Google Wave had 70-80 engineers before securing any external users
Dhanji R. Prasanna · How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · Oct 26, 2025 · at 1:11:33
Block CTO Dhanji R. Prasanna reflects on the failure of Google Wave to demonstrate the danger of over-resourcing products before validating demand.
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“I worked at Google on this product called Google wave, which was trying to be everything to everyone. And. You know, we were 70, 80 engineers building this thing before it even really had any users outside Google.”
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“I still think that things that we interviewed for in the past, a critical mindset, the ability to really understand deeply the technical nature of a problem. Is still much more important than whether you're a fully AI native programmer.”