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

“Starting your own blog. Other than that, I mean, the other thing is they don't want to do that. They're not trying to create something, they're trying to destroy something. Right.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a ridiculous state. YouTube comments, I think they're getting a little better, but notoriously terrible. And if you said, I'm going to go to Google's lobby in Mountain View, and I'm going to start shouting epithets at people. They're not going to be like, have a seat, have some of our free lunch. They're going to be like, no, you got to stop doing that or we're going to kick you out.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the social cost of, for example, saying just get off a social media or don't go on Twitter, don't go on whatever, it's like, well, that's, you know, if I work in media, I work in publishing, I work in tech, it's a business tool. I need that. I need to have a presence there. Translate.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, what happens is people who are not sophisticated in these things think, well, okay, look, if this person's being a jerk to you online, why don't you just not go on Twitter? Or don't you just not, you know, don't worry about it, delete their comment or kind of thing. It's like, well, the difference is when you have people organizing, trying to undermine a specific community, just ignoring it doesn't make it go away. Right”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. I mean, whether it's Gamergate or the men's rights activists, there are a lot of communities that were doing this online. And the interesting thing about this is, one, they learn from each other. They've been evolving this over 10 or 15 years. They are very organized, but they organize in places that people aren't watching. So they're happening on some reddit or a 4chan. I mean, those are ones that people know, but there's also just private channels. You know, they can text each other like anybody else. They're very technically literate.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The evolution of that into organized communities that are trying to undermine other communities or undermine individual people who are trying to communicate by misinformation, by personal attacks, by threats, by all that sort of these tactics, I think people don't understand that these have gotten very organized and very structured. As you said, there are guides to how to do it. And so they say, well, why don't you just ignore it? Not just the Russians.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tribalism Yeah, right, it's misinformation as a tactic. Yeah. And so there's an interesting thing here where we've had this escalation. So first we had what the internet always had ordinary trolls, right? Just people saying like, because I can hide behind my anonymity or relative anonymity, I can be transgressive in this way where I'm just being the person who's like, you know, Ruining things for people, but in a way that I think they think it's entertaining. And that's sort of like it's annoying, but it's not a big deal. And if you can ban them, that's fine.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We didn't do any of that in creating these online systems. And in fact, a lot of the people, and this is something it wasn't as much me, but people that I saw that were creating other tools that made the systems for commenting and feedback online were total zealots about the fact there shouldn't be any rules. It should be Wild West all the time. And Wild West is basically, well, if you have Wild West and there's no cops, guess who runs the show?”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally agree. So there's a couple things I would sort of break out here. The first is I got to watch people creating the first comment systems on the internet. There was a time when you couldn't actually comment on a web page. And so the interestingly, the challenge then was, are people going to type in this box at all? Are they going to even understand that you can leave a comment and it'll show up on the page and that's the thing you can do? So they were hyper-optimized for at any cost. We just want to put, we don't want to put any barriers to somebody typing in this box and leaving comment. Of course, that pretty quickly became, well, we made it really, really easy and now there's no barriers and there's no standards. And what I wish we had understood at the time, and I will say this, this is something I personally didn't get for a long time, was you make a real community by introducing a set of rules that everybody understands. This is true in the physical world. We get it very intuitively. If you go to a park and it's got the, you know, you can't be throwing your ball around here because you're going to hit these little kids that are over here or there's a dog running, you got to keep your dog inside the fence, whatever the rules are, it makes the place work for everybody. And it doesn't have to be honors. It doesn't have to be a burden.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would put Yeah Can. Spammers and trolls and. And Bloomberg as well. Yeah, yeah, sure. You say something really live. Although Twitter's done a good job of protecting people's anonymity. Oh, they've done a hard.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So they had caterers, right? And they had caterers come in show up everywhere. How many employees? So now the company were about 40. It's still pretty small. It's kind of gone up and down in size because over the years, like they co-created Stack Overflow and they created Trello.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and this is one of those things where things become urban legend, and so it's hard to separate fact from fiction. But what I've heard, so one thing that is definitely true, is Fog Creek was one of the first companies to do the like, let's really spoil our coders and our technical workers. And it was everything from great free lunches to one of the things I still spent a lot of time working on, completely end-to-end healthcare. Nobody on our team pays anything for healthcare. In fact, we have people who've been at the company a long time or came right out of school. They didn't know what in-network, out-of-network means because they never had to deal with it. They don't have a network. And I was like, that's great. That's what we want people to feel. And then one of those things was really great free catered lunches. In retrospect, I think some of this was the company was always like downtown Manhattan and especially back then, you know, just post-9-11, there wasn't good restaurants. And also, especially if you're working late, like 5 p.m., it would just shut down that neighborhood would just be deader than so.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Writing this, he was literally like trying to solve a problem, how do you deal with real estate in Manhattan? How do you keep programmers happy in a world where back then, hard as it is to believe, programmers were treated sort of like dirt. They were like this guy in the back, we're going to give him a computer and lock him in the dark and pizza under the door. Exactly, right, and throw caffeine at him. And now, you know, you think, well, I mean, there's probably no more spoiled workers in the world in terms of like the free massages and the trays of candy.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then one day I'll have a radio show. Well, it's so interesting because I had that where, you know, one of the people I connected with back then was Joel Spolsky, who was writing a blog called Joel on Software. And he was really the first person to write about sort of coding culture, technical culture. And it was one of those things that those of us who were coding for a living, which is what I did back then, knew these things but had never seen them addressed as like you are people with a place in society and he was taking programmers very seriously. Part of the reason he was blogging then is he was explaining the ideas behind the new company he had just created which was Fog Creek Software. And so 17 years later for well 16 years from that point that I took over as CEO of that company, it felt like I knew everything about how this company ran and what its values were and what its purpose was in the world because I had from day one followed along with those storytelling. And you think he was not content marketing. He didn't start.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of LinkedIn and founder of LinkedIn. And so all these people were, you know, I knew them as investors and I was not at all fluent in VC. I knew tech, but at that time you could actually build an entire career writing software and never cross paths with VC. Really? You know, it was pretty common. Sure, it was a lot of big companies. Yeah, mom and pop shops that were building software and apps and they would sort of grow organically out of that. And if you weren't in the valley in particular, you could easily, I was in New York, you could just never cross paths. And so to read these blogs was like opening up this whole new world. And they were, now I understand, like, you know, to some degree was content marketing. They were marketing their firms by being better storytellers. I think that's what they were evolved to transparency. Right.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is that a real thing? I don't know, but I know exactly what you mean. And I think that summer, too, was a particularly interesting time, summer of 03 because we had folks coming up that were doing covering aspects of economics that people weren't covering. We brought some of the first, well, really, I think all the first VCs that started blogging came out on type pads. We had Fred Wilson on. Still blogs. Yeah, David Hornick from August Capital, a bunch of these folks, Joe Ito, who's now heading up the media lab at MIT. That might do it, right? And all these folks, Reid Hoffman. Sure.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, newer. They weren't deep enough in it. Right. And I think that was the thing the people writing the blogs are the people who are like, I'm obsessing over this, whether there's an audience or not.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Keep blogging? No, you know, it was really one of those I was underemployed, not real happy with my place in life and thought I'm going to have a creative outlet to put stuff out there and I can't sing and I can't do a radio show, so let me do this. And it was an interesting thing to sort of just have this outlet and then realize this media mattered enough and that I had been early. I thought I was late starting in 99.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think to have bet that that was the way the internet was headed were some of the things that were just as important as the idea that blogs were going to be media that matter.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah. I mean, there's a lot of technology that's sort of come and gone, and I think some of these things will come back around again, but it's been an interesting thing to watch. A lot of these ideas we thought were really radical around, oh, you might take a picture on your camera, on your phone, and then share it with people instantly, and you might store that on Amazon Web Services, and you might use a service that's got a consumer subscription model as the way of accessing it. All those things, you know, we weren't necessarily, well, we were first on some of them, but we weren't, you know, the only ones doing them. I think to have bet”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They changed ownership a bunch of times. I literally haven't even followed because I've been so busy with other stuff the last several years.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then a year later or so, they said, okay, we're going to introduce the App Store at that initial rollout on stage with Steve Jobs. We had our head of product for TypePad showing TypePad, taking photos on your phone, uploading them to the web from your iPhone in real time. This was years long before Instagram took off. The very first initial launch of the App Store type head was one of the first apps they ever featured.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so it was an interesting thing was that we had this app talking to web services from Amazon years and years before I think that became commonplace. And then the third thing that Typehead did, I think nobody really remembers, so the iPhone launch, it didn't have an App Store. Steve Jobs is like, you got to use it.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We had some features that would let you list books you were reading and music you were listening to and they would talk to Amazon and link up buy my book or buy this back then CD. And the interesting thing about that is some of the...”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the idea that we were even going to ask people to do that was radical. I mean, this stuff sounds like ridiculous because we all do it now. But, you know, it was 16 years ago, 15 years ago. People were really, really taken aback by that. The other thing that I think in retrospect was a bigger deal, huge deal. And we sort of just took it for granted was we were probably the first consumer product to use Amazon Web Services on the back end.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. I think anyone knows what that is. For the old timers, but I think the other thing that's really interesting was we were experimenting with today a lot of things that we take for granted in consumer web. So just the fact that we had a consumer pay model that was five bucks a month, $10 a month. I mean, now, you know, everybody's paying for Spotify and Netflix.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that was where Typad came from. You know, I think the predecessor to today you see the WordPresses and mediums and tumblers of the world and all of them, I think, would say, you know, TypePad is a direct antecedent to that.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. Before Friendster, you can remember that one. So way, way back there. And consumer internet was dead, deader than dead in 2001. I mean, you couldn't, you know, we did a round that was 600 grand that we raised. And people were like, wow, that's all the money in the world. I mean, it's like the catering budget for a launch party for one of these startups today. And so we did that. And what was interesting was people almost immediately recognized this is important. This is something new in media. There's something really powerful enabling here. And we thought it's still not easy enough. You had to have a lot of technical knowledge. Right.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They were a then husband and wife couple, Ben Trot and Mina Trot, and really were sort of visionaries about the idea that we should take this medium seriously. It was going to be something big. It wasn't just people sharing their feelings in a journal online. Like this was going to be where media was headed.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, so that was the state of the art. And then in late 99, a couple of the first blogging tools came along. And so I started using those, like Blogger, which Google later bought and other tools like that. And friends shortly thereafter built this tool called Movable Type. And it was the first sort of serious blogging platform almost immediately people used it to build Gawker, Huffington Post. Who was behind?”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was manually doing it. People who use Windows don't remember an app called Notepad. Sure. And I was manually writing HTML, the language of web pages, in Notepad, and saving it onto a web server by myself, which is the cutting edge of technology back in the last century.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source