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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Wix CEO Avishai Abrahami is...

11.28.2023

Today I’m talking with Avishai Abrahami, the CEO of Wix. You might know Wix as a website builder. It’s a competitor to WordPress and Squarespace. Tons of sites across the web run on Wix. But the web is changing rapidly, ...

Decoder with Nilay Patel episodes:

11.28.2023 Wix CEO Avishai Abrahami isn’t worried AI will kill the web Today I’m talking with Avishai Abrahami, the CEO of Wix. You might know Wix as a website builder. It’s a competitor to WordPress and Squarespace. Tons of sites across the web run on Wix. But the web is changing rapidly, ...
11.20.2023 Chaos at OpenAI: What happened to Sam Altman, and what's next What actually happened at OpenAI in the last three days? Decoder host and Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel talks with Verge editors Alex Heath and David Pierce to break it down and try to work out what's next. Further reading: Sam ...
11.14.2023 Volvo CEO Jim Rowan thinks dropping CarPlay is a mistake Today, I’m talking to Jim Rowan, the CEO of Volvo Cars. Now, Jim’s only been at Volvo for a short time. He took over in 2022 after a decades-long career in the consumer electronics industry. Before Volvo, his two longest ...
11.07.2023 Barack Obama on AI, free speech, and the future of the internet We’ve got a good one today. I’m talking to former President Barack Obama about AI, social networks, and how to think about democracy as both of those things collide. I sat down with Obama last week at his offices in ...
10.31.2023 AI is on a collision course with the music industry. Reservoir's Golnar Khosrowshahi thinks there’s a way through it Today I'm talking with Golnar Khosrowshahi, the founder and CEO of Reservoir Media, a newer record label that I think looks a lot like the future of the music industry. As Golnar explains, Reservoir thinks of individual songs as assets, ...
10.24.2023 Harvard professor Lawrence Lessig on why AI and social media are causing a free speech crisis for the internet Today, I’m talking to internet policy legend Lawrence Lessig. He's been teaching law for more than 30 years, and is a defining expert on free speech and the internet — and something of a hero of mine, whose works I've ...
10.17.2023 Clearview AI and the end of privacy, with author Kashmir Hill Today, I’m talking to Kashmir Hill, a New York Times reporter whose new book, Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup’s Quest to End Privacy as We Know It, chronicles the story of Clearview AI, a company that’s built ...
10.12.2023 CEO David Baszucki's mission to make Roblox a billion-player platform Today we’re bringing you the last of our live-on-stage interviews from the 2023 Code Conference. Verge deputy editor Alex Heath sat down to chat with Roblox CEO David Baszucki. Roblox definitely started out as a kid thing, but the company ...
10.10.2023 Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe on ramping up R1T production and competing with the Cybertruck We’ve got another interview from the Code Conference today. My friend and co-host, CNBC’s Julia Boorstin, and I had a chance to talk with Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe. Rivian is a newer company — RJ started it in 2009, and ...
10.05.2023 Getty Images CEO Craig Peters has a plan to defend photography from AI Last week, when I was co-hosting the Code Conference, I got to talk with Getty Images CEO Craig Peters. The generative AI boom is a direct threat to Getty in many ways. For example, the company is suing Stability AI ...
10.03.2023 Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott on how AI and art will coexist in the future I co-hosted the Code Conference last week, and today’s episode is one of my favorite conversations from the show: Microsoft CTO and EVP of AI Kevin Scott. If you caught Kevin on Decoder a few months ago, you know that ...
09.30.2023 'The Android of agriculture': Monarch Tractor CEO Praveen Penmetsa on the future of farming We spent a lot of time here on Decoder talking about electric vehicles and the future of cars and we’re usually talking about passenger vehicles or maybe cargo vans. But there’s another huge industry that can also reap the benefits ...
09.29.2023 AMD CEO Lisa Su on the AI revolution Today, we’re bringing you something a little different. The Code Conference was this week, and we had a great time talking live onstage with all of our guests. We’ll be sharing a lot of these conversations here in the coming ...
09.29.2023 X CEO Linda Yaccarino defends Elon Musk, and herself, at Code 2023 Today, we have a special episode for you. The Code Conference wrapped up this week, and the finale included a rare interview from my Code co-host and CNBC correspondent Julia Boorstin with X CEO Linda Yaccarino. To say the sit-down ...
09.27.2023 Mark Zuckerberg on Threads, the future of AI, and Quest 3 What motivates Mark Zuckerberg these days? It's a question Decoder guest host Alex Heath posed at the end of his interview last week, after he and Zuckerberg had spent an hour talking about Threads, Zuckerberg's vision for how generative AI ...
09.19.2023 After 10 years covering startups, former TechCrunch EIC Matthew Panzarino tells us what's next TechCrunch is one of the most important trade publications in the world of tech and startups, and its annual Disrupt conference is where dozens of major companies have launched… and some have failed. Matt has been the editor-in-chief of TechCrunch ...
09.12.2023 More than Sally Ride: Loren Grush explains how NASA’s first women astronauts changed space The Six: The Untold Story of America's First Women Astronauts, from longtime space reporter and Verge alum Loren Grush, is out today. It’s been 40 years since Sally Ride became the first American woman in space — but she was ...
08.29.2023 Biometrics? Bring it on: Why Okta’s Jameeka Green Aaron wants passwords to go away Okta is a big company, a Wall Street SaaS darling. For most of us, it's the thing we have to log into 50 times a week just to get any work done. But from Okta's point of view, Jameeka Green ...
08.22.2023 Fandom runs some of the biggest communities on the web. Can CEO Perkins Miller keep them happy? 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 ...
08.15.2023 Land of the Giants: Tesla vs. The Competition 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 ...
08.08.2023 There's no AI without the cloud, says AWS CEO Adam Selipsky 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, ...
07.25.2023 Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? ActivityPub is back in the news, thanks to Meta’s Threads launch and Elon’s continued immolation of Twitter — now X. That makes this the perfect time to dig into the Decoder archives to hear what Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko thinks ...
07.18.2023 Why would anyone make a website in 2023? Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena has some ideas Today I’m talking to Anthony Casalena, the founder and CEO of Squarespace, the ubiquitous web hosting and design company. If you’re a podcast listener, you’ve heard a Squarespace ad. I was excited to talk to Anthony because it really feels ...
07.10.2023 Inside Google’s big AI shuffle — and how it plans to stay competitive, with Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis Today, I’m talking to Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google DeepMind, the newly created division of Google responsible for AI efforts across the company. Google DeepMind is the result of an internal merger: Google acquired Demis’ DeepMind startup in 2014 ...
06.27.2023 Why CEO David Baszucki is ready for Roblox to grow up 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 ...
06.21.2023 Gary Vaynerchuk is ‘petrified’ of Slack If you’ve spent more than two minutes somewhere on social media, you have probably come across Gary Vaynerchuk. For years I have wondered, is this just a character? Or is there a real Gary Vaynerchuk somewhere behind “GaryVee,” the social ...
06.13.2023 Private equity bought out your doctor and bankrupted Toys”R”Us. Here’s why that matters. 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 ...
06.06.2023 SiriusXM’s 360 strategy with CEO Jennifer Witz 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 ...
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 ...

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