This is Kristen O'Brien and you're listening to the nfx podcast for founders of social media and communication startups. The last eight years have been an Ice Age 2002 to 2012 was the Golden Era bringing us companies like Facebook Twitter Instagram LinkedIn Poshmark slack and zoom and 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 Helman, 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 Josh you and I have known each other for over a decade. You've been want to Silicon Valley's top social media and Communications experts for over 20 years. You were in the product management engineering inside of realnetworks. One of the first video Communications tools up in Seattle, right? They acquired Philip rosedale's video Codec then he went on to build second life. Then you are at LinkedIn at the beginning there and product and Engineering Facebook product Twitter product and then most recently at Robin Hood in product and then
Of course, you're an investor in Tick-Tock and in between, of course, you're a general partner Greylock right for eight years investing in social media and Communications companies including medium Discord meerkat / 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 thought it would be a great time to
to to dig in to get your perspective on all things social Communications. What's the general Arc of the timeline of social media and Communications tool take us back to the beginning and bring us to the present and maybe if you could drop in some of the Frameworks you use to understand where things are today would be super helpful here. Just hearing you talk about this stuff as always a pleasure. 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 90s.
We're 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 realize they could set things up for themselves. I was actually interning at a company that was called Homestead. 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 build 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.
It could find out who you were what you were thinking about this then turned into blogging. We're 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 to 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 threw an online presence without ever having met them in the real world. AOL had chat rooms where a lot of people were hanging out and that was sort of the early Genesis of what
In the city of like 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 as who you were online go through the internet bust blogging and everything are still growing. Aol's already starting to fade and a bunch of people said wait a sec. What if the internet present and the real world presents are the same they can be one you can actually put your real self online. If you remember back then like a resume was something you only did when you were looking for a job and Reid Hoffman had the idea that it
like what if your resume is a living breathing thing that represents you online that people can find you all the time. So it's not like you're searching for a job is still have your resume online and that was sort of the Genesis of LinkedIn and then it became that and your Professional Network and monster which was the largest job site at the time only had resumes of people who are looking for jobs and all of a sudden LinkedIn had the online Professional Profile of every single person in the world, you know, now who's working or not everybody but almost what was this idea Friendster came out and said hey if you want
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 seems kind of neat. Maybe you could introduce me to her. It eases the burden for the person in the middle. And so 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.
Bigger than just us personally and these kind of two things the real identity online the ability 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 or you know 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 2003-4 era. That's I joined LinkedIn right at the beginning of 2004.
It was like 15 people and and you know, I remember we were like someday we'll get to a million users on LinkedIn. You know now it's a hundreds and hundreds of millions, but it was this idea that like this actually could work. I haven't dropped out of business school to join LinkedIn and my professor was like social networking will never make money. My friends came and did a class project since I was at LinkedIn, they got a c-minus or C+ or something on the project because he just didn't ever believe it. And and so even in those early days, it was still a big question of like so we have people online the real
He's so what was that matter? And that's where the real change then, you know, especially as Facebook came out and said, hey, we're going to map people's real identities. We're going to do this in these clothes 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 the slightly more public way on Facebook. There's this feature that people have forgotten now called writing on walls. There 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 hey, 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 pattern 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 newsfeed and I really think that was the invention that sort of invented. The next wave of the social internet was the idea of a Newsfeed 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 and that really set us for the next 15 years Twitter, too.
All the bloggers who were writing long Forum posts and gave them 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 and that became the more important place because it's where all the conversation happened for that community of loggers 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 Etc. So that takes us kind of through the end of the mm mm 8 9 and 10 all of a sudden our phones come out. I was in people are like wait a sec this posting man. I self 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 our 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 as 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 them look a little bit better. Then all of a sudden you have this lens into the world because of what everybody sharing on their phones and between that and then Facebook finally figuring out mobile.
This transition from early 2010 to like 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 be the first mobile social network that pioneered a lot of things we know like reactions and other stuff if 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 they be of content that disappeared that wasn't permanently logged was so attractive to them just because it freed them up to change their identity and
Things around it Facebook felt so permanent and Instagram felt so permanent that Snapchat took off in that generation. We had this this massive revolution in at the same time. Obviously mobile messaging became so inordinately popular. You have WhatsApp, you just have regular SMS and iMessage and I was in our ways to communicate now, I've gone so much faster than emails and phone calls and all the things that the past and really I think we've been living this over, you know, since those early days. It kind of I call that like 2010 to 2014 was sort of this Hay Day where
We're all getting on Snapchat Instagram was becoming a thing and Facebook mobile was really finding its way then by the end of that period they all started making money to Facebook mobile really became a very large advertising center of the company. They figured out how to do ads in the news feed that we're in abysmal because member this whole lens is 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 are big. They're making a lot of money things are really working snapchats on its way Twitter's on its
A and that sort of takes us up to like 2014-2015 which I think as of 2020. We're still kind of in a similar state of the world where Snapchat Instagram Twitter. Obviously Facebook things like WhatsApp iMessage in the western world are the dominant media forms. And then if you go to Asia, you can add line cacao and then obviously we chat right and it's amazing that the last six years hasn't seen that much change, right? I mean, there's so much change for for 12 years, and then there's been less
Change how do you read that of our core behaviors evolved because of these tools are the needs being fulfilled the network effects just to great. How do you how do you see the opportunity for for new products coming in? So I think a couple things happen one is through this whole period I mean, I went all the way back to the era of like vlogging and home pages to now we've just been adding people to these networks, you know, it started as you know, there are probably hundreds of bloggers in the in the late 90s to billions of people posting.
Things on social media and 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 Myspace got eclipsed by Facebook that was very early on other things kind of never really got going but you know, they just kept layering on Snapchat filled some needs that Facebook didn't Instagram filled needs at Facebook. Didn't you know Twitter was able to co-exist and you start to get the thick where it's hard to find and film you needs as all these
Platforms got big and bigger and there's eight or twelve apps 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 one for and that gets much harder and we do have Network effects. When you post to 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 or 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 platform people. Don't just post content therefore reactions. They might post it for storage, but they need to share it elsewhere where their networks live. And so you kind of had this interesting thing where our 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, you know, Discord and Tick-Tock in particular that have grown substantially.
Lee over the past five years, but those are late additions to this social media stack, I think rather than signs of things to come and you know for the founders out there that you know, all the nfx content is really for early-stage Founders and you know, 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 whatnot. And let's talk to them for a second. I mean because while we have these big hits like Facebook and Linkedin and zoom, we've literally had thousands of companies that didn't hit it big in the social space because
In the social products are exciting their fun. You want to build them boy wouldn't it be great to have a big Network effect business that you could run 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 1040 a hundred million users never became big. They didn't go anywhere when you are in venture capital Did you look at a hundred or a thousand of these media things here at give us a sense of the scale of how many people are still trying it and then I'd 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 the network effects are preventing new and players from coming in against the incumbent know I probably looked at 6 or 700 new companies in sort of a consumer and media worlds every year when I was in venture capital from 2012 through 2017 where my you know full years as a full-time BC 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 it a new trend. So what I was really
Looking for was sort of three things one is is somebody writing a new trend that I think if they get it right can actually own a new habit formation in the future that it 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 going to 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 me to 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 in sort of four years. I've been thinking about this the remote work remote connection staying at home being just as happy to get on a video call with friends might be enough set of new habits that new things can form that couldn't have before. So new 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 in their board. We have to be really really good at that. We seek will be 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 and wanting 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
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 of traction where there's a small group of people who you're completely solving that for already who swear by your product who say every day I check into this product because it does this thing for me and 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.
you've already converted to your product is if you have that then you have a chance to take that deep meaningful connection with some people and expand that to a lot more then the third thing I do look for is a growth Hook is it's not that you've already figured out how to grow or exploit that but hey 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 there's will grow in 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 I 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 to eat with each other and the tools to connect over gaming. We're pretty terrible you had to share IP addresses people could blast the IP and and sort of, you know, ruin the game for everybody. If you found out some of these IP 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 now seen that with Fortnight and everything else but even in 2015,
It was already becoming much more mainstream and the third was it was really hard to get into those other gaming tools to share and chat Discord did it in the web browser? I can just send you a link and we were voice chatting with in about a minute. It was pretty amazing and back then it was a total aha experience to have a 10 people in a voice chat over just a text that was shared over a link. Sorry that was shared like over SMS. And so so we found that they had a couple hundred thousand daily users, but they weren't just daily users. They were like everyday 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. We're talking about using Discord. Once you get one person. They would share it with all their friends who they gained with all of a sudden like it just kept growing virally and through the use of twitch and other gaming influencers and that really helped Discord 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 sure and this court had
Tried a couple times before I mean Mike Cassidy tried xfire earlier like 12 years earlier or something. 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 in wave and the right way for the viral growth to actually flow through current channels for something to really take off as being stuck when xfire was such a good product when they 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 Niche easier than it could have. 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 you said hey, have you noticed that there haven't been any big social networks in Snapchat in 2011, and it's been four years since anything major happened in Social it might be over and you didn't mean it was over but you're kind of saying hey look we're in a new phase. And so what you're saying is going forward.
What's going to be going forward as 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's this really been the shift. And so when you think about what's going forward for this area, you'd mentioned work stuff. Maybe there's this change to remote work the shelter in place tough, the various changing social behaviors. We're going to have to have as a result of covid. What do you see going forward? I mean, we've already got Zoom now, we've got some new tools that are trying to lock down.
On work like Tandem and other things where do you see the opportunity for early stage Founders going forward? So I think what's really special about what's happening right now is that we are normalizing a lot of behaviors that have sort of been out there for a while like zooms been around for a while and it's been an exceptional Workplace video conferencing 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.
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 and 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 going to learn to be a lot better writer. So we'll get things written.
Down that will make the communication a lot more effective writings hard writing. Well is really hard but I think it's worth spending the time in order to do it and then the video calls in the communication. We have we learn how to make that higher Fidelity and and we have to replace not being in person cuz that's all we can do right now. And then I think by normalizing this the next time it's like, oh you can't meet in person. Hey, let's just do a zoom becomes an affirmative action and something that we do and we almost prefer to do to save everybody the hassle of commuting or moving around and we only do that when it's really
Sure. Now if we're going to do that in a number of ways, we need to connect share content share information like it's going to be transformative and there's so many different pieces of what we used to get in person whether it was a 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 if to figure out how to replicate and bring to our digital tools, I think people will be able to carve out lots of slices of these to become important parts of people's working life and then I think on this
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 our 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, you know for across Humanity. So doing the live stream concert is actually pretty good but it's still not as good is seeing some other people in the crowd sharing it may be sometimes it's an intimate Gathering maybe sometimes it's a maths one and there's so much more to invent for the tools that make that experience feel much better even than it does.
Today, but I've personally been amazed going to someone watching some of the live streams some of these so artists from their homes. It's really brought me there. This Hamilton thing that was done on John krasinski'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 are in San Francisco and Oakland and one person even joined from Hawaii where he lives and I never
I 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 and we're still going at 12:30 and 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. Hey that was actually more fun than I thought. It's going to become normal and we can build great products to help people do this more effectively. And I think it's going to be a huge world of opportunity to build the places and spaces that we go on evenings and another time.
In order to do this, is this what you're talking about when you say that your media is becoming social. Is this an idea that you'd written about you? What I've been thinking about is is social media is sort of drifted away from truly being social with social media. We had gotten to a point where it actually I think is becoming more media. Where what James Courier shares on his Facebook certainly on his Twitter or his LinkedIn is James Courier the media channel, not James Courier the human that I love interacting with and
And you know being with and going back and forth with 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 covid like it's your kind of 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 this
Cord phone calls poker night. Those are real 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.
With in person, but that's so much more powerful than cool. I saw your photo and I double tapped. Right? Right and you've had this recent piece in medium where you're talking about the move toward experiences. This is what you mean these experiences together about poker these experiences together seeing the eyes connecting as real human beings these experiences as opposed to the Instagram experience is like look jumping into this waterfall and Hawaii sort of thing. Yeah, that's right now I'll put a little plug in for tick tock which is I think is somewhere in the middle one of the things I found really profound with tick-tock.
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 were kind of tipping the balance where we're putting the burden on consumers as opposed to the creators.
to make something that's valuable for the people they care about with Tick Tock we flip 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 actually spend 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 we're just capturing to show off what we're doing but it's media that we're creating with our heart and wanting to share and
Wanting to get feedback on know 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 like you go on a trip and you make a collage it says hey Josh James just spent, you know, three days, you know or like six hours over three days sure rating 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 in I would always look at it. Whereas if I just see you slam up a hundred pictures. I'm like, thanks.
I hope you had a great trip. Right? So it brings to humanity. It brings to the time. We spend the life's energies that we spent into the actual media form. That's right, and I can Tick Tock is the beginning of that God and we've got some ideas around things like 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? Yeah, you know, that was just a medium blog. 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 and I was talking to a friend and I was brainstorming all these
Diaz of like how can we come together in this time of remote work and humanity 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 and charged fifty or a hundred dollars per person to join for an hour or two and have a very intimate live video chat experience where you can have one on one conversation and you can know who the other friends are who are sitting there and you can all come.
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 now seen this I wrote this before all this stuff was blowing up. We've now seen I watch Chris Martin and 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. And if you think there's a great room for someone to build products that are that can actually allow people to run.
Things we're seeing that in Fitness to wear a lot of Fitness professionals are starting to run virtual classes and they need tools to run the class charge money know who's there have real interactive experiences while this is going on and no great products yet fully solved that Lunch Buddies was a similar silly idea that I had which was you know, getting food right now is hard either you're going to grocery stores and following very strict social distancing rules or you're trying to get delivery which is getting harder and harder as everybody's trying to get.
Delivery and everything's at capacity. What if we could deliver food to a whole bunch of people and they 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 ten people with even a professional chef now, logistically that may actually be hard to do but I was just trying to think of it. Like how do you bring the community back into these moments of time and then with reply 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.
No, you might put out a question in a meeting and then certain people talk and dominate the meeting you might send something out of her email and the people who are just faster pliers always reply first, and we all know that the first person to reply off and sets a tone for a conversation if you put out a question or a thought in the first version is 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 didn't think about it like in a workplace you can usually get over this because you can grab somebody afterwards.
And say hey, please don't respond. That way we can 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 any 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 at an hour or two later, we will share all the replies all at once so everybody gets to write a thoughtful.
Piece of feedback and and you sort of delay the power of firstness 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 to 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 remote times. I think this would be useful, you know in so many ways and in so many conversations and you know, we got a
Remove the power of being first to make sure that we hear from everybody. So these were just you know ideas. I've been dancing around and they're all about like how do you go find those moments of humanity that we can bring back in and and thoughtfulness and connection? What's what's notable. Of course isn't 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, right? So, 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 to 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 SAS or with e-commerce people are talking about just pure numbers, you know, these are spreadsheet type businesses. Whereas 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 tech space that that you've now been in Campton now for for 20 years, you know, do you find that a lot of people can go with you these conversations you 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, you know, I mean I very much
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 teca 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
Really The Secret of almost everything has been built then 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 perceive the person on the other side and have the human connection Ben Rubin who is a founder of House Party in meerkat is talked so much about the power of live video and how being live and kind of create togetherness when we're not together is
So powerful and house party that hasn't changed that much in, you know, almost two years as a product. He's been blowing up in the time of covid because so many of those architectures that been built and then in Seema and the team built still live and Thrive and that's what makes these proximate so special some people who come to technology or Architects. They think about building cities. They think about planning some people are psychologists and I think about
People but I think these types of humanity need to be Applied Technologies is the 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 than meal gacha. The real product here is the psychological insight and you you know, and I I was in early angel investor and meerkat and help Ben Rubin come over from Israel to the US and you and I invested in meerkat. Let's just talk quickly as I think this is these are useful stories for the founders.
Why do you think meerkat didn't work? What do you think happened with the house party Evolution? And and now it's blowing up now. It's now it's working now. It's growing really quickly. What's the story there? So when I first invested meerkat, if I go back to my b-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 Network's could not support it so you could turn a camera on anywhere and if you could create the Hub the habit of live video this shows the people made that shows that people wanted to tune in to watch you.
Actually build a unique independent Network and the Very earliest days of is 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 been in 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 at 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 dying.
On their phones into the conversation so we had like other people dialing in to talk to the group and it was just amazing social moment that we are 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 this is on meerkat. This was all on meerkat. This is again and of any of the February 2015, right a couple weeks before South by and it was just blowing up they've been out for like two or three weeks at that point. And so, you know we
Did ban 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 audience and then a very small group who could sort of, you know, become New Life 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
Only getting tens or hundreds of people to join your live video that actually doesn't feel as fulfilling of your important celebrity is getting thousands or millions of views on something else that you create. So you'd rather spend time doing that for reach. And so it became this thing where it was sort of a nice to have occasional thing to do to augment your social media on a personal level a bunch of people felt like it was too hard to keep going on. We get awkward people in the chat you didn't know and you weren't really having these meaningful conversations interactions.
And so once Facebook and Twitter both came out with their great life products. It was sort of clear that meerkat itself is an independent Standalone entity wasn't going to work because so many people were already had audience on Facebook or Twitter didn't feel like they needed a new app and there wasn't enough to build a new network. So Ben 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. Can we go live? Can we create a room? We create a space where we now
To come and hang out in 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. You know right now in the world it never quite took off in the way that I hoped. It would is a 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 don't want to do that all the time. I'd rather hang out with my friends or just go home and watch TV and so house party never quite became as
Normalized, I'm optimistic that after shelter in place. We'll look forward to that even more than we used to but there was a period of time, you know, we launched 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 or maybe call Grandma. And so so we 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.
Even Zoom, you know was just a great business tool for a long time with what 10 million users meeting participants per day and 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 do and so, you know, sometimes you wait long enough to get lucky with something happening in the world. Hopefully, you don't get lucky at others tragedy like what's happening right now, but you know, you kind of have to wait for your moment. God is a meerkat. It was one of my least favorite internet moments. Who is we were we were at Southpaw
by and the whole meerkat team was staying in my hotel room every sleeping on the floor and whatnot. And it was a Friday night at 10 p.m. And we got a call from the from the the biz Dev Folks at Twitter telling us that dick costolo had decided to turn off meerkats access to the API 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 build it 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 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 decided to shut you down that all of a sudden can can take your growth away.
However, they're wrong. Were there some Investments that you wanted to make a Greylock, but didn't you know, I got really close to the Snapchat team and the early days just really believing again that this deletion by default was going to be transformative and we end up not being able to pull it together at the last minute and that was a quite a big bummer to me because they've gone on and just built an amazing company, you know, I'm not sure the Snapchats as big and it sees as much the opportunity as I thought I could back then but it's still quite large and
An impressive and really special and what they're doing and changing with lenses and cameras and other stuff and I also look back at zoom and you know, I met Eric and the very early days and I was actually trying to build more of a consumer product in the first first stage rather than a B2 B1 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.
With it was gonna be hard to build a new company and and you know, I think still Erickson example where you build better technology than everything else and it just works and you can turn that into a really great company, you know, it's interesting that you know, we had Skype and then we got Google Hangouts and they were sitting there with the Network's they were sitting there with the identities of people already and then Zoom just came kind of out of nowhere and did basically the same thing right? It wasn't like there was a
Psychological insight there was no big emotional Insight. It was literally just technology, right and 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 going to happen. I mean clearly other investors who invested are saying, oh I was so prescient and I could see exactly what was going to happen. But I do think that it sort of does come back to the can you actually build a 10x better product and truly deliver on that promise and zoom truly is 10x better than every other video technology me Google.
A giant company has been building video meeting technology for long time is just never worked as well and smoothly and seamlessly and scalability as Zoom. So I do think that there is a path to building the 10x better product Discord was 10x better than the audio chat products that Gamers were using before but I think if you're going to do that, you really need to be technology first and riding a new technology wave that makes it work differently and and and truly spread differently like Discord was able to Leverage What?
RTS for audio streaming within the browser. They 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 just Cloud technology to make the video streaming so much more efficient and so much faster and get out to the edges 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. And so if I'm a voluntarily stage founder
How do I know if I've got a 10x better product? Is there any I mean I can let logically say, oh, we've got this this Edge Computing with the cloud now that's going to hopefully allow me to build a 10x better product resume 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 10x thing the technology or the product experience. But how do you how do you know what are those things you look for because there's investors investors have to also know that it's 10x better product in order to want to
Money in the take the bet when you're going into crowded marketplaces like Zoom Watson, you know, I mean, this is the hard part is I think you as 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 built WebEx for many many years. And so they knew what worked and what didn't and what old architectures were and what new architectures could provide and you know again they started in the consumer space.
But then eventually probably when they're non-competes ran out pivoted back into the business and it's a market that they knew well and that they could do they could just build a better product with Discord. They just they were Gamers and they built something that they wanted to use that was better than the 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 shared it with their friends, all their friends were like, this is amazing. Why would we ever go back to you? Just have to know that and you know what?
Things I often ask founding teams is use your product. How much do you love your product? Just 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 going to be really hard for you to convince others to through whatever growth tactics are other things you use right? It's interesting. I mean Discord is a little bit like just Unix IRC from the 90s, right? Yeah, just with Emojis and
Although bells and whistles we can put on it today, but it's a behavior that we saw taking place right at the beginning of connectivity. That's right. And it's really it's not so much that it's a new behaviors that it's done better and done so much more easily than any of the ones that came before, you know, whereas like Snapchat Facebook Tick-Tock musically, these all really brought new behaviors into the world. So both can work. Right, right. And as you think about 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. You know, I'm not sure that I ever think of like the grand gesture or really standing out the ones that stand out still to me the most
or 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 like 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 to high school kids and it wasn't quite working and they would make these changes and then they figured out that screenshotting freak people out. So they added screenshot checking and then all of a sudden nobody felt comfortable to use it.
Is it was the story of how he talked to people heard what their objections were heard with their challenges were went and build features to try to solve those gave it back to them and kept that tight iterative Loop and and that sort of talking to customers being your best customer is really what made it work when I met the musically folks. The founder was actually in his late 30s and had a young child and the majority of his yearly users were.
13 15 16 18 who 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. You know, what would make you switch from Instagram to use this? What else do you want us to do? Hey, what were you they would send them videos? They were trying to make and say hey if you made the capture tool do this it would be amazing and they were just in such constant communication with their customers. That is what made it take off and I think that is the
The real secret and 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 and believing in your product and believing in the mission, but also being relentlessly skeptical that you've nailed it and that's a difficult emotional place for people. It's there's a real
Leti 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? Yeah. I mean, I think that that's a real important secret especially in Social is your product is never good enough, you're never harboring enough of the trends and you have to keep searching for what really moves people and you have to keep building the features that do that and keep understanding the growth Hooks and the reasons that somebody uses your
And spreads it because you're so dependent on people using it meaningfully in their lives all the time on a repeated basis. You really need to keep changing and people keep changing and so products have to change too 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 onboarding process has to get a lot more robust in order to get more and more people on it and
eight products have to evolve that way as well. That's been one of the strengths of Facebook is this like a shark constantly swimming forward constantly experimenting and changing every feature on the on all of their products and that mentality to constantly iterate is stayed with them all these years despite the fact that they're so big now and 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 at that vine. I mean Vine was Tick Tock before Tick Tock, right? Yes.
yet why didn't why didn't Vine go why wasn't Vine tick talk to you do you have a few reasons that you could point to there yeah one of the things that was unique about musically because it's really why it wasn't by musically because musically got big then it got sold then it got even further invested in to make Tick Tock which is a phenomenon now and we can even talk about what changed between musically and Tick Tock to make it a true phenomenon but with Vine Pete they were six seconds long and a couple people got so good so early at making things really
be really funny that it felt very hard for most people to create anything and so Vine very quickly moved into a world where there were a few great creators and a lot of Watchers and very few other creators are sharers and so it became a media Network more than anything musically became a lip syncing 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 a 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 and just the music soundtrack changes everything there were 15 seconds samples and they quickly became you know in partnership with all the music labels. So and so and so you're saying that the the original musically features were instead of six seconds with Vine. It was 15 seconds and they started the community to do lip-syncing which guided a certain social behavior Within
In 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 narrow down the types of content. They want to people to make around lip-synching music and by narrowing they actually created a wider hotter Center. So then launched from is that is that part of the story? 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 and you have a soundtrack is just do
I think there were a lot of people that were also trying to make fun videos of life or other things but when you have a good song underneath an even mediocre video content makes the whole experience much better now part of the reason that musically didn't get as big as Tick Tock is right now on its own without selling the bike dance is because the music soundtracks and the early lip-syncing use cases actually did become somewhat narrowing where most people were doing lip syncs and they wanted people to be doing comedy and dance
eating and funny things and educational things and all of these other types of content but because soundtrack made people think about lip-synching to many people actually lip-synched part of what the change to tick tock did they rebranded it they did pay hundreds of millions of dollars and a lot of that was getting different influencers to create different types of content on The Tick Tock but they were able to show all these examples of things that weren't lip-syncs and and they're actually algorithms make sure that you don't see a lot of lip sync
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 and people did what other people were doing to be a much broader mix and that's what sort of helped spawn Tick-Tock to be the massive phenomenon that it is today. So elevating the early videos on musically with soundtrack will both help them get, you know, break out in a way that vine didn't but then also became just enough of a drag that it had to flip into this other.
This other model with Tick-Tock, which was a massive reinvestment, but it's going to pay off in Spades. 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 doing 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 Fiverr, you know, the marketplace where they said everything.
$5.00 they really restricted it. They they narrowed the focus until it was a white-hot center around just things for five dollars. And now of course five dollars or more, you know, they've now expanded it over the last six eight years and then musically ended up doing the same thing saying no, let's do lip-syncing instead of doing everything and then that got them to get big enough so that they could then be a springboard to them go to everything and it's really hard as a Founder to decide to narrow your focus to limit or guide your community or culture on to us.
Pacific thing or look at 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 float. They actually went from broad to narrow and then that narrowness is what gave them their their real growth. And so sometimes naren is can really help you just have to know when to broaden it and I remember having a debate with Bill girly at a dinner that was very loud vociferous where he was claiming that Facebook should stay focused on colleges and do classifieds and you know use books and
thing for for colleges and that was their best way and my argument was like know that they need to flip out of colleges and go after everything but 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 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-syncing 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 white-hot Center where you've got a few people who you're serving their needs a hundred percent and
then expand from there absolutely absolutely it's really finding that early group that doesn't just use your product but really uses it depends on it brings another 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 are using Discord and the product has to change a little bit
The serve those people while not alienating that core base of Gamers as well and and you know, if it really wants to help a lot more people connect, you know, and so that's, you know always a trade-off is to build a giant gaming business or do you build something that's even bigger. Yeah. Well Josh, this has been a fantastic conversation as always. I love talking with you buddy. I love thinking about these things with you. It's great fun. Thank you. Thanks. Thanks so much for having me. This was awesome.
