How David Lieb Turned a Failing Startup Into Google Photos | Backstory

Summary

David Lieb shares his journey from a traditional engineering career path to starting his own app, "Bump," which was initially successful but eventually failed due to low user engagement. Through a series of insightful pivots and relentless determination, he and his team evolved their efforts into Google Photos, overcoming significant setbacks along the way. Even as he faced personal challenges, such as battling leukemia, David remained committed to innovation, ultimately joining Y Combinator to mentor the next generation of entrepreneurs.

Highlights

• David Lieb's journey from a suburb in Dallas to entrepreneurship began with a strong academic background in engineering.
• Despite initial success with the Bump app, its lack of frequent usage led to challenges.
• A turning point came when they identified a user need for photo sharing, leading to the development of Flock and eventually Google Photos.
• Despite setbacks, including being redirected to work on Google+, David persisted with his vision for Google Photos.
• Google Photos became an incredibly successful product with over a billion users within four years.
• While battling leukemia, David found solace in the photos he'd helped make accessible, underscoring the product's impact.
• Transitioning from a tech innovator to a mentor, David now helps guide new startups at Y Combinator.

Key Takeaways

• Find a real problem you're passionate about solving and go build a solution! 💡
• Failure is just a step towards success. Keep moving forward and learning! 🚀
• Trust your intuition when building products - build what you would use! 🤔
• To understand user needs, talk directly to your users. Their insights can pivot your product. 🗣️
• Even when faced with adversity, stick to your vision and push through challenges. 💪
• Support systems, like mentorship, can be vital in startup success and personal growth. 🤝
• Embrace change and new roles in your journey, such as transitioning from a player to a mentor. 🌟

Overview

David Lieb's story is one of resilience, innovation, and transformation. Growing up in a Dallas suburb, David was driven by his passion for math and science, which later burgeoned into a technical career. However, it was his desire to solve everyday problems, like the cumbersome process of sharing contact information, that led him to co-found the app Bump. Despite its initial success, Bump struggled with retaining users due to its infrequent use case, prompting David to pivot.

The true breakthrough came when David and his team learned through user interviews that their app was popular for photo sharing rather than contact exchange. This insight drove them to develop Flock, and laid the foundation for Google Photos. Despite facing internal corporate challenges at Google and having to covertly develop Google Photos, David’s tenacity paid off as Google Photos became a revolutionary product, reaching one billion users quickly.

During a personal battle with leukemia, David found strength and purpose in the work he had done, realizing the impact of Google Photos in preserving precious memories. This profound personal experience, combined with a professional career of highs and lows, led him to a new chapter at Y Combinator, where he now mentors aspiring entrepreneurs, helping them navigate the journey of building impactful companies.

How David Lieb Turned a Failing Startup Into Google Photos | Backstory Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 [Music] if you want to create something that billions of people will use a brand new product Google photos you have to be totally committed and you have to realize that the path to success is very rarely a straight line and you're almost certainly going to fail a few times or be thrown a curveball that you weren't expecting just talk to the ER nurse here it doesn't look good and you just have to keep moving forward no matter what I'm David leeb and this is my backstory
• 00:30 - 01:00 I grew up in a suburb of Dallas pretty normal childhood I was you know into Math and Science computers my dad was an engineer and my mom was a school teacher so very much a focus on like engineering math and science growing up I was one of the top students in in school and you know I wanted to be first in the class and so I got extremely competitive about that I really don't like losing I went to Princeton majored in electrical engineering there and computer science and kind of just continued the traditional path of like get good grades
• 01:00 - 01:30 get good internships after Princeton um you know I didn't really feel the urge to get a job so I went to Stanford and joined the PHD program in artificial intelligence so I did that met a bunch of cool people ended up working on what would be the beginning of the DARPA Grand Challenge which would turn into the self-driving cars that we have today but I was never a PhD researcher like I never felt at home amongst those people and that led me to drop out of the PHD program and go get a job at Texas Instruments back home in Texas I
• 01:30 - 02:00 remember sitting in my Cube at TI and I read these two 25-year-old kids sold YouTube for a billion dollars and that was the first moment that it became tangible to me that like oh those guys don't look much different than I do they don't seem that much different than I do could I do that sometime huh maybe if you were a you know smart engineer that aspired to do more than engineering at least in my era uh The Next Step was to go to business school so you would go and get your MBA and then graduate and become a manager at some tech company so
• 02:00 - 02:30 I pursued that path I I went to University of Chicago I started my MBA and that was like what I thought I was going to do but then the first week of business school I showed up you know we're in a a big room you're meeting all your classmates and the iPhone had just come out and we were all trying to get each other's phone numbers so we could text each other to like meet up and one day I typed in like 10 people's phone numbers and asked them to spell their last name and then I called them and they dismissed the call and they added my contact to their phone and I just
• 02:30 - 03:00 thought like well this is this is ridiculous why are we doing this we have these supercomputers that can run apps now in our in our pockets why hasn't somebody solved this you know the idea that you could share contact information by taking two phones and bumping them together popped into my head in an accounting class one day if you want to share contact info with a bump there's an app for that that became bump I emailed my buddy Andy um to see if we could build it and we started working on it we worked on it for maybe 3 three or 4 weeks just kind of on
• 03:00 - 03:30 nights and weekends as a side project submitted it to the app store for approval the app went live at the end of March 2009 and we did no promotion it just went on the App Store and some people found it um I think the first day like tens of people found it and the second day hundreds of people found it and the third day thousands of people found it and so pretty quickly it just started to take off um and we did a bunch of work then afterwards to try to get the word out we talked to press I would go hit up any blogger that I could
• 03:30 - 04:00 find but it really was driven by word of mouth I think I learned a few things from the beginning of bump um one is anybody can build anything like we had no expertise in doing this we just figured it out and I think the other thing that really resonated in hindsight is that when you're building a product for yourself you can really trust your own intuition about what it should be and how it should work we weren't mobile app developers we didn't know anything about building consumer products I just wanted to build a product that I enjoyed and I wanted to make it really good and
• 04:00 - 04:30 so all of the design decisions that we made just kind of fell out from my intuition so step one is find a problem that bugs you about the world and step two is go build it in the early days of building a product like you have to do everything there's no team that's going to support you there's no marketing team there's no engineering team it's it's just you all three of the founders were former Engineers um and so we just divided things up obviously Andy was the best coder so Andy wrote all the code I worked on kind of the algorithm and the design and Jake helped with design and
• 04:30 - 05:00 the early promotion of the product and so we kind of needed an excuse for the school and for our parents to work on bump but have it be like more legitimate I guess than just messing around with a side project so we decided to apply to YC on a whim so our goal is to turn bump into a verb just like Google has become a verb today U and we're looking forward to doing that this summer thanks we got into YC and the program was to come out to California for the summer for 3 months and and build your startup we got 16,000
• 05:00 - 05:30 667 of funding which in hindsight is pretty small uh but it was totally sufficient to come out to the Bay Area live on a friends floor and and build bump some more turns out I never went back to business school never finished that degree I had been on the traditional path of going to business school becoming a manager at a tech company and then this small little random moment of of having an idea for an app took me on a completely different career journey and YY went really well throughout the PCH the product kept
• 05:30 - 06:00 growing and by the time demo day came around in August we were actually the number two app on the entire App Store so we were like the most popular app in the world other than I glow stick which always will bother me our demo day pitch was pretty simple I showed a map of bumps happening live around the world and the map was just lighting up every second and so everybody realized the bump was like the hottest thing around MC Hammer invested people were dressing up as bump as their Halloween costume that fall fall Steve Jobs put our icon
• 06:00 - 06:30 on a slide on one of his pitch decks we were the the hot app of the time the problem is um people didn't keep using the app U and I think this is a thing that took us many years to figure out the frequency of use of bump was too low for the value that it provided people if you think about kind of a 2 by two grid where there's high frequency and low frequency and then high value per interaction and low value per interaction obviously you want to be in the high frequency high value box that's
• 06:30 - 07:00 the best place to be and it's okay if you're in the low frequency high value or high frequency low value but there's one box you don't want to be in which is the low frequency low value box and that's where we found ourselves with bump and in hindsight you know I realized we made a ton of mistakes we didn't ever have a credible idea for how we would make bump a business we hired a bunch of people to just keep up with demand and you know in hindsight we probably should have hired a lot slower we spent time going to conferences all the VCS wanted to talk to us so we took all the meetings we raised too much
• 07:00 - 07:30 money too quickly because we could um and it prevented us from realizing the real problems that we had in our business all the classic mistakes that you know we at YC now try to teach Founders to avoid uh we made them all ultimately we finally kind of came to terms that like oh this might not work like what are we going to do and so we went back to the very basic YY startup advice which is talk to your users if you don't know what to do go talk to your users we were many years into the bump Journey we'd burn earned $10
• 07:30 - 08:00 million or more probably probably more probably $15 million and I asked our team give me the email addresses of the top 100 users of bump around the world and that day I just emailed them all personally and I said hey I'm the founder of bump you're one of our best users would you mind talking to me on the phone today and that day uh I ended up talking to maybe like 20 or 30 of those people and I learned some interesting things we knew from our data that they were all primarily using bump to share photos and not share contact information but I didn't understand like
• 08:00 - 08:30 why like what was the context and by talking to those people I heard over and over and over again that day that they were using it to share photos of their family with their family members and that was something that was a big surprise to us we had no idea and when we thought about it we realized well the bump product is actually like not the best product in the world if you were going to solve that problem um to solve that problem you don't want to like physically have to touch your hands together in order to give somebody some photos so we realized well if we're going to solve photo sharing problem
• 08:30 - 09:00 like we should build a really great app for that uh and that's where we kicked off building our second app which was called flock so with flock you would just install the app you'd go live your life you'd take photos as you normally do and it would figure out which photos you took in the presence of your actual friends and we did this with geolocation with social graph a bunch of other inputs and help you share those photos with the people that you took them with and so we would go talk to people and ask them hey what do you think of flock like isn't it great and they would say oh yeah yeah I love it it's so great and
• 09:00 - 09:30 then it turns out they weren't using it I think it's really hard to get people to tell you hard things um and so the best way to do it is to actually look at quantitative data like look at the logs see if people are actually using it look at your retention curves um these things are really simple especially when you have very few users you know this was a pretty tough period right we had all these expectations on us we had 150 million users of bump it was the most popular app in the world still but we knew the secret which is it's going to fail our second attempt flock also
• 09:30 - 10:00 didn't work um we're running out of money and so I felt a lot of pressure this was you know probably one of the most challenging periods of of my life and I just wanted to figure out a way to like keep this airplane from crashing and so we went to PG we talked to Paul Graham and we told him what's going on here's here's our status he made us kind of think a little bit bigger than we were thinking so we we showed him flock and we said we got this really awesome photo sharing app but nobody's using it and he pushed us he said you know what
• 10:00 - 10:30 you should do you should just replace the entire photos app on the phone then people will probably use your sharing products and at the time I thought that was Preposterous like how could we ever do that um that would that would be impossible but as we got thinking about it we realized you know the the photos app on the iPhone isn't that good um and if we were designing it we would make it way better so we decided to go build that product with you know four or 5 months of Runway left we called it photo roll we never launched it it ran only on
• 10:30 - 11:00 my iPhone uh because we never scaled it to work on anybody else's but it was the product that we wanted as users of photos and iPhones at the time so I went around and tried to talk to a bunch of companies to see you know who might want to buy bump who might value this photo roll idea that we had and it really was hard for me to accept but like no one wanted bump it was not valuable but this idea of photo roll and the demo that we had built was something that several
• 11:00 - 11:30 companies indicated you know you might be right like maybe that should be the photo app of the future ultimately we sold the company to Google and the plan was to go turn photo roll rebuild it with Google technology and make it Google photos I was actually pretty optimistic about what we could do we had an aligned plan like it was very clear we were going to go build this product and I was just certain in my bones that it was going to be a winner then we showed up to Google on the first day and there had been a reor um and all of the plans that we had agreed upon with our sponsor were out the window and we were
• 11:30 - 12:00 tasked to go work on Google+ The Social Network and I basically just believed so strongly based on all of the time that we had spent working on bump that I was certain Google photos would be a billion user product if we built it and I kind of just didn't do what my boss has asked me to do um and it created a ton of conflict I was definitely not the model employee I just kind of did it on the on the back burner I would go every day and do my day job and then in the afternoon I'd go spend some time with our lead
• 12:00 - 12:30 designer and design Google photos and we did that over several weeks and we got to a point where we had a plan for like what we would go build I started to get some support from the engineers on the team they all looked at what we were working on and they said oh I want that product too like why don't we build that instead of this social network that we don't necessarily want and we just kind of like slowly got some groundwell support despite the fact that our our bosses really were explicitly telling us not to do that I think a big part of this for me personally was we had had
• 12:30 - 13:00 this enormous opportunity with bump and then by many measures we'd blown it right we we ruined it and I didn't want to be a loser I didn't want to have spent the last 5 years of my my life building this thing that ultimately like wouldn't have any you know Legacy in the world and I saw the opportunity with Google photos to build something that would be very long lasting that would make all the work that we did on bump the 30 people that worked at bump over those years make all of their contributions actually matter in the world and I just couldn't let it go like I couldn't say no to that opportunity I
• 13:00 - 13:30 didn't want bump to be a failure and so I just didn't take no for an answer when when the bosses told me you know we're not doing Google photos I said okay boss and then I went and worked on Google photos so ultimately they told me to leave the team right in fact twice I was uh fired from the team and told to go find a new role at Google I called in a bunch of favors um we had a bunch of friends throughout the valley that knew various people at Google and I just used every single pass pathway I could to get
• 13:30 - 14:00 support to build Google photos and eventually uh we won the battle and uh we were given the green light to go build it so I think this is a lesson that U took me a while to learn but you can take way more risk than you think and if you do there's big upside available so once we got the green light um you know it was a team of like 20 of Us From Bump latched on to maybe a team of like 100 people core people from Google with access to all of this incredible technology and we were able to build all of gole photos basically
• 14:00 - 14:30 from scratch in about 9 months and we launched it at Google iio in 2015 I'm thrilled to introduce a brand new product Google photos the core idea of Google photos was a home for all of your life's memories it was a place you could keep your photos and videos we did very early pioneering work on AI to make them searchable uh organize your photos by face create things do editing for you it was this idea of building a photo assistant for every human on the
• 14:30 - 15:00 planet Google photos was a hit from day one and it grew like crazy after that you know things were great we were like an autonomous team inside of Google we could build what we wanted I was the product lead probably the best period of my career in terms of just building and iterating really quickly the next few years things were great Google photos grew to more than a billion users in less than 4 years which I think is the fastest growing product of all time at least at the time so things were good we were popping champagne in the office
• 15:00 - 15:30 everything was Ruby and then I got cancer whale we know no it's leukemia surprise I was feeling just kind of a little tired this was in the middle of Co we had just had our first kid so I had a 5-month-old I wasn't sleeping very much I just kind of felt a little rundown a little tired made sense I'd been working non-stop for the last 15 years but I decided to you know on a whim go to one Medical on Valen Street in San Francisco and get
• 15:30 - 16:00 checked out the next day they did the cursory blood test just to be sure and I got the um emergency phone call from the Atlanta Dispatch Center and the person on the line said you need to go to the ER as soon as possible um there's something very wrong with your blood I uh went to the the ER in San Francisco with my wife you know we're double masked this is the height of covid and they took me back and poked and prodded and you know the doctor's faces were all very serious uh and so I realized is like oh this might be a big deal
• 16:00 - 16:30 for 24 hours they really didn't have anything to tell me they like ruled out a few things but it was clear they didn't know what was wrong with me yet just talk to the ER nurse here it doesn't look good and I remember that night was probably the hardest single night of my life I thought I might die like I I tried to calculate the probability in my head just given the inputs I had I had been given what was the chance I didn't wake up in the morning and in my head that night I had pegged it at 50% so I thought like that
• 16:30 - 17:00 was it there's a chance like coin flip maybe I don't wake up so what did I do like when you know you think about being faced with the end of your life and you can imagine it sometimes and think like what would I do if I knew I was going to die well I did and what I did was look at photos and videos on Google photos of my family I decided I don't want to die in my sleep so I'm going to stay awake as long as possible tonight and just enjoy the memories that I've had and then I fell asleep and I woke up the next morning and I was alive and it was um pretty
• 17:00 - 17:30 amazing to wake up and be alive you take that for granted every day don't you but then that day they came in and they said hey we're going to do one more test um and they did a bone marrow biopsy and they pretty quickly concluded I had leukemia which was not good news but the good news was there were paths to treat it and the doctor said we're going to get started tomorrow um and so at that point I was kind of like all right I got Delta a tough hand that sucks but uh I
• 17:30 - 18:00 know what I need to do and I've done hard things before so let's get it done so the treatment plan was basically one year of what I would call hard chemo followed by three years of easier chemo it was a challenging year I was in the hospital for 38 days straight Harper it's Day 26 of Papa's chemo we're almost done we're just waiting for the cells to come back right I remember when I got out my wife picked me up and we rolled the window down of the car car and I smelled the smells of San Francisco and
• 18:00 - 18:30 it was like the most amazing thing that I had ever experienced it really changed my mindset of how I wanted to spend the rest of my life go go I realized one more thing which was the job that I had been doing at Google over the years it it had evolved and it wasn't anymore the job that I loved which was building products for users I just got this like bonus life period granted to me like I thought I was going to die and now I didn't and I have this like extra piece of Life how
• 18:30 - 19:00 do I want to spend it and the answer was not to be a bureaucrat at a big company I wanted to work with people who were building the future I left Google in September 2022 and joined YC and started working with Founders immediately working at YC is great U you know you get to be in the trenches working with the people who are at the frontier of the future and you get to tell them all the mistakes you made and support them
• 19:00 - 19:30 along the way and maybe be that honest voice that you know I wish I had had in hindsight in building my startup having gone through what I've gone through both in the personal realm and also professionally I've realized now my role is to be the coach rather than the player on the field like be the person who can help the next generation of Founders build the products that we will all use in the future [Music]