Full Transcript for MrBeast CPTO on How the World's Biggest YouTuber Uses AI to Run Every Video Like a Product Launch | Shiva Rajaraman

Founder of WeWork, founder of Spotify, founder of Meta, now founder of MrBeast. I put Jimmy at that level. So what is it that you see there that makes those type of cultures so special? In a world where you don't have that scarcity anymore, you're probably asking yourself a different question. We've got three ideas here. Is three ideas enough? That's really the question now.

Shiva Rajaraman, Chief Product and Technology Officer at MrBeast. A huge part of MrBeast's brand is actually Jimmy, right? So when you're working directly with him and he's involved in a lot of the details, how do you find ways to make sure that he doesn't become that bottleneck? When you see something going wrong, you ask yourself, is that a feature? If so, let's build it.

Now, the weird thing about us is that will turn into a meeting that night. There'll be some vibe coding overnight, prototype what it is, and it will ship the next day. To ship on a weekly basis is already fast. You mentioned you're shipping on a daily basis, right? So how does that actually work? With every founder I've worked with or been close to, they all have major strength.

They also have major blind spots. And one of the biggest blind spots for most founders is... Hey, this is Carlos, CEO at Product School and your host on the Product Podcast. My guest today is Shiva Rajaraman, Chief Product and Technology Officer at MrBeast. Look at the logos. Eight years at Google and YouTube, then Spotify, CTO at WeWork, Commerce at Meta, OpenSea, Uber.

Now, he builds product behind 520 million subscribers and 1 .6 billion views in 90 days. And here's the shift. At every platform before this, he built the canvas for other people's creativity. Here, the product is the output itself. Here are the things we'll cover. Why they threw out enterprise SaaS and built their own tooling in three months.

Forward deployed engineers pointed inward at their own teams. Shipping daily because an idea is now a prompt, not a backlog ticket. Founders ship products designed for themselves and how AI fixes that. The memory layer. So a new hire inherits 10 years of what went wrong. Let's get into it. AI helps us generate ideas, draft plans, and spin up work in minutes.

But faster doesn't necessarily mean better. When everyone has their own AI tools, their own outputs, and their own context, you get fragmentation. Fractured version control. Scattered review processes. Decisions happening in parallel, not in concert. Rebuilding context between people and platforms costs you time and momentum. That's where Mural comes in.

Mural gives teams a shared visual canvas to bring work together. You can generate structured starting points right on the canvas instead of moving outputs between tools. Keep all of your context in one place. And compatible AI agents can contribute alongside the team, bringing in context from the tools they already know. The future of work is still human.

Learn more at mural .co .mural -ai. Shiva, I'm bringing you some water. Because I'm going to make you talk. Thank you.

Okay. Yeah. Well, thank you for being a big contributor over these last years. I think we met when you were Spotify. I mean, you had all the logos, right? Google, Spotify, WeWork. And maybe for Uber. Probably for getting some at this point. Yeah, yes. I fall in love with a lot of things. So we'll leave it at that. But now, Mr. Beast, right? So very curious to know, how is this executive role different than the other executive roles you've had a more traditional big tech? Yeah, let me start with, you know, I've largely worked on platforms.

So a lot of my perspective has always been, how do you serve a ton of creators? And frankly, you become a canvas for other people's creativity. You're not the source of that creativity yourself. So one of the unique things about this role is how do we build products that in and of themselves are creative productions? And that could be a variety of different things.

But of course, we create videos right now. So a lot of it is, ooh, what do you get to do when you're working with someone who's done fantastic, you know, has great ideas on that, right? Wants to do more of it. How do you productize that is really the challenge. But what do you get to do differently when you're working with that creator? You can be a little bit more selfish towards those objectives, right? You can start to get very deep in the workflow and maybe change the workflow.

When you work at a platform, you don't get to do that, right? Like it's really hard. So you have to think, and in our world, our product is the output, not just the platform that enables the output. So it's a very different way of thinking. And I don't want to pretend like it's easy. I'm making a lot of adjustments too. So as a chief product and technology officer, you oversee both internal and external products? Yeah, say it again.

Internal and external products? Correct, correct. And so what exactly are those products? Yeah. So first start with, we have a ton of creative people at Beast Industries. And they're creating content every day. And this is everything from writers to editors to set designers to people figuring out if that's feasible. We often do things that are first ever type of thing happening in the world.

So can you even do it in the world? Like the physics of it becomes a question. So we have all these specialized people who've learned to work together and produce a fantastic piece of content that drops every two weeks on Mr. Beast. But there's many more channels. And we also have our studio that's ramping up new channels that are departed from Mr.

Beast. So one tool is how do we create the workflow for all of those people so we can move fast, produce at the highest quality, but stay on time and budget as well. And in the past, I think all of you know this, you'd probably get some enterprise SaaS tool off the shelf. No offense to anyone in that world. But what we found is like every one of those project management tools, it just falls short in our world.

So our question was in the age of AI is can we actually just build the perfect tool for ourselves? And that started about three months ago. And now you're seeing a ship every day. So we see an issue with the studio. Usually it's Jimmy and the studio team is like, what if we could do this? And it turns out you can do just about anything in software right now.

And you don't have to worry about the cost of it. And you can maintain it very easy as well. So what we've ended up doing is looking at each of those tasks and building an operating system around it. So what's exciting about that as an internal tool is that you never have to compromise anymore. So if, for example, we have people running around a set at midnight trying to make changes, they can just talk to their phone and record that stuff rather than bust out a laptop or look for a mobile app.

And in the past, you couldn't just create that app easily. You'd have to negotiate with the vendor. Is this on your roadmap? They'd come back and say, you're the only customer that has people running around at midnight who can only use voice. So they're not going to do it. And so you're stuck. But in today's world, I think this is a big opportunity for product managers.

If you assume anything is possible and everything is almost zero cost, not entirely zero cost, which we can talk about, why not do it? So that's the philosophy we're taking with internal tools. For external tools, I can't say too much about it, but we're launching a consumer app, which is very public out there. And what we're excited about is, okay, what can we do in that app that lets people in the real world who are fans, who've consumed YouTube content for a long time, or content on Instagram and TikTok, where we're also producing, what else can they do in this app that can be more participatory.

So we're spending time defining that, designing it. And as you can imagine, this is like the peak AI period. So the ability to prototype, bring ideas to vision, test those ideas quickly is what we're working on now. So speaking of numbers, last time I checked, MrBeast has over 520 million subscribers just on YouTube and over 1 .5 billion viewers just in the last 90 days.

Yeah, 1 .6. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So it's not a small thing. It's pretty crazy. So we're talking about how attention is the new currency. And I'm curious to know what's your vision to convert that attention into a business beyond just what we know about how YouTube monetizes. Some of it is just the traditional way you monetize. So if you have a large audience, and you're sitting on an ad supported platform, you can just monetize that through deep sponsorships and advertising.

So I think that's obvious for most people. The question is, as we start to launch our own direct to consumer consumer app, there's obviously different things we can play with there as well, right? We sell merchandise today, right? We could explore things like subscriptions, et cetera. But all of that is secondary. Right now, the real question is, how can I engage you and really crap that engaging experience? And if that takes off, we've got a nice supportive foundation for exploring bets there.

We'll find the right organic way in a good blended way to monetize that, but we don't necessarily have to obsess about it now. I think the other advantage with the theme is how fast can you ship and produce. But I think one of the key things is we want to test those monetization vectors as well, right? What can work here? What can work in a different market? We are a global, you know, our audience is all over the place.

So what might work in the United States might be very different than what works in India. In the past, again, you might spread that over years of development. I think we have a chance to try different things in different pockets, see what sticks and graduate the winners, not just on product core experiences, but on the monetization angle too.

Well, one thing that comes to mind as we think about bottlenecks is that, I mean, a huge part of Mr. Beast brand is actually Jimmy, right? So when you're working directly with him and he's involved in a lot of the details, and in fact, he's on camera, like how is it to work with him? And like, how do you find ways to also make sure that he doesn't become that bottleneck? Good question.

So first start off with, when you think about someone like Jimmy, he's an entrepreneur. He's created something over several years now that is just impressive. And that doesn't come with just looking at creative thinking, right? To build an org that can sustain that, to build a muscle and the tactics to sustain that, you see a lot of product thinking there too, right? In other words, oh, and you see, if any of you have seen him talk, it's totally worth it.

It's like, how can you break down the creative successes into analytical recipes? How do we get that insight? How are we looking at that insight every day? So just like you might launch a product, you might do a product review ahead of the product. You might do a retro after it ships. Every video goes through that same process. So one thing is like, it's actually not hard to work with someone like that because they're thinking like we think, right? In their DNA.

The other side of it is just showing good judgment on workflow. So there are people in the world creatively who aren't very good at looking at the operations behind that creativity and trying to abstract it and see what's repeatable and what tools can make it happy. In our case, we have the companies obsessed around that as well. So if you look at historical industries and you look at how some of the creative workflows have basically evolved over time, many of them haven't changed in 50 years.

If you're native to YouTube and you realize the pace and the bar you need to have, you start looking at each one of those. How do you onboard people? How do you train them? How do you have people experimenting with new tools? How do you give those people superpowers? How do you get rid of the mundane so they can focus on magical aspects of what they do? That obsession is very good.

And the instincts are there in the company to really understand that deeply. And part of that is just everyone running together all the time. And when you see something going wrong, you ask yourself, is that a feature? If so, let's build it. Now, the weird thing about us is that will turn into a meeting that night. There'll be some vibe coding overnight, prototype what it is, and it will ship the next day.

Now that can be exhausting unless you rotate people into that or have some people working on different time zones who can do this. But that pace combined with the observation of what's working or not, bringing that together is very exciting. I hope many more companies are working like that, but it's become very interesting. So one way to look at that, and you give a talk on this too, but internally within our company, we effectively have four deployed engineers in the functions.

So there's a couple that can sit there and prototype and solve problems for the studio. And we can do that in marketing. We can do that in other areas as well, but it's been, a lot of people have talked about FDEs with your client base. It's sort of interesting for us to think about FDEs internally deployed and how can they pick up the speed and insights very quickly, but they live and breathe with the people they support.

The difference is, is they can prototype something very quickly as a solution. And because it's so cheap to prototype, you can try 10 different things, find which one works and throw away the one that doesn't work. So that motion is very new to me actually, but I'm finding it to be very liberating and something we should all think about in our own companies.

And I want to double down on that because even to me, to ship on a weekly basis is already fast. And you mentioned you're shipping on a daily basis, right? So how does that actually work? Well, one is internally shipping on a daily basis just means you're being very responsive to people's needs, right? So you see an issue. Again, I put this again, I compare it.

I'll keep picking on enterprise SaaS, but I don't mean to do it. SaaS is evolving as well. But one of the key things is I just remember throughout my career working with vendors and you'd have that quarterly QBR or review. If you're a major client with your vendors, here's things we want on the roadmap. And too much of the time was spent on like justifying it and what do we need, et cetera, and making a case for it.

In today's world, I think the importance of shipping every day is that, hey, there's something broken or it's not working. Or what if we had this filter or what if we had this view? What if that view looked completely different than a Gantt chart, but it's much more usable for our teams and simpler so they can just glance on it and maybe glance at it on a big screen, right? Because that's the nature of our work.

We can just ship that. So what ends up happening is like ship it, get feedback. If it doesn't work, kill it. Iterate on it. Take a different direction. That's all very, very cheap right now. So shipping every day, I think the way to look at it is it's the equivalent of, you know, in the past, you take all these features and you put them on a board.

Well, if instead you think about taking all those features, you're not putting them on a board and prioritizing them later. You're just taking those ideas and turning them into prompts right then. Throw those prompts out there. See what spits back. Hey, that's kind of interesting. Let's iterate on it for a second. Okay, let's throw it out there.

So you're just compressing time. It makes the product challenge even more important. Someone has to know what problem you're solving. And if you have 50 things all going out there, you could confuse your user base very quickly. So sometimes it's about packaging it up a little bit more. But sometimes it's also, hey, this is for this department and this skill and a very specific view.

It's 10 of them. Just get it out there and see what happens. So we just balance that as we think about shipping every day. No, as you were saying that, I was just thinking about culture and you've had firsthand experience working with some legendary founders and experiencing the culture they created, right? I'm thinking founder of WeWork, founder of Spotify, founder of Meta, now founder of Mr.

Beast. I put Jimmy at that level. So what is it that you see there that makes those type of cultures so special? I think like one thing you're seeing, and this is, there's been a lot of talk about this, but I think it's true is what drives a lot of these founders is the same thing that drives a good product manager, which is, I wish I could ship faster.

I wish I could try five ideas out optionality. I wish I could try five ideas out instead of one. I wish, you know, I knew how to do X, right? And not have to buy it, but I could build it and control it myself. So what you see with a lot of those founders is that they believe that's just the way it should be. And I would argue in the last six months, they've all finally gotten the world they've wished for.

But if you think about it as a product manager, if you've just think about your worst times as a product manager, you have to pick one choice. You have a huge set of options in front of you, but because of engineering scarcity, because of how long it takes, because of what it takes to make that robust and secure, you only get to pick one thing.

And you know, it would have been better to do three things. So great founders sort of just force that, right? In their own organization. Can we do it fast? It can be very annoying, by the way. It's like, can we do it faster? Why can't we just do it? I can vibe code anything now, right? But if you really just put yourself in the product position, we've been trying to play that role for, you know, 25 years now, right? In my case, and I'm just like, oh my gosh, this is crazy.

So I think right now what we do have to do is shift our behavior. Like I know, like when I was in certain roles, I was like, oh, we got to prioritize A, B, and C. So the founder relationship can be very tense because you're trying to justify one path versus five because you have real scarcity. But in a world where you don't have that scarcity anymore, you're probably asking yourself a different question.

We've got three ideas here. Have we actually explored the full option space or is three ideas enough? That's really the question now. Should we really be exploring 10 and how fast can we do that? And what are our principles to guide that? So it's a very different role you're playing. And again, a year from now, you might even be able to explore more options.

Now you've got a different issue, which is judgment. So one of the questions is you have to look at your founder and say, where are their strengths, but where are their blind spots? And if you're a product leader working with those types of people, you need to ask yourself, how do I fill the blind spots, right? While they focus on their strengths.

And with every founder I've worked with or been close to even indirect, they all have major strengths. They also have major blind spots. And one of the biggest blind spots from most founders is they often design a product for themselves, not for their broader set of users. So what you can do now with, I think with AI, it's like, let's do that, but let's create two varieties based on what I understand about the user needs.

And now we've got all three and you don't have to make that choice. But in the past, you'd have to make that choice. And guess who wins in that choice? Your founder's choice, right? And too often, so many products, and this is at every place I've worked, have shipped and launched a product that is designed for the founder, not for the users, and it failed for that reason.

So I think that's what's changing too. And that's a lot, sorry, I'm rambling, but you get the idea. It's the nature. What the force of AI gives you is this superpower of exploration that is firmly in the hands of the product team and others involved, product in quotes. How do you use that now to get a better result is really up to what we need to figure out over the next year.

Speed wins, but also breadth of option space and really thinking through that. Also, it has to go with speed. Otherwise, you might just go down the wrong path very fast, right? So that's the part we need to figure out. I want to explore that with some examples, because I remember even before AI was mainstream, Jimmy was talking about how he was so obsessed over experimenting with the YouTube thumbnails and the title and the image, different facial expressions, something incredible.

So four years forward with now the tools at your disposal, like how are you actually applying AI in specific parts of the process to turbocharge that exploration? The main reason we use AI is largely that we need to just make sure that process is all connected, right? So you could think of it largely as workflow, right? Which is, hey, you have an ideation team, which is very good at all the things you talked about, right? Like what is the title? What is the thumbnail? Et cetera.

And then, okay, now I need to come up with a bunch of storylines for this, et cetera. And then I've got to design the sets for that, et cetera. So there's a sequence of things that happen here, and it's been very disconnected. So putting that in one system so you can see, hey, what's the source of a delay? How do I learn that a particular set that I designed, what if a whole new team is working on a set later? There's no memory layer in these organizations unless you all meet.

And if you're moving very fast, that's a problem. So why not put that memory layer in the AI side of things? Hey, I know you're trying to do this set and it involves like a huge tub and we're going to fill it with something to make it look like whatever. Then, hey, here are the three things you need to remember. By the way, if you do this one thing, it's not going to work.

That should just be instantaneous now. So one way to look at it is just saying there are a hundred people running around all day, running into problems, running into solutions, just making that available. So the next time you pop in an idea, it comes back and tells you what to watch out for. So that's a very concrete way of doing it. I think that's the most interesting thing.

Of course, people are using tools everywhere in the world right now to also do creative workflows, et cetera. What is more interesting for us is how do we take the knowledge that often might be sitting in one person's head? And how do we now make that knowledge available to everyone? So every video, right, every production gets all the errors that can make it go wrong are no longer surprises.

If you join the team on day one, you should have the history of everyone who's worked on this for 10 years, and that should be available to you. And then we should refine that history as we learn things too. So what's been very interesting with AI is how you should institutionalize that force capture of everything. So all those nuggets of knowledge are put into one place.

And then you're kind of voting up or down on whether that knowledge makes sense across everything or is localized to something. Once that base is built, then you'll see like exponential returns on that wisdom. That's the most important aspect of what we're doing, in my opinion. Shiva, we're going to leave you with that. Thank you so much for being part of this.

Sure. Thanks.