a16z Podcast - Insights from the Frontlines of Consumer Tech

Episode Date: April 19, 2023

There is arguably nothing that impacts our daily lives more than consumer technology. This technology can drive our ability to change careers, build an audience, or feel understood. And in this episode, listeners get a sneak peek into our new consumer series, Field Notes, where a16z’s very own Connie Chan speaks with the builders, creators, and investors behind the technology that shapes our daily lives.If you like these segments, you can find the full episodes at a16z.com/fieldnotes.Topics Covered:00:00 - Introduction02:13 - Chris Schroder08:15 - Brian Wong15:35 - Tracy Sun23:03 - Deb Liu30:56 - Susan PlagemannResources: Find the full series: https://a16z.com/fieldnotesFind Connie on Twitter: https://twitter.com/conniechanDeb's Part 1:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Is2pm06MNt8Deb's Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osJp6S66u2UChris's episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zux1wVirUjs Stay Updated: Find a16z on Twitter: https://twitter.com/a16zFind a16z on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16zSubscribe on your favorite podcast app: https://a16z.simplecast.com/Follow our host: https://twitter.com/stephsmithioPlease note that 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/disclosures.

Hi everyone. This is Steph, your host of the A16D podcast. And today, we actually have a very special episode about consumer technology. Look, there is arguably nothing that impacts our daily lives more than consumer technology. This technology can drive our ability to change careers, build an audience, or even feel understood. And as consumer technology advances, so do our behaviors. I mean, just think. Not that long ago, it would have seemed outlander. dish to meet your spouse online, to sleep in a stranger's home, or even sit in a driverless car. But here's the exciting part. The innovation does not stop today. We can look forward to a whole new host of consumer tools in the years to come, fundamentally reshaping the way we work,

play, eat, commute, learn, and even socialize. And so I mentioned earlier that this is a special episode, and it's actually a sneak peek into a new series, Field Notes, by A6 and Z's Consumer General Partner, Connie Chan. You actually probably recognize Connie because she's been a regular on this podcast, and in her new series, Connie chats with the builders, creators, and investors behind the technology that is shaping our daily lives. And in this episode, you'll actually hear five different segments from the series, touching on a few key themes driving the next wave of consumer technology, including how innovation is sprouting in completely unexpected places, new modalities like crater monetization, understanding what metrics really matter, and so much. much more. And if you like these segments, and I have a feeling you well, there's a lot more where they came from. You can find the full episodes at our YouTube channel or at a16.Z.com slash field notes. As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only.

None of the following is investment, business, legal, or tax advice, and please note that A6 and Z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed in this podcast. Please see A6NZ.com slash disclosures. For more important information, including a link to a list of our investments. All right. To kick things off, Connie sits down with longtime friend Chris Schroeder, an American entrepreneur, advisor, and investor. But Chris has also spent an incredible amount of time abroad, investing in emerging markets from Indonesia to Pakistan. And in this you'll get to hear exactly what Chris pays attention to when he's on the ground studying these markets. And as someone who was nomadic for several years, this episode was actually my favorite

from the series. So I'd really encourage you to go listen to the full episode where you'll learn more about everything from last mile logistics to unbanked populations, how to adapt to unique needs of a region, the PayPal effect in other parts of the world, and the ramifications of AI globally. This really was such an important conversation around how innovation can truly come from anywhere. You actually cover so many different regions of the world. Give us a list of the different regions that you spent time studying or spent significant time in. At one level, it sounds like I'm spread too thin, but I think one of the big theses that I have learned in this traveling is that which is happening among emerging markets among themselves is more shared

in many cases than their compatriots in Silicon Valley or even Beijing. And so you just have this pattern recognition across emerging markets that I picked up very early. So I spent a lot of time and have invested in, of course, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Latin America, a little bit in Africa. I have two investments in Pakistan. And I see the same phenomenon repeat itself over and over again. I do agree with you. A lot of the emerging markets do share some common themes like what are some of the common themes that you look for. I know a lot of these places are more mobile first or I'd say even mobile only, right, than us here in the West. A lot of them have very large young populations that are even more tech forward, quick to adopt new

technology. What are some general themes that you see that make those learning so applicable from one region to another? I think you have women and men who sit in a room and discuss the nature of the challenges they have as much as anything else. So last mile logistics is a tremendously difficult thing in most of the markets that we're talking about right now as it has been in China as well. Regulatory environments that are in flux and unpredictable have to navigate it. That's a big thing. Another big thing is frankly just educating people, consumers, folks in the markets. I mean, the fact is that you've got massively unbanked populations who for the first time can get credit quite easily on their phone and have never actually really had that experience to leverage.

So many of the best entrepreneurs I meet are spending a fair amount of their time, literally educating a consumer base that moves very quickly and rapidly, but it is still an element of something that happens there and doesn't happen with many of the companies you see. Maybe we can talk a little bit about how go-to-market strategies are so different from country to country. We have this conventional wisdom that if you even use social media in this form, you want to have influentials in Instagram that had a million followers or two million followers. And certainly that works in certain circumstances.

But one of the things that you've seen emerging markets, when I see this in Africa in particularly, is trust is the most important thing. To be able to light up people who are the trusted community leaders become something. which is really quite unique to these areas and very, very effective. What are some specific anecdotes you've heard of really effective go-to-market strategies that work in the developing world? Look, in a way, this goes back to the conversation about the American Playbook, because in many respects, Uber should have been the ultimate case study of American Playbook.

We had all the technology, all the capital, all the experience to go to any market and win at all. And I could remember a few years ago when they were doing quite well in the Middle East, these upstarts, McKinsey veterans, started a company called, called Kareem, and everyone thought they were crazy. Like, how can they possibly take on Uber and anything else? And there were a whole host of reasons of local understanding that worked for them. But one of the biggest and obvious ones was they began to offer cash payments when you finish a ride in a Kareem car, because they knew that most people in the Middle East were not comfortable yet in the safety and protection of doing a digital transaction. And you watch the numbers.

And just slowly, all of a sudden, Kareem started going like this because they were adapting to the specific needs on the needs. of the market overall, while Uber sat back and said it wasn't going to happen. Needless to say, within a year Uber was offering cash acceptance. But it's a kind of example about these little things that don't seem like big things actually are game changers of what goes on. So when you go into a new region, you get on a plane, which I totally agree. The best way to learn is to just show up and observe, just watch how people are behaving. How much time do you try and spend in a place before you start to form a view and say, like, yes, this is a place I want

to double click on, spend more time on, or this place is interesting, but has some attributes that make it much more difficult than, say, another part of the region where I already have a lot of connections. And I'm not going to say that someone made a funny remark to me the other day I was in Southeast Asian. So the good news about doing what you do in emerging markets is if you go to the five-rate weddings, you can actually get to most of the people who are running the ecosystems overall. And it's a cute statement, and it's not really true. But what is true is that I don't rely on your.

on my observations. I rely on my reporting. I think you can tell very, very quickly whether an ecosystem is beginning to move in the directions you want or what are the constraints often regulatory or elsewhere. But the big question... You're looking for momentum. There are two things. One that you and I've talked about a lot. Momentum is key. Like, are the dynamics right or what have you? But the other one, which you've often pushed me on, I think, quite right. And of course, China was a great beneficiary of a scale. Because at the end of the day, you know, there's 100% smartphone penetration in Singapore. But if you are a Singapore startup alone, there's only so much you could do. So it begins to beg the question,

what are the markets where you can expand, what are the services allow you to take what you're doing and still have some edge as you yourself go to other countries. And I think that even the big juggernauts in some of these regions have learned that they are as much an aggregation of local companies as they are just one-stop shop in terms of what they offer. Speaking of innovation coming from anywhere, this next segment features Brian Wong, the author of the Tao of Alibaba, a chronicle of his experience as the first American to be hired at Alibaba, getting a firsthand look into how Jack Ma shaped the company's culture. And in this clip, Brian speaks to the very earliest days in 1999, a time where very few people in China even knew what the internet was.

And also, how Jack used that to his advantage. He'll get to hear some pretty incredible stories, including how a hotel manager ended up leading Alipay or a secretary, ended up heading up their logistics platform, which, by the way, is now the world's largest digital network for logistics, or even how Jack would encourage several teams within the company to compete with one another. And so as Alibaba would stand up all these new businesses, whether it's shipping or cloud or payments or whatever it is, talk a little bit about how it would either repurpose its existing talent or have to bring completely new outside talent in to do this.

Because one thing that also struck me about Alibaba is not only is turnover abnormally low, but there are all these stories about folks who are secretaries who then become VPs of an entire business line or people who move from one department to another. It's seemingly very, very fluid, potentially even more fluid than like a Google where you hear about people transferring departments all the time. In China in 1999, there were very few people who even knew what the Internet was, let alone have the specific skills to do web development and coding and whatnot. So to some extent, the company had to really train people to move up into these more senior positions.

And we had an approach that when you're thinking about cultural fit versus skills, we always opted for find the person who really believes in the culture and the mission and the vision first, and then you can train them up. And so that was an important process by which the company was able to build its talent pool. So Jonathan Liu is a very good example of someone who was a sales head in Shenzhen. His previous background was that of a hotel manager. So Jack says to him, Jonathan, what do you know about the financial sector? Not a whole lot, Jack.

Have you heard of this company called PayPal? Actually, no. He said, great, you're hired. You're going to lead AliPay and be the founding CEO. And why would he do that? Because he wanted someone who wasn't already influenced or biased by these old financial sort of ways of doing things. And he wanted someone who was customer-centric.

Another example is Judy Tong. Judy came in as a secretary, and she worked her way up within the admin department to a VP level. But when Jack decided, hey, we need to launch Cai Niao, a logistics platform, it's basically a data network that coordinates logistics resources. He said, Judy's the right person and do this. Why? Not because she has a logistics background,

but because she understands administratively how to fit the different parts together and what are the needs of a company such that you can build a data platform to address those needs. And, you know, Tainau is now the world's largest digital network for logistics. So those are some examples of what you're talking about

in terms of using non-traditional people. There's a couple of other management techniques that I see much more frequently in Asia, than I see here in the U.S. So, for example, having two teams build the same thing just to see which one does it better. Actually, the earliest days of WeChat, same thing. Two different teams were coming out

to build a mobile messaging platform, right? How does that play out in Alibaba? I think one that really stands out is AliCloud. I think that there was a lot of concern about whether AlleyCloud in 2009, Dr. Wong-Jen, who's the founder of the Alli-Cloud business, really wanted to build his own sort of operating system for the cloud computing business that he was creating. But a lot of the engineers were not confident in that because they thought, like,

why build your own when you have an open source system called, I think Hadoop was the name of the open source system for cloud computing? And they argued back and forth over this. A lot of people were critical of Dr. Wong. They said he's not going to be able to pull this off. And so much depends on cloud computing moving forward. There was this belief that, that the whole company's future would rely on whether or not this project worked. And in the end, you know, everybody's fighting. They're yelling at each other. Jack is sitting there like a wise man, like a Yoda.

And he suddenly says, stop. And everyone says, well, Jack, what's your decision? And he says, we're going to do both. We're going to do both Dr. Wong's, and we're going to continue with Hadoop. And eventually, Dr. Wong's platform prevailed. It's called Espera and it's Alibaba's. own proprietary cloud computing system, it's the most popular one in China, but it also saved Alibaba a lot of extra resources moving forward in terms of being able to expand this

cloud computing system because it's our own proprietary system. And it gives us many advantages to do much more than we would have using the open source. And these kinds of instances where two teams are building almost like backup plans to each other or competing against each other. Is there also like a reward or is there also a consequence if your team isn't the team that wins? No, I think that you end up learning from that process. I mean, there's some really good examples also of failures of businesses that in the end weren't exactly failures. Yahoo China, most people know Yahoo invested a billion dollars into Alibaba in 2005, but part of that deal was also Alibaba was able to take ownership of Yahoo China business.

Now, a lot of people say that was a failure because Alibaba ran Yahoo China into the ground. It didn't take off the way it should have. But actually, there was silver lining and all that, which is Alibaba learned from that Alibaba China business about the whole ad system that they were using. And then incorporated that into Taubow to run its P for P business. And so that actually became the foundation of what we call Ali Mama, which was the ad network, which became extremely profitable for Tao Bao as a revenue generation system. Another failure was Lai Wang, which was really supposed to be an instant messaging competitor to 10 cents WiiChat. I think this was in 2013 or so. WeChat was growing and becoming a formidable competitor, not just in messaging,

but also in e-commerce and payments. And so Alibaba tried to launch its own instant messenger, failed miserably. But then that became the precursor to what is now Dingtok. And Dingtok is the largest enterprise messaging system in China today and also used around the world. Again, that was Brian Wong. And in his full episode, there are so many more lessons that apply to founders

looking to build generation-defining companies like Alibaba. Especially because Brian got to watch Jack build a culture that transcended when he joined at Employee 52 to over 200,000. today. Now, another company that successfully managed to skill its culture was Poshmark. Here, Tracy Sun, co-founder and SVP of seller experience at Poshmark, shares how the way the internal team conducted themselves in the very earliest days has rubbed off on the marketplace, with many sellers still writing handwritten cards, even as the marketplace has grown to millions of sellers and even gone through in IPO. She also discusses how they've stayed close

to the customer, and among the sea of metrics that you can pay a attention to as a marketplace. Tracy shares the one that placed the greatest thumb on the scale. Another thought I had on sellers and I'm so curious your take here is how much effort do you put into making sure all kinds of sellers see like some kind of success? That's a good question, Connie. What we see in our data is a seller making their first sale is one of the most important milestones that a seller can make in their journey at Poshmark. When they make their first sale, their value to Poshmurg and their value to Poshmmer, but also their excitement for resale just skyrockets. It's not even the second sale. It's the first sale. And does that mean like

they list a bunch of other stuff or how do you know? It doesn't remember like what percent of their items sold. It doesn't really matter how long it's been since they listed. It doesn't matter how much money they made on that item. I mean, all of those factors are there, but the biggest thumb or the scale is I made a sale, which translates to, I have value, I can do this, right? And so what we often see is after that first sale, you know, engagement just goes through the roof. To answer your question, of course, since we know how important this is, we do do a lot of things to help sellers get there. So what are some of the things we do? We provide a lot of inspiration and tips targeted to those sellers who have listed but have not yet achieved their first sale.

Like you'll send them a message to say, you could change this or reprice this. Yeah, here are some tools you can use in order to get that for sale. We also give them a boost by putting a banner on their listing. And we tell everyone at Poshmark when they lend on that listing, hey, you know what, this seller hasn't made a sale yet. You can get a discount of shipping if you're the first person to shop for them. Wow. And that's subsidized by you guys.

That's subsidized by us. Yes. And then we have some community programs where we help give them a community so that they can kind of connect with, not just with us, but with other people to help. Like an apprenticeship type model or you're put in a group of other sellers to learn from. We put them in groups when they're in a same physical environment together. So when we host our posh parties around the country, we'll connect sellers that way physically by their communities. We also have a feature within the Poshmark app, which connects. new sellers with experienced sellers

and form kind of like a digital mentorship program. If you have questions, how do I do this, how to do that in a sea of digital openness. It gives you four or five kind of posh ambassadors to ask questions to so you don't feel so alone. I can tell that the sellers, when they get passionate about Poshmark, the way that they conduct themselves also bring so many benefits to the buyers.

So for example, when I buy something on Poshmark, Mark, the majority of the time it has a really nice card in it. I know. And there's like a really nice handwritten note. And there's like sometimes stickers or other random things. And it's the majority of the time though. Right now, isn't that lovely? And I don't understand that because that doesn't happen, I think, on any other platform that I shopped in.

That is something we started with our community in the first year. How did you start that? How do you guys, for example, change that culture across the platform? For a lot of this, we lead by example. So in the early days, when we had, you know, hundreds of orders, a lot of them were sold by us, right? We're seating the market place. We're selling stuff ourselves. And we were thinking, wow, wouldn't it be really nice if there was a note and you wrapped it up really nicely as if it was like a package from your family present?

And then, oh, if we could put some stickers in there and a thank you card. and tie it with a bow, and we just kept doing it. And what happened is we led by example, we said, look, the people who received the packages were so delighted by it that they then internalize when I make a sale, I'm going to do the same thing. And we sent them. We sent them tissue paper.

We sent them stickers. So we did seed by like seeding the supplies and then seeding the inspiration. I love that story on how you seeded it, though. And I also know a lot of employees almost They dog food the product regular. I don't know if that's something you guys required them to do or if they just do it on their own. But I remember visiting your offices way back when

and every single time the front door is just like stacked with boxes of stuff. And I was like, what is this? And there was just a fresh shipment of stuff coming in because people were buying from other poshers. Your employees were buying and selling themselves. One thing that I've been, you know, repeating during our conversation together is how important it is to really deeply understand your customer if you're in a consumer business. And I think what you're referring to is just the values of the founders of Poshmark

and how that's translated to our team over time, which is if you don't understand their customer, what are you doing here? We're here to serve the customer. If you don't understand what they need, if you're not out at an event listening to them, when we do this annual conference every year, we do Posh Fest, right, where we invite our sellers. to come join us, somewhere in the country. A few thousand will come and we'll have a weekend out of it. What we've done is we take a pretty large group of our product engineering and data team out with us.

They sit at a booth. It's called Appney Anything. And our engineers, you'll direct questions from our customers. And it is mind-blowing how helpful it is for them to do their job. So they'll hear like, I'm over here, but I can't hit this button. Why is it not working? And the engineer will look at it and be like, oh, I designed it and I designed it the wrong way. It makes no sense for the customer.

Or this is really painful for me. Or I love this feature. And so when you get that energy directly from your customer, it brings more meaning. But it also adds a perspective to your work that helps you remember why we're here. We're not here to build product, right? We're here to make their lives more empowered to help them thrive. That is our purpose. that's our values. And so we had that in the beginning and we've carried that through over

time. And it's interesting how, again, like the human element of hearing it directly from the customer versus like seeing it on a data report as a bullet point like X percentage are not clicking into this. It hits differently. It lands differently. So for Poshmark, an important milestone was getting to that first sale. And if you'd like to learn more about Poshmark's early days, don't miss out on Tracy's full episode. where you'll also learn about the challenge of staying relevant across generations and the power of live selling, yet another trend where we can learn from other parts of the world. Next up, we have Deblu, the CEO of Ancestry.com, and former VP of Commerce at Meta.

And in this clip, we again touch on the question that matters to so many founders out there. What metrics really matter? Deb shares the metric that she was paying attention to at Facebook to validate whether they were really deepening relationships with buyers, and also what features they prioritized in order to ensure the people were coming back. What advice do you give for people who are in the growth stage where they actually have a great product? There's good liquidity, but they're not kind of hitting the growth targets that they're looking for. Maybe that's category expansion, but how do you counsel marketplaces on growth? Well, you know, I think sometimes it's easy to, let's just open new categories, right?

Really, the question is, are you actually deepening your relationship every single day with your buyers? really looking hard at the retention curves, the J curves, and seeing, are you retaining them? And is your product getting better every day? One of the things we did for Facebook Marketplace was our first metric wasn't transactions because we couldn't measure them. It was how often people were coming.

It was weekly to monthly actives. Because as a classified marketplace, you look at classifieds marketplaces, and it's about frequency. Basically, people don't buy anything unless they come. And they don't come, they don't, they're not top of money. And so really it was good.

And we get them there. And then once we got them there is, can we get them to message people? And then once we message people, can we get sellers to mark this as sold? And so it was really a single set. But then over time, we actually saw traffic going up. So people came back more often. If they made a transaction satisfactorily, they would come back more often over time. Yeah.

And so they look at the J-Cars. And I think a lot of marketplaces is just like, let's just look at raw tonnage of transactions. Yeah. Most marketplaces, the metrics people focus on, it's all numbers. It's all dollars. It's not number of users or frequency of visits or any of that. But if you actually search Leaky Bucket and eBay, there was an article written about this where, you know, at some point it became a leaky bucket.

And then you burn through entire country of buyers. And that becomes a cheaper problem. And I think they're trying to fix that now. But I think one of the big issues that marketplaces have is you can always bring more people through the door with enough dollars. The question is, can you deep bring a relationship with them? What is your actual 30-day, 90-day, 180-day, retention? of the buyer.

Yes, on the buyer's side. Because to some go where buyers are, and so as long as buyers we're buying, you will have sellers. And then so those buyers, what are some things that you did at Facebook marketplace to get them to spend more time or check it more frequently,

have better attention, anything you can share there? Well, in a marketplace where the goods are completely dynamic. So, for example, you're unlikely to go to Airbnb if you're not traveling, right? You just don't go and browse and see what's available. But in a browse marketplace,

it's really important to bring people in. So we gave people reasons. Every time you actually loaded the marketplace tab, the top of the tab was completely different, different items on it. So it never felt static. You were constantly rethinking. Then we added this thing called top pick.

Like even if there was nothing new, you would shuffle it. You would just reshuffle it. So you constantly because it felt like you wanted people that have that feeling of there's something new here every day. But if you have a very static thing, then, you know, Airbnb just can't do that, right?

They can introduce some of their talks, like you live at a treehouse, which is really cool. But how often are you going to live kids, probably not sleeping in a treehouse? That's really cool from an experience perspective, but usually you go because you have intent. And so are you an intent-based marketplace or you have browsed-based marketplace? And intent-based marketplaces, I need this thing. Where should I go? I'm going here and getting it. And then there's a browse-based marketplace, which is, let me see what's really interesting

available here today because it's just top of mind. And so really knowing what you occupy and where you are, it matters a lot to actually how you build the experience. And in that browse scenario, because a lot of marketplaces tend to be a little bit more browsing, how do you figure out how to balance the, you know, there's sellers that they've already purchased from before. Or maybe there's a restaurant they always order on DoorDash. How do you surface that versus showing the new restaurants that they haven't tried? Well, I think the best thing is really understand people's behaviors. There's a group of people that only buy one thing. Right?

You know, when I go to Dorcas, because I have this favorite Mexican restaurant that was across the street from PayPal, and I still go to. And when we order there, we order like 10 burritos and eat it for like, you know, several days. And to basically show someone like me that. But when I'm in a different location, they should suggest every single thing that's possible out there, right? And I think really understanding the user behavior, I travel a lot. And so the times I use it is other than that Mexican restaurant, which is great in Mount Mew. When we travel, I want to discover anything. I love Vietnamese food.

like, let's find a local Vietnamese food and let's go up on me. And so showing me a selection of things that I looked for before when I'm in a different place. And so really thinking hard about what is the job to be done for this person at this moment and when they come and how can I actually take all that I have on their previous visits and bring it all together. I really love that idea of focusing not just on the dollars, the top line dollars, the GMB that's going through the take rights. I mean, that all matters. But to your point, if the buyers aren't brows, you have fewer and fewer chances to get them to convert to our transactions. So even just figuring out everyday traffic is a really important metric that marketplaces should take into account. It's conversion on traffic. But the other thing you said was it's not just traffic versus GMV. It's, are you thinking about GMV? Are you thinking about transactions? And so there was a time, and this was back when Flipkart was growing like crazy. They really, really chased GMV. And so they sold a ton of mobile phones because it was a high GMV. Amazon, like how many transactions?

Like, I'd rather you buy a, you know, $2 kind of tube of toothpaste here than $200, right? Because it's all about frequency of use because now you're really dependent on it. And that drives things like Prime that unlocks a bunch of other stuff. The whole point is their approach is really different. If you're chasing GMV, you want to sell high GMV, you know, growth categories. If you're chasing transactions, which is people come back buy a $2 toothpaste, then you're really, your behavior, what you present to people is really different. How do you recommend when you

should chase the GMV versus transactions? Because sometimes there are these categories where you're only going to do it once every couple of years. In that case, GMV is absolutely the most important, right? Like, can you get the best thing in front of somebody? And for those categories,

absolutely. There's marketplace like curated, which is higher-end goods, right? And so, again, you're probably going to buy two strollers in your life. How do you think about having the right expert? But you're never going to shop for the third stroller. That's just, you know, unreasonable. And so for that, you want to have the best products or the best person and then try to introduce them to other categories that are high in. But for most marketplaces, how do you get them to come back and want

to do transactions once, twice, three times? How do you, yeah, a habit of theirs to actually shop at your marketplace? Yeah. So something like an eBay should focus on transactions, not just GMV. And anyone trying to go against an eBay, same thing. This is amazing feedback, I think, for a lot of founders to focus on just general traffic and retention, not just GMV, very, very important. If you like that segment, don't forget to check out Deb's full episode. It was so jam-packed that they actually broke it down into two different parts, where Connie and her dive into so much more, including how she was hired as Ancestry's CEO over Zoom, the pioneering work that Ancestry is doing with AI in order to make sense of census records,

why Amazon went from books to music in their early days, building a successful reputation, system, and so much more. Without even hearing the full episode, you can probably get a sense that Deb is capitalizing on a few key trends, from remote work to AI. And she's also not alone. Our final segment is with Susan Plagman, who's embraced many tech transformations herself. As a veteran of the fashion and publishing industries, Susan has spent time at Fogue, Condé Nast, Marie Claire, and is now president of WME fashion. And in this clip, we get to hear about how Vogue responded to the rise of social media, including how they thought about content monetization, something that is still so top of mind for many creators.

And in Susan's full episode, you'll get to hear about the very earliest days of media coming online, including the buildout of vogue.com and the new possibilities that a new platform shift brings. How did Vogue respond to the proliferation of social media? I mean, during that time, there was the app store, there was Facebook, there was Instagram, there is Snapchat. What was the response to social media? They embraced it. They embraced it big time. And I think people were just hungry. Like, we really took advantage of the visuals that you could play. We really took advantage of the play on words. I mean, the wordsmithing with the

hashtags, I think was just some of the most genius ever. And then videos and GIFs and like everything that you could imagine was just like we would go there. And how much did the content that was created on Instagram influence the editorial on print and vice versa? One thing that I think about a lot is that companies that have both a website and a mobile app sometimes feel the need to fully replicate feature, functionality, or content. Do you think it's possible to almost have a different set of content

or a different set of features? I don't know if it was so much different as it was a place to further explore the content that was being created. So I don't think it was if, for instance, I'll just stay on the theme of the MET. The May issue was traditionally always the MET issue.

So what we were doing online in all of the digital formats, it wasn't that we wouldn't cover non-Met things. We would. But we definitely used it as a place to, I think, further explore and speak to our readers in deeper or quicker or in other ways that we couldn't necessarily do just in print and vice versa. And how did social media or just the changing business models influence your thinking of new business lines or new revenue streams for the company? The biggest thing that I always wanted to do was to charge consumers to follow us on social.

And I've been told no for, I don't know, as long as we've had social out there. And so now, as you've seen in recent weeks, now that the platforms are now being asked to actually compensate the publishers for the content, I'm like, hallelujah. Like, of course you should be, because I would argue that brands like Vogue and other really, really great brands actually helped make Instagram as cool and as great as it is. And the same thing with TikTok. I mean, these are highways where people can go and put their content up, but the value of that content, not all content is created equal. And some of that content, I think, has greater value than others. and should be recognized. All right, I hope you enjoyed these snippets

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