10, 9, 8, 7, 6...

Five Days Until Google I/O

Five days out from I/O, and the days are full. Last-minute product work, surprise changes, the kind of busy where you forget about lunch and then suddenly it’s 3pm and your eating a sandwhich in your afternoon meeting (thank you to everyone in that meeting for rolling with my weird schedule).

So this week’s Thursday Thoughts is coming in late, and I’m keeping it short. But I believe in consistency - so here we are.

For the last 10 days, I’ve been doing a daily countdown to I/O…in video form. Each day, I come up with a concept for the number, generate an image in the Gemini app, and then bring it to life with Veo.

Here are days 10 through 5, stitched together:

You can follow along on X for the next five days leading up to the event.

As I’ve been having fun with this countdown (and now also in some of the PM hiring conversations I’ve been having) I’ve noticed an old saying that I keep coming back to: are you building a painkiller or a vitamin? Painkillers are things that you need to have, they solve acute problems. Vitamins are nice-to-haves. The idea that AI can be used to build products that are painkillers is a natural fit - whether that’s reducing the toil, automating the drudgery, or eliminating the pain points - there’s identifiable potential there.

But what I’ve been feeling lately - especially with these silly countdown videos - is the vitamin side. When AI takes away some of the toil, what fills the space? For me, it’s been creativity. Little projects that have no business justification whatsoever. A countdown video that nobody asked for or a book about the 3-legged neighborhood cat named Ron. Just... playing.

The bar for creative expression has dropped dramatically. An idea I had at 9am can be a video by 9:05. That speed changes the relationship between thinking and making. You stop filtering ideas through “is this worth the effort?” and start just trying them.

So my Thursday Thought this week is simple (and maybe more of a provacation): go have fun with the tools. Open up your tool of choice. Make something pointless and delightful. See what happens when the only constraint is your imagination and not your technical skill.

Five more days. See you on the other side.