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
7 transcript-backed records
01 / 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.”
02 / 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.”
03 / 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.”
04 / 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.”
05 / 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.”
06 / 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.”
07 / 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.”