Nikita Bier: preference

Transcript context

…Man, there's just endless stories that we could keep getting into, but we've also gone very long, so I'm going to try to move on to another topic. So I ask people on Twitter what to ask you? Just that question got a thousand likes just me asking, "What should I ask Nikita?" And the most common question, I'm sure you get this a lot, is just people wondering, do you ever want to build a durable consumer app? Is it possible to build a durable consumer app? Scott Belsky asked this, Robert at Figma asked this, and Scott actually had a really nice way of describing it about why are so many quick sensation consumer apps proving to be more akin to summer songs than enduring standalone products and businesses? So there's kind of two questions here. One is, do you aim to build a durable consumer app? And two, how possible is it? A lot of the fundamental tools for communicating with our friends either messaging or broadcasting one-to-many like on stories or the incumbents have built pretty large motes in terms of network effects and to provide true an order of magnitude better experience is non-trivial because they've been actually improving these products so much over the years and there's not that many entry points. Not to say that it's not impossible. Snapchat was showed that there was style of messaging that people wanted that the incumbents weren't serving. But I think there's these kind of edges that you can go after with a much higher probability of success and they might not actually be something that's durable necessarily. And I think finding durability for a communication or social product, that's a black swan event. Retention for consumer social is there's a tremendous amount of randomness. There's one every decade. If it was simple, I would just be printing $1 trillion companies. I be printing Facebook's every time I sat down. But I think it's actually a lot of it is pure randomness. On the other hand, growing a product can be a science. With certainty, if you're good at your job, you can make an app grow and go viral. Now why haven't I tried to take the viral part and build something that has been durable or long-lasting? I'll tell you a little bit about my motivations. My favorite part about product development is you make this thing through the night. You build it and you watch it take over the internet. That is the most thrilling drug I think you could ever experience. And just watching it spread all over the country is like you drop an app in the deep south in Georgia and then you look on your analytics dashboard and 40% of the high school down your street in Los Angeles has downloaded it one week later. That's a really profound feeling. It's crazy to have that sort of impact as a three-person team, and I live for that. When I joined Facebook, here's an interesting connection. So I joined Facebook and I saw that many of my peers were looking up to VPs and they're like, "That's what I want to make it to one day. I want to run a large organization. I want to have lots of reports." And then I met with VPs and they were actually jealous of me because my quality of life was actually pretty cool. I got to build something high impact that made many teens feel better about themselves, made a decent amount of money. And then I wasn't in charge of this becoming a people manager that has to run this large organization for many years. I think one day I will run maybe a venture scale business, but I will say that I kind of like the way that I've been doing things so far in terms of quality of life and being fun. Financially, it's been great. So I think that part is what motivates me. And yeah, I don't think running a large corporation is necessarily what I described as fun. That's amazing, man. I am really happy we went here. So much of this resonates with the way I think. And obviously, a big part of this is also just it's very hard, as you said, to build a consumer app that grows first of all. Second, that actually lasts. But that is interesting that you do hope to one day build a venture funded business.…

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