Bradley Horowitz: Lessons Scaling Billion-User Apps at Google

The speaker discusses the value of attention and how technology can help people be more productive. They also talk about the potential of generative AI applications and the challenges surrounding IP rights. The speaker shares their approach to investing and encourages curiosity and exploration in education.

• Attention is valuable and technology can help people be more productive
• Generative AI applications have product opportunities but also pose challenges for IP rights
• Investing approach is focused on freshness and seeing products through fresh eyes
• Encourages curiosity and exploration in education

Larry Page was focused on reducing latency in Gmail and believed that saving even one second for a billion users could save lives by returning time to them. The speaker also discusses the potential of generative image and text models but notes the challenges surrounding IP rights and ethical considerations.

Bradley Horowitz, industry veteran and Google product leader, speaks with Scale founder and CEO Alexandr Wang about the transformative experiences that have helped him in his current role as lead for products with billions of users, which over the past decade have included Gmail, Calendar, Google Docs, Hangouts, Google News, Blogger, Reader, and Google Photos. He discusses how he learned to build what users really need, and not what academics believe they need. He discusses the potential of AI-enable features and applications being explored further and the need to solve the simple problems before being able to convince customers to try more sophisticated features. When it comes to billion-user systems like Gmail, he explains how he has helped tackle issues with data-driven product development, a good sense of triage, and relentless experimentation. He also covers the lessons he learned from Flickr, which he helped Yahoo acquire, and how it’s best to let computers and humans do what they each do best. Before joining Google, Horowitz helped lead video-analysis startup Virage to an IPO and served as VP of advanced development at Yahoo. Bradley is also an angel investor in Slack, Upstart, Grab, Miro, Coda, Sana and over 100 other high-impact startups.