Evernote Founder Wants to Save Us from Boring Video Calls

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
First Contact with Lori Siegel is a production of Dot
Dot Dot Media and iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:10):
It's very natural whenever something like this happens to focus
on the negative because there's so much negative. It's actually
much harder, but I think ultimately more productive to also
focus on what's better than it's ever been, and how
do we lean into that, How do we fix the problems,
but also how do we just like lean into the
stuff that's already better and make it exponentially better. That's
where that innovation comes from. So much of the innovation

(00:31):
comes from taking advantage and further exploring the things that
are possible now for the first time ever.

Speaker 1 (00:47):
I think we all kind of cringe these days when
we hear the word unprecedented, but there really is no
better way to say it. We're living in unprecedented times.

Speaker 3 (00:58):
And while it's easy to get hung.

Speaker 1 (00:59):
Up on a lot of the negativity around us, Phil
Livin also sees opportunity. Our new hyper connected lifestyles have
revealed weaknesses in the tech we use every day, but
new problems lead to new solutions.

Speaker 3 (01:13):
That's where innovation comes from.

Speaker 1 (01:15):
Phil is probably best known as the co founder and
former CEO of ever note. These days, he heads up
a company called All Turtles, whose latest project mm hmmm, Yes,
that's right, it's called mm hmmm wants to save.

Speaker 3 (01:28):
Us all from the zoom apocalypse.

Speaker 1 (01:31):
But before we get to Phil, I want to tell
you about something new from dot dot dot. It's something
I am really excited about. It's our first newsletter called
The Gray Area. Each month, The Gray Area confronts the
complex issues facing technology and humanity, issues that aren't black
and white, and each edition of the newsletter will feature
an unfiltered opinion from a big name in tech. Our

(01:53):
first contributor is not so coincidentally, today's guest on the show,
Phil Livin. And if you're listening to this, it's out
right now, so don't miss out. Sign up at dot
dot dot media dot com slash newsletter. Okay, so let's
start the show. I'm Laurie Siegel and this is first contact.
I'm excited to interview you. You're a longtime entrepreneur, serial entrepreneur,

(02:16):
as they say in the business right. You are a
co founder of ever know you now co found at
All Turtles, which we'll get into. And we have m HM,
which is I'm not just saying that for our listeners.
That's that's a part of all turtles, and we'll get
into that too. But you're just a fascinating entrepreneur and
interesting voice. And I've known you throughout the years, and

(02:37):
we always start these interviews with our first contact and
how we first met. And I am racking my brain
to try to remember how we first met.

Speaker 3 (02:45):
Do you remember that?

Speaker 2 (02:47):
I'm don't, but I was pro I want to say
that it was like at some conference, probably overseas somewhere,
but I don't know why I think that.

Speaker 1 (02:56):
And it must have been, I mean it must have
been when you were full time too with ever No,
because I always knew you at Phil from Evernode. You
created ever note, which you know was very successful and
was huge for productivity. So I think that's It's always
interesting to see founders do very different things throughout their
careers too, because you're in a whole different stage of

(03:18):
your career now too.

Speaker 2 (03:19):
Uh yeah, yeah, it's I think I started my first
company in nineteen ninety seven, so I guess I've been
doing this for twenty three years.

Speaker 4 (03:28):
We did that math, right, yeah, I did that math right,
twenty three years. I'm old. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (03:33):
By startup standards. That's significant.

Speaker 1 (03:36):
Yeah, Yeah, what was your first company in nineteen ninety seven.

Speaker 2 (03:39):
It was called Engine five because there was originally going
to be five of us, but then two people chickened out.

Speaker 4 (03:45):
We already bought the domain name, so we just kept
it as E five.

Speaker 2 (03:48):
We were one of the first kind of dot com companies.
I remember walking around saying dot com, dot com a
lot we built, like shopping carts for some of the
first e commerce sites like we worked for or e
Toys and Barnes and Noble and stuff like that back
in the beginning of the of the kind of commercial Internet.
And honestly, it feels it feels like we're going through

(04:09):
a similar thing right now with kind of the emergence
of video as a fundamental thing for everyone.

Speaker 1 (04:18):
Yeah, I'm always fascinated by and we can get into
this these moments of disruption and how it certainly seems
like there's so much change happening right now because of
the pandemic, because we're all kind of glued to our
screens to some degree, it certainly feels like there's a
lot of disruption, which is part of why you're doing
kind of what you're doing. But going back, I read
something about when you were younger, you grew up in

(04:40):
New York in the Bronx, and you said something about
how you just got into computers you weren't cool enough
to hang out with the gangs or something like.

Speaker 4 (04:47):
James wouldn't have me. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (04:48):
I also, like, I want because people can't actually see you,
so I want them to envision you right now, like
you're just like this. I mean, I don't want to
say nerdy, but like you have like glass, you can
say nerdy, you know, like you're kind of like a nerdy.

Speaker 3 (04:59):
Guy, like with glasses.

Speaker 1 (05:01):
Like So, that was a very funny statement to be
coming out of your mouth. Can you tell where did
you come from?

Speaker 3 (05:06):
What was it like?

Speaker 1 (05:07):
And how did you get into this idea of computers
as a kid who just couldn't be accepted by the
gangs in the Bronx.

Speaker 4 (05:15):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (05:15):
Well, so I was born in what used to be
the Soviet Union, in a city that used to be
called Leningrad and Saint Petersburg and came over as refugees
with my family in nineteen seventy nine, I was eight,
I think, And yeah, we settled in the Bronx and
right in the middle of it a place called Parkchester,
which was pretty you know, it's a pretty rough neighborhood

(05:36):
back then. And yeah, I think I just got lucky.
I remember kind of begging my parents for my first computer,
you know, when I was I think I saw my
first computer in junior high school and then probably got
one when I was you know, eleven or twelve or
something like that, and it was like an old Atari
four hundred and that was it. Then, you know, for

(05:56):
the next however many decades it's been, I've been a
dedicated endoorsman sitting at home hacking around than on my computer.
And it definitely let me survive the Bronx because it
would have been tough otherwise.

Speaker 1 (06:08):
Why what was I mean, God, it must have been
extraordinary to come to New York during that time, like
nineteen seventy nine, right like that just must have been
a really interesting time.

Speaker 3 (06:16):
I can't even imagine.

Speaker 4 (06:18):
Yeah it was, it was.

Speaker 2 (06:19):
I mean, it was so different obviously from what I
was used to, but you know, at that age, like
at eight, like, it's easy to adopt to anything, so
I didn't really think too much about it, but yeah,
it was.

Speaker 4 (06:27):
It was fascinating. The neighborhood was you know, it was
extremely diverse.

Speaker 2 (06:34):
You know, school was very unpleasant until I got to
until I got to high school because basically, you know,
I barely spoke any English. I was I'm kind of
as a kid, I was very like punishable, you know,
like I was kind of I mean, I was like
I think, I well, I had a combination of being
of thinking of myself as being smart, and so I
was probably pretty smarty and pretty condescending. But I also

(06:56):
didn't speak English vertty well. And it also very physically uncoordinated.
I was exactly the kind of kid that would like
trip over my own shoelaces. And we were poor, so
I didn't have like, you know, it was easy to
kind of make fun of, you know, whatever clothes I
was wearing or something. So it's just like a combination
of things. So school was very much not great. But
you know, I had a computer, I had a few
really nerdy friends, and yeah, that was good enough. And

(07:19):
then by the time I got to high school, I
went to Brook Science, which was kind of this like
nerd magnet school, and so things started things started getting
a little bit better. Yeah, after that, I kind of
followed the you know, the typical nerd trajectory had a
lot of good luck.

Speaker 1 (07:32):
What was it about computers or what was it about
that world that was interesting to you?

Speaker 2 (07:39):
I remember it being like the idea that I could
write something and it did something was kind of amazing.
I'd like just like learning to program when I was
you know, a little kid like that. It literally felt
like magic, right, It literally felt like casting a spell,
like I would like say these words and write these
symbols and then like stuff happened. Yeah, it was like

(08:01):
the feeling of agency that I could actually like make
things happen was was was you.

Speaker 4 (08:07):
Know, pretty significant and really really pretty good addictive.

Speaker 3 (08:11):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (08:11):
And of course at that time, like no one.

Speaker 2 (08:14):
Really knew what they were doing, so it was easy
to like be a teenager and know how to program
and do it more or less as well as professional
programmers of the times that they were like relatively few,
and so you know, I was able to like get
part time jobs pretty quickly. And it was just a
very very fratuitous thing. Like if it wasn't for I
have literally like if had I been born fifty years earlier,
I have no idea what it.

Speaker 4 (08:33):
Could have possibly been doing.

Speaker 1 (08:35):
And you went on to I mean I think I say,
you sold your first company for like five hundred dollars and.

Speaker 3 (08:39):
Something when you were when you were really when you
were very young, very very Yeah.

Speaker 2 (08:43):
That was yeah, in high school. That was before Engine five.
So like in high school, I started a company and
we called it. We called it percy As Data Systems
because we took out the Dungeons and Dragons, you know,
de T's and Demigod's book and we just kind of
flipped pages. We were going to call it Hermes first
because like Hermes is fast. Yeah, but then we were like, nah,
that doesn't sound right. Armies sounds sketchy. So we decided

(09:05):
Perseus Data Systems was the name. But yeah, we sold
that for five hundred, five hundred big ones, but just
five hundred ones.

Speaker 3 (09:10):
Yeah, but like in high school, that's a really big deal.

Speaker 1 (09:13):
Like you must have seen, like wow, like I'm onto
something pretty big, because five hundred dollars for an entrepreneur
in Silicon Valley now is like nothing, but like five
hundred dollars in high school is a pretty big deal.

Speaker 4 (09:23):
Yeah. I mean I was working at Carvel ice Cream
at the time.

Speaker 2 (09:26):
But my you know, my summer job, or like my
part time job was like scooping ice cream at Carroll
and I got fired from that.

Speaker 4 (09:31):
I couldn't. I wasn't I was not competent enough.

Speaker 3 (09:34):
Why'd you get fired? What'd you do well?

Speaker 2 (09:36):
I couldn't make the I lacked the physical dexterity to
make the soft surf cones, because you know, when you're
making the soft surf cones, you have to, like you've
got the cone, you've got a soft surf machine. But
you can't just like put the ice cream down the
middle of the cone, because then you wind up giving
away too much ice cream. You have to like twist
the cone at an angle so that the ice cream
just goes around the edge but doesn't go inside the cone.

(09:58):
You're kind of cheating that the customers out of you know,
they think they're getting the full cone, but they're not.
And I just I lacked the physical dexterity to like
turn it in time, so I alway found up like
giving away twice as much ice cream. I got fired
over that, but I pretended in my brain I resigned
for ethical reasons because I wasn't cool with like cheating
people out of half their phones.

Speaker 4 (10:17):
So that's what I told myself. I'm like, no, this
is this is unethical. I'm out of here. But really
I got fired because I just couldn't. I couldn't do it.

Speaker 3 (10:23):
Yeah, that's amazing City Constellation. I was like the worst
waitress ever in high school. But it looks like you
went on to accomplish some pretty pretty great things. So
let's let's move on.

Speaker 2 (10:33):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (10:34):
Yeah, great thing.

Speaker 1 (10:36):
So you went on and you co founded ever Note.
And I want to get to kind of the whole
disruption happening in media right now. And while you have
a cool background and all that kind of stuff, but
what year did you launch Evernote two thousand and eight?

Speaker 4 (10:50):
So ever Note was there's two companies.

Speaker 2 (10:54):
I had just sold my second company, or was selling
the process of selling my second company. If we were
in Boston with my Tam and we sat around trying
to figure out what we wanted to do, and we
decided we wanted to We actually had this really good
discussion about this. We said, my first company was this
e commerce company, and then with the same team, after
we sold out, we started the second company, which was
a security company that sold to like big banks and governments,

(11:17):
and we were sitting around in two thousand and seven
saying I'm tired of thinking about what the.

Speaker 4 (11:21):
Customer wants, Like I just don't care.

Speaker 2 (11:23):
I don't care what banks want, I don't care what
governments want, I don't care what e commerce stores want.
I want to make something for ourselves, Like what do
we want? Yeah, so we just made a list. This
is the same co founders. And someone said, oh, we
like video games, we should make a video game company,
and we got excited about that, but then I was like, ah,
there's already so many great video games and I already
don't have time to play them, Like.

Speaker 4 (11:42):
I don't think we really need more video games. Yeah,
Like that's not our role.

Speaker 2 (11:45):
Then somebody said, oh, we really like this new social
media stuff, and I remember getting excited about making a
social media company, but then I said, oh, but there's
already my Space and no one can beat MySpace, like
just we're too late. So we decided not to do that.
And then we said, well, what about productivity. We like
like feeling productive, and like existing productivity was basically Microsoft

(12:05):
Office and it hadn't changed in thirty years, and it
wasn't on smartphones, and so we thought, okay, Yeah, that's good.
So we started working on it in Boston, and there
was this other team in California led by Stepan Patchikov,
who was this brilliant Russian American kind of an entrepreneur
and mentor, and he had a team of people working
on this like cognitive prestisis idea. And so there were
two companies and we kind of loonned them together in

(12:26):
two thousand and seven and relaunched kind of what was
the modern ever note.

Speaker 1 (12:30):
It's always interesting to hear how these things come about, right,
because you're right, we have like a hero narrative and
it's all this kind of stuff. But it's like you
guys are sitting in a room being like, all right,
we're sick of hearing what banks want. We're sick of
hearing what you know, other people want, Like what could
we do?

Speaker 3 (12:44):
And you're sitting here being like, well, no one can
compete with my space.

Speaker 1 (12:47):
Let's do productivity, right, Like I know that's you know,
like in some in some way, shape or form, like
that's kind of the birth of ever note, is like
you couldn't compete with my space.

Speaker 4 (12:56):
You know totally. Yeah, we were like no one, no
one's going to beat that's too lay.

Speaker 1 (13:01):
Which like technically like wasn't really true. I mean actually
not technically that wasn't true. Facebook came along and like
annihilated my Space.

Speaker 4 (13:08):
But yeah, like in a few months, yeah, like a
few months later.

Speaker 1 (13:12):
But aren't you I mean, but technically, are you glad
that you didn't you didn't create like Facebook, they have
all sorts of issues, but or maybe who knows, you
could have created the next Spacebook. But Evernote ended up
being a pretty interesting app at a pretty interesting time
because two thousand and eight was a fascinating time for
startups and tech. And I feel very near and dear
to two thousand and eight two thousand nine because that's

(13:32):
around when I started covering technology, and it was such
an interesting time for technology, and you know, because I
think we were in a recession.

Speaker 3 (13:41):
There was a lot of constraint.

Speaker 1 (13:43):
It wasn't really that cool to go to Wall Street,
and there were a lot of creative people, I would say,
like yourself, who were having to who were doing different things,
and who were seeing that there were a lot of
broken systems to some degree, and I think a lot
of interesting, a lot of interesting things came about at
that time, and it seems like ever note something that
kind of popped out of that time.

Speaker 3 (14:01):
A lot of different technology came out of that time.

Speaker 2 (14:04):
Yeah, it was I think, you know, technology follows these
s curves. Something big happens, is a big disruption. Yeah,
and then there's like a ton of activity and a
ton of investment and huge amounts of innovation, and then
things kind of slow down and people start talking.

Speaker 4 (14:18):
About, oh, is that the innovation over?

Speaker 2 (14:20):
And you know, and things kind of get to a
flatter point and then right away there's like some other
new disruption, and it kind of follows these patterns.

Speaker 4 (14:29):
I could definitely trace those back.

Speaker 2 (14:31):
You know. I started working probably in like the mid nineties,
like ninety three, ninety four, and there's been a few
of those cycles. Like first there was PCs, just computers.
Then it was the Internet, Then it was mobile, you know,
then it was AI, and now.

Speaker 4 (14:44):
It's all of this.

Speaker 2 (14:46):
It's it's the hybrid world, it's video, it's the post
pandemic reality.

Speaker 3 (14:50):
That's what you think it'll be. I mean, and so
let's break that down.

Speaker 1 (14:53):
I mean, you know, mobile, I remember mobile was such
a big thing, like you know, two thousand and eight,
we had the recession, you had the iPhone had come out,
the app store had launched, You had a bunch of
entrepreneurs creating all these ideas, encoding them into the hands
of millions of people, and that was such an extraordinary thing.
And then we've heard a lot about AI and where
it's going to go and whatnot, And you think the
next iteration really is is video and some capacity and

(15:17):
how we're communicating with each other. Like right now people
can't see us, but we're looking at each other over Zoom.
And you have a cool background that's much cooler than
my background.

Speaker 3 (15:27):
Which is my staircase.

Speaker 1 (15:29):
But you have like a cool virtual background that's not
one of the Zoom backgrounds. It's through your company that
we'll talk about. But you think that's kind of the
next area of disruption, because out of these periods come disruption.

Speaker 4 (15:42):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (15:43):
Well, first of all, your real background is much cooler
than my real background because I'm just sitting in my
tiny apartment, like in front of a green sheet.

Speaker 4 (15:52):
So yeah, and I'm.

Speaker 2 (15:53):
Kind of glad people can't see us because it's like
close to one hundred degrees in San Francisco and we
can't open windows because airs on fire, So I'm definitely
not looking my best right now.

Speaker 4 (16:04):
But yeah, I think it's exactly right.

Speaker 2 (16:06):
I think you get these massive disruptions and everything changes.
It's very natural whenever something like this happens to focus
on the negative because there's so much negative, and to
focus on the problems and to think about how we
might be able to get close to what we used
to have before. And it's actually much harder, but I

(16:26):
think ultimately more more productive to also focus on what's
better than it's ever been, and how do we lean
into that? Well, what are the superpowers that we were
all just given because of the pandemic and the emergence
of video And obviously there's a lot of problems, but
there's also some glimmers, there's some things that are better
than they've ever been. How do we fix the problems,
but also how do we just like lean into the

(16:48):
stuff that's already better and make it make it exponentially better.
Like that's where that innovation comes from. So much of
the innovation comes from taking advantage and further exploring the
things that are possible now for the right And there's
just like examples of that, Like once once I started
thinking about it in those terms. I can see examples everywhere,
and then yeah, we could we just double down on

(17:08):
the ones that we think are going to be the biggest.

Speaker 1 (17:12):
More from Phil after the break, and make sure you
sign up for our newsletter. It's called The Gray Area
and it's out today. Go to dot dot dot media
dot com slash newsletter to make sure you don't miss it.

(17:37):
I want to go back to finishing off ever note,
you know, because I think we do tell a bit
of a hero story, right and with ever note, I mean,
you know, I just I always hate to interview people
like you who are on paper pretty successful, very successful
and in Silicon.

Speaker 3 (17:53):
Valley and moderately successful like whatever.

Speaker 1 (17:56):
You're successful in Silicon Valley standards and I you know,
and part of the inside baseball crew, and people come
and pitch you ideas for funding, and you're doing all.

Speaker 3 (18:05):
Sorts of different things.

Speaker 1 (18:06):
But you know, being an entrepreneur is really really hard
and very difficult, and there are all sorts of problems
that come along with it. So before we get into
kind of the disruption that's happening, now you're a much
more seasoned entrepreneur. Now, what would you go back and
say to yourself back then. What do you wish you
knew then?

Speaker 2 (18:28):
Well, I certainly didn't create every dought co created it
with several other really really brilliant people, and I was,
I think, very very privileged to be part of that
crew for a long time. I think seasoned entrepreneur is
an interesting way of putting it. And I only realized
this very recently, and I wish I had realized it sooner. Imagine, like,

(18:49):
let's just say that you're a skier. Let's say you're
great at skiing. I'm clearly not like I skied once
in my life and never again. But let's just say you're,
you know, you're a great skier, and you're like in
your twenties and you know you're skiing.

Speaker 4 (19:01):
I don't know, moguls, is that a skiing thing?

Speaker 1 (19:04):
By the way, I've steed once in my life too.
I'm you're not in You're in a safe company here, Okay.

Speaker 2 (19:09):
But let's say, like, you know, we all have friends
who are good skiers and they're, you know, let's just
say in their twenties, they're they're like going all out
and they're they're doing they're jumping and they're doing kind
of crazy things, and you know they kind of know
that they're yeah, they're sort of screwing up their knees
a little bit, but you know it's worth it because
you know it's fun and they're really good at it,
and you know you've got to be a little bit careful.
But no one expects it by the time they're in

(19:30):
their forties or fifties, that they're skiing the same because
people are like, well, yeah, like knees are hardware, so
of course there's going to be wear and tear and
they're going to you know, and like, yeah, by the
time you've been skiing for thirty years, you know, maybe
you're fifty, you're a much more experienced skier. You've got
thirty years of experience, but you're just not going to
be as good. You're not going to be able to
do the same stuff. It's just physically you've kind of

(19:51):
been banging up your knees for thirty years. And that
doesn't surprise people because again, people think that knees are hardware,
but somehow people think that your brain is software.

Speaker 4 (19:59):
Right.

Speaker 2 (19:59):
They think like, oh, well, if you're running a company
and you're doing all this extreme stuff and you're an
entrepreneur and it's all high stress and it's endless days
and you're doing it in your twenties. Like sure, now,
now if you're doing it at twenty years later, like
it must be easier because your experience, right, well, yeah,
it's your more experienced, but you've also been beating up
your brain for twenty or thirty years, and you know

(20:22):
your brain is also hardware, just like you knees are. Yeah,
and the stress and the damage your cruise and you
have to and there's ways to mitigate it, but you
have to be very intentional about mitigating it. And you
can't do the same things as an entrepreneur in your
in your thirties and your forties and your fifties as
you could do you know, in your twenties. It just
doesn't it doesn't work the same way. And we're no

(20:43):
one is taught that. Yeah, like we're sort of taught
to assume that, Like no, no, no, this is this is
what you do. You go all out and you know,
it's a it's a it's a completely all encompassing pursuit,
you know, being a startup founder and yeah, and if
you're on your fifth company, I'm currently on my fifth
startup is my fifth one. It's like, oh, yeah, you've
done all this before, so it should be easier. And

(21:04):
in some sense it is because I've done a lot
of it before, so I kind of know, you know,
where that the ski jumps are. But a lot of
it is harder because I'm, you know, twenty three years
older than the first time I did it, and I
didn't realize that.

Speaker 4 (21:17):
I didn't think of it like that.

Speaker 2 (21:18):
I didn't think of the like the brain is no
more you know, software than your knees are until pretty recently,
and I kind of wish I would have, and I
think then I would have, you know, I would have
just been more mindful about what am I doing to
take care of my brain and how how am I
managing stress and relationships and everything else, kind of on
a more on a more day to day basis, And
I think a lot of founders don't do that, And

(21:39):
I think I would have been a better CEO and
a better founder had I taken that seriously earlier and
not been quite so cavalier about what my limits were.

Speaker 3 (21:48):
So how do you do that asking for a friend?

Speaker 2 (21:52):
Well, not very well yet, you know, I guess the
first step is just being aware of it. Yeah, and
like not brush it off, because I very much used
to brush it off. I was very much like, yeah,
that's that's not a thing like work life balance, like.

Speaker 4 (22:05):
What the hell is going?

Speaker 2 (22:07):
So just being aware of it is important. And then
you know, look, I'm in San Francisco. A few years
ago there was a law pass that required all CEOs
and vcs to get into meditation. Like we'd had those
like a mindfulness bill, those like strict penalties for not meditating.

Speaker 4 (22:22):
So you know, I followed the law.

Speaker 2 (22:23):
I started meditating, I became you know, more mindful. I
a few years ago decided to take my health seriously.
I think when we first met, I was probably ninety
pounds heavier than I am now. So you know, I
had to do I had to start taking that seriously
and figure out how to get into again some amount
of mindfulness, some amount of wellness, some amount of you know, fitness,

(22:45):
and just doing things that I never considered important before
because I never cared about myself and I still don't
care about myself that much. I'm still primarily motivated by
the impact. But what I didn't realize before is that,
like the impact, I can have is directly based on
what kind of shape I'm in. Yeah, And if I
don't care about myself, I'm just going to be in
very bad shape because like running a company, especially a startup,

(23:09):
is very much physically damaging. Yeah, and so unless you
take care.

Speaker 4 (23:13):
Of yourself, it's just it's it's it's.

Speaker 2 (23:15):
Not it's not the way to maximize rentpack. So I
guess if I had everything to do all over again,
I would have had that realization when I was twenty five,
not when I was twenty five.

Speaker 4 (23:24):
But then.

Speaker 2 (23:25):
It's interesting. I actually think like the pandemic has caused
me to professionally adopt all sorts of behaviors that I've
never had before, which I am hopeful will last post pandemic,
because I think they've been really useful.

Speaker 3 (23:37):
Like what.

Speaker 2 (23:41):
Okay, So like, well, this is in the spirit of
like not focusing on what's not as good, focusing what's better.
So I thought, okay, man, I make this is going
to suck working, you know, remotely, because I make so
many important decisions, just like going on a cerendipitous coffee walk,
Like I'll run to someone at the office and I'll
be like, let's go, let's walk for coffee and then
we'll walk for coffee and.

Speaker 4 (24:01):
It'll make some important decisions.

Speaker 2 (24:02):
Yeah, And I was very much like an in person
person impromptu like that, and I can't do that anymore.
How like how things hard things can operate, and I
really miss that. And then what I realized just in
the past few months is, well, I can't do that
anymore because I'm not physically around people to go for
coffee walks. But actually making important decisions by randomly running

(24:23):
into someone and then walking for coffee is not a
great way to make decisions because like everyone else feels
out of the loop and it's not properly documented, and
the people who don't happen to be remote aren't like
full citizens. And so the fact that we couldn't do
that forced me to say, all right, well, I guess
I have to like communicate much more in writing right
over slack over video. We have to like make plans,
we have to stick to plans. I can't I can't

(24:44):
rely on the people who I like. Therefore, there are
the people that I go coffee walking with, you know,
like that can't be the the like I have to
I have to be able to work with and make
decisions with people who I wouldn't normally go for a
walk with just because you know, it just didn't mesh
as well.

Speaker 4 (25:02):
And that's harder. It's like harder for me because I've.

Speaker 2 (25:03):
Had to change you know, twenty whatever years of management style.
But it's so much better, right because obviously, like if
like forcing myself to do this right is much more
scalable habits. And hopefully even after the pandemic, like I
am going to be doing a lot more you know,
written plans and thinking about how to communicate and stuff
like that, because it's clearly a healthy rate round a company.

Speaker 1 (25:25):
Yeah, we all to some degree become more accountable and
writing and then you know, in this form of communication
to some degree.

Speaker 2 (25:32):
Well, like you know, we live in Figma now, it's
like I love Figma. It's like my favorite part about
you know, going to work every day. It's like getting
on Pigma, seeing what everyone's doing, seeing what everyone's.

Speaker 4 (25:43):
Done from the night before. Like it's great.

Speaker 2 (25:45):
We have a lot of like creative meetings in Pigma
And at first I thought, man, this isn't going to
be as good because we used to do a lot
of like brainstorming in person. We like cram into a
conference room and we like put put you know, sticky
notes on whiteboards and like do all sorts of stuff
like that. Do that in Figma, or we can do that,
you know, something similar. But I thought, like the creative
brainstorming isn't going to be as good because we're just

(26:06):
going to miss that like in person vibe. And it's true,
we miss the in person vibe. But what I noticed
is like, all of a sudden, oh man, I'm getting
a lot more out of like the relatively shy employees
this way. Yeah, because I guess it turns out that
like I can be an overbearing ass in an in
person meeting and it's and I'm not quite right now,

(26:29):
that's harder to do when we're like in Figma and
voting on things by putting dots. It's all of a sudden,
like I'm noticing the contribution of people who were frankly
like wallflowers before.

Speaker 4 (26:39):
Yeah, and like that's amazing.

Speaker 2 (26:40):
Right, because like it turns out their talents and their
productivity is not car related to like how willing they
are to interrupt me the CEO in person.

Speaker 4 (26:46):
And say no, I think that's wrong.

Speaker 2 (26:49):
Yeah, So you know, we've like put put up a
structure to allow that, and all of a sudden, like yeah,
I just feel like a productivity has just gone like
way up. So like that's good, that's a that's a
positive effect of this world. So how do we how
do we do more of that? So all sorts of
things like that. In fact, I think my work style
I've never had a period of this much change. I

(27:11):
think the vast majority of it has been for the better.

Speaker 3 (27:13):
Well, that's that's great.

Speaker 1 (27:16):
I feel like I'm medium, Like I think it's it's
actually kind of dot dot dot. It's to be to
be determined right on my end, right It's it's a
it's a constant struggle. Sometimes I'm like, this is amazing,
and sometimes I'm like, well, you know, not undercenture, because
especially in the creative world, it's you sometimes rely on
those in person interactions, and so I think that's it's
probably a good way to segue into what you're doing now,

(27:37):
because it's you know, it certainly feels like the way
of like traditional video and how we interact and this
idea of remote work it seems to some degree broken
if the future is remote work, and I'm not I'm
not sure what the future of remote work is. I
think to some degree we're all going to want human
connection when things open up again.

Speaker 3 (27:54):
But will things ever go back to normal quote normal?
You know, I don't know if we will have a
quote normal.

Speaker 1 (28:01):
We've really seen that we can do a lot of
things easier over video and whatnot, and I think that's
kind of the premise for what you're launching with HM, right,
and I say it correctly, So you know, so first
of all, tell us tell us a little bit what
it is, and it's under the umbrella of all turtles,
which is, you know, something that you launched a while back,

(28:24):
which which I love that you kind of compared it
to Netflix, right, this idea of like the Netflix model.
So that's a lot to kind of pack in there.
So maybe we start with with all turtles. And it's
this idea that you know, if we're looking at technology,
you kind of talk about tech being a little bit
broken and how they do things, and you kind of

(28:44):
like the Hollywood model, and that's how your your next
iteration of all turtles kind of came about and is
under that. So let's let's start with all turtles.

Speaker 2 (28:53):
Well, yeah, so we started All Turtles about three and
a half or four years ago. So basically after every note,
I thought I was gonna semi retire, and so I
became a VCA. I became a managing director at General Catalyst,
which is an amazing fund. But I realized after about
two years that I just wasn't like she wasn't very
good at being a professional investor. I didn't enjoy it
very much. But I think I didn't enjoy it because

(29:13):
it wasn't particularly good at it, and basically because like
people would pitch me and I would get excited about
the idea, and him on my partner at a General
Catalyst at one point, took me aside right from the
beginning and he's like, the mistake you're making is you
hear these pitches and you're excited about.

Speaker 4 (29:30):
What you would do with this idea. But that's like a.

Speaker 2 (29:33):
Terrible way to make investment decisions about because you're not
going to do anything with this idea. You get to
get excited about what these founders are going to do
the idea. And I was like, yeah, that's actually totally true,
because as a CEO, like I hear a good idea
and like I don't really care who proposed it.

Speaker 4 (29:45):
Like like I can think of all sorts of things.

Speaker 2 (29:47):
I can like assign people to work on stuff, but
totally not how a venture works. Of that and other reasons,
wasn't that good at it. So I started All Turtles,
which is a product studio, and the idea was, we
just want to build worthwhile products for the world with
and it as little nonsense as possible, as little of
the nonsense that the Silicon Valley style like VC startup

(30:07):
treadmill produces. There's just a lot, you know, a lot
of the myths that go around it don't actually make
any sense, Like.

Speaker 3 (30:14):
What because can we just talk about all of them
right now?

Speaker 1 (30:16):
There's so many myths, Like you know, I feel like
there's just a lot of stuff that just gets said
and thrown around and then people just start believing it
and it's just like a self fulfilling prophecy.

Speaker 3 (30:25):
So just name a couple.

Speaker 2 (30:26):
Yeah, well, and and you know, because the conventional wisdom
doesn't get to be isn't true, right, It didn't get
to be conventional because it's true. The conventional wisdom like
gets to be conventional because like it's easy to repeat
while sounding smart, right, So there's like no no correlation
between like how often people say something and how true
it is exact.

Speaker 4 (30:44):
Sometimes it's it's.

Speaker 1 (30:45):
Like what's your least favorite one? Just come on, Phil's like,
what's your which one do you hate the most? Uh?

Speaker 4 (30:53):
Well, there's a whole category that I call focus.

Speaker 2 (30:56):
Uh huh uh, And like focus is a thing that
only exists like in hindsight. Like, if you're successful, you've
achieved exactly the perfect amount of focus. If you're not successful,
then either oh, man, you just didn't do enough. You
were like too narrowly focused and you're like the TAM
the total addressable market wasn't big enough of what you
were doing, or oh it's like too diffuse, you did

(31:18):
too much stuff, and so like you can only have
the right amount of focus in hindsight, right. Yet, the
most common advice vcs give entrepreneurs is to focus. And
I'm like, why that is such a not useful piece
of advice, because like, unless you're coming back from you know,
ten years in the future telling me like it's just
not useful right now.

Speaker 4 (31:34):
You know. Another one is.

Speaker 2 (31:37):
Typically it's hard to invest in anything unless you think
it could be a multi billion dollar idea, and so
entrepreneurs are very much incentive to pretend that all of
their ideas could be multi billion dollar ideas. Otherwise it's
you know, it's hard to get investment. And that's weird, right,
Why should that be the case. Why should it be
that the only worthwhile ideas are once that might be
worth many, many billions of dollars. Yeah, it makes sense

(32:00):
for vcs, like the way that VC math works. That
totally makes sense. But that's not good for the world.
That's not good for founders. Yeah, you know, I did
this back of the envelope math when I was starting
old Hurnles. I did this back of the envelope math
and I looked at Now, this was back in like
two thousand and seventeen, so it's changed a little bit
since then. The industry has gotten a little bit better,
but not very much probably. But I did a little
bit of math, and I said, Okay, what makes you

(32:22):
likely to get a top tier Silicon Valley Series A
round done like just you know, just top tier vcs,
you know, the top twenty or thirty of them, top
tier A round?

Speaker 4 (32:33):
What does it take?

Speaker 2 (32:34):
And I did a little bit of math, and it
turns out there was basically six factors that like contributed
that predicted like how likely you were to get a
good a round from a tech VC in Silicon Valley.
So if you were male, white, or South Asian between
the ages of twenty one and twenty seven with a

(32:57):
computer science degree or engineering like basically with the Copewter
degree from Stanford, and you still lived within fifty miles
of Stanford. If you were those six things, you have
like some some odds, let's just normalize, have to say one,
like you have some chance. Obviously it's still really hard
and there's nothing wrong with being those things. But like
if you were all six of those things, let's just
say you're your odds are normalized that one. Yeah, for

(33:19):
every one of those six things that you weren't, your
odds dropped off by an order of magnitude by two
to ten x for each thing. For each of the
six things. So a lot of the deals that wound
up getting done all six things were true, and you know,
sometimes pretty often it would be five out of six,
sometimes four out of six, almost never less than that,

(33:42):
like the number of deals that only three out of
those things things things are true or fewer, very low.
So if you were a you know, forty year old
woman in Tokyo that had studied architecture, you know, you
could be a Mozart level genius, but you're not. You're
not getting into the startup ecosystem. And there's a lot

(34:04):
more people like that than there are the people that
meet these six things, right, And so that's like a massive, massive,
massive inefficiency. And again I'm not like faulting the VC
industry for focusing on that, and a lot of them
are getting a lot better now because it makes sense,
like you can you can make a lot of money,
and there's a lot of great innovation that comes out
of those things, But how could that possibly more than
one tenth of one percent of the total possible important

(34:24):
innovation in the world. Right, So Yeah, so we basically
made a studio to try to not have that kind
of lens, to try to take a much broader lens.
And yeah, we've been working at it for about almost
four years. It's been really hard because it's a new model. Yeah,
but you know, now we're starting to see some successes.
So it's starting to feel pretty good right now. And
h m HM is our second spin out so we

(34:45):
work on things that we don't when we start up,
we don't really care about is it going to become
a startup or is it a big company going to
own it or whatever, Like, we don't we don't focus
on the legal entity of the product.

Speaker 4 (34:54):
First. We just want to make the product.

Speaker 2 (34:55):
But then some things will then become individual startups and
spin out. And we've done a couple of those now
and who is the latest.

Speaker 1 (35:02):
Well, it is interesting you talk about those numbers are staggering, unfortunately,
Like I could act shocked, and I wish I had
like more of like appalled whatever, But it's just like,
you know, you cover this stuff and it isn't even surprising, right,
and you know which is which is upsetting, but it's
just not even surprising, and it's interesting, you know, And
there's a lot lost because the types of products that

(35:22):
are developed just aren't as interesting and aren't as widespread
and you know, won't impact I think the world in
the same way when they're developed by the same people.
And I think it's interesting when I was looking through
the portfolio of the folks under all turtles, like I
think Replica's under there.

Speaker 3 (35:37):
We've done a lot on Replica, which.

Speaker 1 (35:40):
Was founded by Eugenya Kudya, who's a fascinating entrepreneur from
Russia who is creating these AI chatbots that people are
befriending and they're helping with mental health and there's all
these interesting ethical issues, but it's such a fascinating, fascinating
use of technology that could not be more human that
I almost feel like it would take such a different

(36:00):
type of entrepreneur, you know, and she's the exact type
of entrepreneur. I think that that is so interesting, and
so it was cool to see that in You're in
the portfolio under there and I and I do think
what you're talking about with the Netflix model was interesting
of giving people the ability to just go kind of
create and looking at almost like Hollywood as the model

(36:21):
for you know, helping people create different companies.

Speaker 4 (36:24):
Yeah, we kind of thought about it like this, like
let's say thought experiment. Let's say that you are one of.

Speaker 2 (36:30):
The most naturally gifted and talented musicians in the world,
Like you are a Mozart level genius musician, you know what,
literally like you know, one in a million. Right now, Well,
what do you you don't have to make a music company? Yeah,
you just play right, and the platforms exist like YouTube

(36:51):
and others where if you're really like most of level genius,
like yeah, your music will reach you know, millions of
people and you can focus on what you're amazingly good at. Yeah,
let's say you're one of these, like again, one in
a million, super brilliant, you know, writers, you don't have
to like start a publishing company. You can write, and
these platforms exist where you're going to be.

Speaker 4 (37:11):
Able to get to a big audience.

Speaker 2 (37:14):
But if you're like a Mozart level one in a
million genius, like product creator, you have to start a
company first, Like we tell you, like, oh yeah, that's
a great idea. Here's the Wikipedia page and how to
start a startup. Here's what a foreign evaluation is. Go
raise some money and like first become a mediocre CEO
of this like fragile little thing called the startup, and

(37:35):
then we'll talk about your product idea. What the hell,
like why why would that be the way that that
we want to make things in the world. You know,
it'd be like Stanford saying, like, if you want to
work in the physics department at Stanford, you have to
be a world class brilliant physicist, but you also have
to like play the clarinet at like a professional orchestra level. Right,
them's the rules, and like, you know, if we did that,

(37:58):
we would get a lot of a maze using physicists
at Stanford, we're also world class player neet players, because
there are people like that, but like.

Speaker 3 (38:04):
Not most of them, right, So.

Speaker 2 (38:07):
Why do we just why do we like glom these
two totally unrelated things together. Some people are great at
being early stage CEOs and are brilliant at product people,
but for the most part, those are not directly connected.
So yeah, so when we said Netflix model, that's what
we meant. It's like, if you're one of the world's
most brilliant like filmmakers. Let's say you just graduated from
you know, film school, and you're a really gifted filmmaker

(38:27):
and you want to make a movie.

Speaker 4 (38:28):
You're not like, okay, right, so what do we do?

Speaker 2 (38:31):
So first we have to start a film company, and
we have to get some money from seed investors, and
then we have to like hire an HR team and
then like we can like start making our movie.

Speaker 4 (38:41):
Right.

Speaker 2 (38:41):
That's not no, Like what you're thinking is like, okay,
I got to pitch this to Netflix. I want my
movie made at Netflix or at HBO, right, And so
that like these full Stack studios attract by far the
best talent. They make really creative stuff. It's not like
they're making derive of cookie cutter things. I mean, of
course they are. Yeah, Also they make really original stuff
totally globally, totally worldwide and every like in dozens of

(39:04):
countries in the world. And we just wanted to do
the same thing. We wanted to like, we wanted to
do that, but not for movies and TV shows. We
wanted to do that for tech products, which is.

Speaker 1 (39:12):
Really interesting and also kind of gave birth to I
say it again, mm hmm. So talk to me about
it's let's like set the scene. It's March maybe April,
you know, and we all start communicating and having to
switch to remote work. And it happened almost abruptly, and
it was clumsy and weird, and we had a lot

(39:34):
of feelings, and we're all battling our mental health and
you know, and things are getting lost in context and
we're all having to deal with this kind of new
way of work and the zoom apocalypses upon us and
half the population figures out what zoom is for the
first time, and all these things are beginning to happen,
and then what is going on in your head? We

(39:55):
don't have to make this the perspective story, but like
the aha moment for you is what.

Speaker 4 (40:00):
Yeah, So we.

Speaker 2 (40:01):
Were I you know, we sent everyone home and went
into quarantine in early March. And at that point, I
think we had eight or nine things going on at
all Turtles, and you know, the world's falling apart, economies
in free fall, and we had an all hands meeting,
which we never really used to do before, but we decided, okay,
well now we're working over videos, so let's do all hands.
So we did an all hands meeting, and I said, look,

(40:24):
my priority right now is not to fire anyone. Like
what I'm going to optimize for is I don't want
to lay anyone off. Like I just don't want to
lay anyone off during the pandemic. And like that's very
much not the advice that a lot of you know,
entrepreneurs are getting. Yeah back then, but I'm like, and
I get it. I get that sometimes the right thing
to do is to immediately lay people off because you
kind of have to survive like, I get it, I
just don't feel like it. I don't feel like doing it.

(40:45):
I'm like, I'm like, I'm old enough, I've done this enough. Like,
you know, we had very little money, but I'm just
going to try to optimize for not laying people off.

Speaker 4 (40:52):
Yeah, and you know kind of got.

Speaker 2 (40:54):
The team around that and said, I said, look, these
are the things we're working on. Let's figure out what
to double down on, what to pivot. We can't assume
that we're going to get any more investment, so assume
that investment markets are totally done. So basically we have
to get to profitability. And then we just all go
heads down. And you know, the team does really well
on a bunch of different projects or the teams, and
we're just working. We're just heads down every day and

(41:16):
it's it's hard, it's tedious. Everyone's got different you know,
life circumstances obviously. But we spend a few months doing that,
and then in early May, I think I'm just sitting
around just bored because of how tedious living on video is.
It's just like I'm so tired and everyone looks so crappy,
and it's like and I had this green towel camping towel,

(41:37):
had a green camping towel, Like it's pretty small, and
so I just hung it up on the wall behind me.
You didn't cover the whole frame. It was just like
a had a stupid towel hanging behind me. And I
just started experimenting projecting, like in Zoom, just like using
the Zoom green scream functionality to just put like different
pictures on this camp town behind me, just to like
liven up the meetings a little bit. I think the
first thing I ever had there was like the like

(41:58):
the super frowny picture of Anthony Fauci, like glaring, had
that over my shoulder as I would talk, and you know,
and like I started having meetings with this and I
would show art back there and people would like it
and they would laugh. And then I got Steve, who's
one of our engineers and our co founder at and
we just started hacking around with it, and pretty quickly
it just became obvious that like this was this was

(42:20):
a thing. So within a few weeks it went from
you know, the two of us kind of part time
hacking around like really as a joke, yeah, to kind
of being like no, I think actually like everyone who
sees it really wants it and asks like, well.

Speaker 4 (42:32):
What are you doing?

Speaker 2 (42:32):
How can I start doing it? And so we decided
to make it into into a product and it took
off from there. But yeah, it's been really really fast.

Speaker 1 (42:38):
Yeah, and describe exactly what it is, because you did
a demo for me, which is kind of cool, and
it's kind of like this interactive experience of all the
things were frustrated with with Zoom kind of trying to
optimize to make it seem a little bit better. Is
that a safe way to say it. I feel like
it's downplaying it, so you do a better job of it.

Speaker 2 (43:00):
I mean, like the one the one second page is
it's like instant weekend update. It just lets you very
quickly do this very familiar style of you know, being
like John Oliver or like a roscaster or like somebody
on SNL.

Speaker 4 (43:14):
So it just lets you choose what room.

Speaker 2 (43:16):
You're in, like your physical room, and you have like
lots of different options. I'm sitting in this like little
cartoon paper world with cute ducks and you know, clouds
and trees, but you know, I can be I can
be in something that's a lot more kind of fancy
and realistic if I want to have a fancy bookcase, or.

Speaker 1 (43:33):
I know, I should say like for our listeners, like,
first of all, you just had like the weekend update
kind of box that like we see on SNL. And
then now you're you look like you're in like you know,
people have like these zoom background where their heads disappear
and it's like kind of upsetting in the middle of
like a presentation and no one wants to say anything,
but like you seem like you're in like a beautiful
apartment that like none of us could afford in New
York City. Right now, that's kind of like what I

(43:54):
would describe it as. This is like a fun game.
I feel like every background I can just describe it
to our listeners or something.

Speaker 3 (44:00):
Just want Oh no, you look like you're like a
grateful dead fan.

Speaker 4 (44:05):
Yeah this one, this one maybe not.

Speaker 1 (44:07):
Not for early in the or you look like, I mean,
what this looks like the smart drug phase of Silicon
Valley in your background, right it's.

Speaker 3 (44:15):
Kind of like a a.

Speaker 1 (44:19):
Like stained glass church windows with a little psychedelic effect.

Speaker 3 (44:23):
How is that?

Speaker 4 (44:25):
That's quite good?

Speaker 2 (44:26):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (44:26):
Thank you.

Speaker 4 (44:27):
I should get to like write the descriptions for.

Speaker 1 (44:29):
These things, you know, creator storyteller done the last all right, yeah, yeah, okay,
So I can.

Speaker 2 (44:34):
Basically I can choose, you know, I can choose backgrounds.
This is a scrolling kind of Game of Throne style,
you know, paper map or something like. I think this
one is my favorite thing Like this one is like
nice and Calm's.

Speaker 4 (44:46):
Just paper waves.

Speaker 2 (44:48):
And then I and then just have a screen and
the screen behind me. I can just show kind of
whatever I want to show. I can choose you know,
where it goes, what side it's in.

Speaker 4 (44:57):
Uh. And I can do presentations like this.

Speaker 2 (44:59):
So if I am you know, if I want to
present a slide, rather than having to share my screen,
I can just you know, I can shrink and I
can fly around the screen.

Speaker 4 (45:07):
I can you know, point to things, you know this way.

Speaker 2 (45:11):
So it just makes it really easy to make this
really visually compelling communication. And I can do that by myself.
We have a co pilot mode, so two people can
do this kind of at the same time. I can
make recordings that are interactive and so it's a it's
a it's a way to liven up everyone's performance over video,
either like in a zoom call, or you know, in

(45:33):
a video call, or when making content, when making videos
or as a replacement for sending boring.

Speaker 4 (45:38):
Powerpoints slides around. Yeah, that's the that's the main idea.

Speaker 1 (45:42):
You know what's interesting is it's not cheesy if that
makes sense, right, Like you know to some degree, like
you talk about your shrinking and people might not know
what that looks like, but it seems pretty seamless. Like
this sounds like a geeky to describe over like a podcast,
but there is friction when you're sharing your screen and
everyone's awkward and in these video boxes, and I think
maybe the tech person or the tech journalist and he

(46:04):
kind of always says like, Okay, something's broken here, Like
everyone's awkwardly waiting. People are hoping that they don't share
anything awkward on their screen, right, And when you do that,
it certainly looks like you're experiencing something different, right and new?
And can you do that in a seamless way so
I can understand, you know, the point behind it, And
so I think it's interesting to see all the things
you can do with it, right, And this idea of

(46:25):
like if zoom is going to be the future to
some degree, and who knows if once this is all over,
if we're going to be on Zoom at all, but
I have a feeling that will be on Zoom to
some degree. You know, what is the upgraded version of
media and interactivity? And that seems to be what you
guys believe that that m hmm, which I want to
get into why you named it m because Phil, I

(46:47):
don't know why. I just feel awkward saying like mm
hm into the mic many times. But you know why,
you guys believe that this is kind of the future
of how we interact with each other in the remote environment.

Speaker 2 (46:58):
Right, yeah, they think that the initial idea and like
the very first product, like what exists now is basically
it's really it's really simple. Most people who are good
at their jobs in many many industries are also good performers.
So you know, if you think about like the best
teachers you've ever had, like those teachers like knew that
they were performers and were good at performing, and like

(47:21):
the best doctors are performers, and obviously the best journalists
are also performers, right, Like the best bankers or the
best you know, entrepreneurs, like all of us have to perform, right,
all of us have these, like multiple times a day,
these like little micro performances where we say like, hey,
like look at me, I'm doing a bit over here.
Maybe we're just doing it for our kids or our
friends or our boss or whatever. And what's happened is

(47:43):
now that we were all forced suddenly to do it
over video. None of us knows how to perform anymore,
and so we've just lost a lot of the effectiveness
of everything because you lose the basic like showmanship and
the basic personality if you're just an anonymous head in
a box on video and you know, like the gestures
don't quite work the same way, and you can't like

(48:04):
point if you're like showing slides. If you're doing it
in person, you can, like you can like practice like
how to point to things and then how to like shrug.
But if you're performing over zoom and you're like just
doing a presentation people, you're either asking people to choose
between looking at you or looking at your slides and
not both at the same time, and so you just
lose like all of that basic showmanship capabilities. And they

(48:24):
just made everything worse, like shocking wily worse, because all
of a sudden, we went from a world where people
who were kind of at the top of the game
inherently knew how to be somewhat memorable to well, none
of us know how to do this now, right, And
so we were just trying to fix that. We were
just kind of trying to say, like, there's actually no
reason that stuff over video needs to be boring. In fact,
like obviously we have TV, right, we have Saturday Night Live.

Speaker 4 (48:48):
We have movies.

Speaker 2 (48:49):
There's a whole industries of people that know how to
be quite entertaining over video.

Speaker 4 (48:53):
It's just that the rest of us don't.

Speaker 2 (48:54):
And actually those people don't either over zoom because it's
a very different tool set. So can we just improve
people's performance? Can we just reinject some personality into this?
And so we thought, you know, we thought a lot
about mm HM and what.

Speaker 4 (49:07):
You did in the product.

Speaker 2 (49:08):
We were like and we decided specifically, like we are
not a communication product, We're not a collaboration product. We're
not like where your team gathers.

Speaker 4 (49:17):
To do work.

Speaker 2 (49:18):
Like we're not trying to replace Figma or Slack or
any of these other things. We improve your performance, Like
what you do is you perform. You have a micro
performance and we're very focused on that, and there's just
not a lot of people doing that. Surprisingly, I think
there's going to be now. So that's that's it. Like
that's the basic idea, right, It's like we're all boring

(49:39):
on video, but we and and being boring is bad
because it makes us ineffective in our jobs as part
of why you know, online learning is so difficult. But
there's no reason that that education over video has to
be boring. Like I was, you know, back back in
the real world.

Speaker 4 (49:55):
I was on the speaking circuit.

Speaker 2 (49:56):
Once in a while, through some poor set of decisions,
people would pay me to go and give a talk
about something, usually entrepreneurship or something something right, and you know,
I'm okay at it, like I was. I was an
okay professional speaker. And I was talking to my speaking
bureau a few months ago and they're like, man, yeah,
like online, like the whole industry is just dead. Like
no one wants to pay for people to give speeches

(50:18):
online because they're like they're boring and it's like they're
not engaging, and like you can't compete with like people's
kids running around and you can't hold their interests and
I'm like I can, right, Like you you can't because
you suck at speaking over video, but like when I
do it, it's okay. Yeah, And like, you know, those
people had the same kids running around last year when

(50:38):
they were watching the final season of Game of Thrones,
and they had no problem, like HBO had no problem
holding their attention. So let's just like, let's just not
try to replicate the old style. Let's do something native
to this medium, and it could be quite good. And
when I give a speech now about you know, naming
or branding or whatever, like, it's much better than I
used to do it in person because I can like
fly around the screen and point that they with my

(51:00):
head and show graphs and I couldn't do these things
in person before. So that was really the idea. It
is just like, let's just make people entertaining again so
that the world can start being effective, yeah, and not
like dreary. And then from there it obviously became a
much bigger thing because I think you're right. I think
this is a once in a generation transformation of the
entire world.

Speaker 1 (51:20):
So what does that mean for how we communicate? When
you say this is a once in a generation transformation?

Speaker 3 (51:27):
Of the world. What as a tech entrepreneur do.

Speaker 1 (51:30):
You think will be completely transformed?

Speaker 2 (51:35):
Well, so I think the main change is this, right,
is that everything is hybrid.

Speaker 4 (51:42):
And you know, for your listeners, I just put up
a slide that says everything is hybrid. Yes, very literal, So.

Speaker 2 (51:46):
Everything is hybrid from now on and really hybrid. I
think like this, like imagine the spectrum of in person
to online. Right, there's like some stuff that's in person,
some stuff that's online, and then there's a different dimension
of life versus prerecorded. So if you kind of cross
these two things, you get you get a two by two.
You get four quadrants right in person, live, online, and recorded.

(52:08):
And in the before times, you know, eight months ago,
almost every experience fit neatly into just one of these quadrants. Right,
So for example, like music concerts were in person and
live what and like doctor's visits were in person and live,
but like YouTube videos were online pre recorded, and it
was pretty rare for something to exist in more than
one box once in a while, but pretty rare. And

(52:29):
the big change now is because we're doing so much
stuff over video, the boundaries between these boxes is melting
away and we can rebuild every single experience. As a
combination of live plus in person plus pre recorded plus online,
we can like we could remix each of those things.

(52:49):
And this is a massive transformation and it'll continue after
we emerge back, you know, blinking into the sun, because
it's better than it ever was before.

Speaker 4 (52:59):
Like, for example, for healthcare, right, like if I had to.

Speaker 2 (53:04):
You know, make an appointment to see a doctor before,
you know, eight months ago, I'd have to like pick
up the phone and like be on hold and then
like schedule an appointment and then drive to a doctor's
office and then sit in the in the lobby and
wait and then like finally get in person and talk
with the doctor who was like trying to get me
to get rid of me as quickly as possible because
I had to see you know, fifty more patients. Why,

(53:26):
Like I'm never doing that again, right, It's obviously much
better to just be able to like hop in online
and not drive and you know, not have to wait
and you know, get a lot more attention and have
things explained to me kind of correctly. And also like
the doctor doesn't have to explain everything to me live.
I can just you know, click around and do stuff myself,
and if I need to come in person for some
you know, lab test or something, then I can do that.

Speaker 4 (53:46):
Otherwise things get me out to my house.

Speaker 2 (53:48):
Like that is the hybrid experience, and it's better the
than the only in person experience. And I think the
same thing is true for education and for sales and
for all of these other things.

Speaker 1 (53:58):
It's better, right, It's better if you can and still
maintain some sense of humanity. Because what I think we
all struggle with right now is, you know, this experience
right now, this is great because we have the things
in the background and I can see.

Speaker 3 (54:12):
You more animated and whatnot.

Speaker 1 (54:14):
But man, if I were able to see you in person,
wouldn't it be extraordinary? We haven't seen each other in
so long, you know, And so how do you replicate
and not replicate because you talk about not wanting to
replicate that, right, But how do you recreate a new
experience that feels rewarding and human and how do you
utilize technology to do that? Because right now, I think,

(54:36):
and I've talked about this for a long time, but
technology does make us and we were in a moment
where technology, we're all questioning, does make us feel lonelier worse.
You know, we're looking at this information, We are looking
at like a time where kind of the pendulum have
swung one way, and we are at a moment in
the pandemic where we're relying on a lot of these
platforms to make us feel better, and they're not necessarily

(54:58):
bringing us more human ca and if anything, it's kind
of quite the opposite.

Speaker 4 (55:03):
Yeah, I think I think it's right. I think there's.

Speaker 2 (55:08):
I think there's kind of two really important philosophical concepts
of what she just said. One is, yeah, you're totally right, Like,
it's not about replicating the old reality. That's that's a
really big thing, right, If you think about replicating the
old reality and with a new set of limitations and technologies, like,
it's always going to be disappointing because the old reality
was built using the old technology and limitations, and you

(55:29):
can't replicate it. So if you if your success is
like how close can you get to the old reality,
You're always going to fail. So you can't replicate it.
You have to you have to redesign it, right, you
have to do it native to the new reality.

Speaker 3 (55:42):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (55:42):
The example here is.

Speaker 2 (55:46):
Imagine some of the very first movies ever made, Like
the earliest films, you know, from the teens and twenties,
nineteen twenties, they had film cameras, but they hadn't invented
anything else about movies, and so what they knew was theater,
and so they were just trying to replicate the re
the old reality, which is actors on a stage. And
so they were just like film actors on a stage.
And early films are really weird because that's all they new.

(56:06):
They hadn't invented like close ups and two camera shots
and cutaways and editing. But a few decades later you
had the first like native to cinema, you know, directors,
and they invented all the stuff, and we had movies,
and movies were a totally different thing than theater. But
for a while people were thinking of them as like.

Speaker 4 (56:23):
Oh, it's a very poor substitute for theater.

Speaker 2 (56:25):
I used to go to plays here, and like now
they converted it to a movie theater and they show
these movies and it's just an inferior version of theater.
Well yeah, because they were just trying to replicate theater,
it took a while for it to become a totally
new thing. And the same thing happened with television, and
obviously the same thing happened with you know, with smartphones. Right,
So when we started every note two and seven two
thousand and eight, smartphones were a new thing, and existing

(56:48):
companies knew how to make desktop apps, so like Microsoft
knew how to make Microsoft Word, and so the first
generation of smartphone apps were like a shrunken down version
of Microsoft Word to fit on a smaller screen. But obviously,
like that's not that isn't what anyone wanted. So it
took a few years for things like ever noe in dropbox,
in Uber and Airbnb to come around to be like,
these are native. We're not trying to replicate computer PC

(57:10):
applications on your phone. We're trying to make a totally
new thing that couldn't be done before.

Speaker 4 (57:14):
Same thing is.

Speaker 2 (57:14):
Happening with video, right, like zoom saying okay, So meetings, right,
meetings were a bunch of boring people sitting in a
boring room together for an hour with an agenda. And
they can't all be in the same room together. How
do we get as close as possible to a bunch
of boring people sitting in a boring room but with computers.

Speaker 4 (57:34):
And yeah, like it's never going to be as good.

Speaker 2 (57:36):
Yeah, but that's the wrong design goal, right you have
to be like, well, what the hell were the meetings
there for in the first place? How do we reimagine
them totally differently? So this is always the friition, right, Like,
it's never going to be as good as it was before,
and we're always going to feel sadness for the things
we've lost, and that's fine, that's supposed to be that way.

(57:57):
At the same time, in many ways, you're going to
be better than it's ever been, but those ways are different,
and we need to like lean into those. Yeah, something
can be great and terrible at the same time, Like
great and terrible are not opposites. Good and bad are
not opposites, right, Like, something can be very good and
very bad. They don't average out, they don't cancel each

(58:17):
other out. And like the world we're living in right
now is very bad and also kind of good in
some ways, but not in a way that you can
average and come up with like an average score. And
so it's both so like, yeah, like I miss seeing
you in person, and I hope that we do see
each other in person. You know at some point when
when we can come back out into the real world.
But I also think that this conversation right now where

(58:39):
video is maybe the best conversation we've had so like it.

Speaker 4 (58:42):
It's both good and bad.

Speaker 1 (58:44):
Yeah, more from Phil after the break, and make sure
to subscribe to First Contact wherever you listen to your podcast,
see don't miss an episode. When we look to the future,

(59:16):
even of this platform, right, You're absolutely right, Like, I
think maybe when we think about disruptive technology, to some degree,
we have to mourn what we lost and then think
about all the amazing things that can come.

Speaker 3 (59:29):
And so I'll take this two ways. First, where will
we see this go?

Speaker 2 (59:33):
Right?

Speaker 1 (59:34):
Like, because this can be sure for remote work, but
as even a journalist or as someone who was on
CNN for a decade, right Like, I could see people
building a channel over this. I have a friend who's
a magician who's doing zoom magic right now, I could
see that.

Speaker 3 (59:48):
I mean, like, where are you seeing?

Speaker 1 (59:51):
This is in beta, it's closed beta right now, but
people can sign up to be a part of it.

Speaker 3 (59:54):
But where do you see this going?

Speaker 1 (59:57):
You know, this layer that you're building on top of,
where do you see the promise of.

Speaker 2 (01:00:02):
This, I think, I think for people, for individuals, for consumers,
I think we're kind of creating this big new industry
that we're calling a PvP for personal video presence. The
idea is, if you think, you know, eight months ago,
how many of us had to conduct important part of

(01:00:23):
our days over video, It was pretty very few people.
But now just about everyone has to do like something
important over video just about every day. Sure, and that's
going to continue even after we come out of lockdown,
because these hybrid experiences are going to be better. Yes, right,
so there's always going to be something that we're doing
on video and m hmm, like elevates that we make

(01:00:44):
your performance over video better. We're the thing that sits
between my face and the rest of the world during
those times where I'm interacting with the rest of the
world over video, and I think that's going to be
a ubiquitous thing. Everyone is going to be doing this
at least a certain amount of the time, and hopefully
not just as a substitute for in the real world,
because right now it's a substitute because we can't see

(01:01:05):
each other in person. But hopefully over time we won't
be a substitute will be in addition to right, because
it's better and for companies, for organizations, I think it's
an even more profound transformation. I never like using the
word disruption. I don't know, I don't know why.

Speaker 1 (01:01:19):
It just feels because like everyone in still at values,
is it right?

Speaker 2 (01:01:23):
I guess so, yeah, yeah, But it's it's an even
bigger transformation, which is we're still calling it PvP, but
instead of personal video presence, we think it's professional video presence.
And this is like similar to you know, where we
started this conversation, Like when we started my first company,
Engine five and ninety seven, right, we were figuring out
like what percentage of companies would be on the internet,

(01:01:46):
and some people said, you know, twenty five percent and
some people said two percent, and we said, you know,
probably one hundred percent. And the same thing is happening now,
right like eight months ago. In the before times, what
percentage of every like school, gym, restaurant, you know, club business, store, like,
what percentage of all the organizations had to conduct themselves
over video at least some of the time, it's like

(01:02:07):
very few, but now close to one hundred percent. And
so just like in the late nineties and early two thousands,
we went from one percent of like organizations being on
the internet.

Speaker 4 (01:02:18):
To one hundred percent.

Speaker 2 (01:02:20):
We're going to go from like one percent of the
organizations being on video to one hundred percent very soon,
and it's going to change everything. It's going to change
again the way that we get healthcare and the way
that we have meetings, and some of the changes will
make us miss the before times, and some of the
changes will be ridiculously better than they were before. Because

(01:02:43):
of the way the human brain works, we tend to
focus much more on on like the feeling of missing something.

Speaker 3 (01:02:50):
By the way, such a moment for Nostodgia too, exactly.

Speaker 2 (01:02:55):
Definitely, like those of us who remember it will definitely
miss like the good old days.

Speaker 4 (01:02:59):
And we'll remember them as having been better than they
really were.

Speaker 2 (01:03:02):
Yeah, but we'll also like very gratefully accept all of
the improvements and like those will pretty much go without comment. Well,
all of the suff that's better will just be like automatically,
you know.

Speaker 1 (01:03:12):
I remember being in the newsroom and being part of
the before I even started covering technology, I was doing
breaking news at CNN, and I remember the I Report
days and when Twitter was beginning to get big.

Speaker 3 (01:03:24):
And it was amazing because.

Speaker 1 (01:03:25):
It's two thousand and eight, two thousand and nine, and
everyone was able to be their own news reporter to
some degree, and it was the democratization of information and
it was just such an incredible time. You know, the
plane went down to the Hudson and someone tweeted that
infamous image of people walking across the plane in the
Hudson and getting to safety. And these were the days
where we saw the power of disruptive technology to let

(01:03:48):
us all be journalists to some degree. And so when
you talk about, you know, letting us all be professional
video folks, right, my head goes to, wow, this is
incredible because you know, we can all to some degree
be professional when it comes to zoom and when it
comes to being able to represent ourselves better and be
more professional and almost like I think to like almost

(01:04:08):
have like a news.

Speaker 3 (01:04:09):
Channel or in my background and look much more slick.

Speaker 1 (01:04:13):
You know. I also go to the unintended consequence, right,
and I think about, Okay, so what are the things
you're thinking about as you're building out You know, it's
not necessarily like a platform, it's software to go on
the platform, right, But you know, I just did a
whole investigation into QAnon, right and spend a lot of
time in the community, went to the rally, and you know,
really it's these are folks who believe in that they

(01:04:36):
are the news, and so not to say, worst case scenario,
you have these folks who have these millions and millions
and millions of people online who are getting kicked off
of Facebook and Twitter, who decide to create their own,
you know, their own zoom channels, and they're using slickly
produced software from you guys to look even more relevant
as they're putting out conspiracies that aren't true. But you know,

(01:04:58):
so this is where I I played Devil's advocate in asking,
you know, what what are you guys doing and what
are you guys thinking about as you're building this early on,
knowing all we know now about what tech companies have
struggled with over the last you know, five ten years,
with the rise of misinformation and with you know, these
these struggles over free speech and hate speech and the

(01:05:19):
spread of conspiracies and all that kind of stuff. I'm
sure you're having conversations about.

Speaker 4 (01:05:23):
It, Yeah, a lot of them. I think the important
thing is technology that we don't. We don't know yet.

Speaker 2 (01:05:31):
We don't have all the answers, but we do have
a particular point of view, and we have we've at
least identified the questions. And one thing that I'm really
committed to is I hate this notion that technology is neutral.
That technology, Oh, technology is neutral. It could use for good,
it could be use for bad. I don't buy it.
I think that's that's kind of lazy. I think it's

(01:05:52):
you know, it's passing the buck.

Speaker 3 (01:05:53):
But I also think that's a big deal that you
say that.

Speaker 1 (01:05:55):
And I say that as as someone who's talked to
many different founders throughout the years, like as long as
I've covered tech, like you talk to entrepreneurs who are
building platforms and they say, tech is neutral, can be
used for good or bad. It's a reflection of us humans,
like you know, and they build platforms on this we're
just the pipes.

Speaker 3 (01:06:11):
And that's you building something saying.

Speaker 1 (01:06:13):
Like, hey, that's lazy, Like that's a I don't know,
that's like a pretty big deal to kind of come
out in a strong way and say that.

Speaker 2 (01:06:21):
I mean, I maybe it's it's how I felt for
a long time, and it's how I think a lot
of the people that I work with feel so it's
certainly not new to to the ethos of all turtles
of kind of how we started it. The whole point is, look, technology, Okay,
fire is neutral when it occurs in nature.

Speaker 4 (01:06:41):
It's neutral, it's just fire.

Speaker 2 (01:06:43):
As soon as you like make a product that uses fire,
that's not neutral anymore. You've expressed an opinion about how
you want fire used in the world. Right, Like technology
is not a naturally occurring thing, is that it's a
very intentionally built thing. And whenever you do something intentionally,
you have a point of view. You can try to
conceal that point of view, you can try not to

(01:07:04):
think through it enough because you maybe don't care, but
like you have a point of view, you have an
actual effect. Right, Any technology that's been high impact by
definition has like moved the world in some way, and
it's absolutely the responsibility of the creators of that technology
to say, what direction do they want the world to
move in by releasing this product or this technology intentionally?

Speaker 4 (01:07:28):
Like what do they want? And then how do they
know if it's doing that?

Speaker 2 (01:07:32):
And how do they know if it's doing something else
that's you know, maybe unintentional, But it's their responsibility. It's
our responsibility as technologists to worry about the intentional and
unintentional uses and the effects of our products, not just
on the people who use our products, but just as
much in the people who don't use our products.

Speaker 1 (01:07:53):
SOT, Like when you're in the closed door meetings with like,
what are you thinking about? Is like the unintentional use
of the software that you're building, Like, what is the
jam session of worst case scenario?

Speaker 2 (01:08:07):
Well, I mean the one that's top of mind is
exactly what you said, right, It's like, how do we
what if people start using this for really harmful things
like spreading for the division, intolerance, you know, conspiracy theories,
things that are you know, bad for science, bad for society.
I mean that's the that's the easy one to think of, right.

(01:08:27):
There's probably lots of other things that we don't know about,
that we haven't thought of. So the question isn't just
to like identify the things that we think might go
wrong and try to prevent them, but how do we
have a structure so that we can identify things that
go wrong.

Speaker 4 (01:08:38):
That maybe we haven't thought of.

Speaker 2 (01:08:39):
I have a time it's the I call it a
digital canary, you know, it's like the canary in the
coal mine, right, Like, how do we how do we
build digital canaries that are the early warning signals for
something is happening as a result of.

Speaker 4 (01:08:52):
Our product that we don't like, and then.

Speaker 3 (01:08:55):
How do you do it?

Speaker 4 (01:08:56):
How do we stop it? So we've well, so we
made some rules.

Speaker 2 (01:09:00):
We started with with kind of three rules, because you know,
three is a good number to kind of guide us
in this. They're similar to the rules at every note
I published our three rules of data protection. These are similar.
We're just going to refine them a little bit. That basically,
they're all written to be tutologies. They're all written to
sound like very obvious, like A equals A, because I
think like the whole point is all of these rules

(01:09:21):
are very obvious, and the fact that not every company
does them is kind of the problem. Like they should
be really obvious. So the first one is just your
data is your data. They're all written like this, We're
all A equals A. So your data is your data,
which means that it's not our data, it's your data.
So you and trust us to hold down to your

(01:09:41):
data for some amount of time to run the service
or whatever. We have to treat it as this like
valuable thing that you have trusted us with, but it's
not ours.

Speaker 4 (01:09:48):
We don't own it. It's not up to us what
we do with it.

Speaker 2 (01:09:50):
It's up to you, which basically means that we're going
to try everything possible to keep your data private.

Speaker 4 (01:09:54):
We're going to try everything possible.

Speaker 2 (01:09:55):
To keep your data safe because it is a valuable
thing that you have and trust it to our care
for a temporary amount of time. The second rule is
the product is the product, right, I think and this
sounds it's almost stupid sounding, right to say the product
is the product. Yeah, because for so many companies you
don't know what the product is, and you know, there's
a common saying. We're like, if you're not sure what

(01:10:16):
the product is, then like maybe you're the product. And
what we're saying is like, no, our users aren't our product.
Our product is our product, which basically means that we'll
never sell your data and we only allow for it.
Everything we do at alternles, it's only direct revenue. We
don't have anything that we're monetizing your data. We're selling advertising.
Not that there's inherently something wrong with that, but that

(01:10:39):
every time you do that the product is something other
than your product. You wind up with these structural business
model conflicts like yeah, Facebook makes money because it wants
you to stick around long enough to click on things.
And the way it gets you to stick around longer
is to get you into a heightened emotional state. And
the easiest heightened emotional state to generate algorithmically is outrage.

(01:11:03):
It is much easier to like algorithmically generate you know,
tribal outrage than it is to generate you know, love
and a feeling of like blissful joy. So the business
model is like keeping you in a heightened emotional state.
Therefore there's just going to be a lot of a
lot of shit spread around. That's like very negative because
of this fundamental conflict, right, Whereas like Wikipedia doesn't have

(01:11:26):
that as a business objective, Like they don't care how
long you stick around. They just want you to like
learn something. And of course it's a vastly different experience.
And remember when Wikipedia came out, we would all like
laugh about like, oh, I can remember Stephen Colbert doing
jokes about how like how's anyone going to trust this?
Like anyone can edit it? Right, But it turns out
it's like the most trusted site on the Internet, even
though it's like anyone can edit it. You would think
it's totally susceptible to all of the manipulation that happens

(01:11:49):
at Facebook and Twitter because it's like much smaller. Like
I'm going to say something that I have no idea
if it's a true statement, but it sounds really.

Speaker 3 (01:11:56):
Good, so very two if it's any consolation.

Speaker 2 (01:12:01):
Yeah, but I'm admitting that this is I have no
basis for this other than it's beware. I'm going to
say that Facebook like spends more money on or at
least used to before that pandemic, like spends more money
on office snacks than like Wikipedia's entire operating budget.

Speaker 4 (01:12:20):
And yet like, we.

Speaker 3 (01:12:21):
Don't have this confirmed to our listeners. We don't have
this confirm. But okay, okay, it might be true.

Speaker 4 (01:12:26):
Sounds like it's true.

Speaker 3 (01:12:28):
I had there, and they do have lots of good snacks.

Speaker 4 (01:12:31):
You know they have great snacks.

Speaker 3 (01:12:32):
Yeah, go ahead.

Speaker 4 (01:12:34):
My brother used to work for Google in the mid
two thousand s's. I had so much food.

Speaker 3 (01:12:38):
Oh my god.

Speaker 1 (01:12:40):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:12:43):
Uh right, But like Wikipedia, because it doesn't have this
structural conflict manages to be one of the most trustworthy
sites around. So so that's the second rule, right, the
product is the product. And then the third rule is
our community is our community, which basically means that it
is our responsibility, Like we are inviting people in, it
is our responsibility to make sure that people are using

(01:13:03):
us for the stuff that we want in the world
and not the stuff that we don't. And here the ideas.
We have to have a strong point of view about
what we want, and we have to spend a ton
of money and time and resources promoting and highlighting and
sponsoring and curating the stuff we want. Like we want
to spend one hundred times the amount of resources on

(01:13:24):
making sure that there's worthwhile, beautiful, important things made and
shared with h Like we have to actively spend money
and time on that, and I want to spend one
hundred times more on that than I do on getting
rid of the stuff we don't want. But that's also
equally important, Like we also have to get rid of
the stuff we want because it's our community.

Speaker 1 (01:13:43):
So does that mean you won't let there are people
on the no list? Like that means as people begin
to sign up, as you begin to open up. It's automatic. No,
if you find out there and you and on community
or they are you know, member neo Nazi. Is there
a point you talk about having a point of view
early on? So what does that actually mean?

Speaker 2 (01:14:05):
Yeah, i hate neo Nazis and I'm not going to
let them on the platform. If it's in any way
possible to do it, right, it doesn't have to get
more complicated, right, what about sometimes we can't prevent it obviously, right,
Like we're not especially.

Speaker 4 (01:14:16):
Like if you're just using mm hmm the way that
you and I are.

Speaker 2 (01:14:19):
Using it, which is we're just on a zoom call,
right and I'm using it, like because of rule number one,
your data to data, we're not spying on that, right,
So we don't see what everyone is doing, like internally.
So if neo Nazis want to use it on their
you know, internal zoom calls, we're not going to find
out about that, right, you know, we'll make it against
the terms of service. So you know, if they want
to follow the lawyah for that. But as soon as

(01:14:42):
someone OSTs something publicly or shares it or we find
out about it, then yeah, if at all possible, we
will stop it. But you know it's not it's not
a magic solution. But we're also not going to pretend
that we owe freedom of speech the Nazis.

Speaker 4 (01:14:52):
We don't.

Speaker 1 (01:14:53):
I mean, But then there's also I mean that technology
is run into problems, like even look at q No.

Speaker 3 (01:14:57):
Now there's a lot of gray area here, right of like.

Speaker 1 (01:14:59):
What is acceptable and what's not, you know, what crosses
the line and what doesn't. I think this is where
tech companies are running into trouble. I think Facebook got
into a lot of trouble for not cracking down early on,
and then technically some of this stuff didn't fall into
the wheelhouse of against their terms of service, right Yeah, but.

Speaker 2 (01:15:18):
Look, let's just say there's always gray areas, but I
often think the gray area is a little bit exaggerated.
So let's say you know, you're having a house party.
You've invited people to come to your house. You're having
a house party, and you haven't set like that many
rules about what people are allowed to do and what
they aren't because like you know this gray areas.

Speaker 4 (01:15:35):
Who's to say it.

Speaker 2 (01:15:38):
But then you find out that there's this like one
guy like in the house and they're doing some like
really depraved shit whatever, use your imagination, but it's clearly
not cool, and you're like, yeah, you didn't make any rules,
but I'm clearly not cool with this. So you're going
to throw that person out, and you're not going to
be like, well, I didn't specify ahead of time exactly
what it was and what it wasn't and maybe next
time you'll have like better rules. But of course there's
going to be gray areas, and of course there's going

(01:15:59):
to be some edge case where it could go either way,
but there's a lot of things that can't go either
way that are very clear. And if you're hosting a party,
it is very much your ethical and legal responsibility to
be accountable for what's there.

Speaker 4 (01:16:12):
Right, if you're driving a car, you are.

Speaker 2 (01:16:14):
Legally responsible for like the activity of your passengers. You
don't get to say like, well, it's a gray area.
Well yet it is, but you're driving the car, so
you're responsible. And so a part of it is just
that step, right, is so the technologists acknowledging their responsibility
for the community that they make, like very specifically and
not pretending that we don't have.

Speaker 4 (01:16:36):
Responsibility for it.

Speaker 2 (01:16:37):
We do have responsibility for it, and yes, we're going
to get it wrong sometimes because there are gray areas,
but if we acknowledge our responsibility, we can at least
get it right most of the time. Yeah, and so
I think that's like a big part of it, and
I think Facebook is starting to do a lot better
with that. But it didn't start out because there's all
sorts of like libertarian nonsense. But it can go on

(01:16:59):
a long ramp about funny, but it is.

Speaker 1 (01:17:02):
It is super funny because I mean, what you're trying
to say or what but it sounds like you're saying
is like, take responsibility. If you don't think it should
be on there, don't don't put it on there, don't
hide behind the fine print, is what you're saying to
some degree.

Speaker 2 (01:17:14):
Yeah, and don't pretend that you can't even take responsibility,
because how could you even imagine ahead of time what
people are going to do, Like, just take the responsibility.
But the flip side of that is that the rest
of the world shouldn't expect perfect performance from you. Of
course you're going to sometimes get things wrong, but you've
taken responsibility, You've done absolutely the best you can, and
you got to be serious about that.

Speaker 3 (01:17:34):
Then to play Devil's advocate.

Speaker 1 (01:17:35):
There's the whole other side of this, right, which is
these Silicon Valley folks, they just have too much power
to decide what stays and what goes.

Speaker 3 (01:17:42):
So what say you to that?

Speaker 2 (01:17:44):
I mean, yeah, that is the other side, and I
find that side much less compelling, right, just because I
don't think that's responsible for nearly as much of the
problems with the world. I'm all in favor if governments
wanted to legislate stuff, then they would supersede what the
tech founders do. But you know, frankly, like, if I'm
running a private company and I'm staying within the laws,

(01:18:05):
then it's going to be up to me who I
allow and who I don't based on my ethical and
moral responsibilities to the world. And if somebody doesn't agree
with my moral and ethical responsibilities, then hopefully there's like
lots of other options. But yeah, I get that argument,
but I kind of call a bullshit on it. But
that's just step one. Like acknowledging the responsibility is just
step one. Step two, which I think Facebook also didn't

(01:18:26):
do that much of in the beginning, and they still
kind of lame about this. I think is Facebook didn't
spend billions of dollars putting out the things that they wanted,
like making They didn't have a strong point of view
about this is what we want to see on Facebook
and like here, let us spotlight it, let us create it,

(01:18:47):
let us sponsor it, like this is the stuff that's good.

Speaker 4 (01:18:49):
You know.

Speaker 2 (01:18:50):
Instagram actually wound up doing that pretty well in the beginning, right,
Instagram said like, we want to be the place really
beautiful photography, right, and they spotlighted it and they curated it,
and they spend money making it. And that's why, like
in the beginning, at least Instagram was like a lot
of really high quality, beautiful stuff, whereas like Flicker and
everything else just became like a cesspit of you.

Speaker 4 (01:19:09):
Know, ugly images.

Speaker 2 (01:19:10):
But you know, and they didn't they didn't keep up
with it very much, but they at least, you know, tried.
So so the second step is like, you know, again,
I'm hosting this party. I have an opinion about the
vibe that I want, and it's my responsibility as the
host to like to push it in that direction. I'm
not going to be like, Okay, everyone do whatever they want. No,
Like I wanted a particular theme to this party. I'm

(01:19:31):
gonna I'm going to like highlight the things. I'm going
to like buy some of the food. I'm gonna you know,
I'm going to like do whatever is necessary to get
the vibe in the right direction. And I think I
think that companies are to spend again a hundred times
more on that than on the negative, because what you
spotlight is what you get. If you set the tone

(01:19:52):
of this as a place that is not for neo Nazis,
you're going to get fewer neo Nazis just because like
they don't want to hang out at party. That's very
much not wealthreaming to them either. Yeah, so that's that's
also part of it. It's just like, yeah, it's your responsibility.
Make sure you don't have a business model that contradicts
that responsibility by oh yeah, yeah, I say I don't
want conflict, but I make money when there's conflict. Like

(01:20:14):
if there's ever a disconnect between the way you make
money and what your values are, and you're a for
profit company, like your values don't matter. Yeah, it's always
going to go towards how you make money. So make
sure there's no conflict, and then you know, make sure,
we actually promote the stuff that we want to see,
and the last thing is to get rid of the

(01:20:34):
stuff that we don't want to see, which hopefully we
won't have to spend billions of dollars a year on
because we've done all the other things correctly.

Speaker 4 (01:20:39):
But we have to, we have to.

Speaker 3 (01:20:40):
Well that's super interesting.

Speaker 1 (01:20:42):
I'm glad we got into it because I've been saying
mm hm and in an awkward way for a long time. So, like,
tell me, you are a naming person. I feel like
you do brand stuff very well. Where on Earth did
come from?

Speaker 2 (01:20:55):
Well, you know, it came out of Old Turtles as
the studio, And for years people would ask me, like,
you call it all turtles. It's such a strange name.
Why is it called old turtles? And it was like hold
my beer, Like I just wanted. I wanted a name
would make people stop asking me about why old Turtles
is such a strange name. So we came up with
and total success. No one's asked me about old turtles,
you know since then. Look, the real reason is it's

(01:21:17):
actually kind of exactly what you said. It's a word
that everyone can say unintentionally, everyone can say without thinking
about it, but if you try to say it intentionally,
it's actually this friction. Like even I have to like
pause for a second and consider like how I'm going
to pronounce it and which syllable am I going to inflect,
And so it's almost like every time I say the name,

(01:21:37):
it's like a little micro performance. I have to perform it.
And the app is for performing. It's for improving your
performance and so like to get you started, Like just
thinking of the names still a performance, and I think
it's kind of beautiful.

Speaker 4 (01:21:49):
So that's why we named it that.

Speaker 1 (01:22:01):
For more from dot dot dot, sign up for the
Gray Area at dot dot dotmedia dot com slash newsletter.
If you're listening to this, the very first edition is
out today, and follow along on our social media. I'm
at Lori Siegel on Twitter and Instagram and the show
is at First Contact Podcast on Instagram, on Twitter, We're
at First Contactpod And if you like what you heard,

(01:22:23):
leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen.

Speaker 3 (01:22:26):
We really appreciate it.

Speaker 1 (01:22:28):
First Contact is a production of Dot dot Dot Media
Executive produced by Lori Siegel and Derek Dodge. This episode
was produced and edited by Sabine Jansen and Jack Reagan.
The original theme music is by Xander Sangh. First Contact

(01:22:57):
with Lori Siegel is a production of Dot Dot Dot
Media and iHeartRadio

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