Adam Mosseri: AI is a tailwind for authenticity

23:27Lenny Rachitsky:we've evolved from we used to write all our code to now we're approaching all code will be written by ai and it feels like now the transition is it's not just written by ai but it's like one-shotted by ai like coding now is steering ai and it's like how often you have to correct it is is coding now and then there's uh so it's like the software development life cycle slowly being eaten by ai uh it'll start helping us come up with ideas i imagine more and more the question i like to ask people is where do you think human brains will continue to be most valuable as AI continues to eat more and more of that product development lifecycle.

24:04Taste, like we talked about, judgment, particularly around strategy, right? Like you're not, you might get feedback from an AI on the strategy, but you're not asking an AI to come up with a strategy anytime soon. Or if you are, then it's within the context of bounds you set. So here's my goal, here's my vision, here are my constraints, here's my job, here's my budget. I think that, you know, it looks more like management, right? Like you are trying to define what success looks like, decide how prescriptive you want to be about the path to success and then giving feedback along the way. And that is its own craft.

24:42You know, when you, it'll be interesting to see how Matt, you know, you know, some of the same dynamics come up like i believe that if you are too prescriptive as a leader with a team you end up stifling good ideas but if you're too open-ended sometimes teams just waste time um going in the wrong direction and so that level of autonomy you give a team like maybe that applies to agents in the future particularly when we're talking not just about building something but deciding what you built in the first place. But I think of vision as an articulation of the world or the state of the product you want to get to.

25:24And I think of strategy as an opinionated path to achieve that vision. Strategy can't be like, be the best or be amazing. It has to be controversial. A reasonable person should be able to disagree with it because otherwise you're probably just trying to compete on raw execution. and I think both vision and strategy, I think, are going to be where our brains are spreading a lot more and more of our cycles, and I think less on execution.

25:56Lenny Rachitsky:Something I have always thought is AI should be incredibly good at strategy because you would think, here's the market, here's all the information on the market, our competitors, our metrics, our numbers, our growth, all these things, help me figure out how to win. You'd think AI, knowing all that, would be really good at this. I think it could be. I have found it's not unless you steer it pretty aggressively. And I don't mean towards an answer. I mean based on the constraints. It turns out when you're trying to come up with a strategy, there's a lot of things to consider, right? You need to consider the state of the technology, the personnel on the team and what's motivating them and what you can get.

26:33Sometimes coming up with an idea that is on the bubble, you know it's going to actually attract some of the best talent. And so that kind of the push then goes to the idea. obviously the competitive landscape the regulatory landscape for companies as large as ours and the compliance landscape the identity and reason to exist for the brand um you know you have to consider all of these things i think if you ask an ai just for a strategy lazily you're not going to get something right you're going to get something pretty predictable that pop up with

27:06Lenny Rachitsky:the competition would expect you to do i think if you want a really more effective one you need to think long and hard about what are all of the different inputs that need to be considered. Make sure you steer the AI in a way that it's considering those as well. And it needs to be a conversation and a back and forth. But I think if you're willing to put in the work and the time, it can definitely be helpful and definitely be clarifying, particularly if you tell it to be critical. Different models have very different vibes though on how willing they are to be pushed back so i i recommend picking one that likes pushing back yeah mythos has gotten really good at being like i can't do this let's let's move on like uh there's all these lot has always been a little bit of a jerk in a way that i actually appreciate i true i appreciate it i really do because i don't want one that's just like oh you're so right i'm so sorry i said that it's like no hold on i want i want you know i want the real real sort of intelligence i don't want a pleaser this point you made about people being excited about the strategy such an interesting one there's this idea that i read i think cory cory doctor wrote this there's this kind of concept of a centaur centaur and a reverse centaur so centaur is a human body horse this is going somewhere i promise uh human body uh horse sorry human upper part horse lower part horse body yeah yeah horse body where the human is in charge and that's kind of we prefer that we want to be in charge reverse end chart which is what we want to avoid with ai is where the ai is controlling us and we're just doing its bidding it's a horse head on a human body yeah exactly it's terrifying so like in a sense like uber drivers and doordash people kind of this is their life which is not great and this is the danger thing for a lot of people is like like if it's giving us the strategy and telling us here's what we're like no one's going to want to do that so that's a really interesting counterpoint to we don't want ai to be telling us the strategy almost.

29:02Yeah, no, I think there's a lot of things to be careful about right now. And I would certainly not just assume that because you might be able to outsource some workflow to AI that you should. There are certain ones where I think it's really just a win-win. There are certain ones where I think is the risk that outweighs the benefits.

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30:24Lenny Rachitsky:Visit mercury.com to learn more and apply online in minutes. Mercury is a fintech company, not an FDIC insured bank. Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group and Column NA members FDIC. Okay, going back to product leadership, things you've learned along your journey. We were chatting ahead of this about just things you've learned. And one thing that you said about some of the product, the best product leaders you've worked with is that they're less visionary and more curators. I'd love to hear more along these lines. Yeah. I mean, you do sometimes find amazing product leaders who are just like idea machines, just prolific idea machines.

31:02But I do think a lot of the best have taste, have something about them that really makes really strong talent want to work with them, but end up sort of being curators, curators of people, curators of ideas, curators of technologies, curators of strategies. Because I don't really care if I'm hiring a strong lead for an area. If the strategy comes from them or comes from somebody else, I just care that there is an amazing strategy and everyone has bought into it and that we're executing against that strategy well. And so I think that some of the best product leaders, yes, have ideas. It's hard to be a great curator if you don't have some of your own ideas, but embrace the reality that they can't come up with everything themselves.

31:57And so they need to create an environment in which great ideas bubble up and are chosen or decided upon. And so, you know, I think it's not just about curating ideas, but it's sometimes about curating teams and people.

32:13Lenny Rachitsky:I love that. I so agree. I feel like everyone's always joining a team and they just want to do vision strategy, just like not actually hands-on work. And now AI is coming in. Here, let me do the strategy. Yeah, exactly. And I love this point that there's so much power and value and people underestimate just the need for just like a really good curator of the team's ideas. Yeah. Sometimes it's also, So sometimes it's not just who's good or what idea is good. It's also what is going to work given the broader context. So for instance, on team building, a huge thing that I'm always considering is not just like, is this person a really strong candidate for this role?

32:52It is how does this person fit into their leadership team? You know, so if I, you know, first an area like trust and safety, you know, I have an engineering lead. I have a product staff lead. I have a data science lead. I have a design lead. I have a research lead. I need to make sure that those five complement each other. I need to make, and that's about what skills each one has, what weaknesses each one might have. I also need to make sure that they, this is more art than science, have a good vibe, right? You need trust and rapport. A leadership team with strong trust and rapport can work through most anything.

33:30A leadership team without trust or rapport, like anything can become an issue. And so that chemistry bit is, like I said, much more art than science, but that also matters. And so I think some of the best leaders and product leaders specifically also either do that instinctively or consciously. But, you know, they have a nose for building teams that are going to have good energy and good collaboration.

33:59Lenny Rachitsky:Warm and fuzzy stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Well, the flip flip is also true, right? Like I've had many times in my career where I've had two people who I think are amazing and I even adore them and love them and they just can't get along. You're like, this isn't a competency issue. This is just a personality issue. And you just have to sometimes call it and split them. I want to transition to talk about Instagram, the product, the platform, things you guys have learned there. Let me start with this question. What's something that the Instagram algorithm knows about human behavior that people may not realize?

34:37One of the most common misconceptions is actually in the opposite direction. I think people assume that there's a much more detailed semantic understanding of everybody's interests and preferences in the algorithm than there is. most of what's really driven the progress in the world of recommenders over the last five ten years have been you know these large embedding models and these other techniques that basically produce artifacts that cannot be read by people they're not legible they're like giant vectors it's like sure i can show you the vector but it's just going to be a bunch of numbers in like a seven-dimensional space it's like and so when when we talk about does the algorithm know something usually we think in these more semantic terms it knows i like surfing and it's like

35:24Lenny Rachitsky:it doesn't it just has this big ass number that happens to correlate with surfing um that said i think that is starting to change right i think that what one of the things that LLMs are enabling is they can describe in, you know, words, you know, English for, or whatever language you prefer, what some of those previously illegible artifacts are at least proximate to, if not mean directly, right? So this is like the thing I've been really, I posted about this this week, this thing called your algorithm. Basically the idea is we take a look at all of the stuff that you've interacted with. And then all of that is in an embedding space.

36:09You can think of an embedding space as a map. You can map a bunch of videos into the same map. And so videos that are close are similar. And now we can just have an LLM just be like, describe that part of the map. And it can be like, oh, that is like deep pour over coffee snobbery. And that's kind of amazing.

36:29Lenny Rachitsky:That is so cool. You can ask the LLM to look at these numbers and extrapolate here's like the topic that you're interested in yeah or look at the videos and so the way you're um both and so you can also embed concepts into that same space and so i mean embeddings are really the underlying technology underneath llms right that's how the whole thing works and so you know so what what we what we what we do now is we let you you know quote unquote see your algorithm. You can see what topics we think you're interested in. And you can adjust it. You can add and remove things. But the idea here of giving people some agency back in a world where these social media apps are getting taken over by recommendations.

37:13But we can't do a lot of other things yet, which we will be able to do. There's things that aren't topical that you might ask for. I want more fun content. I want to see my friends more. I don't want to see my high school's kids friends kids photos you know i don't know we can come up with it i don't want to see seven photos in a row but i'm happy to see six photos or whatever your hearts can you know whatever your mind can come up with so we have a lot of work to do and so i'm excited about that but um i think a misconception historically is until recently we don't really know as much about you as you think we're just like oh like you liked these photos this these people also like those same photos and they like these other photos.

37:55So you might like those other photos. Like that's kind of how I'm oversimplifying. That's like kind of how it worked. Now, only now are we actually getting as sophisticated as I think people have assumed we've been for many years.

38:06Lenny Rachitsky:That is really interesting. One that comes to mind is kind of this transition everyone eventually goes through to this like algorithmic, broad global feed. Everyone, it always feels like people think, I just want to see chronologically everyone I know and follow. and that's going to be my favorite feed and it continues to be proven wrong. No, you actually engage a lot more, a lot more when it's this algorithmic feed of things we think you will love. Yeah, it's tough because, I mean, I posted this week this thing about agency and I just got destroyed in the comments, which is just part of the job.

38:39I get it, right? But there are a couple issues with the chronological feed. So one is, and some of this is the tension between an individual's interests and what works when you scale it up, right? So if you do a pure chronological feed, the incentive for everybody is to just post as much as possible because it will always be at the top of everyone who follows you's feed as soon as you post. So what ends up happening is that the feed gets overwhelmed with professional content, with usually large company content and publishers because they get you know the new york times can pump out 50 things a day your your best friend won't you know you might get one thing a week from them and so your feed just gets taken over so part of it is the incentives that emerge because when you design these systems it's almost like designing a city you need to think about okay here's the here the here's how the mechanics work what are the incentives that arise how are people going to act within those incentives and then what happens and the other thing is sometimes the most interesting thing was just not the most recent thing recency is an important input into relevance but it's not the only one my sister got engaged last night and you know she's in germany but she

39:58Lenny Rachitsky:didn't if she did she's married she got married last year that's why it was top of my mind but if she got engaged you know and i missed it because she lives in europe and you know with different time differences like do i really want to see a picture of like my brother's pobo sandwich you know po-poi sandwich or do i want to like see my sister's things first so i i it's tough it's tough i'd love to figure out a way to find the right balance i want to give people agency over the experience but i think it needs to be in a way that creates a system that makes sense not just for us as a business which matters i'm not pretending that's not an issue but also for the overall community because we've done chronological by default and where you can make at default and you see not only does usage go down, overall sentiment goes down.

40:43The individual who made that choice might be happy at the moment, but when you just get pummeled with stuff you're less interested in over the course of months, we ask, we run surveys at massive scales. We just see people start to become less and less satisfied with Instagram.

40:57Lenny Rachitsky:Kind of along these lines, everybody asks you about this these days, AI and content and how that all impacts everything that's going on. I want to ask you something I haven't seen someone ask you. Is the rise of AI content a headwind or a tailwind for Instagram versus other platforms? Do you think this helps or hurts you guys? I think it's going to be a tailwind, but I think it's going to be a challenge. And not just because it's more content. Obviously, we're an attention business, driven business. We're an advertising business. More content means potentially more attention. That's not for free, though.

41:31I don't think we're very good at ranking AI content yet. There's great AI content, this crap AI content, you should just see the stuff you're interested in and not any of the stuff you're not interested in. But I do think that in a world where, or for years now, and I've said this many times, power is shifting from institutions to individuals across industries. The easiest example of sports where players are more relevant than teams now, and that was not the case when I was a kid. In that world, I think it behooves us to invest in individuals and to invest in specifically for Instagram and creators.

42:05And I mean, creators broadly, I don't just mean influencers who are promoting branded content and making, you know, native only videos. I mean, anybody who's using platforms like Instagram to help do what they do, right? It could be, you could be a journalist, you could be an artist, you could be selling scarves you sew, but like you're out there as yourself creating and sharing content that helps you achieve whatever it is you're trying to do. So we've been leaning in that direction for many years now. That's been one of our two or three most important audiences for as long as I've been on Instagram.

42:39In a world where there's an abundance of synthetic content, I actually think people are going to seek out creativity and authenticity and people more, not less. And I think that will help us. That doesn't mean that we won't have AI content on our platform. There's going to be bad and good AI content. And we're going to try and handle that, you know, the way we normally handle content. So unsafe goes away. Interesting versus not interesting is based on ranking and personalization. But I think people are going to really seek out other points of view because Instagram was never just about the content.

43:13It was always about, to a certain degree, the person behind the content, the point of view, the reason they're sharing it, their perspective. And I think that's going to become more important, not less. And I think given that we are not the best at a lot of things, but we are the largest creator platform, if you look at how we define creators and how many creators use us versus other platforms, I think it'll be a tailwind for us because I think people are going to seek out people.

43:42Lenny Rachitsky:And this connects to your earlier point that companies like, say, New York Times can pump out a bunch of AI content versus a creator. And And so you're saying you kind of want to protect against that to allow individuals to continue to perform well in spite of just all this AI content. If you just love AI content, great. Like you should be able to have a feed that's just like AI town. And if you don't, then you shouldn't have it in your feed. To me, it's like, I don't think we should. I mean, I understand why people are. I'm not oblivious to the overall paradigm shift and sort of revolution that we're sitting in.

44:19But I don't think we should judge content based on the tool that made it. I think we should judge it based on the content, the point of view, the person behind the content. I don't think we should filter out AI content. I think we should let you know if content is AI content or not. I think we should let you know more about the person who posted anything so that you can make informed decisions about whether or not to believe or trust them based on knowing who they are or where they are. or how many times they've changed their profile, or if their profile is three days old or three years old. But I don't think we should be making value judgments based on what tool you used.

44:59Lenny Rachitsky:Is there an AI content creator you love that you're just like is so good about watching these AI videos? Yeah, what is she called? Plastic Dream Sequence, is that what it is? I think - Check it out. Yeah, Plastic Dream Sequence. I have it on my phone, I'll double check. It's these dolls, Barbies, but they're singing songs in these little tiny silhouettes and snippets. And it's just amazing. It's a little weird, but also kind of amazing. And it's very clearly AI. It's not pretending not to be. But it has a very clear creative and aesthetic point of view. And every time I come by one, I'm like, yep, we're doing this now.

45:45I'm going to watch this for 30 seconds.

45:47Lenny Rachitsky:i have it pulled up here and i don't i want to watch it but i'm not going to that's awesome if only that ai that's another one he's out of he's in france i think he's in paris he uses multiple different tools and models but he kind of tries to create these dreamscapes and animate them so he uses one model to create the image another one to create the video music etc uh he's like very clearly got his own aesthetic um uh and he's just like you could you You can think of him as a painter, but like this is his tool. Is there kind of a vision of AI versus human in the feed? Do you think it'll, like you said, you maybe want to market?

46:24Lenny Rachitsky:Like, how do you think about people? Are they going to be like AI account, non-AI account? How do you think about it? Or is that still kind of a work in progress? Maybe we'll end up in the same place, but there's a difference between marking content and marking accounts, and they're both useful and interesting. So if content was created with AI, I think you should be able to know that. that's hard by the way because we can detect that right now but as these models get better we might lose the ability to detect that so we should also be very careful to be honest with you about how confident we are in our own sort of assessment but i think you should be able to just ask be like hey is this ai and we should be able to tell you we think it probably is or we're not sure or it's definitely not or definitely is i actually think we might be more practical to label camera captured content like basically non-ai content as opposed to labeling ai content long term for a couple reasons but then at the account level i think it also matters there is definitely an a new spam vector which is these fake accounts which by the way an ai creator that's fine there's nothing wrong with that necessarily but there is there are these spam vectors which are trying to abuse that and you know they're selling like you know bogus supplements and it's like an ai monk and it doesn't present it and it's not obvious that it's an AI and it's just trying to take advantage of a certain aesthetic or a certain sort of stereotype.

47:47We need to figure out how to crack down on that. And so I do think we should be making sure that you know. Basically, you just need to know, and then you can make your own informed decision. Is the account a real person or not? Is the content a real piece of content or not?

48:00Lenny Rachitsky:When you think about other platforms in the space, social content platforms, are there any um features or just or like ways of of approaching stuff that they do well that you're kind of jealous of or really impressed by yeah there's a bunch everybody so many people do so much because i mean for me like one of the things that we are finally catching up with but i've been always very impressed with is tiktok and their recommenders ability to break small talent in the world of ranking recommenders and rank you can talk about exploitation based ranking that sounds terrible but it just means like using the data you have and then you can talk about exploration based ranking going and trying to figure out you know what someone might be interested in that they might even not know they're interested in yet and it is much easier to move engagement by showing people stuff that you know they'll probably like because lots of people like it it's much harder to go and figure out how to essentially test content so that we can see like hey maybe you sure you like Bieber but you might also like Afropunk and so we're just going to like show you some Afropunk and see what happens if you do the latter this exploration based ranking you can I think it's really good for niche creators and small creators because you give them a chance to find an audience that either wasn't going to see them before or didn't even know that they were interested before.

49:27So we've invested a lot over the last couple of years in ranking, not just increasing engagement, but increasing originality, increasing the number of pieces of content that break out, increasing recency to stay culturally relevant. And so a lot of that has been inspired by TikTok and ByteDance. I think we're catching up. There's actually a couple of those areas where we, I think, by the best we can tell, we're ahead of them. There's a couple where we're still behind. But we have line of sight to, I think, being the best in class at recommendations for the first time during my tenure. So that's, I think, and they get a lot of credit for inspiring a lot of that work.

50:05Lenny Rachitsky:Nice job. Well, we'll see. Not there yet. They call me disappointed dad. My team is always like, can you ease up on the disappointed dad vibe? So I'm trying to be a little bit more generous about giving people their flowers. Like you say that, but that's an interesting common thread across really successful leaders is just never being satisfied. Yeah, it's a blessing and a curse. Here's all the problem. It is. On this creator piece, I think that's also, you know, people complain about this global algorithm, not showing them all their friends. But I feel like this is a benefit of what happens when you do this.

50:46Lenny Rachitsky:Now that you can break new creators into a wide audience if you have this kind of global algorithmic feed, which is really great for a lot of people. I mean, I'm out there talking about a lot of these contentious issues and I get beat up a lot in the comments, which is fine. My main thing here is just to try to communicate that there's almost always tradeoffs, right? You know, you can't just have all of the things, unfortunately. You want to never see something you're not interested in, then you're also just going to see the most basic, general, lowest common denominator stuff all the time. You want to discover new and interesting things, you're occasionally going to see stuff that was just a mess.

51:32But this isn't just true about ranking. All these major debates have trade-offs. Privacy and safety, those two things are intention. Do you want a company scanning your messages or not? There's some really significant trade-offs on both sides of that debate. And so generally speaking, when I argue and engage in debate with people who feel really strongly about things, I'm not usually trying to convince them. Their mind is usually made up. I'm just trying to enumerate all of the different puts and takes for the rest of the people watching the conversation.

52:05Lenny Rachitsky:Speaking of getting torn apart in the comments, It's like you're so in the middle and think of all of these really hairy situations, changing the feed. You're like in the Cambridge Analytica lawsuit, all this. You're in the center of so much controversy. Is that something? Yep. Oh, man. Is that just like you? I will lean into this. This is the thing I need to do. Or is it like Zuck being like, Adam, you got to be the front face of all the stuff and get in there. Like, where does that come from? It started on Newsfeet. So I used to run Newsfeet at Facebook. And my take was that the debate was going to happen with or without us, so we might as well participate.

52:48And so I started being really active on Twitter specifically, because that's where journalists really lived at the time. And I thought it would show some humility to show up on their turf, so to speak. My Twitter ended up being the darkest place in my life, because I just followed all of our biggest critics. That's not a dig on Twitter. that was just like what I did um and that's where it started and it kind of slowly built from there for better for worse we've become a really important part of daily life for a lot of people we touch a lot of people we have a lot of responsibility and there's a lot of change and there's with change means there's going to be anxiety and stress and scrutiny we've made great decisions we've made mistakes we've been criticized for things that I think we've been criticized unfairly we've been criticized fairly and so we just need to accept that this debate is going to happen broadly so I just think it's better for us to talk about it and just be clear about what we're doing why we're doing it what the trade-offs are if people disagree that's okay we're not necessarily you know winning over friends when we talk about what we do but I think over the long run people are fundamentally more afraid of things that they don't understand um and about things where people are more secretive and less accessible and so i've been tried i've tried to show up in an accessible and authentic way um and i've made mistakes and i have enjoyed it at times and hated it at other times um that's kind of how it started there was also kind of a fun debate in on Mark's sort of senior leadership team a long time ago where we were just talking about how we're a social media company where we had like a very sort of conventional approach to communication and like press releases and say, why don't we just use our platform?

54:36So I was not in that debate, but I stuck myself into that debate, tried to mediate it. And I think, but that was also a reason why I ended up getting sucked in because Mark was like, all right, well, let's see. Like, why don't you try and see how it goes?

54:48Lenny Rachitsky:What's something that helps you deal with the hate that flows at you every time you say something that people disagree with you try to put it in perspective right you know like so it started with i did the redesign of newsfeed in 2009 we launched it march of 2009 for facebook i was a designer i was a front like an ic designer front you know entry-level designer and the first comment that came in was something pretty derogatory i think it was like it was like homophobic and antisemitic it was just like literally we're all sitting there we launched this thing and we're just looking at the stream of comments and it's like the first one and it was specifically about they don't know me but it was like what expletive expletive um sensor sensor uh designed this shit and i was like oh it was me um and i was like devastated i was like 25 year old kid and I don't know I thought about it and I came I came to this idea that if you spent 30 40 50 minutes a day at a at your desk and you organize your photos there and you wrote letters to your friends there and you read there and then I just came and I rearranged your desk and I didn't tell you I didn't warn you I didn't even explain why like you would be pissed and that would be reasonable and that was what was happening just you know with millions of people so I try to put things in perspective and then I try to step away from it get time with my kids get time outside there there are months where it's really not hard at all and there are months where it's really really grinds on me along those lines there's a famous kind of reversal when you redesign the feed into this kind of video scrolly experience there's this whole protest the world protested yeah that was pretty rough uh what was kind of like okay wow we're actually not right and we should go back what was kind of what helped you decide again let's change course so actually that one got that one three or four things got conflated we had a redesign a feed that went to the video viewer that was a test to four percent of users on ios it was a not it was not going to roll out it was just like an early test to get some sense and feedback on the idea.

57:07We were also leaning into reels a lot. We were also leaning into recommendations. So posts from accounts you don't follow a lot. And there were also creators who were upset about the fact that their reach was going down and they were blaming ranking changes on that. Those four things got all conflated. We had some pretty big name creators publicly like slap us. Then the press covered that creator sort of backlash, which then got more creators doing it. So we ended up with this little bit of like a multiplier effect or echo between the creator community and the press back and forth. But we were never going to launch that.

57:45That was an early test. We knew it was going to need to work. We actually have continued to grow video and invest in creative tools and invest in ranking and invest in recommendations. And that's driven most of our growth in the years since. But I think we were pushing.

58:04Lenny Rachitsky:Well, I don't know what does it feel like but like it i think we were i think my real takeaway wasn't that we should have not tested that design necessarily i think we could have been we could have done a bunch of things better to explain and maybe move a little fast move a little slower i think we were just pushing things a little bit too fast and when you are responsible for a platform like instagram you need to be reasonable and realistic about how much you can evolve it now i would much rather have backlashes like that every couple of years, but continue to evolve and continue to stay relevant than the alternative, which would have been like, we didn't have video.

58:41We didn't have DMs. We didn't have stories. We didn't have ranking. And we wouldn't be on having this

58:45Lenny Rachitsky:podcast right now. But the cost of leaning in is that you're going to occasionally make a mistake and you're going to definitely pay for it. It's interesting how running experiments now is very risky for companies at your scale one person spots it and i go shit you kind of need to have a press you don't need to be proactive about communicating it but you need to have a calm strategy like we can't for any for any design change or any test that could be controversial we we talk about it beforehand and be like okay not if it leaks when it leaks what are we saying you know are we you know should we talk about proactively should we talk about reactivity Either way, what's the message?

59:26Because you can't launch something to 3 billion people and not test it first, but you can't test something at our scale and not expect people to cover it. And so you have to be ready to talk about it before you even know you want to launch it. So it makes the development cycle more complicated than it used to be.

59:53Lenny Rachitsky:yeah uh the uh head of growth at anthropic launched an experiment with pricing and it just went crazy on twitter he's like it's all about the one percent of people were just trying stuff like no pricing particularly that one is a real you got to be real careful with that one i've i've learned we've all learned these lessons we should all share notes more how to avoid the internet hating you for the day yeah i'm happy to talk to that growth in a throubbing. I think he's all right. He's all right. Okay. I'm going to take us to two recurring corners on the podcast, fail corner and hot seat corner.

1:00:26Lenny Rachitsky:Fail corner. What's something that you worked on that was just a huge failure that helped you become better? Oh, a bunch. So I'll give you two maybe. So before Instagram, my first project as a PM was on a project called Facebook Home, which was a sort of fork of Android at the operating system level and a piece of hardware with HTC. It was a spectacular failure. I learned way more in that year, year and a half, and I did it any year, I think probably in my career because I was just a design manager before that. I declared myself a PM because the PM on the project quit and I just threw myself head first and understanding carriers and OEMs and certification as well as Android and operating systems and just lend a ton.

1:01:17So, and I'm happy I brought that project to an end because it had been going on for a long time and sometimes you, the best thing you can do is execute an idea that doesn't have market fit well just to decide whether or not the idea was a good idea in the first place. another big mistake i made um during my instagram tenure was the first version of reels was built on top of stories stories had a ton of momentum this was i think 2019 and we were trying to build reels into stories because we were trying to build on the thing that was growing the fastest but it was not a strong foundation most you know the read-through rate on stories is relatively low there's way more stories than most people have time to consume so most of the reels were never seen and then they disappeared um and if we had the version of reels that we launched in like mid just maybe we think it's like the summer of 2020 in the summer of 2019 i think i don't think tiktok isn't i think tiktok is still big and important but i don't think it's as big as it is now because when they really took off was when the pandemic hit and a bunch of people I had a lot of time at home and we're looking for a little bit of joy and we're totally fine with our phone having sound on.

1:02:31And so if you look at the numbers, the 2020 is when they exploded and we were out of position. And on one hand, you know, I'm a designer. I'm trying to not add new things to the product. I'm trying to extend existing primitives. And that was the idea. On the other hand, I was wrong. And it's a pretty big fork in the road if you just look at the overall business over the last eight years.

1:02:55Lenny Rachitsky:We create a lot of economic opportunity in the world, allowing TikTok to grow. I'm glad they exist. Okay, final question. I'm curious just about your screen time policy with your kids. I know you have three kids. There's a lot of concern these days about Instagram not being great for people, not for kids. A lot of tech executives don't let their kids use devices while they're building the product. As head of Instagram, how do you think about screen time with your kids? The key thing for me is boundaries. It's also about education and having conversations with them. But my kids are too young to use social media.

1:03:35They're 10, 8, and 6. But they each have an iPad. They have to earn their time. So they have different ways they earn their time. It's usually about sitting down to do your homework three times for half an hour each gets you the total of 90 minutes on the weekend and then they can use that time on the weekend but you kind of have to set that boundary where it's like you can't just like you know we can't just be they ask for it and you give it to them I think that matters a lot and then I'm pretty opinionated about what they do on it like I approve what apps that they have I think parents should be approving what apps to kids specifically are downloading onto their devices we've been advocating for this at a policy level for a long time at meta i think those things help a lot um there are some exceptions um one is planes it's just like about surviving i don't know if you've ever for those of your parents i'm going to be yeah yeah it's like you just like that's just like all right you know we're flying you know it's a 10-hour flight or eight-hour flight it's like yeah just just you just need to get through it um the other one that i'm starting to experiment with my 10 year old with is so schools are interesting because I think I'm pretty supportive of a no phone in classrooms that's happening more and more I think that's just probably good for education and I do also know in the world of AI that there's concern about kids using AI and not learning critical thinking skills I think that's a valid concern but I also am worried about kids not learning how to leverage AI and then being sort of at a disadvantage so that's a balance I think need both so with with my eldest we started um vibe coding recently together um he's just loves video games so i was like all right let's make a video game and so he's made this 19 level platformer game that kind of looks like an 8-bit version of super mario from when i was a kid but like each level has its own theme its own types of monsters there's a store where you can buy different skins or weapons and there's like uh like it's unbelievable what a 10 year old who still types with three fingers can do um with just you know a couple hours of sitting together but that is more of like a i want you to learn how to um make things i want you to be thinking not just playing games and i'm going to sit with you and we're going to do this together So to me, these are the things that matter.

1:06:06Boundaries, scoping it down to the activities you think are healthy for your kid. Every kid is different. But I do think you want your kids to be digitally literate, AI literate, because I think if they're not, they're going to be at a disadvantage. But you also don't want it to be a free-for-all.

1:06:22Lenny Rachitsky:This is selfishly useful for me as a three-year-old, and I'm trying to figure all this stuff out. So this is useful for me to figure out a strategy. It's a thing. and you're not that far off. You're really just not that far off. It's going to happen in a couple years. Type coding next year. Let's do it. I couldn't believe it. I tried to do it six months ago and it just totally didn't work. And then now with the new remodels, it's been amazing. What's their platform of choice? Are they a cloud coding person? Yeah, my 10-year-old is using cloud code right now. Amazing. But we will see. We'll see how that goes.

1:06:56Lenny Rachitsky:Adam, I'm going to let you go. Thank you so much for being here. You're just like such a gem of a person. It's just so obvious how clear, like how authentic you are and just like how deeply you think about everything. So I really appreciate you being here. I appreciate you bringing me on. I've been a fan for a long time. It's nice to finally get to have a conversation. I really appreciate that. I really appreciate that. Let me just ask you this final question. I ask everyone, what's a way that listeners can be useful to you? I just think, you don't even have to tell this to other people, but just remember that this world and technology is complicated and there are almost always trade-offs and you can totally disagree with the decisions I or we make but just remember that we are people here trying to make these decisions just trying to do the best we can and I actually do invite the criticism and the critique and the feedback but um but know that none of these contentious debates are nearly as simple as most people pretend to make them out to be.

1:07:59Lenny Rachitsky:Wise words. Adam, thank you so much for being here. Pleasure. Thank you, Lenny. Bye, everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny's podcast.com. See you in the next episode.