The Past, Present, and Future of Consumer Social Companies

And even with Amazon, Amazon really is a logistics company, I mean the core product for consumers isn't really that great. I don't know of anyone who opens up Amazon and says, "Wow, I love ordering things here, the experience of using Amazon is so much fun." I think the experience that people like is the quick shipping. I mean they built out that l... See more

And then you think of Walmart. They sort of did a similar thing where they hit this sort of different demographic that wasn't quite being hit properly sort of by Sears but also optimized a lot of things on the infrastructure side.

So Sears was basically built on the catalog and the postal service back in the day. And it really hit a lot of people who were marginalized. People who couldn't afford to or were shunned from going into these big department stores with wealthy folks. They'd say, "You're not allowed in here." So if you can get a catalog mailed to your house and you ... See more

So you have to be careful and you have to be very attentive about how you build your company and how you add different product lines over time. And make sure the incentives align, not only for you as a business but also for your users. And I think we've kind of seen sort of at Facebook, if you look at their user growth in the US, which is where mos... See more

So I think Facebook runs into the challenge of, "Okay, we're trying to shift people into stories, we're trying to shift people into the marketplace, we're trying to get people to use messenger and build this WeChat-like ecosystem within our messaging product. But our Feed makes so much money, it's on autopilot right now, so how do we make that tran... See more

I think Facebook did $186 in revenue per US user over the last 12 months. That's a lot, $186 with RPU [revenue per user]. If you assume that the average marketer is spending to get about a 3x return on their investment, so you take 186 times three, it's about $560 in commerce that's being transacted because of Facebook. Which sounds like a lot. But... See more

And as a creator or as an influencer, you might go on Instagram and you want to start a cooking account, where you post pictures or videos and talk about your cooking. Maybe you want to sell a book, or you want to launch a TV show eventually, you want to get a show on the Food Network about cooking. You have to work extremely hard to grow that acco... See more

So what I think TikTok did was the idea of a follower graph or a social graph, is completely non-existing on TikTok. The core product is an algorithm that shows you what you want, without you actually knowing what you want.

But when you really think about it, why do they still have the feed? Why do you have to tap to get into the Story's experience? I think what TikTok ultimately did, there were a lot of competitors over the last 10 years that were doing similar products, similar sort of full-screen videos. I think what TiKTok really did was they designed the whole pr... See more