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TIMOTHY SEHN: Hi, Diane.
DIANE GREENE: You know, we'll all sit down.
But I don't know if all of you need to stand up and sit down
for a second.
It's kind of cold in here.
And give you all a-- you know, what is it, the seventh inning
break or something?
TIMOTHY SEHN: This is not LA.
CHRIS O'NEILL: Is this because we're Canadian, Diane?
DIANE GREENE: OK.
All right, we can sit.
So yeah, I'm really-- you know, what fun to have
Chris, CEO of Evernote, and Tim, head of-- VP of engineering
at Snap.
And you guys do have a bit in common.
Snap has 100 million active users, at least,
according to your website.
TIMOTHY SEHN: I think the last published number was 150,
but we'll see.
DIANE GREENE: We think maybe more.
And then you have your very popular application with--
or service with-- 200 million.
And I guess you are both, just like our previous speaker,
Canucks.
CHRIS O'NEILL: Yes.
TIMOTHY SEHN: Yes.
DIANE GREENE: Yes
CHRIS O'NEILL: We are.
Diane, we'll try to keep the gloves on,
and we'll keep the hockey references to a minimum.
DIANE GREENE: OK.
CHRIS O'NEILL: But you have to forgive us if we disappear.
So Canada is playing in the World Cup of Hockey
later tonight.
And--
DIANE GREENE: Oh, OK.
CHRIS O'NEILL: Yeah, right, against Europe.
And if we don't watch it, I think the Canadian government
might revoke our passports.
DIANE GREENE: OK.
So you two have taken different paths to the cloud.
Evernote was on-prem.
You're just starting to move to the cloud.
CHRIS O'NEILL: Yeah.
DIANE GREENE: When you arrived at Snapchat,
it was running on Google App Engine.
TIMOTHY SEHN: Absolutely.
DIANE GREENE: And you've built systems both on premise
and in the cloud.
What have you found about working
in the cloud that's different?
Is it better?
Is it worse?
TIMOTHY SEHN: Sure.
To answer the last question first,
I think it's unquestionably better.
I like to tell a story about when I arrived at Snapchat.
So I'm employee 18.
When I started there, my engineering team was 10.
The most experienced engineer on the team
had three years of engineering experience.
The application was doing--
DIANE GREENE: Fresh thinking.
TIMOTHY SEHN: Yeah, yeah, fresh thinking, yeah.
So the application was doing between 200,000 and 300,000
queries per second to the back end.
Not a single one of those people carried a pager.
So they just assumed it would work.
And we were having 5% week over week growth.
And Google was chugging along in the background.
Now, I'm not-- I'm not going to pretend there weren't problems.
Once I got there, I spent a year working with Google to kind
of optimize and get better.
But I was certainly not-- the application
wasn't down all the time.
You think back to the early days of Twitter's hyper-growth,
and everyone would joke about fail whales.
We had none of those.
And so I apologize to anyone from Twitter in the audience
If there is anyone.
DIANE GREENE: Yeah.
You told me, I think, when I met you in January,
that you had 16 sysops people.
TIMOTHY SEHN: So I had 10 people,
and I operated the servers myself.
DIANE GREENE: Oh, you were the only sysops person.
TIMOTHY SEHN: Yeah, I would page myself whenever it went down.
And then I would cut a ticket to Google,
and we'd work together to fix it.
My friend and colleague from Amazon, Aaron, joined me.
And then we would do it together, the two of us,
until about April or May.
So for about the first eight months I was at Snapchat,
I was the lone operator and VP of engineering.
DIANE GREENE: Yeah, still laughing.
Chris, you actually came from Google.
I know you value our technology.
You value our innovation.
What is the technical innovation that you're
looking for from Google?
CHRIS O'NEILL: Yeah, so I've been at Evernote just
over a year.
And in the first observation was,
we were trying to do too many things.
And in this world, I don't care what scale you're at,
you have to do a few things and do them world class.
Like, we operate in every country in the world.
So we really just did a hard assessment of, like,
what things are we going to really double down on
and what things are we not.
And operating a physical data center just
was clearly not something we wanted to differentiate around.
So once we'd made that decision, we
asked ourselves a couple questions, maybe three.
We said, OK, what's the next three to five years
hold in terms of a computing platform?
Who's the best in the world at that?
And then, three, and perhaps most importantly,
what are the capabilities that we
need to really, really meaningfully
differentiate and really deliver value for our users?
The first two were relatively straightforward.
AI and machine learning are the next computing platform,
there's no question in our minds.
And I'm a little biased, perhaps,
from spending some time at Google.
But Google clearly is the leader in terms of AI
and machine learning at scale.
The third question was about, what capabilities
do we need to marry with the user's data
that they trust with us, right?
We have 5 billion notes and 5 billion more attachments.
This is people's very private narrative of their life.
So how do we combine that information with ML,
essentially, to unlock some real user experiences?
And we like to say our mission is to unlock
the potential of ideas.
So really, that's about removing all friction.
So step one, for us, was voice, a very practical implication.
I think we've hit a tipping point when it comes to voice.
And Google has disclosed, 20% of searches come through voice.
So we really want to capture ideas
at the speed at which people come up with them.
So voice is one big bet for us.
And we're really excited about the NLP progress
that you guys have made.
So we think that's one logical intersection.
And then, once people put information of these ideas
into Evernote, it's a very manual process
for organizing today.
And we think that the power of what we saw just a little bit
about that powers Google Photos, for example,
would really help users, as I say,
organize without really organizing.
It's like getting a six-pack without going to the gym.
We can combine that technology to help
people organize their content.
And then last but not least is search or retrieval.
We really want to help people surface the information
that they put in Evernote at just the right time.
So when we thought about, who's the leader,
and who could help us with capabilities,
it was kind of a no-brainer in the end.
And you, frankly, were an intangible,
because you're committed to win.
And it was clear.
When we actually did look at the intangible decision factors,
it was not even close in terms of your ability and your desire
to win in this game, even though you're
coming from a slight disadvantage in terms
of when you started.
DIANE GREENE: Yeah, you're both talking
about something kind of interesting, which
is that for a longest time, when you built a company,
you had to build absolutely everything yourself.
CHRIS O'NEILL: We didn't have a choice.
10 years ago, there was no cloud.
There was no AWS.
DIANE GREENE: Right.
So now, all of a sudden, you're going,
wait a minute, we don't have to build everything ourselves.
And then, look at all the things you want to take advantage of.
And these Stanford undergrads, didn't even occur to them
to build everything themselves.
TIMOTHY SEHN: They took the passive path
of least resistance.
DIANE GREENE: Yeah.
TIMOTHY SEHN: Frankly, for me, it's about focus, right?
And I think that's what he's talking about.
When you don't have to worry about infrastructure,
and you don't have to worry about,
is that rack going to land on the front doors of your data
center so your network engineer can cable it up,
and you can focus on innovating on product,
you end up with just spending more of your own cycles
and your team's cycles on innovation, which is, I think,
where you end up winning in the end.
CHRIS O'NEILL: They're winning because of speed, I think.
And it's not just because of selfies and photos.
It's actually because you guys are really
innovating with product, right?
If you really ask yourself who's pushing out
product at the highest quality in that game, it's Snap.
TIMOTHY SEHN: And we're proud of that.
And we owe a lot of that to Google Cloud,
honestly, and have for the last three years.
We would not be able to do what we
have been able to do without Google Cloud.
DIANE GREENE: And our site reliability engineers
love you guys.
TIMOTHY SEHN: It's a love-hate relationship, I think.
DIANE GREENE: They pay attention, right?
TIMOTHY SEHN: Yeah, they absolutely pay attention.
DIANE GREENE: So if you were to look back, Tim, with all that
experience, and you were your younger self,
is there any advice, if you were just moving to the cloud
or doing things differently?
TIMOTHY SEHN: One of the things I've really learned
is, managed services make a big difference.
And depending on how much state is preserved
dictates my desire for how managed I want them to be.
So for a service where I want large amounts of data
to live forever, I prefer that to be as managed as I can.
And as I move up through the caching layer
and into the serving layer, I'm willing to tolerate
less and less managed-- or less or less
management-- of the services, because it becomes easier,
as an engineer, to do that.
And so I would reinforce that to my younger self and to others.
I think it's tempting, as an engineer,
to want to control your own destiny,
and take matters into your own hands,
and know exactly how your replication is working.
And it takes a little bit of courage
to let that go, and give that to someone else,
and just trust that the data storage
provider or the front end service provider
will be able to take care of that for you
and take care of it better than you possibly do it yourself.
And so just lean into that.
Again, this option wasn't available 10 years ago.
You had to do it all yourself.
And so it exists now.
And the companies that are going to be
able to move fast, and execute, and win, I think,
are going to be the companies that take
advantage of that advantage.
DIANE GREENE: And who would have thought
that a camera company like Snap would need this infrastructure?
I was hoping you would wear some spectacles today.
TIMOTHY SEHN: It's not unveiled yet.
So stay tuned next few weeks.
CHRIS O'NEILL: I think if you frisked him,
you could maybe find a pair, Diane.
DIANE GREENE: And what about Evernote?
What's next for Evernote over the next few years?
CHRIS O'NEILL: So it's been a great year.
We've really invested in a bunch of different areas, primarily
the team.
So I fundamentally believe the team
you build is the company you build, and the best team wins.
DIANE GREENE: Yeah, you've made huge progress
in the last year, yeah.
CHRIS O'NEILL: Yeah, so it's been great.
And we've also invested significantly
in the technical platform, right?
And GCP's a big part of that, of course.
But there are many other things under the hood that we've done.
And we're just so thrilled to start unleashing,
on a regular cadence, stuff that people will start to see.
I use the metaphor of an iceberg sometimes.
A lot of what we've been doing has been below the water.
So whether it's our search technology, our editing,
or our sync technology, these are all new things.
So people are going to start to see those things in the coming
weeks.
And our users are really excited in the early tests.
I think, more strategically, if we look out a couple more
years, we've been a great single player product.
And we really find-- and there's appetite for us
to help impact teams.
So nothing great in the world happens without teams.
And you saw a great announcement from you guys.
We believe in that future too.
So how do we make that migration--
it Is a fifth of our business today--
without actually investing very heavily in that?
So you can expect us to do that.
And I think that's another part of the decision factor for us
too, was, when you try to go win in the workplace,
the stakes are higher.
The stakes are higher in terms of security,
in terms of compliance, and all these other things.
And a lot of those things will come as an added bonus for us.
So we don't have to, again, think about all those features.
You guys can help us with that.
But we really want to win in the workplace
and really help make teams 30%--
DIANE GREENE: We totally want to help you.
We want to work with you with apps.
I do think Tim cares about privacy and security.
TIMOTHY SEHN: Absolutely.
DIANE GREENE: But yes, absolutely, we'll
all-- the stakes, the access controls
get more complicated in the enterprise, that's for sure.
CHRIS O'NEILL: They do.
DIANE GREENE: Thanks, Tim.
Thanks, Chris.
Thank you very much.
CHRIS O'NEILL: Thank you, Diane.
TIMOTHY SEHN: Thank you, Diane.
Appreciate it.
Bye.
DIANE GREENE: OK.
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