YouSaid · the spoken record

Kayvon Beykpour

lines on the record: 100
first: 2024-04-28
most recent: 2024-04-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“People can find me on Twitter X slash whenever we're calling it these days. My handle is caves, K-A-Y-V-Z. And yeah, if you're this podcast and you're working on something cool and you need some help or advice or you're looking for an angel investor, don't hesitate to reach out and would love to try what you're building”
2024-04-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Twitter’s former Head of Product opens up: being fired, meeting Elon, changing stagnant culture, building consumer product, more | Kayvon Beykpour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, he's a great example of that as well. He's definitely a voracious user of all tools and products. And that's why he is really great, really great product sense.”
2024-04-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Twitter’s former Head of Product opens up: being fired, meeting Elon, changing stagnant culture, building consumer product, more | Kayvon Beykpour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Go in this direction I remember probably the second time I ever met Scott, we did it FaceTime, and he was at the TED conference. I want to say it was in Vancouver. And just to like illustrate how cool it would be when he accepted the FaceTime, he's like, cool, and I'm going to take you on a Periscope. And he flipped this camera and started walking around the TED conference. And basically pretending like he was like prototyping the product but using FaceTime. And it was such an amazing experience because having an investor essentially like encourage you down a product direction by showing rather than telling. It was such a great encapsulation of how supportive Scott was and inspiring Scott was as one of our cheerleaders. And I respect him so much for everything he did to help Periscope make happen. And also for betting on us because he, you know, he was one of the first people who said yes to investing. He didn't know us. He just believed in us. And that helped everything else come together.”
2024-04-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Twitter’s former Head of Product opens up: being fired, meeting Elon, changing stagnant culture, building consumer product, more | Kayvon Beykpour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I love that. The thing, I guess, like a funny story about Scott that people might not know, I consider him to have been the first Periscoper. So Scott believed in Periscope before it was Periscope. Before we had turned it into live video, we had like a previous version of our beta that was static Photosharing, same vision, same concept, but the product was called Bounty and it was like a pin somewhere in the world like the Tokyo fish market and someone would respond with a photo of like what it looked like there you know our vision was still to like help you see through someone else's eyes but the first manifestation was really static and had this like marketplace dynamic and you know it took us a while to get to the point where we were like press a button go live and have it be live video because by definition it's like real time rather than static anyway before we built any of that when we were kind of like playing with the idea and Scott was really encouraging us to”
2024-04-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Twitter’s former Head of Product opens up: being fired, meeting Elon, changing stagnant culture, building consumer product, more | Kayvon Beykpour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'll tell you one funny story and then I'll first tell you something I love about Scott. Scott is a great example of someone who I think has driven immense cultural change at a massive legendary company in Adobe, obviously, but the number of transformations that Scott oversaw and led and contributed to at Adobe are incredible. And I'm sure having a fraction of this experience at Twitter, I can appreciate how difficult and challenging and rewarding that was, right? Going from package software to cloud, going from non-AI to AI, going from kind of like discrete tools to an integrated suite that worked really elegantly together. I think Scott oversaw a lot of this stuff and it's pretty incredible to see that transformation have been so successful at Adobe.”
2024-04-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Twitter’s former Head of Product opens up: being fired, meeting Elon, changing stagnant culture, building consumer product, more | Kayvon Beykpour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, never sit around. And that was just, it was so funny because it was this very tiny moment, but I've never, ever forgotten that. Like when you got nothing to do, sweep. And it had such a profound impact on my work ethic of like there's always something you can be doing to move the ball forward and being productive and being impactful. And I'm so grateful that Fred, my boss, you know, had that moment with me because it was like, I don't even think he understands how impactful that was. But it's also so much.”
2024-04-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Twitter’s former Head of Product opens up: being fired, meeting Elon, changing stagnant culture, building consumer product, more | Kayvon Beykpour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something that definitely shaped my Work ethic and like how I work that came from my first boss actually when I was like 14 I had a summer job basically replacing and doing maintenance on fire extinguishers so I would like driving to San Francisco my boss would you know pick me up in his truck we'd go to like big commercial buildings hospitals high rises and we would take all the fire extinguishers in the building, hundreds of them to the garage, empty them, fill them, tag them, inspect them. And that was my first job and I don't even remember if I was getting paid. I was probably getting paid a very small amount. But it was just like first work experience. And I remember there was this moment that I had finished like, you know, dealing with my extinguishers and I was just kind of like sitting in his truck, kind of like twiddling my thumbs doing nothing. And he, my boss, you know, came up to me and was like, when you've got enough nothing to do, sweet.”
2024-04-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Twitter’s former Head of Product opens up: being fired, meeting Elon, changing stagnant culture, building consumer product, more | Kayvon Beykpour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Basically, they consume and aggregate everything that's happening in the world by, among other things, ingesting articles and then crafting these story modules through them that are summarized by AI. And then they let you actually interrogate the news and ask questions. So leveraging LLMs and tool calls, it's able to actually help you understand what's happening in the world. And they also are building a social layer as well. So it's very cool. I'll definitely get you in the beta.”
2024-04-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Twitter’s former Head of Product opens up: being fired, meeting Elon, changing stagnant culture, building consumer product, more | Kayvon Beykpour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Crokinol is like a Canadian, I think it's a Canadian board game. And it's amazing to me because I've never seen a game be captivating to all age ranges. I love it. I play with my friends. My parents over Christmas were like obsessed with this game. My daughter loves, it's like a physical game. You kind of like flick a puck kind of like shuffleboard style but like miniaturized with a totally different set of mechanics. And it was just like seeing this game captivate people of all age ranges was mind-blowing to me. And it's just really fun. So maybe curveball answer for you there. But I think those are some of the products that I've been really enjoying and appreciating lately.”
2024-04-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Twitter’s former Head of Product opens up: being fired, meeting Elon, changing stagnant culture, building consumer product, more | Kayvon Beykpour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A real code. But yeah, so that's amazing. So that'll be my second pick. Give you a non software one, which I'm actually a board game that I ran into. Then I was gifted actually for my birthday. And it's called Crokinole. Have you ever heard of this game called Crokinole?”
2024-04-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Twitter’s former Head of Product opens up: being fired, meeting Elon, changing stagnant culture, building consumer product, more | Kayvon Beykpour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Here's a biased one. My wife is actually working on a startup called Particle, and they're reimagining the news experience with AI. And what I love about what they're doing is that for the first time, they're sort of like, they've rethought what the form factor and the unit of content for news stories should be, like articles are a failed format is my belief. And certainly their belief. And so they've really come up with an elegant and engaging experience for understanding what's happening in the world in a way that's like purely powered by AI. And it's awesome. Again, hashtag biased husband, but it's amazing. In beta right now, you can sign up on the wait list. The URL is particle news.ai. They're letting people in on beta if you sign up use coupon code, hashtag KVON Lenny.”
2024-04-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Twitter’s former Head of Product opens up: being fired, meeting Elon, changing stagnant culture, building consumer product, more | Kayvon Beykpour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love perplexity. It's really interesting to me how perplexity is Perplexity is a product that fits in your life and replaces a product that is so ingrained in people's behavior, which is using Google search for some set of use cases. And it's just really incredible to me how quickly perplexity took that over. It's very hard actually to rewire your muscle memory if you're used to using Google for something for searching for 15, 20 years or whatever. It was just amazing to me how quickly my go-to became perplexity. So I'm, and frankly, it's like one of the only non-development tool AI products that actually has retained. A lot of people try and consume AI products that just aren't really, haven't retained, but perplexity is one that's a daily driver for me. So on my home screen, I love it. I'm very impressed by it.”
2024-04-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Twitter’s former Head of Product opens up: being fired, meeting Elon, changing stagnant culture, building consumer product, more | Kayvon Beykpour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The thing that I find is both very illustrative and helpful is just asking people to talk about something they worked on that failed and talk about something they built that succeeded as well. But I think you just learn a lot about someone's self-reflection and their passions. But in particular, their self-reflection, if they talk through something that they really cared deeply about that didn't work. And why didn't it work? What were the takeaways? What did you learn from it? I think it teaches you about how willing people are to take risks. It tells you, have they experienced failure, what they learn from failure. So I think it's always, you just get to know someone really well. It's like a well-rounded, it ends up in a well-rounded understanding of a person if you can dig into that.”
2024-04-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Twitter’s former Head of Product opens up: being fired, meeting Elon, changing stagnant culture, building consumer product, more | Kayvon Beykpour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I haven't seen it yet. And it's funny some content, people are talking about it so much. That I might kind of, I kind of want to not watch it now because I feel like it's really hard for shows to live up to the hype when you're mid hype cycle. So I haven't gone around to it yet, but it's definitely on my list. I know it's the type of show that I would love, but I just haven't gone.”
2024-04-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Twitter’s former Head of Product opens up: being fired, meeting Elon, changing stagnant culture, building consumer product, more | Kayvon Beykpour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Same. I also thought Oppenheimer was, I'm a huge Nolan fan. Oppenheimer was captivating to have that level of high octane in a biopic consistently for like two and a half hours is like so hard to pull off. And I thought it was exceptional. TV shows. We're watching Tokyo Vice right now, which I really like. I think one of the best TV shows I've watched recently, I mean, succession was amazing, but maybe I'll pull a less popular one, which is devs, also in the sci-fi realm. I think it was a Hulu show. But if you're interested in tech and AI and you want great acting in Nick Offerman, Devs is a pretty amazing show.”
2024-04-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Twitter’s former Head of Product opens up: being fired, meeting Elon, changing stagnant culture, building consumer product, more | Kayvon Beykpour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can help motivate my curiosity and a lot of things I built is sci fi TV, right? Like Star Trek is incredible. We used to use as a metaphor for what Periscope was, we would think about Star Trek. Like it'd be really cool to be able to teleport or get Beam somewhere else in the world. And like we're not smart enough to go build that device. But what's the closest approximation to that that we can realize through software live streaming? So I think that kind of literature or content has always been inspirational for me. And I think getting that through books is really healthy.”
2024-04-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Twitter’s former Head of Product opens up: being fired, meeting Elon, changing stagnant culture, building consumer product, more | Kayvon Beykpour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love reading sci-fi. I just feel like sci-fi and mystery books are so healthy for jogging the imagination. And so some of my favorite books are by Neil Stevenson. I love Kryptonomicon. I love Reem D. I love a book called Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothkis, which is more like a fantasy fantasy book. But I just love kind of escaping reality and thinking about sci-fi, thinking about fantasy as just, it's helpful for the soul and helpful for the imagination. So those are some of my favorite reads because it helps me. I feel like in some weird circular wandering way, it helps me be more creative and imaginative. And by the way, that's true outside of reading as well. Like some of the content that has shaped me, I feel like.”
2024-04-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Twitter’s former Head of Product opens up: being fired, meeting Elon, changing stagnant culture, building consumer product, more | Kayvon Beykpour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Building something in the consumer space, I started the company with a couple co founders late last year. We're not quite ready to talk about it yet, but hopefully you'll be hearing from us pretty soon. But it's really nice to be back building something again, particularly like building something with a small team again after kind of seeing the opposite extreme with a really large company. We've just talked about lots of large company things. Yeah, hopefully you'll be hearing about it soon.”
2024-04-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Twitter’s former Head of Product opens up: being fired, meeting Elon, changing stagnant culture, building consumer product, more | Kayvon Beykpour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll try it even if it seems dumb because sometimes things that seem dumb at the beginning become very meaningful. And so it's always been a very helpful cheat code for me. And it's also just personally interesting. I'm always like every tool, even the silly ones, like people put their heart and soul into it. And it's like an expression of themselves. And it's always interesting to see that, to see people's creations and to learn from them and see what you like, what you don't like, and how you might create something of your own that borrows from that. So if I could give people any advice through the lens of like what's worked for me, it's that.”
2024-04-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Twitter’s former Head of Product opens up: being fired, meeting Elon, changing stagnant culture, building consumer product, more | Kayvon Beykpour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The best cheat codes for getting better at building products is just being a voracious user of products and just trying new things, feeling out what works well, what doesn't, what you like, what you don't like. There's just no replacement for that. It's such an effective way of honing your own taste and seeing what's superficial, but not useful, what's ugly, but useful, what's beautiful and useful. And you hone that by having practice and building muscle memory. And so I think there's not a lot of science to it, I think. I mean, obviously, science can help you become more effective at lots of things, but like I feel like I've just always been very curious about trying new things. I'm a very hungry consumer of new things that people are building. And I'm not quick to judge.”
2024-04-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Twitter’s former Head of Product opens up: being fired, meeting Elon, changing stagnant culture, building consumer product, more | Kayvon Beykpour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was one of the things I love about that team is just you could just feel how palpable their excitement was and their passion was for what they were building. Another universe, we could have worked together more closely. But I think what they built was incredible and we took inspiration from it for sure.”
2024-04-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Twitter’s former Head of Product opens up: being fired, meeting Elon, changing stagnant culture, building consumer product, more | Kayvon Beykpour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was nice to have that full circle experience and also nice that, you know, personally, like I love that aspects of Periscope continue living on within within Twitter.”
2024-04-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Twitter’s former Head of Product opens up: being fired, meeting Elon, changing stagnant culture, building consumer product, more | Kayvon Beykpour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not the winner in this use case. And so we put, like, it was one of the projects I'm most proud of that we worked on at Twitter because we were very radical in our execution. Hydro went from this tiny project that six people were working on that no one knew or care about to we made spaces the number one priority of the company literally like above any other project period And we put a bunch of people on accelerating that product and making it come to life within Twitter. And a lot of that was having felt the pain and burn of fucking this up with Vine and Periscope. And so I'm really proud of our execution. And it was also really energizing and hoped for the company to see though. Wow, we pulled that off. So yeah, it was good. It was nice to.”
2024-04-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Twitter’s former Head of Product opens up: being fired, meeting Elon, changing stagnant culture, building consumer product, more | Kayvon Beykpour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll give them complete credit for that. Paul and Rohan and that team did an exceptional job crafting an experience that really enabled that mechanic and that premise of enabling these longer form conversations to shine. And so we did shamelessly seek inspiration from what they had done and what had worked. And we put our own spin on it, right? Like the execution of spaces within Twitter, I think has some similarities, but also really took advantage of the mechanics that you had available to you in Twitter. It's a different product. And so we were, you know, we took the ideas that we felt were shortcuts to making the experience work. And then we put our own spin on it. And so I have no problems with what we did there. And having had experienced the pain of not moving quickly enough with Vine from the outside and periscope having lived that experience. You know, we were not willing to.”
2024-04-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Twitter’s former Head of Product opens up: being fired, meeting Elon, changing stagnant culture, building consumer product, more | Kayvon Beykpour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“More long form conversation, more in depth conversation, especially in contracts to Twitter, which has mechanics to really incentivize quick, snappy sort of broadcasts that don't sort of lead to much depth. And so when we shut down Periscope, we were like, man, we really need to enable a new form of conversation on Twitter that has some of those properties. And so we had a team that was working on a project that we sort of codenamed Hydra because there are multiple heads on this monster and those heads are participants in a conversation. And so well before Class was on the map, we had many different iterations of both video and audio-only experiences that just didn't feel right weren't working right, but we kind of felt like we were onto something. And when Clubhouse kind of came on the map, it really recentered, it put into focus a user experience that felt a lot more right.”
2024-04-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Twitter’s former Head of Product opens up: being fired, meeting Elon, changing stagnant culture, building consumer product, more | Kayvon Beykpour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something to the idea of synchronous conversations. Because one of the famous things that I think we botched with Periscope is that we always, our dream and our vision for Periscope and how we talked about it was it was a mechanism for teleportation. You could see through someone else's eyes and be teleported somewhere else. It was like, that was the story we told ourselves. That was the thing that inspired Periscope. And to a certain extent, a lot of people did use the product for that way. You could go see what it was like someplace in the world where there was something amazing happening or civil unrest happening or some important moment happening with breaking news or otherwise. But it turns out the vast majority of our users were not using Periscope that way. They were not, it wasn't a rear-facing camera experience where you were showing someone the world. The vast majority of people were using it to just talk to other people. They were bored and they were lonely and they wanted to just have a conversation with other people. And it turns out video and audio is a very interesting way of doing that that allows for more nuance.”
2024-04-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Twitter’s former Head of Product opens up: being fired, meeting Elon, changing stagnant culture, building consumer product, more | Kayvon Beykpour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's always about doing the right thing for the customer. And everyone has always been shamelessly inspired by other people's ideas. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I think copying ideas can be done in poor taste and can be done with taste. I think some of the people who copied Periscope did so in poor taste. Can't blame them. I just, you know, I wouldn't have done it the same way, but it worked. So you can't say it's the wrong thing. I just, I think that it's possible to take ideas in good taste and take ideas and poor taste. And I think, you know, with Clubhouse, we actually had been working on audio. Audio was one of those bets I mentioned that we structured very separately. We had a team of people, many of which were the former Periscope team that when we wound down Periscope, I felt very strongly that there is still”
2024-04-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Twitter’s former Head of Product opens up: being fired, meeting Elon, changing stagnant culture, building consumer product, more | Kayvon Beykpour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's that and also leadership. When you don't have unified leadership around these things You end up Making decisions that are in conflict with one another. They just be highly opinionated person at the top that avoids that kind of messiness from a product and engineering standpoint.”
2024-04-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Twitter’s former Head of Product opens up: being fired, meeting Elon, changing stagnant culture, building consumer product, more | Kayvon Beykpour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The same technology stack and the same user experience that powers Lenny going live from his iPhone. But I think that was like one of the reasons why it was an example of failed execution that ended up wasting time, resources, and just leading to a subpar product experience that other companies, I think, have avoided making such mistakes. Facebook being a prime example, as frustrated I am with them as a competitor for having, you know, Really taken over the use case for live video got to hand it to them brilliant execution and have a lot of respect for them. So we made sure to not make that mistake moving forward.”
2024-04-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Twitter’s former Head of Product opens up: being fired, meeting Elon, changing stagnant culture, building consumer product, more | Kayvon Beykpour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Technology stack. And so you had like two ways to manifest live video on the product. It was like you just see live video, which was kind of like awkwardly not even really implemented well with Twitter at the time. And then premium live video, which had totally different UX, totally different team, totally different architecture. And by the way, like the company put a tremendous amount of energy and investment in talking about Twitter being a place to watch the NFL. And meanwhile, you had this burgeoning UGC ecosystem. So this was like we're making the same mistake all over again. Now, luckily in the Periscope case, with a lot of persistence and impatience and table pounding, we eventually fixed that mistake. But we wasted a tremendous amount of time, right? It was just a lot of headbutting in politics, and eventually it took us a lot of time to technically reintegrate things together. And now it's clean and awesome, right? ESVN can go live with behind the scenes content at Wimbledon. And it's like.”
2024-04-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Twitter’s former Head of Product opens up: being fired, meeting Elon, changing stagnant culture, building consumer product, more | Kayvon Beykpour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're not going to be able to make good on the vision of buying the company and integrating it in all the right ways if you compete with it internally. And we had a similar thing happen with Periscope. We were very focused on Periscope with separate organizations, separate structure, separate app. Periscope at the time primarily was focused on UGC Live Video. So user-generated content being streamed from a phone. Twitter then decided to get in the premium live video business very famously with acquiring rights to Thursday night football, the NFL. Guess what happened? We competed internally rather than have a cohesive technical and product vision for how to embrace live video across the spectrum of UGC and premium live video. Twitter put a separate team in charge of premium with a separate product separate.”
2024-04-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Twitter’s former Head of Product opens up: being fired, meeting Elon, changing stagnant culture, building consumer product, more | Kayvon Beykpour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, it's even more pathetic than that because I think Twitter did believe in video. They had the insight around shortfront video. They bought Vine. They then competed with Vine internally. So Vine was a separate organization within Twitter, separate office, obviously, in New York. And then Twitter rather than like integrated holistically into the product and sort of pour gasoline on it. They built a native Twitter video feature that was like a different stack, different team. And it became what you think of as Twitter video now. It's like those simple active uploading video and all the professional video tools called Media Studio that let publishers like ESPN put content. Like all of that was basically built as a separate team, separate organization, separate product that was fundamentally competing with Vine. You had like two visions for short form video that were manifesting. And that's the quickest way for things to get messy and for, of course, like the separate startup team is going to get.”
2024-04-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Twitter’s former Head of Product opens up: being fired, meeting Elon, changing stagnant culture, building consumer product, more | Kayvon Beykpour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I didn't want to make that mistake. And we didn't end up buying anything as we didn't end up buying anything like Vine or Periscope and keeping the product in-house. We obviously bought lots of small aquahires, but we did obviously have a bit of a story with Clumphouse that ended up with us building spaces and competing with them. But anyway, that was long rambly story. Hopefully that answered your question.”
2024-04-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Twitter’s former Head of Product opens up: being fired, meeting Elon, changing stagnant culture, building consumer product, more | Kayvon Beykpour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We were too slow. And it was very painful to think about because it was like many other Insights that Twitter had early. Twitter had the right insight, but bosh the follow through. I'm not pointing fingers, like I blame myself for that just as much, but there's a pattern where Twitter is really great at spotting meaningful consumer behavior changes, right? Like they spotted Vine and acquired Vine, botched it, spotted Periscope, botched it. Spotted Instagram, by the way, before, you know, Facebook tried to buy Instagram, Twitter was trying to buy Instagram. And there are other reasons why that didn't fall through. It's just interesting to me. It's one of the interesting aspects of Twitter's history. They were phenomenal at spotting meaningful changes in consumer behavior, consumer social behavior, and actually putting their money where their mouth is in terms of trying to follow through on bringing those bets in-house, but then botching the execution. And so that was one of the things that was really motivating for me when I was in my role leading product of Twitter was like, I didn't.”
2024-04-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Twitter’s former Head of Product opens up: being fired, meeting Elon, changing stagnant culture, building consumer product, more | Kayvon Beykpour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And, you know, if you have that level of organizational effort put on building something that, by the way, isn't even like there's no, you don't have to spend any time wondering what the product looks like. Just go like copy these features basically and make them work. And they did a lot of other savvy things too from a partnership standpoint. We have a lot of prominent streamers that ranged from kind of like influencer or just creative people that became known on Periscopes all the way up to celebrities like Kevin Hard and others who were like prolithic Periscopers that Facebook just went and bought out. They were just like, cool, we're going to pay you like a bunch of money to stream exclusively with us. So they kind of hit us from all sides. They had the entire company put their effort towards building live in a way that was cohesive in the core product first with Facebook and then Instagram. And then also attacked it from the creator side as well.”
2024-04-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Twitter’s former Head of Product opens up: being fired, meeting Elon, changing stagnant culture, building consumer product, more | Kayvon Beykpour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Twitch for gaming that have very different properties that make it more durable as a standalone live product. But Periscope was really in this sort of consumer generalized live streaming from a phone land. And I think it was just not durable to have the product be live only. And the time it took us to integrate with Twitter was way too long. And there was reasons for that that come down to Just how distracted the Twitter was with its own roadmap and refining the core. And they just had other fish to fry, basically. And all of that leads us to competition because at some point, Facebook woke up and decided this is cool. And we need to go build this. And, you know, obviously wasn't there on the inside, but like Legend has it. Mark says, hey, you 300 people stop what you're doing. Go basically make live exist in our product as a first one.”
2024-04-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Twitter’s former Head of Product opens up: being fired, meeting Elon, changing stagnant culture, building consumer product, more | Kayvon Beykpour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A community and an ecosystem of users to be able to stay in touch with one another asynchronously and synchronously. This is why a lot of the other products that you mentioned that incorporate live capabilities and we're shameless about copying what was working about Periscope, they're surrounded by a scaffolding that lets people also stay in touch with each other asynchronously, like Instagram. It's an asynchronous product that has synchronous features like live. Same with TikTok, obviously. And I think we were in this position where it was a live-only product, right? Like, you know, you're connecting with your audience and having a great time when you're broadcasting live, but you're not using the product to keep in touch with that community when you're not broadcasting. How often throughout the day would you broadcast live from your phone? And mind you, this is different for products that are like live, there are live consumer products that focus on a specific vertical like whatnot for selling.”
2024-04-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Twitter’s former Head of Product opens up: being fired, meeting Elon, changing stagnant culture, building consumer product, more | Kayvon Beykpour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But underneath that surge, like the core product have retention issues. And it was, we ultimately just did not, we didn't spend enough time prioritizing addressing those. And in fact, we shipped product changes that made those retention issues worse. Compounding that was the fact that one of the theses behind our acquisition, the Twitter acquisition was that we would leverage the scale and the community and the product mechanics of Twitter to make the product grow faster and also become more durable. And I think that sort of connects to one of the reasons why I feel like one of my learnings and one of the things that we knew about just failed to execute on was that I still am very skeptical that there can be a consumer product that is just focused on live video, like a generalized synchronous live video application for short form video. I don't think can be durable on its own. I think you have to surround that product with enough features and capabilities to allow.”
2024-04-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Twitter’s former Head of Product opens up: being fired, meeting Elon, changing stagnant culture, building consumer product, more | Kayvon Beykpour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, there's a few reasons why Periscope failed ultimately and why we shut down the app. I mean, obviously, Periscope, the technology and the mechanics still lives on because you can go live on Twitter. You can watch live broadcasts on Twitter. You can do audio conversations on Twitter. And all of that is the Periscope stack still there, which is awesome that the legacy lives on in a different form factor. The reason that the Periscope app failed, it really comes down to a few things. One, we did not address the core problem that retention wasn't good. Our core retention was macked by just an incredible surge in top line user growth. And for Twitter, or for Periscope, it was interesting because every month or two, we would kind of blow up in a new market that would just bring along an incredible surge of usage. You know, we blew up in the US. We then blew up in France. We then blew up in Turkey. We then blew up in the Middle East. You had these like incredible surges.”
2024-04-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Twitter’s former Head of Product opens up: being fired, meeting Elon, changing stagnant culture, building consumer product, more | Kayvon Beykpour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I just remember it was just such a surreal moment that has, I'll never forget. It was like, I mean, Kobe's a legend, obviously, but like to have that, to have him essentially troll me while also putting a point on what was cool about the experience and that was like bidirectional and like something he commented on could cause the broadcaster.”
2024-04-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Twitter’s former Head of Product opens up: being fired, meeting Elon, changing stagnant culture, building consumer product, more | Kayvon Beykpour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of, like, hey, let me show you around the office. And here's how the chat works, and you can tap the screen to send hearts. And if you want me to do something, like go to the room over there, just type it in the chat and it'll come up. And it sort of showed one of the things that was unique about Periscope was it was a multi, it was a one-to-many broadcast, but still low latency enough that it felt like a FaceTime. So you could have the bi-directional communication between multiple viewers and a broadcaster. And so I was teaching him how to use the chat and showing him the office and he was playing with it. And at one point through the end of the demo, he posts a comment that was like, why the fuck would anyone want to watch someone else stream live? And I remember like my heart sank and I started like fumbling through like, well, we think it's cool. And like before I could even get the words out, he posted like, I'm just fucking with you, bro. This is incredible.”
2024-04-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Twitter’s former Head of Product opens up: being fired, meeting Elon, changing stagnant culture, building consumer product, more | Kayvon Beykpour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Before Periscope launched publicly, which was in March of 2015, I want to say, we had a small beta that grew to maybe 500 people in total before we actually released the app publicly. And in that time, while we were still in beta, I was personally onboarding. I was trying to personally onboard every single user. And I had sort of like a shtick though that I did, which was we'd get them in the app and I would start a broadcast. We had a feature called private broadcasting that we basically built for this use case, which is someone joins I'm going to go live and they're going to join and I'm going to show them how the app works. And we were spending a lot of time in our office. So Kobe, you know, one of Chris Saka actually invited Kobe to the beta. And so, you know, Chris connected us and I did a private broadcast and Kobe joins. And I was like, it was like 10 p.m. in the office. And my routine was like, let me just walk around the office, kind of like talking through the mechanics of Periscope through the lens of this demo.”
2024-04-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Twitter’s former Head of Product opens up: being fired, meeting Elon, changing stagnant culture, building consumer product, more | Kayvon Beykpour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Based on how execution is going, whether you've got the right framework, and you got to be willing to make adjustments when it's not working.”
2024-04-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Twitter’s former Head of Product opens up: being fired, meeting Elon, changing stagnant culture, building consumer product, more | Kayvon Beykpour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Either might not show up as blips on our DAU radar or are going to help some other metric that's important. And so that took us some time to get right. And we tried a variety of schemes to make that work, right? Like community notes, like the project that I was mentioning, Keith started. We intentionally structured that like a startup. Like it was literally like we made a seed bet on Keith and his team and we were like, you don't like don't worry about the OKRs. We're not going to judge you on the basis of your OKRs. And there's some pros and cons to that. Like a lot of our projects work that way. Fleets started that way. Community notes started that way. And some other projects started more kind of like part of the core organization because they were so intertwined with how we were like the nature of the product that it just made sense to separating it was going to be more harm than good. So you just have to figure out based on what”
2024-04-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Twitter’s former Head of Product opens up: being fired, meeting Elon, changing stagnant culture, building consumer product, more | Kayvon Beykpour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Guess what happens when you put a bar at the top of the app that tells people when they're live? You move tweets down. You move ads down. DAU goes down. Revenue goes down. And so if you have an organization that's like just hyper focused on like the thing that matters is driving DAU quarter over quoterer, then that doesn't leave enough room for nuance to accommodate new speculative bets that might hurt one metric but over time have other consequences that are positive and beneficial. enabling an entire new vector of content creation and conversation on the platform. I guess the other answer to your question in terms of like how do you know when the framework's not serving you right? When you start imagining and planning for a bunch of bets that the organization then sees is like disincentivized to make successful, then something's got to change. Either your strategy is just not the right strategy because it doesn't abide by the frameworks or the framework needs to accommodate the fact that actually we're going to try some things that in the short term”
2024-04-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Twitter’s former Head of Product opens up: being fired, meeting Elon, changing stagnant culture, building consumer product, more | Kayvon Beykpour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's a different problem, obviously. But I think in the situation we found ourselves in where the team was, again, understandably hyper-focused on driving DAU because that was the strategy for so long. It left so little room for even taking ambitious bets that in the short term wouldn't drive DA. Like some of our bets that I still to this day believe in hurt DAU in the short term. But you had to squint and believe over time would improve some metric DAU or otherwise, right? Like a product like spaces. In order for spaces to be actually used, you need to make sure that when Lenny starts a space that people would join, right? And how do you get people to join Lenny's space when they're used to having an asynchronous feed of tweets? Well, you can send push notifications. You can occupy really prime real estate at the top of the app that lets people know, hey, Lenny's live right now. He's in a space. There's people here come join.”
2024-04-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Twitter’s former Head of Product opens up: being fired, meeting Elon, changing stagnant culture, building consumer product, more | Kayvon Beykpour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's two, I think, simple and obvious ones. One is if the result of your framework is that subjectively bad decisions are being made, then something's got to change, right? Like assuming you have the person who's making this assessment has good product taste, which is in of itself subjective, obviously. But my personal view on this would be like in the role that I had, if I saw that our organization was being incentivized to make decisions that to some non-trivial degree of the time were just bad decisions that I don't like as a user, I can't stand by as a user or builder, then something's got to change. Either bad judgment was made in following the process or the process was wrong. Or if that framework did not, it didn't even lead to the right debates, then that's how you know. Either you have an incentive problem and the team did what they were incentivized to do, or there was bad judgment.”
2024-04-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Twitter’s former Head of Product opens up: being fired, meeting Elon, changing stagnant culture, building consumer product, more | Kayvon Beykpour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the reason that the team felt strongly about keeping it this way is because it was bare for metrics. Why? Like even if Lenny wants a reverse cron feed, we knew that he would spend more time in the app if we put him in the rang timeline. And this was like the number of debates that we had about this because the team, understandably, was like, this is good for metrics. But at the same time, you'd have customers being like, I fucking hate this experience. I'm telling you I want reverse Quran. Stop randomly changing it for me. Instagram has, I think, gone through their own struggles with this as well. They sort of tiptoeed their way towards ultimately giving people control. And the difficulty in making product decisions comes down ultimately to making these trade-off decisions. And you have to look at things through the lens of the customer. You have to balance that with what's driving the right business outcomes. And sometimes those things are aligned and sometimes they're not. And the answer isn't any one.”
2024-04-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Twitter’s former Head of Product opens up: being fired, meeting Elon, changing stagnant culture, building consumer product, more | Kayvon Beykpour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the team would just be blind towards leaving sort of like hostile customer experiences in place because it was good for metrics and aggregate. And that famous example of this is we had this toggle, which we called swish very affectionately, but it was like a sparkle icon. Before you could switch between the rank timeline and the following that reverse chronological timeline, which is still in the product right now, it was just a toggle, right? You would press a button and it would turn your feed reverse cron, which very few people use as a percentage of our users, but you had power users who really cared about having a reverse chronological timeline. And we had, we took so many baby steps on the evolution of this product. But the very first baby step was you pressed the toggle, it turns you to reverse cron, and then we would pull the rug out from underneath you and make the experience go back to the ring timeline after like, I don't know, 24 hours or something like that.”
2024-04-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Twitter’s former Head of Product opens up: being fired, meeting Elon, changing stagnant culture, building consumer product, more | Kayvon Beykpour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Two shits what metrics that drive for Amazon, that is one of the most customer hostile things I experience in my daily life. I wear a lot of things from Amazon. I hate the fact that I can't search my email to see what I ordered. And so I think the problem with these frameworks is that you lose nuance and ultimately, and this is where I agree with Strong. He actually mentioned this on your podcast as well. You need to be able to make trade-off decisions that balance what's right for the organization and what's right for the customer. And sometimes based on how you devise your frameworks, your metrics aren't actually aligned with the customer's benefit, like the Amazon example. And we had many famous examples in Twitter's history, which were the same. One of our key metrics that we always optimized around growing was DAU. And we had, obviously, the rank timeline did wonders for growing DAU. And it was a great experience for many customers. But we often had features that would not lead to a good customer experience.”
2024-04-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Twitter’s former Head of Product opens up: being fired, meeting Elon, changing stagnant culture, building consumer product, more | Kayvon Beykpour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source