a16z Podcast - a16z Podcast: I Reject the Term Viral Video

Episode Date: March 11, 2016

YouTube star Casey Neistat rejects the term “viral video,” which is strange because he’s had more than his share of internet monsters. To say I want to make a viral movie, is like a musician saying I want to make a hit song -- it’s just not a good place to start, Neistat says, paraphrasing a point made on Twitter. So how does Neistat start? How does he both attract an audience of millions, and keep them coming back on a daily basis? Neistat is joined on this segment of the pod by Bailey Richardson, one of the early team members at Instagram. With the tools of production available to everyone, how do you create something that people will stop and pay attention to? Neistat does it by ripping up the snowy streets of New York on a snowboard towed behind a jeep, but what about the rest of us?

Welcome to the A16Z podcast. I'm Michael Copeland. YouTube star Casey Nystatt rejects the term viral video, which is strange because he's had more than his share of internet monsters. To say I want to make a viral movie is like a musician saying, I want to make a hit song. It's just not a good place to start, Nystead says. So how does Nystatt start? How does he both attract an audience of millions and keep them coming back on a daily basis. NYSTAD is joined on this segment of the pod by Bailey Richardson, one of the early team members at Instagram.

With the tools of production available to everyone, how do you create something that people will stop and pay attention to? NYSTAT does it by ripping up the snowy streets of New York on a snowboard towed behind a Jeep. But what about the rest of us? Bailey Richardson starts the conversation. Awesome, you guys. Thanks so much for coming out. Well, I wanted to ask Casey.

So we kind of come from a little bit of two different sides of the aisle. Working at Instagram really early on, one of the things that we did was we put people on suggested users, we wrote about them, and if you weren't already famous, if you weren't Kim Kardashian or Justin Bieber, that was sort of the only way for you to get exposure on the platform at the beginning. That was a very curated platform, and I wanted to ask you, I think YouTube, your perspective with, especially with YouTube, is that it's pretty, egalitarian and that virality is maybe something that isn't so magic or isn't so controlled by the platform. I just wanted to ask you, you know, how do you define virality today or getting to the point where you can make content that goes viral? What does that mean? I'm not a huge fan of the word viral.

This, somebody tweeted this today and the chance that somebody in here read that somebody else tweeted this today, so I can't claim this is my own quote, but it's a really good quote. To say I want to make a viral movie as like a musician sitting down and saying I want to make a hit song. It's just not a good place to start. I think the best place to start is I want to make a really good movie.

And then sometimes it will go viral. And there are certain sort of zeitgeist you can hit within there that will increase your chances of virality. But beyond that, it has to do with how the content resonates with an audience in order to promote that virality. And certainly, like, what is most attractive

to me about YouTube as a platform, and I should say every time I say YouTube I'm more referring to broadly internet video YouTube just happens to be sort of the arbiter of that right now but it is democratic it is fair one example I like to give is when I started my YouTube channel that I have now I had a show on HBO that was premiering a new episode every single week with a multimillion-dollar marketing budget behind it but I was putting new videos up on YouTube as often as I could

and I was getting like 200 views, 500 views. Like my 13-year-old kid at the time had friends that he was in middle school with that had bigger YouTube channels than I did. So despite that sort of that celebrity that I had from mainstream media, it didn't transfer over. And it was only when I had really explosive videos, videos that popped, that I was able to grow, meaning that like with all of my sort of leverage that I had accrued in my career,

it didn't translate to viewership until I started making content that people really wanted to see. And what do you think it is about the content that pop? Do you have any sense of what were those videos and what made them special? Well, sure. I think that my YouTube channel exploded in 2010, 2011, when I put a movie out there called Bike Lanes, which was right when there was all this controversy, all this discussion,

it was actually in San Francisco and in New York, around the city really heavy-handedly putting bike lanes everywhere. and I made a video about the bike lanes where I get a ticket from a police officer for riding my bike outside of the bike lanes which is not a violation and my argument was like the bike lanes are blocked so I made a video where I ride my bike in the bike lanes

and I do not leave the bike lanes no matter what is in front of me including a parked cop car that I run into at full speed and go right over the handlebars I should definitely watch this one after the event I burst out laughing. Yeah so that video is done I think close to 20 million views

but that video was put online and Michael Bloomberg had to answer to that video on a press conference the same day. It was just exploded so quickly. But again, that's a really good example of touching on a bunch of really capturing the zeitgeist at the moment. It was something people were desperate to talk about. They needed something to be a centerpiece of that conversation. Here's a video that like every 11-year-old in the country thinks it's hysterical. I think one thing I've heard you talk about, too, that I thought was really interesting was that you say you seek out conflict or you seek out sort of that that thing, that button

that everyone's frustrated with, but they're not really quite aware that they're frustrated with. And I feel like bike lane is a good example of that. And it's something that innately we all want to say, hey, this happened to you too. Remember this? Yeah, I think bike lane is probably the best example of that, because you could, at the time, you could search, I think New York Times wrote an article, and it was just about this. You could search on YouTube, like, bikers versus cops. And there were a thousand videos of pissed off bikers screaming at cops about getting a ticket

that they were wrongly given. But nobody wants to see that. Like, that's not interesting. But the idea of, like, physical humor, which is, like, always watching somebody get hurt is always funny. And then, like, cool music, making it fun to watch, making it palatable. So, like, okay, I'll give you two and a half minutes of my time.

And then attaching that to a social issue that is relevant enough to make me click play in the first place. Those things, by the way, are, like, fucking moons aligning with Pluto. Like, they are the greatest anomaly. And if I knew how to prescribe them, that's all I do. But they're way outside of anyone's person's control. And that's why I reject sort of the term of making a viral video. It's because to find the opportunities to create something that hits on all of those things is incredibly elusive.

Yeah, and you talk a lot about quantity, too, just encouraging people. Like, you started vlogging every single day, and that changed your audience numbers massively. But can you talk a little bit about why you believe that people just need to be, or like, if you want to build an audience, by creating a lot of content is something that you think works well for people? Sure, yeah. So literally my first five years on YouTube were just making short films. Short films like that, short films that varied from a subject matter perspective greatly. And I put one out roughly every three weeks.

They did huge numbers. They would do several hundred thousand into the tens of millions of views, wildly successful. But in five years, I accrued 500,000. subscribers and 100 million views, which made me a runaway success. I switched to daily content, and in the next five months, I grew another 500,000 subscribers. So it took me five years. I duplicated in five months. In the next five weeks, I got my next 500,000 subscribers. And now I think I'm close to 400 million views, that's 300 million of which I've gotten in the last

300 days. So I think that it's, what I learned from that is that it's, it's the content is important. It's the most important thing. But a really close second is the relationship that you can form uniquely on the internet with an audience. And nothing else really affords you that opportunity. Nothing in mainstream media. I don't know of another outlet that enables you to have such a dynamic relationship with an audience as YouTube. It's six, to 10 minutes a day that a million and a half people are spending with me, which makes interactions in the street really weird. But it's a really great way to build an audience. It seems like you handle it. You're pretty social with everyone naturally. But one thing I wanted

to ask you about, too, is Casey also had his own HBO show, and you've made films in the past. You've done a lot of, you've done commercial work, and now you call yourself a YouTuber. That's the bio that you choose to take on, and part of it is because of how you're you feel about the audience relationship and will you just talk a little bit about about why youtube specifically and why you prefer that mode of working sure um yeah my background is very traditional media um the last feature film i made premiered at the can film festival premiered in north america at sundance it won an independent spirit award that like the parents got to watch me get on tv and it was a very theatrical distribution um my hbo show i wrote directed and produced and started

and it was premiered in HBO, it was a big deal. And I was probably like, I'd achieved a level of success in the mainstream media that I had sought my entire career. And in that same mainstream media, the idea of being a YouTuber is a really dirty word. It's something that's looked down upon. At least that's like my own insecure perspective on it.

And it wasn't until really this year that I started to reject this term of being a filmmaker. and now I only want to be known as a YouTuber. That's all I want to be identified as. And the reason why, and this is something I just experienced that I just sort of came into vivid focus for me, is mainstream

media, where I was anyways, that is television and feature films, it is a one-way street. It is a one-way conversation. It's me talking to you, and that's where it ends. And YouTube, YouTube is a symbiotic relationship between the creator and the audience.

It's a symbiotic relationship that's built on a democratic, egalitarian platform that everyone has the same entry point on. And when it comes to sort of the romance, the power, the, what moving images, what videos, what movies are capable of, I don't know of like a more sort of beautiful idea of what can be accomplished with that than what's happening on YouTube, on the internet right now. So like, I don't care about 800, like, snobby Frenchmen sitting in a theater watching my movie on screen. I care about, like, the 11-year-old kid sitting.

in the corner of the classroom with his white headphone in one ear, hiding his cell phone in his book, watching my vlog like that, that is a much more profound relationship with the content than even watching in the theater. So for me, like, there is no higher watermark in the world of filmmaking than what it means to succeed on the internet, what it means to succeed on YouTube, and that's why I embrace that title. And how do you interact with your audience back the other direction besides just producing content for them? Do you meet them in person ever? Do you do in-person stuff or just responding online? In-person stuff is terrifying.

You have no idea where it's like to be around like 5,000 people who know everything about you and you have no idea who they are. No, I did one meet-up in my entire career, and it was last year at VidCon, and we had 18 security people, like 18 bodyguards, and then they had to call in six more, and they were all overrun. It was absolute chaos. It was just like that movie World War Z. So those make me uncomfortable. But no, mechanically, like, there are some really great tools out there. Twitter is probably my favorite, and it's my favorite because it's the easiest. It's also my favorite because I'm able to, at a glance, see what questions are being asked,

what's coming my way, and then pick out what I see is, like, if one person asks me something, like that person cares. But if 100 people ask me a same version, a different version of the same question, then that's a question that I probably answer. and I can answer it in a forum that is public. Do you have an example of one of those that you feel like you just all of a sudden got asked a ton? Sure, like a lot of the technical questions.

You know, something I preach from all of my vlogs is this idea that the gear doesn't matter. It's what you can do with it. And that's always followed up by a lot of insecure kids being like, my parents will only buy me or I only have this. So when I see those questions surfacing, I try to answer them in the most sort of forward

and dynamic way possible that just shuts down the conversation. that's like, you're good. You've got a cell phone, you're good. Like, you've got your mom's old, like, elf camera that shoots it. You're good. Like, you got it. Like, it doesn't matter.

Like, this week, the thing that I said that really was, like, Citizen Kane and the Godfather two were edited using scissors and tape. If you've got, like, I'm moving on your mom's old iPhone, you're good. And, like, the opportunity to be able to communicate that to a really broad audience by answering one question is something that I look for. Yeah, and you'll make, I've seen YouTube videos where you address these kinds of questions, so you'll go full on and produce something for a day, which is awesome. And I also wanted to ask you, do you feel like you have a sense of who your audience is?

Is it sort of intuitive, or do you look at information at all? I do, I look at all the information. But there's nothing as powerful, sort of the anecdotal experiences that you have. Yeah. If you ask me, I'm like, no, it's a million 13-year-old kids, 13-year-old boys. but like I was walking my daughter through Tribeca this weekend struggling to put the plastic bag reverse stroller so it's five degrees outside

and like I see this mom pushing a double stroller hunched over and she looks at me and gives you that me that look that I can recognize from mile away and puts her head down and she's like I love your blogs and it's like I was like finally I've like penetrated the Tribeca of mom demographic universal appeal

but like that to me is hugely flat like the flight attendant on last night's flight. Yeah. And it's like, so that's where it's really interesting to me. And nothing underscores sort of the power of the internet like something, like an experience, an interaction like that. So what that means is like, no, it's not just a million teenagers on the other side,

but this is now becoming where people watch stuff. It's not where people watch YouTube videos. It's just what people watch. Yeah. It's, do you feel as though it started as that small, like a group of young teenage boys? Like, from my perspective of at least how we grew Instagram, we started out. with this core audience of people that were photographers and designers. And that's actually who we went and spoke to when we released the app and who we promoted

right away because we felt like they presented an interesting point of view that when you downloaded the app, you weren't just seeing the same photos that you saw on Facebook. So we had this sort of like core group that was really, they really found the value in what we were producing and building. And I feel like any time you build a community, you have to start with some group that really gets you. Do you have a group like that? Do you feel like you started with young teenage boys? I don't know.

I don't know. I know that like when I started out on YouTube, it was the same time I was making videos for the New York Times, which you would think, at least ostensibly, there's a wildly different audiences. But I found there's like a tremendous amount of overlap there. So it was like a really universal appeal with those kinds of videos. Now my vlogs are a completely different monster.

It's the same people tuning in every single day. So I think there's a great deal. there's a lot of disparity in those two different audiences. Yeah. One thing I also want to talk to you about is kind of maybe talk a little bit about how you work with brands. And some of that might be connected to. I know a lot of brands are interested in figuring out what do younger people like or what do younger people interested in?

And clearly, like, a huge group of them are interested in your content. But what is it maybe, could you walk us through how you end up working with a brand? Like just the nuts and bolts of, do they send you an email? Like, how do you make those decisions? Sure. So the mechanics, like, they're not super interesting or sexy, but yeah, I get probably 600, 700 emails a day to my website. I filter all of them myself. I've had assistants do it, but almost every email is written from somebody, and they feel like they're writing directly to me, and it feels really dirty. It's okay if I just glance over somebody's, but it feels really kind of yucky apps. But in there, usually that's where the first point of contact is made.

I'm also, you know, they'll contact my agent if they're slightly more savvy or resourceful. Yeah. But that's it. And then they just sort of ping me and a conversation begins. Sometimes it's an email that gets reviewed. How do they hook you in? What is an example of one where you're like, that one definitely? It's, well, usually it's just the brand.

Yeah. What's the company? And you can learn everything you need to know about that at a glance. Yeah. But yeah, mechanically, so, you know, Nike emails me and like, would you like to work together? It's like, yes, Nike, great. Let's do it. conversation. There's some back and forth. There's no agency in between us, just Nike executives and

myself. But when you say, yeah, it's Nike, is there something about their brand there? And you're like, man, this is just, I have personal affinity. I run. I mean, it's Nike. A better example than is Mercedes-Benz. I mean, Mercedes-Benz, they make fantastic cars. When I think of Mercedes-Benz, I think of old rich white people in really snobby advertising. That's beautiful and perfect. I don't know how to do any of those things and I'm not an old rich white person yet um but so so there's a brand I really want to work with but I'm highly skeptical because if they try to force me into their box like I'm going to do a terrible job it's going to make me look like a jerk and they're not going to like me and also the audience is just so sensitive to that stuff when you're

so unbelievable so personal with them yeah I mean so to zoom out a much more interesting conversation than the mechanics which I'm happy to dive into but is sort of me that the the barometer like what am I willing to work and what am I not willing to work with? The value exchange has to be at least equal, meaning it has to elevate my brand as much as it elevates yours. Like I do believe that my Nike video is still, it was the most, it might now be second most watch video that Nike's ever put online. So clearly the value is great for them.

Maybe you could tell the story of that video just in case. Sure, sure. That video in particular, Nike hired me to do a campaign for them. It was a three video campaign. The first two were typical. They were great, really proud of them. working with their $100 million athletes and they're really fun. They let me do whatever I wanted.

The third video was supposed to be about how people around the world make their daily lives count. Like, what do I just say that's special? But I kind of like 10 weeks into the relationship, just like freak the fuck out because there were so many revisions on the second video that I called my editor and I was like, yo, the whole check cleared for this video. Let's just like take the budget and blow it running around the world, which is something I've always wanted to do. like literally just go to an airport and say where can we go next

whatever the cost is just pay for it on Nike's dollar till we're out of money it was like nine days and you said you didn't even like lay down to sleep for the first four. It was rough it was great and I remember my editor who is my best friend who came with me who is now like a big TV star somewhat ironically

we came back and they had like 55 hours with the footage or something like that and he's like what do we do now and I was like I don't know there's got to be a movie in there somewhere and we missed every single deadline eventually Nike sent somebody from Beaverton to New York City Alex Lopez, the executive there showed up at our door and he's like

you gotta show me something and we showed it to me and he was like guys what is this and we're like we just need more time and eventually we made a video that they really liked and they had this big campaign built around it and they released it and by the end of the first day they're like cancel everything

just let it go and we just let the video go and it just kept going and going and then like the news started to pick up on it And then magazines started writing about it. And then, like, it was just everywhere. And I really, like, that video kicked off, what is now, like, this hopefully we're at the tail end of

because it's really annoying and stupid. But, like, this inspirational advertising. Like, this idea of, like, go yolo. Like, all that stupid, really obnoxious, trite. Like, really terrible. If you bring it all back, there was none of that before that video. That video is the inflection point. But, yeah, wildly successful.

That video still does. millions of views, it still resurfaces and has these little viral pops every couple of months. And what would you say makes good brand content when they're working with a personality like you? It is. Yeah, is it a lot of trust? Do you feel like you just have to pick the right person and then really let them do it from their point of view?

Yeah. I mean, I'm glad I'm not a brand because picking individuals to work with has to be really, really hard. But I can tell you from the other perspective, from my perspective, it's that users have have viewers, I call them users now because of my tech company, but viewers have bullshit sensors that are beyond any of our understandings. I'm looking around, we're all over the age of 13 here. Like, their bullshit sensors are so, so, so sensitive, so hyper-sensitive that, like, the slightest scent of bullshit that we can't even see, like, just sends it into the red,

and it's rejected. The way my kid watches YouTube videos, watches Hulu videos, watches anything, and so he'll be watching like this, he'll click on a video of five, second pre-roll comes up. It's Control T, second tab, goes to another site, views whatever it is for four and a half seconds, clicks back, control one, back on the video like that. His bullshit sensor was so fast. The muscle memory took over, and he avoided that entire commercial, that degree antiperspirant, paid for the pre-roll in front of a million dollar commercial that they paid to produce. His bullshit sensor, like, push that out. So you have to create content that will penetrate that. In order to do that, you have to create

content that people actually want to watch. How do you do that? How do you think? about that when you're making your videos. That's a million dollar question, but by coming to me, I have this, this, this, I can replace where it's like, look, well, people want to watch my stuff. So if the first question is, you want me to make your stuff, like we've already failed, that's not why people show up. So with Mercedes, it was like, well, here's what I would do if I could do anything right now.

I don't know anything about cars. I remember I literally met with the CEO here in San Francisco, and the ad agency is like sitting on the table, they're really nervous, like setting me, sitting me next to the CEO. And he's like, so what are you thinking? And I was like, let me start by saying, I don't know how to sell cars. And everyone, and I'm not interested in that. And I was like, the second I start preaching, like, how many horsepower of this thing, nobody gives a shit. I was like, so let me tell this story about, like, me learning about this car and trying to figure out how to make a car commercial. And that was kind of the brief. I remember there was a one-page brief that I sent them

for a four-video campaign that lasted five months long. That was like really, really well-received by my audience, and I think they were very happy with the impact that the videos had because it was really honest, and it was really frank, and it was really approachable. And I feel like my audience saw it as like, well, if I was given that budget and that car and that camera, I would have made something just like that.

It was all broken and messed up and shot on point and shoots and something that's accessible to me. It makes sense to me. Yeah, inspiring, but accessible, interesting and compelling, but I can understand, I can project myself into that in some way. They wouldn't let me put, when I wrecked the Mercedes,

Either time, any of the times in the video. And one night when I wrecked one, I had to cover it in a tarp before I could get it towed away. I want to go back to this like sort of this like incredible bullshit sensor that young, especially young people have now. And one thing we were talking about just before walking out was how, especially kids today, and I think everyone in this room, we have this incredibly nuanced sense of exactly what content we are going to post in exactly which platform. and you are like, you're huge on Instagram,

but that's not even anything compared to where you are on Snapchat, and that's not even anything compared to where you are on YouTube. And so you're touching all of these different platforms and doing slightly different continent in each place, but I just want you to talk a little bit about video specifically and sort of how you see all of these different but slightly nuanced platforms to publish and what that means for you. Sure.

And I think that from a developer's perspective, something that I also represent is that compartmentalization that's happening on behalf of both the creators and the consumers is becoming so rigid that it makes it very, very, very hard to penetrate. A very literal example of that

is like this is the kind of video that goes on Instagram. If it's not that kind of video doesn't get watched, doesn't get shared. This is the kind of video that goes here. And like that is the rigidity around that is becoming more and more. So navigating that is really challenging.

It's really challenging. It's much harder from a developer's perspective than I think it is from a consumer's perspective. But navigating that, I think, is one of the biggest struggles. For me, literally, you know, I rose super, super fast on Snapchat because essentially I was using Snapchat as a tool to daily blog. I'd pull these little stories out of my daily life and I'd compartmentalize them into a three-act narrative that would be told in under 100 seconds because that was the threshold before they put in that disc and it had a second countdown. If you were three digits, people stopped watching. It had to be 99. seconds were under. I would tell a whole story in a hundred seconds. And then I started daily vlogging. And all of a sudden, this conflict came up, which is like, if this is interesting, it's going on the vlog, not on Snapchat. And all of a sudden, those two boxes perfectly overlapped. And I struggled. And I dropped off on Snapchat. I stopped sharing on Snapchat,

because that's how rigid those boxes were for me. And I think, like, that's one of the biggest struggles. I started a technology company because I believe, very much, now more than ever, not an outlet, there's not a box where you can just sort of share something that's fairly meaningless, something really lightweight, something that's insignificant. If it's on Snapchat needs to be funny or cool or make me look cool. If it's on Instagram, it's got to be beautiful. If it's on YouTube, it's got to be meaningful. If it's on Facebook, it has to be something that my friends and peers really want to engage with. But where's a place where you can just share little moments that are interested, almost passively share. And I don't think there's a box

for that. And I really want a box for that. So I raised a bunch of money and built a whole company that's doing just that. We're still really far from success. But like, I believe in this compartmentalization of content so, so strongly that I built an entire company because I needed another box to put content in. So you think it's going to make it harder to come up as a creator if you need to have content for all of those different spots? I do. Like, it takes a lot of hours. I mean, maybe you could talk a little bit about, I know you edit, like up until late and at night. You wake up early in the morning. You put a lot of effort, obviously, into the, like, it's, gotten to a point where, like, I used to come home from work and start editing, and then,

like, my wife almost left me, threatens to leave me seven nights a week. So, now I, like, pretend to go to bed with her, and, like, when she's asleep, like, sneak out of bed and, like, go and live in and sit there, like, a troll in the dark and edit all night long. And, like, that's my every single day. It is, like, it's a lot of work. It is a huge, huge, huge amount of work. But I think YouTube is unique in that perspective. I think YouTube is by far, the hardest. I think we're already at our last question, which is crazy. But I wanted to ask you, what are you going to do with your content this year that's different from last year? What are you going to change or do differently or focus on? Well, somewhat ironically, I started posting daily

on YouTube because I saw it as a means to increase my social influence that I could then leverage to promote my own social platform that worked and continues to work. But now, like, I've grown this sort of affinity, like this blinding passion for it. It's something I love and find more satisfying and gratifying than any video creation I've ever done in my 15-year career. So I want to continue that, and I want to blow that up. I want to keep going bigger. Beyond that, like, something that I want to figure out this year, that I don't think anyone's really figured out outside of the gaming space is live.

I don't know what that means. I don't think it's Periscope. I think Periscope is a fantastic utility, but I don't think it's a social platform. I don't know where that goes. When we talk about those, like, when I talk about those rigid boxes, I don't think it can be on YouTube, which makes me sad to say. I don't think it can be on Facebook. I think it's somewhere else.

I think it's a really right place. I think people watch my content on YouTube because they want to hang out with me, so what's a much more literal way of letting people hang out with me? I feel like I heard you say one time, live is boring for anything, but you said sports or news. Life is really, really boring. Yeah, unless it's an event. centered around an event, it's boring.

So what is a way that, what are the mechanics for overcoming that? I don't think you can be accomplished on a phone. How do you address that? I don't know. I've done very little experimentation in the place, but I'm in the space. I'm really focused on it. I'd say VR too. I feel like that's just, that's become a default.

I think it's interesting. Have you done any VR stuff? Yeah, I spent a lot of money and a lot of energy doing VR stuff. And I still think, like, people don't quite know what to do with it. I did. I've done like 5 million views on one VR video, and I think because everybody's like, well, cool, click. So to figure out how to find a narrative that really leverages what you can do with VR, I think we're a little bit, there's a little distance between where we are now, where we can go with that. How do you answer the question, why should I use your platform instead of somebody else's? So I post all my pictures on Facebook. Why would I possibly post the same pictures on?

Instagram? We listened to people. I mean, like I was saying, starting out, figuring out who's the group of people that really needs and wants and has adopted early what you're making. And I have this, when we were at Facebook, we kind of went from being this tiny company to all of a sudden needing to be big boys. And we did a lot more just like actually market research into what people thought about Instagram. And we'd independently, by just by talking with people that use it all the time, over email, in person, whatever, come up with our three values, which were community first, inspire creativity, and simplicity matters. And we went out and interviewed all these people about what they thought about Instagram, and they came back to us with those three things. It was about sharing with their friends.

It was about being creative, and it was about it being fast and simple. And we had just anecdotally absorbed all of that just by always reaching out and listening to people who, who are really, really passionate about Instagram. So I think figuring out who are the people that are 100% match with this thing that I'm creating? And then how can I go spend as much time with them as possible to understand what is at the core of their obsession with this thing?

Why are they using it? And how do I bring that piece to more people, introduce it to more people? Thank you. Yeah. Thank you for coming, guys. Thank you.