The Exchanges

Q Tough and direct one. Um, someone on the show said once that bluntly the social graph is terrible at predicting what you like, and just because your friends like it doesn't mean you like it, and that we have totally moved away from the friend graph, and the interest graph is the future of social. Do you agree with that, and that binary nature?

A No, I think it's too black and white. I do think there's tension. Uh, there's a lot of tension. There's, you know, who you care about and who you want to hear from are not the same. What you want your Instagram to be experienced to be if I ask you about in the abstracts over the long term is probably pretty different than what you'd like and interact with on a daily basis in the app. That's the tension between sort of first order and second order preferences. And so things are always a bit more complicated. The thing that's really working about Instagram right now with Reels Is the connection between the two. So, you can see a bunch of Amazing videos from people you know or don't know, um, but aren't necessarily your friends, and then you can share them with your friends in DMs, and that brings people, your friends, back to the app, and then they discover something, and then they might share it with someone else.

AI assessment note: “No, I think it's too black and white. I do think there's tension.”

Q What have you done from working with Mark? Speaking of, like,

A Mark? I mean, Mark has been really helpful in a couple different ways. Uh, Mark is always holding an incredibly high bar. I think his, one of his fears is that we fail hitting our goals all the way down, and so it's his, you know, you can crush it, and then he's like, Set that goal a little higher still. Set that goal a little higher still. And I think there's a, there's a real value to that, um, which is just like really, really setting a high bar. He's also very willing to take risks in a way that sometimes is infuriating, but I think is very good for the company over the long run. 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 far the most convicted early on, um, about taking a big threat.

AI assessment note: “Mark is always holding an incredibly high bar... He's also very willing to take risks”

Q If you're not great in your middle of the pack, how do you become director of design?

A Well, when I first started, it's better now, and it actually was better in 2012 to be fair, but 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. Like, it was one of those weird things where they were talented, they got really good work done, they worked really hard, and you would ask them to work on something, and they would smile and nod, and they would work on something else. Whatever they thought was the most important thing. Um, this is like, You know, Matt Cahill, and Saleo, and Blaise De Persia, and all these characters. And I was reliable, because I had a job before Facebook. I ran a small design firm. I was, like, used to having clients, and felt like I had a bias towards doing what the client asked for. So when I joined a company, I had a bias towards doing what my boss asked me for. And so, I think that helped me get a leg up.

AI assessment note: “I had a bias towards doing what my boss asked me for.”

Q Are there any that stand out to you?

A Yeah, definitely. I mean, look, you gotta make mistakes. I will say, I, like, so the biggest blow up was the press cycle the summer before last around what was called externally Panavision, which actually meant something different internally, and it was a confluence of a bunch of different changes that were happening at once, so it ended up being one of those words that people just projected onto it whatever they didn't like, and so it kind of took on a life of its own. So we were introducing Recommendations into feeds, so content that you, it's not from accounts you follow, very controversial. We were leaning into video, and, you know, our heritage is photos, also controversial. Creators were frustrated with their reach, and I think some of that was for good reason, some of it's because people always want more reach, and we were also experimenting with a pretty radically new design for the main tab. It just all was a little bit too much too fast, and it all kind of blew up in our face, and then there was an interaction between the creator community and the media, and it kind of ping-ponged, and then, um, I did a video explaining what we were doing, and then I became a meme for a week, which was fun. The Daily Show did a pretty, pretty funny, actually, but biting impression of me.

AI assessment note: “the biggest blow up was the press cycle the summer before last”

Q Tough and direct one. Um, someone on the show said once that bluntly the social graph is terrible at predicting what you like, and just because your friends like it doesn't mean you like it, and that we have totally moved away from the friend graph, and the interest graph is the future of social. Do you agree with that, and that binary nature?

A No, I think it's too black and white. I do think there's tension. Uh, there's a lot of tension. There's, you know, who you care about and who you want to hear from are not the same. What you want your Instagram to be experienced to be if I ask you about in the abstracts over the long term is probably pretty different than what you'd like and interact with on a daily basis in the app. That's the tension between sort of first order and second order preferences. And so things are always a bit more complicated. The thing that's really working about Instagram right now with Reels Is the connection between the two. So, you can see a bunch of Amazing videos from people you know or don't know, um, but aren't necessarily your friends, and then you can share them with your friends in DMs, and that brings people, your friends, back to the app, and then they discover something, and then they might share it with someone else.

AI assessment note: “No, I think it's too black and white.”

Q What have you done from working with Mark? Speaking of, like,

A Mark? I mean, Mark has been really helpful in a couple different ways. Uh, Mark is always holding an incredibly high bar. I think his, one of his fears is that we fail hitting our goals all the way down, and so it's his, you know, you can crush it, and then he's like, Set that goal a little higher still. Set that goal a little higher still. And I think there's a, there's a real value to that, um, which is just like really, really setting a high bar. He's also very willing to take risks in a way that sometimes is infuriating, but I think is very good for the company over the long run. 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 far the most convicted early on, um, about taking a big threat.

AI assessment note: “on Threads, he was the one who was like, you guys should just try to build”

Q Are there any that stand out to you?

A Yeah, definitely. I mean, look, you gotta make mistakes. I will say, I, like, so the biggest blow up was the press cycle the summer before last around what was called externally Panavision, which actually meant something different internally, and it was a confluence of a bunch of different changes that were happening at once, so it ended up being one of those words that people just projected onto it whatever they didn't like, and so it kind of took on a life of its own. So we were introducing Recommendations into feeds, so content that you, it's not from accounts you follow, very controversial. We were leaning into video, and, you know, our heritage is photos, also controversial. Creators were frustrated with their reach, and I think some of that was for good reason, some of it's because people always want more reach, and we were also experimenting with a pretty radically new design for the main tab. It just all was a little bit too much too fast, and it all kind of blew up in our face, and then there was an interaction between the creator community and the media, and it kind of ping-ponged, and then, um, I did a video explaining what we were doing, and then I became a meme for a week, which was fun. The Daily Show did a pretty, pretty funny, actually, but biting impression of me.

AI assessment note: “the biggest blow up was the press cycle the summer before last”

Q And so my, my question to you is like, bluntly, do you agree with that talk is cheap and inspiring that internal debate, or are you more like my mindset, which is bluntly velocity and get shit done, move fast?

A It's a balance, and this will feel like a cop out maybe to you, but, so I do think that you do, we, as a lead, you need to talk a lot. And I think people underestimate this. Um, it's just weird. We do it at our company. Our business model is ads and marketing. If you talk to anybody in that world, they'll tell you it's not just about the message, it's also about the frequency of how often you deliver that message. And then internally, we decide we're going to do something different. 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, and so I've tried to really embrace some advice I got early. Who was this from? I forget who it was. It'll come back to me, which was 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 again, and again, and it can be Tough, because you can feel like you're not being heard, or you can feel like you're being predictable, or just annoying, but the truth is people need to hear things multiple times to fully internalize them, and so I do think from the part of that quote that resonates is like, I do think you need to talk a lot. Um, now, I also think you need to be very clear about…

AI assessment note: “It's a balance, and this will feel like a cop out maybe to you”

Q You mentioned Kevin and Mike there. It's a very difficult thing taking over a founder-led company as a kind of new CEO. What are one or two of your biggest lessons, having done it now, very successfully with Instagram?

A I mean, one is actually some advice that Kevin and Mike gave me later. So Kevin and Mike, they were very supportive, and I was, and I'm very grateful to them for a lot of reasons, and I had a drink with them pretty, like, maybe six or nine months in, um, and I had spent a ton of time that year trying to make sure that the team was in a good place. There was a lot of anxiety with the founders leaving. Are we gonna get swallowed by the big company? Are we gonna lose our identity? And You know, I spent a lot of time trying to clarify our identity, to try to, you know, boost morale, team meetings, roundtables, Q&As, you know, all this kind of stuff. And Kevin, Kevin, Kevin's advice was, look, that's all nice, but really what's going to boost morale more than anything else is just doing really good work and succeeding in the market, and everything else is kind of noise. And, um, I don't think he said it quite that, um, And it's quite such a black and white way, but more or less that was the message. And I think he's right. I, I still value investing in org leadership and communication a lot. I spend a lot of time on it. I do weekly Q and A's with my whole team. But I really do think that 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, and, and being successful. And so I've been…

AI assessment note: “what's going to boost morale more than anything else is just doing really good work”

Q But, um, how do you determine between the two?

A I mean, I think you try to make sure that you're understanding what is the fundamental human need that's being met, and is that need gonna probably persist it or not? I mean, look, Instagram has changed a ton over the years, but we, but a lot of it stayed the same. You know, we've always been focused on inspiring creativity. We've always been focused on bringing people together, and how people share and how people entertain themselves has changed a lot, and so how we do those things needs to change with it, but those fundamental needs are the same, and so when you're looking at either a trend or a competitor or how someone's abusing or a community's abusing the app, you can learn a lot from how people abuse your app, um, you can Try and make sure that if there's the, if there's, if you can explain it not only as based on some sort of viral mechanic, but also based on it meeting a need in a better, in a fundamentally richer or better or different way, then you want to play in that space.

AI assessment note: “understanding what is the fundamental human need that's being met”

Q I, I love that. Can I ask, when you think about success with threads, what do you think success is to you? Do you have a Match right here at stake.

A For me, the thing I'm going to look at the most, um, is probably, for the verticals we care about most, what does the creator community engagement look like? Because I think that's going to be, that's going to be a bellwether for how big the app is over the longer run. And then, I mean, right now the thing I care about most is retention, is like, and it's, there's no good signal now, because it hasn't been long enough, and everyone who's signed up is, not everyone, but most of the people who've signed up have been early adopters, and they use Things differently. So we really just don't know yet. 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.

AI assessment note: “the two things I'll focus on most for the next year will be”

Q Can I ask, from a business perspective, how does the business and monetization potential differ when comparing the video visual of Instagram Reels versus the text-based nature of threads?

A I do think it's gonna be easier. I think it, I mean, the, the ad formats will be less immersive, uh, and I think that's, that's a, that's a cost, but it is 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. Um, just because the number of things you consume per hour is just incredibly high because it's so light. Which allows ads to really seamlessly integrate, and we, honestly, we fell into this business model with Facebook. We were, you know, we were putting ads in this sort of right-hand column on the side of the website, like, don't look over here, and the shift to mobile forced us to do it, and it ended up being one of the best businesses of all time.

AI assessment note: “a text-based feed is about the highest monetization efficiency of any sort”

Q What would you tell yourself before becoming that father?

A It's a race to the starting line. Before you have your first, you're so focused on the birth, because it's terrifying. Particularly, obviously, for the mom wants to actually do all the work. Um, but you're like, how's this gonna change my life? My brother, he was calling me a lot before he had his first, and I was like, trying to wrap his head around about how his life was gonna change. And I was like, this is the most absurd exercise. Like, you don't, the whole, having a kid means you can't plan for how your life is gonna change. All you know it's gonna change, it's gonna change a lot, and it'll continue to change. But we, we spend all this time focusing on the birth, focus on how much paternity leave, when to take it, how much paternity leave, when to take it. But this person's coming into your life for, for two decades. The more important thing is how are you going to adjust how you do what you do so you can be there for them for 18 years. Not do you take eight weeks or 12 weeks or 16 weeks of leaving year one that they're not going to remember. By the way, as a dad, your job is basically to take care of the mom. And so I would just say it's a race to the starting line. I was way too focused on day one and way, just, way not ready for the rest of it.

AI assessment note: “I was way too focused on day one and way, just, way not ready”

Q Was it difficult bringing in a whole new C-suite and making them gel together? This is hard.

A Yeah, um, it's, it's always, it's always a challenge. Uh, I, I've been lucky. I have an amazing team. Um, I've made a few mistakes in hiring, but for the, for the, The vast majority of those hires I made in that first year are still at the company and still in the positions at Instagram, but yeah, you have to kind of pick the people based on their skills, but also based on does the group end up with the set of skills you need from the group as opposed from each individual, and then you kind of have to also try and build that and pick people for whom they're going to have some chemistry without having them all be alike. And that's an art, not a science. So, you know, it's a, it's a work in project, uh, process, work in progress, but it's, I just think it's important to spend time on. I'm always working on figuring out how to increase the rapport and the trust within that senior-most team.

AI assessment note: “it's always a challenge. Uh, I, I've been lucky. I have an amazing team.”

Q Can you, like, is it the momentous decision that I'm suggesting it is? And can you take me to that decision? And was it just like a, we're gonna fucking go for TikTok?

A Yeah, I mean, it was, it was, I mean, Reels has been huge for us. Reels is, I don't know, maybe pushing 50% of time spent in the app at this point. Not quite there. And before Reels, we had short form video, right? And short form video was a big part of Instagram. But I don't think we had designed the format to really embrace the form factor of a phone. And I think, you know, Reels being full screen, um, sound on is more fun and immersive, particularly during the pandemic when you're not bothering anybody because you're home. Focus on creators, first person, all of these things were ways to embrace where the world is going and the platform on which we were building, and we hadn't leaned into all of that, and TikTok's rise was just meteoric after years of struggling, um, to get anything to be retentive, and when you see a competitor do something, I think it's super important to be humble enough to To learn from it, and sometimes that will mean building something that looks a lot like it, and sometimes it means figuring out what needs it's meeting and how you might meet those needs in a way that's more native to what you do, and then a range of options in between. We lost a whole year. I still go back to this. This is maybe one of my biggest regrets. The first version of Reels we built was built on top of stories, and it just didn't work.

AI assessment note: “when you see a competitor do something, I think it's super important to be humble”

Q Can I be rude and ask, do you think Like, a really important thing in terms of scaling from, you know, IC to leader is understanding that internal politics, and do you think you kind of understood it in a way that others didn't?

A Maybe a little. I think that it became clear to me that a lot of times, for the people who are senior at the, at the company, and I was not senior, what they really wanted was to be able to hand you a problem, and then not to hear Anything back from you until it was solved. And so I, I kind of made, like, I internalized this early, because that's kind of how I felt when I was a boss running my own design firm. And so I just remember with a couple people, I just was like, look, whenever I get handed something, I didn't tell them this, I was just like, okay, I'm gonna, I'm just gonna do it, and fix it, and do it well, and then they'll, they're not gonna hear back from me. Might be a day, might be a week, might be a month. Until the answer or the response is, I took care of that, just so you know. Uh, and so I definitely leaned into that, um, for a number of years.

AI assessment note: “Maybe a little. I think that it became clear to me”

Q And so my, my question to you is like, bluntly, do you agree with that talk is cheap and inspiring that internal debate, or are you more like my mindset, which is bluntly velocity and get shit done, move fast?

A It's a balance, and this will feel like a cop out maybe to you, but, so I do think that you do, we, as a lead, you need to talk a lot. And I think people underestimate this. Um, it's just weird. We do it at our company. Our business model is ads and marketing. If you talk to anybody in that world, they'll tell you it's not just about the message, it's also about the frequency of how often you deliver that message. And then internally, we decide we're going to do something different. 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, and so I've tried to really embrace some advice I got early. Who was this from? I forget who it was. It'll come back to me, which was 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 again, and again, and it can be Tough, because you can feel like you're not being heard, or you can feel like you're being predictable, or just annoying, but the truth is people need to hear things multiple times to fully internalize them, and so I do think from the part of that quote that resonates is like, I do think you need to talk a lot. Um, now, I also think you need to be very clear about…

AI assessment note: “It's a balance, and this will feel like a cop out maybe to you”

Q You mentioned Kevin and Mike there. It's a very difficult thing taking over a founder-led company as a kind of new CEO. What are one or two of your biggest lessons, having done it now, very successfully with Instagram?

A I mean, one is actually some advice that Kevin and Mike gave me later. So Kevin and Mike, they were very supportive, and I was, and I'm very grateful to them for a lot of reasons, and I had a drink with them pretty, like, maybe six or nine months in, um, and I had spent a ton of time that year trying to make sure that the team was in a good place. There was a lot of anxiety with the founders leaving. Are we gonna get swallowed by the big company? Are we gonna lose our identity? And You know, I spent a lot of time trying to clarify our identity, to try to, you know, boost morale, team meetings, roundtables, Q&As, you know, all this kind of stuff. And Kevin, Kevin, Kevin's advice was, look, that's all nice, but really what's going to boost morale more than anything else is just doing really good work and succeeding in the market, and everything else is kind of noise. And, um, I don't think he said it quite that, um, And it's quite such a black and white way, but more or less that was the message. And I think he's right. I, I still value investing in org leadership and communication a lot. I spend a lot of time on it. I do weekly Q and A's with my whole team. But I really do think that 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, and, and being successful. And so I've been…

AI assessment note: “what's going to boost morale more than anything else is just doing really good work”

Q Do you think Reels is better than TikTok?

A Eh, for certain segments, and not for others, like, TikTok is amazing at a couple things. They are amazing at, um, exploration-based ranking, so discovering new talent, and helping new talent break, right? You know, we, for a long time, had a strong bias towards showing people things that we were pretty confident they would like, because a lot of other people liked them, and it's easier to rank that kind of content, and that sort of reinforces the existing hierarchy. And TikTok was really good at building the systems from the ground up to be more content first, and to go find things that you might love that you never would have heard of before. And therefore, it was also just really entertaining. Really entertaining. Ah, it's really good. They're, they're the, 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, they're, I think, at the top of that.

AI assessment note: “Eh, for certain segments, and not for others”

Q And then you, you know, you, we look at quite a few of Facebook's kind of innovations, and Threads most recently. Is Facebook just a very efficient copy machine?

A 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. And I think stories is a good example. Stories is like, you see stories everywhere. Stories on YouTube. There were stories on Pinterest for a while. Um, obviously Twitter did it for a while. Uh, so I think that that is part of our DNA is that we are We are, we're competitive. We are always, we are, we are always worried that, and I think this is good, that the world will change around us, and we won't change fast enough to keep up. So we are willing to take risks that sometimes really blows up in our face.

AI assessment note: “willing to, when somebody pioneers a new format, to go and adopt that format”

Q But, um, how do you determine between the two?

A I mean, I think you try to make sure that you're understanding what is the fundamental human need that's being met, and is that need gonna probably persist it or not? I mean, look, Instagram has changed a ton over the years, but we, but a lot of it stayed the same. You know, we've always been focused on inspiring creativity. We've always been focused on bringing people together, and how people share and how people entertain themselves has changed a lot, and so how we do those things needs to change with it, but those fundamental needs are the same, and so when you're looking at either a trend or a competitor or how someone's abusing or a community's abusing the app, you can learn a lot from how people abuse your app, um, you can Try and make sure that if there's the, if there's, if you can explain it not only as based on some sort of viral mechanic, but also based on it meeting a need in a better, in a fundamentally richer or better or different way, then you want to play in that space.

AI assessment note: “understanding what is the fundamental human need that's being met, and is that need”

Q Did you expect the speed of adoption for threads?

A No, no. I mean, I thought we had something. Um, I, I think I did an, I did a pod with Kevin and Roos and Casey, and Kevin was asking questions about, like, you guys have launched a lot of separate apps, and they usually don't go so well. In fact, I can't think of anything he said. And he's like, what do you think of this? And I said, like, look, when you're launching a new app, it's, it's always more likely to fail than succeed. The median number of new apps, I read this somewhere, installed a month, is zero for the average person. So you're just, you're, you're swimming upstream. But I did say I was more excited about this one than I have been about anything in a while, but yeah, but I did, but I did want to recognize it was a big risk. And look, the numbers are staggering, but it's just signups. It's, it's way easier to build something that people are willing to try than build something that people want to continue to use in a month or a year from now. So, this is the best, this is day eight. This is the best first eight days I could have ever possibly imagined, but what really matters is how well do we iterate, how well do, how quickly to improve the experience so that it is compelling enough that people will continue to use it over the long run.

AI assessment note: “No, no. I mean, I thought we had something.”

Q Can I ask, from a business perspective, how does the business and monetization potential differ when comparing the video visual of Instagram Reels versus the text-based nature of threads?

A I do think it's gonna be easier. I think it, I mean, the, the ad formats will be less immersive, uh, and I think that's, that's a, that's a cost, but it is 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. Um, just because the number of things you consume per hour is just incredibly high because it's so light. Which allows ads to really seamlessly integrate, and we, honestly, we fell into this business model with Facebook. We were, you know, we were putting ads in this sort of right-hand column on the side of the website, like, don't look over here, and the shift to mobile forced us to do it, and it ended up being one of the best businesses of all time.

AI assessment note: “a text-based feed is about the highest monetization efficiency”

Q I, I love that. Can I ask, when you think about success with threads, what do you think success is to you? Do you have a Match right here at stake.

A For me, the thing I'm going to look at the most, um, is probably, for the verticals we care about most, what does the creator community engagement look like? Because I think that's going to be, that's going to be a bellwether for how big the app is over the longer run. And then, I mean, right now the thing I care about most is retention, is like, and it's, there's no good signal now, because it hasn't been long enough, and everyone who's signed up is, not everyone, but most of the people who've signed up have been early adopters, and they use Things differently. So we really just don't know yet. 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.

AI assessment note: “the two things I'll focus on most for the next year will be the creator community”

Q What would you tell yourself before becoming that father?

A It's a race to the starting line. Before you have your first, you're so focused on the birth, because it's terrifying. Particularly, obviously, for the mom wants to actually do all the work. Um, but you're like, how's this gonna change my life? My brother, he was calling me a lot before he had his first, and I was like, trying to wrap his head around about how his life was gonna change. And I was like, this is the most absurd exercise. Like, you don't, the whole, having a kid means you can't plan for how your life is gonna change. All you know it's gonna change, it's gonna change a lot, and it'll continue to change. But we, we spend all this time focusing on the birth, focus on how much paternity leave, when to take it, how much paternity leave, when to take it. But this person's coming into your life for, for two decades. The more important thing is how are you going to adjust how you do what you do so you can be there for them for 18 years. Not do you take eight weeks or 12 weeks or 16 weeks of leaving year one that they're not going to remember. By the way, as a dad, your job is basically to take care of the mom. And so I would just say it's a race to the starting line. I was way too focused on day one and way, just, way not ready for the rest of it.

AI assessment note: “I was way too focused on day one and way, just, way not ready”

Q Can I be rude and ask, do you think Like, a really important thing in terms of scaling from, you know, IC to leader is understanding that internal politics, and do you think you kind of understood it in a way that others didn't?

A Maybe a little. I think that it became clear to me that a lot of times, for the people who are senior at the, at the company, and I was not senior, what they really wanted was to be able to hand you a problem, and then not to hear Anything back from you until it was solved. And so I, I kind of made, like, I internalized this early, because that's kind of how I felt when I was a boss running my own design firm. And so I just remember with a couple people, I just was like, look, whenever I get handed something, I didn't tell them this, I was just like, okay, I'm gonna, I'm just gonna do it, and fix it, and do it well, and then they'll, they're not gonna hear back from me. Might be a day, might be a week, might be a month. Until the answer or the response is, I took care of that, just so you know. Uh, and so I definitely leaned into that, um, for a number of years.

AI assessment note: “Maybe a little. I think that it became clear to me that a lot of times”

Q Did you expect the speed of adoption for threads?

A No, no. I mean, I thought we had something. Um, I, I think I did an, I did a pod with Kevin and Roos and Casey, and Kevin was asking questions about, like, you guys have launched a lot of separate apps, and they usually don't go so well. In fact, I can't think of anything he said. And he's like, what do you think of this? And I said, like, look, when you're launching a new app, it's, it's always more likely to fail than succeed. The median number of new apps, I read this somewhere, installed a month, is zero for the average person. So you're just, you're, you're swimming upstream. But I did say I was more excited about this one than I have been about anything in a while, but yeah, but I did, but I did want to recognize it was a big risk. And look, the numbers are staggering, but it's just signups. It's, it's way easier to build something that people are willing to try than build something that people want to continue to use in a month or a year from now. So, this is the best, this is day eight. This is the best first eight days I could have ever possibly imagined, but what really matters is how well do we iterate, how well do, how quickly to improve the experience so that it is compelling enough that people will continue to use it over the long run.

AI assessment note: “No, no. I mean, I thought we had something.”

Q Yeah, like payments for replies. I'm like, where's my fucking payment, Elon?

A Yeah. I think you have to think long. I think paying, and the creators, for a lot of creators, it's a business, and I think we've been trying to figure out ways to support those businesses for a while now, but I think 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 opinion, and so we focus on things like subscriptions, which are relevant to a subset of creators, but that's growing. Um, facilitating branded content deals, that's actually going very well on Instagram, and we do some payments as well, but that's more for bootstrapping, and then for, you know, a segment that's creating real content that's really driving a lot of incremental value and revenue for, for Instagram. So, look, I think it's a, I think it's gonna get a bunch of attention for the next couple days, and, but I think it's hard if it's unpredictable. If you're trying to run a business, you kind of need to know That's roughly what you're going to make ahead of time, and if you're kind of getting these lottery-type checks, I think it gets much more harder to plan. I think that's, that's a common complaint I've heard about how TikTok's payments compare to YouTube's payments, for instance, which are much more pre…

AI assessment note: “you can't just pay everybody who's a creator, because if there's tens of millions”

Q Um, but I- Can I ask just, what did you take from your time at design on problem solving?

A So design, I think, is about Really, um, making sure you're incredibly clear about what problem it is that you're solving, articulating multiple solutions, figuring out how to effectively evaluate those solutions, figuring out how to really take feedback and sift through the noise and find the signal. And I think you can apply that to most anything. Um, and so I really, I really enjoyed that. I really enjoyed structured thinking and iteration, but also some creativity blended in there. But, like I said, I wasn't great at it. Um, wasn't great at it. And then, Brett Taylor was my boss, and I was the director of design for Mobile. This might be in 2012. And then he left.

AI assessment note: “making sure you're incredibly clear about what problem it is that you're solving”

Q What's the kindest thing anyone's ever done for you?

A Um, professional, ah, I had a, I had a really, really harsh boss when I first started at Facebook, and I thought I was doing, I thought I was just crushing, I was like, I was like working on these projects, high profile, I'd only been in the company a couple months, was doing mark reviews, all this stuff, and she said, you lack focus. And I thought I was so focused, I was like, all my hours were accounted for, and like getting all this stuff done, but I was spreading myself too thin over too many things, And, um, I had never had a boss before, and so, and she was not, like, you know, didn't have a caring disposition, let's say, but she's fucking smart, and she's like, you, she's like, you know, I think she said something like, you're not focused and your, your work isn't, is suffering for it, and I think that was like a real, I think because it's also your first couple months at a company, you're trying to establish yourself. It was like, it hit home in a way that it wouldn't have hit home, like, you know, three months after that. And it helped, I think, a lot over the long run.

AI assessment note: “she said, you lack focus... And it helped, I think, a lot”