20VC: Instagram CEO, Adam Mosseri on Threads: The Journey from 0-100M Users; What Worked, What Didn't and the Plans Ahead | Instagram: Biggest Mistakes, Successes, Misconceptions, TikTok Competition & The Future of Social Media; Interest Graph or Friend G

21:56And they're just an excuse to start a conversation. Yes, put your up to it, but maybe it's a question, but it's just a reason to give someone a buzz. How do you think there's, I think that's like a really fundamentally challenging product paradigm to navigate through though Which is like a large portion of your audience doesn't want it won't use it But it will ignite a different segment that's really challenging because you got this broad swath For you you need to incorporate it for everyone knowing that only one segment we use it Yeah, so there's a couple ways to deal with it I think it's super valuable to be willing to prioritize certain segments over others We care about young people and we care about creators most because young people I mean, they grew up, but also they are where creators gravitated to over time and they said trends and they often serve as a bell weather.

22:40And creators, I just think are becoming more and more important over time for a bunch of reasons we can go into. So the first thing is to be willing to make that prioritization decision and be like, look, I'm going to eat some cost to overall app engagement, or even overall revenue in the short term, because I think this is going to be better and healthier for the company, the long term or for Instagram in this case in the long term, because either we'll break out of a local maximum or will be more defensible. And then two, I think it's super important if you wanna keep the experience simple and I don't think we've done a good enough job at this to embrace certain ideas like progressive disclosure.

23:12So an app should become more complicated as it needs to be and not become complicated if you don't. And so notes is a nice example because if you're not a friend posted or not, it's just the act of now trade. It just shows you who's on right now. And you might not even know that notes are a thing. But if people start to share notes, then it starts to show you both notes and act of now next to each other that's relatively elegant because you can think of your note as a status and you're active now as a status and so it's sort of seamless but then if you don't it kind of elegantly trends into something simpler.

23:42Is simple always better in design on them? No, and I'm going to get crucible high by a bunch of designers for saying so I have a strong bias towards simplicity I think Instagram has benefited greatly from being simple but I think to say it's always better is a mistake. I think of simplicity as a means to an end and you have to be clear about what that end is. Maybe it's usability, maybe it's broad appeal, but there are instances where a more complicated thing is going to be a better means to that end. There's one portion of Instagram where you need like eight clicks back to get back to main feed and I'm like, for fuck's sake Adam, like...

24:18Yeah, no, it's at the... It's at the nibbriot. No. It's too, the app is too complicated. I mean, let's be serious. I think it's gotten One more sample over the last 12 months or so. We consolidated some of the design patterns and primitives, remove some of the tabs, but it's still more to do. When you manage a large team and they get excited about a new idea, they often want to just build a new thing, and it's tougher and more work to extend an existing pattern or primitive for a new use case than to just invent your own new one because you have to coordinate and you have to maybe snack quite a specialized for this thing that you're going so excited about.

24:50But if you don't do that, you just slowly add more and more complexity to the app in a way that I think burns you over the long run Sort of death by a thousand cuts. So we actually have like I was talking to our head of design and I'm one of our product leads Two days ago about how do we carve out a certain percentage of the team's time to just Unship things that aren't used that much or don't create that much value and Proactively look for opportunities to consolidate things to make them simple and easier to use. What do you think you should Unship that doesn't create a much better? I wish Arya G.

25:20think you haven't tapped the e -cudal shit. One of the things that we did on ship was the activity feed. The activity is like your notifications. And there was a place you could go to see all the things your friends had liked. And it was fun. Like, he was a great way to discover new content, but it's a little bit creepy. Just be like, I'm going to check out... Well, it's Adam, like... I was like, you got a lot of... This? No, that seems a little weird. I got so much hate in my DMs about that. It was less than 1 % of the users who used it. But that's still, you know, and they DM people. Oh, you should see my DMs, yeah.

25:51Really? A lot of DMs, yeah. I just get, it's my birthday, all the way from my birthday, it's a blue check mark. I like to go in once or twice a week and respond to a couple people. Reals was such an important moment, I think. I mean, it was such a strategic, directional decision for the company. Is it the momentous decision that I'm suggesting it is? And can you take me to that decision? And was it just like a, we're going to fucking get potato? Yeah, I mean, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was been huge for us. Reels is pushing 50 % of time spent in the app at this point, not quite there.

26:20And before Reels, we had short form video. But I don't think we designed the format to really embrace the form factor of a phone. And I think Reels being full screen, sound on is more fun and immersive, particularly during the pandemic, when you're not bothering anybody because you're home. Focus on creators, first person, all of these things were ways to embrace where the world is going and the platform in which we were building. And we hadn't leaned in all of that. and TikTok's rise was just mediocre, and for years of struggling to get anything to be attentive. When you see a competitor do something, I think it's super important to be humble enough to learn from it, and sometimes that will mean building something that looks a lot like it, and sometimes it means figuring out what needs its meeting and how you might meet those needs in a way that's more native to what you do, and then a range of options in between.

27:05We lost a whole year. I still go back to this, this movie when my biggest regrets. The first version of Reels we built was built on top of stories. It just didn't work. Why? It was because stories was growing, so we thought stories would be a good foundation on which to lean into short form video. But the thing that's amazing about stories is how deep pressurized they are. People share so much to stories. And there's just way more stories than anyone has time to see, or most people have time to see. So the read through read is very low. I don't know what it is, but it's maybe the teens. You can't build a short form video product that particularly focuses on creators.

27:40If most of the videos they create aren't seen. But we were trying to keep Instagram simple. We were trying to double down on the momentum of stories. We were trying to lean into how younger people use Instagram when they use stories way more than they use feed. And we lost nine to 12 months and we ended up getting it right by leaning into feed and making a couple other strategic changes around recommendations and unconnected content that we're right. That's a really hard decision after nine months of work. The sunk cost of years, I ain't just fucking keep going. But this was all pre -COVID -19.

28:11If we had had a solid foundation before everyone was at home and to spending a whole bunch of time on their phones, the whole trajectory of the app would have been completely different. And instead, these things all landed, but some before but a lot after. And how did it change this trajectory? If you wouldn't replay this, if you could write it the first time. I think how big we are relative to the competition would be super different. And we're catching up, we're growing really fast. I think we're growing the fastest of the big players, but it's very hard. Because if you're going to try and compete and we do, right, when it's a competition has gotten fierce or every year since I've been on the company, you can't just make something as good as the competition.

28:47You have to make something that's better because why would I bother switching if it's just as good or even if it's only 10 % better? So easy reels is better than TikTok. And for certain segments and not for others, like TikTok is amazing and a couple of things. They are amazing at exploration -based ranking, so discovering new talent and helping new talent break. We, for a long time, had a strong bias towards showing people things that we were pretty confident they would like because a lot of other people liked them and it's easier to rank that kind of content. And that sort of reinforces the existing hierarchy.

29:17And TikTok was really good at building the systems from the ground up to be more content first and to go find things that you might love that you never would have heard up before. And therefore it was also just really entertaining, really entertaining. I think they still are the most well -executing competitor I think we've ever faced. There's a couple others that are up there, but they're what I think at the top of that. I think the fastest meaning. In the video space, yeah. The other folk were really fast and really good and I respect a lot is telegram. Telegram is just really good. They built something really well and they can pivot quickly and they decide to do something and they get it out.

29:52You know how before I was like, I'm friendly. I have nice questions to my about it. This might seem unfriendly. I'm sick of that with love. I spent five years running this thing. Everything in Instagram has seemed infinitely more friendly. This is going to be great. But when you look at stories and you look at its origins with snap and Alex, when the team of shultz told me that it was actually hell from cacao, they disagree. But I'm sure that it won't. And then we look at quite a few of Facebook's innovations and threads most recently. It's Facebook just a very efficient copy machine. I think we're very good at optimizing things.

30:29and we are willing to, when somebody pioneers a new format to go and adopt that format if we think it's going to be coming into Street Standard. Stories is a good example. Stories is easy stories everywhere. I mean, stories on YouTube. There's stories on Pinterest for a while. Obviously Twitter did it for a while. Part of our DNA is that we are competitive. We are always worried that the world will change around us and we won't change fast enough to keep up. So we are willing to take risks that sometimes really blows up in our face. Can I ask you a hard one as well? It's just like how do you determine between an innovation that is sustainable and you should learn from and be afraid?

31:06Versus one that I don't know if it's sustainable. You know, we've seen the rise of B -Real. Yeah. People have very strong opinions on whether it's sustainable or not. How do you determine between the two? I mean, I think you try to make sure that you're understanding what is a fundamental human need that's being met and is that need going to probably persist in or not. Instagram has changed a ton over the years, but a lot of it stayed the same. But those fundamental needs are the same. And so when you're looking at either a trend or a competitor or how someone is abusing or a community is abusing the app, then you can learn a lot from how people abuse your app.

31:38If you can explain it not only as based on some sort of viral mechanic, but also based on it meeting a need in a fundamentally richer or better or different way, then you want to play in that space. What have you learned from how people abused the app? Early Facebook days before we had photos, people would just kept teaching their profile picture like every day, multiple times a day. I'm like, oh, so the people want to share photos. Maybe we should build that. Now, are you ready for threads? Yes, I mean, no, but yes. But if we start on threads, the numbers, and it's just been insane. It has been insane.

32:11So the first off, and this is the worst interview question ever. You know when someone wins Wimbledon? And they're like, how do you feel? I actually, I wanted the Wimbledon yesterday, and they asked one of the winners of this, and the woman said, how do you feel? Yeah, it was like, happy. You look good. But one never knows when they launch a new product. You can get a lot of hate. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Did you expect the speed of adoption for miles? I thought we had something, but look, when you're launching a new app, it's always more likely to fail and succeed. The median number of new apps installed a month is zero for the average person.

32:47So you're just, you're swimming upstream. But I did say I was more excited about this one than I have been about anything in a while, but I did want to recognize it was a big risk. And look, the numbers are staggering, but it's just sign ups. It's way easier to build something that people are willing to try, then build something that people want to continue to use in a month or a year from now. So this is the best first eight days I could have ever possibly imagined. But what really matters is how well do we iterate, how quickly do we improve the experience, so that it is compelling enough that people will continue to use it over the long run.

33:18We're going to get into retention. I have a group with by 10 of the best product leaders in the world in it. The Shabby Offender, don't you? Yes. You actually have to be on the show first. Apart, one of them said the most important question for me is, can you get him to talk about what went into boot shopping, the Threads Grosh, Day 1? I mean, this is one of the key reasons for the success, is that you sit in with your Instagram account. It's not a separate account. And you can import your identity, but you can also essentially import your graph by just following everyone you already follow. And you can follow people who are not even on threads yet, so that when they do join, that you automatically are connected.

33:58And so that we can even tell you, hey, you've got 10 ,000 followers on this app already. You haven't even installed it yet. Do you want to try it? Pretty compelling value proposition. And so I think that was that was key. Now look, I do think the public conversation interest graph isn't necessarily the one you're the same interest as what you follow on Instagram, which is why we allow the graphs to fork. We will build over time, I think, a graph sync option. So if you want, just to have the same graph you can, and we can make sure that stays in sync for you. But I think it was also very important, particularly to the team, to allow people to choose a different experience, or a different graph if they wanted one.

34:37And so I think we've found a really good balance between making it really stupid, easy to just pull everything in on day one. but also if you cared and you wanted to curate, you could go do that. How much for no -one like you actually think there is? I think if it is that my brain and my body, if I'm being kind of known as body on Instagram, it's Instagram's my body of recipes, personal trainers, and like any body stuff. And then Twitter's where I gain in slashed advice. And so if I got a feed of like Gordon Ramsay, I'd be like, ah. He's on there. Yeah, I'm sure he is. I know he was on his butt.

35:14How should we think about that? I would laugh actually. How do you actually think about it? I think it's gonna be a very personal choice. I think for a lot of people, it's just gonna be easier not to have to think about it and just be like, it's 80 % the same anyway. I just want you to keep in sync. Did you think about Stony and from No Followers? Yes. We talked about it, but we thought that for enough people, probably the majority, that there would be enough over that there would make a lot of sense to just allow you to quickly do it. Now you can also select, you don't have to select the whole group.

35:40It just seemed like it would be the majority use case. And what threads I think is a really nice balance, where it's different enough that there's a reason for it to be separate app, that we debated that a lot internally. But because there's a heavy overlap in terms of the interest graph between what conversations you want to be privy to and what photos and videos you want to be keeping up with, that it really allowed us to lean into that. And it doesn't know how it would have been successful if you had to bootstrap the graph from scratch. As someone on the show said, once that bluntly the social graph is terrible at protecting what you like, and just because your friends like it doesn't mean you like it, and that we have totally moved away from the friend graph, and the interest graph is the future of social.

36:20Do you agree with that? No, I think it's too black and white. I do think there's tension. Who you care about and who you want to hear from are not the same. What do you want your Instagram to be experienced to be if I ask you about in the abstracts over a long term is probably pretty different than what you'd like and interact with on a daily basis in the app. That's the tension between sort of first order and second order preferences. And so things are always a bit more complicated. The thing that's really working about Instagram right now with Reels is the connection between the two. So you can see a bunch of amazing videos from people you know or don't know, but aren't necessarily your friends.

36:57And then you can share them with your friends and deabs. And that brings your friends back to the app and then they discover something and then they might share it with someone else. The thing that I think people don't always realize is video by its nature as a format is actually really challenging for all the old social networks. It puts a lot of downward pressure on the ads business because if you watch one video for 10 seconds, you would have before, you know, scrolled through four posts and probably seen an ad. And so it's a challenge. Actually video tends to be good for time spent and bad for everything else.

37:29Bad for revenue, bad for comments, bad for likes, bad for sense, etc. Well, it works about reals because we have the inbox integrated into Instagram is this sort of flywheel where you consume things, you send them to friends, then these sort of conversation, maybe they use Instagram more, they want to check out what's going on today, they discover something they send it back to you or to another friend. And so the fact that growing video has massively grown sense, which is a pure friend of friend interaction, Even if you take out the real shares, because they start conversations, I might send you a funny, you know, football clip and then we talk about something else.

38:01It's really, really exciting because everything that we did in the video space before that I was involved in at Instagram and Facebook came at the cost of people's connections and reals is the opposite. These things can be symbiotic if you design the experiences thoughtfully, but there doesn't mean there are no tensions. So do you think threads and reals is kind of the integration of the interest graph and the social rough coming together in one single plan. I mean, I think it's too early to tell on the thread side. I think Reels is embracing that people want to consume video even later on, share as much video and giving people a way to connect with friends that embraces that preference.

38:39And I think recommendations also help with that. So I think that's sort of the intersection of entertainment and connection or friends. I think it's what's kind of working there with threads. I mean, we'll see. We will see it. I'm just refreshing the dashboard. Nice shirt, everything. Hey, days in. It's for the big, the lights are on. Like they're working. There was quite an influence strategy around. Yeah, we mentioned Gordon Ramsay. The influence of activation, I saw it and I was like, yeah, I didn't know. Oh my God, sensational. Such a shout out to you. Partnerships to you. My product group was, you know, like, you know, oh, you're so right.

39:11My question to you is like, how does that plan go with the influence of activation strategy? I'm just fascinated. So it was very clear. When you're starting something new, there's always a question which is like you need to get people on it so that the creators will come or do you need to get creators on it so the people will come. And my biggest fear specifically with threads and I think the team had the same fear was that people would show up and there just be nothing there. And be like, I'm out. It's nice. And we learned this actually from IGTV a lot too, which is we should focus on the creator side.

39:43Because also feeds are very head heavy in general and so is text. So basically that's to say that you have to assume that Twitter and other feed products in general tend to have most of the kind of Consumeless produced by a small number of people so even more so than stories by a lot actually So we're like, okay, how do we get there to be a critical mass of content early in? We are trying to create something that was a lot less angry space You often I think in a way you can't measure can set the tone for a product with some of the decisions you make up front So we had always known early that we wanted to get a bunch of craters into the app early We actually wanted to do it for longer really did it for I think it was like 40 hours and then the partnerships team did a really really good job So I'm see been I've had you just like choose like J .Lo and Gordon Ramsay.

40:29Oh, yeah No, no, it's not me. We have a great small lean mean partnerships team And so we picked verticals that we thought would be important because Mostly we looked for verticals where they already did well on Instagram and there was a vibrant commentary community around that. So we do gray with athletes. And also sports commentary is its own genre in a way. And should I be offended? Yeah, you should be slat. Well, we weren't focusing on tech coming in my product, but we were focused on tech this time. I'll earn it one day. I'll have to shift a couple more things that work. No, we weren't going after tech.

41:02We weren't going after news. We weren't going after politics. We were focused on musicians. We're focused on fashion. We're focused on athletes. We're focused on beauty, we're focused on actually all of those have these amazing, you know, creators and personalities that people are interested in and all these amazing commentators who talk about that world and Look everyone's gonna come like we're not gonna try to be an exclusive club here But that's what we lean into for the lunch and so the partnerships team did a really good job. Do you pay them? No, you pay them. No, we talked about it But no, it's not scalable and as soon as you start a very slippery slope You have to build a platform that provides enough value to someone that they want to share.

41:42If it's really going to be sustainable over the long run. It's not that you should never pay. We've done performance -based incentives on Instagram before, and I think there are targeted ways to do it. It's not a scalable solution, so it's got to be a way to learn or a way to bootstrap. You do post Multimolness. It went very well as an influencer at your strategy. Yes. Why? I think it went well for a few reasons. One is that we had gone a bunch of people ready. We actually had to launch earlier so the partnership team had already engaged everyone and then we had to delay So they were like ready at a moment's notice because we had originally wanted to be up by VidCon That helped being opinion about the verticals helped I think letting a bunch of people a few thousand people in on this was Tuesday I think we launched Wednesday at midnight UK time also built a huge amount of hype around it We ended up having to pull up the launch again because on Wednesday we figured out that the we did this pre -order thing on iOS just to kind of like build some buzz.

42:33And we found out that we couldn't control what time the Apple App Store delivered the app to people's phones and it would just deliver on midnight Thursday local time. So we became the number one store and the App Store in Japan and you couldn't log in because it was like, I mean, that's a product rule. That's a product rule. It was a Wednesday warning in California. That's why we had to pull it up again. So we ended up being like, okay, what's the next biggest most important country that's gonna hit midnight. So we can either cancel the pre -orders, that seems terrible, or pull up the launch.

43:07And so, UK was the next one that was gonna hit midnight, which is why it was midnight UK time that we opened the floodgates. Cause otherwise every UK footballer would have gotten the head pre -ordered, it would have had the app on their phone and they would have logged in and it would have been like, error. Or something like that. That's like, it's gonna be the worst launch of all time. But that actually ended up playing our favorite because I was like, that created more mystery and excitement. Or like it moved up again or moved up and said, just the whole thing ended up playing. Are you getting any sleep at this time?

43:37I don't get a lot of sleep. I'm just like, it feels a little bit acting. Yeah. The tough thing about living in the UK and working for a California -based company is the hours. And I have little, so I have a seven and five and a three -year -old boy. So that's the tough thing. Did you sleep before? Have you just adjusted to this? I slept a lot more before. I've aged a lot this year. I don't, we didn't mean to try to bring to the sea, but I had a lot less gray hair. Dude, I think you look great. Oh, I see. Yeah, no, I look great. My question now is like, I suppose that some of you like into like a consumer social OG about the influencer activation strategy.

44:10And they were like, it's like importing the landed aristocracy to the US. Each platform, Mr. Beast on YouTube, the Kardashians on Instagram, the media on TikTok, they're like native to their own platform. Yeah. And this felt like an importing landed aristocracy. How do you feel when you hear that and it's not right overall? I don't know about aristocracy, but I do think one of the things that played to our favor is there are a lot of platforms to do amazing work with creators out there. I talked about how TikTok is really good at breaking new talent. I think YouTube is the best at doing sustained, consistent payouts with their revshare program because long form videos I think are a lot more conducive to that.

44:48But if you look at all the different platforms, Instagram is the most popular in the credit community as far as we can tell. So the most creators use it. Now more creators over time are using multiple platforms because they're becoming just more savvy and trying to make sure they diversify their risk, which I think is smart. You know, we're not always the most loved, but we've been the most important platform overall, not for an individual creator, but overall in the community, I think, for a while now. So we had this very rich, vibrant community of probably tens of millions of creators that we could just tap into with this.

45:20Then it ended up taking out an energy of itself. As soon as you get enough, not even big names necessarily, but like interesting names. Then everyone's worried about missing out. And so then everybody tries it too, and then it creates a bit of a cycle, which means you know how that you would love to have. I'm threads. Oh, there's a bunch of people playing number one. As my role or as a person, I think a huge one will be beyond say, in terms of my role, in terms of like culture relevance. Taylor Nation, Swift Nation came over, but not Taylor Swift. Yeah, but that'll also be a big deal. She's her reaches insane.

45:52For me, based on my personal interests, I'm really bummed about how long it's going to take to support Europe because I'm a football fan and there's so many amazing footballers in Europe. To me, there's obviously the market and reaching a bunch of people. But it's also getting more and more now than amazing. Yeah, now that I'm messy. Well, messy is like, maybe you have a US account when it goes over to my hand. What? Well, now look at Logan from Saudi Arabia. But football and F1 are so important worldwide and I care every bit as much about making sure that the platform is culturally relevant than the sort of the big number of users.

46:29What did you make of your mentioned kind of this unchallotive in Abing Creates? Twitter recently, I've just seen screenshots on Twitter. Yeah, like payments were applied and I want my fucking payment. Yeah. I think you have to think long. I think for a lot of creators it's a business and I think we've been trying to figure out ways to Support those businesses for a while now, but I think you can't just pay Everybody who's a creator except those tens of millions of creators that just adds up to money That's going to just completely destroy your business model So you have to figure out ways to give them tools to make money in my opinion And so we focus on things like subscriptions which are relevant to a subset of creators But that's growing facilitating branded content deals That's actually going very well on Instagram and we do some payments as well but that's more for bootstrapping and then for a segment that's creating real content that's really dropping a lot of incremental value and revenue for Instagram.

47:16So I think it's going to get a bunch of attention for the next couple of days, but I think it's hard if it's unpredictable. If you're trying to run a business you kind of need to know roughly what you're going to make ahead of time and if you're kind of getting these lottery type checks, I think it's much more harder to plan. Well, that's a common complaint I've heard about how TikTok's payments compare to YouTube's payments for instance, which are much more predictable. They're trying new things. I don't know where Twitter's gonna be any year. They're shaking things up and all sorts of ways over there.

47:44Can I ask Facebook have five friends or six friends with like a retained user? Yeah. Do you have a metric as such with threats? We don't know what the number is yet. I do think you're gonna need two different things. You're definitely gonna need a critical mass, I think of friends, and then you're gonna need a quality of, maybe it's a critical mass on your interest graph side as well. Now we can bootstrap you by showing you recommendations If you don't follow, and you want to start on the interest side, it's much more difficult to do that on the friend side But by the way that number for Facebook back in the day very wildly by country like in Japan It was like six and Indonesia was a hundred and six or something backers because cultural differences Internet usage differences meant that that tipping point very drastically from country to country a lot of social Consumer app or consumer social apps get a lot of buzz Admittedly this has been unlike almost any other before.

48:34How do you think about retention? How do we retain that community? It's just the primary focus. It's gotta be the thing that the team focuses on for the next couple months. I think we have to do a number of different things. We have to plug a bunch of obvious missing features. What are the biggest missing features? Following feed, edit button, supporting content of Europe. I'm actually really excited about the Federer's work that's coming and supporting activity. When does Europe count? Just months, many months, minimum, February. I mean, I'd be excited about that, honestly, at this point. Law is coming out next year, making sure that we're proactive, the compliant with them.

49:04It's about data separation, but it's also about being able to verify all of the statements you make about how data works. On that, and if we're going to make claims, we have to make sure that we prove those claims are true, and that just that work is a lot of time. Are you a politician or are you a politician? I'm not a politician. I mean it in the nicest way. When you get to a stage where you're as big as Facebook, Instagram, or... and you will see, sometimes I forget that I have the job and I can say, once I try to pinch myself, I feel like this is a pretty cool wild thing you got. I think I'm very lucky to have my job.

49:39The way I think about it is, it's my job to build a team and set them up for success by pointing them at the right problems and giving the right support and feedback along the way. Sometimes that means a more specific direction and sometimes that means honestly just being a glorified shit umbrella. Sometimes I joke because I do it with a lot of customer service requests. I joke that I'm highly overpaid customer service rep. It just depends on the need, but it is a weird balance because you think that the more senior you get, the more you just get to make decisions. But in a lot of ways, your influence becomes more and more indirect.

50:15It's a very odd experience sometimes. What have you done from working with Malk? Malk is always holding an incredibly high bar. One of his fears is that we fail hitting our goals all the way down and so you know you can crush it and then he's like Set the goal a little higher still so the whole of a higher still and I think there's a real value to that Which is just like really really setting a high bar He's also very willing to take risks and A way that sometimes is infuriating but I think it's very good for the company over the long run Like for instance on threads He was the one was like you guys should try to build a separate app and we were really trying to figure out a way to do it in the main app because it seemed like it would be much more likely to succeed.

50:55And he was by far the most convicted about taking the risk. It's a risk. It doesn't lock in its face, but behind the people forgot. Yeah, it's still a risk. I think if you fail, I think it can damage your reputation, it can damage your brand, it can make people less likely to want you to succeed in the future. I think it's an opportunity cost. The team is getting smaller, not bigger right now. And so, it's not a big team. I like you as the threats team. It's getting real now. The team really properly formed a little less than five months ago or five months ago We started working on it as a little before but the team didn't really form properly until maybe five months ago dozens 50 something engineers three pms three designers It's pretty lean, but they're really really good engineers designers pms They're scientists researchers.

51:37So the opportunity cost is not properly. I think evaluated by the number Can I screw a business perspective? How does the business and monetization potential differ when comparing the video visual of Instagram Reels versus text -based nature of threats? I actually think it's gonna be easier the ad formats will be less immersive and I think that's the cost But it is a text -based feed is about the highest Modulation efficiency of any online business. I've seen I think that uncertain or basic the two the number of things you consume per hour It's just incredibly high because it's so light, which allows ads to really seamlessly integrate.

52:16And we felt into this business model with Facebook. You know, we were putting ads in this right hand column side of the website, like don't look over here. And the shift in mobile forced us to do it and end up being one of the best businesses of all time. When you think about success with threads, what do you think successes do you have a matric yard stake? For me, the thing I'm going to look at the most is probably for the verticals we care about most. what does the creator community engagement look like? That's going to be a bellwether for how big the app is over the longer run. And then, I mean, right now, the thing I care about most is retention.

52:51There's no good signal now, because it hasn't been long enough and everyone has signed up as not everyone, but most of the people who have signed up have been early adopters and they use things differently. So really, just don't know yet. So the two things I'll focus on most for the next year will be the creator community, not only how many of them use the app, but how many of them share the app, and then retention for the average user. Those are the two things that really would kill tracts will make it not a success. Why would create is not share on threads? I mean, there's also some reasons if you get more reach elsewhere.

53:19Obviously Twitter is definitely a risk. Then is it just for your time? So I try to make content. Often they don't just make content for a living. They do something else for a living too. There's a, you know, you're a musician, you're a footballer. And then you can't bless. Yeah, exactly. And so is the return worth your time? If it degrades in quality, slow or toxic or buggy, all of his O -sinks can hurt you too. Can I just say you're slightly weird, Turn? I like the pre -ember for this question. Yeah, it's just like, you're a great dude. And I joke about the references, but they were phenomenal.

53:53Really? Yeah, they were indeed here. And I'm also like, you're three kids as well. Yeah. And a happy marriage. And you see Evan's, I'm like, oh, a fucking easy job. Yeah. My question to you is when you look at all of it, how do you have the personal side and not losing in teamwork? And being very open, I'm nervous about opening my life up to the personal and losing in teamwork. Yeah, what advice would you have? I just think you have to be really intentional about putting pen to paper on your priorities. I'm constantly feeling like I'm doing a shit job at something, I'm either not there for my kids enough, or I'm not there for my team enough, before I missed something that I could have helped the team avoid and blew up on our face.

54:35I'm a shit friend because I've never had my life as Instagram and after ads and my kids and my wife. And then I barely see friends which I feel terrible about. So every year I put down a few intentions. They used to be very measurable and I would like grade myself within the year to become PMing my life kind of way. I got really good advice from a really close friend named Andre recently which was just Just write yourself like a mantra, like a thing that's hit yourself, and just say it every night before you go to bed. And that'll be the way to keep that intention top of mind, and it'll help you actually better the back to that intention.

55:12So every year I do it, it changes every year, and it gets simpler usually every year. What is it this year? So now the mantra is to care of yourself, love your children, support your wife, be there for your friends. Do you think you can do them? What I mean by that is actually I, and someone told me that you have what, your family, and your friends. Yeah. You can really do too at once. Yeah, and definitely not there for my friends. As much as I would like to be. Occasionally, but not as much as I would like to be. I'm hoping we look at him back to the US where he'll help put X, so it'll be a little bit easier, but we'll see.

55:44If you could cool up yourself before your first child, when you're never stay expecting that first child to come. Oh, yeah. What would you tell yourself before becoming that father? It's a raise to the starting line. Before you have your first, You're so focused on the birth because it's terrifying, particularly obviously for the mom most actually do all the work. But you're like, how's this going to change my life? My brother was calling me a lot before he had his first and was like trying to wrap his head around about how his life was going to change. And I was like, this is the most absurd exercise.

56:12Having a kid means you can't plan for how your life is going to change. All you know, it's going to change, it's going to change a lot. And now it's going to continue to change. When you spend all this time focused on the birth, focus on how much paternity you're leaving, when to take it, how much paternity you leave, when to take it. But this person's coming into your life for two decades. The more important thing is how are you going to adjust how you do what you do so you can be there for them for 18 years? Not do you take eight weeks or 12 weeks or six weeks of leave in year one that they're not going to remember.

56:38By the way, as a dad, your job is basically to take care of them on. And so I would just say it's a race to the starting line. I was way too focused on day one and way not ready for the rest of it. How did you adjust how you work? I started working less. I just ran out of hours. I used to come in really early. I used to come in, I used to try to take like the 6 -12 shot on the morning and get in the city as I could and then come home after dinner and I just couldn't do that anymore. My goal is always to see the boys in the morning and the evening and I get it three or four hours of work days each week.

57:06When you say be there for mum, I actually got that advice yesterday from a billionaire hedge fund investor. The only thing that matters is that he said to the same question I just asked you, the thing I would tell myself is don't worry about being there for the kids, being there for mum. In the beginning, yeah. What does that mean being that, Mum? Is that like a hug at even? I'm really asking with the granny that's been back. Come on, this is like... Well, it's just such a... I mean, I have boys and they're all Mum and Sports, so they all much preferred their Mum. I'm only now remotely relevant, and this is like seven years in.

57:37How? 75 and three. Wait until that's 30. Yeah, yeah, they want a girlfriend. Is it doing that? They're getting Instagram, I think? They're gonna be like, yeah, they're gonna... We don't know what I do at all. As someone asked Nico what I did the other day, and he said, I think he moves around chairs at the office. And I was like, what? I was like, that is kind of what I do. I mean, like giving birth is a huge physical thing. I think people don't realize. So the physical carver is real. If your wife, oh, your partner breast feeds, that's a huge thing. You can, you know, you should change all the diapers you can and do all the things you can, but the truth is, they're going to need more from them, I'm not in the dad.

58:08And so what you can do best to help the kid is to support your wife or whatever way she needs. Whether it's, you know, she needs you to take care of the house or take care of work or whatever it is. because everyone's different, to so that the better place she's in, the better place the kids in, in my experience. Have you done the love line, which thing? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I didn't do the test, but it's very clear. Well, she would love line. I'm all physical touch. All physical touch. Well, it's us. Acts of service and quality time, but it's different. Quality time is just like tie. It should just be tie.

58:39She wants me to be her route. She doesn't need me to talk to her. She wants me to come with her in the party. She won't talk to me the whole night, but it's really important that I'm there. So it's like proximity. if he is her version of Quality Time and definitely like you don't take out the garbage we're packing right now you know whatever it is doing the dishes she's like all about that stuff. Listen I want to do a quick part I say a short statement you give me your immediate thoughts. Okay. What single piece of content has had the most impact on you? Oh actually you have to excuse it's not particularly gender sensitive but there is a Hunter Thompson letter he wrote to a friend I'm going to put it up on my phone real quick but basically it was about being intentional about how you spend your time.

59:16It's a letter he wrote to a friend who asked him for advice. Here I'll read it. So basically a younger man emails, that letter is an email, so this is fucking more word for email. Sends him a letter and he wrote about a career advice or life advice and he goes, as I see it then, the formula runs something like this. A man must choose a path which will let his abilities function at maximum efficiency towards the gratification of his desires. And doing this, he is fulfilling a need, giving himself identity by functioning in a set pattern towards a set goal. He avoids frustration, frustrating his potential, choosing a path which puts no limit on his self -development, and he avoids the terror of seeing his goal willed or lose its charm as he draws closer to it, rather than bending himself to meet the demands of that which he seeks.

1:00:01He has bent his goal to conform to his own abilities and desires. And short, he's not dedicated his life to reaching a predefined goal, but he has rather chosen a way of life he knows he will enjoy. the goal is absolutely secondary. It is functioning toward the goal which is important. And it seems almost ridiculous to say that a man must function in a pattern of his own choosing for letting another man define your own goals is to give up one of the most meaningful aspects of life. The definitive act of will which makes a man an individual. So I have this quote at the top of my yearly intentions that I write over here.

1:00:38So that's not the final goal. He does sometimes. Sometimes. Yeah, no, I mean, that's a balance having a bottom top. I don't have a bottom top. Sorry to hear it. But no, I tell you, I love that. And then it's a thousand. I mean, definitely need to read it. Well, if you changed your mind on in the last 12 months. Oh, in the last 12 months. Ooh, that's a great question. I'm much more bullish on generative AI. It's happening much faster than I would. Why? I didn't say it was further away. Do you integrate into what you do is and scram and threads in it? I integrated into my normal work life like you do.

1:01:12I should be more interested in how it's going to change how people share online But I'm much more interested in how it's going to just change workflows and just allow people to do more with less How do you use it? I use it to some of my favorite writers are a little verbose so I have it summarize articles I don't tell anybody. I write pretty detailed reviews for my reports every six months And so I don't have AI write it But I have it take a first pass at summarizing all the feedback to make sure I didn't miss anything I will sometimes give it a piece, I do a lot of writing at work. I'll give it a piece of writing and tell an LLM what I was hoping to get out of it and ask for feedback.

1:01:48I just think it's going to be interesting how these technologies change how we work. We don't focus a ton on how we work. We focus more on the things that we build generally in my industry, which makes sense because it's why you get into it to build something and just be able to point to your mom to it, to your mom and tell your mom a Christmas that you made this thing. But how we actually do, we do, how productive we are is so important and you know you can double or triple your chances of success. It's like a schmutz that kind of thing to get interested in but it's just so substantive and so I'm really interested in how some of these technologies will change how marketers do their job, how designers do their job, how executives do their job.

1:02:25I think that stuff is going to be super interesting and that's not the like AI intelligence bought future that a lot of people are focused on right now but it is something I think is really fascinating. You can be CEO of any company for a day. Ooh, which would you be CEO? Disney probably. That just seems such like a wild thing. It's such a combination of amazing heritage and has to adapt, has done it a couple of times, needs to do it again. I like the range that they have. What's the kind to say anyone's ever done for you? I had a really, really harsh boss. My first time at Facebook, I thought I was doing so much, I was just crushing.

1:02:59I was like, broke down on these projects, I had a couple of months, I had a couple of months, I was doing mark reviews and stuff. And she said, you lack focus. And I thought I was so focused. So like, oh my hours were accounted for. Like getting all this stuff done. But I was spreading myself toothed in over too many things. I had never had a boss before. And she was not. You never caring this position, let's say. She was fucking smart. And I think she said something like, you're not focusing your work, because it's suffering for it. And because it's also your first couple of months at a company trying to establish yourself.

1:03:28It was like, it hit home in a way that it wouldn't have hit home like, you know, three months after that. And it helped I think a lot over the long run. Tell me, brand wise and like design aesthetic wise, if you were a brand or a design, which one would you most? There's no experience, there's no good experience. Who's that? Where is she? I don't know. I would say like, I'm Audi. You're Audi? Yeah. Actually, I can kind of see that. It's beautiful efficient machine. Thank you. I'm just... Forstbrangdach, technique. But what is worth it, and this is not a commentary and he was a person. They are nicer on the outside than they are on the inside.

1:04:03I don't know. I mean, the brands are so much something. When you said that, I was like, no, that is nothing. No, not you. Audi, at this point, that question's terrible. Hey, would you do this? Is there something you would you do now? I don't know. I don't know what I would be. I've ranged, as like I said before, I think I'm... You know, it's bound you really aligned with. Well, even respects him, I really respect him, my Chanel, a brand that transcends time, transcends geography. Chinese love Chanel, French love Chanel. They're a very different customer base. Better time as well. Yes. Also, budgets, amazing that you will get people who can't afford Chanel, save and stretch for Chanel.

1:04:43That's about aspiration. The ones that I find myself having more affinity for are a little bit more like I always love triumphs, brand, the motorcycle. Yeah. The cafe racers, I always loved back in the day, because they were so crazy. This was probably, you probably just missed this, but the bang and all was in that. There you go. They're around now, but their stereo equipment used to be insane. It used to be like these huge, like, kid night writer style looking visualizers and like all this nutty, hyper -clear and hyper -aggressive stuff. That was like over the top and weirdly masculine, but as a 15 year old boy, I was like, douchey sauce.

1:05:15So let's see, I don't, there's a lot of amazing brand workout there right now. Have you not met that you would love to meet? I want to meet everybody. I love meeting people. but like you see I've been scrumming, you can make kind of anyone. I keep saying this is like one of the best books of my jobs. I can just email people and they write me back, but I don't take advantage of it as much as I should. But I'd pang fatter. Me like, yeah. I met him, I was not. Amazing. I met him at New York. We were at an after party. I was talking, I turned up for half an hour, my wife. Dye is literally every balance his class is, you expect him to be.

1:05:44And my wife tells Roger Federer, who I think is the greatest tennis player of all time. Not a season in the Dye. No, no. And her husband loves playing tennis in the summer. And so Roger Petter asks me to show him my swing. And I said verbatim. Yeah, we're in like a glove in New York City. And I said, I think verbatim, I'm gonna show you how I get to the room. So I said, there's no fucking way. I'm gonna show the goat my tennis swing. And he pushed three or four times and I was like, it's not happening. It's not happening. He goes on to his account and I say, accounts is bad. Exactly. Exactly. Ryan Reynolds.

1:06:23Oh man, that'd be fun. He seems like a lot of fun. Yeah. He seems like a lot of fun. He's been spending a lot of time in the UK now. You should message him. I was supposed to meet him with your boy, how? Yeah, he should do that. Exactly. We'll go. I was supposed to meet him and then I got COVID. This is a couple of years ago. Can I ask you a final one, but a hard one? What does success mean to you as a person? I want to be proud of how I spent my time when I looked back. It's hard to be able to identify exactly what you need to do to be able to say yes to that question, but it forces you to be honest about what you value and it forces you to think about the long term and it forces you to be someone aspirational.

1:06:57I feel like time is such a precious, precious thing. I'm always worried I'm going to spend it poorly. Animates, it shows like this which made me so grateful to you. I need this to be a great one, I'm never honest, but I was like, I have no idea, I black out during these types of things and I'll work later when I watch. But thank you so much for doing this and I've absolutely loved it. Thanks for having me such a blast, such a blast, such a crazy moment right now. So I was happy that I knew we were going to launch threads around now, ish. And when you were trying to sketch this, it'd be good to do it right around then.

1:07:25And then we had to move it back, but then threads fell back a couple weeks and it worked out. I want to say huge thanks Adam for that incredible discussion. If you want to see the full interview in video, you can check it out on YouTube by searching for 20VC. But before we leave you today, this episode is brought to you by Tegas, the go -to research destination for bold investing. In Tegas Curate, expert in -size analysis and financial data to give you powerful perspective for your investment decisions. With lightning fast access, over 60 ,000 transcripts across 20 ,000 companies, you'll discover a wealth of unique insights to fuel your fundamental research, gain perspectives, synthesize information, and even model outcomes all on Tegas.

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