YouTube's Neal Mohan | Powering Creators

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 at Greylock. Today, Greylock General partner David Thacker interviews Neil Mohan, who is the Chief product officer of YouTube and vice president at Google. Neil oversees every aspect of the YouTube platform and ecosystem for over 2 billion users and and millions of content creators plus media partners. Neil is a renowned pioneer of the business model that transformed the advertising. He joined Google in 2007 via the company's acquisition of DoubleClick, where he had been developing Internet ad tech expertise since the 90s. The business model has allowed Internet companies to scale to global audiences and often means that that access to information, content and knowledge can remain free. This interview was recorded as part of Greylock's Iconversations speaker series. In the discussion, Neil shares insights and anecdotes from his career and lays out his vision for the future of user generated content and open platforms. You can read a transcript of this interview on our website greylock.com blog and you can subscribe to the Gray matter podcast on SoundCloud, Spotify, Apple, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi everyone. Welcome to Greylock's Iconversations. I'm David Thacker, a General Partner at Greylock. Our guest today is Neil Mohan, who is the Chief product officer of YouTube and senior vice President at Google. Neil oversees every aspect of the YouTube platform and ecosystem for over 2 billion users and millions of content creators and media partners. He began his tech career in the 1990s at DoubleClick, which is widely regarded as the original Internet ad tech company. He was instrumental in scaling the company up until its acquisition by Google in 2007. Following the acquisition, Neil led Google's video and display advertising Strategy, which transformed YouTube's nascent offerings into one of the company's largest business channels. Today, Neil leads all product user experience, safety and trust across YouTube and is responsible for the creation and enforcement of policies and guidelines that dictate what content is allowed on the platform. And I've had the pleasure of knowing Neil for about 15 years going back to our time working together at Google. We're excited to have him with us here today. Welcome, Neal.

Thanks, David. It's great to be here. It's great to see you. I remember a lot of those Google days very, very fondly working together back in the day. Building 42 days.

Yep, building 42. You know, I think everyone in the audience always likes to understand people's career story, how they end up in technology and startups. So can you tell us about your early career and how you got into the world of technology startups?

Sure, I'll share a little bit. And of course, by doing this, I'm going to be dating myself. But I entered the tech industry back in the mid-90s. I graduated with a degree in double E and took a lot of CS classes. I've always been interested in technology, even before college, and so I always knew that working with computers, doing something in computer science and technology was always going to be the career path that I wanted to be on. And so that was sort of one aspect. The other thing that I would say is when I graduated, when I came into the workforce, it was at a really pivotal moment. And I think in that sense I was very fortunate. You know, whenever you're able to start your career really at the inflection of a big sort of technology change, it's always super interesting. It leads to really interesting opportunities at an incredibly rapid clip. And for me, that was, you know, simply put, it was the dawn of the Internet. Netscape had just come out with its first browser technology. It just started as a startup. You know, down the road here in Silicon Valley, there were lots of companies really excited about making this transition to this brand new thing called the Internet. And that is when I had started my career. I started as a, as a management consultant, working with a lot of technology companies, finding ways to bring this new emerging technology around the Internet to Fortune 500 companies. Very quickly after, I realized that instead of advising them, I really wanted to work at one of these startups. And so that's when I joined one of the really early Internet advertising technology companies called Net Gravity. So that's a little bit about how my career started in the tech business.

And you've been a longtime veteran of the ad industry. And when you look today, you know, all these major digital platforms, Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Nextdoor, all their businesses have been powered by advertising technology. You ended up at DoubleClick pretty early on, which was the original Internet ad tech company. And a side note here, DoubleClick was actually a Greylock portfolio company. We co led the series A. But you were there in the late 90s, up and through 2007. Can you tell us about your early experience there and what was going on during your time there?

It was really the early days of the Internet and so lots and lots of companies were figuring out what the Internet was all about. Was it just a communication channel? Was it just marketing? Were people really going to gravitate towards it of course, being in Silicon Valley, working for companies like Net Gravity and others, I was seeing skyrocketing growth. You'll remember in the.com 1.0 days, companies were raising money, figuring out what their Internet businesses were going to be. It was a really, really exciting time. And one of the things that happened very, very early on was the recognition that the Internet had similarities with lots of other media in the past. Right. Like it was an information channel in many ways, whether it was like print or television or radio or what have you. The Internet was a place where people consumed information, whether that was for entertainment purposes, news purposes, what have you. And it was also where people distributed information. And in those types of scenarios, oftentimes the primary business model is an advertising business model. And the reason for that, in my view, having spent my career really at the nexus of media and technology, is twofold. The first is advertising. Business models are about scale. And the Internet from the very early days has always been about scale, about global audiences, people all over the world. And advertising allows you to do that because it enables revenue generation and content production in a way that where there's no friction between the consumer of the content and the website back in the day, or the app today, or what have you that the content's being consumed on. And then the second part of it, which has actually become a real motivator for my career arc, is that advertising business models generally keep access to information and content and knowledge free. That's the ethos of companies, obviously, like Google and YouTube, but it's a fundamental ethos of the Internet. Lots and lots of information on the Internet that we all consume and enjoy, regardless of where we are in the world, is free because of advertising models. And so one of the things that I would say to all of my teams, whether the teams I was leading at DoubleClick or at Google, it's always about fundamentally powering the creation and consumption of all this incredible information and doing it in a way where whether you're on a kind of low bandwidth connection somewhere in some other part of the world, or sitting on a high speed Internet connection here in Silicon Valley, you have access to the same amount of information, the playing field is level and it's democratized. And so that's been a core sort of aspect of how I thought about my career. And it was really kind of the foundational premise of companies like DoubleClick and then a few years later, companies like Google.

Yeah, it's amazing how advertising has powered these services that are accessible now to billions of People around the world. When Google acquired DoubleClick in 2007, I think it was like a $3.1 billion acquisition. It was the largest acquisition in Google's history. Is there anything you could share about the acquisition and how it went down and how you all ended up at Google?

I probably can't get into the nitty gritty details, but as I'm sure, as I know, you know, David, and I know has been reported publicly, it was certainly a competitive process. And I think probably what might be most interesting to your audience here is some of the motivators behind it. And I think it all goes back to what Google's mission has been about organizing the world's information and making it accessible to Everybody. And what DoubleClick's mission was, which was powering the creation of all this amazing content through the power of advertising. And those two sort of mission statements really complemented each other really well. And if you recall, even from the very early days, Google's business was certainly about the search engine giving users the information they were looking for, but it was also about creating business models for all of those websites that those search results were going to. That's where AdSense came from back in the early days, as you know. And DoubleClick, because it created monetization opportunities for publishers, created advertising opportunities for advertisers, really fit very nicely into that picture where the goal was to create, you know, the best possible products and services for our joint publishers and advertising customers all over the world. We signed the deal with Google, as you said, for a little over $3 billion in 2007. It took a year for the deal to close because it was under review by the regulatory Authorities both in D.C. and in Brussels for a year. So I spent time with the government regulators on that process, you know, in 2008, basically almost kind of a year later, is when the actual transaction happened. And then. And then we were off to the races to actually kind of build on this sort of combined vision of what we could do for publishers, what we could do for our advertisers. As you'll recall, that's where, you know, concepts, new product concepts like the Ad Exchange and Programmatic Advertising came from, which I think have, you know, created lots of opportunities for publishers and advertisers alike.

It's pretty amazing. I think, you know, so many technology acquisitions, especially large acquisitions, end up failing. But I think DoubleClick is widely viewed as a success within Google and certainly the broader industry, as is the YouTube acquisition. So let's switch and talk about YouTube now, you know, YouTube was the original user generated content platform, at least the first to reach a really massive scale and wide audience. And Google acquired YouTube for I think it was 1.65 billion in 2006. So this was prior to the DoubleClick acquisition, you know, shortly before the acquisition. I mean, if you go back to that time frame in 2006, you know, today YouTube's a massive success. Back then there were a lot of questions about the company. And so right before that acquisition in 2006, I want to read a quote that Mark Cuban, who's, you know, the famous investor and the host of the TV show Shark Tank said. And it's quote, anyone who buys YouTube is a moron because of potential lawsuits from copyright violations. There's a reason they haven't yet gone public, they haven't sold is because they are going to be toasted, said Cuban. So of course he's not always right. But you know, as an outsider at the time of that acquisition, if you can think back to 2006, I mean, what did you think of YouTube being acquired by Google and what were the conversations you all were having about it?

It's a great question and I'll share a couple of anecdotes about that. So Mark, actually, When he founded Broadcast.com, he was one of my customers at net Gravity and DoubleClick back in the day. And obviously, as we all know, he's been, he's one of the original pioneers when it came to Internet video regarding YouTube. So YouTube was a customer of DoubleClicks before either company was acquired by Google and actually one of our largest and fastest growing customers. So my insights into YouTube predated the YouTube acquisition by Google. And the key insight that I had was I would fly out from New York at the time when I was helping run DoubleClick to meet with the founders, the exec team at YouTube and the conversation would always be about, hey DoubleClick, can you keep up with the growth that we're experiencing on a month over month basis, quarter over quarter basis? And so I saw firsthand the amazing growth that the company was experiencing. And literally the problems were all of these good problems to have. How does the infrastructure that we're building, the products that we're working with, like DoubleClick keep up with all of this growth? And so that was an amazing sort of journey. Even before the Google acquisition, I'm sure the teams at Google saw the same thing. Google had a product at the time called Google Video and I think you Know, the fundamental reason behind it stands true today, behind all of that growth, behind the success that the platform has had today and sort of how it's kind of this global staple today, if you will. And that has to do with the fact that the core mission of YouTube has remained the same. And it's in its name, YouTube. It's about giving everybody in the world a voice and showing everybody the world. And so if you unpack that mission statement, it's all about the fact that this platform, this app, is a place where you and I, if we have a creative idea, we can set up a channel and start sharing that with an audience all around the world instantaneously. And that has always been the power of YouTube, the power of this open platform. Similarly, if I want to learn something new or I want to be entertained, no matter where I am in the world, I have access to all of these amazing creators on the platform in an instant. And that, I think, is the core engine, that power of an open platform that has been powering YouTube for the last 15 years.

Yeah, it's amazing to think back then, how in the early days of YouTube, to your point, growing so fast, like, how do they keep the servers up? I mean, this was in an era before the public cloud. You didn't have aws, and so I'm sure they were running their own infrastructure. And it's one of those products where you upload a great piece of content, it's going to go viral. One of the first truly viral Internet products. Right. Where something could just grow so fast. You know, since YouTube came onto the scene, there's been a lot of changes to the industry in terms of content platforms and the media industry overall. Can you characterize the media and entertainment industry today? Like, what are you seeing? How do you think it's evolved? What's driving innovation today?

I'd say a few things. Probably the most sort of salient piece around the industry and the business of everything I talked about. So, you know, I talked, you know, we just chatted about sort of the growth from a user standpoint, from a kind of a creator standpoint. But I also think that there's another sort of real vector of growth that's powered all of this, which where YouTube has been, you know, an early pioneer, and it's a term that I think is overused today. But it's something that, you know, YouTube has been doing for over a decade now, which is truly this creator economy, this creative economy. And that's a fundamental sort of characteristic of YouTube. And actually, if you think, you know, if you take it all the way back, even before YouTube, it's a fundamental characteristic of the Internet. You need a business model to sustain the creation of this content. That's what I talked about, you know, when you asked me about DoubleClick and the advertising business model. YouTube has been about the creator economy ever since 2007. We have tried to create a monetization program for creator that allows them to produce content in a sustainable way. And I think that is a trend that's really now sort of kind of become a buzzword, but has always been sort of a core part of our platform and I think remains one of those core engines that's powering not just YouTube, but the entire kind of media and creative industry. So that's kind of the first thing I'd say. The second thing I would say is that, you know, the pandemic that the world has been living through for the last couple years in many ways has accelerated a lot of the trends that were already there. And so one of the big ones on our platform is the rapid growth of mobile created short form content. And the way I think about that is that if YouTube started today, it wouldn't be about creators inventing the vlog format by putting a camera on a tripod in their bedrooms or family rooms. It would be about creators shooting video on their mobile phones, because all of that powerful creation and editing technologies right there on their phones. And so we're seeing rapid growth of that type of content. We have a product called YouTube shorts that's growing incredibly rapidly all over the world. So that's one thing I'd say. The second is consumption on all surfaces and devices, both video on demand content as well as live content. So that means if we polled our audience, I think probably everybody in the audience has watched YouTube, not just on their mobile phones in the last week, or their laptops or desktops, but on living room devices. Living room is our fastest growing surface in many parts of the world. It's our largest in some parts of the world. And that I think this connected TV for the media industry is also kind of a big growth driver. And then the last thing I'll say is just like every other part of the kind of tech business, Internet industry, we have seen a proliferation of commerce opportunities, shopping, you know, basically whether it's through being influenced by creators driving the sale of products and services. You know, YouTube is a place where people come not just for information, for our entertainment, they come to learn about products, to buy products. And so this commerce Acceleration that's happened during the pandemic, kind of the 10xing of it is something that we see that I see in the, not just in kind of the online commerce space, but also in the media space on platforms like YouTube.

It's amazing how powerful a platform YouTube is now. I mean, it really created the creator economy. But when you talk about commerce and the other use cases for YouTube, it really can do pretty much anything. When you first joined Google, you were running display and video advertising there. You built that business. Then you came over to YouTube. So you came in with a very deep advertising background. What were the questions that Advertisers had about YouTube? Because I think back then YouTube hadn't really proven itself to advertisers as like a valuable channel or platform. And I'm going to give one more Mark Cuban quote, that's the last one. But this goes back to again, you know, right around when YouTube was acquired, he said, quote, user generated content is not going away, but do you want your advertising dollars spent on a video of Aunt Jenny watching her niece tap dance? And he said this at Advertising Week in New York, right into it to an audience of big agencies and advertisers. And so there was a lot of skepticism about UGC content as a place where advertisers wanted to put their ad dollars. Talk about that evolution and what your experience was with advertisers with YouTube in.

Terms of that quote, I think the writing's on the wall today in terms of the types of things advertisers are interested in. But I'll give you sort of the context behind that and sort of the way I saw it. So just by way of kind of starting off, my career at Google was, as you described, split into kind of two pieces. For the last few years, I've been helping run, you know, YouTube as the chief product officer. But before that, when I ran our display and video advertising business at YouTube, sort of my biggest customer or partner, I mean, at Google, was YouTube. Because YouTube, fundamentally the types of advertising that runs on YouTube are video and display advertising. And so it ran on a lot of the technology that my teams were building out for the broader Internet and app ecosystem. Even before I came over to YouTube formally, I got a firsthand seat just basically being responsible for the monetization of YouTube in many ways. I spent a lot of my time talking to advertisers. In those very early days, every conversation I had, I think advertisers and ad agencies that were working with those advertisers recognized that there was something really special here. The reason was because they would just hear about it from their friends, their family, their kids, et cetera, even if it might not have been their own experience back in the day. So I think there was that broad recognition that there is something here. And a lot of the conversation focuses on the format, which was video, right? And so people very quickly were able to make the connection between television advertising, which of course is a hundreds of billions of dollars industry, and what YouTube could become. But I think that as advertisers got more sophisticated over the years and, and is certainly the case today, it became almost sort of less about the format. Obviously, video is important. Video is sight, sound and motion. It's the kind of primary storytelling medium which is obviously great for content, but also great for content that are ads. And so I think that goes without saying. But I think the biggest sort of insight that advertisers have had over the years is that it's actually about connections. And it's about the connection between YouTube creators and their audiences and fans around the world. And advertisers really want to participate in that connection. They want to support those connections, they want to support those creators. And that, I think, is really the magic of YouTube from an advertising standpoint, which is, you know, Mr. Beast has tens of millions of followers, not just here in the US but in all parts of the world, because he forms this incredibly strong connection with his audience. And that sort of invisible connection is what YouTube is really all about. And advertisers see that in results, whether they're looking to build a brand, create awareness around a new product, or increasingly, as you see on YouTube these days, drive sales of products and services, direct response advertising. And so that is kind of the core fundamental value proposition. I call it sort of, you know, engaged reach, engaged audiences. Because when people are consuming YouTube, and we probably experience all of this ourselves, you really are leaning forward. You're connecting with a creator in a way that I think is different than any other sort of media that those advertisers could spend on, whether that's digital media or sort of, you know, quote unquote, traditional media, television, print, what have you.

We talked about the industry landscape. I mean, you mentioned a few things that YouTube has done to take advantage of that. When you think back on the trajectory of YouTube, since you've been there, you know, what are some of the main inflection points that have driven growth? You know, a couple examples, maybe you could. You could share more details on paying creators, for instance, you know, encouraging them on the platform, you know, the rise of social media, any other things that were really catalysts for rapid growth.

The first one I was going to touch on is the one that you just pointed out, which is really the advent of the creator economy. And that started with the, the launch of what we call the YouTube Partner Program, which is our primary monetization program on YouTube. And that started all the way back in 2007. And the insight there was just like other parts of the Internet, as we've discussed extensively in this conversation so far, it was clear that in order for there to be a sustainable content creation model, there needed to be a business model associated with it. And to be able to do that at the scale of YouTube advertising was really the way to drive that and to rev share those advertising revenue, share that advertising, those proceeds with creators. And that was really the Genesis of the YouTube Partner Program. And then I think the creative economy as it exists on YouTube today, with millions of creators being able to generate revenue, lots of people being able to generate enough revenue where they can make that their full time career, quit their jobs that they might have had and basically become YouTubers full time. That program started in 2007. I would say that that has been a key catalyst of growth and remains a key aspect of the YouTube platform today. The second thing I might call out is this is right around the time I was starting in my current role at YouTube back in 2015. And that was the recognition that obviously we had this core use case on YouTube of fans connecting with creators, consuming video content. We had that on our main app, on the various mobile platforms, on desktop, on the web. But that is also when we recognized that there were some specific use cases that required diverging from the main app. And so that was when we started the portfolio of YouTube apps that you see today. So a few years after that we launched YouTube TV, which as you know, is our linear television application that we offer as a service to users here in the US we launched YouTube Music, which is a standalone music app. As music is one of the key use cases on YouTube has always been since the very early days for discovering new music, connecting with your favorite artists. And we recognize that sort of an audio first sort of listen type mode really needed to have its own app experience. And so we launched YouTube Music. We obviously built a premium music service around that that we offer as a paid for subscription. We launched YouTube Kids because we wanted to create an environment where parents could feel that they were giving the breadth of YouTube kind of the magic of all of this content. But doing it in a safe way for all of their children, where they had parental controls and things like that. So that's where YouTube Kids came from. And so that was a big seminal moment for us to build all of these. And then I would say, probably three, four years ago now, so time flies. But something that, you know, YouTube, obviously, you know, there's lots of conversations around this with YouTube today, but it was doubling down on this aspect of our responsibility as a, as a global platform. And what I mean by that is, you know, we have 2 billion users all over the world, and it is very clear to me every day that YouTube is not just a reflection of what's happening in the world. We see all of that on YouTube, but it also has an influence on what happens out there in the real sort of physical world as well. And so that's when we created our framework to protect our ecosystem of advertisers, creators, and most importantly, our viewers and users from bad actors. Really doubling down on our community guidelines, scaling out our enforcement of trust and safety operations. And that, I think, has also become one of the core bedrocks. It's always going to remain my number one priority at YouTube. And so that was a big moment for us back in, I'd say probably 2017 or so. So those are, those are kind of three examples I'd call out that I think really were pivotal moments in the history of YouTube.

Yeah. And on that last one, I think later in the call, we're going to, we're going to talk more about trust and safety in depth and how you all handle it. On the second piece, you mentioned some of these new product introductions, like YouTube TV, for instance, which I think is a phenomenal product. I cut the cord several years ago and, you know, it's just, it's a delightful service. But these are subscription models, right, for some of these new products. And so you've moved away from advertising as a sole source of revenue, more into subscription for premium content. We have a lot of entrepreneurs in the audience that are building subscription businesses. Were there any key learnings along the way as you introduced some of these new subscription models?

There's certainly been a lot of learnings. I mean, that was, I'll get into, you know, sort of where we are today with our subscription products, but there were, there were definitely lots of, lots of learnings along the way. The thing I would say, though, first and foremost is, you know, the primary business model at YouTube remains advertising. As I said before, that is the scale model. That is what makes YouTube sort of freely accessible all over the world. And I personally do not see that changing. It works for certainly for YouTube, but it also works for our creators, for our viewers, and of course works for advertisers. And so that's going to remain a core bedrock of the YouTube business. But we have, as you point out, launched two subscription services. And I would say that it's going to sound cliche, but the thing that the primary driver of success there is the strength of the product. You mentioned your experience with YouTube TV. You wouldn't continue to be a subscriber if your experience was different. And I think that that, at least for me, remains kind of the salient sort of area to double down on. So, for example, with YouTube TV, we really, really focused on if you wanted to reimagine the television viewing experience from scratch, how would you do that? Why does a DVR need to sit on a set top box? Why can't it live in the cloud? Why do you need a TV Guide type format to figure out what you want to watch? Why can't you just search? Or better yet, why can't the app actually make those recommendations to you? Why does customer service have to work a particular way? Why can't it just work in whatever means that you want to? Why can't you move seamlessly from screen to screen, on and on and on? The product part, I think, has been really, really critical. And I think that leads to my second point, which is if you're building a subscription business, especially in newer categories, you really have to make the value proposition crystal clear. And so again, back to my YouTube TV example. You described the value proposition as being able to replace whatever solution you had before you cut the cord. And I think that being able to get it down into one or two sentences is really important for any subscription business. We learned that in the case of YouTube Premium, which is our YouTube Music Premium, which is our music subscription service, what is the core value proposition there? When we boil that down to being able to enjoy your favorite content, like music, without interruptions, with background play offline as needed, that really distilled the messaging in terms of our marketing, how we drove customers to the product, et cetera. So that was the second thing that I would say. And then the final piece is really, really focus on sort of that full funnel customer experience. How easy is the signup process? How easy is it for users to continue the subscription if they like it? And actually counterintuitively, frankly, how easy is it to cancel it if you're not interested in it? All of that is part of the user experience and it really shores up that retention and sort of churn funnel that subscription businesses often wrestle with. And so whenever I talk about it, those are sort of things. Three key learnings that I think are important in any subscription business, not just the ones we have here at YouTube. And you know, we're very happy with the growth of both of those products. They have millions of, you know, paid subscribers. We just announced on the YouTube premium side, we crossed the 50 million subscriber threshold. And that number, you know, continues to grow for all of the reasons that.

I highlighted before, before we wrap up this section, we're going to talk about product development in a minute. But going back to the creator economy, what are your thoughts for the next generation? The creator economy, where is it going over the next five to 10 years?

In my view, it's going to be about a few things. I mean, creators, whether they're on YouTube or frankly any other platform or any other media, really look to do two things. They look to build an audience, a following, a group of fans, whatever you want to call it, that are interested in their content. That's the first thing they look to do. And that is all about formats, whether it's a short form, video format, or tools that are required to be able to build up that audience, connect with that audience. So that's the first thing. I think there's going to be lots of innovation continuing to happen there. And the second is that after you build that audience, creators are looking to earn a living to have a sustainable way of producing the content that they love to produce. And so new business models I think are going to continue to evolve. I think advertising is going to remain a fundamental aspect of that. We just talked about subscriptions. There's a third that I'm incredibly excited about that we're investing in very heavily, which is, you know, direct fan funding type products. So we have a product called Channel Memberships where for your most ardent fans, if you're a creator, you can create a subscription based offering just for your channel. So you can offer them exclusive content, exclusive live streams, other types of access that your broader channel subscribers won't get. But as a channel member, you can get, and you know, the channel members support their favorite creators by paying, whether it's $5 a month or what have you. We have other types of fan funding models where, you know, if a gamer, for example, or an esports participant is live streaming their content in the chat, I can have my chat stand out. As a fan, we Call that Super Chat. We have a product where, you know, if I learned, for example, how to fix my garage door on a YouTube channel and it saved me time and probably hundreds of dollars, I want to be able to thank that creator. So we have a product called super thanks where I can just pay something to that creator for the value that they provided me. And so I think a lot of those fan funding models are things that I'm extremely excited about because they kind of marry those two aspects of what creators are trying to do, which is build an audience and build a business.

Yeah, absolutely. Okay, well, great. Let's switch into product development. You've been a long time product leader, and YouTube is one of the most important products on the Internet. How to get speed from a product and engineering organization as it scales from dozens to hundreds of people. So, you know, you've talked a lot about the products that YouTube has been launching. It sounds like a pretty fast pace of product development. How have you continued that? As the company has scaled, it does.

Get harder as the product scales because of a few things. The complexity of the product might increase, the breadth of the stakeholders increases. Right. Like, you know, it's, it's one thing when you're doing something for hundreds of customers. It's a whole other thing when you're doing it for, you know, thousands or millions or billions of customers, whether they're, you know, paying customers, users, what have you. And so I, I do think complexity increases. And I think as a product leader, it comes down to a few things that I would say that I, I've learned through my experience. And I always say, like, if I, if I ever wrote the book on product management, one of the first chapters wouldn't actually be about innovation and creativity. All of that of course is important, but it would actually be about decision making and how you actually create the framework for fast and efficient decisions throughout the organization. At YouTube, I would say that the canonical decision making forum is actually a product review because we're a product company. And so what goes into that? How do you make it so that there's some regular cadence to that? What are the goals of how you actually evaluate whether a trade off is done right or not? And so for me, it's about really sort of first principles. And so we have a pretty rigorous sort of annual planning process around our product roadmaps at YouTube. But it's not sort of, you know, decide once and set in stone those annual, you know, kind of roadmaps turn into quarterly goals. I mean, Google and YouTube are famous for the OKR model, we turn those annual plans into quarterly OKRs that teams are held accountable to. And what ends up happening through that process is you develop your north stars in terms of product decisions. And those north stars are core principles by which you can actually make those really hard trade offs. And for example, at YouTube, a lot of those trade offs are about balancing the needs of our kind of three legged ecosystem of of creators, viewers and advertisers. And sometimes the decisions are at tensions between one of those stakeholders or what have you. And so I think that by having a set of clear goals and principles, it allows for much more efficient and transparent and kind of systematic decision making. And if you can set that up where now you've gone from annual plans to quarterly OKRs to weekly product decision meetings and there's a clear thread through all of those, it leads to faster and more crisp decision making, which then of course turns into faster products being shipped for all of your constituents. And it also allows for that to filter down into the rest of the product organization in a way where people are clear on the goals, they're clear on sort of how those trade off decisions get made. So that not every decision has to bubble up to me, by the time it bubbles up to me, it should be a very difficult decision that probably involves oftentimes two least bad choices. Like what's the less bad choice of two choices? But most of the decisions should be made further down in the organization and that when you have those principles clear, you can do that so that I'm not becoming a bottleneck, for example, on how things get decided and done related to that.

Can you describe YouTube's org structure? Are there product managers for each category? How do they manage the business? What role, if any, do these PMs play in content curation? So can you talk a little bit how you structured this so that the decisions can be made further down in the organization chart?

On the product side, it's actually relatively straightforward, which is each one of the product areas of YouTube has a product leader, you know, responsible for that product area. They work with their counterparts on the engineering side, they work with their counterparts on the content and business side. And you know, their job is to be the quarterback for that respective suite of products. And so there is a person that leads, you know, our YouTube TV efforts. There's a person that leads our YouTube music and premium efforts. There's a person who leads our trust and safety product efforts. We have a team that's led by somebody who builds out our products for creator tools. We have a core, what I call sort of a core area of our products. And so that's sort of the rough organization. The thing about YouTube related to the second part of that question is we're not fundamentally in the business of curating the content. And frankly, I think that if we want to remain true to our sort of core principle of being a truly open platform, we have to live up to that. And so there's lots of content that's produced. We're not gatekeepers on it, we don't curate it. We obviously have teams that build recommendation algorithms, our search algorithms, so that content can get discovered across our vast corpus as efficiently as possible by viewers, but we're not curating any of it.

Great. So going back to how you think about developing products, YouTube is a pretty powerful platform. I'm sure there's all types of use cases for YouTube that maybe weren't intended, that you're seeing and such as the rise of the influencer. How do you respond to those? Is your product development process more reactive to what's happening on the platform and in the ecosystem, or are you trying to be more proactive in pushing the platform, the ecosystem, in certain directions?

I think the real answer and the pragmatic answer is that it's a little bit of both. And what I would say is that it all goes back to what I was saying earlier, which is I like to start with a, a longer term view. What is the vision? What is important from a YouTube standpoint? What is the value that YouTube can add for our creators and viewers? What does that roughly look like over the course of the next two, three, five years? We talked about some of those macro trends, whether it's short form content or commerce, or the growth of multiple devices, connected TVs, all of that. So you do have to have a vision, you have to have a place where you think you want to point the product portfolio, the platform. And that sort of then turns into what I described, which is what are our annual plans, what's important for YouTube to focus on from our roadmap standpoint for the next 12 months, 18 months. And that then translates into how we think about the quarterly objectives in terms of whether we're hitting those roadmaps. But it doesn't mean that once those roadmaps are set in place that everything is locked in stone and that we don't react to what's happening in the industry. We certainly do, we adjust. But it has to be an adjustment that fits into the overall vision that I laid out. Fits into this kind of broad roadmap. To give you an example, building out tools for our creators to create content on mobile devices. The growth of YouTube shorts is an important imperative for us. But that roadmap will evolve and the specific features that we want to build will evolve because we're going to get, and we continue to get lots and lots of feedback from our creators and viewers. I talk to creators on a regular basis myself. The teams that are building those products talk to them just as frequently, if not even more to learn about what they want to continue to build the feedback. And so that's how we continue to adjust on a specific feature basis, which of course translates into what ultimately gets written down in a PRD and built by engineering teams working in partnership with our It's a three legged product development stool. It's obviously engineers front and center, our designers front and center, and then the PMs. And so that's kind of the reality of how the process actually works, which is having a big picture framework and vision and then adjusting based on what you're seeing and what you're hearing from.

Your stakeholders and going back to decision making. I mean, you mentioned earlier you've got these different constituents, advertisers, creators, consumers, and sometimes those are at odds with each other, the interests of those parties and you're trying to make a decision between there's no optimal solution. You've got to make trade offs somewhere. Can you give us maybe a specific example of where you've faced some of those trade offs and where you've had to make a tough call or tough decision and how you thought about what the right thing to do was?

Yeah, I think that when it comes to these decisions, there's three aspects that need to come into play. I talked about a couple of them already, which is you need to have core principles by which you will decide those trade offs. Like ultimately what is really going to win the day, what is very important. And you need to have the process framework by which you allow those principles to be debated, the trade offs to debate it. I talked about the various review forums, the various accountability metrics like okrs, et cetera. Then the third P, if you will, after principles and process that I didn't talk about, which is actually I think the most important, which is people. You really need to have people that are invested in these principles and the values that are espoused by these principles. And I think that, that you know, and I've been fortunate to work with, you know, some amazing product managers, but not just product Managers, but all kinds of people here at YouTube that are looking to sort of do the right thing by those principles. And so to give you an example, if there's ever a trade off, for example, between a short term business objective and what is the right thing to do for our users over the long term, every single time, and we will err on the side of picking what we think is the right thing to do for our users in the long run. And you probably have lots and lots of those sort of small examples. They can be tiny things. They could be things like changes to how we think about the recommendations in our product, algorithmic changes all the way to features, et cetera. So that's sort of how we think about it. This new product that I'm talking about, YouTube shorts, the way we're developing it is that we will always make the trade off in terms of building out the right set of features and functionality for creators to produce shorts content, but then for viewers to consume it. And then all the considerations around what is the business behind that, et cetera, really follows second to doing the right thing in terms of building the best product possible for our users. That's one example that I'm living through today. But you know, there's probably dozens of those types of trade offs happening, you know, every single month, every single quarter.

Yeah. And I think that's one of the things that's made Google so successful. Google and its subsidiaries is just always putting the consumer first. And I think if you look at the top Internet companies today would probably have the same sort of thinking in terms of how they've approached product development. Right, okay, great. Well, let's shift gears back into trust and safety, ethical responsibilities on the platform. YouTube started as a way for anyone to upload content about anything. And obviously when you're at a scale of 2 billion users, people are doing stuff that may not be that responsible on the platform. How do you enforce guidelines without deviating from your original intent of the platform?

First of all, as we've talked about here previously in this discussion, YouTube has always been an open platform. That is the power of YouTube. Back to the mission statement that I described about, you know, giving everyone a voice, showing them the world like that happens because it is an open platform, there aren't gatekeepers. And so, you know, a creator that, you know, whose ideas or creativity might have been shot down before in traditional media, they can build an audience on YouTube if they have something to share with the world, build a community, whether they come from an underrepresented minority or another person who might have been, you know, on the margins of society or what have you, they can actually build a presence on our platform, and that's really, really powerful. But just because we've had an open platform, it doesn't mean that we've always, it's been anything goes. We've always had community guidelines that govern the rules of the road of that open platform. From the very early days, we didn't allow adult content on the platform. And so the way I think about it is it's really a balance between those things and in some sense, the community guidelines that we have in place that govern content on the YouTube platform and is what actually allows it to remain an open platform in the first place. So they kind of, they sound like principles that are at tension, but they actually sort of reinforce each other as well. And that's sort of like a core component to how YouTube works. But of course, as you're pointing out in your question, YouTube has grown, right? The analogy is, you know, YouTube, back when it started over a decade ago, was like a small village or a small town. You know, everybody sort of knew each other, the audiences were small, and so the norms were sort of there in terms of sort of governing the content, et cetera. But now YouTube has grown into this sort of major metropolis, if you will, that is at scale, where not everybody knows each other, there are bad actors, just like in a big city, there's crime. And so we basically recognized, and this was kind of one of the salient moments I called out earlier, that we need to update our community guidelines and how we enforce them with this sort of major metropolis sort of analogy in mind, so that we are really rooting out the bad actors or bad content, so that the 99.9% of creators and viewers that are on the platform looking to do the right thing can actually thrive. And so that has involved making sure that our community guidelines stay up to date, whether it's around hate or harassment, violent extremism, you know, medical misinformation. Obviously, the last couple years of the pandemic has seen a lot of that, and we've had to try to stay on top of that as much as possible, and then building out not just the new set of policies, which we've done over the course of the last few years, but then building out a mechanism, both a technology mechanism and a people powered mechanism, to enforce those policies at scale so that we can be transparent about what the rules of the road are on YouTube. But then if there is a violative content on the platform, we can remove it as quickly and as efficiently as possible at the scale that YouTube operates with around the world. And so those are the areas where we've made a lot of investment over the last few years, building out a more robust sort of policy framework and then building out the enforcement infrastructure that allows us to put those rules to work as effectively and as much scale, scale as possible.

Great. Let's switch topics again. We're coming to the end of our session. Near the end of our session, we want to talk about competition, innovation. So YouTube pioneered video on the web, but if you look today, just about every major Internet platform has introduced video and it's a core part of their strategy, both video and user generated content. How do you assess the competitive landscape? And you know, in particular, what's your perspective on the, on the rise of TikTok?

It's not a surprise to me because video is about storytelling, it's about connecting. As I said, it's about sight, sound and motion. And it really is the most powerful mechanism to be able to convey an idea or connect with a community. And so it's not surprising to see other platforms, other applications really focusing on video. And so you're right, there's been a proliferation of that type of content all across the industry. And I would say, in a nutshell, I think the competition is great. As a consumer, it provides lots and lots of choices to me, to my family. As a person at YouTube, I think I view it as a spur for innovation. It continues to move the industry forward. I will say that when I talk to our creators and our advertising partners, certainly when I poll our viewers, their focus is on what can you do today to make YouTube better? How do you continue to build out more creator tools, Whether it's short form content, more shopping opportunities on YouTube, more live stream products, all of that is really where our focus is when we talk to our creators, our advertisers, et cetera. So that's where a lot of our focus from an innovation standpoint is going, which is what do we need to build for, for all of our stakeholders. And so that's sort of kind of what I'm seeing. And the rise of all kinds of platforms out there, certainly to me is not a surprise because of just the power of video as a medium for connection.

How do you think about differentiating new revenue streams for creators with that question? How do you keep creators thinking of YouTube as the primary place they want to be for their businesses? I think that's related to that question.

The fundamental Aspect of that is, from my perspective, is really trying to diversify the revenue stream for our creators. When I talk to creators, what they tell me is their primary audience is on YouTube. That's where they built the connection with their audiences. Their audiences really get them. They understand the type of content they produce, they give them real feedback in terms of what they should do next, what they should course correct. And so they really do want to continue to Double down on YouTube and build a business there. And so for me, it's about layering on newer monetization opportunities. It all starts with advertising. That's our scale model. I talked about the subscription business. That's not just about a revenue stream for YouTube. We share that revenue just like we do with advertising with all of our creators and partners. And so there's a way for them to grow the business through the growth of our subscription businesses. And then I talked about more direct consumer funding type models, channel memberships, paid digital goods like Super Chats, Super Thanks. Finding ways that not only generate revenue for creators directly from fans, but in that process actually further strengthening the connection between creators and fans. That's a premise of what we call our fan funding portfolio of products. And so today, starting with advertising over a decade ago, we have I think now nearly 10 different ways that creators can monetize the content that they produce on YouTube. And for my teams, it's going to continue to remain an area of focus. And as long as we can continue to do this in a way that works for our creators, works for our viewers, we will continue to add to that portfolio. And if you think about it, all of these products that we're adding not only layer on top of the monetization kind of pyramid, if you will, for creators, they also satisfy very specific types of use cases. Channel memberships is about exclusive access to special content, like a fan club. Super thanks is about thanking a creator for a one off sort of experience they might have given you or piece of knowledge they might have given you. And so we think about it in terms of use cases and potential monetization opportunities that might stem from them for our creators.

Okay, well, we're going to close with a lightning round today, so we'd like to hear about some of your personal favorites when it comes to content and media. The first question for you is what's a favorite book, video show or podcast?

So as I'm sure has come across in the last hour, I am not just a technologist, but I am a media junkie. I love all forms of media. When I Read. I try to read in a way that sort of allows me to de stress and sort of get away from what I do work wise, sort of professionally. So I read a lot of fiction. One of my favorite authors is Jhumpa Lari. She writes a lot of books about the immigrant experience here in the US and other parts of the world. So I've read all of her books. That's a favorite of mine. Let's see. In terms of videos, I mean I watch a lot of sports content. One of my favorite videos of all time on YouTube is Kevin Durant playing at Rucker park, which is this famous sort of like pickup basketball place in the New York area. The video on YouTube, if you haven't seen it, is amazing. Especially for if you're any kind of a sports fan, you don't even have to be a basketball fan. Shows, let's see. I've watched Squid Game like pretty much everybody else and I just completed the new season of Narcos. Those are kind of two of my favorite. And podcast, a podcast I listen to every week, which is super, super interesting. I happen to be kind of a news and politics junkie too. Is the Economist has this podcast called Checks and Balance. So I really enjoy that one. So that's kind of. Those are my favorites across all four of those channels. At least these days. They might change if you ask me in a month, but that's what I'd call out today.

Okay, great. And then what's the most surprising thing you've learned about yourself during the pandemic?

For me, and this is probably a shared experience for many of us, is I kind of knew that a big part of my professional life, my work is obviously everything that we talked about here. Building great products, working with our customers and stakeholders and our viewers. And all of that is amazing. That motivates me. Everything that we do in our trust and safety operation to protect our ecosystem. But one aspect that really came home for me is that a big part of my professional life are all the friendships and relationships with all of my colleagues at work, all of my colleagues in the industry. And I have to say that I really miss that. I miss the personal interactions that frankly, I certainly probably took for granted too much. Next year, being optimistic about it. I'm looking forward to getting back to some of those things. David, you and I haven't seen each other in person in a long time. I look forward to that. That's probably one of the things that came across, at least for me, a few months into the pandemic That's a.

Great note to close on. So we've come to the end of the session today. Neil, thanks again so much for your time and your insights. And thanks again to our audience. We hope you enjoyed today's iconversations. Please keep an eye out for an email survey that you'll receive about this event. We're always looking for ways to improve. Also, we hope to see you again in our next session in a couple of weeks. My partner Mike DeBeau will be interviewing Mike Smith from Stitch Fix. Thanks again Neil. Always great to see you. We appreciate your time you spent with us.

Thanks David, and thank you everybody. It's great to be here.

That concludes this episode of Gray Matter. If you enjoyed this interview and would like to hear more like it, Please subscribe on SoundCloud, Spotify, Apple, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also find all Gray Matter content on our website, greylock.com and you can follow us on Twitter at greylockvc. I'm Heather Mack. Thanks for listening.