Kayvon Beykpour: How to Structure and Manage the Best Product Reviews | 20VC #894

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Kayvon, this is such a joy for me to do. I've been so looking forward to this one. I've been a fan from afar for a while, and then when Scott Belsky said, "Kayvon is the best, you have to have him on," I jumped at the chance. So thank you so much for joining me today.

Thanks for having me. Great to meet you, Harry.

It is so great to me. But I wanna start with actually the story of you and Scott that we just touched on before. So tell me, how did you and Scott first engage around Periscope? And talk to me about that first encounter in those early days of Periscope.

Yeah. So, um, I was actually introduced to Scott by, um, an investor who we had pitched on Periscope. Um, and this is before we'd even built the product. We had mock-ups, we had prototypes, we had basically a fundraising deck, and this was at the time, I think we had t- like it was just me and my co-founder. Maybe we had, like, one or two other people that we were already working with, um, on, on the early team. But this was, like, pre-the app existing, um, and we were doing fundraising 'cause we wanted to hire a team. And, um, basically, like, everyone said no, um, but a few people were interested. And one of the VCs who we had pitched, um, who ended up saying no, by the way, was like, "Eh, this isn't really for me, but I've been talking to this guy, Scott Belsky, who had, like, shared an idea similar to this back in the day. Let me put you in touch with him because maybe you two can, can hit it off." Um, which I'm so grateful for that introduction because I ended up, um, talking to Scott probably a week later, and we just, it, like, it was instant chemistry. First of all, he had been thinking about this idea. And, uh, you know, at the time, we sort of were imagining, um ... What we wanted to build with Periscope was, like, the closest thing to teleportation, you know? Like, we didn't actually know how to build, like, the Star, Star Trek manifestation of, um, you know, you know, uh, beaming people anywhere, um, though that would be really, really cool. Like, we're just not that smart. So we were like, what's the easiest way we can build the most analogous version of this with the technology we have today? And that's when sort of, like, live streaming entered the picture. And Scott, for whatever reason, gi- you know, he's brilliant in his own way, and had been, uh, very successful building Behance and all that. This idea had been sort of stuck in his mind for, for a long time as well. So I think we instantly hit it off for the shared love we had for this, for this dream. Um, and in that first conversation, I can't tell you how refreshing it was, having spent weeks trying to fundraise and getting, you know, striking out left and right. Scott was like, "I'm in. I wanna support you guys." Um, he wrote us, uh, he wrote us, like, a th- uh, well, I don't wanna share how much the check was. But he wrote us a substantially sized check and, and was like, "I wanna be on the team and help you guys make this come to life." Um, and from then on, you know, Scott was just part of our, he was part of our team. He was, like, just an incredible resource for us to, um, you know, keep iterating on this dream and turning it into a reality eventually.