Twitter’s former Head of Product opens up: being fired, meeting Elon, changing stagnant culture, building consumer product, more | Kayvon Beykpour

The first time I ever met Elon was over FaceTime. He was just like, do you want to just like come, like hang out?

You can swipe left or swipe right. You're kind of known for, at Twitter, someone that turned the culture of the product team and Twitter in general from a very stagnant, nothing is changing product.

To shipping all the time. We wanted to change the lack of ambition, the lack of creativity, the lack.

Of customers feeling that the product had changed it all. So here's a list of stuff that you or teams shipped while you were there. Super Follows, Communities, Newsletters, Topics, Fleets, Testing.

Reactions, Edge to Edge Photos, Twitter Blue.

Spaces, and obviously Live Video.

The sacred cows are like their own roadmap. What are all the things that you think we're not allowed to change? Let's start there.

And this was all relatively quickly.

I was like, I might flame out completely, but hell if I don't try.

Today, my guest is Kayvon Bajpour. Kayvon was the beloved and longest tenured head of product at Twitter, and also GM of the consumer business at Twitter, up until the day that it was sold to Elon Musk. He landed at Twitter through an acquisition of his company Periscope, which was the world's largest live streaming platform, which ended up inspiring Instagram Live, TikTok Live, Facebook Live, and basically every other social network getting into live video. He sold the company to Twitter in 2015, continued leading Periscope for a number of years, and then moved into leading product and then the entire consumer business. In our wide-ranging conversation, Kayvon shares what it was like getting Elon up to speed at Twitter, what it was like to be fired from Twitter, which actually happened during his pat leave. He also shares all kinds of lessons and stories from transforming Twitter's internal culture from a risk-averse, stagnant product org to one that was shipping major features regularly. We talk about how they used aquihires and up-and-coming hungry product leaders to lead new initiatives and break through many of their sacred cows. We also get into jobs to be done, Elon's layoffs of most of Twitter staff after the acquisition, his lessons from building and shutting down Periscope and also building consumer products in general. And so much more. This episode is full of stories and lessons and a bunch of stuff that you haven't heard anywhere else. With that, I bring you Kayvon Baki Pour after a short word from our sponsors. And if you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes, and it helps the podcast tremendously. This episode is brought to you by Interpret. Interpret unifies all of your customer interactions from Gong calls to Zendesk tickets to Twitter threads to App Store reviews and makes it available for your product team. It's used by leading product orgs like Canva, Notion, Loom, Linear, and Descript to accurately integrate the voice of the customer into your product development process, helping you build best-in-class products. What makes Interpret special is its ability to build customer specific adaptive AI models that provide the most granular and accurate categorization of all your customer feedback, and also connect customer feedback to revenue impact to help product leaders confidently prioritize things that will actually move the needle for your business. If you want a custom model built for your organization so that you can automate your feedback loops and prioritize your roadmap with confidence, Get in touch with the team at interpret.comlenny. That's E-N-T-E-R-P-R-E-T.comlenny. Today's episode is brought to you by OneSchema, the embeddable CSV importer for SAS. Customers always seem to want to give you their data in the messiest possible CSV file. And building a spreadsheet importer becomes a never-ending sink for your engineering and support resources. You keep adding features to your spreadsheet importer, but customers keep running into issues. Six months later, you're fixing yet another date conversion edge case bug. Most tools aren't built for handling messy data, but one schema is. Companies like Scale AI and Pave are using one schema to make it fast and easy to launch delightful spreadsheet import experiences. From embeddable CSV import to importing CSVs from an SFTP folder on a recurring basis. Spreadsheet import is such an awful experience in so many products. Customers get frustrated by useless messages like error on line 53 and never end up getting get started with your product. One schema intelligently corrects messy data so that your customers don't have to spend hours in Excel just to get started with your product. For listeners of this podcast, One schema is offering a $1,000 discount. Learn more at onesschema.co/Lenny. Kayvon, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

Thanks so much for having me, Lenny. Great to meet you finally.

It's amazing to meet you. I think this is going to be quite a unique and interesting podcast. A big thank you to Scott Belsky, illustrious former podcast guest for introducing us. So when he introduced us, the one thing that he told me is that hopefully Kayvon will share the story about our time getting Elon up to speed at Twitter. I would love to hear that story. I bet other people would too. Are you able to share that story?

You know, when all the drama went down with Twitter and Elon ended up buying the company and after the eight-month saga of legal back and forth, ended up actually taking control of the company. There was that first two-day period where it was complete chaos at Twitter with the sink and Elon spreading his tentacles, trying to find out who are the people that he wants to keep and what are the projects that are interesting. In the midst of all that, Scott ended up getting contacted and being asked, who should Elon talk to? Scott recommended that Elon chat with me. And so the first time I ever met Elon was over FaceTime, where Elon was just very curious to ask, like, hey, you were at Twitter for a while, you seem to have done some things. What should I be digging into and who should I be talking to? At the end of that conversation, we ended up arranging an in-person meeting where Scott and I went to Twitter HQ to actually meet Elon. I think this was like day two of Elon having you know, brought the sink in. And so we had this really bizarre, wild, but really fun experience of walking in the Twitter HQ, and in my case, walking back to Twitter HQ for the first time after having been fired, which was a very strange experience for me. And, you know, we walked into the building. I was sort of like, like scurried through the back door because I didn't want to make a scene and make it you know, there was a lot of rumors around like is Kavon coming back? And I just wanted to avoid all of that. And so it was just a very weird experience of being scurried through the elevator and through the back door and go to this massive conference room, which we had on the second floor of the 110th building. And in that massive conference room, it was me, Scott, Elon, and then at the very, very end of the room, Walter Isaacson, who by the way, I had a hard time I knew I recognized. I'd never met Walter in person, but I was like, Is that Walter Isaacson? But he said nothing the entire time. And we had this very, you know, we had probably like a two hour conversation, you know, talking about the past, the future, Twitter, the good, the bad, the ugly. At the very end of the conversation, Walter came up and introduced himself and was like, hi, Calev, I'm Walter. Like, can I get your information just in case I need to ask any follow-up questions? And I was like, oh, shit. I guess that whole conversation was on the record. I don't know. So it was a very surreal experience for a bunch of reasons, including just being weird for me since I was very conflicted about coming back to Twitter even physically in the office. But it was, I must say, it was really fun. It was fun talking to someone. I mean, obviously Elon, I'd never met him before and he's one of the most, you know, successful entrepreneurs of our time. And so that was exciting to kind of like go into that meeting. And also, I had been spending so much time dreaming about Twitter and trying to mold Twitter in a direction that I thought was compelling and working with a team of people to do that and to meet someone who also had a similar sort of ambition, but obviously in different ways, he had his own dream for Twitter. But it was sort of really bizarre and unique and surreal. seeing that glimmer in someone else who is like, yeah, I also just bought this thing so I can actually do whatever the hell I want. And by the way, here's some crazy dreams I have for doing it. It was just a really, as someone who had their own dreams for the product, witnessing that was really unusual and cool. So I think that's probably what Scott meant when he said to you, you should ask Kayvon about that. I think we both kind of recognized that. Something's about to happen here. Obviously, you have this very public spectacle of someone essentially having a takeover of a public company. But all of that stuff aside, also you could tell Elon was scheming and cooking up, like, what am I going to do with this? And it was cool to see that.

That's an amazing story. I love the Walter Isaacson component of it. Do you feel like you made a dent on his approach and way of thinking? Obviously, he made a lot of big radical changes. Do you feel like you made a dent in his view of where Twitter should go?

I don't know. I certainly don't think I've made any impression on how he should run the company. I think Elon's going to Elon in his way. And I think he certainly has had some radical moves in terms of how he's running the company, the decisions he made, how many people he let go, how the company structure, the culture, and all that stuff is like, We didn't even talk about that stuff. I think what we spent time talking about is I shared my perspective with him of people I thought who were exceptional, who were at the company. And if I was in his shoes, who I would spend time with and embrace. And most of the people that I mentioned are still there, which is awesome. And they seem to be A, empowered, which is great, and B, having fun, which is awesome. so hopefully that stuff is useful. We spent a bunch of time brainstorming products and I had sort of my set of projects that I was very passionate about because we'd sort of given birth to them. And I think a bunch of those projects it seems like Twitter's still investing in and putting a lot of energy behind, like Community Notes, which at the time was called Birdwatch. But I always felt really bullish on that being the future of how essentially how content is moderated on Twitter, just because it was very clear that the way we were handling content moderation, among many other flaws, just wasn't scalable. And spaces and communities and the creator program of helping people make money on the platform, those are projects that we started over the year-ish prior to Elon taking over. My hope, having left the company and having had a new leader come in, was that those things would be given more oxygen. And it's been awesome to see that those have been continuing to sort of grow and be molded in different directions. So, yeah, I think in that sense, I hope that our brainstorm was useful, but I mean, for all I know, he doesn't even remember the conversation.

I freaking love Community Notes. It's such an amazing product. Let me ask two more. dramatic oriented Elon Twitter questions just to get these out of the way. The first is you said you were fired. I don't know if you've shared that publicly. People always wondered, I think, what happened. I know you tweeted during your pat leave, I'm leaving Twitter. And no one really knows the story as far as I know. What actually went on there?

It was weird, to say the least. Honestly, it took me some time to kind of come to peace with it because it was fustrating and surprising. I guess the story of what happened starts with Jack resigning. Jack resigned in, I think it was like November of 2021 at the end of the year. The board chose Parag to be the CEO of the company. And I've had a long relationship with Parag. I respect him, but I had mixed feelings about that. But to his credit, Parag very quickly addressed one of the biggest things that I was really frustrated about, like in the last three years, essentially, of my time at Twitter, one of my biggest points of feedback and points of consternation was the structure of the company and that we had a functional organizational model, meaning we had, like, I had a consumer product, me, we had a head of revenue product, Bruce, we had a head of engineering, we had a head of design, we had, you know, research. It was like functionally run organization and the combination of that model and the type of leader that Jack was wasn't working in my view. I think if you're going to have a functional organization, you need to have a GM or a CEO who's extremely leaned into tie break and resolve conflict and make sure the team is moving quickly. And Jack, for all of his amazing qualities, just wasn't operating that way. And so you had a group of highly opinionated people that often disagreed and would create either the need for consensus or deadlock. And that just was driving a lot of people crazy, including me. And I think it really held us back from living up to Twitter's potential. Anyway, all of that was super frustrating for me. And the combination of that and a new dramatic change in leadership with Jack Levin and Parag coming in, I wasn't feeling too stoked. Parag to his credit, when he became CEO, quickly changed that. And, you know, shifted the company to be a GM structure. And he promoted me to being the GM of consumer. So for the prior three-ish years, having been responsible for growing Twitter's consumer product, I was only responsible for the product management team. I didn't have engineering or design. And that honestly was difficult. It's very difficult to change culture with one hand tied behind your back. Still no regrets, had a lot of fun. I think we had some impact, but it was frustrating. So Parag changed that. And the irony of this, by the way, is he was one of the biggest proponents of the functional structure. When he became the CEO, he changed the structure, promoted me to be the GM of Consumer. And that was, I was at that point, like one month, this is one month before I went on paternity leave because my daughter was due. And so I sort of went into my paternity leave being like, all right, I'm going to give this a shot. We'll see. We'll see how this goes. Is Parag addressed the biggest frustration that I had with the company and how it was being run? And so I kind of had some trepidations, but went into my pat leave feeling optimistic. Mind you, this was all before Elon was even part of the picture. He had not become a board member. There was no news about him having beef with the executive team or for that matter trying to buy the company. So I went on pat leave, you know, maybe a week and a half before our daughter's due date. Three weeks goes by. In that three weeks, Elon joins the board, leaves the board, makes an offer, has a short dramatic feud about whether that goes through. And also during that time, my daughter was born. Some drama at the hospital for us, but a week afterwards we come home. Mom's healthy, daughter's healthy. The day after we get home from the hospital, Parag called me and said that he was letting me go and that he was taking the team in a different direction. And that night, Twitter signed a term sheet with Elon to sell the company. So, you know, a lot happened in a very short period of time. And the reason that Parag gave is exactly what I shared publicly. which was that he wanted to take the team in a different direction. The only other thing he said is that given that new direction, he thinks that the things that I'm good at, Twitter doesn't need anymore, and the things that Twitter needs are not particularly in my skill set or in my interest. He wasn't particularly expressive about what that direction was, but that was the reason he gave me. And that was a huge bummer for me, for a bunch of reasons. I love the company, I love the product, and also just like sucks to leave not on your own terms. And two, it was just confused. The timing was very frustrating and confusing for me, not least of which because I had just come home from the hospital while on paternity leave. But also because, you know, at that time especially, the fact that Elon was buying the company was, well, I was conflicted honestly. I was very excited because Elon is someone that I, looked up to immensely. And you just look at the things that he's achieved in the world, and he can't help but be inspired by that. And two, Twitter, for all of, I think, the impact and progress that we had made, had a lot of challenges associated with its governance and the fact that it was constantly vulnerable as a public company. So that there's just always this drama associated with Twitter as a public company, even a private company before that, that made it extremely hard as a builder to get shit done and have the product live up to its potential. And one of the benefits of this particular takeover was that Elon offered a path towards solving all that. It was like, oh, cool. Now you've got one owner who happens to be, by the way, extremely opinionated about the product and a voracious consumer and creator of the product. And there was something, I think there was an incredible opportunity in that. that now you have this organization and this product and this incredible ecosystem that can be devoid of all the political bullshit associated with being a public company. And now it has this conduit to just living up to its potential. So it was a bummer to be removed from that, I suppose, without having any agency myself. That was very long with an answer to your question, but that's kind of what happened towards the end there. And like I said at the beginning, it took me a while to come to terms with it and to be at peace with it. And I did eventually, I mean, listen, there's a huge silver lining of I spent the first year of my daughter's life with her and my family. And my wife Sarah had left Twitter eight months prior to me leaving. And so, when's the next time we could all be together and have time and space to just enjoy each other and our new family? And frankly, to avoid a lot of the drama that ended up ensuing that not a lot of people could have predicted. The deal was on, the deal was off. It's just a whole lot of drama that I got to miss, which is the silver lining. And then it was confusing there for a bit because when Elon did end up buying the company, in that conversation that I had with him, it was definitely, I was conflicted about like, do I want to maybe spend some time working on this still. And, you know, Elon was very cool about, he actually used this phrase at the end of our conversation, which I still find hilarious. He was just like, do you want to just come? You seem like you care about the product and you don't have dumb ideas and like, do you want to come like hang out? And I was like, what would my job be? And he was like, don't know, you know, just like hang out and you can swipe left or swipe right or I, you know, he used the swipe right swipe left. tinder metaphor. And I thought that was kind of hilarious coming from him for, like, ideas.

That come up, just like, here's, I have no idea.

Right. On whether you want to be here or swipe. Like, we did. He's like, you don't have to. We don't have to make this a thing. Just like, you know, you want to hang out and, you know, work on. Work on the product with us. And so, you know, I sort of ended up deciding that, actually, I'm just ready to. I'm ready to move on. You know, I spent enough time at this company at this product trying to shape it into something that I was passionate about. I think it's someone else's turn. And, you know, especially Elon, like you buy it, it's your turn, you know, you can do whatever you want with it. So that was conflicting for a bit, but I would say towards the end of the year, it was pretty clear in my mind that I was ready to move on and start thinking about other problems.

What I think about is there's always this tension being a PM at a company with a very strong minded product oriented founder. And I feel like you would have been in the epitome worst possible situation there where you're a product leader between Elon and the rest of the org. So I think it probably would not have worked out.

I'm not sure I would have been able to articulate it as succinctly as you did just now, but I think that is the feeling that I had that like it's just, it's not, it's not my place anymore, you know, like I don't have the canvas to, try and exert my dreams on this place. I think it's, you know, Elon took that mantle and, you know, I'm excited to see what he's gonna do with it is kind of the feeling I had.

Yeah. So you touched on this. You're kind of known for, at Twitter, someone that turned the culture of the product team and Twitter in general from a very stagnant, nothing is changing product to shipping. all the time, all kinds of stuff. So here's a list of stuff that I've gathered. Your team shipped while you were there. Twitter Blue, which is, I think, called Premium now, spaces, super follows, communities, newsletters, topics, fleets, being able to see Instagram photos in line, testing reactions, edge-to-edge photos, tons of UX improvements, and obviously live video. What did you learn about how to change a product culture from a company that's very risk averse and essentially just not shipping a lot to taking big bold bets and becoming a lot more open to new stuff.

Trying to drive culture change is both one of the most challenging things and rewarding things. For the first year of my role, there was a chapter of my time at Twitter, maybe just a backup, that was just leading Periscope. And in that first chapter of maybe two years, I was not really involved with Twitter stuff all that much. That started to change when we really tried integrating Periscope with Twitter. But chapter two of my time at Twitter was when I became the head of product. And that first year of being the head of product was one of the most difficult of my career, not because the work was difficult, but because it was so politically and bureaucratically exhausting to try and change culture in a way that just there wasn't alignment around. And it comes back to the point I was making earlier around the organization of the company was functional. And so, you know, it's one thing for me to have some ideas and a plan and a strategy that I felt compelling, but, you know, when you have to essentially drive consensus amongst your peers across the other functions, it's, you know, that's a different game. That's not execution. That's like politics and consensus building. And I both can't stand that stuff, but I'm just, I think this is going to sound like I'm cheating my own home, but good enough at it and I have enough patience at it that I kind of like, you know, I invested the time and the energy. I think a less patient person wouldn't have bothered and would have thrown their hands up. But I think honestly a lot of it just comes down to like I had practice. My first company that I started in college with one of my best friends, Joe, who I ended up co-founding Periscope with. We got acquired by a big public ed tech company called Blackboard. And like we were 19 at the time when we got thrown into like a public, you know, I was a senior executive at a public company that was like not your quintessential tech company. It was even more difficult to kind of get things done. And so through the four years I spent there, I learned a lot about how to like navigate that type of environment. And so it was it all kind of came coming back when when I was given the product role at Twitter, you know, that first year of changing culture was like, you know, walking through mud and it was really difficult. But I think when we started building that alignment and sort of like building excitement that like, oh, actually maybe this maybe we should be taking some bigger swings. And we when we started seeing through the execution against some of those plans, I think it ended up it got Easier and easier, right? Because it becomes addicting. I think people end up feeling like, oh, wow, maybe these sacred cows we had didn't need to be so sacred. And so I think after that first year, it became a lot more fun. It was still difficult, but it felt like we were all swimming in the same direction a lot more. But I think my takeaway there is you can't change culture without having alignment from the top. you can't change culture. It's difficult to change culture when you have a pocket of a company trying to advocate for change. So I think we got there in the end. We didn't move as much urgency as I think we drove. We were not fast enough. We were not bold enough. I was consistently dissatisfied with what I was achieving and what our team was achieving. But I think we did make a change. Twitter was an organization that had a lot of sacred cows and became very calcified in its ways. Literally, when the first two years I was at the company, the stated product strategy for Twitter was refine the core. It was like, we're not making any big bets here, team. Our goal is to keep turning the knobs that are working. And listen, as much as I was kind of throwing stones from the sidelines through that period when I was in Periscope land in our separate office a few blocks away from the mothership, that focus actually did help the company for some period. Like the reason why Twitter went from stagnant to declining DAU growth to growing DAU again is because they refined the core, right? This is when they went from the reverse chronological timeline to the rank timeline. And that, you know, and the year after that was a lot of knob turning. It was like, how do we make these recommendations better? How do we make our push notifications more relevant? Now, that is not an inspiring product strategy. That does not result in the product feeling materially different or added new capabilities, but it did return the company to user growth. And I think that the fact that it did actually calcified the organization's sort of reticence to take any risky bets even more. So it was a very interesting sort of predicament, because when I, you know, got into the role, the goal wasn't to change that progress. Like we wanted to continue reaping the benefits of refining the things about the product that were working really well. What we wanted to change was a lack of ambition, a lack of creativity, the lack of customers feeling that the product was changed at all. Because you would hear people, I mean, one of the beautiful things about working on Twitter as a product is that you have literally customers being injected into your veins. Every single day, whatever you change about the product or whatever you don't change, they're telling you what they love and what they hate. And it is both exhausting and exhilarating. is like one of the most ridiculous luxuries of product development is working on a product that that many people use and therefore you get that much feedback around. And it was a very common thing for us to hear people say, what are you, what are you all doing over there? Like the product hasn't changed in like eight years. And that was horrible to hear. That was like, and I felt it too as a, as a critic on the sidelines, as a, as a user who wasn't an employee, who eventually became an employee, like I had the same feedback. And so that was my mission. I was like, I'm somehow ridiculously in this fortunate position that I've been entrusted some responsibility here. I might flame out completely, but hell if I don't try. And so that was both fun and exhausting, like I said. But it was as simple as starting with, we are voracious users of the product ourselves. And if we aren't, by the way, that's its own problem. I think that in order to build, in order to build something wonderful, like you have to be a customer of the product. And sure, I'm sure you could point to businesses and products where that's not the case, and I'm sure there's a flaw in that philosophy somewhere, but like I've always believed that, you know, one of the best ways to build products is to be a customer yourself and to find your own pain points and to, you know, build a product that you want to use. And so that's like actually not that hard to do if you're a user of Twitter and you like, can think critically, we was ripe with opportunity. And so it was actually really fun and amazing to be able to craft a plan that started to take a swing at some of these things. And the other thing I'll add to this is that there were so many sacred cows at Twitter that the sacred cows are their own roadmap. It's like a built-in free roadmap of, like, all right, what are all the things that you think we're not allowed to change? Let's start there. Everything from moving from reverse chron to a ranked feed, that was a sacred cow. Text and 140 characters, that's a sacred cow. Not letting anyone control any tweets that they see on the platform. The notion of Lenny owning his reply space was anathema at Twitter. It's just like if a tweet gets, if you get an app mention and you don't like it or it's abusive or it's, we're not touching that. We can't annotate tweets with community notes. All that stuff, those are all sacred cows. And the process of starting to address those one by one reveals a lot of the cultural hesitations that existed. So, yeah, I'll never forget one of the first features, and this is such a tiny feature that we worked on after I started in the role. We're building this feature called Hide Replies. It still exists in the product today. If someone replies to one of your tweets, like in the tweet details area, like as a reply to one of your conversations, Before, you had no ability, the only way you could kind of like address unwanted content was reporting it. So that was like Twitter acting as policeman and policewoman, completely unscalable and challenging, especially in the context of like someone replying to one of your tweets. And so we wanted to add a feature that let you hide a reply to one of your tweets. And it's not impacting what people say, it's not impacting free speech in the sense of like, you can still broadcast whatever you want, but if you're gonna like come into my reply space, and say some shit that I don't want to see in my feed, I should be able to hide that. Tweet what you want, but don't @mention. You can't scream in my face, basically. And I remember we had a PM on our team who was leading this feature, who a few weeks into this project mentioned to me that she had had a conversation with someone on the engineering team that told them, Don't work on this feature. This is bad for your career. This is not going to launch. And you don't want to work on this. You don't want to be seen as having worked on this because it was so kind of anathema to we can't let people hide replies to their tweets. And I just remember hearing that and my blood was boiling. That is the most, it was such an interesting representation of the culture, not just hesitation to try new things, which by the way, that product might have failed and that's fine, but which doesn't mean you shouldn't try. But to go so far as to dissuade someone else who is excited about experimenting with a hypothesis to see if it could help customers on the platform and telling them, Don't work on this, it's bad for your careers. As a microcosm for some of the cultural challenge we had around trying big, bold bets, which by the way, this wasn't even a big, bold bet. It was such an innocuous thing to try. But there was a lot of that, and it made it very difficult without some sheer force of will and also just a lot of effort. So there was a lot of that.

Kayvon, there's fractals of stories that I can infinitely follow. There's so much interesting stuff here. One that just stands out is this idea of the sacred cows become your future roadmap. It's flipping it from here's the thing that we're all afraid of. No, this is not what we should be doing. I think that's really interesting and could be a lesson to people. The other is just, I love this point you made about the growth was most accelerant when you were just focusing on the core. That's what actually, like people bash on optimizing the existing experience and just micro-optimizing and improving versus trying to take all these big bold bets and experiments. Obviously that's also valuable, but I think it's really interesting that that's what reignited growth and was responsible for growth for a while.

Yeah, and continue to be, by the way. One of the lines that we had to maneuver was creating a portfolio of bets where some of them were not speculative at all. We knew that if we continue to invest in ML and getting better with recommendations in the main feed and through notifications and, you know, Things like improving the onboarding flow, like it was rife with opportunity. You'd have really dumb things happen. Like we would learn, there was one whole just bizarre and incredible meeting we had where we finally had gotten more rigorous around instrumenting our onboarding flow and we found that in a couple of countries, like we had a bug with our SMS verification flow where we wanted to verify users who were signing up with phone number. and our telco integration to send SMS verification codes just wasn't working. And so like a huge percentage of people signing up in like the UAE and other countries just like couldn't use Twitter. And so like, of course at the scale that we were operating in with hundreds of millions of users, you need to be able to refine the basic building blocks of the product and that's gonna lead to reliable growth. But we wanted to balance that with a portfolio of other bets and product improvements that would materially add new capabilities. And that was a balance that I don't think existed. And by the way, I don't think we nailed it either under my tenure, but it was the driving force of what I wanted to achieve was to create a better balance that would result in evolving the product and introducing new capabilities. And so that's what we tried to do.

In terms of what actually helped turn things around, things that I kind of gathered from what you shared so far. One is just building a little momentum, having some quick wins of new products that people start to get excited about. So creating more excitement down the, oh, wow, we can actually try new things. There's also felt like there's like a sense of trust that you built with Jack and execs of just like, okay, we can actually trust this team. Also, it feels like because growth started up, there's probably a sense of like, okay, we can try some new crazy ideas. It feels like another part of your strategy was acquihires and bringing in these like entrepreneurial folks to take the lead on some of these big ideas. Can you talk about that? Was that something you actively thought about? And was that a big part of the impact there?

Totally, yeah. So I think a couple things. One, the only thing I'd add to what you said in terms of the ingredients, it was also just like storytelling and just like repetitive storytelling around like, this is the vision. These are the bets we're making and here's why. And you can't just tell that story once. I'm talking internally by the way. There's a whole other component of this, which is externally, how do you tell especially for a product like Twitter, where you have, it's a consumer product that hundreds of millions of people are using, and you have many constituents, you have users, you have advertisers. And so it was very important for us to tell the story of like, here's what we're doing and why, here's why you should believe in us. And by the way, give us all your constructive criticism too, because we're listening and we're going to build that into, so that storytelling was really, really important. And there's, this is like oversimplifying the world, but there's two types of internal team members. There are people who hear that story, who have been a part of the organization who's been slow, or maybe they've been outside the company as a user of Twitter, and they're like, I'd never really want to work there because it doesn't seem like a particularly ambitious product company. And one of two things happens when you hear that story. Either you're inspired and you're like, yeah, we can finally take a swing at making this product better. Maybe I wasn't interested at working in this company before, but this is an iconic product and to have an opportunity to reshape it is really exciting. Or, again, oversimplified world, but there are people who are very pessimistic and maybe aren't excited by that vision of, let's just stick to what we know works. We're not going to take any big swings. That's a waste of time. I think one of the really important things about driving cultural change at the leadership level is you've got to identify whether someone's on the wagon or off the wagon and either quickly convince them to get on the wagon or if they're not on the wagon, they shouldn't be there. And that's something that we were terrible at. And we didn't have the organizational structure to be able to enact that.

The wagon is they're excited and bought into this vision and want this to happen. Correct.

And contribute towards it. And off the wagon is like, you're not at the company. And we didn't have an organizational structure that could allow for that, nor frankly the fortitude. I include myself in this. I feel like I've learned a lot about how to make that determination. So I think we were terrible at that. and Elon is like the whatever, like if that's a spectrum, Elon is like the opposite spectrum of that, like his tolerance for people who are not aligned and his tolerance for low performers is famously extremely low. And I think it's, you know, it's one of the things that when I said A/B test, it's very interesting to see the extreme to which he has operated. And I think I've learned a ton around, like we just, you know, we didn't have the organizational structure or the fortitude to be swifter and that made cultural change way slower. We still were able to change the culture not as much as we should have and not as certainly not as quickly as we should have or efficiently as we should have. Because by the way, a lot of high performers who have, who are aligned with that desire to change and build, they don't have the, there's not like a equal distribution of patience, right? If you're extremely talented and you're dealing with like organizational bullshit, you're going to go find someplace else that lets you do your craft and have impact. So it's very difficult. But anyway, going to your question, one of the things we found that was a really effective way of accelerating cultural change and also helping drive some of these product initiatives that were particularly speculative was doing small acquires. And really the benefit of that was A, you bring in a founder type who is an entrepreneur who drives urgency, who has ambition, who's ideally savvy enough to also work in the context of a large organization, which sometimes is a totally different skill set. I mean, it is a totally different skill set. And a lot of our most ambitious bets that were the riskiest and most misaligned with how the product worked or you know, it wasn't like an easy, there was no easy staff for them to build on top of. A lot of those bets were driven by founders who we basically acquired and said, here, you know, you're going to run this. And they believed in it. They were able to rally a team around them. And it's all the attributes of a startup, but with the canvas of a product that hundreds of millions of people use and more resources. So, you know, spaces, communities, community notes called Birdwatch back then. these were all projects driven by fleets as well. These were all projects that were run by small teams led by entrepreneurs who we acquired, right? Like Keith Coleman runs Community Notes, Last Birdwatch. He actually was my predecessor. We acquired his company so that he could be the head of product. And then when he moved on from that role, he was extremely passionate about this idea of Crowdsourced moderation and letting people annotate misleading content on the platform without Twitter acting as a policeman. That was a very speculative bet that, by the way, a lot of people thought, most people thought was a terrible idea. We gave Keith a little silo to go build this vision, and then it was our job to make sure that bet didn't get suffocated. in the context of a big organization that would otherwise not have patience for it. All of the community effort or the creator efforts started with super follows and tipping. All these things were led by Esther Crawford, whose company we acquired, and who had her own couple viral moments with the Elon acquisition. But she's a phenomenal leader who, again, is a perfect example of balancing that entrepreneurial startup muscle with the savviness to be able to get things done at a large organization. Fleets was run by Mo Aladham, who's an entrepreneur, and communities has gone through a few iterations, obviously, and still is in the product, but John Barnett and a team of people who we acquired from Chroma Labs. So I think that that story of acquiring hungry, ambitious founders and giving them responsibility and latitude is a success story of Twitter's history. I mean, I'm a beneficiary of such a bet as well, right? Like my company Periscope was acquired and I was given the responsibility to eventually lead the product team. So I feel like my that we ended up realizing both through the company's history and through learning is that this is actually a very effective way to drive cultural change and to to deliver impact because you need a special type of person to be able to both operate within the existing structure and change the structure, like to know when to use the system and to know when to fuck the system. And that I feel like my whole life has benefited from other people taking bets on me like that, to the point that I even I was like, really? You sure you want to, you know? And so I think I've enjoyed trying to pass the buck and do that for other people, and I've never regretted it. It's always like taking a bet on people and especially throwing them in a deep end, which on paper they may be unqualified for, I think is like one of the best ways of driving change. And by the way, supporting growth, like you've learned so much more when you're thrown in the deep end than in other contexts. And so I think it's a fantastic It's an expensive strategy if you're going to go buy a bunch of companies, but it's a great strategy for the.

Situation that we found ourselves in on Twitter. It feels like every big bet was like one of these companies from the list that you just shared. And I'm glad you shared Periscope. Obviously that's a great example too. I guess maybe just a follow up question here, is there anything you learned about how to do this well? I know you talked about maybe creating a little silo for the team because so many companies acquire and acquihire and they just go nowhere. So I guess just like a two part question, just like, what are some tips for how to do this well at a company? And then two, you also, we were talking offline about this previously, and I think it's a really interesting point that a lot of companies staff based on who's available versus who is right for the role. And let's wait until that person is there for us to bet on this. You just talked about lessons there.

Yeah, that the last one is like a huge pet peeve of mine that I feel like we learned the hard way. And it's particularly It's a common pattern, I think, in highly functional organizations where you have different people making decisions on how to staff projects. And there's nothing inherently wrong with that, but I think in the situation we found ourselves in where we had this sort of cultural evolution that we were going through, where some people just didn't agree with the things that we were prioritizing, they're sort of begrudgingly going along with it, but you would end up in a situation where the combination of that sort of like cultural shift in strategy and the fact that the way teams were being staffed was not, there's no ultimately no single decision maker other than the CEO and like Jack is not going to get in the weeds and debate a staffing decision on a team resulted in a situation where oftentimes we'd have projects like the one I mentioned about hiding replies, where there wasn't even agreement on the team about whether this was a good idea and whether this is worth trying or how to do it. And imagine it's hard enough to build something from nothing. It's even harder if the team doesn't believe in it. This is to the point of just being toxic. A startup would never succeed if all the people who are working on that startup aren't to the point of being perhaps irrational, obsessed with that idea, and still willing to see truth. You need to be able to see whether the thing is working or not. But if you don't believe it in the first place, you know, I'm not betting on that succeeding. And so this was common. This is and sometimes not as extreme as the examples that I mentioned. But, you know, I think one of the lessons I learned and it's not even it's it's quite intuitive actually is like you need to staff projects with a team of people that are well equipped from a skill set standpoint, but more importantly, have have an obsession with the idea of they want to pursue. It's going to make them work harder. It's going to make them be more creative. It's going to make them have the sufficient level of ambition and desire to will this thing into existence. Because every project, you know, whether big or small, like there is an element of you need to like will this thing into existence because it's hard, right? Like the only way you're going to get through that pain is by having that desire. And I think a very easy cheat code for an organization to employ is to say, if you're going to work on something, especially if it's speculative or risky, staff it with a set of people who believe in it and want to really want to learn whether this solves a customer problem or not. Because if you don't have that ingredient, it's going to drag everyone down and it's just not going to be as successful.

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It's intuitive, it anticipates your needs, and it makes it easy for you to do your job. If you're trying to build that kind of experience for your users, you need up-to-date, reliable information about what your users do in your product and why they do it. Want to know how your users behave across platforms? What keeps them coming back? What they're doing that you're not even aware of? Well, I have some great news for you. Heap captures all of this user activity for you automatically and then gives you definitive answers to all your questions about user behavior in seconds, not weeks. With Heap, it's easy to prioritize the product investments that improve conversion, engagement, and retention. Visit heap.io/lenny to get started with a demo. That's h-e-a-p.io/lenny. This kind of touches on something I wanted to touch on, which is jobs to be done. This is like one of the most recurring controversies of the podcast is like, is jobs to be done amazing or is it really bad and not something you should do? We've had many guests share their opinions. I feel like at Twitter, jobs to be done was implemented so strictly that it burned a lot of people out on it. It's like, oh my God, this is not anything anyone should ever do. I'm curious just your lessons and experience of just with frameworks in general, the jobs to be done specifically, maybe even OKRs.

I've only seen one interview on your show that covers this. And it's, you know, Sri Ram was particularly spicy when he talked about jobs to be done, which is unsurprising because I spent a lot of time talking Sri Ram about jobs to be done. I mean, I guess I'll just start by saying, like, I was not a fan of how we leveraged jobs to be done at Twitter. I thought it was, exhausting and not particularly helpful. And so it's a particularly sore subject for me because I was sort of charged with defending it and rolling it out. It's hard to do that when you don't really believe in something. But to me, the critique is less about jobs to be done, though there are many critiques of it. And more about every framework at its limit is followed to such a religious extent is just unhelpful. You need to have nuance in how you leverage these frameworks, otherwise people you lose the forest through the trees and you end up following a process for the sake of following a process. And that's what happened with jobs to be done. So I think that's my real critique of it. It's not the, I mean, listen, the premise of jobs to be done and my most charitable take on jobs to be done, which is actually useful, is that it forces you to look at things through the lens of customers and understanding what their needs are and understanding what their true alternatives are outside of the narrow lens of your product. And I think that's just like healthy product thinking, right? Like you don't need a framework called jobs to be done. You don't need to think about milkshakes in order to be able to do that. It's like you could employ common sense or you could leverage something like jobs to be done to be able to like force your mind to think of things through that lens. So I think that's like my charitable view on what jobs to be done can help you do. But as a framework into and of itself, as a sole governing principle of what to build, It's just not useful. By the way, in the same way as, and I think Twitter had this problem as well prior to our detour around jobs to be done. If the only way the organization is trained to think about what to build and what not to build is OKRs, it's equally unhelpful at the limit. Because sure, you can have a good sense of what you should build to drive metrics, but by the way, you might be focusing on the wrong metrics or that might not help you have the right balance of of things to build. That might not help you see when the things that you're building are actually hostile to customers. So, you know, just as an interesting example, the thing that I remember about your interview with Sri Ram, if I'm not mistaken, he, I think he mentioned, and I love Sri Ram, I'd be happy to debate him about this on his podcast, but he mentioned one of the examples, I think was the Amazon, Amazon doesn't send you, when you get order confirmations from Amazon, They intentionally bury the order details. You have to click the link and authenticate to go see what you ordered. I don't give two shits what metrics that drive for Amazon. That is one of the most customer hostile things I experience in my daily life. I order a lot of things from Amazon. I hate the fact that I can't search my email to see what I ordered. And so I think the problem with these frameworks is that you lose nuance and ultimately, and this is where I agree with Sri, and you actually mentioned this on your podcast as well, you need to be able to make trade-off decisions that balance what's right for the organization and what's right for the customer. And sometimes, based on how you devise your frameworks, your metrics aren't actually aligned with the customer's benefit, like the Amazon example. And we had many famous examples in Twitter's history, which were the same. One of our key metrics that we always optimized around growing was DAU. And we had, obviously the rank timeline did wonders for growing DAU, and it was a great experience for many customers. But we often had features that would not lead to a good customer experience. And the team would just be blind towards leaving sort of like hostile customer experiences in place because it was good for metrics and aggregate. And the famous example of this is we had this toggle, which we called Swish very affectionately, but it was like a Sparkle icon. Before you could switch between the rank timeline and the following, that reverse chronological timeline, which is still in the product right now, It was just a toggle, right? You would press a button and it would turn your feed reverse chron, which very few people use as a percentage of our users, but you had power users who really cared about having a reverse chronological timeline. And we had, you know, we took so many baby steps on the evolution of this product. But the very first baby step was you press the toggle, it turns you to reverse chron, and then we would pull the rug out from underneath you and make the experience go back to the ring timeline after like I don't know, 24 hours or something like that.

Oh, wow.

And the reason that the team felt strongly about keeping it this way is because it was better for metrics. Why? Like, even if Lenny wants a reverse from feed, we knew that he would spend more time in the app if we put him in the rank timeline. And, and this was like, you know, the, the number of debates that we had about this because, you know, the team, understandably, was like, this is good for metrics, but at the same time, you'd have customers being like, I I hate this experience. I'm telling you, I want reverse cron. Stop randomly changing it for me. Instagram has, I think, gone through their own struggles with this as well. They sort of tiptoed their way towards ultimately giving people control. And the difficulty in making product decisions comes down ultimately to making these trade-off decisions. And you have to look at things through the lens of the customer. You have to balance that with what's driving the right business outcomes. And sometimes those things are aligned and sometimes they're not. The answer isn't any one framework. Sometimes it's just good old-fashioned judgment and product taste. And so that's where my take is different. I don't think the issue is jobs to be done, although I'm not the biggest fan of jobs to be done. The issue is just having the right nuance and ultimately the right leadership to be able to weigh these things and see when your frameworks are not actually helping you make the right decisions.

I think that's really important advice, and I love hearing the details if I actually think about this stuff. Actually finding this balance is very hard in practice. I'm curious if there's something you could recommend or have learned about how to know when you've gone too far with a framework. Signs like you have implemented this too religiously and maybe you should be thinking a little more broadly.

There's two, I think, simple and obvious ones. One is if the result of your framework is that subjectively bad decisions are being made, Then something's got to change, right? Like assuming you have the person who's making this assessment has good product taste, which is in of itself subjective, obviously. But my personal view on this would be like in the role that I had, if I saw that our organization was being incentivized to make decisions that to some non-trivial degree of the time were just bad decisions that I don't like as a user, I can't stand by as a user or builder. then something's got to change. Either bad judgment was made in following the process or the process was wrong. Or if that framework didn't even lead to the right debates, then that's how you know, either you have an incentive problem and the team did what they were incentivized to do, or there was bad judgment and that's a different problem, obviously. But I think in the situation we found ourselves in where the team was again, understandably hyper focused on driving DAU because that was the strategy for so long. It left so little room for even taking ambitious bets that in the short term wouldn't drive DAU. Some of our bets that I still to this day believe in hurt DAU in the short term, but you had to squint and believe over time would improve some metric DAU or otherwise. A product like spaces in order for spaces to be actually used, you needed to make sure that when Lenny starts a space, that people would join. Right? And how do you get people to join Lenny's space when they're used to having an asynchronous, you know, feed of tweets? Well, you can send push notifications. You can occupy really prime real estate at the top of the app that lets people know, hey, Lenny's live right now. He's in a space. There's people here. Come join. Guess what happens when you put a bar at the top of the app that tells people when they're live? You move tweets down, you move ads down, DAU goes down, revenue goes down. And so if you have an organization that's just hyper focused on the thing that matters is driving DAU quarter over quarter, then that doesn't leave enough room for nuance to accommodate new speculative bets that might hurt one metric but over time have other consequences that are positive and beneficial, like enabling an entire new vector of content creation and conversation on a platform. I guess the other answer to your question in terms of how do you know when the framework's not serving you? When you start imagining and planning for a bunch of bets that the organization then sees is disincentivized to make successful, then something's got to change. Either your strategy is just not the right strategy because it doesn't abide by the frameworks, or the framework needs to accommodate the fact that actually we're going to try some things that in the short term either might not show up as blips on our DAU radar or are going to help some other metric that's important. And so that took us some time to get right. And we tried a variety of schemes to make that work, right? Like community notes, like the project that I was mentioning, Keith, you know, started. We intentionally structured that like a startup. Like it was literally like we made a seed bet on Keith and his team and we were like, you don't like, don't worry about the OKRs. We're not going to judge you on the basis of your OKRs. And there's some pros and cons to that. Like a lot of our projects worked that way. Fleets started that way, community notes started that way. And some other projects started more kind of like part of the core organization because they were so intertwined with how we were like the nature of the product that it just made sense to separating it was going to be, it was going to do more harm than good. So you just have to figure out based on based on how execution is going, whether you've got the right framework and you've got to be willing to make adjustments when it's not working.

That's actually really helpful. The two that I'm taking away here is how often are you feeling bad about the features you're shipping? They're bad for users and you think they're bad for you as a user potentially. And the other is it keeping you from taking big, bold bets that don't necessarily drive the metrics you're focusing on? Okay, so before I let you go, I want to spend some time on Periscope. I don't know if everybody knows the history and story of Periscope. Basically it was the biggest live video streaming platform in the world, and I imagine inspired basically every other social network to build a live streaming platform, Instagram, live Facebook, TikTok, obviously Twitter. So I want to spend a little time here and see what you learned and also just broadly consumer products. But first of all, I hear there's like a story with Kobe Bryant. and Periscope about him using it in some form. Can you share that story?

Before Periscope launched publicly, which was in March of 2015, I want to say, we had a small beta that grew to maybe 500 people in total before we actually released the app publicly. And in that time, while we were still in beta, I was personally onboarding. I was trying to personally onboard every single user. And I had sort of like a shtick that I did, which was we'd get them in the app and I would start a broadcast. We had a feature called private broadcasting that we basically built for this use case, which is someone joins, I'm going to go live and they're going to join them and show them how the app works. And we were spending a lot of time in our office. So, you know, Kobe, you know, one of them, Chris Sacca actually invited Kobe to the beta. And so, you know, Chris connected us and I did a private broadcast and Kobe joins and I was like, it was like 10 p.m. in the office. And my routine was like, let me just, walk around the office, kind of like talking through the mechanics of Periscope through the lens of this demo of like, Hey, let me show you around the office. And like, here's how the chat works. And you can tap the screen to send hearts. And if you want me to do something, like go to the room over there, just type it in the chat and it'll come up. And it sort of showed the one of the things that was unique about Periscope was, you know, it was a multi, it was a one-to-many broadcast, but still low latency enough that it felt like a FaceTime. So you could have the bidirectional communication between multiple viewers and a broadcaster. And so I was teaching him how to use the chat and showing him the office and he was playing with it. And at one point through the end of the demo, he posts a comment that was like, why the fuck would anyone want to watch someone else stream live? And I remember my heart sank and I started fumbling through, well, we think it's, you know, cool. And, like, before I could even get the words out, he posted, like, I'm just with you, bro. This is incredible. And I just remember it was just such a surreal moment that has. I'll never forget. It was. I mean, Kobe's a legend, obviously, but, like, to have that. To have him essentially troll me while also, like, putting a point on, like, what was cool about the experience and that was, like, bidirectional and something he commented on could cause the broadcaster to change their behavior or change the experience. It was a really ironic full circle of showing off how the product works. But yeah, it's one of my favorite early Periscope stories.

Oh man, if I kept doing that, a manual onboarding, I'd be like, who's coming? I was just always worried that someone else fancy is going to join. You never know, Chris Sacca is getting who's talking to. That's amazing. Okay, so it's been about 10 years, I believe, since you sold Periscope and about six years ish since you stopped running it as CO, something like that. Now, as I shared, every single platform basically is doing this. They added live video streaming. I'm curious if there's anything you learned about just competing with these major platforms.

Well, there's a few reasons why Periscope failed ultimately and why we shut down the app. I mean, obviously, Periscope, the technology and the mechanic still lives on because you can go live on Twitter, you can watch live broadcasts on Twitter, you can do audio conversations on Twitter, and all of that is the Periscope stack still there, which is awesome that the legacy lives on in a different form factor. The reason that the Periscope app failed, it really comes down to a few things. One, we did not address the core problem that retention wasn't good. Our poor retention was met by just an incredible surge in top line user growth. And for Twitter, it was interesting because every month or two, we would blow up in a new market that would just bring along an incredible surge in usage. We blew up in the US, we then blew up in France, we then blew up in Turkey, we then blew up in the Middle East. We had these incredible surges, but underneath that surge, the core product had retention issues. And it was, we ultimately just did not, we didn't spend enough time prioritizing addressing those. And in fact, we shipped product changes that made those retention issues worse. Compounding that was the fact that one of the thesis behind our acquisition, the Twitter acquisition, was that we would leverage the scale in the community and the product mechanics of Twitter to make the product grow faster and also become more durable. And I think that sort of connects to one of the reasons why I feel like One of my learnings and one of the things that we knew but just failed to execute on was that I still am very skeptical that there can be a consumer product that is just focused on live video, like a generalized synchronous live video application for short-form video, I don't think can be durable on its own. I think you have to surround that product with enough features and capabilities to allow a community and an ecosystem of users to be able to stay in touch with one another asynchronously and synchronously. This is why a lot of the other products that you mentioned that incorporate live capabilities and we're shameless about copying, you know, what was working about Periscope, they're surrounded by a scaffolding that lets people also stay in touch with each other asynchronously. Like Instagram, it's an asynchronous product that has synchronous features like live. Same with TikTok, obviously. And I think we were in this position where it was a live only product, right? Like, you know, you are, you're connecting with your audience and having a great time when you're broadcasting live, but you're not using the product to keep in touch with that community when you're not broadcasting. How often throughout the day would you, would you broadcast live from your phone? And mind you, this is different for products that are a lot, like live, there are live consumer products that focus on a specific vertical, like whatnot for selling or Twitch for gaming that have very different properties that make it more durable as a standalone live product. But Periscope was really in this sort of consumer generalized live streaming from a phone land, and I think it was just not durable to have the product be live only. And the time it took us to integrate with Twitter was way too long. And there was reasons for that that, you know, come down to just how distracted Twitter was with its own roadmap and refining the core. And they just had other fish to fry, basically. And all of that leads us to competition, because at some point, Facebook woke up and decided, this is cool, and we need to go build this. And, you know, I obviously wasn't there on the inside, but like, legend has it, Mark says, Hey, like, You 300 people, stop what you're doing, go basically make live exist in our product as a first experience.

Oh, wow. I didn't know that.

And if you have that level of organizational effort put on building something that, by the way, isn't even, you don't have to spend any time wondering what the product looks like. Just go copy these features basically and make them work. And they did a lot of other savvy things too, from a partnership standpoint. We had a lot of prominent streamers that ranged from kind of like influencer or just creative people that became known on Periscopes all the way up to celebrities like Kevin Hart and others who were like prolific Periscopers that Facebook just went and bought out. They were just like, cool, we're gonna pay you like a bunch of money to stream exclusively with us. So they kind of hit us from all sides. They had the entire company put their effort towards building live in a way that was cohesive in the core product, first with Facebook and then and then Instagram, and then also attacked it from the creator side as well. And we were too slow. And it was very painful to think about because it was, like many other insights that Twitter had early, Twitter had the right insight, but botched the follow through. I'm not pointing fingers. I blame myself for that just as much. But there's a pattern where Twitter is really great at spotting meaningful consumer behavior changes. They spotted Vine and acquired Vine, botched it. Spotted Periscope, botched it. Spotted Instagram, by the way, before Facebook tried to buy Instagram. Twitter was trying to buy Instagram. And there are other reasons why that didn't fall through. But it's interesting to me. It's one of the interesting aspects of Twitter's history. phenomenal at spotting meaningful changes in consumer behavior, consumer social behavior, and actually putting their money where their mouth is in terms of trying to follow through on bringing those bets in-house, but then botching the execution. And so that was one of the things that was really motivating for me when I was in my role leading product of Twitter was like, I didn't want to make that mistake. And you know, we didn't end up buying anything as we didn't end up buying anything like Vine or Periscope and keeping the product in house. We obviously bought lots of small aqua hiers. But, you know, we did, we did obviously have a bit of a story with Clubhouse that ended up with us building, you know, building spaces and competing with them. But anyway, that was long, rambly story. Hopefully that answered your question.

Yeah, there's, there's so many. Again, it's all these fractals. four threads I want to follow and ask you about. Real quick on the Vine and Periscope point, I was going to ask this. Twitter, as you said, had the opportunity to win in video in so many ways. Vine was amazing, killing everyone loved it, and then it's like, oh, and then it fades away. I guess you already shared a lot of challenges Twitter had with executing shipping, sacred cows, things like that. Is there anything specific with video? Was it just like, oh, this is.

Not actually a huge priority and we're just going to kind of ride it for now? And that's why it didn't work out. Is there anything more than that? No, it's even more pathetic than that, because I think Twitter did believe in video, but it made this classical mistake that we also unfortunately recreated with Periscope, which was they had the insight around short-form video that bought Vine. They then competed with Vine internally. So Vine was a separate organization within Twitter, separate office, obviously, in New York. And then Twitter, rather than like integrated holistically into the product and sort of pour gasoline on it, they built a native Twitter video feature that was like a different stack, different team. It became what you think of as Twitter video now. It's like, you know, the simple act of uploading video and all the professional video tools called Media Studio that let publishers like ESPN put content, like all of that was basically built as a separate team, separate organization, separate product. that was fundamentally competing with the Vine. You had like two visions for short form video that were manifesting. And that's like the quickest way for things to get messy. And of course, the separate startup team is going to get... You're not going to be able to make good on the vision of buying the company and integrating it in all the right ways if you compete with it internally. And we had a A similar thing happened with Periscope. We were very focused on Periscope with separate organizations, separate structures, separate app. Periscope at the time primarily was focused on UGC live video, so user-generated content being streamed from a phone. Twitter then decided to get in the premium live video business very famously with acquiring rights to Thursday Night Football, the NFL. Guess what happened? We competed internally rather than have a cohesive technical and product vision for how to embrace live video across the spectrum of UGC and premium live video. Twitter put a separate team in charge of premium with a separate product, separate technology stack. And so you had like two ways to manifest live video. product. It was like, you just see live video, which was kind of like awkwardly not even really implemented well with Twitter at the time. And then premium live video, which had totally different UX, totally different team, totally different architecture. And by the way, like the company put in a tremendous amount of energy and investment in talking about Twitter being a place to watch the NFL. And meanwhile, you had this burgeoning UGC ecosystem. So this was like, we're making the same mistake all over again. Now, luckily, with in the Periscope case, With a lot of persistence and impatience and table pounding, we eventually fixed that mistake, but we wasted a tremendous amount of time. It was just a lot of head butting in politics and eventually it took us a lot of time to technically reintegrate things together. And now it's clean and awesome. Like, ESVN can go live with behind the scenes content at Wimbledon and it's like the same technology stack and the same user experience. The powers, Lenny going live from his iPhone. But I think that was one of the reasons why it was an example of failed execution that ended up wasting time, resources, and just leading to a subpar product experience that other companies, I think, have avoided making such mistakes. Facebook being a prime example. As frustrated I am with them as a competitor for having really taken over the use case for live video, Got to hand it to them. Brilliant execution. Have a lot of respect for them. So we made sure to not make that mistake moving forward.

I imagine there was reason for that partly. I imagine this calcification of just like, we can't get you done. We just need to start a new team and do this thing. Like, I imagine it always comes from like, oh, this makes sense. And then you realize, okay, this was a terrible idea down the road.

Yeah, it's that and also leadership. When you don't have unified leadership around these things, You end up making decisions that are in conflict with one another. They just mean a highly opinionated person at the top that avoids that kind of messiness from a product and engineering standpoint.

You mentioned Clubhouse. So I think what's interesting is, one, many people copied Periscope as a product. I don't know if you'll describe it as copying, but it feels like spaces very inspired by Clubhouse. Do you have a just current philosophy on when it makes sense to be super inspired by another product and build it into your existing product versus like, no, you should not do this?

I think it's always about doing the right thing for the customer. And there's, you know, everyone has always been shamelessly inspired by other people's ideas. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I think copying ideas can be done in poor taste. and can be done with taste. I think some of the people who copied Periscope did so in poor taste. Can't blame them. I just, you know, I wouldn't have done it the same way, but, you know, it worked. So you can't say it's the wrong thing. I just, I think that it's possible to take ideas and good taste and take ideas and poor taste. And I think, you know, with Clubhouse, we actually had been working on audio. Audio was one of those bets I mentioned that we structured very separately with a team of people, many of which were the former Periscope team, that when we wound down Periscope, I felt very strongly that there is still something to the idea of synchronous conversations. Because one of the famous things that I think we botched with Periscope is that our dream and our vision for Periscope and how we talked about it was a mechanism for teleportation. You could see through someone else's eyes and be teleported somewhere else. It was like, that was the story we told ourselves. That was the thing that inspired Periscope. And to a certain extent, a lot of people did use the product for that way. You could go see what it was like someplace in the world where there was something amazing happening or civil unrest happening or some important moment happening with breaking news or otherwise. But it turns out the vast majority of our users were not using Periscope that way. They were not, it wasn't a rear-facing camera experience where you were showing someone the world. The vast majority of people were using it to just talk to other people. They were bored or they were lonely and they wanted to just have a conversation with other people. And it turns out video and audio is a very interesting way of doing that that allows for more nuance, more long form conversation, more in depth conversation, especially in contrast to Twitter, which has mechanics that really incentivize quick, snappy sort of broadcasts that don't sort of lead to much depth. And so when we shut down Periscope, we were like, man, we really need to enable a new form of conversation on Twitter that has some of those properties. And so we had a team that was working on a project that we sort of code named Hydra. Hydra because there are multiple heads on this monster, and those heads are participants in a conversation. And so well before Clubhouse was on the map, we had many different iterations of both video and audio only experiences that just didn't feel right, weren't working right, but we were kind of felt like we were onto something. And when Clubhouse kind of came on the map, it really re-centered it put into focus a user experience that felt a lot more right. And I'll give them complete credit for that. They, you know, Paul and Rohan and that team did an exceptional job crafting an experience that really enabled that mechanic and that premise of enabling these longer form conversations to shine. And so we did, you know, shamelessly seek inspiration from what they had done and what had worked, and we put our own spin on it, right? Like the execution of spaces within Twitter, you know, I think has some similarities, but also really took advantage of the mechanics that you had available to you in Twitter. It's a different product. And so we were, you know, we took the ideas that we felt were shortcuts to making the experience work, and then we put our own spin on it. Um, and so I have no problems with, with what we did there. And having had, having had experienced the, the pain of not moving quickly enough with Vine from the outside and Periscope having lived that experience, you know, we were not willing to not be the winner in this, with this, with this use case. And so we put It is one of the projects I'm most proud of that we worked on at Twitter because we were very radical in our execution. Hydro went from this tiny project that six people were working on that no one knew or care about to we made space as the number one priority of the company, literally above any other project, period. And we put a bunch of people on accelerating that product. and making it come to life within Twitter. And a lot of that was having felt the pain and burn of fucking this up with Vine and Periscope. And so I'm really proud of our execution. And it was also really energizing. I hope for the company to see that. Wow, we pulled that off. So yeah, it was good. It was nice to have that full circle experience. And also nice that Personally, I love that aspects of Periscope continue living on within Twitter.

I did not know that. That is extremely interesting. And speaking of full circle, when I joined Clubhouse the first time, Paul was there introducing me to Clubhouse in exactly the way you described Periscope. I feel like he drew some inspiration from you one step back.

Paul's amazing. I feel like we're kindred spirits and I could see the It was one of the things I love about that team is just you could just feel how palpable their excitement was and their passion was for what they were building. You know, in another universe, we could have worked together more closely, but I think what they built was incredible and we took inspiration from it for sure. And yeah.

So you've built some of the most successful, most beloved most used consumer products, you continue to help other founders with their product. I'm curious just if you have any advice for how to get better at building consumer products in terms of maybe craft a product, product sense. What have you learned about what it takes to build a successful consumer product?

The best cheat codes for getting better at building products is just being a voracious user of products. and just trying new things, feeling out what works well, what doesn't, what you like, what you don't like. There's just no replacement for that. It's such a effective way of honing your own taste and seeing what's superficial but not useful, what's ugly but useful, what's beautiful and useful. And you hone that by having practice and building muscle memory. And so I think that there's not a lot of science to it, I think. Obviously, science can help you become more effective at lots of things, but I feel like I've just always been very curious about trying new things. I'm a very hungry consumer of new things that people are building. And I'm not quick to judge. I'll try it even if it seems dumb, because sometimes things that seem dumb at the beginning become very meaningful. And so it's always been a very helpful cheat code for me, and it's also just personally interesting. I'm always like, every tool, even the silly ones, people put their heart and soul into it, and it's like an expression of themselves. And it's always interesting to see that, to see people's creations, and to learn from them and see what you like, what you don't like, and how you might create something of your own that borrows from that. So if I could give people any advice, through the lens of what's worked for me, it's that.

Speaking of trying new things, what are you up to these days?

Building something in the consumer space. I started the company with a couple co-founders late last year. We're not quite ready to talk about it yet, but hopefully you'll be hearing from us pretty soon. But it's really nice to be back Building something again, particularly like building something with a small team again after kind of seeing the opposite extreme with a really large, large company. We've just talked about lots of large company things. But yeah, hopefully you'll be hearing about it soon.

Oh, man, I think this is breaking news. So mysterious and exciting. Kayvon, is there anything else you wanted to share or leave listeners with before we get to our very exciting lightning round?

No, no, I think we've covered quite a bit.

We have indeed. With that, we've reached our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready?

I'm going to take a sip of water and then I'll be ready.

Okay, here we go. First question, what are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people?

I love reading sci-fi. I just feel like sci-fi and mystery books are so healthy for jogging the imagination. And so some of my favorite books are by Neal Stephenson. I love Cryptonomicon, I love Reamde. I love a book called Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss, which is more like a fantasy fantasy book, but I just love kind of escaping reality and thinking about sci-fi, thinking about fantasy is just, it's helpful for the soul and helpful for the imagination. So those are, those are some of my favorite reads because it helps me. I feel like in some weird circular or wandering way, it helps, it helps me be more creative and imaginative. And, and by the way, that's true outside of reading as well. Like, some of the, some of the content that has shaped me, I feel like, and helped motivate my, my curiosity and a lot of things I built is Sci-Fi TV, right? Like, Star Trek is incredible. Like, we used to use as a metaphor for what Periscope was, we would think about, we would think about Star Trek. Like, it'd be really cool to be able to teleport or, you know, get beamed somewhere else in the world. And, like, we're not smart enough to go build that device, but what's the closest approximation to that that we can realize through software live streaming? So I think, like, that kind of literature or, or or content has always been inspirational for me. And I think getting that through books is really healthy.

On that note, is there a favorite recent movie or TV show that's inspired you in addition to Star Trek back in the day?

I mean, most recent movie I saw in theaters was Dune, too, and it was incredible.

I just saw that. It's insane.

I also thought Oppenheimer was, I'm a huge Nolan fan. Oppenheimer was captivating. To have that level of high octane in a biopic consistently for like two and a half hours is like so hard to pull off and I thought it was exceptional. TV shows, we're watching Tokyo Vice right now, which I really like. I think one of the best TV shows I've watched recently, I mean Succession was amazing, but maybe I'll pull a less popular one, which is Devs also in the sci-fi realm. I think it was a Hulu show. But if you're interested in tech and AI and you want great acting in Nick Offerman, Devs is a pretty amazing show.

I haven't heard of that. Have you seen three body problem yet, by the way? It feels like it squarely in your wheelhouse.

I haven't seen it yet. And it's funny, like some content, people are talking about it so much that I'm like, I kind of want to not watch it now because I feel like it's really hard for shows to live up to to the hype when you're mid hype cycle. So I haven't gone around to it yet, but it's definitely on my list. I know it's the type of show that I would love, but I just haven't gone around.

Okay, great. You have a favorite anime question that you like to ask candidates you're hiring?

The thing that I find is both very illustrative and helpful is just asking people to talk about something they worked on that failed and talk about something they built that that succeeded as well. But I think you just learn a lot about someone's self-reflection and their passions. But in particular, their self-reflection, if they talk through something that they really care deeply about that didn't work, and why didn't it work? What were the takeaways? What did you learn from it? I think it teaches you about how willing people are to take risks. It tells you have they experienced failure, what they learned from failure, So I think it's always, you just get to know someone really well. It's like a well-rounded, it ends up in a well-rounded understanding of a person if you can dig into that.

Is there a favorite product you recently discovered that you really like?

I love Perplexity. It's really interesting to me how Perplexity is a product that fits in your life and replaces a product that is so ingrained in people's behavior, which is using Google search for some set of use cases. And it's just really incredible to me how quickly Perplexity took that over. It's very hard actually to rewire your muscle memory if you're used to using Google for searching for 15, 20 years or whatever. It was just amazing to me how quickly my go-to became Perplexity. And frankly, it's one of the only non-development tool AI products that actually has retained A lot of people trying consumer AI products that just aren't really, haven't retained, but Perplexity is one that is a daily driver for me. It's on my home screen and I love it. I'm very impressed by it.

Also a huge fan.

Yeah. Here's a biased one. My wife is actually working on a startup called Particle, and they're reimagining the news experience with AI. what I love about what they're doing is that for the first time, they're sort of like, they've rethought what the form factor and the unit of content for news stories should be. You know, like articles are a failed format is my belief and certainly their belief. And so they've really come up with an elegant and an engaging experience for understanding what's happening in the world in a way that's like purely powered by AI. And it's awesome. Again, biasedhusband, but It's amazing. It's in beta right now. You can sign up on the waitlist. The URL is particlenews.ai. They're letting people in on beta if you sign up. Use coupon code KevonLenny. That's not a real code. But yeah, so that's amazing. So that'll be my second pick. I'll give you a non-software one, which is actually a board game. that I ran into, that I was gifted actually for my birthday. And it's called Crokinole. Have you heard of this game called Crokinole?

I have not.

So Crokinole is like a Canadian, I think it's a Canadian board game. And it's amazing to me because I've never seen a game be captivating to all age ranges. Like, I love it. I play with my friends. My parents over Christmas were like obsessed with this game. My daughter loves, it's like a physical game. You kind of like flick a puck, kind of like shuffleboard style, but like miniaturized with a totally different set of mechanics. And it was just like seeing this game captivate people of all age ranges was mind-blowing to me. And it's just, and it's really fun. So maybe a curveball answer for you there. But I think those are some of the products that I've been really enjoying and appreciating lately.

These are all these are awesome answers. What's the name of that game again? I'm going to Proconal. Proconal. Okay. I don't know how to spell it.

But I'm sure Google will help me figure it out.

We'll link to it in the show notes. C-R-O-K-I-N-O-L-E. Great. I'll put the K in there. That makes it really fun. And by the way, I think it's also particle.news. I'm looking at it.

It's so cool. Basically bullet points of news items and then it links to all the articles that have written about it. So it kind of just summarizes here's the things you need to know. And it's beautiful. They basically, they consume and aggregate everything that's happening in the world, by, among other things, ingesting articles and then crafting these story modules through them that are summarized by AI. And then they let you actually interrogate the news and ask questions. So leveraging, you know, LLMs and tool calls, it's able to actually help you understand what's happening in the world. And they also are building a social layer as well. So it's very cool.

I'll definitely get you in the beta. this is actually amazing timing because I was a huge fan of Artifact, the news app, and they're going away. So this is the next news app for me. So thanks for sharing that. Okay, two more questions. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to or share with people that you find useful in work or in life?

Something that definitely shaped my work ethic and how I work that you know, came from my first boss, actually, when I was like 14, I had a summer job basically replacing and doing maintenance on fire extinguishers. So I would like drive into San Francisco, my boss would, you know, pick me up in his truck, we'd go to like big commercial buildings, hospitals, high rises, and we would take all the fire extinguishers in the building, hundreds of them to the garage, empty them, fill them, Tag them, inspect them. And, you know, that was my first job. And I don't even remember if I was getting paid. I was probably getting paid a very small amount, but it was just like first work experience. And I remember there was this moment that I'd finished, like, you know, dealing with my extinguishers, and I was just kind of like sitting in his truck, kind of like twiddling my thumbs, doing nothing. And he, my boss, you know, came up to me and was like, when you've got nothing to do, sweet, like, never sit around. And that, it was so funny because it was this very tiny moment, but I've never ever forgotten that. When you got nothing to do, sweep. And it had such a profound impact on my work ethic of like, there's always something you can be doing to move the ball forward and being productive and being impactful. And I'm so grateful that Fred, my boss, you know, had that moment with me because it was like, I don't even think he understands how impactful that was. But it's not so much a life motto, but it definitely stuck with me and shaped how I work.

I love that you shared that story. I was gonna, I found that quote and story in GQ magazine, turns out, is where you talked about this. And I was gonna ask about it and I didn't, and I'm glad you shared it because I love it. Final question. We're going to go full circle. Scott Belsky, you're friends with him. What's something people would be surprised about or don't know about Scott that might be interesting?

Well, I'll tell you one funny story and then I'll first tell you something I love about Scott. Scott is a great example of someone who I think has driven immense cultural change at a massive legendary company in Adobe, obviously, but the number of transformations that Scott oversaw and led and contributed to at Adobe are incredible. And I'm sure having a fraction of this experience at Twitter, I can appreciate how difficult and challenging and rewarding that was, right? Going from packaged software to cloud, going from non-AI to AI, going from kind of like discrete tools to an integrated suite that worked really elegantly together. I think you know, Scott oversaw a lot of this stuff, and it's pretty incredible to see that transformation have been so successful at Adobe. So I love that. The thing, I guess, like a funny story about Scott that people might not know, I consider him to have been the first Periscoper. So, you know, Scott. Scott believed in Periscope before it was Periscope. You know, like the. Before we had turned it into live video, we had, like, a previous version of our beta that was static photo sharing. Same vision, same concept, but the product was called Bounty and it was like you put a pin somewhere in the world, like the Tokyo Fish Market, and someone would respond with a photo of what it looked like there.

I didn't know that.

Our vision was still to help you see through someone else's eyes, but the first manifestation was really static and had this marketplace dynamic and it took us a while to get to the point where we were like, press a button, go live and have it be live video. Cause by definition, it's like real time rather than static. Anyways, before we built any of that, when we were kind of like playing with the idea and Scott was really encouraging us to go in this direction, I remember it like probably the second time I ever met Scott, we did a FaceTime. Um, and he was at the TED conference, I want to say it was in Vancouver. And just to like illustrate how cool it would be when he, when he accepted the FaceTime, he's like, cool. And I'm going to take you on a periscope. And he like flipped this camera and started walking around the TED conference. basically pretending like he was like prototyping the product, but using FaceTime. And it was such an amazing experience because, you know, having an investor essentially like encourage you down a product direction by showing rather than telling. It was such a great encapsulation of how supportive Scott was, inspiring Scott was as one of our cheerleaders. And it's, you know, I respect him so much for everything he did to help Periscope made happen, happen. And also for betting on us, 'cause he, you know, he was one of the first people who said yes to investing. He didn't know us, he just believed in us. And that helped everything else come together. And yeah, he's amazing.

What a mensch. We've got to get him back on the podcast. The story reminds me of your Elon story where he FaceTimed you. And it also makes me think about your lesson of building consumer products. Just using it, being obsessed with it, Scott just like here's what it could look like and actually using the product.

Not just talking about it. Yeah, he's a great example of that as well. He's definitely a voracious user of all tools and products and that's why he has really great product sense. Kayvon, you're amazing.

This was so freaking fascinating. There's so many nuggets here. Can't wait for folks to hear this. Two final questions. Where can folks find you if they want to reach out and learn more and maybe follow up on anything? if there's things you want to follow up on potentially. And then how can listeners be useful to you?

People can find me on Twitter slash X slash whatever we're calling it these days. My handle is caves, K-A-Y-V-Z. And yeah, if you're a viewer of this podcast and you're working on something cool and you need some help or advice or you're looking for an angel investor, don't hesitate to reach out and would love to try what you're building. Amazing.

And also check out particle.news.

There you go.

Support the wife.

Exactly.

Amazing. All right, Kayvon, thank you so much for being here. Thanks, Lenny. Great to meet you. Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find All Pass episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com. see you in the next episode.