ConnorHayes

Connor Hayes: In Conversation
with Andrew McClintock

AMFirst off, tell me about Coachella and how do I get a Bieber napkin?

CHWe may actually have some Bieber napkins left over — Coachella was great. […] Yeah, we'll get into this in the conversation, but we're really trying to be a part of the conversation or be the place where the conversation is happening online when things happen in the real world that are interesting to people. And that involves, obviously, having a good product, but also being a culturally relevant product where you're top of mind for people to go to when something happens.

Coachella is definitely one of those events. The last six months have been really interesting for me between Super Bowl week, NBA All-Star, Coachella — we've had presences at these things. And the way that we try to do it is to take advantage of the fact that these are events that cause a bunch of people who have interesting voices and things to say, that either are, or aren't, on our platform — are physically in the same place at the same time. That allows us to build relationships with them. But, the coolest part is they build relationships with one another. So in the context of Threads, these creators and voices and reporters and commentators, whatever: they might be meeting each other for the first time. Our goal is for those relationships to translate back into the product.

AMTotally. And is it fair to say that because obviously on IG there's so much pressure these days for what you're posting and there's not really a level of interaction that allows for that looseness that comes from an IRL community sense? To have that vibe on the platform, would you say that that's baked into how you're thinking about it?

CHYeah, the core value proposition of the product — and I think the thing that makes it really magical for people — is conversations. Obviously there's a bit of back and forth on other platforms in the comment sections, but a lot of times when you look at the comment sections these days, it's like people responding only to the top-level thing, right? I'm reacting to this video, I'm reacting to this photo, I'm saying something funny about it, but it's not a back-and-forth conversation. We've tried to design Threads to be that. […] We have a saying within the team: "Instagram is like the club and Threads is the smoking section."

AMI love the smoking section. On the other side of culture, and more along the lines of how we met in the first place, through visual art — to obviously plug one of our favorite artists here, Drew Bennett — what do you feel the paintings you acquire and the artwork that you live with help you navigate the popular culture side? Where's that balance for you?

CHThose things overlap a lot, so if you go to my office or my home, there's proper visual art, paintings, photographs — a lot of sports memorabilia […] For me it's a form of self-expression. It's also a form of setting tone and intention in a space. Back to your point about Drew, one of the things that I get most excited about is when art reflects this idea and community and culture behind a place and time. The Bay Area is a very special place to me. I go on the record saying I think San Francisco is the greatest city in the world all the time. I think you're a native San Franciscan, so maybe you appreciate that. Drew, David Wilson — who's a friend of ours — Terry Lowenthal, all the stuff that they do at Southern Exposure in San Francisco.

You mentioned online culture — art culture. I think there's a bunch of examples of people growing their presence in the art world through things like Instagram, which is really cool too.

AMOne hundred percent. I mean, Instagram is literally the main — so many people in the art world don't even go to a website anymore — it's all on IG. […] The communities in the art world — they're using the platform to really build and distribute their ideas. I want to ask you about Dear Algo because I love that feature and I was so pleased to see it.

CHWe were very much motivated to work on that by things that people were doing organically on the platform. There was this viral meme on Threads where people were posting "dear algorithm show me more content like this or show me people who are interested in this thing" […] The algorithm is not necessarily designed to work that way, but it's possible/probable that it could have: you're giving some signal to a machine somewhere that says, "I'm interested in this content." What we wanted to do was make that very much more high precision to tell the algorithm this is actually a thing that people want to see more or less of. The way that we've been able to do this is with the advancement of large language models, we have a much deeper understanding of what content is about.

When you have a platform like Threads that's trying to be at this edge of cultural relevance, there are a lot of times when something is being written in cultural in-speak about a topic that prior versions of what is now a large language model would have had a hard time understanding. And so when you hook up this fire hose of real-time cultural information to these LLMs, you can now start to understand, when someone says "Bichota," they're talking about Karol G, because that's the nickname that she's given to herself. […] That has allowed us to actually build this product.

AMPeople have so much anxiety over how an algorithm works without understanding it. I think it's an amazing gift to give users […] That ties into something that I've heard you say before about how the best algorithms are deeply personal. There's also that paradox with how that can scale, but obviously you guys are solving for that because everything you do has to scale.

CHYeah. That is always the challenge of a platform like this. How do you make sure that you balance the equities of feeling like you're informing people about what's going on in culture and what's going on in the world and giving them a chance to learn about those things and participate in conversation about those things but also be deeply personal? There's a bunch of different ways that we try to do this. One of them is with this Communities product that we've built.

AMThreads passed X on daily mobile users recently. Is that accurate?

CHThis is something that some third-party data providers have said publicly, but we have not commented on publicly. We do really well on mobile.

AMWhere do you see Threads in ten years? What's your dream? What does Threads become?

CHWhen we started this project, we always had this mantra, which was: There should be a billion-user product in this space of text-based conversation, social communication, and sharing. That's from a metrics perspective. I think becoming the leader in the space, getting to that level of scale, breaking through the first app in this format to get to that billion-user scale, I think, is really important to me. The other one is just being synonymous with culture and conversation.