Weil: Rigid product strategies require product-market fit; early startups pivot frequently
Kevin Weil · Kevin Weil: Lessons from Leading Product at Instagram & Twitter | 20VC #934 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Oct 7, 2022 · at 18:08
Kevin Weil, Operator in Residence at Scribble Ventures and former Head of Product at Twitter and Instagram, discusses how product strategy differs for early-stage startups versus mature companies.
0:00 / 0:13exact quote · 13.1s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Like you invest in the early stages in companies and they're going to pivot three times before they find anything. So laying out a strategy and sticking to something, it assumes that you have some degree of product market fit.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Kevin Weil
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.”
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.”
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…”
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…”
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…”
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.”