Gaurav Misra
speaker
155 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Gaurav Misra’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
monopolistic by nature, where it's really difficult to get something started and very easy to get killed. And only the biggest one actually wins and survives. And in that arena, they were able to make a place for themselves, mainly because of innovation. And this is just comes down to the CEO, he was able to out of all the random noise, see something and understand, yes, this will work.
And nobody will see it. But I know why it will work. And I think at the core of it was he had an understanding of the product and the customer in a way that nobody did. And nobody even came close to it. There were many moments in the company's history where he was like, we're going to do this. And everybody was like, no, we shouldn't do that. This is a bad idea. And he'd be like, I don't care.
We're doing it. We did it. And it was the best thing we ever did. That's the level to which his intuition was there. Snap was famous almost for like constantly innovating. Stories came out of Snap. The old Maps location sharing product and idea came out of there. There's so many things that we're innovating on. I think they kind of lost a little bit on sort of the public TikTok thing.
But that actually was something that didn't fit in their like pillar vision strategy, basically, because they're a private sharing platform. Their whole purpose was low abuse. People don't feel like you can't even reshare posts because that's a way to like embarrass somebody by like reposting that thing to other people who are not supposed to see it.
Everything was designed around feeling good, having fun and sharing with friends, which was really everything that people cared about at that time. And I think they kind of missed the TikTok thing because it was the exact opposite of that. It was actually shared to everybody.
And interestingly, it created similar dynamics where like sharing to everybody actually made you feel more private because there were so many people that people you know would never see it. Somebody else would see it. But that's the details.
I think on the downsides of Snap, one of the interesting things there is, and one of the learnings there is product market fit often doesn't have a lot to do with what people are doing day to day within the company. And once it exists, it can stay there despite the actions of the people.
So I think what ends up happening sometimes in bad cases is like people think that the wrong actions that they're taking are the contrarian right view because, well, the company is growing. So, of course, whatever I did was the right thing. But actually, the company is growing despite the wrong thing that was going on at the time.
And so it's difficult to tell what actually is causing the company to grow and what's the good thing and what's the bad thing. And a lot of people walk away from these types of high product market companies thinking that all the things they did were good things and there were no bad things because the company grew. But the reality is the company is growing despite those actions.
I think identifying those was a skill that I had to like really work on building to understand like how can we truly measure what we're launching, what we're building and understand what's a good thing and what's a bad thing. So what I'm really grateful for from that time is the ability to work with the CEO there.
He really brought me into the circle, like he had a great design team that he had built. A lot of the decision making was driven through the design team. It was a small set of people, like 10 to 12 people on that team, even when the company was many thousands and thousands of people overall post IPO.
So being a part of that team, learning from the great people on that team, I evolved my design career through this process. And I think his ability to like identify this is a person who will fit in well and will be able to learn and figure these things out. Props to him. Definitely doing something right.
Now I can't use that answer.
Yeah, I mean, I think... It's a little unfair. Besides that, I would say... Likewise, by the way, for me. If I were to give you a different answer, I think it would be just my parents making sure that I was born in the U.S., literally. Because, like, I was only here for, like, the first couple of years of my life.
I was born when my dad was doing his PhD at Northeastern University of Science and Economics. So he was there for, like, four or five years, basically, until then I was born in the middle of that. Then moved back to India after that. But I had the U.S. citizenship. Without that, I'd still be in India. Yeah. Yeah.
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