a16z Podcast - a16z Podcast: Community and Culture, Online

Episode Date: January 6, 2018

We’re so used to thinking of “community” as our friends, families, and neighbors. But what a community is, and who it is made of, has changed thanks to the internet, and without our noticing it. What happens when online communities -- really, new subcultures -- form primarily around interests, not just personal relationships? Featuring VP of Product at Reddit Alex Le, CEO of Rabbit Michael Temkin, and CEO and co-founder of HVMN Geoffrey Woo -- in conversation with a16z general partner Chris Dixon -- this episode of the a16z Podcast is based on a discussion that took place at a16z’s annual Summit in November 2017. As communities of strangers and activities connect online and offline in new and different ways, what else changes? The views expressed here are those of the individual AH Capital Management, L.L.C. (“a16z”) personnel quoted and are not the views of a16z or its affiliates. Certain information contained in here has been obtained from third-party sources, including from portfolio companies of funds managed by a16z. While taken from sources believed to be reliable, a16z has not independently verified such information and makes no representations about the enduring accuracy of the information or its appropriateness for a given situation. This content is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. You should consult your own advisers as to those matters. References to any securities or digital assets are for illustrative purposes only, and do not constitute an investment recommendation or offer to provide investment advisory services. Furthermore, this content is not directed at nor intended for use by any investors or prospective investors, and may not under any circumstances be relied upon when making a decision to invest in any fund managed by a16z. (An offering to invest in an a16z fund will be made only by the private placement memorandum, subscription agreement, and other relevant documentation of any such fund and should be read in their entirety.) Any investments or portfolio companies mentioned, referred to, or described are not representative of all investments in vehicles managed by a16z, and there can be no assurance that the investments will be profitable or that other investments made in the future will have similar characteristics or results. A list of investments made by funds managed by Andreessen Horowitz (excluding investments and certain publicly traded cryptocurrencies/ digital assets for which the issuer has not provided permission for a16z to disclose publicly) is available at https://a16z.com/investments/. Charts and graphs provided within are for informational purposes solely and should not be relied upon when making any investment decision. Past performance is not indicative of future results. The content speaks only as of the date indicated. Any projections, estimates, forecasts, targets, prospects, and/or opinions expressed in these materials are subject to change without notice and may differ or be contrary to opinions expressed by others. Please see https://a16z.com/disclosures for additional important information.

The content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal business tax or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. For more details, please see A16Z.com slash disclosures. Hi and welcome to the A16Z podcast. This episode of the podcast is all about community and culture online. Moderated by Chris Dixon, general partner at A16Z, and including Alex Lay, VP of Product at Reddit, Michael Temkin, CEO of Rabbit, and Jeffrey Wu, co-founder and CEO of Human, is all about how our idea of community is changing, what a community is,

who it's made of, and what it does, thanks to the Internet. This conversation was recorded as part of our summit event in November 2017. It's interesting because these communities, prior to the internet, I don't know, they may have been formed through in-person meetup groups or magazines or something like this, but now it's happening in a much more kind of bottom-up way where people are self-organizing into very large communities of sort of interest communities and doing things like kind of bottom-up science and research and things like this too. Yeah, no, I think it's a good point. I mean, I think a lot of the behaviors were somewhat illicit or sketchy, right? Like people talking about not eating or people talking about cognitive enhancers and you have the range of people

looking at military research compounds to people talking about microdosing illegal substances. So I think it is a lot harder to have these conversations when there was in the internet and these platforms that enable these conversations. But I think, in some sense, I think all of these communities, yeah, we're empowered by the availability of breaking on geographic walls. We could just have these very easy conversations with the people that align around interest. And we got interested, my co-friend and I, Michael, in terms of enhancing cognition. We thought that, you know, humans, what really differentiates us from machines is our ability to think. So it seems sensible to enhance cognitive performance.

There just happen to be, you know, tens of doubt to the people on our neutropics, on the Reddit platform that we're talking about doing citizen science. N-Equels 1 experiments around taking substance, doing cognitive tests, seeing different improvements. And I think this was like a really rapidly growing organic community. And there's a lot of friction for people to acquire neutropics and get into biohack. So it made sense in terms of like the entrepreneurial light bulb. If a lot of people were organically getting into this topic and a lot of people are going with a lot of friction to even enter the space, maybe there's an interesting service

that you built here. What that means from a business point of view is that you tend to have a lot more, you know, a lower acquisition cost for customers, they come to you naturally, you show up an SEO, the news media likes to write about you because these communities are kind of out there and doing interesting stuff. I personally follow a lot of this stuff on Reddit. This is how we discovered a bunch of a lot of the cryptocurrency. stuff, by the way, like that I mentioned, it's almost all happening on Reddit. And so, you know, Reddit,

I think is often, my view is, it's often misunderstood because people look good at the home page and they think it's funny memes and stuff like this, which, of course, there are those things, but it's also this massive, I think of it as like a nation almost, right? Like where, you have all these different cities and subreddits and things like this, which I'm sure creates interesting opportunities and challenges. How do you think about, like, kind of balancing, wanting to foster these communities at the same time, you obviously have communities that you may not love. Do you talk about that? Yeah, I mean, I think the easiest way to talk about that is to think about how we got to the place where we are,

where we actually have millions of communities that are dedicated to almost any given human topic. Reddit actually started off as one community. So we were just a single community of kind of hackers that were interested in sharing tech news. This was like 12 years ago. And really, everything spun off from there. So we created the facility for people to have a community about anything. And it really started slowly. There were just communities that were.

We're kind of adjacent to that first community, and it's spun and spun and spun from there. These are subreddits. These are subredits. And those actually have, people don't understand this, I think, but they actually have their own moderators. It's not you. Right. Right. So the community nominates their own moderators.

Exactly. So we have about 50,000 active on any given day, and those are self-run communities. The moderators are really behind the scenes, doing a lot more to keep the communities in check and guide the conversation than it might seem, and especially more than it might seem from our front page, which, is kind of a lot of memes and the most funny and interesting content. But the way we think about it is we are a network now. We're a network of communities, and we focus on making sure that we can strengthen that network. Every additional node in that network strengthens the network effect, and any nodes that are kind of behaving badly or affecting that overall network, those got to go. And when we think about it as a network, we're happy to see communities

grow and evolve and start to become whole companies or have an industry form around them, as is the case with human, because, you know, we're very focused on the platform and enabling every kind of community to spring out of the network. And so when a company forms to support a community, that's a super happy moment for us, and we want to keep seeing that happen. One of the ways I think about it is the Internet is sort of this set of communities, and then there's this relationship between the different website. So, for example, Reddit tends to be, I think of it, tell me if you disagree, upstream from Facebook. And what I mean by that is people will develop memes and funny videos and other kinds of things, which will then spread to other kind of more mainstream, but like, yeah, Facebook,

I guess Facebook just by definition is more mainstream, right? Just bigger networks. But a lot of that will originate, right? Yeah, I don't know, the source. Yeah, the source of the mouth of the river or something, right? Yeah, yeah. We actually think of ourselves. We often joke in the office that 4chan, which is another weird place on the internet, is like raw dream space. And we are maybe a level up from that where we're refining that content and making it more interesting. And then it goes often spreads. And then it goes into kind of retail. Retail is like Facebook and Twitter or something like this. And you saw that in the election, for example. I think a lot of the smarter politicians get that and they know they need to affect the mouth of the river, right? In order to affect

downstream. Yeah, yeah. And it also affects like SEO and all these search results. This is why it has business implications. You get that community going. Yeah. And that community will determine what the search results are and how people think about a topic. Yeah, the way we like to talk about it, the company is that Reddit is a place where authentic opinions are shared and also authentic opinions can be shaped. It's a moment in time when you're talking to a community of your peers where you're seeking that kind of first inkling of what you want to think about a topic, and that community can really shape your understanding. Michael, so just to dig into a little bit more about what Rabbit does, can you go into a little more detail in terms of what the service is and like what kind of

communities you develop around it? Sure. So people come together to watch anything. So the way it works in Rabbit is anything that has a URL is available to stream synchronously. We make sure that people see the same moments at the same time, and we make sure that you have high-quality video chat and audio and text if you want it. But for us, the high-value experience is seeing people while you're experiencing content together. What people typically watch? Honestly, it's everything. And that's where the sub-communities come in. So we have, it's usually what happens with Rabbit is people will come from somewhere else from an asynchronous

community like Reddit if they have a super-obscure, animated. subgenre that they love to watch together they tend to congregate in places where they can talk about it but of course they want to have that in person more authentic genuine experience of actually watching it together so they'll congregate

in other places and we see it all over Twitter Facebook Reddit and then they'll come into Rabbit and build a more real world social graph around the content so it's as much about discovery and that's really where we focus so we focused first

on perfecting the experience of small groups of friends watching together. So when we started, it was not about being a broadcast community. It was about giving people the experience of being in person with their friends. And then we made it easy to find other things that you might want to watch or other people that you might want to watch with. So the content really is the icebreaker and the thing that draws people together. But then what we see is once you come in for some specific type of content, you'll branch out and we can watch that social graph develop

around related content or related communities. As I understood it's like a lot of it's just people watching random YouTube videos and things. So it's almost like the video is just a excuse to have something to talk about and hang out and it simulates the real world experience of like a dorm room or something. You definitely have people who will come in and watch full-length movies and watch full episodes of TV shows, but there's also a whole group of people who just want to have something on in the background while they hang out with their friends. really is that college dorm mechanism.

You know, hand me the remote. I want to show you this funny cat video that I found, and I want to play this new music video, and let's listen to the song, and experience it together. So it's about those shared moments. It's interesting, because one of course the big changes in the Internet over the last few years has been the push to video, obviously Facebook doing that.

And part of that's just enabled by the fact that the cell phones, you can now get high-quality video, full duplex, you know, and just technically possible. but it also provides kind of a richer experience. I imagine the next level of engagement after having an asynchronous conversation with people is to engage in video and other kinds of things, right? Yeah, so we actually rolled out video

to a subset of our communities just a little while ago, and it's been an amazing thing to watch. The most incredible thing we found is people who were not posting any content at all were willing to do video. There's this amazing low barrier to entry that we have now with video and the consumer landscape where everyone just feels like they can do it.

I think maybe this is partly coming from the Snapchat effect. And so it was a big boost in those communities to content submissions, all from people who weren't posting content otherwise. They weren't writing posts. They weren't responding in comments. They were just kind of lurking. But video unlocked a whole new set of experiences. And the other thing that we saw with video was that people weren't trying to upload video

to become famous or become like a YouTube famous person. They were just uploading a video because they wanted to share it with their community of friends. so we had people in like the golf community just uploading a video of their swing saying can you give me tips on like what I'm doing wrong so it was pretty interesting to see video I think is is it's really incredible what's possible so let's talk about the business side of these things so there could be tension between kind of fostering a healthy community and making money from the community how do you guys think about that Alex yeah so with Reddit we hope that we can map the

entire interest graph that exists in the world and provide a community for any topic that you might be interested in and it's very natural to go from that, knowing the things you're interested, the people that you want to connect with, and the topic you want to read about, to being able to turn that into a commercial intent. And, you know, you can take it very far, as we see with human, where it starts as a community of people kind of just experimenting themselves and needing a business to form in order for them to actually go further. So we think there's a lot of commercial intent when people are diving into the communities. You know, people who are into things and are seeking

a community are the most passionate people in the world a lot of times. You've got audio files who will spend way more money than they should on audio equipment. You have pretty much any topic you can think of. You've got people who are ready to engage with their dollars. But I would say that I think people are smart. I don't think people like being marketed to. So I think the way we think about community at human is that we just create a service around things that people want to do anyways.

So one of the biggest behaviors in our communities around intermittent fasting, this idea of shortening your eating windows and having longer periods of not eating. So people can be fasting for 20 hours a day, which is like a late lunch and early dinner. And the way we think about it is that like, that's like very similar to how Nike has like that's running clubs. Like Nike isn't monetizing people running. There's clearly value odd in terms of just providing a context of people that do things together. Or like Lulu Lemon doing like yoga classes in their studio.

And we create valuable offerings to the community. Then it makes sense for you to actually like talk to them directly. So I think there is like that fine line between overly. collecting value or extracting value from the community versus like can you add value back and then over the long term collect value over that time yeah and that's actually exactly how we think about it as well because the experiences in rabbit even if you're meeting new people who you know you wouldn't know in the real world there's still very intimate experiences it's designed around small groups of friends and you don't want you know you're hanging out with a small group of friends you don't want somebody

walking into your room trying to sell something to you but what's unique about rabbit is we have people's actual behaviors, right? So while you might say on Facebook, you like some show, Facebook and sort of asynchronous social experiences end up being performance art. You're trying to craft a persona to get people to react to you, whereas in Rabbit, you're actually doing whatever it is you're talking about. So if I'm a Game of Thrones fan, I'm probably watching it with specific people who are also Game of Thrones fans, who have other interests, and if we can add value to those experiences by connecting them with content that they wouldn't have discovered otherwise

or products that are relevant or something, there's a big opportunity. So let's like a little about the future. The broad, secular trend seem pretty obvious, which is people are spending less and less time watching traditional TV, consuming traditional media, more and more time on the internet, more and more time on their smartphones,

all the statistics bear that out that's happening with kind of younger generations. So clearly those shifts are happening, and that will have all sorts of secondary effects on content, you know, like sports, rights, deals or something will shift to the internet, presumably, ad dollars will flow. There'll be all sorts of business implications. But, you know, and it's going to be interesting to see, like, this new generation growing up who's just sort of, you know,

mobile smartphone native or something and just expects everything to be, as you said, like the influence of things like Snapchat on people's behaviors. So one would imagine that we're still pretty early on in the development of the internet, and these trends will continue and only accelerate. But I'd love to hear what your guys thought. Yeah, happy to this starts, you know, like projecting into the future. I mean, I think all All of these communities start off fairly marginal, by definition. Otherwise, it would just be like dominant culture. But I think it's like you just see the pace of all of these things growing.

I think all some of these subreddits, you know, communities on Rabbit, you know, hopefully biohacking community ends up becoming just mainstream culture. Just like computing used to be a niche activity with the Homebrew Computing Club. Now everyone, you know, has a supercomputer really in their pockets. You think the same thing is going to happen to biohacking. So I really see, I think it's like one of your like key theses to like, what are smart people doing on a weekend? And how is that going to be a behavior that everyone does in the future?

Well, one thing with the shift of the dominant media form being things like TV and magazines, which were based, you know, in cities like New York and L.A. to the Internet, I think as a secondary consequence, you have a disproportionate influence of kind of tech culture, right? Because tech culture just kind of defines, it just does better on the Internet, right? I mean, I think it's what we're seeing with all these kind of new trends. So I think to see your point, like a lot of these things that seem kind of marginal and nerdy right now. will increasingly seem mainstream. Yeah.

But I think the last point I want to make there is I think to make this not just a fad or like a cult, like there needs to be some core data or science that's thriving fundamental truth, right? Like I think an example of crypto, like, okay, there's maybe some truth that like a decentralized system is just better. Like biohacking techniques like a ketogenic diet

or intermittent fasting is just better than a standard Western diet. Like so I think it's like you can have a community but there needs to be some underlying science driving why this is a better way of living, better way of culture. But do you think that sort of traditional brands who try to kind of get into the internet

and... I think they suck at it. Like, bluntly, I think it just comes up very transparent that they're trying to extract value from the community. Like, I think we were just relatively lucky in terms of being biohackers ourselves. Like, we just... So you think that people are more sensitive

to the authenticity of brands than they used to be... They see through it and they want authenticity. I think it's probably the one of the senses that I think humans are most attuned to like can you just smell BS on people and I think that's why you see it was harder to when everything was moderated through TV ads and everything else and now you can like read about it and go and I actually think the BS meter comes through with traditional brand through the idea of controlling the message and I think that you know for the first time we have an entire generation of people who grew up with participatory media as their first real experience of media not a controlled media experience and that's that's definitely what we're It just seems strange, having somebody shout out a controlled message to you. It just seems like a weird behavior if you're used to. There has to be a real give and take. And even if you manufacture some way for there to be a participation,

if there isn't a genuine chance that the conversation is going to shift because of that participation, they'll smell it a mile away. And I think that's why companies like Neutral Boxer or Human are so successful because they're actually listening. They're like shaping their roadmap based on that conversation. they're not just selling a vision or an aspiration and expecting you to come along. I think that that's actually the key, right? So I think where traditional media has fallen over is sort of discovered participatory media,

social media, whatever, is a thing, and now they want to know, well, how do I make it social? Right. And the reality is you can't make something social. It either has a dynamic that's social and authentic, or it doesn't. And people can sniff that out from a mile away, right? am I participating in this community in a natural, authentic way, or am I being marketed to? And I think in speaking to the future, one of our theses is that because this generation of people is coming online now and they're coming online with spending power, having grown up

in a social media world, I think we're just at the beginning of what's going to happen. And I think it's going to be hard to see, too, because I think that a lot of traditional media isn't paying attention to a lot of the people who are making it really big in social media right now. because traditional media is just too used to controlling that narrative and shaping that story. So you think they're underestimating the degree to which it's happening? Yeah, I think they're underestimbing the degree to which is happening because traditional media looks to itself. It's a little bit navel-gazing to see what's the next thing,

what are the other decision-makers making decisions about now? But when you look at social media and communities, the decision-making is diffuse across millions of people, and you really have to have your finger on the pulse of what everyone is thinking. to understand what's coming next. I think there's a key piece there, which you've both mentioned, actually, which is geography.

I think that traditional media still thinks in very local-centric communities, and one of the things that I think is a big change that's happening, especially through the adoption of video for communications, is communities exist across boundaries. I mean, that's always been true

through, you know, bulletin boards and Facebook and all of that, but now that people can actually talk in real time, no matter where they are, they can exchange ideas, they can essentially do things together. Geography matters less. And especially, it's funny, we've been watching what people are watching in Rabbit. And of course, all the traditional media companies are very concerned about geographical rights for their content. And everything that's happening on YouTube and Facebook, people are sharing it everywhere. So those things are being adopted by a much wider audience.

I was just talking to someone who was a top e-sports player, like League of Legend. and he was talking about how, you know, there's a new thing now where all of the, they're selling the franchise rights for League of Legends and also Overwatch teams to, like, traditional sports teams, yeah. And it's funny because all the, you've talked to the Eastport people, like, it's such a weird concept to have, like, the San Francisco Eastport's team. Like, no one has geographic concepts. Yes.

Right? You like this team because they're cool and they do what, you know, they have this. And they all live in L.A. Yeah, and no one even thinks where you live. Like, it's just, like, you live on the Internet. But, like, you have this, like, oh, but, like, it's awesome. Like, they're, you know, whatever, they're attack strategy or whatever, you know, and they, like, get into that, and then it's funny, though, to see,

and then when the sort of existing sports teams come in, they map their kind of way of thinking of it, geographic, and we'll see how it plays out. But, like, this person was arguing that this idea that you'd have the San Francisco League of Legends team or something was this sort of legacy notion. Well, thank you, and thank you. Thanks, everyone.

Thanks. Thank you, guys. Thank you.