Ravi Mehta (ex Chief Product Officer at Tinder, ex Product at Facebook)

Hey everyone, this is Erik Torenberg and you're listening to Execs by On Deck. Execs is a show for founders, operators, and leaders who want to understand the playbooks, frameworks, and tactics that leading tech companies today have used to scale. Our guests are tech execs in key roles at top tech companies who share their hard-won, earned secrets on how to scale faster. Ravi Mehta is the co-founder and CEO of Scale Hire, a coaching organization reinventing the way that people learn and grow. Prior to launching Scale, Ravi was CPO at Tinder, a product director at Facebook, and VP of consumer product at TripAdvisor. In today's episode, we discuss frameworks for antifragility, hiring, and empathetic product management. Towards the end, we also talk with Ravi on the future of dating, consumer product, and much more. Andrew Yu, Ondex Director of Product Management Fellowship, joined me in this episode as guest co-host. So, so Ravi, when you look back at You look at the arc of your illustrative career, lots of different experiences, and you reflect, what are the threads that you've kept on pulling or kind of like the through lines of how you've chosen to spend your time?

Yeah, it's been— I started early in tech. I kind of got into it by accident. My dad bought a computer back in— this was in the kind of mid, you know, kind of late '80s, mid-'90s. I started to get into technology and development and just fell in love with it and fell in love with how technology can change individual people's lives and how technology can connect people together. And so the main through line for me has really been a focus on consumer. This is something I've focused on my entire career. I've worked in a lot of different domains. I've worked in travel, I've worked in gaming, I've worked in social and dating, but I've really been passionate the entire time about consumer products. And then particularly most of the consumer products that I've worked with have some way in which they're connecting people together, sometimes very directly like Tinder or Facebook, but other times in more indirect ways like TripAdvisor.

Yeah. And how do you think about your consumer products that you worked on that you'll never work on again versus consumer products that you worked on that yet still more opportunity, or what have been kind of your favorite spaces within consumer to focus or emphasize?

It's interesting. I get excited about a lot of different spaces. So I had never used Tinder. I've been married for a long time. Found it really fascinating to think about how do people discover each other, how do they connect, how is that changing over time? So one of the things we spent a lot of time on at Tinder was thinking about Gen Z and where dating and social discovery is going for the next generation, given that they've grown up with social technology embedded into their lives. And so the ability to connect with someone and talk to someone used to be something that was somewhat scarce. in prior generations where people wanted to meet each other. Now people are just ubiquitously connected to each other. They're constantly talking to each other. And so the question is, how do you enable people to discover new people and then turn those into meaningful conversations? And so even though it wasn't something that I had directly experienced myself, it was a problem that I got really excited about. As I think through my career, I can't think of any problems that are done. You know, even going back to the very first thing that I worked on was gaming and multiplayer gaming and thinking about how people can connect to each other. I joined Brian Balfour, who's now the CEO of Reforge, at his first company, which was focused on microtransactions and virtual goods. And back then, we were talking about real estate and things now people talk about in terms of NFTs, we were talking about in terms of virtual goods and microtransactions, and that was about 10 years ago. And so I think all of this stuff is continuing to play out. We're starting to see really interesting rhymes in technology. VR is a good example. VR has kind of come and gone multiple multiple times now, and it hasn't yet hit its stride. But now I think we're probably at an inflection point for at least some applications. And so it's a really interesting question, one I haven't thought a lot about, but I don't think any modes of technology or ways that people connect or any sort of product opportunities are fully played out yet, even in spaces like e-commerce, which feel like they've gotten so much energy and emphasis. It's been really exciting to see what's happened with Shopify and now with Pop Shop Live and some of the innovations around live streaming and e-commerce. So I think, you know, to some extent, there's a lot that's already played out, but to another extent, there's a lot of doors that are wide open.

Fascinating. 3 themes that you've focused on in your career and we'll focus on in this interview are company, people, and craft. And I want to start on the company angle. One of your kind of metaphors or themes is this idea of an antifragile company. So talk about what that means, Yeah, definitely.

So I wrote a post right as the pandemic was sort of in full swing, things were locking down. And it was really fascinating to me to look at the companies that responded in really adaptive and agile and inventive ways to the pandemic, and others that were caught on their heels. And the framework that felt like it really resonated in terms of thinking about those different patterns is something that Nassim Taleb came up with is the idea of antifragility.

Antifragility.

He defines antifragility not as resilience. And so there are things that are fragile. Everyone understands fragility. Glass is fragile. If you tap on glass hard enough, it's going to shatter and you're never going to be able to repair it. There are things that are resilient. So rubber is resilient, right? If you tap on rubber, it's not going to break. It'll keep kind of getting its shape back. And so resilience is not actually the opposite of fragility. It's on its way towards it's antifragility. And antifragility is the idea that you aren't just resilient in the presence of shocks, but actually those shocks help you get stronger. And so muscle is an example of something that is antifragile. Every time muscle breaks, it grows back and it grows back stronger. And so I think the same thing applies to companies. There are certain companies that are fragile. They manage their operations in a way where they have very little slack in the system and small interruptions can have pretty big impact on their bottom line and maybe even drive them into bankruptcy. You see a lot of companies that are resilient. But what was really fascinating is I think in COVID, you saw companies that were antifragile that actually got stronger as a result of what happened with COVID A couple of examples come to mind. Amazon, of course, did a fantastic job of responding to a massive increase in demand and really relying on the things that they had built from a supply chain standpoint to navigate the opportunities presented by COVID. Another example One of the ones I talk about in the piece that I think is a really interesting one is Roblox. So Roblox might— some people might think about it as a game, but it's not really a game. It's much more of a game platform that enables creators to create content. And during COVID what I found was my kids— I've got a 10-year-old and a 12-year-old— what happened was Roblox essentially turned into the playground. And so people were getting off of school, getting off of Zoom, and then jumping onto Roblox. And there were a number of things that happened. things about it that made it such a powerful place to be for kids, including the fact that there was not any sort of, like, prescriptive way in which they needed to socialize. You had kids in groups of 20 playing together, kids playing solo, kids playing in groups of 2 or 3. And so it had this kind of playground-like atmosphere to it. And the thing to me that was really interesting about Roblox is all of that increased demand made the whole pie bigger for the game creators. And so in addition to seeing a lot more people playing Roblox, You also saw a lot of innovation and creativity and expansion in the supply side and the game side. And that's a great example of an antifragile company that can not only resist shocks but actually get stronger in the presence of those shocks.

Yeah. Hey, Ravi, on that note, you've also written that 2 traits of an antifragile company are that they're diversified as well as synergistic. Would love to hear more about that and specifically applying it to the new venture that you've started recently, Scale Hire.

Yeah, definitely. So the example that I use within that article to explain something that— or a company that's both diversified but also synergistic is Disney. And years ago, Disney— Walt Disney created this synergy map where he mapped out all of the different pieces of the business, including IP creation and theme parks and movies and toys, and mapped out how each one of those different pieces connected to each other in a way that was self-reinforcing. And you see that exact same synergy map that he created 50-plus years ago is exactly how Disney runs today. They've got an incredible array of intellectual property that allows them to succeed in a lot of different businesses. And one of the areas where their diversification really played to their benefit during the pandemic was having both businesses that relied on physical location like the theme parks, as well as having a really strong and growing streaming business. And so the diversity enabled them to, you know, have some, you know, multiple irons in the fire when they dealt with these different shocks that they were feeling. So when the theme park demand went down, the streaming demand went up. But what's also really important is the fundamental ingredient of their strategy is their intellectual property, Marvel and Star Wars and all the other entertainment properties that they've built. And so, you know, as people get more and more familiar with characters through Disney+, that creates demand so that when the parks opened up, people want to go and experience those characters in real life. And so a really strong corporate strategy is one where you have the benefits of diversification with the benefits of synergy. And I think Disney's probably one of the best examples of that. I really recently started a new company called Scale Higher, where we're focused on democratizing access to professional coaching. So what we want to do is bring the benefit of coaching to a much wider set of people. And I originally started the company because I kept hearing from folks, especially post-pandemic, that they didn't feel like they had the support that they needed to be successful. So, you know, people want to be successful, there's a lot of opportunity, people are ambitious. But as a result of hybrid work, and people changing jobs more often, and different norms around management and leadership, people just don't feel like they have the one-on-one support that they need in order to be as successful as possible and really navigate their career transitions. And for myself, having a coach, having an executive coach was something that I found incredibly powerful in helping me navigate those transitions and be really successful. But it's something that's just not accessible to a lot of people. And so we saw this really interesting problem in terms of the scope and demand. But we didn't know, can you actually scale coaching? And we started to look at what was happening with products like Headspace and Calm and Talkspace and Noom and Future. And we saw an interesting solution space there of companies that are reimagining the relationship between a person and a one-on-one provider, like a nutrition counselor or meditation coach. And we thought, wow, there's a really interesting opportunity here to take something where we know there's demand and think about how to reinvent that in terms of what's possible with mobile experiences. And so for us, we're in the really early stages of thinking through that strategy, and I can talk through it in more detail. But we've thought a lot about how to create that diversity, as well as how to make sure that the coaches on our platform and the content on our platform is all synergistic and creates a long-term relationship with the user.

Yeah, and Robbie, maybe we would love to hear a little bit more about that strategy, as you were alluding to just now.

Yeah, what's interesting is, so we, we've evolved the strategy over time. One of the things that we wanted to do with the company is not jump in right away and assume that we're right. I've seen so often with startups that startups will have an initial idea of what the solution looks like. And then there's just a lot of pressure to double down on that direction. You raise money, you have investors that are expecting certain results, there's this pressure to grow. before you're ready. And that enables a company, or I think positions a company so that they double down sometimes on the right direction. And when that's the right direction, it works out incredibly well, but sometimes on the wrong direction. And so we started with this idea of we want to fall in love with the problem, which is how do we make coaching more accessible and not be so tied to a particular solution. And so our initial product discovery work was all done in no-code tools where we could work really quickly, we could be agile, we could try out different things. And our initial hypothesis was that we could create something like what Talkspace and BetterHelp have done, where they've both made therapy more accessible through text-based or messaging-based therapy. We thought we could do the same with professional coaching and create a messaging-based coaching product. We rolled it out to a handful of users, and we found that people were having really interesting conversations, but retention wasn't great. People were falling off. And then when we tried to monetize, we got some people to convert, but retention on the subscription wasn't great. We were getting high churn rates. And what we found was that people just weren't used to having a coach via messaging. And so they didn't always know what to talk about. And they didn't always, they didn't always have the habits built up around how to actually engage with someone. So what we did is we took the learnings from that, we created the current iteration of the product, which are these guided sprints that combine structured learning and exercises with one-on-one coaching, they provide a lot more structure to both the coach as well as the member that get people, you know, a shorter path to leveling up in the particular area that they want to level up in. And we found much better retention and monetization with that. And so that's the direction that we're now doubling down on.

Love that. So Ravi, this idea of building people, helping people grow is a pretty common theme throughout, it seems, most of your career, and there's a lot of places to dig into here. You've also written a ton about empathy. You've written Build and Hire and Mentor with Empathy, so lots of themes around that. So we'd just love to start to dig into this idea of talent. You've also written about seeking talent over experience when hiring as well. So yeah, talk to us a little bit about that dynamic of talent and experience and what's the best way to seek talent over experience.

Yeah, I had a really interesting learning when I was at TripAdvisor. So when I was there, the company had just rolled out from Expedia. And so as a new public company, it could start to do things strategically that it couldn't do before. And that meant that there was a lot of growth, a lot of opportunity ahead of the company. And in order to capture that, we knew we needed to grow quickly. So at the time, I had a team of about 7 PMs. There were other PMs in the org, but it was a relatively small product organization relative to the size the impact of TripAdvisor, and we knew that we needed to grow it quickly. But we were based in Boston. It's a consumer-oriented company in the travel space, and there weren't a lot of people at the time in Boston that had that consumer product experience or had that experience with travel. And so it was taking 6 or 9 months in order to hire a really great product manager for an open role, and that just wasn't fast enough relative to the growth that we wanted to have in the product team and ultimately the impact that the team could have. And so the company put together a product rotation program where people could come into their first product role out of business school and go through 4 6-month rotations. And so for people who wanted to get into product but didn't have prior product experience, it was a really great way to launch their career and start to understand what it means to be a different product or to be a product person, to try out different types of product work like backend work or frontend work or growth work or new product development. And for us, it was a way for us to get access to an incredibly rich pipeline of talent who didn't necessarily have experience, but had the raw horsepower to be really great product leaders if we could give them the opportunity and the learning in order to shape shaped their product career. And so over the 5 years that I was at TripAdvisor, we hired about 25 people into that program. That was about half of all the PMs that I was responsible for hiring. Every hiring season, we had hundreds of resumes to choose from, and we had dozens of people that came in for the interview process. And so it was just a fantastic way to hire really talented people and help them grow into a product role. And a number of people that went through that program are well-known product leaders today, and it's been exciting to see a lot of them grow into director and VP-level roles.

Yeah, that's fantastic. And Ravi, one of the components of growing an individual is, of course, mentoring, which you write a lot about as well. You've written that mentoring is often the first step and hiring is the last step in diversifying in the tech industry at large. So you have this vision of how mentoring can actually help eventually diversify tech industry as a whole. I would love to just hear about that vision and kind of the sequencing and the path of those steps.

I think mentoring is really important for our industry, and not just in terms of, you know, people are in a role and they're looking to other people within the organization to mentor them, but really starting with people when they're in high school or college and they're trying to figure out where they wanna go with their careers and how they want to invest in themselves. I think from a diversity perspective, one of the problems that people talk about is that there's this pipeline problem, that there's just not enough people coming into tech so that if you do wanna hire someone from a diverse background, you just don't have enough candidates to choose from. And I think oftentimes the pipeline problem is not as pronounced as people like to say. I think actually it comes down to there's just not enough There are people out there that want to get into the tech industry, they just don't know how, and they don't have the tools to be able to figure out what are the steps they need to take in order to get their first tech role. And so things like that TripAdvisor product rotation program, I think we had something like a 50/50 ratio between male and female PMs that we hired. It may have even been higher than that. And so we were able to get a really diverse set of candidates because of the fact that we weren't necessarily looking for past experience. And the problem when you look at past experience rather than raw talent is there's compounding biases and it gets really hard to find someone who's got exactly the right experience profile who's also diverse because of some of those compounding inequities. And so by taking a talent-first approach, by being really focused on learning and development and mentorship, and for the companies that are, that have the resources, by starting early at the high school level, Or at the college level, I think the industry can do a lot to not create the pipeline, but really foster that pipeline that I think already exists, because there's already a lot of people that want to come into the industry, they just don't know how.

Yeah, and so pulling on that thread a little bit more, I think when we talk about diversification, we talk about mentorship and things like that, underlying that is a more core element of empathy, as you've written about. You've talked about empathy in a lot of different contexts, not only team building and hiring, but also building products with empathy. Tell us a little bit about what you mean when you say product management is empathy. And then specifically, you have this phrase of being a product manager is a fabric weaver of technology. And so would love to hear about it within that context.

Yeah, definitely. I just talked to a cohort of people that were looking to get into their first product role yesterday. And they asked me, what is kind of one tip that you would have for them that I wish I started doing earlier in my career, and now that I'm more experienced, is something that I recommend for folks just getting started out. And the thing that I answered with was, with all the emphasis on metrics and hitting goals and specs and Jira tickets and all that, it's really easy to lose track of the fact that a lot of being successful as a product manager is all about relationships. It starts with relationships with your core team because ultimately the only The only time you create a great product is when you have a great cross-functional group of people that are bringing diverse perspectives to create something really valuable. It's about relationships with stakeholders so that you can create the relationships throughout the organization so that people can understand what the product is trying to do and can help enable that from a pretty broad perspective, whether that's marketing or sales or customer support or other parts of the business. It's also really important to empathize with and build strong relationships with leaders. A lot of people don't think about empathizing with their leaders. They think, you know, my boss is in this really fortunate position. They have a lot of people reporting into them. They're making a lot of money. They have all this responsibility. And so the instinct is not to empathize with your leaders. But if you do take the moment to empathize with your leaders, to understand what they're solving for, it becomes much easier to figure out how to position the work that you're doing. In a way that they'll really appreciate and that they'll want to support. And then lastly, and I think this is the most important part of empathy within product, it's really important to build a relationship with your customers and to empathize with your customers, especially as companies get bigger. There's a tendency to look at numbers rather than look at customers. And even when you do research, a lot of companies do user research, as these big occasional sort of efforts. You might have a quarterly user research program, the output of which is a 400-slide deck that people are gonna sit in a meeting for 2 hours and go over, but they're never gonna come back to. When in reality, I think you can get as much, if not more value from having casual, regular conversations with customers every week. That could be people that are on like an advisory panel. They could be people that you just casually call. They could be people, you can have systems in place, but those regular deep conversations are really important to empathize with the problems that your customers have. One of the examples of this is at Tinder, we noticed that there were quite a number of people that were spending a lot on Tinder. So $100, $200 a month. And we wanted to understand like, what were the factors that drove someone to want to spend that much money on Tinder? And what were they solving for? An initial hypothesis that we had was that this was a form of signaling that you wanted to spend a lot because, you know, you wanted to kind of show off your wealth or that sort of signaling. But what we found when we were talking to folks was that it had nothing to do with sort of the image that they wanted to project. And it was really about the utility that they wanted to get from being on Tinder. They wanted to meet people. They were incentivized to meet people. They were willing to spend money to do it. The amount that they were spending on Tinder was a fraction of the amount that they were spending on going on dates outside of Tinder. And so it made sense in terms of the thing that they were trying to solve for. And the way we were able to get to that understanding was the product leader who was responsible for that effort just got on the phone with users. She reached out to people. She said, you know, we're doing some studies. We've noticed that you've been spending a lot on Tinder. I'd love to see if there's anything that we can do to make your experience better. And I'd love to talk to you about the problems that you're solving for on Tinder. And that set of, it was something like 10 or 15 conversations, was more illuminating than, you know, thousands or even hundreds of thousands of data points could be because she was able to kind of see the product through the eyes of the people that were in that position.

Awesome. And a follow-up question on just the Tinder strategy that you helped execute, specifically around, you know, when we're talking about empathy, how do you empathize with an entire generation? So Gen Z, right? And so, you know, you launched this effort to really imagine and reimagine what dating and social discovery would look like over the next 5 to 10 years for this generation. How did you even go about revamping a product's offering for an entire generation? What was the approach? What were the steps? Yeah, we'd just love to hear about that.

Yeah, it really started when I was at Facebook in terms of understanding how to go about that. So I was on a team at Facebook focused on Gen Z. I was specifically trying to understand how Gen Z engages with social and entertainment applications and why that was changing over time. So I was at— I got to Facebook in 2017. At the time, there was clearly a pull away for younger users from Facebook to Instagram and Snap. At this time, this was before TikTok, but Gen Z was also spending a lot of time on YouTube. And so there was a number of different ways we tried to understand that. We definitely looked internally at the metrics. There's also a really fantastic market research team at Facebook that looked at what was happening across other apps. And so we got to a nice quantitative understanding of what users really want. But the thing that was really a light switch for us was the conversations with individual people. And so, you know, Facebook is lucky to have a fantastic user research team. Our team was lucky to have, you know, incredibly strong user researchers. And so we were running pretty formal user research studies every couple of weeks where we had an opportunity to talk to 10 or 20 different people. We did this in different parts of of the country. We did this in different settings, sometimes bringing people into the office, sometimes renting Airbnbs and having a more, a more home-like setting. And it became pretty clear through those conversations that there were some really interesting things that young people were solving for that prior generations hadn't. The first one was this idea that like everyone in Gen Z is their own personal social media manager. I remember there was one, there was one girl who said, And, you know, one of the things I spend time on, I actually have a notebook, is I'll keep track of how many likes each post my friends have gotten on their posts because I don't want them to feel bad. And so if they posted a bunch of times and they're not getting a lot of likes, I'll go and I'll like it and I'll comment on it because I want them to feel like people are there for them. And so that was an extreme example of it, but it hit on this very interesting thing where past generations haven't had to think about their social relationships in terms of the networks that they're on and in terms of how it's perceived to other people. And there's both good things and bad things that come out of that. Another really interesting example there was we were trying to understand short format video. So at the time, Musical.ly was doing well, but it wasn't doing incredibly well. People were spending a lot of time on video on YouTube and we wanted to understand what was the video strategy that Facebook needed to have. And one of the things that we kept hearing over and over again from people was that they liked watching Vine compilation videos on YouTube. And that was really bizarre to us because everyone knew what Vine was, even though Vine wasn't live at the time. It had actually gone offline about a year earlier at the time we were doing these studies. And so we wanted to know, why do people know about Vine? Like, what are they getting here? And it turned out that the thing that they were getting were these really fun, short-format, humorous videos that they just couldn't get anywhere else. They used to get their memes on Vine. Facebook. They couldn't really do that on Snap. YouTube was too long format. And so these Vine compilations were these really, these kind of fun pieces of entertainment that they could consume, that they could share with other people. And so Vine, even though it wasn't even live at the time, was serving a really valuable need. And Musical.ly wasn't serving it because it was so music-focused. So the thing that we figured out, a little too late for Facebook, was that short format video was this incredibly important thing, but it was really about humor and not music. And that's That's something we wouldn't have been able to figure out without those conversations. TikTok had figured that out as well, eventually bought Musical.ly, rebranded Musical.ly, and it's history since.

Yeah, I actually really miss those Vine videos. A lot of them still, they live forever in the culture now, right? They're referenced here and there. Ravi, a lot of our listeners are operators at startups, maybe they're founders themselves. And for those of those operators who don't have an entire research team to implement and design a Gen Z strategy, how would you— what would you recommend for them? How would they approach this problem?

Yeah, I think you don't need all that. In fact, I think a lot of times that gets in the way. One interesting thing was there was a group of PMs at TripAdvisor. At the time, TripAdvisor didn't have a big user research team, and they would jump on Amtrak from Boston to New York and start talking to people that were traveling and ask them, you know, hey, have you picked out a restaurant? You know, how long are you gonna be in the city? Where are you staying? Why did you pick that place to stay? What things do you wanna see or do while you're in town? And that was like a fantastically inventive way to get to a person at the moment when they're traveling and get some really authentic information. And so same thing with Gen Z, like, you know, a lot of us have family members that are younger, you can go and talk to them, you can, you can also talk to your existing users, there's nothing to prevent you from texting someone or picking up the phone. And so oftentimes, I think it's that machinery around user research that actually prevents those conversations. And it's more common at bigger companies. One of the advantages I think startups and founders have is they don't have any data to work with. And so they have no choice but to talk to customers. And they don't have any systems or they don't have a user research team. So they have no choice but to pick up the phone and talk to folks. And so I think that's an advantage. And I think that's a reason why startups consistently come to disruptive insights that incumbents don't. It's because of that proximity to the customer and the willingness to engage. And the really important thing is to keep that as you scale and not lose sight of it.

I want to go back to your company idea and talk a little bit about the future of coaching. What I heard from you is, hey, take what CEOs have or key executives have and make that available to a wider audience. How do you plan to do that? Is it by making a marketplace of coaches? Or what is sort of your vision for what that looks like?

Yeah, it's a really good question. We're still in the middle of figuring it out. The idea that we've been thinking about is how do we create a digital digitally native version of coaching. And so I think it's Balaji Srinivasan has a framework for how to think about— you have an analog version of something, then you have like an analog-to-digital conversion of something, and then finally you have a digitally native version. And so, uh, you know, in the currency space, your analog currency is your US dollars, your analog-to-digital conversion is PayPal or other payment systems, and then your digitally native currency is Bitcoin. In the digital health space, your analog version is a face-to-face visit with your doctor. The analog-to-digital conversion is Teladoc, so being able to meet with your doctor via video. And the digitally native version is what Hims and Roman are doing by really rethinking that healthcare interaction, adding in messaging, adding in productization, in order to decompose it into its component parts. And so that's the model that thinking about for coaching is how do we think about coaching from a digitally native way? Analog coaching has always worked well, but it's expensive, it's hard to find, it's not accessible to folks. And so there's been some really interesting advances with BetterUp and Torch and other companies creating the analog-to-digital version of coaching by taking coaching and moving it online. And so a lot of what we've been thinking about is what does the next step of that look like? How do we rethink that core coaching interaction, decompose it into its component parts, and build product around those parts so that, you know, that interaction with the coach doesn't have to be entirely on a 45 or 60-minute coaching call. You know, instead, there can be things within the product where people are learning things and practicing things and where they're getting feedback via messaging as well as via video. And all of that comes together to create a new type of coaching interaction That's a lot more scalable and a lot more effective.

Totally. That's fascinating. I want to close by going full circle to where we started by maybe taking some topics in consumer that you spent some time on and just pontificating on the future.

Yeah, sounds good.

Let's go back to dating. If you imagine a company that starts in 2022 that captures the mindshare in the way that Tinder or any of the other big Hinge, for instance, did, or Bumble, etc., but that has a slightly different angle. What could you imagine, or if you were starting a dating company today, what might be different?

I think the first thing that would be different is a lot of the tech industry thinks about platform changes. We had the PC era, then we had the web era, then we had the mobile era. I think there's a platform change that happened that nobody talked about, which is the platform shift to video. Almost every single mobile app has been disrupted by video, but that still hasn't happened yet for dating. So dating companies, because of the pandemic, have added video chat. They're starting to add video to profiles. But today there still is no digitally— or there's no video-native dating experience that looks and feels a lot more like TikTok than like Tinder. So I think that's the first thing. And it might be that one of the existing companies like Tinder creates that, it might be that someone else creates that. So I think that's the first thing. The second thing I think is going to be the ways in which people communicate from both a utility standpoint and an entertainment standpoint are evolving. There's a lot of things from gaming that are coming into play in terms of messaging. Snapchat's a really good example of how to create a really entertaining messaging experience. So the second thing I think we're gonna see is a really interesting addition of gaming and virtual goods and potentially AR and filters into the communication portion of dating so that communicating on a dating app is as immersive and as experiential as it is on Snapchat or other apps like, like TikTok. And, you know, we'll kind of see where that goes. I think that there will be some interesting innovation there. I don't know exactly what it looks like. And then eventually I think we will get into some more metaverse type of things within dating. But I think that's further out than people think. There is still something really fundamental about being able to see someone and engage with someone in their real self or through video versus engaging with someone entirely in avatar form. But it will happen. It's just, I think, a little bit further off than people think.

It's almost, you know, this site soon got sullied with all sorts of inappropriateness. But Chatroulette, there was a moment where there was good-natured fun. Yeah, I wonder if someone will capture that magic in a dating context.

I think someone will. There's pockets of people that are dating on TikTok. Like, if you search for the hashtag dating, you can see people are creating video profiles or connecting with each other. The mechanics of TikTok don't really support that well today, and either TikTok will do it or someone will take that and unbundle it out of Yeah, fascinating.

How about travel? If you were starting something in the travel space today, what might your approach be?

So travel is interesting because I feel like there just hasn't been enough innovation in travel. You have companies like Expedia and Booking that have built extraordinarily large businesses on top of the transaction. This is an example of where larger companies, I think, potentially get themselves into a position where they can't innovate. and get disrupted because those companies are so focused on optimizing that transaction that they're not thinking earlier. And so they've ceded the discovery, the planning, the entertainment side of travel to Google, to Instagram, to TripAdvisor, and to Pinterest. And today across all of those, I don't think that there's a really great experiential travel company that's been built that's video native and that is really geared towards the needs of Gen Z and millennials. And so, you know, this may be me, like kind of wishful thinking, but I think that there is a really interesting opportunity to create the next TripAdvisor, which is much more video-centric, much more immersive, and I think much better tuned to the needs of younger travelers. You see some of that on Instagram. So there's some really interesting influencers to follow. They create really interesting travel content. There's some of that on Pinterest, but it hasn't really come together in a really nice tailored productized experience. This is an interesting area where I think Web3 might come into play. I could absolutely see someone creating a video-centric travel discovery platform, combining that with place-centric NFTs into something where people are engaging around places, sharing content about places, creating, having a reputation around which places they follow and support. So that's an area that I'm excited about. I think there's going to be a lot of innovation.

Where else are you excited about at the intersection of Web3 and consumer?

I'm still trying to figure it out. Like, I've been spending a lot of time looking at different things that are happening within Web3. You know, I think what's interesting a lot of times is that the technology is often ahead of the user behavior. And here I feel like the user behavior and the hype is ahead of the technology. And the technology is magical in terms of what it can do, but there just aren't a lot of really interesting applications yet. I think DAOs are really interesting. I think NFTs hint at something that's really interesting, but the thing that I think is not going to persist is today, NFTs largely exist outside of any context except for the cultural context that they're in. And so there's not a lot of functionality, there's not a lot of interoperability. And so I think the era of loose-leaf NFTs that exist on marketplaces but don't actually plug into an ecosystem or a metaverse is probably limited, and we'll start to see more innovation around NFTs that are actually operable and have functionality, operate within a specific context, as well as have cultural value.

Yeah, that's really interesting. There was this long hope for a while that Twitter would become this interest graph, but it never did. Well, feel free to dispute this premise. What has become the interest graph, or it's kind of been fragmented across different platforms. Do you think that's a big opportunity or what are other data I think it's a great question.

I think what's interesting about datasets is a lot of the data is online, but it's not verticalized in a way that is interesting to a particular use case. So all the travel data is on Google, but it's not actually on Google in a way that makes it easy for me to plan my trip. I got to go and Google 100 times in order to figure out where I want to go and find things that are, you know, that I would like and read reviews and go to Conde Nast and go to Expedia and go to Instagram. And so it's just, it's very generic in the way that the information is indexed. So places, I think, is one area where the way that it's available today just doesn't map well to the use cases that people have. Even though it's early, I think NFTs are similar, right? Like just my ownership of NFTs is interesting and you can, and it's great that you can see it, but there's no layer on top of that that really helps to create use cases around what you could do with collection or what you could do with interoperability and gameplay and things of that sort. There's definitely other areas as well. I haven't thought enough about this. What are some of the areas that you're excited about?

I'll start more concrete. At a high level, for example, there's a lot of data in email around how close I am to various people or other platforms. platforms that could then make a better social or professional graph based on— right now, of course, there's always the LinkedIn problem of, oh, you're friends with them, but do you know them, etc.? How well do you know them, etc.? I'm excited about opportunities that are trying to disrupt LinkedIn, create better professional graphs that more properly represent relationships and perceptions and reputation of what people think about each other. Different people are trying to unbundle this in different ways. The Org is trying to just represent who sits where in the Org. That's one part of it. LinkedIn should be the Craigslist of what's going to follow. There will be an Airbnb and all these other companies that emerge from that. That's one space I'm excited about.

I couldn't agree more. It feels like between LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok, those are all ripe for unbundling because there's a lot of subspaces within those platforms where the data exists, but it exists in a generic way rather I'm also excited.

I've said it's something like Twitter meets Quora, where basically the indexing abilities of Quora with the top-of-funnel stream that is Twitter. So much of the source of culture comes from Twitter, but it's not indexable. You can't really aggregate it. It's hard to make sense, hard to read, it's hard to put it together. And so I feel like there's something there that will I also think there are just other datasets. I think receipts are pretty powerful. Where people spend money indicates what they care about, the charities they donate to, the restaurants they shop at. One other idea I have is making fandom more apparent in the sense of if I'm the 3rd subscriber to your blog, almost like a white label solution that allows every website or business business to dish out social status to their fans. Like, hey, you were the 50th subscriber of this. I should get some status for being that. But then also, this is more aspirational and this is more like the Web3 stuff. I should get some disproportionate economics for that too. In the same way that people want to be cool hunters. They want to discover the next artist, the next restaurant, They want to do it for the social aspect, but if they could do it, if they get economic benefits from it, even better. I was involved in Product Hunt. More people want to curate, get to stuff early, and I feel like everyone wins in that scenario. Right now there's just a lot of social capital and financial capital that's not capitalized as a result of that. I think if you had that, it would be easier to spin up new things because it's so valuable. You'd have more speculation both social status-wise and economic. Speculation has a negative connotation to it, but what it enables is more mobility.

Absolutely. To the earlier question, I think the Spotify listening graph is an example of a base of data that is so rich with that information about who you're supporting and reputation and tastemaking that just hasn't been tapped into.

A couple other ideas I'll just throw out there. I think memes are underexplored and underutilized. I could see 99designs for memes where you create an economy of people who are making memes and who want memes. I think there are other things that compress knowledge so succinctly.

Yeah, I think there'll be a couple big things built around We did some really interesting user research around memes when I was at Facebook. And, you know, one of the interesting observations was that it plays a really important role. If you ask a person the question of where do you get your memes, you can actually track some of the top social apps, right? So if you ask a college student, where do you get your memes, you know, they might have said Facebook, and then they would have said Instagram, and then they would have said Snapchat, and then they would have said TikTok or Vine. And so, yeah, it's something that's really important. And one of the things that we found as part of that is that memes, you know, they're fun, they're entertaining, but they're also super social. They give people a reason to reach out to people and to share with people. And so it's definitely something that's underappreciated in terms of how important that is.

Well, Ravi, I want to be mindful of time. This has been a great episode. Thanks so much for coming on. Where can you point people who want to learn more about you and your work and and what you're doing with Scale Hire.

Yeah, definitely. So you can find me at ravi-meta.com or just Google Ravi Mehta. And I've got my site where I keep— I haven't written a lot, but I try to write things that are important for product managers that are looking to level up their own skills or help their teams. And then you can find Scale Hire at scalehire.com and learn more about the guided sprints that we have available. So our first product is a combination of learning plus coaching. We think about it as cohort-based courses where you're the only one in the cohort. So it's really tailored for you. And so you can learn more about the guided sprints we have available there. And we've soft launched for now. We'll be doing an official launch in Q3 timeframe.

Awesome. Yeah, thanks so much for coming on the podcast.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Thanks for listening to today's episode. Execs is produced by On Deck, where top talent goes to start companies, find their next roles, or invest in their careers. If you're looking to start a company, uplevel your career, or navigate a career transition, I encourage you to visit beyonddeck.com. See you next time.