YouSaid · the spoken record

Adam Mosseri

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2023-07-24
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2023-07-24
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  1. “I mean, I think it's too early to tell on the thread side. I think Reels is embracing that people want to consume video, even though they don't share as much video and giving people a way to connect with friends that embraces that preference. And I think recommendations also help with that. So I think that's sort of the intersection of entertainment and connection or friends, I think, is what's kind of working there. With threads, I mean, we'll see. We will see it. I'm just refreshing the dashboard to make sure everything is.”

    2023-07-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Instagram CEO, Adam Mosseri on Threads: The Journey from 0-100M Users; What Worked, What Didn't and the Plans Ahead | Instagram: Biggest Mistakes, Successes, Misconceptions, TikTok Competition & The Future of Social Media; Interest Graph or Friend G · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “The ads business because if you watch one video for 10 seconds, you would have before scrolled through four posts and probably seen an ad. And so it's a challenge. Actually, video tends to be good for time spent and bad for everything else. Bad for revenue, bad for comments, bad for likes, bad for sends, et cetera. What worries about reels because we have the inbox integrated into Instagram is this sort of flywheel where you consume things, you send them to friends, then you sort of conversation. Maybe they use Instagram more. They want to check out what's going on today. They discover something they send it back to you or to another friend. And so the fact that growing video has massively grown sense, which is a pure friend-to-friend interaction, even if you take out the real shares, because they start conversation, I might send you a funny, you know.”

    2023-07-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Instagram CEO, Adam Mosseri on Threads: The Journey from 0-100M Users; What Worked, What Didn't and the Plans Ahead | Instagram: Biggest Mistakes, Successes, Misconceptions, TikTok Competition & The Future of Social Media; Interest Graph or Friend G · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “No, I think it's too black and white. I do think there's tension. Who you care about and who you want to hear from are not the same. What do you want your Instagram to be experienced to be if I ask you about in the abstracts over the long term is probably pretty different than what you'd like and interact with on a daily basis in the app. That's the tension between sort of first order and second order preferences. And so things are always a bit more complicated. The thing that's really working about Instagram right now with Reels is the connection between the two. So you can see a bunch of amazing videos from people you know or don't know but aren't necessarily your friends. And then you can share them with your friends and DMs. And that brings your friends back to the app and then they discover something and then they might share it with someone else. The thing that I think people don't always realize is video by its nature as a format is actually really challenging for all the old social networks. It puts a lot of downward pressure”

    2023-07-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Instagram CEO, Adam Mosseri on Threads: The Journey from 0-100M Users; What Worked, What Didn't and the Plans Ahead | Instagram: Biggest Mistakes, Successes, Misconceptions, TikTok Competition & The Future of Social Media; Interest Graph or Friend G · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Yes, we talked about it, but we thought that for enough people, probably the majority, that there would be enough overlap that would make a lot of sense to just allow you to quickly do it. Now, you could also select. You don't have to select the whole group. It just seemed like it would be the majority use case. And what threads, I think, is a really nice balance where it's different enough that there's a reason for it to be separate app, that we debated that a lot internally. But because there's a heavy overlap in terms of the interest graph between what conversations you want to be privy to and what photos and videos you want to be keeping up with, that it really allowed us to lean into that. And there's no way it would have been as successful if you had to boost the graph from scratch.”

    2023-07-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Instagram CEO, Adam Mosseri on Threads: The Journey from 0-100M Users; What Worked, What Didn't and the Plans Ahead | Instagram: Biggest Mistakes, Successes, Misconceptions, TikTok Competition & The Future of Social Media; Interest Graph or Friend G · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “I think it's going to be a very personal choice. I think for a lot of people, it's just going to be easier not to have to think about it and just be like, it's 80% the same anyway. I just want you to keep in sync.”

    2023-07-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Instagram CEO, Adam Mosseri on Threads: The Journey from 0-100M Users; What Worked, What Didn't and the Plans Ahead | Instagram: Biggest Mistakes, Successes, Misconceptions, TikTok Competition & The Future of Social Media; Interest Graph or Friend G · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “And so I think that was key. Now, look, I do think the public conversation interest graph isn't necessarily the one you're the same in terms of your interest as what you follow on Instagram, which is why we allow the graphs to fork. We will build over time, I think, a graph sync option. So if you want just to have the same graph, you can and we can make sure that it stays in sync for you. But I think it was also very important, particularly to the team, to allow people to choose a different experience or a different graph if they wanted one. And so I think we found a really good balance between making it really stupid, easy to just pull everything in on day one, but also if you cared and you wanted to curate, you could go do that.”

    2023-07-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Instagram CEO, Adam Mosseri on Threads: The Journey from 0-100M Users; What Worked, What Didn't and the Plans Ahead | Instagram: Biggest Mistakes, Successes, Misconceptions, TikTok Competition & The Future of Social Media; Interest Graph or Friend G · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “I mean, this is one of the key reasons for the success is that you're sitting in with your Instagram account, it's not a separate account, and you can import your identity, but you can also essentially import your graph by just following everyone you already follow. And you can follow people who are not even on threads yet so that when they do join, that you automatically are connected. And so that we can even tell you, hey, you've got 10,000 followers on this app already. You haven't even installed it yet. Do you want to try it? Pretty compelling value proposition.”

    2023-07-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Instagram CEO, Adam Mosseri on Threads: The Journey from 0-100M Users; What Worked, What Didn't and the Plans Ahead | Instagram: Biggest Mistakes, Successes, Misconceptions, TikTok Competition & The Future of Social Media; Interest Graph or Friend G · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “I thought we had something, but look, when you're launching a new app, it's always more likely to fail than succeed. The median number of new apps installed a month is zero for the average person. So you're just swimming upstream. But I did say I was more excited about this one than I have been about anything in a while, but I did want to recognize it was a big risk. And look, the numbers are staggering, but it's just signups. It's way easier to build something that people are willing to try than build something that people want to continue to use in a month or a year from now. So this is the pest first eight days I could have ever possibly imagined. But what really matters is how well do we iterate, how quickly do we improve the experience so that it is compelling enough that people will continue to use it over the long run.”

    2023-07-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Instagram CEO, Adam Mosseri on Threads: The Journey from 0-100M Users; What Worked, What Didn't and the Plans Ahead | Instagram: Biggest Mistakes, Successes, Misconceptions, TikTok Competition & The Future of Social Media; Interest Graph or Friend G · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Early Facebook days before we had photos, people just kept changing their profile picture like every day multiple times a day. I'm like, oh, sounds like people want to share photos. Maybe we should build that.”

    2023-07-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Instagram CEO, Adam Mosseri on Threads: The Journey from 0-100M Users; What Worked, What Didn't and the Plans Ahead | Instagram: Biggest Mistakes, Successes, Misconceptions, TikTok Competition & The Future of Social Media; Interest Graph or Friend G · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “I mean, I think you try to make sure that you're understanding what is the fundamental human need that's being met, and is that need going to probably persist or not? Instagram has changed a ton over the years, but a lot of it stayed the same, but those fundamental needs are the same. And so when you're looking at either a trend or a competitor or how someone is abusing or a community's abusing the app, you can learn a lot from how people abuse your app. If you can explain it not only as based on some sort of viral mechanic, but also based on it meeting a need in a fundamentally richer or better or different way, then you want to play in that space.”

    2023-07-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Instagram CEO, Adam Mosseri on Threads: The Journey from 0-100M Users; What Worked, What Didn't and the Plans Ahead | Instagram: Biggest Mistakes, Successes, Misconceptions, TikTok Competition & The Future of Social Media; Interest Graph or Friend G · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “In the video space, yeah. The other folk who are really fast and really good, and I respect a lot is Telegram. Telegram is just really good. They build something really well and they can pivot quickly. And when they decide to do something, they get it out.”

    2023-07-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Instagram CEO, Adam Mosseri on Threads: The Journey from 0-100M Users; What Worked, What Didn't and the Plans Ahead | Instagram: Biggest Mistakes, Successes, Misconceptions, TikTok Competition & The Future of Social Media; Interest Graph or Friend G · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “For certain segments and not for others, like TikTok is amazing at a couple of things, they are amazing at exploration-based ranking. So discovering new talent and helping new talent break. We for a long time had a strong bias towards showing people things that we were pretty confident they would like because a lot of other people liked them and it's easier to rank that kind of content. And that sort of reinforces the existing hierarchy. And TikTok was really good at building the systems from the ground up to be more content first and to go find things that you might love and you never would have heard of before. And therefore it was also just really entertaining, really entertaining. I think they still are the most well executing competitor I think we've ever faced. There's a couple others that are up there, but there won't. I think at the top of that.”

    2023-07-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Instagram CEO, Adam Mosseri on Threads: The Journey from 0-100M Users; What Worked, What Didn't and the Plans Ahead | Instagram: Biggest Mistakes, Successes, Misconceptions, TikTok Competition & The Future of Social Media; Interest Graph or Friend G · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Think how big we are relative to the competition would be super different. And we're catching up, we're growing really fast. I think we're growing the fastest of the big players, but it's very hard because if you're going to try and compete, and we do, right? Competition has gotten fiercer ever since I've been at the company, you can't just make something as good as the company. You have to make something that's better because why would I bother switching if it's just as good or even if it's only 10% better?”

    2023-07-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Instagram CEO, Adam Mosseri on Threads: The Journey from 0-100M Users; What Worked, What Didn't and the Plans Ahead | Instagram: Biggest Mistakes, Successes, Misconceptions, TikTok Competition & The Future of Social Media; Interest Graph or Friend G · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “But this was all pre COVID 19. If we had a solid foundation before everyone was at home and just spending a whole bunch of time on their phones, the whole trajectory of the app would have been completely different. And instead, these things all landed some before, but a lot after.”

    2023-07-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Instagram CEO, Adam Mosseri on Threads: The Journey from 0-100M Users; What Worked, What Didn't and the Plans Ahead | Instagram: Biggest Mistakes, Successes, Misconceptions, TikTok Competition & The Future of Social Media; Interest Graph or Friend G · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Back to this. This is maybe one of my biggest regrets. The first version of Reels we built was built on top of stories. It just didn't work because stories was growing. So we thought stories would be a good foundation on which to lean into short form video. But the thing that's amazing about stories is how deep pressurized they are. People share so much to stories and there's just way more stories than anyone has time to see or most people have time to see. So the read-through rate is very low. I don't know what it is, but it's maybe in the teens. You can't build a short form video product that particularly focuses on creators if most of the videos they create aren't seen. But we were trying to keep Instagram simple. We were trying to double down on the momentum of stories. We were trying to lean into how younger people use Instagram when they use stories way more than they use feed. And we lost nine to 12 months. And we ended up getting it right by leaning into feed and making a couple other strategic changes around recommendations and unconnected.”

    2023-07-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Instagram CEO, Adam Mosseri on Threads: The Journey from 0-100M Users; What Worked, What Didn't and the Plans Ahead | Instagram: Biggest Mistakes, Successes, Misconceptions, TikTok Competition & The Future of Social Media; Interest Graph or Friend G · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Yeah, I mean, Reels has been huge for us. Reels is pushing 50% of time spent in the app at this point. Not quite there. And before Reels, we had short form video, but I don't think we had designed the format to really embrace the form factor of a phone. And I think, you know, Reels being full screen, sound on is more fun and immersive, particularly during the pandemic when you're not bothering anybody because you're home. Focus on creators first person. All of these things were ways to embrace where the world is going and the platform in which we were building. And we hadn't leaned into all of that. And TikTok's rise was just meteoric after years of struggling to get anything to be retentive. When you see a competitor to do something, I think it's super important to be humble enough to learn from it. And sometimes that will mean building something that looks a lot like it. And sometimes it means figuring out what needs it's meeting and how you might meet those needs in a way that's more native to what you do and then a range of options in between. We lost a whole year. I still”

    2023-07-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Instagram CEO, Adam Mosseri on Threads: The Journey from 0-100M Users; What Worked, What Didn't and the Plans Ahead | Instagram: Biggest Mistakes, Successes, Misconceptions, TikTok Competition & The Future of Social Media; Interest Graph or Friend G · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Lot of DMs, yeah. I just get it's my birthday. All I want for my birthday is a blue check mark. I like to go in once or twice a week and respond to a couple people.”

    2023-07-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Instagram CEO, Adam Mosseri on Threads: The Journey from 0-100M Users; What Worked, What Didn't and the Plans Ahead | Instagram: Biggest Mistakes, Successes, Misconceptions, TikTok Competition & The Future of Social Media; Interest Graph or Friend G · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “I was liking a lot of this. That seems a little work. I got so much hate in my DMs about that. It was less than 1% of the users who used it. But that's still, oh, you should see my DMs, yeah.”

    2023-07-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Instagram CEO, Adam Mosseri on Threads: The Journey from 0-100M Users; What Worked, What Didn't and the Plans Ahead | Instagram: Biggest Mistakes, Successes, Misconceptions, TikTok Competition & The Future of Social Media; Interest Graph or Friend G · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “One of the things that we did unship was the activity feed. Activity is like your notifications. And there was a place you could go to see all the things your friends had liked. And it was fun. Like it was a great way to discover new content, but it's a little bit creepy. Just to be like, I'm going to check out.”

    2023-07-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Instagram CEO, Adam Mosseri on Threads: The Journey from 0-100M Users; What Worked, What Didn't and the Plans Ahead | Instagram: Biggest Mistakes, Successes, Misconceptions, TikTok Competition & The Future of Social Media; Interest Graph or Friend G · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Yeah, no, it's No. The app is too complicated. I mean, let's be serious. I think it's gotten more simple over the last 12 months or so. We consolidated some of the design patterns and primitives, removed some of the tabs, but we still have more to do. When you manage a large team and they get excited about a new idea, they often want to just build a new thing. And it's tougher and more work to extend an existing pattern or primitive for a new use case than to just invent your own new one because you have to coordinate and you have to maybe it's not quite as specialized for this thing that you guys are so excited about. But if you don't do that, you just slowly add more and more complexity to the app in a way that I think burns you over the long run, sort of death by a thousand cuts. So we actually, like I was talking to our head of design and one of our product leads two days ago about how do we carve out a certain percentage of the team's time to just unship things that aren't used that much or don't create that much value and proactively look for opportunities to consolidate things to make them simpler and easier.”

    2023-07-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Instagram CEO, Adam Mosseri on Threads: The Journey from 0-100M Users; What Worked, What Didn't and the Plans Ahead | Instagram: Biggest Mistakes, Successes, Misconceptions, TikTok Competition & The Future of Social Media; Interest Graph or Friend G · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “No, and I'm going to get crucified by a bunch of designers for saying, so I have a strong bias towards simplicity. I think Instagram has benefited greatly from being simple. But I think to say it's always better is a mistake. I think of simplicity as a means to an end and you have to be clear about what that end is. Maybe it's usability. Maybe it's broad appeal. But there are instances where a more complicated thing is going to be a better means to that end.”

    2023-07-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Instagram CEO, Adam Mosseri on Threads: The Journey from 0-100M Users; What Worked, What Didn't and the Plans Ahead | Instagram: Biggest Mistakes, Successes, Misconceptions, TikTok Competition & The Future of Social Media; Interest Graph or Friend G · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Yeah, so there's a couple ways to deal with it, I think. It's super valuable to be willing to prioritize certain segments over others. We care about young people and we care about creators most because young people, when they grow up, but also they are where creators gravitate to over time and they set trends and they often serve as a bellwether. And creators, I just think, are becoming more and more important over time for a bunch of reasons we can go into. So the first thing is to be willing to make that prioritization decision and be like, look, I'm going to eat some cost to overall app engagement or even overall revenue in the short term because I think this is going to be better and healthier for the company in the long term or for Instagram in this case in the long term because I”

    2023-07-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Instagram CEO, Adam Mosseri on Threads: The Journey from 0-100M Users; What Worked, What Didn't and the Plans Ahead | Instagram: Biggest Mistakes, Successes, Misconceptions, TikTok Competition & The Future of Social Media; Interest Graph or Friend G · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “And they're just an excuse to start a conversation. Yes, what you're up to, but maybe it's a question, but they're just a reason to give someone a buzz.”

    2023-07-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Instagram CEO, Adam Mosseri on Threads: The Journey from 0-100M Users; What Worked, What Didn't and the Plans Ahead | Instagram: Biggest Mistakes, Successes, Misconceptions, TikTok Competition & The Future of Social Media; Interest Graph or Friend G · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Take out all the text. There are more photos and videos shared in DMs than there are shared in stories, and there's way more shared in stories than there is in feed. So just forget about the text for a second, just the photos and videos, just the media, the rich media. It's a bigger deal and growing faster in DMs anywhere else. But the thing is, we're not a messaging app. If I was going to run late to today's podcast, the best way to let you know would probably be to text you on WhatsApp. It wouldn't be on Instagram. What Instagram DMs are great for is they provide you an excuse to start a conversation. We call them conversation starters a lot internally. If you switch universities or you go, you're going to Unity for the first time, you switch high schools, you have a crush, you know, replying to someone's stories socially acceptable in a way that a cold text is not. Sending them a funny reel you found in feed or more recently notes. Notes are basically aim status, but better looking at the top of the inbox. Anybody above 20 doesn't use them very much? Unbelievable how much they've moved Instagram engagement overall, app level engagement for teachers.”

    2023-07-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Instagram CEO, Adam Mosseri on Threads: The Journey from 0-100M Users; What Worked, What Didn't and the Plans Ahead | Instagram: Biggest Mistakes, Successes, Misconceptions, TikTok Competition & The Future of Social Media; Interest Graph or Friend G · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “It definitely made me shift more resources towards messaging. Actually, at one point a couple years ago, I think I put the entire stories team on messaging. Wow.”

    2023-07-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Instagram CEO, Adam Mosseri on Threads: The Journey from 0-100M Users; What Worked, What Didn't and the Plans Ahead | Instagram: Biggest Mistakes, Successes, Misconceptions, TikTok Competition & The Future of Social Media; Interest Graph or Friend G · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “So feet had to evolve, otherwise, it would just slowly decay exactly. And so recommendations are a way to tap into this huge, rich repertoire of amazing content that exists on the platform that you might not even know about yet and continue to make sure that feed is alive and well. People, they say like, oh, you don't show enough of my friends' posts. It's because your friends don't post that much to feed. But it's easier to think it's the algorithm. So it was so clear the right thing to do, but it was so clear that it was going to become a scapegoat for anything you didn't like about Instagram, you would just blame the Rex. Rex is what we call recommendations for short internally.”

    2023-07-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Instagram CEO, Adam Mosseri on Threads: The Journey from 0-100M Users; What Worked, What Didn't and the Plans Ahead | Instagram: Biggest Mistakes, Successes, Misconceptions, TikTok Competition & The Future of Social Media; Interest Graph or Friend G · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “I just knew there was going to be so much backlash. It wasn't because I questioned if it was the right thing. It was so clearly the right thing to do. Basically, what people don't realize is they think of Instagram as a feed of square photos, sometimes in chronological order. And if you look at how people share, all of the growth has been in stories and in DMs over the last five years or so. And to the degree, there is growth in feed, it's all in video. It's not in photos in a lot of ways, at least in terms of what people consume. And if you look at how teens spend their time on Instagram, they spend more time in DMs than they do in stories and they spend more time in stories than they do in feed. Yet people think of Instagram as a feed and it's the third most important surface at best, maybe fourth now for teens with some of the most important communities on the platform. Plus all the friends sharing is moving in that direction, but you don't share personal moments and feed today the way you did five or ten years ago. You share them in stories or in messages more.”

    2023-07-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Instagram CEO, Adam Mosseri on Threads: The Journey from 0-100M Users; What Worked, What Didn't and the Plans Ahead | Instagram: Biggest Mistakes, Successes, Misconceptions, TikTok Competition & The Future of Social Media; Interest Graph or Friend G · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “I think the key thing is you make sure both sides are heard, then you make it very clear who's the decision maker, and you make it very clear when there's a decision. And you have to remind people that it's important to disagree and commit because if you're just going to question a decision upstream, downstream over and over again, you're just going to do everything poorly. That one is tough, though. There's a bias a lot of us have to want things to return to the way they were, even though that's not possible.”

    2023-07-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Instagram CEO, Adam Mosseri on Threads: The Journey from 0-100M Users; What Worked, What Didn't and the Plans Ahead | Instagram: Biggest Mistakes, Successes, Misconceptions, TikTok Competition & The Future of Social Media; Interest Graph or Friend G · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “So I was trying to calibrate because on one hand, I do think that if you're not making mistakes, you're not trying big enough things. So if I had no big, painful moments in the last couple years, that would mean that we were being too conservative. So I'm glad, even though it was not fun. On the specific, like all the memes of like a banana, I was wearing a yellow sweater in the video, so there was like a lot of banana, a lot of mini-me memes, like a lot of stuff. So I was like sending stuff to some friends, like, is this mean or is this funny? It's hard for me to tell. And like my brother's like, this is just funny. I sent a bunch to my wife and she didn't respond to any of it. She just isn't interested, I guess. This has all happened for a whole weekend and then a week later”

    2023-07-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Instagram CEO, Adam Mosseri on Threads: The Journey from 0-100M Users; What Worked, What Didn't and the Plans Ahead | Instagram: Biggest Mistakes, Successes, Misconceptions, TikTok Competition & The Future of Social Media; Interest Graph or Friend G · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “Yeah, definitely. I mean, look, you got to make mistakes. The biggest blow up was the press cycle the summer before last around what was called externally panavision, which actually meant something different internally. And it was a confluence of a bunch of different changes that were happening at once. So it ended up being one of those words that people just projected onto it, whatever they didn't like. And so it kind of took on a life of its own. So we were introducing recommendations into feeds, so content that you, it's not from accounts you follow, very controversial. We were leaning into video, you know, our heritage is photos, also controversial. Creators were frustrated with their reach. I think some of that was for good reason and some of it's because people always want more reach. And we were also experimenting with a pretty radically new design for the main tab. And it just always was a little bit too much too fast. And it all kind of blew up in our face. And there was an interaction between the creator community and the media and the kind of ping ponged. And then I did a video explaining what we're doing. And then I became a meme for a week, which was fun.”

    2023-07-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Instagram CEO, Adam Mosseri on Threads: The Journey from 0-100M Users; What Worked, What Didn't and the Plans Ahead | Instagram: Biggest Mistakes, Successes, Misconceptions, TikTok Competition & The Future of Social Media; Interest Graph or Friend G · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “These safety and integrity work, we were running too much of our own stuff and not leveraging the much larger teams at Facebook and in the central teams. I think there were more engineers that worked on safety integrity at the company at the time that then worked at all of Instagram. And so I was like, let's just... With all of this hard stuff, and so that was a big culture shift for that team to go from defining and implementing and enforcing your own policies to integrating with a much larger machine, so to speak. But it was also the midterm elections, his 2018, I was like, we just can't wait. Sorry guys. Like we said before, sometimes you just have to make a decision and it's okay if it ruffles some feathers.”

    2023-07-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Instagram CEO, Adam Mosseri on Threads: The Journey from 0-100M Users; What Worked, What Didn't and the Plans Ahead | Instagram: Biggest Mistakes, Successes, Misconceptions, TikTok Competition & The Future of Social Media; Interest Graph or Friend G · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “I said, I'm going to be a sponge and I'm going to try and learn as much as I can as quickly as I can. And I'm not going to push for any change for at least a couple months. I ended up breaking my promise in one place, but for the most part kept it. And I think that helped.”

    2023-07-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Instagram CEO, Adam Mosseri on Threads: The Journey from 0-100M Users; What Worked, What Didn't and the Plans Ahead | Instagram: Biggest Mistakes, Successes, Misconceptions, TikTok Competition & The Future of Social Media; Interest Graph or Friend G · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “Trying to balance that and make sure that I don't do too much to focus on the short term reactionary and more to focus on how do we really just deliver over years as opposed to worry about something that someone might be upset about this week.”

    2023-07-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Instagram CEO, Adam Mosseri on Threads: The Journey from 0-100M Users; What Worked, What Didn't and the Plans Ahead | Instagram: Biggest Mistakes, Successes, Misconceptions, TikTok Competition & The Future of Social Media; Interest Graph or Friend G · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “I mean, one is actually some advice that Kevin and Mike gave me later. And I had a drink with them maybe six or nine months in. And I had spent a ton of time that year trying to make sure that the team was in a good place. There was a lot of anxiety with the founders leaving. Are we going to get swallowed by the big company? Are we going to lose our identity? You know, I spent a lot of time trying to clarify our identity to try to boost morale, team meetings, round tables, Q&As, all this kind of stuff. And Kevin's advice was, look, that's all nice, but really what's going to boost around more than anything else is doing really good work and succeeding in the market. And everything else is kind of noise. I think he's right. I still value investing in org leadership and communication. I spent a lot of time on it. I do weekly Q&As with my whole team, but I really do think that over the long run, the thing that's going to get people the most rallied, the most excited, the most motivated, the most effective is doing good work and being successful. And so I've been.”

    2023-07-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Instagram CEO, Adam Mosseri on Threads: The Journey from 0-100M Users; What Worked, What Didn't and the Plans Ahead | Instagram: Biggest Mistakes, Successes, Misconceptions, TikTok Competition & The Future of Social Media; Interest Graph or Friend G · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “Yeah, it's always a challenge. I've been lucky. I have an amazing team. I've made a few mistakes in hiring, but for the vast majority of those hires I made in that first year are still at the company and still in the positions at Instagram. But yeah, you have to kind of pick the people based on their skills, but also based on does the group end up with the set of skills you need from this group as opposed from each individual? And then you kind of have to also try and build that and pick people for whom they're going to have some chemistry without having them all be alike. And that's an art, not a science. So, you know, it's always a work in progress. I'm always working on figuring out how to increase the rapport and the trust within that seniormost team.”

    2023-07-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Instagram CEO, Adam Mosseri on Threads: The Journey from 0-100M Users; What Worked, What Didn't and the Plans Ahead | Instagram: Biggest Mistakes, Successes, Misconceptions, TikTok Competition & The Future of Social Media; Interest Graph or Friend G · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “To focus on things that would pay off longer term so that they're like, look, you can mess things up in the short term, but get your staff into place. Aim high, don't compromise because maybe that'll make the next three months worse, but then the next three years will be better. I talked to Will Cathcart a lot who runs WhatsApp? I think he was running the Facebook app at the time. He's been a good guy to bounce ideas off of for a long time now. Some friends outside of the company who had left the company and knew it, but some people are just totally just.”

    2023-07-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Instagram CEO, Adam Mosseri on Threads: The Journey from 0-100M Users; What Worked, What Didn't and the Plans Ahead | Instagram: Biggest Mistakes, Successes, Misconceptions, TikTok Competition & The Future of Social Media; Interest Graph or Friend G · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “Was a lot, and we didn't only lose Mike and Kevin who are amazing, product thinkers, and part of the reason I joined Instagram was to work with them. We ended up losing pretty much our whole leadership team a little bit before and a little bit after that. So in my first year, I had to hire a head of design, engineering, product management, data science, research, HR, communications, marketing, and a COO. It's just a lot. So there was a period there where I was very alone. That was what was really hard because I feel like if you have a really strong staff and they have trust and they get along and they can challenge each other and they bring different skills, you can kind of take on anything. And if you don't, anything can become a problem. And that trough and that, you know, four or five months in was pretty, pretty.”

    2023-07-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Instagram CEO, Adam Mosseri on Threads: The Journey from 0-100M Users; What Worked, What Didn't and the Plans Ahead | Instagram: Biggest Mistakes, Successes, Misconceptions, TikTok Competition & The Future of Social Media; Interest Graph or Friend G · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “And moving it because maybe you learn something and it changes. But it's better to move towards a goal that you set and change it later than to float through and large companies and quickly growing companies like the one I work for will just pull you week to week in the fire over the week. And so if you don't put that stake in the ground, you can really lose a lot of time and then pop your head up and be like, whoa, I don't even know how I spent this last 12 months.”

    2023-07-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Instagram CEO, Adam Mosseri on Threads: The Journey from 0-100M Users; What Worked, What Didn't and the Plans Ahead | Instagram: Biggest Mistakes, Successes, Misconceptions, TikTok Competition & The Future of Social Media; Interest Graph or Friend G · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “I think the advice when I see honestly anybody early in their career is probably just to get a range of different experiences. I think it's super important to broaden your skill set or to even just experiment with different types of work so that you can figure out in a more informed way what your values are, what matters to you, what your aspirations are. Because the most important thing over the long run is that whatever you want to be professionally, that you're clear and honest with yourself about that. And then you need to shape your work to be an overlap between what helps you achieve that and then if you work at a company, what the company needs of you. And your manager's job is to find that overlap and help you with that, but not everyone's a great manager. So I think you need to do that proactively. And I think earlier on in the career, if you want to get into management or become a more senior leader, I think range is valuable even if you want to be a specialist because I think it helps you make a more informed decision about the stake and the ground you want to place about what your aspirations are. But you also have to be okay picking that stake up.”

    2023-07-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Instagram CEO, Adam Mosseri on Threads: The Journey from 0-100M Users; What Worked, What Didn't and the Plans Ahead | Instagram: Biggest Mistakes, Successes, Misconceptions, TikTok Competition & The Future of Social Media; Interest Graph or Friend G · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “Now, I also think you need to be very clear about when you're just going to make a call and when you're not. And there are some times where it's like, no, if I don't make this call, we're going to waste too much time or I have the right occasionally as a leader to just use my veto power, so to speak. But then you have to be careful because if you do that too much, you stifle creativity. You don't create enough space. You cannot hire or retain the most creative and interesting talent. So you have to use that sparingly. But that's like a card to play and you can play it every once in a while, but you can't play it every day. Release is my experience.”

    2023-07-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Instagram CEO, Adam Mosseri on Threads: The Journey from 0-100M Users; What Worked, What Didn't and the Plans Ahead | Instagram: Biggest Mistakes, Successes, Misconceptions, TikTok Competition & The Future of Social Media; Interest Graph or Friend G · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “So, I do think as a lead, you'd need to talk a lot. And I think people underestimate this. Our business model is ads and marketing. If you talk to anybody in that world, they'll tell you it's not just about the message. It's also about the frequency of how often you deliver that message. And then internally, we decide we're going to do something different. We make a post internally and one out of eight employees reads it and we move on with our lives. And we're surprised when the whole company doesn't move along with us. And so I've tried to really embrace some advice I got early. Who was this from? I forget who it was. I could have come to back to me, which was if you really want to move the team on something, you need to say it. So many times that you literally want to throw up in your mouse if you say it again and then you need to say it again and again and again and again. And it can be tough because you can feel like you're not being heard or you can feel like you're being predictable or just annoying. But the truth is people need to hear things multiple times to fully internalize them. And so I do think from the part of that quote that resonates is like, I do think you need to talk a lot.”

    2023-07-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Instagram CEO, Adam Mosseri on Threads: The Journey from 0-100M Users; What Worked, What Didn't and the Plans Ahead | Instagram: Biggest Mistakes, Successes, Misconceptions, TikTok Competition & The Future of Social Media; Interest Graph or Friend G · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “I think that it became clear to me that a lot of times for the people who are senior at the company, and I was not senior, that what they really wanted was to be able to hand you a problem and then not to hear anything back from you until it was solved. Internalize this early. That's kind of how I felt when I was a boss running my own design firm. And so I just memor with a couple people, I just was like, look, whenever I get handed to something, I didn't tell them this. I was just like, okay, I'm going to do it and fix it and do it well. They're not going to hear back from me. Might be a day, might be a week, might be a month until the answer or the responses, I took care of that to say, you know. So I definitely leaned into that for a number of years.”

    2023-07-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Instagram CEO, Adam Mosseri on Threads: The Journey from 0-100M Users; What Worked, What Didn't and the Plans Ahead | Instagram: Biggest Mistakes, Successes, Misconceptions, TikTok Competition & The Future of Social Media; Interest Graph or Friend G · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “When I first started, it's better now, and actually it was better in 2012, to be fair. But when I first started, we had this amazingly talented group of designers, somewhere between eight and 12 of us. They just did whatever they wanted. It was one of those weird things where they were talented. They got really good work done. They worked really hard. And you would ask them to work on something and they would smile and nod, and they would work on something else. Whatever they thought was the most important thing. And I was reliable because I had a job before Facebook. I ran a small design firm. I was used to having clients and felt like I had a bias towards doing what the client asked for. So when I joined a company, I had a bias towards doing what my boss asked me for. And so I think that helped.”

    2023-07-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Instagram CEO, Adam Mosseri on Threads: The Journey from 0-100M Users; What Worked, What Didn't and the Plans Ahead | Instagram: Biggest Mistakes, Successes, Misconceptions, TikTok Competition & The Future of Social Media; Interest Graph or Friend G · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “Design, I think, is about making sure you're incredibly clear about what problem it is that you're solving, articulating multiple solutions, figuring out how to effectively evaluate those solutions, figuring out how to really take feedback and sift through the noise and find the signal. But like I said, it wasn't great at it. And then Brett Taylor was my boss, and I was the director of Design for Mobile. This might be 2012. And then he left.”

    2023-07-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Instagram CEO, Adam Mosseri on Threads: The Journey from 0-100M Users; What Worked, What Didn't and the Plans Ahead | Instagram: Biggest Mistakes, Successes, Misconceptions, TikTok Competition & The Future of Social Media; Interest Graph or Friend G · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “As a designer, I love design. Honestly, if I could wave a magic wand, I think I would be a specialist. I've always romanticized the amazing machine learning engineer, the amazing product designer, the amazing architect or shoemaker. It's just not my shape. I'm not great at anything. Really, I just have a wide range of things that I can do reasonably well. So my strength is my breadth. And so for me, I loved design, but I was solidly middle of the pack at best. I made up for lack of natural talent with just sheer brute force, just hours. And I think that was good. And I think I learned a lot that way. And I actually took a lot from my time as a designer on problem solving.”

    2023-07-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Instagram CEO, Adam Mosseri on Threads: The Journey from 0-100M Users; What Worked, What Didn't and the Plans Ahead | Instagram: Biggest Mistakes, Successes, Misconceptions, TikTok Competition & The Future of Social Media; Interest Graph or Friend G · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “I was intrigued Bartending was one of my first jobs just paying for sort of rent and stuff in New York and university. I spent a lot of time as a teenager in service, so bartending as a waiter, dishwasher, you know, like short chef, that kind of thing. And I think service is a really good thing to do early in life because it teaches you some humility, but also how to work with people in a wide range of people because you end up with all sorts of clients, whether you're waiting a bartending specifically and then figuring out how to manage different personalities at a young age, I think is also a good thing. And then also it's just good to appreciate good service. You end up being a good tipper for life.”

    2023-07-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Instagram CEO, Adam Mosseri on Threads: The Journey from 0-100M Users; What Worked, What Didn't and the Plans Ahead | Instagram: Biggest Mistakes, Successes, Misconceptions, TikTok Competition & The Future of Social Media; Interest Graph or Friend G · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

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    2023-07-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Instagram CEO, Adam Mosseri on Threads: The Journey from 0-100M Users; What Worked, What Didn't and the Plans Ahead | Instagram: Biggest Mistakes, Successes, Misconceptions, TikTok Competition & The Future of Social Media; Interest Graph or Friend G · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

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    2023-07-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Instagram CEO, Adam Mosseri on Threads: The Journey from 0-100M Users; What Worked, What Didn't and the Plans Ahead | Instagram: Biggest Mistakes, Successes, Misconceptions, TikTok Competition & The Future of Social Media; Interest Graph or Friend G · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “Huge thank you to Anne Schultz and Naomi Gelt at Meta and Sam Lesson for some amazing questions suggestions today. It really did make such a difference. But before we dive into the show state, this episode is brought to you by Tigus, the go-to research destination for bold investing. Tiga's curace, expert insights analysis and financial data to give you powerful perspective for your investment decisions with Lightning Fast access to over 60,000 transcripts across 20,000 companies, you'll discover a wealth of unique insights to fuel your fundamental research, gain perspectives, synthesize information and even model outcomes all on TIGUS as a 20 minute VC listener try it for free at Tigus.com forward slash gross gross and you tools we can't live without like Tigus there. Mayfair helps companies protect and grow their cash automatically. Access up to $50 million of FDIC insurance and earn up to $4.42% interest rate on”

    2023-07-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Instagram CEO, Adam Mosseri on Threads: The Journey from 0-100M Users; What Worked, What Didn't and the Plans Ahead | Instagram: Biggest Mistakes, Successes, Misconceptions, TikTok Competition & The Future of Social Media; Interest Graph or Friend G · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “When you see a competitor do something, I think it's super important to be humble enough to learn from it. The numbers are staggering, but it's just signups. It's way easier to build something that people are willing to try than build something that people want to continue to use in a month or a year from now. So this is the best first eight days I could have ever possibly imagined. But what really matters is how well do we iterate so that it is compelling enough that people will continue to use it over the long run. Welcome back. It's 20 VC with me, Harry Stebbings. Now, Stay Show is an immensely special one because in recent weeks we've seen threads smash all previous records and hit 100 million users in just five days. Today, I'm so excited to be joined in the hotsey by Adam Masseri, leading the charge with threads. Adam's also head of Instagram and leading Meta's efforts on creators and reels, and Adam's been at Meta for more than 15 years, having started at Meta as a designer, he then went on to serve as head of Facebook's news feed, and I do want to say”

    2023-07-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Instagram CEO, Adam Mosseri on Threads: The Journey from 0-100M Users; What Worked, What Didn't and the Plans Ahead | Instagram: Biggest Mistakes, Successes, Misconceptions, TikTok Competition & The Future of Social Media; Interest Graph or Friend G · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source