The following is a conversation with Kevin Systrom, co-founder and longtime CEO of Instagram,
including for six years after Facebook's acquisition of Instagram. This is the Lex
Friedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now,
here's my conversation with Kevin Systrom. At the risk of asking the Rolling Stones
to play satisfaction, let me ask you about the origin story of Instagram.
Sure. So maybe some context. You, like we were talking about offline, grew up in Massachusetts,
learned computer programming there, liked to play Doom II, worked at a vinyl record store,
then you went to Stanford, turned down Mr. Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, went to Florence to study
photography. Those are just some random, beautiful, impossibly brief glimpses into a life. So let me
ask again, can you take me through the origin story of Instagram? Give me that context.
Yeah, you basically set it up. All right. So we have a fair amount of time. So I'll go into some
detail. But basically what I'll say is Instagram started out of a company actually called Bourbon
and it was spelled B-U-R-B-N. And a couple of things were happening at the time. So if we zoom
back to 2010, not a lot of people remember what was happening in the.com world then. But check-in
apps were all the rage. So what's a check-in app? Gawalla, Foursquare, Hot Potato. So I'm at a place,
I'm going to tell the world that I'm at this place. That's right. What's the idea behind
this kind of app, by the way? You know what, I'm going to answer that, but through what Instagram
became and why I believe Instagram replaced them. So the whole idea was to share with the world what
you were doing specifically with your friends. But there were all the rage and Foursquare was
getting all the press and I remember sitting around saying, hey, I want to build something,
but I don't know what I want to build. What if I built a better version of Foursquare?
And I asked myself, why don't I like Foursquare or how could it be improved?
And basically I sat down and I said, I think that if you have a few extra features, it might be
enough, one of which happened to be posting a photo of where you were. There were some others.
It turns out that wasn't enough. My co-founder joined, we were going to attack Foursquare
and the likes and try to build something interesting. And no one used it. No one cared
because it wasn't enough. It wasn't different enough. So one day we were sitting down and we
asked ourselves, okay, to come to Jesus moment, are we going to do this startup? And if we're
going to, we can't do what we're currently doing. We have to switch it up. So what do people love
the most? So we sat down and we wrote out three things that we thought people uniquely loved
about our product that weren't in other products. Photos happen to be the top one. So sharing a
photo of what you were doing, where you were at the moment was not something products let you do,
really. Facebook was like, post an album of your vacation from two weeks ago, right? Twitter allowed
you to post a photo, but their feed was primarily text and they didn't show the photo in line.
Or at least I don't think they did at the time. So even though it seems totally stupid and obvious
to us now, at the moment then, posting a photo of what you were doing at the moment was like,
not a thing. So we decided to go after that because we'd noticed that people who used our
service, the one thing they happened to like the most was posting a photo. So that was the beginning
of Instagram. And yes, like we went through and we added filters and there's a bunch of stories
around that. But the origin of this was that we were trying to be a check-in app, realized that
no one wanted another check-in app. It became a photo sharing app, but one that was much more
about what you're doing and where you are. And that's why when I say I think we've replaced
check-in apps, it became a check-in via a photo rather than saying your location and then optionally
adding a photo. When you were thinking about what people like, from where did you get a sense that
this is what people like? You said we sat down, we wrote some stuff down on paper. Where is that
intuition that seems fundamental to the success of an app like Instagram? Where does that idea,
where does that list of three things come from exactly? Only after having studied machine learning
now for a couple of years. You have understood yourself. I've started to make connections.
We can go into this later. But obviously, the connections between machine learning and the
human brain I think are stretched sometimes. At the same time, being able to back prop and being
able to look at the world, try something, figure out how you're wrong, how wrong you are, and then
nudge your company in the right direction based on how wrong you are. It's like a fascinating
concept. We didn't know we were doing it at the time, but that's basically what we were doing.
We put it out to call it 100 people and you would look at their data. You would say,
what are they sharing? What resonates, what doesn't resonate? We think they're going to resonate with
X, but it turns out they resonate with Y. Okay, shift the company towards Y. It turns out if you
do that enough quickly enough, you can get to a solution that has product market fit. Most companies
fail because they sit there and either their learning rate is too slow. They sit there and
they're adamant that they're right, even though the data is telling them they're not right.
Or they're learning rates too high and they wildly chase different ideas and they never
actually set on one where they don't groove. I think when we sat down and we wrote out those
three ideas, what we were saying is, what are the three possible, whether they're local or global
maxima in our world, that users are telling us they like because they're using the product that
way? It was clear people liked the photos because that was the thing they were doing.
And we just said, okay, what if we just cut out most of the other stuff and focus on that thing?
And then it happened to be a multi-billion-dollar business and it's that easy, by the way.
Yeah, I guess so. Well, nobody ever writes about neural networks that miserably failed.
So this particular neural network succeeded. Oh, they fail all the time, right?
Yeah, but nobody writes about... The default state is failing.
Yes. When you said the way people are using the app, is that the loss function for this
neural network or is it also self-report? Do you ever ask people what they like or do you have to
track exactly what they're doing, not what they're saying?
I once made a Thanksgiving dinner and it was for relatives and I like to cook a lot.
Okay. And I worked really hard on picking the specific dishes and I was really proud
because I had planned it out using a Gantt chart and it was ready on time and everything was hot.
I don't know if you're a big Thanksgiving guy, but the worst thing about Thanksgiving
is when the turkey's cold and some things are hot and something... Anyway.
You had a Gantt chart. Did you actually have a chart?
Oh, yeah. Yeah, omniplanet. Fairly expensive Gantt chart thing that I think maybe 10 people
have purchased in the world, but I'm one of them and I use it for recipe planning only around big
holidays. That's brilliant, by the way. Do people do this kind of... Overengineering?
It's not over... It's just engineering. It's planning. Thanksgiving is a complicated
set of events with some uncertainty with a lot of things going on. You should be able...
You should be planning in this way. There should be a chart. It's not over...
I mean, so what's funny is brief aside, I love cooking, I love food, I love coffee,
and I've spent some time with some chefs who know their stuff and they always just take out a piece
of paper and just work backwards in rough order. It's never perfect, but rough order.
It's just like, oh, that makes sense. Why not just work backwards from the end goal and put in
some buffer time? I probably over-specified it a bit using a Gantt chart, but the fact that you
can do it, it's what professional kitchens roughly do. They just don't call it a Gantt chart, or at
least I don't think they do. Anyway, I was telling a story about Thanksgiving. Here's the thing.
I'm sitting down, we have the meal, and then I got to know Ray Dalio fairly well over maybe
the last year of Instagram. One thing that he kept saying was, feedback is really hard to get
honestly from people. I sat down after dinner, I said, guys, I want feedback. What was good
and what was bad? What's funny is literally everyone just said everything was great.
I personally knew I had screwed up a handful of things, but no one would say it.
Can you imagine now not something as high stakes as Thanksgiving dinner? Thanksgiving dinner,
it's not that high stakes, but you're trying to build a product and everyone knows you left
your job for it and you're trying to build it out and you're trying to make something wonderful
and it's yours. You designed it. Now try asking for feedback and know that you're giving this to
your friends and your family. People have trouble giving hard feedback. People have trouble saying,
I don't like this or this isn't great or this is how it's failed me. In fact,
you usually have two classes of people, people who just won't say bad things. You can literally
say to them, please tell me what you hate most about this and they won't do it. They'll try,
but they won't. The other classes of people are just negative period about everything and it's
hard to parse out what is true and what isn't. My rule of thumb with this is you should always ask
people, but at the end of the day, it's amazing what data will tell you. That's why with whatever
project I work on, even now, collecting data from the beginning on usage patterns, so engagement,
how many days of the week do they use it? How many, I don't know, if we were to go back to
Instagram, how many impressions per day? Is that growing? Is that shrinking? Don't be overly
scientific about it because maybe you have 50 beta users or something, but what's fascinating
is that data doesn't lie. People are very defensive about their time. They'll say,
oh, I'm so busy. I'm sorry. I didn't get to use the app. I'm just, but I don't know,
you're posting on Instagram the whole time. At the end of the day, at Facebook, there was
before time spent, became this loaded term there. The idea that people's currency in their lives
is time and they only have a certain amount of time to give things, whether it's friends or family
or apps or TV shows or whatever, there's no way of inventing more of it, at least not that I know of.
If they don't use it, it's because it's not great. The moral of the story is you can ask
all you want, but you just have to look at the data and data doesn't lie.
I mean, there's metrics. Data can obscure the key insight if you're not careful.
Time spent in the app, there's so many metrics you can put at this, and they will give you
totally different insights, especially when you're trying to create something that doesn't
obviously exist yet. Measuring maybe why you left the app or measuring special moments of happiness
that will make sure you return to the app or moments of happiness that are long lasting
versus dopamine short term, all of those things. I suppose in the beginning, you can just get away
with just asking the question, which features are used a lot? Let's do more of that. How hard was
the decision? Maybe you can tell me what Instagram looked in the beginning, but how hard was it to
make pictures the first class citizen? That's a revolutionary idea. Whatever point Instagram
became this feed of photos, that's quite brilliant. Plus, I also don't know when this happened,
but they're all shaped the same. I have to tell you why. That's the interesting part.
Why is that? A couple of things. One is, you're right, you can overinterpret data. Imagine
trying to fly a plane by staring at a single metric like airspeed. You don't know if you're
going up or down. It correlates with up or down, but you don't actually know. It will never help
you land the plane. Don't stare at one metric. It turns out you have to synthesize a bunch of
metrics to know where to go, but it doesn't lie. If your airspeed is zero, unless it's not working,
right? If it's zero, you're probably going to fall out of the sky. Generally, you look around
and you have the scan going, and you're just asking yourself, is this working or is this
not working? But people have trouble explaining how they actually feel. It's about synthesizing
both of them. Then Instagram, we were talking about revolutionary moment where the feed became
square photos, basically. Photos first and then square photos.
It was clear to me that the biggest, so I believe the biggest companies are founded
when enormous technical shifts happen. The biggest technical shift that happened right
before Instagram was founded was the advent of a phone that didn't suck, the iPhone. In retrospect,
we're like, oh my god, the first iPhone that almost wasn't that good. But compared to everything
else at the time, it was amazing. By the way, the first phone that had an incredible camera
that could do as well as the point-and-shoot you might carry around was the iPhone 4, and that
was right when Instagram launched. We looked around and we said, what will change because
everyone has a camera in their pocket? It was so clear to me that the world of social networks before
it was based in the desktop and sitting there and having a link you could share.
And that wasn't going to be the case. The question is, what would you share if you were
out and about in the world if not only did you have a camera that fit in your pocket,
but by the way, that camera had a network attached to it that allowed you to share
instantly. That seemed revolutionary. And a bunch of people saw it at the same time. It wasn't just
Instagram. There were a bunch of competitors. The thing we did, I think, was not only, well,
we focused on two things. So we wrote down those things, we circled photos, and we said,
I think we should invest in this. But then we said, what sucks about photos? One, they look like crap,
right? At least back then. Now, my phone takes pretty great photos, right? Back then,
they were blurry, not so great, compressed, right? Two, it was really slow, really slow
to upload a photo. And I'll tell a fun story about that and explain to you why they're all
the same size and square as well. And three, man, if you wanted to share a photo on different
networks, you had to go to each of the individual apps and select all of them and upload individually.
And so we're like, all right, those are the pain points, we're going to focus on that. So one,
instead of because they weren't beautiful, we're like, why don't we lean into the fact that they're
not beautiful? And I remember studying in Florence, my photography teacher gave me this whole good
camera. And I'm not sure everyone knows what a whole good camera is, but they're these old school
plastic cameras. I think they're produced in China at the time. And I want to say the original ones
like from the 70s or the 80s or something, they're supposed to be like $3 cameras for the
every person. They took nice medium format films, large, large negatives, but they kind of blurred
the light and they kind of like light leaked into the side. And there was this whole resurgence
where people looked at that and said, oh my God, this is a style, right? And I remember using that
in Florence and just saying, well, why don't we just like lean into the fact that these photos
suck and make them suck more, but in an artistic way. And it turns out that had product market
fit. People really liked that. They were willing to share their not so great photos if they looked
not so great on purpose. The second part. That's where the filters come into the picture. So
computational modification of photos to make them look extra crappy to where it becomes art.
Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, add light leaks, add like an overlay filter and make them more
contrasty than they should be. The first filter we ever produced was called X-Pro 2.
And I designed it while I was in this small little bed and breakfast room in Toto Santos,
Mexico, was trying to take a break from the bourbon days. And I remember saying to my co-founder,
I just need like a week to reset. And that was on that trip, worked on the first filter because
I said, you know, I think I can do this. And I literally iterated one by one over the RGB values
in the array that was the photo and just slightly shifted. Basically, there was a function of R,
function of G, function of B that just shifted them slightly. It was in rocket science. And it
turns out that actually made your photo look pretty cool. It just mapped from one color space to
another color space. And it was simple, but it was really slow. I mean, if you applied a filter,
I think it used to take two or three seconds to render. Only eventually would I figure out
how to do it on the GPU. And I'm not even sure it was a GPU, but it was using OpenGL. But anyway,
I would eventually figure that out. And then it would be instant, but it used to be really slow.
By the way, anyone who's watching or listening, it's amazing what you can get away with in a startup
as long as the product outcome is right for the user. Like, you can be slow, you can be terrible,
you can be as long as you have product market fit, people will put up with a lot. And then the
question is just about compressing, making it more performant over time so that they get that
product market fit instantly. So fascinating, because there's some things where those three
those three seconds would make or break the app. But some things you're saying not. It's hard to
know when, you know, it's what it's the problem Spotify solved, making streaming like work.
And like delays in listening to music is a huge negative, even like slight delays.
But here you're saying, I mean, how do you know when those three seconds are okay? Or you just
kind of have to try it out? Because to me, my intuition would be those three seconds would
kill the app. Like I would try to do the OpenGL thing. Right. So I wish I were that smart at the
time. I wasn't, I just knew how to do what I knew how to do, right? And I decided, okay, like, why
don't I just iterate over the values and change them? And what's interesting is that compared
to the alternatives, no one else used OpenGL. Right. So everyone else was doing that the dumb
way. And in fact, they were doing it at a high resolution. Now comes in the small resolution
that we'll talk about. By choosing 512 pixels by 512 pixels, which I believe it was at the time,
we iterated over a lot fewer pixels than our competitors who were trying to do these enormous
output like images. So instead of taking 20 seconds, I mean, three seconds feels pretty good,
right? So on a relative basis, we were winning like a lot. Okay. So that's answer number one.
Answer number two is we actually focused on latency in the right places. So we did this really
wonderful thing when you uploaded. So the way it would work is, you know, you'd take your phone,
you'd take the photo, and then you'd go to the, you'd go the edit screen where you would caption it.
And on that caption screen, you'd start typing, you'd think, okay, like, what's a clever caption?
And I said to Mike, hey, when I worked on the Gmail team, you know what they did? When you typed
in your username or your email address, even before you've entered in your password,
like the chant probability, once you enter in your username that you're going to actually sign in,
is extremely high. So when I just start loading your account in the background, not like sending
it down to the desktop, that would be a security issue. But like, load it into memory on the
server, like get it ready, prepare it. I always thought that was so fascinating and unintuitive.
And I was like, Mike, why don't we just do that? But like, we'll just upload the photo and like,
assume you're going to upload the photo. And if you don't forget about it, we'll delete it, right?
So what ended up happening was people would caption their photo, they'd press done, or upload,
and you'd see this little progress bar just go, it was lightning fast, okay? We were no faster
than anyone else at the time. But by choosing 512 by 512 and doing it in the background, it almost
guaranteed that it was done by the time you captioned. And everyone when they used it was
like, how the hell is this thing so fast? But we were slow, we just hit the slowness. It wasn't
like, these things are just like, it's a shelly game, you're just hiding the latency. That mattered
to people, like a lot. And I think that, so you were willing to put up with a slow filter,
if it meant you could share it immediately. And of course, we added sharing options with
which let you distribute it really quickly. That was the third part. So latency matters,
but relative to what? And then there's some like tricks you get around to just hiding the
latency. Like I don't know if Spotify starts downloading the next song eagerly, I'm assuming
they do. There are a bunch of ideas here that are not rocket science that really help.
And all of that was stuff you were explicitly having a discussion about,
like those designs and argument, you were having like arguments, discussions.
I'm not sure it was arguments. I mean, I'm not sure if you've met my co-founder Mike,
but he's a pretty nice guy. He's very reasonable. And we both just saw eye to eye and we're like,
yeah, just like, make this fast, early seem fast. It'll be great. I mean, honestly,
I think the most contentious thing, and he would say this to you initially,
was I was on an iPhone 3G. So like the not so fast one, and he had a brand new iPhone 4.
I was cheap. Nice. And his feed loaded super smoothly. Like when he would scroll from photo
to photo, buttery smooth, right? But on my phone, every time you got to a new photo, it was like
kuchunk, allocate memory, like all this stuff, right? I was like, Mike, that's unacceptable.
He's like, oh, come on, man, just like upgrade your phone. Basically, you didn't actually say
that. He's nicer than that. But I could tell he wished like I would just stop being cheap and
just get a new phone. But what's funny is we actually sat there working on that little detail
for a few days before launch. And that polished experience plus the fact that uploading seemed
fast for all these people who didn't have nice phones, I think meant a lot because far too often
you see teams focus not on performance, they focus on what's the cool computer science problem they
can solve, right? Can we scale this thing to a billion users and they've got like 100, right?
Yeah. You talked about loss function. So I want to come back to that. But like the loss function
is like, do you provide a great, happy, magical, whatever experience for the consumer? And listen,
if it happens to involve something complex and technical, then great. But it turns out,
I think most of the time, those experiences are just sitting there waiting to be built with like
not that complex solutions. But everyone is just like so stuck in their own head that they have to
over engineer everything. And then they forget about the easy stuff. And you know, so maybe just
flip the loss function there is you're trying to minimize the number of times there's unpleasant
experience, right? Like the one you mentioned where when you go to the next photo, it freezes for a
little bit. So it's almost as opposed to maximizing pleasure, it's probably easier to minimize the
number of like the friction. Yeah. And as we all know, you just make the pleasure negative and then
minimize everything. So we're mapping this all back to neural networks. But actually,
can I say one thing on that, which is, I don't know a lot about machine learning, but I feel
like I've tried studying a bunch. That whole idea of reinforcement learning and planning out more
than the greedy single experience, I think is is the closest you can get to like ideal product
design thinking, where you're not saying, hey, like, can we have a great experience just this
one time? But like, what is the right way to onboard someone? What series of experiences
correlate most with them hanging on long term, right? So not just saying, oh, did the photo load
slowly a couple times or did they get a great photo at the top of their feed? But like, what are
the things that are going to make this person come back over the next week, over the next month?
And as a product designer, asking yourself, okay, I want to optimize, not just minimize
bad experiences in the short run, but like, how do I get someone to engage over the next month?
And I'm not going to claim at all that I thought that way at all at the time, because I certainly
didn't. But if I were going back and giving myself any advice, it would be thinking, what are those,
what are those second order effects that you can create? And it turns out having your friends on
the service is an enormous win. So starting with a very small group of people that produce content
that you wanted to see, which we did, we seeded the community very well, I think, ended up mattering.
Yeah, you said that community is one of the most important things. So it's from a metrics
perspective, from maybe a philosophy perspective, building a certain kind of community within the
app. See, I wasn't sure what exactly you meant by that when I've heard you say that. Maybe you
can elaborate, but as I understand now, it can literally mean get your friends onto the app.
Yeah, think of it this way. You can build an amazing restaurant or bar or whatever, right?
But if you show up and you're the only one there, is it like, does it matter how good the food is?
The drinks, whatever? No. These are inherently social experiences that we were working on.
So the idea of having people there, like you needed to have that, otherwise,
it was just a filter app. But by the way, part of the genius, I'm going to say genius, even though
it wasn't really genius, was starting to be marauding as a filter app was awesome. So we talk
about single player mode a lot, which is like, can you play the game alone? And Instagram,
you could totally play alone. You could filter your photos. And a lot of people would tell me,
I didn't even realize that this thing was a social network until my friend showed up. It
totally worked as a single player game. And then when your friend showed up, all of a sudden it was
like, Oh, not only was this great alone, but now I actually have this trove of photos that people
can look at and start liking. And then I can like theirs. And so it was this bootstrap method of how
do you make the thing not suck when the restaurant is empty? Yeah, but the thing is, when you say
friends, I mean, we're not necessarily referring to friends in the physical space. So you're not
bringing your physical friends with you. You're also making new friends. So you're finding new
community. So it's not immediately obvious to me that it's like, it's almost like building any kind
of community. It was, it was both. And what we learned very early on was what made Instagram
special. And the reason why you would sign up for it versus say, just sit on Facebook and look at
your friends photos. Of course, we were live. And of course, it was interesting to see what your
friends were doing now. But the fact that you can connect with people who like, took really
beautiful photos in a certain style all around the world, whether they were travelers, it was the
beginning or beginning of the influencer economy is these people who became professional
Instagrammers way back when, right? But they took these amazing photos. And some of them were
photographers, right? Like professionally. And all of a sudden, you had this moment in the day
when you could open up this app and sure, you could see what your friends were doing. But also,
it was like, Oh, my God, that's a beautiful, beautiful waterfall or Oh, my God, I didn't
realize there was that corner of England or like really cool stuff. And the beauty about Instagram
early on was that it was international by default. You didn't have to speak English to use it,
right? Just look at the photos. Works great. We did translate, we had some pretty bad
translations, but we did translate the app. And, you know, even if our translations were pretty
poor, the idea that you could just connect with other people through their images was pretty
powerful. How much technical difficulties there with the programming? Like what programming
language you were talking about? Zero. Like maybe it was hard for us. But I mean, we,
there was nothing. The only thing that was complex about Instagram at the beginning,
technically, was making it scale. And we were just plain old objective C for the client.
So it was iPhone only at first?
iPhone only. Yep.
As an Android person, I'm deeply offended. But go ahead.
Come on. This was 2010. Oh, sure, sure. Sorry. Sorry. Android's gotten a lot better, right?
Yeah, yeah. I take it back. You're right.
If I were to do something today, I think it would be very different in terms of
launch strategy, right? Android's enormous, too. But anyway, back to that moment,
it was objective C. And then we were Python based, which is just like, this is before Python was
really cool. Like now it's cool because it's all these machine learning libraries like support
Python and, right? Now it's super, now it's like cool to be Python. Back then it was like, oh,
Google uses Python. Like maybe you should use Python. Facebook was PHP. Like I had worked at
a small startup of some ex-Googlers that used Python. So we used it and we used a framework
called Django. It still exists and people use for basically the backend. And then
you threw a couple interesting things in there. I mean, we used Postgres, which was kind of fun.
It was a little bit like hipster database at the time, right?
MySQL. MySQL. Like everyone used MySQL. So like using Postgres was like an interesting decision,
right? But we used it because it had a bunch of geo features built in because we thought we were
going to be a check-in app, remember? It's also super cool now. So you were into Python before
it was cool and you were into Postgres before it was cool.
Yeah. We were basically like not only hipster photo company, hipster tech company, right?
We also adopted Redis early and loved it. I mean, it solves so many problems for us.
And turns out that's still pretty cool. But the programming was very easy. It was like
sign up a user, have a feed. There was nothing, no machine learning at all, zero.
Can you get some context? How many users at each of these stages? We're talking about 100 users,
1,000 users. So the stage I just described, I mean, that technical stack lasted through
probably 50 million users. I mean, seriously, you can get away with a lot with a pretty basic
stack. I think a lot of startups try to over engineer their solutions from the beginning
to really scale and you can get away with a lot. That being said, most of the first two years of
Instagram was literally just trying to make that stack scale. It was not a Python problem.
It was literally just like, where do we put the data? It's all coming in too fast. How do we
store it? How do we make sure to be up? How do we make sure we're on the right size boxes that
they have enough memory? Those were the issues. Can you speak to the choices you make at that stage
when you're growing so quickly? Do you use something like somebody else's computer infrastructure
or do you build in-house? I'm only laughing because when we launched, we had a single
computer that we had rented in some color space in LA. I don't even remember what it was called
because I thought that's what you did. When I worked at a company called Odio that became Twitter,
I remember visiting our space in San Francisco. You walked in, you had to wear the ear things.
It was cold and fans everywhere. We had to plug one out, replace one, and I was the intern,
so I just held things. I thought to myself, oh, this is how it goes. Then I remember being in a
VC's office. I think it was Benchmark's office. I think we ran into another entrepreneur and they
were like, oh, how are things going? We're like, try to scale this thing. Can't you just add more
instances? I was like, what do you mean? They're like instances on Amazon. I was like, what are
those? It was this moment where we realized how deep in it we were because we had no idea that AWS
existed nor should we be using it. Anyway, that night, we went back to the office and we got on
AWS, but we did this really dumb thing. We're so sorry to people listening. We brought up an
instance, which was our database. It was going to be a replacement for our database. We had it
talking over the public internet to our little box in LA that was our app server.
That's how sophisticated we were. Obviously, that was very, very slow. Didn't work at all.
I mean, it worked, but didn't work. Only later that night did we realize we had to have it all
together. But at least if you're listening right now and you're thinking, I have no chance, I'm
going to start a software, I have no chance. I don't know. We did it and we made a bunch of really
dumb mistakes initially. I think the question is how quickly do you learn that you're making a mistake
and do you do the right thing immediately right after? You didn't pay for those mistakes
by failure. How quickly did you fix it? I guess there's a lot of ways to sneak up to this question
of how the hell do you scale the thing? Other startups, if you have an idea, how do you scale
the thing? It's just AWS and you try to write the code that's easy to spread across a large
number of instances and then the rest is just put money into it. Basically, I would say a couple
of things. First off, don't even ask the question. Just find product market fit, duct tape it together,
right? Like if you have to. I think there's a big caveat here, which I want to get to.
But generally, all that matters is product market fit. That's all that matters. If people like your
product, do not worry about when 50,000 people use your product because you will be happy that you
have that problem when you get there. I actually can't name many startups where they go from
nothing to something overnight and they can't figure out how to scale it. There are some,
but I think nowadays, when I say a solved problem, there are ways of solving it.
The base case is typically that startups worry way too much about scaling way too early and forget
that they actually have to make something that people like. That's the default mistake case.
But what I'll say is once you start scaling, hiring quickly people who have seen the game
before and just know how to do it, it becomes a bit of, yeah, just throw instances at the problem,
right? But the last thing I'll say on this that I think did save us, we were pretty rigorous about
writing tests from the beginning. That helped us move very, very quickly when we wanted to rewrite
parts of the product and know that we weren't breaking something else. Tests are one of those
things where it's like you go slow to go fast and they suck when you have to write them because
you have to figure it out. They're always those ones that break when you don't want them to break
and they're annoying and it feels like you spend all this time. But looking back, I think that
long-term optimal, even with a team of four, it allowed us to move very, very quickly because
anyone could touch any part of the product and know that they weren't going to bring down the
site, or at least in general. At which point do you know product market fit? How many users would
you say? Is it all it takes is like 10 people, or is it 1,000? Is it 50,000?
I don't think it is generally a question of absolute numbers. I think it's a question of
cohorts and I think it's a question of trends. It depends how big your business is trying to be,
right? But if I were signing up 1,000 people a week and they all retain the retention curves
for those cohorts, looked good, healthy, and even as you started getting more people on the
service, maybe those earlier cohorts started curving up again because now there are network
effects and their friends are on the service or totally depends what type of business you're in.
But I'm talking purely social, right? I don't think it's an absolute number. I think it is
I guess you could call it a marginal number. I spent a lot of time when I work with startups
asking them, okay, have you looked at that cohort versus this cohort, whether it's your clients or
whether it's people signing up for the service? But a lot of people think you just have to hit
some mark, like 10,000 people or 50,000 people, but really seven-ish billion people in the world.
Most people forever will not know about your product. There are always more people out there
to sign up. It's just a question of how you turn on the spigot. At that stage, early stage,
yourself, but also by way of advice, should you worry about money at all? How this thing is going
to make money? Or do you just try to find product market fit and get a lot of users to enjoy using
your thing? I think it totally depends and that's an unsatisfying answer. I was talking with a friend
today who, he was one of our earlier investors and he was saying, hey, have you been doing any
angel investing lately? I said, not really. I'm just focused on what I want to do next.
He said the number of financings have just gone bonkers. People are throwing money everywhere
right now. I think the question is, do you have an inkling of how you're going to make money? Or
are you really just waving your hands? I would not like to be an entrepreneur in the position of,
well, I have no idea how this will eventually make money. That's not fun. If you are in an area,
like, let's say you wanted to start a social network, not saying this is a good idea, but if
you did, there are only a handful of ways they've made money and really only one way they've made
money in the past and that's ads. If you have a service that's amenable to that and then I
wouldn't worry too much about that because if you get to the scale, you can hire some smart people
and figure that out. I do think that it is really healthy for a lot of startups these days, especially
the ones doing enterprise software, slacks of the world, et cetera, to be worried about money from
the beginning, but mostly as a way of winning over clients and having stickiness. Of course,
you need to be worried about money, but I'm going to also say this again, which is,
it's like long-term profitability. If you have a roadmap to that, then that's great,
but if you're just like, I don't know, maybe never working on this Metaverse thing, I think maybe
someday, I don't know. That seems harder to me, so you have to be as big as Facebook to finance
that bet, right? Do you think it's possible? You said you're not saying it's necessarily a good idea
to launch a social network. Do you think it's possible today, maybe you can put yourself in
those shoes, to launch a social network that achieves the scale of a Facebook or a Twitter
or an Instagram and maybe even greater scale? Absolutely. How do you do it? Asking for a friend.
Yeah, if I knew, I'd probably be doing it right now and not sitting here.
I mean, there's a lot of ways to ask this question. One is create a totally new
product, market fit, create a new market, create something like Instagram did,
which is like create something kind of new or literally outcompete Facebook at its own thing
or outcompete Twitter at its own thing. The only way to compete now if you want to build a
large social network is to look for the cracks, look for the openings. No one competed with
the core business of Google. No one competed with the core business of Microsoft. You don't
go at the big guys doing exactly what they're doing. Instagram didn't win, quote unquote,
because it tried to be a visual Twitter. We spotted things that either Twitter wasn't
going to do or refused to do, images and feed for the longest time or that Facebook wasn't
doing or not paying attention to because they were mostly desktop at the time and we were purely
mobile, purely visual. Often there are opportunities sitting there. You just have to,
you have to figure out, I think there's a strategy book, I can't remember the name,
but talk about motes and just like the best place to play is where your competitor literally can't
pivot because structurally they're set up not to be there. That's where you win. What's fascinating
is like, do you know how many people are like, images, Facebook does that, Twitter does that?
I mean, how wrong were they? Really wrong. These are some of the smartest people in Silicon Valley,
right? But now Instagram exists for a while. How is it that Snapchat could then exist? Makes
no sense. Plenty of people would say, well, there's Facebook, no images, okay, okay, Instagram,
I'll give you that one. But wait, now another image based social network is going to get really big.
And then TikTok comes along. The prior, so you asked me, is it possible? The only reason I'm
answering yes is because my prior is that it's happened once every, I don't know, three, four,
or five years consistently. And I can't imagine there's anything structurally that would change
that. So that's why I answer that way. Not because I know how I just, when you see a pattern,
you see a pattern and there's no reason to believe that's going to stop.
And it's subtle too, because like you said, Snapchat and TikTok, they're all doing the same
space of things. But there's something fundamentally different about like a three second video and a
five second video and a 15 second video and a one minute video and a one hour video,
right? Like fundamentally different. Fundamentally different. I mean,
I think one of the reasons Snapchat exists is because Instagram was so focused on posting
great, beautiful, manicured versions of yourself throughout time. And there was this enormous
demand of like, Hey, I really like this behavior. I love using Instagram, but man, I just like,
wish I could share something going on in my day. Like, do I really have to put it on my profile?
Do I really have to make it last forever? Do I really? And that opened up a door. It created
a market, right? And then what's fascinating is Instagram had an explore page for the longest
time. It was image driven, right? But there's absolutely a behavior where you open up Instagram
and you sit on the explore page all day. That is effectively TikTok, but obviously focused on videos.
And it's not like you could just put the explore page in TikTok form and it works. It had to be
video. It had to have music. These are the hard parts about product development that are very
hard to predict. But they're all versions of the same thing with varying. If you line them up in
a bunch of dimensions, they're different values of the same dimensions, which is, I guess, easy
to say in retrospect. But if I were an entrepreneur going after that area, I'd ask myself, where's
the opening? What needs to exist because TikTok exists now? So I wonder how much
things that don't yet exist and can exist is in the space of algorithms, in the space of
recommender systems. So in the space of how the feed is generated. So we kind of talk about the
actual elements of the content. That's what we've been talking, the difference between photos,
between short videos, longer videos. I wonder how much disruption it's possible in the way the
algorithms work. Because a lot of the criticism towards social media is in the way the algorithms
work currently. And it feels like, first of all, talking about product market fit, there's certainly
a hunger for social media algorithms that do something different. I don't think anyone,
everyone's complaining. This is not doing, this is hurting me and this is hurting society. But
I keep doing it because I'm addicted to it. And they say, we want something different,
but we don't know what. It feels like a, just different. It feels like there's a hunger for
that. But that's in the space of algorithms. I wonder if it's possible to disrupt in that space.
Absolutely. I have this thesis that the worst part about social networks is that there
is the people. It's a line that sounds funny, right? Because that's why you call it a social
network. But what does social networks actually do for you? Just think, imagine you're an alien
and you landed and someone says, hey, there's this site. It's a social network. We're not going to
tell you what it is, but just what does it do? And you have to explain it to them. Just two things.
One is that people you know and have social ties with distribute updates through whether it's
photos or videos about their lives so that you don't have to physically be with them,
but you can keep in touch with them. That's one. That's like a big part of Instagram.
That's a big part of Snap. It is not part of TikTok at all. So there's another big part,
which is there's all this content out in the world that's entertaining,
whether you want to watch it or you want to read it. And matchmaking between content that
exists in the world and people that want that content turns out to be a really big business.
Search and discovery, would you? Search and discovery. But my point is it could be video,
it could be text, it could be websites, it could be, I mean, think back to,
think back to dig or stumble upon. But what did those do? They basically
distributed interesting content to you. I think the most interesting part or the future of social
networks is going to be making them less social because I think people are part of the root cause
of the problem. So for instance, often in recommender systems, we talk about two stages.
There's a candidate generation step, which is just like of our vast trove of stuff that you
might want to see, what small subset should we pick for you? Typically, that is grabbed from
things your friends have shared. Then there's a ranking step, which says, okay, now given these
100, 200 things depends on the network, let's be really good about ranking them and generally
rank the things up higher that get the most engagement. So what's the problem with that?
Step one is we've limited everything you could possibly see to things that your friends have
chosen to share, or maybe not friends, but influencers. What things do people generally
want to share? They want to share things that are going to get likes, that are going to show up
broadly. So they tend to be more emotionally driven, they tend to be more risque or whatever.
So why do we have this problem? It's because we show people things people have decided to share
and those things self-select to being the things that are most divisive. So how do you fix that?
Well, what if you just imagine for a second that why do you have to grab things from things your
friends have shared? Why not just grab things? That's really fascinating to me. And that's
something I've been thinking a lot about and just like, why is it that when you log on to Twitter,
you're just sitting there looking at things from accounts that you followed for whatever reason.
And TikTok, I think, has done a wonderful job here, which is you can literally be anyone.
And if you produce something fascinating, it'll go viral. But you don't have to be someone that
anyone knows. You don't have to have built up a giant following. You don't have to have paid for
followers. You don't have to try to maintain those followers. You literally just have to
produce something interesting. That is, I think, the future of social networking. That's the
direction things will head. And I think what you'll find is it's far less about people manipulating
distribution and far more about what is this content good. And good is obviously a vague
definition that we spend hours on. But different networks, I think, will decide different value
functions to decide what is good and what isn't good. And I think that's a fascinating direction.
So that's almost like creating an internet. I mean, that's what Google did for web pages.
They did page rank search. So discovery, you don't follow anybody on Google when you use a
search engine. You just discover web pages. And so what TikTok does is saying, let's start from
scratch. Let's start a new internet and have people discover stuff on that new internet
within a particular kind of pool of people. But what's so fascinating about this is the field of
information retrieval. I always talked about, as I was studying this stuff, I would always use the
word query and document. So I was like, why are they saying query and document? They're literally
if you just stop thinking about query as literally a search query, and a query could be a person.
I mean, a lot of the way, I'm not going to claim to know how Instagram or Facebook machine learning
works today. But if you want to find a match for a query, the query is actually the attributes of
the person, their age, their gender, where they're from, maybe some kind of summarization of their
interests. And that's a query, right? And that matches against documents. And by the way,
documents don't have to be text. They can be videos. They're however long. I don't know what
the limit is on TikTok these days. They keep changing it. My point is just, you've got a query,
which is someone in search of something that they want to match, and you've got the document,
and it doesn't have to be text. It could be anything. And how do you match make? And that's
one of these like, I mean, I've spent a lot of time thinking about this, and I don't claim to
have mastered it at all. But I think it's so fascinating about where that will go with new
social networks. See, what I'm also fascinated by is metrics that are different than engagement.
So the other thing from an alien perspective, what social networks are doing is they in the
short term bring out different aspects of each human being. So first, let me say that
an algorithm or a social network for each individual can bring out the best of that
person or the worst of that person, or there's a bunch of different parts to us, parts we're proud
of, that we are, parts we're not so proud of. When we look at the big picture of our lives,
when we look back 30 days from now, am I proud that I said those things or not?
Am I proud that I felt those things? Am I proud that I experienced or read those things or thought
about those things just in that kind of self-reflective kind of way? And so coupled with that,
I wonder if it's possible to have different metrics that are not just about engagement,
but are about long-term happiness, growth of a human being, where they look back and say,
I'm a better human being for having spent 100 hours on that app. And that feels like it's actually
strongly correlated with engagement in the long term. In the short term, it may not be,
but in the long term, it's like the same kind of thing where you really fall in love with the
product. You fall in love with an iPhone, you fall in love with a car. That's what makes you fall
in love is really being proud and just in a self-reflective way, understanding that you're
a better human being for having used the thing. And that's what great relationships are made
from. It's not just like you're hot and we like being together or something like that,
it's more like I'm a better human being because I'm with you. And that feels like a metric that
could be optimized for by the algorithms. But anytime I kind of talk about this with anybody,
they seem to say, yeah, okay, that's going to get outcompeted immediately by the engagement
if it's ad-driven especially. I just don't think so. I mean, a lot of it's just implementation.
I'll say a couple of things. One is to pull back the curtain on daily meetings
inside of these large social media companies. A lot of what management or at least the people
that are tweaking these algorithms spend their time on are trade-offs. And there's these things
called value functions, which are like, okay, we can predict the probability that you'll click on
this thing or the probability that you'll share it or the probability that you will leave a comment
on it or the probability you'll dwell on it. Individual actions. And you've got this neural
network that basically has a bunch of heads at the end and all of them are between zero and one.
And great, they all have values or they all have probabilities. And then in these meetings,
what they will do is say, well, how much do we value a comment versus a click versus a share
versus a... And then maybe even some downstream thing that has nothing to do with the item there,
but like driving follows or something. And what typically happens is they will say, well,
what are our goals for this quarter at the company? Oh, we want to drive sharing up. Okay. Well,
let's turn down these metrics and turn up these metrics. And they blend them into a single scalar
with which they're trying to optimize. That is really hard, because invariably, you think you're
solving for, I don't know, something called meaningful interactions, right? This was the big
Facebook pivot. And I don't actually have any internal knowledge, like I wasn't in those meetings.
But at least from what we've seen over the last month or so, it seems by
actually trying to optimize for meaningful interactions, it had all these side effects
of optimizing for these other things. And I don't claim to fully understand them. But what I will
say is that tradeoffs abound. And as much as you'd like to solve for one thing, if you have a network
of over a billion people, you're going to have unintended consequences either way. And it gets
really hard. So what you're describing is effectively a value model that says, like,
can we capture... This is the thing that I spent a lot of time thinking about. Like, can you capture
utility in a way that actually measures someone's happiness that isn't just a... What do they call
it? A surrogate problem where you say, well, I think the more you use the product, the happier
you are. That was always the argument at Facebook, by the way. It was like, well, people use it more,
so they must be more happy. Turns out there are a lot of things you use more that make you less
happy in the world. Not talking about Facebook, just let's think about whether it's gambling or
whatever that you can do more of, but doesn't necessarily make you happier. So the idea that
time equals happiness, obviously, you can't map utility and time together easily. There are a lot
of edge cases. So when you look around the world and you say, well, what are all the ways we can
model utility that is like one of the... Please, if you know someone's smart doing this, introduce
me because I'm fascinated by it. And it seems really tough. But the idea that reinforcement
learning, everyone interesting I know in machine learning, I was really interested in
recommender systems and supervised learning. And the more I dug into it, I was like, oh,
literally everyone's smart is working on reinforcement learning, literally everyone.
You just made people at OpenAI and DeepMind very happy, yes.
But what's interesting is it's one thing to train a game and that paper where they just
took Atari and they used a ConvNet to basically just train simple actions, mind blowing. Absolutely
mind blowing. But it's a game, great. So now, what if you're constructing a feed for a person?
Right? Like, how can you construct that feed in such a way that optimizes for a diversity of
experience, a long-term happiness, right? But that reward function, it turns out in
reinforcement learning again, as I've learned, reward design is really hard. And I don't know,
like how do you design a scalar reward for someone's happiness over time? I mean,
do you have to measure dopamine levels? Well, you have to have a lot more signals
from the human being. Currently, it feels like there's not enough signals coming from the human
being users of this algorithm. So for reinforcement learning to work well, it needs to have a lot
more data. It needs to have a lot of data. And that actually is a challenge for anyone who wants
to start something, which is you don't have a lot of data. So how do you compete? But I do
think back to your original point, rethinking the algorithm, rethinking reward functions,
rethinking utility, that's fascinating. That's cool. And I think that's an open opportunity
for a company that figures it out. I have to ask about April 2012, when Instagram,
along with its massive employee base of 13 people, was sold to Facebook for $1 billion.
What was the process like on a business level, engineering level, human level? What was that
process of selling to Facebook like? What did it feel like? So I want to provide some context,
which is I worked in corporate development at Google, which not a lot of people know,
but corporate development is effectively the group that buys companies, right? You sit there and
you acquire companies. And I had sat through so many of these meetings with entrepreneurs.
We actually, fun fact, we never acquired a single company when I worked in corporate
development. So I can't claim that I had a lot of experience. But I had enough experience to
understand, okay, what prices are people getting and what's the process? And as we started to grow,
we were trying to keep this thing running and we were exhausted and we were 13 people. And I mean,
we were trying to think back, it's probably 27, 37 now. So young and on a relative basis, right?
And we're trying to keep the thing running. And then, you know, we go out to raise money and
we're kind of like the hot startup at the time. And I remember going into a specific VC and saying,
our terms we're looking for are, we're looking for a $500 million valuation.
And I've never seen so many jobs drop, all in unison, right? And I was like,
thanked and walked out the door very kindly after. And then I got a call the next day from someone
who was connected to them and said, they said, we just want to let you know that like, it was
pretty offensive that you asked for $500 million valuation. And I can't tell if that was like,
just negotiating or what, but it's true, like no one offered us more, right? So we were,
so can you clarify the number again? You said how many million 500 500 million 500 million. Yeah,
half a billion. Yeah. So in my mind, I'm anchored like, okay, well, literally no one's
biting at 500 million. And eventually we would get Sequoia and Greylock and others together at 500
million, basically, post it was 450 pre, I think we raised $50 million. But just like no one was
used to seeing 500 million dollar companies then like, I don't know if it was because we were
just coming out of the hangover 2008 and things were still on recovery mode. But then along comes
Facebook. And after some negotiation, we've two X to the number from a half a billion to a billion.
Yeah, it seems pretty good, you know, and I think Mark and I really saw eye to eye that this
thing could be big. We thought we could, their resources would help us scale it. And in a lot
of ways it de-risks, I mean, it de-risks a lot of the employees' lives for the rest of their lives,
including me, including Mike, right? I think I might have had like 10 grand in my bank account
at the time, right? Like, we're working hard. We had nothing. So on a relative basis, it seems
very high. And then I think the last company to exit for anywhere close to a billion was YouTube
that I could think of. And thus began the giant long bull run of 2012 all the way to where we are
now where I saw some stat yesterday about like how many unicorns exist and it's absurd. But then
again, never underestimate technology and like the value it can provide and man costs have dropped
and man scale has increased. And you can make businesses make a lot of money now. But on a
fundamental level, I don't know, like how do you describe the decision to sell a company with 13
people for a billion dollars? So first of all, like how do you take a lot of guts to set a table
and say 500 million or one billion with Mark Zuckerberg? It seems like a very large number
with 13. Like, especially- It doesn't seem, it is. They're all large numbers. Especially like you
said before the unicorn parade. I like that. I'm going to use that. The unicorn parade. Yeah.
You were at the head of the unicorn parade. It's a massive unicorn parade. Okay, so
no, I mean, we knew we were worth quote unquote a lot, but we didn't, I mean, there was no market
for Instagram. I mean, it's not, you couldn't mark to market this thing in the public markets. You
didn't quite understand what it would be worth or it was worth at the time. So in a market,
an illiquid market where you have one buyer and one seller and you're going back and forth. And
well, I guess there were like VC firms who were willing to invest at a certain valuation. So
I don't know, you just go with your gut. And at the end of the day, I would say
the hardest part of it was not realizing, like when we sold, it was tough because like literally
everywhere I go, restaurants, whatever, like for a good six months after, it was a lot of
attention on the deal, a lot of attention on the product, a lot of attention. It was kind of
miserable, right? And you're like, wait, like I made a lot of money, but like, why is this not
great? And it's because it turns out, you know, and I don't, I don't know, like I don't really
keep in touch with Mark, but I've got to assume his job right now is not exactly the most happy
job in the world. It's really tough when you're on top and it's really tough when you're in the
limelight. So the decision itself was like, oh, cool, this is great. How lucky are we, right?
So, okay, there's a million questions. Yeah, go, go, go. First of all, why,
why is it hard to be on top? Why did you not feel good? Like, can you dig into that? It always,
I've heard like Olympic athletes say after what they win gold, they get depressed.
Is it something like that where it feels like it was kind of like a thing you were working
towards? Yeah, sure. Some loose definition of success. And this sure as like feels like
at least according to other startups, this is what success looks like. And now,
why don't I feel any better? I'm still human. I still have all the same problems. Is that the
nature? Or is it just like negative attention or some kind? I think it's all of the above. But to
be clear, there was a lot of happiness in terms of like, oh my God, this is great. Like we
like won the Super Bowl of startups, right? Anyone who can get to a liquidity event of
anything meaningful feels like, wow, this is what we started out to do. Of course, we want to create
great things that people love. But like we won in a big way. But yeah, there's this big like, oh,
if we won, what is like, what's next? I don't. So they call it the we have arrived syndrome,
which I need to go back and look where I can quote that from. But I remember reading about it
at the time. I was like, oh, yeah, that's that. And I remember we had a product manager leave
very early on when we got to Facebook. And he said to me, I just don't believe I can learn anything
at this company anymore. It's like it's hit its apex. We sold it great. I just don't have anything
else to learn. So from 2012, all the way to the day I left in 2018, like the amount I learned and
the humility with which I realized, oh, we thought we won. Billion dollars is cool. But like,
there are $100 billion companies. And by the way, on top of that, we had no revenue. We had,
I mean, we had a cool product, but we didn't scale it yet. And there's so much to learn.
And then competitors and how fun was it to fight Snapchat? Oh, my God, like it was
it's like Yankee's Red Sox. It's great. Like that's what you live for. You know, you win some,
you lose some. But the amount you can learn through that process, what I've realized in life is that
there is no end. There's always someone who has more, there's always more challenge,
just at different scales. And it sounds like a little Buddhist, but
everything is super challenging, whether you're like a small business or an enormous business.
I say, like, choose the game you like to play, right? You've got to imagine that if you're an
amazing basketball player, you enjoy, to some extent, practicing basketball. It's got to be
something you love. It's going to suck. It's going to be hard. You're going to have injuries,
right? But you got to love it. And the same thing with Instagram, which is,
we might have sold, but it was like, great, there's one Super Bowl title. Can we win five?
We win five. What else can we do? Now I imagine you didn't ask this, but okay, so I left.
There's a little bit of like, what do you do next, right? Like, what do you,
how do you top that thing? It's the wrong question. The question is like, when you wake up every day,
what is the hardest, most interesting thing you can go work on? Because like, at the end of the
day, we all turn into dirt, doesn't matter, right? But what does matter is like, can we really enjoy
this life? Not in a hedonistic way, because that's the, it's like the reinforcement learning,
learning like short term versus long term objectives. Can you wake up every day and truly
enjoy what you're doing, knowing that it's going to be painful, knowing that like, no matter what
you choose, it's going to be painful. Whether you sit on a beach or whether you manage a thousand
people or 10,000, it's going to be painful. So choose something that's fun to have pain. But
yes, there was a lot of, we have arrived and it's a maturation process. You just have to go through.
So no matter how much success there is, how much money you make, you have to wake up the next day
and choose the hard life, whatever that means next. That's fun. The fun slash hard life. Well,
hard life, that's fun. I guess what I'm trying to say is slightly different, which is just that
no one realizes everything's going to be hard. Even chilling out is hard. And then you just
start worrying about stupid stuff. Like, I don't know, like, did so-and-so forget to paint the house
today? Or like, did the gardener come or whatever? Like, or, oh, I'm so angry, my shipment of wine
didn't show up and I'm sitting here on the beach without my wine. I don't know, I'm making shit
up now. But it turns out that even chilling, aka meditation, is hard work. Yeah. And at least
meditation is productive chilling, where you're actually training yourself to calm down and be,
but backing up for a moment. Everything's hard. You might as well be playing the game you love to
play. I just like playing and winning. And I'm still on the, I think, the first half of life,
knock on wood. And I've got a lot of years. And what am I going to do? Sit around. And the other
way of looking at this, by the way, imagine you made one movie and it was great. Would you just
like stop making movies? No. Generally, you're like, wow, I really like making movies. Let's make
another one. A lot of times, by the way, the second one or the third one, not that great. But the
fourth one, awesome. And no one forgets the second, or everyone forgets the second and the third one.
So there's just this constant process of like, can I produce? And is that fun? Is that exciting?
What else can I learn? So this machine learning stuff for me has been this
awesome new chapter of being like, man, that's something I didn't understand at all. And now
I feel like I'm one tenth of the way there. And that feels like a big mountain to climb.
So I distracted us from the original question. No, and we'll return to the machine learning
because I'd love to explore your interest there. But I mean, speaking of sort of challenges and
hard things, is there a possible world where sitting in a room with Mark Zuckerberg,
with a $1 billion deal, you turn it down? Yeah, of course. What does that world
look like? Why would you turn it down? Why did you take it? What was the calculation that you
were making? Thus enters the world of counterfactuals and not really knowing. And if only we could run
that experiment. Well, the universe exists. It's just running in parallel to our own.
Yeah. It's so fascinating, right? I mean, we're talking a lot about money, but the real question
was, I'm not sure you'll believe me when I say this, but could we strap our little company
onto the side of a rocket ship and get out to a lot of people really, really quickly with the
support, with the talent of a place like Facebook? I mean, people often ask me what I would do
differently at Instagram today. And I say, well, I'd probably hire more carefully because we showed
up just like before I knew it. We had like 100 people on the team and 200, then 300. I don't
know where all these people were coming from. I never had to recruit them. I never had to
screen them. They were just like internal transfers, right? So it's like relying on the
Facebook hiring machine, which is quite sort of, I mean, it's an elaborate machine.
And it's great, by the way. They have really talented people there. But my point is,
the choice was like, take this thing, put it on the side of a rocket ship that you know is
growing very quickly. Like I had seen what had happened when Ev sold Blogger to Google,
and then Google went public. Remember, we sold before Facebook went public. There was a moment
at which the stock price was $17, by the way. Facebook stock price was $17. I remember thinking,
what the fuck did I just do, right? Now at 320ish, I don't know where we are today. But like,
okay, like the best thing, by the way, is like when the stock is down, everyone calls you dope.
And then when it's up, they also call you a dope, but just for a different reason.
Right? Like you can't win. Less than in there somewhere. Yeah. But you know,
the choice is to strap yourself to a rocket ship or to build your own. You know, Mr. Elon built
his own, literally, with a rocket ship. That's a difficult choice because there's a world.
Actually, I would say something different, which is Elon and others decided to sell PayPal
for not that much. I mean, how much was it about a billion dollars? I can't remember.
Something like that, yeah. I mean, it was early, but it's worth a lot more now.
To then build a new rocket ship. So this is the cool part, right? If you are an entrepreneur
and you own a controlling stake in the company, not only is it really hard to do something else
with your life, because all of the value is tied up in you as a personality attached to this company.
But if you sell it and you get yourself enough capital and you have enough energy,
you can do another thing, or 10 other things, or in Elon's case, a bunch of other things.
I don't know. I lost count at this point. And it might have seemed silly at the time,
and sure, if you look back, PayPal is worth a lot now, right? But I don't know. Do you think
Elon cares about, are we going to buy Pinterest or not? He created a massive capital that allowed
him to do what he wants to do. And that's awesome. That's more freeing than anything,
because when you are an entrepreneur attached to a company, you got to stay at that company
for a really long time. It's really hard to remove yourself.
But I'm not sure how much he loved PayPal versus SpaceX and Tesla. I have a sense that you love
Instagram. Yeah, I loved enough to work for six years beyond the deal.
Yeah, which is rare, which is very rare. You chose-
But can I tell you why? There are not a lot of companies that you can be part of where
the Pope's like, I would like to sign up for your product. I'm not a religious person at all.
I'm really not. But when you go to the Vatican and you're walking among the giant columns and
you're hearing the music and everything, and the Pope walks in and he wants to press the
sign-up button on your product, it's a moment in life. No matter what your persuasion. The
number of doors and experiences that that opened up, it was incredible. The people I got to meet,
the places I got to go, I assume maybe a payments company is slightly different.
But that's why it was so fun. And plus, I truly believed we were building such a great product,
and I loved the game. It wasn't about money. It was about the game.
Do you think you had the guts to say no? I often think about this. How hard is it for an
entrepreneur to say no? Because the peer pressure, basically the sea of entrepreneurs in Silicon
Valley are going to tell you, this is their dream. The thing you were sitting before is a dream.
To walk away from that is really, it seems like nearly impossible. Because Instagram
could in 10 years be, you could talk about Google. You could be making self-driving cars
and building rockets that go to Mars and compete with SpaceX. Totally. And so that's an interesting
decision to say, am I willing to risk it? And the reason I also say it's an interesting decision,
because it feels like prior previous discussion, if you're launching a social network company,
there's going to be that meeting, whatever that number is, if you're successful. If you're on
this rocket ship of success, there's going to be a meeting with one of the social media,
social network companies that want to buy you, whether it's Facebook or Twitter,
but it could also very well be Google who seems to have like a graveyard of failed social networks.
And I mean, I don't know. I think about that, how difficult it is for an entrepreneur to make
that decision. How many have successfully made that decision, I guess. It's a big question.
It's sad to me, to be honest, that too many make that decision perhaps for the wrong reason.
Sorry, when you say make the decision, you mean to the affirmative?
To the affirmative, yeah. Got it, yeah. There are also companies that don't sell,
and take the path and say, we're going to be independent, and then you've never heard of it
again. I remember Path was one of our competitors early on. There's a big moment when they had,
I can't remember what it was, like $110 million offer from Google or something.
It might have been larger, I don't know. And I remember there was this big tech crunch
article that was like, they turned it down after talking deeply about their values and everything.
I don't know the inner workings of Foursquare, but I'm certain there were many conversations
over time where there were companies that wanted Foursquare as well. Recently,
I mean, what other companies? There's Clubhouse, right? I don't know. Maybe people were really
interested in them too. There are plenty of moments where people say no, and we just forget
that those things happen. We only focus on the ones where they said yes and like, wow,
like what if they had stayed independent? So I don't know. I used to think a lot about this,
now I just don't because I'm like, whatever. Things have gone pretty well. I'm ready for
the next game. I mean, think about an athlete where, I don't know, maybe they do something wrong
in the World Series or whatever. And if you let it haunt you for the rest of your career,
why not just be like, I don't know, it was a game, next game, next shot, right? If you just
moved to that world, at least I have a next shot, right? No, that's beautiful. But I mean,
just in insights, and it's funny you brought up Clubhouse, it is very true. It seems like Clubhouse
on the downward path, and it's very possible to see a billion plus dollar deal at some stage,
maybe like a year ago or half a year ago from Facebook, from Google. I think Facebook was
flirting with that idea too. And I think a lot of companies probably were. I wish it was more
public. You know what? There's not like a badass public story about them making the decision to
walk away. We just don't hear about it. And then we get to see the results of that success or the
failure, more often failure. So a couple of things. One is, I would not assume Clubhouse is down for
the count at all. They're young, they have plenty of money, they're run by really smart people.
I'd give them like a very fighting chance to figure it out. There are a lot of times when
people call Twitter down for the count and they figure it out and they seem to be doing well,
right? So just backing up and not knowing anything about their internals, there's a strong chance
they will figure it out and that people are just down because they like being down about companies.
They like assuming that they're going to fail. So who knows, right? But let's take the ones in the
past where we know how it played out. There are plenty of examples where people have turned down
big offers and then you've just never heard from them again. But we never focus on the companies
because you just forget that those were big. But inside your psyche, I think it's easy for someone
with enough money to say money doesn't matter, which I think is bullshit. Of course, money
matters to people. But at the moment, you just can't even grasp the number of zeros that you're
talking about. It just doesn't make sense, right? So to think rationally in that moment is not something
many people are equipped to do, especially not people where I think we had founded the company
a year earlier, maybe two years earlier, like a year and a half, we were 13 people.
But I will say, I still don't know if it was the right decision because I don't have that
counterfactual. I don't know that other world. I'm just thankful that by and large, most people
love Instagram still do. By and large, people are very happy with the time we had there.
And I'm proud of what we built. So I'm cool. Now it's next shot, right?
Well, if we could just linger on this Yankees versus Red Sox, the fun of it,
the competition over, I would say, over the space of features. So there are a bunch of features.
Like there's photos. There's one minute videos on Instagram. There's IGTV. There's stories.
There's reels. There's live. So that sounds like it's like a long list of too much stuff,
but it's not because it feels like they're close together, but they're somehow, like what we're
saying, fundamentally distinct, like each of the things I mentioned. Maybe can you describe the
philosophies, the design philosophies behind some of these, how you were thinking about it
during the historic war between Snapchat and Instagram or just in general, like this space
of features that was discovered. There's this great book by Clay Christensen called
Competing Against Luck. It's like a terrible title. But within it, there's effectively an
expression of this thing called jobs to be done theory. And it's unclear if he came up with it
or some of his colleagues, but there are a bunch of places you can find with people claiming to
have come up with those jobs to be done theory. But the idea is if you zoom out and you look at
your product, you ask yourself, why are people hiring your product? Imagine every product in
your life is effectively an employee, your CEO of your life, and you hire products to be employees
effectively. They all have roles and jobs. Why are you hiring a product? Why do you
want that product to perform something in your life? What are the hidden reasons why
you're in love with this product? Instagram was about sharing your life with others visually,
period. Why? Because you feel connected with them, you get to show off,
you get to feel good and cared about with likes. And it turns out that that will,
I think, forever define Instagram and any product that serves that job is going to do very well.
Stories, let's take it as an example, is very much serving that job. In fact, it serves it better
than the original product because when you're large and have an enormous audience, you're worried
about people seeing your stuff or you're worried about being permanent so that a college admissions
person is going to see your photo of you doing something. So it turns out that that is a more
efficient way of performing that job than the original product was. The original product still
has its value, but at scale, these two things together work really, really well. Now, I will
claim that other parts of the product over time didn't perform that job as well. I think IGTV
probably didn't. Shopping is completely unrelated to what I just described, but it might work,
I don't know. Products, I think, products that succeed are products that all share this parent
node of this job to be done that is in common, and then they're just different ways of doing it.
Apple, I think, does a great job with this. It's like managing your digital life,
and all the products just work together. They sync. It's beautiful, even if they
require silly specific cords to work, but they're all part of a system. It's when you leave that
system and you start doing something weird that people start scratching their head,
and I think you are less successful. So I think one of the challenges Facebook has had throughout
its life is that it has never fully, I think, appreciated the job to be done of the main product,
and what it's done is said, ooh, there's a shiny object over there that starts getting
subtraction. Let's go copy that thing, and then they're confused why it doesn't work. Why doesn't
it work? It's because the people who show up for this don't want that. It's different.
What's the purpose of Facebook? I remember I was a very early Facebook user. The reason I was
personally excited about Facebook is because you can, first of all, use your real name.
I can exist in this world. It can be formally exist. I like anonymity for certain things,
Reddit and so on, but I want it to also exist not anonymously so that I can connect with
other friends of mine non-anonymously. There's a reliable way to know that I'm real and they're
real and they're connecting. I liked it for the reasons that people linked in, I guess,
but not everybody is dressed up and being super polite, more like with friends.
But then it became something much bigger than that, I suppose. There's a feed. It became a place to
discover content, to share content that's not just about connecting directly with friends.
It became something else. I don't even know what it is really. You said Instagram is a place where
you visually share your life. What is Facebook? Well, let's go back to the founding of Facebook
and why it worked really well initially at Harvard, and then Dartmouth and Stanford,
and probably MIT, there were a handful of schools in that first tranche. It worked because there
are communities that exist in the world that want to transact. When I say transact, I don't mean
commercially, I just mean they want to share, they want to coordinate, they want to communicate,
they want to space for themselves. Facebook at its best, I think, is that. If actually you look
at the most popular products that Facebook has built over time, if you look at things like
groups and marketplace, groups is enormous. And groups is effectively like everyone can
found their own little Stanford or Dartmouth or MIT and find each other and share and communicate
about something that matters deeply to them. That is the core of what Facebook was built around,
and I think today is where it stands most strongly. Yeah, it's brilliant. The groups,
I wish groups were done better. It feels like it's not a first class citizen. I know I may be
saying something without much knowledge, but it feels like it's kind of bolted on while being used
a lot. It feels like there needs to be a little bit more structure in terms of discovery, in terms
of- Yeah. I mean, look at Reddit. Reddit is basically groups of public and open and a little
bit crazy in a good way. But there's clear product market fit for that specific use case,
and it doesn't have to be a college. It can be anything. It can be a small group, a big group,
it can be group messaging. Facebook shines, I think, when it leans into that. I think when
there are other companies that just seem exciting, and now all of a sudden the product shifts in some
fundamental way to go try to compete with that other thing, that's when I think consumers get
confused. Even if you can be successful, even if you can compete with that other company,
even if you can figure out how to bolt it on, eventually you come back and you look at the
app and you're like, I just don't know why I opened this app. There are too many things going on,
and that was always a worry. I mean, you listed all the things at Instagram, and that almost
gave me a heart attack, way too many things. But I don't know, entrepreneurs get bored.
They want to add things. They want to, right? I don't have a good answer for it, except for that,
I think, being true to your original use case, and not even original use case, but- sorry,
actually not use case, original job. There are many use cases under that job. Being true to that
and being really good at it over time and morphing as needs change, I think that's how to make a
company last forever. Honestly, my main thesis about why Facebook is in the position it is today
is if they have had a series of product launches that delighted people over time,
I think they'd be in a totally different world. Imagine for a moment, and by the way,
Apple's entering this, but Apple for so long, just product after product, you couldn't wait for it.
You stood in line for it. You talked about it. You got excited. Amazon makes your life so easy.
It's like, wow, I needed this thing, and it showed up at my door two days later, and both of these
companies, by the way, Amazon, Apple have issues. There are labor issues, whether it's here in the
US or in China, there are environmental issues. But when's the last time you heard a large chorus
being like, these companies better pay for what they're doing on these things, right?
I think Facebook's main issue today is you need to produce a hit. If you don't produce hits,
it's really hard to keep consumers on your side. Then people just start picking on you
for a variety of reasons, whether it's right or wrong. I'm not even going to place a judgment
right here and right now. I'm just going to say that it is way better to be in a world where
you are producing hits and consumers love what you're doing, because then they're on your side.
The past 10 years for Facebook has been fairly hard on this dimension.
So by hits, it doesn't necessarily mean financial hits. It feels like, to me,
you're saying it's something that brings joy, a product that brings joy to some fraction of
the population. Yeah. I mean, TikTok isn't just literally an algorithm. In some ways, TikTok's
content and algorithm have more sway now over the American psyche than Facebook's algorithm.
It's visual, it's video. By the way, it's not defined by who you follow. It's defined by
some magical thing that, by the way, if someone wanted to tweak to show you a certain type of
content for some reason, they could. People love it. So as a CEO, let me ask you a question,
because leadership matters. This is a complicated question. Why is Mark Zuckerberg distrusted,
disliked, and sometimes even hated by many people in public?
Right. That is a complicated question. Well, the premise, I'm not sure I agree with the premise.
And I can expand that to include even a more mysterious question for me, Bill Gates.
What is the Bill Gates version of the question? Do you think people hate Bill Gates?
No, distressed. It's a checklist. I think Mark Zuckerberg's distressed is the primary one,
but there's also a dislike. Maybe hate is too strong a word, but if you look at the articles
that are being written and so on, there's a dislike. It's confusing to me because it's like
the public picks certain individuals and they attach certain kinds of emotions to those individuals.
Yeah. Someone once just recently said, there's a strong case that founder-led companies have
this problem and that a lot of Mark's issues today come from the fact that he is a visible
founder with this story that people have watched in both a movie and they followed along and
he's this boy wonder kid who became one of the world's richest people. And he's no longer Mark
the person. He's marked this image of a person with enormous wealth and power. And in today's
world, we have issues with enormous wealth and power for a variety of reasons. One of which is
we've been stuck inside for a year and a half, two years. One of which is a lot of people were
really unhappy about not the last election, but the last, last election. And where do you take
out that anger? Who do you blame but the people in charge? That's one example or one reason why I
think a lot of people express anger, resentment, or unhappiness with Mark. At the same time,
I don't know, I pointed out to that person, I was like, well, I don't know. I think a lot
of people really like Elon. Elon arguably, he kept his factory open here throughout COVID protocols,
which arguably a lot of people would be against. While saying a bunch of crazy offensive things on
the internet, they still... Basically, gives the middle finger to the SEC on Twitter and like,
I don't know. I'm like, well, there's a founder and people kind of like him.
So, I do think that the founder and CEO of a company that's a social network company
is like an extra level of difficulty. If life is a video game, you just chose the
harder video game. So, I mean, that's why it's interesting to ask you because you were the
founder and CEO of a social network. Right, exactly. But you're one of the rare
examples, even Jack Dorsey's this life, not to the degree, but it just seems harder when you're
running a social media company. It's interesting. I never thought of Jack as just like, I think
generally, he's well respected. Yeah, I think so. I think you're right. But he's not loved.
Yeah. And I feel like to me, Twitter is an incredible thing. Yeah. Again, can I just come
back to this point, which seems oversimplistic, but like, I really do think how a product makes
someone feel, they ascribe that feeling to the founder. Yep. So, so make people feel good.
So, think about it. Like, let's just go with this thesis first, actually. Sure. I like it,
though. Amazon's pretty utilitarian, right? It delivers brown boxes to your front door. Sure,
you can have Alexa and you can have all these things, right? But in general, it delivers
stuff quickly to you at a reasonable price, right? I think Jeff Bezos is wonderfully wealthy,
thoughtful, smart guy, right? But like, people kind of feel that way about them. They're like,
wow, this is really big. We're impressed that this is really big. But he's doing the same
space stuff Elon's doing, but they don't necessarily ascribe the same sense of wonder,
right? Now, let's take Elon. And again, this is pet theory. I don't have much proof other
than my own intuition. He is literally about living the future, Mars. It's about wonder.
It's about going back to that feeling as a kid when you looked up to the stars and asked,
is there life out there? People get behind that because it's a sense of hope and excitement and
innovation. And you can say whatever you want, but we ascribe that emotion to that person. Now,
let's say you're on a social network and people make you kind of angry because they disagree with
you or they say something ridiculous or they're living a FOMO type life where you're like, wow,
I wish I was doing that thing. I think Instagram, if I were to think back, by and large, when I was
there, was not about FOMO, was not about this influencer economy, although it certainly became
that way closer to the end. It was about the sense of wonder and happiness and beautiful
things in the world. And I don't know. I mean, I don't want to have a blind spot,
but I don't think anyone had a strong opinion about FOMO or the other.
For the longest time, the way people explained to me, I mean, if you want to go for toxicity,
you go to Facebook or Twitter. If you want to go to feel good about life, you go to Instagram to
enjoy, celebrate life. And my experience when talking to people is they gave me the benefit
of the doubt because of that. But if your experience of the product is kind of makes you
angry, it's where you argue, I mean, a big part of Jack might be that he wasn't actually the
CEO for a very long time and only became recently. So I'm not sure how much of the connection got
made. But in general, I mean, if you hate, you know, I'm just thinking about other companies
that are in tech companies, if you hate like what a company is doing or it makes you not feel happy,
I don't know, like people are really angry about Comcast or whatever. Are they even called
Comcast anymore? It's like Xfinity or something, right? They had to rebrand. They became meta,
right? But my point is if it makes you angry. That's beautiful. Yeah. But the thing is,
this is me saying this, I think your thesis is very strong and correct, has elements of correctness.
But I still personally put some blame on individuals. Of course. I think you said, Elon, looking up,
there's something about childlike wander to him, like to his personality, his character,
something about, I think, more so than others, what people can trust them. And there's, I don't
know, Son of a Child is an example of somebody who's like, there's some, it's hard to put into words,
but there's something about the human being where he's trustworthy. He's human in a way that connects
to us. And the same with Sajin Adela. I mean, some of these folks, something about us is drawn to
them, even when they're flawed, even like, so like your thesis really holds up for Steve Jobs,
because I think people didn't like Steve Jobs, but like he delivered products that and then they
fell in love every time. I guess you could say that the CEO, the leader is also a product.
And if they keep delivering a product that people like by being a public and saying things that
people like, that's also a way to make people happy. But from a social network perspective,
it makes me wonder how difficult it is to explain to people why certain things happen,
like to explain machine learning, to explain why certain the the woke mob effect happens,
or the certain kinds of like bullying happens, which is like, it's human nature combined with
algorithm. And it's very difficult to control for how the spread of quote unquote misinformation
happens. It's very difficult to control for that. And so you try to decelerate certain parts,
you create more problems than you solve. And anything that looks at all like censorship can
create huge amounts of problems as it's liberty slope. And then you have to inject humans to
oversee the machine learning algorithms. And anytime you inject humans into the system,
it's going to create a huge number of problems. And I feel like it's up to the leader to communicate
that effectively to be transparent. First of all, design products that don't have those problems.
And second of all, when they have those problems, to be able to communicate with them, I guess that's
all going to when you run a social network company, your job is hard. Yeah, I will say the one element
that you haven't named that I think you're getting at is just bedside manner, which Steve Jobs,
I never worked for him, I never met him in person, had an like an uncanny ability in public to have
bedside manner. I mean, some of the best clips of Steve Jobs from like, I would say,
maybe the 80s when he's on these stage and getting questions from the audience about life for,
and he'll take this question that is like, how are you going to compete with blah? And it's super
boring. And I don't even know the name of the company. And his answer is, if you just asked
like your grandfather, the meaning of life, and you sit there and you're just like, what? Like,
and there's that bedside manner. And if you lack that, or if that's just not intuitive to you,
I think that it can be a lot harder to gain the trust of people and then add on top of that
missteps of companies, right? It's, I don't know if you have any friends from the past where like,
maybe they crossed you once or like, maybe you get back together and your friends again, but
you just never really forget that thing. It's human nature not to forget.
I'm Russian, you crossed me once. We solved the problem.
So my point is, there's, humans don't forget. And if there are times in the past where they feel
like they don't trust the company or the company hasn't had their back, that is really hard to
earn back, especially if you don't have that bedside manner. And again, like, I'm not
attributing this specifically to Mark, because I think a lot of the companies have this issue where
one, you have to be trustworthy to the company and live by it and live by those actions. And then
two, I think you need to be able to be really relatable in a way that's very difficult if
you're worth like what these people are. It's really hard.
Yeah. Jack does a pretty good job of this by being a monk.
But I also, like Jack issues attention, like he's not out there almost on purpose. He's just
working hard, doing square. I literally shared a desk like this with him at Odio. I mean,
this normal guy who likes painting, I remember he would leave early on Wednesdays or something
to go to a painting class. And he's creative, he's thoughtful. Money makes people more creative
and more thoughtful, like extreme versions of themselves. And this was a long, long time ago.
Right. And this was a long, long time ago. You mentioned that he asked you to do some
kind of JavaScript thing. We were working on some JavaScript together.
How hilarious, like pre-Twitter, early Twitter days, you and Jack Dorsey are in a room together
talking about JavaScript, solving some kind of menial problem.
Terrible problems. Yeah, I mean, not terrible, just like boring widget problem. I think it was
the Odio widget we were working on at the time. I'm surprised anyone paid me to be in the room as
an intern because I didn't really provide any value. I'm very thankful to anyone who included me
back in the day. It was very helpful. So thank you if you're listening.
I mean, is there Odio that's a precursor to Twitter? First of all, did you have any
anticipation that this Jack Dorsey guy could be also a head of a major social network?
And second, did you learn anything from the guy that, like, do you think it's a coincidence
that you two were in the room together? And the coincidence meaning, like,
why does the world play its game in a certain way where these two founders of social networks?
I don't know. It's so weird, right? I mean, it's also weird that
Mark showed up in our fraternity my sophomore year and we got to know each other then,
like, long before Instagram. It's a small world. But let me tell a fun story about Jack.
We're at Odio and I don't know. I think Ev was feeling like people weren't working hard enough
for something. Nice. And I can't remember exactly what he did. He created this thing where every
Friday, I don't know if it was every Friday, I only remember this happening once. But he had us
like a statuette. It's like a merry. And in the bottom, it's hollow, right? And
I remember on a Friday, he decided he was going to let everyone vote for who had worked the hardest
that week. We all voted closed ballot, right? We all put in a bucket and he tallied the votes.
And then whoever got the most votes, as I recall, got the statuette. And in the statuette was a
thousand bucks. I recall there was a thousand bucks. It might have been a hundred bucks,
but let's call it a thousand. It's more exciting that way. It felt like a thousand.
It did, to me, for sure. I actually got two votes. I was very happy. We were a small company,
but as the intern, I got at least two votes. So everybody knew how many votes they got
individually? Yeah. Yeah. And I think it was one of these self-accountability things. Anyway,
I remember Jack just getting like the vast majority of votes from everyone. And I remember
just thinking, like, I couldn't imagine he would become what he'd become and do what he would do,
but I had a profound respect that the new guy who I really liked worked that hard.
And you could see his dedication, even then, and that people respected him.
That's the one story that I remember of him like working with him specifically from that summer.
Can take a small tangent on that. Of course.
There's kind of a pushback in Silicon Valley a little bit against hard work.
Can you speak to the sort of the thing you admired to see the new guy working so hard,
that thing? What is the value of that thing in a company?
See, this is just to be very frank. It drives me nuts. I saw this really funny video on TikTok.
Was it on TikTok? It was like, I'm taking a break from my mental health to work on my career.
I thought that was funny. So it's like, oh, it is kind of phrased that way the opposite often,
right? Okay, so a couple of things. I have worked so hard to do the things that I did.
Like Mike and I lost years off of our lives, staying up late, figuring things out,
the stress that comes with the job. I have a lot more gray hair now than I did back then.
And it requires an enormous amount of work. And most people aren't successful, right?
But even the ones that do don't skate by. I am okay if people choose not to work hard,
because I don't actually think there's anything in this world that says you have to work hard.
But I do think that great things require a lot of hard work. So there's no way you can expect
to change the world without working really hard. And by the way, even changing the world,
you know, the folks that I respect the most have nudged the world in like a slight direction,
slight, very, very slight. Like, even if Elon accomplishes all the things he wants to accomplish,
we will have have nudged the world in a slight direction. But it requires enormous amount. There
was an interview with him where he was just like, he was interviewed, I think, at the Tesla factory,
and he was like, work is really hard. This is actually unhealthy. And I can't recall the exact,
but he was like visibly shaken about how hard he had been working. And he was like, this is bad.
And unfortunately, I think to have great outcomes, you actually do need to work at like
three standard deviations above the mean. But there's nothing saying that people have to go for
that. See, the thing is, but what I would argue, this is my personal opinion, is nobody has to do
anything first of all. Exactly. They certainly don't have to work hard. Exactly. But I think hard
work in a company should be admired. I do too. And you should not feel like you shouldn't feel
good about yourself for not working hard. Like, so for example, I don't have to work out. I don't
have to run. I hate running. But like, I certainly don't feel good if I don't run because I know
for my health, like there's certain values, I guess is what I'm trying to get. The certain
values that you have in life, it feels like there are certain values that companies should have.
And hard work is one of the things I think that should be admired. I often ask this kind of silly
question just to get a sense of people, like if I'm hiring and so on, and just ask if they
think it's better to work hard or work smart. It was helpful for me to get a sense of people from
that. Because you think- The answer is both. The answer is both. The answer is both. I usually
try not to give them that. But sometimes I'll say both if that's an option. But a lot of people kind
of- A surprising number will say work smart. And there are usually people who don't know how to
work smart. And they're literally just lazy. Not just that there's two effects behind that. One
is laziness. And the other is ego. When you're younger and you say it's better to work smart,
it means you think you know what it means to work smart at this early stage. To me, people that say
work hard or both, they have the humility to understand like, I'm going to have to work my
ass off because I'm too dumb to know how to work smart. And people who are self-critical in this
way in some small amount, you have to have some confidence. But if you have humility, that means
you're going to actually eventually figure out what it means to work smart. And then to actually
be successful, you should do both. So I have a very particular take on this, which is that
no one's forcing you to do anything, all choices of consequences. So if you major in,
I don't know, theoretical literature, I don't even know if that's a major. I'm just making something
up. That's supposed to regular literature. Like applied literature. Yeah, think about like theoretical
Spanish lit from the 14th century. Like just make up your esoteric thing. And then the number of
people I went to Stanford with who get out in the world and they're like, wait, what? I can't find a
job. Like no one wants a theoretical, like there are plenty of counter examples of people who've
majored in esoteric things and gone on to be very successful. So I just want to be clear. It's not
about the major, but every choice you make, whether it's to have kids, like I love my children. It's
so awesome to have two kids. And it is so hard to work really hard and also have kids. It's really
hard. And there's a reason why certain very successful people like don't have or not successful,
but people who run very, very large companies or startups have chosen not to have kids for a while
or chosen not to like prioritize them. Everything's a choice. And like I choose to prioritize my
children because like I want to do that, right? So everything's a choice. Now, once you've made
that choice, I think it's important that the contract is clear, which is to say, let's imagine
you were joining a new startup. It's important that that startup communicate that like the
expectation is like, we're all working really, really hard right now. You don't have to join
the startup. But like if you do just know, like it's almost as if you join, I don't know, pick
your like sports team. Like let's go back to the Yankees for a second. You want to join the Yankees,
but you don't really want to work that hard. You don't really want to do batting practice or
pitching practice or whatever for your position, right? That to me is wacko. And that's actually
the world that it feels like we live in and tech sometimes where people both want to work for the
Yankees because it pays a lot. But like don't actually want to work that hard. That I don't
fully understand because if you sign up for some of these things, just sign up for it. But it's
okay if you don't want to sign up for it. There's so many wonderful careers in this world that don't
require 80 hours a week. But when I read about companies going to like four day workweeks and
stuff, I just like, I chuckle because I can't get enough done with a seven day week. I don't know how
and people will say, oh, you're just not working smart. And it's like, no, I work pretty smart,
I think in general, like I wouldn't have gotten to this point if I hadn't like some amount of working
smart. And there is balance though. So I used to be like a pretty big cyclist, I don't do it much
anymore just because of kids and like prioritizing other things, right? But one of the most important
things to learn as a cyclist is to take a rest day. But to me and to cyclists, like resting is a
function of optimizing for the long run. It's not like a thing that you do for its own merits.
It's actually like if you don't rest or muscles don't recover, and then you're just not as like
you're not training as efficiently. You should probably, the successful people I've known in
terms of athletes, they hate rest days, but they know they have to do it for the long term.
Absolutely. They think their opposition is getting stronger and stronger. And that's the
feeling, but you know, it's the right thing. And usually you need a coach to help you.
Yeah, totally. So I mean, I use this thing called training peaks. And that's interesting because
it actually mathematically shows like where you are on the curve and all this stuff.
But you have to, like you have to have that rest, but it's a function of going harder for
longer. Again, it's this reinforcement learning like planning the aggregate and the long,
but a lot of people will hide behind laziness by saying that they're trying to optimize for
the long run and they're not, they're just not working very hard. But again, you don't have
to sign up for it. It's totally cool. Like I don't think less of people for like not working super
hard, just like don't sign up for things that require working super hard. And some of that
requires for the leadership to have the guts, the boldness to communicate effectively at the very
beginning. I mean, sometimes I think most of the problems arise from the fact that the leadership
is kind of hesitant to communicate the socially difficult truth of what it takes to be at this
company. And so they kind of say, hey, come with us. We have snacks. Unlimited vacation.
And you know, Ray at Bridgewater is always fascinating because people, it's been called
like a cult on the outside or cult-ish. But what's fascinating is like they just don't give on their
principles. They're like, listen, this is what it's like to work here. We record every meeting.
We're like brutally honest. And that's not going to feel right to everyone. And if it
doesn't feel right to you, totally cool. Just go work somewhere else. But if you work here,
you are signing up for this. And that's been fascinating to me because it's honesty up front.
It's a system in which you operate. And if it's not for you, like no one's forcing you to work
there, right? I actually did. So I did a conversation with him and kind of got stuck
in a funny moment, which is at the end, I asked him to give me honest feedback of how I did on
the interview. And I was like, I don't think so. He was super nice. He asked me, he's like,
well, tell me, did you accomplish what you're hoping to accomplish? I was like, that's not,
that's not, I'm asking you as an objective observer of two people talking, how do we do today?
And then he's like, well, he gave me this politician's answer. Well, I feel like we've
accomplished successful communication of ideas, which is I'd love to spread some of the ideas
in that, like in principles and so on. Back to my original point, it's really hard to get
feedback. Even for Ray Dalio. It's really hard to give feedback. And one of the other things I
learned from him and just people in that world is like, man, humans really like to pretend like
they've come to, that they've come to some kind of meeting of the minds, like if there's conflict,
if you and I have conflict, it's always better to meet face to face, right? Or on the phone,
Slack is not great, right? Email is not great. But face to face, what's crazy is you and I get
together and we actively try to, even if we're not actually solving the conflict, we actively try
to paper over the conflict. Oh yeah, it didn't really bother bother me that much. Oh yeah,
I'm sure you didn't mean it. I'm sure. But like, no, in our minds, we're still there. Yeah. So
this is one of the things that as a leader, you always have to be digging, especially as you
ascend straight to the conflict. Yeah, as you ascend, no one wants to tell you you're crazy.
No one wants to tell you your your ideas bad. And you can, you're like, Oh, I'm going to be a leader.
And the idea is, well, I'm just going to ask people, I want to tell you. So like you have to
look for the markers, knowing that literally just people aren't going to tell you along the way.
And be paranoid. I mean, you asked about selling, you know, the company, I think one of the biggest
differences between me and a lot of other entrepreneurs is like, I wasn't completely
confident we could do it. Like we could be alone and actually be great. And if any
entrepreneurs honest with you, they also feel that way. But a lot of people are like, well,
I have to be cocky and just say, I can do this on my own. We're going to be fine. We're going to
crush everyone. Some people do say that. And then it's not right. And they fail. But
being honest in that moment with yourself, with those close to you.
And also, you talked about the personality of leaders and who resonates and who doesn't.
And it's rare that I see leaders be vulnerable, rare. And one thing I tried to do at Instagram,
at least internally, was like, say when I screwed up and like point out how I was wrong
about things and point out where my judgment was off. Everyone thinks they have to bat 1,000,
right? Like, that's crazy. The best quant hedge funds in the world bat 50.001%.
They just take a lot of bets, right? Renaissance. They might bat 51%. But
holy hell, the question isn't, are you right every single time and you have to seem invincible?
The question is, how many at bats do you get? And on average, are you better on average
with enough bets and enough at bats that your aggregate can be very high?
I mean, Steve Jobs was wrong at a lot of stuff. The Newton was too early, right? Maxed, not quite
right. There was even a time when he said like, no one will ever want to watch video
on the iPod. Totally wrong. But who cares if you come around and realize your mistake and fix it?
It becomes just like you said, harder and harder when your ego grows and the number of people around
you that say positive things towards you grows. I actually think it's really valuable that
like let's imagine a counterfactual where Instagram became worth like $300 billion or
something crazy, right? I kind of like that my life is relatively normal now. When I say
relatively, you get what I mean. I'm not making a claim that I live a normal life.
But I certainly don't live in a world where there are like 15 Sherpas following me,
like fetching me water or whatever. That's not how it works. I actually like that I
have a sense of humility of like, I may not found another thing that's nearly as big. So I have to
work twice as hard or I have to like learn twice as much. We haven't talked about machine
learning yet, but my favorite thing is all these famous tech guys who have worked in
the industry, pontificating about the future of machine learning and how it's going to kill us all
and right. And like, I'm pretty sure they've never tried to build anything with machine
learning themselves. Yes. So there's a nice line between people that actually build stuff
with machine, like actually program something, or at least understand some of those fundamentals
and the people that are just saying philosophical stuff or journalists and so on. It's an
interesting line to walk because the people who program are often not philosophers.
Or don't have the attention. They can't write an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal,
like it doesn't work. So like, it's nice to be both a little bit, like to have elements of both.
My point is the fact that I have to learn stuff from scratch or that I choose to or like...
It's humbling. Yeah. I mean, again, I have a lot of advantages. But my point is,
it's awesome to be back in a game where you have to fight. That is, that's fun. So being humble,
being vulnerable, it's an important aspect of a leader. And I hope it serves me well. But like,
I can't fast forward 10 years to know. I've just, that's my game plan.
Before I forget, I have to ask you one last thing on Instagram.
What do you think about the whistleblower, Francis Haugen recently coming out and saying
that Facebook is aware of Instagram's harmful effect on teenage girls as per their own internal
research studies and the matter? What do you think about this baby of yours, Instagram,
being under fire now, as we've been talking about under the leadership of Facebook?
You know, I often question, where does the blame lie? Is the blame at the people that originated
the network? Me, right? Is the blame at the decision to combine the network with another
network with a certain set of values? Is the blame at how it gets run after I left? Is it
the driver? Is it the car? Is it that someone enabled these devices in the first place,
if you go to an extreme? Or is it the users themselves, just human nature? Is it just
the way of human nature? Sure. And the idea that we're going to find a mutually exclusive answer
here is crazy. There's not one place that's a combination of a lot of these things.
And then the question is, is it true at all? I'm not actually saying that it's not true or
that it's true, but there's always more nuance here. Do I believe that social media has an
effect on young people? Well, it's got to. They use it a lot. And I bet you there are a lot of
positive effects. And I bet you there are negative effects, just like any technology.
And where I've come to in my thinking on this is that I think any technology has negative side
effects. The question is, as a leader, what do you do about them? And are you actively working
on them? Or do you just not really believe in them? If you're a leader that sits there and says,
well, we're going to put an enormous amount of resources against this, we're going to acknowledge
when there are true criticisms, we're going to be vulnerable and that we're not perfect,
and we're going to go fix them and we're going to be held accountable along the way.
I think that people generally really respect that. But I think that where Facebook, I think,
has had issues in the past is where they say things like, I can't remember what Mark said about
misinformation during the election. There was that famous quote where he's like,
it's pretty crazy to think that Facebook had anything to do with this election. That was
something like that quote. And I don't remember what stage he was on. But that did not age well,
right? You have to be willing to say, well, maybe there's something there and, wow, I want to go
look into it and truly believe it in your gut. But if people look at you and how you act and what
you say and don't believe, you truly feel that way? It's not just the words you say, but how you
say them and that people believe they actually feel the pain of having caused any suffering in
the world. So to me, it's much more about your actions and your posture post-event than it is
about debugging the why. Because I don't know, I don't know this research. It was written well
after I left. Is it the algorithm? Is it the Explorer page? Is it the people you might know
unit connecting you to ideas that are dangerous? I really don't know. So we'd have to have a much
deeper dive to understand where the blame lies. What's very unpleasant to me to consider, now,
I don't know if this is true, but to consider the very fact that there might be some complicated
games being played here. For example, as somebody, I really love psychology. And I love it enough
to know that the field is pretty broken in the following way. It's very difficult to study human
beings well at scale. Because the questions you ask affect the results. You can basically get any
results you want. And so you have an internal Facebook study that asks some question of which
we don't know the full details. There's some kind of analysis. But that's just the one little tiny
slice into some much bigger picture. And so you can have thousands of employees at Facebook,
one of them comes out and picks whatever narrative, knowing that they become famous,
coupled with the other really uncomfortable thing I see in the world, which is journalists seem to
understand they get a lot of clickbait attention from saying something negative about social networks.
Certain companies, they even get some clickbait stuff about Tesla, especially when there's a
public famous CEO type of person, if they get a lot of views on the negative, not the positive.
The positive they'll get, I mean, it actually goes to the thing you were saying before,
if there's a hot sexy new product, that's great to look forward to. They get positive on that.
But absent a product, it's nice to have the CEO messing up in some kind of way. And so
coupled that with the whistleblower and with this whole dynamic of journalism and so on,
with social dilemma being really popular documentary, it's like, all right,
my concern is there's deep flaws in human nature here in terms of things we need to deal with,
like the nature of hate, bullying, all those kinds of things. And then there's people who are trying
to use that potentially to become famous and make money off of blaming others for causing more of
the problem as opposed to helping solve the problem. So I don't know what to think. I'm not saying
this is like, I'm just uncomfortable with, I guess, not knowing what to think about any of this.
Because a bunch of folks I know that work at Facebook on the machine learning side,
so Jan Lacoon, I mean, they're quite upset by what's happening, because there's a lot of
really brilliant good people inside Facebook, they're trying to do good. And so like all of
this press, Jan is one of them. And he has an amazing team of machine learning researchers,
like he's really upset with the fact that people don't seem to understand that this is not,
the portrayal does not represent the full nature of efforts that's going on on Facebook.
So I don't know what to think about that. Well, you just, I think, very
helpfully explain the nuance of the situation and why it's so hard to understand. But a couple
things, one is, I think I have been surprised at the scale with which some product manager
can do an enormous amount of harm to a very, very large company by releasing a trove of
documents. Like I think I read a couple of them when they got published, and I haven't even
spent any time going deep. Part of it's like, I don't really feel like reliving a previous life, but
wow, like talk about challenging the idea of open culture and like what that does to
Facebook internally. If Facebook was built, like I remember, like my office, we had this like no
visitors rule around my office, because we always had like confidential stuff up on the walls and
never was super angry because they're like, that goes against our culture of transparency. And
like Mark's in the fish cube or whatever they call it, the aquarium, I think they called it,
where like literally anyone could see what he was doing at any point. And I don't know. I mean,
other companies like Apple have been quiet slash lockdown, Snapchat's the same way for a reason.
And I don't know what this does to transparency on the inside of startups that value that. I think
that it's a seminal moment. And you can say, well, you should have nothing to hide. But to your point,
you can pick out documents that show anything. But I don't know. So what happens to transparency
inside of startups and the culture that startups or companies in the future will grow? Like the
startup of the future that becomes the next Facebook will be locked down. And what does that do?
Right. So that's part one, part two. Like, I don't think that you could design a more like
well orchestrated handful of events from the like 60 minutes to
releasing the documents in the way that they were released at the right time.
That takes a lot of planning and partnership. And it seems like she has a partner at some firm,
right, that probably helped a lot with this. But man, as at a personal level, if you're her,
you'd have to really believe in what you are doing, really believe in it, because you are personally
putting your ass on the line, right? Like, you've got a very large company that doesn't like enemies,
right? It takes a lot of guts. And I don't love these conspiracy theories about like, oh,
she's being financed from some person or people like, I don't love them because that's like the
easy thing to say. I think the Occam's razor here is like someone thought they were doing something
wrong. And was like very, very courageous. And I don't know if courageous is the word, but like,
so without getting into like, is she a martyr? Is she courageous? Is she right? Like,
let's put that aside for a second. Then there are the documents themselves. They say what they say.
To your point, a lot of the things that like people have been worried about
are already in the documents or they're already been said externally. And I don't know. I'm just
like, I'm thankful that I am focused on new things with my life.
Well, let me just say, I just think it's a really hard problem that probably Facebook and Twitter
are trying to solve. I'm actually just fascinated by how hard this problem is.
There are fundamental issues at Facebook in tone and in an approach of how product gets built and
the objective functions. And since people, organizations are not people. So yawn and fair,
right? Like, there are a lot of really great people who like literally just want to push
reinforcement learning forward. They literally just want to teach a robot to touch, feel, lift,
right? Like, they're not thinking about political misinformation, right? But there's a strong
connection between what funds that research and an enormously profitable machine that has tradeoffs.
And one cannot separate the two. You are not completely separate from the system.
So, I agree. It can feel really frustrating to feel if you're internal there, that you're working
on something completely unrelated and you feel like your group's good. I can understand that.
But there's some responsibility still. You have to acknowledge, it's like the right
value thing. You have to look in the mirror and see if there's problems and you have to fix those
problems. Yeah. You've mentioned machine learning and reinforcement quite a bit. I mean, to me,
social networks is one of the exciting places, the recommender systems where machine learning is
applied. Where else in the world, in the space of possibilities over the next 5, 10, 20 years,
do you think we're going to see impact over machine learning when you try it? On the philosophical
level, on a technical level, what do you think? Or within social networks themselves?
Well, I think the obvious answers are climate change. Think about how much fuel
or just waste there is in energy consumption today because we don't plan accordingly. Because we
take the least efficient route. The logistics and stuff, the supply chain and all that kind
of stuff. Yeah. Listen, if we're going to fight climate change, one awesome way to do it is figure
out how to optimize how we operate as a species and minimize the amount of energy we consume to
maximize whatever economic impact we want to have. Because right now, those two are very much tied
together. And I don't believe that has to be the case. There's this really interesting, you've read
it, for people who are listening. There's this really interesting paper on reinforcement learning
and energy consumption inside buildings. It's one of the seminal ones. But imagine that at
massive scale. That's super interesting. They've done resource planning for servers for peak load
using reinforcement learning. I don't know if that was at Google or somewhere else, but like,
okay, great, you do it for servers. But what if you could do it for just capacity and general
energy capacity for cities and planning for traffic. And of course, there's all the self-driving cars.
I don't know. I'm not going to pontificate crazy ideas using reinforcement learning or
machine learning. It's just so clear to me that humans don't think quickly enough.
So it's interesting to think about machine learning helping a little bit at scale. So a
little bit to a large number of people that has a huge impact. So if you optimize, it's like Google
Maps, something like that trajectory planning, or what would the map quest first? Getting here,
I looked and it was like, here's the most energy efficient route. And I was like, I'm going to
be late. I need to take the fastest route as opposed to unrolling the map. And that's going
to be very inefficient no matter what. I was definitely the other day, part of the Epsilon
of Epsilon Greedy with ways where I was sent on a weird route that I could tell they're like,
we just need to collect data of this road. Kevin's definitely going to be the guinea pig.
And great. Now we have- Did you at least feel pride?
Oh, going through it, I was like, oh, this is fun. Now they get data about this weird shortcut.
And actually, I hit all the green lights and it worked. I'm like, this is a problem.
Just put bad data. Bad data. They're just going to imagine- I could see you slowing down and
stopping at a green light just to give them the right kind of data.
But to answer your question, I feel like that was fairly unsatisfying. And it's easy to say
climate change. But what I would say is, at Instagram, everything we applied machining,
learning to got better for users and it got better for the company. And I saw the power.
I didn't fully understand it as an executive. And I think that's actually one of the issues
that- And when I say understand, I mean the mathematics of it. I understand what it does.
I understand that it helps. But there are a lot of executives now that talk about it in the way
that they talk about the internet. Are they talked about the internet like 10 years ago?
They're like, we're going to build mobile. And you're like, what does that mean? They're like,
we're just going to do mobile. And you're like, okay. So my sense is the next generation of leaders
will have grown up having had classes in reinforcement learning, supervised learning,
whatever. And they will be able to thoughtfully apply it to their companies and the places it
is needed most. And that's really cool. Because I mean, talk about efficiency gains.
That's what excites me the most about it. Yeah. So it's interesting just to get a fundamental
first principles understanding of certain concepts of machine learning. So supervised
learning from an executive perspective, supervised learning, you have to have a lot of humans label
a lot of data. So the question there is, okay, can we gather a large amount of data that can be labeled
well? And that's the question Tesla asked, like, can we create a data engine that keeps
sending an imperfect machine learning system out there, whenever it fails, it gives us data back,
we label it by human and we send it back and forth. So this way, then there is a young lakoon's excited
about this self supervised learning, where you do much less human labeling. And there's some kind
of mechanism for the system to learn it by itself on a human generated data. And then there's the
reinforcement learning, which is like, basically allowing it's applying the alpha zero technology
that allow through self play to learn how to solve the game of go and achieve incredible
levels at the game of chess. Can you formulate the problem you're trying to solve in a way that's
amenable to reinforcement learning? And can you get the right kind of signal at scale because you
need a lot a lot of signal. And that's, that's kind of fascinating to see which part of a social
network can you convert into a reinforcement learning problem. The fascinating thing about
reinforcement learning, I think, is that we now have learned to apply neural networks to guess
the Q function, basically the values for any state in action. And that is fascinating because we
used to just like, I don't know, have like a linear regression like hope it worked. And that was the
fanciest version of it. But now you look at it, I'm like trying to learn this stuff. And I look at
it, I'm like, there are like 17 different acronyms of different ways you can try to apply this. No
one quite agrees. Like, what's the best? Generally, if you're trying to like build a neural network,
there are pretty well trodden ways of doing that. You use Adam, you use Reilu, you like,
there's just like general good ideas. And in reinforcement learning, I feel like the consensus
is like, it totally depends. And by the way, it's really hard to get it to converge. And it's noisy.
So there are all these really interesting ideas around building simulators.
You know, like, for instance, in self driving, right, like, you don't want to like, actually have
someone getting in an accident to learn that an accident is bad. So you start simulating accidents,
simulating aggressive drivers, or simulating crazy dogs that run into the street. And wow,
fascinating, right? Like, my mind starts racing. And then the question is, okay, forget about
self driving cars, let's talk about social networks. How can you produce a better, more
thoughtful experience using these types of algorithms? And honestly, in talking to some of the people
that work at Facebook and old Instagrammers, most people are like, yeah, we tried a lot of things,
didn't quite ever make it work. I mean, for the longest time, Facebook ads was effectively a
logistic regression. Okay, I don't know what it is now. But like, if you look at this paper that
they published back in the day, it was literally just a logistic regression, made a lot of money.
So even at these like extremely large scales, if we are not yet touching what reinforcement
learning can truly do, imagine what the next 10 years looks like. How cool is that?
It's amazing. So I really like the use of reinforcement learning as part of the simulation,
for example, like with self driving cars, it's modeling pedestrians. So the nice thing about
reinforcement learning, it can be used to learn agents within the world. So they can learn to
behave properly. Like you can teach pedestrians that like you don't hard code the way they behave.
They learn how to behave. And that same way, I do have a hope was that Jack Dorsey talks
about healthy conversations. You talked about meaningful interactions, I believe. Yeah.
Yeah. Like, simulating interactions. So you can learn how to manage that. It's fascinating. So
where most of your algorithm development happens in virtual worlds. And then you can really learn
how to design the interface, how you design much of aspects of the experience, in terms of the,
how you select what's shown in the feed, all those kinds of things that it feels like if you
can connect reinforcement learning to that, that's super exciting. Yep. And I think if you have a
company and leadership that believe in doing the right things and can apply this technology in the
right way, some really special stuff can happen. It is mostly likely going to be a group of people
we've never heard about, start up from scratch, right? And you asked if like new social networks
could be built. I've got to imagine they will be. And whoever starts it, it might be some kids in a
garage that took these classes from these people, you, right? Like, and they're building all of
these things with this tech at the core. So I'm trying not to be someone who just like throws
around reinforcement learning as a buzzword. I truly believe that it is the most cutting edge
in what can happen in social networks. And I also believe it's super hard. Like, it's super hard to
make it work. It's super hard to do it at scale. It's super hard to find people that truly understand
it. So I'm not going to say that like, I think it'll be applied in social networks before we have
true self driving. Yeah. Let me put it that way. We could argue about this for a long time. But yes,
I agree with you. I think self driving is way harder than people realize. Oh, absolutely. Let me
ask you, in terms of that kid in the garage or those couple of kids in the garage, what advice
would you give to them if they want to start a new social network or a business? What advice would
you give to somebody with a big dream and a young startup? To me, you have to choose to do something
that even if it fails, like it was so fun, right? Like, we never started Instagram knowing it was
going to be big. We started Instagram because we loved photography. We loved social networks. I had
seen what other social networks had done. And I thought, hmm, maybe we put did a spin on this.
But like, nowhere was our fate predestined. Like, it wasn't like, it wasn't written out
anywhere that everything was going to go great. And I often think the counterfactual, like,
what if it had not gone well? I would be like, I don't know, that was fun. We raised some money.
We learned some stuff. And does it position you well for the next experience? That's the advice
that I would give to anyone wanting to start something today, which is like, does this meet with
your ultimate goals, not wealth, not fame, none of that, because all of that, by the way, is bullshit.
You can get super famous and super wealthy. And I think generally, those are not things that,
again, it's easy to say with like a lot of money that somehow, like, it's not good to have a lot
of money. It's just, I think that complicates life enormously in a way that people don't fully
comprehend. So I think it is way more interesting to shoot for, can I make something that people love
that provides value in the world that I love building that I love working on that, right?
That's, that's what I would do if I were starting from scratch. And by the way,
like in some ways that I will do that personally, which is like, choose the thing that you get up
every morning, you're like, I love this, even when it's painful. Even when it's painful. What about
a social network specifically, if you were to imagine put yourself in the mind, compete against
myself, I can't give out ideas. Okay, I got you. No, but like high level, you like focus on community.
Yeah. And yet, I said that as a, as a half joke. In all honesty, I think these things are so hard
to build that like ideas are a dime a dozen. But you have to talk about keeping it simple.
Can I tell you, which is a liberating idea? Yes. It's three circles and they overlap.
One circle is, what do I have experience at slash what am I good at? I don't like saying what am I
good at? Because it just like seems like, what do I have experience in? Right? What can I bring to
the table? What am I excited about is the other circle? What gets it? Well, it's just super cool,
right? That I want to work on because even when this is hard, I think it's so cool. I want to stick
with it. And the last circle is like, what does the world need? And if that circle ain't there,
it doesn't matter what you work on, because there are a lot of startups that exist that just no one
needs or very small markets need. But if you want to be successful, I think if you're like,
if you're good at it, you have it, sorry, if you're good at it, you're passionate about it,
and the world needs it. I mean, this sounds simple, but not enough people sit down and just think
about those circles and think, do these things overlap? And then can I get that middle section?
It's small, but can I get that middle section? I think a lot about that personally.
And then you have to be really honest about the circle that you're good at,
and really honest about the circle that the world needs. And as opposed to really honest
about the passion, what do you actually love? As opposed to some kind of dream of making money,
all those kinds of stuff. I literally loved it. I had a former engineer who decided to start a startup
and I was like, are you sure you want to start a company versus join something else? Because
being a coach of an NBA team and playing basketball are two very, very different things.
And not everyone fully understands the difference. I think you can kind of do it both.
And I don't know, jury's out on that one, because they're in the middle of it now.
So, but it's really important to figure out what you're good at, not be full of yourself,
like truly look at your track record. What's the saying? It ain't bragging if you can do it.
But too many people are delusional and think they're better at things than they actually are,
or think there's a bigger market than there actually is. When you confuse your passion for
things with a big market, that's really scary. Just because you think it's cool doesn't mean
that it's a big business opportunity. So what evidence do you have? Again, I'm a strict
rationalist on this. And sometimes people don't like working with me because I'm pretty pragmatic
about things. I'm not Elon. I don't sit and make bold proclamations about visiting Mars. That's
just not how I work. I'm like, okay, I want to build this really cool thing that's fairly
practical. And I think we could do it. And it's in this way. And what's cool, though, is like,
that's just my sweet spot. I'm not like, I just, I can't, I can't with a straight face talk about
the metaverse. I can't. I just, it's not me. What do you think about the Facebook we're naming?
It's a meta? I didn't mean that as a dig. I just literally mean like, I'm fairly,
I like to live in the next five years. And like, what things can I get out in a year that people
will use at scale? And so it's just, again, those circles, I think, are different for
different people. But it's important to realize that like, market matters, you being good at it
matters and having passion for it matters. Your question, sorry. Well, on this topic,
in terms of funding, is there by way of advice, was funding in your own journey helpful,
unhelpful? Like, is there a right time to get funding? Venture funding? Venture funding or
anything, boss some money for your parents, I don't know. But like, is money getting the way?
Does it help? Is the timing important? Is there some kind of wisdom you can give there? Because
you were exceptionally successful very quickly. Funding helps as long as it's from the right
people. That includes yourself. And I'll talk about myself funding myself in a second, which is
like, because I can fund myself doing whatever projects I can do, I don't really have another
person putting pressure on me, except for myself. And that creates strange dynamics, right? But let's
like, talk about people getting funding from a venture capitalist initially. We raised money
from Matt Kohler at Benchmark. He's brilliant. Amazing guy, very thoughtful. And he was very
helpful early on. But I have stories from entrepreneurs where they raised money from
the wrong person or the wrong firm, where incentives weren't aligned. They didn't think
in the same way. And bad things happened because of that. The boardroom was always noisy. There
were fights. We just never had that. Matt was great. I think capital these days is kind of a
dime a dozen, right? Like, as long as you're fundable, it seems like there's money out there
is what I'm hearing. It's really important that you are aligned and that you think of
raising money as hiring someone for your team, rather than taking money,
if capital is plentiful, right? It provides a certain amount of pressure to do the right thing
that I think is healthy for any startup. And it keeps you real and honest, because they don't
want to lose their money. They're paid to not lose their money. The problem, maybe I could
depersonalize it, but I remember having lunch with Elon. It only happened once. And I asked him,
I was trying to figure out what it was doing after Instagram, right? And I asked him something
about angel investing. And he looked at me with a straight face and he was like, why the F would I
do that? I was like, I don't know. You're connected. Seems like I only invest in myself. I was like,
ooh, okay. Not the confidence. I was just like, what a novel idea. It's like, yeah,
if you have money, why not just put it against your bag and enable visiting Mars or something,
right? That's awesome, great. But I had never really thought of it that way. But also with
that comes an interesting dynamic where you don't actually have people who are going to lose that
money telling you, hey, don't do this or hey, you need to face this reality. So you need to create
other versions of that truth teller. And whatever I do next, that's going to be one of the
interesting challenges is how do you create that truth telling situation? And that's part of why,
by the way, I think someone like Jack, when you start Square, you have money, but you still,
you bring on partners because I think it creates a truth telling type environment.
I'm still trying to figure this out. It's an interesting dynamic.
So you're thinking of perhaps launching some kind of venture where you're investing in yourself?
Is that in the books potential?
I'm 37 going on 38 next month. I have a long life to live. I'm definitely not going to sit on the
beach, right? So I'm going to do something at some point. And I got to imagine I will help fund it,
right? So the other way of thinking about this is you could park your money in the S&P and this
is bad because the S&P has done wonderfully well over the last year, right? Or you can invest in
yourself. And if you're not going to invest in yourself, you probably shouldn't do a startup.
It's kind of the way of thinking about it. And you can invest in yourself in the way Elon does,
which is basically go all in on this investment. Maybe that's one way to achieve accountability
is you're kind of screwed if you fail. I personally like that. I like burning bridges
behind me so that I'm fucked if it fails. It's really important though. One of the things I
think Mark said to me early on that sticks with me that I think is true, we were talking about
people who had left operating roles and started doing venture or something. And he was like,
a lot of people convince themselves they work really hard. They think they work really hard
and they put on the show and in their minds, they work really hard, but they don't work very hard.
There is something about lighting a fire underneath you and burning bridges such that you
can't turn back that I think we didn't talk about this specifically, but I think you're right.
You need to have that because there's this self-delusion at a certain scale.
I have so many board calls. We have all these things to figure out. This is one of the hard
parts about it being an operator. There are so many people that have made a lot of money not
operating, but operating is just one of the hardest things on earth. It is just so effing hard.
It is stressful. It is you're dealing with real humans, not just throwing capital in and hoping
it grows. I'm not undermining the VC mindset. I think it's a wonderful thing and needed and
so many wonderful VCs I've worked with. But yeah, when your ass is on the line and it's your money,
talk to me in 10 years. We'll see how it goes. Yeah, but you're saying that as a source. When
you wake up in the morning and you look forward to the day full of challenges, that's also where
you can find happiness. Let me ask you about love and friendship. Sure. What's the role in this
heck of a difficult journey you have been on of love, of friendship? What's the role of love in
the human condition? Well, first things first, the woman I married, my wife Nicole, no way I could
do what I do if we weren't together. She had the filter idea. Yeah, exactly. We didn't go over that
story. Everything is a partnership. And to achieve great things, it's not about someone
pulling their weight in places. It's not like someone supporting you so that you could do this
other thing. Mike and I and our partnership as co-founders is fascinating because I don't think
Instagram would have happened without that partnership. Either him or me alone, no way.
We pushed and pulled each other in a way that allowed us to build a better thing because of it.
Nicole, she pushed me to work on the filters early on. And yes, that's a fun story, right?
But the truth of it is being able to level with someone about how hard the process is and have
someone see you for who you are before Instagram and know that there's a constant you throughout
all of this and be able to call you when you're drifting from that, but also support you when
you're trying to stick with that. That's true friendship slash love, whatever you want to call
it. But also for someone not to care, I remember Nicole saying, hey, I know you're going to do
this Instagram thing. I guess it was bourbon at the time. You should do it because even if it
doesn't work, we can move to a smaller apartment and it'll be fine. We'll make it work. How beautiful
is that, right? That's almost like a superpower. It gives you permission to fail and somehow that
actually leads to success. But also, she's the least impressed about Instagram of anyone. She's
like, yeah, it's great, but I love you for you. I like that you're a decent cook. That's beautiful.
That's beautiful with the Gantt chart and Thanksgiving, which I still think is a brilliant
f-ing idea. Thank you. Big ridiculous question. Have you, you're old and wise at the stage,
so have you discovered meaning to this whole thing? Why the hell are we descendants of
apes here on earth? What's the meaning of it? What's the meaning of life?
I haven't. The best learning for me has been no matter what level of success you achieve,
you're still worried about similar things, maybe on a slightly different scale. You're
still concerned about the same things. You're still self-conscious about the same things.
Actually, that moment going through that is what makes you believe there's got to be more
machinery to life or purpose to life and that we're all chasing these materialistic things,
but you start realizing it's almost like the Truman Show when he gets the edge and he knocks
against it. You're like, what? There's this awakening that happens when you get to that
edge that you realize, oh, sure, it's great that we all chase money and fame and success,
but you hit the edge and I'm not even claiming I hit an edge like Elon's hit an edge. There's
clearly larger scales, but what's cool is you learn that it doesn't actually matter and that
there are all these other things that truly matter. That's not a case for working less hard,
that's not a case for taking it easy, that's not a case for the four-day work. What that is a case
for is designing your life exactly the way you want to design it because I don't know. I think
we go around the Sun a certain number of times and then we die and then that's it. That's me.
CB – Are you afraid of that moment?
No, not at all. In fact, at least not yet. Listen, I'm a pilot. I do crazy things and I'm like,
no, if anything, I'm like, oh, I got to choose mindfully and purposefully the thing I am doing
right now and not just fall into it because you're going to wake up one day and ask yourself,
why the hell you spent the last 10 years doing X, Y, or Z? I guess my shorter answer to this is
doing things on purpose because you choose to do them so important in life and not just floating
down the river of life, hitting branches along the way because you will hit branches,
but rather literally plotting a course and not having a 10-year plan, but just choosing every
day to opt in. I haven't figured out the meaning of life by any stretch of the imagination,
but it certainly isn't money and it certainly isn't fame and it certainly isn't travel and
it's way more of opting into the game you love playing.
CB – Every day, opting in.
CB – Just opting in. Don't let it happen. You opt in.
CB – Kevin, it's great to end on the love and the meaning of life. This is an amazing
conversation. You gave me light into some fascinating aspects of this technical world
and I can't honestly wait to see what you do next. Thank you so much.
CB – Thanks for having me.
CB – Thanks for listening to this conversation with Kevin Systrom. To support this podcast,
please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you some words from Kevin,
Systrom himself, focusing on one thing and doing it really, really well can get you very far.
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.