Sara Beykpour: The Next Wave of AI’s Impact On Journalism

0:05Hey, everyone, and welcome to Generative Now. I am Michael Magnato. I'm a partner at Lightspeed And this week on the podcast, I'm talking with Sarah Bakepore. Sarah has been at the forefront of creating novel media platforms throughout her entire career. She built and launched apps for Vine, Secret, Periscope, and Twitter. These were truly groundbreaking products that set the stage for today's media landscape. Now, Sarah is the co-founder and CEO of Particle, an AI-driven news platform designed to both summarize stories of interest to the user, as well as allow deep dives on topics readers want to explore further.

0:41I talked with Sarah about her time riding the wave of social media startups, why she started Particle, and how AI could help make new business models work for publishers. Check it out. Hey, Sarah. Hey, Mike. How's it going? Good. Thanks for doing this. Yeah, thanks for having me. So obviously, we're going to talk all about Particle and AI, but I think it'd be really fun to talk about Vine. Sure, let's do it. And Periscope and Secret and all of the amazing companies that you were at. It feels like when I think about your career, I feel like all of the most explosive moments in consumer mobile apps, like for whatever reason, you've been there.

1:22Like you were there. And I don't know if that's luck. I don't know if you're, you know, one of the most sought after people in all of tech, like? Tell us about some of these experiences. I think a lot of it was right place at the right time. I went to school and I grew up in Toronto and I went to the University of Waterloo. And then my now brother-in-law interned at Google and kind of came back from that experience and was like, Sarah, you got to get yourself to Silicon Valley. And I was lucky enough to get a couple of internships at Google in my final years at Waterloo and just fell in love with California and Silicon Valley and San Francisco.

1:59When I think about where, you know, finding Twitter, being able to work at some of these awesome consumer companies, it really felt like right place, right time. It wouldn't have happened if I was anywhere else. And I look back on that and think how lucky I am to have found what, you know, what really speaks to me and in the place that where it's all happening. So what was the sequence of these opportunities? So you're in California. Yeah, there's we can rattle through them again. There's obviously Twitter. You spent a long time at Twitter. We're going to talk about that. You're at Vine. You're at Secret when that when that like totally took over tech for a couple of months or a year or whatever.

2:37Yeah. And then Periscope, which was also super explosive. So walk us through. Sure. The journey. So in 2009, I started at Twitter. OK. The company was about 75 people. It was a startup. And it started in what year? Oh, seven. Oh, seven. Oh, six. Oh, seven. It was really early. Yes. Yeah. It was startup life. We didn't have air conditioning. It was very hot. And everyone fit in a couple of rooms. And pretty soon after that, we moved to a larger office. But, you know, those early days were, you know, real, real startup days. I worked as a tools engineer. Okay. Building support tools for support agents, trust and safety agents.

3:18And I was, you know, a year out of college at that point. Even back then, Twitter's doing trust and safety. Oh, absolutely. Two years in, it was already that big that it needed that level of moderation. For sure. And there was a sizable number of agents and team. And at that time, it was all, at least I think, if I remember correctly, it was local. These were not outsourced teams. These were people, employees of the company that were doing trust and safety. Is this when people were still texting to use Twitter? Because I remember when I first got it, I had to text a number to tweet. Is that right?

3:5240404. Yeah. Yeah, I have that tattooed to my... No, I'm just kidding. There was a texting SMS interface, and that lasted actually a very, very long time. But when I joined, we had a website. It was before... It was not a Web 2.0 website. It was static pages. It was probably 2010 that we moved to a more Web 2.0 asynchronous JSON. What about an app? I guess you probably didn't have an app then, right? Wow. We had an API. And so there were third party apps on Blackberry and other phones. Twitterific. Twitterific. What were some of these? Seismic. And then eventually, Lauren Richter created the first real iOS client that we acquired.

4:40That was a long time ago. Early days, working on tools. I moved after a couple of years, I moved to mobile and started working on Twitter for Android. And that was also not an acquisition, but it was a demo app that Google had created and gave to us and said. And they did that with all of the popular social apps at the time, Foursquare. So Foursquare, Twitter, they all looked the same in those early days because Google wrote them all. Back up, explain this. So Google wants companies to adopt Android. Yes. So they build you apps. Exactly. Wow. And then they handed it to us. Wow. That's fascinating.

5:14It was fascinating. And a really interesting model, you know, given that they were building an open source OS and it was like they were really positioning themselves kind of differently from Apple. So we had taken that Android app and started to kind of work on it. And I joined, I think, about a year after we had kind of taken that app. And I was the second Android engineer. And we hired another one. And for a year, it was just three of us. So did that for two years ish. And then one day, Dick Costolo, who's the CEO at the time, comes up to me and he's like, what do you think about moving to New York for a bit?

5:56I was like, say more. He's like, well, we're acquiring a company called Vine. And they only have an iOS app and they need an Android app. So they're in New York. And this is, of course, before remote was like even a possibility. Right. And this was, you know, end of 2012, basically. And he was like. You're young, you're single, go to New York, have a grand time, build me an Android app. And I did. So I moved to New York in March of 2013, started the Android team. And Vine had not launched yet, right? Nobody, nobody in the world other than Twitter really knew what Vine was. And investors, I guess, a lot of VCs in the app.

6:39But yeah. Yeah. And, you know, I'm sure people who are watching or listening, I'm sure most people remember Vine, but maybe just to recap for them what Vine was. To the young kids today, Vine is kind of like TikTok if you kind of went backwards about a decade. um uh vine was six second uh videos uh that ran on a loop it had a really unique interface for you to record where you just tap and hold to record so you could create these cuts um and it really unlocked a lot of creativity the constraints of vine six seconds only tap to hold created uh or allowed for the creation of very uh neat and interesting things people would do stop motion and magic tricks and music and all that kind of stuff.

7:27My memory of the landscape of Vine is that for a lot of people, it was the first time they laughed from something on their phone. A lot of people experienced comedy on their phone for the first time. And I think when people talk today about bringing back Vine, which every year someone says, let's bring back Vine. I think Elon just tweeted about it a few days ago. I think what people miss is that feeling of joy that they had never experienced on the internet before, let alone their mobile phones. People are nostalgic for that. And I don't think actually anyone wants Vine. So I agree with you, but I also feel like the way I hear people talk about TikTok, they often express a similar feeling and that it makes them feel joy.

8:15They laugh. It's funny. And maybe, you know, not coincidentally, you know, you mentioned when you were talking about Vine, and how it was almost like before TikTok, before TikTok existed, a lot of, if I, if I'm correct, I think a lot of the users that became very influential on Vine went on to become really influential YouTubers and TikTokers. And so it almost created this, this new generation and this new form of creativity that kind of does still persist to this day. Totally. It's crazy. So many influencers launched their careers on, on, on Vine and, and, um, went on from there. Um, But, you know, it's an old tech.

8:50You're a VC. So, you know, if someone were to be like, I'm starting a new video sharing app, you might have a lot of skepticism in today's world. And that's kind of how I feel when people say they want to bring back Vine. I'm like, well, it was a moment in time and it's over. And if you wanted to do something novel in the video space, do something novel in the video space. I don't know that we need to go back to that. Well, when it launched, I mean, it was really, really explosive. I mean, I can't even imagine what that day must have been like for you and the team. I remember getting it. I was working at Aviary here in the city and it just took over our office and it completely distracted us from work that entire week.

9:28Everyone publishing and posting. Hadn't joined the Vine team yet. I knew I was joining, but I hadn't joined yet. And so I was still in San Francisco doing exactly what you were doing. It was that moment where you're like, video on the internet is going to change. Video online on mobile is going to change and you could just feel it. And of course, it was hilarious. Uh, my moments with Vine were when we launched the Android app. Which is a huge unlock for any mobile startup because it's like half or more than half of the world, right? Yeah. I was given a very strict deadline on this app. Now this is all, you know, water under the bridge.

10:02The, the direction I was given was you must launch Vine on Android before Instagram launches their video product. And we did. I think we beat them by about two weeks. Nice. And then the next big milestone in my Vine memory is the day Instagram video launched. Wow. It changed the company? It changed everything. Wow. It was significant. We saw the impact to the numbers immediately. Everyone has their own story of Vine. Everyone has their own history with it and their own relationship to it. In my history, that was the day the writing was on the wall. Wow. Wow. Okay. And it took years for it just to, you know, shut down eventually.

10:48But for me, that is, I knew it then. I remember when it got shut down, a lot of people were saying it was a huge mistake. And, you know, obviously, like you said, people to this day want to bring it back. What do you think? Irony of ironies, I led the shutdown. Oh, wow. Not in that, like, I wanted to shut it down and it was my decision. But in the, if I need to shut down, Sarah, you're in charge of making sure that all the boxes are checked. and GDPR is complied with and all of that kind of thing. So I actually led the kind of logistical shutdown of mine. I think it was the right move. It wasn't growing.

11:25It was expensive. We did not have the je ne sais quoi that a consumer app requires to keep going and growing and building. And it wasn't there anymore. And so we went through leadership changes. We, you know, some teams were working on different things. And I'm sure folks on the team will be like, well, we didn't get enough resources or the leadership team didn't believe in us or I disagreed with the direction. I'm sure everyone has their own story of what happened. Yeah. And I think that's probably why you hear so many stories about what happened. And my story is, is that the bottom line wasn't going to work for the company.

12:00The company was public at this time. We had other things going on. It was a rough time, couple of years, you know, 2015, 2016. I digress on that because this was after I came back, right? I left after Vine. Yeah. I came back and among other things. You left to join Secret? I left to join Secret. Okay. Yeah. It lets you post anonymous messages. It was anonymous. And then people could react to them. Yes. Yeah. But what was really the really interesting angle was that you uploaded your contact book so you could see if the anonymous post was from someone you knew or from a friend of a friend. Right.

12:36And that is what made it salacious. Yeah. It was just like, you know. Who posted this? Like, which of my friends said that? Yeah, yep. But it was also very, very explosive when it launched. It was explosive when it launched. I'll start to sound like a broken record because it was an unlaunched iOS app that only some people had access to. And the founders were looking for an Android engineer. So I had been at Twitter now for four and a half years.

13:05And I thought, you know, company had gone public. worked on a bunch of teams. I was like, it's time to do something different. I was still in my, you know, mid-20s, was kind of okay jumping into a startup, taking a risk. I met with the founders, David Vitale, Chris Bader, and Jude, and just kind of fell in love with that team. We got on so well, and they were building something that had not yet launched, but a lot of people in Silicon Valley were in. And it was just really exciting. So I joined them to build their Android app in early 2014. For the second time in a row, from March to June, I built and launched an Android app.

13:50Wow. Second year in a row. And that was really awesome, really fun. I mean, that team was extremely high caliber, extremely high caliber engineering design team. It was the startup dream. I had, you know, I was not married, had no children. I was coding all day, every day. And then like, just like going out to bars at night in San Francisco, and then just like doing it again the next day. It was the dream. The app launched, had the most massive spike of downloads, usage, all of that you could possibly imagine. And then started to plateau. Started to what? Plateau. Yeah. And these anonymous apps, they always seem to implode a bit, right?

14:31There's there's sort of a problem with the format. The moderation is difficult. Yeah. It was easy for that to get out of control. Yeah. Especially when it's anonymous. Periscope. Right. So a year later, Secret was kind of on its way down. It was kind of clear that it wasn't going to work. And to this day, I commend David and Chris for deciding to wind it down instead of, you know, trying to revive this thing that was no longer alive. a new app emerged that had not launched yet called Periscope. Wow. Once again, unlaunched. Unlaunched. Third year in a row. Third year in a row. And they had an iOS app and they needed an Android engineer.

15:17I got put in touch from a couple of mutual friends to Kayvon, the founder and CEO of Periscope. I met with a team. And at the time, you know, Periscope was a live streaming app before live streaming ever became a thing. So I first discovered Periscope while on a date. Someone I had met took me out to a bar. He's like, hey, have you heard of this app called Periscope? And I was like, no. And so he started a broadcast and he created some funny title like Broadcasting My Date. And I looked at it and, you know, people were joining and there were these parts floating. And I was like, this is incredible.

15:56This is an experience that we haven't had before. and I at the end was like you need to introduce me to the founder of this app because oh wow I you know this is this is something I would be interested in working on so he introduced me at the same time another mutual friend of ours introduced um introduced me to came on and um uh met the team and they were like we need an android engineer and I was like well for the third year in a row let's do this I uh you know went back to secret told them that I was going to leave, you know, did all of that. It was really bittersweet for me because I really loved working on that team.

16:36But I knew that we had to move on. So I went back to Kayvon and his co-founder, Joe, and they took me out to my favorite bar in San Francisco, which is Smuggler's Cove. And they're like, okay, we would love for you to join us. We have to tell you something before you join and that it's that we've sold the company to Twitter. And I was like, wait, what? I'm pretty sure I cursed. And I was like, I just left there. And then I calmed down a little bit. I called Dick Costolo right after that meeting because I had seen him that previous weekend. It was the Superbowl, if I remember correctly. And that whole weekend I was like talking about this company Periscope.

17:18And I was like, Dick, you should look at this app and this company. This is really cool. I'm thinking of going to work there. And he was like, uh-huh. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Did he already know about it at the time or? He had already bought the company. Oh, he had already bought it. Where I thought you were going was you had sort of tipped him off. Oh, no. And then he went and acquired the company right after you told him. He had already acquired. Oh, wow. Good poker face, I guess. I know. Yeah, great poker face. He was like, I know I didn't say anything because I'm not supposed to, but now that you know, you should come back to Twitter and we'll figure all that.

17:51Were you bummed that it wasn't going to be a startup anymore? Or like, did you reconsider joining? Well, they had this plan where they were going to stay separate from Twitter. Yeah. And so we were going to have our own office and it was going to stay separate. We're going to operate like a startup and all that. The other thing was that the acquisition was supposed to remain a secret for the foreseeable future. and but I was kind of I was rejoining Twitter and so we had to come up with a way to let me rejoin the corporate software without tipping anyone off that I had rejoined the company because you know that would raise questions like oh Sarah back at Twitter or like what's going on that must have been complicated so I yeah I rejoined Twitter under a fake name what yes and This is real?

18:41This is real. I rejoined under a pseudonym. The person that came and did my onboarding, Alex Stillings, who was one of the most awesome IT guys. He came to my desk at Periscope to do my onboarding personally and told me, like, put your real name here, put your fake name there. And so I reentered the system with no face and a fake name. What was the name? The name was Shana York. Wow. And to this day, I still get mail under Shana York sometimes. because, you know, for a while that was a name that, you know, had a mailing address and everything. I mean, I'm assuming at some point this leaks, like you said, there wasn't a lot of remote work going on back then.

19:26What happens? How did people find out that you were actually back and that Twitter had acquired Periscope? So for three weeks, it was really funny because, you know, I didn't go into Twitter HQ. I just stayed at the Periscope office. But sometimes people would come visit the Periscope office. So I remember the day Mike Davidson, who was one of the designers at Twitter, came to see the Periscope team and say hello and saw me sitting there. And he was like, what? Yeah. Why are you here? Anyway, three weeks later, a journalist, and I can't remember who it was, got the scoop that Twitter had acquired Periscope.

19:59Got it. So they had to make an announcement about it. And at that point, there was no reason to keep it a secret anymore. So I tweeted about it and everything was out of the bag. Did it launch around the same time? I feel like I remember, again, like Vine, it was sort of Twitter has acquired a company and here's the product. It was not long after that that it launched on iOS. Yeah. And I remember also having like a really interesting first use case with the kind of like your story. I was I was still at Aviary and we were in a different office, though. And I remember that there was an explosion of a building on the Lower East Side.

20:35and you could see it from the office. And I had never used Periscope before, but I just downloaded. I took it, I fired it up. And literally within a minute, I had like tens of thousands of people watching it. And I had like journalists reaching out to me, asking me if they could use the footage on like the nightly news and stuff. I was like, this is crazy. This is an experience, like you said. It was really fascinating. Really fascinating. It really changed the way you can connect online. with other people in a way that we definitely take for granted now because we have short-term memories. And now, of course, you can live stream with somebody else and all that.

21:13But yeah, it was super novel. I think it's really interesting. And obviously, we're going to talk about Particle, your new company and product in a little bit. But I think it's really interesting that these three experiences and really also Twitter, not only have you been sort of at the forefront of these new moments in consumer tech, but they've been around media formats, right? Six second videos, anonymous postings, you know, live video stream with interactive hearts and chat and stuff. But they've been these novel formats. It's it's super interesting. I don't know if it's coincidental. When I look back on it, it feels like it can't be coincidental.

21:52But at the time, it does feel coincidental because I was just kind of going to where the next thing was. And again, that's being in the right place at the right time around the right people. You know, finding the next company that you're going to work at because you're on some rando date is not going to happen anywhere outside of Silicon Valley. I mean, maybe it'll happen in New York, but, you know, that it just matters so much. So, of course, you ended up being at Twitter for a long time after that. I stayed like six and a half, seven years. Yeah, and leading product for a number of really, really big initiatives.

22:25I think this leads into Particle nicely. Obviously, Twitter is a place for media. It's a place for news consumption. It's a place not only for consumers of news, but also publishers of the news. So much of the media, journalists, publishers rely on Twitter for publishing. Talk about that experience. Talk about your experience with news and journalism and media throughout the course of your six years at Twitter. Like you said, Twitter has been at the forefront and the intersection of news and social and what's happening. And journalists are such a huge part of that. Most of my exposure to media and journalism at Twitter was through working with the press.

23:07and it was it's it's such an interesting relationship because not only are you talking to them because of your product announcements but they also use your product to you know to announce whatever it is that they want to announce whether it's what you're working on what somebody else is working on but now I'm talking to a lot of the corporate side of media publishers and and journalists so it's a definitely a different angle that I'm learning a lot about but the last thing that I worked on at Twitter one of the one of the last things was Twitter Blue okay which is the premium subscription product and we had acquired a company called Scroll that was led by a guy named Tony Hale who's a very good friend as part of Twitter Blue we included a product that allowed you to bypass ads or to have an ad-free reading experience and to push back the paywall a little bit if you were a Twitter Blue subscriber.

24:02And you could also see as a subscriber where your dollars were going, you know, to the publishers that you were reading and all of that. And so that was one of my first real forays into the kind of the business side of journalism and media at Twitter, kind of working with Tony on this project. You mentioned a minute ago that you're sort of, you're building for obviously readers and consumers, but also journalists and publishers. How do you balance that? And also, do you distinguish between sort of building for journalists versus versus building for anyone that wants to tweet? Right. What's the difference between a journalist and just me wanting to tweet, I guess?

24:38How does that define and inform your your roadmap, I would say? So I would say that this is actually, you know, looking back, one of the places where I feel like Twitter really struggled to to define its user because Twitter used a lot of traditional OKRs and metrics. And the fact that only if, you know, a fraction of people tweet and the fact that of the fraction of people that are tweeting, a subset of those are responsible for the content that everyone actually wants to see was difficult to measure. And so to build something for journalists where a lot of people, open up Twitter and they want to see what journals have to say, was often difficult to justify because it didn't directly impact the top line metrics.

25:33Right. And this is a problem that I'm sure many big companies struggle with. And you're smiling, so maybe you have that experience as well. This was difficult at Twitter to kind of get the resources needed to justify some of these power user features that are responsible for creating the content that everybody else wants to consume. I tried to push as much as I could to get these features into Twitter Blue. And the justification I could make was that Twitter Blue, to start, was going to be for power users, journalists or power users on Twitter. And we can justify that not because it's going to hit top line DAU, but it's going to have incremental revenue.

26:18So I found another metric to measure these folks by, and armed with that, was able to kind of get more things through. And how did journalists react to this? It was mixed. I think not all of the features that we were building were necessarily, you know, for the kinds of things that they wanted. I would have loved to have, you know, been able to spend more time there to build features that made their lives a lot easier. How did you see the consumer experience evolve throughout your time at Twitter when it comes to consuming news? Like, what was that like? And maybe what was it like back then versus what it's like today?