Shreya Murthy

And when you think about most advertising models, they also work best when the model of the product is to keep eyeballs glued to the screen.

That's not the model of Partiful.

The whole point of the product is to get you off of your phone and into the real world.

The most important time spent metric for us is the time that you spend partying with your friends, going to a really cool event or talk or concert series.

and having a great time.

But we aren't, you know, we couldn't monetize those eyeballs even if we wanted to because they're not happening on the product.

And so from the beginning, you know, just running a bunch of display ads has never really made sense because it just wouldn't work with the way that our product works because we don't optimize on time spent.

And so we've had to think about what are the other ways that we can monetize.

One company I really admire, which is I think gearing up for IPO soon is Strava, which is a beloved consumer product that has built this incredible fan base of people who are really, really passionate about their fitness and about how Strava supports them in their goals.

And they've been able to scale up revenue remarkably into the hundreds of millions by building something that users pay for directly.

when so much of the experience, you know, the running experience is actually happening outside of the platform.

So that's, I think, one example of how it can be done really well.

We can never and will never have an ads model on Partiful, but that doesn't mean that I don't think it can make sense for other businesses.

What I do agree with is that not all ads are bad.

Like, I actually love the ads I get on Instagram.

It's like how I found a new couch.

When I'm looking for a new sweater, I'll just get an ad for a great sweater.

And I think that's great.

I think where it gets really scary for me and for a lot of people is how our data is being used to serve those ads.

which, you know, honestly is how Instagram serves me such great ads, right?