracted to these things, even Gemini, despite its size, is very much got a zero to one heartbeat all over it. And so I think part of it is the type of builder, the type of person you're attracting, these blurring lines between what it takes. Two, we're all AI kind of nuts and maniacs. We love this stuff. We can't get enough of it. We're building all the time. The third one though I would say is a little bit of everyone on the team, we talk a little bit about the order of how we think about our priorities and the mantra on the team is users first, Google second, and our product third. And so Labs third or Gemini third. And I think that unites us too. And that's like we don't try to do things for our own team. We're very much part of team Google, but also ultimately it's like, is someone loving this on the other end of this product? And so that does tie it all together, but they are on different ends of the spectrum for sure on terms of size, like conventional numbers.
00:21:29 · Lenny Rachitsky, Josh Woodward
[00:21:29] S0: Yeah. It's quite confusing as an outsider, but I get it. Is everything you're doing in Labs now AI based? Is there anything non-AI driven in Labs now? [00:21:40] S1: Yeah, it's all AI driven right now for sure. When we started four or five years ago, we had a few other areas we were exploring and we made the call, at least for the foreseeable future, go all in on AI. We don't just do software stuff though. I mean, Google Beam is one of the projects we're working on is this incredible kind of magic mirror that can create a 3D version. We should get you one. [00:21:41] S0: I'll take it. [00:22:04] S1: Where you can kind of talk to someone almost like they're a hologram on the other side. [00:22:04] S0: Like you're seeing them. [00:22:09] S1: Yeah. So we are exploring other adjacent things to AI. You could consider that almost like AI hardware in a way. [00:22:18] S0: I'll take it. Thank you. I'll send you my address. So it feels like consumer right now is in a really fun place where there's always been the sense of consumer's dead. There's nothing you can do. Facebook got on Google. There's no way to compete against these juggernauts that have taken the consumer world, but AI feels like it's unlocking a lot of opportunity in consumer. I'm curious what your hypothesis is for where a major breakthrough might happen in a consumer app.
00:22:45 · Josh Woodward
[00:22:45] S1: Yeah, I feel like consumer is one of the most exciting, competitive, all the things happening right now. So it feels completely opposite to me from that kind of view. A couple of areas I think that are kind of interesting. I mean, one, I think there's a big question. We talked a little bit earlier of just where's entertainment going to go? Are we going to be looking at different types of feeds forever or are there ways that this technology can bring us maybe closer together in the real world or do things with other people? I mean, there's different views on where that could go, more around bots or more around people. And so I think that's very interesting space. I think we're watching right before us now, the entire messaging chat space felt like, hey, that was sort of maybe solved. There's lots of different experiments happening on that right now, both inside Google and outside. So that feels like a whole nother area that maybe is no longer as fixed as it once felt. And then maybe the third one I would throw out is I still feel like going back again to the problems, what are some of the big problems people face in the world? And I think what are things that are super scarce? Time on earth, how much money people have and how they can save money. These kind of memories or experiences that people can have kind of IRL together and that kind of thing. So I do feel like there's maybe new consumer products to be built that can go after a lot of that stuff that whether it takes the form factor of a chatbot or a personal agent or whatever that's going to look like, I think it's kind of yet to be invented in a lot of ways.
00:24:31 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:24:31] S0: Okay. Let me ask you a spicy question along these lines. I'm so curious to get your take. So it feels like every AI assistant app that's launching these days basically sucks in Gmail and Google Calendar and Docs, all the Google data, all this juicy Google stuff, connects and does all these magical things with it. Within Google, I cannot do any of these things. It's so hard to build anything. First of all, you may be working on AI assistant, but there's nothing there yet as far as I can see. And then just generally, it feels like everyone's just taking all this juicy data and doing magical things with it and Google hasn't. What's kept you guys from doing something like that? Is it privacy concerns? Is it orgs bureaucracy stuff? Is it coming? What can you say?