Big Technology Podcast - Homebrew VC Hunter Walk Talks Twitter, TikTok, and Tech in the Time of Biden

Episode Date: November 11, 2020

During Donald Trump’s presidency, tech products became explicitly political. Operatives from both sides picked apart their algorithms and features, examining how they shaped society’s beliefs. And the companies, meanwhile, made choices about what parts of the administration they’d work with. Hunter Walk, who spent nearly a decade at Google and is now a partner at Homebrew, has watched the evolutions firsthand. He joins the Big Technology Podcast to discuss tech’s impact on politics and where it goes next under a Joe Biden presidency. 

Okay, so we are recording. Do you still want to do that thing where you ask me some questions at the end? Yeah, sure, whatever. I got plenty of questions to ask you, so one way or the other. Hello and welcome to the big technology podcast, a show for cool-headed, nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. Well, a lot has gone on over the past few days. definitely in the past few weeks. And joining us to discuss it, we're going to have a great conversation, break it all down,

is Hunter Walk. He's a partner at Homebrew VC. Welcome, Hunter. Hey, thanks for having me. Count legal votes only. Legal votes only. Is that the Friday theme? That's the Friday theme, right?

Friday theme is legal votes only. Yeah, we're recording this on Friday, what's today, November 6th, and this will go up on Wednesday, the following Wednesday. So by the time this thing goes live, I'm fairly certain that Joe Biden is going to be declared the president-elect, if not a lot of people are going to have considerable amount of egg on their face. But it definitely looks like it's going that way, probably by this afternoon.

I'm excited about that. So how have your past few days gone? Have you just been like sitting and, you know, refreshing Twitter consistently? I have watched zero video this week. I have not had to hear any pundit speak. And surprisingly, I've been going. more on the raw data, right? So there was that GitHub. So you're refreshing that spreadsheet? Yeah. So it's kind of interesting. Like this is the, for me, the election without punditry and the election that was sort of just about numbers. You haven't watched any TV? No. Zero. I watched on

Tuesday night when it was clear that it wasn't going to be, you know, sort of a call that evening. I fired up the, the WWF streaming network and I watched a little bit of WrestleMania 3. because that's comfort food for my, for my childhood. And I know, I know the good guy wins at the end of that one. Yeah. So, yeah, so that was the only, the only video I watched this week was Hulk Hogan. Yeah, well, it's fake just like the news hunter. So I hate to break it to you.

Okay, so we've known each other for about five years, but I want to introduce you quickly to the audience. And one of the things that I learned while going through your LinkedIn was something new that I didn't know about you was that you actually worked on. Conan's show in the 90s? Yeah, that's the, you know, if I had just stayed on the path of television, you know, my life would have been different. I was, I always had a little bit of a journalism bug growing up, you know, editor of the paper, that type of thing. And when I got to college, I did a cable access TV show, which sort of opened my eyes

to the idea of, well, you know, besides a typewriter, maybe a camera is good too. And so I had the chance, my senior year of college, to essentially spend three days a week in Manhattan working on what was the second season of Conan O'Brien. That's amazing. Did you have any idea of how big he was going to get? It was interesting. Like that was a point where, you know, the show was still on at 1.30 in the morning. It was on quarterly renewal cycles, which is, every three months they decided you'll live. Which is like, especially back then was very nonstandard. Like you'd get, you'd get, you know, year over year renewals, if not multi. year back then. And so we started to notice a little thing, though, during college vacations, like, you know, holiday breaks, his ratings would start to go up. And so basically, it was like he was being discovered by sort of the next generation of, you know, young adults, kids, whatever,

who hadn't been into, you know, sort of like their parents late night television. And so we had a little bit of hope that if we could just survive long enough, like, we would find our audience and our audience would find us. One of the other things, you know, and this is so crazy and, you know, obviously having worked at YouTube, I was back in the center of this, you know, decades later. But one of the credits to Conan's success was the music booker. So the guy who would book the musical act, he took like a very smart strategy. This was 94, 95, where, you know, if there was a band you liked that wasn't necessarily

mainstream, you couldn't just go online and call up, you know, call up songs or video clips of them. Like you, you know, you maybe would catch a glimpse of them every now and then on like some network show or something like that. But the idea of watching your favorite band was was really kind of rare. And he started booking bands that were like, you know, really, really enthusiastic kind of niche, niche fan bases, you know, I mean, back then, radiohead, stuff like that, still pre-mainstream cranberries, almond brothers, I remember some of those things, where their fan base, you know, probably couldn't, you know, either hadn't heard of Conan or couldn't really care about Conan, but like, would tune in for their band. And, you know, and then, and some of those

folks, you know, would say, like, oh, hey, this guy was kind of funny. And so, you know, lots, I guess lots of different ways to build an audience. Right. So it was come for the music stay for the jokes. And then the jokes ended up being the thing that won for him. Okay, I won't ask a thousand Conan questions, but I do have one more. One of my favorite parts of his show, and I feel like I get sucked in these YouTube rabbit holes all the times is when he tortures his staff. Oh, yeah. Which is funny, but was that something that was apparent at the beginning? Yeah, you know, he's a nice guy. And he had a good sense of humor. Like, a lot of those folks were from Harvard, from the Lampoon. So I think there was always like a little bit of a, you know,

arched eyebrow and, you know, like torture the staff type of stuff. But it was always, you know, always in good fun. Good nature. With love. He was a really nice guy. Andy Richter was a really nice guy um you know my boss i i basically i researched celebrity upcoming celebrity guests um if they'd been on the show before i watched their interviews and decided like oh hey here's something to call back to or let's not talk about this we talked about it last time um and my boss who ran research later became the one of the producers of the rosy o'donnell show and then one of the earlier producers on the ellen show so if i had just hitched my wagon to her um you would have been well you would have been tortured by ellen my career my career would have been so different

Instead, I ended up at, you know, stupid Google. Yeah, you ended up at stupid Google, and now you're telling us you don't watch TV on election night. So let's talk about the Google thing quickly. So you were there for about 10 years or 9 and a half years from 2003 to 2013. Exactly. Working largely on YouTube? No, well, my first three and a half years were on AdSense. YouTube happened sort of beginning, late 2006, beginning in 2007.

So I had always been interested, you know, in how tech. Technology helps creation. And then I also thought it was these platforms had an opportunity or maybe even a responsibility to get involved in the economics of creativity on behalf of the creator. Basically, how do you help the creators make money, not just yourself? And so I was attracted to the idea of AdSense, which was, you know, just rolling out this contextualized advertising format during a time where, you know, the punch the monkey banners or pop-ups, pop-unders were still kind of the only way, especially if you were a small website to make money off the traffic you've been building. And so AdSense was the idea of, hey, you just put a few, you know, lines of JavaScript on a page. And if you're running a fan site about, you know, camera gear and photography, like, you'll see some ads about cameras and you'll get paid when people click on them. And so I thought that was kind of a neat idea. You know, blogging was coming of age then. The idea that you could build, you know, spin up a community website was pretty novel. And so AdSense would help them make money by selling ads through Google now.

Exactly. You didn't have to, you didn't have to become an ad sales person yourself. you just had to make great content and put Google on your website and sharing that ad revenue. So I worked on that for about. Hold on. I want to pause you there for a second. I want to spend a thousand percent of our time talking about your background. I want to get into some of the issues of the day.

But I do want to ask a question about that because that was sort of a watermark moment for Google when it started to help websites make money in that it went from being something that you used to search the internet to then having a hand in actually structuring what the internet was because the companies that, I mean, yeah, when you get into involved in monetizing websites, you are involved in picking some of the winner or helping some shape what some of the winners and losers are going to look like. Did that ever resonate with you? And how do you think about that now? Well, I don't think you shaped winners or losers. It was available, you know, was available to anybody. It essentially started to put a very specific price on content.

And certain types of content were valued more by advertisers and others, right? So if you were building a, product review site, you probably had ads that were more valuable and, importantly, more relevant to your users than if you were just running, let's say, a general purpose social network. Indeed, like Google tried to use AdSense to help MySpace monetize, and it sort of didn't work as well as, you know, helping shopping sites and other particular kind of vertical sites. So I think for the first time, what it's sort of exposed was the idea that, you know, depending upon why you were on a site and you're sort of how close you were to a transaction, let's say, much like search, that you could be worth something different and to the to the site itself or to an

advertiser. So I guess that did sort of end up creating a bunch of folks who all of a sudden said, wow, you know, there's money in them hills, right? So let's go create a lot of product sites. Let's go create a lot of sites around commercial notions. But, you know, at the end of the day, Google, Google didn't send traffic to those sites. You still had to earn, well, I mean, Google didn't deliberately send traffic to those sites because they were AdSense customers. You sort of the, there was a, you know, a wall between the idea of, you know, search and search ranking and whether or not you were, you know, an advertising partner of Google's. Totally. But it does sort of impact who can, who can sustain themselves. Yeah. You know what?

I actually have a patent. I have a patent somewhere. I mean, it's probably you can look it up. that basically was about communicating imbalances in supply and demand to content publishers so that it could help guide their content creation, right? So if content creators knew that, hey, look, we're seeing a spike in, let's call it like environmental, you know, environmentally safe houselights or something. Like that means that those advertisers really want to reach that audience.

And so you should create content around that. And if you can attract audience, the ads will be there for you. So I guess I did always sort of approach at this notion of, hey, look, we're making a marketplace. And the more information that we can give both sides of that marketplace, sort of the more efficient it will be. But at the end of the day, users are still going to vote with their attention. You can't convince me to get interested in something I'm not. That's true. That's true. Okay. So skip quickly ahead. In 2013, you found your own VC firm called Homebrew. And your last raise was about $90 million in 2018. Is that

right? Yeah. So, you know, it's a good transition because the reason I started homebrew was primarily because my partner at homebrew, Sacha Patel and I had worked together on AdSense during those years. He had started a little bit earlier in 2003. I came in a little bit later, and we were basically on the same team for about three and a half years until the beginning of 2007. We'd always wanted to work together again, but we're both sort of busy doing our own thing. So it remained and touch his friends. And it wasn't until the end of 2012 where he left running product to Twitter. And I was thinking, about leaving Google that we had the chance to start with a blank sheet of paper and home brew

was what came out of that right um and i do want to note that one of your companies was called managed by q i think this is another good transition did they ever think of changing that name given the they predate they predate q i know they were before q and honor maybe they are the person i don't know well i mean it gets it gets all the more tangled they got they got acquired by we work so are you are you are you saying that adam newman is q i mean it's quite possible it would be a a definitely funny thing to happen is that all of a sudden

when all this tension builds up in the country your company magically gets rid of you you have all of this money and then what are you doing there's always a few democratic process

there's like during the anthrax scare like a few decades ago the band anthrax you know was wondered whether they have to change their name I mean I guess we kind of knew what anthrax was prior anyway but like yeah

I stand by managed by Q is the best is the best Q. The best Q? This other Q is a pretender, pretender to the managed by Q throne. That's right. Okay. Well, yeah, we, we'll see.

Maybe managed by Q will outlast the other Q because apparently Q hasn't posted since the election. I saw. Okay. So let's actually talk a little bit about the election. Obviously, we said at the top that we're in this moment where the election seems to be called. I just wrote a newsletter this week talking about how Alttech is. is political now. I think maybe before the Trump era, tech platforms felt a little bit nervous about getting their products involved and, you know, anything political. Of course, they lobbied

and all that stuff, but the product themselves generally stayed clear politics. And then since we've seen all these different types of like political interventions, you know, you have everything from the ravelry, which is a knitting social network banning Trump to pro-Trump social networks starting up to companies saying we want to work with the Department of Defense and ICE and companies saying we don't. And it just seems like tech unlike ever before is fully in the political fray right now. And I think that kind of makes me a little bit depressed because, you know, when I first started covering this stuff and when I first got interested in it, I always was interested in the fact that tech seemed to be something about progress.

And, you know, I had spent a little bit of time in politics in Washington and always felt to me like it was sniping and going backwards. And I'm kind of curious what you think about this moment. Is it, you know, the fact, I actually am curious if you think, if you agree with the premise that much of tech is political right now and what that sort of means for the industry. And do you share any of that dismay or am I thinking about this the wrong way? I guess I'd separate into two camps. Sort of is society political right now? Are we being challenged by this last administration and what America is going through right now to take a stance on sort of a values basis for what we believe in? And then separate from that is can tech embrace or sit apart from politics when tech is no longer an underdog?

So the former, I think, is where a lot of the sort of heat is, right? because that's where the passion, the I don't want my company to do business with a government department that's separating families, you know, a bunch of questions about what is the role of a company and should it have a political viewpoint, so and so forth. And we can talk more about that. But I think a lot of this also has to do with the technology industry essentially being the driver of economic growth and innovation for America. And so you have an industry that's incredibly powerful, doesn't always want to acknowledge or realize that. It still very much thinks of itself as an underdog, sits up, you know, just, just, you know,

trying to do good for the world, sitting apart from all these other, you know, establishment. But in reality, that's naive. You know, tech is now an industry with a lot of power. And that power, you know, attracts attention of government, attention of regulators. And so I don't think that's. going anywhere. The, you know, the question of, like, are we in a heightened moment where the decisions you make as a company are seen through partisan lenses? Yeah, I think, you know, we're probably, you know, at a 10 out of 10 scale, you know, on that right now. And I'm not sure

if that persists, you know, into the future in the same way. But politics and tech are going to be, are going to be linked, you know, so long as technology is driving the economy. Yeah. And I remember visiting Facebook's offices. I don't know if you were ever visited around this time, but maybe in 2011. That was my first visit there. And all of the conference rooms were named after countries that

Facebook was bigger then. And now, of course, they're bigger than every country in the world. And there was this sort of sense like, oh, we transcend nation states. And look at us, like we've creating something that's better than what government's given

us before. And I just wonder what you mean what you think this means for the future of the tech industry that that's gone and now it seems like its future is forever going to be interlinked with political action. Well, look, I look back and like we can look at times like that and I'll, you know, I'll reflect on my times at YouTube. I think there were times, there were aspects of that that were hopeful and aspirational and there were also aspects of that that were naive. So when we talked about citizen journalism at YouTube, 2007, 2008, 2009, you know, we are thinking Arab Spring, the idea that citizens with camera phones would be able to tell you a truth and give you opinions and access to realities

that were often ignored or censored by government, you know, the handful of media outlets that got most of the distribution and sort of establishment press. And we only saw that as a good thing. We basically believed that that meant empowerment. It meant truth. You know, it meant giving people a voice. Now, whether it was just because, you know, we saw the world through that lens and it was glass half full, whether it was because we weren't diverse enough, you know, as a team, geographically, culturally, you know, I'm sure all those things are true. But it came from a good place. It came from a hopeful place. Now you look, you know, 10, 15 years later and the, you know, the content moderation debates, you know, aren't about, you know, should you have nipples or not in videos and nudity or

things like that. It's about truthiness, right? It's about, well, what happens when everybody is allowed to upload content, you know, that essentially shows their version of reality versus a consensus version of reality. And, and what role do the platforms have in that? I remember, you know, we saw as, you know, what is it, the, uh, the, uh, own. Is it that the network that's like to the right. One American news network. Yeah, America. It's the only truthful network hunter, remember that. Right. So I saw people are chanting. What are they chanting about Fox News outside of the Arizona? Oh, I don't know. But I think, I think this other one is going to become, it's going to be like Trump is going to take over this other one. It's going to be nicknamed Tan or something like Trump,

Trump's American news. But, you know, I saw a bunch of people talking this week about the content that they were putting up on YouTube. Should YouTube, you know, what should YouTube do? Should YouTube not promote it? You should not allow it? I looked a little bit. And what I was interesting is, this is a, you know, this is a network that is also on Verizon, Fios, is also on direct TV. You know, is also, so you have the telcos are distributing this network also. And I think it's just such an interesting question about with some of this content of, you know, people turn to the tech companies first and say, what are you going to do about it? But there's, you know, there's distribution alongside that. And then there's the content creators themselves, you know, of like, where does

responsibility fall? Yeah, there's a reason why people are looking at the tech companies first, which is that, I mean, look, this is, I don't have the numbers in front of me. But if you look at the Fios viewership of some fringe, you know, craze network, you're not going to see big numbers. But on YouTube, those videos are going to get millions and millions of views. And that's sort of like part of the discussion here when people talk about censorship is like YouTube, you know, it's so it's interesting. It's like YouTube definitely pick these winners by nature of the algorithm. So if it pulls it back, is that censorship or is that, you know, it correcting its algorithm

in order to, you know, make it more in line with reality. I mean, it's a tough question. I don't really know if I have an answer on that. And I tend to look. I tend to be a little bit more maybe than my average. my average, you know, sort of a tech community member, I tend to be a little bit more of a believer that platforms do create policies. The idea of that they, you know, are just quote unquote enforcing laws is kind of BS.

If that was the case, you know, there's a very narrow definition of content that's actually illegal and otherwise there'd be a whole bunch of things that they would allow. But in their community standards in terms of service, they've decided that that type of content is not productive to, you know, the business environment. they want to build or the community they want to build. And so they're, they're already, you know, making these decisions every day. And so sort of asking them to make a few more decisions to me, you know, doesn't break, you know, doesn't break democracy. But at the same time. Right. And not only that, they make decisions with the product themselves in terms of the way

they structure the conversation. Yeah, implicitly and explicitly sometimes. But I do find it interesting that like we have to decide ultimately what do we want to leave up to judgment and sort of, you know, market forces versus what do we want to create regulatory guidelines around? And I think often these discussions are very, very theoretical. And when you try to actually put them into, well, what do you want the regulations to be? It sort of breaks down to people describing for each situation the way that they wish the world worked, but not being able to create sort of a uniform set of guidelines that apply to, you know, YouTube with its billion people, but, you know, Fios with its however many, right? Well, I'm extremely nervous about having government come in and actually say what you can

and cannot say on a social platform. To me, it seems sort of antithetical of the role of government that should be in the hands of the private sector. The question is, you know, how do they solve this? Like, where do you think the line should be when it comes to the type of speech that they should allow. And by the way, feel free to dispute my premise at the beginning of that question. I mean, I guess I would say that, you know, it's this question around what is, you know, is it a distribution mechanism or is it a broadcast network and what sort of things have we traditionally applied to television, radio, and so and so forth. And why are why not? Does that extend to the internet? I would have to say that I am, I would agree with you in the sense of I don't want the government

to make all the decisions for me. I also think it is difficult to then turn a around and say private sector should do that and private sector should be perfect in doing it. And so, you know, I don't know if the answer is allow us to tune as individuals more of what we want to see or don't see. That leads to echo chambers. I kind of believe some of the conversation that occurs around freedom of speech versus freedom of reach. So the idea that making something available and hosting it is different than promoting it, boosting it, pushing it, you know, onto me. And so what does it mean about, you know, having things on the site, but that are hard to find unless you're actually looking for them versus the chain of events that, you know, starts you wanting to learn about World War II and leaves you, you know, signing up for, you know, Stormfront websites? I think those things, you know, do need speed bumps, you know, if not, you know, if not control in the hands of the individual themselves.

Every day on YouTube when I was there, and this was more than a decade ago, there was content that I would see that I wasn't necessarily proud to have on the site, but did not trigger any of our community standards, right? So like some of the stuff that used to get uploaded to, what do you call it, World Star, World Star Hip Hop, like fight videos and things like that. Yeah, yeah. Like we had some of that on YouTube. I didn't think that was particularly socially redeeming. but you know you try to realize that in order to some extent you know to create a space where you aren't taking a scalpel to try to predetermine what content is allowed on the platform and what content isn't allowed on the platform but you know see understand what emerges

and then start with principles and then turn those principles into policy I think sometimes they try to do it the other way around they're like if we can't write the perfect policy we can't enforce our principles I think that ends up being a tremendous stumbling block. These environments are all very dynamic. People are very smart in terms of, you know, users, uploaders, you know, they find ways to get around all sorts of policy. I'm just, you know, this is parity.

I'm just asking questions, all those sorts of things. So I actually think it's much easier to be clear in your principles and then continue to evolve your policy to meet the needs of the times rather than believe that, you know, if you don't get the wording exactly right on the, you know, first attempt. that you're somehow then, you know, unable to enforce, you know, unable to enforce it going forward. Yeah. And we talk about all these metaphors for these companies. You know, are they the phone company? Are they an editor? Are they simply a platform? They say they're a mirror to society. I think the most accurate one is that they're a funhouse mirror to society, right? Like, we see a reflection, but it's warped. It's not exactly what we look like, but we're looking in the mirror and we believe that that's us for a split second. longer. And so for me, the question is not necessarily like, how do you then, you know, shape the reflection that you see, but do you want to actually go and move around the contours

of the mirror a little bit to make the other side look a little less scary? Yeah. And that's, that's sort of the question, I think that we, that's, you know, been missing in a large part of the discussion is like, you know, what part of the product fundamentals can be shifted that can make the discussion better. They can make the conversation better. And in fact, and I'll let you respond to this just after this last point. But one of the interesting things that we've seen in the run-up to the election is that these companies also that there was a potential for our democracy's integrity to be put into question, which it is right now. And, you know, they also saw that like there could be violence. And so, yeah, of course, of course they've put labels on the parts on, you know,

Trump's tweets that have said this election was rigged. things of that nature. But they've also turned off things like, you know, they've added friction, turned down the retweet, you know, made group recommendations go off for a while, which all sort of prove that the mechanisms and the machinery is actually partially, you know, largely responsible for some of the stuff we see and they can control it. So what do you think about that? Yeah. I mean, I don't, I mean, I guess I always say like, I think Fox News is more dangerous than any of these platforms and gets a pass from, you know, press the establishment, so and so forth for reasons that I don't fully understand. I'm of the mindset that, like, Silicon Valley

shouldn't do business with, you know, Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch, you know, but yet we spend a lot of time trying to understand, you know, did Jack Dorsey do the right thing or not? So, you know, we don't, you know, there's a broad brush to ask these questions. For the platforms themselves, you know, it's funny, you talk Funhouse Mirror. I would sometimes talk about it as a supermarket where where it was very, very difficult to find healthy food on the shelf. And, you know, our bodies are sort of like, oh, this tastes good, this tastes good, this tastes good. But then, you know, if all you're eating is sugar-saturated fat and, and other artificial additives, like your body is going to waste away. So ultimately, what do you do? Do you have to put more healthy food in front of people,

more good choices, you know, or do you have to prevent, you know, ban the snacks from being in the supermarket is, you know, it was very difficult to figure that out. I do, I do agree with you in the sense that these platforms have traditionally been built towards, let's call it Web 2 metrics. Remember back in the Web 2 days, we would talk about like engagement and we assume that like more clicks, more playback, more discussion was all positive. If those went up into the right, you know, our business model worked and it meant people were happy. I think that it's possible that there's, you know, actually a different set of metrics that, to understand the health of these systems that we haven't spent enough time. And when those came up, we would figure out how to slow things

down or stop what we were doing rather than sell into it. So sometimes, for example, like the flame war, you know, back and forth between two people on Twitter, looks like deep, deep engagement, you know, until one of them quits the service, you know, and then you've just lost a user. Yeah. It doesn't always tell the whole story like people used to say 10 years ago. doesn't tell the story at all. And if you, you know, I bet if you could, you know, what do they call like fMRIs, you know, where you're sort of monitoring people's brains. If you looked at sort of like what some of this content or interactions were triggering the, you know, and, and what it means to fire somebody's, you know, anger, shame, guilt, you know, versus other more healthy, sustainable

impact upon people. Like, I do think we are causing real harm to folks. I sometimes call it on Twitter, like even like paper cuts, right? So all the types of interactions. you encounter and look, I'm a straight white male, so folks of other genders or, you know, other backgrounds or who are, you know, activists or more forwardly activists on these platforms, get it a thousand times worse than I do. But you're constantly encountering interactions that don't, you know, don't violate the terms of service, but don't make you feel good. And I'd love to see systems be more responsible around that. And, you know, I, I, Sometimes I know a bunch of people at these different companies.

I, you know, for the large part, I think they're all smart, well-intended, responsible people. But I think something happens when you aggregate them together into a corporate structure that makes, you know, everything a little bit more complex to, you know, sometimes, you know, try some, try some experiments that might re-envision the way that these systems could work. That's right. And what did you, I mean, just briefly, what did you, you left in 2013, you left, you left. YouTube in 2013 what did you see like similar like you knew the demand for the type of websites on the internet what did you there was obviously like some demand uh on youtube for like some fringy political folks uh who not as much like so i stopped running but but that's yeah that's where went though right so what what did you feel like when you saw offspring up i i immediately wondered

what did we miss like um what what did we not see in 2011 you know through 20. 2007 through middle 2011. And what's your answer? It's twofold. The first is we one of my regrets was once we started to move

into monetization, which was also very important, not just for YouTube, but for our creators. I tended to de-staff some of the things that were hardest to measure the immediate impact of, like figuring out how to make comments better, right? Like, we still did work there on trust and safety, but, like, we didn't spend the time to say, hey, look, we've got a few places here to make sure that this service as a whole represents, like, a shows that we care.

We care about the interactions. We care about the, you know, the harassment, the abuse, whatever. And we stubbed our toe a little bit there. So, you know, maybe that's sort of the broken windows, crack sidewalks, like, you know, that I think about. The second thing I think about is, and I, you know, I don't remember every looking deeply at this. So, you know, but I remember when I started to see this stuff creep up, the only thing I went back and thought about was I wonder, I wonder about the Tea Party. I wonder about the types of videos that started to get uploaded, the birtherism, the sort of some of the things that, you know, weren't the, we're not talking flat earthers. We're not talking, you know, outright supremacist content.

We're not talking about things that I think everybody would look at and say, oh, we have, we have an understanding about the. content is and it doesn't belong on the site. But, you know, I think that's a movement that's sort of, you know, maybe understudied a little bit in the sense of, did, you know, the beginnings of that, that group, you know, embracing the platforms for organization, content creation, and distribution, you know, that wasn't about economic anxiety and taxes, right? That was about we have a black president. And whether there's, you know, direct lines from that to some of the things we see today. Right. Well, it also turns out that French groups get pretty good at doing this stuff because they are not going to get the airtime on a regular network. So that sort of energy that they were going

into, you know, trying to get their message out on the mainstream. It's going to go nowhere. They get much more, much better bang for their buck, you know, going online. I don't want to get too social dilemma because we've had a lot of discussion of that movie on, on this. on this podcast. So let's just end it with this question. How do you think the tech companies did with the election? I actually think where we sit right now, you know, this Friday, like this past week, the tech companies and the news media, I think did a pretty good job.

I know that there were, you know, this video didn't, you know, the Steve Bannon video stayed up too long on Facebook or these types of things. I get a little bit less concerned about whether it came down in 10 hours or came down in one hour. and more like, why are these, why is he still on some of these platforms? Why did that piece of content get removed, but not the channel? I think it's very hard to prevent somebody from fooling you once. I think if you're allowing them to fool you multiple times, then your culpability is increasing.

So I'd love to see, you know, sort of folks take a harder line on, look, you don't get to keep coming back. You know, like some of the things that distress me most in, you know, what I read over the past few months where, you know, where people putting their thumb on the scale at Facebook, removing strikes from some of the conservative pages because, you know, a fair imbalance or pressure like that. Like once you start saying, look, you know, we're not enforcing our rules, that makes me nervous because let's continue to improve these rules. Fantastic. But you've got to enforce them and you got to enforce them consistently. So, you know, I think the platforms did a pretty

good job this week, at least in terms of the stuff that I saw, you know, hit my radar. Yeah, I agree. they did a good job. I do get a little bit queasy to see labels put in front of, you know, messages from a head of state. But in this situation, it just seems like it was the less bad option. Like I just don't see, I don't like the idea of not letting a message get through, but also when someone's questioning the integrity, the democracy based off of, you know, nothing based off of vapor. It's really tough to let that go through. Yeah, I see I blocked all those folks years ago. So I don't see, I don't see the tweets, let alone the warnings. You blocked the president? Oh, yeah. I'm not interested. Like, all that stuff I decided I just didn't want,

I didn't want in my stream. But yeah, I would agree. Like, it's hard, you know, the, I think that's a real tough challenge for them. I think they're all very, very excited. The reporting that, you know, proactively confirmed that some of the privileges maybe to float above the policies expire January 20th or whatever inauguration is. Yeah. So it'll be interesting to see what. happens after that. I think some of those, some of those decisions come from, let's call it, let's call it delayed enforcement. When you don't draw a line early with entities, and this isn't just, you know, Trump, this might be, you know, the other end of political spectrum, you know, calling for guillotine or whatever. I mean, I don't know in particular, but, and I don't mean

to like compare the president to, you know, an anonymous account, you know, tweeting at Bezos. Well, Steve Bannon did just call for some beheadings, so it's not too far away. Not too far. But like, you know, sometimes when you don't draw the line early and you have actors of bad faith who keep pushing, keep pushing, keep pushing, you know, when you finally do take action, like it's in a very visible way that, you know, sort of does lead to these conundrums versus, you know, sort of drawing lines earlier. But, you know, ultimately at the end of the day, like I, you know, I think they did a good job this week. Okay. I want to come back. after the break and talk a little bit about what tech is going to look like under a Biden administration.

But first, let's step away for a quick word from our sponsor. Hey, everyone. Let me tell you about The Hustle Daily Show, a podcast filled with business, tech news, and original stories to keep you in the loop on what's trending. More than 2 million professionals read The Hustle's daily email for its irreverent and informative takes on business and tech news. Now, they have a daily podcast called The Hustle Daily show, where their team of writers break down the biggest business headlines. in 15 minutes or less, and explain why you should care about them. So, search for The Hustled Daily Show and your favorite podcast app, like the one you're using right now.

And we're back here for the second half of the big technology podcast with Hunter Walk, a partner at Home Brew VC, who said stops at YouTube and other parts of Google. And, of course, as we spoke about at the top, the Conan O'Brien show. Hunter, let's just talk quickly, like, what do you think's going to happen to tech under a Biden administration? Are we going to see some of the same discussions we've had? I mean, obviously, you know, it seems like there'll probably be conversation about content moderation and about antitrust, is that sort of, but, you know, we're already having these discussions.

Is that sort of going to be the same way it is today going forward or is there going to be something else that we should look out for, you know, in terms of what happens to what happens to tech under Biden administration? Yeah, the three things that I'm maybe most excited about or eager to see embraced, I'd like to see a class of, you know, worker that's not strictly full-time or contractor. So what does it mean to give a gig worker, you know, protection that doesn't have to be solved state by state with, you know, here in California, the, you know, sort of the quote-unquote, you know, Uber-written amendment, what is it, 22?

Prop 22, right? Prop 22. Yeah, which was just an exemption from the Assembly Bill 5. of AB5, which was also sort of felt, you know, trying to, uh, one size fit all. Right. It was a pretty blunt instrument. Yeah. So, yeah, for the, just for the listeners benefit, AB5 would qualify Uber drivers and lift drivers and door-dust drivers as employees, which means that like, well, anyway, it's, it's pretty political when you get into the details, but basically like, you'd be looking

at like a 40-hour work week and benefits, disability, all those things. Um, but also would sort of change the nature of these services, undoubtedly. Yeah. So truth is somewhere in between and I'd love to see, you know, something created at a federal level that allows for protection of gig employees where employers have to, even if they're not full time, you know, whether it's, you know, pay into, you know, benefits in a time bank provision or something like that. I'm hoping that our administration is thoughtful about that. The second thing is I definitely think, you know, looking at acquisitions and trying to better understand, what is going to be the framework for, you know, how we think about monopoly, what sort of acquisitions we want to allow or not allow, you know, traditionally they look at size. You know, I'm not a scholar in this stuff. So I'm going to give just a layman's understanding, you know, size and adjacency, right? So concentration and within a market, right?

that's very different than when you look at some of the acquisitions that, let's say, if Facebook has made, which were about, you know, sort of acquiring and, you know, killing off or absorbing, you know, nascent challengers, right? So maybe there's a different way of looking at. I think Ben Thompson does a lot of this, you know, in his idea of if you are truly an aggregator, you know, should you be able to make acquisitions of smaller companies that, you know, would potentially challenge you or things like that. I'd like to see more discussion about that.

That's not about break up the big tech companies. That's not where my head goes, but it is around the question about what sort of M&A guidelines and activity should we allow. And the third is, you know, this China question. I, you know, I hope now that the weird, you know, sort of giving TikTok's cloud business to Oracle, you know, maybe that doesn't have to be the next,

you know, action in figuring out, what's the relationship between U.S. and China from a tech sector, but I do think that is a bigger topic than maybe, you know, traditional free market Democrats have, you know, sort of postulated about. And so I do think that under a Biden administration, we're going to have to decide what sort of relationship we want to have with China in terms of, you know, market, market and technology, you know, sort of exchange when it's not bilateral. Yeah, interesting. The China part is not something I thought about, but could definitely play a big role now. I mean, do you think some of this, there might be some lasting tension due to the TikTok situation? Or do you think that that sort of blows over once Trump leaves office? I think it's a flashpoint. I think it's going to be interesting to see whether they want to take it back up. You know, it had some bipartisan support, right? It's hard to tell how much of that was because in an election year, you know, Democrats didn't want to.

to look weak on China or whether, you know, it was a reasonable argument inartfully handled, you know, by the current administration. I don't know. You know, my tendency to guess is what's the next deadline, November 15th or something like that, you know, so it'll be interesting to see like whether this current administration wants to push it to its conclusion or leave it as sort of tangled, not, you know, to let the next administration inherit. I don't know. And I don't You know, I don't have direct exposure to this from a business standpoint. I just think it's one of the, you know, broader questions of our times that has gotten politicized, you know, but actually is more of a question about America, not a question about either party. Yeah, I think the administration will be happy to burn everything down on the way out.

And steal the China, literally. That'll be the other aspect of China. I don't have that much, you know, I don't, I don't, the regulatory, the content moderation, that type of stuff. like, you know, I have not heard a politician yet come out with a set of statements or proposals that I immediately line up behind. So I remember, you know, when Elizabeth Warren was in the, was in the primaries, and she was releasing all of the individual, I think, which like her policies, you know, as medium posts, right? And I remember there was sort of this consensus in tech amongst a lot of people that, like, oh, wow, everything she's written about every other industry is

so right on, but oh my goodness, she's so wrong about tech. And I always thought that was funny. I had to sort of look in the mirror a little bit and be like, wait, is it, you know, is it maybe it's that nobody likes when, you know, somebody is telling them about what their industry should do, you know, and so I want to be open to under, to not just, you know, pulling up the drawbridge and putting up the walls to the castle and being like, don't touch, you know, don't touch our precious industry. And so I think some of this stuff is about dialogue, more. so than resistance. But I would say that I haven't found a politician yet who has expressed a policy statement that I can get behind. And so maybe that means that I actually need to get

more involved, not less involved in this stuff. At least I feel like this is an administration that I'd be proud to assist versus, you know, this previous one where I think I'd find it difficult to, I probably would be asked under the room, let alone find it able to help. Okay, one thing you touched on earlier is just about tech size. And I feel like that's one thing worth asking about, get your perspective on. I mean, under Trump, tech grew significantly. Like it went almost over the course of four years from something that was an important part of our economy to the driver of our economy, the tech giants, you know, Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft all more than doubled their market.

caps under him. It became impossible to avoid tech wherever you went. Do you think their bigness just continues to increase over the Biden administration? Is that something the government eventually has to step in and do something about? I think they are continued to be in an amazing place economically. Maybe they don't, you know, I think we've seen a, we've coming out of a portion of time where in some ways they grew faster than the tech sector itself. I think maybe that changes a little bit. That, you know, we have broad growth, not just concentrated growth, but I don't see any, you know, immediate threats to their size and performance. You know, I used to come from the school that said, oh, people once said this about GE and they once said

this about, you know, half a dozen other companies through, you know, the railroad industry, the banking industry, so and so forth. And let's just let the market play itself out. I sort of still believe that. But, you know, I would certainly like to see these large companies, you know, pay their fair share of taxes and, you know, treat employees well and set a tone for, you know, not perpetuating some of the structural inequalities, you know, that have come out of industrial capitalism. So I guess I still see them as a force for good. I know that's, you know, I know, I know that's come under attack in the last few years. Maybe it's the bias I was inside of a place like Google for so long. I still think of them as lovable and well intended. It's probably

a little bit of a blind spot for me. But I'd like to just tighten up the regulations around corporate governance, taxes, so on and so forth so that tech companies are quote unquote paying their fair share like everybody else. I'm not as worried in the near term about whether they should be broken up or not. I think it's very, very difficult to look backwards and undue. I do think, you know, new types of acquisitions and growth, you know, need to be looked at through a different framework than maybe the way some of these agencies are currently thinking about it. But, you know, but I don't have the, I don't have the policy proposal. Yeah, yeah. It will be, it'll be interesting to watch. I mean, antitrust stuff is going to take the front and center,

I think over the years. Yeah, I just don't know. You know, I remember, so I got to Google a little bit before the IPO, a little bit before the S1. And as, you know, as transformative of that event was in my life materially and I'm incredibly thankful for it, I remember having a little bit of sadness when it happened because I did feel like, wow, this is the last time Google just gave up its chance to be different from an org structure standpoint, right? To say, hey, look, we're going to be a holding company of smaller companies or we're going to spin all of these things out because large S will eventually slow down, you know, our ability to be innovative. Like we can't sacrifice

all of these things just for shareholder value. And so there's always, you know, the size for me is actually always comes with a little bit of sadness because I know how, I know how size, you know, causes organizations to behave differently, regulatory capture, protect, you know, protect what's working and not take bigger risks. You know, it's very hard to sort of convince people to rethink their business if it's, you know, if it's paying their salary. And so to some extent, you know, I do.

do think we might get more in different types of innovation, you know, if they were able to operate with something other than near-term shareholder concerns, which is why I'm an angel investor in the long-term stock exchange and sort of, you know, other mechanisms to think about how do we take these companies public? How do we give citizens and investors the chance to share in their upside, but not, you know, sort of force them to think about just squeezing the last dollar you know each quarter from an ad system totally okay hunter when we first started speaking about having you on the show uh you proposed that at a certain point we flip it and let you host and then basically give you a chance to interrogate me a little bit so yeah i'm just going to

do interested in doing that i'm going to turn the show over to you for our last 10 minutes and have at it i'm just going to do live reads for my portfolio companies now is that this Is that appropriate? No, Alex, I appreciate it. I appreciate it. I do. So, you know, recently sprung out on your own, right? Like, we are talking in, you know, something that's Alex Coe, not owned by somebody else. You probably covered this earlier, but, you know, every episode brings new listeners. What was the motivation for that? That's a great question. I had just finished getting, well, getting my book out. I mean, I'm publishing always day one. at the very worst moment of this pandemic was really tough.

Obviously, pales in comparison to everything else that was going on for people. But, you know, just looking at this from a purely, you know, individual selfish lens, I'd spent two years working on this book that goes into the inner workings of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. And, you know, it came out at a moment where the world just wasn't going to, you know, be ready for it. And so I just realized that, like, number one, I was going to have, to put way more energy into getting the word out about that than I would have otherwise.

So I felt that like it was important for me to be independent to do that. Number two, there were things that were going on that I learned in that book that I just sort of found, you know, were worth expanding on. Like I wanted to go deeper into some of the management stuff and, you know, into the way that these companies work versus like being someone who just like kept up on every, you know, incremental bit of news. So I felt that going independent would allow me to do that as well. And I also just sort of like loved the process of following my own curiosity that was something that I was able to do throughout the book where I had like something that I thought might be interesting.

And then just basically went after it and just kept, you know, asking questions and making calls until I got to the bottom of it. And I just felt that doing something independent would give me that opportunity and I thought it was going to be fun. and so far so good. Do you think that, you know, people talk about sort of the trend of going indie, substacks, and so forth, is that something that continues this year? Or do folks find out the reality of being on their own isn't all rosy? It's hard, man. I mean, I don't know if this thing is going to work or not.

But so far so good, it's gone well. And I think it's on track to be sustainable. Is that when you say, when you talk about sort of sustainability and gone well or not, Is that purely economic, or are there other considerations around what it means to be sustainable? Yeah, definitely. I mean, I'm definitely looking at, am I making enough money to keep doing this? Like, you know, I have, you know, a bit of runway. But if this thing becomes a money loser, I'm eventually going to try to go out and do something else.

But so economically, it's been okay. And then, yeah, I'm looking at the growth numbers and seeing, am I able to build an audience, are people opening the email last week? The newsletter got a 42% open rate, which was the highest ever. So that seems to be pointing in the right direction and basically seeing the people are receptive to it. So, yeah, so I think it is going well from that standpoint. Have you had to learn new skills that you think impact that sort of sustainability? Or is it just write well and, you know, people find you.

Or are you now also your own, you know, your own marketer, your own strategist, you know, your own biz dev person? Totally. I think the content is going to be the lead horse one way or the other. Like, no matter how well you market a newsletter, if the newslet or the newslet, if the newsletter sucks, no one's going to read it because it's like we have so many other things that we could be doing with our time. So content will lead. But like I think instead of learning new skills, it's been me tapping into some old skills. So before I went into journalism, I spent three years

in sales and marketing and I bought digital ads. So for me like this moment has definitely brought some of those back, some of those things back like I'm putting together the first ad sales deck for big technology. And I'm going to try to support it with advertising to keep it free for people as long as possible. And so that's been interesting. And honestly, it's kind of fun. I enjoyed selling. I was just selling a product that wasn't very great back in the day. And now it's cool because I'm able to like have control of the product and of the sales process. Very fun. One last question on that. I wrote something a week or two ago called sort of, you know, come for the content, stay for the community that I've noticed that a lot of the authors or journalists, reporters that

I've followed into sort of their individual newsletters are doing something besides the content creation, besides sort of the one way, hey, I'm publishing something to you, you know, in text or audio. And they're either doing events or Slack groups or, you know, some sort of about the act of convening their readership together, you know, for for some sort of community aspect that is less static than, you know, maybe sort of the traditional byline publishing. Do you think about that at all, or is that something that is in process for big technology? Yeah, definitely. So if I end up releasing a paid tier of the big technology experience, it will almost

certainly be community-based. And what I think that would mean would be like a monthly Zoom. call or even like live podcast tapings. And to me, I just think that, and I like what, you know, I read your story and I like the fact that you posted that screenshot of Lenny's newsletters, Slack Group, where basically people who are paid subscribers could come in and build community around there. Honestly, yeah, I think that's the main value. I could write more, but I feel like once a week is a pretty good cadence, but I would definitely

like be excited to build a community and you know get more into depth and it sort of is self reinforcing like me getting in touch with the audience is great and I think that if I can add value to their lives in a way that you know makes paying a small monthly fee you know worthwhile then and in terms of like you know both the insight I can share from the experience of doing this but also introducing them to people in the community I mean that seems like it would be a bull's So it's definitely something that will probably, I'll probably put into motion within the next six months or so. Awesome. Well, I'm excited to be on the podcast every other week.

I'll look forward to it and, you know, we'll have more of these great discussions. For sure, for sure. Well, many thanks to everybody for listening and to Nate Guatney, our great editor, folks at Red Circle, who host and sell ads on the show. And Hunter, do you want to close it off? Do a sign off here? You're going to bring us home. I'm going to bring you home. Well, you know, it's Friday after a long week. I've eaten a lot of donuts and drank a lot of scotch and, you know, be kind. Be kind to each other.

Okay, what a note to leave it on. All right, thanks, everyone. We'll see you next Wednesday.