YouSaid · the spoken record

Anil Dash

lines on the record: 131
first: 2017-12-28
most recent: 2017-12-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I wish I had known that technology follows the same rules of human society that the physical world does, in the same way that we architect our buildings and design our communities in our neighborhoods to be safe, comfortable, welcoming, warm places for us to live, we need to put that same thought into designing our digital spaces so that people are welcoming and kind to each other and treat each other well and feel neighborly towards one another. And if we can just repeat a lot of the lessons that the last 10,000 years of civilization have taught us, we can make being online and in our apps a lot more thoughtful and rewarding experience.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's really key. I think the other part, because the tide is starting to turn particularly in tech, find the people who are most on the margins, least connected, least central, and least privileged in tech, and lift them up. Because people, one, they will remember it. They'll never forget you did it. Two, I think that is who's ascendant broadly, is the people on the outside are saying, like, okay, I want to be part of this success and I want to benefit from it. And three, it's just the right thing to do. It feels good.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the key things is find the topic about what you are irrationally passionate. It can be as narrow as niche as you want, but if you can be the person who is the one person in the world who is most in love with that idea, knows the most about it, obsesses over it, and really just owns it, there's something there for you. You can really build a whole career around that because you can't win on everybody's chasing this one trend and I'm going to be part of it.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Did all these sort of interesting cultural things. And then, of course, just at a human level for me, one of the best ways to clear my head is I have got a six-year-old son and will go out and, you know, just sort of do something fun, go to a museum, you know, walk around the neighborhood, take the dog for a walk. And I am never not reset by spending just a little bit of time listening to him and his view of the world.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love music. I know you're a music fan. I still am sort of notorious for being a big Prince fan even before he passed away. But I love sort of. Cataloging his work, and so he's showing the cultural impact. And so it's a fun hobby because you cross paths with an improbable cross section of life. Like there are people in politics and media, all these different disciplines that are like, oh, whatever. Like the music, it's fun, but also this like, oh, he was a pioneer in tech. Right.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absurd. If we had said, let's plan for what happens when a billion people show up on these social networks. Because people are like, you're out of your mind. There aren't a billion people with computers.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To use these tools That was just unimaginable at 99. Yeah, you know, someday there's going to be a million people on social media. And she was, you know, she was the founder of our company. She's like, you idiot, there's going to be 100 million people. Of course, then it turns out there's a billion. And so, you know, you would never, it would have been.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do think one of the biggest failures was in being part of the community that created the first social media and social networking tools. We were so desperate for and hungry for people to use them and optimize for growth at the expense of making these environments humane and thoughtful for people. And so there's been a tremendous social cost where, yeah, everybody got connected and it's great. It's amazing to be able to send messages and media and photos to people. Instantly anywhere in the world. But it should have also been something that empowered the people most at the margins, most vulnerable to be able to advocate for themselves. And instead, in many ways, we re-victimize them. And that is something that I hope to spend the rest of my career working to fix.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Percent of the ad dollars go to those two. Exactly. And about that much of the tech platform development. So what developers are doing outside in the world is, oh, I'm doing this for iOS, for Apple. I'm doing this for Android, for Google. And being able to go back and say, well, the web itself is still the bigger platform. It's still the biggest platform that's ever existed. How do you create for that and support that and express yourself there? And I mean, you know, we have a dog in this fight with Glitch where I'm very lucky because developers love it and they're catching on and really saying like this is one of the things that gives us hope. But I think it's a broader movement, which is what brought a lot of us to the web in the first place, the idea that we could create something and the world could find it and respond to it and make it a success.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is that the promise of the web was that we were all going to have a voice and we're going to have a place and that we would be able to publish and create things. And there is such a centralization happening around Facebook, Google.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A big field. You should have no problem with that. I do think there is a return to First Principles about people being able to create on their own.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, and also there were voices before her, right? I think the fact that just a steady drum beat of activism worked. And that you have things like the CEO of Uber stepping down. I think these are hopefully a moment of reckoning for so many of us that have been talking about the need for tech to be more ethical, more humane, more inclusive, to be able to really point at that having had some impact. And these are not victories because these are horrible situations that people went through But it's just the first time that we didn't completely lose after somebody had to endure these kinds of indignities at work.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know what? I would say these past couple weeks has been one of the most significant milestones, which is wild, right? This reckoning of VCs being pushed out of their own funds on ethical grounds.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People are trying to do similar things. And they did such a good job of telling a story and of even being self critical. About the mistakes they made. And, for example, that the park is not really inclusive enough of the community that it's part of. I thought it was just very thoughtful and nuanced and also showed how you can build things that are improperly ambitious and make them happen anyway.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Give There was actually, I'm going to forget the name of it, there was a book about the creation of the Highline Park here in New York City And how it started as a really a community movement, and it became this sort of one of the top landmarks in the city now. Those guys”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I forget what the actual title is. There's a bunch of books about Aretha Name and Respect. Didn't go with that name. Take it, but it is.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Favorite books The Power Broker, Robert Karros Bio of Robert Moses, I think the classic and also really teaches systems thinking.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And later sold it to Lotus and it was working with Mitch Kapoor and that team that made one, two, three. But Dan is one of the more thoughtful, brilliant, creative voices, really undersung as one of the heroes of the tech industry. And super generous with his thoughts and ideas.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe one of the biggest influences is Dan Bricklin, who is the inventor of the spreadsheet. He created VisiCalc back in 70s. All right.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've been very lucky to have a lot of good ones. I had a business partner named Fred Burke, who was my partner in my first company I started the day after I graduated high school. And he taught me a ton about sales and marketing. And that was really, really instructive.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of people don't know that I am from a tiny little town in rural Pennsylvania and that we were one of the only, certainly only Asian families. And that really informed a lot of my view of having a very different, probably the opposite perspective of living in a big city like Manhattan.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's really, really hard to break out. And that is going to be about You have the relationships? Do you have somebody who's going to scratch your back by giving you traffic?”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think it's overstaying it because you still have the same dynamics you have in a lot of media, one of which is just simple like old boys network. People promote who they know and these kinds of things. I think it's easier to get in. I think you can blog your way to being the voice on a certain topic. If you have a certain niche or a certain subject that you are just obsessive about and you go all in on and you just keep blogging about it, you can own that topic or that idea. And that's still true. I think if you're in a popular subject, the sort of like, like for me, like a generic tech blog about what's happening in the tech industry.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. And, you know, so I think the business tensions always arise, and you see that with even sites that create great blogs, they sort of fade out after a while because the company is like, I'm not really behind this. I don't believe in this. And I draw that contrast to organizations that started by blogging, right? So, you know, Gizmoto, formerly Gawker, like they're sort of still all in and they still do good work. I mean, I think it's. It's always been uneven, but the good stuff has always been good. BuzzFeed still feels like a blog, even though you can define blog however you want, but that aesthetic, that voice is still there.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that model can work, but very few of the major outlets have a business model for that. You can't hide the blog behind a paywall because that ruins its point of linking to stuff.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In mainstream media. I think it depends on the vertical and what space you're covering and how much reporting and the original network sort of fuels it. There are great blogs done by mainstream media outlets. That are usually written by somebody that has a great voice, that knows the space really well, has their network, and can turn that into a story really quickly. And I look at like, actually, it wasn't a blog, but I look at like David Carr, what he had done at the times. Boy, I missed that guy. And, you know, he was very blog-like in the way even he wrote his print columns very fast, turned things around, knew exactly who to call, connected the dots really, really well.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's no question the discovery experience on print media is good. It is an interesting and unique thing and you find stuff you wouldn't find otherwise on digital. But that's also just a design challenge. Like it's not impossible to solve those problems in the digital realm. They just haven't invested in doing so.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Magazines, it's pointless. Well, it's like, yeah, unless you're going to the beach or something, you're not looking at that print edition. And I see this all the time with people that I watch that have print subscriptions that are saying, okay, well, I found this article, but I'm going to read it online.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, and this is all about the metrics and the numbers, right? For the advertising. Exactly. So they want to tell the advertiser we have this many print subscribers, even though all those people are just, you know, recycling.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, that's true. And there are more cat pictures or lists that are subsidizing that journalism on the BuzzFeed than there are on the other sites. But that's just a question of how you subsidize. In the case of the Times or whatever, they're subsidizing through print subscriptions that are going to go away.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's all of them. There's no difference between those. Really? Yeah. I mean, you look at the best reported stories on BuzzFeed are not different than the best reported stories on the Times of the Post. When you do good journalism, there are not necessarily.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They might have killed it off. But even to that example, the existence of an automobile section was a soft to advertisers, obviously. But it didn't skew the hard news reporting. And so that was okay because you're like, okay, whatever. You got to pay the bills. Of course, you have comics. You don't have comics because you're like, this is important news for people. This makes people read and that gets the circulation up and that lets us do the hard news work. And the problem is that line goes away in web media. There isn't some like, well, you're going to come and read the car ads and that's going to support reading the hard news. The hard news has to sell on its own. And so it gets more and more distorted and more and more exaggerated in order to get that attention because you're in this more and more extreme environment.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is this reaction to seeing the distorting effect that the major ad models have on web media. And the Facebooks and Twitters and Instagrams of the world built models that were totally advertising independent and so get hyper exaggerated into attention getting models. And I think that's something that the publishers didn't understand how much that would skew their business. And it's interesting because in print, there was one, there was more ad dollars to go around. Two, they were indirect models. So the fact that you had a ton of classified ads might encourage you to have a real estate section, but it didn't make your news headlines more extreme. About politics and about weather and about whatever.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right You won't believe what slide three. Right. But even if you're going to do that, you were incentivized to build your audience on your terms, but not just views at any cost. You know, Page views in any cause. And everybody else basically went with the ad model. And I was really adamantly against it. And I do think... You see this sort of return to subscription models, the times, New York Times, like everybody we want you to subscribe and pay for great journalism, all these kinds of things.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, and I was lucky in that we had built a product when we built blogging tools that people paid for, you paid for, right? Right. And so if you wanted to have a voice and a platform, you were going to directly support it and you were headed investment in it. And so we weren't based on attention. We were not based on the ad model.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. And I think that was very naive on my part. And the amazing thing about it is I felt like I was slow to get that lesson and slow to really build it into my work and the tools and the platforms I was creating. And yet I think it still took even longer for the people that made the Facebooks and Twitters of the world to get that lesson.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And, you know, that's not the case. And it was a long, slow, painful lesson that I know I personally took too long to learn.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and the idea that the people who didn't have access to get their voice out there, some of them would not use that power responsibly. I was such an optimist and idealist of like, wow, if we just give everybody a printing press, all they're going to print is good, thoughtful, true things.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. And, you know, I've been very lucky to benefit from that too. And I think that was true. And we kept saying, you know, the whatever, the mainstream media makes all these mistakes and now the social media will help correct it. And then we ignored or didn't anticipate the exact opposite, which was the times when mainstream media was exactly right and people would use social media to spread disinformation.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's interesting. I was such an idealist about blogging and social media when it came out. I was like, we're going to give platforms that are going to give voice to people that don't have any other place to share their words. And that was true. That did happen.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My universe is finance Like you Yeah. It could be whatever. They didn't eat lunch that day or they have something else going on”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's fun. And you can really read that into the work. I think that's been really instructive because I don't keep a mood journal. And so I could be writing about whatever, a new update to Windows came out when I used to blog about tech a lot. And I could still tell you exactly how I felt. You know, when I read it, I think that's really instructive. I think my attitude about dealing with people being aggressive or hostile online has changed a lot over the years. I think initially, you know, I think your first reaction is like, well, screw you too, buddy, and you sort of go at them. I think I spent a long time trying to be like, I'm just going to love you to death, and that'll get you to change. And I had some successes with that. I have actually seen conversations where I changed somebody's mind or they changed my mind.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What are your thoughts on? Yeah. You know, I've learned a lot. I think it is, I definitely see when I look back at 18 years of writing now that it is always this sort of ink blot test about where I met in my head. You go back and read it and I can see exactly how I was feeling at the moment, even if I don't remember writing it. It's shocking, isn't it? Oh, wow, I was having a bad day that day. Or wow, I was really in a good mood.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You don't think about consciously as a kid, but they sort of seep into your mind. And so there was always a healthy debate about how to do these things. I mean, you know, like, especially you look at this is still true today, civil rights movements always have these big schisms within them of like how radical do we want to be and what's the right way to approach this and you know do we change the system from the inside or do we you know try to tear it down from the outside and those kinds of debates I think those are fascinating and timeless debates and I'm always happy to engage in those the people who are like I want to personally you know hurt you or I want to attack you and that's the only way to advance my ideas I'm like that's never that's never going to be the thing that that persuades me or that makes me see the light and it certainly doesn't indicate much confidence in that person's argument anyway”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so there is this tradition of like, how do you use your own platform using technology out there? Exactly. Get ideas out there. Right. Yeah. So a century ago, that was cutting-edge technology to be able to have in a rural, very, very poor part of India. And so, yeah, I think there is this idea of how do you debate ideas using cutting edge platforms to get your ideas out there and advancing the cause of social justice. And I think those are things that...”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and I'm very, you know, my mother's family's all lawyers, and I've sort of raised that. Well, you know, it's interesting. They were both some were criminal defense lawyers. And then my great grandfather was involved in the Indian Independence Movement. He marked with Gandhi and was sort of very involved in civil rights and social justice. Was he”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right Nobody needs be a jerk. Life is too short and I got too much left to learn to spend my time fighting with a stranger that really wants to fight more than they want to learn.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. Like, why the fact that my family is multiracial is wrong, like that is never going to be the thing that I'm like, wow, I've seen the like.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's like it's not that I'm not intellectually curious. I know I am. I'm very interested in having my assumptions challenged and learning things. I am very much like, I love that idea of I had to change my mind because I was wrong about the way I thought about this thing. Like I love that feeling. It doesn't come from somebody saying like, why? Screaming.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I'm just like, you know what? I'm tough as nails. I have no question about that. I know what I've been through and I know what I'm able to do. I'm just like, why would I want to deal with you? This is like, this is an elective thing. It's about me having good judgment and discernment where I'm like, you're a person who acts obnoxious online all day. Why would I, like, I'm not worried? That's not the idea I'm working the engagement with. If you think that the only way that your ideas can be represented in culture is by you acting like a monster all day, lighting it on fire and throwing into a school bus, then your ideas probably aren't that good.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source