Adam Mosseri

23:30Or is it all about the individual? I think creativity is all about the individual that said one interesting technique would be zooming out. Let's say the task was to design a bridge. And you're designing a bridge because people want to get from one side of the river to the other side of the river. What might be interesting, instead of making the task narrow, zoom out and say the goal is to get people from one side of the river to the other. Let's find the most elegant solution for that problem. You don't assume the thing you're making is the thing you're making. You zoom out a step further to what is the thing you're making accomplish.

24:13So then the assignment will be the most open version of the assignment to allow the most interesting solutions to come forth. And sometimes you might be surprised and maybe there's a better solution than a bridge. Taking all of the limitations off of the ask can open it up to more interesting solutions, more novel solutions, and solutions that have more significance. Another thing you can try is the face off. And this is something that was a technique used with the chili peppers. If we were working on a song and we needed a new part, let's say the verse and the chorus worked really well, but we needed a new bridge written.

24:56John and Flee both write music and the chili peppers. So instead of them working together to create the best solution, they worked independently. And in their case, they said, let's do a face off. They would come to the middle of the room, press their faces together, and then both leave to two different rooms, spend 15 or 20 minutes writing, and then both come back. And then they would each present their idea to the band. And something good always came from it. Sometimes one solution might be that one works for the bridge, Flee's idea works for the bridge, but John's idea is great too. Let's use John's idea for the outro.

25:33So the beauty of the face off is if you have a team of people working on building the same thing, instead take the team apart, give each of the individuals the full assignment, then pull those solutions altogether, all of the individual solutions, and usually the whole room together gets on the same page very quickly. It's like, up that idea, idea B, that was the best idea.

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27:32I mean, in our world, it's so fast -paced, it's so focused on competition on the time. So dead -eye -oriented, outcome -oriented. This isn't quite the same, but one of the things that I always find tricky is how to help teams play with that decision, which is when you're trying to achieve a certain outcome or design a certain thing with a purpose. At the beginning, it's about exploring the solution space. Just trying stuff, seeing what feels good. And there's also ways to do that. I might be visual. You can build prototypes, make videos, talk to people. But there is this sort of part that really feels more like art than science, which is when do you go from exploring more and more ideas and be more breath -oriented to beginning to narrow and focus on a subset of ideas and refine and iterate.

28:18And if you don't have enough time, you might set the focus too soon. And if you have unlimited time, you might just wander off into something less helpful or productive. One of my roles is to make space for people who are, honestly, on the design side for the designers that work for me, like stronger designers than I ever was, to do work that they're proud of. And I can do that by either giving them more time or helping to create an environment that is more conducive to that sort of creative expression, whether it's maybe they just need more time just to riff. Maybe they want to talk more, maybe they need the right team.

28:59A lot of what I do is build teams that complement each other and can sort of inspire each other. But that part always feels a little bit like, not the argument, just like, do you keep the same teams together or do they change for different projects? I like to keep teams together that have figured out how to collaborate really effectively. This one sounds like an economist, but you build equity in that team. And when you break that team up, because maybe that project is over or that product failed or that idea failed, sometimes it's good, right? You mix new people, new ideas, new inspiration, but you lose something.

29:36It's like a band. You get sort of a psychic connection when the people can finish each other's sentences, things move a lot quicker. Yeah, they finish each other's sentences. For these teams, it's interesting because their crafts are so different. If you're an engineer and someone else is a designer and someone else is a researcher, someone else is a product manager, their crafts are different. But they've got that emotional investment. They're like, my designer makes this amazing stuff. It's hard to build, but I pride myself in being able to actually build it. Or my engineer is pushing himself or herself further to actually make it work.

30:13I'm going to make sure they have everything they need for me because they've stayed up late, pushed it harder, been more resilient. And I'm a rater of the team. Everybody wants to deliver for everyone else. Yeah, yeah. They're in a really big way. And so I like to try and preserve those teams when they work. Because other times they don't. I'll often have teams that are somewhere between dysfunctional or just functioning, just okay. And it doesn't mean anybody's bad. It might be multiple people that I know love and respect. I think they're brilliant. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. As a manager, you're like, this is a job.

31:00You're smart. You're smart. Figure it out. But sometimes you just have to be like, everybody who works for me, my job is to set them up for success. And if I put them in a bad arrangement, ultimately that's on me. And I need to then figure out how to correct it. In the team, you named four different crafts. What does each one of those crafts do? Yeah. So the core nucleus of any product, in usually has five crafts. So usually has product design, which we've talked a little bit about. So you're designing the interface, not only how it looks, but how it works. You'll have engineers who, this ten times as many engineers as any other function.

31:38They build it. And there's front -end engineers and back -end engineers as all types of engineers. So is the first one the designer more conceptual? Yes. So it's more conceptual. The engineer is more practical. I'm building it. Usually, yes. But if you're lucky, you'll get an engineer who has got really strong opinions about what to build, not just how to build it. Understanding how the systems work can help better inform what to build in the first place. Okay. You've got a data scientist, which I didn't mention before, but another one, which he's trying to understand. So, you know, what do they do?

32:10So the data scientist will look at, okay, well, how many stories do people share? What kind of stories do people share? How many stories do people see? How do they see them? Do you just tap and click through them? Or do you tap into one, leave, go to something else, tap into another, then we call that hunting and pecking? If you get to a really long one, like maybe I post 50 things in a day, so I'm just, does that make people object? Should we design a way to skip? Helping you understand how things are used today, so you can find that. Does that have a psychological dimension to it? The psychological part is the fourth function, which is the researcher.

32:50There's also it's a different research methodologies. You know, from ethnography studies to surveys and everything in between. So you might bring people in and have them use stuff. You might just bring people in and talk to them. You might run surveys and ask people questions. You might ask tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people questions on the platform. You try to shed light on insights. So what are problems people have? What's working for people? What's not? I mean, fundamentally what we're trying to do is understand people's needs and then meet those needs. And researchers and data scientists as a pair help us sort of understand people.

33:26And then the fifth one is product management so that you're more of the coordinator. Make sure there's a shared vision for what we're building. You don't have to come up with it yourself. But you have to make sure you get it out of your team. Make sure everybody knows what they need to know. So whether it's what we're doing, why we're doing it, how we're evaluating success, what the deadlines are, what the dependencies are. You know, setting milestones, road maps, the project management part as well. I did that for a number of years too. There's content design and product growth and data engineering.

33:59So it's a lot of the bigger we get the more functions we have. But the smallest five are those first five. So what do you mean? You mentioned earlier that my space was the competition. Yeah, they were big. Tell me the story of my space and Facebook. Yeah, I mean, so my space, I think started before us and they were bigger than us when I joined Facebook in 2008. What did they do different than what Facebook did? There were a number of things. They were more, it was easier to customize. You could kind of make it more your own. I think that was a positive or a negative? I think it was positive. I think they also, they leaned into music, which is a little bit more niche, but I think was probably positive.

34:41I think they had trouble continually to evolve forward. They got bought at some point and that's always hard to maintain your culture and your agility or you're sort of how nimble you are as a creative team. Would you say that sale was the beginning of the downfall? I don't know. I wouldn't be surprised, but it's hard to say without really knowing that many people who worked there. I'm trying to remember so many years ago now. I think they started to innovate less. They're trying to make money, which is something wrong with that. But I think they, it was more of this approach of how do we make money out of this thing than the inverse, which is how do we make this thing so big that it's easy to make money?

35:22If you're focused on the end user and how do we create value for them, so more people use it, waste make money to income. I think post acquisition if I had to express it. Maybe you'd call it a short -sightedness. I think they got focused a little bit too much on the short term back then. Twitter, we were terrified of Twitter. They're going to add photos and videos and they're like, they were the younger ups start up at the time. They felt very different though. Okay, let's do this. Describe each of the social networks, what makes each of them them? Oh, I think it's the small decisions at the very beginning that really end up setting the tone for the network.

35:59So what makes Twitter Twitter? Twitter is designed for debate. It's designed for back and forth. It's actually way better for conversations at Facebook or Instagram. I think that's great. Those are healthy things. I think the way they went about it has ended up evolving it into a more negative space in general. I don't mean that Twitter is all negative. I think there's lots of Twitter that's great. But in general, I think the tone of the overall community is more negative than Instagram, which is at the opposite end of the spectrum, where we focus on visual expression, immersive photos and videos.

36:39So I think we ended up having a bit of a bias on purpose or not towards creativity and towards visual expression, which ended up being a bit more positive. Makes sense. If one is focused on debate, debate is always going to be combative. Yeah, it's designed for news. News is always going to be more negative because that's just the nature of that industry. We don't even support links. It's sort of the opposite of supportive of news on Instagram. Facebook was kind of in the middle. They have news you guys have poetry. Yeah, exactly. That's different. And to be fair, I want to be clear, we have negative things on Instagram.

37:18There is news on Instagram. But the tone, it's a different tone. It's a different tone. And what's our role? I don't want to do anything to encourage news on Instagram. But I'm not going to do anything to discourage it either. I'm not going to, of course, if someone was to post news on Instagram, then it is not our role to shut that down in any way, shape or form. But we're never going to build news specific features because I just think it comes with too much scrutiny, negativity, complexity. It's not actually what I love that. I think it's a great choice, especially when it feels like so many big companies see another big company do something and feel like they need to do the same thing.

38:03I don't know why that is, but I see that happening all the time. Yeah, we do that all the time. It's so odd. It's like, play your hand. You do what you're good at. Be better at what you're good at. Yeah, do you want to play someone else's game? I agree with the spirit of it, but I also want to be honest, we have definitely acted that way many times over the years. We're very competitive by nature. It's a cultural thing. I don't know whether or not to describe it. So we're building up, we have this competitor now for Twitter. And then we're trying to do it differently. There's news on threads. We're not trying to focus on news.

38:38We're trying to figure out ways to create a less angry space. So little subtle things like giving people more control of who can reply, how you rank being differently. We're looking at little things like, all right, if I post and someone replies to me and I then like it, is that a signal that it was a more cordial or civil conversation? We're exploring all these types of ideas, trying to figure out ways without having any perfect answers. I want to be clear, to facilitate a friendlier, more supportive space. And we'll see if it works. Maybe it will. Maybe it won't.

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40:53Has Instagram continued to grow? What does the slope look like? Yeah, no, it's been an amazing couple of years actually. It varies a lot by country, but overall we're finishing this last day of 2023 with a really strong air. Do you measure it based on users? How do you measure success? We look at how many people use it, how long they use it for, how they feel about it, sort of brand sentiment, you know, is it worth your time these types of surveys like we talked about? And then as a business we look at revenue. We're growing particularly fast in countries like India and Brazil because there are some enormous countries and more and more coming online.

41:36So the growth rates there are pretty wild. It's the fact that it's as visual as it is, help in terms of global. I would think Twitter is more language dependent. I wouldn't be surprised if it helps that so much content can be interesting even if you don't speak the language. That's less true for videos and photos, but still much more true than text. But it's wild to see how differently people use it in different parts of the world. Give me examples of how different countries, what's big in different countries on Instagram. So sometimes it's by countries and sometimes it's by age. So teens and young people use Instagram very differently than adults.

42:15But all of Brazil seems to use Instagram like teens do everywhere else. They're way more focused on stories than feed. Did they come online later or no? Brazil? I can't know. So India yes. So I think you have this thing often where people who come on later who are in their 30s will use phones a bit more like teens do everywhere because they don't have the same baggage of the 10 year. You came online at the same year even though you're different ages. But Brazilians just seem incredibly expressive. I don't really know how to explain it anyway. Because it's not like we're the only game in town. Like WhatsApp is enormous in Brazil and WhatsApp also has their version of stories called status.

42:57And Facebook is their Snapchat is there. But it's been an amazingly expressive community and culture. What are some of the key differences? In Japan, people are much more thoughtful about whether or not they sign up. But if they do sign up they're much more likely to stick around. That's a much more intentional decision. Their networks are much smaller. So we look at this thing like how many followers do you need to get to a healthy place? That number is much lower in Japan than it is in the US and it's much lower in the US and it is in Indonesia for instance. Actually one thing you see sometimes in Japan are these micro -fints.

43:39So like three people will create secondary counts and they'll just follow each other. So they have their own Instagram as just the three of them. So imagine like you, me and our friend Andrew all had secret accounts and just followed each other. And so we could just log into Instagram and my whole Instagram would be Rick and Andrew. So interesting. And I think that's more about the culture being careful with what they share. You needing the right ingredients to feel comfortable expressing yourself. It's not that Japanese people are any less expressive. They're expressive and creative but the environment you need to create to tap into that is different.

44:19And it's much more private. So what you try and do is you try to understand a specific group that you care about. Maybe we care about Brazil, maybe we care about the US, care about creators. But then you try to design solutions not with them in mind but for everyone. We actively avoid whenever possible launching things specifically to a specific country. We want to understand the country, build something that works and then make it available to everyone because I'm sure there's someone who's similar somewhere else in the world. But that is one of the more interesting things about the job is not only looking at the data but traveling around the world, meeting people and understanding how Instagram means something different in different places to different people.

45:04It's so cool. Yeah, that's one of the more really interesting. What's Web 3? Web 3 is a very marketing sounding term. But basically the idea is if the second version of the Web was these large centralized companies like Meta, building these networks that are largely closed and where a lot of the important decisions were centralized in a small number of decision makers' hands. What you can argue is a lot of how the internet has worked over the last 10 or 20 years. Then Web 3 is the idea is a more decentralized approach. And there's lots of ways to support distributing power. So one big part of Web 3 is crypto.

45:48And there's the crypto bulls and the crypto bears and it's a religious thing. But the idea being that a technology where nobody owns the database or the log or the ledger, but everybody owns it is one where you can do interesting things. So one of the ideas I really want us to do at some point but we can't do it right now is allow you to more directly own your audience. So if you build up a set of followers on Instagram, that's great. But there is a concern that people have that ultimately they're not dependent on us as a company. And if they do something, like if they post something that violates our guidelines and we take it down and they get enough strikes and they eventually get disabled, they lose those relationships with those followers that they've built and earned over the years.

46:42Whereas if you, there are ways using some of these technologies, you don't have to but there's something interesting about how they're built that I'll explain in a second. That allow you not to have to trust us as an intermediary. So if all of your followers maybe we'll use a smaller example like subscribers, like you can actually have people pay you for access to your content on Instagram. If all your subscribers, if that connection was made on chain, then Instagram couldn't delete them even if we wanted to. So even if we de -platform you and kick you off of Instagram, your relationship would exist in a publicly accessible way with all of your subscribers so that another app or competitor could then support and honor those relationships.

47:28And what's interesting isn't like, is it possible to like share a list of subscribers that's possible now without these technologies. But with these technologies you make it so that we can't not share it. So it's like literally we can't delete the data even if we wanted to. If a government was like, we're going to shut you down unless you deleted this data, we wouldn't be able to. The same way WhatsApp can't look at your messages because they just don't have access. What I think is interesting about Web 3 isn't necessarily the technologies behind encryption or crypto, but rather the things that they might enable.

48:03Which is fundamentally removing the need to trust in the intermediary. I in a bunch of different examples like subscribers. And that's kind of a powerful thing in a world where I think people have less and less faith in institutions. It makes sense. And if we use my space as an example, if you built your life on my space and my space goes away, that's gone. Yeah. And that's a liability. And people are whizing up to that. Like creators in general are becoming more and more invested in multiple platforms. And I think it's for that same reason. You don't want to have all your eggs in one basket. So you might build up a presence on YouTube and on Instagram.

48:40Or an Instagram or an Instagram or an Twitter creator starting today. How would you organize your flow of information? Where would you keep everything and where would you put it? It would depend on when I was trying to achieve. This is one of the key things is that I think people need to be intentional about how they use these platforms. Are you trying to just express yourself? Are you trying to sell something? Are you trying to build up interest in what you do so that you can then do something else? You know, build up a name for yourself or reputation? Are you trying to just advocate for a cause?

49:14Depending on what you want to do, how do you use Instagram and which platforms to use or whether or not even to use Instagram? They answer those questions well, very. I do think in general it's good to be on multiple platforms because that reduces your risk. But that doesn't increase the work. I do think the different people on different platforms are different. So you can just post across platforms. That's generally a good thing. It'll help you increase your reach. But you're following on Twitter is probably a different group of people than you're following on Instagram. And your content might want to be different in order to appeal to them.

49:52So you have to be thoughtful about that. But I do worry people sometimes get too focused just on the numbers. How many people are reaching? How many likes am I getting? How many impressions am I getting? Because it's very tempting to just focus on those metrics. But I think that if you do that too much, you can lose sight of why you're doing what you're doing in the first place. And the quality of the engagement and who you're speaking to. Yeah. And so if your numbers are going up, what you're doing isn't aligned with what you want to get out of the platform. It doesn't matter. So you should always go back to what's your intention.

50:30And then how do you make sure what you do aligns with your intention. And you want, yes, of course, the great content that people enjoy and find engaging. But not in a way that undermines your integrity or compromises your intention. So that's you have to find the overlap. How many people get the platform? Not a lot in terms of absolute numbers, not a lot in terms of percentage percentages. Because there's so many people. Unless you do something really problematic, like, you know, if you find terrorism on the platform or anything kind of stuff, you can come off right away. But for most things, like if you post nudity, if you post something violent, you know, the strike system.

51:11So we try to make sure that that's always if that's if we're doing things that way, it's appropriateness for the most sort of problematic violations. We've made it now so that if you do anything and something's taken down, we let you know and you can appeal. Sometimes we make mistakes. But a lot of my DMs are people who are really mad about disagreeing with decisions about what was taken down or accounts that were suspended. And do you take down people or do you take down posts? First posts. To get your account taken down, you it's almost always because you repeatedly violated content and you had like five or 10 or 15 things taken down.

51:47And then eventually your account gets taken down. But that's not a good vibe. You know, but I'll say also I always get the feeling that Instagram is pretty friendly place. This doesn't we're trying to be there. The definitely instances when we're not but we that is that that is our intention. How does our intention. Yeah. How is working at meta or within the meta umbrella different than other companies you've worked at? Well, meta was the biggest company I'd ever worked at when I joined 15 years ago. So I had only worked at startups and for myself as a as a freelance designer design consultant.

52:23Do you have a work at Google or at YouTube? No, not. Some reason I thought you worked at YouTube for a period. No, a lot of friends who did. Okay. Big family YouTube. They do great work. But I mean all these companies are probably pretty similar in the grand scheme of things. If you compare it to what it's like to work at one of tech company versus be a surfer versus big gardener versus be I don't know a trader. But within the tech bubble there are differences in the cultures. I think Google is a bit more academic as far as I can tell from the people I know there. So we want to build things the right way.

52:58They focus a bit more on how much education you have, what degrees you have, academic prowess. Meta and Facebook were forward is a bit more of just like a pragmatic approach. Like figure out how to get it done and get it done fast. So we were a bit more focused on speed. A bit more interested in trying lots of things. A bit more of a hacker type culture. I don't mean hacker hacking in the things you shouldn't have access to. I mean, just building things and being scrappy. Apples of much more sort of design oriented culture. It's much more about designing a tool for a person as opposed to a space for a community.

53:40Instagram does is much more of a space for a community where Apple builds the phone or the computer or the piece of software for the video editing software for the editor. They do build some networks but much more oriented to building a product for a person. So they all have their different cultures and in them some designers are more important, some PMs are more important, some engineers are more important. So for us in the industry they feel like wildly different cultures. But if you spend any time with anybody outside the industry you quickly realize that you're actually operating within a few degrees of difference compared to the real world.

54:17By the rest of the world. When you're working on something new, where does the idea to do it come from? Does it come down from meta? Does it come up from the engineers or designers below? Do you come up with them? Where's the to -do list come from? More comes at bottoms up than topstown but there's a bit of both. This is actually very much in our culture. It's to create a space where people can try things because we know that the leaders aren't going to have all the good ideas. And so how do you create a space for teams to try things in a responsible way? And they can even test things. I learn about things sometimes that Instagram is trying because somebody on Twitter or threads or Instagram posts about the tests that they saw.

55:00And I don't even... Wow, that's cool. Yeah, I get tagged in the middle. It speaks to how big the organization is. Yeah, yeah. And it's good. It's fun. I mean, it can be uncomfortable at times because sometimes I get tagged and I'm like, what is this? And I'm like, I gotta go as the team. I'm gonna get back to you in a day. But that happens all the time. And then some things are much more tops down. I personally have been a designer and deeply presented being micromanaged at different parts of my own career. Yeah. Really try and focus more on making sure that me and the team are aligned on what we're trying to do and what success might look like.

55:38And I try and my team will make fun of me because they probably think I'm terrible at this. Not to focus nearly as much on how we do it. Yeah. I think that's where you can unintentionally really stifle creativity as a manager. Yeah, also there is one right way to do it. You'll be surprised when someone comes up with a way better than whatever you thought of. Yeah, it's exciting. And also when they do come up with something and you disagree with it, I like to let them test it anyway. Yeah. Because I feel like the both outcomes are reasonably positive. Either you were wrong and they were right. Yeah.

56:12At which point, great. Yeah. Or you were right. And maybe they'll listen to you a little bit more next time and that's kind of cool too. Yeah. And either way it's good to know. There's no downside in finding out. Yeah. So I actively try to be like, here's my take, but you get to decide whether or not you try this or not.

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57:53Do you feel like you spend most of your time managing up or managing down? Probably a little bit more down? It really depends. I have a very, very strange job because the nature of what I do in a given day changes so much. I might spend a whole bunch of time catching up the other most senior people of the company about what we're doing and why in a given week. Another week I'm going to spend all my time going deep in a specific area and understanding what's not working and why and helping them get what they need to block it. Another week I might spend all my time prepping to testify in front of Congress or traveling in a country where we are growing and trying to get better.

58:37I'm trying to understand why we're growing or what's working and what's not. In some ways it's amazing because you get to just exercise all these different parts if you're brain, but it's very odd in a lot of ways. So it'll really vary a lot. But in general I like to think of my responsibilities setting up my people for success by creating an environment in which they can succeed, which means having the right people, resources, focus, etc. Priorities. And then when it comes to managing up being what I like to affectionately call being sort of a glorified shit umbrella, like just like let me create the space.

59:17If it works, I'll try to push the credit down. If it doesn't work, I'll take on the accountability. That can be very freeing for people to protect the team so they can go do their thing. So I try to do that as best I can. Are you typically working on things that are going to be released in the next week, year or three years? So increasingly it's getting further and further out. I think that's one of the interesting things about becoming more senior or working in the same place for longer, or you're operating on longer and longer time frames, where I felt like five years ago I was almost the vast majority of my energy was focused on some things that were happening in the next month or two.

59:57And now that's not the case at all. In some ways it's not a good thing, sometimes it's like, oh, just taking us longer to build stuff. But in other ways, it's about operating in a different altitude, where I feel like right now, for the last couple of months I've been thinking a lot about 2024 and 2025, thinking a year to two out with most of my time is not something I would have done even four years ago. Interesting. Yeah. There's pros and cons, I think, to it. I worry sometimes we get lost in the abstract, and you think too far out, in some ways it's really empowering because you can be thinking at a bigger scale.

1:00:37But in some ways you can run the risk of getting lost in the abstract of the philosophical and becoming detached from the work. One of my greatest fears is that I become so detached from the work that I don't really know what I'm talking about anymore. Yeah, understand. You mentioned preparing for the Senate. How much of an issue is government intervention? It's a ton of work. I mean, we have just grown to some end scale. Pretty much faster, not just we being Instagram and Matt up, just the industry in general, right? You know, the other big tank companies. Faster than any industry has gotten this big, I think, in history.

1:01:17And normally what would happen is the regulation in the law would have had decades to figure out their own point of view and their involvement. While something got really big, be it TV or radio or film or whatever technology you want to think of. And in this case, it's just happened so fast that it's much more tenuous. If you would ask me when I joined 15 years ago, what I'd be spending a decent percentage of my time reading and understanding new regulations and figuring out how to comply, I would have told you there's no way. But that's a big part of the job. And so one of the key things there is to figure out how to be responsible and obviously comply with the law.

1:02:04But how do you approach that in a way so that it's not necessarily something that everybody's always focused on? How do you build systems that make that compliance more scalable? How do you have specific teams that focus on that? Because you might have other teams that you need to focus on evolving the product forward or figuring out what's coming next. How do we start it in square one? Exactly. That's great. So how do you balance that is an increasingly tricky part of the job? It's really smart though that you're focused on finding ways of making that more an aspect of the job instead of taking all the focus when it comes up.

1:02:41There's not a lot of us, but we even now have some small teams that are specifically just dedicated to dealing with short -term fires, so to speak. Something will come up, something will break, or something new law will land that we didn't expect, and it'll have to be a scramble. So we have teams that specialize in those scramble now, because the mindset and the processes to approach something that needs to get fixed in 48 hours is very different than a team of filling something over the next two years. Absolutely. And to separate those, it allows the forward momentum not to get slowed. How important is privacy in the online world?

1:03:23I think it's very important, but not in the way that a lot of people often think about it. So from what I can tell, most people don't think about privacy explicitly very often at all. And so if you ask them questions about it, they won't give you answers that will suggest that they care. But if you look at how people share, it's very clear that they do care in a more implicit and explicit way. So I think why people share way more in messages than they do broadcasting to all their friends is because it's a more private medium. What I message you is different than what I'm going to say to 150 followers.

1:04:03And so I'm going to be very thoughtful about what I say in a private message to that. Roses, what I say in a story that's going to be gone tomorrow, which is what I'm going to say in a feed post that's going to be around forever, theoretically. And so I think if you look at how people have shifted more to stories that even more to DMs, that would suggest that privacy loosely speaking or broadly speaking is incredibly important. But if you ask people about their privacy settings or their data settings, there's a lot of focus on it. There's a meaningful but small minority that cares a ton. Obviously regulators care a ton.

1:04:40But the average person doesn't seem to even want to engage in that topic. But if you look at how they actually show up and use their phone and the internet, they are clearly savvy about where they share and how they share. Because they share so differently in different places based on how private or public that's been. You think it's because people don't understand the how public their information might be? Like you know when you're sharing something on Instagram, people can see it. But when you sign up for a service, the idea that the information you put in when you sign up for the service that people couldn't somehow access that or that you could get on a list of someone to be advertised to, for example.

1:05:20Yeah. I think part of it's because it's more complicated. So you know, but I also think that most people simultaneously don't understand the details of the technology, but do understand the broad shape of it. You know, if I use Instagram and I mostly talk about baking and share baking and look at baking things, I don't think people are surprised when they see baking ads. But how that works exactly behind the scenes is that a pixel tracking system, is that an interest inference system, is that is that data Instagram's data or is that an advertiser's data that gets too complicated, too quickly for most people to want to engage.

1:06:01But if they feel like their privacy is violated in some way than yes, then I just think people get quite upset. But I do think fundamentally, and this is a controversial opinion, that we just believe in personalization. You know, I grew up watching TV and seeing ads for cars, and I couldn't afford one nor was I old enough to drive for ads for tampons in which made no sense. I get ads on Instagram and I know people don't always love ads, but sometimes I get really cool little things. I will tell you, I always get ads for things that I want every single time, and I don't know how it works because it's like magic.

1:06:37Yeah, yeah. No, the ads too, it's a great job, but it's the same basic thing that we're trying to do with the core product, which is understand your interests and then help you explore them. You know, if you look at my explore page, you'll see men's fashion, you'll see a lot of European football, you'll see some basketball, you'll see some watches, you'll see some skiing, some surfing. And like those are the things I tend to like to see on Instagram, and so when I get ads, there are things in that space, so like cool, dad sweat pants, and the more you use it, the better, and the more we understand your interests and we try to show you more of what you're interested in less of what you're not.

1:07:17And that is like one of the big debates, like is that a bad thing? Is targeted advertising a bad thing? It seems good, but I will say without knowing how it works, it feels spooky. Yeah, it feels spooky. I mean, I'm constantly being accused of listening to people, people always think that I'm like, I was just talking to my girlfriend about whatever it was, like the red archery peppers, and now I'm getting, you know, you're totally listening, and it's like, no, we're not listening. I mean, not only gross violation of privacy, you would drain your battery, you'd have a little green light at the top.

1:07:52They told you to say you're not listening. You're not allowed to say you're listening. Actually one of the funniest videos I've seen, I saw it on Instagram and on TikTok, was it was like a woman just shot clearly from the phone sitting on a counter, and she was just, the bit was that it was her husband's phone, and she was just saying things near the phone. She's like, diamond rings. Manicures. Pedicures. That's so funny. Just like trying to hack the algorithm, and I was like, it's not how it works. I have this fight with people I know and love all the time. No, but it turns out that what you're interested in on terms of who you follow, what you like and comment, is a pretty good indicator of what you're interested in buying.

1:08:40We do things like, you know, look alike, so like people who are interested in these same interests tend to buy these types of things, and you're interested in those interests, so you might be interested in those types of things. And the other thing that happens that people don't realize is they actually see the ad a couple times. They don't really notice it because they're just flying by, but it's there in the back of their head, and then they end up talking about it. So all of these things add up, but I know people are my family who just don't believe me, and I will continue to try and make the case.

1:09:12How different has advertised changed since disability to target advertising? A lot. I think one of the most amazing things about targeted advertising, particularly the fact that not just platforms like ours, but you know, Google's as well, allows anybody access to these sophisticated tools, has allowed a lot of smaller businesses to thrive. Because traditionally, if you wanted to reach people, you either needed to have a ton of reach and dollars, so you have to be a big brand, or if you wanted more sophisticated tools, you had to have big dollars, and then again, big brands, big companies. And what our bread and butter advertising isn't really brand advertising.

1:09:49We have brand advertising, but it's what we call direct response. It's like, it's a mattress company. It's a phone case company. It's a, yeah, it's cool. I always feel like I'm seeing something I haven't seen before. It's more niche. And usually cooler than the thing that you'd see advertised in a shotgun approach. Yeah. And that shotgun is, you know, that brand advertising has a place in the world that's that sort of, yeah, Coca -Cola, top of funnel, but our bread and butter is more, has more intention. So like you're closer to the moment of actually deciding to purchase something. The closer you are to actually being interested in purchasing something, the better we tend to be at actually helping the advertiser find the right person.

1:10:34And the other common misconception is that we sell people's data. The biggest thing to understand there is that that would make no sense, because then we would actually undermine our own business. Like if you're an advertiser, you pay us and then we find people who are interested in you and we show them your ad. If we sold you the data, then you don't need us anymore. You could go to another platform. But I get that it can feel spooky. Like if you do it in a way that is the lack of integrity or it's like too aggressive, you can startle people and nobody wants to be so. How does the model work?

1:11:04Do you get paid if someone buys something on an ad or no? It depends. So you as an advertiser can decide. Do you want to pay for a depression? Do you want to pay for some sort of outcome? Is it a follow that you're trying to buy or an actual purchase? So there's different ways. And the other thing to understand is the system is it's not like we set a fixed price. It's an auction. And so a bunch of different advertisers might be like, I want to reach men in their 40s in the Bay Area. And if you say that's targeted, is that Bay Area? You can do that, yeah. Wow. So that's great. Because if you're a music venue, you don't really want to be advertising to people who live 3000 miles away.

1:11:48But what you're willing to pay, you put in a bid and other people also put in bids and then the highest bid wins. And so the prices end up moving around a lot, depending on what advertisers are interested in. And also depending on how many advertising slots we have with that particular demographic that people are trying to reach. If we get bigger and like more people use Instagram and they see more ads, the prices for advertisers go down because the competition is less fierce per slot. So the system is very dynamic in a way that is in some ways challenging because you're managing a more complicated system.

1:12:30But in some ways, much more fair and resilient. But it's rooted in the actual value of what you're getting. Very, very demand oriented. It also just means that if some advertisers leave us, it's not as problematic because the next advertiser who's willing to pay a little bit less kind of slides in. Whereas Twitter, for instance, which has been predominantly brand advertising is much more difficult this last year for them where a bunch of brand advertisers have left. And there isn't an auction system in the same way to sort of backfill that revenue. Why do you think Twitter set up their selves as big brand advertisers versus the model that you guys use?

1:13:16I don't know. I mean, they have a model that's similar to ours. I just think they've been less successful at that type of direct response advertising. I also think brand dollars are really tempting because of big numbers. We have brand, I don't want to say that we don't care about brand advertising. We simply do. But I think a combination of us being particularly good at this, Google being particularly good at this, them not executing quite as well over the years as they probably wanted to. And then probably becoming a little bit more focused on brand advertising that might have been ideal has put them in a more precarious position where their relationship with a few of their top advertisers is incredibly important.

1:14:01And there's a lot of tension there. How competitive is it to hire the best people? Super competitive between who are the particularly for specific types of talent. I mean, a lot of it is that there's a whole market of startups. And then there's the big players and then there's some mid players. But the big players obviously are Microsoft and open AI now because machine learning talent is probably the most prized talent. Amazon, Google, Apple, Meta are the big ones. But then there's the other big companies that aren't quite as big. Netflix has an amazing machine learning and ranking team. Fundamentally what they're trying to do is very similar to us.

1:14:46We try to find things you're interested in that are photos and videos. They try to show you longer videos that you're interested in. They look at what you've watched before and then they show you. I wouldn't have made that connection. That's interesting. They have a very good ranking team actually. So the big companies compete a ton. All the startups also. The appeal is a little bit smaller company, less bureaucracy and a possible bigger payday if your startup blows up and makes it big. You riskier but bigger reward in the risk. But the competition for talent has always been fierce. Are you involved in that at all, bringing people in?

1:15:25Yeah. I focus more of my time when it comes to recruiting on senior leaders. I don't have any open senior roles now. So I spend less of my time on that directly. So more of my time there is on keeping those people satisfied and happy. Trying to make sure there's a meaningful overlap between their aspirations and what the company needs of them. Because if it's all about what they want and out of what the company needs, that's not great or sustainable. If it's all about what the company needs and it's not about what they want, they're going to burn out and leave. Because there's plenty of people who are also willing to hire them.

1:15:58So finding that overlap. And then just creating an environment where people want to stay and want to work hard and want to build something that they're proud of. But over the years I've spent a ton of time recruiting. Are most of the people in your upper, newer hires or people who've been there for a long time? A lot of the people in my staff have come up in the company. Almost all of them are in the biggest job they've ever had. But are people who've been at the company for a while? Yeah, exactly. Often people you've known for a long time are not necessarily. Often, not necessarily. Not always.

1:16:32It's a big enough company where you don't know a lot of people. Yeah, but I think you tend to build relationships. And I mean, I moved around the company a lot. I was a designer, I was a product manager. I worked on newsfeed, I worked on what we call friend sharing. I switched to Instagram into a smaller job. I would end up taking over Instagram. And it's always good to try to hire a new talent and diverse talent to get new ideas. But you also often will build up if you're, I think, if you're doing good work, your relationships and a bit of a following. So there's some people I've hired multiple times.

1:17:06Oh, I see. I've moved to different parts of the company and then they've followed. They've left the company entirely and then a year or so later didn't work out. And then you always, it's super important when someone leaves to be supportive. Like, look, the world is big. Like, not everything that nobody needs to work at this company. Yeah. But always make sure that you leave the door open, which is like, hey, if it doesn't work out, just I want to be one of your first calls. What's the main reason people would leave working at Instagram? Lots of different reasons. I mean, if you look at the last couple of years, we're a bigger company.

1:17:42So sometimes people just really want to go to, they want to do a startup with a friend. They just want to go to the opposite of the spectrum. I want to work in with five people in a room, not in three or four thousand people. They had a company of tens of thousands. That's one common one. So another one is another big company will well, push them we say often. Or this bigger role or more money or some combination. I mean, our stock price took a massive hit about a year ago. And so we lost a lot of people during that sort of low. Because a huge part of compensation is in stock. Which we think is good because it means you have invested interest in the company's success, not just in showing up and punching and punching out.

1:18:24Was that just a short term dip? I mean, we went from the mid -300s to as low as 80 bucks a share. Wow. Hopefully, of course, of about six months. But everything did. This was the time when everything kind of the world did that. Right. But if you, you know, when we come all the way down like that, and then if you want to hop ship to another big company, your new offer is going to be at their stock price, which is a dollar amount, to start and then calculate the number of shares. And so a lot of people could just make a time or money jumping ship. Understood. The flip sides, if you stayed, now that things have gone well over the last year, then you ended up getting these grants at much lower values, and then you did really well.

1:19:07You try to focus people on the long term. Yeah. But compensation is a part of financial compensation. There's nothing wrong with caring about how much money you make. And so, you know, so people, they get offered these big numbers, other elsewhere, and you kind of have to be like, all right, as long as you're confident you're going to be happy. You like, you got to support them. Are you the first CEO since the founders? Yeah. So Mike and Kevin, phenomenal guys, super creative, super thoughtful. I joined to run products, so the PM function, and report to Kevin. Keep the high for you? Yeah. And I was part of why I joined, even though it was in some ways a much smaller job.

1:19:48I was managing maybe 700 or 1000 people before, and then I went to managing 50 and working for Kevin, and with Mikey. But part of it is I wanted to work with those two guys. They have got their own startup now. It's called Artifact. They're doing some really interesting work in the new space. And they're broadening out further than that. But they're just really insightful. Like I felt constantly in working with them, like I was learning. So one of the reasons why I wanted to work with them specifically is Artifact. Artifact started as primarily an AI -driven news app. So you let it know what you're interested in, and it helps you find news.

1:20:31But then pushes you actually to those news websites. So it tries to be very publisher friendly. They're expanding beyond news in a couple other ways. I don't want to speak out of turn and not do them justice. Because I wanted to succeed. And they've done a lot of good work over the years. And so I just think you always have to respect what they do. So that was one of the reasons why I joined Instagram in the first place. But they left. And why did they leave? Well, they were at Facebook after Instagram was bought for six and a half years. Which is actually a long time for founders. That is a long time.

1:21:08Most founders don't last that long. That's true. And I think that basically what happened from my point of view is that they got, Instagram got so big and so successful that we no longer could really have it run almost entirely independently. We had to be thoughtful about how it interacted with the other apps. Because it was just so big that they were bumping into each other, so to speak. And so that meant that they went from what was more or less like a hundred percent autonomy to less than a hundred percent. Now for me coming from Facebook, this was all gravy. Because to me it was like I went from feeling like I had no autonomy to a lot of autonomy.

1:21:52Yeah. Because we had way more space than the Facebook I've did. But for them and I understand this, I don't not say this was any judgment at all. Going from more or less a hundred percent to even something like 90 or 80 is a big delta. And so I think without guessing too much, I think that's a big part of what it was. I wish I had more time with them. But I'm grateful for the time I did have. And I really just think they're phenomenally talented duo. And they're really, they're a pair. I wouldn't be surprised if they spend the rest of their careers working together. Yeah. And that's just kind of a cool thing to see.

1:22:28Yeah. But how did Instagram change when they left? And as it got bigger, how did that relationship with Facebook change from autonomous to more part of the company? We just coordinated more. I mean the big thing that I had to deal with when they first left was less about the product changing and more about the culture where I was, I'd only been an Instagram for maybe six months. And so I had to earn the trust of the team. And the team kind of looked at me like, do you bleed? Blue, do you bleed sort of gradient? Yeah. You were the new guy. I was the new guy. And you were the corporate guy. Yeah.

1:23:06And so I had to break down that us and them mentality. And that took, that's a culture change. And culture changes at large organizations, they don't happen quickly. They take often usually years. Sometimes they're impossible. Yeah. So that was the big actual challenge. In terms of the work, it was more about helping each other out more, more actively. So we have one ad system. And then you say, I want to try to, you know, sell cool, sweatsh pants. And then we figure out how to show those ads on Instagram or Facebook. So we have, you know, how do we, that system was already heavily integrated.

1:23:43Where we had to do more proactive work was like, okay, on the safety side, there's a bunch of really good work at better using technology to find hate speech on Facebook. How can we extend that technology and leverage it on Instagram as opposed to running our own? So in the safety and integrity space, a lot of integration work. Advertising. That one was already more or less one system with two, but, you know, things built on top. Not to take anything away from the Instagram ad team building really beautiful stuff on top. The ones where we had to share way more were safety and integrity, ranking in general.

1:24:17So how do we better understand people's interests and surface? In terms of the research piece would be the same. It's just the bigger data set. So the bigger the data set, the more you know. You should be able to do more with that. You get better at it. You should be able to get better. Yeah. But even without sharing data, just sharing technology, sharing approaches to ranking. What are the best ways to understand people's interests? What are the best ways to ask people what they're interested in? What are the best ways to do more exploration based ranking, which is where you try and not just surface the thing to someone that everyone has seen that you know they'll like, but try things that they might like to better help them discover niche interests.

1:24:59I think one of the things that Instagram benefited from being part of Facebook and now met at the most over the years was honestly just a lesson learned. It's like that didn't work. Maybe we don't try that or that work. Maybe we try that. And not everything translates one to one, but a lot of it does. So that was how the work evolved. But the bigger thing was that first year or two was really the culture and building trust. Do you know your counterpart at TikTok? So no, but TikTok is an interesting thing because TikTok is really, I mean, this is an American company with an American app, but it's really owned by a Chinese company called Byte Dance.

1:25:36And most of the technology as far as we can tell, the most important stuff is all run actually out of China. So even if I did, it would be, I'd be more interested in meeting and understanding the culture of the Chinese company, which I think at the end of the day makes the most important decisions. I do try to meet people though in general, so I've tried to build relationships with senior people in Google and other companies, but I don't have any strong relationships. It's interesting. And do you look at the people at the other companies as counterparts, contemporaries, or the competition? Both.

1:26:15I mean, I think you can be both. Yeah, I have a weird job though, right? Because I'm not really a CEO. Like, I have a boss that's not the board. I have a team, but I'm part of a bigger company. But Instagram is so big and so important to the company that it's, I'm not just like some random, you know, mid -level executive either. I mean, a weird sort of tweenspot. Nobody sounds like a good position because you're running a big company without some of the, I would say baggage that comes with answering to the board. You know, it's like it feels like that really gets in the way of doing good work.

1:26:55It could, yeah. I do present to the board sometimes, and that's always a fun thing to do too. Look, I have an amazing job. I don't want ever complain about my job. It's the unique opportunity and privilege. I want to make sure I didn't make the most of it while I'm here. But it is one that is, there's not that many people with similar jobs. Yeah. There's a lot of CEOs out there, but this is kind of a different thing. So when I meet people who have similar positions, I'm always kind of interested in it. Yeah. And how they approach what they do. How do they even define the job? So would you say having friends at Google, having friends at the other companies, do you look at TikTok as more of a black box?

1:27:32Can you just not know because where it's run from? We can learn, but it's harder to learn, and you learn more indirectly. So we learn from, you know, engineers that we've hired from the years, or engineers that have friends with engineers there, that kind of stuff. You know, I have a lot of employees who speak Chinese, and they'll read sort of the TikTok engineering blogs, which are Chinese, which I can't read, because I don't want to read Mandarin. But for what is the thing that I love most about meeting people outside the company, is meeting people outside of the industry, because one of the most amazing perks of my job is I get to meet all these amazing people, and then try to understand their worlds.

1:28:12And I find it fascinating, even if it's an industry I would never want to work in myself. Yeah. But to better understand, like, power movies made in finance. Or how does the world of fashion actually get run, and how the trends get set, and who actually makes those decisions? Or how is basketball and entertainment blending over the last five or ten years? It's so interesting. People who are good at whatever the thing is that they do. On a high level, it's always interesting. Or whether you're interested in that subject or not. And this amazing perk, which I can just, because of my title, because I'm not famous, but I have this title, I can just email people, and I tend to get a response.

1:28:53And so I try, and I don't do this as often as I should, to just meet interesting people, and learn from them. Great. What do you think the perfect size for a company is? Oh, there's no perfect size. I do think there are sizes that tend to work better. So I think there's a thing, which is like, when you're not just the person, there's like, you know, half a dozen of you. There's like that kind of, when you can all sit at a table, and crank, that's a size that tends to kind of work. And then it gets a little awkward until you get to about 40. Maybe it's because you can have like four managers who all have four teams, or whatever it is.

1:29:30Maybe it's about the sort of layered, nature of an organization, where, but it's more clear, like, whose leadership, what everyone's role is, and then that can kind of work. And then my experience is it gets pretty awkward again, until something like a hundred and twenty or so. And then after that, you start to get to big company stuff. And then the question is, how do you stay? I mean, lean is the wrong word. Because even as much as we focus on efficiency over the last 12 months, like, I don't think you can really call us lean. But, you know, how do you stay efficient? How do you not build up whole teams that are of good people doing work that's fundamentally not super important?

1:30:14How do you stay focused? How do you stay? It was a big story when Elon bought Twitter, and he ended up letting it or something like 85 % of the people there. Yeah. It felt like that had reverberations through the entire tech world. I think it did. I mean, I think two things happened at the same time. You had economic instability, not just in the stock market prices, but also just in the outlook. You know, this is more economic, macroeconomic sort of question. It's more like, you know, the most important thing is that you have to be cautious to have been in a long time. At the same time as, like, the stock market move is the same time as Elon just slashes his organization at the bone.

1:30:51And so I definitely think that that has led all of tech to go through, you know, a year of really focusing on efficiency in 2023. But the other thing is we all, almost all the major companies did multiple rounds of layoffs. The number one rule of doing layoffs is cut deeps. You don't have to cut twice. And everybody made the same mistake that every company tends to make the first time they do it. And I think what you're kind of seeing is the industry maturing. The industry is a new industry. Yeah. But it's an industry that was just explosive growth for the longest time. And it was more efficient just to focus on what to build next than to how to do more with less.

1:31:32Obviously, that can't go far on forever. And so it's a rubicon you cross. When you do run a layoff set an organization, you fundamentally change the relationship between leadership and the teams. There is more sort of an anxiety or fear. I think it doesn't have to be all bad. I think people can be pride in being sort of lean and mean. But it is, there's a few moments over a course of our history that is a really stark difference between before and after those thresholds across. Tell me what those all were that you can remember from your start in the business. One of them has been going from like one app to sort of a bigger company and a family of apps.

1:32:14And which culminated eventually with the rename of the company Mehta. But that really was almost like making official what had already happened internally. But that's a big change. Huge. How to support a bunch of teams that build a bunch of apps. The biggest of which, by the way, is WhatsApp. We don't talk about a lot in the US, but outside the US is like... Outside the US. It seems to be the only way people communicate. Yeah. And it's more than that, yes. Yeah. Yeah. There's communities, there's status. There's like, last I checked, people share more stories on WhatsApp in the world worldwide than they do on Instagram in a given day.

1:32:48Wow. Which people don't even think about here in the US. Yeah, I don't think a bit as a function of what that does. Yeah. Most people in the US don't... It's a messaging device, as far as I know. So how do you support that? How do you share infrastructure, share lessons, but also respect the fact that their identities of the apps are different? WhatsApp is about private communication. Instagram is about creativity. You know, Facebook is about communities or discovery or just sort of like, you don't know what could happen. Anything cool you could find on a given day. So that was a big shift and that took years.

1:33:25And then it was kind of made official with the rebrand. Another huge one was the 2016 election cycle here in the US. Fundamentally, we made some mistakes, but also I think the outcome was a huge surprise. And people needed a way to explain that. And we were in a community way to explain that. We went from being for the most part, like a beloved brand and company to a hated one. I saw a different thing happen in terms of hatred that shifted. I remember Mark Zuckerberg was sort of the world's darling who created this thing that everybody loves. And then I remember it started hearing rumors that he was thinking about running for president.

1:34:09So yeah, I remember when this was... And as soon as those rumors happened, all the energy changed and he was evil Mark. When was it 2014? I don't know. I just remember it's like this is so weird. That is weird. I don't think he was ever going to actually run for president. I do remember that when those rumors were going around because he was traveling around a lot. And people thought he was campaigning. Internally, the feeling you get when you told someone you worked at Facebook, had a dinner party, was like night and day before and after 2016. Tell me the whole Cambridge Journal because that was a big story.

1:34:40That one was wild because Cambridge Analytica was obviously a huge moment for us and a massive press cycle and a massive sort of black eye for the company. And fundamentally, I do want to acknowledge we made some mistakes. But at the end of the day, I think it was in a lot of ways a bit of a red herring. Basically, we used to be able to make apps on top of Facebook. And people made all these quiz apps. You remember all those quiz apps that were going around? Or do you need to use Facebook much back in the day? Anyway, there were like, you know, 10 questions to tell you like, I don't know what Harry Potter house you're in.

1:35:14That kind of stuff. And the way these apps would work is you would make an app, you would build it on top of Facebook. And then you would ask people. So if you used the app, the app would ask, can I get a list of your friends or can I get your email address? And you would say yes or no. And one of the things you would ask for is a list of friends so that you could then, you know, maybe you could invite them. At that point, the developer, the person who made that app, isn't Facebook. They're getting access to some data that you as a user are sharing. And Facebook is facilitating that connection.

1:35:44So we, which is only good. It's your allowing communication. Ironically, when I first ran Facebook, one of the biggest criticisms we had is that we weren't doing enough of this. Right. We were being, we were being accused of being a walled garden. Right. Not supporting other developers. But the downside of sharing that data is that data can get misused. So this specific developer for this app basically took that data and was using it in ways that weren't disclosed when they collected that data with Cambridge Analytica, basically trying to sell their ability to understand voters for, you know, in campaigns in the shady way during the, but that, when Cambridge Analytica blew up, that API, the ability even requests that data had been shut down for years.

1:36:31It was old news in a lot of ways. But because the political environment was so polarized and people were so worked up, it just became a flashpoint for a lot of frustration. In practice, if you look at any of the research since, it doesn't look like Cambridge Analytica was an effective consultant or even really mattered. Yeah. But it was at the heart of the controversies around the election, around Trump, around data, around Facebook, and it just ended up being the perfect storm. It's like a scapegoat. And in some ways, yeah, and to be clear, we probably should never have had that API. So I don't want to absolve ourselves of responsibility.

1:37:12But I think what people don't really understand is one, that thing had gotten shut down years before. It was a developer misusing data, and that wasn't like, we had some sort of security breach. And it turned out Cambridge Analytica was not remotely effective at what they said they could do anyway. But none of that matters at the end of the day. What matters was, is perception, and we have to live with that, and accept that, and make sure that we're thoughtful about how we operate going forward. But the thing that I've tried to do is less convinced people to like us or not like us, and more try to shed some light on the trade -offs, because things are almost always complicated.

1:37:53In the wake of Cambridge Analytica, we're going to be, naturally, much, much more conservative and careful with what data you can access. And in some ways, that's good. That's good from our privacy perspective. But in some ways, that's very much at odds. It's good to the wild garden. Yeah. And a lot of what we're getting pushed on in terms of regulation, on one, from one front, is interoperability. You should be able to bring your friends from Facebook to another platform. You should be able to integrate, you know, I don't know, Snapchat and Instagram. That would be good for competition. But it comes at a privacy trade -off, and at a risk of people misusing data trade -offs.

1:38:32So the thing that I try is a little bit less that convinced people to be on one side or the other of any specific argument. Or did it lend at one place on the spectrum? There's lots of these big existential questions, like safety versus privacy, or competition versus privacy. And a little bit more just to try to articulate, like, look, these things are complicated, and there are trade -offs. And it's our responsibility to try and make the best decisions that we can and be transparent about how we make those decisions. But try to help people understand that it's really black and white in a way that I think people like to think it is.

1:39:11It also seems like ultimately you're running a business, and if the focus is not doing what's best for the business, whatever it is, you're not really being there for your shareholders. Is that not right? I mean, that's a thing, but I also just don't... Shareholder is a side. I think business is a good thing. I think if you make a... And this is... Look, this is now contentious in this country. But I think having a profitable business allows you to hire good talent, allows you to do more interesting, more meaningful work. Fundamentally, I think we provide a service. It's free, and it allows people to find audiences, to express themselves, to connect with their friends, to do all these things.

1:39:53And we do it well because we are for profit business, and we can hire some of the best people. But I do think that in a world where the wealth gap seems to be increasing and more and more wealth seems to be concentrated in a small minority, and a lot of the institutions, I think, that we live with, are becoming less effective. People are more and more skeptical of the whole system. And part of that, I think, is just being directed at business. I think there's a lot of people now, particularly young people, who are just skeptical of any business, for the simple reason that it is a business. And I think I understand what that's coming from.

1:40:34I don't agree with that. But I think that's the reality that we live with right now. Tell me about the house you grew up in. I grew up in a few different places. I started in New York City on Indian restaurant street and then moved to the Upper West Side. But most of my childhood that I remember was at a house in Westchester and the suburbs of New York City. How far from a man? About an hour. My dad was commuting out of the city when we lived in the city, and I was going to PSA to Westchester. Oh, that's interesting. He worked for the Jewish Board of Family and Children Services in administration.

1:41:08So he was in the world of supporting young people who are physical, mental, and social issues. And some of the institutions or the actual places were up north. And also the public schools in New York is a whole difficult thing. I was going to PSA. You were a doctor. Psychotherapist. Psychotherapist. Yeah, PhD. Dr. Moserry. Yeah, yeah. And so the public schools were better in Westchester. That's interesting growing up with the psychotherapist. Oh, yeah. My dad is a psychotherapist. My mom is an architect. Awesome. They're very interesting. She's an Irish Catholic from Pittsburgh. Her brothers' names are Owen Timothy, Brendan Patrick, Conan and Michael.

1:41:50So that is Irish as you can get. Yeah. And my dad is like an Israeli Jew -born in Cairo. Like how do they be more different? New York City. Yeah. I get my emotional intelligence from my dad and my sort of structured problem solving and thinking from my mom. But I remember a little house in the suburbs. I remember shoveling snow in the winter. I remember my mom used to love. She used to... It leaked heat. It just leaked heat as this old colonial house. So just like... And so we used to keep the... We were poor. I'm not trying to like say we were poor or anything. But we used to keep the house like 58 in the winter.

1:42:29Because otherwise he would just go straight out the windows. Yeah. So I remember growing up with a big, thick, you know, nits. Yeah. And socks. And the winter time. And then my Israeli family would come and visit and they'd be like, What is this? It's not traumatic. It was great. It makes you strong too. The cold's supposed to make you strong. Yeah. I like it. It was lovely. It was lovely. Where did you grow up? I grew up in Long Beach. I would commute to Manhattan because my aunt worked at... I'd mentioned before my mom's oldest sister. She ran the design department of estate, Lauder. So I would go and spend time with her in the city.

1:43:09And she was my cultured aunt. My parents were more like children. She was more like... Yeah. Where in the city was the office? In the General Motors building. You know the Apple store with the glass box? Yeah. It's that building. It's a white stone building. And I would go there all the time and just hang out in the design department. And I loved it. I used to love going to the city as a high school, like a young high school kid for shows. Yeah. Because it's really a scar. Yeah. It's not the best genre of music. And I was a old friend. But I used to remember you had to catch that one AM train back.

1:43:42I remember missing it and having to walk around the city. Wow. And like no cell phones. Yeah. And you got to get that 6 AM. Yeah. That's usually on like the 11 o 'clock train back to my team. But you have that buffer in case you miss it. But some of my best memories were like trying to stay awake in diners in Midtown before the 5 or 6 AM train came around. So how'd you end up in NYU? I grew up like we said in Westchester and I was going to go to a university of Chicago. But my parents split and I had little siblings so I didn't want to go too far away. How did that impact you, your parents splitting?

1:44:23At the time I just took on very much the role of... It was probably very inappropriate for me to take on, which was like mediator. Like I kind of got between... I wanted to one protect my little brother and my little sister. And then two, I wanted to make sure that they were being reasonable. So you were the oldest? I am the oldest. So I kind of got in the middle of it in a way that's probably not good for a 16 or 17 year old to do. But I think that's part of why I went to NYU is I wanted to stay close. I was accepted at university. Chicago and came very close to going as well. There you go. Same story.

1:44:56Little to the day I was supposed to make an official eye switch. And I couldn't tell you on that day why I did it. But NYU was... You're a bit of a number. It's such a big school that like it's not the same sort of personal experience. But I loved it because for me it was... The city was such a rich resource in a way that a university really could never quite be. Absolutely. So what school did you go to at NYU? To school of the arts. I started as a philosophy major. But then I switched to the school of the arts because I was going to go to law school and didn't matter what my undergraduate degree was in.

1:45:31So I started in philosophy. But all my friends are in film and television. Yeah. I just thought it would be more fun. After two years. I started in the college of arts and science. I think I was either going to measure in philosophy or math. And I think I was thinking more math classes. And then I switched into Gallatin where you make up your own curricula. One of the things that really took from NYU and Gallatin was particularly good at helping kids with this. But I think NYU in general is good at this. You kind of had to learn to hustle. You could get a lot out of university if you had some hustle.

1:46:06And Gallatin specifically because we took classes at all the other schools. I weaseled my way into a photography class at Tish. Or programming classes at ITP which is a graduate program. Awesome. You figure out if like, oh, the department chair is a Gallatin alum. Maybe if I meet him, you learn how to like work a system. I think a lot of that, those lessons, which were a bit more life lessons a little bit less academic, served me really well. I also worked. So I started my design from while I was at NYU. Great. So by the time I started my American company in NYU too. Yeah, by the time I was at software, junior, I was working full -time and also taking classes.

1:46:49Awesome. I don't think I slept much because I definitely spent a lot of time with friends in addition to having a full -time job in a field. I don't think I slept at all. No, that happens when you're young. I looked back on those days really fondly though. I had a blast. Well, clips closed at four. We would go out to the Empire diner and eat and then go home before sunrise. I had a sweet gig. I was bartending at a steakhouse that's still around on Twistery called the Striphouse. And at the time it was one of the better steaks in the town. Close -free didn't wear. Between like university and fifth maybe or whatever.

1:47:23Those things are right in that area. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The university and fifth. And it was a great bartending job because you made bartending money, which is good cash. But you didn't work bar hours because it was a restaurant. You'd be off at midnight maybe two depending on your shift. And then you still got two hours before the bar is closed, minimum. As a 19 year old kid I'd walk out with $220 and 20 is my pocket. And go straight to a bar and spend a lot of it. And it also was this amazing contrast. I mean, maybe you had a similar experience. But when a senior in high school in the suburbs, you're the top of the totem pole.

1:48:04Everybody you know is your age or younger. And then there's parents. And parents don't count. It's like Charlie Brown. They speak a different language. And then you go to NYU and you're in the middle of a city. You have access to everything. And you don't really know anything. No. And you're the youngest of everybody. Everybody. And it was such an amazingly exciting and intoxicating and humbling sort of transition. Absolutely. I can remember when I first got there, I didn't know who I was. Because I only knew who I was in the context of my little family. So when I didn't come home to my parents, it was a very different experience of starting to understand who I was.

1:48:45No, I remember feeling very ungrounded. Very detached and then confused. But also very excited. And I mean, it was a dream to be in Manhattan. Because even when I lived in the suburbs, the dream was still living in Manhattan. Yeah, exactly. Same thing. And you had access to everything. You wanted to go to a knitting factory and see a show. You wanted to go see some of the best stand -up or anything. One of the jazz clubs or... Well, it didn't matter what you had interest in. You could do it. Yeah. No, I wouldn't trade it. Who wouldn't trade it for anything? Yeah, I felt like my education came from living in New York City more than going to NYU.

1:49:26Yeah. It felt like you were living in New York and going to NYU as your job. Yeah. Not like you were living in NYU and you'd visit New York. No, it was the other way around. It was like, yeah. The primary connection was with the city. The city. Because that's where all of culture was. Like you got to experience everything. And anything. And one of the things I missed most leaving New York is I had all these friends by the time I left, that used to drag me to things that I would kill to go do. Little indie films I would never have heard of. Or dance performances way out and out of Brooklyn. Or off off Broadway plays.

1:50:03One of my best friends was a playwright. You would go to these things and you would be like, oh, I'm tired. And you would show it up. And they would be so inspired. It's so cool. And you just took an offer granted. Yeah. At least I did. Where did you live? First I lived over on third. And that didn't really work out. So I moved to Rubin, which is on fifth and tenth. And then I did a year down in Chinatown at their big dorm called Lafayette. And then I realized that they really kind of overcharged for the dorms. So then I moved over to Union Square and to like a four bedroom with five or six dudes in one bathroom.

1:50:35How did you find the people to live with? They were just friends from college mostly and then their friends. So I lived in Union Square. I lived in Harlem. I lived in Clinton Hill. I lived in Weinstein. Oh, yeah. Oh, man. There was a cafeteria in Weinstein. Yeah. I got off the meal plan pretty quickly. I think I lived on like pasta and mozzarella. And if I'm on a cigarette, I used to smoke. When he'd start smoking. When I worked at that bar. I used to leave work. I had never had a cigarette in high school with the craving for cigarettes. Because people were smoking there? Yeah. Yeah. This is before smoking had been banned.

1:51:19The second hand smoke law. So I'd leave with the craving and go to another bar and then have a cigarette. I smoked for years. Did you ever smoke at work? Yeah. When I first joined Facebook, you just think I took the fire. No, I mean at the bar. No, that's not. Do you still smoke? No. When did you stop? 15 years ago, maybe more. More. Was it difficult? No. So I had it lucky. So my wife decided that we needed to get into shape. This is forever. 17 years ago, maybe. And so she signed us up for this boot camp where seven in the morning we'd go out and work out with these. Like other random people with a trainer and they were like, have us run up and down hills.

1:52:00It was actually the rain area. Yeah, in San Francisco. It was great because you would hang out with people you would never normally hang out with. Like a barber and a bus driver and people who were way outside of tech. It was such a hard workout that I wouldn't want to cigarette that whole day. And I would do that four or five days a week. And so I just was smoking less and less and then it started to taste different. Great. So thank God, thanks to her. I quit. But I do, from honest, miss it. I did love it. How did you meet your wife? San Francisco. We moved out. No five, each of us. We had my friend from high school went to college with her friend from high school.

1:52:38I used to cook a lot and she was working at Williams in Noma. So I asked her if she would take me into one of the stores and pretend to be my girlfriend so I could buy some pots and pans on discount. I think I still have those all clouds. Williams knows a great store. So she actually worked there and then she got a job at Facebook in 2007. Before you? Before me. And what was her job? By the time she left, she was in partnerships. But when she started, she was the lowest level entry operations. Like people forgot their passwords and she'd respond to their email, of course. But she got me my job.

1:53:15I applied every month for a year and she kept on hounding and recruiting to me. Like my boyfriend is really, is good what he does. And I was like, yeah, sure, whatever. But it took about a year of her helping. And then I got an interview in July of 2008. She started in February of 2007. So I got an interview in June of 2008 and I started in July of 2008. So cool. Yeah, yeah. No, I would totally absolutely not be sitting here with you. Was it weird both working at the same place or was it good? Or positives and negatives? Tell me. She was all business at work. She didn't even get a car. I'd walk around the hallway.

1:53:52I'm like, hey babe, and she wouldn't even look up. My wife's not messing around. And did she still work at Facebook? No, no, she left nine years ago. She ran a food startup for five years. And then she worked in design and tear design for another since then. She told us. Design like you, tech design? No, interior design. She's like, she... But your mom was an architect and your wife's an interior designer. Yeah. It's all in the family. It's all in the family. I owe a lot to both of those women, to both of those women. But never would have worked at Facebook and never would have gotten this job at Instagram without Monica.

1:54:28Are your parents still alive? Yeah. But my pop lives in Tel Aviv and Yafo. How long has he lived there? So he was from Israel originally or from Cairo and then Israel. And then he was living in New York forever and then the pandemic hit. And New York really wasn't taking it seriously. Do you remember those first couple of weeks where California kind of locked down and knew it was like, yeah, it's cool. Yeah. And I called him and he was visiting Tel Aviv at the time because he had sister had passed a couple of months before he was spending some time with his brother and his family. And I was like, pop.

1:54:59It's like, it's going to get bad in New York. They're not taking it seriously. And Israel was really organized at the time. I was like, you might want to just stick around a little bit longer, like post -pulling your flight back. And then I called him a week or two later and he was like, yeah, okay. So I bought a car and I got a two year lease and an apartment. I was like, wait, I didn't mean like, move. Would he, if you would ask him a year before that, do you feel like New York or Israel is home? What would he have answered? New York. But I think he always thought he would eventually go back.

1:55:31I just think the pandemic moved it up by five or ten years. And my mom lives in Palm Springs now. And does she like it? She seems like it. She's new. She's been there for a couple of months. And your relationship with them is similar to how it's always been? Yeah. I don't see them as often as I'd like. You know, it's just three kids and travel. It's tough. It's been pretty consistent for a long time now. I'm closest though to my brother and my sister. I got really lucky with siblings. I have my siblings are much more interesting and cooler than I am. And I just love hanging out with them. And other than more like, can I stay with you for a month?

1:56:12They'll be like, yes. And I think that's... Do you still have that feeling of like, older siblings slash parents? Yeah, pseudo -parents vibes. Yeah. I try to have it less. I don't think they like that. Particularly my sister because we were 11 years apart. It's a long time. It's a long time. But it's been really nice now for us to be more like friends and less like a parent -child relationship. Plus she can keep you up with like, what's going on on the street? Yeah, yeah, yeah. She's much hip -hoper than I am. I mean, Berlin's a pretty hip -town. When did she move to Berlin? Five years ago. And she loves it.

1:56:46She loves it. She speaks German. She has a dog, a boyfriend, an apartment, a job. A visa. It's crazy. It is, I think, such an impressive thing to do to move to another country with a different language and really kind of embrace it and learn it. It's just a very cool thing. I wish I had done it at some point. So I have a lot of respect for her. The world is such an amazing place. And growing up, first of all growing up anywhere in the United States, there's this myopic feeling of this is the only place in the world. And then if you come from New York, there's nothing outside in New York. You know, there's California, if you're willing to go away as a way, but there's nothing in between.

1:57:25It's nuts. And we're missing such a big picture. And I've been loving spending time in different parts of the world. It's amazing. I feel like it's the same way. Like we spend a year living in London, like I said, and part of it is I wanted my case to spend sometimes somewhere else. Our ability to move around such a big world is insane and we take it for granted. And so I just try to take advantage of it. Like living in London for one of the best perks was you could go to so many other places. You could get to Paris for breakfast on the train. Yeah. And it's nice. The train is great. The train is the best way to travel if you can in New York.

1:58:01But we went everywhere. We went to, we spent time in Scotland and we spent a lot of time in Italy. Great. You know, just try to take advantage of it as best we could. How did you end up spending time in Italy? I went originally, a friend invited me on a trip on a boat. And I went with him and I started doing those on a regular basis when I got invited. And really liked it. And I was like the Amalfi coast and experiencing that. The beautiful place. And then my wife said, I think you'd really like Tuscany. And I said, I don't know. You know, I like the ocean. Yeah. And then we went to Tuscany and I fell in love and we ended up getting a place and spending.

1:58:38It's so amazing. A lot of our time there. We spent some time in the coast of Tuscany last summer with some friends who are Italian and this little town. Nobody spoke any English. Yeah. It's for our friends. And it was just a blast. It's such a good feeling. The food's great. The architecture's unbelievable. The people are so nice. The parenting is totally different. Yeah. You go to the beach and the kids just go. And then I see what noon for lunch. It's more like when we were kids. Yeah. It's much more, um... Yeah, yeah. It's like, let them make some mistakes and learn. It just thought it was so healthy.

1:59:14It was so good. They would make fun of us because we would take our kids home with like six to like get them showered and fed so they could be asleep by seven. And all these Italians were like, what's wrong with you? Hang out. You know, relax. That'd be fine. Is the future decentralized? Uh... It is going to be more... My take is that it'll be more decentralized than it is now. I think... Like any hard question, the answer is not usually simple. But I really do think that... In a world where people have less and less trust in major institutions, there's going to be demand for systems that are more decentralized in nature.

1:59:54But it's not going to be a binary outcome. But, you know, we're trying... We're doing... I'm trying to lean into it. Threads... Our new app is built on this technology, this protocol called activity pub, which essentially allows you to interoperate. So you can... We're just starting to support this now. You can follow people on threads on apps like Macedon. So you don't even have to have threads to see the content. And then eventually you'll be able to follow accounts from servers like Macedon on threads. And even... So in other words, you can use one app and see stuff from different apps. Yes.

2:00:30Like, metacritic for apps. Yeah. And so right now we just took our first baby step towards this. So you can actually follow my threads account and a couple of other people on the Teams account from, you know, other apps like Macedon. Why wouldn't every app want to be part of it? I think there's pros and cons. It's definitely more complicated to build. You know, you have to build things in a different way, because, you know, we have to run all of our... When we start importing content, we have to run all of our safety systems on content, you know, that is in our server. There's technical challenges with that.

2:01:03There's compliance in a lot of legal challenges with that. There's risk, right? Like, if you can follow all the best accounts... Threads accounts without ever downloading threads, why would you ever download threads? It might be bad for the business. I see. But I do think it's where the world is going. And I do think there's benefits. You'll be able to follow accounts that's not on threads. From threads, you'll be able to reach more people even using threads. And reach people who would never use threads or use an app built by a company like Meta. So, you know, for me, with threads as a new app, it was an opportunity to try something new and lean into where I think the world is going.

2:01:42And so, it's taking much longer than I wanted to support this. I think it'll be the better part of a year before we've got meaningful data flowing in both directions from now. But we made this big first step this month. So, it's exciting to see. What's your personal relationship to social media? What do you use? I use Instagram the most, but it's more for work, really. So, I try to use it to understand it and feel the pain that creators feel when they don't get what they want using it. I use WhatsApp a ton. I actually probably use WhatsApp more than Instagram even, because I... Or for communication.

2:02:23Mostly messaging. Like, my dad lives in a country that mostly uses WhatsApp. My sister lives in a country that mostly uses WhatsApp. All my friends from living in the UK and here use WhatsApp. All my family in Israel uses WhatsApp. So, I just have a ton of my life on that. I used Twitter a lot for a long time, because one of the things I really thought was important is that we engage with our critics. And journalists live on Twitter. And so, I thought, why not meet them where they are? So, particularly when I was working on news feed back in the day, I spent a lot of time on Twitter just trying to engage in the conversation.

2:02:58I try to use everything. I use YouTube a lot. I use TikTok a lot more than I do now. What's the difference between TikTok and Instagram? Well, it's less so over time. So, TikTok started almost entirely focused on short from video, and we've started entirely focused on photos. And over time, we've now leaned much more into long from video. And now, TikTok has stories, and they have photos, and they have messages. So, they're overlapping more. I think TikTok is better at helping you explore your interests. So, we're closing that gap. But they've always been very good at what we call exploration -based writing, like we talked about earlier.

2:03:37And if it's certainly been better, just being reliably really entertaining. And I think Instagram has been better at connecting you with people you know, with your friends. And connecting with your friends over content or about content. But we certainly compete head to head in a lot. And we're both fundamentally like a team that works for another company or a bigger company. Them with bite dance and us with meta. So, there's a lot of similarities. And I think we learn from each other. In practice, we're much bigger and smaller in different parts of the world and with different different areas.

2:04:11What about age of users? Is that different? They are the strongest with young people. They have a lot of usage with teens. That's a bread and butter for sure. Would you say Instagram is slightly older? Well, I think we have less usage with teens than they do, but a lot of usage with teens. We have more usage with adults. So, I think we're bigger worldwide. We've got more users. But they've got this incredibly strong position with young people. Which is important. Because young people, they're trendsetters. They're early adopters. When they go to the first place. They can go either way though, because they can either be the trendsetter for the moment and then move on.

2:04:51Yes. Or they can grow with the product depending on what it is. Yes. They move quickly. But when new things happen, they tend to do them first before the rest of the world does. Now everyone message is a lot more that started with teens. You know, that kind of thing is very common. Do you think a new platform can come out today and be successful or is that done? I think it's possible. I think it's hard. The median number of new apps installed by someone in the States, I think, in a month is zero. I would have said the same thing before TikTok got big. And I would have said the same thing before Snapchat got big.

2:05:26Yeah. I think it was a long shot for threads to get big. You know, if you asked me a year ago, we're going to have an app with 100 million users. You have 100 million users? On threads, yeah. That's awesome. Yeah. No idea. And even exist. Is this an idea last December? Amazing. So it's possible. But it's the exception not the rule. Tell me from your perspective looking at it from the outside the story of Snapchat. Snapchat is great. Evan, who runs it, is I think, is brilliant. They really popularized the story's format. They are actually predominantly a messaging app in a way that people don't realize.

2:06:01There's a lot of stories on Snapchat. I didn't know that at all. But teens use it to message images, a ton to each other. They were kind of interesting in that they were hard to use, but maybe in a good way. Because teens that were wanting to be on platforms that their parents are on. So it kind of was this sort of nice balance where like teens could figure it out. But other people were like, I don't know how this is for. They had some trouble in the early years. Getting their Android app to a good place, growing in markets outside of the US or iPhone dominant markets, but they've made a lot of progress since then.

2:06:32I think they have a half a billion users now. I don't know Evan at all. So remember, there's that Sony leak a long time ago. A bunch of his emails with Sony were in that Sony leak doesn't matter. He was really thoughtful and brilliant and insightful. So I don't know him. So I don't know this firsthand at all. But from what I can tell, he's super sharp. There used to be the other photo. There was Tumblr. There was Pinterest Flickr. I remember there was a moment when Tumblr was really good. Yeah, I tried to remember what happened to them. It was kind of interesting because they were kind of embracing the sort of blog or view of the world.

2:07:08When everyone could have their own space, make it their own, and then you could have this aggregation. I think the biggest issue with them is probably that they struggle to navigate the shift to mobile. Like we talked about these big changes at the company. Another big one I didn't mention I probably should have was we went from being predominantly a website to predominantly a app on your phone. That's huge. And we had to learn how to program a different language, it's designed at a different scale. It's a different thing to design something in your pocket than a design something that's on your laptop.

2:07:40I think they struggle with that transition. There's always the smaller players that come up and do interesting things. And sometimes they pop and go away and sometimes they stick around. But over the last year, laps has been a big deal. B -reels has been a big deal. They've been other apps as well. I don't know this. B -reels, you get a text, you get a notification of it and it ran up part of the day. And you had two minutes to post a photo of what you were up to right then and there. How is human taste different than an algorithm? Oh, I think they're completely different. An algorithm is just a way of trying to accomplish an outcome.

2:08:16So whether it is to recommend a movie, you want to watch on Netflix, or the right brand of the order and you want to buy on Amazon, or on Instagram, a photo or a video you might find interesting, it's just a proxy. It's an educated guess. Basically the way it works is for Instagram and we look at all the things you've done before on Instagram. And then we come up with a prediction for how likely you are to like this photo, how like you are to share it with a friend, how like you are to comment on it. And then we add those things up and we create a score. And then we order things by that score.

2:08:52But human taste is the real thing, right? It's what are you actually interested in? Well, taste is even more than just what you're interested in. It's like what are the criteria by which you decide what's good and what's not. An algorithm doesn't have taste. It doesn't mean that it's neutral, it's not. You know, you're deciding what you're optimizing for. Even if it's strictly in chronological order, that's still technically an algorithm and what you're optimizing for. In that case is recency. I'm just going to show you the most recent thing. Not the thing that I think you're the most interested in.

2:09:24But it's an approximation of something, right? You can rank for what I think you're going to find entertaining. You can rank for what I think you're going to send to a friend. You can rank for what I think you're going to watch for a long time. You have to make a decision about what the outcome is that you're optimizing for. But at the end of the day, taste is not only what you like. It's your ability to decipher what you like from what you don't. I think it's infinitely more complicated. Is AI and algorithms the same thing? They overlap. So there are a lot of the algorithms that we use now to try and understand your interests.

2:10:06It's built on top of AI. But an algorithm could be as simple as a set of rules you always follow. Like every time I see someone with a hat, I wave hello. That's technically an algorithm. Tell me the story of likes and getting rid of likes. Oh yeah, this one's contentious. So likes, we first built likes, I think in 2007 or 2008, right around the time I joined. So Leo, I have a friend of mine now, lives in London. He was the designer on that project. The idea was just to give you some lightweight feedback. People like feedback. The more feedback you tend to get on social media, the more you tend to share.

2:10:44An idea of a like was just to give you the lightest weight possible feedback. All of it is tap the spot and let's have a know you liked it. That's the basic idea. Now, it's evolved and I think one, the idea behind hiding likes was to depressurize the experience. So you'd focus a little bit less on your like count and a little bit more on the content. Less like a game because I remember there was a period of time where people talked about trying to game -ify things. Yeah. Because it made people engage. And our hope was that it would measurably improve your well -being. Like there was that grand in aspiration.

2:11:20In practice, it didn't do that. The way we try to understand someone's well -being is you ask them questions that correlate with well -being based on academic research. And in just in practice, the data didn't back up the sort of hypothesis. And it also was very polarizing. Some people really liked it and some people really didn't. So we decided to make it an option as opposed to just the default. And I wasn't getting rid of likes. It was making the counts private. So you could see how many people liked your thing. But you wouldn't see how many people liked other people's things. I was very excited about it.

2:11:57And I had hoped it would work. And it didn't pan out. And when we test things like that, we have to talk about them because it's such a big change. It's going to get covered anyways. We might as well explain our intentions. But as a result, we ended up unintentionally building up a lot of excitement about it. And then when it didn't work out, some people were frustrated. If you build something new and give people an option, you said before, it's impossible to get a read on whether it works in general. But is there a benefit in letting people choose and seeing what happens? There are benefits and there are costs.

2:12:32I mean, the benefit, I think, is that not everyone's different. And so the same reason why we do ranking and we believe in personalization is the best version of Instagram for you is different than the best version for me. The cost is the more options you have, the more complicated the experience gets. The harder it is to understand the experience. As a user, the harder it is for us to understand and maintain the experience as the platform. So it's a balance. I think in general, I believe in providing controls. But I think they should be simple, powerful and easy to understand. I wonder if there's another category besides follow.

2:13:11It's almost more than a follow, like a trusted source. Oh, yeah. That could be interesting. We have one called favorite. The name isn't quite favorite, it's different though. Yeah, the name isn't quite what it is. It's actually not really a trusted source either. But a trusted source would be interesting. Are you interested in that more for you wanted to affect what you see or what your friends see? More what I see. If I'm interested in a lot of different things. But I could pick trusted sources where I know I'm not going to miss anything from these people. Yeah. I might use a service more if it was less of a grab bag.

2:13:49Yeah, yeah. That's what favorite is trying to do. It allows you to basically pin their stuff to the top. So I've marked only three or four people as favorites. You can mark a lot more if you want. And whenever they post, they show up at the top of the little star. So I know that's the other key thing about controls. You have to close the loop. You have to show that it's working. Yeah. If you say I want to see less about baking. Yeah. And we show you less about baking when it's working. You don't know. And when it doesn't work, you're like, this thing is broken. Whereas if you say I always want to see my wife stuff at the top.

2:14:21Every time you see it, if there's a little marker that that's happening, then you can build trust. What's the best project you ever part of that never took off? It's so many projects. I know it was the best, but my first project as a PM was on a project where we made software for a phone. We actually built a phone with HTC and actual phone, a Facebook phone, called the Facebook home. And it was a spectacular failure. Was it a physical device or was it an operating system? It was built on top of Android, but it was a physical device with a specific version of Android that we had made. Wow. And I learned more in that year than probably in any other year of my career.

2:15:01Because my first year as a PM, I learned about hardware, I learned about marketing, I learned about PMmanship, I learned about working with policy and legal. I learned about working on a company priority. I learned about working with a small, but mean, super senior team. I don't think I slept much. And what was good about the phone and why didn't it work? There are a few things that were good about it. The idea was that your phone should be, instead of organiser on apps, it should be organiser on people. It's a more human way to think about the world. I think that was an aspiration that turned out to be less effective in practice, but a nice idea.

2:15:42I think a lot of it was pretty well designed. Actually, a lot of the design ideas we have now folded into the actual experiences over time, like how you can chat on Android across apps, works that way now, some of the full screen design works that way now on Instagram. It's a lot of good design ideas came in there, but it's not a great... I'm not trying to say it was a great idea or a great project. At the end of the day, people get to decide whether or not something is useful or not, and they decided it wasn't that useful. But it was just a great experience, even though it was humbling. It sounds great.

2:16:14And it was my first project as a PM, which was really trial by far. How would you say the world is different since social media? To me, I really think of social media as fundamentally just an extension of the Internet. And what the Internet allows and social media particularly allows is for anyone with a compelling idea to find an audience. It used to be that if you... no matter what you made, if you wanted to really reach people, you needed to work through some sort of intermediary. If you're a journalist, you had to work for a local newspaper who owned the trucks and the truck routes. If you were a musician, you had to get on one of the 40 radio stations.

2:17:02If you were making a sitcom, there was only a handful of networks. Gatekeepers. Yeah. What the Internet allows for in social media amplifies is the ability for anybody to reach anybody. Because it reduces the cost of distributing the thing to essentially zero and it makes it so that you can discover anything or anyone. Like you can sum out a content it seems. The podcast you consume the news you read probably comes from all over the world. That would not be possible 50 years ago. And so I think that has all these crazy downstream consequences and some of them are good and some of them are bad.

2:17:43But you're essentially connecting everybody. And it means that there's way more opportunity for more creatives to succeed. There's way more opportunity for more niche interests to find an audience. There's way more opportunity for small businesses to compete. But there's also more opportunity for bad actors to achieve harm. Our responsibility as platforms is to maximize the good and minimize the bad and be transparent about how. But at the end of the day I feel a little bit more like we are almost inevitable by part of the Internet. It's opposed to anything else. It's really great. This is fun.

2:18:26This is Grade 5's. You got a great spot. Thank you for talking to me.

2:18:49Thank you.