Why Marissa Mayer Is Betting Big On Consumer Tech

Marissa Mayer is the CEO and co-founder of Sunshine, the former CEO of Yahoo, and a longtime Google executive. She joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss why she's betting on consumer tech, building a new array of products including Sunshine Contacts and the newly released Shine, a photo sharing app. Mayer discusses how AI impacts building for consumers today, and whether independent tech stands a chance against big tech. We also discuss the state of OpenAI, Google's competitive position, the lessons from Mayer's Tumblr acquisition, and what motivated her to found a company. Tune in for a fun, in-depth conversation with one of tech's leading executives. --- You can subscribe to Big Technology Premium for 25% off at https://bit.ly/bigtechnology Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice. For weekly updates on the show, sign up for the pod newsletter on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/6901970121829801984/ Questions? Feedback? Write to: [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  Let's talk with Marissa Meyer, the longtime Google executive and former Yahoo CEO, about whether new consumer technology stands a chance and where the AI race goes next. That's coming up right after this. This episode is brought to you by Genesis. What does it actually take to put a Gentic AI to work across an entire enterprise? I recently spoke with Genesis chairman and CEO Tony Bates about why orchestration is emerging as a competitive advantage in customer experience and what companies need to get right in the AI era. Then I sat down with Adam Mitchell, head of enterprise business solutions at Voya Financial, to go inside a large-scale agentic CX transformation, including the business decisions, trade-offs, and lessons along the way.

• 0:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  You can watch both conversations now on my YouTube channel today. It's never been more challenging to get frontier compute. How do you know where to look, who to trust, or how much to pay? Akash is an open cloud that provides easy access, flexibility, and peace of mind. That's how companies like Razer were able to cut their inference cost by 15 times. Visit akash.network/alex for a free consultation. That's akash.network/alex for a free consultation.

• 1:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  Welcome to Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool-headed, nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. Marissa Mayer is here. She's the co-founder and CEO of Sunshine, and before that was Google employee number 20, holding an array of executive positions there for 13 years before becoming the president and CEO of Yahoo. Now at Sunshine, she has a new contacts app, a new photo sharing app, and more, and she's here to talk all about that and plenty more with us today. Marissa, welcome to the show.

• 1:46Speaker 01

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 1:48Alex Kantrowitz?

  Thanks for being here. You know, you're making a bold bet, introducing apps in the consumer space where so many venture capitalists and founders seem to have written off the space entirely. Let me just read you what M.G. Siegler, who's a venture partner at GV, which is formerly Google Ventures, and one of my must-reads, says about consumer products today, and I think the folly of Starting them and I would love to get you to respond to that. So MG says it really just boils down to time. We all have the apps and services we use on a daily basis. Once one is lodged in that cycle, it's extremely hard to dislodge both because of habits and for social apps, network effects. And whereas 10 to 15 years ago, everyone was gung ho to try new apps to see what might stick.

• 2:32Alex Kantrowitz?

  We're all now stuck with what we have. What do you think about that?

• 2:36Speaker 01

  Well, I do think MG is right about one thing, which is that consumer apps tend to be stickier than people realize. Yes, there's low switching costs, you can try new things. But people do have their routines, they have their habits and they do tend to stick with them. That said, I do think people are really dismissive of the consumer space. People feel like everything's been done. We already have our stuff, as MG says. And I feel like when I've watched the pattern of consumer technology over time, people tend to say that and then something new comes along and they say, well, everything was done except for that. And then, you know, then they say now, now everything's been done. And then it continues for a while like that. And then, and something new comes along and say, well, well, that hadn't been done before. You're right. And that's actually really useful.

• 3:21Speaker 01

  And so I think that there is actually more opportunity in the consumer space than people realize. That's one of the reasons why we're very focused on it at Sunshine. And I think that at the core of consumer, what you really need to do is focus on the user needs. What is, what user problem are you trying to solve? And you do need to aim at problems that are pervasive, that affect a lot of users every day where you feel you can add a lot of value. I think that's really the key. And so, you know, a lot of times, these are spaces that might be very crowded. You might have to do some disruption. And they're, they're bigger bets, bigger bets than smaller bets, right? Because it's bigger in terms of the overall target audience

• 4:04Speaker 01

  and the amount of time and attention you're trying to capture. Smaller in that sometimes because they're pervasive, there's a little bit of amount of time every single day from the user. And they're a smaller touch point. But I think that that's really the key is to not discount the consumer space as done. Because I think there's a lot of things that have yet to be invented that are incredibly useful. And instead to focus on those user problems and those user pain points you're trying to solve for and make sure that it's something that's really relatable to a lot of people.

• 4:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I'm with you and I personally would love to see more innovation in the consumer space. These apps are just fun to use. And anyone who says that we're at like, you know, the maturation point for what consumer app should be is totally wrong because there is so much more to do. And we're going to talk about your specific apps in a moment. But the interesting thing is, you know, you talk about smaller bets, right? Just a little bit of time. And actually, MG's post was about BeReal, which like, was this great anecdote to the sort of polished photo sharing that we do and takes like, what, like 30 seconds a day to use. And he talked about how that was this big hit and then went away. And he continues his post and talks about like, you know, yes, you can do it, like, and gives

• 5:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  TikTok as an example. And here's, here's what he says. He goes, but, but, but TikTok. Yes, you too can build TikTok. All it takes is algorithms trained over time on millions of users in China, acquiring another company which was already operating in the US market, and then spending billions of dollars to market it, a meta property to siphon off users to your network. And even then, it won't work unless your product is actually great. Those millions of users will just churn. So, do you think that he's, he's overhyping the challenge? I mean, it's, I don't think that he's right in saying that this stuff is baked. But the challenge is great, right? Because if you think about the consumer apps that have broken through, let's say, since, I don't know, Instagram, is TikTok the only big one? What's your thought on this?

• 6:01Speaker 01

  I think that there are, in theory, that, you know, there are more apps that have broken out in my mind. I do think that he's right. There's a big barrier to entry in some of these cases, especially when you talk about video, because video is, you know, it's expensive to move around, it's expensive in terms of user time, in terms of how people consume it, it's serial, opposed to parallel. So, you know, the way you have to engineer the stream and things like that, just to make sure that you really hold attention, is more intense. So I think he's got some good points in terms of TikTok and video in particular. That said, I think that

• 6:38Speaker 01

  Again, if you look at that core of what people are doing in consumer, what are you helping them do? And if you're helping them do something that they need to do anyway, and you're helping them do it better and with new innovation, I think that that is really greenfield. Because I think people are always looking for ways to be more efficient. They like trying things new, right? We are creatures that love novelty. And so I think that those types of things have a real chance of breaking through. And if there's something that helps you handle your everyday tasks, and something that we really like to focus on here at Sunshine, I think the odds it becomes part of your routine and a critical part of your routine is there.

• 7:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  So, and that's where you've decided to focus. Contacts, birthdays, event planning, photo sharing. I'm a new user of your apps. I just downloaded Shine and Sunshine Contacts. Shine is for the photo sharing and it's auto generating albums for me already, just like shortly after downloading, which is pretty cool. Now, I noticed that Sunshine's been around for a while, like about six years. And I think, was it Loomy Labs beforehand? Or I'd love to hear your, you obviously went through a journey, you know, between founding the company and deciding this is where you wanted to focus. So can you talk a little bit about that?

• 7:56Speaker 01

  Sure. Well, when we first started the company, we knew the broad space we were interested in. We loved consumer applications and we wanted things that were useful every day. But that's a really broad space. So we did a lot of experimentation to really think through where do we want to start? Where could we add value? And we were really interested in people's relationships. How are groups formed? You know, the soccer team, the class at your child's school, you know, your friends from college. How are groups formed? What makes them cohesive? How do they get together? How do you have those shared experiences? So we got very interested in groups and events. But we realized to do groups and events well,

• 8:39Speaker 01

  we really needed to help people stay in touch. So we started with contacts because for us, those were foundational. We learned a lot about contacts. Sunshine Contacts today is the highest rated app in the App Store for contact management. And we think it's the best, obviously, but it does a great job taking your contacts, deduplicating them, updating them, enriching them. So we find your contacts in the white pages. We find them on Facebook. We find them on LinkedIn and we also connect them with your email, which is really key because we can get a lot of information out of signatures and out of emails that can really make your address book that much more useful. So we're really proud of of Sunshine Contacts, but as I said, for us, that was a foundational portion of what we wanted

• 9:24Speaker 01

  to build in that overall pursuit of that everyday utility around groups and events. And so what we launched last week, Shine, is our photo sharing for groups app. It takes basically a time and a place and lets people join an album and share in full resolution their photos. And it's AI-powered in that it understands and tries to present photos that are share-worthy for automatic upload. And it also does things like reduces duplicates, the same thing we were doing in contacts, we're doing in photos. And it makes it easier to share photos across people who might not have each other's contacts.

• 10:06Speaker 01

  It might be a friend of a friend at an event that you're at. And that brings me to events. At the same time that we launched Shine, the app, we also launched Shine on the web, which helps you with event organization. And so there you can set up your event. We have fast, fluid communication around R S V Ps. And we also have breathtakingly gorgeous invitations made by generative AI. And so overall, we think that these two work really well together. You can use them separately, of course, but they basically overall help you capture special moments when you're together with friends.

• 10:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. And so I'm putting all these different areas that you're working in together. And I'm looking at, okay, so it's photos, contacts, events. To me, it seems like it's almost breaking down what Facebook used to do well and trying to build it back in a different, maybe more of a utility versus a social network. What do you think about that thought?

• 11:03Speaker 01

  You know, as I said, for us, we're very focused on what we think people need every day, what we think will delight them, what we think will make their relationships stronger. And I do think that there were things and are things that that Facebook does really well. For us, we're not so much following that template as opposed to just looking at people's everyday tasks and overall what's getting in the way. And I think we can all agree today, photo sharing is really broken. The number of times you might say, oh, let me take that on my phone, too. Or, you know, don't forget to send me that photo when you're parting, you know, at the end of time together, you know, those types of things. And the odds you get the photo is probably pretty low. Maybe for some people it's higher, but I think that is overall pretty low.

• 11:48Speaker 01

  And so we wanted to say, look, if a photo really belongs to the time and a place and the people who are there, it should be easy, especially among friends and people who are connected even through other people, to seamlessly share those photos. And at the end, you know, right now, AI is working on things like global facial recognition. But for a lot of us, we spend a lot of our time pinching and zooming and trying to make sure that we have the shot that has the right expression, the eyes open, all of those types of things. And those are all things that Shine can do easily and well.

• 12:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. And, you know, I won't press the issue too much, but it does seem like, you know, the one thing that really set me off on this path was seeing birthdays there. It's like, well, photo sharing, it actually used to be that you would share that in your newsfeed, birthdays, you would see it on the right rail. Like, there really is this opportunity for an unbundling of some of the bigger, you know, social utilities that we've had for a while. And that's kind of where where this might come in. And then it sort of leads to my next question to you, which is that this is, there's, there's a huge AI portion to what you're trying to do. I think you talked about it a little bit, whether it's like finding the right photo, you know, figuring out who to share, deduplicating, like, these are all something you need, something that's artificially intelligent to do, I imagine. And

• 13:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's interesting because if you're starting these new consumer apps, the other question is, is big tech just going to do what you do? And so I'd love to talk to you a little bit about that. The first big question, you know, having set that up to you is, do you think this AI moment is going to make big tech even stronger than it is? Or do you think it will give startups like yours a chance to like really fill in some of the gaps that they haven't tended to for a while now that they've gotten bigger and slower?

• 13:34Speaker 01

  I think that overall it's a great opportunity, a great moment for startups. I think that yes, big tech is providing an amazing platform. The AI models and the LLMs that we have today enable us to do things that, you know, we could only dream of just a few years ago. But I think that in terms of the fact that we can access APIs for these things, we can apply them to specific domains and specific problems. I think it really allows the startup to build that much more quickly, build that more intelligently. And the type of focus that comes with being in a smaller company

• 14:16Speaker 01

  and much more strategically focused on something is a great opportunity for startups. So yes, I do think this is a moment when big tech will thrive for obvious reasons related to AI. But I also think it's a great moment to be in the startup world, building something that's really relentlessly focused on a specific domain.

• 14:37Alex Kantrowitz?

  And I think this gets to a really good point, which is that a lot of people say, don't even bother trying to compete in AI because it takes so much compute and the models are so expensive to train. But there are applications, it seems like you're saying, that you can build on top of these very expensive models and actually do things that are unique and differentiated without having to spend, let's say, $100 million on trading your own LLM or, you know, text recognition model.

• 15:05Speaker 01

  Yes, I think that foundational AI has a huge barrier to entry, but I think applied AI, taking these models and applying them in a specific space in a specific way, is a really terrific opportunity right now. And I also think that the fact that you, that there's lots of different types of AI being developed by big tech is, is helpful. And what's nice is, I personally don't necessarily think that the winner in LLMs will necessarily be the winner in visual creation. And so as a startup, the fact that you can pick whichever model or whichever offering and API you feel fits your needs best is great. Where in some cases, the big tech companies are going to end up using just their own models

• 15:49Speaker 01

  and not necessarily being able to use what they see as, as best of industry, I think overall could be limiting for them. And so I like the fact that we're able to shop different models and ultimately find the one that fits our needs best.

• 16:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right, and so you've been within Google. There's this like perspective out there that like a second, the second like some startup does something right, Google or Facebook or, you know, you name it, will copy it. So like Google obviously does photo sharing with Google Photos, contact management. I mean, like as you open up Sunshine Contacts, you're like, the first two things that you're plugging into are Gmail and, and Google Contacts. Is there something that, having been inside the company, that gives you confidence that they just aren't able to or won't end up taking the features that you've built and then baking them into their own apps?

• 16:36Speaker 01

  Oh, I mean, I think there's always a concern that you could have someone who fast follows or copies something that you're successful in. But I think that the type of focus that a startup can bring is really valuable. Being really relentlessly focused on that, that's how of course Google got its start, being really relentlessly focused on search. Even Gmail that launched 20 years ago this week, like ultimately was really, it was a search-based lens on email, which it turns out is really useful and, and people hadn't thought of email that way in the past. But taking that lens where you have a lot of deep learnings and insights about your users and applying that to a problem, I think ultimately is how you stay ahead,

• 17:20Speaker 01

  even if you have a much larger company competing with you.

• 17:23Alex Kantrowitz?

  Looking at this type of startup, if someone didn't know the context here, they'd be like, oh, this is like a pretty like, pretty easy to see the path that this startup takes off and then gets acquired within Google. Is this, are you gonna stay the course alone? Or if, you know, let's say Sundar calls up and says, we want to acquire this and come in and run some of our consumer products, is that something you're open to?

• 17:48Speaker 01

  Uh, you know, for me, this adventure, obviously, what I'm mostly focused on is impact. I want to have a large group of users, a large user base, that's using the products and finding value in it every day. I think if we're successful in that, there's all kinds of opportunities. But for me, what really intrigued me and brought me to being an entrepreneur, was the act of building a company. Not necessarily building a feature or building a team. I really love the design problem of working on a company as a whole, right? Having a product, a business model, a team, a culture that all works together, to build something that can provide a lot of value and stand the test of time. So our hope would be to be able to continue independently.

• 18:32Speaker 01

  I've learned in business, you should never say never. But our goal is to really build and design something that has that type of strength.

• 18:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, so let's talk a little bit about some of these models that you may or may not be building on top of, beginning with OpenAI. What's your view of the state of OpenAI right now? Obviously, there's been some turbulence, but it seems like that's potentially behind it. But the technology thing really becomes interesting now because you have this GPT-4 model that's out there, they might be on their way to releasing GPT-5 sometime this year, but the competition's really good. So what would you say is the state of the company right now?

• 19:12Speaker 01

  Uh, I think that OpenAI, at least in my view at the moment, has the lead, both in text generation, ChatGPT, as well as with Dolly. But obviously, it's a fiercely competitive space. And I think that those, those things can be won and lost quickly. And there's a lot of really able competitors. Obviously, I've been close to Google and have a real fondness for it. But I think in terms of the stable of talent they have, as well as the type of data they have to run on, I think that, you know, you can't count them out.

• 19:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yep. And so I've heard you talk a little bit about which model will win. And you did draw a parallel between what's going on with AI bots now or AI models in search. And I was like, kind of surprised to hear you talk about search. You talked about how search was effectively commoditized. But every now and again, there would be one answer that Google might give that was better than the others and that helped build Google's like, long-term trust. And right now, we're in this moment where these models, these AI models are on their way to commoditization. So I'm curious, like, what you think will enable these models to differentiate themselves? Is it that better answer every 30 tries or something? Or is it something else?

• 20:26Speaker 01

  I think that that brings me back to the first question you asked in the podcast around the stickiness of consumer apps. I think that one of the things we learned as we built Google and it grew, is that yes, there was a lot, there was kind of a head of queries, the queries that people do all the time, and didn't matter what search engine you used for those. They were all pretty much the same. It's the long tail of queries, deep research queries, queries that people had never done before, where Google's flexibility and depth and comprehensiveness and speed really set us apart. We get much better answers there. That said, you know, when we saw it, like, the difference between us and even the second-best search engine was sometimes pretty narrow, 3%, 5%, as you said, at which

• 21:11Speaker 01

  point in time, you're saying, well, look, you're really only getting a better answer with Google once out of every, one out of every 20 tries, or one out of every 30 tries. And two things we saw. One, once you become part of someone's routine, the odds they keep turning to you as their search engine is really high. So as I said, consumer apps are stickier than people realize. The other is that people are so grateful when they get a novel, insightful answer or result, that they, it builds a huge amount of allegiance. The fact that you can just really nail someone's query, you know, one in 30 times, one in 20 times.

• 21:48Speaker 01

  That stands out in their mind. You know, Google brought them something that no one else was able to bring them. And the type of allegiance and loyalty that builds among consumers and users is, is really quite profound, and I think in many ways underestimated. And I think we're going to see the same thing happen in some of these chat interfaces. If you start to realize, wait, I just like the types of answers. I get better here. I get better insights. I get answers that speak to me more, that, you know, express themselves more in language that I can use if I'm asking the model to write something for me, things like that. I think that those are, you know, those can be quite profound. I noticed that even in Gmail, you know, they'll do the auto compose.

• 22:29Speaker 01

  And I was talking with a friend of mine and we were talking about the fact that like, we would never write "yeah" in an email, you know, "yeah comma" as an answer, but it frequently composes that. And you're like, look, it's little things like that where if over time, the time savings and just knowing you well enough to know that you would always write "yes comma" as opposed to "yeah comma." Those types of little things make a big difference in terms of how at home you feel with the technology, how much you feel like you can rely on the technology, the type of time savings it gives you, how well it understands you. And so sometimes it's those little things around the edges, the 3% of queries where you're much better, the little things that you say, "Well, look, I might speak that way, but I would never write that way."

• 23:12Speaker 01

  Having technology that really understands that and brings that to bear ultimately can make the difference, especially in a very competitive space like this.

• 23:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, and those Gmail auto replies or auto completes, they're unfailingly polite. I feel like they've taught me to become a more polite email, emailer, which I appreciate. And maybe it's borne fruit because here we are talking after a cold email. So, thank you Gmail on that front. Another thing that, that you brought up, which is a way that these bots can differentiate themselves is personality. And it does seem like all these bots right now have the same personality. It's, I don't know, it's kind of boring. They're all pretty boring. They're very helpful, but they're, they're not like someone you're, like someone, I'm already anthropomorph, anthropomorphizing these things, but, you know, they're, they're not someone you're excited to talk to. You're like, oh, okay, let's see if this is useful.

• 24:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  Like the one that's taken a shot at doing a personality is Grok from Elon Musk and it's... Pretty cringe. So talk a little bit about that. I'm curious to hear your thoughts on like, is the laggard here just gonna open up and try to make a more personable bot? Or kind of like a psychobot that doesn't have any guardrails? Like, I'm personally, I, maybe I'm alone, but I'd love to have one that like, we'll just talk about anything with you and use this intelligence that it has baked in to like, really do some of the wacky stuff it did. For instance, when Kevin Ruiz was talking with Sydney and the Sydney Bot tried to break up his marriage.

• 24:43Speaker 01

  It's interesting. In the early days of Google, I talked to a Hollywood producer who was doing some side collaboration with Google. And he felt really strongly that search engines were going to have to develop a personality. That people were gonna say, oh, I'm choosing between Google or Yahoo or, you know, Microsoft. And that there was gonna have to be flavors, the same way there is on like CBS, ABC, NBC, right? In terms of like what shows they would carry. And, you know, there's something about what he said that made sense to me. But in my view, it didn't play out that way at all. And I think it's because, you know, for you and your, you know, a search engine is fundamentally almost like a teacher, right?

• 25:27Speaker 01

  It's bringing you information. You need to trust it. It needs to have a personality that has integrity, that's trustworthy. But a lot of times, you don't necessarily want it to be super personality rich. You really want it to be efficient and pretty much to the point. And I think that there, the fact that it was somewhat, you know, Google in his presentation did sort of fade into the background, right? It might be something that he was no more bland than a Hollywood producer might have actually envisioned, was actually helpful. And I also think that it put the focus on the quality of the answers we are providing. I think there's a couple of things that are going to happen in the AI space if I had to guess.

• 26:08Speaker 01

  I think that we will see that when you're doing work and really conversing one-on-one with the, with the AI, I think you're ultimately going to want to have low personality. Not necessarily objectionable personality. You want to feel understood. But you don't want that necessarily to get in the way and be distracting because overall, it makes you less efficient. I think if you're asking AI to write on your behalf, it's going to become very important that it understands how you like to express yourself. It will, you know, if it does, it will result in fewer edits and a better, you know, first draft of a product, things like that.

• 26:48Speaker 01

  And so I think that you'll see a few different places in terms of how the AI is deployed by different people. And it may be that they're one and the same, that the chatbot you're conversing with to teach yourself is the same as the chatbot you're using to write as it is today. And that there's one that kind of has the right type of of interface and the right way of expressing yourself that's very comfortable in both regards. But my guess is it's that latter task where you're asking the AI to act more like an agent on your behalf, really representing you. I think it's going to be really important for people that in that world that they have a, they are able to have a presence that isn't cringe, that feels very comfortable to them.

• 27:32Speaker 01

  And so I think there the personality piece will be more important.

• 27:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  And I definitely want to talk about agents as well as Google. You were the person that hired Sundar Pichai, so why don't we do that right after the break? This episode is brought to you by App Point. Everyone's racing to roll out AI right now. Co-pilots, chatbots, agents doing real work. But here's the part nobody loves talking about. All that AI runs on your data. And most teams have no single way to see it, secure it, and prove it's under control. That's exactly what App Point does. For 25 years, they've been the trusted layer beneath the world's most demanding data, now extended across your entire AI estate. Your data, your cloud, and the agents acting on your behalf.

• 28:18Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 28:44Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 29:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast with Marissa Meyer, CEO of Sunshine. Marissa, let's just talk quickly about Google. What do you think the state of Google is? Because, I mean, I guess this, every time we talk about the company, it needs this preface. It seems like it's in a weird position with AI. Its business model, of course, like, doesn't really want us to run to these bots so quickly. But then again, on the stock market, we're talking Monday of this week, and just hit all-time highs today. So it's an interesting position for Google to be in.

• 30:17Speaker 01

  I think that this is an interesting moment for Google. I personally am very bullish on the company. They have an amazing team. They have incredible talent, particularly in the AI space. And the data they have in Gmail, in order to understand who you are, what you like, who you communicate, how you communicate. You know, if I had to say, you know, "Look, I trust one company to take this data and really be able to make sense of it and understand how to deploy it." To do things efficiently for me, my money would be on Google. Because there's just so much of that that's in in email. And so many other things that Google has, even things from like maps,

• 30:59Speaker 01

  navigations, where you go, how you get there, all of those types of things. They have so much data, both on each of us, all of us personally, but also collectively. But I think that there's a real opportunity that we're going to see major breakthroughs and some of the best in class work being done by Google. At the same time, they have a huge business. And there's just no question in my mind that the current search interface, right, typing something into the box and getting ads back is going to be disrupted. And that transition is going to be very tricky, just given the overall size of the business. That's what I think if they can embrace. Well, I think if they can embrace that change.

• 31:40Speaker 01

  And, you know, at the end of my time at Google, we were working on something that we called contextual search. The idea that a query should be more than just the words. It should be, you know, it should be your whole present state, right? You know, who you are, where you are, the conversation you just had. We had this notion, it's kind of counterintuitive, thinking about like, what if you were the query? What if you could feed not just your question, but all of you into the search box? I think that we're going to see something like that. And I think it does need an interface breakthrough. Today, we don't have an interface that works well enough in that regard. I think the chat box, the bots that sometimes are too chatty. I think the search interface is too limited.

• 32:22Speaker 01

  And I think there will be an interface breakthrough that allows the search engine to gather, either through things like email or history or other inputs, basically gather more of a contextual picture for you to be able to provide even better results. But I think it's where we start to see the power of L L Ms meet personal information. I think that's ultimately. That personal information and context, that's ultimately where we're going to see a real breakout in terms of how search advances. And as I said, that takes in both an interface and an input mechanism improvement. But I think it's clear that that's where it's going, and it will be disruptive to the Google business model.

• 33:03Speaker 01

  That said, I still am bullish that they can do, handle the transition well and come out a winner in the space.

• 33:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's fascinating. I hadn't thought that like all of our emailing and Gmail might be eventually used to train a more personalized bot for us or a more personalized agent for us, but it makes a lot of sense.

• 33:22Speaker 01

  Anecdotally, we did a fun thing at Yahoo. We wanted to look at people's, we looked at the receipts that were coming into people's emails. And the funny thing was, we could tell, and this didn't totally make sense to me, but I guess it does make sense in retrospect. We could tell based on where people were buying socks, where it was particularly rainy. I've never had this thought pattern, but I think apparently when it rains, people start to think a lot about their feet getting wet, and they tend to buy socks. But you could actually tie, you could actually tie together Yahoo Weather, because obviously we had the weather patterns with when people, when and where people bought socks. And so there were lots of strange correlations like that, especially when you look at a

• 34:03Speaker 01

  large body of data, Yahoo Mail, Google Mail, where you can find all kinds of fascinating correlations that really point more to context being a big piece, context and personal information being a big piece of what it is people need and what they need to know.

• 34:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  Can you talk us through a little bit about how Google thinks about how it will make product changes in this moment? Because from the people I speak with on the inside of that company, and there are a lot of them, it seems like Google's really going to weigh like, is this product change going to even cause like a 1% decrease in search advertising, and therefore we won't do it? Is that really the way that this company thinks about products? And if it's the case, how do you expect them then to go to that shift in format, interface? It's going to take a pretty bold decision, right? Just like a very bold, gutsy product choice? That seems like it's the only way.

• 34:58Speaker 01

  I think that there is a tension. Obviously, when you have something as big and valuable as the Google Search business, which I ran for around a decade, there is this tendency towards incrementalism. Right? You want to just try and make things. You have a pretty good product and a pretty good business already, and you just want to try and keep chipping away at it and making it better and better. There is that kind of progress that comes, but I think there's also a boldness inside of Google. And I think it's been there since the core of saying, wait, what if we did email? What if we do Maps? Right? What if we go into driverless cars? And I think this is one of these moments where they're going to have to be bold. And interestingly, when I left Google for Yahoo, my last conversation as a formal Google

• 35:43Speaker 01

  employee was with Sergey himself. And I asked Sergey if he had any advice for me, and he gave me a lot of different advice. And we'd worked together for a long time. And as I went to leave, it was time for me to go. I had my hand on the door handle, and I remember Sergey stopped and said, "Marissa, wait. Don't forget to be bold." He's like, you know, just continuing to try and make Yahoo incrementally better isn't going to get you where you want to go. He just said, "Don't forget to be bold," and left it at that. But that was, it was huge for me because I do think, it reminded me that, you know, in our attempt to make Yahoo great again, we were going to have to make bold decisions.

• 36:28Speaker 01

  And I do think there is, at the heart of Google, in terms of the way the founders have set up the company, the culture, there is this desire for bold, unbridled innovation. And I think this is a moment when the company has to lean into that. And you can't be reckless about it. You obviously have users, employees, shareholders, a lot of stakeholders that need to be considered. But I don't think that that can get in the way of the overarching narrative that AI is coming, it's going to change search in a really profound way. And Google still is, in my view, the company that's best positioned to be the leader in search at the end of this wave, as it is right now. But it's going to mean leaning back into that, that original creative impulse.

• 37:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  But I do wonder about the boldness thing because, you know, in the notes that I put down before this conversation, I wrote, you know, you had just tweeted about Gmail's 20th anniversary, you mentioned it here. And I wrote a note, could that happen today? Like, where is that today within Google? We don't see the same experimental projects coming out of the company that we used to, at least as far as I can tell. So what makes you think the boldness is still there?

• 37:42Speaker 01

  I have to say, even when we started Gmail, which Gmail launched in 2004, but started in 2002, it took a lot of effort. I remember when they first said, like, we're going to build an email client, we were all like, no, like, we're building a search engine. Like, what part of email is interesting? It was actually hard to get it off the ground and it's had to start kind of a skunkworks project that was kicked off by Larry. And, you know, over time, we started to see the value in it and we started to see what search and some of the profoundness of the size of storage and our cost of storage could really bring to bear on email. And that was all very exciting. And so, but in the beginning, it took a lot, it took a lot of energy, right, to, to start something new, even in a little company.

• 38:26Speaker 01

  You know, breaking out of that status quo takes a lot of energy. And it takes courage, but I think Google has both that energy and that courage. And I think, as I said, this, this space is something that they've been, been working in and preparing. And this moment is something that they've been preparing for, for a very long time. You know, everything from a lot of the underlying advances, a lot of the underlying insights. There was a great article last week, The Transformers, talking about the eight people who've really shaped modern AI, all of whom worked at, at Google. You know, this has been, been building for, for, for quite a long time. And I think that they clearly have the team and the data to do it.

• 39:08Speaker 01

  And I do think they have the impulse to really embrace this change and, and be the powerful player within it.

• 39:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  So you hired Sundar as a product manager within Google?

• 39:19Speaker 01

  I can't take credit for that. Susan Wojcicki hired Sundar. She was the head of ads. I was the head of search and product management.

• 39:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  You put him to work on his first project.

• 39:28Speaker 01

  We started, we kind of collectively hired search product managers across the product management organization. And then when they came, assigned them. So Susan sourced him. We hired him through the product management hiring committee of which I ran. And then when he came in, we realized that we had a real need in the client space. So Sundar started off and realized that we didn't have a PM, a product manager on Google toolbar. And Google toolbar had like 200 million users or something like embarrassingly large like that. And I said, well, you know, I told you there was more work than people here. So there was no shortage of things to do. So if you'd

• 40:11Speaker 01

  like to be the PM on toolbar, you can. And so he became our PM on toolbar. And then ultimately, we realized we didn't just want a toolbar inside of a browser. We wanted actually the browser. The browser launched to great fanfare and was really well received. And then we realized we could actually use the browser as an operating system paradigm. So it became Chrome OS. And things took off from there. But Sundar is an extraordinary individual. And he turned up fully formed.

• 40:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I think the toolbar story is one of the coolest stories in Google history. Just a product that needed to be there to protect the company against the real anti-competitive stuff that Microsoft was doing. I mean, Microsoft eventually made its browser worse so the web would go slower. It's like, almost you'd think Google's in the same position now, right? But it's not doing the same things. But it made the browser worse. So the web would go slower to hold off Google, which challenged everything within Microsoft from Office to the operating system. But we could talk about that for hours. One question about Sundar for you. Is, knowing Sundar back then, are there things that he would do? Or is there something that you saw in him then that make you believe that he is the right leader for now?

• 41:28Speaker 01

  Sundar is incredible in a number of ways. One, he's incredibly intelligent. He's able to synthesize many different viewpoints extremely quickly. And he's also a very independent thinker. So he's able to take in all those viewpoints, be it from users, from executives, et cetera, and synthesize them in a way that also brings his own lens and his own judgment to bear. And so I do think that he, and he's not afraid of betting big, right? It was, I remember, I remember getting yelled at in the first time we went in to propose that we should do a browser.

• 42:12Speaker 01

  Because obviously at the time, Eric Schmidt, one of my longtime mentors, who I just love, had been deeply embedded in the wars with Microsoft. And he was like, you know what we don't need to do? We don't need to build a browser. And we were like, actually, we really want to build a browser. And here's how we think we can have a browser that's differentiated. And here's how we think it's going to be better. And yes, it's going to be a lot of work. And there's a lot of technical decisions that we have to get right in order to actually compete in this space. But, you know, it was a really fraught debate inside the company to actually decide to pursue and build Chrome. And it was controversial. And Sundar wasn't afraid of that. And there were certainly people around him that supported him and guided him.

• 42:57Speaker 01

  But, you know, overall, it was really, he wasn't afraid to take the charge and say, look, we need to do something that's counterintuitive and controversial and place this big bet. And I think it's really going to be foundational in the long run for the company. And he was absolutely right.

• 43:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  Let me ask you a couple Yahoo questions before we wrap. If I can, our audience is kind of obsessed with Yahoo. They're fun like that. We're talking, I mean, just in the context of consumer products. What do you think the lesson is to be learned from Tumblr? And why do you think that it ended up declining the way that it did?

• 43:30Speaker 01

  Uh, I think that the ultimate lesson to learn um from Tumblr is there are times when a company should be really, you know, held aside, right? I, I, you, you say, you, you know, Google did that really successfully with YouTube. Um, Facebook did that really successfully with Instagram, right? There's times when something's just a rocket ship and it needs to be kept separately, separate from the mothership because the mothership might just love it to death. That was really what we were worried about at YouTube and I know from Instagram, they were, we had similar concerns there. I think that for Tumblr, you know, we felt that it was that kind of rocket ship and there had a lot of great attributes.

• 44:12Speaker 01

  At the same time, I think that it could have used a little bit more support from Yahoo in terms of overall what's working, some of the technical infrastructure and decisions, certainly some of the marketing and positioning of the platform. And also just in terms of be, of becoming a, you know, a platform that was hospitable to ads and really had the type of viewership and followership um that would monetize well with ads. And so I think that if I had it to do over again, I still would do the Tumblr acquisition, but I would have integrated it more and I would have loaned more talent from Yahoo, Yahoo to Tumblr. And it may have ultimately changed Tumblr in terms of what it uh, what it became in

• 44:56Speaker 01

  the long run, but I think it would have ultimately been, been more successful.

• 45:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  You also, you acquired Sumly, which was kind of way ahead of its time. It summarized the web, used AI to do this stuff. I've been thinking about it a lot when it comes to generative stuff because a lot of companies are trying to do that now. Knowing that this is the direction and with that context, do you think there's a bright future for the web? I mean, there's, there are browsers now that you'll go to the webpage and it just, instead of having you read the article, will summarize uh it for you. So I guess I'm curious if you think that this is the future and if it is, what it means for the web.

• 45:31Speaker 01

  I think that summarization is going to be really important. That's why I bought Sumly. I think it ultimately makes you a lot more efficient in your daily routines. It helps you consume a lot more content and also ultimately understand where do I want just a surface level summary and where do I want to do a deep dive? So I think that summarization technology is incredibly helpful. And I also think, you know, one of the big reasons we bought it was to apply it on video. Because there's definitely times where you can't watch a video or, you know, you can't listen to a podcast, but if you can basically take all that content and summarize it down, it's ultimately really useful. I do think that one of the concerns I have about the web in the long run is with machine-generated

• 46:13Speaker 01

  content, I'm not confident that the web improves. Maybe it stays the same, maybe it declines slightly, but for a lot of these technologies, we need the web and we need this base of knowledge and data that everything's learning off of to continue to get better. And I do think that's going to be one of the challenges in the future as we continue to train models and advance these technologies is how do we make sure that we're training on things where the quality is actually monotonically increasing as opposed to staying the same or decreasing?

• 46:46Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, yeah, and not no worry about like the fact that I almost feel like it's this cycle where like you have AI-generated stuff, it gets fed into these chatbots, people don't visit websites anymore, websites go away and you just end up in this death spiral. Is that, am I overly concerned about that or anything that's legitimate?

• 47:05Speaker 01

  I think that there is, I think that originality and newness is a real thing. And I think that there's a lot that people can bring to bear. I think that some of what you're saying will happen, but I don't think it's going to overall be the overarching trend.

• 47:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, great. And then just to sum up, first time founder, after holding some very interesting positions over time, you don't really have to work anymore. So I'm curious, and being a founder is a very tough job. What continues to drive you and how's the experience been so far?

• 47:37Speaker 01

  It's been terrific. As I said, I love working on Design problems. And, you know, building a company is a tremendous design problem. And I have to say, launching products last week, it was so fun. I love the exhilaration of bringing something new in the market. You know, it's never going to be perfect the first time out. You're always going to get a lot of feedback. And when you get that feedback, you have to decide, is that defeating feedback? Or does that just make you want to make your product even better? And so for me, I love building things and I love the team that I get to do it with. And I'm just really excited about what types of things we can build in the future, especially now that we have feedback from real users in terms of what they like and what works for them.

• 48:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  Is there anything you're trying to show the tech world or show yourself, like, starting from zero as opposed to trying to incubate something within a larger company? I mean, you started Google when it was pretty early, but I'm curious if there's any of that that comes into play.

• 48:35Speaker 01

  I think that, you know, my interaction with entrepreneurs has defined my whole career. Obviously for Larry and Sergey, and then Philo and Yang, who I got to work with at Yahoo, Philo more closely than Yang, but both of them. And then, you know, over the course of my career, I've acquired somewhere on the order of 80 companies, around 50 at Yahoo, around 30 at Google. And I've gotten to work with some of the best. And, you know, everyone from like Tim and Nina Zagat, to David Karp from Tumblr, there's so many different personalities that come. And I started to realize that, you know, so much of my career was, you know, based around milestones of different founders and their traits and their insights. That, you know, that, that, that respect for entrepreneurs was something that really carried with me.

• 49:20Speaker 01

  I'm very grateful for all those experiences and it was something that I did want to have for myself.

• 49:25Alex Kantrowitz?

  Cool stuff. All right. So if people want to download the apps, where do they go?

• 49:29Speaker 01

  You can go to sunshine.com, or you can go to bit.ly/shinebysunshine and download it on the App Store and it'll be coming to Android soon.

• 49:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  All right. Well, as one of the newest users, I'm definitely looking forward to use them. And, and hopefully there's more that come because we don't want consumer to be said and done for. So appreciate you taking the swing here.

• 49:54Speaker 01

  Totally. Thank you so much.

• 49:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  Thank you, Marissa. Thank you, everybody, for listening. We'll be back on Friday. Ranjan Roy is returning. We're going to talk about the week's news. We also have a special guest, Zeke Fox, who's here to talk with us all about the state of crypto after the SBF sentencing, and plenty more. So tune in on Friday. And thanks again for listening. We'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.

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