Welcome to the A16Z podcast. I'm Michael Copeland. YouTube star Casey Nystatt rejects the term viral video,

which is strange because he's had more than his share of internet monsters. To say I want to make a viral

movie is like a musician saying, I want to make a hit song. It's just not a good place to start,

Nistadt says. So how does Nysdat start? How does you both

attract an audience of millions and keep them coming back on a daily basis? Nysad is joined on this

segment of the pod by Bailey Richardson, one of the early team members at Instagram. With the tools

of production available to everyone, how do you create something

that people will stop and pay attention to? Nistadt does it by ripping up the snowy streets of

New York on a snowboard towed behind a Jeep. But what about the rest of us? Bailey Richardson starts the

conversation. Awesome, you guys. Thanks so much for coming out. Well, I wanted to ask Casey. So we kind of come from a little bit of two different sides of the aisle. Working at Instagram really early on, one of the things that we did was we put people on suggested users. We wrote about them. And if you weren't already famous, if you weren't Kim Kardashian or Justin Bieber, that was sort of the only way for you to get exposure on the platform at the beginning.

I was a very curated platform.

And I wanted to ask you, I think YouTube, your perspective with, especially with YouTube, is that it's pretty egalitarian and that virality is maybe something that isn't

so magic or isn't so controlled by the platform. I just wanted to ask you, you know,

how do you define virality today or getting to the point where you can make content that goes viral?

What does that mean? I'm not a huge fan of the word viral.

Somebody tweeted this today and the chance that somebody in here read that somebody else tweeted this today, so I can't claim this is my own quote, but it's a really good quote.

To say I want to make a viral movie as like a musician sitting down and saying I want to make a hit song. It's just not a good place to start. I think the best place to start is I want to make a viral movie as like a musician sitting down and saying, I want to make a hit song.

It's just not a good place to start. I think the best place to start is I want to make a really good movie. And then sometimes it will go viral. And there are certain sort of zeitgeist you can

hit within there that will increase your chances of virality. But beyond that, it has to do with

how the content resonates with an audience in order to promote that

virality and certainly like what is most attractive to me about YouTube as a platform

and I should say every time I say YouTube I'm more referring to broadly internet video

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