Kayvon Beykpour: evaluation

Transcript context

…I think it's always about doing the right thing for the customer. Everyone has always been shameless to be shamelessly inspired by other people's ideas. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I think copying ideas can be done in poor taste and can be done with taste. I think some of the people who copied Periscope did so in poor taste, can't blame them. I wouldn't have done it the same way, but it worked. So you can't say it's the wrong thing. I think that it's possible to take ideas in good taste and take ideas in poor taste. And I think with Clubhouse, we actually had been working on audio. Audio was one of those bets I mentioned that we structured very separately with a team of people, many of which were the former Periscope team, that when we wound down Periscope, I felt very strongly that there was still something to the idea of synchronous conversations. Because one of the famous things that I think we botched with Periscope is that we always... Our dream and our vision for Periscope and how we talked about it was was a mechanism for teleportation. You could see through someone else's eyes and be teleported somewhere else. It was like that was the story we told ourselves. That was the thing that inspired Periscope. And to a certain extent, a lot of people did use the product for that way. You could go see what it was like someplace in the world where it was something amazing happening or civil unrest happening or some important moment happening with breaking news or otherwise. But it turns out the vast majority of our users were not using Periscope that way. It wasn't a rear-facing camera experience where you were showing someone the world, the vast majority of people were using it to just talk to other people. They were bored or they were lonely and they wanted to just have a conversation with other people. And it turns out video and audio is a very interesting way of doing that that allows for more nuance, more long-form conversation, more in-depth conversation, especially in contracts to Twitter, which has mechanics to really incentivize quick, snappy broadcasts that don't lead to much depth. And so when we shut down Periscope, we were like, man, we really need to enable a new form of conversation on Twitter that has some of those properties. And so we had a team that was working on a project that we sort of code named Hydra. Hydra because there were multiple heads on this monster and those heads are participants in a conversation. And so well before Clubhouse was on the map, we had many different iterations of both video and audio only experiences that just didn't feel right, weren't working right, but we felt like we were onto something. And when Clubhouse came on the map, it really re-centered, it put into focus a user experience that felt a lot more right and now give them complete credit for that. felt like we were onto something. And when Clubhouse came on the map, it really re-centered, it put into focus a user experience that felt a lot more right and now give them complete credit for that. Paul and Rohan and that team did an exceptional job crafting an experience that really enabled that mechanic and that premise of enabling these longer form conversations to shine. And so we did shamelessly seek inspiration from what they had done and what had worked and we put our own spin on it. The execution of Spaces within Twitter I think has some similarities, but also really took advantage of the mechanics that you had available to you in Twitter. It's a different product. And so we took the ideas that we felt were shortcuts to making the experience work and then we put our own spin on it. And so I have no problems with what we did there. And having had experienced the pain of not moving quickly enough with Vine from the outside and Periscope having lived that experience, we were not willing to not be the winner with this use case. It is one of the projects I'm most proud of that we worked on at Twitter because we were very radical in our execution. Hydra went from this tiny project that six people were working on that no one knew or care about to, we made Spaces as the number one priority of the company literally above any other project period. And we put a bunch of people on accelerating that product and making it come to life within Twitter. And a lot of that was having felt the pain and burn of fucking this up with Vine and Periscope. And so I'm really proud of our execution. And it was also really energizing. I hope for the company to see that, wow, we pulled that off. So yeah, it was good. It was nice to have that full circle experience and also nice that, personally, I love that aspects of Periscope continue living on within Twitter. I did not know that. That is extremely interesting. Speaking full circle, when I joined Clubhouse the first time, Paul was there introducing me to Clubhouse and exactly the way you described Periscope, so I feel like he drew some inspiration from you one step back.…

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