Instagram CEO, Adam Mosseri on Threads: The Journey from 0-100M Users; What Worked, What…

Bartending was one of my first jobs. Just paying for sort of rent and stuff in New York and in university. I spent a lot of time as a teenager in service. So bartending as a waiter, dishwasher, you know, like short chef, that kind of thing. And I think service is a really good thing to do early in life because it teaches you some humility, but also how to work with people in a wide right range of people because you end up with all sorts of clients, whether you’re waiting or bartending specifically.

And then figuring out how to manage different personalities at a young age, I think, is also a good thing. And then also, it’s just good to appreciate good service.

As a designer, I love design. Honestly, if I could wave a magic wand, I think I would be a specialist. I’ve always romanticized, like, the amazing machine learning engineer, the amazing product designer, the amazing architect or shoemaker. It’s just not my shape. I’m not great at anything, really. I just have a wide range of things that I can do reasonably well. So my strength is in my breath. And so for me, I loved design, but I was solidly middle of the pack at best. I made up for lack of natural talent with just sheer brute force, just hours.

And I think it was good, and I think I learned a lot that way, and I actually took a lot from my time as a designer on problem solving. What did you take from your time in design on problem solving? Design, I think, is about making sure you’re incredibly clear about what problem it is that you’re solving, articulating multiple solutions, figuring out how to effectively evaluate those solutions, figuring out how to really take feedback and sift through the noise and find the signal. But, yeah, like I said, I wasn’t great at it.

And then Brett Taylor was my boss, and I was the director of design for mobile. It might be 2012,

Well well Yeah. When I first started it’s better now, and it actually was better in 2012, to be fair. But when I first started, we had this amazingly talented group of designers, somewhere between eight and twelve of us. They just did whatever they wanted. Like, it was one of those weird things where they were talented. They got really good work done. They worked really hard, and you would ask them to work on something, and they would smile and nod, and they would work on something else.

Whatever they thought was the most important thing. And I was reliable because I had a job before Facebook. I ran a small design firm. I was, like, used to having clients and felt like I had a bias towards doing what the client asked for. So when I joined a company, had a bias towards doing what my boss asked me for,

I think that it became clear to me that a lot of times for the people who are senior at the company, and I was not senior, that what they really wanted was to be able to hand you a problem and then not to hear anything back from you until it was solved. I internalized this early. That’s kinda how I felt when I was a boss running my own design firm. And so I just remember with a couple people, I just was like, look. Whenever I get handed something, I didn’t tell them this.

I was just like, okay. I’m gonna do it and fix it and do it well. They’re not gonna hear back from me. Might be a day. Might be a week. Might be a month. Until the answer or the response is, I took care of that, just so you know. And so I definitely leaned into that for

I don’t have that. No. No. I don’t. But I don’t know if I want it. I love my team. I have so much affection for my team, probably more than it’s healthy. And part of it is because they’re all particularly my directs are all much better at me at something, and I can learn from them. And so I try and create an environment where they can challenge me. I know that sometimes I take up too much air in the room, so I’m always trying to figure out how to delegate more, how to empower them more publicly so that they don’t do the wrong thing even if I ask

reason? No. No. I understood it. Wasn’t why I thought that the world was gonna go.

So I do think as a lead, you’d need to talk a lot, and I think people underestimate this. Our business model is ads and marketing. If If you talk to anybody in that world, they’ll tell you it’s not just about the message, it’s also about the frequency of how often you deliver that message. And then internally, we decide we’re gonna do something different. We make a post internally, and one out of eight employees reads it, and we move on with our lives, and we’re surprised when the whole company doesn’t move along with us.

And so I’ve tried to really embrace some advice I got early. Who was this from? I forget who it was. I could have come back to me, which was if you really wanna move the team on something, you need to say it so many times that you literally want to throw up in your mouth if you say it again, and then you need to say it again and again and again and again. And it can be tough because you can feel like you’re not being heard, or you can feel like you’re being predictable or just annoying.

But the truth is people need to hear things multiple times to fully internalize them. And so I do think from the part of that quote that resonates is, I do think you need to talk a lot. Now I also think you need to be very clear about when you’re just gonna make a call and when you’re not. And there are some times where it’s like, no. If I don’t make this call, we’re gonna waste too much time, or I have the right occasionally as a leader to just use my veto power, so to speak.

But then you have to be careful because if you do that too much, you stifle creativity. You don’t create enough space. You cannot hire or retain the most creative and interesting talent. So you have to use that sparingly. But that’s like a card to play, and you can play it every once in a while, but you can’t play it every day.

IC, honestly, anybody early in their career is probably just to get a range of different experiences. I think it’s super important to broaden your skill set or to even just experiment with different types of work so that you can figure out in a more informed way what your values are, what matters to you, what your aspirations are. Because the most important thing over the long run is that whatever you want to be professionally, that you’re clear and honest with yourself about that, and then you need to shape your work to be an overlap between what helps you achieve that, and then if you work at a company, what the company needs of you.

And your manager’s job is to find that overlap and help you with that, but not everyone’s a great manager. So I think you need to do that proactively. And I think early on in the career, if you wanna get into management or become a more senior leader, I think range is valuable even if you wanna be a specialist because I think it helps you make a more informed decision about the stake in the ground you wanna place about what your aspirations are. But you also have to be okay picking that stake up and moving it because maybe you learn something and it changes.

But it’s better to move towards a goal that you set and change it later than to float through. And large companies and quickly growing companies like the one I work for will just pull you week to week in the fire over the week. And so if you don’t put that stake in the ground, you can really lose a lot of time and then pop your head up and be like, woah. I don’t even

It probably would be more like emotional support, but probably would just be be patient. Has it been more emotionally challenging than you thought? The first year was really tough. Three, four months in my take was like, I’ve made a horrible mistake. I’m just Why was that? Just too much? It was a lot. I mean, we didn’t only lose Mike and Kevin, who are amazing product thinkers, part of the reason I joined Instagram was to work with them. We ended up losing pretty much our whole leadership team a little bit before and a little bit after that.

So in my first year, I had to hire a head of design, engineering, product management, data science, research, HR, communications, marketing, and a COO. It’s just a lot. So there was a period there where I was very alone. That was what was really hard because I feel like if you have a really strong staff and they and they have trust and they get along and they can challenge each other and they bring different skills, you can kinda take on anything. And if you don’t, anything could become a problem.

And those that trough and that, you know, four or five months in was pretty pretty Can I ask who did you talk to? Because that is learning. I talked to some friends who are CEOs of other companies. What did they advise you? To focus on things that would pay off longer term. So they’re like, look. You can mess things up in the short term, but get your staff in the place. Aim high. Don’t compromise. Because maybe that’ll make the next three months worse, but then the next three years will be better.

I talked to Will Cathcart a lot who runs WhatsApp. I think he was running the Facebook app at the time. He’s been a good guy to bounce ideas off of for a long time now. Some friends outside of the company who had left the company who knew it, but some people are just

a challenge. I’ve been lucky. I have an amazing team. I’ve made a few mistakes in hiring, but for the vast majority of those hires I made in that first year are still at the company and still in the positions at Instagram. But, yeah, you have to kind of pick the people based on their skills, but also based on does the group end up with the set of skills you need from this group as opposed from each individual? And then you kinda have to also try and build that and pick people for whom they’re gonna have some chemistry without having them all be alike, and that’s an art, not a science.

So, you know, it’s an it’s a work in progress. I’m always working on figuring out how to increase the rapport and the trust within that senior most team.

I mean, one is actually some advice that Kevin and Mike gave me later. And I had a drink with them maybe six or nine months in, and I had spent a ton of time that year trying to make sure that the team was in a good place. There was a lot of anxiety with the founders leaving. Are we gonna get swallowed by the big company? Are we gonna lose our identity? You know, I spent a lot of time trying to clarify our identity to try to boost morale, team meetings, roundtables, q and a’s, you know, all this kind of stuff.

And Kevin’s advice was, look, that’s all nice, but really what’s gonna boost more than anything else is doing really good work and succeeding in the market, and everything else is kinda noise. I think he’s right. I I still value investing in org leadership and in communication a lot. I spent a lot of time on it. I do weekly q and a’s with my whole team. But I really do think that over the long run, the thing that’s going to get people the most rallied, the most excited, the most motivated, and the most effective is doing good work and being successful.

And so I’ve been trying to balance that and make sure that I don’t do too much to focus on the short term reactionary and more to focus on how do we really just deliver over years as opposed to worry

something

I said, I’m gonna be a sponge, and I’m gonna try and learn as much as I can as quickly as I can, and I’m not gonna push for any change for at least a couple months. I ended up breaking my promise in one place, but for the most part, I kept it, and I think that helped. Where did you break your promise? The safety and integrity work, we were running too much of our own stuff and not leveraging the much larger teams at Facebook and in the central teams.

I think there were more engineers that worked on safety integrity at the company at the time that then worked at all of Instagram. And so I was like, let’s just do that. They’re They’re to do with all of this hard stuff. And so that was a big culture shift for that team to go from defining and implementing and enforcing your own policies to integrating with a much larger machine, so to speak. But it was also the midterm elections since 2018. I was like, we just can’t wait.

Sorry, guys. Like we said before,

you just have to make

gotta make mistakes. The biggest blow up was the press cycle the summer before last around what was called externally Panavision, which actually meant something different internally. And it was a confluence of a bunch of different changes that were happening at once. So ended up being one of those words that people just projected onto it whatever they didn’t like, and so it kinda took on a life of its own. So we were introducing recommendations into feeds, content that you it’s not from accounts you would follow, very controversial.

We were leaning into video. You know, our heritage is photos, also controversial. Creators were frustrated with their reach. I think some of that was for good reason. Some of it’s because people always want more reach. And we were also experimenting with a pretty radically new design for the main tab. And it just all was a little bit too much too fast, and it all kind of blew up in our face. And there was an interaction between the creator community and the media and it kind of ping ponged.

And then I did a video explaining what we’re doing, and then I became a meme for a week, which was fun. I think The Daily Show did it pretty funny, actually. Rebiting impression of me. Was it funny at the time? Were you like, oh, no. So I was trying to get I was trying I was trying to calibrate. Because on one hand, like, I do think that if you’re not making mistakes, you’re not trying big enough things. So if I if I had no big painful moments in the last couple years, that would mean that we were being too conservative.

So I’m I’m glad even though it was not fun. On the specific, like, all the memes of, a ban I was wearing a yellow sweater in the video, so there was, like, a lot of banana, a lot of mini me memes, like, a lot of stuff. So I was, like, sending stuff to some friends. They’re like, is this mean or is this funny? Because it I like it’s hard for me to tell. And, like, my brother’s like, this is just funny. I sent a bunch to my wife, and she didn’t respond to any of it.

And she just isn’t, like, interested, I guess. This was all happened for a whole week, then a week later, she’s like, hey. What what happened again this week? You said something was going on?

key thing is you make sure both sides are heard, and then you make it very clear who’s the decision maker, and you make it very clear when there’s a decision. And you have to remind people that it’s important to disagree and commit, because if you’re just gonna question a decision upstream, downstream over and over again, you’re just gonna do everything poorly. That one is tough, though. There’s a bias a lot of us have to want things to return to the way they were, even though that’s not possible.

That one was That was? Really leaning into recommendations and feed. That was the hardest. And why was that feed? Because I just knew there was gonna be so much backlash. It wasn’t because I questioned if it was the right thing. It was so clearly the right thing to do. Basically, what people don’t realize is they think of Instagram as a feed of square photos, sometimes in chronological order. And if you look at how people share, all of the growth has been in stories and in DMs over the last five years or so.

And to the degree there is growth in feed, it’s all in video. It’s not in photos in a lot of ways, at least in terms of what people consume. And, you know, if you look at how teens spend their time on Instagram, they spend more time in DMs than they do in stories, and they spend more time in stories than they do in feed. Yet people think of Instagram as a feed, and it’s the third most important surface at best, maybe fourth now for teens who are at some of the most important communities on the platform.

Plus, all the friend sharing is moving in that direction, but you don’t share personal moments in feed today the way you did five or ten years ago. You share them in stories or in messages more so. So Feed had to evolve. Otherwise, it would just slowly decay. Exactly. And so recommendations are a way to tap into this huge, rich repertoire of amazing content that exists on the platform that you might not even know about yet and continue to make sure that feed is alive and well.

People, they say, like, why? You don’t show enough of my friends’ posts. It’s because your friends don’t post that much Mhmm. To feed, but it’s easier to think it’s the algorithm. So it was so clear the right thing to do, but it was so clear that it was gonna become a scapegoat. For anything you didn’t like about Instagram, you would just blame the rex. Like, a super rex is what we call recommendations for short internally.

me shift more resources towards messaging. Actually, at one point a couple years ago, I think I put the entire stories team on messaging. Wow. Why? Take out all the text. There are more photos and videos shared in DMs than there are shared in stories, and there’s way more shared in stories than there is in feed. So just forget about the text for a second. Just the photos and videos. Just the media, the rich media. It’s a bigger deal and growing faster in DMs anywhere else. But the thing is we’re not a messaging app.

If I’m was gonna run late to today’s podcast, the best way to let you know would probably be to text you on WhatsApp. It wouldn’t be on Instagram. What Instagram DMs are great for is they provide you an excuse to start a conversation. We call them conversation starters a lot internally. If you switch universities or you go you’re going to unity for the first time, you switch high schools, you you have a crush. You know, replying to someone’s story is socially acceptable in a way that a cold text is not.

Sending them a funny reel you found in feed or more recently notes. Notes are basically aim status, but better looking at the top of the inbox. Anybody above 20, like, doesn’t use them very much. Unbelievable how much they’ve moved Instagram engagement overall, app level engagement for teens. And they’re just so an excuse to start a conversation. Yes. What you’re up to, but maybe it’s a question, but they’re just a reason to give someone a buzz.

Yeah. So there’s a couple ways to deal with it. I think it’s super valuable to be willing to prioritize certain segments over others. We care about young people, and we care about creators most. Because young people, I mean, they grow up, but also they are where creators gravitate to over time, and they set trends, And they often serve as a bellwether. And creators, I just think, are becoming more and more important over time for a bunch of reasons we can go into. So the first thing is to be willing to make that prioritization decision and be like, look.

I’m gonna eat some cost to overall app engagement or even overall revenue in the short term because I think this is gonna be better and healthier for the company in the long term or for Instagram in this case in the long term because either we’ll break out of a local maximum or we’ll be more defensible. And then two, I think it’s super important if you wanna keep the experience simple, and I don’t think we’ve done a good enough job at this, to embrace certain ideas like progressive disclosure.

So an app should become more complicated as it needs to be and not be complicated if you don’t. And so notes is a nice example because if none of your friend posted a note, it’s just the active now tray. It just shows you who’s on right now. And you might not even know that notes are a thing. But if people start to share notes, then it starts to show you both notes and active now next to each other. That’s relatively elegant because you can think of your note as a status and your active now as a status, and so it’s sort of seamless.

But then if you don’t, it kind of elegantly turns into something simpler. Is simple always

No. And I’m gonna get crucified by a bunch of designers for saying so. I have a strong bias towards simplicity. I think Instagram has benefited greatly from being simple. But I think to say it’s always better is a mistake. I think of simplicity as a means to an end, and you have to be clear about what that end is. Maybe it’s usability, maybe it’s broad appeal, but there are instances where a more complicated thing

Yeah. No. It’s thing. Is that deliberate? No. It’s too the app is too complicated. I mean, let’s be serious. I think it’s gotten more simple over the last twelve months or so. We consolidated some of the design patterns and primitives. We removed some of the tabs, but it we still have more to do. When you manage a large team and they get excited about a new idea, they often wanna just build a new thing, and it’s tougher and more work to extend an existing pattern or primitive for a new use case than to just invent your own new one because you have to coordinate and you have to maybe it’s not quite as specialized for this thing that you guys are so excited about.

But if you don’t do that, you just slowly add and more complexity to the app in a way that I think burns you over the long run, so death by a thousand cuts. So we actually have like, I was talking to our head of design and one of our product leads two days ago about how do we carve out a certain percentage of the team’s time to just unship things that aren’t used that much or don’t create that much value and proactively look for opportunities to consolidate things to make them simpler and easier

ship was the activity feed. Activities are getting notifications, and there was a place you could go to see all the things your friends had liked, and it was fun. Like, it was a great way to discover new content, but it’s a little bit creepy. Just to be like, I’m gonna check out. What’s Adam like? Yeah. Yeah. Adam’s liking a lot of this. No. That seems a little weird. I got so much hate in my DMs about that. It was less than 1% of the users who used it, but that’s still, you And they DM’d eat?

People. Oh, you should see my DMs. Yeah. Really? A lot of DMs. Yeah. I just get it’s my birthday. All I want for my birthday is a blue check mark.

Yeah. I mean, it was it was I mean, Reels has been huge for us. Reels is pushing 50% of time spent in the app at this point, not quite there. And before Reels, we had short form video, but I don’t think we had designed the format to really embrace the form factor of a phone. And I think, you know, Reels being full screen, sound on is more fun and immersive, particularly during the pandemic when you’re not bothering anybody because you’re home. Focus on creators, first person.

All of these things were ways to embrace where the world is going and the platform in which we were building. And we hadn’t leaned into all of that. And TikTok’s rise was just mediocre after years of struggling to get anything to be retentive. When you see a competitor do something, I think it’s super important to be humble enough to learn from it. And sometimes, that will mean building something that looks a lot like it, and sometimes it means figuring out what needs it’s meeting and how you might meet those needs in a way that’s more native to what you do, and then a range of options in between.

We lost a whole year. I still go back to this. This may be one of my biggest regrets. The first version of Reels we built was built on top of Stories. It just didn’t work. Why? It was because Stories was growing, so we thought stories would be a good foundation on which to lean into short form video. But the thing that’s amazing about stories is how depressurized they are. People share so much to stories, and there’s just way more stories than anyone has time to see or most people have time to see.

So the the read through rate is very low. You know, I don’t know what it is, but it’s maybe in the teens. You can’t build a short form video product that particularly focuses on creators if most of the videos they create aren’t seen. But we were trying to keep Instagram simple. We were trying to double down on the momentum of stories. We were trying to lean into how younger people use Instagram when they use stories way more than they use feed. And we lost nine to twelve months, and we ended up getting it right by leaning into feed and making a couple other strategic changes around recommendations and unconnected content that were right.

But this was all pre COVID nineteen. If we had a solid foundation before everyone was at home and just spending a whole bunch of time on their phones, the whole trajectory of the app would have been completely different. And instead, these these things all landed, but some before, but a lot after.

I think how big we are relative to competition would be super different. And we’re catching up. We’re growing really fast. I think we’re growing the fastest of the big players, but it’s very hard. Because when if you’re gonna try and compete, and we do. Right? I mean, it’s a competition has gotten fiercer every year since I’ve been at the company. You can’t just make something as good as the competition. You have to make something that’s better, because why would I bother switching if it’s just as good or even if it’s only 10% better?

So Do see Reels as better than TikTok? For certain segments and not for others. Like, TikTok is amazing at a couple of things. They are amazing at exploration based ranking, so discovering new talent and helping new talent break. We, for a long time, had a strong bias towards showing people things that we were pretty confident they would like because a lot of other people like them, and it’s easier to rank that kind of content. And that sort of reinforces the existing hierarchy. And TikTok was really good at building the systems from the ground up to be more content first and to go find things that you might love and you never would have heard of before.

And therefore, was also just really entertaining, really entertaining. I think they still are the most well executing competitor I think we’ve ever faced. There’s a couple others that are up there, but they’re, I think, at the top of that. Are

In the video space, yeah. The other folk who are really fast and really good and I respect a lot is Telegram. Telegram is just really good. They build something really well, and they can pivot quickly. And when they decide to do something, they get it out.

but I’m sad with luck. I spent I spent five years running News Feed. Everything at Instagram has seemed infinitely more friendly.

we are willing to, when somebody pioneers a new format, to go and adopt that format if we think it’s gonna become an industry standard. Stories is a good example. Stories is you see stories everywhere. There’s stories on YouTube. There’s stories on Pinterest for a while. Obviously, Twitter did it for a while. Part of our DNA is that we are competitive. We are always worried that the world will change around us, and we won’t change fast enough to keep up. So we are willing to take risks that sometimes really

try to make sure that you’re understanding what is the fundamental human need that’s being met, and is that need gonna probably persist it or not. Instagram has changed a ton over the years, but a lot of it stayed the same. But those fundamental needs are the same. And so when you’re looking at either a trend or a competitor or how someone’s abusing or a community’s abusing the app, then you can learn a lot from how people abuse your app. If you can explain it not only as based on some sort of viral mechanic, but also based on it meeting a need in a fundamentally richer or better or different way, then you wanna play in that space.

What have you learned from how people abuse the app? Early Facebook days before we had photos, people just kept changing their profile picture, like, every day, multiple times a day. I’m like, oh, sounds like people wanna share photos. Maybe we should build that.

Yes. I mean, no. But yes.

I won the Wimbledon yesterday, and they asked the one of the winners of this woman’s semis, how do you feel? Yeah. I was like,

I thought we had something, but look. When you’re launching a new app, it’s always more likely to fail than succeed. The median number of new apps installed a month is zero for the average person. So you’re just you’re you’re swimming upstream. But I did say I was more excited about this one than I have been about anything in a while, but I did wanna recognize it was a big risk. And look. The the numbers are staggering, but it’s just sign ups. It’s it’s way easier to build something that people are willing to try than build something that people wanna continue to use in a month or a year from now.

So this is the past first eight days I could have ever possibly imagined. But what really matters is how well do we iterate, how well do we how quickly do we improve the experience so that it is compelling enough that people

the key reasons for the success, is that you’re sitting in with your Instagram account. It’s not a separate account. And you can import your identity, but you can also essentially import your graph by just following everyone you already follow. And you can follow people who are not even on threads yet, so that when they do join, that you automatically are connected. And so that we can even tell you, hey, you’ve got 10,000 followers on this app already. You haven’t even installed it yet. Do you wanna try it?

Pretty compelling value proposition. Sure. And so I think that was that was key. Now, look, I do think the public conversation interest graph isn’t necessarily the one you’re the same in terms of your interest as what you follow on Instagram, which is why we allow the graphs to fork. We will build over time, I think, a graph sync option. So if you want just to have the same graph, you can, and we can make sure that stays in sync for you. But I think it was also very important, particularly to the team, to allow people to choose a different experience or a different graph if they wanted one.

And so I think we’ve found a really good balance between making it really stupid easy to just pull everything in on day one, but also if

I think it’s gonna be a very personal choice. I think for a lot of people, it’s just gonna be easier not to have to think about it and just be like, it’s 80% the same anyway. I just want you to keep in sync. Did you think

Yes. We talked about it, but we thought that for enough people, probably the majority, that either would be enough overlap that would make a lot of sense to just allow you to quickly do it. Now you can also select. You don’t have to select the whole group. It just seemed like it would be the majority use case. And with Threads, I think, is a really nice balance where it’s different enough that it’s there’s a reason for it to be separate app that we debated that a lot internally.

But because there’s a heavy overlap in terms of the interest graph between what conversations you wanna be privy to and what photos and videos you wanna be keeping up with, that it really allowed us to lean into that. And it is no way it would have been as successful if you had to bootstrap the graph from scratch.

No. I think it’s too black and white. I do think there’s tension. Who you care about and who you wanna hear from are not the same. What do you want your Instagram to be experienced to be if I ask you about it in the abstracts over the long term is probably pretty different than what you’d like and interact with on a daily basis in the app. That’s the tension between sort of first order and second order preferences. And so things are always a bit more complicated.

The thing that’s really working about Instagram right now with Reels is the connection between the two. So you can see a bunch of amazing videos from people you know or don’t know, but aren’t necessarily your friends. And then you can share them with your friends in DMs. And that brings your friends back to the app, and then they discover something, and then they might share it with someone else. The thing that I think people don’t always realize is video, by its nature as a format, is actually really challenging for all the old social social networks.

It puts a lot of downward pressure on the ads business. Because if you watch one video for ten seconds, you would have before, you know, scrolled through four posts and probably seen an ad. And so it’s it’s a challenge. Actually, video tends to be good for time spent and bad for everything else. Bad for revenue, bad for comments, bad for likes, bad for sends, etcetera. What worries about Reels, because we have the inbox integrated into Instagram, is this sort of flywheel where you consume things, you send them to friends, then the sort of conversation, maybe they use Instagram more, they wanna check out what’s going on today.

They discover something, they send it back to you or to another friend. And so the fact that growing video has massively grown sense, which is a pure friend to friend interaction, even if you take out the Reels shares, because as they start conversation, I might send you a funny, you know, football clip, and then we talk about something else Mhmm. Is really, really exciting because everything that we did in the video space before that I was involved in at Instagram and Facebook came at the cost of people’s connections, and Reels is the opposite.

These things can be symbiotic if you design the experiences thoughtfully, but that that doesn’t mean there are no tensions.

I mean, I think it’s too early to tell on the thread side. I think Reels is embracing that people wanna consume video even though they don’t share as much video, and giving people a way to connect with friends that embraces that preference. And I think recommendations also help with that. So I think that’s that’s sort of the intersection of entertainment and connection or friends, I think, what’s kind of working there. With Threads, I mean, we’ll see we will see it. I’m just refreshing the dashboard to make sure everything is eight days in.

So it was very clear. When you’re starting something new, there’s always a question, which is, like, do need to get people on it so that the creators will come, or do you need to get creators on it so the people will come? And my biggest fear specifically with Threads, and I I think the team had the same fear, was that people would show up and there’d just be nothing there. They’d be like, I’m out. Seems nice. And we learned this actually from IGTV a lot too, which is we should focus on the creator side.

Because also feeds are very head heavy in general, and so is text. So, basically, that’s to say that you have to assume that Twitter and other feed products in general tend to have most of the content consumed is produced by a small number of people. So even more so than stories by a lot actually. So we’re like, okay. How do we get there to be a critical mass of content early? And we were trying to create something that was a less angry space. You often, I think, in a way you can’t measure, can set the tone for a product with some of the decisions you make upfront.

So we had always known early that we wanted to get a bunch of creators into the app early. We actually wanted to do it for longer. We only did it for I think it was, like, forty hours.

Oh, yeah. No. No. It’s not me. We have a great small, lean, mean partnerships team, and so we we picked verticals that we thought would be important because, mostly we look for verticals where they already did well on Instagram, and there was a vibrant commentary community around that. So we do great with athletes, and also sports commentary is its own sort of genre in a way. And should I be offended if you didn’t ask? Yeah. You You should be slant. Well, we weren’t I we weren’t focusing on tech.

Don’t call me in my product, but We were focused. That’s fair. I’ll earn it one day. I’ll to ship a couple more things at work. No. We weren’t going after tech. We weren’t going after news. We weren’t going after politics. We were focused on musicians. We’re focused on fashion. We’re focused on athletes. We’re focused on beauty. We’re focused on actually, all of those have these amazing, you know, creators and personalities that people are interested in and all these amazing commentators who talk about that world. And look.

Everyone’s gonna come. Like, we’re not gonna try to be an exclusive club here, but that’s what we leaned into for the launch. And so the partnership team did a really good job. Do you pay them? No. You didn’t pay them? No. We talked about it, but no. It’s not scalable. And as soon as you start, it’s a very slippery slope. You have to build a platform that provides enough value to someone that they want to share if it’s really gonna be sustainable over the long run.

It’s just not to say you should never pay. We we’ve done performance based incentives on Instagram before, and I think there are targeted ways to do it. It’s not a scalable solution, so it’s gotta be a way to

I think it went well for a few reasons. One is that we had, like, gotten a bunch of people ready. We actually had wanted to launch earlier, so the partnership team had already kind of engaged everyone, and then we had to delay. So they were, like, ready at a moment’s notice because we had originally wanted to be up by VidCon. That helped. Being opinionated about the verticals helped. I think letting a bunch of people, a few thousand people in on this was Tuesday. I think we launched Wednesday at midnight UK time.

Also built a huge amount of hype around it. We ended up having to pull up the launch again because on Wednesday, we figured out that the we did this preorder thing on iOS just to kind of, like, build some buzz, and we found out that we couldn’t control what time the Apple App Store delivered the app to people’s phones, and it would just deliver on midnight Thursday local time. So we became the number one store in the app store in Japan, and you couldn’t log in because it was because it was like I mean, that’s a product wall.

That’s a product wall. It was a Wednesday morning in California. That’s why we had to pull it up again. So we ended up being like, okay. What’s the next biggest, most important country that’s gonna hit midnight? So we can either cancel the preorders, that seems terrible, or pull up the launch. And so UK was the next one that was gonna hit midnight, which is why it was midnight UK time that we opened the floodgates. Because otherwise, every, you know, UK footballer would have gotten the they had preordered it, would have had the app on their phone, and they would have logged in, and it would have been, like, error.

Or something like error. That’s like it’s gonna be, like, the worst launch of all time. But that actually ended up playing to our favor because that was, like that created more mystery and excitement. They’re, like, it moved up again or moved up, and so just the whole thing ended up playing. Are you getting any sleep at this time? I don’t get a lot of sleep. I’m just, like, it

Yeah. The tough thing about living in The UK and working for a California based company is the hours, and I have littles. I have a seven and five and a three year old boy, so that’s the tough thing. Did you sleep before,

I slept a lot more before. I’ve aged a lot this year. I don’t we didn’t mange each other until this year, but I had a lot less gray hair. Dude, I think you look great.

I don’t know about aristocracy, but I do think one of the things that played to our favor is there are a lot of platforms to do amazing work with creators out there. I talked about how TikTok is really good at breaking new talent. I think YouTube is the best at doing sustained consistent payouts with their rev share program because long form video is, I think, a lot more conducive to that. But if you look at all the different platforms, Instagram is the most popular in the credit community as far as we can tell.

So the most creators use it. Now more creators over time are using multiple platforms because they’re becoming just more savvy and trying to make sure they diversify their risk, which I think is smart. You know, we’re not always the most loved, but we’ve been the most important platform overall, not for an individual creator, but overall in the community, I think, for a while now. So we had this very rich, vibrant community of probably tens of millions of creators that we could just tap into with this.

Then it ended up taking out an energy of itself. As soon as you get enough, not even big names necessarily, but, like, interesting names, then everyone’s worried about missing out. And so then everybody tries it too, and then it creates a bit of a cycle. Which name do you not have that you would love to have? On Threads? Oh, there’s a bunch of people. Playing number one. As my role or as a person? Both. I think a huge one will be Beyonce in terms of my role, in terms of, like, cultural relevance.

Taylor Nation. Swift Nation came over, but not Taylor Swift yet, but that’ll also be a big deal. She’s her reach is insane. For me, based on my personal interests, I’m really bummed about how long it’s gonna take to support Europe because I’m a football fan, and there’s so many amazing footballers Yeah. In Europe. To me, there’s, like, the obviously, the market and, like, reaching a bunch of people, but it’s also Getting

Ronaldo or Messi? Ronaldo or Messi. Well, Messi is like, maybe he’ll have a US account when he goes over to Miami. What? Ronaldo can log in from Saudi Arabia. But football and f one are so important worldwide, and I care every bit as much about making sure that the platform is culturally relevant than the sort of

think long. I think for a lot of creators, it’s a business, and I think we’ve been trying to figure out ways to support those businesses for a while now. But I think you can’t just pay everybody who’s a creator, because if there’s tens of millions of creators, that just adds up to money that’s gonna just completely destroy your business model. So you have to figure out ways to give them tools to make money, in my opinion. And so we focus on things like subscriptions, which are relevant to a subset of creators, but that’s growing.

Facilitating branded content deals, that’s actually going very well on Instagram. And we do some payments as well, but that’s more for bootstrapping. And then for a segment that’s creating real content that’s really driving a of incremental value and revenue for Instagram. So I think it’s gonna get a bunch of attention for the next couple of days, but I think it’s hard if it’s unpredictable. If you’re trying to run a business, you kind of need to know roughly what you’re gonna make ahead of time. And if you’re kind of getting these lottery type checks, I think it’s much more harder to plan.

Well, that’s a common complaint I’ve heard about how TikTok’s payments compared to YouTube’s payments, for instance, which are much more predictable. They’re trying new things. Like, I don’t know where Twitter’s gonna be in a year. They’re

things up in all

ways over there.

We don’t know what the number is yet. I do think you’re gonna need two different things. You’re definitely gonna need a critical mass, I think, of friends, and then you’re gonna need a quality of maybe it’s a critical mass on your interest graph side as well. Now we can bootstrap you by showing you recommendations if you don’t follow anyone to start on the interest side. It’s much more difficult to do that on the friend side. But by the way, that number for Facebook back in the day varied wildly by country.

Like, in Japan, it was, like, six. In Indonesia, it was a 106 or something bonkers because cultural differences, Internet usage differences meant that that tipping point varied drastically from country to country.

be the thing that the team focuses on for the next couple months. I think we have to do a number of different things. We have to plug a bunch of obvious missing features. What are the biggest missing features? Following feed, edit button, supporting continent of Europe. I’m actually really excited about the Federalverse work that’s coming and supporting activity. When does Europe come? Months, many months, minimum. February. I mean, I’d be excited about that, honestly, at this point. Laws coming out next year, making sure that we’re proactively compliant with them.

It’s about data separation, but it’s also about being able to verify all of the statements you make about how data works. On that, and if we’re gonna make claims, we have to make sure that we prove those claims are true, and that just that work is is a lot it’s a lot of time. Are you a politician or

once I try to pinch myself, like, this is a pretty cool, wild thing you got. I think I’m very lucky to have my job. The way I think about it is it’s my job to build a team and set them up for success by pointing them at the right problems and giving the right support and feedback along the way. Sometimes that means a more specific direction, and sometimes that means, honestly, just being a glorified shit umbrella. Sometimes I joke because I do I do with a lot of customer service requests.

I joke that I’m a highly overpaid customer service rep. It just depends on the need, but it is a weird balance because you think that the more senior you get, the more you just get to make decisions. But in a lot of ways, your influence becomes more and more indirect. It’s a very odd experience sometimes. What have you done from working with Mark? Mark is always holding an incredibly high bar. One of his fears is that we fail hitting our goals all the way down, and so, you know, you can crush it.

And then he’s like, set the goal a little higher still. Set the goal a higher still. And I think there’s a real value to that, which is just, like, really, really setting a high bar. He’s also very willing to take risks in a way that sometimes is infuriating, but I think it’s very good for the company over the long run. Like, for instance, on Threads, he was the one who was like, you guys should try to build a separate app. And we were really trying to figure out a way to do it in the main app because it seemed like it would be much more likely to succeed, and he was by far the most convicted about taking the Is Threads a risk?

Yeah. It’s still a risk. I think if you fail, I think it can damage your reputation. It can damage your brand. It can make people less likely to want you to succeed in the future. I think it’s a huge opportunity cost. The team is getting smaller, not bigger right now. And so, like, it’s not a big team. How big is the Threads team? It’s getting real now. The team really properly formed a little less than five months ago or five months ago. We started working on it a little before, but the team didn’t really form properly until maybe five months ago.

Dozens, 50 something Wow. Engineers, three PMs, three designers. It’s pretty lean, but they’re really, really good engineers, designers, PMs, data scientists, researchers. So the opportunity cost is not properly, I think, evaluated by the number.

I actually think it’s gonna be easier. The ad formats will be less immersive, and I think that’s the cost. But it is a text based feed is about the highest monetization efficiency of any online business I’ve seen. I think the that and search are basically the two. The number of things you consume per hour is just incredibly high because it’s so light, which allows ads to really seamlessly integrate. And we honestly, we fell into this business model with Facebook. You know, we were putting ads in this right hand column on the side of the website, like, don’t look over here.

And the shift to mobile forced us to do it and end up being one of the best businesses of all time.

For me, the thing I’m gonna look at the most is probably for the verticals we care about most, what does the creator community engagement look like? That’s going to be a bellwether for how big the app is over the longer run. And then, I mean, right now, the thing I care about most is retention. There’s no good signal now because this hasn’t been long enough, and everyone who signed up is not everyone. But most of the people who signed up have been early adopters, and they’d use things differently.

So I really just don’t know yet. So it’ll be the two things I’ll focus on most for the next year will be the creator community, not only how many of them use the app, but how many of them share the app, and then retention for the average user.

I mean, there’s all sorts of reasons. If you get more reach elsewhere, and obviously, is definitely a risk, then is it just worth your time? They’re trying to make content. Often, they’re don’t just make content for a living. They do something else for a living too. There’s a you know, you’ll be a you’re a musician. You’re a footballer. Then you’re capitalist. Yeah. Exactly. And so is the return worth your time? If it degrades in quality, slow or toxic or buggy, like, all of those things can hurt you too.

Yeah. What advice would you have? I just think you have to be really intentional about putting pen to paper on your priorities. I’m constantly feeling like I’m doing a shit job at something. I’m either not there for my kids enough, or I’m not there for my team enough, or I missed something that I could have helped the team avoid and blew up on her face. I’m a shit friend because I’m never around. My life is Instagram and Threads my kids and my wife. And then, like, I barely see friends, which I feel terrible about.

So every year, I put down a few intentions. I used to be very measurable, and I would, like, grade myself at the end of the year, typical PM ing my life kind of way. I got really good advice from a really close friend named Andre recently, which was just write yourself like a mantra, like a thing or say to yourself, and just say it every night before you go to bed. And that’ll be the way to keep that intention top of mind, and it’ll help you actually better live up to that intention.

So every year I do it, it changes every year, and it gets simpler usually every year. What is it this year? So now the mantra is take care of yourself, love your children,

Yeah. I’m definitely not I’m definitely not there for my friends as much as I would like to be. Occasionally, but not as much as I would like to. I’m hoping relocating back to The US will help with that because it’ll be a little bit easier, but we’ll see.

It’s a race to the starting line. Before you have your first, you’re so focused on the birth because it’s terrifying, particularly, obviously, for the mom who wants to actually do all the work. But you’re like, how is this gonna change my life? My brother was calling me a lot before he had his first. So I was, trying to wrap his head around about how his life was gonna change. I was like, this is the most absurd exercise. Having a kid means you can’t plan for how your life is gonna change.

All you know it’s gonna change, it’s gonna change a lot, and it’ll continue to change. We spend all this time focused on the birth, focused on how much paternity they are leave, when to take it, how much paternity to leave, when to take it. But this person’s coming into your life for two decades. The more important thing is how are you going to adjust how you do what you do so you can be there for them for eighteen years? Not do you take eight weeks or twelve weeks or sixteen weeks of leave in year one that they’re not gonna remember.

By way, as a dad, your job is basically to take care of the mom. And so I would just say it’s a race to the starting line. I was way too focused on day one and way not ready for the rest of it. How did you adjust how you work? I started working less. I just ran out of hours. I used to come in really early. I used to come in. I used to try to take, like, the six, twelve shuttle in the morning and get in as soon as I could, and then come home after dinner.

I just couldn’t do that anymore. My goal is always to see the boys in the morning and the evening. And I I get it three or four of the workdays each week.

Well, it’s just it’s such a mean, I I had boys, and they’re all mama’s boys, so they all much preferred their mom. I’m only now remotely relevant, and this is, like, seven years in. How old are they? Seven, five, and three. Wait until they’re 13.

It’s gonna be like, yeah. They’re gonna We don’t know what I do at all. Someone asked Nico what I did the other day, and he said, I think he moves around chairs at the office. And I was like, what? And I was like, that is kinda what I do. I mean, look. Giving birth is a huge physical thing anyway people don’t realize. So the physical recovery is real. If your wife or your partner breastfeeds, that’s a huge thing. You can you know, you should change all the diapers you can, do all the things you can, but the truth is they’re gonna need more from the mom than the dad.

And so what you can do best to help the kid is to support your wife for whatever way she needs, whether it’s, you know, she needs you to take care of the house or take care of work or whatever it is. Everyone’s different to so that the better place she’s in, the better place the kid’s in in my experience. Have you done the love language thing? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I didn’t do the test, but it’s very clear. What’s your love language? I’m all physical touch.

All physical touch. All tasks. Acts of service and quality time, but it’s different. Quality time is just like time. It should just be time. She wants me to be around. She doesn’t need me to talk to her. She wants me to come with her to the party. She won’t talk to me the whole night, but it’s really important that I’m there. So it’s, like, proximity, maybe it’s her version of quality time, and definitely, like, you know, take out the garbage. Pack we’re packing right now, you know, whatever it is, doing the dishes.

She’s, like,

particularly gender sensitive, but there is a Hunter Thompson letter he wrote to a friend. I’m gonna try pull it up on my phone real quick. But, basically, it was about being intentional about how you spend your time. It’s a letter he wrote to a friend who asked him for advice. Here. I’ll read it. So, basically, a younger man emails letters of emails. This is fucking long before email. Sends him a letter, and he wrote about a career advice or life advice. And he goes, as I see it then, the formula runs something like this.

A man must choose a path which will let his abilities function at maximum efficiency towards the gratification of his desires. And doing this, he is fulfilling a need, giving himself identity by functioning in a set pattern towards a set goal. He avoids frustration, frustrating his potential, choosing a path which puts no limit on his self development, and he avoids the terror of seeing his goal wilt or lose its charm as he draws closer to it rather than bending himself to meet the demands of that which he seeks.

He has bent his goal to conform to his own abilities and desires. In short, he’s not dedicated his life to reaching a predefined goal, but he has rather chosen a way of life he knows he will enjoy. The goal is absolutely secondary. It is functioning toward the goal, which is important. And it seems almost ridiculous to say that a man must function in a pattern of his own choosing for letting another man define your own goals is to give up one of the most meaningful aspects of life.

The definitive act of will, which makes a man an individual. So I have this quote at the top of my yearly intentions that I write over here. Does that not define your goals? It does sometimes. It sometimes. Yeah. No. I mean, that’s a balance having a bar on the top. I don’t have a bar.

twelve months. Oh, that’s a great question. I’m much more bullish on generative AI. It’s happening much faster than I thought it would. I just thought it was further away.

Threads in it? I integrate it into my my normal work life. Like You do? I should be more interested in how it’s gonna change how people share online, but I’m much more interested in how it’s gonna just change workflows and just allow people to do more with less. How do you use it? I use it to some of my favorite writers are a little verbose, so I have it summarize articles. I don’t tell anybody. I write pretty detailed reviews for my reports every six months, And so I don’t have AI write it, but I have it take a first pass at summarizing all the feedback to make sure I didn’t miss anything.

I will sometimes give it a piece. I do a lot of writing at work. I will give it a piece of writing and tell an LLM what I was hoping to get out of it and ask for feedback. I just think it’s gonna be interesting how these technologies change how we work. We don’t focus a ton on how we work. We focus more on the things that we build generally in my industry, which makes sense because it’s kinda why you get into it, to build something and just be able to point to your mom to it to your mom and tell your mom at Christmas that you made this thing.

But how we actually do we do, how productive we are is so important, and, you know, you can double or triple your chances of success. It’s like a schmazza kind of thing to get interested in, but it’s just so substantive. And so I’m really interested in how some of these technologies will change how marketers do their job, how designers do their job, how executives do their job. I think that stuff is gonna be super interesting. And that’s not the, like, AI intelligence bot future that a lot of people are focused on right now, but it is something I think is really fascinating.

probably. That just seems such like a wild thing. It’s such a combination of amazing heritage and has to adapt, has done it a couple times, needs to do it again. I like the range that they have. What’s the kindest thing anyone’s ever

I had a really, really harsh boss when I first started at Facebook. I thought I was doing I thought it was just crushing. I was like, working on these projects, high profile. I joined them in the company a couple months with doing Mark reviews, all this stuff. And she said, you lack focus. And I thought I was so focused. I think all my hours were accounted for and, like, getting all this stuff done. But I was spreading myself too thin over too many things. I had never had a boss before, and she was not.

Didn’t have a caring disposition, let’s say. She’s fucking smart. And I think she said something like, you’re not focusing. Your your work isn’t is suffering for it. I think because it’s also your first couple months at a company, you’re trying to establish yourself. It was like, it hit home in a way that it wouldn’t have hit home, like, I you know, three months after that,

For what it’s worth, and this is not a commentary on you as a person, they are nicer on the outside than they are on the inside. I don’t know. I I mean, the brains are very savage summary. When you said that,

What do you seriously, what do you do now? I don’t know. I don’t know what I would be. I’ve ranged.

That’s about aspiration. The ones that I find myself having more affinity for are a little bit more like I always loved Triumph’s brand, the motorcycle. Yeah. The Cafe Racers, I always loved back in the day because they were so crazy. This was probably you probably just missed this, but the banging all of a sudden, stereo equipment they’re around now, but their stereo equipment used to be insane. It used be, like, these huge, like, kid Knight Rider style looking visualizers and, like, all this nutty hyper clear and hyper aggressive stuff that was, like, over the top and weirdly masculine.

But as a 15 year old boy, was like, this is awesome. So we’ll see. I don’t know. There’s a lot of amazing brand work out there right now.

I keep saying that this is, one of the best perks of my job is I could just email people and they write me back, but I don’t take advantage of it as much as I should. But I’d ping fatter. I mean, like, yeah. I met him. How was that? Amazing. I met him at in New York. We were at an after party. I was talking to I turned up for half an hour with my wife. Guys, literally every ounce is classy as you expect him to be.

And my wife tells Roger Federer, who I think is the greatest tennis player of all time No. She’s an adult. No. No. Then her husband loves playing tennis in the summer. And so Roger Federer asks me to show him my swing. And I said That? Verbatim. Yeah. We’re at, like, we’re in, like, a club in New York City. And I said, I think verbatim, what did say? I’m not sure I get the words right. I said, there’s no fucking way I’m gonna show the goat my tennis sweater.

And he pushed three or four times, and I was like, it’s not happening.

He seems like a lot of fun. Yeah. He seems like a he’s I feel like he’s spending a of time in The UK now. You should message him. I was supposed to meet him

Yeah.

I

be proud of how I spent my time when I look back. It’s hard to be able to identify exactly what you need to do to be able to say yes to that question, but it forces you to be honest about what you value, and it forces you to think about the long term, and it forces you to be somewhat aspirational. I feel like time is such a precious, precious thing. I’m always worried I’m gonna spend it poorly.

Thanks for having me. Such a blast. Such a blast. Such a crazy moment right now. So I was happy that I I knew we were gonna launch Threads around now ish, and when you were were trying to sketch this, I was like, it’d be good to do it right around then. And then we had to move it back, but then Threads fell back a couple weeks, and it worked out.