The Exchanges

Q You could, you could, just to, just to clarify, you could get any word you wanted printed on the Nike-ish, on the side of a pair of Nikes, right?

A Yeah, although they had blacklisted a bunch of words, so I was trying to figure out which words did they blacklist, and, and then I put the word sweatshop in, and it went through. So I was like, oh, I can get a pair of Nikes that say sweatshop under the swoosh, and the, the next day I got an email From a Nike rep saying that the word sweatshop is inappropriate slang. And so I just responded to the email and said, it said, no, it's in the dictionary. It means a shop or factory where workers toil under unhealthy conditions. Can you, you know, now can you send me the shoes? And then they wrote back another excuse, and we were having this back and forth, which if you're procrastinating writing a paper, this is perfect, right? You're just like back and forth. Um, and then eventually they said, we reserve the right to not put that on the shoe. You have to change the ID. And I said, okay, I'll change the ID, but Can you at least send me a picture of the ten-year-old Vietnamese girl who stitches the shoes together? And then they didn't write back after that.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, although they had blacklisted a bunch of words”

Q things that you guys really pioneered was people call native advertising or sponsored, uh, branded content, sponsored content, which is, which is controversial in the, you know, the news world, right? It's basically appears to some people to, to be You know, uh, to be indistinguishable from reported pieces. What, what, tell me the thinking behind that, and, and why did you think that was the right way to go?

A It actually is in that first pitch deck, which it was, 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 paid links, and that's how they made their money. And what that meant was the core engine that Google built, which was search, uh, would help Serve the consumer with organic links and would make them more money with paid links, and they can invest that money back into making search better. And so that was a very different model than when you looked at publishers. Like at Huffington Post, it was so frustrating to me that we build all these tools and technology to grow Huffington Post, and then the way we made money was banner ads that were powered by some other technology company that we didn't control, that often slowed down our site and made it harder to read or blocked, you know, the content on the site. And when we got better at making the technology, For, for our editors and writers and, and audience, we didn't actually get better at making money. That was like someone else's job. And so BuzzFeed is, I don't want to make that same mistake. I want the core engine of BuzzFeed, which is creating amazing content people love and want to share across the social web to also…

AI assessment note: “I want the core engine of BuzzFeed... to also be our business model”

Q Yeah, tell me, tell me about that. This is all around AI apps, right?

A Yeah, I mean, I think the apps are Use AI, but I think anytime you're building something new now, there'll be some AI aspect to it. The main thing isn't that it's AI. Um, the main thing is that it's starting fresh to build things for the world as it exists today. One of the apps that is, uh, really fun is if you search in the app, uh, the Apple app store, uh, is Conjure Camera. You get one challenge every day, uh, from a mysterious spirit, and you take Pictures with the camera and it shows you unseen things that are in the world around you. It's kind of like a Pokemon go, uh, meets Instagram meets, uh, a new thing that couldn't have existed until, you know, a year or two ago. Um, and so building things like that are, you know, really exciting for me because it, it, it gets back to the reinventing it and creating new things and seeing a lot of excitement. In, in the new models that we're developing around community, membership, programmatic advertising, new AI apps, and new ways of, of operating.

AI assessment note: “One of the apps that is, uh, really fun... is Conjure Camera.”

Q You were trying to figure out why people Share things rather than why people just click on things?

A Yeah, why do people share things? What's going to happen in the media industry if the distribution is people sharing with each other, where the consumer powers it? It felt like that was a big shift. And, you know, from the Nike email where, what does it mean that a student can reach millions of people without a gatekeeper blessing it? And what's that going to do to The entire media industry and entertainment industry, what's going to do to politics? Like, that was a fascinating, big question, and it gets into psychology of what matters to people. It gets into social psychology of how do people want to represent themselves to other people? What do people want to share with other people, and why, and what value do they get when they share? So there are all those kind of questions that I was fascinated by, and John, my partner at BuzzFeed, when we, when, when, you know, John Johnson, who started iBeam, Is a more academic type guy as well, and so he was very interested in these questions and also in funding BuzzFeed.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, why do people share things? What's going to happen in the media industry”

Q At that school. It seems like that experience was, was like a, kind of a, a turning point for you. I mean, you started to look at technology, especially the internet. You started to sort of develop some early ideas about it that would eventually lead you to where you are today. What, what, what were you exposed to? What were you thinking about at that time?

A I mean, I was thinking about how to connect with my students and, and to get them to learn things and get them excited. And that is something that, Has heavily influenced the way I think about content, because 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, you real, you start, you quickly start to learn that the really good teachers are shaping the curriculum based on the feedback they're getting from the students. They're trying to, to, to read the, the room and read the audience and get them more engaged. So I was, you know, I was designing, uh, Virtual, uh, role-playing, uh, historical role-playing in virtual worlds, and some of these, like, early VR, VR things.

AI assessment note: “I was thinking about how to connect with my students and, and to get them to learn”

Q When people asked you, so what, what is this BuzzFeed thing that you're doing? Did you say, oh, I intend to build a media company, or, or how did you think of it at the time?

A Well, early, early on when John was funding it and we had no revenue and it was like a lab, I mean, we were technically a company, but we were exploring and experimenting. It was only when we started to get a little bit bigger. We launched the website BuzzFeed. We started to have people there who were, whose jobs and was, was tied to BuzzFeed that I thought we should raise some money that isn't from John. I also did never took a salary at BuzzFeed in the early days, so I live entirely off the HuffPost. And, and so I, I started to feel guilty that my friend was, like, funding this company, and I wanted to go find some outside capital to build BuzzFeed.

AI assessment note: “it was like a lab, I mean, we were technically a company, but we were exploring”

Q So, so why, why did you turn them down?

A Uh, I think that part of it is a, 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. Um, at the time we were really a website and our video business had just started. It was growing so much. And, and I knew that that was going to be a big part of our future. Um, I valued our independence a lot and thought that there were a lot of things we could do on our own. Um, I worried about being part of a big company and being so, so small relative to the company that might own us where, um, I, I, I feel like we wanted to figure out how to invent the future of media and how things should work in the future, and we wanted to make sure we had the independence to do that. So, so, so, you know, maybe it would have, maybe it would have been great, but I think, you know, I'm happy with the decision, and I, we, we've been able to do a lot as an independent company.

AI assessment note: “I valued our independence a lot and thought that there were a lot of things”

Q How do you know how to make something go viral? Do you have a gut sense for it? I mean, are you, is it just something that you intuitively know how to do?

A It's as complicated as human psychology, which is why it's so interesting. Um, there's a bunch of things. The reason humor works so well, and the reason cute animals work so well, is that there are natural ways that people bond with each other. If you go out for drinks with your friend, And people are telling jokes. The next day, you don't remember the specific jokes. You just remember you laughed with your friends and you feel closer to them. Or if you pet the family dog and everyone gathers around, you feel closer to the dog, but you feel closer to everyone in your, in your family. Feeling the same emotion at the same time or laughing with people is a way of bonding with people. And so, um, 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 someone in your life and building a closer relationship with them. And then from there, it started to expand in a whole bunch of different areas. You, um, share this content to express your identity. I'm from, you know, if, if I'm from Oakland and I see something about Oakland, that's like what signs you grew up in Oakland, I will share that because I want my friends who also grew up in Oakland to connect with me. But I also want people…

AI assessment note: “We had this insight that content was on social was a way of connecting”

Q How much of your success, and what's happened to you, and the creation of BuzzFeed, is due to your Brilliance, and talent, and hard work, and how much of it is luck?

A I, I don't know that people's self-knowledge on these things is the best knowledge. Um, I, I think that in general, um, there's a huge amount of luck. Um, I think there's also, there's concept of, you know, Mark Zuckerberg who runs, you know, Facebook, you know, partly he gets smarter by running Facebook, you know, so, so like once you have some initial success, you get access to people and ideas and data that allow you to synthesize things. And so, um, I think that is, is also, you know, really important. And then if, you know, if you can grow something seven percent every month, you can double it every year. And if you do that for a few years, you know, 10 X is the size of that. And so if you stay at something long enough and you learn as you're doing it and you prove as you do it, um, a niche, a little bit of initial luck can be turned into something much bigger over time. Um, but there's a, there's a huge amount of luck and privilege and, and opportunity of where you're born and how you, you know, Um, and I think that is a prominent thing.

AI assessment note: “a little bit of initial luck can be turned into something much bigger over time”