He Broke Turkish Twitter - Abhijit Mehta

Explicit content warning

02/22/24 • 65 min

Critical Point War Stories with Kevin Riggle

Kevin Riggle interviews Abhijit Mehta, who tells how one tiny dot made almost made a massive difference to Twitter's Turkish ad revenue.

Abhijit's Twitter: https://twitter.com/AbhijitCMehta
Abhijit's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mehtaabhijit/

Chapters:

(00:00) - Intro
(01:25) - How did you find yourself in a place where you could break production?
(08:53) - Akamai & the 'aha' moments of product development
(15:30) - Google & the Google culture
(17:35) - Twitter & what's the difference between brand ads and direct-response ads?
(23:58) - How Twitter made its money
(27:58) - Re-architecting the fundamental ad platform at Twitter
(32:35) - "We had to be really careful!"
(34:48) - "There's something really weird happening in Turkey"
(37:49) - The meaning of scale
(41:02) - "Well we'd thought of all the horses, so we started looking for zebras"
(43:48) - "So here's what happened"
(49:30) - "So this will work fine almost everywhere"
(53:51) - How do you roll things like this out safely?
(59:56) - "In general I'm an optimist, there's exciting things to come"
(01:03:52) - Thanks & CTAs

Credits:

Emoji artwork is provided by Emojitwo (https://emojitwo.github.io/), originally released as Emojione 2.2 (https://www.emojione.com/) by Ranks.com (http://www.ranks.com/) with contributions from the Emojitwo community and is licensed under CC-BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode).

Intro & outro - "Senpai Funk" by Paul T. Starr. Used with permission.
https://soundcloud.com/ptstarr

Critical Point logo and wordmark designed by Timothy James Lopez.
https://www.behance.net/lopeztimes

Produced by Complex Systems Group LLC (https://complexsystems.group).

Kevin Riggle interviews Abhijit Mehta, who tells how one tiny dot made almost made a massive difference to Twitter's Turkish ad revenue.

Abhijit's Twitter: https://twitter.com/AbhijitCMehta
Abhijit's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mehtaabhijit/

Chapters:

(00:00) - Intro
(01:25) - How did you find yourself in a place where you could break production?
(08:53) - Akamai & the 'aha' moments of product development
(15:30) - Google & the Google culture
(17:35) - Twitter & what's the difference between brand ads and direct-response ads?
(23:58) - How Twitter made its money
(27:58) - Re-architecting the fundamental ad platform at Twitter
(32:35) - "We had to be really careful!"
(34:48) - "There's something really weird happening in Turkey"
(37:49) - The meaning of scale
(41:02) - "Well we'd thought of all the horses, so we started looking for zebras"
(43:48) - "So here's what happened"
(49:30) - "So this will work fine almost everywhere"
(53:51) - How do you roll things like this out safely?
(59:56) - "In general I'm an optimist, there's exciting things to come"
(01:03:52) - Thanks & CTAs

Credits:

Intro & outro - "Senpai Funk" by Paul T. Starr. Used with permission.
https://soundcloud.com/ptstarr

Critical Point logo and wordmark designed by Timothy James Lopez.
https://www.behance.net/lopeztimes

Produced by Complex Systems Group LLC (https://complexsystems.group).

Previous Episode

She Missed the Overnight Push! - Julia Lunetta

Kevin Riggle interviews Julia Lunetta, who tells us how an ostensibly minor change caused her employer, a financial institution (Upromise Investments), to miss its overnight reconciliation with its banks.

Credits:

Intro & outro - "Senpai Funk" by Paul T. Starr. Used with permission.
https://soundcloud.com/ptstarr

Critical Point logo and wordmark designed by Timothy James Lopez.
https://www.behance.net/lopeztimes

Produced by Complex Systems Group LLC (https://complexsystems.group).

Next Episode

Was Akamai the Velvet Underground of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)? - Abhijit Mehta - Bonus

Kevin Riggle interviews Abhijit Mehta about Akamai and its role in the history and development of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE). Bonus episode outtake from https://warstories.criticalpoint.tv/episodes/he-broke-turkish-twitter-abhijit-mehta

Abhijit's Twitter: https://twitter.com/AbhijitCMehta
Abhijit's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mehtaabhijit/

To watch the video version of the podcast on YouTube, check out the channel page at https://youtube.com/@critical-point

Credits:

Transcript/captions by Melody Wisp (https://melodywisp.carrd.co/#commissions).

Intro & outro - "Senpai Funk" by Paul T. Starr. Used with permission.
https://soundcloud.com/ptstarr

Critical Point logo and wordmark designed by Timothy James Lopez.
https://www.behance.net/lopeztimes

Produced by Complex Systems Group LLC (https://complexsystems.group).