Gaurav Misra (00:00:00): There's rarely a time like this where so much is possible. Even like five, seven years ago, it's so hard to start a company. Everything feels like it's done, someone else is working on it. Suddenly, it's a time, right now, which I've never even experienced, where everything you try just works. Lenny Rachitsky (00:00:14): With people constantly hearing about all the things happening. Is there any tools or processes or approaches you've figured out to help stay focused? Gaurav Misra (00:00:21): Our engineering goal is every engineer should ship a marketable product every week. Lenny Rachitsky (00:00:27): I love just how wild that sounds. How do you maintain quality and make it all cohesive? Gaurav Misra (00:00:31): I actually think as a startup your job is to take on technical debt because that is how you operate faster than a bigger company. Bigger companies don't take contact technical debt, they pay it usually right away, or they're paying back technical debt from the days when they were a startup. Lenny Rachitsky (00:00:45): Is there anything else that in how you operate and the way you build product that you think is really unique and interesting? Gaurav Misra (00:00:50): We have what we think of as the public roadmap. This is basically what people have asked us for. There's all these surface areas where we receive user feedback, but these are all features that every competitor knows about. If a user is asking us for it, they're asking everybody for it. (00:01:04): It's not going to be a game changer in terms of winning against your competition. So we have a second roadmap which we think of as a secret roadmap. Lenny Rachitsky (00:01:15): Today my guest is Gaurav Misra. Gaurav was an early employee at Snap where he led the design engineering team, which he explains in the conversation. He's also an engineer at Microsoft and a couple other companies. Most recently, he's the co-founder and CEO of Captions, one of the most successful...