Tech Brew Ride Home - (BNS) John Borthwick Of Betaworks

Episode Date: September 13, 2025

John Borthwick on Betaworks shares his journey from a tech-savvy youth to a prominent figure in the New York City tech scene. He discusses his early experiences with computers, the transformative impact of the World Wide Web, and the vibrant tech culture of the 90s. Borthwick reflects on his role in creating Total New York, the lessons learned from the AOL acquisition, and the challenges faced during the dot-com bubble burst. He also highlights the rise of social media platforms like Photolog and the evolution of BetaWorks as a hub for innovation, particularly in the AI space. Throughout the discussion, Borthwick emphasizes the importance of creativity, constraints, and the ever-changing landscape of technology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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GoogleFi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. One of the promises of AI from an investing standpoint in terms of what's the business model, who the winner is going to be, is this sense of abundance potentially in terms of what it can achieve? Yeah, it's really interesting because you have this like sort of, you know, you have this early days of the internet. You just have this and use these metaphors to get that. But you have these like sort of sense you've discovered a new land, right? and that there's an entirely new world that's opened up

and that you can build whatever you want in there. Right. And then on the flip side is that there's some real constraints in terms of what you can do, what you're capable of doing with technology, what you can do, what capital you have, all those constraints. And so like balancing those things is like sort of one of the key jobs of the entrepreneur. But it's also, you know, it is always, you know, them keeping in mind sort of the, I order like some like a new I am I actually building.

I think it is absolutely central to, you know, ending up building things which matter and building things which change the world. John Borthwick, thanks for talking to us today. pleasure. I want to do a little bit of this as your life. So let's go all the way back and just sort of ask you real quick. Were you a computer kid growing up? Were you into tech and gadgets and things?

like that. I was a nerd. I was a computer kid. I did my first bit of programming on a computer, which included tape cassette. And I would never say that I was programmers.

I grew up, I sort of ended up scripting more. Sort of like figuring out how to cobble together and use computer code to make one thing to do something else. and, you know, I grew up in the, I grew up in the, I grew up in UK, half English, half French, not a lot of exposure to computers or nerds, but gravitated towards them whenever I could.

I had a sort of very creative family, so a lot of stuff on the arts, and so between nerds and arts, I kept myself busy. I sometimes ask people their first computer, like the one that made them fall in love with computer or whatever. And so since you just said UK, Europe, like, can I ask you that question? Like, was it a Sinclair, a Commodore? Like, what was your first computer? It was a Commodore. It was a Commodore. But I did not love it. I mean, yeah, the first computer I loved, which was not mine, but I was when I was in college, I was in Connecticut. Somebody there in my dorm got one of the GEMM in Ashtonches.

And I just loved that. And so the combination of the design, the GUI, everything from the keyboard to, I think it was still on that with the clutch, you know, the feel of the keyboard. And a little happy guy when you boot it off. At Wesleyan, you studied economics, is that right? Economics and art history. Well, I was an art history minor, but economics is often a major that folks say, in retrospect, if I could have done that, like, that would have been very useful.

What about studying economics has sort of informed your work? So, Brian, I did development economics. Explain what that is, then. So basically, the, you know, like USAID. I've got it. So essentially economic development and how development happens across different geographies in different countries and how countries, you know, how they trade, how they relate to each other. So it was very much that I had no interest in like accounting or a balance sheet or, you know,

understanding sort of the, that side of economics. So I did some of that later when I went to Wharton, went to grad school at Wharton, and I did some of that there. Wharton was an MBA? Did an MBA at Wharton? Went to Wharton. You know, I was kind of fish out of water there because, you know, mostly finance people, got a few nerds, but I enjoyed it. I spent a bunch of time in computer science department down in Penn and did some classes there. And I met my wife there, which was the best of the best.

thing that me came out of one. And then in 94, I was graduating summer of 94. And in spring of 94, I want to say February March, a friend of mine who was working at the AI lab up at MIT, so not the media lab. There was an AI lab back in 94. and he said, hey, we just ride up a, we've got a computer that's on the World Wide Web and you can come see it.

And so I drove to Boston to see the World Wide Web because there has to have been a terminal event somewhere. But we're talking about, I think it was an SGI box. And so I drove about whatever it was, five hours to Boston to sit down and and I went to a few websites

including the Web Lube. If you remember that. Yes. And Nicholas Pinoch, if I remember right. What was that? Nicholas Pinoch was the guy who curated the Web Lube. Right. So essentially, the Lube put pictures at this point because they didn't even have video for that first site. Anyway.

Oh my gosh, no. It was up. It was. Exactly. the loo. It was this guy, Nicholas, who was a nerd in Paris, and he was just like, I love the loom, so I'm going to put this up on. And the images kind of like took, you know, about four minutes to render on this big SGI eyeballs. And we're, and we're postage stamp-sized. And we're, yes, we're tiny in the middle of a page. And I drove back to pen that night. And I had sweaty palms on the way down because I felt I had seen the future. And that it would be, um, I needed to drop out of school when I needed to just get going because it was going to happen. It was right in front of us. And I was right, but it took a bit of time. Had you done some consulting or something a little bit?

I did some between undergrad, between Westland and Penn undergrad. I did consulting with a sort of quant firm here in New York. It's going on with Wyman, and, you know, I ended up doing a bunch of sort of, you know, computer work or data modeling work for them. They were very quantish. So these were kind of, these were, you know, on PCs. It was not quant, as they call it. Not with AI and deep learning and stuff. So we're talking about the 94-95-ish era.

So this is still dial-up, and the web is extremely nymph. We're not even in close to like the the dot-com bubble era, but you are in New York at this point? I'm in New York. I'm in New York. I graduate from one. I can, if you're interested, I just remember it's downstairs, I can go get this artifact. But I, so I'm in New York and I want to start the web company. And I went to

the World Wide Web Symposium, which was packed with a whole bunch of it was I believe in Illinois. It was hacked

through a whole bunch of engineers and researchers. So we're talking about very, very early days.

Not seeing the what I learned since Brazil? Yeah, the founding. Boom.

Let's see. Ah, the, I'm going to say for people listening, it's the WWW

Conference 94 Mosaic and the pull out a bit. Mosaic and something, something, Mosaic

and the web advanced proceedings volume two. Yes. I no longer have volume one. And so,

yeah, and so this was the second international worldwide web conference. and so did that.

And yeah, the other thing I want to show you, you're going to edit this, right, Brian? Not for the Internet History podcast, but for some of the other stuff, sure. Yeah, because I just, while I'm down here, I just want to show you this. So, like, one of the things that was crazy at that period was that, you know, some of the magazines,

and this was PC computing, thought that they could draw an app of the web. because like navigation you think as you think sort of early metaphors and like how you get around this world was like a question that people asked earlier like the map metaphor yeah

oh wow there's map of we've got actually two of them here and these are from 94 I guess my glasses upstairs but like Yahoo is on there I can send you a photo if you're interested. Yahoo's on there, but it's not Yahoo.com. It's their Stanford. Stanford account.

And by the way, Yahoo wasn't even a search engine at that point. It was just a directory. So again, continuing the sort of like the analog metaphors of maps and directories as opposed to even what we would think of a search now. Correct. Correct. And I think that, you know, one of the patterns that I've seen through, you know, the world of technology and the world of startups. And, you know, just as we've gone to, sort of, you know, cycles from, you know, the internet to, to mobile, to AI is just, you know, how incredibly stubborn we are as humans, you know, to want to see something new, some metaphors of something always. Can I come back to what New York is like in 94-95?

Is there a sense, and I'm not even saying, is there a sense that there's a tech scene happening, but is there a sense that something is happening around technology? Are there people, artists, media folk, whatever? Is there like a sense that there's a new era dawning? Yeah, so there was a ton of activity happening on the West Coast, right? And so, like, starting to bubble on the West Coast. And we were starting to see seasons, shades of it in New York, right? So I graduated, came back to New York, came to New York. And, you know, I had, I had like a flow of people coming through my apartment wanting to see the internet. And, you know, a bunch of them wanted domain names or like, well, like, how can I get my, you know, how can get a piece of turf here?

By the way, how are you serving up the internet to them? Are you dialing in somewhere or do you have a T1 line or something? No, no, no, no. What was the not pipex? It was a thing called Typeline, which was

one of the early ISPs. Yeah, but we're talking about modem and we're talking about dialogue, right? And so that I managed to get Panx. Amix.

Do you remember PanX PN IX? No. Early New Rockies speech. So anyway, so managed to get connectivity. You know, I, so a lot of people in the, you know, what I would describe as the sort of nerd creative community in New York, starting to get interesting and sort of doing, you know, sort of informal and meetups, people, friends getting together and like trying to figure out, you know, what is this thing and how can we start things, right? I think quite a few people, you know, given the depths of experience that we want to have said, you know, media advertising agency world, quite a few people in that world, you know, starting to think about it because starting to think about, okay, how does this relate to media and everything that relates to that? People, I think people in publishing probably less so, but a bit.

And then creative people. And I gravitated very much towards, you know, I felt like, I thought at the time, this is a fundamentally new medium. And that we are, I'm naturally going to, like, put my assumptions, you know, we're calling it where page is, we're talking about navigation, we're doing all the things that, like, are suggestive that we sort of know and understand what this medium is, but I was like, this thing is just a, you know, it's just an alien thing that is completely near. And so I thought that what we should do is what I wanted to do initially was work with creative people to create creative projects on the internet. And so the very first

thing I did was a site which I started working on, which was called, Faddeweb named after Eda Byron Eidavirn. Let me just spell that out for people listening. ADA web, ada web, yes. Addaweb.com

it's still actually around because we ended up giving it to the Warcum Museum. And so it still sort of functions, which, you know, many of the commercial things I ended up doing after that, no longer around. But the first thing I did was Adderweb. And so the principle of Adderweb was very simply

we were going to work with artists and put an artist and an engineer together and see if they could make something. So the first artist that I wanted to work with was a woman called Jenny Holfzer and H-O-L-Z-E-R. And Jenny's work, which is I loved her work. I had no idea how to get to her, but I thought her work was fascinating and brilliant,

but she worked with language. If she looked her up, she puts these, like, she puts what she, she has a series that she refers to as truisms, which are sort of like, very short sentences that are highly provocative

and that she puts in public places. Sort of like Barbara, Barbara Kruger a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. She would not. She would say different. Not casting aspergens, sorry. Yes. Yeah. Your artist, too. So, I mean, here is, I remember seeing her project that she did in Times Square, which I can, you know, just drop in the channel. but she I thought her work was brilliant

and because it was sort of so fast because it was just text I thought this can actually work given the limitations of the internet at the time so anyway so I am I just

I think I tried Kruger too but I thought okay I'm going to try and get a phone now but we'll try and So I managed to, through somebody, I got a phone number, and I called her off. And I spoke for about 15 minutes and told her, because I wanted to do, I wanted to do an Internet project. And she said, me, said, young man, I have no idea what my fuck you're talking about. But she said, if you drive upstate, I will cook you chili.

And you can shab me your Internet. So packed up a car, rented some modems, and went to some modems, and went. upstate and showed Jenny the internet. And then we ended up creating a project. We then end up making about 15 other projects. And then after about six months, I started the first commercial thing. So that was kind of the early, early days for me. Was the first commercial thing that was Total New York? Yes. Yes. Yes. Yeah, yeah. I started just got local information and like getting around. And so, yeah.

Again, well, hey, again, the navigation metaphor. Again, navigation. So explain a little bit what Total New York was. Yeah, so we started Tall New York. We really started a few months later, so it started at the end of 94. And then I think, I mean, we, you know, I found a bunch of things in the scrapbook. I think we went live in early 95. But the, you know, Toul, New York, really the inspiration behind told New York,

told New York or the idea behind Totally New York was there is there's going to be when I grew up in London it was time out and I was like there has to be a great you know there has to be a great site around New York City

and so you know we started building to New York and you know I got together with a small team and you know we ended up taking the same office as the other way people. So we did it together.

And then I very quickly sort of like started thinking about this as a studio. And so, you know, in a funny sense, I mean, it sort of is this. My wife says there's a lot of like underpinnings of Betawks because, you know, from the very outset, I was trying to create sort of a studio like atmosphere where we could have several different things that we were building and total was a local. news content information site. It is interesting, like that this, again, we're using metaphors, studios, like with the arts and how, you know, you're experimenting, throwing things against the wall as opposed

to like this idea of, you know, an incubator, which is sort of, we'll come back to that. Let me seg through some things a little bit. I would also say just sort of ground that, right? Yeah. Or like take that a bit further, right? So we've told New York, right, we started up, and there was this small team of Daigonsia and was where Ted were and this guy of Dio, S.A. And we, you know, we got together and started building this sort of first version of it. And this woman Janice joined through.

And so we were sort of this motley crew of creative technologists who were really interested in, like, figuring out how media, how stuff about New York. but how media would be in this thing. And so, and we had to figure out how to make this stuff pay for itself. And we had to figure out how we could actually get people interested in the web and going to this website. So not only did we have to like make the website compelling, we had to make the web compiler. And so, you know, a lot of the early things we did at Total New York were, actually, you know, sort of content, but they were experiments, parentheses, stunts, to be able to get people to use the internet. And so, like we did, in 95-96, you know, we did this

idea where we said, let's do a road trip from Silicon Alley, Silicon Valley. And so we found this guy, Greg Allen, we put a camera on his helmet. we put a laptop on his motorbike and he drove from Silicon Valley Silicon Valley and on the way he stopped creating a daily journal of interviews with people

who were critical in creating the internet so like he went to I think DARPA and met with Ray Tomlinson who created the ad sign and interviewed Ray and wrote a post,

a blog post, not known as a blog post back then, a journal post, because you've writing a daily diary of the internet. And so, and what happened was the traditional media followed us because they were like,

this is crazy. And it also helps us explain the internet to people. And we were like, it helps tell people why they should get on the internet. And then hopefully they'll come to our website too. So you can see that it was kind of a,

it was, it was a, it was an amazing time. It just felt so, like, and free and creative and like, you know, you could, like, cobble together anything, and people were doing things to get to choose. People were just, like, fiddling stuff out. It was just, you know, it was, so it was a very, it was an amazing creative time.

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city or something around this time. And that would be a lesson of like they at the time have distribution for doing the things that you're talking about, like getting the audience that you're looking for. I don't know if I even formed a question there, but tell me about the lessons of like that, of like teaching, finding the audience, but also teaching the audience why they need it. And then distribution. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, I think the distribution at the highest level distribution for the actual internet, right? Because what we did is we ended up building up to New York. We had a whole bunch of content on it.

We had some sort of what I would describe as directory bits of intent. But it was a lot of content. And we did a lot of these events, right? So I described the Silicon Valley thing. We did another thing where we did, I think, the first mayor to mayor, mayor of Boston, mayor of New York. So Giuliani was back to New York. and we worked with some

microsystems and did a sort of see you see me direct conversation between the mess and the two cities again the stunt to illustrate the internet

our Schmidt was over some microsystems then and he was the sort of at Sin Mark's Cafe which we wired up a terminal there and he showed up but Giuliani ended up not showing up

So we had the mayor of Boston sitting there with Erk Schmidt, and it was fun and interesting and weird. So we did a lot of these events and these things to try and get people to understand the internet and to start using the internet and start, like, yeah, building the company, seeing if we could make some money, right? Because these events were also ways that sponsors and advertisers could sort of understand how,

it would make sense for them to back an internet project. It was definitely coming from experimental ad budgets, but it was before there was any sort of quantification of clicks or even really demonstration of ad balance, right? I mean, I think, so fast forward to the AOL acquiring us. So AOL brought us and us being the whole company, run the studio, which we called web partner studios, of the EP Studio.

And so at that point, we had Tone, New York, we had Adweb, and then we had created the thing that was called Spanker. That was a daily blog where we had a very creative writer who would basically, as they said back, all the days say back in England, take the piss out of somebody on the internet. And so basically take a GeoCities page and write a piece of editorial around it, Spanked.

And I had to explain that. Gawker era, in the Gawker era, they'd call that snark, right? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. It was very snarky and fun, but I had to explain that because it's not your listeners may leave with. Yeah. So they bought AOL board it, and it was about distribution.

It was about distribution, and it was about Cape Belty's around local, right? The early days of the internet, you know this, but it went through, we went through these waves of, okay, the internet's going to change everything. Okay, the internet's going to change commerce. The internet's going to change how people get around. The internet's going to change local. And so there was these sort of waves of interest, all sort of peaks. You know, everybody thinks about the internet wave,

the initial internet wave, the capital of interest as being just one thing, but it was really all, like it's a fractal sort of, all these little peaks in that. And so there was a ton of interest, which went on for about a year. in local. And so there was a thing called city search

and the air wall guys who had, you know, done a terrific enramp to the internet themselves. They had not done a lot in local. So they showed off and they said, hey, we want to do a big local thing. I want to buy you guys,

want to make you bank a site, and then have you John of the team help run the digital cities thing, which was their local thing. I want to point out, again, for historical context, that one of the metaphors is, you know, geography in, you know, 30 years on, the web kind of blew that up, the internet blew that up. But the analogy at the time was things like the Yellow Pages, which was a $20 billion industry or so things like, again, directories, but local guides and things like that, there was a sense that you could replicate this. on the web as well. And that's sort of what you were

experimenting with and poking at? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. That was happening very much at the time. You know, Elon never came by, I told New York, but his brother, Kimball, came by. I want to point out that Elon's first startup was something like this, like a local directory site thing.

And do you remember who he sold it to? It was zip to... Compact. Compact. computer computers. Yeah. Zip2 was the company. Yeah, look that up, everybody. Why would a computer company buy that? It was crazy, right? But it was gain distribution, right? It was like sort of like the idea it's like AT&T buying Time Warner, right? Or Time Warner by an AIW. It's kind of like the same sort of like people trying to go up and down the stack and like control distribution and, you know, content and media.

Can you give me a little bit of color about AOL? So AOL, again, for historical context, was like sort of the first big internet bohemoth, even if it didn't last. But there was a period where AOL, again, as a sort of meeting of tech and media, was the biggest game in town, bought AOL Time Warner around the year 2000. It's like, okay, this is the future. future right before the bubble's about to burst. But I think you worked there even after the bubbles bursting. So give me a sense, even with a New York City lens, a little bit of what AOL was

like to work for, what they were trying to do, anything like that. Yeah. Yeah. So I ended up staying in AOL for a couple of years. I thought I would stay for a couple of months, right? I was just like, I was keen to do the, you know, figure out how, you know, we ended up deep in negotiations with TCI, and they wanted to buy it, and they kind of like dumped us at the altar. And AOL, we also knew, and so we ended up doing a deal with EWL, but it sort of, you know, as a startup and with startup founders, you put yourself in the mode of, okay, we're going to exit, and the whole team and everybody's kind of in that mode. And it becomes hard to click out of that.

So we ended up doing this deal with AOL. I joined AOL, thought I'd stayed for a few months, always worked at AOL from New York. So I remained part of and built the New York office, part of the team. Went down there a lot. So there was Virginia, was Reston and Tyson's Corner, Virginia.

The Airwall team, like when I first went down then, it was still fairly young, but it was Steve Case, you know, was at the helm of Airw and, you know, Steve had built airw as this, you know, he had a sort of vision of an online, almost gaming network. It literally was like a tour. It literally was a dial-in gaming company at some point in its life, yes. Yeah, yeah.

And, you know, and they introduced email earlier, so they had native email embedded in there. Email and chat rooms became incredibly sort of, you know, word back then was sticky, right? They became sort of these retention vehicles. And so then they, you know, they grew out the team and I ended up working with a guy who's still around and it was built a big sports empire down in DC. With Barry Shuler and we brought Pittman. So, you know, when Pittman came on board, really, I think Steve and the AWOL team sort of had this inside. We believe that, okay, we got this internet thing.

We got this dial-up game thing. People are spending a long time on email, a lot of time on chat. So there's this internet thing when people get onto our thing, they use that kind of to open up the internet things. Let's see if we can bring the internet into AOL, right? And there was sort of this brief period of like probably two years where it felt like airwell could be the internet. And then the internet ended up becoming, you know, bigger than AOL.

And there were lots of other ways to get into the internet. And so I think that that was sort of peak AOL hubris was AOL can be the internet. And, you know, Bob and Bob Pittman, you know, he was part of his genius was he was a media person and he was like, okay, you've got all these people who are looking at this thing. Let's channelize it. And Bob and Ted and Barry and the team basically created these media channels and said, okay, when people come and check their email, they want to go to some news. Let's put news here. They want to go sports. They want to go to the classfides, as you were saying.

Just category by category. let's see if we can turn us into a media experience. There's another metaphor there of channels, so TV, yeah. Channels and TV. Also metaphors of radio, like seeping in there, but yeah, a lot of TV. Yeah. And these guys weren't media guys. But Bob and, you know, the media guys came from New York.

And so, and the telecom guys really were down at the general. So it was kind of a culture clash even then a bit. But that's sort of accelerated once we acquired time warmer. AOL folks were known, Cowboys is a term that is thrown around, those Virginia folks. There were some sharp elbows thrown in terms of like, you know, the legend is that you were a startup, you would raise $100 million or something and you'd give it all to AOL. Anything about the AOL culture and like compared to like, let's say, startup culture and stuff like that today? Yeah, so I mean, look, I think that the AOL culture was very much a culture and sort of, you know, what I described as media slash business development.

And it was not a technology to be culture. And I think even when people are in the country somewhere, he doesn't talk, yeah, he was breathing the CTO over the EO. and, you know, people from the West Coast or people who were sort of steeped in engineering culture I found that pretty, you know, sort of jarring and just a very, it was very much a business culture, business-driven culture, deal culture, deal cowboy, and very much sort of like run fast or chit-down kind of culture.

You know, you're alluding to sort of these sort of round-trip deals that we, you know, the AOL team did, We deal with, you know, a lot of, you know, up-and-coming startups of the Amazon, so the eBay of the world, or any of the pet.com or, like, any of these sort of category-based startups, you know, we go to them, or we'd say to them, eat toys, we'd say to them, hey, you want more distribution. Why don't we invest in you? And you invest in some distribution.

basically you take some piece of the investment. And there's usually a large piece, but not 100% black. And you come back and buy services from us or buy placement from us. So on one hand, you can go, that's really fucked up. Yes, and take a look at Anthropic and open AI. And the round trip deals, Microsoft, puts a billion dollars into open AI. And part of that comes with a round-trip deal to buy X amount of compute on a zero.

And so, you know, this stuff is, you know, the music's still going. One more thing on this sort of era, when the dot-com bubble burst, I was here in New York City at that point, and I remember a sense of, especially in media and other industries, oh, I'm glad that fed. is over. But then there were other folks that were like, that fad's not over. No one's stopping using the internet. So your sense of the nuclear winter of the bubble bursting and then the tech resurgence. Yeah. Yeah. So at the time, I was still with an air valve. So I'd stay. And then I ended up after time, I had the ledger with Tom Warner and there's one cycle of management. I ended up moving over to Time Warner and taking CTO's job there.

And so I sort of had a very different sort of view, you know, or approach to like see the world. My view was that the internet was just getting going. None of this was stopping. But it was brutal in New York for the startup community. Because, you know, the startup clearly didn't have a lot of, like, depths to it. And a lot of people, a lot of companies shut down. down and there wasn't any sort of the work jobs or alternatives to them to do rather than go back into traditional media.

And then as you're alluding to, right, like media has always had this really complicit relationship with the internet, which is both a, you and you're new and interesting. I want to write about you, but also you may be the sense of demise. And I think bad that happens to you is something I want to write about in particular. And so, you know, there were a lot of, I mean, the other thing is, you know, sort of, there's always a sort of dialectical, sort of like, once you've told the sort of, you know, vision story, the internet, the next story you need to tell is the takedown story, right? It's just like, so, you know, the pendulum just sort of swings in the media narrative. And so the media narrative was, I think, was all too happy that this was sort of the end of that. that pescular will lead to that thing is gone, not away. In terms of the next era of what the internet and the web becomes, can I jump to Photolog, which is sort of in the social era of what technology is becoming. Give me a little bit about Photologue, and then let's jump to debate.

Yeah, so I had stayed, even when I took the CTO's drop-up time, Warner, I was very involved with. I stayed plugged into the New York Tech community as much as I could. And I did that through friends hanging out, learning. I also did that sort of bit of an angel investing. And so I became an angel investor in photo log. Scott Heiferman started out photo log. Basically, Scott has an old friend and he had done eye traffic, which was an early sort of agency. And then he, I got together with him and he said,

I've got two ideas. One's called photo log. One's called Meetup. And I had also done a seed investment in blogger, which was F. Williams as a startup. And so I was, I was totally fascinated in publishing, in self-publishing.

In these, you know, bigger school bets, that Silicon Valley experience, right? this idea of daily publishing was an idea which really fascinating me and distributed publishing and then we, you know, we'd a fast-forward at the works that we became early, we were very early in Twitter. So you can see the themes like tying together and emerging, you know, from the early days. So, Photologue was an idea that Scott had, which I thought was wonderful and was to basically close a single photo every day.

And it was a social network for photos. This was before there was Instagram, before there was mobile browsers, before there was iPhones. This was very, very early on. And Scott got his friend Adam Seifer, who else knew, and Adam was from 6 degrees,

which was one of the early... I've never spoken to anyone at 6 degrees, yes. Yeah, yeah. So Adam Cipher. and Andrew Andrew Weinrich, I think. Yes.

The two founders. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. It's amazing how you remember this stuff. And so Adam Seifer stepped in and started working with Scott and started building Folonog.

And I, you know, wrote a C-Chicc and I was fascinating with it. Fast forward, Photologue became a huge phenomena in Brazil. Like you would, you know, Adam went to Brazil and there were like kids wanting him to sign. They didn't have mobile phones back then, but sign something, like give him an autograph. I mean, it was just like it was a cultural phenomenon in Brazil and in South America. It did not become a cultural phenomenon in the U.S.

because he got a clips by Flickr. And Flickr had a lot of the same properties, but Flickr would let you post multiple photos every day. Mm-hmm. But, you know, the one photo every day was both a sort of a limitation on the costs. But it was also, it was social design. It was much more that. It was basically, Brian, kill one photo today that really matters. Curate.

And there was also the beginning of a holograph there. And so the idea of having, you know, I wouldn't want to see all my friends flickered photos every day in the feed. but there was the beginning of, again, metaphor feed and beginning of sort of like reverse cron feed, that blogging idea, starting to come together and take shape. And so, yes, that was for a lot. But it's interesting, you suggested that that was also motivation for that was the constraints that you're working under

in terms of, you know, bandwidth or costs and things like that. It's always interesting to me what constraints force in terms of creativity forcing and things like that. Own it all. Pay off your home, travel for life, drive a Ferrari. In celebration of the world premiere of the Monopoly

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At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. Let me jump to BetoWorks. Yeah, I would say, yeah, Brian, I would say really interesting about creativity. You know, please.

So much creativity. comes out of those constraints. And so you look like what Josh Harris was doing at Sudo in those early days, right? And then we'd go down to like the place on Broadway. And you can see with, you know, there was so little throughput of bandwidth, but you could have this idea of living in public. So the concept was very clear. But you didn't need to actually materialize it.

Muds and Moves, if you remember those things, right? These are text-based chatterooms, which, you know, became increasingly. incredibly rich in terms of their sort of creative evolution, but they were just text. There was no images, right? And the assumption is that everybody thinks or assumes naturally you need very high fidelity, you need a 3D world, before you can have a conversation and before you can have a fantasy about going into the forest. Do you need a 3D rendering of forest?

No muds and moves illustrated that you can do this just with text. So I think the human, and there's something about transferring that into the human brain, or the human creativity, which I think is incredibly powerful. So constraints, yes. I would also say the flip side, right? I was talking with the developers about this yesterday. Like, you know, technology, you have to build for the future. Like, one of the things that was genius about Netscape

is going back to that wet loop example, right, like right at the beginning, is that they made the browser, early browser, could render images really well. and a lot of people are like, that's really stupid. There are no images on the internet. It's like five places of images. And they were like, but we're building to the future. In the same way, I was saying to those founders yesterday, you know, just spend on tokens.

Because if you look at the cost of tokens today, it is plummeted, right? We're talking about like 500% in last year in some areas of cost reduction. So you should just max your spend on tokens. in every way, shape or form. You know, the foundation models are becoming a lot of the end. You should just assume that what you're paying today will be fractions tomorrow. Okay. So, this both constraint and spend.

I want to poke at that. So I'm going to, okay, BetoWorks founded, sort of like the studio model, etc., etc. But let me jump on what you were just talking about. one of the promises of AI from an investing standpoint in terms of what's the business model, who the winner is going to be, is this sense of abundance potentially in terms of what it can achieve? So explain to me your thinking as an investor or when you're advising companies right now in present day, AI space, this, what we're talking about, the tension of potential abundance versus the constraints

economically or even resource-wise? Yeah, it's really interesting because you have this like sort of, you know, you have this early days of the internet, you would just have this and use these metaphors to get that, but you have these like sort of sense you've discovered a new land,

right? And this is an entirely new world that's opened up and that you can build whatever you want in that new world, right? And then on the flip side is that there are some real constraints in terms of what you can do, what you're capable of doing with technology, what you can do, what capital you have, all those constraints.

And so, like, balancing those things is, like, sort of one of the key jobs of the entrepreneur. But it's also, you know, it is always, you know, them keeping in mind sort of the higher order, like, some, like, why am I here? What am I actually building? I think it is absolutely central to, you know, ending up building things which matter and building things which change the world. So, you know, do you want me to go further into that or do you want me go, you tell me, because you asked a question which was sort of fast forwarding into the

BetoWorks world, so I can just... Yeah, so if you're advising someone that you're working with at BetoWorks today, if it's, if it's, you described Virgin Territory wide open versus the constraint, and things like that. Like how, what is the tension? How do you weigh that in terms of like go for abundance versus the constraints that allow you to make smarter decisions and be smarter about the startup that you're building? Yeah.

So it is, I mean, we're in the time right now. We're in the time of what it feels like there is endless abundance. And people, you know, I will advise people, coach people to push people to like go for because there is like there's wide open territory right now. You can think of, you think of the last 20. I view AI has been a successor technology to the internet. So it's being bootloaded by the internet. It is transforming the internet.

And so I think that you can look at everything on the internet that will be that becomes AI-inified. And then you look at everything in the actual world that can be impacted once it becomes legible. and two AI models in one way, shape, or form, right? Either through computer vision or through robots or through self-driving vehicles or through whatever. And so you could just see the breadth of the tons and of scope. And then on the flip side, you know, the world right now is, I mean, we have a lot of challenges in our world, but in the world of tech in New York, there's a tremendous amount of activity and interest, building, creation,

And I think that, you know, the stage that we're at is that people are really starting to say, okay, what are the native properties of this medium? And how can I use this to actually build, like, radically new things, right? And, you know, we're thinking a lot today about next generation interfaces. Last year we were thinking a lot about agents. These are things which I think are going to radically transform the way we understand everything in the world, the way the world is legible to us as human being. But that said is that, you know, there will be a time when, I don't foresee this tomorrow,

but there will be a time when capital pulls back. And sort of the cycles of, you know, inheriting the business that we're all in in the startup world, and particularly on the investor side, but inherently in the entire business, is that you overshoot areas of the investment, right? You go back to the only days the Internet. that part of the overshoot was they overbuilt in a lot of the infrastructure. So that in turn became incredibly valuable, all that fiber once they could put it to good use. But it was, you know, some of those companies like the World Comps of the World just, you know,

overshot and overspent and, you know, didn't end up managing the short-term realities of the business and their ability to raise capital, their ability to get dead, and to basically, be financed at business. I want to end by talking about BettaWorks. I keep calling it studio model or whatever. But it's also, it's like a clubhouse for founders. Like I've been to events there. Chris and I have invested in companies that have been through the Bettaworks program or whatever.

So if you're a New York based startup right now, tell me what BetoWorks can do for you and who you're looking for and what you're excited about right now. Yeah, yeah. So Betawks is roots, right? You flew by a photolog. So a solar photolog started Bayterworks in 2008, late 2007, 2008. And we started out, and most people know us, as the sort of OG Venture Studio. So Venture Studio, I view it as kind of a suitcase word that people, different people put different things in the suitcase. And so you could sort of interpret what it is. In our case, we were always the thesis first, right? We always had a view of the world. And our first five years. We spent a lot of time building and investing around the social web. So we have thesis first

and we raised some money into the venture studio to go build companies and to invest. And so, you know, early things and wins we had at Baylor works is that we and we were very interested in social web. You're the first check into Tumblr. We did. There was a Twitter search engine that we worked with and then pivoted and then sold Twitter became Twitter search engine. And Twitterrific. And then there was Twitterific and there was tweet deck and there was we were very prolific and Twitterific around the Twitter ecosystem.

And so we did a lot of things in the Twitter ecosystem. And then as that ecosystem shut down, we sold all those things to Twitter or we pivoted them or some of them failed. We built things like Bitley, which became sort of like, you know, sort of tools to use the social web. We then moved to mobile and to do some fun things. We did Giffy, we did Dots the game, so we built much things. In 2016, we decided we made two decisions.

The first is that the Venture Studio model that we'd been running at that point there for about eight years, we felt like that the market and the, specifically the New York Tech market, it becomes so active with founders that there were these, of comparative edge that we had as being the place you would go to meet founders and builds things was changing and that we needed to change. So we changed our approach. And so we started, we took basically the best of the Venture Studio model and we sort of brought it together with the accelerator model, those sort of YC accelerator model. And we started off thematic accelerators. You know, fast forward to today, we've done about close to 15 of them.

The one which started two weeks ago is around AI interfaces. I mentioned agents before. We did the first half the last year. We did agents. There were native AI apps. We've had a whole bunch of, you know, we started doing AI machine learning stuff in 2016. Our first camp, which Chris was involved with, I think, and he definitely came to speak at, was called Bar Camp, and where we were looking at conversational interfaces, and

hugging face was in that camp. And then the second thing we also changed, which is kind of detail, is we changed our capital structure and took a few years, but we sort of had a holding company structure, and then we moved into sort of a GPLP structure. So we sort of change the engines behind Betawks. But if you come to Betawks today, you know, we're down in me packing. You know, we had a fun event last night with some symbiants, with some artificial life hanging out and chatting with them. We have a camping process now. So we do a ton of events here. We still use it as a space to convene founders and bring founders together and sort of a hub of activity around AI, machine learning, robotics, and sort of, I would say deepish tap. All I can say

personally is that it's a great space and I enjoy it every time I'm down there. John, Betowworks, all the great stuff from the history of the New York City tech scene. Thanks for coming on and remembering all that for us. It was a pleasure. Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money because behind every headline is a bottom line, whether it's the funds-fueling AI or crypto's trillion dollar swings, there's a money side to every story. And when you see the money side, you understand what others miss. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe now at Bloomberg.com.