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

Kayvon Beykpour (00:00:00):
The first time I ever met Elon was over FaceTime. He was just like, "Do you want to just come hang out? You can swipe left or swipe right."

Lenny Rachitsky (00:00:05):
You're 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.

Kayvon Beykpour (00:00:15):
We wanted to change the lack of ambition, the lack of creativity, the lack of customers feeling that the product had changed at all.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:00:21):
Here's a list of stuff that your team shipped while you were there, Super Follows, Communities, newsletters, topics, Fleets, testing reactions, edge-to-edge photos, Twitter Blue, Spaces, and obviously, live video.

Kayvon Beykpour (00:00:31):
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.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:00:37):
This was all relatively quickly.

Kayvon Beykpour (00:00:39):
I was like, "I might flame out completely, but Hell if I don't try."

Lenny Rachitsky (00:00:46):
Today, my guest is Kayvon Beykpour. 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.

(00:01:19):
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 acquihires and up-and-coming hungry product leaders to lead new initiatives and break through many of their sacred cows.

(00:01:47):
We also get into jobs-to-be-done, Elon's layoffs of most of Twitter's 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 Beykpour 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.

(00:02:21):
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(00:04:28):
Kayvon, thank you so much for being here, and welcome to the podcast.

Kayvon Beykpour (00:04:35):
Thanks so much for having me, Lenny. Great to meet you finally.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:04:38):
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. 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?

Kayvon Beykpour (00:05:03):
When all the drama went down with Twitter and Elon ended up buying the company and after the eight months 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.

(00:05:42):
So, the first time I ever met Elon was over at FaceTime where Elon was just very curious to ask, "Hey, you were at Twitter for a while. You seem to have done some things. What should I be digging into, and who 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 day two of Elon having brought the sink in. So, we had this really bizarre, wild, but really fun experience of walking into 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 we walked into the building.

(00:06:29):
I was scurried through the back door because I didn't want to make a scene and make it ... There was a lot of rumors around is Kayvon coming back, and I just wanted to avoid all of that. 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.

(00:06:53):
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 probably a two-hour conversation talking about the past, the future of Twitter, the good, the bad, the ugly. At the very end of the conversation, Walter came up and introduced himself and was like, "Hi, I'm Walter. 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."

(00:07:31):
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 I must say it was really fun. It was fun talking to someone. Obviously Elon, I'd never met him before, and he's one of the most successful entrepreneurs of our time. So, that was exciting to go into that meeting. 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 ambition, but obviously, in different ways ... He had his own dream for Twitter ... but it was really bizarre and unique and surreal seeing that glimmer in someone else who was 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."

(00:08:35):
It was just a really ... As someone who had had their own dreams for the product, witnessing that it was really unusual and cool. I think that's probably what Scott meant when he said, "You should ask Kayvon about that," was 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, "What am I going to do with this?" It was cool to see that.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:09:12):
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?

Kayvon Beykpour (00:09:26):
I don't know. I certainly don't think I've made any impression on how he should run the company. I think that's 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 is structured, the culture, and all that stuff is like ... We didn't even talk about that stuff.

(00:09:49):
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. 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.

(00:10:16):
We spent a bunch of time brainstorming products, and I had my set of projects that I was very passionate about because we'd given birth to them. 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 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.

(00:10:55):
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. It's been awesome to see that those have been continuing to grow and be molded in different directions. Yeah, I think in that sense, I hope that our brainstorm was useful, but for all I know he doesn't even remember the conversation.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:11:31):
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?

Kayvon Beykpour (00:11:53):
It was weird, to say the least. Honestly, it took me some time to come to peace with it because it was frustrating and surprising. I guess the story of what happened starts with Jack resigning. Jack resigned in ... 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.

(00:12:23):
To his credit, Parag very quickly addressed one of the biggest things that I was really frustrated about 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 in that we had a functional organizational model, meaning we had a head of 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 head research. It was a functionally run organization.

(00:12:52):
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-in to tiebreak 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. 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.

(00:13:29):
Anyway, all of that was super frustrating for me, and the combination of that and a dramatic change in leadership with Jack leaving and Parag coming in, I wasn't feeling too stoked. Parag to his credit, when he became CEO, quickly changed that and shifted the company to be a GM structure. And he promoted me to being the GM of consumers. 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.

(00:14:10):
Still no regrets. Had a lot of fun. I think we had some impact, but it was frustrating. So, Parag changed that. The irony of this, by the way, is he was one of the biggest proponents of the functional structure. When he became a CEO, he changed the structure, promoted me to be the GM of consumer, and I was, at that point, one month ... This is one month before I went on pat leave because my daughter was due.

(00:14:35):
So, I 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," as Parag addressed the biggest frustration that I had with the company and how it was being run. So, I 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.

(00:15:06):
So, I went on pat leave 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.

(00:15:35):
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. That night, Twitter signed a term sheet with Elon to sell the company. So, 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.

(00:16:14):
He wasn't particularly expressive about what that direction was, but that was the reason he gave me. That was a huge bummer for me for a bunch of reasons. One, I love the company. I love the product, and also it just sucks to leave not on your own terms. And two, I 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 at that time, especially the fact that Elon was buying the company was ...

(00:16:48):
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 you 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, 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.

(00:17:27):
One of the benefits of this particular takeover was that Elon offered a path towards solving all of 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." 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. Now, it has this conduit to just living up to its potential.

(00:17:59):
So, it was a bummer to be removed from that, I suppose, without having any agency myself. That was very a long-winded answer to your question, but that's what happened towards the end there. Like I said at the beginning, it took me a while to come to terms with it and to be at peace with it. I did eventually. Listen, there's a huge silver lining of I spent the first year of my daughter's life with her and my family. 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 is just a whole lot of drama that I got to miss, which is the silver lining.

(00:18:53):
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 do I want to maybe spend some time working on this still? 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. Do you want to come hang out?" And I was like, "What would my job be?" And he was like, "Don't know, just hang out, and you can swipe left or swipe right." He used the swipe right, swipe left Tinder metaphor, and I thought that was hilarious coming from him.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:19:38):
For ideas that come up just like, "Here, I have this idea [inaudible 00:19:41]?

Kayvon Beykpour (00:19:40):
No, like swipe right on whether you want to be here or swipe ... He's like, "We don't have to make this a thing. Just do you want to hang out and work on the product with us?"

Lenny Rachitsky (00:19:40):
That's so funny.

Kayvon Beykpour (00:19:51):
So, I ended up deciding that actually, I'm just ready. I'm ready to move on. 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 especially Elon. If you buy it's your turn. You can do whatever you want with it.

(00:20:13):
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.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:20:23):
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've been in the epitome worst possible situation there, where you're a product leader between Elon and the rest of org. So, I think it probably would not have worked out.

Kayvon Beykpour (00:20:40):
I'm not sure I would've been able to articulate it as succinctly as you did just now, but I think that is the feeling that I had that it's not my place anymore. I don't have a canvas to try and exert my dreams on this place. I think Elon took that mantle, and I'm excited to see what he going to do with it is the feeling I had.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:21:07):
Yeah. You've touched on this. You're 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?

Kayvon Beykpour (00:21:53):
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 to backup, that was just leading Periscope. 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. 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.

(00:22:40):
It comes back to the point I was making earlier around the organization of the company was functional, and so it is one thing for me to have some ideas and a plan and a strategy that I felt compelling. But when you have to essentially drive consensus amongst your peers across the other functions, that's a different game. That's not execution. That's politics and consensus building. I both can't stand that stuff, but I think ... This is going to sound like I'm tooting my own horn, but good enough at it and I have enough patience at it that I invested the time and the energy. I think a less patient person wouldn't have bothered and would've thrown their hands up.

(00:23:25):
I think honestly, a lot of it just comes down to I had practice. At 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, ad tech company called Blackboard, and we were 19 at the time. We got thrown into a public ... I was a senior executive at a public company that was not your quintessential tech company. It was even more difficult to get things done. So, through the four years I spent there, I learned a lot about how to navigate that type of environment.

(00:23:56):
It all came coming back when I was given the product role at Twitter. That first year of changing culture was like-

Kayvon Beykpour (00:24:00):
... product role at Twitter. That first year of changing culture was like walking through mud, and it was really difficult. But I think when we started building that alignment and building excitement that like, oh, actually maybe we should be taking some bigger swings, and when we started seeing through the execution against some of those plans, I think it ended up, it got easier and easier. 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.

(00:24:37):
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. It's difficult to change culture when you have a pocket of a company trying to advocate for change.

(00:25:01):
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 [inaudible 00:25:24] in its ways. Literally 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.

(00:25:42):
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. The reason why Twitter went from stagnant to declining DAU growth to growing DAU again is because they refined the core. This is when they went from the reverse chronological timeline to the ranked timeline, 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?

(00:26:16):
Now, that is not an inspiring product strategy. That does not result in the product feeling materially different or adding 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 reticence to take any risky bets even more. So it was a very interesting predicament because when I got into the role, the goal wasn't to change that progress. 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, the lack of creativity, the lack of customers feeling that the product was changed at all.

(00:26:58):
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 a 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. It is one of the most ridiculous luxuries of product development, is working on a product that many people use and therefore you get that much feedback around.

(00:27:25):
And it was a very common thing for us to hear people say, "What are you all doing over there? The product hasn't changed in eight years." And that was horrible to hear, and I felt it too, as a critic on the sidelines, as a user who wasn't an employee who eventually became an employee, I had the same feedback. And so that was my mission. I was like, I am 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.

(00:28:00):
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 something wonderful, 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 I've always believed that one of the best ways to build products is to be a customer yourself and to find your own pain points and to build a product that you want to use. And so that's actually not that hard to do if you're a user of Twitter and you can think critically. It 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.

(00:28:50):
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.

(00:29:21):
It's just like if a tweet gets, if you get an at mention and you don't like it or it's abusive, we're not touching that. We can't annotate tweets with [inaudible 00:29:30], 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.

(00:29:43):
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 the role, we were building this feature called hide replies. It still exists in the product today. If someone replies to one of your tweets, in the tweet details area as a reply to one of your conversations, before you had no ability, the only way you could address unwanted content was reporting it. So that was like Twitter acting as policemen and policewoman, completely unscalable and challenging, especially in the context of someone replying to one of your tweets.

(00:30:18):
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 you can still broadcast whatever you want, but if you're going to 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 at mention. You can't scream in my face basically.

(00:30:40):
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've failed. And that's fine, but it doesn't mean you shouldn't try.

(00:31:27):
But to go so far as to dissuade someone else who was 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 career." 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.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:32:01):
Kayvon, there's fractals of stories that I could 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 like 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.

(00:32:20):
The other is just, I love this point you made about the growth was most accelerant when you're just focusing on the core, that's what actually ... Like optimize, people bash on optimizing the existing experience and just micro-optimizing, 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.

Kayvon Beykpour (00:32:44):
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 things like improving the onboarding flow, it was rife with opportunity.

(00:33:12):
You'd have really dumb things happen. We would learn. There was one just bizarre and incredible meeting we had where we finally had got more rigorous around instrumenting our onboarding flow. And we found that in a couple countries, like we had a bug with our SMS verification flow where we wanted to verify users who were signing up with a phone number and our telco integration to send SMS verification cards just wasn't working. And so a huge percentage of people signing up in the UAE and other countries just couldn't use Twitter.

(00:33:46):
And so 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 going to 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.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:34:28):
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, it felt like there's a sense of trust that you built with Jack and execs of just like, okay, we can actually trust this team.

(00:34:47):
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 [inaudible 00:34:56] hires and bringing in these 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?

Kayvon Beykpour (00:35:07):
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 storytelling and just repetitive storytelling around this is the vision, these are the bets we're making. 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 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 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.

(00:35:51):
And this is 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. And maybe I wasn't interested in working in this company before, but I mean, 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. Let's just stick to what we know works. We're not going to take any big swings. That's a waste of time.

(00:36:35):
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.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:36:59):
The wagon is they're excited and bought into this vision and want this to happen?

Kayvon Beykpour (00:37:03):
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 the whatever, if that's a spectrum, Elon is the opposite spectrum of that. His tolerance for people who are not aligned and his tolerance for low performance is famously extremely low. And I think it's one of the things that when I say A/B test, it's very interesting to see the extreme to which he has operated.

(00:37:37):
And I think I've learned a ton around, we didn't have the organizational structure nor 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 certainly not as quickly as we should have or efficiently as we should have. Because by the way, a lot of high performers who are aligned with that desire to change and build, they don't have the, there's not like an equal distribution of patients. If you're extremely talented and you're dealing with organizational shit, you're going to go find someplace else that lets you do your craft and have impact. So it's very difficult.

(00:38:16):
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 skillset. I mean, it is a totally different skillset. And a lot of our most ambitious bets that were the riskiest and most misaligned with how the product worked or there was no easy staff to build on top of, a lot of those bets were driven by founders who we basically acquired and said, "Here, you are going to run this."

(00:39:13):
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 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, 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 crowdsource moderation and letting people annotate misleading content on the platform without Twitter acting as a policeman.

(00:40:03):
And 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 have not had patience for it.

(00:40:26):
All of the community effort or the creator efforts started with Super Follows and tipping, and all these things were led by Esther Crawford, whose company we acquired and who had her own couple of 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 Oladam, 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.

(00:41:02):
So I think that that story of acquiring hungry, ambitious founders and giving them responsibility and latitude is a success story of Twitter's. I mean, I'm a beneficiary of such a bet as well. My company Periscope was acquired, and I was given the responsibility to eventually lead the product team. So I feel like that we ended up realizing, both through the company's history and through learning, that this is actually a very effective way to drive cultural change and 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, to know when to use the system and to know when to fuck the system.

(00:41:52):
And I feel like my whole life has benefited from other people taking bets on me like that, to the point that even I was like, "Really? You sure you want to?" And so I think I've enjoyed trying to pass the buck and do that for other people, and I've never regretted it. You always, taking a bet on people and especially throwing them in a deep end, which on paper they may be unqualified for, I think is one of the best ways of driving change. And by the way, supporting growth, you've learned so much more when you're thrown into the deep end than in other contexts. And so I think it's 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 at Twitter.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:42:40):
It feels like every big bet was 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.

(00:42:59):
So I guess just 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. Can you just talk about lessons there?

Kayvon Beykpour (00:43:19):
That last one is a huge pet peeve of mine that I feel like we learned the hard way, and 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 situations, 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 were begrudgingly going along with it, but you would end up in a situation where the combination of that sort of cultural shift and strategy and the fact that the way teams were being staffed was not, there's ultimately no single decision maker other than the CEO and Jack is not going to get in the weeds and debate a staffing decision on the team, resulted in a situation where oftentimes we'd have projects, like the one I mentioned about hiding replies, where there wasn't even an agreement on the team about whether this was a good idea and whether this is worth trying or how to do it.

(00:44:22):
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. The 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, I'm not betting on that succeeding.

(00:44:50):
And so this was common, and sometimes not as extreme as the examples that I mentioned, but I think one of the lessons I learned, and it's quite intuitive actually, is you need to staff projects with the team of people that are well equipped from a skillset standpoint, but more importantly have an obsession with the idea 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, whether big or small, there is an element of you need to will this thing into existence because it's hard. 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 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.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:45:55):
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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 heap.io/lenny. This kind of touches on something I wanted to touch on, which is jobs-to-be-done. This is maybe one of the most recurring controversies of the podcast, 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, 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.

Kayvon Beykpour (00:47:31):
I've only seen one interview on your show that covers this. Sriram was particularly spicy when he talked about jobs-to-be-done, which is unsurprising because. I spent a lot of time talking to Sriram about jobs-to-be-done. I mean, I guess I'll just start by saying 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...

Kayvon Beykpour (00:48:00):
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 it's just unhelpful. You need to have nuance in how you leverage these frameworks. Otherwise, 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.

(00:48:47):
And I think that's just healthy product thinking. 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 force your mind to think of things through that lens. So I think that's 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.

(00:49:14):
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 things to build. That might not help you see when the things that you're building are actually hostile to customers.

(00:49:47):
So just as an interesting example, the thing that I remember about your interview with Shriram, if I'm not mistaken, I think he mentioned, and I love Shriram, I'd be happy to debate him about this on his podcast, but he mentioned one of the examples I think was the Amazon. When you get order confirmation 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 Shriram, he 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.

(00:50:43):
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 Shriram 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 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.

(00:51:26):
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 the toggle. 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 took so many baby steps on the evolution of this product. 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 rank timeline after, I don't know, 24 hours or something like that.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:52:02):
Oh, wow.

Kayvon Beykpour (00:52:03):
And the reason that the team felt strongly about keeping it this way is it was better for metrics. Why? Even if Lenny wants a reverse chron feed, we knew that he would spend more time in the app if we put them in the rank timeline and this was the number of debates that we had about this because the team understandably was like, "This is good for metrics", but at the same time you'd have customers being like, "I fucking hate this experience. I'm telling you I want reverse chron. Stop randomly changing it for me."

(00:52:34):
Instagram has I think gone through their own struggles with this as well. They 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, and 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.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:53:20):
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 like signs like you have implemented this to religiously and maybe you should be thinking a little more broadly.

Kayvon Beykpour (00:53:41):
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. Assuming 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 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, it didn't even lead to the right debates, then that's how you know. Either you have an incentive problem but the team did what they were incentivized to do or that there was bad judgment and that's a different problem obviously.

(00:54:38):
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, like 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, like 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. And how do you get people to join Lenny space when they're used to having an asynchronous feed of tweets? Well, you can send push notifications, you can occupy really trying 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."

(00:55:31):
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 the platform. I guess the other answer to your question in terms of how do you know when the framework's not serving you right? 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.

(00:56:17):
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, and we tried a variety of schemes to make that work. Community Notes, the project that I was mentioning Keith started, we intentionally structured that like a startup. It was literally like we made a seed bet on Keith and his team and we were like, don't worry about the OKRs. We're not going to judge you on the basis of your OKRs.

(00:56:57):
And there's some pros and cons to that. A lot of our projects worked that way. Fleets started that way. Community Notes started that way and some other projects started more part of the core organization because they were so intertwined with how we were the nature of the product that it just made sense to... Separating it was going to do more harm than good. So you just have to figure out 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.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:57:29):
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? Like 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 a story with Kobe Bryant and Periscope about him using it in some form. Can you share that story?

Kayvon Beykpour (00:58:18):
Before Periscope launched publicly, which it 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 trying to personally onboard every single user and I had 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 and I'm going to show them how the app works. And we were spending a lot of time in our office, so Kobe, Chris Saka actually invited Kobe to the beta.

(00:58:59):
And so Chris connected us and I did a private broadcast and Kobe joins and I was like, it was like 10:00 PM in the office and my routine was like, let me just walk around the office talking through the mechanics of Periscope through the lens of this demo of like, "Hey, let me show you around the office and here's how the chat works and you can tap the screen to send hearts and if you want me to do something, go to the room over there, just type it in the chat and it'll come up."

(00:59:22):
And sort of showed one of the things that was unique about Periscope was it was a one to many broadcasts, 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 like, "Well, we think it's cool."

(01:00:03):
And before I could even get the words out, he posted like, "I'm just fucking with you, bro. This is incredible." And I just remember it was just such a surreal moment that has, I'll never forget, I mean Kobe's a legend obviously, but to have him essentially troll me while also putting a point on what was cool about the experience and that was bidirectional and something he commented on to 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.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:00:41):
Oh man, if I kept doing that, the manual onboarding, I'd be like, "Who's coming?" Just always worried that someone else fancy is going to join. You never know who Chris Saka is getting, who he'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 at as CEO, 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.

Kayvon Beykpour (01:01:14):
Well, there's a few reasons why Periscope failed ultimately and why we shut down the app. Obviously Periscope, the technology and the mechanics 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 mapped by just an incredible surge in top-line user growth. And for Periscope, 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.

(01:02:02):
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 and you had these incredible surges, but underneath that surge, the core product had retention issues and 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 theses behind our acquisition, the Twitter acquisition, was that we would leverage the scale and the community and the product mechanics of Twitter to make the product grow faster and also become more durable. And I think that's 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. What was working about Periscope, they're surrounded by a scaffolding that lets people also stay in touch with each other. Asynchronously 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.

(01:03:39):
You are 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 broadcast live from your phone? And mind you, this is different for products that are 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 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 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.

(01:04:32):
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 I obviously wasn't there on the inside, but legend has it, Mark says, "Hey, you 300 people, stop what you're doing. Go basically make live exist in our product as a first [inaudible 01:04:56] experience."

Lenny Rachitsky (01:04:56):
Oh, wow. I didn't know that.

Kayvon Beykpour (01:04:57):
And if you have that level of organizational effort put on building something that by the way, 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 influencer or just creative people that became known on Periscopes, all the way up to celebrities like Kevin Hart and others who were prolific Periscopers that Facebook just went and bought out.

(01:05:30):
They were just like, "Cool, we're going to pay you a bunch of money to stream exclusively with us." So they 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 Instagram and then also attacked it from the creator 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.

(01:06:35):
They were phenomenal at spotting meaningful changes in 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 I didn't want to make that mistake and we didn't end as up buying anything like Vine or Periscope and keeping the product. We obviously bought lots of small acquirers, but we did obviously have a bit of a story with Clubhouse that ended up with us building Spaces and competing with them. But anyway, that was a long, rambly story. Hopefully that answered your question.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:07:25):
Yeah, there's so many. Again, it's all these fractals of thought 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 fades away. I guess, you already shared a lot of challenges Twitter had with executing, shipping, Secret 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 ride it for now and that's why it didn't work out? Or is there anything more that?

Kayvon Beykpour (01:07:53):
No, it's even more like pathetic than that 'cause 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-run video, they 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 integrated holistically into the product and pour gasoline on it, they built a native Twitter video feature that was a different stack, different team. It became what you think of as Twitter video now. It's like the most simple active uploading video and all the professional video tools called Media Studio that let publishers like ESPN put content. All of that was basically built as a separate team, separate organization, separate product that was competing with Vine. You had two visions for short form video that were manifesting, and that's the quickest way for things to get messy.

(01:08:58):
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 similar thing happen 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 two ways to manifest live video on the product. It was like UGC live video, which was awkwardly not even really implemented well with Twitter at the time. And then premium live video, which had totally different UX, total different team, totally different architecture. And by the way, the company put 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 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 headbutting in politics and eventually it took us a lot of time to technically reintegrate things together and now it's clean and awesome, right?

(01:10:48):
ESPN can go live with behind the scenes content at Wimbledon and it's 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.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:11:33):
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. I imagine it always comes from like, oh, this makes sense. And then you realize, okay, this was a terrible idea down the road.

Kayvon Beykpour (01:11:47):
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're just need a highly opinionated person at the top that avoids that kind of messiness from a.

Kayvon Beykpour (01:12:01):
That kind of messiness from a product and engineering standpoint.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:12:05):
You mentioned Clubhouse, so I think what's interesting is one, many people copy 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 just a 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?

Kayvon Beykpour (01:12:30):
I think it's always about doing the right thing for the customer. Everyone has always been shameless to be 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 wouldn't have done it the same way, but it worked. So you can't say it's the wrong thing. I think that it's possible to take ideas in good taste and take ideas in poor taste.

(01:13:07):
And I think 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 was still something to the idea of synchronous conversations. Because one of the famous things that I think we botched with Periscope is that we always... Our dream and our vision for Periscope and how we talked about it was 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 it was something amazing happening or civil unrest happening or some important moment happening with breaking news or otherwise.

(01:13:58):
But it turns out the vast majority of our users were not using Periscope that way. 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 contracts to Twitter, which has mechanics to really incentivize quick, snappy broadcasts that don't 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 were multiple heads on this monster and those heads are participants in a conversation.

(01:14:54):
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 felt like we were onto something. And when Clubhouse came on the map, it really re-centered, it put into focus a user experience that felt a lot more right and now give them complete credit for that. 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 shamelessly seek inspiration from what they had done and what had worked and we put our own spin on it. The execution of Spaces within Twitter 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 took the ideas that we felt were shortcuts to making the experience work and then we put our own spin on it. And so I have no problems with what we did there.

(01:15:55):
And having had experienced the pain of not moving quickly enough with Vine from the outside and Periscope having lived that experience, we were not willing to not be the winner with this use case. 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. Hydra went from this tiny project that six people were working on that no one knew or care about to, we made Spaces 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.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:17:15):
I did not know that. That is extremely interesting. Speaking full circle, when I joined Clubhouse the first time, Paul was there introducing me to Clubhouse and exactly the way you described Periscope, so I feel like he drew some inspiration from you one step back.

Kayvon Beykpour (01:17:30):
Paul's amazing. I feel like we're kindred spirits and I could see... 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. 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. Yeah.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:17:58):
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?

Kayvon Beykpour (01:18:19):
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 an 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 there's not a lot of science to it, I think. I mean 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.

(01:19:20):
And so it's always been a very helpful cheat code for me. And it's also just personally interesting. 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.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:19:51):
Speaking of trying new things, what are you up to these days?

Kayvon Beykpour (01:19:55):
I'm building something in the consumer space. I started the company with a couple of 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 building something with a small team again after seeing the opposite extreme with a really large company. We've just talked about lots of large company things. But yeah, hopefully you'll be hearing about it soon.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:20:26):
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?

Kayvon Beykpour (01:20:38):
No, no, I think we've covered quite a bit.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:20:42):
We have. We have indeed. With that, we've reached our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready?

Kayvon Beykpour (01:20:46):
I'm going to take a sip of water and then I'll be ready.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:20:49):
Okay, here we go. First question, what are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people?

Kayvon Beykpour (01:20:54):
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 book, but I just love 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 some of my favorite reads because it helps me. I feel like in some weird circular or wandering way, it helps me be more creative and imaginative. And by the way, that's true outside of reading as well. Some of the content that has shaped me, I feel like and help motivate my curiosity and a lot of things I built is sci-fi TV, right? Star Trek is incredible. We used to use as a metaphor for what Periscope was, we would think about Star Trek. It'd be really cool to be able to teleport or get beamed somewhere else in the world and 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 that kind of literature or content has always been inspirational for me and I think getting that through books is really healthy.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:22:30):
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?

Kayvon Beykpour (01:22:37):
I mean the most recent movie I saw in theaters was Dune Two, and it was incredible.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:22:41):
I just saw that.

Kayvon Beykpour (01:22:41):
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 two and a half hours is 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.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:23:28):
I haven't heard of that. Have you seen 3 Body Problem yet, by the way? It feels like it's squarely in your wheelhouse.

Kayvon Beykpour (01:23:33):
I haven't seen it yet.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:23:35):
Okay.

Kayvon Beykpour (01:23:35):
And it's funny, some content people are talking about it so much that I kind of want to not watch it now because I feel like it's really hard for shows to live up 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.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:23:54):
Okay, great. Do you have a favorite interview question that you like to ask candidates you're hiring?

Kayvon Beykpour (01:23:58):
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 succeeded as well. But I think you just learn a lot about self-reflection and their passions. But particularly their self-reflection. If they talk through something that they really cared 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. And so I think it's always, you just get to know someone really well. It ends up in a well-rounded understanding of a person, if you can dig into that.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:24:48):
Is there a favorite product you recently discovered that you really like?

Kayvon Beykpour (01:24:51):
I love Proplexity. It's really interesting to me how Proplexity 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 Proplexity took that over. It is 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 Proplexity. And frankly, it's one of the only non-development tool AI products that actually has retained. A lot of people try and consumer AI products that just aren't really, haven't retained. But Proplexity is one that it's a daily driver for me. It's on my home screen and I love it. I'm very impressed by it.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:25:45):
Also a huge fan.

Kayvon Beykpour (01:25:46):
Yeah. Here's a bias one, my wife is actually working on a startup called Particle, and they're the news experience with AI. And what I love about what they're doing is that for the first time they're like they've rethought what the form factor and the unit of content for news stories should be. Articles are a failed format, is my belief, and certainly their belief. And so they've really come up with an elegant and engaging experience for understanding what's happening in the world in a way that's purely powered by AI. And it's awesome. Again, hashtag biased husband, but it's amazing. It's in beta right now. You can sign up on the wait list. The URL is particlenews.ai. They're letting people in on beta. If you sign up, use coupon code hashtag #KayvonLenny. That's not a real code. But yeah, so that's amazing. So that would be my second pick.

(01:26:48):
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?

Lenny Rachitsky (01:27:00):
I have not.

Kayvon Beykpour (01:27:01):
So Crokinole is 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. I love it. I play with my friends. My parents over Christmas were obsessed with this game. My daughter loves. It's a physical game. You flick a puck, like shuffleboard style, but 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 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.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:27:48):
These are awesome answers. What's the name of that game again? I'm going to-

Kayvon Beykpour (01:27:48):
Crokinole.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:27:53):
Okay. I don't 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.

Kayvon Beykpour (01:27:56):
C-R-O-K-I-N-O-L-E.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:27:59):
Great. I love the K in there. That makes it really fun. And by the way, I think it's also Particle.news looking at it. It's so cool. It's basically bullet points of news items and then it links to all the articles that have written about it. So it just summarizes, here's the things you need to know and it's beautiful.

Kayvon Beykpour (01:28:13):
Yeah, 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 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 was very cool. I'll definitely get you in the beta.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:28:39):
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, 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?

Kayvon Beykpour (01:28:57):
Something that definitely shaped my work ethic and how I work that came from my first boss actually. When I was 14, I had a summer job basically replacing and doing maintenance on fire extinguishers. So I would drive into San Francisco, my boss would pick me up in his truck, we'd go to 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 that was my first job. And I don't even remember if I was getting paid. I was probably getting paid very small amount, but it was just first work experience. And I remember there was this moment that I had finished dealing with my extinguishers and I was just sitting in his truck twiddling my thumbs doing nothing. And my boss came up to me and was like, when you've got nothing to do, sweep never sit around.

(01:29:57):
And it was so funny, it was just 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 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, had that moment with me. It was like, I don't even think he understands how impactful that was, but it felt so much a life motto, but it definitely stuck with me and shaped how I work.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:30:35):
I love that you shared that story. I found that quote and story in GQ Magazine turns out is where you talked about this and I was going to ask about it and I didn't and I'm glad you shared it because I love it.

(01:30:47):
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?

Kayvon Beykpour (01:30:58):
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 package software to cloud, going from non-AI to AI, going from discrete tools to an integrated suite that worked really elegantly together. I think 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.

(01:31:55):
I guess a funny story about Scott that people might not know, I consider him to have been the first Periscoper. So Scott believed in Periscope before it was Periscope, before we had turned it into live video, we had 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.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:32:25):
I didn't know that.

Kayvon Beykpour (01:32:26):
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 because by definition it's real time rather than static.

(01:32:42):
Anyways, before we built any of that, when we were playing with the idea and Scott was encouraging us to go in this direction, I remember probably the second time I ever met Scott, we did it FaceTime and he was at the TED conference, I want to say it was in Vancouver, and just to illustrate how cool it would be when he accepted the FaceTime and he's like, "Cool, and I'm going to take you on a Periscope." And he flipped this camera and started walking around the TED conference and basically pretending like he was prototyping the product, but using FaceTime. And it was such an amazing experience because having an investor essentially encourage you down a product direction by showing rather than telling, it was such a great encapsulation of how supportive Scott was and inspiring Scott was as one of our cheerleaders. And I respect him so much for everything he did to help Periscope make happen, and also for betting on us, because 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.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:33:48):
What a mensch.

Kayvon Beykpour (01:33:48):
What a mensch.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:33:49):
We've got to get him back on the podcast. The story reminds me of your Elon's 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.

Kayvon Beykpour (01:34:04):
Yeah, he's a great example of that as well. He's definitely a gracious user of all tools and products, and that's why he has really great, really great product sense.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:34:15):
Kayvon, you're amazing. This was so freaking fascinating. There's so many nuggets here. Can't wait for folks to hear this.

(01:34:20):
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?

Kayvon Beykpour (01:34:30):
People can find me on Twitter/X/whatever we're calling it these days. My handle is @kayvz, K-A-Y-V-Z. And yeah, if you're 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.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:34:51):
Amazing. And also check out Particle.news.

Kayvon Beykpour (01:34:53):
There you go.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:34:54):
Support the wife.

Kayvon Beykpour (01:34:55):
Exactly.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:34:56):
Amazing. All right, Kayvon, thank you so much for being here.

Kayvon Beykpour (01:34:59):
Thanks Lenny. Great to meet you.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:35:00):
Bye everyone.

(01:35:03):
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 past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode.