This Week in Startups - Launching Twitter Blue with Twitter’s Head of Product Kayvon Beykpour | E1225

Episode Date: June 3, 2021

Kayvon Beykpour, Twitter's Head of Product shares the strategy behind Twitter's recent feature releases, what structural changes enabled Twitter to increase product velocity, how they segment composers & consumers, the Twitter blue launch & more!

This week in startups is brought to you by Masterworks, the first company allowing investors exposure into the blue chip artwork asset class. Twist listeners can skip the 17,000 person wait list by going to Masterworks.io and using promo code twist. Rippling. Rippling helps thousands of fast-growing startups automate their HR and IT, from their team's payroll and benefits to devices and apps. See how at rippling.com slash twist and LinkedIn marketing. To redeem a $100 LinkedIn ad credit and launch your first campaign, go to LinkedIn.com slash this week in startups. Hey everybody, welcome to this week in startups.

And today on the program, a startup you may have heard of it's called Twitter. And now that we're in our second decade, we're having all these amazing startups that were on the podcast in the early. days when they were nascent companies, and Ev Williams and Jack had started along with Biz. Twitter, well, now Twitter is at-scale hundreds of millions of users, and we noticed something in the last six months, 12 months, something started percolating over at Twitter. The product velocity at Twitter accelerated massively. Now, this is a company that's always been very cautious to protect the core experience in

Twitter. You didn't see Twitter change all that much, and that was for good reason. It worked, and you had very, very noisy customers, like myself, who'd been on the platform for 10 years, and they don't want certain things to change. Well, things have started to change, and I think in an incredibly positive direction, and dare I say, Twitter has gotten its groove back. Kavon Bakeport is a large reason for that. He is the head of product, and he's on the program today. Thanks for joining us. Kivon. Thanks for having you, Jason. Good to see you as well.

Now, you came to Twitter via an acquisition of Periscope, and if my memory serves me correctly, they bought the company which was pretty hot in beta before you even launched, and it was around the time that they had also acquired Vine, if I remember correctly. Vine was at least a year prior.

Yeah. Probably a couple of years prior. Because I remember when we were going through the early diligence conversations with Twitter, I actually got introduced to the Vine founders and kind of asked them. So what's it like to work at Twitter? So yeah, they were at the company for at least a year or so. But yeah, we were in beta.

We got acquired, you know, by the time we got the deal done, it was in January. We kind of kept it under wraps because we wanted to get ready for launch and not have a bunch of public pressure around the acquisition having happened. So we ended up launching in March of that year. Now, you heard my little intro there. Am I correct that the culture of Twitter, is to be, if I'm being generous, methodical, maybe a cynical person would say too conservative in terms of changing the core product.

And what changed in the last couple of years? Because we started to see this rapid acceleration in the vision. Was that you? Was that Jack? Was that some function of watching other people take your social graph and just rebuild products based on the Twitter social graph? What's happening over there? Do they change the coffee?

We've gone through a few evolutions of the coffee. Yeah. I think it is a fair assessment to say that for many years, people who were using Twitter were used to seeing not much evolution of the product. It was a pretty common source of criticism and frustration from our customers. And so I think that's a very fair assessment. I wouldn't, there are certainly parts of Twitter's culture that are methodical and very intentionally are methodical.

So some of it is, some of it was intentional. Some of it was, I think, the absence of conviction, like enduring consistent conviction around a strategy that didn't change like every year. Because if you have a revolving door of strategy, it's really hard to take big swings.

And there was, I think, a little bit of both. And here's what I mean by that. On the revolving door thing, one, like, there was a lot of churn at the leadership levels of Twitter, in particular the product role.

Like I, you know, there are, I think 12 heads of product in 12 years, which is kind of crazy. You know, what happens, or at least my observation, what happens when there's that much churn is the organization tries to build calluses around the fact that there's like instability and product strategy, and you tend to then have an organization that works on features that are not likely to get killed through those strategy changes. So that's, I think, one, that's like my interpret. of, I think one of the things that was happening was, there was a lot of focus on like incremental things because they were less speculative and, you know, people don't want to work on things

that don't ship, which is very understandable. The second thing that I think was going on was a very intentional strategy at the time. Roughly when I joined the company, actually, one of the big strategic efforts at the time was what we called refine the core. And what that meant was, let's focus on doing as few things as possible and do those few things really well. And one of those things was refining the core product experience. And really, like, a couple of material things happened during that time period. This is like in the 2013 to 14, 15 timeframe. That's when we moved from a reverse chronological timeline to a ranks timeline

and really focused on improving our ability to recommend content to people. Now, a couple of things to say about that phase. One, if you focus on refining the core for a long period of time, customers will maybe see less swings, less different sort of product experiments that you might sort of see other sort of startups or bigger companies taking bigger swings on. And that, I think, contributed maybe to some of the rhetoric around Twitter being, you know, not taking a lot of swings. To be honest, like I at the time was pretty frustrated as well,

kind of like being at the company, being focused on Periscope and sort of wondering why we weren't taking big swings. that being said, what I have an appreciation for now that I don't think I did then was that period of time where for two years we focused on refining the core, that focus is what actually returned the company to user growth. Like building the rank timeline, building sophistication around machine learning to be able to recommend content to people, which is like fundamentally people come to Twitter to stay informed about their interests.

We're not good at recommending content. We're nowhere. And that period of time, even though it didn't see, spark a bunch of divergent bets that would manifest in crazy new product experiences, we ended up really improving the nuts and bolts and the bread and butter of Twitter. And that brought us to kind of where we are now, which is like every quarter consistently we've grown Twitter in terms of our GAU double digits year over year. Like that's a pretty remarkable turnaround from essentially having been flat.

And so that, I share all that context because, yes, there was a period of time where the product wasn't really evolving at the surface level, but it was absolutely being evolved underneath the hood. And frankly, that product debt, right? I mean, there was either, you could call it technical or maybe product debt would be more accurate here in

that people were used to on Instagram or Facebook or other services. You open it up and it gives you the most interesting things. An algorithm looks through everything and says, hey, since you've been gone, here's what's most interesting. And, you know, when you open Twitter,

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Get started at Masterworks.com.io and use the code twist to skip their 30,000. in person waiting list. See important information at masterworks.io slash disclaimer. And we have the founder of Masterworks on the podcast and he's a really brilliant guy. And it's a fascinating, fascinating world. And I think it's a very cool idea. Okay, let's get back for this amazing pod. The top Twitter users, how addicted are they? How often does, let's call it, the top 20% of users use the product? I know for people like myself or maybe watch Elon Musk using it, just from his public, you usage of it. There are people who are, you know, in important positions of power, journalists, CEOs, politicians who are on it seemingly throughout the day. What do those top 20% look

like, the wells in your system? And do you have a name for them internally? Well, we have, we have sort of frameworks that we use to classify customers based on their behavior. For example, we look at the behavior of what we call composers, like people who tend to create content very differently. they sort of had different behaviors than folks who are heavy content consumers. They spend a lot of time on the service, but they're not so much active on the content production side. They're more consumers.

And so that's sort of one framework we use. And then we sort of classify customers on the basis of how active are they. And those are useful when you're trying to understand, like, how is a product feature working? Because sometimes it works very differently amongst different cohorts. Yeah. I mean, every company has sort of different frameworks like that. certainly when you're at scale looking at how product experiences are working, it's helpful to kind of stratify based on those dimensions.

So those creators who are constantly creating content, um, you sheer comes to mind just somebody who during the Trump era, you know, just seems to be on like a full time job almost. Those users are super important. And it seems to me that a lot of your focus as the product officer is around servicing, I'll call them frequent creators, hypercreators, consistent creators, something like that. Is that your focus now, is to really service them or over-service them or service them better than other opportunities they have in the world? It's certainly one of our focuses. Maybe if it's helpful, I can sort of step back and give you a sense of, like, what are the big, like, strategic rocks that we're focused on? Yes, please. what you're referencing is certainly one of the focus areas, but there's a few kind of strategic

initiatives that we sort of disproportionately focus on as part of our strategy. The first is health. You know, it's been it's been a long focus for us over the last few years because it's important if people are participating in public conversation is important for that conversation to be healthy. And for us, that means a couple things specifically. One, it means like conversation, like people need to feel like they feel safe participating in the conversation. Like if you feel like you're going to be abused or harassed, you're not going to want to talk on Twitter. And there's a bunch of things that we know we can do to improve that from being more transparent about our rules, giving people more controls. And so conversational health is one aspect. The other is, you know,

if people don't feel like they can trust the integrity of the content they find on the platform, but it's not free of misinformation, of spam, of state-sponsored activity, like they're just not going to trust what they see on Twitter. So health is a really important strategic focus for us and has been for quite some time. The other is what we call interests. Now, interest is maybe one of the most fundamental parts of Twitter, but it's really about how do we connect people to the content, people, and communities they care about. Like one of the fundamental reasons people come to Twitter is to follow and talk about

their interests. So if we can't understand what Jason is interested, and if we can't understand, if we can't understand how the people and content on the platform map to those interests. And if we can't connect those dots, we're failing in one of the basic building blocks of what Twitter needs to do. And so interest is a really critical one that actually, it's important for both creators and consumers. And if anything, there's far more non-creators than there are creators. And a lot of the folks who are coming to Twitter every day, you know, they might be coming to Twitter because something happened in the world, you know, whether it was something in their neighborhood or some

world event like COVID or whatever it might be. And anyone who comes in the door to Twitter, they have many more interests, many more things that they're interested in beyond that thing that brought them to Twitter. We need to do a really good job of understanding what those are and connecting people to those interests. So projects like topics that you see us investing in now really are part and parcel to that strategy. That's going incredibly well.

And that was something that was user generated in the beginning with hashtags. But you've obviously figured out, hey, you know that I'm into the Knicks. and the Warriors, somebody else might be into the Hawks and the Lakers, just from my liking activity that I follow players on the team, some amount of signal is telling you show Jason more Nix, correct? Show Jason more Nix and then maybe give him the option to explicitly follow the Nix so that he doesn't have to know who are all the players, who are all the coaches, who are all the sports journalists that cover the NICS,

who are all the super fans that have the most interesting takes on NIC's content. So rather than, you know, we would replace, the eight months you would have had to spend finding and following all those people in the previous world. And instead, theoretically, you follow the next topic. And we will figure all that out and just recommend the best content to you. And maybe you also find interesting people as a result of that that you then follow. What's interesting about those first two rocks that you put in the product jar there using

the metaphor, the big rocks going in, those rocks are things that people really aren't going to see, right? The hope is that they don't have a health of security problem. So it's kind of like, you know, I didn't see trash on the street. It's not like you took trash out of my life. I just didn't happen to see on the street. And then, oh yeah, you're showing more interesting stuff. But again, to our earlier conversation, it's not like it's some new feature like spaces that is explicitly like, hey, here's something new, a shiny object.

Those were foundational things that have made the service grow and engagement grow. So yes and no, I think certainly in the first year and a half of our focus on. health, there's a lot of under the hood stuff that maybe doesn't manifest to most people very clearly, but to some people it does. When you experience abuse and you report a tweet, you want to know that there's like a, you know, there's good procedural justice and a system that like evaluates user reports and makes action and yada, yada, yada, that's not user-facing in the spaces sense, but it does impact customers.

Over time, though, we've actually made sure that as a part of our health roadmap, we do build real user-facing features. examples of this are, you know, I think about a year and a half ago at this point, we really started this with a feature called hide replies, which lets you, if someone responds to a tweet that you posted with a reply that you just think is garbage, like maybe it doesn't violate our terms of service. Twitter's not going to take action on it, but for you, you know, you were posting about the next episode of the pod that's dropping and someone responds with some really annoying.

Snarky, whatever. Yeah, you can hide it so other people don't see. And like, sure, we've had features like mute and block, but those are, local decisions. We're now giving people more agency around the space in which their conversations happen. So features like hide replies, features like conversation controls where you can start a tweet and say, you know what, this tweet and the conversation within it is only for the people that I follow. Whereas this other... So those are all in the spirit of giving people more controls to have a healthier experience. I would say it's totally working. I have to say that your security

features, which unfortunately I've had to deal with, you know, being doxed, you know, two or three times, I've had to report them. And what's really great is when you do a report, you get a follow-up. And they say, hey, listen, this tweet was taken down. And I had retweeted some video. And I guess somebody reported it because it was like one of these like fail videos. And maybe they felt like because it was a kid who failed. It might have been violence or something. I don't know why exactly got reported. But I opened my account up and it said, hey, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, your account's been suspended. And I was like, really?

Well, that's weird. Because the first time in 11 years, or no, 20 years almost. And I clicked it and it was like, oh, for this tweet, would you like to take this tweet down? And I was like, yeah, I'll just take it down.

I didn't realize this would be offended to I don't care. And that kind of new moderation feature seems to be very elegant to me. And it took a while to get there, but do people, are people feeling satisfied with the work you've done? Or are you seeing that? Because there's a lot of people who complain,

like, harassing me, but, you know, sometimes it's just people being like, I think you're dumb. And it's not really harassment. It's more just like people saying, I think you're dumb. I bring that example up because people say that to me all the time. I don't get to report that one, right? I think it's really, it's tricky because this is such a difficult space. Precisely for the reason you mentioned, like, there's a, there's a wide, like, health is a very wide spectrum. there's there's objectively deplorable content that is against our terms of service that is somewhat easier to take action on through automation processing etc yeah easy right and then then there's a

you know child sexual exploitation like there are things like that that are not great it's like very clear and then there's a tremendously wide spectrum of gray area which is very subjective around like unwanted interactions right what you might consider unwanted it is very different than what I might consider unwanted. And historically, we have not provided the nuanced controls in the product to actually solve for that. We had to solve for it through the black hole of- Is that really your responsibility though? I mean, just, I hate to cut you off, but I kind of feel like if you're going to be in a public space that is as vibrant as Twitter is, with, you know, let's face it, a lot of intellectual people, some trolls, whatever, but like, should people's expectation be that they have to, they should

be able to dictate, I want this style of conversation. Is that a bridge too far? Like maybe you're just, you know, the expectation should be, listen, it's going to be safe, but people might disagree with you. It might think you're stupid. And that's just called the real world. I think there's a certain point where like we cannot, we're not going to be able to dictate and control all of the micro interactions that people have on our platform. So I think that's kind of the point you're making, which I agree with that sentiment. However, we as the platform, we own an operating. and build the tools and mechanics that govern how people behave. And that is our responsibility.

If you went to a dinner party and every time you went to that dinner party, it was just like a nasty experience. You would not go back to that dinner party. And we would like to have a platform that makes as many people feel comfortable talking. That's possible. Fundamentally, we believe the more people have in public conversation, the better. Like, that's good for the world. So I think as we build new modalities like audio,

as we build new controls, as we build new use cases like conversation controls, let you have like fireside chats that you couldn't have before without like people yelling in your ear, these just enable more types and more analogs of conversation that we already have in the real world. Like in the real world, it's not like every form of human discourse is Jason going to a public square standing on a stool and yelling. Like that's kind of what tweeting can feel like sometimes. Sure.

But with these new analogs, be it conversation controls and spaces, and, you know, fleets and DMs. Like, these are all sort of different permutations of how people can talk. Some in public, some in semi-public, some in private. It sort of creates a more fluid spectrum of how people can talk in public. Yeah, it's also one key to block somebody and they're out of your life forever. This new world of remote work is here to stay. So are all of the HR and IT headaches.

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And it saves us time. right notice blocking has become much more sophisticated when you're blocking somebody now you can't even search for their name and all kinds of stuff because I know like people would I would block somebody but then they would still see my stuff I know they can get a burner account and I'm a public figure so I don't really have too many expectations but blocking is super effective right I mean and so is muting people both of these things work and there's also the I guess they call it I don't know if you have an internal name for this but it's sort of like the soft block which is you block somebody I don't know if you know about this You block somebody and then you unblock them.

So that turns off them following you so they don't know. They just think they forgot to follow you. Yeah. And I keep saying like, Chimath, why do you, I was following you? Why do you keep softball? Hey, Chimot doesn't do it to me. What do you call that internally when somebody does that? Like, you block somebody in order to get them to unfollow you and then you unblock them.

I don't know if you just infected me or insepted me with the term soft block. But we may call it that, but we observe this behavior. And this is actually like one of the interesting things that we try and do as part of our product development process is look at all the ways people are hacking the product to try and get it to do what they want and make that easier. And this is exactly one of them. Like what people fundamentally are trying to do is force and unfollow. Like we could make that easier for folks so that they don't have to discover that they have to block and then unblock. And then it creates this mystery around like is there a bug? The Twitter screw something up. So I think that's those are all, that's like one very helpful lens through which we look. at, you know, what we built. The system has existed for a very long period of time. When it started, people looked at Twitter as a chat room. And so, you know, or kind of like being in a bar. In other words, people were a little loosey-goosey, maybe not as buttoned up as they should

be, and we saw many people's careers, you know, people get canceled by something they said 10 years ago. You know, obviously that must not feel great for you at Twitter or for the team there. and I basically went and I just deleted my entire Twitter archive. I used the third party tool like tweet to delete everything. Now I backed it up for myself, but I was like, you know what?

I don't even remember what arguments I was having, you know, 12 years ago. It's just a liability. I'll just back it all up and delete it. But I really wanted to archive it. Just like Instagram now, you can,

I started turning off all my Instagram photos because like a creepy people. And I was like, let me just archive these, right? Have you thought about a way instead of forcing me to delete? to delete my archive. I could just say anything over a year old, I just want archive.

Or is that kind of tool kind of antithetical to the public discourse? And how would you go think about making a decision like that? Certainly it must have come up in discussion. I'm smiling and this is super creepy because we literally had a product review

on this concept today. What? So I'm like freaked out that you're actually in our internal systems, Jason. I'm a power user, obviously. I mean, you escalated from power user to you have LDAP access now.

So is it antithetical? No, not at all. Like this is something that we know through the developer ecosystem. We know from customer feedback that, you know, sometimes you don't want something you said eight years ago to remain on the public record and searchable. And we don't make that particularly easy right now. A lot of our customers find and use these third-party tools.

Some of them are great. Some of them are a little overzealous with their API privileges and are a little bit abusive. Yes, they can get your band. You've got to be careful. Yeah. So, you know, it's something that absolutely we're thinking of, and this product review I mentioned today, was exploring such a concept that allows you to essentially... This could be part of the Twitter Blue paid product. I've always felt that there should be a pro product. And if you're a professional using, you've been with the platform for five or ten years, why not pay $10 a month? Talk to me a little bit about how you think about users paying for the platform and that whole discussion. What would be in a premium product if you did launch one? Or what are people asking for?

So let's take all those questions one by one. So in terms of like, how do we think about it? Like I think the notion of having a direct relationship with our customers where they only pay us if we're delivering valuable add-on features that don't exist in the product today, I think is great. I think that's a really important diverse source of revenue that we need to have and frankly creates good incentive for us to build features for a set of power users that would be interested in lots of capabilities that we don't have right now.

Those features may not attract hundreds of millions of users, but they do attract a subset of users that are power users. Certainly millions. Certainly millions. I believe so. And so, you know, the rumors are true. We are not only super interested in this, like this is a big priority for the company. And there's a team working on this. And we're going to do a first launch limited to a couple markets, a couple geographies, because we want to test and learn and make sure we're getting this right.

But tomorrow in Australia and Canada, we're going to have a couple of markets. we're going to have the first launch of Twitter Blue be available for customers, and they'll be able to pay Twitter to access our first bundle of features. And that's just a starting point. Like we will be adding features and capabilities constantly. What will be on the first feature set? So in the first feature set, you'll have a few things. You'll be able to, and I'll sort of give you the list first,

and we can talk about the sort of sure, the why behind them. And then I'd love your feedback on what else we should add. You'll be able to manage bookmarks. So as you know, we have bookmarks feature today, but it's one of the most common, probably like next to edit tweets, the second most requested feature I hear about. Well, edit tweets, verify me in reverse order, and then let me manage my bookmarks. So a lot of people are using bookmarks, but they want to be able to create folders. They want to be able to search them. They want to be able to organize all the great content they see on Twitter rather than have this flat list.

So managing bookmarks will be in Twitter blue. We'll improve that over time, hopefully build search, but for now it's just creating folders and being able to add, you know, bookmark tweets into those specific collections. Would you be able to make those shareable too? Like, would you be able to share my bookmarks eventually? Not in this first version,

but that's definitely like there's lots of interesting directions we can take this. And I think... Multiplayer mode. And opening up API around this, I think we'll have lots of awesome things happen with the developer ecosystem. but starting

with just managing bookmarks you'll be able to undo tweets and what that means is similar to Gmail when you post a tweet we queue it up on the back end but we give you a period of time to decide to undo it if you notice a spelling mistake

or if you want to undo it for any number of reasons and we sort of take you back to the tweet composer where you can change the tweet this is something that 10 seconds 15 seconds what is the countdown clock I believe it's 10 seconds right now,

but we're going to make it modifiable. So some people might want to change, you know, change that. What would be good is, too, is to have, with that countdown clock, the undo is to also have approval.

So one user account writes it, another account has approval on it. So if, you know, it was the corporate account for, you know, stake them. One person could write it in the comms department

and the CFO could approve it, you know, like that sort of work. Yeah, I think there's a whole, there's a whole interesting thread there around businesses and creating specific features for businesses that we think is an interesting exploration as well. This is very much starting with like an end user, like more features for end users. Got it. So we got bookmarks, we got the undo.

Bookmarks, undo. The feature called Reader Mode, which is really, really awesome. It's very simple, but you ever run into a long thread on Twitter that has 15, 20 tweets and it's just I've written them. So reader mode lets you when you happen upon one of these threads

you tap a button and we take you to a really sort of elegant reading only experience where we take away all the engagements a lot of the other fluff outside of the content and we sort of make it more of a long form reading experience so you can focus on the content. Nice. And then in addition to that we have a bunch of small

customization perks So you can change the color of some of the sort of common color elements in the app to make it more sort of thematically customized. You can change your app icon. So these are like small little personalization things that feel little, but having used them for for a few months now, it's actually quite delightful. Yeah. And all the features that I mentioned to you, we've heard from customers through research are just really like different cohorts of customers really care about these things. and we thought they'd be a really good sort of bundle to put together to start with

and use it as a foundation upon which we'll build. We've got a bunch of other really exciting things that we're not quite ready to talk about, but you'll see us add to the subscription and make it more and more compelling to customers over time. I have most killer one. Most killer one. Tell me.

It's a little controversial, but everybody who is a power user are using third parties to do this anyway, which is knowing when somebody unfollows you, or knowing if somebody blocks you. Now, knowing if somebody blocks you opens up a little bit of a security can of worms

because there might be a reason they're blocking you and that when you do block somebody, everybody knows that's a little bit of an agitating moment for the blockee and they might act out. So you have to be a little cautious with that one. But just knowing who unfollowed me and when would let me know and give me a feedback loop to

maybe I'm tweeting too much. Maybe I should stop tweeting about Michael Bloomberg and now I want him as president instead of Bernie Sanders, which I think I lost an advertiser on the podcast because of, I'm not kidding, somebody got upset. I don't know if they canceled their head by or not, but they were upset that I was pro-Bernie. Not pro-Bernie and I was pro-Bloomberg.

I do think knowing who unfollowed you and giving some basic metrics, I subscribe to some service that's five or ten bucks a month. That just sends me a daily report of my top tweets, what the metrics were. And, you know, it's very elegant and simple. I'll forward it to you after the show. And some sort of daily report of my metrics, I think, would be killer because, you know, is it metrics or analytics dot Twitter.com? And is that available to everybody or only verified accounts?

There are a subset of our, so all of our customers have access to a subset of analytics, like at the tweet level. And then we have a more sort of in-depth product that is part of our Media Studio suite. And also part of our- And part of our advertiser dashboards as well that not all customers have access to. But I think that thematically what you're saying is spot on. Like we know that another entire area where we can deliver great value and also where there's willingness for customers to pay because they're already paying third-party tools is in the analytic space. And just sort of lasering in on, zeroing in on what are the specific analytics that people would be interested in whether it's on follows or some of the other dynamics around what if my content is performing well, you know, how many people are visiting my profile or who, you know, there's a lot there that I think. Who's visiting your profile, that LinkedIn one?

I feel like that one's a little privacy iffy, because I'm not sure that people know exactly that they're, I know that they're creeping on my profile page. So I'm a little bit iffy on that one. But I do like the idea of, hey, you got a lot of engagement on this one, not just because it's a great way for you to make money through the Twitter Blue program,

but also make me a better tweeter, right? Make me a better tweeter. Hey, this one got a lot of engagement. Hey, this one was ratioed. Here's what that means here. this one, you know, just those little kind of updates on I did something right and look what's going well here and the metrics in giving me encouragement or something. It's just such a huge win for me. I do think DMs is another area where I am like a power DM user and I have groups

on there, but the search doesn't work great and the product hasn't changed really much. How do you think about DM? Because, man, DMs are given the people who, given the people who are, given the people who are on Twitter. I don't want to say, I don't want to introduce inmail like LinkedIn has, but I don't not want to introduce that. I have open DMs, other people don't.

A DM request feature where I could DM somebody who doesn't follow me and I could do it 10 times a month if I had a premium account and you had my credit card and you knew who I was. It seems like it wouldn't be so bad. Yeah, I think,

first of all, like our DM's feature has a lot of room to grow. Yeah. For a long time, DMs were actually on maintenance mode, which is kind of one of the reasons why we are where we are playing catch up. And so, you know, you asked me how we think about DMs. Like, we are investing in getting DMs to a better place on a couple dimensions. One, adding desperately requested features.

Like you mentioned search is busted. Search has been busted for a long time. We actually, I don't know if you've seen in the last couple weeks, we actually launched two production and improved search feature for searching conversation groups, like the person's name or the group's name. It's not, it's no lot. It used to be just cached on your iPhone or your Android, like whatever the last 30 conversations were,

which makes it impossible to go search for, you know, last year's, you know, thread from Coachella. Yeah. Yeah, or last time you DM Chimoth was like two years ago because he ghosted you and you were trying to like find that. Yeah. So that, you know, we've been working on getting our, you know, solving a bunch of those features and getting to a better place there

while also renovating our infrastructure, which fundamentally talk about tech debt. This was an area where we had a lot of tech debt where we found it difficult to make fast progress and first had to go quite slow to be able to go fast. So we're not completely out of the woods there on that, but we're working on it.

Marketing budgets don't grow on trees. Right now, LinkedIn is going to give you $100 credit towards your first ad campaign on LinkedIn. This is very important because over 78% of B2B marketers rate LinkedIn. as the most effective social media platform for reaching objectives. Because there are over 62 million decision makers on LinkedIn, and they mean business. Of course, there's like well over 700 million members on LinkedIn, but decision makers are there too.

So while they're on LinkedIn hiring management teams are updating their corporate profile pages, which is super important these days. They've got to see your advertising. Imagine you're about to launch a marketing campaign. Everything is going according to plan, except for the thought in the back of your head. how do I ensure that the people I want to target will be in the mindset to receive my message? Context is critical. The answer is LinkedIn.

When you market on LinkedIn, you reach people who are ready to do business. They're in the right mindset. This is critical. They have tools for brand building and lead generation. You can target professionals down to their job title and the company name and location. You want CFOs. You want CFOs. You know your product.

And that's why LinkedIn is so special. Because you can target by GEO and title company. sector, all that good stuff. You can engage folks you already know based on previous visits to your site or other outreach. So do business where business is done and get a hundi. And $100 ad credit towards your first LinkedIn campaign, LinkedIn.com slash this week in startups. That's LinkedIn.com slash this weekend startups for the hundy. Type those letters, get that hundy terms and conditions apply because they're giving you the hundy. I got another one that, you see, I really think this pro account Twitter blue is one step. I think Twitter blue,

corporate for $500 a month would be the real winner. And I used a company called Social Rang back in the day, which had a very interesting fee. I don't know if you remember Social Rang. I remember the name. I couldn't tell you. Yeah, it was in New York company that did all kinds of analysis of your different social graphs. The one killer feature they had was I could organize anybody in my Twitter following that had the word venture capital, Angel, whatever. So now out of 400,000 people, I have 25,000 who have explicitly in their bio, they're a venture capitalist, a startup founder, whatever.

I then could DM that group. So in other words, I could use them almost like a mailing list and I could DM them, hey, I'm in New York. And so I did all this work where I would say, give me everybody in New York when I did my book thing. And I invited everybody in New York to come to a reading of my book and a lunch with me. It was so effective. but I think technically maybe in the gray area sending a mass DM or even a semi-mass DM. You don't allow third parties to send DMs to more than 100 people or something. Is there some sort of rule around that?

The way I would frame it is we see very few legitimate use cases for those tools and we see far more often that there are sort of nefarious use cases there. I think your broader point around the in-mail concept and really being able to not just improve DMs, but build more sort of commercial intent or capabilities that businesses or people might find useful is super interesting. And we're very much in the early stages of Twitter Blue, obviously, but the intersection of Twitter Blue and how a canvas like DMs could overlap is really interesting. And what excites me about Twitter Blue is it very much is a canvas around which we are like going to build rapidly and, you know, making a long and big bet here that I think can take

lots of different forms. And we're also, you know, a lot of our, some of our acquisitions have been motivated by, by this as well. Like you mentioned scroll early on. Like scroll was a full disclosure, I'm an angel investor in scroll. Oh, awesome. That's great. Yes, you know the product very well, but we see it as being a really awesome compliment to, A, Twitter, because so many people are discovering long-form articles, whether their newsletters or whether there are articles through typical publishers they might find on the internet, they're happening upon them through Twitter. We send a lot of traffic to, you know, to publisher websites and giving people a clean, awesome, beautiful reading experience that is fast-loading free of ads.

We think, will, A, feel great for customers, and B, we actually think we'll help put money the pockets of publishers to a higher degree than how much they would have been able to make from advertising from those same customers. And so putting that as a feature amongst the broader bundle within our subscription, we're super excited about.

And so people didn't know, scroll allowed you through a collection of pretty highly well-known publications, pay as you go to read articles essentially. And so imagine, if you will, you're on Twitter and you get to that Atlantic story or the Wall Street

journal. You don't need a subscription to Atlantic, but you do want to read that one story. What do you do? Well, if you could use a little bit of your Twitter blue credits to read it, and then Twitter could pay a penny or five cents to the person who published it, that's more than they

make per CPM on the article. Well, so there's actually a couple different dimensions here. There's pay as you go and sort of paywall content, which we're actually not tackling quite yet. Got it. But I think it's super interesting over time. So that's one dimension. The other dimension is giving people, not getting behind the paywall,

but taking existing non-paywall publisher content, like an article, removing ads, making the page load really fast, and knowing that as a Twitter user, when you happen upon this publisher's website and read this article, by virtue of being a Twitter blue or a subscriber to Twitter, your attention will end up getting that publisher paid by virtue of like a subset of our subscription pool will go towards paying out publishers

whose content is read. This is fantastic. I mean, just to even open up the aperture of what you're doing here, for you to be able to allow publishers to make more money could totally revitalize publishing and really push people towards a third way. You have subscribe,

which is a blunt tool once a year, $100 to $500. You have ads, which is just brutal and carries within all kinds of link baiting and bad second and third order effects. And this third way of, hey, you know, you pay Twitter 100 bucks a year and Twitter keeps 10% of that or 5% of whatever in a pool. And people who come upon these articles will splashy cashy, give a little money to everybody whose articles are shown. It really is, I think it's going to bend journalism to, you know, hey, how high quality can I make this story as opposed to how link bait can I make it? Yeah, we're really excited that our, like, we have a number of different aspects of our strategy that I think are building this, this interesting multifaceted ecosystem where, like you said, there are some creators or publishers that you may want to directly subscribe to and features like SuperFollowes will help you do that.

Whether these content creators are publishing long form newsletters or whether they're, you know, posting tweet storms or whether they're just, you know, like Yashar, who you mentioned earlier, you've got a thing for the Iranian. another Iranian there. Yeah. I didn't know he's Iranian. Yashar Ali, yeah, it's great. Direct subscriptions to your, to folks who you want to be a really major and recurring patron of, I think is one clear, viable, well understood in the ecosystem mechanic, among many others, where this, you know, the scroll model is another one that we think is fascinating.

And, you know, obviously then you have ad hoc payments, whether it's tips or one-time gifts. And we started with a baby step there with tip jar, but we think there's a whole very interesting avenue of exploration there. You know, we really do see this as an ecosystem where there's different tools for different jobs and we're very keen to explore a few of these dimensions. So if super follows works, a person who has, let's call it 100,000 followers converts but 3% to paying as super followers for but 3%. $3 a month, two or $3 a month each. They literally, to Kevin Kelly's 1,000 or 2,000 true fans, you know, thesis, could become sustainable as a person who tweets or interacts on Twitter for a living. Is that the goal and the rally and cry internally is to make tweeting or being involved in the Twitter ecosystem for a creator a full-time job, if that's what they want? We don't necessarily frame it as full-time job, but here's how we think of it.

There's two distinct high-level goals. And this is an interesting way of distinguishing the difference between Twitter Blue from all of the other sort of creator projects we're talking about here, like super follows and ticketed spaces and tip jar and these sorts of things. The purpose of all of our efforts around these creation tools is to help creators make money. Maybe that's because they want to make their craft a full-time job rather than a side hustle. Maybe it's because they just want to be rewarded for their work. Maybe they have grand ambitions of creating a business and, you know, they just want to be able to be directly supported from their audience.

Like, there's a whole spectrum of why is there around why creators, you know, conduct their craft and do what they do. Our focus and our goal is how do we maximize the amount of money that people can make on the platform. The goal isn't for Twitter to make money. In fact, we may forego taking substantial cuts in a bunch of these product efforts because our goal actually is not to maximize revenue. Our goal is to put as much money in the pockets of customers. And frankly, ultimately, like we believe that the measure of success here is that we're driving more conversation on Twitter. That's the goal.

And helping creators, because a certain subset of our customers are motivated by being able to make money, and we have not historically given them adequate tools to do that. So that's the goal, helping creators make money. Separate from that, we have projects like Twitter Blue, where the goal is, like, we believe Twitter can make money. from a diverse source of revenue, and that source of revenue is being directly supported by our customers to build features and functionality that provide extra value to them.

And so they both, both of these umbrellas of work happen to involve accepting payments, but they're actually motivated by very different things. Will cryptocurrency make its way into this? I mean, I know Jack is a big fan, obviously. I'm not sure how you feel about it, but would we see a Twitter coin, at some point. Certainly somebody in the company said, like, we should just make our own cryptocurrency. Which, you know, on top of having to fix DMs

and lists and everything else and technical debt and, you know, launch a bunch of new products, sure, we could create our own cryptocurrency too, but that's a whole other unit that would have to put 500 people on. So have you thought about that? Does that add anything to the party? You know, letting people put Bitcoin or Doge or whatever they're into, into their wallets?

So we are absolutely thinking about cryptocurrency and just the blockchain generally. I think that we're still in the early stages of figuring out what a product experience would look like here. But I think that the world is changing with how what you can achieve through decentralization, the use cases you can enable through the blockchain. We're in the very beginning stages of figuring out. And especially at the intersection of cryptocurrency and the creator economy, I think there are many interesting explorations and many interesting products that already exist, some of which are quite intersecting with our platform.

You see, you know, products like BitClout that are already flirting with this today. So, like, we're absolutely thinking about it. Nothing to announce today or in the coming weeks, but definitely something that we're exploring. It would make sense in that the recycling of currency in the system could become very powerful. In other words, you know, I might let people super follow me, but as an investor and a podcaster, I don't need the money from the fans paying me directly. We had a Patreon. I always felt like I do, I don't want the fans money. But I will put up one if I could say, you know what, everything that comes to me, I'm going to put 25% towards the smash program, 25% girls who code, 25% towards this food bank and 25% towards this school in Brooklyn. Like, if I could come up with a way to redirect my payments to other. Twitter handles, my lord, that would be so much fun for me. And then you just think about that recirculation. It works so well with cryptocurrency if it's just moving around fluidly like that.

Now, this question is not about product, but it'd be remiss if I don't ask it, which is Trump got a lifetime van. Pretty obvious. How has culture, if at all, change inside of the company since making that stand? coming to work, does it change at all? What was it like during that period of time when that decision was made? I know it's not your department exactly, but I'm just curious, because I just heard while we were on the pod here, taping this the day before you launched Twitter Space at Twitter Blue,

that Trump's being reinstated on another platform. You know, I would not say that our culture changed at all as a result of that decision. I think a lot of, you know, certainly it impacted, some people's day jobs, because there's, you know, from a, from a policy and enforcement standpoint, there's lots of tricky decisions to weigh there, created a lot of effort and work for folks. So I don't want to discount that, but I wouldn't say culture changed. At the end of the day, like, you know, we have a policy enforcement apparatus that has principles around enforcing our rules as consistently as possible, as quickly as possible. Culturally, there were no,

like, major inflection points. It just happened to be a specific decision that, um, was very noticeable, was very talked about, and was very high profile. But culture didn't change as a result. Yeah. I thought it was a very well-done decision. I was frequently hearing people say, oh, you know, they've got to throw them off the platform for years. And I was like, you can't really throw the president of the United States off the platform. But it's very clear inciting any kind of violence is, you know, against the rules.

And that's a pretty severe thing. So I thought it was a reasonable decision. Listen, it's been great to watch the platform. evolve and the velocity. I love the fact that you're engaging with the fans on Twitter spaces, which is an extraordinary product. We don't want to talk too much about that, but congratulations at the velocity of which that is increasing and so many great conversations are occurring. And it's really made me even more enthusiastic for my preferred social media platform, the place where I spend hours a day and just love, you know, to engage with so

many people. I've made so many friends on Twitter over the years. And I'm not just talking like, I'm talking high profile people sliding into my DM sometime. It would never have happened. I would never have met some of the most important relationships I have in my life and some of the most interesting

people if it had not been for Twitter. And I really do thank you and the team over there and wish you great success on this incredible second decade you're having of just really innovating. And I love the fact that you're so focused on both empowering all these creators

to make sustainable livings while even making some money yourselves, you know, adding this subscription line because advertising, yeah, it's fun, but I just love to see you have a paid product. I think it's going to increase the level of engagement and it's time. You know, it's time for social media,

to ask the users who are getting value to pay for it. I didn't ask you this, if I pay for Twitter Blue, does that take ads out? Or is that going to be an option? How do you think about that? Not right now. Our focus right now is really on the features and functionality that, you know, are like new capabilities that we build for power users. We've definitely heard that request before, and I think it's a very sensible one,

but it's not something that we're focused on right now. I don't know if you have Hulu or NBA League Pass. You can, like, pay extra to turn off ads if you're really like a kooky person, like the 100%. All right, listen, Kavana. Great job. Thank you, Jason. And I'll see you on Twitter and see you on Spaces. And we'll see all of you next time on this week in Surveillance.

Bye-bye. Thank you.