This is Kristin O'Brien, and you're listening to the NFX podcast. This is the insider story of house party. In the last two months, the video app has grown 1600% to become the number one social app in 82 countries, including the US with 100 of millions of users. Its success, however, has been many years and trials in the making.
In this episode, early investor and adviser James Currier joins Ben Rubin, the founder of house Pete, to share the insider story of how the product went from 0 to 1 to ubiquity. This is a masterclass in product pivots, and perseverance that every founder will benefit from. Today, we're here with Ben Rubin. Ben Rubin is the CEO and founder of a new company just announced called slash talk, which you probably don't know what you will be knowing about.
He was also the founder of a company called Meercat, which you might have heard about, which then evolved and changed into an app called House Party. Which you undoubtedly have heard about because since COVID-nineteen, it's become the number one social app in 82 countries, including the United States, It's had 1600% growth in downloads. 100 of millions of people are using it. And all of this is coming from Ben and his teams that he's pulled together.
I was lucky enough to be an early seed investor in his company. And Ben and I have now known each other for a lot of years. And so today, it's, my great pleasure to be hanging out with him and talking about some things because I take every founder who's out there is gonna benefit from hearing his thoughts, his perseverance, how he comes up with his visions, and the many ups and many downs that Ben has been going through in the last few years since we've known each other.
So today, Ben's Pete, and we can tell the real story that most founders never get to hear. Ben, welcome. Thank you. Hey, guys. So, let's go back 6 years to 2014. You and I Pete. You were still living in Israel. I was traveling there for, a week I met more than 30 companies on that trip, and I really hit it off with you. And we decided that, I would invest in the company. And the name of the company at the time was Yevo, yevv oh, what was the idea behind it?
So Lifoneer, which is the company you invested in, SCID, and the company that I I founded in 2012 was focused on bringing people together in the most human way possible when they're physically apart. And we specifically focused on mobile first live streaming experiences. And, that was the framework of the company. And what we did is a bunch of product the first of which was Yevo, and it did a lot.
Yevo tried to do a lot, including live streaming over Twitter, which was one feature inside of Yevo. And that was also one of the things that feature that was really successful in Yevo. That was the inspiration behind next iteration, which was Morgan. So the yellow thing was doing live streaming video before it was really easy to do. You guys had some real technical challenges doing that. And and it also got very viral in certain countries.
You had hundreds of thousands of teens using this thing, but then it Pete out, then there wasn't their retention. And then you decided to move to the US. Why'd you move to the US? If you're trying to build consumer and you try to reach a mass appeal, you need to understand the environment in which you are conducting yourself. You need to know how things are being sold into supermarkets, what people say to each other, what is like March madness looks like.
You know, all of these those things that you can expect be with a mass appeal, and and do it all remotely, especially not in culture. Like, cybersecurity, I Pete, things that are more behind the scenes. You can maybe do it. You are but but if you if you wanna do a a a social mobile app, in the United States, you gotta be in the United States.
And, and Yevo, for, for that comment about the name, we're, like, one of the things that was funny is that NVvo is like being live and that's one of the reason it's clicked for people in Mexico. Yeah. But it was, like, number 1 in Mexico at some point. It was a phenomena, and you know, that made me realize that back in back in 2014. Yeah. Exactly. 2014, 2013. Yeah. Okay. So then you move to the United States, And then and then I've invested in you, and then what do we do? What's the process?
I get it. I don't I think I thanked you, but you know what? That's an opportunity to thank you publicly if they can so much time and dedication to explain the process of how to think about iteration and iterative thinking, because this is where we actually we walked through, and I remember that meeting. I remember going to that meeting. It was like, in displacing Soma. You go down. There was, like, some co working space under that building, and we see it.
And what we do is we do, a matrix what are the use cases that we've seen in Yevo Working, and what are the graph that are actually correlating with that? And then we can create a heat map of, like, another heat map, but a heating map. Like, what type of use case and graph we can work. And, like, what we've seen with Yevo is that people in Michigan use Yevo to stream to their friends around school, high schools, We're like, can we emulate this geo fencing of the geo fencing of of a high school?
And, like, can you create a product where people open and see who is like, in one mile from them, and can you create a network around that? So we kinda mapped everything. And then another one was somebody was in a concert of Lady Gaga, and that was, like, one of our biggest streams because they they used this feature that was hidden inside of YAML to tweet and go live. I was like, oh, let's do broadcastin on Twitter and that was meerkat. And then we did not want air.
I don't know if you remember air. So we came up with a with a whole series of ideas. We came up with a whole series the the the guideline was it needs to be dead simple, minimum clicks, and we need to be able to bang it up to 2 months and move on. But he had a really good point, which which took too hard. No. Actually, I said it needed to be done in 30 days, which showed I didn't understand it, but then you did it in 60 days. And then you did the next one in 30 days. You actually did it.
Yeah. You didn't think you could do it. Your team had taken 14 months on the first app. Exactly. 8 months on the second app. Then took 60 days for the 3rd app and then 30 days for the 4th app because you realized you could do it. Yeah. Exactly. And it's, like, so much you know, because as we are approaching everything that we Pete in out there, and it all comes back to insecurity. And especially as founders, we we do allow the insecurity.
And One of the things that happen when you approach to put something out there for the first time, you kinda make sure it's pretty, you go and you cut around the dreams and you groom yourself and, like, everything needs to be pre but then you realize that, actually, there's a way to hack it. And the way you hack it is that being okay with authenticity okay, we do your art because people eventually, it kinda melts them.
And it kinda brings the good side of you, and it makes people be okay with the things that they that you don't like. And, and if you create products that are tent to the statement that you carry, just like a comedian coming every day of the stage. Probably they ramble too much. They they, you know, they feel uncomfortable, but slowly, you start being comfortable in your own body.
And I think that's the kind of if you think about a company as an Morgan as an organism, that's the kind of culture we start into, like, we didn't care, but what you would think about us. We just cared about, let's do something cool that's that fits the manifesto that fits the statement and just put it out there and we're okay. With bunch of things not not being solved right now.
And we're okay that some things are up in the air, and we're okay with the fact that you're gonna have some bunch of questions to us that we're not gonna know how to answer. But what was important is that if the melody was right, people will dance. Doesn't matter if the equalizer or the base or all the lights are not right. That's okay. People will dance. If your Beller is right.
But seriously, with these software products and the language you put on them, your personality, the personality of the team comes out in these products, and the users can feel it. Right? And if you're doing it your own way, and this is something I've known about you for a long time, Ben, is you really do things your own way.
And having that that meld of the insecurity of trying to get it right, but the security of doing it your own way, that that tension comes out in the product And that, I think, really helps people to resonate with those products. So MiR count launches in 2015, you spent 60 days building it, right? A quarter of the time you'd built the last one in. The following month, the south by southwest. Right? So I've got a hotel room there.
You and the team are sleeping on the floor and the beds and meerkat explodes. Take us to that moment. What's happening there? February 28, 2015, we put it on product hunt. And it at that point, it was I think you saw that presentation, like, the three slides that were a memo to a board meeting. Oh, but with Skype works project that we're doing while we're working on air, which was in the matrix, live streaming to your contact Flint.
And what happened is that the CTO and co founder at the time, it tie to Kyiv and basically hacked the shit out of it to do this very simple product that the idea behind it was can we get people from download to go in live to their audience in one click.
And we were able to actually do it for the first time in two clicks because you had to authorize Twitter first But after that, it was one click, and we have your James, and we have your audience, and we have all of this stuff, and it goes out that people can watch, which was the biggest hurdle of all the u streams and the u now and all the live stream ins that were I don't know if people remember. There were so many broadcasting and live streaming products there.
But they couldn't pass on because they were so obsessed in trying to get broadcaster to onboard their audience on And once we realized that this is the biggest challenge, we said, well, why not why not just meet the audience where it is? API was open. And there were so many cool things to do with it. It was so many cool things to do with it. And, you know, I remember sitting sitting in the office with Ittai, and he's like, discovering all these things about the API.
And then we had this one of my favorite people that I worked with, both on house party, and this guy, Morgan Cooley, and Ryan was like, oh my god. I think that when two people tweet, about the same hashtag, a third person, that's what one will do in QA. We're doing QA tomorrow. We discover that if two people tweet about the same hash tag, the third person Pete a push with Ben and James tweet on the same hashtag.
So we decided to put hashtag meerkat on all the streams And what happened is that when people were when people were tweeting, all their friends got to know about haircut, you know, and it kinda discovered that you can actually, in the API, create the every every live stream is a thread. It's a Twitter thread. So all the comments become reply.
Can other people get, you know, and it's basically becomes this monster, and I have this email exchange with Ikai, where he forward me email notifications from, Twitter that and it's letting you know that people, in your network are tweeting the streams or talk because of those those cross signaling that they use, this algorithm that they use, and how we use it into our methods. And I remember he forwarded it to him, and it says, I think this is gonna grow.
And I replied, no. This is going to explode. They're going to explode, and it was, like, 2 weeks before we we released it. We knew that this is gonna be highly explosive content. We designed this beautiful UI where we bring the, the watchers into it. And it was, like, really innovative at the time. You can also watch it whatever angle you watch it, I think Quibi does it now, but we were doing, like, when you can hold it both vertically and horizontally.
And we we did it in in 2015 kind of funny and and cool. You know, what happened is that, Twitter, bought Periscope 2 months before that or, like, 3 months before we launch. But they hadn't announced it. Right? They haven't announced it. And what happens is, you know, they put a 100,000,000 behind that that thing that they bought, and they're like, oh, wow. Like, the startup is taking all, like, this investment that we have.
And the Pete the Periscope app was quite similar to meerkat in its functionality, but it wasn't as viral It wasn't as viral, and I also don't I don't believe that they were, like, copying us or stuff like this. It just the the stars align in a weird way. And it was like this awkward situation, where, you know, you work hard, you sell your company, and all of a sudden somebody else, hijacked sold the all the all the spotlight. And then Twitter moved into basically how to protect their assets.
We're there at South Bay, James, Genesys rocking America chair. There was, like, 20, 20 shirts like this. And whoever wore it was the coolest person on the university. The phone rings, it's like 10 fuck on a Friday night. Exactly. It was, yeah, it was afternoon, Friday night on a good call, and that's Jess Burrelli and, who is now at Google Venture and Kevin will.
Both who I like very much, by the way, are on the phone, and they were both, on the Twitter team there, I think Kevin was the VP product or something like that. Super nice Pete, and they're like, dude, we're sorry, but we're gonna we're gonna close the API tonight. I was not mad. First, like, they dealt with it. You know, they were human about it, and and I also, like, my approach to life is, like, I would do the same. Like, I would do the same. I'm fine to split up. Like, that's my company.
I just put a 100,000,000 behind something Beller, and you're using and and, you know, the guidelines of the API is you cannot use the API to something that competitive with Twitter. It's like bad luck, but it sucks. But we didn't but we didn't know that Twitter had acquired them until like, a day before. Exactly. Exactly. And because it was on a nice Exactly. And that's what they were telling me on the on the call. That's what they were telling me. Like, Hey. We have this thing.
We bought it, and now you're completed with our thing, which is against the policy. And they were very, you know, I, I give it to them. They were very cool about it, and I was I was, like, just dealing with it the way I think people should deal with bad news, which is you just need to suck it up and understand what you can do and what's your next move. You know? There's nothing you you can do, besides looking petty and, like, getting to Pete into other skin for no reason.
Yeah. And you and you still had 2 or 3 more days of playing superstar southby and getting interviewed by everybody. So you needed to keep that going. We showed that to all the interviews and, like, the app was still growing. The app was still growing. It's doing great.
Then I think about, okay, going back in, like, how do you deal with this kind of things and, like, how do you take your liabilities as just like a general framework for people to go out there and think about, like, how to navigate situation like this and, like, something things just, like, suck and explode in your face, but you still have some things that you can do. And so we took a step back, and we started looking at the data. And we're like, okay. This is a liability.
And the liability here is that they're about to launch Feriscope, and they have all this, all this reach. Right?
And not only this, Facebook is announcing that it's gonna be Facebook Live and all this stuff, And we're starting looking into, the use cases that our competitor will go, will venture into, which are celebs, media, and use, and map all those use cases based on what we see from our 2,000,000 users at the point within, like, less than a month, like, 2,000,000 users using Morgan And we map it based on because we have their profiles and we Pete how many following followers they have.
We separate between influencers, media, news, all of these things. And we see that there is no retention for broadcasters on the 99% who are not celebs, median use. And this is where we understand that the only thing that justify an independent company here is if you can capture an ongoing daily basis, obviously, that's that's rule for anyone. And then when you look at Mirka, you say, okay. The only use case here that is a daily use case is select media use.
And if both Twitter and Facebook are gonna fight for it, when they have all the reach, we we're not in business. Like, we don't have a business. And now you can either cry to mommy or you can say, you know what? Let's Flint it on the head. What is a product that will focus on the 99% or not slows me the end user? They're not comfortable being loud. And going live, and that's the reason they are not continuing to engage.
We had a pretty good understanding of, like, what are the things that bother them mostly because people are boring. People are not interested in our day to day. We everybody wants to see Cardi B, but they don't they don't they don't need to see us. So then you ask yourself, what would get on their life on air mission? To bring people together in the most human way possible when they're physically apart. What will get the 99% to actually go live on the day to day?
And it required a certain openness and a certain being open to iteration from the company that was really admirable everybody, you know, were 4 months, and we, we came to a board meeting. And I walked through exactly the conversation, the what I'm saying right now to the board, and I'm like, guys, I, like, I could have put on the on the graph our water number, which was growing. The u DAU growing, the water number growing. But what I showed is that graph versus the retention of the broadcaster.
And I chose to look into the problem and say, this is why we're gonna die in a month or, like, 3, 4, 5 months. It's not gonna work out for us. And I actually don't think that maybe long term, it's gonna be sustainable because if you're gonna get if you're gonna get the day to day person to go live, it's not gonna work out. And, basically, 3 months, 4 months after raising $40,000,000 from Greylock, Josh Beller, And Evan found himself Flint Morgan meeting when I'm saying, hey, guys.
We need to start over. It's a challenging conversation to have, but I'm super grateful that everybody was supportive on that. And we came up with this metaphor of the house party, and it was such a clear, nice metaphor because we can then deduct all the product guidelines and the statement of the product. The manifesto of the product is the house party. So you can imagine people asking on the hills of of Mirka Pete in the team asking why wouldn't we stream the conversations? It it makes sense.
We just just did meerkat. So it makes sense. Maybe it sounds good on paper, and that's where we started having a real clear vision of what is house party and what makes a great house party. And that basically started a process in which within 6 months we were already in market iterating with the market on house party, which was some people think house party is aggressive now. It used to be much more aggressive in how it Pete people together in in conversations.
And we slowly chiseled the way and tweaked it and tweaked it And within within a year from when we had the board meeting of a 1,000,000 daily active on house party, which was really incredible. You know, we didn't we didn't talk too much about what happened at South Buy with the fundraising because it was at that moment that you went you went into a rarified startup startup situation, it just doesn't happen to most founder.
Even the even companies I know that have exited for billions never went through an experience like this where the tables really turn on the VCs and all the VCs saw meerkat. It was the hottest thing. Everyone wanted to invest. And there was a big scramble to try to get your attention to try to get on the cap Beller to try to get your allocation. The sharp elbows came out. James, you were you were controlling that. I was like, James, I don't know anything. I was in the idea of 3 years ago.
I was still like, in in the army in Israel, you're gonna be you're gonna be on the on the you're gonna be controlling the cap table. And I think I still have access at Google Sheet a Google sheet. I said, dude, let's just get a Google sheet, and then we'll just work on it.
And we went from meeting to meeting, and then we just plopped ourselves down in the in the lobby of the Hilton, and one after the other, different venture people came in, and eventually, we just sat with Josh because we knew it was gonna be Josh, Elman, from from Greylock, you know, one of the one of the one of the greatest social media investors in the world. And we then worked on the cap table there, and it was it was it was rapid. It was acrimonious. There was people on phone.
Everybody was on phones walking around the Beller. In the middle of the lobby, it's out by trying to get this deal done. And there are a lot of upset people, because everyone wanted into your You know, I actually have a good lesson from this. I think that it was so much pressure. Here's the thing. Sometimes, you're going back to insecurity. Sometimes you get validation from getting, get this name and that name and this name and another name. And you end up giving a lot of small checks.
Now if you don't have relationship with those people, those small checks specifically if they come from not from the personal money of the person and they're not operators, they're gonna forget about you. And it's not it's just business. It's not like there are bad people or anything. But if you expect somebody to add value to you, either you give them a big check so they have something to lose or you make sure that the check is personal from somebody who does not do investing for living.
Because on both ends, you're either gonna, and, and that person is an operator. It's like somebody who's an operator is is they have a job, she or he has a has a job, they have a specific insight to something that you will need or need through their day to day, and they're putting the personal money. You can always call them and get Beller, and they will help you.
The other way is it's an investor, make sure that they're gonna lose their not lose their socks, but they're gonna lose it's gonna hurt.
Otherwise, you're not you're just not gonna get anything besides making yourself feeling good that you got some names on your Pete table, but those names are not gonna care because it's not exactly their money, and it's not big enough to actually It only gives them bragging rights and you bragging rights, and it's just an ego at this Flint, and it's not really helping your company. Yeah. So you get a great point for for startup investors everywhere.
You know, picking picking your investors, managing that cap table, so that, you're getting the most out of everybody who's got some equity in your company. And and and then also, of course, make sure their personality aligned. Right? Absolutely. Yeah. So I've learned from that. And then, yep, Okay. So that was that was the series a that happened at South Bay in the midst of the chaos. 4 months later, you tell the board, guys, I'm not gonna run from the numbers.
I'm not gonna tell you everything's great. I'm not gonna lie to you and I'm not gonna lie to my team. I'm looking at the internal numbers I'm looking for the problem I'm looking for the weaknesses, and I have found a serious weakness. Yeah. And you could have gone for another 4 or 5 or 6 months before anybody would have known.
I actually even challenged that not to, sorry, add to this that I think we could have rate because we were still growing growing, you know, 20, 30 percent a month, which is, you know, there is a thesis behind it that if it keeps growing, then Facebook not launching their yet to launch their Facebook live might wanna acquire this, and stuff like this. So there were people start calling, right? The the the m and a p the m and a people at all the big companies need to do their job.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And when their boss asks them, have you talked to meerkat? They have to say, yeah. I know Beller Ben's a good buddy. We've had lunch. They have to say that. And so they reach out just to see what the deal is. And so there's relationships that get and they actually, you know, learn something about your business, which is a little odd because they're your competitor. But ultimately, you can't not take the meeting because, you know, you gotta build those relationships.
So that's all going on at the same time. So you lean into the negativity that you see in the numbers. You're not scared of it. You're not pretending. You're not pretending so that you can go raise another bunch of money and they'll then tell Pete. You're you're you're you're honest all the way through. You tell people this is not working. We gotta pivot. The board has courage. The board is their product people. Yeah. And Aidan's got good framework. So Aidan from from Aleph in Israel. Right?
For those of you who are listening. Yeah. And and, you know, also Gigi, who's one of the seed investors in, in life on air, he was so behind. I remember a breakfast with Gigi, we had this breakfast. And I'm like, Gigi, you should see, like, house party, this thing that we're testing, and he's like, go all in on this. Like, I don't know what you're dealing with. Like, leave meerkat. Leave this. Like, he gave me such good boost encourage to, like, go and follow that, and I really I remember that.
Right. To add to the Currier instead of dragging down with doubts and whatnot. Yeah. Exactly. Maybe it's not gonna work. I don't know. No. It was like, do it.
She's a kind of an Israeli approach, which, you know, and it's something that I really liked about growing up in Israel is that ability to be okay with things that are not going your way and try to understand that This is just the way things are, and you can totally be happy and navigate that and find joy in that and just remove in Israel to say somebody eats from my plate, somebody drank from my cup, somebody, you know, all of this, like, you just move it away, and you just okay.
Just deal with a reality as it presents itself. So you make the pivot. You go to house party. You got a million people a year later using the thing. Then what happens? Because, you know, for founders out there, they need to understand that there's a there's a mental pattern you've got to do things your own way, to to bring people together in the most human way pop possibly when they're physically distant. And that is a thread that lines through your personality and the way you approach this.
And the ups and downs were so extreme on your journey so far just to understand the vicissitudes, the the, you know, how how extreme it can be so that they can put their own vicissitudes in perspective. It's even even a guy like yourself who, you know, continues to put out very interesting products and and has such successes like Muir County House Party and has access to everybody in the in the Silicon Valley. You too have gone through the downs as well. So you pivot. It's it's working.
And then what happens? Beller, a quick add to what to to what you're saying, this what I realized over time that this mental framework of bringing people together in the most even way possible when they're physically apart.
It actually started earlier when I started when I learned architecture and, like, dealing with space, and how to create new opportunities for people to interact in ways that create a meaningful experience that that's one of the things that I really love about architecture for some reason, in my 3rd year, that kinda light bulbs turned on. And I said, like, the next space frontier is actually digital.
I'm gonna spend my time being in our to continue being an architect just in a new dimension that is Pete don't even think about it as as a space. And, you know, today, people are talking about presence and how presence important and all these things.
But this has been a clear a motive of mine, something that I have so much passion, and I think it goes to, like, you know, some things for my childhoods and how I got brought up and, you know, pains that I care with myself and learn and go through it in my own journey. But this is how you know, some people deal with their pain and deal with their and grow through singing. Some people, through playing guitar. Some people become actors through, like, process themselves.
And I think for me, it's the creating of this presence and this shared intimacy and that I pursued in architect sure and and then go in and doing what I'm doing all the way to even the company that I'm doing now. So that's great. That's a great point. I want to tie it up because it's like, keep yourself open.
Yeah. You gotta keep yourself open to different, product interfaces to the same emotion, to the same goal, the same healing of yourself and the healing of the people around you, making the world a better place. You know, this is a, this is a thing that that I, I lament a lot, but I mean, you know, if I, I think I said to you the other day that, you know, you're you're feeling me like you're somebody from 2002. Like, when people came to Silicon Valley, not for money, But you came for love.
You came for product. You came for creative creativity. Right? You came for for customers. You came for the people that you were serving in these spaces. And Part of the reason I think that you're able to navigate the ups and downs of this so well is that you're not attached to the money. You're actually just attached to the product and to the vision and what you're creating.
I think that's an important point that we don't, we don't make enough here in Silicon Valley is that everyone's gotten so blinded by the money, but underneath it all is a deep need we all personally have to create something. Those Pete, I think, are the ones who create the great products. Yeah. And, you know, just to to nuance that is like, I'm I'm very much attached to the idea of a good business. That that is able to sustain itself and continue the message that you wanna carry in the wall.
The idea of personal money, fame, power, all the things that we seek because we feel insecure, these are the thing that when things get in rough, people retreat because there are this is something that my wife say, and I totally believe in that 100%. It's like, you have focus on the aim and not on the region. When you hear about focus on the aim, not on the origin. Exactly.
They're not focused on inside, who am I, what am I standing for, what do I love about myself, what are the things that I actually enjoy doing, being present, doing, they focus on, I'm gonna achieve 1, 2, and 3, and they will get me that.
And then when things don't go that way, that's where all the insecurity and tension, and then we're you don't let things happen in a way that is natural for you to grow into it, because you're so obsessed on a defined image that is not really obtained yet, and it's in the far And you have not asked yourself why you are the way you are and what do you want to do and what do you love about yourself and what do you do you feel like you wanna deal with?
Cause there is joy in dealing with all the kind of pain and, like, understanding it. There is real joy in it. And if you are able to detach yourself from this idea of, you know, the unfortunate thing that came with the the blood testing, Theranos. That's the am I pronouncing it yet?
Yeah. Yeah. You know, these and there's other other other example where founders were so obsessed with the aim that even if they started from a place of from a sincere place, it kinda got got lost because they never visited. They were never focused on the origin of where they work. And I still I always work with it also with myself, try to understand why am I feeling insecure? What are the anxieties I have? Why do I procrastinate?
What am afraid of and try to break it down to myself and understand, is it a distraction, or is it true, or what is it that I'm learning about when I'm angry about somebody or when I quote unquote hate somebody, what what are they teaching me about myself? Like, what what is the things inside of me that I don't like? That I look away that makes me, not like this person. And I and I and I learned that's what makes those things kinda I find it to be very intuitive.
Like, once you gotta change we step away. So, yeah, that was a long rambo of saying, I don't have problem with money. I like money, but it's, like, not Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No. No. No. No. No. Money is money is the fuel that goes in the rocket. Right? But it's it's focusing on building the rocket, not on the fuel. And you know, it it also is the case that these startups that we start are self development machines on steroids.
Because you are experiencing so many things so rapidly, so intensely that it gives you so many opportunities to examine yourself and understand what makes you tick. And then to try to understand your team and to understand the people you're co creating with. And that learning about yourself and about them is ultimately the reward for your own transformation. And that transformation well done could lead to a lot of money. But regardless, it could lead to a beautiful product.
The 100 of millions of Pete, like house party does today? Yes. And and the the flip side, the the downside of it is sometimes because of this, our culture, unfortunately, to your point, the the tech culture, our culture, it started to show so much, fetishize it the founder and the idea of the Currier, article, and, like, you know, private Pete, and I'm hearing all these crazy stories about this thing. And I'm, this kind of self fulfilling, I, I, idolizing or idolizing narrative.
Yeah. So it's a, yeah, the self fulfilling narrative. Where the the startup itself become a way for the founder to distract themselves, this be a distraction from their own pain that they need to grow through. And they were not they're actually what it becomes as a drug that is a Band Aid and not a solution. And then things start to just, like, get off the rails And this is where we see the the this incredible story from the Ubers and the Weworks and the where we're like, how things happen?
And I don't know, by the way, I'm generalizing now. I don't know the details of all these things, but I give it as an example of we are busy too much in saying this person did that. That person is so cool. This person has all this money. And, like, we stopped talking about What are we building? What are you creating? Tell me about what it is that is new, that is innovative, and what is the joy?
Like, I really wish that somebody would do a profile on an entire company through the eyes of one of the engineers or one of the product managers. And it's entirely anchored in the day to day thinking of the company and how that works. And that's the profile of the company. But instead, we like just because this is how we are as millennials. Millennials run are now in the phase where they mostly like in all like, they're in all the jobs I would say, like, they're in their peak.
So as millennials, we are reacting to the previous generation by seeking status and going outwards. And where Gen Z is going more inwards. And and it's so apparent, like, how we think about Instagram and Twitter and how and what kind of finders we create and what kind of stories we have because we kind of seek, validity going outwards because we are reacting to the collapse of the middle class that our parents had. And it's just, like, really interesting dynamic.
And and, obviously, how social network came to be is just, like, make these things, much more apparent. Anyways The the core the core of the founder journey, man. The core of the founder journey, and we don't talk nearly enough about it. Because that's your that's your day to day internal life. Okay. So so how's parties doing well? 1,000,000 DAUs? What then happens? In a way, it's it's still doing it's it's still the the following year did pretty well. It's just not as Beller.
Like, then you raise money and Sequoia did are, again, we're in the same situation, which is quite quite incredible. It's like third Pete in, and it the second back to back where you capture lightning in the bottle. And Sequoia comes in and do and do, do leads a $50,000,000 round, with participation of GrayLock and Aleph. And, you know, we we set a plan and, you know, the product is growing, but it's not growing as much as you would expect from company that have $70,000,000.
And there is great engagement, but it's all around teens. And the growth is not enough for you to justify a new round. And the size of the users that we have, which was quite big and engaged community is not big enough to also monetize. So you're kinda stuck. So you find yourself, 2 years later or a year and a half later, and you're like, what's happening? Like, we're kinda there's millions of users using it every day. But it's just not growing the way we would expecting to grow it right now.
Right. And it's not it's not it's not it's not big enough for growing fast enough to be be a threat any of the big companies who would then need to buy it from a defensive perspective the way Facebook bought WhatsApp. Yeah. And Josh will tell you, it's like such an anomaly. Josh Beller, it's like you don't see social products like this. Like, how come something gets stuck like this? And, and we, we it either goes up on that. It either gets big or yeah. And this was just holding.
He's holding steady and it's it's growing, you know, but it's just like, not, not enough. A lot of the same schedule that happens in high school, the fact that people have the same day to day schedule. So they're available and not available to talk at the same time. House Party is a product that's based on presence. So if all your friends are available to talk, have home at the same time, examine at the same time, go to vacation at the same time. They're all available when you're available.
And when you're not available, they're also not available. What happens when they move to college is that this is all out of the window. You know, it's like, people have different schedules, and they're no longer as they can be as active. It's funny. Could be as active, but still they're not gonna match with other people for conversation. And another thing that changes is the code of conduct changes. In high school, you wanna friends with everyone. You wanna be. You wanna know everyone.
You wanna be in the high school parking lot. But in in in the college, it's, you know, you wanna have new friends. You don't wanna friends with anyone, you might have developed more of your self identity. So there are some people you wanna be friends of, and some people you don't wanna be friends of, and you start being more selective about your time and and select about the people that he talked.
And it was an interesting problem in terms of growth because if you look at the classic growth accounting, which I'm pretty fluent there to to to judge, what is the problem and identify the problem. You won't see it. It look it would look like how these disappear. And and we don't know why. We don't know why all of a sudden cluster of these disappear here and disappear there and why, you know, this phenomenon of, like, these just yeah. And it just, like, it's you can't James sense.
And then what we did is started matching it based on classes. So when did you start the class? When is your school and when? And then things started to align and make sense. Oh, people leave to college, and then they don't find the same heat match, and they start to find new friends, but they're all friends come in and interrupt their their flow of of work. And this is where basically said, like, look, we have an amazing product. We have millions of users now engaged. It is growing.
But it just, like, we either need to to sell it or pivot because it's just not we're not gonna be able to fronting steiner away away from this. And we're not gonna be able to, you know, like, when when when start up start to add more and more features. And the only time you need to add features is if you're growing like crazy and you have more and more and more, user personas and use a different user starting using your product, so you add features for them.
But if you're not growing, don't add more features. You know, don't use features to to grow. It's just like not gonna unless they're an enhancement of something in the core frame. I hope that's not too complicated. But what I'm trying to say is, like, sometimes you try to do too much. And you don't wanna you wanna turn into a Frankenstein of a product Yeah.
You know, you could have lots and lots of ideas and everyone in the organization comes up with ideas and pet projects, and I wanna try this feature and that feature change that, then it'll grow. And then you'll just end up with a Frankenstein product. When you think about it as a song or as a dinner, when I think about consumer product, I always think about there are atomic unit of consumer product that you can learn from everywhere.
From your body, from a bodega that you like to go, from a menu in a restaurant, from a song, all of these are things that get other people emotional attachment, And there is something about their location, their timing, the narratives that they are saying within the community that makes them successful. And if you're able to spot that pattern, you can actually learn a lot from this analogy. And what I'm trying to say here is any more icons to the menu will not make this, restaurant successful.
Making this song longer will not make it a hit. That's what I'm trying to say. And it's like, you know, and and and it's it's it's it's an interesting dynamic. It's an interesting dynamic to deal with, but I honestly think that you can learn a lot from the cool, fast casual restaurant that is barely, like, you know, 500 square foot, but it's just killing it. And there's Flint around. There's something about it that's worked, and and you can deduct from it and learn also for your own product.
And by the way, even now throughout the past 8 years that I've been doing this, metaphors like music and food are tools that I use on a day to day basis multiple James to explain, to my team and work with my team Flint understanding what is the attitude and approach that we have to think One of my favorite things is, something that Miles David says, which I think is super important for people who build product in jazz when you think you play the wrong note, it's
the next note that dictates if the previous one was wrong. And product development especially in the 0 to 1 stage product development is Jess. Nobody can sit behind the computer and say, okay. I'm gonna have a hit, a musical hit. Like, you don't rewrite all the stuff and put the drums machine and the baseline and all the effects. And then you first press hit a play, and now you have a hit. That's not how it goes.
And you would need to understand and learn from how creative Pete in different disciplines really come into the fermentation and the process of iterating and understanding what is the kind of feeling we're aiming to and letting things be open it's really hard for engineers and for even product managers that are really product, process oriented, which is something good How do you create a shared language within that team that allows for an open space to see
beyond what's there, to Beller okay with answers that are not there? And how do are we okay with the process where answers present themselves as we're playing the music and feeling what's wrong and right? Or or Beller, what happens. Just like what happened with Gevo, you end up doing a lot a lot horizontally, and you don't know what is your next step because you have no idea where you are. There's so many things that you're doing, right?
And instead of doing ten steps at a time, what you wanna do is, 1, understand where you are and know where to second. And then go to second and look, because there's so many things that you can do. We can do anything with software. We can do literally anything. And that's the beauty of it. How do you navigate within a feeling? So when I work with my teams, I try to create my specs look like one page of a proposal that thinks about the rhythm and the attitude and the melody a little bit of it.
And I I find ways through explaining the goal, the high level goal, and the problem. And through examples, to leave the open space for the discussion between the team and the jamming to actually reach the answer. So I'm trying to, and it's part of my own growth process. How do you move away from defining the answers to defining the question, which is a cliche? But it is but it is what are we what are we asking Pete? Right. And that's that's the beauty of it.
That that's that's, I think, what's what's the beauty of it So you had to pivot or sell? So we had to pivot or Beller, and, we, you know, your $70,000,000 in the bank this is the 3rd the 3rd pivot. House party is the 3rd pivot or even the 4th pivot if you actually count air. You know, at this point, you are 8 years in and $70,000,000 is not, you know, LPs need to see returns. People need to see something.
And it becomes a really hard conversation now with between you and investors, but also between you and your team to convince people to go for another And this is where we had a really it was a hard conversation, but it was a productive one where you kinda realized that, okay, we need to sell. Like, you know, people have, you know, been troopers have been, like, pushed through, like, 2 pivots. Some people, 3 pivots.
You know, this company had so much different cultures, and you just need to say, okay. You know, this is where the journey for that is ending. And then we're gonna we're gonna sell it. We have a great team. We have a terrific product, and we can find a great place to landed and, and hopefully provide value to whoever acquires us. And, we thought we we will be able to sell it to one of the social networks. And I was excited. To be honest, I was, like, excited.
I was, like, you know, I'm gonna sell it to somebody. I know I'm not gonna make money, but I'm gonna learn, like, how much I I'm gonna sure I'm gonna learn from going into a big company. Like, I'm gonna learn. And then it it then we realize that social networks are not gonna do it. And, once you realize that, I had a hard time. Like, the next move, our plan b was like, okay.
We're gonna go after media companies and and gaming companies, which is a really good idea, but it's just not who I am going going into. And then I had to have a conversation with the board, with my cofounder and said, you know, this is just not not me. It's it's I I don't know how I can go to a media company and, and work on this. But it's a great plan. And, I was lucky because my co founder could step up to that. And that's that was her break, background.
And she did she and the team did a great, great job finding, epic games was a perfect match because we had so many people using a house party when they used Fortnite, and it all worked out. And I got to start a new company. And, and wind up selling the company, which is great. And the James over there at Epic Games and now that things blowing up and Exactly.
And that's something incredible to be proud of because, you know, we've built that product together, and they added all these James that I'm sure are Pete love using during during the COVID, and, people find a lot of comfort in it in these days, and it's pretty incredible. Like, I feel super proud dude. How many people get to say, hey. I had a product with, like, hundreds of million people using it. It's, like, pretty cool. Do you feel do you feel regret? Do you feel regret that you sold it?
No. At the time, like, you cannot predict the you you cannot predict the COVID, and you don't know what will happen after it goes away. You know, you cannot you have no idea. And I think that we did the right decision, and I think Epic got a great deal. Everybody got a great deal. Like, the team got a great deal. I got a great like, everybody got a great Yeah. And it's still alive and it's still growing.
You get to see the fruition of all the work that you did for 8 years to navigate there to your 4th your 4th pivot work. Right? Exactly. So what do you when you look back, what was the highest high? And then and then what was the lowest low? The highest high I was baking bread at home, and I was doing a process. This is before it became, like, Trinity because of COVID. We're talking 2016 here. And I gotta push notification from this is, sorry, 2 end of 20 team.
I got a push notification from our POC product of house party. And I got into the zone when I'm sometimes I have this feeling where, like, things click and I start to jive with it, and I understand it. And I was listening to this song of Drake back to back. And as I'm listening to back to back, I'm kinda kneading my dough, and it's the first or second notification that comes from the POC of House Party.
And it's Ryan Cooley, and this guy, Will Dennis, who is who is now actually a film director Morgan he has a movie out. It's like, I mean, incredible. These are guys who are on your team. Claim with the with the field. These are notification members of the of the Using the first the first POCs. And I'm like, back to back, and I swipe in and, you know, Ryan is doing this thing. Will is doing this thing.
Like, one of the first conversations on house party, and it was, like, a real genuine moment And I was listening to the song, this back to back, and it's like dawned on me that we're going to have a back to back hit, because that feeling of, oh my god, this is an incredible Morgan. Like, these are my friends. They're jumping in, like, all team members, but, like, we're we're friends. Like, they're we're jumping on. We're having a conversation.
I'm leaving though, like, and song is banging in the in the in the background of Drake back to me. I'm like, we are going this is gonna work. Like, it just and it was a high day. It's like the joy of, like, the small things. But it was knowing that you're building something true and unique and special, and it grabs you without you it has its own life because it grabbed your attention. You didn't seek its attention, and you're like, we're gonna do it back to back. And he and he did.
Yeah. And when you step back to back and Drake is singing back to back, you mean that you caught lightning in a bottle with meerkat, and then you're gonna catch it again without party. That was that was yeah. That's the idea. I'm just clarifying for the people listening. That that's what you mean by do it a second time back to back. Yeah. That that's amazing. That's amazing. And what was your lowest low?
The lowest low was definitely the understanding that cannot pivot it again, and I will have to I will have to sell it. And, like, you know, and and making peace with it and understanding that this is the right course of action. Sure. Sure. So you're, after that, you become an EIR benchmark. You start coming around and meet with all your friends like me and talking through new ideas. And now you're launching your next product slash talk. Tell us about the slash talk.
Beller, slash talk is, is a product for fast decentralized conversations. And the idea is that we're gonna be we're anti meeting tool. So we're trying to break down. So so it's for work. So it's for work. So instead of going after consumer, you're going after sort of the work environment? Or I'm going after people who have Morgan are tired to spend their time in meetings that are not productive. They are the lowest common denominator, like time and getting people on the same thing.
And I think it actually hinders creativity where we tie ourselves to this arbitrary constraint of time And usually they're not inclusive because the person who talks most is the person who's, like, getting the most reward for the meeting And I think that as creators, as contributors, and there's, like, in slash talk, we just put our manifesto there as contributors, We everybody inside is both contributor and talker.
And we say talker, talker is the side of us that is insecure, that is always preamble meet like, long preamble in meetings, bloated agenda, trying to to say something. And the contributor is the one beside of us that try to Beller. And I think that the tool of meetings, the idea of meetings is is important for some use cases, but the most use cases it actually suppresses the part of us that Beller, and it gives rooms to the part of us the talk.
And what we're trying to do with slash talk is to break down the meeting into the building blocks of the topics, the people, and the time, and we're trying to reorganize conversations to that's gonna be topic driven. Gonna be super fast. And it's totally different way to think about how you construct a a live conversation with you Pete. And and it's really cool. You know, we got we got some people worked very early on on house party, back in the team, working on this.
I, my cofounder, used to be the GM of engineering of Skype, and he's, like, both an incredible engineer and can manage a team of 300 people, which, and he brought some, you know, early Skype on and, and we get some people on Facebook and, and it just they worked on interesting products. And, it really starting to jam really cool. We are definitely in the Jazz phase right now. It's a totally different way of how you jump on a quick conversation with your teammate.
Another way to look at it, just to kinda Is it we have inbox for meetings, it called calendar, but we have all these, like, quick 3 to 5 minutes microconversations usually in the form of like, Hey, do you have a minute that are starting to increase more and more as we the organization becomes more remote and decentralized? And we don't have an inbox for them.
We're running around with, like, little little topics that we scribble that we need to catch up with James or need to catch up with this designer. And there's no inbox for them. And there's no organizing principle of how do we have a place for all this conversation to happen? And not only this, how do we make sure that the value that's come out of it is something that a lot of people can build on top. So we're focused specifically on internal quick unscheduled calls. That happens.
So I'm excited about this, and we're gonna see we're gonna see what happens. Yeah. It's well, I think it's exciting. I think there's it's such a fertile soil. Right? I mean, there's so there's so little solutions for that and it's such a big need. And I think in 10 years, when there's a solution, whether it's slash talk or something else, we're gonna look back and say, heck did we do it before? I mean, it feels like there could be that kind of a switch.
And it's like, you know, in one spectrum, we have the presidency things like be live now, call people now, or be just like live. And on the other side of the spectrum, you Pete the meeting, the schedule meeting, But the work is being done actually in the middle. There is a gray area that doesn't even have a namespace. What is a micro condensation? What is a quick like, we don't we we you talk to engineers in Stripe, will say, we don't have meetings.
And then I ask them, do you jump on a quick call with, with your colleagues? Oh, all the time. They don't even call it meetings. And now you need to understand, okay, there is this new emerging use case of this, like, quick unscheduled calls. And if we believe that organization and work is going to continue to centralize. This use case is going to grow more and more. And there's no inbox for it. There's no organizing principle for it. And this is actually where work is getting done.
This is where 2 ICs review code. This is where an engineer and a designer see where spec is missing. This is where 2 people review why they're getting errors in the compilers. This is where work is getting done.
And if you're able to actually solve the pain there by owning that funnel, you actually sitting on where conversations and the workflow actually converge, and you can start indexing the conversation about work with the actual work And this is how this thing can become and actually a system of record of the internal conversation in the organization where people can actually point back to all the conversation happening around the file, all the, things that
are relevant for you to know and not know when you approach your work. And the, the approach we on it. It doesn't even look like an app. I'm excited. I'm, I'm really excited to show it to people. Well, if I know anything about you, it's going to evolve and iterate, over the next few years, it's something that, catches the lightning in the bottle. So I'm excited to watch it. Yeah. Ben Reuben. It's been a great pleasure to have you, my friend. And, thanks for coming. Thank you.