[WMD 2015] Greylock Partners, Josh Elman "How To Build On Other Platforms"

So we have this constant debate with every single company I talk to that says, hey, I really want to build a big company. I want to go build something on Facebook, on Twitter, on everything else. And they come with this great idea, and they say, Facebook's not doing this thing. I can just build this little thing that will make all Facebook users happier. Maybe I can get a big partnership with Facebook. And none of that is right. The reality is, if you want to build a big company, you've got to find your own thing and build it from scratch. And get it really big, but we have these massive platforms today, and I think you can use them to get independently big. And I'm going to talk about why it's not that scary to go build on Facebook or on Twitter or on everything else, even though it seems like it. Because every day we see news like this. Just yesterday, Facebook shut down the ability to get data on friends of friends. And there were a whole bunch of companies like dating companies and other things that when you signed into Facebook, it would actually give all this data about all of your friends, and they've cut that off. And in fact, just like every time the platform changes, I got this great tweet storm here. You don't need to read it all, but the basic idea was there's a lot of companies that have been built off sort of filtering and reputation management that are all going to die now because they were completely reliant on this one API from Facebook, and it said when you signed up, it would check to see if you were valid by basically how many friends you had. and how valid your friends were. And this is a constant refrain that it's always scary to go build on these platforms. If you depend on one thing, the platform will change. And I'll talk a little bit about why. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't do it and you shouldn't try. You just have to think ahead and not just rely on one thing from working, but figure out how to get it to help you. This has gone on for a long time. Who here was building a Twitter app before Twitter killed the ecosystem? Anyone? I was. Just one hand here, good. Those scars are all gone then. Who here has been building on Google's SEO and then things like the Panda update or any SEO algorithm change just crushes you? Just a couple hands here, good. So you guys aren't too reliant on Google. How about on Facebook? Who's built Facebook apps that have just been decimated when Facebook came out with some platform changes that just totally crushed you? Okay, got just a hand or two. And even LinkedIn, who was trying to build LinkedIn stuff before they just obliterated the platform? Okay, so a few hands. So look, there's always carnage in all of these things, but there's so many people who've been kind of a combination of lucky and right that I think you can still do it. Because you really sit there and you're like, okay, well with all these horror stories, maybe I just should go back to email and SMS, and Apple's really nice, they never hurt anybody. Good, okay, you guys got the joke. And yet look, the short answer to all this is yes. The only way you're going to get big is by doing this. Because if you think about every single company, and all of you who are building companies, everybody starts at zero. Look, this is Google Beta, back when they literally were sending out emails at Stanford to say, please come try our new little search engine. It was called BackRub then. And then they kind of built this and put this out there. Still had the big exclamation point. You guys have all heard the Airbnb story. They were trying to build this little platform. They were trying to build this thing where they could start renting out rooms, and they thought it was a good idea because they were renting out their room. They weren't making any money, so they went and sold cereal in order to hustle their way into getting people to be even aware of their platform. Or even this is the very first blog post for Instagram, which I would encourage you to take time after this and go back and read some of the early blog posts from Instagram, Uber, these companies that we sort of take for granted are really big today. They basically said, hey, we're launching our new product today. We think mobile photos on the phone aren't as good. We think we can make them more beautiful with our filters. We think that we can, what's the second part? We think that we can make it much easier to share and get it off your phone because we're going to let you connect to Tumblr and LinkedIn and Twitter and, or not LinkedIn, but Tumblr and Facebook and Twitter and push your photos out from your phone, and we're going to make it really fast to upload because photo uploading was actually really, really painful off the phone with all the apps at the time. They didn't really have this ambition to go, hey, we're going to go be this massive network for the future of But we're gonna figure out how to help you get these photos off your phone. We're just gonna use all these other networks cuz we know that you wanna share it with your friends, not that we expect you to just see it on Instagram. And by the way, it's totally worked now. And so I said, look, you really have to remember that every single company, nobody gets lucky out of the gate. Everybody starts by hustling and by trying to figure it out. I also encourage you, if we put up the slides later, there's a great thing on the left from when Evan Spiegel, who's the founder of Snapchat, was trying to get people aware of his product called Peekaboo, which is basically the same thing. He was literally going to forums and emailing people everywhere trying to get them to try out his little app where you could delete photos. And this is Meerkat. Meerkat launched just a couple months ago. Ben, the founder, had been working on live video for a couple years. I'd gotten to know him through that. It wasn't really working, and they kind of went back and said, okay, let's just build the simplest live streaming product. that we can possibly do, and maybe we'll go launch it on Product Hunt, which is, you know, it's a great place to kind of get some early activity and engagement. He wrote this big post, he spent all day answering questions on Product Hunt, and because of the way that he integrated with Twitter, it totally took off. And we'll come back to that story kind of at the end, but everybody starts just by grinding kind of day one. Nothing grows overnight immediately. And yet you all have this goal of virality, and really the real promise of of getting anything big isn't just to figure out if you can spend a lot of money to market it, but can you really get any of these products to a point where they're sustainable? Where each time that somebody does something, you're touching other people, and they're touching their friends, and they're touching people who follow them, and they're touching people that they know in the world or that they might meet somewhere else. And you really want this engagement and this viral organic growth loop, but you've got to figure out how to do it because at the very beginning, you don't have enough users on your platform to do any of that. So you need help. You need to go find somewhere and some places where all those users live in order to really get big. And I think this is sort of the reality of the world, that it's okay to ask for help, and it's okay to figure out how to get all these platforms to help you. So if I go back to my question, should you really touch a platform? I think it's actually a really simple answer, but I'll make it a little bit longer. Everybody starts with zero users, and you need to get in front of users to grow. And these big platforms have a ton of users, just a mega ton of users right now. And they actually offer lots and lots of ways to get in front of them. So if you can figure out how to tap into any of these platforms, you will actually grow, even if you're afraid of them cutting everything and changing and they have to go do all that. And so just to remind you, we live in an era where these are huge. Google has over 3 billion searches a day. Facebook has 1.3 billion users around the world. YouTube's got over a billion. active users. WhatsApp's 800, Facebook Messenger's 600, Instagram's 300. It's kind of amazing that Facebook has 4 of these just massive platforms of people coming every day. Google has 2. Twitter's got over 300 million active users. LinkedIn has 300 million users. Pinterest, Snapchat, Slack, on and on and on. These are all growing really fast. These are where people already are. So your goal is to get them there. And as I said, you need their help, but these These companies actually want your help too. These companies actually want better things for their users. Google wants better results for a query. If you have a page that's a better result than what they already show, they want to be able to show it. That's what SEO is theoretically all about. Facebook wants people sharing more content because the more that people do and engage with their Facebook friends, the more people use Facebook. YouTube wants people sharing and watching more videos and engaging more on YouTube. WhatsApp, Messenger, these new messaging products, Look, people talk a lot on the messaging products with their friends. They want more things to talk about. They wanna make it really easy to pass content in through those platforms so that you'll actually spend more time there talking and engaging with your friends. Instagram wants people sharing and viewing more pictures. Twitter wants people sharing and viewing more content. Because this all fits their business goals. If Facebook has more people sharing more content and viewing more content, they make more money on advertising. If Twitter wants people, gets people sharing and viewing more content, They make more money on advertising. And so you really need to understand that they actually want these things to make their businesses better. So if you go back 10, 15 years in the internet history, this always used to be done by partnerships. And partnerships were kind of this holy grail. And you would go, you were a little company, you were like Google, this cute little search engine. And you'd go to all these big companies like AOL and Yahoo, and you'd be like, Please let us power your search, and we'll take kind of the power from your big platform, and we'll be able to build our thing better, and we'll just serve you and make your users better. And it's hard to remember that Google was actually much bigger in the early days powering searches on Yahoo and AOL than they were on Google.com. But whatever— what started happening was everybody realized, hey wait, those results are really good on Yahoo, and if I go to the Google page, it's actually a much cleaner experience. And everybody started going to Google.com and talking about Google.com instead of Yahoo. So they kind of are like this great holy grail example of an amazing partnership with a big company when they were just a tiny little startup, and then obviously they ended up becoming the big dominant company and everybody else's lunch. But partnerships like that are so rare and hard to balance. Most big companies look more like the shark here in Nemo, where they kind of look at the neat little company and say, oh, maybe you can help us a little bit, but they'll never create these kind of partnerships. that would really kind of give away the crown jewels in that same way that Yahoo did. But they've actually become even better than that. Instead of needing to go and try to do all these little partnerships now as a startup, you get the platform. You can just stop asking and trying to get the deal. When I worked at Facebook on the Connect platform and on the platform, it was amazing how many companies that wanted a special deal with Facebook. They would say, please put a link here, or please do this for us. And I would just look at them and I was like, we have this huge platform. You can already partner with Facebook out of the gate. Just go build on our platform and we'll make that really easy for you. And everybody always wanted that special favor, and honestly all those companies that came knocking and begging didn't ever do that much. The ones that really tried to figure it out had a much bigger chance to go big. Okay, so I've kind of kept saying platforms are great, and yet they still seem so shaky, like this big oil platform where you're like, okay, can I really build on this thing? Is it stable or not? And so let's step back and try to understand what the company is thinking when they do a platform. Why do they want a platform? So if you think of a company like Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn, why do they want to let people sort of partner with them in this open way? Well, look, the first example I like to talk about is companies have massive roadmaps. They want to go build so many products. They want to go build so many features for their users. And every single user, every one of you in this room probably has your personal pet feature you'd love to see on Facebook or on LinkedIn or on Twitter or whatever. And as a company, even as big as those companies are, they still have priorities. And what I like to say is they can only build their top 20 features, even over time. And they try to hit the most users they can to hit their business goals better with those features. So they start to ask themselves, well, how can we get people to offer features like 21 to 1,000 in our platform? Hmm, that would be really interesting if instead of us having to do it, we could do it. And so then they go, well, huh. What if we outsource this to other engineers? What if we started to say, hey you, you might want to build something cool. You could build sort of one of these features that we know will make our product better, but we're never going to actually get to it. And so maybe we can build incentives where you'll actually want to build it for us. And then the last thing these companies always say is, look, and if we are successful in building a platform and everybody depends on us, other companies do, other businesses do, it's a very powerful network effect. So now we have this really established value that we're not just a cool platform and a product people use, But it's very hard to leave because all these businesses and other companies around the world depend on it. Google is partially stronger because everybody's really optimized their pages for Google. Facebook's stronger because all these other businesses are offering Facebook login and are really relying on Facebook to run their business. So that's why they want a platform. Oops. So then they go, okay, let's open a platform. And they say build it and they will come, and that never works. This is from Field of Dreams if you guys have not watched that movie. I forgot how old it is. When I was talking to somebody else earlier today. But Field of Dreams is this idea, I'm just going to open a field and build it and they will come. And with a platform, that never works. The companies really have to go out and figure out what the deep direct incentives are between them as a platform and the individual developers, and do that step by step. So in order to make this platform successful, they need really clear incentives for the developer to get value. They need to figure out how to show developers the users, Or show me— I like to say developers will all say, show me the users, or show me the money. I think Dave McClure used to say it a little bit more artistically. Distribution and monetization. Distribution and monetization? Or I'll quote Dave. It was get them laid or get them paid. The second thing that all platforms need to do is show clear value for users. You really aren't going to be able to build this thing unless you're showing the users how you get these extra features, how you get this extra value, how more things you can do on the product, more time, more fun. For Facebook, obviously, game developers figured out that there was a very massive opportunity, and the users loved it too because they were really using those games. But the last thing that's most important that I think is where the conflict often comes in is the platform actually needs trust from users. The users need to trust that as they're using their main product like Facebook or Twitter or anything else, they're actually getting value They're not giving away the farm to all these other unscrupulous developers that are taking it. And a lot of times the platform has to keep changing things in order to reinstate that trust with users and show them that they're protecting them. Apple does its app review. Facebook's had a whole bunch of policies that they've had to enforce. Because at the end of the day, the platform itself needs to keep focusing on its goals and get big. In order to create more opportunity for developers, rather than think they're ever doing developers a favor. Now these are why companies fear a platform. Every company, when we open up our APIs, like at Facebook or at Twitter or other companies, you really get worried that all the developers are going to come in and spam all the users. I used to call it like they're peeing in our pool. They're coming in and sort of, it doesn't matter if they spam 100 users. If they get 3 new users for them, they're happy. But everybody else on Facebook or on Twitter or on other things, gets really upset. And so because of that peeing in the pool notion, I say it's actually time for us to— we actually had to go make a lot of changes to protect all of our users, to keep our pool clean, even though there were a lot of good things happening as well. And the second thing that every company fears when they start to open a platform is that they're going to lose their data, or they're going to lose their monetization opportunities, and they're going to lose real value. Now it's important to find that win-win. Apple's done a great job with sort of a a 30% rev share on everything that happens. And so developers just know going in that there's a bit of an Apple tax, and then they're actually pretty happy. And Apple still shuts down certain things that could actually get in the way of what Apple's business— like you can't run another app store on top of Apple. But other companies, especially in these early days with Facebook and Twitter and their platforms, they were constantly afraid of what was going to happen with their business model. They didn't know what it would be, and if someone else took all the users, into different clients, or if somebody took the data and started running different ad products against it. The platform itself got worried about this, so it kept making changes. So in order for this to all hold together, you need to trust as a developer building on these platforms, the platforms themselves will keep changing. Look, for 3 main reasons. If you're using Facebook, you're using Twitter, you're using your iPhone and it has a platform on it, you expect it to keep getting better. The moment it stops getting better, you'll stop using it. And so every single product has to keep getting better no matter what else is happening, and whether or not just to fix the data worries or people peeing in the pool, it just has to keep making the product better. Look, and the second thing is the platform business models do shift and new opportunities open up. And when mobile opens up, that's where everybody needs to be, Facebook has to go to mobile, and that means it changes its platform on the web in order to make mobile better or try to bring people over. And so you need to understand that You're not just, hey, this platform is here to stay. They're going to keep changing it as their model shifts or solidifies. And then the third thing that— the reason the platform has to keep changing is whenever there's a risk that users are using apps less. We actually saw moments in time on Facebook where the conversion rate to use an app, to authorize an app, actually went down because of all the bad behavior from apps. So we had to keep making substantial changes to the platform in order to do it. That change I talked about at the very beginning where you couldn't pull all the data from your friends. There was enough bad behavior that was preventing people from actually authorizing apps that they're now hoping people will use apps more and they'll start to trust it again. And so platforms have to keep working on this. So as long as you understand their mentality, they're building their business, they're not building yours. Facebook is not your friend, even though the people there are awesome people and they tell you we love your product and you should keep building it on our platform. Just remember that they're building their thing and they're doing their thing and you're doing your thing. And don't ever get confused by that. And when Facebook puts you on stage and says, this is the greatest product ever, it really builds on our platform, then the next year they're realizing you're spamming everybody and they start to take it down. That will happen, but doesn't mean you shouldn't use Facebook, because you certainly should. So I'm going to walk through some examples now. Most are successful companies that work through this model. A few of them are kind of these high-profile disasters, and we'll just talk a little bit about what happened and sort of what went on through each of those. So who remembers MySpace and YouTube and the MySpace-YouTube wars? Who used MySpace? OK, we're getting like— that's not a good quantity in this room. I'm starting to feel really old on the internet. So back in the early days, MySpace was this social network. And you built a page. And you could actually insert all this code into the page. You could embed things in it. And so they didn't really ever have a real platform, but they did because you could embed widgets in it. There were a lot of companies that went out and built widgets and built embedding things. And YouTube was this place you could just host video, and they figured out if they made it really easy to embed their videos, they could grow a lot bigger. And so they made it really easy. You can see up here, there's on the left, there's the YouTube embed code. There's a big way that you just paste it into MySpace, and boom, all of a sudden your video appears on YouTube. Sorry, your YouTube video appears on MySpace. And what ended up happening was people started to keep watching the videos on MySpace, and they'd be like, this video's pretty cool. And at the end it would say, here's another video or two, and it would click you over to this YouTube thing. And you kept going to MySpace, seeing these videos, and then clicking over to YouTube and discovering YouTube and saying, oh, YouTube's where all the cool videos are. And what's ironic is, who uses YouTube today? Okay, it's a way better show of hands than MySpace, Because YouTube, by getting hosted on MySpace, by getting people to discover all the videos on MySpace where they already were, and then drawing people over to YouTube, they ended up winning. So you really have to think about when you're running on another platform, the loop is not just, hey, look, I'm getting all these views on MySpace, but how are the views that I'm getting on another platform drawing people into my platform and getting them to come back time and again? And I call this the side door versus the front door. And it becomes very, very important over time, no matter what platform you use, that you understand how to map users that are coming in the side door to pull them to come back through the front door. And if you can't do that, then you're out of luck. So here's another set of examples. Who remembers kind of the 2007, 2008 era of Facebook Canvas pages, profile boxes, apps? So raise your hand if you were working in that case. Again, internet history, we're all losing the— The past, it's amazing, because mobile is like everything now. Pretty soon I'll be a relic talking about HTML browsers on the web. But back in these days, there were these companies like Slide and RockYou and Zynga and iLike and Flixster. And Facebook had opened up this incredible platform that was revolutionary. You can get millions of users in like a week, and it was the first time we saw the power, I think, of social distribution. Coming to apps, and Slide and Zynga both built very different products. Zynga built products that were very finely tuned for exactly how Facebook worked. There was this thing called Super Poke that you would poke somebody and then a notification would go out on Facebook, and then somebody else would click in on the notification and they would poke you, and it was this loop that kept going and it was optimized. And you could see how big Slide got sort of in that era. And then you would look at Zynga, and Zynga was building games, and Zynga was building destination games where you would go to. And so when we were making these first set of changes at Facebook, we kind of removed the profile boxes and changed the way the platform worked. I was trying to talk to all the developers, and one of the things I kept saying is you need to get people coming directly to you. If they're not coming searching for your app or going to your app directly, you're going to get hit a lot when we make all these changes. And if you look at the curve here, you can see what happened to Slide. Zynga, on the other hand, at that time had built these iconic games, Poker, FarmVille, Mafia Wars, CityVille. And people would come to Facebook looking for FarmVille or looking for poker. And because they weren't as reliant on exactly how the Facebook platform worked, they did a much better job retaining users. And you can see that all those changes hardly hit them at all. And so this was the idea that even when you're building apps or running on somebody else's platform, if you're just relying on push notifications, feed notifications, tweet notifications, You don't necessarily have people coming to your product. You need to create a loop where they again start coming into your front door. Okay, so who remembers SocialCam and Viddy and when those little video apps were really blowing up on Facebook and Twitter? So it was actually this amazing era of the Open Graph in about 2012 where you would go to Facebook, you'd see, hey, my friend just watched a video on SocialCam. You'd click through, you'd see this little page, go get the SocialCam app to watch the video. And all of a sudden you'd go and download the app and install it. And this was the first time that I think we really saw social distribution drive app downloads too. So you'd click, you'd download it, this is like the App Store, and then you'd go and watch the video and you'd connect in with Facebook. And the moment that you watched the video, all your friends got the same notification that I just watched that same video. And then the next friend would authorize the app, then they would watch the video too, and then boom, you had this amazing spike where these I mean, you can see that spike where these apps just got so big so quickly because they just finely tuned this Facebook graph. And what happened was Facebook said, you know what, this actually isn't driving the kind of behavior we want. Just because you watch a video, we tell all your friends, they come watch the video, that's not actually a loop that is healthy and it's kind of starting to spam the feed. Users don't expect to share that they watched a video. And what ended up not happening was people didn't start coming to Socialcam or Viddy to watch videos. In fact, those apps were really about taking videos and sharing them with friends, and most of the videos that were watched were more viral hit videos. And so one person actually likened this to sort of a virus that sort of passed through Facebook at one point where everybody got infected and then moved on, like the flu every winter, as opposed to something that was really durable. But I actually still think there was a real opportunity to build the mobile video viewer and to build this thing that we came back to every day and watched it. It was just that when you downloaded the app and and this kind of spammy loop happened, you never actually got to a point where you were coming back to the app every day and just watching videos in there. And maybe it could happen, but they got so caught up in this kind of momentum, and everybody, they raised money at huge valuations, that people sort of forgot that it takes people coming every day to your individual app in order to do it. So a better example that I've seen recently is sort of what I call Facebook and the media sites. So in the upper left corner is Huffington Post. Which I helped work on when we built the first social, Huffington Post. There's BuzzFeed, there's Upworthy, which I think hasn't been as successful. What's been amazing with Huffington Post and BuzzFeed is they have built this incredible distribution, again, trying to use Facebook to get people to share. They figured out how to optimize algorithms that if they understand what people want to share, then people are more likely to share it and create these very tight loops. And in this chart that I show in the upper right, What gets a little bit scary is that's the traffic between Facebook and Google referring to BuzzFeed. And it used to be almost equal, and you've seen that as they've optimized it over 2013, Facebook really, really took off and really got this much better. So what these media sites though have done is they've figured out how to create a loop now where as people keep seeing them and keep going to Huffington Post to read an article or BuzzFeed to read an article, they start going back to Huffington Post and BuzzFeed directly. And over 20 to 30% now of the traffic to those sites generated directly, not just through all these referral channels, and they think that's going up. And so instead of it just being, how can we leverage Facebook to keep getting views or keep getting users, can we really get to this point where they're coming back every day to our platform? So I'll go to another story that's kind of near and dear to my heart, which is the Twitter clients. If everybody remembers back in the early days of Twitter, Twitter was a website and they had a very open API, and a lot of people said, you know what? The thing I'm gonna build is the same thing as Twitter on the web in a different place. And they would basically try to build the same mainstream client just for BlackBerry or for iPhone or for other things. And what ended up happening was Twitter realized, you know what the best Twitter on iPhone should probably be? Twitter. You know what the best Twitter on BlackBerry should probably be? Twitter. What the best Twitter on Android should probably be is Twitter. Because it's great to have all these developers doing it, but But I like to call this, there was a great blog post about filling holes versus building real solutions. And just saying, hey, there's no Twitter on iPhone, I can go build that on iPhone, doesn't mean you have a long-term sustainable path to a company. It means you found something that's kind of missing and you can get a bunch of users to your thing. But on the right-hand side, I put up a company called HootSuite. And HootSuite didn't say, hey, we're just going to go build Twitter for the web or Twitter for iPhone. They basically said, we're going to go figure out how to take Twitter to this very niche audience of marketers and brands who want to listen, be able to do some customer service and do sort of other listening. And we're going to just build them the very best solution. And in fact, we're going to figure out how to build them the best solution for listening and everything else through Twitter and probably other platforms over time. And Hootsuite's now multi-billion, is valued I think over $1 billion and is making tons of money on those brands and marketers paying for it because they really went and picked a solution and said, because Twitter exists, we have this opportunity to go build this thing. for brands and marketers, but not, and customer service, but not, hey, there's no Twitter on the phone, so we're gonna go build that. And it's very important to figure out I'm building a unique solution for an audience, not just kind of filling a hole. Now what is neat about this is Twitter did buy TweetDeck, Twitter did buy Tweety, so a couple of those developers did end up becoming the core things for Twitter, so it's not like all that effort was lost. But a lot of companies also didn't end up succeeding through that process. And so one that's near and dear to my heart is Meerkat. And I hope all of you, I encourage you, go home, Meerkat everything, broadcast your life in the real world. But Meerkat, as I said, Ben was just, they were playing with this idea and they said, oh, what if we just built video for Twitter? Live video for Twitter, they just integrated really nicely. You press stream, it goes live. This could be, you see the tweet over there, it could be really exciting just to have this entire loop working. And it took off, and it was amazing. And all of a sudden every day people were Meerkatting live video and realizing that when they connected with their Twitter audience it really, really worked. But the power of Meerkat is not because of Twitter. Twitter just gave them this little acceleration to kind of get into the world. Media brands learned about it at South by Southwest, it became really popular. But the real goal of Meerkat is to build its own domain, its own network. And so Twitter had, unknown to the Meerkat team, Twitter had bought their own company called Periscope to do something very similar, so they shut down Meerkat. And everyone said, my gosh, Meerkat went from the next big thing to the dead thing in 3 weeks, right around when I funded it. But what's amazing is Meerkat's going to be fine because it's not about the fact that it was glued to Twitter. Twitter was a great acceleration for it. Twitter let people see it and see the power of live video and build this really simple experience. And over time, Meerkat people are building their own audience. their own community on Meerkat. We're gonna figure out how to help people bring in from other platforms too, because we understand the power of what that can be from the Twitter experience. But ultimately, the goal is when people wanna go live, they have their community and audience on Meerkat to be able to go live rather than needing to rely on any of these other platforms. And they're gonna be just fine. And this is the risk. And I say they're gonna be just fine. This is the journey that's still to be seen. But this is kind of the exciting thing is they got a moment in time where people learned about them. The brand started to get created. We have a real chance now to go build something great. And look, the company I'd like to end on for examples is Instagram. I don't think when everybody first saw Instagram, it was like, oh look, it's mobile photos you can share through Twitter and Facebook. It's filling a hole. It's just being the camera. There were a bunch of things you could take pictures and share them, but Instagram did it perfectly. When you connected with Instagram, you signed up, it helped you connect your Twitter and your Facebook and find your friends on Twitter and Facebook, and you started to follow everybody. And then whenever you posted a photo, it would make it very, very simple to post it out to Twitter, post it out to Facebook. They only had one webpage. They were a full mobile app at the time, but they made it very, very simple to do all that. And in that entire world, they then became their own network and their own destination and their own loop that people go to every day. So they are just the example of if you wanna think about how to bootstrap off other platforms, and get scared by all the horror stories that came before you, also remember that Instagram did it and it's a huge success. And then there's a current one now, if you guys haven't played with Dubsmash, it's an app, it's in the top 10 in the App Store, I'll show the app rankings here in a sec. But with Dubsmash, you basically go and create a little video of yourself dubbing over a funny audio clip, and then at the very end of the screen they just have share it, because why would you create a video like this if you didn't want to share it with friends? Everybody who gets the video goes, this is awesome, and then they say, oh, where'd you get that? Oh, that was on Dubsmash, and they're chatting back and forth on WhatsApp, and then they go to Dubsmash, download it, make their own video, and share it too, and almost all distribution has been through WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, and they're deeply integrated now with Facebook Messenger because they figured out how to make this thing that's really fun and viral and shares. So these things do exist. They are out there now. They really can work, But you need to come up with what it is durable at the end. And so where do you go next? There's Facebook Messenger. They've launched a new platform. I think there's a lot of ways to go build your product on top of them, but think through how it ends up getting to your product. Snapchat may open a platform someday. Pinterest. BuzzFeed actually says Pinterest is their number 2 referrer after Facebook in terms of social. I'm very, very surprised that more people haven't figured out how to leverage Pinterest to really grow their business. Their companies and networks. Tastemade, a few kind of food and other things have, but I think it's surprising people haven't done that. Go out to China, WeChat has an API. You can figure out how to learn a lot from what users are doing there. It's a slightly different audience. Who knows, the watch, if you guys are getting your Apple Watches, may become a really interesting platform for new distribution and to exploit new mechanics. So just in summary, I really do believe platforms can work for you. You need to remember the value exchange. You need to give the platform better features, they give you users and usage, and if you aren't giving them better features and content and instead are kind of peeing in their pool, they're going to cut you off. Or if you start to risk their business model, they will cut you off. Platforms are always an accelerant for you, but never get comfortable. They're not your friends, no matter how nice the people who work there are. They will always change, but if you can take advantage of a moment to get big, get on the radar, have a chance to go build something big yourself, you should do it. And just remember, ignore all the big numbers that you get from platforms. They don't matter at all. Only core users who come back to your front door matter every day. Because if you start getting fooled and thinking stuff's really working, when in fact it's only because of the way the platform works, they can change it in an instant, you're only fooling yourselves. But when you can get people to come over to your front door like YouTube did, like Instagram did, like we hope Meerkat will, then you have a chance to build a really big company off of it. Thanks. So that's it. Thank you. Thank you.