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SPEAKER_01: Hey everybody, welcome to This Week in Startups and today on the program, a startup you may have heard of.

SPEAKER_02: It's called Twitter and now that we're in our second decade, we're having all these amazing startups that were on the podcast in the early days when they were nascent companies and Ev Williams and Jack had started along with Biz. Twitter, well now Twitter is at scale, hundreds of millions of users, and we noticed something in the last six months, 12 months, something started percolating over at Twitter. The product velocity at Twitter accelerated massively. Now, this is a company that's always been very cautious to protect the core experience in Twitter. You didn't see Twitter change all that much and that was for good reason. It worked and you had very, very noisy customers like myself who've been on the platform for 10 years and they don't want certain things to change. Well, things have started to change and I think in an incredibly positive direction and, dare I say, Twitter has gotten its groove back. Kayvon Baikpour is a large reason for that. He is the head of product and he's on the program today. Thanks for joining us, Kayvon.

SPEAKER_03: Thanks for having me, Jason.

SPEAKER_02: Good to see you. Good to see you as well. Now, you came to Twitter via an acquisition of Periscope, and if my memory serves me correctly, they bought the company which was pretty hot in beta before you even launched and it was just around the time that they'd also acquired Vine, if I remember correctly.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Vine was at least a year prior. Yeah. Probably a couple years prior because I remember when we were going through the early diligence conversations with Twitter, I actually got introduced to the Vine founders and kind of asked them, so what's it like to work at Twitter? So, yeah, they were at the company for at least a year or so, but, yeah, we were in beta. We got acquired, you know, by the time we got the deal done, it was in January. We kind of kept it under wraps because we wanted to get ready for launch

SPEAKER_10: and not have a bunch of public pressure around the acquisition having happened, so we ended up launching in March of that year.

SPEAKER_02: Now, you heard my little intro there. Am I correct that the culture of Twitter is to be, if I'm being generous, methodical, maybe a cynical person would say too conservative in terms of changing the core product? And what changed in the last couple of years? Because we started to see this rapid acceleration in the vision. Was that you? Was that Jack? Was that some function of watching other people take your social graph and just rebuild products based on the Twitter social graph?

SPEAKER_13: What's happening over there? Did they change the coffee?

SPEAKER_15: We've gone through a few evolutions of the coffee. Yeah. I think it is a fair assessment to say that for many years,

SPEAKER_10: people who were using Twitter were used to seeing not much evolution of the product. It was a pretty common source of criticism and frustration from our customers. And so, I think that's a very fair assessment. I wouldn't... There are certainly parts of Twitter's culture that are methodical and very intentionally are methodical. So, some of it is...

Chamath Palihapitiya: Some of it was intentional. Some of it was, I think, the absence of conviction, like enduring consistent conviction around a strategy that didn't change like every year. Because if you have a revolving door of strategy, it's really hard to take big swings. And there was, I think, a little bit of both.

SPEAKER_15: And here's what I mean by that. On the revolving door thing, one, like there was a lot of churn at the leadership levels of Twitter, in particular, the product role. Like I, you know, there were, I think, 12 heads of product in 12 years,

Chamath Palihapitiya: which is kind of crazy. You know, what happens, or at least my observation, what happens when there's that much churn is the organization tries to build calluses around the fact that there's like instability in product strategy. And you tend to then have an organization that works on features that are not likely to get killed through those strategy changes. So, that's, I think, one, that's like my interpretation of, I think one of the things that was happening was there's a lot of focus on like incremental things because they were less speculative. And, you know, people don't want to work on things that don't ship, which is very understandable. The second thing that I think was going on

SPEAKER_10: was a very intentional strategy at the time. Roughly when I joined the company, actually,

Chamath Palihapitiya: one of the big strategic efforts at the time was what we called refine the core. And what that meant was, let's focus on doing as few things as possible and do those few things really well. And one of those things was refining the core product experience. And really, like a couple of material things happened during that time period. This is like the 2013 to 14, 15 timeframe. That's when we moved from a reverse chronological timeline to a ranked timeline and really focused on improving our ability to recommend content to people. Now, a couple of things to say about that phase. One, you know, if you focus on refining the core for a long period of time, customers will maybe see less swings, less different sort of product experiments that you might sort of see other sort of startups or bigger companies taking bigger swings on.

SPEAKER_10: And that, I think, contributed maybe to some of the rhetoric around Twitter being, you know, not taking a lot of swings. To be honest, like I at the time was pretty frustrated as well, kind of like being at the company, being focused on Periscope and sort of wondering why we weren't taking big swings.

SPEAKER_18: That being said, what I have an appreciation for now that I don't think I did then

Chamath Palihapitiya: was that period of time where for two years we focused on refining the core, that focus is what actually returned the company to user growth. Like building the ranked timeline, building sophistication around machine learning to be able to recommend content to people, which is like fundamentally people come to Twitter to stay informed about their interests. If we're not good at recommending content, we're nowhere. And that period of time, even though it didn't spark a bunch of divergent bets that would manifest in crazy new product experiences, we ended up really improving

SPEAKER_18: the nuts and bolts and the bread and butter of Twitter. And that brought us to kind of where we are now, which is like every quarter consistently we've grown Twitter

Chamath Palihapitiya: in terms of our GAU double digits year over year. Like that's a pretty remarkable turnaround from essentially having been flat. And so that I share all that context because yes, there was a period of time where the product wasn't really evolving at the surface level,

SPEAKER_19: but it was absolutely being evolved underneath the hood. And frankly,

SPEAKER_21: there was product debt, right?

SPEAKER_02: I mean, there was either you could call it technical or maybe product debt would be more accurate here in that people were used to on Instagram or Facebook or other services, you open it up and it gives you the most interesting things and algorithm looks through everything and says, hey, since you've been gone, here's what's most interesting. And you know, when you open Twitter, you guys do a heck of a job showing me the most relevant, interesting tweets and that creates water cooler moments and it makes you want to open the app more are you concerned

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SPEAKER_25: to this amazing pod.

SPEAKER_13: The top Twitter users, how addicted are they? How often does, let's call it, the top 20 percent of users use the product? I know for people like myself or maybe you watch Elon Musk using it just from his public usage of it.

SPEAKER_27: There are people who are, you know, in important positions of power, journalists, CEOs, politicians

SPEAKER_13: who are on it seemingly throughout the day. What do those top 20 percent look like, the wells in your system and do you have a name for them internally?

Chamath Palihapitiya: Well, we have, we have sort of frameworks that we use to classify customers based on their behavior. Here, for example, we look at the behavior of what we call composers, like people who tend to create content very differently.

SPEAKER_18: They sort of had different behaviors than folks who are heavy content consumers. They spend a lot of time

SPEAKER_10: on the service, but they're not so much active on the content production side. They're more consumers. And so that's sort of one framework we use and then we sort of classify customers on the basis of how active are they. And those are useful when you're trying to understand, like, how is a product feature working? Because sometimes it works very differently amongst different cohorts. Yeah, I mean, every company has sort of different, different frameworks like that. You know, certainly when you're at scale looking

SPEAKER_34: at how product experiences are working, it's helpful to kind of stratify based on those dimensions.

SPEAKER_13: So those creators who are constantly creating content, Yashir comes to mind, just somebody who during the Trump era, you know, just seems to be on like a full-time job almost.

SPEAKER_02: Those users are super important. And it seems to me that a lot of your focus as the product officer is around servicing, I'll call them frequent creators, hyper creators, consistent creators, something like that. Is that the, is that your focus now

SPEAKER_13: is to really service them or over service them or service them better than other opportunities they have in the world?

SPEAKER_18: It's certainly one of our focuses and maybe if it's helpful, I can sort of step back and give you a sense of like, what are the big

SPEAKER_10: like strategic rocks that we're focused on? Yes, please. What you're referencing is certainly one of the focus areas, but there's a few kind of strategic initiatives that we sort of disproportionately focus on as part of our strategy. The first is health. You know, it's been, it's been a long focus for us over the last few years because it's important

Chamath Palihapitiya: if people are participating in public conversation, it's important for that conversation to be healthy. And for us, that means a couple things specifically. One, it means like conversation, like people need to feel like they, they feel safe participating in the conversation. Like if you feel like you're going to be abused or harassed, you're not going to want to talk on Twitter. And there's a bunch of things that we know we can do to improve that from being more transparent about our rules, giving people more controls. And so conversational health is one aspect. The other is, you know, if people don't feel like they can trust the integrity of the content they find on the platform, but it's not free of misinformation, of spam, of state-sponsored activity, like they're just not going to trust what they see on Twitter. So health is a really important strategic focus for us and has been for quite some time. The other is what we call interests. Now, interests is maybe one of the most fundamental parts of Twitter, but it's really about how do we connect people to the content, people, and communities they care about. Like one of the fundamental reasons people come to Twitter is to follow and talk about their interests. So if we can't understand what Jason is interested, and if we can't understand how the people and content on the platform map to those interests, and if we can't connect those dots, we're failing in one of the basic building blocks of what Twitter needs to do. And so interest is a really critical one that actually, it's important for both creators and consumers. And if anything, there's far more non-creators than there are creators. And a lot of the folks who are coming to Twitter every day, you know, they might be coming to Twitter because something happened in the world, you know, whether it was something in their neighborhood or some world event like COVID

SPEAKER_18: or whatever it might be. And anyone who comes in the door to Twitter, they have many more interests, many more things that they're interested in beyond that thing that brought them to Twitter.

SPEAKER_40: That's going incredibly well. And that was something that was user generated in the beginning with hashtags, but you've obviously figured out,

SPEAKER_13: hey, you know that I'm into the Knicks and the Warriors, somebody else might be into the Hawks and the Lakers. Just from my liking activity that I follow

SPEAKER_41: players on the team, some amount of signal is telling you show Jason more Knicks, correct?

SPEAKER_19: Show Jason more Knicks and then maybe give him

SPEAKER_18: the option to explicitly follow the Knicks so that he doesn't have to know who are all the players, who are all the coaches,

Chamath Palihapitiya: who are all the sports journalists that cover the Knicks, who are all the super fans that have the most interesting takes on Knicks content. So rather than, you know, we would replace

SPEAKER_18: the eight months you would have had to spend finding and following all those people in a previous world and instead, theoretically, you follow the Knicks topic and we will figure all that out and just recommend the best content to you. And maybe you also find interesting people as a result of that that you then follow.

SPEAKER_13: But in the product jar, they are using the metaphor, the big rocks going in.

SPEAKER_02: Those rocks are things that people really aren't going to see, right? The hope is that

SPEAKER_13: they don't have a health or security problem. So it's kind of like, you know, I didn't see trash on the street. It's not like you took trash out of my life. I just didn't happen to see on the street. But then, oh yeah, you're showing more interesting stuff. But again, to our earlier conversation, it's not like it's some new feature like spaces that is explicitly like, hey, here's something new, a shiny object. Those were foundational things that have made the service grow and engagement grow.

SPEAKER_46: So yes and no. I think certainly in the first year and a half of our focus on health, there's a lot of under the hood stuff that maybe doesn't manifest

SPEAKER_10: to most people very clearly. But to some people, it does. When you experience abuse and you report a tweet, you want to know that there's like a, you know, there's good procedural justice in a system that like evaluates user reports and makes action and yada, yada, yada. That's not user facing in the spaces sense,

Chamath Palihapitiya: but it does impact customers. Over time, though, we've actually made sure that as a part of our health roadmap, we do build real user facing features. Examples of this are, you know, I think about a year and a half ago at this point, we really started this with a feature called hide replies, which lets you, if someone responds to a tweet that you posted with a reply that you just think is garbage, like maybe it doesn't violate our terms of service, posting about the next episode of the pod that's dropping and someone responds with some really annoying snarky, whatever. Yeah, you can hide it so other people don't see and like, sure, we've had features like mute and block, but those are local decisions. We're now giving people more agency around the space in which their conversations happen. So features like hide replies, features like conversation controls where you can start a tweet and say, you know what, this tweet and the conversation within it is only for the people that I follow. Whereas this other I love that. spirit of giving people more controls to have a healthier experience.

SPEAKER_40: I would say it's totally working. I have to say that your security features, which unfortunately I've had to deal with,

SPEAKER_13: you know, being doxed, you know, two or three times, I've had to report them and what's really great is when you do a report,

SPEAKER_02: you get a follow-up and they say, hey, listen, this tweet was taken down and I had retweeted some video and I guess

SPEAKER_13: somebody reported because it was like one of these like fail videos and maybe they felt like because it was a kid who failed, it might have been violence or something. I don't know why exactly I reported, but I opened my account up and it said, hey, your account's been suspended and I was like, really? Well, that's weird because first time in 11 years or no, 20 years almost and I clicked it and it was like, oh, for this tweet, would you like to take this tweet down? I was like, yeah, I'll just take it down. I didn't realize this would be offended and I don't care and that kind of new moderation feature seems to be very elegant to me and it took a while to get there but are people feeling satisfied with the work you've done or are you seeing that? Because there's a lot of people who complain like, oh my God,

SPEAKER_53: people are harassing me but sometimes it's just people being like, I think you're dumb and it's not really harassment, it's more just like people saying, I think you're dumb.

SPEAKER_55: I bring that example up because people say that to me all the time. I don't get to report at that one, right?

SPEAKER_15: I think it's really, it's tricky because this is such a difficult space

Chamath Palihapitiya: precisely for the reason you mentioned like there's a, there's a wide, like health is a very wide spectrum. There's, there's, there's objectively

SPEAKER_10: deplorable content that is against our terms of service that is somewhat easier to take action

Chamath Palihapitiya: on through automation, ratifying, processing, et cetera. Yeah. And there's a, right. And then, then there's a, you know, child sexual exploitation, like there are things like that that are not great. And then there's a tremendously wide spectrum of gray area, which is very subjective

SPEAKER_18: around like unwanted interactions, right? What you might consider unwanted is very different than what I might consider unwanted. And historically, we have not provided the nuanced controls in the product to actually solve for that. We, we had to solve for it

SPEAKER_59: through the lack of

SPEAKER_58: responsibility though.

SPEAKER_13: I mean, just, I hate to cut you off, but I kind of feel like if you're going to be in a public space, that is as vibrant as Twitter is with, you know, let's face it, a lot of intellectual people, some trolls, whatever, but like, should people's expectation be that they have to, they should be able to dictate, I want this style of conversation. Is that a bridge too far? Like maybe you're just, you know, the expectation should be, listen, it's going to be safe, but people might disagree with you. It might think you're stupid and that's just

SPEAKER_06: called the real world. I think there's a certain

Chamath Palihapitiya: point where like we cannot, we're not going to be able to dictate and control all of the micro interactions that people have on our platform. So I think that's kind of the point you're making, which I agree with that sentiment. However, we, as the platform, we own and operate and build the tools and mechanics that govern how people behave and that is our responsibility. If you went

SPEAKER_15: to a dinner party and every time you went to that dinner party, it was just like a nasty experience, you would not go back to that dinner party.

SPEAKER_32: We would like to have a platform that makes as many people feel comfortable talking

Chamath Palihapitiya: as possible. Fundamentally, we believe the more people have in public conversation, the better. Like that's good for the world. So I think as we build new modalities like audio, as we build new controls, as we build new use cases like conversation controls, let you have like fireside chats that you couldn't have before without like people yelling in your ear, these just enable more types and more analogs of conversation that we already have in the real world. Like in the real world, it's not like every form of human discourse is Jason going to a public square, standing on a stool and yelling. Like that's kind of what tweeting can feel like sometimes. But with these new analogs, be it conversation controls and spaces and fleets and DMs, like these are all sort of different permutations of how people can talk, some in public, some in semi-public, some in private. It sort of creates a more fluid spectrum of how people

SPEAKER_62: can talk in public.

SPEAKER_28: It's also one key to block somebody and they're out of your life forever.

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SPEAKER_63: I notice blocking has become much more sophisticated.

SPEAKER_13: When you're blocking somebody now, you can't even search for their name and all kinds of stuff because I know like people would, I would block somebody but then they would still see my stuff. I know they can get a burner account and I'm a public figure so I don't really have too many expectations but blocking is super effective, right? I mean and so is muting people. Both of these things work and there's also the, I guess they call it, I don't know if you have an internal name for this but it's sort of like the soft block which is you block somebody, I don't know if you know about this, you block somebody and then you unblock them. So that turns off them following you so they don't know, they just think they forgot to follow you.

SPEAKER_64: Yeah. And I keep, I keep saying like Chamath, why do you, I was following you, why do you keep soft block? Hey, Chamath doesn't do it to me. What do you call that internally when somebody does that?

SPEAKER_06: Like you block somebody in order to get them to unfollow you and then you unblock them. I don't know if you just infected me or incepted me

SPEAKER_07: with the term

Chamath Palihapitiya: soft block but we may call it that but we, we, we, we observe this behavior and this is actually like one of the interesting things that we try and do as part of our product development process is look at all the ways people are hacking the product to try and get

SPEAKER_18: it to do what they want and make that easier. And this is exactly one of them. Like what people fundamentally are trying to do is force and unfollow. Like we could make that easier for folks so that they don't

SPEAKER_10: have to discover that they have to block and then unblock and then it creates this mystery around like is there a bug? Did Twitter screw something up? Um, so I think that's, um, those

SPEAKER_18: are all, that's like one very helpful lens through which we look at, um, you know, what we built.

SPEAKER_40: The system has existed for a very long period of time. When it started, people looked at

SPEAKER_13: Twitter as a chat room. And so, you know, or kind of like being in a bar. In other words, people were a little loosey-goosey, maybe not as buttoned up as they should be. And we saw many people's careers, you know, people get canceled by something they said 10 years ago. Um, you know, obviously that must not feel great for, for you at Twitter or for the team there. And I basically went and I just deleted my entire Twitter archive. I used a third party tool like tweet delete to delete everything. I backed it up for myself, but I was like, you know what? I don't even remember what arguments I was having, you know, 12 years ago. It's just a liability. I'll just back it all up and delete it. But I really wanted to archive it. Just like Instagram. Now you can, I started turning off all my Instagram photos cause like a creepy people. And I was just like, let me just archive these, right? Have you thought about a way instead of forcing me to delete my archive, I could just say anything over a year old. I just want archive or is that kind of tool kind of antithetical to the public discourse? And how would you go think about making a decision like that? Certainly it's must have come up in discussion.

SPEAKER_68: I'm, I'm smiling and this is super creepy

Chamath Palihapitiya: cause we literally had a product review on this concept today. Um, so I'm like freaked out that you're actually in our internal systems, Jason. Um, but I'm a power user, obviously. I mean, you, you escalated from power user to, you have LDAP access now. Um, so, uh, is it antithetical? No, not at all. Like this is something that

SPEAKER_10: we, we know through the developer ecosystem. We know from customer feedback that, um, you know, sometimes you don't

Chamath Palihapitiya: want something you said eight years ago to remain on the public record and searchable. Um, and we don't make that particularly easy right now. A lot of our customers find

SPEAKER_10: and use these third party tools. Some of them are great. Some of them are a little overzealous with their API

SPEAKER_15: privileges and are, are a little bit abusive. Yes.

SPEAKER_07: They can get you banned. You gotta be careful. Yeah. So, you know, it's something that absolutely we're, we're thinking of. And this product review I mentioned today was exploring

SPEAKER_10: such a concept that allows

SPEAKER_51: you to essentially part of the Twitter blue paid product. I've always felt that there should be a pro product.

SPEAKER_13: And if you're a professional user, you've been with the platform for five or 10 years, why not pay $10 a month? Talk to me a little bit about how you think about

SPEAKER_63: users paying for the platform and, and that whole discussion, what would be in a premium product if you did launch

SPEAKER_15: one or what are people asking for? So let's, let's take all those questions one by one. So in terms of like, how

Chamath Palihapitiya: do we think about it? Like I, I think the notion of having a, um, direct relationship, um, with our customers where they only pay us if we're delivering valuable add on features

SPEAKER_10: that don't exist in the product today, I think is great. I think that's a really important, diverse source of revenue that we need to have. And frankly, creates good incentive for us to build features for a set of power users that would be interested in lots of

Chamath Palihapitiya: capabilities that we don't have right now. And those features may not attract hundreds of millions of users, but they do attract a subset of users that are. Certainly millions, certainly millions. I believe so. Um, and so, you know, the rumors are true. We are not only super interested in this, like this is a, this is a big priority for the company. And, um, there's a team working on this and we're going to, um, do a first launch, um, limited to, um, a couple of markets, a couple of geographies, cause we want to test and learn and make sure we're, we're getting this right. Um, but tomorrow in, uh, in Australia and Canada, we're going to have the first launch of Twitter blue be available for customers and

SPEAKER_10: they'll be able to pay Twitter to access our first bundle of features. And that's just a starting point. Like we will be adding features and capabilities constantly.

SPEAKER_78: What will be on the first feature set?

SPEAKER_10: So in the first feature set, you'll have a few things, um, you'll be able

Chamath Palihapitiya: to, and I'll sort of give you the list first and we can talk about the sort of sure, the why behind them. Uh, and then I'd love your feedback on what else we should add. Um, you'll be able to, uh, manage bookmarks. So as you know, you know, we have bookmarks feature today, but it's one of the, one of the most common, probably like next to edit tweets, the second most requested feature I hear about, well, edit tweets, verify me in reverse order, and then, um, let me manage my bookmarks. Um, so a lot of people are using bookmarks, but they want to be able to create folders. They want to be able to search them. They want to be able to organize all the great content they see on Twitter

SPEAKER_18: rather than have this flat list. Um, so managing bookmarks will be in, in Twitter blue. We'll improve that over time. Hopefully build, build search, but for now it's just creating folders and being able to add, you know, bookmark tweets into

SPEAKER_07: those specific collections. Um, would you be able to make those shareable too? Like, would you be able to share, would I be able to share my bookmarks eventually? Not in this, not in this first version, but that's

SPEAKER_15: definitely like, there's lots of interesting directions we can take this. And I think multiplayer mode opening up API around this. I think we'll have lots of awesome things happen with the developer ecosystem.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Um, but starting, starting, um, with bookmarks, you'll

SPEAKER_10: be able to undo tweets. And what that means is similar to Gmail. Um, when you post a tweet, um, we queue it up on the backend, but we give you a period of time to decide to

SPEAKER_18: undo it. If you notice a spelling mistake or, or, or if you want to undo it for any number of reasons. And we sort of, you know, take you back to the tweet

SPEAKER_83: composer where you can, where you can change the tweet. This is something that

SPEAKER_07: 10 seconds, 15 seconds. What is the countdown clock? I believe it's 10 seconds right now, but we're, we're going to make it modifiable.

SPEAKER_83: Um, so some, some people might want to change, you know, change that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_13: What'd be good is too, is to have with that countdown clock, the undo is to also have approval. So one user account writes it, another account has approval on it. So if you know, it was the corporate account for, you know, stakeums, one person could write it in the comms department and the CFO could

SPEAKER_06: approve it, you know, like that sort of work. Yeah. I think there's a whole, there's a whole interesting

SPEAKER_15: thread there around businesses and creating, um, specific features for businesses that we, um, we think is an interesting exploration as

SPEAKER_18: well. This is very much starting with like an end user, like what are features for end

SPEAKER_07: users? Got it. So we got bookmarks, we got the undo bookmarks, undo, um, the feature called reader mode, which is, um, really, really awesome.

Chamath Palihapitiya: It's very simple, but, um, you ever run into a long thread on

SPEAKER_10: Twitter that has sure 15, 20 tweets and, um, it's, it's just, I've written them.

SPEAKER_90: Yeah.

SPEAKER_10: Um, so reader mode lets you, um, when you're, when you happen upon one of these threads, you tap a button and then we take you to a really

Chamath Palihapitiya: sort of elegant, um, reading only experience where we take away all the engagements, a lot of the other fluff outside of the content and it would sort of make it more of a long form reading experience. Um, so you can focus on the content. Nice. And then, um, in addition to that, we have a bunch of small, um, customization perks. So you can change the color of some of the sort of common color elements in the app to make that, make it more sort of thematically customized. You can change your app icon. So these are like small little personalization things that feel little, but having used them for, for, um, a few months now, it's actually quite delightful. Yeah. And all of the features that I

SPEAKER_18: mentioned to you, we've heard

SPEAKER_10: from customers through research are just really like, um, different cohorts of customers really care about these things.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Um, we thought they'd be a really good sort of bundle to put together to start with and use it as a foundation upon which we'll, we'll build. We've got a bunch of other really exciting things that, um, we're not quite ready to talk about, but you'll see us add to the subscription and make it, um, more and more compelling to customers.

SPEAKER_93: The most killer one, most killer one. Tell me.

SPEAKER_13: It's a little controversial, but everybody who is a power user are using third parties to do this anyway, which is knowing when somebody unfollows you, uh, or knowing if somebody blocks you now, knowing if somebody blocks you opens up a little bit of a security can of worms because there might be a reason they're blocking you and that when you do block somebody, everybody knows that's a little bit of an agitating moment for the blocky and they might act out. So you have to be a little cautious with that one, but

SPEAKER_101: just knowing who unfollowed me and, uh, when would let me know and give me a feedback loop to maybe I'm tweeting too much.

SPEAKER_53: Maybe I should stop tweeting about Michael Bloomberg and how I want him as president instead of Bernie Sanders, which I think I lost an advertiser on the podcast because of, uh, I'm not kidding. Somebody got upset. I don't know if they canceled their ad buyer not, but they were upset that I was pro Bernie at a pro not pro Bernie. And I was pro Bloomberg.

SPEAKER_23: I do think knowing who unfollowed you and giving some basic metrics, I subscribe to some service that's five or 10 bucks

SPEAKER_13: a month that just sends me a daily report of my top tweets, what the metrics were. And, you know, it's very elegant and simple. I'll forward it to you after the show, um, and some sort of daily report of my metrics I

SPEAKER_23: think would be killer because you know, is it metrics or analytics dot twitter.com and is that available to everybody or only verified accounts?

SPEAKER_15: There are, um, a subset of our, so all of our customers have

SPEAKER_10: access to a subset of analytics like at the tweet level, and then we have, um, a more, uh, sort of in-depth product, um, that is part of our media studio suite. Um, and also that's why I have it and part of our advertiser dashboards as well that, that not all customers have access to. Um, but I think that

Chamath Palihapitiya: thematically what you're saying is spot on, like we know that another entire area, uh, where we can deliver great value and also where, where there's willingness for customers to pay because they're already paying third-party tools is in the analytics space and just sort of

SPEAKER_18: lasering in on zeroing in on what are the specific analytics that people would be interested in, whether it's on follows or, um, some of the other dynamics around what,

Chamath Palihapitiya: which, what, what, what if my content is performing well, you know, how many people are visiting my profile or who, you know, there's a lot there that I

SPEAKER_40: think I was visiting your profile, like that LinkedIn one. I feel like that was a little privacy iffy, because I'm not

SPEAKER_13: sure that people know exactly that they're, I know that they're creeping on my profile page. So I'm a little bit iffy on that one, but I do like the idea of, Hey, you've got a lot of engagement on this one, not just because it's a great way for you to make money through the Twitter blue program, but also make me a better tweeter, right? Make me a better tweeter. Hey, this one got a lot of engagement. Hey, this one was ratio and here's what that means here. This one, you know, just those little kind of updates on I did something right and look what's going well here and the metrics and giving me encouragement or something. It's just such a huge win for me. I do think DMS is another area where I am like a power DM user and I have groups on there, but the search doesn't work great and the product hasn't changed all that much. How do you think about DM? Because man, DMS are. I would, given the people who are on Twitter, I don't want to say, I don't want to introduce in mail like LinkedIn has, but I don't not want to introduce that. I have open DMS. Other people don't a DM request feature where I could DM somebody

SPEAKER_101: who doesn't follow me and I could do it 10 times a month. If I had a premium account and you had my credit card and you knew who I was, it seems like it wouldn't be so bad.

SPEAKER_15: Yeah, I think, um, first of all, like our DMS feature, um, has a lot of room to grow.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Um, for a long time, DMS were actually on maintenance mode, uh, which is kind of one of the reasons why we're, we are where we are playing catch up. And so, you know, you asked me how, how we think about DMS, like we are investing in getting DMS to a better place on a couple of dimensions. One adding desperately requested features. Like you mentioned searches busted searches been busted for a long time. We actually, I don't know if you've seen in the last couple of weeks, we actually launched to production, um, an improved search feature for searching conversation groups, like, like the person's name or the group's name. It's not, it's no lie. It used to be just cached on your iPhone or pure Android, like whatever the last 30 conversations were, which makes it impossible to go search for, you know, uh, let's

SPEAKER_115: see last year's, you know, you read last time.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Yeah. Yeah. Or last time you DM'd him off was like two years ago. Cause he ghosted you and you were trying to like find that. Yeah. Um, so that, you know, we're, we've been working on, um, getting our, you know, solving a bunch of those features and getting to a, um, a better place there while also kind of renovating our infrastructure, which fundamentally want to talk about tech debt. This was an area where we had a lot of tech debt, where we found it difficult to make fast progress and first had to go quite slow to be able to go fast. Um, so we're not completely out of the woods there on that, but we're, we're working on it.

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SPEAKER_101: I got another one that you see, I really think this, this pro account

SPEAKER_13: Twitter blue is one step. I think Twitter blue corporate for $500 a month would be the real winner. Uh, and I used a company called social rank back in the day, which had a very interesting fee. I don't know if you remember social rank. I remember the name. I couldn't tell you what they do. Yeah, it was a New York company that did all kinds of analysis of your different social graphs. The one killer feature they had was I could organize anybody in my Twitter following that had the word venture capital, angel, whatever. So now out of 400,000 people, I have 25,000 who have explicitly in their bio, they're a venture capitalists, a startup founder, whatever. I then could DM that group. So in other words, I could use them almost like a mailing list and I could DM them, Hey, I'm in New York. And so I did all this work where I would say, give me everybody in New York when I did my book thing. And I invited everybody in New York to come to a reading of my book and a lunch with me. It was so effective, but I think technically maybe in the gray area sending a mass DM or even a semi mass DM. You don't allow third parties to send DMs to more than a hundred people or something.

SPEAKER_06: Is there some sort of rule around that? The way I would frame it is we see

SPEAKER_10: very few legitimate use cases for those tools and we see far more often that there are sort of nefarious use cases there. I think your broader point around the in-mail concept and really being able

Chamath Palihapitiya: to not just improve DMs, but build more sort of commercial intent or capabilities that businesses or people might find useful is super interesting. And we're very much in the early stages of Twitter Blue, obviously, but the intersection of Twitter Blue and how a canvas like DMs could could overlap is is really interesting. And what excites me about Twitter Blue is it very much is a canvas around which we are like going to build rapidly. And, you know, making a long and big bet here that I think can take lots of different forms. And we're also, you know, a lot of our

SPEAKER_10: some of our acquisitions have been motivated by by this as well. Like you mentioned Scroll early on, like Scroll is a full disclosure.

SPEAKER_58: I'm an angel investor in Scroll. So awesome.

SPEAKER_10: That's great. Yes. You know the product very well, but we see it as being a really awesome compliment to a Twitter because so many people are discovering long form

Chamath Palihapitiya: articles, whether the newsletters or whether their articles through typical publishers they might find on the Internet, they're they're happening upon them through Twitter. We send a lot of traffic to, you know, to publisher websites and giving people a clean, awesome, beautiful reading experience that is fast loading, free of ads.

SPEAKER_18: We think will a feel great for customers and be we actually think will help put money in the pockets of publishers to a higher degree than how much they would have been able to make from advertising from those same customers. And so putting that as a feature amongst the broader bundle within

SPEAKER_132: within our subscription. Yeah, we're we're super excited about

SPEAKER_13: and so people didn't know scroll allowed you through a collection of pretty highly well known publications pay as you go to read articles essentially. And so imagine if you will, you're on Twitter and you get to that Atlantic story or the Wall Street Journal. You don't need a subscription to Atlantic, but you do want to read that one story. What do you do? Well, if you could use a little bit of your Twitter blue credits to read it or and then Twitter could pay a penny or five cents to the person who published it, that's more than

SPEAKER_23: they make per CPM on the article.

SPEAKER_15: So there's there's actually a couple couple different dimensions here. There's there's pay as you go and

Chamath Palihapitiya: sort of paywalled content, which we're actually not tackling quite yet. Got it. But I think it's super interesting over time.

SPEAKER_10: So that's one dimension. The other dimension is giving people not getting behind the paywall, but taking existing non paywall publisher content like an article. Yeah. Removing ads, making the page load really fast and knowing that as a as a Twitter user, when

Chamath Palihapitiya: you happen upon this publisher's website and read this article by virtue of being a Twitter blue or a subscriber to Twitter, your attention will end up getting that publisher paid by virtue of like a

SPEAKER_10: subset of our subscription pool will go towards paying out publishers whose content is read.

SPEAKER_135: This is fantastic. I mean, just to even open up the aperture of what you're doing here

SPEAKER_13: for you to be able to allow publishers to make more money could totally revitalize publishing and really push people towards a third way. You have subscribe, which is a blunt tool once a year, a hundred to $500. You have ads, which is just brutal and carries with it all kinds of link baiting and bad second and third water effects and this third way of, hey, you know, you pay Twitter a hundred bucks a year and Twitter keeps 10% of that or 5% of whatever in a pool and people who come upon these articles will, will, will splashy cashy, give a little money to everybody whose articles are shown. It really is. I think it's going to bend journalism to, you know, Hey, how high quality can I make this story as opposed to how link baby can I make it?

SPEAKER_07: Yeah. We're, we're really excited that our, like, we have a number of different aspects of our

Chamath Palihapitiya: strategy that I think we'll are building this, this interesting multifaceted ecosystem where, like you said, there are some creators or publishers that you may want to directly, um, subscribe to and features like super follows will help you do that. Whether these content creators are publishing long form newsletters or whether they're, you know, posting tweet storms or whether they're just, you know, like Yashar, um, who you mentioned earlier,

SPEAKER_15: you've got a thing for the Iranians, um, another Iranian there.

SPEAKER_138: Um, yeah, I didn't know he's Iranian. Yashar Ali.

SPEAKER_15: Yeah, he's great.

SPEAKER_18: Um, like direct subscriptions to your, to, to folks who you want to be a really major and recurring patron of, um, I think is one clear, viable, well understood in the ecosystem mechanic, um, among

Chamath Palihapitiya: many others where this, you know, the scroll model is another one that we think is fascinating. Um, and, and obviously then you have ad hoc payments, whether it's tips or, uh, one-time gifts. And, um, you know, we started with a, with a baby

SPEAKER_18: step there with, with tip jar. Um, but we think there's a whole very interesting avenue of exploration there. You know, we really do see this as an ecosystem where there's different tools for different jobs and we're very keen to, to explore a few of these dimensions.

SPEAKER_02: So if super follows works, a person who has, let's call

SPEAKER_13: it a hundred thousand followers converts, but 3% to paying as super followers for, but $3 a month, two or $3 a month. Each they'd literally to Kevin Kelly's a thousand or 2000 true

SPEAKER_02: fans, you know, thesis could become sustainable as a person who tweets or interacts on Twitter for a living. Is that the goal? And the rally and cry internally is to make tweeting or being

SPEAKER_13: involved in the Twitter ecosystem for a creator, a full-time job. If that's what they want.

SPEAKER_15: We don't necessarily frame it as full-time job, but here's how we think of it.

Chamath Palihapitiya: There's like, there's two distinct high level goals. Um, and, and this is like an, an interesting way of distinguishing the difference between Twitter blue from all of the other sort of creator projects we're talking about here, like super follows and ticketed spaces and, and tip jar and these sorts of things. Um, the purpose of our, all of our efforts around, um, these creation tools is to help creators make money. Maybe that's because they want to make their craft a full-time job rather than a side hustle. Maybe it's because they just want to be rewarded for their work and maybe they have grand ambitions of creating a business and, you know, they just want to be able to be directly supported from their audience. Like that, there's a whole spectrum of, of why's there around why creators, you know, conduct their craft and do what they do. Our focus and our goal is how do we maximize the amount of money that people can make on the platform? The goal isn't for Twitter to make money. In fact, we may forego taking, taking substantial cuts in a bunch of these product, um, efforts because our goal actually is not to maximize revenue. Our goal is to put as much money in the pockets of customers. And frankly, ultimately, like we believe that the measure of success here is that we're driving more conversation on Twitter. That's, that's the goal and helping creators because a certain subset of our customers are motivated by, um, being able to make money. And we have not historically given them adequate tools to do that. Um, so that's the goal, helping creators make money. Separate from that, we have projects like Twitter blue, where the goal is like, we believe Twitter can make money from a, a diverse source of revenue. And that source of revenue is being directly supported by our customers to build features and functionality that provide extra value to them. Um, and so that, so they're, they both, both of these umbrellas of work happen to

SPEAKER_18: involve accepting payments, but they're actually motivated by very different things.

SPEAKER_02: It will, uh, will cryptocurrency, uh, make its way into this? I mean, I know Jack is a big fan, obviously, and I'm not sure how you feel about it.

SPEAKER_13: Um, but would, would we see a Twitter coin at some point? Certainly, certainly somebody in the company said like, we should just make our own

SPEAKER_53: cryptocurrency, uh, which, you know, on top of having to fix DMS and lists and everything else and technical debt and, you know, launch a bunch of new products short. We could create our own cryptocurrency too, but that's a whole nother, uh, you know,

SPEAKER_13: unit that would have to put 500 people on. So, um, have you, have you thought about that? Does that add anything to the party, you know, letting people put Bitcoin or doge or

SPEAKER_23: whatever they're into, into their wallets?

SPEAKER_15: Um, so we are absolutely thinking about cryptocurrency and, and just the blockchain generally, I think that we're still in the early stages of figuring out what, you know, a product experience would look like here.

SPEAKER_10: But I think that, you know, the world is changing with how the, the, what you can achieve through decentralization, the use cases you can enable through the blockchain.

SPEAKER_18: We're in the very beginning stages of figuring out, and especially at the intersection of, um, cryptocurrency and the creator economy.

Chamath Palihapitiya: I think there are many interesting explorations and many interesting products that already exist. Um, some of which are quite intersecting with our platform. You see, you see, you know, uh, products like BitCloud, um, they're already flirting with this today. So like, we're absolutely thinking about it, um, nothing to announce today or, or in the coming weeks, but, um, definitely something that we're, we're exploring.

SPEAKER_02: It would make sense in that the recycling of currency in the system could become very powerful.

SPEAKER_13: In other words, you know, I, I might let people super follow me, but as an investor and a podcaster, I, I don't need the money from the fans paying me directly. We had a Patreon. I always felt like I do. I don't want the fans money, but I, I will put up one if I could say, you know what, everything that comes to me, I'm going to put 25% towards the smash program, 25% girls who code 25% towards this food bank and 25% towards this school in Brooklyn. Like if I could come up with a way to redirect my payments to other Twitter handles, my Lord, that would be so much fun for me. And then you just think about that recirculation. It works so well with cryptocurrency. If it's just moving around, um, fluidly like that. Uh, now this question is not about product, but it'd be remiss if I don't ask it, which is, uh, Trump got a lifetime van. Pretty obvious why. How has culture, if at all change inside of the company since making that stand? Um, and like coming to work, does it change at all? What was it like during that period of time when that decision was made? I know it's not your department exactly, but I'm just curious, uh, cause it's, I just heard while we were on the pod here, uh, taping this the day before you launched Twitter space at Twitter blue, that Trump's being reinstated on another platform.

SPEAKER_15: You know, I would not say that our culture changed at all as a result of that decision. Um, I think a lot of, you know, certainly, uh, it impacted some people's day jobs because there's, you know, from a, from a policy and enforcement standpoint, there's lots of

SPEAKER_10: tricky decisions to weigh there created a lot of effort and work for, for folks. So I don't want to discount that, but I wouldn't say culture changed at the end of the day. Like, you know, we have a policy enforcement apparatus that has principles around enforcing our rules as consistently as possible, as quickly as possible. So, culturally, there were no like major inflection points.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Uh, it just happened to be a specific decision that, um, there's, was very noticeable, was very talked about and, um, was very high profile, but culture didn't change as a result.

SPEAKER_101: Yeah. I thought it was a very well done decision.

SPEAKER_13: I was frequently hearing people say, oh, you know, they got to throw him off the platform for years. And I was like, you can't really throw the president of the United States off the platform, but it's very clear inciting any kind of violence is, you know, against the rules. And that's a pretty severe thing. So I thought it was a reasonable, uh, decision. Listen, it's been great to watch the platform evolve and the velocity. I love the fact that you're engaging with the fans on Twitter spaces, which is an extraordinary product. We don't want to talk too much about that, but congratulations at the velocity at which that is increasing. And so many great conversations are occurring. And it's really made me even more enthusiastic for my preferred social media platform, the place where I spent hours a day and just love, you know, to engage with so many people. I've made so many friends on Twitter over the years. And I'm not just talking like, I'm talking high profile people sliding to my DM sometime. It would never have happened. I would never have met some of the most important relationships I have in my life. Um, and some of the most interesting people, if it had not been for Twitter, and I really do thank you and the team over there and wish you great success on this incredible second decade you're having of just really innovating. And I love the fact that you're so focused on both empowering all these creators to make sustainable livings, uh, while, you know, even making some money yourselves through this, you know, adding this subscription line because advertising, that's fun. But I just love to see you have a paid product. I think it's going to increase the level of, uh, engagement and it just, it's, it's, it's time, you know, it's time for social media to ask the users who are getting value to pay for it. I didn't ask you this, if I pay for Twitter blue, does that take ads out or is that

SPEAKER_101: going to be an option? How do you think about that?

SPEAKER_15: Not, not right now. Our focus right now is, um, really on the features and functionality that, um, you know,

Chamath Palihapitiya: are, are like new capabilities that we build for, for power users.

SPEAKER_10: We've, we've definitely heard that, that request before. And I think it's a, it's a very sensible one, but it's not, it's not something that we're focused on right now.

SPEAKER_09: I don't know if you have Hulu or NBA league pass, you can like pay extra to turn off ads if you're really like a kooky person, like the 100%.

SPEAKER_118: All right, listen, Kayvon, great job. And I'll see you on Twitter and see you on spaces and we'll see all of you next time on this week in startups. Bye bye.