How to win in the AI era: Ship a feature every week, embrace technical debt, ruthlessly cut scope, and create magic your competitors can't copy | Gaurav Misra (CEO and co-founder of Captions)

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. 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? Our engineering goal is every engineer should ship a marketable product. Every week. I love just how wild that sounds. How do you maintain quality and make it all cohesive? 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 on technical debt. They pay it usually right away, or they're paying back technical debt. From the days when they were a startup. Is there anything else that in how you operate and the way you build product that you think is really unique and interesting? 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. It's not gonna 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.

Today my guest is Gorov Misra. Gorov 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 and cutting edge consumer AI products. Which lets you generate and edit talking videos with AI. They have over 10 million users and have raised over a hundred million dollars. In our conversation, we essentially do an archaeology of how a modern AI oriented startup operates. Including how every single engineer at their company ships a marketable product or feature every single week. Why they have a secret roadmap in addition to a regular roadmap?

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