Why Marissa Mayer Is Betting Big On Consumer Tech
let's talk with Marissa Meyer the longtime Google executive and former Yahoo CEO about whether new consumer technology stands a chance and where the AI race goes next that's coming up right after this welcome to Big technology podcast a show for cool-headed nuance conversation of the tech world and Beyond Marissa Meyer is here she's the co-founder and CEO of sunshine and before that was Google employee number 20 holding an array of executive positions there for 13 years before becoming the president and CEO of Yahoo now at sunshine she has a new contacts app a new photo sharing app and more and she's here to talk all about that and plenty more with us today Marissa welcome to the show thank you so much for having me thanks for being here you know you're making a bold bet introducing apps in the consumer space where so many Venture capitalists and Founders seem to have written off the space entirely let me just read you uh what mg seagler who's a venture partner at GV which is formerly Google Ventures and one of my must-reads says about consumer products today and I think the Folly of starting them and I would love to get you to respond to that um so mg says it really just boils down to time we all have the apps and services we use on a daily basis once one is lodged in that cycle EXT it's extremely hard to dislodge both because of habits and for social apps Network effects and whereas 10 to 15 years ago everyone was gunko to try new apps to see what might stick we're all now stuck with what we have what do you think about that well I do think mg is right about one thing which is that consumer apps tend to be stickier Than People realize yes there's low switching costs you can try new things but people do have their routines they have their habits and they and they do tend to stick with them that said I do think people are really dismissive of the consumer space people feel like everything's been done we already have our stuff as mg says and I feel like when I've watched the pattern of consumer technology over time people tend to say that and then something new comes along and they say well everything was done except for that and then right you know and then then they say now now everything's been done and then it continues for a while like that and then and something new comes along they say well well well that that hadn't been done before you're right and that's actually really useful and so I think that there is actually more opportunity in the consumer space than people realize that's one of the reasons why we're very focused on it at sunshine and I think that at the core of consumer what you really need to do is focus on the user needs what is what user problem are you trying to solve and you do need to aim at problems that are pervasive that affect a lot of users every day where you feel you can add a lot of value I think that's really the key um and so you know a lot of times these are spaces that might be very crowded you might have to do some disruption um and they're they're bigger bets uh bigger bets in smaller bets right because it's bigger in terms of the overall target audience uh and the amount of time and and attention you're trying to capture smaller in that sometimes because they're pervasive they're just a little bit amount of time every single day from the user um and have they're a smaller touch point but I think that that's really the key is to not discount the consumer space as done because I think there's a lot of things that have yet to be invented that are incredibly useful and instead to focus on those user problems and those user pain points you're trying to solve for and make sure that it's something that's really relatable to a lot of people yeah I'm with you and I personally would love to see more innovation in the consumer space these apps are just fun to use and anyone who says that we're at like you know the maturation point for what consumer app should be is totally wrong because there is so much more to do and we're going to talk about your specific apps uh in a moment but the the interesting thing is you know you talk about smaller bets right just a little bit of time and actually mg's post was about uh be real which like was this great antidote to the sort of polished photo sharing that we do and takes like what like 30 seconds a day to use and he talked about how that was this big hit and then went away and he continues his post and talks about like you know yes you can do it like and gives tiktock as as an example and and here's uh here's what he says he goes but but but Tik Tock yes you two can build Tik Tock all it takes is algorithms trained over time on millions of users in China acquiring another company which was already operating in the US market and then spell spending billions of dollars to Market it on meta properties to siphon off users to your network and even then it won't work unless your product is actually great those millions of users will just turn so do you think that he's he's overhyping the challenge I mean it's I don't think that he's right in saying that this stuff is baked but the challenge is great right because if you think about the consumer apps that have broken through let's say since I don't know Instagram uh Tik Tock is is Tik Tok the only big one what's your thought on this uh I think that there are in theory that you know there are more apps that of broken out in my mind I do think that he's right there's a big barrier to entry in some of these cases especially when you talk about video because video is you know it's expensive to move around it's expensive in terms of user time uh in terms of how people consume it it's seral as opposed to parallel so you know the way you have to engineer the stream and things like that just to make sure that you really hold attention uh is more intense so I think he's got some good points uh in terms of Tik Tok and Video in particular that said I think that again if you look at that core of what people are doing in consumer what are you helping them do and if you're helping them do something that they need to do anyway and you're helping them do it better and with new innovation I think that that is really green field uh because I think people are always looking for ways to be more efficient they like trying things new right we are creatures that love novelty and so I think that those types of things have a real chance of of of breaking through and if there's something that helped you handle your everyday tasks again something that we really like to focus on here at sunshine I think the odds that becomes part of your routine and a critical part of your routine is is is there so and that's where you've decided to focus uh contacts birthdays event planning photo sharing uh I'm a new user of your apps I just downloaded uh shine and sunshine context shine is for the photo sharing and it's autogenerating albums for me already just like shortly after downloading which is uh pretty cool now I noticed that Sunshine's been around for a while like about six years and I think was it Lumi Labs beforehand or U but anyway um I'd love to hear your you you obviously went through a journey you know between founding the company and deciding this is where you wanted to focus so can you talk a little bit about that sure well when we first started the company we knew the broad space we were interested in we loved consumer applications and we wanted things that were useful every day but that's a really broad space so we did a lot of experimentation to really think through where do we want to start where could we add value uh and we were really interested in people's relationships how are groups formed you know the soccer team the class at your child's school you know your friends from college how are groups formed what makes them cohesive how do they get together how do you have those shared experiences so we got very interested in groups and events but we realized to do groups and events well we really needed to help people stay in touch so we started with contacts because for us those were foundational we learned a lot about contacts Sunshine contacts today is the highest rated app in the app store for contact management and we think it's the best uh obviously but it does a great job taking your contacts duplicating them updating them enriching them so we find your contacts um in the White Pages we find them on Facebook we find them on LinkedIn and we also connect them with your email which is really key because we can get a lot of information out of signatures and out of emails that can really make your address book that much more useful so we're really proud of of sunshine contacts but as I said for us that was a foundational portion of what we wanted to build in that overall pursuit of of that everyday utility around groups and events and so what we launched last week shine is our photo sharing for groups app it takes basically a time and a place and lets people join an album and share in Full Resolution their photos and it's AI powered and that it understands and tries to present photos that are sharew worthy for automatic upload uh and it also does things like reduces duplicates the same thing we were doing in contacts we're doing in photos uh and it makes it easier to share photos uh across people who might not have each other's contacts it might be a friend of a friend at an event that you're at that brings me to events at the same time that we launch shine uh the app we also launch shine on the web which helps you with event organization and so there you can set up your event we have fast fluid communication around our VPS and we also have breathtakingly gorgeous invitations made by generative AI uh and so overall we think that these two work really well together you can use them separately of course but they basically overall help you capture special moments when you're together with friends right and so I'm putting all these uh different areas that you're working in together and I'm looking at okay so it's photos contacts events um to me it seems like it's almost breaking down what Facebook used to do well and trying to build it back in in a different maybe more of a utility versus a social network what do you think about that thought you know as I said for us we're very focused on what we think people need every day what we think we Delight them what we think will make their relationship stronger and I do think that there were things and are things that that Facebook does really well for us we're not so much following that template as opposed to just looking at people's everyday tasks and overall what's getting in the way and I think we can all agree today photo sharing is really broken the number of times you might say oh let me take that on my phone too or you know don't forget to send me that photo uh when you're parting you know at the end of of time together you know those types of things and the odd that you get the photo is probably pretty low um maybe for some people it's higher but I think that is overall pretty low and so we wanted to say look if a photo really belongs to the time and a place and the people who were there it should be easy especially among friends and people who are connected even through other people to seamlessly share those photos and at the end you know right now ai is working on things like Global facial recognition or for a lot of us we spend a lot of our time pinching and zooming and trying to make sure that we have the the T the the shot that has the right expression the eyes open all of those types of things and those are all things that shine can do easily and well right and you know I won't press the issue too much but it does seem like you know the one thing that really set me off on this path was uh seeing birthdays there it's like well photo sharing it actually used to be that you would share that in your newsfeed birthdays you would see it on the right rail like there really is this uh opportunity for an unbundling of some of the bigger you know social utilities that we've had for a while and that's kind of where where this might come in and then it sort of leads to my next question to you which is that this is there's there's a huge AI uh portion to what you're trying to to do you I think you talked about it a little bit whether it's like finding the right photo you know figuring out who who to share D duplicating like these are all something you need something that's artificially intelligent to do I imagine and it's interesting because if you're starting these new consumer apps the other question is is Big Tech just going to do what you do um and so I I'd love to talk to you a little bit about that the first big question you know having set that up to you is do you think this AI moment is going to make big Tech even stronger than it is or do you think it will give startups like yours a chance to like really fill in some of the gaps that they haven't tended to for a while now that they've gotten bigger and slower uh I think that overall it's a great opportunity a great moment for uh for startups I think that yes big Tech is providing an amazing platform the AI models and the llms that we have today enable us to do things that you know we could only dream of just a few years ago but I think that in terms of the fact that we can access apis for these things we can apply them to specific domains and specific problems I think it really allows the uh a startup to build that much more quickly build that much more intelligently and the type of focus that comes with being in a smaller company and much more strategically focus on something um is a great opportunity for startups so yes I do think this is a moment when big Tech Will Thrive for obvious reasons related to AI but I also think it's a great moment to be in the startup World building something that's really relentlessly focused on a specific domain are there any other ways that AI work in your products that I didn't touch on sure uh we have a few uh so we uh use AI in shine on our photos app to uh to do things like d duplicate to overall uh understand um and and understand when you might be doing something that's share worthy either on a photo level or on an album level you mentioned earlier the suggested albums it's one of my favorite features the fact that the AI can figure out where I tend to take interesting group photos and where I don't and make those kinds of suggestions to me is something that relies on AI in our Events app we're using generative AI so different type um to make beautiful invitations and we do have gotten reviews for imitations they are my view is they are the the best out there in terms of really helping build a mood and a theme and anticipation for your event uh and in things like sunshine contacts we're deploying uh text recognition and pattern recognition to overall do extraction around signatures so we can figure out which of your contacts is this person and we can ultimately pull in their professional information phone numbers uh and all of those pieces to really make your contact that much more up to-date uh and enriched and I think this gets to a really good point which is that a lot of people say don't even bother trying to compete in AI because it takes so much compute and the models are so expensive to train but there are applications it seems like you're saying that you can build on top of these very expensive models and actually do things that are unique and differentiated without having to spend let's say hundred million on trading your own llm or you know text recognition model yes I think that foundational AI has a huge barrier to entry but I think applied AI taking these models and applying them in a specific space and a specific way uh is a really terrific opportunity right now and I also think that the fact that you that there's lots of different types of AI being developed by big Tech is is helpful and what's nice is I personally don't necessarily think that the winner in llms will necessarily be the winner in visual creation and so as a startup the fact that you can pick whichever model or whichever offering and API you feel fits your needs best is great where in some cases the big tech companies are going to end up using just their own models and not necessarily being able to use um what they see as as best of Industry I think overall could be limiting for them and so I like the fact that we're able to to shop different models and ultimately find the one that fits our needs best right and so you've been uh within Google um there's this like perspective out there that like a second the second like some startup does something right Google or Facebook or you know you name it we'll copy it and or yeah we'll copy it and bake it into their products so like Google obviously does photo sharing with Google photos contact management I mean like as you open up sunshine contacts you're like the first two things that you're plugging into are email and Google contacts um is there something that having been inside the company that gives you confidence that they just aren't able to or won't end up taking the features that you've built and then baking them into their own apps uh I mean I think there's always a concern that you could have someone who fast follows or copies something that you're successful in but I think that the type of focus that a startup can bring is really valuable um being really relentlessly focused on that that's how of course Google got it start being really relentlessly focused on search even Gmail that launched 20 years ago uh this week like ultimately was really it was a search-based lens on email which it turns out is really useful and and people hadn't thought of email that way uh in the past but taking that lens where you have a lot of deep learnings and insights about your users and applying that to a problem I think ultimately is how you stay ahead uh even if you have a much larger company competing with you right and so you know looking at this type of startup um if someone didn't know the context here they would be like oh this is like a pretty like pretty easy to see the path that this startup takes off and then gets acquired within Google um is this are you going to stay the course alone or if you know let's say suar calls up and says we want to acquire this and come in and run some of our consumer products is that something you're open to uh you know for me this adventure obviously what I'm mostly focused on is impact I want to have a large group of users a large user base that's using the products and finding value in it every day and I think if we're successful in that there's all kinds of opportunities but for me what really intrigued me and and brought me to being an entrepreneur was the act of building a company not necessarily be building a feature um or building a team I really love the design problem of working on a company as a whole right having a product a business model A Team a culture that all works together to build something that can provide a lot of value and stay on the test of time so our hope would be to be able to continue independently um I've learned in business you should never say never uh but our goal is to really build and design something that has that type of strength okay so let's talk a little bit about some of these models that you may or may not be building on top of um beginning with opening AI uh what's your view of the state of open AI right now obviously there's been some turbulence um but it seems like that's potentially behind it um but the technology thing really becomes interesting now because you have this gp4 model that's out there they might be on their way to releasing GPT 5 sometime this year but the competition's really good so what would you uh say is the state of the company right now uh I think that open AI at least in my view at the moment has the lead both in text generation uh chat gbt as well as with Dolly uh but obviously it's a fiercely competitive space and I think that those um those things can be won and lost quickly and there's a lot of really able competitors obviously I've been close to Google and have a real fondness for it but I think in terms of the stable of talent they have as well as the type of data they have to run on uh I think that you know you can't count them out yeah and so I've heard you talk a little bit about which model will win and you did draw a parallel between what's going on with AI Bots now or AI models and search and I I was like kind of surprised to hear you talk about search how you talked about how search was effectively commoditized but every now and again there would be one answer that Google might give that was better than the others and that helped build Google's like long-term trust and right now we're in this moment where these models these AI models are on their way to commoditization so I'm curious like what you think will enable these models to differentiate themselves is it that better answer every 30 tries or something or is it something else I think that that brings me back to the first question you asked in the podcast around the stickiness of consumer apps I think that one of the things we learned as we built Google and it grew is that yes there was a lot there was kind of aead of queries the queries that people do all the time and it didn't matter what search engine you used for those they were all pretty much the same it's the long tale of queries deep research queries queries that people had never done before where Google's flexibility and depth and comprehensiveness and speed really set us apart we you get much better answers there that said you know when we saw it like the difference between us and even the second best search engine was sometimes pretty narrow 3% 5% as you said at which point in time you're saying well look you're really only getting a better answer with Google once out of every one out of every 20 tries or one out of every 30 tries and two things we saw one once you become part of someone's routine the odds they keep turning to you as their search engine is really high so as I said consumer apps are stickier Than People realize the other is that people are so grateful when they get a novel insightful answer or result that they it builds a huge amount of Allegiance the fact that you can just really nail someone's query you know one in 30 times one in 20 times that stands out in their mind Google brought them something that no one else was able to bring them and the type of Allegiance and loyalty that builds among consumers and users is is really quite profound and I think in many ways underestimated and I think we're going to see the same thing happen uh in some of these chat interfaces if you start to realize wait I just like the types of answers I get better here I get better insights I get answers that speak to me more that you know Express themselves more in language that I can use if I'm asking the model to write something for me things like that I think that those are you know those can be quite profound I noticed that even in in Gmail you know we'll do the autoc compose and uh I was talking with um a friend of mine and we were talking about the fact that like we would never write yeah in an email you know yeah comma as an answer but it frequently composes that and you're like look it's little things like that where if over time the time savings and just knowing you well enough to know that you would always write yes comma as opposed to yeah comma those types of little things make a big difference in terms of how at home you feel with the technology how much you feel like you can rely on the technology the type of Time Savings it gives you how well it understands you and so sometimes it's those little things around the edges the 3% of queries where you're much better the little things that you say well look I might speak that way but I would never write that way um having technology that really understands that and brings that to bear ultim Ely can make the difference especially in a very competitive space like this yeah and those Gmail Auto uh replies or Auto auto um complet they're unfailingly polite I feel like they've taught me to become a more polite email emailer which I appreciate um and maybe it's boring fruit because here we are talking after a cold email so thank you Gmail on that front um another thing that that you brought up which is uh a way that these Bots can differentiate themselves is personality and it does seem like all these Bots right now have the same personality it's I don't know it's kind of boring they're all pretty boring they're very helpful but they're they're not like someone you're like someone I'm already anthropomorph anthropomorphizing these things but you know they're they're not someone you're excited to talk to you're like oh okay let's see if this is useful like the one that's taken a shot at doing a personality is grock from Elon Musk and it's pretty cringe so um talk a little bit about that I'm curious to hear your thoughts on like is the lager here just going to open up and try to make a more personable bot or um kind of like a psychobot that doesn't have any guard rails like I'm personally I maybe I'm alone but I'd love to have one that like we'll just talk about anything with you and use this intelligence that it has baked in to like really do some of the wacky stuff it did for instance when Kevin ruse was talking with Sydney and the Sydney B tried to break up his marriage mm um you know I think that it's interesting in the early days of Google I talked to a Hollywood producer uh who was doing some some side collaboration with Google and he felt really strongly that search engines were going to have to develop a personality that people were going to say oh I'm choosing between Google or Yahoo or you know Microsoft um and that there's going to have to be flavors the same way there is on like CBS ABC NBC right in terms of like what shows they would carry and you know there's something about what he said that made sense to me but in my view it didn't play out that way at all and I think it's because you know for you when you're you know a search engine is fundamentally almost like a teacher right it's bringing you information you need to trust it needs to have a personality that has integrity that's trustworthy but a lot of times you don't necessarily want it to be super personality Rich you really want it to be efficient and and pretty much to the point and I think that there the fact that it was somewhat you know Google in his presentation did sort of Fade Into the background right it might be something that you was know more bland than a Hollywood producer might have actually in envisioned was actually helpful and I also think that put the focus on the quality of the answers we were providing I think there's a couple of things that are going to happen in the AI space if I had to guess um I think that we will will see that when you're doing work and really conversing one-on-one with the uh with the AI I think you're ultimately going to want to have low personality not necessarily objectionable personality you want to feel understood but you don't want that necessarily to get in the way and be distracting because it overall it makes you less efficient I think if you're asking AI to write on your behalf is going to become very important that it understands how you like to express yourself it'll you know if if it does it will result in fewer edits um and a better you know first draft of a product things like that and so I think that that you'll see a few different places in terms of how the AI is deployed by different people and it may be that they're one and the same that the chat bot you're conversing with to teach yourself is the same as the chatbot you're using to write as it is today uh and that there's one that kind of has the right type of of interface and the way right way of expressing that's very comfortable in both regards but my guess is it's that latter task where you're asking the AI to act more like an agent on your behalf really representing you uh I think it's going to be really important for people that in that world that they have a they are able to have that a presence that isn't cringe that feels very comfortable to them and so I think they are the personality piece would be more important and I definitely want to talk about agents as well as Google uh you were the person that hired Sundar Pai so why don't we do that right after the break and we're back here on big technology podcast with Marissa Meer uh CEO of sunshine uh Marissa let's just talk quickly about Google what what do you think the state of Google is because I mean I guess this every time we talk about the company it needs this preface it seems like it's in a weird position with AI uh it's business model of course like doesn't really want us to run to these bods so quickly but then again on the stock market uh we're F Monday and of this week and just hit all-time highs today so it's an interesting position for Google to be in uh I think that this is an interesting moment for Google uh I personally am very bullish on the company they have an amazing team they have incredible Talent particularly in the AI space and the data they have in Gmail in order to understand who you are what you like who you communicate how you communicate you know if I had to say you know look I trust one company to take this data and really be able to make sense of it and understand how to deploy it um to do things efficiently for me my money would be on Google because there's just so much of that that's in in email um and so many other things that Google has even things from like Maps navigations where you go how you get there all of those types of things you know they have so much data both on each of us all of us personally but also collectively that I think that there's a real opportunity that we're going to see major breakthroughs and some of the best in class uh work being done by Google at the same time they have a huge business and there's just no question in my mind that the current search interface right typing something into the box and getting ads back is going to be disrupted and that transition is going to be very tricky just given the overall size of the business that's can Embrace I think if they can Embrace that change and you know at the end of my time at Google we were working on something that we called contextual search the idea that a query should be more than just the words it should be you know it should be your whole present state right you know who you are where you are the conversation you just had we have this notion it's kind of counterintuitive think about like what if you were the query what if you could feed not just your question but all of you into the search box um I think that we're going to see something like that and I think it does need an interface breakthrough today we don't have an interface that works well enough in that regard I think the chat box Bots that sometimes are are too chatty I think the search interface is too limited and I think there will be an interface breakthrough that allows you the search engine to gather either through things like email or or history um or other inputs basically gather more of a contextual picture for you to be able to provide even better results but I think it's where we start to see the power of llms meet personal information I think that's ultimately um that personal information and context that's ultimately where we're going to see a real breakout in terms of how search advances and as I said that takes an both an interface and an input mechanism Improvement um but I think it's clear that that's where it's going and it will be disruptive to the Google business model that said I still am bullish that they can do handle the transition well uh and and come out a winner in the space that's fascinating I hadn't thought that like all of our emailing and Gmail might be eventually used to train a more personalized bot for us or more personalized agent for us but it makes a lot of sense anecdotally we did a a fun thing at Yahoo we wanted to look at people's we looked at the receipts that were coming into people's emails and the funny thing was we could tell and I this didn't totally make sense to me but I guess it does make sense in retrospect we could tell how based on where people were buying socks where it was particularly rainy I've never had this thought pattern but I think apparently when it rains people start to think a lot about their feet getting wet and they tend to buy socks but you could actually T you could actually tie together Yahoo weather so obviously we had the weather patterns with when people when and where people bought socks and so there were lots of strange correlations like that when especially when you look at a large body of data Yahoo male um Google Mail where you can find all kinds of fascinating correlations that really Point more to context being a big piece context and personal information being a big piece of what it is people need and what they need to know can you talk us through a little bit about how Google thinks about how it will make product changes in this moment because from the people I speak with on the inside of that company and there are a lot of them it seems like Google's really going to weigh like is this product change going to even cause like a 1% decrease in search advertising and therefore we won't do it is that really the way that this company thinks about products and if it's the case how do you expect them then to go to um that that shift and format uh interface uh it's going to take a pretty bold decision right just like a very bold gutsy product choice that seems like it's the only way uh I think that there is a tension uh obviously when you have something as big and valuable as the Google sech business which I ran for around a decade there is this tendency towards incrementalism right you want to just try and make things you have a pretty good product and a pretty good business already and you just want to try and keep chipping away it and making it better and better there is that kind of progress that comes but I think there's also uh a boldness inside of Google uh and I think it's been there since the core of saying wait what if we did email what if we do maps right what if we go into driverless cars and I think this is one of these moments where they're going to have to be bold uh and interestingly when I left Google for Yahoo my last conversation as a formal Google employee was with Sergey himself and um uh I asked Sergey if he had any advice for me and he gave me a lot of different advice and um we had worked together for a long time and and uh uh and as I went to leave um it was time for me to go I had my hand on the door handle and I remember Sergey stopped and said Mera wait don't forget to be bold MH he's like you know if you just continuing to try and make you know Yahoo incrementally better isn't going to get you where you wanted to go he just said he just said don't forget to be bold and left it at that but that was it was huge for me because I do think it it reminded me that you know in our attempt to make Yahoo great again we were going to have to make bold decisions and I do think there's at the heart of Google in terms of the way the founders have set up the company the culture there is this desired for bold unbridled Innovation and I think this is a moment when the company has to lean into that and you can't be Reckless about it you obviously have users employees shareholders a lot of of stakeholders that need to be considered but I don't think that that can get in the way of the you know overarching narrative that AI is coming is going to change search in a really profound way and Google still is in my view the company that's best position to be the leader in search at the end of this wave as it is right now um but it's going to mean leaning back into that that original uh creative impulse but I do wonder about the boldness thing because you know in the notes that I put down before this conversation I wrote you know you had just tweeted about Gmail's 20th anniversary you mentioned it here and I wrote a not could that happen today like where is that today within Google we don't see the same experimental Pro projects coming out of the company that we used to at least as far as I can tell so what makes you think the boldness is still there I have to say even when we started gmail which Gmail launched in 2004 but started in 2002 took a lot of effort I remember when they first said like we're going to build an email client we were all like no like we're building a search engine like what part of email is interesting it was actually hard to get off the ground and it had to start kind of a Skunk Works project that was kicked off uh by Larry uh and you know over time we started to see the value in it and we started to see what search and some of the profoundness of the size of storage and the our cost of storage could really bring to bear on email and that was all very exciting uh and so but in the beginning it took a it took a lot of energy right to to start something new even in a little company um you know breaking out of that status quo takes a lot of energy um and it takes courage but I think Google has both that energy and that courage and I think as I said this this space is something that they've been been working in and preparing and this moment is something one they've been preparing for for a very long time uh you know everything from a lot of the underlying advances lot of the underlying insights um there was a great article last week uh the Transformers talking about the eight people whove really shaped modern AI all of whom worked at at Google uh you know this has been been building for for for quite a long time and I think that they clearly have the team and the data to do it and I do think they have the impulse to really Embrace this change and and be the powerful player within it so you you hired Sundar as a product manager within Google I I can't take credit for that Susan wsky hired Sundar she was the head of ads I was the head of search uh and product management you put you put him work on his first project he started we kind of collectively hired search uh product managers across uh the product management organization and then when they came assigned them so so Susan um sourced him we hired him through the product management uh hiring Committee of which I ran and then when he came in we realized that we had a real need in the client space so Sundar uh one of started off and realized that we didn't have a PM uh product manager on Google Toolbar and Google to toolbar had like 200 million users or something like embarrassingly large like that and I said well you know I told you there was more work than people here so there's no shortage of things to do so if you'd like to be the PM on toolbar you can and so he became our pm on toolbar and then ultimately we realized we didn't just want a toolbar inside of a browser we wanted actually the browser the browser launched to Great Fanfare and and um was really well received and then we realized we could actually use the browser as an operating system Paradigm so it became Chrome OS uh and things you know took off from there but um right soon is as an extraordinary individual um I think turned up fully formed yeah I think the toolbar story is one of the coolest stories in Google history uh just a a product that needed to be there to protect the company against the real anti-competitive stuff that Microsoft was doing I mean Microsoft eventually made its browser worse so the web would go slower it's like almost you think Google's in the same position now right but it's not doing the same things but it made the browser worse so web would go slower to hold off Google which challenged everything within Microsoft from office to the operating system but that we could talk about that for hours uh one question about Sundar for you is you know knowing Sundar back then um are there things that he would do or is there uh something that you saw in him then that make you believe that he's the right leader for now uh Sundar uh is incredible in a number of ways one he's incredibly intelligent he's able to synthesize many different viewpoints extremely quickly and he's also a very independent thinker so he's able to take in all those viewpoints be it from users from Executives Etc and synthesize them in a way that also brings his own lens and his own judgment to Bear uh and so I do think that he and he's not afraid of betting big right it was I remember uh I remember getting yelled at in the first time we went in to propose that we should do a browser um because obviously at the time Eric Schmidt one of my longtime mentors who I just love had been deeply embedded in the wars with Microsoft and he was like you know what we don't need to do we don't need to build a browser and we were like actually we really want to build a browser and here's how we think we can have a browser that's differentiate and here's how we think it's going to be better and yes it's going to be a lot of work and there's a of technical decisions that we have to get right in order to actually compete in this space um but you know it was a really fraught debate inside the company to actually uh decide to pursue and build Chrome uh and it was controversial and Sundar wasn't afraid of that um and there were certainly people around him that supported him and guided him um but you know overall it was really he wasn't afraid to take the charge and say look we need to do something that's com counterintuitive and controversial and place this big bet and I think it's really going to be foundational in the long run for the company and he was absolutely right uh let me ask you a couple Yahoo questions before we wrap uh if if I can our audience is kind of obsessed with Yahoo um they're fun like that um we're talking I mean just in the context of consumer products um what do you think the lesson is to be learned from Tumblr uh and why do you think that it ended up declining the way that it did uh I think that the ultimate lesson to learn um from Tumblr is there are times when a company should be really you know held aside right I I you you say you you know Google did that really successfully with YouTube um Facebook did that really successfully with Instagram right there's times when something's just a rocket ship and it needs to be kept separately separate from the mothership because the mothership might just love it to death that was really what we were worried about it YouTube and I know from Instagram they were had similar concerns there I think that for Tumblr you know we felt that it was that kind of rocket ship and there were a lot of great attributes at the same time I think that it could have used a little bit more support from Yahoo in terms of overall what's working some of the technical infrastructure and decisions certainly some of the marketing and positioning of the platform and also just in terms of the becoming a you know a platform that was hospitable to ads and really had the type of viewership and followership um that would monetize well with ads and so I think that if I had it to do over again I still would do the Tumblr acquisition but I would have integrated it more and I would have loaned more Talent from Yahoo Yahoo to Tumblr and it may have ultimately changed Tumblr in terms of what it uh what it became in the long run but I think it would have ultimately been been more successful full yeah you also you acquired suly um which which was kind of way ahead of its time it summarized the web use AI to do this stuff I've been thinking about it a lot when it comes to generative stuff because a lot of companies are trying to do that now um knowing that this is the direction and with that context do you think there's a bright future for the web I mean there's there are browsers now that you'll go to the web page and it just instead of having you read the article will summarize uh it for you so I guess I'm curious if you think that this is the future and if it is what it means for the web uh I think that summarization is going to be really important that's why I bought suly I think It ultimately makes you a lot more efficient in your daily routines it helps you consume a lot more content and also ultimately understand where do I want just a surface level summary and where do I want to do a deep dive uh so I think that summarization technology is incredibly helpful and I also think we you know one of the big reasons we bought it was to apply it on video because there's definitely time s where you can't watch a video um or you know you can't listen to a podcast but if you can basically take all that content and summarize it down uh is ultimately really useful uh I do think that one of the concerns I have about the web in the long run is with machine generated content I'm not confident that the web improves maybe it stays the same maybe it declines slightly but for a lot of these Technologies we need the web and we need this base of knowledge and data that everything's learning off of to continue to get better and I do think that's going to be one of the challenges in the future as we continue to train models and Advance these Technologies is how do we make sure that we're training on things where the quality is actually monotonically increasing as opposed to staying the same or decreasing okay yeah and not no worry about like the fact that I almost feel like it's this cycle where like you have ai generated stuff it gets fed into these chat Bots people don't visit websites anymore websites go away and you just end up in this death spiral is that am I overly concerned about that or even legitimate I think that there is I think that originality and newness is is a is a real thing and I think that there's a lot that people can bring to bear I think that some of what you're saying will happen but I I don't think it's going to overall be the the overarching trend okay great and then just to sum up first-time founder um after holding some very interesting positions over time um you don't really have to work anymore so I'm curious and being a Founder is a very tough job uh what continues to drive you and how's the experience been so far um it's been terrific as I said I love working on design problems um and you know building a company is a tremendous design problem and I have to say launching products last week it was so fun I love the exhilaration of bringing something new in the market you know it's never going to be perfect the first time out you're always going to get a lot of feedback and when you get that feedback you have to decide is that defeating feedback or does that just make you want to make your product even better uh and so for me I love building things and I love the team that I get to do it with uh and I'm just really excited about what types of things we can build in the future especially now that we have feedback from real users in terms of what they like and what works for them is there anything you're to show the tech world or show yourself like starting from zero as opposed to trying to incubate something within a larger company I mean you started Google when it was pretty early but I'm curious if there's any of that that comes into play I think that you know my interaction with entrepreneurs has defined my whole career obviously from Larry and Sergey and then Pho and yang who I got to work with at at Yahoo Pho more closely than Yang but both of them and then you over the course of my career I've acquired somewhere on the order of 80 companies around 50 at Yahoo around 30 at Google and I've gotten to work with some of the best and um you know everyone from like Tim and Nina zat to David KP from Tumblr there's so many different personalities that come and I started to realize that you know so much of my career was you know based around Milestones of different Founders and their traits and their insights that you know that that that respect for entrepreneurs was something that really carried with me I'm very grateful for all those experiences and it was something that I did want to have for myself cool stuff all right so if people want to download the apps where do they go uh you can go to sunshine.com uh or you can go to bit.ly shine by Sunshine uh and download it on the App Store and it'll be coming to Android soon all right well as one of the newest users I'm definitely looking forward to uh to use them and and uh hopefully there's more that come because uh we don't want consumer to be said and done for so I appreciate you taking this s gear totally thank you so much thank you Marissa thank you everybody for listening we'll be back on Friday Rona and Roy is returning we're going to talk about the week's news we also have a special guest Zeke Fox who's here to talk uh with us all about the state of crypto after the spbf sentencing and plenty more so tune on tune in on Friday and thanks again for listening we'll see you next time on big technology podcast
2024-04-21 14:17
