David Lieb
General Partner, Y Combinator. On 2 shows, 8 appearances, plus 1 compilation re-air not counted. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveinvestoroperator@dflieb ↗ycombinator.com/people/david-lieb ↗
David Lieb co-founded and served as CEO of Bump, a mobile sharing app acquired by Google in 2013. Following the acquisition, he created and led Google Photos before returning to Y Combinator as an investing partner.
2shows
8appearances
64statements
8resolved
6supported
0contradicted
75%fully supported
1said about them ↓ Everything David Lieb said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Lieb: Elon Musk's hardware taste does not translate to software
“Jeff Bezos once said that, like, taste is not transferable across domains, and to me, this is like a great example of that. I would say, Elon, like, if I drive a Tesla, I think it's the best car that I've ever sat in, but the taste and the decisions they made …”
David Lieb: Domain experience anti-correlates with top PM performance
“Most of the really strong PMs that have emerged, say, on the Google Photos team came from backgrounds with no experience in this domain. I would probably go so far as to say that it's anti-correlated with the top performers.”
Lieb: Prior domain experience is anti-correlated with top product performance
“In my experience, most of the really strong PMs that have emerged, say on the Google Photos team came from backgrounds with no experience in this domain really at all. Like you talked to some of them. In fact, I would say, I would probably go so far as to say …”
Dave Lieb predicts AI will eventually write any type of code
“I think it will get good enough to write any code.”
Lieb Secretly Designed Google Photos Despite Orders to Build Google+
“I kind of just didn't do what my bosses asked me to do. And it created a ton of conflict. I was definitely not the model employee. I just kind of did it on the back burner. I would go every day and do my day job, and then in the afternoon, I'd go spend some ti…”
Lieb: Over-indexing on past team scale ruins product hires
“The number one failure mode when people hire product leaders is they over index on previous scale. How big of a team have you previously managed or tenure?”
Lieb: If you are unsure about product-market fit, you lack it
“If you don't know if you've got it or not, you don't is the simplest answer, right? It is a thing where something clicks and people just use your product or demand your product so much more than you could have ever fathomed. That is generally when you've got s…”
Lieb: Analytical product design prevents failure but caps upside
“Using science kind of bounds your variance of your outcomes. It makes sure you don't, like, totally blow it, but it also makes sure that you don't, like, find something that no one else would have found because you would never try it. And that's where I think …”
Lieb: Human gut instinct is the ultimate machine learning model
“I think your gut is the world's most sophisticated machine learning model ever created. It is like the best supercomputer we've got.”
Lieb: Early-stage startups shouldn't scale teams before finding product-market fit
“This is another meta mistake is people think like, oh, I like, I've raised my seed round. I have four million dollars. Like, let's go hire a team of 20 people. That's what I see all my cohorts cohort members doing. That's probably the wrong thing to do unless …”
Lieb: Joining remote meetings late intentionally builds team culture
“The technique that I found, like, the most successful, it's the simplest thing I could think of, is for every meeting that I was kind of, like, the top person in, I would just intentionally show up, like, five to seven minutes late. And I would, it creates thi…”
Lieb: Product managers should oversee design, engineering, and analytics
“I think the product manager role as defined by the world is way too pigeonholed. I think we should broaden the responsibilities of the PM role. I think they should be much more responsible for design, much more responsible for engineering, for analytics. Like,…”
Lieb: Google Photos operates at a 90-plus percent gross margin
“And it turns out it's like a 90 plus percent margin.”
Lieb: LLM technology is capable enough for non-programmers to build apps
“And this is like a great example of how the LLM technology is actually good enough to let non-programmers
Program these apps.”
Dave Lieb says up to half of YC startups primarily use AI
“I would say maybe like a third to a half of the companies would say that they pretty much primarily write code in this style.”
Dave Lieb says AI will improve software design by shrinking team sizes
“I think design of the products that we use, the quality of the products that we use is going to go way up because if you look at bad design or bad experiences that you encounter in your life, I think a lot of it comes from interfaces between people or between …”
Lieb Was Fired Twice From His Team While Pitching Google Photos
“In fact, twice I was a I got fired from the team and told to go find a new role at Google.”
Lieb: Musk said Twitter should make far-left and far-right equally unhappy
“I think Elon explicitly said, when you're using Twitter, you should feel equally bad if you're on the far left or on the far right.”
Lieb: Tying paid subscriptions to blue checkmarks destroyed identity verification
“That makes sense, and if they connect that to the blue check, though, they now overload this term, and now I don't know if it's just a twelve-year-old in his basement paying for Twitter premium, or an actual legit person that I should pay attention to.”
Lieb: Integrating Grok into X makes zero sense for normal users
“So this is basically ChatGPT inside of Twitter, which to me doesn't make a whole lot of sense, and I'm sure to any normal person makes zero sense.”
Lieb: Bump prematurely hired a product lead before reaching PMF
“I made this mistake myself at Bump. We got to like, maybe it was 30 employees. All of our vanity metric graphs were like going way up. We were feeling really good. And I thought our company is going to need to like figure out our business model. Eventually we'…”
Lieb: Founders must not delegate their startup's primary problem
“Generally, that is a very dangerous place to be where the founders or the CEO of the company is not working on the most important problem for the company's success.”
Lieb: Founders delegate sales and core roles too early
“You certainly need to make that trade off at some point, but I think most founders do it too early. They think they think like, oh, we have a product that like shows some glimmers of, you know, product market fit. Let's go hire a sales team. And that will be t…”
The other half of the tape: David Lieb's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 1 time in 1 episode across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 1
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 1
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens David's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 Y COMBINATORLEDGER | General Partner, Y Combinator | 7 | 34 | 60% 3/5 | full record on the Y Combinator Startup Podcast → |
| 20VCLEDGER | General Partner, Y Combinator | 1 +1 | 30 | 100% 3/3 | full record on 20VC → |