Millinfluencer Spotlight: Kayvon Beykpour of Periscope
The Millinfluencer spotlight series will highlight one millennial influencer (get it?) every Thursday and give you just enough information about them to want you to go and learn more and follow their journey!
This week’s millennial influencer is Periscope’s co-founder and CEO, Kayvon Beykpour! I am especially excited about this week’s spotlight as there has been a lot of news around Kayvon and his ever expanding role within Twitter (more on that later). Let’s first start with the basics — Kayvon is a 29-year-old entrepreneur that has been creating and selling legit businesses for almost a decade.
Beykpour, who earned his Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Stanford University in just three years, has never been one to shy away from the ambitious. In July 2007 (at the age of 19), just before his first semester at Stanford, Beykpour started doing freelance web development, brand strategy and marketing research for Goodby, Silverstien & Partners. At the same time, he served as Apple Campus Rep, a position he held for two years. That same summer Kayvon got together with a childhood friend to co-found Terriblyclever Design, a platform for universities to create and manage white-labeled mobile applications for their academic community. When the company was secured by Blackboard in 2009, Beykpour remained onboard, guiding the start-up’s transition into Blackboard’s new Mobile division.
The hustle did not stop there
Kayvon was visiting Istanbul one year and there happened to be major protest demonstrations going on, Beykpour found himself wondering why he couldn’t see what was happening in the same way he could read about it on Twitter or Facebook. Wishing he could see what was happening around the world, Beykpour and co-founder Joe Bernstein started playing with the idea of a teleportation machine. Acknowledging the impossibility of this concept, they moved on to the next best thing. The result was Periscope, a forum that allows users to see through the eyes of other users throughout the world — via live video. Since Periscope went live in February 2014, the app raised a $1.5 million funding round, with investors including Founder Collective, Scott Belsky, Maveron, Google Ventures, Menio Ventures, Bessemer, Standford — StartX, and Sam Shank. Before they even launched, the company was acquired by Twitter in a January 2015 for an amount north of $90 million. Periscope had a million registered users within a week of its launch, surging to 10 million users within four months. Needless to say, Beykpour made it look easy and here is some more proof: On December 9, 2015, Apple named Periscope the iPhone ‘App Of The Year’. Periscope’s most recently available traffic numbers as of March 2016 boast in excess of 200 million total broadcasts and over 110 years of live video watched every day around the world.
Twitter Life for Kayvon
Today, Beykpour is rising up the power ladder inside Twitter. His role has expanded since the new year, and he now oversees all product and engineering behind Twitter’s live video efforts, like its NFL livestreams. This is in addition to his role running Periscope. He’ll continue to report to CEO Jack Dorsey, which he has been doing for almost a year since being promoted to Twitter’s executive team. Kayvon grew up in Northern California and speaks Persian. He stays pretty private as there’s not a lot of interviews with him on the internet but he’s proven to be one of the most influential under 30 millennials of our time. He has won many Forbes 30 under 30 awards along with other industry-related accolades.
If you enjoyed this post, please feel free to share it and explore more about any of the millennial influencers that we highlight every Thursday as part of the Millinfluencer Spotlight series. You can also find my work on my Medium page and my Google+ collections.