Twitter’s former Head of Product opens up: being fired, meeting Elon, changing stagnant culture, building consumer product, more | Kayvon Beykpour

The first time I ever met Elon was over at FaceTime. It's just like, do you want to just like come like hang out? You can swipe left or swipe right. You're kind of known for at Twitter someone that turned the culture of the product team and Twitter in general from a very stagnant, nothing is changing product to shipping all the time. We wanted to change the lack of ambition, the lack of creativity, the lack of customers feeling the The part changed at all. So here's a list of stuff that you or teams ship while you were there. Super follows, communities, newsletters, topics, leads, testing reactions, edge to edge photos, twitter blue, spaces, and obviously live video. The sacred cows are like their own roadmap. What are all the things that you think we're not allowed to change? Let's start there. And this was all relatively quickly. I was like I might flame out completely but how if I don't try? Today my guest is Kavon Bakepor. Kavon was the beloved and longest tenured head of product at Twitter.

And also GM of the consumer business at Twitter. Up until the day that it was sold to Elon Musk. He landed at Twitter through an acquisition of his company Periscope. Which was the world's largest live streaming platform. Which ended up inspiring Instagram Live, TikTok Live, Facebook Live, and basically every other social network getting into Live Video. He sold the company to Twitter in 2015, continued leading Periscope for a number of years, and then moved into leading product and then the entire consumer business. In our wide ranging conversation,

K-Von shares what it was like getting Elon up to speed at Twitter. What it was like to be fired from Twitter, which actually happened during his pap leave. He also shares all kinds of lessons and stories from transforming Twitter's internal culture from a risk-averse, stagnant product org to one that was shipping major features regularly. We talk about how they used aqua hires and up and coming hungry product leaders to lead new initiatives and break through many of their sacred cows. We also get into jobs to be done.

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