How David Lieb Turned A Failed Startup Into Google Photos | Backstory

**David Lieb** (0:00)
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 curve ball 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 Lieb, and this is my backstory.
I grew up in a suburb of Dallas, pretty normal childhood. I was into math and science, computers. My dad was an engineer, and my mom was a school teacher. So very much a focus on engineering, math and science growing up. I was one of the top students in school, and 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, get good internships. After Princeton, 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 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 smart engineer that aspired to do more than engineering, at least in my era, 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 I pursued that path. 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 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 thought like, well, this is ridiculous. Why are we doing this? We have these supercomputers that can run apps now 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 to see if we could build it, and we started working on it. We worked on it for maybe three or four weeks, just kind of on 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. 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. 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 find. But it really was driven by word of mouth. I think I learned a few things from the beginning of Bump. 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 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 just you. All three of the founders were former engineers. 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 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. 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 three months and build your startup. We got $16,667 of funding, which in hindsight is pretty small, but it was totally sufficient to come out to the Bay Area, live on a friend's floor 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 having an idea for an app took me on a completely different career journey. And YC went really well. Throughout the batch, the product kept 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 iGlowstick, 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 that bump was like the hottest thing around. MC Hammer invested. People were dressing up as bump as their Halloween costume that fall. Steve Jobs put our icon on a slide on one of his pitch decks. We were the hot app of the time. The problem was people didn't keep using the app, 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 2x2 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 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, 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 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 money too quickly because we could, and it prevented us from realizing the real problems that we had in our business. All the classic mistakes that we at YC now try to teach founders to avoid, we made them all. Ultimately, we finally came to terms that, oh, this might not work. What are we going to do? And so we went back to the very basic YC 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 burned $10 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, 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 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 gonna solve that problem. To solve that problem, you don't wanna like physically have to touch your hands together in order to give somebody some photos.