Navigating AI and Product Development in Startups

Gaurav Misra is the co-founder and CEO of Captions, an AI-powered video creation company and one of the most successful consumer AI products in the world today. Previously he was a product leader at Snap, where he created the design engineering function and spent years helping develop features used by hundreds of millions of users worldwide. With a background in both engineering and design, Gaurav brings a unique cross-functional perspective to product development.

What you’ll learn:

1. Why the “ship a marketable feature every week” approach helps his team stay focused and the product stay top of mind for users amid constant AI breakthroughs

2. How to balance rapid shipping with maintaining quality by cutting scope rather than compromising on timelines

3. The “secret roadmap” strategy that helps Captions develop breakthrough features competitors never see coming

4. Why taking on strategic technical debt is essential for startups to outpace larger companies

5. How Captions accidentally ignored their most successful product for 1.5 years (and why it still grew to 500K users with no updates or support)

6. How Snap’s unique product development approach—with designers functioning as PMs—enabled their success as the last major social network to break through

7. Why AI video will transform marketing before other industries

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Brought to you by:

• Brex — The banking solution for startups

• Paragon—Ship every SaaS integration your customers want

• Coda—The all-in-one collaborative workspace

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Find the transcript at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-win-in-the-ai-era-gaurav-misra

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Where to find Gaurav Misra:

• X: https://x.com/gmharhar

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gamisra1/

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Where to find Lenny:

• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com

• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/

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In this episode, we cover:

(00:00) Gaurav’s background

(04:47) The exciting era of AI and startups

(09:30) Staying top of mind

(11:26) Tips for staying focused

(13:14) Shipping marketable features weekly

(19:03) Managing technical debt in startups

(25:31) Snap’s unique product development approach

(32:09) Brainstorming with AI

(35:09) What Snap got right

(41:06) Scaling with a small, agile team

(49:33) The shift toward prototyping in product management

(51:47) The product manager role

(55:40) Snap’s mission and product decisions

(01:02:13) The future of AI-generated video

(01:10:20) Leveraging AI for marketing

(01:14:37) Failure corner

(01:20:21) Lightning round and closing thoughts

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Referenced:

• Snap: https://www.snap.com/

• Captions: https://www.captions.ai/

• Iron Man on Disney+: https://www.disneyplus.com/movies/iron-man/6aM2a8mZATiu

• J.A.R.V.I.S.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J.A.R.V.I.S.

• Cursor: https://www.cursor.com/

• Devin: https://devin.ai/

• Eye contact: https://www.captions.ai/eye-contact

• Nvidia: https://www.nvidia.com

• Descript: https://www.descript.com

• Evan Spiegel on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/evan-spiegel-8ab74034a/

• TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/

• Spotlight: https://www.snapchat.com/spotlight/

• Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/building-product-at-stripe-jeff-weinstein

• Patrick Collison on X: https://x.com/patrickc

• DeepSeek: https://www.deepseek.com/

• ByteDance Goku: New video generation AI model, better than OpenAI Sora: https://medium.com/data-science-in-your-pocket/bytedance-goku-new-video-generation-ai-model-better-than-openai-sora-56c017a320a5

• Will Smith eating spaghetti and other weird AI benchmarks that took off in 2024: https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/31/will-smith-eating-spaghetti-and-other-weird-ai-benchmarks-that-took-off-in-2024/

• Silo on AppleTV+: https://tv.apple.com/us/show/silo/umc.cmc.3yksgc857px0k0rqe5zd4jice

• Severance on AppleTV+: https://tv.apple.com/us/show/severance/umc.cmc.1srk2goyh2q2zdxcx605w8vtx

• Linear: https://linear.app/

• Superhuman: https://superhuman.com/

• Notion: https://www.notion.com

• Perplexity: https://www.perplexity.ai/

• OmniHuman-1 AI Video Generation Looks Too Real: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fY0KB516m-E

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Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com.

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Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed.

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