Being Like Level with Someone About How Hard the Process Is

It's a fun story right but the truth of it is being able to like level with someone about how hard the process is and have someone see you for who you are before instagram and know that there's a constant you throughout all of this and be able to call you when you're drifting from that but also support you when you're trying to stick with that that's i mean that's that's true friendship slash love whatever you want to call it um but also for someone not to care i remember nicole saying hey like i know you're gonna do this instagram thing you should i guess it was bourbon at the time you should do it because um you know even if it doesn't work we can move to like a smaller apartment and it'll be fine like we'll make it work how beautiful is that right yeah that's almost like a superpower it gives you permission to fail and somehow that actually leads to success but also she's like the least impressed about instagram of anyone she's like yeah it's great but like i love you for you like i like that you're like a decent cock beautiful it's beautiful with the uh with the gantt chart and thanksgiving which i still think is a brilliant effing idea thank you um big ridiculous question have you uh you're you're old and wise at this stage so have you discovered meaning to this whole thing why the hell are we descendants of um apes here on earth what's the meaning of it what's the meaning of life i haven't and it and i i am inco so the crazy so the best learning for me has been like no matter what level of success you achieve you're still worried about similar things maybe on a slightly different scale you're still concerned about the same thing you're still self-conscious about the same things it's like and actually that moment going through that is what makes you believe there's got to be like more machinery to life or purpose to life and that that we're all chasing these materialistic things but you start start realizing like um it's almost like you know the truman show when he gets the edge and he like knocks against it he's like what like there's this awakening that happens when you get to that edge that you realize oh like sure it's great it's great that we all chase money and fame and and success but you hit the edge and and i'm not even claiming i hit an edge like like elon's hit an edge like there's clearly larger scales but what's cool is you learn that like it doesn't actually matter and that there are all these other things that truly matter um that's not a case for working less hard that's not a case for taking it easy that's not a case for the four day work week what that is a case for is designing your life exactly the way you want to design it because i don't know i i think we go around the or you know the sun a certain number of times and then we die and then that's it that's me are you afraid of that moment no not at all in fact at least not yet listen i'm like a pilot like i do crazy things and i like um no i like if anything i'm like oh i gotta choose uh uh mindfully and purposefully the thing i am doing right now and not just fall into it because you're gonna wake up one day and ask yourself why the hell you spent the last 10 years doing x y or z yeah so i guess my like shorter answer to this is doing things on purpose because you choose to do them so important in life and not just like floating down the river of life hitting branches along the way because you will hit branches right but rather like literally plotting a course and not having a 10-year plan but just choosing every day to opt in that i think has been more like i haven't figured out the meaning of life by any stretch of the imagination but it certainly isn't money and it certainly isn't fame and it certainly isn't travel and it's like and it's way more of like opting into the game you love playing every day opting in just opting in and like it's don't let it happen you opt in kevin uh it's great to end on the love and the meaning of life this is an amazing conversation a lot of fun thank you you gave me like a light into some fascinating aspects of this of the technical world and i can't honestly wait to see what you do next thank you so much thanks for having me thanks for listening to this conversation with kevin systrom

The Importance of Designing Your Life

Focusing on one thing and doing it really, really well can get you very far. This is a lesson that Kevin Systrom has learned throughout his career. As the co-founder of Instagram, Systrom has had the opportunity to work on some of the most iconic projects in social media history. But despite the success he's achieved, he's also experienced his fair share of challenges and setbacks.

One of the key takeaways from Systrom's experience is the importance of designing your life. Rather than just going through the motions and following a predetermined path, it's essential to take control of your own destiny and make conscious choices about how you want to live your life. This might involve setting clear goals for yourself, prioritizing what's truly important, and being intentional about how you spend your time.

Systrom's approach to designing his life has been shaped by his experiences as a photographer and entrepreneur. As he navigated the early days of Instagram, he faced numerous challenges and obstacles that could have easily derailed his vision. But instead of giving up, Systrom chose to focus on what was truly important: creating a platform that would allow people to share their lives with others.

This approach has allowed Systrom to stay focused and motivated, even in the face of adversity. By designing his life around his core values and passions, he's been able to create something truly remarkable – an app that has changed the way we communicate and connect with each other.

Designing your life is not about being perfect; it's about being intentional and making choices that align with your values and goals. It's a process that requires patience, self-awareness, and a willingness to take risks. But the rewards are well worth it – a life that is truly fulfilling and meaningful.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthe following is a conversation with kevin systrom co-founder and long-time ceo of instagram including for six years after facebook's acquisition of instagram this is the lex friedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now here's my conversation with kevin systrom at the risk of uh asking the rolling stones to play satisfaction let me ask you about the origin story of instagram sure so maybe some context you like we were talking about offline grew up in massachusetts learned computer programming there liked to play doom two uh worked at a vinyl record store then you went to stanford turned down mr uh mark zuckerberg and facebook went to florence to study photography those are just some random beautiful impossibly brief glimpses into a life so let me ask again can you take me through the origin story of instagram giving that context you basically set it up um all right so uh we have a fair amount of time so i'll go into some detail but basically what i'll say is um instagram started out of a company actually called bourbon and it was spelled b-u-r-b-n and uh a couple things were happening at the time so if we zoom back to 2010 not a lot of people remember what was happening in the dot-com world then uh but check-in apps were all the rage so what's this checking out uh gowalla four square hot potato so i'm at a place i'm gonna tell the world that i'm at this place that's right what's what's the idea behind this kind of app by the way you know what i'm gonna answer that but through what instagram became and why i believe instagram replaced them so the whole idea was to share with the world what you were doing specifically with your friends right um but they were all the rage and foursquare was getting all the press and i remember sitting around saying hey i want to build something but i don't know what i want to build what if i built a better version of foursquare and i asked myself why don't i like foursquare or how could it be improved um and basically i sat down and i said i think that if you have a few extra features it might be enough one of which happened to be posting a photo of where you were there were some others it turns out that wasn't enough my co-founder joined we were going to attack uh you know foursquare and the likes and and try to build something interesting um and no one used it no one cared because it wasn't enough it wasn't it wasn't different enough right so one day we were sitting down and we asked ourselves okay let's come to jesus moment are we going to do this startup and if we're going to we can't do what we're currently doing we have to switch it up so what do people love the most so we sat down and we wrote out three things that we thought people uniquely loved about our product that weren't in other products photos happened to be the top one so sharing a photo of what you were doing where you were at the moment was not something products let you do really facebook was like post an album of your vacation from two weeks ago right twitter allowed you to post a photo but their feed was primarily text and they didn't show the photo in line or at least i don't think they did at the time so even though it seems totally stupid and obvious to us now at the moment then posting a photo of what you were doing at the moment was like not a thing so we decided to go after that because we noticed that people who used our service the one thing they happened to like the most was posting a photo so that was the beginning of instagram and yes like we went through and we added filters and there's a bunch of stories around that but the origin of this was that we were trying to be a checking app realized that no one wanted another checking app it became a photo sharing app but one that was much more about what you're doing and where you are and that's why when i say i think we've replaced checkin apps it became a check-in via a photo rather than saying your location and then optionally adding a photo when you were thinking about what people like from where did you get a sense that this is what people like you you said we sat down we wrote some stuff down on paper where is that intuition that seems fundamental to the success of an app like instagram what is that idea where's that list of three things come from exactly only after having studied machine learning now for a couple of years i like i have a you have understood yourself i've started to make connections like we can go into this later but obviously the the um the connections between machine learning and the human brain i think are stretched sometimes right at the same time being able to backprop and being able to like look at the world try something figure out how you're wrong how wrong you are and then nudge your company in the right direction based on how wrong you are is like a fascinating concept right and i don't we didn't know we were doing it at the time but that's basically what we were doing right we put it out to call it a hundred people and you would look at their data you would say what are they sharing what like what resonates what doesn't resonate we think they're going to resonate with x but turns out they resonate with y okay shift the company towards y and it turns out if you do that enough quickly enough you can get to a solution that has product market fit most companies fail because they sit there and they don't either their learning rate's too slow they sit there and they're just they're adamant that they're right even though the data is telling them they're not right or they their learning rate's too high and they wildly chase different ideas and they never actually set on on one where where they don't groove right and i think when we sat down and we wrote out those three ideas what we were saying is what are the three possible whether they're local or global maxima in our world right that users are telling us they like because they're using the product that way it was clear people liked the photos because that was the thing they were doing and we just said okay like what if we just cut out most of the other stuff and focus on that thing um and then it happened to be a multi-billion dollar business and it's that easy by the way yeah i guess so um well nobody ever writes about neural networks that miserably failed so this this particular neural network succeeded this is the sound all the time right yeah but nobody right default state is failing yes um when you said the way people are using the app is that the lost function for this neural network or is it also self-report like do you ever ask people what they like or do you have to track exactly what they're doing not what they're saying i once made a thanksgiving dinner okay and uh it was for relatives and i like to cook a lot okay and i worked really hard on picking the specific uh dishes and and i was really proud because i had planned it out using a gantt chart and like it was ready on time and everything was hot nice like i don't know if you're a big thanksgiving guy but like the worst thing about thanksgiving is when the turkey is cold and some things are hot and something anyway you got a gantt chart you actually have a chart oh yeah yeah omni plan fairly expensive like gantt chart thing that i think maybe 10 people have purchased in the world but i'm one of them and i use it for recipe planning only around big holidays that's brilliant by the way do people do this kind of uh over engineering it's not overdue it's just engineering it's planning thanksgiving is a complicated uh set of events with some uncertainty with a lot of things going on you should be able you should be planning in this way there should be a chart it's not over i mean so what's funny is um brief aside yes uh brilliant i love cooking i love food i love coffee and i've spent some time with some chefs who like know their stuff and they always just take out a piece of paper and just work backwards in rough order like it's never perfect but rough order it's just like oh that makes sense why not just work backwards from from the end goal right and put in some buffer time and so i probably overspecified it a bit using a gantt chart but the fact that you can do it it's what professional kitchens roughly do they just don't call it a gantt chart or at least i don't think they do um anyway i was telling a story about thanksgiving so here's uh here's the thing i'm sitting down we have the meal and then i'm you know i got to know ray dalio fairly well over maybe the last year of instagram um and one thing that he kept saying was like feedback is really hard to get honestly from people and i sat down at after dinner i said guys i want feedback what was good and what was bad yes and what's funny is like literally everyone just said everything was great and i like personally knew i had screwed up a handful of things um but no one would say it and can you imagine now not something as high stakes as thanksgiving dinner okay thanksgiving dinner it's not that high stakes but you're trying to build a product and everyone knows you left your job for it you're trying to build it out and you're trying to make something wonderful and it's yours right you designed it now try asking for feedback and know that you're giving this to your friends and your family people have trouble giving hard feedback people have trouble saying i don't like this or this isn't great or this is how it's failed me in fact um you usually have two classes of people people who just won't say bad things you can literally say to them please tell me what you hate most about this and they won't do it they'll try but they won't and then the other class of people are just negative period about everything and it's hard to parse out like what is true and what isn't so my rule of thumb with this is you should always ask people but at the end of the day it's amazing what data will tell you and that's why with whatever project i work on even now collecting data from the beginning on usage patterns so engagement how many days of the week do they use it how many i don't know if we were to go back to instagram how many impressions per day right is that growing is that shrinking and don't be like overly scientific about it right because maybe you have 50 beta users or something but what's fascinating is that data doesn't lie people are very uh defensive about their time they'll say oh i'm so busy i'm sorry i didn't get to use the app like i'm just you know um but i don't know you're posting on instagram the whole time so i don't know at the end of the day like at facebook there was you know before time spent became kind of this loaded term there the idea that people people's currency in their lives is time and they only have a certain amount of time to give things whether it's friends or family or apps or tv shows or whatever it's there's no way of inventing more of it at least not that i know of if they don't use it it's because it's not great so the moral of the story is you can ask all you want but you just have to look at the data and data doesn't lie right i mean there's metrics there's uh data can obscure the key insight if you're not careful so so time spent in the app that's ones there's so many metrics you can put at this and they will give you totally different insights especially when you're trying to create something that doesn't obviously exist yet so you know measuring maybe why you left the app or measuring special moments of happiness that will make sure you return to the app or moments of happiness that are long lasting versus like dopamine short term all of those things but i think i suppose in the beginning you can just get away with just asking the question which features are used a lot let's do more of that and how hard was the decision and uh i mean maybe you can tell me what instagram looked in the beginning but how hard was it to make pictures the first class citizen that's a revolutionary idea like um at whatever point instagram became this feed of photos that's quite brilliant plus i also don't know when this happened but they're all shaped the same it's like uh i have to tell you why that's the interesting part why is that so a couple of things one is data data like you're right you can over interpret data like imagine trying to fly a plane by staring at i don't know a single metric like airspeed you don't know if you're going up or down i mean it correlates with up or down but you don't actually know it will never help you land the plane so don't stare at one metric like it turns out you have to synthesize a bunch of metrics to know where to go um but it doesn't lie like if your air speed is zero unless it's not working right if if it's zero you're probably going to fall out of the sky so generally you look around and you have the scan going yes and you're just asking yourself is this working or is this not working um but people have trouble explaining how they actually feel so just it's about synthesizing both of them so then instagram right uh we were talking about revolutionary moment where where the feed became square photos basically and photos first and then square footage yeah um it was clear to me that the biggest so i believe the biggest companies are founded when enormous technical shifts happen and the biggest technical shift that happened right before instagram was founded was the advent of a phone that didn't suck the iphone right like in retrospect we're like oh my god the first iphone that almost had like it wasn't that good but compared to everything else at the time it was amazing and by the way the first phone that had an incredible camera that could that could like do as well as the point and shoot you might carry around was the iphone 4 and that was right when instagram launched and we looked around and we said what will change because everyone has a camera in their pocket and it was so clear to me that the the world of social networks before it was based in the desktop and sitting there and having a link you could share right and that wasn't going to be the case so the question is what would you share if you were out and about in the world if not only did you have a camera that's in your pocket but by the way that camera had a network attached to it that allowed you to share instantly that seemed revolutionary and a bunch of people saw it at the same time it wasn't just instagram there were a bunch of competitors the thing we did i think was not only well we focused on two things so we wrote down those things we circled photos and we said i think we should invest in this but then we said what sucks about photos one they look like crap right they just at least back then now my phone takes pretty great photos right um back then they were blurry not so great compressed right two uh it was really slow like really slow to upload a photo and i'll tell a fun story about that and explain to you why they're all the same size and square as well um and three man if you wanted to share a photo on different networks you had to go to each of the individual apps and select all of them and upload individually and so we're like all right those are the pain points we're gonna focus on that so one instead of because they weren't beautiful um we were like why don't we lean into the fact that they're not beautiful and i remember studying in florence my photography teacher gave me this whole gay camera and i'm not sure everyone knows what a whole gay camera is but they're these old-school plastic cameras i think they're produced in china at the time and they're i want to say the original ones like from the 70s or the 80s or something they're supposed to be like three dollar cameras for the every person they took nice medium format films large large negatives but they kind of blurred the the the light and they kind of like light leaked into the side and there was this whole resurgence where people looked at that and said oh my god this is a style right and i remember using that in florence and just saying well why don't we just like lean into the fact that these photos suck and make them suck more but in an artistic way and it turns out that had product market fit people really liked that they were willing to share their not so great photos if they looked not so great on purpose okay it's the second part that's the where the filters come into the picture yeah so computational modification of photos to make them look extra crappy to where it becomes art yeah yeah and i mean add light leaks add like an overlay filter make them more contrasty than they should be uh the first filter we ever produced was called x-pro 2. and i designed it while i was in this small little bed and breakfast room in total santos mexico i was trying to take a break from the the bourbon days and i i remember saying to my co-founder i just need like a week to reset and that was on that trip worked on the first filter because i said you know i think i can do this and i literally iterated one by one over the rgb values in the array that was the photo and just slightly shifted basically there was a function of our function of g function of b that just shifted them slightly it wasn't rocket science um and it turns out that actually made your photo look pretty cool it just mapped from one color space to another color space it was simple but it was really slow i mean if you applied a filter i think it used to take two or three seconds to render only eventually would i figure out how to do it on the gpu and i'm not even sure it was gpu but was using opengl but anyway um i would eventually figure that out and then it would be instant but it used to be really slow by the way anyone who's watching or listening it's amazing what you can get away with in a startup as long as the product outcome is right for the user like you can be slow you can be terrible you can be as long as you have product market fit people will put up with a lot and then the question is just about compressing making it more performant over time so that they get that product market fit instantly so fascinating because there's some things where those three seconds would make or break the app but some things you're saying not it's hard to know when you know it's what it's the problem spotify solved making streaming like work and like delays in listening to music is a huge negative even like slight delays but here you're saying i mean how do you know when those three seconds are okay are you just gonna have to try it out because to me my intuition would be those three seconds would kill the app like i would try to do the opengl thing right so i wish i were that smart at the time um i wasn't i just knew how to do what i knew how to do right and i decided okay like why don't i just iterate over the values and change them and what's interesting is that um compared to the alternatives no one else used opengl right so everyone else was doing that the dumb way and in fact they were doing it at a high resolution now comes in the small resolution that we'll talk about for a second um by choosing 512 pixels by 512 pixels which i believe it was at the time we iterated over a lot fewer pixels than our competitors who were trying to do these enormous output like images yeah so instead of taking 20 seconds i mean three seconds feels pretty good right so on a relative basis we were winning like a lot okay so that's answer number one answer number two is uh we actually focused on latency in the right places so we did this really wonderful thing um when you uploaded so uh the way it would work is you know you'd take your phone you'd take the photo and then you'd go to the um you'd go the edit screen where you would caption it and on that caption screen you start typing you think okay like what's a clever caption and and i said to mike hey when i worked on the gmail team you know what they did when you typed in your username or your email address even before you've entered in your password like the chat probability once you enter in your username that you're going to actually sign in is extremely high so why not just start loading your account in the background not not like sending it down to the desktop that would be a security uh uh issue but like load it into memory on the server like get it ready prepare it i always thought that was so fascinating and unintuitive i was like mike why don't we just do that but like we'll just upload the photo and like assume you're gonna upload the photo and if you don't forget about it we'll delete it right so what ended up happening was people would caption their uh photo they'd press done or upload and you'd see this little progress bar just go it was lightning fast okay we were no faster than anyone else at the time but by choosing 512 by 512 and doing in the background it almost guaranteed that it was done by the time you captioned and everyone when they used it was like how the hell is this thing so fast but we were slow we just hid the the slowness it wasn't like these things are just like it's a shelly game you're just hiding the latency that that mattered to people like a lot and i think that so you were willing to put up with a slow filter if it meant you could share it immediately and of course we added sharing options which let you distribute it really quickly that was the third part um so latency matters but relative to what and then there's some like tricks you can get around to just hiding the latency um like i don't know if spotify starts downloading the next song eagerly i'm assuming they do there are a bunch of ideas here that are not rocket science that that really help and all of that was stuff you were explicitly having a discussion about like those designs and argument you were having like arguments discussions uh i'm sure it was arguments i mean i'm not sure if you've met my co-founder mike but he's a pretty nice guy and he's very reasonable and uh and we both just saw eye to eye and we're like yeah just like make this fast early seem fast it'll be great i mean honestly i think the most contentious thing and he would say this too initially was um i was on an iphone 3g so like the the not so fast one and he had a brand new iphone 4. i was cheap nice um and his feed loaded super smoothly like when he would scroll from photo to photo buttery smooth right but on my phone every time you got to a new photo it was like a chunk allocate memory like all this stuff right i was like mike that's unacceptable he's like oh come on man just like upgrade your phone basically you didn't actually say that it's nicer than that um but i could tell he wished like i would just stop being cheap and just get a new phone but what's funny is we actually sat there working on that little detail for a few days before launch and that polished experience plus the fact that uploading seemed fast for all these people who didn't have nice phones i think meant a lot because far too often you see teams focus not on performance they focus on what's the cool computer science problem they can solve right can we scale this thing to a billion users and they've got like 100 right yeah you talked about loss function so i want to come back to that but like the loss function is like do you provide a great happy magical whatever experience for the consumer and listen if it happens to involve something complex and technical then great but it turns out i think most of the time those experiences are just sitting there waiting to be built with like not that complex solutions uh but everyone is just like so stuck in their own head that they have to over engineer everything and then they forget about the easy stuff i mean also maybe to flip the lost function there is you're trying to minimize the number of times you there's unpleasant experience right like uh the one you mention where when you go to the next photo it freezes for a little bit so it's almost as opposed to maximizing pleasure it's probably easier to minimize the number of like the friction yeah and as we all know you just you just uh you just make the pleasure negative and then minimize everything so we're mapping this all back to neural networks but actually can i say one thing on that which is i don't know a lot about machine learning but i feel like i've i've tried studying a bunch that whole idea of reinforcement learning and planning out more than the greedy single experience i think is is the closest you can get to like ideal product design thinking where you're not saying hey like can we have a great experience just this one time but like what is the right way to onboard someone what series of experiences correlate most with them hanging on long term right so not just saying oh did the photo load slowly a couple times or did they get a great photo at the top of their feed but like what are the things that are going to make this person come back over the next week over the next month and as a product designer asking yourself okay i want to optimize not just minimize bad experiences in the short run but like how do i get someone to engage over the next month and i'm not going to claim at all that i thought that way at all at the time because i certainly didn't but if i were going back and giving myself any advice it would be thinking what are those what are those second order effects that you can create and it turns out having your friends on the service it's an enormous win so starting with a very small group of people that produce content that you wanted to see which we did we seeded the community very well i think ended up mattering and so yeah you said that community is one of the most important things so it's from a metrics perspective from uh maybe a philosophy perspective building a certain kind of community within the app see i wasn't sure what exactly you meant by that when when i've heard you say that maybe you can elaborate but as i understand now it's can literally mean get your friends onto the app yeah think of it this way you can build an amazing restaurant or bar or whatever right but if you show up and you're the only one there is it like does it matter how good the food is the drinks whatever um no um these are inherently social experiences that we were working on so the idea of having people there like you needed to have that otherwise it was just to filter out but by the way part of the genius i'm going to say genius even though i wasn't really genius was starting to be marauding as a filter app was awesome the fact that you could so we talk about single player mode a lot which is like can you play the game alone and instagram you could totally play alone you could filter your photos and a lot of people would tell me i didn't even realize that this thing was a social network until my friend showed up it totally worked as a single player game and then when your friend showed up all of a sudden it was like oh not only was this great alone but now i actually have this trove of photos that people can look at and start liking and then i can like theirs and so it was this bootstrap method of how do you make the thing not suck when the restaurant is empty yeah but the thing is when you say friends i mean we're not necessarily referring to friends in the physical space so you're not bringing your physical friends with you you're also making new friends so you're finding new community so it's not immediately obvious to me that it's like it's almost like building any kind of community it was it was both and what we learned very early on was what made instagram special and the reason why you would sign up for it versus say just sit on facebook and look at your friends photos of course we were live and of course it was interesting to see what your friends were doing now but the fact that you could connect with people who like took really beautiful photos in a certain style all around the world whether they were travelers it was the beginning or beginning of the influencer economy there's these people who became professional instagramers way back when right um but they took these amazing photos and some of them were photographers right um like professionally and all of a sudden you had this moment in the day when you could open up this app and sure you could see what your friends were doing but also it was like oh my god that's a beautiful beautiful waterfall or oh my god i didn't realize there was that corner of england or like really cool stuff um and the beauty about instagram early on was that it was international by default you didn't have to speak english to use it right you could just look at the photos worked great we did translate we had some pretty bad translations but we did translate the app and uh you know even if our translations were pretty poor the the idea that you could just connect with other people through their images was pretty powerful how much uh technical difficulties there with the programming like what programming language you were talking about what was zero i'd like maybe it was hard for us but um i mean we there was nothing the only thing that was complex about instagram at the beginning technically was making it scale and we were just plain old objective c for the client uh so it was iphone only yep as an android person i'm deeply offended but go ahead again come on this was 2010. oh sure sure sorry android's getting a lot better yeah yeah so um i take it back you're right if i were to do something today i think it would be very different in terms of launch strategy right android's enormous too uh but anyway um back to that moment it was objective c uh and then we were python based uh which is just like this is before python was really cool like now it's cool because it's all these machine learning libraries like support python and right now it's super now it's like cool to be by the back then it was like oh google uses python like maybe you should use python facebook was php like i had worked at a small startup of some ex-googlers that used python so we used it and we used a framework called django uh still exists and people use for basically the back end and then you threw a couple interesting things in there i mean we used postgres which was kind of fun it was a little bit like hipster database at the time right my sequel my sequel like everyone used my sequel so like using postcards was like an interesting decision right uh but we used it because it had a bunch of uh geo features built in because we thought we were going to be a checking out pretty much it's also super cool now so you were into python before it was cool and you were into postgres before it was cool yeah we were basically like not only hipster hipster photo company hipster tech company right uh we also adopted redis early and like loved it i mean it solved so many problems for us and turns out that's still pretty cool but the programming was very easy it was like sign up a user have a feed there was nothing no machine learning at all zero can you get some context how many users at each of these stages are we talking about 100 users a thousand users so the stage i just described i mean that technical stack lasted through probably 50 million users um i mean seriously like you can get away with a lot with with a pretty basic stack um like i think a lot of startups try to over engineer their solutions from the beginning to like really scale and you can get away with a lot that being said most of the first two years of instagram was literally just trying to make that stack scale and it wasn't it was it was not a python problem it was like literally just like where do we put the data like it's all coming in too fast like how do we store it how do we make sure to be up how do we like how do we make sure we're on the right side of boxes that they have enough memory um those were the issues but can you speak to the choices you make at that stage when you're growing so quickly do you use something like somebody else's computer infrastructure or do you build in-house i'm only laughing because we when we launched we had a single computer that we had rented in some colo space in la i don't even remember what it was called because i thought that's what you did when i worked at a company called odio that became twitter i remember visiting our space in san francisco you walked in you had to wear the ear things and it was cold and fans everywhere right and we had to you know plug one out replace one and i was the intern so i just like held things but i thought to myself oh this is how it goes and then i remember being in a vc's office i think it was benchmark's office and i think we ran into another entrepreneur and they were like oh how are things going we're like uh you know trying to scale this thing and they were like well i mean can't you just add more instances and i was like what do you mean and they're like instances on amazon i was like what are those and it was this moment where we realized how deep in it we were because we had no idea that aw aws existed nor should we be using it anyway that night we went back to the office and we got on aws but we we did this really dumb thing we're i'm so sorry to people listening but um we brought up an instance which was our our database it's going to be a replacement for our database but we had it talking over the public internet to our little box in la that was our app server very nice yeah um that's how sophisticated we were and obviously that was very very slow didn't work at all i mean it worked but didn't work did we only like later that night did we realize we had to have it all together but at least like if you're listening right now and you're thinking you know i have no chance i'm going to start to start i have no chance i don't know we did it and we made a bunch of really dumb mistakes initially i think the question is how quickly do you learn that you're making a mistake and do you do the right thing immediately right after so you didn't pay for those mistakes by you know by failure so yeah how quickly did you fix it i guess there's a lot of ways to sneak up to this question of how the hell do you scale the thing other startups if you have an idea how do you scale the thing is this is just aws and uh you try to write the kind of code that's easy to spread across a large number of instances and then the rest is just put money into it basically i would say a couple things first off don't even ask the question just find product market fit duct tape it together right like if you have to i think there's a big caveat here which i want to get to but generally all that matters is product market fit that's all that matters if people like your product do not worry about when 50 000 people use your product because you will be happy that you have that problem when you get there i actually can't name many startups where they go from nothing to something overnight and they can't figure out how to scale it there are some but i think nowadays it's a when i say a solved problem like there are ways of solving it the base case is typically that startups worry way too much about scaling way too early and forget that they actually have to make something that people like that's the that's the default mistake case but what i'll say is um once you start scaling i mean hiring quickly people who have seen the game before and just know how to do it it it becomes um it becomes a bit of like yeah just throw instances of the problem right but the last thing i'll say on this that i think did save us um we were pretty rigorous about writing tests uh from the beginning that helped us move very very quickly when we wanted to rewrite parts of the product and know that we weren't breaking something else tests are one of those things where it's like you go slow to go fast and they suck when you have to write them because you have to figure it out and they're always those ones that break when you don't want them to break and they're annoying and it feels like you spent all this time but looking back i think that like long-term optimal even with the team of four it allowed us to move very very quickly because anyone could touch any part of the the the product and know that they weren't going to bring down the site or at least in general at which point do you know product market fit how many users would you say what is it all it takes is like 10 people or is it a thousand is it 50 000 i don't think it is generally a question of absolute numbers i think it's a question of cohorts and i think it's a question of trends so you know it depends how big your business is trying to be right but if i were signing up a thousand people a week and they all retain like the retention curves for those cohorts looked good healthy and even like as you started getting more people on the service maybe those earlier cohorts started curving up again because now there are network effects and their friends are on the service or totally depends what type of business you're in but i'm talking purely social right um i don't think it's an absolute number i think it is a i guess you could call it a marginal number so i spend a lot of time when i work with startups asking them like okay have you looked at that cohort versus this cohort whether it's your clients or whether it's people signing up for uh the service but a lot of people think you just have to hit some mark like 10 000 people or 50 000 people but really seven-ish billion people in the world most people forever will not know about your product there are always more people out there to sign up it's just a question of how you turn on the spigot so at that stage early stage yourself but also by way of advice should you worry about money at all how this thing is going to make money or do you just try to find product market fit and get a lot of users to enjoy using your thing i think it totally depends and that's an unsatisfying answer um i was talking with a friend today who he was one of our earlier investors and he was saying hey like have you been doing any angel investing lately i said not really i'm just like focused on what i want to do next and he said the number of financings have just gone bonkers like just bonk like people are throwing money everywhere right now um and i think the question is do you have an inkling of how you're gonna make money or are you really just like waving your hands i would not like to be an entrepreneur in the position of well i have no idea how this will eventually make money that's not fun um if you are in an area like let's say you wanted to start a social network right not saying this is a good idea but if you did they're only a handful of ways they've made money and really only one way they've made money in the past and that's ads so you know if you have a service that's amenable to that and then i wouldn't worry too much about that because if you get to the scale you can hire some smart people and figure that out i do think that is really healthy for a lot of startups these days especially the ones doing like enterprise software slacks of the world etc to be worried about money from the beginning but mostly as a way of winning over clients and having stickiness um i think i like of course you need to be worried about money but i'm going to also say this again which is it's like long-term profitability if you have a roadmap to that then that's great but if you're just like i don't know maybe never like we're working on this meta first thing i think maybe someday i don't know like that seems harder to me um so you have to be as big as facebook to like finance that bet right do you think it's possible you said you're not saying it's necessarily a good idea to launch a social network do you think it's possible today maybe you can put yourself in those shoes to launch a social network that achieves the scale of a facebook or a twitter or an instagram and maybe even greater scale absolutely how do you do it asking for a friend yeah if i knew i i'd probably be doing it right now and not sitting here so i mean there's a lot of ways to ask this question one is create a totally new product market fit create a new market create something like instagram did which is like create something kind of new or literally out compete facebook at its own thing or i'll compete twitter at its own thing the only way to compete now if you want to build a large social network is to look for the cracks look for the openings um you know no one competed i mean no one competed with the core business of google no one competed with the core business of microsoft you don't go at the big guys doing exactly what they're doing instagram didn't win quote unquote because it tried to be a visual twitter like we spotted things that either twitter wasn't going to do or refused to do images and feed for the longest time right or that facebook wasn't doing or not paying attention to because they were mostly desktop at the time and we were purely mobile purely visual often there are opportunities sitting there you just have to you have to you have to figure out like uh i think like there's a strategy book i can't remember the name but talk about moats and just like the best place to play is where your competitor like literally can't pivot because structurally they're set up not to be there and that's where you win um and what's fascinating is like do you know how many people are like images facebook does that twitter does that i mean how wrong were they really wrong these are some of the smartest people in silicon valley right but now instagram exists for a while how is it that snapchat could then exist makes no sense like plenty of people would say well there's facebook no images okay okay i mean instagram i'll give you that one but wait now another image based social network's gonna get really big and then tick tock comes along like the prior so you asked me is it possible the only answer and reason i'm answering yes is because my prior is that it's happened once every i don't know three four or five years consistently and i can't imagine there's anything structurally that would change that so that's why i answer that way not because i know how i just when you see a pattern you see a pattern and there's no reason to believe that's going to stop and it's subtle too because like you said snapchat and tick tock they're all doing the same space of things but there's something fundamentally different about like a three second video and a five second video and a 15 second video in a one minute video and a one hour video right like fundamentally different fundamentally different i mean i think one of the reasons snapchat exists is because instagram was so focused on posting great beautiful manicured versions of yourself throughout time and there was this enormous demand of like hey i really like this behavior i love using instagram but man i just like wish i could share something going on in my day like do i really have to put it on my profile do i really have to make it last forever do i really um and that opened up a door it created a market right and then what's fascinating is instagram had an explore page for the longest time it was image driven right um but there's absolutely a behavior where you open up instagram and you sit on the explore page all day that is effectively tick tock but obviously focused on videos and it's not like you could just put the explore page in tik tok form and it works it had to be video it had to have music these are the hard parts about product development that are very hard to predict but um they're all versions of the same thing with varying if you line them up in a bunch of dimensions they're just like kind of on they're different values of the same dimensions which is like i guess easy to say in retrospect but like if i were an entrepreneur going after that area i'd ask myself like where's the opening what needs to exist because tiktok exists now so i wonder how much things that don't yet exist and can exist is in the space of algorithms in the space of recommender systems so in the space of how the feed is generated so we kind of talk about the actual elements of the um the content that's what we've been talking the difference between photos between uh short videos longer videos i wonder how much disruption is possible in the way the algorithms work because a lot of the criticism towards social media is in the way the algorithms work currently and it feels like first of all talking about product market fit there's certainly a hunger for um social media algorithms that do something different i don't think anyone everyone said complaining this is not doing this is this is hurting me and this is hurting society but i keep doing it because i'm addicted to it and they say we want something different but we don't know what it feels like a uh just different uh it feels like there's a hunger for that but that's in the space of algorithms i wonder if it's possible to disrupt in that space absolutely um i have this thesis that the worst part about social networks is that they're uh is the people it's it's it's a line that sounds funny right because like that's why you call it a social network um but what does social networks actually do for you like just think you know like imagine you were an alien and you landed and someone says hey there's this site it's a social network we're not going to tell you what it is but just what does it do and you have to explain it to them it does two things one is that people you know and have social ties with uh distribute updates through whether it's uh you know photos or videos about their lives so that you don't have to physically be with them but you can keep in touch with them that's one that's like a big part of instagram that's a big part of snap it is not part of tick tock at all so there's another big part which is there's all this content out in the world that's entertaining whether you want to watch it or you want to read it um and matchmaking between content that exists in the world and uh people that want that content turns out to be like a really big business right search and discovery would you search and discovery but my point is it could be video it could be text it could be websites it could be i mean think back to um think back to like dig right or stumble upon or right nice yeah but like what did those do like they basically distributed interesting content to you right um i think the most interesting part or the future of social networks is going to be making them less social because i think people are part of the root cause of the problem so for instance um often in recommender systems we talk about two stages there's a candidate generation step which is just like of our vast trove of stuff that you might want to see what small subset should we pick for you okay typically that is grabbed from things your friends have shared right then there's a ranking step which says okay now given these hundred 200 things depends on the network right let's like be really good about ranking them and generally rank the things up higher that get the most engagement right so what's the problem with that step one is we've limited everything you could possibly see to things that your friends have chosen to share or maybe not friends but influencers what things do people generally want to share they want to share things that are going to get likes that are going to show up broadly so they tend to be more emotionally driven they tend to be more risque or whatever so why do we have this problem it's because we show people things people have decided to share and those things self-select to being the things that are most divisive so how do you fix that well what if you just imagine for a second that why do you have to grab things from things your friends have shared why not just like grab things that's really fascinating to me and that's something i've been thinking a lot about and just like you know why is it that when you log on to twitter you're just sitting there looking at things from accounts that you've followed for whatever reason and tick tock i think has done a wonderful job here which is like you can literally be anyone and if you produce something fascinating it'll go viral but like you don't have to be someone that anyone knows you don't have to have built up a giant following you don't have to have paid for followers you don't have to try to maintain those followers you literally just have to produce something interesting that is i think the future of social networking that's the that's the direction things will head and i think what you'll find is it's far less about people manipulating distribution and far more about what is like is this content good and good is obviously a vague definition that we spend hours on but different networks i think will decide different value functions to decide what is good and what isn't good and i i think that's a fascinating direction so that's almost like creating an internet i mean that's what google did for web pages they did the you know page rank search so discovery you don't you don't follow anybody on google when you use a search engine you just discover web pages and so what tick tock does is saying let's start from scratch let's like like start a new internet and have people discover stuff on that new internet within a particular kind of pool of people well what's so fascinating about this is like the the um field of information retrieval like i always talked about and as i was studying this stuff they would always use the word query and document so i was like why are they saying query undocuments like they're literally imagine like if you just stop thinking about query as like literally a search query and a query could be a person i mean a lot of the way i'm not going to claim to know how instagram or facebook machine learning works today but you know if you want to find a match for a query the query is actually the attributes of the person their age their gender where they're from maybe some kind of summarization of their interests and and that's a query right and that matches against documents and by the way documents don't have to be text they can be videos they're however long i don't know what the limit is on tick tock these days they keep changing it my point is just you've got a query which is someone in search of something that they want to match and you've got the document it doesn't have to be text it could be anything and how do you match make and that's one of these like i mean i've spent a lot of time thinking about this and i don't claim to have mastered it at all but i think it's so fascinating about where that will go with new social networks see what i'm also fascinated by is metrics that are different than engagement so the other thing from an alien perspective what social networks are doing is they they in the short term bring out different aspects of each human being so first let me say that an algorithm or a social network for each individual can bring out the best of that person or the worst of that person or there's a bunch of different parts to us parts we're proud of that that we are parts we're not so proud of when we look at the big picture of our lives when we look back 30 days from now am i proud that i said those things or not am i proud that i felt those things am i proud that i experienced or read those things or thought about those things just in that kind of self-reflective kind of way and so coupled with that i wonder if it's possible to have different metrics they're not just about engagement but are about long-term happiness growth of a human being well they look back and say i am a better human being for having spent 100 hours on that app and that feels like it's actually strongly correlated with engagement in the long term in the short term it might not be but in long term it's like the same kind of thing where you really fall in love with the product you fall in love with an iphone you fall in love with a car that's what makes you fall in love is like really being proud and just in a self-reflective way understanding that you're a better human being for having used the thing and that's like where the f that's what great relationships are made from it's not just like you're hot and we like being together or something like that it's more like i'm a better human being because i'm with you and that feels like a metric that could be optimized for by the algorithms um but you know anytime i kind of talk about this with anybody they seem to say yeah okay that's going to get out competed immediately by the engagement if it's ad driven especially i just don't think so i don't i mean a lot of is just implementation i'll say a couple things one is to pull back the curtain on daily meetings inside of these large social media companies a lot of what management or at least the people that are are tweaking these algorithms spend their time on our trade-offs and there's these things called value functions which are like okay we can predict the probability that you'll click on this thing or the probability that you'll share it or the probability that you will leave a comment on it or the probability you'll dwell on it individual actions right and you've got this neural network that basically has a bunch of heads at the end and all of them are between zero and one and great they all have values right or or they all have probabilities um and then in these meetings what they will do is say well uh how much do we value a comment versus a click versus a share versus a and then maybe even some downstream thing right that has nothing to do with the item there but like driving follows or something and what typically happens is they will say well what are our goals for this quarter at the company oh we want to drive sharing up okay well let's uh turn down these metrics and turn up these metrics and and they blend them right into a single scaler with which they're trying to optimize that is really hard because invariably you think you're solving for i don't know something called meaningful interactions right this was the big facebook pivot and i i don't actually have any internal knowledge like i wasn't in those meetings but at least from from what we've seen over the last month or so it seems by actually trying to trying to optimize for meaningful interactions it had all these side effects of optimizing for these other things and i don't claim to fully understand them but what i will say is that trade-offs abound and as much as you'd like to solve for one thing if you have a network of over a billion people you're gonna have unintended consequences either way and it gets really hard so what you're describing is effectively a value model that says like can we capture this is the thing that i spent a lot of time thinking about like can you capture utility in a way that like actually measures someone's happiness that isn't just a um what do they call it a surrogate problem where you say well i kind of think like the more you use the product the happier you are that was always the argument at facebook by the way it was like well people use it more so they must be more happy yeah turns out they're like a lot of things you use more that make you less happy in the world not talking about facebook just you know let's think about whether it's gambling or whatever like that you can do more of but doesn't necessarily make you happier so the idea that time equals happiness obviously you can't map utility and time together easily there are a lot of edge cases so when you look around the world and you say well what are all the ways we can model utility that is like one of the please if you know someone smart doing this introduce me because i'm fascinated by it and it seems really tough but the idea that reinforcement learning like everyone interesting i know in machine learning like i was really interested in recommender systems and supervised learning and and the more i dug into it i was like oh literally everyone smart is working on reinforcement learning like literally everyone you just made people at open ai and deep mind very happy yes but i mean but what's interesting is like it's one thing to train a game and like i mean that paper that where they just took atari and they used a convnet to basically just like train simple actions mind-blowing right absolutely mind-blowing but it's a game great so now what if you're constructing a feed for a person right like how can you construct that feed in such a way that optimizes for a diversity of experience a a long term happiness right but that reward function it turns out in reinforcement learning again as i've learned like reward design is really hard and i don't know like how do you design a scalar reward for someone's happiness over time i mean do you have to measure dopamine levels like do you have to well you have to have a lot of a lot more signals from the human being currently it feels like there's not enough signals coming from the human being users of uh of this algorithm so for reinforcement learning to work well it needs to have a lot more data needs to have a lot of data and that actually is a challenge for anyone who wants to start something which is you don't have a lot of data so how do you compete but i do think back to your original point rethinking the algorithm rethinking reward functions rethinking utility that's fascinating that's cool and i think that's an open opportunity for for a company that figures it out i have to ask about april 2012 when instagram along with its massive employee base of 13 people was sold to facebook for 1 billion dollars what was the process like on a business level engineering level human level what was that process of selling to facebook like what did it feel like so i want to provide some context which is i worked in corporate development at google which not a lot of people know but corporate development is effectively the group that buys companies right you sit there and you acquire companies and i had sat through so many of these meetings with entrepreneurs we actually fun fact we never acquired a single company when i worked in corporate development so i can't claim that um i had like a lot of experience but i had enough experience to understand okay like what prices are people getting and what's the process and and as we started to grow you know we were trying to keep this thing running and we were exhausted and we were 13 people and i mean we were trying to think back he was probably 27 37 now um so young and on a relative basis right and uh we're trying to keep the thing running and then you know we go out to raise money and we're kind of like the hot startup at the time and i remember going into a specific vc and saying our terms we're looking for are we're looking for a 500 million valuation and i've never seen so many jaws drop all in unison right and i was like thanked and walked out the door very kindly after um and then i got a call the next day uh from someone who was connected to them and said they said we just want to let you know that like uh it was pretty offensive that you asked for a 500 billion dollar evaluation and i i can't tell if that was um like just negotiating or what but it's true like no one offered us more right so we were so can you clarify the the number again you said how many million 500 500 million 500 million yeah half a billion yeah um so in my mind i'm anchored like okay well literally no one's biting at 500 million and eventually we would get sequoia and greylock and others together at 500 million basically uh post uh it was 450 pre i think we raised 50 million dollars but just like no one was used to seeing 500 million dollar companies then like i don't know if it was because we were just coming out of the hangover 2008 and things were still on recovery mode but then along comes facebook and after some negotiation we've 2xed the number from a half a billion to a billion yeah it seems pretty good you know and uh i think mark and i really saw eye to eye that this thing could be big um we thought we could their resources would help us scale it and in a lot of ways it de-risks i mean it degrees a lot of the employees lives for the rest of their lives including me including mike right um i think i might have had like 10 grand in my bank account at the time right like we're working hard we had nothing um so on a relative basis it seemed very high and then i think the last company to exit for anywhere close to a billion was youtube that i could think of and uh and thus began the giant long bull run of 2012 to all the way all the way to where we are now where um i saw some stat yesterday about like how many unicorns exist and it's absurd but then again never underestimate technology and like the value it can provide and man costs have dropped and man scale has increased and you can make businesses make a lot of money now but on a on a fundamental level i don't know like how do you describe the decision to sell a company with 13 people for a billion dollars so first of all like how did it take a lot of guts to set a table and say 500 million or 1 billion with mark zuckerberg it seems like a very large number with 13. like especially like it doesn't seem it is it is they're all larger especially like you said before the unicorn parade i like that i'm going to use that unicorn yeah the uh the the you are at the head of the unicorn parade it's the uh yeah it's a massive unicorn parade um okay so no i mean we knew we were worth quote-unquote a lot but we didn't i mean there was no market for instagram i mean it's not you could mark you couldn't mark to market this thing in the public markets you didn't quite understand what it would be worth or it was worth at the time so in a market an illiquid market where you have one buyer and one seller and you're going back and forth and well i guess there were like vc firms who are willing to you know invest at a certain valuation so i don't know you just go with your gut and uh and at the end of the day i would say um the hardest part of it was not realizing uh like when we sold it was tough because like literally everywhere i go restaurants whatever like for a good six months after there was a lot of attention on the deal a lot of attention on the product a lot of attention it was kind of miserable right and you're like wait like i made a lot of money but like why is this not great and it's because it turns out you know and i don't i don't know like i don't really keep in touch with mark but i've got to assume his job right now is not exactly the most happy job in the world it's really tough when you're on top and it's really tough when you're in the limelight so the decision itself was like oh cool this is great how lucky are we right so okay there's a million questions yeah go first of all first of all why why is it hard to be on top why did you not feel good like can you dig into that it always um i've heard like olympic athletes say after what they win gold they they get depressed is it something like that where it feels like it was kind of like a thing you were working towards yeah some some loose definition of success and this sure psych feels like uh at least according to other startups this is what success looks like and now why don't i feel any better i'm still human i still have all the same problems is that the nature or is it just like negative attention or some kind what i think it's all of the above um but to be clear there was a lot of happiness in terms of like oh my god this is great like we like won the super bowl of startups right um anyone who can get to a liquidity event of anything meaningful feels like wow this is what we started out to do of course we want to create great things that people love but um like we won in a big way but yeah there's this big like oh if we won what is like what's next i don't so they call it the we have arrived syndrome um which i i need to go back and look where i can quote that from but i remember reading about it at the time i was like oh yeah that's that i remember we had a product manager leave very early on when we got to facebook and he said to me um i just don't believe i can learn anything at this company anymore it's like it's hit its apex we sold it great i just don't have anything else to learn so from 2012 all the way to the day i left in 2018 like the amount i learned and the humility with which i realized oh we thought we won billion dollars is cool but like there are a hundred billion dollar companies and by the way on top of that we had no revenue we had i mean we had a cool product but we didn't scale it yet and there's so much to learn and then competitors and how fun was it to fight snapchat oh my god like it was it's like yankees red sox it's great like that's what you live for um you know you win some you lose some but uh the amount you can learn through that process uh what i've realized in life is that there is no end there's always someone who has more there's always more challenge just at different scales and uh it sounds like a little buddhist but um everything is super challenging whether you're like a small business or an enormous business i say like choose the game you like to play right you've got to imagine that if you're an amazing basketball player you enjoy to some extent practicing basketball it's got to be something you love it's going to suck it's going to be hard you're going to have injuries right but you got to love it and the same thing with instagram which is um we might have sold but it was like great there's one super bowl title can we win five what else can we do now i imagine you didn't ask this but okay so i left there's a little bit of like what do you do next right like what do you how do you top that thing it's the wrong question the question is like when you wake up every day what is the hardest most interesting thing you can go work on because like at the end of the day we all turn into dirt doesn't matter right but what does matter is like can we really enjoy this life not in a hedonistic way because that's those it's like the reinforcement learning learning like short term versus long-term objectives can you wake up every day and truly enjoy what you're doing um knowing that it's going to be painful knowing that like no matter what you choose it's going to be painful um whether you sit on a beach or whether you manage a thousand people or ten thousand it's gonna be painful so choose something that's fun to have pain um but yes there was uh there was a lot of we have arrived and um it's a maturation process you just have to go through so no matter how much success is there is how much money you make you have to wake up the next day and choose the hard life whatever that means next that's fun the fun slash hard life hard life that's fun i guess what i'm trying to say is slightly different which is just that no one realizes everything's gonna be hard even chilling out is hard and then you just start worrying about stupid stuff like i don't know like did so and so forget to paint the house today or like did the gardener come or whatever like yeah or oh i'm so angry and my shipment of wine didn't show up and i'm sitting here on the beach without my wine i don't know i'm making shit up now but like it turns out that even chilling aka meditation is hard work yeah i and at least meditation is like productive chilling where you're like actually training yourself to calm down and be but backing up for a moment everything's hard you might as well be like playing in the game you love to play i just like playing and winning and and i'm i'm on the on the i'm still on the i think the first half of life knock on wood um and i've got a lot of years what am i going to do sit around and the other way of looking at this by the way um imagine you made one movie it was great would you just like stop making movies no generally you're like wow i really like making movies let's make another one a lot of times by the way the second one or the third one not that great but the fourth one awesome and no one forgets the sec everyone forgets the second and the third one so there's just this constant process of like can i produce and is that fun is that exciting what else can i learn so this machine learning stuff for me has been this awesome new chapter of being like man that's something i didn't understand at all and now i feel like i'm one-tenth of the way there and that feels like a big mountain to climb uh so i distracted us from the original question no return to machine learning because i'd love to explore your interest there but i mean speaking of sort of challenges and hard things is there a possible world where sitting in a room with mark zuckerberg with a one billion dollar deal you turn it down yeah of course what does that world look like why would you turn it down why did you take it what was the calculation that you were making ah thus enters the world of counterfactuals and not really knowing and if only we could run that experiment well the universe exists it's just running in parallel to our own yeah it's so fascinating right um i mean we're talking a lot about money but the real question was um i'm not sure you'll believe me when i say this but could we strap our little company onto the side of a rocket ship and like get out to a lot of people really really quickly with the support with the the talent of a place like facebook i mean people often ask me what i would do differently um at instagram today and i say well i probably hire more carefully because we showed up just like before i knew it we had like 100 people on the team and 200 and 300 i don't know where all these people were coming from i never had to recruit them i never had to screen them they were just like internal transfers right so it's like relying on the facebook hiring machine which is quite sort of i mean it's an elaborate machine it's and it's great by the way they have really talented people there but my point is um the choice was like take this thing put it on the side of a rocket ship that you know is growing very quickly like i had seen what had happened when ev sold blogger to google and then google went public remember we sold before facebook went public there was a moment at which the stock price was 17 by the way the facebook stock price was 17 i remember thinking what the f did i just do right uh now at 320-ish i don't know where we are today but like okay like the best thing by the way is like when the stock is down everyone calls you dope and then when it's up they also call you a dope but just for a different reason right like you can't win lesson in there somewhere yeah so but you know the choice is to stripe yourself to a rocket ship or to build your own you know mr elon built his own literally with the rocket ship that's a difficult choice because um there's a world actually i would say something different which is elon and others decided to sell paypal for not that much i mean how much was it about a billion dollars i can't remember something like that yeah i mean it was early and um but it's worth a lot more an hour and then build a new rocket ship so this is the cool part right if you are an entrepreneur and you own a controlling stake in the company not only is it really hard to do something else with your life because all of the you know value is tied up in you as a personality attached to this company right but if you sell it and you get yourself enough capital and you like have enough energy you could do another thing or 10 other things or in elon's case like a bunch of other things i don't know like i lost count at this point um and it might have seemed silly at the time and sure like if you look back man paypal's worth a lot now right but i don't know like do you think elon like cares about like are we gonna buy pinterest or not like i just he is he created a a a massive capital that allowed him to do what he wants to do and that's awesome that's more freeing than anything because when you are an entrepreneur attached to a company you gotta stay at that company for a really long time it's really hard to remove yourself but i'm not sure how much he loved paypal versus spacex and tesla i have a sense that you love instagram yeah i loved enough to like work for six years beyond that which is rare which is very rare you chose but can i tell you why sure it's um please there are not a lot of companies that you can be part of where the pope's like i would like to sign up for your product like i'm not a religious person at all i'm really not um yeah but when you go to the vatican and you're like walking among the giant columns and you're hearing the music and everything and like the pope walks in and he wants to press the sign up button on your product like it's a moment in life okay um no matter what your persuasion okay the number of doors and experiences that that opened up was it was incredible i mean the people i got to meet the places i got to go um i assume maybe like a payments company is slightly different right but that's why like it was so fun and plus i truly believed we were building such a great product and i loved loved the game it wasn't about the money it was about the game do you think do you think you had the guts to say no is that so his i often think about this like how hard is it for entrepreneur to say no because the peer pressure so every like basically the sea of entrepreneurs in silicon valley are going to tell you this is their dream the the the thing you were sitting before was is a dream to walk away from that is really it seems like nearly impossible because instagram could in 10 years be you know you could talk about google you could be making self-driving cars and building rockets that go to mars and compete with spacex totally and so that's an interesting decision to say am i willing to risk it and the reason i also say it's an interesting decision because it feels like per previous discussion if you're launching a social uh social network company there's there's going to be that meeting whatever that number is if you're successful if if you're on this rocket ship of success there's going to be a meeting with one of the social media social network companies that want to buy you uh whether it's facebook or twitter but it could also very well be google who seems to have like a graveyard of failed social networks and it's i mean i don't know i i i think about that how difficult it is for the entrepreneur to make that decision how many have successfully made that decision i guess this is a big question it's sad to me to be honest that too many make that decision perhaps for the wrong reason to to so when you say make the decision you mean to the affirmative affirmative you got it yeah there are also companies that don't sell right and take the path and say we're going to be independent and then you've never heard of them again like i remember uh path right was one of our competitors early on uh there's a big moment when they had i can't remember what it was like 110 million offer from google or something it might have been larger i don't know um and i remember there was like this big techcrunch article that was like they turned it down after talking deeply about their values and everything and i don't i don't know the inner workings of foursquare but like i'm certain there were many conversations over time where there were companies that wanted foursquare as well um recently like i mean what other companies there's clubhouse right like i don't know maybe people were really interested in them too like there are plenty of moments where people say no and we just forget that those things happen we only focus on the ones where like uh uh they said yes and like wow like what if they had stayed independent so i don't know i like i used to think a lot about this and now i just don't because i'm like whatever i you know like things have gone pretty well yeah i'm ready for the next game i mean think about um an athlete where i don't know maybe they they they do something wrong in the world series or whatever and like if you let it haunt you for the rest of your career like why not just be like i don't know it was a game next game next shot right and if if you just move to that world like at least i have a next shot right no that's that's beautiful but i mean just in insights uh and it's funny you brought up clubhouse it is very true it seems like clubhouse is uh you know on the downward path and it's very possible to see a billion plus dollar deal at some stage maybe like a year ago or half a year ago from facebook from google i think facebook was flirting with that idea too and i think a lot of companies probably were i wish it was more public you know what there's not like a badass public story about them making the decision to walk away we just don't hear about it and then we get to see the the results of that success or the failure more often failure so a couple things one is i would not assume clubhouse is down for the count at all they're young they have plenty of money they're run by really smart people i'd give them like a very fighting chance to figure it out there are a lot of times when people call twitter down for the count and they figure it out and they seem to be doing well right yeah um so just backing up like and not knowing anything about their internals like there's a strong chance they will figure it out and that people are just down because they like being down about companies they like assuming that they're going to fail so who knows right but let's take the ones in the past where like we know how it played out there are plenty of examples where people have turned down big offers and then you've just never heard from them again but we never focus on the companies because you just forget that those were big but inside your psyche i think they're um it's easy for someone with enough money to say money doesn't matter which i think is like it's bullshit of course money matters to people um but at the moment you just can't even grasp like the number of zeros that you're talking about it just doesn't make sense right so to think rationally in that moment is not something many people are equipped to do especially not people where i think we had founded the company a year earlier maybe two years earlier like a year and a half we were 13 people but um i will say i still don't know if it was the right decision because i don't have that counterfactual i don't know that other world i'm just thankful that by and large most people love instagram still do by and large people are very happy with like the time we had there um and i'm proud of what we built so like i'm cool like we're you know now now it's it's next shot right well if we could just linger on this yankees versus red sox the fun of it the competition over i would say over the space of features so um there are a bunch of features like there's photos there's one minute videos on instagram there's igtv there's stories there's reels there's live so that sounds like it's like a long list of too much stuff but it's it's not because it feels like they're they're close together but they're somehow like what we're saying fundamentally distinct like each of the things i mentioned maybe can you describe the philosophies the design philosophies behind some of these how you were thinking about it during the uh the historic war between snapchat and instagram or just in general like this space of features that was discovered there's this um great book by clay christensen called competing against luck it's like a terrible uh title but within it there's uh effectively an expression of this thing called jobs to be done theory and it's unclear if like he came up with it or some of his colleagues but everyone there are a bunch of places you can find with people claiming to have come up with this jobs to be done theory but the idea is if you if you like zoom out and you look at your product you ask yourself why are people hiring your product like imagine every product in your life is effectively an employee you know your ceo of your life and you hire products to be employees effectively they all have roles and jobs right why are you hiring a product why do you want that product to perform something in your life and what like what are the hidden reasons why uh you're you're in love with this product instagram was about sharing your life with others visually period right why because you feel connected with them you get to show off you get to feel good and and cared about right with likes and um and it turns out that that will i think forever define instagram and any product that serves that job is going to do very well okay stories let's take it as an example is very much serving that job in fact it serves it better than the original product because when you're large and have an enormous audience you're worried about people seeing your stuff or you're worried about being permanent so that a college admissions person is going to see your photo of you doing something and so it turns out that that is a more efficient way of performing that job than the original product was the original product still has its value but at scale these two things together work really really well now i will claim that other parts of the product over time didn't perform that job as well i think igtv probably didn't right shopping is like completely unrelated to what i just described but it might work i don't know right um products i think products that succeed are products that all share this parent node of like this job to be done that is in common and then they're just like different ways of doing it right apple i think does a great job with this right it's like managing your digital life and all the products just work together they sink they like it's beautiful right even if they require like silly specific cords to work but they're all part of a system it's when you leave that system and you start doing something weird that people start scratching their head and i think you are less successful so i think one of the challenges facebook has had throughout its life is that it has never fully i think appreciated the job to be done of the main product and what it's done is said oh there's a shiny object over there that starts getting some traction let's go copy that thing and then they're confused why it doesn't work like why doesn't it work it's because the people who show up for this don't want that it's different what's the purpose of facebook i remember i was a very early facebook user i was the reason i was personally excited about facebook is um because you can first of all use your real name like i i can exist in this world it can be like formally exist there's i i like anonymity for certain things reddit and so on but i want it to also exist uh not anonymously so that that can connect with other friends of mine not anonymously and there's a reliable way to know that i'm real and they're real and that we're connecting and though it's kind of like um i liked it for the for the reasons that people like linkedin i guess but like without the form like not everybody is dressed up and being super polite like more like with friends but then it became something much bigger than that i suppose there's a feed it it became this um i mean it became a place to get discover content to share content that's not just about connecting directly with friends i mean it becomes something else i don't even know what it is really so you said instagram is a place where you visually share your life what is facebook well let's go back to the founding of facebook and why it worked really well initially at harvard and then dartmouth and stanford and i can't remember probably mit there were like a handful of schools in that first tranche right um it worked because there are communities that exist in the world that want to transact and when i say transact i don't mean commercially i just mean they want to share they want to coordinate they want to communicate they want a space for themselves and facebook at its best i think is that and if actually you look at the most popular products that facebook has built over time if you look at things that like groups marketplace groups is enormous yeah and groups is effectively like everyone can found their own little stanford or dartmouth or mit right and and find each other and and and share and communicate about something that matters deeply to them that is the core of what facebook was built around and i think today is where it stands most uh most strongly yeah it's brilliant the groups i wish um i wish groups were done better it feels like it's not a first-class citizen i know i may be saying something without much knowledge but it feels like it's uh it's kind of bolted on while being used a lot it feels like there needs to be a little bit more structure in terms of discovery in terms of yeah like i mean look at reddit like red is basically groups yeah public and open and a little bit a little bit crazy right in a good way yeah um but there's clear product market fit for that specific use case and it doesn't have to be a college it can be anything it can be a small group big group it can be group messaging facebook shines i think when it leans into that i think when there are other companies that just seem exciting and now all of a sudden the product shifts in some fundamental way to go try to compete with that other thing that's when i think consumers get confused um even if you can be successful like even if you can compete with that other company even if you can figure out how to bolt it on eventually you come back and you look at the app and you're like i just don't know why i opened this app like why like too many things going on and that was always a worry i mean you listed all the things at instagram and it almost gave me a heart attack like way too many things but i don't know entrepreneurs get bored they want to add things they want to like right um i don't have a good answer for it except for that um i think being true to your original use case and not even original use case but sorry actually not use case original job there are many use cases under that job being true to that and like being really good at it over time and and morphing as as needs change i think that's how to make a company last forever and i mean honestly i like my main thesis about why facebook is in the position it is today is if if they have had a series of product launches that delighted people over time i think they'd be in a totally different world so just like imagine for a moment and by the way apple's entering this but like apple for so long just like product after product you couldn't wait for it you stood in line for it you talked about it you got excited amazon makes your life so easy it's like wow i needed this thing and it showed up at my door two days later and like both of these companies by the way amazon apple have issues right there are labor issues whether it's here in the us or in china there are environmental issues there are but like when's the last time you heard like a large chorus being like these companies better pay for what they're doing on these things right i think facebook's main issue today is like i you need to produce a hit if you don't produce hits it's really hard to keep consumers on your side then people just start picking on you and for a variety of reasons whether it's right or wrong i'm not even going to place a judgment right here right now i'm just going to say that it is way better to be in a world where you are producing hits and consumers love what you're doing because then they're on your side and i i think that's it's the past 10 years for facebook has been fairly hard on this dimension so and by hits it doesn't necessarily mean financial hits it feels like to me what you're saying is something that brings a joy yeah a product that brings joy to some fraction of the population yeah i mean tick tock isn't just literally an algorithm in some ways tick tock's content uh and algorithm have more sway now over the american psyche than facebook's algorithm right it's visual it's video by the way it's not defined by who you follow it's defined by some magical thing that by the way if someone wanted to tweak to show you a certain type of content for some reason they could right um but people love it so as a ceo let me ask you a question because leadership matters it's a complicated question why is mark zuckerberg distrusted disliked and sometimes even hated by many people in public right that is a complicated question um well the premise i'm not sure i agree with the premise um and i can i can expand that to include even a more mysterious question for me bill gates hmm what is the bill gates version of the question do you think people hate bill gates no distrust ah so uh take away one it's a checklist uh there's i think mark zuckerberg's distrust is the primary one but there's also like a like a dislike maybe hate is too strong award but just if you look at like the articles that are being written and so on there's a dislike and it makes it's confusing to me because it's like the public picks certain individuals and they and they attach certain kinds of emotions to those individuals yeah so someone once uh just recently said there's a strong case that founder-led companies have this problem and that a lot of mark's issues um come today come from the fact that he is a visible founder with this story that people have watched in both a movie and they followed along and he's this boy wonder kid who became one of the world's richest people and and he's no longer mark the person he's marked this this image of of a person with enormous wealth and power and in today's world we we have issues with enormous wealth and power for a variety of reasons one of which is we've been stuck inside you know for a year and a half two years uh one of which is a lot of people were really unhappy about not the last election but the last last election and where do you take out that anger who do you blame but the people in charge that's one example or one reason why i think um a lot of people uh express anger or resentment or unhappiness with with mark at the same time i don't know i pointed out to that person i was like well i don't know like i think a lot of people really like elon like ilana arguably like he kept his you know factory open here throughout covet protocols which arguably a lot of people would be against um while saying a bunch of uh crazy offensive things on the internet they still like basically you know gives the middle finger to the sec like on twitter and like i don't know i'm like well there's a founder and like people kind of like him i so i do think that the so like the the founder and slash ceo of a company that's a social network company is like an extra level of difficulty if if life is a video game you just chose the harder video game so i mean that's why it's interesting to ask you because you were the founder and the ceo oh yeah of a social network right challenge because exactly so but you're one of the rare even jack dorsey's disliked not to the degree but it just seems harder when you're running a social media company it's interesting i i never thought of jack as just like i think generally he's well respected um yeah i think so i i think you're right but like he's but he's not loved yeah and i feel like you i mean to me twitter is an incredible thing yeah again can i just come back to this point which seems over simplistic but like i really do think how a product makes someone feel yeah they ascribe that feeling to the founder yep uh so so make people feel good so think about it like let's just go with this thesis for a second sure i like it though um amazon's pretty utilitarian right it delivers brown boxes to your front door sure you can have alexa and you can have all these things right but in general it delivers stuff quickly to you at a reasonable price right i think jeff bezos is wonderfully wealthy thoughtful smart guy right but like people kind of feel that way about them they're like wow this is really big we're impressed that this is really big and but they he's doing the same space stuff elon's doing but they don't necessarily describe the same sense of wonder right um now let's take elon uh and again this is pet theory i don't have much proof other than my own intuition um he is literally about living the future mars space it's about wonder it's about going back to that feeling as a kid when you looked up to the stars and asked is there life out there people get behind that because it's a sense of hope and excitement and and innovation and like you can say whatever you want but we ascribe that emotion to that person now let's say you're on a social network and people make you kind of angry because they disagree with you or they say something ridiculous or they're living a fomo type life where you're like wow i wish i was doing that thing i think instagram if i were to think back by and large when i was there was not about fomo was not about this influence or economy although it certainly became that way closer to the end it was about the sense of wonder and happiness and beautiful things in the world and i don't know i mean like i don't want to have a blind spot but i don't think anyone had a strong opinion about one way or the other for the longest time the way people explain to me i mean if you want to go for toxicity you go to facebook or twitter if you want to go to make feel good about life you go to instagram to enjoy celebrate life though and my experience when talking to people is they gave me the benefit of the doubt because that but if your experience of the product is kind of makes you angry it's where you argue i mean a big part of jack might be that he wasn't actually the ceo for a very long time and only became recently so i'm not sure how much of the connection got made um but in general i mean if you hate you know i'm just thinking about other companies that aren't tech companies if you hate like what a company is doing or it makes you not feel happy i don't know like people are really angry about comcast or whatever are they even called comcast anymore it's like xfinity or something right they had to rebrand they they became meta right um it's like uh but my point is if it makes you that's beautiful yeah but the thing is this is me saying this i think your thesis is very strong and correct has elements of correctness but i still personally put some blame on individuals of course i think uh you said elon looking up there's something about childlike wander to him like to to his personality his character something about i think more so than others where people can trust them and there's uh i don't know santa pachai is an example of somebody who's like there's some kind it's it's hard to put into words but there's something about the human being where he's trustworthy yeah he's he's human in a way that uh connects to us and the same with uh sadji nadella i mean some of these folks um something about us is drawn to them even when they're flawed even like um so like your thesis really holds up for steve jobs because i think people didn't like steve jobs but like he delivered products that and then they fell in love every time i guess you could say that the ceo the leader is also a product and if they keep delivering a product that people like by being in public and saying things that people like that's also a way to make people happy but from a social network perspective it makes me wonder how difficult it is to explain to people why certain things happen like how to explain machine learning to explain why certain uh the the woke mob effect happens or the certain kinds of like bullying happens which is like it's human nature combined with algorithm and it's very difficult to control for how the spread of quote-unquote misinformation happens it's very difficult to control for that and to you so you try to decelerate certain parts and you create more problems then you solve and anything that looks at all like censorship can create huge amounts of problems that's the slippery slope and then you have to inject humans to oversee the machine learning algorithms and anytime you inject humans into the system it's gonna create a huge number of problems and i feel like it's up to the leader to communicate that effectively to be transparent uh first of all design products that don't have those problems and second of all when they have those problems to be able to communicate with them i guess that's all going to when you run a social network company your job is hard yeah i will say the one element that you haven't named that i think you're getting at is just bedside manner which steve jobs i never worked for him i never met him in person um had an enor like an uncanny ability in public to have bedside manner i mean some of the best clips of steve jobs are from like i would say maybe the 80s when he's on these stage and getting questions from the audience about life or and he'll take this question that is like how are you going to compete with blah and it's super boring and i don't even know the name of the coming and his answer is is if you just asked like your grandfather the meaning of life yeah yeah and you sit there and you're just like what like yeah and there's that bedside manner um and if you lack that or if that's just not intuitive to you uh i think that it can be a lot harder to gain the trust of people and then add on top of that missteps of companies right it's i don't know if you have any friends from the past where like maybe they crossed you once or like maybe you get back together and you're friends again but you just never really forget that thing it's human nature not to forget i'm russian you cost me one we solve the problem so my point is it there's humans don't forget and if there are times in the past where they feel like they don't trust the company or the company hasn't had their back that is really hard to earn back especially if you don't have that bedside manner um and again like i'm not attributing this specifically to mark because i think a lot of companies have this issue where one you have to be trustworthy as a company and live by it and live by those actions and then two i think you need to be able to be really relatable in a way that's very difficult if you're worth like what these people are it's really hard yeah jack does a pretty good job of this by being a monk but i also like jack issues attention like he's not out there almost on purpose he's just working hard doing square right like i literally shared a desk like this with him at audio i mean just normal guy who likes painting i like i remember he would leave early on like wednesdays or something to go to like a painting class yeah and he's creative he's thoughtful i mean money makes people like more creative and more thoughtful like extreme versions of themselves right um and this was a long long time ago uh you mentioned that he uh he asked you to do some kind of javascript thing we were working on some javascript together i like that's hilarious like pre-twitter early twitter days you and jack dorsey are in a room together talking about javascript solving some kind of menial problem terrible problems yeah i mean not terrible just like boring boring widget probably i think it was the odo widget we were working on at the time i'm surprised anyone paid me to be in the room as an intern because i didn't really provide any value i'm very thankful to anyone who included me back in the day uh it was very helpful so thank you for listening i mean is there uh odia that's a precursor to twitter first of all did you have any anticipation that this jack dorsey guy could be also a head of a major social network and um second did you learn anything from the guy that like did do do you think it's a coincidence that you two were in the room together and it's the coincidence meaning like why does the world play its game in a certain way were these two founders of social networks i don't know it's so weird right like i i mean it's also weird that mark showed up you know in our fraternity my sophomore year and we got to know each other then like long before instagram it's it's a small world but let me tell a fun story about jack um we're at odio and i don't know i think ev was feeling like people weren't working hard enough or something nice and i can't remember exactly what he he created this thing where every friday i don't know if it was every friday i only remember this happening once but he had us like a statuette it's like of mary and in the bottom it's it's hollow right and i remember on a friday he decided decided he was going to let everyone vote for who had worked the hardest that week we all voted closed ballot right we all put in a bucket and he tallied the votes and then whoever got the most votes as i recall got the statuette and in the statue it was a thousand bucks whereas i recall there was a thousand bucks tonight it might have been a hundred bucks but let's call it a thousand it's more exciting that way it felt like a thousand yeah it did to me for sure i actually got two votes i was very happy we were a small company but i as the intern i got at least two votes so everybody knew how many votes they got individually yeah yeah i think it was one of these self-accountability things anyway i remember jack just getting like the vast majority of votes from everyone and i remember just thinking like like i couldn't imagine he would become what he'd become and do what he would do but i had a profound respect that the new guy who i really liked worked that hard and you could see his dedication even then and that people respected him that's the one story that i remember of him like working with him specifically from that summer can take a small tangent on that of course there's kind of a push back in silicon valley a little bit against hard work can you speak to the sort of the thing you admire to see the new guy working so hard that thing what is the value of that thing in a company see this is i like just to be very frank it drives me nuts like i saw this really funny video on tick tock was it on tick tock it was like i'm taking a break from my mental health to work on my career i thought that was funny um yeah so it's like oh it is kind of phrased that way the opposite often right yeah um okay so a couple things uh i uh i have worked so hard to do the things that i did like mike and i lost years off of our lives staying up late figuring things out the stress that comes with the job i have a lot more gray hair now than i did back then it requires an enormous amount of work and most people aren't successful right but even the ones that do don't skate by um i am okay if people choose not to work hard because i don't actually think there's anything in this world that says you have to work hard um but i do think that great things require a lot of hard work so there's no way you can expect to change the world without working really hard and by the way even changing the world you know the folks that i respect the most have nudged the world in like a slight direction slight very very slight like even if elon accomplishes all the things he wants to accomplish we will have uh have nudged the world in a slight direction but it requires enormous amount there was an interview with him where he was just like he was interviewed i think at the tesla factory and he was like work is really hard this is actually unhealthy and i can't recall the exact but he was like visibly shaken about how hard he had been working and he was like this is bad and unfortunately i think to have great outcomes you actually do need to work at like three standard deviations above the mean but there's nothing saying that people have to go for this the thing is but what i would argue this is my personal opinion is nobody has to do anything first of all exactly they certainly don't have to work hard exactly but i think hard work in a company should be admired i do too and you should not feel like you shouldn't feel good about yourself for not working hard like so for example i don't have to work out i don't have to run i hate running but like i certainly don't feel good if i don't run because i know for my health like there's certain values i guess is what i'm trying to get right the the certain values that you have in life it feels like there's certain values that companies should have and hard work is one of the things um i think that should be admired i often ask this kind of silly question uh just just to get a sense of people one that like if i'm hiring and so on i just ask if they uh think it's better to work hard or work smart it was helpful for me to get a sense of people from that because you think like the right both was that the answer was the answer's both i usually try not to give them that but sometimes i'll say both if that's an option but a lot of people kind of a surprising number will say work smart and they're usually people who don't know how to work smart and uh they're they're literally just lazy not just there's two there's two effects behind that it's one is laziness and the other is ego when you're younger and you say it's better to work smart it means you think you know what it means to work smart at this early stage to me people that say work hard or both they have the humility to understand like i'm going to have to work my ass off because i'm too dumb to know how to work smart and people who are self-critical in this way in some small amount you have to have some confidence but you have if you have humility that means you're going to actually eventually figure out what it means to work smart and then to actually be successful you should do both so i have a very particular take on this which is that um no one's forcing you to do anything all choices have consequences so if you major in i don't know theoretical literature i i don't even know if that's a major i'm just making something up as opposed to regular literature like if but like literature yeah think about like like theoretical yeah spanish lit from the 14th century like just make make up your esoteric thing and then the number of people i went to stanford with who get out in the world are like wait what i can't find a job like no one wants a theoretical like there are plenty of counter examples of people have majored in esoteric things and gone on to be very successful so i just want to be clear it's not about the major but every choice you make whether it's to have kids like i love my children it's so awesome to have two kids and it is so hard to work really hard and also have kids it's really hard and there's a reason why certain very successful people like don't have are not successful but people who run very very large companies or startups have chosen not to have kids for a while or chosen not to like prioritize them everything's a choice and like i choose to prioritize my children because like i want to do that right so everything's a choice now once you've made that choice i think it's important that the contract is clear which is to say let's imagine you were joining a new startup it's important that that startup communicate that like the expectation is like we're all working really really hard right now you don't have to join the startup but like if you do just know like you're it's almost as if you join i don't know pick your uh pick your pick your like sports team like let's go back to the yankees for a second you want to join the yankees but you don't really want to work that hard you don't really want to do batting practice or pitching practice or whatever for your position right um that to me is wacko and that's actually the world that it feels like we live in in tech sometimes where people both want to work for the yankees because it pays a lot but like don't actually want to work that hard that i don't fully understand because if you sign up for some of these things just sign up for it but it's okay if you don't want to sign up for it there's so many wonderful careers in this world that don't require 80 hours a week but when i read about companies going to like four day work weeks and stuff i just like i chuckle because i can't get enough done with a seven day week i don't know how and people will say oh you're just not working smart and it's like no i i work pretty smart i think in general like i would have gotten to this point if i hadn't like some amount of working smart and there is balance though so i used to be like a pretty big cyclist i don't do it much anymore just because of kids and like prioritizing other things right but one of the most important things to learn as a cyclist is to take a rest day but to me and to cyclists like resting is a function of optimizing for the long run it's not like a thing that you do for its own merits it's actually like if you don't rest your muscles don't recover and then you're just not as like you're not training as efficiently you should probably the the successful people i've known in terms of athletes they hate rest days but they know they have to do it for the long term like absolutely they think their opposition is getting stronger and stronger and that's the feeling but you know it's the right thing and usually you need a coach to help you yeah totally so i mean i use this thing called training peaks and it's interesting because it actually mathematically shows like where you are on the curve and all this stuff yeah but you have to re like you have to have that rest but it it's a function of going harder for longer again it's this reinforcement learning like planning the aggregate and long but a lot of people will hide behind laziness by saying that they're trying to optimize for the long run and they're not they're just not working very hard but again you don't have to sign up for it it's totally cool like i don't think less of people for like not working super hard just like don't sign up for things that require working super hard and some of that requires for the leadership to have the guts the boldness to communicate effectively at the very beginning i mean sometimes i think most of the problems arise from the fact that the leadership is kind of hesitant to to communicate this the socially um difficult truth of what it takes to be at this company so they kind of say hey come come with us there's we have snacks you know but unlimited vacation and yeah you know uh ray at bridgewater is always fascinating because you know people it's been called like a cult on the outside or cultish and but what's fascinating is like they just don't give on their principles they're like listen this is what it's like to work here we record every meeting we're like brutally honest and that's not gonna feel right to everyone and if it doesn't feel regular totally cool just go work somewhere else but if you work here you are signing up for this and that's that's been fascinating to me because it's honesty up front it's a system in which you operate um and if it's not for you like no one's forcing you to work there right i i actually did so i i did a conversation with him and uh kind of got stuck in a funny moment which is uh at the end i asked him you know to give me honest feedback of how i did on the interview and um i don't think so he was super nice he asked me he's like well tell me did you accomplish what you were hoping to accomplish i was like that's not that's not i'm asking you as an objective observer of two people talking how do we do today and then he's like well um he gave me this politician answer well i feel like we've accomplished successful communication of like ideas which is i'd like i've loved to spread some of the ideas in that like in principles and so on back to my original point it's really hard to get even for ray it's really hard to give feedback and one of the other things i learned from him and and just people in that world is like man humans really like to pretend like they've come to uh that they've come to some kind of meeting of the minds like if there's conflict if you and i have conflict it's always better to meet face to face right we're on the phone slack is not great right email's not great but face to face what's crazy is you and i get together and we actively try to even if we're not actually solving the conflict we actively try to paper over the conflict oh yeah it didn't really bother bothering me that much oh yeah i'm sure you didn't mean it i'm sure but like no in our minds we're still there yeah um so this is one of the things that as a leader you always have to be digging especially as you straight to the conflict yeah but as you ascend no one wants to tell you you're crazy no one wants to tell you your idea is bad and you can you're like oh oh i'm going to be a leader and the idea is well i'm just going to ask people no one tells you so like you have to look for the markers knowing that literally just people aren't going to tell you along the way and be paranoid i mean you asked about selling you know the company i think one of the biggest differences between me and a lot of other entrepreneurs is like i wasn't completely confident we could do it like we could be alone and and and actually be great and if any entrepreneur is honest with you they also feel that way but a lot of people are like well i have to be cocky and just say i can do this on my own we're going to be fine we're going to crush everyone some people do say that and then it's not right and they and they fail but um being honest in that moment with yourself with the those close to you and also uh you talked about the personality of leaders and and who resonates and who doesn't it's rare that i see leaders be vulnerable rare and one thing i tried to do at instagram at least internally was like say when i screwed up and like point out how i was wrong about things and point out where my judgment was off everyone thinks they have to bat a thousand right like that's crazy the best quant hedge funds in the world bat 50.001 percent they just take a lot of bets right renaissance they might they might bat fifty one percent right but holy hell like the question isn't are you right every single time and you have to seem invincible the question is how many at-bats do you get and on average are you are you better on average right with enough bets and enough at bats that your aggregate can be very high i mean steve jobs was wrong at a lot of stuff the newton was too early right next not quite right um there was even a time when he said like no one will ever want to watch video on the ipod totally wrong but who cares if you come around and realize your mistake and fix it it becomes just like you said harder and harder when your ego grows and the number of people around you that say positive things towards you grows and i actually think it's really valuable that like let's manage and a counter factual where instagram became worth like 300 billion or something crazy right um i kind of like that my life is relatively normal now when i say relatively you get what i mean i'm not making a claim that i live a normal life but like i certainly don't live in a world where there are like 15 sherpas following me like fetching me water or whatever like that's not how it works i actually like that i have a sense of humility of like i may not found another thing that's nearly as big so i have to work twice as hard or i have to like learn twice as much i have to re my we haven't talked about machine learning yet but my favorite thing is all these like famous you know uh tech guys who have worked in the industry pontificating about the future of machine learning and how it's gonna kill us all and right like and like i'm pretty sure they've never tried to build anything with machine learning themselves yes so there's a nice line between people that actually built stuff with the machine like actually program something or at least understand some of those fundamentals and the people they're just saying philosophical stuff for journalists and so on it's it's a it's an interesting line to walk because the people who program are often not philosophers or don't have the attention they can't write an op-ed for the wall street journal like it doesn't work so like it's nice to be both a little bit like to have elements of both my point is the fact that i have to learn stuff from scratch or or that i choose to are like it's humbling uh yeah i mean again i have a lot of advantages i like but my point is it's awesome to be back in a game where you have to fight that is that's fun so being humble being vulnerable it's an important aspect of leader and i hope it serves me well but like i can't fast forward 10 years to now i'm just that's my game plan before i forget i have to ask you one last thing on instagram what do you think about the whistleblower francis hogan recently coming out and saying that facebook is aware for instagram's harmful effect on teenage girls as per their own internal research studies and the matter what do you think about this baby of yours instagram being under fire now as we've been talking about under the leadership of facebook you know i often question where does the blame lie is the blame at the people that originated the network me right uh is the blame at like the decision to combine the network with another network with a certain set of values is the blame at how it gets run after i left like is is it the driver or is it the car right um is it that someone enabled these devices in the first place if you go to an extreme right or is it the users themselves just human nature is it is it just the way of human nature sure and like the idea that we're gonna find a mutually exclusive answer here is crazy there's not one place it's a combination of a lot of these things and then the question is like is it true at all right like i'm not actually saying that's not true or that it's true but there's always more nuance here do i believe that social media has an effect on young people well it's got it they use it a lot and i bet you there are a lot of positive effects and i bet you there are negative effects just like any technology and where i've come to in my thinking on this is that i think any technology has negative side effects the question is as a leader what do you do about them and are you actively working on them or do you just like not really believe in them if you're a leader that sits there and says well we're going to put an enormous amount of resources against this we're going to acknowledge when there are true criticisms we're going to be vulnerable that we're not perfect and we're going to go fix them and we're going to be held accountable along the way i think that people generally really respect that but i think that where facebook i think has had issues in the past is where they say things like i can't remember what mark said about misinformation during the election there was that like famous quote where he's like it's pretty crazy to think that facebook had anything to do with this election like that was something like that quote and i don't remember what stage he was on and yeah yeah but ooh that did not age well right like you have to be willing to say well maybe there's there's there's something there and and wow like i want to go look into it and truly believe it in your gut but if people look at you and how you act and what you say and don't believe you truly feel that way it's not just the words you say about how you say them and that people believe that you actually feel the pain of having caused any suffering so to me it's um it's much more about your actions and your posture post event than it is about debugging the why because i don't know is it like i don't know this research it was written well after i left right like is it the algorithm is it the explorer page is it the people you might know unit connecting you to you know ideas that are dangerous like i i really don't know yeah um so we'd have to have a much deeper i think dive to understand where the blame lies what's very unpleasant to me to consider now i don't know if this is true but to consider the very fact that there might be some complicated games being played here for example you know as somebody i really love psychology and i love it enough to know that the field is pretty broken in the following way it's very difficult to study human beings well at scale because the questions you ask affect the results you can you can basically get any results you want and so you have an internal facebook study that asks some question of which we don't know the full details there's some kind of analysis but that's just the one little tiny slice into a some much bigger picture and so you can have thousands of employees of facebook one of them comes out and picks whatever narrative knowing that they become famous coupled with the other really uncomfortable thing i see in the world which is journalists seem to understand they get a lot of click-bait attention from saying something negative about social networks certain companies like they even get some some click-bait stuff about tesla or about especially when it's like when there's a public famous ceo type of person if they get a lot of views on the negative not the positive the positive they'll get i mean it actually goes to the thing you were saying before if there's a hot sexy new product that's great to look forward to they get positive on that but absent the product it's nice to have uh like the ceo messing up with some kind of way and so couple that with the whistleblower and with the uh this whole dynamic of journalism and so on you know uh with social dilemma being a really popular documentary it's like all right my concern is there's deep flaws in human nature here in terms of things we need to deal with like the nature of hate yeah of bullying all those kinds of things and then there's people who are trying to use that potentially to become famous and make money off of off of blaming others for causing more of the problem as opposed to helping solve the problem so i don't know what to think i'm not saying this is like i'm just uncomfortable with i guess not knowing what to think about any of this because a bunch of folks i know that work at facebook on the machine learning side so young lacoon i mean they they're quite upset by what's happening because there's a lot of really brilliant good people inside facebook they're trying to yeah do good and so like all of us impressed jan is one of them and he has an amazing team of the machine learning researchers like he's really upset with the fact that people don't seem to understand that this this is not the portrayal does not represent the the full nature of efforts that's going on facebook so i don't know what to think about that well you just i think very helpfully explained the nuance of the situation and why it's so hard to understand but a couple things one is um i think i i have been surprised at the scale with which some product manager can do an enormous amount of harm to a very very large company by releasing a trove of documents like i i think i read a couple of them when they got published i haven't even spent any time going deep part of it's like i don't really feel like reliving a previous life but um wow like talk about challenging the idea of open culture and like what that does to facebook internally if facebook was built like i remember um like my office uh we had this like no visitors rule around my office because we always had like confidential stuff up on the walls and never was super angry because they're like that goes against our culture of transparency and like mark's in the fish cube or whatever they call it the aquarium i think they called it um where like literally anyone could see what he was doing at any point and um and i don't know i mean other companies like apple have been quiet slash lockdown snapchats the same way for a reason and i don't know what this does to transparency on the inside of startups that value that i think that it's a seminal moment and you can say well you should have nothing to hide right but to your point you can pick out documents that show anything right um but i don't know so what happens to transparency inside of startups and the culture that will have that that startups or companies in the future will grow like the startup of the future that becomes the next facebook will be locked down and what does that do right so that's part one part two like i i don't think that you could design a more like uh uh well-orchestrated handful of events from the like 16 minutes to um releasing the documents in the way that they were released at the right time that takes a lot of planning and partnership and it seems like she has a partner at some firm right that probably uh helped a lot with this but man as at a personal level if you're her you'd have to really believe in what you are doing really believe in it because you are personally putting your ass on the line right like you've got a very large company that that doesn't like enemies right um it takes a lot of guts uh and i don't love these conspiracy theories about like oh she's being financed from some person or people like i don't love them because that's like the easy thing to say i think the the the occam's razor here is like someone thought they were doing something wrong and was like very very courageous in in i don't know if courageous is the word but like so without getting into like is she a martyr is she courageous is she right like let's put that aside for a second yeah then there are the documents themselves they say what they say to your point a lot of the things that like people have been worried about already in the documents are or they're already been said externally and um i don't know i'm just like i'm i'm thankful that i am focused on new things with my life well let me just say i just think it's a really hard problem that probably facebook and twitter are trying to solve i'm actually just fascinated by how hard this problem is there are fundamental issues at facebook in tone and in an approach of how product gets built and the objective functions and um and since people uh uh organizations are not people so yawn and fair right like there are a lot of really great people who like literally just want to push reinforcement learning forward they literally just want to teach a robot to touch feel lift right like they're not thinking about political misinformation right yeah but there's a there's a strong connection between what funds that research and an enormously profitable machine uh that has trade-offs and uh one cannot one cannot separate the two you are not completely separate from the system so i agree it can feel really frustrating to feel if you're internally internal there that you're working on something completely unrelated and you feel like your group's good i can understand that but there's some responsibility still you have to acknowledge it's like the ray dalio thing you have to look in the mirror and see if there's problems and you have to fix those problems you mentioned machine learning reinforcement quite a bit i mean to me social networks is one of the exciting places recommender systems where machine learning is applied where else in the world in space of possibilities over the next 5 10 20 years do you think we're going to see impact of machine learning when you try on the philosophical level on a technical level what do you think or or within social networks themselves well i think the obvious answers are climate change right like think about how much fuel or or just waste there is in energy consumption today because we don't plan accordingly because we take the least efficient route or the logistics and stuff the supply chain all that kind of stuff yeah i mean listen if we're going to fight climate change like one really way one awesome way to do it is figure out how to optimize how we operate as a species and and minimize the amount of energy we consume to maximize whatever economic impact we want to have because right now those two are very much tied together and i don't believe that has to be the case there's this really interesting you've read it um for people who are listening there's this really interesting paper on reinforcement learning and energy consumption inside buildings it's like one of the seminal ones right um but imagine that at massive scale that's super interesting i mean they've done like resource planning for servers for peak load using reinforcement learning i don't know if that was at google or somewhere else but like okay great you do it for servers but what if you could do it for just capacity and general energy capacity for cities and planning for traffic and of course there's all the um self-driving cars and i don't know like i'm not going to pontificate like crazy ideas using reinforcement learning or machine learning it's just so clear to me that humans don't think quickly enough so it's interesting to think about machine learning helping a little bit at scale so a little bit to a large number of people that has a huge impact so if you optimize say google maps something like that trajectory planning or would it map quest first uh yeah getting here i looked and it was like here's the most energy efficient route i was like i'm gonna be late i need to take the fastest route as opposed to unrolling the map yeah yeah like and that's going to be very inefficient no matter what i was definitely the other day like part of the epsilon of epsilon greedy with waze where like i was sent on like a weird route that i could tell they're like we just need to collect data of this road like we just kevin's the ant they sent out kevin's definitely gonna be the guinea pig and great now we have did you at least feel pride oh going through it i was like oh this is fun like now they get data about this weird shortcut and actually i hit all the green lights and it worked and i'm like this is a problem data bad data they're just going to imagine i could see you slowing down and stopping in a green light just to give them the right kind of data yeah um but to answer your question like i feel like that was fairly unsatisfying and it's easy to say climate change but what i would say is at instagram everything we applied machining learning to uh got better for users and it got better better for the company i saw the power i didn't fully understand it as an executive and i think that's actually one of the issues that uh and when i say understand i mean the mathematics of it like i understand what it does i understand that it helps but um there are a lot of executives now that talk about it and the way that they talk about the internet or they talked about the internet like 10 years ago they're like we're gonna build mobile and you're like what does that mean they're like we're just gonna do mobile and you're like okay um so my sense is the next generation of leaders will have grown up having had classes in reinforcement learning supervised learning whatever and they will be able to thoughtfully apply it to their companies and the places it it is needed most and that's really cool because i mean talk about efficiency gains i it's that that's what excites me the most about it yeah so there's it's interesting just to get a fundamental first principles understanding of certain concepts of machine learning so supervised learning from an executive perspective supervised learning you have to have a lot of humans label a lot of data so the question there is okay can we gather a large amount of data that can be labeled well and that's the question tesla asks like can we create a data engine that keeps um sending an imperfect machine learning system out there whenever it fails it gives us data back we label it by human and we send it back and forth so this way then there is uh yamaha coons excited about this self-supervised learning where you do much less human labeling and there's some kind of mechanism for the system to learn it by itself on the on the human generated data and then there's the reinforcement learning which is like basically allowing it's it's applying the alpha zero uh technology that uh allowed through self-play to learn how to solve the game of go and and achieve incredible levels at the game of chess it can you formulate the problem you're trying to solve in a way that's amenable to reinforcement learning and can you get the right kind of signal at scale because you need a lot a lot of signal and that that's that's kind of fascinating to see which part of a social network can you convert into a reinforcement learning problem the fascinating thing about reinforcement learning i think is that we now have learned to apply uh neural networks to guess uh you know q func like the q function basically the values for any state in action and that is fascinating because we used to just like i don't know have like a linear regression like hope it worked and that was the fanciest version of it but now you look at it i'm like trying to learn this stuff and i look at it i'm like there are like 17 different acronyms of different ways you can try to apply this no one quite agrees like what's the best generally if you're trying to like build a neural network they're pretty well-trodden ways of doing that you use atom you use relu you use like there's just like general good ideas and in in reinforcement learning i feel like the consensus is like it totally depends and by the way it's really hard to get it to converge and it's noisy and it like so there are all these really interesting ideas around building simulators um you know like for instance in self-driving right like you don't want to like actually have someone get in an accident to learn that an accident is bad so you start simulating accidents simulating aggressive drivers they're simulating crazy dogs that run into the street and wow fascinating right like that my mind starts racing and then the question is okay forget about uh self-driving cars let's talk about uh social networks um how can you produce a better more thoughtful experience using these types of of algorithms and honestly in talking to some of the people that work at facebook and and old instagramers most people are like yeah we tried a lot of things didn't quite ever make it work i mean for the longest time facebook ads was effectively a logistic regression okay i don't know what it is now but like if you look at this paper they published back in the day it was literally just a logistic regression made a lot of money um so even at these like extremely large scales if we are not yet touching what reinforcement learning can truly do imagine what the next 10 years looks like yeah how cool is that it's amazing so i really like the use of reinforcement learning as part of the simulation for example like with self-driving cars it's modeling pedestrians so the nice thing about reinforcement learning it can be used to learn agents within the world so they can learn to behave properly like you can teach pedestrians to like you don't hard code the way they behave they learn how to behave in that same way i do have a hope was it jack dorsey talks about healthy conversations you talked about uh meaningful interactions i believe yeah like simulating interactions so you can learn how to manage that it's fascinating so where most of your algorithm development happens on in virtual worlds and then you can really learn how to design the interface how you design much of aspects of the experience in terms of the how you select what's shown in the feed all those kinds of things that it feels like if you can connect reinforce some learning to that that's super exciting yep and uh i think if you have if you have a company and leadership that believe in doing the right things and can apply this technology in the right way some really special stuff can happen it is mostly like likely going to be a group of people we've never heard about startup from scratch right um and and you asked if like new social networks could be built i i've got to imagine they will be and whoever starts it it might be some kids in a garage that took these classes from these people you right like and they're building all of these things with this tech at the core so i'm trying not to be someone who just like throws around reinforcement learning as a buzzword i truly believe that it is the most cutting edge in what can happen in social networks and i also believe it's super hard like it's super hard to make it work it's super hard to do it at scale it's super hard to find people that truly understand it so i'm not gonna say that like i think it'll be applied in social networks before we have true self-driving yeah let me put it that way we could argue about this for a long time but yes i agree with you so i think self-driving is way harder than people realize oh absolutely uh let me ask you in terms of that kid in the garage or those couple of kids in the garage what advice would you give to them if they want to start a new social network or a business what advice would you give to somebody with a big dream and a young startup to me you have to choose to do something that even if it fails like you you it was so fun right like we never started instagram knowing it was going to be big we started instagram because we loved photography we loved social networks i had seen what other social networks had done and i thought hmm maybe we did a spin on this but like nowhere was our feet predestined like it wasn't like it wasn't written out anywhere that everything was going to go great and i often think the counterfactual like what if it had not gone well i would've been like i don't know that was fun we raised some money we learned some stuff and and does it position you well for the next experience that's the advice that i would give to anyone wanting to start something today which is like does this meet with your ultimate goals not wealth not fame none of that because all of that by the way is bullshit like you can get super famous and super wealthy and i like i think generally those are not things that again it's easy to say with like a lot of money that somehow like it's not good to have a lot of money it's just i think that complicates life enormously in a way that people don't fully comprehend so i think it's way more interesting to shoot for can i make something that people love that provides value in the world that i love building that i love working on that i write that's um that's what i would do if i were starting from scratch and by the way like in some ways that i will do that personally which is like choose the thing that you get up every morning you're like i love this even when it's painful even when it's painful what about a social network specifically if you were to imagine put yourself in the mind of someone compete against myself i can't give out ideas okay i gotcha no but it's like high level you like focus on community yeah and yeah i i said that as a as a half joke um in all honesty i think these things are so hard to build that like ideas are a dime a dozen but um you have to i talked about keeping it simple can i tell you which is a liberating idea that model is yes it's three circles and they overlap one circle is uh what do i have experience at slash what am i good at i don't like saying what am i good at because it just like seems like what do i have experience in right what can i bring to the table what am i excited about is the other circle what gets what's just super cool right that i want to work on because even when this is hard um i think it's so cool i want to stick with it and the last circle is like what does the world need and if that circle ain't there it doesn't matter what you work on because there are a lot of startups that exist that just no one needs or very small markets need but if you want to be successful i think if you're like if you're good at it you have it sorry if you're good at it if you're passionate about it and the world needs it i mean this sounds simple but not enough people sit down and just think about those circles and think do these things overlapping can i get that middle section it's small but can i get that middle section um i think a lot about that personally and then you have to be really honest about the circle that you're good at and really honest about the circle that uh the world needs and i suppose really honest about the passion like what you actually love yeah as opposed to like some kind of dream of making money all those kind of stuff like literally love i had a former engineer who decided to start a startup and i was like are you sure you want to start a company versus like join something else because um being a coach of an nba team and playing basketball are two very very different things and like not everyone fully understands the difference i think you can kind of do it both um and i don't know jury's out on that one because like they're in the middle of it now so but it's really important to figure out what you're good at not be full of yourself like truly look at your track record um what's the saying like it ain't bragging if you could if if you can do it um but too many people are delusional and like think they're better at things than they actually are or think there's a bigger market than there actually is just when you confuse your passion for things with a big market that's really scary right like just because you think it's cool doesn't mean that it's a big business opportunity so like what evidence do you have again i'm a fairly like i'm a strict rationalist on this and like sometimes people don't like working with me because i'm pretty pragmatic about things like i'm not i'm not elon like i don't sit and make bold proclamations about visiting mars like that's just not how i work i'm like okay i want to build this really cool thing that's fairly practical and i think we could do it and it's in this way and what's cool though is like that's just my sweet spot i'm not like i just i can't i can't with a straight face talk about the metaverse i can't i just it's not me uh what do you think about the the facebook renaming it and that is a dick i just literally know like i'm i'm fairly i like to live in the next five years and like what what things can i get out in a year that people will use at scale and um so it's just again those circles i think are different for different people but it's important to realize that like market matters you being good at it matters and having passion for it matters uh your question sorry well unless on this topic in terms of funding is there by way of advice was funding in your own journey helpful unhelpful like is there a right time to get funding for funding venture funding or anything borrow some money from your parents i don't know like is money get in the way does it help is the timing important is there some kind of wisdom you can give there because you were exceptionally successful very quickly funding helps as long as it's from the right people that includes yourself and i'll talk about myself funding myself in in a second which is like because i can fund myself doing whatever projects i can do i don't really have another person putting pressure on me except for myself and that creates strange dynamics right but let's like talk about people getting funding from a venture capitalist initially uh we raised money from matt kohler at benchmark he's brilliant amazing guy very thoughtful and he was very helpful early on but i have stories from entrepreneurs where they raise money from the wrong person or the wrong firm where incentives weren't aligned they didn't think in the same way um and bad things happened because of that the border room was always noisy there were fights like we just never had that matt was great i think usu like capital these days is kind of a dime a dozen right like as long as you're fundable like it seems like there's money out there this is what i'm hearing um it's really important that you are aligned and that you think of raising money as hiring someone for your team rather than taking money if capital is plentiful right it provides a certain amount of pressure to do the right thing that i think is healthy for any startup and it keeps you real and honest because they don't want to lose their money they're paid to not lose their money the problem you know maybe i could de-personalize it but like i remember having lunch with elon it's only happened once and i asked him like i was trying to figure out what i was doing after instagram right and i asked him something about like angel investing and he looked at me with a straight face and was like why the f would i do that like why like i was like i don't know like you're connected like seems like he's like i only invested myself i was like okay you know like not the confidence i was just like what a novel idea it's like yeah if you have money like why not just put it against your bag and like yeah enable you visiting mars or something right like that's awesome great but i had never really thought of it that way but also with that comes an interesting dynamic where um you don't actually have people who are gonna lose that money telling you hey don't do this or hey you need to face this reality so you need to create other versions of that truth teller and i whatever i do next that's going to be one of the interesting challenges is how do you create that truth-telling situation um and that's part of why by the way i think someone like jack when you start square you have money but you still you bring on partners because i think it creates a truth-telling type environment um i'm still trying to figure this out like i like it's an interesting it's an interesting diamond so you're thinking of perhaps launching some kind of venture where you're investing in yourself i mean is there in the books potentially i'm 37 going on 38 next month i have a long life to live i'm not definitely not gonna sit on the beach right so i'm gonna do something at some point and i gotta imagine i will i will like help fund it right so the other way of thinking about this is you could park your money in the smp and this is bad because the smp has done wonderfully well in the last year right or you can invest in yourself and um if you're not going to invest in yourself you probably shouldn't do a startup it's kind of the way of thinking about it and you can invest in yourself in the way elon does which is basically uh go all in on this investment maybe that's one way to achieve accountability is like you're kind of screwed if you're if you fail yeah that's yeah i i personally like that i like burning bridges behind me so that i'm fucked if it fails yeah yeah yeah it's really important though one of the things i think mark said to me early on that that sticks with me that i think is true uh we were talking about people who had left like operating roles and started doing venture or something it was like a lot of people convinced themselves they work really hard like they think they work really hard and they they put on the show and in their minds they work really hard but they don't work very hard there is something about lighting a fire underneath you and burning bridges such that you can't turn back yeah that i think you know we didn't talk about this specifically but i think you're right there is you need to have that because there's this self-delusion at a certain scale oh i have so many board calls oh like we have all these things to figure out it's like this is one of the hard parts about it being an operator is like there are so many people that have made a lot of money not operating but operating is just one of the hardest things on earth it is just so effing hard it is stressful it is you're dealing with real humans you're not just like throwing capital in and hoping it grows i'm not undermining the vc mindset i think it's a wonderful thing and needed and and so many wonderful vcs i've worked with but um yeah like when your ass is on the line and it's your money it's talk to me in 10 years we'll see how it goes yeah but like you're saying that is a source when you wake up in the morning as uh you look forward to the day full of challenges that's also where you can find happiness let me ask you about love and friendship sure what's the role in this heck of a difficult journey you've been on of love of uh friendship what's the role of love in the human condition well first things first the woman i married my wife nicole no way i could do what i do if we weren't together she had the filter idea yeah yeah exactly we didn't go over that story um everything is a partnership right and to achieve great things it's not about like someone pulling their weight in places like it's not like someone's supporting you so that you could do this other thing it's literally like you know i mike and i and our partnership as co-founders is fascinating because i don't think instagram would have happened without that partnership like either him or me alone no way we pushed and pulled each other in a way that allowed us to build a better thing because of it nicole sure like she pushed me to work on the filters early on and yes that's exciting it's a fun story right but the truth of it is being able to like level with someone about how hard the process is and have someone see you for who you are before instagram and know that there's a constant you throughout all of this and be able to call you when you're drifting from that but also support you when you're trying to stick with that that's i mean that's that's true friendship slash love whatever you want to call it um but also for someone not to care i remember nicole saying hey like i know you're gonna do this instagram thing you should i guess it was bourbon at the time you should do it because um you know even if it doesn't work we can move to like a smaller apartment and it'll be fine like we'll make it work how beautiful is that right yeah that's almost like a superpower it gives you permission to fail and somehow that actually leads to success but also she's like the least impressed about instagram of anyone she's like yeah it's great but like i love you for you like i like that you're like a decent cock beautiful it's beautiful with the uh with the gantt chart and thanksgiving which i still think is a brilliant effing idea thank you um big ridiculous question have you uh you're you're old and wise at this stage so have you discovered meaning to this whole thing why the hell are we descendants of um apes here on earth what's the meaning of it what's the meaning of life i haven't and it and i i am inco so the crazy so the best learning for me has been like no matter what level of success you achieve you're still worried about similar things maybe on a slightly different scale you're still concerned about the same thing you're still self-conscious about the same things it's like and actually that moment going through that is what makes you believe there's got to be like more machinery to life or purpose to life and that that we're all chasing these materialistic things but you start start realizing like um it's almost like you know the truman show when he gets the edge and he like knocks against it he's like what like there's this awakening that happens when you get to that edge that you realize oh like sure it's great it's great that we all chase money and fame and and success but you hit the edge and and i'm not even claiming i hit an edge like like elon's hit an edge like there's clearly larger scales but what's cool is you learn that like it doesn't actually matter and that there are all these other things that truly matter um that's not a case for working less hard that's not a case for taking it easy that's not a case for the four day work week what that is a case for is designing your life exactly the way you want to design it because i don't know i i think we go around the or you know the sun a certain number of times and then we die and then that's it that's me are you afraid of that moment no not at all in fact at least not yet listen i'm like a pilot like i do crazy things and i like um no i like if anything i'm like oh i gotta choose uh uh mindfully and purposefully the thing i am doing right now and not just fall into it because you're gonna wake up one day and ask yourself why the hell you spent the last 10 years doing x y or z yeah so i guess my like shorter answer to this is doing things on purpose because you choose to do them so important in life and not just like floating down the river of life hitting branches along the way because you will hit branches right but rather like literally plotting a course and not having a 10-year plan but just choosing every day to opt in that i think has been more like i haven't figured out the meaning of life by any stretch of the imagination but it certainly isn't money and it certainly isn't fame and it certainly isn't travel and it's like and it's way more of like opting into the game you love playing every day opting in just opting in and like it's don't let it happen you opt in kevin uh it's great to end on the love and the meaning of life this is an amazing conversation a lot of fun thank you you gave me like a light into some fascinating aspects of this of the technical world and i can't honestly wait to see what you do next thank you so much thanks for having me thanks for listening to this conversation with kevin systrom to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you with some words from kevin systrom himself focusing on one thing and doing it really really well can get you very far thank you for listening and hope to see you next time youthe following is a conversation with kevin systrom co-founder and long-time ceo of instagram including for six years after facebook's acquisition of instagram this is the lex friedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now here's my conversation with kevin systrom at the risk of uh asking the rolling stones to play satisfaction let me ask you about the origin story of instagram sure so maybe some context you like we were talking about offline grew up in massachusetts learned computer programming there liked to play doom two uh worked at a vinyl record store then you went to stanford turned down mr uh mark zuckerberg and facebook went to florence to study photography those are just some random beautiful impossibly brief glimpses into a life so let me ask again can you take me through the origin story of instagram giving that context you basically set it up um all right so uh we have a fair amount of time so i'll go into some detail but basically what i'll say is um instagram started out of a company actually called bourbon and it was spelled b-u-r-b-n and uh a couple things were happening at the time so if we zoom back to 2010 not a lot of people remember what was happening in the dot-com world then uh but check-in apps were all the rage so what's this checking out uh gowalla four square hot potato so i'm at a place i'm gonna tell the world that i'm at this place that's right what's what's the idea behind this kind of app by the way you know what i'm gonna answer that but through what instagram became and why i believe instagram replaced them so the whole idea was to share with the world what you were doing specifically with your friends right um but they were all the rage and foursquare was getting all the press and i remember sitting around saying hey i want to build something but i don't know what i want to build what if i built a better version of foursquare and i asked myself why don't i like foursquare or how could it be improved um and basically i sat down and i said i think that if you have a few extra features it might be enough one of which happened to be posting a photo of where you were there were some others it turns out that wasn't enough my co-founder joined we were going to attack uh you know foursquare and the likes and and try to build something interesting um and no one used it no one cared because it wasn't enough it wasn't it wasn't different enough right so one day we were sitting down and we asked ourselves okay let's come to jesus moment are we going to do this startup and if we're going to we can't do what we're currently doing we have to switch it up so what do people love the most so we sat down and we wrote out three things that we thought people uniquely loved about our product that weren't in other products photos happened to be the top one so sharing a photo of what you were doing where you were at the moment was not something products let you do really facebook was like post an album of your vacation from two weeks ago right twitter allowed you to post a photo but their feed was primarily text and they didn't show the photo in line or at least i don't think they did at the time so even though it seems totally stupid and obvious to us now at the moment then posting a photo of what you were doing at the moment was like not a thing so we decided to go after that because we noticed that people who used our service the one thing they happened to like the most was posting a photo so that was the beginning of instagram and yes like we went through and we added filters and there's a bunch of stories around that but the origin of this was that we were trying to be a checking app realized that no one wanted another checking app it became a photo sharing app but one that was much more about what you're doing and where you are and that's why when i say i think we've replaced checkin apps it became a check-in via a photo rather than saying your location and then optionally adding a photo when you were thinking about what people like from where did you get a sense that this is what people like you you said we sat down we wrote some stuff down on paper where is that intuition that seems fundamental to the success of an app like instagram what is that idea where's that list of three things come from exactly only after having studied machine learning now for a couple of years i like i have a you have understood yourself i've started to make connections like we can go into this later but obviously the the um the connections between machine learning and the human brain i think are stretched sometimes right at the same time being able to backprop and being able to like look at the world try something figure out how you're wrong how wrong you are and then nudge your company in the right direction based on how wrong you are is like a fascinating concept right and i don't we didn't know we were doing it at the time but that's basically what we were doing right we put it out to call it a hundred people and you would look at their data you would say what are they sharing what like what resonates what doesn't resonate we think they're going to resonate with x but turns out they resonate with y okay shift the company towards y and it turns out if you do that enough quickly enough you can get to a solution that has product market fit most companies fail because they sit there and they don't either their learning rate's too slow they sit there and they're just they're adamant that they're right even though the data is telling them they're not right or they their learning rate's too high and they wildly chase different ideas and they never actually set on on one where where they don't groove right and i think when we sat down and we wrote out those three ideas what we were saying is what are the three possible whether they're local or global maxima in our world right that users are telling us they like because they're using the product that way it was clear people liked the photos because that was the thing they were doing and we just said okay like what if we just cut out most of the other stuff and focus on that thing um and then it happened to be a multi-billion dollar business and it's that easy by the way yeah i guess so um well nobody ever writes about neural networks that miserably failed so this this particular neural network succeeded this is the sound all the time right yeah but nobody right default state is failing yes um when you said the way people are using the app is that the lost function for this neural network or is it also self-report like do you ever ask people what they like or do you have to track exactly what they're doing not what they're saying i once made a thanksgiving dinner okay and uh it was for relatives and i like to cook a lot okay and i worked really hard on picking the specific uh dishes and and i was really proud because i had planned it out using a gantt chart and like it was ready on time and everything was hot nice like i don't know if you're a big thanksgiving guy but like the worst thing about thanksgiving is when the turkey is cold and some things are hot and something anyway you got a gantt chart you actually have a chart oh yeah yeah omni plan fairly expensive like gantt chart thing that i think maybe 10 people have purchased in the world but i'm one of them and i use it for recipe planning only around big holidays that's brilliant by the way do people do this kind of uh over engineering it's not overdue it's just engineering it's planning thanksgiving is a complicated uh set of events with some uncertainty with a lot of things going on you should be able you should be planning in this way there should be a chart it's not over i mean so what's funny is um brief aside yes uh brilliant i love cooking i love food i love coffee and i've spent some time with some chefs who like know their stuff and they always just take out a piece of paper and just work backwards in rough order like it's never perfect but rough order it's just like oh that makes sense why not just work backwards from from the end goal right and put in some buffer time and so i probably overspecified it a bit using a gantt chart but the fact that you can do it it's what professional kitchens roughly do they just don't call it a gantt chart or at least i don't think they do um anyway i was telling a story about thanksgiving so here's uh here's the thing i'm sitting down we have the meal and then i'm you know i got to know ray dalio fairly well over maybe the last year of instagram um and one thing that he kept saying was like feedback is really hard to get honestly from people and i sat down at after dinner i said guys i want feedback what was good and what was bad yes and what's funny is like literally everyone just said everything was great and i like personally knew i had screwed up a handful of things um but no one would say it and can you imagine now not something as high stakes as thanksgiving dinner okay thanksgiving dinner it's not that high stakes but you're trying to build a product and everyone knows you left your job for it you're trying to build it out and you're trying to make something wonderful and it's yours right you designed it now try asking for feedback and know that you're giving this to your friends and your family people have trouble giving hard feedback people have trouble saying i don't like this or this isn't great or this is how it's failed me in fact um you usually have two classes of people people who just won't say bad things you can literally say to them please tell me what you hate most about this and they won't do it they'll try but they won't and then the other class of people are just negative period about everything and it's hard to parse out like what is true and what isn't so my rule of thumb with this is you should always ask people but at the end of the day it's amazing what data will tell you and that's why with whatever project i work on even now collecting data from the beginning on usage patterns so engagement how many days of the week do they use it how many i don't know if we were to go back to instagram how many impressions per day right is that growing is that shrinking and don't be like overly scientific about it right because maybe you have 50 beta users or something but what's fascinating is that data doesn't lie people are very uh defensive about their time they'll say oh i'm so busy i'm sorry i didn't get to use the app like i'm just you know um but i don't know you're posting on instagram the whole time so i don't know at the end of the day like at facebook there was you know before time spent became kind of this loaded term there the idea that people people's currency in their lives is time and they only have a certain amount of time to give things whether it's friends or family or apps or tv shows or whatever it's there's no way of inventing more of it at least not that i know of if they don't use it it's because it's not great so the moral of the story is you can ask all you want but you just have to look at the data and data doesn't lie right i mean there's metrics there's uh data can obscure the key insight if you're not careful so so time spent in the app that's ones there's so many metrics you can put at this and they will give you totally different insights especially when you're trying to create something that doesn't obviously exist yet so you know measuring maybe why you left the app or measuring special moments of happiness that will make sure you return to the app or moments of happiness that are long lasting versus like dopamine short term all of those things but i think i suppose in the beginning you can just get away with just asking the question which features are used a lot let's do more of that and how hard was the decision and uh i mean maybe you can tell me what instagram looked in the beginning but how hard was it to make pictures the first class citizen that's a revolutionary idea like um at whatever point instagram became this feed of photos that's quite brilliant plus i also don't know when this happened but they're all shaped the same it's like uh i have to tell you why that's the interesting part why is that so a couple of things one is data data like you're right you can over interpret data like imagine trying to fly a plane by staring at i don't know a single metric like airspeed you don't know if you're going up or down i mean it correlates with up or down but you don't actually know it will never help you land the plane so don't stare at one metric like it turns out you have to synthesize a bunch of metrics to know where to go um but it doesn't lie like if your air speed is zero unless it's not working right if if it's zero you're probably going to fall out of the sky so generally you look around and you have the scan going yes and you're just asking yourself is this working or is this not working um but people have trouble explaining how they actually feel so just it's about synthesizing both of them so then instagram right uh we were talking about revolutionary moment where where the feed became square photos basically and photos first and then square footage yeah um it was clear to me that the biggest so i believe the biggest companies are founded when enormous technical shifts happen and the biggest technical shift that happened right before instagram was founded was the advent of a phone that didn't suck the iphone right like in retrospect we're like oh my god the first iphone that almost had like it wasn't that good but compared to everything else at the time it was amazing and by the way the first phone that had an incredible camera that could that could like do as well as the point and shoot you might carry around was the iphone 4 and that was right when instagram launched and we looked around and we said what will change because everyone has a camera in their pocket and it was so clear to me that the the world of social networks before it was based in the desktop and sitting there and having a link you could share right and that wasn't going to be the case so the question is what would you share if you were out and about in the world if not only did you have a camera that's in your pocket but by the way that camera had a network attached to it that allowed you to share instantly that seemed revolutionary and a bunch of people saw it at the same time it wasn't just instagram there were a bunch of competitors the thing we did i think was not only well we focused on two things so we wrote down those things we circled photos and we said i think we should invest in this but then we said what sucks about photos one they look like crap right they just at least back then now my phone takes pretty great photos right um back then they were blurry not so great compressed right two uh it was really slow like really slow to upload a photo and i'll tell a fun story about that and explain to you why they're all the same size and square as well um and three man if you wanted to share a photo on different networks you had to go to each of the individual apps and select all of them and upload individually and so we're like all right those are the pain points we're gonna focus on that so one instead of because they weren't beautiful um we were like why don't we lean into the fact that they're not beautiful and i remember studying in florence my photography teacher gave me this whole gay camera and i'm not sure everyone knows what a whole gay camera is but they're these old-school plastic cameras i think they're produced in china at the time and they're i want to say the original ones like from the 70s or the 80s or something they're supposed to be like three dollar cameras for the every person they took nice medium format films large large negatives but they kind of blurred the the the light and they kind of like light leaked into the side and there was this whole resurgence where people looked at that and said oh my god this is a style right and i remember using that in florence and just saying well why don't we just like lean into the fact that these photos suck and make them suck more but in an artistic way and it turns out that had product market fit people really liked that they were willing to share their not so great photos if they looked not so great on purpose okay it's the second part that's the where the filters come into the picture yeah so computational modification of photos to make them look extra crappy to where it becomes art yeah yeah and i mean add light leaks add like an overlay filter make them more contrasty than they should be uh the first filter we ever produced was called x-pro 2. and i designed it while i was in this small little bed and breakfast room in total santos mexico i was trying to take a break from the the bourbon days and i i remember saying to my co-founder i just need like a week to reset and that was on that trip worked on the first filter because i said you know i think i can do this and i literally iterated one by one over the rgb values in the array that was the photo and just slightly shifted basically there was a function of our function of g function of b that just shifted them slightly it wasn't rocket science um and it turns out that actually made your photo look pretty cool it just mapped from one color space to another color space it was simple but it was really slow i mean if you applied a filter i think it used to take two or three seconds to render only eventually would i figure out how to do it on the gpu and i'm not even sure it was gpu but was using opengl but anyway um i would eventually figure that out and then it would be instant but it used to be really slow by the way anyone who's watching or listening it's amazing what you can get away with in a startup as long as the product outcome is right for the user like you can be slow you can be terrible you can be as long as you have product market fit people will put up with a lot and then the question is just about compressing making it more performant over time so that they get that product market fit instantly so fascinating because there's some things where those three seconds would make or break the app but some things you're saying not it's hard to know when you know it's what it's the problem spotify solved making streaming like work and like delays in listening to music is a huge negative even like slight delays but here you're saying i mean how do you know when those three seconds are okay are you just gonna have to try it out because to me my intuition would be those three seconds would kill the app like i would try to do the opengl thing right so i wish i were that smart at the time um i wasn't i just knew how to do what i knew how to do right and i decided okay like why don't i just iterate over the values and change them and what's interesting is that um compared to the alternatives no one else used opengl right so everyone else was doing that the dumb way and in fact they were doing it at a high resolution now comes in the small resolution that we'll talk about for a second um by choosing 512 pixels by 512 pixels which i believe it was at the time we iterated over a lot fewer pixels than our competitors who were trying to do these enormous output like images yeah so instead of taking 20 seconds i mean three seconds feels pretty good right so on a relative basis we were winning like a lot okay so that's answer number one answer number two is uh we actually focused on latency in the right places so we did this really wonderful thing um when you uploaded so uh the way it would work is you know you'd take your phone you'd take the photo and then you'd go to the um you'd go the edit screen where you would caption it and on that caption screen you start typing you think okay like what's a clever caption and and i said to mike hey when i worked on the gmail team you know what they did when you typed in your username or your email address even before you've entered in your password like the chat probability once you enter in your username that you're going to actually sign in is extremely high so why not just start loading your account in the background not not like sending it down to the desktop that would be a security uh uh issue but like load it into memory on the server like get it ready prepare it i always thought that was so fascinating and unintuitive i was like mike why don't we just do that but like we'll just upload the photo and like assume you're gonna upload the photo and if you don't forget about it we'll delete it right so what ended up happening was people would caption their uh photo they'd press done or upload and you'd see this little progress bar just go it was lightning fast okay we were no faster than anyone else at the time but by choosing 512 by 512 and doing in the background it almost guaranteed that it was done by the time you captioned and everyone when they used it was like how the hell is this thing so fast but we were slow we just hid the the slowness it wasn't like these things are just like it's a shelly game you're just hiding the latency that that mattered to people like a lot and i think that so you were willing to put up with a slow filter if it meant you could share it immediately and of course we added sharing options which let you distribute it really quickly that was the third part um so latency matters but relative to what and then there's some like tricks you can get around to just hiding the latency um like i don't know if spotify starts downloading the next song eagerly i'm assuming they do there are a bunch of ideas here that are not rocket science that that really help and all of that was stuff you were explicitly having a discussion about like those designs and argument you were having like arguments discussions uh i'm sure it was arguments i mean i'm not sure if you've met my co-founder mike but he's a pretty nice guy and he's very reasonable and uh and we both just saw eye to eye and we're like yeah just like make this fast early seem fast it'll be great i mean honestly i think the most contentious thing and he would say this too initially was um i was on an iphone 3g so like the the not so fast one and he had a brand new iphone 4. i was cheap nice um and his feed loaded super smoothly like when he would scroll from photo to photo buttery smooth right but on my phone every time you got to a new photo it was like a chunk allocate memory like all this stuff right i was like mike that's unacceptable he's like oh come on man just like upgrade your phone basically you didn't actually say that it's nicer than that um but i could tell he wished like i would just stop being cheap and just get a new phone but what's funny is we actually sat there working on that little detail for a few days before launch and that polished experience plus the fact that uploading seemed fast for all these people who didn't have nice phones i think meant a lot because far too often you see teams focus not on performance they focus on what's the cool computer science problem they can solve right can we scale this thing to a billion users and they've got like 100 right yeah you talked about loss function so i want to come back to that but like the loss function is like do you provide a great happy magical whatever experience for the consumer and listen if it happens to involve something complex and technical then great but it turns out i think most of the time those experiences are just sitting there waiting to be built with like not that complex solutions uh but everyone is just like so stuck in their own head that they have to over engineer everything and then they forget about the easy stuff i mean also maybe to flip the lost function there is you're trying to minimize the number of times you there's unpleasant experience right like uh the one you mention where when you go to the next photo it freezes for a little bit so it's almost as opposed to maximizing pleasure it's probably easier to minimize the number of like the friction yeah and as we all know you just you just uh you just make the pleasure negative and then minimize everything so we're mapping this all back to neural networks but actually can i say one thing on that which is i don't know a lot about machine learning but i feel like i've i've tried studying a bunch that whole idea of reinforcement learning and planning out more than the greedy single experience i think is is the closest you can get to like ideal product design thinking where you're not saying hey like can we have a great experience just this one time but like what is the right way to onboard someone what series of experiences correlate most with them hanging on long term right so not just saying oh did the photo load slowly a couple times or did they get a great photo at the top of their feed but like what are the things that are going to make this person come back over the next week over the next month and as a product designer asking yourself okay i want to optimize not just minimize bad experiences in the short run but like how do i get someone to engage over the next month and i'm not going to claim at all that i thought that way at all at the time because i certainly didn't but if i were going back and giving myself any advice it would be thinking what are those what are those second order effects that you can create and it turns out having your friends on the service it's an enormous win so starting with a very small group of people that produce content that you wanted to see which we did we seeded the community very well i think ended up mattering and so yeah you said that community is one of the most important things so it's from a metrics perspective from uh maybe a philosophy perspective building a certain kind of community within the app see i wasn't sure what exactly you meant by that when when i've heard you say that maybe you can elaborate but as i understand now it's can literally mean get your friends onto the app yeah think of it this way you can build an amazing restaurant or bar or whatever right but if you show up and you're the only one there is it like does it matter how good the food is the drinks whatever um no um these are inherently social experiences that we were working on so the idea of having people there like you needed to have that otherwise it was just to filter out but by the way part of the genius i'm going to say genius even though i wasn't really genius was starting to be marauding as a filter app was awesome the fact that you could so we talk about single player mode a lot which is like can you play the game alone and instagram you could totally play alone you could filter your photos and a lot of people would tell me i didn't even realize that this thing was a social network until my friend showed up it totally worked as a single player game and then when your friend showed up all of a sudden it was like oh not only was this great alone but now i actually have this trove of photos that people can look at and start liking and then i can like theirs and so it was this bootstrap method of how do you make the thing not suck when the restaurant is empty yeah but the thing is when you say friends i mean we're not necessarily referring to friends in the physical space so you're not bringing your physical friends with you you're also making new friends so you're finding new community so it's not immediately obvious to me that it's like it's almost like building any kind of community it was it was both and what we learned very early on was what made instagram special and the reason why you would sign up for it versus say just sit on facebook and look at your friends photos of course we were live and of course it was interesting to see what your friends were doing now but the fact that you could connect with people who like took really beautiful photos in a certain style all around the world whether they were travelers it was the beginning or beginning of the influencer economy there's these people who became professional instagramers way back when right um but they took these amazing photos and some of them were photographers right um like professionally and all of a sudden you had this moment in the day when you could open up this app and sure you could see what your friends were doing but also it was like oh my god that's a beautiful beautiful waterfall or oh my god i didn't realize there was that corner of england or like really cool stuff um and the beauty about instagram early on was that it was international by default you didn't have to speak english to use it right you could just look at the photos worked great we did translate we had some pretty bad translations but we did translate the app and uh you know even if our translations were pretty poor the the idea that you could just connect with other people through their images was pretty powerful how much uh technical difficulties there with the programming like what programming language you were talking about what was zero i'd like maybe it was hard for us but um i mean we there was nothing the only thing that was complex about instagram at the beginning technically was making it scale and we were just plain old objective c for the client uh so it was iphone only yep as an android person i'm deeply offended but go ahead again come on this was 2010. oh sure sure sorry android's getting a lot better yeah yeah so um i take it back you're right if i were to do something today i think it would be very different in terms of launch strategy right android's enormous too uh but anyway um back to that moment it was objective c uh and then we were python based uh which is just like this is before python was really cool like now it's cool because it's all these machine learning libraries like support python and right now it's super now it's like cool to be by the back then it was like oh google uses python like maybe you should use python facebook was php like i had worked at a small startup of some ex-googlers that used python so we used it and we used a framework called django uh still exists and people use for basically the back end and then you threw a couple interesting things in there i mean we used postgres which was kind of fun it was a little bit like hipster database at the time right my sequel my sequel like everyone used my sequel so like using postcards was like an interesting decision right uh but we used it because it had a bunch of uh geo features built in because we thought we were going to be a checking out pretty much it's also super cool now so you were into python before it was cool and you were into postgres before it was cool yeah we were basically like not only hipster hipster photo company hipster tech company right uh we also adopted redis early and like loved it i mean it solved so many problems for us and turns out that's still pretty cool but the programming was very easy it was like sign up a user have a feed there was nothing no machine learning at all zero can you get some context how many users at each of these stages are we talking about 100 users a thousand users so the stage i just described i mean that technical stack lasted through probably 50 million users um i mean seriously like you can get away with a lot with with a pretty basic stack um like i think a lot of startups try to over engineer their solutions from the beginning to like really scale and you can get away with a lot that being said most of the first two years of instagram was literally just trying to make that stack scale and it wasn't it was it was not a python problem it was like literally just like where do we put the data like it's all coming in too fast like how do we store it how do we make sure to be up how do we like how do we make sure we're on the right side of boxes that they have enough memory um those were the issues but can you speak to the choices you make at that stage when you're growing so quickly do you use something like somebody else's computer infrastructure or do you build in-house i'm only laughing because we when we launched we had a single computer that we had rented in some colo space in la i don't even remember what it was called because i thought that's what you did when i worked at a company called odio that became twitter i remember visiting our space in san francisco you walked in you had to wear the ear things and it was cold and fans everywhere right and we had to you know plug one out replace one and i was the intern so i just like held things but i thought to myself oh this is how it goes and then i remember being in a vc's office i think it was benchmark's office and i think we ran into another entrepreneur and they were like oh how are things going we're like uh you know trying to scale this thing and they were like well i mean can't you just add more instances and i was like what do you mean and they're like instances on amazon i was like what are those and it was this moment where we realized how deep in it we were because we had no idea that aw aws existed nor should we be using it anyway that night we went back to the office and we got on aws but we we did this really dumb thing we're i'm so sorry to people listening but um we brought up an instance which was our our database it's going to be a replacement for our database but we had it talking over the public internet to our little box in la that was our app server very nice yeah um that's how sophisticated we were and obviously that was very very slow didn't work at all i mean it worked but didn't work did we only like later that night did we realize we had to have it all together but at least like if you're listening right now and you're thinking you know i have no chance i'm going to start to start i have no chance i don't know we did it and we made a bunch of really dumb mistakes initially i think the question is how quickly do you learn that you're making a mistake and do you do the right thing immediately right after so you didn't pay for those mistakes by you know by failure so yeah how quickly did you fix it i guess there's a lot of ways to sneak up to this question of how the hell do you scale the thing other startups if you have an idea how do you scale the thing is this is just aws and uh you try to write the kind of code that's easy to spread across a large number of instances and then the rest is just put money into it basically i would say a couple things first off don't even ask the question just find product market fit duct tape it together right like if you have to i think there's a big caveat here which i want to get to but generally all that matters is product market fit that's all that matters if people like your product do not worry about when 50 000 people use your product because you will be happy that you have that problem when you get there i actually can't name many startups where they go from nothing to something overnight and they can't figure out how to scale it there are some but i think nowadays it's a when i say a solved problem like there are ways of solving it the base case is typically that startups worry way too much about scaling way too early and forget that they actually have to make something that people like that's the that's the default mistake case but what i'll say is um once you start scaling i mean hiring quickly people who have seen the game before and just know how to do it it it becomes um it becomes a bit of like yeah just throw instances of the problem right but the last thing i'll say on this that i think did save us um we were pretty rigorous about writing tests uh from the beginning that helped us move very very quickly when we wanted to rewrite parts of the product and know that we weren't breaking something else tests are one of those things where it's like you go slow to go fast and they suck when you have to write them because you have to figure it out and they're always those ones that break when you don't want them to break and they're annoying and it feels like you spent all this time but looking back i think that like long-term optimal even with the team of four it allowed us to move very very quickly because anyone could touch any part of the the the product and know that they weren't going to bring down the site or at least in general at which point do you know product market fit how many users would you say what is it all it takes is like 10 people or is it a thousand is it 50 000 i don't think it is generally a question of absolute numbers i think it's a question of cohorts and i think it's a question of trends so you know it depends how big your business is trying to be right but if i were signing up a thousand people a week and they all retain like the retention curves for those cohorts looked good healthy and even like as you started getting more people on the service maybe those earlier cohorts started curving up again because now there are network effects and their friends are on the service or totally depends what type of business you're in but i'm talking purely social right um i don't think it's an absolute number i think it is a i guess you could call it a marginal number so i spend a lot of time when i work with startups asking them like okay have you looked at that cohort versus this cohort whether it's your clients or whether it's people signing up for uh the service but a lot of people think you just have to hit some mark like 10 000 people or 50 000 people but really seven-ish billion people in the world most people forever will not know about your product there are always more people out there to sign up it's just a question of how you turn on the spigot so at that stage early stage yourself but also by way of advice should you worry about money at all how this thing is going to make money or do you just try to find product market fit and get a lot of users to enjoy using your thing i think it totally depends and that's an unsatisfying answer um i was talking with a friend today who he was one of our earlier investors and he was saying hey like have you been doing any angel investing lately i said not really i'm just like focused on what i want to do next and he said the number of financings have just gone bonkers like just bonk like people are throwing money everywhere right now um and i think the question is do you have an inkling of how you're gonna make money or are you really just like waving your hands i would not like to be an entrepreneur in the position of well i have no idea how this will eventually make money that's not fun um if you are in an area like let's say you wanted to start a social network right not saying this is a good idea but if you did they're only a handful of ways they've made money and really only one way they've made money in the past and that's ads so you know if you have a service that's amenable to that and then i wouldn't worry too much about that because if you get to the scale you can hire some smart people and figure that out i do think that is really healthy for a lot of startups these days especially the ones doing like enterprise software slacks of the world etc to be worried about money from the beginning but mostly as a way of winning over clients and having stickiness um i think i like of course you need to be worried about money but i'm going to also say this again which is it's like long-term profitability if you have a roadmap to that then that's great but if you're just like i don't know maybe never like we're working on this meta first thing i think maybe someday i don't know like that seems harder to me um so you have to be as big as facebook to like finance that bet right do you think it's possible you said you're not saying it's necessarily a good idea to launch a social network do you think it's possible today maybe you can put yourself in those shoes to launch a social network that achieves the scale of a facebook or a twitter or an instagram and maybe even greater scale absolutely how do you do it asking for a friend yeah if i knew i i'd probably be doing it right now and not sitting here so i mean there's a lot of ways to ask this question one is create a totally new product market fit create a new market create something like instagram did which is like create something kind of new or literally out compete facebook at its own thing or i'll compete twitter at its own thing the only way to compete now if you want to build a large social network is to look for the cracks look for the openings um you know no one competed i mean no one competed with the core business of google no one competed with the core business of microsoft you don't go at the big guys doing exactly what they're doing instagram didn't win quote unquote because it tried to be a visual twitter like we spotted things that either twitter wasn't going to do or refused to do images and feed for the longest time right or that facebook wasn't doing or not paying attention to because they were mostly desktop at the time and we were purely mobile purely visual often there are opportunities sitting there you just have to you have to you have to figure out like uh i think like there's a strategy book i can't remember the name but talk about moats and just like the best place to play is where your competitor like literally can't pivot because structurally they're set up not to be there and that's where you win um and what's fascinating is like do you know how many people are like images facebook does that twitter does that i mean how wrong were they really wrong these are some of the smartest people in silicon valley right but now instagram exists for a while how is it that snapchat could then exist makes no sense like plenty of people would say well there's facebook no images okay okay i mean instagram i'll give you that one but wait now another image based social network's gonna get really big and then tick tock comes along like the prior so you asked me is it possible the only answer and reason i'm answering yes is because my prior is that it's happened once every i don't know three four or five years consistently and i can't imagine there's anything structurally that would change that so that's why i answer that way not because i know how i just when you see a pattern you see a pattern and there's no reason to believe that's going to stop and it's subtle too because like you said snapchat and tick tock they're all doing the same space of things but there's something fundamentally different about like a three second video and a five second video and a 15 second video in a one minute video and a one hour video right like fundamentally different fundamentally different i mean i think one of the reasons snapchat exists is because instagram was so focused on posting great beautiful manicured versions of yourself throughout time and there was this enormous demand of like hey i really like this behavior i love using instagram but man i just like wish i could share something going on in my day like do i really have to put it on my profile do i really have to make it last forever do i really um and that opened up a door it created a market right and then what's fascinating is instagram had an explore page for the longest time it was image driven right um but there's absolutely a behavior where you open up instagram and you sit on the explore page all day that is effectively tick tock but obviously focused on videos and it's not like you could just put the explore page in tik tok form and it works it had to be video it had to have music these are the hard parts about product development that are very hard to predict but um they're all versions of the same thing with varying if you line them up in a bunch of dimensions they're just like kind of on they're different values of the same dimensions which is like i guess easy to say in retrospect but like if i were an entrepreneur going after that area i'd ask myself like where's the opening what needs to exist because tiktok exists now so i wonder how much things that don't yet exist and can exist is in the space of algorithms in the space of recommender systems so in the space of how the feed is generated so we kind of talk about the actual elements of the um the content that's what we've been talking the difference between photos between uh short videos longer videos i wonder how much disruption is possible in the way the algorithms work because a lot of the criticism towards social media is in the way the algorithms work currently and it feels like first of all talking about product market fit there's certainly a hunger for um social media algorithms that do something different i don't think anyone everyone said complaining this is not doing this is this is hurting me and this is hurting society but i keep doing it because i'm addicted to it and they say we want something different but we don't know what it feels like a uh just different uh it feels like there's a hunger for that but that's in the space of algorithms i wonder if it's possible to disrupt in that space absolutely um i have this thesis that the worst part about social networks is that they're uh is the people it's it's it's a line that sounds funny right because like that's why you call it a social network um but what does social networks actually do for you like just think you know like imagine you were an alien and you landed and someone says hey there's this site it's a social network we're not going to tell you what it is but just what does it do and you have to explain it to them it does two things one is that people you know and have social ties with uh distribute updates through whether it's uh you know photos or videos about their lives so that you don't have to physically be with them but you can keep in touch with them that's one that's like a big part of instagram that's a big part of snap it is not part of tick tock at all so there's another big part which is there's all this content out in the world that's entertaining whether you want to watch it or you want to read it um and matchmaking between content that exists in the world and uh people that want that content turns out to be like a really big business right search and discovery would you search and discovery but my point is it could be video it could be text it could be websites it could be i mean think back to um think back to like dig right or stumble upon or right nice yeah but like what did those do like they basically distributed interesting content to you right um i think the most interesting part or the future of social networks is going to be making them less social because i think people are part of the root cause of the problem so for instance um often in recommender systems we talk about two stages there's a candidate generation step which is just like of our vast trove of stuff that you might want to see what small subset should we pick for you okay typically that is grabbed from things your friends have shared right then there's a ranking step which says okay now given these hundred 200 things depends on the network right let's like be really good about ranking them and generally rank the things up higher that get the most engagement right so what's the problem with that step one is we've limited everything you could possibly see to things that your friends have chosen to share or maybe not friends but influencers what things do people generally want to share they want to share things that are going to get likes that are going to show up broadly so they tend to be more emotionally driven they tend to be more risque or whatever so why do we have this problem it's because we show people things people have decided to share and those things self-select to being the things that are most divisive so how do you fix that well what if you just imagine for a second that why do you have to grab things from things your friends have shared why not just like grab things that's really fascinating to me and that's something i've been thinking a lot about and just like you know why is it that when you log on to twitter you're just sitting there looking at things from accounts that you've followed for whatever reason and tick tock i think has done a wonderful job here which is like you can literally be anyone and if you produce something fascinating it'll go viral but like you don't have to be someone that anyone knows you don't have to have built up a giant following you don't have to have paid for followers you don't have to try to maintain those followers you literally just have to produce something interesting that is i think the future of social networking that's the that's the direction things will head and i think what you'll find is it's far less about people manipulating distribution and far more about what is like is this content good and good is obviously a vague definition that we spend hours on but different networks i think will decide different value functions to decide what is good and what isn't good and i i think that's a fascinating direction so that's almost like creating an internet i mean that's what google did for web pages they did the you know page rank search so discovery you don't you don't follow anybody on google when you use a search engine you just discover web pages and so what tick tock does is saying let's start from scratch let's like like start a new internet and have people discover stuff on that new internet within a particular kind of pool of people well what's so fascinating about this is like the the um field of information retrieval like i always talked about and as i was studying this stuff they would always use the word query and document so i was like why are they saying query undocuments like they're literally imagine like if you just stop thinking about query as like literally a search query and a query could be a person i mean a lot of the way i'm not going to claim to know how instagram or facebook machine learning works today but you know if you want to find a match for a query the query is actually the attributes of the person their age their gender where they're from maybe some kind of summarization of their interests and and that's a query right and that matches against documents and by the way documents don't have to be text they can be videos they're however long i don't know what the limit is on tick tock these days they keep changing it my point is just you've got a query which is someone in search of something that they want to match and you've got the document it doesn't have to be text it could be anything and how do you match make and that's one of these like i mean i've spent a lot of time thinking about this and i don't claim to have mastered it at all but i think it's so fascinating about where that will go with new social networks see what i'm also fascinated by is metrics that are different than engagement so the other thing from an alien perspective what social networks are doing is they they in the short term bring out different aspects of each human being so first let me say that an algorithm or a social network for each individual can bring out the best of that person or the worst of that person or there's a bunch of different parts to us parts we're proud of that that we are parts we're not so proud of when we look at the big picture of our lives when we look back 30 days from now am i proud that i said those things or not am i proud that i felt those things am i proud that i experienced or read those things or thought about those things just in that kind of self-reflective kind of way and so coupled with that i wonder if it's possible to have different metrics they're not just about engagement but are about long-term happiness growth of a human being well they look back and say i am a better human being for having spent 100 hours on that app and that feels like it's actually strongly correlated with engagement in the long term in the short term it might not be but in long term it's like the same kind of thing where you really fall in love with the product you fall in love with an iphone you fall in love with a car that's what makes you fall in love is like really being proud and just in a self-reflective way understanding that you're a better human being for having used the thing and that's like where the f that's what great relationships are made from it's not just like you're hot and we like being together or something like that it's more like i'm a better human being because i'm with you and that feels like a metric that could be optimized for by the algorithms um but you know anytime i kind of talk about this with anybody they seem to say yeah okay that's going to get out competed immediately by the engagement if it's ad driven especially i just don't think so i don't i mean a lot of is just implementation i'll say a couple things one is to pull back the curtain on daily meetings inside of these large social media companies a lot of what management or at least the people that are are tweaking these algorithms spend their time on our trade-offs and there's these things called value functions which are like okay we can predict the probability that you'll click on this thing or the probability that you'll share it or the probability that you will leave a comment on it or the probability you'll dwell on it individual actions right and you've got this neural network that basically has a bunch of heads at the end and all of them are between zero and one and great they all have values right or or they all have probabilities um and then in these meetings what they will do is say well uh how much do we value a comment versus a click versus a share versus a and then maybe even some downstream thing right that has nothing to do with the item there but like driving follows or something and what typically happens is they will say well what are our goals for this quarter at the company oh we want to drive sharing up okay well let's uh turn down these metrics and turn up these metrics and and they blend them right into a single scaler with which they're trying to optimize that is really hard because invariably you think you're solving for i don't know something called meaningful interactions right this was the big facebook pivot and i i don't actually have any internal knowledge like i wasn't in those meetings but at least from from what we've seen over the last month or so it seems by actually trying to trying to optimize for meaningful interactions it had all these side effects of optimizing for these other things and i don't claim to fully understand them but what i will say is that trade-offs abound and as much as you'd like to solve for one thing if you have a network of over a billion people you're gonna have unintended consequences either way and it gets really hard so what you're describing is effectively a value model that says like can we capture this is the thing that i spent a lot of time thinking about like can you capture utility in a way that like actually measures someone's happiness that isn't just a um what do they call it a surrogate problem where you say well i kind of think like the more you use the product the happier you are that was always the argument at facebook by the way it was like well people use it more so they must be more happy yeah turns out they're like a lot of things you use more that make you less happy in the world not talking about facebook just you know let's think about whether it's gambling or whatever like that you can do more of but doesn't necessarily make you happier so the idea that time equals happiness obviously you can't map utility and time together easily there are a lot of edge cases so when you look around the world and you say well what are all the ways we can model utility that is like one of the please if you know someone smart doing this introduce me because i'm fascinated by it and it seems really tough but the idea that reinforcement learning like everyone interesting i know in machine learning like i was really interested in recommender systems and supervised learning and and the more i dug into it i was like oh literally everyone smart is working on reinforcement learning like literally everyone you just made people at open ai and deep mind very happy yes but i mean but what's interesting is like it's one thing to train a game and like i mean that paper that where they just took atari and they used a convnet to basically just like train simple actions mind-blowing right absolutely mind-blowing but it's a game great so now what if you're constructing a feed for a person right like how can you construct that feed in such a way that optimizes for a diversity of experience a a long term happiness right but that reward function it turns out in reinforcement learning again as i've learned like reward design is really hard and i don't know like how do you design a scalar reward for someone's happiness over time i mean do you have to measure dopamine levels like do you have to well you have to have a lot of a lot more signals from the human being currently it feels like there's not enough signals coming from the human being users of uh of this algorithm so for reinforcement learning to work well it needs to have a lot more data needs to have a lot of data and that actually is a challenge for anyone who wants to start something which is you don't have a lot of data so how do you compete but i do think back to your original point rethinking the algorithm rethinking reward functions rethinking utility that's fascinating that's cool and i think that's an open opportunity for for a company that figures it out i have to ask about april 2012 when instagram along with its massive employee base of 13 people was sold to facebook for 1 billion dollars what was the process like on a business level engineering level human level what was that process of selling to facebook like what did it feel like so i want to provide some context which is i worked in corporate development at google which not a lot of people know but corporate development is effectively the group that buys companies right you sit there and you acquire companies and i had sat through so many of these meetings with entrepreneurs we actually fun fact we never acquired a single company when i worked in corporate development so i can't claim that um i had like a lot of experience but i had enough experience to understand okay like what prices are people getting and what's the process and and as we started to grow you know we were trying to keep this thing running and we were exhausted and we were 13 people and i mean we were trying to think back he was probably 27 37 now um so young and on a relative basis right and uh we're trying to keep the thing running and then you know we go out to raise money and we're kind of like the hot startup at the time and i remember going into a specific vc and saying our terms we're looking for are we're looking for a 500 million valuation and i've never seen so many jaws drop all in unison right and i was like thanked and walked out the door very kindly after um and then i got a call the next day uh from someone who was connected to them and said they said we just want to let you know that like uh it was pretty offensive that you asked for a 500 billion dollar evaluation and i i can't tell if that was um like just negotiating or what but it's true like no one offered us more right so we were so can you clarify the the number again you said how many million 500 500 million 500 million yeah half a billion yeah um so in my mind i'm anchored like okay well literally no one's biting at 500 million and eventually we would get sequoia and greylock and others together at 500 million basically uh post uh it was 450 pre i think we raised 50 million dollars but just like no one was used to seeing 500 million dollar companies then like i don't know if it was because we were just coming out of the hangover 2008 and things were still on recovery mode but then along comes facebook and after some negotiation we've 2xed the number from a half a billion to a billion yeah it seems pretty good you know and uh i think mark and i really saw eye to eye that this thing could be big um we thought we could their resources would help us scale it and in a lot of ways it de-risks i mean it degrees a lot of the employees lives for the rest of their lives including me including mike right um i think i might have had like 10 grand in my bank account at the time right like we're working hard we had nothing um so on a relative basis it seemed very high and then i think the last company to exit for anywhere close to a billion was youtube that i could think of and uh and thus began the giant long bull run of 2012 to all the way all the way to where we are now where um i saw some stat yesterday about like how many unicorns exist and it's absurd but then again never underestimate technology and like the value it can provide and man costs have dropped and man scale has increased and you can make businesses make a lot of money now but on a on a fundamental level i don't know like how do you describe the decision to sell a company with 13 people for a billion dollars so first of all like how did it take a lot of guts to set a table and say 500 million or 1 billion with mark zuckerberg it seems like a very large number with 13. like especially like it doesn't seem it is it is they're all larger especially like you said before the unicorn parade i like that i'm going to use that unicorn yeah the uh the the you are at the head of the unicorn parade it's the uh yeah it's a massive unicorn parade um okay so no i mean we knew we were worth quote-unquote a lot but we didn't i mean there was no market for instagram i mean it's not you could mark you couldn't mark to market this thing in the public markets you didn't quite understand what it would be worth or it was worth at the time so in a market an illiquid market where you have one buyer and one seller and you're going back and forth and well i guess there were like vc firms who are willing to you know invest at a certain valuation so i don't know you just go with your gut and uh and at the end of the day i would say um the hardest part of it was not realizing uh like when we sold it was tough because like literally everywhere i go restaurants whatever like for a good six months after there was a lot of attention on the deal a lot of attention on the product a lot of attention it was kind of miserable right and you're like wait like i made a lot of money but like why is this not great and it's because it turns out you know and i don't i don't know like i don't really keep in touch with mark but i've got to assume his job right now is not exactly the most happy job in the world it's really tough when you're on top and it's really tough when you're in the limelight so the decision itself was like oh cool this is great how lucky are we right so okay there's a million questions yeah go first of all first of all why why is it hard to be on top why did you not feel good like can you dig into that it always um i've heard like olympic athletes say after what they win gold they they get depressed is it something like that where it feels like it was kind of like a thing you were working towards yeah some some loose definition of success and this sure psych feels like uh at least according to other startups this is what success looks like and now why don't i feel any better i'm still human i still have all the same problems is that the nature or is it just like negative attention or some kind what i think it's all of the above um but to be clear there was a lot of happiness in terms of like oh my god this is great like we like won the super bowl of startups right um anyone who can get to a liquidity event of anything meaningful feels like wow this is what we started out to do of course we want to create great things that people love but um like we won in a big way but yeah there's this big like oh if we won what is like what's next i don't so they call it the we have arrived syndrome um which i i need to go back and look where i can quote that from but i remember reading about it at the time i was like oh yeah that's that i remember we had a product manager leave very early on when we got to facebook and he said to me um i just don't believe i can learn anything at this company anymore it's like it's hit its apex we sold it great i just don't have anything else to learn so from 2012 all the way to the day i left in 2018 like the amount i learned and the humility with which i realized oh we thought we won billion dollars is cool but like there are a hundred billion dollar companies and by the way on top of that we had no revenue we had i mean we had a cool product but we didn't scale it yet and there's so much to learn and then competitors and how fun was it to fight snapchat oh my god like it was it's like yankees red sox it's great like that's what you live for um you know you win some you lose some but uh the amount you can learn through that process uh what i've realized in life is that there is no end there's always someone who has more there's always more challenge just at different scales and uh it sounds like a little buddhist but um everything is super challenging whether you're like a small business or an enormous business i say like choose the game you like to play right you've got to imagine that if you're an amazing basketball player you enjoy to some extent practicing basketball it's got to be something you love it's going to suck it's going to be hard you're going to have injuries right but you got to love it and the same thing with instagram which is um we might have sold but it was like great there's one super bowl title can we win five what else can we do now i imagine you didn't ask this but okay so i left there's a little bit of like what do you do next right like what do you how do you top that thing it's the wrong question the question is like when you wake up every day what is the hardest most interesting thing you can go work on because like at the end of the day we all turn into dirt doesn't matter right but what does matter is like can we really enjoy this life not in a hedonistic way because that's those it's like the reinforcement learning learning like short term versus long-term objectives can you wake up every day and truly enjoy what you're doing um knowing that it's going to be painful knowing that like no matter what you choose it's going to be painful um whether you sit on a beach or whether you manage a thousand people or ten thousand it's gonna be painful so choose something that's fun to have pain um but yes there was uh there was a lot of we have arrived and um it's a maturation process you just have to go through so no matter how much success is there is how much money you make you have to wake up the next day and choose the hard life whatever that means next that's fun the fun slash hard life hard life that's fun i guess what i'm trying to say is slightly different which is just that no one realizes everything's gonna be hard even chilling out is hard and then you just start worrying about stupid stuff like i don't know like did so and so forget to paint the house today or like did the gardener come or whatever like yeah or oh i'm so angry and my shipment of wine didn't show up and i'm sitting here on the beach without my wine i don't know i'm making shit up now but like it turns out that even chilling aka meditation is hard work yeah i and at least meditation is like productive chilling where you're like actually training yourself to calm down and be but backing up for a moment everything's hard you might as well be like playing in the game you love to play i just like playing and winning and and i'm i'm on the on the i'm still on the i think the first half of life knock on wood um and i've got a lot of years what am i going to do sit around and the other way of looking at this by the way um imagine you made one movie it was great would you just like stop making movies no generally you're like wow i really like making movies let's make another one a lot of times by the way the second one or the third one not that great but the fourth one awesome and no one forgets the sec everyone forgets the second and the third one so there's just this constant process of like can i produce and is that fun is that exciting what else can i learn so this machine learning stuff for me has been this awesome new chapter of being like man that's something i didn't understand at all and now i feel like i'm one-tenth of the way there and that feels like a big mountain to climb uh so i distracted us from the original question no return to machine learning because i'd love to explore your interest there but i mean speaking of sort of challenges and hard things is there a possible world where sitting in a room with mark zuckerberg with a one billion dollar deal you turn it down yeah of course what does that world look like why would you turn it down why did you take it what was the calculation that you were making ah thus enters the world of counterfactuals and not really knowing and if only we could run that experiment well the universe exists it's just running in parallel to our own yeah it's so fascinating right um i mean we're talking a lot about money but the real question was um i'm not sure you'll believe me when i say this but could we strap our little company onto the side of a rocket ship and like get out to a lot of people really really quickly with the support with the the talent of a place like facebook i mean people often ask me what i would do differently um at instagram today and i say well i probably hire more carefully because we showed up just like before i knew it we had like 100 people on the team and 200 and 300 i don't know where all these people were coming from i never had to recruit them i never had to screen them they were just like internal transfers right so it's like relying on the facebook hiring machine which is quite sort of i mean it's an elaborate machine it's and it's great by the way they have really talented people there but my point is um the choice was like take this thing put it on the side of a rocket ship that you know is growing very quickly like i had seen what had happened when ev sold blogger to google and then google went public remember we sold before facebook went public there was a moment at which the stock price was 17 by the way the facebook stock price was 17 i remember thinking what the f did i just do right uh now at 320-ish i don't know where we are today but like okay like the best thing by the way is like when the stock is down everyone calls you dope and then when it's up they also call you a dope but just for a different reason right like you can't win lesson in there somewhere yeah so but you know the choice is to stripe yourself to a rocket ship or to build your own you know mr elon built his own literally with the rocket ship that's a difficult choice because um there's a world actually i would say something different which is elon and others decided to sell paypal for not that much i mean how much was it about a billion dollars i can't remember something like that yeah i mean it was early and um but it's worth a lot more an hour and then build a new rocket ship so this is the cool part right if you are an entrepreneur and you own a controlling stake in the company not only is it really hard to do something else with your life because all of the you know value is tied up in you as a personality attached to this company right but if you sell it and you get yourself enough capital and you like have enough energy you could do another thing or 10 other things or in elon's case like a bunch of other things i don't know like i lost count at this point um and it might have seemed silly at the time and sure like if you look back man paypal's worth a lot now right but i don't know like do you think elon like cares about like are we gonna buy pinterest or not like i just he is he created a a a massive capital that allowed him to do what he wants to do and that's awesome that's more freeing than anything because when you are an entrepreneur attached to a company you gotta stay at that company for a really long time it's really hard to remove yourself but i'm not sure how much he loved paypal versus spacex and tesla i have a sense that you love instagram yeah i loved enough to like work for six years beyond that which is rare which is very rare you chose but can i tell you why sure it's um please there are not a lot of companies that you can be part of where the pope's like i would like to sign up for your product like i'm not a religious person at all i'm really not um yeah but when you go to the vatican and you're like walking among the giant columns and you're hearing the music and everything and like the pope walks in and he wants to press the sign up button on your product like it's a moment in life okay um no matter what your persuasion okay the number of doors and experiences that that opened up was it was incredible i mean the people i got to meet the places i got to go um i assume maybe like a payments company is slightly different right but that's why like it was so fun and plus i truly believed we were building such a great product and i loved loved the game it wasn't about the money it was about the game do you think do you think you had the guts to say no is that so his i often think about this like how hard is it for entrepreneur to say no because the peer pressure so every like basically the sea of entrepreneurs in silicon valley are going to tell you this is their dream the the the thing you were sitting before was is a dream to walk away from that is really it seems like nearly impossible because instagram could in 10 years be you know you could talk about google you could be making self-driving cars and building rockets that go to mars and compete with spacex totally and so that's an interesting decision to say am i willing to risk it and the reason i also say it's an interesting decision because it feels like per previous discussion if you're launching a social uh social network company there's there's going to be that meeting whatever that number is if you're successful if if you're on this rocket ship of success there's going to be a meeting with one of the social media social network companies that want to buy you uh whether it's facebook or twitter but it could also very well be google who seems to have like a graveyard of failed social networks and it's i mean i don't know i i i think about that how difficult it is for the entrepreneur to make that decision how many have successfully made that decision i guess this is a big question it's sad to me to be honest that too many make that decision perhaps for the wrong reason to to so when you say make the decision you mean to the affirmative affirmative you got it yeah there are also companies that don't sell right and take the path and say we're going to be independent and then you've never heard of them again like i remember uh path right was one of our competitors early on uh there's a big moment when they had i can't remember what it was like 110 million offer from google or something it might have been larger i don't know um and i remember there was like this big techcrunch article that was like they turned it down after talking deeply about their values and everything and i don't i don't know the inner workings of foursquare but like i'm certain there were many conversations over time where there were companies that wanted foursquare as well um recently like i mean what other companies there's clubhouse right like i don't know maybe people were really interested in them too like there are plenty of moments where people say no and we just forget that those things happen we only focus on the ones where like uh uh they said yes and like wow like what if they had stayed independent so i don't know i like i used to think a lot about this and now i just don't because i'm like whatever i you know like things have gone pretty well yeah i'm ready for the next game i mean think about um an athlete where i don't know maybe they they they do something wrong in the world series or whatever and like if you let it haunt you for the rest of your career like why not just be like i don't know it was a game next game next shot right and if if you just move to that world like at least i have a next shot right no that's that's beautiful but i mean just in insights uh and it's funny you brought up clubhouse it is very true it seems like clubhouse is uh you know on the downward path and it's very possible to see a billion plus dollar deal at some stage maybe like a year ago or half a year ago from facebook from google i think facebook was flirting with that idea too and i think a lot of companies probably were i wish it was more public you know what there's not like a badass public story about them making the decision to walk away we just don't hear about it and then we get to see the the results of that success or the failure more often failure so a couple things one is i would not assume clubhouse is down for the count at all they're young they have plenty of money they're run by really smart people i'd give them like a very fighting chance to figure it out there are a lot of times when people call twitter down for the count and they figure it out and they seem to be doing well right yeah um so just backing up like and not knowing anything about their internals like there's a strong chance they will figure it out and that people are just down because they like being down about companies they like assuming that they're going to fail so who knows right but let's take the ones in the past where like we know how it played out there are plenty of examples where people have turned down big offers and then you've just never heard from them again but we never focus on the companies because you just forget that those were big but inside your psyche i think they're um it's easy for someone with enough money to say money doesn't matter which i think is like it's bullshit of course money matters to people um but at the moment you just can't even grasp like the number of zeros that you're talking about it just doesn't make sense right so to think rationally in that moment is not something many people are equipped to do especially not people where i think we had founded the company a year earlier maybe two years earlier like a year and a half we were 13 people but um i will say i still don't know if it was the right decision because i don't have that counterfactual i don't know that other world i'm just thankful that by and large most people love instagram still do by and large people are very happy with like the time we had there um and i'm proud of what we built so like i'm cool like we're you know now now it's it's next shot right well if we could just linger on this yankees versus red sox the fun of it the competition over i would say over the space of features so um there are a bunch of features like there's photos there's one minute videos on instagram there's igtv there's stories there's reels there's live so that sounds like it's like a long list of too much stuff but it's it's not because it feels like they're they're close together but they're somehow like what we're saying fundamentally distinct like each of the things i mentioned maybe can you describe the philosophies the design philosophies behind some of these how you were thinking about it during the uh the historic war between snapchat and instagram or just in general like this space of features that was discovered there's this um great book by clay christensen called competing against luck it's like a terrible uh title but within it there's uh effectively an expression of this thing called jobs to be done theory and it's unclear if like he came up with it or some of his colleagues but everyone there are a bunch of places you can find with people claiming to have come up with this jobs to be done theory but the idea is if you if you like zoom out and you look at your product you ask yourself why are people hiring your product like imagine every product in your life is effectively an employee you know your ceo of your life and you hire products to be employees effectively they all have roles and jobs right why are you hiring a product why do you want that product to perform something in your life and what like what are the hidden reasons why uh you're you're in love with this product instagram was about sharing your life with others visually period right why because you feel connected with them you get to show off you get to feel good and and cared about right with likes and um and it turns out that that will i think forever define instagram and any product that serves that job is going to do very well okay stories let's take it as an example is very much serving that job in fact it serves it better than the original product because when you're large and have an enormous audience you're worried about people seeing your stuff or you're worried about being permanent so that a college admissions person is going to see your photo of you doing something and so it turns out that that is a more efficient way of performing that job than the original product was the original product still has its value but at scale these two things together work really really well now i will claim that other parts of the product over time didn't perform that job as well i think igtv probably didn't right shopping is like completely unrelated to what i just described but it might work i don't know right um products i think products that succeed are products that all share this parent node of like this job to be done that is in common and then they're just like different ways of doing it right apple i think does a great job with this right it's like managing your digital life and all the products just work together they sink they like it's beautiful right even if they require like silly specific cords to work but they're all part of a system it's when you leave that system and you start doing something weird that people start scratching their head and i think you are less successful so i think one of the challenges facebook has had throughout its life is that it has never fully i think appreciated the job to be done of the main product and what it's done is said oh there's a shiny object over there that starts getting some traction let's go copy that thing and then they're confused why it doesn't work like why doesn't it work it's because the people who show up for this don't want that it's different what's the purpose of facebook i remember i was a very early facebook user i was the reason i was personally excited about facebook is um because you can first of all use your real name like i i can exist in this world it can be like formally exist there's i i like anonymity for certain things reddit and so on but i want it to also exist uh not anonymously so that that can connect with other friends of mine not anonymously and there's a reliable way to know that i'm real and they're real and that we're connecting and though it's kind of like um i liked it for the for the reasons that people like linkedin i guess but like without the form like not everybody is dressed up and being super polite like more like with friends but then it became something much bigger than that i suppose there's a feed it it became this um i mean it became a place to get discover content to share content that's not just about connecting directly with friends i mean it becomes something else i don't even know what it is really so you said instagram is a place where you visually share your life what is facebook well let's go back to the founding of facebook and why it worked really well initially at harvard and then dartmouth and stanford and i can't remember probably mit there were like a handful of schools in that first tranche right um it worked because there are communities that exist in the world that want to transact and when i say transact i don't mean commercially i just mean they want to share they want to coordinate they want to communicate they want a space for themselves and facebook at its best i think is that and if actually you look at the most popular products that facebook has built over time if you look at things that like groups marketplace groups is enormous yeah and groups is effectively like everyone can found their own little stanford or dartmouth or mit right and and find each other and and and share and communicate about something that matters deeply to them that is the core of what facebook was built around and i think today is where it stands most uh most strongly yeah it's brilliant the groups i wish um i wish groups were done better it feels like it's not a first-class citizen i know i may be saying something without much knowledge but it feels like it's uh it's kind of bolted on while being used a lot it feels like there needs to be a little bit more structure in terms of discovery in terms of yeah like i mean look at reddit like red is basically groups yeah public and open and a little bit a little bit crazy right in a good way yeah um but there's clear product market fit for that specific use case and it doesn't have to be a college it can be anything it can be a small group big group it can be group messaging facebook shines i think when it leans into that i think when there are other companies that just seem exciting and now all of a sudden the product shifts in some fundamental way to go try to compete with that other thing that's when i think consumers get confused um even if you can be successful like even if you can compete with that other company even if you can figure out how to bolt it on eventually you come back and you look at the app and you're like i just don't know why i opened this app like why like too many things going on and that was always a worry i mean you listed all the things at instagram and it almost gave me a heart attack like way too many things but i don't know entrepreneurs get bored they want to add things they want to like right um i don't have a good answer for it except for that um i think being true to your original use case and not even original use case but sorry actually not use case original job there are many use cases under that job being true to that and like being really good at it over time and and morphing as as needs change i think that's how to make a company last forever and i mean honestly i like my main thesis about why facebook is in the position it is today is if if they have had a series of product launches that delighted people over time i think they'd be in a totally different world so just like imagine for a moment and by the way apple's entering this but like apple for so long just like product after product you couldn't wait for it you stood in line for it you talked about it you got excited amazon makes your life so easy it's like wow i needed this thing and it showed up at my door two days later and like both of these companies by the way amazon apple have issues right there are labor issues whether it's here in the us or in china there are environmental issues there are but like when's the last time you heard like a large chorus being like these companies better pay for what they're doing on these things right i think facebook's main issue today is like i you need to produce a hit if you don't produce hits it's really hard to keep consumers on your side then people just start picking on you and for a variety of reasons whether it's right or wrong i'm not even going to place a judgment right here right now i'm just going to say that it is way better to be in a world where you are producing hits and consumers love what you're doing because then they're on your side and i i think that's it's the past 10 years for facebook has been fairly hard on this dimension so and by hits it doesn't necessarily mean financial hits it feels like to me what you're saying is something that brings a joy yeah a product that brings joy to some fraction of the population yeah i mean tick tock isn't just literally an algorithm in some ways tick tock's content uh and algorithm have more sway now over the american psyche than facebook's algorithm right it's visual it's video by the way it's not defined by who you follow it's defined by some magical thing that by the way if someone wanted to tweak to show you a certain type of content for some reason they could right um but people love it so as a ceo let me ask you a question because leadership matters it's a complicated question why is mark zuckerberg distrusted disliked and sometimes even hated by many people in public right that is a complicated question um well the premise i'm not sure i agree with the premise um and i can i can expand that to include even a more mysterious question for me bill gates hmm what is the bill gates version of the question do you think people hate bill gates no distrust ah so uh take away one it's a checklist uh there's i think mark zuckerberg's distrust is the primary one but there's also like a like a dislike maybe hate is too strong award but just if you look at like the articles that are being written and so on there's a dislike and it makes it's confusing to me because it's like the public picks certain individuals and they and they attach certain kinds of emotions to those individuals yeah so someone once uh just recently said there's a strong case that founder-led companies have this problem and that a lot of mark's issues um come today come from the fact that he is a visible founder with this story that people have watched in both a movie and they followed along and he's this boy wonder kid who became one of the world's richest people and and he's no longer mark the person he's marked this this image of of a person with enormous wealth and power and in today's world we we have issues with enormous wealth and power for a variety of reasons one of which is we've been stuck inside you know for a year and a half two years uh one of which is a lot of people were really unhappy about not the last election but the last last election and where do you take out that anger who do you blame but the people in charge that's one example or one reason why i think um a lot of people uh express anger or resentment or unhappiness with with mark at the same time i don't know i pointed out to that person i was like well i don't know like i think a lot of people really like elon like ilana arguably like he kept his you know factory open here throughout covet protocols which arguably a lot of people would be against um while saying a bunch of uh crazy offensive things on the internet they still like basically you know gives the middle finger to the sec like on twitter and like i don't know i'm like well there's a founder and like people kind of like him i so i do think that the so like the the founder and slash ceo of a company that's a social network company is like an extra level of difficulty if if life is a video game you just chose the harder video game so i mean that's why it's interesting to ask you because you were the founder and the ceo oh yeah of a social network right challenge because exactly so but you're one of the rare even jack dorsey's disliked not to the degree but it just seems harder when you're running a social media company it's interesting i i never thought of jack as just like i think generally he's well respected um yeah i think so i i think you're right but like he's but he's not loved yeah and i feel like you i mean to me twitter is an incredible thing yeah again can i just come back to this point which seems over simplistic but like i really do think how a product makes someone feel yeah they ascribe that feeling to the founder yep uh so so make people feel good so think about it like let's just go with this thesis for a second sure i like it though um amazon's pretty utilitarian right it delivers brown boxes to your front door sure you can have alexa and you can have all these things right but in general it delivers stuff quickly to you at a reasonable price right i think jeff bezos is wonderfully wealthy thoughtful smart guy right but like people kind of feel that way about them they're like wow this is really big we're impressed that this is really big and but they he's doing the same space stuff elon's doing but they don't necessarily describe the same sense of wonder right um now let's take elon uh and again this is pet theory i don't have much proof other than my own intuition um he is literally about living the future mars space it's about wonder it's about going back to that feeling as a kid when you looked up to the stars and asked is there life out there people get behind that because it's a sense of hope and excitement and and innovation and like you can say whatever you want but we ascribe that emotion to that person now let's say you're on a social network and people make you kind of angry because they disagree with you or they say something ridiculous or they're living a fomo type life where you're like wow i wish i was doing that thing i think instagram if i were to think back by and large when i was there was not about fomo was not about this influence or economy although it certainly became that way closer to the end it was about the sense of wonder and happiness and beautiful things in the world and i don't know i mean like i don't want to have a blind spot but i don't think anyone had a strong opinion about one way or the other for the longest time the way people explain to me i mean if you want to go for toxicity you go to facebook or twitter if you want to go to make feel good about life you go to instagram to enjoy celebrate life though and my experience when talking to people is they gave me the benefit of the doubt because that but if your experience of the product is kind of makes you angry it's where you argue i mean a big part of jack might be that he wasn't actually the ceo for a very long time and only became recently so i'm not sure how much of the connection got made um but in general i mean if you hate you know i'm just thinking about other companies that aren't tech companies if you hate like what a company is doing or it makes you not feel happy i don't know like people are really angry about comcast or whatever are they even called comcast anymore it's like xfinity or something right they had to rebrand they they became meta right um it's like uh but my point is if it makes you that's beautiful yeah but the thing is this is me saying this i think your thesis is very strong and correct has elements of correctness but i still personally put some blame on individuals of course i think uh you said elon looking up there's something about childlike wander to him like to to his personality his character something about i think more so than others where people can trust them and there's uh i don't know santa pachai is an example of somebody who's like there's some kind it's it's hard to put into words but there's something about the human being where he's trustworthy yeah he's he's human in a way that uh connects to us and the same with uh sadji nadella i mean some of these folks um something about us is drawn to them even when they're flawed even like um so like your thesis really holds up for steve jobs because i think people didn't like steve jobs but like he delivered products that and then they fell in love every time i guess you could say that the ceo the leader is also a product and if they keep delivering a product that people like by being in public and saying things that people like that's also a way to make people happy but from a social network perspective it makes me wonder how difficult it is to explain to people why certain things happen like how to explain machine learning to explain why certain uh the the woke mob effect happens or the certain kinds of like bullying happens which is like it's human nature combined with algorithm and it's very difficult to control for how the spread of quote-unquote misinformation happens it's very difficult to control for that and to you so you try to decelerate certain parts and you create more problems then you solve and anything that looks at all like censorship can create huge amounts of problems that's the slippery slope and then you have to inject humans to oversee the machine learning algorithms and anytime you inject humans into the system it's gonna create a huge number of problems and i feel like it's up to the leader to communicate that effectively to be transparent uh first of all design products that don't have those problems and second of all when they have those problems to be able to communicate with them i guess that's all going to when you run a social network company your job is hard yeah i will say the one element that you haven't named that i think you're getting at is just bedside manner which steve jobs i never worked for him i never met him in person um had an enor like an uncanny ability in public to have bedside manner i mean some of the best clips of steve jobs are from like i would say maybe the 80s when he's on these stage and getting questions from the audience about life or and he'll take this question that is like how are you going to compete with blah and it's super boring and i don't even know the name of the coming and his answer is is if you just asked like your grandfather the meaning of life yeah yeah and you sit there and you're just like what like yeah and there's that bedside manner um and if you lack that or if that's just not intuitive to you uh i think that it can be a lot harder to gain the trust of people and then add on top of that missteps of companies right it's i don't know if you have any friends from the past where like maybe they crossed you once or like maybe you get back together and you're friends again but you just never really forget that thing it's human nature not to forget i'm russian you cost me one we solve the problem so my point is it there's humans don't forget and if there are times in the past where they feel like they don't trust the company or the company hasn't had their back that is really hard to earn back especially if you don't have that bedside manner um and again like i'm not attributing this specifically to mark because i think a lot of companies have this issue where one you have to be trustworthy as a company and live by it and live by those actions and then two i think you need to be able to be really relatable in a way that's very difficult if you're worth like what these people are it's really hard yeah jack does a pretty good job of this by being a monk but i also like jack issues attention like he's not out there almost on purpose he's just working hard doing square right like i literally shared a desk like this with him at audio i mean just normal guy who likes painting i like i remember he would leave early on like wednesdays or something to go to like a painting class yeah and he's creative he's thoughtful i mean money makes people like more creative and more thoughtful like extreme versions of themselves right um and this was a long long time ago uh you mentioned that he uh he asked you to do some kind of javascript thing we were working on some javascript together i like that's hilarious like pre-twitter early twitter days you and jack dorsey are in a room together talking about javascript solving some kind of menial problem terrible problems yeah i mean not terrible just like boring boring widget probably i think it was the odo widget we were working on at the time i'm surprised anyone paid me to be in the room as an intern because i didn't really provide any value i'm very thankful to anyone who included me back in the day uh it was very helpful so thank you for listening i mean is there uh odia that's a precursor to twitter first of all did you have any anticipation that this jack dorsey guy could be also a head of a major social network and um second did you learn anything from the guy that like did do do you think it's a coincidence that you two were in the room together and it's the coincidence meaning like why does the world play its game in a certain way were these two founders of social networks i don't know it's so weird right like i i mean it's also weird that mark showed up you know in our fraternity my sophomore year and we got to know each other then like long before instagram it's it's a small world but let me tell a fun story about jack um we're at odio and i don't know i think ev was feeling like people weren't working hard enough or something nice and i can't remember exactly what he he created this thing where every friday i don't know if it was every friday i only remember this happening once but he had us like a statuette it's like of mary and in the bottom it's it's hollow right and i remember on a friday he decided decided he was going to let everyone vote for who had worked the hardest that week we all voted closed ballot right we all put in a bucket and he tallied the votes and then whoever got the most votes as i recall got the statuette and in the statue it was a thousand bucks whereas i recall there was a thousand bucks tonight it might have been a hundred bucks but let's call it a thousand it's more exciting that way it felt like a thousand yeah it did to me for sure i actually got two votes i was very happy we were a small company but i as the intern i got at least two votes so everybody knew how many votes they got individually yeah yeah i think it was one of these self-accountability things anyway i remember jack just getting like the vast majority of votes from everyone and i remember just thinking like like i couldn't imagine he would become what he'd become and do what he would do but i had a profound respect that the new guy who i really liked worked that hard and you could see his dedication even then and that people respected him that's the one story that i remember of him like working with him specifically from that summer can take a small tangent on that of course there's kind of a push back in silicon valley a little bit against hard work can you speak to the sort of the thing you admire to see the new guy working so hard that thing what is the value of that thing in a company see this is i like just to be very frank it drives me nuts like i saw this really funny video on tick tock was it on tick tock it was like i'm taking a break from my mental health to work on my career i thought that was funny um yeah so it's like oh it is kind of phrased that way the opposite often right yeah um okay so a couple things uh i uh i have worked so hard to do the things that i did like mike and i lost years off of our lives staying up late figuring things out the stress that comes with the job i have a lot more gray hair now than i did back then it requires an enormous amount of work and most people aren't successful right but even the ones that do don't skate by um i am okay if people choose not to work hard because i don't actually think there's anything in this world that says you have to work hard um but i do think that great things require a lot of hard work so there's no way you can expect to change the world without working really hard and by the way even changing the world you know the folks that i respect the most have nudged the world in like a slight direction slight very very slight like even if elon accomplishes all the things he wants to accomplish we will have uh have nudged the world in a slight direction but it requires enormous amount there was an interview with him where he was just like he was interviewed i think at the tesla factory and he was like work is really hard this is actually unhealthy and i can't recall the exact but he was like visibly shaken about how hard he had been working and he was like this is bad and unfortunately i think to have great outcomes you actually do need to work at like three standard deviations above the mean but there's nothing saying that people have to go for this the thing is but what i would argue this is my personal opinion is nobody has to do anything first of all exactly they certainly don't have to work hard exactly but i think hard work in a company should be admired i do too and you should not feel like you shouldn't feel good about yourself for not working hard like so for example i don't have to work out i don't have to run i hate running but like i certainly don't feel good if i don't run because i know for my health like there's certain values i guess is what i'm trying to get right the the certain values that you have in life it feels like there's certain values that companies should have and hard work is one of the things um i think that should be admired i often ask this kind of silly question uh just just to get a sense of people one that like if i'm hiring and so on i just ask if they uh think it's better to work hard or work smart it was helpful for me to get a sense of people from that because you think like the right both was that the answer was the answer's both i usually try not to give them that but sometimes i'll say both if that's an option but a lot of people kind of a surprising number will say work smart and they're usually people who don't know how to work smart and uh they're they're literally just lazy not just there's two there's two effects behind that it's one is laziness and the other is ego when you're younger and you say it's better to work smart it means you think you know what it means to work smart at this early stage to me people that say work hard or both they have the humility to understand like i'm going to have to work my ass off because i'm too dumb to know how to work smart and people who are self-critical in this way in some small amount you have to have some confidence but you have if you have humility that means you're going to actually eventually figure out what it means to work smart and then to actually be successful you should do both so i have a very particular take on this which is that um no one's forcing you to do anything all choices have consequences so if you major in i don't know theoretical literature i i don't even know if that's a major i'm just making something up as opposed to regular literature like if but like literature yeah think about like like theoretical yeah spanish lit from the 14th century like just make make up your esoteric thing and then the number of people i went to stanford with who get out in the world are like wait what i can't find a job like no one wants a theoretical like there are plenty of counter examples of people have majored in esoteric things and gone on to be very successful so i just want to be clear it's not about the major but every choice you make whether it's to have kids like i love my children it's so awesome to have two kids and it is so hard to work really hard and also have kids it's really hard and there's a reason why certain very successful people like don't have are not successful but people who run very very large companies or startups have chosen not to have kids for a while or chosen not to like prioritize them everything's a choice and like i choose to prioritize my children because like i want to do that right so everything's a choice now once you've made that choice i think it's important that the contract is clear which is to say let's imagine you were joining a new startup it's important that that startup communicate that like the expectation is like we're all working really really hard right now you don't have to join the startup but like if you do just know like you're it's almost as if you join i don't know pick your uh pick your pick your like sports team like let's go back to the yankees for a second you want to join the yankees but you don't really want to work that hard you don't really want to do batting practice or pitching practice or whatever for your position right um that to me is wacko and that's actually the world that it feels like we live in in tech sometimes where people both want to work for the yankees because it pays a lot but like don't actually want to work that hard that i don't fully understand because if you sign up for some of these things just sign up for it but it's okay if you don't want to sign up for it there's so many wonderful careers in this world that don't require 80 hours a week but when i read about companies going to like four day work weeks and stuff i just like i chuckle because i can't get enough done with a seven day week i don't know how and people will say oh you're just not working smart and it's like no i i work pretty smart i think in general like i would have gotten to this point if i hadn't like some amount of working smart and there is balance though so i used to be like a pretty big cyclist i don't do it much anymore just because of kids and like prioritizing other things right but one of the most important things to learn as a cyclist is to take a rest day but to me and to cyclists like resting is a function of optimizing for the long run it's not like a thing that you do for its own merits it's actually like if you don't rest your muscles don't recover and then you're just not as like you're not training as efficiently you should probably the the successful people i've known in terms of athletes they hate rest days but they know they have to do it for the long term like absolutely they think their opposition is getting stronger and stronger and that's the feeling but you know it's the right thing and usually you need a coach to help you yeah totally so i mean i use this thing called training peaks and it's interesting because it actually mathematically shows like where you are on the curve and all this stuff yeah but you have to re like you have to have that rest but it it's a function of going harder for longer again it's this reinforcement learning like planning the aggregate and long but a lot of people will hide behind laziness by saying that they're trying to optimize for the long run and they're not they're just not working very hard but again you don't have to sign up for it it's totally cool like i don't think less of people for like not working super hard just like don't sign up for things that require working super hard and some of that requires for the leadership to have the guts the boldness to communicate effectively at the very beginning i mean sometimes i think most of the problems arise from the fact that the leadership is kind of hesitant to to communicate this the socially um difficult truth of what it takes to be at this company so they kind of say hey come come with us there's we have snacks you know but unlimited vacation and yeah you know uh ray at bridgewater is always fascinating because you know people it's been called like a cult on the outside or cultish and but what's fascinating is like they just don't give on their principles they're like listen this is what it's like to work here we record every meeting we're like brutally honest and that's not gonna feel right to everyone and if it doesn't feel regular totally cool just go work somewhere else but if you work here you are signing up for this and that's that's been fascinating to me because it's honesty up front it's a system in which you operate um and if it's not for you like no one's forcing you to work there right i i actually did so i i did a conversation with him and uh kind of got stuck in a funny moment which is uh at the end i asked him you know to give me honest feedback of how i did on the interview and um i don't think so he was super nice he asked me he's like well tell me did you accomplish what you were hoping to accomplish i was like that's not that's not i'm asking you as an objective observer of two people talking how do we do today and then he's like well um he gave me this politician answer well i feel like we've accomplished successful communication of like ideas which is i'd like i've loved to spread some of the ideas in that like in principles and so on back to my original point it's really hard to get even for ray it's really hard to give feedback and one of the other things i learned from him and and just people in that world is like man humans really like to pretend like they've come to uh that they've come to some kind of meeting of the minds like if there's conflict if you and i have conflict it's always better to meet face to face right we're on the phone slack is not great right email's not great but face to face what's crazy is you and i get together and we actively try to even if we're not actually solving the conflict we actively try to paper over the conflict oh yeah it didn't really bother bothering me that much oh yeah i'm sure you didn't mean it i'm sure but like no in our minds we're still there yeah um so this is one of the things that as a leader you always have to be digging especially as you straight to the conflict yeah but as you ascend no one wants to tell you you're crazy no one wants to tell you your idea is bad and you can you're like oh oh i'm going to be a leader and the idea is well i'm just going to ask people no one tells you so like you have to look for the markers knowing that literally just people aren't going to tell you along the way and be paranoid i mean you asked about selling you know the company i think one of the biggest differences between me and a lot of other entrepreneurs is like i wasn't completely confident we could do it like we could be alone and and and actually be great and if any entrepreneur is honest with you they also feel that way but a lot of people are like well i have to be cocky and just say i can do this on my own we're going to be fine we're going to crush everyone some people do say that and then it's not right and they and they fail but um being honest in that moment with yourself with the those close to you and also uh you talked about the personality of leaders and and who resonates and who doesn't it's rare that i see leaders be vulnerable rare and one thing i tried to do at instagram at least internally was like say when i screwed up and like point out how i was wrong about things and point out where my judgment was off everyone thinks they have to bat a thousand right like that's crazy the best quant hedge funds in the world bat 50.001 percent they just take a lot of bets right renaissance they might they might bat fifty one percent right but holy hell like the question isn't are you right every single time and you have to seem invincible the question is how many at-bats do you get and on average are you are you better on average right with enough bets and enough at bats that your aggregate can be very high i mean steve jobs was wrong at a lot of stuff the newton was too early right next not quite right um there was even a time when he said like no one will ever want to watch video on the ipod totally wrong but who cares if you come around and realize your mistake and fix it it becomes just like you said harder and harder when your ego grows and the number of people around you that say positive things towards you grows and i actually think it's really valuable that like let's manage and a counter factual where instagram became worth like 300 billion or something crazy right um i kind of like that my life is relatively normal now when i say relatively you get what i mean i'm not making a claim that i live a normal life but like i certainly don't live in a world where there are like 15 sherpas following me like fetching me water or whatever like that's not how it works i actually like that i have a sense of humility of like i may not found another thing that's nearly as big so i have to work twice as hard or i have to like learn twice as much i have to re my we haven't talked about machine learning yet but my favorite thing is all these like famous you know uh tech guys who have worked in the industry pontificating about the future of machine learning and how it's gonna kill us all and right like and like i'm pretty sure they've never tried to build anything with machine learning themselves yes so there's a nice line between people that actually built stuff with the machine like actually program something or at least understand some of those fundamentals and the people they're just saying philosophical stuff for journalists and so on it's it's a it's an interesting line to walk because the people who program are often not philosophers or don't have the attention they can't write an op-ed for the wall street journal like it doesn't work so like it's nice to be both a little bit like to have elements of both my point is the fact that i have to learn stuff from scratch or or that i choose to are like it's humbling uh yeah i mean again i have a lot of advantages i like but my point is it's awesome to be back in a game where you have to fight that is that's fun so being humble being vulnerable it's an important aspect of leader and i hope it serves me well but like i can't fast forward 10 years to now i'm just that's my game plan before i forget i have to ask you one last thing on instagram what do you think about the whistleblower francis hogan recently coming out and saying that facebook is aware for instagram's harmful effect on teenage girls as per their own internal research studies and the matter what do you think about this baby of yours instagram being under fire now as we've been talking about under the leadership of facebook you know i often question where does the blame lie is the blame at the people that originated the network me right uh is the blame at like the decision to combine the network with another network with a certain set of values is the blame at how it gets run after i left like is is it the driver or is it the car right um is it that someone enabled these devices in the first place if you go to an extreme right or is it the users themselves just human nature is it is it just the way of human nature sure and like the idea that we're gonna find a mutually exclusive answer here is crazy there's not one place it's a combination of a lot of these things and then the question is like is it true at all right like i'm not actually saying that's not true or that it's true but there's always more nuance here do i believe that social media has an effect on young people well it's got it they use it a lot and i bet you there are a lot of positive effects and i bet you there are negative effects just like any technology and where i've come to in my thinking on this is that i think any technology has negative side effects the question is as a leader what do you do about them and are you actively working on them or do you just like not really believe in them if you're a leader that sits there and says well we're going to put an enormous amount of resources against this we're going to acknowledge when there are true criticisms we're going to be vulnerable that we're not perfect and we're going to go fix them and we're going to be held accountable along the way i think that people generally really respect that but i think that where facebook i think has had issues in the past is where they say things like i can't remember what mark said about misinformation during the election there was that like famous quote where he's like it's pretty crazy to think that facebook had anything to do with this election like that was something like that quote and i don't remember what stage he was on and yeah yeah but ooh that did not age well right like you have to be willing to say well maybe there's there's there's something there and and wow like i want to go look into it and truly believe it in your gut but if people look at you and how you act and what you say and don't believe you truly feel that way it's not just the words you say about how you say them and that people believe that you actually feel the pain of having caused any suffering so to me it's um it's much more about your actions and your posture post event than it is about debugging the why because i don't know is it like i don't know this research it was written well after i left right like is it the algorithm is it the explorer page is it the people you might know unit connecting you to you know ideas that are dangerous like i i really don't know yeah um so we'd have to have a much deeper i think dive to understand where the blame lies what's very unpleasant to me to consider now i don't know if this is true but to consider the very fact that there might be some complicated games being played here for example you know as somebody i really love psychology and i love it enough to know that the field is pretty broken in the following way it's very difficult to study human beings well at scale because the questions you ask affect the results you can you can basically get any results you want and so you have an internal facebook study that asks some question of which we don't know the full details there's some kind of analysis but that's just the one little tiny slice into a some much bigger picture and so you can have thousands of employees of facebook one of them comes out and picks whatever narrative knowing that they become famous coupled with the other really uncomfortable thing i see in the world which is journalists seem to understand they get a lot of click-bait attention from saying something negative about social networks certain companies like they even get some some click-bait stuff about tesla or about especially when it's like when there's a public famous ceo type of person if they get a lot of views on the negative not the positive the positive they'll get i mean it actually goes to the thing you were saying before if there's a hot sexy new product that's great to look forward to they get positive on that but absent the product it's nice to have uh like the ceo messing up with some kind of way and so couple that with the whistleblower and with the uh this whole dynamic of journalism and so on you know uh with social dilemma being a really popular documentary it's like all right my concern is there's deep flaws in human nature here in terms of things we need to deal with like the nature of hate yeah of bullying all those kinds of things and then there's people who are trying to use that potentially to become famous and make money off of off of blaming others for causing more of the problem as opposed to helping solve the problem so i don't know what to think i'm not saying this is like i'm just uncomfortable with i guess not knowing what to think about any of this because a bunch of folks i know that work at facebook on the machine learning side so young lacoon i mean they they're quite upset by what's happening because there's a lot of really brilliant good people inside facebook they're trying to yeah do good and so like all of us impressed jan is one of them and he has an amazing team of the machine learning researchers like he's really upset with the fact that people don't seem to understand that this this is not the portrayal does not represent the the full nature of efforts that's going on facebook so i don't know what to think about that well you just i think very helpfully explained the nuance of the situation and why it's so hard to understand but a couple things one is um i think i i have been surprised at the scale with which some product manager can do an enormous amount of harm to a very very large company by releasing a trove of documents like i i think i read a couple of them when they got published i haven't even spent any time going deep part of it's like i don't really feel like reliving a previous life but um wow like talk about challenging the idea of open culture and like what that does to facebook internally if facebook was built like i remember um like my office uh we had this like no visitors rule around my office because we always had like confidential stuff up on the walls and never was super angry because they're like that goes against our culture of transparency and like mark's in the fish cube or whatever they call it the aquarium i think they called it um where like literally anyone could see what he was doing at any point and um and i don't know i mean other companies like apple have been quiet slash lockdown snapchats the same way for a reason and i don't know what this does to transparency on the inside of startups that value that i think that it's a seminal moment and you can say well you should have nothing to hide right but to your point you can pick out documents that show anything right um but i don't know so what happens to transparency inside of startups and the culture that will have that that startups or companies in the future will grow like the startup of the future that becomes the next facebook will be locked down and what does that do right so that's part one part two like i i don't think that you could design a more like uh uh well-orchestrated handful of events from the like 16 minutes to um releasing the documents in the way that they were released at the right time that takes a lot of planning and partnership and it seems like she has a partner at some firm right that probably uh helped a lot with this but man as at a personal level if you're her you'd have to really believe in what you are doing really believe in it because you are personally putting your ass on the line right like you've got a very large company that that doesn't like enemies right um it takes a lot of guts uh and i don't love these conspiracy theories about like oh she's being financed from some person or people like i don't love them because that's like the easy thing to say i think the the the occam's razor here is like someone thought they were doing something wrong and was like very very courageous in in i don't know if courageous is the word but like so without getting into like is she a martyr is she courageous is she right like let's put that aside for a second yeah then there are the documents themselves they say what they say to your point a lot of the things that like people have been worried about already in the documents are or they're already been said externally and um i don't know i'm just like i'm i'm thankful that i am focused on new things with my life well let me just say i just think it's a really hard problem that probably facebook and twitter are trying to solve i'm actually just fascinated by how hard this problem is there are fundamental issues at facebook in tone and in an approach of how product gets built and the objective functions and um and since people uh uh organizations are not people so yawn and fair right like there are a lot of really great people who like literally just want to push reinforcement learning forward they literally just want to teach a robot to touch feel lift right like they're not thinking about political misinformation right yeah but there's a there's a strong connection between what funds that research and an enormously profitable machine uh that has trade-offs and uh one cannot one cannot separate the two you are not completely separate from the system so i agree it can feel really frustrating to feel if you're internally internal there that you're working on something completely unrelated and you feel like your group's good i can understand that but there's some responsibility still you have to acknowledge it's like the ray dalio thing you have to look in the mirror and see if there's problems and you have to fix those problems you mentioned machine learning reinforcement quite a bit i mean to me social networks is one of the exciting places recommender systems where machine learning is applied where else in the world in space of possibilities over the next 5 10 20 years do you think we're going to see impact of machine learning when you try on the philosophical level on a technical level what do you think or or within social networks themselves well i think the obvious answers are climate change right like think about how much fuel or or just waste there is in energy consumption today because we don't plan accordingly because we take the least efficient route or the logistics and stuff the supply chain all that kind of stuff yeah i mean listen if we're going to fight climate change like one really way one awesome way to do it is figure out how to optimize how we operate as a species and and minimize the amount of energy we consume to maximize whatever economic impact we want to have because right now those two are very much tied together and i don't believe that has to be the case there's this really interesting you've read it um for people who are listening there's this really interesting paper on reinforcement learning and energy consumption inside buildings it's like one of the seminal ones right um but imagine that at massive scale that's super interesting i mean they've done like resource planning for servers for peak load using reinforcement learning i don't know if that was at google or somewhere else but like okay great you do it for servers but what if you could do it for just capacity and general energy capacity for cities and planning for traffic and of course there's all the um self-driving cars and i don't know like i'm not going to pontificate like crazy ideas using reinforcement learning or machine learning it's just so clear to me that humans don't think quickly enough so it's interesting to think about machine learning helping a little bit at scale so a little bit to a large number of people that has a huge impact so if you optimize say google maps something like that trajectory planning or would it map quest first uh yeah getting here i looked and it was like here's the most energy efficient route i was like i'm gonna be late i need to take the fastest route as opposed to unrolling the map yeah yeah like and that's going to be very inefficient no matter what i was definitely the other day like part of the epsilon of epsilon greedy with waze where like i was sent on like a weird route that i could tell they're like we just need to collect data of this road like we just kevin's the ant they sent out kevin's definitely gonna be the guinea pig and great now we have did you at least feel pride oh going through it i was like oh this is fun like now they get data about this weird shortcut and actually i hit all the green lights and it worked and i'm like this is a problem data bad data they're just going to imagine i could see you slowing down and stopping in a green light just to give them the right kind of data yeah um but to answer your question like i feel like that was fairly unsatisfying and it's easy to say climate change but what i would say is at instagram everything we applied machining learning to uh got better for users and it got better better for the company i saw the power i didn't fully understand it as an executive and i think that's actually one of the issues that uh and when i say understand i mean the mathematics of it like i understand what it does i understand that it helps but um there are a lot of executives now that talk about it and the way that they talk about the internet or they talked about the internet like 10 years ago they're like we're gonna build mobile and you're like what does that mean they're like we're just gonna do mobile and you're like okay um so my sense is the next generation of leaders will have grown up having had classes in reinforcement learning supervised learning whatever and they will be able to thoughtfully apply it to their companies and the places it it is needed most and that's really cool because i mean talk about efficiency gains i it's that that's what excites me the most about it yeah so there's it's interesting just to get a fundamental first principles understanding of certain concepts of machine learning so supervised learning from an executive perspective supervised learning you have to have a lot of humans label a lot of data so the question there is okay can we gather a large amount of data that can be labeled well and that's the question tesla asks like can we create a data engine that keeps um sending an imperfect machine learning system out there whenever it fails it gives us data back we label it by human and we send it back and forth so this way then there is uh yamaha coons excited about this self-supervised learning where you do much less human labeling and there's some kind of mechanism for the system to learn it by itself on the on the human generated data and then there's the reinforcement learning which is like basically allowing it's it's applying the alpha zero uh technology that uh allowed through self-play to learn how to solve the game of go and and achieve incredible levels at the game of chess it can you formulate the problem you're trying to solve in a way that's amenable to reinforcement learning and can you get the right kind of signal at scale because you need a lot a lot of signal and that that's that's kind of fascinating to see which part of a social network can you convert into a reinforcement learning problem the fascinating thing about reinforcement learning i think is that we now have learned to apply uh neural networks to guess uh you know q func like the q function basically the values for any state in action and that is fascinating because we used to just like i don't know have like a linear regression like hope it worked and that was the fanciest version of it but now you look at it i'm like trying to learn this stuff and i look at it i'm like there are like 17 different acronyms of different ways you can try to apply this no one quite agrees like what's the best generally if you're trying to like build a neural network they're pretty well-trodden ways of doing that you use atom you use relu you use like there's just like general good ideas and in in reinforcement learning i feel like the consensus is like it totally depends and by the way it's really hard to get it to converge and it's noisy and it like so there are all these really interesting ideas around building simulators um you know like for instance in self-driving right like you don't want to like actually have someone get in an accident to learn that an accident is bad so you start simulating accidents simulating aggressive drivers they're simulating crazy dogs that run into the street and wow fascinating right like that my mind starts racing and then the question is okay forget about uh self-driving cars let's talk about uh social networks um how can you produce a better more thoughtful experience using these types of of algorithms and honestly in talking to some of the people that work at facebook and and old instagramers most people are like yeah we tried a lot of things didn't quite ever make it work i mean for the longest time facebook ads was effectively a logistic regression okay i don't know what it is now but like if you look at this paper they published back in the day it was literally just a logistic regression made a lot of money um so even at these like extremely large scales if we are not yet touching what reinforcement learning can truly do imagine what the next 10 years looks like yeah how cool is that it's amazing so i really like the use of reinforcement learning as part of the simulation for example like with self-driving cars it's modeling pedestrians so the nice thing about reinforcement learning it can be used to learn agents within the world so they can learn to behave properly like you can teach pedestrians to like you don't hard code the way they behave they learn how to behave in that same way i do have a hope was it jack dorsey talks about healthy conversations you talked about uh meaningful interactions i believe yeah like simulating interactions so you can learn how to manage that it's fascinating so where most of your algorithm development happens on in virtual worlds and then you can really learn how to design the interface how you design much of aspects of the experience in terms of the how you select what's shown in the feed all those kinds of things that it feels like if you can connect reinforce some learning to that that's super exciting yep and uh i think if you have if you have a company and leadership that believe in doing the right things and can apply this technology in the right way some really special stuff can happen it is mostly like likely going to be a group of people we've never heard about startup from scratch right um and and you asked if like new social networks could be built i i've got to imagine they will be and whoever starts it it might be some kids in a garage that took these classes from these people you right like and they're building all of these things with this tech at the core so i'm trying not to be someone who just like throws around reinforcement learning as a buzzword i truly believe that it is the most cutting edge in what can happen in social networks and i also believe it's super hard like it's super hard to make it work it's super hard to do it at scale it's super hard to find people that truly understand it so i'm not gonna say that like i think it'll be applied in social networks before we have true self-driving yeah let me put it that way we could argue about this for a long time but yes i agree with you so i think self-driving is way harder than people realize oh absolutely uh let me ask you in terms of that kid in the garage or those couple of kids in the garage what advice would you give to them if they want to start a new social network or a business what advice would you give to somebody with a big dream and a young startup to me you have to choose to do something that even if it fails like you you it was so fun right like we never started instagram knowing it was going to be big we started instagram because we loved photography we loved social networks i had seen what other social networks had done and i thought hmm maybe we did a spin on this but like nowhere was our feet predestined like it wasn't like it wasn't written out anywhere that everything was going to go great and i often think the counterfactual like what if it had not gone well i would've been like i don't know that was fun we raised some money we learned some stuff and and does it position you well for the next experience that's the advice that i would give to anyone wanting to start something today which is like does this meet with your ultimate goals not wealth not fame none of that because all of that by the way is bullshit like you can get super famous and super wealthy and i like i think generally those are not things that again it's easy to say with like a lot of money that somehow like it's not good to have a lot of money it's just i think that complicates life enormously in a way that people don't fully comprehend so i think it's way more interesting to shoot for can i make something that people love that provides value in the world that i love building that i love working on that i write that's um that's what i would do if i were starting from scratch and by the way like in some ways that i will do that personally which is like choose the thing that you get up every morning you're like i love this even when it's painful even when it's painful what about a social network specifically if you were to imagine put yourself in the mind of someone compete against myself i can't give out ideas okay i gotcha no but it's like high level you like focus on community yeah and yeah i i said that as a as a half joke um in all honesty i think these things are so hard to build that like ideas are a dime a dozen but um you have to i talked about keeping it simple can i tell you which is a liberating idea that model is yes it's three circles and they overlap one circle is uh what do i have experience at slash what am i good at i don't like saying what am i good at because it just like seems like what do i have experience in right what can i bring to the table what am i excited about is the other circle what gets what's just super cool right that i want to work on because even when this is hard um i think it's so cool i want to stick with it and the last circle is like what does the world need and if that circle ain't there it doesn't matter what you work on because there are a lot of startups that exist that just no one needs or very small markets need but if you want to be successful i think if you're like if you're good at it you have it sorry if you're good at it if you're passionate about it and the world needs it i mean this sounds simple but not enough people sit down and just think about those circles and think do these things overlapping can i get that middle section it's small but can i get that middle section um i think a lot about that personally and then you have to be really honest about the circle that you're good at and really honest about the circle that uh the world needs and i suppose really honest about the passion like what you actually love yeah as opposed to like some kind of dream of making money all those kind of stuff like literally love i had a former engineer who decided to start a startup and i was like are you sure you want to start a company versus like join something else because um being a coach of an nba team and playing basketball are two very very different things and like not everyone fully understands the difference i think you can kind of do it both um and i don't know jury's out on that one because like they're in the middle of it now so but it's really important to figure out what you're good at not be full of yourself like truly look at your track record um what's the saying like it ain't bragging if you could if if you can do it um but too many people are delusional and like think they're better at things than they actually are or think there's a bigger market than there actually is just when you confuse your passion for things with a big market that's really scary right like just because you think it's cool doesn't mean that it's a big business opportunity so like what evidence do you have again i'm a fairly like i'm a strict rationalist on this and like sometimes people don't like working with me because i'm pretty pragmatic about things like i'm not i'm not elon like i don't sit and make bold proclamations about visiting mars like that's just not how i work i'm like okay i want to build this really cool thing that's fairly practical and i think we could do it and it's in this way and what's cool though is like that's just my sweet spot i'm not like i just i can't i can't with a straight face talk about the metaverse i can't i just it's not me uh what do you think about the the facebook renaming it and that is a dick i just literally know like i'm i'm fairly i like to live in the next five years and like what what things can i get out in a year that people will use at scale and um so it's just again those circles i think are different for different people but it's important to realize that like market matters you being good at it matters and having passion for it matters uh your question sorry well unless on this topic in terms of funding is there by way of advice was funding in your own journey helpful unhelpful like is there a right time to get funding for funding venture funding or anything borrow some money from your parents i don't know like is money get in the way does it help is the timing important is there some kind of wisdom you can give there because you were exceptionally successful very quickly funding helps as long as it's from the right people that includes yourself and i'll talk about myself funding myself in in a second which is like because i can fund myself doing whatever projects i can do i don't really have another person putting pressure on me except for myself and that creates strange dynamics right but let's like talk about people getting funding from a venture capitalist initially uh we raised money from matt kohler at benchmark he's brilliant amazing guy very thoughtful and he was very helpful early on but i have stories from entrepreneurs where they raise money from the wrong person or the wrong firm where incentives weren't aligned they didn't think in the same way um and bad things happened because of that the border room was always noisy there were fights like we just never had that matt was great i think usu like capital these days is kind of a dime a dozen right like as long as you're fundable like it seems like there's money out there this is what i'm hearing um it's really important that you are aligned and that you think of raising money as hiring someone for your team rather than taking money if capital is plentiful right it provides a certain amount of pressure to do the right thing that i think is healthy for any startup and it keeps you real and honest because they don't want to lose their money they're paid to not lose their money the problem you know maybe i could de-personalize it but like i remember having lunch with elon it's only happened once and i asked him like i was trying to figure out what i was doing after instagram right and i asked him something about like angel investing and he looked at me with a straight face and was like why the f would i do that like why like i was like i don't know like you're connected like seems like he's like i only invested myself i was like okay you know like not the confidence i was just like what a novel idea it's like yeah if you have money like why not just put it against your bag and like yeah enable you visiting mars or something right like that's awesome great but i had never really thought of it that way but also with that comes an interesting dynamic where um you don't actually have people who are gonna lose that money telling you hey don't do this or hey you need to face this reality so you need to create other versions of that truth teller and i whatever i do next that's going to be one of the interesting challenges is how do you create that truth-telling situation um and that's part of why by the way i think someone like jack when you start square you have money but you still you bring on partners because i think it creates a truth-telling type environment um i'm still trying to figure this out like i like it's an interesting it's an interesting diamond so you're thinking of perhaps launching some kind of venture where you're investing in yourself i mean is there in the books potentially i'm 37 going on 38 next month i have a long life to live i'm not definitely not gonna sit on the beach right so i'm gonna do something at some point and i gotta imagine i will i will like help fund it right so the other way of thinking about this is you could park your money in the smp and this is bad because the smp has done wonderfully well in the last year right or you can invest in yourself and um if you're not going to invest in yourself you probably shouldn't do a startup it's kind of the way of thinking about it and you can invest in yourself in the way elon does which is basically uh go all in on this investment maybe that's one way to achieve accountability is like you're kind of screwed if you're if you fail yeah that's yeah i i personally like that i like burning bridges behind me so that i'm fucked if it fails yeah yeah yeah it's really important though one of the things i think mark said to me early on that that sticks with me that i think is true uh we were talking about people who had left like operating roles and started doing venture or something it was like a lot of people convinced themselves they work really hard like they think they work really hard and they they put on the show and in their minds they work really hard but they don't work very hard there is something about lighting a fire underneath you and burning bridges such that you can't turn back yeah that i think you know we didn't talk about this specifically but i think you're right there is you need to have that because there's this self-delusion at a certain scale oh i have so many board calls oh like we have all these things to figure out it's like this is one of the hard parts about it being an operator is like there are so many people that have made a lot of money not operating but operating is just one of the hardest things on earth it is just so effing hard it is stressful it is you're dealing with real humans you're not just like throwing capital in and hoping it grows i'm not undermining the vc mindset i think it's a wonderful thing and needed and and so many wonderful vcs i've worked with but um yeah like when your ass is on the line and it's your money it's talk to me in 10 years we'll see how it goes yeah but like you're saying that is a source when you wake up in the morning as uh you look forward to the day full of challenges that's also where you can find happiness let me ask you about love and friendship sure what's the role in this heck of a difficult journey you've been on of love of uh friendship what's the role of love in the human condition well first things first the woman i married my wife nicole no way i could do what i do if we weren't together she had the filter idea yeah yeah exactly we didn't go over that story um everything is a partnership right and to achieve great things it's not about like someone pulling their weight in places like it's not like someone's supporting you so that you could do this other thing it's literally like you know i mike and i and our partnership as co-founders is fascinating because i don't think instagram would have happened without that partnership like either him or me alone no way we pushed and pulled each other in a way that allowed us to build a better thing because of it nicole sure like she pushed me to work on the filters early on and yes that's exciting it's a fun story right but the truth of it is being able to like level with someone about how hard the process is and have someone see you for who you are before instagram and know that there's a constant you throughout all of this and be able to call you when you're drifting from that but also support you when you're trying to stick with that that's i mean that's that's true friendship slash love whatever you want to call it um but also for someone not to care i remember nicole saying hey like i know you're gonna do this instagram thing you should i guess it was bourbon at the time you should do it because um you know even if it doesn't work we can move to like a smaller apartment and it'll be fine like we'll make it work how beautiful is that right yeah that's almost like a superpower it gives you permission to fail and somehow that actually leads to success but also she's like the least impressed about instagram of anyone she's like yeah it's great but like i love you for you like i like that you're like a decent cock beautiful it's beautiful with the uh with the gantt chart and thanksgiving which i still think is a brilliant effing idea thank you um big ridiculous question have you uh you're you're old and wise at this stage so have you discovered meaning to this whole thing why the hell are we descendants of um apes here on earth what's the meaning of it what's the meaning of life i haven't and it and i i am inco so the crazy so the best learning for me has been like no matter what level of success you achieve you're still worried about similar things maybe on a slightly different scale you're still concerned about the same thing you're still self-conscious about the same things it's like and actually that moment going through that is what makes you believe there's got to be like more machinery to life or purpose to life and that that we're all chasing these materialistic things but you start start realizing like um it's almost like you know the truman show when he gets the edge and he like knocks against it he's like what like there's this awakening that happens when you get to that edge that you realize oh like sure it's great it's great that we all chase money and fame and and success but you hit the edge and and i'm not even claiming i hit an edge like like elon's hit an edge like there's clearly larger scales but what's cool is you learn that like it doesn't actually matter and that there are all these other things that truly matter um that's not a case for working less hard that's not a case for taking it easy that's not a case for the four day work week what that is a case for is designing your life exactly the way you want to design it because i don't know i i think we go around the or you know the sun a certain number of times and then we die and then that's it that's me are you afraid of that moment no not at all in fact at least not yet listen i'm like a pilot like i do crazy things and i like um no i like if anything i'm like oh i gotta choose uh uh mindfully and purposefully the thing i am doing right now and not just fall into it because you're gonna wake up one day and ask yourself why the hell you spent the last 10 years doing x y or z yeah so i guess my like shorter answer to this is doing things on purpose because you choose to do them so important in life and not just like floating down the river of life hitting branches along the way because you will hit branches right but rather like literally plotting a course and not having a 10-year plan but just choosing every day to opt in that i think has been more like i haven't figured out the meaning of life by any stretch of the imagination but it certainly isn't money and it certainly isn't fame and it certainly isn't travel and it's like and it's way more of like opting into the game you love playing every day opting in just opting in and like it's don't let it happen you opt in kevin uh it's great to end on the love and the meaning of life this is an amazing conversation a lot of fun thank you you gave me like a light into some fascinating aspects of this of the technical world and i can't honestly wait to see what you do next thank you so much thanks for having me thanks for listening to this conversation with kevin systrom to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you with some words from kevin systrom himself focusing on one thing and doing it really really well can get you very far thank you for listening and hope to see you next time you\n"