I spoke with GoDaddy CEO Aman Bhutani live on stage last week at an event hosted by Alix Partners in Palo Alto. GoDaddy is one of those companies that feels tied to an earlier era, but Aman’s been CEO since 2019, and he’s been building out what he calls adjacencies. The business of the web has really changed in the past few years: the walled-garden, social network era really took over in the past decade, and now huge changes to Google Search and the addition of generative AI have really put a ma...
Nov 25, 2024•57 min
For nearly 20 years now, the web has been Google’s platform; we’ve all just lived on it. Google is constantly changing that platform — it launched another attempt to combat ‘parasite SEO’ just this week — and not all of those changes have worked well. Earlier this year I talked to a lot of people who have built on that platform. For a lot of small businesses and content creators, that’s suddenly not stable anymore. The number one question I have for anyone building things on someone else’s platf...
Nov 21, 2024•34 min
Hey everyone, it’s Nilay — Decoder is on a short break this week. We’ll be back with a special live interview episode on Monday of next week, and then regular programming will resume in December. I’m very excited for what we have coming up on the schedule. But while we’re out, we’d like to highlight a great episode of a new podcast from our friends over at Vox called Explain It To Me. On this episode, host Jonquilyn Hill and her team tackle a decision that looms large for a lot of young people i...
Nov 18, 2024•45 min
Today we’re talking about Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and Tesla — and I have to say, it feels like the first of many episodes about these three characters that we’ll be doing over the course of the next four years. Because when Elon used his wealth and influence to help Trump get elected, he also bought himself a seat at the president-elect’s inner circle. But what does the world’s richest person really want in return? And how is the CEO of an electric car company, an outspoken advocate for combati...
Nov 14, 2024•36 min
Harvey Mason, Jr is CEO of the Recording Academy, the nonprofit organization most famous for the Grammy Awards. We spoke right before this year's Grammy nominations came out, and you'll hear us talk a whole lot about the changes he's tried to make with how the awarding membership works. I always say to watch what’s happening to the music industry because it’s a preview into what will happen to every other creative industry five years later. My chat with Harvey really drove the point home: AI, di...
Nov 11, 2024•1 hr 15 min
Today, we’re talking about work. Specifically, where we work, how our expectations of working remotely were radically changed by the pandemic, and how those expectations feel like they’re on the verge of changing yet again. For many people, the pendulum has swung wildly between working fully remote and now a push to return to the office from their bosses, and there are a lot of theories about what might really be motivating big companies to try and bring everyone back. To explain it, I caught up...
Nov 07, 2024•39 min
Today, I’m talking with Baris Cetinok, who is in charge of all the software in the cars that GM makes, which is a lot of cars. And if you’ve been following any of the drama in the world of car software, you know it also means Baris is the guy who has to defend GM’s decision to drop Apple CarPlay and Android Auto from most of its cars, especially EVs. I’ve had versions of this conversation with the CEOs of car companies before, but Baris is in charge of actually building this stuff. So we really ...
Nov 04, 2024•1 hr 15 min
Trump and a bunch of billionaires, like Elon Musk, are calling for the FCC to punish TV stations by revoking their licenses and using the spectrum for other stuff. In a normal world, this would be idle billionaire wishcasting. Punishing news organizations is one of those things we have a First Amendment to protect against. You know — the one that protects free speech by prohibiting the government from making speech regulations or punishing people for what they say? But, it turns out, there is a ...
Oct 31, 2024•43 min
Today, I’m talking with Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky, who is only the second person to be on Decoder three times — the other is Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Brian made a lot of waves earlier this year when he started talking about something called “founder mode,” or at least, when well-known investor Paul Graham wrote a blog post about Brian’s approach to running Airbnb that gave it that name. Founder mode has since become a little bit of a meme, and I was excited to have Brian back on to talk about it,...
Oct 28, 2024•1 hr 16 min
Today, we’re going to try and figure out "digital god." I figured we’ve been doing Decoder long enough, let’s just get after it. Can we build an artificial intelligence so powerful it changes the world and answers all our questions? The AI industry has decided the answer is yes. In September, OpenAI’s Sam Altman published a blog post claiming we’ll have superintelligent AI in “a few thousand days.” And earlier this month, Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic published a 14,000-word post laying out...
Oct 24, 2024•47 min
Today’s episode, well — it’s a ride. I’m talking to Intuit CEO Sasan Goodarzi, who’s built Intuit into a juggernaut business software company in part through a series of major acquisitions: TurboTax, MailChimp, CreditKarma, and loads more. There’s a lot of good Decoder material there, and we get into it. But it’s TurboTax, and the company’s tax lobbying efforts to protect it, that really drives a major narrative about Intuit, for better and worse. So you can bet I asked Sasan about all this, and...
Oct 21, 2024•57 min
Today’s episode is a little different: Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi and I recorded this conversation live on stage during advertising week in New York City at an event graciously hosted by Adweek. I've actually been dying to talk to Amy. Digitas is one of the most important agencies in the entire advertising business with huge clients and massive influence over big platforms like Instagram and YouTube. After all, they're the ones buying the ads that keep all of those companies afloat. As you'd expect, ...
Oct 17, 2024•1 hr 5 min
Luis von Ahn is the co-founder and CEO of Duolingo. There are lots of opportunities to enhance a product like Duolingo with AI, and we talk about all that — but I also wanted to talk to Luis about learning, generally. Duolingo is a global product, and there are a lot of tech tensions there, dealing with different user needs worldwide. We talk about it all in a pretty direct way... including all those unhinged things the owl does on social media. Links: Duolingo Introduces AI-Powered Innovations ...
Oct 14, 2024•1 hr 24 min
I’m talking with my good friend David Pierce, Vergecast co-host and The Verge’s editor-at-large, about something he spends an ungodly amount of time thinking and writing about: software. Scores of new workplace apps are cropping with clever metaphors to try to make us work differently. Sometimes that works… and sometimes it really, really doesn’t. And it feels like the addition of AI to the mix will accelerate the pace of experimentation here in pretty radical ways. Links: Why software is eating...
Oct 10, 2024•50 min
Rabbit’s adorable R1 gadget launched with a lot of hype, but early reviews of the device were universally bad. Now, a core feature, its long-promised LAM Playground has arrived. I had a lot of big questions for CEO Jesse Lyu about how it all works — not just technologically, but if his plans are sustainable from a business and legal perspective. Links: Rabbit R1 review: an unfinished, unhelpful AI gadget | The Verge Loopholes aren’t a technology | Buzzfeed News (2012) I tested Rabbit R1's next g...
Oct 07, 2024•1 hr 23 min
Today, I’m talking to Jason Schreier, a Bloomberg journalist and author of the new book Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment. If you don’t know Blizzard, you do know its games — the studio behind Warcraft, Diablo, and Overwatch has achieved legendary status over three decades. At the same time, the company has become emblematic of many of gaming’s biggest failings. Jason’s book is out on October 8th, and it’s an incredible, detailed accounting of how Blizzard started, ...
Oct 03, 2024•54 min
Matt Strauss is the Chairman of Direct-to-Consumer at NBC Universal. That’s a big fancy title that means he’s not only in charge of Peacock but also every other streaming video offering the company has worldwide. So you can bet Matt and I got into what that structure even looks like, and how it all operates under the overall ownership of Comcast, which is in the middle of its own massive transition as its traditional cable TV business continues to fade. There’s a lot in this one – tech, media, s...
Sep 30, 2024•1 hr 16 min
We have a very special episode of Decoder today. It’s become a tradition every fall to have Verge deputy editor Alex Heath interview Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on the show at Meta Connect. This year, before his interview with Mark, Alex got to try a new pair of experimental AR glasses the company is calling Orion. Alex talked to Mark about a whole lot more, including why the company is investing so heavily in AR, why he's shifted away from politics, Mark's thoughts on the link between teen mental ...
Sep 25, 2024•1 hr 11 min
Today, I’m talking with Josh Miller, co-founder and CEO of The Browser Company, a relatively new software maker that develops the Arc browser. The company also has a mobile app called Arc Search that does AI summaries of webpages, which puts it right in the middle of a contentious debate in the tech industry around paying web creators for their work. We’ve been talking about these topics pretty much nonstop for last year here on Decoder. So I was really excited to have Josh on the show to explor...
Sep 23, 2024•1 hr 12 min
Google’s in the middle of its antitrust case in just as many months, after it lost a landmark trial in August over anticompetitive search practices. This time around, the DOJ is claiming Google has another illegal monopoly in the online advertising market. Verge senior policy reporter Lauren Feiner has been on the ground at the courthouse to hear testimony from news publishers, advertising experts, and Google executives to make sense of it — and, ultimately, to see whether a federal judge hands ...
Sep 19, 2024•35 min
Today, I’m talking with Roy Jakobs. He’s the CEO of Royal Philips, which makes medical devices ranging from MRI machines to ventilators. Philips has a long history —- the company began in the late 19th century as a lightbulb manufacturer, and over the past century it’s grown and shrunk in various ways. Basically, while every other company has been trying to get bigger, Philips has been paring itself down to a tight focus on healthcare, and Roy and I talked about why that market is worth the focu...
Sep 16, 2024•1 hr 11 min
We’ve been covering the rise of AI image editing very closely here on Decoder and at The Verge for several years now — the ability to create photorealistic images with nothing more than a chatbot prompt could completely reset our cultural relationship to photography. But one argument keeps cropping up in response. You’ve heard it a million times, and it’s when people say “it’s just like Photoshop,” with “Photoshop” standing in for the concept of image editing generally. So today, we’re trying to...
Sep 12, 2024•46 min
Today, I’m talking with Mike Krieger, the new chief product officer at Anthropic, one of the hottest AI companies in the industry. Anthropic’s main product right now is Claude, the name of both its industry-leading AI model and a chatbot that competes with ChatGPT. Mike has a fascinating resume: he was the cofounder of Instagram, and then started AI-powered newsreader Artifact. I was a fan of Artifact, so I wanted to know more about the decision to shut it down as well as the decision to sell it...
Sep 09, 2024•1 hr 23 min
The web has a problem: huge chunks of it keep going offline. The web isn’t static, parts of it sometimes just… vanish. But it’s not all grim. The Internet Archive has a massive mission to identify and back up our online world into a vast digital library. In 2001, it launched the Wayback Machine, an interface that lets anyone call up snapshots of sites and look at how they used to be and what they used to say at a given moment in time. Mark Graham, director of the Wayback Machine, joins Decoder t...
Sep 05, 2024•44 min
Decoder is off this week for a short end-of-summer break. We’ll be back with both our interview and explainer episodes after the Labor Day holiday. In the meantime we thought we’d re-share an explainer that’s taken on a whole new relevance in the last couple weeks, about deepfakes and misinformation. In February, I talked with Verge policy editor Adi Robertson how the generative AI boom might start fueling a wave of election-related misinformation, especially deepfakes and manipulated media. It’...
Aug 29, 2024•45 min
Decoder is off this week for a short end-of-summer break. We’ll be back with both our interview and explainer episodes after the Labor Day holiday, and I’m very excited for what we have coming up on the schedule. But while we’re out, we’d like to highlight a great episode from the Land of the Giants podcast, which is over at Vulture this season, for a deep dive into Disney. Can it be a tech company? It’s the question that defines the struggles of its streaming service Disney Plus — and it also t...
Aug 26, 2024•42 min
The Onion is a comedy institution — and like everything else in media, it went on a pure nightmare hell ride in the 2010s. We could do an entire episode on the G/O Media calamity, but the short version is: A bunch of friends just managed to buy The Onion, and they're busy relaunching the website, going back to print, and, clearly, having a blast doing it. CEO Ben Collins and chief product officer Danielle Strle joined me to explain how that even works in 2024. Links: The Onion sold by G/O Media ...
Aug 22, 2024•1 hr 2 min
Today I’m talking with Thomas Dohmke, the CEO of GitHub. GitHub is the platform for managing code – but since 2018, it’s also been owned by Microsoft. We talk a lot about how independent GitHub really is inside of Microsoft — especially now that Microsoft is all-in on AI, and Gitbhub Copilot is one of the biggest AI product success stories that exists right now. But his perspective on AI is pretty refreshing: It’s clear there’s still a long way to go. Links: Original GitHub landing page | Waybac...
Aug 19, 2024•1 hr 21 min
There’s a major internet speech regulation currently making its way through Congress, and it has a really good chance of becoming law. It’s called KOSPA: the Kids Online Safety and Privacy Act, which passed in the Senate with overwhelming bipartisan support late last month. At a high level, KOSPA could radically change how tech platforms handle speech in an effort to try and make the internet safer for minors. It’s a controversial bill, with a lot going on. To break it all down, I invited on Ver...
Aug 15, 2024•42 min
Today, I’m talking with Replika founder and CEO Eugenia Kuyda, and I will just tell you right away, we get all the way to people marrying their AI companions, so get ready. It’s a ride. Replika’s basic pitch is pretty simple: what if you had an AI friend? The company offers avatars you can curate to your liking that pretend to be human, so they can be your friend, your therapist, or even your date. That’s a lot for a private company running an iPhone app, and Eugenia and I talked a lot about the...
Aug 12, 2024•1 hr 12 min
