The Journey from India to Building a $500M AI Video Product | Gaurav Misra, Captions

Intro

00:00I grew up in India. I had no idea or no concept of like what is Boston? What is New York? I hadn't been to any of these places. Boston generally is a very multicultural environment. People come there from a lot of different countries and I went to Boston University where that's especially the case.

00:11After graduating from college, I actually started a PhD in machine learning which I actually dropped out of. I left my PhD

How I Became an Entrepreneur at 16

00:18program and I joined a startup. People thought I was crazy that I would just drop out of it and get kind of go join some startup, right? But I think it was the right decision looking back at it. It was a very high-risisk decision, but it worked out.

00:29Especially in the US, and I think that's what makes the US such a special place. There's definitely so much opportunity that I think it's better to be a little bit more of a risk-taker. Most of the time, you can take a risk and actually get rewarded for it.

00:41I think people don't bias enough towards taking risks. If you just do what everybody else is doing, then you'll just end up wherever everybody else is going, right? My name is Goraf and I am the co-founder and CEO of Captions. Captions is a video creation company.

00:58Our goal is to make it easy for anybody anywhere to be able to tell their story through video without actually going through the physical process of recording or editing a video. We've raised over $und00 million in funding. It's gotten to tens of millions of users and over 100,000 plus users daily.

01:22I was in the US for the first four years of my life and my parents moved to India. I grew up in India. Moving back to the US like I had no idea or no concept of like what it would be like. What is Boston? What is New York? Like I hadn't been to any of these places.

01:34My parents were like Boston's great you should go there. And I was like sounds great. Let me do that. So at Boston University it was an interesting situation because coming from India sort of the curriculum there especially around computer science is just very advanced compared to the US and a lot of the things that we actually were being taught in college we had already covered in high school for the most part.

01:55A lot of college classes were essentially repeating what I had already done in high school. It probably was the case for a lot of people from India I imagine. I think that did give me a chance to actually go and explore outside of just that and kind of see what else I can learn and what more I can do.

02:11I did tons of projects. I like worked on projects with my roommates. I worked on a lot of different apps that we launched and this was like in 2012 2011 when the app store was still early in high school and going into college. I had started a kind of a company in a strange way.

02:25I say that because I actually didn't realize it was a company until much later. I was working on some games and there was some need around like security software for those games and I decided to make it and the game company decided to buy it for me not knowing that I was like 16 years old and I ended up selling it to a bunch of other companies as well.

02:42I didn't realize at that time that this is what a company is is like you make a product you sell it but much later I was like wow that's kind of what it was. It was a interesting sort of experience to go through because it kind of transitioned from generally games and gaming into sort of more general skill set.

02:55I really enjoy learning new things. How do you learn things quickly and how do you figure things out quickly? It's something that not a lot of people talk about, but it's like one of the most important skills in my mind. Go to a new domain, you know, go to a new area, something that you haven't done before, try for the first time, figure it out quickly, and be actually useful and productive in it is like it's a pretty cool skill and it's pretty fun one to work on because you get to try out a lot of different things.

03:21You'll get to learn a lot of different things and focus on that as a skill in itself. Being able to do all those different things and figuring those things out is really [Music]

First Career in Microsoft and Snapchat

03:34important. Through the early part of my career, I was really focused on machine learning as a central aspect of what I was doing. At Microsoft, I joined them on this new team they were developing called Azure Machine Learning. It's like a machine learning platform they were building.

03:48And then at Snapchat, there was a bit of a difference. I got a chance to really get more on the product side and eventually ended up joining the design team which was like a huge shift from what I had done previously and the idea of like connecting technology to actual design and actual product made a lot of sense.

04:05So I ended up starting a team there called design engineering which was like how do you bring together great design and great engineering to build amazing products right? One of the things I learned at Snap, if you think about Snap as a company, I think Snap was one of the earliest companies to actually get into video for consumer use cases, especially short video.

04:22It did get me very immersed into the space of like video in general, especially video for communication, short videos, and all the challenges both technical and product that are related to that. But I think in general, one of the things that I noticed was essentially a shift in the way that people were communicating.

04:40A lot of people thought Tik Tok was just, oh, Tik Tok, that's like just people dancing, right? It's for fun. But I think the reality was that yes, there were a bunch of people dancing, but there was a lot of people talking and there were a lot of people telling stories and, you know, sometimes bad things that happened to them, good things that happened to them.

04:56People were like talking about ideas and like what could be done and what should be done and people were arguing with each other, right? And I think that was like a shift in the way people communicated from like that's the type of stuff that would happen like on Twitter or like on text beforehand, right?

05:10and it was now happening on video for the first time. So, I got pretty familiar with all the different ways that people are communicating and kind of what works better and what doesn't

Success is in the Small Decisions

05:24work. When we started the company, we were thinking about building a social network and so we were thinking, okay, there's like a distribution part and then there's a creation part of the social network. We thought, hey, let's start with the creation first.

05:35So we started off with the idea of literally just adding captions to videos, text on videos based on what people are saying. The reason we did this is because we saw there was a big accessibility movement at that time. There were a lot of people sort of manually writing text on top of their videos and it was spent an hour like typing it all out.

05:54There wasn't actually a solution for this that was in the market at that time. So we were the first ones to build it and the absolute first project we built it in one weekend just as like a test essentially and we put it on the app store and the next day we woke up and it was like 600 people per minute using it basically it was completely at the top of the app store with no marketing no nothing done essentially and I think that was like the moment where it was like wow it can't be this easy right like it really can't be because we had been told right like it's going to be a lot of work to

06:28find product market fit and things like that. But I think that being said, we had just started the company and we had this idea of a social network and things like that. I think we were like, "Okay, this is working, but I wonder if we should go back and like really think about the social network aspect of this."

06:41And so we tried to figure out how to get people to post on the platform and things like that until we essentially rediscovered captions. And this was a interesting moment where we were working on another application which was called Spam App.

06:52It was like a photo sharing app. It was actually doing really well. While we were working on

The Small Decisions he did

06:57that, we're looking at the bills and there was like a good $10,000 a month going to captions. You know, I remember talking to my co-founder and we were like, "Okay, let's just delete it because we don't want to spend $120,000 a year on this, right?"

07:08We decided to delete it. I remember going back home and on Saturday going through like, you know, the UI to be like, "Okay, I'm going to press delete now." And while I was going to press delete, I was just thinking, "Ah, but like we worked so hard on this.

07:24Like I don't want to delete this, right?" Like it's like I want to keep it for memories at least, right? So I had an idea just in the moment quickly design a little payw wall where we ask people to pay for the app. If nobody pays for it then it's essentially shut down but we can continue using it because you know we work hard on it and if someone pays for it then it pays for itself.

07:43So we're not paying the bills basically. So I quickly made that in about 2 or 3 hours put it on the app store and launched it and then completely forgot about it. So, we continued working on spam app and it continued growing through the next, you know, four, five, six months.

07:59While we were doing that, I for some reason decided to check my account. And when I checked it, it was like at $500,000 or more and growing. And like the craziest part was not only did people pay for it, people retained on it. And it was growing in revenue completely on its own with like zero employees working on it.

08:20So, no employees. There were like 2,000 open support tickets. Nobody was answering obviously, right? And it would continue to grow. You know, we had to have this like tough conversation of like, oh my god, like this is truly working, right?

08:34And it was tough because we already had another thing that was also working and that we were raising a new round on essentially, right? I think we discussed this for a couple of weeks and we ended up deciding we're going to switch to captions and we're going to just focus on creation as the primary.

08:52We switched over and literally the moment we launched the first set of features on top of the existing app. What was looking like a fast growth completely condensed because the new growth was exponential just like straight up. I mean, I think that's kind of the crazy thing that I think about at this point is like that split-second decision was the difference between two completely different paths.

09:15Here's the thing, like we don't know. The other side could have been even more successful. That's the tough part about these decisions is like you have to choose one and you'll never know what the other could have been. I think the big decisions are actually in the small decisions in a way and the small decisions are what actually you don't think about too much but actually turn the tide of like what will happen in the future.

09:36I think that was the case over here too, right? Because like what felt like a very small decision of like other app should we delete it or not seem like kind of obvious. Anybody we would have asked would have told us, yeah, just delete it, right?

09:45Whatever. But I think those small decisions actually are way more important than the big ones sometimes. And I think this shows quite a bit like if you look at any competition at a global scale, right, which building a startup is kind of a competition at a global scale.

09:58Like look at the Olympics for example, right? Like people are like within seconds of each other, right? Sometimes even milliseconds of each other. That's not because of some major decision they made while training or something like that. Everyone's very good, right?

10:09It's probably like some minor micro decision that happened in the moment like, you know, while they're swimming and they moved one arm at this angle versus the other angle. Like that's what's deciding who wins and loses, right? I think it's like those small decisions that count the most.

How to Win with Quick MVPs and Feedback

10:29We did face challenges around like identifying the user and making sure we're building for the right user because when we launched the app like it was immediately sort of successful, right? And it immediately blew up. It made things easier and harder in some ways.

10:42I think one of the things that can happen when too many people join sort of your app or product very quickly is you kind of lose lose sight of who the customer is because there's a lot of people who are just checking it out. There's a lot of people who don't actually care about the use case, but they want to just see what's going on.

10:58Between all that noise, it's difficult to figure out like which one of these people are the actual user. Who's going to retain and for whom is this actually solving a real problem? That's really important because at the end of the day, without focusing on the right customer, you'll end up building the wrong product.

11:11Captions was a paid app from the beginning. And I think elements there that was interesting is like being paid actually helped filter our user base a little bit and to only those people who were willing to pay. Those people that were willing to pay were people who had real pain point.

11:23And so with that, we got really good feedback from users, right, around like what we should build and what we should prioritize and what they want from us in the future. We decided to keep the app paid right from the beginning all the way till today because of that reason.

11:36I think on the technical side, we try to avoid as much as possible technical challenges that it's sort of unproven essentially, right? Like I think one of the mistakes that can be made is like spending a lot of time building something very technically complex without fully recognizing whether there's product market fit there or not.

11:52We spend a year building something and nobody wants it. Right? That happens very often and it's happened to us too. The key factor there is like how do you reduce the technical risk to like an MVP? How do you test with like just the bare minimum?

12:03Get something out in front of people. Have them see it. Have them try it. If they don't retain, then don't invest more in it, right? Try something else. And I think that's the other thing is like not going deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole almost in a way.

12:13I think there's also tendencies of like building the first version seeing that it doesn't completely work and then justifying it by saying well if it only had this feature and that feature and that third feature then maybe it would have worked right but I think the reality is like it would not probably not have worked with as many features as you want.

12:30It would only have worked with a single feature only one of those things right whatever actually people want at the end of the day. So, I think the better skill is to just learn how to quickly build stuff. Try as many things as possible. The most important thing is getting stuff out in front of people, testing it.

12:45If it doesn't work, kill it and start again. And keep doing that as quickly as possible. [Music] [Music]