Adam Mosseri on Instagram, Reels and the Early Days of Threads

Instagram head Adam Mosseri tells Harry Stebbings that early service jobs, including bartending, taught him humility and how to deal with different personalities. He thinks that experience also made him appreciate good service. His career later moved from design into product leadership at Facebook and Instagram.

Mosseri describes himself as a generalist whose strength is breadth rather than exceptional skill in one discipline. Design taught him to define a problem, generate and evaluate alternatives, and separate useful feedback from noise. Those are his own reflections on his career.

He says reliability helped him become a design leader: after running a small design firm, he was accustomed to taking a client’s problem and returning with a solution. Later, as a manager, he came to value a team whose members could challenge him and contribute skills stronger than his own.

Leadership requires repetition, Mosseri argues. An internal announcement read by only a fraction of employees cannot by itself move a large organization; a message may need to be repeated long after its author is tired of saying it. A leader must also know when to make a call and use veto power sparingly so that creativity survives.

For someone moving from individual contributor to management, he recommends seeking a range of experiences and identifying the overlap between personal aspirations and the company’s needs. Goals can change as a person learns. Without a deliberate direction, he says, urgent work can consume a year.

His first year leading Instagram was emotionally difficult. Founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger had left, and Mosseri says he had to rebuild much of the leadership team across design, engineering, product, research and other functions. He recalls feeling alone and later taking advice to prioritize strong long-term hires over short-term comfort.

Hiring a leadership team means assembling complementary skills and chemistry without making everyone alike. Mosseri says the Instagram founders later advised him that doing strong work and succeeding in the market would do more for morale than communication alone. He still values organizational communication, but wants to balance it with delivery over years.

On taking over a founder-led product, he initially promised to listen and avoid major changes for a few months. He made an exception for safety and integrity, integrating more closely with larger Facebook teams ahead of the 2018 midterm elections. He describes this as a significant cultural change for the Instagram team.

Mosseri identifies the backlash over Instagram changes in the summer of 2022 as a painful mistake. Recommendations from unfollowed accounts, a stronger video emphasis, creators’ concerns about reach and a redesigned main tab arrived together. He thinks too much changed too quickly, even though he maintains that some underlying changes were necessary.

When teams disagree, he wants both sides heard, a clear decision-maker and a clear decision, followed by commitment. The hardest product decision for him was adding more recommendations to feed because he anticipated backlash. This is his account as the executive responsible for Instagram, not an independent assessment of the change.

He says growth in personal sharing had moved toward Stories and direct messages, while feed consumption growth was concentrated in video. He reports that teens spent more time in messages than Stories and more in Stories than feed. The usage claims are his 2023 description of internal patterns, not data independently verified here.

Mosseri argues recommendations could keep feed useful by exposing people to content beyond the accounts they follow. He says fewer friends were posting to feed, making algorithmic blame an incomplete explanation for missing friend posts. Critics and creators may assess those choices differently; the interview presents his rationale.

He says he shifted resources toward messaging, at one point moving the Stories team there. According to him, more photos and videos were shared in direct messages than in Stories, and more in Stories than feed. Instagram messages often serve as conversation starters, such as replying to a Story or sharing a Reel.

Notes, short status-like posts in the inbox, became especially useful for younger users, he says. Product teams sometimes must prioritize a segment even at a short-term cost to aggregate engagement or revenue. Mosseri describes young people and creators as priorities because of their influence on future use.

He favors progressive disclosure: an interface can show more complexity when a user needs it and stay simpler otherwise. But he says simplicity is a means to usability or another goal, not an absolute rule. He acknowledges Instagram had become too complicated and says teams should remove underused features and consolidate patterns.

One removed feature let people inspect what their friends liked. Mosseri says fewer than 1% of users used it, although those users cared deeply and some complained when it disappeared. The feature offered discovery but also raised an uncomfortable surveillance-like feeling, in his account.

Reels became a major strategic decision. At the time he estimated it was approaching, but had not reached, half of time spent in Instagram. He says full-screen video and sound better suited the phone and that TikTok’s growth taught Instagram to learn from a competitor; the usage estimate is his, not independently confirmed.

He regrets building the first version of Reels on Stories. Stories encouraged low-pressure sharing but had low completion rates, which did not serve creators seeking an audience. He says the team lost nine to twelve months before shifting toward feed and recommendations, and believes an earlier success would have changed Instagram’s competitive trajectory.

Mosseri praises TikTok’s ability to discover new creators through content-first ranking rather than repeatedly favoring already popular material. He considers it one of the strongest competitors Instagram has faced and also praises Telegram’s execution. These are competitive judgments from a Meta executive.

Asked whether Facebook is a copy machine, he says the company is good at optimization and willing to adopt formats pioneered elsewhere when they appear likely to become industry standards. He describes Stories as an example. He says the test is whether a trend meets a durable human need, not merely whether it has a viral mechanic.

He recalls early Facebook users repeatedly changing profile pictures before the service had photo sharing. Their improvised behavior suggested a need the product did not yet meet. Teams can learn from ways people use a product outside its intended design.

On Threads, Mosseri says its first eight days exceeded his expectations, while emphasizing that sign-ups are easier to win than sustained use. The important question in July 2023 was whether the team could improve the product enough for people to return over months or years.

Threads used Instagram accounts and let people follow the same accounts, including people who had not joined yet. Mosseri considers that imported graph central to launch, but says users could curate a different set of follows because public conversation and photo interests do not always overlap. He contemplated an optional sync feature, not an accomplished future release.

He contrasts Threads with earlier standalone experiments. Facebook Home and Paper felt too much like repackaged Facebook, while other projects failed to use the parent company’s strengths. In his view, Threads was different enough to stand alone while benefiting from Instagram’s existing relationships; he believes starting from zero would have been much harder.

Mosseri rejects a simple choice between friend graphs and interest graphs. Reels can introduce videos from unfamiliar creators and then give people something to share with friends in direct messages. He says preferences and social connections can reinforce one another, although there are tensions and it was too early to judge Threads.

Video also creates business tradeoffs: watching a ten-second video may displace several feed posts and opportunities to show an ad. Mosseri says video can increase time spent while pressuring revenue and other interactions. He argues that sharing Reels into messages can create conversations and bring friends back, a company executive’s assessment of the product.

For Threads’ launch, the team worried that visitors would arrive to an empty feed. They invited creators early, focusing on categories such as music, fashion, athletes and beauty where Instagram already had communities, rather than concentrating on technology, news or politics. Mosseri says they did not pay creators for the launch.

He says paying every creator indefinitely would not scale, although targeted incentives can help bootstrap a product. Existing relationships and an early preview for thousands of people helped build interest. An iOS preorder scheduling issue caused the team to bring the launch forward when users in Japan received the app before they could log in.

Stebbings asks whether importing established Instagram creators resembles importing an aristocracy. Mosseri says Instagram’s existing creator community helped, while praising TikTok for discovering talent and YouTube for consistent revenue sharing. His claims about Instagram’s popularity among creators are his company’s assessment.

Mosseri wants Threads to become culturally relevant, not merely large, and mentions musicians and footballers he hoped would join. He says support for Europe would take months because of work related to forthcoming laws and data handling. This was a July 2023 estimate and explanation, not current legal guidance or a confirmed release date.

Creator businesses need predictable ways to earn, he argues. He describes subscriptions, branded-content partnerships and some targeted Instagram payments, and questions whether irregular payouts allow creators to plan. His comparison of other platforms’ payouts is an opinion based on what he says he has heard.

Mosseri says Threads did not yet have a known threshold for a retained user. He expects both sufficient connections and relevant interests to matter, noting that historical Facebook thresholds differed by country. In the next few months the team’s priority was retention and missing features, including a following feed and editing.

He describes his job as building a team, choosing problems and providing support and feedback; influence can become more indirect at senior levels. He credits Mark Zuckerberg with setting a high bar and taking risks, including pushing for Threads as a separate app when the team considered building inside Instagram.

Mosseri says the Threads team had formed roughly five months earlier and included around 50 engineers, three product managers and three designers, alongside other specialists. He argues that a text feed could be easier to monetize than video because users consume many small items, creating ad opportunities. That was a business hypothesis, not established Threads revenue.

The two measures he most wanted to watch were creator engagement and ordinary-user retention. Early adopters behave differently, so he says there was not yet a reliable long-term retention signal. Limited creator reach, time constraints, bugs or a toxic environment could undermine the product.

Stebbings asks how to balance work, marriage and raising children. Mosseri says he often feels he falls short somewhere, especially with friends, and writes annual intentions to make priorities explicit. His personal mantra centers on caring for himself, his children, his wife and his friends.

He says new parents may focus on the birth and leave but should also think about being present over many years. After having children he reduced his working hours and tries to see his sons in the morning and evening several workdays a week. He emphasizes supporting a partner after childbirth according to that family’s needs.

Mosseri describes a Hunter S. Thompson letter that influenced him to think about choosing a way of life suited to one’s abilities and desires. He keeps it with his annual intentions. He acknowledges the tension between setting personal goals and working for someone else.

In 2023 he says he had become more optimistic about generative AI and its potential to change workflows. He uses it for tasks such as summarizing articles and feedback and reviewing drafts, while saying he writes his own reviews. His expectations for productivity are forward-looking views, not measured gains.

Asked about kindness at work, he recalls a demanding early manager telling him he lacked focus despite working hard. The feedback helped him recognize that he was spreading himself across too many projects. He discusses brands and people he admires, including a memorable meeting with Roger Federer.

On BeReal, Mosseri calls its initial growth and mechanic powerful but thinks the challenge was expanding after the surge. As a competing platform executive, his assessment has a commercial context. He closes by saying success means looking back with pride at how he spent his time; the interview ends with thanks.