Twitter’s former Head of Product opens up: being fired, meeting Elon, changing stagnant culture, building consumer product, more | Kayvon Beykpour

25:55Like the reason why Twitter went from stagnant to declining DAU growth to growing DAU again is because they refine the core, right? This is when they went from the reverse chronological timeline to the rank timeline. And that, you know, and the year after that was a lot of nob turning. Like how do we make these recommendations better? How do we make our push notifications more relevant? Now that is not an inspiring product strategy that does not result in the product feeling, materially different or adding new capabilities, but it did return the company to user growth. And I think that the fact that it did actually calcified the organization's sort of redisense to take any risky bets even more.

26:37So it was a very interesting sort of predicament because when I got into the role, the goal wasn't to change that product. Like we wanted to continue reaping the benefits of refining things about the product and we're working really well. What we wanted to change was a lack of ambition, the lack of creativity, the lack of customers feeling that the product was a change to it all. Because you would hear people, I mean, one of the beautiful things about working on Twitter as a product is that you have literally like customers being injected into your veins. Every single day, whatever you change about the product or whatever you don't change, they're telling you what they love and what they hate.

27:12And it is both exhausting and exhilarating. It is like one of the most ridiculous luxuries of product development is working on a product that that many people use and therefore you get that much feedback around. And it was a very common thing for us to hear people say, what are you all doing over there? Like the product hasn't changed in like eight years and that was horrible to hear. That was like, and I felt it too, as a critic on the sidelines as a user who wasn't an employee, who eventually became an employee, like I have the same feedback. And so that was my mission. I was like, I am somehow ridiculously in this fortunate position that I've been entrusted some responsibility here.

27:53Like I might flame out completely, but hell if I don't try. And so that was both fun and exhausting, like I said, but it was really, it was as simple as starting with like, we are voracious users of the product ourselves. And if we aren't, by the way, that's its own problem. Like I think that in order to build, in order to build something wonderful, like you have to be a customer of the product. And sure I'm sure you could point to businesses and products where that's not the case. And I'm sure there's a flaw in that philosophy somewhere. But like I've always believed that, you know, one of the best ways to build products is to be a customer yourself and to find your own paint clients and to, you know, build the product that you want to use.

28:32And so that's like actually not that hard to do if you're a user of Twitter and you like, you know, can think critically. We was ripe with opportunity. And so it was actually really fun and amazing to be able to kind of craft a plan that started to take a swing at some of these things. And the other thing I'll add to this is that there were so many sacred cows at Twitter that the sacred cows are like their own roadmap. It's like a built -in free roadmap of like, all right, what are all the things that you think were not allowed to change? Let's start there, you know, everything from like moving from reverse trunks or ranked feet, that was a sacred cow.

29:09Text and 140 characters, that's a sacred cow. Not letting anyone control any tweets that they see on the platform. Like the notion of Lenny owning his reply space was anathema at Twitter. You know, it's just like if the tweet gets, you know, if you get an ad mention and you don't like it or it's abusive or it's, like, we're not touching that. We can't annotate tweets with community. You know, it's all that stuff. Those were all sacred cows. And, you know, the process of starting to address those one by one reveals a lot of the cultural hesitations that exist it. So, yeah, I'll number for you. One of the first features, and this is such a tiny feature that we worked on, you know, after I started the role, we're building this feature called hide replies.

29:56Still exists in the product. If someone replies to one of your tweets, like in the tweet details area, like as reply to one of your conversations, before you had no ability, the only way you could kind of like address unwanted content was reporting it. So that was like Twitter acting as police men and police woman completely unscathable and challenging, especially in the context of like someone replying to one of your tweets. And so we wanted to add a feature that let you hide a reply to one of your tweets. And it's not impacting what people say. It's not impacting free speech in the sense of like, you can still broadcast whatever you want.

30:28But if you're going to like come into my reply space and say some shit that I don't want to see in my feed, like I should be able to hide that. You know, tweet what you want, but don't at mention, don't you can't scream in my face basically. And I remember we had a PM on our team who was leading this feature, who, you know, the few weeks into this project mentioned to me that she had had a conversation with someone on the engineering team that told them, don't work on this feature. This is bad for your career. This is not going to launch, and you don't want to work on this. You don't want to be seen as having worked on this because it was so kind of anathema to, we can't let people hide replies to their tweets.

31:11And I just remember hearing that and my blood was boiling. Like that is like the most, it is such an interesting representation of the culture, like not just like hesitation to try new things, which by the way that their product might have failed and that's fine, but we shouldn't try. But like to go so far as to dissuade someone else who is excited about experimenting with the hypothesis to see if it could help customers on the platform and telling them like, don't work on this is bad for your careers. As a microcosm for some of the cultural challenge we had around trying big bull bet, which by the way, this wasn't even a big bull bet.

31:46It was like such an innocuous thing to try. But there was a lot of that and it made it very difficult without like some sheer force of will and also like just a lot of effort. There was a lot of that. K -von, there's like fractals of stories that I could infinitely follow. There's so much interesting stuff here. One that just stands out is this idea of the sacred cows become like your future roadmap. It's like flipping it from, here's the thing they were all afraid of. No, this is not what we should be doing. I think that's really interesting and could be a lesson to people. The other is just, I love this point you made about the growth was most accelerant when you're just focusing on the core.

32:27That's what actually, people bash on optimizing the existing experience and just microoptimizing and proving versus trying to take all these big bull bets and experiments. Obviously that's also valuable. But I think it's really interesting that that's what regnetic growth and was responsible for growth for a while. Yeah, and continue to be, by the way. One of the lines that we had to maneuver was creating a portfolio of bets where some of them were not speculative at all. We knew that if we continue to invest in ML and getting better with recommendations in the main seed and through notifications and things like improving the onboarding slow, it was just, it was rife with opportunity to have really dumb things happen.

33:14We would learn, there's one who just bizarre and incredible meeting we had where we finally had got more rigorous amount around instrumenting our onboarding slow when we found that in a couple of countries, we had a bug with our SMS verification flow where we wanted to verify users who were signing up as phone numbers and our telco integration to send SMS verification because it just wasn't working. And so a huge percentage of people signing up and like the UAE and other countries just couldn't use Twitter. And so of course, at the scale that we were operating in with hundreds of millions of users, you need to be able to refine the basic building blocks with the product and that's gonna lead to reliable growth.

33:57But we wanted to balance that with a portfolio of other bets and product improvements that would materially add new capabilities. And that was a balance that I don't think existed. And by the way, I don't think we nailed it either under my tenure, but it was the driving force of what I wanted to achieve was to create a better balance that would result in evolving the product and introducing new capabilities. And so that's what we try to do. In terms of what actually helped turn things around, things that I kind of gathered from what you shared. So far one is just building a little momentum, having some quick wins of new products that people start to get excited about so creating more excitement down there.

34:39Oh wow, we can actually try new things. There's also felt like there's like a sense of trust that you built with Jack and execs of just like, okay, we can actually trust this team. Also feels like because growth started up, there's probably a sense of like, okay, we can try some new crazy ideas. It feels like another part of your strategy was aqua hires and bringing in these like entrepreneurial folks to take the lead on some of these big ideas. Can you talk about that? Was that something you actively thought about and was that a big part of the impact there? Totally, yeah. So I think the couple of things, one, the only thing I'd add to what you said in terms of the ingredients, it was also just like storytelling and just like repetitive storytelling around like, this is the vision, these are the best for making and here's why.

35:21And like you can't just tell that story once. I'm talking internally about it. There's a whole other component of this, which is like externally, how do you tell, especially for product like Twitter where you have it's a consumer product that hundreds of knowns of people are using and you have many constituents, you have users, you have advertisers. And so it was very important for us to tell a story of like, here's what we're doing and why. Here's why you should believe in us. And by the way, give us all your constructive criticism too because like we're listening and we're gonna build that into, so that storytelling was really, really important.

35:51And you know, there's, this is like over simple buying the world but there's two types of internal team members. There are people who hear that story, who have been a part of the organization who's been slow or maybe they've been outside the company as a user of Twitter and they're like, yeah, I never really wanna work there because it doesn't seem like a particularly ambitious product company. And one of two things happens when you hear that story, either you're inspired and you're like, yeah, we can finally like take a swing at making this product better. Maybe I wasn't interested in working with this company before but, I mean, this is an iconic product and to have an opportunity to reshape it is really exciting.

36:23Or, you know, again, over -simplified world but there are people who are very pessimistic and maybe aren't excited by that vision of like, why, let's just stick to what we know works. You know, when we're not gonna take any big swings, that's waste of time. I think one of the really important things about driving cultural change at the leadership level is you gotta identify whether someone's on the wagon or off the wagon and either quickly convincing to get on the wagon or if they're not on the wagon, like they shouldn't be there. And that's something that we were terrible at. And we didn't have the organizational structure to be able to enact that.

36:59The wagon is their excited and bought into this vision and want this to happen. Correct, and contribute towards it. And off the wagon is like, you're not at the company and we didn't have an organizational structure that could allow for that. Nor frankly the fortitude. I include myself in this. I feel like I've learned a lot about, you know, how to make that determination. So I think we were terrible at that. And Elon is like the, whatever, like if that's a spectra, Elon is like the opposite spectra of that. Like his tolerance for people who are not aligned and his tolerance for low performers is famously extremely low.

37:28And I think it's, you know, it's one of the things that when I said eb tests, it's like very interesting to see the extreme to which he has operated. And I think like I've learned a ton around like, we just, you know, we didn't have the organizational structure in order for the fortitude to be swifter and that made cultural change way slower. We still were able to change the culture not as much as we should have and not as, certainly not as quickly as we should have or efficiently as we should have. Because by the way, a lot of high performers who have, who are aligned with that desire to change and build, they don't have the, they don't, there's not like a equal distribution of patience, right?

38:06If you're extremely talented and you're dealing with like organizational bullshit, you're gonna go find some place else that lets you do your craft and have impact. So it's, it's very different. But anyway, going to your question, one of the things we found that was a really effective way of accelerating cultural change and also helping drive some of these product initiatives that were particularly speculative was doing small acquires. And really the benefit of that was, A, you bring in a founder type who is an entrepreneur, who drives urgency, who has ambition, who's ideally savvy enough to also work in the context of a large organization, which, you know, sometimes is a totally different scale set.

38:51I mean, it is a totally different scale set. And a lot of our most ambitious bets that were the riskiest and most kind of misaligned with how the product worked or, you know, it wasn't like easy, there was no easy staff within the build on top of. While those bets were driven by founders who we basically acquired and said, here, you know, you're gonna run this and it believed in it, they were able to rally a team around them and it's all the attributes of the startup but with the canvas of a product that hundreds of millions of people use. And more resources. So, you know, spaces, communities, community notes called Birdwatch back then.

39:30These were all projects driven by fleets as well. These were all projects that were run by small teams led by entrepreneurs who we acquired, right? Like Keith Coleman runs community notes last Birdwatch, you know, he actually was my predecessor. We acquired his company so that he could be the head of product and then when he moved on from that role, he was extremely passionate about this idea. Sort of crowdsource moderation and letting people annotate, you know, misleading content in the platform without Twitter acting as a policeman and that was a very speculative bet that, by the way, a lot of people thought, most people thought it was a terrible idea.

40:09We gave Keith a little silo to go build, you know, build this vision and then, you know, it was our job to make sure that bet didn't get suffocated in the context of the big organization that otherwise had not had patience for it. You know, all of the community effort or the creator efforts started with super follows and tipping and all these things were led by Esther Crawford who's company we acquired and who had her own couple of viral moments with the Elon acquisition, but she's a phenomenal leader who, again, as a perfect example of balancing that sort of entrepreneurial startup muscle with the staviness to be able to get things done at a large organization.

40:49Fleets was run by Moaldon, who's an entrepreneur, and, you know, communities was, you know, has gone through a few iterations obviously and still is in the product, but John Barnett and a team of people who we acquired from Chroma Labs. So I think that that story of acquiring hungry ambitious founders and giving them responsibility and latitude is a success story of Twitter's history. I mean, I'm a beneficiary of such a bet as well, right? Like my company, Periscope was acquired and I was given the responsibility to eventually lead the product team. So I feel like that we ended up realizing both of the company's history and through learnings that this is actually a very effective way to drive cultural change and to deliver impact because you need a special type of person to be able to both operate within the existing structure and change the structure.

41:47Like to know when to use the system and to know when to fuck the system. And that I feel like my whole life has benefited from other people taking bets on me like that to the point that even I was like, really? You sure you wanna, you know, and so I think I've enjoyed trying to pass the buck and do that for other people and I've never regretted it. You always like taking a bet on people and especially throwing them into deep end which on paper they may be on qualify for, I think is like one of the best ways of driving change and by the way, supporting growth, like you've learned so much more when you're thrown into deep end than in other contexts.

42:30And so I think it's a fantastic, it's an expensive strategy if you're gonna go buy a bunch of companies but it's a great strategy for the situation that we found ourselves in Twitter. It feels like every big bet was like one of these companies from the list that you just shared and I'm glad you shared Periscope. Obviously that's a great example too. I guess maybe just a follow -up question here is there anything you learned about how to do this? Well, I know you talked about maybe creating a little style or for the team because so many companies acquire and acquire and they just go nowhere. So I guess just like a two -bar question just like, what are some tips for how to do this well at a company?

43:04And then too, we were talking offline about this previously and I think it's a really interesting point that a lot of companies staff based on who's available versus who is right for the role and with wait until that person is there for us to bet on this. You just talked about lessons there. Yeah, the last one is like a huge pet peeve of mine that I feel like we learn the hard way. And it's particularly, it's a common pattern, I think in highly functional organizations where you have different people making decisions on how to staff projects and there's nothing inherently wrong with that. But I think in the situations, we, in the situation we found ourselves in where we had this sort of like cultural evolution that we were going through where some people just didn't like agree with the things that we were prioritizing.

43:51They're sort of like begrudgingly going along with it but you would end up in a situation where the combination of that sort of like cultural shift and strategy and the fact that the way teams were being staffed was not, there's no, ultimately no single decision made to other than the CEO and like Jack is not gonna get in the weeds and debate a staffing decision on the team. Resulted in a situation where oftentimes we have projects like the one I mentioned about hiding replies where there wasn't even agreement on the team about whether this was a good idea and whether this is worth trying or how to do it.

44:22And imagine it's hard enough to build something from nothing. It's even harder if like the team doesn't believe in it. Like, like this is like, to the point of just being toxic like the startup would never succeed if all the people who are working on that startup are and like to the point of being perhaps irrational obsessed with that idea and still willing to see true if like you need to be able to see whether the thing is working or not, but if you don't believe it in the first place, you know, I'm not betting on that succeeding and so this was common. This is, and sometimes not because it's as extreme as the examples I mentioned, but you know, I think one of the lessons I learned and it's not even, it's quite intuitive actually is like, you need to staff projects with a team of people that are well equipped from a skill set standpoint, but more importantly, have an obsession with the idea of they want to pursue.

45:12It's gonna make them work harder, it's gonna make them be more creative, it's gonna make them have the sufficient level of ambition and desire to will this thing into existence because every project, you know, whether big or small, like there is an element of need to like will this thing into existence? Because it's hard, right? The only way you're gonna get through that pain is by having that desire and I think a very easy cheat code for an organization to employ us to say, if you're gonna work on something, especially if it's speculative or risky, staff it with a set of people who believe in it and want it like really want to learn whether this solves a customer problem or not.

45:49Because if you don't have that ingredient, it's gonna drag everyone down and it's just not gonna be as successful. This episode is brought to you by Heap, the product analytics solution that shows you everything users do on your digital product, website, mobile product, or other digital surfaces. We all know a great digital experience when we see it. It's intuitive, it anticipates your needs and it makes it easy for you to do your job. If you're trying to build that kind of experience for your users, you need up to date, reliable information about what your users do in your product and why they do it.

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47:05This is like one of the most recurring controversies of the podcast is like, is jobs to be done amazing or is it really bad and not something you should do? We've had many guests share their opinions. I feel like a Twitter, it like jobs to be done was implemented so strictly that it burned a lot of people out on it's like, oh my God, so there's not many things anyone should ever do. I'm curious just your lessons and experience have just, with frameworks in general, the jobs to be done specifically may be even OKRs. I've only seen one interview on your show that covers this and it's, you know, Sriram was particularly spicy when he talked about jobs to be done, which is unsurprising because there's been a lot of time talking to Sriram about jobs to be done.

47:43I mean, I guess I'll just start by saying, like I was not a fan of how we leveraged jobs to be done at Twitter. I thought it was exhausting and not particularly helpful. And so I, it's a particularly this, particularly sort of subject to me because I was sort of charged with defending it and rolling it out. It's hard to do that when you don't really believe in something. But to me, the critique is less about jobs to be done though there are many critiques of it. And more about like every framework at its limit, it's followed to such a religious extent is just unhelpful. But you need to have nuance in how you leveraged these frameworks.

48:17Otherwise, people, you lose the force to the trees and you end up following a process for the sake of following a process. And that's what happened with jobs to be done. So I think that's my real critique of it. It's not the, I mean, listen, the premise of jobs to be done and my most charitable take on jobs to be done, which is actually useful, is that it forces you to look at things through the lens of customers and understanding what their needs are and understanding what their true alternatives are outside of the narrow lens of your product. And I think that's just like healthy product thinking, right?

48:49Like you don't need to frame or call jobs to be done or you're going to think about milkshakes in order to be able to do that. It's like, you could employ common sense or you could leverage something like jobs to be done to be able to like force your mind to think of things through that lens. So I think that's like my charitable view on what jobs to be done can help you do. But as a framework into and of itself as a sole governing principle of what to build, it's just not useful. By the way, in the same way as, and Twitter had this problem as well, prior to our detour around jobs to be done, if the only way the organization is trained to think about what to build and what not to build is OKRs, it's equally unhelpful at the limit.

49:30Because, you know, sure, you can have a good sense of like what you should build to drive metrics. But by the way, you might be focusing on the right wrong metrics, or that might not help you have the right balance of things to build. That might not help you see when the things that you're building are actually hostile to customers. So, you know, it just as an interesting example that I remember about your interview with Sriram, if I'm not mistaken, he, I think he mentioned, and I love Sriram, I'd be half -it -a -dibate him about this on his podcast. But he mentioned, one of the examples, I think was the Amazon, Amazon doesn't send you, when you get older confirmation from Amazon, they intentionally bury the order details, it's like click the link and authenticate to go see what you ordered.

50:15I don't give two shits what metrics that drive for Amazon. That is one of the most customer hostile things I experience in my daily life. I wear a lot of things from Amazon. I hate the fact that I can't, you know, search my email to see what I ordered. And so I think the problem with these frameworks is that you lose nuance and ultimately, and this is where I agree with Sriram, you actually mentioned this on your podcast as well, you need to be able to make trade -off decisions, the balance what's right for the organization, and what's right for the customer. And sometimes based on how you devise your frameworks, your metrics aren't actually aligned with the customer's benefit, like the Amazon example.

50:51And we had many famous examples in Twitter's history, which were the same, like one of our T metrics that we always optimized rank growing with a DAU. And we had, you know, obviously the rank timeline did wonders for growing DAU and it was a great experience for many customers. But we often had features that would not lead to a good customer experience. And the team would just be blind towards leaving sort of like hostile customer experiences in place because it was good for metrics and aggregate. And the famous example of this is we had this toggle, which we called SWISH very affectionately, but it was like a sparkle icon.

51:26Before you could switch between the rank timeline and the following that reverse chronological timeline, which is still in the product right now, it was just the toggle, right? You would press a button and it would turn your feed reverse crown, which very few people would use as a percentage of our users, but you had power users who really cared about having a reverse chronological timeline. And we had, you know, we took so many baby steps on the evolution of this product. But the very first baby step was you press the toggle, it turns you to the reverse crown and then we would pull the rug out from underneath you and make the experience go back to the rank timeline after like, I don't know, 24 hours or something like that.

52:02So wow. And the reason the team felt strongly about keeping it this way is because it was better for metrics. Why? Like even if Lenny wants a reverse -pronged feed, we knew that he would spend more time in the app if we put him in the rank timeline. And this was like, you know, the number of debates that we had about this because, you know, the team understandably was like, this is good for metrics. But at the same time, you'd have customers being like, I fucking hate this experience. Why I'm telling you I want reverse crown, stop randomly changing it for me. You know, Instagram has, I think, gone through their own struggles with this as well.

52:37They sort of tiptoed their way towards ultimately getting people control. And like the difficulty in making product decisions comes down ultimately to making these trade -off decisions. And you have to look at things through the lens of the customer. You have to balance that with, you know, what's driving the red business outcomes and sometimes those things are aligned and sometimes they're not. And the answer isn't any one framework. Sometimes it's just good old fashioned, like, judgment and product taste. And so that's where like, my take is different. I don't think the issue is jobs to be done, although I'm not the biggest fan of jobs to be done.

53:11The issue is just having the right nuance and ultimately the right leadership to be able to weigh these things and see when your frameworks are not actually helping you make the right decisions. I think that's really important advice. And I love hearing details if I actually think about this stuff. Actually finding these balances very hard in practice. I'm curious if there's something you could recommend or have learned about how to know when you've gone too far with the framework. Like signs like you have implemented this too religiously and maybe you should be thinking a little more broadly.

53:41There's two, I think simple and obvious ones. One is if the result of your framework is that subjectively bad decisions are being made, then something's gotta change, right? Like assuming you have the person who's making this assessment has good product taste, which is in of itself subjective, obviously. But my personal view on this would be like, in the role that I had, if I saw that our organization was being incentivized to make decisions that to some non -trivial degree of the time were just bad decisions that I don't like as a user. I can't stand by as a user or builder. Then something's gotta change.

54:18Either bad judgment was made in following the process or the process was wrong. Or if that framework didn't even lead to the right debates, then that's how you know, you know. Either you have an incentive problem and like the team did what they were incentivized to do or you know, there was bad judgment and that's a different problem, obviously. But I think, you know, in the situation we found ourselves in where the team was, again, understandably hyper focused on driving DAU because that was the strategy for so long, left so little room for even, you know, taking ambitious bets that in the short term wouldn't drive DAU.

54:55Like some of our bets that I still to this day believe in hurt DAU in the short term, but you know, you had to squint and believe over time would improve some metric DAU or otherwise, right? Like a product like Spaces. In order for Spaces to be actually used, you needed to make sure that when Lenny starts a space that people would join, right? And how do you get people to join Lenny's space when they're used to having an asynchronous, you know, feed of tweets? Well, you can send push notifications. You can occupy really try and real estate at the top of the app that lets people know, hey, Lenny's live right now.

55:29He's using a space that people here come join. Guess what happens when you put a bar at the top of the app that tells people when they're live? You move tweets down, you move ads down, DAU goes down, revenue goes down. And so if you have an organization that's like just hyper focused on like the thing that matters is driving DAU quarter over quarter, then that doesn't leave enough room for nuance to accommodate new speculative bets that might hurt one metric, but over time have other consequences that are positive and beneficial, like enabling an entire new vector of content creation and conversation on the platform.

56:03I guess the other answer to your question in terms of like, how do you know when the framework is not serving you right? When you start imagining and planning for a bunch of bets that the organization then sees is like disincentivized to make successful, then something's gotta change. Either your strategy is just not the right strategy because it doesn't abide by the frameworks or the framework needs to accommodate the fact that actually we're gonna try some things that in the short term either might not show up as blips on our DAU radar or are gonna help some other metric that's important. And so that took us some time to get right and we tried a variety of schemes to make that work, right?

56:40Like community notes, the project that I was mentioning Keith started, we intentionally structured that like a startup. Like it was literally like we made a seed bet on Keith and his team and we were like, you don't like, don't worry about the OTRs. We're not gonna judge you on the basis of your OTRs. And there's in pros and cons of that. Like a lot of our projects worked that way. Fleets started that way, community notes started that way and some other projects started more kind of like part of the core organization because they were so intertwined with how we were like the nature of the product that it just made sense to separating it was gonna be, it was gonna do more harm than good.

57:19So you just have to figure out based on what, based on how execution is going, whether you've got the right framework and you gotta be willing to make adjustments when it's not working. That's actually really helpful. Kind of the two that I'm taking away here is how often are you feeling bad about the features you're shipping? Like they're bad for users and you think they're bad for you as a user potentially. And the other is keeping you from taking big bold bets that don't necessarily drive the metrics you're focusing on. Okay, so before I let you go, I wanna spend some time on Periscope. I don't know if everybody knows the history and history of Periscope.

57:51Basically it was the biggest live video streaming platform in the world and I imagine inspired basically every other social network to build a live streaming platform, Instagram, live Facebook, TikTok, obviously Twitter. So I wanna spend a little time here and see what you learned and also just broadly consumer products. But first of all, I hear there's like a story with Kobe Bryant and Periscope about him using it in some form. Kitty share that story. Before Periscope launched publicly, which is like it was in March of 2015, I wanna say, we had a small beta that grew to maybe 500 people in total before we actually released the app publicly.

58:29And in that time while we were still in beta, I was personally onboarding. I was trying to personally onboard every single user. And I had sort of like a stick to that that I did, which was we'd get them in the app and I would start a broadcast with a feature called private broadcasting that we basically built for this use case, which is someone joins, I'm gonna go live and they're gonna join them and show them how the app works. And we were staying a lot of time in our office. So Kobe, one of them, Chris Socka actually invited Kobe to the beta. And so Chris connected us and I did a private broadcast and Kobe joins and I was like 10 PM in the office.

59:06And my routine was like, let me just walk around the office kind of like talking through the mechanics of Periscope through the lens of this demo of like, hey, let me show you around the office and like, here's how the chat works and you can tap the screen to send a heart. And if you want me to do something like go to the room over there, just type it in the chat and it'll come up. And it sort of showed the, one of the things that was unique about Periscope was, you know, it was a multi, it was a one to many broadcasts but still low latency enough that it felt like a FaceTime. So you could have the bidirectional communication between multiple viewers and a broadcaster.

59:39And so I was teaching him how to use the chat and showing him the office and he was playing with it. At one point through the end of the demo, he post a comment that was like, why the fuck would anyone want to watch someone else stream live? And I remember like my heart sank and I started like fumbling through like, well, we think it's, you know, cool. And like before I could even get the words out, he posted like, I'm just fucking with you bro. This is incredible. And I just remember, it was just such a surreal moment that has, I'll never forget. It was like, I mean, Kobe's a legend obviously, but like to have that, to have him essentially troll me but while also like putting a point on like, what was cool about the experience and it was like bidirectional and like something to each comments it on, could cause the broadcaster to kind of like, change their behavior or change their, change the experience.

1:00:33It was like a really ironic full circle showing off how the product works. But yeah, it's one of my favorite early Periscope stories. Now man, if I kept doing that, Emmanuel onboarding and be like, who's coming? You're just always worried that someone else fancy is gonna join, you never know, Chris Sock is getting, we's talking to. That's amazing. Okay, so it's been about 10 years, I believe since you sold Periscope and about six years ish, since you stopped running at a CEO, something like that. Now as I shared every single platform basically is doing this, they added live video streaming. I'm curious if there's anything you learn about just competing with these major platforms.

1:01:14Well, there's a few reasons why why Periscope failed ultimately and why we shut down the app. I mean, obviously Periscope, the technology and the mechanics still lives on because you can go live on Twitter, you can watch live broadcasts on Twitter, you can do audio conversations on Twitter and all of that is the Periscope stack, still there, which is like, it's awesome that the legacy lives on in a different form factor. The reason that the Periscope app failed, it really comes down to a few things. One, we did not address the core problem that retention wasn't good. Our poor retention was maxed by just an incredible surge in top -line user growth.

1:01:50And for Twitter, for Periscope, it was interesting because every month or two, we would kind of blow up in a new market that would just bring along an incredible surge of usage. We blew up in the US, we then blew up in France, we then blew up in Turkey, we then blew up in the Middle East, we had these incredible surges, but underneath that surge, the core product had retention issues. And we ultimately just did not, we didn't spend enough time prioritizing, addressing, in fact, we shipped product changes that made those retention issues worse. Compounding that was the fact that one of the feces behind the Twitter acquisition was that we would leverage the scale in the community and the product mechanics of Twitter to make the product grow faster and also become more durable.

1:02:38And I think that sort of connects to one of the reasons why I feel like one of my learnings and one of the things that we knew but just failed to execute on was that, I still am very skeptical that there can be a consumer product that is just focused on live video, like a generalized synchronous live video application for short form video, I don't think can be durable on its own. I think you have to surround that product with enough features and capabilities to allow a community and an ecosystem of users to be able to stay in touch with one another asynchronously and synchronously. This is why a lot of the other products that you mentioned that incorporate live capabilities and we're shameless about copying what was working about Periscope, they're surrounded by a scaffolding that lets people also stay in touch with each other asynchronously, like Instagram.

1:03:27It's an asynchronous product that has synchronous features like live, same with TikTok obviously. And I think we were in this position where it was a live -only product, right? Like, you're connecting with your audience and having a great time when you're broadcasting live but you're not using the product to keep in touch with that community when you're not broadcasting. How else I'm throughout the day would you broadcast live from your phone? And, imagine, there's a different for products that are live consumer products that focus on a specific vertical, like what not for selling or twitch for gaming, that have very different properties that make it more durable as a standalone live product.

1:04:05But Periscope was really in this sort of consumer generalized live streaming from a phone land. And I think it was just not durable to have the product be live only. And the time it took us to integrate with Twitter was way too long. And there was reasons for that that come down to just how to track the Twitter was with its own roadmap and refining the core. They just had other fish to fry basically. And that all of that leads us to competition because at some point, Facebook woke up and decided, this is cool and we need to go build this. And obviously wasn't there on the inside but like legend has it, Mark says, hey, like, you 300 people saw what you're doing, go basically make live, exist in our product as a first -of -year variance.

1:04:56I didn't know that. And if you have that level of organizational effort put on building something that by the way isn't even, there's no, you don't have to spend any time wondering what the product looks like. Just go and copy it in features basically and make them work. And they did a lot of other savvy things too from a partnership standpoint. We had a lot of prominent streamers that ranged from influencer or just creative people that became known on Periscopes all the way up to celebrities, like Kevin Hart and others who were like prologic Periscopers that Facebook just went and bought out.

1:05:30They were just like, cool, we're gonna pay you like a bunch of money to stream exclusively with us. So they kind of hit us from all sides. They had the entire company put their effort towards building live in a way that was cohesive in the core product first with Facebook and then Instagram and then also attacked it from the creator side as well. And we were too slow. And it was very painful to think about because it was like many other insights that Twitter had early, Twitter had the right insight but Bosch to follow through. I'm not pointing fingers, I blame myself for that just as much, but there's a pattern where Twitter is really great at spotting meaningful consumer behavior changes, right?

1:06:17Like they spotted Vine and acquired Vine, botched it. Spotted Periscope, botched it. So it spotted Instagram by the way, before Facebook tried to buy Instagram, Twitter was trying to buy Instagram and there are other reasons why I didn't fall through. But it's interesting to me. It's one of the interesting aspects of Twitter's history. They were phenomenal at spotting meaningful changes in consumer behavior, consumer social behavior and actually putting their money where their mouth is in terms of trying to follow through on bringing those bets in house but then botching the execution. And so that was one of the things that was really motivating for me when I was in my role leading product of Twitter was like, I didn't wanna make that mistake.

1:07:01And we didn't end up buying anything as we didn't end up buying anything like Vine or Periscope and keeping the product in house. We obviously bought lots of small aquahires but we did obviously have a bit of a story with Clubhouse that ended up with us building spaces and competing with that. But anyway, that was a long, rambly story. Hopefully that answered your question. Yeah, there's so many, again, it's all these fractals of thought threads I wanna follow and ask about. Real quick on the Vine and Periscope point, I was gonna ask this, Twitter, as you said, had the opportunity to win in video in so many ways.

1:07:35Vine was amazing, killing everyone loved it and then it's like, and they do, I guess you already shared a lot of challenges Twitter had with executing shipping, I say, crack house things like that. Is there anything specific with video? Was it just like, oh, this is not actually a huge priority and we're just gonna kind of write it for now? And that's why I didn't work out, is there anything more of it? No, it's even more pathetic than that because I think Twitter did believe in video but it made this classical mistake that we also, unfortunately, retreated with Periscope, which was they had the insight around short front video that bought Vine, they then competed with Vine internally.

1:08:13So Vine was a separate organization within Twitter, separate office I'm seeing in New York, and then Twitter rather than like, integrated holistically into the product and sort of poor gasoline on it, they built a native Twitter video feature that was like a different stack, different team, it became what you think of as Twitter video now, it's like the simple act of uploading video and all the professional video tools called Media Studio that let publishers like ESPN put content, like all of that was basically built as a separate team, separate organization, separate product that was fundamentally competing with Vine.

1:08:48You had like two visions for short -form video that were manifesting and that's like, that's like the quickest way for things to get messy and for, of course, like the separate startup team is gonna get, you're not gonna be able to make good on the vision of buying the company and integrating it in all the right ways if you compete with it internally. And we had a similar thing happen with Periscope. We were very focused on Periscope with, separate organization, separate structure, separate app. Periscope at the time primarily was focused on UGC Live video. So user -generated content being streamed from a phone.

1:09:29Twitter then decided to get an premium live video business very famously with acquiring rights to Thursday night football, the NFL. Guess what happened? We competed internally, rather than have a cohesives technical and product vision for how to embrace live video across the spectrum of UGC and premium live video, Twitter put a separate team in charge of premium with a separate product, separate technology stack. And so you had like two ways to manifest live video on the product. It was like, you just see live video, which was kind of like, awkwardly not even really implemented well with Twitter at the time.

1:10:09And then premium live video, which had totally different UX, total different team, total different architecture. And by the way, like the company put a tremendous amount of energy and investment in talking about Twitter being a place to watch the NFL. And meanwhile, you had this burgeoning UGC ecosystem. So this was like, we're making the same mistake all over again. Now luckily, with an Periscope case, with a lot of persistence and impatience and table pounding, we eventually fixed that in the state, but we wasted a tremendous amount of time. It was just a lot of pet budding and politics. And eventually it took us a lot of time to technically reintegrate things together.

1:10:46And now it's clean and awesome, right? Like ESPN can go live with behind -the -scenes content at Wimbledon and it's like the same technology stack and the same user experience, the powers Lenny going live from his iPhone. But I think that was like one of the reasons why it was an example of failed execution that ended up wasting time, resources, and just leading to a subpar product experience that other companies I think have avoided making such mistakes. Facebook being a prime example, as frustrated I am with them as a competitor for having really taken over the use case for live video, got a hand into them, for early in execution.

1:11:26Have a lot of respect for them. So we made sure to not make that mistake moving forward. Imagine there was reason for that. Partly, I imagine the scalification of just like, we can't get you done, we just need to start a new team and do this thing. Like I imagine it always comes from like, oh, this makes sense. And then you realize, okay, this was a terrible idea down the road. Yeah, it's that and also leadership. When you don't have unified leadership around these things, you end up making decisions that are in conflict with one another. They just be a highly opinionated person at the top that avoids that kind of, that kind of messiness from a product and engineering standpoint.

1:12:05You mentioned Clubhouse. So I think what's interesting is one, many people copy Periscope as a product. I don't know if you'll describe it as copying, but it feels like space is very inspired by Clubhouse. You have a just current philosophy on when it makes sense to be super inspired by another product and build it into your existing product versus like, no, you should not do this. I think it's always about doing the right thing to the customer.

1:12:36Everyone has always been shamelessly inspired by other people's ideas. And I think there's anything wrong with that. I think copying ideas can be done in poor taste and can be done in with taste. I think some of the people who copied Periscope did so in poor taste can't blame them. I just, I wouldn't have done it the same way, but it worked. So you can't say it's the wrong thing. I just think that it's possible to take ideas and good taste and take ideas in poor taste. And I think with Clubhouse, we actually have been working on audio. Audio was one of those bets I mentioned that we structured very separately.

1:13:17We had a team of people, many of which were the former Periscope team, that when we wound down Periscope, I felt very strongly that there was still something to the idea of synchronous conversations. Because one of the famous things that I think we botched with Periscope is that we always are dream in our vision for Periscope and how we talked about it was it was a mechanism for teleportation. You could see through someone else's eyes and be teleported somewhere else. It was like that was the story we told ourselves. That was the thing that inspired Periscope. And to a certain extent, a lot of people did use the product for that way.

1:13:49You could go see what it was like someplace in the world where there was something amazing happening or civil unrest happening or some important moment happening with breaking news or otherwise. But it turns out the vast majority of our users were not using Periscope that way. They were not, it wasn't a rear -facing camera experience where you were showing someone the world. The vast majority of people were using it to just talk to other people. They were bored and they were lonely and they wanted to just have a conversation with other people. And it turns out video and audio is a very interesting way of doing that that allows for more nuance, more long -film conversation, more in -depth conversation, especially in contracts to Twitter, which has mechanics that really incentivize quick, snappy sort of broadcasts that don't sort of lead to much depth.

1:14:33And so when we shut down Periscope, we were like, we really need to enable a new form of conversation on Twitter that has some of those properties. And so we had a team that was working on a project that we sort of codenamed Hydra. Hydra because there were multiple heads on this monster and those heads are participants in a conversation. And so well before Clubhouse was on the map, we had many different iterations of both video and audio only experiences that just didn't feel right. We weren't working right, but we kind of felt like we were onto something. And when Clubhouse kind of came on the map, it really re -centered, it put into focus a user experience that felt a lot more right.

1:15:14And I'll give them complete credit for that. They, Paul and Rohan and that team, did an exceptional job crafting an experience that really enabled that mechanic and that premise of enabling these longer form conversations to shine. And so we did shamelessly seek inspiration from what they had done and what had worked and we put our own spin on it, right? Like the execution of spaces within Twitter, I think has some similarities, but also really took advantage of the mechanics that you had available to you in Twitter. It's a different product. And so we were, we took the ideas that we felt were shortcuts to making the experience work and then we put our own spin on it.

1:15:52And so I have no problems with what we did there and having had experienced the pain of not moving quickly enough with Vine from the outside and Periscope having lived that experience, we were not willing to not be the winner in this with this use case. And so we put, like it is one of the projects I'm most proud of that we worked on at Twitter because we were very radical in our execution. We, you know, Hydrone went from this like tiny project that like six people were working on that no one knew or cared about too. We made spaces the number one priority of the company, literally like above any other project period.

1:16:38And we put a bunch of people on accelerating that product and making it come to life within Twitter. And a lot of that was having felt the pain and burnos fucking this up with Vine and Periscope. And so I'm really proud of our execution. And it was also really energizing and I hope for the company to see that. Wow, we pulled that off. So yeah, it was good. It was nice to have that full circle experience and also nice that, you know, personally, like I love that aspects of Periscope continue living on within Twitter. I did not know that. That is extremely interesting. And speaking of full circle, when I joined Clubhouse the first time, Paul was there introducing me to Clubhouse and exactly the way you described Periscope.

1:17:25So I feel like he was a gruesome inspiration from you once that back. Paul's amazing. I feel like we're kindred spirits. And I could see the, it was one of the things I love about that team is just you could just feel how palpable their excitement was and their passion was for what they were building. You know, another universe we could have worked together more closely. But I think what they built was incredible and we took inspiration from it for sure. And yeah. So you built some of the most successful, most beloved, most used consumer products. You continue to help other founders with their product.

1:18:06And here's just if you have any advice for how to get better at building consumer products in terms of maybe craft the product, product sense. What have you learned about what it takes to build a successful consumer product? The best cheat codes for getting better at building products is just being a voracious user of products. And just trying new things, feeling out what works well, what doesn't, what you like, what you don't like. There's just no replacement for that. It's such an effective way of honing your own taste and seeing like what's superficial, but not useful, what's ugly, what useful, what's beautiful and useful.

1:18:48And you just, you hone that by having practice and building muscle memory. And so I think, there's not a lot of science to it, I think. Obviously, science can help you become more effective at lots of things, but I feel like I've just always been very curious about trying new things. I'm a very hungry consumer of new things that people are building. And I'm not quick to judge. I'll try it even if it seems dumb, because sometimes things that seem dumb at the beginning become very meaningful. And so it's always been a very helpful cheat code for me. It's also just personally interesting. I'm always like every tool, even the silly ones, like people put their heart and soul into it.

1:19:31And it's like an expression of themselves. And it's always interesting to see that, to see people's creations, and to learn from them, and see what you like, what you don't like, and how you might create something of your own that borrows, borrows from that. So if I could give people any advice through the lens of what's worked for me, it's that. Speaking of trying new things, what do you up to these days? I'm building something in the consumer space. I started the company with a couple co -founders late last year. We're not quite ready to talk about it yet, but hopefully you'll be hearing from us pretty soon.

1:20:10But it's really nice to be back building something again, particularly like building something with a small team again after seeing the opposite extreme with a really large company. We've just talked about lots of large company things, but hopefully you'll be hearing about it soon. Oh man, I think this is breaking news. So mysterious and exciting. Kavon, is there anything else you wanted to share or leave listeners with before we get to our very exciting lightning round? No, no, I think we've covered quite a bit. We have indeed. With that, we've reached our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready?

1:20:47I'm gonna take a sip of water and then I'll be ready. Okay, here we go. First question, what are two or three books that you've recommended most other people? I love reading sci -fi. I just feel like sci -fi and mystery books are so healthy for jogging the imagination. And so some of my favorite books are by Neil Stevenson. I love Krypton, Krypton Mekhan. I love Remdi. I love a book called, Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothkiss, which is a more like a fantasy book, but I just love kind of escaping reality and thinking about sci -fi, thinking about fantasy is just, it's helpful for the soul, and helpful for the imagination.

1:21:34So those are some of my favorite reads because it helps me. I feel like it in some weird circular or wandering way, it helps me be more creative and imaginative. And by the way, that's true outside of reading as well. Like some of the content that has shaped me, I feel like it helped motivate my curiosity and a lot of things I built as sci -fi TV, right? Like Star Trek is incredible. Like we used to use as a metaphor for what Periscope was, we would think about Star Trek. Like it'd be really cool to be able to teleport or get beamed somewhere else in the world. And like we're not smart enough to go build that device, but what's the closest approximation to that that we can realize through software, live streaming?

1:22:17So I think that kind of literature or content has always been inspirational for me and I think getting that through books is really healthy. On that note, is there a favorite recent movie or TV show that's inspired you in addition to Star Trek back in the day? I mean, most recent movie I saw in theaters was doomed too and it was incredible. I just saw that. It's insane. I also thought Oppenheimer was, I'm a huge no one fan. Oppenheimer was like, was captivating. To have that level of like high octane in a biopic, consistently for like two and a half hours is like so hard to pull off. And I thought it was exceptional.

1:22:58TV shows, we're watching Tokyo Vice right now, which I really like. I think one of the best TV shows I've watched recently, I mean, succession was amazing, but maybe I'll pull a less popular one, which is Dev's also in the sci -fi realm. I think it was a Hulu show, but if you're interested in tech and AI, anyone great acting in Nick Offerman, Dev's is a pretty amazing show. I haven't heard of that. Have you seen three body problems? By the way, it feels like it's squarely in your real house. I haven't seen it yet. And it's funny. Like some content, people are talking about it so much that I kind of want to not watch it now because I feel like it's really hard for shows to live up to the hype when you're mid -hype cycle.

1:23:47So I haven't gone around to it yet, but it's definitely on my list. I know it's the type of show that I would love, but I'm just having a lot of it. Okay, great. Do you have a favorite any of your questions that you like to ask candidates you're hiring? The thing that I find is both very illustrative and helpful is just asking people to talk about something they worked on that failed, and then talk about something that they built that succeeded as well. But I think you just learn a lot about someone's self -reflection and their passions, and but in particular, their self -reflection, if they talk through something that they really shared deeply about, that didn't work.

1:24:25And why didn't it work? Well, what were the takeaways? What did you learn from it? I think it teaches you about how willing people are to take risks. It tells you, have they experienced failure, what they learn from failure? So I think it's always, you just get to know someone really well. It's like a well -rounded, it ends up in a well -rounded understanding of a person if you can dig into that. Is there a favorite product you recently discovered that you really like? I love Proplexity. It's really interesting to me how, like Proplexity is a product that fits in your life and replaces a product that is so ingrained in people's behavior, which is using Google search for some set of use cases.

1:25:08And it's just really incredible to me how quickly Proplexity took that over. It's very hard actually to rewire your muscle memory if you're like, you used to using Google for something for searching for 15, 20 years or whatever. It was just amazing to me how quickly my go -to became Proplexity. So I'm, and frankly, it's like one of the only non -development tool AI products that actually has retained. A lot of people try and consume AI products that just aren't really, have it retained. But Proplexity is one that is a daily driver for me. So on my home screen, and I love it, I'm very impressed by it.

1:25:45Also a huge fan. Yeah. Here's a bias one. My wife is actually working on a startup called Particle and they're reimagining the news experience with AI. And what I love about what they're doing is that for the first time, they're sort of like, they've rethought what the form factor and the unit of content for news stories should be. Like articles are a failed format is my belief. And certainly they're belief. And so they've really come up with an elegant and engaging experience for understanding what's happening in the world in a way that's purely powered by AI. And it's awesome. Again, hashtag biased, biased husband, but it's amazing.

1:26:27It's in beta right now. You can sign up on the wait list. The URL is particlenews .ai. They're letting people in on beta if you sign up. Use coupon code hashtag caveonlinate. That's not a real code. But yeah, so that's amazing. So that'll be my second pick. I'll give you a non software one, which is actually a board game that I ran into that I was gifted actually for my birthday. And it's called Croconol. Have you heard of this game called Croconol? I have not. So Croconol is like a Canadian, I think it's a Canadian board game. And it's amazing to me because I've never seen a game be captivating to all age ranges.

1:27:14Like, I love it. I play with my friends. My parents over Christmas were like obsessed with this game. My daughter loves, it's like a physical game. You kind of like flick a puck, kind of like shuffleboard style, but like miniaturized with a totally different set of mechanics. And it's just like seeing this game captivate people of all age ranges was mind blowing to me. And it's just really fun. So made a curveball answer for you there. But I think those are some of the products that I've been really enjoying and appreciating lately. These are all some answers. What's the name of that game again?

1:27:50I'm going to Croconol. Croconol. OK. I don't know how to spell it, but I'm sure Google will help me figure that out. We'll link to it in the show notes. CROKINOLE. Great. I love the K in there. That makes it really fun. And by the way, I think it's also particle .News. I'm looking at it. It's so cool. Basically bullet points of news items and links to all the articles that have written about it. So kind of just summarizes here's the things you need to know. And it's beautiful. Basically, they consume and they aggregate everything that's happening in the world by, among other things, ingesting articles.

1:28:20And then crafting the story modules through them that are summarized by AI. And then they let you actually interrogate the news and ask questions. So leveraging, you know, LLNs and tool calls it's able to actually help you understand what's happening in the world. And they also are building a social layer as well. So it's very cool. Definitely kitchen to beta. This is actually amazing timing because I was a huge fan of artifact. The news app and they're going away. So this is the next news app. So thanks for sharing that. Okay, two more questions. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to or share with people that you find useful and work or in life?

1:28:57Something that definitely shaped my work ethic and how I work that came from my first boss actually. When I was like 14, I had a summer job, basically replacing and doing maintenance on fire extinguishers. So I would like drive in San Francisco. My boss would pick me up in his truck. We'd go to like big commercial buildings, hospitals, high rises, and we would take all the fire extinguishers in the building, hundreds of them to the garage, empty them, fill them, tag them, inspect them. And you know, it was my first job. And I don't even remember if I was getting paid. I was probably getting paid very small amount, but it was just like first work experience.

1:29:40And I remember there was this moment that I'd finished like, you know, dealing with my extinguishers. And I was just kind of like sitting in his truck, kind of like twiddling my thumbs, doing nothing. And he, my boss, you know, came up to me and was like, when you've got nothing to do, sweep, like never sit around. And that it was just, it was so funny because it was just like very, you know, tiny moments, but I've never, ever forgotten that. Like when you got nothing to do, sweep. And it was, it had such a profound impact on my work ethic of like, there's always something you can be doing to moving, to move the ball forward and being productive and being impactful.

1:30:18And you know, I'm so grateful that Fred, my boss, you know, had that moment with me because it was like, I don't even think he understands how impactful that was. But it's also much a life motto, but it's, it definitely stuck with me and shaped it, shaped it how I work. I love that you shared that story. I was gonna, I found that quote and story in the GQ Magazine turns out, is where you were talking about this. And I was gonna ask about it. And I didn't and I'm glad you shared it because I love it. Final question. We're gonna go full circle, Scott Belski, your friends with him. What's something people would be surprised about or don't know about Scott?

1:30:56That might be interesting. Well, I'll tell you one funny story. And then I'll, I'll, I'll first tell you something a lot of that Scott. Scott is a great example of someone who I think has driven immense cultural change at a massive legendary company in Adobe obviously, but the number of transformations that, you know, box, that that that Scott oversaw and led and contributed to at Adobe are incredible. And I'm sure having, you know, a fraction of this experience at Twitter, I can appreciate how difficult and challenging of rewarding that was, right? Going from, you know, package software to cloud, going from non AI to AI, going from kind of like discrete tools to an integrated suite that worked really eloquently together, I think, you know, Scott oversaw a lot of this stuff and it's pretty incredible to see that transformation because I've been so successful at Adobe.

1:31:53So I love that. The thing, I guess like a funny story about Scott that people might not know, I consider him to have been the first pariscoper. So, you know, Scott believed in pariscop before it was pariscop, you know, like the, before we had turned it into live video, we had like a previous version of our beta that was static photo sharing. Same vision, same concept, but the product was called bounty and it was like you put a pen somewhere in the world like the Tokyo Fish Market and someone would respond with a photo and like what, you know, what it looked like there. You know, our vision was still to like help you see through someone else's eyes, but the first manifestation was really static and had this like marketplace dynamic and you know, it took us a while to get to the point where we were like press the button go live and have a B live video because by definition it's like real time rather than static.

1:32:42Anyway, before we built any of that, when we were kind of like playing with the idea and Scott was really encouraging us to go in this direction, I remember like probably the second time I ever met Scott, we did it FaceTime. And he was at the TED conference, I wanna say it was in Vancouver and just to like illustrate how cool it would be when he accepted the FaceTime, he's like, cool and I'm gonna take you on a Periscope and he like glips this camera and sort of walk around the TED conference and basically pretending like he was like prototyping the product but using FaceTime and it was such an amazing experience because having an investor essentially like encourage you down a product direction by showing rather than telling.

1:33:22It was such a great encapsulation of how supportive Scott was and inspiring Scott was as one of our cheerleaders and I respect him so much for everything he did to help Periscope make happen and also for betting on us because he was one of the first people who said yes to investing, he didn't know us, he just believed in us and that helped everything else come together and yeah, he's amazing. What a manch, we gotta get him back. What a manch. What a manch. The story reminds me of Elon's story where he FaceTime drew and it also makes me think about your lesson of building consumer products just using it, being obsessed with it.

1:34:00Scott just like cares what it could look like and actually using the product and I'm just talking about. Yeah, he's a great example of that as well. He's definitely a voracious user of all tools and products and it's why he has really great product sense. K -Von, you're amazing. This was so freaking fascinating. There's so many nuggets here. Can't wait for folks to hear this. Two final questions, work in folks, find if they want to reach out and learn more and maybe follow up on anything if there's things you want to follow up on potentially and then how can listeners be useful to you? People can find me on Twitter slash x slash whenever we're calling it these days.

1:34:34My handle is Caves, K -A -Y -V -Z and yeah, if you're this podcast and you're working on something cool and you need some help or advice or you're looking for an angel investor who don't hesitate to reach out and would love to try what you're building. Amazing, and also check out Particle .News. There you go. Of course, support the wife. Exactly. Amazing. All right, K -Von, thank you so much for being here. Thanks, Lanny. Great to meet you. Hi, 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.

1:35:11Also, please consider giving us a rating or a leaving review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny'spodcast .com. See you in the next episode.