Every argument clarity score on this site is built from rows on this page. Each
question and answer was assessed with names hidden, the host's own answers included, on
four things from 1 to 5:
directness (does it answer the question asked), coherence (do the ideas follow),
precision (concrete details and clear references), compression (says a lot per word). The weighted
mix (30/30/25/15) is the exchange score. A person's published score averages their exchange
scores on raw tape only, at least 8 of them, shrunk toward the cohort mean.
Full method →
Answered raw tape
D 5 · C 5 · P 5 · Cm 4 4.85
Q And were you a fan of Digg already at that point?
A Absolutely. I, I was a dig user early, early on, again, back in the Kevin and Jay days, like you, and I was also one of the folks that was really, really sad in 2010 when the entire community fled for a bunch of reasons, uh, and I went with them, to be very honest, to Reddit, about, I think it was in late 2013, a colleague of mine at Spotify reintroduced me to what the new dig looked like, and I just thought it was a beautifully Built product. And day in and day out introduced me to some incredible articles and videos that I honestly would otherwise have not found in any of my social networks. And then hearing Andrew talk about why they built Dig the way they did and what they want to do in the future, uh, made me really, really excited about the business. And so when they offered to really allow me to join as the chief operating officer, uh, I kind of jumped at the opportunity and I joined them in March of this year of And, uh, like you said earlier, very recently transitioned into the CEO role as Andrew, uh, moved back to being a full-time partner at Betaworks and also the chairman of the Dig board.
AI assessment note: “Absolutely. I, I was a dig user early, early on”
Answered raw tape
D 5 · C 5 · P 5 · Cm 4 4.85
Q So, so let's get the ball rolling. So what's your background and how did you end up as the newly appointed, and congratulations on that, by the way, CEO of Dig?
A The right answer here is that I got very, very lucky. But the trajectory of that luck, uh, started off in, at Google. So I started my tech career in sales operations at Google in Ann Arbor, Michigan, of all places. I was literally scrubbing and qualifying leads for a mid-market AdWords sales team. I graduated to analytics at Google, and then eventually left Google to join a small VC-backed startup here in New York City called Clickable. Clickable was building a search management platform Or SaaS for SMBs. Uh, not a very sexy industry at all. At that point, it was also increasingly getting crowded. Uh, but we were trying to build something that made search advertising easy for folks that really only had maybe 10, 15, 20 minutes per week to figure out how their search advertising spend is being spent, uh, and to optimize it. So I spent about one and a half years there at Clickable doing a myriad of different things. And then a year and a half In, I left to join AOL to lead revenue operations and strategy at what is now the infamous patch.com. I was, I was actually lucky enough to move on from patch before all of the infamy, all the drama eventually hit. But yeah, so I was there for not, not an incredibly long time, but got to grow a revenue strategy and operations team from effectively non-existent to a 65 person team there. And then when I left, I left to go to Spotify. Now, Spo…
AI assessment note: “The right answer here is that I got very, very lucky. But the trajectory”
Answered raw tape
D 5 · C 5 · P 5 · Cm 4 4.85
Q And were you a fan of Digg already at that point?
A Absolutely. I, I was a dig user early, early on, again, back in the Kevin and Jay days, like you, and I was also one of the folks that was really, really sad in 2010 when the entire community fled for a bunch of reasons, uh, and I went with them, to be very honest, to Reddit, about, I think it was in late 2013, a colleague of mine at Spotify reintroduced me to what the new dig looked like, and I just thought it was a beautifully Built product. And day in and day out introduced me to some incredible articles and videos that I honestly would otherwise have not found in any of my social networks. And then hearing Andrew talk about why they built Dig the way they did and what they want to do in the future, uh, made me really, really excited about the business. And so when they offered to really allow me to join as the chief operating officer, uh, I kind of jumped at the opportunity and I joined them in March of this year of And, uh, like you said earlier, very recently transitioned into the CEO role as Andrew, uh, moved back to being a full-time partner at Betaworks and also the chairman of the Dig board.
AI assessment note: “Absolutely. I, I was a dig user early, early on”
Answered raw tape
D 5 · C 5 · P 5 · Cm 4 4.85
Q So, so yeah, so four people and four different opinions. What, so what do you think they would be?
A It really was, uh, Dig version four. That was a launch in the summer of twenty-ten. Where Dig effectively fundamentally changed as a product. It wasn't just a user experience change. It wasn't just a branding change. It was the functionality, um, and it was the kind of community that Dig seemed to want to keep with the features that they launched. First of all, the release itself was slightly unstable. I remember that it was unstable. A lot of things just didn't quite work the way that they were supposed to. And it did, for the community, which you and I were a part of, it felt slightly tone deaf, unfortunately. Yeah. The reality was that a bunch of features were removed that people really cared about, and introduced a bunch of social features that no one really wanted. Now, I'm speaking from a fan and a community member's point of view, which is a little bit odd for me now that I'm CEO of the company and look back at history like this. But it really was that, and a lot of people at that point decided to look for an alternative. And one of the things was that this was actually paired at the same time As the front page becoming less and less relevant, because there was suddenly this group of super users that could effectively control what articles made it to the front page, and the community kind of lost trust in the front page being a truly democratic way of discovering great c…
AI assessment note: “It really was, uh, Dig version four. That was a launch in the summer”
Answered raw tape
D 4 · C 5 · P 5 · Cm 4 4.55
Q So, so yeah, so four people and four different opinions. What, so what do you think they would be?
A It really was, uh, Dig version four. That was a launch in the summer of twenty-ten. Where Dig effectively fundamentally changed as a product. It wasn't just a user experience change. It wasn't just a branding change. It was the functionality, um, and it was the kind of community that Dig seemed to want to keep with the features that they launched. First of all, the release itself was slightly unstable. I remember that it was unstable. A lot of things just didn't quite work the way that they were supposed to. And it did, for the community, which you and I were a part of, it felt slightly tone deaf, unfortunately. Yeah. The reality was that a bunch of features were removed that people really cared about, and introduced a bunch of social features that no one really wanted. Now, I'm speaking from a fan and a community member's point of view, which is a little bit odd for me now that I'm CEO of the company and look back at history like this. But it really was that, and a lot of people at that point decided to look for an alternative. And one of the things was that this was actually paired at the same time As the front page becoming less and less relevant, because there was suddenly this group of super users that could effectively control what articles made it to the front page, and the community kind of lost trust in the front page being a truly democratic way of discovering great c…
AI assessment note: “It really was, uh, Dig version four. That was a launch in the summer of twenty-ten.”
Partly raw tape
D 3 · C 4 · P 4 · Cm 3 3.55
Q And then moving to Dig now, and obviously a darling of the internet at one point, and then not so much, as you said, you slightly migrated to Reddit. Shame on you for that. So talk to us a little about the history. What went wrong, do you think, and what is the new direction for Dig? Where are we heading?
A So Dig really invented the wisdom of the crowd as a way to organize content. Dig's history is fascinating. Founded, I think, in Uh, by Kevin and Jay, the old version of Dig, and had an incredible run through really about six years until 2010. Uh, it really was, like you said, the darling of the internet. It was the front page of the internet, and during that, those, that six year run was when the term, the Dig effect was coined, where publishers all around the world actually could see their, in their data, when their articles hit the Dig front page, Because it would just drive an immense amount of traffic, and it really was, I mean, back then, we didn't quite have the same vernacular as we do right now, but Dig was the viral and social content king, without a doubt. What happened was, in 2010, and by the way, if you ask three different people, or four or five different people who were involved in Dig at the time, you'll probably get 10 different opinions about what exactly happened.
AI assessment note: “you'll probably get 10 different opinions about what exactly happened”
Partly raw tape
D 3 · C 4 · P 4 · Cm 3 3.55
Q And then, finally, let's talk about monetization. So, how does a platform like Dig plan to monetize content with the ever-disappearing ad dollar? Is it something that you're concerned about, or do you see other areas for potential?
A Yeah, I do think that we'd be naive in the publishing and media world not to be concerned about this disappearing ad dollar. So let's actually address that first, and then I'll talk about how Dig is approaching the problem. So the biggest issue at this point, uh, is ad blockers. It, for a while, publishers and media were hoping that ad blocking a niche product, and it turned out that that's not the case. Um, deservedly so, the, our audiences, the general public, they want a great user experience when consuming content. Now there is a value gap between content creation and content consumption, right? Because of the internet, everyone assumes that we should be able to get content for free without really thinking about the cost of creating high quality content that you would actually want to read and consume. And this was the exact same problem that, uh, we addressed, uh, at Spotify for music. Um, this app is happening in media as well, in the rest of media as well. So ad blockers are here, and I think that they are absolutely here to stay. It's, Especially now that iOS has built it in as a native feature in the new iOS build. So, the ad dollars are disappearing because of that, because the inventory is going down, um, ads are not showing, and people are actually not willing to give away their data, uh, for the sake of, uh, highly, high quality targeted ads, it turns out, right? A…
AI assessment note: “we'd be naive in the publishing and media world not to be concerned”
Partly raw tape
D 3 · C 4 · P 4 · Cm 3 3.55
Q And then moving to Dig now, and obviously a darling of the internet at one point, and then not so much, as you said, you slightly migrated to Reddit. Shame on you for that. So talk to us a little about the history. What went wrong, do you think, and what is the new direction for Dig? Where are we heading?
A So Dig really invented the wisdom of the crowd as a way to organize content. Dig's history is fascinating. Founded, I think, in Uh, by Kevin and Jay, the old version of Dig, and had an incredible run through really about six years until 2010. Uh, it really was, like you said, the darling of the internet. It was the front page of the internet, and during that, those, that six year run was when the term, the Dig effect was coined, where publishers all around the world actually could see their, in their data, when their articles hit the Dig front page, Because it would just drive an immense amount of traffic, and it really was, I mean, back then, we didn't quite have the same vernacular as we do right now, but Dig was the viral and social content king, without a doubt. What happened was, in 2010, and by the way, if you ask three different people, or four or five different people who were involved in Dig at the time, you'll probably get 10 different opinions about what exactly happened.
AI assessment note: “Dig's history is fascinating. Founded, I think, in Uh, by Kevin and Jay”
Partly raw tape
D 3 · C 4 · P 3 · Cm 3 3.30
Q And then having worked at tech titans like Google and Spotify, what principles did you really take away and adapt to your process now at Dig?
A Uh, I definitely hope that I've taken some of those principles to dig. Otherwise, I feel like it'll be a serious misuse of the luck that I've had along the way. The funny thing is, at all of these three companies that you mentioned, Google, AOL, and Spotify, I entered into those companies. I joined them during very different phases of each company's growth. So at Google, I joined when it was already massively scaled, obviously working. They figured out not only a very clear product market fit, but also an incredibly profitable business model. And it really, already at that point, was a north star of how tech companies should operate. And I was very, very fortunate to start my tech career there, because I got to see what the rest of us, for the rest of our lives, really are trying to build, or trying to chase after what Google was able to accomplish in a bunch of different ways. Um, and I may sound a little bit like, like a Google Homer, but that's the reality of it, and that's what I always tell folks who are thinking about Whether they go to a small startup, or they go join Google for a couple years, um, and there seems to be sort of a stigma of folks that, uh, feel like they have an entrepreneur's spirit going to a big company like Google now. I do recommend that, uh, folks always think a little bit more critically about what it means to go to Google and at the very least kno…
AI assessment note: “I joined them during very different phases of each company's growth.”
Redirected raw tape
D 2 · C 3 · P 3 · Cm 2 2.55
Q And then having worked at tech titans like Google and Spotify, what principles did you really take away and adapt to your process now at Dig?
A Uh, I definitely hope that I've taken some of those principles to dig. Otherwise, I feel like it'll be a serious misuse of the luck that I've had along the way. The funny thing is, at all of these three companies that you mentioned, Google, AOL, and Spotify, I entered into those companies. I joined them during very different phases of each company's growth. So at Google, I joined when it was already massively scaled, obviously working. They figured out not only a very clear product market fit, but also an incredibly profitable business model. And it really, already at that point, was a north star of how tech companies should operate. And I was very, very fortunate to start my tech career there, because I got to see what the rest of us, for the rest of our lives, really are trying to build, or trying to chase after what Google was able to accomplish in a bunch of different ways. Um, and I may sound a little bit like, like a Google Homer, but that's the reality of it, and that's what I always tell folks who are thinking about Whether they go to a small startup, or they go join Google for a couple years, um, and there seems to be sort of a stigma of folks that, uh, feel like they have an entrepreneur's spirit going to a big company like Google now. I do recommend that, uh, folks always think a little bit more critically about what it means to go to Google and at the very least kno…
AI assessment note: “I definitely hope that I've taken some of those principles to dig.”
