[00:00:03] Host Create clip Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy, and this is invest like the best. This show is an open ended exploration of markets, ideas, methods, stories, end of strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. You can learn Maur and stay up to date an investor field guide dot com Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This'll podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of a Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions, and the securities discussed in this podcast guest this week are Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, the co founders of Instagram. I met Kevin and Mike a few months ago over a shared interest in business and investing. I found them both to be extremely good people who have a rare talent for finding and solving interesting problems. Indeed, problem solving and jobs to be done is a big part of our conversation. I realized walking into the podcast that Kevin and Mike also have a rare set of experiences having both built and sold an extremely successful product from scratch, but then also operated and scaled inside of one of the largest businesses in the world. This means they have unique knowledge to offer just about anybody interested in business and in products. We dig into all those lessons here. I'm working on hosting Maur founders and CEOs on this podcast and can't think of a better pair to show you why I want to do so. Please enjoy my conversation with Kevin and Mike.

[00:01:38] Host Create clip So, gentlemen, we're gonna talk about a lot of business related stuff. We'll talk about Instagram for sure, because I'm fascinated by what you learned both building the business from scratch and then also operating inside of a massive organization. But I would like to begin with whatever has your interest and attention right now. So you've had some time since leaving Instagram? Last time we were here, we were talking about all sorts of interesting cos that you had seen and data science related projects you were working on and you strike me as two incredibly curious and interested guys. So let's just begin there with what have you been tooling away at playing with learning about since having a little bit more free time? Yeah, I

[00:02:13] Host Create clip think for me it's been getting back in the code, which has been very gratifying. A lot of fun last year and 1/2 of Instagram owes coating less and less because I was still relatively in the technical details. But it's irresponsible to try to coat too much of that level of company size. But I think one thing that's been interesting for me recently is seeing how much data has become gonna say like a first class citizen in programming. What I mean by that is I remember when we were first spinning up even some Instagram data pipelines. You have a bunch of ad hoc scripts. They run every night. Hopefully, sometimes they fail. We can tell the story of how our first analytics pipeline ranks. It was seriously duct tape, harrowing disaster, and going from that to the point where you have things like tensorflow be readily available, have been playing with some data pipeline stuff where it's just much more declarative, much forethought through much more built for a whole team working together on data rather than that one data analyst in the corner. That's probably the thing that is most changed from when we started Instagram. Where the new hotness then was Web frameworks let you spend up a site fairly quickly, like Django and Rails to now. I think the same opportunity exists in data and pipelines.

[00:03:18] Host Create clip I feel like when we started we were beginners, and by the end we went mastered the game. You can never quite mastered the game, but by the end we had figured out our game and we had a great run, and we created something that a lot of people love in the world. Over a 1,000,000,000 people use it every month. We were really proud of the team we had created. It was over 1000 people when we laughed across. How many offices?

[00:03:40] Host Create clip Three main ones and probably six or seven other ones? Yeah,

[00:03:42] Host Create clip exactly. So we had all these amazing people around the world and to be 35. And I guess Mike is 33. Pressing the reset button and starting again is this awesome but harrowing adventure of becoming a beginner again. So I did what I think a lot of people would do in our situation, which is you take a few months off and you clear your head and you tell yourself you're gonna go do whatever interests you. So Mike and I didn't actually really talk that much for those 1st 3 months. I went skiing, I was in the mountains and I was like, I'm gonna get away from it all. And I grew up my beard and by day six of skiing, I was like, What am I doing out here? It was a lot of fun for six days, and then it was just cold. So I'm out there in mountains. We had moved out there. We're gonna be there for three months or so. And I decided I would open up some books and I would start asking myself what was interesting. And I remember Mike had said he was taking a course at Stanford. I guess you were auditing or taking the online version of the machine learning course. And I was like a machine learning. I've heard a lot about that. I should probably look into it helped us lot instrument. It was phenomenally useful for making the site what it is today, but I never really understood the details. It just caught my eye and I sat down and started working on it. And then Amazon shipment after Amazon shipment of books coming to the house as reading all this stuff. And I texted Mike and I was like, Mike, this Aye, aye, stops really cool. So I mean, if you look at the last six months or so, I guess we've been gone about a year now. Most of that time has been understanding the math behind modern machine learning and then implementing experiments and trying it ourselves. But Mike was my inspiration there. What is your early opinion on the place? Is that what you're learning can be applied most usefully, whether that's in a business context or some other context? There's an engineer at Instagram who's our machine learning guru, and he had this amazing phrase, which is machine learning. It's just math, and I love that, by the way, it is just math. It's not Magic can tell the future Well, in some cases, it might be able to tell the future, but we'll get to that. But it's just math, and if you just understand that it's just math. Then you understand that you can't hope to just apply math two problems and have it solved those problems overnight. I mean, of course, it's world changing. And, of course, you congrats to better outcomes. At the end of the day, it's just math. So you have to have a healthy dose of humility when you approach new problems. I mean, Mike has been experimenting as well.

[00:06:10] Host Create clip Yeah, I think for me, what stands out is you need to have a reasonable hypothesis about why it is that throwing a bunch of data into some kind of prediction system is going to yield a useful prediction. It sounds like maybe a trite phrase. But you see it? I mean, I saw it on Instagram, too. When you are building a machine learning system the way that you could try to increase your Acrisius that features. So, for instance, might be where was the photo taken? How many licks does it have? And you start with the obvious ones, and then all of a sudden you find your team is mostly doing future engineer on this long, long tale of self like Which direction was the camera pointed I'm making some of these up. What was the weather that day? And they might actually have some predictive power in the short term. But you're probably over fitting the data, and you get really excited and at least all sorts of weird effects downstream because you haven't actually created one. So I guess to directly answer your question. I think it's places where the quantity and quality of data has gotten to the point where it actually is useful to throw the it's just math approach on and try to yield a generally useful prediction in a way that might be different than having hundreds of analysts try to extract some meeting in the same data. It's not, I think, useful in the magic sense of all these patterns that we never knew were there. They probably weren't there to begin with.

[00:07:18] Host Create clip You have a most interesting experience that you've had thus far diving back into data and

[00:07:22] Host Create clip code, maybe with machine learning specifically something fun that you played with or something that surprised you. I think the feeling that you have one looking at some of the computer vision stuff and its applicability beyond the set. Its trade on. What I mean by that is there's always this interesting question. Our machine learning systems trying to emulate, some kind of physiological thing that's happening in the brain. You hear the phrase neural networks a lot, and actually, I think the neurological side or the neuroscience and the computer science I'd probably diverged in the seventies and haven't really re converge until there's been some interesting conversations recently. But one thing I found really exciting was you train a bunch of computer vision algorithms on a set of images for one particular problem. And weirdly, it works really well for other sets of problems, sometimes not even vision related. So I think there is this convergence that might happen now in the next 5 10 years, where we say, Hey, all right, it is just math, but it is looking at things in a way that could have some perilous. How we see it and what's beautiful about the human brain is how plastic it is and how much were able to say, Yeah, I know howto see in this domain. But now I'm interested in applying that somewhere else. So that applicability was the moment that there might be something more to this than just a particular domain vertical sort of thing, and it kind of comes through and you start looking at all right. How can we analyse time? Siri's is that sort of analyzing an image? And how is it like analyzing an image or a sound wave and thinking about the applicability across domains? Even a given for a given model

[00:08:42] Host Create clip ML seems like one of the many incredible new tools for leverage in the emerging business persons tool kit. One of things I was fascinated about, Instagram is when you sold us, I think 12 people, a small team that even at that size had achieved serious scale. And that was almost 10 years ago when you guys started. I know you've also looked at some startup founders, maybe even made some angel investments. What is your take on the most significant differences between the stack that you guys dealt with when you started and what you're seeing either hands on personally or from the start of founders that you've talked to recently? I'll go actually all the way back to my internship in college was said a company called Odio, which not many people know. But you know the company it became, which is Twitter. And we were maybe eight people when I joined Odio and I remember part of my job as an intern was to go to the co location facility in San Francisco. And I remember the general area town. I don't remember the building, but we would walk in and you'd have to wear these your covers because it was really loud. And you bring your jacket and we should, like, go reboot the servers and we have eight on Iraq. And anyway, when we started instagram, I guess I just thought that's how you did things. So Mike will laugh at this because at the beginning we both thought it was normal. We bought a server in Ako facility, and by the way, this was interesting as we had never seen the server, whereas at least in the audio days, we knew our servers. When Instagram launched, the flood of people came in, everyone wanted to use the service and we couldn't keep up with demand. So we had to figure out What are we going to do? And I'd like to say the only time Mike and I have ever really gotten into an argument was whether or not we needed another server. I didn't want another server because I was penny pinching. We were startup. And who knew what would happen? Mike was like, We have to get another server. Mike was right, and we had to get a few more after that, it turns out, but my point in telling the story is it used to be that you had to have these physical things. And then we were out of V. C's office and they're like, Well, why don't you just use a W s more like what's A W s and the second week on A W s? It was like, Wow, we just scale efficiently. And by the way, that things were scaling efficiently were all libraries that had been open source by many companies before we had started. Remember in the audio days, what did you use as a cashing layer? Maybe had to roll your own thing, And then it was Mom cashed for us, and then it became this other thing and this other thing and just the number of open source libraries that we could use for free to start a business. A W s costs something, but it was effectively scale for free. You could build a business For what? I think we spent 65 k total by launch day when we launched instrument and that was a $500,000 raised. Maybe we should have raised less. I don't know. Should've. Could've, would've right. But now you look at it and you realize that I bought a book back in the day and I think it's called Aye, aye and python or so there was no Riley book, but it was back in the day and it had an entire chapter on neural nets. But it was like how to create them from scratch. There were no libraries. You can plug in anything. There were no server types that you just spin up with everything installed and now were in the place where actually you could do that. Psychic learn exists. And not to say that that's production ready. But it exists and you can use it extra boost we were talking about the other day. It exists. You can use it tensor flow. All the flavors around tensorflow exists. Now you're in this place where for zero marginal cost, you, too can have these things at your fingertips. And then it becomes, I think, not about access, but about the knowledge of how to use thes super tools. Because man people misuse them. They throw them at problems they shouldn't. They break all sorts of over fitting rules. And that's actually where I see the opportunity. Going forward is who knows how to use this stuff, not just who has access.

[00:12:25] Host Create clip We had this phrase it instrument we used religiously, which is do the simple thing. First kind of a spoke to the approach both from a business side but also from a technology side at the time. That meant Don't reinvent your own Web framework. Use Jango Pick Python because it's a simple language. We can get it up and going. But we had a conversation recent of this private equity person and he said, Ah, lot of they're downsizing. What they do is they take companies that have millions of lines of code, and they're like, Yeah, this is actually just eight Amazon service's. We can compose and put 3000 lines of glue around and done, and that's it. And It's interesting question around this question of not invented here. It's even less of. What you're inventing is core technology at this point, because they're great open source or Amazon or Microsoft provided components. Now it's what you do with. And now you differentiate on what data you can get in what data you can provide or what problem you're solving for people. But I think it's actually exciting because we sit around. You're like his world well served by hundreds of companies, all reinventing the same exact technology. No, it's like, Let's do something interesting with

[00:13:22] Host Create clip it. Yeah, what is in common between the most interesting younger founders that you've talked to in terms of the markers of someone that might use this stuff responsibly? Can you sort out any difference between those that you think are going to do a good job versus those just copying and using powerful tools just to use them? I think the founders

[00:13:41] Host Create clip who get interested in what their data actually looks like underneath it's like an underappreciated thing because you're like I have a 1,000,000 examples of this. I'm gonna throw it in the system, and I like the founders ever like Oh, yeah, I spent day just looking at The examples were like, Oh, we realized half the images came in backwards or upside down. I'm like that would have been a problem, but you wouldn't have seen it if you actually weren't diving in. So I think what we always try to do is bridge the things that were really unscathed. Hable kindly support tickets ourselves at the beginning or still coding for a really long time, even though the team was scaling and then obviously trying to build a company for scale. And I think that's a balance. You need a strike as an early stage founder to which is don't get so enamored by building something super scaleable on. Just the millions of things you could throw in theirs have a deep understanding of the problem you're solving and what it actually looks like in the details.

[00:14:25] Host Create clip There's this really interesting thrust to start ups that are general purpose tools, productivity tools for lack of a better term that could do a 1,000,000 different things, but they don't seem to do any one thing that you actually need, which is a good excuse to talk about your guys his interest in this jobs to be done. Framework. I know this was an important part of how you thought about things that instagram I'd love to hear. Just kind of from the beginning. Why you find this idea compelling and how you think other business people can use it to their advantage. Well, from the beginning, we always said you have to solve a problem. So if you're gonna build a product, the only reason it should exist in the world is because it's all someone's problem. And when we started Instagram, we listed out what the top three problems were with mobile photos at the time. So number one was that most people felt their photos were terrible because by the way they were there were with the blurry lens. It was gonna old camera are not an old camera. But it was.

[00:15:17] Host Create clip The sensor was terrible. It was just at the beginning of digital photography. The second was that people wanted to be able to share their photos everywhere. They were fragmented between a bunch of different service is so they were on Twitter. They were on Facebook. They were on at the time of preposterous and force where you were across all these service is And you just wanted to take one photo in one place. And the last one was speed. It was so slow to not only take a photo, but also get it onto one of these service is because I don't remember what transfer speeds were on average, but it felt like it took a couple of minutes often. And this was when you can't remember if at the beginning and scream you were allowed to background APS because remember, you couldn't actually background a nap, and then it couldn't upload the photo. Miss, you were staring at it. Exactly. So all the things we take for granted now in terms of solved problems, were unsolved problems there. So we wrote this three's down when we say we're gonna crush each of them. So we made filters as good as we possibly could to make up for the fact that the camera wasn't that good, we made a one click sharing future that allowed you to tap a bunch of service, is an off with them and share all at once. That turned out to be great for growth, By the way, and then last one we were most proud of was, as you were captioning your photo. We would actually upload the photo in the background regardless of whether or not you completed because, okay, we'll upload it. And if you say cancel will throw it away. But if you say, Hey, here's my whole caption that I spent five minutes. You figure out what to say to sound clever. It turns out, all that time your foot has been uploading the backgrounds. When you click done within a fraction of a second, it's is done. And you're like, Wait. But I thought I had to go upload it now. And that little sleight of hand meant that instrument felt enormously fast compared to all the other ones. So by focusing on those three problems, I think and by the way, a bit of lock and timing. Instagram was at the right place the right time. And it's solved core problems around something people clearly wanted to do so later on in Instagram. So we always had that phrase, which is solve a problem. I came across Clay Christian since book, competing against luck. Actually, I came across one of his writings in a different form where he mentions this but then found out he wrote a book about it. So reading about jobs to be done theory was one of the most transformative experiences frosted instagram because we realized that's what we had meant when we said Solve a problem. So jobs to be done is effectively. People need this product in their lives to solve a problem for them. So what are they hiring it to Dio? It sounds a little weird to hire a product is usually you hire people, but imagine all the things in your life or employee is instead of just things. What do you want them to do in your life for you? And if you can explicitly state the problems that it solves not just the functional ones, but the social ones, the emotional ones. Then you understand why people have this product. And when we started to pivot around that notion, saying each of her product needs to be very clear. What problem? It's homing in someone's life. Why is someone adopting this thing? Then you started to see this enormous amount of success. I mean, the number of products we launched in the success of things like stories. Eventually on the Instagram platform is all because we had adopted this framework.

[00:18:24] Host Create clip We found jobs to be done. Has this interesting application not just in the products you ship, but how you think about your different teams. So I like to think we ran our infrastructure teams like a product company would. So I had all of our infrastructure seems actually write up what job they were doing for the other teams. Because you can often enough with these teams that go off into sort of gold plating land or bill technology nobody needs. And then a year later they're complaining cause nobody adopted their technology when that's not everybody else's job, other than them to build actually useful things for the company. And at first, people kind of grandmother like, Why are we writing these strategy documents and jobs to be done for a team that's focusing on machine learning tools? And then a year later, they're like, Oh, cool. I know that my job, our job as a team is to build the fastest way of deploying models for other INSTAGRAM teams. Let's throw out the other half of the project that wouldn't solve that job. Let's do the stuff that actually matters.

[00:19:14] Host Create clip I'm really curious how your ability to identify problems or jobs evolved through Instagram. So one of the things, for example, that we've noticed in Mr Graham is very much a platform people do with it unexpected things and some curious whether Maur the jobs were discovered by unusual ways that the product was being used, that you didn't intend for or review. Coming up with a thesis and then identifying it beforehand or afterwards, is kind of what I'm interested in out of both, By the way, there's no secret here. You don't wake up one day and have this vision. You're on top of the mountain and you say, Team, we're going this direction and no one's ever seen this thing before and it's gonna be amazing. That doesn't happen. I'm sorry. The romance is out of the story. Instead, what happens is you note these trends that happen in the world that you see popping up and maybe even in your data. One of my favorite stories is about this tool called Fiddler Internally, where effectively, they said, Hey, I want to know how people are using this product. So for public posts, whether it's on stories or on regular instrument and feed, I want to select. Maybe it's men age 13 to 21 in the U. S. How are they using it? It just samples a bunch of their post, and it shows it to integrate. Okay, females in France who are 24 to 37. I'm making these ages up. Let's see that. So you're kind of seeing a sampling of the world in a specific demo, Would you? Very quickly see is that although instagrams primitives air very basic and could be used in many different ways, turns out groups of people use it in very specific ways. So when we were designing stories and we asked ourselves, Okay, what tools might be super useful? It turns out that all those teen boys loved taking two stories and asking questions of their friends so they would color out. The background is a solid color. They wouldn't even take a photo and they'd ask a question. One of our engineers had this inside that he was gonna build a pulling sticker for instagram stories, and I still remember seeing that going? I don't know. Am I gonna use that? They're like, trust me. The teens are gonna love it and they launch this thing and day one, it was a hit, and it just skyrocket and usage of stories skyrocketed. That's a simple story of a developed product. How you can look into the data, see the trends and say, Hey, how are people hacking our product and how can we meet them in the middle to make that way easier? Hashtags on instagram People were using hashtag way before we allowed people toe actually track them, track them or click them. Or in fact, that was one of the harder technical projects. Early on, we were trying to figure out how to make links. We were really early in our technical careers back then, but there are probably other examples to

[00:21:55] Host Create clip We had a one where we found we were just looking for anomalies in our accounts, which is important when you're fighting spam and just making sure that your communities healthy. We found one account that had deleted thousands of images. Clearly, they're posting bad stuff and then deleting it. Let's go take it on the account. Okay, we should look at what they're posting first, and we realize it was an accountant, Indonesia. It was a store sort of independent business, and they would post a item for sale. And then when they sold it, they would delete. It was, of course, they would lead a bunch of things. This was 2013 years before he had any inkling of a commerce product inside Instagram. And you're like, Oh, these people are quote unquote misusing the product, but they're using it for this very real use case, which is they want to transact and the comment to say, How much is it? And they respond to be its 50 and what's at me. That's how they would get payment in that hole.

[00:22:39] Host Create clip Completely external Instagram infrastructure was getting created by people who found a neat because they had the audience. They're so you can ask, All right, is there a job to be done that's adjacent to the jobs we already do? Because I think that's important. I feel like companies fail when they are getting hired for one job, but there are jealous of another job they wish they got hired for. That's the way out in left field and they launch a product. And they wonder why I can't really tell these people using the product. Why don't they just use it for this other thing? I think you always need to build in these adjacent seas. So people were already getting inspired on instagram and seeing interesting products. Now you can also buy them. That feels like a pretty normal link. Where is that That that behavior didn't exist on Instagram and he launched a commerce product would probably flop because there's no existing behavior that you consort of, divert

[00:23:18] Host Create clip or build upon? Did that change a lot over the years where? I mean, it sounds like there's just tons of examples of observing behavior and realizing there's a job happening that you can amplify and provide a better tool kit for even when that was happening. Were you also just coming up with the classic jobs thing? No one asked. For an iPhone. You have to sort of anticipate the needs of your customers versus just observe and accommodate them. I mean, people were asking for an iPhone. That's the crazy part. If you look at it. The Nokia smartphones, with little games and everything. The terrible What was it called that? Yeah, thanks WAP. It's especially formatted Web pages for your mobile phone. They were. In fact, they were screaming for an iPhone. And you just had to be at a point where you could say, Oh, interesting. Everyone wants to browse the Web on their phone, not just makes sense. It just sucks when we do it right now. So what if we made it not suck? There is a brilliant idea, and to their credit, I think everyone saw it. Everyone knew that. APs We're going to exist in some way. Everyone knew that Web browsing was going to exist, but not everyone knew how to do it. So touch screens, giving up the keyboard. I mean, so many companies get their way from solving a problem or being hired by consumers because they just assumed too much is going to stay the same. They assume people would never use a phone without a physical keyboard. They assumed no one would ever use a mobile on Lee Photo Sharing service. Because, of course, you're gonna want to upload from your camera that you hook up to your desktop with a cable. You spent so much money on it, why wouldn't you just stick with that thing? The companies that question a fundamental assumption during an enormous transition of technology, meaning there's this wave of mobile that comes and no one quite knows how it's gonna play out. But everyone knows that. I don't know there's a camera attached. If you can take advantage of that wave and say, Listen, there's an unmet need of sharing photos with your friends on these mobile devices. No one's touched it yet. We can do in a slightly better way. I think that's where companies end up taking off. How early in Instagrams history were you planting? I want to call them core values or principles around product. Oh, from day one as a user of instagram. One thing that stands out is visual simplicity. I've seen some of the we chat in China, with seven million things going on now that works for them. It's a huge, huge product, but Instagram is extremely elegantly simple. So how early did you plant some of these principles, and how did you arrive at the principal's themselves? It's funny. I don't remember the word principles ever coming up early on. But I remember Mike and I being very principle. We had not arguments because they weren't between us, but they'd be about Should we do something or not? And we've always come back to these few simple ones. It was one. It had to be community first. So if we're gonna do something to the product, was it to our benefit as founders or the company, or was it to the communities benefit? So community first was an enormous principle of ours that I think kept us focused on building stuff for people again solving their problems. The second was Keep it simple or do the simple thing First. We had just been bitten too many times when we tried to make things really complex. And then we realized, Wait, that wasn't the right thing to do. It took us many months, and actually we could just do this simple solution and it's fine. And then speed was a huge one, too. I mean, early on, we were so incredibly focused on making the app work really well on my terrible iPhone. Was it a three d? Yeah. Mike had the new version. He was fancy. I had the old war.

[00:26:53] Host Create clip He had a disease. Three g. I think we know now that we know now the battery gets slow, the phone gets slower. So I think now I know what was happening that phone. But it was slower than every other three g in the world. But it was great because Kevin come in and be like it still doesn't work well in this phone, an object I

[00:27:09] Host Create clip know. Mike wanted to move on. It was like, Hey, we've got other projects to you, man. I don't care that you're feeds stuttering. And I was like, No, we need to make this like glass. And the fun part about Mike is he looks that he might be frustrating for all of 1/2 a second, but then he's like, Oh, great. This is a huge technical challenge. And then when you get to that point where you open up the phone on this three g and it's like last when you scroll now on every better phone, it's the best experience ever. So anyway, you asked if we had principles from the beginning. Yes. And then some speed. It was craft. It was simplicity. it was being community first. What other ones do we have?

[00:27:43] Host Create clip We talked often about unlocking people's creativity as well, building tools that let you feel like, Oh, I wouldn't share this before. But now I actually feel like I captured something new and interesting and different, and that obviously evolved throughout the years because the nice thing about all those, they're evergreen. What they meant evolved or how we explained it evolved. But they're kind of court of the product to this day, I think, actually, do you think that

[00:28:03] Host Create clip if you were to start another business today, that right away you would start with those same principles? I think

[00:28:08] Host Create clip the truth underlying that for sure. The simple thing. First, we still just been noodling around and hacking on stuff. I still get caught. The other day I was like, Man, I spent two hours with this really complicated solution. It turns out it could have used a one liner from Matt Plot Lab or something, and they're like, you know, again, you still after. It's almost like the more you learn, the more you have to remind yourself of that one. I think community 1st 1 when it gets out is I think we've seen this broadly, like I don't think people get enough credit as consumers for sniffing out the intentions or sort of the underlying ethos of the companies that they're using. I think they're getting even more attuned to it now. So the same community first in being community for us, for us was. Ultimately, people can't tell who they're kind of using products from. They can tell what the ethos is. And I think people really could sell for a long time as me and Kev running Instagram and whether that meant we would post announcements to the Explorer pages. That's the only way we could communicate with people about outages, that we're gonna do our improvements we're gonna make. Or in seeing us on public meaning, like when we're doing talks, I think it kind of cuts through. So the truth underneath community first is people can tell who's behind the companies will be authentic and talk to them as real people rather than as an abstract user base.

[00:29:16] Host Create clip To answer your question about, would we do it again? I don't know any other way. That's the problem. It's like you meet athletes I'm reading this book, this fascinating book. I think it's called Analytic Methods and sports. Don't get me wrong. I'm not into sports at all on sports. And this was the one way. I thought, Maybe if I, like, apply math to it, I'll get into sports. But it was talking about the different types of you guys are both laughing. I love that. It's a very Kevin way of thinking about the world, by the way. No, not Hackman. Shit like find something to love in something. Oh, the math. It's great. Anyway, it was talking about different types of I don't know whether it was running backs or something. I don't even know what a running back is anyway, depending on your body type. Are there different distributions for performance for those different groups? And I was thinking of myself. There are sprinters in business. There are marathoners and business. I don't know for a sprinter, a marathon or whatever or high jumper, But whatever we are, I don't know how to be anything else. I'm never gonna be good at any of those other things. You can try to be something else, but the values that we have internally are kind of like our DNA, and all I know is keeping things simple, maybe out of necessity. Because when we started in scram, I was the best of a lot of these things. We raised money for an HTML five Web, not a nap. Why not? Because I thought h tomorrow five was the future. I didn't know how to make an app, so I had to keep it simple. So again, when you ask if we did it again, would we keep all those same principles? Absolutely us. But not because we choose to, but because we have to sew the community thing is fascinating to me. How do you manage a community when the community at the point that you left is the world? It's just a slice of the entire world. So I understand cultivating community. I think that's super important when you could sort of draw boundaries about what makes a community a community. But now you're dealing with the entire human populace, and that remains an important thing. So how did you manage that challenge?

[00:31:09] Host Create clip I think realizing that we have the team for a while is called a community team and We often wanted to call it the community's team because ultimately that's what you get. You get this sort of amalgamation of a bunch of communities, and then I think the interesting sort of challenge becomes. How do you at different points in time, go deep on one or the other and understand how they're using the product and whether there's something you could do to cultivate that? So I mentioned Commerce is one of them independent cells. People like I went back home to Brazil and I got to meet a bunch of entrepreneurs for whom it's around was their storefront. That's an interesting community. People can you connect them to other people doing the same thing so they can share insights or a community might be geo specific. So what we would do is send research teams out, not always send engineers with them because I think having insights viewed firsthand was always interesting on they'd come back and say, Hey, you just spent a week talking to French teens. Here's what's interesting about that community. It let's change the product in this way, potentially open. Let's make it work better in this way, so you end up realizing that the joy of Instagram is that it could scale and not become just one huge living room with a 1,000,000,000 people in it but a whole collection of different spaces. And then it's about can you let people transit through the interesting spaces that they might have for themselves and let it evolve over time to cause you might pick up a new habit or a new interest? And now it's timeto involve your usage of Instagram. So I think that's how it changed. And one of the challenges internally was helping people evolve past our initial community, which is people who are super interested in iPhone photography. And that was sort of ah, new thing at the time was called I Photography, which nobody has ever called it, that after 2000 and 10. Because, of course, it's just photography. You just take it with your phone to understanding that we were now dealing with a huge group of communities rather than this individual sort of initial user base.

[00:32:47] Host Create clip What were the hardest or some of the hardest challenges in that community piece of the equation through the entire experience? The hardest things yet deal with. I mean the list goes on because of a lot of what you just explain, which is you're not dealing with one community. You're dealing with many communities, so maybe I'll give two broad examples are too broad patterns. One is changing the AP. So maybe the first example of this was expanding to Android, which, of course, everyone now is like, of course, you're on Android. It would be crazy not to. But when we decided we were gonna launch Android, there was almost a community. Revolted is like nowhere I photographers and we have these beautiful phones and you're gonna ruin Instagram if you let those android users on fun. Fact. Now I guess Mike's on. I'm looking over. He's got an iPhone. But for a while there you were an android user. Instagram could never get to over a 1,000,000,000 people if it just focused solely on iPhone. So part of it is negotiating with your community in a way that isn't patronizing about a big change that's happening. We know we have to get to this place. We know at some point yes, Britney Spears is going to be honest suggested user list, because it turns out a lot of people really care about Britney Spears or Kim care. It doesn't matter like very large pot figures.

[00:34:04] Host Create clip I know you adopted this app initially because you wanted to just follow the best photographers in the world, but in streams larger than any of us. Now, with our own viewpoints, it's this platform that should be universal and not just unique. Thio are own, wants and needs. It would be selfish as leaders if we kept it to just our thing. Because what we want to do is build a platform, not just a little app. So those changes, I think we're hard. The second is I would call it the relativism issue, which is in the U. S. Nudity on public platforms generally not accepted. You look at the app store terms, et cetera. It's read a newspaper here. There's not knew Deena generally or magazines generally, but in Europe that it's a little different. Standards are different, but, it turns out, is a platform you have to make one rule. And how do you deal with the fact that France might see it one way and the United States might see it? Another in your one group. So explaining to people why certain things could be on the platform and certain things can't.

[00:35:04] Host Create clip That's really tough because you're caught between different views on a subject. But when we say community first and were that big, we don't mean the community runs the platform. Instead, it's okay. We wouldn't be here if these 1,000,000,000 people didn't use this app. You can either treat it as if you are a dictator and charge of the thing that they use. You have your views on policies, etcetera or ikan view it as I'm really thankful I have this job. I'm really thankful these people showed up, and for some reason they continue to show up, and then some. How do I make it so that it's best for them? And I think that the companies that do well in the long run understand that balance and really serve the community and say, Hey, I'm gonna do my absolute best But it's gonna be hard going to do my absolute best and that continues toe, I think play out today on Instagram. It can to use growing, and people love it, have

[00:35:58] Host Create clip to be occasionally okay, changing the product in a way that might actually break the product in some way for some group of people, memorably for us. So Instagram directors of probably evolved many, many times, and one incarnation was the way it worked as you would post a photo ad people to that private photo and then people would have a conversation about it, which it was okay for a first pass. But it turned out

[00:36:19] Host Create clip okay is very nice.

[00:36:20] Host Create clip Yeah, okay. Do not do Well, it turns out that we eventually did

[00:36:24] Host Create clip not meet expectations

[00:36:27] Host Create clip to fire that product on we evolved. It eventually be like threats that were more permanent makes way more sense. You generally have some groups of people you keep talking to. Every messenger app is eventually evolved to that. So we're like, OK, everybody's gonna think this new versions way better. That's easy. And it turns out that some people were using the fact that these ephemeral groups get created to tell stories. There were storytelling groups. Online is very neat,

[00:36:48] Host Create clip Isn't it a role play?

[00:36:49] Host Create clip It was like a role playing game thing. I forget

[00:36:52] Host Create clip Lar pingers are connected to that community

[00:36:55] Host Create clip and they would post a photo and then they would all role play, which is not a use case that anybody on the team had, and it was very small. But remember the first day we were getting bombarded while small? You have a plan from a 1,000,000,000 people. If it's a small percentage of sub 1% it's still a lot of people, and the team is really upset. The man, like all these people, are really angry about this change in, like, can we find out what they're like? It's all these large firms, like All right, well, you have to be okay sometimes changing the product in the way that might break some use case and just try to understand. Was it a bug, or did you just make a decision of the principal?

[00:37:28] Host Create clip But Mike agree or disagree? Every major change that came with a ton of pain was either a the best decision we ever made or be the worst decision we ever made exactly. I guess there was a degree or agree in a multiple choice. I think what's

[00:37:44] Host Create clip interesting there is you can't treat every major disruptive change as being necessarily the right thing for their products, But if you automatically assume it will be the wrong thing for the product. You'll just be paralyzed and never actually make any of these changes. And we had this conversation of the team before we launch stories. So sort of notably for us, we did a bunch of incremental A B tests with the product along the way, but for stories we launched it to basically everybody in the world of the exact same. What year was that? 2016.

[00:38:10] Host Create clip We had a small hold out and that was it. Maybe even not a holdout.

[00:38:13] Host Create clip We have, like, 1/2 a percent of people didn't get it, and not because we thought it wasn't the right move. It, we thought, would be at least usefully over measure what effect it had, at least among some group of people. We try to keep that hold out very short, like a couple of weeks, and then they got the product, and I remember the team being really freaked out like, But what if it breaks Instagram? What if this and we can't look at the team and say, Look, we can always turn it off? I mean, it wouldn't look great. Kind of embarrassing But I think there's also this element of sort of conviction that you need a having the major changes that you're making that if you sort of tiptoe your win today again, it goes back to the community. First point I think people can tell if do you guys mean it? Are you guys really launching this or you

[00:38:50] Host Create clip also like my friends have this? I don't

[00:38:52] Host Create clip Yeah, it's all sorts of weird social dynamics if you don't go all in on it. So it could have been the wrong decision, and then it was one of the best changes we ever made to the product. But I like that instagram we tried not to sort of half launch things will make these half decisions and instead say, Let's go for it and we'll deal with the consequence of figuring on the other side of it didn't work.

[00:39:11] Host Create clip How extreme were some of the evolution. So maybe at the end, what percent of usage on the Hide fund uses like face timer? Screen time was video and stories versus the original filtered photos. Not sure I remember the exact time spent on all of them, but let me put it this way. Regular instagram continued to grow. Time spent per users the way we measured it. So how many minutes per day? Daily active. Basically, that continues to grow Over time. It was doing okay and then we launched a couple of things. One was machine learning ranking for our feed. So it was like, Okay, now you have too much in your feed. If you get bored after the third thing because everyone's posting all the time you turn off in there. So we're gonna filter through and basically say, What do we think you're gonna enjoy the most? That an enormous impact on time spent. The other one actually was our pivot towards focusing on your friends. So as Instagram grew, it was easier and easier to see stuff by, like I said, Britney Spears or Kim care or one of these really large accounts like Taylor Swift or a band you like. But it is much harder to find your friends. So if Mikey Post, maybe it would get lost in the shuffle. So we both had toe optimize for time but also optimized to see your friends. And it turns out that pivot in optimizing towards your friends had an enormous boost to the usage of the apus well, and we thought that was pretty good. And then it turns out stories came along and stories was there's some trade off, but it was highly additive. And you look at Instagrams time spent today and I'm not internal, so I don't know where it's at anymore. But we had no idea that we could have multiple chapters of success in terms of expanding the time people spend on instagram bye again, focusing on what we talked about before solving the problems that people have in their lives. They want to know what's happening with their friends. They want to know what's happening with celebrities and these public figures, and they don't want to trade off between the two. So if you just put two products, they're kind of optimized for each of those groups in the product, they'll spend more time, and they'll enjoy it more so again, coming back to solving problems every single step of the way. It was just how does this product stink for this group of users, and how can we fix it that helped increase time spend significantly by then I'm curious in the jobs to be done lens. What stories was accomplishing so well? Because my own subjective take on this is often will just look at those not even do the feet. And it seems like the volume of my friends putting stuff. It's way easier to know what's going on in their lives by looking at their stories than their pictures. Is that what it is that it's just more ephemeral stuff? Well, initially, we would see people post photos of whether a snap code or they would link to their snapshot profiling in their bios. And we asked ourselves, Hey, what are people trying to hack here? And we realized what people want to do is express their lives to their friends. They don't care what platform it's on, whether it's Facebook, instagram, Snapchat, twitter, you name it. They just want to be able to express. And people were trying to tell us, Hey, your products missing a feature.

[00:42:09] Host Create clip We want this thing in here. We want our friends and our networks to know that we have this type of ephemeral content that's lying around because if they linked it from their profile, it wasn't true. that there was this completely other social graph they were telling their social graph on Instagram that this stuff existed. So the thesis was, and no one agreed. At the time, I certainly didn't that it would work, but through our experiments. First we try an internal version, hack on a little bit. Then you see employees start using your like hot. Maybe there's a there there, so you double click on a little bit, make a little bit better. And what we saw by the end was that people just want to express themselves creatively to their friends and family or fans. And it doesn't actually matter if that's something that lives on your profile permanently, or whether it goes away in 24 hours and it's full screen, it doesn't matter. Maybe there are new products that could be launched based on that insight we just got to in and then we're not there. So

[00:43:05] Host Create clip my take on stories was that when you think about jobs to be done, instruments being hired for a job and it had gotten like as an employee that might degrade in performance for time, it's your eye just gotten worse for that job. When you look at early instagram, that's a lot more like stories. People would post 45 times a day, whatever they wanted. Over time, you have sort of what I think. It was like sort of the natural laws of physics of a feed product, which is, people start being more selective about what they post. We would interview a bunch of people over the years, and they would kind of express what the rules of instagram or tow us, which I was really, really funny to me. And they would say You never double Instead, what does that mean? You don't post twice in a day, maybe at prom. Look okay, we've not built intentionally, but we've evolved a product that is self limiting in a way that the original version wasn't like if you scroll back all the way in my feet or Kevin's feet. I was posting multiple things a day, and even I got more selective over time. So I'd like to think that we just got worse at the job that people originally hired us for. And stories was the evolution we needed to make in order to recapture being really good at the job that people hired us originally, which is I want it really quickly. Sure what I'm up to with my friends and then engage with them on it when they see what I'm up to.

[00:44:14] Host Create clip What was the most interesting thing you saw as Instagram penetrated Maur into developing parts of the world? I'm assuming that your success sort of followed better bandwith and better mobile penetration or something like that. Any interesting observations that must have been really need to watch that happen.

[00:44:31] Host Create clip All sorts, especially the last couple years of instagram, spent a lot of time thinking about. We've talked about instagram emerging markets and how we make that work kind of things you notice in us. You can rely on people having generally the same quality of network connection throughout a day, and that could be very wildly in other countries. So we sent a research team over in India and they would say, I try to load up as much my feet as I can at home because I have WiFi there and then I go out and I'm really rate limited everywhere else. So we realize our product was actually not great for that cause the second you went somewhere new would try to refresh. And if the refresh failed to, basically the product would stop working. So there's things you can do around thinking about people's day long experience of instagram versus sort of single experience of instagram. The other thing you start realizing is how cost plays a factor. One of our largest growth drivers ever internationally was this concept of zero rating, where basically a carrier wants to get more customers. So they'll say, Hey, Instagram is free for a month, or Instagram is free up to this amount, or Instagram is free for photos but not videos. And this self writer in India launched that future for Instagram, and it was incredible what a rocket ship that was where if that happened to 18 t here, I don't think we'd see much more than a blip. Most people are either on lacks enough data plans or have universal WiFi like it just not an issue. So you start realizing our the impediments to using your product different in different countries. Are you limited because most people are using a device on enter a device that you don't support yet. Okay, well, we should probably go support that also interesting example we had was we often look at what version of Instagram people were signing up with. Usually it should be a pretty recent version, because if you think about what happens when people sign up, they go to the play store. The APP store. Did Alan Instruments the latest version? They install it. We're getting all these sign ups from a version that was a year and 1/2 old more. The spammers are at it again, and we dug into it and it wasn't that it was phones being sold. I think it was in Nigeria and it came preloaded with Instagram. An old version of instrument wasn't a deal they done with us. They just were doing this because they wanted that we had to make it work. Well, even for that use case where the band with wasn't wide enough for them to just instantly download the latest version, you have to support the one that came on their phones. So all sorts of things and these only manifest themselves as you grow. But that's where it starts becoming very important. Having teams that are tuned into what's going on internationally. It's

[00:46:40] Host Create clip fascinating to think about the ways in which Instagram has shaped culture, like literally square shaped things that show up that people can take pictures in front of How much did you think or care about that? A specific outcomes, like a medium is the message kind of thing. We didn't care. Not that we didn't care about the outcome. Obviously, we cared about the outcome. But how do I put it? There is a great venture investor here in town that came out with the other week, and he said, often the companies that basically start off searching for a great startup idea never find one. The companies that start off with Hey, I had this itch. I want to just scratch it. I think other people have this problem, too. I'm gonna create something really awesome that, like, solves this thing for me. And to be very clear, the first version of Instrument was literally for me and Mike. It was all the stuff we wanted in a process of bourbon, right? But the future version of bourbon that would become in scream when we decided to just do photos only we focused solely on what we thought was an awesome product for us and, thankfully, that resonated with a larger group. Square photos came I mean, in large part because I think a lot of companies were doing it at the time, like Hipster Matic and camera bag were kind of square photos. But I had taken this class in Florence photography class when I studied abroad and my photography teacher made me use Ah Holgate camera that on Lee took square photos with, by the way, a pretty terrible lens. So the idea of how do you make terrible lens plus square photos work on the iPhone was something that I kind of went back to my experience in that dark room saying, What makes these things more interesting? Toning them Overexposure, light leaks. All this stuff borders were a big deal, none of which, by the way, matter today on Instagram. When's the last time one of your friends added a border or put like enormous filter with light leaks on there? Think about that. But what God is there didn't get us here and just looking back at that experience, you have to just kind of see what people say they want at the time. What problem it solves at the time, knowing that those problems get Arbed away pretty quickly and then it's on to next thing. But imagine Instrument today has live streaming. There's not a world in which I thought live streaming could happen on Instagram be one because sell speed was so slow the devices were so so I don't even think when when did it become possible to, like, take a video on the iPhone? I mean, maybe it was always possible, but I don't think you could share it. I don't even remember it was the iPhone force were jumps on my right. We should go back to the books to figure this out. But the idea that video was going to exist and then you could stream it and that someone could go live and stream into the that screams like pine, this guy I know, and maybe I'm just not too much of a futurist are good enough one at that. I consider myself a hyper pragmatist, which is just what problem exists right now. How do we solve it best, and then that'll earn us the ticket to go solve the next version and the next version, the next version. If you amass a community in the meantime and you're nice to them, they will pay you back. And then some on. That's how instrument got where it is today.

[00:49:46] Host Create clip Actually, get set of management challenge. I think we had over time, which was I think we share this characteristic. Kevin are very complimentary in many ways. But sheriff, I think a couple of a set of values and ways of looking at the world and one of them is that sort of what's available today or soon, like in the next six months. And how can we make that mainstream and make that a behavior, then all of a sudden, people that unlocks in people, which I think was taking photos. It was shooting video. It was live streaming, and our teams would sometimes looking at me like, Yeah, but what are we doing in five years? What's the five year vision?

[00:50:14] Host Create clip I'd be like, Promise me You still work here in five years

[00:50:16] Host Create clip years? Exactly. Average tenure it was not, and we had a year. I remember where we were like All right, well, maybe we should be doing more of this. And we spent some time prototyping hardware ideas that never saw the light of day, and I don't think our heart was in it for either of them. And then the end result of all of the federation was saying, Let's solve a problem that we have today, which is people want a post longer video on Instagram But it doesn't really fit in feed, which is where I G. T. V came out of. But I think we eventually got to the point where we got the team to trust us in saying that the jobs were the thing that carry you forward three years for that you're actually probably solving that job, that you're doing that now, plus some adjacent ones and technology we will continuously looking at and saying all right that can now be taken mainstream that is now available on the iPhone. You can bring it to everybody, not so much. Wow, We're all wearing a R headsets. Let's build that today because he's going to use it, and by the way, you have a 1,000,000,000 people that would have benefited from a different thing. You could have been building on instead. I don't think enough teams think about the opportunity cost of being super pie in the sky. And obviously it's important to have RND teams and some companies developing that technology rose. It wouldn't exist. But I think folks often confuse very product heavy companies for very RND driven companies and lose sight of solving problems that could be solved today.

[00:51:27] Host Create clip I like to think of this so I'm not a surfer, but I've seen surfing on TV once. I told you I'm not smart. There's an optimal time to start paddling to catch a wave. You start too early. You look like an idiot. You start too late, you look like an idiot or like you're trying to catch up and you don't quite catch the crest. You started the right time. Everything aligns and instagram started at the right time. It was right when the iPhone for had come out, So people were just beginning to think maybe I'll use this camera on my phone instead of bringing along a camera on this trip. That was not a foregone conclusion at the time, but because we were just there right at the right moment, with all the right ingredients. The thing took off, and I think for whatever Mike and I do, next thing we talked most about is what waves are happening right now. And it's rare that if your head's down in a company or if you're just staring at every other company, trying to figure out what waves are high respect. No, you don't get a higher perspective. And I think machine learning is one of these waves that is absolutely happening. The question is, how does it get applied and what industries And what problems will it actually solve? Because you can't just gonna get some companies have actually found it just machine learning companies and sold them for a lot. But I think those air limited and whenever we will not a product. Yeah, we always talked about Are you technology in search of a problem, or are you problem focused? Searching for what technology will best solve it, And the honest answer is it's OK to say, Hey, there's this new technology like the iPhone. What is it on lock? But unless you then identify the problem that you're gonna go solve your paddling too early, what are some of the other potential waves that you've observed in the year cents leaving Instagram, we tell you. But then, uh, we'd have to delete the podcast.

[00:53:07] Host Create clip In all honesty, I think machine learning and all flavors of it is the big one that I've seen. I mean, there's crypto. There's revolutions happening in personal transportation, whether it's self driving cars or electric vertical takeoff and landing. I guess you'd call them planes. The one I get most excited about that feels like a wave like a real wave. Technologically is the idea that we now have the ability for when I say the Everyman, I mean literally just me with my laptop to go apply machine learning to problems were maybe maybe you haven't applied it before, And as long as you follow the rules and you're buttoned up, you can make some pretty revolutionary stuff happen. What about you, Mike?

[00:53:45] Host Create clip That was a cognitive science major in college, and I think it's interesting how you give cycles in your life and focusing more on the human computer action design. You excited and built that school out but have been reconnecting recently like what happened in neuroscience in the last 12 to 14 years and in some cases, not a lot in other cases, a vast sea change. So when I was at Stanford, you wanted to do an E e G measurement on somebody's brain. You're talking 10 to $20,000 of equipment. You can get a pretty beautifully designed off the shelf muse headset for $100 an hour to 50. That's always the trainer on miniaturization and all these different things. But actually it's a story about machine learning, which is the only reason that the muse, which basically helps you meditate is useful is that they've trained a bunch of a male models on brain waves. And they could say, This is what calm looks like. And this is what stress looks like and, you know, I'm grossly oversimplifying it, but now we can tailor an experience around it. So I'm excited about that combination of things. I just got the or a ban that measures sleep, and in some cases it's telling you what you already know. Tick. Yeah, I did sleep very poorly last night. It's like I feel bad, but also to me, it was interesting to say, like, What does it look like when I am more stressed out before bed in terms of heart rate variability. So I think that combination of devices getting smaller, more powerful. The fact that the Oregon pack all of that into a ring shape is pretty interesting. The fact that the Muse can basically just look like a headband from Star Trek something you were in public, but it's so portable I can travel with it and generate useful insight is a combination that I'm pretty excited about.

[00:55:11] Host Create clip You guys have unusual, maybe singular, experience of being kind of the perfect, typical early stage garage style founders from bootstrapping something interesting, like Instagram through managing a very big team but also doing it inside of one of the largest companies in the world. There's just got to be really interesting insight to tap from here guys brains because of this experience. So the first is the ways in which your thoughts on leadership and management of teams and people maybe change the most or evolve the most in the time in which you were at Facebook. I don't know how big the team was when you joined against 12 and 1000 when you left So what major chunky lessons do you take from the leadership part of the job while at Facebook? So there were how many chapters? We'll lay out the chapters and then we'll go through. The first was the Me and Mike Face. It was just us. We were hacking. We're getting stuff done. I mean, the big thing. I think we realized there was enormous prioritization of your time working on things that matter so again, identifying problems that people actually have rank ordering what you're actually focused on and focusing only on the top one or two things to the detriment of everything else. And it's okay.

[00:56:17] Host Create clip We had a no external meeting policy for like, four months before launch and drove investors crazy because, like, What do you mean? No, who you think you are? And it was not born of arrogance. It was literally born of the fact that there were two of us, and every minute spent outside are tiny desks on a pier was minutes that the product wasn't getting built and we stuck to it basically until we launched. But

[00:56:36] Host Create clip also so Mike, remember early on it was just the two of us, so scale and leverage was an enormous lesson that we entered into this death spiral where we launched and I think we might have been no, we were two people who are we lunched? And I think we hired Josh, our community manager, right after that. And then we got Shane to come on, and so it was four people. But the problem was it was growing like a weed, and we were fixing it and not hiring people. So we went in this death spiral of not having enough time to hire people. That's the problems were getting bigger because it was accelerating beyond our control. And then we wouldn't have the timeto go hire those people. So it just compounding Brad compounded. I don't even remember how we got out of it. But the point is hiring people earlier for something that's working. I think it was both enormously helpful to be small and nimble when we had to be. But then when that thing starts going, don't hesitate a higher up. I mean, Mike did a lot of the early hiring early on, but also did a tremendous amount of the server fixing at when I am there are pictures of him on a camping trip where he's got his laptop open with a WiFi card rebooting the servers. But scale on leverage. I think at that point, was important. What about maybe once we joined Facebook?

[00:57:46] Host Create clip Yeah, I think what was interesting about that transition is we were, I think, at that time, 16. We'd hired all of four people during the time the deal closed and we needed to accelerate and one of the benefits of being inside face because they put a ton of work into sort of core engineering management training. So I think a lot of companies sort of looked around and said, All that person has been around the longest. Maybe they should manage, and that's often the wrong approach. So I think the two things from there that we adopted, I think we're absolutely the right thing. Number one is make management apparel career track to individual contribution, and it sounds obvious, and I would have assumed that most companies do this, but was just speaking at a dinner for growth stage companies and I was sort of talking about this point at me like of course, everybody does. This is what he came up to me afterwards, like I was about to roll out our new career ladders and they don't do that and management was a promotion. I'm so glad I came to this dinner tonight, but it's essential because you don't want people to self selecting to management just because they see it as a promotion or the way that they're gonna get more authority in the company. But as a calling or at least an interest of like, You know, I'm more interested in the people side in building out the teams, and that's something we adopted very early, and we actually let people transition from one to the other. In one case, one person went into management, did that for two years, was excited to get his hands dirty again, did that for another year, then back into management so it could be fairly porous on either directions. I think that was a pretty interesting side of things then. Another mistake I think companies make is that they're like, now your manager just cause we called you that you know everything that you're doing or like, maybe here's a book. Actually, it's like a real transition and require Israel mentorship. So giving people that extra set of resources for that first year, whether it's extra coaching, other internal or external, doing skipped levels, meaning I would often go talk to their direct reports and say, How's it going with this new person? And they're like, It's great except for this one thing or it's a disaster like Okay, well, maybe we need to hit the reset button and do something different, just a lot of intentionality around. That practice of core management was key, and I think that's how we got from 16 people with no managers. Thio base. A year later, we were

[00:59:40] Host Create clip almost 80 and we already had probably 12 managers managing that,

[00:59:44] Host Create clip and you sort of start figure out the right ratios that you wanted, so you make a great point. We grew up in a very interesting way where our first managers, other than me and Kevin, happened once we

[00:59:53] Host Create clip were already inside Facebook, which meant that we were able to sort of look at what was working well about their internals of core

[00:59:58] Host Create clip engineering, management discipline and say great, that works really well. Let's adopt that as much as possible. I think one of the

[01:00:04] Host Create clip things that maybe we both caught on towards the end was Don't forget that your main job is to build great products for people. You can get into the state where you've got career ladders and you've got all these tools for managing at scale. When's the last time you sat down and said What product we're gonna build for people? What do they care about? Or are you just sitting there having people bring it to you that don't actually subscribe to the same philosophies that we did early on? And And I think it's really important to remember that the job, yes, you need to scale. But the job is not to just manage people. The job is to build great stuff. And if managing people is in the name of that, an awesome. So Mike and I would try to spend a tremendous amount of time just bringing people back to the core problem. It's like, I know you care about your promotion. I get it. But can we please just talk about the product for a second? And I think that you can get to a certain scale where people forget that the fun job is not just the politics of managing a large organization, but instead you gotta work on the product. Also think whether the lessons we learned throughout our time at Facebook was Do not pat yourself on the pack, ever.

[01:01:14] Host Create clip We got him the face so hard, multiple times launching products that didn't work. And thankfully, very few people remember the name Bolt. It was a little lap that we launched. Never worked. I'm surprised I'm bringing it up right now. But my point is, people forget your failures there. Remember your successes so forever. People will remember our stories, Pivot. Very few people remember the 15 projects that came before that that failed. My point is, sometimes when you're a successful company, you can get through these chapters and you just think you're the hot s. You're amazing. And what ends up happening is you get lazy and you focus on the management stuff. And what you have to remember is that there's someone out there who really, really wants your spot in line and they're gonna fight hard and they're gonna they're gonna launch an amazing product. And if you're not hungry and if you're not paranoid. And if you're not focused like I said, on building most products, you can pat yourself on the back to getting this level and assume everything that got you to this point. We'll get you to the next point and you are going to be dead wrong. And I just think we had enough failures early on and maybe because we sold the company and people were like, Oh, you're done We wanted to prove them wrong. I think we stayed really hungry and we tried really hard and we learned not to just sit upon the perch and assume that everything was going to go well. And I think that's part of why I continue to go. Well,

[01:02:36] Host Create clip I think we would learn this lesson. Would Wren bi annual employee surveys on obviously checking with people in between. But almost every metric in the end was correlated with. Are we doing great work on the product? I remember it was like, How optimistic are you about instagrams future? Do you feel like you're growing an instagram? You see yourself here what, 10 years you expect to have an instagram and the pre and post of thing like stories or things like ranked feed or things like pivoting and making direct work was stark and you'd look it. We would do initiatives internally to do the management side of things, and they're important to, because after you'll fix some block and tackle that you're dropping the ball on. But then ultimately, that rising tide of Oh, yeah, we are excited makes kind of annoyed that this order is not exactly structure the right way. Yeah, and I'll keep raising it. But I'm really excited to get to tackle this big thing

[01:03:23] Host Create clip listening to you guys. There's two major things that I extract, and I'm just curious if you think these to explain things best. So the first is this sort of community slash product centris ity, which you've heard other great modern business leaders talk a lot about this principle, Bezos, Most notably maybe with this kind of customer obsession idea and then the second, which is really interesting. Is this humility tied to pragmatic observation that you're not trying to predict what the problems are gonna be five years from now, trying to look around and see what they are today? And the humility piece is the willingness to disrupt your own business. Do you think that those air kind of the right to pillars of my missing a major one? I totally forgot. We had this principle early on are we called it a value which was humbled by confident. It's like you should be ripping, confident about your idea, but humble enough to know you might be wrong. Figure it out pretty quickly and I don't know why we focus so much on that humility. I think it was just because the fear of being wrong, the fear of missing this great opportunity I mean, let's go back to this context. We were two guys who had pretty good jobs and tack, and we both really desperately wanted to try to take a crack at starting a startup. And this was our one chance. If this didn't go well, I mean, probably not gonna raise money again anytime soon. We just be Those guys have burned like cash, and this was our chance. So I think the only way to face challenges like that is to say we're gonna put everything possible into making sure these people who use their product or happy and we're gonna try to be so humble that every moment we're gonna maybe question ourselves four times before cutting or before shooting or whatever you want. And when we do that, that just raises the chances of success at every single try a long way. Would you agree?

[01:05:04] Host Create clip Yeah, I think almost to a fault. We were very intentional about every sort of decision that we made along the way. And I think that comes from that balance of the decision, esta matter. So you have to be prioritizing correctly, something that comes from the products interested and then sort of user focus. But then ultimately, you also have to be willing to say, All right, let's debate this and then it's also commit and go forward. One of the phrases really liked was from a case study. We both studied independently, which was we may not be right, but we're not confused and we love that because it really captures. You can't basically try to diversify your efforts. When you're two people, you got two people. You should probably focus on one thing, but you're also have the ability to say, like, well, we might not be right. A story like to tell us bourbon dot com, which is the product that we'd built before Instagram that site and product was active, and we're ready to pivot back to it after we launched Instagram. If that hadn't worked four hours into the launch of Instagram, it was clearly working. We had to turn it off because the server was overloaded. We're just turning off left and right anything that we could. But I woke up in the morning. We launch Instagram. It was like I hope this works, but if it doesn't, I'm not done. I want to keep going. We still got money in the bank. Let's figure out what's next the

[01:06:06] Host Create clip two other areas that it's funny. You talk so much about a business and not touched on these two areas. Yet Instagram again is unusual in this sort of build it, and they came distribution sort of handled itself. I'm sure that there were a lot of things that went into thinking about its growth but seemed to grow pretty fast just virally from the jump, which is unusual, obviously for a business. So distribution is the first growth, and then the second is the business model, so This is a free product, and we know now how it makes money or some of the ways in which it makes money. But how often did you guys think? Or do you think about growth distribution? Building those channels intentionally versus just letting it be, letting the best possible product handle growth on its own? Because it's that good. It's a little bit of both. How do you manage it? And then how do you not get in its way, how we manage it? I mean, my God, I would spend a ton of time early on optimizing the landing page. So it's to be clear. When I said the three problems that we solved, one of them was sharing on multiple platforms, and it turns out we both loved Mike was like he has hundreds of thousands of users on Twitter, and that was before Mike was the founder of Instrument, and we looked at that were like, Wow, if we help people sort of these platforms and their links back to our platform, that can be enormously helpful. So we optimized that landing page to make sure that when you clicked on a photo from a friend you would see that this was the app they used. It turns out the filters and the borders were actually kind of calling cards for us. So people are like, Oh, how did you do this up? So we actually did architect it very well. At the same time, we had no idea what was happening underneath. So we didn't know how many new users we were acquiring versus how many were turning out versus how many were resurrecting. We didn't really have those metrics styled in, But once we did get those metrics style, then we realised very quickly that often when growth wasn't going well, it was because of something we had screwed up. So we were like, Get out of the way of the thing growing. We're screwing it up. I mean, Mike has a bunch of stories about push notifications not working. Or how did we screw up growth up? We

[01:08:01] Host Create clip don't know exactly. And we would look at it and say like, Wow, this growth went off a cliff. How did people changes their competitors and 99 out of 100 times it was the push notification system broke. That was a very, very common one or someone engagement thing broke memorably Once we shipped a version that crashed every time you try to upload a photo. If you were in Japan, got of getting this very specific crazy region specific bugs, didn't you to make some changes as we grew were like, It's hard to find a user name that seems like a trivial problem, but you start running out of either names. How do you help people through that sign up process is not the same way you would have helped him through it at the very, very beginning. But I think going back to the surfing metaphor the way you distribute and grow is also very much tied toe when you're building it. People come to me all the time like, Hey, I'm launching an app. What should I do to make it as big a instagram like time travel back to 2010 and have a conversation because it's a different thing. The avenues of growth we had, for example, we shared a lot on Twitter and Facebook, and then you would get attribution and he would share back. I don't know. That's the case for either of those platforms anymore,

[01:08:59] Host Create clip mostly because Instagram grew service so much. Right now, I was like, Wait a second grew

[01:09:04] Host Create clip off of the Twitter and Facebook social graphs when you could connect and find your friends and that one away at the same time for your buildings started three years ago. The way to do it was raised a bunch of money and try to outspend everybody in APP store app, install ads on Facebook. I think that's changed, too. So I think it irritably have to figure out what are the available mechanisms of distribution. We were playing with an app that tries to distribute itself by being a sticker on Snapchat and hope that you tap the sticker and go back to their aph. So that playbook is obviously new and different, so that always was evolving and always changing it, and also became, ah, function of scale to for us. Like what we're trying to choir early were people who were into Twitter and Facebook and using photos. When you're acquiring your 1000000001st person, you're thinking all right, they're in a different country, have a herd of instagram. Maybe the already avert of it is about making sure they know their friends are on their about thinking more creatively but never forgetting the block and tackle basics of growth. Because that was often where we would have to turn to and say that thing. That is what we need to focus

[01:10:00] Host Create clip on. I'm curious, since it was a free product. How early on you were thinking deliberately about the economic model, for whether it's ads or whatever else, what roles that play in this whole story. I'm smiling just cause in order to get Mike to work at Instagram is Brazilian was Brazilian over

[01:10:17] Host Create clip on Brazilian. I

[01:10:19] Host Create clip guess you'll always be resorted. Yeah, but we had to get him h one b visa. And they didn't believe that the company was really They were like, Is this a shell company or you just trying to get so Mike, what was your first assignment at Instrument?

[01:10:31] Host Create clip So basically, they're like this visa. We can't approve it until we have more information. Just sending us your business plan, thinking I'm sure the government like, of course, they have a business plan that we look at each other. All right, what is this plan Wade raised on a hope in a dream and a nap demo. Kevin had raise because I wasn't even involved in. So I wrote up a business plan to capture our hopes and dreams about bourbon, which is the proper working on. And the business model of the time is that it was all about local discoveries, so we would sell local ads. Local business could run local hyper local ads and paid to basically promote themselves on the platform, obviously, as we pivot away from bourbon, not even sure that business automated since the begin with. But it definitely didn't make sense when you went towards Instagram. And then I think you look at the nature of the product and super visual, and the best ads have always been visual, So there was clearly a plausible path to that working. But exactly what form that took in terms of Is it programmatic versus a magazine type model where you to spend a bunch of money on one big moment? I think that was all left to be. Figure it out, but I think we both always had the intuition. Once we're working on Instagram rather than bourbon, that this thing is monetizing. If it's large enough we'd be idiots not to be able to monetize it in some way.

[01:11:40] Host Create clip I do remember our pitch to benchmark capital. Who? That was our Siri's be years. A series A You're right. So we had her seed are a Yeah benchmark a so man. If I could go back and re pitch, I would try so much harder. I think we walked in with maybe three slots, maybe a user growth side business model Question mark, slide. But I remember the business mark question model slide, which it featured Instagram and we had to screen shots. And I remember it had a picture of Banana Republic and I had a photo. And it is an ad by Banana Republic effectively. And we didn't have ads at that time, and I don't think we had been in a republic at that time, But we got to a point where they did sign up, and that didn't come true. And I'm pretty sure they advertise on Instagram now. So that was our Siri's A. I mean, we understood that you could have ads on Instagram. I think our pitch was Listen, what are the most effective ads in the world today? Where does people spend all their money? It's print and video advertising on TV, magazines, et cetera. It's not that different. This is just on your phone.

[01:12:39] Host Create clip Yeah, and then involved and figured it out over time and at beginning. It was highly manual, and we thought of looking at every ad. I shouldn't my favorite do this simple thing first stories that we ever had. So the first ad product you could buy on Instagram it was a pretty big deal. You may be the only advertised on Instagram that they were starting basic and small and very controlled. And you're a tech company would have built this great auction system from day one to figure out who ran on each day and make sure they got the right impressions. V one of our auction system was literally a white board with a calendar that was drawn in Sharpie. And basically maybe March 5th would say, But Anna Republic, they're running the ad that day and in the morning, the engineers are looking at me like I gotta make sure Banana Republic is running that day, which on one hand is what we call clown town. But actually it was like a great example of doing the simple thing first, if that ad system didn't work, meaning people weren't interested in buying those kinds as in scram, why would you have spent a year building the perfect auction model and when it worked, then you go build the thing that lets thousands and thousands of different kinds of ads be running on Instagram in any given time. But that evolution kind of happened over time, and but I was loved like I look at the wiper blade Banana republic time. Now, that gang that's today we're running the ad.

[01:13:43] Host Create clip I'm curious how you guys think about your own kind of business and investing ambitions was investing show. Haven't talked about investing it all. I know you're interested in companies being built and problems being solved. And so how do you think about what to do as investors as allocators of your own capital? Now you don't have to spend as much time thinking about how to allocate capital on resource is within a much bigger business. I'd like to say we were always venture investors. We just hired our own entrepreneurs, and again, at every moment you're deciding how to spend time. And also resource is when you hire people on what products and projects, they just all happen to be related. Maybe that's why some of the best investors, especially adventure, tend to invest in verticals and get it right because they understand the space versus spreading themselves too thin. I don't know. I maybe listening five years from now to this podcast, I'll be like, interesting. That's how I thought about venture investing and maybe I'll have a completely different view. I mean, the world of investing is giving ideas the chance to take flight, hoping that they work and basically just having different levels of risk at the seed stage. Or like, I have no idea if this product is going to become this world changing thing. And in Instagram, I like to say whoever invested in Instagram early had zero insight into what Instagram would become because they didn't invest in Instagram. They invested in bourbon. Maybe there's a view there on the team, and maybe there's I think we all got very lucky back then, and then there's once it takes flight, you have to decide. Okay, does it have a chance and then once. It's really big. The question is, what are the growth avenues? And maybe it becomes public someday and then you have different Juries all along the way. But as an investor myself, what I look for our great companies that understand their customer in and out there solving a really unique problem that no one else has quite figured out how to solve. And those companies tend to do very, very well. But I have very little track record. I mean, have a little spreadsheet. I said, Mike, I was like, here all the venture investments I've done. I'm like the multiples that's looking good. It's not great, but you got to be humble because you never know. But looking at ITM or focused in the next few years I have this one mentor. He was like, Yeah, you figured out a be a great entrepreneur. But being a great investor is a completely different game, and unless you approach it with that humility, I might actually be pretty bad at this. So how can I learn as quickly as possible? I think that's the only way to figure out this next chapter investing. But again, I don't know if it's 10% of her time or 90% of our time. But it's a fun game to figure it out because it's so different. As much as it was similar. We

[01:16:13] Host Create clip walked into a meeting with BC month or two ago and he's like, Biggest thing I've learned my Kerr is a VC product doesn't really matter. Go to market is everything which, you know, both of us were like, what? That could be the right thesis, baby within a category of things. And I think if that were the case, I don't think I would enjoy investing because if there is any amount of edge or unique view we have on the world, I think it's what problems are solved. How while the product is solving those problems and what team is going out in solving those problems in Howard, they tackling what's their unique view of the problem And I have to believe that is an interesting view on the world and will lead to some ability to spot things, although maybe it doesn't lead the ability to spot things very early. So I think we're in the total discovery motive, understanding where we add value as well. So far, my intuition is not so much the seed stage where you feel like very lottery tickets. There often isn't a product, so I'm not sure there's a lot we can even get into in terms of, like, what problem they're solving. Yet where is actually the sort of underappreciated may be? Part of our journey was going from that 16 24 to 1000 employees based where you're saying, How do I motivate a huge team? How do I think about building a repeatable product process? How do I think about having multiple bets in play at once and make sure that we'd still deliver on the core of the product? All of that stuff is really interesting, and in many ways the companies have enjoyed spending the most time with are in that series. B have traction, but don't really have a company around

[01:17:35] Host Create clip it. How about mentors for you guys? You just mentioned a mentor of yours. And you also mention this idea of being thoughtful about training people inside of Instagram, whether it be the individual contributor tractor, the management tracked or some major mentors that you guys had that made an impact on your thinking. One

[01:17:52] Host Create clip of the people I met in college, actually, I was taking a class on digital design and building things was Reid Hoffman, and at the time he was still mostly involved with Linc did and hadn't yet thought about. It was maybe doing a little bit of investing but wasn't full on venture yet. And you think about mentors. There's probably a theme that you have learned from each of them and for Reed, I think it's leverage when he goes and says, Hey, I want to make this podcast happen. I want to make this book happens. He's get somebody great to partner with and then make that happen. And I think from a self reflection, I'm the kind of person that tried to do too much myself. I'm like, of course, I can figure this out on The answer isn't that you couldn't have? It's that one. That's probably somebody else out there has been thinking about it for much longer. Who could do that faster and better, and to that incremental minute could be spend thinking about some different things, so that question of leverage and how to scale yourself has won the on self reflection need to be even more mindful of now that we don't have a team anymore because, quite literally, there's no delegation that can happen right now. What are we working on tomorrow? This all that's getting done right now in this partnership.

[01:18:46] Host Create clip So for me, it actually came later on an instagram because early on I was like, Yeah, I mean, everyone looks up to Steve Jobs Number one looks up to Bill Gates, and I think they should, because they've been enormously successful and what they do. But it wasn't like a personal relationship, or we go back to being specific athletes. They were all very specific athletes in their own arena, but it never quite clicked in for me. I went outside of venture startups and I said, Who just thinks the way I like to think very logically and principled, and I got introduced to Radar Leo and I remember my first conversation with them. We were talking about some of the ways we ran instagram and some of the ways they run Bridgewater and men that couldn't be more different. But having a very specific view and holding onto it, I thought It was something that was really special, regardless of whether, right? I think I learned a lot from him to think a little bit more principled about what we were doing. And what are the rules of the road inside of instrument? What do we believe? One of the things we think are true universally throughout building product and the more we started coming around and writing those values down some, I called them principles. I call them values for Instagram. The more I realized. Actually, you can apply that over and over again. So he was an enormous influence on me. It still is looking outside of your own world, other industries, whether that's global macro hedge fund or whether that's neuroscience for Mike. I think I get the most inspiration when you step outside of your world because that's what really inspires you, and you find people that think differently. The idea of not being confused It's such a I never thought about it that way, but it's such a clarifying the values and principles things through the lens of not being confused makes so much sense. The male definitely take that away. In closing a couple fun topics that I know you guys are interested in or passionate about. One of them is flying. So I know you're learning to fly or have learned to fly. What drew you to that? And what have you most taken from it thus far? OK, so number one, I'm gonna answer the question in a roundabout way, which is I think everyone should have a someday. Maybe list a friend way back in the day gave me this book getting things done by David Allen, and most people skim it in there like he okay, I have to do list and triggers an action, and they kind of subscribed to it. They don't really. And then they forget about it. I went pretty deep on it, but the one thing I came away with was you should always have a list of things that you think are really interesting. But you don't quite have the time to do right now. And I have a long list of those and then keeps crying. But when I left in scram, I said to myself, Okay, what do I want to do when I was like, well, you know, go fender investing. I could go hiking. I did the skiing thing we talked about. I looked down on my list. I said, Oh, that's right. I have this list and I went through and I was like, I think people who sometimes leave their companies get a little I don't know the word might be dull. They just get a little slow. They're not as sharp because they're not managing something every day. And I was like, I want something really hard to learn where my life's on the line And that could be like, thrilling and exciting, but also very technical. So I was like, Whoa, look, I could either do My trip to Japan isn't those things or I could learn to fly. So I looked up a local school, asked them to learn to fly, and I went up and I was like, Okay, this is definitely gonna be the thing that keeps me sharp. And by the way, I went through my regular license. Then I got my instrument reading in the course of about six months of training, which is pretty quick, but I had a lot of time, and by the end, I was like That's exactly what I needed. It was both the distraction from the tech world just to get my head free a little bit, but also an expansive view of what the human brain can do if you just give it a little bit of time. That's why I learned to fly, but I've had a lot of fun with it. What else is on the sometimes Maybe list the someday, maybe. Listen, David. Yeah, I can't say only when the items come off. Do we talk about, Ah, first rule of someday? Maybe, exactly. But having obviously having a kid I'm about to have my second child, having a family is a big one. But when you're founding a company and you're going crazy trying to fix things, you just don't have time for a lot of these other big projects. It's a list of things I wanna learn to do. It's a list of places I want to travel. If Mike goes to a cool hotel somewhere and try some great drink or something, I'll put it down. So it's a mix of different levels. Some of them are a little bit cooler than others. I love it. I read that you guys are both very interested in coffee. What was the source of that interest? Try to stay away.

[01:23:08] Host Create clip Copy this.

[01:23:09] Host Create clip Funding from Brazil Results. Obviously a huge coffee country actually grew up disliking coffee, and I think I really didn't retrospect. Now it's cause you mostly drink coffee with milk and Brazil. I've never liked that. I still don't like it. I remember that goes back to this craft principle, like remember, moving to San Francisco wandering into this weird dirty alley. And I was just on a walk. There's a coffee shop in the wall and, like, what is going on here and having this awesome mind blowingly good experience make Oh, this could actually be really pleasurable, intentional experience. And that was Blue Bottle in one of their first locations. And that sort of went, I think it was actually fun instance of craft and Instagram early on, which is we got everybody. So Kevin was a barista in college and understands espresso really well. And we taught basically every new employee how to pull a reasonable espresso shots. You had any given moment. You see somebody over there grinding and tamping it down and extracting and wandering back to their desk. It was like a good sort of on boarding experience that we both enjoyed.

[01:24:04] Host Create clip I think the key here, it honor saying this story is that I didn't want anyone touching the espresso machine that wasn't trained. I mean, I'm like, fairly detail oriented. Some might say overbearingly detail oriented, But the idea that, like a new employee was gonna come on and touch this espresso machine will get it all dirty. I was mortified. So it's true, actually. And I don't know if you know this, but one of our early employees, Shane I was talking on the other day he opened up a coffee shop. Did he really? So yeah, exactly. I mean, it's not his only thing they used ring, but my point is it's traveled far and wide in the Instagram community. But early on, it was just like we gotta stay awake. I couldn't really afford to go to the coffee shop all the times. It was like if you could have a really nice espresso, we didn't even have a sink nearby. It was a terrible idea. What's the key to pulling a good shot? If I were to give one answer. It's measurements, absolutely all measurements. If you don't have exactly how many grams of being you're gonna grind in if you don't know the coarseness or the fineness of that grind. If you don't know the time through which you're playing that shot 27 seconds. 28 32. Those are all normal, but you have to know, and then how many grams out do you want? If you have that recipe you know really far, and then you can get super geeky and you can look a temperature profiles, pressure profiles, all sorts of stuff these days with a kid. When I wake up in the morning, I just want fast coffee. And pulling an espresso shot is a great way to get your mind working in the morning, because it's this little balancing act of getting everything set. But it's good when you hit it, you hit it. And when you don't, if you're a little bit off its nasty

[01:25:35] Host Create clip yeah, there's like, probably punishes you. There's probably four things that I think people in tech are naturally drawn to take. Coffee is one of them because you could be very precise. Photography's another one where I think this is actually gone away with the iPhone being the predominant way people capture or our friends being the predominant people capture. But for a while there, people would love me like, What's your ice? Oh, eyes able to get this great low lying to this long exposure. I've stopped three and I love that stuff, too. And I have something. I realized I was more in love with the technical processes in the technical side of photography in the natural. Photography's out of it flying. Is that the other one? I think where there's all these things going on all at once and you're trying to figure out while I go then cooking is probably the last one where Tech has managed to take over cooking as well. Like I love doing su vida and being like, All right, we're gonna do this 36 hour Carnitas recipe at exactly 1 44 and I'm gonna brown and I don't know. I think it gives you an excuse to learn something new.

[01:26:24] Host Create clip Yeah, so you guys are roughly my age. I'm 34. You've had a fascinating set of life experiences thus far. What parting thoughts are lessons. Would you leave people listening with that You've gleaned from your experience, advice or otherwise,

[01:26:37] Host Create clip never self selecting out of things because you don't feel like you know them Yet when you look at us, we were not. People with computer science agrees. I did agree Inhuman creature action. Kevin agreed. Management, science and engineering like we knew some programming. But when I think I found a photo recently from Week one and 1/2 of Instagram and a friend, Sean is sitting next to me, and I think it's Kevin's photo Captions like working on the servers or something like that. And it was a friend of mine who worked at the previous start up with, and he'd come over and try to help me with some of the scaling things. And I was like, I look back on what? I didn't know then about scalability about servers, load averages, setting up good database design. I had no idea, and we had no idea about management. We never managed a person, I would joke with our Instagram team. Every person we hired was automatically the largest team had ever managed in my life, so you have to have the self awareness to know that you don't know everything and hire people that can teach you or get yourself that lesson otherwise. But also the sort of open mindedness is saying. I don't know that yet, but not knowing that is standing in the way of me proving something out or solving some problem and then taking that sort of learning mentality like that was us over and over and over and over again.

[01:27:39] Host Create clip I think I have two connected. This one is no matter what new idea you have, people are going to tell you it stinks. People are going to tell you it's not possible. It's been done a bunch of times. I mean, think about how many times when we said we were doing photo sharing like, Ah, photo sharing has been done. When's the last time anyone innovated in photos? They're gonna tell you this, and the goal is twofold. One is first of all, if you're looking for some sense of congratulations or go get him, you're not gonna get it. You're just not the second is that doesn't mean it's a terrible idea. It also doesn't mean it's a good idea The one common thing of all great ideas is that they usually look pretty bad at the beginning. Also, really bad ideas also look bad at the beginning. So it's your job, I think, to tease out quickly. Are you on the good side or the bad side? And I think that's something we did fairly quickly. I mean, we had bourbon which wasn't working, and it was on the bad side. There was some good things about it, but it was on the bad side. We learned quickly we isolated the things that were working and then out came Instagram. But everyone along the way, I mean, even the first couple of years, people were saying instagrams a fad. So the ability for humans to foretell the future is terrible. So don't focus on that. Just focus on whether or not you have conviction. And based on the data, do you have proof? I think the second thing and is the final thing, is just to stay super curious and stay a learner. I think people throughout their lives will get to you. I don't know if you're lucky. You get through college and then people stopped learning and Then they stopped trying and they go, They get a job at a desk and maybe there was no a podcast to pass the time. Maybe that's you listening right now, but think about it. When's the last time you picked up a book on a new subject? Something that piques your interest? I mean, maybe you don't have a lot of time. Does work is super busy. Maybe you're managing a family, etcetera. Find ways of staying curious and learning new things because it's super sad to think that the last moment we learned is that last day in college, my goal is for college. So last my entire life, even if I'm not paying for it. So I loved both those answers, and I got this image Mike, when you were talking about anything. If you're going to be really successful, almost by definition, it means, you know, 5% of the stuff that you're going to know at that end state. What could be more exciting than that? My closing question for everybody is to ask for the kind of thing that anyone's ever done for you. I can go first and go for it. Yeah, is the good thing about having two people okay, so kind of thing. It's hard because there are a lot of kind things along the way. But the one that stands out to me is my uncle. When I was saying fourth grade, so this would have been think 94 I was getting into computers and I had this curiosity and he ran this computer business and he could tell I was excited about it, and I had learned some Q basic programming. Remember that Mike Cue Basic as playing around with it and showed him that I was excited. We had one computer in the house and my dad was doing it for work. My mom needed it. The family shared it. And one time I don't remember exactly when he came to our house and he pulled out a laptop, and I still remember it because the screen was green and black. It wasn't black and white. It was black and green, he said. Here you can have this, and I don't even remember if it just ran DOS or something. It basically let me start programming, and I had it in my room and I remember the table. It's sat on, and I would use it every single night for hours on end instead of doing my homework and for him to take what probably was really expensive at the time. I mean, laptops were not cheap and just say, Here, kid, take this thing, program your heart out. I was definitely the kind of thing anyone's ever done for me. Wonderful. It's

[01:31:17] Host Create clip hard to pick one, but the one that came to mind. So my now wife, then girlfriend for Valentine's Day in 2011 I want to say I really wanted to do something different. A special agreed to dating for two or three years of the time, and she decided she was gonna learn to code and build a thing called Love sta Graham, which was around for a few years. Or basically, you put your name on your Valentine's name in, and it would go through both of your Instagrams and find photos of you together basically create like a digital postcard of that stuff. It was awesome. One. It's a very thoughtful, cold thing to do because we're deep in Instagram at the time, literally the most important thing in the world at the time of the my relationship with her, but two it was fun was like the learning that she went through for that, and she kept it a secret till the night before the day. And this is like, Hey, I need to tell you, this is gonna launch is tomorrow. I'm worried it's gonna fall over. And I basically spent the next four hours adding them cash, making stuff a synchronous, and I was like, That's my way of expressing love. Back is I'm gonna optimize your gift now, but just the thoughtfulness and the fact that learning has obviously been a theme of our conversation. But the fact that that was the thing that she chose to do and she had almost basically no programming experience before that to go from that to a fully functioning Django app with use of the instagram, a p I and Web design was incredible.

[01:32:28] Host Create clip Well, I'm really, genuinely thankful to you guys for the time we talked before have record about my idea to start talking to more and more CEOs, and I think I like lists and having like a to be CEO list is really interesting, and I definitely would put both of you on that list in terms of how you think about business, how you think about community and product. It's incredibly refreshing. All the lessons we've talked about in the theme of curiosity, it's obvious. So thank you so much for your time. Thank you, everyone. Patrick, you're again to find more episodes of Invest like the best Go to Investor field guide dot com forward slash podcast. If you're a book lover, you can also sign up for my book club. But investor field guy dot com forward slash book club after you sign up to receive a full investor curriculum right away and then 3 to 4 suggestions of new books every month. You can also follow me on Twitter at Patrick Underscore. Oh, shag os H G.

[01:33:23] Host Create clip If you enjoy the show, please leave a quick review for us on iTunes, which will help more people discover invest like the best. Thanks so much for listening