Jul 27, 2017 · 48m · how-i-built-this
Live Episode! BuzzFeed: Jonah Peretti
Jonah Peretti · 31m spoken Guy Raz · 11m spoken Linda Holmes · 12s spoken Stephen Thompson · 8s spoken
0:00 / 0:00
gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
Recorded live in New York, this episode of 'How I Built This' features BuzzFeed co-founder and CEO Jonah Peretti discussing his journey from viral prankster to digital media pioneer. Peretti explains how understanding social psychology and web dynamics allowed him to co-found The Huffington Post and scale BuzzFeed into a multi-faceted global media enterprise.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Guy holds 27% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Guy as informed peer 4.2 Guest teaching 4.2 Guest disagreement 1.4 Guy pushing back 1.6
speaking balance: gold is Guy, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 35:04 Jonah defending transparency on unverified intelligence dossier
Jonah rejects the premise that publishing the Steele dossier damaged journalistic credibility, insisting that withholding a document already shaping government policy treats the public paternalistically.
Hardest push from Guy ▶ 34:39 Guy Raz challenging the journalistic ethics of publishing unverified claimsRaz directly challenges Jonah on whether dumping unverified claims fueled political attacks labeling mainstream reporting as fake news.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 38:25 Jonah reframing media consumption from information delivery to social bondingJonah educates Raz on the psychology of virality, explaining that social sharing functions as interpersonal emotional glue rather than passive informational uptake.
Guy holds their own ▶ 34:39 Guy Raz confronting guest with journalistic accountabilityRaz leverages his background in hard news journalism to interrogate the editorial and societal risks of BuzzFeed publishing unverified opposition research.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Guy as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Guy pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Live Stage Opening and the Tech Uniform | 4 | 2 | 1 | 1 | Guy Raz opens the live show in New York with an easygoing exploration of tech culture cliches, teasing Peretti about wearing the requisite tech hoodie. Jonah jokes along, noting business people get disappointed if startup founders dress formally. | |
| Classroom Feedback and Transition to MIT Media Lab | 5 | 4 | 1 | 2 | Jonah explains how classroom teaching taught him to adjust content dynamically based on audience feedback. He details the famous 2001 Nike sweatshop email exchange, which Raz labels early internet trolling. | |
| Replicating Virality: NYC Rejection Line and Black People Love Us | 5 | 5 | 2 | 1 | Jonah details how prominent network theorists Duncan Watts and Cameron Marlow claimed virality was a random fluke, spurring him to deliberately reproduce viral phenomena with projects like the NYC Rejection Line and Black People Love Us. | |
| Connecting with Ken Lerer and Exploring New Media Ideas | 4 | 3 | 1 | 1 | Jonah recounts being brought along by Duncan Watts to meet Ken Lerer because of the promise of a town car ride. He details how brainstorming with early web innovators led to a collaborative business partnership with Lerer. | |
| Meeting Arianna Huffington and Launching The Huffington Post | 4 | 4 | 1 | 1 | Jonah recalls his surreal first meeting with Arianna Huffington over breakfast, where she immediately tried to appoint him digital director for a California gubernatorial candidate. He explains the commercial logic behind launching Huffington Post as a left-wing counterpart to Drudge Report. | |
| Inception of BuzzFeed Labs as an R&D Experiment | 4 | 5 | 1 | 1 | Peretti explains why he started BuzzFeed Labs as an R&D side project, noting Huffington Post was scaling too fast to allow experimental research on social distribution mechanics and sharing psychology. | |
| Mid-Show Break and Recap | 4 | 3 | 1 | 1 | Jonah discusses early technical experiments like web crawlers and chatbots, and describes splitting his day between BuzzFeed and Huffington Post by ferrying Vietnamese sandwiches between Chinatown and Soho. | |
| Venture Pitch Rejections and the Decision to Hire Creators | 5 | 6 | 2 | 2 | Jonah explains the pushback from venture capitalists who wanted pure software platforms without payroll for human content creators. He outlines his conviction that understanding virality required in-house creative talent actively tweaking content. | |
| Hiring Ben Smith and Building BuzzFeed News | 6 | 5 | 4 | 6 | Raz presses Peretti on publishing the unverified Trump Steele dossier, questioning whether publishing unverified claims validated the administration's 'fake news' accusations. Jonah firmly defends the decision as radical transparency for a document already circulating at the highest levels of government. | |
| Pioneering Native Advertising and Branded Content | 5 | 6 | 2 | 2 | Peretti breaks down why traditional banner ads fail publishers and explains how BuzzFeed adapted Google's native advertising logic to social media, creating branded quizzes and content that matched organic editorial formats. | |
| The Social Psychology of Virality and Content Sharing | 4 | 7 | 1 | 1 | Jonah delivers an extensive breakdown of social psychology, explaining that virality stems from interpersonal bonding, shared identity, and social utility rather than raw information transfer. | |
| Rejecting the Disney Acquisition Offer | 5 | 4 | 2 | 3 | Raz probes Jonah on declining Disney's acquisition offer and his personal feelings regarding the company's billion-dollar valuation. Jonah reframes the valuation as operational independence rather than personal wealth, while acknowledging the heavy role of luck and compounding growth. | |
| The Hard Reality of Startups and Interview Conclusion | 4 | 5 | 1 | 1 | Jonah dismantles the romanticized narrative of seamless startup success, highlighting high failure rates and comparing the gradual endurance needed in startups to leveling up in video games. | |
| Postscript: The Brother Orange Viral Phenomenon | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Host closing monologue recounting the viral Brother Orange story and reading episode production credits. |
Statements from this episode (21)
Peretti: Traditional business people expect startup founders to wear hoodies
“People get mad if you don't wear them, you know. Particularly, like business people, you know. If I, like, wear a nice button down and go to a meeting, they're like, oh, it's kind of disappointed. I kind of wanted, like, a startup person.”
Raz: BuzzFeed Built a Larger Newsroom Than Most US News Outlets
“A company that just six years ago didn't even employ a single journalist, and today it has a bigger news team than most newsrooms in America.”
Peretti: Great content and teaching adapt in real time to audience feedback
“I think if you think about content from a, from at the time, print and broadcast, you think about making something that you push out to this giant audience, but if you're in a classroom teaching, you know, 25 kids that are in front of you real, you start, you …”
Peretti: In viral media, the audience becomes the distribution network
“It's supposed to be there's an executive or an editor or someone who determines what lots of people see, and this was just an emergent thing where sending it to people resulted in more people seeing it, and people became the distribution. The way that it sprea…”
Peretti: Viral diffusion timelines dropped from months to weeks between 2001 and 2003
“And with each project, the timeline for it to spread got shorter. So, so, so the Nike email diffused over something like three and a half months, and then rejection line was like two months for, you know, and then like it was like two, three weeks you know, so…”
Peretti: A strong right-wing media outlet always leaves room for a left-wing equivalent
“In every industry, if there's a Coke, there's going to be a big spot for a Pepsi, and the Drudge Report's out there by themselves, and in every, in political media, if there's a strong right-wing thing, there's always room for a left-wing, and the internet was…”
Peretti: The Huffington Post launched with no internal article pages
“And we didn't even have article pages when we launched. We had blog, you know, we had blog posts, which were the only permalinks on the site, and then the headlines all clicked out to other, other sources.”
Peretti: John Johnson personally funded BuzzFeed's expenses at launch
“When we started, John just paid every month the expenses of BuzzFeed.”
Peretti: BuzzFeed Doubled Audience Annually From Launch
“We basically doubled our audience every year from when we launched the site, and it started with something like 200,000 or 300,000 people a month.”
Peretti: SoftBank funded BuzzFeed so he could stay at HuffPost
“Really the first time we were able to raise money, you know, was from SoftBank, which also was invested in HuffPost, and they, there was another firm that wanted to invest, but they told me I had to leave HuffPost.”
Peretti: Silicon Valley Tech Companies Are Monocultures Shunning Content Creators
“If you look at all the big tech companies in Silicon Valley, they're monocultures of engineers and business people. They don't really hire people who make and create content.”
Peretti: BuzzFeed Could Not Have Raised VC by Pitching Journalism Hires
“Cause we probably wouldn't have been able to even raise money if we had said, oh, our plan is to hire lots and lots of journalists and reporters.”
Peretti: Election Run-Ups Are the Best Time to Launch News Organizations
“We learned from Huffington Post that building a news business in the run-up to election is a good time to do it”
Peretti: BuzzFeed made the right call publishing the Trump-Russia dossier
“I definitely think it was the right decision, and the reason we published it was because you had everyone in the senior levels of government and media talking about this document and referring to the document even in public communications.”
Peretti: The best internet businesses align core products with native advertising
“I looked at the best businesses on the internet, and they tended to use some form of native advertising. So Google had a search engine, and you enter a keyword in, and it would give you a bunch of related links, but it would also give you a bunch of related pa…”
Peretti: BuzzFeed's branded HBO 'Game of Thrones' quiz hit 1M views
“When quizzes got really big, a month after that, we could have a branded quiz for HBO, which is, how will you die in Game of Thrones? And you answer questions, and it'll be like, you'll be trampled, or you'll be beheaded. And, like, it was, it got a million vi…”
Peretti: Social content succeeds as relational connective tissue, not raw information
“When we started BuzzFeed, everyone thought of content as information to get in people's head. This is the article. Are people going to read it and get the information in their head? We had this insight that content was on social was a way of connecting with so…”
Peretti: People Share Harvard Business Review to Signal Intelligence
“So people like to say that they read Harvard Business Review or share articles from Harvard Business Review because it seems like they're smart and like, and it has the word Harvard in it.”
Peretti: Why he rejected Disney's 2013 buyout offer for BuzzFeed
“I think that part of it is a gut thing or an emotional thing where you just didn't feel ready. I felt like there was a lot more we had to build. At the time we were really a website and our video business had just started. It was growing so much. And I knew th…”
Peretti: Long-term building requires a high valuation and large investment capital
“The valuation is set through investment, and the fact that people have invested in us has given us resources To build big things in the future, and to not think day to day, like, how are we doing this quarter, or how are we doing, you know, this week, and thin…”
Peretti: Founding startups is not a good way to make money
“First of all, in terms of the money question you're asking, it's not a good way to make a lot of money. Sometimes people are fortunate and make a lot of money in startups, but most of them fail, and when I think about the New York tech scene and the people tha…”