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SiriusXM’s 360 strategy with CEO Jennifer Witz
6 juni 2023 · 1 uur 6 min
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 ever more complex and computer-like, the Sirius experience has to keep up. On top of that, the state of car software is a mess. GM announced it won’t support Apple CarPlay in new EVs. Other companies are using various versions of Android. Tesla has its own platform. And Sirius has to support all of it with applications that compete with Big Tech companies, all while continuing to integrate the satellite hardware into the cars themselves — on top of launching satellites on SpaceX rockets.
Links:
After layoffs, SiriusXM looks to star-studded podcasts
What Is SiriusXM with 360L? A Breakdown of the New Audio Platform
SiriusXM CEO Calls Audio Ad Sales Market “Tough”
Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23514318
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Jackie McDermott and Raghu Manavalan, and it was edited by Callie Wright.
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 Lees meer -
Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott on AI copilots, disagreeing with OpenAI, and Sydney making a comeback
23 mei 2023 · 1 uur 7 min
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 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 Terminal.
Basically, if there’s a text box, Microsoft thinks AI can help you fill it out, and Microsoft has a long history of assistance like this. You might remember Clippy from the ’90s. Well, AI Super Clippy is here.
Microsoft is building these Copilots in collaboration with OpenAI, and Kevin manages that partnership. I wanted to ask Kevin why Microsoft decided to partner with a startup instead of building the AI tech internally, where the two companies disagree, how they resolve any differences, and what Microsoft is choosing to build for itself instead of relying on OpenAI. Kevin controls the entire GPU budget at Microsoft. I wanted to know how he decides to spend it.
We also talked about what happened when Bing tried to get New York Times columnist Kevin Roose to leave his wife. Like I said, this episode has a little bit of everything. Okay. Kevin Scott, CTO and executive vice president of AI at Microsoft. Here we go. Lees meerLinks:
Microsoft Build - The Verge
Kevin Scott on Vergecast in 2020
GitHub Copilot gets a new ChatGPT-like assistant to help developers write and fix code - The Verge
Hackers made Iran's nuclear computers blast AC/DC - The Verge
Microsoft resurrects Clippy again after brutally killing him off in Microsoft Teams - The Verge
Google’s Sundar Pichai talks Search, AI, and dancing with Microsoft - The Verge
Congress hates Big Tech — but it still seems optimistic about AI - The Verge
Hollywood writers to strike over low wages caused by streaming boom. - The Verge
Th… -
Recode Media: Inside the AI Gold Rush
16 mei 2023 · 50 min
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. Lees meer
AI has captured the imagination of Silicon Valley. In fact, in the last few months, I’ve 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 plan to re-design the world with it, and why are a bunch of smart people very, very worried?
In this episode, they’re diving into the gold rush around AI. Figuring out what’s just hype, meeting the VCs that are hungry to invest, and finding out if there will be room for startups, or if the giants will just own it all.
If you’re a Decoder listener, this is right up your alley. Thanks to Peter Kafka and Vox.
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Exclusive: Google’s Sundar Pichai talks Search, AI, and dancing with Microsoft
12 mei 2023 · 42 min
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. Lees meer
We have a special episode today – I’m talking to Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google and Alphabet. We hung out the day after Google IO, the company’s big developer conference, where Sundar introduced new generative AI features in virtually all of the company’s products.
It’s an important moment for Google, which invented a lot of the core technology behind the current AI moment – the company is quick to point out the T in chatGPT stands for Transformer, the large language model tech first which was invented at Google. But openAI and others have been first to market with generative AI products — and openAI in particular has partnered with Microsoft on a new version of Bing that feels like the first real competitor to Google search in a long time.
So I wanted to know what Sundar thinks of this moment – and in particular, what he thinks of the future of search, which is the heart of Google’s business. Web search right now can be pretty hit or miss, right? There’s a lot of weird content farms out there, and AI-based search might be able to just answer questions in a more natural way. But that means remaking the web, and really, remaking Google.
Sundar is already going down that path – he just reorganized Google and Alphabet’s AI teams, moving a company called DeepMind inside Google and merging it with the Google Brain AI group to form a new unit called Google DeepMind. I can’t resist an org chart question, so we talked about why he made that call – and how he made it.
We also talked about Sundar’s vision for Google – where he wants it to go, and what’s driving his ambition to take the company into the future.
This is a jam-packed episode – we talked about a lot, and I didn’t even get to Google’s AI metadata plans, or what’s going on with RCS and Android. Maybe next time.
Links:
The nine biggest announcements from Google I/O 2023
W… -
I can't make products just for 41 year old tech founders," Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on taking it back to the basics
9 mei 2023 · 1 uur 4 min
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, Chesky’s back in the office several days a week, and they’re two years into that new structure. So that’s pure Decoder bait. I wanted to ask Chesky how that restructure is going. Has it really made the company more agile and cohesive like he hoped? Has the bet on working from anywhere paid off? Lees meerLinks:
Brian Chesky's tweet announcing the summer 2023 launch
Microsoft thinks AI can beat Google at search — CEO Satya Nadella explains why
Samsung caught faking zoom photos of the Moon
Why the future of work is the future of travel, with Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky
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 -
The social media age for news is over. Former BuzzFeed News editor Ben Smith on what’s next
2 mei 2023 · 1 uur 11 min
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. Lees meer
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 America… -
Bitcoin is still the future of payments, says Lightspark CEO David Marcus
25 april 2023 · 51 min
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. Lees meer
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 VergeTranscript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/23460507Credits:
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 -
Brightdrop isn’t just selling electric vans — it's redesigning delivery
18 april 2023 · 1 uur 11 min
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. Lees meer
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 VergeTranscript: 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
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Is Substack Notes a ‘Twitter clone’? We asked CEO Chris Best.
13 april 2023 · 1 uur 8 min
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
Substa… Lees meer -
Watching Silicon Valley Bank melt down from the front row with Brex CEO Henrique Dubugras
4 april 2023 · 1 uur 3 min
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. Lees meerLinks:
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 AdvisorTranscript: 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 podc… -
The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks
31 maart 2023 · 1 uur 11 min
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. Lees meerLinks:
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) B… -
Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter?
28 maart 2023 · 1 uur 17 min
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. Lees meerLinks:
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 (@Gargron@mastodon.social)
XKCD
Erase browser history: can AI reset the browser battle?
Twitter alt… -
How to play the long game, with New York Times CEO Meredith Kopit Levien
23 maart 2023 · 1 uur 2 min
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. Lees meerLinks:
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 CEOTranscript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/23416720Credits:
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… -
Taylor Swift vs. Ronald Reagan: The Ticketmaster story
21 maart 2023 · 31 min
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. Lees meer
Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/23409098Credits:
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 -
‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots
16 maart 2023 · 1 uur 3 min
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. Lees meerLinks
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 HistoryTranscript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/23406145Credits:
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 … -
Why Spotify wants to look like TikTok, with co-president Gustav Söderström
14 maart 2023 · 59 min
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 introduces a visual, TikTok-like feed for discovering new content on the app’s homepage. As his boss CEO Daniel Ek put it last week, it’s “the biggest change Spotify has undergone since we introduced mobile.”
With the title of co-president and chief product and technology officer, Söderström is responsible for not only how Spotify looks and feels but also all the AI work happening behind the scenes to power its increasingly important recommendations. According to Söderström, it turns out that improving those recommendations is actually at the heart of the big redesign. “I think companies that don’t have an efficient user interface for a machine learning world are not going to be able to leverage machine learning,” he told Alex Heath on the newest episode of Decoder. Lees meerLinks:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napster
Spotify is laying off 6 percent of its global workforce, CEO announces
Spotify’s new design turns your music and podcasts into a TikTok feed
Alex Heath's Tweet
Functional versus Unit Organizations
Two-Pizza TeamsTranscript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/23402123Credits:
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 -
Can Xerox reinvent itself for another 100 years?
9 maart 2023 · 1 uur 4 min
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 there’s still a lot in the world to print, and selling and servicing printers continues to be where Xerox begins its relationships with most customers. And fixing printers is getting high tech: Steve is excited about his new AR app that walks you through getting the copy machine working again so you don’t have to wait for a technician to come fix it.
We also talked about the future of Xerox’s legendary Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC, whether Xerox wants more consolidation, and we even spitball some ideas about how to get Gen Z excited about printers. Lees meerLinks:
John Visentin, Xerox C.E.O., Dies at 59
Xerox Ousts CEO In Deal With Icahn
Carl Icahn Makes Case for Xerox-HP Union
Xerox abandons $35 billion hostile bid for HP
Apple Lisa: the ‘OK’ Computer
About PARC, a Xerox CompanyTranscript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/23394156Credits:
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 -
How Reddit is getting simpler — and dealing with TikTok, with chief product officer Pali Bhat
7 maart 2023 · 1 uur
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 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 tools Reddit builds for them. So Pali has a big job bringing all these products together and making them better, all while trying to grow Reddit as a platform. Lees meer
This was a really deep conversation, and it touched on a lot of big Decoder themes. I think you’re going to like it. Okay, Pali Bhat, the chief product officer of Reddit. Here we go.
Links:
New features aimed at making Reddit easier to use: an update on our product priorities focussed on simplification
Reddit’s new features include a TikTok-style video feed
Reddit is bringing back r/Place, its April Fools’ Day art experiment
How to buy a social network, with Tumblr CEO Matt Mullenweg
Microsoft thinks AI can beat Google at search — CEO Satya Nadella explains why
AI-generated fiction is flooding literary magazines — but not fooling anyoneTranscript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/23390325Credits:
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 -
Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne
28 februari 2023 · 1 uur 7 min
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 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 iHeartMedia’s digital audio group. Conal oversees podcasting at a giant radio company, and his group accounts for a quarter of iHeart’s revenue, which was $1 billion last quarter alone. His team makes some of the biggest podcasts around, with huge talent like Will Ferrell, Shonda Rhimes, and Charlamagne tha God, who you’ll hear Conal talk about quite a lot.
Conal and iHeart Digital earned that success by doing some unconventional things. Whereas other big podcasting players like Spotify and Apple have tried to boost revenue through subscriptions or platform exclusivity, Conal shunned those approaches and said he’s going for big audience reach, made possible in part by his ability to run ads and even shows on iHeart’s huge network of traditional radio stations.
But that maverick approach has included some controversial steps as well. Last year, Verge alumni and Bloomberg reporter Ashley Carman reported that iHeart worked with a firm called Jun Group to essentially buy podcast downloads through video games. To many in the industry, that seemed pretty disingenuous. So of course I asked Conal about that and lots more. He was a great guest, super game to answer the questions, especially in front of a live audience. Lees meerLinks:
iHeartMedia Buys Stuff Media for $55 Million - WSJ
Podcasters Are Buying Millions of Listeners Through Mobile-Game Ads
Cost Per Thousand (CPM) Definition and Its Role in Marketing
Spotify reportedly paid $200 million for Joe Rogan’s podcast - The Verge
Chris Dixon t… -
Erase browser history: can AI reset the browser battle?
14 februari 2023 · 1 uur 8 min
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. Lees meer
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 Mozilla’s structure is really interesting. Mozilla itself is a nonprofit foundation, but it contains within it something called the Mozilla Corporation, which actually makes Firefox and the rest. Mitchell is the chairwoman of the foundation, and the CEO of the corporation. And the Mozilla Corporation, which they charmingly call MoCo, can make a profit - or it can least be taxed, which is an important distinction you’ll hear Mitchell talk about.
I bring this up because Mozilla has been around since 1994 in a variety of structures and business models – it started as a company called Netscape, and Mitchell was one of the first employees in the legal department. Netscape’s product was Netscape Navigator, the first commercial web browser, which of course changed the consumer internet and scared Microsoft so much it did a bunch of anticompetitive things that led to the famous antitrust case. In the meantime, Netscape got sold to AOL, and along the way Mitchell led the somewhat renegade Mozilla Project inside the company which eventually lead to Mozilla the non-profit foundation that eventually launched Firefox. It’s a lot!
But now Mitchell is trying to live up to Mozilla’s nonprofit ideals of protecting the open internet while still trying to compete and cooperate with tech giants like Apple and Google. And these are complicated relationships: Google still accounts for a huge percentage of Mozilla’s revenue – it pays hundreds of millions of dollars to be the default search engine in Firefox. And Apple restricts what brows…
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Microsoft thinks AI can beat Google at search — CEO Satya Nadella explains why
8 februari 2023 · 24 min
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 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 demo’d it making a travel itinerary, posting to LinkedIn, and rewriting code to work in a different programming language.
After the presentation, I was able to get some time with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. Nadella has been very bullish on AI. He’s previously talked about AI as the next major computing platform. I wanted to talk about this next step in AI, the partnership with OpenAI, and why he thought now was the best time to go after Google search.
This is a short interview, but it’s a good one. Okay, Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft. Here we go. Lees meerWatch this interview as a video
Microsoft announces new Bing and Edge browser powered by upgraded ChatGPT AI
All the news from Microsoft’s February AI eventTranscript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/23354035Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today's episode was produced by Creighton DeSimone, Jackie McDermott, Vjeran Pavic and Becca Farsace 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 -
How HBO’s creatives survived corporate chaos
7 februari 2023 · 1 uur 6 min
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 Office comes from.
But it grew from there in surprising ways: HBO was a major innovator in satellite distribution, in working with cable operators around the country, and of course in programming. The company’s taste and style has influenced and shaped culture for a generation now. And importantly, HBO did it without any real data: the cable companies owned all the subscribers, so HBO made decisions through instinct and experience.
The amazing thing about HBO is that it has stayed true to itself through an absolutely tumultuous set of ownership changes and strategy shifts. If you’re a Decoder listener you know about the chaos of AT&T and HBO Max and the sale to Discovery to create Warner Brothers Discovery, but it’s so much twistier than that.
I talked through all of those twists with Felix Gillette and John Koblin, authors of the terrific book It’s Not TV: The Spectacular Rise, Revolution, and Future of HBO. Felix and John also peeled back the curtain on your favorite HBO shows from Sex and the City to Game of Thrones.
Before we get into the episode, I have to do our usual set of disclosures: I’m a Netflix executive producer. We made a Netflix show called The Future Of. You should watch it. I’m hopelessly biased in favor of the show we made. Also, Vox Media has a minority investment from Comcast. They don’t like me very much. And I worked at AOL Time Warner. I quit to start The Verge.
Ok that’s that. Let’s get into the interview—it’s a good one. Lees meerTranscript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23352141
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… -
Inside the global battle over chip manufacturing
31 januari 2023 · 51 min
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 to make the most advanced chips. Apple couldn’t make iPhone chips without this one machine from the Netherlands’ biggest company. ASML doesn’t just shape the Dutch economy—it shapes the entire world economy. How did that happen?
Chris Miller, Tufts professor and author of Chip War: The Fight For The World’s Most Critical Technology walked me through a lot of this, along with some deep dives into geopolitics and the absolutely fascinating chip manufacturing process. This one has everything: foreign policy, high powered lasers, hotshot executives, monopolies, the fundamental limits of physics, and, of course, Texas. Here we go. Lees meerLinks:
US issues sweeping restrictions on chip sales to China
Japan and the Netherlands join US with tough chip controls on China
Pat Gelsinger came back to turn Intel around — here’s how it’s goingTranscript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/23342471Credits:
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 -
Taylor Swift and the music industry's next $20
17 januari 2023 · 1 uur 22 min
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; or simply being disrupted by new kinds of artists who use new forms of promotion like TikTok in unexpected ways. I’ve always thought that if you can wrap your head around what’s happening to the music industry, you can pretty much see the future of TV or movies or the news or whatever it is, because the music industry just moves that fast. Lees meer
I was talking about this with my friend Charlie Harding, the co-host of Switched on Pop, and he said that he thinks the upcoming Taylor Swift Eras Tour is itself the end of an era in music — that the age of cheap streaming services is coming to an inevitable conclusion, and that something has to change in order for industry to sustain itself in the future.
So, in this episode, Charlie and I walk through a brief history of the music business—which, despite its ever-changing business models, is permanently trying to find something to sell you for $20 whether that’s the music itself, all-access streaming, merch, and even NFTs—using Taylor Swift as a case study. We map her big moves against the business of music over time to try to see if this really is the end of an era. And maybe more importantly, to try and figure out if the music industry can sustain and support artists who are not Taylor Swift, because streaming, all by itself, definitely cannot.
Links:
Switched on Pop
Charlie’s first appearance on Decoder: Good 4 who? How music copyright has gone too far - The Verge
Why Amazon VP Steve Boom just made the entire music catalog free with Prime - The Verge
Spotify launching in the US at 8AM tomorrow, open to all pre-registered users - The Verge
Metallica sued Napster 15 years ago today - The Verge
Taylor Swift calls Apple Music free trial 'shocking, disappointing' in open letter - The Verge
Taylor Swift versu… -
Breaking free from big tech and big content with authors Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin
10 januari 2023 · 1 uur 28 min
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 capture value that might otherwise go to artists and creators.. In other words, it’s a lot of Decoder stuff.
As we were prepping this episode, the Decoder team realized it previews a lot of things we’re going to talk about in 2023: antitrust law. Ticketmaster. Spotify and the future of the music industry. Amazon and the book industry. And, of course, being a creator trying to make a living on all these platforms.
This episode is longer than normal, but it was a really great conversation and I'm glad we are sharing it with you. Lees meerLinks:
What is Mixer, Ninja’s new exclusive streaming home?
Ninja returns to Twitch
This was Sony Music's contract with SpotifyTranscript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/23311918Credits:
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 -
‘We might be wrong, but we’re not confused’: how Tomer Cohen, chief product officer at LinkedIn, figures out what works best
20 december 2022 · 1 uur 16 min
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 after my first interview with Tomer, we were hanging out, talking about the perpetual battles between engineers, product managers, and designers. And he said something that completely jumped out at me:
“We might be wrong, but we’re not fucking confused.”
This isn’t a totally new line — it’s been floating around for a while, you can Google it — but you know I love an f-bomb, and honestly, it’s one of the most simple and clarifying things a manager can say, especially when managing across large teams. So I asked Tomer to come back and really dig in on that idea.
On top of that, we’ve been talking a lot about running social networks lately, and LinkedIn is a fascinating social network because it doesn’t have the same engagement-based success metrics as other social platforms like Twitter and Instagram. Tomer doesn’t care about time spent on LinkedIn; the platform is designed to be successful when people get new jobs. That means his ideas for features and user experiences are just really different. Lees meerLinks:
Employment Situation Summary (Jobs Report)
December Workforce Report 2022 (LinkedIn)
Vision to values flowchart
ChatGPT proves AI is finally mainstream — and things are only going to get weirder
LinkedIn buys California-based SaaS learning platform
How big companies kill ideas — and how to fight back, with Tony Fadell
RAPID decision makingTranscript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/23281360Credits:
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 podcastchoi… -
How to buy a social network, with Tumblr CEO Matt Mullenweg
13 december 2022 · 1 uur 41 min
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 wrong. There are lots of other social networks and community-based products, and they all have basically the same problems: some technical (you have to run the service), some political (you have to comply with various laws and platform regulations around the world), and some social (you have to get millions of users to post for free while making sure what they post is good stuff and not bad stuff).
So, we’re doing something a little different this week. First, I’m talking to Matt Mullenweg, who is the CEO of Automattic, which owns WordPress, the blog hosting platform, and Tumblr, the social network, which he purchased from Verizon in 2019. Then, Verge deputy editor Alex Heath and I are going to break down a bunch of what Matt told me and apply it to Twitter to see what we can learn.
Okay, Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Tumblr, followed by Alex Heath. Here we go. Lees meerLinks:
How WordPress and Tumblr are keeping the internet weird
GPL - General Public License
Verizon is selling Tumblr to WordPress’ owner
Kanye West suspended from Twitter after posting a swastika
‘Martin Scorsese’s lost film’ Goncharov (1973), explained
Yahoo acquires Tumblr in $1.1 billion cash deal, promises 'not to screw it up'
Verizon is selling Tumblr to WordPress’ owner
Turnaround Definition
Welcome to Tumblr. Now Go Away.
Work With Us / Twitter – Automattic
Tumblr will sell you two useless blue check marks for $8
Elon Musk is laying off even more Twitter workers
Welcome to hell, Elon
Why “Go Nuts, Show Nuts” Doesn't Work in 2022
How America turned against the First Amendment
About – SHOSHANA ZUBOFF
A Framework for Moderation
First Amendment - Freedom of Religion, Speech, Press, Assembly, and Petition | Constitution Center
America’s Favorite Flimsy Pretext for Limi… -
Disney’s CEO drama explained, with Julia Alexander
6 december 2022 · 1 uur
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 then, on November 20th, was replaced by Bob Iger. Bobs, man.
The heart of this whole thing is total Decoder bait. It’s a story about how to structure a company like Disney. Then you add in the complexity of the shift to streaming, the future of TV and movies generally, and the gigantic reputation of a character like Bob Iger, who many people think could plausibly run for president. There’s just a lot going on here.
Whenever I need to talk Disney, media, and Bobs, I call one person: Julia Alexander, director of strategy at Parrot Analytics and a former reporter at The Verge. Julia pays a lot of attention to the streaming giants, she’s sourced inside all the companies battling for our attention, and she has a lot to say about the Bobs. Lees meerLinks:
Bob Iger steps back in as Disney CEO, replacing Bob Chapek
Reed Hastings on Twitter
Disney+ launch lineup: Every movie and TV show available to stream on day one - The Verge
Bob Iger steps down as Disney CEO, replaced by Bob Chapek - The Verge
Disney streaming chief Kevin Mayer resigns to become TikTok CEO - The Verge
Disney Plus surpasses 100 million subscribers - The Verge
Meta announces huge job cuts affecting 11,000 employees - The Verge
Netflix's $6.99 per month ad tier is now live
Stranger Things - The Verge
Disney’s major reorganization is good news for anyone who loves Disney Plus - The Verge
Functional Structure: Advantages and Disadvantages | Indeed.com
Pros and Cons of Implementing a Divisional Structure | Indeed.com
Disney Proposal to Restructure, on McKinsey’s Advice, Triggered Uproar From Creative Executives - WSJ
Disney Shows the Limits of Streaming - WSJ
Disney Erases Almost All Its Pandemic Gains After Earnings Miss
‘Strange World’: Beautiful to look at, but not much below the surface - The Washington … -
How Bose compete with AirPods — and why it’s in more cars than ever, with CEO Lila Snyder
29 november 2022 · 1 uur 17 min
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 are the popular consumer products like the QuietComfort headphones that reviewers like Chris Welch here at The Verge rate as some of the best in the game. Bose is in tons of cars as well: audio systems in GM, Honda, Hyundai, Porsche, and more are developed and tuned by Bose.
Bose was founded in 1964 by Dr. Amar Bose, who donated a majority of the shares of the company to MIT, where he was a professor. That means to this day, Bose is a private company with no pressure to go public. However, Bose still has to compete against big tech in talent, products, and compatibility.
So today I’m talking to Bose CEO Lila Snyder about Bose’s dependence on platform vendors like Apple and Google, how she thinks about standards like Bluetooth, and where she thinks she can compete and win against AirPods and other products that get preferential treatment on phones. Lees meerLinks:
Bose QuietComfort Earbuds II review: noise cancellation domination
How Amar Bose used research to build better speakers
List of Bose shelf stereos
Hearing Aids | FDA
Digital signal processor
Functional organization
Bose names its first female CEO as wait continues for new products
Amar Bose ’51 makes stock donation to MIT
Meta announces huge job cuts affecting 11,000 employees
Amazon mass layoffs will reportedly ax 10,000 people this week
Elon Musk demands Twitter employees commit to ‘extremely hardcore’ culture or leave
The iPhone 7 has no headphone jack
Bluetooth Special Interest Group
Qualcomm Partners with Meta and Bose
Bose gets into hearing aid business with new FDA-cleared SoundControl hearing aids
Over-the-counter hearing aids could blur the line with headphones
New Bose-Lexie Hearing Aid to Enter the Over-the-Counter Market
Lexie Partners with Bose to Offer Lexie B1 Powered by Bose Hearing Aids
B… -
On with Kara Swisher: Can Chris Licht Turn CNN Around?
22 november 2022 · 1 uur 4 min
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 six months, he’s shut down CNN+, ousted Brian Stelter, and shuffled anchors around, including Don Lemon and Jake Tapper. This week, the network chief held an internal town hall meeting where he faced a staff of thousands and discussed upcoming layoffs. Shortly afterwards, he sat down with Kara — who grilled him, of course.
She asks Licht whether he has any real actual power or if he’s simply executing orders from Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav — who is in search of cuts, as the company stares down the barrel at $50 billion in debt — and billionaire board member, John Malone, who has said he’d like to see more “centrist” programming from CNN. They discuss Licht’s vision for the newsroom, his plan to build trust with journalists who fear losing jobs, and how CNN will cover Donald Trump during the 2024 election.
Before the interview, Kara and Nayeema discuss the challenges facing journalism in an era of disinformation. Stay tuned for Kara’s closing rant on “citizen journalism” and Elon’s latest broadside against the press.
You can find Kara and Nayeema on Twitter @karaswisher and @nayeema.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Lees meer -
Phil Spencer really wants you to know that native Call of Duty will stay on PlayStation
15 november 2022 · 1 uur 3 min
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 proposed 68.7 billion dollar acquisition of Activision Blizzard, which makes the enormous Call of Duty series, as well as Candy Crush on phones.
So I had the chance to ask Phil: Will he make the concessions that regulators want in order to close this deal? And is the deal really just about Call of Duty, or something else? Is Microsoft committed to keep Call of Duty available on Playstation?
Phil’s a candid guy. He’s been on Decoder before. I always enjoy talking to him, and this was a fun one. Lees meerLinks:
Microsoft’s Phil Spencer on the new Xbox launch - The Verge
Microsoft to acquire Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion - The Verge
Why Microsoft bought Bethesda for $7.5 billion
Microsoft announces big, multistudio push to create more Xbox exclusives
Bethesda’s Starfield and Redfall have been delayed to 2023
Tech antitrust pioneer Lina Khan will officially lead the FTC
Sony says Microsoft’s Call of Duty offer was ‘inadequate on many levels’
Microsoft: Xbox game streaming console is ‘years away'
This is Microsoft’s Xbox game streaming device
Google is shutting down Stadia in January 2023 - The Verge
Razer’s Edge is one sharp-looking cloud gaming Android handheld
Logitech G Cloud Gaming Handheld review: terminally online
Steam Deck review: it’s not ready
Steam Deck, one month later
Tech Leaders Discuss the Metaverse’s Future | WSJ Tech Live 2022
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on the business of Windows
Microsoft partners with Meta to bring Teams, Office, Windows, and Xbox to VR
EU opens ‘in-depth investigation’ into Microsoft’s Activision Blizzard acquisitionTranscript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/23223230Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
It was produced by Creighton DeSimone a… -
Why Figma is selling to Adobe for $20 billion, with CEO Dylan Field
8 november 2022 · 1 uur 7 min
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 Google Docs? Figma is that for design work. We just redesigned The Verge; we used Figma extensively throughout that process.
So for years, people have been waiting on the inevitable Figma vs. Adobe standoff since Figma was such a clear upstart competitor to Photoshop and Illustrator and the rest. Well, buckle up because in September, Adobe announced that it was buying Figma for $20 billion. Figma is going to remain independent inside Adobe, but you know, it’s a little weird.
So I wanted to talk to Dylan about the deal, why he’s doing it, how he made the decision to sell, and what things he can do as part of Adobe that he couldn’t do as an independent company.
Dylan’s also a pretty expansive thinker, so after we talked about his company getting the “fuck you” money from Adobe, we talked about making VR Figma for the metaverse and AGI, which is artificial general intelligence, or the kind of AI that can fully think for itself. This episode takes a turn. I think you’re going to like it.
Okay, Dylan Field, CEO of Figma. Here we go. Lees meerLinks:
Welcome to the new Verge
Adobe to acquire Figma in a deal worth $20 billion
A New Collaboration with Adobe
Designers worry Adobe won't let Figma flourish
WebGL - Wikipedia
How big companies kill ideas — and how to fight back, with Tony Fadell - Decoder
Dylan Field on Twitter: "Our goal is to be Figma not Adobe"
College Dropout Turns Thiel Fellowship Into a $2 Billion Figma Fortune
Generative adversarial network (GAN) - Wikipedia
GPT-3 - Wikipedia
Is VR the next frontier in fitness? - Decoder
Artificial general intelligence - WikipediaTranscript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/23209862Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
It was produced by Creighton DeSimone a… -
The mystery of Biden’s deadlocked FCC
3 november 2022 · 41 min
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 get Gigi confirmed at the FCC has left the commission deadlocked with two Democrats and two Republicans. That means the commission in charge of regulating all telecom in the United States, including how you get your internet service, is unable to get much done. The Biden administration can't accomplish some of its biggest policy priorities like rural broadband and restoring net neutrality. President Biden first nominated Gigi Sohn to the FCC over a year ago, but the full Senate vote to confirm her just hasn't happened. We’ve been digging into the story for a few months now, trying to figure out what's going on here, and we found a simple but really frustrating answer… Lees meer
Links:
Gigi Sohn Author Profile - The Verge
Comcast trying to “torpedo” Biden FCC pick Gigi Sohn, advocacy group says
The Slime Machine Targeting Dozens of Biden Nominees
Attempted acquisition of Tribune Media by Sinclair Broadcast Group
The Vergecast: Net neutrality was repealed a year ago. Gigi Sohn explains what’s happened since
Confirmation Hearing for FCC and Commerce Department Nominees
Biden signs $280 billion CHIPS and Science Act
Biden Signs Bill to Help Veterans Exposed to Toxic Burn Pits
With the Inflation Reduction Act, the US brings climate goals within reach
Federal Communications Commission v. Pacifica Foundation
Federal Communications Commission v. Pacifica Foundation
A Media Censor for the FCC?
Hyperpartisan Gigi Sohn Doesn’t Belong at the FCC
Gigi Sohn and the Police
Gigi Sohn Facebook Tweet
Tech antitrust pioneer Lina Khan will officially lead the FTC
Confirmation Hearing For FCC Nominee
FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel on staying connected during a pandemicTranscript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/23201559Credits:
D… -
Why Amazon VP Steve Boom just made the entire music catalog free with Prime
1 november 2022 · 1 uur 7 min
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 years ahead of everything else when it comes to being disrupted by tech: whatever happens to the music industry because of technology eventually happens to everything else. Lees meer
Today I'm talking to Steve Boom, the VP of Amazon Music. Amazon just announced that they are upgrading the music service that Prime members get as part of their subscription. Starting today, one of the benefits for Amazon Prime members is that you now get access to the entire Amazon Music catalog, about 100 million songs, to play in shuffle mode. That service used to only contain 2 million songs. And they are removing ads from a large selection of podcasts including the entire Wondery catalog.
I wanted to ask Steve: what’s it like to negotiate with the record labels for a service like this? What can streaming services do to make artists more money? And where do podcasts fit into the overall strategy? Amazon and Spotify both spend a lot of money buying podcast studios. Is it paying off?Links:
Amazon buys Wondery, setting itself up to compete against Spotify for podcast domination
Apple’s Anti-Competitive Behavior Hurts Everyone—Including Audiobook Listeners, Publishers, and Authors
Why Rdio died
Why it makes sense for Amazon to buy Twitch
Amazon Launches Audio App Amp Combining Music and Live Conversation
The days of cheap music streaming may be numbered
Why did Jack Dorsey’s Square buy Tidal, Jay-Z’s failed music service?
Amazon Music rolls out a lossless streaming tier that Spotify and Apple can’t match
How Amazon runs Alexa, with Dave Limp
Apple’s new podcast charts show Amazon at the top
Spotify gets serious about podcasts with two acquisitions
Vox Media acquires Cafe Studios, Preet Bharara’s podcast-first company
Vox Media Acquires Criminal Productions, Leading Narrative Podcast … -
Never pay the ransom — a cybersecurity CEO explains why
27 oktober 2022 · 1 uur 6 min
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 attackers know that hospitals are more likely to just pay up. If the cryptocurrency explosion has accomplished anything, it’s making ransomware attacks easier and more lucrative for bad guys.
Steve told me there’s so much personal information in a hospital system that a single patient’s record can sell for a huge premium over somthing like a credit card number. And we talked about amount of regulation needed to secure that data and that some insurance providers require hospitals to have a minimum level of security, or they won't be covered. It's a fascinating one. Lees meerLinks:
Cyber Security Week 2022
Penetration test
Cyberattack delays patient care at major US hospital chain
Average Healthcare Data Breach Costs Surpass $10M, IBM FindsTranscript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/23175031Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
It was produced by Creighton DeSimone and Jackie McDermott. Research by Liz Lian and it was edited by Jackson Bierfeldt.
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 -
The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers – here's how it works
25 oktober 2022 · 1 uur 6 min
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 landscape: it’s where developers come together, ask questions, and get answers about how to build software, including actual code they can use in their own projects. It’s basically a huge question and answer forum. More than 100 million people visit Stack Overflow every single month. The company also sells Stack Overflow as an internal forum tool that big companies can use for their own teams: Microsoft, Google, Logitech—you name it, they’re using Stack Overflow to coordinate conversations between their engineers.
The platform has a long reputation of elitism; Prashanth himself is a developer and he told me his own first experience on Stack Overflow was a negative one. In fact, he took over as CEO about three years ago, after a pretty serious moderation controversy that saw several longtime Stack Overflow moderators quit. I wanted to talk to Prashanth about how it works, how the company makes money, and how to grow such a specialized user base while still being welcoming to new people. Lees meerLinks:
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)
Stack Overflow Sold to Tech Giant Prosus for $1.8 Billion
Stack Overflow helps millions of developers do their jobs every single day. Its new CEO says the next stage of its growth is selling to businesses.
Big Tech's hiring freeze unlocks rich talent pool for U.S. startups
Stack Overflow raises $85M in Series E funding to further accelerate SaaS business
Chris Dixon thinks web3 is the future of the internet — is it?
Stack Overflow Has a New Code of Conduct: You Must 'Be Nice'
Code of Conduct - Stack Overflow
Eight great sites that offer online classes
The other side of Stack Overflow content moderation
Everything you need to know about Section 230Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/23185361Credits:
Decoder … -
Why Signal won’t compromise on encryption, with president Meredith Whittaker
18 oktober 2022 · 1 uur 13 min
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 she’s at Signal, which is a little different than the usual tech company: it’s operated by a nonprofit foundation and prides itself on collecting as little data as possible.
But messaging apps are a complicated business. Governments around the world really dislike encrypted messaging and often push companies to put in backdoors for surveillance and law enforcement because criminals use encrypted messaging for all sorts of deeply evil things. But there’s no half step to breaking encryption, so companies like Signal often find themselves in the difficult position of refusing to help governments. You might recall that Apple has often refused to help the government break into iPhones, for example. I wanted to know how that tradeoff plays out at Signal’s much smaller and more idealistic scale.
This is a good one, with lots of Decoder themes in the mix. We have to start doing checklists or something. Okay, Meredith Whittaker, president of Signal. Here we go. Lees meerLinks:
The battle inside Signal
Yes, even Signal is doing stories now
Here’s why Apple’s new child safety features are so controversial
Signal is ‘starting to phase out SMS support’ from its Android app
A very brief history of every Google messaging app
RCS: What it is and why you might want it
Let’s chat about RCS
WhatsApp is now entirely end-to-end encrypted
Moxie Marlinspike has stepped down as CEO of Signal
Meredith Whittaker TweetTranscript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/23173757Credits:
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 Jackson Bierfeldt.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Sr Audio Director is Andrew Marino and o… -
Mark Zuckerberg on the Quest Pro, future of the metaverse, and more
11 oktober 2022 · 1 uur 1 min
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 also talked about the future of social media, why he enjoys “being doubted,” and the growing concerns about TikTok’s Chinese ownership. Lees meer
Links:
The Meta Quest Pro is a cutting-edge headset looking for an audience
Xbox Cloud Gaming is coming to the Meta Quest
Apple’s mixed reality headset will reportedly come with an M2 chip
We finally got our hands and eyes on the PlayStation VR2
Apple’s app tracking policy reportedly cost social media platforms nearly $10 billion
Mark Zuckerberg took on China in a speech defending free expression
Why BeReal is breaking out
Elon Musk is buying Twitter, probably?Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/23161228Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Creighton DeSimone, Vjeran Pavic, 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 -
Pat Gelsinger came back to turn Intel around – here’s how it’s going
4 oktober 2022 · 1 uur 9 min
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 all. Intel is a very important company with a huge series of challenges in front of it. It’s still the largest chip manufacturer by revenue, and makes more chips than any other company in the United States. In fact there are basically only three major chip manufacturers: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, or TSMC, which is in Taiwan, Samsung, based in South Korea. And Intel, here in the United States.
The Intel Pat took over was struggling, and was losing ground to in a variety of markets. But in the past year and a half, Pat’s restructured the company, turned over almost all of its leadership positions, opened a new line of business that would compete with TSMC and make chips for other companies including Intel’s competitors, and generally tried to reset Intel’s famous engineering culture around engineering. Lees meerGlossary:
IFS - Intel Foundry Service.
Raptor Lake - codename for intel's Gen 13 processors that were just the day before we had our conversation.
Sapphire Rapids - the codename for Intel's 4th generation Xeon server processors.
20A and 18A - 20A is a rebranding of what was intel's 5nm process scheduled to debut in 2024 and 18A is a rebranding of Intels 5nm+ node due out in 2025.
Packaging - integrated circuit packaging is the last step of semiconductor fabrication. It's where a block of semiconductor material is put into a case. The case, is known as a "package" and that is what allows you put a circuit on a board.
Wafers - When a processor is made they make processors you make hundreds of them at once on a giant wafer.
EUV - is Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography. It's the most advanced way to make chips.
ASML - Is the company that makes the machines that lets you make chips. They are the only company that makes EUV machines.
RibbonFET - A new transistor techn… -
How Arm conquered the chip market without making a single chip, with CEO Rene Haas
27 september 2022 · 1 uur 3 min
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 and maybe even your laptop. I’m talking about ARM, a chip design company that’s been through quite a lot these past few years, and I'm talking to Arm CEO Rene Haas.
Arm designs the instruction sets for modern chips: Qualcomm’s chips are Arm chips. Apple’s chips are Arm chips. Samsung’s chips are Arm chips. It’s the heart of modern computing. Arm licenses the instruction set to those companies, who then go off and actually make chips with all sorts of customizations. Basically every smartphone runs an Arm processor, Apple’s Macs now run arm processors, and everything from cars to coffee machines are showing up with more and more arm processors in them. Lees meerWe want to know what you think about Decoder. Take our listener survey!
Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/23137412Links:
The Vergecast: The HDMI Holiday Spec-tacular on Apple Podcasts
Biden signs $280 billion CHIPS and Science Act
Intel needs 7,000 workers to build its $20 billion chip plant in Ohio - The Verge
What comes after the smartphone, with Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon - The Verge
Why the global chip shortage is making it so hard to buy a PS5
Nvidia’s huge Arm deal has just been scrapped
What is a SoC?
What is an ECU?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. Our Editorial Director is Brooke Minters. And our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices -
Can software simplify the supply chain? Ryan Petersen thinks so
20 september 2022 · 1 uur 3 min
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 Idaho: rail, sea, truck. We’ve talked about the supply chain and inventory management on Decoder with a lot of our guests — the chip shortage seems to affect every company, and sorting out how to get products made and delivered on time is a pretty universal problem. But we haven’t really talked about how products get from one place to another around the world.
So I wanted to talk to Ryan, figure out what Flexport’s role in all this is, what his bigger supply chain solutions would be, and why he’s leaving his job as CEO to be executive chairman and handing the reins to Dave Clark, who used to work at Amazon. Lees meerLinks:
Dave Clark to Join Flexport As Our New CEO
Flexport Wants to Be Uber of the Oceans
At Google, Eric Schmidt Wrote the Book on Adult Supervision
The real story behind a tech founder’s ‘tweetstorm that saves Christmas’
Ryan's twitter threadTranscript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/23126062Credits:
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. Our Editorial Director is Brooke Minters. And our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices -
Everyone knows what YouTube is. Few know how it really works.
13 september 2022 · 1 uur 4 min
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. Lees meer
YouTube has always been fascinating to me because it’s such a black box: everyone feels like they know how the platform works, but very few people have a real understanding of the internal politics and tradeoffs that actually drive YouTube’s decision. Mark’s book is one of the best of its kind I’ve read: not only does he take you inside the company, but he connects the decisions made inside YouTube to the creators who use the platform and the effects it has on them.
This was a fun one – keep in mind that for as little as we might know about YouTube, we might know even less about TikTok, which is driving all sorts of platforms, even YouTube, into competing with it.
Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23113078
Links:
YouTube Partner Program
Hank Green on Decoder
iJustineCredits:
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. Our Editorial Director is Brooke Minters. And our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices -
Rewind: How big companies kill ideas — and how to fight back, with Tony Fadell
6 september 2022 · 1 uur 16 min
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 in 2011. Tony sold Nest to Google for $3.2 billion in 2014 and eventually left Google. He now runs an investment company called Future Shape. Lees meerLinks:
Inside the Nest: iPod creator Tony Fadell wants to reinvent the thermostat
General Magic - Trailer
Inside Facebook’s metaverse for work
Silicon Graphics
Google is reorganizing and Sundar Pichai will become new CEO
Fire drill: can Tony Fadell and Nest build a better smoke detector?
Google purchases Nest for $3.2 billion
Twitter accepts buyout, giving Elon Musk total control of the company
Nest is rejoining Google to better compete with Amazon and Apple
Apple Music Event 2005 - Motorola Rokr E1 / iTunes Phone
Activision Blizzard hit with another sexual harassment lawsuit
Nest buying video-monitoring startup Dropcam for $555 million
What matters about Matter, the new smart home standard
ZIGBEE ON MARS!Directory:
Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple
Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel
Pat Gelsinger, current CEO of Intel
Sundar Pichai, current CEO of Alphabet
Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, SpaceX, and The Boring Company
Jeff Williams, COO of Apple
Matt Rogers, Nest co-founder
Jeff Robbin, VP of consumer applications at Apple
Steve Hoteling, former CEO gesture recognition company Finger Works
Jon Rubinstein, senior VP of the iPod division at Apple
Steve Sakomen, hardware engineer and executive at Apple
Avie Tavanian, chief software technology officer at Apple
Scott Forstall, senior VP of iOS software, Apple
Jony Ive, chief design officer, AppleTranscript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/22817673Credits:
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 i… -
How the head of Facebook plans to compete with TikTok and win back Gen Z
30 augustus 2022 · 1 uur 3 min
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 Giants. This season is about Facebook and Meta. The season finale comes out tomorrow.
Alex has been reporting for Land of the Giants for many months, and along the way he interviewed Tom. Facebook has a lot of challenges, but it seems like the biggest problem is TikTok: Facebook's problem is that it spent years – you spent years – building out a social graph that, it turns out, is less interesting than just being shown content that the company thinks you might like. Alison has been at Facebook for more than a decade and previously ran engineering for the News Feed, so he knows more than almost anyone about the history of feeds and where they are going. Lees meerLinks:
Land of the Giants
Facebook is changing its algorithm to take on TikTok, leaked memo reveals
Facebook is revamping its home feed to feel more like TikTokTranscript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/23092319Credits:
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. Our Editorial Director is Brooke Minters. And our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices -
Advertising is everywhere. Wieden+Kennedy CEO Neal Arthur explains how it works
23 augustus 2022 · 1 uur 1 min
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 start a company and invent a great product, but you still need to market it: you need to tell people about it, and eventually convince them to buy it. And so you take out an add on a platform and, well, the platform companies we all depend on mostly run on ads. Google’s entire consumer business is ads. Meta’s entire business is ads. And when we talk to creators, they’re even more tied to ads: their distribution platforms like TikTok and YouTube are all ad-supported, and a huge portion of their revenue is ads.
This week I’m talking to Neal Arthur, the CEO of Weiden and Kennedy, one of the few independent major ad agencies in the world, and maybe the coolest one? It’s got a rep. Weiden is the agency that came up with Just Do It for Nike and Bud Light Legends for Bud Light. They’ve done campaigns for Coke, Miller, Microsoft, ESPN – you name it. Coming off our conversation last week with Katie Welch about building a brand from the ground up using influencer marketing and potentially never hiring an ad agency, I wanted to get a view from the other side: how does a big ad agency work? Where does their money come from? So many of the big agencies are merging into what are called holding companies – why is Wieden still independent? Lees meerLinks:
Bud Light puts creative account up for review after years with Wieden+Kennedy
Mover Over Millennials -- Here Comes Gen Z
How Selena Gomez's Rare Beauty Goes Viral, With CMO Katie Welch
Mad Men (TV Series 2007-2015)Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/23081723Credits:
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. It was edited by Callie Wright. And researched by Liz Lian.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster … -
How Selena Gomez's Rare Beauty goes viral, with CMO Katie Welch
16 augustus 2022 · 1 uur 1 min
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 traditional marketing: Rare Beauty is a true internet brand, that depends on social media strategy, influencer marketing, and community to drive sales. Specifically, the enormous community around Selena Gomez, who, again, is an international superstar with a fandom of her own.
This kind of marketing is essentially new. Famous people making their own products and companies and using their online reach to launch and grow those businesses is a combination of art and commerce that is 10 – 15 years old at most, Rihanna’s Fenty Beauty is only five years old, but it’s redefined the industry and helped make her a billionaire. Some of the first big successes came from the Kardashian-Jenners including Kylie Cosmetics, founded in 2015, as well as Kim Kardashian’s Skims, founded in 2019.
I’ve been really curious about how these businesses work, how they reach their audiences and customers, how CMOs like Katie measure success, whether being the marketing executive for an super online celebrity-driven business feels different than being a traditional marketing person, and whether the ever-present risk of weird things happening online make her plan differently. Lees meerTranscript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/23071490Links:
Why BeReal is breaking out
Why Hank Green can’t quit YouTube for TikTok
Apple’s app tracking transparency feature isn’t an instant privacy button
Apple’s app tracking policy reportedly cost social media platforms nearly $10 billion
Updating The Verge’s background policy
Marketing Funnels
Katie's TikTok
Instagram walks back TikTok-style changes — Adam Mosseri explains why
Makeup company Glossier to sell its products at Sephora as new CEO pushes to expand reachCredits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the… -
The risky new way of building mobile broadband networks
9 augustus 2022 · 1 uur 20 min
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 the mobile market. Now, in 2022, Dish’s network is slowly getting off the ground. And it’s built on a new kind of wireless technology called Open Radio Access Network, or O-RAN. Dish’s network is only the third O-RAN network in the entire world, and if O-RAN works, it will radically change how the entire wireless industry operates.
I have wanted to know more about O-RAN for a long time. So today, I’m talking to Tareq Amin, CEO of Rakuten Mobile. Rakuten Mobile is a new wireless carrier in Japan, it just launched in 2020 – it’s also the world’s first Open RAN network, and Tareq basically pushed this whole concept into existence. I really wanted to know if ORAN is going to work, and how Tareq managed to make it happen in such a traditional industry. So we got into it – like, really into it. Lees meerLinks:
Rakuten
Rakuten Edge Cloud
"Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM"
Rakuten Group to Acquire Mobile Industry Innovator Altiostar
Gadgets 360
Massive MIMOTranscript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/23061797Credits:
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. Our Editorial Director is Brooke Minters. And our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices -
Why Hank Green can’t quit YouTube for TikTok
2 augustus 2022 · 1 uur 13 min
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 favor of creators. But other platforms don't have this. There is no revenue share on Instagram. There is no revenue share on Twitter. There’s no revenue on Twitter at all, really. And importantly there is no revenue share on TikTok: instead there’s something called a creator fund, which shares fixed pool of money, about a billion dollars, among all the creators on the platform. That means as more and more creators join TikTok, everyone gets paid. You might understand this concept as: basic division.
This episode is long, and it’s weedsy. Honestly, it’s pretty deep in our feelings about participating in the internet culture economy, and the relationship between huge platform companies and the communities that build on them. But it’s a good one, and it’s not really something any of us talk about enough. Lees meerLinks:
Vlogbrothers
Decoder interview with YouTube Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan
Viacom Has Officially Acquired VidCon, A Global Online Video Convention Series
Patreon Acquires Subbable, Aligning the YouTube Stars
The Verge EMAILS t-shirt
Crash Course
SciShow
Eons
The medium is the message
The Kardashians hate the new Instagram
Hank Green: So… TikTok Sucks
Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast, “TikTok vs YouTube with Hank Green”
Decoder: The videos that don’t work on YouTube and the future of the creator business with Nebula CEO Dave Wiskus
Awesome Socks Club
Awesome Coffee ClubTranscript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/23051537Credits:
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. Our Editorial Director is Bro… -
Rent the Runway CEO Jennifer Hyman thinks clothing rental is inflation-proof
26 juli 2022 · 1 uur 7 min
Today we’re talking to Jennifer Hyman, co-founder and CEO of Rent the Runway. Lees meer
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 simple: you can rent clothes one by one, and Subscribers pay a certain monthly amount for a certain number of pieces that they can swap out anywhere from 1 to 4 times a month depending on the tier of their membership. Rent the Runway also lets customers buy secondhand clothing either after they rent it or just outright.
But Rent the Runway has had a pretty intense path from its founding in 2008 to going public in 2021: the onset of the pandemic in 2020 cratered the business as 60 percent of customers canceled or paused their subscriptions, and Jennifer was forced to make drastic cuts to survive. But she says that now things are swinging back, as more and more people are spending their dollars going out, traveling, and generally shifting their spending from things to experiences. There’s a post Covid wedding boom going on: Rent the Runway is right there for people.
Jenn and I talked about that swing in the business, but we spent most of this conversation talking about running a company that basically does really high-risk logistics: sourcing clothes, sending them to people, getting them back, cleaning them, and sending them out again. Spotify and Netflix run subscription businesses where the products never wear out or get dirty; Jenn has to deal with red win stains at scale. In fact, Rent the Runway runs one of the country’s biggest dry cleaning operations, which I find to be completely fascinating: what does dry cleaning innovation actually look like, and how does it hit the bottom line?
My favorite episodes of Decoder are the ones where simple ideas – renting clothes – turn out to be incredible complicated to execute. This is one of those.
Links:
Apple defends upcoming privacy changes as ‘standing up for our users’
Rent the Runway, a … -
Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball
19 juli 2022 · 1 uur 19 min
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 the entire company to focus on the metaverse.
The problem, very simply, is that no one knows what the metaverse is, what it’s supposed to do, or why anyone should care about it.
Luckily, we have some help. Today, I’m talking to Matthew Ball, who is the author of the new book called The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything. Matthew was the global head of strategy at Amazon Studios. In 2018, he left Amazon to become an analyst and started writing about the metaverse on his blog. He’s been writing about this since way before the hype exploded, and his book aims to be the best resource for understanding the metaverse, which he sees as the next phase of the internet. It’s not just something that you access through a VR headset, though that’s part of it. It’s how you’ll interact with everything. That sort of change is where new companies have opportunities to unseat the old guard.
This episode gets very in the weeds, but it really helped me understand the decisions some companies have made around building digital worlds and the technical challenges and business challenges that are slowing it down — or might even stop it. And, of course, I asked whether any of this is a good idea in the first place because, well, I’m not so sure. But there’s a lot here, so listen, and then you tell me.
Links:
Matthew Ball on Twitter
Mark Zuckerberg on why Facebook is rebranding to Meta
Microsoft, Meta, and others are founding a metaverse open standards group
Android emoji will actually look human this year
Apple’s app tracking policy reportedly cost social media platforms nearly $10 billion
Microsoft and Activision Blizzard: the latest news on the acquisition
Microsoft HoloLens boss Alex Kipman is out after misconduct… Lees meer