Decoder with Nilay Patel

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, Buzzfeed actually shut down Buzzfeed News, saying it just wasn’t making enough money, Facebook and the rest are all in on vertical video, and the chaos at Twitter means a lot of baseline media industry assumptions are now up for grabs. Ben and I talked about a lot – where do journalists build their brands now? Where does traffic even come from anymore? What’s next?

Of course, we talked about Semafor as well. Ben and his co-founder, Justin Smith, raised $25 million and launched a news website, newsletters, and events covering the US and sub-Saharan Africa, with plans to expand into other regions. I wanted to know what lessons from Buzzfeed Ben brought into Semafor and, honestly, how he’s thinking about building an audience instead of just trying to get traffic. 

This is a good one. The book’s great, too.

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23470662

Links:

Traffic by Ben Smith

What Colors Are This Dress? 

TikTok - The Verge

Is Substack Notes a ‘Twitter clone’? We asked CEO Chris Best - The Verge

MyPillow CEO’s free speech social network will ban posts that take the Lord’s name in vain - The Verge

Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News

Cambridge Analytica: understanding Facebook’s data privacy scandal - The Verge

28 Signs You Were Raised By Persian Parents In America

Here's The Powerful Letter The Stanford Victim Read To Her Attacker

More Than 180 Women Have Reported Sexual Assaults At Massage Envy

Macedonia’s Pro-Trump Fake News Industry Had American Links, And Is Under Investigation For Possible Russia Ties

Watching Silicon Valley Bank melt down from the front row, with Brex CEO Henrique Dubugras - Decoder, The Verge 

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

It was produced by Creighton DeSimone and Jackie McDermott with help from Hadley Robinson and it was edited by Callie Wright. 

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Editorial Director is Brooke Minters and our Executive Director is Eleanor Donovan.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 Bitcoin on something called the Lightning Network. David was previously at PayPal, and then he led Meta’s big payments effort that went nowhere, but he’s got a lot to say about where crypto and payments are right now.

Links:

Launching the Lightspark Platform

Facebook tells Congress how it thinks Libra should be regulated - The Verge

The leader of Facebook’s stalled cryptocurrency project is leaving the company - The Verge

Transcript:

https://www.theverge.com/e/23460507 

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Creighton DeSimone and Jackie McDermott and it was edited by Callie Wright.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Sr Audio Director is Andrew Marino and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.  

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 it’s got big ideas for making the steps from the van to your door more efficient as well with something called e-carts.

Katz says there’s a huge demand for delivery especially as online shopping keeps getting bigger, but the transportation network is at capacity, and you can’t just keep throwing more trucks and drivers on the road, or making city streets wider. His plan is to redesign the entire system to make it more efficient. So I wanted to know how he’s attacking that problem and making it manageable, all while getting buy-in from customers that won’t really accept delays or increased costs.

BrightDrop is a wholly owned subsidiary of General Motors, so I also wanted to know how that works, what he gets from being part of the big company, and which parts slow him down. Lots of classic Decoder stuff in this one.

Links:

GM’s electric delivery van just set a world record — with me riding shotgun - The Verge 

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23451134 

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

It was produced by Creighton DeSimone and Jackie McDermott with help from Hadley Robinson and it was edited by Callie Wright. 

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Editorial Director is Brooke Minters and our Executive Director is Eleanor Donovan.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 last week, Twitter was taking aggressive actions against Substack. At one point you couldn’t even like tweets with Substack links in them. At another point, clicking on a Substack link resulted in a warning message about the platform being unsafe. And finally, Twitter redirected all searches for the word Substack to “newsletter.” Musk claimed Substack was somehow downloading the Twitter database to bootstrap Substack Notes, which, well, I’m still not sure what that means, but I at least asked Chris what he thought that meant and whether he was doing it. 

It’s tempting to think of Substack like a rival platform to Twitter, but until the arrival of Substack Notes, it was much more like enterprise software. With Substack Notes, the company is in direct competition with social networks like Twitter. It’s shipping a consumer product that’s designed to be used by Substack readers. It is no longer just a software vendor; it’s a consumer product company. And that carries with it another set of content moderation concerns, that, after talking to Chris, I’m just not sure Substack is ready for. Like, I really don’t know. You’ll just have to listen to his answers — or really, non-answers — for yourself.

This is a wild one. I’m still processing it. Let me know what you think. Okay, Chris Best, CEO of Substack. Here we go.

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23445916

Links:

Can Substack CEO Chris Best build a new model for journalism? - The Verge

Now live for all: Substack Notes

Substack Content Guidelines

Welcome to the new Verge (re Quick Posts)

Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? - The Verge

Twitter’s newsletter tool is shutting down in less than a month - The Verge

Elon Musk on Twitter: "@BretWeinstein 1. Substack links were never blocked..."

Casey Newton - Substack Notes

Platformer on Substack   

Can we regulate social media without breaking the First Amendment? - The Verge

How to buy a social network, with Tumblr CEO Matt Mullenweg - The Verge

Newsletter platform Substack raises $65 mln in Andreessen Horowitz-led funding round | Reuters

Substack Drops Fund-Raising Efforts as Market Sours - The New York Times

Substack Wefunder

Substack Notes, Twitter Blocks Substack, Substack Versus Writers

How much money do we think Substack lost last year? - The Verge

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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, giving Dubugras a bird's-eye view of what was happening — and what was happening was not great for the banking system, especially in Silicon Valley. (Our own Liz Lopatto has been covering this in depth.)

I wanted to hear Dubugras' perspective on SVB both as a fintech CEO and a founder himself, whether he thought the crisis was rational or just a panic caused by group texts and easy-to-use mobile banking interfaces, what he thinks will happen to the startup ecosystem next, and how much of an opportunity all this was for Brex.

Dubugras is a young CEO. He just turned 27. He really surprised me with his depth here, and he will probably surprise some of you as well.

Okay, Henrique Dubugras, CEO of Brex. Here we go.

Links:

The tech industry moved fast and broke its most prestigious bank 

Liz Lopatto - The Verge 

A fintech CEO is trying to raise more than $1 billion to fund bridge loans for startups impacted by the Silicon Valley Bank collapse

Robinhood Users Say The Trading App Won’t Cash In Their Profitable Bets Against Silicon Valley Bank 

What Is A Neobank? – Forbes Advisor  

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23433504 

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

It was produced by Creighton DeSimone and Jackie McDermott and it was edited by Callie Wright. 

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Editorial Director is Brooke Minters and our Executive Director is Eleanor Donovan.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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, he’s started the process of restructuring the company, which is pure Decoder bait. 

He’s also dealt with some crises: He’s fended off an activist investor that wanted him to spin Wizards of the Coast out into a new company. The Magic community was upset that too many card sets were being released, including rare collector cards that could suddenly be bought by anybody who had enough money. Then, an attempt to change the open gaming license for Dungeons & Dragons led to a fan backlash, and Hasbro walked the entire plan back. We talked about these challenges, how he handled them, and what it means for toys and games to have such passionate fandoms. It really changes how Hasbro operates.

He’s also selling off part of eOne, the company’s TV and film production company — we get into why and how he decided to do that.

Chris is a lifelong gamer — you’ll hear him talk about that history several times. And he’s also keenly aware that toys and games have become an adults’ market as much as a kids’ one, and that changes the company’s business strategy. This is really a remarkable conversation: toys are a big, complex business.

Links:

Chris Cocks Is Hasbro’s Gamer in Chief

Chris Cocks Statement at Hasbro Investor Day

Hasbro strongly refutes claims it is ‘destroying’ Magic: The Gathering

Dungeons & Dragons finally addresses its new Open Gaming License

Hasbro CEO on D&D fiasco: ‘We misfired’ on the OGL but have ‘since course corrected’

Magic: The Gathering Becomes a Billion-Dollar Brand for Toymaker Hasbro

Hasbro Puts Newly Acquired TV Brand Entertainment One (eOne) Back Up For Sale

Transcript:

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Creighton DeSimone and Hadley Robinson and it was edited by Amanda Rose Smith. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Editorial Director is Brooke Minters. And our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 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 don’t like the people who run your server, or you think they’re moderating content too strictly, you can leave, and take your followers and social graph with you. Think about it like email and you’ll get it – if you don’t like Gmail, you can switch to something else, but you don’t have to quit email entirely as a concept.

Now if you are like me, you hear the words open-source and decentralized, and then the word CEO, and you think – wait, why does the decentralized open standard have a CEO? The whole point is that no single person or company is in charge, right? Well, welcome to the wild world of open-source governance. It’s a riot, my friends – you’re going to hear Eugen and I say the phrase benevolent dictator for life in dead seriousness, because that’s how a lot of these projects are run.

Of course, we also talk about money, and structure – Mastodon doesn’t make a lot of money, and Eugen is figuring out how to build a structure that scale past just a handful of people — but keep that in mind, actually. This tiny mostly volunteer labor of love might very well be the future of social networking, and, if you believe the hype about ActivityPub, might have some part in the future of the web. That’s pretty exciting, even if things are seem a little messy in the moment.

Links:

More than two million users have flocked to Mastodon since Elon Musk took over Twitter 

A beginner’s guide to Mastodon, the hot new open-source Twitter clone

Elon Musk

Benevolent dictator for life

Mastodon Social

Eugen Rochko (@[email protected])

XKCD   

Erase browser history: can AI reset the browser battle?

Twitter alternatives for the Musk-averse

We tried to run a social media site and it was awful

Denial-of-service attack

Transcript:

https://www.theverge.com/e/23422689 

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

It was produced by Creighton DeSimone and Jackie McDermott and it was edited by Callie Wright. 

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Editorial Director is Brooke Minters and our Executive Director is Eleanor Donovan.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 become a force on the internet. It’s 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 emerged as something closer to Netflix or Spotify – a subscription business with a huge investment in product and engineering. 

Meredith has led a lot of that change, and in particular, she’s led the charge in turning a Times subscription into much more than paying for news – NYT Cooking and Games are hit apps, and of course she bought Wordle last year in a bit of a coup.

We talked about that structure, how Meredith intends to appeal to a broader audience with all those products when the country is basically divided in half politically and one half doesn’t care for the Times at all, and about platforms and growth. And like all media organizations, the Times has a complex relationship with Google, so we talked about that, too.

Links:

Our Strategy | The New York Times Company

NYT CEO outlines plans to reach 15 million subscribers by 2027

Why the New York Times is buying the Athletic

Wordle has been bought by The New York Times, will ‘initially’ remain free for everyone to play 

The Economics at the Heart of the Times Union Standoff 

'Unstoppable innovator': The meteoric rise of Meredith Kopit Levien, the next New York Times CEO

Transcript:

https://www.theverge.com/e/23416720

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

It was produced by Creighton DeSimone and Hadley Robinson and it was edited by Amanda Rose Smith

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Editorial Director is Brooke Minters and our Executive Director is Eleanor Donovan.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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. We’re 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 and shared their valuable insights for this episode including Dean Budnik, Florian Ederer, Russ Tannen, and Sandeep Vaheesan. And special thanks to Makena Kelly and Jake Kastrenakes. 

This episode was written and reported by Jackie McDermott and Owen Grove. It was produced by Jackie McDermott, Owen Grove, and Creighton DeSimone with help from Jasmine Lewis. It was edited by Callie Wright. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 from being the monster that inspired the plot of the movie You’ve Got Mail, it’s 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 2019, who installed Daunt as CEO, and he’s managed to turn things around by doing two main things. 

First, he has decentralized operations of the stores, letting each store act like a local bookshop and giving his booksellers more control over what titles they sell and display. He immediately ended a system that allowed publishers to pay for special placement in bookstores, which he said corrupted the entire system in service of short-term profits. Second, he’s using Barnes & Noble’s scale to build a purchasing and distribution pipeline that serves as the rest of the book industry’s competitor to Amazon. 

We get into all of it — the culture wars, J.K. Rowling, book ban bills in states across the country, and how Barnes & Noble went from being the bully on the block to competing with Amazon.

Links

Hedge Fund Buys Barnes & Noble

Can Britain’s Top Bookseller Save Barnes & Noble? - The New York Times

How Barnes & Noble transformed its brand from corporate bully to lovable neighborhood bookstore

Barnes & Noble to expand, marking a new chapter for private equity

#BookTok: Is TikTok changing the publishing industry? 

How book lovers on TikTok are changing the publishing industry

Barnes & Noble History

Transcript:

https://www.theverge.com/e/23406145

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

It was produced by Creighton DeSimone and Hadley Robinson and it was edited by Jackson Bierfeldt. 

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Editorial Director is Brooke Minters and our Executive Director is Eleanor Donovan.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices