Jul 24, 2023 · 1h 27m · news
Adam Mosseri: Why Video Is Bad For Business; Does Feed Matter Anymore? | E1039 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In this interview, Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri joins Harry Stebbings to discuss Instagram's structural evolution toward messaging and Reels, the strategic launch of Threads, his core management principles, and the personal challenges of balancing a high-profile executive role with fatherhood and family life.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Harry holds 17.7% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Harry as informed peer 4.7 Guest teaching 5.8 Guest disagreement 1.9 Harry pushing back 4.5
speaking balance: gold is Harry, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 36:00 Defending Meta against the 'copy machine' label
Mosseri shows his highest pushback energy when Stebbings asks if Meta is just an efficient copy machine, forcefully reframing format adoption as competitive willingness to evolve.
Hardest push from Harry ▶ 36:00 Asking if Meta is a copy machineStebbings delivers his most direct, unvarnished challenge, setting aside friendly intro rapport to ask Mosseri point-blank if Meta is simply an efficient copying operation.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 21:03 Explaining the shift from Feed to DMs and StoriesMosseri educates Stebbings on underlying usage metrics, revealing that teens consume far more media in DMs and Stories than Feed, demonstrating why recommendations were necessary to save Feed.
Harry holds his own ▶ 32:11 Drilling into the 12-month mistake on ReelsStebbings drills into product strategy and sunk costs, forcing Mosseri to acknowledge losing 9 to 12 months by incorrectly building Reels on top of Stories.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Harry as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Harry pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Transitioning from Design to Product Leadership | 5 | 4 | 2 | 6 | Stebbings asks blunt questions regarding Mosseri's early career, pressing on how a 'middle of the pack' designer rose to Director level. Mosseri candidly explains that his reliability and internal execution focus set him apart from more talented but unmanageable peers. | |
| Management Philosophy, Delegation, and Communication | 5 | 5 | 2 | 5 | Stebbings contrasts Mosseri's communication focus with a quote from Spotify leadership on velocity over talk. Mosseri reframes leadership messaging as akin to ad frequency, requiring constant repetition to move large orgs. | |
| Career Advice for Transitioning ICs | 4 | 6 | 1 | 4 | Mosseri provides advice for ICs seeking leadership and recounts the intense emotional burden of losing Instagram's entire leadership suite within his first year. Stebbings guides the narrative thoughtfully without heavy challenge. | |
| Lessons from Founders and Culture Shifts | 5 | 5 | 2 | 4 | Stebbings asks about the delicate transition of taking over a founder-led company. Mosseri details Kevin Systrom's advice to focus on winning product outcomes rather than internal noise, citing his decision to integrate safety systems into Meta. | |
| Managing Controversial Product Decisions (The Panavision Backlash) | 4 | 6 | 2 | 4 | Mosseri reflects on the public 'Panavision' redesign backlash, admitting he became a meme for a week. Stebbings asks how Mosseri resolves internal ideological clashes between competing product philosophies. | |
| The Evolution of Instagram Feed, Stories, and Messaging | 5 | 7 | 2 | 4 | Mosseri educates Stebbings on user shift patterns across Feed, Stories, and DMs, demonstrating why recommendations were necessary to prevent Feed decay. Stebbings listens attentively as Mosseri drops platform analytics. | |
| Product Prioritization and the Illusion of Simplicity | 6 | 6 | 3 | 6 | Stebbings challenges Mosseri on whether simple design is always superior and complains about needing eight taps to navigate back to the main feed. Mosseri admits the app has grown too complex and agrees unshipping features is required. | |
| Unshipping the Activity Feed and Managing DMs | 4 | 5 | 2 | 5 | Stebbings presses Mosseri to name specific features to unship. Mosseri recounts retiring the Activity Feed due to low usage and user privacy discomfort, while sharing anecdotes of personally replying to complaints on Reddit. | |
| The Strategy and Sunk Cost Regrets of Reels | 6 | 7 | 2 | 6 | Stebbings probes into the strategic pivot behind Reels and the sunk cost of lost time. Mosseri admits losing up to 12 months by incorrectly building the first version of Reels on top of Stories as one of his biggest regrets. | |
| Competition, Sustainable Trends, and the 'Copy Machine' Label | 6 | 7 | 4 | 8 | Stebbings delivers the sharpest probe of the interview, asking if Meta is fundamentally 'a very efficient copy machine'. Mosseri defends Meta's ethos, admitting aggressive competitiveness and willingness to adopt industry-standard formats. | |
| The Hype, Sign-ups, and Graph-Bootstrapping of Threads | 6 | 7 | 2 | 5 | Stebbings brings questions from top product leaders about bootstrapping Threads' graph from Instagram. Mosseri breaks down the technical and product rationale behind allowing users to port their social graph while enabling it to fork. | |
| The Symbiosis of Interest Graph, Reels, and Messaging | 6 | 7 | 3 | 6 | Stebbings challenges Mosseri with a guest's claim that social graphs are useless for content recommendations compared to interest graphs. Mosseri refutes the binary distinction, explaining how Reels and DM sharing form a synergistic flywheel. | |
| The Creator & Influencer Strategy for Threads | 5 | 6 | 2 | 4 | Stebbings inquires about Threads' influencer activation. Mosseri reveals they targeted specific non-tech verticals without paying creators and explains how Apple App Store rules forced an emergency midnight launch in the UK. | |
| Living in the UK, Sleep Deprivation, and Family | 5 | 6 | 2 | 5 | Stebbings presents a critique framing Threads' strategy as 'importing the landed aristocracy'. Mosseri rejects the framing while emphasizing Instagram's role as the most critical platform for creator diversification. | |
| Retaining Users on Threads and Complying with EU Law | 5 | 6 | 2 | 5 | Stebbings presses on Threads retention and EU expansion timing. Mosseri reveals European deployment will take months due to stringent data compliance and verification requirements. | |
| Management at the Top: Zuckerberg's Influence and Lean Teams | 5 | 6 | 3 | 6 | Stebbings asks whether Mosseri is a politician or a CEO. Mosseri discusses internal management dynamics, self-deprecatingly describing himself as a 'glorified shit umbrella' and noting Mark Zuckerberg's push for a standalone Threads app. | |
| The Economics of Text Feeds and Defining Threads' Success | 6 | 7 | 1 | 4 | Stebbings asks about monetization variances between video and text feeds. Mosseri explains that text feeds possess extraordinary monetization efficiency surpassed only by search due to high hourly consumption rates. | |
| Work-Life Balance and Personal Priorities | 4 | 5 | 1 | 3 | Stebbings shares personal vulnerability about balancing intense work with personal life. Mosseri offers empathetic personal reflection, sharing his yearly nightly mantra for keeping family and personal priorities centered. | |
| Advice on Fatherhood and Marriage | 3 | 6 | 1 | 3 | Stebbings asks for fatherhood advice. Mosseri reframes childbirth as merely a 'race to the starting line' and argues that a father's main job in early years is supporting the mother. | |
| Understanding Love Languages | 3 | 5 | 1 | 2 | Stebbings and Mosseri lightheartedly discuss love languages. Mosseri reads an extended excerpt from a Hunter S. Thompson letter about choosing a path based on process rather than static external goals. | |
| Quick-Fire: Evolving Views on Generative AI | 5 | 6 | 1 | 3 | Stebbings asks about recent mindset shifts. Mosseri notes becoming significantly more bullish on generative AI, focusing on how LLMs optimize executive and operational workflows rather than consumer chatbots. | |
| Quick-Fire: Becoming CEO of Disney for a Day | 4 | 5 | 2 | 4 | Stebbings asks rapid-fire questions about CEO choices and harsh feedback. Mosseri selects Disney and recounts harsh early career feedback at Facebook where a manager corrected his lack of focus. | |
| Quick-Fire: Meeting Roger Federer and Ryan Reynolds | 3 | 4 | 1 | 3 | Stebbings asks who Mosseri wants to meet. Mosseri shares an amusing story about refusing Roger Federer's request to demonstrate his tennis swing at a New York club. | |
| Quick-Fire: Defining Personal Success | 3 | 5 | 1 | 2 | Stebbings closes by asking for Mosseri's definition of personal success. Mosseri reflects on the scarcity of time and his desire to look back with pride on how he allocated his energy. |
Statements from this episode (43)
Mosseri Reallocated Instagram's Entire Stories Team to Messaging
“Actually, at one point, a couple years ago, I think I put the entire stories team on messaging.”
Instagram Users Share More Media in DMs Than Feed or Stories
“If you take out all the text, there are more photos and videos shared in DMs than there are shared in stories. And there's way more shared in stories than there is in feed.”
Early Facebook Design Team Had 8 to 12 Independent Designers
“When I first started, We had this amazingly talented group of designers, I don't know how many there were, eight, somewhere between eight and 12 of us, and they just did whatever they wanted.”
Only One in Eight Meta Employees Reads Leadership's Internal Posts
“We make a post Internally, and one out of eight employees reads it, and we move on with our lives, and we're surprised when the whole company doesn't move along with us”
Leaders Must Repeat Strategic Directives Until It Feels Excessive
“If you really want to move the team on something, you need to say it until so many times that you literally want to throw up in your mouth if you say it again, and then you need to say it again, and again, and it can be Tough, because you can feel like you're …”
Overusing Executive Veto Power Prevents Retaining Top Creative Talent
“If you do that too much, you stifle creativity, you don't create enough space, you cannot hire or retain the most creative and interesting talent, so you have to use that sparingly.”
Mosseri Rebuilt Instagram's Leadership Team Across Nine Functions in Year One
“So my first year, I had to hire a head of design, engineering, product management, data science, research, HR, communications, marketing, and a COO.”
Market Success Drives Team Morale More Than Internal Communication
“Over the long run, the thing that's going to get people the most rallied, the most excited, the most motivated, the most effective is doing good work and being successful.”
Facebook's Safety Team Was Larger Than Instagram's Total Headcount
“The safety and integrity work, we were running too much of our own stuff and not leveraging the much larger teams at Facebook and in the central teams. I think there were more engineers that worked on safety and integrity at the company at the time that then w…”
Instagram's Five-Year Growth Was Driven Entirely by Stories and DMs
“All of the growth has been in, in stories and in DMs over the last five years or so. And to the degree there is growth in feed, it's all in video, it's not in photos in a lot of ways.”
Feed Is Only the Third Most Important Instagram Surface for Teens
“If you look at how teens spend their time on Instagram, they spend more time in DMs than they do in stories, and they spend more time in stories than they do in feed. Yet people think of Instagram as a feed, and it's the third most important Surfers at best. M…”
Instagram Notes Drove Significant Teen Engagement Despite Low Adult Adoption
“Notes are, you know, basically aim status, but better looking at the top of the inbox. Anybody above 20, like, doesn't use them very much. Unbelievable how much they've moved Instagram engagement overall, app level engagement for teens.”
Instagram Prioritizes Young People and Creators Above All Other Segments
“And for us, we care about young people, and we care about creators most.”
Simplicity in Product Design Is Not Always the Best Choice
“But I think to say it's always better is a mistake. I think of simplicity as a means to an end, and you have to be clear about what that end is. Maybe it's usability, maybe it's broad appeal, but I think that it's possible. There are instances where a more com…”
Adam Mosseri Admits the Instagram App Is Currently Too Complicated
“The app is too complicated. I mean, let's be serious. They are, the, I think it's gotten more simple over the last 12 months or so. We consolidated some of the design patterns and primitives, removed some of the tabs, but we still have more to do.”
Less Than One Percent of Instagram Users Used the Activity Feed
“It was what, it was probably a small, it was a, it was less than one percent of the users who used it, but that's still, you know, millions of people.”
Reels Is Approaching 50% of Total Time Spent on Instagram
“Reels is, I don't know, maybe pushing 50% of time spent in the app at this point. Not quite there.”
Adam Mosseri Claims Instagram Is Growing Faster Than Any Major Competitor
“We're growing really fast. I think we're growing the fastest of the big players.”
TikTok Is the Most Well-Executing Competitor Meta Has Ever Faced
“They're, I think they still are the most well-executing competitor I think we've ever faced. There's a couple others that are up there, but they're, I think, at the top of that.”
Adam Mosseri Praises Telegram's Speed, Execution, and Ability to Pivot
“The other in the video space, yeah, the other folk who are really fast and really good and I respect a lot is Telegram. Telegram is just, the, that team is just really good, they build something really well, and they can pivot quickly, and when they decide to …”
Meta Adopts Competitor-Pioneered Formats When They Become Industry Standards
“I think we're very good at optimizing things, and I think that we are willing to, when somebody pioneers a new format, to go and adopt that format if we think it's going to become an industry standard.”
Frequent Profile Picture Updates on Early Facebook Inspired Photo Sharing
“Early Facebook days, before we had photos, people just kept changing their profile picture. Like every day, multiple times a day. I'm like, oh, sounds like people want to share photos. Maybe we should build that.”
The Average Consumer Installs Zero New Apps Per Month
“The median number of new apps, I read this somewhere, installed a month, is zero for the average person.”
Meta Will Build an Instagram-Threads Social Graph Sync Option
“We will build over time, I think, a graph sync option. So if you want Just to have the same graph, you can, and we can make sure that stays in sync for you.”
Threads Would Not Have Succeeded Without Instagram Graph Bootstrapping
“And I think that's, it is no way it would have been as successful if you had to bootstrap the graph from scratch.”
Video Is Good for Time Spent but Bad for Revenue
“Yeah, and so the thing that I think people don't always realize is video, by its nature as a format, is actually really challenging for all the old social networks. It puts a lot of downward pressure on the ads business, because if you watch one video for 10 s…”
Prior Facebook and Instagram Video Products Hurt User Connection
“And so the fact that video, growing video has massively grown sends, which is a pure friend-to-friend interaction, even not even, even if you take out the real shares, because they start conversation, I might send you a funny, you know, football clip, and then…”
Feed Products Like Twitter Are Heavily Dominated by Key Creators
“Feeds are very head heavy in general, and so is text. So basically that's to say that you have to assume that Twitter and other feed products in general tend to have most of the content is consumed by a small number, sorry, most of the content consumed is prod…”
Threads Launch Targeted Fashion, Music, and Sports Over News or Tech
“We weren't going after tech, we weren't going after news, we weren't going after politics. We were focused on musicians. We're focused on fashion. We're focused on athletes. We're focused on beauty”
YouTube Is the Best Platform for Sustained Creator Revenue Payouts
“YouTube is the best at You know, doing sustained, consistent payouts with their ref share program, because long form video is, I think, a lot more conducive to that.”
Instagram Is the Most Popular Platform Among Creators Overall
“Instagram is the, it's the most popular in the creator community, as far as we can tell. So the most creators use it.”
Maintaining Platform Cultural Relevance Matters More Than Raw User Count
“I care every bit about, every bit as much about making sure that the, even, maybe even more, that the platform is culturally relevant than the, sort of, the big number of users.”
Directly Paying Every Creator Destroys a Social Platform's Business Model
“You can't just pay everybody who's a creator, because if there's tens of millions of creators, that just adds up to money that's going to just completely destroy your business model. So you have to figure out ways to give them tools to make money, in my opinio…”
TikTok Creator Payouts Are Unpredictable Lottery Checks Compared to YouTube
“If you're kind of getting these lottery-type checks, I think it gets much more harder to plan. I think that's a common complaint I've heard about how TikTok's payments compare to YouTube's payments, for instance, which are much more predictable.”
Facebook's Retention Benchmark Was 6 Friends in Japan, 106 in Indonesia
“That number for Facebook back in the day varied wildly by country. Like in Japan it was like six, and in Indonesia it was a 106 or something bonkers.”
Mark Zuckerberg Pushed to Launch Threads as a Standalone App
“Like, for instance, on Threads, he was the one who was like, you guys should just try to build a separate app. And we were really trying to figure out a way to do it in the main app, because it seemed like It would be much more likely to succeed, and he was by…”
Meta Built Threads With Only 50 Engineers and Three Product Managers
“The team really properly formed a little less than five months ago, or five months ago. We started working on it a little before, but the team didn't really form properly until maybe five months ago. Dozens. Fifty-something engineers. Three PMs, three designer…”
Text Feeds and Search Have the Highest Monetization Efficiency in Tech
“A text-based feed is about the highest monetization efficiency of any sort of online business I've seen. I think that and search are basically the two. Just because the number of things you consume per hour is just incredibly high because it's so light.”
Threads Will Focus on Creator Sharing and Retention for the Next Year
“So it'll be, the two things I'll focus on most for the next year will be the creator community, specifically, not only how many of them use the app, but how many of them share the app as a place for their creativity, and then retention for the average user.”
Adam Mosseri Uses LLMs to Summarize Performance Feedback and Edit Writing
“I write pretty detailed reviews for my reports every six months and so I don't have AI write it, but I have it take a first pass at summarizing all the feedback to make sure I didn't miss anything. I will sometimes Give it a piece. I do a lot of writing at wor…”
BeReal Has Struggled to Expand Beyond Initial Viral Attention
“I think it's a really powerful mechanic. I think it's it was an amazing moment. I think it was, like, incredibly culturally relevant. I think when that, when you have that explosive growth like that, that you just focus a hundred percent on just keeping the li…”