Maya Frai | Design-Centered Product

Hi, everyone. Welcome to Grey Matter, the podcast from Greylock, where we share stories from company builders and business leaders. I'm Heather Mack, head of editorial for Greylock. Today I'm happy to be talking with fellow Greylock colleague Maya Fry. Maya joined our investing team in January and is focused on working with founders. Building the next generation of consumer software. Technology built for a wide range of consumers is Maya's wheelhouse. Prior to joining us at Greylock, she was part of product design and development teams at Google, Facebook, and Rent the Runway. She's also an advisor to the startup Reink, which was founded by World cup champions. Maya's experience has distilled her focus to a core aspect of product development. Design centered products, which tend to be the ones that best resonate with us. The reason being they are made to work in accordance with our existing behaviors rather than attempt to change them. But of course, in the process of us embracing them, these products inevitably change almost everything about our everyday lives. That's a lot to unpack, so let's dive in. Maya, thanks so much for joining me today.

Thanks so much for having me.

Before we get into product design and your path to becoming an investor, can you share a little bit about your personal background? Did you always know you wanted to build businesses?

So I was actually born and raised in Miami. My mother is Brazilian, my dad's Israeli. They met in Miami almost 30 or so years ago and they had started actually a jewelry company together. Ever since then they've been working together and have been building up this business from the ground up. And I think that has actually really formulated a lot of how I think about building up a business and thinking about businesses, especially small to medium sized businesses. And you know, in Miami, it's such a vibrant city. And part of what I think about design and how I look at design is actually through my upbringing there. And I remember right before I was kind of deciding to go to school, I wanted to do something of my own. I almost, I was kind of fiddling around with a couple projects. One thing that I had built was an education platform actually for AP students. And at the time I had was I was such a ner. I mean, I was writing outlines for all of these AP courses and my friends actually had asked me could I get these outlines to study for the exams. It actually evolved into so many requests that one friend was like, you know what, you should just build a website and put all your outlines on this site. And I was like, okay, sure, I'll do this. And so I put it on over the course of the months, I saw thousands of users coming to this site in order to prepare for their AP exams. And a couple months later, it ended up looking at multiple countries of people going to this site. And that was kind of like one core example of me trying to use technology in such a way to kind of share education. I joke oftentimes where the biggest lesson I learned from that too is that it's really hard to monetize education platforms. I remember I had hooked up AdSense for a bit over the week to try to understand if this is something that I can monetize via advertising. Over the course of a month, I think I had made a cent. And I kind of realized that there's a lot that goes into how you monetize a consumer products. And thereafter, I think I got really fascinated about brands, and I think I got really interested in starting a brand of my own. And so my sister and I, we had gone to Brazil very often for months prior, and we'd come back with cheap swimwear and very high quality swimwear. And in Miami, the best thing you do is go to the beach every other weekend. So we started this swimwear brand called Killer Ivy Swimmer. And it was all around, like, empowering young women. You know, we designed all the swimwear, we had found all the partnerships, we'd done multiple trunk shows. And it was 2014 and Instagram had just kind of reached its peak popularity. And I remember building the entire business on Instagram. It was like reaching out to photographers, getting models, getting our first sale all through Instagram. And it was. We were using square to get transactions and trunk shows. And I just saw, you know, from every touch point of building up this brand, one, the creative side that I loved, and the other, the other heart and grit that goes into trying to get your first transaction and get people to come back. And so I realized that technology really enables that. And I was like, how do I do this? Like, how do I enable other people to start businesses?

So how did that set the tone for your path towards product design and development?

So when I got to Cornell, I got very involved in the design community and I started learning so much about computer science. I started learning so much about products and learning about how to go about building a product. And that was really like my first goal. Like, how do I go about learning about really truly building a business from the first principles of how to develop better product and from a lot of different experiences there. I had actually gone back to Miami my freshman year and I had gotten to know There was an event that the CTO over at the Runway was actually there at the time. And this is also Miami back in, like 2016, with like, virtually no tech whatsoever, like, even now. Changed so, so dramatically at that point. Learned about Rent the Runway, was able to land an internship there that following winter. And I remember going to Rent the Runway and understand this just crazy logistical business and understand how they go about both building a really great product as well as a really great business. And when I was there, I was really, really inspired by Jennifer Hyman. I think she was really able to build up this team that blended this kind of creative aspect of fashion with technology. That's kind of one of my first experiences working for a company in the industry and almost kind of setting my own framework of how I think about the intersection between design, product and technology. And I remember at the kind of having this question around, do I go all in on software engineering? Do I do the traditional path of going into software engineering, or do I go into product design? And I actually knew at the time the end goal was to get a job in product management. I saw product management as the beautiful intersection of those three areas. I netted out talking with a friend, and I was kind of telling him I was kind of worried. I was like, I don't necessarily think of myself as a designer. I never studied graphics. I don't think myself as an artist. And I remember him mentioning where, like, this is just a way to structure your thinking, how to solve problems, and you almost just learn the ins and outs of the exact outcome that you're trying to get to right a product, a business. And it all starts from understanding what users want. And I remember that really stuck with me. And I landed a product internship, product design internship at Facebook.

And.

And we had gone through a product design camp. They took us through everything from Android design to localization to the fundamentals of prototyping. And I remember it just being such a classic course on product design that I wanted. And at the end of the summer, I had worked on a number of different things there. I was primarily focused on the Facebook Pages platform, which was, funny enough, something that I used so often when I was building that business in Miami, and same with my parents. So I definitely understood how to think about empathy for a product like that. And working with teams on the local side, working with teams on Instagram and just being so entranced by what the Facebook team was doing. And netted out at the end of the summer talking with a bunch of product managers, people that were there at the time, especially the women product management teams like Fiji Simo or Ashley Yuki and learning a lot from them on how to get to product management. And it was really actually then learning about the Google APM internship of almost this kind of next step as getting into product management more formally. In between that time, though, I again continued to do a bunch of different creative projects at Cornell. And it was right around the same time, it was March of 2018, when there was a lot of conversations around MeToo and the MeToo movement was really kicking up speed. It was something where it almost just, like, hit us all. Like it just hit us all almost every week with a new story. And I remember at the time wanting to contribute, wanting to keep these stories relevant, wanting to kind of better understand and better visualize the amazing women that were doing great things, not only for this movement, but in their own lives and their own industries. And so I started a female empowerment platform at the time, a couple weeks later. It was called let's Hear It. It was initially started to be a discovery platform. It was kind of like your directory, and you could filter by venture capital, you could filter by technology or politics, and almost like, find your role model. Find your role model and your key person that you would find inspiration from and learn about them, learn about their career, learn about how they're thinking about their current movement, their thinking about their place in all of this. And so it was kind of like a way to create a discovery platform for a lot of these stories, as well as the ones that were the leading women in a number of different tech fallouts at the time, right? Like Susan Fowler and kind of looking at a lot of her work and her publication around her opinions at the time. And it quickly actually evolved into a publication. I started talking with a lot of these women, and I think a lot of them were just so interested in sharing their story and I think inspiring the next generation of young women. And I remember at the time kind of talking with a bunch of people that were subscribing to the newsletter or listening to some of the interviews that I had done. And these were interviews with women from all walks of life. And it was just such an interesting process to kind of learn more about some of these career journeys and getting feedback from a couple people. I was almost like, thinking of, okay, what's the next step for something like this? And so many people had shared, you know, Maya, this is already so great. Like, you can stop at inspiration, right? Like, inspiration is already such an important part about why people use platforms and why people listen to certain things, like inspiration can be a really key driver for really great work from then on. A couple months later, it was the summer and I was. I then had joined Google as an APM intern. I was working on Google Search at the time. One of the other things that actually came out from that summer was working with Reink. And funny enough, I'm Brazilian, but I don't follow soccer very much. I follow Brazilian soccer and at the time the brand is founded by four women's soccer players. But I had known the players through their work for gender or pay equity. I didn't necessarily follow the soccer players via their leagues. So when I had seen that the players banded together to create this and I was looking at the brand identity behind it, looking at all of the purpose behind it, it was very much about empowerment of people. And I need to learn more.

How did working with organizations that were focused on inspiration and empowerment influence your next career move in technology? I think it'll be helpful for founders to hear how you took what you learned and applied it to product design and development.

I knew that going into product management was like the thing I wanted to do after college. And it so happened that I landed the Google APM program, so the full time program right after I got the internship. And I had just graduated cornell December of 2019 and took a couple months right before joining YouTube in April of 2020. I joined YouTube right at the start of the pandemic. And so this was a crazy time to join a new company as well as be in a role as a product manager where you're dealing with so many different people, right? And so all of this was done fully, virtually. So I joined YouTube and at the time the team was tasked with launching live sports. And right before I joined the team, they had bought around 25 games of major League Baseball. And the main goal for the team was really to prepare for the bigger leagues, right? Like the NFL. And YouTube at the time was kind of in this turning point and still continues to be around paid content and elevating the content that's live and available for streaming on YouTube. Live sports is like the big one, right? It's where people still use cable for just to watch live sports. And our general charter was, hey, we want to bring the technology around dynamic ad insertion, which is essentially the proprietary technology that personalizes ads in real time. You want personalized ads. And a lot of these traditional media companies don't necessarily invest in that same technology. A lot of these ads are just burned into the streams and so what we tried to do at YouTube was essentially we had built out all of this DAI for short technology on YouTube TV and we wanted to transport that over to the YouTube main platform so we could monetize live sports. And ideally, what the whole kind of strategy behind that is, we want to nail down the entire market of cord cutters. We want people to go watch on YouTube TV if they want to subscribe, or they can just watch it for free with ads on the YouTube main platform. Right. And the YouTube main platform has 2 billion plus users. So if you can nail that, that market of people watching live sports, you've definitely won a good portion of the market. And so that was our primary strategy.

Walk us through the process. How did you go about implementing that?

We started thinking about, okay, we have these games, we need to start testing it. And in the coming months we were kind of like still on the fence about whether or not we would even be able to test. And the team had actually started then testing on live news and some other content that we just had that we could repurpose in order to be prepared for the first game. And it was kind of weird. We were kind of in this chicken egg problem where like every month it was, you know, getting more updates. We were very much trying to get in tune with the MLB team, trying to get updates, trying to get a sense of, you know, how to continue to test the product. And you can imagine, you know, first time PM trying to get things out the door, trying to keep up team morale. And I think it was definitely a crash course in a number of things. And at the end of the day, it's a job in managing products, the managing the outcome. And the outcome for live sports at the time was getting to that first initial launch and showing proof of revenue. And because that was delayed for so long, I was constantly in this chicken and egg where it's like, okay, I want to take this team with me in seeing the behind the scenes process of how we're going about picking the games. But nothing was happening. We were constantly, constantly delayed. And so I was trying to balance this out with managing a pivot. I was like, okay, what can we do if this doesn't happen? If we don't get these live games, what's the next best thing that we have on YouTube? And so we started exploring a couple different avenues. At the time, esports was booming. We had live streams hitting peak concurrency, so highest, highest viewership at a given time for things like the SpaceX launch, for things like the esports Games. And we were constantly thinking about, okay, how do we apply this technology to these new content streams that are just, just peaking and are just surging during the pandemic. And I guess the TLDR on that is it's not that easy. And I think, you know, we were trying to almost be scrappy about the technology, but because we had developed it in such a way where it was almost going to align with live sports the best. Right. And because we hadn't tested that out, we don't exactly know the limits of the technology for this content. And so applying it to something like a different content category like esports wasn't the best one to one relationship. So we were kind of working through those things. But again, I think what I really learned from that experience was truly understanding that the best developments often come from working with your team to door to an outcome. And I think what I tried to do really well was every week involve my team in the process of talking with the end content partnerships team that were directing their concerns to mlb, going back to the team and saying, hey, okay, we're going to have another week, but let's do this instead to test this xyz. And so it's kind of going this back and forth around making sure that the team was feeling like we were getting somewhere while also showing that we had ideally some backup plan and ideally some proof points for us to show at the end of the year. And so right before I had left, we actually launched. That was great. We had launched basically about a year later and I was right about to transition to my next team when we had our first live game.

From there, you moved into different verticals at Google. What were your primary takeaways from working at such a big company in terms of lessons that are applicable to companies of all sizes?

I moved over to a different team within Google and it was essentially Google's food ordering team as well as their reservations team. So it's kind of like everything within the food vertical was oriented around our team on search and maps. And from that experience we were working with a lot of marketplace oriented food companies. So things like DoorDash or Uber Eats in helping them get more users right via Google and ideally through organic experiences, not necessarily always through advertising. And so it was actually kind of this balance between building up organic experiences on search to enable transactions. Right. So to enable an end reservation or to enable an end order with fielding some of these concerns around disintermediation because Google, the best thing it could do is acquire users and then oftentimes they'll leave. So search, you'll issue a query, you see a bunch of links, then you leave Google, right? And so I think there's a lot to learn on again, almost thinking about products in terms of meeting users where they are. And I think for Google search, it was really about showing people the highest relevance results and ideally getting them to their decision faster. It's almost like, how do we get the highest signal in order to make that conversion more likely to happen? That was a lot of what we'd been tasked about in order to prove revenue as well as to prove usage and conversion for these end customers that we worked with. It was a really interesting crash course on how Google is just this giant acquisition engine, so like very similar to YouTube, I mean, YouTube's entire operations and sales team. I mean, I was amazed because there's so many things that go into just monetizing, not to even mention the whole creator platform. Right. And so there was so much to learn just in terms of being both a PM on a monetization team to then switching over gears onto a consumer team.

Was it a natural progression to investing from there?

I guess overall, from, from that experience, I was really, really interested in kind of understanding, okay, where I've had these experiences on product teams. I've talked with a bunch of different people, both in technology as well as venture capital, and I think it was very much the decision around supporting early stage teams. And I think I had been on a lot of teams where I could see scale, I could see getting to the next billion users, I could see getting next to the next consumer shift, like at Rent the Runway or at Facebook, where it was like, how do we almost elevate the product that exists already? And I think a really big thing for me was just trying to understand what's kind of the process just from day one or even day zero. And I think a lot of it, I've actually been through a couple small checks I had done through angel investing over the last two years and I had gotten involved in a couple different companies and I think also through Reink, it was really just seeing that full process and just being there from really, really early days and then just like seeing how it's just growing and growing month over month. And that experience was like truly, truly inspiring as well as telling for me that I would love to do this every day and I would love to be part of this every day. And I think that's really where you learn the most. And it was further validating. Right before I joined Google. I had been connected to MG on the Google Ventures team ever since I had been an intern on the team. And he was kind enough to say, hey, why don't you spend some time on our consumer team before heading out. That was really great. And the team over there is amazing and super design driven, super design oriented. And that was just a further validation. I was like, this is definitely something that I would love to do full time. And so Greylock had been a firm that I had known for a couple years prior. I'd been involved with a couple of their student events and always held Greylock in very high regard. I often tell people it really brings me back full circle because I was that 14 year old reading Reid Hoffman's books and reading about venture capital through a lot of the literature that Greylock puts out. So it was a full circle moment for me when Greylock had reached out and shared that there happened to be an opening on the team. I think at the time it was such a serendipitous moment for me. It was very much in line with what I had been thinking about.

You've had some amazing background experience and with some really incredible people. You mentioned Fiji, Simo, Jennifer, Hyman, both who are amazing leaders from these past experiences. How do you think about approaching human focused product design and how do you work with teams and building on that? How does that help you channel your interest into what to invest in?

I like to think about the areas I'm interested in based on where companies can meet consumer needs and approach design from first principles to really develop the best product to solve those consumer needs. I think the first is really the team and the wedge and this is really the differentiator. So people the people and the starting entry point that differentiates them from others. And this could really be anything from Shopify, starting from the liquid template language that enables custom storefronts, that then evolves into this truly beautiful infrastructure company that now many, many different companies are now built on top of it. I think you could probably see the same about a lot of some social platforms where a lot of creators are now building businesses on top of it. Same way as going back to the initial brand that I had started in Miami, built right on top of Instagram. And I think the second thing is really the technologies. So these are the enablers. And I think this is really when you think about how founders came to execute the idea. So the idea could be coming into fruition based on personal experience. But what really probably gets them over the edge is a new technology that they are starting to experiment with or starting to see that it's further developed to the point where they can build a company that leverages the technology. I think AI is a big one here. I think the blockchain and crypto is a big one here. And it's really these very, very new and interesting technologies that create the best innovations that ideally can achieve scale. The last one is really like markets. So these are really the tailwinds. These are the things that ideally push your company over the edge.

How do you see companies building for today's experience? What do they need to keep in mind?

I think about this in a couple different ways. I think it's not necessarily just the public markets. It's really the general sense of where consumers are. So this is actually a lot more economical and oriented around consumer behavior and almost government regulation as well. Like almost thinking about the entire picture of macroeconomic activity and really understanding how this is so impacted by how consumers think and how consumers spend and their reactions to certain things. And so I think it's truly behavioral and I think it then evolves into where markets price certain things and how companies end up getting valued at their exit. And so I think a lot of these three different factors have altered how I think about certain companies. The simplest way that I like to think about a couple different areas is just really understanding where founders can create a very design centric product. There's so many things that go wrong in a company. The story of starting a company is just like day zero. I mean, everything after it is really where the bulk of the work comes from. But I do think that what I believe stays really consistent among successful teams is the focus on design. And, and I also don't mean that it's just how the product looks or how it's communicated, but it's truly design across product function. It's around culture, it's around organizational structure of the company. Like all the inputs that you can control for, right? Like right now, the public markets can put evaluation at a company. But how do you control the inputs that you are working on day in and day out that make your company really, really impactful? And I've always referenced Airbnb as a really great example of this. I think from the get go, if you look at early interviews with Brian Chesky and the two founders, Nathan and Joe, they've had such a great setup from the day one in terms of leveraging each of their skill sets in navigating the first initial milestone for the company. And I think Brian and Joe especially nailed down design as being truly core to the development of their product. And they had this infamous storyboarding the the 10 star Airbnb experience. And that was one part of developing up the company. And the second was really thinking about design around the development of culture. And I think that was seen in installing the Airbnb replicas as their conference rooms. And now, many years later, this move to a fully remote culture helps them even more. The conference rooms was all about achieving empathy for guests and hosts. And I think there's so many examples. And you know, it could be from founders that come from a design background or founders that are just super interested in leveraging design fundamentals and methodologies around building really great products. And I think it really comes down to just having empathy. And I think as a product manager, you constantly need to be in tune with your customer, with your end user. And another good example here, even just going back to designing products around inspiration is probably like Pinterest. So Ben Silverman has really always prioritized user empathy, have always prioritized the user above everyone else. And he's often said that they have tons of dashboards, they have tons of metrics that they track, but they have always, from the beginning, emphasized this loyalty, this loyal community of people that love the product and are the ones that are using it day in and day out, so they have the feedback, right? Like these are the community driving product decisions. And if you have that line of connection to that community, then you can really create a really great product. And I saw this at Reink, I saw this at Facebook, I saw this at YouTube, I saw this at Rent the Runway. Like community breeds loyalty, breeds so much interesting insights that you as a product manager just love, right? You want to get these insights from the these people that are truly obsessed with your product. And I think so much of that is truly like almost you have to create those opportunities. You have to create those opportunities for people to give feedback. And you have to have the mindset in that you can take those as truly critical nuggets that you can often digest and then ideally put that back into how you're thinking about designing your roadmap.

Let's talk about how that's playing out with your work here at Greylock so far. Where are you spending most of your time? Start with telling us about which deals you've worked on so far.

I started to work with David Thacker on this company called Curated. And Curated is a marketplace for high consideration commerce purchases. So it's really a company that allows you to not Necessarily get connected with a chatbot, which was the situation before. Right. If you wanted to ask a sales rep online to get advice on a certain product, you would probably like, you know, ask a couple questions in this chat feature and you know, depending on the response, it would probably just, you know, delegate you to a customer support agent. Maybe wouldn't necessarily get into the nuances of exactly what you're trying to get from a product. And so what curated tries to do is match you with an expert. And I think one of the things that's really resonated with me that Eddie has mentioned about the company is that they'll prioritize matching you with the best expert versus matching you instantly with maybe the expert that isn't the right fit. And I think that was really interesting because you could prioritize speed. But what he's really prioritizing is quality. And I think it's so important to have the best first experience because in commerce the switching costs is pretty, pretty low, I would say. I think there's certainly a lot of brands out there and it's certainly very competitive and so developing a super unique product in order to make that first experience really, really great. Obviously the bar is going to be super high for businesses like this. I definitely saw the complexities of innovating with a new business model like this. I saw this certainly a rent the Runway where there's this new model oriented around rental, where there's a whole, a whole logistics operation that's happening in the background just to make those shipments possible and efficient. And I think it's just shown that in order to do something that's new and different, there's a lot of infrastructure that's happening in the background.

Okay. And so you're interested in all of the various aspects of how commerce is changing. How are you thinking about this area as an investment opportunity?

Yeah, commerce is such an interesting area. And I think it's also really one of my favorite ways to think about tech and design because it's really both social and transactional. And the other interesting thing about commerce is that it's really dynamic. And if you just take right now with inflation, if you think about the outcome of that, people are going to spend less on higher priced goods and discretionary spending or the pandemic where there was doordash increasing their revenue by 600%. And the pandemic just shifted this online spending pattern. And so I think it's so interesting to kind of see, see how commerce is this dynamic oriented business, which makes it really hard to start a company in this space. But truly when you have both a technical moat or a logistics moat around commerce, you can win a lot of strong user adoption. And you don't have to necessarily worry too much about revenue just because you're already driving purchasing behavior. People are coming to you with high transaction intent. So it's a little bit different than social platforms that have some mixed intent around it. And I think the interesting thing that I've really loved always about commerce and E commerce businesses, both from technology companies in the space as well as brands in the space, is that it's really been always about storytelling and it's always this question around why do you want someone to spend their hard earned money on your product over another? And as a brand, this is the number one thing we all think about. I really noticed this in supporting the Re Ink team where we've always talked about brand positioning, we've always talked about how do we stay very true to our mission statement, which is very broad. It's to reimagine the status quo. And it's this kind of similar way that, you know, you can look at Nike around empowering people to be like athletes, to adopt the athlete lifestyle and mindset. And similar to Reink, we want people to adopt the activist mindset. We want everyone in their own lives to think about how they both make an impact in their own lives in order to make the lives of other people better. And we've always this always been the anchor to everything we prioritize and decide on everything that we do. So from partnerships to collections to new products, we are always thinking about the impact that we have. And I think a lot of this has been certain products that we've developed that may not necessarily be core revenue drivers. It could just be a really interesting way of visually representing some of our core values. I think for really commerce as a whole, what I feel like we're really seeing is almost this massive transformation around distribution and thinking about relationships with your end customers. I remember talking with another investor in commerce and he had put this quite well. Where we've almost gone from local distribution. So kind of like bazaars and shops to mass distribution to marketplaces to hyper personalization. And we're almost like still moving back and forth between all of those with some overlap in between. And I think what's been really interesting is following this E commerce boom over the last couple of years and we saw this like D2C boom where everyone wanted to create a D2C brand and have that end to end conversation. With their customers and truly own that relationship. And we've also then had advertising models where it just became about acquisition and there was less and less direct relationship with your customers in that way. But you could achieve scale. And I think it's probably one of the most efficient ways of scaling your audience and reaching new audiences. I think the interesting thing is trying to understand where you can find organic models of distribution. So I do think that there's certainly a lot of interesting companies that are propping up just to help support these new purchasing models and these new distribution models, from shipping to logistics to, you know, operations and supply chain. I think there is certainly going to be a lot more, a lot more innovation around there as well.

Web3 and crypto is going through an awkward stage right now, but it's still a big area of focus for you and a few other investors here as we're getting to the next stage. How do you think about that space as a whole?

Yeah, definitely. And I think crypto is definitely, you know, a big space that's getting a lot of attention right now. And I think, you know, crypto and going back to certain like framework around companies, I think crypto blockchain is a great technology. I think it is certainly the going to be the foundation of a lot of companies, a lot of the next generation consumer companies. I think with crypto though, you know, you both have community oriented design principles around crypto being developed right now. Not everything has to necessarily use blockchain technology in order to be successful in the next 10 years time. But what could also be interesting is companies that are just adopting the underlying design principles that some crypto communities have started to evangelize and started to adopt. And one of that is ownership, right? Like ownership around assets or ownership around certain media. And a lot of this I think has already been starting to get a lot of excitement in the community around the creator economy or thinking about how people have already started to become independent on certain platforms. And I think the, you know, I think the interesting thing about crypto is I think it does have a very large design problem at this moment in time. I think for a really long time crypto has been associated with just the financial industry. And I think for a really long time there was the common perception around just crypto just being an investable asset. It's just all oriented around investing in a token or investing in bitcoin. And I think in its own definition it truly is the financialization of an asset. And so I think because of that reason, a lot of users haven't yet onboarded to the consumer facing application of it. And I think there is certainly now going to be a lot more interesting consumer applications. But the utility has yet to be proven out and I think I'm super, super excited about what is to come. I think it's certainly already seen success outcomes in terms of NFTs. I think, I think when NFTS really took root, we had the first visual representation of a token. And I think in that such a way you can put an image to a financial asset. And I think so much of that is about design and I think so much of that captures people's attention. And I can only imagine the next set of applications that we have that are built on NFTs. And so I do think we're entering truly a new wave of crypto applications, very similar to how the advent of mobile ushered in so many interesting consumer applications that we now use on a daily basis.

This is a good opportunity to talk about social, which as you're saying, has a lot of overlap with everything.

Definitely. And I do think that social is definitely really at the core of a lot of the products I've worked on and certainly helped impact how I think about technology. And I think there's certainly two aspects of social that I've always found really interesting. And I think the first piece is social has always been about how we present ourselves online, and the second is how we engage with other people online. I think the beauty of a lot of social platforms is you get access to an audience, but you also get access to a tool. And I think you can evolve that into owning an audience and becoming a consistent content creator. But it can also just be a platform for consumption. And I think going back to thinking about how new social platforms are innovating in this space, I think it's actually largely been oriented around the creator. But I do also think that there's going to be a lot of new interesting models and new kind of ways of driving authentic creation for the everyday creator on a lot of these platforms. And so I think overall within social platforms, what I've learned is I think founders and companies, they've looked to create tools that either offer distribution or monetization for users. I do think that a lot of these platforms, they either do one or the other, or they try to focus a little bit more on distribution for a specific vertical. And I think going back to before, I think what happens a lot of the time is users will either appropriate some of these tools to do something totally different than what it was intended for, or it actually becomes this major part of how they think about their independent identity, how they think about work, how they start to monetize their content. And I mean, the best example here is certainly something like Subsac or Medium, where two different companies approached it with two different models. And I think one was a little bit more focused on distribution, like Medium versus Substack, which was focused on monetization very at the outset. And I think for now, there's a lot of new interesting individual LED social platforms that may think about differentiation relative to the medium. So it's like video or audio, as well as what is the first entry point in order to get users onboarded. So is it the tool? Is it the fact that you can create an audience? Is it the fact that you can monetize that audience? So I feel like there's definitely a lot of context collapse on some of these social platforms and certainly very interesting and how new business models are going to be created in the coming years. And I think going back to talking about crypto earlier, there's certainly this underlying push on how users can own the data that they're giving to some of these social platforms. And thinking about what the opportunity is around daos. And I think daos in and of itself is a social network. You're getting a group of people together, you're trying to achieve a shared goal. And a lot of it is truly about trying to optimize for a shared level of interest in a certain topic. And I think the best examples of a lot of these daos is investment collectives. You're trying to reduce the barrier to entry, to invest in an asset on the Internet, so something like an nft and you can set up a dao to do just that. And I think when I started looking into daos early last year, I really came from it from the perspective of thinking about how people can set up new and interesting projects, get a group of people together to contribute to that shared project. And it's truly just become a really powerful way to organize people online, to crowdfund as well as collaborate. And I think for any social platform to really be successful, it's certainly a product of its people, and it's certainly a product of whether or not people feel like they can consistently contribute.

Great. And so a lot of these elements are at play with these other sectors we're talking about commerce, social, web 3. They're also at play with a lot of the new software that we're seeing, especially with those that enable remote work, hybrid work, Anything that helps with productivity and collaboration. We saw this with Greylock's recent investment in Scenery. The firm led the Series A. And you worked closely with Josh McFarlane on that partnership. Tell me about that.

Definitely, yeah. Scenery was super fun company to work on. Definitely one of the first deals that I've done at Greylock. And Josh was super, super great on kind of getting me along for the journey for that company. And it's really interesting because it's one of those companies that I'd been almost thinking about for the past couple of years, actually ever since joining YouTube and joining Facebook. Is that when I started using some design tools like Sketch and then evolved into Figma, really saw this beauty of real time editing in the cloud. Right. And I think it was almost a question of what other types of tools can come out from this. And I remember using Sketch, seeing already like all of the different nuances that I had learned, all the certain shortcuts that I had done. And Figma coming in, they already had that. The switch from Sketch to Figma was actually super easy. And it was because Figma for such a long time was so in tune with what product designers were already doing. And it was just a question of how to supercharge that, how to get them to the next level, how to level up the existing workflows that product designers were already doing. And Scenery is doing exactly just that for video editing, for creating a video. You know, I remember because the last time I actually had set up a video was for. Let's hear it. I was editing podcasts, I was editing a bunch of different content types. But the last thing I had done was a compilation video for International Women's Day. And I remember, you know, we were trying to get certain points of feedback and you know, it's kind of like a lot of these disparate workflows that you have with video. You know, you're. You're recording things. It's very similar to product design because it starts from an idea. It starts from this brainstorm with maybe a couple people or just individually. It then gets into this kind of experimental mode where you're trying to create a bunch of different things and you're creating and setting up different art boards to get that visualization, ideally getting feedback here and there. You are using so many different tools to achieve even just that setup period of just getting to that first initial cut. Right. And that's not even to mention all the other edits that you need to do to get to the final cut. And so I think video was just one of those big opportunities for disruption for something that's more collaborative, for something that's more consolidated. I think that's really the other big thing about Scenery is how do you consolidate all of these asset uploads, feedback as well as storage, and, and just putting all of that into one tool is really, really powerful. And so when I saw the first demo of Scenery, I was like, wow, these guys did it, that type of thing. These are repeat entrepreneurs in the video space. Very perfect for solving a problem like this and already had a working prototype of what this could look like. And the social aspect to it is getting that network effect of people to use the tool. And then you're just going to be seeing all these different creations that you're just going to get inspired. You just want to create a video. And so I think there's going to be a lot of really interesting organic marketing opportunities for Scenery, as well as some organic hooks to get people introduced into Scenery that I think we've already seen some other companies do. But I think with Video, we haven't yet seen the same adoption. So I think with something like Scenery, it's just going to be this really powerful tool that both consolidates your workflow as well as just think about how to really enable this social distribution of video that we've already seen has blown up on social platforms today. So I think adding Scenery to the mix is really is only going to further that development of video as a communication mechanism.

Well, Maya, that's all really interesting, super cool areas to look into and obviously lots of opportunities there. You bring some great, very unique experience to the table and I really appreciate you coming to Gray Matter today and sharing all this with us. So thanks for joining us.

Thanks so much.

That concludes this episode of Gray Matter. If you aren't already a subscriber, you can find us wherever you get your podcasts. And be sure to check out our website, greylock.com blog for all new content and follow us on Twitter at greylockvc. I'm Heather Mack. Thanks for listening.