Josh Elman & James Currier on the Arrival of the Next Social Era

This is Kristen O'Brien, and you're listening to the NFX Podcast. For founders of social media and communication startups, the last 8 years have been an ice age. 2002 to 2012 was the golden era, bringing us companies like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Poshmark, Slack, and Zoom. In the subsequent 8 years, outside of Asia, few consumer companies emerged. But now that's changing. The pandemic is rewiring our relationship to technology, and we believe the new wave of social startups has arrived. In this episode, social media experts James Currier and Josh Elman give a blueprint for the evolution of social, what it takes to build a breakout product, and the opportunities they're seeing for founders to reinvent the social landscape.

So, so Josh, you and I have known each other for over a decade. You've, you've been one of Silicon Valley's top social media and communications experts for over 20 years. You know, you were in the product management engineering inside of RealNetworks, one of the first video communications tools up in Seattle, right? They acquired Philip Rosedale's video codec Then he went on to build Second Life. Then you were at LinkedIn at the beginning there in product and engineering, Facebook product, Twitter product, and then most recently at Robinhood in product. And then, of course, you're an investor in TikTok. And in between, of course, you're a general partner at Greylock for 8 years investing in social media and communications companies, including Medium, Discord, Meerkat/Houseparty. And so we've been hanging out talking about viral growth and social media and social communications forever. Right now is a really interesting time. The recent growth in remote working tools and digital communications, the takeover of our world by social media companies that you've been part of building, obviously. Thought it'd be a great time to, to dig in to get your perspective on all things social communications. What's the general arc of the timeline of social media and communications tools? Take us back to the beginning and bring us to the present. And maybe if you could drop in some of the frameworks you use to understand where things are today, it would be super helpful here. Just hearing you talk about this stuff is always a pleasure.

Thanks, James, so much for having me. I always love talking to you, and we've shared a lot of this history of building all these things together. And I think it really comes back to the early internet, that sort of late '90s vibe where in general it was first about companies setting up web pages and setting up presences, and sort of the early internet was a business internet. And then people realized they could set things up for themselves. I was actually interning at a company that was called Homestead, and we were starting to talk about what it was like to build a web page on the internet that represented you, and it was like, Don't just build a homepage, build a homestead. And this idea that people could have a presence online sort of made their identity now twofold. It wasn't just the people that knew them in their community, but it was anybody on the internet could find out who you were, what you were thinking about. This then turned into blogging, where a very small group of people figured out how to write every day, and they would write these incredible pieces, and we would all start to read them. And these few writers became somewhat famous in the small nerdy internet world. And it was exciting to kind of think about what that meant and how you could start to get to know somebody just through an online presence without ever having met them in the real world. AOL had chat rooms where a lot of people were hanging out, and that was sort of the early genesis of what became this idea of like an internet presence related to your real-world presence. But at the beginning, they were mostly different. Who you were in the AOL chat room might not be the same thing as who you were online. Go through the internet bust, blogging and everything are still growing, AOL is already starting to fade, and a bunch of people said, wait a sec, what if the internet presence and the real-world presence are the same. They can be one. You can actually put your real self online. If you remember back then, like, a resume was something you only did when you were looking for a job. And Reid Hoffman had the idea that it was like, what if your resume is a living, breathing thing that represents you online, that people can find you all the time? So it's not like you're searching for a job to still have your resume online. And that was sort of the genesis of LinkedIn. And then it became that and your professional network. And Monster, which was the largest job site at the time, only had resumes of people who were looking for jobs. And all of a sudden, LinkedIn had The online professional profile of every single person in the world now who's working, or not everybody, but almost. What was this idea? Friendster came out and said, hey, if you want to start dating somebody, instead of the awkward trying to find people through your friends or trying to ask around because you're single, what if you just knew who your friend's friends were and you could just browse them and you say, hey, James, I think you have a friend who seems kind of neat. Maybe you could introduce me to her. It eases the burden for the person in the middle. And so all of a sudden, not just do we have these online profiles that represent our real identity, identity, but we actually now have— we know who knows who and who's connected to who, and we can start using those to get to people and realize our reach is much bigger than just us personally. And these kind of two things, the real identity online, the ability to talk, which the small group of bloggers sort of showed us was possible, and this idea of our friend networks, our social graph, as it eventually got to be called, just became these foundational things that have now spawned a trillion dollars worth of companies. and billions of people now using new products every day. So that was sort of the genesis that got us into that 2003-2004 era. I joined LinkedIn right at the beginning of 2004 when it was like 15 people. And I remember we were like, someday we'll get to a million users on LinkedIn. Now it's hundreds and hundreds of millions. But it was this idea that this actually could work. I even dropped out of business school to join LinkedIn. And my professor was like, social networking will never make money. My friends came and did a a class project since I was at LinkedIn. They got a C- or C+ or something on the project because they just didn't ever believe it. And so even in those early days, it was still a big question of like, so we have people online, their real identities. So what? Why does that matter? And that's where the real change then, especially as Facebook came out, said, hey, we're going to map people's real identities. We're going to do this in these closed communities like colleges. People will then start to share updates. Status was a big thing. And this came again from instant messaging, which had been very private in the past, where you would only kind of, you would chat with your friends in a very private way. And all of a sudden you could sort of chat in a slightly more public way on Facebook. There's this feature that people have forgotten now called writing on walls that was actually one of the most important early social communication features. I could go to your profile, James, and say, hey man, happy birthday, or hey, what's up? Or hey, I think I saw you walking across the quad. And other people could see it and start to comment on it as well. And that collectively is what made our sort of communication patterns start to change. And so Facebook realized this and said, wait a sec, everyone can talk to each other. People are updating their status with real-time updates almost of what they're doing. People are updating pictures, they're updating their relationship status. They turn that into the newsfeed. And then I really think that was the invention that sort of invented the next wave of the social internet was the idea of a newsfeed, a place that we can post information and immediately at one glance see what everybody else is up to. And kind of everything we've really built in social since then has been based off of that core idea that you could post something around your identity and people kind of consume it in this sort of feed-like form. And that really set us for the next 15 years. Twitter took all the bloggers who were writing long-form posts and gave them a place to do very short posts in between. That became an incredible feed. And people used to call it microblogging, but that was because it was the short form of blogging. And then everybody would go back to their longer-form blogging and say, well, on Twitter we were all discussing this in short form. Now I'm going to write a long piece on it. And so it became sort of the in-between place where all the conversation happened. And then that became the more important place because it's where all the conversation happened for that community of bloggers, which then became the community of media professionals, celebrities, people who just like to talk. And that's what really helped Twitter kind of still become this place where important conversation happens for the whole world. And at the same time, Facebook then just got everybody in the world building their profile. sharing things, et cetera. So that takes us kind of through the end of the 2000s, 2008, '09, and '10. And all of a sudden our phones come out and all of a sudden people are like, wait a sec, this posting, man, I still have to go to a website on a desktop computer to make updates. What if I could just do it from my phone? And, you know, we also had cameras on our phone. So all of a sudden the transformation goes from simple posts you make when you're on a web browser, maybe a few times a day, to conversations you can have all the time. Twitter started as a little SMS service. But it became really popular once everybody was doing it on their phones. Instagram came out and said, hey, your phone pictures kind of suck. Let's make them look a little bit better. And all of a sudden you have this lens into the world because of what everybody's sharing on their phones. And between that and then Facebook finally figuring out mobile, you have this transition from really 2010 to like 2014 where the entire world moves on to mobile social networks. There was a company called Path that got started in the meantime that was trying to build it, be the first mobile social network that pioneered a lot of things we know, like reactions and other stuff. You have Snapchat that said, hey, we're all sharing photos. What if they just disappear? And as every high schooler was getting their very first phones, the idea of content that disappeared that wasn't permanently logged was so attractive to them just because it freed them up to change their identity and change things around. And Facebook felt so permanent and Instagram felt so permanent that Snapchat took off in that generation. We had this, this massive revolution. And at the same time, obviously, mobile messaging became so inordinately popular. You have WhatsApp, you just have regular SMS and iMessage, and all of a sudden our ways to communicate now have gone so much faster than emails and phone calls and all the things of the past. And really, I think we've been living this over, you know, since those early days of kind of— I call that like 2010 to 2014 was sort of this heyday where we're all getting on Snapchat and Instagram was becoming a thing and Facebook Mobile was really finding its way. And then by the end of that period, they all started making money too. Facebook Mobile really became a very large advertising center of the company. They figured out how to do ads in the newsfeed that weren't abysmal because remember, this whole lens of social media always had a will it And so by that point, now we get to sort of this era where these companies are big, they're making a lot of money, things are really working. Snapchat's on its way, Twitter's on its way. And that sort of takes us up to like 2014, 2015, which I think as of 2020, we're still kind of in a similar state of the world where Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, obviously Facebook, things like WhatsApp, iMessage in the Western world are the dominant media forms. And then if you go to Asia, you can add Line, Kakao, and then obviously WeChat. Right.

Right. And it's amazing that the last 6 years hasn't seen that much change, right? I mean, there was so much change for, for 12 years and then there's been less change. How, how do you read that? Have our core behaviors evolved because of these tools? Are, are the needs being fulfilled? The network effects just too great? How do you, how do you see the opportunity for, for, for new products, uh, coming in?

So I think a couple things happened. One is through this whole period, I mean, I went all the way back to the era of like blogging and homepages. To now, we've just been adding people to these networks. It started as there were probably hundreds of bloggers in the late '90s to billions of people posting things on social media in the past hour. And so as part of this expansion, we kept expanding and getting new people on the platforms. And there were just so many new opportunities to fill that even a lot of the old ones didn't really die. I mean, MySpace got eclipsed by Facebook. That was very early on. Other things kind of never really got going, but they just kept layering on. Snapchat filled some Instagram filled needs that Facebook didn't. Twitter was able to coexist. You start to get to the thick where it's hard to find and fill new needs as all these platforms got big and bigger. There are 8 or 12 apps I have on my phone that fill so many of my needs that you either have to now replace one or truly find something different that I'll probably drop one for. That gets much harder. We do have network effects. When you post to Instagram, it's hard to get you You post somewhere else. When you post a video to Facebook and your family comments on it or your friends do, or people just call you and say, I love the video you posted on Facebook, why would you post that somewhere else? Even YouTube, which people think of as this massive platform, and it certainly is, it's much more of a media platform than it ever has really become a social platform because people don't just post content there for reactions. They might post it for storage, but they need to share it elsewhere where their networks live. You kind of have had this interesting thing where our networks are so big and so dense and our audience and where we want to get feedback from is so fixed already that it's hard to imagine somewhere new. Now, there have been a few things, Discord and TikTok in particular, that have grown substantially over the past 5 years, but those are late additions to this social media stack, I think, rather than signs of things to come.

For the founders out there, all the NFX content is really for early-stage founders. You know, a lot of people still come to us and say, look, I've got this social idea. They're excited about it and they're like, this is why it's different and whatnot. And let's talk to them for a second. I mean, because while we have these big hits like Facebook and LinkedIn and Zoom, we've literally had thousands of companies that didn't hit it big in the social space because, you know, social products are exciting. They're fun. You want to build them. Boy, wouldn't it be great to have a big network effect business that you could run and have fun connecting people? You know, it's sort of a dream, right? So few of the companies that got started, even the ones that got 10, 40, 100 million users, never became big. They didn't go anywhere. When you were in venture capital, did you look at 100 or 1,000 of these media things a year? Give us a sense of the scale of how many people are still trying it. And then I'd love to talk about what you think, you know, early-stage founders today should be looking for in this space, given that a lot of the network effects are preventing new players from coming in against the incumbents.

No, I probably looked at 600 or 700 new companies in sort of the consumer and media worlds every year. year when I was in venture capital from 2012 through 2017 were my full years as a full-time VC. And there were so many people doing interesting things, but a lot of them felt derivative or a little gap or sort of not trying to play to new trends. So what I was really always looking for was sort of 3 things. One is, is somebody riding a new trend that I think if they get it right, can actually own a new habit formation in the future that starts small but can snowball very large to become a new center? of gravity for that new habit or behavior. And it really needs to be something new. It's like, I have a better way to share photos, just wasn't nearly as interesting as, hey, I think people are actually going to start recording a lot more videos, and I think we have a way to do it that we might become the hub of short-form videos, which was what actually led me to invest in Musical.ly when it was starting to work in 2015. But looking for a new habit or trend, and I think right now in the world, for the first time in sort of 4 years I've been thinking about this, The remote work, remote connection, staying at home, being just as happy to get on a video call with friends might be enough set of new habits that new things can form that couldn't have before. So new habits is one. The second is you think about stickiness and sort of what that really means is like, is this a habit that becomes central to somebody's life that they want to do it often and be top of mind for it? And so if you think about it, like if I'm bored right now, what do you do? You might go to Facebook, you might go to other things. But being bored is, you know, you can always try to be something else to help people when they're bored, but you have to be really, really good at that. We see Quibi just launching, trying to say, hey, we're better content than everything else, use us. And it really depends on how good the content is there, if they'll be able to fulfill being bored and wanting entertainment better than anything else. So I look for like, I want to get out more, or I want to connect better with my friends, where I could find more meaningful time with my friends. Like, what are some of these needs that you can actually become central and solve in people's lives that other products don't today. And when I'm looking at a company, usually look for a little bit of traction where there's a small group of people who you're completely solving that for already, who swear by your product, who say, every day I check into this product because it does this thing for me. And when I look for traction, I don't care about the big numbers per se. I care about the depth of the numbers for the people who you've already converted to your product. Because if you have that, then you have a chance to take that deep, meaningful connection with some people and expand that to a lot more. And then the third thing I do look for is a growth hook. It's not that you've already figured out how to grow or exploit that, but hey, if this small group of people are using it, here's why they want more people to join them. And here's how this will expand and this will grow and this will rise above the noise. Because any company that you want to grow from something small to be very big needs enough reasons why it'll grow above the noise. Discord was one of the rare examples that I found in my venture career that sort of hit on all 3 of these. It was riding the trend of gaming where people were starting to play a lot more games with each other. And the tools to connect over gaming were pretty terrible. You had to share IP addresses. People could blast the IP and sort of ruin the game for everybody if you found out somebody's IP address they were using for their Skype group chat or their Mumble server. Gaming was becoming much more of a core behavior. We've obviously now seen that with Fortnite and everything else. But even in 2015, this was already becoming much more mainstream. And the third was it was really hard to get into those other gaming tools to share and chat. Discord did it in the web browser where I could just send you a link and we were voice chatting within about a minute. And it was pretty amazing. And back then it was a total aha experience to have 10 people in a voice chat over just a text that was shared over a link, sorry, that was shared like over SMS. And so we found that they had a couple hundred thousand daily users, but they weren't just daily users. They were like every day, hours a day. 10% of the people had the app open over 10 hours per day. And so this was a really committed group of people. And then they had a really good growth hook. Like the gaming ecosystem was blowing up. Twitch streamers were talking about using Discord. Once you get one person, they would share it with all their friends who they gamed with. And all of a sudden, like, it just kept growing virally and through the use of Twitch and other gaming influencers. And that really helped Discord become such a meaningful company. But I kind of bet on it because of those 3 things. But it was rare to find all 3 of those in one product.

Sure. And Discord had been tried a couple of times before. I mean, Mike Cassidy had tried Xfire earlier, like 12 years earlier or something.

That's right. Yeah, I mean, look, there's very few ideas that have never been tried before. It's all about getting the right product at the right time with the right trending and wave and the right way for the viral growth to actually flow through current channels for something to really take off versus being stuck when— XFire was such a good product when it came out, but gaming was just nichier enough and just more isolated, and people didn't sort of proudly talk about themselves as a gamer back then. And so it always ended up feeling much nichier than it could have.

Yeah, yeah, that's right. And I remember in 2015, you and I were sitting at what I think was my first and last NFL football game. you said, hey, have you noticed that there haven't been any big social networks since Snapchat in 2011? And it's been 4 years since anything major happened in social. It might be over. And you didn't mean it was over, but you were kind of saying, hey, look, we're in a new phase. And so what you're saying is going forward, what's gonna be going forward is we need to find new habits, stickiness, and growth hooks in order to really make an impact on the incumbents the way it is today. And there's really been this shift. And so when you think about what's going forward for this area, you'd mentioned work stuff. Maybe there's this change to remote work. The shelter-in-place stuff, the various changing social behaviors we're going to have to have as a result of COVID What do you see going forward? I mean, we've already got Zoom. Now we've got some new tools that are trying to, trying to lock down on work like Tandem and other things. Where do you see the opportunity for early-stage founders going forward?

Well, so I think what's really special about what's happening right now is that we're normalizing a lot of behaviors that have sort have been out there for a while. Like, Zoom's been around for a while and it's been an exceptional workplace video conferencing product, but it always felt second rate to get on a Zoom versus trying to have a meeting in person. It always felt like if somebody was working from home, they were sort of doing the secondary option and having to Zoom them into the meeting was a slight burden. Even if you were a company with multiple offices and you were doing video calls often and there was the person dialing in on the TV in the meeting room, it always felt like it wasn't quite as good as being in person. And what I think the shelter-in-place in these surreal times are doing is making us go, wait a sec, what if this is the default? How do we then learn new norms and operate and make sure that this is as effective as possible? I think people are going to learn to be a lot better writers, so they'll get things written down that will make the communication a lot more effective. Writing's hard. Writing well is really hard, but I think it's worth spending the time in order to do it. And then the video calls and the communication we have, we learn how to make that higher fidelity. And we have to replace not being in person because that's all we can do right now. And then I think by normalizing this, the next time it's like, oh, you can't meet in person, hey, let's just do a Zoom, becomes an affirmative action and something that we do and we almost prefer to do to save everybody the hassle of commuting or moving around. And we only do that when it's really special. Now, if we're going to do that, the number of ways we need to connect, share content, share information, like it's going to be transformative. And there's so many different pieces of what we used to get in person, whether it was a hallway chat after a meeting or the greetings or sharing food or giving gifts. All of these things that we just do naturally in person, we have to figure out how to replicate and bring to our digital tools. I think people will be able to carve out lots of slices of these to become important parts of people's working life. Then I think, on the social side, we're learning exactly the same thing. Hey, normally we would want to go out to a concert. And that would be like our fun event that we might do. You know, some people do that every week, some people do that monthly, and right now we can't do any of it, you know, across humanity. So doing the livestream concert is actually pretty good, but it's still not as good as seeing some other people in the crowd, sharing it. Maybe sometimes it's an intimate gathering, maybe sometimes it's a mass one. I think there's so much more to invent for the tools that make that experience feel much better even than it does today. But I've personally been amazed going to some— watching some of the livestreams Some of these artists from their homes. It's really brought me there. This Hamilton thing that was done on John Krasinski's Feel Good News was just amazing. I just watched that yesterday like 5 times. It kind of shows you the intimacy that can happen over digital if we start creating those experiences. I personally did poker night with some friends on Friday night. I normally would never have jumped in the car to go up. People were in San Francisco and Oakland, and one person even joined from Hawaii where he lives. I never would have gone out to poker night because it was a Friday night, it was late, and I probably would have been tired. We started at like 8:30 and we're still going at 12:30. And I had so much fun. We had Zoom on, a mediocre poker app on the phone, but it was really about the people. And I think now that we start to go, hey, that was actually more fun than I thought, it's going to become normal and we can build great products to help people do this more effectively. And I think there's going to be a huge world of opportunity to build the places and spaces that we go on evenings and other times in order to do this.

Is this what you're talking about when you say that your media is becoming social? Is this an idea that you'd written about?

Yeah. What I've been thinking about is social media has sort of drifted away from truly being social. With social media, we had gotten to a point where it actually, I think, is becoming more media, where what James Currier shares on his Facebook, certainly on his Twitter or his LinkedIn, is James Currier the media channel, not James Currier the human that I love interacting with and being with and going back and forth with. Podcasts, I think, are much closer to that. But being social is really the art of being together, conversing, engaging, sharing experiences, sharing moments, these emotional connections that happen. And so I worry that Facebook, Instagram— I mean, with what's happening in the time of COVID Instagram is pretty boring. People aren't going out and doing all these cool things that they're showing off. They're living their lives. And creating a media channel about yourself living your lives is less interesting. Instagram Live, Discord, phone calls, poker nights— those are real social experiences that bring back that feeling of connection. Those feel much, much more powerful these days. And so that's kind of what I mean, is like, we might be moving away from thinking that social networks are about social media and that the best social networks are the ones that bring us together. You know, when you're talking to somebody, you have so much more adrenaline and endorphins and connections between you two, even if it's just a phone call. Better if it's a video call and you're making eye contact. Still highest bandwidth in person, but that's so much more powerful than, cool, I saw your photo and I double-tapped.

Right, right. And you've had this recent piece in Medium where you're talking about the move toward experiences. This is what you mean. These experiences together about poker, these experiences together of seeing the eyes, connecting as real human beings, these experiences. As opposed to the Instagram experiences, like, look, I'm jumping into this waterfall in Hawaii.

Yeah, that's right. Now, I'll put a little plug in for TikTok, which I think is somewhere in the middle. One of the things I've found really profound with TikTok is it's no longer just about snapping something that you're doing and sharing it, but it's actually about the art of creating. When we first invested in 2015, one of my theories was that we had sort of, with Instagram and Snapchat, we had made capturing a moment so effortless and so fast that you could sort of get anything you wanted. And just share it out there, and it might actually take longer for somebody to consume it than it took for you to make it. We were kind of tipping the balance where we were putting the burden on consumers as opposed to the creators to make something that's valuable for the people they care about. With TikTok, we flipped that again, which is to actually make a lip sync, to make a good dance video, to make a funny, humorous piece of content, people actually spend hours learning steps and going to make them. We turned the world back into creators with our phones. That's the other part of social media that I do like, which is, it's not media that we're just capturing to show off what we're doing, but it's media that we're creating with our heart and wanting to share and wanting to get feedback on. I've long dreamed that the best social network out there could be one that shows how long you spent making a post or if you go on a trip. and you make a collage, it says, hey Josh, James just spent, you know, 3 days, you know, or like 6 hours over 3 days curating these pictures to share his album from this amazing trip he did. Would you like to look at it? And if it said that you would put that much time in, I would always look at it. Whereas if I just see you slam up 100 pictures, I'm like, thanks, I hope you had a great trip.

Right. So it brings the humanity, it brings the, the time we spend, the life's energies that we Uh, into the actual media form.

That's right. And I think TikTok is the beginning of that.

Got it. And you've got some ideas around things like Reply Time and Jam Session and Lunch Buddies. What— tell us about those. What kind— and then what kind of ideas are you thinking about these days?

Yeah, you know, that was just a Medium blog. That was just a funny thing that I was thinking about the other night, and I was talking to a couple weeks ago, and I was talking to a friend, and, and I was brainstorming all these ideas of like, how can we come together in this time of remote work and humanity. And I kind of went down 2 different paths. So the idea of Jam Session, what I wrote was, wouldn't it be fun to give all these artists a tool where they can set up a private jam session and charge $50 or $100 per person to join for an hour or 2 and have a very intimate live video chat experience where you can have one-on-one conversation and you can know who the other friends are who are sitting there and you can all kind of groove to the music together and have that same feeling as if you were a social club. We've actually now seen this. I wrote this before all this stuff was blowing up. We've now seen— I watched Chris Martin in his living room or John Legend or a bunch of Broadway stars singing from their bedrooms. And they've been doing this in a way that is just so much more intimate, but it's still like one-to-many. I feel like they're doing it for their fans, but it hasn't sort of turned into a club and a business. And I do think there's a great room for someone to build products that can actually allow people to run these We're seeing that in fitness too, where a lot of fitness professionals are starting to run virtual classes and they need tools to run the class, charge money, know who's there, have real interactive experiences while this is going on. And no great products yet fully solve that. Lunch Buddies was a similar silly idea that I had, which was getting food right now is hard. Either you're going to grocery stores and following very strict social distancing rules, or you're trying to get delivery, which is getting harder and harder as everybody's trying to get delivery and everything's at capacity. What if What if we could deliver food to a whole bunch of people and they could all sort of cook it together and you could have sort of the cook-at-home, talk-over-lunch experience with a group of 10 people with even a professional chef? Now, logistically, that may actually be hard to do, but I was just trying to think about how do you bring the humanity back into these moments of time? Then with Reply Time, this was something that I had been thinking about a lot just for how do we change work and work patterns, especially when we're all remote. When we're all working together, you might put out a question in a meeting and then certain people talk and dominate the meeting. You might send something out over email and the people who are just fast repliers always reply first. And we all know that the first person to reply often sets a tone for a conversation. If you put out a question or a thought and the first person is like, that's terrible, then the entire rest of the reply thread or the Slack thread or the meeting conversation is unwinding why it's terrible and why there might be some merit in the idea. I just been thinking about, like, in a workplace, you can usually get over this because you can grab somebody afterwards. And say, hey, please don't respond that way. Or you can go to 3 other people privately and say, please give me your feedback. As we move to fully remote, it gets harder to have those sort of side conversations as meaningfully as this sort of, and as sort of softly. And so I was thinking about like, what if we change the way that we go and ask for feedback? What if instead of first reply always wins and sets the tone for the thread, you put out an email and you say, everybody can reply to this email, and that an hour or 2 later, we will share all the replies all at once. So everybody gets to write a thoughtful piece of feedback. And you sort of delay the power of firstness. And especially when everybody's working at home, they have other distractions maybe at home, they are doing real work, and they can't just be on Threads to respond to everything. If you could put in some delay, I think you could really transform how we communicate at work. And I think this isn't just an idea for remote times. I think this would be useful in so many ways and in so many conversations. And we've got to remove the power of being first to make sure that we hear from everybody. So these were just ideas I've been dancing around, and they're all about how do you go find those moments of humanity that we can bring back in and thoughtfulness and connection.

What's notable, of course, is that you're talking about psychology. You're talking about emotions. You're talking— we say that we're in the tech space, But the fact is, the way you're thinking about this is much more liberal arts, right? So it's much more about being human and how we think and feel and painting with those colors, painting with that language as a way to seek out new products, as a way to seek out new ideas that could impact people, make the world better, build networks. A lot of times in the tech space, you see with SaaS or with e-commerce, people are talking about just pure These are spreadsheet-type businesses, whereas what you're talking about is very much a work of art around how it makes somebody feel or makes somebody think or the order in which we communicate. I mean, this is not usual. This is an unusual sector within the tech space that you've now been encamped in now for 20 years. Do you find that a lot of people can go with you in these conversations? Do you find like a lot of the founders out there understand the depth of emotion and psychology you need to understand in order to find something that's valuable and new and important?

I very much think so. In fact, I think the best founders, especially in this space, are great studies of humanity. They are great studies of people, and they are really great psychologists. I used to say this, this is maybe 10 or 12 years ago, like, Google is a technology company and Facebook is a psychology company. If you think of the early tech of Facebook, it was really just a bunch of forms that people could fill in and how it communicated the forms to other people, but it understood how to do that in a way that made humans feel better. That's really the secret of almost everything that's been built then. Evan Spiegel, when he was talking about the early days of Snapchat, he very much sounded like a psychologist too where he talked about why deletion by default changes the entire way that you perceive the person on the other side and have the human connection. Ben Rubin, who's the founder of Houseparty and Meerkat, has talked so much about the power of live video and how being live and trying to create togetherness when we're not together has been so powerful. Houseparty hasn't changed that much in almost 2 years as a product. It's been blowing up in the time of COVID because so many of those architectures that Ben built, um, and, and that Ben and Seema and the team built, you know, still live and thrive. And that's what makes these, these products so special. Some people who come to technology are architects. They think about building cities. They think about planning. Some people are psychologists and they think about people. But I think these types of humanity need to be applied. Technology is just the enabler. It's not the— it's not the— it's the sauce. It's an ingredient in the Got it.

The real product here is the psychological insight. And you and I— I was an early angel investor in Meerkat and helped Ben Rubin come over from Israel to the US. And you and I invested in Meerkat. Let's just talk quickly. I think these are useful stories for the founders. Why do you think Meerkat didn't work? What do you think happened with the house party evolution? And now it's blowing up. Now it's working. Now it's growing really quickly. What's the story there?

When I first invested in Meerkat, if I go back to my 3 pillars, I believe that there was a massive trend towards live video. I believe that our phones could now support it. I believe that the networks could now support it so you could turn a camera on anywhere. If you could create the hub, the habit of live video, the shows that people made, the shows that people wanted to tune in to watch, you could actually build a unique independent network. At the very earliest days, it was only a few weeks old when I invested. It was right before South by Southwest 2015. You were seeing just amazing adoption in the way that Ben had hooked into Twitter and into the Twitter graph, and it was creating these connections. One of my favorite internet moments was the end of February in 2015 when a couple of friends were at a restaurant and I was sitting on my couch at home. They were livestreaming conversations in the restaurant and a whole bunch of us were in the comment thread. Then people started dialing on their phones into the conversation. We had other people dialing in to talk to the group. It was just this amazing social moment that we were creating on the fly even though not everybody was together. It was so powerful. I was like, this feels like the future.

This was on Meerkat?

This was all on Meerkat. This was, again, end of February of 2015, a couple of weeks before South by. It was just blowing up. It had been out for 2 or 3 weeks at that point. And so we funded Ben and we invested a lot in the company and the technology and to keep growing. But a couple of things that didn't quite happen is it's really hard to make good live video and to be a good host, and a very small number of people can do it. And those people tended to be more interesting if they were already interesting in the world, create audience, and then a very small group who could sort of become new live stars. The second thing was it wasn't really a high We thought that there was more of a habit there, but it's exhausting and intense to go live. If you're only getting tens or hundreds of people to join your live video, that actually doesn't feel as fulfilling if you're an important celebrity as getting thousands or millions of views on something else that you create. You'd rather spend time doing that for reach. It became this thing where it was sort of a nice-to-have occasional thing to do to augment your social media. On a personal level, A bunch of people felt like it was too hard to keep going on. You would get awkward people in the chat you didn't know, and you weren't really having these meaningful conversations and interactions. Once Facebook and Twitter both came out with their great live products, it was sort of clear that Meerkat itself as an independent standalone entity wasn't going to work because so many people already had audience on Facebook or Twitter. They didn't feel like they needed a new app and there wasn't enough to build a new network. Ben took those insights with Sima and they went and rebuilt Houseparty and said, wait a sec. What if it's just those private, small interactions that really matter? Can we go live? Can we create a room? Can we create a space where we now want to come and hang out in more often? But even Houseparty, while it had a couple of moments of real blowing up and it's so wonderful to see what it's serving right now in the world, it never quite took off in the way that I hoped it would as a premium social network. Because getting on video chat for a long time still felt intense. It felt like an extra effort. A lot of us would do it sometimes and then go, I don't want to do that all the time. I'd rather either hang out with my friends or just go home and watch TV. Houseparty never quite became as normalized. I'm optimistic that, after shelter-in-place, we'll look forward to that even more than we used to. But there was a period of time— we launched Houseparty in the middle of 2016. There's a period between then and now that it wasn't ever as much of a thing to get on video with people other than a very occasional basis or maybe call grandma. You've got to find those right things you really believe in the world and have the right time for it to become normalized and exactly the right product. Even Zoom was just a great business tool for a long time with, what, 10 million meeting participants per day. They said, look, in March, we went from that to $200 million because, all of a sudden, it became normalized and the only thing you could do. Sometimes you wait long enough to get lucky with something happening in the world. Hopefully, you don't get lucky at others' tragedy like what's happening right now, but you kind of have to wait for your moment.

Got it. Meerkat was one of my least favorite internet moments. We were at South by, and the whole Meerkat team was staying in my hotel room. Everybody was sleeping on the floor. and whatnot. And it was a Friday night at 10:00 PM, and we got a call from the biz dev folks at Twitter telling us that Dick Costolo had decided to turn off Meerkat's access to the API, which meant that the viral growth was going to stop, because it was blowing up all day long. That ended up having some impact on it as well. Building these things on top of somebody else's network typically leads to getting turned off if you actually start to get some traction.

Yeah, that's that growth hook that I talked about earlier, that it's so important to understand your growth and to find a durable, sustainable, repeatable channel. Because if you can't sustain it through your own engine and your own effort, it is easy to have a Google algorithm change, a Facebook algorithm change, a business development person or CEO decide to shut you down, that all of a sudden, Were there some investments that you wanted to make at Greylock but didn't? I got really close to the Snapchat team in the early days, just really believing, again, that this deletion by default was going to be transformative. We ended up not being able to pull it together at the last minute, and that was quite a big bummer to me because they've gone on and just built an amazing company. I'm not sure that Snapchat is as big and has seized as much of the opportunity as I thought it could have. good back then, but it's still quite large and quite impressive and really special on what they're doing and changing with lenses and cameras and other stuff. I also look back at Zoom. I met Eric in the very early days, and he was actually trying to build more of a consumer product in the first days rather than a B2B one. I just thought the technology they were building, it was already so much smoother than anything else. I wish we had invested. I think we thought business video conferencing was such a sort of tried and trodden and sort of worn path that it was gonna be hard to build a new company. And, and, you know, I think still Eric's an example where you build better technology than everything else and it just works, and you can turn that into a really great company.

Yeah, it's interesting that, you know, we had Skype and then we got Google Hangouts, and, and they were sitting there with the network They were sitting there with the identities of people already. And then Zoom just came out of nowhere and did basically the same thing. It wasn't like there was a big psychological insight. There was no big emotional insight. It was literally just technology.

Right.

And that was hard to predict, I guess, is what you're saying is like, even though you saw them, it wasn't that easy to predict that that was what's going to happen. Clearly, other investors who invested are saying, oh, I was so prescient, and I could see exactly what was going to happen.

But I do think that it sort of does come back to the, can you actually build a 10x better product and truly deliver on that promise? Zoom truly is 10x better than every other video technology. Google, giant company, has been building video meeting technology for a long time. It's just never worked as well and smoothly and seamlessly and scalably as Zoom. I do think that there is a path to building the 10x better product. Discord was 10x better than the audio chat products that gamers were using before. But I think if you're going to do that, you really need to be technology first and riding a new technology wave that makes it work differently and truly spread differently. Discord was able to leverage WebRTC for audio streaming within the browser that made it easy for me to send you a link and be talking to you within a minute without you having to download anything. Zoom was able to use this cloud technology to make the video streaming so much more efficient and so much faster and get out to the edges much better than everything else. I do think that you can ride technology waves, but you really have to be a great product as well as a great technology.

If I'm an early-stage founder, how do I know if I've got a 10x better product? I can logically say, oh, we've got this edge computing with the cloud now that's going hopefully allow me to build a 10x better product with Zoom, or this WebRTS is kind of sucky right now, but I anticipate it's going to get good over the next 12, 14 months. I can imagine why that would give me an advantage in 10xing the technology or the product experience. But how do you know? What are those things you look for? Because as investors, investors have to also know that it's a 10x better product in order to want to put the money in and take the bet when you're going into crowded marketplaces like Zoom was.

No, I mean, This is the hard part, is I think you as a founder and the founding team really have to believe in that premise that now is the time to build something better and that you're so frustrated with the old technology that you can go do it. The Zoom founders had the benefit of having built WebEx for many, many years, and so they knew what worked and what didn't and what old architectures were and what new architectures could provide. And again, they started in the consumer space, but then eventually, probably when their non-competes ran out, pivoted back into to business, and it's a market that they knew well and that they knew they could just build a better product. With Discord, they were gamers and they built something that they wanted to use that was better than the stuff that they had before. That was a big shift for them. They were just like, this is so much better, and look, we can do this. When they started using it and shared it with their friends, all their friends were like, this is amazing. Why would we ever go back? You just have to know that. I often ask founding teams is, do you use your product? How much do you love your product? Is this embodying your habits? I think, in the consumer world, that's foundational. If you don't love your product and use it all the time and haven't shifted over completely for these reasons, it's going to be really hard for you to convince others to through whatever growth tactics or other things you use.

Right. It's interesting. Discord is a little bit like just Unix IRC from the '90s, Right?

Yep.

Just with emojis and all the bells and whistles we can put on it today. But it's, it's a behavior that we saw, uh, taking place right at the beginning of connectivity.

That's right. Um, and, and, and it's really— it's not so much that it's a new behavior as that it's done better and done so much more easily than any of the ones that came before. You know, whereas like Snapchat, Facebook, TikTok, Musical.ly— these all really brought new behaviors into the world. So both can work, Right, right.

And as you think about some pinnacle things you've seen in the last 12, 15 years around social media and social communications, I would love to hear any things that stand out that CEOs did that you thought were, wow, that's incredibly innovative, that really stands out, that was, that was a big shift in how things could have gone because of what that founder did.

Are there some things that you look back on like I'm not sure that I ever think of the grand gesture of really standing out. The ones that stand out still to me the most were the ones who had their heads down building and found their way to a product that they loved and that they got other people around them to love. And so the examples I keep coming back to is when I first met Evan at Snapchat and he talked about how they started with this thing and then they kept showing it to to high school kids and it wasn't quite working and they would make these changes. Then they figured out that screenshotting freaked people out, so they added screenshot checking. Then all of a sudden, everybody felt comfortable to use it. It was the story of how we talked to people, heard what their objections were, heard what their challenges were, went and built features that tried to solve those, gave it back to them, and kept that tight iterative loop. That sort of talking to customers, being your best customer. customer is really what made it work. When I met the Musical.ly folks, the founder was actually in his late 30s and had a young child. The majority of his early users were 13, 15, 16, 18 who were building Musical.ly, but they had a WeChat group set up and they were talking to them every day, asking them questions, sending them mockups, getting feedback. What would make you switch from Instagram to use this? What else do you want us to do? They would send them videos they were trying to make and say, hey, if you made the capture tool do this, it would be amazing. They were just in such constant communication with their customers that that is what made it take off. I think that is the real secret.

Really, it's the emotional tenor of that CEO to be able to maintain those conversations and to realize that the product you have now isn't What isn't quite working, you thought was right last week is still not right this week, and you need to keep being humble. You need to maintain this nice balance between believing in yourself and believing in your product and believing in the mission, but also being relentlessly skeptical that you've nailed it. And that's a difficult emotional place for people. There's a real facility that Eric and others have shown in balancing those 2 things. Do you find that personality type in these CEOs that are successful this way?

Yeah, I mean, I think that that's a real important secret, especially in social, is your product is never good enough. You're never harboring enough of the trends, and you have to keep searching for what really moves people, and you have to keep building the features that do that and keep understanding the growth hooks and the reasons that somebody uses your product and spreads it because you're so dependent on people people using it meaningfully in their lives all the time on a repeat basis that you really need to keep changing. And people keep changing, and so products have to change too. And I think that's a really important thing to understand. And as you go from your earliest adopters to your later adopters to the early majority, you also have to understand that it has to get simpler and it has to get dumbed down and the onboarding process has to get a lot more robust in order to get more and more people on it. And great products have to evolve that way as well.

And that's been one of the strengths of Facebook is it's like a shark constantly swimming forward, constantly experimenting and changing every feature on all of their products. And that mentality to constantly iterate has stayed with them all these years despite the fact that they're so big now. And seeing founders who don't have that approach trying to get into social media, I just don't feel like there's a good personality fit there. If you look at Vine, Vine was TikTok before TikTok, right?

Yes.

Yet, why didn't Vine go? Why wasn't Vine TikTok? Do you have a few reasons that you could point to there?

Yeah. One of the things that was unique about Musical.ly, because it was really why it wasn't Vine, Musical.ly, because Musical.ly got big, then it got sold, then it got even further invested in to make TikTok, which is the phenomenon now. We can even talk about what changed between Musical.ly and TikTok to make it a true phenomenon.

On.

But with Vine, they were 6 seconds long, and a couple people got so good so early at making things really, really funny that it felt very hard for most people to create anything. And so Vine very quickly moved into a world where there were a few great creators and a lot of watchers and very few other creators or sharers. And so it became a media network more than anything. Musical.ly became a lip-syncing product where it was actually It was pretty easy for anybody to make something that felt pretty good. Just like Instagram let you make a photo that felt pretty good in the earliest days of Instagram, with Musical.ly, you could put on a song you like and just sing into the camera, and it looked more professional or more fun than any other video you might have made to record your life. Just the music soundtrack changes everything. There were 15-second samples, and they quickly became in partnership with all the music labels.

You're saying that the original Musical.ly features were, instead of 6 seconds, with Vine, it was 15 seconds. They started the community to do lip-syncing, which guided a certain social behavior within the community, which turned out to be an easier thing for more creators to do better at, which is what made the difference. They narrowed down the types of content they wanted people to make around lip-syncing music. By narrowing, they actually created a whiter, hotter center to then launch from. Is that part of the story?

Yeah, but, but where you say narrowing, I would say actually just enabling people to make something that was better because it actually just had a soundtrack. And so a lot of people, the simplest thing you could do when you have a soundtrack is just do a lip sync. There were a lot of people that were also trying to make, you know, fun videos of life or other things, but when you have a good song underneath an even mediocre video content, it makes the whole experience much better. Now, part of the reason that Musical.ly didn't get as big as TikTok is right now on its own without selling to ByteDance is because the music soundtracks and the early lip-syncing use cases actually did become somewhat narrowing, where most people were doing lip syncs and they wanted people to be doing comedy and dancing and funny things and educational things and all of these other types of content. But because soundtrack made people think about lip-syncing, too many people actually lip-synced. Part of what the change to TikTok did, they rebranded it, they did pay hundreds of millions of dollars, and then a lot of that was getting different influencers to create different types of content onto TikTok. But they were able to show all these examples of things that weren't lip syncs, and, and they're actually algorithms make sure that you don't see a lot of lip sync videos right now. And so all of a sudden they were able to change the mix of the content that people viewed and people were inspired by. And people did what other people were doing to be a much broader mix. And that's what sort of helped spawn TikTok to be the massive phenomenon that it is today. So elevating the early videos on Musical.ly with soundtrack will both help them get, you know, break out in a way that Vine didn't, but then also became just enough of a drag that it had to flip into this other, this other model with TikTok, which was a massive reinvestment But it's going to pay off in spades.

Yeah, I mean, this is something I feel like founders make a mistake on all the time. I mean, there were several social networks that had 30, 50 million people before Facebook ever launched. Facebook comes in and says, we're just doing colleges, really narrow market. But that ended up allowing them to use real identities first, which then allowed them to springboard into owning the whole space. You see the same thing with Fiverr, the marketplace where they said everything for $5. They really restricted it. They narrowed the focus until it was a white-hot center around just things for $5. And now, of course, $5 and more. They've now expanded it over the last 6, 8 years. And then Musical.ly ended up doing the same thing, saying, no, let's do lip-syncing instead of doing everything. And then that got them to get big enough so that they could then be a springboard to then go do everything. And it's really hard as a founder to decide to narrow your focus. to limit or guide your community or culture onto a specific thing. Or look at Twitch. Twitch came out of Justin.tv. Justin.tv was everything. Then they found one narrow niche around the gaming, and then they actually went from broad to narrow. Then that narrowness is what gave them their real growth. Sometimes narrowness can really help. You just have to know when to broaden it. I remember having a debate with Bill Gurley at a dinner dinner that was very loud and vociferous where he was claiming that Facebook should stay focused on colleges and do classifieds and used books and everything for colleges, and that was their best way. My argument was like, no, they need to flip out of colleges and go after everything, but it's a matter of the timing of when they're going to do that. This narrow focus can be very, very helpful for companies at the beginning, and it's hard to do because you want to take the whole thing, and there's a lot of venture people who say, well, that's not exciting. Why would I just want to do lip syncing? That's That's too small. Why would I just want to do colleges? That's too small. But in the end, as you said, you've got to find that, that white-hot center where you've got a few people who you're serving their needs 100% and then expand from there.

Absolutely. Absolutely. It's really finding that early group that doesn't just use your product, but really uses it, depends on it, brings it into their lives in a super meaningful way. And once you have that, now you have a base that you have a chance to build from and replicate. and keep expanding. We're seeing that in Discord right now, which is the gamer use case was so fundamental to get it as big as it is, but a lot of people now aren't gamers that are using Discord, and the product has to change a little bit to serve those people while not alienating that core base of gamers as well if it really wants to help a lot more people connect. That's always the trade-off is to build a giant gaming business Or do you build something that's, that's even bigger?

Yeah. Well, Josh, this has been a fantastic conversation. As always, I love talking with you, buddy. I love thinking about these things with you. It's great fun. Thank you.

Thanks. Thanks so much for having me. This was awesome.