Gaurav Misra
Co-founder and CEO at Captions (now Mirage)
Co-founder and CEO of Captions, one of the most successful consumer AI products for generating and editing talking videos, with over 10 million users, previously an early employee at Snap leading the design engineering team.
Dimension Profile
Key Themes
Episode Summary
Gaurav Misra reveals how Captions operates as a cutting-edge consumer AI startup, including their extreme engineering goal of every engineer shipping a marketable product every week, their dual public/secret roadmap strategy, and their deliberate approach to taking on technical debt for speed. Drawing from his experience at Snap, he also shares lessons on design-led product development and what happens when AI video becomes indistinguishable from reality.
Leadership Principles
- → Every engineer should ship a marketable product every week — that's the engineering goal
- → As a startup your job is to take on technical debt because that is how you operate faster than a bigger company
- → Have a public roadmap and a secret roadmap — the public roadmap is what users and competitors all know about, the secret roadmap is where differentiation happens
Notable Quotes
"Our engineering goal is every engineer should ship a marketable product every week."
— On the extreme shipping velocity at Captions
"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."
— On the counterintuitive value of technical debt for startups
"We have a public roadmap — these are all features that every competitor knows about. So we have a second roadmap which we think of as a secret roadmap."
— On maintaining competitive differentiation while being responsive to users
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