YouSaid · the spoken record

Ashton Kutcher

lines on the record: 95
first: 2016-10-17
most recent: 2016-10-17
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'm very, very, very, very loyal as an entrepreneur and probably stick with people and things when the writing's on the wall that it's not going to work. Because I have a sort of absolute optimist perspective on things. And it's really hard for me to pull the plug. And I'm so founder friendly that even sometimes when companies should just sell, I'm like, no, you have a vision for it. You want to do it. And if you fail doing it, then you fail trying to do the thing that you want to do. And I've sort of grown to realize that in some cases there's an outcome that's better with a reset, whether it's a reset with an employee that isn't working out where you go, listen, you're not thriving here and I want you to thrive as a person and I want you to thrive in your career. I need to like do a reset on that. It actually sometimes...”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Very last question, then we have to go. What mistake have you made as an entrepreneur? We argue that you're an entrepreneur. What mistake have you made? A lot of people listen are wanting to be entrepreneurs. And what did you do about it?”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a little, whenever you get into those, for me, consumer, it's like that consumer is my domain expertise. I am a consumer, so I can really try the product and understand it, which is one of my important thresholds.”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think there's a lot of opportunities in health. I'm not smart enough about it to really talk about it a lot, but I'm looking at a lot of things in the space. In the science is just in general, I think there's some extraordinary stuff that's happening. We invest in a company called Emerald Cloud Lab that built a laboratory in the cloud. It's almost like what AWS is. But for a scientist, so that all of their experiments can be done under perfect control. And so they have a software front end that scientists can use or laboratories or universities can use to affect whatever in vitro experiments they want to affect. And because there's so much falloff and capacity to create redundancy and whatever scientific experiments you're doing, this creates perfect controls every single time. So you have absolute redundancy. That's interesting. So we think that that's really exciting. And this company called Bench Lean that's doing a lot of genetic engineering stuff in a similar fashion.”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There you go. So because it knows so much about my personal context and my relationships, and I'd be hard-pressed to believe that Facebook at some point in time wouldn't launch one of these as well, given that it has such great contextual understanding of my relationships. So it's going to be interesting. I was thinking about putting the Google one in my office, and I've got the Echo at home. So we need to order things for the house or whatever the stuff on Prime, it's kind of wonderful having it in the house. And we have connected the lights in the TV and the whole shebang, which is a little annoying still there because it's not worked out. But I think that platform is going to be an extraordinary ecosystem for growth.”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and then now that Google's is out, I'm very interested to play with their version of it because what was it called?”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They're unbelievable. And I think that there's a whole ecosystem of use case that could be relative to that. And there's a whole other ecosystem of hardware that could be relative to that. There's no reason why I can't just say make the coffee and have my coffee be made. I shouldn't have to go do all the business or feed the dogs. And you should be able to just feed the, I think there's a lot of just sort of.”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's unbelievable. And I think obviously Google's just launched theirs, and I'm sure Apple has one in the pipeline because I think that you can't miss that market. I think that's going to be an extraordinary. Like, if there's anything from a hardware perspective that I've seen that could have the same value from an investor perspective as what the smartphone had and the app ecosystem had, it could be an ecosystem of applications relative to voice interface. I invested in a company called AI that sold early that was just building pipes for voice. And we saw it relatively early and thought about it with the mobile phone. But now that these devices exist.”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I'm not investing in any individual company. I'm an investor in Tesla on the public market. But the self-driving mode is extraordinary. Now, I liken it to a cruise control right now where you kind of always still have to pay attention. You really still.”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, I am every day every time Donald Trump tweets. But talk about very, well, let's finish up talking about other things you think are promising an investment. Are you self-driving car guy? I love it. Do you like the vertical thing I wrote about recently that Uber's thinking of a vertical helicopter?”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That would help the platform. Many people think that for sure. It's certainly more fun away that is very hard for it. It's also one of the most emotionally demented companies in Silicon Valley of so many, but they really are. There's so much emotionality in that company from the very beginning, which I think is...”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Trolls showed up, sort of beating everybody up, so then it became a platform where you couldn't have that honest conversation. And then, you know, Jack's come back in and is trying to do some things around media and actually embrace the media platform that it's become. But I don't know. I mean, that's another platform that maybe could really benefit from some anti-troll AI that would help the platform.”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Maybe, and I think Twitter sort of suffered from in the beginning, it was a really intimate environment that you could go to and get one-to-one, one to few, one-to-many feedback loops. And it was a conversation. It was an open faced conversation that was going on, which I thought made the platform extremely compelling. And then it got inundated by people just trying to sell you stuff and or by media organizations just trying to post links to drive you out. Now had deep linking existed then, they probably would have held a lot of that content on platform. And then I think that because they went public when they went public, they were sort of forced to try to drive revenue really early and then lost the product reps that were necessary. The platform became this non-intimate platform.”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He had time to even get the staff in order to actually build the product and then to roll out the products that are actually going to affect the platform in a positive manner. The most interesting product I've seen come out is the NFL product.”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So either they roll out some product things that really start fixing it quickly and ramp up their revenue or they're in deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep trouble. And it's sort of like... Interesting, like, so that Jack was in there, and then Ev Williams came in, and then Dick Costello came in. And now Jack is back in. And it takes with a company of that size, it takes like a year plus to actually start to see some of the products that are being developed by the new team to roll out, right? Like even since Jack's been in, did he, like, has he had enough time to get the staff? By the way, I haven't talked to him at all about this, so I don't know anything.”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Best known citizens. Contrary to popular belief, I've never had a dollar invested in Twitter. I wish I had, which was another thing that sort of spurred my investing. I was like, wait, if I can affect Audience growth, what's going to happen to Twitter? So it looks like everybody's kind of bowing out, and it looks like even the Salesforce board is pushing Mark to bow out as well. That leaves the company in a really sort of tricky position at this point.”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the most interesting thing, I actually think that content streaming with conversation associated with it, I think it's a pretty compelling product move. And so I think things like that will persist.”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Snapchat vertical video upright. I think there's some content within that vertical video distribution channel that could be somewhat interesting and differently consumable. Yeah, I mean, I think what Instagram's done with their stories as well, like, I think that lends itself. I think we're going to see a lot more higher quality live content over time in the digital domain. Because I think Facebook's putting a lot of energy and everything. What do you think about what you're doing w”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And lastly, on this thing, what about format, like things that are going to be created? Now, you were talking about you dump all the shows at once, you do different things. VR is too early, but is there a content format you see emerging, a different content format?”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The game has been up by everybody, and I think that for content creators is wonderful. And then I think that the unit economics are going to go into pseudo-limbo shift, right? They have to be thought about when you're negotiating your content deals up front. So, for example, with Netflix, they do buyouts, long-term buyouts relative to what you would get in syndication for various shows. And I think that that model is going to slowly work itself out. And I think that's where all the sort of agents and multiple players get involved and try to get tricky and bright. Right now they can make Enormous amounts of money selling through the old system. But as the new system works itself out, I think it'll just.”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So competition in some ways. Which I think is good. And I think we're seeing that happen. I think that a lot of the programming that's coming out on Netflix in particular is extraordinary programming because it's being built in this competitive base. And I actually think some of the programming on traditional television network, I mean, if you look at some of the content on HBO right now, like Game of Thrones is the most unbelievable thing that people have ever been able to watch in their living room that wasn't made as a movie. So I think that's a good thing right now.”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Content is dying. So, what happens to the holiday? I know you say there's not people running it, but there is a system here, just like there's a Wall Street system, just like there's a banking system, all of which are a car system right now, which is going to be under siege, is in the middle of being disrupted, obviously.”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, no, not necessarily last job because they can move to digital platforms and become content creators there. But I think they know that that model of distribution is on the decline. I mean, there's just absolute, it's like denying climate change. There's evidence. There's legitimate statistical data that suggests your platform, your way of distributing content is dying.”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would call them a dinosaur to their face. They know they're dinosaurs. There's not an executive that is at one of these traditional terrestrial television distribution platforms that doesn't think that in some way, shape or form.”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As a creator, more optionality. Like right now, I can still go to the dinosaurs and sell something to the dinosaur companies, and I can go to the newcomer.”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Those are all digital platforms. So that's done. Signed sealed, delivered, digital owns that. It's the long-form content play that right now is sort of in the balance, whether it's feature films going direct to digital or feature films that are going to get released into theater. And a lot of them are going day and date now, which I think there's this new deal with iPICs, right, that somebody just did a new deal with iPix that they're going to go day in date on all their content. So I think it's just.”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. But let's take VR off the table. I think everybody's way too overhyped on VR, and it's just not time to play there yet, right? Like, I think VR is still pretty far off in the distance. If you consider even just the number of headsets that are going to be in the market in the next X number. They're still unwieldy. It's just a problem. And, you know, you have to buy into this basic notion that people don't want the cut. People want the cut, right? Because the cut is what fast forwards you through a story. Stories since the beginning of time, since people sat around a campfire and told stories, they cut their story. They cut out the boring parts and move through the interesting parts. That's how you tell a story. And the minute that you're forced into a platform where you don't get it cut relative to your storytelling, all of a sudden you get into this sort of ambiguous short form zone that it has to be short in order to even engage an audience. So I think that there is a short form content. I mean, first of all, digital own shortform content.”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's not just a high quality program, it's how we're doing programming. I mean, you can talk about VR, you can talk about mobile-only shows, you can talk about, I mean, I have a 14-year-old that only watches on mobile. And I don't think he's uncommon. He doesn't like going to movies. He watches television of a sort.”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Then sell to the advertisers online and actually sell as an advertiser online to get distribution around their content, right? And so they're playing this little arbitrage game that will continue to go until it's dollar for dollar, eyeball for eyeball. And I think that we're virtually there. And then it just becomes incumbent upon the digital platforms to have the same confidence that Netflix has had to actually spend the money on high quality programming. And then it's game over.”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's abundantly clear that there's an open market now for selling your shows, right? So if you're not locked into some studio deal that demands that you go to that network, you can take your show to a myriad of buyers, whether it's Netflix like I did or whether it's Amazon or whether across the board there's an abundant number of content distributors that are starting to shift that market. And now that Netflix is spending billion plus on content creation, it's just pretty clear that the tide has already shifted. I met with Les Moombiz years and years ago and he said when advertising is dollar for dollar internet to television the whole thing goes upside down right and right now everybody's playing this like weird little arbitrage game with their television ad sales right and then their spending of a portion of that money to”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, that's wrong. All right. Come on. That's not true. Look at Netflix, right? That's a shift in tech that is drastically affected the market”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But it is true. And so, or at least it was when I was looking at it, they may have changed it. I don't know. So I'm not going to be an authority on. But that really bothered me because I went, wait, the first hack where these kids are showing whatever pictures they're showing to each other on this thing. The first hack that comes out, it's not going to be good for the company and it's not going to be good for the users. And it really, really scared me. And it wasn't until they launched true messaging product that I saw Evan out somewhere. I was like, okay, that's a good product. Yeah, I was moving a little nicer than that”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Actually, I just thought that the product was like it was a little crickety and a little rickety and a little not, it just wasn't beautiful or elegant. And I have this dumb personal pet peeve about that. And it really bugged me. And it wasn't until...”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, so I went on Twitter and I do this every six months. I went on Twitter and I said, what's the new app that you're using or what's the new product that you think is really cool? And there were two companies that like it was like the writing was on the wall. It was like there were 10 responses that said Snapchat and 10 responses that said Tinder. And I was like, whoa. Hold on. And so I started using Tinder's product and playing around with it. And I was like, this is amazing. The swipe left, swipe, right? Like just that simple product feature I thought was outstanding, like just a beautiful piece of product. And I knew Sean Radd because he had a company called Adley that he was wanted me to invest in before that I passed on. And so I reached out to Sean and was trying to invest in Tinder and had a deal done and then found out that they had come out of an incubator that was IAC owned. And so therefore they couldn't raise money. So we had term sheets that got tore up, which really bummed me out. And then I looked at.”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and I think that I actually think when AI bots get released to eliminate trolling, I think those markets will work a lot better.”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that was a college campus version of Secret. And so we've liked that space in general because we believe that there's a true market where people have public fear to talk about themselves in a very intimate way, but would be willing to do so in an anonymous format.”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think that there's a lot of work being done in AI. Actually, Jared Cohen from Jigsaw, Google, just had an article on Wired that was talking about launching AI to eliminate trolls from the web. And I think that once that technology gets deployed and works really well, I think that an anonymous chat or an anonymous social network could work. You know, it was sort of a shot that we were taking that, you know, Whisper was kind of percolating, secret was percolating, there were a couple of them that were percolating all at the same time. Yick-yak. And in fact, we had made an investment in a company years ago called Like a Little.”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that one didn't work out. Why? I don't know. I mean, I don't know. The anonymous space for chat and conversation, I think is something that maybe we want to have happen, but people aren't ready to have happen.”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Qualities in shifting market conditions. And what I realized is that Airbnb had that same quality, that people were still going to travel no matter what the market conditions were. And that in fact they would be looking for a more economic resourceful way.”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Somebody planted that in my ear at one point, and when I saw Airbnb growing the way that it was growing, I was like, this is totally counterintuitive. I don't know. I mean, who's going to open up their house desk ranger and let them sleep in their spare bedroom? And it was just the evidence was all over that was going to happen. And so I downloaded the app and started trying it. And it was amazing. It was like an extraordinary experience where I got more for less. And I think, you know, at the end of the day, when these companies work, they have that quality. Also, my partner at the time was Ron Berkel. And Ron had a lot of investments in the hotel space. So I understood the value. He coached me up on the value of investing in hotels and why they have some impervious”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Somebody put something into my ear that I think Peter Seal's probably established his foothold on around making investments in companies that have non-intuitive properties where whatever intuition is about one thing or another so happens to be not true. And that when you do that, there's green grass for days and days on end. Right.”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Very, very different founders, both equally passionate about their business. I think different tact towards the way they build their business, but I think they both have all of the qualities that it takes to sort of push through to the next one.”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I started realizing that the regulatory hair that it was like bizarre in many places, like in Denver, you couldn't have a black car within two miles or within like two city blocks of an establishment that was selling alcohol. It was like some weird random law that was on the books for generations. And I realized that, you know, this was just a monopoly trying to hold on to their ground. And there was enough momentum behind the company that I thought it could push through. Same thing goes for Airbnb. I mean, I think a lot of these...”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Eventually, I saw a product market fit. You know, I think we ended up investing like the B round. And it was pretty clear that there was a product market fit there and growth. And then I started looking at where the real hair on the company was, which is regulatory.”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Almost like the Uber X model that would win out. And it so happens that I think that that model is the model that ultimately wins out. But I think he started top down, built his brand with the Lux model and then moved down.”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yep, I thought it was interesting. There were a couple other people sort of toying with this ride-sharing idea, right? Where it was like, and I've been pitched a couple other companies that were list your car and share your vehicle. And I actually thought it would end up falling. I thought the person that would win that space would end up being one of these ride-hitching platforms and not necessarily a company that had these sort of high-end vehicles like the sort of, I didn't, I didn't kind of understand the Lux value in the space. I thought it would end up being one of these like”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Travis pitched me the company when he didn't have any investors very, very early. I didn't quite get it right off the bat.”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm not the CEO of it. I'm the chairman of the board. And my former executive director, Julie Corgia, is now the CEO of it, but it's still running and doing extremely well. And we're building a bunch of other tools in the space I can't really talk about.”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I saw a dateline special years ago on human trafficking I saw these like six and seven year old kids being sold for sex. And I thought it was repulsive. And as I looked out and tried to find groups that were actually doing something effective to solve it, there weren't very many. And there was certainly none doing it in the digital domain. And I saw a statistic that said that 75% of the transactions around sex are happening online. And I thought that in the same way that you can build a business online, the only way you're going to disintermediate that business is to actually go online and fight it online. But there wasn't really any group that had any kind of technical domain expertise relative to that area that would be able to do anything. So we built one.”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so we built a technical task force and worked with a myriad of tech companies to do it. And then we designed a product with a company called Digital Reasoning that helped us build the product. And now we've deployed it and it's doing extremely well.”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT