Big Technology Podcast - How Twitter, Instagram, and Planet Build Products — With Kevin Weil

Episode Date: July 6, 2022

Kevin Weil is the ex-head of product at Twitter and Instagram. He's currently the president of business and product at Planet. Weil joins Big Technology Podcast to share an insider's view of how Twitter and Instagram build products, what their potential is, and how each product is dealing with big, imposing, outside forces (Elon Musk and TikTok). Stay tuned for the second half, where we discuss Planet, a fascinating company whose hundreds of satellites orbiting the earth capture a new, complete picture of our world daily.

LinkedIn Presents. beyond. And man, am I excited about our guests today? I've been trying to book him for a while. We finally have him here in studio or in virtual studio. Kevin Wheels is our guest today. He is a person who's had an unbelievable look into the way that companies like Facebook and Twitter build products. And he's also at a very interesting company called Planet, which we will talk about in a moment. At Planet, he is the president of product and business. He was formerly the SVP of product at Twitter, VP of product that Instagram also helped Facebook with their crypto efforts. I don't need to say much more.

We're going to get right into it. Kevin, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. Great to have you here. You know, I've been following your career for a long time, you know, from the early days as a beat reporter at BuzzFeed covering Twitter where you were running product. And we've got some good conversations over the year, but we've never done anything like this. And I'm like very excited to get into what you've seen and your perspective on the tech world. Yeah, I was excited that you asked me. Let's do it.

Okay, great. So let's just start with Twitter, because Twitter, everyone has an opinion of what Twitter is, what Twitter should be, what its potential is, where it's going wrong. Everyone has that last opinion for sure. When you were running product for Twitter, what did you see as the potential there? And how do you think the company has matched up to that or failed to meet what your expectations were over the years? so Twitter is a fascinating company and product and if you look across the spectrum of social platforms there are I actually think when you get into them each of them is used differently by different audiences in different ways even even Facebook and Instagram which are maybe more similar than some others so there's still nothing like Twitter right I mean if Twitter went away tomorrow nothing replaces it there's no other platform for public conversation that brings together people in the way that Twitter does, I mean, I fundamentally think that's important. I've met people on Twitter. I'm sure you have as well. You have interactions and people. You just never would have been exposed to. Ideas you never would have been exposed to.

And so, you know, that was that was what we were trying to serve. I think it's a challenging, one of the challenges that you have, at least that we always faced, was if your, Twitter is a lot about ideas, right? And if you've got five minutes in line at the store, you know, you need to kill some time. The first thing you're going to look at is probably your texts. Your, the closest friends and family conversations that you have. Next thing is probably your closest friends. And there you're going to look for something like Instagram. And Twitter is, it's about ideas. So that might be the third thing that you check. And in five minutes in line, you may not, you may not have that time. And so it's a little bit further out on the, the, the,

sort of set of concentric circles of the things that matter to you most in some ways, but it's also some of the most enriching, at least for me. So that's a constant struggle for the product, but again, there's just nothing like it. And if you're into ideas, you're into learning and growth, I still think it's the best platform out there. Right. And I think at a certain point, so Twitter went to the IPO with this idea that there'd be like a billion users, but I do think at a certain point, there was an acceptance that,

yeah, it was number three in line. It played a vital role in our society, but it, you know, I think that it was an acceptance. I feel like it was a really healthy moment for Twitter once it realized, hey, look, a billion users is probably out of the picture, but we're still going to play this like really important role in society, you know, be used for news in particular, like you said, ideas. Were you there for that moment? And do you sort of agree with that assessment?

I certainly wasn't there when that was ever explicitly acknowledged. You know, I think at one point, we felt like, and I think Facebook even felt like Twitter might be the next Facebook, and now as it's evolved, it's something totally different. People don't think of them at all the same. You don't say, well, I'm not going to be on Twitter. I have Facebook or vice versa, right? So they've kind of evolved into their own niches. And like I said, Twitter is for ideas, and that may mean that it's not. for everybody, but it sure is valuable for the set of people that care about that kind of thing. And then how do you build a product in that way? And did you ever think of like, okay, well, we're doing pretty good on ideas, but maybe we can find ways to move up that hierarchy that you talked about to become that, you know, the first thing people touch? I mean, for sure we did. And that it was one of the things that led us to rank the Twitter timeline, which a lot of people, it's still controversial to this day, but I would argue personally, it's the right thing to do for any number of reasons. The incentives otherwise are to, you know, for certain accounts to tweet all the time because they get them to the top of your timeline and all sorts of funny things. And, you know, in contrast, if someone that you care about tweets and they tweeted an hour ago and you open Twitter for the first time, like I think that's probably one of the first things you're going to want to see. So that, you know,

That was both, I think, the right product decision, but also something that we did in service to being more, more relevant, more useful. And it's a, it gets it some of the nuances of Twitter where you're like the ranking for, when you're ranking a Twitter timeline and ranking an Instagram timeline or Instagram feed, they're very different because Twitter, you do want to preserve the sort of element of real time. And, and yet, if your spouse or significant other tweeted two hours. ago, you want that at the top. So there's just there's a lot more to balance. And we absolutely, I mean, you want to bring Twitter to more people in the world, especially when you're inside the company or, you know, I think you're a very active user as well. You feel the value that it brings. And there's always this sense of if we could just help people see that, then this is absolutely a billion user product. And the challenge was always, how do you get people up and running

and seeing value in a way that shows them what Twitter can really be. And it's just a little bit harder when you're trying to connect with the ideas that they care about versus, you know, it's maybe an easier problem when you're trying to connect them to the five closest friends that they have when you can do an email import or whatever and off you go. And I don't know that we have, and I say we, I haven't been at Twitter for years now, but obviously still a big fan of the company and the people there, I don't know. that it's been cracked yet, but it still does feel like an opportunity. It's not hard for me to imagine that there are a billion people using Twitter one day. Yeah, what was your reaction when you

saw Elon Musk make his bid for the company, or at least like initially get involved when he bought those shares? I mean, look, we're actually partners in my current company at Planet. We're partners with Elon and SpaceX, you don't bet against Elon. He's one of the world's best entrepreneurs. At the same time, I think it's fair to say Twitter is a very different thing than SpaceX and Tesla and all the other amazing things that Elon's done. So I think he's going to have a lot to learn. I think, you know, in particular on speech, he's going to have, he's going to go through sort of an accelerated process that all the platforms went through. Like, You look at all the platforms, and at some point, every single one of them was talking about the sort of unadulterated value of free speech.

And then one by one, every one of those platforms learned that there are negatives, and you have to be careful about speech because it can actually, allowing unfettered free speech can actually chill important speech because people don't feel safe. And there's no right answer. There's lots of places to land. on this one. But the platforms all evolved in their thinking. I imagine Elon will too. And I'm, you know, he's, he's an incredible entrepreneur. He's going to learn. He's going to learn quickly. And it will be fascinating to see where he takes Twitter. Yeah, I always think about the 4chan stuff. If 4chan agrees to moderate content, then it does seem to make some sense. If it, you know, for others, you know, even the founders of H.N are the one. Yeah. So go ahead.

Totally. You just, they're not going to. for like a yeah exactly and the funny thing is not we could spend an hour on this and we probably shouldn't but um at least in my experience with the the platforms that i've worked on zero point one percent of it is political it's almost not political it's almost never political content that you're worried about it's so much more like a group of anonymous online trolls bullying a teenage girl you know and you're just like that should not be on the platform and it can have real world consequences but it's not illegal it's certainly not uh illegal speech and and so you just you get into these areas where you're like well wait a minute that like that shouldn't be there that doesn't feel right and so

you begin trying to find a line and it's impossible there is no line like it's as complex as the nuances of human communication, but this is why it's hard to run a platform. You're kind of ever, you're trying to get better every single day, knowing that you're never going to be perfect at it. Totally. And the question of what to moderate is a tough one, but can we at least agree the platforms, you know, should take responsibility for what they amplify. I feel like you mentioned it's a nuanced conversation.

A lot of the nuance gets lost. Freedom to speak, yes. Freedom to have the platform send your speech to a million people. Okay, that's another question. Yeah, you know, this is kind of gone, I think people have more or less forgotten about it, but Mark Zuckerberg actually laid out what I thought was a very reasonable sort of framework for how to think about it a bunch of years ago, maybe he was 2017 or 2018. He basically drew a line where, you know, wherever you draw the line on your platform as to what

speech is allowed, he drew a line. And he said, you know, in actuality, what happens is that as your speech approaches the line, actually tends to get more visibility because, you know, people have strong reactions to it one way or the other. It gets lots of comments, retweets, re-shares, whatever. What should actually happen is that as your commentary gets close to the line, it drops in reach. And yeah, sure, you can still reach your followers because it's accepted on the platform, but you don't get all the amplification. I've always found that to be a really simple and clear framework. Now, of course, the challenge is making that happen where in order to know what speech is allowed or what's getting

close to the line, again, you have to, your platform has to be as sophisticated as the nuances of human communication. And we haven't figured that out yet. But that to me has always been a very clear framework that resonated. And we're going to get to Facebook stuff in a minute, but one last question about Twitter. Elon has this like really ambitious PowerPoint where he's saying that he is going to bring Twitter to this billion user mark. And a lot of people are saying, Well, if it was that easy, you know, Twitter would have just pivoted and tried to do this lifestyle content and gotten more users on board the platform. And so, like, you know, it's rare we get a chance to speak to someone who was inside and had that visibility and was at that inflection point. So this idea of like changing the content a little bit and making it something that instantly appeals to a billion users, possible, kind of tough.

What do you think? Well, I don't know how you change the content. The content is created by you and me. So I suppose you can change the incentives a little bit. But at the end of the day, it's hundreds of millions of people that are creating the content every day. And you have an opportunity to shape how you display that, what kinds of content they can create, what kinds of media they can attach and what kinds of experiences. But the content is you and me, and that's the power and that's also the challenge.

Yeah. So you were the SVP of product at Twitter and then you move over to meta as VP. product at Instagram? Yeah. What was the conversation like when you used, because Twitter and Instagram are, you know, in some ways rivals. Twitter doesn't really display the links on, you know, of Instagram photos. They actually gave in a little bit on that recently.

But they compete. So what's that conversation like where you're like, listen, it's been a good run, but I'm going to the death star. Yeah. By the way, I really tried to fix that over the years that I was there. So I actually, Kevin Sistram has been. was a friend of ours for a long time. He came to our wedding. He and my wife knew each other well at Stanford. So we'd known him for years before Instagram. And we were just having dinner with him

and his wife one evening. And I had resigned from Twitter at this time, but I hadn't told anybody because I was doing kind of a long phaseout. So some people internally knew, but nobody externally knew it. So I wasn't about to tell him either because I hadn't even shared with most to my team yet. But he was like, hey, would you ever think about Instagram? And I was like, no, no, no, no. Like, I bleed Twitter blue. I couldn't possibly, you know. And at some point, we kept talking about it. And somebody was like, hey, come on and meet the team. And I said, okay. And it took a few weeks. This was, I think, around Christmas sometime. And I went in and met the team and just totally fell in love with the product, with the company, with the team. It was, Twitter at that point

had grown from about 40 to 4,000 while I was there. And Instagram was this tiny team of like 100, 150 people. And, you know, with all the advantages of being inside Facebook, but also all the advantages of being very separate. Because at the time, I think it's not quite the case any longer, but at the time it was super, it was run very separately. Mark did what I think is a fantastic job of giving Kevin a lot of responsibility and autonomy. And so it was going back to this tiny team that was having a huge impact on the world. And to go work for Kevin Sistram, who I still think is the single best consumer product thinker anywhere.

Now, I learned so much from that guy. So, yeah, I was kind of hooked despite my initial sense. So I'm really glad I did. It was an amazing experience. I learned a ton. Yes, let's dig into that a little bit. I'd love to hear from your perspective, like, what the process of building products is like at Twitter and how that compares to building products at a place like Facebook. Yeah, this is, it's one of the things that I really, I feel like I've learned a lot from over the years.

One of my friends, when I was at Twitter and thinking about leaving, one of my friends said, you know, you don't really know the difference between the way Twitter does something and the right way to do something. And it's not that those are always different. Sometimes sometimes they're exactly the same, but sometimes they're not and you don't have a sense. And the reason he said that was I had never been really at any other company. I'd worked at a couple startups that didn't work very well. And so that was kind of my first real experience with scale and with any degree of responsibility. And he was totally right. So I went to Instagram and saw completely different ways of doing things, of building products, of running a company.

And it's not that Instagram did everything right. either but seeing lots of different ways and actually Instagram was fascinating because Instagram was inside Facebook and so I could see and I could learn from the way that Mark ran the company I could learn from the way that Kevin ran Instagram within Facebook and then could draw on the you know what I'd learn from the things we got right and wrong at Twitter so I mean one of the things that I've taken away from my time at Twitter is when I came into the head of product role I was way too timid Twitter was a very discussion-based culture.

We talked about a lot of things, and it was a little bit too consensus-oriented. We'd go and say, hey, here's an idea. What do you all think? And people would have some good ideas, they would raise some concerns. And you kind of end up in this morass of like, well, should I do it or not? I don't know. Those concerns were about, well, and we kind of like just didn't do stuff. And you could see it in the product.

We didn't, you know, we didn't, and this is on me. I'm not criticizing anybody but myself, but we didn't, we didn't ship enough. Even if you go back and read at the time, people were talking when Alex Redder, who I think was on your podcast a little while ago, Alex was head of engineering while I was head of product. At the time, there were a bunch of articles being written about how we were speeding up development and shipping more things, but we still, in retrospect, weren't doing enough. And it was, I was too hesitant to come in and it was, it was. my first head of product role and I felt like I knew the ad side, which is what I've been working on, but was learning the consumer side. And I was just too timid. And where we, you know, discussed and debated and ended up not doing things, I should have just said, you know what, let's, let's move

ahead in this direction. And even if we're not right, we're going to ship it, we're going to learn something, we're going to pivot, we'll get it right the next time, a whole lot faster than we would if we didn't do anything at all and we just continued to debate. And that was in sharp contrast to then going to Instagram where like Kevin and Mikey ran Instagram and Kevin in particular like what he wanted to happen happen and he was willing to make on popular decisions he was willing to go deep on particular choices and at the end of the day it he drove that product and you know he's very good at what he does so he drove it really well I'll give you one example which was stories So it was one of the first things I worked on when I joined.

And Kevin was like running that project. I mean, it was one of those transformational things. Now it's just, it's been there for years. You think of it as just part of Instagram. But at the time, Instagram was for these perfect photos, right? And there was no place for like funny, silly, daily, random moments. And that was what we were trying to change. And as the product sort of took shape, Kevin was like,

We are going to put this on the front tab, main tab of Instagram right at the top. The most valuable real estate there is. I mean, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, right, to any kind of space. And he was like, no, we're going to put this front and center. Like, we are changing the product that we need to enable this use case, and we're not going to do it by putting it in the third tab. And you know what? If we don't get it right, we're going to fix it and we're going to ship and iterate forward. But it's going front and center.

And it was so different than the decision that we would have made at Twitter. We could have had similar ideas and we would have said, okay, well, let's put it on the third tab and we'll put it in the corner. And if people like it, then, you know, we'll start to see the uptick of usage and we'll maybe test it. And it probably wouldn't have worked because nobody would have found it and you wouldn't have generated network effects and so on. And instead, Sistram, to his credit, was like, nope, front and center.

it's going to be here and this is we're going to make this work um and it turned out we we got it pretty right on the first try and you know we could go into that story too but obviously all credit to snapchat for the original innovation that we were building off of but it just the the the guttiness to say this is going to go front and center of this popular product that by all accounts was doing incredibly well we're going to take this risk and like we're not going to have this discussion because i've already landed on it was so different than what i'd experienced and I learned a ton from that kind of thinking. So, Kevin, what do you make of Instagram's fight with TikTok right now?

The company is in the middle, I think, of rolling out a redesign of Instagram. And it looks exactly like TikTok, but it's weird because it does have this strange balance where, you know, you talked in the beginning about the hierarchy of interest, right? You have, you know, your immediate friends and family, then the people you know and love, and then the ideas, right? Instagram is people you know and love. TikTok is entertainment. And the company is trying to blend, you know, I guess category two and three.

And I wonder if they can keep their identity and remain competitive by trying to copy TikTok the way they are. What's your thought on that? Yeah, I think it's a really big challenge. Obviously, TikTok has taken the world by storm. And, you know, a little bit sentimentally since I worked on the Instagram product at a time when it was really about friends and family, I think that's an important part of people's lives.

It's why people use Instagram today. At the same time, credit to Mark, I mean, he is unsentimental in, and I mean that in a positive way, about just dispassionately looking at what's working and what's not and evolving the product. There have been any number of times over the course of Facebook's history where people have thought he was wrong and,

You know, he turned out to be right, and of course he makes mistakes too. But I personally struggle a little bit with an app that's really a blend of both. I've been talking to my friends still at Instagram saying, man, I'm getting a whole lot of like unconnected videos in my feed. And like, I get it. They're interesting. I actually watch them. But I wonder if this is one of those cases where the metrics don't tell you the full story because, yes, I watch them. But it doesn't, it doesn't draw me back into the product in the same way.

And I wonder if it's the same kind of long. term retentive value. But of course, like, they're not there. Or rather, I'm not there. They are there. They're working on it. They're looking at the data. They're responding to the competitive challenges. So, you know, as a, as a fan of Instagram, I hope they find the right path forward. Yeah. Do you, do you see the possibility that the app can kind of confuse, you know, itself on this one? Like, I mean, my reaction when I saw the update was like, what the hell is this? So I'm curious what your perspective is. Yeah. I mean, my reaction is I've seen more of unconnected videos in my feed. I'm not sure if I have the full redesign, but as I've seen more unconnected

videos in my feed, I'm like, man, I want my friends back. You know, I want to see, I use Instagram to keep up with my friends and, you know, understand what's going on with their kids, watch their stories, that kind of thing. And I don't want to lose that. So that's not to say that you couldn't find some blend that's better. But I think it will be a challenge. And, you know, the people that are there are fantastic. I work. work with a lot of folks, you know, like Ashley Yuki in particular, is an amazing product leader, and I imagine that she's playing a big part in this. So I have faith, but I'm still waiting for it to land for me personally. Yeah. It'll be interesting to see. I think this is like

a pretty existential moment for Facebook. And there were some amazing comments from Mark Zuckerberg that were made just last week. He was saying, see if I can pull it up, basically he was saying that, Oh, there's a lot of people at this company that probably shouldn't be here. Here, I'm going to read it. He said, realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company that shouldn't be here. And he's raised goals and expectations. Part of my hope by raising expectations, having more aggressive goals. And kind of just turning up the heat a little bit is that I think some of you might decide that this place isn't for you.

And that self-selection is okay with me. They're also coming some hiring targets. I mean, he's saying that we should prepare for like a really bad recession. This is kind of unique stuff from Zuckerberg. Yeah, I mean, look, I have a ton of respect for Mark, and I think it's easy to caricature him from the outside, but the view of Mark that you get from the inside, and as you spend more time with him,

he's a very honest, direct guy. He says what he means. He, I believe, intends to do good in the world at scale. Does he make mistakes? Sure. but um i like i i i read those and i don't have a whole lot more info than you do from the outside maybe you have more than i do um but uh but i respect those remarks from mark uh like you you should want to be there um you should believe in the mission that yeah facebook and instagram

and and um uh all of the arvr stuff is trying to achieve or you shouldn't be there right there's like life is short there's a lot more to do and if you if you don't love what you're doing every day you're not willing to put a lot into it then like go find something where you are yeah and my theory is with social media it's the you're the most vulnerable position uh as a social media company like people talked about the tech giants facebook google amazon apple microsoft i was always like facebook is definitely the most vulnerable even when it seemed like facebook was you know this juggernaut because you're just basically you're not an operating system they're kind of subject to the whims of you know people deciding to open that app every day and uh and and and you know you know

need, you need, if you're going to succeed, you need a CEO that's pretty comfortable in wartime. And it's clear that Zuck is, you know, pretty comfortable as a wartime CEO. It's almost like you always have to be in that sort of position. Yeah, I think that's actually the right way to look at it is, I've said this to a bunch of friends before. Mark is the best I've ever seen at creating wartime out of peacetime. And again, I say that positively. Like, even in the times when Facebook was just up and to the right and nothing could go wrong, there was all. always something urgent, something existential that he would get everyone focused on.

And it was a way of creating focus and creating drive when, you know, you could be forgiven, I guess, for getting lazy for a little while. Mark always had that thing. He's competitive like nobody I've ever seen before. So I wouldn't bet against him. Yeah. Yeah, we'll see. This is, I've been covering the company for a long time.

I would say this is probably the most role. they've been from the moment I started covering them. Yeah, I mean, the, the ARVR bet is either going to work out big or it's going to not work out, right? And it will be fascinating to see. Right. And if it works out big, huge moment for the company. And if it fails, then, you know, the company might go down the drain with it.

So maybe that's a bit dramatic, but something close to it. The thing that I respect about Mark, though, is he's always like, the dude makes bets. And when he makes a bet, he doesn't go halfway. Yeah. And you could be wrong. but, like, that's also the way to be really right. And he's been really right a handful of times. Here, he's taking a huge bet years ahead of, you know,

when probably anybody else would have. So it will be, it'll be really interesting to watch it play out. Now, one last question. We're going to ask a crypto question here because you worked on Facebook's crypto efforts with Novi. Uh-huh. Previously, Libra. From people from the outside say, you know,

shouldn't have been glaringly obvious that regulators never would have let a Facebook cryptocurrency out in, the wild. So, you know, you sat in the position where you were making the decisions of whether to go forward it or not with it or not. So what, I guess from your perspective, why was there a belief that this would succeed given the conditions that you were bringing it into the world into? And then what happened? Yeah. It's a fair question. Look, we, we set out with a really big mission. We thought we wanted to make it as easy to send money anywhere, to any, to any in the world as quickly, as cheaply, as simply as you would send a text message.

And if you ever go and study this stuff, if you go and look at what the experiences are actually like, if you want to, you know, send money home to a family member in another country, it's an absolute nightmare. And it gets worse as, you know, as sort of, the less financially well set up you are, the worse it gets. And the more expensive it gets is just it's regressive. It's slow. It's terrible. And we were like, man, we're sitting here with WhatsApp and Messenger. And these are apps that connect loved ones across, you know, every corner of the world. This is the exact set of people that you would want to send money to when you're sending remittances and so forth. Like, we could just make the world a better place if we could

make this happen. And we certainly weren't blind to the fact that Facebook was not going to be people's favorite messenger for this and it it played into how we designed it like we right people people forget but this wasn't an fb centric thing at the end of the day we set it up it was open source we set it up uh with a to be run by and administered by a non-profit in which there were something like 30 members all of which had equal votes so facebook was you know three to four percent of the vote could not actually influence decisions that it made and you saw this as things went on where the nonprofit, the organization actually made decisions that ran counter to, you know, what we would have ideally seen as Facebook. And we, you never, the design of the system was such that you could never have touched a Facebook product in your entire life and still been able to use Libra, then, you know, DM as a full member of the platform.

You did not need to touch a Facebook product. and so we hoped that in setting it up that way that people would see that it wasn't just a Facebook product it was actually a product for everyone and then Facebook was going to play a role in sort of kickstarting what we hoped would be a vibrant ecosystem now it didn't work out that way and regulars were just never comfortable with with something that had Facebook's name strongly attached unfortunately I do think it's really unfortunate though but because I think that it was going to be the highest most regulated crypto project in the ecosystem. I think it leaps and bounds beyond some of the other platforms, and we could have done a lot of good, and it's a bummer.

But the good thing is because it's open source, that project is being taken forward in a number of different directions by folks, you know, a lot of whom came from that team and have now gone and started companies around it. So I'm still hopeful that some of that impact lives on and that we that we see some of the work that we did, you know, actually in people's hands. Yeah, I continue to think that remittances are the lowest hinking fruit for crypto and whether it works or not, it's going to put pressure on this very, you know, regressive archaic industry. All right, we're going to, let's take a break and come back. We have got to talk about planet. So let's take a break. Kevin Wheels with us, he's the SVP, no, president of product and business at Planet, which you're going to hear about after the break, and the former SVP of product in Twitter

and the former VP of product at Instagram. Hard to find a guy with a resume like this. All right, we're back right after the break. Hey, everyone. Let me tell you about the Hustle Daily Show, a podcast filled with business, tech news, and original stories to keep you in the loop on what's trending. More than 2 million professionals read The Hustle's daily email for its irreverent and informative takes on business and tech news.

Now, they have a daily podcast called The Hustle Daily Show, where their team of writers break down the biggest business headlines in 15 minutes or less and explain why you should care about them. So, search for The Hustle Daily Show and your favorite podcast app, like the one you're using right now. And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast with Kevin Wheel. It's the president of product and business at Planet, former SVP of product at Twitter and a former VP of product.

Instagram also did some crypto stuff at Facebook. Let's talk about planet, Kevin. It is a really interesting company. I feel like this is a company that people are going to start to hear more and more about the company's profile is definitely on the rise. And it's pretty fascinating. So from my understanding, the company has dozens of effectively iPhone-sized satellites, you know, up in space, taking photos of the Earth and basically updating a map.

pretty frequently. So can you talk a little bit about the genesis of the company? What got you interested in there? It's a pretty interesting hop after, you know, Twitter and Facebook. And what should we look at right now in terms of what's going on at the company? Yeah. And by the way, hundreds of satellites, not dozens. It's the most interesting company I have ever worked for.

So it got started back. It's about 10 years old. and the two founders, before they were, before they started the company, they were at NASA. And they were watching all of the rest of the industry launch these big, like, $800 million dollar school bus size satellites that took 10 years to develop. And they were like, wait a minute, you know, you don't want a five-year-old phone. Why do you want a five-year-old satellite? What if we could do this in a completely different way?

and so they actually got the idea to launch an Android phone into space. So they strapped a solar panel to the back of an Android phone. They shot it into space on a rocket. And they found that it could take pictures of the Earth. And it could even send them down using the little radio on this phone, could send them down to a ground station on Earth. And it taught them that there was just a completely different way to build satellites and to think about infrastructure in space.

And so what they did, was they started building they left they started the company and they began building this fleet of satellites that are the size of a shoe box literally these things weigh like five or six kilograms you can hold one in your hand and because they are they're so small and compact they use off-the-shelf components which means you know fewer supply chain issues it means you're getting you're able to keep up with Moore's law as Moore's law improves you're using new stuff you're not using 10-year-old stuff, and they're orders of magnitude cheaper as well because they're tiny and they use off-the-shelf components. And that all lines up to you being able to to be able to launch

a constellation that's much larger than anything anybody has ever seen before. So planet today, we operate the world's largest constellation of Earth imaging satellites. These satellites go around the world like this, sort of in a north-south motion, while the world spins west to east, and they basically line scan the entire planet on a daily basis. And they do that at about three meter resolution. So think of a square 10 feet on a side. That becomes one pixel in the resulting image, and we have that over the whole landmass of the earth.

And when you think about what it means, you know, I'm smaller than a 10 foot square. You're smaller than a 10 foot square. So we can't identify individual people. We can't read a license plate. we can't, you know, read your newspaper, but we can see global change. We can see how the planet is evolving on a daily basis, and that is relevant for everything from agriculture and growing more food to geopolitics and border disputes and what's going on in Ukraine, to civil government and road and building development and urban development,

to finance, to insurance, to very particularly these days, sustainability and climate. right you can't hope to mitigate what's going on with our climate until you understand it can measure it and then you can understand what's working and what's not as we look to improve so it's just a fascinating company yeah it is fascinating um i want to get to who the customers are and how the business works but to start with i just am curious from your perspective so company that images the planet you know once or more a day is the planet in better or worse shape than you thought coming in because you've got him the chance to really look at it uh three your job. Well, it's a mix

of all of it, right? Like, one of the things, we have an internal we have a Slack channel where images that a computer algorithm deems interesting are just sort of automatically displayed there once it's taken, and you get, it gives you a sense, and we actually publish some of these on our

website, I can send you the link later, but it gives you a sense for just the sheer size of the earth and the amount of variability in the landscapes on the earth. We see such a small percentage of it in our daily lives. And you and me, like we live in cities and you see a really tiny percentage of it. But the Earth is unbelievable.

And so, you know, it gives you, you see that. And you also see the world without borders, which is sort of an interesting way of looking at the Earth as well. Kind of reminds you that we're all travelers on this one big spaceship Earth. And we've got to do our best to protect it because we don't get another one. you certainly see you track day on day areas where glaciers are shrinking and where you see very definite effects of climate change and you also can see places where people have done interesting things with crops with growing they've tried new techniques and all of a sudden you see things growing back so it actually does paint both pictures but I think you know first

and foremost it provides transparency into what's actually happening and transparency creates accountability and ultimately creates change. Yeah, have you seen this, there's this video of this guy who can, like, look at just some sample of dirt and locate it to, like, where it is on the planet. It's some unbelievable stuff out there. I still don't believe that that's real. Those videos are so crazy. Yeah, they are. It's, yeah, I would say probably 50% it's fake, but yeah, I wouldn't put it past these folks. So, so, okay, cool, taking picture of the Earth every day who pays for it and how is this a business yeah it's a it's a great question because the interesting thing is we talked about the satellites and that was kind of how i introduced the

company but ultimately it's a recurring revenue SaaS business it's a data business at the end of the day so our customers by and large come and are you know the analog of like a per seat license in a SaaS world is like a per square kilometer uh license if you will so you're paying for the area that you care about. So if you're a civil government, that might be, you know, maybe you're the, maybe you're a state in the U.S., you care about your state. If you're an agriculture company, and we have, we, agriculture is our biggest, is our biggest commercial industry. And we work with the bears and the singentas and basically all the biggest agricultural companies in the world. They serve millions of farmers all over the world.

And so the area that they care about is by and large, the sort of patchwork of fields that their farmers manage. And so for any one of our customers, that's generally how they access our data and they do so, you know, year-long contracts, multi-year contracts. So it really is a recurring revenue business. It's fascinating. Does anyone have a full planet license? Nobody has a full planet license today, although there are some interesting use cases for it. And I wouldn't be surprised if we see it in the future. I would love to see that.

Interesting. What do you think the use cases for it would be? Well, so one of our customers is Google, which is, we have a really interesting history with Google, actually. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I've used their products once. They're great. You should try it. We actually bought, so we've been talking about our medium-res satellites that image the whole Earth every day. We have another constellation of higher-resolution satellites that are 50 centimeters per pixel.

So these satellites can basically zoom. zoom in on an area and they don't passively scan the earth the way that our medium red satellites do you test them so you use an API you go to our website and you actually say I want an image of this place at about this time and these satellites can go and grab it for you and we actually bought those satellites from Google so this was back when Google was acquiring robot dogs and satellites and all sorts of things and then at some point I think Ruth Horat came in and said wait what do we have all this stuff

stuff. And they started, and ultimately they were, they bought the satellites because they wanted to use them for Google Maps and keeping their maps updated. And I think they realized over time that, we could probably run a constellation of satellites better. And they could just buy the data, which is what they do. So, so Google's a customer. And a customer, a partner, they're kind of everything. They're an investor, obviously, from when we bought the satellites from them. And, uh, and they use, our data to keep their maps up to date. So when they see something anomalous, and they suspect that part of their maps is, like the world has changed and their maps haven't updated, you know, they see cars driving through what they think is a field, for example, then they'll use our satellites to go and get updated imagery and figure out what's actually going on.

So those are, there are lots of worldwide use cases like that. You can certainly imagine climate use cases. where you're looking at detecting change on a global basis and then intelligently over time, you know, having algorithms that understand what that change is and then task some of the high-res satellites to go in and get a closer look at what that change is. And in that way, you have this transparent understanding of how the world is evolving on a daily basis. Right. And you mentioned you have a partnership with SpaceX. Are they a customer? Are they helping bring your satellites into orbit? What's it like working with them? So they're a launch partner of ours.

So we launch satellites on a yearly basis or more, and they help us take the stuff into space. The nice thing about having tiny satellites is that we can fit on basically any rocket. But it's no surprise. SpaceX is the best in the industry, and we're very happy to partner with them. Let's go quickly through a couple more use cases. One of the interesting things is that you don't have to have any blackout areas. you know, with a country like China, for instance, that might not want people to see what's going on in certain areas. And we actually had Mega Roger Gopalon on the show who did this Pulitzer winning story for BuzzFeed News using the satellite imagery to uncover some, I think just maybe where they were concentration camps where Uyghurs were being placed in Xinjiang in China.

So how do you manage sort of what data you make available? And, you know, you could be upsetting some big, you know, world powers when you do it. So talk through a little bit about what the calculation is there. Well, it's a really simple calculation on our part. Transparency is one of the core values of the company. And there's a strong belief that transparency actually helps create more peace overall. You know, if you go back and look at wars of the past or you're talking about the Cold War or other things, it's often when there was a lack of transparency, And the other side didn't know what was going on.

That's when tension heightens. And when you have transparency, tension tends to come down. And so our belief is that transparency actually creates more peace in the world. And so we don't allied anything. And we don't have to because space is a little bit like international waters. So nobody is able to tell a satellite company what to image and what not to image. subject to, we have some, obviously we're licensed by the U.S. government, but basically the, we image anywhere. Also, of course, other country satellites can image anywhere, but you

end up with a net increase in transparency. And you saw this play out with the instance that you're talking about, where these researchers were poking around in Bidu maps and found that there were when they zoomed in in certain areas in i think it was northwest china the map tiles just went away they went blank and they said well wait why what's what's going on there and they went and looked at planet imagery and of course our data was there and they saw that there were weger camps in these locations and then they they were able to use our data to show the world what was happening there and the interesting thing is it's not just one image because planet images the earth every day, you could also go back in time and look at the development of

these Uyghur camps day on day on day. Oh, wow. And then you can start looking, you know, applying computer vision algorithms to say, well, where are there other developments that look like this? And then you can start to spot more of these things. And their researchers have done the same spotting nuclear missile silos over broad expanses and things like that. So the data, especially when combined with computer vision, is incredibly powerful.

whole. Last thing I want to talk about NASA is, and by the way, I hope you guys have good security because while you like transparency, there are a lot of folks that don't. Let's talk about the NASA example. They're using a planet to monitor what's happening in Ukraine and looking at, you know, potential food shortages there. And by the way, as I mentioned in this, like, can't this be used for like evil? Like, I'm also thinking like, all right, well, you know, this can be used by like, you know, to monitor troop movements and stuff that people might want to remain hidden. So anyway, you can take. those in whatever order you would like yeah actually one of the things that really impressed me about planet as I was getting to know the company is there has been an ethics process deeply built into the company since the early days since before they had anything to sell they thought about this they designed processes around it and the process has evolved since and so when we do major deals there is an ethics process that they go through anybody at the company can call you know essentially stop the line. Like I see something going on here that I don't think feels right. And we will go deep to understand the customer, the use case, you know, just to make sure that what's

happening is in line with the overall mission of the company around, you know, creating more peace and transparency and sustainability. And without going into details, that process has teeth. There are any number of times where we have not done significant deals because of that. And I really respect it. So that was something that I really valued coming into the company. It's a really thoughtful process. And it's a hard process.

And then Ukraine is fascinating. I mean, Ukraine is terrible. Everything that's happening in Ukraine is just horrible, I'll say at the outset. But as a sort of an insight into the way planet's data is used and is valuable, it's like

a microcosm of you've got the defense and intelligence use cases that people think about when they think about satellites. So working with the Ukraine MOD and other allied governments to help Ukraine preserve its sovereignty. But it's also examples like you said. It's one of the big second order effects of the war in Ukraine is going to be the food crises because Ukraine is the world's fifth largest exporter of wheat. And there just isn't going to be as much wheat grown and harvested and exported as

in most years. And so we're working with a range of NGOs and governmental organizations and NASA, as you mentioned, to monitor the harvest, to actually understand across the whole country what crops are being grown, how much, how are they doing, what will harvest be like, how is this exporting going to happen so that at the very least we can get ahead of it. And other countries can begin acting on the most recent information. And then there's all these other interesting use cases where we're like working with media and with NGOs and human rights organizations to document potential war crimes from attacks on civilians to signs of mass graves. And so it's just you get the sense of how fundamental this data is.

And, you know, we're very early on. I think it's going to transform a whole bunch of industries around the world. Yeah, pretty fascinating stuff. If people want to find a little bit more about what planet does, or get in touch with you, what's the good way for them to follow the work? Well, so planet.com, first and foremost, Will, our CEO and founder, has also given a couple TED talks that I think are fantastic introductions to the space.

I watch them. And just they'll give you a sense of the mission and how deep it goes. And then, you know, I'm at Kevin Weill on Twitter, so anybody is welcome to my DMs are open. Feel free to hit me up. As you can tell, I'm very excited about what we do. I'm happy to talk about it. Amazing.

Man, this went fast. It did. Great talking to you, Kevin. Really appreciate it. Kevin Will, thank you so much for joining the show. Let's do this again sometime soon. Yeah, thank you for having me.

Talk to you soon. Speak to you in a bit. All right, everybody, thank you so much for listening. Thank you, Nate Gwattany for handling our audio. Appreciate it. As always, thank you, LinkedIn, for having me as part of your podcast network.

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