Sriram Krishnan: evaluation

Transcript context

…And I've done two startups. The second one I did, three years in, we still sort of were struggling and trying to figure out what we were doing. So I mean, I feel like founders just need some time to breathe in and figure out what to go do. So I'm bullish on Clubhouse, I think they'll figure it out and Paul and Rohan are great founders. They've been doing social stuff for over a decade plus and so they've got to figure it out. And I know that it's like, they get this thing on, "Oh, they were really hot during the pandemic. Is this a pandemic fad versus not?" I don't know, it's a product at the end of the day and you're going to have to find product market fit and I think they'll figure it out. Yeah. The broader question of how do social products acquire the users is super interesting. One of my favorite pieces written on this is Eugene Wei's Status as a Service. Eugene should absolutely be on your podcast someday. It's a 10,000 word piece, which is amazing and highly suggest people read it. But one of the key takeaways from that piece is the idea that when you have a new network, think of it as a new country, you want the high status people and high status mean they're interesting, people want to be where they are in some shape or form because they have money, they're smart, they're cool, they're good-looking, whatever it may be and you want to get them onto your network. And there's exactly an interesting corollary that they're often underserved by other existing platforms. And because if they're already well-served, they wouldn't want to move to you. And Eugene doesn't talk about it, but if I look at say the history of all the three, four large social media companies, you've seen this pattern. For example, they've often each had a breakout set of stars who are unique to the platform. For example, if you look at say Snapchat, you had folks like Kylie Jenner who really broke out first. If you look at Instagram, I would think The Rock, Cristiano Ronaldo, a lot of others are organic to Instagram. But let's say you get to TikTok. One of the things you'll see is a lot of the folks from the Instagram world rarely move to TikTok and there's a couple of reasons. One, they didn't really need to because they were already popular on some of these other existing platforms, but two, TikTok actually took advantage of a different set of skillsets. People who are really good on video, people who could dance, be funny. And so you saw the rise of Charli D'Amelio and Addison and so many others who are different. So every single time, I think you need to go after a set of people who are high status who are also underserved. So coming back to Clubhouse, I think one of the interesting things is I think these celebrities are super interesting, but what is more interesting for me is all the homegrown folks. I actually consider us as a part of that, we would not be here doing the show if it wasn't for Clubhouse. There are many folks who had that original launch using the platform, so I think for folks here who are thinking about social platforms, it's interesting about okay, you need interesting people from elsewhere, but you also need homegrown talent. And by the way, you are a perfect example of this phenomenon because you are Substack's homegrown talent and I think you bring a lot of value to Substack. And there are a lot of people with huge newsletters, et cetera, but I think your rise and your popularity is so tied to Substack now and that's actually a great example of all of this. Yeah. It reminds me, the founder of Musical.ly who turned into TikTok has a great story. I think you've heard his talk about this, how the way he thought about it is there's all these successful people on Instagram, that's Europe, and the people you can convince to come to America are not the kings of Europe, but they're the peasants that are like, "Oh, we have a new opportunity to rise and become a king or a queen." And so those are the people you pull in, the people not doing well on another platform that want to do well versus the people already killing it.…

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