Kayvon Beykpour: evaluation

Transcript context

…Oh man, if I kept doing that, the manual onboarding, I'd be like, "Who's coming?" Just always worried that someone else fancy is going to join. You never know who Chris Saka is getting, who he's talking to. That's amazing. Okay, so it's been about 10 years, I believe, since you sold Periscope and about six years ish since you stopped running at as CEO, something like that. Now as I shared, every single platform basically is doing this. They added live video streaming. I'm curious if there's anything you learned about just competing with these major platforms. Well, there's a few reasons why Periscope failed ultimately and why we shut down the app. Obviously Periscope, the technology and the mechanics still lives on because you can go live on Twitter, you can watch live broadcasts on Twitter, you can do audio conversations on Twitter and all of that is the Periscope stack. Still there, which is awesome that the legacy lives on in a different form factor. The reason that the Periscope app failed, it really comes down to a few things. One, we did not address the core problem that retention wasn't good. Our poor retention was mapped by just an incredible surge in top-line user growth. And for Periscope, it was interesting because every month or two we would blow up in a new market that would just bring along an incredible surge in usage. We blew up in the US, we then blew up in France. We then blew up in Turkey. We then blew up in the Middle East and you had these incredible surges, but underneath that surge, the core product had retention issues and we ultimately just did not, we didn't spend enough time prioritizing, addressing those. And in fact, we shipped product changes that made those retention issues worse. Compounding that was the fact that one of the theses behind our acquisition, the Twitter acquisition, was that we would leverage the scale and the community and the product mechanics of Twitter to make the product grow faster and also become more durable. And I think that's connects to one of the reasons why I feel like one of my learnings and one of the things that we knew but just failed to execute on was that I still am very skeptical that there can be a consumer product that is just focused on live video, like a generalized synchronous live video application for short form video I don't think can be durable on its own. I think you have to surround that product with enough features and capabilities to allow a community and an ecosystem of users to be able to stay in touch with one another asynchronously and synchronously. This is why a lot of the other products that you mentioned that incorporate live capabilities and we're shameless about copying. What was working about Periscope, they're surrounded by a scaffolding that lets people also stay in touch with each other. Asynchronously Instagram, it's an asynchronous product that has synchronous features like live. Same with TikTok obviously. And I think we were in this position where it was a live only product. You are connecting with your audience and having a great time when you're broadcasting live, but you're not using the product to keep in touch with that community when you're not broadcasting. How often throughout the day would you broadcast live from your phone? And mind you, this is different for products that are live. There are live consumer products that focus on a specific vertical like whatnot for selling or Twitch for gaming that have very different properties that make it more durable as a standalone live product. e are live consumer products that focus on a specific vertical like whatnot for selling or Twitch for gaming that have very different properties that make it more durable as a standalone live product. But Periscope was really in this consumer generalized live-streaming from a phone land, and I think it was just not durable to have the product be live only. And the time it took us to integrate with Twitter was way too long. And there was reasons for that that come down to just how distracted Twitter was with its own roadmap and refining the core and they just had other fish to fry basically. And all of that leads us to competition because at some point Facebook woke up and decided this is cool and we need to go build this. And I obviously wasn't there on the inside, but legend has it, Mark says, "Hey, you 300 people, stop what you're doing. Go basically make live exist in our product as a first [inaudible 01:04:56] experience."…

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