a16z Podcast - a16z Podcast: Guiding Startup Culture -- The Genius ISMs

Episode Date: November 28, 2014

It might seem that culture at a startup is something that is just intuitive. And in the first days, with the first handful of people, that might be true. But the co-founders of Genius.com, Tom Lehman and Ilan Zechory (pictured), found that even at 25 people taking the time to describe their company's culture in detail -- their basic principles of life and work -- was critical. What follows is their version of a culture guide, the "Genius ISMs," from the practical -- "take the roast out of the oven," and "run into the spike," to the more tonal -- "we'll figure it out" and "the chaos will not be minimized." You can check out all 17 here: http://genius.com/Genius-the-genius-isms-annotated And of course here's the interview annotated: http://genius.com/A16z-genius-podcast-annotated 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. Welcome to the A16Z podcast, Brooklyn edition. We're here at the World Headquarters of Genius.com with Tom Lehman and Ilan Zaccori. founders. Two days ago the gang of genius released the geniusisms

and it's a list of rules, concepts, feelings to live by. Rules is a real thing. Decrees. It's less about rules and more about commands slash secret. No, it's more about like just commandments? Commandments. Commandments, I think. There's a lot of.

There's 17 commandments. Yeah. Ten wasn't enough so there's 17. It's sort of like an aspirational self-definition. How we work sort of some slogans and some ideas you can refer to when you're working some things that tend to come up a lot over the years and we've been at this working together for five years and just a lot of stuff keeps coming up

and as you're hiring and building a new company you have a new person and it's kind of like a re-education in all the sort of means you're used to dealing with and so we kind of tried to write it all down stuff kind of doesn't happen so directly but Dan Gilbert when I first met him And he was the sort of topic that he was fascinated by was just how do you communicate who you are to a growing company when you have 20 people or 30 people or 1,000 people.

How do you communicate like the key ideas and do it in a way that sort of scales and is efficient and makes everybody work well together? And so he told us that he told me that and I thought this was interesting. He's saying some really interesting stuff. He runs this huge multifaceted organization. And it turns out that there's plenty of complexity with 25 people that you have to do this type of thing too. Right, and in some ways by doing it now you fend off even more

complexity later, is that the hope at least? Yeah, that's the hope. It's also fun just to have stuff to say that people are going to make the individual isms, the individual commandments marketable. Not all these are great. We've got to improve them. But it's just fun that stuff that you can say, you know, some shibboleths.

Yeah, we really like run into the spike. Yeah, so let's dig into them. One of them is run into the spike. Yeah, so run into the spike is basically the idea that whenever you're trying to decide what to do, you should do the thing you don't want to do. So there's always, when you're making a decision, you're like, well, it's this or that, and like, I know what I want to do, and so I'm going to decide, but just always do the thing you don't want to do. So whether the thing

you don't want to do is go exercise or whether the thing you want to do is go meditate or whether the thing you don't want to do is work on a hard project. And, you know, the thing you do is probably check your email or, you know, look at Twitter or check Genius. Don't do that. Don't Go to the website, genius.com. Run. So instead, run into the spike. Yeah, run away from genius.com and into the spike. And it's just a way of getting yourself to do things that are hard.

You know, it's, it's, there are a lot of things that you can do that are, or let me put it this way, like when I find myself procrastinating, I'm rarely doing something where, you know, I'm rarely like on Facebook for like two hours. But like what I will do to procrastinate is do, maybe I'll go through my inbox for like a long time and like I trick myself into thinking that's not procrastinating because it's something that's like positive for the thing but it's really ultimately a waste of time relative to what I should be doing so it's just run to the spike it's kind of one of the ways of getting towards like just what is the really hard thing you should be doing don't take the easy way out and do the

procrastination thing it's also a thing where we believe that for anything you do that's valuable you kind of have to pay the toll of like getting there like there's a bridge to get to doing the thing that's valuable and you have to walk across the bridge and there's someone saying like pay the toll in pain or whatever. And so we believe in paying that toll and just embracing it. You know, like there's the feeling of running into the spike, which is not always pleasant, but if you kind of make it a value that's explicit, people kind of get into it. And then you have the pleasure of doing something that. There's ABS, always be suffering. You know, that was one of the original, the original name for the scissors. Don't always be suffering, but run into the spike,

I think it's still good. So some of these kind of sound like what they are. Others, I'm completely baffled by. Take the roast out of the oven. This is interesting. The name here is actually Jacked from Dan Gilbert just because we started sort of repeating this and found it to be like sticky for whatever reason. But the idea is, you know, you can put all this work into getting this whole roast ready

and it's in the oven and all you have to do is take it out of the oven to serve the meal. And so just take it out of the oven. You know, it seems like a simple thing. Finish the job. But like in real life, it's often harder to take it out of the oven and finish the job. And so, you know, what will happen is you'll get to 80% done

on a project and now like, whoa. Like, getting to the point where I can actually put this out in the world is actually, like, it seems harder than I thought it was. And so, you know, that's both reason to, like, push yourself through and finish and don't give up and, like, actually make the world different. And also be careful about what you embark upon because it's probably going to be harder than you think and you don't want to get far down the road with a project or something you want to do and then quit.

And that's a bad thing to do. So avoid that. Yeah, there are people who work extremely hard and do a lot of really high-quality work, but have a sort of fear of finishing of putting themselves out there and this is to make you feel like you have to. Well, and in your world, in the world of, you know, software, essentially, you have no choice but to keep taking those roast out of the oven, right?

Yeah, and part of the roast out of the oven thing is connected to another isom, maybe the earliest ism in some sense, one that I was banding about on the tech side for, you know, a couple of years actually called Worse's Better, which is just this idea. One way to get the roast out of the oven is just to, take it out, even if you think it is not done, even if you think it's going to be embarrassing, even if you think it's, you know, just

definitely not yet. Take it out, put it out there in the world. You know, the worst, the worst thing is the best thing. Like, the worst the project is, the better it is to get it out there and then perfected in public, to the extent needs to be perfected. Just worse is better and take the roast they have and kind of combine to say just like, you know, your perfectionism, your desire to make things perfect is good.

It comes from a good place, but ultimately, to make progress, you can't be a slave to that. You've got to just put stuff out there and see what happens. Yeah, there are artists who take 10 years, 15 years between projects, between an album, or between their next film or whatever. And then there are artists who put out thousands of songs or whatever. And we think that in the art of trying to build a consumer-facing internet company,

you've got to be more like Lil B and less like, who's a good artist who takes like 20 years? Like DiAngelo or whatever. Michelangelo, you're thinking of. Yeah, you know, I think, and there's another aspect to it. which is just don't try to plan everything out in advance, you know, like one sort of almostism is don't be Le Caborset, you know, am I pronouncing that, right? So, you know, the corbusier, the, the, cubicié, you know, I saw it red before pronounced, that's actually better that I can't say it right, but the, the Perseille, you know,

obviously, and so he, you know, his thing was like, let's plan the city down to the doorknob, you know, let's plan everything out in advance, and the perfectionist impulse, the anti-Worse is better impulse, the anti-take-the-Oven impulses is, I've got this grand plan for this thing and I'm going to execute that plan and release it. It's like you don't have a plan you know, it's got to be this organic thing it's got to be more organic and so I just want to recommend this book

that Alon and Mopo actually recommended to me so I'm just totally jacking from them but I came to love it more than they ever will. It's called Seeing like a State by Jim Scott and it basically sort of is a long argument against sort of making a grand plan and then trying

to execute it and it's just it's going to go awry so don't make a grand plan do an incremental thing. Don't be Liquorcia. Anyone listening to this, if you find yourself literally being Liquorcia, stop. And the story is basically

about how even well-intentioned, that's scare quotes, I guess we're on the radio, you can't tell. But like well-intentioned government schemes to improve the human condition, large-scale projects

have caused, you know, untold human suffering, unintended human suffering. And no one's going to vacation in Brasilia, except I kind of want to go. Feel it to my face. This is a big one.

Like, you know, Tom and I, we were kind of on this tip in the early days because just we found that the co-founder relationship was just so fraught with feelings. And, you know, then if you don't talk about things, if you don't hammer out the subtext, if you don't check in, if you don't admit vulnerability, you're screwed. You know, you can't really run a business if it's loaded with or do a creative project with someone, if it's just totally loaded with unspoken emotional stuff. and you know we hire a bunch of people a bunch of really talented people people with strong personalities people who feel things very deeply and that stuff needs to get communicated and often it's not clear if you're an employee at a company like what's appropriate what's not appropriate to say to other people and so we just believe that not only should you if you're feeling something and it's making you unhappy uneasy or whatever you should say it to someone

but in particular you should say it to the person who it's relevant to you's like relevant to your situations if I'm feeling something about let's just say Max who works here it's probably not to everyone's always always about that guy he's a musician what a Max wonderful guy and uh great guy great guy and so

you know it's better for me to go just talk to Max and like sort of run into that spike rather than to go talk to Tom about how Max is upsetting me because and to have Tom soothe me or whatever and then Max is just blissfully unaware of the whole thing so it's about just going to the people suffering that initial discomfort realizing it's not as bad as

think it's going to be. And in fact, it's actually really healthy. You probably feel a lot better. Another sort of, sorry, another side of this is about feedback, you know, so like just say what you actually think about something, whether it's someone's, you know, some work that someone did, whether it's what the company's doing, you know, like, you think about, like, if you have food on your face, like your friend tells you that you have food on your face, your non-friend doesn't tell you. And the reason is your friends now to suffer an uncomfortable conversation to help you and your non-friend just doesn't want themselves to feel uncomfortable. And so, you know, if someone has food on their face,

metaphorically or literally, like, suffer the uncomfortable moment and tell them what's real, you know? It's also just the whole, it's the feel to my face is part of another thing, which I think just people underappreciate in companies and business, is just how big of a part the emotional side of things play. So part of field to my face is not just like, you know, part of it is the feedback thing, but like that in some sense is kind of obvious because it's like we're here working on something,

and we're doing this work, and if I think the work is bad, I probably should overcome the awkwardness and say something. But the emotional side, if I just feel like, did we have like an awkward moment there? Did I say something? Like the emotional side, like I think people, and I definitely did this, especially when I was coming out of school, people just think that like, ah, the way the world of adults work

is people go to the offices and kind of check their emotions at the door and their professionals or whatever. And it's like, that's not true. The emotional side of the world is just very, very real, you know. And no matter how well you know the people, No matter how well you know the people, maybe even more so, as you know the people better, but like Tom and I, through all our experience and, like, however close we are, still have the capacity to make each other feel very bad, even by accident, you know, just by being

who we are and having communication patterns. And so, like, we'll have some conversation about something, and it might just feel a little bit off, and neither of us can diagnose it or whatever, but I will go away and I'll feel bad until we resolve it, and somebody's got a breakthrough and say the thing, which is like, is something weird with our relationship? and then we talk about what's really going on and what sort of unrelated things happened and then, you know, feel much better, so...

This sort of relates to one that I really like here, write it like a human. Why was that even necessary, although I believe it it is and believe me, I hope I wish everyone did. Yeah, you know, the thinking behind this was like, I was kind of saying, like, we were kind of trying to say, like,

writing is important, and here is the most important thing about writing from a business perspective, in my opinion. And it's like, be a good writer and do well at written communication, is definitely important and like if I just tell you one thing for the top level thing it's just right like a human right like you would communicate if you're just talking to someone trust your natural voice trust who you are don't think you have to come into a professional

or business context and change who you are to be someone else because that's what's professional and that's kind of related to the emotional side of things like I'm going to check my emotions at the door and I'm going to write like I'm not a human like I have no emotions and I'm just going to sound professional that's how people in the world write and the answer the actual reality is just trust your normal voice and that will make you seem more appealing and that will be just more fun and better. And so it's just right like you would say it, don't say, you know, don't hesitate to ask if you have any questions or whatever. Right. With respect to, may I, yeah, we'll figure it out. Yeah, we'll figure it out as this is, I got to give a shout out to Tom. Tom's really

taught me this over the years like in terms of crisis psychology, even if it's not a huge crisis, But in huge crises as well, it's just always have the attitude of we'll figure it out. Things can appear. Things will appear. If you're doing any startup, things will appear incredibly gloomy, no matter how good your circumstances are. I'm sure that in the sort of meteoric rise of Facebook or Google or whatever, they felt at times like they were totally and totally and you know, you have to have, you can't overreact, you can't do stupid things out of. of like an emotional impulse and you have to look at crises as opportunities so you got to be sort of clinical when stuff's going on sort of check your anger or compartmentalize your anger and say

okay like I'm confident we've been in these situations before we will figure it out we'll work our way out of this hole and even beyond that what are the big opportunities that are here now because we're in this crisis that might not otherwise have been there and can we seize those opportunities and so it's just a basic like having a base level of optimism even when things feel really bad and not sort of taking out your pessimism on other people and trying to get credit because you're predicting doom and you might be right right right yeah what i like about we'll figure it out is it's just among what alam was saying like just it's something where just the name of it i think is good just starts saying we'll figure it out like if someone if you're

getting a thing and looks doom and just say we'll figure it out and that will like that's what you're supposed to say in that situation. That'll make you feel a little better. That should be your approach. Does it give people here a little bit more freedom to just try stuff too and like maybe going to the wrong direction and or cause a problem for that matter? Yeah, you know, I think the, I think that's something probably we should add to that. Like I think, um, you know, one part of we'll figure it out is don't get mad at someone for, you know, don't get upset with someone for causing a problem. Right. You know, like there are going to be problems and fault is like, Who knows?

Like what, like, some person maybe literally cause it, but who knows what led to it? The point is, we're going to have problems. Don't get upset with someone for solving a problem. Be solution-oriented. Maybe you should get upset with someone if they aren't down to help solve it. But, like, you know, problems are going to happen. We will figure it out. Don't lose your head.

And that also means don't get upset of people for doing bad stuff accidentally. The chaos will not be minimized. This is, this is obviously a Gil Scott Herron reference. That should be in the annotation. But, you know, this is kind of related to the, the Cabassier thing, in a sense. Like, anything great is messy. Building anything great is messy.

And so if you look at, like, you know, an art studio or an operating room or, you know, my favorite example, which is from seeing like the state, seeing like a state is like an army on parade versus an army in battle. And you think, if you were new to armies, you might think, God, an army on parade, that's what I want.

It looks like this art project. It's so in line and everyone's orderly. But they're not. doing what they're supposed to do in that context, like the Army doing what is supposed to do is in battle. And from the outside, it looks like a total mess. And it feels like a total mess from the inside. But, you know, you can accomplish things that way because what we're trying to do what the Army's trying to do is maximize results, maximize output, not minimize chaos or maximize comfort. I think a lot of the time people kind of feel like, why would you do

this? Like, you know, why would you do this to me? This sucks for me to be to have a reorganization of how the company's management works. Now I work for someone else. I thought I worked for you. And it's kind of like, well, that is definitely your feelings in this case are like a consideration, but like, you know, the chaos will not be minimized means like we're always going to be changing. We're always going to be doing what's best for the company. It doesn't mean that too much change can't be disruptive to actual effectiveness and productivity. Like you still have to like think about that. But we are not just going to make decisions to minimize rough change reactions. Like we are going to make the best decisions and everyone's got to kind of get down with the fact that things change.

lot or else this probably isn't a place for you and you should be working in a bigger company. Yeah, and it's not a, it's not a function of 25 people or 50 people or a thousand people even like. That's just what you're going to do. Well, it's just the converse, if you're doing the thing that makes you feel comfortable, you know, there's the Mario Andretti quote, I guess. Like if you feel like you can control your car, you're going too slow. It's just like, if you are feeling comfortable, you are not moving fast enough. You're not pushing hard enough. And it's kind of a corny, like, cliche at this point, but I think it's very true.

And so, you know, if you work here, you shouldn't expect to feel comfortable, but also whatever you're doing in life, if you're feeling comfortable, you might want to try, like, moving faster, pushing harder. Don't fill up on bread. Yet another food-related... One of the other food-related ones? Take the roast out of the oven and never eat gluten. Don't fill up on bread. Like, another way of saying this is just, like, don't work on stupid shit that seems like it might be good. right um there's it's so there's so many small projects you can do that seem like they're valuable

you can have so many pieces of bread before dinner um but you've got to work on big sort of impactful opportunities uh as much as you can and there's lots of small projects that you have to work on sometimes but just if you could fill your whole work life just doing small stuff and then you just you're going to get fat i think the the sort of challenge is when you're thinking about worse is better you're thinking about doing small things. There's a reality, which is you don't want to release some huge, you know, the software context, some huge feature in whole cloth. And so the idea of worse is better is do it in small increments.

But you want to make sure your small increments are leading towards a grand vision and you're not just doing a bunch of random small stuff because it's very easy to do a bunch of random small stuff. There's plenty of stuff. Like if you look at your inbox, someone's going to write you an email and say, hey, like, I work at blah, blah, blah. Maybe we could collaborate at blah, blah, blah. Maybe you should do that, but you probably shouldn't do it just because you happen to see it in your inbox. You'd be part of your plan in some way.

Are you guys experts in anything? It says they would be skeptical of experts. I mean, people would think I'm an expert in a lot of stuff or some stuff, and then they would ask me questions, but they should definitely be skeptical of my advice. Like, I'm an expert in SEO. I'm an expert in hypnotherapy. Like, I don't know. What else?

But like, don't ask me any questions about any of this stuff. I know. Anitations in Alon's, Alon wrote a brilliant essay about a meditation retreat he took. And one of the reasons for taking the retreat was some. anxiety and it was like in the text it was a it was like some anxiety around my like my iTunes playlist and if you click the annotation you see like here was the playlist in question and the top thing is how to be a super confident hypnotherapist and so just like it was a bunch of hypnosis like downloads it was like how to stop being lazy like how to get rid of like such a such

addiction or that addiction and then it was just like how to be a super confident hypnotherapist meanwhile all my hypnotherapy clients are reading that they're like uh oh who is this guy and so it's like you go into the hypnotherapy thing, but beforehand, you know, the hypnototherapist is, is, is, is, is, is, is playing pop that to pump himself up because he's nervous about the thing. And that's part of it. The other side of it is just an experience that, that, that we had, like, particularly in Y Combinator, which was just, we get to Y Combinator. And, you know, frankly, I personally, at least, was totally starstruck, you know, like Paul Graham in particular, but everyone else around there was like, this was like my dream, you know, and these were my idols. And not only that, but they gave so much access. So, you know, Paul Graham, you can talk to him. You can talk to Sam Alton. you can talk to everyone on staff but they can hook you up with anyone else too and so you go and you say wow with all this access I'm going to be able to find people who are going to help me solve my hard problems

and so you know part of that is true talking to people inspires you and can give you good advice and can help but whenever I had a, whenever we had a hard problem then we went into a meeting with a lawyer or an investor or a YC partner or some kind of expert thinking this is the meeting where someone's going to tell us

like what to do and it's so great that we have access to this it just doesn't happen and the reason is that A, the idiosyncrasies of your situation are more relevant than you think. Like, you can't truly describe your whole situation in, like, an hour or something. Like, you know a lot more eosyncratic stuff than you think. Which is also related to Lecoborcia, by the way. Like, the criticism of Lecoorsi is there's so much idiosyncratic on the ground social life going on in cities

that you can't just take the expert of... Anyway, so there's a lot of stuff, you know, and the expert doesn't care as much as you, probably. And so you need to combine those two things, your superior knowledge and your superior amount of caring and figure it out yourself and not look for the mythical expert who's going to get you out of your hard problem. So you guys have these, you know, from top to bottom, is there a sort of ascending or descending order? Are they all equally important? Does it just depend on the situation? I think it's going to, there's no, I don't think there's any real implicit order here.

I think it'll emerge, like which ones get used the most. But they're sort of just an equal smattering, I would say. Some order. I think we'll figure it out. I definitely wanted to put at the end because of like statement of hope. And I think it's not not your job as a good one to. That's the first one. And people, by the way, this is all up on genius.com and people can come in an annotator.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Put some annotations up there, especially if you disagree with something, you know, clap at us, you know, feel it to our face. So it's not your job you wanted to lead with that? Yeah, I just think that's like an overall sort of positive message to say. I mean, it's kind of phrased in somewhat negatively, but just... It's a double negative. It's a double negative message, so I think I'll be a app on that one, but I don't. I think it works out to something good, basically.

And so, you know, it's just a statement about, like, you know, look, like, and this is related to, like, only hire the best people, only hire eight players, is like, everyone we bring in here, you know, is going to be responsible for either the success or failure of the company. That's how we genuinely feel. And, you know, that doesn't mean that everyone should be thinking about every problem every second, but no one should ever be in a situation where they are thinking, okay, I am doing my job, great, and that's it. Like, if the company failed, I would still say to myself, I did my job, great.

You know, this is not how it is at bigger, you know, companies, like, you know, big company, a lot of inertia around what's going on. Like, you can just do your job and that's fine. But here, everyone's got to be a leader. Everyone's got to be looking out for the actual success of the thing. And that means, you know, one thing that means is trusting your gut about what's good and bad. You know, part of, you know, it's not just a lazy thing of saying, like, oh, I don't want to do this. It's kind of like, I'll leave that to the expert of doing that.

Like, I think something's weird in this part of the company, but I'm just not going to it's like no say something speak up like don't say don't think you're not qualified to comment pick oh pick up the rock and see the creepy crawlies underneath and tell people about it and try to fix the problems like you know before i had this in here uh before we put this in here like one thing i and i still am tempted to tell us say this when new people join it's just like everything you think that's everything you think that's messed up is actually messed up like there's a tendency you come into a place you see something messed up you think oh it's me like i'm not seeing the the real deal like i must not know what's up no if you

think it's messed up it is messed up speak up um in doing this did because it took a lot of sort of obviously thought and and focus to kind of figure out what you guys are all about you probably knew it sort of intuitively but to put it down to write it down did it sort of teach you guys any anything about this company and and yourselves well it's taught us that our impulse is to be very robust so i i got to give uh props to alon who's much better at sort of saying the truth about how many isms you should have at the start at least

I was sort of like an ism fantasy land in time here 40 or so like 27 that's what you know we were having a good nature board meeting and the sort of slogan of as we presented our 32 isms or whatever to them was sort of like more

engineers fewer isms I think was the basic like rallying cry but that was a good rally so any engineers out there like we need you to work here so we can have more isms, right? That's the point. We need isms. You have ism to engineer.

Yeah. Well. Ivan, Tom. Thank you guys. That's it? Well, okay, so Lightning Round. Nice. We bought ourselves some more podcasts.

Great. We're now going to go to the Lightning Round. One question I want to ask you guys, you guys are annotating news stories now. And it's sort of happening from the outside, genius.com, but also on the inside within media properties. What's that an attempt to do? And I just want to sort of get your opinion on like how we can have better conversations

within the news flow. And it can be entertainment news, whatever. But, you know, within the flow of information, how can we have better conversations and what are you guys doing to that end? There are a bunch of levels to like what annotation can bring to news, you know, what I think is most exciting and most interesting is bringing real accountability to journalism. and so, you know, obviously people can annotate a primary source and people want to annotate the State of the Union

and have commentary on it because it's an interesting primary text, but you know what's secondary sources. You know, if you look at the Newsweek article about the Bitcoin founder, for example, that was a case where there's this article. It's in this major publication, and there's some criticism flying around the Internet on Twitter and elsewhere, but if you can go directly to the article and have experts on the subject, annotate, and challenge the journalist claims

or have the subject of a piece oftentimes there are articles about people and people get upset because they were misquoted, things were taken out of context subjecting a piece the internet and this technology allows you to subject all pieces of journalism to actual criticism

and that criticism can come from regular people who have something to say about it or it can come from subjects of a piece it can come from experts on a piece the journalist can respond to criticism on the piece itself focused on specific aspects of the piece that are in question. So you structure a conversation around a claim, around the specific piece of reporting that's happening. And so we think we're building some tools that allow these

conversations to happen in interesting ways and surface these conversations to the right people, but also send signals to people who might be interesting commentators on these stories. And so as we build out our product, which is allowing people to annotate any website, not just stuff on our site, We think this is going to be a key part of how people read and write journalism. So distinguish then, though, for me, we have comments, or at least we've had comments, you know, off and on, depending on what you read and watch, but they usually devolve into sort of pissing matches, right? And that's the problem with comments by and large.

How does this change that dynamic or can it, do you think? Well, I think a big part of it is the sort of community and editorial structure for what happens on our site and what will soon happen on every site when the platform. sort of gets woven to the fabric of the internet. So, you know, one big thing that we do on the site right now is we are trying to sort of explain what's going on. So whether you're reading a Shakespeare, you know, seven ages of man's speech, you know,

mulling and puking like an infant or whatever. Like if you're reading, like, you want to know what mulling means or if you're, you know, listening to a piece of music, and you want to know what that means. And so we spend a lot of time developing software and social norms surrounding this community that, you know, sort of is designed to produce the best possible interpretation.

So one person will take a stab in interpreting a line, and another person will add a suggestion, and then an editor will come in and sort of resolve the sort of discrepancy between the suggestion, the original thing can create like a wiki-style document that's going to cover the good explanation of what's going on. So it's sort of that type of thing that we want to take to other sites. So both literally in the sense that you should go to a site and see a sort of genius editorial board approved annotation, which is, you know, we call it the genius annotation, which is sort of the annotation that we are putting out there, and we are saying, like, this is the sort of best, impartial,

not too long, kind of funny, annotation, explanation of, like, what is going on in this claim the author's making. But then the editorial board also has another function, which is finding and surfacing relevant in other people's comments. So, you know, for example, like, you know, as a lot was saying, like one key example is, like, the subject of a piece or someone cited in a piece. So, like, we want that person to be able to comment, and right now if that person goes and comments

on the piece in the comments below, like their comment it's going to get lost or maybe if it's not lost, someone will have a question about is it actually from this person, is this real? And so the function of the community and the software is basically to find out, okay, who's relevant to this? How can we bring them to this piece? How can we confirm that they are real?

And then when they do annotate, how can we make sure their annotations are visible and noted as such? And so, you know, that kind of curatorial aspect combined with sort of the straight editorial function is going to be a big part of it. In general, in comments at the bottom of an article, you don't have any principle of organization that says, let's surface the best stuff in the topic.

Part of what Reddit has been, why Reddit has been so successful, is they simply have a good algorithm for sorting the top comment out or Hacker News. It's like, normally you read, what is the thing, and the top comment, and that thread is usually fairly interesting underneath the top comment. With most publications, don't even do that, let alone call out who is saying something, why,

is it interesting, tying it to a specific part of the article that it's referencing and you have people sort of manually quoting things and then commenting on them, but then it's just lost in a wash of a lot of commentary. If you have an editorial and a sort of community infrastructure that creates interesting comment, both from a sort of crowd perspective and from an individual perspective and surfaces that content right there on the article, that makes for a pretty interesting reading experience. All right, that wasn't very lightning, but we're going to go into the lightning round now. piece of music coming out

that you're excited about? Dage Loaf. Dage Loaf is she has a song called Try Me. She has a song called We Good. She's a rapper out of Detroit. She's just arriving and she's going to be massive.

I love her. I also got to say, like, I'm super slow and lame, basically, but I just love the song Lifestyle, Rich Gang and Young Thug, which is just the classic. I found out about it because everyone on Twitter was like,

that's the song you really need rap genius for because I can't, you know, I just don't even, because it's really hard to understand what he's saying, but it's a great song, and I just, I can't get enough. That's not really new, I apologize. Sneakers, high tops or low tops? Both. You just got it.

Impossible to answer. It's insanely complicated. Both. I think Nike AirMax is probably, you know, the gold standard for sneaker, but, you know, I'm wearing mid tops now and loving every second of it. Mid.

Hi. Mid's not bad. Brooklyn. Getting crowded, having to move? Yeah, we're running away from the hordes. We're in Williamsburg right now, but we're moving to Gowanus. Gowanus, still a lot of people there, but there's, like, far fewer... Is that near Cuba?

It's sort of similar. It's a couple blocks from the only whole foods in Brooklyn, so it's not exactly totally out there, but Gowanus is historically kind of, like, more of like what Williamsburg was 25 years ago or something like that. The headline in the Wall Street Journal, like... think was like area known for smelly canal draws hot startup or something oh really like there's a smell there's smelly no people say they throw body in the guanus that's kind of what the guanus is known for good well hopefully there'll be no body stone on the guanus on your account um this time

tom ilan thank you guys very much that's it okay all right all right we're done it's good that was good