Google's Robby Stein Joins TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 Lineup

TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 is adding another heavyweight name to its speaker roster: Robby Stein, Vice President of Product for Google Search. Stein sits at the center of one of the most consequential product transitions in consumer technology — the rewiring of Google Search around generative AI — and he'll be on stage to talk about how that work actually gets done at a scale of billions of daily queries.

For founders, the appeal is straightforward. Very few product leaders have shipped features that touch this many people, and even fewer have done it while the underlying technology shifts beneath them. Stein's remit covers AI Mode, AI Overviews, and the broader effort to make Search feel conversational without breaking the habits of users who have relied on ten blue links for two decades.

From zero to billions

Stein's career arc is unusual in that he has worked both ends of the scaling curve. Before Google, he spent years at Instagram, where he led product for Stories and helped push the format from an internal bet into a daily habit for hundreds of millions of people. He also co-founded a startup, Yes, which was acquired by Instagram's parent company — giving him firsthand experience of the gap between a scrappy zero-to-one launch and the machinery required to serve a global audience.

That combination is the theme Disrupt organizers are leaning into. Building a product that a thousand people love is a different discipline from building one that a billion people tolerate, trust, and return to. The trade-offs around latency, cost per query, safety review, localization, and measurement all change character as the numbers grow — and those trade-offs are increasingly relevant to AI startups that find themselves scaling faster than any previous generation of software companies.

What he's likely to cover

Expect the conversation to touch on several areas that matter to anyone shipping AI products today:

• Deciding what ships. How a team prioritizes AI features when the model capabilities change every few months.
• Measuring quality. What signals Google uses to judge whether an AI answer is actually better than a list of links.
• Cost and speed. The unglamorous engineering economics of running inference at planetary scale.
• The publisher question. How Search balances AI-generated answers with the open web that supplies the underlying information.
• Team structure. How product organizations reorganize when a core technology stops being incremental.

Stein has also been publicly vocal about agentic capabilities in Search — features that go beyond answering a question to completing a task — which remains one of the more contested frontiers in consumer AI.

Why it matters for attendees

Disrupt has long mixed early-stage founders with executives from the companies those founders either partner with or compete against. Google Search is both for a large share of the AI ecosystem: a distribution channel, a benchmark, and a competitive threat depending on the week. Hearing directly from the person setting product direction offers a rare read on where the platform is heading.

The session will join a program that spans AI infrastructure, fintech, space, and the Startup Battlefield 200. Attendees should watch the official agenda for the confirmed stage and time slot, as well as any related breakout sessions on AI product development.

For teams currently deciding how much of their roadmap to bet on AI-native interfaces, it's a session worth blocking out.