Today I’m talking with Avishai Abrahami, the CEO of Wix. You might know Wix as a website builder. It’s a competitor to WordPress and Squarespace. Tons of sites across the web run on Wix. But the web is changing rapidly, and Wix’s business today is less about web publishing, and more about providing software to help business owners run their entire companies. It’s fascinating, and Avishai has built a fascinating structure inside of Wix to make all that happen. Wix is also an Israeli company. Avis...
Nov 28, 2023•1 hr 12 min
What actually happened at OpenAI in the last three days? Decoder host and Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel talks with Verge editors Alex Heath and David Pierce to break it down and try to work out what's next. Further reading: Sam Altman fired as CEO of OpenAI OpenAI’s new CEO is Twitch co-founder Emmett Shear OpenAI board in discussions with Sam Altman to return as CEO Emmett Shear named new CEO of OpenAI by board Microsoft hires former OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Hundreds of OpenAI employees threat...
Nov 20, 2023•1 hr 9 min
Today, I’m talking to Jim Rowan, the CEO of Volvo Cars. Now, Jim’s only been at Volvo for a short time. He took over in 2022 after a decades-long career in the consumer electronics industry. Before Volvo, his two longest stints were at BlackBerry, whose QNX software is used in tons of cars, and then at Dyson, which once tried and failed to make an electric car. Jim and I talked a lot about how that unique experience has influenced how he thinks about the transformational changes happening in the...
Nov 14, 2023•1 hr 7 min
We’ve got a good one today. I’m talking to former President Barack Obama about AI, social networks, and how to think about democracy as both of those things collide. I sat down with Obama last week at his offices in Washington, DC, just hours after President Joe Biden signed a sweeping executive order about AI. You’ll hear Obama say he’s been talking to the Biden administration and leaders across the tech industry about AI and how best to regulate it. My idea here was to talk to Obama the consti...
Nov 07, 2023•48 min
Today I'm talking with Golnar Khosrowshahi, the founder and CEO of Reservoir Media, a newer record label that I think looks a lot like the future of the music industry. As Golnar explains, Reservoir thinks of individual songs as assets, and after acquiring them, the company sets about monetizing those assets in various ways. This is a copyright-based business in an age where copyright is under a lot of pressure — from TikTok, generative AI, and all of the now-familiar threats to the music busine...
Oct 31, 2023•57 min
Today, I’m talking to internet policy legend Lawrence Lessig. He's been teaching law for more than 30 years, and is a defining expert on free speech and the internet — and something of a hero of mine, whose works I've been reading since college. You’ll hear us agree that the internet at this moment in time is absolutely flooded with disinformation, misinformation, and other really toxic stuff that’s harmful to us as individuals and, frankly, to our future as a functioning democracy. But you’ll a...
Oct 24, 2023•55 min
Today, I’m talking to Kashmir Hill, a New York Times reporter whose new book, Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup’s Quest to End Privacy as We Know It, chronicles the story of Clearview AI, a company that’s built some of the most sophisticated facial recognition and search technology that’s ever existed. As Kashmir reports, you simply plug a photo of someone into Clearview’s app, and it will find every photo of that person that’s ever been posted on the internet. It’s breathtaking and s...
Oct 17, 2023•1 hr 2 min
Today we’re bringing you the last of our live-on-stage interviews from the 2023 Code Conference. Verge deputy editor Alex Heath sat down to chat with Roblox CEO David Baszucki. Roblox definitely started out as a kid thing, but the company has big plans to change all that, and Alex got to find out a bit about how that’s going. Roblox is determined to be a platform, even more than a product — something users can develop games and experiences on. And of course, David and Alex spoke about AI. David ...
Oct 12, 2023•32 min
We’ve got another interview from the Code Conference today. My friend and co-host, CNBC’s Julia Boorstin, and I had a chance to talk with Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe. Rivian is a newer company — RJ started it in 2009, and it took more than 10 years to start shipping cars to consumers. But its first vehicle, the R1T pickup, made a big splash when it arrived in 2021, and the company has more back orders for both the R1T and its second vehicle, the R1S SUV, than it can handle. For now. We asked RJ about...
Oct 10, 2023•40 min
Last week, when I was co-hosting the Code Conference, I got to talk with Getty Images CEO Craig Peters. The generative AI boom is a direct threat to Getty in many ways. For example, the company is suing Stability AI for training the Stable Diffusion model on Getty content — sometimes clearly including AI-generated copies of the Getty watermark — without permission. Getty's answer? Its own proprietary, in-house AI tool, trained — with permission — on its own content, using a model where the origi...
Oct 05, 2023•34 min
I co-hosted the Code Conference last week, and today’s episode is one of my favorite conversations from the show: Microsoft CTO and EVP of AI Kevin Scott. If you caught Kevin on Decoder a few months ago, you know that he and I love talking about technology together. I really appreciate that he thinks about the relationship between technology and culture as much as we do at The Verge, and it was great to add the energy from the live Code audience to that dynamic. Kevin and I talked about how thin...
Oct 03, 2023•44 min
We spent a lot of time here on Decoder talking about electric vehicles and the future of cars and we’re usually talking about passenger vehicles or maybe cargo vans. But there’s another huge industry that can also reap the benefits of electrified transportation: agriculture. I co-hosted the Code Conference this week where I had the opportunity to hangout onstage with Monarch Tractor CEO Praveen Penmetsa. Honestly, this was one of my favorite conversations of the entire event. We are utterly reli...
Sep 30, 2023•28 min
Today, we’re bringing you something a little different. The Code Conference was this week, and we had a great time talking live onstage with all of our guests. We’ll be sharing a lot of these conversations here in the coming days, and the first one we’re sharing is my chat with Dr. Lisa Su, the CEO of AMD. Lisa and I spoke for half an hour, and we covered an incredible number of topics, especially about AI and the chip supply chain. The balance of supply and demand is overall in a pretty good pl...
Sep 29, 2023•36 min
Today, we have a special episode for you. The Code Conference wrapped up this week, and the finale included a rare interview from my Code co-host and CNBC correspondent Julia Boorstin with X CEO Linda Yaccarino. To say the sit-down with Elon Musk’s No. 2 was confrontational would be an understatement. Yaccarino appeared both unprepared to answer tough questions and very combative, especially when asked about comments from former trust and safety head Yoel Roth, who’s become an outspoken critic o...
Sep 29, 2023•42 min
What motivates Mark Zuckerberg these days? It's a question Decoder guest host Alex Heath posed at the end of his interview last week, after he and Zuckerberg had spent an hour talking about Threads, Zuckerberg's vision for how generative AI will reshape Meta's apps, the Quest 3, and other news from the company's Connect conference, which kicked off today. After spending the past five years as a wartime CEO, Zuckerberg is getting back to basics, and he clearly feels good about it. "I think we've ...
Sep 27, 2023•1 hr 11 min
TechCrunch is one of the most important trade publications in the world of tech and startups, and its annual Disrupt conference is where dozens of major companies have launched… and some have failed. Matt has been the editor-in-chief of TechCrunch for essentially a decade now, and he and I have been both friends and competitors the entire time. We’ve competed for scoops, traded criticisms, and asked each other for advice in running our publications and managing our teams. So when Matt announced ...
Sep 19, 2023•52 min
The Six: The Untold Story of America's First Women Astronauts, from longtime space reporter and Verge alum Loren Grush, is out today. It’s been 40 years since Sally Ride became the first American woman in space — but she was far from the last. In the early 1980s six women — Sally Ride, Judy Resnick, Kathy Sullivan, Anna Fisher, Rhea Seddon, and Shannon Lucid — would get a chance to fly a mission on one of the space shuttles… including, unfortunately, the ill-fated 1986 Challenger launch. The sto...
Sep 12, 2023•58 min
Okta is a big company, a Wall Street SaaS darling. For most of us, it's the thing we have to log into 50 times a week just to get any work done. But from Okta's point of view, Jameeka Green Aaron told us, it's an identity company. I spoke with Jameeka about what "identity" really means — in the digital space, in your real life, and at work — in 2023, and how an identity-based approach might be more or less secure than other approaches. I’m also gearing up to host Code in September (apply to atte...
Aug 29, 2023•1 hr 13 min
Perkins Miller is the CEO of Fandom, which both hosts thousands of wikis for everything from Disney to Grand Theft Auto and also runs several publications. Millions of people contribute millions of pieces of content to the platform, and Fandom surrounds all that content with ads and uses all that data to generate insights about how fans think about their favorite games, TV shows, and movies. While you might enjoy the content, a lot of people have complaints — especially about the sheer number of...
Aug 22, 2023•1 hr 10 min
We have a little surprise in the feed today: An episode of "Land of the Giants," which is all about Tesla this season. Former Verge transportation reporter Tamara Warren and former Jalopnik EIC Patrick George, who are both deeply sourced in the world of cars, host, and every episode has reporting and insight about Tesla that really hasn’t been shared before. It was ahead of the EV competition in basically every way for a long time. But the question Tamara and Patrick want to answer is: Is Tesla ...
Aug 15, 2023•38 min
AWS is quite a story. It started as an experiment almost 20 years ago with Amazon trying to sell its excess server capacity. And people really doubted it. Why was the online bookstore trying to sell cloud services? But now, AWS is the largest cloud services provider in the world, and it’s the most profitable segment of Amazon, generating more than $22 billion in sales last quarter alone. By some estimates, AWS powers roughly one-third of the entire global internet. And on the rare occasion an AW...
Aug 08, 2023•1 hr 9 min
ActivityPub is back in the news, thanks to Meta’s Threads launch and Elon’s continued immolation of Twitter — now X. That makes this the perfect time to dig into the Decoder archives to hear what Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko thinks about the future of social media. Mastodon got a head start as the most well-known of the rising decentralized social networks, but that’s changing fast. Bluesky, on a competing protocol, is picking up steam and Threads promises to decentralize in the future, using the s...
Jul 25, 2023•1 hr 21 min
Today I’m talking to Anthony Casalena, the founder and CEO of Squarespace, the ubiquitous web hosting and design company. If you’re a podcast listener, you’ve heard a Squarespace ad. I was excited to talk to Anthony because it really feels like we’re going through a reset moment on the internet, and I wanted to hear how he’s thinking about the web and what websites are even for in 2023. If you’re a Vergecast listener, you know I’ve been saying it feels a lot like 2011 out there. The big platform...
Jul 18, 2023•1 hr 4 min
Today, I’m talking to Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google DeepMind, the newly created division of Google responsible for AI efforts across the company. Google DeepMind is the result of an internal merger: Google acquired Demis’ DeepMind startup in 2014 and ran it as a separate company inside its parent company, Alphabet, while Google itself had an AI team called Google Brain. Google has been showing off AI demos for years now, but with the explosion of ChatGPT and a renewed threat from Microsoft i...
Jul 10, 2023•1 hr 2 min
Roblox has 66 million daily users, and people spent 14 billion collective hours on Roblox in just Q1 of 2023. But its CEO David Baszucki still wants to see the company grow. One idea? Aging up the kinds of experiences that are allowed on its platform. Roblox recently introduced 17+ experiences. It wants to add new AI world-building capabilities. It’s even partnering with advertisers to roll out more immersive ad experiences. It’s been years since the number of adults gaming outnumbered kids – it...
Jun 27, 2023•54 min
If you’ve spent more than two minutes somewhere on social media, you have probably come across Gary Vaynerchuk. For years I have wondered, is this just a character? Or is there a real Gary Vaynerchuk somewhere behind “GaryVee,” the social media entrepreneur and internet brand? Gary got his start working at his family’s liquor store, which he turned into an online wine shop. That’s where he started in social media, hosting a long-running YouTube show called “Wine Library TV.” He parlayed that int...
Jun 21, 2023•50 min
The idea behind private equity or PE is simple: a private equity firm gathers up a bunch of cash, raises some investor cash and takes on a lot of debt to buy various companies, often taking them off the public stock market. Then, they usually install new management and embark on aggressive cost cutting and turnaround programs – mostly because they have to pay down all that debt pretty fast. Then, the company can be sold or taken public again for a hefty profit. But don’t worry—if it doesn’t work...
Jun 13, 2023•1 hr 1 min
Jennifer Witz is the CEO of SiriusXM. You probably know the company as the satellite radio brand in virtually every new car, but it also owns Pandora, a huge podcast network that includes Team Coco and 99% Invisible, a content operation with huge stars like Howard Stern, and has broadcast deals with every major sports league. SiriusXM is effectively the dominant market leader for built-in premium audio in cars, in a time when competition is increasing. As the infotainment system in cars gets eve...
Jun 06, 2023•1 hr 6 min
Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott oversees the company's AI efforts, including its big partnership with OpenAI and ChatGPT. Kevin and I spoke ahead of his keynote talk at Microsoft Build, the company’s annual developer conference, where he showed off the company’s new AI assistant tools, which Microsoft calls Copilots. Microsoft is big into Copilots. GitHub Copilot is already helping millions of developers write code, and now, the company is adding Copilots to everything from Office to the Windows Termi...
May 23, 2023•1 hr 7 min
Today – we’ve got a treat for you. We’re going to run a special episode from our friends over at Vox. Peter Kafka and his team just wrapped up a special 3-part series on AI. AI has captured the imagination of Silicon Valley. In fact, in the last few months, I’ve talked to both Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella about AI after they announced new AI-powered search products. And in the middle of the frenzy, it's hard to tell what's really going on. What exactly is AI, how does...
May 16, 2023•50 min
