What's up, y'all? I'm Skylar Diggins, seven-time WNBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years, covering the biggest names and stories in sports, and mom. And this is AmMOM, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds.
Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Should the U.S. start bringing troops home from Europe?
I worry a lot that this is where we're headed. Trump's will signal it a lot during his first term. And in my conversations with European friends, I've been telling them, be ready for this, because I do not think we get through four years without the United States reducing its European footprint. I'm Jake Sullivan.
And I'm John Feiner. And we're the hosts of The Long Game, a weekly national security podcast. This week, we debate whether the U.S. should draw down its true presence in Europe, and we break down the latest developments in the Iran War.
The episode's out now. Search for and follow The Long Game wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Kara Swisher, the editor at large of Recode. You may know me as the CIO of Facebook, which stands for Chief Irritating Officer, but in my spare time, I talk tech, and you're listening to Recode Decode from the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today, we're going to play two live interviews I just conducted in Toronto, Canada. I spoke with Facebook's former Chief Security Officer, Alex Samos, who left the company last year and was deeply involved in the Cambridge Analytica scandal. I also spoke with Twitter co-founder, Ev Williams, who's now the CEO of the blogging platform Medium and a partner at Obvious Ventures. These interviews were recorded live on stage at the Collision Conference in Toronto, so let's go there now to hear both of them, starting with Facebook's former Chief Security Officer, Alex Samos.
Hi, everybody. I'm back. So, Alex and I know each other really well, so we like to argue with each other about a lot of things, and we were most recently up in Napa Valley at this stunning resort, and all we did, we were in a wine cellar, and we started streaming at each other, essentially, so we're hoping to replicate that here a little bit. So let's talk about...
There's a lot less wine. I don't think that's... I'm going to give you... I'm going to go off from our discussion.
One of Alex's contentions, even though he talks a lot, he's been one of the more forthright people in tech about what happened at Facebook and other places, is that it's misunderstood. So one of your arguments is that Facebook is misunderstood. Is that correct? What I think is, I think there's a lot of directionally correct criticism where the details are wrong.
Right, so directionally correct, they ruin democracy, and... No, well, so, no, I don't think Facebook has ruined democracy. So I think there's a couple things going on here. One, there's a whole class of tech criticism that is actually criticism of other people, right?
Like, you know, the saying starts to say, hell is other people, Facebook is other people, right? And when you talk about anti-vaxxers and crazy parents today recommending bleach, this is the collective decisions of millions or billions of people when you give them a freedom they never had before. Now, that doesn't mean the company doesn't have responsibility, but I think one of the problems is we're not teasing apart what the companies are doing actively and what kind of societal issues have been unleashed by the fact that we have gone rid of the information gatekeepers. And I think that's one of the core disagreements between the value overall and the media is sometimes for those of us in tech.
It feels a little bit like there's a lot of media people who want to go back to the world where 38 million white guys decide what is the political... No, come on. That's bullshit. That's not true.
That's not the case. What you're essentially arguing is Facebook doesn't kill people, people kill people, right? Or not? It's humanity, essentially.
What I'm saying is that people will utilize speech sometimes to do really good things and a lot of times do bad things. And we've got to think about what responsibility we want the companies to have because when we give them responsibility, we also give them power. And that's the other thing that I disagree actually with some of my friends at Facebook because I think in a lot of ways Facebook is too powerful. And I'm very afraid of this moment when we are assigning responsibility to half trillion to trillion dollar companies with no democratic accountability and no limits to that power and then asking them to fix societal wide issues.
Let's get first to the beginning of this. I want to talk about some of your fixes. I think some of them are. We do agree on some of them.
So the misunderstood part is directionally it was correct. So what direction was it correct and what has been incorrect? Okay, so a great example of something that I'm still really active on. So a little pitch, my colleagues at Stanford are releasing a report on June 6 about what to do after the Mueller report on election security.
And one of our big recommendations is both for regulation from Congress and self-regulation from tech companies to really expand the definition of political advertising and to reduce the ability to use targeted ads against individuals. So the direction of allowing people to use hyper-targeting to manipulate societies, absolutely a correct issue, criticism, issue with tech. So direct targeting of people, the ability to target people in unprecedented ways and presumably manipulate them. Right, right.
Whether or not it's Russians or not, it's just a bad thing. It is a bad thing that we are now, the truth is that this has been a problem for a while. The 2012 election where Obama's team totally kicked the butt of the Republicans online, that is probably the first U.S. election that was quote-unquote thrown by Facebook.
That was at least significantly affected by online advertising. But most people in the media were okay with the outcome, so they didn't get pissed about it. Or they didn't know it. Or they didn't know about it.
I don't know. It was pretty well covered. I saw the Obama tech team give a big interview at an Amazon Webster conference where they talked about how much data they're holding from Facebook and how finely they're targeting the ads. And so they did nothing.
Everything that is complained about in Cambridge and America really happened in 2012. There's a difference between the Obama team and a group of Russians in St. Petersburg manipulating an election. I think we can...
Yes and no? There's a difference there, but the problem is that the actual most effective use of Facebook to manipulate people in 2016 was almost certainly the core Trump campaign and a variety of RNC-related groups. It wasn't the Russians themselves. The biggest thing the Russians did was the hacking league campaign, for which the actual conduit of that was the mass media.
The fact that the media covered Podesta leaks and the DNC leaks and changed the way it covered Hillary around her emails based upon the Russian hacking. If you look just from a size perspective, both from an organic and advertised content, the Internet Research Agency output pales in comparison to the amount of money spent and the quality of the targeting by the Trump campaign itself and by a variety of Republican groups. All right, so targeted advertising is directionally a problem. What about the involvement of the Russians?
Because I've just been spending a lot of time in Washington, most intelligence people feel like it's increased exponentially. Oh, yeah. Not just at Facebook, but on our electric grids, telephone systems, all kinds of things. Right, I mean, we are entering a very, very scary period, right?
And for a couple of reasons, one, the Russian playbook for 2016 is out there. It is not that technically difficult to hack the email of a couple of grandfathers and release the contents, nor is it that difficult to build a team of people that basically are, you know, edgelords pushing memes all day and then doing a little bit of targeted advertising. So what I expect is that the Russian playbook is going to be executed inside the United States by domestic groups. In which case, some of it other than the hacking is not illegal.
All the Russian internet agency stuff is done by a group hired by an American billionaire and they're careful around existing law. No, American, like if you had an American, you know, the Koch brothers or Sheldon Adelson or George Soros or, you know, Pick Your Billionaire, you know, we often got kind of caught paying for a company to do some of this stuff on the Democratic side. My real fear is in 2020, it is going to be the battle of the billionaires of secret groups working for people aligned on both sides who are trying to manipulate this at scale online. And one of the hard parts is there's a difficult, it's very difficult to draw the line about what's acceptable political speech, especially in the United States where Citizens United gives these guys almost no legal barriers at all.
And then how do we tell the companies we want them to stop it? Because it's easy to say we want to stop Russians, right? That's an easy rule to write. It's a lot harder to say we want to stop some kind of super pact that is secretly manipulating people at scale, especially if what they're doing might violate some of Facebook's terms of service, but don't violate federal law.
Because of Citizens United. Because of Citizens United. So what would be the solution? So you have the billionaires, the attack of the billionaires on the election.
You have influence by the Russians who will continue to do it because it works, presumably. Other countries, China, Iran, others. Right. I think we'll see less China in the West.
The Taiwanese election in January 2020, the PRC is going to be all over that. Right. And in India, which is happening now? India, so India's election is over.
The county is happening right now. India is a fascinating issue because most of this information is driven by domestic actors. And they're doing it on WhatsApp. It's actually interesting.
WhatsApp is the exception that proves that some of the kind of dumb criticism about Facebook and algorithms is poorly built because WhatsApp has no algorithmic ranking. It has a huge amount of privacy for people. And yet there's a disinformation problem because the problem is equal. And in this case, in India, you have the ability to enlist hundreds of thousands of people to push propaganda on behalf of your political party.
All right. So the problem is people, which you said again, but they've been armed with tools that are unprecedented and possibly not controlled. So would you argue me to say that I have said this, I think you know this, that I felt like these companies have weaponized everything and amplified it at the same time. Sort of like going from a gun that shoots six bullets to a machine, you know, a semi-automatic machine gun.
How do you look at it? That's how I look at it. Well, I like your use of the term amplification because I think one of the things we start to forget is that these companies are actually many products at once. If you take just the Facebook product, the big blue app, you could decompose it into 10 or 12 different applications that have different levels of amplification.
And at the top of, I use on a chart, an inverted pyramid for this, the top of that inverted pyramid is advertising and recommendation engines. And so I think that's where you start because that's where the most risk is. And there's also, I think, the least amount of free expression concern when you block somebody's access to advertising. And so if we're going to start from a regulatory, both self-regulatory and federal regulatory perspective, you start at the top there of regulated political ads.
We have a bunch of detailed recommendations in this report that's coming out, but we're going to talk about how we would expand the Honest Ads Act, the kind of transparency requirements. There's been a bunch of transparency changes, but they're totally voluntary, so these companies can just drop them. So a bill, I mean, this is Amy Klobuchar's bill, both here and elsewhere in the globe, not just in the United States. Yes, and actually, I mean, the real game in town seems to be other countries.
It seems to be post, after the Christchurch shooting, the most interesting regulatory moves have all been in the non-U.S. anglophone countries. Australia, New Zealand, Canada. Here in Canada, there's lots of discussion about regulation.
And because of the lack of a First Amendment, parliamentary systems, where you have kind of an implied constitution, but no constitutional right to free speech, these countries can move much more quickly than the United States can. And so my proposal would be, I think the U.S. should lead on this. And so we should have a U.S.
The U.S. should lead on regulating ads. We should have a U.S. federal privacy law.
Our reluctance to play in this space has opened the door for other countries to regulate in a way that is, in some cases, not helpful. And in this case, maybe we could set a standard that becomes an international standard. Would it? Because they don't have the same...
I think so. I mean, I think what would happen is if the U.S. came up with a broader definition of political ads and then came up with requirements around who you have to be to run them, what kind of transparency is provided, and how much microtargeting can happen, I do think that would encourage a number of other countries to adopt the same standards, if only because it is much more likely they will be enforced. But the U.S.
just decided not to join the online extremism proposal from Dissendard and... Yes, that's a problem. And so I think that's a different issue of online ads. I think on the content moderation extremism, the United States is out of the game.
Partially because of the First Amendment, partially because of the Trump administration is never going to do anything that undercuts their... It's pretty clear that one of their 2020 strategies is to build a huge amount of kind of cultural dislocation among their supporters based upon saying that internet companies are suppressing them, right? Like conservatives control Fox News, they have a huge online ecosystem. So the Russian strategy, I like to call it.
I'm not sure that's the Russian strategy, but yeah. It was creating discord, dislocation, feeling... Yeah, and creating the idea that you're a suppressed minority, right? Even if you control two branches of government and a huge media ecosystem.
And so there's no way they're going to sign up for Christchurch or anything else that could possibly undercut the argument that Trump supporters are the suppressed group. That there's any kind of moderation that means anything. We're here with Facebook's former chief security officer, Alex Samos. We're going to take a quick break now, but we'll be back after this.
This week on Network and Shell, I'm joined by Tank Sinatra, the meme king, with over 15 million followers across Tank's big news, influencers in the wild, and his personal account. Tank is breaking down what the meme economy really is, how much a single-sponsored post pays, why major brands are throwing serious money at jokes, and how meme culture, think Preparation H, Starter Packs, and a perfectly timed screenshot is actually reshaping how we think about money and value. Get ready for a conversation that'll change the way you scroll, make you rethink what going viral is really worth, and prove that sometimes the most serious money moves are wrapped in the silliest of jokes. Listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on youtube.com slash yourrichbff.
All right, so privacy bills, something with fines. What about fines? On privacy bills? No, not fines, with fines by government agencies all around the world.
Yeah, I mean, one of the interesting problems we have in the U.S. is we don't have a competent privacy regulator that translates rules into, so one, we don't really have privacy laws, right? So the FTC kind of comes up with, they move the goalposts, and they say you have to follow these goalposts, and there's not a lot of interpretation of what that actually means technically, and this is a problem you see a lot in Europe, because European GPR has been interpreted by 20 different data protection authorities, so you have 20 goalposts you're trying to shoot through. I think in the U.S.
we can do a better job on if we had an organization that could fine without going to court, right? And that's what some of these other companies do have, like the Irish, is they have organizations that can do things before they go nuclear. Right now, the FTC's options are they threaten to go nuclear, and then that allows them to have a negotiation, and if that doesn't work out, they have to go to court and to fight your fight. And then antitrust.
Antitrust. So I think there are legitimate antitrust arguments for breaking up Facebook and breaking YouTube up from Google. Those arguments, legitimate arguments are the ones on competition policy, right? If you want to argue that these companies have reduced competition through their incredible ability to predict the future, to use their cash reserves to buy companies and take out competition, I think that's a legitimate argument.
Breaking up the companies does not solve the fundamental issues. You can't solve climate change by breaking up X on mobile and making 10 X on mobiles, right? You have to address the underlying issues, and so I think there's a lot of excitement for antitrust because it kind of feels good to be like, oh, I hate this company, so let's break it up. Having three companies that have the same fundamental problems doesn't make anything better.
So what is the solution? You have a couple that are interesting. Right, so if Mark Zuckerberg called me, which he doesn't, and asked my advice on this, I would say a couple things. I think Facebook needs to have an internal revolution on the culture of how products are built, and there's actually a model for this, which was Microsoft 2002, in which Microsoft was facing kind of the same level of pushback on core information security issues, and they completely changed how the product works.
So he directionally has some ideas on that, but I think it's hard without making significant leadership changes to do that, and so if I was Mark, my suggestion would be, especially because there's all this, the antitrust side is a lot very personalized on him, he should hire... Well, it's personalized on him because he controls the company. Because he controls the company, right, because there is a legitimate argument that he has too much power. He needs to give up some of that power, and if I was him, I would go hire a new CEO for the company.
He's already acting as the chief product officer with Chris Coxconn. That's where his passion is. He should hire a CEO that can help signal both internally and externally that the culture has to change. And I mean, my recommendation, I'm not a recruiter, but if I can get 20% of this guy's salary in the first year, that would be fantastic.
My recommendation would be Brad Smith from Microsoft, but some adults who have gone through this before at another company. And then the second, I think, big thing I would do... To change the management structure. Change the management structure, yeah.
To have not the technologist who owns product be at the top. I think it is important to have a manager... Should we go a step further and not allow these tech companies to have this kind of stock where they have complete kingship over it? So this is where I disagree, because I worked for a tech company that had an activist investor that cared mostly about what Wall Street thinks.
Well, Yahoo, yes. That came at the end. Right, well, yeah. So Yahoo was dying for 10 years.
I mean, there's a lot of problems with Yahoo. But I actually think that companies are too beholding to Wall Street. And so the second big thing I would change is they need to get rid of stock compensation at big public companies. So, like, 80-something percent of my compensation at Facebook was set by Wall Street.
And so this is a crazy world. If the CEO comes to you and says, you've done a really poor job of making our products good for the world, I'm very upset with you, congratulations, you got a raise because our stock went up, right? Allowing using RSUs as the main form of compensation for executives takes away any kind of discretion from the CEO to motivate people with money. And I think that's a fundamental issue in Silicon Valley.
For startups, stock makes sense because people are taking a risk. If you work for a huge profitable company, they already have to fully expense it. There's no tax credit that you're paying full marginal tax rates on stock compensation. You should be bonusing people.
You can pay them as much, but the bonuses should be based upon a basket of metrics that measure whether you're doing good long-term things for the world, not based upon whether Wall Street liked your recent numbers. Because Wall Street doesn't give a crap. You can give you incentives to do the worst thing, presumably. Right, because what kind of message is it to say we're pivoting the company to care about long-term issues, yet most of your compensation is based upon what happens right after the quarterly numbers are released.
I mean, Facebook stock is way back up. And it's not because any fundamental things were fixed, it's because they're making more money than ever. And so, like, how do you manage a team when you can't control what you're paying people? Do you think, we just have a few more minutes, do you think they actually are committed to fixing things at Facebook, or is it just a lot of talk?
I mean, I do think Mark is serious that he really cares about what people remember him for and what this company does. I think that one of the fundamental issues is that the metrics the company has been measuring to manage tens of thousands of people that make decisions have been the wrong ones. And that's a hard thing to change. And that's why I'm saying, changing out leadership on the product side to help also signal that the things we used to measure around engagement, around time use, time span, all that kind of stuff, that's not what we care about anymore.
All right, last question. If you were running Facebook, do they call you? Do they talk to you? I talk to lower down people who are actually working on these problems.
Okay, but they don't like... At the top? Yeah, I know about you. You're not close.
If you were running Facebook right now in the product area, give me, we've got only two seconds to do this, give me three or four things you think have to be done to make the product healthier for humanity. So I agree with some of the directional stuff of moving the company towards smaller groups, moving it towards ephemerality, moving it towards encryption. Encryption and encryption gives you the ability to mathematically guarantee people's privacy that allows you to put data out of your reach and out of the reach of your advertising team and anybody who wants to use it. The thing that has to happen with that is they have to do some fundamental rethinking of how they do safety in this situation, which the problem is there's a future in which Facebook encrypts everything.
Everything moves to small groups. A lot of these problems go away from the press because the press doesn't exceeding more, but they actually exist and the societal impact is still bad. And I think that is a very seductive future for the company and the company has to resist that and they have to work on... Well, I believe in encryption and privacy, but we have to balance the privacy responsibility with the safety responsibility and there's lots of good technical work we can do to do better on both of those.
I'd like to see them spend the next year doing that. Anything else? No, great to be here. No more I'm sorry, Tori, right?
You wouldn't stop it. Oh, well, I mean, the other big thing is I think they just need to be honest about what they can and can't do. One of the big problems of the company is they make these content decisions based upon external pressure and trying to react to immediate issues and they don't base it upon kind of a constitution of why does Facebook do certain things? And the truth is there should be limits to the company's power and I think it would be better for the company to say there are certain things we are not going to do even if we get yelled at a lot by the New York Times or Ted Cruz, right, exactly because what's happened is they've vacillated back and forth and so to use a recent metaphor there's a little bit of a change of heart and action going on here of working the refs, right?
They have indicated as the refs that they can be worked that they will give you the call if you flop and so everybody's flopping now and that's not good for democracy for these decisions to be made in a secret conference room based upon external pressure it needs to be made with a public discussion based upon really core fundamental values of what they want to do and I don't understand what those are I mean, I work there I don't understand what is the goal of Facebook's content moderation is it to keep people safe is it to help make the product better for society is it to help the community they haven't explained what is the fundamental goal and they haven't said this is the limit that we will not go past and that is a critical thing they need I'm going to give you a pro tip maybe they haven't thought about it anyway, thank you Alex Damos thanks again to Alex Damos for joining me on stage we're going to take another break now but we'll be back after this with Medium CEO Ev Williams we're here with Ev who I've known for forever seems like it and I want to talk about a lot of things let's start, first of all it's called Life After Twitter which you've had quite a life after Twitter you left the board this year yeah, a couple months ago can you talk about a little bit why you did that? yeah, it's not very dramatic I've been on the board since there was a board so approximately 12, 13 years and only on the board for the last 10 or so or however, 9 so I stayed on the board as long as I thought I could be helpful, mostly and the company is a really good place now compared to some of the time it's been before and I just felt like I want to spend my time on energy on other things was it overwhelming for you like the issues you all face there around hate around President Trump around mostly President Trump really? well, being on the board is not being at the company and so while it's called Life After Twitter I kind of laugh because it's kind of been Life After Twitter for me for a long time and I'll always be associated with the company I'll always be rooting for it I'm still a shareholder of the company so there's a certain part of my year is no longer spent in Twitter board meetings but I've been focusing my time on other things for a long time where do you think it is right now as a media in the whole social media space it's obviously been under attack quite heavily I don't assume you're going to write a Chris Hughes-like document for the New York Times correct? no what do you think social media is right now?
it's in the bleakness of figuring out where it needs to go I don't have any answers as to how we get out of the current situation but I think there's a tendency to say oh social media is terrible and forget all the great things about it which I still believe are true and I believe the terrible things are true because social media is humanity and it amplifies unfortunately it amplifies a lot of bad aspects of humanity it's very powerful at that and very powerful at connecting people with terrible ideas and amplifying those and making them seem like they're good ideas on the other hand it does the opposite and I think there is a better version of social media to be invented and I don't know if that will happen incrementally because there's lots of smart people trying to evolve these systems at these massive companies or if it will happen the novelty and some of the excitement that brought us to is wearing off there's like a sugar high and now we're like oh do we need this in our life in the same way right and do you imagine let's get to new companies because you're an investor with Obvious Ventures you're not really investing in that space we don't really know why is that it's not that we wouldn't but at Obvious Ventures we focus on what we call world positive investing which is things that we think address big systemic problems we face as a society we haven't seen something come along and we don't do actually very many internet or media things we do a little bit but we do things more in health and wellness and sustainability world positive that's a very techie word what does that mean well it's just our term before things we have a lens we're not an impact investor we're a for profit investor because that doesn't compromise on financial returns but we're very genuinely focused on things that we think are big ideas and big solutions why don't you want to call it impact investing impact investing can be great but impact investing historically is a view that we will take a lesser financial return in order to have some sort of other impact and there's investments that make sense for that our view is that the biggest companies that scale the most are not going to have they're going to have big returns and so rather than say we're going to compromise returns we feel like that can be a failure mode and say actually it's not that healthy of a company or it doesn't have great product market fit we're saying no it has to be great so an example one of our companies is Beyond Meat which has done phenomenal and it's not an impact investment it's a phenomenally lucrative profitable investment that addresses this massive need of lowering our carbon footprint when it comes to meat what's really interesting is that Beyond Meat is doing great in the stock market and Uber is tanking and Lyft is tanking I wouldn't have predicted that necessarily a few years ago so talk about how you got into this the Beyond Meat because there's also Impossible Foods there's a lot of food tech investing Beyond Meat was one of the first investments we did in this company and so he brought it to us and we were very excited about it we love the products I've been vegan and pescatarian for a long time wait which one are you? I was vegan now I'm pescatarian so I haven't eaten a land animal for a very long time so I enjoy the products you just draw the line at fish? I draw the line at fish and Ethan Brown the CEO and founder of Beyond Meat is an incredible human and so we backed him for earlier on and at the time you did it there wasn't a lot of people interested in that sector and there was investments it was more on the research side a lot of the research stuff and this is a small market what did you hope I'll get to the stock market thing why did you go public with it and what did you hope for that it would be in every supermarket or you're aiming at people you need I mean the goal with it and the company's been around for a few years and the goal with it was always to penetrate the meat market and I mean that in the actual the grocery store sense and to really that's this massive trillion dollar market that we thought there's a better alternative to so we didn't have the plan for that Ethan and his team had the plan but it's going well so far so where do you imagine there's a world I guess it would be world positive how much pushback have you had from meat companies I know they don't want you to call it meat because just the way the milk distributors don't want oat milk to be called oat milk or cashew milk I think some of them see it as an opportunity and some of them see it as a threat it's Tyson isn't it right Tyson was actually a big investor and shareholder and they got out just before the IPO they're making their own version yeah I would assume any meat company the response to Beyond Meat IPO which has been so gratifying is that people are paying attention to this plant protein company that most people wouldn't have predicted would make such a big blip and I think it's a lot of people seeing the potential and in terms of when you think about these world positive things talk about what your theories are of venture because that's changed a lot you have the advent of giant investors just like SoftBank which of course has got a bath in the Uber investment how do you look at investing that as a venture how do you distinguish yourself so ours we kind of play a different game I think than most Silicon Valley investors and first of all it's our lens of filtering out a lot of things that could be great investments but if we don't think they really are going to address some need for society we'll say that's okay there's lots of others which eliminates most of enterprise software and then also the message that entrepreneurs really appreciate is that we are mission aligned and we will support an entrepreneur who is mission focused which people come to us because they really like hearing that because as an entrepreneur you can be and I've been in this position where you're aligned with your investors in terms of wanting to build something really big but you can get misaligned in terms of really the purpose of that thing so what does that bring you to what areas are you excited about so we do a lot of stuff in sustainability from solar and solar software we're investors in Fraterra the electric bus company there's some other another exit we just had was Ollie which was a supplement company and so we tend to do things that are outside of the traditional Silicon Valley world that I know which of course Silicon Valley is expanding greatly in terms of what they invest in but it's not a lot of software or media alright I'm going to get to media in a second but when you think about venture I just interviewed Mark Cuban and Steve Case and they were talking about the efforts they're making to get all around the world to try to get more talent from elsewhere right now 80% of venture capital goes to three states and most of it to California and most of it to Silicon Valley continues to be all white all male not very geographically diverse not very globally diverse why does that continue from your perspective? I think it's a habit it's definitely not the lack of viable investments that are outside the geography or demographics of that traditional set and so we aren't internationally focused and one thing is that so much of the money is in Silicon Valley and the firms are there because they come out of you know it's historic and it is hard to invest in other places where you're not there's just a time in the day problem we have a couple investments in Europe but not a lot and we have some in New York throughout the country but part of that I certainly celebrate expanding the ethos and the formula of Silicon Valley to other places but it's pretty massive and there's this perpetuating cycle people come out of companies and they go back in and they invest in their friends I get that but why does it happen?
You're a very well meaning person and you have a broad attitude for diversity but most people just talk about it and nothing happens in that regard it seems like you're one missing the boat meaning there's lots of investments you're missing and two perpetuating something like this is not an excuse for doing that yeah I agree I don't see any excuse for doing it we try very hard to invest I don't have the data off the top of my head about our portfolio I know it is something that comes up in every partner meeting and every conversation I'm in about how we both hire in the firm both women and people from underrepresented backgrounds and how we get that in our portfolio and we work on it daily and my partners are very focused on that but I don't have an excuse Do you think Silicon Valley has changed an attitude given this tech lash that's happening? I think it has dramatically I mean in my 20 years of building companies in Silicon Valley the intensity of focus on diversity and inclusion in the last five years is dramatically higher it's an order of magnitude higher and it's changing so when you think about where the biggest most interesting innovations are happening where do you tend towards right now? You're obviously in food tech there's a lot of mobility stuff going on and that's not mobile phones where do you think the hottest place to look at is? What do you think the height the worst place right now is?
Well I don't spend that much time looking at investments to tell you the truth I spend more of my time on Medium which maybe we should talk about that Yes I'm going to talk about that I'm going to get that right now But I mean I think obviously AI is infiltrating everything we do and there's some very interesting things actually there's an overlap of AI and material and molecule discovery which I'll probably butcher this if I try to explain one of our companies is Zymergen which is just doing mind-blowing things and inventing new discovering new materials and new chemicals through AI and so that's a field that I barely understand and I think every time I learn more about it it's doing incredible things there's a number of companies like that Yes What's happening with Medium now? When last we talked you changed it about 63 times the way you're looking about it how do you look at it right now? What do you think of it as? I would argue I have not changed it 63 times although I do spend my Medium I don't mind it I don't care if you change it We haven't changed that many things about Medium Medium's been around for about 7 years the entire time it's been an open publishing platform that has grown that entire time so more people write more people read two years ago we started building a subscription business on top of that that's been going very well and so in the last two years the main thing we've done is built this premium consumer subscription business on top of the open publishing platform so it's really a mesh of those two things it allows anyone to publish to have a voice potentially get paid we pay thousands of writers from all over the world every week and that's a growing amount and then we have a professional editorial team and then we also work with third party publishers so we do all that Would you be right to say you've pushed all of the professional stuff more and tended more towards different writers has that not worked as well or what part has worked the best everything's growing the bulk of medium is still self-published authors and we have our partner program where we pay them through most people write a medium we don't opt in to get paid they're looking to find audiences we also have a very growing editorial team that is publishing the latest thing we've been doing is starting these little publications or mini magazines around a variety of topics we've been doing that both in-house and through partners like Mark Bittman and Roxane Gay we just launched something a couple weeks ago and so all that is working it's really the combination of things that are working because it's very clear to me that advertising isn't working pure advertising for publishing for quality information people still want good things to read and to inform their view of the world and so every publisher as you know is putting up paywalls and subscriptions and it seems very clear that people aren't going to subscribe to dozens of sites just like they don't subscribe to every TV show they watch or every musician they're going to look for a lot of value under one subscription that's personalized that's high quality that I think ad-free is tremendously people are doing that in podcasts they're trying to bring together podcasts they are and we're much farther along than anyone doing that in podcasts do you consider yourself a network then and how would you describe yourself as a media company you could call it a network and medium's always been a network it's really a platform and the subscription part is a bundle it's a bundle of thousands of writers of dozens of publications for one price some of that is licensed by the way from third party publishers and so we include New York Times Financial Times Bloomberg a lot of these part of just a few stories from them are in there and so really our goal is to build the best content subscription product that there is.
Do you think yourself of buying big media companies, all the others, a lot of them, Lorraine Powell Jobs, Mark Benioff, obviously Jeff Bezos, and others with some money have been purchasing things. There was a rumor you were looking at New York Magazine. Is that true? It's true.
There was a rumor about that. And I love New York Magazine. I think they do a great job. And look, I think it is something I've thought about because I think there's a lot of those organizations that do great work and they need a new model, frankly.
And a lot of them are, I think, will be fine, but a lot of them are going through more difficult times. The difference between myself and most of the people you mentioned is if we were to do that, it would plug into the business and build in. So what do you imagine, finishing up, what the modern media company looks like? What's been the thing that you've done and you've thought, ah, that's not the way it should go?
What do you think a modern media company looks like? Because you could go and buy old media companies and try to... Yeah, I don't think that's... I think a modern media company, we think, I think the idea of being open to some degree is important.
And this is where we're really trying to capture the best of what you get from the internet and from social media in many ways, which is giving a lot of people the chance to be heard. But it's not guaranteed. It's not just let the machines and algorithms and people fight it out for attention. It's really blending openness.
So not Twitter, right? Not Twitter, but we just serve a very different purpose. So the modern media company, if you're building a publisher today, given the internet, I think it'd be crazy to limit yourself to the people in the building or the people who you know. And so we have the good fortune of getting tens of thousands of people every single day saying, here's my story, here's my idea, here's my perspective.
And we curate that. And sometimes we edit it and we put it in front of more people. And then we also get the benefit of working with people who are well-established. And so a modern media company, I think, taps the world's brains and really builds the best.
And a big part of what we do in our philosophy is blending humans and machines. So we've seen the pure open platform, what that gives us in terms of content. And we've seen that the traditional world and how that can be limited in terms of scale and efficiency. And so I think the next version is going to blend those things.
That's what we're trying to do. And are you positive about media? Because it's still in its long death swoon, which they still haven't killed off media. It's been more popular.
Reading is more popular. Television is more popular. Are you worried about media? About media?
In general, do you think the changes are being made? I'm very optimistic. I think it's interesting that the written word and publishing, which we're currently focused on, though not limited to, is kind of the last. There was time when it was going to be the death of the music industry.
And there's a time, it was never, as I recall, the death of the TV industry, but there's a time when reality TV dominated and that's what we kind of thought the future was. And both of those are tremendously better, both as businesses and as consumer products. And I think the same thing, for the same reason, can happen with the information we read and non-fiction educational content as well. So you imagine that there will be great media brands not, like, you know, you have Game of Thrones, for example, which just finished, which we're not sure we're going to do after that.
But you still are positive that media can morph into this and it's noisy, angry. Absolutely. The reason it sucks is because of advertising, full stop. That is the game that we've been playing for 20 years and it wasn't so bad at first and now attention wins, period.
The cheapest way you can generate attention, which is the same reason that reality TV dominated. Change the business model, you change the content. To me, people talk about saving, publishing or saving news. How about we create something way better?
And I think we can do that in the same way other industries do by changing the incentive structure. So that would make kind of Twitter and Facebook reality television in a weird way because that's where a lot of people The reality TV version of the internet will exist in, you know, for a long time, just the reality TV version. I think Facebook and Twitter are distribution systems for content more than they are content themselves and social media is a whole nother thing. But I'm talking about publishing and even when people are talking about where they get their news and information, most things people read are on other sites that are commercially published and driven by advertising.
All right, last question. Do you think you'll go public with Medium? It's too soon to say that if we do, I would like to go on a long-term stock exchange and other obvious investments. All right, we'll talk about that later.
Thank you, Kevin. Thanks, girl. Thanks again to Alex and Ev for joining me on stage and thanks to you all for listening. You can follow me on Twitter at Kara Swisher.
My executive producer, Eric Anderson, is at Erica America. My producer, Eric Johnson, is at HeyHeyESJ. If you liked this episode, Recode Media and Pivot. Just search for them in your podcasting app of choice.
Thanks also to our editor, Joel Robbie. Special thanks to Donald Donovan, Zara McGrath, Hugh Gallagher, Eamon DeFrezis, and Clarissa Shirozzi. Thank you for listening to this episode of Recode Decode. I'll be back here on Monday.
Tune in then.