Kayvon Beykpour: belief

Transcript context

…Kayvon, there's fractals of stories that I could infinitely follow. There's so much interesting stuff here. One that just stands out is this idea of the sacred cows become your future roadmap. It's like flipping it from here's the thing that we're all afraid of. No, this is not what we should be doing. I think that's really interesting and could be a lesson to people. The other is just, I love this point you made about the growth was most accelerant when you're just focusing on the core, that's what actually ... Like optimize, people bash on optimizing the existing experience and just micro-optimizing, improving, versus trying to take all these big, bold bets and experiments. Obviously, that's also valuable. But I think it's really interesting that that's what reignited growth and was responsible for growth for a while. And continue to be, by the way. One of the lines that we had to maneuver was creating a portfolio of bets where some of them were not speculative at all. We knew that if we continue to invest in ML and getting better with recommendations in the main feed and through notifications and things like improving the onboarding flow, it was rife with opportunity. You'd have really dumb things happen. We would learn. There was one just bizarre and incredible meeting we had where we finally had got more rigorous around instrumenting our onboarding flow. And we found that in a couple countries, like we had a bug with our SMS verification flow where we wanted to verify users who were signing up with a phone number and our telco integration to send SMS verification cards just wasn't working. And so a huge percentage of people signing up in the UAE and other countries just couldn't use Twitter. And so of course at the scale that we were operating in with hundreds of millions of users, you need to be able to refine the basic building blocks of the product, and that's going to lead to reliable growth. But we wanted to balance that with a portfolio of other bets and product improvements that would materially add new capabilities. And that was a balance that I don't think existed. And by the way, I don't think we nailed it either under my tenure, but it was the driving force of what I wanted to achieve, was to create a better balance that would result in evolving the product and introducing new capabilities. And so that's what we tried to do. In terms of what actually helped turn things around, things that I kind of gathered from what you shared so far, one is just building a little momentum, having some quick wins of new products that people start to get excited about. So creating more excitement down the, oh wow, we can actually try new things. There's also, it felt like there's a sense of trust that you built with Jack and execs of just like, okay, we can actually trust this team. Also, it feels like because growth started up, there's probably a sense of like, okay, we can try some new crazy ideas. It feels like another part of your strategy was [inaudible 00:34:56] hires and bringing in these entrepreneurial folks to take the lead on some of these big ideas. Can you talk about that? Was that something you actively thought about and was that a big part of the impact there?…

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