Building a Live Social Network with Houseparty Co-Founders Ben Rubin and Sima Sistani | Greymatter

Hi, this is Josh Hellman from Greylock Partners and I'm thrilled to be here with Ben Rubin and Seema Sistani who are co founders of houseparty. Thanks for joining us guys.

Thank you.

Thanks.

So Ben, like we first met in 2014, I think, and you're building a company, you called it Life on Air. You had a different live streaming video product out there. You know, tell me a little about the kind of life on air and what you've been thinking about since four and a half years, since late 2012.

So the mission of Life on Air is to bring people together in the most human way possible when they're physically apart. And when we met, the mindset that we have in the products that we were working on were basically one to many broadcast mobile based live video products.

And why did you think that like this was the time for mobile live video? I mean it seemed early, nobody had enough bandwidth, like what were you actually seeing to get you excited about mobile live video?

So it's not that I'm excited about mobile live video as much as I'm excited about rethinking the paradigm off. I'm putting something out there and then somebody asynchronously edit crops and reply to this, which I think is a fine way. In the past 20 years we've been hacking the Internet with a bunch of desktop based micro interactions, asynchronous micro interactions, to feel closer to each other. And I think that what more you.

Mean like Facebook likes and Instagram likes?

Yes, exactly. And the epitome of that is like Snapchat stories which feel so immersive and real in real time, but it's like the asymptote that you cannot cross of asynchronous. Like it feels so real, but yet it's still a reaction that is asynchronous. And I think that what's exciting about live video as a tool and mobile as a tool, and so our infrastructure is nowadays a tool, is that they enable self expression that is very reciprocal and is very real. And I think that in terms of social networking, it's, it is not really explored as much as it could. And that's basically what we're doing in Life on Air.

That's one of the things I always loved about you, is every time we would talk about live video we'd get to this place where we talked about people are sharing and shouting back and forth. You said live is completely different. We're here together in the moment, just like we are in this room right now. And Just that it's like apples and oranges, and you've always really stuck to that. And I know we've been looking for kind of mobile broadcast, and all of a sudden you kind of came up with this concept of Meerkat. You took your first product, and I think it was called Gavo. You pivoted that to Meerkat. You launched Meerkat at the beginning of 2015, pretty tightly integrated with Twitter broadcasting. All of a sudden, it took off and everybody started seeing what you were seeing. Tell us about what got you to Meerkat and what got you to that sort of moment.

So we were grinding on three different live video broadcast product before we got to Meerkat and through all of them. And by the way, two of them had tweet and go live. You actually tweeted and go live from Yevo.

That's right. I was so embarrassed. I was like, what? Everybody's watching me.

But what we understood as we looked back, and every product, we looked back and understood, like, what didn't work. There were moments where it was working, but there were much more moments where it did not. And we came to realize that first, being live is very taxing, and it has a lot of emotional baggage. And then we started to say, well, what if we make everything else simple as dead simple as possible? So the only noise we get about the product is about the live experience. And we thought, okay, what is the simplest product that could possibly be made with existing things in the Internet that somebody can go live immediately to their audience? And then we started charting it, and we find that, you know, we looked at different kind of platforms and how to do it. And then we said, like, okay, we failed in the past three products. What would be the simplest way for you to broadcast to your audience? And we say, like, okay, live on Twitter, but how? And we looked at the Twitter API and we say, what if you can go live from sign up? From sign up to being live to your audience within two clicks? And that's what we did. Meerkat basically looked at the Twitter API and did everything automatically for you. And the format in the medium really made sense because the format of live video and the medium of Twitter has a lot of similarity about the interest graph and the broadcast graph. So we said, okay, we'll do auto follow between people that auto follow. We auto build the graph. And we don't need to ask you, do you want to tweet? Do you not want to tweet? We don't want to ask you, who are the People you want to follow, you don't want to follow. It's just an extension. We're going to look at it as a dumb extension to Twitter and we're going to do everything for you. And I think that was the magic of Meerkat because you can come and you have 50,000 followers and you can come, you can download it. You press sign up with Twitter, you immediately get to the first page and there's like go live big button and you can press go live and that's it. And once you go live, even if you don't have people on meerkat, you will still tweet it out and people will get this format saying live now this and that, and the preview of the broadcast would be there. And I think that what's nice about product development, and I think the best product development has a very strong statement and reduces all the uncertainties right off the get go from a product development perspective. And I think that what after three bad tries, that was a very interesting point of time in my personal thinking in the team, personal thinking in how we think about product, about how important the statement needs to be so clear so users can say to each other very easily, I use Meerkat because I want to tweet and go live or I want to go live to my audience. I use houseparty because I want a group face time with my friends. And then the execution, the first execution need to be so simple that it removes all the uncertainties.

So we've been talking about live video for a long time. I mean, I'd been even doing live video since 1997. I was so excited for this to come. You launched Meerkat. It pops. It doesn't just pop in a little way. Like everybody I'm following on Twitter is starting to use meerkat and go all the live all the time with your two clicks. And people were seeing it and they were seeing people go back and forth and trying new things. It couldn't have been more interesting and more fun. And seeing my friends go live, seeing famous people, we were hanging out at south by Southwest. It was like the talk of south by Southwest. You could see what was going on everywhere at south by Southwest in 2015 through Meerkat. And it just seemed like we're gonna be doing live video like this for a really long time. I now can't remember the last time I watched a live video on Facebook or Twitter or, or Meerkat, which is no longer there. Like, what happened? Like, what was going on at that time. Of like incredible energy and what didn't feel like it stuck.

There is two problems with live video and what we discovered about live video in the format of the modality of one to many. First, the notion of being live and be able to see your friends in real time is really exciting to people. It's exciting to people because when you say it, there is a different vision in the person mind that gets them excited about it. But the actual truth and the actual reality is that 99% of the people who are not celebs, media and news, don't have the kind of life. And I'm including myself in this, that word going live every day. And that means that we will go live. And I'm considering, you know, I'm talking about all of us around this room. We will go live when our friend is getting married, when there's a fire in the street, when a rhino is dressed with a pink dress and walking down San Diego. I don't know, it's like the last time I went live I was on ATV outside in the desert in Marrakech. That was six months ago. Being live is very hard emotionally because you're putting yourself out there and you cannot edit it. And then on top of it, your audience need to get content that they can enjoy. And arguably the only demographic that it makes sense for to go live every day is celebs, media, news. And since the 99% of the people. It's not a daily product, it's not a daily habit. You cannot really build a company. But the big argument about why Pivot Meerkat was rooted in the understanding that if we cannot turn this into a platform, millions of people come every day and put themselves in being an input medium, then we cannot build a platform that is sustainable for long term and build a business. Because basically what we will build is a cable company. And then we will be competing and bidding on content. And in a world of Facebook and Twitter, this put us back three or four steps behind because we don't have enough money to compete on the content. What the biggest innovators in social networking space are doing, they are owning a daily habit of people coming every day and putting little bits of themselves every day into the platform. And that habit is their mo. And since we saw very early that even though we distilled the product offering to the very simplest form of going live and still people would not come back. And we're talking Jimmy Fallon, like I remember getting a push. Jimmy Fallon joined Meerkat. Jimmy Fallon is live right now. And then seeing like 5,000, 7,000 people watching, which then was incredible. It was incredible. It was like 7,000 people are watching this. Wow. That was like a numbers that we couldn't even fathom. And there was people from Red Bull and NBA players and NFL players. And I think it was an incredible time to see how the world was reacting for the hope and the notion of live video.

So what was the largest audience ever on Meerkat?

I think like 40 something thousand in one moment.

Concurrent. Concurrent and seema. So look, one of the things that I love that we help do at Greylock is when we invest, we kind of help build up the team. And I think one of the first things we talked about, Ben, as things were blowing up with Meerkat is we, we need somebody who can really help build the content story. And we were super lucky to get connected to sema. I know you were at the time were one of the executives leading a lot of the partnerships over at Tumblr within Yahoo. And you had obviously seen a lot of the influencers and other things what attracted you to come join this company and how did we help get you in and sort of what brought you to actually be convinced that there was going to be something here to go build.

It's true, definitely, that Greylock played matchmaker, but actually, Ben and I first met at a Tumblr party at south by Southwest with Michael Kivas. And I remember specifically because earlier that day I was speaking at south by, and my topic was the End of Live. And the whole time the moderator had his phone up, and I thought he was reading notes. And it turned out he was meerkatting. And he looked at me and said, okay, hey, we're going, and started talking to his phone. And then I was like, what are you doing? And he said, oh, I just meerkat this. There were like 400 people watching, which was like, more than were there to watch me actually speak. And I was like, whoa, that's pretty cool. And then, you know, come to see this guy at the party, like, all these people around him, he's wearing this yellow shirt. And. And I was like, who's that? Is he on our guest list? And they're like, yeah, that's Ben. He's like the Meerkat founder. So Michael Kivis is a good friend of mine. And I went over and started talking to Ben a little bit. And so, you know, there was this moment there where I started thinking, this is really interesting. I'd always been thinking about live more in the traditional media sense. But the idea of bringing live and putting it in everybody's back pocket, that scratched an itch. And I feel like Ben and I, when you guys did introduce us and we had that chance to connect, you know, his passion for what he was doing and the mission of bringing people together in the most human way possible, with live video really being the hypothesis around it, resonated with me in a big way. And what I loved even more about Ben was that, you know, meerkat came at a time where the chips were down. You know, they were on the end of their Runway, they'd had a couple, like, fails, and basically, Phoenix rising from the ashes in that moment. It's easy to do things when the wind is at your back. But for me, it was just, like, simpatico right from the beginning. And also, like, I bought into that mission instantly.

Now let's talk a little about kind of this incredible wave of meerkat energy. Ben is, you know, the center of south by Southwest. We're seeing meerkats everywhere, live streaming, so big. Twitter gets in with Periscope. Facebook comes in with Facebook Live. We had recruited you out of a pretty big job to come join this little startup that had some funding that we thought could go be a big thing. And it doesn't feel like meerkat's working in the way that Ben said.

Like, the.

The habit just wasn't there. The habit wasn't forming. We weren't seeing it across any of the platforms. And look, we can still go on at plenty of money in the bank, keep driving, find something to do with meerkat. You know, you'd left a big job to come and do this. Like, tell us a little about your perspective as you get the company to this point and how you're thinking about where things go. And then I really want to hear from Ben of, you know, how did you then start to say, well, maybe we need to switch?

Well, what was interesting is, in hindsight, the press really loved to play out the David and Goliath story. I actually think that worked in our benefit. But the. The truth was, it was David versus David. Right. We were in there fighting our own battle of how do we build our community, how do we get people excited to keep coming back to this platform? And it wasn't the noise around us.

It wasn't really Twitter versus Meerkat. It was just lots of little companies trying to prove that this thing could exist.

Exactly. We did have a really amazing community who was super excited about what we were doing, and we never paid for any content either. So the other thing that was awesome is we had tons of partners who wanted to come work with us because they did see that. Well, where there seems to be some authenticity in this type of medium is with meerkat. At the end of the day, I feel uncomfortable going live, and my brother, who's 10 years younger than me, feels uncomfortable. I can't even explain it to my parents. We saw the metrics, and we were like, something is not right here. That was the moment where these are like the kind of the make or break moments where it could have been like a. Like, we're just gonna give up. But, like, nobody had that feeling. We all just kept thinking about, something's here. How do we make it work? And I think it came back down to we all felt that excitement when a friend of ours would go live or someone we cared about, or when we were streaming and somebody we knew would join us. And that was the magic that we then started to hone in on while the outside world played out this Shakespearean story.

Media influencers.

Yeah, we were really kind of strong on the fact that we had these learnings that we could now capitalize on.

No, I still remember my very favorite meerkat moment was when a couple friends of mine went live at a restaurant in San Francisco, and there was another, probably 20 different friends inside the tech stream. And then somebody actually got the crazy idea to call one of the other friends on a FaceTime phone. So it was sort of a cameo in the call. And literally, that was one of the most fun. I was watching Netflix. I paused it. I ended up turning it off when I got the notification on my phone to hang out with my friends for an hour. And I just remember that being just like such a magical meerkat experience versus trying to watch some star, you know, do something backstage for a little while.

Can we just say that everybody's measure for success should be. Does it make you pause Netflix?

So, Ben, you're the founder of this company. You've got this massive center of hype, and you'd raised a bunch of money, you'd hired a bunch of people under this promise, and you start to scratch your head. Like Seema said, it's not quite working. What's going through your head?

Where.

Where do you see the light?

I remember walking into the board meeting in August or July 2015, and the whole thesis of my board pack was, why we need to pivot meerkat. And I remember that, you know, we were talking a little bit on the phone, and you know, it's very. In that moment, it was not from an outside perspective, even if you're a board member, it's not really easy to understand or why life is not going to work. Like, you really need the founders to come with like the courage to say, this is not working. And I'm going to go to someone who just gave me $15 million and say, Josh, this is not going to work. And here is why I didn't totally believe you. Yeah, but you know what? To your credit and to Greylock's credit, when Twitter pulled the graph, you still stuck to your commitment to follow through on the term sheet. And when the founder came to you and adamantly said, this is not going to work, trust me, we need to pivot. And here's how we're going to pivot. You said, I don't believe you, but it's my job to support you. So we're going to go on three months, milestones every time until you prove me otherwise. And I think that, you know, you can say a lot of things about investors, but the moment they do in moments like this, when shit hit the fan and they reluctantly or not, sticking behind you, it's something that as a founder, I credit. And I remember it was three months after we, four months after we released Meerkat. And what was always stuck into my head is that the only company that succeeded to build a meaningful platform on live video is Twitch. And the only thing that differentiate them versus Facebook at a time, Periscope at the time and Meerkat at the time that they were looking at retention of broadcasters as a key metric, while all the other platform looked at time spent watching, which is so important about how you look and how you build the product and how you evolve the product. And I remember keep thinking about it and going to Needles, who is our analyst. And like, we kept looking at the retention of the broadcasters and that's not working. And it was like not there. And while views and time spent is going up or not, you know, not going up as at the pace that we wanted to, but was still like growing. So at that moment you as you digested and it was, I think at August, it was also like this exercise of the whole company where we thought, how do we get people to come every day and put themselves in, not consume something because that will be our strength. And it took a couple of weeks of thinking and retrospective and looking into data. And we're at the point when there is a fundamental threat to the company because the only demographic that understand how to create a daily habit is celebs, media news and Facebook and Twitter are definitely gonna do a better job than us. And that was the argument to the board, which then agreed to start experimenting a pivot. And then slowly, slowly we made from board meeting to board meeting. I think it took three to completely pivot or two to completely pivot the company into working in what then turned into house party.

What was the insight that you really in your head when you're like, we gotta pause meerkat, we gotta go build this proof of concept? Like, what was the insight that you're really going for is getting people to do this habit every day? What was going to get them to do that? Like, what formed houseparty?

So you think about the opportunity and the mission and what's missing, and you think about how, what is the best way for me to get people together in the most human way possible when they're physically apart? And what was clear from 10 and more million users with a very simple product like meerkat is that it was not cutting it for the everyday usage. And every big product, the beginning of Instagram, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Facebook, that only anomaly is Twitter, which is interesting is their success is rooted in the everyday person coming every day to the platform, checking it four times a day and doing something and inserting something. And yes, as they grow, they turn into broadcast, because that's the way you layer business model. But the heartbeat, the thing that makes the things work is a normal person with a 9 to 5 job that has normal life, really excited using it.

And I think in most cases to talk to their friends. Yeah.

And I mean, ultimately where we landed too, after the off site that Ben was talking about was when we went around the table and the whole team talked about their favorite moments of meerkat. And it was about family and it was about friends. And what we realized was we built a medium that was perfect for the stage. Right. You had to perform, but most people aren't performers. And that's where the metaphor started of, well, what's the opposite of that? What are we trying to build? Well, we're trying to build something that feels comfortable and that people want to go to, like a house party. And in that moment, we started to think about bringing down the network, basically making the product more about who you know, not who you want to know.

And I remember your analogy. That was to go from the theater to the living room. And actually that transformation from the theater to the living room, you spend a lot of time on that so you kind of get through this proof of concept, you start building it. Just explain house party kind of in the simplest way and the way that you described meerkat earlier. And then let's talk about what happens when you start playing with it.

So in the most simplest form, houseparty is the fastest way to get a group video chat going. Oh, I can just open an app and immediately be with my friends. And I don't need to set up a phone call or set up a conference call or schedule a meeting. And the very basic premise of this is that everybody has two or three people they're comfortable FaceTiming to, and they have maybe 20 or 30 people that they would be very happy to see, but it's too awkward to call them or to set up a conference call. And another thing that I think is very sad is that if you, Josh, want to talk to two of your best friends tonight, you're not gonna send them a Google Calendar invite with a hangout link saying, hey, let's catch up for three minutes tonight at 8pm PST. Because the format of calling as it is in the past 100 years just made it a very emotional and it has a lot of baggage to it. I mean, you try to call any 16 year old in the country and they will not answer and reply with what's wrong in text. And I think that says a lot about how social networking has evolved because it was constrained by asynchronous things, which is still great. By not exploring the synchronous aspect of this, we lost a very humane aspect of seeing people and talking to people, which I think is missing. It's missing as a component of synchronous social networking. And synchronous social networking as a concept is something that doesn't really exist.

And so look, so I remember we said, okay, let's go do this proof of concept. Let's start using it from the team. The one stat that I recall as you said, hey, we've only had this product in the team's hand for about a month, and they've been live more hours than they were collectively ever live on meerkat.

Yeah.

Now we started talking about rolling it out, and I remember you guys did something really clever. You know, we were meerkat, we were fairly high profile, and you didn't want the world to see what we were working on yet because we didn't know if it worked. Kind of talk through that strategy. And how did you guys kind of get to that point where, you know, that got us to where we are today, where we were really able to get it into millions of people's hands. And at the very beginning we just weren't even sure if we could.

It was really hard and we knew we were onto something. We were excited by it, but there was a lot of pressure and people, as I said, the outside world was still very much thinking about us as the meerkat team. And so one of the major learnings that we took away from that experience was, was the go to market around influencers and hype. It masked the numbers for us for a while before we could really get a sense of what was working and what wasn't. So we actively took the opposite approach for House Party said, you know what? No influencers, no hype. If we can get this thing going in Iowa, then we know we're onto something. But the idea was let's roll this out to what we call the cousins Network. Let's get our friends and our family it and let's get those learnings. But there was actually just this nuance in the way Apple changed their settings for test flight users where you had to do all these permissions now. And it just felt like a lot. So we put it in the App Store under a pseudonym, happens to be my husband. And that was a big part of the strategy. And we started to see.

So this way by putting the App Store under somebody else's, nobody knew it came from you guys.

Exactly. And we basically seeded the app through this cousins network, if you will. Well, I just mean that we were trying to find younger people to use our app. Actually that came from learnings we had from just the team using it and trying to see where it landed the best. And it just turned out that the Gen Z kit, Gen Z was more into it than say my generation, which was a big bet by the way, because. Because I definitely thought that with my friends being all over busier that this would resonate. But it was definitely with a younger demographic. And so we wanted to get it in their hands, but we didn't want it to be on the coasts and we wanted to see how, what feedback they would give us. So we planted seeds in the Midwest, in the south, if you will, and we just started watching it grow and we had this feature which wasn't an intended feature of the app, Instabug. And people would shake it and give us feedback and we would get all these DMs from users telling us what we want this, we don't want this, we like this. And we were taking that feedback and iterating on it, and that's basically the start of our go to market unintentionally.

Sounds like it was pretty interesting that they even spread it to their friends and their friends friends. And that's sort of how it took off. When did you know you had something? When did you know that, like, okay, we actually should build and focus the company around houseparty? What was that feeling like? Especially after having been in those challenging periods of Meerkat?

So the PoC of Houseparty was an app that has no sign in, that has no log, no user, nothing. You just open and you're there. And whoever has that app get a push that says someone is in that app and that splits the screen to have that person and another person open and it splits it again and then that's how it go. And it would say, one person is in the app, another person is in the app, another person is in the app, and we just send it to the team. So it was, you know, you can control the graph, which is just your team. We just saw what happened. We say, this is going to be explosive because we could feel that something there is working. I think that the reason we were able to ship Houseparty so fast is the team. Since October 2015 until February 2016, the team felt that this is super exciting. They felt the POC and they were like, this is it. This is like we're filling it. And it took three months and we released a very radical version of houseparty. Not the houseparty you have now, but we were able to get an MVP out in three months.

And I just want to add to that, during this time, as we talked about the pivot, we didn't. Nobody left the company. And I think that pivots are really hard. And that part of that reason was because we believed in it before we even put it out there, just based on how we were using it. And that also is what gave us the courage to take that opposite go to market strategy and not leverage the brand equity we had in Meerkat and just kind of, you know, say, we're gonna do this on our own.

There was such an amazing debate inside the company. You guys wouldn't believe whether to call it meerkat with the friends or house party. And I remember it was at some point we had like, Seema would say it has to be meerkat, and I say it has to be house party. And then a month after Seema says it has to be a house party, and I said, it has to be meerkat. And it's like every time we had this huge convention about how we should go to market with it, and I'm very happy. Eventually we gave it its own life and its own name and its own branding, but it was another risk that we put into the mix.

So talk about where house parties come from there. So we go and get it live through the cousins network on a bunch of colleges. We start getting a lot of feedback. People start using it. People keep using it. When did you guys kind of double down all in, build up more of the engineering team and say, we're going to go build a great big company around this? And how are you thinking about it now?

The idea to double up on the engineering team and move operations here to the US I think was one of the hardest ones that we had to make. And it really came from the excitement of the user base we were hearing on social media, we were hearing through the DMs, the emails. It just felt like, okay, we've scratched an itch that people have in figuring out how to get them connected. We've built a painkiller, not a vitamin. And what I mean by that is when the app started blowing up and the shit hit the fan and our back end failed us, everybody started saying, where is this? Where is this? The app wasn't working. You know, like, I think we dropped. We dropped one out of every three parties, and people stuck with us because they needed it. It was not a nice to have. They had to have it. And so that's what really, for me, drove that conviction. And when we would go on campuses and we talk to users, what we kept hearing is like, I can be myself. I don't have to be like, this polished version of who I am on these other places. You're giving me something new to do. And we started calling it, like, this is like the post selfie era. And I don't mean that literally, but that it's this idea of we, me and my BFFs, whether those are, you know, your summer camp friends, your high school friends, your family, you know, whoever that group may be, we are now giving them a way to keep connected in a way that's simple, spontaneous, and that's really where the conviction and doubling down and moving the operations came from.

That houseparty's been growing since you launched it last year. Grew incredibly fast, you know, over kind of the fall of 2016. It felt like, where are you now? Where do you go from here?

I think we're in A point where we see a lot like millions of users that have consistent usage. And there is a question about how do we grow it from there. And a bunch of what we do right now is understanding the exact patterns of how people use, which is a challenge that is new to the team because we used to be exposed to all of the streams and now when, you know, it's a private conversation. So we definitely don't save it and we definitely don't look at it. So it's a bit harder to understand. The whole company was under rebuilding the infrastructure and the client for the past year. Some of the things we recently launched are passing notes to each other so people can talk back and forth while they're in rooms or in locked rooms, and sneaking into the house where you can launch the app without telling your friends that you're in the app. And I think these kind of dynamics and the gamification around them are the things that are going to make this thing very unique and different to users.

And just in a world where we do have things like Facebook and Instagram and Snapchat and Twitter that people use every day to talk and share and capture and do all this, like, make the case for why we need a live synchronous social network, one that we spend all of our time and have kind of our best moments with friends.

The best case to make is millions of people coming every day and spending 50 minutes or more per user talking to friends. And this is one of the biggest things that tell you there is something incredibly important there that we need to unlock. The second case is more about the value statement and saying because of technical constraint and because we worked with what we have, the world has detached himself from the humane side of the communication and have asynchronous micro interaction. We feel more together but less humane. Instead of your mom telling you it's funny, she needs to like it on Facebook. And I think there is a place where it's incredibly important to have a different type of communication that is about seeing, talking and being with your friends in real time. And I don't think we figured it out perfectly, but there is something incredibly important and interesting in understanding what does it mean to be a synchronous social network and what are the dynamics that are around it. And in a world where you have Facebook and WeChat and all this stuff and Snapchat, what makes me optimistic is the fact that they are so indexed for asynchronous that there is a huge opportunity of rethinking what it means to be online and what presence means in 2017 and moving forward.

I just would add to that that, you know, sometimes it's hard for us because this idea of synchronous is more nostalgic, but for Gen Z, it's brand new. For them, this is a new way to communicate. And I think that that's why they've been the first to really come to the platform and love it and feel that it's giving them something that doesn't already exist. Where the rest of us, they came to it a lot more slowly after they realized they don't need an agenda to be on houseparty.

And then my last question for both of you. What's your favorite moment so far that you've gotten to have in house Party?

Definitely my mom on house Party were four sons, and I'm in San Francisco. My younger brother was in Berlin. Another younger brother who's an officer in the Israeli Defense Force was on, and another brother that was in studies in Jerusalem. It was the first Shabbat dinner that she was alone, but she was on House Party, and we were all there together. And she didn't, like, you know, there was no WhatsApp exchange saying, hey, let's go on house party. She just opened it, and I jumped in, and I say, hey, Mom. Shabbat shalom. And then another brother comes in, and then another brother. And I can see in the face of my mom that she's so happy to see everyone right now. And I was like, okay, if we can create this experience to every user once a week, not even once a day, but once a week, we hit gold. And for me, that was the biggest moment.

Just yesterday, I had it open, and Needles on our team was pretty much babysitting my kids for me while I had to go run because my son, who's 4, knows how to use houseparty. And so he now talks about Jeff at work because Jeff has come into the party sometimes, even when I'm there to talk to, like, my mom or dad. And so they were sitting there and talking to each other while I was cooking. And, you know, my son is, like, trying to say hi to my brother to bring him into the conversation. Or the other day, I saw, you know, one of my girlfriends from Duke pop in, and she's on the east coast, and another one who was in Chicago and another one who's in San Diego, and they were all there, and I had this crazy fomo and I'm driving, and I literally pulled over to, like, be like, what's going on? What are you guys talking about? And they were like, nothing. We're just. We're just hanging. And in that moment, I was like, this is why we built this app. It was so great because you just. You don't have those anymore. That sort of spontaneity in your newsfeed. And so that it's those kind of house party, the new high school parking lot. That's what really makes me warm and fuzzy.

That's awesome. Thank you guys so much for doing this.

Thank you.