Nikita Bier

[gentle music] Still talking about the Lego set, Elon said, "Lego sets that were researched and bought for me by Grok Bot have arrived, and bot automatically stopped checking the shipping status." So to all those people that were like, "Oh, I'm gonna make sure it doesn't arrive, Elon," it did, and his kids can play with Legos now.

Nikita Bier says, "There is something beautiful about the most expensive game of all time, $2 billion, being dropped the same month that AI models become capable of creating comparable experiences.

The swan song for the big studio era." Are we talking about game, um, GTA VI?

Yes.

Well, all of a sudden, you're really incentivized to be kind of a provocative asshole who just works to get their base riled up.

Because every time they leave one of those comments, you get another couple cents or whatever it is, you know? So you did see Nikita Bier, who was the head of product over at X at the time, really working to deal with some of the negative externalities this caused.

For example, there was a proliferation of American political commentators who were not in the US at all, right? They're, like, in Nigeria.

[laughs] And all of a sudden, there's this question of, like, why are we letting Nigerian profiteers rile up American audiences purely for money? Like, let's be absolutely candid about what's happening here.

So Cameo, intro.co. For, for those unfamiliar, like intro.co, I'm on there, I think.

But you can just like basically pay-- Like Nikita Bier, you can pay him like 10 grand, and he'll get on a call with you for [laughs] an hour.

This, this is gonna expose that no one actually wanted, not Nikita specifically, but no one actually wanted to hear what someone had to say.

They just wanted to meet them.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You wanna meet them, and, and for, like Nikita Bier, for example, you want his knowledge, right? You want, you know, "Hey, I have this app.

I'm trying to grow it on the App Store.

Josh helped me in my career." You know, I said that.

Nikita said that.

A bun- bunch of other people said that.

And then, you know, the next day just happened.

[laughs]

[laughs]

Especially if it's something, it's the Nikita Bier.

Like your friends just answered this question about you strategy, which worked so well three times.

We have a strategy.

As long as I do something that's in, in, in support of Muse and what's going on with the personal super intelligence mission that the CEO and founder has laid out, I'm good." Even if I'm on Facebook Marketplace team and I feel like I'm gonna get steamrolled because of the Nikita Bier take that everyone's gonna be negotiating and low-balling on Facebook Marketplace, well, the Facebook Marketplace team, they can say, "Okay, well now we're gonna build tools for sellers to make that not annoying." And so there's more work to be done, and it's more aligned with the overall mission.

The vibes should be good.

At the same time, The Verge ran a story that said the verbs...

I personally agree with that.

And then there was an interesting point from Nikita Bier who kind of runs X. I don't know.

I think he's head of product at X.

But he tweeted and said, how important is AI to meta? Here's one easy tell.

More recently, he was head of product at Discord, which he helped grow significantly, and now he's between gigs, which means he was finally able to come on the podcast without a comms team, without a PR team, which means that he's able to be especially honest and real about everything that he's seen and learned and has been excited to share.

We cover so much ground, from how the best teams are organized like terrorist organizations, what it's like to manage Nikita Bier, why most PMs are really bad, why Snapchat has struggled to build a truly massive business in spite of having a billion monthly active users, and it's not what you think, and so much more.

This episode is full of so much gold, and that's why it went so long.

I couldn't stop digging into stuff that Peter kept bringing up.

There's, there's a lot of alpha in that.

[laughs]

Speaking of, um, a higher power, uh, a fun fact about you is you managed Nikita Bier, who, uh, came on the podcast, one of the most popular episodes of the podcast, quite a character, uh, was head of product for X recently for I think a year.

Uh, very few people have worked with Nikita.