How Twitter, Instagram, and Planet Build Products — With Kevin Weil

Kevin Weil is the ex-head of product at Twitter and Instagram. He's currently the president of business and product at Planet. Weil joins Big Technology Podcast to share an insider's view of how Twitter and Instagram build products, what their potential is, and how each product is dealing with big, imposing, outside forces (Elon Musk and TikTok). Stay tuned for the second half, where we discuss Planet, a fascinating company whose hundreds of satellites orbiting the earth capture a new, complete picture of our world daily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  This episode is brought to you by Genesis. What does it actually take to put Agentic AI to work across an entire enterprise? I recently spoke with Genesis chairman and CEO Tony Bates about why orchestration is emerging as a competitive advantage in customer experience and what companies need to get right in the AI era. Then I sat down with Adam Mitchell, head of enterprise business solutions at Voya Financial, to go inside a large-scale Agentic CX transformation, including the business decisions, trade-offs, and lessons along the way. You can watch both conversations now on my YouTube channel today. It's never been more challenging to get frontier compute. How do you know where to look, who to trust, or how much to pay?

• 0:43Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 1:03Speaker 01

  LinkedIn Presents.

• 1:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  Hello and welcome to the Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool, edited, nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. And man, am I excited about our guest today. I've been trying to book him for a while. We finally have him here in studio or in virtual studio. Kevin Wiel's our guest today. He is a person who's had an unbelievable look into the way that companies like Facebook and Twitter build products, and he's also at a very interesting company called Planet, which we will talk about in a moment. At Planet, he is the president of product and business. He was formerly SVP of Product at Twitter, VP of Product at Instagram, also helped Facebook with their crypto efforts. I don't need to say much more. We're going to get right into it. Kevin, welcome to the show.

• 2:10Speaker 02

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 2:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  Great to have you here. You know, I've been following your career for a long time, you know, from the early days as a beat reporter at BuzzFeed, covering Twitter, where you were running product. And we've had some good conversations over the year, but we've never done anything like this. And I'm like, very excited to get into what you've seen and your perspective on the tech world.

• 2:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was excited that you asked me. Let's do it.

• 2:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, great. So let's just start with Twitter, because Twitter, everyone has an opinion of what Twitter is, what Twitter should be, what its potential is, where it's going wrong. Everyone has that last opinion for sure. When you were running product for Twitter, what did you see as the potential there? And how do you think the company has matched up to that or failed to meet what your expectations were over the years?

• 2:58Speaker 02

  So Twitter is a fascinating company and product. And if you look across the spectrum of social platforms, there are, I actually think when you get into them, each of them is used differently by different audiences in different ways. Even Facebook and Instagram, which are maybe more similar than some others. So there's still nothing like Twitter, right? I mean, if Twitter went away tomorrow, nothing replaces it. There's no other platform for public conversation that brings together people in the way that Twitter does. I mean, I fundamentally think that's important. I've met people on Twitter. I'm sure you have as well. You have interactions with people you just never would have been exposed to, ideas you never would have been exposed to. And so, you know, that was, that was what we were trying to serve.

• 3:43Speaker 02

  I think it's a challenging, one of the challenges that you have, at least that we always faced, was

• 3:51Speaker 02

  if you're, Twitter is a lot about ideas, right? And if you've got five minutes in line at the store, you know, you need to kill some time. The first thing you're going to look at is probably your texts. Your, your, the closest friends and family conversations that you have. Next thing is probably your closest friends, and then you're going to look for something like Instagram. And Twitter is, it's about ideas. So that might be the third thing that you check. And in five minutes in line, you may not, you may not have that time. And so it's, it's a little bit further out on the, the sort of set of concentric circles of the things that matter to you most in some ways. But it's also some of the most enriching, at least for me. Uh, so that's a, that's a constant struggle for, uh, for the product. But again, there's just nothing like it.

• 4:35Speaker 02

  And if you're into ideas, you're into learning and growth. I still think it's the best platform out there.

• 4:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. And I think at a certain point, so Twitter went to the IPO with this idea that there'd be like a billion users. But I do think at a certain point, there was an acceptance that, yeah, it was number three in line. It played a vital role in our society, but it, you know, I think that there was an acceptance. And I, I feel like it was a really healthy moment for Twitter. Once it realized, hey, look, a billion users is probably out of the picture, but we're still going to play this like really important role in society. You know, be used for news in particular, like you said, ideas.

• 5:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  Were you there for, for that moment? And do you sort of agree with that assessment?

• 5:15Speaker 02

  I certainly wasn't there when that was ever explicitly acknowledged. You know, I think at, at one point, we, we felt like, and I think Facebook even felt like Twitter might be the next Facebook. And now as it's evolved, it's something totally different. People don't think of them at all the same. You don't, you don't say, well, I'm not going to be on Twitter. I have Facebook or vice versa. Right? So they've, they've kind of evolved into their own niches and, um, but like I said, there, Twitter is for ideas and that's, it's,

• 5:47Speaker 02

  that may mean that it's not for everybody, but it sure is valuable for the set of people that, that care about that kind of thing.

• 5:54Alex Kantrowitz?

  And then how do you build a, a product in that, in that way? And did you ever think of like, okay, well, we're doing pretty good on ideas, but maybe we can find ways to move up that hierarchy that you talked about? To become that, you know, the first thing people touch.

• 6:07Speaker 02

  I mean, for sure we did. Um, and that, it was one of the things that led us to rank the Twitter timeline. Which a lot of people, you know, it's still controversial to this day, but I would argue personally, it's, it's the right thing to do for any number of reasons. The incentives otherwise are to, uh, you know, for certain accounts to tweet all the time because it gets them to the top of your timeline and all sorts of funny things. And, you know, in contrast, if someone that you care about tweets and they tweeted an hour ago and you open Twitter for the first time, like, I think that's probably one of the first things you're gonna wanna see. So, that, that was both, I think, the right product decision, but also something that we did in service to being more, more

• 6:52Speaker 02

  relevant, more useful. And it's a, it, it gets at some of the nuances of Twitter, where you're, like, the ranking, or when you're ranking a Twitter timeline and ranking an Instagram timeline or Instagram feed, they're very different, because Twitter, you do wanna preserve the sort of element of real time. And, and, and yet, if your spouse or significant other tweeted two hours ago, you want that at the top. So, there's, just, there, there's a lot more to balance. And, we absolutely, I mean, you, you want to bring Twitter to more people in the world, especially when you're inside the company, or, you know, I think you're a very active user as well. You feel the value that it brings. And there's

• 7:32Speaker 02

  always this sense of, if we could just help people see that, then this is absolutely a billion-user product. And, the, the challenge was always, how do you get people up and running and seeing value in a way that, that, that shows them what Twitter can really be? And, it's just a little bit harder when you're trying to connect with the ideas that they care about, versus, you know, it, it's maybe an easier problem when you're trying to connect them to the, the five closest friends that they have, when you can do an email import or whatever, and off, and off you go. And, I, I don't know that we have, and I say we, I haven't been at Twitter for years now, but, um, obviously still a big fan of the company and the people there. I, I don't know that it's been cracked yet,

• 8:15Speaker 02

  but it still does feel like an opportunity. It's not, it's not hard for me to imagine that there are a billion people using Twitter one day.

• 8:23Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. What was your reaction when you saw Elon Musk make his bid for the company? Or at least, like, initially get involved, when he bought those shares?

• 8:31Speaker 02

  Uh, I mean, look, um...

• 8:35Speaker 02

  We uh we're actually partners in my current company at Planet. We're partners with Elon and SpaceX. You don't bet against Elon. He's one of the world's best entrepreneurs. At the same time, I think it's fair to say Twitter is a very different thing than uh than SpaceX and Tesla and and all the other amazing things that Elon's done. So I think he's gonna have a lot to learn. I think, you know, in particular on speech, he's gonna have, he's gonna, he's gonna go through like sort of an accelerated process that all the platforms went through. Like, you look at all the platforms and at some point, every single one of them was talking about the sort of un- unadulterated value of of free speech.

• 9:18Speaker 02

  And then one by one, every one of those platforms uh learned that there are negatives. And you have to be careful about uh about speech because it can actually, allowing unfettered free speech can actually chill important speech because people don't feel safe. And there's no, there's no right answer. There's lots of uh, there's lots of places to land on this one. But the platforms all evolved in their thinking. I imagine Elon will too. Um, and I'm, you know, he's, he's an incredible entrepreneur. He's gonna learn. He's gonna learn quickly and uh it will be fascinating to see where he takes Twitter.

• 9:53Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I always think about the 4chan stuff. If 4chan agrees to moderate content, then it does seem to make some sense if if it, you know, for others. Uh, you know, even the founders of 8chan are the one. Uh, yeah, so, go ahead.

• 10:06Speaker 02

  Totally. Uh, you just, there are all these scenarios.

• 10:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 10:11Speaker 02

  Exactly. And the funny thing is, not, we could spend an hour on this and we probably shouldn't, but um, at least in my experience with the the platforms that I've worked on. 0.1% of it is political. It's almost not political. It was almost never political content that you're worried about. It's so much more like a a group of anonymous online trolls bullying a teenage girl. You know, and you're just like, that should not be on the platform and it can have real world consequences. But it's not illegal. It's certainly not uh illegal speech. And and so you just, you get into these areas where you're like, well, wait a minute, that like, that shouldn't be there. That doesn't feel right. And so you begin trying to find uh.

• 10:57Speaker 02

  A line and it's impossible. There is no line like it's as complex as the nuances of communication. But this is, this is why it's hard to run a platform. You kind of ever, you're trying to get better every single day, knowing that you're never going to be perfect at it.

• 11:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  Totally. And the question of what to moderate is a tough one, but can we at least agree the platforms, you know, should take responsibility for what they amplify? I feel like you mentioned it's a nuanced conversation. A lot of the nuance gets lost. Freedom to speak, yes. Freedom to have the platform send your speech to a million people. Okay, that's another question.

• 11:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, this is kind of gone. I think people have more or less forgotten about it, but Mark Zuckerberg actually laid out what I thought was a very reasonable

• 11:42Speaker 02

  sort of framework for how to think about it. A bunch of years ago, maybe it was 2017 or 2018. He basically drew a line where, you know, wherever you draw the line on the, on your platform as to what speech is allowed, he drew a line and, and he said, you know, in actuality, what happens is that as your speech approaches the line, it actually tends to get more visibility because, you know, people have strong reactions to it one way or the other. It gets lots of comments, retweets, retweets, whatever. What, what should actually happen is that as your, as your commentary gets close to the line, it, it drops in reach. And yeah, sure, you can still reach your followers because it's, it's accepted on

• 12:21Speaker 02

  the platform, but you don't get all the amplification. I've always found that to be a really simple and clear framework. Now, of course, the challenge is, is making that happen where in order to know what speech is allowed or what's getting close to the line, again, you have to, your platform has to be as sophisticated as the nuances of communicating human communication. And we haven't figured that out yet.

• 12:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 12:45Speaker 02

  But that, that to me has always been a very clear framework that, that resonated.

• 12:49Alex Kantrowitz?

  And we're going to get to Facebook stuff in a minute, but one last question about Twitter. Elon has this like really ambitious PowerPoint where he's saying that he is going to bring Twitter to this billion user mark.

• 12:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  And a lot of people are saying, well, if it was that easy, you know, Twitter would have just pivoted and tried to be, do this lifestyle content and gotten more users on board the platform. And so like, you know, it's rare we get a chance to speak to someone who was inside and had that visibility and was at that inflection point. So this idea of like changing the content a little bit and making it something that instantly appeals to a billion users, possible, kind of tough. What do you think?

• 13:28Speaker 02

  Well, I don't know how you change the content. I mean, the content is created by you and me. So I suppose you can change the incentives a little bit, but at the end of the day, it's hundreds of millions of people that are creating the content every day. And you have an opportunity to shape how you how you display that, what kinds of content they can create, what kinds of media they can attach, and what kinds of experiences. But the content is you and me, and that's the power, and that's also the challenge.

• 13:54Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. So you were the SVP of Product at Twitter, and then you move over to Meta as VP of Product at Instagram.

• 14:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  What was the conversation like when you, because Twitter and Instagram are, you know, in some ways rivals. Twitter doesn't really display the links on Instagram photos. They actually gave in a little bit on that recently, but they compete. So what's that conversation like where you're like, listen, it's been a good run, but I'm going to the Death Star?

• 14:22Speaker 02

  Yeah. By the way, I really tried to fix that over the years that I was there. So I actually, Kevin Systrom was, has been, was a friend of ours for a long time. He came to our wedding. He and my wife knew each other well at Stanford. So we'd known him for years before Instagram. And we were just having dinner with him and his wife one evening. And I had resigned from Twitter at this time, but I hadn't told anybody because I was doing kind of a long phase out. So some people internally knew, but nobody externally knew. So I wasn't about to tell him either because it, you know, wasn't, I hadn't even shared with most of my team yet. But he was like, hey, would you ever think about Instagram?

• 15:03Speaker 02

  And I was like, no, no, no, no. Like, I bleed Twitter blue. I couldn't possibly, you know? And at some point, we kept talking about it. And somebody was like, hey, come on and meet the team. And I said, okay. And it took a few weeks. This was, I think, around Christmas sometime. And

• 15:22Speaker 02

  And I went in and met the team and just totally fell in love with the product, with the company, with the team. It was Twitter at that point had grown from about forty to four thousand while I was there. And Instagram was this tiny team of like a hundred, hundred and fifty people. And you know, with all the advantages of being inside Facebook, but also all the advantages of being very separate. Because at the time, I think it's not quite the case any longer, but at the time it was super, it was run very separately. Mark did what I think is a fantastic job of giving Kevin a lot of responsibility and autonomy. And so it was going back to this tiny team that was having a huge impact on the world.

• 16:02Speaker 02

  And to go work for Kevin Systrom, who I still think is the single best consumer product thinker anywhere. Now, I learned so much from that guy. So, um, so yeah, I was, I was kind of hooked despite my, despite my initial sense. So I'm really glad I did. It was an amazing experience. I learned a ton.

• 16:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yes, let's dig into that a little bit. I'd love to hear from your perspective, like what the process of building products is like at Twitter? And how that compares to building products at a place like Facebook?

• 16:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is, it's one of the things that I really, I feel like I've learned a lot from over the years. One of my friends, when I was at Twitter and thinking about leaving, one of my friends said, you know, you don't really know the difference between the way Twitter does something and the right way to do something. And it's not that those are always different. Sometimes, sometimes, sometimes they're exactly the same, but sometimes they're not and you don't have a sense. And the reason he said that was I had never been really at any other company. I'd worked at a couple startups that, that didn't work very well. And, and so that was kind of my first real experience with scale and with any degree of responsibility.

• 17:09Speaker 02

  And he was totally right. So I went to Instagram and saw completely different ways of doing things, of building products, of running a company.

• 17:19Speaker 02

  It's not that Instagram did everything right either, but seeing lots of different ways. And actually Instagram was fascinating because Instagram was inside Facebook. And so I could see, and I could learn from the way that Mark ran the company. I could learn from the way that Kevin ran Instagram within Facebook. And then could draw on the, you know, what I'd learned from the things we got right and wrong at Twitter. So, I mean, one of the things that I've taken away from my time at Twitter is when I came into the head of product role, I was way too timid. Um, Twitter was a very discussion-based culture. Uh, we, we talked about a lot of things and it was a little bit too consensus oriented. You know, we'd go and say, hey, here's an idea, let's, what do you all think?

• 18:03Speaker 02

  And people would have some good ideas, some, they would raise some concerns. And you kind of end up in this morass of like, well, should I do it or not? I don't know. Those concerns were about, oh, and we kind of like, just didn't do stuff. And, um, and you could see it in the product. We didn't, you know, we didn't, and this is on me, I'm, I'm not criticizing anybody but myself, but, um, we didn't, we didn't ship enough. Even if you go back and read at the time, people were talking when, when Alex Redder, who I think was on your podcast a little while ago. Alex was head of engineering while I was head of product. At the time, there were a bunch of articles being written about how we were speeding up development and shipping more things. But we still, in retrospect, weren't doing enough.

• 18:42Speaker 02

  Um, and it was, I was too hesitant to come in and, uh, in my first head of product role. And I felt like I knew the ad side, which is what I'd been working on, but was learning the consumer side. And I was just too timid. And where we, you know, discussed and debated and ended up not doing things, I should have just said, you know what? Let's, let's move ahead in this direction. And even if we're not right, we're going to ship it, we're going to learn something, we're going to pivot, we'll get it right the next time. A whole lot faster than we would if we didn't do anything at all and we just continued to debate. And that was in sharp contrast to then going to Instagram where like Kevin and Mikey ran Instagram. And Kevin in particular, like what he wanted to happen, happened.

• 19:26Speaker 02

  And he was willing to make unpopular decisions. He was willing to go deep on particular choices. Uh, and at the end of the day, it, he drove that product and, you know, he's very good at what he does. So he drove it really well. Um, I'll give you one example, which was stories. So it was one of the first things I worked on when I joined. And Kevin was like running that project. I mean, it was it was one of those transformational things. Now it's just it's been there for years. You you think of it as just part of Instagram. But at the time Instagram was for these perfect photos. Right? And there was no place for like funny, silly, daily, random moments. And that was what we were trying to change.

• 20:10Speaker 02

  And as the product sort of took shape, Kevin was like, we are going to put this on the front tab, main tab of Instagram, right at the top. The most valuable real estate there is. I mean, worth worth hundreds of millions of dollars, right? To any kind of space. And he was like, no, we're going to put this front and center. Like, we are changing the product. This we need to enable this use case, and we're not going to do it by putting it in the third tab. And you know what? If we don't get it right, we're going to fix it and we're going to ship and iterate forward. But it's going front and center. And it was so different than what than the decision that we would have made at Twitter. We could have had similar ideas.

• 20:52Speaker 02

  And we would have said, OK, well, let's put it on the third tab and we'll put it in the corner. And if people like it, then, you know, we'll start to see the uptick of usage. And we'll A B test it. And if it and and it probably wouldn't have worked because nobody would have found it. And you wouldn't have generated network effects and so on. And instead, Sisram, to his credit, was like, nope, front and center. It's going to be here. And this is we're going to make this work. And it turned out we we got it pretty right on the first try. And, you know, we could go into that story too. But obviously, all credit to Snapchat for the original innovation that we were building off of. But it just the the the gutsiness to say, this is going to go front and center of this popular product that by all accounts was doing incredibly well.

• 21:35Speaker 02

  We're going to take this risk and like, we're not going to have this discussion because I've already landed on it. Was so different than what I'd experienced and I learned a ton from that kind of thinking.

• 21:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  So Kevin, what do you make of Instagram's fight with TikTok right now? The company is in the middle, I think of rolling out a redesign of Instagram. And it, it looks exactly like TikTok, but it's weird because it does have this strange balance where, you know, we talked in the beginning about the hierarchy of interests, right? You have, um, you know, your immediate friends and family, then the people you know and love, and then the ideas, right? Instagram is people you know and love. TikTok is entertainment. And the company is trying to blend, you know, I guess category two and three. And I wonder if they can keep their identity and, and remain competitive by trying to, to copy TikTok the way they are. What's your thought on that?

• 22:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it's a really big challenge. Uh, obviously TikTok has taken the world by storm. Um, and, uh, you know, a little bit sentimentally, since I worked on the Instagram product at a time when it was really about friends and family. Uh, I, I think that's an important, that's an important, uh, part of people's lives. It's, it's why people use Instagram today. At the same time, credit to Mark, I mean, he, he is, he is unsentimental in, and, and I mean that in a positive way about like just dispassionately looking at what's working and what's not, and evolving the product. There have been a number of times over the course of Facebook's history where people have thought he was wrong and, you know, he turned out to be right.

• 23:10Speaker 02

  And of course he makes mistakes too, but I personally struggle a little bit with a, with an app that's really a blend of both. I've been talking to my friends still at Instagram, saying, man, I'm getting a whole lot of like unconnected videos in my feed and like, I get it, they're interesting. I actually watch them, but I wonder if this is one of those cases where the, the metrics don't tell you the full story. Because yes, I watch them, but it doesn't, it doesn't draw me back into the product in the same way. And I wonder if it's the same kind of long-term retentive value. But of course, like they're not there, or rather I'm not there. They are there, they're working on it, they're looking at the data, they're responding to the competitive challenges. So, um, you know, as a, as a fan of Instagram, I, I hope they find the right path forward.

• 23:55Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. Do you, do you see the possibility that the app can kind of confuse, you know, itself on this one? Like, I mean, my reaction when I saw the update was like, what the hell is this? So I'm curious what your perspective is.

• 24:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, my, my reaction is I've seen more unconnected videos in my feed. Uh, I'm not sure if I have the full redesign, but as I've seen more unconnected videos in my feed, I'm like, man, I want my friends back. You know, I want to see, I, I use Instagram to keep up with my friends and, you know, understand what's going on with their kids, watch their stories, that kind of thing. And I don't want to lose that. So, um, that's not to say that you couldn't find some blend that's better. Uh, but I think it will be a challenge and, uh, you know, the, the people that are there are fantastic. I've worked with a lot of folks, you know, like Ashley Yuki in particular is an amazing product leader. And I, I imagine that she's playing a big part in this. So I have faith.

• 24:49Speaker 02

  Um, but I'm, I'm still waiting for it to land for me personally.

• 24:53Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. It'll be interesting to see. I think this is like a pretty existential moment for Facebook. And there were some amazing comments from, uh, Mark Zuckerberg that were made just last week. He was saying, see if I can pull it up. Basically saying that, oh, there's a lot of people at this company that, that probably shouldn't be here. Here, I'm going to read it. Uh, he said, realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company that shouldn't be here. And he's raised goals and expectations. Part of my hope by raising expectations, having more aggressive goals and kind of just turning up the heat a little bit is that I think some of you might decide that this place isn't for you. And that self-selection is okay with me. And they're also coming some hiring targets. I mean, he's saying that we could, we should prepare for like a really bad recession.

• 25:37Alex Kantrowitz?

  This is kind of unique stuff from Zuckerberg.

• 25:40Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, look, I, I have a ton of respect for Mark and I, I think it's easy to caricature him from the outside. But the, the view of Mark that you get from the inside, um, and as you spend more time with him, it's, he's a, he's a very honest, direct guy. He says what he means. He, he, I, I believe intends to do good in the world at scale. Does he make mistakes? Sure. But, um, I I I I read those and I don't have a whole lot more info than you do from the outside. Maybe you have more than I do, um, but uh, but I respect those remarks from Mark. Uh, like you, you should want to be there.

• 26:21Speaker 02

  Um, you should believe in the mission that that Facebook and Instagram and and um, uh, all of the ARVR stuff is trying to achieve, or you shouldn't be there, right? There's like, life is short, there's a lot more to do. And if you, if you don't love what you're doing every day, if you're not willing to put a lot into it, then like, go find something where you are.

• 26:39Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, and my theory is with, with social media, it's the, you're the most vulnerable position, uh, as a social media company. Like, people talked about the tech giants, Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft. I was always like, Facebook is definitely the most vulnerable, even when it seemed like Facebook was, you know, this juggernaut, because you're just basically, you're not an operating system. They're kind of subject to the whims of, you know, people deciding to open that app every day. And uh, and so, and you need, you need, if you're going to succeed, you need a CEO that's pretty comfortable in wartime. And it's clear that Zuck is, you know, pretty comfortable as a wartime CEO. It's almost like you always have to be in that sort of position.

• 27:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that's actually the right way to look at it is, um, I, I've said this to a bunch of friends before. Mark is the best I've ever seen at creating wartime out of peacetime. And again, I say that positively, like even, even, even in the times when Facebook was just up and to the right and nothing could go wrong, there was always something urgent, something existential that he would get everyone focused on. And it was a way of creating focus and creating drive when, you know, you, you could be forgiven, I guess, for getting lazy for a little while. Mark always had that thing. He's competitive like nobody I've ever seen before, um, so I, I wouldn't bet against him.

• 27:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, yeah, we'll see. This is I've been covering the company for a long time. I would say this is probably the the most vulnerable they've been from the moment I started covering them.

• 28:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, the the ARVR bet is either going to work out big or it's going to not work out, right? And it will be fascinating to see.

• 28:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. And if it works out big, huge moment for the company. And if it fails, then you know, the company might go down the drain with it. So maybe that's a bit dramatic, but something close to it.

• 28:26Speaker 02

  The thing that I respect about Mark, though, is he's always like, the dude makes bets. And when he makes a bet, he doesn't go halfway.

• 28:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 28:33Speaker 02

  And you could be wrong, but like, that's also the way to be really right. And he's been really right a handful of times. Here, he's taking a huge bet years ahead of, you know, when probably anybody else would have. So it will be, it'll be really interesting to watch it play out.

• 28:48Alex Kantrowitz?

  Now, one last question. We're going to ask a crypto question here because you worked on Facebook's crypto efforts with Novi.

• 28:54Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 28:55Alex Kantrowitz?

  Previously Libra. From people from the outside say, you know, shouldn't have been glaringly obvious that regulators never would have let a Facebook cryptocurrency out into the wild. So, you know, you sat in the position where you were making the decisions of whether to go forward it or not with it or not. So what I guess, from your perspective, why was there a belief that this would succeed? Given the conditions that you were bringing it into the world into, and then what happened?

• 29:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a fair question. Look, I we we set out with a really big mission. We thought we we wanted to make it as easy to send money anywhere, to anybody in the world as quickly, as cheaply, as simply as you would send a text message. And if you ever go and study this stuff, if you go and look at what the experiences are actually like, if you want to, you know, send money home to a family member in another country, it's an absolute nightmare. And it gets worse as, you know, as sort of the less financially well set up you are, the worse it gets. And the more expensive it gets is just it's regressive, it's slow, it's terrible.

• 30:06Speaker 02

  And we were like, man, we're sitting here with WhatsApp and Messenger and these are apps that connect loved ones across, you know, every corner of the world. This is the exact set of people that you would want to send money to. Um, when you're sending remittances and so forth, like we could just make the world a better place if we could make this happen. Um, and we certainly weren't blind to the fact that, uh, Facebook was not going to be people's favorite, uh, messenger for this. And it, it, it played into how we designed it. Like we, Right. People, people forget, but this wasn't an FB centric thing. At the end of the day, we set it up. It was open source. We set it up, uh, with a, to be run by and administered by a nonprofit.

• 30:51Speaker 02

  In which there were something like 30 members, all of which had equal votes. So Facebook was, you know, three to 4% of the vote. Could not actually influence decisions that it made. And you saw this as, as things went on where the, the, the nonprofit, the organization actually made decisions that ran counter to, to, you know, what we would have ideally seen as Facebook. And we, we, you never, the design of the system was such that you could never have touched a Facebook product in your entire life. And still been able to use Libra than, you know, DM as, uh, as a full, member of the platform. You did not need to touch a Facebook product.

• 31:31Speaker 02

  And so we hoped that in setting it up that way, that people would see that it wasn't just a, Facebook product. It was actually, uh, a, a product for everyone. And then Facebook was going to play a role in sort of kickstarting, what we hoped would be a vibrant ecosystem. Now, it didn't work out that way and regulators were just never comfortable with, uh, with something that had Facebook's name strongly attached, unfortunately. I, I do think it's really unfortunate though, because I think that, that it was going to be the highest, most regulated crypto project in the ecosystem. I, I think it leaps and bounds beyond, uh, some of the other platforms.

• 32:16Speaker 02

  And we could have done a lot of good and it's a, it's a bummer, but. The good thing is, because it's open source, that project is being taken forward in a number of different directions by folks, you know, a lot of whom came from that team and have now gone and started companies around it. So I'm still hopeful that that that some of that impact lives on and that we that we see some of the work that we did, you know, actually in people's hands.

• 32:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I continue to think that remittances are the lowest hanging fruit for crypto. And whether it works or not, it's going to put pressure on this very, you know, regressive, archaic industry. All right, we're gonna, um, let's take a break and come back. We have got to talk about Planet. So let's take a break. Kevin Wiel's with us. He's the SVP, no, President of Product and Business at Planet, which you're going to hear about after the break, and the former SVP of Product in Twitter and the former VP of Product at Instagram. Hard to find a guy with a resume like this. All right, we'll be back right after the break. This episode is brought to you by Avpoint. Everyone's racing to roll out AI right now. Co-pilots, chatbots, agents doing real work. But here's the part nobody loves talking about.

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• 35:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast with Kevin Weel. He's the President of Product and Business at Planet, former SVP of Product at Twitter and a former VP of Product Instagram. Also did some crypto stuff at Facebook. Let's talk about Planet, Kevin. It is a really interesting company. I feel like this is a company that people are going to start to hear more and more about. The company's profile is definitely on the rise. And it's pretty fascinating. So from my understanding, the company has dozens of effectively iPhone-sized satellites up in space, taking photos of the Earth and basically updating a map pretty frequently. So can you talk a little bit about the genesis of the company? What got you interested in there? It's a pretty interesting hop after Twitter and Facebook.

• 36:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  And what should we look at right now in terms of what's going on at the company?

• 36:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, and by the way, hundreds of satellites, not dozens. It's the most interesting company I have ever worked for. So it got started back, it's about 10 years old. And the two founders, before they were, before they started the company, they were at NASA. And they were watching all of the rest of the industry launch these big, like $800 million school bus-sized satellites that took 10 years to develop. And

• 36:41Speaker 02

  They were like, wait a minute, you know, you don't want a five-year-old phone. Why do you want a five-year-old satellite? Uh, what if we could do this in a completely different way? And so they actually got the idea to launch an Android phone into space. So they strapped a solar panel to the back of an Android phone. They shot it into space on a rocket and they found that it could take pictures of the earth. And it could even send them down using the little radio on this phone could send them down to a ground station on earth. And it taught them that there was just a completely different way to to build satellites and to think about uh infrastructure in space. And so what they did was they started building, they they left, they started the company.

• 37:24Speaker 02

  And they began building this fleet of satellites that are the size of a shoebox. Literally, these things weigh like five or six kilograms, you can hold one in your hand. And because they are, they're so small and compact, they use off-the-shelf components, which means, you know, fewer supply chain issues, it means you're getting, you're able to keep up with Moore's law as Moore's law improves, you're using new stuff, you're not using ten-year-old stuff. And they're orders of magnitude cheaper as well because they're they're tiny and they use off-the-shelf components. And that all lines up to you being able to to to be able to launch a constellation that's much larger than anything anybody has ever seen before. So Planet Today, we operate the world's largest constellation of earth imaging satellites.

• 38:10Speaker 02

  These satellites go around the world like this, sort of in a north-south motion, while the world spins west to east. And they basically line scan the entire planet on a daily basis. Uh, and they do that at about three-meter resolution. So think of a square, ten feet on a side. That becomes one pixel in the resulting image and we have that over the whole landmass of the earth. And when you think about what it means, you know, I'm smaller than a 10 foot square. You're you're smaller than a 10 foot square. So we can't identify individual people. We can't read a license plate. We can't, you know, read your newspaper. But we can see global change. We can see how the planet is evolving on a daily basis.

• 38:52Speaker 02

  And that is relevant for everything from agriculture and growing more food to geopolitics and border disputes and what's going on in Ukraine, to civil government and road and building developments and urban development, to finance, to insurance, to very particularly these days, sustainability and and climate. Right? You can't hope to mitigate what's going on with our climate until you understand it, can measure it. And then you can understand what's working and what's not as we look to improve. So it's just a fascinating company.

• 39:25Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, it is fascinating. I want to get to who the customers are and how the business works. But to start with, I just am curious from your perspective. So a company that images the planet, you know, once or more a day. Is the planet in better or worse shape than you thought coming in? Because you got a chance to really look at it through your job.

• 39:44Speaker 02

  Well, it's a it's a mix of all of it, right? Like it, one of the things we have an internal, we have a Slack channel where

• 39:54Speaker 02

  images that a computer algorithm deems interesting are just sort of automatically displayed there once it's taken and you get, it gives you a sense. And we actually published some of these on our website. I can send you the link later. But it gives you a sense for just the the sheer size of the earth and the amount of variability in the landscapes on the earth. We see such a small percentage of it in our daily lives. And you and me, like, we live in cities and you see a really tiny percentage of it. But the earth is unbelievable. And so, you know, it gives you, you you see that. And you also see the world without borders, which is sort of a an interesting way of looking at at the earth as well. Kind of reminds you that we're all. Uh, we're all travelers on this one big spaceship Earth and we, we've got to do our best to protect it.

• 40:40Speaker 02

  Uh, cause we don't get another one.

• 40:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  Um.

• 40:43Speaker 02

  You certainly see, you know, you, you track day on day areas where glaciers are shrinking and where you see very definite effects of climate change. And you also can see places where people have done interesting things with, uh, with crops, with growing, they've tried new techniques. And all of a sudden you see things growing back. So it actually does paint both pictures. But I think, you know, first and foremost, it provides transparency into what's actually happening. And transparency creates accountability and ultimately creates change.

• 41:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. Have you seen this? There's this video of this guy who can like, look at, um, just some sample of dirt and locate it to like where it is on the planet. It's, um, some unbelievable stuff out there.

• 41:23Speaker 02

  I still don't believe that that, that's real. Those videos are so crazy.

• 41:29Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, they, they are. It's, yeah, I would say probably 50% is fake, but yeah, I wouldn't put it past these, these folks. Um, so, so, okay, cool. Taking picture of the, the earth every day. Who pays for it? And how is this a business?

• 41:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a, it's a great question because the interesting thing is, we talked about the satellites and that was kind of how I introduced the company. But ultimately it's a recurring revenue SaaS business. It's a data business at the end of the day. So our customers by and large come and are, you know, it, the analog of like a per seat license in a SaaS world is like a per square kilometer. Uh, license, if you will. So you're paying for the area that you care about. So if you're, if you're a civil government, that might be, you know, maybe you're the, maybe you're a state in the U S. You care about your state. If you're a, an agriculture company and we have, we, uh, agriculture is our biggest, uh, is our biggest commercial industry.

• 42:27Speaker 02

  And we work with the bears and Syngentas and basically all the biggest agricultural companies in the world. They serve millions of farmers all over the world. And so the area that they care about is by and large, the sort of patchwork of fields that their farmers manage. And so for any, any one of our customers, that's generally how they, they access our data and they do so, you know, year-long contracts, multi-year contracts. So it really is a recurring revenue business. It's fascinating.

• 42:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  Does anyone have a full Planet license?

• 42:59Speaker 02

  Nobody has a full Planet license today, although there are some interesting use cases for it and I wouldn't be surprised if we, if we see it in the future. I would love to see that.

• 43:07Alex Kantrowitz?

  Interesting. What do you think the use cases for it would be?

• 43:10Speaker 02

  Well, so one of our customers is Google, which is, uh, we have a really interesting history with Google, actually. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've used their products once. They're great. You should try it. The, um, we actually bought, so we've been talking about our medium-res satellites that image the whole Earth every day. We have another constellation of higher resolution satellites that are 50 centimeters per pixel. So these satellites can basically zoom in on an area and they don't passively scan the Earth the way that our medium-res satellites do. You task them. So you use an API, you go to our website and you actually say, I want an image of this place at about this time and these satellites can go and grab it for you. And we actually bought those satellites from Google.

• 43:55Speaker 02

  So this was back when Google was acquiring robot dogs and satellites and all sorts of things. And then at some point, I think Ruth Horat came in and said, wait, why do we have all this stuff? And they, they started,

• 44:09Speaker 02

  and ultimately they were, they bought the satellites because they wanted to use them for Google Maps and keeping their maps updated. And I think they realized over time that we could probably run a constellation of satellites better and they could just buy the data, which is what they do. So, uh, so Google's a customer and a customer, a partner, they're kind of everything. They're an investor, obviously, from when we bought the satellites from them. And, uh, and they use our data to keep their maps up to date. So when they see something anomalous and they suspect that part of their,

• 44:45Speaker 02

  Part of their maps is like the world has changed and their maps haven't updated. You know, they see their, they see cars driving through what they think is a field. For example, then they'll use our satellites to go and get updated imagery and figure out what's actually going on. So those are, there are lots of worldwide use cases like that. You could certainly imagine climate use cases where you're looking at detecting change on a global basis. And then intelligently over time, you know, having, having algorithms that understand what that change is and then task some of the high-res satellites to go in and get a closer look at what that change is. And in that way, you have this transparent understanding of how the world is evolving on a daily basis.

• 45:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. And you mentioned you have a partnership with SpaceX. Are they a customer? Are they helping bring your satellites into orbit? What's it like working with them?

• 45:34Speaker 02

  So they're a launch partner of ours. So we launch satellites on a yearly basis or more and they help us take the stuff into space. You know, the nice thing about having tiny satellites is that we can fit on basically, on basically any rocket. But it's no surprise SpaceX is the best in the industry and we're, we're very happy to partner with them.

• 45:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  Let's go quickly through a couple more use cases. One of the interesting things is that, you know, you don't have to have any blackout areas, you know, with a country like China, for instance, that might not want people to see what's going on in certain areas. And we actually had mega Rajagopal on, on the show, who did this Pulitzer winning story for BuzzFeed News, using the satellite imagery to uncover some, I think, just maybe where they were concentration camps where Uyghurs were being placed in Xinjiang in China. So how, how do you manage sort of what data you make available? And, you know, you, you could be upsetting some, some big, you know, world powers when you do it.

• 46:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  So talk through a little bit about what the calculation is there.

• 46:43Speaker 02

  Well, it's a really simple calculation on our part. Transparency is one of the core values of the company. And there's a strong belief that transparency actually helps create more peace overall. You know, if you go back and look at wars of the past, or you're talking about the Cold War or other things, it's often when there was a lack of transparency, when the other side didn't know what was going on, that's when tension heightens. And when you have transparency, tension tends to come down. And so our belief is that transparency actually creates more peace in the world. And so we don't belied anything. And we don't have to, because space is a little bit like international waters.

• 47:24Speaker 02

  So nobody is able to tell a satellite company what to image and what not to image, subject to, we have some, we have some, obviously, we're licensed by the US government. But basically, we image anywhere. Also, of course, other countries' satellites can image anywhere. But you end up with a net increase in transparency. And you saw this play out with the instance that you're talking about, where these researchers were poking around in Baidu Maps and found that there were, when they zoomed in in certain areas in, I think it was northwest China, the map tiles just went away. They went blank. And they said, well, wait, why, what's going on there?

• 48:08Speaker 02

  And they went and looked at planet imagery. And of course, our data was there. And they saw that there were Uyghur camps in these locations. And then they were able to use our data to show the world what was happening there. And the interesting thing is, it's not just one image. Because planet images the Earth every day. You could also go back in time and look at the development of these Uyghur camps, day on day on day.

• 48:31Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh, wow.

• 48:32Speaker 02

  And then you can start looking, you know, applying computer vision algorithms to say, well, where are there other developments that look like this? And then you can start to spot more of these things. And there, researchers have done the same, spotting nuclear missile silos over broad expanses and things like that. So the data, especially when combined with computer vision, is incredibly powerful.

• 48:55Alex Kantrowitz?

  Last thing I want to talk about NASA is, and by the way, I hope you guys have good security, because while you like transparency, there are a lot of folks that don't. Well, let's talk about the NASA example. They're using Planet to monitor what's happening in Ukraine and looking at, you know, potential food shortages there. And by the way, as I mentioned in this, like, can't this be used for like evil? Like, I'm also thinking like, alright, well, you know, this can be used by like, you know, to monitor troop movements and stuff that people might want to remain hidden. So, anyway, you can take those in whatever order you would like.

• 49:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, actually, one of the things that really impressed me about Planet as I was getting to know the company is there has been an ethics process deeply built into the company since the early days, since before they had anything to sell. They thought about this, they designed processes around it, and the process has evolved since. And so, when we do major deals, there is an ethics process that they go through. Anybody at the company can call, you know, essentially stop the line, like, I see something going on here that I don't think feels right, and we will, uh, we will go deep to understand the customer, the use case, you know, just to make sure that, that what's happening is in line with the overall mission of the company around, you know, creating more peace

• 50:10Speaker 02

  and transparency and sustainability. Uh, and without going into details, that process has teeth. There are any number of times where, uh, we have not done significant deals because, uh, because of that, and I really respect it. So, that, that was something that, uh, that I really valued coming into the company. It's a really thoughtful process, um, and it's, it's a hard process. Um, so, uh, and then Ukraine is, is fascinating. I mean, Ukraine is terrible. Everything that's happening in Ukraine is just horrible, I'll say at the outset. But as a, as a sort of an insight into the way Planet's data is used and is valuable, it's like a microcosm of, uh, you've got, you've got the defense and intelligence use

• 50:55Speaker 02

  cases that people think about when they think about satellites. So, working with the Ukraine MOD and other, other allied governments to help Ukraine preserve its sovereignty.

• 51:06Speaker 02

  But it's also examples, like you said, it's one of the, one of the big second order effects of the war in Ukraine is going to be the food crises because Ukraine is the world's, I think, fifth largest exporter of wheat. And there just isn't going to be as much wheat grown and harvested and exported as in most years. And so we're working with a range of NGOs and governmental organizations and NASA, as you mentioned, to monitor the harvest, to actually understand across the whole country where, what crops are being grown, how much, how are they doing, what will harvest be like, how is this exporting going to happen? So that at the very least, we can get ahead of it and, and other countries can begin acting on, on the most recent information.

• 51:51Speaker 02

  And then there's all these other interesting use cases where we're like working with media and with NGOs and human rights organizations to document potential war crimes, from attacks on civilians to signs of mass graves. And so it's just, you get the sense of how fundamental this data is. And, and, you know, we're very early on. I think it's going to transform a whole bunch of industries around the world.

• 52:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, pretty fascinating stuff. If people want to find a little bit more about what Planet does or get in touch with you, what's the good way for them to follow the work?

• 52:24Speaker 02

  Well, so planet.com first and foremost. Will, our CEO and founder, has also given a bunch, a couple TED Talks that I think are fantastic, fantastic introductions to the space.

• 52:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  I watched them.

• 52:36Speaker 02

  And, yeah, and just they'll give you a sense of the mission and how deep it goes. And then, you know, I'm at Kevin Wheel on Twitter, so anybody is welcome to, my DMs are open, feel free to hit me up. As you can tell, I'm, I'm very excited about what we do. I'm happy to talk about it.

• 52:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  Amazing. Man, this went fast.

• 52:54Speaker 02

  It did.

• 52:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  Great talking to you, Kevin. Really appreciate it. Kevin Weil, thank you so much for joining the show. Let's do this again sometime soon.

• 53:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, thank you for having me. Talk to you soon.

• 53:06Alex Kantrowitz?

  Speak to you in a bit. All right, everybody. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you, Nick Watney, for handling our audio. Appreciate it. As always, thank you LinkedIn for having me as part of your podcast network. Thanks to all of you, the listeners, coming back every week. We got a heck of a slate coming up over the next couple of weeks. We got a, maybe I just announce it now. We have Jonathan Haidt is coming up next week to talk about whether social media is good or bad. You're not going to want to miss that one. So if this is your first time listening, I recommend you subscribe. And if you've been here for a while, you want to give us a rating, that would make a big difference. All right, that's going to do it for us here. Really appreciate you guys again coming week in, week out. Thanks again, and we will see you next time on the Big Technology Podcast.

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