I’m stupid-excited to say that I’ve just joined Google’s Skynet Machine Perception team to build kickass creative, expressive experiences, delivering augmented reality to (let’s hope) a billion+ people. I told you sh*t just got real. 🙂

Now, the following career bits may be of interest only to me (and possibly my mom), but in case you’re wondering, “Wait, don’t you work on Google Photos…?”

Well, like SNL’s Stefon, “I’ve had a weird couple of years…” 

The greatly smoothed version goes basically like this:

• I joined Google in early 2014 to work on Photos. I liked to say I was “Teaching Google Photoshop,” meaning getting computers to see & synthesize like humans (making your Assistant your artist!). Among other things, we created a brand-new image editor, did some early AR face-painting work (a year+ ahead of Snapchat et al), and made movies for tens of millions of people.
• After a bit over a year, I wanted to explore some crazier photo- and video-related ideas (stuff not ready for Photos to include then, if ever), so I left the team & walked across the hall to work with & learn from Luke Wroblewski. Thus I was “working at Google on photos, just not Photos.” This was a subtle distinction, and as I was working on secret stuff, I didn’t spend time publicizing it. I remained closely involved with the ex-Nik Photos folks in building out Snapseed & the next rev of the new editor we’d started.
• Meanwhile I spent the better part of the next year thinking up, prototyping, and iterating on a bunch of little photo apps. It was a tough but enlightening process. I know we were on to something, but I also felt like Edison saying some variant of “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways not to make a light bulb.”
• Somewhat tired from the process & eager to make concrete contributions, I was set to join an imaging hardware team. When project plans changed, however, I agreed to help improve photography experiences on social apps including Google+.
• Having witnessed on Photos the massive importance of speed, I teamed up with my future teammates in Research to build out RAISR, a machine-learning library and ship it in Google+, saving users immense amounts of bandwidth (critical in the developing world).
• Since then, and up until this week, I’ve been focusing on enterprise social needs. Though it wasn’t an area I sought out, I ended up really digging the experience, and I look forward to eventually sharing some of the rad stuff my team was building.
• And then, Google bought this little company in Belarus & my old Research friends came calling…

So now we’ve come full circle, and to capture my feelings, I’ll cite SNL yet again. Wish me luck. 🙂 

“Arbiter of Focus”—that’s how David Lieb, who was the CEO of Bump & who now leads product for Google Photos—describes a PM’s job. Elsewhere I’ve heard, “What game are we playing, and how do we keep score?” In a similar vein, I found resonance in these remarks from Francis Ford Coppola:

Q. What is the one thing to keep in mind when making a film?

A. When you make a movie, always try to discover what the theme of the movie is in one or two words. Every time I made a film, I always knew what I thought the theme was, the core, in one word. In “The Godfather,” it was succession. In “The Conversation,” it was privacy. In “Apocalypse,” it was morality. The reason it’s important to have this is because most of the time what a director really does is make decisions. All day long: Do you want it to be long hair or short hair? Do you want a dress or pants? Do you want a beard or no beard? There are many times when you don’t know the answer. Knowing what the theme is always helps you.

Here’s the rest of the interview.

“That’s not an explosion—it’s just a rapid unscheduled disassembly!”

Think of the swagger a company must have to own their history of mishaps this hard. Respect !

[YouTube] [Via]

Anyone I’ve interviewed at Google will immediately know why I find this so great—but it would be great no matter what:

[YouTube]