· David Senra, Alexandr Wang
[00:00:00] S0: Say more about this. Why did you just call it a single piece of art and that you need a single perspective or point of view? [00:00:00] S1: I think one criticism of products that come from larger organizations, and I think this is even now starting to plague a lot of the AI labs, is that they become kind of this Frankenstein, almost like Cronenberg amalgamation of a bunch of different people's points of view and visions and beliefs. And it's sort of like PM hell in some sense, where every PM has a thing that they're trying to get into the product and jam into the product, and then all of that kind of blends together into this smoothie almost. People feel it as users and consumers. You can feel when a product is just like, it feels like lots of different people worked on it and there were clearly different people who were goaled differently, so they just kind of jammed it all together. Muse had to be the exact opposite, which is like, there's one clear point of view. There is one cohesive experience that we're trying to deliver to the world.
· David Senra, Alexandr Wang
[00:00:00] S0: I love that you said that, and it just happens to be pure coincidence. I don't know when this is going to come out, but we're recording this on the 15th anniversary of Steve Jobs' death. And when you think of somebody, like consumer products that had a single point of view, you obviously think of Steve first. I've read every single book on Steve and the history of Apple, and I've done, I don't know, 15 or 20 episodes on him for my other podcast, "Founders." But one of my favorite lines to describe Steve's impact was, it says that, "Apple is just Steve Jobs with 10,000 lives." The products are to his taste, his perspective, his point of view. What he wanted to see in the world is exactly what the end user got. [00:00:00] S1: In Muse's case, Nat Friedman deserves a lot of credit. His taste and sensibilities ultimately dictated and shaped what that product became. [00:00:00] S0: Do you talk about how many people are using Muse? Are you guys talking about this publicly or no? [00:00:00] S1: We have said millions, and then I have retweeted other people who have shown graphs where you would imply that Muse is the fastest-growing consumer app of all time, consumer AI app of all time. [00:00:00] S0: So you won't say a number, though? [00:00:00] S1: We've said millions, yeah.
· Alexandr Wang, David Senra
[00:00:00] S1: We've said millions, yeah. [00:00:00] S0: Well, millions could be hundreds of millions. That's also millions. So you're just not adding the beginning to that. I want to go into, you've been kind of going, and I mean this in a loving way, unhinged on X. So can you talk about your, is this marketing strategy? What is going on? I feel like there's a distinct difference in your public tweeting since Muse launch. What are you doing? [00:00:00] S1: There's a few pieces of what's happening here. [00:00:00] S0: This has got to be more fun than Scale AI, when you were building Scale AI. It has to be. We're going to talk about that later, but it has to be.
· David Senra, Alexandr Wang
[00:00:00] S0: This has got to be more fun than Scale AI, when you were building Scale AI. It has to be. We're going to talk about that later, but it has to be. [00:00:00] S1: The past few weeks have been some of my most fun building, yeah, certainly in my career. And I think there's a few things happening. So one is, it felt important that we figured out a way to make Muse break through. It's a pretty torrential, going back to this, it's this torrential stream of updates. For most people, they're just constantly being bombarded with new AI products and startups and releases and things and models, and here's another model, and here's another product, and here's another feature, and it's just this torrential stream. We had actually large meetings where we talked about this as a team, and it was like, "We need to break through." And obviously, Meta, we have lots of distribution. We can make sure everyone knows about it, but that's not enough to make it break through in an interesting cultural or fascinating way for the world to kind of pay attention to. I separately in my life have happened to have met and become friends with memers, and I have these, I affectionately call them my schizo friends, but people who literally they spend all their day thinking about memes and the internet and understanding that. [00:00:00] S0: I have people that are obsessed with Muse, and they're also obsessed with your X feed, and they're convinced that you have like a hundred Muses coming up with memes to meme Muse. [00:00:00] S1: No, they-
· Alexandr Wang, David Senra
[00:00:00] S1: No, they- [00:00:00] S0: Looks like you just have a collection of schizophrenic friends that are terminally online. [00:00:00] S1: The X feed, just for what it's worth, is literally every one of those tweets I write. There were quite a period where it was really hard for me to pay attention in meetings because I would just think of a meme, and I'd be like, "Oh God, I have to get this out." And it was moments of inspiration. I was trying to have dinner with one of my coworkers, and then during the dinner I was like, "Wait, wait, I figured it out," and then I posted a different meme. I almost felt like I was an engineer solving bugs again because it was like you could tell when something was going to click. But yeah, so one thing is we wanted to break through. Another thing that I just thought was important is, how do we make Meta cool again? Because for whatever reason, despite having these incredible pieces of cultural software, like Instagram and Facebook historically, Meta was not cool for a while. And so, wanted to make Meta cool and interesting and kind of funny. And then the unhingedness was something that happened kind of naturally over time. When Muse first came out, I was just mostly focused on promoting all the interesting use cases that I saw. I was retweeting tens of interesting use cases that I saw of people using Muse. And then at some point, it was because I was just tweeting so much, there were a few tweets where I was just didn't think that much about it and just said, "Fuck it, post." And then some of those tweets did really well.
· Alexandr Wang, David Senra
[00:00:00] S1: The X feed, just for what it's worth, is literally every one of those tweets I write. There were quite a period where it was really hard for me to pay attention in meetings because I would just think of a meme, and I'd be like, "Oh God, I have to get this out." And it was moments of inspiration. I was trying to have dinner with one of my coworkers, and then during the dinner I was like, "Wait, wait, I figured it out," and then I posted a different meme. I almost felt like I was an engineer solving bugs again because it was like you could tell when something was going to click. But yeah, so one thing is we wanted to break through. Another thing that I just thought was important is, how do we make Meta cool again? Because for whatever reason, despite having these incredible pieces of cultural software, like Instagram and Facebook historically, Meta was not cool for a while. And so, wanted to make Meta cool and interesting and kind of funny. And then the unhingedness was something that happened kind of naturally over time. When Muse first came out, I was just mostly focused on promoting all the interesting use cases that I saw. I was retweeting tens of interesting use cases that I saw of people using Muse. And then at some point, it was because I was just tweeting so much, there were a few tweets where I was just didn't think that much about it and just said, "Fuck it, post." And then some of those tweets did really well. [00:00:00] S0: Have you seen this time spent thinking about it and then banger? Have you seen that graph?