What makes AI truly useful and impactful for users? That’s the question that drives Matthieu Rouif, CEO and co-founder of Photoroom, the AI-first photo editing app for mobile. This week on Generative Now, Lightspeed Partner and host Michael Mignano talks to Matthieu Rouif about what he learned from his previous ventures in app development, how Photoroom found product market fit early, and how Photoroom went from a feature to a product with more than 150 million downloads and 30 million monthly active users. 

Matthieu started working on photo apps decades ago while studying at Polytechnique in France and Stanford in the United States. Matthieu created the first mobile apps for ski resorts and co-founded the HeyCrowd app to make surveys more social. He later was a product leader for Replay Video Editor (Awarded ‘Best App of the Year’ by Apple and Google). While working as a Product Manager at GoPro, he became frustrated with the time-consuming process of manually removing backgrounds in Photoshop and realized that there was a demand for a better solution on the App Store. This led Matthieu to study machine learning, and he met with Eliot Andres, a machine learning expert, and together they created the first version of Photoroom in just two weeks.

Episode Chapters

00:00) Introduction to Matthieu Rouif & Photoroom
(01:57) Matthieu Rouif's Entrepreneurial Journey
(04:44) Early Startup Successes and Lessons Learned
(10:30) The Creation of PhotoRoom: Bridging AI and Usability
(16:45) Finding Product-Market Fit & The Power of User Feedback
(19:40) Scaling PhotoRoom Amidst COVID-19
(21:05) Unlocking User-Centric AI with Open Source
(23:30) Evolving Beyond Background Removal
(30:19) Wider Application of the APIs and Success Stories with Barbie and Netflix
(37:12) Building a Remote Team Culture & “No DM” Policy
(40:37) Landscape of AI Innovation in Paris

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