Perkins Miller is the CEO of Fandom, which both hosts thousands of wikis for everything from Disney to Grand Theft Auto and also runs several publications. Millions of people contribute millions of pieces of content to the platform, and Fandom surrounds all that content with ads and uses all that data to generate insights about how fans think about their favorite games, TV shows, and movies. While you might enjoy the content, a lot of people have complaints especially about the sheer number of a...
Aug 22, 2023•1 hr 10 min•Transcript available on Metacast We have a little surprise in the feed today: An episode of "Land of the Giants," which is all about Tesla this season. Former Verge transportation reporter Tamara Warren and former Jalopnik EIC Patrick George, who are both deeply sourced in the world of cars, host, and every episode has reporting and insight about Tesla that really hasnt been shared before.It was ahead of the EV competition in basically every way for a long time. But the question Tamara and Patrick want to answer is: Is Tesla st...
Aug 15, 2023•38 min•Transcript available on Metacast AWS is quite a story. It started as an experiment almost 20 years ago with Amazon trying to sell its excess server capacity. And people really doubted it. Why was the online bookstore trying to sell cloud services? But now, AWS is the largest cloud services provider in the world, and its the most profitable segment of Amazon, generating more than $22 billion in sales last quarter alone. By some estimates, AWS powers roughly one-third of the entire global internet. And on the rare occasion an AWS...
Aug 08, 2023•1 hr 9 min•Transcript available on Metacast ActivityPub is back in the news, thanks to Metas Threads launch and Elons continued immolation of Twitter now X. That makes this the perfect time to dig into the Decoder archives to hear what Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko thinks about the future of social media. Mastodon got a head start as the most well-known of the rising decentralized social networks, but thats changing fast. Bluesky, on a competing protocol, is picking up steam and Threads promises to decentralize in the future, using the same A...
Jul 25, 2023•1 hr 21 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today Im talking to Anthony Casalena, the founder and CEO of Squarespace, the ubiquitous web hosting and design company. If youre a podcast listener, youve heard a Squarespace ad. I was excited to talk to Anthony because it really feels like were going through a reset moment on the internet, and I wanted to hear how hes thinking about the web and what websites are even for in 2023. If youre a Vergecast listener, you know Ive been saying it feels a lot like 2011 out there. The big platforms like ...
Jul 18, 2023•1 hr 4 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today, Im talking to Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google DeepMind, the newly created division of Google responsible for AI efforts across the company. Google DeepMind is the result of an internal merger: Google acquired Demis DeepMind startup in 2014 and ran it as a separate company inside its parent company, Alphabet, while Google itself had an AI team called Google Brain. Google has been showing off AI demos for years now, but with the explosion of ChatGPT and a renewed threat from Microsoft in ...
Jul 10, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Transcript available on Metacast Roblox has 66 million daily users, and people spent 14 billion collective hours on Roblox in just Q1 of 2023. But its CEO David Baszucki still wants to see the company grow. One idea? Aging up the kinds of experiences that are allowed on its platform. Roblox recently introduced 17+ experiences. It wants to add new AI world-building capabilities. Its even partnering with advertisers to roll out more immersive ad experiences. Its been years since the number of adults gaming outnumbered kids it see...
Jun 27, 2023•54 min•Transcript available on Metacast If youve spent more than two minutes somewhere on social media, you have probably come across Gary Vaynerchuk. For years I have wondered, is this just a character? Or is there a real Gary Vaynerchuk somewhere behind GaryVee, the social media entrepreneur and internet brand? Gary got his start working at his familys liquor store, which he turned into an online wine shop. Thats where he started in social media, hosting a long-running YouTube show called Wine Library TV. He parlayed that into the g...
Jun 21, 2023•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast The idea behind private equity or PE is simple: a private equity firm gathers up a bunch of cash, raises some investor cash and takes on a lot of debt to buy various companies, often taking them off the public stock market. Then, they usually install new management and embark on aggressive cost cutting and turnaround programs mostly because they have to pay down all that debt pretty fast. Then, the company can be sold or taken public again for a hefty profit. But dont worryif it doesnt work out,...
Jun 13, 2023•1 hr 1 min•Transcript available on Metacast Jennifer Witz is the CEO of SiriusXM. You probably know the company as the satellite radio brand in virtually every new car, but it also owns Pandora, a huge podcast network that includes Team Coco and 99% Invisible, a content operation with huge stars like Howard Stern, and has broadcast deals with every major sports league. SiriusXM is effectively the dominant market leader for built-in premium audio in cars, in a time when competition is increasing. As the infotainment system in cars gets eve...
Jun 06, 2023•1 hr 6 min•Transcript available on Metacast Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott oversees the company's AI efforts, including its big partnership with OpenAI and ChatGPT. Kevin and I spoke ahead of his keynote talk at Microsoft Build, the companys annual developer conference, where he showed off the companys new AI assistant tools, which Microsoft calls Copilots. Microsoft is big into Copilots. GitHub Copilot is already helping millions of developers write code, and now, the company is adding Copilots to everything from Office to the Windows Termina...
May 23, 2023•1 hr 7 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today weve got a treat for you. Were going to run a special episode from our friends over at Vox. Peter Kafka and his team just wrapped up a special 3-part series on AI. AI has captured the imagination of Silicon Valley. In fact, in the last few months, Ive talked to both Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella about AI after they announced new AI-powered search products. And in the middle of the frenzy, it's hard to tell what's really going on. What exactly is AI, how does tech...
May 16, 2023•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast Hello and welcome to Decoder. Im Nilay Patel, editor in chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas, and other problems. We have a special episode today Im talking to Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google and Alphabet. We hung out the day after Google IO, the companys big developer conference, where Sundar introduced new generative AI features in virtually all of the companys products. Its an important moment for Google, which invented a lot of the core technology behind the current AI...
May 12, 2023•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Brian Chesky, the co-founder and CEO of Airbnb, was previously on the show in 2021. Back then, Airbnb was betting big on long-term stays for remote work amid the pandemic, and Chesky had just restructured the company to a more functional organization, getting rid of the divisions it had before. Now, the pandemic is ending, Airbnb has itself adopted a hybrid policy, Cheskys back in the office several days a week, and theyre two years into that new structure. So thats pure Decoder bait. I wanted t...
May 09, 2023•1 hr 4 min•Transcript available on Metacast Ben Smith is the former and founding editor-in-chief of Buzzfeed News, the founder and editor-in-chief of Semafor, and the author of a new book called Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral, which is about the rise and fall of the social platform age in media, through the lens of Gawker Media and Buzzfeed and, in particular, their founders, Nick Denton and Jonah Peretti. I say the fall of the social platform age pretty literally: just before we spoke, Buzzf...
May 02, 2023•1 hr 11 min•Transcript available on Metacast Weve got a special episode with Alex Heath, deputy editor at The Verge and a familiar host for Decoder listeners, and David Marcus, the CEO of Lightspark. Thats a company that just launched a service to make fast transactions using Bitcoin on something called the Lightning Network. David was previously at PayPal, and then he led Metas big payments effort that went nowhere, but hes got a lot to say about where crypto and payments are right now. Links: Launching the Lightspark Platform Facebook te...
Apr 25, 2023•51 min•Transcript available on Metacast Travis Katz is the CEO of BrightDrop, a subsidiary of GM that makes electrified delivery vans with an eye toward rebooting all of how delivery works. BrightDrop has pretty big partnerships already, with names like FedEx, Verizon, and Walmart committed to its Zevo 600 van, and its got big ideas for making the steps from the van to your door more efficient as well with something called e-carts. Katz says theres a huge demand for delivery especially as online shopping keeps getting bigger, but the ...
Apr 18, 2023•1 hr 11 min•Transcript available on Metacast It is fair to say that Substack has had a dramatic week and a half or so, and I talked to their CEO Chris Best about it. The company announced a new feature called Substack Notes, which looks quite a bit like Twitter Substack authors can post short bits of text to share links and kick off discussions, and people can reply to them, like the posts, the whole thing. Like I said, Twitter. Twitter, under the direction of Elon Musk, did not like the prospect of this competition, and for several days l...
Apr 13, 2023•1 hr 8 min•Transcript available on Metacast Brex CEO Henrique Dubugras found himself playing an important role during the Silicon Valley Bank collapse. Brex is what you might call a neobank not a traditional bank but rather a financial services provider that helps companies manage how they spend money, corporate cards, travel expenses and the rest. In the middle of the SVB collapse, Brex was more than just a spending management company. It was also a safe place to park money. Brex saw billions of deposits in a very short period of time, g...
Apr 04, 2023•1 hr 5 min•Transcript available on Metacast Chris Cocks is the CEO of Hasbro, a company that just turned 100 this year. Hasbro is a huge company, making everything from Transformers to Lincoln Logs to My Little Pony and Monopoly. It also makes Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons, which are massive and growing businesses. Chris was the head of that division, called Wizards of the Coast, before he became the CEO of Hasbro overall last year. Since then, hes started the process of restructuring the company, which is pure Decoder bait....
Mar 31, 2023•1 hr 11 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today Im talking to Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko. Mastodon is the open-source, decentralized competitor to Twitter, and its where a lot of Twitter users have gone in this, our post-Elon era. The idea is that you dont join a single platform that one company controls, you join a server, and that server can show you content from users across the entire network. If you decide you dont like the people who run your server, or you think theyre moderating content too strictly, you can leave, and take your ...
Mar 28, 2023•1 hr 19 min•Transcript available on Metacast Meredith Kopit Levien is the CEO of The New York Times, which is perhaps the most famous journalism organization in the world, and certainly one of Americas most complicated companies. The Times is 172 years old, and has only recently become a force on the internet. Its hard to remember, but back in 2014 and 15, people thought the Times was doomed that it would be replaced by BuzzFeed and Vice and Vox. Instead, the company has undergone a radical and sometimes painful public transformation, and ...
Mar 23, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Transcript available on Metacast This special episode dives deep on Taylor Swift, Ticketmaster, and how a handful of policy changes in the 1980s led to one firm so thoroughly dominating the live events business in the United States that Congress held a hearing in 2023, because Taylor Swift fans were so upset about antitrust law. That sentence is wild. Were going to unpack all of this with the help of some experts. Here we go. Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23409098 Credits: Thanks so much to everyone who talked to us an...
Mar 21, 2023•33 min•Transcript available on Metacast In this installment of our Centennial Series on companies that are over 100 years old, we are talking to Barnes & Noble CEO James Daunt. The last few decades have thrown some hurdles in Barnes & Nobles way, however. Far from being the monster that inspired the plot of the movie Youve Got Mail, its had to face down a new Goliath called Amazon and the general decline of big-box retail stores. After years of closures and declining revenues, Barnes & Noble was bought out by activist investors in 201...
Mar 16, 2023•1 hr 3 min•Transcript available on Metacast Gustav Sderstrm has worked at Spotify for a long time; his first big project was leading the launch of its mobile app back in 2009. That makes him the perfect company leader to talk to about Spotifys recent redesign, which introduces a visual, TikTok-like feed for discovering new content on the apps homepage. As his boss CEO Daniel Ek put it last week, its the biggest change Spotify has undergone since we introduced mobile. With the title of co-president and chief product and technology officer,...
Mar 14, 2023•1 hr 1 min•Transcript available on Metacast Intro: Steve Bandrowczak, the CEO of Xerox, an iconic company that got started all the way back in 1906 as a manufacturer of photo paper and is, of course, best known for pioneering the copy machine. Here in 2023, Xerox has moved well beyond paper. It now works with companies large and small to provide IT services: it optimizes workflows, manages data, automates parts of businesses, and yes, still fixes the printers. Steve insists theres still a lot in the world to print, and selling and servici...
Mar 09, 2023•1 hr 4 min•Transcript available on Metacast Pali Bhat joined Reddit from Google about a year ago hes actually Reddits first-ever chief product officer, which is pretty surprising considering that Reddit is a series of product experiences: the reading experience, the writing experience, and importantly, the moderation experience. One thing we always say on Decoder is that the real product of any social network is content moderation, and Reddit is maybe the best example of that: every subreddit is shaped by volunteer moderators who use the ...
Mar 07, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Transcript available on Metacast We taped this episode live at Hot Pod Summit. Thats our conference for the podcast industry. We have a whole newsletter for podcasters. Its called Hot Pod, written by our very own Ariel Shapiro. Hot Pod Summit is where we bring that community of creators, trendsetters and decision-makers together to explore the latest developments in podcasting, audiobooks, and more. It was a packed house and a great time. We ended the day by recording our first-ever live Decoder with Conal Byrne, CEO of iHeartM...
Feb 28, 2023•1 hr 9 min•Transcript available on Metacast Hello and welcome to Decoder. Im Nilay Patel, editor in chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas, and other problems. Today, I'm talking to Mitchell Baker, the chairwoman and CEO of Mozilla, the organization behind the Firefox browser, the Thunderbird email client, the Pocket newsreader, and a bunch of other interesting internet tools. Now as you all know, Decoder is secretly a podcast about org charts maybe not so secretly, and Mozillas structure is really interesting. Mozilla...
Feb 14, 2023•1 hr 10 min•Transcript available on Metacast Im coming to you from Microsofts campus in Redmond, where just a few hours ago, Microsoft announced that the next version of the Bing search engine would be powered by OpenAI, the company that makes ChatGPT. Theres also a new version of the Edge web browser with OpenAI chat tech in a window that can help you browse and understand web pages. The in-depth presentation showed how OpenAI running in Bing and Edge could radically increase your productivity. They demod it making a travel itinerary, pos...
Feb 08, 2023•24 min•Transcript available on Metacast