Kayvon Beykpour: commitment

Transcript context

…Correct, and contribute towards it. And off the wagon is like you're not at the company. And we didn't have an organizational structure that could allow for that, nor frankly, the fortitude. I include myself in this. I feel like I've learned a lot about how to make that determination. So I think we were terrible at that. And Elon is the whatever, if that's a spectrum, Elon is the opposite spectrum of that. His tolerance for people who are not aligned and his tolerance for low performance is famously extremely low. And I think it's one of the things that when I say A/B test, it's very interesting to see the extreme to which he has operated. And I think I've learned a ton around, we didn't have the organizational structure nor the fortitude to be swifter, and that made cultural change way slower. We still were able to change the culture, not as much as we should have, and certainly not as quickly as we should have or efficiently as we should have. Because by the way, a lot of high performers who are aligned with that desire to change and build, they don't have the, there's not like an equal distribution of patients. If you're extremely talented and you're dealing with organizational shit, you're going to go find someplace else that lets you do your craft and have impact. So it's very difficult. But anyway, going to your question, one of the things we found that was a really effective way of accelerating cultural change and also helping drive some of these product initiatives that were particularly speculative was doing small acquires. And really the benefit of that was, A, you bring in a founder type who is an entrepreneur, who drives urgency, who has ambition, who's ideally savvy enough to also work in the context of a large organization, which sometimes is a totally different skillset. I mean, it is a totally different skillset. And a lot of our most ambitious bets that were the riskiest and most misaligned with how the product worked or there was no easy staff to build on top of, a lot of those bets were driven by founders who we basically acquired and said, "Here, you are going to run this." And they believed in it. They were able to rally a team around them, and it's all the attributes of a startup, but with the canvas of a product that hundreds of millions of people use and more resources. So Spaces, Communities, Community Notes, called Birdwatch back then, these were all projects driven by ... Fleets, as well. These were all projects that were run by small teams led by entrepreneurs who we acquired, like Keith Coleman runs Community Notes, last Birdwatch. He actually was my predecessor. We acquired his company so that he could be the head of product. And then when he moved on from that role, he was extremely passionate about this idea of crowdsource moderation and letting people annotate misleading content on the platform without Twitter acting as a policeman. he moved on from that role, he was extremely passionate about this idea of crowdsource moderation and letting people annotate misleading content on the platform without Twitter acting as a policeman. And that was a very speculative bet that by the way, a lot of people thought, most people thought was a terrible idea. We gave Keith a little silo to go build this vision, and then it was our job to make sure that bet didn't get suffocated in the context of a big organization that would otherwise have not had patience for it. All of the community effort or the creator efforts started with Super Follows and tipping, and all these things were led by Esther Crawford, whose company we acquired and who had her own couple of viral moments with the Elon acquisition. But she's a phenomenal leader who, again, is a perfect example of balancing that entrepreneurial startup muscle with the savviness to be able to get things done at a large organization. Fleets was run by Mo Oladam, who's an entrepreneur, and Communities has gone through a few iterations obviously and still is in the product, but John Barnett and a team of people who we acquired from Chroma Labs. So I think that that story of acquiring hungry, ambitious founders and giving them responsibility and latitude is a success story of Twitter's. I mean, I'm a beneficiary of such a bet as well. My company Periscope was acquired, and I was given the responsibility to eventually lead the product team. So I feel like that we ended up realizing, both through the company's history and through learning, that this is actually a very effective way to drive cultural change and to deliver impact because you need a special type of person to be able to both operate within the existing structure and change the structure, to know when to use the system and to know when to fuck the system. And I feel like my whole life has benefited from other people taking bets on me like that, to the point that even I was like, "Really? You sure you want to?" And so I think I've enjoyed trying to pass the buck and do that for other people, and I've never regretted it. You always, taking a bet on people and especially throwing them in a deep end, which on paper they may be unqualified for, I think is one of the best ways of driving change. And by the way, supporting growth, you've learned so much more when you're thrown into the deep end than in other contexts. And so I think it's fantastic, it's an expensive strategy if you're going to go buy a bunch of companies, but it's a great strategy for the situation that we found ourselves in at Twitter. It feels like every big bet was one of these companies from the list that you just shared, and I'm glad you shared Periscope, obviously. That's a great example, too. I guess maybe just a follow-up question here, is there anything you learned about how to do this well? I know you talked about maybe creating a little silo for the team, because so many companies acquire and acquihire and they just go nowhere. So I guess just a two-part question, just like what are some tips for how to do this well at a company? And then, two, you also, we were talking offline about this previously and I think it's a really interesting point, that a lot of companies staff based on who's available versus who is right for the role, and let's wait until that person is there for us to bet on this. Can you just talk about lessons there?…

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