Adam Mosseri

Tetragrammaton If I'm completely honest, I've never really liked the term social media. I'm not sure if I can really articulate why. Social media, I think, is essentially platforms like Instagram where what you consume is primarily produced by other people like you as opposed to something that's more professionally produced. That said, that line is blurring over time, right? There's a lot of professionally produced content,

not on Instagram, but on all social media. But the basic idea is that it's what we would

call user-generated content. So we're not going out and making content ourselves, we're not buying content for the most part, but we're providing a platform that allows people to share and find an audience, which is an interesting role because you're a connector and you understand to a certain degree what people are saying on the platform, but you don't have a point of view in the same way about content the way you would if you were

just producing content directly. Makes perfect sense. It's more of a distribution network. Yeah, but it's not as neutral as like a telephone network, right? Or you know, I pick up the phone and I call you, but we're not waking up in the morning and trying to decide what we think

is important, whatever one should consume and whatever one shouldn't consume. So one of the more difficult questions we're always wrestling with, which is where to be on that spectrum, how much to have an opinion and how to do that responsibly and transparently, which is a sticky, tricky problem. Yeah, why would the phone comparison not be the best version? Because we do rank content, it's a more complicated network than a phone network

in a lot of ways and so a lot of the decisions we make affect what people see. It's closer to a phone than to like a magazine or a newspaper, but it is kind of its own thing. And I suppose on a phone, it's a one to one or if it's more than one to one, you're still

deciding who's on. It's a closed loop, whereas Instagram's an open loop. It is, but actually one of the interesting things I think a lot of people have misunderstood is they people think of Instagram as a feed of square photos, high-pressurated, high contrast, but it's really changed a lot over the last five, 10 years. If you just look at what people share and take out all texts, people share way more photos and videos in DMs than they do in

stories and they share way more photos and videos in stories than they do in feed. So feed is actually the least important of those three surfaces, but because it's where we started, most people associate themselves. Tell me the difference between those three. What are those three? So DMs are just direct messages. So, you know, if I follow you on Instagram and you follow me, we can message. Young people particularly spend most of their time messaging

about content. So it's not the same as, you know, if you and I were texting about meeting today, we would use our message or if we were in Italy, we'd use WhatsApp. But on Instagram, you're usually using it to talk about something that you discovered. Maybe I'm replying to your story or I'm sharing a video or a comedy clip or something that I found that I thought you would like. So it's actually the thing that people do the most on Instagram, particularly

young people. DMing. Yeah. I'm shocked. Yeah. Most people don't think about that way. Yeah. Young people literally spend more time in DMs than they do in stories or feed. And were the DMs from the beginning? No. We added DMs probably almost 10 years ago now. And then we added stories a few years after that. So the feed was first. Yes. Describe the feed when you came to the company. What was the feed? Yeah. So I worked on Facebook. So I worked

for Meta before I worked for Instagram. And then Instagram was bought by Facebook now Meta. So when Instagram first started, when I first started working with the team a little bit, not directly, it was just literally photos from people you follow that had to be square. There were no videos. There was no messaging. There was no stories. There was none of it.

It was just there was text. You could put a caption below the photo. Okay. With their comments, comments and likes, it was a huge deal when we added video or when we decided not to force square as the aspect ratio. These things felt like sacred cows that we were sacrificing in a way. But the idea was always, even before I joined the team, the world is going to continue to change. And that if we don't evolve, then the risk we face is just becoming

irrelevant. And that's always an interesting dance as well, which is if you evolve too much, you change too much. People get mad. But if you don't evolve, if you can imagine if we didn't have stories or DMs, we would be the fraction of this as we are today. So

that's always a balance. But you have to kind of have some sympathy because the way I think about it is, like you, your desk there, let's say you spent an hour at that desk every day, half an hour, organizing your photos, talking to some friends, maybe making some notes. And that's not all that different than what you might be doing on Instagram. Now, if I came one day and I just rearranged your desk and I didn't tell you why, I didn't give

you an option. Maybe it's better, maybe it's worse, but you're probably, at first it wouldn't be good. No, at first you'd be like, what were you doing? I think you do, right? This is my desk. And that's how people feel about the platform, which is I think, and some way is a good thing, right? That's a good idea. Yeah, but the flip side is that you have to be careful. So that's about it. And that's a balance too. Along the way, was there anything that you brought in new that was not well

received? Yeah, many, many. What was the feeling? Tell me the thought behind bringing it in, the reaction and what it felt like? Yeah, we've been in many. The biggest negative one during my 10 year, we were testing a few different changes at once. We were testing a new design for the main feed that was full screen. We were leaning more into what we call recommendations, so helping showing things in feed from accounts you don't yet

follow that we think you might like. And how do you know what someone might like? Lots of ways, but it's usually less sophisticated than people think. If you look at how fundamentally work. So, you know, let's say we, we know all the photos and videos you've liked on Instagram on the past. We can look at other people who've also liked those photos and videos and then look at other photos and videos that they've liked. That's called collaborative filtering.

It's like that to try and guess and an educated guess, but a guess help you discover new things you might love. The benefit being we can increase the amount of reach creators on the platform have, we can help you discover new things, we actually increased the overall usage of Instagram. But it's really controversial because for a lot of people they feel like my feed is curated. I followed these accounts. I didn't want you to start putting other stuff in there. So

we had a couple of changes going on at once and it just blew up. Just totally blew up. Do you always, when you release new features, do you release it everywhere at once or do you do test cases? Tiny tests. Lots of different types. So, for the new design change, we were showing it to a few percent of people. I think on the order of one or two percent of people were seeing people opt in or just one day it changes. Just changes? Because if

they opt in, then you have what we call a selection bias. So you won't really know how it's confused by the average person. Because people who opt in early are early adopters. Sometimes we'll launch a test to a whole country because it has what we will call network effects. So it won't make sense if you don't do it to the whole country. So when we were testing hiding likes, and it would be weird if you and I were friends and I can't see your likes,

but you can see mine. So we did the whole country of Brazil, for instance. So it depends on the thing that we're testing. So anyway, we had two or three things testing at once and then we had some high profile names get mad and then the press covered their frustration and then it just sort of ping ponged. I did a video explaining what we were doing on the platform. I got meamed hard. I was wearing a yellow sweatshirt. And so there's a lot of

minion memes and bananom memes and I remember my wife like it's so funny. Yeah, it's just a great story. Yeah. My wife doesn't really tune in too much to all of this. So I remember at the end of the week, she's like, what's going on? And I was like, babe, I sent you a video of the daily show just roasting me like two nights ago. And she's like, oh, no, I just haven't watched you. I watched you later. I was like, don't worry about it. It's fine.

So you know, you try to take it all with some, you try to keep a sense of humor and you'd admit when you were wearing yellow sweater again. No, no, I got to wear it. I got to wear it. I got to wear it. You got to just double down. I feel like when we launched threads earlier this year, I almost wore the yellow sweater for the launch video because I was like, oh, it'll be nice. Just to bring it back. Just get meamed again. Look, you got to learn from your

mistakes. You got to acknowledge them and then you got to iterate and move forward. So in that first case, well, there was a bad reaction to the changes. Do you go back or do you, what happens? So with that one, we actually did a couple different things. The design wasn't working anyway. So we were never going to actually launch it. So we turned that test off. We slowed down the recommendations work. So I think we were going too hard, too fast. And we were kind of getting

ahead of our skis, so to speak. So we kind of made sure we were better at recommending content before we grew that part of the app. We're still leaning into recommendations. We're still leaning into video. A lot of the same things that were contentious at the time. And I don't think Instagram has ever been stronger. So it's sometimes it's too soon. Sometimes it's not executed quite right. And so you got to try to sift through all the noise and find the signal.

So most of it actually we followed through with except for one or two things. So we talked about feeds. We talked a little bit about DMs, which she said when did that start about 10 years ago? Yeah. And then when did stories start and what is stories? Stories is just a lighter way to share. So when people share the feed, for better for worse is become very pressurized. People feel like they got to be careful with what they share because it's going to be around forever. It's on

your profile. People call it your grid. They're worried. It's sort of like reflects on their identity. So it just becomes higher stakes than we really want it to be. So what stories was was trying to create a space that was less pressurized. So it's around only for a day. You have to opt into them right. So you tap on your story to see your story. I don't just see it in my feed. Scrolling. If I reply that's private. So there's no public comment section. It's just in every way

I think less pressurized. Snapchat really popularized the format. Kakao and Korea actually I think invented it originally before them. People are way more comfortable sharing that way. So they share way more there than they haven't feed. So you might share many times a day in your stories or many days a week. You might share one thing a week. Actually you share one thing at a time. And then you remove it before you share the next. What's the story behind that?

It started with posting things on Twitter. These quotes. And the way that happened was I put out a book earlier this year. And I had gathered all this material but I didn't have the form for the book yet. I had about a thousand pages of ideas and no order. It was frustrating because I didn't know what it was going to be or if it was ever going to be because I knew that the material was good but I didn't have any way to present it where it would make sense. And I heard two pieces

of information, two separate days in the sauna. The first one was a poetry book written by a Korean Buddhist teacher that sold three million copies outside of the US. And I heard that and I'm thinking it's weird that first of all that I don't know the name of this Korean Buddhist teacher because that's kind of I'm interested in these things. I'm interested in that world and for it to have that much impact. And I know that people don't buy those kind of books like I do but it's a

fringe market. Yeah, three million is a huge number. Huge number. And that's outside of this country. It's like how does that happen? So that was piece one. And I just stored that. I filed that as like okay that's something I don't understand about the world. And then a few weeks later I heard about a 21 year old poet who had a New York Times bestseller poetry book for 70 weeks. I was like people don't buy poetry books. A 21 year old poet has a bestseller for 70 weeks of poetry. How can it be?

Doesn't fit my worldview. Both of those. And the second one made me want to research both because there were both cases of I don't understand the world anymore. The world is not as I understand it. Yeah. I researched both the Buddhist teacher put quotes up or stories up or ideas up on Instagram and had a huge following on Instagram. And based on that he put out a book that was a collection of the stuff that he was talking about on Instagram and it was a huge bestseller. The poet whose name

is Rupi Korr. She's an Instagram poet. Yeah. And she had a huge following on Instagram. And then she put together a book with the poems that she put on Instagram. Now I had no idea about any of this. So I hear these two stories. I don't think I was on Instagram yet. I was on Twitter. Although when I say I was on Twitter, I had one tweet. I had the tweet that allowed me to get my first blue check mark 12 years ago. Yeah, there you go. That was my only I never tweeted since. Yeah.

I don't use any social media. Yeah. So I heard those two stories. I have a thousand pages of ideas. No idea how and when it will ever become a book. And I thought maybe I'll just start posting an idea based on those two stories. In a way it was pre-promotion for the book. But if the book never came out, it wouldn't matter. It was like, yeah. A good use of a good use of spreading the ideas. So I started

spreading the ideas that way. And right from the beginning I thought I like the idea of something being I remember growing up seeing like live television and how the idea of an event and if you miss the event, it was different. It kind of gives it a different kind of value. And it feels like if you don't get it, it's going to be gone, which gives it some preciousness. And then I did that for like three years. Then another friend of mine said, you know, you really should be doing this on

Instagram. So it happened that way just really naturally. But I like that idea of it being something that's not permanent, not to make less of it, to make more of it. Yeah. Because it gives some temporalness. Yeah. And it's rooted in real life. I mean, that's how the world works. That's how it works. If I say something it's gone, usually that's really how the world works. So I think some of those things though are the most exciting and interesting about working on a platform like Instagram

is the the uses that you don't anticipate. You know, the fact that poetry on Instagram is its own sort of subculture is wild because Instagram is clearly through and through designed to be a visual medium. And there's a whole world of poets who have found ways to express their art form, their craft on a visual platform. And it's become its own sort of subculture. And that's rat. You know, you're using feed, but actually keeping it temporal and one at a time is not at all how

we design the system, but it's great. And I think those creative hacks are kind of some of the most fun. I got a member of once, who did I meet, who did this? Prince Harry and Harry and Megan. When they had an account, they used to follow a set of accounts every month that had to do with a cause. Maybe it was climate change or, you know, girls' education. And then at the end of the month, they would unfollow all of those accounts and then follow another set of accounts about a

different cause. That's interesting. And one thing people do a lot on Instagram is they go to someone's account and they see who they follow in order to discover new people to follow. So that was another kind of cool, almost abusive, the system, but in a positive way. Yeah, it's a hack. A hack. Yeah. So I love those because those are often, sometimes when you find those, you were like, oh, we should probably support that first class. And sometimes it's like, no, that's great.

Let's just leave it as it is. Like actually way back even before I joined Facebook 15 years ago, the reason why Facebook first built support for photos is they found people were changing their profile pic multiple times a day. And this is when Facebook was just for colleges. And the people who worked there, who I know now, but who I was before, my time, they're like, why do these people just keep changing their profile pic? And it was just because they were trying to share photos,

and there was no way to actually share photos. I see. And so it was like profile pic. It just was whatever they were doing that day. And so they're like, oh, we should probably make it so you can share photos on Facebook. So cool. Which now doesn't even seem it'd be weird to have a social platform or not be able to share a photo. But when Facebook first started, it was just a profile and text and text. And you would go to people's profiles and you'd be like, what books do

they like? What groups are they? And what are their favorite musicians? There was a yearbook. So sometimes the most interesting stuff evolves out of those hacks. Besides poetry, what are some of the other subcultures? I want to ask to do even better at this. I really think that one of the most interesting and exciting things about the internet is it should allow for the success of more niche interests. And I think it has in a lot of ways, but still not quite as much as you

would expect. I still feel like we listen to more and more niche music over time, but we still a lot of us listen to the same top 40 type stuff. Pick a vertical. There's still a lot of concentration at the head. But those niche interests I think are always kind of the most fun. There's like a bunch of grammar videos. People who just really get off on grammar type stuff, just making funny videos about M-dashes and M-dashes and the differences. Like that bubbled up on

Instagram one day for me, which was kind of wild and fun. I mean the big ones you can imagine is obviously dance videos. For fashion and beauty, one of the biggest things is like tutorial type, like how-to type stuff. You do really well with musicians and athletes as well. But I kind of get more excited about the random little ones. Recipes cooking, whole world of these fast pace recipe videos where you'll watch someone make something really quickly and then they'll

have the full recipe and the caption so you can actually make it yourself. These cultures, these communities, they start to emerge and you try to nurture them and support them. On threads is evolving differently, which is our other app right now, which is sort of a Twitter competitor. I'm by like NBA commentary as a whole thing. It's a whole big community around women supporting women. So it's kind of fun to see it all evolve. How has Facebook changed over

the 15 years that you've been there? The company? Yeah. Well when I joined it was a company. It was, you know, we had an HR department. It wasn't just a couple of kids in the dorm room. We were about 400 people. How many years old was it at that time? Four. Four years old. I think so. I think that's right. Was there any competition at that time? Lots. Our big thing was my space. My space was bigger than us. We had like a Myspace t-shirt pinned up on the wall and the whole thing is we

had to catch up with Myspace. Interesting. Twitter was around a couple years in. Well when I joined and we were really worried about them, we were small though. The design, I joined as a designer and the design team at the time I think they're seven or eight of us. When you say design team, is it product design? Yeah. So we would call it product design. I think most of the world would think like a shoe when you say product design. And tech, it just means like designing the app or

just at that point designing the website. This is before 2008. That's right around the time like the iPhone came out. We were focused on dub, dub, dub that Facebook.com. So you're engineers? So at that time we were. So no longer but back then to be a designer you and get hired at the company had to also be able to program. So I did a lot of terrible programming for a lot of years that I hope no one ever looks up. But yeah, we were engineers and designers at the time.

There was maybe a hundred engineers. So when you say design, you could mean the way it operates. Yeah, but more how it works. How it works. You know interface design and I was around when we first built groups. Well actually when we changed groups. So you could actually share into a group. So what does that even mean? Should you be able to share into a group? Should a group just be a message thread? What does the page look like? How do you create one? What's the privacy model? Do I have to add

you? Do you have to discover it? Do I invite you? All of these small decisions end up really changing how the thing is used over time. And so we've worked on a lot of different things like that in the early years. But yeah, designers always been the craft that I grew up in. I started my career as

a designer. But from the beginning that was a digital at Facebook. Yes. Before Facebook, I ran a design startup for a year and before that I was at a design firm and we did print design exhibition design traditional design. Yeah, brand work. And we did digital work too. We did websites. But at Facebook it was always digital. But that's actually the thing I was actually curious about you take on it. So it seems like from reading your book and just following you over the years, a big part of what

you do is help create an environment that fosters creativity. But the creative view work with our artists. One of the things that was interesting in reading your book is how different your approaches to like my day to day, which is a lot of business, spreadsheets, emails, regulation, understanding kind of stuff. So that was kind of a really refreshing thing. But the other thing is the creativity in my world, at least at the company, is about design, not about artistic expression.

I think the biggest difference between design and artistic expression or art is that there's a bit more focus on the function. What it means, Charles and Riems defined design as it was organizing elements to achieve a particular purpose or something along those lines and people watching that quote, but that it's about that purpose. You're building a chair to sit on, a piano to play

music on, an app to share on. Does that mean that what I need to do because I have a lot of creatives that work for me is different in terms of creating space for creativity or is space for creativity just some basic approaches that are universal or is it all about the individual? I think creativity is all about the individual that said one interesting technique would be zooming out. Let's say the task was to design a bridge and you're designing a bridge because

people want to get from one side of the river to the other side of the river. What might be interesting instead of making the task narrow zoom out and say the goal is to get people from one side of the river to the other. Let's find the most elegant solution for that problem. You don't assume the thing you're making is the thing you're making. You zoom out a step further to what is the thing you're making accomplish. Then the assignment will be the most open version of the assignment to

allow the most interesting solutions to come forth. Sometimes you might be surprised and maybe there's a better solution than a bridge. Taking all of the limitations off of the ask can open it up to more interesting solutions, more novel solutions and solutions that have more significance. Another thing you can try is the face off. This is something that was a technique used with the chili peppers. If we were working on a song and we needed a new part, let's say the verse in the chorus worked

really well, but we needed a new bridge written. John and Flea both write music in the chili peppers. Instead of them working together to create the best solution, they worked independently. In their case they said let's do a face off. They would come to the middle of the room, press their faces together and then both leave to two different rooms, spend 15 or 20 minutes writing and then both come back. Then they would each present their idea to the band. Something good always came

from it. Sometimes one solution might be that one works for the bridge, Flea's idea works for the bridge, but John's idea is great too. Let's use John's idea for the outro. The beauty of the face off is if you have a team of people working on building the same thing, instead take the team apart, give each of the individuals the full assignment, then pull those solutions altogether, all of the individual solutions, and usually the whole room together gets on the same page very quickly. It's

like up that idea, idea B, that was the best idea. In our world it's so fast-paced, it's so focused on competition on the time, we're so dead-eye-oriented, out-to-com oriented. This isn't quite the same, but one of the things that I always find tricky is how to help teams play with that decision, which is when you're trying to achieve a certain outcome or design a certain thing with a purpose. At the beginning it's about exploring the solution space,

just trying stuff, seeing what feels good. There's also some ways to do that. I might be visual, you can build prototypes, make videos, talk to people, but there's this sort of part that really feels more like art than science, which is when do you go from exploring more and more ideas and be more breath-oriented to beginning to narrow and focus on a subset of ideas

and refine and iterate? If you don't have enough time, you might set the focus too soon, and if you have unlimited time, you might just wander off into something less helpful or productive. One of my roles is to make space for people who are on the same design side for the designers that work for me, like stronger designers than I ever was, to do work that they're proud of.

I can do that by either giving them more time or helping to create an environment that is more conducive to that sort of creative expression, whether it's maybe they just need more time just to riff, maybe they want to talk more, maybe they need the right team. A lot of what I do is build teams that complement each other and can inspire each other. But that part always feels a little bit like, not dark matter, just like, do you keep the same teams together or do they change for different

projects? I like to keep teams together that have figured out how to collaborate really effectively. This one sounds like an economist, but you build equity in that team. Yeah. And when you break that team up, because maybe that project is over or that product failed or that idea failed, someone says, good right, you mix new people, new ideas, new inspiration, but you lose something. It's like a band. You get sort of a psychic connection when the people

can finish each other's sentences, things move a lot quicker. Yeah. Yeah, they finish their sentences, because for these teams, it's interesting because their crafts are so different. If you're an engineer and someone else is a designer and someone else has a research or someone else is a product manager that their crafts are different, but they've got that emotional investment. They're like, oh, my designer makes this amazing stuff. It's hard to build, but I pride myself in being

well, actually build it. Yeah. Or my engineer is pushing himself or herself further to actually make it work. I'm going to make sure they have everything they need for me because they've stayed up late, pushed it harder, been more resilient. And I'm a rater of the team. Everybody wants to deliver for everyone else. Yeah, and a really big way. And so I like to try and preserve those teams when they work. Because other times they don't. I'll often have teams that are

somewhere between dysfunctional or just functioning just okay. And it doesn't mean anybody's bad. It might be multiple people that I know love and respect. I think a brilliant combination. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. Just same like band. Again, the best players together don't always make the best band. Yeah. And it's wild because as a manager, you're like, this is a job. You're smart. You're smart. Figure it out. But sometimes you just have to be like,

everybody who works for me, my job is to set them up for success. Yeah. And if I've put them in a bad arrangement, ultimately that's on me. And I need to then figure out how to correct it. In the team, you named four different crafts. Yeah. What does each one of those crafts do? Yeah. So the core nucleus of any product team usually has five crafts. So usually has product design, which we've talked a little bit about. So you're designing the interface, not only how it

looks, but how it works. You'll have engineers who, there's 10 times as many engineers as any other function. They build it. And there's front-end engineers and back-end engineers. There's all types of engineers. So is the first one the designer more conceptual? Yes. So it's more conceptual. Engineers more practical on building it. Usually yes. But if you're lucky, you'll get an engineer who has got really strong opinions about what to build, not just how to build it.

Yeah. Understanding how the systems work can help better inform what to build in the first place. Okay. You've got a data scientist, which I didn't mention before, but another one, which is trying to understand. So you know, what do they do? So the data scientists would look at, okay, well, how many stories do people share? What kind of stories do people share? How many stories do people see? How do they see them? Do you just tap and click through them? Or do you tap into one, leave,

go to something else, tap into another, then we call that hunting and pecking? If you get to a really long one, like maybe I post 50 things in a day, so I'm just, does that make people eject? Should we design a way to skip? Helping you understand how things are used today, so you can find that. Does that have a psychological dimension to it? The psychological part is the fourth function, which is the researcher. There's also a different research methodologies, you know, from ethnography

studies to surveys and everything in between. So you might bring people in and have them use stuff, you might just bring people in and talk to them. You might run surveys and ask people questions, you might ask tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people questions on the platform. You tried to shed light on insights. So what are problems people have? What's working for people? What's not? I mean, fundamentally what we're trying to do is understand people's needs and then

meet those needs. And researchers and data scientists, there's a pair, help us sort of understand people. And then the fifth one is product management, so that you're more of the coordinator. Make sure there's a shared vision for what we're building. You don't have to come up with it yourself, but do you have to make sure you get it out of your team? Make sure everybody knows what they need to know. So whether it's what we're doing, why we're doing it, how we're evaluating success,

what the deadlines are, what the dependencies are. You know, setting milestones, road maps, the project management part as well. I did that for a number of years too. There's content design and product growth and data engineering. So it's a lot of the bigger we get the more functions we have. But the smallest five are those first five, Fever Team. You mentioned earlier that my space was the competition. Yeah, they were big. Tell me the story of my space and Facebook. Yeah.

I mean, so my space, I think, started before us and they were bigger than us when I joined Facebook in 2008. What did they do different than what Facebook did? A number of things. They were more, it was easier to customize. You could kind of make it more your own. Do you think that was a positive or a negative? I think it was positive. I think they also, they leaned in the music, which is a little bit more niche, but I think was probably positive. I think they had trouble

continuing to evolve forward. They got bought at some point and that's always hard to maintain your culture and your agility or your, so to how nimble you are as a creative team. Would you say that sale was the beginning of the downfall? I don't know. I wouldn't be surprised, but it's hard to say without really knowing that many people who worked there.

I'm trying to remember so many years ago now. I think they started to innovate less. They're trying to make money, which is something wrong with that, but I think they, it was more of this approach of how do we make money out of this thing than the inverse, which is how do we make this thing so big that it's easy to make money. If you're focused on the end user and how do we create value for them, so more people use it, waste make money to income, and I think post

acquisition if I had to express it. Maybe you'd call it like a short-sightedness. Yeah, I think they got focused a little bit too much on the short term back then. Twitter, we were terrified of Twitter, rather than they're going to add photos and videos and they're like they're, they were the younger ups start up at the time. They felt very different though. Okay, let's do this. Describe each of the social networks

what makes each of them them. Oh, I think it's the small decisions at the very beginning that really end up setting the tone for the network. So what makes Twitter Twitter? Twitter is designed for debate. It's designed for back and forth. It's actually way better for conversations at Facebook or Instagram. And I think that's great, those are healthy things. I think the way they went about it has ended up evolving it into a more negative space in general.

I don't mean that Twitter is all negative. I think there's lots of Twitter that's great. But in general, I think the tone of the overall community is more negative than Instagram, which is at the opposite end of the spectrum where we focus on visual expression, immersive photos and videos. So I think we ended up having a bit of a bias on purpose or not towards creativity and towards visual expression, which ended up being a bit more positive.

Makes sense if one is focused on debate, debate is always going to be combative. Yeah, it's designed for news. News is always going to be more negative because that's just the nature of that industry. We don't even support links. It's sort of the opposite of supportive of news on Instagram. Facebook was kind of in the middle. They have news you guys have poetry. Yeah, exactly. And we have, and I want to be clear, we have negative things on Instagram,

there is news on Instagram. But the tone, it's a different tone. It's a different tone. And we've what's our role? I don't want to do anything to encourage news on Instagram, but I'm not going to do anything to discourage it either. I'm not going to, of course, if someone was to post news on Instagram, then it is not our role to shut that down in any way, shape or form. But we're never going to build news specific features because I just think it comes with too much

scrutiny, negativity, complexity. It's not actually what I love that. I think it's a great choice, especially when it feels like so many big companies see another big company do something and feel like they need to do the same thing. I don't know why that is, but I see that happening all the time. Yeah, we do that all the time. It's so odd. It's like play your hand. You do what you're good at. Be better at what you're good at. Why do you want to play someone else's game?

I agree with the spirit of it, but I also want to be honest, we have definitely acted that way many times over the years. We're very competitive by nature. It's a cultural thing. I don't know where they're going to describe it. We're building up, we have this competitor now for Twitter. And then we're trying to do it differently. There's news on threads. We're not trying to focus on news.

We're trying to figure out ways to create a less angry space. So little subtle things, like giving people more control over who can reply, how you rank being differently. We're looking at little things like, all right, if I post and someone replies to me and I then like it, is that a signal that it was a more cordial or civil conversation? We're exploring all these types of ideas, trying to figure out ways without having any perfect answers. I want to be clear.

To facilitate a friendlier, more supportive space. And we'll see if it works. Maybe it will, maybe it won't. Has Instagram continued to grow? What does the slope look like? Yeah, no, it's been an amazing couple of years actually. It varies a lot by country, but overall we're finishing this last day of 2023 with a really strong year. Do you measure it based on users? How do you measure success? We look at how many people use it? How long they use it for?

How do they feel about it? Sort of brand sentiment? Is it worth your time? These types of surveys like we talked about? And then as a business, we look at revenue. We're growing particularly fast in countries like India and Brazil because there are some enormous countries and more and more coming online. So the growth rates there are pretty wild. It's the fact that it's as visual as it is,

help in terms of global. I would think Twitter is more language dependent. I wouldn't be surprised if it helps that so much content can be interesting even if you don't speak the language. Now that's less true for videos and photos, but still much more true than text. But it's wild to see how differently people use it in different parts of the world. Give me examples of how different countries, what's big in different countries on Instagram. So sometimes it's by countries

and it's by age. So teens and young people use Instagram very differently than adults. But all of Brazil seems to use Instagram like teens do everywhere else. They're way more focused on stories than feed. Did they come online later or no? Brazil? I can't know. So India, yes. So I think you have this thing often where people who come on later who are in their 30s will use phones a bit more like teens do everywhere because they don't have the same baggage of the

10 year. You came online at the same year even though you're different ages. But Brazilians just seem incredibly expressive. I don't really know how to explain it anyway. It's not like we're the only game in town. What's up is enormous in Brazil. What's up also has their version of stories called status and Facebook is their Snapchat is there. But it's been an amazingly expressive community and culture. What are some of the key differences? In Japan, people are much more

thoughtful about whether or not they sign up. But if they do sign up they're much more likely to stick around. That's a much more intentional decision. Interesting. Their networks are much smaller. So we look at this thing like how many followers do you need to get to a healthy place? That number is much lower in Japan than it is in the US and it's much lower in the US and it is in Indonesia for instance. Actually one thing you see sometimes in Japan are these micro-fints. So like three people

will create secondary counts and they'll just follow each other. So they have their own Instagram. It's just the three of them. So imagine like you, me and our friend Andrew all had secret accounts and just followed each other. And so we could just log into Instagram and my whole Instagram would be Rick and Andrew. It's so interesting. And I think that's more about the culture being careful with what they share. You needing the right ingredients to feel comfortable expressing

yourself. It's not that Japanese people are any less expressive. They're expressive and creative. But the environment you need to create to tap into that is different and it's much more private. So what you try and do is you try to understand a specific group that you care about. Maybe we care about Brazil, maybe we care about the US, care about creators. But then you try to design solutions not with them in mind but for everyone. We actively avoid whenever possible launching things

specifically to a specific country. We want to understand the country, build something that works and then make it available to everyone because I'm sure there's someone who's similar somewhere else in the world. But that is one of the more interesting things about the job is not only looking at the data but traveling around the world, meeting people and understanding how Instagram means something different in different places to different people. So cool. Yeah, that's one of

the most really interesting. What's Web 3? Web 3 is a very marketing sounding term. But basically the idea is if the second version of the web was these large centralized companies like Meta, building these networks that are largely closed and where a lot of the important decisions were centralized in a small number of decision makers hands. What you can argue is a lot of how the internet has worked over the last 10 or 20 years. Then Web 3 is the idea is a more decentralized

approach and there's lots of ways to support distributing power. So one big part of Web 3 is crypto. There's the crypto bulls and the crypto bears and it's a religious thing. But the idea being that a technology where nobody owns the database or the log or the ledger but everybody owns it is one where you can do interesting things. So one of the ideas I really want us to do at some point but we can't do it right now is allow you to more directly own your audience.

So if you build up a set of followers on Instagram, that's great. But there is a concern that people have that ultimately they're not dependent on us as a company. And if they do something like if they post something that violates our guidelines and we take it down and they get enough strikes and they eventually get disabled, they lose those relationships with those followers that they've

built and earned over the years. Whereas if you there are ways using some of these technologies, you don't have to but there's something interesting about how they're built that I'll explain in a second that it allows you not to have to trust us as an intermediary. So if all of your followers maybe we'll use a smaller example like subscribers like you can actually have people pay you for access to your content on Instagram. If all your subscribers, if that connection was made

on chain, then Instagram couldn't delete them even if we wanted to. So even if we de-platform you and kick you off of Instagram, your relationship would exist in a publicly accessible way with all of your subscribers so that another app or competitor could then support and honor those relationships. And what's interesting isn't like is it possible to like share a list of subscribers? That's possible now without these technologies. But with these technologies,

you make it so that we can't not share it. So it's like literally we can't delete the data even if we wanted to. If a government was like we're going to shut you down unless you deleted this data, we wouldn't be able to. The same way WhatsApp can't look at your messages because they just don't have access. What I think is interesting about Web 3 isn't necessarily the technologies behind encryption or crypto or crypto, but rather the things that they might enable, which is fundamentally

removing the need to trust in the intermediary. I have a bunch of different examples like subscribers. And that's kind of a powerful thing in a world where I think people have less and less faith in institutions. It makes sense. And if we use Myspace as an example, if you built your life on Myspace, and Myspace goes away, that's gone. Yeah. And that's a liability. And people are rising up to that. Like creators in general are becoming more and more invested in multiple platforms. And I think

it's for that same reason. You don't want to have all your eggs in one basket. So they, you know, you might build up a presence on YouTube and on Instagram or Instagram. It's a kind of a creator starting today. How would you organize your flow of information? Where would you keep everything and where would you put it? It would depend on when I was trying to achieve. This is one of the key things is that I think people need to be intentional about how they use these platforms. Are you trying

to just express yourself? Are you trying to sell something? Are you trying to build up interest in what you do so that you can then do something else? You know, build up a name for yourself or reputation? Are you trying to just advocate for a cause? Right? Depending on what you want to do, how do you use Instagram and which platforms to use or whether or not even to use Instagram? They answer those questions will vary. I do think in general, it's good to be on multiple platforms

because that reduces your risk, but that doesn't increase the work. I do think the different people on different platforms are different. So you can just post across platforms and that's generally a good thing. It'll help you increase your reach. But you know, you're following on Twitter is probably a different group of people than you're following on Instagram and your content might want to be different in order to appeal to them. So you have to be thoughtful about that. But I do worry

people sometimes get too focused just on the numbers. Like how many people are reaching? How many likes am I getting? How many impressions am I getting? Because it's very tempting to just focus on those metrics. But I think that if you do that too much, you can lose sight of why you're doing what you're doing in the first place. And the quality of the engagement and who you're speaking to. Yeah. And so if your numbers are going up, but what you're doing isn't aligned with what you

want to get out of the platform, it doesn't matter. So you should always go back to what's your intention and then how do you make sure what you do aligns with your intention? And you want, yes, of course, to create content that people enjoy and find engaging, but not in a way that undermines your integrity or compromises your intention. So you have to find that over that. How many people get the platform? Not. I mean, a lot in terms of absolute numbers, not a lot in terms of percentage

percentages. Because there's so many people. Unless you do something really problematic, like you know, if you find terrorism on the platform or anything kind of stuff, you can come off right away. But for most things, like if you post nudity, if you post something violent, you know, this is a strike system. So we try to make sure that that's always, if that's if we're doing things that way, it's appropriateness for the most sort of problematic violations.

We've made it now so that if you do anything and something's taken down, we let you know and you can appeal. Sometimes we make mistakes. But a lot of my DMs are people who are really mad about how I'm disagreeing with decisions about what was taken down or accounts that were suspended. And do you take down people or do you take down posts? First posts. To get your account taken down, it's almost always because you repeatedly violated content and you had like five or ten or

15 things taken down and then eventually your account gets taken down. But that's not a good vibe. No, but I'll say also, I always get the feeling that Instagram is pretty friendly place. It doesn't, we're trying to be. The definitely instances when we're not, but that is our intention. How does that make sense? How is working at Metta or within the Metta umbrella different than other companies you've worked at? Well, Metta was the biggest company I'd ever worked at when I

joined 15 years ago. So I had only worked at startups and for myself as a freelance designer, design consultant. Do you have a work at Google or at YouTube? No, not. Some ways I thought you worked at YouTube for a period. No, a lot of friends who did. Okay. Big family YouTube. They do great work. But I mean, all these companies are probably

pretty similar in the grand scheme of things. If you compare it to what it's like to work, it's like to work at one of the tech company versus BSR for versus big gardener versus the trader. But within the tech bubble, there are differences in the cultures. I think Google is a bit more academic as far as I can tell from the people I know there. So we want to build things the right way. They focus a bit more on how much education you have, what degrees you have,

academic prowess. Metta and Facebook were forward is a bit more of just like a pragmatic approach. Like figure out how to get it done and get it done fast. So we were a bit more focused on speed, a bit more interested in trying lots of things, a bit more of a hacker type culture. I don't mean hacker hacking in the things you shouldn't have access to. I mean, just building things and being scrappy. Apple is a much more sort of design oriented culture. It's much more about designing a

tool for a person as opposed to a space for a community. You know what Instagram does is it's much more of a space for a community where Apple builds like the phone or the computer or the piece of software for the you know the video editing software for the editor. They do build some networks but much more way to building a product for a person. So they all have their different their different cultures and in them like you know some and some designers are more important and

some PMs are more important and some engineers are more important. So for us in the industry they feel like wildly different cultures. But if you spend any time with anybody outside industry you quickly realize that you're actually operating within a few degrees of difference compared to the real world by the rest of the world. When you're working on something new where does the idea to do it come from? Does it come down from meta? Does it come up from the engineers or designers below? Do

you come up with them? Where's the to-do list come from? More comes at bottoms up in top-stown but there's a bit of both. We try this is actually very much in our culture is to try to create a space where people can try things because we know that the leaders aren't going to have all the good ideas and so how do you create a space for teams to try things in a responsible way? And they can even test things. I learn about things sometimes that Instagram is trying because somebody on Twitter

or threads or Instagram posts about the tests that they saw. And I don't even... Wow that's cool. Yeah I got tagged and the way it speaks to how big the organization is. Yeah yeah. And it's good it's fun. I mean it can be uncomfortable at times because I don't like it tagged and like what is this and it's like I gotta go as the team and I get back to you in a day. But that happens all the time and then some things are much more tops down. I personally haven't been a designer and

deeply presented being micromanaged at different parts of my own career. Yeah. Really try and focus more on making sure me and the team are aligned on what we're trying to do and what success might look like. And I try and my team will make fun of me because they probably think I'm terrible at this and that way. Not to focus nearly as much on how we do it. Yeah. I think that's where you can unintentionally really stifle creativity as a manager. Yeah also there is one right way to do it.

You'll be surprised when someone comes up with a way better than whatever you thought of. Yeah it's exciting. And also when they when they do come up with something and you disagree with it, I like to let them test it anyway because I feel like the both outcomes are reasonably positive. Either you were wrong and they were right. Yeah. Which point great. Yeah. Or you were right. And maybe they'll listen to you a little bit more next time and that's kind of cool too. Yeah.

And either way it's good to know there's no downside in finding out. Yeah. So I actively try to be like here's my take but you get to decide whether or not you try this or not. Do you feel like you spend most of your time managing up or managing down? Probably a little bit more down. It really depends. I have a very very strange job because the

nature of what I do in a given day changes so much. You know I might spend a whole bunch of time caching up the other most senior people the company about what we're doing and why and in a given week. Another week I might spend all of my time going deep in a specific area and understanding what's not working and why and helping them get what they need to unblock it.

Another week I might spend all my time prepping to testifying in front of Congress or traveling in a country where we are growing and trying to better understand why we're growing or what's working and why's not. It's in some ways amazing because you get to just exercise all these different

parts if you're brain but it's very odd in a lot of ways. So it'll really vary a lot. But in general I like to think of my responsibility as setting up my people for success by creating an environment in which they can succeed which means having the right people resources focus etc. Priorities. And then when it comes to managing up being what I like to affectionately call being sort of a glorified shit umbrella. Like just like let me create the space. Yeah. If it works I'll try to push

to put it down. If it doesn't work I'll take on the accountability that it can be very freeing for people to protect the team so they can go do their thing. Yeah. So I try to do that as best I can. Are you typically working on things that are going to be released in the next week, year or

three years. So increasingly it's getting further and further out. I think that's one of the interesting things about becoming more senior or working in the same place for longer or you're operating on longer and longer time frames where I felt like five years ago I was almost the vast majority of my energy was focused on some of the things that were happening in the next month or two. And now that's not the case at all. And some ways it's not a good thing sometimes it's like oh

just taking us longer to build stuff. But in other ways it's about operating in a different altitude where I feel like right now like for the last couple of months I've been thinking a lot about 2024 and 2025. Thinking a year to two out with most of my time is not something I would have done even four years ago. Interesting. Yeah. There's pros and cons I think to it. I worry sometimes we get lost in the abstract and you think too far out and some ways it's really empowering because

you can be thinking at a bigger scale. But in some ways you can run the risk of getting lost in the abstract of the philosophical and becoming detached from the work. One of my greatest fears is that I become so detached from the work that I don't really know what I'm talking about anymore. Yeah. Understand. You mentioned preparing for the Senate. How much of an issue is government intervention? It's ton of work. I mean we have just grown to some men's scale pretty much faster.

Not just we being Instagram and Met up just the industry in general right you know the other big tank companies. Faster than any industry has gotten this big I think in history. And normally what would happen is the regulation in the law and that would have had decades to figure out their own point of view in their involvement. While something got really big be it TV or radio or film or whatever technology want to think of. And in this case it's just happened so fast that

it's much more tenuous. If you would ask me when I joined 15 years ago what I'd be spending a decent percentage of my time like reading and understanding new regulations and figuring out how to comply I would have told you there's no way. But that's a big part of the job. And so one of the key things there is to figure out how to be responsible and you know obviously comply with the law. But how do you approach that in a way so that it's not necessarily something

that everybody's always focused on. Yeah. How do you build systems that make that compliance more scalable? How do you have specific teams that focus on that? Because you might have other teams that you need to focus on evolving the product forward or figuring out what's coming next. How do you know we starting at square one? Exactly. That's great. So how do you balance that is a

is a increasingly tricky part of the job? It's really smart though that you're focused on finding ways of making that more an aspect of the job instead of taking all the focus when it comes up. There's not a lot of us but we even now have a few some small teams that are specifically just dedicated to dealing with short-term fires so to speak. Something will come up, something will break or some new level land that we didn't expect and it'll have to be a scramble. So we have

teams that specialize in those scrambles now. Because the mindset and the processes to approach something that needs to get fixed in 48 hours is very different than a team of building something over the next two years. Absolutely. And to separate those, it allows the forward momentum not to get slowed. How important is privacy in the online world? I think it's very important but not in the way that a lot of people often think about it. So from what I can tell, most people don't

think about privacy explicitly very often at all. And so if you ask them questions about it, they won't give you answers that will suggest that they care. But if you look at how people share, it's very clear that they do care in a more implicit and explicit way. So I think why people share way more in messages than they do broadcasting to all their friends is because it's a more private medium. What I message you is different than what I'm going to say to 150 followers. And so

I'm going to be very thoughtful about what I say in a private message to that. Bruce is what I say in a story that's going to be gone tomorrow. Bruce is what I'm going to say in a feed post, it's going to be around forever, theoretically. And so I think if you look at how people have shifted more to stories and even more to DMs, that would suggest that privacy loosely speaking or broadly speaking is incredibly important. But if you ask people about their privacy settings or their data

settings, there's a lot of focus on it. There's a meaningful but small minority that cares a ton. Obviously regulators care a ton. But the average person doesn't seem to even want to engage in that topic. But if you look at how they actually show up and use their phone and the internet, they are clearly savvy about where they share and how they share because they share so differently in different places based on how private or public that's the reason. You think it's because people

don't understand how public their information might be? You know when you're sharing something on Instagram, people can see it. But when you sign up for a service, the idea that the information you put in when you sign up for the service that people couldn't somehow access that or that you could get on a list of someone to be advertised to, for example. Yeah. I think part of it's because it's more complicated. But I also think that most people simultaneously don't understand the

details of the technology, but do understand the broad shape of it. If I use Instagram and I mostly talk about baking and share baking and look at baking things, I don't think people are surprised when they see baking ads. But how that works exactly behind the scenes is that a pixel tracking system is that an interest inference system is that is that data, Instagram's data or is that an advertiser's data that gets too complicated too quickly for most people to want to engage.

But if they feel like their privacy is violated in some way than yes, then I just think people get quite upset. But I do think fundamentally, and this isn't a controversial opinion, that we just believe in personalization. You know, I grew up watching TV and seeing ads for cars and I couldn't afford one nor was I old enough to drive or ads for tampons in which made no sense. I get ads on Instagram and I know people don't always love ads, but sometimes I get

really cool little things. I will tell you, I always get ads for things that I want every single time. And I don't know how it works because it's like magic. Yeah, yeah. No, the ads too, it's a great job. But it's the same basic thing that we're trying to do with the core product, which is understand your interests and then help you explore them. You know, if you look at my explore page, you'll see men's fashion. You'll see a lot of European football. You'll see some basketball.

You'll see some watches. You'll see some skiing, some surfing. And like those are the things I tend to like to see on Instagram. And so when I get ads, there are things in that space. So like cool, dad sweat pants or stuff that's just and the more you use it, the better and the more we understand your interests and we try to show you more of what you're interested in, and less of what you're not. And that is like one of the big debates. Like is that a bad thing?

It's targeted advertising. It seems good, but I will say without knowing how it works, it feels spooky. Yeah. It feels spooky. I mean, I'm constantly being accused of listening to people. People always think that I'm like, like I was just talking to my girlfriend about whatever it was. Like the red archery peppers. And now I'm getting, you know, you're totally listening. And it's like, no, not listening. Not only gross violation of privacy, you drain your battery. You'd have

a little green light at the top. They told you to say you're not listening. You're not allowed to say you're listening. Actually, one of the funniest videos I've seen, I saw it on Instagram and on TikTok, was it was like a woman just shot clearly from the phone sitting on a counter. And she was just the bit was that it was her husband's phone. And she was just saying things near the phone. She's like, diamond rings. Manicures. Pettacures. That's so funny. Just like trying

to hack the algorithm. And I was like, it's not how it works. I have this fight with people I know in love all the time. No, what happens is it turns out that what you're interested in on terms of who you follow, what you like and comment is a pretty good indicator of what you're interested in buying. We do things like, you know, look alike. So like people who are interested in these same interests tend to buy these types of things. And you're interested in those interests.

So you might be interested in those types of things. And the other thing that happens that people don't realize is they actually see the ad a couple times. They don't really notice it. They're just flying by. But it's there in the back of their head. And then they end up talking about it. So all of these things add up. But I know people are my family who just don't believe me. And I will continue to try and make the case. How different has advertised changed since disability to target

advertising? A lot. I think one of the most amazing things about targeted advertising, particularly the fact that not just platforms like ours, but you know, Google's as well, allows anybody access to these sophisticated tools has allowed a lot of smaller businesses to thrive. Because traditionally, if you wanted to reach people, you either needed to have a ton of reach and dollars. So you have to be a big brand. Or if you wanted more sophisticated tools, you had to have big dollars. And they

again, big brands, big companies. And what our bread and butter advertising isn't really brand advertising. We have brand advertising, but it's what we call direct response. It's like, it's a mattress company. It's a phone case company. It's a yeah, it's cool. I always feel like I'm seeing something I haven't seen before. It's more niche. And you're usually cooler than the thing that you'd see advertised in a shotgun approach. And that shotgun is, you know, that brand advertising

has a place in the world that's that sort of yeah, cool, cool top of funnel, stuff. But our bread and butter is more has more intention. So like you're closer to the moment of actually deciding to purchase something. The closer you are to actually being interested in purchases and something, the better we tend to be at actually helping the advertiser find the right person. And the other common misconception is that we sell people's data. The biggest thing to understand is that

that would make no sense because then we would actually undermine our own business. Like if you're an advertiser, you pay us and then we find people who are interested in you and we show them your ad. If we sold you the data, then you don't need us anymore. You could go to another platform. But I get that it can feel spooky. Like if you do it in a way that is the lack of integrity or it's like too aggressive, you can startle people and nobody wants to be so. How does the model work? Do

you get paid if someone buys something on an ad or no? It depends. So you as an advertiser can decide. Do you want to pay for impression? Do you want to pay for some sort of outcome? Is it a follow that you're trying to buy or an actual purchase? So there's different ways. And the other thing to understand is the system is it's not like we set a fixed price. It's an auction. And so a bunch of different advertisers might be like, I want to reach men in their 40s in the Bay Area. And if you say

that's targeted, is that Bay Area? You can do that. Yeah. Wow. So that's great. Because if you're a music venue, you don't really want to be advertising to people who live 3000 miles away. But what you're willing to pay, you put in a bid and other people also put in bids and then the highest bid wins. And so the price is end up moving around a lot depending on what advertisers are interested in. And also depending on how many advertising slots we have with that particular

demographic that people are trying to reach. If we get bigger and like more people use Instagram and they see more ads, the prices for advertisers go down because the competition is less fierce per slot. So the system is very dynamic in a way that is in some ways challenging because you're managing a more complicated system. But in some ways, much more fair and resilient. It's rooted in

yes, rooted in the actual value of what you're doing. Very, very demand oriented. It also just means that if some advertisers leave us, it's not as problematic because the next advertiser who is willing to pay a little bit less kind of slides in. Whereas Twitter, for instance, which has been predominantly brand advertising, it's much more difficult this last year for them where a bunch of brand advertisers have left. And there isn't an auction system in the same way to sort of backfill

that revenue. Why do you think Twitter set up their selves as big brand advertisers versus the model that you guys use? I don't know. I mean, they have a model that's similar in the hours. I just think they've been less successful at that type of direct response advertising. I also think brand dollars are really tempting because they're big numbers. I don't want to say that we don't

care about brand advertising. We certainly do. But I think a combination of us being particularly good at this, Google being particularly good at this, them not executing court as well over the years as they probably wanted to. And then then probably becoming a little bit more focused on brand advertising that might have been ideal has put them in a more precarious position where their relationship with a few of their top advertisers is incredibly important. And there's a lot of

tension there. How competitive is it to hire the best people? Super competitive. Between who? Who are the particularly for specific types of talent? I mean, a lot of it is the, there's a whole market of startups. And then there's the big players and then there's some mid players. But the big players obviously are Microsoft and OpenAI now because machine learning talent is probably the most prized talent. Amazon, Google, Apple, Meta are the big ones. But then there's the other

big companies that aren't quite as big. Netflix has an amazing machine learning and ranking team. Fundamentally what they're trying to do is very similar to us. We try to find things you're interested in that are photos and videos. They try to show you longer videos that you're interested in. They look at what you've watched before and then they show you. I wouldn't have made that connection. That's interesting. Yeah. They have a very good ranking team actually. So the big companies

compete a ton. All the startups also, the appeal is a little bit, you know, a smaller company, less bureaucracy and a possible bigger payday if you start up blows up and makes it big. Whiskeyier but bigger reward in the risk. Yeah. But it's the competition for talent. There's always been fierce. Are you involved in that at all, bringing people in? Yeah. I focus more of my time when it comes to recruiting. I'm senior leaders. I don't have any open senior roles now. So I

spend less of my time on that directly. So more of my time there is on keeping those people satisfied and happy. Trying to make sure there's a meaningful overlap between their aspirations and what the company needs of them. Because if it's all about what they want and out of what the company needs, that's not great or sustainable. If it's all about what the company needs and it's not about what they want, they're going to burn out and leave. Because there's plenty of people who

are also willing to hire them. So finding that overlap. And then just creating an environment where people want to stay and want to work hard and want to build something that they're proud of. But over the years, I've spent a ton of time recruiting. Are most of the people in your upper newer hires or people who've been there for a long time? A lot of the people in my staff have come up in the company. Almost all of them are in the biggest job they've ever had. But our people

who've been at the company for a while. Yeah, exactly. Often people you've known for a long time are not necessarily. Often, not necessarily. Not always. It's a big enough company where you don't know a lot of people. Yeah, but I think you tend to build relationships. And I mean, I moved around the company a lot. I was a designer. I was a product manager. I worked on newsfeed. I worked on what we call friend sharing. I switched to Instagram into a smaller job. I would not end up taking over

Instagram. And it's always good to try to hire a new talent and diverse talent to get new ideas. But you also often will build up if you're, I think, if you're doing good work, your relationships in a bit of a following. So there's some people I've hired multiple times. I've moved to different parts of the company and then they've followed. They've left the company entirely and then a year or two later didn't work out. And then you always, it's super important when someone leaves to be

supportive. Like, look, the world is big. Like, not everything that everybody needs to work at this company. But always make sure that you leave the door open, which is like, hey, if it doesn't work out, just I want to be one of your first calls. What's the main reason people would leave working at Instagram? Lots of different reasons. I mean, if you look at the last couple of years, we're a bigger company. So sometimes people just really want to go to, they want to do a startup

with a friend or they just want to go to the opposite of the spectrum. I want to work in with five people in a room, three or four thousand people in a company of tens of thousands. That's one common one. So another one is another big company. We'll post them, we say often. Whether it's a bigger role or more money or some combination.

I mean, our stock price took a massive hit about a year ago. And so we lost a lot of people during that sort of low because a huge part of compensation is in stock, which we think is good because it means you have a vested interest in the company's success, not just in showing up and punching and punching out. Was that just a short term dip? I mean, we went from the mid-300s to as low as 80 bucks a share. Wow. Hopefully, of course, of about six months. But everything did. This

was the time when everything kind of the world did that. Right. But if you, you know, when we come all the way down like that, and then if you want to hop ship to another big company, your new offer is going to be at their stock price, which is a dollar amount to start and then calculate the number of shares. And so a lot of people could just make a time or money jumping ship. Understood. The flip side is if you stayed, now that things have gone well over the last year, then you ended

up getting these grants at much lower values. And then you did really well. You try to focus people in the long term. Yeah. But compensation is a part of financial compensation is a part of compensation. There's nothing wrong with caring about how much money you make. And so, you know, some people make it off of these big numbers, other elsewhere, and you kind of have to be like, all right, well, as long as you're confident, you're going to be happy. Like, you got to support them.

Are you the first CEO since the founders? Yeah. So Mike and Kevin, phenomenal guys, super creative, super thoughtful. I joined to run products. So the PM function and report to the PM. They hire you. Yeah. And I was part of why I joined, even though it was in some ways a much smaller job. I was managing maybe 700 or 1000 people before and then I went to managing 50 and working for Kevin and with Mikey. But part of it is I wanted to work with those two guys.

They have got their own startup now. It's called Artifact. They're doing some really interesting work in the new space. They're broadening out further than that. But they're just really insightful. Like I felt constantly in working with them like I was learning. So one of the reasons why I wanted to work with them is I wanted to work with them specifically. What is the artifact? Artifact started as primarily an AI driven news app. So you let it know what you're interested in and it helps

you find news. But then pushes you actually to those news websites. So it tries to be very publisher friendly. They're expanding beyond news and in a couple other ways. I don't want to speak out of turn and like not do them justice because I want them to succeed. And they've done a lot of good work over the years. And so I just think you always have to always have to respect what they do. So that was as one of the reasons why I joined in. It's the game in the first place.

But they left. And why did they leave? Well, they were at Facebook after Instagram was bought for six and a half years. Which is actually a long time for founders. Most founders don't last that long. That's true. And I think that basically what happened just from my point of view is that they got Instagram got so big and so successful that we no longer could really have it run almost entirely independently. We had to be thoughtful about how it interacted with the other apps.

Because it was just so big that they were bumping into each other so to speak. And so that meant that they went from what was more or less like a hundred percent autonomy to less than a hundred percent. Now for me coming from Facebook, this was all gravy. Because to me it was like I went from feeling like I had no autonomy to a lot of autonomy. Because we had way more space than the Facebook

update. But for them and I understand this, I don't not think this was any judgment at all. Going from more or less a hundred percent to even something like 90 or 80 is a big delta. And so I think without guessing too much, I think that's a big part of what it was. I wish I had more time with them. But I'm grateful for the time I did have. And I really just think they're phenomenally talented duo. And they're really, they're a pair. I wouldn't be surprised if they spend the rest of their

careers working together. And that's just kind of a cool thing to see. How did Instagram change when they left? And as it got bigger, how did that relationship with Facebook change from autonomous stood more part of the company? We just coordinated more. I mean the big thing that I had to deal with when they first left was less about the product changing and more about the culture where I was, I'd only been an Instagram for maybe six months. And so I had to earn the trust of the team. And the

team kind of looked at me like, do you bleed? Blue, do you bleed? Sort of gradient. Yeah. I think you were the new guy. I was the new guy. And you were the corporate guy. Yeah. And so I had to break down that usendem mentality. And that took, that's a culture change. And culture changes at large organizations. They don't happen quickly. They take often usually years. Sometimes they're impossible. Yeah. So that was the big actual challenge. In terms of the work, it was more about helping

each other out more actively. So we have one ad system. And then you say, I want to try to sell cool, sweatsh pants. And then we figure out to show those ads on Instagram or Facebook. So we have, you know, how do we, that system was already heavily integrated where we had to do more proactive work was like, okay, on the safety side, there's a bunch of really good work at better using technology to find hate speech on Facebook. How can we extend that technology and leverage it

on Instagram as opposed to running our own? So in the safety and integrity space, a lot of integration work. Advertising. That one was already more or less one system with two, but you know, things built on top, not to take anything away from the Instagram ad team building really beautiful stuff on top. The ones where we had to share way more were safety and integrity, ranking in general. So how do we better understand people's interests and surface in terms of the research piece

would be the same. It's just the bigger data set. So the bigger the data set, the more you know, you should be able to do more with that. You should be able to get better. Yeah. But even without sharing data, just sharing technology, sharing approaches to ranking. What are the best ways to understand people's interests? What are the best ways to ask people what they're interested in?

What are the best ways to do more exploration based ranking, which is where you try and not just surface the thing you to someone that everyone has seen that you know they'll like, but try things that they might like to better help them discover niche interests. I think one of the things that Instagram benefited from being part of Facebook and now met at the most over the years was honestly just a lesson learned. It's like that didn't work,

maybe we don't try that or that work, maybe we try that. And not everything translates one to one, but a lot of it does. So that was how the work evolved. But the bigger thing was that first year or two was really the culture and building trust. Do you know your counterpart at TikTok? So no, but TikTok is an interesting thing because TikTok is really, I mean, this is an American

company with an American app, but it's really owned by a Chinese company called Bite Dance. And most of the technology as far as we can tell, the most important stuff is all run actually out of China. So even if I did, it would be, I'd be more interested in meeting and understanding the culture of the Chinese company, which I think at the end of the day makes the most important decisions. I do try to meet people though in general. So I've tried to build relationships with senior people

in Google and other companies, but I don't have any strong relationship. It's interesting. And do you look at the people at the other companies as counterparts, contemporaries, or the competition? Both. I mean, I think you can be both. Yeah. I have a weird job though, right? Because I'm not really a CEO. Like I have a boss that's not the board. I have a team, but I'm part of a bigger company. But Instagram is so big and so important to the company that it's, I'm not just like

some random, you know, mid-level executive either. I mean, a weird sort of tweens spot. Nobody, it sounds like a good position because you're running a big company without some of the, I would say baggage that comes with answering to the board. You know, it's like it feels like that really gets in the way of doing good work. It could. Yeah. I do present to the board sometimes. That's always a fun thing to do too. Look, I have an amazing job. I don't want to have a

complaint about my job. It's a unique opportunity and privilege. I want to make sure I didn't make the most of it while I'm here. But it is one that is, there's not that many people with similar jobs. Yeah. There's a lot of CEOs out there, but this is kind of a different thing. So when I meet people who have similar positions, I'm always kind of interested in how they approach what they do. How do they even define the job? So would you say having friends at Google, having friends at the other

companies, do you look at TikTok as more of a black box? Can you just not know because where it's run from? We can learn, but it's harder to learn and you learn more indirectly. So we learn from, you know, engineers that we've hired from the years or engineers that have friends with engineers there. That kind of stuff. I have a lot of employees who speak Chinese and they'll read sort of the TikTok engineering blogs, which are Chinese, which I can't read because I don't want to read Mandarin.

But for what is with the thing that I love most about meeting people outside the company is meeting people outside of the industry. Because one of the most amazing perks of my job is I get to meet all these amazing people and then try to understand their worlds. And I find it fascinating, even if it's an industry I would never want to work in myself. But to better understand like power movies made in finance. How does the world of fashion actually get run and how

the trends get set and who actually makes those decisions? Or how is basketball and entertainment blending over the last five or ten years? It's so interesting. People who are good at whatever the thing is that they do on a high level. It's always interesting. With your interested in that subject or not. I have this amazing perk which I can just because of my title. Because I'm not

famous but I have this title. I can just email people and I tend to get a response. And so I try, and I don't do this as often as I should, to just meet interesting people and learn from them. Great. What do you think the perfect size for a company is? Oh, there's no there's no perfect size. I do think there are sizes that tend to work better. So I think there's a thing which is when you're not just a person, there's half a dozen of you. There's that kind of, when you can

all sit at a table and crank, that's a size that tends to kind of work. And then it gets a little awkward until you get to about 40. Maybe it's because you can have four managers who will have four teams or whatever it is. Maybe it's about the layered nature of an organization. But it's more clear like whose leadership, what everyone's role is, and then that can kind of work. And then my experience is it gets pre-occurred again until something like a hundred and twenty or so.

And then after that you start to get to big company stuff. And then the question is how do you stay, I mean, lean is the wrong word. Because even as much as we focus on efficiency over the last 12 months, like, I don't think you can really cause lean. But, you know, how do you, how do you stay efficient? How do you not build up whole teams that are of good people doing work that's fundamentally not super important? How do you stay focused? How do you stay? It was a big story when Elon bought

Twitter and he ended up letting it or something like 85% of the people there. Yeah. It felt like that had reverberations through the entire tech world. I think it did. I mean, I think two things happened at the same time. You had economic instability, not just in the stock market prices, but also just in the outlook. You know, this is more economic, macroeconomic sort of questions that have been in a long time. At the same time as like, stock market moves is the same time as

Elon just slashes his organization to the bone. And so I definitely think that that has led all of tech to go through, you know, a year of really focusing on efficiency in 2023. But the other thing is we all almost all the major companies did multiple runs of playoffs. The number one rule of doing layoffs is cut deep so you don't have to cut twice. And everybody made the same mistake that every company tends to make the first time they do it.

And I think what you're kind of seeing is the industry maturing. The industry is a new industry. Yeah, but it's an industry that was just explosive growth for the longest time. And it was more efficient just to focus on what to build next than to how to do more with less. Obviously, that can't go far on forever. And so we've, it's a rubric on you cross. When you do run of layoffs at an organization, you've fundamentally changed the relationship between leadership and the teams.

There is more sort of the anxiety or fear. I think it can, it doesn't have to be all bad. I think people can be, take pride in being sort of lean and mean. But it is, there's a few moments over, of course, of our history that is a really stark difference between before and after those, those thresholds across. Tell me what those all were that you can remember from your start in the business. One of them has been going from like one app to sort of a bigger company and a family

of apps. And which culminated eventually with the rename of the company meta. But that really was almost like making official what had already happened internally. But that's a big change. Huge. How to support a bunch of teams that build a bunch of apps. The biggest of which, by the way, is WhatsApp. We don't talk about a lot in the US, but outside the US is like outside the US. It seems to be the only way people communicate. And it's more than that, yes. Yeah. Yeah.

There's communities, there's status. There's like, last I checked, people share more stories on WhatsApp in the world worldwide than they do on Instagram in a given day. Wow. Which people don't even think about here in the US. Yeah. I don't think a bit as a function of what that does. Yeah. Most people in the US don't. It's a messaging device as far as I know. So how do you support that? How do you share infrastructure, share lessons, but also

respect the fact that their identities of the apps are different? WhatsApp is about private communication. Instagram is about creativity. Facebook is about communities or discovery or just sort of like, you don't know what could happen. Anything cool, you could find any given day. So that was a big shift. And that took years. And then it was kind of made official with the

rebrand. Another huge one was the 2016 election cycle here in the US. Finally, we made some mistakes, but also I think the outcome was a huge surprise and people needed a way to explain that. And we were in a community way to explain that. We went from being for the most part like a beloved brand and company to, you know, a hated one. I saw a different thing happen in terms of hatred that shifted. I remember Mark Zuckerberg was sort of with the world's

darling who created this thing that everybody loves. And then I remember it started hearing rumors that he was thinking about running for president. So yeah, I remember when those rumors went on. And as soon as those rumors happened, all the energy changed and he was evil Mark. Was that, when was it 2014? I don't know. I just remember it's like, this is so weird. That is

a weird. I don't think he was ever going to actually run for president. I do remember that when those rumors were going around because he was traveling around a lot and people thought he was campaigning. Internally, the feeling you get when you told someone you worked at Facebook, had a dinner party, was like night and day before and after 2016. Tell me the whole Cambridge

channel because that was a big story. That one was wild because Cambridge Analytica was obviously a huge moment for us and a massive press cycle and a massive sort of black eye for the company. And fundamentally, I do want to acknowledge we made some mistakes. But at the end of the day, I think it was in a lot of ways a bit of a red herring. Basically, we used to be able to make apps on top of Facebook. And people made all these quiz apps. You remember all those quiz apps that

were going around? Or did an agent use Facebook much back in the day? Anyway, they were like, you know, 10 questions to tell you, I don't know what Harry Potter house you're in. That kind of stuff. And the way these apps would work is you would make an app, you would build it on top of

Facebook and then you would ask people. So if you used the app, the app would ask, can I get a list of your friends or can I get your email address and you would say yes or no. And one of the things you would ask for is a list of friends so that you could then, you know, maybe you could invite them. At that point, the developer, the person who made that app, isn't Facebook. Are they getting access to some data that you as the user are sharing? And Facebook is facilitating

that connection. So we, which is only good. It's your allowing communication. I want to come with what I first shared in Facebook. One of the biggest criticisms we had is that we weren't doing enough of this. We were being, we were being accused of being a walled garden. Right. Not supporting other developers. But the downside of sharing that data is that data can

get misused. So this specific developer for this app basically took that data and was using it in ways that weren't as close when they collected that data with Cambridge Analytica. Yeah. Basically trying to sell their ability to understand voters for, you know, in campaigns in the shady way during the, but that when Cambridge Analytica blew up, that API, the ability even requests that data had been shut down for years. It was old news in a lot of ways.

But because the political environment was so polarized and people were so worked up, it just became a flashpoint for a lot of frustration. In practice, if you look at any of the research since, it doesn't look like Cambridge Analytica was an effective consultant or even really mattered. Yeah. But it was at the heart of the controversies around the election, around Trump, around data, around Facebook. And it just ended up being the perfect storm. It's like a scapegoat.

In some ways, yeah. And to be clear, we probably should never have had that API. So I don't want to like absolve ourselves of responsibility. But I think what people don't really understand is one, like that thing had gotten shut down years before. It was a developer misusing data. And that wasn't, like we had some sort of security breach. And it turned out Cambridge Analytica was not remotely effective at what they said they could do anyway. But none of that matters at the end of the day.

What matters was is perception and we have to live with that and accept that and make sure that we're thoughtful about how we operate going forward. But the thing that I've tried to do is let's convince people to like us or not like us and more try to shed some light on the trade-offs because things are almost always complicated. In the wake of Cambridge Analytica, we're going to be naturally much much more conservative and careful with what data you can access. And in some ways

that's good. That's good from our privacy perspective. But in some ways, that's very much at odds. It's good to the world garden. Yeah. And a lot of what we're getting pushed on in terms of regulation on one from one front is interoperability. You should be able to bring your friends from Facebook to another platform. You should be able to integrate, you know, I don't know, Snapchat and Instagram. That would be good for competition. But it comes at a privacy trade-off and at a risk

of people misusing data trade-offs. So the thing that I try is a little bit less to convince people to be on one side or the other, any specific argument. Or did it land at one place on the spectrum? You know, there's lots of these big existential questions like safety versus privacy or competition versus privacy. And a little bit more just to try to articulate like look, these things are complicated. And there are trade-offs. And it's our responsibility to try and make the best

decisions that we can and be transparent about how we make those decisions. But try to have people understand that it's it's rarely black and white in a way that I think people like to think it is. Also seems like ultimately you're running a business. And if the focus is not doing what's best for the business, whatever it is, you're not really being there for your shareholders. Is that not right? I mean, that's a thing. But I also just don't, shareholders aside, I think

business is a good thing. I think if you make a pro, and this is, look, this is now contentious in this country. But I think making, having a profitable business allows you to hire good talent, allows you to do more interesting, more meaningful work. Fundamentally, I think we provide a service, it's free, and it allows people to find audiences, to express themselves, to connect with their friends, to do all these things. And we do it well because we are for profit business and we can

hire some of the best people. But I do think that in a world where the wealth gap seems to be increasing and more and more wealth seems to be concentrated in a small minority. And a lot of the institutions I think that we live with are becoming less effective. People are more and more skeptical of the whole system. And part of that I think is just being directed at business. I think there's a lot of people now, particularly young people, who are just skeptical

of any business, for the simple reason that it is a business. And I think I understand what that's coming from. I don't agree with that. But I think that's the reality that we live with right now. Tell me about the house you grew up in. I grew up in a few different places. I started in New York City on Indian restaurant street and then moved to the Upper West Side. But most of the my childhood that I remember was at a house in Westchester in the suburbs of New York City.

How far from a man? But an hour, my dad was commuting out of the city when we lived in the city and I was going to PSA to Westchester. To Westchester. Oh that's interesting. Yeah he was a work for the Jewish Board of Family Children Services in administration. So he was in the world of supporting young people with physical mental and sort of social issues. And that some of the institutions or the actual places were up north.

And also the public schools in New York is a whole difficult thing. I was going to PSA. Psychotherapist. Psychotherapist. Yeah PhD. Dr. Mosary. Yeah yeah. And so the public schools were better in Westchester. That's interesting growing up with the psychotherapist. Oh yeah. My dad is a psychotherapist. My mom is an architect. Awesome. They're very interesting. She's an Irish Catholic from Pittsburgh. Her brothers' names are Owen Timothy,

Brendan Patrick, Conan and Michael. So that is Irish as you can get. Yeah. And my dad is like in his rarely Jew-born in Cairo. Like they could be more different. New York City. Yeah. Yeah. I get my emotional intelligence from my dad and my sort of structured problem solving and thinking from my mom. But I remember a little house in the suburbs. I remember shoveling snow in the winter. I remember my mom used to love. She used to... It leaked heat. It just leaked

heat. It's this old colonial house. So just like... And so we used to keep it... We were more poor. I'm not trying to like say we were poor or anything. But we used to keep the house like 58 in the winter just because otherwise he would just go straight out the windows. So I remember growing up with a big thick... You know, knits. Yeah. In socks. In the winter time. And then my Israeli family would come and visit and be like, what is this? It's not traumatic. It was great. It makes you

strong too. The cold supposed to make you strong. Yeah. I like it. It was lovely. It was lovely. Where did you grow up? I grew up in Long Beach. I would commute to Manhattan because my aunt worked at... I mentioned before my mom's oldest sister. She ran the design department of S.D. Lauder. So I would go and spend time with her in the city. And she was my cultured aunt. My parents were more like children. She was more like... Yeah. Where in the city was the office? In the General Motors

building. You know the Apple store with the glass box? Yeah. It's that building. It's a white, white stone building. And I would go there all the time and just hang out in the design department. And I loved it. I used to love going to the city as a like a high school, like a young high school kid for shows. Yeah. Because it's like... The sky. Yeah. It's not the best genre of music. And as a old friend. But I used to remember you had to catch that one AM train back. I remember missing it

and having to like walk around the city. Wow. And like no cell phones. Yeah. And you got to get that 6 AM. Yeah. That was usually on like the 11 o'clock train back to my team. But you have that buffer in case you miss it. But some of my best memories were like trying to stay awake in diners in Midtown before the five or six AM train came around. So had you end up in NYU? I mean, I grew up like we said in Westchester and I was going to go to a university of Chicago. But my

parents split and I had little siblings. So I didn't want to go too far away. How did that impact you, your parents splitting? At the time, I just took on very much the role of... It was probably very inappropriate for me to take on, which was like mediator. Like I kind of got between... I wanted to want to protect my little brother and my little sister. And then too, I wanted to make sure that they

were being reasonable. So you were the oldest? I am the oldest. So I kind of got in the middle of it in a way that's probably not good for a 16 or 17 year old to do. But I think that's part of my one time in my use. I wanted to stay close. I was accepted at university. Chicago and came very close to going as well. So you got the same story, yeah. The little of the day I was supposed to make it official. I switched. Yeah. And I can tell you on that day why I did it. But in my year was you're

a bit of a number. It's such a big school that like it's not the same sort of personal experience. But I loved it. Because for me, it was... The city was such a rich resource in a way that a university really could never quite be. Absolutely. So what school did you go to then? Where you? To School of the Arts. I started as a philosophy major. But then I switched to the School of the Arts because I was going to go to law school and didn't matter what my undergraduate degree was in.

So I started philosophy, but all my friends are in film and television. Yeah. I just thought it would be more fun after two years. I started in the College of Arts and Science. I think I was either going to measure in philosophy or math. And I think I was taking more math classes. And then I switched into Gallatin where you make up your own curricula. One of the things I really took from NYU and Gallatin was particularly good at helping kids with this. But I think

NYU in general is good at this. You kind of had to learn to hustle. You could get a lot out of the university if you had some hustle. And Gallatin specifically because we took classes at all the other schools, I weaseled my way into a photography class at Tish or programming classes at ITP, which was a graduate program. Awesome. You figure out if like, oh, the department chair is a Gallatin

alum. Maybe if I meet him, you know, you learn how to like work a system. I think a lot of that, those lessons, which are a bit more life lessons a little bit less academic, served me really well. I also worked. So I started my design from while I was at NYU. Great. So by the time I started American company and NYU too. Yeah. By the time I was at sophomore, junior, I was working full time and also taking classes. Awesome. I don't think I slept much because I definitely spent a lot

of time with friends in addition to having a full time job in a full time job. I don't think I slept at all. No, that happens when you're young. Yeah. I looked back on those days really fondly though. I had a blast. Well, clubs closed at four. We would go out to the Empire Diner and eat and then go home before sunrise. Yeah. I had a sweet gig. I was bartending at a steakhouse that's still around on Twistery called the Strip House. And at the time it was one of the better

steaks I'm going to have. Close reading where? Between like university and fifth maybe or one of those things. I think they're right in that area. Yeah. I don't know. You're university and fifth. And it was a great bartending job because you made bartending money which was good cash. But you didn't work bar hours because it was a restaurant. So you'd be off at like midnight maybe

two depending on your shift. And then you still got two hours before the bar is closed. Minimum you know as a 19 year old kid I'd walk out with 220 dollars and 20s in my pocket and go straight to a bar and spend a little bit of it. And it also is this amazing contrast. I mean maybe you had a similar experience. But like when a senior in high school in the suburbs you're the top of the totem pole. Everybody you know is your age or younger. And then that's parents and parents don't

count. It's like Charlie Brown they speak a different language. And then you go to NYU and you're in the middle of a city you have access to everything. And you don't really know anything. No. And you're the youngest of everybody. Everybody. And it was such an amazingly exciting and intoxicating and humbling sort of transition. Absolutely. I can remember when I first got there I didn't know who I was because I only knew who I was in the context of my little family. So when I didn't come home to

my parents it was a very different experience of starting to understand who I was. No I remember feeling very ungrounded. Very detached and then confused but also very excited. And I mean it was a dream to be in Manhattan because even when I lived in the suburbs the dream was still living in Manhattan. Exactly. Same thing. And you had access to everything. You wanted to go to knitting factory and see a show. You wanted to go see some of the best stand up or anything. One of the jazz

clubs or well it doesn't matter what you had interest in you could do it. Yeah. No I wouldn't trade it. Wouldn't trade it for anything. Yeah I felt like my education came from living in New York City more than going to NYU. Yeah. It felt like you were living in New York and going to NYU was your job. Yeah. Not like you were living in NYU and you'd visit New York. It was No. It was the other way around. Yeah. The primary connection was with the city. The city.

Because that's where all of culture was. Like you got to experience everything. And anything. And one of the things I missed most leaving New York is I had all these friends by the time I left that used to drag me to things that now I would kill to go do. Yeah. Little indie films I would never have heard of or dance performances way out and out of Brooklyn or off off Broadway plays. One of my best friends was a playwright. You would go to these things and you would be like

I'm tired and you would show up and they would be so inspired. So cool. And you just took an offer granted. Yeah. At least I did. Wait did you live? First I lived over on third and that didn't really work out. So I moved to Rubin which is on 5th and 10th. And then I did a year down in Chinatown at their big dorm called Lafayette. And then I realized that they really kind of overcharged for the dorms. So then I moved over to Union Square and to like a four bedroom with

five or six dudes in one bathroom. How did you find the people to live with? They're just friends from college mostly and then their friends. So I live in Union Square. I lived in Harlem. I lived in Clinton Hill. I lived. I lived in Weinstein. Oh yeah. Oh man. There was a cafeteria in Weinstein. Yeah. I got off the meal plan pretty quickly. I think I lived on like pasta and mozzarella. And if I'm on a cigarette, I used to smoke. When did you start smoking?

When I worked at that bar. I used to leave work. I had never had a cigarette in high school with the craving for cigarettes because I had people were smoking there. Yeah. This is before smoking. I'd been begging. The second hand smoke law. So I'd leave with the craving and go to another bar and then have a cigarette. I smoked for years. Did you ever smoke at work? Yeah. When I first joined Facebook, you just think I took the fire. No, I mean at the bar. No, that's not.

Do you still smoke? No. When did you stop? 15 years ago, maybe more. More. Was it difficult? No. So I had it lucky. So my wife decided that we needed to get into shape. This is forever ago. 17 years ago, maybe. And so she signed us up for this boot camp where seven in the morning would go out and work out with these like other random people with a trainer and they were like, have us run up and down hills. It was actually the rain area. Yeah. In San Francisco. It was great

because you would hang out with people you would never normally hang out with. Like a barber and a bus driver and people who were way outside of tech. It was such a hard workout that I wouldn't want to cigarette that whole day. And I would do that four or five days a week. And so I just was smoking less and less. And then it started to taste different. Great. So thank God, thanks to her. I quit. But I do, from honest, miss it. I did love it. How did you meet your wife? San Francisco, we moved

out. No five. Each of us. We had my friend from high school went to college with her friend from high school. I used to cook a lot and she was working at Williams in Noma. So I asked her if she would take me into one of the stores and pretend to be my girlfriend so I could buy some pots and pans on discount. I think I still have those all clouds. Williams Noma is a great store. So she actually worked there and then she got a job at Facebook in 2007. Before you? Before me. And what

was her job? By the time she left, she was like in partnerships. But when she started, she was like the lowest level entry operations. Like people forgot their passwords and she'd respond to their email, of course. But she got me my job. I applied every month for a year and she kept on howling the recruiting to me like my boyfriend is really good at what he does. And I was like, yeah, sure, whatever. But it took about a year of her helping. And then I got an interview in July

of 2008. She started in February of 2007. So I got an interview in June of 2008 and I started in July of 2008. So cool. Yeah. No, I would totally absolutely not be sitting here with you. Was it weird? Both working at the same place? Or was it good? Or positives and negatives? Tell me. She was all business at work. She wouldn't even have come. I'd want her in the hallway. I'm like, hey babe and she wouldn't even look up. My wife's not my son around. And did she

still work at Facebook? No, no. She left nine years ago. She ran a food startup for five years and then she worked in design and tear design for another since then. She didn't want to. Designed like you, tech design? No, interior design. She's like, she... But your mom was an architect. Your wife's an interior designer. It's like it's all in the family. It's all in the family. I owe a lot to both of those women, to both of those women. But never would have worked

at Facebook and never would have gotten this job at Instagram without Monica. Are your parents still alive? Yeah. My pop lives in Tel Aviv and Yafo. How long has he lived there? So he was from Israel originally or from Cairo in Israel and then he was living in New York forever and then the pandemic hit. And New York really wasn't taking it seriously. Do you remember those first couple weeks where California kind of locked down and knew it was like, yeah, it's cool. Yeah.

And I called him and he was visiting Tel Aviv at the time because he had sister had passed a couple months before he was spending time with his brother and his family. And I was like, pop. It's going to get bad in New York. They're not taking it seriously. And Israel was really organized at the time. I was like, you might want to just stick around a little bit longer, like post-pone your flight back. And then I called him a week or two later and he was like, yeah, okay. So I bought

a car and I got it two years at an apartment. I was like, wait, I didn't mean like move. Would he, if you would ask him a year before that, do you feel like New York or Israel is home? What would he have answered? New York. But I think he always thought he would eventually go back. I just think the pandemic moved it up by five or ten years. And my mom lives in Palm Springs now. And did she like it? She seems like it. She's new. She's been there for a couple months. And your relationship

with them is similar to how it's always been? Yeah. I don't see them as often as I'd like. You know, it's just three kids and travel. It's tough. It's been pretty consistent for a long time now. I'm closest though to my brother and my sister. I got really lucky with siblings. My siblings are much more interesting and cooler than I am. And I just love hanging out with them. And other than more like, can I stay with you for a month? To be like, yes. And I think that's, do you still have

that feeling of like, older siblings slash parents? Yeah, pseudo parent vibes. Yeah. I try to have it less. I don't think they like that. Particularly my sister because we were 11 years apart. So, it's a long time. It's a long time. But it's been really nice now for us to be more like friends and less like a parent child relationship. Plus she can keep you up with like, what's going on on the street? Yeah, yeah, yeah. She's much hip-hoper than I am. I mean, Berlin's a pretty hip-town.

When did she move to Berlin? Five years ago. And she loves it. Love's it speaks German as a dog, a boyfriend, an apartment, a job, a visa. It's crazy. It is, I think, such an impressive thing to do to move to another country with a different language and really kind of embrace it and learn it. It's just a very cool thing. I wish I had done it

at some point. So, I have a lot of respect for her. The world is such an amazing place and growing up, first of all, growing up anywhere in the United States, there's this myopic feeling of this is the only place in the world. And then if you come from New York, there's nothing outside in New York. You know, there's California, if you're willing to go away as a way, but there's nothing in between. It's nuts. And we're missing such a big picture. And I've been loving spending time

in different parts of the world. It's amazing. I feel like it's the same way. Like we spend a year living in London, like I said, and part of it, I wanted my case to spend sometimes somewhere else. Our ability to move around such a big world is insane and we take it for granted. And so, I just try to take advantage of it. Like living in London for a year, one of the best perks was you could go to so many other places. You could get to Paris for breakfast on the train. Yeah. And it's nice.

The train is great. Well, the train is the best way to travel if you can in Europe. But we went everywhere. We went to, we spent time in Scotland and we spent a lot of time in Italy. Great. You know, just try to take advantage of it as best we could. How did you end up spending time in Italy? I went originally, a friend invited me on a trip on a boat and I went with him and I started doing those on a regular basis when I got invited and really liked it. And I was like the Amalfi

coast and experiencing that. The beautiful place. And then my wife said, I think you'd really like Tuscany and I said, I don't know, you know, I like the ocean. Yeah. And then we went to Tuscany and I fell in love and we ended up getting in place and spending so many. A lot of our time there. We spent some time in the coast of Tuscany last summer with some friends who are Italian and this little town nobody spoke any English to for our friends. And it was just a blast. It's such a good

feeling. The food's great. The architectures unbelievable. The people are so nice. The parenting is totally different. Yeah. You go to the beach and the kids just go. Yeah. And like I see what noon for lunch. It's more like when we were kids. Yeah. It's much more. Yeah, yeah. It's like, let them let them make some mistakes and learn. It just thought it was so

healthy. It was so good. They would make fun of us because we would take our kids home with like six to like get them showered and fed so they could be asleep by seven and all these Italians were like, what's wrong with you? Hang out. Relax. That'd be fine. Is the future decentralized? It is going to be more my take is that it'll be more decentralized

than it is now. I think like any hard question the answer is not usually simple but I really do think that in a world where people have less and less trust in major institutions, there's going to be demand for systems that are more decentralized in nature. But it's not going to be a binary outcome. But we know we're trying. We're doing I'm trying to lean into it. Threads, our new app is built on this technology, this protocol called activity pub, which essentially

allows you to interoperate. So you can we're just starting to support this now. You can follow people on threads on apps like Macedon. So you don't even have to have threads to see the content. And then eventually you'll be able to follow accounts from servers like Macedon on threads. And even so in other words, you can use one app and see stuff from different apps. Yes. Like metacritic for apps. Yeah. And so right now we just took our first baby step towards this.

So you can actually follow my threads account and a couple of other people on the teams account from, you know, other apps like Macedon. Why wouldn't every app want to be part of it? I think there's pros and cons. It's definitely more complicated to build. You know, you have to build things in a different way because you know, we have to run all of our, when we start importing content, we have to run all of our safety systems on content,

you know, that isn't on our servers. There's technical challenges with that. There's compliance in law legal challenges with that. There's risk, right? Like if you can follow all the best accounts threads accounts without ever downloading threads, why would you ever download threads? I might be bad for the business. I see. But I do think it's where the world is going. And I do think there's benefits. You'll be able to follow account that's not on threads. From threads,

you'll be able to reach more people even using threads. And reach people who would never use threads or use an app built by a company like Metacritic. So, you know, for me with threads as a new app, it was an opportunity to try something new and lean into where I think the world is going. And so it's taking much longer than I wanted to support this. I think it'll be the better part of a year before we've got meaningful data flowing in both directions from now. But we made this big

first step this month. So it's exciting to see. What's your personal relationship to social media? What do you use? I use Instagram the most, but it's more for work, really. So I try to use it to understand it and feel the pain that creators feel when they don't get what they want using it. I use WhatsApp a ton. I actually probably use WhatsApp more than Instagram even because I it's how I talk to a family or for communication. Mostly messaging. Like my dad that was in

a country that mostly used WhatsApp. My sister lives in the country that mostly uses WhatsApp. All my friends living in the UK and here use WhatsApp. All my family in Israel uses WhatsApp. So I just have a ton of my life on that. I used Twitter a lot for a long time because one of the things I really thought was important is that we engage with our critics and journalists live

on Twitter. And so I thought why not meet them where they are. So particularly when I was working on news feed back in the day, I spent a lot of time on Twitter just trying to engage in the conversation. I try to use everything. I use YouTube a lot. I use to use TikTok a lot more than I do now. What's the difference between TikTok and Instagram? Well, it's less so over time. So TikTok started almost entirely focused on short from video and we've started entirely focused

on photos. And over time we've now leaned much more into long from video and now TikTok has stories and they have photos and they have messages. So they're overlapping more. I think TikTok is better at helping you explore your interests so we're closing that gap. But they've always been very good at what we call exploration based right in like we talked about earlier. And they've, if it's so, it could have been better just being reliably really entertaining.

And I think Instagram has been better at connecting you with people you know when you're friends. And connecting with your friends over content or about content. But we certainly compete head to head in a lot. And we're both fundamentally like a team that works for another company or bigger company than with by dance and us with meta. So there's a lot of similarities and I think we learned from each other. In practice we're much bigger and smaller and different parts of the world and

with different different areas. What about age of users? Is that different? They are the strongest with young people. They have a lot of usage with teens. That's the burden butter for you. We do say Instagram is slightly older. Well I think we have less usage with teens than they do but a lot of usage with teens. We have more usage with not with adults. So I think we're bigger worldwide. We find more users. But they've got this incredibly strong position with young people.

Which is important because young people, they're trendsetters. They're early adopters. When they go to the earth. They can go either way though because they can either be the trend setter for the moment and then move on. Yes. Or they can grow with the product depending on what it is. They move quickly. But when new things happen, they tend to do them first before the rest of the world does. Now everyone message is a lot more that started with teens. You know that kind

of thing is very common. Do you think a new platform can come out today and be successful or is that done? I think it's possible. I think it's hard. The median number of new apps installed by someone in the States I think in a month is zero. I would have said the same thing before TikTok got big and I would have said the same thing before Snapchat got big. I think it was a long shot for threads to get big. You know if you asked me a year ago, do we're going to have

an app with 100 million users? You have 100 million users? On threads? Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah. No idea. Didn't even exist. Is this an idea last December? Amazing. So it's possible. But it's the exception not the rule. Tell me from your perspective looking at it from the outside the story of Snapchat. Snapchat is great. Evan who runs it is I think he's brilliant. They really popularized the stories format. They are actually predominantly a messaging

app in a way that people don't realize. There's a lot of stories on Snapchat. I didn't know that at all. But teens use it to message images a ton to each other. They were kind of interesting in that they were hard to use but maybe in a good way because teens that were one of the platforms that their parents are on. So it was this nice balance where teens could figure it out

but other people were like I don't know how this is for. They had some trouble in the early years getting their Android app to a good place growing in markets outside of the US or iPhone dominant markets but they've made a lot of progress since then. I think they're about half a million users now. I don't know Evan at all. So remember there's that Sony leak a long time ago a bunch of his emails

with Sony were in that Sony leak doesn't matter. He was just really thoughtful and brilliant and insightful and so I don't know him so I don't know this firsthand at all but from what I can tell he's super sharp. There used to be the other photo. There was Tumblr. There was Pinterest. Pinterest Flickr. I remember there was a moment when Tumblr was really good. Yeah I tried to remember what

happened to them. It was kind of interesting because they were kind of embracing the sort of blog or view of the world where everyone could have their own space make it their own and then you could have this aggregation. I think the biggest issue with them is probably that they struggle to navigate the shift to mobile. Like we talked about these big changes at the company. Another big one I didn't mention I probably should have was we went from being predominantly a website to

predominantly a app on your phone. That's huge. In Vietnam I learned how to program a different language is designed at a different scale. It's a different thing to design someone's in your pocket than a design someone's in your laptop. I think they struggle with that transition. There's always the smaller players that come up and do interesting things and sometimes they pop and go away. It's I know they stick around but like over the last year you know laps has been a big deal. B-reels has

been a big deal. They've been other apps as well. I don't know this. B-reel you had to you get a text. You got a notification that ran up out of the day and you had two minutes to post a photo of what you were up to right then and there. That was human taste different than an algorithm. Oh I think they're completely different. An algorithm is just a way of trying to accomplish an outcome.

Right so whether it's just a recommend of movie you want to watch on Netflix or the right brand of New Yorker and you want to buy an Amazon or an Instagram photo or a video you might find

interesting. It's just a proxy. It's an educated guess. Basically the way it works is for an Instagram we look at all the things you've done before on Instagram and then we come up with a prediction for how likely you are to like this photo, how like you're to share it with a friend, how like you are to comment on it and then we add those things up and we create a score and then we order things

by that score. But human taste is the real thing right it's what are you actually interested in well taste is even more than just what you're interested in it's like what are the criteria by which you decide what's good and what's not. An algorithm doesn't have taste it doesn't mean that it's neutral it's not you know you're deciding what you're optimizing for even if it's strictly in chronological order that's still technically an algorithm and what you're optimizing for

in that case is recency. I'm just going to show you the most recent thing not the thing that I think you're the most interested in but it's an approximation of something right you can rank for what I think you're going to find entertaining you can rank for what I think you're going to

send to a friend you can rank for what I think you're going to watch for a long time you have to make a decision about what the outcome is that you're optimizing for but at the end of the day taste is not only what you like it's your ability to decipher what you like from what you don't I think it's infinitely more complicated is AI and algorithms the same thing?

They overlap so there you know a lot of the algorithms that we use now to try and understand your interests are built on top of AI but an algorithm could be as simple as a set of rules you always follow like every time I see someone with a hat I wave hello that's technically an algorithm

tell me the story of likes and getting rid of likes oh yeah this one's contentious so likes we first built likes I think in 2007 or 2008 right around the time I joined so Leo I got a friend of mine now lives in London he used the designer on that project the idea was just to give you

some lightweight feedback people like feedback the more feedback you tend to get on social media the more you tend to share an idea of a like was just give you the latest weight possible feedback all of it is tap this button let's have a know you liked it that's the basic idea now it's evolved

and I think one the idea behind hiding likes was to make to depressurize the experience so you'd focus a little bit less on your like count and a little bit more on the content less like a game because I remember there was a period of time where people talked about trying to game a five

things yeah because it made people engage yeah and our hope was that it would measurably improve your well-being like there was that grand in aspiration in practice it didn't do that you know we we try to understand someone's well-being as you ask them questions

that correlate with well-being based on academic research and in just in practice it is it didn't the data didn't back up the sort of hypothesis and it also was very polarizing some people really liked it and some people really didn't so we decided to make it an option as opposed

to just the default and I wasn't getting rid of likes it was making the counts private so you could see how many people liked your thing but you wouldn't see how many people liked other people's things I was very excited about it and I had hoped it would work and it didn't pan out and when we test things like that we have to talk about them because it's such a big change it's going to get covered anyways we might as well explain our intentions but as a result we ended up unintentionally

building up a lot of excitement about it and then when it didn't work out some people were frustrated if you build something new and give people an option you said before it's impossible to get a read on whether it works in general but is there a benefit in letting people choose and see what

happens their benefits and their costs I mean the benefit I think is that not everyone's different and so the same reason why we do ranking and we believe in personalization is like the best version of Instagram for you is different than the best version for me the cost is the more

options you have the more complicated the experience gets the harder it is to understand the experience as a user the harder it is for us to understand and maintain the experience as the platform such a balance I think in general I believe in providing controls but I think they should

be simple powerful and easy to understand I wonder if there's another category besides follow it's almost more than a follow like a trusted source oh yeah that could be interesting we have one called favorite the name isn't quite favorite's different though yeah the name isn't quite what it is it's actually not really a trusted source either but a trusted source would be interesting are you interested in that more for you wanted to affect what you see or what your friends see more what I see

if I'm interested in a lot of different things but I could pick trusted sources where I know I'm not going to miss anything from these people yeah I might use a service more yeah if it was less of a grab bag yeah yeah that's what favorite is trying to do it allows you to basically pin their stuff to

the top so I've marked only three or four people's favorites you can mark a lot more if you want and whenever they post they show up at the top of the little star so I know that's the other key thing about controls is you have to close the loop you have to show that it's working yeah if you

say I want to see less about baking yeah and we show you less about baking when it's working you don't know and when it doesn't work you're like this thing is broken whereas if you say I always want to see my wife stuff at the top every time you see it if there's a little marker that that's

happening then you can build trust what's the best project you ever part of that never took off it's so many projects I know it was the best but my first project is a PM was on a project where we made software for a phone we actually built a phone with HTC an actual phone a Facebook phone

called a Facebook home and it was a spectacular failure was it a physical device or is it an operating system it was built on top of Android but it was a physical device with a specific version of Android that we had made wow and I learned more in that year than probably in any

other year of my career because my first year is a PM I learned about hardware I learned about marketing I learned about PMmanship I learned about working with policy and legal I worked a lot and about working on a company priority I learned about working with a small but mean super

senior team I don't think I slept much and what was good about the phone and why did network there are a few things that were good about it it was trying to the idea was that your phone should be instead of organizer on apps it should be organized around people it's more human way to

think about the world I think that was an aspiration that turned out to be less effective in practice but a nice idea I think a lot of it was pretty well designed actually a lot of the design ideas we have now folded into the actual experiences over time like how you can chat on Android across

apps works that way now some of the full screen design works that way now on Instagram that's a lot of good design ideas came in there but it's not a great I'm not trying to say it was a great idea a great project at the end of the day people get to decide whether or not something

is useful or not and they decided it wasn't that useful but it was just a great experience even though it was humbling that sounds great and it was my first project as a PM which is which was really trial by far how would you say the world is different since social media to me I

I really think of social media as fundamentally just an extension of the internet and what the internet allows and social media particularly allows is for anyone with a compelling idea to find an audience it used to be that if you no matter what you made if you wanted to really reach people

you needed to work through some sort of intermediary you know if you were a journalist you had to work for a local newspaper who owned the trucks in the truck routes if you were a musician you had to get on one of the 40 radio stations if you were making a sitcom you know there was only a handful

of number of gamers yeah what the internet allows for in social media amplifies is the ability for anybody to reach anybody because it reduces the cost of distributing the thing to essentially zero and it makes it so that you can discover anything or anyone like you can you can sum out a

content it seems the podcast you consume the news you read probably comes from all over the world that would not be possible 50 years ago and so I think that has all these crazy downstream consequences and some of them are good and some of them are bad but you're essentially connecting

everybody and it means that there's way more opportunity for more creatives to succeed there's way more opportunity for more niche interests to find an audience there's way more opportunity for small businesses to compete but there's also more opportunity for bad actors to

achieve harm our responsibility as platforms is to maximize the good and minimize the bad and be transparent about how but at the end of the day I feel a little bit more like we are almost inevitable by part of the internet as opposed to anything else it's really great this is fun this is great vibes you go great spot thank you for talking to me these