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

This episode features an in-depth conversation with Kayvon Beykpour, the former Head of Product at Twitter, covering his experiences with company culture transformation, product development, and his interactions with Elon Musk during Twitter's transitional phase.

1. Transformation of Company Culture: Kayvon played a crucial role in shifting Twitter from a stagnant culture to one that embraced rapid innovation and product releases.
2. Impact of Leadership Changes: His experiences underline how leadership changes at Twitter, including Elon Musk's takeover, critically influenced product strategy and team dynamics.
3. Product Development Insights: He shares valuable insights on product development and the importance of aligning new features with user needs and company strategy.
4. Navigating Corporate Challenges: Kayvon's story highlights the challenges of navigating corporate politics and structural changes in a tech company.
5. Personal Resilience and Adaptability: His ability to adapt to drastic changes, including his unexpected firing, showcases resilience and flexibility crucial in the tech industry.

1: Meeting Elon Musk

Kayvon recounts his first interaction with Elon Musk over FaceTime and their subsequent meeting that discussed the future of Twitter. This chapter provides insight into the immediate effects of Musk's acquisition. Kayvon Beykpour: "The first time I ever met Elon was over at FaceTime."

2: Transforming Twitter

This chapter focuses on how Kayvon transformed the product team's culture at Twitter, encouraging rapid development and creativity. Kayvon Beykpour: "You're kind of known for at Twitter, someone that turned the culture of the product team and Twitter in general from a very stagnant nothing is changing product to shipping all the time."

3: The Firing

Kayvon discusses the personal and professional impact of being fired from Twitter during his paternity leave, reflecting on corporate dynamics and personal resilience. Kayvon Beykpour: "It was weird, to say the least. Honestly, it took me some time to kind of come to peace with it because it was frustrating and surprising."

1. Embrace Change: Adapt to leadership and structural changes within your organization to stay relevant.
2. Foster Innovation: Encourage a culture of rapid testing and development to keep your product offerings fresh and engaging.
3. Understand User Needs: Regularly gather and integrate user feedback to ensure your product developments are aligned with customer expectations.
4. Navigate Corporate Politics: Develop strategies to handle internal politics and structural changes effectively.
5. Build Resilience: Prepare for unexpected changes in your career and use them as opportunities for growth and learning.

Kayvon Beykpour was the longest-serving head of product at Twitter and was GM of Twitter’s consumer division until the platform was acquired by Elon Musk. He originally joined Twitter in 2015 through the acquisition of his company, Periscope, the largest live video streaming platform at the time. Periscope pioneered technology that inspired Instagram Live, TikTok Live, Facebook Live, and other social networks’ expansion into video streaming.

People

Elon Musk, Kayvon Beykpour

Companies

Twitter

Books

None

Guest Name(s):

Kayvon Beykpour

Content Warnings:

None

Kayvon Beykpour
The first time I ever met Elon was over at Facetime. Just like, do you want to just like come, like hang out? You can swipe left or swipe right. You're kind of known for at Twitter, someone that turned the culture of the product team and Twitter in general from a very stagnant nothing is changing product to shipping all the time. We wanted to change the lack of ambition, the lack of creativity, the lack of customers feeling that the product had changed it all.

Lenny Rachitsky
So here's a list of stuff that you or team shipped while you were there. Superfollows Communities Newsletters Topics fleets testing reactions edge to edge photos Twitter blue spaces and obviously live video the sacred cows. Are like their own roadmap. What are all the things that you think we're not allowed to change? Let's start there.

And this was all relatively quickly. I was like, I might flame out completely, but hell if I don't try.

Today. My guest is Kevon Bakepor. Kevan was the beloved and longest tenured head of product at Twitter and also GM of the consumer business at Twitter up until the day that it was sold to Elon Musk. He landed at Twitter through an acquisition of his company Periscope, which was the world's largest live streaming platform, which ended up inspiring Instagram Live, TikTok Live, Facebook Live, and basically every other social network getting into live video. He sold the company to Twitter in 2015, continued leading periscope for a number of years, and then moved into leading product and then the entire consumer business.

In our wide ranging conversation, Kayvon shares what it was like getting Elon up to speed at Twitter, what it was like to be fired from Twitter, which actually happened during his pap leave. He also shares all kinds of lessons and stories, from transforming Twitter's internal culture from a risk averse, stagnant product to one that was shipping major features regularly. We talk about how they used aqua hires and up and coming hungry product leaders to lead new initiatives and break through many of their sacred cows. We also get into jobs to be done Elon's layoffs of most of Twitter staff after the acquisition, his lessons from building and shutting down periscope and also building consumer products in general and so much more. This episode is full of stories and lessons and a bunch of stuff that you havent heard anywhere else.

With that, I bring you Kayvon Bakepore after a short word from our sponsors. And if you enjoy this podcast, dont forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. Its the best way to avoid missing future episodes, and it helps the podcast tremendously. This episode is brought to you by Interpret. Interpret unifies all of your customer interactions, from Gong calls to Zendesk tickets, to Twitter threads, to App Store reviews, and makes it available for your product team.

It's used by leading product orgs like Canva Notion, Loom, linear, and descript to accurately integrate the voice of the customer into your product development process, helping you build best in class products. What makes Interpret special is its ability to build customer specific adaptive AI models that provide the most granular and accurate categorization of all your customer feedback and also connect customer feedback to revenue impact to help product leaders confidently prioritize things that will actually move the needle for your business. If you want a custom model built for your organization so that you can automate your feedback loops and prioritize your roadmap with confidence, get in touch with the team@interpret.com. Lenny that's enterpret.com Lenny Today's episode is brought to you by one schema, the embeddable CSV importer for SAS. Customers always seem to want to give you their data in the messiest possible CSV file, and building a spreadsheet importer becomes a never ending sync for your engineering and support resources.

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Kayvon Beykpour
Thanks so much for having me. Lenny, great to meet you finally. It's amazing to meet you. I think this is going to be quite a unique and interesting podcast. A big thank you to Scott Belsky, illustrious former podcast guest, for introducing us.

Lenny Rachitsky
So when he introduced us, the one thing that he told me is that hopefully, Kevon 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? When all the drama went down with Twitter and Elon ended up buying the company, and after the eight month saga of legal back and forth, ended up actually taking control of the company, there was that first two day period where it was complete chaos at Twitter with the sink and Elon spreading his tentacles, trying to find out who are the people he wants to keep and what are the projects that are interesting.

Kayvon Beykpour
In the midst of all that, Scott ended up getting contacted and being asked, like, you know, who should Elon talk to? And Scott recommended that Elon chat with me. And so the first time I ever met Elon was over at FaceTime, where Elon was just very curious to ask, like, hey, you were at Twitter for a while. You seem to have done some things like, what should I be digging into and who should I be talking to? At the end of that conversation, we ended up arranging an in person meeting where Scott and I went to Twitter HQ to actually meet Elon.

I think this was, like, day two of Elon having brought the sync in. And 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, you know, we walked into the building. I was sort of, like, scurried through the back door because I didn't want to make a scene and make it. You know, there was a lot of, like, rumors around, like this Kevon coming back, and I just wanted to avoid all of that.

And so it was just like, a very weird experience of being, like, scurried through the elevator and through the back door and go to this, like, massive conference room, which we had on the second floor of the one 10th building. And in that massive conference room, it was me, Scott Elon, and then at the very, very end of the room, Walter Isaacson, who, by the way, I had a hard time. I knew, I recognized I'd never met Walter in person, but I was like, is that Walter Isaacson? But he said nothing the entire time. And we had this very.

We had probably, like, a two hour conversation talking about the past, the future, Twitter, the good, the bad, the ugly. At the very end of the conversation, Walter came up and introduced himself and was like, hi, Kevin, I'm Walter. Like, can I get your information just in case I need to ask any follow up questions. And I was like, oh, shit. I guess that whole conversation was on the record.

I don't know. So it was a very surreal experience for a bunch of reasons, including just being weird for me, since I was very conflicted about coming back to Twitter, even physically in the office. But it was, I must say, it was really fun. It was fun talking to someone. I mean, obviously, Elon, I'd never met him before, and he's one of the most successful entrepreneurs of our time.

And so that was exciting to kind of, like, go into that meeting. And also, I had been spending so much time dreaming about Twitter and trying to mold Twitter in a direction that I. I thought was compelling and working with a team of people to do that and to meet someone who also had a similar sort of ambition, but obviously in different ways. He had his own dream for Twitter, but it was sort of really bizarre and unique and surreal seeing that glimmer in someone else who 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.

It was just a really, as someone who had their own dreams for the product, witnessing that was. It was really unusual and cool. So I think that's probably what Scott meant when he said to you, you should ask Kevin about that, was, I think we both kind of recognized that something's about to happen here. Obviously, you have this very public spectacle of someone essentially having a takeover of a public company. But all of that stuff aside, also, you could tell Elon was scheming and cooking up, like, what am I going to do with this?

And it was cool to see that. That's an amazing story. I love the Walter Isaacson component of iT. Do you feel like you made a dent on his approach and way of thinking? Obviously, he made a lot of big, radical changes.

Lenny Rachitsky
Do you feel like you made a dent in his view of where Twitter should go? I don't know. I certainly don't think I've made any impression on how he should run the company. I think Elon's going to Elon in his way, and I think he certainly has had some radical moves in terms of how he's running the company, the decisions he made, like, how many people he let go, how the company structure, the culture, and all that stuff is. Like, we didn't even talk about that stuff.

Kayvon Beykpour
I think what we spent time talking about is I shared my perspective with him of people I thought who were exceptional, who were at the company, and if I was in his shoes, who I would spend time with and embrace. And most of the people that I mentioned are still there, which is awesome. And they seem to be, a, empowered, which is great, and b, having fun, which is awesome. Hopefully that stuff is useful. We spent a bunch of time brainstorming products, and I had my set of projects that I was very passionate about because we'd sort of given birth to them and I think a bunch of those projects, it seems like Twitter is still investing in and putting a lot of energy behind, like community notes, which at the time was called Birdwatch.

But I always felt really bullish on that being the future of how essentially how content is moderated on Twitter, just because it was very clear that the way we were handling content moderation, among many other flaws, just wasn't scalable. And spaces and communities and the creator program of helping people make money on the platform, those are projects that we started over the year ish prior to Elon taking over. And my hope, having left the company and having had a new leader come in, was that those things would be given more oxygen. And it's been awesome to see that those have been continuing to grow, be molded in different directions. So, yeah, I think in that sense, I hope that our brainstorm was useful.

But I mean, for all I know, he doesn't even remember the conversation. So I freaking love community notes. It's such an amazing product. Let me ask two more dramatic oriented elan Twitter questions just to get these out of the way. The first is you said you were fired.

Lenny Rachitsky
I don't know if you've shared that publicly. People always wondered, I think, what happened. I know you tweeted during your pat leave, I'm leaving Twitter, and no one really knows the story, as far as I know, what actually went on there. It was weird, to say the least. Honestly, it took me some time to kind of come to peace with it because it was frustrating and surprising, I guess.

Kayvon Beykpour
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, you know, I chose Parag to be the CEO of the company. And, you know, I've had a long relationship with Parag. I respect him, but I had mixed feelings about, about that.

But to his credit, Parag very quickly addressed one of the biggest things that I was really frustrated about, like in the last three years, essentially, of my time at Twitter. One of my biggest points of feedback and points of consternation was the structure of the company and that we had a functional organizational model, meaning we had, like, I had a consumer product, me, we had a head of revenue product, Bruce. We had a head of engineering. We had a head of design. We had research.

It was like functionally run organization. And the combination of that model and the type of leader that Jack was wasn't working, in my view. I think if you're going to have a functional organization, you need to have a GM or a CEO who's extremely leaned in to tie break and resolve conflict and make sure the team is moving quickly. And Jack, for all of his amazing qualities, just wasn't operating that way. And so you had a group of highly opinionated people that often disagreed and would create either the need for consensus or deadlock.

And that just was driving a lot of people crazy, including me. And I think it really held us back from living up to Twitter's potential. Anyway, all of that was super frustrating for me. And the combination of that and a dramatic change in leadership with Jack leaving and Prague coming in, I wasn't feeling too stoked. Prague, 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 consumer. For the prior three ish years, having been responsible for growing Twitter's consumer product, I was only responsible for the product management team. I didn't have engineering or design. And that, honestly was difficult. It's very difficult to change culture with one hand tied behind your back.

Still, no regrets. Had a lot of fun. I think we had some impact, but it was frustrating. 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 that was, you know, I was at that point, like one month, this is one month before I went on Pat leave because my daughter was. Was due. And so I sort of went into my paternity leave being like, all right, I'm going to give this a shot, you know, like, we'll see how this goes. Like, you know, is Parag addressed the biggest frustration that I had with the company and how it was being run.

And so I kind of, like, you know, had some trepidations, but went into my patly feeling optimistic. Mind you, this was all before Elon was even part of the picture. He had not become a board member. There was no news about him having beef with the executive team, or for that matter, trying to buy the company. So I went on Pat leave maybe a week and a half before our daughter's due date, three weeks goes by.

In that three weeks, Elon joins the board, leaves the board, makes an offer, has a short, dramatic feud about whether that goes through. And also during that time, my daughter was born. Some drama at the hospital for us, but a week afterwards, we come home, mom's healthy, daughter's healthy. The day after we get home from the hospital, Parag called me and said that he was letting me go and that he was taking the team in a different direction. And that night, Twitter signed a term sheet with Elon to sell the company.

So 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 skillset or in my interest. He wasn't particularly expressive about what that direction was, but that was the reason he gave me, and that was a huge bummer for me for a bunch of reasons.

One, I love the company, I love the product, and also just, like, sucks to leave, not on your own terms. And two, it was just confused. The timing was very frustrating and confusing for me, not least of which because I had just come home from the hospital while on paternity leave, but also because at that time, especially, the fact that Elon was buying the company was. Well, I was conflicted. Honestly.

I was very excited, because Elon is someone that I looked up to immensely. And you just look at things that he's achieved in the world, and he can't help but be inspired by that. And two, Twitter, for all of, I think the impact and progress that we had made, had a lot of challenges associated with its governance and the fact that it was constantly vulnerable as a public company. So that there's just always this drama associated with Twitter as a public company, even a private company before that, that made it extremely hard as a builder to get shit done and have the product live up to its potential. And one of the benefits of this particular takeover was that Elon offered a path towards solving all that.

It was like, oh, cool. Now you've got one owner who happens to be, by the way, extremely opinionated about the product, and a voracious consumer and creator of the product. And there was something. I think there's an incredible opportunity in that, that now you have this organization and this product and this incredible ecosystem that can be devoid of all the political bullshit associated with being a public company. And now it has this, like, conduit to just living up to its potential.

So it was a bummer to have to be removed from that, I suppose, without having any agency myself. So that was very long with an answer to your question, but that's kind of what happened towards the end there. And like I said at the beginning, it took me a while to come to terms with it and to be at peace with it. And I did eventually. I mean, listen, there's like a huge silver lining of, I spent the first year of my daughter's life with her and my family, and my wife Sarah had left Twitter like eight months prior to me leaving.

And so when's the next time we could all be together and have time and space to just enjoy each other and our new family and frankly, to avoid a lot of the drama that ended up ensuing that not a lot of people could have predicted. The deal was on, the deal was off. It's just a whole lot of drama that I got to miss, which is the silver lining. And then it was confusing there for a bit, because when Elon did end up buying the company, in that conversation that I had with him, I was conflicted about, do I want to maybe spend some time working on this still? And 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 like, come? You seem like you care about the product and you don't have dumb ideas, and like, do you want to come, like, hang out? And I was like, what would my job be? And he was like, dunno, just like, hang out and you can swipe left or swipe right, or I, you know, he used to swipe right, swipe left. Tinder metaphor.

And I thought that was kind of. Hilarious coming from him for, like, ideas that come up. Just like, here. No, like, swipe right on whether you want to be here or swipe like we did. We don't have to make this a thing, just like, you know, they want to hang out and work on the product with us.

And so I sort of ended up deciding that actually I'm ready to move on. I've 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. You buy it, it's your turn, you can do whatever you want with it. 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
What I think about is there's always this tension, being a PM at a company with a very strong minded, product oriented founder. And I feel like you would have been in the epitome worst possible situation there where you're a product leader between Elon and the rest of the. So I think it probably would not have worked out. I'm not sure I would have been able to articulate it as succinctly as you did just now, but I think that is the feeling that I had, that it's not my place anymore. I don't have the canvas to try and exert my dreams on this place.

Kayvon Beykpour
I think it's Elon took that mental, and I'm excited to see what he's going to do with it, is the feeling I had. Yeah. So you touched on this. You're kind of known for at Twitter, someone that turned the culture of the product team and Twitter in general from a very stagnant nothing is changing product to shipping all the time, all kinds of stuff. So here's a list of stuff that I've gathered your teams shipped while you were there.

Lenny Rachitsky
Twitter blue, which is I think called premium now spaces superfollows 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 bolt bets and becoming a lot more open to new stuff, trying to drive. Culture change is both one of the most challenging things and rewarding things. Like for the first year of my role, there was a chapter of my time at Twitter, maybe just to back up, that was just leading periscope. And in that first chapter of maybe two years, I was not really involved with Twitter stuff all that much.

Kayvon Beykpour
That started to change when we really tried integrating periscope with Twitter. But sort of chapter two of my time at Twitter was when I became the head of product. And that first year of being the head of product was like one of the most difficult of my career. Not because the work was difficult, but because it was so politically and bureaucratically exhausting to try and change culture in a way that just there wasn't alignment around. And it comes back to the point I was making earlier around, like the organization of the company was functional.

And so, you know, it's one thing for me to have some ideas and a plan and a strategy that I felt compelling, but, you know, when, when you have to essentially drive consensus amongst your peers across the other functions, it's, you know, it's. That's a different game. That's not execution. That's like politics and consensus building. And I both can't stand that stuff.

But I'm just, I think, like, this is gonna sound like I'm too my own, but, like, good enough at it and I have enough patience at it that I kind of, like, you know, I invested the time and the energy. I think a less patient person wouldn't have bothered and would have throw their hands up. But I think, honestly, a lot of it just comes down to, like, I had practice, like, 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 edtech company called Blackboard. And, like, we were 19 at the time.

When we got thrown into, like, a public, I was a senior executive at a public company that was, like, not your opponent, central tech company. It was even more difficult to kind of get things done. And so through the four years I spent there, I learned a lot about how to, like, navigate that type of environment. And so it all kind of came coming back. When I was given the 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 sort of, like, 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, right, because it becomes addicting. I think people end up feeling like, oh, wow, maybe these sacred cows we had didn't need to be so sacred. And so I think after that first year, it became a lot more fun.

It was still difficult, but it felt like we were all swimming in the same direction a lot more. But I think my takeaway there is, you can't change culture without having alignment from the top. You can't change culture. It's difficult to change culture when you have a pocket of a company trying to advocate for change. So I think we got there in the end.

We didn't move as much urgency as I think we drove. We were not fast enough. We were not bold enough. I was consistently dissatisfied with what I was achieving and what our team was achieving, but I think, you know, we did make a change. You know, like, Twitter was an organization that had a lot of sacred cows and became very calcified in its ways.

Literally, when. When, you know, in the first two years I was at the company, the stated product strategy for Twitter was refine the core. It was like, you know, don't. We're not, you know, we're not making any big bets here, team. Our goal is to keep turning the knobs that are working and listen.

As much as I was 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 rank 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?

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 sort of reticence to take any risky bets even more. So, it was a very interesting sort of 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 had changed it all. Because you would hear people. I mean, one of the beautiful things about working on Twitter as a product is that you have literally customers being injected into your veins every single day. Whatever you change about 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, is like one of the most ridiculous luxuries of product development is working on a product that that many people use, and therefore you get that much feedback around. And it was a very common thing for us to hear people say, what are you 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 that was my mission. I was like, I'm somehow ridiculously in this fortunate position that I've been entrusted some responsibility here. I might flame out completely, but hell if I don't try. And so that was both fun and exhausting, like I said.

But it was really, it was as simple as starting with, like, we are voracious users of the product ourselves, and if we aren't, by the way, that's its own problem. Like, I don't. I think that in order to build. In order to build something wonderful, like, you have to be a customer of the product. And sure, I'm sure you could point to businesses and products where that's not the case.

And I'm sure there's a flaw in that philosophy somewhere. But, like, I've always believed that one of the best ways to build products is to be a customer yourself and to find your own pain points and to build the 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. We was ripe with opportunity, and so it was actually really fun and amazing to be able to craft a plan that started to take a swing at some of these things. And the other thing I'll add to this is that there were so many sacred cows at Twitter that the sacred cows are like 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 Tron to a ranked street, 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.

Like, the notion of Lenny owning his reply space was anathema at Twitter. You know, it's just like, if a tweet gets, you know, if you get an app mention and you don't like it or it's abusive, or it's like, we're not touching that. We can't annotate tweets with community notes, all that stuff, those are all sacred cows. And, you know, the process of starting to address those one by one reveals a lot of the cultural hesitations that existed. So, yeah, I'll never forget one of the first features, and this is such a tiny feature that we worked on after I started in the role we 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 policeman and policewoman, completely unscalable and challenging, especially in the context of, like, someone replying to one of your tweets. And so we wanted to add a feature that let you hide a reply to one of your tweets.

And it's not impacting what people say. It's not impacting free speech in the sense of, like, you can still broadcast whatever you want, but if you're gonna, like, come into my reply space and say some shit that I don't want to see in my feed, like, I should be able to hide that, you know, tweet what you want, but don't mention, you can't scream in my face, basically. And I remember we had a PM on our team who was leading this feature, who, a few weeks into this project, mentioned to me that she had had a conversation with someone on the engineering team that told them, don't work on this feature. This is bad for your career, this is not going to launch, and you don't want to work on this. You don't want to be seen as having worked on this because it was so kind of anathema to, we can't let people hide replies to their tweets.

And I just remember hearing that and my blood was boiling. That is the most. It was such an interesting representation of the culture, not just hesitation to try new things, which, by the way, that product might have failed, and that's fine, but which doesn't mean you shouldn't try, but to go so far as to dissuade someone else who was excited about experimenting with the hypothesis to see if it could help customers on the platform and telling them, don't work on this, it's bad for your careers. As a microcosm, for some of the cultural challenge, we had around trying big, bold bets, which, by the way, this wasn't even a big, bold bet, it was such an innocuous thing to try, but there was a lot of that, and it made it very difficult without some sheer force of will and also just a lot of. Just a lot of effort.

So there was a lot of that. Kevin, there's like fractals of stories that I could infinitely follow. There's so much interesting stuff here, one that just stands out as this idea of the sacred cows become, like, 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.

Lenny Rachitsky
I think that's really interesting and could be a lesson to people. The other is just, I love this point you made about the growth was most accelerant when you're just focusing on the core. That's what actually people bash on. Optimizing the existing experience and just micro optimizing and improving versus trying to take all these big bold bets and experiments. Obviously that's also valuable, but I think it's really interesting that that's what reignetic growth and was responsible for growth for a while.

Kayvon Beykpour
Yeah, and continue to be. By the way, one of the lines that we had to maneuver was creating a portfolio of bets where some of them were not speculative at all. We knew that if we continue to invest in ML and getting better with recommendations in the main feed and through notifications and things like improving the onboarding flow, it was rife with opportunity. You'd have really dumb things happen. We would learn.

There's one who just bizarre and incredible meeting we had where we finally had gotten more rigorous around instrumenting our onboarding flow. And we found that in a couple of countries we had a bug with our SMS verification flow where we wanted to verify users who were signing up with phone number and our telco integration to send SMS verification codes just wasn't working. And so a huge percentage of people signing up and the UAE and other countries just couldn't use Twitter. And so, like, of course, at the scale that we were operating in, with hundreds of millions of users, you need to be able to refine the basic building blocks of the product, and that's 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.

That's what we tried to do in. Terms of what actually helped turn things around, things that I 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, creating more excitement down the oh, wow, we can actually try new things. There's also felt like there's like a sense of trust that you built with Jack and execs of just like, okay, we can actually trust this team. Also, it feels like because growth started up, there's probably a sense of like, okay, we can try some new crazy ideas. It feels like another part of your strategy was aqua hires and bringing in these, like, entrepreneurial folks to take the lead on some of these big ideas.

Lenny Rachitsky
Can you talk about that? Was that something you actively thought about? And was that a big part of the impact there? Totally, yeah. So I think a couple things.

Kayvon Beykpour
One, the only thing I'd add to what you said in terms of the ingredients, it was also just, like, storytelling and just repetitive storytelling around, like, this is the vision. These are the bets we're making, and here's why. And you can't just tell that story once I'm talking internally, by the way, there's a whole other component of this, which is externally, how do you tell, especially for a product like Twitter, where you, you know, you have. It's a consumer product that hundreds of millions of people are using, and you have many constituents. You have users, you have advertisers.

And so it was very important for us to tell the story of, like, here's what we're doing and why. Here's why you should believe in us. And by the way, give us all your constructive criticism, too, because, like, we're listening, and we're gonna build that into, you know, so that storytelling was really, really important. And, you know, there's. This is, like, oversimplifying the world, but there's two types of internal team members.

There are people who hear that story who have been a part of the organization, who's been slow, or maybe they've been outside the company as a user of Twitter, and they're like, I never really want to work there because it doesn't seem like a particularly ambitious product company. And one of two things happens when you hear that story. Either you're inspired and you're like, yeah, we can finally take a swing at making this product better. Maybe I wasn't interested in working in this company before, but this is an iconic product, and to have an opportunity to reshape it is really exciting, or, again, oversimplified world. But there are people who are very pessimistic and maybe aren't excited by that vision of, like, why?

Let's just stick to what we know works. You know what? We're not going to take any big swings. That's a waste of time. I think one of the really important things about driving cultural change at the leadership level is you 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, we didn't have the organizational structure to be able to enact that. The wagon is, they're excited and bought into this vision and want to want this to happen. Correct and contribute towards it.

And off the wagon is like, you're not at the company. And we didn't have an organizational structure that could allow for that, nor, frankly, the fortitude. I include myself in this. Like, I feel like I've learned a lot about, you know, how to make that determination. So I think we were, we were terrible at that.

And, and Elon is like, the whatever. Like, if that's a spectrum, Elon is like, the opposite spectra of that. Like, his tolerance for people who are not aligned and his tolerance for low performers is famously extremely low. And I think it's, you know, it's, it's one of the things that, when I, when I said a b test, it's, like, very interesting to see the extreme to which he has operated. And I think, like, I've learned a ton around, like, we just, you know, 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 patience, right? If you're extremely talented and you're dealing with, like, organizational bullshit, you're going to go find someplace else that lets you do your craft and have impact. It's very difficult. But anyway, going to your question, one of the things we found that was a really effective way of accelerating cultural change and also helping drive some of these product initiatives that were particularly speculative, was doing small acquires.

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 kind of misaligned with how the product worked, or it wasn't like, an easy, there was no easy staff with them to build on top of. A lot of those bets were driven by founders who we basically acquired and said, here, you're going to run this. And they believed in it.

They were able to rally a team around them. And it's all the attributes of a startup, but with the canvas of a product that hundreds of millions of people use and more resources. So 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.

Lenny Rachitsky
Right? Like Keith Coleman runs community notes, 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 sort of crowdsource moderation and letting people annotate misleading content on the platform without Twitter acting as a, a policeman.

Kayvon Beykpour
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, you know, build this vision. And then, you know, it was, it was our job to make sure that bet didn't get suffocated in the context of a big organization that would otherwise not, had not had patience for it. You know, all of the community effort or the creator efforts started with superfollows 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 sort of entrepreneurial startup muscle with the savviness to be able to get things done at a large organization. Fleets was run by Mo Oladom, who's an entrepreneur. And communities has gone through a few iterations, obviously, and still is in the product. John Barnett and a team of people who acquired from Chroma Labs. So I think that that story of acquiring hungry, ambitious founders and giving them responsibility and latitude is a success story of Twitter's history.

I mean, I'm a beneficiary of such a bet as well, right? Like, my company, periscope was acquired and I was given the responsibility to eventually lead the product team. So I feel like we ended up realizing both of the company's history and through learnings 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 and that 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? You know, and so I think I've enjoyed trying to pass the buck and do that for other people and I've never regretted it.

It's always like taking a bet on people and especially throwing them in a deep end, which on paper, they may be unqualified for, I think is 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 deep end than in other contexts. And so I think it's a fantastic. It's an expensive strategy if you're going to go buy a bunch of companies, but it's a great strategy for the situation that we found ourselves in on twitter.

Lenny Rachitsky
It feels like every big bet was like one of these companies from the list that you just shared. And I'm glad you shared periscope, obviously, that's a great example, too. I guess maybe just a follow up question here. Is there anything you learned about how to do this? Well, I know you talked about maybe creating a little silo for the team because so many companies acquire an acquihire and they just go nowhere.

So I guess just like a two part question, just like, what are some tips for how to do this? Well at a company? And then two, you also, we were talking offline about this previously, and I think it's a really interesting point that a lot of companies staff based on who's available versus who is right for the role. And let's wait until then that person is there for us to bet on this. You just talk about lessons there.

Kayvon Beykpour
Yeah. The last one is like a huge pet peeve of mine that I feel like we learned the hard way. And it's particularly, it's a common pattern, I think, in highly functional organizations where you have different, different people making decisions on how to staff projects. And there's nothing inherently wrong with that. But I think in the situations we, in the situation we found ourselves in, where we had this sort of cultural evolution that we were going through, where some people just didn't agree with the things that we were prioritizing, they're sort of like begrudgingly going along with it.

But you would end up in a situation where the combination of that sort of cultural shift in 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 a team resulted in a situation where oftentimes we'd have projects like the one I mentioned about hiding replies, where there wasn't even agreement on the team about whether this was a good idea and whether this is worth trying or how to do it. And imagine it's hard enough to build something from nothing. It's even harder if the team doesn't believe in it.

This is to the point of just being toxic. A startup would never succeed if all the people who are working on that startup aren't like, to the point of being perhaps irrational, obsessed with that idea and still willing to see truth. Like 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. 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 not even, it's quite intuitive, actually, is like you need to staff projects with a team of people that are well equipped from a skillset standpoint, but more importantly have an obsession with the idea of they want to pursue, it's going to make them work harder, it's going to make them be more creative, it's going to make them have the sufficient level of ambition and desire to will this thing into existence. Because every project, whether big or small, there is an element of you need to will this thing into existence because it's hard, right? 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
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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 like maybe one of the most recurring controversies of the podcast is like, is jobs to be done amazing, or is it really bad and not something you should do?

We've had many guests share their opinions. I feel like at Twitter it like, drops to be done was implemented so strictly that it burned a lot of people out on. It's like, oh my God, this is not anything anyone should ever do. I'm curious, just your lessons and experience of just with frameworks in general, the jobs to be done specifically, maybe even okrs. I've only seen one interview on your show that covers this, and it's, you know, 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 without jobs to be done.

Kayvon Beykpour
I mean, I guess I'll just start by saying like, I was not a fan of how we leverage jobs to be done at Twitter. I thought it was exhausting and not particularly helpful. And so it's a particularly sore subject for me because I was sort of charged with defending it and rolling it out. It's hard to do that when you don't really believe in something. But to me, the critique is less about jobs to be done, though there are many critiques of it, and more, about every framework at its limit is followed to such a religious extent is just unhelpful.

You need to have nuance in how you leverage these frameworks. Otherwise people, you lose the forest through the trees and you end up following a process for the sake of following a process. And that's what happened with jobs to be done. So I think that's my real critique of it. It's not the.

I mean, listen, the premise of jobs to be done, and my most charitable take on jobs to be done, which is actually useful, is that it forces you to look at things through the lens of customers and understanding what their needs are and understanding what their true alternatives are outside of the narrow lens of your product. And I think that's just like healthy product thinking. You don't need a framework called jobs to be done, or 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 like my charitable view on what jobs to be done can help you do, but as a framework into and of itself as a sole governing principle of what to build, it's just not useful.

By the way, in the same way as, and I think Twitter had this problem as well prior to our detour around jobs to be done. If the only way the organization is trained to think about what to build and what not to build is okrs, it's equally unhelpful at the limit, because sure, you can have a good sense of what you should build to drive metrics, but by the way, you might be focusing on the right wrong metrics. 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. Just as an interesting example, the thing that I remember about your interview with Sriram, if I'm not mistaken, I think he mentioned, and I love Srim, I'd be happy to debate him about this on his podcast.

But he mentioned one of the examples I think was the Amazon. Amazon doesn't send you when you get order confirmations from Amazon. They intentionally bury the order details. You 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 Sriram, you actually mentioned this on your podcast as well, you need to be able to make trade off decisions that balance what's right for the organization and what's right for the customer.

And sometimes, based on how you devise your frameworks, your metrics aren't actually aligned with the customer's benefit. Like the Amazon example. And we had many famous examples in Twitter's history which were the same. One of our key metrics that we always optimized around growing was DaU. And we had, obviously the rank timeline did wonders for growing DaU, and it was a great experience for many customers.

But we often had features that would not lead to a good customer experience, and the team would just be blind towards leaving hostile customer experiences in place because it was good for metrics and aggregate. The famous example of this is we had this toggle, which we called swish, very affectionately, but it was like a sparkle icon before you could switch between the rank timeline and the following, that reverse chronological timeline, which is still in the product right now, it was just a toggle. You would press a button and it would turn your feed reverse cron, which very few people used as a percentage of our users. But you had power users who really cared about having a reverse chronological timeline. And we had, you know, we took so many baby steps on the evolution of this product.

But the very first baby step was you press the toggle, it turns you to reverse Cron. And then we would pull the rug out from underneath you and make the experience go back to the ranked timeline after, like, I don't know, 24 hours or something like that. Oh, wow. And the reason that the team felt strongly about keeping it this way is because it was better for metrics. Why?

Like, even if Lenny wants a reverse cron feed, we knew that he would spend more time in the app if we put them in the rank timeline. And this was like 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 cron. Stop randomly changing it for me. Instagram has, I think, gone through their own struggles with this as well.

They sort of tiptoed their way towards ultimately giving people control. The difficulty in making product decisions comes down ultimately to making these trade off decisions. You have to look at things through the lens of the customer. You have to balance that with what's driving the right business outcomes. And sometimes those things are aligned and sometimes they're not.

The answer isn't any one framework. Sometimes it's just good old fashioned judgment and product taste. That's where my take is different. I don't think the issue is jobs to be done, although I'm not, 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
I think that's really important advice and I love hearing the details. If I actually think about this stuff, actually finding these 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 implemented this too religiously, and maybe you should be thinking a little more broadly. There's two, I think, simple and obvious ones. One is if the result of your framework is that subjectively bad decisions are being made, then something's got to change, right?

Kayvon Beykpour
Like assuming you have the person who's making this assessment has good product taste, which is in of itself subjective, obviously. But my personal view on this would be like in the role that I had, if I saw that our organization was being incentivized to make decisions that to some non trivial degree of the time, where just bad decisions that I don't like as a user, I can't stand by as a user or builder, then something's got to change. Either bad judgment was made in following the process, or the process was wrong, or if that framework didn't even lead to the right debates, then that's how you know either you have an incentive problem and the team did what they were incentivized to do, or there is bad judgment. And that's a different problem, obviously. But I think in the situation we found ourselves in, where the team was, again understandably hyper focused on driving dau, because that was the strategy for so long, it left so little room for even taking ambitious bets that in the short term wouldn't drive dau.

Some of our bets that I still to this day believe in, hurt dau in the short term. But you had to squint and believe over time would improve some metric, dau or otherwise. A product like spaces. In order for spaces to be actually used, you needed to make sure that when Lenny starts a space that people would join. And how do you get people to join Lenny's space when they're used to having an asynchronous feed of tweets?

Well, you can send push notifications, you can occupy really prime real estate at the top of the app that lets people know, hey, Lenny's live right now. He's in a space. There's people here. Come join. Guess what me 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 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 like, 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 like disincentivized to make successful, then something's got to change. Either your strategy is just not the right strategy because it doesn't abide by the frameworks, or the framework needs to accommodate the fact that actually we're going to try some things that in the short term either might not show up as blips on our dau radar or are going to help some other metric that's important.

And so that took us some time to get. 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, you don't like, don't worry about the okrs. We're not going to judge you on the basis of your okrs.

And there's some pros and cons to that. A lot of our projects work 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. 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 got to be willing to make adjustments when it's not working.

Lenny Rachitsky
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
Before Periscope launched publicly, which is 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. In that time, while we were still in beta, I was personally onboarding. I was trying to personally onboard every single user. I had a shtick that I did, which was, we get them in the app and I would start a broadcast. We had a feature called private broadcasting that we basically built for this use case, which is someone joins, I'm going to go live, and they're going to join them and show them how the app works.

We were spending a lot of time in our office.

Chris Sacca actually invited Coby to the beta. Chris connected us, and I did a private broadcast, and Coby joins, and it was like 10:00 p.m. In the office. And my routine was like, let me just walk around the office, kind of like talking through the mechanics of periscope through the lens of this demo of like, hey, let me show you around the office. And like, here's how the chat works.

And you can tap the screen to send hearts. And if you want me to do something like, go to. Go to the room over there, just type it in the chat and it'll come up. And it sort of showed the, one of the things that was unique about periscope was, you know, it was a multi, it was a one to many broadcast, but still low latency enough that it felt like a Facetime, so you could have the bi directional 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 posted 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. And, like, 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. It was. I mean, Coby's a legend, obviously, but, like, to have that, to have him essentially troll me while also, like, putting a point on, like, what was cool about the experience and that was like, bi directional and, like, something he commented on could cause the broadcaster to kind of like, change their behavior or change their. Changed the experience. It was like a really ironic full circle of showing off how the product works.

But yeah, it's one of my favorite early periscope stories. Oh, man, if I kept doing that manual onboarding, I'd be like, who's coming? You're just always worried that someone else fancy is going to join. You never know what Chris Saka is getting, who he's talking to. That's amazing.

Lenny Rachitsky
Okay, so it's been about ten years, I believe, since you sold Periscope and about six years ish since you stopped running it as co, something like that. Now, as I shared, every single platform basically is doing this. They added live video streaming. I'm curious if there's anything you learn about just competing with these major platforms. Well, there's a few reasons why periscope failed, ultimately, and why we shut down the app.

Kayvon Beykpour
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.

For Twitter it was very. Or for periscope, it was interesting because every month or two we would kind of blow up in a new market that would just bring along an incredible surge in usage. We blew up in the US, we then blew up in France, we then blew up in Turkey, we then blew up in the Middle east. 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 sort of connects to one of the reasons why I feel like one of my learnings and one of the things that we knew, but just failed to execute on was that I still am very skeptical that there can be a consumer product that is just focused on live video, like a generalized synchronous live video application for short form video I don't think can be durable on its own.

I think you have to surround that product with enough features and capabilities to allow a community and an ecosystem of users to be able to stay in touch with one another asynchronously and synchronously. This is why a lot of the other products that you mentioned that incorporate live capabilities and were 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, like Instagram. It's an asynchronous product that has synchronous features like live. Same with TikTok, obviously. And I think we were in this position where it was a live only product.

Like, you know, 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. Consumer products that focus on a specific vertical, like whatnot for selling or twitch for gaming, that have very different properties that make it more durable as a standalone live product. But periscope was really in this sort of consumer generalized live streaming from a phone land, and I think it was just not durable to have the product be live only.

And the time it took us to integrate with Twitter was way too long. And there was reasons for that that come down to just how distracted Twitter was with its own roadmap refining the core, and they just had other fish to fry, basically. And all of that leads us to competition, because at some point Facebook woke up and decided, this is cool and we need to go build this. And obviously it 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.

Lenny Rachitsky
Product as a first experience, I don't know. And, you know, if you have that level of organizational effort put on building something that, by the way, isn't even like, there's no, you don't have to spend any time wondering what the product looks like, just go like, copy these features basically, and make them, make them work. And they did a lot of other savvy things too, from a partnership standpoint. Like we had a lot of prominent streamers that ranged from kind of like influencer or just creative people that became known on periscopes all the way up to celebrities like Kevin Hart and, and others who were like prolific periscopers that Facebook just went and bought out. They were just like, cool, we're going to pay you a bunch of money to stream exclusively with us.

Kayvon Beykpour
So they kind of hit us from all sides. They had the entire company put their effort towards building live in a way that was cohesive in the core product, first with Facebook and then Instagram, and then also attacked it from the creator side as well. 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 vinegar. 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. They were phenomenal at spotting meaningful changes in consumer behavior, consumer social behavior, and actually putting their money where their mouth is in terms of trying to follow through on bringing those bets in house, but then botching the execution. And so that was one of the things that was really motivating for me when I was in my role leading product of Twitter was like, I didn't want to make that mistake and we didn't end up buying anything as we end up buying anything like vine or periscope and keeping the product in house. We obviously bought lots of small aqua hires, but, you know, we did.

We did obviously have a bit of a story with clubhouse that ended up with us building, you know, building spaces and competing with them. But anyway, that was long, rambly story. Hopefully that answered your question. Yeah, there's so many. Again, it's all these fractals of threads I want to follow and ask about real quick on the vine and periscope point.

Lenny Rachitsky
I was going to ask this. Twitter, as you said, had the opportunity to win in video in so many ways. Vine was amazing. Killing everyone loved it. And then it's like, they do, I guess you already shared a lot of challenges Twitter had with executing, shipping sacred cows, things like that.

Is there anything specific with video? Was it just like, oh, this is not actually a huge priority and we're just going to kind of write it for now and that's why it didn't work out. Or is there anything more that. No, it's even more like pathetic than that, because I think Twitter did believe in video, but it made this classical mistake that we also unfortunately recreated with Periscope, which was they had the insight around shortfall video. They bought vine, they then competed with vine internally.

Kayvon Beykpour
So vine was a separate organization within Twitter, separate office, obviously, in New York. And then Twitter, rather than integrate it 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 the simple act of uploading video and of 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 fundamentally competing with. You had two visions for short form video that were manifesting, and that's the quickest way for things to get messy.

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, user generated content being streamed from a phone. Twitter then decided to get in the premium live video business very famously with acquiring rights to Thursday Night Football, the NFL.

Guess what happened? We competed internally rather than have a cohesive technical and product vision for how to embrace live video. Across the spectrum of UGC and premium live video, Twitter put a separate team in charge of premium with a separate product, separate technology stack. And so you had like two ways to manifest live video on the product. It was like you just see live video, which was kind of like awkwardly not even really implemented well with Twitter at the time.

And then premium live video, which had totally different ux, total different team, totally different architecture. And by the way, like, 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, within 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, right?

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? ESPN can go live with behind the scenes content at Wimbledon and it's like the same technology stack and the same user experience. The powers Lenny going live from his iPhone. But I think that was one of the reasons why it was an example of failed execution that ended up wasting time, resources and just leading to a subpar product experience that other companies, I think, have avoided making such mistakes.

Facebook being a prime example, as frustrated I am with them as a competitor for having, you know, really taken over the use case for live video. Gotta hand it to them, brilliant execution, have a lot of respect for them. So we made sure to not make that mistake moving forward. I imagine there was reason for that. Partly.

Lenny Rachitsky
I imagine this calcification of just like, we can't get you done, we just need to start a new team and do this thing. Like I imagine always comes from like, oh, this makes sense. And then you realize, okay, this was a terrible idea down the road. Yeah, it's that and also leadership. When you don't have unified leadership around these things, you end up making decisions that are in conflict with one another.

Kayvon Beykpour
They just mean a highly opinionated person at the top that avoids that kind of messiness from a product and engineering standpoint. You mentioned clubhouse, so I think what's interesting is one, many people copied periscope as a product. I don't know if you'll describe it as copying, but it feels like spaces. Very inspired by clubhouse. Do you have 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.

I think it's always about doing the right thing for the customer. And there's, you know, everyone has always been shamelessly inspired by other people's ideas. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I think copying ideas can be done in poor taste and can be done with taste. I think some of the people who copied periscope did so in poor taste.

Can't blame them. I just 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. 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 is 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. It was a mechanism for teleportation. You could see through someone else's eyes and be teleported somewhere else. It was like, that was the story we told ourselves.

That was the thing that inspired periscope. And to a certain extent, a lot of people did use the product for that way you could go see what it was like someplace in the world where there was something amazing happening or civil unrest happening or. Or some important moment happening with breaking news or otherwise. But it turns out the vast majority of our users were not using periscope that way. 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 sort of lead to much depth. 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 code named Hydra. Hydra. Because there are multiple heads on this monster, and those heads are participants in a conversation. And so, well before Clubhouse was on the map, we had many different iterations of both video and audio only experiences that just didn't feel right, weren't working right, but we kind of felt like we were onto something. And when Clubhouse kind of came on the map, it really recentered.

It put into focus a user experience that felt a lot more right. And I'll 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. We were, you know, we took the ideas that we felt were shortcuts to making the experience work, and then we put our own spin on it. And so I have no problems with what we did there. And having had. Having had experienced the pain of not moving quickly enough with vine from the outside and periscope, having lived that experience, you know, we were not willing to not the winner with this use case.

And so we put like. It was one of the projects I'm most proud of, that we worked on at Twitter, because we were very radical in our execution.

Hydro went from this tiny project that six people were working on that no one knew or care about to. We made space as the number one priority of the company, literally, like, above any other project, period. And we put a bunch of people on accelerating that product and making it come to life within Twitter. A lot of that was having felt the pain and burn of fucking this up with vine and periscope. I'm really proud of our execution, and it was also really energizing, I hope, for the company to see.

Wow, we pulled that off.

It was nice to, it was nice to have that full circle experience, and also nice that, personally, I love that aspects of periscope continue living on within Twitter. I did not know that. That is extremely interesting. And speaking full circle, when I joined Clubhouse the first time, Paul was there introducing me to clubhouse in exactly the way you described periscope. So I feel like he drew some inspiration from you.

Lenny Rachitsky
One step back. Paul's amazing. I feel like we're kindred spirits, and I could see the, it was one of the things I love about that team is just, you could just feel how palpable their excitement was and their passion was for what they were building, you know, another universe. We could have. We could have worked together more closely, but I think what they built wasn't.

Kayvon Beykpour
Was incredible. And we took inspiration from it, for sure. And, yeah, so you've built some of. The most successful, most beloved, most used consumer products. You continue to help other founders with their product.

Lenny Rachitsky
I'm curious, just if you have any advice for how to get better at building consumer products in terms of maybe craft a product, product sense, what have you learned about what it takes to build a successful consumer product? The best cheat codes for getting better at building products is just being a voracious user of products and just trying new things, feeling out what works well, what doesn't, what you like, what you don't like. There's just no replacement for that. It's such 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.

Kayvon Beykpour
And so I think there's not a lot of science to it. I think, obviously, science can help you become more effective at lots of things. But I feel like I've just always been very curious about trying new things. I'm a very hungry consumer of new things that people are building, and I'm not quick to judge. I'll try it, even if it seems dumb, because sometimes things that seem dumb at the beginning become very meaningful.

And so it's always been a very helpful cheat code for me. And it's also just personally interesting. I'm always like every tool, even the silly ones. People put their heart and soul into it, and it's like an expression of themselves. And it's always interesting to see that, to see people's creations and to learn from them and see what you like, what you don't like, and how you might create something of your own that borrows from that.

So if I could give people any advice through the lens of what's worked for me, it's that. Speaking of trying new things, what are you up to these days? Building something in the consumer space. I started the company with a couple 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 like building something with a small team again after kind of seeing the opposite extreme with a really large, large company. We just talked about lots of large company things, but, yeah, hopefully you'll be hearing about it soon. Oh, man, I think this is breaking news. So mysterious and exciting. Kevon, is there anything else you wanted to share or leave listeners with before we get to our very exciting lightning round?

No, no, I think we've covered. We've covered quite a bit. We have. We have indeed. With that, we've reached our very exciting lightning round.

Lenny Rachitsky
Are you ready? I'm going to take a sip of water and then I'll be ready. Okay, here we go. First question. What are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people?

Kayvon Beykpour
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 Kryptonomicon I love ream Dee. I love a book called Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothkis, which is more like a fantasy fantasy book. But I just love kind of escaping reality and thinking about Sci-fi thinking about fantasy is just, it's helpful for the soul and helpful for the imagination.

So those are, those are some of my favorite reads because it helps me, I feel like in some weird, circular or wandering way, it helps 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 helped motivate my curiosity. And a lot of things I built is Sci-Fi TV. Right? Like, 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, or content has always been inspirational for me.

And I think getting that through books is really healthy. On that note, is there a favorite recent movie or tv show that's inspired you in addition to Star Trek? Back in the day? I mean, most recent movie I saw in theaters was Dune too, and it was incredible. I just saw that.

Lenny Rachitsky
It's insane. I also thought Oppenheimer was. I'm a huge Nolan fan. Oppenheimer was captivating. To have that level of high octane in a biopic consistently for like two and a half hours is like so hard to pull off.

Kayvon Beykpour
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
I haven't heard of that. Have you seen three body problem yet, by the way? Feels like it's squarely in your wheelhouse. I haven't seen it yet. And it's funny.

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

Lenny Rachitsky
Do you have a favorite, any big question that you like to ask candidates you're hiring? The thing that I find is both very illustrative and helpful is just asking people to talk about something they worked on that failed and talk about something they built that that succeeded as well. But I think you just learn a lot about someone's self reflection and their passions, but in particular their self reflection. If they talk through something that they really cared deeply about, that didn't work and why didn't it work? What were the takeaways?

Kayvon Beykpour
What did you learn from it? I think it teaches you about how willing people are to take risks. It tells you, have they experienced failure? What they learned from failure? So I think it's always, you just get to know someone really well.

It's like a well rounded, it ends up in a well rounded understanding of a person, if you can dig into that. Is there a favorite product you recently discovered that you really like? I love perplexity. It's really interesting to me how like perplexity is. Perplexity is a product that fits in your life and replaces a product that is so ingrained in people's behavior, which is using Google search for some set of use cases.

And it's just really incredible to me how quickly perplexity took that over. It's very hard actually to rewire your muscle memory if you're used to using Google for something, for searching for 1520 years or whatever. It was just amazing to me how quickly my go to became perplexity. Frankly, it's one of the only non development tool AI products that actually has retained a lot of people trying consumer AI products that just aren't really haven't retained. But perplexity is one that, it's a daily driver for me.

It's on my home screen and I love it. I'm very impressed by it. Also a huge fan. Yeah, here's a biased one. My wife is actually working on a startup called particle, and they're reimagining the news experience with AI.

What I love about what they're doing is that for the first time they're sort of like they've rethought what the form factor and the unit of content for news stories should be. 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, hash biasedhusband.

But it's amazing. It's in beta right now. You can sign up on the waitlist. The URL is particlenews AI. They're letting people in on beta.

If you sign up, use a coupon code. Hash kvonlenny. That's not a real code, but yeah, so that's amazing. So that'll be my second pick. I'll give you a non software one, which is actually a board game that I ran into that I was gifted, actually, for my birthday, and it's called croconal.

Have you heard of this game called Croconal? I have not. So croquenol is like a canadian, I think it's a canadian board game. And it's amazing to me because I've never seen a game be captivating to all age ranges. I love it.

I play with my friends. My parents over Christmas were obsessed with this game my daughter loves. It's like a physical game. You kind of like flick a puck, kind of like shuffleboard style, but like miniaturized with a totally different set of mechanics. And it was just like, seeing this game captivate people of all age ranges is.

Was mind blowing to me. And it's just, and it's really fun. So maybe a curveball answer for you there, but I think those are some of the products that I've been really enjoying and appreciating lately. These are all, these are awesome answers. What's the name of that game again?

I'm gonna prokonal. Prokonol. Okay. I don't know how to spell it, but I'm sure google will help me figure it out. We'll link to it in the show notes.

C r o k I n o l e. Great. I love the k in there. That makes it really fun. And by the way, I think it's also particle news.

Lenny Rachitsky
I'm looking at it. It's so cool. It's basically bullet points of news items and then links to all the articles that have written about it. So it kind of just summarizes, here's the things you need to know and it's beautiful. They basically, they consume and aggregate everything that's happening in the world by, among other things, ingesting articles and then crafting these story modules through them that are summarized by AI.

Kayvon Beykpour
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's very cool. I'll definitely get you into beta.

Lenny Rachitsky
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
Something that definitely shaped my work ethic and how I work. That came from my first boss, actually. When I was, like, 14, I had a summer job basically replacing and doing maintenance on fire extinguishers. So I would, like, drive in 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 amounts. It was just, like, first work experience.

And I remember there was this moment that I had finished, like, dealing with my extinguishers, and I was just kind of, like, sitting in his truck, kind of like twiddling my thumbs, doing nothing. And my boss came up to me and was like, when you've got nothing to do sweep, like, never sit around and that. It was so funny because it was this, like, very tiny moment. But I've never, ever forgotten that, like, when you got nothing to do sweep. And it was.

Had such a profound impact on my work ethic of, like, there's always something you can be doing to move the ball forward and being productive and being impactful. And, you know, I'm so grateful that Fred, my boss, you know, had that moment with me. Cause it was like, I don't even think he understands how impactful that was. But it's. It's not so much a life motto, but it's.

It definitely stuck with me and shaped. Shaped how I work. I love that you shared that story. I was gonna. I found that quote and story in GQ magazine, turns out, is where you talked about this, and I was gonna ask about it, and I didn't.

Lenny Rachitsky
And I'm glad you shared it because I love it. Final question. We're gonna go full circle. Scott Belsky, you're friends with him. What's something people would be surprised about or don't know about Scott.

That might be interesting. Well, I'll tell you one funny story and then I'll, 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, going from packaged software to cloud, going from non AI to AI, going from discrete tools to an integrated suite that worked really elegantly together.

Kayvon Beykpour
I think Scott oversaw a lot of this stuff and it's pretty incredible to see that transformation have been so successful at Adobe. I love that. The thing, I guess a funny story about Scott that people might not know. I consider him to have been the first periscoper. 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 like what, you know, what it looked like there. You know, our vision was still to like help you see through someone else's eyes. But the first manifestation was really static and had this like marketplace dynamic.

And, you know, it took us a while to get to the point where we like press a button, go live and have it be live video because by definition it's like real time rather than static. Anyways, before we built any of that, when we were kind of like playing with the idea and Scott was really encouraging us to go in this direction. I remember 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, 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 like 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 me 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.

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

Lenny Rachitsky
And actually using the product, not just talking about it. Yeah, he's a great example of that as well. He's definitely a voracious user of all tools and products. That's why he has really great, really great product sense. Kevon, you're amazing.

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

If there's things you want to follow up on, potentially. And then how can listeners be useful to you? People can find me on Twitter x, whatever we're calling it these days. My handle is caves. Kayvz.

Kayvon Beykpour
And yeah, if you're this podcast and you're working on something cool and you need some help or advice or you're looking for an angel investor, don't hesitate to reach out and would love to try what you're building. Amazing. And also check out particle news. There you go. Support the wife.

Exactly. Amazing. All right, Kevon, thank you so much for being here. Thanks, Lenny. Great to meet you.

Lenny Rachitsky
Hi, everyone.

Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show@lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode.