The Exchanges

Q Now, um, I'd like to thank, obviously, Soraya Darabi for setting this up, uh, and I'd like to kick off by hearing about your start in the industry. We've got Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Zazzle, but where did it all start for you?

A You know, um, when I was graduating from Stanford, I really wanted to move back up to the Seattle area, and I was looking to find the most interesting private company back in 1997 that I thought could have a huge impact on the world, and I got super excited about real networks, or they were called progressive networks back then, um, making real player, real audio, which was trying to put audio and video on the internet. We take it for granted now that we can do all this stuff of audio video over the internet, but back then it was actually Pretty hard and complicated and new and different. Lucky, luckily enough, my cousin happened to work at Progressive Networks and, um, sent in my resume as a potential engineer graduating, and it went from there. I had some internships, but that was my first full-time job, was, was a programmer, and we got to ship the RealPlayer product to hundreds of millions of people around the world to get their first time listening to audio, watching video on the computer, and, um, I was working on the encoding technologies. It was, it was an amazing time and experience.

AI assessment note: “that was my first full-time job, was, was a programmer”

Q And then, which investor do you most look, ah, to and admire, emulate, admire, respect? Who's it for you?

A You know, the, the one that, that's been my mentor really across my career has been David Zee, who's my partner who now runs Greylock. I first met David when he invested in LinkedIn in, I think, 2004. And he was a former operator trying to find his way in the consumer internet. And what he really showed me was believing longterm, having a thesis and just becoming a great friend and partner to the CEOs he worked with. I watched him and Reed Hoffman, who's now another one of my partners at Greylock, just build this incredible lifelong friendship. As a VC, as a partner, and helping read, build LinkedIn, and as I kept going in my career, I always look back and said, how can I grow up to be that guy? And, and now I'm a partner with him at Greylock, and still trying to figure it out.

AI assessment note: “the one that, that's been my mentor really across my career has been David Zee”

Q And you said before about the onboarding process and how games do it very well in terms of kind of guiding you through and levels and killing one by. Can you, would you apply that then to Twissit and slowly adapting your learning to it?

A Yeah, so we used to talk at Twitter when I was there about what I called the ladder of engagement, which is how do we, through the process of revealing Twitter to you, get you step by step. Step one was understand what a tweet is. It might have a link, it might be a 140 characters, and it's a piece of information from another person. Step two is understand that following people makes your time, gives you a timeline. And if you don't follow people, you don't get a timeline. So teach you that the basic of Twitter is follow people, get tweets, read tweets. Third is get you to figure out, third was like, figure out how to get you to actually check your timeline fairly often and understand there's something new. When you're signing up for the first time, you might see a bunch of stuff. The magic of Twitter is when you come back 10 minutes later, and there's 10 minutes worth of new stuff that's still very live and very current. You come back two hours later, and it's two hours later, new information, fresh and very current, versus the newspaper, which is, you know, daily, doesn't update that often, Facebook, which is algorithm, works on some cycle. Twitter's magically new, two hours later. The third thing Um, once we got you that, it's how do you check it on your phone, check it on the computer, check it everywhere else. None of that is even before we get you participating. So we use…

AI assessment note: “Yeah, so we used to talk at Twitter when I was there about what I called the ladder of engagement”

Q Now, um, I'd like to thank, obviously, Soraya Darabi for setting this up, uh, and I'd like to kick off by hearing about your start in the industry. We've got Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Zazzle, but where did it all start for you?

A You know, um, when I was graduating from Stanford, I really wanted to move back up to the Seattle area, and I was looking to find the most interesting private company back in 1997 that I thought could have a huge impact on the world, and I got super excited about real networks, or they were called progressive networks back then, um, making real player, real audio, which was trying to put audio and video on the internet. We take it for granted now that we can do all this stuff of audio video over the internet, but back then it was actually Pretty hard and complicated and new and different. Lucky, luckily enough, my cousin happened to work at Progressive Networks and, um, sent in my resume as a potential engineer graduating, and it went from there. I had some internships, but that was my first full-time job, was, was a programmer, and we got to ship the RealPlayer product to hundreds of millions of people around the world to get their first time listening to audio, watching video on the computer, and, um, I was working on the encoding technologies. It was, it was an amazing time and experience.

AI assessment note: “that was my first full-time job, was, was a programmer”

Q And then at what stage did you decide to, to switch sides of the table and join the world of VC from the operating world?

A I mean, after real networks, I worked at LinkedIn for a couple of years, Zazzle for a couple of years, Facebook for a couple of years, we got to work on launching Facebook connect, Twitter. I joined them and got to, it's about 80 people when I joined and we got to work on user growth from, you know, up to a hundred million users. I, I mean, I get to see these companies go from really small to now these companies like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter at least that are huge. And then, you know, I honestly got kicked out of Twitter. You know, I, I, uh, in some of the turmoil of Twitter, they were restructuring the product team and, and asked me not to go to work the next day. And so, um, you know, at that point I was like, well, what do I do next? I've gotten to see these amazing companies grow, you know, over my career, multiple different companies at different stages, but all very early. You know, LinkedIn was, 15 people when I joined, Twitter was maybe 80 something, you know, Facebook was maybe 500 something, and now they're all giants. And so, so I thought, well, what's a job where I could sort of do what I've done over my career, but maybe in parallel instead of serially?

AI assessment note: “I honestly got kicked out of Twitter... And so, at that point I was like”

Q And you said before about the onboarding process and how games do it very well in terms of kind of guiding you through and levels and killing one by. Can you, would you apply that then to Twissit and slowly adapting your learning to it?

A Yeah, so we used to talk at Twitter when I was there about what I called the ladder of engagement, which is how do we, through the process of revealing Twitter to you, get you step by step. Step one was understand what a tweet is. It might have a link, it might be a 140 characters, and it's a piece of information from another person. Step two is understand that following people makes your time, gives you a timeline. And if you don't follow people, you don't get a timeline. So teach you that the basic of Twitter is follow people, get tweets, read tweets. Third is get you to figure out, third was like, figure out how to get you to actually check your timeline fairly often and understand there's something new. When you're signing up for the first time, you might see a bunch of stuff. The magic of Twitter is when you come back 10 minutes later, and there's 10 minutes worth of new stuff that's still very live and very current. You come back two hours later, and it's two hours later, new information, fresh and very current, versus the newspaper, which is, you know, daily, doesn't update that often, Facebook, which is algorithm, works on some cycle. Twitter's magically new, two hours later. The third thing Um, once we got you that, it's how do you check it on your phone, check it on the computer, check it everywhere else. None of that is even before we get you participating. So we use…

AI assessment note: “we used to talk at Twitter when I was there about what I called the ladder of engagement”

Q And then kind of considering the next kind of medium for social media innovation, where are you looking at? Are you looking at kind of voice? Are you looking at, uh, video, um, messaging? Where, where's it for you, the next wave?

A You know, the, the short answer is if I knew I would already be there, you know, I've got, I've got some really exciting bets. I made an investment recently in a company that's trying to build a social network around gaming and voice gaming, and people, when you're playing, it's called Discord, and when you're playing League of Legends or Dota or Counter-Strike, you all jump on Discord and talk to each other, and then you can engage with each other after the game, and it's really trying to redefine how gamers connect in this live, live way, and one of the things I got excited about Discord is I think this live We're actually spending time together. We're, we're doing the same thing at the same time connected by the power of the internet. It's something that can be facilitated at a much bigger level. I still think there's a ton to do around video and creating video and sharing video and being in the moment with each other through video that hasn't all been exposed. And you're seeing musically and Triller and lots of things kind of explode and sort of around video creation. You know, Magisto has been there for a long time. It was a really interesting video creation app. Like, we don't even know what it means now. We know what it means when everybody has a camera in their pockets. We still don't even think about when everybody has a video camera in their pockets, what that's going…

AI assessment note: “I made an investment recently in a company that's trying to build a social network”

Q into your speciality now, which is consumer software. And a lot of people, when they hear consumer software, think of Fred Wilson's post on the mobile downturn and how difficult it is for consumer mobile. Um, so what's your take on, on the consumer mobile, uh, ecosystem itself? Why do you, do you think it's so hard? And as hard as he said, um, what are your thoughts on this?

A Well, look, I think we have more ways, more people connected to each other faster than ever before. Like, everybody has a phone in their pocket. We can communicate all kinds of things. On the other end, we have more ways to really connect and talk to our friends than ever before. So if you're building a new friend communication app, there's a lot of other things people are already using to do it that have to be displaced. On the other hand, I think we all are craving a whole bunch of different ways to connect that still aren't there. I looked at the explosion of something like Peach or the explosion of apps like Musical.ly as saying there's still room in mobile if you tap into something new. Peach maybe hasn't tapped into everybody yet. Maybe it will over time, and it's found an interesting base, but it sure showed how many people want to try something new, see if there's new ways to emotionally connect with other people around us. I think people who unlock that have the chance to reach hundreds of millions of people than ever before, but you truly have to be different. It has to be profound. It has to access a part of the way that we interact with each other or people that we want to interact with that we aren't that we haven't so far. I've been tracking some apps to help you go out with other people and say, Hey, I want to just hang like there. That's like such a core human b…

AI assessment note: “there's a lot of other things people are already using to do it that have to be displaced”

Q And then, and then the second question from that is, you mentioned that Twitter, and I was actually at Twitter yesterday with a friend of mine, Jeff Cybert, uh, and, and he, I asked him what I should ask you. And he said, I want Josh to, to answer, what would you do with Twitter today? What would you change about the product? This is from him, not from me.

A That's great. And, and, you know, I'm, I'm a huge fan of Jeff and his work and what they're trying to do to, to take Twitter the next direction. No, I think, I think Twitter, I mean, it's such an amazing product when you get Twitter set up, and you are following people that are interesting to you, that hit multiples of your passions, you open Twitter, and your timeline is, is just one after the other, a tweet from somebody you care about, or about one of your passions, or about another one of your interests, or news that's important to the world, and then another one of your passions, I like sports, I like Broadway, I like, you know, movies, I like, you know, certain artists, and every time I open Twitter, I get this great mix of all of that All in one stream. Most people cannot figure out how to get their Twitter tuned. I call it tuning your Twitter feed in the same way that I have. And so I really think what they can do to make Twitter much, much easier is help people tune it much more broadly. If you're into tech, let's help you just say, I'm into tech, not figure out which VCs, founders, reporters, you know, publications to follow, but just say, I'm into this kind of tech. And like, we can get pretty discreet. Are you into consumer techs? Are you into startups? Are you into You know, mobile apps. Are you into games? Are you into, you know, social products? And we can get yo…

AI assessment note: “what they can do to make Twitter much, much easier is help people tune it”

Q into your speciality now, which is consumer software. And a lot of people, when they hear consumer software, think of Fred Wilson's post on the mobile downturn and how difficult it is for consumer mobile. Um, so what's your take on, on the consumer mobile, uh, ecosystem itself? Why do you, do you think it's so hard? And as hard as he said, um, what are your thoughts on this?

A Well, look, I think we have more ways, more people connected to each other faster than ever before. Like, everybody has a phone in their pocket. We can communicate all kinds of things. On the other end, we have more ways to really connect and talk to our friends than ever before. So if you're building a new friend communication app, there's a lot of other things people are already using to do it that have to be displaced. On the other hand, I think we all are craving a whole bunch of different ways to connect that still aren't there. I looked at the explosion of something like Peach or the explosion of apps like Musical.ly as saying there's still room in mobile if you tap into something new. Peach maybe hasn't tapped into everybody yet. Maybe it will over time, and it's found an interesting base, but it sure showed how many people want to try something new, see if there's new ways to emotionally connect with other people around us. I think people who unlock that have the chance to reach hundreds of millions of people than ever before, but you truly have to be different. It has to be profound. It has to access a part of the way that we interact with each other or people that we want to interact with that we aren't that we haven't so far. I've been tracking some apps to help you go out with other people and say, Hey, I want to just hang like there. That's like such a core human b…

AI assessment note: “there's a lot of other things people are already using to do it that have to be displaced.”

Q Well, I have two big questions from that then. What were, A, what were the biggest learning curves from watching those companies go into hyper growth mode, serious hyper growth mode to the hundreds of millions of users for you first?

A You know, the, the biggest learning for me is it really does take a village to build a company, and you have to spend as much time just being really deliberate about everything you do and saying, hey, will this help us reach our goals of hundreds of millions of people? And every decision, when you frame every decision that way, it changes your decision sometimes. You don't think short term, and you don't try to just make the quarter, or you don't try to just address this one person who's like barking in your ear, but you really think, is this the right Framework to try to answer this question so that when we get the next thousand questions, we'll be able to actually answer them all underneath the same framework. If not, let's actually debate the framework more rather than just keep making one off decisions. And when you're going through that transition of, I mean, at the very beginning, you try to get everything working one off, one at a time, you know, you actually do those things that are very unscalable. And then when you start to hit that hyper growth, you have to make every decision in the context of, Will this scale?

AI assessment note: “the biggest learning for me is it really does take a village to build”

Q And then kind of considering the next kind of medium for social media innovation, where are you looking at? Are you looking at kind of voice? Are you looking at, uh, video, um, messaging? Where, where's it for you, the next wave?

A You know, the, the short answer is if I knew I would already be there, you know, I've got, I've got some really exciting bets. I made an investment recently in a company that's trying to build a social network around gaming and voice gaming, and people, when you're playing, it's called Discord, and when you're playing League of Legends or Dota or Counter-Strike, you all jump on Discord and talk to each other, and then you can engage with each other after the game, and it's really trying to redefine how gamers connect in this live, live way, and one of the things I got excited about Discord is I think this live We're actually spending time together. We're, we're doing the same thing at the same time connected by the power of the internet. It's something that can be facilitated at a much bigger level. I still think there's a ton to do around video and creating video and sharing video and being in the moment with each other through video that hasn't all been exposed. And you're seeing musically and Triller and lots of things kind of explode and sort of around video creation. You know, Magisto has been there for a long time. It was a really interesting video creation app. Like, we don't even know what it means now. We know what it means when everybody has a camera in their pockets. We still don't even think about when everybody has a video camera in their pockets, what that's going…

AI assessment note: “I made an investment recently in a company that's trying to build a social network”

Q And then at what stage did you decide to, to switch sides of the table and join the world of VC from the operating world?

A I mean, after real networks, I worked at LinkedIn for a couple of years, Zazzle for a couple of years, Facebook for a couple of years, we got to work on launching Facebook connect, Twitter. I joined them and got to, it's about 80 people when I joined and we got to work on user growth from, you know, up to a hundred million users. I, I mean, I get to see these companies go from really small to now these companies like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter at least that are huge. And then, you know, I honestly got kicked out of Twitter. You know, I, I, uh, in some of the turmoil of Twitter, they were restructuring the product team and, and asked me not to go to work the next day. And so, um, you know, at that point I was like, well, what do I do next? I've gotten to see these amazing companies grow, you know, over my career, multiple different companies at different stages, but all very early. You know, LinkedIn was, 15 people when I joined, Twitter was maybe 80 something, you know, Facebook was maybe 500 something, and now they're all giants. And so, so I thought, well, what's a job where I could sort of do what I've done over my career, but maybe in parallel instead of serially?

AI assessment note: “what's a job where I could sort of do what I've done over my career, but maybe in parallel”

Q And then, and then the second question from that is, you mentioned that Twitter, and I was actually at Twitter yesterday with a friend of mine, Jeff Cybert, uh, and, and he, I asked him what I should ask you. And he said, I want Josh to, to answer, what would you do with Twitter today? What would you change about the product? This is from him, not from me.

A That's great. And, and, you know, I'm, I'm a huge fan of Jeff and his work and what they're trying to do to, to take Twitter the next direction. No, I think, I think Twitter, I mean, it's such an amazing product when you get Twitter set up, and you are following people that are interesting to you, that hit multiples of your passions, you open Twitter, and your timeline is, is just one after the other, a tweet from somebody you care about, or about one of your passions, or about another one of your interests, or news that's important to the world, and then another one of your passions, I like sports, I like Broadway, I like, you know, movies, I like, you know, certain artists, and every time I open Twitter, I get this great mix of all of that All in one stream. Most people cannot figure out how to get their Twitter tuned. I call it tuning your Twitter feed in the same way that I have. And so I really think what they can do to make Twitter much, much easier is help people tune it much more broadly. If you're into tech, let's help you just say, I'm into tech, not figure out which VCs, founders, reporters, you know, publications to follow, but just say, I'm into this kind of tech. And like, we can get pretty discreet. Are you into consumer techs? Are you into startups? Are you into You know, mobile apps. Are you into games? Are you into, you know, social products? And we can get yo…

AI assessment note: “make Twitter much, much easier is help people tune it much more broadly”

Q What would you say? You said there's been many challenges and, you know, there's difficulties every year. What's the biggest you face now, would you say?

A I think there's two big challenges. One is there's so much opaqueness. Like there's so little transparency on both sides of the equation between what founders are doing and how VCs think and how both think. I love podcasts like yours that try to start to get this out more into the open and try to make it realize like this isn't about this side of the table, that side of the table. It's We're really trying to find just a match on somebody on your team. People spend days, hours, weeks trying to hire the right candidate, and putting somebody on your board, giving somebody a big chunk of your company for dollars, that's somebody that you're going to be calling at night when there's problems, that's actually more important of a hiring decision, so to speak, than actually just hiring a great engineer or even a great executive. And yet, I think some people treat it like a financial transaction. I think so, like, when you start to realize, like, how do we work together? How does, what does it mean to have somebody On your board, who's really in your corner, who really is part of your team versus somebody who just wrote you a check. And now they're observing you at board meetings and they're giving you advice, but they aren't necessarily somebody you would have wanted to hire, bring into your company. I think that fixing that is sort of one big challenge. I see a lot of founders try to …

AI assessment note: “I think there's two big challenges. One is there's so much opaqueness.”

Q What would you say? You said there's been many challenges and, you know, there's difficulties every year. What's the biggest you face now, would you say?

A I think there's two big challenges. One is there's so much opaqueness. Like there's so little transparency on both sides of the equation between what founders are doing and how VCs think and how both think. I love podcasts like yours that try to start to get this out more into the open and try to make it realize like this isn't about this side of the table, that side of the table. It's We're really trying to find just a match on somebody on your team. People spend days, hours, weeks trying to hire the right candidate, and putting somebody on your board, giving somebody a big chunk of your company for dollars, that's somebody that you're going to be calling at night when there's problems, that's actually more important of a hiring decision, so to speak, than actually just hiring a great engineer or even a great executive. And yet, I think some people treat it like a financial transaction. I think so, like, when you start to realize, like, how do we work together? How does, what does it mean to have somebody On your board, who's really in your corner, who really is part of your team versus somebody who just wrote you a check. And now they're observing you at board meetings and they're giving you advice, but they aren't necessarily somebody you would have wanted to hire, bring into your company. I think that fixing that is sort of one big challenge. I see a lot of founders try to …

AI assessment note: “I think there's two big challenges. One is there's so much opaqueness.”

Q Well, I have two big questions from that then. What were, A, what were the biggest learning curves from watching those companies go into hyper growth mode, serious hyper growth mode to the hundreds of millions of users for you first?

A You know, the, the biggest learning for me is it really does take a village to build a company, and you have to spend as much time just being really deliberate about everything you do and saying, hey, will this help us reach our goals of hundreds of millions of people? And every decision, when you frame every decision that way, it changes your decision sometimes. You don't think short term, and you don't try to just make the quarter, or you don't try to just address this one person who's like barking in your ear, but you really think, is this the right Framework to try to answer this question so that when we get the next thousand questions, we'll be able to actually answer them all underneath the same framework. If not, let's actually debate the framework more rather than just keep making one off decisions. And when you're going through that transition of, I mean, at the very beginning, you try to get everything working one off, one at a time, you know, you actually do those things that are very unscalable. And then when you start to hit that hyper growth, you have to make every decision in the context of, Will this scale?

AI assessment note: “the, the biggest learning for me is it really does take a village”

Q by kind of social media and the integration of offline and online. So, you know, from Tinder swiping right to meeting someone in a bar. Uh, and that, that happens very much. So with, with one of your investments operator, you know, messaging to actually transactions. So, so talk to me about that and the business model and the scalability of that. I mean, are we looking at AI humans?

A Well, well, look, I think, um, it's great that you ask about operator operators. The other thing that I think is going to finally happen now that all humans are connected and we're so used to messaging each other, it's time to get our relationship with our businesses to be just as, As sort of forward thinking and be as easy as a text away. You know, with operator, you know, our big vision there is how do we help you get connected to the right expert? You know, you want to buy something and then, you know, 20 years ago before e-commerce, you would actually have to go to a store. And what was neat about, say, 80% of the stores you would go to, especially if you're looking for, like, electronics or shop or fashion or, or furniture or something, is you would meet somebody who on the floor is theoretically an expert. They're a sales associate. They're actually Able to help you and go, that looks great on you, or you don't want these speakers, you want these, and you know, maybe you trusted them, maybe you didn't, but, but overall, they were there to help, and they were really supposed to be trained in what they were doing, and I remember going to the comic book store and having the comic book store owner be able to tell us which things were new. Hey, I'm kind of bored. I've been reading all of these. They would point you to a new X-Men series that you might not have found out about,…

AI assessment note: “some of that will be AI that we help route you to the right person”

Q by kind of social media and the integration of offline and online. So, you know, from Tinder swiping right to meeting someone in a bar. Uh, and that, that happens very much. So with, with one of your investments operator, you know, messaging to actually transactions. So, so talk to me about that and the business model and the scalability of that. I mean, are we looking at AI humans?

A Well, well, look, I think, um, it's great that you ask about operator operators. The other thing that I think is going to finally happen now that all humans are connected and we're so used to messaging each other, it's time to get our relationship with our businesses to be just as, As sort of forward thinking and be as easy as a text away. You know, with operator, you know, our big vision there is how do we help you get connected to the right expert? You know, you want to buy something and then, you know, 20 years ago before e-commerce, you would actually have to go to a store. And what was neat about, say, 80% of the stores you would go to, especially if you're looking for, like, electronics or shop or fashion or, or furniture or something, is you would meet somebody who on the floor is theoretically an expert. They're a sales associate. They're actually Able to help you and go, that looks great on you, or you don't want these speakers, you want these, and you know, maybe you trusted them, maybe you didn't, but, but overall, they were there to help, and they were really supposed to be trained in what they were doing, and I remember going to the comic book store and having the comic book store owner be able to tell us which things were new. Hey, I'm kind of bored. I've been reading all of these. They would point you to a new X-Men series that you might not have found out about,…

AI assessment note: “whether that's some of that will be AI that we help route you”

Q And then before we dive into a quick fire round, I want to talk about you and kind of your investing pieces itself now. So how have you seen that honed and refined over the years now since you joined Greylock?

A It's a great question. I've been at, I've been at Greylock four years, and every year it's a whole new set of challenges. The markets change. The opportunities change. I'm constantly thinking about what's, um, what's different. But I think, you know, what I'm looking for is Great founding teams with a big vision of what they want to take over the world, where they've just figured out that thing that's starting to work, where they have this thesis that this thing, this thesis we have on how the world should behave differently. We've now figured out how to get it working in one community, in one area with one set of people. And we want, you know, your help, you know, Josh Graylock, you know, all of us to help us build the company and scale this product up to tens or hundreds of millions of people.

AI assessment note: “every year it's a whole new set of challenges. The markets change.”