Big Technology Podcast - Twitter Product Head Kayvon Beykpour On The Story Behind Twitter’s Revival

Episode Date: March 10, 2021

Kayvon Beykpour is one of Silicon Valley’s busiest product executives. As Twitter’s head of product, he’s survived for years in a formerly-cursed role that seemed to turn over every few months. Now, Beykpour’s team is shipping. Twitter just released a Clubhouse clone, called Spaces. It bought Revue, a newsletter platform. And it just announced Super Follow, a feature that wraps it all together by letting you pay for added access and content from people you follow on Twitter. This is new territory for Twitter, which spent the past few years 

Hello, Kvon. Hey, Alex. Nice to see you again. Nice to see you. I'll just read the ad and then we'll get started. Cool. MediaOcean is for people who like to be efficient, like listening to this podcast at 2X speed. So I'm talking slow to make sure this ad is super clear.

If you work in advertising, go to MediaOcean.com slash big tech to register for a big virtual event on March 23rd. That's Mediaocean.com slash big tech. Hello and welcome to the big technology podcast, a show for cool-headed, nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. Joining us today is one of Silicon Valley's busiest product executives. Kavan Bakeport is the head of product at Twitter, and his team has been shipping. The company is rolling out a clubhouse clone called Spaces, a paid newsletter feature with

its new acquisition of review, and a subscription product called Super Follow. For a long time, I thought Twitter was just going to be Twitter, a niche product that appealed to a subset of the population obsessed with news. But now, I admit, I might have been wrong. We'll see if Kvon can convince me the rest of the way. Kvon, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Alex. And great to see you.

That's good to see you again. I think the last time we ran into each other was at the blue bottle right by Twitter offices. And I do miss those times. But now you guys are fully remote. Who knows? Are you going to ever go back into the office again? Oh, we will go back to the office, but it'll be a very different type of office life than what we were used to pre-pandemic. I think, you know, like many.

other companies, what's not changing is that we will forever be a remote friendly and sort of decentralized company in a way that we certainly wanted to be before the pandemic, but the last year has just accelerated that shift by probably a decade. So it won't ever be the same. Are you staying in the Bay Area or if you moved to Miami or Austin? We just did a show with Francis Suarez. He's pretty convincing and with the Austin mayor and Madison Mayor too. I'm still in the Bay Area. I sort of bumble between Marin and Tahoe, but still in Northern California. I have not gotten the Miami itch yet.

But I can tell you that I don't love the idea of going back to an office. I think, you know, like everyone else, like I miss being with people and I want to be able to hang out with colleagues. And there's certainly occasions where being in an office or in some, you know, shared space is useful. But I love working from home. I love being around the dogs. I love not having to commute. I love being able to go for walks around the house. Like, it's, I don't want to go back to an office.

No, it's pretty nice. I mean, after I left BuzzFeed, I've decamped to working from home forever until I start, you know, hiring people and bringing an office of my own. And I'm into it. I'm into it. Okay. So let's get, let's get into these new products that you guys have been shipping. I'm particularly interested in the timing. So the 2020 election happens.

You guys banned Donald Trump. And then you start shipping all these. sorts of products. And before this, and don't take offense, and others have noted this, your biggest product innovation that people point to was expanding the character count on tweets. So, were you guys waiting for the election to end and for that storm to blow over before you started, you know, letting these things out of the barn? What's going on with the timing there? It's funny that you asked that because like literally in the last, in the last 24 hours, in the 24 hours after our sort of analyst day presentation, I've seen a bunch of tweets that are

of the same flavor. My favorite one, I think, was from Ashley, Mayor. She said something along the lines of, it looks like, you know, Twitter has saved all their product launches and their drafts and then hit send yesterday, which I thought is what it felt like, yeah. I can appreciate how it might feel like that, but I promise you that's not actually how it works. And to answer your question directly about the elections. It had nothing to do with us waiting for post elections. Like a lot of what we shared at our analyst day presentation has been in the works for quite some time, like in some cases over a year. And, you know, a very public presentation like Analyst Day where we're also sharing, you know, our strategy with the entire world is a very

handy moment in time to do some storytelling around both what we have been working on for a while, what's relatively new, what's launched, what's about to launch, and what's a little bit further out. So I think the fact that we told that story all in one place, really for the first time since 2014, the last time we had a public sort of presentation like this, makes it seem like we hit send on a bunch of product launches. But we did not start this stuff prior, around the time of the elections. We started this stuff way prior to that. Of course, you've been working on it before, but you did ship it afterwards. So, well, not, not in every case. I mean, you know, we talked about a few things, right? We talked about

topics. Topics we shipped a year ago. And it's, you know, Rome wasn't built in a day. We've been drilling and evolving the product experience. Spaces we first put in beta in late November, early December. People are hearing about it a lot more now because we're expanding the rollout and there's a lot of energy and excitement around the medium. So people, you know, it might seem like it has just launched. But in fact, it's been in beta for a while. It hasn't even fully rolled out to GA yet. The only thing that we announced two new things that the world had not heard of at all that we announced for the first time yesterday. Sorry.

This is going to run delayed. So you're not supposed to say that. I'm supposed to not be time about it. We had to talk about this. No, I'm kidding. I broke the first rule of bike one. Super follows, which is new and communities, which we had not talked to the world about either of those two things.

Right. And we'll get into those here, for sure. I'm jumping ahead now. I'm going back in time. I'm going ahead of time. Yeah, yeah. No, they're interesting products. Yeah. The short answer to your question is like, that's not, we don't do product development like that.

We don't wait for, you know, some election-related thing to then decide to announce a bunch of things anew. Right. Everything that we shared at our analyst day strategically, like our focus on health, conversations, interests, these have been our strategic pillars for like two years. And it's taken us more time than I would like, but nevertheless, it's taken us time to kind of build a foundation of changes. such that now the world is seeing our pace and hopefully seeing and feeling the fact that we're speeding up. But, you know, it took a while for us to get to that point. Yeah, I want to get into the products. I want to get into the culture around it. Quick question about culture before we jump into the nitty-gritty of products because we're talking about Trump. I've been just fascinated

about Twitter culture ever since I started reporting on you guys many, many years ago. From the reporting. It seemed like the policy team made a decision to ban Trump. And then they told Jack. So what does that say about Twitter's culture that the process went that way? Are you so decentralized in your decision making or what can we learn from that? Well, how else would you expect the process to go? I'm curious. Everybody on the outside thinks that, you know, when it came to banning Trump, Twitter and Facebook basically, you know, had had years of wanting to stay in the middle of it. And then finally this happened and they took it, Facebook took it to Mark and Twitter took it to Jack and the CEOs made the decision. There have been so many op-eds that have said, oh, it was always

about what one person at the top, you know, wanted anyway. But it seems like it was different inside Twitter. So I'd love to hear like what actually happened. And yeah, what do you think it says about Twitter? I think we've, Twitter has always, I can't speak for other companies, obviously, but Twitter has always made policy enforcement decisions on the basis of having clearly defined rules and being able to make enforcement decisions that are commensurate to those rules. And what I just described sounds simple, but it's actually incredibly difficult, as you can imagine, the interpretation of rules and the circumstances around, you know, how enforcement

decisions are made is really, really complicated. And that's something that we've had our own sort of. of process and evolution around being better, being more transparent, being more consistent about getting those enforcement decisions right. But the way we made this decision philosophically is no different than how we make any other decision, which is like we have a set of rules and we need to enforce those rules. Right. But banning the present of the United States has always been a different category of decisions. So it's something Twitter has talked about in the past. So it is interesting. So yeah, I mean, it is interesting. It's a different magnitude of

decision, but it's one that we've also tried to carve policy around, right? Like, we've tried to craft policy to articulate why that circumstance, not like the U.S. president, but like world leaders generally. And we've had our own, you know, process of evolution around that. So I don't think we purport to be perfect. Like, it's difficult to get any policy right from the beginning, which is why you see us iterate on the policies themselves, as long as our enforcement against them. But that is how the process works. The engine of policy making an enforcement is how we go about making our decisions. It's not like a, hey, let's go get Jack to make a decision this way or that way. That's just never been how we work. Yeah. So it wasn't Jack who made that call. I mean, the, in terms of like who approved the

decision, that's been well documented. Like Vigja, you know, Vigna is our lead for policy enforcement. I know that the world will find it juicy to be like, well, who made the who made the, who made the, the decision and all that. But, like, that's, I find that to be a little bit over-dramatizing, honestly. That's a fair point. I think for us, it's- But, yeah, it's also in the public interest to kind of know how these choices are made. So, but yeah, sorry, go ahead. No, it's, it's just that, right? We have a policy apparatus and an enforcement apparatus. And, you know, ultimately, Vigya, as our, as our head of policy, made, made a decision. Jack is aware and supportive. How often do, do decisions boil up to Jack versus, I mean, Jack sometimes will be at square.

Sometimes he's on vacation or in a different country that operates on a time zone, you know, where it's day, where it's night here. Is decision, like, how about your decision making on the product team? Does Jack sort of set a vision and then you end up go and ship or how does that work? One of the things that I love about Jack, both because it's something I admire about him but also because I think it jives with how I like to work is he provides a lot of trust and autonomy to his leadership team. And for me, that's everything around the product and development apparatus. And so Jack, I often, when it comes to big strategic changes or just

gnarly product changes, we'll consult Jack. But Jack is immensely trusting of, you know, ultimately my decisions. Even if he disagrees with them, there are plenty of times where Jack and I will have some fun product debate where we land on different sides. And, you know, I always know his perspective, but he trusts me to make the call. And that's a style of working. That is not a function of the fact that he has two jobs. I think that also is one of those like juicy things that people, for understandable reasons. Well, it's untraditional. Yeah. Of course, it's untraditional. And I think that's why he's one of the most interesting leaders of our time. He's built two amazing companies out of a non-traditional way of working. And I have a lot of respect for him. But one misunderstood thing about

Jack is, you know, though it's, again, easy to talk about the fact that there are constraints on his time, I have never, ever needed something from Jack and had him not be there for me, regardless of time of day, time zone, you know, what, I don't even know what he's focusing on. It doesn't seem like he has any other job other than being there for Twitter. Yeah. Which is just my perspective. Now, people have talked about this culture in the past, like as I've reported on Twitter, where Jack has let a lot of the decision-making live lower down.

And they've pointed to that as the reason of the slow product shipping. I mean, Jack admitted in the analyst day that you guys just had, that you guys have been slow. So has something changed inside Twitter? I mean, what's gotten into you guys? That's a good question. First of all, I think that the, this is like the cause for our slowness in the past extends far before Jack's return to CEO. I think there's a lot. Honestly, I'll try and break it down from my perspective.

But, you know, one is there just was a lot of churn at the company. I mean, just take my role, the head of product role. When I got this job. You've held it for long as cursed. It was a cursed job before you took it. Yeah. When I got this job, I had had 12 predecessors. successors in the last 13 years, which is crazy. Like literally when I got this job, people

are like, okay, how, like, whatever, tell us what you want to do. Like, let's see how long that last, which is kind of a weird, weird sort of role to step into. Welcome. Right. So, but I think just thinking about that more organizationally, when there's that much historical churn with an important role, like the product, product leader role, the sort of organization builds. calluses around that where people don't want to work on things that get killed. People want to work on things that see the light of day. And so organizationally, over time, the entire orc sort of gravitates around things that are most likely to be seen through. And that tends to be really iterative, smaller things that are less controversial. And so that's sort of one thing. Two,

there was a period of time at the company. And this is right around when I joined, you know, as you know, I was very focused on Periscope for the first like two years of my time at Twitter. You know, the stated company strategy, like product strategy at the time was refine the core. A lot of this we talked about at Annalistay, too. We were hyper focused on doing very, very few things. And the one main thing we were focused on from a consumer standpoint was refining the relevance of our home timeline and all the recommendations. And honestly, at the time, like I was sort of on the sidelines casting stones being like,

this is kind of on the head of product. Let me build something new. Well, no, I wasn't the head of product. I was the CEO of Periscope. and just as a fan of Twitter and as an employee of the company, I, you know, was, I wish we would have taken bigger swings. And so I was a critic at the time. Looking back on it now, as much as that was frustrating as a phase for customers, because they sort of perceived that Twitter wasn't evolving very much. What I appreciate about that time now, and I have a lot of respect for

the leaders who made this happen, was that period of a year and a half or two years where we literally did nothing other than make our recommendations better, return the company to user growth, return the company to revenue growth, and gave us the wind in our sales and the oxygen that we now have to take bigger swings and bigger bets that will take time to pay off. We did not have that luxury five years ago, six years ago when I joined the company. And I think the unfortunate thing about that is, you know, there's a period of time where our customers were like, what's going on, what's going on at Twitter? Like the product isn't changing.

The customers are your users? Those are two separate things. It's interesting you bring this up. We don't consider them different things. We sort of internally in our nomenclature, we've tried to stop using the word users because it's less empathetic and like, what is it? We don't pay you guys, though. The advertisers pay you.

Well, people pay us with their attention, which is something we have to be respectful of. And the fact that people aren't paying us with their dollars doesn't change the fact that they are customers who come to Twitter to fulfill some need that they have. have. You're right that advertisers are a different form of customer. They have they have different needs and different problems that we can solve for them. It's interesting. It's a really untraditional way of looking at it, the way that you're describing it. That's another one of those Jack things. Jack feels very strongly about framing, you know, framing all of our focus around our customers and solving customer problems, not not users. Okay. I want to get into the specific

product changes that you've made. But one more question before we do to talk a little bit about what's going on inside the company sometime last year, I believe Elliot management and activist investor comes in, tries to oust jack and, you know, wants to make big changes inside the company, thinks it knows what's best for Twitter. How did that, like, how did that, how did that go down inside the company? Like, what were the discussions that you had like was, is that, and it also was that like a kick in the butt that was like, oh, we really need to get these products out? Because there is a deal that if Twitter doesn't grow by certain metrics, then Jack has to leave or something like that. So how did that impact what was going on inside? How was that felt inside?

So I would say for 99% of the company, it was not, it had no, like that whole period of time had no impact. People had no sort of visibility into the. Maybe you were part of the 1% that it did impact. So honestly, it wasn't, it wasn't that time consuming for me either. I can tell you like, honestly, it was distracting hearing news cycles around, you know, lack of faith from a cohort of shareholders about the CEO, you know, that sucks to hear and that's distracting emotionally for sure. But, you know, ultimately the decisions that were made and the, a lot of the hard work, you know, around that period of time was not something that I was spending time on. You know, certainly certain members of our management team and the board were very involved.

you know, I've been focused on, you know, building the product. So it's not high leverage time for me to get involved in those dynamics. And, you know, I'm happy with where things ended up. But one thing I want to touch on, you mentioned sort of like it being a kick in the butt. I think that like there's not a single person on our management team who for the last two years hasn't understood that if we don't deliver for our customers and our shareholders, that like we are not the right people, that we would not be the right people in our jobs.

Like we don't need like any more external pressure to understand that. And I think, you know, another one of those sort of convenient narratives I've heard in the last, in the last week have been around like, oh, look at like the pace that Twitter is sort of picking up. It must be because of all these changes to the board. And I can promise you like that has nothing to do with it. Like we have been working really hard over the last three years to,

make progress and build the momentum that people are seeing now. We did not start that work a year ago. Like, good on us if we could have achieved something like that in the last two months or even year. Like we've had to reshape our leadership team, hire new people across product engineering design research. We've had to set new strategies in place that, you know, it's taken a while to sort of like shift this cruise ship that is Twitter and aim it at a different, in a different direction and

at way faster pace, and we're starting to just see the results of that. Well, the world is starting to see the results of that. For us, it's been a long, multi-year journey. Yeah, no doubt. I mean, yeah, well, let's just, let's leave that there. I think that we've covered the culture stuff enough. I want to talk about the actual products. So, first of all, I would say that maybe even a few months ago, you know, Twitter seemed

to just be sending me, like, different apps or different experiences, like, I feel like every other tweet was like a clubhouse, join this clubhouse, sign up for my newsletter, watch this TikTok. But now you're building some of those elements into Twitter. Spaces is a dead ringer for Clubhouse. Review competes directly with Substack. So were you guys just sick of seeing people build audiences on Twitter and then make money from them elsewhere? What's behind this push that you guys have made to try to compete with some of these other services that essentially are, you know, people who have Twitter audiences? that are going elsewhere and finding a ways to be to make productive use of it.

Yeah. You know, it's less, it's less reactive to the competition than it may seem at the surface area. The competition definitely is relevant in the sense of driving urgency for us, which I think is great for any ecosystem to have that urgency. But the sort of motivation to answer your question stems to, stems back, you know, a year and a half. You know, we started publicly talking about how our focus, we have this focus on our conversations. strategy, which to us has always boiled down into a few different kind of sub-goals.

One is enabling new use cases. For the longest time, we've been describing Twitter as a place where people can talk about what's happening. And yet we've been very slow to evolve the actual form factors that people can use to talk about stuff. Like you can only accomplish so much with the- Your conversation strategy, you mentioned that. Can you just like very quickly elaborate what that means?

Yeah. Like to us, what the conversation strategy means is like the thing that's, you know, the thing that makes Twitter unique relative to some other platform or service that you can use to find out what's happening is that Twitter relies on somewhere in the world using their voice to say something, whether that's like 140 characters, a 20-day characters or publishing a link, like it's a user-generated platform that's predicated on people feeling comfortable talking in public. So if we do not create a service with capabilities and features and incentives that people use to say stuff in public,

then there is nothing for people to consume. This isn't the New York Times where we have publishers that are employed to create content, right? Like we, it's a user-generated platform. It's a two-sided marketplace. And so the conversation strategy for us is essentially the umbrella of work that allows us to really build the capabilities

and the functionality that motivate people to create content on the platform. And for us, that sort of boils down into a few different things. One, we want to enable new use cases for conversation because, like, for the last 15 years, Twitter has actually been quite limited in the analogs of conversation that are supported, right? Like, Twitter is better tuned for sort of short form quips and short form broadcasting than it is thoughtful discourse. And we've built an amazing service that's very valuable to the world,

I think, out of a very narrow form factor, but therein lies the opportunity. And that's why we're focused on things like fleets, which, enables more sort of lightweight, ephemeral media forward content sharing. So I were focused on stories, which is essentially Snapchat stories copied. But okay, well, that's what fleets are. Yeah, okay. Sorry, keep going. Was that your way of sneaking in a zinger, Alex?

No, no, I'm not zinging. I'm just saying, you know, people don't know what fleets are. So now they know what fleets are. Sorry, go ahead. Yeah. You guys, you guys don't get, you know, shit for copying Snapchat stories. I think Facebook, you know, started that. We might be able to talk about you copying Clubhouse, but let's, let's keep the list going.

We'll keep the list going. You know, spaces for us is sort of pursuant to the same goal of enabling new use cases, but it's really focused on, you know, long form audio-based conversation, which is a both at the surface level is a huge departure from Twitter because people are like, wow, we have tweets and now we have these like audio-based conversations. But like fundamentally to us, this use case is Twitter. This is people talking in public. So what are spaces?

You know, we've tried it. We've been in spaces. together, but just, you know, how do you think about them? Like, if you were to explain to someone who hasn't been in one, what would you say they were briefly? Um, spaces is a way for people to literally talk on Twitter. So you, you know, with their voices. Yeah, with their voices. You know, you can start a, you can start a space, which is basically just a public room that, um, anyone can drop into. Most often your, your followers or, um, you know, followers of other speakers who join you. And, um, it's a, it's a space where people can literally talk using their voices.

about, you know, anything they want. And I think to me, what's interesting about this is it is Twitter. Like, this is how people have wanted to use Twitter, but sort of mechanically by proxy of asynchronous, text-based back and forth. And this audio layer on top of Twitter is fascinating because people already leverage Twitter as a sort of interest graph, right? They're following the people and the topics that they're interested in. and being able to hear interesting long-form conversations about those topics is just a

it's just a it's a it's a more powerful manifestation of what Twitter already is. Anyway, my point was just to say, we've been focused on this problem for a while. And then Clubhouse came out and you said, okay, let's just do that. Clubhouse undoubtedly encouraged us to focus and move way faster, or with more urgency. And I think what the Clubhouse team has done is awesome. Like they've like, you know, every half decade or so, someone uncovers some new use case or mechanic that changes how people communicate on

digital platforms. And I think Clubhouse was really the first to kind of visualize that for, for what is the sort of audio conversational format. I don't think these things stay exclusive to one platform. Like we saw this with ephemeral content. we saw this with live video and Periscope, by the way, right? Like a year after Periscope launched, every platform had essentially a carbon copy. Yeah.

So I think this sort of is a natural evolution where there is a company or startup that usually uncovers some mechanic first, and then other platforms kind of think about how to adapt them to their mediums in different ways. Yeah, I think it fits pretty well on Twitter, as I've written in the past. Let's move on to another thing you're doing, which is, the superfollow. What is superfollow? Superfollows is a feature that we're building, not released yet, that will allow creators or influences, anyone who has a Twitter account to be subscribed to by their biggest fans. So rather than just following Alex to get his tweets, you can superfollow him

to get access to a subset of whatever content that Alex might want to publish for just as subscribers. So that's sort of like mechanically what it is. Sort of the why, like the why behind this and like why we're super interested in it is for years people have had people have built followings on Twitter and have had to really leverage other tools and services outside of Twitter to be able to sort of be supported directly by their audience and to sort of provide exclusive content to their subscribers. Like we've seen platforms like Patreon and Only fans and many others. kind of build these capabilities that fundamentally are just helping creators make money and

helping creators kind of have a new type of relationship and sort of back and forth with their biggest fans. And we think it's a, you know, a huge opportunity, both for creators and for Twitter, to help offer that as a layer within Twitter, particularly one that allows us to sort of stitch together for creators and influencers, many of the capabilities that we're adding on to Twitter right now. So if you had a superfower capability, Alex, you would be able to publish newsletters using review to your super followers. You'd be able to host subscriber-only spaces. The newsletter platform that you guys just acquired and then subscriber-only spaces, which is interesting. Subscriber-only DMs, subscriber-only tweets. You can just imagine a subscriber-only fleets.

Imagine every sort of capability that exists on Twitter right now in terms of how you might create content and share it with the world. but then add to it the ability to kind of like narrow cast and target that that content to either everyone or just your your super followers and be able to kind of create a, you know, your own custom definition of what you will provide your super followers, whether that's the price point that you choose or how much, you know, content and what type of content they should expect from you on a periodic basis. Like we expect all those things to be highly customizable by the creator themselves. But we think of this as a like audience rewards layer that allows creators and their biggest fans to have a new type of interaction on the platform. Yeah, this one is particularly interesting to me because, you know, I did leave BuzzFeed to start my own newsletter, big technology and, of course, this podcast.

And I tweet a lot. So I'm kind of doing all the things that you guys are getting into. But I, you know, I think that like there is some hesitancy to go on to. one platform. So, like, maybe I could like take the, you know, I could potentially take the newsletter, bring it to review, take this podcast, bring it to spaces, put some of the tweets that I do behind a paywall. What's, what's, you know, I guess like, what's the convincing argument, though, for me to leave, you know, these services that I like and then bring them to, you know, a centralized platform and then essentially bet everything on Twitter? You know, I'm not, I'm not sure you need to.

Our intent here is not to be winner takes all. There will be many platforms that allow creators to be rewarded by their audience. And I think we imagine a world where Twitter can be a part of that ecosystem and actually play quite nicely with that ecosystem. I think that there are specific capabilities within Twitter that we are uniquely well positioned to provide, like being able to have a conversational layer, a public conversational layer between you and your followers and your sort of the biggest super fans or super followers, like that is something that we are uniquely positioned to excel on. But I don't think in order for us to succeed, like, we don't need you to stop podcasting and like move to use spaces exclusively. Like you can create a podcast just like you normally do right now and then use Twitter as a layer to have either conversations beforehand.

Like, hey, what Chavon and I talk about? Like, do you want to influence what the agenda of this conversation is going to be super followers? And I did just ask that in a tweet right before we got on the line. So. Right. Yeah. So I think like we're less thinking of this as a like we need to create the one and only way where people can have like, you know, create the subscriber graph. Like I don't, that's not how we're thinking about this. Like I think it would be foolish for us to be so narrowly centered on. We're going to create the best and only thing. Rather than how do we build something that's uniquely, that uniquely leverages the strengths of Twitter and also can sort of play nicely with the rest of the ecosystem in a way that ultimately helps. creators. Like our goal here is to incentivize creators to be able to have more interesting conversations on the platform. Yeah. And it is interesting. I mean, review will take 5% of subscriber fees, whereas like substack will take 10. So I think you will have a convincing argument that you're going to be able to make to a bunch of people in my position. And in fact,

you know, I'll tell you already the chatter is among some folks, you know, do I start charging, you know, people who have built decent size followings on substack? Do I start charging on on substack or just bring everything over to review. So that's pretty interesting and bring it over to Twitter. How do you think about that? Like what's the sort of, what are the pros and cons and the dimensions of that decision for you? I personally think Twitter is a compelling use case for what I'm trying to do. I think review has a lot of work that it needs to do in terms of design.

Like I don't like the design there. And I really think substack is good and the CMS is better. But if you guys get at parity there, then, you know, And I'm able to, like, bring subscribers into the same experience. That would make, I think that would make a lot of sense for what I'm trying to do. In fact, like, I have had people who, so when people unsubscribe from big technology, you know, I have a little form tell me about what you've, why you've decided to leave. And people have just said, well, I'm just going to read your tweets.

So there is a tension between, like, what I'm writing for newsletter subscribers. By the way, newsletter is free. And what I'm doing on the podcast, podcast is also free and ad supported. I'd always want to keep a free element, but there's definitely something intriguing about taking everything that I'm doing and bringing it under, you know, one roof, charging one fee for it and trying to make this instead of an experiment, which it is right now, you know, something that potentially has long-term staying power. Yeah, I think that what you just touched on this question of how much of this sort of like class of creator we're talking about that you... The middle class. That's what I call it, the middle class. we're not we're not the big influencers but there's enough people paying attention that

you know it's a there's i mean that's the bet that i'm making big technology there's a chance to make a living off of it yeah i think what the one of the super interesting questions um is like what subset of my content goes as part of the sort of free layer versus the subscriber only layer i think it's a fascinating one and something that we're also thinking a lot about because you know you know there's this sort of podcasting as one medium there's the news long form newsletter as and other medium. And with superfollows, we're sort of, we're adding a bunch of other mediums to this where tweets kind of have their own formula of like, well, what do I tweet to my, you know, super followers versus everyone? And I think it's something that I'm super interested to see how

that evolves. Don't, don't purport to have the right answer, but we want to build, build the product with the flexibility to let everyone kind of figure out what that formula means to them. No doubt. I'm going to seriously consider migrating. We'll, we'll see where things go when you when you roll it out, but it is definitely interesting. And it, what, what strikes me also is that it's not just paying for tweets. That's what kind of annoyed me yesterday. Everyone's like, oh, you can pay for tweets. It's like, well, I don't know, you know, it's paying for tweets, but also, you know, you pay for, you know, the stories in the newsletter and you pay for, you know, potential, you know, the community with spaces. And that's much more compelling than just paying

for 280 character misses. Yeah, I think I definitely agree. I don't think paying for tweets is the right take. It's paying for community and paying for a relationship that is is different than the relationship that creators already have with their audience. This is a different type of relationship that can take new forms and be a little bit more intimate just as a natural function of how much smaller the community it will be. Totally. Before you guys bought review, which is the newsletter platform, we've talked about people were saying you were interested in buying substack. Did you guys try to buy Substack? I've long admired that team. And, you know, I've met, I met the team a couple times. I think they're really awesome. And just like what we were talking about with Clubhouse,

I think, you know, Substack has done a really amazing job of kind of willing this new form. It's both not new, but also in the way Substack has really grown, like they've made this a movement. You had acquisition discussions with them. I'm not going to comment on, on M&A, but I can I can tell you have, like, met that team and really love what they're doing and admire them. All right. We'll read between the lines. And then it was interesting that they said, we're not selling Twitter, like, that they thought the, the opportunity was bigger on their own.

And it is now interesting that you and Andrew Chen, the guy who funds them and is also funding Clubhouse from Andreessen Horowitz, are kind of head to head. I've, I've already reached out to Andrew over DMs and complimented him. I think he's very good at his job. And he's supporting some awesome companies. I definitely admire it. Obviously, you're following his roadmap in some ways, which is interesting. But what's different between you guys?

I wouldn't quite frame it like that. But I appreciate the observation. Go for it. What's interesting about you guys and them is that, like, you know, the Andresen investments are sort of hostile to journalists, you know, maybe implicitly. But Clubhouse has this aura. Mark Andreessen, who's like one of the biggest user blocks like every reporter he sees. You know, you guys have made a specific effort to bring reporters onto spaces. Substack, which by the way, I love, I use, it's been super helpful for my career.

But you also look at the messaging from like CEO Chris Best, who's like, you know, had, you know, very straightforward anti-New York Times tweets. You know, he's telling against them. Whereas, like, it seems like you guys are giving. like Kate Conger access to you and and, you know, and your executives before this stuff comes and access to spaces. So tell me a little bit more about your more pro journalist strategy. How do you guys think about that? I mean, I'll give you sort of my perspective on Twitter first. I can speak better to that. Less about how the other companies are thinking about it. Yeah, just tell us why you get why you guys are pro journalist, it seems like. Journalists are our customers. Like there's one of the

most important demographics of people who use who use Twitter. And so it's instrumental for us to make sure that we're building a product that is valuable to journalists, both from a consumption standpoint and particularly in the case of spaces, a creation mechanic. I long for the day that journalists as a matter, a sort of natural course of their work are able to use a product like spaces on Twitter to communicate about their research, the pieces they publish, and to talk to talk about what's happening in the world. I think that that will make Twitter a better ecosystem if journalists, along with many other types of customers, have that capability. So it's just invaluable for us to have folks like you and Kate using the product in the early days and helping

us shape how it works. And for what it's weird, like I don't think that, I know like Mark Andresen and A16Z has their own views. I think like I don't see clubhouse as necessarily being anti-journalist either, like the product has that same promise. I think how certain people leverage their block list is different than like the product's intent is. No, no, I hear you. Maybe I was a little bit overboard on that one. But, but it certainly is, you know, you said a, like you know, you said a tone, you said a culture and that gets reflected. Yeah. For us, the tone we're trying to set with spaces is we are building in the public and we want to hear from all of our customers. And that is inherently messy and chaotic, but like, it's so Twitter.

Like we've always, at our best, we've built in public and we've shaped the product through the intent and will of our customers. It's how the retweet was born. It's how the app mentioned was born. It's how the hashtag was born. And we want to, like what we're doing with spaces that's, like in that same spirit is obviously developing in public. What's different about spaces is we are building very, very quickly.

Like we are taking action in days and weeks. Like we don't use the units of time of months and quarters. And we're just, you know, we're trying to build, build this product really quickly and bring it to our customers. Yeah. And I'm hopeful from it. Like, I think it can do really good things for journalism because unfortunately journalists have, you know, I mean, don't be too upset about this. But they've spoken to the public in tweets and that has not done them a lot of good because, you know, it takes the nuance and the thoughtfulness that's inherent to the job and strip.

it out completely. And I think that when people do see reporters up there having a conversation, it will reveal them to be people and it will reveal some of that thoughtfulness that exists in the work. And for journalists, it'll be good to hear from people who disagree with them. Like, I could try to have a conversation with someone who disagrees with me and the, like, the app mentions or the replies to tweet, it's not going to happen. The temperature is way too high. And so maybe spaces can be that place where someone who's like, you know, disagree with me. I say, okay, let's, you know, instead of trying this, let's go in and have a discussion about it and let other people come in and discuss with us. I couldn't agree with you more. I would just like copy paste everything you said, but like that's true for not just journalists. Like I think that's good for everyone, probably.

I think like we've actually, and this is, we've been talking about this as part of our product strategy for quite some time. Like, you know, Jack over a year and a half ago said like we're rethinking the incentives of the service. And what that refers to is exactly this conversation. Like the mechanics. of Twitter have long incentivized a certain type of discourse. And that discourse is way more tuned towards witty quips that can get lots of likes and retweets. And that is useful for some outrage stoking. Yeah. Yeah. Outrage tends to do well sometimes when you're optimizing for reach. And that has really, that has some positive, the mechanics have some positive, you know, outcomes, right? Like news can travel very quickly. People can stay informed about things that are happening in the world very quickly. But it has a lot of downsides, too.

It does not lead to empathetic, thoughtful discourse. Like, it's no wonder why, like, the depth of any conversation on Twitter through tweets, like doesn't go particularly deep. Like, it's really hard to have a substantive back and forth. And that's a product problem. That's a mechanic. That's a mechanics problem. People are so angry on there.

And I think that it's even ramped recently. So I do hope that this is, I view it almost as like the ice bath, right, after a pretty intense practice you jump in the ice bath and cool off and maybe spaces can be like the ice bath of Twitter or instead of just like you know running more dead heats and yelling at each other you go in and talk it out yeah I think a lot of it's the medium audio specifically and we you know we even when we first started periscope like we always used to say like we chose live video as a medium for our sort of teleportation goal because live video can build truth and empathy and the empathy bit is very voice specific because like when you hear someone when you hear the

intonation when you hear the emotion behind their voice like it's a level of empathy you can build with them that's very different than seeing an avatar and 140 characters of text yeah and i believe that that's a really big part of what's going to make this medium on twitter change the change the tone of conversation on the platform not to suggest that there isn't value for like asynchronous text based back and forth. But it's the complement of the two together that I think is really fascinating. Yeah, I agree. I think they work well together. There is a, so there's a thing inside substack. I don't, didn't mean to focus so much on journalism, but actually this stuff has real implications. So let's, let's keep going. There's something inside substack.

They call it the Bichess number. I don't know if you know about it. No. It's named after Nathan Bichess. He used to work there and he's now doing his own newsletter. And they basically, take the number of Twitter followers that somebody has and they look at their engagement and they can tell pretty well, like whether they would make a successful newsletter writer or not. And I believe they go try and recruit. This didn't happen with me. I did this on my own. I don't meet the Beshez number. But they try to recruit them and say, hey, you could make a better living, more stable living if you were just writing a paid newsletter. I'm curious if you guys think that, like how you think this, and Casey Newton's discussed this in his newsletter.

How do you think that this feature will change, like, modern day newsrooms? Because superstars who have, like, you know, long gone in and they've gotten paid well and felt comfortable may actually be able to make more money doing something like a review space, a superfollow combination and feel less of the need to be entrenched inside, you know, let's say the New York Times, for instance. I'm sure people are going to leave the New York Times to try this out. So what do you think about that? I think we're already seeing it. I mean, I think it's, you know, the tools that now exist, both help the tools that help you build your own audience, the tools that help you publish with minimal investment and a minimal team behind you. And the tools that help you sort of make money to support yourself to continue your craft, it's never been more rich. And so I think that's true.

By the way, broadly, well beyond like long form publishing. Like this is the best time for an entrepreneur to start a company and go build some new technology-based product, you know, on AWS and like you don't need to hire a 30-person infrastructure team to go build some tools. So never been cheaper. It's never been cheaper. And you've never been able to do it as quickly. And you've never been able to reach an audience as quickly, you know, helpful in part due to platforms like Twitter and IG and all the other platforms that help you get distribution. So I think that we're absolutely going to continue seeing this across all verticals, just journalism. And I think it will be interesting to see how sort of traditional publishers

evolve and how the platforms like Twitter evolve and how sort of this burgeoning ecosystem of tools sort of evolve around it. What are the use cases do you see? With what? The superfollow. I mean, I've talked a lot about journalism because it's what I know well, but when you say it not just journalism, what are you thinking of in your mind? I think that one of the things that's most exciting to me and also a little bit intimidating is that something like Super Follows will, it's not going to displace an existing type of conversation that's going to move from public to like private subscriber only. It's going to create a new avenue for conversation that isn't happening right now.

There's this funny back and forth where someone tweeted, I don't remember who it was, but someone tweeted, like, what would this person need to tweet for you to, or which of these tweets would you be willing to pay for or something? And Scott Belski, who's an old friend and one of the first investors of Periscope, had this great response. He replied with, you're super following them for the things that they don't tweet, which I think is so spot on. Like, I think this layer will, this layer, if done correctly, will allow a new type of relationship and a new type of sort of conversation to flourish between creators and their audience that doesn't really flourish today on Twitter at least. Maybe it flourishes through other mediums. Well, now I got to ask the only fans

question. Do you see this as competitive with only fans? I think that Only fans, I think that there are certain use cases. People in my mentions were like, yeah, they were all like this is an only fans competitor. I think there are certain use cases that, you know, I would hope, you know, people would choose super followers for rather than OnlyFans, but I think Only fans will continue to exist. I mean, they have also a particular sort of demographic of usage that we're not sort of shooting for on Twitter. But I think like any time a capability like this gets built at a bigger platform, like there are certain use cases that it competes for and there are certain use cases that it doesn't compete for. So I think time will tell. But we're not really thinking of this through the

lens of, hey, let's go like get, let's go, like, let's go, like, let's go after only fans and Patreon. Like, we're, as hard as it might be believed, we think of this from a first principle standpoint, like, how do we build a product that allows creators on Twitter to get more value out of Twitter and get, be able to develop a new type of relationship with their, with their audience? And it just so happens that that does, you know, that will intersect with some use cases that other third party tools, um, fulfilled today. And in some cases, we'll allow for use cases that aren't fulfilled by any tool. Yeah, I like that.

It's the stuff that people aren't saying out loud, but might say to a small select group of people who are willing to pay and be part of a private community. That's really interesting. Okay, last question. Maybe we can fit two more in. So first of all, at your analyst day, you said you're going to add 120,

or you expect to add 123 million users in the next two years. You only have about 200 million in the 200 million range Now, why does Twitter set such high expectations for it? Because it just seems like, this is what happened with the IPO. And then it took years to dig out of the gulf between the expectations and what Twitter was actually doing. And isn't this just creating a situation where, yeah, you're going to be, you know, fighting against that number versus, you know, I don't know, focusing energy where it should be? I can't speak to the IPO and what decision-making went into the expectation setting then. I can tell you that, well, a couple things.

One, I would actually argue that people have low expectations of Twitter. Like, over the last five years, I think people have had, like, insanely low expectations. Right. But you're ramping them up again. Yeah. And I think rightfully so. For a couple reasons. One, these are our expectations.

And we, I think there's a power to being transparent about your own expectations because it is yet another way that you can be held account, right? Like it's one thing to have your own intrinsic motivation to do something, but when you put it on the public record, it really puts a fire under you. And I think that's a good, that's terrifying, but it's a good quality to instill in a team. So I think that's one of the benefits. Like the other, and I suspect this is somewhat different to Twitter of yesteryear is we're not like making shit up. Like, this is our strategy. We have goals around that strategy that we want to hold ourselves accountable to. And we're not pulling things out of a hat.

Like, these are things. This is a strategy that we didn't, we didn't publish this like last night or a week ago. Like, we've been focused on this strategy for quite some time. We have some momentum under our belt and we're intent on seeing it through. Sorry if you're hearing my dog spark in the background. That's okay. We always have dogs in this work from home podcast era. Dogs appear on every show.

Millie, come here. Let's see if Millie can get a little feature. really come on um so that to me this is a it's both important for the world to know where twitter is going um because you know we are building a public conversation platform like you know it would be ironic if we were not public about our own strategy and ambitions um i think it is sort of uniquely twitter to be leaned in and transparent about um the work that we're doing so I don't see it as a distraction. I think it is, you know, it's an added layer of complexity, which I think is a feature,

not a complexity, it's an added layer of accountability, which to me is a feature, not a bug. And, you know, we're going to try really hard to not let ourselves and our customers and our shareholders down. Great. The last question I was going to ask you is, I know we're out of time. The last question I was going to ask you is, how did Jack show up at the beginning of your analyst day in a sweatshirt and what looked like a yoga lounge? and then end up with like a hunter hat in some other location later in the day. But that's just going to be a mystery. We're just going to leave that to the universe.

And I don't know if. Does that happen every day at Twitter? Which? Jack's, you know, physical transformations. You know, it's funny. He's a man of mystery. I lost power for the entirety of analyst day, which is like the worst possible time for the utility company to like ruin the neighborhood's power.

So I actually wasn't able to watch on videos. I didn't see the transformation. Yeah. But I will say, I think Jack has earned the right to wear whatever the fuck he wants. Okay. Well, we'll end it with that. That was a good exclamation point for a really interesting conversation. Kavan, I appreciate you joining.

It is great to hear from you guys and be able to discuss this stuff. This is the longest, I think we've spoken before. And I appreciate you making yourself available. I've seen you in all the spaces. I hear there's a rule that you have to join every space like. get started. So I hope we can pick up the conversation at some point over there. But until then, I do appreciate you coming on the show. Thanks for having me. I've always enjoyed our conversations. I remember the first time we chatted was about the rise of Periscope in Turkey. Yeah, because that's

where it began. It's not where it began, but it's where the idea, the idea came from. Yeah, yeah, the idea came. The idea was in part inspired by my trip to Turkey. And then it was one of the biggest countries that kind of blew up. It wasn't the first, but it was one of the countries that really blew up in the first few months. Anyway, our conversations

have morphed quite a bit since then, but definitely. Always great to keep in touch. Always great to chat. Yeah, that was fascinating to watch how Turkey really grabbed hold to Periscope after your experience

trying to travel there, ended up influencing the creation of the app. It's a fun story. I'll put in the show notes. Well, this has been great. Thanks again. Thanks, let's do it again soon. Thanks everybody for listening.

If it's your first time here, please subscribe we have new conversations with tech insiders and outside agitators every wednesday if you're a long time listener and you want to rate us we of course appreciate that thank you to nick wotney for editing the show and for red circle for hosting and selling ads and thanks to you all for listening we will be back next wednesday with a new episode of big technology podcast until then take care Thank you.