Kayvon Beykpour
Co-founder & CEO, Macroscope. On 2 shows, 2 appearances, plus 1 compilation re-air not counted. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
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.
2shows
2appearances
37statements
3resolved
2supported
0contradicted
67%fully supported
14said about them ↓ Everything Kayvon Beykpour said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Agrawal fired Beykpour the night Twitter signed the Musk term sheet
“The day after we get home from the hospital, Parag called me and said that he was letting me go, and that he was taking the team in a different direction. And that night, Twitter signed a term sheet with Elon to sell the company.”
Beykpour: Generalized live-only consumer video apps cannot be durable standalone products
“I still am very skeptical that there can be a consumer product that is just focused on live video, like a generalized synchronous live video application for short form video. I don't think can be durable on its own.”
Beykpour: Twitter spotted consumer trends early but repeatedly botched execution
“There's a pattern where Twitter is really great at spotting meaningful consumer behavior changes, right? Like they spotted Vine and acquired Vine, botched it, spotted Periscope, botched it. Just spotted Instagram, by the way, before, you know, Facebook tried t…”
Beykpour: Twitter undermined Vine by building a competing internal video stack
“They then competed with vine internally. So vine was a separate organization within, within Twitter, separate office, obviously in New York. And then Twitter, rather than like, Integrated holistically into the product and sort of pour gasoline on it. They buil…”
Beykpour: Twitter 'Shamelessly' Took Inspiration from Clubhouse for Spaces
“When Clubhouse kind of came on the map, it really re-centered, it put into focus a user experience that felt a lot more right, and I'll give them complete credit for that. They, you know, Paul and Rohan and that team did an exceptional job crafting an experien…”
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 …”
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.”
Beykpour: Cultural change requires removing employees not bought into the vision
“I think one of the really important things about driving cultural change
At the leadership level is you gotta identify whether someone's on the wagon or off the wagon and either quickly convince them to get on the wagon or if they're not on the wagon, like th…”
Beykpour: Amazon Burying Order Details in Confirmation Emails Is Customer-Hostile
“Amazon doesn't send you when you get older confirmation from Amazon, they intentionally bury the order details. It's like, click the link and authenticate to go see what you ordered. I don't give two shits what metrics that drive for Amazon. That is one of the…”
Beykpour: Twitter Reverted Reverse-Chron Feeds to Algorithmic to Drive Metrics
“You press the toggle, it turns you to reverse cron, and then we would pull the rug out from underneath you and make the experience go back to the ring timeline after like, I don't know, 24 hours or something like that. Oh, wow. And the reason that the team fel…”
Beykpour: Twitter Made Spaces Its Top Priority Company-Wide
“Hydro went from this like tiny project that like six people were working on that no one knew or care about to we made space as the number one priority of the company literally like above any other project period.”
Beykpour: Perplexity is one of few consumer AI products that retains
“It's like one of the only non-development tool AI products that actually has retained. A lot of people try and consumer AI products that just aren't really, haven't retained, but perplexity is one that is a, it's a daily driver for me.”
Beykpour: News articles are a failed format
“Articles are a failed format is my belief and certainly their belief.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
Beykpour: Community Notes is the future because standard moderation is unscalable
“I always felt really bullish on that being the future of how essentially how like content is moderated on Twitter, just cause it was very clear that the way we were handling content moderation Among many other flaws just wasn't scalable”
Beykpour: Ranked timeline and core optimization returned Twitter to DAU growth
“The reason why Twitter went from stagnant to declining DAU growth To growing DAU again is because they refine the core, right? This is when they went from the reverse chronological timeline to the rank timeline and that, you know, and the year after that was a…”
Beykpour: Small acqui-hires accelerated cultural change and speculative product bets at Twitter
“One of the things we found
That was a really effective way of accelerating cultural change and also helping drive some of these product initiatives that were particularly speculative was doing small acquires.
And really the benefit of that was a, you bring i…”
Beykpour: Defending Twitter's Jobs to Be Done Rollout Was Exhausting
“I was not a fan of how we leveraged jobs to be done at Twitter. I thought it was Exhausting and not particularly helpful. And so I, it's a particularly, particularly sore subject for me because, you know, I was sort of charged with defending it and rolling it …”
Beykpour: Twitter Seeded Community Notes and Fleets Free From OKRs
“Community notes, like the project that I was mentioning Keith, you know, started, we intentionally structured that like a startup. Like it was literally like we made a seed bet on Keith and his team. And we were like, you don't like, Don't worry about the OKRs…”
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.”
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?”
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…”
The other half of the tape: Kayvon Beykpour's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 14 times in 6 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Lenny Rachitsky 6Scott Belsky 4Harry Stebbings 3Rishi Garg 1
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 8
Lenny's Podcast 6
2024 6 mentions in 1 episode
2023 1 mention in 1 episode
2022 3 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
- 20 Product: Robinhood CPO on The 3 Stages of Product Management, How to Structure and Execute Great Product Reviews, The Secret to Building a World-Class Hiring Funnel in Product Team Building with Aparna Chennapragada
- 20 Product: Scott Belsky on How to Hire Your Product Leader and Team, 3 Questions All Great Product Leaders Ask, How To Structure and Run Effective Product Reviews & Is Product More Art or Science?
- every mention in 2022, scene by scene →
2019 3 mentions in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Kayvon's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| LENNY'S PODCASTLEDGER | Co-founder & CEO, Macroscope | 1 | 20 | 67% 2/3 | full record on Lenny's Podcast → |
| 20VCLEDGER | Co-founder & CEO, Macroscope | 1 +1 | 17 | — | full record on 20VC → |