YouSaid · the spoken record

Sarah Frier

lines on the record: 97
first: 2020-04-13
most recent: 2020-04-13
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Ridiculous WhatsApp Right, they were honest about, which is like, we don't remember that a lot from when we knew. He was like, yeah, it was a great idea. And he had a radio. Facebook was horrified that they were going to say that.”
2020-04-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sarah Frier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But things are growing. They stay there a long time. A lot of the founders, most of the founders of companies that Facebook bought have left, right? All of them, all of them, right? Oculus. Yeah. Pretty much WhatsApp? WhatsApp, Instagram. Kevin really wanted to stay there. That was my impression. And Mike, the same thing. Talk about what happened. And then our next section, we're going to talk about influencers and things like that. But what went wrong here, even though it was growing, everything is up and to the right, successful, beautiful product. You know, they did borrow stories. And Kevin, actually, the reason I like Kevin, he said, yeah, I did. Right. They were honest about, we don't remember that a lot. He was like, yeah, it was a great idea. And he had a radio and I made a better radio. Like, thank you. Like, that's what she was holding.”
2020-04-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sarah Frier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That would be a benefit for the world. Including ads, including ads. My kid is always like, those ads. He's bought like, he keeps buying things off of Instagram. And it's the only place he buys things, which I think is interesting because the ads really do appeal to him, which is interesting. And I'm always fascinated because he doesn't buy ads anywhere else on the internet, which I found. And I'm sure Facebook has a big part of that, but it's got an Instagram style to it, which is interesting. All right, so the tensions are happening”
2020-04-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sarah Frier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And to your point, one thing that I found fascinating about Instagram after covering Facebook and Twitter, these companies who say, oh, we are just neutral platforms. We actually don't care what you post. We don't want to think about what makes for good content on Facebook or what makes for good content on Twitter. That's kind of up to the user to decide Instagram had an editorial opinion about what good content was. And they advocated for it and they made people into stars and they curated it themselves on the at Instagram account, which by the way is still the most popular Instagram account more than any Kardashian, more than any soccer star. And that was really training their user base to use the product in a way that would be beneficial for the world.”
2020-04-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sarah Frier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right instead. So that was a definite back and forth. And one of the things I remember hearing Facebook people tell me at the time, I knew it was trouble, right? Like, was like, we're the ones that made them big. I'm like, no, they're a great product made them big. Like, no, he could have done fine at Google. It could have done fine. It's like the product matters. They don't hate products, Facebook, but they really do. They don't really have any respect for actual products.”
2020-04-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sarah Frier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, one tidbit in my book is when Instagram builds the algorithm, the way that they tune the algorithm is to show you content that inspires you to post more yourself. That's very different than the way Facebook goals things, which is to show you content that will get you to share and interact and spend more time on Facebook and get sucked in. It's more about what are people going to be incentivized to do”
2020-04-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sarah Frier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But yeah, they proved that out and it really flew in the face of what Facebook thought was good. Because when Facebook looks at your activity, the way that they process it is very utilitarian. As long as you're using the product more, you must like it more. Which is totally not. the case. No.”
2020-04-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sarah Frier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Besides, I always have a red dot even if there's nothing for it. The society collection. Did you know that you're invited to an event two weeks from now? No, I don't.”
2020-04-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sarah Frier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That Money and user growth. Right And Kevin proves his point that this is really like you don't have to spam people with red dot notifications. You don't have to give them a million recommendations. Oh my God, you don't have to write a million recommendations about who to follow. That is why I don't.”
2020-04-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sarah Frier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And good taste. He wants to dominate. Well, dominate, that word that he uses in meetings, he used the word dominate. He loves Augustus Caesar. The kind of choices he's making are, it's really interesting. One of the things that he tends to, and I had heard this story of him talking to Kevin, like we got you for cheap or something, money is the way he, like, we got you, we beat you. Money and user growth. User growth are the two things. And then with Kevin, it is, it's interesting to use the word precious because it was just good. Like it was better. Like, that's not precious. It's just better made. And so it was a really interesting, to me at the beginning, I thought, oh no, these two aren't going to be. This guy is precious, but it's good because his stuff is good. So you can be precious if that's the way. And in fact, it's not just good. It actually is good and people like it and it grows. Right. So it isn't just something that a small group.”
2020-04-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sarah Frier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, no, I mean, you're right. That's a really great analogy to help people understand the differences between how these two leaders think. Like Zuckerberg is competitive in a very different way than Kevin is. Kevin's form of competition is to try and do his personal best. He wants everything to be well crafted and good taste. And in artistic and creative and to mean something to people, and Zuckerberg wants to be better than everyone else, he wants dominate.”
2020-04-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sarah Frier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So such jealousy that Gates had. And I think the reason was someone told me, not now because he's changed because of the philanthropy, but when Bill Gates died, he was going to be the richest man died today. You know what I mean? And when Steve Jobs died, which he did, sadly, Steve Jobs' most creative person in technology who broke barriers and did all this amazing innovation, died today. And Bill Gates hated that idea, hated the idea. And so it would be as if it seemed like he was trying to submarine him all the time or had some sort of jealousy because Mark on the face of it is not a creative person. He just isn't. He's very Bill Gatesian and Kevin is more Steve Jobsian. And I wouldn't, again, no, no.”
2020-04-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sarah Frier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, how can it be? That's such an interesting thing because I found that really an unusual part. I think it went back even further. I think Mark was a jackass to Kevin right at the start. I think he was jealous of his creativity. It would remind me of if Bill Gates bought Apple.”
2020-04-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sarah Frier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Doing stories to compete with Snapchat. It's wildly successful, and suddenly, just as Facebook is in the midst of crisis over the election results, Instagram is having its best year ever and starts to look like a threat to Facebook's future.”
2020-04-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sarah Frier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Facebook had to say, well, you're being too precious because you have to grow. We're seeing the amount of users on Instagram, but you don't have a business model. And so really the first thing that happens is Facebook says you need to have ads that are able to purchase through our general ad buying and they can't be any different than Facebook ads. So there's this whole struggle around 2014-2015 about that. And Zuckerberg is vindicated because once Instagram moves over to their advertising system, it's great. They have a billion dollars in revenue in runwrite in 2015, which is really crazy for how quickly they started. But eventually Instagram comes into its own. Once they're making money, they have this ability to advocate for themselves within the company. They start to do riskier things like, for example,”
2020-04-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sarah Frier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We need to see if you are the reason that people are sharing fewer photos on Facebook. Because it used to be that we all went to parties and we shared an entire album of pictures from that party on Facebook and that behavior was a little bit endangered and they thought Instagram was why. Well, they ran a study and Instagram is kind of in limbo at Facebook end of 2012. And they found it to be inconclusive. So they, okay, fine, you can grow. But Facebook wanted them to grow the Facebook wave, lots of notifications with lots of data collection, with all these things. And Instagram was like, well, we don't want to be annoying. We don't want to be the people who are in your inbox all the time telling you about your random acquaintance who posted something that you don't care about. We're a very different kind of network. So they really had to advocate for that. But eventually.”
2020-04-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sarah Frier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He was investor in Blue Bottle, you're right. But one of the very first things that happens when Instagram walks into Facebook is Facebook says hold up before we let you grow. By the way, it's up to Facebook whether you grow now.”
2020-04-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sarah Frier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So they really started the minute Instagram walked into the door at Facebook. And it's this tiny team. You're right. They have their whiskey shelf. They have their quirkiness. They invite Facebook employees over for pour over coffee because the free coffee at Facebook is not as high quality as the coffee.”
2020-04-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sarah Frier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, good. So start to talk about that. So they get there. They get there and they were like, okay, we're part of this big company. I know, Kevin, I remember visiting there. They tried to have their whiskey area. They tried to be different within that giant Facebook campus. But they tried to differentiate themselves. And eventually, I think they moved to a different area. And that was his hope. He used to talk about our own building, our own area. And as it grew, it certainly deserved that because it started to become this fastest growing part of Facebook and sort of competing with the big blue app, which is what they call Facebook internally. Right. Talk about how those tensions started.”
2020-04-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sarah Frier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The vast majority of the people I talk to for this book did not have authorization to talk to me. Okay, good. Check. The company did participate to an extent. I got to talk to a couple dozen people who were at Instagram and Facebook, but mostly on the Instagram side. And I did not get to talk to Mark for this book. He was not asked many times. He was not interested in talking to me. Cheryl Sandberg was not interested in participating in this book. The CTO of Facebook was nobody on the executive level on the Facebook side was at all interested in participating. And I think that the tension at the end of this story is really indicative as to why.”
2020-04-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sarah Frier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're here with Sarah Fryer from Bloomberg because she's author of No Filter, which is about Instagram. So I just interviewed Stephen Levy about his inside Facebook story. And one of the arguments I had with him was about access. I thought he frittered away his access that he had. How much access did you have to the people there? You were saying you talk to people who would never talk to journalists.”
2020-04-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sarah Frier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. Yeah. Well, Kevin wanted to be thought of as a visionary, as somebody who was a CEO in his own right. And eventually he did get the CEO title at Facebook, which they don't do anymore. Yeah, he really advocated for Instagram to get its own place in.”
2020-04-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sarah Frier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The perception that the founders had about how it would work at Facebook versus the reality, and this is an issue for everyone who gets acquired, it was dramatically harder for them to really get that kind of respect and the independence within Facebook that they wanted Instagram to have. Ironically growth in.”
2020-04-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sarah Frier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, it depends on how you define success, right? Because by selling to Facebook, I think the biggest benefit that Instagram got out of it is that we haven't really as a public given them a reckoning the way we have for every other social media company, for every other large tech company, the responsibility has really fallen on Facebook to fix Instagram and testify in front of Congress and all of those things. And so in a way, it's a little bit more relaxing when you sell your company to somebody else. At the same time, the perception of”
2020-04-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sarah Frier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Inst Well, now it looks on their side. It was the worst trade ever because now I know the arguments from Facebook, it wouldn't have gotten this big without it. I think it would have just fine. I think what it was doing was great, and they would have figured this all out by themselves. And you can look at the history of Silicon Valley, YouTube, which eventually did get bought, but there's all kinds of companies that sold, like YouTube and Instagram, and now are enormous. And then there's companies who didn't sell, like Facebook had the opportunity to sell to Yahoo, to Google, because all kinds of places that made the right decision not to sell. You could have seen there's lots of companies like that.”
2020-04-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sarah Frier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a ticket out of the stress, right? Because a billion dollars really feels like success in Silicon Valley. And what Instagram was going through at that time, they either had to take that money or hire like 80 people. And it was really hard for Kevin and Mike to hire because they just had these very exacting standards about what qualified somebody to be an employee of Instagram. They had to be super enthusiastic. They had to be creative and artsy. And it was kind of different than you would see at a Google or another startup where it's all about like, did you go in an Ivy League school? Did you have good engineering chops? They wanted to hire people who were like them who were creatives and a little quirky and had interesting interests, like the kind of people that they wanted to use Instagram.”
2020-04-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sarah Frier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was after. Well, it's not that they gave up on trying to innovate in that area. In fact, Mark is so paranoid about the potential for Facebook to be out innovated or outcompeted that he's trying multiple things at once. He's buying Instagram, as he's buying Instagram, Facebook is building up its own Facebook camera team and launching a competing product just in case the acquisition doesn't go through. He's thinking about other founders he can start to acquire because Instagram acquisition looks like a good idea. Everyone thought he was crazy by the way. I mean, now it looks like the smartest acquisition and technology ever. At the time, everyone was saying, What? A billion dollars for an app with only 13 people working for it, and no revenue to speak of.”
2020-04-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sarah Frier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, right. And so that was what some people call that is the killer acquisition in order to, what's interesting is they tried to do the similar thing with Snapchat before that, right? His attempt to buy was it before? Well, it was after. It was after. But this was a thing was we are not going to be able to innovate here, which I want to know why they can't from you. And then let's just buy it and put not worry about that, not worry about it.”
2020-04-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sarah Frier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Start this overvaluation of tech startups. But what he understood is that You know, everything was kind of up in the air. Facebook hadn't even gone public yet. One billion dollars for Instagram seemed fair because it accounted for 1% of Facebook's private company valuation at that time To him, it was like you can see the network effects with this thing. They're small, but the way they are growing is faster than their competitors. Their trajectory is to be very big and potentially very threatening to Facebook.”
2020-04-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sarah Frier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which now seems cheap, which really set off this boom in valuations for technology startups. In which Mark actually was worried about. He was worried that if he paid that much for Instagram, then he would.”
2020-04-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sarah Frier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We'll get to that, which in the end you didn't like Sequoia. Right. And they did end up completing that round. But right as they were signing the check, Kevin was going down to Zuckerberg's house in Palo Alto and in ironing out the biggest ever deal for a mobile app so far.”
2020-04-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sarah Frier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which he didn't like. And then we'll get to that. In the end, he didn't like. But there was a back and forth, and he was also getting, they were also looking for funding at the time and actually were completing some rounds. I think it was Sequoia. Right.”
2020-04-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sarah Frier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They thought they were close, but Kevin was never wooed by that idea because Twitter didn't really know what they wanted to do with Instagram once they got it inside. They wanted to own it, but they didn't really give Kevin the opportunity to maintain independence, to be a founder. They didn't even know really that he wanted that. They offered him, for example, head of product at Twitter in addition to running Instagram. kind of thing didn't appeal as much as what Zuckerberg pitched to Kevin and Mike, which was like, you guys can have your own company within Facebook. I'll respect you as founders. I'll let you have independence. I'll let you have control. And I'll let you have your vision. And basically you can Envision yourselves being as big as Facebook one day, maybe.”
2020-04-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sarah Frier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Facebook shows up and really beats Twitter. So Twitter had been trying. They tried multiple times to acquire Instagram and just couldn't make it work with.”
2020-04-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sarah Frier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. It made you feel like a professional. And the other thing that Instagram did is it didn't try to reinvent the wheel around building a network. Instagram piggybacked off the existing networks of Twitter, of Facebook, of Foursquare, of all these other places that you could share your Instagram photos to. And that served as marketing back to Instagram. And so Jack is a great example. He already had millions of followers on Twitter, of course, being the founder. And whenever he would share his Instagram photos there, people would see that and then say, oh, I want my photos to look that good. And they would start using Instagram.”
2020-04-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sarah Frier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was really about this simplicity. I mean, a lot of those other Options for Photo sharing camera plus is another one of them. Eventually, Path had a lot of options for what you could put into your filters. A lot of them looked a little bit campy. Kevin was an actual photographer, and he really had an appreciation for what would make a picture look better. He designed these filters himself in Photoshop and brought that artistic approach to... Building of the filters for Instagram. And so when people used it, instead of making it look like they were trying to do like a 1970s, you know, Smoky photo that was very obviously altered. Instagrams were a little bit more like”
2020-04-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sarah Frier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So talk about the other. There's lots of other people. First of all, before Hismatic, but before that there was Picasa, which Google bought. There was a whole bunch Flickr, which Yahoo bought. There was a whole photo, what was the other one? There were so many of them. But there were a lot of them. So talk about how that moved to this kind of Instagram version because Instagram was built around the iPhone, obviously.”
2020-04-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sarah Frier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Jack had been ousted from Twitter at that point, but he had a lot of money from that good idea. And Kevin was the first person who ever asked him to be an angel investor. And Jack was all in. As you said, he's very artistic person. He loves this kind of creative opportunity. He loves photography. And he was really the person that led to Instagram's early success by creating Buzz around it. You could call him the first Instagram influencer. He got so many people to download the product early on and Instagram was not the only company that was trying this.”
2020-04-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sarah Frier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was actually an angel investor in Instagram, and he was very flattered by the opportunity when Kevin came to him, Jack is his old buddy from doing ode.”
2020-04-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sarah Frier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Artistic bent, they're much more product focused, they're much more alike than different. And so Jack immediately glomnant, which is interesting because Twitter didn't have any of these kind of features, really. It wasn't an easy place to use photos or things like that.”
2020-04-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sarah Frier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The conclusion of that was they knew of each other, but they didn't actually become co founders until a mutual friend was like, well, I don't want to found this company with you, but maybe you should reach out to Mikey. And Mikey was looking for that kind of opportunity. And he is a much more technical person. Really has the ability to learn on the job, to fix the fact that Instagram kept going down because people were just Piling on and using it so much”
2020-04-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sarah Frier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, Kevin had an opportunity to work at Facebook in the very early days, and he turned it down because he wanted to get the opportunity to kind of see what it was like to work at a successful company and did Google. He worked for Odeo, which later became Twitter. He really became immersed in... The tech community, but didn't really know how to code until much later. He had dabbled in projects, but he was never considered himself an engineer. And he met Mike Krieger through this entrepreneurship program at Stanford called the Mayfield Fellowship, which a lot of people that you may know of have gone through.”
2020-04-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sarah Frier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, the details. Now, one of the things people don't realize is they were Mike and Kevin were put together by a venture cap, right? They went on kind of entrepreneur dates, essentially. Mike was the technical person, and Kevin was the more creative person who I think was the CEO at the time when it got bought, but that he had worked at a number of companies. Kevin, I think it was Google.”
2020-04-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sarah Frier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Equipment on the phones made really blurry bad pictures, and what the filters could do is make that content more shareable, beautiful, and really provide a window into people's lives. And so it was such a simple product, and it caught on so quickly that they really didn't have a lot of time to think about anything, hiring, fixing those problems. As you said, when they got acquired, even though they had tens of millions of registered users, they didn't actually know how many of them were coming on a daily basis, they weren't building their business model yet. It was a very young company. Facebook provided an opportunity for them to not have to worry about those things.”
2020-04-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sarah Frier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of two founders to marry art and technology and build something that was not as maybe technical as the other products going on, but it solved a very simple problem, which is that people had these new phones in their pockets, the iPhone was just starting to become mainstream. And all the camera...”
2020-04-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sarah Frier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“First of all, Instagram has become really a phenomena. It was bought at a very early stage in its history. I wrote a profile of Kevin a long time ago for Fannity Fair, I think. And one of the things was I ate people, if I recall, it was just eight people. They worked actually nearby here and struggled for the first time, but they were a very short time in life as a startup. So talk a little bit about the background of the company.”
2020-04-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sarah Frier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I've been covering social media since around Facebook's IPO. I moved here in 2013 to move here to San Francisco to make that my main beat. And since then, have been able to dive deep into Facebook and Twitter and Snapchat. What really led to this book is I realized that we as journals haven't really. Known the story of Instagram or haven't gotten to dig as much into that company. And when I started doing so, I noticed that there was so much that hadn't been said, so many people that hadn't ever talked with journalists before and that it was really an opportunity to write a book about it”
2020-04-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sarah Frier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT