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: Ambition is the single most important trait when hiring early PMs
“I would say at the early stage, the number one thing I would filter for initially for product people, and product people at an early stage company is a very broad set of skills. Like, you're kind of looking for people who can kind of do anything decently well.…”
Lieb: Prematurely hiring a product lead at Bump was a key mistake
“At bump, you know, we got to like, Maybe it was 30 employees, and we were, all of our vanity metric graphs were, like, going way up. We were feeling really good and I thought, oh, like, our company is gonna need to, like, figure out our business model eventual…”
Lieb: Over-indexing on scale or tenure is top product hiring mistake
“I would say like the number one failure mode when people hire product leaders is they over index on Either like previous scale, like how many, how big of a team have you previously managed? Or tenure, like how long have you been doing this? What experience do …”
Lieb: Modulating angel check sizes by success probability is counterproductive
“So if you modulate your check size based on like probability of success or like how big the market is or whatever, you'll probably be doing the exact opposite of what you should do.”
Lieb: I was asked to leave my Google team twice
“I didn't get fired from Google. I did get asked to leave the team twice.”
Dave Lieb says AI adoption in legal and finance will become default
“And I think we're now getting to the point in legal, in finance, and all these other areas where it's become a competitive disadvantage if you don't embrace it. So I think it will become default.”
Raising Too Much Capital Quickly Masked Bump's Core Business Problems
“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.”
Acquirers Saw No Value in Bump, Only the Unreleased Photo Roll
“No one wanted bump. It was not valuable, but this idea of photo roll and the demo that we had built was something that several companies indicated, you know, you might be right.”
Google Reassigned the Acquired Bump Team to Google+ on Day One
“Then we showed up. To Google on the first day and there had been a reorg and all of the plans that we had agreed upon with our sponsor were out the window and we were tasked to go work on Google plus the social network.”
Google Photos Reached One Billion Users in Under Four Years
“Google Photos grew to more than a billion users in less than four years, which I think is the fastest growing product of all time, at least at the time.”
Lieb: Twitter's biggest change is shifting to an engagement-based feed
“By far the biggest change that I have seen in Twitter over the last year or so is this shift from a, you know, chronological-ish feed of topics that you have expressed that you want to follow to now kind of like more of a TikTok feed of stuff that you might Be…”
Lieb: Engaging users with content they dislike damages long-term retention
“If I am highly engaged in content that ultimately I really don't like long-term retention will be poorer, right? And so eventually, even if your business model is ads and you're getting me to spend a bunch of time on the site, I'm gonna eventually stop using i…”
Lieb: News Feed was the single best product change Facebook ever made
“Probably the single biggest change that Facebook, the product ever made for the better was moving to this newsfeed where basically anytime someone would modulate their wall, it would show you the content that you had chosen to see.”
Lieb: TikTok skipped social graphs to rely purely on algorithmic discovery
“And TikTok, the most recent one I think just skipped straight to the end game. Which is like, let's just show all the possible content in the world and let the algorithms figure out what the human brain wants to see.”
Lieb: Building real human connection requires resisting engagement optimization
“If the product you're trying to build is like connection between real people, then probably you need to very explicitly like fight against this urge to just drive more engagement.”
Lieb: Twitter excels in breaking news due to direct first-party publishing
“I think it is that it is so easy for first party information owners to put content onto the platform. So like we saw, like during the assassination attempt, we saw a bunch of firsthand videos that The normal media organization would not have produced for us so…”
Lieb: A founder's job is clearly articulating product purpose and usage
“I think this is a great example of probably the job of a founder or product leader, which is to clearly articulate to the entire team and to the world What this product is for and how you're supposed to use it.”
David Lieb: Concentrating generalist skills in few people yields extraordinary results
“And I think that's a skill, this like generalist skill that generally people don't have at big companies because they don't need to. There's experts at big companies that do everything, but I think magic happens when you bring all that stuff together in a very…”
Lieb: Google Photos intentionally rejected social features and photo editing
“And we said internally at Google, like, we're not going to build a social tool. This isn't a social network. Like, that's not what we're doing. We're not going to build some crazy, like, photo editing product. Like, it's not about being, quote, creative with y…”
Lieb: Great products are always built by tiny, obsessed teams
“If you look at like truly great products, pick any product that you use that you're like, that product is just really well done. Generally there are a very small set of people behind that product That really love it. That obsess over every single thing about i…”
Lieb: Startups should ship early to learn, while big companies need polished launches
“For most startups, the answer is you should probably ship something and learn something from someone. And then you can make it better. If you're a big company, you might need to make something like quite good before you want to launch it.”
Lieb: Cohort retention is the single most important early product metric
“I think that's the number one thing you should look at when you're building a new product is what is your cohort retention curve look like?”
Lieb: Bump reached 150 million installs, on 20% of global smartphones
“In, in, in the Bump kind of heyday, we had a hundred and fifty million installs on, on phones when the market for phones was only like, I don't know, maybe a billion phones in the world, or probably less than that, probably hundreds of high hundreds of million…”
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
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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 → |