David Lieb: From Bump to Google Photos to YC

A Y Combinator interview, summer two thousand nine. Dave Lieb is pitching, and Paul Graham puts his head down on the table.

Puts his head DOWN? Like, bored-out-of-his-mind down?

Then he looks up and asks one question: how is this going to be bigger than Google?

Brutal. And what was the thing? What was he pitching?

An app called Bump. You hold your phones, tap your fists together, and your contact details jump across.

Oh, I remember Bump. I thought that was magic when I was like fourteen.

A hundred and fifty million installs by twenty thirteen. Lieb has said it was on something like twenty to forty percent of all phones in the world.

So... that's a win, right? Why does this story need a near-death moment?

Because it never made any real money. And the way out of that hole is Google Photos. Which, yes, is the same company.

Hang on, Google Photos comes from the fist-bump app?

It starts in business school. Fall two thousand eight, Lieb is an engineer who'd worked at Texas Instruments, now at Chicago Booth, and bored in the remedial accounting class.

Remedial accounting. The glamour.

That's literally where he meets co-founder Jake Mintz. They realize they'd both worked at TI, in Dallas, a mile apart, and never met.

Okay, and the idea?

He's meeting dozens of new classmates and typing every phone number by hand. One day he does it ten times and thinks, somebody should fix this, and now there are apps.

So what's the ambition level here? Change the world?

No. He'd heard about another student who made an app that found open WiFi networks and earned a six-figure sum in one summer. Lieb told his dad he thought he could make twenty-five thousand dollars.

Twenty-five grand. To cover tuition.

He emails Andy Huibers, a guy from TI. Andy's reply is basically, I think Android's going to be bigger. And Andy didn't own a Mac and had never written anything for Apple.

The technical lead doesn't have the computer.

He bought one the next day and had the basics working within a week. Then the three of them met on Skype every single week at nine Central, and every weekend asked each other: do we keep going, or are we done?

How many weeks did that go on before they committed?

Thirty.

Thirty weeks of "should we quit." That's weirdly comforting.

They launched March twenty-seventh, two thousand nine. Macworld profiled it as the App Store's billionth download. And the reason they did YC at all? They did NOT want a business school summer internship at an investment bank.

So the whole thing is an elaborate scheme to avoid banking.

Now the hard part. Bump is enormous, but people don't come back often enough, and it's free. Lieb's been blunt about it: they were anchored on how many people used it and how often, which he says in hindsight was not the right thing to focus on.

What should they have been looking at?

Whether that use could ever support a business. Downloads aren't retention, and retention isn't revenue.

So what do they actually do about it?

Lieb calls it the most transformational day of his career. He and Jake phoned the top hundred Bump users, one by one, and asked why they used it.

And they said... not contacts?

Photos. People were bumping phones to swap photos. Paul Graham's line to them was, talk to your users, they'll tell you what they want.

So they chase that.

They build Flock, semi-automatic shared albums with whoever you were standing next to. It doesn't grow. So they rebuild it as a photo gallery app first, sharing second, called Photoroll.

Which I have never heard of, so I'm guessing it died too.

Never released. And then Apple announces AirDrop in iOS seven, which does what Bump does, built into the phone.

Oh, that's the end. Your entire product becomes a system setting.

Summer twenty thirteen, Google buys Bump. Terms weren't disclosed; TechCrunch's sources put it around thirty-five million, against nearly twenty million raised. Not a home run.

So the headline is "big app sells for not very much." Where's the payoff?

The unreleased one. Photoroll became the foundation of Google Photos. Lieb led it from inception past a billion users.

The app nobody ever got to use is the one that won.

And seventeen out of seventeen Bump team members were still at Google four years later.

Okay, and he's back at YC now?

Full-time Group Partner since April twenty twenty-four, after three batches as a visiting partner. Over five hundred office hours with YC companies.

What's he looking for in founders, then? Given all that.

Technical people who build fast, who are honest about whether anyone actually comes back, and who'll follow the strongest signal in their own data even if it kills the product they love.

Which is exactly the thing he had to do himself.

And Paul Graham's question is still in there somewhere. How is this bigger than Google? Turns out, for Lieb, the answer was: it becomes part of it.

Not the route I'd have predicted from a fist bump.