Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neil Appetel, editor in chief of the

Verge, and Decoder is my new podcast about big ideas and other problems.

Today I'm talking to Kavon Bakeport, the head of consumer product at Twitter,

which means he's responsible for deciding what tools Twitter actually builds for

people to express themselves. And Twitter's product is incredibly important.

It is a flashpoint of interest and controversy for politicians and celebrities

and regulators and regular people all around the world. It often seems like

people don't know the difference between Twitter and real life. So whatever

changes Twitter makes that product have repercussions everywhere. Twitter

recently announced that it's going to be building a lot of new things into

its product. There's Twitter Spaces, which is a live audio feature very similar

to the Red Hot Clubhouse app. There's Twitter fleets, which look like snap

in Instagram stories. Twitter just acquired review, which is a newsletter

product similar to Substack. And it also announced something called Superfathers,

which will let people pay creators on Twitter for special content. It's a lot,

especially after Twitter spent so long seemingly not adding any features at all.

Kavon and I talked a lot about what it took to reset the team towards growth,

how he decides what to prioritize and what features to build, and what the

timelines for success look like across all of those different products. Of course,

we talked about the products themselves and how they will change the Twitter

experience, especially Superfathers since adding paid content seems like a huge

change to Twitter. And enabling a creator revenue model on a social network

...