Inside the Google vs. Apple War: Launching YouTube iOS | Andrey Doronichev (3/4)

Intro- 00:00:06: Welcome to the Biotech Startups Podcast by Excedr. Join us as we speak with first-time founders, serial entrepreneurs, and experienced investors about the challenges and triumphs of running a biotech startup from pre-seed to IPO with your host, Jon Chee. In our last episode, Andrey Doronichev shared how he launched one of Russia's first mobile content platforms, stepped away at the height of its success, and found his way to Google through a cold email. If you missed it, check out part two. In part three, Andrey reflects on his time at YouTube, how he helped bring the platform to mobile, scaled it to billions of users, and convinced two rival companies to support one of the most high-profile app launches in history. He also talks about navigating rapid growth, building a team culture that embraced bold ideas, and how those lessons shaped his approach to product and to leadership.

Jon Chee - 00:01:12: No, because I think it goes to show, like, no one really knows anything, right? We're all just figuring it out, and you had this early insight from a personal experience. It seemed like your counterpart in Tokyo also just had a personal experience. And it's like—I don't wanna say it's luck, but sometimes these things are like the stars aligning, and you've had these personal experiences that inform where you think things are going. And sometimes a lot of people just don't have that experience, so they're like, "Yeah, YouTube's cooked." But you're like, "No, it is not. I promise you, it is not."

Andrey Doronichev - 00:01:48: I think a meaningful lesson from this—and, of course, this is special; I got lucky in many ways, right? I was part of this right-place, right-time, all that. But the useful insight that listeners can use is that while a lot of things in the world are enabled by institutions or corporations or some big entities like governments, change is driven by humans, by separate people. There's a person who enables a change in every big organization, and that then becomes a big thing. And then, of course, without this big organization behind it, this one person wouldn't do anything. But it's an important thing that you as a leader of a startup—no matter how small—or you as an employee of a big organization, you could be the agent of change. And I learned it this way. I was just one guy with an accent, and there were a few other people—actually, all of them with accents—who really believed in this idea.

Jon Chee - 00:02:43: Yeah.

Andrey Doronichev - 00:02:44: And then we took this thing from a crazy, zero-usage experiment all the way to the first billion users and then the biggest app in the world. For a while, YouTube was—and it still is—one of the biggest apps. I don't know if it is the biggest, but definitely, at that time, in 2012, we were the biggest app in the world, period. And that was something.

Jon Chee - 00:03:11: So crazy. And I think I'm trying to think about all the elements at play during that time too. It's like the iPhone coming out. There's also—before, I think, unlimited data was a thing on your mobile plan, right? You were probably getting throttled. AT&T or whoever were just like, "No, you don't get unlimited. You're gonna get capped off, and everything after that is an overage bill that you're receiving." Was that a limiting factor?

Andrey Doronichev - 00:03:36: It was a big problem for us. You can Google my name, and you will find a bunch of old newspapers where I would get into scandals with the AT&Ts of this world because they would accuse us of using all the bandwidth and breaking the network. The truth is, the Internet was exploding on mobile. The infrastructure was not ready. Yes, we were a very popular service. And, of course, a lot of the traffic that video was generating was indeed putting a strain on their networks. So it was an interesting time of hypergrowth. And, you know, again, it's a huge luck to be part of that, but I feel like there's always something that is hyper-growing. Right now, it's AI. You always can position yourself to be part of that. And then, of course, it's a bit of luck to actually become part of something that works.

Jon Chee - 00:04:27: Yeah, absolutely. And as you're reflecting on being the head of mobile—I'm imagining, we talked about a little bit of the data considerations for phone plans—what were some other challenges and kind of triumphs of that era for you leading YouTube mobile?

Andrey Doronichev - 00:04:44: The biggest thing I'm most proud of is getting to launch the YouTube app for iPhone, for iOS. It is a separate long story, but if I try to tell it quickly, Google and Apple were truly fighting. Steve Jobs hated Google because he felt betrayed that Google started Android while Eric Schmidt was on the board of Apple. So there was this huge drama going on. The two companies went from being allies and friends and having YouTube pre-installed on the original iPhone to being the worst enemies and not talking to each other. And here I am, a 29-year-old product manager from London who tries to build an app and replace that original iPhone feature and actually have it launched in the App Store, where Apple doesn't approve anything that Google tries to launch. And so everyone at Google told me, "This will never launch. This is a stupid investment. No." And then, over three years, gradually, with some clever strategizing and communication, I managed to go and talk to the top management of Apple and then to the top management of Google and basically be this person trying to convince both sides that even though they hate each other, it will be good for everyone if the iPhone had a great YouTube experience. And a way to enable it is to let my team launch the app. I had to convince Google that they needed to fund us building an app for Apple, and I had to convince Apple that they had to allow us to launch it. Oh my god. It was a really dramatic moment in 2012 when iOS 6 came out. I was negotiating with both parties really, really hard, trying to basically convince Apple to remove the pre-installed, outdated, old TV player kind of thing.

Jon Chee - 00:06:38: I remember that. Yeah.

Andrey Doronichev - 00:06:40: It was essentially a replacement for Flash, right? Because YouTube was running on Flash. The iPhone didn't support Flash. So in order for them not to look like the browser was inferior, they had to do something. So they put this little TV icon. All it could do was play some really small subset of YouTube videos, but it created the impression that the iPhone had a proper browser. And so the hard problem was, how do I convince them to really change the face of the iPhone—because this thing was there from V1—remove it, and simultaneously approve the app we've built in the App Store? And so they would never tell us what was going on, if they'd allow that or not. But I had been requesting all that many times, and then the iOS 6 preview comes out, and it doesn't have the old TV icon in it. And the whole world erupts. The media starts writing, "Oh, Apple escalates fight with Google. They ditched the YouTube app," and whatnot. And meanwhile, me and the team are celebrating that. That means that they agreed. Right? So they cleared the way, and we launched this app, and that was the biggest and the most exciting launch in my entire life, I think.

Jon Chee - 00:07:48: Holy crap. I realize this probably could be a multi-hour saga, but how did you convince them that it was a win-win? How did you get past the bad blood? I mean, maybe there still was bad blood, and they're like, "Fine."

Andrey Doronichev - 00:08:00: Yeah, it was bad blood all the way.

Jon Chee - 00:08:02: Was it just an economic, "Alright, we still hate each other, but let's make money," kind of thing?

Andrey Doronichev - 00:08:08: No. I really, really, really carefully studied the psychology of both teams and the specific executives that were involved in the decision. I created these slides—really beautifully designed in Apple style in Keynote, with all the attention to details and fonts and everything—that were essentially rooting for the user. And they were giving very specific reasons—and there were a lot of them—why if you want to prioritize user experience and make it truly great, if you're standing by your values, this is the only way. I will not go into details, but there were so many things that I truly believed in. So, basically, the path to enable this massive kind of diplomatic win was to focus the conversation on something other than the zero-sum game of us versus them. I was almost acting as an advocate for a user that both companies share. It's almost like a kid in the custody of parents who are getting a divorce. In the custody battle, at some point, you have to convince both sides to think of the interest of the person in the middle. And so that was the play, and it worked.

Jon Chee - 00:09:25: That's amazing.

Andrey Doronichev - 00:09:26: No matter how much those companies were hating each other, they all really cared about their loyal users. And they did the right thing, and I'm really grateful to all of them.

Jon Chee - 00:09:37: Yeah. I mean, that's amazing. And hearing that, that's a lesson for anyone, right? It's just you gotta get people out of the zero-sum mindset, where it's like, "I gotta win at your expense." But I really appreciate the emphasis on the psychology because, again, we're all just—you talk about how change comes from within, it's a person.

Andrey Doronichev - 00:09:58: There's a person.

Jon Chee - 00:09:59: There's a person. There's a face to it. And also, at the same time, despite the bad blood, know who you're talking to and what they care about and how they're predisposed and all those things. Navigating that is critically important.

Andrey Doronichev - 00:10:13: That's a great summary, Jon. Actually, jumping ahead and connecting the dots, I think a lot of people in my current position—where, let's say, you're running a biotech or you're running a tech bio company that does some technology that you want big pharma to pay attention to—are probably having these conversations. "Oh, what will Roche be interested in, or will Genentech care about it?" And you talk about those corporations as these big, faceless things. Well, in reality, the path to success is to actually think of a specific person at Roche or Genentech or whatever company who might be interested and who might become the champion for the deal or partnership. Who is a particular principal investigator? What is the particular role with a particular lead who has a face and salary and interest and psychology to whom you can appeal, whose life you can make better by partnering? How do you reach out to them? How do you find them? How do you build a relationship with them? And that is an important lesson: that those corporations, at the end of the day, they're just a bunch of people with their own interests in mind. And, really, what you're trying to do is to align the interests of yourself, of the company's representative, and the patient—or the population of patients in between you all—who will win as a result of your deal.

Jon Chee - 00:11:32: Absolutely. I mean, at the culmination of getting it approved for iOS, it just goes to show you can get it done even if there is bad blood, really bad blood. So for anyone out there who's like, "Man, this is an insurmountable task," it's just like, it starts from that, and you can get it done even when relations might be tense. And so that was a big culmination, it sounds like. And beyond YouTube, you started to broadly oversee product management. Can you talk a little bit about life post heading YouTube mobile at Google?

Andrey Doronichev - 00:12:07: As it happens, you know, a launch like this—like, when you are in bio, if you are that researcher who really believed in some idea and then it became a successful drug—of course, that gives you a lot of weight in the organization, and suddenly it changes your life. Right? Because suddenly, you can be the person who has ideas, and they get funded, and you get resources. And at that time, it was 2014, when I took my team to Hawaii because our app became YouTube, and everyone recognized that that was it. And this is a great thing about Google. People gave credit to me and my team, truly gave credit. We didn't remain just these guys in the basement who coded something up. I love Google and its culture in this way. It's really amazing. So we got a lot of credit, and as a result, I got a lot of creative freedom to do things. At the same time, the YouTube mobile app became such a huge thing with so many people working on it. And I felt like I was becoming an operator rather than actually starting something from scratch. And at my core, I'm an entrepreneur. I like starting with zero, with a vision, and then with a couple of people putting something together and then growing from that. That is my thing. So managing a hundred-person team and driving revenue from that many billions to that many billions is not really what I love. So I started thinking of starting something new. At that time, I was thinking of this core mission of mine: liberating information. And so the interesting thing that was happening back then, I was thinking, what's after video? And it seemed like what is after video is 3D, is virtual reality, is this more immersive stuff. And that was 2014. That was the very beginning of it. Oculus was a startup at that time, not even at Meta. A couple of other companies tried something in 3D and immersive stuff. Google didn't have anything. And I started pitching this idea that maybe the next step beyond video is hosting immersive 3D on YouTube, creating those 3D experiences and some stereoscopic vision things and posting content for virtual reality glasses and all that. And so I started digging into this. And as it happens in academia or indie hacker circles, you find like-minded people by just getting your ideas out and pitching to everyone. And so soon enough, I found a group of people within Google who were thinking along the same lines. And Google had this cool thing that was called "20% projects," where you could dedicate 20% of your time to something you're really passionate about. In reality, normally, that was between 120% and 140% of your work. But we started this 20% project called Google Cardboard, which was super cheap virtual reality glasses where you could put your phone. It was an open-source design made out of cardboard, literally, with an SDK and a bunch of apps. And so we had 18 people working on this project. I was one of two product managers who worked on this launch, and it wasn't supposed to be a big thing. It was supposed to be a fun little thing we did out of cardboard, but suddenly it blew up and became a thing. To this day, the vast majority of people who got their first experience with VR probably got it through some version of Google Cardboard, not necessarily made by Google, but built using our designs and using our SDK. And then they would upgrade to Oculuses and Vision Pros and other more sophisticated VR devices. So yeah, suddenly, I found myself starting a new team, being one of the founding members of a new virtual and augmented reality team at Google. And it was a really scrappy startup experience again. We literally squatted in the office. We found this condemned building that was supposed to be knocked down. It didn't have micro-kitchens and normal Google stuff, and we were just hanging out there and building our things, building some prototypes and whatnot. And, of course, over the next two years, it became a real team with a thousand-something people working. And I was in charge of all the applications, VR and AR applications, at Google. So if you play Google Earth in VR or you play Tilt Brush where you'd paint in space around you in 3D or Google Expeditions, which is the product for schools, and many, many other products, that was all my team. A lot of really smart people were working in my organization at that time, and of course, I'm super proud to be part of it. And then that eventually became Android XR, and that's what it is, Google's program in this area. It's basically Google XR, Android XR, Stargate, the 3D video conferencing project, the YouTube VR app, and all the 3D content on YouTube. All those things are results of this original VR team.

Jon Chee - 00:17:10: Love that. And I love how you're like, "I wanna go back to the scrappy startup days," and were able to carve out a niche even within a large organization like Google to do it again. But even despite the success of the YouTube mobile app, they put you in this building. They didn't give you the plush office. They were just like, "No, you're back at square one. Here you go."

Andrey Doronichev - 00:17:31: I think this just tells a story of the entrepreneurial journey. Because if you are a really fancy, successful founder—let's say your therapeutics worked and you sold it to big pharma and you cashed out and you're very, very successful—so many of those people start a new company again. And when you start a new company, it's once again, you're in the co-working space. Here's a desk. You have your coffee mug. You have nothing else. You have no monitor, and you need to buy one. And you're once again running around pitching a thing, and a bunch of investors tell you no despite your previous successes. And this journey of going back to the roots and starting from scratch, you either love it or you hate it. I obviously love it, and so I've done it so many times for that reason.

Jon Chee - 00:18:15: Yeah, exactly. And I think something to think about—and I think this is a recurring theme—is know that you like it. Know that you like that before you embark on it and push off, because especially if you start taking on capital, on that journey, there's an expectation that you stick it out for a decently long time.

Andrey Doronichev - 00:18:37: Yes.

Jon Chee - 00:18:37: And if you go in and you're like, "Yeah, I like this," pretending...

Andrey Doronichev - 00:18:44: And then you're like, "Oh, just kidding." It is hard to just...

Jon Chee - 00:18:48: "Just kidding" and pull the rip cord on that thing. It's next to impossible. And if you do it, it's very painful.

Andrey Doronichev - 00:18:54: I actually tried, and I will tell the story of OPTIC and my current company and how we pivoted. Before we pivoted to bio, we had a previous business that actually worked, and then it didn't. And at that time, we still had most of the investors' money in our account. And I called my investors, and I was like, "Hey. So, okay, that didn't work out. Let us return the money, and I'll think about what I do next." And our investors were like, "Yeah, actually, we're not in the business of taking money back. So go figure out how to multiply it with a different idea." Think exactly that. Pulling the rip cord is not so easy.

Jon Chee - 00:19:32: Not so easy. They're like, "No, we're good. You'll figure it out."

Andrey Doronichev - 00:19:34: No, you have to commit. That's the thing. Starting from scratch is fun, but you gotta know that once you start something, at some point, you're in the death valley of nothing's happening. It's not fun anymore. It's just a grind, and it's not growing, and it's gonna happen. It's happening to me right now, and it's hard, and you have to go through it. And, you know, at some point, it might actually work out.

Jon Chee - 00:20:02: Yeah, that's a personal introspection thing, right? And, you know, not everyone necessarily has the experience to know that for certain. But I think I recommend for anyone who is contemplating a startup company: go join a startup. Just go join it and maybe, adjacent, just feel the roller coaster. Not necessarily, like, the first go is, "I am starting it. I know I love this roller coaster," and then you're like, "God, get me off this roller coaster."

Andrey Doronichev - 00:20:35: Which is funny. This is an aside. When I was dating my now wife, but girlfriend at the time, I took her on a roller coaster. She pretended. She's like, "No, I love roller coasters." And it's at that time when we're just like, "Yeah, we'll do anything. Everything's fun." Went on the roller coaster at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk.

Jon Chee - 00:20:52: Oh, yeah. I've never been screamed at. There were just tears.

Andrey Doronichev - 00:20:58: I was like, "I thought you said you liked roller coasters," and she was just screaming. That is the story of getting a friend or a colleague as a co-founder in a startup. You're like, "Whoa, what's going on?"

Jon Chee - 00:21:12: And so, anyway, it's like anyone who's thinking about starting a company, join one and see if it's a fit for you because there will eventually be a road bump. And if you get through a road bump, you're like, "I could do that some more."

Andrey Doronichev - 00:21:25: Yeah. Go find out what it smells like. I always tell you, my friend and investor took his daughter to one of the fast-growing startups in their office, and they work, like, 24/7, six days a week, whatever. As she went out, she's like, "Oh, now I know what product-market fit smells like." It smells like sweat. And you're just like, "Not for me."

Jon Chee - 00:21:51: Not for me. I'm gonna go elsewhere. So, you know, it seems like you had this itch to continue to go back to the entrepreneurial roots. When did you know it was time to leave Google, and did you know what was next?

Andrey Doronichev - 00:22:06: Yeah. From my whole career, what I learned was, one, I really love the entrepreneurial start-from-scratch, get-people-excited-about-this-idea, and-then-find-this-growth journey. Second thing I learned was that I don't enjoy working on more straightforward or well-understood things. At Google, I could have worked on ads or products that are already clearly successful, and there's so much more opportunity. You can come up with new ideas and create so much more value. But I kept gravitating towards things that were borderline insane or looked like they wouldn't work. So it is this academia-researcher part of me who really just pokes holes in the frontier of knowledge and sees what's out there. And in most cases, those jobs fail. Right? Yes, YouTube worked out, and I got lucky. But my next stage was VR. We started the team in 2014, 2015—2014 was Cardboard, 2015 was the full team. And only now are we starting to see some traction, but it's still so small compared to the iPhone. And so when I was pitching this back then, I was like, "This is the next iPhone. This is the next mobile industry. It's gonna blow up." It didn't. I was wrong. And by the way, as an extension of this virtual reality work, at some point, I realized that if we're making information accessible, and I really want to make interactive 3D more accessible, requiring someone to wear a separate device on their face is not really increasing your addressable market. So how can we actually avoid doing that? And the way to avoid doing that—actually, interactive 3D exists out there. It's called games. Computer games. And so, actually, my last project at Google was also interactive 3D. But rather than running it on specialized devices that you wear on your face, we tried to make it accessible through the browser. Basically, making computer games and 3D interactive software available as a streamable, almost-like-YouTube, browser link. And it was called Stadia. It also didn't fly, but it was an extremely bold and technologically marvelous platform that I was in charge of launching. And I was a product manager for the consumer side of it, not all of it. But that was my last project. It didn't work out. It was 2021. At that time, right after the pandemic, we didn't go to the office. I hadn't seen my team for a year and a half by that time. And honestly, that was the time when I felt like it was time to move on. I felt like, yes, I can try to start something from scratch at Google, but without this in-person energy... if I'd be frank, I just didn't enjoy working from this office on Zoom all day. It didn't feel creative. There's something special about smelling the smell of startups. This grindy room in a building that was somewhere on the side of the campus and really working your asses off to make something happen. Being on Zoom and trying to do things remotely didn't work for me anymore. Also around the same time, as I was sniffing around Google and talking to people, I talked to a bunch of AI research people in Jeff Dean's organization. And there was this organization of researchers. Right? So their job is publishing papers, like "Attention Is All You Need," that enabled transformers. And there was so much research going on, so much cool stuff happening there. None of that was becoming products. Looking into what was on the forefront of AI—and I was really deeply connected with machine learning since my YouTube days because that was how we made YouTube searchable. A lot of computer vision advancements and research and the applicability of early-days ML research actually came from YouTube. It's underestimated how much of a role YouTube as a product played in Google's need to invest in sophisticated machine learning algorithms. So a lot of great research that enabled modern computer vision and later on, modern generative AI, didn't necessarily come from the YouTube organization but was sponsored by the YouTube product for the Google research team to develop. And so because I was in charge of this biggest consumer-facing surface—search and discovery at YouTube was an important part of my world—I worked with those teams that enabled indexing and watching every video and understanding what's in it, or moderating content and understanding bad stuff or stuff that someone should be paid for because you uploaded a video with a Katy Perry song in the background. But instead of blocking you, YouTube would show an ad to your viewer and then give this money to Katy Perry. All those technologies that enabled this free flow of information were heavily reliant on machine learning. And so because I had all this exposure, by the time I was done with my last project at Google and I left, I took some time off, a proper sabbatical. But I realized that what I wanted to do next, the next big thing, the next "mobile" kind of thing, was gonna be AI, was gonna be machine learning. And I thought I wanted to start a private company, an AI research company that would focus on some verticals. So the whole thesis behind OPTIC when we started was that we won't compete with the Googles of this world on some massive horizontal problems, like building a new LLM. I felt like, "Okay, I don't think we can succeed there." But finding a verticalized niche where you have a lot of data, a lot of money, and very few native AI engineers—that is a game that we wanted to play. And so from there, you can think, okay, if you go straight into, let's say, video, which was my bread and butter for many years, and I know the industry really well, it probably will have a lot of native AI engineers already working because it's such a broad thing to do. But if you go into, let's say, blockchain, which had tons of publicly available data and a lot of money, but not enough people in that industry really cared about machine learning or AI, that sounds like a perfect fit. Bio, same story. Tons of data—at least I thought so. You might put a little asterisk here. But it sounds like academia has been measuring things for decades. There's so much data available. All those papers, it's out there. You can just grab it and train some models. And then the pharma industry: billions and trillions of dollars, a ginormous industry, so much money, and all those super smart people, but they're not ML researchers. So it sounds like a great fit. There were a couple more hypotheses there that were smaller. Those were the two big ones. And we actually started with blockchain. That was the first year of OPTIC, when we built essentially a content moderation system for all the publicly available content that was on-chain. And the hypothesis was that if blockchain really becomes the new web, Web3, then all the content will move there. So the YouTubes of this world and Facebooks and all the other content providers will eventually end up doing some sort of on-chain content. For that, you will require a lot of infrastructure, including authenticity and safety of content, and that's what we were building. We became quite successful in the first year. Actually, most of the existing market—that nascent market—most of the existing big providers like NFT marketplaces and all the people who were doing content for Web3 actually became our customers, and we were generating revenue. And we felt quite good. We made a couple of million dollars in revenue in the very first year. So I felt like, okay, great. But then, as it happens when you're making those bets on a market that doesn't yet exist, a year later, the FTX scandal happened. This whole industry just fell apart, and we realized that we were betting on a niche that will not happen. And so that was the time when, as I mentioned, we came to our investors, and my first reaction was like, "Okay, we bet on a niche. This didn't happen. Take back your money, and we'll figure something else out, and we'll come back and pitch again." And they were like, "No, you already have this money in your account, and you're already committed. Go figure it out. Do something else." I didn't realize that's how it works. Okay, fine. And admittedly, the businesses I had before were not venture-backed. Right? So that was my first experience with actual, real, good-pedigree investors. Kleiner Perkins is our lead investor, and Greylock and many other good names. And so I was new to this, right? And I didn't realize that they would let us do something completely different. But our investors were super nice. They said, "Hey, Andrey, we believe in you and the team. There's a great AI team. There are all the other things that you can do with AI."

Outro - 00:31:05: That's all for this episode of the Biotech Startups Podcast with Andrey Doronichev. Join us next time for the final part of this four-part series, where we'll hear how Andrey and his team pivoted from blockchain to biotech and what it took to turn a failing startup into an AI-powered drug discovery company. He'll also discuss the winding path to founding OPTIC, what he's learned about platform strategy, and why solving for science alone isn't enough in biotech. If you're enjoying the podcast, be sure to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with a friend. Thanks for listening. The Biotech Startups Podcast is produced by Excedr. Don't want to miss an episode? Search for The Biotech Startups Podcast wherever you get your podcasts and click subscribe. Excedr provides research labs with equipment leases on founder-friendly terms to support path to exceptional outcomes. To learn more, visit our website, www.excedr.com. On behalf of the team here at Excedr, thanks for listening. The Biotech Startups Podcast provides general insights into the life science sector through the experiences of its guests. The use of information on this podcast or materials linked from the podcast is at the user's own risk. The views expressed by the participants are their own and are not the views of Excedr or its sponsors. No reference to any product, service, or company in the podcast is an endorsement by Excedr or its guests.