Instagram

“What we found is that they would always underperform next to user generated assets. So a brand that essentially, you know, has an influencer in front of it that says, I tried this product. I love it. I'm filming this ad for my iPhone. Like, look, check it out.…”

“In hindsight, we were a little bit mistaken to believe that the idea that the atomic unit would be a person talking about a place that they're at, and you have to have a physical place to tie it to, versus a person sharing a moment or an experience that they'r…”

“They're making, like, tens of thousands of dollars a day just so that's one way to make a living.”

“I, I'm not on Instagram and I'm not on Facebook. Like I was on both of those things and I left both of them. Like I disabled my accounts. I am on Twitter and LinkedIn, but I don't have either of those apps installed on my phone. I stay logged out of those site…”

“And basically because Andreessen Horowitz had like invested in my company was on the board, even though they were investors in Instagram That was like a conflict and they didn't do the deal.”

“And so they basically built a pretty legitimate knockoff of the Hipstamatic filters, combining it with a social graph and they launched it and it pretty quickly took off. So of course this is Instagram.”

“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…”

“Instagram had just this fantastic culture of thinking about how do we ship high, high quality products, right? And what does product craft mean? And so that is something that, you know, I came to YouTube and my teams particularly, they didn't have a mental mod…”

“So every sprint, let's say you do a three-week sprint or a three-month roadmap, you're executing on the things that you have a lot of conviction around, and you're also doing understand work in parallel. And so at the end of the sprint, you have learnings from…”

“Another part that goes unspoken, still critical to this day was like the celebrity partnerships. Was critical, right? Because basically, you know, they had this wonderful partnerships team that basically took Instagram and taught celebrities how to use it, how…”

“At Instagram you know, we saw this big problem where people were logging out and not being able to get back into their account. It was crazy. Like hundreds of thousands of people a day could not get back into the account. And it was because, and like when I sa…”

“The idea of launching web really drove and actually increased Instagram's growth by 10% the minute we launched it, and it was something that, you know, George Wang, who was there before me, had the invent, had the idea around.”

“And so that connection pivot was critical. It changed, it literally angle changed the retention on Instagram. And so if you, like, Google Instagram growth, there was, like, a tech crunch article about Instagram's growth that, you know, I think, 2017, 20 18, wh…”

“I remember when I left Instagram, this is many years ago, but we had like, had 15 teams and we might've been running 12 to 20 experiments, a quarter a team. And I would say probably 60 to 70% of them were like positive and shippable, which is incredible.”

“When I joined Instagram in January, 2016, believe it or not, the onboarding, the, like the signup flow at Instagram had literally no logging to it. It had logging of how many people started and how many people ended.”

“I think when I joined, we were at like, four hundred and forty five million monthly actives January, 2016. At the end of that year, we were at six hundred thirty six million. We were like 47% that year.”

“Instagram could have come out in 2008, it probably wouldn't have worked. It probably wouldn't have worked to the extent that it did.”

“You need to get enough intensity of adoption and density for a social network to start to get the flywheel spinning, but the app should grow by itself after that. And people think we would just went to like from school to school following every kid on it. Like…”

“And as a product person, the way that I think this should really work is that instead of everyone entering, you know, teens use on average, 40 apps instead of Instagram and the other 39 apps that teens use trying to verify the age of the person using their app…”

“So there's tens of millions of teens that currently have public Accounts today that we are going to automatically transition to private accounts, unless they get their parents permission to stay public.”

“It's the thing it most reminds me of like from the Instagram days where like Apple, like WWC announcements, you're like, this could either be awesome for us or could like absolutely like cause chaos for it. It's like that, but your own company is the one kind …”

“I mean, not many people could, but like, this is like probably a list of three companies that would have been interesting.”

“Some early things that we're seeing that we think are really interesting, one is UI testing, which is like, I was, like, at Instagram, we had basically no UI tests, because they're hard to write, they're, like, they're brittle and they're, like, often, like, a…”

“When you talk to people who work at companies like Instagram, what they will admit is that the engagement And a product like that actually goes up after the user posts something, which suggests that maybe people are actually going back to the product more ofte…”

“We ran a sentiment analysis recently. We were kind of like looking at different social networks, analyzing all the comments, and we found actually that the negative, you know, the sort of devil horn fraction on like what was it? Like LinkedIn, Facebook, Instag…”

“Snapchat opens to the camera. And that was actually the differentiator, right? That was actually that small decision was holding the entire company against all competition. Because when the moment passes where your friend is doing something funny, and you need…”

“Instagram DAU, which is just an impossible bar. Like only one company since that, maybe two, right. You could say maybe ChatGVT and TikTok have like reached that kind of like mass consumer adoption”

“And I think there were like major shifts that we would have wanted to make it both in the strategy and the product and the team. And it's really hard to do that. If you are all fully remote, like nothing replaces like the Instagram days”

“Instagram spread in the early days because people would take photos and then post them on other networks and tell friends about it. And there was like this really natural, like, how did you do that? I want to do it. News was very personal. Like I can't tell me…”

“And so we live in a time when it's very easy to produce things at incredibly high production values, but they don't mean anything. And so they're just like fancy potato chips. There's no nourishment there, man.”

“You can really have the best team in the world with the best product taste. And you can't really predict what's gonna hit on the first go.”

“Having a strong point of view is really important because like, you know, there's a saying that Mike and Kevin had it at Instagram, which is we may not be right, but at least we're not confused. I think that just, it was, it's a beautiful phrase. I thought, be…”

“Facebook probably created the modern feed, but there's a feed for every single product, right? And there's a LinkedIn feed and there's a feed for DoorDash. You know, it's not like these things become core primitives quickly and formats. And then at the end of …”

“Snapchat at the time didn't allow you to upload photos. It was like, you have to use a snap camera.”

“There was this, there's a story in, in close friends at Instagram where It just totally failed at first on, on in, in a bunch of, just when we shipped it. And it turned out that we looked at the data and people were only adding one close friend to their list b…”

“You know, certainly in Instagram, there's been a big shift over the years of sharing into public, very large broadcast posts and feed into these more lightweight formats, like stories and DM, actually private sharing as well.”

“Whenever you try to mix a core product, that's very cemented in someone's mind and physically looks a specific way. And you're trying to make contort it to do something new. It's usually a bad recipe.”

“In many ways, the AI version of Google and stories and reels, they're all kind of similar in that they're new formats in the world that people are expecting and wanting more of. And by adding them, It becomes complimentary, not replacement. And in both cases, …”

“It was working really well for people who added 20 to 30 people to their list. Cause what would happen is you put 30 people on your list and then two of them would write back to you on DM. And now you have closed the loop and you feel connected to those people…”

“I, we looked at NPS, net promoter scores, and we saw That when people quit Facebook and quit Instagram, they went from a plus 35 to a -35.”

“So we've invested a lot over the last couple of years in ranking, not just increasing engagement, but increasing originality, increasing the number of pieces of content that break out increasing recency to stay culturally relevant. And so a lot of that has bee…”

“Because we've done chronological by default and where you can make a default and you see not only does usage go down, overall sentiment goes down. The individual who made that choice might be happy at the moment, but when you just get pummeled with stuff you'r…”

“We've adopted what we call pods, which are just mini teams where it's call it four to six engineers who are a bit more generalists. One We call product staff, which is sort of an evolution of the PM. So a PM who can do some of what a designer does, and some of…”

“We had a redesign of feed that went to the video viewer. That was a test to four percent of users on iOS. It was a not, it was not going to roll out.”

“You can't launch something to three billion people and not test it first, but you can't test something at our scale and not expect people to cover it and not, and be, and so you have to be ready to talk about it before you even know you want to launch it.”

“I actually think we might be more practical to label camera captured content, like basically non AI content as opposed to labeling AI content long term for a couple of reasons.”

“And if we had the version of reels that we launched In like mid, just maybe we think it's like the summer of 20 20, in the summer of 2019. I think, I don't think TikTok isn't, I think TikTok is still big and important, but I don't think it's as big as it is no…”

“I think of vision as an articulation of the world or the state of the product you want to get to. And I think of strategy as an opinionated path to achieve that vision. If strategy, strategy can't be like, be the best or be amazing. It has to be controversial …”

“I think people assume that there's a much more detailed semantic understanding of everybody's interests and preferences in the algorithm than there is. Most of what's really driven the progress in the world of recommenders over the last five, 10 years have bee…”

“So what we do now is we let you know, quote unquote, see your algorithm. You can see what topics we think you're interested in. And you can adjust it. You can add and remove things, but the idea here, giving people some agency back in a world where, you know, …”

“In a world where there's an abundance of synthetic content, I actually think people are going to seek out creativity and authenticity and people more, not less. And I think that that will help us. That doesn't mean that we won't have AI content on our platform…”

“I think we'll have more smaller teams and there'll be less people who manage thousands of people. And so That's not that that job will go away, but that will be less of what I'm looking for in hires because I'm gonna have less roles like that.”

“The CTO of Workday is just a member of technical staff at Anthropic, CTO, CTO of Instagram, Box, the CTO. Super.com CTO. They're just like engineers now at Anthropic.”

“Like we spent more time at Instagram, we definitely moved slower. And I would say that we changed the product less and that actually worked really well for most stages of Instagram. But I don't think that that would work in, in the current stage of where we're…”

“I worked on IGTV, which was, like, a huge flop, and then we shipped Reels and Reels was, like, we, and look, I mean, that's a good example, because, like, we had, we just, like, kind of baked in some wrong assumptions, and we held on to a few constraints, But …”