Big Technology
The Story Behind Twitter’s Revival: A Conversation With Twitter Product Head Kayvon Beykpour
‘We were hyper-focused on doing very, very few things’
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Kayvon Beykpour is one of Silicon Valley’s busiest product executives. As Twitter’s head of product, he’s survived for years in a formerly cursed role that seemed to turn over every few months. Now, Beykpour’s team is shipping. Twitter just released a Clubhouse clone, called Spaces. It bought Revue, a newsletter platform. And it announced Super Follow, a feature that wraps it all together by letting you pay for added access and content from people you follow on Twitter. This is new territory for Twitter, which spent the past few years with a seemingly stagnant product development process. Beykpour joins Big Technology Podcast for a wide-ranging discussion of all that and more.
Kantrowitz: Hi Kayvon. Were you waiting for the 2020 election to blow over before letting these products out of the barn?
Beykpour: I can appreciate how it might feel like that, but I promise you, that’s not actually how it works. It had nothing to do with us waiting for post-election. A lot of what we shared at our Analyst Day presentation has been in the works for quite some time. Like in some cases, over a year. These are very handy moments in time to do some storytelling around both what we have been working on for a while, what’s relatively new, what’s launched, what’s about to launch, and what’s a little bit further out.
But the short answer to your question is, we don’t do product development like that. We don’t wait for some election-related thing to then decide to announce a bunch of things, no.
Because we’re talking about Trump, it seems from the reporting that the Twitter policy team made a decision to ban Trump, and then they told Jack…
