How David Lieb turned a failing startup into Google Photos

Executive overview

Bump reached 150 million users but had no retention and no business model. After burning $15 million, the team pivoted twice, got acquired by Google, and built Google Photos — which reached a billion users in under four years.

The path was not a pivot strategy. It was persistence: talking to users when lost, ignoring bosses when certain, and refusing to accept failure as the final word.

If you're certain you're right, you can take far more risk than you think.

Early lessons from Bump's rise and fall

• Bump solved a real problem the founder personally experienced — contact sharing via phone bump
• App went viral with zero promotion; growth was entirely word of mouth
• Classic mistakes followed: hired too fast, attended too many conferences, raised too much money too early
• Excess capital masked the real problem: low-frequency use with low per-interaction value
• Bump sat in the worst quadrant — low frequency, low value — and retention never worked

Pivoting through user research

• After years of struggle, emailed the top 100 users personally in one day
• Discovered users were sharing family photos, not contact info — a complete surprise
• Built Flock: auto-shared photos based on geolocation and social graph
• Flock also failed; users said they loved it but didn't use it
• Key lesson: ignore what users say, watch what they do — look at retention curves and logs

Building Google Photos against the odds

• Paul Graham pushed them to replace the entire Photos app, not just add sharing
• Built Photo Roll prototype with four months of runway left; never launched publicly
• Sold to Google on the strength of that demo, not Bump itself
• Arrived at Google to find a reorg — tasked to work on Google+ instead
• Worked on Google Photos covertly while doing his day job; fired from the team twice
• Used every personal connection to build internal support; eventually got the green light
• Built Google Photos from scratch with a team of ~120 in nine months; launched at Google I/O 2015

Cancer, recovery, and what comes next

• Diagnosed with leukemia in 2020, during COVID, with a five-month-old at home
• Spent the hardest night of his life looking at family photos on Google Photos
• 38 days in hospital; four years of chemo total
• Recovery forced a reassessment: the role at Google had drifted away from building
• Left Google in 2022 to join YC as a General Partner — chose coaching over building