This Week in Startups - Melania Trump’s NFT, Reddit to go public + Twitter’s Tony Haile: news & product evolution | E1347

Episode Date: December 17, 2021

First Jason covers Melania Trump launching an NFT series (02:27) and Reddit just filing to go public(13:10). Then, Twitter's Tony Haile joins (24:14) to talk about selling his startup Scroll to Twitter, helping lead Twitter's product team (37:07), Twitter's roadmap and more.

Okay, everybody, strong show for you today. Melania Trump is dropping her own NFT platform. I kid you not. We are at a peak. It's a peak. I'm going to talk a little bit about our grift of the day, a little bit about Trump, a little bit about the Obamas. I think actually her NFT platform, I might be a contrarian here.

It's kind of dope. And Reddit just filed to go public. I'm going to break down their metrics, revenue price to sales, revenue for employee. And what is the genius of Reddit and how it got here and how just masterful Alexis and Steve, the co-founders are as co-founders, but also community builders. They really are savants at that, just total imprisarios. Then I'm going to interview my friend Tony Hale. I invested in his first company Chartbeat, his second company, Scroll.

Scroll was bought by Twitter. Scroll is a big part of Twitter Blue. It's got a lot of ideas on micro payments for and subscriptions for news. We had a really open discourse about Twitter's product and what it's like to be a founder and go into a big company. and he was pretty honest and we went a little double-clicked on Twitter's roadmap and what they're doing over there.

And he even talked a little bit about the unexpected CEO change. He was super honest and I really appreciate Twitter's, comms, and communication groups allowing their executives to come on this program and talk. I think it's like a really cool thing. We don't get that from the Facebooks of the world or the Instagrams or even Susan Mojewski at YouTube. I've invited her many times.

A lot of the big companies are not sharing their executives to talk about product and the company and where they're going. But Twitter has made the decision to be really open and talk to their users. So I do appreciate that. Stick with us.

It's going to be a great show. This week in startups is brought to you by Disruptive Advertising, the top digital marketing agency for startups and SMBs. Get $1,000 off your first month of service at disruptiveadvertising.com slash twist.

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helps startup secure the most important types of insurance at a lower cost and with less hassle. Save up to 20% off traditional insurance today atembroker.com slash twist. While you're there, get an extra 10% off using offer code twist. All right, everybody, it's time for grift of the day. Yes, it's a very grifty time right now.

We have Nancy Pelosi on one side, the greatest trader ever, putting up a strong defense that she should be able to trade on all the amazing information she and other politicians get that's absolutely deranged. But there's nothing better than presidential and presidential family grift. Those are the high order grifts.

because every country, every corporation loves, loves to get a picture of a former president of the United States, you know, in their lobby, buy their logo next to their CEO, and you just put that up and you're instantly credible. Some of the least credible investors I've known and founders for that matter have a picture of themselves with Clinton, Obama, Trump, Bush, everybody in their offices. on their social media, Instagram, whatever. And it's just a classic great grift. If you are modestly wealthy,

you can pay $25,000 to $50,000 to get a picture with any president you want. And so you can collect all four presidents for $100,000. Less than half the price of a board ape, you can put four pictures of four presidents on your wall. And then when you do sales or anybody comes, it's the greatest trick in the book. And a lot of those,

top of the funnel coach, mastermind, e-book, grifters use this technique. And they talk about it. They'll hire John Travolta. They'll hire, you know, any,

any celebrity who just needs a quick 50K speaking gig to do those pictures and to sort of associate. It has nothing to do with the content. It's just to get the picture. So they give them the 50K to get the picture and then boom,

they're good. So in our grift of the day, Maloney of Trump is launching an NFT platform. I kid you not. Here's the announcement. Excited for this new venture, which combines my passion. I should do it in a Melania voice, right?

Excited for this new venture, which combines my passion for art and commitment to helping our nation's children fulfill their own unique American dream to grift hard on web three. I added that last sentence. The former first lady tweeted a document from the office of Melania Trump stating the first NFT available for purchase, so this is going to be a series, will be called Melania's vision, priced at one sole, which is $180 as of this morning, RIP to the 240 soul, sorry to my besties. The NFT is watercolor art that, quote, embodies Mrs. Trump's cobalt blue eyes, providing the collector with an amulet, an amulet to inspire. It also includes an audio recording of Melania

Trump, and here it is, a message of hope from Melania Trump. My vision is Look forward with inspiration Strength And courage My vision is Look forward and be inspired My vision

Is who Divorce Donald And get Marlao as in settlement And turn it Oh God It's just so brutal So you can buy this

I think she's going to do it every day I think it's pretty awesome I gotta admit like, I don't want to be one of 10,000 apes, but I kind of do want to own one of these. And I think she should cameo it. So it should be like, this is special inspiration to this week in startup's team.

Be your best. Your boss is insufferable, but be best. This is legitimate art. For me, this is legitimate art. Melania is an icon. I'm not a strong. As you all know, but I'm team Melania, man. I think she has got like a kind of interesting sense of humor here about this.

And I like when she like bats away Donald Trump's hands or rolls her eyes at him. Like she is a queen. And like these are going to become, I predict huge. Like she could just do this every day, like inspiration a day from Melania Trump. This could become super viral. This could be her moment. And if she sells one of these a day for a couple of Gs, I mean, she's going to be doing, you know, as good as Perez Hilton on Cameo,

who I think was the top person in Cameo for a while. Trump stated, through this new technological-based platform, we will provide children, computer science skills, including programming and software development, to thrive in the age out of the foster community. Okay, I guess she's going to do some, oh, I see, a portion of the proceeds. I guess she's going to donate, or maybe this is part of the grift. I think that Trump kids got a bunch of money for cancer kids and then put up, like, flagpoles at their golf course.

It's like the Trump nonprofit foundation was actually shut down in New York. It's the best of my recollection. Somebody fact jade me on that if I'm wrong. I think this kind of feels like Warhol and like what he did with Edie Sedgwick and some of that. But speaking of politicians cashing in, obviously Trump has got the $2 billion back. That is worth more than like four or five times where BuzzFeed has worked. I mean, poor Jonah Peretti and the team over there.

They poured, you know, over a decade into building BuzzFeed, getting to $360 million in revenue, and they're worth $5 or $600 million, which with the $100 million in cash they have means the business is worth one times revenue or $1.4 times revenue. And then Trump starts a SPAC, does nothing, puts up the worst white paper of ever seen the worst pitch deck in the history of pitch decks, literally something that should be on SNL. I mean, and it's worth over $2 billion, and they've got hundreds of millions in cash. and they had a more successful IPO than BuzzVeed? What is happening in the world? This is peak NFT and peak SPAC. Both of these examples are examples of peaks.

One of the ways to know you're at a peak is to look for the grift. So here's a lesson for everybody. Consider this a micro lesson for you. Shout out Scott Adams on its micro lessons. Here's a micro lesson. When people who have nothing to do with the technology, then go all in to secure the, bag and there's no there there kind of a peaky moment we saw it with ICOs right

Paris Hilton and the Kardashians everybody's ICOing ICO this ICO that and then you saw some of them get fines uh some celebrities got fines and then the ICO thing went away and whoever bought ICOs was left holding the bag I think in large part correct me if I'm wrong there were thousands of these ICOs and uh I think none of them were money making correct me if I'm wrong is there a money making one file coin Icel maybe I don't know uh but I think almost universally the I CEOs were became worth zero. Now when I say, hey, listen, NFTs could become worth like close to 99% of the money spent could go to go away and there'd be 1%. People say I'm crazy. But it's not exactly what happened with ICOs. Correct me if I'm wrong. 90x% of the revenue is gone. It's a

grift. They took the money. They ran. NFTs, likely the same thing. 90% of the money spent on NFTs is gone forever. 10% may stick around. One percent may stick around. Who knows? So be careful out there. All right, listen. Have Apple's new private. updates impacted your attribution for paid ads. I bet it has. Well, there's good news. Folks at Disruptive Advertising can help you. They manage over $250 million a year in advertising spend. That means they're experts. That means they get to see all these changes and they get to solve problems before anybody else has even figured out those problems exist. They're trusted by hundreds of brands like Adobe and Scott's Miracle Grow. So if your Google and Facebook ads are

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Disruptiveadvertising.com slash twist to get $1,000 off. It's a great crew over there. I met the founder. They really love the show. They love helping startups. So go ahead and give them a shot, right? And then report back to me. Tell me how you did.

All right. Let's get back to the program. This is a sign of the peak, but let's be honest. The Trump's pal in comparison in their grift, pal to previous presidents and families. According to the Financial Times, Penguin Random House paid $65 million for the global rights to two books written by Barack and Michelle Obama

and, according to CNN business, the payout for their Netflix deal was in the high eight figures. I'm guessing they got stock. I heard it was like, yeah, I heard this is like another 50 or something million dollar deal. Just as a point of complete,

complete randoms. And it's incredible how these two things are absolutely not correlated. They're correlated, but clearly not caused. Netflix stocks went on a 40X wreck. in the Obama era going from 1.4 billion to 58 billion. It's obviously at 260 billion today. And Obama did a huge deal with them.

These two things are obviously in no way related. And of course, over that decade, what was the number one issue for Netflix? Anybody remember what the number one existential crisis for Netflix was? Net neutrality. Net neutrality. Would they have to pay for all the bandwidth they were using on other people's servers?

I wonder... I wonder what the Obama administration's position on net neutrality was. I look it up. I voted for Obama. Okay? So I'm just saying, presidents and their families are the grifters of the griftiest class. You can go back to the Clintons doing crazy speaking gigs. But yeah, maybe double click on that and take a look for me.

All right. In other incredible news, and congratulations to the founders of Reddard. it, they just confidentially filed to go public. And for 16 years, it's been over 16 years, hasn't it? And 1.3 billion in funding. The announcement came last night. Steve Huffman has been running the company, and Alexis O'Hanian was there for a little bit. Had a little bit of a disaster.

They put Ellen Powell in charge for like a year or two, and the thing just almost imploded from what I read. But they put it back in the hands of the founder, which is always the best idea. The S-1 is not available for us to review yet because this is a confidential filing. So you know they're filing, but they don't put all the data in there yet. According to the verge, the company has been considering the IPO for some time. We know that. Some rumors have been out there.

It's, uh, Reddit is probably the 20th most traffic site in the world, according to Alexa and similar web and other places. Here's an image of the chart with companies near them. BK is the Russian Facebook, but, you know, they're obviously in a great area. In August, Redd, it raised a $700 million series F at a $10 billion valuation, and they're making hundreds of, of million in revenue. The round was led by Fidelity, according to Pitchbook, which, you know, public investors dipping down and doing those late stage ones pretty normal.

100 million in ad revenue for Q2 of 2021. So that's $400 million run rate, 52 million Dows. And so if we were to compare that to the revenue of BuzzFeed, pretty similar. Busfeed's worth 600 million. This company probably going to go out and be worth 20 times that, I would guess. Now, why? Why would this be worth 20 times? Well, BuzzFeed hires a bunch of journalists to get their traffic and Reddit hires zero. So the community-driven network and community means lower costs, higher a number of users. They have $52 million.

I don't know what BuzzFeed has, to be honest, but I think it's nowhere near that. And they have over 100,000 active subreddits. Those are like groups by verticals. And that was the big win, I would say, in the history of Reddit, the two things they got right were subreddits and never changing the interface and just not being put under pressure. Kevin Rose put under a lot of pressure by venture capitalist to change the interface.

Condi Nast had bought Reddit, so they didn't invest in it. So as a function of that ridiculous sale of like $6, 10 million dollars to Condonest, I think they sold for $6 million or $10 million to Condonast. It was like a fire sale. It was crazy. Maybe it was more. Maybe it was 20 or 30. Anyway, Condi Nast got it for a fraction of a percentage of what it is worth today.

And they apparently didn't really invest in it, so therefore the interface didn't change. When the interface doesn't change, users can just use the product. eBay, Amazon, Craigslist, come to money. And when you don't change the interface, users can just keep using it. SEO can keep growing. And so over 100,000 actresses. Yeah, Condoness paid, get this. This is what things were like $10 million for Reddit in 2006.

I had sold Weblogs Inc for $30 million. And it was just sort of the nature of the time period. It was very small acquisitions. Reddit was considered kind of a side show. I wouldn't say a joke. It was just considered like a silly message board. But a silly message board when the community is truly cherished and valued. think that's the genius of Alexis, Ohanian, and Steve.

I think those two are product geniuses and community geniuses. I really do mean that sincerely. I'm not just saying that, like, they were able to really focus and understand their community, and then everything else worked out. Because if those conversations are baking constantly and people are submitting tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of stories a day, and some number of them get discussions under it, all that content is free, just like Quora's content is free, stock, overflow's content is free. and this is user-generated content UGC was all the rage in Web 2.0.

And so, you know, Reddit is now worth 1,000 times what content has paid for it. They have $450 million in yearly ad revenue, according to sources, and 1,400 employees. That means they're making $320,000 per employee. If you did that stat with BuzzFeed, I'm going to almost guarantee it's much less, but I could be wrong. We'll see. The point is, generally speaking, that user-generated content means lower costs. I wonder what all these employees are working on. That's the crazy thing.

And so giving a little credit for some growth on the $100 million a quarter run rate, let's just say it's $4.50, at a $10 billion valuation, they're 22 times. If they're growing at 20% a year, seems reasonable to me. I bet you they're also under monetized, which basically means they're probably not making as much per page view as BuzzFeed or, let's say, Jim Bankov's box properties. And so the media business is really hard. You have to deal with a bunch of journalists and content creators, which is brilliant. Because if you self-select to be a journalist or a content creator, you are by definition opinionated. By definition, a debater, great with words. In other words, you're a management nightmare.

Writers are the most difficult people to manage in the world, journalists. You see this because what's the big existential crisis for all of those publications? It's the unions and the unionization and the employees walking out and them making crazy demands, yada, yada, yada. That's what Bankoff and Freddie and all those people are struggling through. Even the New York Times is like wirecutters walking out. Everybody's walking out. It's literally like managing journalists, trust me, I did this. And now I have analysts that inside and managing those folks, it is like managing like the members of the Dungeons and Dragons theater and debate club. Like imagine a hundred people who were in all three of those clubs.

They played Dungeon Dragons, they were in the theater club and in the debate club, and now you have to manage them. It's crazy. That's why media brands just have a hard time, and they generally try to stay small, you know, 100 person to 500 person staff. And then Condon asked it such a brilliant job. Okay, we'll give Graydon Carter Vanity Fair on one floor and Anna Wintour, gets vogue on one floor, different cultures, little micro ecosystems, 100 to 500 people, they have their own P&L. because once you get to the New York Times scale or Vox's scale, now you're seeing what's happening. The unions are like, oh, we got to get the wirecutter people.

We got to combine them with this group of people, the curbed people, the New York Mag union. And you have, I think Vox has like seven unions inside of Vox. These businesses are challenged. Vox is actually pretty profitable, actually. Jim Bankos knows what he's doing. And that's probably a smart plan because if you're not profitable, I think people are going to put you in a bucket like it'll never be profitable.

And it's just a bad business model. So smart move on bankoff's part to focus on profitability. I think that's going to make Vox actually maybe live up to their evaluation in the private markets. Maybe why Peretti and BuzzFeed isn't. I think if BuzzFeed can show they can be profitable, you know, have a 30% 20, 30% margin. Their fate will change. There's really only the hard part about community is being patient. That's the hard part about building community.

It's just a slow burn. I call it like hot coals marketing. You know, you have to just build up a base of like hot coals. and then when you put a log on a bunch of hot coals, it goes on fire. If you put three logs in a fire pit, throw some money on top of it, lighter fluid, and you light it on fire.

You're just going to get a charred group of three logs. So you have to be patient for the first five or ten years to just build a community that likes to see each other. And when they're not in the community, they're kind of bummed. And they're like, oh, I miss my community. I got to go back and check, which is how I am with Nix fan TV

or the This Week in Startups community. The other thing is like Slack and Discord. That's a little bit too fast. for most people in their passions. In other words, if you go to a Discord, you're not going to scroll up for the last 24 hours and look at that conversation and try to read it like it's a transcript

where a stenographer did it. You kind of prefer the lightness and the ease of using a algorithmically based subreddit, right? This is kind of a brilliant model. And so moderation is a slight problem. People making bad reddits. Obviously, there's a ton of porn Reddits, and there were a ton of hate reddits.

They got rid of all the hate. I think they still have all the adult content, which I think Tumblr had adult content too. Twitter's got a lot of adult content. These companies have done a really good job of turning that off by default, and then having the people who are making the adult content flag it. So if you're not flagging it, they'll flag it for you, I think, is what happens. And so a lot of these are offshore. So those 1,400 employees, I wouldn't be surprised if 500 of them are in the Philippines and

Manila getting paid $1 to $3 an hour, US, which is a great salary over there. It translates really well to a middle class income from what I understand. And they're just trained, you know, like, this is porn. If it's porn, just label it porn. And so all that will come out. Maybe it's, you know, 20 or 30% adult content. I'm sorry, I should probably use that word on some of these sites, on Twitter, et cetera.

But you don't see it. It's kind of hidden. And they may, they probably can't monetize it either. So it's kind of like a growth hack. So those are the only issues. Reddit, great, great community, great, great site. Congratulations to Alexis O'Hanning and Steve Hoffman and the entire team. team, both have been on the pod a couple times, both great entrepreneurs, a lot of respect

for both of them in their careers. And let's go on to my interview with Scroll founder, former CEO of Chartbeat and now one of the great product people at Twitter, Tony Keph. If you want to make the jump in 2022 and start your own online business or blog, well, Squarespace is the answer. And I encourage you to be an entrepreneur to chart your own path. And Squarespace is the foundation of you taking that journey. It's the first, step to put out your idea in the world and you, a company of one that is put in under an hour will look as good as companies that have a million or 100,000 employees. It's the truth. Squarespace is the answer for making beautiful websites that are highly functional. With built-in

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squarespace.com slash twist. Okay, great job team. All right. Everybody, welcome back to this week in startups. In his second appearance on the program, Tony Hale is back. He was on, I kid you not, episode 77 of this podcast in September of 2010 when I had just started my angel investing journey as a scout for Sequoia Capital. And one of the other, those investments I made was in a little company called Chartbeat. How did I wind up investing in Chartbeat? Well, my friend John Borthwick was running his own little startup studio called BetaWorks, and he said, come see these three or four projects. And he had like three or four projects going on. One of them was Chartbeat. One of them was Dev Post, a very cool site. And I said,

okay, I'll take those two. As if I was shopping. He was like, oh, that one's not available. This one is available. I said, either I take both or I take none, because I knew that if he liked one and it wasn't available, then that was the winner. And he's like, God, I'm never playing poker with you. Okay. So I got to be the first investor, at least theoretically, after him in Chartbeat, which has done wonderfully, and it was a great service. And Tony was the CEO of that company. And then he went on to do a company called Scroll to take on the mission that so many founders have absolutely gotten knocked out by. And we'll talk to him about that today. But he made it. And now he is a senior director of product at Twitter, which bought

Scroll, which I was an investor in as well. Welcome back to the program. 11 years later, Tony Hal. Thank you. It's very good to be here. So, let's start with what was scroll? How many years did you work on it?

And how close did you get to your mission? My God. How close did I get to my mission is a terrifying question. So scroll was quite simply our attempt to see if we could build a better internet, which was when you were a scroll member,

when you visited any number of several hundred sites, including the Atlantic, Box, the Birch, local sites like the Philadelphia Inquirer and so forth, when you got there, it didn't matter how you got there, when you got there, they would deliver you a clean, fast, ad-free experience, no trackers, no Lodge-Chun boxes for the clickbait. It was just the clean content that you wanted to see. And then we paid out from the subscription.

more money than they would have made from ads. So it was an attempt at a whole new business model for the internet, where consumers got what they wanted, and publishers and journalists still got to pay rent. Does this fall under the 20-year journey of people trying to get micro-payments back into online systems? It's pretty a little bit closer to Spotify in some way, and that we didn't want someone to be constantly like saying, yes, I will pay, yes, I will pay, yes, I'll pay, yes, I'll pay. Instead, we wanted to be frictionless, so they would just go to the site, and then some

portion of their money. So in that case, a micropayment would go to the publisher. And one of the interesting things that we found was that it was remarkably easy to beat the ad economics with subscription mechanics. So we could charge five bucks a month, have a three-buck-fifty pool, and we could easily beat what the publisher would have made from Avatar. So let me reflect back to you what you said, so I completely understand. And so does the audience. A $5 a month subscription, 350, 70%, just like the App Store, goes to the publishers. If I was a user and I clicked on 350 stories, they would each get a penny. A penny would be a $10 CPM, I guess, right?

A thousand views at a penny would be something like that. Am I ballpark correct? And you're saying the economics worked out. Yeah, the economics worked out. In general, our minimum was that we would beat them by 40%. So if you think about the math like this from a kind of, from a top of the market perspective, about kind of 234 million consumers of news and media in the U.S., The top group of publishers, like all the big, large premium publishers together, make about

$7 billion in digital ad revenue, that's including classifieds and everything else over the course of a year. So that breaks down to an ARPOO, an average revenue per user, about $2.50 a person. So if you've got all of those big publishers into and then you'd have to beat at least $2.50 to make it worth a while. And we had a $3.50 pool. So the math just works. Now, of course, people have been trying to do this.

Micro payments were done one at a time. Hey, a penny a story, four cents a story, which is kind of what we're talking about here. They were making a couple of pennies per story that's clicked on. But it creates cognitive load to make that decision every time you look at an article. So what you did so brilliantly was said, hey, don't worry about making a decision in the moment. Is this article worth five cents or one cent? just will come up with an average. Some people might read a thousand stories,

but there might be somebody else who reads but 10, and it all comes out in the wash. Is that correct what you basically conceived of? Yeah, it's very similar to the kind of discussions that Spotify had to have with the music industry back in the day where they were saying, look, we have some people who spend $1,000 a year on albums, and you're all going to charge them $10 a month for listen to everything.

And the key was, if there's a, bucket of people that's worth $10 million to you, and I deliver $15 million from that bucket. So, yes, some people will have more, some people will have less, but the total yield is going to go up. Now, this didn't work previously. People had tried it in the 90s. They tried it in the 2000s. You must have studied all of that.

What gave you the Hootspah, the audacity to come at this problem in, you know, let's call it the third decade of people trying for a quick history lesson. Minitel, which was in France, was an online service that charged you by the minute. Therefore, if you were on a news story from Le Monde, you would be charged some percentage of your online time. The same thing happened on Prodigy and AOL in the early days you were paying three to five bucks an hour, and they would give a percentage of that to whoever was running the chat room or content or video game experience.

So what gave you the audacity to try this? And then what was the reaction when you went to investors? Mine was crazy, let's go. but I'm that kind of guy, but what was the reaction and what gave you that audacity? So, you're right, there's a ton of corpses in this particular graveyard.

And that was both terrifying, but also useful because we knew all the things that had gone wrong in the past, to your point, there'd been like attempts to create, to create the micropayments where there'd been that cognitive friction

where people just weren't going to do that kind of like, I'm going to say, yes, two cents, yes, four cents. That wasn't going to work. When people had tried to do this as their own separate silo, when they tried to do it in an app, and they'd basically said to people,

hey, you can have this experience. Now you have to change everything about how you discover content to use it. Those kind of approaches had struggled because there wasn't a large installed base. So there was a bunch of different challenges. And one of the things that gave me the courage to do this was the fact that I had an English accent. and so I thought I'd be more persuasive to publishers than people in the past. And it was also one of the kind of big questions about how you approach this kind of problem,

which is you're effectively got two sides. You've got consumers and your publishers and you're trying to bring them together in some kind of like quasi-marketplace. And which side to go with first is always a tricky question. And a lot of people in the past had tried to go by saying, I'm going to build up a user base around this and then I'm going to go and do content deals. And in fact, ad block plus had tried to do something with flatter, which was their only kind of attempt to do this. And in each one of these situations that there was a lack of trust because they started by like effectively taking money away from publishers and from the people creating the content. hilarious.

Yeah. So it was like you've been screw and say over for the last five years. Now you want to do a deal? No. So one of the decisions that we started with was we were like, okay, we know. We know pretty much everybody in publishing anyway because I've been working with them for the last seven years as CEO of Chartbeat. We could test this idea with a bunch of people and we knew we wanted to start in a kind of ethical scale level way. So we started by doing the deals with the publishers and making sure the model worked.

And that kind of gave people a little bit more confidence where previously people had not been able to get publishers to do these deals. We were the first to really get this kind of deal done. and let's be honest, publishers over the last five to ten years have been suffering. They've been losing the ad race to Google and Facebook, which have better products for advertisers who are trying to reach true scale. Now, if you're trying to reach a niche audience, sure, of, you know, one of Jim Bankov's Vox's publications might be better or, you know, a specific section of the New York Times might reach your specific niche and you want to be associated with it.

But if you're trying to hit scale, you know, YouTube, Google, Facebook, Instagram, there are at-scale platforms. So they were willing, over the last five years that you were running, scroll, they would be, four or five years, they would be willing to take a shot right now, right? They're like, hey, if it works, it's all upside for us. There's no downside for them, right? This was one of the things that was critical for us. It was making sure that we could make it a win-win from the beginning.

And you're right, like, the word on everyone's lips was revenue diversity, because they could see what was happening with the ad business. they could see reports coming in where it's like 85% of digital ad spend is going to two companies. They're like, we're not one of those two companies. We have to do something about this. And so there was a desire for revenue diversity.

And the critical thing was also avoiding the notion of cannibalization. We effectively worked a little bit like programmatic advertising. You came to the site, and instead of there being auction between advertisers, we were just bidding the most for that person to deliver a particular experience. And instead of it being a Mercedes ad, it was a clean, beautiful page.

Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, there is an increasing number of individuals, I believe, who are valuing their time and the cleanliness, the hygiene of the page they're on. And I think one of the best examples of this is YouTube, I think they were calling it red. I don't know what they call it today. But are you a member of YouTube's Red service? And do you pay for it? Because I have to tell you, it was the most life-changing experience for me as a YouTube person.

doubled my usage of YouTube because the ads were the most annoying thing and now they're all gone and I give them what, 10 or 15 bucks a month? So worth it. This is why I'm not a member of YouTube. It's read it's because if I was, I would also double my usage of YouTube. And right now, that would get me in a tremendous amount of trouble with my family. So I like, so thus far, but it's, it's that same thing, yeah, which is like, people will pay a premium either for experience or access. And so for us, it was like, okay, we can make the economics work around

experience in a way that could make the world a bit better and maybe we were naive to dream about these kind of things, but that was the dream. It was always like, can you make the internet the way it always should have been where payments and like my web free friends will tell me about this all the time, payments have been the missing infrastructure of the web.

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Love you guys. Talk to me about paywalls. What happened when you brought up the discussion of, hey, content behind the paywall being included in this model when you talk to publisher? So paywalls are the most important and also area for publishers and also the area where they get most terrified. And quite rightly so. Like, they've seen so many of their kind of like revenue models being taken away by platforms, often with kind of arbitrary decisions at times about like how these things they've seen, what happened with like Facebook and video, I mean, we all remember Google and Panda and all of

these things. So keeping that relationship sacrosanct has been critical. And so one of the things that was super important for us was to show that we weren't kind of cannibalizing those. paywall subscriptions and that we're finding a way to be able to deliver this experience in a way that didn't stop them from subscribing.

And actually people, because they were getting a better experience, started caring about the content more and started kind of converting more. And that was one of the things that we found that people who wouldn't subscribe to the Atlantic before, suddenly were like, I go here because I know I'm going to get a clean experience

and now I'm going to subscribe to the site. I know that when I do, I'm going to continue to get this out of experience on whatever content I can see. And you were, successful in this run that you had as an independent company, Twitter, which is, has launched a subscription service that is, I think, excellent. And it's 1.0. It's called Twitter Blue. It's only $3 a month. Feels like it should be $5 to $7.50 a year. But I guess Twitter is going for a

lower price. Bought the company. And I think you're a key piece of the Twitter Blue experience, correct? Yeah. So we were super lucky. We've been talking to Twitter for a while. they actually invested in our series A, although that wasn't public. And so we'd been working with them for a while, and they were like, look, we want to come in with a subscription service. We want to try and build and be the first kind of large platform to really kind of diversify seriously in this way. And we want to do it in a way that kind of like recognizes and support the ecosystem. Like the phrase that I've been hearing at Twitter a lot over the last six months that I've been there is like, how can we be a different? kind of platform.

And so they wanted to bring in scroll and we very, very swiftly, we're able to kind of rebuild a bunch of it inside of Twitter and then launch it as part of Twitter Blue with ad-free articles. So a large portion of what you give to Twitter for that subscription actually funds the journalism that you read. So now journalists who already are obsessed with Twitter,

both as consumers, as a news source, as a place to talk to subject, to find news stories. And that was just a critical piece that Evan Williams got right in Bistone and Jack in the early days was they just decided, hey, let's give journalists blue check marks, celebrities, etc. So people don't fake them. And then that really made a great place not just to promote yourself, but to actually do your job, right? So they're kind of embedded in this ecosystem now if you can help them generate revenue and get rid of ads and make it more sustainable. Oh, my Lord.

That's so in Twitter's wheelhouse. So is the service essentially just ported over now and all the publishers get to experience this again? Yeah? Yeah. So there was a lot of work that went in a lot of late nights that went into that porting over. And we're also lucky enough that we're able to kind of expand the team

and add some more people on the partnership side as well. And so we're able to bring in sites like the Washington Post and the LA Times. And there's a whole bunch of more. launching, I wish I could say just now, but give us a couple of weeks around this, who were able to kind of augment even what we built at scroll.

And Twitter Blue, of course, is not just ad for articles. There's a bunch of amazing other features involved in it, but like this is the one that's close to my baby, that one in top articles, which is for the Nuzzle fans. We brought that one back. Where do you find that in the interface?

I didn't see top articles in the interface. So if you go to the left, If you click on your profile picture in the app and you'll see top articles in the... Oh, yes, I did see this. Yes, this should be... This is going to wind up in the main navigation

or maybe on the Explorer page, I think, right? You're just being tested there. So one thing you can do with this is with Twitter Blue, you also have the ability to customize your kind of bottom of the app nav. And so I just put it directly in the center. It's one of... So that's one of the things I love about it. Got it.

And that's amazing. the team, Kisten Tucker was the PM on that, a whole bunch of engineers and designers worked really hard to kind of build this kind of like homage to nozzle in six months. Wow.

Customizing the navigation is a feature I didn't know was part of Twitter or Blue. We were educating the audience. So you have the, you have six icons in your task bar down there, right? And you can pick which ones you want. And so bookmarks can be there. Lists can be there.

And top articles can be there. So only six items can be there. I don't need to have spaces there or communities so I can turn off spaces and communities and replace it with top articles and lists which I love. Oh my God, that's such a game changer for a Twitter addict.

I'm glad you like it. I think that like the next piece, really, I think, is I think becoming a blue checkmark should be what Twitter blue is about. Is now that you know my name, you have my credit card, I can be verified as anybody and that would turn what is a cost center now into a paid center.

So is there any movement on that internally or do people talking about that? I know you can't tip your cards too much, but. I think there's a, there's a lot of interest in kind of like how to signal being a Twitter blue subscriber and thinking about that kind of verification thing. I would say that one of the things that's always important for us in these conversations is thinking about kind of equity and what those signals mean for other people when they come.

Like, in some ways, the verified check mark has been this kind of like, this proof of status, or it's seen as a proof of status. And if you can just kind of like, buy your way into that proof of status, we don't want to see bad actors leveraging that or other things.

So it's identity and verification, all these things. I came in and I was like, how about this idea and this idea? And people were like, yeah, we've been thinking about this for six years. And we have like these challenges that you have to go away and solve before you can do it.

So it's definitely. an area of interest, but I think we always want to be cautious about anything where the imprimatur of the platform might denote something that's not necessarily there. Yeah, and the reader view is really spectacular. Maybe we can just play that video and you can talk over it for a minute, but now when you have a thread on your Twitter, if you press that button, as you can see here, if you're watching the YouTube video, it just makes it look nice and clean, right? I mean, you take out the interface and you just get to read it as if it was like a medium article or some well-designed protocol had a nice design,

just like a beautiful designed web page almost. Yeah. Yeah. This was actually the feature that blew my mind. It was something that the team that I work on long form had been working on for a while before I got there and they shipped it, I think, first in Australia and Canada in June. And it blew my mind because it completely changed my notion of a thread.

I'd always been thinking about them as just like, it's a selection of tweets and so forth. But to be able to have that kind of immersive reading experience, but one where you could also still create the signals of engagement around particular components of it, it made me even start to think about articles in a different way. And so I think one of the things that if you're thinking about kind of areas where we're trying to go with Twitter blue,

it's certainly around notions of kind of more control, more customization, but also really trying to think about that content experience across the board to like what top articles does is it really kind of double-stallowing. down on that notion of time well spent. You can kind of see in a flash like the most important things in your story. With reader mode, suddenly you can be just immersed in one voice. And that's the kind of

critical thing for me. You're going from a timeline of a thousand voices to one voice and when you're reading one voice, you just want to be able to focus. And so that's all, a lot of these features are kind of focused around. It's like when you go from a thousand voices to one voice, how we make that experience like the most Zen-like possible?

Yeah, and you know, the mouse and the revenue, quarter by quarter, Twitter doing quite nicely. And I think the product velocity since Kavana took over Big Cor, who is the head of product, who was on episode 1225, it feels like Twitter was very concerned, you and I as users before you were there. We were like, they're very precious about the interface and doing experiments, and now it feels like something happened in the last year or two, and I think it's Kavon, that there is an open-mindedness to experimentation here now, yeah?

So I think there's a couple of things. It's important not to underestimate just like during those kind of dark periods where it felt like Twitter wasn't doing much, just how much work was going behind the scenes to kind of put the infrastructure in a place where we could now do this. There was a tremendous amount of work from people very kind of very thanklessly like rebuilding and modularizing infrastructure and making even possible to build one thing over here without how.

having to touch every single other piece of the stack. So there was a tremendous amount of work there. Then also, yeah, I think there's been a willingness to drive faster and explore an experiment and also to kill experiments. Like one of the things that really kind of like made me feel very good about Twitter when I joined was we experimented with fleets, didn't get to where we wanted to, and so we killed it. And it was, that's exactly the kind of product decision making that I want to see out of a

company. It's like, we're going to experiment. We're going to, like, go hard on the thing. It doesn't work out. We're going to kill it. Try something else. You know, I was literally about to bring that up, is that the fleets experiment was like, okay, people are just putting their tweets in fleets. It doesn't make any sense. And that space up there works so much better when you see spaces there. And you really started to see once you guys got through the technical debt, which is a term of art for those people who are new to the startup space, you know, you build something for a decade or two. platforms and paradigm shift and to move the entire, you know, it's like taking your house and

moving it from, you know, one plumbing system or electrical system to a brand new one. It's the house has to get ripped apart. The house is a bit messy. You can't work on other projects when you're ripping up the floors and putting, you know, heating under the floors. But when you put the heating under the floors, you put the solar in, all of a sudden, your house uses half as much electricity, but you do have to pause for the cause, yeah. Yeah, that was exactly it.

And it's been, it's been fascinating to be on the inside now and to understand and seal that, because I was the same. I was the guy outside going like, what's happening with Twitter? And now I get it. And so big CEO change. How has that been? And tell me about the new honcho,

the new head honcho, as it were. It was all a bit of a surprise, I think, to all of us. It happened on a day of rest, which became less of a day of rest. Once a month throughout the pandemic, we've been taking a day off as a company, just for mental health.

Yeah, it's actually been a really nice, thoughtful thing. for people to do just to be able to take a step back. And so, of course, this was when the news broke about Parag. So on the Namaste Day, let's drop the biggest news story. That's what everybody is. It's, yeah, that's super paradoxical.

So that happened. But we were lucky because we had an all hands the next day. And for a lot of people, they got to meet Parag for the very first time. And Parag is like, he bleeds Twitter. He's been there for, 10 years. And he's just this kind of wonderful, humble guy. And I think, like, he won a lot of fans on that day.

And immediately kind of like going in, making, making decisions and kind of really putting a step in the company. So I'm, it's very early days. I'm super excited to see, uh, see what he does. I just love the idea that somebody who was, was he, uh, the head of engineering, uh, was CTO? CTO, right. So I think maybe that was his first title.

It was like a VP of engineering. then CTO. What's really great about that is, you know, the critique of, you know, Twitter in its early days was, you know, maybe Ev and Jack were product guys, but the tech wasn't as strong as it needed to be. We just talked about technical debt getting built up. And obviously, like, it was so popular Twitter in the early days, they had the failwell. They couldn't even keep the servers up and running because it was growing so fast. And the velocity of data being shared was just a really big technical challenge. When you think about all those unique feeds on a global basis in all those languages across, and people expect it to just pop up immediately. So that's kind of like a really good sign that, you know, we're looking at this as a technological company that needs to really have a product velocity that matches the opportunity and the opportunity is so great. So I guess that how do you make a decision that something is going to be in the paid product versus the free product? Maybe you can walk us through in a big company when you say, hey, you know, the edit button, right? Like I have the undo button now because I'm playing for Twitter below.

Undue button, game changing, delightful. You have to figure out how many seconds to do because sometimes you want your tweet to go out immediately. Other times you would love a minute, but a minute means like you might have six or seven tweets backed up. It's a little bit of a weird experience. So I think I put it at 20 seconds or something. And now I reread the tweets and then I hit send if I feel, you know, so it's almost like having two send buttons, like a like a review button and then a published button. But in that example or other examples, what is? the thought process as a team of give it to everybody, make the experience better for everybody

or incentivize people to join us on this Twitter Blue Journey? Yeah, I think it's a fascinating question. And I totally hear you on the undue tweet thing. For a lot of people, it's about catching typos. For me, it's very much a question of, do you really want to tweet this level of snark? Or should you just be nice? And it's kind of like good Tony and evil Tony on my shoulders trying to, I want to see evil Tony's drafts.

I want to see the drafts. I went through my draft folder at one point. I was like, ooh, it was dark in here. I'm going to get that. That's going to get buried in my coffin with me. That's never coming out. I think like, so when I think about the kind of products that we look for, obviously the group that we care about,

we're focused on right now from a blue perspective, it's kind of super users of Twitter. And super users of Twitter and not necessarily like everybody else. We do weird things. Describe the super user, actually, I think there's a good point because a lot of people will push you, hey, Bill for the lowest common denominator. And then other people say, hey, you got to really understand who the tip of the spear here is. So when you think about that tip of the spear, what is the profile of a Twitter top 10% user? So what's interesting is there's obviously people who are heavy tweeters.

But the thing that's fascinating to me is the people who are like heavy non-tweaters as well. There are people who are obsessively using Twitter who just don't tweet that off at all. But use it for a variety of reasons. And you get this kind of weird kind of prosumer group as well. It's like people who are like for journalists, we were talking about journalists earlier. Twitter is their LinkedIn. You know, it's their professional network. It's how they get seen.

It's their work. For other people, this is a. It's their watering hole. It's like kind of a place to hang. Yeah. So it has a variety of different kind of user groups. So one of the things that we try to think about when we're thinking, about features of blue.

And this is kind of how, like, Sarah Bakepoor and Smita Gupta, who are the kind of, like, along with the Averyi Mehta are the kind of real heroes and leaders of blue, they talk to me about, like, the kind of notion of niche features, features that are like, not all of the several hundred million people who come to Twitter on a kind of daily basis are going to care about, say, bookmark folders. You know, it's not necessarily something for everyone, for a group of people that is, like, the biggest damn deal. can imagine. And so when we think about a lot of these features, it's often about like,

what is something that is super valuable to a particular niche, but doesn't really have an impact on the general population of the audience. So we think about those things. And then we also thought about, and for example, even top articles, yeah, top articles is great if you're like you and me and we follow a whole bunch of people and we want some way to be able to kind of sort through the stream. If you follow 50 people, it's not as good. Yeah. Um, And so there are those kind of factors that kind of feed into feature choice. And then the ones like ad-free articles, which would be great for everybody. But we made a very clear decision that we wanted to fund journalism.

And so funding journalism, that money has to come in before it can go out. All right, paywalls. This is the holy grail. There's got to be someone who has a paywall business. Insider seems to be Bloomberg seems to be going for. for it. There's an Atlantic seems to be going for it. Can I give you 10 bucks a month like I do with Apple News at some point to just not have to, for me it's just even about logging in. I have a log in to a lot of these. I just want it to be seamless and easy, breezy. And so I'm more

than willing to pay 10 bucks a month to just get 100 articles, 10 cents an article. I would pay for like on a consumption basis. I pay a flat rate. Is that going to work? Is that going to happen? Do you do it by, you know, just piecemeal? What's the strategy there? I think there's a bunch of different things that we can do to make that experience better. The first one, which is in some ways, the simplest one to do is if you're already a subscriber to a website, just make sure that you're logged in when you get there. There's nothing more frustrating than when you're subscribed to say the Washington Post or the Atlantic or wherever.

And you hit there and you're like logged out, showing me the paywall. I want to throw my phone across the room. That's technically, the issue there technically, correct me of wrong, is you're popping up like a mini browser. and it doesn't have your previous credentials in it if you did log in. One of the things that's been a kind of additional casualty of Apple's kind of war against cookies in general, which has been kind of helpful for kind of privacy around advertising. It's also made life a lot, lot harder for publishers you just want to keep you logged in. And so one of the things that we'd love to just like, we just want to kind of knock off these kind of user challenges.

are like, start with the easiest things, then kind of like work our way up. So one of the things is like, yes, can we kind of make sure that whenever you come from Twitter, you're always logged into the sites that your subscriber to, just solve that pain point straight away. Secondly, it's like, can we do things where it actually makes economic sense, not to get rid of the paywall, but to move the paywall back? You know, there's like your top one or two sites that actually you probably should subscribe to and support directly, and that's great. There's a whole ton of other sites that you're never going to subscribe to after that.

But you're only visiting like two or three times in a given month and you're still getting frustrated by that payable. Ah, so that's clever. Can we help those people by saying we're going to make the economics work and the yield work for a publisher where they can still attract their super fans but avoid kind of like frustrating those. So like whatever we do, there's a whole bunch of different ways to attack this problem and it's going to be piecemeal and staged and all of the experiments are going to happen and fail. I like what you're saying. because there is like the poorest paywall where they give you two articles for free and then they upsell you. And then there's, hey, listen, I love this publication, the Wall Street Journal. I read three or four stories a day.

Of course, I'm going to pay for it. And then there's like, okay, listen, I stumble upon an insider Bloomberg, Atlantic article, Washington Post article, once a week, once every two weeks maybe more accurately. And I want to read a deep dive or something. I'm never going to subscribe to it. So they might as well get me as a tweener for some amount of money. I'm more than happy to pay five or ten cents, which is much more than they would get on a CPM basis, correct? Yeah.

So that's very much the kind of area that like we want to, we want to think about. We want to make sure that we're never kind of cannibalizing a publisher's own subscriber base. We want to make, like we, one of the things you'll hear consistently and what drives the team is this notion that we want to help journalists like pay rent. So great.

It's a little anti-Zuck, like the anti-Facebook. Again, it's like how do we be a different kind of platform? And so we will always want to be thinking, starting with that point. But we think there's a whole ton of ways in which we can work with publishers to help them like build more of an audience relationship, do it in a way that makes them more money, and relieve some of the frustration that occurs when people are kind of like going across the web. So we're going to explore a whole ton of that over two.

I have a great suggestion for you, as a publisher myself, you know, in a former journalist, you know, one of the key sticking points is knowing who is coming to your site. So if the scroll asset, you know, Twitter Blue, could tell the Atlantic, and I would be fine with this as a user as well, the at Jason handle is looking at this many Atlantic articles through his Twitter Blue subscription, not which articles, just they're, you know, I'm doing one to five, five to 10 and then they could upsell me. So you could give them, hey, listen, here's a target for upsell.

Jason is what, you know, is hitting you, you know, he's done his 25th article with Twitter Blue. Yeah, you might want to upsell them. This is a good target for you. And they could just say, target my top users, or at least be able to market to them in a sort of an audience as a group. What do you think of that idea? Or is that already part of the product?

I think there's a bunch of stuff. We always want to be careful about kind of user privacy and making sure we have consent. And that's a kind of starting kind of grounding point. I think there's a ton of ways in which we could help either with like special discounted deals when we can see that you're a particular fan of an area. Perfect. One thing even. So one of the things that we do within Twitter Blue is we show you at the, we show you transparently where your money goes. So there's a chart in the Twitter Blue settings, we say see your impact.

And it shows like, okay, a dollar of your money is going to the Vox is going to Vox. and like 90 cents is going to the Miami Herald and all of these kinds of things. It shows where you want is going. And one of the things that's really interesting about that is not only is it kind of like a newly transparent way to do business in this area, but it also tells people just how much they love particular publishers.

And we've heard people say, like, you know what? I didn't realize that I read the Atlantic that often. Screw it, I'm going to subscribe. Fantastic. That's the great way to do it. Yeah. Like trying to find those kind of like hooks and signals of like,

How do we get you to a place where you'll get an experience that you want and also supporting the journalists? Well, here's another way. I'm part of Twitter Blue, and you see that I've read these stories on the Atlantic. But I don't follow the journalist who wrote it. You know the journalist, you know the byline. That's very simple to put together on a technological basis. All they need to do is put in the metadata on the article, the Twitter handle of the writer next to it. And most people do put the Twitter handle somewhere.

But what that would do is then you could upsell me, hey, suggested users follow these Atlantic journalists or Atlantic journalists you don't follow, but you've read the story. Have you thought about that kind of stuff? Because getting followers for journalists is truly valuable to journalists. Journalists are getting paid salaries and book advances based on how many followers they have. I kid you not. Yeah, I love that. I think if we're not thinking about that, we should be. I got product ideas.

I'm more than willing to give them for free. I remember the first time we met in 2009, you immediately gave me like 20 different product ideas and told me correctly that I was charging way too little for my startup and everything you said then was right and so I've always paid careful attention ever since. I just think there's so many different places we can take this once we think about like how to do these things together.

Even for example, like, can you create subscriber only spaces or subscriber any tweets and threads for people? Like there's a whole bunch of different things. Yeah, subscriber spaces and group clubs. I just got invited to a next. club and nah, those clubs or groups, whatever you're calling them is going to be, I think, a big experience in the near future. I love it. I'm not able to create one, but I'm in one.

And I, this next one, I'm like, you know what? It's kind of like by DM groups, but it's using the Twitter format. It's like there's a little overlap there on the product use case, but it's pretty, pretty darn cool. And I think that's going to be a big one is these little sort of subreddits inside of Twitter. They're kind of like subredits is how I think about them. They're great communities and hopefully like most of them will be less depressing than a next one. But it's, uh, it's been up and down for us. It's been up and down.

But I consider a developing year. Listen, Tony, congratulations on the sale. Um, it's been great to invest in you twice. And then, uh, you know, I really do appreciate that Twitter has been, uh, embracing my podcast specifically to come on here and talk about it and, you know, let us as the community of Twitter, uh, you know, participate in a dialogue of what we want the service. to be because Twitter is something very important to a lot of us in our lives. And I think it has tremendous upside.

And I feel like Twitter is run by a group of very good actors. I know people have been getting on you guys about like, oh, these little rule changes and freedom of speech. I am certain there is no one at Twitter who wants to limit freedom of speech. You just have this crazy responsibility that's never existed before, which is to get hundreds of millions of people to interact on a daily basis who, you know, have all the empathy sucked out of them because they're on a device in a very charged time. I mean, it's not an easy job to try to manage a community at scale, isn't? It's, it's incredibly hard. We're dealing with

new complexities around society that we've never had to deal with before. I think that that is the, uh, that's the challenge in why people rightly kind of hold us to account on this side of things. What I can say is to agree with you that like every single person I've met in Twitter, their hearts are pure, their intent is real. And they want to try and be, be better and make the world better. And we're like Twitter isn't the largest platform. It's arguably the most important one. And we've got to treat it like that. That's actually super accurate. Yeah. It's, it might be 20% of the size of other platforms, uh, or 30% whatever it is, but it's the most influential clearly. And we have to be very thoughtful about it.

like this idea that you're going to kick the president in the United States off just because you disagree with them or because he triggers you or just or or even if he's doing bad things it's kind of hard to silence the president of the United States and the free world. And then also if the person is actually inciting violence, I'm not going to make you comment on any of this, but I can speak my opinion here. I know that, you know, you have to be careful because whatever you say is could be reaggregated by somebody speaking of the news. But, you know, is a very delicate decision. I happen to think Twitter did a good job. But if somebody's inciting violence, that's clearly against the rules.

You can't get away with that. If somebody has an opinion you don't like, okay, grow up. You have to deal with that. That's part of life. And then it's just not easy. I mean, and I think the Trump situation is such a wild card that it's almost like, what I told people is like if you're thinking about how to design a social network and then you put Trump in, that's like the trolley car problem.

You're aware of the trolley car problem, like where it's like the trolley can kill like the baby being pushed by mom or eight adults. like, who should suffer more in this crazy situation? Like, that's Trump in your social network. It's like, there's no winning here. There's persons in a act. He's just chaotically tweeting all day long. There's no winning. Listen, it's been great to talk to you.

I will not make you comment on. I just as your background. I will advise you to not comment on the Trump situation because you'll be. See me starting to sweat profusely here right now. No, I mean, the problem is, like, I just got off an interview about Theranos with a journalist and they're just the framing of every question that gotcheness sometimes. And like what I try to do on this podcast, I have empathy for you as somebody who's working on Twitter. I don't want you to comment on Trump, to be totally honest. Like, because all that does

is then somebody on the left, somebody on the right, somebody in between is just going to misconstrude and aggregate your tweet and say, look, this supports my vision of the world. The fact is, it's a hard job. You guys do the best you can. And the surface kicks ass. And we all love and you're adding more features. So thank you for that. And to the Twitter team, really appreciate all the experiments you're doing. Great job the last two years.

A plus spaces, scroll, blue. We got to talk about DMs. DMs are in a sad state. I already talked to Cavemon about this. I know somebody's in charge of DMs. If you can get them in a room, we need an off-site meeting. DM's got to be searchable. It's got to become a modern messaging platform.

That's a big, big win. If you guys can get DMs, correct. We just announced that we just acquired the Quill messaging team. What? I don't know that. I think it was last week we announced that. And so I think, I think. Praise Jesus.

The DM team who's already been working really, really hard are now going to have even more people and resources to help make it even better. Feels like a technical debt problem. Like when I see that the search, like searching 10 years worth of DMs doesn't work. I'm like, this is like 10 year plus of DMs. It's a hard, it's a hard search problem to solve, like, across a giant corpus. I understand there's a lot of technical debt there and all likelihood, and it's going to be a lot of work before it starts. But they, you do have pin conversations. I don't know if you saw that in DMs, pin conversations. Because when you're a

super router like me, you have like three or four important groups and they just, I have to scroll, scroll, scroll to try to find them and now boom, I got them pin. Great job. I love that feature. All right. Listen, I'll talk to you soon, brother. Congratulations. And, and And I'll see you all next time on this week and startup. Sign up for Twitter Blue. It's awesome.