Smash Notes
The Next Social Era is Here: Josh Elman & James Currier on Social Products Reshaping Human Connection
Speaker 2
This is Kristen O Brien, and you're listening to the n effects podcast for founders of social media and communications
Speaker 1
startups. The last eight years have been an ice age 2000 to 2012 is the golden era, bringing US companies like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Posh Mark, Slack and Zoom. In the subsequent eight years outside of Asia, few consumer companies emerged. But now that's changing. The pandemic is rewiring our relationship to technology, and we believe the new wave of social startups has arrived.
In this episode, Social media experts James Courier and Josh Elman give a blueprint for the evolution of social, what it takes to build a breakout product and the opportunities they're seeing for founders to reinvent the social landscape.
So So Joshua and I have known each other for over decade. You you've been one of Silicon Valley's top social media and communications experts for over 20 years. You were in the product management engineering inside of Riel Networks, one of the first video communications tools up in Seattle, right? They acquired Philip Rose Dale's video, Kodak, and he went on to build Second Life.
Then you weren't linked in a two beginning there in product and engineering Facebook product, Twitter product and then most recently at Robin Hood. Ah, in product. And then, of course, you're an investor in TIC Tac. And in between, of course, you're a general partner at Greylock, right? For eight years, investing in social, media and communications companies, including medium discord, meerkat slash house party.
And so we've been hanging out talking about viral growth and social media and social communications forever. And right now is a really interesting time. The recent growth and remote working tools and digital communications, the takeover of our world by social media companies that you've been part of building. Obviously, that would be a great time to dig in to get your perspective, all things social communications, what's the general arc of the timeline of social media and communications Total? Take us back to the beginning and bring us to the present.
And maybe if you could drop in some of the framer to use to understand where things are today would be super helpful. You're just hearing you talk about this stuff is always a pleasure.
Speaker 2
Thanks, James. So much for having me. I always love talking to you. and we've shared a lot of this history of building all these things together. And I think it really comes back to the early Internet, that sort of late nineties vibe where, you know, in general it was first about companies setting up Web pages and setting up presences and sort of the early Internet was a business Internet, and then people realized they could set things up for themselves.
I was actually interning at a company that was called Homestead when we were starting to talk about what it was like to build a Web page on the Internet that represented you. And it was like, Don't just build a home Page built a homestead. And this idea that people could have a presence online sort of made their identity now to fold. It wasn't just the people that knew them in their community, but it was.
Anybody on the Internet could find out who you were, what you were thinking about. This then turned into blogging, where a very small group of people figured out how to write every day, and they would write these incredible pieces and we would all start toe read them. And these few writers became somewhat famous in the small, nerdy Internet world, and it was exciting to kind of think about what that meant and how you could start to get to know somebody just through an online presence without ever having met them in the real world.
A well had chat rooms where a lot of people were hanging out, and that was sort of the early genesis of what became a city of a an Internet presence related to your to your real world presence. But the beginning they were mostly different. Who you were in the AOL chat room might not be the same thing is who you were on mine go through the Internet bust, blogging and everything are still growing.
A well is already starting to fade, and a bunch of people said, Wait a sec. What if the Internet presence and in the real world presents are the same, they could be one. You can actually put your real self online if you remember back then, like a resume was something you on Lee did when you were looking for a job and Reid Hoffman had the idea that it was like, What if your resume is a living, breathing thing that represents you online, that people confined you all the time.
So it's not like you're searching for a job to still have your resume online, and that was sort of the genesis of linked in. And then it became that and your professional network and a monster, which was the largest job site at the time, only had resumes of people who are looking for jobs. All of a sudden, linked in had the online national profile of every single person in the world.
Now who's working or not? Everybody but almost. What was this idea? Friendster came out and said, Hey, if you wanna start dating somebody instead of the awkward trying to find people through your friends or trying to ask around because you're single, What if you just knew who your friends friends were, and you could just browse them and you say, Hey, James, I think you have a friend who's it seems kind of neat.
Maybe you could introduce me to her. These is the burden for the person in the middle until all of a sudden, not just do we have these online profiles that represent a real identity, but we actually now have we know who knows who and who's connected to who, and we can start using those to get to people and realize our reach is much bigger than just us personally.
In these kind of two things. The rial identity online, the ability to to talk, which like the small group of bloggers, sort of showed us was possible. And this idea of our friend networks are social graph is it eventually got to be called just became these foundational things that have now spawned arguing trillion dollars worth of companies and billions of people now using new products every day.
So that was sort of the genesis that got us into that, like 3 2004 era. That's I joined LinkedIn right the beginning of 2004 and it was like 15 people and and, you know, I remember we were like Someday we'll get to a 1,000,000 users on linked in, you know, Now it's a hundreds and hundreds of millions, but it was this idea that, like this, actually could work.
I even dropped out of business school to join Lincoln, and my professor was like social networking, will never make money. My friends came and did a A class project. Since I was at LinkedIn. They got a C minus or a C plus or something on the project is he just didn't never believe it. And and so even in those early days, it was still a big question of like So we have people on lines, the real identities.
So what? What does that matter? And that's where the real change then you know, especially his Facebook came out said, Hey, we're gonna map people's real identities. We're gonna do this in these closed communities like colleges, people will then start to share updates. Status was a big thing, and this came again from instant messaging, which had been very private in the past.
We would only kind of you would chat with your friends and very private way. All of a sudden, you could sort of chat in a slightly more public way on Facebook. There's this feature that people have forgotten now called Writing on Walls, that was actually one of the most important early social communication features. I could go to your profile James and say, Hey, man, Happy birthday or hey, what's up, or I think I saw you walking across the quad and other people could see it and start to comment on it as well.
And that, collectively, is what made our sort of communication patterns start to change. And so Facebook realized this and said, Wait a sec. Everyone can talk to each other. People are updating their status with real time updates, almost of what they're doing. People are updating pictures, they're updating their relationship status. They turn that into the news feed.
And I really think that was the invention that sort of invented. The next wave of the Social Internet was the idea of a news feet, a place that we can post information and immediately at one glance, see what everybody else is up to, and kind of everything we've really built in social since then has been based off of that core idea that you could post something around your identity, and people kind of consume it in this sort of feed like form.
Um, and that really set us for the next 15 years. Twitter took all the bloggers who were writing long form posts and gave him a place to do very short posts in between. That became an incredible feed, and people used to call it micro blogging. But that was because it was the short form of blogging. And then everybody would go back to their longer form blogging and say, Well, on Twitter, we were all discussing this in short form.
Now I'm going to write a long piece on it. And so it became sort of the in between place where all the conversation happened. That became the more important place because it's where all the conversation happened for that community of bloggers, which then became the community of media professionals, celebrities, people who just like to talk.
And that's what really helped Twitter kind of still become this place where important conversation happens for the whole world. And at the same time, Facebook then just got everybody in the world building their profile, sharing things, etcetera so that take this kind of through the end of the two thousands 8 2009 and 10. All of a sudden, our phones come out.
I was setting. People are like Wait a sec, this posting man myself to go to a website on a desktop computer to make updates. What if I could just do it from my phone? And you know, we also had cameras on her phone. So all of a sudden the transformation goes from simple post you make when you're on a Web browser, maybe a few times a day to conversations you can have all the time.
Twitter started is a little SMS service, but it became really popular once everybody was doing on their phones. Instagram came out and said, Hey, your phone pictures kind of sucked. Let's make him look a little bit better than all of a sudden. You have this lens into the world because of what everybody's sharing on their phones. And between that and then Facebook finally figuring out Mobile have this transition from 2010 to 2014 where the entire world moves on to mobile social networks.
There's a company called Path that got started in the meantime, that was trying to build it to be the first mobile social network that pioneered a lot of things we know, like reactions and other stuff you have Snapchat that said, Hey, we're all sharing photos. What if they just disappear? And as every high schooler was getting their very first phones.
The idea of content that disappeared that wasn't permanently logged was so attractive to them just cause it freed them up to change their identity and change things around Facebook felt so permanent. Instagram felt so permanent that Snapchat took off. In that generation we have this this massive revolution and at the same time, obviously mobile messaging became so inordinately popular.
Um whats app You just have regular SMS and I Message and awesome are ways to communicate now have gone so much faster than e mails and phone calls and all the things of the past. And really I think we've been living this over, you know, since as early days, that kind of call that like 2010 and 2014 was sort of this heyday where we're all getting on Snapchat instagrammers becoming a thing and Facebook Mobile was really finding its way.
And then by the end of that period, they all started making money to Facebook Mobile really became a ah very large advertising center of the company that figure out how to do ads in the news feed that weren't abysmal. Remember this whole lens of social media always had a will it ever make money? Question? And so by that point, now we get to sort of this era where these companies air big.
They're making a lot of money. Things were really working Snapchats on its way. Twitter's on its way, and that sort of takes us up to, like 2014 2015 which I think as of 2020 were still kind of in a similar state of the world where Snapchat, instagram, Twitter, obviously Facebook, things like WhatsApp I message in the Western world are the dominant media forms.
And then if you go to Asia, you can add line, Cacau. And then obviously we check
Speaker 1
right. And it's amazing that the last six years hasn't seen that much change, right? I mean, there was so much change for 12 years, and then there's been less change. How do you read that of our core behaviours evolved because of these tools Are are the needs being fulfilled? The network effects just too great. How do how do you see the opportunity for for new products coming in?
Speaker 2
So I think a couple things happened. One is through this whole period. I mean, I went all the way back to the era of life blogging and home pages. Teoh. Now we've just been adding people to these networks, you know it started is, you know, there are probably hundreds of bloggers in the in the late nineties, too billions of people posting things on social media in the past hour.
And so as part of this expansion, we kept expanding and getting new people on the platforms. And there were just so many new opportunities to fill that even a lot of the old ones didn't really die. I mean, my space got eclipsed by Facebook. That was very, very early arm. Other things kind of never really got going, but, you know, they just kept layering on Snapchat fields and needs that Facebook didn't instagram filled needs that Facebook didn't know Twitter was able to co exist.
And you start to get the thick where it's hard to find and fill new needs as all these platforms got big and bigger. And there's eight or 12 after I have on my phone that fill so many of my needs that you either have to now replace one or truly find something different that I will probably drop 14 and that gets much harder. And we do have network effect.
When you post the Instagram, it's hard to get you post somewhere else when you post a video to Facebook and your family comments on it, or your friends do where people just call you and say, I love the video you posted on Facebook. Why would you post that somewhere else? Even YouTube, which people think of is this massive platform, and it certainly is.
It's much more of a media platform than it ever has really become a social platforms. People don't just post content there for reactions. They might post it for storage, but they need to share it elsewhere where their networks live. And so you kind of have had this interesting that were. Networks are so big and so dense, and our audience and where we want to get feedback from is so fixed already that it's hard to imagine somewhere new Now.
There have been a few things discord and tic tac in particular that have grown substantially over the past five years. But those air late additions to this social media stack, I think, rather than signs of things to come.
Speaker 1
And, you know, for the founders out there that, you know, all the FX content is really for early stage founders, and a lot of people still come to us and say, Look, I've got the social idea they're excited about, and they're like, This is why it's different and what not And let's talk to them for a second. Because while we have these big hits like Facebook and Lengthen and Zoom, we've literally had thousands of companies that didn't hit it big in the social space because the social products are exciting.
They're fun. You want to build them? Boy wouldn't be great to have a big network effect business that you could run, uh, and have fun connecting people. You know, it's sort of a dream, right? But so few of the companies that got started, even the ones that got 10 41 100 million users, never became big, didn't go anywhere when you were in venture capital.
Did you look at 100 or 1000 of these media things here, give us a sense of the scale of how many people are still trying it. Then I love to talk about what you think you know. Early stage founders today should be looking for in this space, given that a lot of the network effects are preventing new in players from coming in against the incumbents.
Speaker 2
No, I probably looked it six or 700 new companies in sort of a consumer and media worlds every year when I was in venture capital from 2012 through, Ah 2017 where my full years is a full time V C. And there were so many people doing interesting things. But a lot of them felt derivative or a little gap, or sort of not trying to play the new trends.
So what I was really always looking for were sort of three things. One is. Is somebody riding a new trend that I think, if they get it right, can actually own a new habit formation in the future that starts small but can snowball very large to become a new center of gravity for that new habit or behavior, and it really needs to be something new.
It's like I have a better way to share photos just wasn't nearly as interesting as I think people are actually gonna start recording a lot more videos, and I think we have a way to do it, that we might become the hub of short form videos, which was what actually led Meteo invest in musically when it was starting to work in 2015. But looking for a new habit or trend.
And, you know, I think right now in the world, for the first time and sort of four years, I've been thinking about this. The remote work, remote connection, staying at home. Being Justus happy to get on a video call with friends might be enough set of new habits that new things conform that couldn't have before. So knew habits is one. The second is you think about stickiness and sort of where that really means is like, Is this a habit that becomes central to somebody's life, that they want to do it often and be top of mind for it? And so if you think about it like if I'm bored right now, what do you do? You might go to Facebook.
You might go to other things, but being bored is you can always try to be something else to help people on their board. We have to be really, really good at that. We see Quimby just launching, trying to say, Hey, we're better content than everything else use us and it really depends on how good the content is there if they'll be able to fulfill being bored morning entertainment better than anything else.
So I look for like like I want to get out more or I want to connect better with my friends where I could find more meaningful time with my friends. Like, what are some of these needs that you can actually become central and solving people's lives that other products don't today? And when I'm looking at a company, usually it for a little bit attraction where there is a small group of people who you're completely solving that four already who swear by your product, you say every day I check into this product because it does this thing for me.
When I look for attraction, I don't care about the big numbers per se. I care about the death of the numbers for the people who have already converted to your product because if you have that, then you have a chance to take that deep, meaningful connection with some people and expand it to a lot more. And then the third thing I do look for is a growth hook.
It's not that you've already figured out how to grow or exploit that, but if this small group of people are using it, here's why they want more people to join them. And here's how this will expand and this will grow. And this will rise above the noise because any company that you want to grow from something small to be very big needs enough reasons why would grow above the noise.
Discord was one of the rare examples that I found in my in my venture career, that sort of kid on all three of these. It was riding the trend of gaming, where people were starting to play a lot more games with each other, and the tools to connect over gaming were pretty terrible. You had to share I P addresses. People could blast the I P and sort of, you know, ruin the game for everybody.
If you found out some of these I p address they were using for their Skype group chat or their mumble server gaming was becoming much more of a core behavior. We've obviously not seen that with Fortnight and everything else, but even in 2015 was already becoming much more mainstream. And the third was it was really hard to get into those other gaming tools toe to share and chat.
Discord did it in the Web browser record to send you a link, and we're voice chatting within about a minute. It was pretty amazing. And back then it was a total ah ha experience to have 10 people in a voice chat over just a text that was shared over a link star that was shared like over estimates. And so So we found that they had a couple 100,000 daily users, but they weren't just daily users.
They were like every day, hours a day. 10% of the people were have the APP open over 10 hours per day, and so this was a really, really committed group of people, and then they had a really good growth hook like the gaming ecosystem was blowing up. Twitch streamers were talking about using discord. Once you get one person, they would share it with all their friends who they gamed with all of a sudden like it just kept growing virally and through the use of twitch in another gaming influencers.
And that really helped this court become such a meaningful company. But I kind of bet on it because of those three things. But it was rare to find all three of those in one product.
Speaker 1
Sure, and this court had been tried a couple times before. I mean, my Cassidy tried X fire earlier, like 12 years earlier or something.
Speaker 2
That's right. Yeah. I mean, look, there's very few ideas that have never been tried before. It's all about getting the right product at the right time, with the right trend and wave and the right way for the viral growth toe actually flow through current channels for something to really take off or is being stuck when on expire, was such a good product when it came out, the gaming was just niche here enough and just more isolated, and people didn't sort of proudly talk about themselves as a gamer back then.
And so it always ended up feeling much next year than it could have.
Speaker 1
Yeah, yeah, that's right. And you know. I remember in 2015 you and I are sitting at what I think was my first and last NFL football game. And, uh, you said, Hey, if
Speaker 2
you noticed that
Speaker 1
there haven't been any big social networks and Snapshot 2011 and it's been four years since anything major happened in social might be over and you didn't mean it was over. But you're kind of saying, Hey, look, we're in a we're in a new phase is what you're saying is going forward. What's gonna be going forward is we need to find new habits, stickiness and growth hooks in order to really make an impact on the incumbents the way it is today.
And and it has really been the shift. And so when you think about what's going forward for for this area you had mentioned work stuff. Maybe this has changed, too. Remote work of the shelter in place, stuff, the various changing social behaviors. We're gonna have to have her as a result of Kobe. What do you see going forward? I mean, we've already got Zoom.
Now we've got some new tools that are trying toe lock down on work like tandem and other things. Where do you see the opportunity for early stage founders going forward?
Speaker 2
So I think what's really special about what's happening right now is that we're normalising a lot of behaviors that have sort of been out there for a while. Like Zoom has been around for a while, and it's been an exceptional workplace videoconferencing product. But it always felt second rate to get on a zoom versus trying to have a meeting in person.
It always felt like if somebody was working from home, they were sort of doing the secondary option, and having to zoom them into the meeting was a slight burden. Even if you were a company with multiple offices and you were doing video calls often and there was the person dialing in on the TV in the meeting room, it always felt like it wasn't quite as good as being in person.
And what I think the shelter in place in these like surreal times are doing is making us go. Wait a sec. What if this is the default? How do we then learn new norms and operate and make sure that this is as effective as possible. I think people are gonna learn to be a lot better writer, so we'll get things written down that will make the communication a lot more effective.
Writing's hard writing well is really hard, but I think it's worth spending the time or to do it. And then the video calls and the communication we have. We learned how to make that higher fidelity, and we have to replace not being in persons. That's all we can do right now and then I think by normalizing this the next time, it's like all you can't meet in person.
Hey, let's just do a zoom becomes an affirmative action and something that we do when we almost prefer to do to save everybody the hassle of commuting or moving around. And we only do that when it's really special. Now, if we're gonna do that, the number of ways we need to connect share content, share information like it's gonna be transformative.
And there's so many different pieces of what we used to get in person, whether it was the hallway chat after a meeting or the, you know, greetings or, you know, sharing food or giving gifts all of these things that we just do naturally in person have to figure out how to replicate and bring toward digital tools. I think people will be able to carve out lots of slices of these to become, you know, important parts of people's working life.
And then I think on the social side, we're learning exactly the same thing. Hey, normally we would want to go out to a concert, and that would be like Are fun event that we might do You know, some people do that every week. Some people do that monthly, and right now we can't do any of it. Is is, you know, for across humanity. So doing the Livestream concert is actually pretty good, but it's still not as good is seeing some other people in the crowd sharing it.
Maybe sometimes it's an intimate gathering. Maybe sometimes that the maths one there's so much more to invent for the tools that make that experience feel much better. Even then, it does today, but I've personally been in me is going to some watching some of the live streams, some of these artists from their homes. It's really brought me there.
This Hamilton thing that was done on John Kaczynski's feel good news was, was just amazing. And I just watched that yesterday, like five times, and it kind of shows you the intimacy that can happen over Digital if we start creating those experiences. And I personally did Poker night with some friends on Friday night, and I normally would never have jumped in the car to go up people in San Francisco in Oakland.
And one person even joined from Hawaii, where he lives, and I never would have gone out to Poker night because it was a Friday night. It was late and I probably would have been tired. We started it like 8 30 we're still going at 12 30 I had so much fun. We had zoom on a mediocre poker app on the phone, but it was really about the people. And I think now that we start to go, and that was actually more fun than I thought.
It's gonna become normal, and we can build great products to help people do this more effectively, and I think it's gonna be a huge world of opportunity to build the places and spaces that we go on evenings and in other times in order to do this is this way you're
Speaker 1
talking about when you say that your media is becoming social. Is this an idea that you had written about?
Speaker 2
What happened think about is is social media has sort of drifted away from truly being social with social media. We had gotten to a point, right? Actually, I think it's becoming more media where what James Courier shares on his Facebook, certainly on his Twitter is linked in is James Career, the Media Channel. Not James Courier, the human that I love interacting with and you know, being with and going back and forth with your podcast, I think are much closer to that.
But being social is really the art of being together, conversing, engaging, sharing experiences, sharing moments, these emotional connections that happen. And so I worry that Facebook instagram, I mean with with what's happening in the time of Covic like Instagram, is pretty boring. People aren't going out and doing all these cool things that they're showing off their living their lives and creating a media channel about yourself.
Living your lives is less interesting. Instagram live discord, phone calls poker nights, those air riel social experiences that bring back that feeling of connection. Those feel much, much more powerful these days. And so that's kind of what I mean is like we might be moving away from thinking that social networks are about social media and that the best social networks are the ones that bring us together.
You know, when you're talking to somebody, you have so much more adrenaline and endorphins and connections between you two, even if it's just a phone call. Better if it's a video calling you making eye contact. Still highest band with in person. But that's so much more powerful than cool. I saw your photo on a double tapped,
Speaker 1
right? Right. And you Have you had this recent piece in medium where you're talking about Thea Move toward experiences. This is what you mean. These experiences to get about poker, these experiences together of seeing the eyes connecting as Israel human beings. These experiences as opposed to the Instagram experiences like Look, jump jumping into this waterfall in Hawaii surfing.
Speaker 2
Yeah, that's right. Now I'll put a little plug in for Tic tac, which is I think it's somewhere in the middle. One of things I found really profound with Tic Tac is it's no longer just about snapping something that you're doing and sharing it. But it's actually about the art of creating. When we first invested in 2015 like, one of my theories was that we had sort of with Instagram and Snapchat.
We had made capturing a moment so effortless and so fast that you could sort of get anything you wanted and just share it out there, and it might actually take longer for somebody to consume it. Then it took for you to make it and and so we're kind of tipping the balance where we're putting the burden on consumers as opposed to the creators, to make something that is valuable for the people that care about.
With Tic Tac. We flipped that again, which is to actually make a lip sync to make a good dance video to make a funny, humorous piece of content like people after spent hours learning steps and going to make them. And we turn the world back in the creators with our phones and and that's the other part of sort of social media that I do like, which is it's not media that were just capturing to show off what we're doing, but its media that works, creating with our heart and wanting to share and wanting to get feedback on.
No, I've long. I've long dreamed that the best social network out there could be one that shows how long you spent making a post or if you go on a trip, you make a collage. It says, Hey, Josh, James just spent, You know, three days, you know, are like six hours over three days curating these pictures to share his album. From this amazing trip he did.
Would you like to look at it? And if it said that you would put that much time and I would always look at it, whereas if I just see you slam up 100 pictures, I'm like, Thanks. I hope you had a great trip,
Speaker 1
right? So appraised humanity. It brings the time we spend the life's energies that we spend into the actual media form.
Speaker 2
That's right. And I think Tic tac is the beginning of that.
Speaker 1
Got a and we've got some ideas around things like a reply, time and jam session and lunch buddies. What? Tell us about those What kind And then what kind of ideas you thinking about these days?
Speaker 2
You know, that was just Ah, medium blawg. That was just a funny thing that I was thinking about the other night. And I was talking to it for a couple weeks ago. I was talking to a friend and I was brainstorming all these ideas of, like, how can we come together in this time of remote work and inhumanity and and kind of went down two different paths.
So the idea of, like, jam session what I wrote was, wouldn't it be fun to give all these artists a tool where they can set up a private jam session in charge 50 or $100 per person, to join for an hour, to have a very intimate live video chat experience reading up one on one conversation and you can know who the other friends are who are sitting there.
And you can all kind of groove to the music together and have that same feeling as if you were in a social club. It was just getting We've actually seen this Everett this before. All this stuff was blowing up. We've now seen I watched Chris Martin in his living room or John Legend or a bunch of Broadway stars, you know, singing from their bedrooms.
And they've been doing this in a way that is just so much more intimate. But it's still like one too many. I feel like they're doing it for their fans, but it hasn't sort of turned into a club in the business. Do you think there's a great room for someone to build products that are that can actually allow people that to run these things? You know, we're seeing that in fitness to wear a lot of fitness professionals are starting to run virtual classes.
Many tools to run the class, charge money. No, Who's there have really interactive experiences while this is going on and in no great products and yet fully solved that lunch buddies was was a similar silly idea that I had, which was, you know, getting food right now is hard. Either you go into grocery stores and following very strict social distancing rules, or you're trying to get delivery, which is getting harder and harder is.
Everybody's trying to get delivery and everything's at capacity. What if we could deliver food to a whole bunch of people on day? Could all sort of cook it together, and you could have sort of the like, cook at home, talk over lunch experience with a group of like 10 people with even a professional chef. Now, logistically, that may actually be hard to do.
But I was just trying to think about like, How do you bring that humanity back into these moments of time and then, with replied, time. This was something that I had been thinking about a lot just for, like, how do we change work and work patterns, especially when we're all remote? You know, when we're all working together, you know, you might put out a question in a meeting, and then certain people talk and dominate the meaty.
You might send something out of her email, and the people who are just fast reply IRS always reply first, and we'll know that the first person to reply off and set the tone for a conversation. If you put out a question or thought in the first persons like that's terrible, then the entire rest of the reply thread or the slack thread or the meeting conversation is unwinding why it's terrible and why there might be some merit in the idea.
I just don't think about like in a workplace. You can usually get over this cause you can grab somebody afterwards and say, Hey, please don't respond That way we could go to three other people privately and say, Please give me your feedback As we move to fully remote, it gets harder to have those sort of side conversations as meaningfully is a sort of in a sort of softly.
And so I see my like what if we change the way that we go and ask for feedback? What if, instead of first reply always wins and sets the tone for the thread, you put out an email and you say everybody can reply to this email and that on our or two later we will share all the replies all at once. So everybody gets to write a a thoughtful piece of feedback and and you sort of delay the power of first nous.
And especially nobody's working at home. They have other distractions. Maybe at home they are doing real work, and they can't just be on threads to respond everything. If you could put in some delay, I think you could really transform how we communicate at work. And I think this isn't just an idea for for, um no remote times. I think this would be useful, you know, in so many ways and in so many conversations.
And, you know, we gotta remove the power of being first to make sure that we hear from everybody. So you're just, you know, ideas. I've been dancing around and they're all about like, How do you go find those moments of community that we can bring back in and and thoughtfulness and in connection.
Speaker 1
What's what's notable, of course, is that you're talking about psychology. You're talking about emotions you're talking. You know, we say that we're in the tech space, but the fact is, the way you're thinking about this is much more liberal, Arts writes. It's much more about about being human and how we think and feel and painting with those colors.
Painting with that language as a way to seek out new products as a way, seek out new ideas that could impact people, make the world better build networks, you know, a lot of times with, you know, in the tech space you see, with sass with e commerce, people are talking about just pure numbers. You know, these air spreadsheet type businesses.
Where's what you're talking about is very much a work of art around how it makes somebody feel or make somebody think, or the order in which we communicate. I mean, this is not This is not usual. This is This is an unusual sector within the text base that that you have now been encamped in now for 20 years. The do you find that a lot of people can go with you with these conversations, you find, like a lot of the founders out there, understand the depth of of emotion and psychology you need to understand in order to find something that's valuable and new and important,
Speaker 2
you know, I mean, I very much think so. And in fact, I think the best founders, especially in this space, are great studies of humanity. They are great studies of people, and they are really great psychologists. I used to say this is maybe 10 or 12 years ago. Like Google is a technology company, and Facebook is a psychology company. You know, if you think of the early tack of Facebook, it was really just a bunch of forms of people could fill in and how it communicated the forms to other people.
But it understood how to do that in a way that made humans feel better. And that's really the secret of almost everything that's been built then, um, Evan Spiegel. When he was talking about the early days of Snapchat, he very much sounded like a psychologist to where he talked about why deletion by default changes the entire way that you perceived the person on the other side and have the human connection.
Ben Rubin was the founder of House Party in Meerkat is talked so much about the power of live video and how being live and trying to create togetherness when we're not together has been so powerful in House Party. That hasn't changed that much in almost two years, as a product has been blowing up in the time of covert because so many of those architectures that Ben built in the bed and semen and the team built still live and thrive, and that's what makes the process so special.
Some people who come to technology or architects, they think about building cities. They think about planning. Some people are psychologist and I think about people. But I think these types of humanity need to be applied technologies to see enabler. It's not the it's not the it's the saw. It's an ingredient in the sauce, but it's no longer the meal.
Speaker 1
The real product here is the psychological insight, and you, you and I, uh, I was an early angel investor in Meerkat and help Ben Rubin come over from Israel to the US and you and I invested in Meerkat. Let's just talk quickly, You know, I think this is the's, a useful stories for the founders. Why do you think meerkat didn't work? What do you think happened with the House Party evolution and now it's blowing up.
Now it's now it's working now it's growing really quickly. What's the story there?
Speaker 2
So when I first invested in Meerkat, if I go back to my three pillars like I believe that there was a massive trend towards live video, I believe that our phones could now support it. I believe that the networks could now support it so you could turn the camera on anywhere. But if you could create the hub, the habit of live video that shows the people made the shows that people wanted to tune in to watch, you could actually build ah unique independent network.
And at the very earliest days, there's only a few weeks old. When I invested, it was right before South by Southwest 2015. You were seeing just amazing adoption the way that Ben had hooked into Twitter and into the Twitter graph, and it was creating these connections. And one of my favorite Internet moments was the end of February and 2015 when a couple friends were in a restaurant and I was sitting on my couch at home and they were live streaming conversation with the restaurant, and a whole bunch of us were in the comment thread.
Then people started dialing on their phones into the conversation, so we had, like, other people dialing in to talk to the group. And it was just this amazing social moment that we were creating on the fly, even though not everybody was together and it was so powerful, and I was like this feels like the future And and
Speaker 1
this is on meerkat This was
Speaker 2
all on meerkat. This is again end of any of that, uh, February 2015. All right, a couple days before South by, and it was just blowing up and they've been out for, like, two or three weeks at that point. And so, you know, we funded Ben, and we invested a lot in the company and the technology and to keep growing. But a couple things that didn't quite happen is it's really hard to make good live video and to be a good host and very small number of people can do it.
And those people tended to be more interesting if they were already interesting in the world. Create out against it in a very small group who could sort of, you know, become new my stars. The second thing was, it wasn't really a habit. We thought that there was more of a habit there, but it's exhausting and intense to go live. And if you're only getting tens or hundreds of people to join your live video, that actually doesn't feel as for feeling if you're important, celebrity is getting thousands or millions of views on something else that you creates.
You'd rather spend time doing that for reach. And so it became this thing where it was sort of a nice toe, have occasional thing to do to augment your social media. And on a personal level, a bunch of people felt like it was too hard to keep going on. You would get awkward people in the chat you didn't know and you weren't really having these meaningful conversations.
Interactions and so ones Facebook and Twitter both came out with their great live products. They're sort of clear that New York had itself as an independent stand alone entity wasn't gonna work because so many people were you already had audience on Facebook or Twitter. They didn't feel like they needed a new app, and there wasn't enough to build a new network.
So then took those insights with Seema, and they went and rebuilt House party and said, Wait a sec. What if it's just those private small interactions that really matter? We go live, we create a room, we create a space where we now want to come and hang out and more often. But even House Party while it had a couple moments of real blowing up.
And it's so wonderful to see what it's serving right now in the world. It never quite took off in the way that I hoped it would is Ah, premium social network because getting on video chat for a long time still felt intense. It felt like an extra effort and a lot of us would do it sometimes and then go. I want to do that all the time, but rather their hang out with my friends or just go home and watch TV.
And so House Party never quite became is normalized. I'm optimistic that after shelter in place will look forward to that even more than we used to. But there was a period of time way want House party in the middle of 2016 and there's a period between then and now that it wasn't ever as much of a thing. To get on video with people other than a very occasional basis may be called grandma on DSO, so we've got to find those right things.
You really believe in the world and have the right time for to become normalized and exactly the right product. I mean, even Zoom, you know, was just a great business tool for a long time. With what, 10 million users? Your meeting participants per day. They said hook in March we went from that to 200 million because all of a sudden it became normalized in the only thing you could dio.
And so, you know, sometimes you wait long enough to get lucky with something happening in the world. Hopefully don't get lucky and others tragedy like what's happening right now. But no, you kind of have to wait for your moment.
Speaker 1
Got it in meerkat, you know is one of my least favorite. The Internet moments was we were at south by and the whole meerkat team was staying in my hotel room. Everyone's sleeping on the floor and what nodded? Who was Ah, Friday night It Ah, 10 p.m. And we got a call from the from the business folks that Ah Twitter telling us that did cost.
Ola had decided to turn off meerkats access to the a p I, which meant that the viral growth was going to stop because it was blowing up all day long that ended up having some impact on as well. Building. Building these things on top of somebody else's network typically leads to getting turned off if you actually start to get some traction.
So
Speaker 2
yeah, that's that's that growth hook that that I talked about earlier, that it's so important to understand your growth and to find a durable, sustainable, repeatable channel. Because if you can't, if you can't sustain it through your own engine in your own effort, it is easy to have a Google algorithm change of Facebook algorithm. Change a business development person or CEO decide toe toe shut you down that all of a sudden can take your growth away
Speaker 1
over there. Um, were there some investments that you wanted to make a Greylock? But didn't
Speaker 2
you know, I got really close to the Snapchat team in the early days, just really believing again that this deletion by default was gonna be transformative, and we end up not being able to pull it together at the last minute. And that was quite a big number two because they've gone on and just built an amazing company. Um, you know, I'm not sure the snapshots as big and it sees as much of the opportunities I thought I could back then.
But it's still quite large and quite impressive and really special on what they're doing and changing with lenses and cameras, another stuff in them. Also, the fact that zoom And you know, I met Eric in the very early days. He was actually trying to build more of a consumer product in the 1st 1st days rather than a B two B one, and just thought the technology they were building it was already so much smoother than anything else.
And I wish we had invested. I think we thought business video conferencing was such a sort of tried and trodden and sort of worn path that was gonna be hard to build a new company. And and, you know, I think still, Erickson example, where build better technology than everything else and it just works and you can turn that into ah, really great company.
Speaker 1
You know, it's interesting that, you know, we had Skype and then we got Google hangouts and they were sitting there with the networks. They were sitting there with the I identities of people already and then zoom just came kind out of nowhere on did basically the same thing, right? It wasn't like there was a big psychological insight. There was no big emotional inside.
It was literally just technology, right? And, um, that was kind of hard to predict, I guess, is what you're saying is like even though you saw them, it wasn't that easy. Predict that that was what's gonna happen. I mean, clearly, other investors who invested are saying, Oh, I was so prescient and I could see exactly what was gonna happen.
But
Speaker 2
but But I do think that it sort of does come back to the can you actually build a 10 x better product and truly deliver on that promise? And zoom truly is 10 x better than every other video technology. Google Giant Company has been building video, you know, meeting technology for a long time. It's just never worked as well and smoothly and seamlessly and scale Publius Zoom.
So I do think that there is a path to building the 10 x better product discord was 10 x better than the audio chat products that gamers were using before. But I think if you're gonna do that, you really need to be technology first and riding a new technology wave that makes it work differently and and truly spread differently, like discord was ableto leverage Web RTs for audio streaming within the browser.
That made it easy for me to send you a link and be talking to you within a minute without you having to download anything, Zoom was able to you this cloud technology to make the video streaming so much more efficient and so much faster and get out to the edge is much better than everything else. And so I do think that that you can ride technology waves, but you really have to be a great product as well as a great technology.
Speaker 1
And so, if I'm of early stage founder, how do I know if I've got a 10 X better product there any I mean, I I can logically sale. We've got this, uh, this edge computing with the cloud now that's going toe. Hopefully allow me to build a 10 x better product with Zoom or this Web. RTs is kind of sucky right now, but I anticipate it's going to get good over the next 12 14 months.
I can imagine why that would give me an advantage in 10 x ing the technology of the product experience. But how do you How do you know what one of those things you look for? Because his investors, investors have to also know that it's 10 x better product in order to want to put the money in and take the bet when you're going into crowded marketplaces like Zoom Watts,
Speaker 2
you know, I mean, this is the hard part is that you is a founder and the founding team really have to believe in that premise that now is the time to build something better and that you're so frustrated with the old technology that you can go do it. No. The Zoom founders had the benefit of having build WebEx for many, many years, and so they knew what worked and what didn't and what old architectures word what new architectures could provide.
And again, they started in the consumer space. But then eventually, probably when they're non competes, ran out, pivoted back into two business. It's a market that they knew well that they could do that. Just build a better product with discord. They just they were gamers and they built something that they wanted to use. It was better than the stuff that they had before, and so that was a big shift for them.
They just like this is so much better. And look, we can do this. And when they started using it and share it with their friends, all their friends were like, This is amazing. Why would we ever go back? You know, you just have to know that. And you know, one of the things I often ask founding teams is to use your product. How much do you love your product? Is this embodying your habits? And I think in the consumer world, that's foundational.
And if you don't love your product and use it all the time and haven't shifted over completely for these reasons, it's gonna be really hard for you to convince others, too, Through whatever growth tactics or other things you use,
Speaker 1
right, it's interesting. I mean, discord is a little bit like just UNIX IRC from the nineties, right? Yep, just with emojis. And although bells and whistles we can put on it today, but it's it's a behavior that we saw taking place right at the beginning of connectivity.
Speaker 2
That's right. Um and really, it's not so much that's new behavior is that it done better and done so much more easily than any of the ones that came before. You know, where is like Snapchat, Facebook? Tic tac? Musically, these all really brought new behaviors in the world. So both can work,
Speaker 1
right? Right. And as you think about, ah, some pinnacle things you've seen in the last 12 15 years around social media and social communications, I would love to hear any things that stand out that CEOs did that you thought were Wow, That's incredibly innovative. That really stands out. That was that was a big shift and how things could have gone because of what that founder did.
There's some things that you look back on like that.
Speaker 2
You know, I'm not sure that I ever think of, like, the grand gesture really standing out the ones that stand out still to me the most were the ones who had their heads down building and found their way to a product that they loved and that they got other people around them to love. And so they the examples I keep coming back to you is you know, when I first met Evan, it's Snapchat and he talked about how they started with this thing.
And then they kept showing it Teoh High School Kids and it wasn't quite working and they would make these changes. And then they figured out that screen shotting freak people out. So they added screenshot checking, and then all of a sudden nobody felt comfortable to use it. It was It was the story of how he talked to people, heard what their objections were heard with.
Their challenges were went and build features that tried to solve those, gave it back to them and kept that tight narrative loop. And that sort of talking to customers. Being your best customer is really what, what made it work when I met the musically folks and the found was actually in his late thirties and had a young child, and the majority of his yearly users were 13 15 16 18.
We're building musically, but they had a wee chat group set up, and they were talking to them every day, asking them questions, sending them mock ups, getting feedback. What would make you switch from Instagram to use this. What else do you want us to do? Hey, what were they would send them videos they were trying to make and say, Hey, I commit the capture tool.
Do this. It would be amazing. And there was in such constant communication with their customers. That is what me to take off. And I think that is the the real secret.
Speaker 1
And really, it's the emotional tenor of that CEO to be able to maintain those conversations and to realize that the product you have now isn't quite working you thought was right. Last week is still not right this week, and you need to keep being humble. You need to maintain this nice balance between believing in yourself, believing in your product of believing in the mission, but also being relentlessly skeptical that you've nailed it.
And that's a difficult emotional place for people. If there's a riel facility that Eric and others have shown in in balancing those two things, do you do find that personality type in these CEOs that are successful this way?
Speaker 2
Yeah, I mean, I think that that's ah really important secret, especially in in social is your product is never good enough. You never harboring enough of the trends, and you have to keep searching for what really moves people. You have to keep building the features that do that and keep understanding that growth hooks and the reasons that somebody uses your product and spreads it because you're so dependent on people using it meaningfully in their lives all the time.
On a repeat basis, you really need to keep changing and people keep changing, and so products have to change to. And I think that's a really important thing to understand. And as you go from your earliest adopters to your later adopters to the early majority, you also have to understand that like it has to get simpler and it has to get dumbed down.
And the on boarding process has to get a lot more robust in order to get more and more people on it. And great products have to evolve that way as well.
Speaker 1
That's been one of the strengths of Facebook is this. It's like a shark constantly swimming forward, constantly experimenting and changing every feature on the on all of their products. In that mentality to constantly Iterating is stayed with them all these years despite the fact that they're so big now, um, you know, seeing founders who don't have that approach trying to get into social media.
I just don't feel like there's a good personality fit there. I mean, you look a at vine. Vine was tic tac before tic tac, right? Yes. And yet why didn't why didn't find go? Why? Why wasn't vine tick talk to you? Do you have a few reasons that you could point to their
Speaker 2
Yeah, one of the things that was unique about musically because there's really why wasn vine musically because musically got big, Then it got sold. Then it got even further invested in to make tic tac, which is a phenomenon now on. We could even talk about what changed between musically and tick talk to make it a true phenomenon, but with fine.
There were six seconds long and a couple people got so good so early at making things really, really funny that it felt very hard for most people to create anything. And so vine very quickly moved in a world where there were a few great creators and a lot of watchers and very few other creators or sharers. And so it became a media network more than anything, musically became a lip sinking product, where it was actually pretty easy for anybody to make something that felt pretty good.
Just like Instagram let you make a photo that felt pretty good in the earliest days of Instagram. With musically, you could put on the song you like and just sing into the camera, and it looked more professional or more fun than any other video you might have made to record your life. Just the music soundtrack changes everything. There were 15 2nd samples, and they quickly became, you know, in partnership with all the music labels.
Speaker 1
And so and so you're saying that the original musically features were instead of six seconds with vine. It was 15 seconds, and they started the community to do lip sinking, which guided a certain social behaviour within the community, which turned out to be an easier thing for more creators to do better at which is what made the difference.
So they narrowed down the types of content they wanted people to make around lips thinking music, and by narrowing, they actually created a whiter, hotter center to then launch from Is that is that part of the story?
Speaker 2
Yeah, but But where you say narrowing, I would say, actually, just enabling people to make something that was better because it actually just had a soundtrack. And so a lot of people, the simplest thing you could do when you have a soundtrack is just to a lip sync. There were a lot of people that were also trying to make, you know, fun videos of life for other things.
But when you have a good song underneath, uneven, mediocre video content makes the whole experience much better now. Part of the reason that musically didn't get as big as Aziz Tic Tac is right now on its own without selling the bike dance is because the music soundtracks and the early lip sinking use cases actually did become somewhat narrowing where most people were doing lip syncs.
And they wanted people to be doing comedy and dancing and funny things and educational things and all of these other types of content. But because soundtrack made people think about lip sinking, too many people actually lips seat, part of what the changed tic TAC did they rebranded it? They did pay hundreds of millions of dollars. And a lot of that was giving different influencers toe create different types of content on the tic TAC.
But they were able to show all these examples of things that weren't lip syncs. And they're actually algorithms Make sure that you don't see a lot of lip syncs videos right now. And so all of a sudden they were able to change the mix of the content that people viewed and people were inspired by. People did what other people were doing to be a much broader mix.
And that's what sort of helped spawn Tic Tac to be. The massive phenomenon that is is today. So elevating the early videos on musically with soundtrack We'll both helped them get, you know, break out in a way that fine didn't but then also became just enough of a drag that it had to flip into this other Southern model with Tic tac, which was a massive reinvestment.
But it's gonna pay off in spades.
Speaker 1
Yeah, I mean, this is something I feel like founders make a mistake on all the time, and there were several social networks that we had 30 50 million people before Facebook ever launched. Facebook comes in and says We're just two in colleges, really narrow market. But that ended up allowing them to use real identities first, which then allowed them to springboard into owning the whole space.
You see the same thing with fiber, you know, the marketplace where they said everything for $5. They really restricted it. They narrowed the focus until it was a white hot center around just things for $5. And now, of course, $5 more. You know, they have now expanded it over the last 68 years and then musically ended up doing the same thing, saying No, let's do lip sinking instead of doing everything and then that got them to get big enough so that they could then be a springboard to.
Then go do everything. And it's really hard as a founder toe. Decide to narrow your focus, to limit or guide your community or culture onto a specific thing, or look a twitch right, which came out of Justin TV. Justin TV was everything, and then they found one narrow niche around the gaming and then they folk, they they actually went from broad, too narrow.
And then that narrowness is what gave them their their real growth. And so sometimes narrowness can really help. You just have to know when to broaden it. And I remember having a debate with Bill Gurley at a dinner. It was very loud, vociferous where he was claiming that Facebook should stay focused on colleges into classifieds and, you know, use books and everything for for colleges.
And that was their best way. And my argument was like, No, that they need to flip out of colleges and go after everything. But it's It's a matter of the timing of when they're going to do that. And so this this narrow focus can be very, very helpful for companies at the beginning. And it's and it's hard to do because you want to take the whole thing.
And there's a lot of venture people who say, Well, that's not exciting. Why would I just want to do lip sinking? That's stupid. That's too small. Why would I just want to do colleges that's too small? But in the end, as you said, you've got to find that that white hot center where you've got a few people who you're serving their needs 100% and then expand from there.
Speaker 2
Absolutely, absolutely. It's really finding that early group that doesn't just use your product but really uses. It depends on it brings into their lives in a super meaningful way. And once you have that, now you have a base that you have a chance to build from and replicate and and keep expanding. And we're seeing that in discord right now, which is the gamer use Case was so fundamental to get it as big as it is.
But a lot of people now aren't gamers that air using discord, and the product has to change a little bit to serve those people while not alienating that core base of gamers. Aziz. Well, and you know, if it really wants toe to help a lot more people connect, you know. And so that's always a trade off is to build a giant gaming business. Or do you build something that that's even bigger?
Speaker 1
Yeah, well, Josh, this has been a fantastic conversation. As always, I love talking with your buddy. I love thinking about these things with you. It's great fun. Thank you. Thanks. Thanks so
Speaker 2
much for having me. This was awesome.