Kevin Weil, former Head of Product at Instagram and Twitter, discusses reference-checking tactics on 20VC.
What-if
Weil: Instagram Stories would have failed with a timid, experimental rollout
“If instead we'd done the timid thing and put it like in the back of a third tab and like, well, if people find it, we'll do a one percent experiment and maybe it'll work. Like it never would have taken off.”
What-if
Weil: Directly plopping Snapchat Stories into Instagram would have failed
“But I think if you had just taken stories and like plopped it in the middle of Instagram, it wouldn't have worked.”
Assertion Partly supported
US State Department asked Twitter to reschedule maintenance during Arab Spring
“Someone from the State Department reached out, and this is a public story, so I'm not saying anything that can't be said. Someone from the State Department reached out and said, wait, wait, you can't go down at, you know, two a.m. Pacific. That's the middle of…”
Insight
Weil: Effective organizations alternate leadership tiers between instigators and harmonizers
“You want alternating skills, just like you were saying, you want alternating skills, and he kind of classified people into, like, you know, are they kind of I'm trying to remember the word he used I don't remember, he had a provocative word for it, but basical…”
Disclosure
Weil passed on investing in former colleagues who built successful startups
“There are a couple of companies that I chose not to invest in because they were founded by people whose work that I just, that, that I worked with and for whatever reason in that environment weren't amazing. And so I made the assumption that that was them, not…”
Opinion
Weil: Venture capital industry is fifty-fifty on hard work versus hype
“Less hype, more hard work for founders. I think the industry's kind of fifty-fifty there, you know. Some people are in, like, hustling every single day for the right things and helping their portfolio companies, and others are not.”