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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“Done. If you are, if the only way the organization is trained to think about what to build and what not to build is OKRs, it's equally unhelpful at the limit because sure you can have a good sense of like what you should build to drive metrics. But by the way, you might be focusing on the right, wrong metrics, or that might not help you have the right balance of things to build. That might not help you see when the things that you're building are actually hostile to customers. So just as an interesting example, the thing that I remember about your interview with Sri Ram, if I'm not mistaken, I think he mentioned, and I love Siram, I'd be happy to debate him about this on his podcast, but he mentioned one of the examples, I think, was the Amazon doesn't send you, when you get order confirmations from Amazon, they intentionally bury the order details. You have to click the link and authenticate to go see what you ordered. I don't give.”
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
“Done. So I think that's my real critique of it. It's not the, I mean, listen, the premise of jobs to be done and my most charitable take on jobs to be done, which is actually useful, is that it forces you to look at things through the lens of customers and understanding what their needs are and understanding what their true alternatives are outside of the narrow lens of your product. And I think that's just like healthy product thinking, right? You don't need a framework called jobs to be done. You don't need to think about milkshakes in order to be able to do that. It's like you could employ common sense or you could leverage something like jobs to be done to be able to force your mind to think of things through that lens. So I think that's like my charitable view on what jobs to be done can help you do. But as a framework into and of itself, as a sole governing principle of what to build, it's just not useful. By the way, in the same way as, and I think the Twitter had this problem as well prior to our detour around jobs to be”
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've only seen one interview on your show that covers this, and it's Siram was particularly spicy when he talked about jobs to be done, which is unsurprising because I spent a lot of time talking to Siram about Job Sudan. I mean, I guess I'll just start by saying I was not a fan of how we leveraged jobs to be done at Twitter. I thought it was exhausting and not particularly helpful. And so it's a particularly sore subject for me because I was sort of charged with defending it and rolling it out. It's hard to hard to do that when you don't really believe in something. But to me, the critique is less about jobs to be done, though there are many critiques of it and more about like every framework at its limit is followed to such a religious extent is just unhelpful. You need to have nuance in how you leverage these frameworks. Otherwise, people, you lose the force through the trees and you end up following a process for the sake of following a process. And that's what happened with jobs to be.”
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
“Have an obsession with the idea they want to pursue. It's going to make them work harder. It's going to make them be more creative. It's going to make them have the sufficient level of ambition and desire to will this thing into existence because every project, whether big or small, like there is an element of need to will this thing into existence because it's hard, right? I think a very easy cheat code for an organization to employ is to say if you're going to work on something, especially if it's speculative or risky, staff it with a set of people who believe in it and want to like really want to learn whether this solves a customer problem or not. Because if you don't have that ingredient, it's going to drag everyone down and it's just not going to be as successful.”
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
“About hiding replies, where there wasn't even agreement on the team about whether this was a good idea and whether this is worth trying or how to do it. And imagine it's hard enough to build something from nothing. It's even harder if the team doesn't believe in it. This is like to the point of just being toxic. A startup would never succeed if all the people who are working on that startup aren't to the point of being perhaps irrational obsessed with that idea and still willing to see truth. Like you need to be able to see whether the thing is working or not. But if you don't believe it in the first place, you know, I'm not betting on that succeeding. And so this was common. And sometimes not as extreme as the examples that I mentioned. But, you know, I think one of the lessons I learned, and it's not even, it's quite intuitive actually, is like you need to staff projects with a team of people that are well equipped from a skill set standpoint, but more importantly.”
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, the last one is like a huge pet peeve of mine that I feel like we learned the hard way. And it's particularly, it's a common pattern, I think, in highly functional organizations where you have different people making decisions on how to staff projects. And there's nothing inherently wrong with that. But I think in the situations we found ourselves in where we had this sort of like cultural evolution that we were going through where some people just didn't like agree with the things that we were prioritizing. They're sort of like begrudging like going along with it, but you would end up in a situation where the combination of that sort of like cultural shift and strategy and the fact that the way teams were being staffed was not, there's ultimately no single decision maker other than the CEO. And like Jack is not going to get in the weeds and debate a staffing decision on a team resulted in a situation where oftentimes we'd have projects like the one I mentioned.”
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 sure you want to, you know, and so I think I've enjoyed trying to pass the buck and do that for other people. And I've never regretted it. You always like taking a bet on people and especially throwing them in a deep end, which on paper they may be unqualified for, I think is like one of the best ways of driving change. And by the way, supporting growth, like you've learned so much more when you're thrown into deep end than in other contexts. And so I think it's a fantastic, it's an expensive strategy if you're going to go buy a bunch of companies, but it's a great strategy for the situation that we found ourselves in at 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
“Hungry, ambitious founders and giving them responsibility and latitude is a success story of Twitter's history. I mean, I'm a beneficiary of such a bet as well, right? Like my company, Periscope was acquired and I was given the responsibility to eventually lead the product team. So I feel like we ended up realizing both of the company's history and through learnings that this is actually a very effective way to drive cultural change and to deliver impact because you need a special type of person to be able to both operate within the existing structure and change the structure, like to know when to use the system and to know when to fuck the system. And that I feel like my whole life has benefited from other people taking bets on me like that to the point that even I was like, really?”
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
“Little silo to go build this vision and then it was our job to make sure that bet didn't get suffocated in the context of the big organization that would otherwise not have not had patience for it. All of the community effort or the creator efforts started with superflows and tipping and all these things were led by Esther Crawford, whose company we acquired and who had her own couple of viral moments with the Elon acquisition, but she's a phenomenal leader who, again, is a perfect example of balancing that sort of entrepreneurial startup muscle with the savviness to be able to get things done at a large organization. Fleets was run by Mo Aladam, who's an entrepreneur. And communities was gone through a few iterations, obviously, and still is in the product. But John Barnett and a team of people who acquired from Chroma Labs. So I think that that story of acquired”
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
“All the attributes of a startup, but with the canvas of a product that hundreds of millions of people use and more resources. So spaces, communities, community notes called Birdwatch back then. These were all projects driven by fleets as well. These were all projects that were run by small teams led by entrepreneurs who we acquired, right? Like Keith Coleman runs community notes last Bird Watch. He actually was my predecessor. We acquired his company so that he could be the head of product. And then when he moved on from that role, he was extremely passionate about this idea of sort of crowdsource moderation and letting people annotate misleading content on the platform without Twitter acting as a policeman. And that was a very speculative bet that, by the way, a lot of people thought most people thought was a terrible idea. We gave Keith.”
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
“Have who are aligned One of the things we found Was a really effective way of accelerating cultural change and also helping drive some of these product initiatives that were particularly speculative was doing small acquires. And really the benefit of that was, A, you bring in a founder type who is an entrepreneur who drives urgency, who has ambition, who's ideally savvy enough to also work in the context of a large organization, which sometimes is a totally different skill set. I mean, it is a totally different skill set. And a lot of our most ambitious bets that were the riskiest and most kind of misaligned with how the product worked or, you know, it wasn't like easy, there was no easy staff for them to build on top of. A lot of those bets were driven by founders who we basically acquired and said, here, you're going to run this. And they believed in it. They were able to rally a team around them.”
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
“Correct and contribute towards it. And off the wagon is like you're not at the company. And we didn't have an organizational structure that could allow for that. Nor, frankly, the fortitude. I include myself in this. I feel like I've learned a lot about how to make that determination. So I think we were terrible at that. And Elon is like the spectrum. Elon is like the opposite spectrum of that. Like his tolerance for people who are not aligned and his tolerance for low performers is famously extremely low. And I think it's one of the things that when I said A-B test, it's like very interesting to see the extreme to which he has operated. And I think like I've learned a ton around like we just, you know, we didn't have the organizational structure nor the fortitude to be swifter. And that made cultural change way slower. We still were able to change the culture, not as much as we should have and not as certainly not as quickly as we should have or efficiently as we should have. Because by the way, a lot of high performers who”
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
“User of Twitter, and they're like, I never really want to work there because it doesn't seem like a particularly ambitious product company. And one of two things happens when you hear that story. Either you're inspired and you're like, yeah, we can finally take a swing at making this product better. And maybe I wasn't interested at working in this company before, but I mean, this is an iconic product and to have an opportunity to reshape it is really exciting. Or, you know, again, oversimplified world, but there are people who are very pessimistic and maybe aren't excited by that vision of like, why, let's just stick to what we know works, you know, we're not going to take any big swings. That's a waste of time. I think one of the really important things about driving cultural change at the leadership level is you've got to identify whether someone's on the wagon or off the wagon and either quickly convinced them to get on the wagon or if they're not on the wagon, like they shouldn't be there. And that's something that we were terrible at. And we didn't have the, we didn't have the organizational structure.”
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
“Totally. Yeah. So I think a couple of things. One, the only thing I'd add to what you said in terms of the ingredients, it was also just like storytelling and just repetitive storytelling around like this is the vision. This is the bets we're making. And here's why. And like you can't just tell that story once. I'm talking internally, by the way. There's a whole other component of this, which is externally how do you tell, especially for a product like Twitter where you have it's a consumer product that hundreds of millions of people are using and you have many constituents, you have users, you have advertisers. And so it was very important for us to tell the story of like, here's what we're doing and why. Here's why you should believe in us. And by the way, give us all your constructive criticism too, because like we're listening and we're going to build that into, you know, so that storytelling was really, really important. And, you know, there's like oversimplifying the world, but there's two types of internal team members. There are people who hear that story, who have been a part of the organization, who's been slow, or maybe they've been outside the company as a”
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
“Use Twitter. And so, like, of course, at the scale that we were operating in with hundreds of millions of users, you need to be able to refine the basic building blocks of the product. And that's going to lead to reliable growth. But we wanted to balance that with a portfolio of other bets and product improvements that would materially add new capabilities. And that was a balance that I don't think existed. And by the way, I don't think we nailed it either under my tenure, but it was the driving force of what I wanted to achieve was to create a better balance that would result in evolving the product and introducing new capabilities. And so that's what we tried to do.”
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. And continue to be, by the way. One of the lines that we had to Maneuver was creating a portfolio of bets where some of them were not speculative at all. We knew that if we continue to invest in ML and getting better with recommendations in the main feed and through notifications and things like improving the onboarding slot, it was rife with opportunity. You'd have like really dumb things happen like we would learn just one whole like just bizarre and incredible meeting we had where we finally had got more rigorous around instrumenting our onboarding flow and we found that like in a couple countries like we like one of the we had a bug with our like SMS verification flow where we wanted to verify users who were signing up with phone number and our telco integration to send SMS verification cards just wasn't working and so like a huge percentage of people signing up and like the UAE and other countries just like couldn't couldn'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
“On the platform and telling them, don't work on this, it's bad for your careers. As a microcosm for some of the cultural challenge we had around trying big, bold bets, which by the way, this wasn't even a big bold bet. It was like such an innocuous thing to try. But there was a lot of that. And it made it very difficult without some sheer force of will. And also just a lot of effort. So there was a lot of 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
“And I remember we had a PM on our team who was leading this feature, who a few weeks into this project mentioned to me that she had had a conversation with someone on the engineering team that told them, don't work on this feature. This is bad for your career. This is not going to launch. And you don't want to work on this. You don't want to be seen as having worked on this because it was so kind of anathema to we can't let people hide replies to their tweets. And I just remember hearing that in my blood was boiling. Like that is like the most, it was such an interesting representation of the culture, like not just like hesitation to try new things, which by the way, that product might have failed. And that's fine, but which doesn't mean you shouldn't try. But to go so far as to dissuade someone else who is excited about experimenting with a hypothesis to see if it could help customers.”
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
“Reporting it. So that was like Twitter acting as policeman and policeman completely unscalable and challenging, especially in the context of someone replying to one of your tweets. And so we wanted to add a feature that let you hide a reply to one of your tweets. And it's not impacting what people say. It's not impacting free speech in the sense of like, you can still broadcast whatever you want. But if you're going to come into my reply.”
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
“Any tweets that they see on the platform, like the notion of Lenny owning his reply space was anathema at Twitter. It's just like if the tweet gets, you know, if you get an app mention and you don't like it or it's abusive or it's like we're not touching that. We can't annotate tweets with community. All that stuff, those are all sacred cows. The process of starting to address those one by one reveals a lot of the cultural hesitations that existed. So yeah, I'll never forget one of the first features, and this is such a tiny feature that we worked on after I started the role. Building this feature called hide replies. Still exists in the product. If someone replies to any of your tweets, like in the tweet details area, like as a reply to one of your conversations before, you had no ability. The only way you could kind of like address unwanted content.”
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
“Businesses and products where that's not the case, and I'm sure there's a flaw enough philosophy somewhere, but I've always believed that one of the best ways to build products is to be a customer yourself and to find your own pain clients and to build a product that you want to use. And so that's actually not that hard to do if you're a user of Twitter and you can think critically, we was ripe with opportunity. And so it was actually really fun and amazing to be able to kind of craft a plan that started to take a swing at some of these things. And the other thing I'll add to this is that there were so many sacred cows at Twitter that the sacred cows are like their own roadmap. It's like a built-in free roadmap of like, all right, what are all the things that you think we're not allowed to change? Let's start there. Everything from like moving from reverse Tron to a ranked feet that was a sacred cow. Text and 140 characters, that's a sacred cow, not letting anyone control.”
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
“Feedback around. And it was a very common thing for us to hear people say, what are you all doing over there? Like the product hasn't changed in like eight years. And that was horrible to hear. That was like, and I felt it too as a critic on the sidelines, as a user who wasn't an employee, who eventually became an employee. Like I had the same feedback. And so that was my mission. I was like, I'm somehow ridiculously in this fortunate position that I've been entrusted, some responsibility here. I might, you know, flame out completely, but hell, if I don't try. And so that was both fun and exhausting. Like I said, but it was really, it was a simple as starting with we are voracious users of the product ourselves. And if we aren't, by the way, that's its own problem. I think that in order to build something wonderful, like you have to be a customer of the product. Sure, I'm sure you could point 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
“That the fact that it did actually calcified the organization's sort of reticence to take any risky bets even more. So it was a very interesting sort of predicament because when I got into the role, the goal wasn't to change that progress. Like we wanted to continue reaping the benefits of refining the things about the product and were working really well. What we wanted to change was a lack of ambition, a lack of creativity, the lack of customers feeling that the product had changed at all. Because you would hear people, and then one of the beautiful things about working on Twitter as a product is that you have literally like customers being injected into your veins every single day, whatever you change about the product or whatever you don't change, they're telling you what they love and what they hate. And it is both exhausting and exhilarating. It is like one of the most ridiculous luxuries of product development is working on a product that that many people use and therefore you get that 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
“It was like, you know, we're not, you know, we're not making any big bets here, team. Our goal is to keep turning the knobs that are working. And listen, as much as I was kind of throwing stones from the sidelines through that period when I was in Periscope land or separate office a few blocks away from the mothership, that focus actually did help the company for some period. Like the reason why Twitter went from stagnant to declining DAU growth to growing DAU again is because they refined the core, right? This is when they went from the reverse chronological timeline to the rank timeline. And the year after that was a lot of knob turning. It was like, how do we make these recommendations better? How do we make our push notifications more relevant? Now that is not an inspiring product strategy that does not result in the product feeling materially different or add a new capabilities, but it did return the company to user growth.”
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 that first year became a lot more fun, it was still difficult, but it became, it felt like we were all swimming in the same direction a lot more. But I think my takeaway there is like you just can't change culture without having alignment from the top. You can't change culture. It's difficult to change culture when you have like a pocket of a company trying to advocate for change. So I think we got there in the end. We didn't move as much urgency as I think we drove. We were not fast enough. We were not bold enough. Like I'm like, I was consistently dissatisfied with what I was achieving and what our team was achieving. But I think, you know, we did make a change. Twitter was an organization that had a lot of sacred cows and became very calcified in its ways. I mean, literally when, you know, in the first two years, I was at the company, the stated product strategy for Twitter was refine the core.”
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
“Company that was like not your quota central tech company. It was even more difficult to kind of get things done. And so through the four years I spent there, I learned a lot about how to like navigate that type of environment. And so it was it all kind of came coming back when I was given the product role at Twitter, you know, that first year of changing culture was like walking through mud. And it was really difficult. But I think when we started building that alignment and sort of like building excitement, that like, oh, actually, maybe we should be taking some bigger swings. And we when we started seeing through the execution against some of those plans, I think it ended up, it got easier and easier, right? Because it sort of, it becomes addicting. I think people end up feeling like, oh, wow, maybe these sacred cows we had didn't need to be so sacred. And so I think, you know,”
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
“Some ideas and a plan and a strategy that I felt compelling. But when you have to essentially drive consensus amongst your peers across the other functions, that's a different game. That's not execution. That's like politics and consensus building. And I both can't stand that stuff, but I'm just, I think this is going to sound like I'm to do my own, but like good enough at it and I have enough patience at it that I kind of like, you know, I invested the time and the energy. I think a less patient person wouldn't have bothered and would have thrown their hands up. But I think honestly, a lot of it just comes down to like I had practiced. Like my first company that I started in college with when my best friends, Joe, who I ended up co-founding Periscope with, we got acquired by a big public ed tech company called Blackboard. And like we were 19 at the time when we got thrown into like a public, I was a senior executive at a public.”
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
“Trying to drive culture change is both one of the most challenging things and rewarding things. Like, you know, for the first year of my role, there is a chapter of my time at Twitter, maybe just a backup that was just leading Periscope. And in that first chapter, maybe two years, I was not really involved with Twitter stuff all that much. That started to change when we really tried integrating Periscope with Twitter, but sort of chapter two of my time at Twitter was when I became the head of product. And that first year of being the head of product was like one of the most difficult of my career. Not because the work was difficult, but because it was so politically and bureaucratically exhausting to try and change culture in a way that just there was an alignment around. And it comes back to the point I was making earlier around like the organization of a company was functional. And so, you know, it's one thing for me to have.”
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'm not sure I would have been able to articulate it as succinctly as you did just now, but I think that is the feeling that I had that like it's just it's not my place anymore. I don't have a canvas to try and exert my dreams on this place. I think it's Elon took that mantle and I'm excited to see what he's going to do with it is kind of the feeling I had.”
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 so I sort of ended up deciding that actually I'm just ready to move on. I've spent enough time at this company at this product trying to shape it into something that I was passionate about. I think it's someone else's turn and especially Elon, like you buy it, it's your turn. You can do whatever you want with it. That was conflicting for a bit. But I would say towards the end of the year, it was pretty clear in my mind that I was ready to move on and start thinking about other problems.”
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
“In that conversation that I had with him, it was definitely, I was conflicted about like, do I want to maybe spend some time working on this still? And Elon was very cool about, he actually used this phrase at the end of our conversation, which I still find hilarious. He was just like, do you want to just like come? You seem like you care about the product and you don't have dumb ideas. And like, do you want to come hang out? And I was like, what would my job be? And he was like, dunno, you know, just like hang out and you can swipe left or swipe right or I, you know, he used the swipe right, swipe left tinder metaphor. And I thought that was kind of hilarious coming from him.”
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 have time and space to just enjoy each other and our new family. And frankly, to avoid a lot of the drama that ended up ensuing that not a lot of people could have predicted. The deal was on. The deal was off. It's just a whole lot of drama that I got to miss, which is the silver laying. And then it was confusing there for a bit because when Elon did end up buying the company.”
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
“Consumer and creator of the product. And there was something, I think, there was an incredible opportunity in that, that now you have this organization and this product and this incredible ecosystem that can be devoid of all the political bullshit associated with being a public company. And now it has this conduit to just living up to its potential. So it was a bummer to be removed from that, I suppose, without having any agency myself. So that was very long with an answer to your question, but that's kind of what happened towards the end there. And like I said at the beginning, it took me a while to come to terms with it and to be at peace with it. And I did eventually, I mean, listen, there's like a huge silver lining of I spent the first, you know, year of my daughter's life with her and my family. And my wife Sarah had left Twitter like eight months prior to me leaving. And so, you know, when's the next time we could all be 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
“The fact that Elon was buying the company, well, I was conflicted, honestly. I was very excited because Elon is someone that I looked up to immensely. And, you know, you just look at things that he's achieved in the world. And he can't help but be inspired by that. And two, Twitter for all, I think, the impact and progress that we had made had a lot of challenges associated with its governance and the fact that it was constantly vulnerable as a public company. So there's just always this drama associated with Twitter as a public company, even a private company before that, that made it extremely hard as a builder to get shit done and have the product live up to its potential. And one of the benefits of this particular takeover was that Elon offered a path towards solving all of that. It was like, oh, cool, now you've got one owner who happens to be, by the way, extremely opinionated about the product and a voracious.”
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 the company. I love the product. And also, just like sucks to leave not on your own terms. And two, it was just confused. The timing was very frustrating and confusing for me, not least of which because I had just come home from the hospital while on paternity leave, but also because, you know, at that time especially,”
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
“Mom's healthy, daughter's healthy. The day after we get home from the hospital, Prague called me and said that he was letting me go and that he was taking the team in a different direction. And that night, Twitter signed a term sheet with Ilan to sell the company. So, you know, a lot happened in a very short period of time. And the reason that Frag gave is exactly what I shared publicly, which was that he wanted to take the team in a different direction. The only other thing he said is that given that new direction, he thinks that the things that I'm good at, Twitter doesn't need anymore and the things that Twitter needs are not particularly in my skill set or in my interest. He wasn't particularly expressive about what that direction was, but that was the reason he gave me. And that was a huge bummer for me for a bunch of reasons.”
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 went on patent leaf maybe a week and a half before our daughter's due date. Three weeks goes by. In that three weeks, Elon joins the board, leaves the board, makes an offer, has a short, dramatic feud about whether that goes through. And also during that time, my daughter was born. Some drama at the hospital for us, but.”
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
“Still regrets had a lot of fun. You know, I think we had some impact, but it was frustrating. So Parag changed that. And the irony of this, by the way, is he was one of the biggest proponents of the functional structure. When he became the CEO, he changed the structure, promoted me to be the GM of consumer. And that was, you know, I was at that point like one month. This is one month before I went on Patley because my daughter was due. And so I sort of went into my paternity leave being like, all right, I'm going to give this a shot. We'll see how this goes. Is Farog addressed to the biggest frustration that I had with the company and how it was being run? And so I kind of like, you know, had some trepidations, but went into my pat lead feeling optimistic. Mind you, this was all before Elon was even part of the picture. He had not become a board member. He had not, there was no like news about him having beef with the executive team or for that matter, like trying to buy the company.”
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
“Quickly change that and shifted the company to be a GM structure. And he promoted me to being the GM of consumers. So for the prior three-ish years, having been responsible for growing Twitter's consumer product, I was only responsible for the product management team. I didn't have engineering or design. And that honestly was difficult. It's like trying to, it's very difficult to change culture with one hand tied behind your back.”
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
“Research, it was like functionally run organization. And the combination of that model and the type of leader that Jack was wasn't working in my view. If you're going to have a functional organization, you need to have a GM or a CEO who's extremely leaned into tiebreak and resolve conflict and make sure the team is moving quickly. Jack, for all of his amazing qualities, just wasn't operating that way. And so you had a group of highly opinionated people that often disagreed and would create either the need for consensus or deadlock. And that just was driving a lot of people crazy, including me. And I think it really helped us back from living up to Twitter's potential. Anyway, all of that was super frustrating for me. And the combination of that and a dramatic change in leadership with Jack Leaving and Prague coming in, I wasn't feeling too stoked. Prague to his credit when he became CEO.”
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 weird to say the least. Honestly, it took me some time to kind of come to peace with it because it was frustrating and surprising. I guess the story of what happened starts with Jack resigning. Jack resigned in, I think it was like November of 2021 at the end of the year. The board chose Prague to be the CEO of the company. I've had a long relationship with Prague. I respect him, but I had mixed feelings about that. But to his credit, Prague very quickly addressed one of the biggest things that I was really frustrated about in the last three years essentially of my time at Twitter. One of my biggest points of feedback and points of consternation was the structure of the company and that we had a functional organizational model, meaning we had like I had a consumer product me. We had a head of revenue product, Bruce. We had a head of engineering. We had a head of design.”
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's been awesome to see that those have been continuing to sort of grow and be molded in different directions. So, yeah, I think in that sense, I hope that our brainstorm was useful. But, I mean, for all I know, he doesn't even remember the conversation.”
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 had sort of my set of projects that I was very passionate about because we'd sort of given birth to them. I think a bunch of those projects, it seems like Twitter's still investing in and putting a lot of energy behind, like community notes, which at the time was called Birdwatch. But I always felt really bullish on that being the future of how essentially how content is moderated on Twitter, just because it was very clear that the way we were handling content moderation among many other flaws just wasn't scalable. And spaces and communities and the creative program of helping people make money on the platform, like those are projects that we started over the year-ish prior to Elon taking over. And my hope, you know, having left the company and having had a new leader come in was that those things would be given more oxygen.”
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 don't know. I certainly don't think I've made any impression on how he should run the company. I think that's, you know, Elon's going to Elon in his way. And I think he certainly has had some radical moves in terms of how he's running the company, the decisions he made, like how many people he let go, how the company structure the culture and all that stuff is like, you know, we didn't even talk about that stuff. I think what we spent time talking about is I shared my perspective with him of like people I thought who were exceptional, who were at the company. And if I was in his shoes, like who I would spend time with and embrace. And most of the people that I mentioned are still there, which is awesome. And they seem to be A empowered, which is great. And B, having fun, which is awesome. So, you know, hopefully that stuff is useful. We spent a bunch of time brainstorming products.”
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
“That was, I think we both kind of recognized that something's about to happen here, obviously, like you have this very public spectacle of someone essentially having a takeover of a public company, but all of that stuff aside also, you could tell Elon was scheming and cooking up like, you know, what am I going to do with this? And that was, it was cool to see 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
“Successful entrepreneurs of our time. And so that was exciting to kind of like go into that meeting. And also I had been spending so much time dreaming about Twitter and trying to mold Twitter in a direction that I thought was compelling and working with a team of people to do that and to meet someone who also had a similar sort of ambition, but obviously in different ways, he had his own dream for Twitter. But it was sort of really bizarre and unique and surreal seeing that glimmer in someone else who was like, yeah, I also just bought this thing so I can actually do whatever the hell I want. And by the way, here's some like crazy dreams I have for doing it. It was just a really, as someone who had had their own dreams for the product, like witnessing that was, it was really unusual and cool. So I think that's like probably what Scott meant when he said to you, you should ask Kayvon about.”
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
“Talking about the past, the future, Twitter, the good, the bad, the ugly, at the very end of the conversation, Walther came up and introduced himself and was like, hi, Kayla. I'm Walter. Can I get your information just in case I need to ask any follow-up questions? And I was like, oh shit. That whole conversation was on the record? I don't know. So it was a very surreal experience. For a bunch of reasons, including just being weird for me since I was very conflicted about coming back to Twitter even physically in the office. But it was, I must say, it was like it was really fun. It was fun. Talking to someone, obviously Elon had never met him before, and he's one of the most”
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 so it was just like a very weird experience of being scurried through the elevator and through the back door and go to this massive conference room, which we had on the second floor of the 110th building. And in that massive conference room Was me, Elon, and then at the very, very end of the room, Walter Isaacson, who, by the way, like I had a hard time, I knew I recognized, I'd never met Walter in person, but I was like, is that Walter Isaacson? But he said nothing the entire time. And we have this very, we had probably like a two hour conversation.”
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 just very cheerful to ask hey, you know, you're at Twitter for a while, you seem to have done some things. What should I be digging into and who should I be talking to? At the end of that conversation, we ended up arranging an in-person meeting where Scott and I Went to Twitter HQ to actually meet Elon. I think this was like day two of Elon having brought the sink in. So we had this really bizarre wild but really fun experience of walking into Twitter. In my case, walking back to Twitter HQ for the first time after having been fired, which was Very strange experience for me. And we walked into the building. I was sort of like scurried through the back door because I didn't want to make a scene and make it, you know. There is a lot of rumors around is Kevon coming back, and I just wanted to avoid all of 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
“When all the drama went down with Twitter, and Elon ended up buying the company. After the eight month saga of legal back and forth ended up actually taking control of the company, there was that first like two-day period where it was complete chaos at Twitter with the sync and like Elon spreading his tentacles trying to find out who are the people that he wants to keep and what are the projects that are interesting in the midst of all that Scott ended up getting contacted and being asked like who should I who should Elon talk to and Scott recommended that Elon chat with me. And so the first time I ever met Elon was over at FaceTime where”
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