At Product SF, Greylock's Josh Elman talks to Slow Ventures founder and partner Dave Morin about Dave's days at Apple and Facebook and his learnings from building Path. Dave discusses the distinctions between building social products that involve a community and building products that do not have social components. This presentation was recorded at Product SF, an event hosted by Greylock Partners that brings together founders, PMs, and product leaders to talk about the challenges of building new innovative products that change lives and create habits. For more podcasts, please visit news.greylock.com.
I'm really looking forward to this next conversation with my friend Dave Morin, because I think we'll talk about some of the other sides of that challenge. I mean, Dave in his career, he started at Apple where he was working in the college program, and he was getting excited about this great thing to market to college students called Facebook. He joined Facebook as one of the first hundred people, got to build Facebook platform that I think was the biggest explosion of distribution on the consumer internet, and then left to found a company called Path that I still use pretty often with a very intimate close set of friends and family, and he sold that to Daum Kakao. And you know, when you look at the world of these massive multi-billion dollar, multi-hundred million dollar networks, Path didn't ultimately end up becoming one, and I think it's just great to think about sort of what some of the learnings are from that. So Dave, I'd love to bring you up and let's just have a fun conversation. So thanks, dude, thanks for coming.
Hey Josh, thanks for having me.
After college, you joined two of what are today the most important companies in the world, getting to work at both Apple and Facebook. Like what did you actually see? What did you recognize that drew you there so early in their histories, or so early in some of the patterns that really have turned them out to be the companies of today?
Interesting question. I have this vivid memory of reading an article that Steve Jobs was interviewed in, probably back in like 2002 or 2001, I think I was probably a senior in college, and he was saying that Mac OS 10 was coming out and he said that the icons were so beautiful that you would want to lick them. I had always been a Mac user my entire life, I had one when I was like four years old, so I was a hardcore Apple guy, but I'd taken a detour for a few years and was using Windows mostly in college. I was really inspired by a lot of what Steve was talking about and some of the new products that were coming out. The iBook in particular, I thought was… the iMac was great and the blue ones were all around, but the white iBook, the first one, and then the combination of that with Mac OS 10 and a lot of the feature work and the way that Mac OS 10 worked, I just thought was better in almost every way than Windows. So that was a big reason that attracted me. It was prior to the iPod; I think the iPod launched like right around when I got there. A lot of people don't remember this, but the iPod, we couldn't sell the iPod to anyone for like the first two years. One of the first things that I had to do when I got to Apple was we gave away iPods to every student at Duke, because we couldn't get students to buy them. Nobody remembers these things, so watch out for the Apple Watch, are they giving them away? Sooner or later a lot of people forget, but the thing that made the iPod really go was the iTunes Music Store. For the first two years, you had to rip music off of CDs and put it onto the iPod, which the friction was just way too high. That's a story about Apple. The story about Facebook is, I was like Josh said, I was working on college marketing for Apple and I learned about Facebook because I was kind of obsessed with social networks. Ironically, to Reed's conversation this morning, I used to find out about a new social network and then send it out to all the student reps. I had 900 of them all over the country. I had sent LinkedIn out, they all joined LinkedIn, and I sent Friendster out and they all joined Friendster. I think MySpace was probably already out. And then I found Facebook and sent it out. I had a meeting later on in that day with Jennifer Bailey, who ran the online store at Apple for a long time, and I think she's now running the wallet and Apple Pay, and I was trying to prove to her that this Facebook system was really powerful. So I sent out to all the student reps and I said, hey, send me a friend request. And it was like two hours' time in between when I sent that email and got into the meeting. I had like 150 friend requests. And this was like a good example of just how insane the engagement was on Facebook. So I think from the minute I saw Facebook, the engagement was just so through the roof compared to most of the internet systems that I'd ever used that it was pretty obvious early on whether it was going to scale bigger than that, it certainly felt like it. I think those were probably two good stories. I don't know if that answers your question.
No, that does. So you joined Facebook and you get involved in this little thing called the Facebook platform, which was like a crazy bet that Facebook at the time didn't seem like something you would build a platform around. Can you talk a little about what inspired that launch of the platform and what you guys were thinking, and then I want to talk about what happened after the cat was out of the bag?
It's kind of this interesting story of a conversation that happened between Apple and Facebook at that moment in time. I had switched out of marketing and was working in this special projects group on product stuff. It was basically Steve and John Couch were like, 'The social networking thing seems like a pretty good thing, we should figure out how to put it into more of our products.' So I was going around to the iPhoto team and the iMovie team and the OS 10 team trying to convince them to do social networking stuff. One of the things that I got the most obsessed with was this idea of replacing the address book with Facebook, because everybody's address book is full of dead data. How many startups… if you want to be sure your startup dies, try to go after the contacts problem. So Dustin Moskovitz, the co-founder of Facebook, he wrote this API so that we could try to integrate with Mac OS 10, and we kept trying to do this. We were running around Apple trying to convince people that this was a good idea to replace the address book with Facebook, but Facebook was really small, it only had 5 million users, and people don't remember this either, but MySpace had like 100 million users at the time. Steve was really annoyed at MySpace because it was messing with the iTunes business, so he couldn't convince anyone. 'It's just too small, this Facebook thing, it's not going to be a thing.' So Dustin and I were having a lot of conversations that summer about this idea: what if you could put the social graph in the hands of developers and create a social operating system? This conversation kind of happened in the summer of 2006 of, well, we could keep trying to convince Apple to do this, or we could turn Facebook into an operating system. And so that was kind of the straw that broke the camel's back. Dustin still gives me, and Mark gives me, grief to this day that I should have joined two years prior to that and joined that summer. We got the platform project underway, and we kind of had a small group of, I think it was like about six people working on it initially. I guess it started with Dave Fetterman and I, and then we kind of had a six-person team. We spent the next nine months figuring out what exactly it is that makes Facebook Facebook. Our most important example was the photos app. The photos app was like the premier example of the power of the Facebook social graph. A lot of the reasons why it was very simple: you could upload a photo and you could use the social graph to tag the person that was in it, and that would push that content over onto their Facebook profile, which would then expose the content to their friend network, which is a critical piece of the distribution system. So a lot of what we spent the year trying to figure out is how do we get developers the ability to do these same kind of distribution things, and then creating tools to do that. There were a bunch of privacy considerations. We had to invent a new markup language, a new JavaScript language, we had to invent a new query language and database to enable people to query the graph but not violate privacy and not display who is visiting whose profile, all these interesting questions in order to give people the ability to create apps. I think we got it done in about 9 months and launched in 2007. Who here was building Facebook apps in that 2007, 2008 Cambrian explosion? It's a good set of you, so you'll remember this era really well.
I still miss the profile from back then.
Me too. The profile with all the little profile widgets, you could really express yourself, really decorate. Back in the era of expression, nobody expresses themselves now. We live in a uniform era.
So the cat is out of the bag. You guys figure out this new language, got all the privacy stuff figured out, you got great distribution for everybody, and then it works. By the way, if you guys have ever met Charlie Cheever, the guy's like a mad genius. Facebook platform would not have happened without him. He created all these languages and things, it's unbelievable. And it worked so well that I think everybody was inviting every friend to every single product, and things were showing up on people's profiles and feeds were getting spammed. All of a sudden, Facebook started changing things and maybe taking some things away or curbing some things. I remember you were out there as a very visible figure hosting events, talking about the Facebook platform, and I also remember you bearing a ton of the anger and frustration from developers directly.
I still do. I'm afraid to go on stages.
What did you learn about how to manage a platform? What are you so proud of that went right, and what do you wish you'd done differently after that experience?
