David Friedberg: okay everybody strong show for you today melania trump is dropping her own nft platform i kid you not we are at a peak it's a peak i'm going to talk a little bit about our grift of the day a little bit about trump a little bit about the obamas i think actually her nft platform i might be a contrarian here it's kind of dope and reddit just filed to go public i'm going to break down their metrics revenue price to sales revenue per employee and what uh is the genius of reddit and

SPEAKER_03: how it got here and how just masterful alexis and steve uh the co-founders are as co-founders but also community builders they really are savants at that just total impresarios then i'm going to

David Friedberg: interview my friend tony howe i invested in his first company chartbeat his second company scroll scroll was bought by twitter scroll is a big part of twitter blue it's got a lot of ideas on micropayments for and subscriptions for news uh we had a really open discourse about twitter's product and what it's like to be a founder and go into a big company and he was pretty honest and we went a little double clicked on twitter's roadmap and what they're doing over there and he even talked a little bit about the unexpected ceo change so super honest uh and i really appreciate twitter's comms and communication groups allowing their executives to come on this program and talk i think it's like a really cool thing we don't get that from the facebooks of the world uh or the instagrams or even

SPEAKER_10: susan mojacki at youtube i've invited her many times a lot of the big companies are not sharing

SPEAKER_07: uh their executives to talk about product and the company and where they're going uh but twitter has made the decision to be uh really open and talk to their users so i do appreciate that stick with us

SPEAKER_11: it's going to be a great show this week in startups is brought to you by disruptive advertising the top digital marketing agency for startups and smbs get one thousand dollars off your first month of service at disruptive advertising dot com slash twist squarespace turn your idea into a new website go to squarespace.com slash twist for a free trial when you're ready to launch use offer code twist to save 10 off your first purchase of a website or domain and mbroker's startup insurance program helps startups secure the most important types of insurance at a lower cost and with less hassle save up to 20 off traditional insurance today at mbroker.com slash twist while you're there get an

SPEAKER_15: extra 10 off using offer code twist all right everybody it's time for grift of the day yes it's

David Friedberg: a very grifty time right now we have nancy pelosi on one side uh the greatest trader ever putting up a strong defense uh that she should be able to trade on all the amazing information she and other politicians get that's absolutely deranged but there's nothing better than presidential and

SPEAKER_15: presidential family grift those are the high order grifts because every country every corporation loves loves to get a picture of a former president of the united states you know in their lobby by their logo next to their ceo and you just put that up and you're instantly credible some of the least

SPEAKER_20: credible investors i've known and founders for that matter have a picture of themselves with clinton obama trump bush everybody in their offices on their social media uh instagram whatever and it's just a classic great grift uh if you are modestly wealthy you can pay 25 to 50 000 to get a picture with any president you want and so you can collect all four presidents for 100 grand less than half the price of a board ape uh you can put four pictures of four presidents on your wall and then when you do sales or anybody comes it's the greatest trick in the book and um a lot of those top of the funnel coach mastermind ebook grifters use this technique and they talk about it they'll hire john travolta they'll hire you know any any celebrity who just needs a quick 50k speaking gig to do those

SPEAKER_07: pictures and to sort of associate it has nothing to do with the content it's just to get the picture so they give them the 50k to get the picture and then boom they're good so uh in our grift of the

David Friedberg: day melania trump is launching an nft platform i kid you not here's the announcement excited for this new venture which combines my passion i should do it in a melania voice right excited for this new

SPEAKER_26: venture which combines my passion for art and commitment to helping our nation's children fulfill their own unique american dream to grift hard and web3 i added that last sentence uh the

SPEAKER_10: former first lady tweeted a document from the office of melania trump stating the first nft available for purchase so this is going to be a series will be called melania's vision priced at one soul which is 180 as of this morning uh rip to the 240 uh so sorry to my besties the nft is watercolor art that quote embodies mrs trump's cobalt blue eyes providing the collector with an amulet an amulet to inspire

SPEAKER_07: also includes an audio recording of melania trump and here it is a message of hope from melania trump

SPEAKER_27: my vision is look forward with inspiration strength and courage my vision is look forward and be inspired inspiration my vision and courage is who my vision is divorce donald forward with inspiration and get

SPEAKER_31: marla go as a settlement and turn it oh god it's just so brutal uh so you can buy this i think she's

SPEAKER_33: gonna do it every day uh i think it's pretty awesome i gotta admit like i like i don't want to be one of

SPEAKER_37: 10 000 apes but i kind of do want to own one of these and i think she should cameo it so it should be like this is special inspiration to this week in startup steam be your best your boss is insufferable

SPEAKER_20: but be best this is legitimate art for me this is legitimate art melania is an icon uh i'm not a trump as you all know but i'm team melania man i think she is got like a kind of interesting sense

David Friedberg: of humor here about this uh and i like when she like bats away donald trump's hands or rolls her eyes at

SPEAKER_15: him like she is a queen and like these are going to become i predict huge like she could just do this every day like inspiration a day from melania trump this could become super viral this could be her moment and if she sells one of these a day for a couple of g's i mean she's going to be doing you know as

SPEAKER_38: good as perez hilton on cameo who i think was the top person cameo for a while trump stated through this

SPEAKER_41: new technological based platform we will provide children computer science skills including programming

SPEAKER_42: and software development to thrive in the age out of the foster community okay i guess she's going to

SPEAKER_10: do some oh i see a portion of the proceeds i guess she's going to donate or maybe this is part of the grift i think the trump kids got a bunch of money for cancer kids and then put up like flag

David Friedberg: polls at their uh at their golf courses like the trump non-profit foundation was actually um shut down in new york it's the best of my recollection somebody fact check me on that if i'm wrong i think this kind of feels like warhol and like what he did with ed sedgwick and some of that but speaking of politicians cashing in obviously trump has got the two billion dollars back that is worth more than like four or five times where buzzfeed is work i mean poor jonah peretti and the team over there

SPEAKER_20: like they poured you know over a decade into building buzzfeed getting to 360 million dollars in revenue and they're worth five or six hundred million which with 100 million in cash they have means the business is worth one times revenue or 1.4 times revenue and then trump starts a spac does nothing puts up the worst white paper i've ever seen the worst pitch deck in the history of pitch decks literally something that should be on snl i mean and it's worth over two billion and they've got hundreds of millions in cash and they had a more successful ipo than buzzfeed what is happening in the world this is peak nft and peak spac both of these examples are examples of peaks what are the ways to know you're at a peak is to look for the grift so here's a lesson for everybody consider this a micro lesson for you uh shout out scott adams on his micro lessons here's a micro lesson when people who have nothing to do with the technology then go all in to secure the bag and there's no there there kind of a peaky moment we saw it with icos right paris hilton and the kardashians everybody's ico-ing ico this ico that and then you saw some of them get fines uh some celebrities got fines and then the ico thing went away and whoever bought icos was left holding the bag i think in large part correct me

David Friedberg: i'm wrong there were thousands of these icos and uh i think none of them were money making correct me if i'm wrong is there a money-making one file coin ico maybe i don't know uh but i think almost universally

SPEAKER_07: the icos were uh became worth zero now when i say hey listen nfts could become worth like close to

SPEAKER_10: zero 99 of the money spent could go to go away and there'd be one percent people say i'm crazy but it's not exactly what happened with icos and correct me if i'm wrong 90 x percent of the revenue is gone it's a grift they took the money they ran nfts likely the same thing 90 of the money spent on nfts

SPEAKER_07: is gone forever 10 may stick around one percent may stick around who knows so be careful out there

SPEAKER_41: all right listen have apple's new privacy updates impacted your attribution for paid ads i bet it has

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SPEAKER_53: million dollars a year in advertising spend that means they're experts that means they get to see all these changes and they get to solve problems before anybody else has even figured out those problems exist they're trusted by hundreds of brands like adobe and scott's miracle grow so if your google and facebook ads are not scaling like they used to you got to reach out to disruptive they're going to look to help you scale your spend profitably and how are they going to do that by diversifying your ad strategy on less popular platforms and listen every platform takes like a year to master well they've mastered them all already that's their job it's all they do focus the marketing consultants focus on end-to-end tracking across your crm marketing automations and your e-commerce platforms so they're thinking holistically about your whole marketing stack

SPEAKER_54: and what disruptive really focuses on is contribution margin profitability and closed deals you don't

SPEAKER_53: want to just spend your money and give you a high five no you're looking at your actual business metrics that matter contribution margin your profitability what deals you're closing with those leads and they want to reach startups and mid-sized companies and help you grow and obviously

SPEAKER_07: they work with the big companies already so how about this how about i get you a thousand dollars off your first month of service at disruptive advertising dot com twist disruptive advertising dot com twist to get a thousand dollars off it's a great crew over there i met the founder they really love the show they love helping startups so go ahead and give them a shot right and then report back to me uh tell me how you did all right let's get back to the program uh this is a sign of the peak but let's be honest the trumps pal in comparison in their grift pal to previous

SPEAKER_41: presidents and families according to the financial times penguin random house paid 65 million dollars

David Friedberg: for the global rights to two books written by barack and michelle obama and according to cnn business

SPEAKER_36: the payout for their netflix deal was in the high eight figures i'm guessing they got stock i heard it was

SPEAKER_41: like yeah i heard this is like another 50 or something million dollar deal this is a point of complete

David Friedberg: complete complete randomness and it's incredible how these two things are absolutely not correlated they're correlated but clearly not caused netflix socks went on a 40x wreck in the obama era going

SPEAKER_07: from 1.4 billion to 58 billion uh it's obviously at 260 billion today uh and obama did a huge deal with them these two things are obviously in no way related um and of course over that decade what was the number one issue for netflix anybody remember what the number one existential crisis for netflix was net neutrality net neutrality would they have to pay for all the bandwidth they were using on other

SPEAKER_59: people's servers i wonder wonder what the obama administration's position on net neutrality was

SPEAKER_07: i'm gonna look it up i voted for obama okay so i'm just saying presidents and their families are the grifters of the griftiest class you can go back to the clintons doing crazy speaking gigs but yeah maybe

David Friedberg: double click on that and take a look for me all right in other incredible news and uh congratulations to the founders of reddit uh they just confidentially filed to go public after 16 years it's been over 16 years hasn't it and 1.3 billion in funding the announcement came last night steve huffman has been running the company and uh alexis orhanian was there for a little bit had a little bit of a

SPEAKER_41: disaster they put ellen pow in charge for like a year or two and the thing just almost imploded uh from

David Friedberg: what i read um but they put it back in the hands of the founder which is always the best idea the s1 is

SPEAKER_20: not available for us to review yet because this is a confidential filing so you know they're filing but they don't put all the data in there yet according to the verge the company has been considering the

SPEAKER_36: ipo for some time we know that uh rumors have been out there it's uh reddit is probably the 20th

SPEAKER_07: most traffic site in the world according to alexa and similarweb and other places here's an image of

David Friedberg: the chart uh with companies near them bk is the russian facebook uh but you know they're obviously in a great uh area in august reddit raised a 700 million dollar series f at a 10 billion dollar

SPEAKER_07: valuation and uh they're making hundreds of million in revenue the round was led by fidelity uh according to pitch book which you know public investors dipping down and doing those late stage ones pretty normal 100 million in ad revenue for q2 of 2021 so that's 400 million run rate 52 million dows and so if we were to compare that to the revenue of buzzfeed pretty similar buzzfeed worth 600

SPEAKER_20: million uh this company probably going to go out and be worth 20 times that i would guess now why why would this be worth 20 times well buzzfeed hires a bunch of journalists to get their traffic and reddit hires zero so the community driven network and community means lower costs higher number

SPEAKER_07: of users they have 52 million dollars i don't know what buzzfeed has to be honest but i think it's nowhere near that and uh they have over a hundred thousand active subreddits those are like groups by verticals and that was the big win i would say in the history of reddit the two things they got right

SPEAKER_20: were subreddits and never changing the interface and just not being put under pressure kevin rose put under a lot of pressure by venture capitalists to change the interface condé nest had bought reddit so they didn't invest in it so as a function of that ridiculous sale of like six ten million dollars

SPEAKER_07: to condé nest i think they sold for six million or ten million to condé nest it was like a fire sale it was crazy uh maybe it was more maybe it was 20 or 30. anyway condé nest got it for a fraction of a

SPEAKER_53: percentage of what it is worth today and they apparently didn't really invest in it so therefore the interface didn't change when the interface doesn't change users can just use the product

David Friedberg: ebay amazon craigslist come to mine and when you don't change the interface users can just keep using it seo can keep growing and so over a hundred thousand active sites yeah condé nest paid get this this is what things were like 10 million dollars for reddit in 2006 i had sold weblogs inc for 30 million

SPEAKER_10: and it was just sort of the nature of the time period it was very small acquisitions right it was considered kind of a sideshow i wouldn't say a joke it was just considered like a silly message board

David Friedberg: but a silly message board when the community is truly cherished and valued i think that's the genius of alexis uh ohanian and steve i think those two are product geniuses and community geniuses i really do mean that sincerely i'm not just saying that like they were able to really focus and understand their community and then everything else worked out because if those conversations are baking constantly and people are submitting tens of thousands hundreds of thousands of stories a day and some number of them get discussions under it all that content is free just like chorus content is free stock

SPEAKER_07: overflow's content is free and this is user generated content ugc was all the rage in web 2.0 um and so you know reddit is now worth a thousand times what content has paid for it they have 450 million in yearly ad revenue uh according to sources and 1400 employees that means they're making 320 thousand dollars per employee if you did that uh stat with buzzfeed i'm gonna almost guarantee it's much less but i could be wrong we'll see the point is generally speaking that user generated content

David Friedberg: means lower costs i wonder what all these employees are working on uh that's the crazy thing and so giving a little credit for some growth on 100 million a quarter run rate let's just say it's 450 uh at a 10 billion valuation they're 22 times if they're growing at 20 a year seems reasonable to me i bet you they're also under monetized which basically means they're probably not making as much per page view as buzzfeed or let's say jim bankoff's vox properties um and so the media business is really hard you have to deal with a bunch of journalists and content creators which is brutal because if you self-select to be a journalist or a content creator you are by definition opinionated by definition a debater great with words in other words you're a management nightmare writers are the most difficult people to manage in the world journalists you see this because what's the big existential crisis

SPEAKER_10: for all of those publications it's the unions and the unionization and the employees walking out and them making crazy demands yada yada yada that's what bank off and peretti and all those people are struggling through even the new york times is like wire cutters walking out everybody's walking out it's literally like managing journalists trust me i did this and now i have analysts that inside and

SPEAKER_73: managing those folks it is like managing like the members of the dungeons and dragons

SPEAKER_20: theater and debate club like imagine a hundred people who were in all three of those clubs they played dungeon dragons they were in the theater club and in the debate club and now you have to manage them it's crazy that's why media brands just have a hard time and they uh generally try to stay small you know a hundred person to 500 person staff and then condon asked it's such a brilliant job okay we'll give grayton carter vanity fair on one floor and anna wintour gets vogue on one floor different cultures little micro ecosystems 100 to 500 people they have their own pnl because once you get to the new york times scale or vox's scale now you're seeing what's happening the unions are like oh we got to get the wire cutter people we got to combine them with this group of people the curbed people the new york mag union and you have i think vox has like seven unions inside of vox these businesses are challenged vox is actually pretty profitable actually jim bankos knows what he's doing and

SPEAKER_07: that's probably a smart plan because if you're not profitable i think people are going to put you in a bucket like it'll never be profitable and it's just a bad business model so a smart move on bank off's part to focus on profitability i think that's going to make box actually maybe live up to their valuation in the private markets maybe why peretti and buzzfeed isn't i think if buzzfeed show they can be profitable you know have a 30 20 30 margin their fate will change um there's really only the the hard

David Friedberg: part about community is being patient that's the hard part about building community it's just a slow

SPEAKER_36: burn i call it like hot coals marketing you know you have to just build up a base of like hot coals and

David Friedberg: then when you put a log on a bunch of hot coals it goes on fire if you put three logs in a fire pit throw some like money on top of it lighter fluid and you light it on fire you're just gonna get a charred group of three logs so you have to be patient for the first five or ten years to just build a community that likes to see each other and when they're not in the community they're kind of bummed and they're like i miss my community i gotta go back and check which is how i am with nick's fan tv uh or the this week in startups community the other thing is like slack and discord that's a little bit too fast uh for most people in their passions in other words if you go to a discord like you're not going to scroll up for the last 24 hours and look at that conversation and try to read it like it's a transcript or a stenographer did it you kind of prefer the lightness and the ease of using a algorithmically based subreddit right this is kind of a brilliant model uh and so moderation is a slight problem people making bad reddits obviously there's a ton of porn reddits uh and there were a ton of hate reddits they got rid of all the hate i think they still have all the adult content which i think tumblr had adult content too twitter's got a lot of adult content these companies have done a really good job of turning that off by default and then having the people who

SPEAKER_07: are making the adult content flag it so if you're not flagging it they'll flag it for you i think is what happens and so a lot of these are offshore so there's 1400 employees i wouldn't be surprised if 500 of them are in the philippines and manila getting paid one to three dollars an hour us which is a great salary over there translates really well to a middle class income from what i understand and they're just trained you know like this is porn if it's porn just label it porn and so well that will come out maybe it's you know 20 or 30 percent adult content i'm sorry i should probably use that word on some of these sites on twitter etc but you don't see it uh it's kind of hidden and uh they may they probably can't monetize it either so it's kind of like a growth hack but so those are the only issues uh reddit great great community great great site congratulations to alexis ohanian steve huffman and the entire team both have been on the pod a couple times uh both great entrepreneurs a lot of respect for both of them in their careers and uh let's go on to my interview with scroll founder former ceo of chartbeat and now one of the great product people at twitter tony

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SPEAKER_15: twist okay great job team all right everybody welcome back to this week in startups in his second appearance on the program tony hale is back he was on i kid you not episode 77 of this podcast in september of 2010 when i had just started my angel investing journey as a scout for sequoia capital and one of those investments i made was in a little company called chartbeat how did i wind up investing in chartbeat well my friend john borthwick was running his own little startup studio called beta works and he said come see these three or four projects and he had like three or

SPEAKER_36: four projects going on one of them was chartbeat one of them was devpost a very cool site and i said okay i'll take those two as if i was shopping he's like oh that one's not available this one is available i said either i take both or i take none because i knew that if he liked one and it wasn't available then that was the winner and he's like god i'm never playing poker with you okay so i got

SPEAKER_87: to be the first investor at least theoretically uh after him in chartbeat which has done wonderfully and it was a great service and uh tony was the ceo of that company and then he went on to do

SPEAKER_36: a company called scroll to take on the uh mission that so many founders have absolutely gotten

SPEAKER_87: knocked out by uh and we'll talk to him about that today but he made it and now he is a senior director of product at twitter which bought scroll which i was an investor in as well welcome back to the program 11 years later tony how thank you it's very good to be here uh so uh let's start with what was scroll uh how many years did you work on it and how close did you get to your mission

SPEAKER_99: my god uh how close do i get to my mission is a terrifying question

SPEAKER_101: uh so scroll was quite simply uh our attempt to see if we could build a better internet which was when you were a scroll member when you visited any number of like several hundred sites

SPEAKER_102: including the atlantic box verge um local sites like the philadelphia inquirer and so forth when you got there it didn't matter how you got there when you got there they would deliver you a clean fast ad-free experience no trackers no lucky chunk boxes for the clickbait it was just the clean content that you wanted to see and then we paid out from the subscription more money than they would make from ads so it was an attempt at a whole new business model for the internet where consumers got

SPEAKER_103: what they wanted and publishers and journalists still got to pay rent does this fall under the

SPEAKER_57: 20-year journey of people trying to get micro payments back into online systems it's it's pretty

SPEAKER_102: a little bit closer to spotify in some way and that we didn't want someone to be constantly like saying yes i will pay yes i will pay yes i will pay instead we wanted to be frictionless so they would just go to the site and then some portion of their money so in that case a micropayment would go to the publisher and one of the interesting things that we found was that it was remarkably easy to

SPEAKER_99: beat the ad economics with subscription mechanics so we could charge five bucks a month have a three buck fifty pool and we could easily beat what the publisher would have made from avatar so let me

SPEAKER_73: reflect back to you what you said so i completely understand and so does the audience a five dollar a month subscription 350 70 just like the app store goes to the publishers if i was a user and i clicked on uh 350 stories they would each get a penny a penny would be a ten dollar cpm i guess right a thousand

David Friedberg: views at a penny would be something like that am i ballpark correct and you're saying the economics

SPEAKER_111: yeah the economic the economics worked out um in general our minimum was that we would beat them by

SPEAKER_102: 40 so if you if you think about the math like this from a kind of from a top of the market perspective about kind of 234 million consumers of news and media in the us the top group of publishers like all the big large premium publishers together make about seven billion dollars in digital ad revenue that's including classifieds and everything else uh over the course of a year so that breaks down to an arpu an average revenue per user of about two bucks fifty a person so if you've got all of those big publishers into and then you'd have to beat at least two bucks fifty to be met to make it worth a while

David Friedberg: and we had a three buck fifty pool so the math just works now of course people have been trying to do

SPEAKER_73: this micro payments were done one at a time hey a penny a story four cents a story which is kind of what we're talking about here they were making a couple of pennies per story that's clicked on um but it creates cognitive load to make that decision every time you look at an article so what you did so brilliantly we said hey don't worry about making a decision in the moment is this article worth five cents or one cent just we'll we'll we'll come up with an average some people might read a

SPEAKER_36: thousand stories and but there might be somebody else who reads but 10 and it all comes out in the

SPEAKER_07: watch is that correct what you basically conceived of yeah it's very similar to the the kind of

SPEAKER_102: discussions that spotify had to have with the music industry back in the day where they were saying look we have some people who spend a thousand dollars a year on albums and you're going to charge them 10 bucks a month to listen to everything and the key was if there's a bucket of people that's worth 10 million dollars to you and i deliver 15 million dollars from that so yeah some people will have more some people have less but the total yield is going to go up now uh this didn't work

SPEAKER_36: previously people had tried it in the 90s they tried it in the 2000s you must have studied all of that the audacity to come at this problem in you know let's call it the third decade of people trying for

SPEAKER_73: a quick history lesson minitel which was in france was an online service that charged you by the minute therefore if you were on a news story from le monde you would be charged some percentage of your online time the same thing happened on prodigy in aol in the early days you were paying five three to five bucks an hour and they would give a percentage of that to whoever was running the chat room or content

SPEAKER_36: or video game experience so what gave you the audacity to try this and then what was the reaction when you went to investors mine was crazy let's go but i'm that kind of guy but what was the reaction

SPEAKER_102: and what gave you that audacity um so you're right there's a ton of corpses in this particular graveyard and that was both terrifying but also useful because we knew all the things that had gone wrong

SPEAKER_101: uh in the past your point there'd been like attempts to create uh to create the micropayments where there'd been that cognitive friction uh where people just weren't going to do that kind of like

SPEAKER_102: i'm gonna say yes two cents yes four cents that wasn't gonna work when people had tried to do this

SPEAKER_101: as their own separate silo when they tried to do it in an app and they basically said to people hey you can uh you can have this experience you know you have to change everything about how you discover content to use it those kind of approaches had struggled because there wasn't a large installed base

SPEAKER_102: um so there was a bunch of different challenges um and one of the things that gave me the courage to do this was the fact that i had an english accent and so i thought i'd be more persuasive to publishers um than uh people in the past and it was also one of those one of the kind of big questions about how you approach this kind of problem which is you're effectively got two sides you've got consumers and your publishers and trying to bring them together in some kind of like quasi marketplace and which side to go with first is always a tricky question and a lot of people in the past had tried to go by saying i'm going to build up a user base around this and then i'm going to go and do content deals and in fact adblock plus to try to do something with flatter uh which was their only kind of attempt to do this and in each one of these situations that there was a lack of trust because

SPEAKER_101: they'd started by like effectively taking money away from publishers and from the people creating

SPEAKER_129: the content um hilarious yeah so it was like you've been screwing this over the for the last five years now you want to do a deal no um so one of the decisions that we started with was we were like okay

SPEAKER_102: we know pretty much everyone publishing anyway because i've been working with them for the last seven years as ceo of chartbeat we could test this idea with a bunch of people and we knew we wanted to start in a kind of ethical scale level way so we started by doing the deals with the publishers and we're making sure the model worked and that kind of gave people a little bit more confidence

SPEAKER_131: where where previously people had not been able to get publishers to do these deals we were the first

SPEAKER_73: to really get this kind of deal done and let's be honest publishers over the last five to ten years have been suffering um they've been losing the ad race to google and facebook which have better products for advertisers who are trying to reach true scale now if you're trying to reach a niche audience sure of you know one of jim bankoff's vox publications might be better or you know a

David Friedberg: specific section of the new york times might reach your specific niche and you want to be associated with

SPEAKER_73: it but if you're trying to hit scale you know youtube google facebook instagram there are at scale platforms so they were willing over the last five years that you were running uh scroll they would be

David Friedberg: will four or five years they would be willing to to take a shot right now right they're like hey if it works it's all upside for us there's no downside for them right this was this was one of the things

SPEAKER_101: that um was critical for us it was making sure that we could make it a win-win from the beginning and you're right like the word on everyone's lips was revenue diversity because they could see what was happening with the ad business they could see like uh reports coming in where it's like 85 percent

SPEAKER_102: of digital ad spend is going to two companies they're like we're not one of those two companies we have to do something about this um and so there was a there's a desire for revenue diversity and the critical thing was also avoiding the notion of cannibalization we effectively worked a little bit like programmatic advertising you came to the site and instead of it being uh auction between advertisers

SPEAKER_101: we were just bidding the most for that person to deliver a particular experience and instead of it

SPEAKER_73: being a mercedes ad it was a clean beautiful page yeah i mean at the end of the day there is an

SPEAKER_36: increasing number of individuals i believe who are valuing their time and the cleanliness the the

SPEAKER_07: hygiene of the page they're on and i think one of the best examples of this is youtube i think they

SPEAKER_36: were calling it red i don't know what they call it today um but are you a member of youtube's red service and uh do you pay for it because i have to tell you it's the most life-changing experience for me as a youtube person it doubled my usage of youtube because the ads were the most annoying

SPEAKER_07: thing and now they're all gone and i give them what 10 or 15 bucks a month so worth it this is this

SPEAKER_142: is why i'm not a member of youtube is uh red is because if i was i would also double my usage of youtube

SPEAKER_102: uh and right now that would get me in a tremendous amount of trouble with my family uh so i like well so thus far but it's it's that same thing yeah which is like people will pay a

SPEAKER_101: premium either for experience or access and so for us it was like okay we can make the economics work around the experience in a way that could make the world a bit better and maybe we were naive

SPEAKER_102: uh to dream about these kind of things but we that was the dream was always like can you can you make the internet the way it always should have been where payments and like my my web three friends will tell me about this all the time payments have been the missing infrastructure of the web yeah so we were like an initial kind of like uh attempt at that if you don't have business insurance you failed

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SPEAKER_151: um what happened when you brought up the discussion of hey content behind the paywall being included in

SPEAKER_102: this model when you talk to publisher so paywalls are the most important and also area for publishers also the area where they get most terrified yeah um and quite rightly so like though they've seen so many of their kind of like revenue revenue models being taken away by platforms often with kind of arbitrary decisions uh at times about like are these things that we've seen what happened with like facebook and video with i mean we all read the google and panda and all of these things so keeping that relationship uh sacrosanct has been has been critical and so one of the things that was super important for us was to show that we weren't kind of cannibalizing those uh paywall subscriptions and then we're finding a way to be able to deliver this experience in a way that didn't uh stop them from subscribing and actually people because they were getting a better experience started caring about the content more and started kind of converting more and that was one of the things that we found so that people who would like wouldn't subscribe to the atlantic before suddenly were like i go here because i know i'm going to get a clean experience and now i'm going to subscribe to the site i know that when i do i'm going to continue to get this after experience on

SPEAKER_73: whatever content i consume and uh you were uh so successful in um this run that you had as an

SPEAKER_07: independent company twitter uh which is uh has launched a subscription service that is i think excellent and it's 1.0 it's called twitter blue it's only three dollars a month feels like it should be five to seven fifty bucks a year but i guess twitter is uh going for a lower price bought the

David Friedberg: company and i think you're a key piece of the twitter blue experience correct yeah so uh we were we were

SPEAKER_160: super lucky we've been we've been talking to twitter for a while they uh actually invested in our series

SPEAKER_102: a although that wasn't uh public um and so we've been working with them for a while and they were like look we want to come in with uh a subscription service we want to try and build and like be the kind of the first kind of large platform to really kind of diversify seriously in in this way and we want to do it in a way that kind of like recognizes and support the ecosystem like the the phrase that

SPEAKER_101: i've been hearing at twitter a lot over the last six months that i've been there is like how can we be a different kind of platform uh and so they they wanted to bring in uh scroll and we very very

SPEAKER_102: swiftly uh were able to kind of rebuild a bunch of it inside of twitter and then launch it as part

SPEAKER_103: of twitter blue with ad free articles so um a large portion of what uh you you give to twitter for that subscription actually funds the journalism uh that you read so now journalists who already are

SPEAKER_36: obsessed with twitter both as consumers as a news source as a place to talk to subjects to find news

SPEAKER_07: stories and that was just a critical uh piece that evan williams uh got right and biz stone and jack in the early days was they just decided hey let's give journalists blue check marks celebrities etc so people don't fake them and then that really made uh you know this a great place not just to

SPEAKER_36: promote yourself but to actually do your job right so they're kind of embedded in this ecosystem now if you can help them generate uh revenue and get rid of ads and make it more sustainable oh my lord

SPEAKER_73: that's so in twitter's uh wheelhouse uh so is the service essentially just ported over now and all the

SPEAKER_101: publishers get to experience this again yeah yeah so we there was a there was a lot of work that went in a lot of late nights that went into that porting over and we're also lucky enough that uh we're able to kind of expand the team and add some more people on the partnership side as well and so we're able to

SPEAKER_102: bring in sites like the washington post and the la times and there's a whole bunch more uh launching i wish i could say just now but like it was a couple of weeks um uh around this who were able to kind of augment even what we built at scroll so and twitter blue of course is not just uh ad-free articles there's a bunch of amazing other features uh involved in it but like this is this is the one that's close to my baby that one and top articles because uh for the nuzzle fans uh we brought that

SPEAKER_151: one back ah where where do you find that in the interface i didn't see top articles um so uh in the

SPEAKER_101: interface so if you go to the left uh if you click on your profile picture uh in the app and you'll see top

SPEAKER_07: articles in the uh oh yes i did see this yes this should be this is going to wind up in the main navigation or maybe on the explore page i think right you just so one thing you can do with this

SPEAKER_101: is with twitter blue you also have the ability to customize your kind of bottom of the app nav and so i just put it directly in the center uh it's one of so i that's one of the things i love about it uh and that's amazing the team kristin tucker was the pm on that whole bunch of engineers uh and designers worked really hard to kind of build this kind of like homage to nozzle in six months wow and

SPEAKER_100: get it customizing the net navigation is a feature i didn't know was part of twitter blue we were

SPEAKER_36: educating the audience so you have the you have six icons in your task bar down there right and you can pick which ones you want and so bookmarks can be there lists can be there and top articles can be there so only six items can be there i don't need to have spaces there or communities so i can turn off spaces and communities and replace it with top articles and lists which i love oh my god that's such a game changer for a twitter addict i'm glad you like it i i think that like the next piece really i think is um i think becoming a blue check mark should be what twitter blue is about is now that you know my name you have my credit card i can be verified as anybody uh and that would turn what is a cost center now into a paid center so is there any movement on that internally or to people talking about that i know you can't tip your cards too much but i think there's a there's a lot of interest

SPEAKER_102: in kind of like how to signal being a twitter blue subscriber and thinking about that kind of verification thing i would say that one of the things that's always important for us in these

SPEAKER_101: in these conversations is thinking about kind of equity and what those signals mean for uh other people when that when they when they come like it's in some ways the verify check mark has been this kind of like this proof of status uh or it seems that proof of proof of status and if you can just kind of like buy your way into that proof of status we don't want to see bad actors leveraging that or or other other things so it's uh identity and verification all these things i came in and i

SPEAKER_129: was like how about this idea and this idea and people like yeah we've been thinking about this for six years and we have like these we have these challenges that you have to go away and solve

SPEAKER_101: before you can do it so it's it's definitely an area of interest but i think we always want to be cautious about anything where the imprimatur of the platform might denote something that's not

SPEAKER_172: necessarily there yeah and the the reader view is really spectacular maybe we can just play that

SPEAKER_07: video and you can talk over for a minute but but now when you have a thread on your twitter if you press that button as you can see here if you're watching the youtube video it just makes it look nice and clean right i mean uh you take out the interface uh and you just get to read it as if it was like a medium article or some well-designed protocol had a nice design just like a beautiful

SPEAKER_102: designed web page almost yeah yeah this was actually the feature um that blew my mind it was something that the team that i work on long form had been working on um uh for a while before i got there and they uh and they shipped it i think first in australia and canada in june and it blew my mind because it completely changed my notion of a thread i'd always been thinking about them as just like it's a selection of tweets and so forth but like to be able to have that kind of immersive reading experience but one where you could also still create the signals of engagement around particular components of it it made me even start to think about articles in a different way and so i think one of the things that if you're thinking about kind of areas where we're trying to go with twitter blue it's certainly around uh notions of kind of more control more customization but also really trying to think about that content experience across the board so like what top articles does is it really kind of doubles down on that notion of time well spent you can kind of see it in a flash like the most

SPEAKER_101: important things in your story with reader mode suddenly you can be just immersed in one voice that's the kind of critical thing for me you're going from a timeline of a thousand voices to one

SPEAKER_102: voice and when you're reading one voice you just want to be able to focus and so that's all a lot of these features are kind of focused around it's like when you go from a thousand voices to one voice and we make that experience like the most zen-like possible yeah and you know the the mouse and the

SPEAKER_07: revenue quarter by quarter uh twitter doing quite nicely um and i think the product velocity since

SPEAKER_47: cavon i took over uh big core who was the head of product who was on episode 1225 um it feels like

SPEAKER_36: uh twitter was very concerned you and i as users before you were there we were like they're very precious about the interface and doing experiments and now it feels like something happened in the last year

SPEAKER_73: or two and i think it's cave on that there is an open-mindedness to experimentation here now yeah

SPEAKER_101: well i think there's a couple of things um it's it's important not to underestimate just like during those kind of dark periods where it felt like twitter wasn't doing much just how much work was going behind the scenes to kind of put the infrastructure in a place where we could now do this there was a tremendous amount of work from people very kind of very thanklessly like rebuilding and modularizing infrastructure and making it even possible to build one thing over here without having to touch every single other piece of the stack so there's a tremendous amount of work there then also yeah i think there's been a willingness to kind of to drive faster and explore an experiment and also to kill experiments like one of the things that really kind of like made me feel very good about twitter when i joined was we experimented with fleets didn't get to where we wanted to and so we killed

SPEAKER_102: it and it was that's exactly the kind of product decision making that i want to see out of the company it's like we're going to experiment we're going to like go hard on the thing if it doesn't

David Friedberg: work out we're going to kill it try something else you know that i was literally about to bring that up is that the fleets experiment was like okay people are just putting their tweets in fleets it doesn't

SPEAKER_73: make any sense and that space up there works so much better when you see spaces there and you

SPEAKER_07: you really started to see once you guys got through the technical debt which is a a term of

David Friedberg: art for those people who are new to the startup space you build something for a decade or two you know platforms and paradigm shift and to move the entire you know it's like taking your house and moving it from you know one plumbing system or electrical system to a brand new one it's the house has to get ripped apart the house is a bit messy you can't work on other projects when you're ripping up the floors and putting you know heating under the floors but when you put the heating under the floors you put the solar in all of a sudden your house uses half as much electricity but

SPEAKER_101: you do have to pause for the cause yeah yeah that was exactly it and it's been it's been fascinating to be on the inside now and to understand and see all that because i was the same i was the guy outside going like what's happening with twitter and now i get it uh and so big ceo change how has

SPEAKER_36: that been uh and tell me about the new uh honcho the new head honcho as it were it was all a bit of a

SPEAKER_201: surprise uh i think to all of us it happened on a day of rest which became less of a day of rest uh

SPEAKER_102: we're like once a once a month throughout the um and then we've been taking a day off as a company just for like like mental health and yeah it's been it's actually been a really nice thoughtful

SPEAKER_103: thing uh for people to do just to be able to take a step back and so of course this is when the news

SPEAKER_204: broke uh about parag and uh namaste day like let's pop the biggest news story that's everybody's it's

SPEAKER_129: bread that's uh yeah that's uh super paradoxical so um uh so so so that happened and uh but we were lucky because we had an all-hands the next day and for a lot of people they got to meet parag for

SPEAKER_102: the very first time and parag is like he bleats twitter he's been there for 10 years and he's just this kind of wonderful humble guy and i think like he he won a lot of fans on that day and immediately kind of like going in making making decisions and kind of really putting a step in the company so it's very early days i'm super excited to see uh see what he does i just love the idea that somebody

David Friedberg: who was was he uh the head of engineering uh previously cto right so i think maybe that was

SPEAKER_07: his first title was like a vp of engineering then cto what's really great about that is you know the

Chamath Palihapitiya: the critique of you know twitter in its early days was you know maybe ev and jack were product guys

David Friedberg: but the tech wasn't as strong as it needed to be we just talked about technical debt getting built up and obviously like it was so popular twitter in the early days they had the fail well they couldn't even keep the servers up and running because it was growing so fast and the velocity of data being shared was just a really big technical challenge when you think about all those unique feeds on a global basis in all those languages across and people expect it to just pop up

SPEAKER_73: immediately so that's kind of like a really good sign that you know we're looking at this as a technological company uh that needs to really have a product velocity that matches the opportunity and the opportunity is so great so i guess that the how do you make a decision that something is going to be in the paid product versus the free product maybe you walk us through in a big company

SPEAKER_36: when you say hey you know uh at the edit button right like i have the undo button now because i'm playing for twitter blue undo button game changing delightful you have to figure out how many seconds to do because sometimes you want your tweet to go out immediately other times you would love a minute but a minute means like you might have six or seven tweets backed up it's a little bit of a weird experience so i think i put it at 20 seconds or something and now i reread the tweets and then i hit send if i feel you know so i'm almost it's almost like having two send buttons like a like a review button and then a publish button but in that example or other examples what is the thought process as a team of give it to everybody make the experience better for everybody or incentivize people to to join us on

SPEAKER_101: this twitter blue journey yeah i think it's uh it's it's a fascinating question and like i totally hear you on the undo tweet thing for a lot of people it's about catching typos for me it's very much

SPEAKER_129: uh a question do you really want to tweet this level of snark um or or should you just be should

SPEAKER_101: you just be nice and it's kind of like good tony and evil tony on my shoulders trying to uh i want to

SPEAKER_215: see tony's drafts i went through my draft folder at one point and i was like oh it was dark in here

SPEAKER_218: i'm gonna get that that's gonna get buried in my coffin with me uh that's never that's never coming

SPEAKER_160: out i think like so when i think about the the kind of products that we we look for obviously one the group that we care about uh or that we're focused on right now from a blue perspective

SPEAKER_218: is kind of super users of twitter and super users of twitter i'm not necessarily like everybody else

SPEAKER_53: we do weird things describe the super user actually i think that's a good point uh because

SPEAKER_36: a lot of people uh will push you hey bill for the lowest common denominator and then other people say

SPEAKER_53: hey you got to really understand who the tip of the spear here is so when you think about that tip of the spear what is the profile of a twitter top 10 user so what's interesting is it kind of

SPEAKER_129: there's obviously people who are heavy tweeters um but the thing that's fascinating to me is the people

SPEAKER_102: who are like heavy non-tweeters as well there are people who are obsessively using twitter who just don't tweet that often at all and but use it for a variety of reasons and you get this kind of weird

SPEAKER_101: kind of prosumer group as well it's like people who are like for journalists and we were talking about journalists earlier yeah twitter is their linkedin you know it's their professional network it's how they get seen it's their it's their work for other people this is a it's their watering hole

SPEAKER_228: all right it's like kind of a place to hang yeah so so it has a variety of different kind of user

SPEAKER_129: groups and so what so one of the things that we try to think about when we're thinking about uh features

SPEAKER_101: of blue uh and this is kind of how like uh sarah bigpore and uh smita gupta who are the kind of like along with abhijit metta are the kind of real uh heroes and leaders of blue they talk to me about like the kind of notion of niche features features that are like not all of the several hundred million

SPEAKER_102: people who come to twitter on a kind of daily basis are gonna are gonna care about say bookmark folders uh you know it's not necessarily something for everyone for for a group of people that is like the biggest damn deal they can imagine and so when we think about a lot of these features it's often about like what is something that is super valuable to a particular niche but doesn't really have an impact on the general population so we think about those things and then we also thought about um and for example even top articles yeah top articles is great if you're like you and me and we

SPEAKER_160: follow a whole bunch of people and we want some way to be able to kind of sort through the stream if you

SPEAKER_102: follow 50 people it's not as good yeah um and so there are those kind of factors that kind of feed

SPEAKER_101: into uh into future choice um and then there are the ones like ad free articles which would be great

SPEAKER_102: for everybody but we made a very clear decision that we wanted to fund journalism and so funding journalism that money has to come in before it can go out all right paywalls this is the this the holy

SPEAKER_36: grail uh there's got to be someone who has a you know paywall business insider seems to be bloomberg seems to be going for it there's an atlantic seems to be going for it can i give you 10 bucks a month like i do with apple news at some point to just not have to for me it's just even about logging in i have a login to a lot of these i just want it to be seamless and easy breezy and so i'm more than willing to pay 10 bucks a month to just get a hundred articles 10 cents an article i would pay for like on a consumption basis i pay a flat rate okay is is that going

SPEAKER_92: to work is that going to happen do you do it by you know just piecemeal what's the strategy there

SPEAKER_102: i think there's a bunch of different things that we can do to make that experience better the first one which is in some ways the simplest one to to do is if you're already a subscriber to a website just

SPEAKER_101: make sure that you're logged in when you get there there's nothing more frustrating than when you're subscribed subscribed to say the washington post or the atlantic or wherever and you hit there and you're like logged out showing me the paywall i look i want to throw my phone across the room that's

SPEAKER_07: technically the issue there technically correct me if we're wrong is you're popping up like a mini browser and it doesn't have your previous credentials in it if you did log in yeah and so yeah one of the

SPEAKER_102: one of the things that's been uh uh a kind of additional casualty of apple's kind of war against cookies in general which has been kind of helpful for kind of privacy around advertising it's also made life a lot lot harder for publishers who just want to keep you logged in and so one of the things uh that we'd love to just like we just want to kind of knock off these kind of user challenges like start with the easiest things then kind of like work our way up so one of the things is like yes can we kind of make sure that whenever you come from twitter you're always logged into the site to your subscriber to just solve that pain point straight away secondly it's like can we do things where it actually makes economic sense not to get rid of the paywall but to move the paywall back you know there's like your top one or two sites that actually you probably should subscribe to and support directly and that's great there's a whole ton of other sites that you're never going to subscribe to after that but you're only visiting like two or three times in a given month and you're

SPEAKER_101: still getting frustrated by that paywall ah so that's clever can we yeah can we can we like help those people um by saying we're going to make the economics work and the yield work for publisher

SPEAKER_102: where they can still attract their super fans but avoid kind of like uh frustrating those so like whatever we do there's a whole bunch of different ways to attack this problem and it's going to be

SPEAKER_101: piecemeal and staged and all of the experiments are going to happen and fail and i like what you're

SPEAKER_244: saying because there is like the poorest paywall where they give you two articles for free and then

SPEAKER_73: they upsell you and then there's hey listen i love this publication the wall street journal i read three

SPEAKER_15: or four stories a day of course i'm going to pay for it and then there's like okay listen i i stumble upon an insider bloomberg atlantic article washington post article once a week once every two weeks maybe

SPEAKER_73: more accurately and i want to read a deep dive or something i'm never going to subscribe to it so they might as well get me as a tweener for some amount of money i'm more than happy to pay five or ten cents

SPEAKER_07: which is much more than they would get on a cpm basis correct yeah so like that's and that's very

SPEAKER_102: much the kind of area that like we want to we want to think about we wanted we want to make sure that we're never kind of cannibalizing a publisher's own subscriber base we want to make we like we one of the

SPEAKER_101: things you'll hear consistently and what drives the team is this notion that we want to help journalists

SPEAKER_250: like pay rent like so great you know like it's a little bit like the anti-facebook it's again it's

SPEAKER_101: like how do we be a different kind of platform and and so we will always want to be thinking starting with that point but we think there's a whole ton of ways which we can work with publishers

SPEAKER_102: to help them like build more of an audience relationship do it in a way that makes them more money and really some of the frustration that occurs when people are kind of like going across the web so

SPEAKER_41: we're going to explore a whole ton of that over i have a great suggestion for you as a publisher

SPEAKER_73: myself you know and a former journalist you know one of the key sticking points is knowing who is coming to your site so if the scroll asset you know twitter blue could tell the atlantic and i would be fine with this as a user as well the at jason handle is looking at this many atlantic articles through his twitter blue subscription not which articles just they're you know i'm doing one to

SPEAKER_36: five five to ten and then they could upsell me so you could give them hey listen here's a target for upsell jason is what you know is hitting you you know he's done his 25th article with twitter blue yeah you might want to upsell them this is a good target for you and they could just say target my top users um or at least be able to market to them in a in a sort of an audience as a group what do you

SPEAKER_07: think of that idea or is that already part of the product i think there's i i think there's a bunch of

SPEAKER_101: stuff we want we always want to be careful about kind of user privacy and making sure we have consent and that's a kind of starting kind of grounding point i think there's a ton of ways in which uh we could help either with like special discounted deals when we can see that you're a particular fan of

SPEAKER_102: an of an area perfect one one thing even so one of the things that we do uh within twitter blue is we show you what we show you transparently where your money goes so there's a chart in in the twitter blue settings which says see your impact and it shows like okay a dollar of your money is going to the vox is going to vox and like 90 cents is going to the miami herald and all of these kind of things it shows where your money is going and one of the things that's really interesting about that is not only is it kind of like a newly transparent way to do business and in in this area but it also tells people just how much they love particular publishers

SPEAKER_101: and we've heard people say like you know what i didn't realize that i read the atlantic that often screw it i'm going to subscribe uh and so fantastic that's the great way to do it yeah yeah like trying

SPEAKER_102: to find those kind of like hooks and signals of like how do we get you to a place where you're getting the experience that you want and also supporting the journalists or here's another way you

Chamath Palihapitiya: know i'm part of twitter blue and you see that i've read uh you know these stories on the atlantic

SPEAKER_53: but i don't follow the journalist who wrote it you know the journalist you know the byline that's

SPEAKER_36: very simple to put together on a technological basis all they need to do is put in the metadata

SPEAKER_73: on the article the twitter handle of the writer next to it and most people do put the twitter handle somewhere but what that would do is then you could upsell me hey suggested users follow these atlantic journalists or atlantic journalists you don't follow but you've read the story have you thought about that kind of stuff because getting followers for reader for journalists is truly

David Friedberg: valuable to journalists journalists are getting paid salaries and book advances based on how many

SPEAKER_101: followers they have i kid you not yeah i love that uh i think if we're not thinking about that we

SPEAKER_272: should be uh and i got product ideas i'm more than willing to give them for free i i remember the

SPEAKER_129: first time we met in 2009 you immediately gave me like 20 different product ideas and told me

SPEAKER_101: correctly that i was charging way too little for my startup and uh everything you said then was right and so i've always paid careful attention ever since and like i just think there's there's so many

SPEAKER_102: different places we can take this once we think about like how to do these things together even

SPEAKER_131: for example like can you create subscriber spaces or subscriber tweets and threads for people like

SPEAKER_36: there's a whole bunch yeah subscriber spaces and group clubs i just got invited to a next club and

SPEAKER_47: those clubs or groups whatever you're calling them is going to be i think a big experience uh in the

SPEAKER_36: near future i love it i'm not able to create one but i'm in one and i this next one i'm like you know what it's kind of like my dm groups but it's using the twitter format it's like there's a little overlap there in the product uh use case but it's pretty pretty darn cool and i think that's going

SPEAKER_47: to be a big one is these little sort of subreddits inside of twitter they're kind of like subreddits

SPEAKER_234: is how i think about them they're great communities and hopefully like most of them will be less depressing than the next one but it's uh it's been up and down for us it's been up and down but i i

SPEAKER_36: consider it developing your listen tony congratulations on the sale um it's been great to invest in you twice and then uh you know i really do appreciate that twitter has been uh embracing my podcast specifically to come on here and talk about it and and you know let us as the community of twitter uh you know participate in a dialogue of what we want the service to be because twitter is something very important to a lot of us in our lives and i think it has tremendous upside and i feel like twitter is run by a group of very good actors i know people have been getting on you guys about like oh these little rule changes and freedom of speech i i am certain there is no one at twitter who wants to limit freedom of speech there you just have this crazy uh responsibility that's never existed before which is to get hundreds of millions of people to interact on a daily basis uh who you know have all the empathy sucked out of them because they're on a device in a very charged time i mean it's it's not an easy job to try to manage a community at scale is it's uh it's incredibly hard

SPEAKER_102: we're dealing with new complexities around society that we've never had to deal with before and i think

SPEAKER_101: that that is the uh that's the challenge and why people rightly kind of hold us to account uh on this side of things what i can say is to agree with you that like every single person i've met on twitter their hearts are pure their intent is real uh and they want to try and be uh be better and make the world better and we're like twitter isn't the largest platform it's arguably the most important one and

SPEAKER_07: we've got to treat it like that's actually super accurate yeah it's it might be 20 of the size of other platforms uh or 30 whatever it is but it's the most influential clearly and we have to be very

SPEAKER_15: thoughtful about it and like this idea that you're going to kick the president of the united states off just because you disagree with them or because he triggers you or just or or even if he's doing bad things it's kind of hard to silence the president of the united states in the free world

David Friedberg: and then also if the person is actually inciting violence i'm not going to make you comment on any of this but i i can speak my opinion here i know that you know you have to be careful because whatever you say is could be re-aggregated by somebody speaking of the news but you know is a very delicate decision i happen to think twitter did a good job but if somebody's inciting violence that's clearly against the rules you can't get away with that if somebody has an opinion you don't like okay grow up you have to deal with that that's part of life and then i it's just not easy i mean and i think the trump situation is such a wild card that it's almost like i what i tell people is like if you're thinking about how to design a social network and then you put trump and that's like the trolley

SPEAKER_36: car problem you're aware of the trolley car problem like where it's like the trolley can kill like

SPEAKER_293: the baby uh being pushed by mom or eight adults like who should suffer more in this crazy situation like that's trump in your social network it's like there's no winning here if there's persons just chaotically tweeting all day long there's no winning uh listen it's been great to talk to you

SPEAKER_206: i will not make you comment on i just as you're very much i will advise you to not comment on the trump situation because you'll be see me start to sweat profusely here right now i mean the problem

SPEAKER_15: is like i just got off an interview about theranos with a journalist and they're just the framing of every question the gotcha-ness sometimes and like what i try to do on this podcast i have empathy for you as somebody who's working on twitter i don't want you to comment on trump to be totally honest because all that does is then somebody on the left somebody on the right somebody in between is just going to misconstrue and aggregate your tweet and say look this supports my vision of the world the fact is it's a hard job you guys do the best you can and the service kicks ass and we all love it

SPEAKER_53: and you're adding more features so thank you for that and to the twitter team we just really appreciate

SPEAKER_300: all the experiments you're doing great job the last two years a plus spaces scroll blue we got to

SPEAKER_36: talk about dms dms are in a sad state i already talked to caveman about this i know somebody's in charge of dms if you can get them in a room we need an off-site meeting dm's got to be searchable you got they it's got to become a modern messaging platform that's a big big win if you guys can get dms

SPEAKER_234: correct well we just announced that we just acquired uh the quill messaging team what i didn't know

SPEAKER_101: that well i think it was last week we announced that um and so i think i think praise jesus the dm

SPEAKER_201: team who's who've already been working really really hard um are now going to have even more people and resources um to help uh make it even better feels like a technical debt problem like when i see that

David Friedberg: the search like searching 10 years worth of dms doesn't work i'm like this is like 10 year plus of dms

SPEAKER_03: it's gonna hard it's a hard search problem to solve like across the giant corpus i understand there's a lot of technical debt there and all likelihood it's going to be a lot of work before it uh starts

SPEAKER_07: but they you do have pin conversations i don't know if you saw that in dms pin conversations

David Friedberg: because when you're a super router like me you you have like three or four important groups and they just i have to scroll scroll scroll to try to find them and now boom i got them pinned great job i love that feature all right listen i'll talk to you soon brother congratulations and we'll see you all next time on this we can start up sign up for twitter blue it's awesome