Ben Smith is the former and founding editor-in-chief of Buzzfeed News, the founder and editor-in-chief of Semafor, and the author of a new book called Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral, which is about the rise and fall of the social platform age in media, through the lens of Gawker Media and Buzzfeed and, in particular, their founders, Nick Denton and Jonah Peretti. I say the fall of the social platform age pretty literally: just before we spoke, Buzzf...
May 02, 2023•1 hr 11 min
We’ve got a special episode with Alex Heath, deputy editor at The Verge and a familiar host for Decoder listeners, and David Marcus, the CEO of Lightspark. That’s a company that just launched a service to make fast transactions using Bitcoin on something called the Lightning Network. David was previously at PayPal, and then he led Meta’s big payments effort that went nowhere, but he’s got a lot to say about where crypto and payments are right now. Links: Launching the Lightspark Platform Faceboo...
Apr 25, 2023•51 min
Travis Katz is the CEO of BrightDrop, a subsidiary of GM that makes electrified delivery vans with an eye toward rebooting all of how delivery works. BrightDrop has pretty big partnerships already, with names like FedEx, Verizon, and Walmart committed to its Zevo 600 van, and it’s got big ideas for making the steps from the van to your door more efficient as well with something called e-carts. Katz says there’s a huge demand for delivery especially as online shopping keeps getting bigger, but th...
Apr 18, 2023•1 hr 11 min
It is fair to say that Substack has had a dramatic week and a half or so, and I talked to their CEO Chris Best about it. The company announced a new feature called Substack Notes, which looks quite a bit like Twitter — Substack authors can post short bits of text to share links and kick off discussions, and people can reply to them, like the posts, the whole thing. Like I said, Twitter. Twitter, under the direction of Elon Musk, did not like the prospect of this competition, and for several days...
Apr 13, 2023•1 hr 8 min
Brex CEO Henrique Dubugras found himself playing an important role during the Silicon Valley Bank collapse. Brex is what you might call a neobank — not a traditional bank but rather a financial services provider that helps companies manage how they spend money, corporate cards, travel expenses and the rest. In the middle of the SVB collapse, Brex was more than just a spending management company. It was also a safe place to park money. Brex saw billions of deposits in a very short period of time,...
Apr 04, 2023•1 hr 5 min
Chris Cocks is the CEO of Hasbro, a company that just turned 100 this year. Hasbro is a huge company, making everything from Transformers to Lincoln Logs to My Little Pony and Monopoly. It also makes Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons, which are massive and growing businesses. Chris was the head of that division, called Wizards of the Coast, before he became the CEO of Hasbro overall last year. Since then, he’s started the process of restructuring the company, which is pure Decoder bait...
Mar 31, 2023•1 hr 11 min
Today I’m talking to Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko. Mastodon is the open-source, decentralized competitor to Twitter, and it’s where a lot of Twitter users have gone in this, our post-Elon era. The idea is that you don’t join a single platform that one company controls, you join a server, and that server can show you content from users across the entire network. If you decide you don’t like the people who run your server, or you think they’re moderating content too strictly, you can leave, and take ...
Mar 28, 2023•1 hr 19 min
Meredith Kopit Levien is the CEO of The New York Times, which is perhaps the most famous journalism organization in the world, and certainly one of America’s most complicated companies. The Times is 172 years old, and has only recently become a force on the internet. It’s hard to remember, but back in 2014 and ‘15, people thought the Times was doomed — that it would be replaced by BuzzFeed and Vice and Vox. Instead, the company has undergone a radical and sometimes painful public transformation,...
Mar 23, 2023•1 hr 2 min
This special episode dives deep on Taylor Swift, Ticketmaster, and how a handful of policy changes in the 1980s led to one firm so thoroughly dominating the live events business in the United States that Congress held a hearing in 2023, because Taylor Swift fans were so upset about antitrust law. That sentence is wild. We’re going to unpack all of this with the help of some experts. Here we go. Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23409098 Credits: Thanks so much to everyone who talked to us a...
Mar 21, 2023•33 min
In this installment of our Centennial Series on companies that are over 100 years old, we are talking to Barnes & Noble CEO James Daunt. The last few decades have thrown some hurdles in Barnes & Noble’s way, however. Far from being the monster that inspired the plot of the movie You’ve Got Mail, it’s had to face down a new Goliath called Amazon and the general decline of big-box retail stores. After years of closures and declining revenues, Barnes & Noble was bought out by activist investors in ...
Mar 16, 2023•1 hr 3 min
Gustav Söderström has worked at Spotify for a long time; his first big project was leading the launch of its mobile app back in 2009. That makes him the perfect company leader to talk to about Spotify’s recent redesign, which introduces a visual, TikTok-like feed for discovering new content on the app’s homepage. As his boss CEO Daniel Ek put it last week, it’s “the biggest change Spotify has undergone since we introduced mobile.” With the title of co-president and chief product and technology o...
Mar 14, 2023•1 hr 1 min
Intro: Steve Bandrowczak, the CEO of Xerox, an iconic company that got started all the way back in 1906 as a manufacturer of photo paper and is, of course, best known for pioneering the copy machine. Here in 2023, Xerox has moved well beyond paper. It now works with companies large and small to provide IT services: it optimizes workflows, manages data, automates parts of businesses, and yes, still fixes the printers. Steve insists there’s still a lot in the world to print, and selling and servic...
Mar 09, 2023•1 hr 4 min
Pali Bhat joined Reddit from Google about a year ago — he’s actually Reddit’s first-ever chief product officer, which is pretty surprising considering that Reddit is a series of product experiences: the reading experience, the writing experience, and importantly, the moderation experience. One thing we always say on Decoder is that the real product of any social network is content moderation, and Reddit is maybe the best example of that: every subreddit is shaped by volunteer moderators who use ...
Mar 07, 2023•1 hr 2 min
We taped this episode live at Hot Pod Summit. That’s our conference for the podcast industry. We have a whole newsletter for podcasters. It’s called Hot Pod, written by our very own Ariel Shapiro. Hot Pod Summit is where we bring that community of creators, trendsetters and decision-makers together to explore the latest developments in podcasting, audiobooks, and more. It was a packed house and a great time. We ended the day by recording our first-ever live Decoder with Conal Byrne, CEO of iHear...
Feb 28, 2023•1 hr 9 min
Hello and welcome to Decoder. I’m Nilay Patel, editor in chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas, and other problems. Today, I'm talking to Mitchell Baker, the chairwoman and CEO of Mozilla, the organization behind the Firefox browser, the Thunderbird email client, the Pocket newsreader, and a bunch of other interesting internet tools. Now as you all know, Decoder is secretly a podcast about org charts – maybe not so secretly, and Mozilla’s structure is really interesting. Moz...
Feb 14, 2023•1 hr 10 min
I’m coming to you from Microsoft’s campus in Redmond, where just a few hours ago, Microsoft announced that the next version of the Bing search engine would be powered by OpenAI, the company that makes ChatGPT. There’s also a new version of the Edge web browser with OpenAI chat tech in a window that can help you browse and understand web pages. The in-depth presentation showed how OpenAI running in Bing and Edge could radically increase your productivity. They demo’d it making a travel itinerary,...
Feb 08, 2023•24 min
HBO started as an experiment. It was a way to get people to switch from getting TV over broadcast antennas to cable by offering events you’d otherwise need tickets to see: boxing, plays, movies. That’s where the name Home Box Office comes from. But it grew from there in surprising ways: HBO was a major innovator in satellite distribution, in working with cable operators around the country, and of course in programming. The company’s taste and style has influenced and shaped culture for a generat...
Feb 07, 2023•1 hr 8 min
A few weeks ago, President Biden was in the Netherlands, where he asked the Dutch government to restrict export from a company called ASML to China. ASML is the only company in the world that makes a specific machine needed to make the most advanced chips. Apple couldn’t make iPhone chips without this one machine from the Netherlands’ biggest company. ASML doesn’t just shape the Dutch economy—it shapes the entire world economy. How did that happen? Chris Miller, Tufts professor and author of Chi...
Jan 31, 2023•53 min
I have this theory that music is usually about five years ahead of the rest of media in terms of its relationship to tech—whether that’s new formats based on new tech, like vinyl to CDs; new business models like streaming; or simply being disrupted by new kinds of artists who use new forms of promotion like TikTok in unexpected ways. I’ve always thought that if you can wrap your head around what’s happening to the music industry, you can pretty much see the future of TV or movies or the news or ...
Jan 17, 2023•1 hr 24 min
Last year I spoke with Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin about their new book, Chokepoint Capitalism. It’s a book about artists and technology and platforms, and how different kinds of distribution and creations tools create chokepoints for different companies to capture value that might otherwise go to artists and creators.. In other words, it’s a lot of Decoder stuff. As we were prepping this episode, the Decoder team realized it previews a lot of things we’re going to talk about in 2023: antit...
Jan 10, 2023•2 hr 30 min
Tomer Cohen is the chief product officer at LinkedIn, and actually, I talked to Tomer twice. Here’s a little secret about Decoder: we do the interviews, and then often, the guest and I just keep chatting for a while. So after my first interview with Tomer, we were hanging out, talking about the perpetual battles between engineers, product managers, and designers. And he said something that completely jumped out at me: “We might be wrong, but we’re not fucking confused.” This isn’t a totally new ...
Dec 20, 2022•1 hr 18 min
We have to talk about Twitter, right? Elon Musk bought it. He’s making all these changes, and he’s realizing that content moderation decisions are quite complicated, especially when the stakes are high. But talking about Twitter in a vacuum seems wrong. There are lots of other social networks and community-based products, and they all have basically the same problems: some technical (you have to run the service), some political (you have to comply with various laws and platform regulations aroun...
Dec 13, 2022•2 hr 43 min
Today, we need to talk about Bob. Two Bobs, actually: Bob Iger, the former and now current CEO of Disney, and Bob Chapek, the man Iger handpicked as his replacement, who flamed out and was fired by the board, and then, on November 20th, was replaced by Bob Iger. Bobs, man. The heart of this whole thing is total Decoder bait. It’s a story about how to structure a company like Disney. Then you add in the complexity of the shift to streaming, the future of TV and movies generally, and the gigantic ...
Dec 06, 2022•1 hr 2 min
Bose is one of the most recognizable audio brands in the world: it was famous for the Wave radio in the 80s, it invented noise cancellation, you can see its logo on NFL sidelines every Sunday, and of course there are the popular consumer products like the QuietComfort headphones that reviewers like Chris Welch here at The Verge rate as some of the best in the game. Bose is in tons of cars as well: audio systems in GM, Honda, Hyundai, Porsche, and more are developed and tuned by Bose. Bose was fo...
Nov 29, 2022•1 hr 19 min
Chris Licht faces an uphill battle at CNN. He got the CEO gig in the midst of a prickly merger between Warner Bros. and Discovery and right after the shocking exit of beloved long-time boss, Jeff Zucker. In his first six months, he’s shut down CNN+, ousted Brian Stelter, and shuffled anchors around, including Don Lemon and Jake Tapper. This week, the network chief held an internal town hall meeting where he faced a staff of thousands and discussed upcoming layoffs. Shortly afterwards, he sat dow...
Nov 22, 2022•1 hr 6 min
Phil Spencer, CEO of Microsoft Gaming, is in charge of Xbox and all the game studios that Microsoft has acquired over the years. Phil came to talk to us hours before the European Commission announced an in-depth investigation into Microsoft’s proposed 68.7 billion dollar acquisition of Activision Blizzard, which makes the enormous Call of Duty series, as well as Candy Crush on phones. So I had the chance to ask Phil: Will he make the concessions that regulators want in order to close this deal? ...
Nov 15, 2022•1 hr 5 min
Dylan Field is the co-founder and CEO of Figma, which makes a very popular design tool that allows designers and their collaborators to all work together right in a web browser. You know how multiple people can edit together in Google Docs? Figma is that for design work. We just redesigned The Verge; we used Figma extensively throughout that process. So for years, people have been waiting on the inevitable Figma vs. Adobe standoff since Figma was such a clear upstart competitor to Photoshop and ...
Nov 08, 2022•1 hr 9 min
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is currently short a commissioner, and the Biden Administration and Senate Democrats just can't seem to get that seat filled despite having nominated an amazingly qualified person. Her name is Gigi Sohn. The inability to get Gigi confirmed at the FCC has left the commission deadlocked with two Democrats and two Republicans. That means the commission in charge of regulating all telecom in the United States, including how you get your internet service, i...
Nov 03, 2022•41 min
I love covering the music industry, but over the past 10 years I’ve found that it’s one of the most challenging things to make accessible to a wide audience. See, my theory is that the music industry is like five years ahead of everything else when it comes to being disrupted by tech: whatever happens to the music industry because of technology eventually happens to everything else. Today I'm talking to Steve Boom, the VP of Amazon Music. Amazon just announced that they are upgrading the music s...
Nov 01, 2022•1 hr 9 min
Steve Cagle is the CEO of Clearwater Compliance, which is a cybersecurity firm focused on the healthcare industry. Basically, they lock down hospital computer systems, which contain a huge amount of personal data, and are so mission critical that ransomware attackers know that hospitals are more likely to just pay up. If the cryptocurrency explosion has accomplished anything, it’s making ransomware attacks easier and more lucrative for bad guys. Steve told me there’s so much personal information...
Oct 27, 2022•1 hr 6 min
