Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Books, apps, and tools
book / likes
“I love a book called Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss, which is more like a fantasy book, but I just love escaping reality and thinking about sci-fi, thinking about fantasy is just, it's helpful for the soul and helpful for the imagination. So those are some of my favorite reads because it helps me.”
book / likes
“I love reading sci-fi. I just feel like sci-fi and mystery books are so healthy for jogging the imagination. And so some of my favorite books are by Neal Stephenson, I love Cryptonomicon. I love Reamde. I love a book called Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss, which is more like a fantasy book, but I just love escaping reality and thinking about sci-fi, thinking about fantasy is just, it's helpful for the soul and helpful for the imagination. So those are some of my favorite reads because it helps me. I feel like in some weird circular or wandering way, it helps me be more creative and imaginative. And by the way, that's true outside of reading as well. Some of the content that has shaped me, I feel like and help motivate my curiosity and a lot of things I built is sci-fi TV, right? Star Trek is incredible. We used to use as a metaphor for what Periscope was, we would think about Star Trek. It'd be really cool to be able to teleport or get beamed somewhere else in the world and we're not smart enough to go build that device, but what's the closest approximation to that that we can realize through software? Live streaming. So I think that kind of literature or content has always been inspirational for me and I think getting that through books is really healthy.”
book / likes
“I love reading sci-fi. I just feel like sci-fi and mystery books are so healthy for jogging the imagination. And so some of my favorite books are by Neal Stephenson, I love Cryptonomicon. I love Reamde. I love a book called Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss, which is more like a fantasy book, but I just love escaping reality and thinking about sci-fi, thinking about fantasy is just, it's helpful for the soul and helpful for the imagination. So those are some of my favorite reads because it helps me. I feel like in some weird circular or wandering way, it helps me be more creative and imaginative. And by the way, that's true outside of reading as well. Some of the content that has shaped me, I feel like and help motivate my curiosity and a lot of things I built is sci-fi TV, right? Star Trek is incredible. We used to use as a metaphor for what Periscope was, we would think about Star Trek. It'd be really cool to be able to teleport or get beamed somewhere else in the world and we're not smart enough to go build that device, but what's the closest approximation to that that we can realize through software? Live streaming. So I think that kind of literature or content has always been inspirational for me and I think getting that through books is really healthy.”
Claim ledger
20 transcript-backed records
01 / recommendation
“I love reading sci-fi. I just feel like sci-fi and mystery books are so healthy for jogging the imagination. And so some of my favorite books are by Neal Stephenson, I love Cryptonomicon. I love Reamde. I love a book called Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss, which is more like a fantasy book, but I just love escaping reality and thinking about sci-fi, thinking about fantasy is just, it's helpful for the soul and helpful for the imagination. So those are some of my favorite reads because it helps me. I feel like in some weird circular or wandering way, it helps me be more creative and imaginative. And by the way, that's true outside of reading as well. Some of the content that has shaped me, I feel like and help motivate my curiosity and a lot of things I built is sci-fi TV, right? Star Trek is incredible. We used to use as a metaphor for what Periscope was, we would think about Star Trek. It'd be really cool to be able to teleport or get beamed somewhere else in the world and we're not smart enough to go build that device, but what's the closest approximation to that that we can realize through software? Live streaming. So I think that kind of literature or content has always been inspirational for me and I think getting that through books is really healthy.”
02 / recommendation
“I love a book called Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss, which is more like a fantasy book, but I just love escaping reality and thinking about sci-fi, thinking about fantasy is just, it's helpful for the soul and helpful for the imagination.”
03 / recommendation
“I love a book called Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss, which is more like a fantasy book, but I just love escaping reality and thinking about sci-fi, thinking about fantasy is just, it's helpful for the soul and helpful for the imagination. So those are some of my favorite reads because it helps me.”
04 / belief
“You can do whatever you want with it. So, that was conflicting for a bit, but I would say towards the end of the year, it was pretty clear in my mind that I was ready to move on and start thinking about other problems.”
05 / belief
“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.”
06 / belief
“The thing that I find is both very illustrative and helpful is just asking people to talk about something they worked on that failed and talk about something they built that succeeded as well. But I think you just learn a lot about self-reflection and their passions.”
07 / belief
“I'm not sure I would've been able to articulate it as succinctly as you did just now, but I think that is the feeling that I had that it's not my place anymore.”
08 / belief
“Either you have an incentive problem but the team did what they were incentivized to do or that there was bad judgment and that's a different problem obviously. But I think in the situation we found ourselves in where the team was again understandably hyper focused on driving DAU because that was the strategy for so long.”
09 / belief
“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...”
10 / belief
“I think that's probably what Scott meant when he said, "You should ask Kayvon about that," was that I think we both kind of recognized that something's about to happen here.”
11 / evaluation
“That last one is a huge pet peeve of mine that I feel like we learned the hard way, and particularly it's a common pattern I think in highly functional organizations where you have different people making decisions on how to staff projects, and there's nothing inherently wrong with that. But I think in the situations, in the situation we found ourselves in where we had this sort of cultural evolution that we were going through where some people just didn't agree with the things that we were prioritizing, they were begrudgingly going along with it, but you would end up in a situation where the combination of that sort of cultural shift and strategy and the fact that the way teams were being staffed was not, there's ultimately no single decision maker other than the CEO and Jack is not going to get in the weeds and debate a staffing decision on the team, resulted in a situation where oftentimes we'd have projects, like the one I mentioned about hiding replies, where there wasn't even an agreement on the team about whether this was a good idea and whether this is worth trying or how to do it.”
12 / commitment
“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.”
13 / recommendation
“I think if you're going to have a functional organization, you need to have a GM or a CEO who's extremely leaned-in to tiebreak and resolve conflict and make sure the team is moving quickly.”
14 / evaluation
“" I think there was an incredible opportunity in that that now you have this organization and this product and this incredible ecosystem that can be devoid of all the political bullshit associated with being a public company.”
15 / evaluation
“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.”
16 / evaluation
“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.”
17 / prediction
“I think that's Elon's going to Elon in his way, and I think he certainly has had some radical moves in terms of how he's running the company, the decisions he made, how many people he let go, how the company is structured, the culture, and all that stuff is like ...”
18 / evaluation
“One of our key metrics that we always optimized Shriram growing was DAU and we had obviously the rank timeline did wonders for growing DAU and it was a great experience for many customers, but we often had features that would not lead to a good customer experience and the team would just be blind towards leaving hostile customer experiences in place because it was good for metrics and aggregate.”
19 / evaluation
“By the way, in the same way as, and I think Twitter had this problem as well prior to our detour around Jobs-to-be-Done, if the only way the organization is trained to think about what to build and what not to build is OKRs, it's equally unhelpful at the limit because sure, you can have a good sense of what you should build to drive metrics, but by the way, you might be focusing on the wrong metrics or that might not help you have the right balance of things to build.”
20 / evaluation
“You can't scream in my face basically. And I remember we had a PM on our team who was leading this feature who a few weeks into this project mentioned to me that she had had a conversation with someone on the engineering team that told them, "Don't work on this feature.”