Nikita Bier Is Out Of Office

When it comes down to it, there's really no silver bullet to growth. We're going to not leave a single stone unturned. It's crazy how sentiment on X changes on a dime. Yeah. You know, at the beginning of that week, I think people thought I had killed the crypto industry. And by the end, I was this hero.

Wait, why were you a hero? I've noticed in recent months now I have money in my X account. There's like a. I guess. Is it sort of like a bank now? What's. Like, what's the plan for all those features?

I mean, Elon, originally, when he was first getting started, he's wanted to turn X into this kind of financial network where you can do your banking. I just want to see X survive the test of time. Because if it doesn't survive, like, I built this audience on the platform, you know?

You personally suffer the consequences.

I personally suffer consequences. I lose as a creator.

I'm Michael Magnano from Lightspeed, and this is out of office today. I'm talking with Nikita Beer, the head of product at X, a venture partner at Lightspeed, and the former co founder of GAS and tbh. I flew out to California to meet Nikita in Redondo Beach, a small city just south of L. A. Right near where he grew up. Nikita showed me around his old stomping grounds while we talked about all things X. Getting hired by Elon Musk through his DMs and his experience as one of the most prolific posters on the platform. I met up with Nikita at a coffee shop right near the beach. Yo, what's up?

Welcome to South Bay.

Thank you. What do you call it down here?

South Bay.

South Bay. I thought that's the low. San Francisco.

No, no, this is the OG South Bay. Cool. Yeah.

Coffee? Yeah. All right, let's do it. So tell me, Redondo. I've. I don't think I've ever actually been here.

This whole area is called South Bay. And it's basically, like, completely isolated from the rest of Los Angeles. And everyone who, like, lives here is kind of like a townie. They never leave. So, you know, if I walk around, I'll see people I recognize from high school and from growing up. But the reason they don't leave is because it's so beautiful. Like, there's just beautiful coast. Like, untouched coastline, low crime, great weather. It's just a. It was. It was a great place to grow up, but there's not that much to do, really.

And did you surf growing up? I imagine there's like surf culture, there's beach culture. Is that you, your family or. Not really?

I think I was the only person in my high school class that didn't surf. Like, I love living here, but it meant I spent like a huge amount of time on the Internet. I. When there's nothing to do around you, like that's your outlet to the world. Cause I got my first computer when I was like five years old. It was a Packard Bell. And I started doing some kind of breaking the rules a bit. I was pirating video games. I got into counterfeiting coupons. That's how I learned Photoshop and design. I also did phishing and hacking.

When was this?

So I really got into it when I was 12 years old. And that's when I started like really bending the rules. And I think a lot of those, that period of my life when I was like, you know, 12, 13, it taught me a lot about how the world works. And it also taught me how to think like an adversary, which is very critical when you're building consumer Internet software. Since everyone's going to be trying to like attack you on every front, like spam, they're going to try to manipulate things and hack things in a way they weren't intended. It was a good primer to actually understanding how to build consumer products.

Do you think that applies to growth as well? Obviously you're very well known for growth. I think thinking like an adversary is clearly good for stopping spam attacks or bad actors. But could you invert that and say it's actually good for growth as well? Because growth is very, very hard to achieve. You have to kind of hack growth. Right? You almost have to be an adversary to grow. Do you think it applies when you're.

Doing growth, you're trying to get distribution, you're trying to get reach. And if you know how email filters work or how spam filters work, you can know how to send bulk invites, things like that. And the other aspect that actually helped me become a great designer on funnels was I built some fishing sites when I was 12. And that's actually the ultimate challenge to convince someone to believe that you are this website. And so that's like a true conversion optimization problem. I'm not really proud of that, but it was a great learning experience for a 12 year old.

Was this during the time of AOL and these apps like AO hell and these sort of. Do you know what you're talking about?

I was deep in that.

Yeah, I remember all that stuff too.

I got into the AOL hacking. That was my first exposure. Then I got into irc. It stands for Internet Relay Chat. It's kind of like Slack, but decentralized. From there I got into Usenet. It's like bulletin boards. And I kind of went to the furthest depths of the Internet and really understood how it all works.

So when you were doing these apps on AOL and kind of hacking and building these phishing sites, were you actually coding or were you more like, you know, Script Kitty, just kind of like taking tools off the shelf?

I'm not the best engineer, but I was doing some like, light coding and learning PHP and JavaScript. Just enough to be dangerous. Yeah.

I feel like back in the day, in that era, if I remember correctly, the thing to learn was Visual Basic. Yeah, like everyone was learning Visual Basic and building these, like, AOL hacks on top of it.

Yeah, I mainly was focused on all, like, the web stuff, but yeah, I tried using Visual Basic. It wasn't for me, but yeah, yeah.

Would you say that's kind of what led you to tech and to building products and apps, which I know you did at Berkeley, which I'm sure we'll get into, but was that kind of the entryway to that?

It's how I learned design programming. And I knew deep inside that I always wanted to build products on the Internet. But I ended up getting kind of distracted when I went to Berkeley, like in high school, where everyone else was trying to get, you know, into college, become a lawyer, become a consultant. That's kind of where I thought I was going to end up. And so I. At, at Berkeley, I was studying to. To eventually go to law school. And I'm glad I didn't do that. That would have been a huge mistake, I think.

So how's it going at X? I know, you know, obviously you and I catch up often and, and we talk about it, but yeah, like, tell me how it's been.

I think it's the hardest job I've ever done in my life. It's.

It looks that way from, from the outside.

But it's also been, I think, one of the most interesting products I've ever worked on because before I joined the company, I've been a power user for the last decade. I use the product. My screen time is embarrassing. I think it's four to five hours a day on X. And to work on a product that you spend every waking moment on is just a lot of fun. It's also really challenging because, like, I think it's the most important communication product in the world, in history. It's the global town square. It's where, you know, news breaks. It's where the world's most powerful people convene. And we're a very small team. There's literally like 30 core product engineers.

Especially now after. After Elon took over. Right.

Essentially, the size of the engineering team is equivalent to a feature. When I worked at Facebook, it's essentially operating like a startup. Like after a startup that has found product market fit, but there's very little communication overhead, very few managers. But the hardest part is, like, every morning, every day, there's a new crisis. I'll just open my phone and be like, oh, my God, I got to deal with this. Like, last night I just opened my phone and like, Candace Owens wrote a hit piece on me, like some conspiracy theory.

Oh, my God. Yeah. I'm always surprised by how early, like sometimes you and I are texting. I'm on the east coast and, you know, you're texting me at like 5am your time, and I'm like, what is he doing up? And you're like, oh, I'm dealing with a crisis.

Yeah, yeah, there's always something, but that's what makes it so fun. And when I joined, I mean, I was pretty nervous. Like, this is a 20 year old app. Can I really have an impact here? And, you know, for these, like, mature, late stage social networks, they're kind of on. A lot of them are just kind of on a trajectory toward irrelevance. And so the first thing when I got there was, how can we restart growth? Because X had a lot of, like, aging millennials. And we wanted to see it, like, I wanted to see the next generation adopt it so this product would be durable into perpetuity, to last, last the test of time. And so we audited every possible funnel to get into the app, and we threw every growth hack in the world at it. And within I think the first 30 days, we jumped from number 78 in the app Store to a peak position of number two. We had double downloads. And I wanted the app to grow again, not just for the business, but also for the team. Because seeing the app suddenly become relevant and at the top of the charts was a big morale boost and really made everyone proud to work at the company.

Just get growth going again.

Yeah, yeah.

So actually, let's take a step back. You know, you and I have known each other for a while, but, you know, when you and I started talking more and talking about this idea of you coming to lightspeed in Some capacity. You were contemplating going to X. This was before you took the job. And I'm trying to remember that story. I mean, because it spanned over several months. Like, tell us that story. Tell us the story of you joining X. How did this come together? You almost did. And then you were an advisor, I think, and then you weren't. And then you got hired full time. Like, what's that like going through that process, talking to Elon and team. Why did they want you?

Yeah. I had been using X to kind of share my advice and product wisdom about how to build consumer products over.

The last decade, especially after Discord. Right. You started to really lean into growth advice on X. Yeah.

And so I built this great reputation. And so a few of the investors at XAI had reached out asking, do you want to advise us on product and growth? Okay. And so I kind of took this role of like interim product lead while the company was just getting started. It was, I think, you know, about 25 people, mostly just AI engineers. I started advising them. So one of their investors reached out saying, I have a super secret project. We need your help. And I said, you know, I have a trip to Japan, that signal, and in like three days. And they're like, can you work from Japan? And so as I was traveling, I was doing 2am calls with the team. Mainly what I had focused on was the integrations with X and how it could grow.

The integration of XAI with X. Yeah, Grok.

So like Groq analyze, like the button on every post, the upsells, things like that. I was advising them for a year. They wanted me to get more involved. I wasn't really ready at the time. I just left Discord, a growth stage company, after selling the Gas app, which is kind of the viral social network that I launched. And I was just wanting to kind of advise. And I was going to live in New York and just kind of hang out. And then the company just started growing like crazy. I would see them one meeting and then the next meeting the team would be double the size.

Whoa.

And the product team, or all of xai, the engineering team.

Okay.

I mean, it was. The company is primarily just engineers.

Yeah.

The data center went up extraordinarily fast. I think it was like two months to build Colossus. I was seeing like the true momentum of an Elon company. Yeah. And then they announced the merger of the two companies between X and xai. And some of the leaders reached out and said, we could use your help on X. I was pretty excited about it.

Yeah. Because you're a forever user.

I love the platform. So then Elon suddenly DM'd me and said, maybe we can work together.

This is on X. He DMs you on X. Yeah. Had you ever talked to him before?

We had met twice during, when I was advising X.

A guy, and I'm assuming he followed you on X and he, you know, he knew who you were. He knew. Yeah. He knew your content?

Yeah. He said, come out to Palo Alto. I was living in New York at the time, and I literally just grabbed my backpack, called an Uber, and bought a plane ticket on the way to the airport. So then I arrived in Palo Alto at midnight. Okay. Elon's finally free at 2. And we talk about what I can do at X. Then Elon said, why don't you just get. Why don't you just get started now.

At 2 in the morning or 1 in the morning?

Just. Right. Yeah. And I already had a lot of ideas of what we could be working on, but I think this was effectively the interview. Right. So I message a designer that I've worked with for 10 years, Nicholas Duptodon. He lived in San Francisco. And I said, I need you to drive down to Palo Alto tomorrow.

I thought you were going to say right now at 2am I said, it's.

A really exciting project. We're going to work through the weekend on redesigning the onboarding flow for the Xapp. And so we work basically for like, 48 hours straight, build a beautiful prototype of the onboarding flow. Elon flies in after he stepped down from Doge. He walks in, we finish right then, and he said, what have you been working on? And I said, we redid the onboarding flow for the app. Hand it to him. He says, this is great. Let's move forward. Wow.

That was your test?

Yeah. So I've been building consumer products. I've been building social products for my entire life. So things like an onboarding flow, I basically learn every possible permutation of what an onboarding flow can do. And as I was demoing it to people and demoing it to Elon, I was like, that's going to convert at 45%. That's going to convert at 65. We do that because of that. And I've just seen so many dashboards on these funnels that I knew exactly what needed to be done. I think that's what enabled me to take this role and also have this sudden impact on growth.

When Elon hires you or when X hires you, like, how much do you Think it matters that you are a huge presence on the platform. The fact that you have hundreds of thousands of followers and you're a prolific poster, like, does that factor into his decision? Is that the reason he's, he wants to work with you or is that just coincidental?

I think it's coincidental, but I think as a head of product, you need to use the product, you need to deeply understand it and you need to understand what it's like being a creator on the platform. I mean, consumer product development is probably one of the hardest things in the world because there's playbooks on funnels and growth, like growth. But on a lot of the core product stuff, you're just running experiments. Yeah, but with a, with a product that I use like every single day, I knew exactly, like I knew exactly what needed to be done without having these huge iteration loops. So a lot of the stuff that we've launched, they've immediately hit. There's very little that we ended up rolling back during the last six months. And so I think my presence on the platform, like being empower, has enabled me to know what to build. I'm kind of like the mascot in some ways because I get like tat. Like if I open my phone right now, there's probably 100 mentions of various bugs on the platform.

Show me this, I gotta see this.

Yeah. It's an amazing feedback loop. Yeah. So the moment we launch something like within seconds I'm getting tagged and I know exactly how it's being interpreted, what the feedback is and what you need to do to improve it. Yeah, yeah. I've kind of created a new approach, I think, to product development at big companies where we've been doing this kind of build in public approach where we'll share kind of early ideas of what we want to do on the platform, what sort of features we want to launch, to get feedback, understand the edge cases, you know, get buy in from the community and make sure that when we launch, we're launching with like absolute precision. That's been very effective these last few months. There's no one who's more open to giving critical feedback than X users.

Oh yeah. So your point about being the mascot, I mean, it's so true. Like you are, I mean as a user of the platform, I feel that, I'm sure many others do as well. I have to imagine that's fairly disruptive for your life. You were already a very well known person on this platform. Now you're the guy that's responsible for everything that happens on it. What does that mean? I mean, do you get constant death threats? Do you fear for your safety? Do you need security?

Yeah. So being customer support for like 500 million people is a crazy experience. But I kind of knew what I was signing up for. I knew that it would be the most visible role I could have ever taken. It was also professionally risky, like if X doesn't grow or if I build something that doesn't resonate with users, that comes back to me. What about personally risky? I've had my home address posted probably once every two weeks for the last six months. But I mean, when you're operating at scale, you're always going to get, you know, crazy people.

It's like the law of the Internet. Once. Yeah, yeah, once you have enough people on there.

Yeah. And you know, conspiracy theories catch fire and they just spread really rapidly. But I think for the most part I've managed it pretty well. I don't think there's anyone else who could probably manage it because I just, I really have a good pulse on the community and I think we've done some really amazing things that have earned the respect of users. But there's still so much more to do. I think there's areas of the company where I don't have oversight over, but I still catch the. I'm still held responsible for it and things like the algorithm that's mainly run by xai. So I've been primarily focused on the core product, making sure it grows, making sure all the features that we're building help people share post. That part's been, I think the toughest where I don't have direct oversight and then people tend to blame me for, but I still try to be have the agency to go to those parts of the company and fix things. Anytime I get feedback about the algorithm, I meet with them like once a week and I kind of compile all the feedback and say this is kind of general sentiment about how the timeline is feeling. I joined at a pretty interesting time in the company's history. The XAI team actually rebuilt the algorithm from scratch. And that's kind of like changing the engine on a jet mid flight. Yeah. They moved it to the Memphis data centers. It's running on tens of thousands of GPUs. The goal was like, could engagement stay at least flat after the migration and it did. And then it's been up higher than any time in history.

I have felt differences for sure in a surprising way. It's like if I look at one post that's maybe different than What I normally look at, literally the next time I refresh, there's content that matches that. Yeah, it's pretty interesting.

Yeah. But I think there's still a lot of work to be done. Yeah, of course. I think for users that have been using the platform for now, it's a 20 year old app. And for users who are really used to the way it works, we have to kind of be sensitive to how it's changing for them.

And it feels like even the smallest things can sort of spiral and escalate. Like a few weeks ago I saw this thing with crypto. Twitter, right. Ct. Is that what it's called? Yeah, you're sort of like. Or the algorithm is penalizing, you know, pointless posts like GM or whatever. And then all of a sudden even Beeple is making an image of you as a pig and everyone on X is coming after you. Like, it feels like a no win situation. You just can't avoid it. Anything you do could trigger the ire of millions of people.

Some of that was really funny. I mean, I think the Nikita bore meme is probably the.

Oh, is that the. Is that why it's a pig? Why the image is a pig? Nikita Bor. Oh, wow.

Yeah, So I get tagged in a new Nikita boar every day. It's pretty funny. There's like a whole community around it.

So that doesn't bother you?

No, I think it's pretty funny. But it's crazy how sentiment on X changes on a dime. At the beginning of that week, I think people thought I had killed the crypto industry. And by the end I was this hero.

Wait, why were you a hero?

One of the cultural attributes in crypto is kind of just saying gm. And the reply is good morning. And it's kind of these like, I was framing it as like low quality engagement. And when people don't engage with it, the algorithm doesn't have any signal to know whether to how to rank your content. And so I said, you know, and then when you actually have something important to post, it ends up getting buried.

Because you've been flagged as contributing to low quality content.

Well, not necessarily like flagged, just like. It's just the people who stumbled across that reply did not find it engaging.

Right. So they likely won't find the next post engaging. Yeah.

I've since learned never ever say anything critical about gm. That's like such a cornerstone of crypto culture that you should like, over that week we had a ton of things planned because, I mean, I'm an advisor to Solana like one of the biggest blockchains and like, I'm pretty deeply entrenched in like how the crypto industry works. And over the course of that week, we actually had a ton planned for the that would benefit the community. We announced something called Smart Cash tags to get real time financial data, real time charts into timeline. And then the other thing that we announced that ended up being a huge hit was we actually blocked a form of spam that was exploded, exploding on the platform called infofi. Oh yeah, these blockchains are compensating people for talking about the token. And it led to a ton of bots and LLM spam in the replies and we terminated those API keys and then suddenly we saw a huge decline in spam across the platform.

So your point is it had nothing to do with you talking about gm that made you the hero by the end of the week. It's just you happen to be launching so many other things that just shifted the sentiment. Like the news cycle just moves so fast.

Yeah. They eventually came around and realized like, we're actually in good faith trying to make the platform better.

Yeah, totally.

I think that that's like one of the hardest parts. Some people I question, do you have, you know, hidden intentions? But I just want to see X survive the test of time and because if it doesn't survive, like I built this audience on the platform, you personally suffer the consequences. I personally suffer consequences I lose. As a creator. It's such a mission oriented job for me because, like I've seen like the ma, like the magic of X. I mean, I signed up a long time ago, like 2012, but I didn't really get it until 2016, 2017. That's when I really started getting into posting on X and growing my audience. I went from like 5,000 followers. Now it's like close to 800,000. But I really started understanding X when I went two layers deep on the taxonomy of my interests. Let me explain what that kind of means. So like I saw tech Twitter and I was like, cool. I guess this is just like kind of like TechCrunch but with comments. And then I went one layer deeper to like consumer Internet. And then I went to like social app builders. And when I found that cluster of people, I realized every niche is represented on X. And if you could find that, that's the magic of the platform. One of the things that I've said internally when trying to map out the vision and direction of the company is, and it sounds kind of silly, but I say if you're a plumber and you sign up for X, you should find like minded plumbers. You should be able to find that community of plumbers and that actually exists on X. Yeah. It's not very trivial to get people ramped up to those communities and those niches because X is an affinity based network. So you can't just like sync your contacts and suddenly have a relevant feed. You have to ask people in onboarding, use the timeline recommendations. It's a really challenging problem, but when it works, it works extraordinarily well.

I'm guessing it's why you did starter packs.

Yeah, starter packs. That originated from a conversation that I had with Josh Elman. He's a big mentor of mine for the last 10 years.

Good friend. Yeah, he's great.

And we got breakfast before I took the job and it was one of the dream features he wanted to build.

StarterFX.

Yeah.

Oh, wow, that's cool.

This only would have been possible because XAI merged with X. Because suddenly we could actually analyze accounts at scale and find out who are the thought leaders in each niche, who are the best posters. Of course we had to clean it up and curate a bit, but for the most part Grok had given us a good starting point to create these packs. Since launching it, the numbers have been crazy. We've doubled time spent in the app for new users and that's like, it's really hard to just boost time spent by a few percentage points. But we've had 100% increase and especially in like places where X historically has not not had a huge presence in non English speaking countries like Western Europe, Italy, France, because we've created like we have, we have starter packs for like Peruvian politics.

Oh, it goes that deep?

Yeah.

Oh, I didn't know that because you showed me some of it. Now it's kind of the categories I would imagine like tech and sports, but I didn't realize it goes that deep. But how do you get people there? How do you get a user to Peruvian politics in onboarding?

I think that's the magic of the onboarding process where you sign up from this country and you select your interests. Yeah, but that's been a really awesome feature to roll out and just see the numbers. But when we rolled it out, the feedback from users was like with any feature on X, 50% hate it, 50% love it. But the data spoke for itself. As I built this audience on X, a lot of people, let's call them normies, that don't use the platform, I would tell them why X is so great and they wouldn't understand. I was like, how can I ramp these people up? And I'm so glad that now there's a way to just get them ramped up. The people that I know in real life.

That's awesome. So I feel like that was a really key feature. I feel like there have been others that I, at least as an outsider, have found very interesting. Obviously a thing that X has always had to deal with is identity and verifying the identity of a person, Getting rid of bad actors who are sort of manipulating the feed by pretending to be someone and posting content. And you launched a feature that I think addresses this in some way, but kind of in a way that I wouldn't expect. I thought it was really clever, the thing that you did with the country of origin. Talk about that and how that came together and what the purpose of it was and why you chose that as the way to sort of combat, you know, problems with identity.

So X is the only at scale social network that has true free speech. That's like a core value of the platform, kind of one of our guiding principles and why it's so valuable to the world. It's why it's the global town square. And no other product has kind of filled that role since X. And the content that people read, they have to verify the authenticity of what they're reading. Because certainly you can try to manipulate discourse by making it seem like something is more supported or more people are against something than by posting comments. And we had to work within the constraints of like, okay, we're a free speech network. How can we enable users to verify the authenticity and make sure that what they read is truly representative of what people think?

Meaning how do you balance the sort of mission, the edict of free speech with the idea that with free speech inevitably comes misinformation and deception. And obviously you don't want to be a platform for deception and misinformation.

Yeah. So if people are forming their opinions based off what they read on X, they need to know that the content they read is authentic. And this feature came about like users actually had suggested it. And I kind of had it in the back of my mind as something that could potentially resolve this country of origin.

What do you mean specifically? Yeah, why does that solve it?

So when you read maybe a political post, you'll know, like, is it actually an American that's saying that? Is it actually a person in France saying that? Someone who has no stake in this problem and why are they speaking on behalf of it?

So it's specifically meant to combat political.

Misinformation, truly, like, any form, you should just be able to verify anything that you read.

Right.

And when we were like, building it out, this was a pretty controversial feature.

Yeah.

Historically, X had been, you know, you could be on a pseudonym, you could be posting from. You could claim you're from one place and be in another. Totally. And what we did was in the way that I said, like, we're building in public, we decided to preview the feature first to get feedback on it. So we announced it and we learned a lot. Like, in countries that have limitations on penalties for things, you might say, we have to have enough privacy safeguards so you can still speak your mind, but the counterparty to that still knows generally where something's coming from. And so we added this region toggle that allowed us to launch the precise feature that. That solved this problem. And it was a huge undertaking to actually verify that someone is actually from this place. Because people use VPNs. And I think some of my kind of hacker roots. Thinking like an adversary. Thinking like an adversary really helped here. And then the other side was like a privacy dimension too. Like, if you're traveling, should it be in real time updating your location? So we had to think through all those scenarios. And so when we launched it, it ended up unmasking all of these. Like, they were basically like grifters that were pretending to be Americans or pretending to be in Japan. And like, I think the Ivanka Trump fan club account with millions of followers was based in Nigeria. When you're working there, you stumble across this stuff regularly, internally, you see, like, oh, this account is not who they say they are. I mean, it was really unsettling when you see that. Yeah. And I'm like, well, we can't. We can't like, suspend them.

Right.

Because you're a free speech platform. This is a free speech network. But we can add transparency that shows you, you know, is this person who they say.

Right. So instead of, instead of silencing or banning or whatever, it's like, actually, let's just add more context, more information. It's like the whole sunlight is the best disinfectant thing.

Yeah.

What are the other ways that you can provide more? So country of origin is actually really, really interesting because, yeah, like you said, it helps. It sounds like it helps specifically with political content. But what are the other ways that you could provide transparency to help users better judge the authenticity of content?

So, I mean, we have community notes.

Yeah, that's great.

And Then Grok.

Grok, yeah, Grok's a good one.

Yeah.

You mean just how everyone is now asking Grok to verify something? I'm seeing that on, I feel like I see that on like 50% of posts now.

Yeah. So all these products are like perfect complements to what X is. And X is a perfect complement to Grok because, I mean, the mission of, of XAI has been to build the maximally truth seeking AI. And you can only have that when you have a true free speech network.

Yeah.

Because ultimately truth is debated, discussed and determined on X every day.

Yeah. What about how do you verify human generated content? Is that something you've thought about? Like whether it's using AI to confirm that something was written by a human or. You know, I've heard rumors of OpenAI wanting to build a network that only allows people who have scanned.

I think this is one of the great challenges of the next few years. With LLMs basically at our fingertips, it's been extraordinarily easy for people to spam and it's hard to define what actually where is the line?

Where's the line? Is AI a tool or is it replacing humans?

Yeah, some people, when they draft a post, they run it through AI to clean up the language, like make it sound smoother. And so I don't think the jury's out really on how this problem should be solved. The one glimmer of hope here is that I don't think we'd have a path out at X unless we were the same company building a frontier AI model and the smartest AI model.

You need to align those interests, you need to align the missions to solve this stuff.

Yeah. If the companies had it merged, I don't think we'd have a solution to this. We're making progress, but this is a really challenging problem. Each day content that's written by AI is harder and harder to tell that it was written by AI. Yeah.

The other feature or area of X that I feel is probably the most discussed since even before you joined or actually even before it became X, is links, posting links. Does posting links get penalized? Does it not get penalized? Should you post without a link and then reply with a link like this has been a huge topic for a long time. And then obviously very recently or I guess within the past couple of months, you launched a feature that I think is meant to address this. Give us the real story of links on X. Yeah.

General principle has been that social networks discourage links because it pushes you off platform and you spend less Time in the app.

We want to keep you on platform.

That's why Instagram does not allow links in the captions, why there's no links on TikTok, and why Facebook has demoted them.

Facebook demotes them.

Yeah, like in the algorithms. Yeah.

Okay, but what about X?

So when you view a link on X, you open the page, the web view opens up, you read this article, and then it actually blocks all the engagement buttons while you're reading it. There's no like button. It takes over the whole screen. There's no comment. You read it, you close it, you go back to Timeline, and then X can't get any signals about whether or not that content was any good.

And not only that, I mean, I imagine oftentimes people then also choose to open in Safari, which takes them out of the app completely.

When I was seeing that happen, and I knew a lot of writers are on X, a lot of journalists, and they were complaining about this, and it was an issue that I genuinely felt we had to solve. So I kind of sat down with pen and paper and I was like, how can we allow you to engage while you're reading a webpage on X? And so I designed this mechanic where the engagement, the caption, the actual post, is right below the page. We prototyped it, made it feel really smooth so that while you're reading something, you can engage, you can like it. And suddenly we saw link impressions go way up. But the thing we were really mindful of was would it actually lead to less time spent in the app? And it was actually flat. And that was a huge success because now writers could post links, and you have to. I mean, if you're building an audience, you're selling something. It's part of what you post. When we finally saw that this was working so well, we scaled it out, and it's now the exact same UI has been adopted by.

I've seen this by Threads and Reddit.

Crazy. And it was kind of cool. It was cool to set the industry standard on how links should be viewed on social networks. The really awesome part, though, is I'm actually really proud of the design. It actually feels really nice with the haptics and everything. I think we hit that one out of the park. And so it's win, win for everyone, the writers, the platform, and the readers.

So basically what you're saying is the algorithm that controls the Timeline, historically it would not deprioritize links, but it would prioritize content. That led to more engagement, and links inevitably lead to less engagement because it's taking people off the platform. So those posts would get deprioritized. But now with this new feature, what you're seeing is because you keep the like button, the repost button visible and people stay in the app, you're actually getting signals while people are reading this content. Which means the algorithm can now prioritize this content or does prioritize this content.

Finally, we could get signal about whether someone actually liked this post.

Right.

And that was ultimately the core problem. They would get no engagement. It wasn't any intentional act of like demoting links. That was just a byproduct of the ui. Reflecting on it now is like all that we had to change was just some of the core product. I actually built some of it myself with Claude code, actually.

Oh, really?

You five coded it? Yeah, so I shipped some of them. That's pretty cool. Yeah, I shipped some production code to X for that.

That's awesome. Tell me, what's it been like now a year in working for Elon, what's that like? I mean, obviously we've all read the stories, the Walter Isaacson book. We know the intensity he brings, the passion he brings. But tell us what it's really like.

So I worked at Meta, I worked at Discord, and I've basically done the roadshow around all the social networks and seen how all these organizations operate. At an Elon company, it's a very flat organization. Large number of people report direct to Elon Musk and there's very few managers. Everyone has an incredible amount of agency. We come up with an idea, we build it in a week and it's out. At Facebook, things would take months to get approvals, even after engineering was done. But working with Elon, I've never seen an executive with his amount of responsibility that is that deep in the weeds, he cares a lot. He does weekly reviews basically with every engineer at the company.

Wow.

And you just go around with, you have one or two slides, you present what you got done that week. He gives feedback. The amount of context switching that he has to do between SpaceX, Tesla and Xai and X and Boring company and Neuralink. It's incredible. And he has just an incredible perspective on each of these problems. And I think the thing that I didn't really fully internalize before working directly with him is Elon always takes the high road. Like he will always do the hard things. When you're a consumer product builder, you're often looking for short term, quick lands, quick wins. And I'd present some of these options and he'd be like, no, we're going to do the hard thing. He says, we have to do this. This is the most important thing we have to do. We have to rebuild the algorithm or we have to build these data centers. And I think that's the reason so much wealth has been created with his companies and his shareholders, and why investors kind of are ready to finance his next project, because he will always do the hard thing. And that was such a profoundly different approach to what I had been used to working at other companies or a lot of stuff I've seen in tech. Like, a lot of those hard things seem absolutely impossible. But when he gives engineers agency to do it and says, let's make it two weeks, rebuild the algorithm in two weeks, amazing things happen. Yeah.

It motivates them.

Yeah. And when you have very little communication overhead, small teams, these miracles happen. And that's how we built a data center in two months when everyone said it would take two years. Yeah.

Any crazy stories to share?

Yeah, I think, like, when we're in a conference room, like, presenting slides, I. You kind of, like, lose context on the amount of impact this single person has had on the world. We had this little incentive for if you. If you referred a bunch of people, got them hired at the company. You go to Starbase and see a rocket launch.

Oh, that's sweet.

When I arrived at Starbase, I was like, and that is a crazy place. Elon has essentially built, like, a city in Texas for the pure purpose of going to Mars. When you're just surrounded by rockets and you see this whole infrastructure, like the city that's developed around, there's, like, restaurants.

Oh, wow.

And then as far as the eye can see, you can see factories. And the same thing happened when we were going out to fundraise for xai's last round. We flew out to the Gigafactory in Austin, and you just look around and you see just miles of just factories coming up. The Optimus factory, the Tesla, and then you see the cars coming out of the assembly line autonomously. Yeah. So, like, when I'm like, deep in the pixels on X, I sometimes forget. The way that Elon always does the hard things is the reason that all of this infrastructure has been built and all this huge impact to society has happened. Wild.

I'd love to see more of Redondo.

Yeah.

If you want to show me. All right, cool. Let's go. So what is next for you at X?

We're building a lot of new things on timeline for the different niches on the platform. One of the things I'm most excited about is a feature called Smart Cash Tags, which show real time financial data like charts, and allow you to effectively trade from timeline. You just type a ticker and then you'd be able to click it and then you'd see the chart and, and all the conversations around it. A lot of money is allocated based off of what people read on X. Yeah, Hedge fund managers are on there. People are trying to gauge sentiment. I think it'll benefit the financial community, also the crypto community. So that's super exciting. The key problems I'm looking to solve is the app's 20 years old at this point and everyone has created an account at one point or another. And what we're trying to do is like we have billions of accounts that only check in for news and I'd like to get them ramped up on their interests. A lot of resurrections of dormant users that we'd like to do. That'll be much easier now that we have a new onboarding flow with starter packs.

What about. You know, I've noticed in recent months now I have like a. I have money in my X account. There's like a. I guess, is it sort of like a bank now? What's the plan for all those features?

I mean, Elon, originally he's wanted to turn X into this kind of financial network where you can do your banking.

So you want to be able to do like banking, financial services. All right.

On X. Yeah. The vision has always been like the everything app, but for the last six months I've just been so focused on making sure that the areas that we have deep product market fit, like timeline works for everyone. And that's ramping them up on the accounts that they should be following. Because ultimately when you look at like a social network, the most important thing is like having good inventory of content.

Right.

And then the XAI team works on the algorithm to decide who it's most relevant for. But I think the links feature certainly created vastly more friendly environment for creators to post links as a form of content.

Do you think there's an opportunity to take some of these financial features and the fact that you're already compensating creators and I don't know, merge those together, basically incentivize creators more through liquidity and use that to get enough sort of money into the system that people start now, like actually transacting either with themselves or maybe to buy things on the platform. Is that like part of the vision?

Yeah, I mean if users can transact directly from their timeline, buy products that are recommended to them, that's like the ultimate vision here. And, you know, I've bought so many things off the recommendations of users on On X. I mean, like, what have you bought? You get companies like eight Sleep that have just built their entire brand and business off of sentiment on X. When an advertiser, like, thinks about where they want presence, I think a lot of them ignore that. X is where sentiment and public opinion is determined and everything else is downstream of that. Like, as a business, you kind of want to win the hearts and minds of users on X because everything is downstream from there.

Got it. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah, I know. Like, when Twitter became X, there was this whole notion of advertisers leaving the platform. And I think I've heard maybe you say or seen Elon post that, like, advertisers have come back. Like, is that an area of the business that's really growing again and getting revitalized?

Yeah, I think, you know, we had 90% of advertisers return to the platform. I think it's actually higher than that since the acquisition. And I think they're starting to realize, you know, the highest agency, most influential people in the world are On X, and if you want to reach them, you have to have a presence here.

So where are we going now? Where are you taking me?

So we're going to check out the Strand, which is probably one of the most beautiful places, I think, in the world. You'll see where I grew up, and you'll see beautiful Redondo Beach.

Awesome.

We're looking at where I grew up. There. That's Palos Verdes, one of the most beautiful places in la. Nice. Awesome.

Yeah, it's super beautiful around here. And we got the perfect day. So I feel like you're kind of famous for building and selling the same app twice. Maybe that's unfair, but that's kind of the legend. So I think we need to unpack that a little bit and learn about TBH and gas.

I started that, the first company, tbh, out of college.

Yeah.

That's when I kind of realized I love building consumer products. The company actually originally started as a tool called Politify. That would tell you the financial impact of different presidential policies.

This was while you were at Berkeley?

Yeah, yeah. I started it in my senior year at Berkeley. And that's when I made this kind of change where I'm like, I don't want to go to law school. I don't Want to be a consultant or anything. I love building consumer apps. And that product went super viral, and we raised some money. We were going to. This is the politics app. Yeah, yeah. We were going to make it into this economic simulator company that licensed it, that was licensing software to governments. After doing that for a year, we encountered the government shutdown. In the middle of the kind of the fundraising process, I realized it actually kind of sucks to sell software to the government. And what was actually really fun was building this viral app that really resonated with users. And so I pivoted the company to be this consumer app studio. And we probably built, like, I think 15 apps during the course of the history of that company. And we were on our last legs. And I started seeing a pattern pattern on Snapchat of teenagers sending their friends compliments. And the game was called tbh. We're like, could we productize this and actually turn it into a whole experience? And we unpacked what those people were doing, and they were just looking for this avenue to disclose their feelings in a safe space. And we launched it as TBH to send anonymous compliments to your friends using a poll mechanic where you answer polls. I ended up writing all the polls, like, who has the best.

Yeah, what are examples?

Who has the best smile? Great fashion sense. Like, love their taste in music. And then you'd pick one of the four names, and then they say, a girl in ninth grade picked you for this one.

These all sound positive. Is that the idea?

Yeah. There were a lot of anonymous apps that had come before us, and most of them actually had to shut down because of bullying. And we were like, well, how can we capture the value of why these anonymous apps were created and still make sure that people weren't bullied? And we came up with this mechanic and it immediately went viral. It went to number one in the app store in a matter of, like, two weeks. And we just launched it in one city in Georgia, and it just spread through the rest of the country like wildfire. What was kind of energizing about building that product, though, was like, we would get messages every day from kids who said, you know, I was considering, like, self harm, like suicide. But then I got all these affirmations from my friends, and I felt that, like, I was actually valued in the world, and they reconsidered their decisions, and we get those messages every single day. So it was hugely impactful for teens from that generation. And then also, within 30 days of launching, Facebook showed up and said, we love what you're doing. We'd like to acquire you. And we sold it within two months of launching.

That's wild. That's great. I mean, so many social apps, I feel like, have this viral sort of.

Flash in the pan moment and then.

They sort of fizzle out. Maybe TBH would have sustained forever, but it's probably, probably not a bad idea to sell and strike while the iron's hot in those first few months.

Yeah, I mean, things that rise very fast tend to also crash really fast. But what we kind of understood in retrospect was that many of these kind of viral apps have a short shelf life, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're not valuable to society. It's a lot of these viral apps basically are like films. You watch it, it has this cultural impact and then people move on to the next. So it's like almost a piece of content. It was good timing to sell and I was proud of the impact we had. And then I got my first job ever, which was working at Facebook, which was a huge change because we were like a four person company before this. And suddenly we joined the youth team, which was like, I think like 150 people. And it was crazy to see just one small part of the company, like, was that much larger than what our team was.

That's wild. And you mentioned you launched in one school in Georgia. Like, what does that mean? And how did you. Why Georgia? How did you launch in one school? What was the point of that?

So I think with any kind of social network, the hardest part is getting enough density so that the value can emerge. So we knew we could validate the concept if one cluster of friends were all on the app. And so we kind of developed a reproducible model to just flood the school with ads, do highly relevant marketing.

You mean on Instagram or Facebook or something? Yeah, just like point everyone at that. From that school to this app.

Yeah. And try to get everyone to download at the exact same time and try to get critical mass. And so we were doing that with all our apps that we had launched over months, just getting quick signal. And then if it didn't resonate, we'd go and launch again.

That's really smart. So then you would just pick more schools and then you would sort of replicate it, or all you really need to do is Georgia. And then it just kind of took off.

It was just a validation tool because we knew if the product resonated, it would grow organically. So we just did that at a handful of schools. Like, each time we'd test A new product, we would do that and usually within 48 hours we'd know if it was working. And with tbh, we knew that night. It was like a lot of my team was pretty fatigued after five years of building apps. Two engineers of the four gave their two weeks notice the day before we launched. Oh, wow. And I said, well, let's launch this last one. Let's give it ourselves and what if it gets to number one? And then they all just kind of laughed. It caught like wildfire. And it's kind of like a movie almost.

Wow. What was it like working at Meta.

Especially as your first job? I guess back then it was Facebook. Yeah. I saw how these large tech organizations are run. I was wearing all the hats when I was running the startup. It was a lot easier to focus on the things I cared about and. But there's huge amounts of communication overhead, a lot of stakeholders. As an entrepreneur, it's a very jarring change, but I'm glad I did it. And I spent four years there and I primarily focused on building zero to one social apps and testing them, but I also advised Instagram and Messenger. And yeah, it was a good experience.

And then. So you eventually left, obviously, after four years. And then, you know, I think there's like this kind of this joke that you then built the same app and sold the same app. Is that kind of how you see it?

That was called Gas. Yeah. I always wondered, you know, like, if we monetized it, would we have had to have sold? And I was curious, like, would it work again, you know, four years later? And so there was an engineer, his name was Isaiah, and he said, I just left my job. Is there anything you want to build? I said, I have one idea. And he came over to my house and started building it.

The idea being the same idea or was Gas different?

Yeah, it was. Well, the optics of it were largely the same, the value proposition, but meaning.

Like let's do these polls or some sort of polling mechanism that's positive and sort of gets people to bring their friends in.

Yeah, okay. But a lot of the kind of growth systems and certain mechanics had to be reinvented because the landscape had changed. So we had to rebuild invitations. But I think the thing that I've been exceptionally good at when it comes to doing social app product development is getting the social graph right. So when someone signs up, can they find everyone that they know? And when we launched it, we launched actually in the same school, the same school in Georgia on the same day, five years later.

Five Years is interesting because now you're dealing with people that definitely didn't try it before. Didn't try TBH before.

Yeah. Yeah. You know, a lot had changed over the years, but it took off just like it had five years ago. That's wild. But this time we had all these learnings from the previous app, and it grew way faster.

Oh, wow.

And that was wild to see. It grew so fast. We suddenly had a bunch of companies interested in buying us, and Discord reached out, and I thought, this is a fast growing social app that we could help fuel their growth. And that also happened in a matter of a couple months. Wow.

And so, once again, it's like, strike while the iron is hot. You don't know what's going to happen. Let's sell to Discord.

Yeah. But I mean, there was no urgency, and that wasn't the plan because we monetized it. There's a little subscription that was optional for users, and it made $10 million in 90 days.

That's pretty cool.

I mean, the entire company was run on free startup credits, too. And there were no salaries. We just used. Everyone had equity, so it was like it was a home run on that front. And then when.

And you didn't raise money either.

I self financed it. It cost 25,000 bucks to get it started up, and that was it.

That's wild.

Yeah. And so this myth started. You can sell the same app twice, but I think it was like, just, you know, the circumstances just emerged.

Again, good timing.

Yeah.

Speaking of timing, I'd love to see more of Redondo and pv. You want to, like, grab some food or something?

Yeah, let's get some tacos.

All right, let's do it. So what is this place?

We're at the Redondo Beach Pier. This place used to be, like, totally packed in the 90s. Kind of a lesson of innovator die. But it still kind of gives this nostalgic vibe of an era past.

Would you come here a lot when.

You were a kid? Yeah, we'd hang out here. There's an arcade down over there, and this is like, the equivalent. Yeah, there's nobody here.

So this is like, where you would come with friends and hang out, like, after school and stuff?

Yeah, I went, like, fishing on the docks that we're gonna buy in a second.

Wanna get some tacos here?

Yeah, let's do it. All right.

So when you and I first started talking a lot, you had stepped away from Discord, and you were. The thing I found fascinating is you were Basically like consulting on growth for a living. Like you were like the product growth expert. I think you were doing it on Intro. Like how did that all come together?

I've been sharing sort of my learnings over the years on x since like 2017. And that's kind of how this like big audience grew around me. And I realized a lot of people reached out for advice on their apps. Yeah, and a friend of mine in LA started a company called Intro Rod and he said you should offer help through our service. And so it was kind of a cool way to off board from my full time job and just help a bunch of startups get a bunch of exposure to all different things happening in the ecosystem. It was a lot of fun. It started off with mostly really small companies like Series A, and then public companies started reaching out. I was talking to Coinbase and Sweet Green all over the place. What I learned was like, you know, a lot of the lessons and tactics to grow kind of a social network apply to many other products. There's a lot of like hard fought lessons that I picked up over the years, like undisclosed growth hacks and things like that that have been super helpful. And the most amazing part is just, you know, you're helping a company, they have kind of a novel concept, but they haven't gone through the years of learning on how to grow things and just to watch their apps suddenly hit the top of the app store. Yeah.

Any good examples or stories from that time?

After I joined X, there was a app called Bible Chat. Yeah, of course. It's an app for like prayer. And I was advising them for like six months and right when X kind of hit the top of the charts, they unseated us. No way. So the same app that I had been helping and giving the tactics to, unseated, what did it like, what was.

The magical feature or growth hack that made it possible for them to do that?

When it comes down to it, there's really no silver bullet to growth. When I start any sort of advisory engagement, I'm like, we're going to not leave a single stone unturned. We're going to juice every surface we can to make sure that if people are having a great time on the app that they can tell their friends about it. And ultimately to get virality, you have to just incrementally find bits of K factor because you need to get to a 1.0k factor to be truly viral. For a lot of apps like utility apps and not social networks, there isn't necessarily a path to get to like a full 1.0k factor. But what I was helping to do was at least get them above 0.9. Yeah. And then they'd augment that with paid acquisition. And obviously organic distribution is ideal because you get genuine users from referrals from their peers. But the only way apps can grow aside from word of mouth is referrals like invitations, like one to one acquisition and then the other is sharing one to many. So like, you know, posting on your story and you really have to unpack those funnels. A lot of people conflate, you know, going viral on TikTok, having a video about your product. But that's. That's not organic. That's not organic. Yeah. It's kind of like a press bump. True product LED growth is where the mechanics of the product are actually driving the acquisition.

So you're really. I mean, the two things you're really focusing then on are people inviting their friends and people sharing on one to many channels. Like those are the two tactics.

Yeah. But I mean, sometimes I met with a company and I'm like, we need to rename the app. And if you.

Why is that?

Because it was hard to communicate the value proposition. It wasn't. The conversion rates to. To download were really poor. And an example of that was, it was kind of a controversial decision, but it was a longevity app that I've been advising for a couple years and they originally called most days. And I said, let's just call it defclock. And it communicated exactly what the product did. So in addition to all the virality mechanisms that they employed, it was actually a great story that the press talked about. And once they did the renaming, I saw they had a bid on it on Stephen Colbert. And I was like, well, that was the right decision, but it's all in.

Service of the funnel. Right. It's like if we get the positioning right, we get the name right, then when the person lands on the App Store page, they'll more easily understand it and it'll lead to higher install.

Yeah. I think the biggest gap I see with startups when they try to grow, they're not actually methodically looking at every part of the funnel. And there's crazy places that users drop off that you wouldn't ever anticipate. And it starts with just instrumentation and knowing what's happening through the whole thing.

Are you starting like from the top of the funnel when you do this, do you basically look at. Is the first step to look at whatever install rate. Then it's like, okay, who Taps. How many people tap the sign up button? Okay. How many people put in their name? Like, are you literally going one step at a time? Or is the order in which you tack the funnel kind of random? Or. Doesn't matter.

What I try to do is like to see where is there already organic distribution happening? So that's like my first kind of overview is like I ask a question, how is it growing today and how can we augment that? So that often looks at like trying to attribute traffic, whereas where are these downloads coming from? And. But I mean, on a lot of the stuff, like an onboarding funnel, I could look at it in 30 seconds and just immediately know where the issue is. Yeah, yeah. That's what was a really fun period of like where I was still figuring out what I wanted to do. And I got to meet some really awesome people over those. Over that year doing the consulting work. Yeah, yeah.

And then like with some of these, I think you, you also end up.

Becoming an angel investor or you have.

Become an angel investor. And tell us about that. What has that been like, what are some of your favorite investments?

So one of my childhood friends that lived in PV with me, Rahul, he was actually a police officer. Initially he told me he wanted to start a tech company. So I invested in his first company. What was that? So that one was called Spider Tech and it was like a CRM from for police officers. If you call, it'll send you a feedback note. Things like that wasn't really a big hit. Got my money back. But then he came to me a second time and was like, there's a really big opportunity here with using drones for public safety for firefighters, police officers. Started this company called Aerodone. Redondo Beach PD is a customer.

Really?

Yeah.

Oh, wow.

That's pretty cool. And if you look at. Must be cool for him, he's reserved for Redondo Beach PD still.

Oh, wow.

Yeah, but I mean, these drones, they've basically eliminated car break ins in San Francisco. Rates are like down like 80% now. So it's really a technology that I was like, proud to get behind because it actually has like an immediate impact of quality of life for people. Yeah, that's really cool.

What are you thinking now about kind of how AI changes app building and maybe even more specifically growth. Growth of products.

The role of engineers is changing rapidly, almost too fast. But what I've seen, you know, at AD X and at startups I've been talking to is like engineers are effectively conductors at this point, and they're Spending way less time doing, you know, more of the boilerplate code writing. And I think we're going to see one of the biggest kind of economic booms because of it. On the other end of it, I've seen many products from non technical people get built that otherwise would have never, never been built. And it's amazing to watch.

Yeah, it's crazy the way that people are able to build stuff now. Like, what impact do you think that has on startups and startup building? Like, are we going to still see people raising a bunch of money, hiring a bunch of people, hiring a bunch of engineers? Or do you think the role of the engineer changes such that people are more like PMs and kind of anyone can build?

I think engineers are still going to have a critical role in the company, but I think the validation process is going to be much faster. And ultimately, I think when you're building production code, especially like backend code, you probably want to harden it against security vulnerabilities, things like that. Don't want to really vibe code, a database of Social Security numbers or something.

Do you think this changes kind of the platform dynamics of say, the App Store or the traditional ways in which products are distributed, monetized? Who gets to distribute and monetize them? How do you think about that?

Well, one thing that we're seeing right now is the number of apps submitted to the App Store has kind of skyrocketed in the last few months. So I think it's going to unlock a whole other level of creativity and personalization for products that weren't economically viable because traditionally it would have cost 200, $250,000 to get a fully baked production app into the App Store. You know, sign up flows, sharing, all that. Now, like a lot of smaller niche markets can have products built for them. And I think that's really exciting because, you know, you'd go to a VC and say, I want to raise money for this idea. And they'd be like, what's, what's the tam? And then you'd be like, oh, it's a few hundred million, not big enough. But I think that's going to change now. And I'm pretty excited for that.

Yeah, for sure. Me as well. I may have seen on X that you choked recently. Is this a thing?

Yeah, I was eating some fried chicken and it got like stuck and scratched my throat. And I posted about it and I mean, this has happened to me a couple of times where you've choked or.

You'Ve gotten something stuck in your throat.

Yeah. Where I've got stuff stuck in my throat. And the X users found all the posts of me talking about it over the years, and they were like, meaning it. But then one guy replies, you have this disease, Acylophilus esophagitis. Apparently, it's like an inflamed esophagus. I went to see a doctor, and they did an endoscopy, and the diagnosis was that, wow, I thought we hit AGI. It was the power of the hive mind, right?

It wasn't even AI, it was just the community.

Yeah. It was like, honestly, one of the greatest marketing moments for X. But also, there's a post that said Nikita thought he was building products for users, but he was actually building a product for himself.

Saved your life.

It's so funny. Whenever I post anything on X, I look at Google Alerts and they write an article about it. So the SpaceX doctor reached out and said, I read about the chicken getting stuck in your throat. I'm like, what? And it's like, where do they write that? But, yeah, that was funny experience. I guess it happens almost every day on axis. That's wild.

Well, I'm glad you're okay.

Yeah.

Show me a little bit more of the pier.

Yeah, let's do it.

Well, I know you got to get back to work. Thank you so much for showing me around Redondo Beach. It's been a lot of fun seeing where you grew up.

Thanks for having me.

All right, man, I'll see you soon.

I'll see you on X.

Yes. See you on X. Later, man.

See you.

All right. Thank you so much for tuning into this special episode of out of Office with Nikita. Beer? If you don't already subscribe to the show, go ahead and hit that subscribe button or that follow button, depending on whatever platform you're watching this on. And, of course, if you want to learn more about lightspeed, you can follow us, LightspeedVP. Or if you want to follow me, you're. You could follow me at McNano. Out of Office is a production of Lightspeed and Pod People. Thank you so much for watching. We'll see you next time.