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Kayvon Beykpour

Co-founder & CEO, Macroscope · 1 appearance on the record, plus 1 compilation re-air.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

founderexecutiveinvestoroperator@kayvz ↗LinkedIn ↗beykpour.com ↗

Kayvon Beykpour co-founded the live-streaming app Periscope, which was acquired by Twitter in 2015, where he served as Head of Product and GM of Consumer until 2022. Today, he is the co-founder and CEO of Macroscope and actively angel invests in early-stage tech companies.

17statements → 2claims → 0claims resolved → 3.79/5average certainty → 2/5average debate potential → 4.3/5argument clarity · the sources → 8said about them ↓

2 not checkable as stated how the 2 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

2 assertions · 1 opinion · 11 insights · 3 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 2 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 0 are resolved, and 2 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Kayvon argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Argument clarity: do they answer the question? how? →

4.3 / 5 directness 4.6 · coherence 4.7 · precision 4 · compression 3.6

redirected or did not address 5 of 36 assessed questions (14%). Watch them ▸

This is a score against a rubric. It is not a rank. Every host question → answer exchange is scored with names hidden on directness, coherence, precision and compression, 1–5 each, on meaning alone: disfluencies are ignored, and only raw unedited episodes count. This is the score that measures thought. Every scored exchange, scores shown → · The rubric and its checks →

How they sound: speaking style how? →

279 words/min while actually speaking · 29.8 um and uh per 1k words · 16.5 false starts per 1k · 34.8% of pauses land inside a clause

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 9,318 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

How the interview went all their pushback → series average →

Across 2 rated episodes:

host pushback ▾ 0.5/10
pushed back at the host 1/10
setup questions received 88%

Everything Kayvon Beykpour said on 20VC that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Insight
Beykpour: Executive Overrules in Product Reviews Signal a Broken System
“Assume everything you hear from like leadership at product reviews, including from my mouth directly is just feedback and input and not a directive unless explicitly stated otherwise. Like in the five percent of time that we make a decision that is overruling …”
Kayvon Beykpour Jun 8, 2022 ▶ 35:36 Kayvon Beykpour: How to Structure and Manage the Best Product Reviews | 20VC #894 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Beykpour: The product-market fit for live video is hanging out, not news broadcasting
“That is not the product market fit use case. That is the exception use case. The product market fit use case is people use live video to hang out.”
Kayvon Beykpour Jun 8, 2022 ▶ 46:11 Kayvon Beykpour: How to Structure and Manage the Best Product Reviews | 20VC #894 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Beykpour: Big-tech PMs struggle at early startups due to excess structure
“Sometimes see like folks that have only worked at larger companies struggle with this because they're so used to having a lot of structure and clarity around like, okay, my job is this and therefore my expectations are this.”
Kayvon Beykpour Feb 3, 2023 ▶ 47:08 20Product: When to Hire a CPO, The Three Different Types of CPO, How To Know What You Need, How To Structure the Hiring Process, What Are the Must-Ask Questions, What Tests and Case Studies Should Be Used, How Should Their Compensation Package Be Structur
Insight
Beykpour: Waiting too long to fire bad hires is founders' biggest mistake
“I think the most classical mistake is actually not in Making hiring mistakes, but in making the mistake of waiting too long to realize you made a mistake, right? Like that's in my experience, the way harder thing.”
Kayvon Beykpour Jun 8, 2022 ▶ 25:53 Kayvon Beykpour: How to Structure and Manage the Best Product Reviews | 20VC #894 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Opinion
Beykpour: Periscope's biggest mistake was defaulting broadcast retention to persist indefinitely
“I think one of the biggest mistakes we made with Periscope Is we changed the default Sort of data retention to persist indefinitely.”
Kayvon Beykpour Jun 8, 2022 ▶ 44:19 Kayvon Beykpour: How to Structure and Manage the Best Product Reviews | 20VC #894 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Beykpour: Product reviews serve two customers: product teams and leadership
“I think there's like two customers for a product review. There's the team that's a customer, and then there's like the leadership team that's a customer.”
Kayvon Beykpour Jul 6, 2022 ▶ 24:26 20 Product: The Ultimate Guide to Product Reviews: What Makes the Best vs the Worst | How Often Should They Be | Who Should Be Invited | Who Sets The Agenda | How to do Follow-Ups Post Product Reviews
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Beykpour: Simple projects at Twitter required dozens of cross-functional team members
“Whereas like, if you bring that out to Twitter scale, most projects, even the simplest projects at Twitter could potentially have dozens of people working on them. And then complex projects have hundreds of people, right?”
Kayvon Beykpour Jun 8, 2022 ▶ 16:42 Kayvon Beykpour: How to Structure and Manage the Best Product Reviews | 20VC #894 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Beykpour: Startups need a PM when teams become purely reactive to fixes
“Well, I think one signal is if the team is constantly reacting to what the product needs. Like if you're constantly underwater and the things you end up prioritizing are the things that you learn really late are broken. And you're not feeling like you can be p…”
Kayvon Beykpour Jun 8, 2022 ▶ 18:04 Kayvon Beykpour: How to Structure and Manage the Best Product Reviews | 20VC #894 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Beykpour: People who need extreme clarity cannot thrive at startups
“There's so many ambiguities of being at an early stage startup and it is not a role. It's, it is not an environment where people who need extreme clarity can thrive in, I believe, right?”
Kayvon Beykpour Jun 8, 2022 ▶ 21:52 Kayvon Beykpour: How to Structure and Manage the Best Product Reviews | 20VC #894 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Beykpour: Product Reviews Serve Two Customers, the Team and Leadership
“I think there's like two customers for a product review. There's the team. That's a customer. And then there's like the leadership team. That's a customer.”
Kayvon Beykpour Jun 8, 2022 ▶ 29:24 Kayvon Beykpour: How to Structure and Manage the Best Product Reviews | 20VC #894 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Beykpour: Product managers must explicitly ignore certain customer feedback
“And your job as a team and as a product manager is to take all that input in. And make organization and prioritization out of chaos. You cannot react to all the things you should not react to all the things. And you should have a well-tuned barometer about kno…”
Kayvon Beykpour Jun 8, 2022 ▶ 37:12 Kayvon Beykpour: How to Structure and Manage the Best Product Reviews | 20VC #894 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Beykpour: Leadership should distill product review feedback into written bullet points
“And so one of the things we've started doing and maybe there are better ways of doing it, but this is just like the way we've adjusted doing it is after the pro after we have the live product review, we have a debrief as a leadership team. 15 minute debrief wh…”
Kayvon Beykpour Jun 8, 2022 ▶ 40:00 Kayvon Beykpour: How to Structure and Manage the Best Product Reviews | 20VC #894 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Beykpour: Angel investors shouldn't give unprompted product feedback
“Angel investing as someone who's very, who has strong opinions and convictions around Building product is, is, is always tricky business. Cause you have to know that you're so far from the details and you're, you shouldn't necessarily volunteer your perspectiv…”
Kayvon Beykpour Jun 8, 2022 ▶ 49:56 Kayvon Beykpour: How to Structure and Manage the Best Product Reviews | 20VC #894 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Disclosure
Beykpour: Twitter leadership distills product reviews into 4-5 written bullets
“After we have the live product review, we have a debrief as a leadership team, a fifteen-minute debrief, where we try and, amongst ourselves, say, alright, we just talked about a lot of stuff. What's the most useful feedback we can, like, clarify and write dow…”
Kayvon Beykpour Jul 6, 2022 ▶ 32:30 20 Product: The Ultimate Guide to Product Reviews: What Makes the Best vs the Worst | How Often Should They Be | Who Should Be Invited | Who Sets The Agenda | How to do Follow-Ups Post Product Reviews
Disclosure
Beykpour: Periscope reduced live stream latency to sub-five seconds
“Technically what that meant is we had to take what was sort of industry standard as like tens of seconds, if not more of latency and bring it down to like sub five seconds.”
Kayvon Beykpour Jun 8, 2022 ▶ 11:10 Kayvon Beykpour: How to Structure and Manage the Best Product Reviews | 20VC #894 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Beykpour: Twitter Held Three 45-Minute Executive Product Reviews Weekly
“So in terms of like the what we have product reviews on a week or I host product reviews on a weekly basis. And the reason I say I is like cascading down our product organization. Some of our product leads have their own cadences around product reviews as well…”
Kayvon Beykpour Jun 8, 2022 ▶ 27:43 Kayvon Beykpour: How to Structure and Manage the Best Product Reviews | 20VC #894 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Disclosure
Scott Belsky wrote a substantial early seed check for Periscope
“Scott was like, I mean, I want to support you guys. He wrote us, I don't want to share how much the check was, but he wrote us a substantially sized check and was like, I want to be on the team and help you guys make this come to life.”
Kayvon Beykpour Jun 8, 2022 ▶ 2:36 Kayvon Beykpour: How to Structure and Manage the Best Product Reviews | 20VC #894 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings

The other half of the tape: Kayvon Beykpour's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 8 times in 5 episodes on 20VC. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Scott Belsky 4Harry Stebbings 3Rishi Garg 1

Every mention by year

tap a year for its mentions
0021322017201820192020202120222023episodesmentions
0122017201820192020202120222023episodes it came up in
001.51322017201820192020202120222023episodesmentions per episode
2023 1 mention in 1 episode
2022 3 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
2019 3 mentions in 1 episode
2017 1 mention in 1 episode

Appearances (2)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
20 Product: The Ultimate Guide to Product Reviews: What Makes the Best vs the Worst | How compilation Jul 6, 2022 9m
Kayvon Beykpour: How to Structure and Manage the Best Product Reviews | 20VC #894 · 20VC w Jun 8, 2022 44m
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