Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics

Before that, you had companies like Yahoo Geo Cities. My first blog was on Geo Cities and I say this it's It's really not a joke. It's true. I say it as a joke, but it's true. I would take fift twenty minutes to write something and then two hours to code in an HTM out in order for it to work. On Geo Cities. It was you were literally coding everything. Every every indent, every bold, every underlying, every

paragraph had an htmail code arout it. So to reduce that process of of micro publishing to something that was like it very much was like working on a document on Microsoft Word. If you wanted to format it, you just clicked the button that said, here's your underline, here's your talles, here's your footnote, here's your and it was. It was absolutely game changing. It went from a tent to one ratio of of coding to writing to hundreds

to one in the opposite direction. You would take a half hour to write something and maybe thirty seconds to format it. It was easy as pie. My first blog was big Picture dot type head dot com. It's still up there, by the way. Not only did they create the software for this, but they also created the hosting for it. And I find six apart was a game changer for the world of publishing. I found this to be an absolutely fascinating conversation. If you're into blogging, technology, entrepreneurship,

venture capital, et cetera, you're gonna find this conversation fascinating. So, with no further ado, my conversation with a Neil Dash, My special guest today is a Neil Dash. He was an advisor to the Obama White House's Office of Digital Strategy. He is a technical advisor to Vox Media advises the company medium on its publishing. He is also on the

National Advisory Council of Donors Choose. His day job is CEO of fog Create Software, which has created such products as stack overflow and trell Oh were they involved in Marker Bass or is that something separate? Was a startup was doing right before this? Before that, he writes a monthly opinion column on the impact of technology on society for Wired magazine. I know him as employee number one at six Apart, behind the seminal blogging software type Pad.

He also serves on the board of the Data and Society Research Institute. Neil Dash Welcome to Bloomberg. Thanks so much for having me here. So I mentioned type head, I really have to jump right into that. I know who you are because I actually was a beta tester for type pad, and that's where I rolled out. Thank you for being one. That's where I rolled out the big picture blogged tell us about your role with the

company six Sure. So I started blogging back and there were a couple dozen bloggers on the internet, and I thought, what were you using? Two blog? I was manually doing it. I was the people who use Windows who remember an app called notepad, and I was manually writing HTML, the language of webpages, in Notepad and saving it onto a web server by myself, which is the cutting edge or technology back into the last So I was using Yahoo

geo Cities, which you're telling me is more advanced. I was just cutting and pasting content and then having to wrap the HTML code around, right. So that was the state of the art. And then in late ninety nine a couple of the first blogging tools came along and then and so I started using those like Blogger and which Google later bought and other things like that, and uh and Friends shortly thereafter built this tool called movable type and it was the first sort of serious blogging platform.

Almost immediately people used it to build Gawker, huffing and post. What was behind movable type, Uh, they were then husband and wife couple Ben trot A, Mina trot Um and um, and really we're sort of visionaries about the idea that we should take this medium seriously. It was going to be something big. It wasn't just h you know, people sharing their feelings in a journal online like this was going to be where media was head. And this is this is pre Facebook, pre Twitter. Oh yeah, this is

way earlier. Yeah before friends stir you even remember that one, so way way back there, and consumer internet was dead deader than dead in two thousand one. I mean you couldn't you know. We we did it a round that was six grand that we raised, and people were like, wow, that's all the money in the world. You know, I was here. I mean, it's it's it's like the catering budget for a launch party for one of these startups today.

And uh. And so we did that and what was interesting was people almost immediately recognized this is important, this is something new in media. There's something really powerful enabling here. And we thought it's still not easy enough. It was still you had to have a lot of technical knowledge. And that was where Type came from. You know, I think the predecessor to today. You see the word presses and mediums and tumblers of the world, and all of them I think would say, you know, Type had as

a direct antecedent to that. And it was the first, as far as I can recall, is the first whizzy wig sort of blogging software. What you see is what you get. It was like operating within a word perfect or a word doc. Since it was since it was seventeen years ago, I could say word perfect exactly like anyone knows what that for The old timers. But I think, you know, the other thing really interesting was we were experimenting with today you know, a lot of things that

we take for granted and consumer web. So just the fact that we had a consumer pay model those five bucks a month, ten bucks a month. I mean, now you know, everybody's paying for Spotify and Netflix and it's nothing, right, Nobody was really thinking in terms of recurring revenue stream in a monthly Yeah, hits a credit card. Yeah. The idea that that we were even gonna ask people to do that was radical. I mean, this stuff sounds like ridiculous because we all do it now, but you know,

it was this sixteen years ago. Fifteen years ago, people

were really really taken aback by that. The other thing that I think in retrospect was a bigger deal, huge deal, and we sort of just took it for granted, was we were probably the first consumer product to use Amazon Web services on the back end, so were we had some features that would let you list books you were reading and music you were listening to, and they would talk to Amazon and link up you know, buy my book or or or you know by this back then CD.

And the interesting thing about that is some of us still buy CDs just as every one's in a great while, I will say so for collecting purposes, that's right. And and so it was an interesting thing was that, um, we had this this app talking to web services from Amazon. Um, you know, years and years before I think that became commonplace. And then the third thing that that type Pad did, I think nobody really remembers. Um So the you know,

the iPhone launch, you didn't have an app store. You know, Steve Jobs is like, you gotta use against it originally and then and then a year later, so they said, okay, we're gonna introduce the app store. At that initial rollout on stage with Jobs, we had our head of product for type Pad showing type Pad taking photos on your phone, uploading them to the web from your iPhone, you know, in real time. This was, you know, the sort of

the years long before Instagram took off. The very first initial launch of the app store, type Pad was one of the first apps they ever future and type head is still around, still support, still doing this. They they changed ownership a bunch of times. I don't I literally have even followed because I've been so busy with other stuff. For the the last several years. But they I mean, I know the old big picture, which I did not take down when I moved toward press in in oh eight.

I picked September oh eight is perfect time in the middle of the financial crisis. It was like six months in advance, and then the world blew up. I kept both that and I had a fun Essays and a Fluvia for just random of fluvia. Um and they're still up and running. I still at one point in time it was fifty percent of the traffic to wear Press and then it gradually, you know, as as people move their bookmarks and RSS feeders which no longer. Yeah, there's

a lot. I mean, there's a lot of technology that's sort of come, come and gone, and I think some of these things will come back around again. But it's been an interesting thing to watch. Um, a lot of these ideas we thought were really radical around Oh, you might take a picture on your camera on your phone and then share with people instantly, and you might store that on Amazon web services, and you might use a service that's got a consumer subscription model as the way

of accessing it. All those things, Um, you know, we weren't necessarily what we were first on some of them, but we weren't, you know, the only ones doing them. I think to have been certainly popularized that I think to bet that that was the way the Internet was headed, where some of the things that we're just as important as the idea that blogs were going to be media

that matter. Here's the quote of yours that I like, any form of electronic communication will first be dismissed as trivial and worseless until it produces a profound result, after which it will be described as obvious and boring. Yeah, that's been my experience for sure. You've been blogging since? Was this the plan all along? To keep keep? You know?

It was really one of those I was underemployed, not real happy with my place in life, and thought, I'm gonna have a creative outlet to put stuff out there. And I can't sing, and I can't, you know, I can't, I can't do a radio show, so let me do this, and uh, it was an interesting thing to to sort of just have this outlet. And then realized this media mattered enough and that I had been early, you know, I thought it was late, starting at nine. That's funny

because when I started on type head. It was oh three the song I even remember July, and it was essentially a handful of college uh economics p fessors, nobody really writing about markets, nobody really writing about investing, and you end up my experience was similar to yours, and that I'm not thrilled with what I'm doing. I'm kinda, you know, looking for a creative outlet. But it was clear that the mainstream media they take some young kid out of school and throw them. Uh. Nobody wants to

cover the FED. Nobody wants to do economics back then, and they were frequently, if not wrong, then lacking context. They were they weren't deep enough in it right. And I think that was the thing. Is that then the people writing the blogs, with the people who are like, I'm obsessing over this whether there's an audience or not, that's that nobody cares, you know. My view was, who cares if there's an audience? There was a whole run of expert amateurs. Is that is that a real thing?

I don't know, but I know exactly what you mean. And I think that summer too was a particularly interesting time, summer a GOO three, because we had folks coming up that we're doing covering aspects of economics that people weren't covering. Um, we brought some of the verse first. Well, really, I think all the first vcs that started blog and came

out on type paths. We had Fred Wilson on, we had yeah, David Hornick from August Capital, a bunch of these folks, Joe Eto, who's now heading up the media, and you know, all these folks were Reid Hoffman, um, you know, like has a podcast exactly, the CEO of of Lincoln and uh and so all these people were you know, I knew them as investors, and I was not at all fluent in m VC. You know, I knew tech, but at that time you could actually build

an entire career writing software and never crossed paths with VC. Really, yeah, you know it was it was pretty common. And because it was a lot of big companies on the pop shops that were building software and apps and they would sort of grow organically out of that. And um, and if you weren't in the valley in particular, you know, you could easily. I was in New York. You could

just never cross paths. And so to read these blogs was like opening up this whole new world, and they were now I understand, like you know, to some degree, was content marketing. They were marketing their their firms by being better storytellers. I think that's what it's involved, right, I think that's what it's evolved to, the same thing with the freemium model. Here was a whole bunch of free content owned by the way. If you want to work with us, you can. But that's not I don't

think that was anyone's intent. It truly wasn't my intention. Here's what I do. I'm gonna blog in obscurity for twelve years and then have a radio show. Well, it's so interesting because I had that where. You know, one of the people I connected with back then, UM was Joel Spolsky who was writing a blog called Joel on Software, and he was really the first person to write about sort of coding culture, technical culture, and it was one of the things that those of us were coding for

a living, which is what I did back then. I knew these things, but had never seen them addressed as like you are you are you know people at the place in society, and he was taking programmers very seriously. Um. Part of the reason he was blogging. Then he was explaining the ideas behind the new company he had just created, which was Fall Creek Software. And so seventeen years later, you know, for well sixteen years from that point that

I took over as CEO of that company. Uh, it felt like I knew everything about how this company ran and what its values were, and what his purpose was in the world, because I had from day one followed along with the storytelling. And you think he was not content marketing, He was not. He didn't start writing this stuff. He was literally like trying to solve a problem like

how do you deal with real estate in Manhattan? How do you how do you keep programmers happy in a world where you know, back then, hard as it is to believe, programmers were treated sort of like dirt. They were like this guy in the back, We're going to get him a computer and lock him in the dark

and exactly right, and throw caffeine at him. And uh and now you know, you think, well, I mean, there's probably no more spoiled workers in the world in terms of like the free massages and the trades of candy. And you mentioned that Google lifted the idea of all the free food. Yeah, this and this is one of those things where like things become urban legend, and so

it's hard to separate fact from fiction. But what I've heard so one thing that is, you know, definitely true is fault Creek was one of the first companies to do the like let's really spoil our coders and our technical workers. And it was everything from great free lunches to UM. One of the things I still spend a lot of time working on completely end to end healthcare. Nobody on our team pays anything for healthcare UM. In fact, we have people who have been at the company a

long time or they came right out of school. They didn't know what in network out of network means because they never had to deal with it the network. And I was like, that's great, Like that's what we want people to feel. And then one of those things was really great free catered lunches. In retrospect, I think some of this was the company was always like downtown Manhattan, and especially back then, you know, just post nine eleven, there wasn't There wasn't like good restaurants there, you know.

You know it also, especially if you're working late, like five pm, it would just shut down that neighborhood would just be dead a so how do you get food down to So they had caterers, right, and they had caterers come in many employees. So now the company were about forty it's it's still pretty small. It's it's kind of going up and down in size because um over the years, like they co created stack Overflow and they created Trello, and as those products grow, they get pretty

big and then they would spin them out. You know, Trello spun out a couple of years ago and sold to it last back in January for let let me reel you back into the blog is sphere and talk about one of my favorite subjects, which is um uh public a blog post of yours called Don't Read the Comments Now. I wrote Bailout Nation on the blog. I would put up a few hundred words and I would get feedback and have you seen this story and look at this link and the readers the community was astonishing.

And then tragedy of the comments that just gets overrun with the spammers and trolls, and it became so time consuming to stay on top of comments that finally I had to just grip my teeth and rip the band aid off in close conscience, and I was not happy about doing it, but it just became this giant time suck. What is the problem? And by the way, that's true on my columns at the Washington Post and Bloomberg as well. It's like, if you want to say something, go someplace.

Here's a link to Twitter, Here's a link to Facebook, where hopefully you aren't doing this anonymously, and you could be called out because eventually I could subpoena Twitter and find out who you are if you say something. Although Twitter has been done a good job of protecting people's nanimity, they've done at protecting on a non amenmity yet but but not abuse at all. Right, they're just in fact. In fact, my argument as to why Twitter stock prices has been in the crap all this time is they

have not created an encouraging communally totally agree. So there's a couple things I would sort of break out here. You know. The first is, um, I get to watch people creating the first comment systems on the internet. You know, there was a time when you couldn't actually comment on a web page and so um. The interestingly, the challenge then was what are people can type in this box at all. Are they can even understand that you can leave a comment and will show up on the page,

and that's the thing you can do. So they were hyper optimized for at any cost. We just want to put we don't want to put any barriers to somebody typing in this box and leave and comment. Um. Of course that pretty quickly became well, we made it really really easy, and now there's no barriers and there's no standard and what you know, I wish we had understood the time. And I will say this, this is something

I personally didn't get for a long time. Was you make a real community by introducing a set of rules that everybody understands. This is true in the physical world. We get it very intuitively. If you go to a park and it's got the you know, you can't be throwing your ball around here because you're gonna hit these little kids that are over here, or there's a dog running. You gotta keep your dog inside the fence. Whatever the rules are. It makes the place work for everybody, and

it doesn't have to be honors. It doesn't have to be a burden. We needn't do any of that in creating these online systems, and in fact, a lot of the people, and this is something it wasn't as much me, but people that I saw that were creating other tools that made the systems for commenting and feedback online were total zealots about the fact there shouldn't be any rules.

It should be wild West all the time. And you know wild West is basically well, if you have wild West and there's no cops, guess who runs the shell the outlaws. And in fact, when when I was I went through a two step process. The first step was saying, all right, we're gonna do moderated comments and and in order to I'm gonna set up some rules which I'm not going to share, so you're not gonna know, you won't be able to gain the system just for just

just to get past step one. And then step two is no ad hominem attacks, no no false no fake news like it. It's amazing that one simple sentence of nonsense can undercut this conversation deep deeply researched, intelligently debated um and I want back and forth. I wanted debate, but what I didn't want was just people derailing things with nonsense. So we've had Trump talk about fake news. Fake news, some of which is confirmation bias and tribalism,

and some of which is just people purposefully trying to Yeah. Yeah, And there's there's a couple of guides online which I've posted on the blog as a see. It's it's the guide to disrupting Social Forums. They're they're actually out there and they're out of the CIA Black Book to how to go disrupt society. Right, it's misinformation as a tactic. And so there's there's an interesting thing here where we

we've had this escalation. So first we had, um, you know what, the Internet always had ordinary trolls, right, just people saying like I don't because I can hide behind my anonymity or relative nanimity, I can be transgressive in this way where I'm just being the person who's like, you know, ruining things for people, but but in a way that I think they think it's entertaining. Um, And that's sort of like it's annoying, but it's not a big deal, and if you can ban them, that's fine.

The evolution of that into organized communities that are trying to undermine other communities or undermine individual people who are trying to communicate by misinformation, by personal attacks, by threats, by all that sort of these tactics. I think people don't understand that these have gotten very organized and very instructure. As you said, there are guides to how to do it, and so they say, well, why don't you just ignore it if you don't you know, get y yeah, yeah, total.

I mean, whether whether it's you know, the game or Gate or or or the men's rights activists, like, there are a lot of communities that we're doing this online. And and the interesting thing about this is one they learned from each other. They've been evolving this over ten or fifteen years. Uh, they are very organized, but they organized in places that people aren't watching. So they're happening

on you know, some screw chan. I mean, there's the ones that people know, but there's also just private channels. You know, they can text each other like anybody else. Like they're they're not you know, they're very technically literate. And so what happens is people who are not sophisticating these things think, well, okay, look, if this person is being a jerk to online, why don't you just not

go on Twitter? Or why don't you just not you know, don't worry about a delete or comment and kind of thing. And it's like, well, the difference is when you have people organizing trying to undermine a specific community, Um, just ignoring it doesn't make it go away. And the the the social costs of for example, saying just get off of social media or don't go on Twitter, don't go whenever, it's like, well, that's you know, if I work in media, I work in publisher and work in tech. It's a

business tool. I need that. I need to have a presence there. Translate the digital version of that into meat space. It's sort of like saying don't go to the town square, don't don't go to the school, don't go to the theater, and it's it's a ridiculous exactly right. Then you take like, you know, YouTube comments. I think they're getting a little better,

but notoriously terrible. And if you said I'm gonna go to Google's lobby in Mountain View and I'm going to start shouting epithets at people, They're not gonna be like, have a seat, have some of our free lash. They're gonna be like, no, you gotta stop doing that. We're gonna kick you out my My explanation of it was, if you have a cocktail party, a you get to invite who comes and be someone starts flipping over tables,

you get to throw them out. It's not like well, the thing that makes me incensed about this is that they scream First Amendment. And my response is always, nothing is stopping you from going and starting your own blog and laboriously building it other than the fact that you're lazy untalented. Other than yeah, I mean the other thing to feel free. They don't want to do that. They're not trying to create some coy're trying to destroy something exactly.

And I think that that there's a really there's a tough lunge where um, you know, you can express yourself however you want. You're not entitled to destroy my platform and my community and my back and forth. Yea, and and and and It's an interesting thing because there's also we, I think especially technical people, have this desire to say, I want one set of rules that applies to everybody, and I want this one set of you know, this behavior is always bad if you do this, if if

then exactly exactly exactly. Binary logic like the stuff that that doesn't always work, and and it ignores the realities of societies, which which is that people have different positions, roles, power, all these things shape of dynamics. And the example I else give is the sort of like the classic, you know, one of the worst things that people do to threaten people who are on the margins, who are vulnerable or ideas that are unpopular. You know, they're gonna, we're gonna

expose you. We're gonna, we're gonna you know what they called docking, and we're going to publish your home address. I mean, have had this happen to me? You know, the gamer gets published my home address. Don't you have your phone number on your do? I thought that was insane, you know. So there's an interesting thing where part of it is about reclaim aiming like I'm going to control this stuff and what's out there. Um, some of it is I do I want to show people of good intent.

I am accessible, I'm not trying to hide sometimes, I'm not trying to be you know, wall myself off from because I do think most people are good and do want to engage with ideas and want to be thoughtful. And so that's something that's just signaling like I'm open to that. Then there's this other part, which is so there's a behavior where like if somebody is like legitimately vulnerable and they are keeping themselves anonymous or pseudonymous in order to to keep themselves safe, and you out them,

that's a real danger. On the other hand, if you say, the person who did this transgressive thing, this dangerous thing, who posted this threat, I'm gonna identify them, that is actually protecting people. Right. So the exact same activity I'm gonna identify this person who's trying to hide can be both very good or very bad. It can be very much a positive that helps society, or can be very

negative because you're making somebody vulnerable. And so the logic of what I think a lot of programmers tend towards, like if you do this rule, you're bad. If you follow this, if you break this rule, you're bad. It ignores power, ignores the dynamics of society, and that's why we keep bumping into what seemed like really obvious screw ups in tech where we're like, how come we can't make a civil place. It's like, you're not going to be able to regulate human behavior with a single binary

set of rules. Let's talk a little bit about diversity and inclusion. This is all over the You were way way ahead of the curve on this. We have the CEO of Uber being forced out. We have a number of vcs having to step down either from the boards that they serve on or from their own companies. Uh. It looks like the broke culture in Silicon Valley is coming to an end. UH, tell us a little bit about your perspective on diversity and inclusion in the world

of technology. So there's definitely a moment of reckoning going on right now. And for me, ten years ago, I was just I had been in Silicon Value a couple of years. Um, even though I've been in tech twenty years, I've spent a couple of years. Because you're really uh in New York. Yeah, yeah, so you when did you? Were you here when we were they were doing six apart and the company was growing. And I went out to uh San Francisco in two thousand four and I

was there until two thousand seven. And really one of the drivers for me of sort of being done with being in Silicon Valley and being in San Francisco was it felt so homogeneous and and yeah, it just you know, well, I think I've been spoiled. I've been in New York.

I had worked in media publishing, where you are there's so many and you know, and I had people that, you know, there were friends that were outside of tech and they were in other just ones that they could be in fashion, they can be media, they can be in in finance, whatever it was. And you just get a different view of the world. And it was astonishing to me. It's like, with all the problems that you know, say the entertainment industry had, there was still much more

inclusive and much more diverse. And so to go into conference rooms, boardrooms, meeting rooms in Silicon Valley and look around and be like, essentially, this is just a bunch of white and Asian guys and that doesn't count as diversity, you know. Well, and it's interesting because it's it's it's particularly complicated being Asian American, where we're overrepresented and you know, like we over index were two percent of the population.

And yet you look at just Indian American you know, people in tech, the CEO of Google, CEO of Microsoft, CEO of Adobe, these are all Indian guys, it's like, we're doing fine. And yet you know, like I said, being in media, publishing, entertainment, I was like, I know that there are black and Latino folks in California. You can't tell me they're not there. And yet you go to these offices and it wasn't just technical staff, it was the legal staff, the marketing staff that you know, everything,

every one of these roles. The representation was way out of whack to a point where you couldn't ignore it anymore. The number that was in in one of your columns, California's Hispanic population is uh the average percentage of employees and tech companies head quartered there is less than five percent.

Google is three And if you look at the industry average for women, it's only a third of employees and women when more than half of the population of women, right, and so so there's just this proportionality where you like, at a certain point you can say, Okay, it's not exactly match, of course not, but if you try, if you take you said, well, we we looked at the population and we could only find three percent of our staff that could meet our requirements. I don't buy I

just don't buy it. Just the math doesn't add up. Now that the pushback to that is, hey, you know you mentioned India, huge technical training, engineering, mathematics science, UH, Indian Institute of Technology, go down the list, just tremendous. UH. And my other favorite stat is half of the C suite and Silicon Valley are immigrants. So there's clearly some recognition of meritocracy, at least in fear that's the ideal. And I mean, I could not be more pro immigrant.

My parents are immigrants. They're here because you know, you know, they were willing to do the work and get educated and and and you know, I'm incredibly proud to be in that you know, of that descent and in that tradition.

That being said, you look at the costs for paying for an H one B, for paying for the lawyers to bring somebody over here, for paying for all these things to bring those workers over here is a huge investment for these companies, huge And for the same amount of money, you could train workers here and they're not and you could train people from the underrepresented communities. So what's the thinking that's a sure thing and training them is a risk? You know, well, I think there's a

lot of factors. I think one of them is, you know, h one B workers can never organize or really complain because if you you know, essentially, if you get too up at you lose your job, you get deported, and then you're not sending money back to your family, to your village or whatever else. So the amount of leverage

they have over these workers is incredible. UM. I have to think that's a factor, you know, you look at particularly in the case of like there was UM this collusion orchestrated by Steve Jobs and and and Eric Google Apple for you of the biggest techn companies, everybody exceptally essentially except for Facebook, UM colluded against their own workers right to depress their wages by saying we're not going to poach each other's workers and UM, which is still

astonishing to me. And if there was almost no ramification, this is an amazing thing. Is the workers Like there was a sort of obligatory lawsuit. I think it was for eight billion dollars or something. They settled it for a tiny pittance that which and you know the people at Apple who went through this. I talked to people that work there and they were like, yeah, I still just really love and Revere, Steve, and I'm like, the guy took money out of your kids college funds and

you're like, it seems like a nice guy. Like what would you have to do for you to be like, I'm not gonna, you know, fall along with this. You'd have to remove the headphone jack from that is a bridge too far, right, That's the line. And what you realize, what you realize is, you know, when there's that reverence to they're like, who am I to complaint? I am

getting a good salary, I am being paid well. And what they don't see is common cause with those H one B workers or common cause with the you know the contractors, I say contractors and quotes who are providing the meals, driving the shuttles to the office and giving them a free massages. All those things are presented as perks or you get free lunch, you get these things like therese are people are workers and they never get

equity in these companies. And so we realize that there's this sort of you know, this class system built in that um and I'm just a big believer in like, you got to treat your people well and they certainly have the money to do it, and they didn't need

to nickel and dime their workers they did. That's kind of odds because there was no reason they have more cash than all these companies and more cash I have to point out that the only reason Facebook did not participate in it is a they were too young for that deal was originally made, and be they were busy rating Google for some of their favorite engineers. So as well as Apple. Let's talk a little bit about what fog Creek is doing before we have you repair Twitter.

Tell me what tell us about glitch and some of the other products. Creek Creek is a very storied company, has been around seventeen years. Brilliant co founders Joe Spoilsky, Michael Prior and what they always wanted to build one a great place for like people who want to make the most interesting technology to come work. And it's been

a very influential company that has spun out. They co created stack overflow, which is a community that pretty much every code in the world uses to answer the questions about programming. Did that eventually become like a white labeled version where if you want to set up your own internal Q and a UM you you can do that. Yeah, for sure a sacriflow has has an enterprise product for that. I'm I'm just on the board of Stacks, so I

get to see a lot of what they're doing. And and the bigger thing to me is you have this community where tens of millions of coders around the world come and answer each other's questions in this really collaborative way. Um and and interestingly, it's a very you know, reassuring, nurturing,

supportive environment. People really get answers right away, problems or no and you know, like I think historically the one of the biggest challenges was they weren't probably friendly enough to newbies because they were like, you have to phrase your question the right way and it has to be you know, exactly right. I think that's starting to ease up a little bit, is the sort of you know, the community evolves in being more welcoming. But the key

thing is there's never been wide scale harassment. There's never really wide scale abuse. And that's what the site that is probably in the top forty websites in the world in terms of traffic. So it's possible to make a large site that works well. So so Stack was co created with the Jeff Atwood and his team, and that's spun out. It's an independent company. H They made a project management tool, Trelloh, which lots of people use. It's really popular, and that spun out and last thing about that.

So there's this track record of making these wildly successful products. And you know, I they approached me about taking over the CEO last year and I said, well, you know what's what's coming down the pipe. And I saw what became Glitch that we launched earlier this year, and I was just blown away. I think it's one of the most revolutionary products I've seen in my life, like in my whole co text. And so what glitches is very simply, it's a it's a programming environment where you can go

and write code. Um and there's a couple of things that does that nobody has done before. The first is as you type, it's automatically taking the code you're writing, the that you're creating and publishing it live to the web. That sounds trivial, but that's you know, you take entire businesses like Amazon's web services hosting business or Hiroku, which is sort of beloved by coders, and the whole process of getting an app live onto the web is really hard.

It's become very complicated. To do it completely automatically in the background is a radical change. So is this an app? When when we talk about apps, I think about the app store in the Android stores right now web app So this is things that you go to in your browsers. So if you want to make a little, you know, a simple app for your business, you're gonna make an expensing app for your your team to use, or you make it to do list app or something like that.

It can be as complicated as you want. But the problem is that process of like even if you know how to write the code and you've built that whole thing yourself, just getting it onto the web was a lot of work and it was just a pain. So we took all that away and that was step one. Step two was your entire coding environment. Everything just lives

in the browser. And that's easier for the same reason that like you'd like to use Gmail instead of having a mail app on your on your computers, like it's just there, whatever computer log into all my stuff is there. Those alone were a big leap forward. The biggest things that happened the two things that sort of came out earliest year was the first is we made almost an app store, a catalog of all the different apps people

have built, and you can remix any of them. So I say, somebody already made it to do list app and you say, well that's nice, but I want to be blue instead of green. You go in there, you edit it. That's instantly, years you can remix it, do whatever you want to with it. So it's really the power the promise of open source that we've had for many years. And then the thing that blew my mind when I saw the team had built it was you can edit this code in real time with other people.

So like Google Docs. I was about to say, that makes me think of Google Docs, but for application exactly applications that's exactly it. So nobody has made that kind of powerful real programming environment that that is multiplayer. What's the business model on this? You're selling it to enterprise.

There's there's a couple parts to it. Um. The first thing we're doing is um incidental to the fact that you can code at the same time as other people, which is an incredible learning tool, teaching tool because you

can help people. So right now, all of the big companies have what they call their APIs Application Programming Interface, and this is the way that you build services on top of Stripe for payments, or Twilio for messages, or um Twitter for sending messages obviously and um but it's really hard for them to get developers to try out their tools. So if you say, we have a new developer platform and we want people to use it. For example, Amazon has skills for the Alexa, you want to make

new commands that work there. Where Slack has bots in their messaging app. They're desperate to be just added a whole bunch of slack bots and the birthdays and it's just really interesting. Now you see that and you're like, wow, I wish it would talk to this other system we're using, Like I can never do that, that's too hard. The process with glitch now is we've got a sample slack

bot for you. You go and your remix it. You change the part that just works for your system to be exactly what you wanted to be, and it's instantly up and running. So we take the time to develop a slack bot or Alexa skill from uh days or hours in two minutes, and that is something that's a normal value. All these companies of shots platforms, so they want to use it um and be able to pay to do a couple of different things. The key one

is supporting developers creating these things. So right now, if you're like, I want to build on you know, Alexa's skill set from Amazon, so it's Amazon buying this or or Twitter buying this, not necessarily an enterprise company to create their own unique Everybody's desperate to make things easier for developers because developers are so in demand and it's so rare to get them and pay attention to your platform. And I look at it. There's a search tool called

Algolia that I just love. It was one of those searchers really hard to do well, Like, I'm not Google, I'm not going to figure this thing out. I had always been interested in trying it, and I thought I have if I could tie that search feature into my app, would be really useful. And I was like, but you know, I'm running a company. I'm busy. I don't have time to learn all this stuff. Even if I got a

little bit of coding skills. Now I can go remix an example out from Algolia that already has search working. Just plug in the parts that I want to into my own app and be up and running instantly. That was something where I was like, it took it from it would be cool to try this out. I have this intent of learning this programming skill into I can

deploy it instantly. And the biggest thing I see is the coders who we show it too, like their eyes light up, like it looks like Christmas morning for them, And I'm like, that is a really good sign that we were on something something big with glitch. So that sounds really fascinating. You you mentioned Twitter earlier. Let's let's

talk about what you would do to fix Twitter. I've been amazed that they while there have been a series of updates and they continue to improve the interface and some of the general behaviors, the broader concept behind the community, they just can't seem to wrap their their heads around. It's a hard thing. And I do have a lot of empathy for the team. I do think they're trying, but I think, you know, it was so long for them to turn the ship around to really addressing a

lot of the issues that that's the question. Believe in it. Why why did it take so long? For them to notice that they had a giant harassment problem. You know, I think there's a there's a lot of reasons for that. I am one of the key issues is um who feels the pain? Right? So we talked about the inclusion in diversity issue and tech and you know, Twitter is like most of the tech companies, it doesn't have a lot of people from you know, black and Latino communities,

doesn't have as many women. And guess who gets targeted by the majority of harassment online. See, I haven't let me stop you there, because as a white dude in New York City, perhaps I'm not experiencing the same thing. However, and I'm kind of thick skinned. I'm more annoyed by the failed logical deduction people calling me ugly. But what I I'm amazed at is and I'm I'm I'm seeing all this harassment mostly on a partisan basis, name calling

and stupidity, just craziness, which I think discourages knew you. Oh, I don't want to go ye absolutely, And so it's a little moderate in Facebook because people have to use theoretically are using their real names or otherwise I have to go through hope process of creating a fake name. And I know people certainly do that, but but there's some barriers, right, it's harder to do. So what would you do to fix fixed Twitter? Yeah, there are a

couple of things. I actually wrote a piece back in January one Jack Dorsey asked, I guess the whole internet, like, how would you how would you fix Twitter? And there were a couple of things I wrote in there, and um, the more cogent ones. One of them which was, um, show people you know how to update the service and update the apps. Just the ability to iterate and introduce new things would introduce a lot of trust into the platform.

Because they hadn't shipped any features, they hadn't updated anything, so you can make whatever proclamations you want to about we're fixing abuse, for fixing harrassment, we're adding better features or filtering or whatever, and people don't believe it because like, well, the thing hasn't changed at all in a long time, you know. And in fact, they were killing off things like vine that was really great and creative and interesting

and didn't have harassment problem. And and you know, she said, okay, well these these things that make you feel good, and those are getting killed and the things that are making me feel terrible. You're you're you know, doubling down on So what I think they've gotten better at that they've sort of started shipping more too, is to sort of

be really clear about a harassment policy. So instead of these nebulous, vague rules like we have to see like this person who's very obviously transgressing, being abusive and horrible to people, Um, we got to see their account gets suspended. That that happened not too long ago. I forgot his name is a fairly milos Yanna Pulosolis, right, notorious troll and harasser. And he finally again you have to go

so far, so repeatedly before your account. Is not not just that that he transgressed so frequently, so often that he was openly explicit about the fact he was trying to harass people, right, you know, and like these are the things where it's like this is a um, but the fact that he stands out as as someone who's banned and there isn't. First of all, there's a boatload

of bots just insane anounza. I assume half might it or followers or software al goes and then on top of that, it seems that there are some people that are just you know, calls to violence and just all sorts of like how do they tolerate this? I think one of the things it's easy to lose track of outside of Silicon Valley is how extreme they are about

some of some parts of libertarianism around these views. Right, so they're very like everything is free speech, everything is fair you know, fair game to put no one saying you you can't do this. But we're a private company, this is our product, and you could go do this house free. You're free to be obnoxious and offense of

wherever you want, just not in our private community. Well, the interesting thing, I think there's a couple of parts they sort of ignore, one of which is, you know, the argument there's often the argument that technically it's too hard to limit these things. They say, well listen, and I say listen, you know, go ahead and upload a Beyonce MP MP three. Quickly they can detect that. So like the tech is there, Right, it's not harder to detect you know, a sound signature and a song than

it is text. Right, this is a racial epic. A key phrases. Here's I mean especially in the machine learning is making leaps and bounds in advancements like that can be something where you can get better at a I should really be all over And I think that is starting to seep into Twitter a little bit. They're getting a little bit better at hiding and flagging things. Um. And it's hard to say, but that's part of this.

They need to communicate clearly about it. The The other part is, um, you know, we always talk about the free speech for the people who are harassing and abusing, but what they do is they chase off vulnerable voices, and what about the free speech and the people who are exactly And I see this where like you know, I have extremely thick skin. I am a loudmouth all the time, so like I'm I'm pretty hard to shut up.

There are times when you get to the worst of them, you know, a mob of people coming after you and they're you know, targeting you, your friends, your family, your coworkers, and you just say enough, I'm gonna put this away. And like, if I can go through that with all as fortunate and privilege as I am, with as much of a network as I have to be able to

be like, sometimes it's too much. People who aren't as lucky as I am and don't have that support network behind them can easily be hounded out off of this network. And it's like their speech matters too. And I care a lot more about the people who are targeted, you know, fairly for harassment. I care a lot more about their free speech than the people who are saying horrible things to them. We have been speaking to a Neil Dash

of fog Creek Software. If you enjoy this conversation, be sure and stick around for the podcast extras, where we keep the tape running and continue to discuss all things technology. Be sure to check out my daily column on Bloomberg View dot com. We love your comments, feedback and suggestions right to us at m IB podcast at Bloomberg dot net. You can follow me on Twitter at rid Holts. I'm Barry rid Holts. You're listening to Masters in Business on

Bloomberg Radio. Welcome to the podcast, and Neil, thank you for doing this and appreciate you being for so so generous with your time. Happy to be here. We we were talking during the during the break about the blocking problem on on Twitter, and you mentioned the service Twitter has its own service for importing and exporting lists of blocks,

but it's not very well integrated. There is a site called block together that actually a bunch of activists made that gives you the tools to share a block list with your friends and or to subscribe to theirs and uh and it's really handy because then you don't have to individually block a whole community of people that are trying to troll a harass. So if you're looking to so I break the world into three categories of people and we'll we'll keep this relatively PG. But there are

the folks who are just simply misinformed. And I've learned if you give somebody a fact that challenges their misunderstanding,

it doesn't doesn't help them. So what I always do with that group of people is you should find data source for the bls and if you could, if you can prove to me that what you're you're saying is correct, I'll write a column on it and either all because if they follow me, I could d M them and then subsequently delete the d M so they can't harangue me on direct message, and I'll give them a not so much a homework assignment. But if you really believe

this steaming pile and nonsense you've shared. I'm not asking you to create a persuasive argument, just sending your data source. Right. So so that's a that's the sort of gentle nudge. The next level of people who are just kind of

ideologically broken. And what I mean by that is no concept of of beyond not having any data, any data that contradicts their beliefs, their ideology, just pure cognitive dissonance, right, and and for them but not but not venal, but not vicious, just philosophically askew on top of not being

evidence based. And so now you know, I really because I start, I'll look at something and I'll go down the rabbit hole and it's like, oh, okay, I know this is you know, old roads lead to bright Bard and Drudge in a bunch of And there's some versions of that on the left as well. Some of the early um, I'm trying to remember the sites Salon could be a little over the top. And then there's another one on the left. And I mean, I think they can be wrong or exaggerated, but they very seldom inspire

a mob to go target people, that's for sure. But as somebody who works in finance. I can't afford to have a stream of dead, bad memes and misinformation and myths. So I just want to cut so those people get me did But the aggressive like I'm wrong and I'm gonna be aggressive about it, um and obnoxious about it and offensive about it. I'm sorry those folks have to be blocked. I didn't know block together even existed. My only concern is how do I not So I've noticed

some crazy Trumpers lately. Right at one point in time, it was other crazies. But I don't mean people who are pro Trump or anti Trump. I have friends in the Trump administration. Anthony Scamucci is a buddy of mine. We've had very civil debates about Trump. Someone in my office as a Trump supporter. She and I have had very rational adult discussions that online just do something tribal and partisan that people lose their mind. So, and I'll

give you a perfect example. This weekend, I discovered that Jenna Jamison, the former adult film star, is kind of like a wild just listen there. There is some extreme behavior in her history. So but I never expected that to tip into wild ideological and it was just kind

of random that I found she's amplified white supremacists. I mean, there's Yeah, it's a sort of surprising, you know, I think, Um, so, how do you how do you block the people that you want to block, yet at the same time not block so so I can't say it on the radio, but there was a science thing about something happening in one of the guests, giants in outer space, about a subsequent probe. I won't even go there, and she just retweeted,

at least buy me dinner first. And I just found that hilarious that I was looking for something science and phil plate uh does does a bad astronomy exactly? And from that led to this, led to that, So I don't want to The beauty of the web is the random serendipity. Yeah, absolutely, So how do you block people on a list like um blocked together and not lose

that random? You know what I want? They're going to be some false positives, but that already happens, an email that already happens, and everything, right, I mean, but you can at least check your seat. But yeah, but it's the same thing like if you really I mean, you know somebody exactly, you can just go and and bet it like if you're like I really want to see this tweet, but I have this person blocked, you just

do unblock them. There's nothing to that. I think what is key is like being able to use the service where like it's not it's not some huge barrier, right if you block somebody, they can still see your tweets if they want, they just don't. Yeah, absolutely, So it's not like this is some impermeable barrier. All it's doing is making it harder for a mob of harassers to

target you. And that's really useful. Like for me, it's like like if I'm like whatever, out with my kid and you know, we're doing fun stuff on the weekend, and it happens to be the moment when like a mob of white supremacist is a decided they want to come after me for something I wrote. And the thing is like, they'll go back through your history. It could be something I wrote years ago. Um, and I'm getting notifications on my phone while I'm out with my kid

and I'm like, yeah, exactly. I like, I don't want to be distracted by this. If I can just go and find somebody who's already got a good block list, and just share it and be like, Okay, good, I've been able to sort of cut this off. That's it's a no brainer. Like why can you search for a blocklist by a specific it's block list with this person and then I'll share it's just a person. Yeah, so you go by like an individual Twitter user who you

trust and use, you know what I mean? The opposite, I want to block Jimmy Dean and then who else is blocked? I don't think so, And part like they've been very thoughtful about it where they don't they don't encourage sort of willy nilly blocking, Like it's really about sort of sharing with the community and doing and and and people having human judgment involved in it. And so

I think that's really good. And you can um and you can also go and search for like people that you UM follow who do have lists, and so like those things are very handy. I think Twitter is gonna

involve their tools too. But the key is that, like, um, there's a there's a really valid use to blocking people that we learned from Again, like I almost think digital communities need to learn from physical communities, right, And there's a reason why we sort of say, like you can't come into this coffee shop if you're going to shout at people, and you can't you come into this lobby if you're gonna be acting this way, and a crowd theater, and so being able to have analogous tools for sort

of just limiting really really anti social behavior. I think it's really useful, and I'm glad that, like the tools are starting to evolve. I think it's a shame they're happening by like activists self funding themselves, building as opposed to the platforms building in. So are we just going to end up with ideologically opposed left blocks and right blocks or is it really is the unifying factor anti

social behavior? I think it's a social behavior. There are people that do that, of course, that are like ignore anybody who disagrees with them politically, but they were already doing that, Like they don't need software to do that if you're the kind of person they can't deal with dissenting ideas. The block was not the issue. The interesting thing that's happening rhetorically now where I'm like, I don't want to interact with for example, like white supremacists online,

go figure right and they'll come back to me. And be like, oh, you can't handle political dissentsion sake. I love the expression snowflake, yeah, because it's all massive projection because to the slightest challenge and and and and I'm just like, you know what, Like I like, I'm tough as nails. I have no question about that. Like I know what I've been through, and I know you know what I'm able to do. I'm just like, why would I want to deal with you? This is like, this

is an elective thing. It's about me having good judgment and discernment where I'm like, you're you're a person who acts obnoxious online all day? Why would I put like, I'm not that's that's not the idea. I'm working to engagement. Like if you think that the only way that your ideas can be representing in culture is by you acting like a monster all day lighting it on fire, and yours probably aren't that good, you know. And it's like, it's not that I'm not intellectually curious. I know, I am.

I'm very interested in having my options challenge and learning things like I am very much like I love that idea of like I had to change my mind because I was wrong about the way I thought about this thing, Like I love that feeling. Uh, it doesn't come from somebody saying, like why streaming epithets exactly, Like why the fact that, like my family is multiracial is wrong? Like that is never going to be the thing that I'm like, Wow,

I've seen the light. You know, we used to have laws against that sort of stuff that's in the good old days. It's uh, it's it's amazing. You know, when I get the requests through a colleague, Hey, you block so and so so. Now the processes, I'll go look at their not only their tweet stream, but their tweets and replies because I want to see how they're interacting. That's right. And I say to people, listen, life is too short. You're not a good person. There's eight billion people,

most of whom are half decent and well intentioned. Some may be misguided. But I don't need venal jerks and nobody needs no Life is too short, and I got too much left to learn to spend my fighting with the strangers really wants to fight more than they want to learn. Right, That's right. You know. One of the beauties of of going to law school is mood court. And the best part about mood court is you have to be able to switch hats and argue either side

of any litigation. Literally mid case, you could be all right now. So I've always taken that as a as a sign of intellectual openness. Having the ability to see all sides of an issue, of a problem, what have you prevent you from, uh turning your your opponents into a sub human It keeps the discussion rational because Hey, things that are really really at least in court, things that are really one sided, those cases settle. But where

there's a legitimate debate, let's have the debate. And unfortunately too many people uh just can't imagine the other side of the discussion. And that's amazing. Yeah, and I'm very you know, my my mother's families all lawyers, and I'm sort of you know Rais Well, you know, it's interesting they were both um somewhere criminal defense lawyers and and then um, my great grandfather was involved in the Indian

independence movement. He marked with FANDI and was sort of very involved in civil rights and social justice about you know what's interesting is they had a printing press at the house, and so there is a tradition of like how do you use your own you know platform exact idea? Right, Yeah, so you know a century ago, that was cutting edge technology to be able to have in a rural, very

very poor part of India. And so yeah, I think there is this idea of how do you debate ideas using cutting edge platforms to get your ideas out there and advancing the cause of social justice. And I think those are things that you know, you don't think about consciously as a kid, but they sort of seep in into your mind. And and so there was always a healthy debate about how to how to do these things. I mean, you know, like especially you look at this

is still true today. Civil rights movements always have these big schisms within them of like how how radical do we want to be? And what's the right way to approach this? And you know, do we change the system from the inside or do we you know, try to tear it down from the outside. And those kinds of debates. I think those are fascinating and timeless debates. And I'm

always happy to engage in those. The people who are like I want to personally, you know, hurt you or or or I want to attack you, and and and that's the only way to vance my ideas. I'm like, that's never it's never going to be the thing that that persuades me or that makes me see the light. And it certainly doesn't indicate much confidence in that person's

argument anyway. You know, I've gone back and looked at some old blog posts that I could see are out of frustration where I don't want to say I just called other people idiots, but I would look at their position and first try and take it apart, and somewhere in the middle was a little bit of name calling would be in and then you catch yourself and move

away from it. How have you you, more than any person and I know, have been at the vanguard of of seeing the arc of the blogosphere change over time. What what have you noticed? Um? How has this evolved? Do you plan on continuing blogging for forever? What? What are your thoughts on? Yeah, you know, I've learned a lot. I think, Um, it is that I definitely see you when I look back at eighteen years of writing now, UM that it is always this sort of ink blot

test about where I met in my head. You go back and read it and I can see exactly how I was feeling at the moment, even if I don't remember writing it. Shocking, wo, I was having a bad day that you know, or or wow, I was really in a good mood. And and and you can really

read that into you know, the work. I think that that's been really instructive, because like, I don't keep a like a mood journal, and so I could be writing about like whatever a new update to Windows came out when I used to blog about tech a lot, and I could still tell you exactly how I felt, you know what I read. I think that really instructive. I think my attitude about dealing with you know, people being aggressive or hostile online has has changed a lot over

the years. I think initially, um, you know, I think your first reaction is like, well, you know, screw you too, buddy, and you can sort of go at them. I think I spent a long time trying to be like I'm just gonna, you know, love you to death and that'll get you to change. And and I had some successes

with that. I mean, I have actually seen conversations where I change somebody's mind her they changed my mind, or at least you get them to back down from the sort of over I think people's initial emails, like it would be great if email had like a sixty minute delay, Like you can't respond instantly. So every now and then someone sends an email and if you give them a big friendly hug and say like you're really upset or or hey, I hope you're not missing the key point here,

here's my data source. What are you using to reach this conclusion? As often as not or not, especially in the professional community, So my universe's finance. When someone gets it's not even though back down it's like I've gotten Hey, I appreciate your responding. Civilly, I was online like you say, oh, these people are really professional and smart. He was just perturbed at something. Yeah, it's yeah. It could be whatever they you know, they didn't eat lunch that day, or

they have something else going on. What what about the change in media? How has the bloggersphere impacted that? In your perspective, it is It's interesting. I was such an idealist about blogging and social media when he came out. I was like, we're gonna give platforms that are going to give voice to people that don't have any other

places to share the words, and that was true. That did happen the professional amateurs exactly who are no longer amateurs now they're professional experts, expert professionals, right, And I'm exhibit A. Yeah, and you know I've been very lucky to benefit from that too. And I think that was true. And and we kept saying, you know, the whatever, the mainstream media makes all these mistakes, and now the social

media will help correct it. And then we ignored or didn't anticipate the exact opposite, which was the times when mainstream media was exactly right, and people would use social media to spread disinformation. Yeah, and the idea that like, um, the people who didn't have access to get their voice out there, some of them would would not use that

power responsibly. We I was such an optimist and idealist of like, wow, if we just give everybody a printing press, all they're going to print is good, thoughtful, true things, and um, you know that's not the case. And it was a a long, slow, painful lesson that I I know, I personally took too long to learn. What's the old quota a law is halfway around the world where the truth is still tying on its boots. Yeah, yeah, and

I think that was very naive on my part. And the amazing thing about it is I felt like I was slow to get that lesson and slow to to really build it into my work and the and the tools and the platforms I was creating. And yet I think it still took even longer for the people that made the facebooks and twitters of the world to get

that lesson. And not only do they have to recognize that, they have to then recognize that it's an existential threat to their platform and then create the tech to response to it. Well, and I was lucky and that we had built a product when we built blogging tools that people paid for. You paid for right, you know, And so, um, if you wanted to have a voice in a platform, you were going to directly support it and you were

head an investment in it. And so we weren't based on attention, We were not based on the ad model, and um, so you didn't have to be outrageous, you didn't have to jump up that scream, you don't have

to have clickbait headlines. Well, and you won't believe what slide three, right, But even if you're going to do that, you were incentivized to build your audience on your terms, but not just views at any cost, you know, Patriots in any cost and everybody else basically went with the ad model, and I, you know, I was really adamantly against it, and I do think inc you know, you see the sort of return as subscription models right at the Times New York Times and like everybody, we want

you to subscribe and pay for great journalism all these things. This is this reaction to seeing the distorting effect that that the major ad models have on on web media and the facebooks and twitters and and you know instagrams in the world built models that were totally advertising dependent and so get hyper exaggerated into attention getting models. And I think that's something that the publishers didn't understand how

much that would skew their business. And it's interesting because in print, you know, there's one of there was more ad dollars to go around two they were indirect models, right, So the fact that you had a ton of classified ads might encourage you to have a real estate section, but it didn't make your news headlines more extreme about

politics and about whether and about whatever. Same thing with the automobile, so you can go through each of the major sections of the Sunday New York Times, and they were advertising and so you have the theater section, the arts and Arts and Entertainment section, real estate, automobiles. I don't know if they still have an automobiles. They might,

they might have killed off. But even to that example, like the existence of an automobile section was as a sop to advertisers obviously, but it didn't skew the hard news reporting, and so that was okay because you're like, okay, whatever, you gotta pay the bills. Of course you have comics. You don't have comics because like, like, this is an important news for people, Like this makes people read and that gets the circulation up, and that that um, let's

just do the hard news work. And the problem is that line goes away in web media. There isn't some like, well, you're gonna come and read the car ads and that's going to support you're reading the hard news. The hard news has to sell on its own, and so it gets more and more distorted and more and more exaggerated in order to get to that attention because you're in

this more and more extreme environment. Now that that's a buzz Feed or maybe a vox or something like that, But that shouldn't be The Washington Post, in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journals, all of them. There's no difference between those. Like, yeah, I mean you look at like the best reported stories on buzz feed are not different than the best reported story race on the Times of the Post, like when you do good journalism, like there are but not necessarily the most read stories. No,

that's true. And there are more you know, cat pictures or lists that are subsidizing that journalism on the buzz feeds than there are on you know, the other sides. But like that's just a that's just a question of how you subsidize, you know, in the case of the Post of the Times or whatever, they're subsidizing through print subscriptions that are going to go away as that audience

ages out. I finally, I finally dropped everything but the weekend edition in New York Times because I would carry through the office carrying home and it would go go into the recycled. Then yeah, and the Wall Street Journal comes to the office, and this way I don't have to take it home. It goes right into the recycled, right, the way the Journal has there, and I think the Times is the same. If you do a digital subscription,

the print edition is free. Yeah what what? Well? And this is all about the metrics and the numbers, right, so the advertising exactly. So they want to tell the advertiser, we this many print subscribers, even though all those people are just you know, when does that stop? When does

that go next? Ten years? Ten years? No more newspapers? Yeah, I mean you know, for any practical purposes, there will be the same thing with New York or New York or the digital subscription and the digital plus um print are the same price. So your initial reaction is, oh, well this is more for the same price. I'll take that. Then you have a stack of unread magazines. It's pointless.

Well it's like, yeah, unless you're going to the beach or something, you're not you're not looking at that print edition. And I see this all the time with people that like I watched, that have print subscriptions that are saying, Okay, well I found this article, but I'm gonna read it online. Now. I will tell you that when you thumb through a paper, you're gonna find things that you're not going to discovery digital. Yeah, it's other than the ink on your hands and and

the fact that you're carrying around. There's there's no question the discovery experience on print media is good, is an interesting and unique thing, and you find stuff you wouldn't find otherwise on digital. But that's also just a design challenge, Like it's not impossible to solve these problems in the

digital realm, they just haven't invested in doing so. So one of the things I've noticed in the arc of um of media has been how in the beginning, and I want to call that the mid two thousands, they felt very comfortable lifting anything from print, anything from the blogosphere without attribution, just relentlessly, and and I started the read it here first, here's the blog post from Monday, and oh look, this is what the whole Street General

had on Thursday. I would do screenshots side by side. Yeah, I definitely had that with with stuff I read about tech. Right, And then then you send it to the editor and saying I want you to know that I'm going to keep doing this until you're free to call me. I have a professional title where I'm quoted in the media all the time. Don't don't rip this off, and if you do this more blatantly, I'm going to stick the

lawyers on UKUS. At a certain point, you cross the line from inspired by two copyright infringement and there was a head. My favorite was a thing I did on terrestrial radio. I'm a big music buff and I just hated what Clear Channel was doing to music. And I didn't right oh three or row four. It was way early.

And then I think it was Barons had this front pick cover story losing the signal, and to their credit, they didn't actually steal language, but the structure, and it was like, wait a second, this looks really really didn't even notice it until a friend said, hey, Barons ripped you off? What do you mean? Look at that? It's um And there are a couple of other people I won't mention their names who feel like they can take that and it's so first that was the first phase.

The second phase was one the Wall Street Journal in New York Times and other mainstream media started rolling out blogs of their own. Does this have any staying power? What? How do you see the role of a fast, not really very lightly edited, get it out quick gale. How do you see the role of that in mainstream media. I think it depends on the vertical and you know what what space you're covering, and um, how much reporting and and you know the original network sort of fuels it.

There are there are great blogs done by mainstream media outlets that are usually written by somebody that has a great voice, that knows the space really well, has their network, and um can turn that into you know, a story really quickly. And I look at like it, Actually it wasn't a blog, but I look at like David Carr what he had done at the Times. Um, boy, I

missed that guy. And you know he was very blog like in the way even he wrote his print columns very fast, turn things around new exactly who to call connected the dots really really well. I think that model can work, UM, but very few of the major outlets have a business model for that. You can't hide the blog behind a paywall, because that that ruins its point of linking to stuff. I've had that argument with the Wolster,

this discussion with editors of the Wall Street Journal. Hey, why don't you put your blog out ahead of the payaball? But you have to be a registered subscriber to comment, and this way not only that you have actual people who are identifiable and make sense, right, you're inherently raising

the quality of discussion. Yeah yeah, and you know so I think the business tensions always arise, and you see that with even sites that create great blogs, they sort of fade out after a while because the company is like, I'm not really behind this, I don't believe in this, um and and I draw that contrast to like organizations that started by blogging, right, so, you know, Gizmoto formerly Gawker, like they're sort of still all in and they still

do good work. I mean, I think it's you know, it's always been uneven, but like the good stuff has always been good. You know, BuzzFeed still feels like a blog, um, even though you know, I don't like you can define blog however you want, but like that that that aesthetic, that voice is still there. Can we say the blogosphere is a meritocracy? Or is that overstating Yeah? I think that's overstating it because you still have the same dynamics

you have in a lot of media. Would one of which is just simple, like you know, old boys network, like people promote who they know and these kinds of things. I think it's easier to get in. UM. I think you can blog your way to being the voice on a certain topic. Like if you have a certain niche or a certain subject that you are just obsessive about and you go all in on and you just keep bloging about it, you can own that topic or that idea. UM,

and that's still true. I think if you're in a popular subject of you know, you know, the sort of like like for me, like a generic tech blog about what's happening in the tech industry, it's really really hard to break out. And that is going to be about do you have the relationships? Do you have somebody who's gonna scratch your back by giving you traffic? Let's jump right into our favorite questions. Tell me something. The most

important thing people don't know about your background. UM, A lot of people don't know that I am from a tiny little town in rural Pennsylvania and that we were one of the only uh certainly only Asian families uh and that and that really UM informed out of my view of like having a very different, probably the opposite perspective of living in a big city like Manhattan. Understandable, who are some of your early mentors. Um, I've been

very lucky to have a lot of good ones. I had a business partner named Fred Burke, who was my partner in my first company I started the day after I graduated high school, and he taught me a ton about sales and marketing and that was really really instructive. Who most influenced your approach to technology and entrepreneurship? Um, maybe one of the biggest influences is Dan Brocklin, who is the inventor of the spreadsheet and later later it sold it to Lettus and was working with Mr k

Port and that team that made one too three. But Dan is one of the more thoughtful, brilliant, creative voices, you know, really undersung as one of the heroes of the tech industry and um super generous with his thoughts and ideas. This is the question that listeners ask all about constantly. This is the most asked question from listeners. What are some of your favorite books? Favorite books? UM, The Powerbroker, Robert Carross, Bio Robert most classic and and

and also really teaches systems thinking. Um, so that's one of those that really really jumps out. Um. Uh. David Ritz did a biography of Aretha Franklin. Really and it is it is it's almost a history of America in the form of a biographyavor Wretha Franklin. It is such a brilliant, brilliant David Ritz, Yeah, the biography of Aretha Franklin. Yeah, yeah,

see I would have named that respect if Yeah. He I forget what, I forget what the actual titles and they there's a bunch of books about are name of respect, so they didn't go with that name. But it is, um, it is actually one of the best business books that I've read in a long time. Really, Yeah, that's quite fascinating. And give me one more. Oh, um fiction nonfiction technom. Yeah, that's there's so many, it's really it's it's give us

ten more. There was actually, um, I'm gonna forget the name of it, there was a book about the creation of the Highline Park here in New York City, um, and how it started as a really a community movement and it became this sort of you know, one of the top landmarks in the city. Now touris to visit. Those guys are actually consulting around the world, people are trying to do similar and they did such a good job of telling story and of even being self critical

about the mistakes they made. UM, and for example that the park is not really inclusive enough of the community that that's part of UM. I thought it was just very thoughtful and nuanced and also showed how you can build things that are improbably ambitious and make them happen. Anyway, now now they're talking about trying to create an underground park from it. I don't know if that will really work to the same degree. But listen, no one thought

the Highline would work. It's been a home run. UM. Since you've joined tech, tell us about what you think are the most significant changes. UM. You know what I would say these past couple of weeks has been one of the most significant milestones, which is this this wreckling of you know, vcs being pushed out of their own funds on ethical grounds Susan Fowler blog post, which was really powerful, which is amazing because that post was around

for months before it seems to have gained any traction. Yeah. Yeah, and and also there were voices before her, right, And you know, I think the fact that just a steady drumbeat of activism worked and that you have things like you know, the CEO of Uber stepping down. I think these are hopefully a moment of reckoning for so many of us that have been talking about the need for tech to be more ethical, more humane, more inclusive, to be able to really point at that having had some impact.

And these are not victories, because these are horrible situations that people went through, but it's just the first time that we didn't completely lose after somebody had to endure these kinds of indignities at work. I suspect Travis, who owns fifty one plus percent of the voting stuff, is going to eventually find his way back when he's being you know, re educated and and the kindler, gentler Travis will show up. But you never know. Um. So that's

that's the changes that have taken place. What do you think the next major changes are? And it's only technology, it's not a big field that I do think there is um a return to first principles about people being able to create on their own, which is that, you know, the promise of the web was that we were all going to have a voice and we have a place, and that we would be able to publish and create things.

And there is such a centralization happening around Facebook, Google, you know, go to those two exactly and about that much of the tech platform development. So what developers are doing outside in the world is I'm doing this for iOS, for for Apple, I'm doing this for Android for Google, and being able to go back and say, well, the web itself is still the bigger platforms. So the biggest platform has ever existed. How do you create for that

and support that and express yourself there? And I mean, you know, we have a dog in this fight with glitch where I'm very lucky because developers love it and they're catching on and and really saying like this is

one of the things that gives us hope. But I think it's a broader movement, which is um what brought a lot of us to the web in the first place, the idea that we could create something in the world could find it and respond to it and make it a successful So this is a standard question I asked people, but it's especially poignant for you. Tell us about a fail. Tell us about a time you failed and what you

learned from the experience. And if people want to know why that is a point in question, just google anal dash and quote fail and you'll understand why. Um, I do think one of the biggest failures was in being part of the community that created the first social media

and social networking tools. We were so desperate for and hungry for people to use them and optimize for growth at the expense of making these environments humane and thoughtful for people, and and so there's been a tremendous social costs where Yeah, everybody got connected, and it's great, it's amazing to be able to send messages and media and photos to people instantly anywhere in the world, but it should have also been something that empowered the people, most

of the margins, most vulnerable, to be able to advocate for themselves. And and instead, in many ways, we re victimized them. And um that is something that I hope to spend the rest of my career working to fix. To be fair to you guys, that's like third level thinking at the time, it's hey, is anybody going to use these tools? Not the is gonna become widespread, widespread adoption, It'll be enormously successful, so successful that trolls are going to be a problem in the common sense that that

was just ends. Yeah, you know, you know, someday there's gonna be a million people on social media, and she was you know, she was founder of our company, and she's like, you idiot, there's gonna be a hundred million people. Of course, then it turns out there's a billion, and so, you know, you would never it would have been absurd if we had said, let's plan for what happens when a billion people show up on these social networks, because

people like you're of your mind. There aren't a billion people with computers, right, but there are a billion people with smartphones. It was just so there was no like science fiction that that's exactly right. Um, what do you do to keep mentally? You're physically fit outside of the office, what do you do to relax? I love music. I know you're a music fan. I I still am. I'm sort of notorious for being a big Prince fan even

before he passed away. But I love sort of cataloging his work and so he's showing the cultural impact and so it's it's it's a fun hobby because you cross paths with like an improbable cross section of life. Like there are people in politics and media, all these different disciplines that are like, oh, you know whatever, they like the music. It's fun, but also this like, oh, he was a pioneer in tech and did all these sort

of interesting cultural things. And then of course just at a human level for me, like, um, one of the best ways to clear my head is I have got a six year old son and will go out and you know, just sort of do something fun. Go to a museum, uh, you know, walk around the neighborhood, take the dog for a walk, and I am now for not reset by spending it just a little bit of time listening to him in his view of the world.

That's a lot of fun. If UM, if a millennial came to you, or someone at the beginning of their career came to you and said, hey, I'm interested in going into tech or social community, what sort of advice might you give them? Um? One of the key things is, uh, find this topic about which you are irrationally passionate, like so that it can be as narrow as niche as

you want. But if you can be the person who is the one person in the world who is most in love with that idea and knows the most about it, obsesses over it, and really just owns it, Um, there's something there for you like you you can you can really build a whole career around that because you can't win on Like everybody is chasing this one trend and I'm going to be part of it. I think that's

really key. I think the other part um, because the tide is starting to turn, particularly in tech, find the people who are most of the margins, least connected, least central, at least privileged in tech and lift them up because people one day will remember it. They'll never forget you did it too. I think that is who is a sentant broadly is the people on on the outside are saying, Okay, I want to be part of this success, that I want to benefit from it. And three it's just the

right thing to do. It feels good. And our final question, what is it that you know about technology and social networks today that you wish you knew seventeen or twenty years ago? Um? I wish I had known that technology follows the same rules of human society that the physical world does. In the same way that we architect our buildings and design our communities in our neighborhoods to be safe, comfortable, welcoming,

warm places for us to live. We need to put the same thought into designing our digital spaces so that people are welcoming and kind to each other and treat each other well and feel neighborly towards one another. And if we can just repeat a lot of the lessons that the last ten thousand years of civilization have taught us, uh, we can make being online and in our apps a lot more thoughtful and rewarding experience. We have been speaking with Anald Dash he is the CEO of fog Creek Software.

Be sure and look up an inch or down an inch on Apple iTunes and you could see any of the other hundred and fifty or so such conversations. We love your feedback, comments and suggestions right to me at m IB podcast at Bloomberg dot net. I would be remiss if I did not thank my audio engineer Charlie Valmer, my head of research Michael bat Nick, and my booker slash producer Taylor Riggs. I'm Barry Ritolts. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.