How I Built This with Guy Raz - Live Episode! BuzzFeed: Jonah Peretti

Episode Date: July 27, 2017

In 2001, when most of us had no idea what it meant to "go viral," Jonah Peretti shared an email prank among his friends — and saw it spread to millions. That began his fascination with how information spreads, and set him on the path to launch two of the most powerful media organizations of the Internet age: The Huffington Post and BuzzFeed. Recorded live in New York City.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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I don't even really remember. It just was kind of, you know, it was like she was charming and smart and, you know, fun to talk to. And then a little while later, she's like, you have to meet Phil Angelini. He's running for governor of California. And then, like, Ariana's introducing me to Phil Angelini's. But Ariana is like introducing me to Phil Angelini's. And he's like, he's like, he should be your head of dinner. digital, you know, and I'm like, what?

He's like a digital genius, you know? And then I'm like, I'm like, I live in New York City. I don't work in politics. And like I didn't even know that Phil Angelini's was, you know, a person until. Right. Right. Earlier this morning and now I'm going to be a head of digital. From NPR, it's how I built this, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists,

and the stories behind the movements they built. I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how an anti-corporate prank and a viral email inspired Jonah Peretti to build two of the most powerful news organizations of the Internet age. So if you were to walk into an office building and get into an elevator with a whole bunch of other people, you wouldn't necessarily pick out Jonah Peretti as the media mogul in the elevator. In fact, he looks more like a graduate student, pretty young, pretty casual. And when I met him a few weeks ago for a conversation in front of a live audience in New York, he was, of course, wearing a hoodie.

I want to start by asking you the question about this sort of the tech uniform because everybody wears hoodies. What is the story with? I mean, they're comfortable. I have hoodies. People get mad if you don't wear them, you know? Yeah, they don't invite you to parties. Particularly like business people, you know. If I like wear a nice button down and go to a meeting, they're like, oh, it's kind of disappointing.

I kind of wanted like a startup person. Right. You've got to play the part. Fair enough. So even though he might not look like a traditional media mogul, by almost any definition, he is. Because Jonah Peretti co-founded the Huffington Post, a news site that totally disrupted the journalism world.

And if he stopped there, that would be impressive enough. But he didn't. While at Huffington Post, He started to tinker around with an idea that would become BuzzFeed, a company that just six years ago didn't even employ a single journalist. And today, it has a bigger news team than most newsrooms in America. Now, Jonah isn't a journalist. He's not a coder. He's not a businessman.

And he doesn't come from money. So you might be wondering, how did he do this? Well, the story begins just after Jonah graduated from college. He took classes in environmental studies at UC Santa Cruz in Northern California, and he had to decide what to do next. So I was trying to decide whether to be a teacher or to work at a startup. And then I love teaching. And through college, I made money by teaching.

I saw there was some thing where you could get hired as a teacher. And I just, when I was on a trip with my mom, and I walked into it. And they were like, I was like, I don't have a teaching credential. They were like, you don't need one. And I was like, oh, great. And there was a school in New Orleans that was just starting a computer education program, and they had gotten a grant, and they got all these computers. And then I flew to New Orleans to interview for the job,

and it was the Newman School in New Orleans, and their logo was an alligator. And I had to present to a bunch of second semester seniors. I taught them how to do web design and make it animated GIF. And I animated the school mascot so that the alley. I'm gesturing now. You can't, if you're not in a live audience, I'm making an alligator with my fingers. And it, like, would move its tail and open its mouth. And they were like, oh, my God.

Like, they saw the alligator thrashing and thought it was, like, the coolest thing. And then I taught them to do web design, and I forgot to, like, close one of the tags on the HTML. And so none of the pages works. The lesson totally failed. But the animated gif alligator saved me, and so I got hired. It seems like that experience, because you were there for three years, right? Yeah. of school. It seems like that experience was,

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

I mean, I was thinking about how to connect with my students and to get them to learn things and get them excited. And that is something that has heavily influenced the way I think about content. Because I think if you think about content from at the time print and broadcast, you think about making something that you push out to this giant audience. But if you're in a classroom teaching, you know, 25 kids that are in front

of you, you really start to learn that the really good teachers are shaping the curriculum based on the feedback they're getting from the students. They're trying to read the room and read the audience and get them more engaged. So I was, you know, I was designing virtual role playing, a historical role playing in virtual worlds and some of these like early VR things. This is like the late 90s. Yeah. And I could teach about anything.

We do social protest letters using the Microsoft Word, Wizard. You know, we could do kind of any topic because technology was new. So from the reaction of the students, I could get a sense of what was getting their brains going and do more of that. So how did that lead you to go to MIT

to study at the Media Lab? I went to the Media Lab because there were really smart people in educational technology artificial intelligence and people who are thinking about learning and technology. So it was an extension of the interest in education plus technology. So in 2001, you're at MIT, and you decide to order a custom pair of Nikes. Can you explain what that was all out?

So I was procrastinating, which is what students do when they have to write a long paper. Someone told me that Nike had launched a service where you could customize your shoes, which was a new novel thing. I went and I think first tried a four-letter word and it rejected it. And so I was trying to figure out how the system worked. You could just to clarify, you could get any words you want it printed on the Nike, on the side of a pair of Nikes, right? Yeah, although they had blacklisted a bunch of words.

So I was trying to figure out which words do they blacklist. And then I put the word sweatshop in and it went through. So I was like, oh, I can get a pair of Nikes that say sweatshop under the swoosh. And the next day I got an email from a Nike rep saying that the word sweatshop is inappropriate slang. And so I just responded to the email and said, no, it's in the dictionary. It means a shopper factory where workers toil and are under healthy conditions. Can you, you know, now can you send me the shoes? And then they wrote back another excuse.

And we were having this back and forth, which if you're procrastinating writing a paper, this is perfect, right? You're just like back and forth. And then eventually they said we reserve the right time. could not put that on the shoe. You have to change the ID. And I said, okay, I'll change the ID, but can you at least send me a picture of the 10-year-old Vietnamese girl who stitches the shoes together? And then they didn't write back after that. You were the first internet troll. I'm sure there's trolls that predated that. So you didn't get, were you, by the way, were you like an activist? Was this something that was near and dear to your heart?

I wasn't an activist. I had read news articles about, about, sweatshops, but I wasn't an expert on it. And then I ended up, so, so, and I pasted these emails together and sent them to a few friends. And then it became, the exchange with Nike. Yeah, the exchange with Nike, I pasted together, sent to a few friends, and then it became an early email forward. So if you remember in the dark ages of social, there were things called email forwards, where people would forward something they thought they liked to their entire address book. So this ended up, I started getting emails from strangers. And then it started to hit the activist community, people who really knew and cared about the issue, and people who, you know,

would send me death threats and marriage proposals and, like, various, you know, but strangers sending me things, which in 2001 is weird that all of a sudden strangers are emailing you. Were people even using the term viral in 2001? It was not anything that anyone really thought about or was on anyone's radar. It was pre-before Facebook, before YouTube, you know, it wasn't something people thought about. So the email forward starts to spread, and I get thousands of emails back from, from strangers, and then reporters start calling me, and I didn't know much about the sweatshop

issue, but I ended up on the Today Show with Nike's head of global PR, and Katie Couric, like, talking about, you know, sweatshop labor, and I'm, you know, I've never been on TV before. I don't know anything about the media. So she's asking you all these questions about sweatshop labor, and you have to represent that position? Well, so she... Did you do some homework beforehand? So Katie Kirk is a pro, and she sensed how weak I was, you know? So, so, like, when you have David and Goliath on your show, you don't go hard at David, you know? So it was, I was very nervous, but it wasn't, she wasn't too hard on me. Do you, do you know how many people that email exchange reached? There were various news stories that tried to estimate, oh, this probably

reached 9 million people or this, you know, back then, email forwards and things like that were it was really hard to measure, really hard to understand what was going on. And so I became fascinated with this topic of how does this stuff work? How can a student with no context in the media reached millions of people about an issue he knows very little about. And this does not seem like the way the media is supposed to work. It's supposed to be there's an executive or an editor or someone who determines what lots of people see. And this was just an emergent thing where sending it people resulted in more people seeing it. And people became the distribution. The way that it spread was the audience became the network. Yeah. Did people at MIT at the time?

because, I mean, they were epidemiologists and people who probably studied contagion and how things spread. Were there people who went up to Dunes just said, this is a total fluke, like this is a one-off. This cannot, this can't be repeated. Well, my good friend Cameron Marla, who went on to be the first data scientist

or head data scientist at Facebook, was observing this and the Nike email spreading, and he said exactly that. He said, these kinds of phenomena are rare, and they're hard to predict, and so this is not something that you can repeat. And so that kind of drove me to say, let me try to make more of these.

Let me prove Cameron wrong. So he's saying to you, this can't be replicated. And you're saying, maybe it can. Yeah. And then Duncan Watts, another friend who became a friend because I was looking for people to understand this, he figured out the mathematics of six degrees of separation and small worlds where people had this concept

that everyone is connected through a few short jumps. And he also had a very pessimistic view. and would say, okay, it's hard to make things go viral, and it's hard to replicate this. And so both of them, it was fun to try to prove them wrong. So what did you do? So next thing I did was with my sister, who's a stand-up comic.

Chelsea Peretti, from Brooklyn Nine-N-N-N-N-N-N. I'd like a little sum of applause for Chelsea. That's nice. Yeah, there we go. So Chelsea was not on Brooklyn Nine-N-N-N-N-Band, though. She was, like, doing the Parkside Lounge to terrible audiences and like just starting her comedy career. But we created something together called the New York City Rejection Line.

And the concept of the New York City rejection line is it was a phone number where someone was hitting on you and wouldn't take no for an answer. You could give them your number. But it actually was a local New York number. And when you called, you get an automated rejection message. So it would say the person who gave you this number doesn't actually want to talk to you or see you again. You can press one to speak to a comfort. specialist. You can press two to hear a sad poem written by a kindred spirit, or you could

press three to cling to the unrealistic hope of relationship still possible. And then she had various comic friends record each of the messages in the phone tree. And then after that, we did a project called Black People Love Us, which was a website that looked like it was created by these two super white people, Sally and Johnny, who were so proud of having black friends that they created a whole website to celebrate it. And it really, like, depicted what now people would call microaggressions, you know? So it was like testimonials like, Sally loves to touch my hair, you know, and, and, but with black people love, it's like, we ended up on Good Morning America with Diane Sawyer talking about race in America. So, wow.

And, you know, rejection line was like, we were on CNN talking about relationships. So it was this weird thing where you could make something that would take off on the Internet. spread to lots of people and then reporters in traditional media would see it and be like, oh, I discovered this on the internet. And with each project, the timeline for it to spread got shorter. So the Nike email diffused over something like three and a half months. And then rejection line was like two months for, you know, and then black people was like it was like two, three weeks. So we started to see. And that was just 2001, 2002, 2003. So it was one a year. and the internet and social got much more connected,

or even just in the span of 2001, 2003. And by the time you get in 2006, 7, 8, people are trying to make things go viral and it starts to become a science and social. You know, YouTube is, you know, taking off. And people are thinking about this as being a way of distributing media for the first time, even though it's still small.

So how did you, I mean, this is around 2003, 2004, 2005, you get on the radar, I guess, of people who wanted to create the Huffington Post. How did that happen? So Ken Laird was a retired from, you know, sort of retired executive, and he really cared a lot about gun control as an issue and wanted to figure out how to use the Internet

to do political advocacy, political action. And so he put together a group of the smartest people in the Internet space that could come together and advise him on this. And I was not one of those people. But Duncan Watts was. And so Duncan Watts, the guy I mentioned before about the six to read the separation guy, Kenny had read Duncan's book. And it said, you have to come to this thing.

So then Duncan calls me and he's like, oh, this rich guy wants me to come to this thing to help him figure out the internet. And like you'd be much better at that than I would. And I think I said, well, you know, I don't know. Like it seems kind of like going to Midtown seems kind of like a hassle. And then he said, well, you know, and Duncan had broken his leg skiing. So he was in a cast. And he's like, well, but this guy told me, this guy has a driver. And he says that after the meeting, I can take his car and go anywhere in the city.

And I was like, oh, that sounds kind of cool. So I was like, okay, I'll come with you. So I went to the meeting because like we get to drive around, you know, after. So you meet Ken there. and how does he say... So, Taney has a circle of all these different people and like, you know, Jeff Jarvis is telling him about blogs

and Scott Hyperman is telling him about Meetup and there's someone doing mobile stuff telling him about that. And I talk about the Nike email and making things that are shared on the internet and he's, you know, and he sort of ended not just with me, but a few other people like, yeah, let's do, let's do a blog,

let's do some viral thing, let's do this, let's do it. And so I ended up working on a couple projects with him. And it was a lot of fun. And he was a great, fun person to work with. And he had a lot of different experience that I didn't have. Like, I'd never done anything in business. I'd been a teacher and worked in an academic environment. And at the end, I worked together for a while. He said, let's start a business together. Like, I, you know the internet. I know business. Like, let's do something together. And you said yes right away. And I said, yeah, sure. And we like shook hands. And we didn't know what the business would be though, you know? So it was kind of like, you know, and then, and then he ended up

meeting Ariana subsequently, and he kind of came back from the meeting saying, she knows everyone in business and media and, and, you know, politics, and she's bringing it all together. And imagine if you could bring that online. And so, you know, he started saying, you know, our company with Ariana. And I was like, I was like, what? You know, who's that? I'm like, Googling her. Then I was like, Well, if we're starting to come with her, I have to meet her. And so I flew out to L.A. to go meet Ariana. What was your first impression of her? Well, I got there late at night.

And so I went, I didn't meet her. I just went to sleep in her guest room. So I wake up at something like six in the morning, which for me is super early, or maybe it was, it felt so early to me. And I come out, and Ariana is having breakfast. So then we have our meeting. She's talking about, you know, what she wants to do. What she wants to do?

I don't even really remember. It just was kind of, you know. It was like talking to her, and she was charming and smart and really fun to talk to. And then a little while later, she's like, you have to meet Phil Angelini's. He's running for governor of California. And then like Ariana is introducing me to Phil Angelini's. But Ariana is like introducing me to Phil Angelini's. And he's like, he should be your head of digital, you know?

And I'm like, what? He's like a digital genius, you know? And then I'm like, I live in New York City. I don't work in politics. And I didn't even know that Phil Angelini's was, you know, a person until, like, earlier this morning and now I'm going to be his head of digital. So anyway, I fly back to New York and Kenny is like, oh, what did you think? And I was like, yeah, let's do it. This is going to be really fun.

Wow. So I kind of thought, oh, it'll be an adventure. It'll be, you know, I tried to apply these ideas about virality on the internet to a bunch of different one-off projects. the idea of applying into a company was a new thing. And so it felt like a next stage to try to do that. And at that point, I mean, the vision of Huffington Post was to kind of be like a left-wing drudge report? Yeah, I think, you know,

Kenny said, you know, in every industry, if there's a Coke, there's going to be a big spot for a Pepsi and the drudge reports out there by themselves. And in political media, if there's a strong right-wing thing, there's always room for a left-wing. And the Internet was being underutilized by left-wing or progressive site.

There was a kind of utopian left-wing blogosphere, but there wasn't a site that was run like a company and a business that had that perspective. And I think Kenny had a strong vision that that would work at Ariana as well. And I was more of, I had ideas about how to grow something on the internet. I was still kind of in that mindset. It wasn't that I was shaping the vision of Huffington Post in a way. I was trying to think, okay, how do you make the most? out of the Arianas network and bringing those people into the blogosphere and how do you make the most out of

a sticky front page with links where people come back. I was thinking of kind of those kind of dynamics. And we didn't even have article pages when we launched. We had blog posts, which were the only permalinks on the site, and then the headlines all clicked out to other sources. And so really the election drove a lot of the early growth. And as we approached the election, we had to think, how are we going to continue to grow after the election, or we're going to just die after the election? Is it 2008 election?

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I'm bad with dates. Yeah, no. So, I mean, pretty soon, I guess within a year or 18 months of starting, helping to launch the Huffington Post, you started this side project, this thing that you called BuzzFeed Labs. Before we talk about what it was, what was it that you couldn't do at Huffington Post? that, I don't know, that it kind of gave you this itch to do something on your own.

I couldn't play an experiment as much as I wanted. We were right from the start building a company and trying to grow it really fast at Huffington Post. You know, I think when I, Ariana asked me, what's the earliest we could launch the Huffington Post? And I think I told her a date. And then, like, she announced in the press that we would launch it three days before that or something. And I was like, oh, you know, like, everything was, like, so rush. and fast and there wasn't a real R&D or experimentation or research type thing. So I learned a lot of Huffington Post about building a business and startups, but there were still

things I wanted to figure about media, how media worked, what does it mean when people can share media and become the distribution? There were all these things I was still trying to understand. I couldn't do it at HuffPost, so I started BuzzFeed as a lab where I could continue to play and do research and experiment. You were trying to figure out why people share things rather than why people just click on things. Yeah, why do people share things? What's going to happen in the media industry if the distribution is people sharing with each other where the consumer powers it? It felt like

that was a big shift. And from the Nike email where what does it mean that a student can reach millions of people without a gatekeeper blessing it? And what's that going to do to the entire media industry and entertainment industry? What's going to do to politics? That was a fascinating, big question and it gets into psychology of what matters to people. It gets into social psychology of how do people want to represent themselves to other people? What do people want to share with other people and why

and what value do they get when they share? So there are all those kind of questions that I was fascinated by and John, my partner in BuzzFeed, when John Johnson, who started IBEAM, is a more academic type guy as well. And so he was very interested in these questions and also in funding BuzzFeed

and partner in fund. He gave you some seed money to start it. When we started, John just paid every month the expenses of BuzzFeed. This is not like your other founder's stories where there's like a mysterious dashing millionaire who like funds a totally unviable business. Okay. Yes. In just a moment, we'll find out how Jonah turned BuzzFeed into a very viable business. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to a special live episode of how I built this from NPR.

Hey, welcome back to this special live episode of How I Built This from NPR. I'm Guy Raz. So it's around 2008 and Jonah Peretti is still at the Huffington Post, but he started the side project called BuzzFeed Labs. And he starts to tinker with an idea, a question really, that was still pretty new at the time. And the question was, how do you use the internet to spread content? The vision was to try to solve the bigger problem of what is it?

mean when the people become the distribution? And what does it mean when people sharing is how people discover new content? So then I would do anything it took to solve that problem. So it might be developing tech, which we built a lot of tech. It might be hiring really creative editors who can make lists and quizzes. Eventually, as news started to be shared on these social networks, it was building a journalism function. But that happened later. I mean, initially, it was just finding things that you thought could be viral, like, well, like, I mean, we always say cat videos, right? Or like the dog on a skateboard.

Was that what you were experimenting with originally? We had something that was similar to blog decks where we would crawl sites and look for acceleration. We had a chat bot that would then send out links to people, but you could only have like 20 people connected to it. So it wasn't a scalable business. We built some tool that would scrape left wing and right wing sites and then show the differences between left and right and right. that was like this left-first-right thing. We were just doing lots of experiments to try to understand things. We were like a lab, basically.

And who was reading BuzzFeed? Was it, I mean, at that time, how many people were clicking on the site? We basically doubled our audience every year from when we launched the site. And it started with something like 200,000 or 300,000 people a month. And where was your traffic coming from? We had some of it coming from a small widget on Huffington Post because Huffington Post only had politics content, so we had little links to some other content.

and then someone was coming direct to the site. And then when Facebook and Twitter became bigger, that's really when BuzzFeed was viable because the whole thing we were obsessed with was social. And so first social unlocked internet memes and humor. Then it unlocked, you started to have things like cute animals and things like that. And then eventually news and entertainment and video and kind of everything.

And so as social became bigger, we were able to grow along with it. And how did you do that? I mean, you were a major person at Huffington Post. You've got this side hustle. What were you doing? Were you like doing it on nights and weekends? How did you, were you going back and forth? I would just sort of walk between Chinatown and Soho.

I would pick up Vietnamese sandwiches for the Huff Post people on my way. Literally. You would pick up sandwiches. So on a day-to-day basis? There was a jewelry store in Chinatown that had these amazing sandwiches in the back of the jewelry store. And so I would walk from BuzzFeed, BuzzFeed when it had, you know, eight people, and then I would do a traffic meeting at HuffPost with all the editors who were focused on growth and traffic and things like that.

When people asked you, so what is this BuzzVee thing that you're doing? Did you say, oh, I intend to build a media company, or how did you think of it at the time? Well, early on, when John was funding it and we had no revenue and it was like a lab, I mean, we were technically a company, but we were exploring and experimenting. It was only when we started to get a little bit bigger. We launched the website BuzzFeed. We started to have people there whose jobs

and was tied to BuzzFeed that I thought we should raise some money that isn't from John. I also never took a salary at BuzzFeed in the early days, so I'd live entirely off the Huff post. And so I started to feel guilty that my friend was like funding this company

and I wanted to go find some outside capital to build BuzzFeed. I mean, I'm just imagining you're going to potential investors and you're like, well, we're trying to create this thing, We're not really sure what it is, but we're really interested in viral content. And this is still before people really talked about that or knew about that. Were there investors who were like, I don't really get what you're trying to do?

Yeah, nobody wanted to invest. Our first pitch deck is, we put it online, so you can actually go see our first pitch deck. And I don't know, now that BuzzFeed's done well and grown, people think, oh, that's a good pitch tech. You should pattern your pitch tech off that. But everyone rejected our pitch. and really the first time we were able to raise money was from SoftBink, which also was invested in HuffPost.

And there was another firm that wanted to invest, but they told me I had to leave HuffPost. And so once there was another firm that said, you have to leave HuffPost, then the HuffPost investors were like, no, don't leave, we'll invest in BuzzFeed. We think BuzzFeed's great, you know. And so did you, I mean,

were there any moments even before, because this is still, BuzzFeed is, this is still before you started to create original content. Was there any point where, I don't know, BuzzFeed could have gone under? I mean, I think we were able to raise money before we ever were about to run out of money,

but it was hard. And so I think any startup in the early days, you question the viability and you question, you know, is this going to deliver, you know, grow the way we wanted to grow. Why was it important for you to essentially transition into creating more of a media company that made content? I mean, you could have just been an aggregator and found the best cat videos and dogs on wheels and probably still been profitable. What was the turning point in your mind where you thought, you know, let me, let's hire a team. Let's start

making our own stuff, writing our own content. Investors didn't want us to hire journalists or reporters or many people other than engineers and business people. If you look at all the big tech companies in Silicon Valley, they're monocultures of engineers and business people. They don't really hire people who make and create content. Because it's expensive. It's expensive. And they'd rather have a model where you just build a platform and then the content comes for free because everyone posts their baby pictures or their own viral videos or whatever it is. And so that was the main feedback from investors. We don't want to invest because, you're going to have to hire all these people and that's expensive. And our first investor deck was like, well, we're going to hire some people, but they're test pilots for our technology and maybe won't hire that many people because we probably wouldn't have been able to even raise money if we had said, oh, our plan is to hire lots and lots of journalists and reporters. But I wanted to solve the problem.

Like, I wanted to understand how do you make things that's so meaningful that someone wants to share it with someone else in their life? And in order to do that, you can't just build a platform because if you just build a platform, people will, you're not involved in the actual creation. And if you look at my, the earlier work we were talking about of things like rejection line, black people love us and Nike, we are making the content and just understanding how it's spread. And by varying the content or tweaking the content, improving the content, finding new sources of inspiration, new sources of creativity, you actually, it actually has a huge effect on how things spread. And so I wanted to solve that

problem. So I needed, I needed creative people to do that. It seems from the outside, and it may be different from the inside of it, but it seems to the outside that big turning point was in 2011 when you hired Ben Smith of Politico to be the editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed. That was obviously, I would assume that the goal of that, the idea behind that was to really expand your

original content. The main thing was that we were doing, you know, when BuzzFeed started, the iPhone hadn't come out yet. Twitter was what you had for lunch. Facebook was how you used. met up with your friends and the only content people shared were cute animals and internet memes. And that's the kind of stuff we made in the early days. Then we started to notice that people

were sharing news on Facebook and Twitter and that was new and we got very excited because we said now we can go into the news business. And we felt left out of that because we started to see news being shared and we on a day when there was lots of news like we were kind of didn't have much to do. And so we could hire Ben Smith and we had another general election coming up. We learned from Huffington Post that building a news business in the run-up to election is a good time to do it. And so Ben joined, hired a really great crew of reporters, beat reporters covering the election. And we built our news business in that election and then was able to grow it from there. I want to just digress for a moment. I want to ask you about a very, you know, a very

controversial decision that BuzzFeed took earlier this year to post the contents of the Trump dossier, right, which was, which, which, which suggested that there were all kinds of things that happened in a hotel room in Russia, et cetera, et cetera. Buzz, the administration, or it was before the administration was inaugurated, they went crazy. So you think that's the point where they went crazy? Do you think that, that, I mean, do you think that you would have done that again? Do you think that was the right decision to make, given that, you know, there really isn't a whole lot of consensus about whether it was accurate? I definitely think it was the right decision. And the

reason we published it was because you had everyone in the senior levels of government and media talking about this document and referring to the document, even in public communications, you had the president of the president-electing briefed on the document, but the public was totally in the dark. You know, and you had CNN saying, oh, this document exists. And Harry Reid saying, so you felt people should at least have exposure to it.

So this was something that could be hugely important to the country. And the public didn't know what was going on. They just knew something was up. And it felt, you know, so we think that news is really, particularly with the internet, news is really moving from a period, a long period where you would trust a few news anchors

to tell you, the truth and you had to kind of believe them based on their authority to the public really wanting to see the work and understand what's what's actually happening. But doesn't it in a sense kind of feed into this narrative that Donald Trump has, that the news media's fake news when there are things that are published that are not accurate? Isn't there a danger of that as well? Well, I think that definitely there is a danger of having the president call everything fake news. And it makes it very hard to know what does that word even mean. We were very clear and careful when we published it that this was a document that was

circulating that some things in it we were able to determine were not true and that there were many unverified things in the document and that we were publishing it so the public could see what was being discussed. So we weren't publishing it saying this is a bunch of things that we're verifying and saying are true. On the contrary, we were actually reporting out what was actually happening and what the conversation was about. So turning back to BuzzFeed, in your, I mean,

your business model is around advertising, obviously. And one of the things that you guys really pioneered was people call native advertising or sponsored, branded content, sponsored content, which is controversial in the news world, right? It's basically appears to some people to be, you know, to be indistinguishable,

from reported pieces. Tell me the thinking behind that and why did you think that was the right way to go? It actually is in that first pitch deck, which I looked at the best businesses on the internet, and they tended to use some form of native advertising.

So Google had a search engine, and you enter a keyword in, and it would give you a bunch of related links, but it would also give you a bunch of related paid links, and that's how that's how they made their money. And what that meant was the core engine that Google built, which was search, would help serve the consumer with organic links and would make them more money with paid links, and they could invest that money back into making search better. And so that was a

very different model than when you looked at publishers. Like at Huffington Post, it was so frustrating to me that we built all these tools and technology to grow Huffington Post. And then the way we made money was banner ads that were powered by some other technology company that we didn't control that often slowed down our site and made it harder to read or blocked the content on the site. And when we got better at making the technology for our editors and writers and audience, we didn't actually get better at making money. That was like someone else's job. And so at BuzzFeed is that I don't want to make that same mistake. I want the core engine of BuzzFeed, which is creating amazing content that people love and want to share across the social web to also be our

business model where we can take all the things we learn. and apply that to our advertisers. So one quick example, when quizzes got really big, a month after that, we could have a branded quiz for HBO, which is how will you die in Game of Thrones? And you answer questions,

and it'll be like, you'll be trampled or you'll beheaded. And like, it was some, it got a million views. Users loved it. The byline was HBO. It was clear it was about HBO. But it allowed us to make advertising

that it didn't suck. It allowed us to make advertising that people actually loved it. liked. And when we got better at making something like a quiz, we also got better at making money. And so that was the thinking from the start. How do you know how to make something go viral? Do you have a gut sense for it? I mean, is it just something that you intuitively know how to do? It's as complicated as human psychology, which is why it's so interesting. So there's a bunch of

things. The reason humor works so well and the reason cute animals work so well is that there are natural ways that people bond with each other. If you go out for drinks with your friend and people are telling jokes, the next day, you don't remember the specific jokes. You just remember you laughed with your friends and you feel closer to them. Or if you pet the family dog and everyone gathers around, you feel closer to the dog, but you feel closer to everyone in your family. Feeling the same emotion at the same time or laughing with people is a way of bonding with people. And so when we started BuzzFeed, everyone thought of content is information to get in people's head. This is the article. Are people going to read it and get the information in our head?

We had this insight that content was on social was a way of connecting with someone in your life and building a closer relationship with them. And then from there, it started to expand in a whole bunch of different areas. You share this content to express your identity. I'm from, you know, if I'm from Oakland and I see something about Oakland that's like what signs you grew up in Oakland, I will share that because I want my friends who also grew up in Oakland to connect with me. But I also want people who didn't grow up there to know what it's like.

so that I can feel closer to them. And so we started to always think from the perspective of the audience and what are their social needs, what are the jobs that they want to achieve in their life, what are the things that matter to them? And can we use content as a kind of glue to help them do that? While you were building the company and as you continue to develop the company,

you are the CEO. How did you learn how to be that, do that job? I mean, that wasn't what you were trained to do. You didn't go to business school. You didn't have that background. No, I'm very unqualified for the job that I have. So how did you figure out how to be the CEO of a company? I'm still figuring it out.

It's like constantly learning, and the company changes so much every year that I have to learn and evolve. I read lots of books. I read lots of business books. I read Harvard Business Review on airplanes. That's like... Really? Yeah. Wow.

Because I didn't go to business school. And I didn't know, you know. And actually, Harvard Business Review is a good example of why people share. So people like to say that they read Harvard Business Review or share articles from Harvard Business Review because it seems like they're smart and like, and it has the word Harvard in it. And so even if I didn't read Harvard Business Review,

you still might say that. So people would think, oh, he's qualified to be a CEO. He read an article. in Harvard Business Review. You guys are still a private company. You got an offer from Disney to buy BuzzFeed, I guess, in 2013. From what I read, a pretty nice offer. How much money, by the way, did they offer you?

I don't remember. So why did you turn them down? I think that part of it is a gut thing or an emotional thing, where it just didn't feel ready. I felt like there was a lot more we had to build. At the time, we were really a website, and our video business had just started. It was growing so much,

and I knew that that was going to be a big part of our future. I valued our independence a lot and thought that there were a lot of things we could do on our own. I worried about being part of a big company and being so small relative to the company that might own us, where I feel like we wanted to figure out how to invent the future of media and how things should work in the future and we wanted to make sure we had the independence to do that.

So, so, so, you know, maybe it would have, maybe it would have been great, but I think, you know, I'm happy with the decision and I, we've been able to do a lot as an independent company. You, your company, the last valuation was like one, one and a half billion dollars that may be valued higher now. When you, when you think about that number, one and a half billion dollars, it has made you whether you like it or not, a rich person, you're a rich man. Does that mean anything to you? Is it just a paper number? Do you sometimes think, oh, my God, I'm so rich now?

I mean, I feel fortunate that we've been able to build a company to be something that is valuable that other people think is worth, you know, as a valuable entity. And the real thing that I value is that the valuation is set through investment. And the fact that people have invested in us has given us resources, to build big things in the future and to not think day to day, like, how are we doing this quarter or how are we doing, you know, this week and think, be able to think much more long-term and say we can, what are things going to be like in two years and five years and how do we

build towards that? And you can't do that unless you have a high valuation and people willing to invest lots of, lots of money. How much of your success and what's happened to you and the creation of BuzzFeed is due to your brilliance and talent and hard work and how much of is luck? I don't know that people's self-knowledge on these things is the best knowledge. I think that in general there's a huge amount of luck. I think there's also this concept of, you know, Mark Zuckerberg who runs, you know, Facebook, you know, partly he gets smarter by running Facebook. So like once you have some initial success, you get.

access to people and ideas and data that allow you to synthesize things. And so I think that is also, you know, really important. And then if, you know, if you can grow something 7% every month, you can double it every year. And if you do that for a few years, you know, 10x is the size of that. And so if you stay at something long enough and you learn as you're doing it and you prove as you do it, a little bit of initial luck can be turned into something much bigger over time. But there's a, there's a huge amount of luck and privilege and an opportunity of where you're born and how you, you know, and I think that is a, is a prominent thing. You know, I think for a lot of people hearing this story, it would, it would sound very

seamless. Jonah, you know, does this viral thing with Nike, and then he gets connected to the people who start Huffington Post, and then that happens, and then he's able to start BuzzFeed, and, you know, and BuzzFeed just scales. What is it about startups that either you didn't understand or other people that you talked to about startups don't understand? Like it's harder than it looks is the kind of thing? Is it?

I mean, is that right? It is hard. Yeah, it's really hard. I think you have to love the fact that it's hard. First of all, in terms of the money question you're asking, it's not a good way to make a lot of money. Sometimes people are fortunate and make a lot of money in startups, but most of them fail. And when I think about the New York tech scene and the people that I knew over the years,

lots of really smart, creative people put so much effort into building startups that for various reasons, often outside of their control, didn't succeed. And so you have to love it, and you have to love the struggle, and you have to love that it's hard, building something new and having lots of competition and having people doubt what you're doing and having big incumbents trying to, you know, hire your people or take your business. And it's hard. I mean, it requires being really liking to do hard things and to push against struggle. I think when you think about any worthwhile endeavor, though, it's hard.

Like exercising, if you want to get in shape. It's like, it's hard, you know, or, you know, playing video games. Like, you know, certain levels are really hard. Does anyone here play video games? I mean... Yeah. And like with video games, if you started on level 26, it would be terrible. You would just, like, get destroyed, right?

But if you play your way up to level 26, then it's fun that it's so hard. Jonah Peretti, co-founder of BuzzFeed and The Huffington Post. Thank you. Thank you. By the way, in 2015, a BuzzFeed reporter in New York tracked down his life. lost iPhone to a rural village in China. The reporter flew there. He met the new owner of the phone.

The two men became friends. That story and the photos were posted in a blog on BuzzFeed that went viral. The two of them then went on a tour of China and eventually made it onto the Ellen DeGeneres show. And soon, their story will become a feature film, co-produced by BuzzFeed and Ellen DeGeneres. How is that for Meta? Hey, thanks for listening to the show this week. We recorded this episode in front of a live audience at the SVA Theater in New York on July 12th. Special thanks to Ali Prescott and Jessica Goldstein at NPR for all of your help.

This episode was produced by Ramtin Arablui, who also composed the music. Neva Grant makes it all come together. Thanks also to San Asmeshkampur, Claire Breen, and Jeff Rogers, and our intern, Lawrence Wu. Stay tuned for more live episodes this summer. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This from NPR. I'm Linda Holmes. And I'm Stephen Thompson. There's more stuff to watch and read these days than any one person can get to.

That's why we make Pop Culture Happy Hour. Twice a week, we sort through the nonsense, share reactions, and give you the lowdown on what's worth your precious time and what's not. Find Pop Culture Happy Hour on the NPR One app or wherever you get your podcasts.