interview with Adam mosseri, Ceo of instagram

Q1: From your perspective, how did Threads’ first year go?

Adam Mosseri: It has been a wild year. Given that we had 100 million registrations in the first four and a half days, expectations went through the roof immediately. Then, the product went through what every new product does, which is a novelty phase where everyone tries it out. After a couple of weeks, the numbers went down in terms of actual daily users. Then all of a sudden, we were a complete failure in everyone's eyes. And then when we started to really grow again, and actually get significantly bigger than even those initial registration numbers — all of a sudden, if we don't beat Twitter by the end of the year, we're a failure again.
What I try to do is, as much as I can, keep the team focused on making the thing better every week.

What have you learned over the past year about what people want from Threads? And has your thinking evolved at all around what the core use cases for it are?

When we launched, we were very focused on facilitating conversations. Conversations are amazing, and I don't think they're any less viable than I did when we entered. But Threads is actually for a broader use case, which is sharing your ideas. It's a place for commentary about what's happening in the world.

I've been struck at how quickly Threads has shipped updates over the past year. How did you set the Threads team up to make this happen?

It's been really fun to work on something that is just faster. Part of it is just that you're earlier in the development cycle, so it's more obvious what would be good to build. Part of it is that the team was built around a small nucleus of really passionate people. So we try to pick people who weren't necessarily the most senior, but were the most geared up about trying to build this thing.

And we've tried to design our processes to be really nimble because it was a sprint to start. We wanted to build it in a couple months, and it took a couple more months than we wanted. But still, we built it in less than a year. And that was sort of part of the DNA of the team.