The Vergecast - Being hopeful about the web with Paul Ford

Episode Date: August 6, 2019

This week on the interview episode of The Vergecast, editor of cheif of The Verge Nilay Patel sits down with CEO of Postlight Paul Ford. Paul Ford co-founded Postlight in 2015 and is a writer, product strategist, educator, programmer, and software consultant. If you read a lot of tech writing, you probably know Paul’s name. In 2015, Ford wrote an entire issue of Bloomberg’s Business Week titled “What is code?”  which colorfully explained how programming works on the web for people who don’t do it. Recently, he wrote a piece in Wired about how we should still be hopeful and excited about tech and what it can still do for us. Theres a lot of negative conversation about tech lately — regulating huge companies, what Facebook and Amazon are doing wrong — but from someone who builds things for the web, Paul brings an optimistic look at how tech can positively and creatively impact our lives in a fun and exciting way. Paul comes in to talk about his hopefulness, his piece in Wired, the state of building stuff for the web, and  how people think about tech today.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hey, everybody, it's tonight from the Vergecast. On this week's interview episode, we have Paul Ford. If you are an active Twitter user,

somebody reads a lot about tech, reads a lot of tech writing. You probably know Paul's name. He wrote an entire issue of Bloomberg Business Week called What Is Code a few years ago. He's been writing about ever since. He runs a product studio called Postlight here in New York City. And he recently wrote this piece I really like about how we should still be hopeful

and excited about tech and what it can do for us in Wired. So I had Paul come in. We talked about that piece. We talked about sort of the state of building stuff for the web, the state of how people think about tech, what they're using, why they're using it. We just got into it. I've had so many conversations lately that are kind of inherently negative about tech. We constantly talk about regulating this industry or what Facebook is doing wrong.

It was great to get that other perspective of someone who's still building stuff in charge of building things for a lot of different people and companies and is still hopeful about technology. So check it out. It's Paul Ford on the podcast. Paul Ford, you're in the studio with me. Hello. It's lovely here. Thank you. It is. The studio is too nice for a show. That's what I've always believed.

It's pretty good. It's pretty good. Nice acoustic deadening has happened here. I've got a lovely view. Yeah. Paul, 2015, you were already on the scene. But I would say you burst into the collective consciousness of the world because Business Week let you write an entire issue of their magazine. Let's be clear. Not going to be a lot of those in my life. It was just like a weird pop culture moment. Yeah. When people wanted to know what purpose. programming was all about. Yeah. And, you know, I'm a nerdy writer who's been around for a while. And the people at Business Week went, yeah, write, write something. And then they kept going, let's keep writing, keep going, keep going, they gave me the whole issue. Yeah. And it just became a

thing for a minute. Like, I've never been in the middle of a thing, right? I'm a, I'm a, now gray, chubby, you know, started out as a pearl programmers. And things weren't supposed to happen to me. But I did have my, like, that was my one thing. I got to go and try. Charlie Rose, which is a little less exciting than it used to be. But no one expected a hit, right? They just expected like, oh, quirky Business Week. And then just millions of people were like, finally someone explained what this thing is. So the issue of business was called What is Code?

What is Code? It was literally the entire print issue of Business Week as a moment. A great online presentation. Unlike print, you can, if you're listening to this, you can just go look at that right now. That's right. You just wrote another piece for Wired. It is not, they did not give you the entire issue of Wired, which is a I know that my competitors would take it for a wheel.

Mistake to not give you the entire issue. No, I'm really glad not to have the whole issue. It's awful to have the whole issue. What's the piece in why it called? Why I still, in parentheses, love tech in defense of a difficult industry. So you and I have been in the same circles. We've never actually sat down and had a conversation like this. It's weird, yeah.

We've been around each other. But I'm glad we have media to intermediate between us. Yeah, exactly. Let's make a document. So why I still love tech in defense of a difficult industry. I've been talking to a lot of folks in the show for weeks and months. There's a lot of criticism of the tech industry. We had Shoshana Zuboff on the show, Shared a book called Surveillance Capitalism.

The business model of tech companies is bad. We talk to academics, politicians. They tell us it's time to regulate the tech industry. They've gone too far. They have too much power. We should break them up. The whole thing. You're saying, I still love this thing.

It's hard, but I love it. Why do you love it? Because you can make the... little robot dance on the screen. I mean, it's really that simple. It's, first of all, all those people who are criticizing, tech can handle it. It's trillions of dollars now. Come on.

It's okay. It's okay that somebody doesn't love your thing and say that you're the best thing that ever happened. Yeah. We got to get over that part of it. The part that I still love, that's still real, is making the thing go, right? And so I got into this because I never thought anyone ever would let me write or do anything. And so you could go make a web page and you could put your stuff up into the world and people would read it and connect to it.

And it was like 25 people. And that just was wonderful. That was fantastic. That impact, that small amount of impact could be sort of had by anybody who had access to a computer, which again, not everybody has access to a computer. But still, the baseline has come down. And you can really do things, unlike television, unlike newspapers, unlike just about everything that came before, the whole thing could be manipulated. And what you do with that from that point on, that's when the ethics start to really creep in. It gets tricky.

Like, am I going to spy on people with that or am I going to make funny jokes? You know, in the case of Twitter, you can do both. And it's just like, it's that. And then there's a whole culture there. There's a culture of people who make things. What is the right way to arrange human beings and turn them into good contributors to a culture of shipping and making software? And there are a million arguments and discussions about the right way to do that. literally many of them originate in this building from the chorus team, right?

I mean, it's like there's a culture, and the same is true of design, and the same is true of product management. And so I still think that that culture is really interesting and has an unbelievable amount to contribute. And I don't think people, even the critics would disagree with that, right? Like, I think there's just lots to do. What do you think is the sort of biggest disconnect between the critics and I am one? and the people who are building the stuff. Oh, boy. Well, this is fundamental, right?

There's no, it's not a culture of introspection. So if you grew up in a good liberal arts tradition, I did. And like, you are used to interrogating the hell out of everything. And it's sort of like, is this good or bad? It doesn't matter. It's a book. It's a bug. It's a glass of water.

Like, everything carries a huge amount of significance. And there are, and it lives in an ecosystem of everything else. and that's, you know, your undergraduate semiotics class and all languages and sort of intertwined. And so you get into that, you really started like see the world as this big connected thing with, you know, colonialism and sort of all sorts of economic shenanigans at the base. I don't get the sense when I talk to like a young startup person

that that's how they see their stuff. They go on hacker news and they read about startups and they see people who are making enormous amounts of money and having an enormous amount of impact, and they go, I want that. And I think what's unusual is because those two spaces are smashed into each other. You know, I don't think that, like, you participate in technology culture. We're down by Wall Street right now talking. Like, there wasn't as much participation in the banking industry in the 80s and early 90s

when it was just going wild everywhere, right? You couldn't get close to it because it was so opaque and it was jargon driven and so on. And I feel that, like, with tech, you've got these worlds where everybody's colliding. Like, you know, people putting up their web pages and starting their zines. And over on the other side, you have, you know, relatively young people who are like, nah, man, I just want to get my startup and get paid. And it just everybody's in the room together and they start fighting. This is what I really, I tricked you.

This is what I really want to talk about, which is the web. So the actual democratizing force in tech when we talk about tech broadly was the web. God, yeah. It's so good. It was the thing. Like the web browser shipped. Actually, this is Mark Andreessen's line. The guy who created Netflix was software's eating the world.

Right. We're going to interconnect all these businesses. Their businesses will become software businesses. The software will be of the money is. But it was the web. I always feel that he sort of stops early in the digestive process. Like then it's like software then is going to sort of poop out the rest of the world. And here we are.

What are we going to do that? It's 2019. Eating is not the end game. Right? That's a system. At a certain level, are you going to vomit the world back out or poop the world back out? The world will then fertilize new worlds to come. That's what I love about that, though, it's the tech industry going like,

the most important thing is that fork gets in my mouth, right? After that, it's your problem. But it was the web. That was the thing. And now, obviously, there are many other layers by which you can access a consumer. But the first thing that allowed a kid to start a zine and reach everybody was the web. Tim Berners-Lee in his book about the web. So Tim Berners-Lee is really the progenitor and inventor of the web.

He created the with a few other people, but it was his baby. And in his book, he actually describes Mark Andreessen of that quote, really actively trying to commercialize and lock down access, right? And so what you had with Berners-Lee and with the early concept was, we need to create a tool that will take all the data that's scattered everywhere around the internet, which at this point could fit on your Apple Watch. But, like, at that point, felt like a lot of data. And we need to make it easier to access.

Rolodexes and, you know, and sort of information about people here at the high-energy physics lab that I work at and so on. And also pages of content, especially physics papers, and we'll link them together. And it was that simple. And then because of the network effects and because people had Unix servers floating around, suddenly you had this thing out in the world. Real software people didn't take it seriously. They're like, oh, my God, what is this? It's nonsense. Everybody, I remember in the 90s.

Everybody was just like, no, there's much better ways to do this. Trust me. The hypertext people thought it was silly. And the Internet people were like, nah, gopher is better. And just all these ridiculous things that now are kind of footnotes. Yeah. And my co-host eater is from Minnesota. So I often give him shit that gopher, which was a University of Minnesota protocol,

was like patent encumbered, so it lost. That was it. That was it. It's very, very powerful if it hits at the right moment. And so what you had was this publishing platform that was so easy. And that's the part that I really, that's changed, is it used to be so easy to put something online. Now, it was harder than going to medium and typing things in the box. It's harder than publishing with the CMS.

But it was like being a participant in that world on a kind of equal playing field. There was like a short period where everybody got to play. Yeah. And kind of was at the same level. Okay. So that was then in a web built these businesses. It enabled our business. Absolutely.

You now run a development studio called Postlight. That's right. What does Postlight do exactly? We are, we're a product studio, meaning product management, design engineering. You come to us, sometimes places much like this one come to us and say build our big CMS platform. We work for. And you run screaming.

You're like, no. No. Come on in. Come on in. And then they're like, what about WordPress? We're like, okay. We've got a lot of content management, a lot of NGOs, and then because we're New York City, a lot of institutional banking and insurance clients.

So just exactly what you'd expect. So you're building web stuff for people. Yes, except you don't say web stuff anymore, because that doesn't sound like fancy. You're a product studio. Product studio. That's good. And what you're really delivering. This is what's tricky.

You're not making web pages that much anymore. You're building like the API underneath or you're combining three or four APIs and, and, and, you're, And so you're speaking data. And then you're setting that up on a cloud service provider. And then you're building a web app that talks to that as well as maybe mobile web apps or mobile apps. Right. So these are like we're in this world where it's everything is APIs talking to platforms instead of pages being loaded in browsers. That's where the language is gone.

Yeah. Is the web doomed? So when I said I brought you in to trick you. Yeah. This is the trick. Literally every morning. both upright shrieking. Well, I mean, look, if you just look at it, you have mobile apps, right?

Apple seems very intent on moving consumers into its app ecosystem for a variety of reasons good and bad. Google feels less so, but a lot of that going on over there on the Android side as well. You have Facebooks of the world, which are sort of pulling people into an ecosystem that is web accessible, or I would say web adjacent in many ways. And you have other platform, Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube. These are, we're going to suck you into platform world, and you're going to live by the rules of the platform.

And the web is just the place where you go to the platforms, as opposed to the place where you go to the people. I mean, and Microsoft was going to do that before, too. Like, people keep trying. My co-founder is way more of a hard-nosed business person than I am. Although I've become more hard-news since we started the company. But still, like, he's tougher. And he's just like, oh, no, man, I would never bet against it.

It is, there's something about an open platform that shows up and can do just about enough. Yeah. That works everywhere and that ends up working. Like, you know, I got a nice pixel phone now. I moved over from iOS. And the mobile web browser on that is just fine for just about everything I do. And I forget that there are apps half the time. And Google's got like, oh, no, this is like an app, but it's also a web.

And I'm just like, I don't care, man. Just give me that app. Like, it still works. And the other thing, too, you load up that first web page, it's looking good. it's still going fine. You know, you're 25 years in now or thereabouts and all the old stuff still works pretty good. Mobile sort of threw everybody a curveball, but we figured that out too. So I still, look, it's so big now. This is the other thing too. Like you had a tech industry back in the day that it wasn't, you know, Wall Street was much bigger. Now you have this thing,

this entity that is almost like a substrate of all culture, just like banking is and finance or just like the concept of money. Like money and tech are two separate concepts, right? So you can't say that I don't think you can really go like there is one technology. There is one web or there is one anything anymore. I mean, it used to be that you web standards as created by the World Wide Web Consortium defined what the web really is. I don't think that that's, now it's more complicated.

And sort of like the browsers get to say it, except that Firefox has sort of, you know, reemerged as a pretty fast, pretty good browser. I just switched over to it again. And like, I know. Everyone lives on this roller coaster. I know. No, exactly. This is your Firefox season.

This is my season of Firefox. That is right. You know, but no, I don't, look, it would be really convenient for everyone if they controlled the means of all communication. You know, I mean, Facebook and Apple. And they're like, look, man, we just really want to help our consumers. I think they believe it. But it's just this messy, sloppy pile of standards and technology.

just keeps asserting itself. So when you are out and you're building for your big clients and they're like, we need AMP. Oh, yeah. Like, Amp is taking, it's taking over. It's, right? I mean, like, that is the conversation. We've had the head of AMP on the show.

Yeah. Right? And Malte was like, we're just trying to make it faster. We're not trying to colonize the web. Okay, here's where it's... And the pushback is every little thing kills the web. Yeah. Look, okay.

So I used to be a magazine editor. There was another editor there. And I remember one day, I was at Harper's Magazine, which is a very progressive magazine and very, oh, it's a good way to describe. Just people there were very smart and assured of their intelligence. And I don't remember why, but I was outraged about the New York Times that day. Who is it? Just, you know, you have a day. It's the hometown paper, and they piss you off.

So I went into the senior editor's office, and I was like, and I won't sell him out because he's now at the New York Times. But I was like, how the time. The way of all things. blah blah blah and the times and it's just like listen dude come on it contains multitudes there are lots of people who work there are doing great work and there's amazing stories you're just angry today and i don't he didn't mean that to be like let me blow your mind but i thought about it over and over because it's like it's just simple but true it's like the thing that outrages you and drives you bananas is often has these aspects that are really valuable google is just at such a

scale. Like the AMP project, they decided that they would make a better web for mobile and they would make it really faster to load pages. And they said, well, what do we need to do? And they kind of work backwards from first principles. And then they said, okay, let's have an open standard. But not, like, let's not go too open because there's so much friction when you go purely open for everybody. We still need to drive this thing. It's about our ecosystem. And AMP, you know, you're supposed to be able to cache pages. So we'll make a really good cache. We'll make the best cash possible here at Google. Well, then that means like suddenly all the pages are hosted from Google. And so the way I don't look, I'm kind of at a point of my life where it's not like I'm done with right or wrong, but it's just when you look at the platform companies, they have power, they exist.

And it is impossible to hit a button and make them stop being what they are. Right. So then you have to say, what is Google want? Right. And when you talk to people at Google, and I think this is real top to bottom, they're like, we want a healthy media equal. system. We want, like, we want, but it's true. They have said that to me. They want only good things. They'll look you in the eyes. Google cares about real estate ads, right? Which used to be something that the media kind of controlled. Now, Google's got it. And so you're playing in that world,

and I think there's an element of ego where the media is like, you know, wait, what is this, is this for us or not? And Google's going like, no, AMP pages are cool. They'll let you look at house listings and browse videos and do all sorts of stuff. And there's a great ad product in here that's really fast and works really well. And that's their universe. Yeah. And then they present that to you and you go as a media person and you're like, is this going to take money out of my pocket?

And they're like, well, no, it's actually, you know, it's monetizing just fine. But then here's what's tricky. You get all invested and you do all this amp work and you, you know, it takes a team of three like a couple months and you've spent about $150,000 inside your organization purely on your AMP migration. And you got to then cross your fingers that Google still cares. Yeah. Right.

It's the scale. Is God going to reach down and sort of pet you on the head? Or if he forgets, will he sort of like knock your head right off? Also, like the implicit promise of AMP. You do that work. You spend that money. The implicit promises, and then you will rank higher. No, that's right.

And they won't make that promise because they know that's very problematic. That's right. But you kind of got to get in there. And it's not even wink, nod. They're just like, well, the pages will be semantically better. Like, it's just hard. Yeah. It's a mess. And, you know, if you're a big platform company and 150 grand isn't that big a deal of internal budget move around. And you put Susie and Sam on that for a couple months and they do the AMP integration and it monetizes it 12% better. But over your traffic, that adds up to about quarter million dollars a year, you're pretty happy with AMP. And if it adds up to $15,000 a year, you need, it's going to take you 10 years to make your investment back and you feel really bad about it. So that's a lot of pressure.

I mean, even on a big organization, that's a lot of time. That's a lot of energy. Not spent building. They'll tell you, like, no big deal, man. This will take like five minutes, but it's everybody's CMS is such a mess that nothing is easy turnkey like that. Somehow, I knew this would end up in a CMS conversation. The reason I'm asking is that's a lot of money, effort, time spent platform dancing instead of building new kinds of web experiences. And I haven't seen a big new app on the web that's been really interesting in quite a long time.

No, not in our world. The world that is getting all the money and all the energy is software as a service. People are very excited about new C.R. There are more things that have canband board interfaces in the world than have ever been before, right? Like move those cards along. Yeah. There's actually relatively, like, content is locking down into the product that you guys make. Chorus arc for like the high from the Washington Post for like the high

velocity stuff and then WordPress is kind of everywhere else and then there's a few like sort of more branding and marketing ones like Adobe Experience Manager and SiteCorps and then kind of everybody else and that's global right so it's like now how many programmers are in this building

right now working on chorus in ways that focus on monetization and revenue which are what the big players need you're years ahead so like what's going to blow up and disrupt that so that a new player could show up, nobody knows. And if something blows up and disrupts it, then people will, but for the most part, everybody else is like, oh, I see a niche over here for smaller publications or this or

that or this kind of, you know, or the whole ad tech world. They're looking for niches as opposed to big platforms. And they got to make do with that. I feel like my CEO is going to come beat down my door if I don't tell people what chorus is. Do it. Chorus is the platform that the Verge publishes on. It's R CMS. It's proprietary.

It has, to Paul's point, a revenue engine next to it called Concert, which is a programmatic ad thing, run a lot of the ads you see on the site. That's it. I'm not here to pitch my own company's products. I just want to tell people what it is. This is what's real, right? Is that you used to get software, and now you get this sort of service and platform that has an understanding of how your business works.

So at some level, Chorus is also as a service, right? No, it absolutely. You can't download it and just run it on your Windows XP box. and experiment. No, you pay us, we run it for you. Yep. So my question is there was a time, I would say, early 2000s, there's this like raft of extremely interesting consumer web apps that just appear.

Twitter is like, I think the first one I think of, right? It appeared at South by Southwest. We're all going to read TechCrunch that day and we used Twitter that night and on and on it goes. Kaboom, yeah. I don't see that anymore. I don't see that. Every new at TikTok, right, is I would say the parallel to that.

variation on a theme. Right, but that is a mobile first native app on phones. It is barely a web property. Right. Well, I mean, but you know the funny thing is that yes, but if you look at the underlying infrastructure, everything's a web property. Sure. Like it's, you know, things speak, HTTP and like all the, I'm not going to throw acronyms

at your poor listeners, but like that's what they're here for. I know, but like the systems underneath, the things that make the apps interesting and engaging and have communities are all web. technologies. Yeah. And the app often tends to display a little web browser inside of the app, except it's all wrapped up in the app. And so like there, you know, it's this one, it's this app you download, but the text is all HTML. Or you know, just like, so the web isn't really going away. It's the shorthand that everybody understands for. I need to put some words on a screen or I need to do like 30 or 40 things that you usually do. It just all gets wrapped up in these little packages. And so,

But yeah, the real, I don't know. I mean, why do you think? Well, so, Deeter, who I mentioned before has an article that he links to all the time called a brief definition of the web, which is a response exactly to the point you just made, which is web technologies are everywhere. Right. But that is not the web. So here's Deeter's definition, a brief definition of the web.

If account as being part of the web, your app or page must be linkable and allow any client to access it. That is not true of TikTok on your phone. Not true. There's some content in TikTok that is accessible. Oh, there's always, it's like Instagram is a good example. You can kind of get to it on the web. You can't get Instagram DMs on the web. Yeah, no, that's right.

It's the thing that makes. The full Instagram experience is not there. Now, what makes Instagram Instagram is not like what you can see when you go to Instagram.com. It's just, it is, it is the app. Yeah. So my question is, if that's what's happening, we're taking all these web technologies that allowed your business to thrive, that allowed our business to thrive, that we are now selling. But, you know, WordPress exists, Arc exists. Like, there's all these software platforms for the web that you can just buy, and then now

people are in your platform. But if the thing that enabled it was linkable, allow any client to access it, and that's being shoved into apps, what is the push and pull dynamic? Like, if you're hopeful about tech, it seems to me the thing that everyone was most hopeful about was this democracy of access. I know, but boy, did we learn. Okay, so look, I mean, deep down, what do I believe in my heart? A, they can't take it away.

Browser's work, and I can publish a web page and put it up in the world. And if it really has a message that the world needs to hear, they'll probably, I'll get, you know, between seven or eight readers. No, I mean, there is a, things are cheaper than they've ever been, and you can produce and distribute ideas at an extraordinary velocity. The problem is platform lock-in, and also just the way these ecosystems work, right? Like, one of the thing that's real in our world is, like, people talk about regulation a lot. regulation is the Apple terms of service, right? Like, I'm not, I don't have to think too much about the law because Apple's going to tell me what's allowed on the app store

and Google's going to tell me what's allowed. And I'll probably inherit a lot of those decisions for the web app version as well, right? Like, they are the interpreters. So there's a lot of convenience there. And at some level, I just have to be like, it's okay. This is a big new world. We're in the middle.

I don't know, like, you know, there is this possible future where Amazon and Google drones are fighting. over us and, you know, raining cameras down on our heads to take pictures of us. Everyone gets a ring camera to surveil their neighbors forever. Yeah, exactly, right? And that is that as ridiculous as it used to be? Not anymore. No, I mean, because it's gotten really casual.

Like, we're now, because, yeah, the ring camera could show up. They could mail one to you tomorrow and you'd be like, huh. Yeah. What's going on here? And, you know, is it possible that in your life you could write an article that's like, I always thought I would hate all this surveillance. that was in my, you know, blah, blah, but I kind of love it. Like, they can get you.

They're good. They're good of marketing. They're good at messaging. And the tradeoffs and the giant platforms are pretty cool. You get a lot of toys to play with. Will people want to connect to something smaller? Will they want to make a little, here's my thing is always, when you could go to your router and plug a little, like, tiny gumstick-sized computer into a USB port,

and that's your social network for, like, you and your friends, if that ever became popular, if like teens no longer wanted to be on platforms because they were lame, but somehow got really an assist-adminning Unix. You know, I mean, this is what's tricky. It's never cool. Like the hard part that you need to build the community and the connection is still hard and requires a lot of knowledge. And it doesn't, it's not sociable in the way that, like, playing guitar is sociable.

Right. You started a server called Tilly Club. Yeah. Describe it. Okay. So this is one of those things that you ever have the side project where you're like, oh, God, what have I done? Yeah.

And then it's a little source of guilt for the rest of your life. I had a couple drinks one night, and I created a website called Tilda Club. It used to be in the olden days that you're at which I'm trying not to talk about you olden days, but to hell with it. All right. So Tilda, you'd have a website and it'd be like. It was your username. Some server.com, yeah, slash tilda character, your username. And so I created Tilda Club because it sounded ridiculous.

And it was just a Unix machine. And I gave like people accounts. And I went to bed. I gave like 10 people accounts as a joke on Twitter. And then I woke up and there were like a thousand requests and then 7,000. And I got to like 500. And then I was like, what am I doing? I have children.

But people got on that server and they made web pages and they just partied like it was 99, but it was new novel sort of fun stuff. And after that there were all these new servers that came up in the quote, Tildaverse and people started creating all kinds of new environments to play and mess with this. And Tilda Club is actually still running. And somebody asked if they could take it over. And I said, yeah, we should do that.

And then I keep forgetting it's smart Zuckerberg. Yeah, it's fine. At this point, I'd love to save the $50 a month. But no, but Tilda Club is a, when you say it's just a Unix server. Just, it was literally on Amazon.com. People are FTPing up, like, files. Yeah, they have accounts. I just gave it to them.

Could they run like CGI's? Like you can do the whole thing? I don't think I turned it on. I tried to keep it under control. Yeah. What you find is, you know, after you get to that, what is it, Dunbar's number, 150? Mm-hmm. You get after that and suddenly the behavior of human beings is a lot harder to manage.

And so I just didn't want, there's this thing with aggregate humanity, which I know you run into two where it just becomes like monkeys hitting the bone. Yeah. I was trying to avoid that. I've had that so many times. my curve at this point. I just, I didn't want the monkey bone smashing feeling of the fun side project with the community. Yeah.

So no, it was this wonderful, like, I would say, month-long party of people making stuff and engaging with some of the reasons why they like the medium. That's still there. I can go buy a Raspberry Pi for the computer for, you know, 30, 40 bucks. And I can put it on the internet. And I can send a signal to a million people if I can find a million people. And again, like the challenge now is nobody's looking. because the platforms are sort of constantly flowing,

except honestly, if that has a good URL and somebody on Twitter sees it, that content could get out there. Yeah. Same with Facebook. Like, it's just you are reliant on the platforms in a way you didn't used to be. I don't think people go to Google

and poke around for fun anymore, right? No. It's a little... Well, I think people go to YouTube and poke around for fun. That is true. But that's a closed, that's a hermetically sealed universe.

They won't even let you click the links. Yeah. When you think about what a healthier ecosystem would look like. It is nice when the platforms, like, allow your content to get distributed, and it's expensive to actually put video online. Like, it is really not easy to host a lot of streaming video for lots of people who want it. And so that's a good thing that they do. It's very valuable. It's just if we could have 100 YouTube's or a thousand so that there was some competition between all the YouTube's as opposed to just. A constant theme of the show. Yeah, right? Like, I mean,

that's, but again, you know, wouldn't it be nice? And I feel that sometimes in this industry, we're like, oh, you know, there should be a utopian state that should exist because it's in my head and I'm a dude who likes tech and I think it should be this way. And then the world is not really going to do that. Like, it's not like Google's like, oh, you know, you're right. We need to split up YouTube. The government could do it if it could figure out what the hell's going on. They're trying, you know. But like, so Postlight, why don't you, has any a client come to you and said, we want to build a competitor to YouTube? No, not in 2019. And it doesn't seem like anyone's that interested in doing such a thing.

No. The only people who do that are literally like they see some Facebook ad and it's like a 19-year-old. Who's like, I'm going to make a new YouTube, but it's all going to be about cargo pants. And you're like, cool, what's your budget? And they're like, what? I would love to be in one of those meetings where you're like have to gently let down a teenager who wants to build cargo pants YouTube. Oh, just do it. Just I'll do it all the time.

I've let down so many hundreds of people at this point. I have talked to 200 people about their CMSes. Yeah. Yeah. No, but I mean, that's the thing. Like, where is that energy? It's out there. It's just they grew up in the world with the platforms, not with the web.

So they're thinking, I want to do X on Spotify. I want to create this and put it on YouTube. They're thinking, you know, I remember in Parks and Rec where Aziz, I'm sorry, had entertainment 720 or whatever. It's like that. It's absolutely my favorite arc on that entire show. Exactly. Everybody wants that.

They're like, I'm going to build a multimedia conglomerate, and they skip ahead. to it. They're going to build the podcast network. They're going to build the, you know, the 360. No, go to 720. And it's, um, that's what I see coming up. I don't know. It's kind of great. I hope, it succeeds. It's a lot of stuff that isn't from, like I don't, you know, okay, create your fashion brand and your podcast network, um, recent NYU grad. Like, you know, and I, I don't know if you remember too. There's this, this moment in your 20s where everyone is incredibly jealous of incredibly small things and nobody has actually accomplished anything yet. So you get that vibe too. Like everybody's trying to kind of outpace their friends' fantasies to show that they're the real hustler. And so

there's that. But I love it. I love the energy. I mean, it's my favorite thing. I mean, I am a capitalist. That's like, that's the animating force. I think we should probably put some tighter guardrails around it. I think that would be good. Like, I think anybody who lives in a very, anyone who takes public transportation in New York City is like, yeah, we got to, it's, I like a little capitalism, but we also got to like figure some stuff out here. It'd be great if we sorted that out. Yeah.

I mean, also, the whole city is going to be underwater in like two hours. It was underwater yesterday. Yeah, I know. So it's like, I'm excited. I'm excited. I like hustling. I like making money.

And I've loved building this company, especially. I have a very good, like the co-founder. My co-founder, Rich and I, like, it worked out real good. I lucked out in my partner. But there's another part of me that's excited about the trillions of dollars of global warming investment that is going to be necessary to keep Manhattan from evaporating? I'm like, that could be cool. I wonder what's going to happen there. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Every thriving, successful business has to start somewhere.

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We've talked a lot about the environment in which he builds stuff now. It's radically different than a few years ago. But right at the beginning of this conversation, you said, we got a lace in the ethics maybe a little bit earlier, right? Wait, what did I say about ethics? You were like, the platform's got big, there's not a lot of introspection. Yeah. It would be good if we maybe talked about it a little bit earlier in the process.

Sure. So you're, you know, product manager. You probably talk to a lot of product managers. You've built a lot of stuff. How do you think that's changed and how do you think we make that better? so that we preserve the spirit of hope and excitement. Well, I think, first of all, there's just a lot of work to do, so that part's good. Like, you know, everybody's got a digital platform sitting around the, as we're talking,

I'm looking at skyscrapers. There are 700 to 2,000 badly decaying digital platforms within eyesight. Right? So there's that. There's just a lot to do. There's lots of work. I mean, it's like, I'm looking at the window. I'm like, oh, my God.

building and a fall? Yeah, no, they're all going to fall. Yeah. No, I mean, the air conditioning monitoring system is falling apart or the website hasn't been updated or the trading platform doesn't work. Like, all of those things are still real. So in terms of hope, first of all, I don't think product and product management is hurting for hope.

You have to be hopeful to be a product manager because products don't want to ship, like most things in the world, don't want to get across the line. So there is a fundamental optimism that has to be paired with a willing to. willingness to say no and sort of all that stuff. I think there's lots of things that are really complicated and big and weird in the world and the platform companies are confusing and messy. We're in a platform company talking right now. We're going to make something. That's exciting. The thing that is still mind-boggling, and maybe this is just the adolescent like model train part of myself, is that it gets cheaper to do more every day. Now, it's hard and it's rigid because

you have to make the app-like experiences. You can't just publish a page anymore and so on. But, like, you know, my old website, F-terrain.com, which don't take that as an endorsement. Nobody needs to look at that. It used to cost me $100 a year or $100 a month to host, just to have a good server that could handle a reasonable amount of traffic and so on. And I let that sit for like a couple years while we got Postlight rolling. And then one weekend, I'm like, I got to stop spending this money.

This is ridiculous. It costs me $1.99 a month to run now because I use this thing called Zite and I just like put it all in the Zite, static posting. There's some command lines I run. I have no clue what's happening. I don't know where it is. I don't know what's working. I cut and paste it from a tutorial and it is like it's either $1.99 or $2.49. And it works great.

Everything works just fine. And I have this archive going back 20 years that is stable and secure and I have it backed up in case that goes. away. And if I used, Amazon, I could probably get it down even further. So it's getting cheaper to do more, but it is not an environment that rewards the vast and ridiculous creativity that we saw in the early days. And I think it would. I think that just a little more ridiculousness would be welcomed because it's very inexpensive to be ridiculous at scale. Yeah. I mean, we ran a piece today about Plex. Yeah. Bajon and Stephen wrote it. It's a great piece. And it's about little communities that pop up share in a Plex server.

It's basically about piracy, just to be blunt. And before everyone tweets at me, yes, I know there are legitimate uses for Plex. I see you people ripping your entire Bluroy collections. You're great. But the larger uses of Plex are these little communities that form. Little baby social networks. It's better than piracy communities. They're so much fun.

They're really great. But I'm missing that, right? These small, Tildo Club is another example. This is a small community. Tilda Club got too big. It got too big. You're saying it got too big at like 150 people. Yeah, it did.

I think a nice size for a community is 30. Yeah. Right? And this is what's tricky is because you can't get famous on 30. 30 can't pay your bills. 30 doesn't really care that much if you're like playing in a band. Like it's just community at that point. There's none of the narcissistic rewards that we love so much.

I mean, I love it. I like having all my Twitter followers. It's very exciting. But if I could have like, and I know who'd be in my 30, it would be. like this one guy who's a little bit older than me used to be a student of my dad's and we used you're basically putting together a wedding guest list it is but no no no it's specific

though it's like a couple dudes who are really a couple dudes who are probably a little too into Prague Rock and like you know like some the person who's great yeah you know actually make the whole list so that everybody when we promote the episode everyone has to listen to CMA

that's right you know where you see some of it is the little like the Tumblr cohorts that are really specific on a topic. And they're like, there, it's just digging and archiving and digging up experiences and sort of putting it together. But getting away from the broader platforms, there's no need for, let's be real, right, like with a nicely instrumented $10 Raspberry Pi, plugged in the USB, and the ability to get on the network or a really tiny cloud server, I should be able to host lots of media and have lots of fun in chat and conversation with 30 friends for probably like $15 a year.

Yeah. So the platform's there. We have access. Then there's all sorts of stuff to make this work. It's a little clunky around the edges. And I think that the other problem, too, is like streaming platforms have made the piracy less valuable. Like it used to be like, you got to see this.

This is an obscure bootleg from the band that we care about. And now it's probably on Spotify or it's close enough that you're just like, I don't need to hear any more. You can definitely find a slightly sped up version on YouTube. Yeah, exactly. That's right. That's right. So it doesn't quite catch the algorithm. Yeah. So, I mean, is that a thing that we should be looking at is can we build smaller networks of people, smaller communities? Are we ready to let go of the tens of thousands of people possibly telling you how interesting and important you are every single day? And the thing is, it's kind of rigid, right? Like, I feel part of me would really, I think you can probably have both. Part of me would like to really just take a step back. But I have a business. I promote my business. I talk about that. things, me being in public and having conversations, like this one, is an important part of, like, doing a job in 2019. And so, like, where am I going to put my energy in time? And right now, I'm probably putting more energy into being outward facing. But yeah, the thing I crave is just, like,

goofing off with your friends. So then stuff for fun. Just being silly. I miss the silly. And I'm making, and there's private slacks and stuff like that. Yeah, I think that one of the spirits of earlier than I miss was building silly stuff just for fun to see if you could pull it off. That's right. And a lot of that stuff basically was digital vandalism. It was, or you just, you know what, just sucking. You knew you sucked. It was fine.

Yeah. But then there's something so demoralizing about 5,000 people telling you exactly why you suck. Yeah. And you're just like, I guess I shouldn't. Okay. Okay. So I have two ideas for your product, studio. Oh, we're going to build something together?

We're going to build a turnkey raspberry pie that you stick into the back of your router. Okay. It's a hardware social network. You know, I've thought about this a lot. The problem is getting that port open at the router level. It's because it's not. We've had tons of router company CEOs. We'll get like Nick Weaver from ERO.

Okay. It'll be a special button. Yeah, because the problem is like, no, but it's the cable. It's like Optimum doesn't want to open up port 8080. Hmm. You got to, that's like a phone call. And then you got to get the right person. Yeah, we've got the CEO of Optimal wants to come on this show.

There's a lot of like other things to talk about with the cable co-executive. What about Port 80? Hey, guys. Hold out of that. So you have no competition. You've been subtly raising prices and your service is bad, but I really want this one port open from my hardware social network startup idea. Listen, it would be worth it. All right, hardware social networks.

I think of it would that be fun. Yeah, let's do it. It's like BBS is, but smaller. Just, I mean, okay, just take a pause for a second. Like, I was like a deep BBS nerd. Right. What if people want? They want to leave a, they want to write a little graffiti on the wall.

Be like I was here. They want to share some files. What else? Yeah, I think there's the... That's it, right? It doesn't have to be that complicated. It's photos. Well, they want to find people with sharing.

I mean, like Reddit is this idea at scale. Right. But how do I keep it small? Yeah. It's got to stay small. Well, you clearly are rate limited by the power of your raspberry pie. It's brutal right, though, because if you say it's 30 and then someone has to come and someone has to go. No, I'm telling you, this is 100%.

All you're doing is making a wedding guest list. Oh, it's just mean. This is how my wedding was 450 people. Yeah. This is the thing. How do you keep it smaller when some people have a much higher. threshold for knowing people. All right, here's the second thing that I think you should do is you should promote your

podcast, which is why you came on this podcast. So tell us about that and we'll wrap it up. Thank you for this opportunity. Yeah, if you like the sound of my voice and who wouldn't, you should check out track changes from Postlight. Just go to Postlight.com. You will find it right away. It is a weekly podcast that I do with my co-founder Richard Ziyadi, all about how technology

is changing the world. But also, if you're really into like, what the hell is enterprise software and what is product, we're the place to go. What is product? Well, we get a lot of different definitions. What I would say is it's a social craft

more than anything in which you take the energy of designers and the energy of engineers and you help and coordinate with them and often with other stakeholders to make the thing happen and to get it shipped across the line. So sometimes different kinds of product managers. Some people are like writing the document and saying here's what we're going to build.

Some are just every day sitting down with the team. But you're you're coordinating the development of the product and you are managing scope, cutting scope, working on budgets, like making it real. At a large or we're client service, so we're mostly focused on shipping the thing. At a big company, a product manager is also usually responsible for revenue. Yeah. Like this thing that we're launching has to make $100 million a year. Yeah. That seems terrible. That's a lot of money. No, that is when you go work for the big platform companies, it's like, what do you do as a PM?

Well, I'm responsible. I have to, in 18 months, develop a product with an $100 million run rate. But you do that because you're already on top of something that makes billions. So you're like, okay, instead of oranges, we're going to sell lemons. And we get more markup on the lemons. And they're like, wow, that added up to $100 million. You get a bonus. That sounds a lot.

Easier and harder than what I do. Yeah. One of the reason that I'm in journalism, I'm like, I'm over here from the revenue. you. Yeah, that's... It happens over there. It's great. Yeah, it's always... You definitely stay away from the money is a great plan for your career. I'm working on it. That's what I would tell everyone in journalism. Don't ever understand the business. No, God. That's foolish. That's another 45 minutes of us talking about the past and the future. Paul Ford, thank you so much for joining us. It's exciting. It is really truly odd that we have known of each other and around each other for so long we've never sat down to.

It's a big city. It's still a big industry. Yeah. All right. Well, thank you. Thanks for coming on. All right, that was Paul Ford. My thanks to him for joining us. You can check out his show, track changes. It's all about product management. It's great. I encourage you to listen to it. We'll be back on Friday with more Vergecast. We'll be back on Tuesday with more interview. We're just going to keep it going.

We've got some surprises in store for you coming up on the feed, though. I'm excited about those. You can tweet at me. I'm at Reckless. I would love to hear from you. Love your feedback on the show. Here you want me to talk to you, what you want me to get into. We're here for you. We'll see you on Friday.