This is the insider story of Houseparty. In the last two months, the video app has grown 1600% to become the #1 social app in 82 countries, including the U.S., with hundreds of millions of users. Its success, however, has been many years and trials in the making. In this episode, early investor & advisor James Currier joins Ben Rubin, the Founder of Houseparty to share the insider story of how the product went from zero-to-one to ubiquity. It’s the real story that most founders never get to hear. This episode is about the ups and downs of building Meerkat & Houseparty, and about his new work communications network, /Talk (Slash Talk). This is a masterclass in product, pivots and perseverance that every Founder will benefit from.
James Currier (00:45):
Today, we're here with Ben Rubin. Ben Rubin is the CEO and founder of a new company he's just announced called /talk, which you probably don't know but you will be knowing about. He was also the founder of a company called Meercat, which you might've heard about, which then evolved and changed into an app called Houseparty, which you undoubtedly have heard about because since COVID- 19, it's become the number one social app in 82 countries including the United States. It's had 1600% growth in downloads. Hundreds of millions of people are using it. And all of this is coming from Ben and his teams that he's pulled together. I was lucky enough to be an early seed investor in his company and Ben and I have now known each other for a lot of years. And so today it's my great pleasure to be hanging out with him and talking about some things, because I think every founder who's out there is going to benefit from hearing his thoughts, his perseverance, how he comes up with his visions and the many ups and many downs that Ben has been going through in the last few years since we've known each other.
James Currier (01:48):
So today Ben's here and we can tell the real story that most founders never get to hear. Ben welcome.
Ben Rubin (01:53): Thank you. Hey guys.
James Currier (01:55):
So let's go back six years to 2014. You and I met. You were still living in Israel. I was traveling there for a week. I met more than 30 companies on that trip, and I really hit it off with you. And we decided that I would invest in the company. And the name of the company at the time was Yevvo, Y E V V O. What was the idea behind it?
Ben Rubin (02:15):
So Life on Air, which is the company you invested in as seed, and the company that I founded in 2012 was focused on bringing people together in the most human way possible when they're physically apart. And we specifically focused on mobile first live streaming experiences. And that was the framework of the company.
Ben Rubin (02:35):
And what we did is bunch of products, the first of which was Yevvo. And it did a lot. Yevvo tried to do a lot, including live streaming over Twitter, which was one feature inside of Yevvo. And that was also one
of the things, that feature, that was really successful on Yevvo, but that was the inspiration behind next iteration, which was Meerkat.
James Currier (02:57):
So the Yevvo thing was doing live streaming before it was really easy to do. You guys had some real technical challenges doing that. And it also got very viral in certain countries. You had hundreds of thousands of teens using this thing, but then it petered out. Then there wasn't the retention. And then you decided to move to the US. Why did you move to the US?
Ben Rubin (03:16):
If you're trying to build consumer and you try to reach a mass appeal, you need to understand the environment in which you are conducting yourself. You need to know how things are being sold in the supermarkets. What people say to each other. What is March Madness looks like. All of those things that you can expect be with a mass appeal and do it all remotely, especially not in culture. Cyber security I get, things that are more behind the scenes. You can maybe do it.
James Currier (03:47):
But if you want to do a social mobile app in the United States, you got to be in the United States.
Ben Rubin (03:52):
And Yevvo, for that comment about the name, one of the things that was funny is that en vivo is being live. And that's one of the reasons it clicked for people in Mexico. Yevvo was number one in Mexico at some point. It was a phenomenon. And that made me realize that-
James Currier (04:10):
Back in 2014, this was back in 2014.
Ben Rubin (04:11):
Yeah. Exactly. 2014, 2013.
James Currier (04:13):
Yeah. Okay. So then you moved to the United States and then I've invested in you and then what do we
do? What's the process?
Ben Rubin (04:25):
I think I thanked you, but that's an opportunity to thank you publicly of taking so much time and dedication to explain the process of how to think about iteration and [inaudible 00:04:37] thinking, because this is where we walked through. And I remembered that meeting. I remember going to that meeting. It was in this place in Soma. You go down, there was some coworking space under that building. And we sit, and what we do is we do a matrix. What are the use cases that we've seen in Yevvo working and what are the graphs that are actually correlating with that? And then we can create a heat map of, not a heat map, but a heating map, like what type of use case and graph we can work in. What we've seen with Yevvo is that people in Michigan used Yevvo to stream to their friends around school, high schools, and we're like, can we emulate this geo fencing off of a high school?
Ben Rubin (05:24):
And can you create a product where it's people open and see who is in one mile from them? And can you create a network around that? So we mapped everything. And then another one was somebody was in a concert of Lady Gaga in Yevvo and that was one of our biggest streams because they used this feature that was hidden inside of Yevvo to tweet and go live. I was like, oh, let's do broadcasting on Twitter. And that was Meercat. And then we had another one, Air. I don't know if you remember Air.
James Currier (05:51):
So we came up with a whole series of ideas.
Ben Rubin (05:53): Yes.
James Currier (05:53):
We came up with a whole series-
Ben Rubin (05:55):
The guideline was it needs be dead simple, minimum clicks, and we need to be able to bang it out in two
months and move on. But you had really good point which we took to heart.
James Currier (06:06):
No, actually I said it needed to be done in 30 days, which showed I didn't understand it, but then you did
it in 60 days. And then you did the next one in 30 days. You actually did it.
Ben Rubin (06:14): Yeah.
James Currier (06:14):
You didn't think you could do it. Your team had taken 14 months on the first app, eight months on the second app, and then took 60 days for the third app, and then 30 days for the fourth app, because you realized you could do it.
Ben Rubin (06:25):
Yeah, exactly. And it's so much because as we are approaching everything that we putting out there and it all comes back to insecurity and especially as founders, we do a lot with insecurity. And one of the things that happen when you approach to put something out there for the first time, you make sure it's pretty, you go and you cut around the trims and you groom yourself and everything needs to be, but then you realize that actually there's a way to hack it.
Ben Rubin (06:53):
And the way you hack it is being okay with authenticity, being okay with who you are, because people eventually, it melts them. And it brings the good side of you and it makes people be okay with the things that you don't like. And if you create products that are attentive to the statement that you carry, just like a comedian coming everyday on the stage, probably they ramble too much. They feel
uncomfortable, but slowly you start being comfortable in your own body. And I think that's the, if you think about a company as an organism, that's the culture we start into. We didn't care about what you would think about us, we just cared about let's do something cool that fits the manifesto, that fits the statement and just put it out there and we're okay with bunch of things not being solved right now.
Ben Rubin (07:36):
And we're okay that some things are up in the air. And we're okay with the fact that you're going to have bunch of questions to us that we're not going to know how to answer. But what was important is that if the melody was right, people will dance. It's a matter of the equalizer or the bass or all the lights are not right. That's okay. People will dance if your melody is right.
James Currier (07:54):
Seriously, with these software products and the language you put on them, your personality, the personality of the team comes out in these products and the users can feel it. And if you're doing it your own way, and this is something I've known about you for a long time, Ben, is you really do things your own way and having that meld of the insecurity of trying to get it right, but the security of doing it your own way, that tension, it comes out in the product. And that I think really helps people to resonate with those products.
James Currier (08:20):
So Meercat launches in 2015. you spent 60 days building it. A quarter of the time you'd built the last one in. The following month is South by Southwest. So I've got a hotel room there. You and the team are sleeping on the floor under the beds and Meercat explodes. Take us to that moment. What's happening there?
Ben Rubin (08:37):
February 28, 2015, we put it on Product [inaudible 00:08:43] and at that point it was, I think you saw that presentation, the three slides that were a memo to a board meeting about the Sky Quartz project that we're doing while we're working on Air, which was in the matrix live streaming through your contact [inaudible 00:00:08:59]. And what happened is that the CTO and co-founder at the time, Itai, took Yevvo and basically hacked the shit out of it to do this very simple product that the idea behind it was can we get people from download to going live to their audience in one click?
Ben Rubin (09:17):
And we were able to actually do it for the first time in two clicks because you have to authorize Twitter first. But after that, it was one click and we have your name and we have your audience and we have all of this stuff. And it goes out. And people can watch. Which was the biggest hurdle of all the you streams and the you now and all the live streamings that were, I don't know if people remember, there were so many broadcasting and life streaming products there, but they couldn't pass on because they were so obsessed in trying to get broadcaster to onboard their audience on. And once we realized that this is the biggest challenge, we said, well, why not just meet the audience where it is?
James Currier (09:54): API was open.
Ben Rubin (09:55):
And there were so many cool things to do with it. It was so many cool things to do with it. And I remember sitting in the office with Itai and he's discovering all these things about API. And then we had this, one of my favorite people that I've worked with both on Houseparty this guy, Ryan Cooley, and Ryan was like, oh my God. I think that when two people tweet about the same hashtag, a third person. That's what while we were doing QA. We were doing QA to Meercat and we discover that if two people tweet about the same hashtag, the third person get a push with Ben and James tweet on the same hashtag. So we decided to put hashtag Meercat on all the streams. And what happened is that when people were tweeting, all their friends got to know about Meercat. And Itai discovered that you can actually, in the API, create every livestream is a thread, is a Twitter trend.
Ben Rubin (10:45):
So all the comments become reply and other people get to it. And it's basically becomes this monster. And I have this email exchange with Itai where he forwarded me email notifications from Twitter, letting you know that people in your network are tweeting the streams or because of those cross signaling that they use, those algorithm that they use and how we use the thing to our advantage. And I remember he forwarded it to him and he says, I think this is going to grow. And I reply, no, this is going to explode. They're going to exploded. It was like two weeks before at least that we knew that this is going to be highly explosive content. We designed this beautiful UI where we bring the watchers into it. And it was really innovative at the time. You can also watch it, whatever angle you watch it, I think Quibi does it now.
Ben Rubin (11:33):
But we were doing when you can hold it both vertically and horizontally, and we did it in 2015. Kind of funny and cool. What happened is that Twitter bought Periscope two months before that, or three months before we launched.
James Currier (11:49):
But they hadn't announced it, right?
Ben Rubin (11:51):
They hadn't announced it, and what happens is they put a hundred million behind that thing that they
bought and they're like, oh wow. The startup is taking all this investment that we have.
James Currier (12:03):
And the Periscope app was quite similar to Meercat in its functionality, but it wasn't as viral.
Ben Rubin (12:09):
It wasn't as viral. And I don't believe that they were copying us or stuff like this. It just the stars aligned in a weird way. And it was this awkward situation where you work hard, you sell your company and all of a sudden, somebody else hijacks all the spotlight.
Ben Rubin (12:25):
And then Twitter moved into basically how to protect their assets. We're there at South by James is Rocking America tour, there was 20 shirts like this. And whoever wore it was the coolest person on the universe.
James Currier (12:39):
The phone rings. It's like 10 o'clock on a Friday night.
Ben Rubin (12:42):
Exactly. It was afternoon, Friday night, and we get a call. And it's Jess Verrilli and who is now at Google Venture and Kevin Well, both who I like very much, by the way, are on the phone. And they were both on the Twitter team there. I think Kevin was the VP product or something like that. Super nice people. And they're like, dude, we're sorry, but we're going to close the API tonight. I was not mad. At first, they dealt with it. They were human about it. And also, my approach to life is I would do the same. I will do the same. [inaudible 00:13:18]. That's my company. I just put 100 million behind something else. And you're using the guidelines of the API is if you cannot use the API to something that competitive with Twitter. It's bad luck, but it sucks.
James Currier (13:30):
But we didn't know that Twitter had acquired them until a day before.
Ben Rubin (13:33): Exactly, exactly.
James Currier (13:33): Because it was unannounced.
Ben Rubin (13:36):
Exactly. And that's what they were telling me on the call. That's what they were telling me. Hey, we have this thing, we bought it. And now you're competing with our thing, which is against the policy. And they were very... I give it to them. They were very cool about it. And I was just dealing with it the way I think people should deal with bad news, which is you just need to suck it up and understand what you can do. And what's your next move. There's nothing you can do besides looking petty and getting to you can do besides looking petty and getting to get into other skin for no reason.
James Currier (14:06):
Yeah. And you still had two or three more days of playing superstar itself and getting interviewed by everybody. So you needed to keep that knowledge.
Ben Rubin (14:12):
We showed up all the interviews and the app was still growing. The app was still growing. It was doing great. Then I think about, okay, going back and how do you deal with this kind of things? And how do you take your liabilities as just a general framework for people go out there and think about how to navigate situations like this and some time things just suck and explode in your face, but you still have some things that you can do. And so we took a step back and we started looking at the data and we're like, okay, this is a liability.
Ben Rubin (14:42):
And the liability here is that they're about to launch Periscope and they have all this reach. And not only this, Facebook is announcing there is going to be Facebook Live and all of this stuff. And we're starting looking into the use cases that our competitor will go, will venture into, which are celebs, media, and news. And map all those use cases based on what we see from our two million users at the point. Within less than a month, 2 million users using Meerkat and we're mapping based on because we have their profiles and we see how many followers they have. We separate between influencers, media, news, all of these things. And we see that there is no retention for broadcasters on the 99% who are not celebs, media, and news. And this is where we understand that the only thing that justify an independent company here is if you can capture an ongoing daily basis, obviously that's rule for anyone.
Ben Rubin (15:38):
And then when you look at Meerkat and you say, okay, the only use case here that is a daily use case is celebs, media, and news. And if both Twitter and Facebook are going to fight for it when they have all the reach, we're not in business. We don't have a business. And now you can either cry to mommy, or you can say, you know what, let's flip it on the head. What is a product that will focus on the 99% that are not celebs, media, or news? If they're not comfortable being live and going live and that's the reason they are not continuing to engage. We had a pretty good understanding of what are the things that bother them? Mostly because people are boring. People are not interested in our day to day. Everybody wants to see Cardi B, but they don't need to see us.
Ben Rubin (16:17):
So then you ask yourself what would get under [inaudible 00:16:19] or their mission to bring people together in the most human way possible when they're physically apart. What will get the 99% to actually go live on a day to day. And it required a certain openness and a certain being open to iteration from the company that was really admirable because everybody we're four months. And we came to a board meeting and I walked through exactly the conversation, what I'm saying right now, to the board. And I'm like, guys, I could have put on the graph, our water number, which was growing. The [inaudible 00:16:52] growing, the water number growing. But what I showed is that graph versus the retention of the broadcasters. And I chose look into the problem and say, this is why we're going to die in a month or three, four or five months.
Ben Rubin (17:05):
It's not going to work out for us. And I actually don't think that maybe longterm it's going to be sustainable because if you cannot get the day to day person to go live, it's not going to work out. And basically three months, four months after raising $14 million from Greylock, Josh Elman and Evan found themself in a board meeting when I'm saying hey guys, we need to start over. It's a challenging conversation to have, but I'm super grateful that everybody was supportive on that. And we came up with this metaphor of the house party and it was such a clear, nice metaphor because we can then deduct all the product guidelines. And the statement of the product, manifest of the product is a house party. So you can imagine people asking on the heels of Meerkat, people in the team asking why wouldn't we stream the conversations.
Ben Rubin (17:53):
It makes sense. We just did Meerkat. So it makes sense. Maybe it sounds good on paper. And that's where we started having a real clear vision of what is Houseparty and what makes a great house party.
And that basically started a process in which within six months we were already in market [inaudible 00:18:10] with the market on Houseparty, which some people think Houseparty is aggressive now. It used to be much more aggressive in how it put people together in conversations. And we slowly chiseled away and tweaked it and tweaked it. And within a year from when we had the board meeting of a million daily active [inaudible 00:18:29] on Houseparty, which was really incredible.
James Currier (18:32):
We didn't talk too much about what happened at South by with the fundraising, because it was at that moment that you went into a rarefied startup situation that just doesn't happen to most founders. Even the companies I know that have exited for billions, never went through an experience like this. Where the tables really turned on the VCs and all the VCs saw Meerkat.
James Currier (18:54):
It was the hottest thing everyone wanted to invest. And there was a big scramble to try to get your
attention, to try to get on the cap table, to try to get your allocation. The sharp elbows came out.
Ben Rubin (19:05):
James, you were controlling that. I was like James, I don't know anything. I was in the idea of three years ago, I was still in the army in Israel. You're going to be controlling the cap table. And I think I still have access-
James Currier (19:19):
That Google sheet. I said dude, let's just get a Google sheet and then we'll just work on it. And we went from meeting to meeting and then we just plopped ourselves down in the lobby of the Hilton. And one after the other, the different venture people came in and eventually we just sat with Josh because we knew it was going to be Josh Elman from Greylock. One of the greatest social media investors in the world, and we then worked on the cap table there. And it was rapid. It was acrimonious. There was people on the phone. Everybody was on phones, walking around the table in the middle of the lobby at South by, trying to get this deal done. And a lot of upset people because everyone wanted into your deal.
Ben Rubin (19:56):
I actually have a good lesson from this. I think that it was so much pressure. Here's the thing. Sometimes, going back to insecurity, sometimes you get validation from getting get this name and that name and this name and then another name. And you end up given a lot of small checks.
Ben Rubin (20:09):
Now, if you don't have relationship with those people, those small checks specifically if they come not from the personal money of the person and they're not operators, they're going to forget about you. And it's just business. It's not like they're bad people or anything. But if you expect somebody to add value to you, either you give them a big check so they have something to lose, or you make sure that the check is personal from somebody who does not do investing for living. Because on both ends you either going to, and that person is an operator. It's somebody who was an operator, is they have a job. She or he has a job. They have a specific insight to something that you will need or need to their day to day. And they're putting the personal money. You can always call them and get help and they will help you.
Ben Rubin (20:54):
The other way is if it's an investor, make sure that they are going to, not lose their socks, but it's going to be hurt. Otherwise, you're just not going to get anything besides making yourself feeling good that you've got some names on your cap table, but those names are not going to care because it's not exactly their money and it only gives them bragging rights and you bragging rights. And it's just an ego at this point, and it's not really helping your company.
James Currier (21:19):
That's a great point for startup investors everywhere. Picking your investors, managing that cap table so that you're getting the most out of everybody who's got some equity in your company. And then also of course, make sure their personality aligned.
Ben Rubin (21:34):
Absolutely. Yeah. So I've learned from that.
James Currier (21:38):
So that was the series A, that happened at South by in the midst of the chaos. Four months later, you tell the board guys, I'm not going to run from the numbers. I'm not going to tell you everything's great. I'm not going to lie to you and I'm not going to lie to my team. I'm looking at the internal numbers. I'm looking for the problems. I'm looking for the weaknesses. And I have found a serious weakness. You could have gone for another four or five or six months before anybody would have known.
Ben Rubin (22:02):
Yeah. I actually even challenged that, not challenged, sorry. Add to this that I think we could have raised because we were still growing. Growing 20, 30% a month, which there is a thesis behind it that if it keeps growing, then Facebook not yet to launch their Facebook Live might want to acquire this and stuff like this. So there were-
James Currier (22:25):
People start calling. The M and A people at all the big companies need to do their job. And when their boss asks them have you talked to Meerkat? They have to say yeah. I know Ben, Ben's a good buddy. We've had lunch. They have to say that. And so they reach out just to see what the deal is. And so there's relationships that get built and they actually learn something about your business, which is a little odd because they're your competitor. But ultimately you can't not take the meeting because you got to build those relationships. So that's all going on at the same time. So you lean into the negativity that you see in the numbers. You're not scared of it. You're not pretending. You're not pretending so that you can go raise another bunch of money and they'll then tell people. You're honest all the way through. You tell people this is not working, we got to pivot.
James Currier (23:09):
The board has courage. The board is, they're product people.
Ben Rubin (23:13): Yeah.
James Currier (23:14):
And Aiden's got a good framework. So Aiden from LS in Israel. For those of you who are listening.
Ben Rubin (23:19):
Yeah, Aiden. And also Giggy, who's one of the seed investors in Life on Air. He was so behind. I remember a breakfast with Giggy. We had this breakfast and I'm like Giggy, you should see Houseparty, this thing we're testing. And he's like go all in on this. I don't know what you're doing with... Leave Meerkat. Leave this. It gave me such good boost and courage to go and follow that. And I really remember that.
James Currier (23:49):
To add to the courage instead of dragging down with doubts and whatnot.
Ben Rubin (23:53):
Yeah. Exactly. Maybe it's not going to work, I don't know. No. It was like do it. Which is kind of an Israeli approach, which... It's something that I really liked about growing up in Israel is that ability to be okay with things that are not going your way and try to understand that this is just the way things are and you can totally be happy and navigate that and find joy in that and just remove the... In Israel they say somebody eats from my plate, somebody drink from my cup, somebody... all of this.
Ben Rubin (24:26):
You just move it away and you just deal with reality as it presents itself.
James Currier (24:30):
So you make the pivot and you go to Houseparty. You got a million people a year later using the thing. Then what happens? Because for founders out there, they need to understand that there's a mental pattern you've got to do things your own way, to try to bring people together in the most human way possible, even when they're physically distant. And that is a thread that lines through your personality and the way you've approached this and the ups and downs were so extreme on your journey so far. Just to understand the vicissitudes, how extreme it can be so that they can put their own vicissitudes in perspective.
James Currier (25:04):
Even a guy like yourself who continues to put out very interesting products and has such successes like Meerkat and Houseparty and has access to everybody in the Silicon Valley. You too have gone through the downs as well. So you pivot and it's working and then what happens?
Ben Rubin (25:21):
A quick add to what you're saying. What I realized over time, that this mental framework of bringing people together in the most human way possible when they're physical apart. It actually started earlier when I learned architecture and dealing with space and how to create new opportunities for people to interact in ways that create a meaningful experience. That's one of the things that I really love about architecture. For some reason in my third year, that light bulb turned on. And I said the next space frontier is actually digital.
Ben Rubin (25:51):
I'm going to spend my time being an architect, continue being an architect, just in a new dimension that is people don't even think about it as a space. And today people are talking about presence and how presence is important and all these things. But this has been a motive of mine, something that I have so much passion. And I think it goes to some things from my childhoods and how I got brought up and pain that I care with myself and learn and go through it in my own journey. But this is how some people deal with their pain and deal with and grow through singing. Some people through playing guitar. Some people become actors to process themselves. And I think for me, it's the creating of this presence and this shared intimacy that I pursued in architecture and then go in and doing what I'm doing, all the way through even the company that I'm doing now.
James Currier (26:41):
That's great. That's a great point.
Ben Rubin (26:43):
I want to tie it up. Keep yourself open.
James Currier (26:46):
Yeah. You got to keep yourself open to different product interfaces. To the same emotion. To the same goal. The same healing of yourself and the healing of the people around you. Making the world a better place. This is a thing that I lament a lot, Ben. I think I said to you the other day that you feel to me like you're somebody from 2002. When people came to Silicon Valley not for money, but you came for love, you came for product, you came for creativity. You came for customers, you came for the people that you are serving in these spaces. And part of the reason I think that you're able to navigate the ups and downs of this so well is that you're not attached to the money. You're actually just attached to the product and to the vision and what you're creating.
Ben Rubin (27:26): Yup.
James Currier (27:27):
And I think that's an important point that we don't make enough here in Silicon Valley, is that everyone's gotten so blinded by the money, but underneath it all is a deep need we all personally have to create something. And those people, I think, are the ones who create the great products.
Ben Rubin (27:40):
Yeah. And just to nuance that. I'm very much attached to the idea of a good business that is able to sustain itself and continue the message that you want to carry in the world. The idea of personal money, fame, power, all the things that we seek because we feel insecure. These are the things that when things get in rough, people retreat. This is something that my wife said, and I totally believe in that 100%, focus on the aim and not on the origin. When you hear about ...
James Currier (28:13):
Focus on the aim, not on the origin.
Ben Rubin (28:15):
Exactly. They're not focused on inside who am I, what am I standing for, what do I love about myself, what are the things that I actually enjoy doing, being present doing. They focus on I'm going to achieve one, two, and three, and that will get me that. Then when things don't go their way, that's where all the insecurity and tension, and then you don't let things happen in a way that is natural for you to grow into it. Because you're so obsessed on the defined image that is not really obtained yet, and it is in the far, and you have not asked yourself why you are the way you are, and what do you want to do, and what do you love about yourself, and what do you feel like you want to build with. Because there is joy in dealing with all the kind of pain, and understanding it. There is real joy in it, and if you are able to detach yourself from this idea of the unfortunate thing that came with the blood testing, Theranos, am I pronouncing it yet?
James Currier (29:12): Yeah.
Ben Rubin (29:13):
These and there's other examples where founders were so obsessed with the aim that even if they started from a sincere place, it kind of got lost because they never visited, they were never focused on the origin of why they work. I always work with it also with myself, trying to understand why am I feeling insecure, what are the anxieties I have, why do I procrastinate, what am I afraid of, and try to break it down to myself and understand is it a distraction or is it true, or what is it that I'm learning about when I'm angry about somebody, or when I "hate" somebody. What are they teaching me about myself? What is the things that are inside of me that I don't like, that I look away, that makes me not like this person? I learned that's what makes those things kind of ... I find it to be very enjoyable, once you kind of change, you step away.
James Currier (30:06): Yeah.
Ben Rubin (30:06):
That was a long ramble of saying I don't have a problem with money, I like money, but it's not ...
James Currier (30:12):
Yeah, no, money is the fuel that goes in the rocket, but it's focusing on building the rocket, not on the fuel. It also is the case that these startups that we start are self-development machines on steroids. Because you are experiencing so many things so rapidly so intensely that it gives you so many opportunities to examine yourself and understand what makes you tick, and then to try to understand your team, and to understand the people you're co-creating with. That learning about yourself and
about them is ultimately the reward for your own transformation. That transformation well done could lead to a lot of money, but regardless it could lead to a beautiful product that touches hundreds of millions of people, like House Party does today.
Ben Rubin (30:59):
Yes. The downside of it is sometimes because of our culture unfortunately to your point, the tech culture, our culture, has started to show so much fetishizes the founder, and the idea of the cover article, and private jets, and I'm hearing all this crazy stories about this thing, and I'm like this kind of self fulfilling idolizing, or idolized ...
James Currier (31:28):
Narrative, yeah, the self- fulfilling narrative.
Ben Rubin (31:31):
Where the startup itself becomes a way for the founder to destruct themself, be a destruction through their own fame that they need to grow through, and actually what it becomes is a drug that is a bandaid, and not a solution, and then things start to just get off the rails, and this is where we see the incredible story from the Ubers and the We Works and where we're like how things happen. I don't know. By the way, I'm generalizing right now. I don't know the details of all these things, but I give it as an example of we are busy too much in say this person did that. That person is so cool, this person has all this money. We stop talking about what are we building, what are you creating, tell me about what it is that is new, that is innovative, and what is the joy. I really wish that somebody would do a profile on an entire company through the eyes of one of the engineers or one of the product managers, and it's entirely anchored in the day to day thinking of the company, and how that works. That's the profile of the company.
Ben Rubin (32:35):
Instead, we like just because this is how we are as millennials, and millennials are now in the phase where they mostly, like they're in all the jobs, I would say, they're in their peak. As millennials, we are reacting to the previous generation by seeking status, and going outwards. Where Gen Z is going more inwards, and it's so apparent how we think about Instagram and Twitter, and what kind of founders we create, and what kind of stories we have, because we kind of seek validity, going outwards, because we are reacting to the collapse of the middle class that our parents had. It just really interesting dynamic, and obviously how social network came to be is just like make these things much more apparent.
James Currier (33:22):
That's the core of the founder journey, man, the core of the founder journey, and we don't talk nearly enough about it. Because that's your day to day internal life. House Party is doing well, million DAUs, what then happens?
Ben Rubin (33:35):
Either way, it's still the following year did pretty well. It's just not as well. Then you raise money, and Sequoia did our ... Again, we're in the same situation, which is quite incredible. It's like [inaudible 00:33:50] in, and the second back to back, where you capture lightning in a bottle. Sequoia comes in and do leads a $50-million dollar round with participation of Gray Lock and Olive, and we set a plan, and the product is growing, but it's not growing as much as you would expect from a company that has $70-
million dollars. There is great engagement, but it's all around teens, but the growth is not enough for you to justify a new round, and the size of the users that we have, which was quite big and engaged community, is not big enough to also monetize. You're kind of stuck. You find yourself two years later, or a year and a half later, and you're like what's happening, there's millions of users using it everyday, but it's just not growing the way we were expecting to grow right now.
James Currier (34:43):
Right. It's not big enough for growing fast enough to be a threat to any of the big companies who would then need to buy it from a defensive perspective, the way Facebook bought WhatsApp. Josh will tell you it's such an anomaly, It's like you don't see social products like this. How come something gets stuck like this?
Ben Rubin (35:02):
It either goes up or down.
James Currier (35:07):
Yeah, and this was just holding steady.
Ben Rubin (35:08):
It's holding steady, and it's growing, but it's not enough. A lot of the same schedule that happens in high school, the fact that people have the same day to day schedule, so they are available and not available to talk at the same time, House Party is a product based on presence. If all your friends are available to talk, have homework at the same time, exam at the same time, go to vacation at the same time, they're all available when you're available, and when you're not available they're also not available. What happens when they move to college is that this is all out of the window. It's like people have different schedules, and they can be as active, it's funny, they can be as active, but still they're not going to match with other people for conversations.
Ben Rubin (35:50):
The other thing that changes is the code of conduct changes. In high school, you want to be friends with everyone, you want to know everyone, you want to be in the high school parking lot. In college, it's you want to have new friends, you don't want to be friends with anyone. You might have developed more of your self identity, so there's some people you want to be friends of and some people you don't want to be friends of. You start being more selective of your time, and selective of the people that you talk. It
was an interesting problem in terms of growth, because if you look at the classic growth accounting, which I'm pretty fluent at, to judge what is the problem, and identify the problem, you won't see it. It would look like how bees disappear, and we don't know why. We don't know why all the sudden a cluster of bees disappear here and disappear there, and you know this phenomena of bees ...
Ben Rubin (36:37):
You can't make sense. Then what we did is started matching it based on classes, so when did you start the class, when does your school end, and then things started to align and make sense, people leave to college, and then they don't find the same hit match, and they start to find new friends, but their old friends come in and interrupt their flow of work. This is where basically I said we have an amazing product, we have millions of users that are engaged, it is growing, but it just we either need to sell it or pivot, because it's just not we're not going to be able to Frankenstein our way away from this, and we're not going to be able to ... When startups start to add more and more features, and the only time you need to add features is if you're growing like crazy, and you have more and more user personas, and different users starting using your product, you add features for them. If you're not growing, don't add more features. Don't use features to grow. Unless they're an enhancement of something in the core.
Ben Rubin (37:39):
I hope that's not too complicated. What I'm trying to say is that sometimes you try to do too much.
James Currier (37:45):
You don't want to turn into a Frankenstein of a product.
Ben Rubin (37:47): Yeah. You can have lots and lots of ideas, and everyone in the organization comes up with an idea and pet projects, and I want to try this feature and that feature, and if we change that then it will grow, and you'll just end up with a Frankenstein product.
Ben Rubin (38:00):
When you think about it as a song or as a dinner, when I think about consumer product, I always think about there are atomic unit of consumer product that you can learn from everywhere, from your body, a bodega that you like to go, from a menu in a restaurant, from a song. All of these are things that get other people emotional attachment, and there is something about their location, their timing, the narrative they're saying within the community, that makes them successful. If you're able to spot that pattern, you can actually learn a lot from this analogy. What I'm trying to say here is adding more items to the menu will not make the restaurant successful. Making the song longer will not make it a hit. That's what I'm trying to say. It's an interesting dynamic to deal with, but I honestly think that you can learn a lot from that cool fast casual restaurant that is barely 500 square foot, but is just killing it, and there's a line around it, there's something about it that works, and you can deduct from it and learn also for your own product.
Ben Rubin (39:06):
By the way, even now, throughout the past eight years that I've been doing this, metaphors like music and food are tools that I use on a day to day basis, multiple times, to explain to my team, and work with my team to understand what is the attitude and approach that we have to things. One of my favorite things is something that Miles Davis says, which I think is super important for people who build product. In Jazz, when you think you play the wrong note, it's the next note that dictates if the previous one was wrong. Product development especially in the zero to one stage, product development is Jazz. Nobody can sit behind the computer and say okay, I'm going to have a hit, a musical hit. You don't pre-write all the stuff, and put the drums machine and the bassline, and all the effects, and then you first press play, and now you have a hit, that's not how it goes. You need to understand and learn from how creative peoples and different disciplines really come into the fermentation and the process of iterating and understanding what is the kind of feeling we're aiming to, and letting things be open.
Ben Rubin (40:16):
It's really hard for engineers and for even product managers that are process oriented, which is something good, how do you create a shared language within that team that allows for an open space to see beyond what's there, to be okay with answers that are not there, and how are we okay with a process where answers present themselves as we're playing the music, and feeling what's wrong or right. Or else, what happens, just like what happened with Yevvo, you end up doing a lot, a lot horizontally, and you don't know what is your next step because you have no idea where you are. There is so many things that you are doing, and instead of doing ten steps at a time what you want to do is one, understand where you are, and know where's second, and then go to second. Because there's so many things that you can do. You can do anything with software. We can do literally anything, and that's the beauty of it. How do you navigate within a feeling?
Ben Rubin (41:10):
When I work with my teams, I try to create my specs look like one page of a proposal, that thinks about the rhythm and the attitude and the melody, a little bit of it. I find ways through explaining the goal, the high-level goal and the problem, and through examples to leave the open space for the discussion between the team, and the jamming, to actually reach the answer. I'm trying to, and it's part of my own world process, how do you move away from defining the answers to defining the question, which is a cliché, but it is what are we asking here. That's the beauty of it, that's I think what's the beauty of it.
James Currier (41:58):
You had to pivot or sell.
Ben Rubin (42:01):
So we have two people in a cell and you're $70 million in the bank. This is the third pivot, Houseparty is the third pivot, or even the fourth pivot if you actually count air. At this point, you are eight years in and $70 million is not a... LPs needs to see returns. People need to see something.
Ben Rubin (42:25):
And it becomes a really hard conversation now between you and investors, but also between you and your team to convince people to go for another pivot. And this is where we had a really... It was a hard conversation, but it was a productive one where you realize that, okay, we need to sell. People have been troopers have been pushed through two pivots, some people three pivots. This company had so much different cultures and you just need to say, "Okay, this is where the journey for that is ending and we're going to sell. We have a great team, we have a terrific product and we can find a great place to land it. And hopefully provide value to whoever acquires us."
Ben Rubin (43:12):
And we thought we will be able to sell it to one of the social networks. And to be honest, I was excited. I was going to sell it to somebody. I know I'm not going to make money, but I'm going to sure I'm going to learn from going into a big company. I'm going to learn.
Ben Rubin (43:34):
And then we realize that the social networks are not going to do it. And once we realized that, I had a hard time, the next move, our plan B was like, okay, we're going to go after media companies and gaming companies, which is a really good idea, but it's just not who I am, going into.
Ben Rubin (43:53):
And then I had to have a conversation with the board, with my cofounder and say, " This is just not me." I don't know how I can go to a media company and work on this, but it's a great plan. And I was lucky because my cofounder could step up to that. And that was her break background. And she and the team did a great, great job finding Epic Games. And it was a perfect match because we had so many people using Houseparty when they used Fortnite. And it all worked out. And I got to start a new company and we ended up selling the company, which is great.
James Currier (44:34):
And the team's over there at Epic Games and now the thing's blowing up.
Ben Rubin (44:37):
Exactly, and that's something incredible to be proud of because we built that product together. And they added all these games that I'm sure people love using during the COVID. And people find a lot of comfort in it in these days. And it's pretty incredible. I feel super proud. Dude, how many people get to say, "Hey, I had a product with hundreds of million people using it"? It's pretty cool.
James Currier (45:02):
Do you feel regret? Do you feel regret that you sold it?
Ben Rubin (45:04):
No. At the time you cannot predict the COVID and you don't know what will happen after it goes away. You have no idea. And I think that we did the right decision and I think Epic got a great deal. Everybody got a great deal. The team got a great deal. I got a great... Everybody got a great deal.
James Currier (45:23):
Yeah. And it's still alive and it's still growing. And you get to see the fruition of all the work that you did
for eight years. And not have to navigate there your fourth pivot worked, right?
Ben Rubin (45:31): Exactly.
James Currier (45:33):
So, when you look back, what was the highest high? And then what was the lowest low?
Ben Rubin (45:38):
The highest high I was baking bread at home and I was doing a process. This is before it became trendy because of COVID. We're talking 2016 here. And I got a push notification from... This is, sorry, end of 2015. I got a push notification from our POC product of Houseparty.
Ben Rubin (46:01):
And I got into the zone when, sometimes I have this feeling where things click and I start to jive with it. And I understand it. And I was listening to the song of Drake, Back To Back. And as I'm listening to Back To Back, I'm kneading my dough and it's the first or second notification that comes from the POC of Houseparty. And it's Ryan Cooley and this guy Will Dennis, who is now actually a film director and he has a movie. It's incredible.
James Currier (46:28):
These are guys who are all on your team?
Ben Rubin (46:29): Playing with the period.
James Currier (46:30):
Yeah. These are notifications from members of the Houseparty?
Ben Rubin (46:34):
Using the first POCs. And I'm Back To Back and I swipe in and Ryan is doing his thing. Will is doing this thing. One of the first conversation on Houseparty And it was like a real genuine moment. And I was listening to the song, this Back to Back and it's dawned on me that we're going to have a Back to Back hit because that feeling of, "Oh my God, this is an incredible aha moment. These are my friends. They're jumping..." All team members but we're friends. We're jumping on, we're having a conversation. I'm kneading dough and the song is banging in the background of Drake, Back to Back.
Ben Rubin (47:14):
I'm like, this is going to work. And it was a high that it's the joy of the small things, but it was knowing that you're building something true and unique and special. And it grabs you without you... It has its own life because it grabbed your attention. You didn't seek it's attention. And you're like, we're going to do it Back to Back. And it did.
James Currier (47:37):
And when you say Back to Back, and Drake is singing Back to Back, you mean that you caught lightning in a bottle with Meerkat and then you're going to catch it again with Houseparty?
Ben Rubin (47:45): Yeah.
James Currier (47:46):
That's the idea. I'm just clarifying for the people listening. That's what you mean by do it a second time back to back?
Ben Rubin (47:52): Yeah.
James Currier (47:53):
That's amazing. That's amazing. What was your lowest low?
Ben Rubin (47:55):
The lowest low was definitely the understanding that I cannot pivot it again and I will have to sell it. And making peace with it and understanding that this is the right course of action.
James Currier (48:09):
Sure, sure. So, after that you become an EIR Benchmark. You start coming around and meet with all your friends like me and talking through new ideas. And now you're launching your next product, Slashtalk. Tell us about the Slashtalk.
Ben Rubin (48:24):
Well, Slashtalk is a product for fast decentralized conversations. And the idea is that we're anti-meeting tool. So we're trying to break down-
James Currier (48:35):
So it's for work? So it's for work? So instead of going after consumer, you're going after the work environment?
Ben Rubin (48:40):
I'm going after people who have worked and are tired to spend their time in meetings that are not productive. They are the lowest common denominator, time and getting people in the same thing. And I think it actually hinders creativity where we tie ourselves to this arbitrary constraint of time. And usually they're not inclusive because the person who talks most is the person who is getting the most reward for the meeting.
Ben Rubin (49:04):
And I think that as creators, as contributors, and there's in Slashtalk, we just put our manifesto there. As contributors, everybody inside is both contributor and talker. And we say talker, talker is the side of us that is insecure. That is always long preamble in meetings, bloated agenda, trying to say something.
Ben Rubin (49:25):
And the contributor is the one, the side of us that try to build. And I think that the tool of meetings, the idea of meetings is important for some use cases, but the most use cases, it actually suppresses the part of us that builds. And it gives rooms to the part that wants to talk.
Ben Rubin (49:41):
And what we're trying to do with Slashtalk is to break down the meaning into the building blocks of the topics, the people and the time. And we're trying to reorganize conversations that going to be topic driven, going to be super fast. And it's a totally different way to think about how you construct a live conversation with your IC.
Ben Rubin (50:01):
And it's really cool. We got some people who worked very early on on Houseparty back in the team, working on this. My co founder used to be the GM of engineering of Skype. And he's both an incredible engineer and can manage a team of 300 people. And he brought some early Skypers on and we get some people on Facebooks. And they've worked on interesting products and it really starting to jam, really cool. We are definitely the jazz phase right now.
Ben Rubin (50:34):
It's a totally different way of how you jump on a quick conversation with your teammate. Another way to look at it, just to kind of... Is it, we have inbox for meetings, it called Calendar. But we have all these quick three to five minutes micro conversations, usually in the form of like, "Hey, do you have a minute?" that are starting to increase more and more as the organization becomes more remote and decentralized.
Ben Rubin (50:57):
And we don't have an inbox for them. We're running around with little, little topics that we scribbled that we need to catch up with James or need to catch up with this designer. And there's no inbox for them. And there's no organizing principle of how do we have a place for all of this conversation to happen? And not only this, how do we make sure that the value that's come out of it is something a lot of people can build on top? So we're focused specifically on internal, quick unscheduled calls that happens. So I'm excited about this and we're going to see what happens.
James Currier (51:26):
That's why I think it's exciting. I think it's such a fertile soil. Right. I mean, there's so little solutions for that and there's such a big need. And I think in 10 years when there's a solution, whether it's Slashtalk or something else, we're going to look back and say, "How the heck did we do it before?" I mean, it feels like there could be that kind of a switch.
Ben Rubin (51:42):
And it's like in one spectrum we have the presencey things like be live now, call people now or be just live. And on the other side of the spectrum you've got the meeting, the scheduled meeting, but the work is being done actually in the middle. There's a gray area that doesn't even have a namespace. What is a micro conversation? You talk to engineers in Stripe, they will say, "We don't have meetings." And then I ask them, "Do you jump on a quick call with your colleagues?" "Oh. All the time." So they don't even call it meetings. And now you need to understand, okay, there is this new emerging use case of this quick unscheduled calls. And if we believe that organization and work is going to continue to centralize this, use case is going to grow more and more. And there's no inbox for it. There's no organizing principle for it.
Ben Rubin (52:28):
And this is actually where work is getting done. This is where 2ICs review code. This is where an engineer and a designer see where spec is missing. This is where two people review why they're getting errors in the compilers. This is where work is getting done. And if you're able to actually solve the pain there by owning that funnel, you are actually sitting on work conversations and the workflow actually converge.
Ben Rubin (52:53):
And you can start indexing the conversation about work with the actual work. And this is how this thing can become an actually a system of record of the internal conversation in the organization where people can actually point back to all the conversation happening around the file. All the things that are relevant for you to know and not know when you approach your work. And the approach we take on it, it doesn't even look like an app. I'm excited. I'm really excited to show it to people.
James Currier (53:19):
Well, if I know anything about you it's going to evolve and iterate over the next few years. It's something that catches the lightning in the bottle. So I'm excited to watch it.
Ben Rubin (53:29): Yeah.
James Currier (53:30):
Ben Rubin, it's been a great pleasure to have you my friend. And thanks for coming.
Ben Rubin (53:34): Thank you.