YouSaid · the spoken record

Anthony Casalena

lines on the record: 88
first: 2023-07-18
most recent: 2023-07-18
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

“Yeah, I mean, so many exciting things. Like, towards the end of the year, the new product launches we've got for service-based sellers, classes, and courses, all the improvements we're making around Google Domains, our payments products, hopefully some new brands soon, enhancements to the existing brands, and just a really powerful portfolio of products for entrepreneurs. It remains incredibly rewarding the work on that. And there's just a lot left to do.”
2023-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why would anyone make a website in 2023? Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena has some ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, yeah, I mean, we didn't get into all those hypotheticals, but I was mostly talking about it in the context of the business and not, you know, the context of like a dystopian five-year view.”
2023-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why would anyone make a website in 2023? Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena has some ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, for sure. Anthony, you've given me a ton of time here. I feel like I go for another hour on just what the future holds. It is refreshing to talk to someone as optimistic as you about this stuff, even that the AI people who should be the most optimistic based on the valuations have a twinge of like, oh, so it could kill us all.”
2023-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why would anyone make a website in 2023? Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena has some ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's a precursor to socks. I learned the program, and that was from people on that. I should say, from when I was 14, 15. But remember, there were different networks. And it was all the same protocol, but there were different networks. And so if you didn't agree with one, you could switch to the other. They could interoperate. They could merge. They could split. So that was sort of interesting. It's interesting to see a bit of a return to that. So do I think everyone's going to run their own servers? No. Do I think in some context something more decentralized, but sharing a protocol could work? Maybe. I mean, it used to work for email until spam would have ended that one, right?”
2023-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why would anyone make a website in 2023? Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena has some ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm not sure we approach those in any way that's substantially different than how we've approached them appearing in the past because again there has to be there's usually this link out somewhere if there's not this link out somewhere you know people can't really transact on the platform and so their businesses are just going to be so limited there I mean I think it's going to be very interesting to see whether or not content moderation sits on the server or in the client What's more appropriate for that? And what I think is interesting about something like a Mastodon from what I know about it, or Blue Sky, from what I know about it, I could be getting this part wrong, is by decentralizing the servers, you create an environment almost like old school IRC, if you remember, which is something I grew up on and programmed.”
2023-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why would anyone make a website in 2023? Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena has some ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are you thinking about the next generation of social media services, the decentralized products like Blue Sky and Mask on whatever Reddit clones are, let me came in? Right, you're talking about your new homepage is going to be Instagram. We went out and bought a company and made a product to make your homepage better at Instagram. Are you thinking, okay, we got to get ahead of it on Mastodon or whatever.”
2023-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why would anyone make a website in 2023? Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena has some ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Saying it's only on the web unless you're in a walled garden, right? Unless you're selling through Amazon, for instance, a physical product. But as sites like the success of Shopify has showed us, there's a massive demand for people to go direct to consumer and disintermediate those experiences. Otherwise, we wouldn't even have a Shopify. It's a great company. They do a great job. We, of course, have ways to sell physical products. many other things you're selling on Squarespace that are not a physical product, service, an appointment, et cetera.”
2023-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why would anyone make a website in 2023? Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena has some ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think less because of what we were just talking about. For instance, if your homepage in your mind is your Instagram profile, How much does your actual top level URL matter as much as if you were trying to sell a product the detailed URL that you link to from your Instagram page? That is something that has nothing to do with Google, that we need to really, you know, when we do, think about where is the traffic coming from and how are they gaining popularity and how does our how our URLs and whatnot present themselves in those environments at the end of the day, most of the transactions that are occurring, maybe almost all of them, are not actually happening on the social network themselves. They're not happening on Twitter. They're not happening actually within Instagram. There are some examples where that might be the case, but a lot of the complex things need to occur. It's still happening at a URL somewhere at some point because there's a lot of back-end logistics and a lot of things need to happen, a lot of delivery.”
2023-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why would anyone make a website in 2023? Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena has some ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You should start with something that's more niche, a community around you. You know, for blogs a million years ago, you would participate in the comment section and leave your link and get authority that way. There's different ways to get authority on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok. Name your social network. But I think when people flock to those greenfield opportunities, it is specifically because ranking on a very common term on Google is not where anyone is starting. It's impossible. That's more the result of success versus the generic term, of course, versus the way you become initially successful.”
2023-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why would anyone make a website in 2023? Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena has some ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, it's a good time to buy. And when I do buy one, okay, so it's a great, okay, let's get funny, of course, but you were talking about it with relation to Google. So why are people putting this content on TikTok? Why are they putting it on Instagram? Why are they putting it on Twitter? Because to rank on the first page of that on Google is maybe not where you should start.”
2023-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why would anyone make a website in 2023? Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena has some ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I was just curious because you can have a website. Your website's not worth a lot without traffic. And so a lot of my silly car dealer example or whatever is they're just trying to get traffic, right? They're looking at what people are searching for and they're firing out content to just try to get one click onto their website in the search result. And Google is the last big funnel of traffic from what I can see. Maybe some people have links on the Instagram page or links on their pressure washer guys. I'll have links on their TikTok pages. But the last big source of traffic is Google. Yeah. And it seems like the influence is getting correspondingly bigger as well. BuzzFeed, for example, was a Facebook product, right? They were not organized around SEO. And now they're getting more organized around SEO because the Facebook traffic has fallen off. That's just a big example I can give you. Do you see that pressure inside your own business? Okay, we help people make websites in order to market those websites or get traffic. We have to increasingly push them towards what Google.”
2023-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why would anyone make a website in 2023? Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena has some ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't think those two things are in tension the way they used to be maybe 10 years ago. I think that there's ways we can mark things up and ways Google can like 10 years ago, for example, a classic instance of that would be like, well, we want to push the web in this direction and we want these huge images. People who are not programmers, Squarespace will continue to exist as a place that pushes forward what they're able to do creatively by themselves. And we'll always have a place on the web for completely custom coded one-off content that is beautiful and creative and amazing. And it may be some time before a CMS replaces those sorts of things. But look, both can coexist.”
2023-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why would anyone make a website in 2023? Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena has some ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you say you're good at SEO, this is actually something I'm really curious about. You do a lot of design services, you have a lot of templates. Do you feel the tension between, okay, here's where we think the web should go, or here are some experiences we'd like to build, and here's what Google needs in order to rank.”
2023-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why would anyone make a website in 2023? Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena has some ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would imagine I wish I had a better answer for you on that because it would probably depend on the segment. For some segments, it might be Google and Google Rankings, as you know, for certain keywords, for a few sites that rank for those Obviously, Squarespace is too great at Google. We've been around for two decades. We know about SEO. But depending on the personality, a lot of your traffic might come from your Instagram page. It might come from where you have a following. So I don't think there's any one answer to that based on just the entirety of Squarespace.”
2023-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why would anyone make a website in 2023? Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena has some ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thing it said it was, right? And so I think these tools will displace a certain amount of like bad writing or something like that. But I do not think right now in their current form there are a replacement for human creativity and storytelling and its deepest of forms. And I think they could be an assist on that. Maybe that's just a romantic me holding out for creativity in the world.”
2023-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why would anyone make a website in 2023? Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena has some ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Lo and behold, there are still jobs for people who help people with creativity and content on the web. There are more of them. They've just changed. So if you are capable of coding really generic websites, yeah, Squarespace totally did displace that the need to do that a long time ago. And so when you talk about copy or you talk about image generation, first off, there's a lot of things in that realm that are totally unique and a unique story. And you need to, you know, you might start with somebody helping with the paragraph, but you need to write more. Secondarily, to your car dealership example, how do you know which one's good? Well, probably you have some human filter for like, no, that's actually a picture of the real car dealership, I think. They could lie completely and fool you, but at some point that will end when you show up at the car dealership. It's not.”
2023-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why would anyone make a website in 2023? Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena has some ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, but kind of what you were saying towards the end of that, and I'll respond to the beginning of it, like when you say someone should flag that this is AI garbage and we don't want to rank it, Google has as much authority or more as a third-party observer to make that determination than we do, because then you have to trust us. And I actually don't trust because we haven't invested billions into it our ability to tell them because you can just paste something in. If it's completely AI generated or not, I'd say one other thing. That as technology evolves, take Squarespace from 15 years ago. Squarespace is replacing web developers. There will never be more jobs for web developers.”
2023-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why would anyone make a website in 2023? Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena has some ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There comes a point where the car dealer is going to say, Look, I am tired of paying for anyone to write this copy. Just have the intern write me five paragraphs about installing a booster seat and put that on the Squarespace page. Right. And like that will be easier and cheaper at scale for more businesses to do for more things Eventually, that stuff will get indexed into Google, and that will be kind of a recursive loop that leads to bad outcomes. And at some point, someone's going to say we should stop it. Google could say we could stop it in a pretty dramatic way. Or they could come to you and say, Hey, start letting us know when this is happening so we can downrank it, or the government could tell you to stop it. But at some point, that cycle gets to a place where there's more garbage in the ecosystem than not.”
2023-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why would anyone make a website in 2023? Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena has some ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Anti-bot filter. I don't think that's the bad outcome. I think the bad outcome is all of your customers. Start using the tools. Sometime on it doesn't seem that far out, you will be serving 100,000 AI generated.”
2023-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why would anyone make a website in 2023? Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena has some ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have we equipped people or even equipped the LLM creators to understand what is allowed to be used, who is restricted, what requires attribution, right? Because that's kind of an interesting one. Like, you know, if I'm asking an LLM a question, I would love to know if it could tell me sort of whereabouts some of the sentences were sourced from like is this 80% Wikipedia type stuff? Is this 80%, you know, mayo clinic or whatever pick your company that has a large number of URLs? So I was thinking more about it like that from a user perspective and less about it from like a All of a sudden, we're going to be the host to 100,000 AI generated articles that, you know, and I'm sure somebody's already going about doing that.”
2023-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why would anyone make a website in 2023? Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena has some ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I have two responses to that. If you're looking to generate a large number of web pages, call it 10,000, 100,000, making 100,000 Squarespace trials and injecting that. It's probably a really bad way to go about that. So, that being said, from an AI perspective, though, what I've started to contemplate is kind of more interesting is, and for a long time, the internet has had robots.txt, which tells crawlers what they're allowed to do with the content on your site. And we've also had Creative Commons licenses and other things you should put on your site so that humans know if this is free, if this requires attribution, all that sort of thing. Where I think is a bit of the Wild West is”
2023-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why would anyone make a website in 2023? Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena has some ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is there an effective way of telling if a content block is generated by AI? Because obviously we know if you click the button on Squarespace, but if you went to some other model and pasted it in.”
2023-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why would anyone make a website in 2023? Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena has some ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I used to be a programmer. Are you going to watermark Squarespace pages that are made with AI? This is like a hot topic, right? That you should be able to somehow detect what content has been made with AI or somehow mark content that's authentically made by humans. And it seems like for a provider of web pages in the most abstract sense, Squarespace could say, okay, if you use AI tools, we're going to tell Google the content of this page is made by AI. Or we're going to tell Google, actually a human made this.”
2023-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why would anyone make a website in 2023? Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena has some ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is hypothetical, but like a better alternative to search is I'm a coder. He used to be. Now I joke that I'm a HR and comms person, but I used to be a programmer. And honestly, like looking up this coding snippets and getting started, not writing the whole program for me, but getting started with like, how do I do an X in Python if it's like this in Java? That's a magical result. It's giving you. It's really, really, really interesting. And so I think you'll see reduced traffic to certain kinds of things on the web, whereas you'll see increased traffic and usage of the LLMs.”
2023-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why would anyone make a website in 2023? Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena has some ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That question for you. Some of them have attribution. Some of them are just computations that Google will just do. That's cool. And you don't need to go to the website, or maybe the website is a click later because the transaction is still occurring on the website. But I think it's really interesting how to think about how the web and private data even will flow into these models and for which examples the LLMs will be a better alternative to search and when there'll be a worse alternative to search. Now, I mean, one of the examples comes to mind for”
2023-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why would anyone make a website in 2023? Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena has some ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I would wonder what percentage of their articles are actually generating the majority of their revenues. And I wonder how Google is either giving them credibility or not credibility. When I think of more is how the web has been a massive input to these models. And I think a lot of disruption can happen to certain businesses where if you've ingested the entirety of a reputable set of content, right, a Wikipedia, a stack overflow, right, that the LLM model can sometimes do a bit better of actually giving you a response on top of that corpus of knowledge. That's really interesting. I wonder how people are going to feel about the lack of attribution within the LLMs that, you know, Google fought with for a while. Like right now, if you type into Google various search terms, many summaries and cards appear that are not websites that are attempting to answer.”
2023-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why would anyone make a website in 2023? Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena has some ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, but I'm saying I'll give you the example, just a really dumb example every time I pick an example, you tell me all the details of this example, which is my favorite part of this conversation. But I'm going to pick car dealers. Car dealer websites are full of garbage, right? They are basically SEO honeypots. Like you search for a feature in a car that you're interested in, and a car dealer has a web page that may or may not be accurate designed to just rank and search. That's what I mean. It's going to be a lot easier for that set of actors who are doing something that could be described as honest content marketing, but is actually underlying it pretty insincere, right? They're just trying to get traffic.”
2023-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why would anyone make a website in 2023? Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena has some ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so to be clear, we currently have in production the ability for you to auto-generate text using, you know, in the background I call it OpenAI, and there are LLMs, and we make that accessible to all of our customers right now. Now, if you were trying to, as you put it, flood the web with text, using Squarespace would probably be a pretty bad way of doing that. I think you'd want to script stuff and output it and all that. But they're big.”
2023-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why would anyone make a website in 2023? Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena has some ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That has implications just for the web as a whole, and then on the other side of it, there's distribution, right? Like Facebook is not sending a ton of traffic websites. It's all Google and Google's incentives have really shaped the web for the past decade. And now we're at a point where Google is going to start eating some of those search results. And they're just, maybe AI is overheated in some places, but on the web, it seems like the issues are fairly clear.”
2023-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why would anyone make a website in 2023? Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena has some ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I got you, but there's one specific place where I can say AI is going to radically change this thing. And that is the web. For two reasons one, flooding the web with text is pretty easy. If you have a Squarespace account, it's not built into the tool. I can set up a new website and have some LLM. You still haven't told me which one, but I can have some LLM fill a website with text.”
2023-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why would anyone make a website in 2023? Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena has some ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Will now be completely different because of the large language, or at least not right now. You could paint yourself a way of getting there because it's going to, you know, all the coders are 10x productive and then you can get there somehow. But it doesn't currently seem like outside a number of very specific use cases. Wall Street has modeled in that all of the company's workforces are going to go down by 50% and then thus all the profit margins are going up by whatever equivalent is or there's business is completely gone because it's replaced by, I don't know what. So, you know.”
2023-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why would anyone make a website in 2023? Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena has some ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a funny thing to respond to because I'm going to preface it by saying I'm blown away by the developments in AI and I think that the LLMs and the experience of that are amazing. And I think with the prompt engineering and that on top of tools we have is ultra exciting. Do I think people have gone into this all the jobs are gone tomorrow, next week thing like a little too fast? It sure seems like it. And this is something that's going to be disruptive to many, many industries and something we're incorporating. But I think this is a phenomenon where like, you know, just because everything could be eventually possible, it's not all possible today and even next week or even next month. And so again, a lot of those things I listed out that Squarespace does, nobody is sitting there going.”
2023-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why would anyone make a website in 2023? Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena has some ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Something like $20 a month that it's just there's a lot of value that we do that's not just like code me a website. I'm excited about the future of the core business because, frankly, the great reception we've seen in the past couple quarters only core product. But then I'm excited to integrate these new technologies and augment the ones we already have. And hopefully that I'm pretty confident it'll create a tailwind for us.”
2023-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why would anyone make a website in 2023? Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena has some ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That we've been training on our own data sets and getting better with this will be an evolution on top of that. That's super exciting. You know, I talk about this extensively in my last earnings call because it was such a overnight interest in all of this. I'm actually not as worried about the impact of the LLMs on Squarespace's core business for frankly a number of reasons. One is we stop requiring people to code websites two decades ago and also a lot of what we do on Squarespace is not the coding of the website. It's storage, it's bandwidth, it's DDoS protection, it's CDNs, it's an SSL certificate, it's domains, it's payments, its support, its design assistance, it's our email campaigns product like it's anti-spam. There's 20 things that are happening in your subscription for”
2023-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why would anyone make a website in 2023? Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena has some ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“First off, just to frame it off for us, I'll take it from two angles. One is we're a very tech focused forward company. I mean, my background is engineering from when I was a kid. So the AI and machine learning is absolutely nothing new to us. I mean, obviously the leaps that the LLMs have provided are really kind of exciting and new. And, you know, we're all excited to either integrate them like we've already done in the product for text generation or we are integrating them on onboarding in the form of prompt engineering into an LLM, which will feed back into the visual product of Squarespace or even a little further out for us, how do we incorporate that into assistance. But we've been incorporating machine learning models in Squarespace for a long time. We've had some form of AI powered support for four or five years now.”
2023-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why would anyone make a website in 2023? Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena has some ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or do you really want another point of free cash flow, another two points of free cash flow to get us working in that direction, which then just opens up even more opportunities for us, right? I mean, to be able to fund a transact, there's only so many companies that can even fund a transaction like Google Domains, either out of cash or debt. And so, you know, that's really important to us for when these things come around. Imagine another world where we were private burning cash. Maybe we couldn't even finance it. You know, like, so I think it's been positive.”
2023-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why would anyone make a website in 2023? Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena has some ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can't have any tricks, you know? And so if anything, I think it's accelerated decision making about things that aren't working so that we're optimizing more for the long term. I think depending on if we needed to do something like super risky that would just change the whole model or something, I think maybe I'd have a different feeling. But a lot of what we're doing is additive. I think it's actually accelerated decision making because it's like, hey, you're going to make this decision now or this is what it's going to look like this quarter next quarter. Like do it. Move forward. It gives you in a weird way I'll say air covers the wrong word, but you can point to some numbers and say, this thing's not contributing to this in year two or three. Do you ever see it? Or hey, do you really want this expense right now?”
2023-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why would anyone make a website in 2023? Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena has some ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People always seem to want to get into this, like, oh, well, they're going to do all these short term things to meet the quarter or something like that. There aren't that many short-term things I can do to meet the quarter. You're not like a sales force based on like.”
2023-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why would anyone make a website in 2023? Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena has some ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know change like that so rapidly, but we're here to stay and just so many great opportunities coming up. So it's exciting. I mean, and you get kind of immediate feedback on that stuff in the public market. So, you know, just a different equation.”
2023-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why would anyone make a website in 2023? Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena has some ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Greatly dislike unpredictability. We're more on the predictable side. We're not a money losing business. We've been operating this way for quite some time. There's a million opportunities in front of us in terms of these services for entrepreneurs, the payments business, the other acquisitions, things like Google Domains. I think it's exciting. And so, you know, it's just a different kind of world. I think it's, yeah, maybe hard. Look, the past few years has not been fun to be any public tech company outside of maybe like three or something like that, but even there it sort of has sucked. So that's just been different because I think Squarespace generally plays we're used to up until the right, maybe not as fast as they might have liked, but up into the right. So it's traumatizing to see the value.”
2023-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why would anyone make a website in 2023? Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena has some ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Earnings calls and everything else. This wasn't like a Giant surprise, but I actually think it's been a really good thing. I mean, the employees can get liquidity, investors can get liquidity. You have this lovely dynamic where there's analysts looking at Squarespace all the time masking sometimes good, sometimes medium questions about how the business is going. But in a way that's a level of transparency that you don't have in the private market and it really forces you to think about what are we really doing here? If we're here for another year, two, three, four years, do we have a viable growing business or do we not? I think it puts it in your face all the time. Luckily, because our business is mostly subscription and has been built over the course of 20 years, a lot of our revenue is very, very predictable because we have all these existing cohorts coming over. And so, you know, it really is about what can we do for growth. And so, you know, I think the public markets generally”
2023-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why would anyone make a website in 2023? Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena has some ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kind of put a floor on things, if you will. How is being public changed who we are? Aside from just the unfun nature of dealing with the volatility and dealing with all these new actors that are in the public market, I actually think that it's actually been somewhat of a, frankly, a good thing for Squarespace. You know, when you're private, your employees are waiting for tender transactions to happen. Those generally happen at a discount too, your 49A, which is based on public comps over the past few years, depending which comps you pick for us. We're trading at a premium to those public comps. So you could be unhappy with the share price, but again, almost guarantee you privately it would have been lower. So that's been good. I think, you know, after getting into the cadence with the quarterly earnings, I think it brings a discipline to the company that I wouldn't say we didn't have before because we certainly prepped for two or three years before going public, including having, you know, mocker.”
2023-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why would anyone make a website in 2023? Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena has some ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we've been public for just a little over two years now, which, you know, as I'm sure you and other, you've seen another guest would have mentioned is probably not the most fun time to be a public tech company, no matter if you're high-flying or profitable or anything else. I mean, we at least have the luxury of being, we were running cash flow break-even for 15 years and have been profitable for the last five. So, you know, we weren't in this like.”
2023-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why would anyone make a website in 2023? Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena has some ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's good. I've got a whole sequence of questions about AI, and that was like a perfect AI. Sand to the edges right off that answer. You mentioned your board. You have a rare experience here. You're the founder even at it for 20 years. You obviously started before you were a public company. Now you're a public company. You've been on the public markets for a little bit. How has that changed your decision making process?”
2023-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why would anyone make a website in 2023? Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena has some ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Stress test the idea or get more people aligned with what we're doing. And Google Domains was no exception to this, right? I mean, had to start with a small group of people because it was so confidential. And then, yeah, we did that widening of concentric circles. They get more buy-in. I pressure test financial models with finance, with the board, try and just gain some conviction that this is something that's smart. The other acquisitions, same way. Some of the product releases and product initiatives, same way. It's interesting because a lot of what we do actually starts from insights and feelings and orientation we have for doing something for so long. We don't just sit there and wait for all of our customers to ask us for something to do it. So it's an interesting balance between like what we feel that the market needs just being in it for so long and external factors to kind of either popping up as an opportunistic thing like Google Domains or just something staring us in the face as just being a giant market that”
2023-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why would anyone make a website in 2023? Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena has some ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This one was kind of complex, right? Because it's very confidential as it's going on, you know, very uncertain at various phases of it. I mean, this one for me, after the inbound and talking it over with some corp dev and engineering a little bit, this was almost purely a business decision. And it was interesting because we've been in the Debaine's business for almost a decade. And so it's not like this huge bill, we sold workspace for almost a decade. So it's not this like huge build where it's like, oh, all these new things are going to have to do. There are new parts of this deal that we will have to build to. And we've already got that staffed up. But, you know, I think that to answer your question more broadly, depending on what the thing is, it generally starts with a much smaller group of people and then I widen the concentric circles to either”
2023-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why would anyone make a website in 2023? Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena has some ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Look, we'd love it if they use Squarespace as a website. But again, I think that Squarespace domains should be a completely legitimate option, whether or not you would like to use Squarespace or not, will we try and show you things about our services? Sure. And if you unsubscribe from that, we'll leave you alone. Again, I was a Google Domains customer, so I am in that seat of understanding what that experience should be like, but we're using a lot of the same infrastructure Google is using in their cloud DNS product. And so. I think it's going to be a good outcome.”
2023-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why would anyone make a website in 2023? Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena has some ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So you said you're just buying the domains. You're not buying the people. You're not buying the infrastructure. As part of it, okay, we're going to get these domains. We have a suite of services. We can go market to those customers now too. Or is it, hey, maybe some of them will actually move to our web solutions as well.”
2023-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why would anyone make a website in 2023? Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena has some ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Make sure I get me know. After me and some of the people here, guinea pig eyes offer ourselves a guinea pigs to trans forever. But now, I mean, we have incredible resources dedicated to this. I'm confident it'll be a success. And yeah, for us, we've been on the internet for all of our lives. You just pile up domains for some reason. Yeah.”
2023-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why would anyone make a website in 2023? Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena has some ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I use Google Domains and I've had a number of domains there for over a decade. And why is that? Because Squarespace started very website first and then added domain second. It's very valid to get multiple domains on Squarespace now, but just due to inertia and Google Domains being a good product, I had left a couple of domains there. So I am extremely interested in making sure that a really good experience exists on the other side for all of our customers, myself, our employees who use this product. And we're familiar with it. And I just see it as a great opportunity.”
2023-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why would anyone make a website in 2023? Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena has some ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT