Kayvon Beykpour on Periscope's origin story, Twitter acquisition, and new venture Macroscope — X-ray vision for engineering teams

And did that become

live streaming?

Live streaming.

We get it from Kon directly. Let's bring him in to the TBP Ultradome from the Reream waiting room. Kavon, how you doing?

Welcome to the show.

Hey guys, great to meet you.

Clarify Jord's question. Did tell us the story of Periscope. We'll work through to Macroscope, but I'm super interested in in some of the Silicon Valley lore here. Yeah, just kick us off.

By the way, huge opportunity for somebody to buy up all the scopes with scope at the end. Just every English word. So your next company you're going to be like h I got to I got to keep double down.

I might have I might have already done it. You never know.

I got to I got to tell you actually funny funny thing. 9 years ago almost to the day 9 years ago we launched a feature called Periscope Producer

which is the same infrastructure that is powering this very broadcast right now. And our our dream when we built Periscope Producer was literally for a show like TVPN to exist. It's sort of like that perfect blend of eye production live streaming content blended with the conversation of what's happening on Twitter.

And you know, it took a while for that to to come to fruition, but it just like makes me so happy and proud in a very emotional way to see everything you guys have done and to see it happening on on Twitterx. Um,

that's awesome.

That's awesome. Congrats on everything you guys. Thank you for for building the bedrock.

Yeah, I mean I I I want to get to macroscope, but tell me more of the lore. Uh what was the what were the early days of Periscope like? Uh what was the first like go to market motion? There's this there's all these famous uh back then there was the era of like go to South by Southwest. This is the story of uh of a bunch of uh social apps including Twitter uh where you get the early you kind of create a ground swell of tech early adopters. What what was the first product build? What was the story back then? Uh, how'd you launch the product?

Well, I mean, if you want to go way back, the very first version of Periscope, A, it wasn't called Periscope. It was called Bounty. And B, it wasn't it wasn't actually live streaming. Our first prototype was essentially um I sort of think of it as like a reverse marketplace for for Google Maps. Like you would you would drop a pin somewhere in the world and someone would take a photo. you would you would you would have some prompt like you would put a bounty on you know what's happening at the Tokyo fish market right now and someone would respond with a photo um and that to us was like a really cool way of trying to attempt to build like a teleportation device um we didn't know how to we didn't know how to actually build teleportation so many fascinating like social app social mobile local apps at that time it was a big it was a big trend and there were a whole bunch of different ideas that were experimented with it was such a fascinating time

well and it's yeah interestingly enough like Instagram has like delivered effectively that functionality now or Snapchat where you can teleport and see how what's the vibe at this restaurant right now.

And if you click on the location that you tagged, I can see who else put pictures there if they're public. So yeah, those features you were clearly very early.

Yeah, I think Snap Map actually was like probably one of the best manifestations of that early on. The our stories feature really brought that use case to life for Periscope's journey. You know, we we when we built that prototype, we realized it a just wasn't really interesting and b you have this like liquidity problem if you're just dropping pins randomly in the world and c it didn't really feel like teleportation because of static photos by definition old by the time you see it.

So that's that's when we were like let's flip this and make it press a button go live and and rather than using static photos, let's try making it live video. And so that was one key thing that we did. And then the second key thing that we did that really made Periscope click was the the floating hearts. I don't know if you guys remember, but like it was the first social network we had seen where you could have an infinite form of expression. It wasn't just like pressing a button to like it. It was sort of an infinite infinite amount of love.

Yeah.

Um and you know, we had this beta of 20 users. It just like our friends basically and some you know, family and investors. And when we when we shipped that version of the of the build that had live video with the floating hearts, it just it just was so clear to us that there was something here. Um, and one of the early beta users happened to work at Corp Dev at Twitter. She invited Jack and Dick who was the CEO at the time and that sort of like put us on the radar uh with Twitter and so we actually ended up getting acquired before we launched the product. like there was no go to market motion that got us and it was just like a beta of 30 people and Twitter was like the 31st user.

Um

that team was crazy about the early acquisitions. I mean Vine had launched but they acquired Vine as well. They were like very aggressive about picking stuff up early.

Top tier picking companies, not top tier at landing the plane on the integration. That's my TLDDR.

Someone called it a clown car, but we're not going to go into that. Someone you met with yesterday called it a clown car that fell into a gold mine.

Gold mine, which is a great a great quote. Anyway, um uh I want to know like uh what do you think about live stream monetization? Like we've we we have we have ads running on a ticker. We've we've we've uh we've brought through a bunch of like the TV era aesthetics, but then we also do just host red ads. Um we don't really that I'm aware of get a big share of like programmatic ads. We don't do I know Twitch you can do like I'm going to an ad break and it will play programmatic ads. We haven't done that. Did uh we've heard a ton of stories about Tik Tok shop and the live streaming sales stuff. Uh we've joked that we want to be like that for enterprise

live commerce for macroscope. I got one license. I got one license.

Got one license here. Pick it up.

I got five seats left. Buy now. I got 25 credits over here. I got an SDR. I I think you guys are an interesting place where you can you can sort of benefit from all of these models, right? You can do the pre-roll, you can do the midroll, you've got obviously incredible brand placements from some of the best tech companies in the world. Um and then I think also you have a unique vibe going where you can benefit from a lot of the monetization techniques that like have been become popularized on you know uh Twitch and Tik Tok and you know even Periscope early on we had this thing called super hearts which was like people could pay for inapp purchases to you know fly Ferraris off the on the screen or whatever like I think you have enough super fans that watch the show that there's like an enduser monetization component on you know in addition to what you're able to do with big brands. I don't think there's many types of content that can benefit from all of those forms of monetization. Did you uh did you feel like you were at at at what point like now it feels like Periscope was like extremely early even though even though like like I think people anticipated live streaming would be big but I feel like only in the last few years people at least the tech world has like woken up to how big live streaming is even outside more more so outside of tech right

and on mobile too I mean that that that was one of the unique insights like there there there were there was a there was a host of companies that were really focused on solving like I mean Flickr existed and then Instagram was huge and then uh there were a whole bunch of video apps Vine one of them like YouTube existed but no one had cracked it on mobile and it required actual deep insight into the user experience and also the engineering to understand how to get it to work on a phone which wasn't as powerful as a laptop back then but yeah

yeah I mean I think there's a lot of tech there were a lot of technological problems to making uh mobile based live streaming work well at the time a lot of those problems are just solved now and and somewhat commoditized. I mean, there's just like SDKs that let you do this really easily. I think my my big takeaway, and you know, call me somewhat jaded on this. Um, but I I I think what we learned the hard way is that a live focused social network on mobile that's like short form live video um isn't tenable, right? And that's what Periscope was. It was live only as distinct from like Instagram or Facebook live at the time. that was live was a feature amongst the social network that let you communicate and keep in touch with people asynchronously. And I think it took us longer to build async forms of connection than it did take Instagram and Facebook building all of our features into their existing platforms. And so that was our sort of like hard lesson learned. Um because you know we had a parallel track where we were trying to make Periscope integrate into Twitter. That was the whole thesis of the integration and it just took us way too long for for reasons that we can get into if you're interested. um to to make that integration come to life. And so as much as we you know we grew from zero to 100 million users in like a year and a half. It was insane. But just everyone else built all the feature

Yeah.

Everyone else built all the features um you know uh quickly.

Yeah. What what do you think about the lack of uh Sorry, last question on Periscope. Just

talk about macroscopes. I know. But uh uh lack of screen sharing API on mobile. I felt like uh during the Clubhouse era that was something that was sort of missing was uh like you go to Twitch, yes, you're watching someone live stream, but a lot of the work is done by the video game that they're playing or the video that they're reacting to. And being able to put something else on the screen so that someone doesn't need to just stand there and do an eight hour standup routine with no support for eight hours straight, that helps. And I felt like Apple kind of nerfed that or never really and maybe it was just a hardware thing, but uh what was your take on like like how important that was? Am I misunderstanding that? And and like how how how how would it have played out if it was easy to screen share?

Um I don't know the state of the current APIs, but I know at the time and this is probably like 2018 I want to say we did a lot. We we actually built a bunch of integrations that let you share your screen including from mobile.

I think just the reality is it's such an edge case. relative to what like the the vast majority of the use case for our product was people just was people talking to people, right? It was like 98% was that type of broadcasting and 2% was what you guys are doing which is like professional broadcast whether it's from the NFL or TVPN or anything in between.

Um and so I I just I don't think that would have had a material impact for us as a use case.

Um but I don't know if the if if Apple if Apple did indeed nerf those APIs. That's that's news to me.

Yeah. I talked to a YC company once that was trying to do uh mobile Twitch. So you would screen share from the phone. Now people do that with like you take the video feed out of USBC, you route it through a PC. There are huge mobile gaming Twitch streamers, but they basically like are screen recording with a third party device. It's very complicated. It's not something they can do on the go. Um anyway, sorry. I want to move on. Jordy, what do you got?

I I I I want to continue that conversation. Limited time. Uh let let's yeah let's switch gears to macroscope. What uh give give us the I don't know give us a hybrid investor slashc customer pitch. I want kind of a bit of both kind of long-term vision as well as like why somebody should sign up today.

Yeah, totally. So I'll start with the like the sort of customer focused angle because it's it's I think what resonates the most with me. You know, we think of Macroscope as um X-ray vision for your company. You know, we help you understand what's happening. um how's the product changing? How's the codebase evolving? What's everyone working on? But just answered automatically um and answered via the source of truth, which is the codebase. If for any company that builds software, the source of truth is the codebase. If it's not in the codebase, it hasn't happened yet. And if it isn't in the codebase, we you know, AI and state-ofthe-art LM can do a really good job of articulating how things work, who did it, when it happened. Um and sort of our observation having worked at many companies both small startups that we've started and you know very large companies like Twitter is it's actually extremely hard to answer these basic questions like the classic what did you get done this week which is ironically very relevant to Twitter's history is something that every leader thinks about constant like so much of my job as a head of product at Twitter was literally just understanding what the [ __ ] people were working on

um and usually it's like the state-of-the-art solution to this problem is meetings issue management systems, spreadsheet trackers, just bugging engineers and asking them and sort of multiply that out by an organization that's hundreds if not thousands of engineers. There's a lot of human capital waste that goes into this problem. Um, and so our thesis is that this is silly like in a world of LM um you know there's a lot of amazing AI tools tools built for engineers not a lot of great AI tools built for leaders and so that's what microscope is trying to do. trying to being be an an understanding engine for your company that simultaneously gives leaders clarity while saving time for engineers, right? It's sort of this interesting hybrid where we're solving problems that are paper cuts that engineers, you know, feel 50 times a day, whether it's automating their PR descriptions, doing AI code review, avoiding them having to go to status updates or write status updates, which like there's nothing an engineer hates more than, you know, getting distracted from building something and instead reporting status through some game of telephone. Um, and so we are simultaneously helping the leadership team get automated visibility while saving engineers a bunch of time. And we think that like I mean we're obviously biased but like there's just no way every company in in 5 years like every company is going to have a tool like this whether it's macroscope or some other tool. It is just complete insanity to imagine that we are doing this the oldfashioned way.

So

so when when did you actually start the company because you announced around yesterday with light speeded our friend Michael but uh I imagine and you've been at it for a while.

Yeah we started the company in July of 2023. raise a seed round from um uh our mutual friends at Thrive Capital and Adverb and GV and some amazing angels. Um nice and then and then yeah

but to go back at that point in time at that point the the the the AGI pill folks were saying AGI by 2025 SAS is not going to matter fast take off. So did you always did you never lose faith in enterprise SAS? It feels feels like you had you had conviction that this type of thing was going to be important for a long time.

I I think there's a lot of dramatization that goes into like the shifting of the you know landscape and they make for great headlines and all that. I actually think that as every engineer gets turbocharged by AI and as like coding agents completely revolutionized how software gets written. I think this problem the problem that microscope is solving only becomes more important right like if if we if companies are writing 10x more code and humans are writing less of it and humans are reviewing less of it then it becomes even more challenging to understand what's happening and ultimately like humans are still accountable for the outputs of what a company is shipping and building and so I think having this AI air traffic control system and understanding engine for what's happening with your company becomes even more imperative um so I the company's built like assuming that agents will get better and better and better and that humans will just stay at this like more and more at this global level of just kind of witnessing okay what are what are all my play what what's my whole team doing what what what's this player doing it doesn't really matter if they're a person or or an agent

yeah today it's like 95% of the use cases are what are my humans building assisted with AI and in tomorrow five years from now it might be you know 90% of it might what are what have all my agents produced and maybe 10% of that is like what have humans produced but I think the the problem that's being solved is still fundamentally the same which is what changed what impact did it have um and um you know and where do we go from here like that's that's a neverending thing that is the highest leverage thing a leader whether you're an engineering leader or a product leader or a CEO like those questions are always on your mind

how do you think about the level of integration into the systems that you want to pull data for. Like I could imagine like a Slackbot that talks to every it effectively acts as a middle manager literally asking people what did you do this week and then they write their little status update and that gets rolled up and then that can be queried. Uh, I could also imagine something like, you know, a screen recorder super integrated into everything the employee is doing and you can query, hey, did my employee do send this email that you have full transparency and then a wide swath of tradeoffs in between for the level of abstraction integration you want into the systems.

Yeah. Well, like the first thing I'll say is like we're not we're not big fans of the there's a surveillance state.

Yeah. We're not fans of that angle and like the last thing we want to build is a is a spy tool. So we don't we don't imagine you know doing screen reporting or anything like that but I do think having sort of extensive integrations with the the stack that a company uses to build and manage their product is really important like today we started with a few systems we integrate with GitHub we integrate with your issue management system so whether you use Jur linear we integrate with Slack

um and we think those are the critical starting points but it's just the beginning because you know the codebase can tell you what you did and how it works like how does our billing system work the code can answer that question. It can't tell you why you did something like what customer problem we were resolving with this feature is not in the codebase, but it's probably in a Google doc or a notion. Um it might be in in a linear ticket. Likewise, like

who can see this feature is not necessarily in the codebase, right? You might have a launch darkly flag or a static flag that tells you, oh, this is available to 1% of users in Japan, but like the the codebase can be the glue that then stitches into all these other systems. And we're building macroscope in a way that allows it to be a conversational interface to all those questions and answers. Like today we have a Slackbot that lets you ask a question like the one I asked. Like have we launched this feature? If so, who can see it? And we imagine over time building all these other integrations that let you essentially get more insight into what's happening and how things work.

How do you how are you kind of uh setting goals with the team and forecasting with Periscope? you built like a viral consumer app. And so uh and and today even in uh developer tools like there's this intense like you know a lot of companies are growing ridiculously fast pretty unprecedented for for B2B products. Uh, and so there's this intense pressure to like, you know, show massive traction and adoption quickly, but Macroscope feels like a pretty complicated product that you're still going to need to be like iterating around and and figuring out where different types of companies are getting value. So, how do how do you how do you kind of like set goals with the team and and what is success look like over the next 12 months?

Yeah, I mean, it's a good question and it's obviously early days for us. If you really sort of simplify our product down into two components right now um there's really two pieces. We have a code review feature um which is um relatively speaking it's a it's a more mature space right like we are not the first code review tool um but code review is an enormously important problem for for companies to solve and I think that the sort of like heruristics around whether our product is working well for them or are are much easier to quantify right like we we released a benchmark um as part of our launch yesterday which sort of is one indicator of what we use to evaluate whether our code review tool is working like how what percentage of bugs can detect um in a customer's pull request. And so like we think about goals very differently for a product area like that where we can measure ourselves very in a very quantifiable way relative to competitors um than we do the other part of our product which we sort of refer to as status. Like we help you understand the status of anything happening in your product development process. That's way more green field, right? Like it's we're not aware of really any other products like technological solutions to that problem. And so both our road map and how we think about goals for for that part of the business is a little bit more greenfield. We're just sort of excited to push the envelope on where this goes and how we can solve bigger and bigger problems for customers.

Talk to me about where the budget is coming to buy macroscope. It feels like with even zooming out broader to just the AI enabled SAS market, there's there's a lot of products that don't neatly fit in with okay, I'm going to rip out this and replace. It's a lot of adding something on top. We're seeing a lot of like the SAS apocalypse, the seatbased models going away, but it feels like it would be hard to quantify this with like value based pricing. How are you thinking about justifying a budget internally if you're dealing with a larger customer who's trying to kind of underwrite the value that Macroscope brings relative to the cost?

Yeah. Well, so our you know our buyer is I would say half the time it's the engineering leader. So this would be like a CTO or head of engineering and the other half of the time it's the CEO. Y

and you know I think I think um from a from a value standpoint like if you're an engineering leader you want your team spending as little time reviewing code um and and as little time dealing with production issues as a result of shipping bugs into production as possible. And so like the the value of even catching one production incident from an AI code review tool um I think is intuitively very easy to understand. like we don't we don't see customers asking the question of is a code review tool valuable what they want to know is like why is this tool better than all the competition um so I think you know and that's just going to become that's going to be more and more true over time just given what's happening in the AI coding landscape I think for the other aspect of our product which is the sort of understanding layer it is you know relatively speaking it's it's it's green field right there is no product solution they're ripping out with ours and so what we've seen resonate with with our customers is you can you have an intuitive feel for how much time your team is spending in meetings and dealing with all the [ __ ] work around the work. Um, and so I think the the the value proposition really is um do I do I buy that this tool is going to help my team focus more on building and less on doing that work around the work um and is that is that worth the the you know the the price of entry which from our standpoint like again the questions that our customers are asking is not like is this valuable the question is does it work the way you say it does um and but obviously that's where we have to do our job well um but I think anyone who's worked at a big company and has you know invested in solving this problem the oldfashioned way knows that it's like the worst part part of working at big companies and they would gladly pay any amount of money to solve the problem if it actually works.

Yeah. How do you think about uh generative UI or actually like I could imagine some people want text result of they want to chat and ask what you know how are things going. Someone in the chat said, uh, this is more of a progress bar. And I could imagine someone wants to see a dashboard, a progress bar, stats. Like, do you think in the future you'll be able to like instantiate exactly what the particular manager wants to see kind of like a a dashboard of of what's going on in the organization?

I think there's there's lots of interesting vectors here. One is just often times we're describing in in words how a product is changing. And there's nothing more powerful than just showing how the product is changing, right? So whether that's like integrating with Figma and showing you the intended mockup that just got shipped or whether it's actually running the code. Like a lot of time, like think about what an engineer does when they ship a feature. They ship the feature, they go into Slack and they literally record their local branch and like a mockup of the product and they post it in Slack and say, "Hey, I just shipped this thing. It merged into staging." We should just automate that, right? we should literally automatically run the product and show you the thing that just got shipped and save the engineer the time from having to do all that. So that's like one angle that this can take and the other is sort of what you what you were saying um which is kind of like in the appropriate time generating dashboards or some other visual manifestation of some status update. I think all of these things are are possible. We have to sort of pick our punches in terms of where we start. Um but um but yeah, humble beginnings. Well, thanks so much for coming on the show. It was great catching up with you.

Come back on again anytime.

Yeah, I I love I love Silicon Valley lore and I I'm very excited about what you're building. Congratulations.

Thanks for having me, guys.

We'll talk to you soon. See you.

public.com investing for those that take it seriously. I already told you about public. So, I'm going to tell you about.com. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable.

I time the double call button perfectly.

You did say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only adqu combines technology out of home expertise and data to enable efficient