20VC: Instagram CEO, Adam Mosseri on Threads: The Journey from 0-100M Users; What Worked, What Didn't and the Plans Ahead | Instagram: Biggest Mistakes, Successes, Misconceptions, TikTok Competition & The Future of Social Media; Interest Graph or Friend G

Adam Mosseri is the Head of Instagram, where he is responsible for overseeing the engineering, product, and business teams and leading Meta’s efforts on creators and Reels. Adam has been at Meta for more than fifteen years. He started at Meta as a designer for Facebook's mobile app before moving to product management, where he led the Facebook News Feed product and engineering teams, and served as the Head of Facebook News Feed. Adam began his career founding a design consultancy focused on graphic, interaction, and exhibition design before joining TokBox as the company’s first designer. In Today's Discussion with Adam Mosseri We Discuss: 1. From Designer to Product Leader to Instagram CEO: What did Adam learn from his first job bartending? How did it impact his approach to customer support and research? What are the top 1-2 pieces of advice Adam would give to someone wanting to make the move from individual contributor to leader? If Adam was "not amazing at anything", what did he do that enabled him to rise above the rest and become CEO of Instagram? What have been 1-2 of the biggest lessons from working with Mark Zuckerberg for 15 years? 2. A Deep Dive on the Wild Times as Instagram CEO: What has been Adam's single biggest mistake as CEO of Instagram? What does Adam believe is the least known feature within Instagram that has made them successful? What does Adam believe has been the biggest product decision he has made as CEO? Why does Adam believe that Instagram is too complicated as a product? Who does Adam believe is the most formidable competitor to Instagram? Was Instagram Reels a simple copy of TikTok? What have Instagram learned from TikTok? How does Adam respond to the statement that Instagram is a "copy-cat machine" and lacks innovaton? 3. Threads: The Journey from 0-100M Users in Three Days: Did Adam and the team expect the response they got to Threads? Why did they decide to break Threads out into a separate app? What went into bootstrapping the Threads friendship and interest graph? What was the Threads influencer activation strategy? What worked? What did not? Did they pay influencers? How did they choose which verticals to focus on? What is Adam's core focus with Threads today? How is the team analysing and measuring retention? What are their goals? What are the 1-2 core reasons why Threads would not work? How do they aim to prevent them? In 12 months, where will Threads be? 4. The Future of Consumer Social: What Happens Now? Does Adam believe we have seen the transition from the social graph to the interest graph? Is it that binary? Is it possible to have both the interest and the friendship graph all in one app? How does the monetization potential differ when comparing Threads (text) to Instagram (visual)? How important is it for the next consumer social platforms to have stars that are native to their platform (Mr Beast on Youtube, D'Amelio on TikTok etc.)

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  When you see a competitor do something, I think it's super important to be humble enough to learn from it. The numbers are staggering, but it's just signups. It's way easier to build something that people are willing to try than build something that people want to continue to use in a month or a year from now. So this is the best first eight days I could have ever possibly imagined. But what really matters is how well do we iterate so that it is compelling enough that people will continue to use it over the long run?

• 0:25Harry Stebbings?

  Welcome back to 20 VC with me, Harry Stebbings. Now, today's show is an immensely special one because in recent weeks, we've seen Threads smash all previous records and hit 100 million users in just five days. Today, I'm so excited to be joined in the hot seat by Adam Mosseri, leading the charge with Threads. Adam's also head of Instagram and leading Meta's efforts on creators and reels. And Adam's been at Meta for more than 15 years. Having started at Meta as a designer, he then went on to serve as head of Facebook's newsfeed. And I do want to say a huge thank you to Annie Scholz and Naomi Gelt at Meta and Sam Lessin for some amazing questions and suggestions today. It really did make such a difference. But before we dive into the show today, this episode is brought to you by Tegus,

• 1:07Harry Stebbings?

  the go-to research destination for bold investing. Tegus curates expert insights, analysis, and financial data to give you powerful perspective for your investment decisions. With lightning-fast access to over 60,000 transcripts across 20,000 companies, you'll discover a wealth of unique insights to fuel your fundamental research, gain perspectives, synthesize information, and even model outcomes, all on Tegus. As a 20-minute VC listener, try it for free at tegus.com/growth. And to be you tools we can't live without like Tegus there, Mayfair helps companies protect and grow their cash automatically, access up to $50 million of FDIC insurance, and earn up to 4.42% interest rate on your deposits

• 1:50Harry Stebbings?

  from a single account. After the failure of SVB and First Republic, it's clear that the standard FDIC limit of $250,000 is simply not enough for VC-backed startups. So for founders, that means finding a safe home for cash is now a priority and a major burden. Well, Mayfair can take care of that for you in under 10 minutes through its partner banks. And suite providers, Mayfair automatically spreads customer deposits across a network of over 200 banks, therefore multiplying the level of FDIC insurance coverage and limiting the risk of any single point of failure. Think of it like a high-yield savings account that actually pays a high yield and is actually safe. Go to getmayfair.com/20vc to get started today.

• 2:32Harry Stebbings?

  And finally, SecureFrame is the leading all-in-one platform for automated security and privacy compliance. SecureFrame simplifies and streamlines the process of getting and staying compliant to the most rigorous global privacy and security standards like SOC 2, HIPAA, GDPR, and many more. SecureFrame's industry-leading compliance automation platform, paired with their in-house compliance experts and former auditors, helps you get audit-ready in weeks, not months, so you can close more deals faster. And SecureFrame uses over 150 integrations, so you have built-in security training, vendor and risk management, and more to make compliance uncomplicated. SecureFrame makes it fast and easy to achieve and maintain compliance, so you can focus on serving your customers.

• 3:16Harry Stebbings?

  Automate your security and privacy compliance with SecureFrame, and you can schedule a demo today at secureframe.com.

• 3:28Speaker 00

  You have now arrived at your destination.

• 3:31Harry Stebbings?

  Adam, I am so excited for this one. We said just beforehand how many reference calls I've done. I had nothing but wonderful things, so thank you so much for joining me.

• 3:38Speaker 00

  Oh, well, thank you for having me. You have to have heard some bad things, I feel like.

• 3:42Harry Stebbings?

  Well, I mean, it's coming in question too. I thought I'd start with the nice one. But the nice one and the kind of ease intro, I normally do the how did you get into tech? But I think it was Sam Lessin, he said about your first job as a bartender and what you learned from it. I was intrigued to start on that.

• 3:56Speaker 00

  Bartending was one of my first jobs, just paying for sort of rent and stuff in New York and university. I spent a lot of time as a teenager in service, bartending, as a waiter, dishwasher, you know, like short chef, that kind of thing. And I think service is a really good thing to do early in life because it teaches you some humility, but also how to work with people and a wide range of people. Because you end up with all sorts of clients, whether you're waiting or bartending specifically. And then figuring out how to manage different personalities at a young age, I think, is also a good thing. And then also, it's just good to appreciate good service. You end up being a good tipper for life.

• 4:35Harry Stebbings?

  I totally agree with you. It's funny, actually. I think it's Goldman Sachs or JP Morgan, the highest rated point on your CV you can have is if you worked at McDonald's.

• 4:43Speaker 00

  Really?

• 4:43Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 4:44Speaker 00

  That's amazing.

• 4:44Harry Stebbings?

  Because of time pressures, difficult customers, lots of different moving parts. It's actually challenging in so many different ways.

• 4:50Speaker 00

  I believe it. I totally believe it.

• 4:51Harry Stebbings?

  But then I heard about the transition from a very young and junior designer to the incredible product leader that we have today. Talk to me about that and the early days of being a junior designer and how you felt about what you needed to do to become a product leader.

• 5:06Speaker 00

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

• 5:44Harry Stebbings?

  What did you take from your time in design on problem solving?

• 5:47Speaker 00

  Design, I think, is about making sure you're incredibly clear about what problem it is that you're solving, articulating multiple solutions, figuring out how to effectively evaluate those solutions, figuring out how to really take feedback and sift through the noise and find the signal. But like I said, I wasn't great at it. And then Brett Taylor was my boss, and I was the Director of Design for Mobile. This might be 2012. And then he left.

• 6:12Harry Stebbings?

  Can I be really rude?

• 6:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 6:13Harry Stebbings?

  If you're not great at it and you're middle of the pack,

• 6:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 6:16Harry Stebbings?

  how do you come Director of Design?

• 6:20Speaker 00

  Well, when I first started, it's better now, and it actually was better in 2012, to be fair. But when I first started, we had this amazingly talented group of designers, somewhere between eight and 12 of us. They just did whatever they wanted. Like, it was one of those weird things where they were talented, they got really good work done, they worked really hard. And you would ask them to work on something and they would smile and nod and they would work on something else. Whatever they thought was the most important thing. And I was reliable because I had a job before Facebook. I ran a small design firm. I was like used to having clients and felt like I had a bias towards doing what the client asked for. So when I joined a company, I had a bias towards doing what my boss asked me for. And so I think that helped.

• 7:01Harry Stebbings?

  Do you think a really important thing in terms of scaling from IC to leader is understanding that internal politics? And do you think you kind of understood it in a way that others didn't?

• 7:10Speaker 00

  I think that it became clear to me that a lot of times for the people who are senior at the company, and I was not senior, that what they really wanted was to be able to hand you a problem and then not to hear anything back from you until it was solved. I internalized this early. That's kind of how I felt when I was a boss running my own design firm. And so I just remember with a couple of people, I just was like, look, whenever I got handed something, I didn't tell them this. I was just like, OK, I'm gonna do it and fix it and do it well. They're not gonna hear back from me. Might be a day, might be a week, might be a month, until the answer or the response is, I took care of that, just so you know. And so I definitely leaned into that for a number of years.

• 7:49Harry Stebbings?

  Do you feel you have that today with the people in your team? That sounds like a dream to me as a manager. I don't have that.

• 7:54Speaker 00

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

• 8:21Harry Stebbings?

  You said about them challenging you. I- I love Gustav, who's a CPO at Spotify. And he said, talk is cheap and so we should do more of it when it comes to products. I thought, very sweet of you.

• 8:33Speaker 00

  Wait, what? Talk is cheap? No, no, I understood it. Just it wasn't where I thought that that was gonna go.

• 8:39Harry Stebbings?

  And so my question to you is like bluntly, do you agree with that talk is cheap and inspiring that internal debate? Or are you more like my mindset, which is bluntly velocity and get shit done, move fast?

• 8:52Speaker 00

  So I do think as a lead, you need to talk a lot. And I think people underestimate this. Our business model is ads and marketing. If you talk to anybody in that world, they'll tell you it's not just about the message, it's also about the frequency of how often you deliver that message. And then internally, we decide we're gonna do something different. We make a post internally and one out of eight employees reads it and we move on with our lives. And we're surprised when the whole company doesn't move along with us. And so I've tried to really embrace some advice I got early. Who was this from? I forget who it was, it could have come back to me, which was if you really wanna move the team on something, you need to say it so many times that you literally want to throw up in your mouth if you say it again. And then you need to say it again and again and again and again.

• 9:31Speaker 00

  And it can be tough because you can feel like you're not being heard or you can feel like you're being predictable or just annoying. But the truth is people need to hear things multiple times to fully internalize them. And so I do think from the part of that quote that resonates is like, I do think you need to talk a lot. Now, I also think you need to be very clear about when you're just gonna make a call and when you're not. And there are some times where it's like, no, if I don't make this call, we're gonna waste too much time. Or I have the right occasionally as a leader to just use my veto power, so to speak. But then you have to be careful because if you do that too much, you stifle creativity, you don't create enough space, you cannot hire or retain the most creative and interesting talent. So you have to use that sparingly. But that's like a card to play and you can play it every once in a while, but you can't play it every day.

• 10:16Speaker 00

  At least is my experience.

• 10:18Harry Stebbings?

  If you were my mentor and I was a product or design IC and I wanted to make the transition, knowing all you know now, is there anything that you'd advise me in terms of making that transition?

• 10:28Speaker 00

  I think. The advice to when I see honestly, anybody early in their career is probably just to get a range of different experiences. I think it's super important to broaden your skill set or to even just experiment with different types of work so that you can figure out in a more informed way what your values are, what matters to you, what your aspirations are. Because the most important thing over the long run is that whatever you want to be professionally, that you're clear and honest with yourself about that. And then you need to shape your work to be an overlap between what helps you achieve that. And then if you work at a company, what the company needs of you. And your manager's job is to find that overlap and help you with that, but not everyone's a great manager. So I think you need to do that proactively. And I think earlier on in the career, if you want to get into management or become a

• 11:11Speaker 00

  senior leader, I think range is valuable, even if you want to be a specialist, because I think it helps you make a more informed decision about the stake in the ground you want to place, about what your aspirations are. But you also have to be okay picking that stake up and moving it because maybe you learned something and it changes. But it's better to move towards a goal that you set and change it later than to float through. And large companies and quickly growing companies like the one I work for will just pull you week to week in the fire of the week. And so if you don't put that stake in the ground, you can really lose a lot of time and then pop your head up and be like, whoa, I don't even know how I spent this last 12 months.

• 11:46Harry Stebbings?

  One of my favorite questions to ask is if you could, with all you know now, call up Adam the night before your first day as CEO of Instagram and give yourself some advice on what's to come, what you could or should know, what would that advice have been?

• 11:59Speaker 00

  It probably would be more like emotional support, but probably would just be patient.

• 12:04Harry Stebbings?

  Has it been more emotionally challenging than you thought?

• 12:06Speaker 00

  The first year was really tough. Three, four months in, my take was like, I've made a horrible mistake.

• 12:10Harry Stebbings?

  Why was that? Just too much?

• 12:14Speaker 00

  It was a lot. We didn't only lose Mike and Kevin, who are amazing product thinkers. And part of the reason I joined Instagram was to work with them. We ended up losing pretty much our whole leadership team a little bit before and a little bit after that. So my first year, I had to hire a head of design, engineering, product management, data science, research, HR, communications, marketing, and a COO. It's just a lot. So there was a period there where I was very alone. That was what. It was really hard because I feel like if you have a really strong staff and they have trust and they get along and they can challenge each other and they bring different skills, you can kind of take on anything. And if you don't, anything can become a problem. And that trough in that, you know, four or five months in was pretty.

• 12:54Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask, who did you talk to? Because that is learning.

• 12:56Speaker 00

  I talked to some friends who are CEOs of other companies.

• 13:00Harry Stebbings?

  What did they advise you?

• 13:01Speaker 00

  To focus on things that would pay off longer term. So they're like, if you can mess things up in the short term, like get your staff in a place. Aim high, don't compromise because maybe that'll make the next three months worse, but then the next three years will be better. I talked to Will Cathcart a lot who runs WhatsApp. I think he was running the Facebook app at the time. He's been a good guy to bounce ideas off of for a long time now. Some friends outside of the company who had left the company who knew it, but some people were just totally just.

• 13:26Harry Stebbings?

  Was it difficult bringing in a whole new C suite and making them gel together? This is hard.

• 13:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's always a challenge. I've been lucky. I have an amazing team. I've made a few mistakes in hiring, but for the vast majority of those hires I made in that first year are still at the company and still in the positions at Instagram. But yeah, you have to kind of pick the people based on their skills, but also based on, does the group end up with the set of skills you need from this group as opposed from each individual? And then you kind of have to also try and build that and pick people for whom they're going to have some chemistry without having them all be alike. And that's an art, not a science. So, you know, it's always a work in progress. I'm always working on figuring out how to increase the rapport and the trust within that senior most team.

• 14:10Harry Stebbings?

  You mentioned Kevin and Mike. It's a very difficult thing taking over a founder led company. What are one or two of your biggest lessons, having done it now very successfully with Instagram?

• 14:19Speaker 00

  I mean, one is actually some advice that Kevin and Mike gave me later. And I had a drink with them maybe six or nine months in. And I had spent a ton of time that year trying to make sure that the team was in a good place. There was a lot of anxiety with the founders leaving. Are we going to get swallowed by the big company? Are we going to lose our identity? You know, I spent a lot of time trying to clarify our identity, to try to boost morale, team meetings, roundtables, Q and As, you know, all this kind of stuff. And Kevin's advice was, look, that's all nice, but really what's going to boost morale more than anything else is doing really good work and succeeding in the market. And everything else is kind of noise. I think he's right. I still value investing in org leadership and in communication a lot. I spend a lot of time on it. I do weekly Q and As with my whole team.

• 15:02Speaker 00

  But I really do think that over the long run, the thing that's going to get people the most rallied, the most excited, the most motivated, the most effective is doing good work and being successful. And so I've been trying to balance that and make sure that I don't do too much to focus on the short term reactionary and more to focus on how do we really just deliver over years as opposed to worry about something that someone might be upset about this week.

• 15:28Harry Stebbings?

  What's your message to the team when you come in? Is it like this is a continuation of what we've done before? How did you approach that?

• 15:34Speaker 00

  I said, I'm going to be a sponge and I'm going to try and learn as much as I can, as quickly as I can. And I'm not going to push for any change for at least a couple of months. I ended up breaking my promise in one place, but for the most part, I kept it. And I think that helped.

• 15:47Harry Stebbings?

  Where did you break the promise?

• 15:49Speaker 00

  The safety and integrity work, we were running too much of our own stuff and not leveraging the much larger teams at Facebook and in the central teams. I think there were more engineers that worked on safety integrity at the company at the time that then worked at all of Instagram. And so I was like, let's just do that. They're just dealing with all of this hard stuff. And so that was a big culture shift for that team to go from defining and implementing and enforcing your own policies to integrating with a much larger machine, so to speak. But it was also the midterm elections since 2018. I was like, we just can't wait. Sorry, guys. Like we said before, sometimes you just have to make a decision and it's okay if it ruffles some feathers.

• 16:27Harry Stebbings?

  Sometimes you make a decision and it's not the right decision. Sometimes mistakes are made. When you think about kind of a fuck up or two that happened in the process.

• 16:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:34Harry Stebbings?

  Is there any that stand out to you?

• 16:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, definitely. I mean, look, you got to make mistakes. The biggest blow up was the press cycle the summer before last around what was called externally Panavision, which actually meant something different internally. And it was a confluence of a bunch of different changes that were happening at once. So it ended up being one of those words that people just projected onto it, whatever they didn't like. And so it kind of took on a left foot zone. So we were introducing recommendations into feeds, so content that you start from accounts you follow. Very controversial. We were leaning into video. You know, our heritage is photos. Also controversial. Creators were frustrated with their reach. I think some of that was for good reason and some of it's because people always want more reach. And we were also experimenting with a pretty radically new design for the maiden tab. And it just all was a little bit too much, too fast.

• 17:20Speaker 00

  And it all kind of blew up in our face. And then there was an interaction between the creator community and the media and it kind of ping ponged. And then I did a video explaining what we were doing and then I became a meme for a week, which was fun. I think The Daily Show did it pretty funny, actually, with biting impression of me.

• 17:36Harry Stebbings?

  Was it funny at the time? Were you like, oh, no?

• 17:39Speaker 00

  So I was trying to get, I was trying, I was trying to calibrate. Because on one hand, like, I do think that if you're not making mistakes, you're not trying big enough things. So if I had no big painful moments in the last couple of years, that would mean that we were being too conservative. So I'm glad, even though it was not fun. On the specific, like, all the memes of like a banana, I was wearing a yellow sweater in the video, so there were like a lot of banana, a lot of mini me memes, like a lot of stuff. So I was like sending stuff to some friends, being like, is this mean or is this funny? Because I like, it's hard for me to tell. And like, my brother's like, this is just funny. I sent a bunch to my wife and she didn't respond to any of it. And she just isn't like interested, I guess. This was all happened for a whole week and then a week later, she's like, hey, what happened again this week? You said something was going on? I was like, don't even worry about it.

• 18:21Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask a weird one? When you have the controversial elements, like, I love the recommendations, actually, that are in my feed, but it's controversial. When you have two opposing, not teams, but ideologies almost internally, how do you resolve that?

• 18:35Speaker 00

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

• 18:56Harry Stebbings?

  I always think about it with like the iPhone. Remember when they removed the home button?

• 18:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:59Harry Stebbings?

  But these are hard product decisions in the moment.

• 19:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:02Harry Stebbings?

  When you think back over the time on Instagram, what's been the hardest product decision for you?

• 19:07Speaker 00

  That one was.

• 19:08Harry Stebbings?

  That was?

• 19:08Speaker 00

  Really leaning into recommendations and feed. That was the hardest.

• 19:11Harry Stebbings?

  And why was that, Fee?

• 19:13Speaker 00

  Because I just knew there was going to be so much backlash. It wasn't because I questioned if it was the right thing. It was so clearly the right thing to do. Basically, what people don't realize is they think of Instagram as a feed of square photos, sometimes in chronological order. And if you look at how people share, all of the growth has been in stories and in DMs over the last five years or so. And to the degree there is growth in feed, it's all in video, it's not in photos in a lot of ways, at least in terms of what people consume. And if you look at how teens spend their time on Instagram, they spend more time in DMs than they do in stories, and they spend more time in stories than they do in feed. Yet, people think of Instagram as a feed, and it's the third most important surface at best, maybe fourth now, for teens who are some of the most important communities on the platform.

• 19:58Speaker 00

  Plus, all the friend sharing is moving in that direction. But you don't share personal moments in feed today the way you did five or 10 years ago. You share them in stories or in messages more so. So feed had to evolve, otherwise it would just slowly decay exactly. And so recommendations are a way to tap into this huge, rich repertoire of amazing content that exists on the platform that you might not even know about yet, and continue to make sure that feed is alive and well. People, they say, like, oh, you don't show enough of my friends' posts. It's because your friends don't post that much to feed. But it's easier to think it's the algorithm. So it was so clear the right thing to do, but it was so clear that it was going to become a scapegoat. For anything you didn't like about Instagram, you would just blame the Rex.

• 20:41Speaker 00

  Rex is what we call recommendations for short internally.

• 20:44Harry Stebbings?

  What does that mean for you internally when you see that DMs and messages is number one? How does that change how you think with the recognition that DMs and messaging is one?

• 20:51Speaker 00

  It definitely made me shift more resources towards messaging. Actually, at one point a couple of years ago, I think I put the entire stories team on messaging.

• 20:59Harry Stebbings?

  Wow. Why?

• 21:01Speaker 00

  Take out all the text, there are more photos and videos shared in DMs than there are shared in stories. And there's way more shared in stories than there is in feed. So just forget about the text for a second, just the photos and videos, just the media, the rich media. It's a bigger deal and growing faster in DMs anywhere else. But the thing is, we're not a messaging app. If I was going to run late to today's podcast, the best way to let you know would probably be to text you on WhatsApp. It wouldn't be on Instagram. What Instagram DMs are great for is they provide you an excuse to start a conversation. We call them conversation starters a lot internally. If you You switch universities or you go, you're going to uni for the first time. You switch high schools, you have a crush. You know, replying to someone's stories socially acceptable in a way that a cold text is not. Sending them a funny reel you found in feed or more recently, notes.

• 21:43Speaker 00

  Notes are basically AIM status, but better looking at the top of the inbox. Anybody above 20 like doesn't use them very much. Unbelievable how much they've moved Instagram engagement overall, app level engagement for teens. And they're just an excuse to start a conversation. Yes, what you're up to, but maybe it's a question, but they're just a reason to give someone a buzz.

• 22:03Harry Stebbings?

  How do you think, because I think that's like a really fundamentally challenging product paradigm to navigate through there, which is like a large portion of your audience doesn't want it, won't use it, but it will ignite a different segment. That's really challenging because you've got this broad swathe. For you, you need to incorporate it for everyone, knowing that only one segment will use it.

• 22:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, so there's a couple of ways to deal with it. I think it's super valuable to be willing to prioritize certain segments over others. We care about young people and we care about creators most because young people, I mean, they grow up, but also they are where creators grow up to do over time and they set trends and they often serve as a bellwether. And creators, I just think are becoming more and more important over time for a bunch of reasons we can go into. So the first thing is to be willing to make that prioritization decision and be like, look, I'm going to eat some cost to overall app engagement or even overall revenue in the short term, because I think this is going to be better and healthier for the company in the long term or for Instagram in this case in the long term, because either we'll break out of a local maximum or we'll be more defensible.

• 23:03Speaker 00

  And then two, I think it's super important if you want to keep the experience simple, and I don't think we've done a good enough job at this, to embrace certain ideas like progressive disclosure. So an app should become more complicated as it needs to be and not be complicated if you don't. And so notes is a nice example because if none of your friend posted a note, it's just the active now tray. It just shows you who's on right now and you might not even know that notes are a thing. But if people start to share notes, then it starts to show you both notes and active now next to each other. That's relatively elegant because you can think of it. Your note as a status and you're active now as a status and so it's sort of seamless. But then if you don't, it kind of elegantly turns into something simpler.

• 23:42Harry Stebbings?

  Is simple always better in design, Adam?

• 23:45Speaker 00

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

• 24:11Harry Stebbings?

  There's one portion of Instagram where you need like eight clicks back to get back to main feed and I'm like, for fuck's sake, Adam, like.

• 24:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, it's a thing.

• 24:18Harry Stebbings?

  Is that deliberate?

• 24:19Speaker 00

  No. It's too, the app is too complicated. I mean, let's be serious. I think it's gotten more simple over the last 12 months or so. We consolidated some of the design patterns and primitives, removed some of the tabs, but we still have more to do. When you manage a large team and they get excited about a new idea, they often want to just build a new thing and it's tougher and more work to extend an existing pattern or primitive for a new use case than to just invent your own new one because you have to coordinate and you have to, maybe it's not quite as specialized for this thing that you're so excited about. But if you don't do that, you just slowly add more and more complexity to the app in a way that I think burns you over the long run, sort of death by a thousand cuts. So we actually, like I was talking to our head of design and one of our product leads

• 25:02Speaker 00

  two days ago about how do we carve out a certain percentage of the team's time to just unship things that aren't used that much or don't create that much value and proactively look for opportunities to consolidate things to make them simpler and easier to use.

• 25:15Harry Stebbings?

  What do you think you should unship that doesn't create that much value? And which area do you think you haven't tapped that you could or should?

• 25:23Speaker 00

  One of the things that we did unship was the activity feed. Activity is like your notifications and there was a place you could go to see all the things your friends had liked and it was fun. Like it was a great way to discover new content, but it's a little bit creepy just to be like, I'm gonna check out.

• 25:37Harry Stebbings?

  What's Adam like?

• 25:39Speaker 00

  Adam's like, you got a lot of this, that, that seems a little weird. I got so much hate in my DMs about that. It was less than 1% of the users who used it, but that's still, you know.

• 25:48Harry Stebbings?

  And they DM you?

• 25:49Speaker 00

  People. Oh, you should see my DMs, yeah.

• 25:51Harry Stebbings?

  Really?

• 25:52Speaker 00

  A lot of DMs, yeah. I just get, it's my birthday, all I want for my birthday is a blue check mark. I like to go in once or twice a week and respond to a couple of people.

• 25:58Harry Stebbings?

  Reels was such an important moment, I think. I think it was such a strategic directional decision for the company. Is it the momentous decision that I'm suggesting it is? And can you take me to that decision? And was it just like a, we're gonna fucking go for TikTok?

• 26:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, it was, it was, I mean, Reels has been huge for us. Reels is pushing 50% of time spent in the app at this point, not quite there. And before Reels, we had short form video. But I don't think we had designed the format to really embrace the form factor of a phone. And I think, you know, Reels being fullscreen, sound on is more fun and immersive, particularly during the pandemic when you're not bothering anybody because you're home. Focus on creators, first person, all of these things were ways to embrace where the world is going and the platform in which we were building. And we hadn't leaned into all of that. And TikTok's rise was just meteoric. After years of struggling to get anything to be retentive. When you see a competitor do something, I think it's super important to be humble enough to learn from it. And sometimes that will mean building something that looks a lot like it.

• 26:57Speaker 00

  And sometimes it means figuring out what needs it's meeting and how you might meet those needs in a way that's more native to what you do. And then a range of options in between. We lost a whole year. I still go back to this. This may be one of my biggest regrets. The first version of Reels we built was built on top of Stories. It just didn't work.

• 27:14Harry Stebbings?

  Why?

• 27:14Speaker 00

  Well, because Stories was growing, so we thought Stories would be a good foundation on which to lean into short form video. But the thing that's amazing about Stories is how depressurized they are. People share so much to Stories. And there's just way more Stories than anyone has time to see or most people have time to see. So the read through rate is very low. You know, I don't know what it is, but it's maybe in the teens. You can't build a short form video product that particularly focuses on creators if most of the videos they create aren't seen. But we were trying to keep Instagram simple. We were trying to double down on the momentum of Stories. We were trying to lean into how younger people use Instagram and they use Stories way more than they use Feed. And we lost nine to 12 months. And we ended up getting it right by leaning into Feed

• 27:59Speaker 00

  and making a couple of other strategic changes around recommendations and unconnected content that were right.

• 28:04Harry Stebbings?

  That's a really hard decision after nine months of work. The sunk cost of you saying, just fucking keep going.

• 28:09Speaker 00

  But this was all pre-COVID-19. If we had had a solid foundation before everyone was at home and just spending a whole bunch of time on their phones, the whole trajectory of the app would have been completely different. And instead, these things all landed, some before, but a lot after.

• 28:25Harry Stebbings?

  How did it change the strategy? If you wouldn't replay this, if you got it right the first time.

• 28:30Speaker 00

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

• 28:52Harry Stebbings?

  Do you think Reels is better than TikTok?

• 28:54Speaker 00

  For certain segments, and not for others. Like TikTok is amazing at a couple of things. They are amazing at exploration-based ranking. So discovering new talent and helping new talent break. We, for a long time, had a strong bias towards showing people things that we were pretty confident they would like. Because a lot of other people liked them, and it's easier to rank that kind of content. And that sort of reinforces the existing hierarchy. And TikTok was really good at building the systems from the ground up to be more content-first and to go find things that you might love and you never would have heard of before. And therefore, it was also just really entertaining, really entertaining. I think they still are the most well-executing competitor, I think, we've ever faced. There's a couple others that are up there, but they're, I think, at the top of that.

• 29:37Harry Stebbings?

  Are they the fastest-moving?

• 29:39Speaker 00

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

• 29:52Harry Stebbings?

  You know how before I was like, "Unfriendly, I ask nice questions, don't worry about it." This might seem unfriendly, but I'm just sad with love.

• 30:00Speaker 00

  I spent, I spent five years running News Feed. Everything at Instagram has seemed infinitely more friendly.

• 30:07Harry Stebbings?

  Well, this is gonna be great. But like, you know, when you look at stories, and you look at its origins with Snap, and then Alex, I don't know, Tim Schultze told me that it was actually held from Kakao. They disagree, but you know.

• 30:18Speaker 00

  I'm sure they do.

• 30:19Harry Stebbings?

  And then we look at quite a few of Facebook's kind of innovations and threads most recently. Is Facebook just a very efficient copying machine?

• 30:27Speaker 00

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

• 30:58Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask you a hard one as well, which is like, how do you determine between an innovation that is sustainable and you should learn from and incorporate? Versus one that I don't know if it's sustainable. You know, we've seen the rise of BeReal.

• 31:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:11Harry Stebbings?

  People have very strong opinions on whether it's sustainable or not. How do you determine between the two?

• 31:17Speaker 00

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

• 31:47Harry Stebbings?

  What have you learned from how people abuse the app?

• 31:49Speaker 00

  Early Facebook days, before we had photos, people just kept changing their profile picture like every day, multiple times a day. I'm like, oh, sounds like people want to share photos. Maybe we should build that.

• 32:01Harry Stebbings?

  Now, are you ready for threads?

• 32:03Speaker 00

  Yes. I mean, no, but yes.

• 32:06Harry Stebbings?

  If we start on threads, the numbers, and it's just been insane.

• 32:10Speaker 00

  It has been insane.

• 32:11Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah. So first off, and this is the worst interview question ever. You know, when like someone wins Wimbledon and they're like, how do you feel?

• 32:20Speaker 00

  I actually, I was there one more day yesterday and they asked the one in the winners of the women's semis, how do you feel?

• 32:25Harry Stebbings?

  I was like, happy. Good. But one never knows when they launch a new product. You can get a lot of hate.

• 32:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 32:34Harry Stebbings?

  Did you expect the speed of adoption for this?

• 32:37Speaker 00

  No, I thought we had something, but look, when you're launching a new app, it's always more likely to fail than succeed. The median number of new apps installed a month is zero for the average person. So you're just, you're swimming upstream. But I did say I was more excited about this one than I have been about anything in a while. But I did want to recognize it was a big risk. And look, the numbers are staggering, but it's just signups. It's way easier to build something that people are willing to try than build something that people want to continue to use in a month or a year from now. So this is the best first eight days I could have ever possibly imagined. But what really matters is how well do we iterate? How well, how quickly to improve the experience so that it is compelling enough that people will continue to use it over the long run.

• 33:18Harry Stebbings?

  We're going to get to retention. I have a group with like 10 of the best product leaders in the world in it.

• 33:23Speaker 00

  Should I be offended on this?

• 33:24Harry Stebbings?

  Yes. Do you actually have to be on the show first?

• 33:29Harry Stebbings?

  But one of them said, the most important question for me is, can you get him to talk about what went into bootstrapping the thread graph day one?

• 33:39Speaker 00

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

• 34:07Harry Stebbings?

  Show them.

• 34:08Speaker 00

  And so I think that was, that was key. Now, look, I do think the public conversation interest graph. Isn't necessarily the one you're the same in terms of your interest as what you follow on Instagram, which is why we allow the graphs to fork. We will build over time, I think, a graph sync option. So if you want just to have the same graph, you can, and we can make sure that stays in sync for you. But I think it was also very important, particularly to the team, to allow people to choose a different experience or a different graph if they wanted one. And so I think we found a really good balance between making it really stupid easy to just pull everything in on day one, but also if you cared and you wanted to curate, you could go do that.

• 34:47Harry Stebbings?

  How much of an overlap do you actually think there is? I think if it is like my brain and my body, if I'm being kind of honest, body on Instagram, Instagram's my body of like recipes, personal trainers.

• 34:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 34:57Harry Stebbings?

  And like any body stuff.

• 35:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:00Harry Stebbings?

  And then Twitter's like where I gain intellectual advancement. And so if I got a feed of like Gordon Ramsay, I'd be like, ah.

• 35:09Speaker 00

  He's on there.

• 35:10Harry Stebbings?

  I'm sure he is. I know he was on this, but how should we think about that overlap, actually? And how do you actually think about it?

• 35:17Speaker 00

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

• 35:27Harry Stebbings?

  Did you think about starting again from no followers?

• 35:29Speaker 00

  Yes. We talked about it, but we thought that for enough people, probably the majority, that there would be enough overlap, there would make a lot of sense to just allow you to quickly do it. Now, you can also select, you don't have to select the whole group. It just seemed like it would be the majority use case. And what threads, I think, is a really nice balance where it's different enough that it's there's a reason for it to be a separate app, that we debated that a lot internally. But because there's a heavy overlap in terms of the interest graph between what conversations you want to be privy to and what photos and videos you want to be keeping up with, that it really allowed us to lean into that. And it is no way it would have been as successful if you had to bootstrap the graph from scratch.

• 36:07Harry Stebbings?

  As someone on the show said once, bluntly, the social graph is terrible at predicting what you like, and just because your friends like it doesn't mean you like it, and that we have totally moved away from the friend graph and the interest graph is the future of social. Do you agree with that?

• 36:21Speaker 00

  No, I think it's too black and white. I do think there's tension. Who you care about and who you want to hear from are not the same. What you want your Instagram to be experienced to be if I ask you about in the abstracts over the long term is probably pretty different than what you'd like and interact with on a daily basis in the app. That's the tension between sort of first order and second order preferences. And so things are always a bit more complicated. The thing that's really working about Instagram right now with reels is the connection between the two. So you can see a bunch of amazing videos from people you know or don't know, but aren't necessarily your friends. And then you can share them with your friends in DMs. And that brings your friends back to the app, and then they discover something, and then they might share it with someone

• 37:05Speaker 00

  else. The thing that I think people don't always realize is video, by its nature as a format, is actually really challenging for all the old social networks. It puts a lot of downward pressure on the ads business, because if you watch one video for 10 seconds, you would have before scrolled through four posts and probably seen an ad. And so it's a challenge. Actually, video tends to be good for time spent and bad for everything else. Bad for revenue, bad for comments, bad for likes, bad for sends, et cetera. What worries about reels, because we have the inbox integrated into Instagram, is this sort of flywheel where you consume things, you send them to friends, then you start a conversation, maybe they use Instagram more, they want to check out what's going on today, they discover something, they send it back to you or to another friend. And so the fact that growing

• 37:50Speaker 00

  video has massively grown sense, which is a pure friend-to-friend interaction, even if you take out the reel shares, because they start conversation, I might send you a funny football clip, and then we talk about something else, is really, really exciting, because everything that we did in the video space before that I was involved in at Instagram and Facebook came at the cost of people's connections. And reels is the opposite. These things can be symbiotic if you design the experiences thoughtfully, but that doesn't mean there are no tensions.

• 38:17Harry Stebbings?

  So do you think threads in reels is kind of the integration of the interest graph and the social graph coming together in one single platform?

• 38:26Speaker 00

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

• 38:52Harry Stebbings?

  Come on, it's eight days in.

• 38:53Speaker 00

  Just to make sure the lights are on.

• 38:55Harry Stebbings?

  Still working. There was quite an influencer strategy around.

• 38:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 39:00Harry Stebbings?

  We mentioned Gordon Ramsay. The influencer activation, I saw it and I was like, Adam.

• 39:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, oh my god.

• 39:05Harry Stebbings?

  Sensational.

• 39:07Speaker 00

  Such a shout out to partnerships, too.

• 39:08Harry Stebbings?

  My product group was just going like, you know, I usually like this. My question to you is like, how does that plan go with the influencer activation strategy? I'm just fascinated.

• 39:18Speaker 00

  So it was very clear, when you're starting something new, there's always a question, which is like, do you need to get people on it so that the creators will come? Or do you need to get creators on it so the people will come? And my biggest fear, specifically with threads, and I think the team had the same fear, was that people would show up and there'd just be nothing there. And be like, I'm out. Seems nice. And we learned this actually from IGTV a lot, too, which is we should focus on the creator side. Because also, feeds are very head-heavy in general, and so is text. So basically, that's to say that you have to assume that Twitter and other feed products in general tend to have, most of the content consumed is produced by a small number of people. So even more so than stories by a lot, actually.

• 39:58Speaker 00

  So we're like, okay, how do we get there to be a critical mass of content early? And we were trying to create something that was a less angry space. You often, I think, in a way you can't measure, can set the tone for a product with some of the decisions you make upfront. So we had always known early that we wanted to get a bunch of creators into the app early. We actually wanted to do it for longer. We only did it for, I think it was like 40 hours. And then the partnerships team did a really, really good job.

• 40:25Harry Stebbings?

  So I'm super nervous. Did you just like choose like J Lo and Gordon Ramsay?

• 40:29Speaker 00

  Oh yeah, no, it's not me. We have a great, small, lean, mean partnerships team, and so we picked verticals that we thought would be important. Because mostly we look for verticals where they already did well on Instagram. And there was a vibrant commentary community around that. So we do great with athletes and also sports commentary is its own sort of genre in a way.

• 40:49Harry Stebbings?

  And should I be offended if you did not?

• 40:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, you should be slapped. Well, we weren't focusing on tech.

• 40:55Harry Stebbings?

  I'm coming in my product, mate.

• 40:57Speaker 00

  That's fair. I'll earn it one day. I'll have to ship a couple more things that work. No, we weren't going after tech. We weren't going after news. We weren't going after politics. We were focused on musicians. We're focused on fashion. We're focused on athletes. We're focused on beauty. We're focused on, actually, all of those have these amazing creators and personalities that people are interested in. And all these amazing commentators who talk about that world. And look, everyone's going to come. Like, we're not going to try to be an exclusive club here. But that's what we leaned into for the launch. And so the partnership team did a really good job.

• 41:28Harry Stebbings?

  Do you pay them?

• 41:29Speaker 00

  No.

• 41:30Harry Stebbings?

  You didn't pay them?

• 41:31Speaker 00

  No. We talked about it, but no. It's not scalable. And as soon as you start, it's a very slippery slope. You have to build a platform that provides enough value to someone that they want to share. If it's really going to be sustainable over the long run. It's not that you should never pay. We've done performance-based incentives on Instagram before. And I think there are targeted ways to do it. It's not a scalable solution. So it's got to be a way to learn or a way to bootstrap.

• 41:55Harry Stebbings?

  You do a postmortem on this. It went very well as an influencer activation strategy.

• 41:59Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 41:59Harry Stebbings?

  Why?

• 42:00Speaker 00

  I think it went well for a few reasons. One is that we had gotten a bunch of people ready. We actually had wanted to launch earlier, so the partnership team had already engaged everyone. And then we had to delay, so they were ready at a moment's notice because we had originally wanted to be up by VidCon. That helped. Being opinionated about the verticals helped. I think letting a bunch of people, a few thousand people in, and this was Tuesday. I think we launched Wednesday at midnight, UK time, also built a huge amount of hype around it. We ended up having to pull up the launch again because on Wednesday, we figured out that the, we did this preorder thing on iOS, just to build some buzz. And we found out that we couldn't control what time the Apple App Store delivered the app to people's phones. And it would just deliver on midnight Thursday, local time.

• 42:43Speaker 00

  So we became the number one store in the app store in Japan. And you couldn't log in because it was because it was like.

• 42:50Harry Stebbings?

  I mean, there's a product wall and that's a product wall.

• 42:53Speaker 00

  It was a Wednesday morning in California. That's why we had to pull it up again. So we ended up being like, okay, what's the next biggest, most important country? That's going to hit midnight. So we can either cancel the preorders. That seems terrible. Or pull up the launch. And so UK was the next one that was going to hit midnight, which is why it was midnight UK time. That we opened the floodgates because otherwise every, you know, UK footballer would have gotten the app that had preordered it. Would have had the app on their phone and they would have logged in and it would have been like error or something. And that's like, it's going to be like the worst launch of all time. But that actually ended up playing to our favor because that was like, that created more mystery and excitement. They're like, it moved up again or moved up. And so just the whole thing ended up playing.

• 43:35Harry Stebbings?

  Are you getting any sleep at this time?

• 43:37Speaker 00

  I don't get a lot of sleep.

• 43:39Harry Stebbings?

  Just like, it feels a little bit hectic.

• 43:42Speaker 00

  Yeah. The tough thing about living in the UK and working for a California based company is the hours. And I have little, so I have a seven and five and a three year old boy. So that's the tough thing.

• 43:51Harry Stebbings?

  Did you sleep before or have you just adjusted to this?

• 43:54Speaker 00

  I slept a lot more before. I've aged a lot this year. I don't, we didn't manage each other until this year, but I had a lot less gray hair.

• 44:00Harry Stebbings?

  Dude, I think you look great.

• 44:02Speaker 00

  Oh, I'll take it.

• 44:02Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah, no, I know. My question now is like, I spoke to someone who I consider like a consumer social OG about the influencer activation strategy. And they were like, it's like importing the landed aristocracy to the US. Each platform, Mr. Beast on YouTube, the Kardashians on Instagram, D'Amelio on TikTok. They're like native to their own platform.

• 44:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 44:23Harry Stebbings?

  And this felt like a importing landed aristocracy. How do you feel when you hear that? And is that right or wrong?

• 44:28Speaker 00

  I don't know about aristocracy, but I do think one of the things that played to our favor is there are a lot of platforms to do amazing work with creators out there. I talked about how TikTok is really good at breaking new talent. I think YouTube is the best at doing sustained, consistent payouts. With their rev share program because long form videos, I think a lot more conducive to that. But if you look at all the different platforms, Instagram is the most popular in the creator community, as far as we can tell. So the most creators use it. Now, more creators over time are using multiple platforms because they're becoming just more savvy and trying to make sure they diversify their risk, which I think is smart. You know, we're not always the most loved, but we've been the most important platform overall, not for an individual creator,

• 45:11Speaker 00

  but overall in the community, I think, for a while now. So we had this very rich, vibrant community of probably tens of millions of creators that we could just tap into with this. Then it ended up taking out an energy of itself. As soon as you get enough, not even big names necessarily, but like interesting names, then everyone's worried about missing out. And so then everybody tries it too, and then it creates a bit of a cycle.

• 45:32Harry Stebbings?

  Which name do you not have that you would love to have?

• 45:35Speaker 00

  Threads? No, there's a bunch of people.

• 45:37Harry Stebbings?

  But number one?

• 45:38Speaker 00

  As my role or as a person?

• 45:40Harry Stebbings?

  Both.

• 45:41Speaker 00

  I think a huge one will be Beyonce, in terms of my role, in terms of like cultural relevance. Taylor Nation, Swift Nation came over, but not Taylor Swift yet, but that'll also be a big deal. She's, her reach is insane. For me, based on my personal interests, I'm really bummed about how long it's going to take to support Europe because I'm a football fan and there's so many amazing footballers in Europe. To me, there's like the, obviously the market and like reaching a bunch of people, but it's also-

• 46:06Harry Stebbings?

  Getting Ronaldo is amazing. Ronaldo or Messi?

• 46:09Speaker 00

  Ronaldo or Messi. Well, Messi's like, maybe he'll have a US account when he goes over to Miami. What? Ronaldo can log in from Saudi Arabia.

• 46:18Speaker 00

  But football and F1 are so important worldwide, and I care every bit as much about making sure that the platform is culturally relevant than the sort of the big number of users.

• 46:29Harry Stebbings?

  What did you make of, you mentioned kind of the centrality of enabling creators. Twitter have recently been, I've just seen screenshots on Twitter.

• 46:35Speaker 00

  Are they payments?

• 46:36Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah, like payments for replies. I'm like, why is my fucking payment even?

• 46:40Speaker 00

  I think you have to think long. I think for a lot of creators, it's a business. And I think we've been trying to figure out ways to support those businesses for a while now. But I think you can't just pay everybody who's a creator, because if there's tens of millions of creators, that just adds up to money that's going to just completely destroy your business model. So you have to figure out- Ways to give them tools to make money, in my opinion. And so we focus on things like subscriptions, which are relevant to a subset of creators, but that's growing. Facilitating branded content deals, that's actually going very well on Instagram. And we do some payments as well, but that's more for bootstrapping. And then for a segment that's creating real content, that's really driving a lot of incremental value and revenue for Instagram. So I think it's going to get a bunch of attention for the next couple of days. But I think it's hard if it's unpredictable.

• 47:23Speaker 00

  If you're trying to run a business, you kind of need to know roughly what you're going to make ahead of time. And if you're kind of getting these lottery type checks, I think it's much more harder to plan. Well, that's a common complaint. I've heard about how TikTok's payments compared to YouTube's payments, for instance, which are much more predictable. They're trying new things. Like, I don't know where Twitter's going to be in a year. They're shaking things up in all sorts of ways over there.

• 47:44Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask, Facebook had five friends or six friends was like a retained user.

• 47:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 47:48Harry Stebbings?

  Do you have a metric as such with threats?

• 47:51Speaker 00

  We don't know what the number is yet. I do think you're going to need two different things. You're definitely going to need a critical mass, I think, of friends. And then you're going to need a quality of, maybe it's a critical mass, on your interest graph side as well. Now, we can bootstrap you by showing you recommendations. If you don't follow anyone to start on the interest side, it's much more difficult to do that on the friend side. But by the way, that number for Facebook back in the day varied wildly by country. Like, in Japan, it was like six. And in Indonesia, it was a hundred and six or something bonkers. Because cultural differences, internet usage differences, meant that that tipping point varied drastically from country to country.

• 48:26Harry Stebbings?

  A lot of social consumer app or consumer social apps get a lot of buzz. Admittedly, this has been unlike almost any other before. How do you think about retention? How do we retain the community?

• 48:37Speaker 00

  It's just the primary focus. It's got to be the thing that the team focuses on for the next couple of months. I think we have to do a number of different things. We have to plug a bunch of obvious missing features.

• 48:45Harry Stebbings?

  What are the biggest missing features?

• 48:47Speaker 00

  Following feed, edit button, supporting continent of Europe. I'm actually really excited about the Fediverse work that's coming and supporting activity.

• 48:54Harry Stebbings?

  When does Europe come?

• 48:55Speaker 00

  Months, many months, minimum.

• 48:57Harry Stebbings?

  February.

• 48:58Speaker 00

  I mean, I'd be excited about that, honestly, at this point. Laws coming out next year, making sure that we're proactively compliant with them. It's about data separation, but it's also about being able to verify all of the statements you make about how data works on that. And if we're going to make claims, we have to make sure that we prove those claims are true and that just that work is a lot of time.

• 49:18Harry Stebbings?

  Are you a politician or a CEO?

• 49:20Speaker 00

  I'm neither. I'm not a politician.

• 49:24Harry Stebbings?

  I mean it in the nicest way. When you get to a stage where you're as big as Facebook, Meta, Instagram are, and you are CEO.

• 49:31Speaker 00

  Sometimes I forget that I have a job and I can say, and once I'll try to pinch myself, but this is a pretty cool, wild thing you got. I think I'm very lucky to have my job. The way I think about it is it's my job to build a team and set them up for success by pointing them at the right problems and giving the right support and feedback along the way. Sometimes that means a more specific direction and sometimes that means, honestly, just being a glorified shit umbrella. Sometimes I joke because I do with a lot of customer service requests. I joke that I'm a highly overpaid customer service rep. It just depends on the need, but it is a weird balance because you think that the more senior you get, the more you just get to make decisions. But in a lot of ways, your influence becomes more and more indirect.

• 50:15Speaker 00

  It's a very odd experience sometimes.

• 50:17Harry Stebbings?

  What have you done from working with Mark?

• 50:19Speaker 00

  Mark is always holding an incredibly high bar. One of his fears is that we fail hitting our goals all the way down. And so, you know, you can crush it and then he's like, set the goal a little higher still. Set the goal a little higher still. And I think there's a real value to that, which is just like really, really setting a high bar. He's also very willing to take risks in a way that sometimes is infuriating, but I think is very good for the company over the long run. Like, for instance, on Threads, he was the one who was like, you guys should try to build a separate app. And we were really trying to figure out a way to do it in the main app because it seemed like. It would be much more likely to succeed. And he was by far the most convicted about taking.

• 50:57Harry Stebbings?

  It's threats a risk. It doesn't work and it's a Facebook home that people forget.

• 51:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's still a risk. I think if you fail, I think it can damage your reputation. It can damage your brand. It can make people less likely to want you to succeed in the future. I think it's an opportunity cost. The team is getting smaller, not bigger right now. And so like, it's not a big team.

• 51:16Harry Stebbings?

  How big is the Threads team?

• 51:18Speaker 00

  It's going to grow now. The team really properly formed a little less than five months ago. Or five months ago, we started working on it a little before, but the team didn't really form properly until maybe five months ago. Dozens, fifty something engineers, three PMs, three designers. It's pretty lean, but they're really, really good engineers, designers, PMs, they're scientists, researchers. So the opportunity cost is not properly, I think, evaluated by the number.

• 51:42Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask, from a business perspective, how does the business and monetization potential differ when comparing the video visual of Instagram reels versus text-based nature of threads?

• 51:53Speaker 00

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

• 52:29Harry Stebbings?

  When you think about success with threads, what do you think success is to you? Do you have a metric yardstick?

• 52:35Speaker 00

  For me, the thing I'm going to look at the most is probably, for the verticals we care about most, what does the creator community engagement look like? That's going to be a bellwether for how big the app is over the longer run. And then, I mean, right now, the thing I care about most is retention. There's no good signal now because it hasn't been long enough. And everyone who's signed up is not everyone, but most of the people who've signed up have been early adopters and they use things differently. So we really just don't know yet. So it'll be the two things I'll focus on most for the next year will be the creator community, not only how many of them use the app, but how many of them share the app and then retention for the average user.

• 53:10Harry Stebbings?

  Those are the two things that really would kill, try to make it not a success. Why would creators not share on threads?

• 53:16Speaker 00

  I mean, there's all sorts of reasons. If you get more reach elsewhere, and obviously Twitter is definitely a risk, then is it just worth your time? They're trying to make content. Often they don't just make content for a living, they do something else for a living too. You know, you're a musician, you're a footballer.

• 53:30Harry Stebbings?

  An eventual capitalist.

• 53:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. And so is the return worth your time? If it degrades in quality, slow or toxic or buggy, like all of those things can hurt you too.

• 53:42Harry Stebbings?

  Can I just take a slightly weird turn?

• 53:45Speaker 00

  I like the preamble for this question.

• 53:47Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah, it's just like, you're a great dude. And I joked about the references and kind of, but they were phenomenal.

• 53:53Speaker 00

  Really?

• 53:53Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah, they really were. But I'm also like, you're three kids as well.

• 53:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 53:58Harry Stebbings?

  And a happy marriage. And you see on Instagram, it's not a fucking easy job.

• 54:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:03Harry Stebbings?

  My question to you is, when you look at all of it, how do you have the personal side and not lose an inch on work? I'm being very open. I'm nervous about opening my life up to the personal.

• 54:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:14Harry Stebbings?

  And losing an inch on work.

• 54:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:16Harry Stebbings?

  What advice would you have?

• 54:18Speaker 00

  I just think you have to be really intentional about putting pen to paper on your priorities. I'm constantly feeling like I'm doing a shit job at something. I'm either not there for my kids enough, or I'm not there for my team enough, or I missed something that I could have helped the team avoid and blew up in our face. I'm a shit friend, because I'm never around. My life is Instagram and now Threads and my kids and my wife. And then like I barely see friends, which I feel terrible about. So every year I put down a few intentions. They used to be very measurable. And I would like grade myself at the end of the year, typical PMing my life kind of way. I got really good advice from a really close friend named Handro recently, which was just write yourself like a mantra,

• 55:02Speaker 00

  like a thing to say to yourself, and just say it every night before you go to bed. And that'll be the way to keep that. Intention top of mind and it'll help you actually better live up to that intention. So every year I do it, it changes every year. It gets simpler usually every year.

• 55:16Harry Stebbings?

  What is it this year?

• 55:17Speaker 00

  So now the mantra is take care of yourself, love your children, support your wife, be there for your friends.

• 55:23Harry Stebbings?

  Do you think you can do all them? And what I mean by that is like, actually, someone told me that you have your work, your family and your friends.

• 55:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 55:31Harry Stebbings?

  You can only do two at once.

• 55:32Speaker 00

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

• 55:44Harry Stebbings?

  If you could call up yourself before your first child, when you're nervously expecting that first child to come.

• 55:51Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 55:52Harry Stebbings?

  What would you tell yourself before becoming that father?

• 55:55Speaker 00

  It's a race to the starting line. Before you have your first, you're so focused on the birth because it's terrifying. Particularly obviously for the mom who has to actually do all the work. But you're like, how is this going to change my life? My brother was calling me a lot before he had his first and I was like, trying to wrap his head around about how his life was going to change. And I was like, this is the most absurd exercise. Having a kid means you can't plan for how your life is going to change. All you know it's going to change, it's going to change a lot and it'll continue to change. You spend all this time focused on the birth, focus on how much paternity to leave, when to take it, how much paternity to leave, when to take it. But this person's coming into your life for two decades. The more important thing is how are you going to adjust how you do what you do so you can be there for them for 18 years? Not do you take eight weeks or 12 weeks or 16 weeks of leave in year one that they're not going to remember.

• 56:38Speaker 00

  By the way, as a dad, your job is basically to take care of them all. And so I would just say it's a race to the starting line. I was way too focused on day one and way not ready for the rest of it.

• 56:47Harry Stebbings?

  How did you adjust how you work?

• 56:49Speaker 00

  I started working less. I just ran out of hours. I used to come in really early. I used to come in, I used to try to take like the 6:12 shuttle in the morning and get in as soon as I could. And then come home after dinner and I just couldn't do that anymore. My goal is always to see the boys in the morning and the evening. And I get it three or four half the workdays each week.

• 57:06Harry Stebbings?

  When you say be there for mum, I actually got a lot of advice yesterday from a billionaire hedge fund investor. He was like, the only thing that matters, he said to the same question I just asked you. The thing I would tell myself is, don't worry about being there for the kids. The only thing that matters is being there for mum.

• 57:20Speaker 00

  In the beginning, yeah.

• 57:20Harry Stebbings?

  What does that mean, being there for mum? Is that like a hug at the end? I'm really asking with a grain of the feedback.

• 57:29Speaker 00

  Well, it's just, it's such a, I mean, I have boys and they're all mama's boys. So they all much prefer their mum. I'm only now remotely relevant and this is like seven years in.

• 57:37Harry Stebbings?

  How old are they?

• 57:37Speaker 00

  Seven, five and three.

• 57:39Harry Stebbings?

  Wait until that's thirteen.

• 57:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 57:40Harry Stebbings?

  They wanna go for a, do a, I'll see Instagram, it's gonna be like, yeah.

• 57:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, they're gonna, they don't know what I do at all. Someone asked Nico what I did the other day and he said, I think he moves around chairs at the office. And I was like, what? And I was like, that is kinda what I do. I mean, look, giving birth is a huge physical thing in any way people don't realize. So the physical recovery is real. If your wife or your partner breastfeeds, that's a huge thing. You can, you know, you should change all the diapers you can and do all the things you can. But the truth is they're gonna need more from their mum than the dad. And so what you can do best to help the kid is to support your wife whatever way she needs. Whether it's, you know, she needs you to take care of the house or take care of work or whatever it is. Like everyone's different. So that the better place she's in, the better place the kid's in, in my experience.

• 58:24Harry Stebbings?

  Have you done the love language thing?

• 58:25Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I didn't do the test, but it's very clear.

• 58:28Harry Stebbings?

  What's your love language?

• 58:29Speaker 00

  I'm all physical touch, all physical touch.

• 58:31Harry Stebbings?

  What's hers?

• 58:32Speaker 00

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

• 58:56Harry Stebbings?

  Listen, I wanna do a quick fire. So I say a short statement and you give me your immediate thoughts.

• 59:00Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 59:00Harry Stebbings?

  What single piece of content has had the most impact on you?

• 59:04Speaker 00

  Oh, actually, you'll have to excuse it's not particularly gender sensitive. But there is a Hunter S. Thompson letter he wrote to a friend. I'm going to try to pull it up on my phone real quick. But basically, it was about being intentional about how you spend your time. It's a letter he wrote to a friend who asked him for advice. Here, I'll read it. So basically, a younger man emails, that letter isn't emails, this is fucking, I don't know what for email. Sends him a letter and he wrote about a career advice or life advice. And he goes, as I see it then, the formula runs something like this. A man must choose a path which will let his abilities function at maximum efficiency towards the gratification of his desires. And doing this, he is fulfilling a need, giving himself identity by functioning in a set pattern towards a set goal.

• 59:46Speaker 00

  He avoids frustration, frustrating his potential, choosing a path which puts no limit on his self-development, and he avoids the terror of seeing his goal wilt or lose its charm as he draws closer to it, rather than bending himself to meet the demands of that which he seeks. He has bent his goal to conform to his own abilities and desires. In short, he's not dedicated his life to reaching a predefined goal, but he has rather chosen a way of life he knows he will enjoy. The goal is absolutely secondary. It is functioning toward the goal which is important. And it seems almost ridiculous to say that a man must function in a pattern of his own choosing for letting another man define your own goals is to give up one of the most meaningful aspects of life,

• 1:00:30Speaker 00

  the definitive act of will which makes a man an individual. So I have this quote at the top of my yearly intentions that I write over here.

• 1:00:38Harry Stebbings?

  Does that not define your goals?

• 1:00:41Speaker 00

  It does sometimes. It does sometimes.

• 1:00:44Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah, no, I mean, that's a balance, having a bot.

• 1:00:46Speaker 00

  I don't have a bot. Sorry, dude.

• 1:00:49Harry Stebbings?

  But no, I tell you, I love that and that's fantastic. I mean, definitely good to read it. What have you changed your mind on in the last 12 months?

• 1:00:56Speaker 00

  Oh, in the last 12 months? Oh, that's a great question. I'm much more bullish on generative AI. It's happening much faster than I thought. I didn't thought it was further away.

• 1:01:05Harry Stebbings?

  Do you integrate it into what you do with Instagram and threads in it?

• 1:01:09Speaker 00

  I integrate it into my, my normal work life.

• 1:01:11Harry Stebbings?

  You do?

• 1:01:12Speaker 00

  I should be more interested in how it's going to change how people share online, but I'm much more interested in how it's going to just change workflows and just allow people to do more with less.

• 1:01:20Harry Stebbings?

  How do you use it?

• 1:01:21Speaker 00

  I use it to, some of my favorite writers are a little verbose, so I have it summarize articles. I don't tell anybody. I write pretty detailed reviews for my reports every six months. And so I don't have AI write it, but I have it take a first pass at summarizing all the feedback to make sure I didn't miss anything. I will sometimes give it a piece. I do a lot of writing at work. I'll give it a piece of writing and tell an LLM what I was hoping to get out of it and ask for feedback. I just think it's going to be interesting how these technologies change how we work. We don't focus a ton on how we work. We focus more on the things that we build generally in my industry, which makes sense because it's why you get into it, to build something and just be able to point to your mom, to your mom and tell your mom at Christmas that you made this thing.

• 1:02:04Speaker 00

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

• 1:02:34Harry Stebbings?

  You can be CEO of any company for a day.

• 1:02:38Speaker 00

  Ooh.

• 1:02:38Harry Stebbings?

  Which would you be CEO of?

• 1:02:40Speaker 00

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

• 1:02:51Harry Stebbings?

  What's the kindest thing anyone's ever done for you?

• 1:02:53Speaker 00

  I had a really, really harsh boss when I first started at Facebook. I thought I was doing, I thought I was just crushing. I was like working on these projects, high profile. I'd only been in the company a couple of months, was doing market reviews, all this stuff. And she said, you lack focus. And I thought I was so focused. I think all my hours were accounted for and like getting all this stuff done, but I was spreading myself too thin over too many things. I had never had a boss before and she was not. You never carrying this position, let's say. She's fucking smart. And I think she said something like, you're not focused and your work isn't, is suffering for it. And because it's also your first couple of months at a company, you're trying to establish yourself. It was like, it hit home in a way that it wouldn't have hit home like, you know, three months after that. And it helped us think a lot over the long run.

• 1:03:34Harry Stebbings?

  Tell me, brand wise and like design aesthetic wise, if you were a brand or a design, which one would you most?

• 1:03:42Speaker 00

  There's no good answer. There's no good answer to this question. I don't know.

• 1:03:45Harry Stebbings?

  I would say like, I'm Audi.

• 1:03:47Speaker 00

  You're Audi?

• 1:03:48Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:48Speaker 00

  Actually, I can kind of see that.

• 1:03:50Harry Stebbings?

  It's beautiful, efficient machine.

• 1:03:55Harry Stebbings?

  Force sprung, duh, technique.

• 1:03:57Speaker 00

  For what it's worth, and this is not a commentary on you as a person, they are nicer on the outside than they are on the inside. I don't know. I mean, the brands are.

• 1:04:05Harry Stebbings?

  That's a very savage summary. When you said that, I was like, no, what does that mean?

• 1:04:09Speaker 00

  Oh, no, not you. Outie.

• 1:04:11Harry Stebbings?

  That's fine. That question's terrible. I hated it. Seriously, what did you do now?

• 1:04:16Speaker 00

  I don't know. I don't know what I would be. I have range. It's like I said before, I think I'm.

• 1:04:21Harry Stebbings?

  What brand do you really align with? Well, even respecting my, I really respect my Chanel. A brand that transcends time, transcends geography.

• 1:04:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:04:30Harry Stebbings?

  Chinese love Chanel, French love Chanel. That's a very different customer base.

• 1:04:34Speaker 00

  That is.

• 1:04:35Harry Stebbings?

  Time as well.

• 1:04:36Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:04:36Harry Stebbings?

  Also budget. Amazing that you will get people who can't afford Chanel, save and stretch for Chanel.

• 1:04:43Speaker 00

  That's about aspiration. The ones that I find myself having more affinity for are a little bit more like, I always loved Triumph's brand, the motorcycle.

• 1:04:50Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:51Speaker 00

  The Cafe Racers, I always loved back in the day because they were so crazy. This was probably, you probably just missed this, but the Bangin' Allison stereo equipment, they're around now, but their stereo equipment used to be insane. It used to be like these huge, like, kid Knight Rider style looking visualizers and like all this nutty, hyper, hyper aggressive stuff. That was like over the top and weirdly masculine, but as a 15 year old boy, I was like, this is awesome. So is he. I don't, there's a lot of amazing brand work out there right now.

• 1:05:18Harry Stebbings?

  Who have you not met that you would love to meet?

• 1:05:21Speaker 00

  I want to meet everybody. I love meeting people.

• 1:05:23Harry Stebbings?

  Well, you'll see on Instagram, you can meet kind of anyone.

• 1:05:25Speaker 00

  I keep saying this is like one of the best perks of my job is I can just email people and they write me back, but I don't take advantage of it as much as I should.

• 1:05:31Harry Stebbings?

  But I'd ping Federer, I mean, like.

• 1:05:32Speaker 00

  I met him.

• 1:05:33Harry Stebbings?

  How was that?

• 1:05:34Speaker 00

  Amazing. I met him at, in New York. We were at an after party. I was talking, I turned up for half an hour with my wife. Guy is literally every ounce as classy as you expect him to be. And my wife tells Roger Federer, who I think is the greatest tennis player of all time.

• 1:05:49Harry Stebbings?

  No, she's in the Delta.

• 1:05:50Speaker 00

  No, no. And her husband loves playing tennis in the summer. And so Roger Federer asks me to show him my swing. And I said.

• 1:05:59Harry Stebbings?

  That?

• 1:06:00Speaker 00

  Verbatim. Yeah, we're at, like, wearing like a glove in New York City. And I said, I think verbatim, what did I say? I'm not sure I get the words right. I said, there's no fucking way I'm going to show the goat my tennis swing. And he pushed three or four times and I was like, it's not happening. It's not happening.

• 1:06:17Harry Stebbings?

  He goes on to his account and his day account suspended.

• 1:06:20Speaker 00

  Exactly, exactly.

• 1:06:22Harry Stebbings?

  Ryan Reynolds.

• 1:06:23Speaker 00

  Oh, man, that'd be fun. He seems like a lot of fun.

• 1:06:25Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:25Speaker 00

  He seems like a lot of fun. I feel like he's spending a lot of time in the UK now.

• 1:06:28Harry Stebbings?

  You should message him.

• 1:06:29Speaker 00

  I was supposed to meet him.

• 1:06:30Harry Stebbings?

  With your boy Harry.

• 1:06:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:06:32Harry Stebbings?

  We should do drinks together.

• 1:06:33Speaker 00

  I was supposed to meet him and then I got COVID. This was a couple of years ago.

• 1:06:37Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask you a final one, but a hard one? What does success mean to you as a person?

• 1:06:42Speaker 00

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

• 1:07:02Harry Stebbings?

  Adam, it's shows like this which make me so grateful to see what I do. I knew this would be a great one, I'm honest, but I was like.

• 1:07:08Speaker 00

  I have no idea. I blackout during these types of things and I'll remember it later when I watch.

• 1:07:12Harry Stebbings?

  But thank you so much for doing this and I've absolutely loved it.

• 1:07:14Speaker 00

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

• 1:07:30Harry Stebbings?

  I want to say huge thanks to Adam for that incredible discussion. If you want to see the full interview in video, you can check it out on YouTube by searching for 20VC. But before we leave you today, this episode is brought to you by Tegus, the go-to research destination for bold investing. Tegus curates expert insights, analysis and financial data to give you powerful perspective for your investment decisions. With lightning-fast access to over 60,000 transcripts across 20,000 companies, you'll discover a wealth of unique insights to fuel your fundamental research, gain perspectives, synthesize information and even model outcomes, all on Tegus. As a 20-minute VC listener, try it for free at tegus.com/growth and speaking tools we can't live without like Tegus there. Mayfair helps companies protect and grow their cash automatically, access up to $50 million of FDIC insurance and earn up to 4.42% interest rate on your deposits from a single account.

• 1:08:26Harry Stebbings?

  After the failure of SVB and First Republic, it's clear that the standard FDIC limit of $250,000 is simply not enough for VC-backed startups. So for founders, that means finding a safe home for cash is now a priority and a major burden. Mayfair can take care of that for you in under 10 minutes. Through its partner banks and sweep providers, Mayfair automatically spreads customer deposits across a network of over 200 banks, therefore multiplying the level of FDIC insurance coverage and limiting the risk of any single point of failure. Think of it like a high-yield savings account that actually pays a high yield and is actually safe. Go to getmayfair.com/20vc to get started today.

• 1:09:07Harry Stebbings?

  And finally, SecureFrame is the leading all-in-one platform for automated security and privacy compliance. SecureFrame simplifies and streamlines the process of getting and staying compliant to the most rigorous global privacy and security standards like SOC 2, HIPAA, GDPR, and many more. SecureFrame's industry-leading compliance automation platform, paired with their in-house compliance experts and former auditors, helps you get audit-ready in weeks, not months, so you can close more deals faster. And SecureFrame uses over 150 integrations, so you have built-in security training, vendor and risk management, and more to make compliance uncomplicated. SecureFrame makes it fast and easy to achieve and maintain compliance, so you can focus on serving your customers.

• 1:09:50Harry Stebbings?

  Automate your security and privacy compliance with SecureFrame, and you can schedule a demo today at secureframe.com.

• 1:09:57Speaker 00

  As always, I so appreciate all your support, and stay tuned for an incredible 20Growth episode on Wednesday with Sri Batu, Head of Growth at Ramp.