1. The "YouTube Moment": While working at Texas Instruments, Lieb read about two 25-year-old kids selling YouTube for a billion dollars. This moment made entrepreneurship tangible to him, as he realized that these successful founders weren't fundamentally different from himself, inspiring him to consider if he could achieve similar success.
  2. The Genesis of Bump: The problem that inspired Bump was the difficulty of sharing contact information with new acquaintances, especially in the era of the first iPhone. Lieb observed people manually typing numbers and realized there should be a simpler, app-based solution, leading to the idea of "bumping" phones together to share contacts.
  3. Early Success of Bump: Bump gained initial traction through word-of-mouth after being submitted to the App Store without promotion. Lieb learned that "anybody can build anything" and that building a product for oneself, trusting one's intuition, can lead to good design decisions.
  4. The "Low Frequency, Low Value" Problem: The Bump team realized that people didn't keep using the app frequently enough for the value it provided. They categorized this as being in the "low frequency, low value" box of a 2x2 grid, a critical position to avoid for product sustainability.
  5. Flock: A Pivot Gone Wrong: Bump pivoted to Flock after discovering through user interviews that their top users were primarily sharing photos, not contacts, with family. Flock aimed to automate photo sharing with friends based on geolocation, but it also failed because quantitative data showed users weren't actually using it, despite positive qualitative feedback. Lieb was able to understand to focus on photo roll after mailing top 100 users.
  6. The Vision for Photo Roll: Paul Graham pushed Lieb and his team to "replace the entire photos app on the phone" rather than just building a sharing product. This led to the ambitious idea for Photo Roll, designed to be a significantly better, comprehensive photo management application.
  7. The Google Acquisition and Internal Conflict: The plan was to rebuild Photo Roll with Google technology to become Google Photos. However, upon arrival at Google, a reorg shifted their focus to Google+. Lieb strongly believed in the Google Photos vision and worked on it "on the back burner," creating significant conflict with his bosses, who explicitly told him not to.
  8. The Birth and Success of Google Photos: Google Photos was built from scratch in about 9 months and launched in 2015, quickly becoming a hit. It grew to over a billion users in less than four years, making it one of the fastest-growing products of all time. Its core idea was a "home for all of your life's memories," offering searchable, organized photos with AI features like face recognition and editing.
  9. Consider the challenges and opportunities of intrapreneurship (entrepreneurship within a large organization) as illustrated by David Lieb's experience at Google. Discuss the conflicts he faced, his unconventional strategies, and the factors that ultimately led to the internal green light for Google Photos.