Decoder with Nilay Patel

By The Verge

Technology Business

What's Decoder with Nilay Patel about?

Decoder is a show from The Verge about big ideas — and other problems. Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel talks to a diverse cast of innovators and policymakers at the frontiers of business and technology to reveal how they’re navigating an ever-changing landscape, what keeps them up at night, and what it all means for our shared future.

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Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott o...

05.23.2023

Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott oversees the company's AI efforts, including its big partnership with OpenAI and ChatGPT. Kevin and I spoke ahead of his keynote talk at Microsoft Build, the company’s annual developer conference, where he showed off the company’s ...

Decoder with Nilay Patel episodes:

05.23.2023 Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott on AI copilots, disagreeing with OpenAI, and Sydney making a comeback Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott oversees the company's AI efforts, including its big partnership with OpenAI and ChatGPT. Kevin and I spoke ahead of his keynote talk at Microsoft Build, the company’s annual developer conference, where he showed off the company’s ...
05.16.2023 Recode Media: Inside the AI Gold Rush Today – we’ve got a treat for you. We’re going to run a special episode from our friends over at Vox. Peter Kafka and his team just wrapped up a special 3-part series on AI. AI has captured the imagination ...
05.12.2023 Exclusive: Google’s Sundar Pichai talks Search, AI, and dancing with Microsoft Hello and welcome to Decoder. I’m Nilay Patel, editor in chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas, and other problems. We have a special episode today – I’m talking to Sundar Pichai, the CEO of ...
05.09.2023 I can't make products just for 41 year old tech founders," Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on taking it back to the basics 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 ...
05.02.2023 The social media age for news is over. Former BuzzFeed News editor Ben Smith on what’s next 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 ...
04.25.2023 Bitcoin is still the future of payments, says Lightspark CEO David Marcus We’ve got a special episode with Alex Heath, deputy editor at The Verge and a familiar host for Decoder listeners, and David Marcus, the CEO of Lightspark. That’s a company that just launched a service to make fast transactions using ...
04.18.2023 Brightdrop isn’t just selling electric vans — it's redesigning delivery 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 ...
04.13.2023 Is Substack Notes a ‘Twitter clone’? We asked CEO Chris Best. 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 ...
04.04.2023 Watching Silicon Valley Bank melt down from the front row with Brex CEO Henrique Dubugras 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 ...
03.31.2023 The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks 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 ...
03.28.2023 Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? Today I’m talking to Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko. Mastodon is the open-source, decentralized competitor to Twitter, and it’s where a lot of Twitter users have gone in this, our post-Elon era. The idea is that you don’t join a single ...
03.23.2023 How to play the long game, with New York Times CEO Meredith Kopit Levien Meredith Kopit Levien is the CEO of The New York Times, which is perhaps the most famous journalism organization in the world, and certainly one of America’s most complicated companies. The Times is 172 years old, and has only recently ...
03.21.2023 Taylor Swift vs. Ronald Reagan: The Ticketmaster story 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 ...
03.16.2023 ‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots In this installment of our Centennial Series on companies that are over 100 years old, we are talking to Barnes & Noble CEO James Daunt. The last few decades have thrown some hurdles in Barnes & Noble’s way, however. Far ...
03.14.2023 Why Spotify wants to look like TikTok, with co-president Gustav Söderström Gustav Söderström has worked at Spotify for a long time; his first big project was leading the launch of its mobile app back in 2009. That makes him the perfect company leader to talk to about Spotify’s recent redesign, which ...
03.09.2023 Can Xerox reinvent itself for another 100 years? 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 ...
03.07.2023 How Reddit is getting simpler — and dealing with TikTok, with chief product officer Pali Bhat Pali Bhat joined Reddit from Google about a year ago — he’s actually Reddit’s first-ever chief product officer, which is pretty surprising considering that Reddit is a series of product experiences: the reading experience, the writing experience, and importantly, the ...
02.28.2023 Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne We taped this episode live at Hot Pod Summit. That’s our conference for the podcast industry. We have a whole newsletter for podcasters. It’s called Hot Pod, written by our very own Ariel Shapiro. Hot Pod Summit is where we ...
02.14.2023 Erase browser history: can AI reset the browser battle? Hello and welcome to Decoder. I’m Nilay Patel, editor in chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas, and other problems. Today, I'm talking to Mitchell Baker, the chairwoman and CEO of Mozilla, the organization behind ...
02.08.2023 Microsoft thinks AI can beat Google at search — CEO Satya Nadella explains why I’m coming to you from Microsoft’s campus in Redmond, where just a few hours ago, Microsoft announced that the next version of the Bing search engine would be powered by OpenAI, the company that makes ChatGPT. There’s also a new ...
02.07.2023 How HBO’s creatives survived corporate chaos HBO started as an experiment. It was a way to get people to switch from getting TV over broadcast antennas to cable by offering events you’d otherwise need tickets to see: boxing, plays, movies. That’s where the name Home Box ...
01.31.2023 Inside the global battle over chip manufacturing A few weeks ago, President Biden was in the Netherlands, where he asked the Dutch government to restrict export from a company called ASML to China. ASML is the only company in the world that makes a specific machine needed ...
01.17.2023 Taylor Swift and the music industry's next $20 I have this theory that music is usually about five years ahead of the rest of media in terms of its relationship to tech—whether that’s new formats based on new tech, like vinyl to CDs; new business models like streaming; ...
01.10.2023 Breaking free from big tech and big content with authors Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin Last year I spoke with Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin about their new book, Chokepoint Capitalism. It’s a book about artists and technology and platforms, and how different kinds of distribution and creations tools create chokepoints for different companies to ...
12.20.2022 ‘We might be wrong, but we’re not confused’: how Tomer Cohen, chief product officer at LinkedIn, figures out what works best Tomer Cohen is the chief product officer at LinkedIn, and actually, I talked to Tomer twice. Here’s a little secret about Decoder: we do the interviews, and then often, the guest and I just keep chatting for a while. So ...
12.13.2022 How to buy a social network, with Tumblr CEO Matt Mullenweg We have to talk about Twitter, right? Elon Musk bought it. He’s making all these changes, and he’s realizing that content moderation decisions are quite complicated, especially when the stakes are high. But talking about Twitter in a vacuum seems ...
12.06.2022 Disney’s CEO drama explained, with Julia Alexander Today, we need to talk about Bob. Two Bobs, actually: Bob Iger, the former and now current CEO of Disney, and Bob Chapek, the man Iger handpicked as his replacement, who flamed out and was fired by the board, and ...
11.29.2022 How Bose compete with AirPods — and why it’s in more cars than ever, with CEO Lila Snyder Bose is one of the most recognizable audio brands in the world: it was famous for the Wave radio in the 80s, it invented noise cancellation, you can see its logo on NFL sidelines every Sunday, and of course there ...
11.22.2022 On with Kara Swisher: Can Chris Licht Turn CNN Around? Chris Licht faces an uphill battle at CNN. He got the CEO gig in the midst of a prickly merger between Warner Bros. and Discovery and right after the shocking exit of beloved long-time boss, Jeff Zucker. In his first ...
11.15.2022 Phil Spencer really wants you to know that native Call of Duty will stay on PlayStation Phil Spencer, CEO of Microsoft Gaming, is in charge of Xbox and all the game studios that Microsoft has acquired over the years. Phil came to talk to us hours before the European Commission announced an in-depth investigation into Microsoft’s ...
11.08.2022 Why Figma is selling to Adobe for $20 billion, with CEO Dylan Field Dylan Field is the co-founder and CEO of Figma, which makes a very popular design tool that allows designers and their collaborators to all work together right in a web browser. You know how multiple people can edit together in ...
11.03.2022 The mystery of Biden’s deadlocked FCC The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is currently short a commissioner, and the Biden Administration and Senate Democrats just can't seem to get that seat filled despite having nominated an amazingly qualified person. Her name is Gigi Sohn. The inability to ...
11.01.2022 Why Amazon VP Steve Boom just made the entire music catalog free with Prime I love covering the music industry, but over the past 10 years I’ve found that it’s one of the most challenging things to make accessible to a wide audience. See, my theory is that the music industry is like five ...
10.27.2022 Never pay the ransom — a cybersecurity CEO explains why Steve Cagle is the CEO of Clearwater Compliance, which is a cybersecurity firm focused on the healthcare industry. Basically, they lock down hospital computer systems, which contain a huge amount of personal data, and are so mission critical that ransomware ...
10.25.2022 The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers – here's how it works Today I'm talking to Prashanth Chandrasekar the CEO of Stack Overflow – a highly specialized kind of social network, with a really unique business model. If you don't know Stack Overflow is a major part of the modern software development ...
10.18.2022 Why Signal won’t compromise on encryption, with president Meredith Whittaker Meredith Whittaker is the president of Signal, the popular messaging app that offers encrypted communication. You might recognize Meredith’s name from 2018 when she was an AI researcher at Google and one of the organizers of the Google walkout. Now ...
10.11.2022 Mark Zuckerberg on the Quest Pro, future of the metaverse, and more Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg joined The Verge’s deputy editor Alex Heath for an in-depth conversation about the company’s new high-end, mixed reality headset, the $1,499 Quest Pro, and why he isn’t backing down from building the metaverse. Zuckerberg and Heath ...
10.04.2022 Pat Gelsinger came back to turn Intel around – here’s how it’s going Today I'm talking to Pat Gelsinger, the CEO of Intel. I’ve been excited to have this conversation for a very long time – ever since Pat took over as CEO a little over a year and a half ago. After ...
09.27.2022 How Arm conquered the chip market without making a single chip, with CEO Rene Haas One of the more interesting quirks of the modern tech world is that there’s a really important company at the center of it all that doesn’t make anything. But its work is in your phone, in your TV, your car ...
09.20.2022 Can software simplify the supply chain? Ryan Petersen thinks so Ryan Petersen, is the CEO of Flexport, ac ompany that builds software that integrates all the different shipping vendor systems you might run into as you try to get a product from a factory in China to a consumer in ...
09.13.2022 Everyone knows what YouTube is. Few know how it really works. Today, I’m talking to Mark Bergen, a reporter at Bloomberg and the author of a new book about YouTube called. Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube’s Chaotic Rise to World Domination. YouTube has always been fascinating to me because it’s such ...
09.06.2022 Rewind: How big companies kill ideas — and how to fight back, with Tony Fadell This episode was originally published on May 3rd, 2022. Tony Fadell was instrumental in the development of the iPod and iPhone at Apple and then co-founded Nest Labs, which kicked off the consumer smart home market with its smart thermostat ...
08.30.2022 How the head of Facebook plans to compete with TikTok and win back Gen Z We’ve got a special episode of Decoder today – an interview between Verge deputy editor Alex Heath and Meta’s Tom Alison, the head of Facebook. Alex is the co-host of the newest season of Vox Media’s podcast Land of the ...
08.23.2022 Advertising is everywhere. Wieden+Kennedy CEO Neal Arthur explains how it works One thing that strikes me, in all these episodes of Decoder, is how little any of us really pay attention to the advertising industry, and how deeply connected it is to almost other every modern business. After all you can ...
08.16.2022 How Selena Gomez's Rare Beauty goes viral, with CMO Katie Welch Katie Welch is the Chief Marketing Officer of Rare Beauty — the beauty products company founded by superstar musician and actress Selena Gomez. Rare Beauty sells its products online and in Sephora retail stores, and importantly, Katie does almost no ...
08.09.2022 The risky new way of building mobile broadband networks In 2019, the Trump administration brokered a deal allowing TMobile to buy Sprint as long as it helped Dish Network stand up a new 5G network to keep the number of national wireless carriers at 4 and preserve competition in ...
08.02.2022 Why Hank Green can’t quit YouTube for TikTok Today I’m talking to Hank Green. Hank doesn’t need much introduction. In fact, he invited himself on Decoder to talk about YouTube's partner program, which shares ad revenue between YouTube and the people making videos. The split is 55/45 in ...
07.26.2022 Rent the Runway CEO Jennifer Hyman thinks clothing rental is inflation-proof Today we’re talking to Jennifer Hyman, co-founder and CEO of Rent the Runway. Rent the Runway is a a pretty simple idea: it’s a clothing rental and subscription business for women which launched in 2008. The basic idea is pretty ...
07.19.2022 Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball All right, let’s talk about the metaverse. You probably can’t stop hearing about it. It’s in startup pitches, in earnings reports, some companies are creating metaverse divisions, and Mark Zuckerberg changed Facebook’s name to Meta to signal that he’s shifting ...
07.14.2022 Land of the Giants: Facebook gets a facelift This week, we're sharing the first episode of Land of the Giants: The Facebook/ Meta Disruption. Long before Mark Zuckerberg renamed Facebook Meta and made an unprecedented pivot into the metaverse, he invented a feature that turned Facebook into a ...

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