This is Kristin O'Brien, and you're listening to the NFX podcast. For founders of social media and communication start the last 8 years have been an ice age. 2002 to 2012 was the golden era, bringing us companies like Facebook, Twitter, instagram, LinkedIn, poshmark, Slack and Zoom, and the subsequent 8 years outside of Asia, few consumer companies emerged, but now that's changing.
The pandemic is rewiring our relationship to technology, and we believe the new wave of social startups has arrived. In this episode, social media experts James Currier and Josh Beller give a blueprint for the evolution of social, what it takes to build a breakout product, and the opportunities they're seeing for founders to reinvent the social landscape So so Josh, you and I have known each other for over a decade.
You've been one of Silicon Valley's top social media and communications experts for over 20 years. You know, you were in the product management engineering inside of real network. One of the first video communications tools up in Seattle. Right? They acquired Philip Rosedale's video codec, then he went on to build 2nd life. Then you were at LinkedIn, at the beginning there in product and engineering, Facebook, product, Twitter product, and then, most recently at Robinhood, in product.
And then, of course, you're an investor in TikTok. And in between, of course, you're a general partner at Greylock, right, for 8 years. Investing in social media and communications companies, including medium, discord, meerkat slash house party. And so We've been hanging out talking about viral growth and social media and social communications forever. And right now is a really interesting time.
The recent growth and remote working tools and digital communications, the takeover of our world by social media companies that you've been part of building, obviously. Thought it'd be a great time to to dig in to get your perspective on all things social communications. What's the general arc of the timeline of social media and communication tool. Take us back to the beginning and bring us to the present.
And maybe if you could drop in some of the frameworks you use to understand where things are today, it would be super helpful here. Just hearing you talk about this stuff always a pleasure. Thanks, James. So much for having me. I always love talking to you, and we've shared a lot of this history of building all these things together.
You know, I think it really comes back to the early internet that sort of late nineties vibe where, you know, in general, it was first about companies setting up web James and setting up presences and sort of the early internet was a business internet. And then people realized they could set things up for themselves. I was actually interning at a company that was called homestead. And we were starting to talk about what it was like to build a web page on the internet that represented you.
And it was like, don't just build a home page. Build a homestead. And this idea that people could have a presence online sort of made their identity now twofold. It wasn't just the people that knew them in their community. But it was anybody on the internet could find out who you were, what you were thinking about. This then turned into blogging where a very small group of people figured out how to write every day, and they would write these incredible pieces.
And we would all start to read them, and these few writers became somewhat famous in the small nerdy internet world. And it was exciting to kind of think about what what that meant and how you could start to get to know somebody just through an online presence without ever having met them in the real world. AOL had chat rooms where a lot of people were hanging out.
And that was sort of the early genesis of what became the city of, like, an internet presence related to your, to your real world presence the beginning, they were mostly different. Who you were in the AOL chat room might not be the same thing as who you were online. Go through the internet, bust, blogging and everything are still growing. AOL's already starting to fade, and a bunch of people said, wait a sec. What if the internet presence and and the real world presence are the same.
They can be, 1, you can actually put your real self online. If you remember back then, like, a resume was something you only did when you were looking for a job. And Reed Hoffman had the idea that it was like, what if your resume is a living, breathing thing that represents you online that people can find you all the time?
So it's not like you're searching for a job to still have your resume online, and that was sort of the genesis of LinkedIn, and then it became that and your professional network. And, you know, monster, which was the largest job site at the time only had resumes of people who were looking for James. And all of a sudden, LinkedIn had the online, professional profile, every single person in the world, you know, now who's working or not everybody, but almost, what was this idea?
Friendster came out and said, hey, if you wanna start dating somebody instead of the awkward trying to find people through your friends or trying to ask around because you're single. What if you just knew who you're your friends' friends were and you could just browse them and you say, hey, James, I think you have a friend who seems kinda neat. Maybe you could introduce me to her. These is the burden for the person in the middle.
And so all of a sudden, not just do we have these online profiles that represent our real identity, but we actually now have we know who knows who and who's connected to who, and we can start using those to get to people and realize our reach is much bigger than just us personally.
And these kind of two things, the real identity online the ability to to talk, which, like, the small group of bloggers sort of showed us was possible, and this idea of our friend networks social graph as it eventually got to be called just became these foundational things that have now spawned or, you know, a $1,000,000,000,000 worth of companies and billions of people now using new products every day. So that was sort of the genesis that got us into that, like, 2003, 4 era.
I joined LinkedIn, right, the beginning of 2004, and it was, like, fifteen Pete. And and, you know, I remember we were like, someday we'll get to a million users on LinkedIn. You know, now it's at 100100 of 1,000,000, but it was this idea that, like, this actually could work. I even dropped out a business school to to join LinkedIn my professor was like, social networking will never make money. My friends came and did a a a class project since I was at LinkedIn.
They got a C minus C plus or something on the project because he just didn't ever believe it. And and so even in those early days, it was still a big question of, like so we have people online, they're real identities. So what? Why does that matter? And that's where the real change then, you know, especially as Facebook came out and said, hey. We're gonna map people's real identities gonna do this in these closed communities like colleges. People will then start to share updates.
Status was a big thing, and this came again from instant messaging. Should've been very private in the past, where you would only kind of you would chat with your friends in a very private way. And all of a sudden, you could sort of chat in a slightly more public way on Facebook. There's this feature that people have forgotten now called writing on walls that was actually one of the most important early social communication features. I could go to your profile, James, and say, hey, man.
Happy birthday. Or, hey. What's up? Or, hey. I think I saw you walking across the quad, and other people could see it and start to comment on it as Beller. And that collectively is what made our sort of communication Pete start to change. And so Facebook realized this and said, wait a sec. Everyone can talk to each other. People are updating their status with real time updates almost of what they're doing. Pete are updating pictures. They're updating their relationship status.
They turn that into the news feed. And then I really think that was the invention that sort of invented the next wave of the social internet was the idea of a newsfeed, a place that we could post information and immediately at one glance, see what everybody else is up to. And kind of everything we've really built in social since then has been based off of that core idea that you could post something around your identity and people kind of consume it in this sort of feed like form.
And that really set us for the next 15 years. Twitter took all the bloggers who were writing long form posts and gave him a place to do very short post in between that became an incredible Beller. And people used to call it micro blogging, but that was because it was the short form of blogging, and then everybody would go back to their longer form blogging and say, well, on Twitter, we were all discussing this in short form. Now I'm gonna write a long piece on it.
And so it became sort of the in between place where all the conversation happened and that became the more important place because it's where all the conversation happened. For that community of bloggers, which then became the community of media professionals, celebrities, people who just like to talk, and that's what really helped Twitter kind of still become this place where important conversation happens for the whole world.
And at the same time, Facebook then just got everybody in the world building their profile, sharing things, etcetera. That takes us kind of through the end of the the 2000s, 2008, 910. And all of a sudden, our phones come out. Now all of a sudden, people are like, wait a sec. This posting, man, I still have to go to a website on a desktop computer to to make updates. What if I could just do it from my phone? And, you know, we also had cameras on our phone.
So all of a sudden, the transformation goes from simple post you make when you're on a web browser, maybe a few times a day to conversations you can have all the time. Twitter started as a little SMS service, but it became really popular once everybody was doing on their phones. Instagram came out and said, Hey. Your phone pictures kinda suck. Let's make them look a little bit better. All of a sudden, you have this lens into the world because of what everybody's sharing on their phones.
And between that, and then Facebook finally figuring out mobile, You have this transition from, really, 2010 to, like, 2014 where the entire world moves on to mobile social networks. Was a company called Path that got started in the meantime that was trying to build it to be the 1st mobile social network that pioneered a lot of things we know, like reactions and other stuff. You have Snapchat that said, hey. We're all sharing photos. What if they just disappear?
And as every high schooler was getting their very first phones, the idea of content that disappeared that wasn't permanently logged was so attractive to them just because it freed them up to change their identity and and change things around it. Facebook felt so permanent and Instagram felt so permanent that Snapchat took off in that generation. We had this this massive revolution, and at the same time, obviously, mobile messaging became so inordinately popular. You have WhatsApp.
You just have regular SMS and I message. And all of a sudden, our ways to communicate now have gone so much faster than emails and phone calls and all the things of the past. And really, I think we've been living this over, you know, since that's early days. It kinda I call that, like, 2010 to 2014 was sort of this heyday where we're all getting on Snapchat and Instagram was becoming a thing and Facebook mobile was really finding its way.
And then by the end period, they all started making money too. Facebook mobile really became a a a very large advertising center of the company. They figured out how to do ads in the news feed that weren't abysmal. Cause, remember, this whole lens of social media always had a, will it ever make money question? And so by that, point, now we get to sort of this era where these companies are big. They're making a lot of money. Things are really working. Snapchat's on its way. Twitter's on its way.
That sort of takes us up to, like, 2014, 2015, which I think as of 2020, we're still kind of in a similar state of the world where Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, obviously Facebook, things like WhatsApp, imessage in in the Western world, are they dominant media forms. And then if you go to Asia, you can add Flint, cacao, and then obviously we chat. Right. And it's amazing that the last 6 years hasn't seen that much change. Right?
I mean, there was so much change for, for 12 years, and then there's been less change. How do you read that of our core behaviors evolve? Because of these tools? Are are the needs being fulfilled? The network effects just too great? How do you, how do you see the opportunity for for for new products, coming in. So I think a couple of things happened.
One is through this whole period, I mean, I went all the way back to the era of, like, logging and home pages to to now We've just been adding people to these networks. You know, it started as, you know, there were probably hundreds of bloggers in the in the late nineties. To billions of people posting things on social media in the past hour.
And so as part of this expansion, we kept expanding and getting new people on the forms, and there were just so many new opportunities to fill that even a lot of the old ones didn't really die. I mean, myspace got eclipsed by Facebook. That was ver very early on. Other things kind of never really got going, but, you know, they just kept layering on.
Snapchat filled some needs that Facebook didn't Instagram filled needs that Facebook didn't, you know, Twitter was able to coexist, and you start to get to the thick where it's hard to find and fill new needs as all these platforms got big and Beller. And, you know, there's 8 or 12 apps I have on my phone that fill so many of my needs that you either have to now replace 1 or truly find something different that I will probably drop 1 for. And that gets much harder, and we do have network effects.
When you post to Instagram, it's hard to get you to post somewhere Beller. When you post a video to Facebook and your family comments on it or your friends do, or people just call you and say, I love the video you posted on Facebook. Why would you post that somewhere else? Even YouTube, which people think of as this massive platform, and it certainly is. It's much more of a media platform than it ever has really become a social platform because people don't just post content there for reactions.
They might post it for storage, but they need to share it elsewhere where their networks live. And so you you kind of have had this interesting thing where our Pete works are so big and so dense, and our audience and where we wanna get feedback from is so fixed already that it's hard to imagine somewhere new.
Now there have been a few things, you know, discord and TikTok in particular that have grown substantially over the past 5 years, but those are late additions to this social media stack, I think, rather than signs of things to come. And, you know, for the founders out there that, you know, all the NFX content is really for early stage founders and know, a lot of people still come to us and say, look, I've got the social idea.
They're excited about it, and they're like, this is why it's different and whatnot. And let's talk to them for a second. I mean, because While we have these big hits like Facebook and LinkedIn and and Zoom, we've literally had thousands of companies that didn't hit it big in the social space, because know, social products are exciting. They're fun. You wanna build them.
Boy, wouldn't it be great to have a big network effect, business that you could run and have fun connecting Pete, you know, it's sort of a dream, right? But so few of the companies that got started, even the ones that got 10, 40, 100,000,000 users never became big. They didn't go anywhere. When you were in venture capital, did you look at a 100 or a 1000 of these media things Pete? Give us a sense of the scale of how many people are still trying it.
And then I'd love to talk about what you think, you know, early stage founders today should be looking for in this space given that a lot of the the network effects are preventing new players from coming in against the incumbents. No, I probably looked at 6 or 700 new companies in sort of a consumer and media world.
Every year when I was in venture capital from, you know, 2012 through, 2017 where my, you know, full years is a full time Pete and There were so many people doing interesting things, but a lot of them felt derivative or a little gap or sort of not trying to play to new trends. So what I was really always looking for was sort of 3 things.
One is, is somebody writing a new trend that I think if they get it right can actually own a new habit formation in the future that that starts small but can snowball very large to become a new center, of gravity for that new habit or behavior. And and it really needs to be something new.
It's like I have a better way to share photos just wasn't nearly as interesting as I think people are actually gonna start recording a lot more videos, and I think we have a way to do it that we might become the hub of short form videos, which was what actually led me to to invest in musically when it was starting to work in 2015. But looking for a new Habit or trend, and, you know, I think right now in the world, for the first time in sort of 4 years. I've been thinking about this.
The remote work, remote connection, staying at home, being just as happy to get on a video call with friends, might be enough set of new habits that new things can form that couldn't have before. So new habits is 1. The second is you think about stickiness and sort of what what that really means is, like, is this a habit that becomes central to somebody's life that they wanna do it often and be top of mind for it? And so if you think about it, like, if I'm bored right now, what do you do?
You might go to Facebook. You might go to other things. But being bored is, you know, you can always try to be something else to help people in their board. We have to be really, really good at We see Quibi just launching trying to say, hey. We're better content than everything else. Use us, and it really depends on on how good the content is there. They'll be able to fulfill being bored and wanting entertainment better than anything else.
So I look for, like, like, I wanna get out Morgan, or I wanna connect better with my friends where I could find more meaningful time with my friends? Like, what are some of these needs that you can actually become central and solve in people's lives don't today.
And when I'm looking at a company, usually Morgan little bit of traction where there's a small group of people who you're completely solving that for already, who swear by your product who say, every day, I check into this product because it does this thing for me. And when I look for traction, I don't care about the big numbers per se. I care about the death of the numbers for the people who've you've already converted to your product.
Because if you have that, then you have a chance to take that deep meaningful connection with some people and expand that to a lot more. And then the third thing I do look for is a growth hook is it's not that you've already figured out how to grow or exploit that, but, hey.
If this small group of people are using it, here's why they want more people to join them, and here's how this will span, and this will grow, and this will rise above the noise, because any company that you wanna grow from something small to be to very big needs enough reasons why it'll grow above the noise. Discord was one of the the rare examples that I found in my in my venture career that sort of hit on all three of these.
It was riding the trend of gaming where people were starting play a lot more games to with each other, and the tools to connect over gaming were pretty terrible. You had to share IP addresses. People could blast the IP and and sort of, you know, ruin the game for everybody. If you found out some of these IP address they were using for their Skype group chat or their mumble server, gaming was becoming much more of a core behavior.
We've obviously not seen that with Fortnite and everything else, but even in 2015, so it's already becoming more mainstream. And the third was it was really hard to get into those other gaming tools to to share and chat. Discord did it in the web browser record to send you a Flint, and we were voice chatting within about a minute, and it was pretty amazing.
And it, back then, it was a total experience to have, like, ten people in a voice chat over just the text that was shared, over a Flint star that was shared, like, over SMS. And so so we found that they had a couple 100,000 daily users but they weren't just daily users. They were, like, every day, hours a day. 10% of the people were have the app open over 10 hours per day And so this was a really, really committed group of Pete. And then they had a really good growth hook.
Like, the gaming ecosystem was blowing up Twitch streamers. We're talking about using Discord once you get one person, they would share it with all their friends who they gained with. And all of a sudden, like, it just kept growing virally and through the use of of Twitch and, and other gaming influencers, you know, and that really helped Discord become such a meaningful company. But I kind of bet on it because of those 3 things, but it was rare to find all three of those in one product.
Sure. And this court had been tried a couple James before. I mean, Mike Cassidy had tried X Fire earlier, like 12 years earlier or something. That's right. Yeah. I mean, Look, there's very few ideas that have never been tried before.
It's all about getting the right product at the right time with the right trend in wave and the right way for the the viral growth to actually flow through current channels for something to really take off versus being stuck when on X Fire, it was such a good product when it came out. The gaming was just niche year enough and just more isolated and people didn't sort of proudly talk about themselves as a gamer back then. And so it always ended up feeling much niche here than it could have.
Yeah. Yeah. That's right. And, you know, I remember in 2015, you and our sitting at, what I think was my first and last NFL Football James. And, you said, Hey, have you noticed that there haven't been any big social networks since Snapchat in 2011? And it's been 4 years since anything major happened in social. It might be over, and you didn't mean it was over, but you're kind of saying, Hey, look, we're in a, we're in a new phase.
And so what you're saying is going forward, what's going to be going forward is we need to find new habits, stickiness, and growth hooks, in order to really make an impact on the incumbents the way it is today. And, and, and it's, there's really been the shift. And so when you think about what's going forward for, for this area, you'd mentioned works stuff.
Maybe this has changed to remote work, you know, the shelter in play stuff, the various changing social behaviors we're going to have to have as a result of COVID, what do you see going forward? I mean, we've already got zoomed. Now we've got, some new tools that are trying to trying to lock down on work like tandem and other things. Where do you see the opportunity for early stage founders going forward?
Well, so I think what's really special about what's happening right now is that we're normalizing a lot of behaviors that have sort of been out there for a while. Like, Zoom's been around for a while, and it's been an exceptional workplace video conferencing product. But it always felt second rate to get on a zoom versus trying to have a meeting in person.
It always felt like if somebody was working from home, they were sort of doing the secondary option and having to zoom them into the meeting was a slight burden. Even if you were a company with multiple offices and you were doing video calls Morgan, and there was the person dialing in on the the TV in the meeting room, it always felt like it wasn't quite as good as being in person. And what I think the shelter in place in in these, like, surreal times are doing is making us go, wait a sec.
What if this is the default? How do we then learn new norms and operate and make sure that this is as effective possible. I think people are gonna learn to be a lot better writers, so they'll get things written down that will make the communication a lot more effective. Writing's hard. Writing well is really hard. But I think it's worth spending the time in order to do it.
And then the video calls and the communication we have, we learn how to make that higher fidelity, and and we replace not being in person because that's all we can do right now. And and then I think by normalizing this, the next time it's like, oh, you can't meet in person. Hey. Let's just do a Zoom becomes an affirmative act and something that we do, and we almost prefer to do to save everybody the hassle of commuting or moving around, and we only do that when it's really special.
Now if we're gonna do that, the number of ways we need to connect, share content, share information. Like, it's gonna be transformative, and there's so many different pieces of what we used to get in person, whether it was the hallway chat after a meeting or the, you know, greetings or, you know, sharing food or giving gifts All of these things that we just do naturally in person, we have to figure out how to replicate and bring to our digital tools.
I think people will be able to carve out lots slices of these to become, you know, important parts of people's working life. And then I think on the social side, we're learning exactly the same thing. Hey. Normally, we would wanna go out to a concert, and that would be, like, our fun event that we might do. You know, some people do that every week. Some people do that monthly. And right now, we can't do any of it. Is is, you know, for across humanity.
So doing the live stream concert is actually pretty good, but it's still not as good as seeing some other people in the crowd sharing it. Maybe sometimes it's Flint intimate gathering. Maybe sometimes it's a math 1. I think there's so much more to invent for the tools that make that experience feel much better even than it does today, but I've personally been amazed going to some watching some of the live streams, some of these artists from their James. It's really brought me there.
This Hamilton thing that was done on John Krasinski's feel good news was was just amazing, and I just watched that yesterday. Like, five James, and it kind of shows you the intimacy that can happen over digital if we start creating those experiences.
And I personally did poker night with some friends on Friday night, and I normally would never have jumped in the car to go Pete people in San Francisco and Oakland, and one person even joined from Hawaii where he lives, And I never would have gone out to poker night because it was a Friday night. It was late, and I probably would have been tired. We started at, like, 8:30, and we're still going to 12:30. And I had so much fun.
We had zoom on, a mediocre poker app on the phone, but it was really about the people. And I think now that we start to go, hey. That was actually more fun than I thought, It's gonna become normal, and we can build great products to help people do this more effectively. And I think there's gonna be a huge world of opportunity to build the places and spaces that we go on evenings and other times in order to do this.
Is this what you're talking about when you you say that your media is becoming social Is this an idea that you'd you'd written about? Yeah. What I haven't think about is is social media has sort of drifted away from truly being social.
With social media, we had gotten to a point where it actually, I think, is becoming more media where what James Currier shares on his Facebook, certainly on his Twitter or his LinkedIn is James Currier, the media channel, not James Currier, the human that I love interacting with, and and, you know, being with and going back and forth with, you know, podcasts, I think are much closer to that.
But being social is really the art of being together conversing, engaging, sharing experiences, sharing moments, these emotional connections that happen. And so I worry that Facebook, Instagram, I mean, with with what's happening in the time of COVID, like, Instagram's pretty boring. People aren't going out and doing all these cool things that they're showing off. They're living their lives. And creating a media channel about yourself with living your lives is less interesting.
Instagram live, discord, phone calls, poker nights, those are real social experiences that bring back that feeling of connection. Those feel much, much more powerful these days. And so that's kind of what I mean is, like, we might be moving away from thinking that social networks are about social media and that the best social networks are the ones that bring us together.
Know, when you're talking to somebody, you have so much more adrenaline and endorphins and and connections between you two, even if it's just a phone call, Beller if it's a video call and you're making eye contact, still highest bandwidth in person, but that's so much more powerful than cool. I saw your photo and I double tapped. Right. Right. And you've you've had this recent piece in medium where you're talking about the, the move toward experiences. This is what you mean.
These experiences together about poker, these experiences together have seen the eyes, connecting as as real human beings, these experiences. As opposed to the Instagram experiences, like, look, jump jumping into this, you know, waterfall in Hawaii sort of thing. Yeah. That's right. Now I'll put a little plugin for TikTok, which is I think is somewhere in the middle.
One of the things I found really profound with TikTok is it's no longer just about snapping something that you're doing and sharing it, but it's actually about the art of creating. When we first invested in 2015, like, one of my theories was that We had sort of with Instagram and Snapchat, we had made capturing a moment so effortless and so fast that you could sort of get anything you wanted and just share it out there.
And it might actually take longer for somebody to consume it than it took for you to make it. And and so we were kind of tipping the balance where we're putting the burden on consumers as opposed to, the creators to make something that that's valuable for the people they care about. With TikTok, we flipped that again, which is to actually make a lip sync to make a good dance video, to make a funny humorous piece of content.
Like, people actually spend hours learning steps and going to make them, and we turn the world back into creators with our phones. And and that's the other part of sort of social media that I do like, which is It's not media that we're just capturing to show off what we're doing, but it's media that we're creating with our heart and wanting to share and wanting to get feedback on.
You know, I've long, I've long dream that the best social network out there could be one that shows how long you spent making a post. Or if, like, you go on a trip, and you make a collage, it says, hey, Josh. James just spent, you know, 3 days, you know, or, like, 6 hours over 3 days curating these pictures. To share his album from this amazing trip he did. Would you like to look at it? And if it said that you would put that much time in, I would always look at it.
Whereas, if I just see you slam up a 100 pictures. I'm like, thanks. I hope you had a great trip. Right. So it brings to humanity. It brings to the time we spend, the life's energies that we spend into the actual media form. That's right. And I think TikTok is the beginning of that. Got it. And we've got some ideas around things like reply time and James session and lunch buddies. What tell us about those. What kind and then what kind of ideas are you thinking about these days?
Yeah. You know, that was just medium blog. That was just a funny thing that I was thinking about the other night, and I was talking to a friend a couple weeks ago, and I was talking to a friend. And and I was brainstorming all these ideas of, like, how can we come together in this time of remote work and and humanity. And and I kind of went down 2 different paths.
So the idea of, like, jam sessions what I wrote was, wouldn't it be fun to give all these artists a tool where they can set up a private jam session and charge 50 or $100 per person to join for an hour or 2 and have a very intimate live video chat experience where you can have one on one conversation, and you can know who the other friends are who are sitting there, and you can all kind of groove to the music together and have that same feeling as if you were in a social club.
Was just, you know, we've actually now seen this. I wrote this before. All this stuff was blowing up. We've now seen you know, I watched Chris Martin in his living room or John Legend or, a bunch of Broadway stars you know, singing from their bedrooms. And they've been doing this in a way that it's just so much more intimate, but it's still, like, one to many feel like they're doing it for their fans, but it hasn't sort of turned into a club and a business.
And I do think there's a great room for someone to build products that are that can actually allow people to to run these things. We're seeing that in fitness too where a lot of fitness professionals are starting to run virtual classes. Many tools to run the class, charge money, know who's there, have real interactive experiences while this is going on, and and no great products yet fully solved that.
Lunch buddies was was a similar silly idea that I had, which was you know, getting food right now is hard. Either you go into grocery stores and following, very strict social distancing rules or you're trying to get delivery, which is getting harder and harder as everybody's trying to get delivery and everything's at capacity.
What if we could deliver food to a whole bunch of Pete, and they could all sort of cook it together You could have sort of the, like, cook at home, talk over lunch experience with a group of, like, ten people with even a professional chef. Now logistically, that may actually be hard to do, but I was just trying to think about, like, how do you bring the humanity back into these moments of time?
And then with reply time, this was something that I had been thinking about a lot just for, like, how do we change work and work patterns, especially when we're all remote? You know, when we're all working together, you know, you might put out a question in a meeting and then certain people talk and dominate the meeting.
You might send something out over email and the people who are just fast replyers always reply first And we all know that the first person to reply often sets a tone for a conversation. If you put out a, a question or a thought and the first person's like, that's terrible.
Then the entire risk of the reply thread or the slack thread or the meeting conversation is unwinding why it's terrible and why there might be some merit in the idea I just didn't think about, like, in a workplace, you can usually get over this because you can grab somebody afterwards and say, hey. Please don't respond that way. We can go to three other people privately and say, please give me your your feedback.
As we move to fully remote, it gets harder to have those sort of side conversations as meaningfully as a sort of in a sort of softly And so I was thinking about, like, what if we change the way that we go and ask for feedback? What if instead of first reply always wins and Pete a tone for the thread? You put out an email and you say, Everybody can reply to this email, and at an hour or 2 later, we will share all the replies all at once. So everybody gets to write a thoughtful piece of feedback.
And and you sort of delay the power of firstness. And especially when nobody's working at home, they have other distractions, maybe at home, They are doing real work, and they can't just be on threads to respond to everything. If you could put in some delay, I think you could really transform how we communicate at work. And I think this isn't just an idea for for, you know, remote times.
I think this would be useful, you know, in so many ways and in so many conversations, And, you know, we gotta remove the power of being first to make sure that we hear from everybody. So these were just you know, ideas I've been dancing around, and they're all about, like, how do you go find those moments of humanity that we can bring back in and and thoughtfulness and in connection. What's what's notable, of course, is that you're talking about psychology. You're talking about emotions.
You're talking you know, we say that we're in the tech space, but, the fact is the way you're thinking about this is much more liberal arts, right?
So it's much more about, about being human and how we think and feel and painting with those colors, painting with that language as a way to seek out new products, as a way to seek out new ideas that could impact people, make the world better, build networks, you know, a lot of times with you know, in the tech space you see with SAS or with e commerce Pete are talking about just pure numbers.
You know, these are spreadsheet type businesses, whereas What you're talking about is very much a a work of art around how it makes somebody feel or James somebody think or the order in which we communicated. I mean, this is not this is not usual. This is this is an unusual sector within the tech space that that you've now been encamped in now for for 20 years. You know, do you find that a lot of people can go with you with these conversations?
You You find like a lot of the founders out there understand the depth of of emotion and psychology. You need to understand in order to find something that's valuable and new and important? You know, I mean, I I very much think so. And in fact, I think the best founders, especially in this space, are great studies of humanity They are great studies of people, and they are really great psychologists. I used to say this is maybe 10 or 12 years ago.
Like, Google is a technology company, and Facebook is a psychology company. You know, if you think of the early tech of Facebook, it was really just a bunch of forms that people could fill in how it communicated the forms to other people, but it understood how to do that in a way that made humans feel better. And that's really the secret of almost everything that's been built then.
Evan Pete, when he was talking about the early days of Snapchat, he very much sounded like a psychologist too, where he talked about why deletion by default changes the entire way that you perceive the person on the other side and have the human connection. Ben Rubin, who's the founder of House Party And Meerkat, is talked so much about the power of live video and how being live and trying to create togetherness when we're not together has been so powerful.
On house party, that hasn't changed that much in, you know, almost 2 years as a product has been blowing up in the time of of COVID because so many of those architectures that Beller built, and and that Ben and Seema and the team built, you know, still live and thrive. And that's what makes these these products Flint so special. Some people who come to technology or architects, they think about building cities They think about planning. Some people are psychologists, and they think about Pete.
But I think these types of humanity need to be applied. Technology is just the enabler. It's not the it's not the it's the soft it's an ingredient in the sauce, but it's no longer the meal. Got it. The the real product here is the psychological insight. And, you know, you, you and I, I was an early angel investor in Morgan and helped Ben Rubin come over from Israel to the US and and you and I invested in meerkat.
Let's just talk quickly, you know, I think this is these are useful stories for the founders why do you think meerkat didn't work? What do you think happened with the house party evolution and and and now it's blowing up? Now it's now it's working. Now it's growing really quickly. What's the story there? When I first invested in Meerkat, if I go back to my 3 pillars, like, I believe that there was a massive trend towards live video. I believe that our phones could now support it.
I believe that the networks could now support it so you could turn a camera on anywhere. And if you could create the hub, the habit of live video, the shows that people made, the shows that people wanted to tune in to watch. You could actually build a a a unique independent network. And at the very earliest days, there was only a few weeks sold when I invested, it was right before south by southwest 2015.
You were seeing just amazing adoption in the way that Ben had hooked into Twitter and into the Twitter graph, and it creating these connections. And one of my favorite internet moments was the end of February 2015 when a couple of friends were at a restaurant, and I was sitting on my couch at home. And they were live streaming conversation with the restaurant, and a whole bunch of us were in the comment thread. And then people started dialing on their phones into the conversation.
So we had, like, other people dialing in to talk to the group. It was just this amazing social moment that we were creating on the fly, even though not everybody was together, and it was so powerful. And I was like, this feels like the future. And and This was on meerkat. This was all on meerkat. This is, again, end of any of the February of 2015, right, a couple weeks before south by. And it was just blowing up, and they'd been out for, like, 2 or 3 weeks at that point.
And so, you know, we funded then, and we it a lot in the company and the technology and and to keep growing. But a couple things that that didn't quite happen is it's really hard to make good live video and to be a good host. And a very small number of people can do it, and those people tended to be more interesting if they were already interesting in the world, create audience, and then a very small group who could sort of, you know, become new live stars.
The second thing was it wasn't really a habit we thought that there was more of a habit there, but it's exhausting and intense to go live. And if you're only getting tens or 100 of people to join your live video that actually doesn't feel as fulfilling if you're a important celebrity is getting thousands or millions of views on something else that you create. So you'd rather spend time doing that to reach.
And so it became this thing where where it was sort of a nice to have occasional thing to do to augment your social media and on a personal level, A bunch of people felt like it was too hard to keep going on. We would get awkward people in the chat. You didn't know, and you weren't really having these meaningful conversations and interactions.
And so Once Facebook and Twitter both came out with their great live products, it was sort of clear that meerkat itself as an independent stand alone entity wasn't gonna work. Because so many people were, you know, already had audience on Facebook or Twitter. They didn't feel like they needed a new app, and there wasn't enough to build a new network. So Ben took those insights, with CEMA, and they went and rebuilt house party and said, wait a sec.
What if it's just private, small interactions that really matter. Can we go live? Can we create a room? Can we create a space where we now wanna come and hang out in more often? But even house party while it had a couple moments of real blowing up, and it's so wonderful to see what it's serving, you know, right now in the world. It never quite took off in the way that I hoped it would is a a premium social network because getting on video chat for a long time still felt intense.
It felt like an extra effort. And A lot of us would do it sometimes and then go, I don't wanna do that all the time. I'd rather either hang out with my friends or just go home and watch TV. And so house party never quite became as normalized. I'm I'm optimistic that after shelter in place, we'll look forward to that even more than we used to. But there was a period of time.
You know, we we launched house party in the, like, middle of 2016, and there's a period between then and now that that it wasn't ever as much of a thing to get on video with people other than a very occasional basis or maybe called Gramma. And so so, you know, you gotta find those right things you really believe in the world and have the right time for it to become normalized and exactly the right products.
I mean, even Zoom, you know, was just a great business tool for a long time with what 10,000,000 user, you know, meeting participants per day. And they said, look, in March, we went from that to 200,000,000 because all of a sudden, it became normalized. And the only thing you could do And so, you know, sometimes you wait long enough to get lucky with something happening in the world. Hopefully, you don't get lucky at others tragedy like what's happening right now, but No.
You kinda have to wait for your moment. Got it. And meerkat, you know, it was one of my my least favorite internet moments was we were we were at south by the whole meerkat team was staying in my hotel room. Everybody was sleeping on the floor and and and whatnot. And it was a Friday night at 10 PM where we got a call from the from the the biz dev folks at, Twitter telling us that Dick Costola had decided to turn off Meerkat's, access to the Pete.
Which meant that the viral growth was going to stop, because it was blowing up all day long. That ended up having some impact on as well. Building building these things on top of somebody else's network, typically leads to, getting turned off if you actually start to get some traction. So Yeah. That's that's that growth hook that that I talked about earlier that so important to understand your growth and to find a durable, sustainable, repeatable channel.
Because if you can't if you can't sustain it through your own engine and your own effort, it it is easy to have a Google algorithm change, a Facebook algorithm change a business development person or CEO decide to to shut you down that all of a sudden can can take your growth away. Over there, Were there some, investments that you wanted to make at GreatLock, but didn't?
You know, I got really close to the Snapchat team in the early days, just really believing again that this deletion by fault was gonna be transformative. And we ended up not being able to pull it together, at the last minute, and that was a, quite a big bummer to me because they've got on and built an amazing company.
You know, I I'm not sure the Snapchat's as big and it sees as much of the opportunity as I thought it could back then, but it's still quite large and quite impressive and and really special on what they're doing and changing with lenses and cameras and other stuff.
And, I also looked back at Zoom and, you know, I met Eric in the very early days, and he was actually trying to build more of a consumer product in the first 1st days rather than a a b to b 1 and just thought the technology they were building. It was already so much smoother than anything Beller. And I I wish we had invested. I think we thought business, video conferencing was such a sort of tried and trodden and sort of Morgan path it was gonna be hard to build a new company.
And and, you know, I think still Eric's an example where we build better technology than everything else, and it just works. And you can turn that into a a really great company. Yeah. It's interesting that, you know, we had Skype and then we got, Google Hangouts and and they were sitting there with the networks. They were sitting there with the, identities of people already. And then Zoom just came kinda out of nowhere, and did basically the same thing. Right?
It wasn't like there was a big psychological insight. There was no big emotional insight. It was literally just technology. Right. And, that was kind of hard to predict, I guess, is what you're saying is, like, even though you saw them, it wasn't that easy to predict that that was what's gonna I mean, clearly other investors who invested are saying, oh, I was so pressing, and I could see exactly what was gonna happen.
But but I do think that it sort of does come back to the Can you actually build a 10 x better product and truly deliver on that promise? And Zoom truly is 10 x better than every other video technology. I mean, Google giant company has been building video, you know, meeting technology for a long time. It's just never worked as well and smoothly and seamlessly and scalably as zoom. So I do think that there is a path to building the 10 x better product.
Discord was 10 x better than the audio chat products that gamers were using before. I think if you're gonna do that, you really need to be technology first and writing a new technology wave that makes it work differently and and Flint truly spread differently.
Like, Discord was able to to leverage, web, RTS for audio streaming within the browser that made it easy for me to send you a link and be talking to you within a minute without you having to download anything, Zoom was able to use this cloud technology to make the video streaming so much more efficient and so much faster and get out to the edges much better than everything else.
And so I do think that that you can ride technology waves, but you really have to be a great product as well as a great technology. And so if I'm a if I'm a early stage founder, how do I know if I've got a 10 x better product?
Is there any, I mean, I, I can logically say, oh, we've got this, this edge computing with the cloud now that's gonna hopefully allow me to build a 10 x better product with zoom, or this WebRTS is kinda sucky right now, but I anticipate it's gonna get good over the next 12, 14 months. I can imagine why that would give me an advantage in Ten X ing the technology of the product experience. But how do you, how do you know? What, what are those things you look for?
Because as investors, investors have to also know that 10x better product in order to want to put the money in and take the bet when you're going into crowded marketplaces like zoom was. You know, I mean, this is this is the hard part as I think you as a founder and the founding team really have to believe in that premise that now is a time to build something better and that you're so frustrated with the old technology that you can go do it.
You know, the Zoom founders had the benefit of having built Webex for many, many years. And so they knew what what worked and what didn't and what old architectures were and what new architectures could provide. And, you know, again, they started in the consumer space, but then eventually, probably when their non competes ran out pivoted back into to business, and it's a market that they knew well and that they could do. They could build a better product.
With Discord, they just they were James, and they built something that they wanted to use that was better than the the stuff that they had before. And so that was a a big shift for them, but they just like, this is so much better. And, look, we can do this. And when they started using it and shared it with their friends, all their friends were like, This is amazing. Why would we ever go back? You know, and so you just have to know that.
And, you know, one of the things that I often ask founding teams is Do you use your product? How much do you love your product? Is this embodying your habits? And I think in the consumer world, that's foundational And if you don't love your product and use it all the time and haven't shifted over completely for these reasons, it's gonna be really hard for you to convince others too through whatever growth tactics or other things you use. Right. It's interesting.
I mean, discord is a little bit, like just UNX IRC from the nineties. Right? Yep. Just with emojis and although bells and whistles we can put on it today, but it's it's a behavior that we saw, taking place right at the beginning of connectivity. That's right. And and and it's really it's not so much that's a new behavior is that it's done better and done so much more easily than any of the ones that came before.
You know, whereas like Snapchat, Facebook, TikTok, musically, these all really brought new behaviors into the world. So both can work. Right. Right. And as you think about, some pinnacle things you've seen in the last 12, 15 years around social media and social communications. I would love to hear any things stand out that CEOs did that you thought were, wow, that's incredibly innovative. That really stands out.
That was, that was a big shift in how things could have gone because of what that founder did. Are there some things that you look back on like that? You know, I'm not sure that I I ever think of, like, the grand gesture are really standing out. The ones that that stand out still to me the most were the ones who had their heads down, building and found their way to a product that they loved and that they got other people around them to love.
And so like, the the examples I keep coming back to you is, you know, when I first met Evan at Snapchat, and he talked about how they started with this thing, and then they kept showing it to high school kids, and it wasn't quite working, and they would make these changes. And then they figured out that screenshot and freak people out. So they added screenshot checking. And then all of a sudden, everybody felt comfortable to use it.
It was it was the story of how we talked to people, heard what their objections were, heard what their challenges were, went and build features that tried to solve those, gave it back to them, and kept that tight narrative loop. And and that sort of talking to customers, being your best customer, is really what what made it work. When I met the the musically folks, the founder was actually in his late thirties and had a young child. And the majority of his yearly users were 13, 15, 16, 18.
Who are building musically, but they had a WeChat group set up, and they were talking to them every day, asking them questions, sending them mock ups, getting feedback, you know, what would make you switch from Instagram to use this? What else do you want us to do? Hey. What were you they would send them videos they were trying to and say, hey. If you made the capture tool, do this, it would be amazing.
And they were just in such constant communication with their customers that that is what made it take off. And I think that is the the the real secret. And and really it's the emotional tenor of that CEO to be able to maintain those conversations and to realize that the product you have now isn't quite working. You thought was right last week is still not right this week, and you need to keep being humble.
You need to maintain this nice balance between believing in yourself and believing in your product and believing in the mission, but also being relentlessly skeptical that you've nailed it. And that's a difficult emotional place for people. It's, there's a real facility that Eric and others have shown in, in, in balancing, those two things. Do do you find that personality type in these CEOs that are successful this way?
Yeah. I mean, I think that that's a real important secret, especially in in social, is Your product is never good enough.
You're never harboring enough of the trends, and you have to keep searching for what really moves Pete, and you have to keep building the features to do that and keep understanding the growth hooks and the reasons that somebody uses your product and spreads it because you're so dependent on people using it meaningfully in their lives all the time on a repeat basis that you really need to to keep changing. And people keep changing, and so products have to change too.
And I think that's a a really important thing to understand. And as you go from your earliest adopters to your later adopters, to the early majority, You also have to understand that, like, it has to get simpler and it has to get dumbed down and the onboarding process has to get a lot more robust in order to get more and more people on it. And great products have to evolve that way as well. And that's been one of the strengths of Facebook.
It's just it's like a shark constantly swimming forward, constantly experimenting and changing every feature on the on all of their products, and that mentality, to constantly iterate is is stayed with them all these years Pete the fact that they're so big now. You know, seeing founders who don't have that approach, trying to get into social media, I just don't feel like there's a good personality fit there. I mean, you look at at Vine. I mean, Vine was TikTok before TikTok. Right?
Yes. And yet, why didn't why didn't Vine go? Why why wasn't Vine TikTok Do you do you have a few reasons that you could point to there? Yeah. One of the things that was unique about Musically because it was really why it was in vine musically, because musically got big, then it got sold, then it got even further invested in, to make TikTok, which is the phenomenon now.
And we can even talk about what changed between Musically and TikTok to make it a truth phenomenon, but with Vine, pea they were 6 seconds Morgan, and a couple Pete got so good, so early at making things really, really funny that it felt very hard for most people to create anything. And so Vine very quickly moved into a world where there were a few great creators and a lot of watchers and very few other creators or sharers. And so it became a media network more than anything.
Musically became a lip synching product where it was actually pretty easy for anybody to make something that felt pretty good. Just like Instagram, let you make a photo that felt pretty good in the earliest days of Instagram. With musically, you could put on a song you like and just sing into the camera, and it looks more professional or more fun than any other video you might have made to record your life. And just the music soundtrack changes everything.
There were 15 second samples, and they quickly became, you know, in partnership with all the music labels. So And so and so you're saying that the the original musically features were instead of 6 with Vine, it was 15 seconds, and they started the community to do lip synching, which guided a certain social behavior within the community, which turned out to be an easier thing for more creators to do better at, which is what made the difference.
So they narrowed down the types of content they wanted people to make around lip syncing music. And by narrowing, they actually created a a whiter hotter center to then launch from. Is that is that part of the story? Yeah. But but where you say narrowing, I would say actually just enabling people to make something that was better because it actually just had a soundtrack. And so a lot of people, the simplest thing you could do when you have a soundtrack is just do a lip sync.
There were a lot of people that were also trying to make you know, fun videos of life or other things, but when you have a good song underneath an even mediocre video content, it makes the whole experience much better.
Now part of the reason that Musically didn't get as big as as TikTok is right now on its own without selling to ByteDance is because the music soundtracks and the early lip syncing use cases actually did become somewhat narrowing, where most people were doing lip syncs, and they wanted people to be doing comedy and dancing and funny things and educational things and all of these other types of content.
But because, soundtrack made people think about lip syncing, too many people actually lip synced, part of what the change to TikTok did. They rebranded it. They did pay 100 of 1,000,000 of Beller, and then a lot of that was getting different influencers to create different types of content onto TikTok, but they were able to show all these examples of things that weren't lip syncs. And then and they're actually algorithms make sure that you don't see a lot of lip synchs videos right now.
And so all of a sudden, they were able to change the mix of the content that people viewed and people were inspired by and people did what other people were doing to be a much broader mix. And that's what sort of Beller spawn TikTok to be the massive phenomenon that it is today.
So elevating the early videos on Musically with soundtrack will will both help them get, you know, break out in a way that Vine didn't, but then also became just enough of a drag that it had to flip into this other this other model with TikTok, which was a massive reinvestment, but it's gonna pay off in spades. Yeah. I mean, this is something I feel like founders make a mistake on all the time.
I mean, there were several social networks that we had 30, 50,000,000 people before Facebook ever launched. Facebook comes in and says we're just doing colleges. Really narrow market, but that ended up allowing them to use real identities first, which then allowed them to springboard into owning the whole space. You see the same thing with fiber, you know, the marketplace where they said everything for $5. They really restricted it.
They, they narrowed the focus until it was a white hot center around just things for $5. And now, of course, $5 and more. You know, they they've they've now expanded it over the last 6, 8 years. And then, musically ended up doing the same thing, saying, no, let's through lip synching instead of doing everything, and then that got them to get big enough so that they could then be a springboard that they can go do everything.
And it's really hard as a founder to decide to narrow your focus, to limit, or guide your community or culture onto a specific thing or or look at Twitch, right? Twitch came out of Justin TV. Justin TV was everything. And then they found one narrow niche around the gaming, and then they they they actually went from broad to narrow. And then that narrowness is what gave them their their real growth. And so Sometimes narrowness can really help. You just have to know when to, broaden it.
And, I remember having a, debate with Bill Gurley at a dinner was very loud vociferous where he was claiming that Facebook should stay focused on colleges and do classifieds and, you know, use books and everything for for colleges, and that was their best way. And my argument was like, no, they need to flip out of colleges and go after everything, but it's, it's a matter of the timing of when they're going to do that.
And so this, this narrow focus, can be very, very helpful for companies at the beginning, and it's, and it's hard to do because you want to take the whole thing. And there's a lot of venture people who say, well, that's not siding, why would I just wanna do lip synching? That's stupid. That's too small. Why would I just wanna do colleges? That's too small.
But in the end, as you said, you've gotta find that that white hot center where you've got a few people who are serving their needs a 100% and then expand from there. Absolutely. Absolutely. It's really finding that early group that doesn't just use your product, but really uses it, depends on it, brings it into their lives in a super meaningful way. And and once you have that, now you have a base that you have a chance to build from and replicate and and keep expanding.
You know, we're seeing that in Discord right now, which is the gamer use case was so fundamental to get it as big as it is, but a lot of people now aren't gamers that are using Discord, and the product has to change a little bit. To serve those people while not alienating that core base of gamers, as Beller. And, and, you know, if it really wants to, to help a lot more people connect.
You know, and so that's, you know, always a trade off is do you build a giant gaming business, or do you build something that's that's even bigger? Well, Josh, this has been a fantastic conversation as always. I love talking with you, buddy. I love thinking about these things with you. It's great fun. Thank you. Thanks. Thanks so much for having me. This was awesome.