How to win in the AI era: Ship a feature every week, embrace technical debt, ruthlessly cut scope, and create magic your competitors can't copy | Gaurav Misra (CEO and co-founder of Captions)

Lenny's Podcast: Product | Growth | Career

Lenny Rachitsky

Technology, Business, Entrepreneurship

5 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 27 March 2025

⏱️ 86 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

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

—

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

—

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

—

Where to find Gaurav Misra:

• X: https://x.com/gmharhar

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

—

Where to find Lenny:

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

• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan

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

—

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

—

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

—

Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].

—

Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed.

Get full access to Lenny's Newsletter at www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	There's rarely a time like this where so much as possible.
0:02.5	Even like five, seven years ago, it's so hard to start a company.
0:05.7	Everything feels like it's done, someone else is working on it.
0:08.4	Suddenly, it's a time right now, which I've never even experienced,
0:12.1	where everything you try just works.
0:14.4	With people constantly hearing about all the things happening,
0:17.1	is there any tools or processes or approaches you've figured out to help stay focused?
0:21.2	Our engineering goal is every engineer should ship a marketable product every week.
0:27.5	I love just how wild that sounds.
0:29.1	How do you maintain quality and make it all cohesive?
0:31.7	I actually think as a startup, your job is to take on technical debt because that is how you
0:36.6	operate faster than a bigger company. Bigger companies don't take on technical debt because that is how you operate faster than a bigger company.
0:38.9	Your companies don't take on technical debt. They pay it usually right away or they're
0:43.0	paying back technical debt from the days when they were a startup.
0:45.5	Is there anything else that in how you operate and the way you build product that you think
0:49.5	is really unique and interesting?
0:50.5	We have what we think of as the public roadmap. This is basically what people have asked us for.
0:55.0	There's all these surface areas we receive user feedback.
0:58.0	But these are all features that every competitor knows about.
1:01.0	If a user is asking us for it, they're asking everybody for it.
1:04.0	It's not going to be a game changer in terms of winning against your competition.
1:08.0	So we have a second roadmap, which we think of as a secret
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Lenny Rachitsky, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Lenny Rachitsky and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.