Nikhil Kamath x YouTube CEO, Neal Mohan | People by WTF Ep.9

28:13It's kind of a long answer, But I think that's important because it's not a place that's a fly-by-night place. If you were to replace the influencer in my question to content creator, say me, Nikhil wants to sell t-shirts. I need to create some kind of content before I can go about selling my t-shirts. So I have somebody watching my content where I can market this t-shirt. What will work today? What I'm asking you is, in a very euphemized manner, what is the YouTube algorithm to a layman like me? And what can I do today to succeed on it? Success, in my definition in this particular subject, would be the number of views and distribution I get.

28:55Yeah, I would say that the most important advice that I give to, two pieces of advice that I give to somebody thinking about building a career on YouTube. The first is really think hard about what type of content you're passionate about. So if it happens to be t-shirts or something related to it. No, I want to sell t-shirts. I want you to tell me content. Yes, but I think that if your only goal in life is to sell t-shirts, then you better also really care and have passion around creating content. It shouldn't be a means to an end. Right. So that's what I meant by home of creators. because if you don't have passion around that, you're not going to be your authentic self and fans will figure that out very, very quickly and you're not going to build a fan base.

29:47And so the first and most important thing that I would say is think hard about what you are really, really excited about. We work with all kinds of athletes on our platform and it comes through really, really quickly when they're talking about something that they're really excited about versus not, right? Like it's not just about throwing up a piece of content. And that's super, super important because the power of YouTube is that it's not just an algorithm of your favorite meme of the week or favorite what have you. It is about your face, you as the creator. And you built that because you talk about something authentically that your fans understand.

30:29That's really the most important thing. And I say that over and over. That's the difference between somebody who stops doing it after a few months and that really continues. The second, YouTube can be a bit of a slow burn. And so if you are passionate about something, care deeply about it, give it time. Because you want to set expectations with your audience about what you're going to talk about, what's your content going to be about, what are you going to do, and how you're going to go about doing it. And that builds over time. And that builds in terms of followerships, but it actually also builds in terms of the algorithm.

31:09Because the algorithm is just a reflection of the audience. So those are the two most important things. A really smart person once said about passion, that the passion about something goes away when you truly understand something. Do you think, what is passion to you? Because the answer to my question, you said, you know, you should build around what you're passionate about. What is the definition of passion? Oh, well, I think it is something that you have such deep and abiding interest in that you would just keep doing it if it wasn't for all of these other goals as well. Is there anything like that, Neil?

31:57Would you do something if, what is that for you? You know, my background is I am a technologist by training. I've been interested in, you know, let's say passionate about technology since I was a really young kid. I went to high school in Lucknow. I had a little software startup back in the day, building software for other high school kids and teachers. And so I've always had a deep and abiding interest in technology. but I have also, from a very, very early days, for lack of a better term, been a media junkie. Like I love stories in the general, in the broadest sense of the term, movies, music, sports, I'm a sports nut.

32:44Those are like two abiding passions I've had since I was probably five or six years old. But you're talking about consuming something. I'm talking about you practicing something? Well, I mean, I do try to practice those things. I'm not very good at them. So that's in terms of my love of sports. But I'm highlighting it because those are areas of passion of mine. And the way that I practice them is what I do every day. I think that YouTube is one of the few places that combines both those passions that I have, both technology as well as media. And so, you know, did I stumble upon this? Probably.

33:28Like, I got lucky that I was given this opportunity. But those really are a place where I get to work on technology in service of, like, the thing that I really love. The more I think about passion and talent, Neil, in my life it's starting to sound to me more as an output than as an input. I believe I'm passionate or talented at something when I do something and I'm a little bit better at it than my peer group. I was having this conversation with someone. If I believed that I was passionate about playing cricket and I played cricket for 10 years, trained really hard and sucked at it, I don't think I would be passionate about cricket.

34:17So passion is almost an output. Talent is almost an output. less so an input to me today. Do you think you were good at technology and hence you felt like you could be passionate about it? It's interesting. I mean, I think what you're describing is kind of like almost a flywheel or chicken and egg type of a thing. I have always been passionate about sports, for example. I played Little League, I played soccer, I played cricket. I was never good enough to... But were you good? Were you better than the people you played with? I was okay. But that interest still continues today. I love playing basketball with my son.

34:59Are you generally a modest person? I was asking your team earlier, they said you're a quiet person. I tend to be a quiet person, yes. That's probably how my wife would describe me. You seem more like a euphemism versus embellishment kind of person. My wife calls me even-keeled Neil. So that is, I think, a pretty apt description. So you're not very emotive? I can be emotive. I mean, my kids would say that I can be emotive sometimes. But I'm pretty even-keeled in terms of my day-to-day, in terms of how I go about myself. And I think part of it has to do with, I think, perspective. I think that whether there's challenges that you face in your work life or even in your personal life, They can be very, very hard.

35:49But keeping things in perspective is really oftentimes the best way to get through them. Is that good for work? I think that it is good for work. I mean, I think the things that are really important in my job leading YouTube is actually having a level head to be, because that allows for, I think, sort of the most well-considered judgment around things. I always say that by the time a decision comes up to me, it's usually a decision between two bad choices. Because if it was easier, then it would have been made several levels below me in the organization. And so if that's the nature of the types of decisions I have to make, I'd rather make them with a level head, a cool head.

36:38I'd also like to make them with principles that I've hopefully thought about well ahead of time. especially when it comes to difficult trade-offs. So yeah, I think it is a useful skill in my professional life. You mentioned Lucknow just now. You were born in the West, in the U.S., came back for high school and then went back. And I read that your father was from IIT who went to the U.S. to do his PhD. The one thing that stood out to me is you grew up on things like Transformers and baseball and Star Wars. So even though you look like me, you're not really somebody who grew up on the same diet of content as me.

37:24You know what I would say about that, though, Nikhil? Probably the biggest reason for that is because you're younger than me. No, seriously, I do think that I'm 51, so that does make a bit of a difference. But, you know, it's interesting. Like you said, I went to high school in Lucknow, my dad. I was born in Indiana. My dad was getting his PhD. So when my parents were grad students was when I was born. And came back here for high school. And yes, that was a part of the diet that I grew up on. You know, Transformers and Star Wars and all of that. But I'd say a couple things. Even back then, and now I'm really dating myself.

38:07so you're talking mid-80s. A lot of those things had spilled over to my friends here. But I would say... Not particularly. A little bit. But the other thing, though, is back to what we were talking about. These were specific types of interests, but I think that if you broadened it out, I fell in love with cricket, for example, right away. And why? Because I liked all kinds of sports. And so whether it was baseball or basketball growing up or cricket when I was in high school, like the nature of the competition, the nature of sort of teamwork and how those things happened, like that was like really natural for me.

38:54And also just lots of ways to have relationships and conversations with people. You know, I loved a particular set of movies. but then I remember watching what was popular here and actually back to media that was right around the time that the media landscape here started to change dramatically too which was, there was of course Bollywood and then what T-Series represented in Bollywood but it was also the advent of things like Star so that was like a precursor to a lot of what we're talking about today in terms of just changing the media diet through lots of choice, for example, right? And so that was a big sort of, I think, foundational thing for me when I was a kid.

39:41And I think, you know, again, people always find these sorts of threads, like, in retrospect, to kind of sort of justify what they've done in the rest of their careers. But I do think that, like, that early, especially in those formative years of just falling in love with all these different types of media and storytelling was an important part of my childhood that I sort of carried through. Because it was one of those things where growing up in the U.S., I love baseball, I love Transformers, et cetera. And then coming here where I sounded funny, like I didn't have those immediate things to connect with people on, but finding some of these common ground types of things like sports, like music, et cetera, was like really formative for me.

40:31And I do think that that's probably back to your sort of passion or interests. Like that's carried forward in the rest of my career because I do think that like one of the foundational things is we as human beings are storytellers. Like the way we connect with each other is like telling stories. Like I'll remember an anecdote about you in this conversation and you'll likely do that. What will you remember? Well, I'll remember the story. Yeah, the story you walked through in terms of your own media diet evolution. Obviously, I know your bio, your enormous success professionally, but that was an interesting anecdote that you told me that was true to who you are, right?

41:14You've been wealthy a long time. I remember reading this thing about Google offering you$100 million not to quit, not today, but 15 years ago, which was a lot of money.

41:31What is it? I like that you're waiting for the question at this point and not reacting. I want to see where you're going to take this.

41:43What is it about, you know, there's a, I can put you in a box, not in a bad way, but in the manner that techie growing up, IIT dad, I'm going to make the assumption and extrapolate that you were fairly nerdy growing up, Indian origin, making a lot of money in the US in the last 20, 30 years. When you come from that background to India, A, what is working for Indian origin people in the US who are accomplishing as much as you are? And B, when you come here, does projecting patriotism to India almost help open up a market which you and your peer group believe will be really large going forward tomorrow?

42:38When you say projecting patriotism, you mean like professing a love for India? The admiration for India? No, I feel like deep down we are all wearing a mask. The mask changes depending on who we are sitting around. Now that the world is so connected, the masks have become more nuanced because one mask in a certain geography can be viewed by another in another geography. And YouTube has played a big part in that. So when you come to India now, Neil Mohan, the CEO of YouTube, what masks work and what don't, And which one do you have on? Oh, my goodness. Well, hopefully I'm not very sophisticated in masks.

43:25So I always like to think that it's what you see is what you get. And by the way, I don't believe every single headline that you read, even if it was 15 years old. So I'll address the first part of your question. I would say that, I mean, again, just in my particular role, what's amazing about YouTube is it really is truly global. Like you just said, like this conversation, you know, you've had enormous success here in India, but you've had success all over the world. And so I expect everything that we talk about here is going to be consumed, not just here, but really in every other part of the world.

44:12And hopefully what we're talking about is just as applicable in that sense. You know, when I come to India, I mean, I really, I'll say a few things that I've said before that I think really ring true. is you see the enormous success of India on YouTube, but in general, in the creative, and we started this conversation talking about waves, in the creative industries through numbers and data. Four out of five Indians is on YouTube. Billions of hours of content being created, consumed 100 million channels, uploading videos. 15 ,000 over a million subs. Indian creators generated 21 ,000 crores $2.5 billion on YouTube in the last three years.

45:04I could go on and on and on but it is not until you are here on the ground that you viscerally understand that. And what I mean by that is the vibrancy around the creator economy. And it's like kind of and you sort of alluded to this earlier, it's like it's two things. Yes, you have to be a creative person, an authentic a thought, you have to share it with yourself, but you also have to be an entrepreneur. You have to be someone who's really, and what I mean by that is truly entrepreneurially in the best sense, someone who's willing to work hard and really give in to their passion kind of a thing.

45:38And I see that every time I'm here in India. And I really think that that's where all of this success has come from. And it's not just like their success of these creators in India, something like on the order of 15 % which translates to about 45 billion hours of watch time of content created by Indian creators is actually consumed outside of India so it's an exporter of ideas and culture but you viscerally see that when it's happening here when you see that just walking the streets in terms of what they're watching on their phones you see that in the conversations I have with creators And so that's really what I would reiterate every time I'm here.

46:24Whether you call that a mask or not, that's the reality from my standpoint. I'm an investor, first and foremost. If I had$100 to invest and I could buy Spotify, YouTube, a movie theater business, a Hollywood studio, a news broadcasting company, where would I put my money if I could only put it in one place for the next decade? I mean, I'm not going to give you investment advice. You're a much savvier investor than I am. I can't give you any advice. I would, again, just maybe broaden it. I would just say, I think that really YouTube is different than all of those pieces that you touched on. I mean, we interact with, we probably compete with some of those players that you mentioned, but our lane is different.

47:20It really is about watching, sharing, and creating video, full stop. That's what we want to do. We want to make sure that we continue to do it. We are the world's oldest and largest creator economy. It's my ambition as CEO to make sure that continues to be the case. If I were to go back to the fact that I'm speaking to entrepreneurs who want to use this platform to grow a business, can you give me five non-obvious insights about the world of content that I might not be able to find online? Yeah, let me say a few things. First is, and I don't know if this is obvious or not, but I'll say sort of the things that I think an up-and-coming entrepreneur would want to think about.

48:07One is, you know, places like YouTube, but other platforms also, have really eliminated the need or the fact of a barrier between you and your audience or your customer or however you think about it. You are in the driver's seat, you get to control what that conversation looks like, and you get the feedback immediately. That's the second thing. As opposed to feedback that would happen in the traditional way, whether you were an entrepreneur and getting the feedback from the market six months down the road or from your investors a year down the road, feedback on a place like YouTube is instantaneously.

48:46You literally see it in the comments within minutes of you, seconds, minutes within you posting the video. So that's a world that you really, really have to be ready for. The third we talked about, which is truly global. So you can have local, regional, national sort of ambitions, but content tends to be global. Storylines do translate. They are specifics, obviously, and obviously culture matters a lot. But that's kind of the third thing that I would say. One thing that I think was not obvious for a while is now starting to be more obvious around content is it truly is multi-screen. Like the mental model, when you say the word YouTube, what pops into your head?

49:35It might be a mobile phone. Well, in the U.S., the majority of content is actually consumed on television screens. And that could happen in the rest of the world. It's our fastest growing screen. So just kind of this multi-modality, multi-surface is super, super important. And then I think the very last thing I'll say again from an entrepreneur standpoint is our fundamental business model is an advertising model. And that's because we're large scale, right? Like it is a way to reach a very large pool of people with your content if it's ad-supported. But I also think that entrepreneurs should think about other types of monetization models like SVOD.

50:16We have a subscription business with YouTube Premium. Direct fan funding models, especially if you have niche content. If you are creating content in a particular education vertical that is super, super valuable but probably doesn't have broad reach, than a direct consumer fan funding type model might make sense. We talked about shopping and merch and those types of use cases. So be creative and flexible about the monetization models, but be very rock solid in terms of the content that's true to you. If all the world is stories and a stage, if Neil had to quit YouTube tomorrow and build YouTube's competition because the world should not just have one, two or three stages but many stages what would you build that can compete with YouTube as a better place to tell stories?

51:17Well hopefully if that's going to be the case we're doing it within YouTube I always say to our teams that we really do have to continue to disrupt ourselves. That's what our creators and our viewers expect, whether they say it or not, they do expect that. One area that we haven't talked a lot about, but I am very excited by, and I do think it will be disruptive, not just to YouTube, but to the creative industries in general, is AI and everything that's happening with AI. And I think it can be disruptive up and down the stack. What we're doing, and I'm sure lots of competition is doing, but what we're doing at YouTube is how do we turn it into tools that allow for that disruption to occur because you can't bury that technological disruption, but allow for it to feel like it is in the hands of the creative people.

52:13I'll just give you a couple of examples. The technology exists today. When you hit that plus camera on YouTube to now, within a few seconds, give it a text prompt of, you know, let's change this set to one where we're sitting in a spring meadow and there's birds and flowers outside. And that's probably something that would have taken us days or weeks to put together, if that's what we wanted our set to be. AI allows you to do that now in seconds, and that's a collaboration between YouTube and Google DeepMind. So that's pretty profound from a user standpoint. As fans, we're like, wow, we get the benefit of this really, really quickly.

52:58I also think it is a tool in the hands of the creator. Like, it was your decision or my decision to come up with that creative idea, and now it's there. And so that's really cool, because now this technology is in the hands of a lot more creators. But it is disruptive, because it did disrupt a lot of things that needed to happen in the pre-AI scenario, right? Like days or weeks that it would have taken. So I don't want to be naive to that. And so I just, I think that's where you're going to see lots of really interesting disruption in a way that creates new opportunities because now 10 ,000 more people could produce that content than otherwise could have.

53:38But I do recognize that it's actually also going to disrupt certain parts of that sort of value chain or stack or whatever you want to call it through the process. And I could give you many examples of that in the creative industry. If I were to put back the investor hat for a second, let's assume OpenAI used YouTube data for Sora. And again, if you had$100 that you could bet behind one large AI company, which company has the most data? Is it Google? Is it Microsoft? Is it, as an outsider, trying to take a bet on the world of AI broadly? where do you think that money should go? Remove your own company from the pitch.

54:24You know, I think it's hard to answer who has the most data or what have you. I think that data is sort of one part of the equation. I do think that technological breakthroughs and investment in innovation is another big part of it. I get to work very closely with Google DeepMind every day, particularly in areas of audio and video, with the VO models, et cetera. So I see how powerful that innovation can be. And then there's a third piece, which doesn't actually get talked about that much, but I think is also very important, which is the applications of these models. How do they actually show up?

55:05How do they show up in a way where they're useful and they capture the imagination, but not just capture the imagination once and then they're forgotten about, but then really become something mainstream. And so I think all three of those pieces are important. At YouTube, our focus is really obviously working on the deep sort of technology and collaboration with DeepMind, but also just as much turning it into tools and features. So I describe this product to you called DreamScreen, which is like, you know, kind of this super interesting product. Whoa, oh my God, you can create that amazing video out of thin air from just this quick text prompt?

55:41Of course it's amazing, it's mind-blowing. But when we talk to our creators, when I talk to creators, they love that feature. They think it's powerful. It democratizes creation. All great, great stuff. But they also talk to me things about, like, you know, why don't you do something even more kind of basic and mundane? Which is, like, why not just give me a translation of my video in ten big languages? Why not give it to me in a thousand different languages? and why not do it in a way where it captures my tone, my inflection and AI will be able to do that and that will be magical too and that will have a profound impact on some kid trying to learn algebra in a small Indian village and that's a profound impact on humanity but it's not as interesting, at least it's not as glitzy of a use case another one that comes to mind that creators always talk to me about is one of their biggest challenges is sort of the blank screen problem.

56:47Like, I have a video, I have no idea what to do next. And I'm a travel vlogger. Well, could I iterate with an AI to actually help me come up with ideas on where should I take my next trip and what sort of video should I produce around it? So these are the types of things where a lot of AI innovation is happening because that's what makes it actually practical for real users. Are attention spans falling or growing? I can watch a Netflix or a YouTube show for 10 hours and binge it, and yet I hear people's attention spans have come down to 10 seconds or 20 seconds. What do you think? I don't see it one way or the other.

57:32I mean, we see all nature of consumption patterns on YouTube. What are you betting more on, long form or shorts? I mean, I think I really view them as kind of a continual, I don't view them as two separate things, I guess, is what I would say. I think shorts sort of stands on its own in the sense in that it's like, it's vertical, it's shot on a mobile phone, maybe it gets consumed more in a feed. But all it is is just like, it's shorter video. It's like if you take, put your head back to where YouTube was, we were just celebrating our 20th birthday, right? So go back to the very early days of YouTube.

58:10People call that shorts. That was shorts back then. And so I think it's like a frame of reference thing. And in our corpus, we see our long-form content in many cases growing even longer, getting more episodic in nature, as you're describing. And we have short-form content that's 15 seconds, but we get lots of asks for that short-form content to be over three minutes long. So it's just like a continuum. And I think in terms of attention span, you can have a long session just consuming quote unquote short content and vice versa. So I see it really, we see it in all different directions. I don't think there's one or the other.

59:02I use YouTube a lot as a second screen while I'm at work. So if I would... What do you use it for? I'm watching like podcasts and I don't know, random like studies and stuff like that. I actually find that, this is me being really honest, when I turn on a screen, my TV and I watch Netflix, I feel like I'm doing something wrong. But when I turn on my TV and I watch YouTube, very subconsciously, I feel like I'm doing something right. I don't know how to describe this. Because somewhere in my subconscious, the latter makes me think I'm learning. And when I'm learning, some anxiety in me is alleviated.

59:48I don't know if that's by design or not. I'm not sure. It's not by design in the sense of anything that we have done to either communicate that or pick the content. So I feel like the credit really goes, again, to our amazing creators, the 100 million creators that upload in India or wherever. I will say learning is a really big use case on YouTube. And when I say learning, I mean the broad definition of the term learning. Frankly, in my own experience, I use YouTube a lot for that. And all kinds of niches of learning are really popular. Obviously, there's the obvious learning, like a high school kid in the classroom kind of learning.

1:00:32And then there's the other sort of very obvious thing, which is like, well, how do I fix my bike? Or how do I fix my garage door? But the really deep learning use cases are pretty esoteric and have lots and lots of content in very particular places. A colleague of mine always talks about his love of woodworking and carving. And you can go really deep on that on YouTube. I love, it's kind of random, but I love logistics and logistics patterns and how things happen in infrastructure. You can go really deep on that on YouTube. So that is not something that we pick those content verticals on purpose, but just like every niche exists on YouTube, there's 20 billion videos that have been uploaded to YouTube.

1:01:19That's where the experience comes from. So five years ago when I turned on YouTube, it was to play songs. That position in my mind somehow has been lost to Spotify. Now when I think of a song, I go to Spotify. When I think of a podcast or something around learning, I go to YouTube. When I think of entertainment, entertainment, I go to Netflix. Do you think the music battle, Spotify has gained a lot of traction in it over the last few years? Why do you feel that way about music? I don't know, it's just how I use it. I didn't have Spotify six, seven years ago, and also I'm not the generic Indian user, but somehow my music needs today are not met by YouTube, but more needs of mine around learning are met by YouTube.

1:02:13Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, like I said, learning is a very large use case on YouTube across every demographic, every part of the world. It's one that I'm very proud of. I saw a stat 90 % plus of classroom teachers use YouTube in the classroom in some particular way. So that is core to what we do. But music is our, I'd say almost oldest and one of our most important verticals by far. It's really core to the YouTube heritage, starting from the early days of YouTube and T-Series, and T-Series is still one of our most important, most strategic, largest partners. There's a few things that I would say that's happened, I think, to music in India in general, regardless of YouTube or Spotify, which is the growth of Indian origin music, pop music, in that sort of not classic Bollywood, right?

1:03:08Like we have amazing YouTubers like King who grew up on our platform who are superstars in and of their own right but sort of charted their own path. And he's obviously kind of a megastar, but there's lots and lots of examples like that. and I would say that that's a really big phenomenon on YouTube just like it is on other platforms. One of the things that I want to continue to do is invest more in terms of actually showcasing that on YouTube. So again, not about the algorithm or what have you but having charts for example, popular charts not just in sort of classic Bollywood Hindi but in all of these different languages to recognize those artists.

1:03:49so we're doing more and more work like that getting more precise about algorithmic recommendations around because the Indian music landscape is so diverse in terms of language and style that it sort of in that sense presents a unique challenge and opportunity to how sophisticated the algorithm needs to be to be able to make good recommendations in that context and so those are areas that we're investing in and we're actually going to talk more about some of that at Waves too The first night of Waves is the YouTube cultural night, which is our chance to put our best foot forward of all of our YouTubers.

1:04:26So yeah, music is very important. I'm not sure why you feel that way, but Indian music is a core part of our investment. Any fleeting thoughts, Neil? You want to tell us something, anything that you'd like to tell us? No, I think what I would say, first of all, thank you so much for making the time. Thank you so much for doing this. It's really a privilege. to have the conversation. I would just say that every time I come back to India, I'm amazed at sort of how much the Indian creative economy and creative industry continues to grow. We at YouTube are privileged to play our role in that. And as I said earlier in the conversation, I think we're just getting started.

1:05:07It's still the early innings. Thank you so much for doing this, Neil. You make India proud and hope to see you again soon. Thank you very much. Thanks for having me. Okay. All right. How was it? It was good. You're a pro. You're very, very well prepared.

1:05:29Do you guys have a studio there too?

1:05:35Awesome. Very cool. All right, Nikhil. Take care. Thank you, everybody.

1:05:42Are you speaking there? Where are you? I'm participating in some round table with the PM. Oh, nice. Yeah, okay. I think I'll probably see you there. You'll probably be on it.