YouSaid · the spoken record

Chris Anderson

lines on the record: 144
first: 2017-07-05
most recent: 2017-07-05
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

“So we had a book. We followed the instructions of the book. But that was it. We weren't doing anything innovative. So what was new about the Maker movement in 2007 was the key year in the Maker movement. A bunch of things happened that year. You know, first of all, on all those things, we're standing on the shoulders of the web and communities and open source, et cetera. But you had things like Arduino, which was an open source computing board that allowed you to use your coding skills, but actually move things in the physical world. There was 3D printing that allowed you to fabricate things you couldn't do on your own. You started to see these sensors in like a Wii controller, and in my case, it was Lego Mindstorms that you allowed to measure the real world with the extraordinary little chips that could measure things. There was Make Magazine, there was the Maker Fair. And behind it all”
2017-07-05 · Masters in Business · Chris Anderson: Don’t Confuse Valuation With Tech Adaptation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the fundamental difference there was not just the cost of the goods, because they were already pretty cheap. It's just that when you and I were tinkering in our bedrooms or workshops or basements, et cetera, we were essentially re-all doing the same thing. We're all doing the same kits, but we weren't doing anything new, innovative, and we weren't building on other people's work because we didn't have an internet back then.”
2017-07-05 · Masters in Business · Chris Anderson: Don’t Confuse Valuation With Tech Adaptation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So again, I didn't coin anything, I didn't invent anything. What I saw, though, is that there was a smart people were starting to act in a certain way, and I just created a framework for it.”
2017-07-05 · Masters in Business · Chris Anderson: Don’t Confuse Valuation With Tech Adaptation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In app purchases being the perfect example. So today, freemium is the canonical business model of mobile apps, which is to say most apps are free, especially games, et cetera. And there's all these in-app purchases that include...”
2017-07-05 · Masters in Business · Chris Anderson: Don’t Confuse Valuation With Tech Adaptation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I have to admit that I didn't do anything. I mean, it was happening around me. There was a bazillion great entrepreneurs, Fred Wilson from Union Square Venture. I think it was the person who deserves the most credit for popularizing Freemium. But all I did is...”
2017-07-05 · Masters in Business · Chris Anderson: Don’t Confuse Valuation With Tech Adaptation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. So in worlds where you have non zero marginal costs, you can give away 1%, and you must sell 99, where you have near zero marginal costs, you can give away 99% to sell one. And just that notion that there was an underlying economic model behind the long tail that drove the long tail led me to free. So freemium, you're correct, is the business model around it. When I wrote it, freemium was kind of starting to be known in kind of business-to-business software, et cetera. It was just before the App Store and mobile. And you could start to see the beginnings of it. It was mostly in web games that you were seeing Freemium as a model.”
2017-07-05 · Masters in Business · Chris Anderson: Don’t Confuse Valuation With Tech Adaptation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Close to zero. So, what are the economics of zero cost markets? These are markets where essentially free is an attainable price. What are the economics of free? Well, there weren't any. Economics by definition is monetary economics. Non-monetary economics are something else, psychology. Sociology, right. Sociology, exactly. But what if you applied economic principles to try to create an economic framework for free to treat it the same way you would treat monetary markets, then you could explain not only how things could be free, but how maybe you would use free as the way, as a form of marketing, that you would basically give things away for free. And that, unlike in traditional market, where you can give out, you know, you can get out free tastes of brownies, but not many.”
2017-07-05 · Masters in Business · Chris Anderson: Don’t Confuse Valuation With Tech Adaptation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You've articulated the thesis of those very well, but let me suggest that they're more connected than you may suggest. Okay, so if infinite shelf space creates infinite choice, And therefore, we can measure people's actual likes and dislikes in a world of infinite choice, then how do you get infinite shelf space? Well, the only way you can get infinite shelf space is the cost of shelf space, the marginal cost is zero.”
2017-07-05 · Masters in Business · Chris Anderson: Don’t Confuse Valuation With Tech Adaptation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like print journalism. Yeah, I know exactly. So, I mean, just to be clear, I've written three books that are all basically the same book. So the long tail. Hold on a second.”
2017-07-05 · Masters in Business · Chris Anderson: Don’t Confuse Valuation With Tech Adaptation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the things that wired as a bully pulpit, I guess, for the technology stories, one of the things that the editors can do is to be a public persona and to do their own writing. Unlike most media, which is American media, which is required to be impartial and dispassionate and not take a point of view, the economist and Wired shared one thing, which is that they do have a point of view. They have a worldview. The economist won famously is British liberalism, which is free markets and free people. Wired basically took the same approach, but then had this evangelism for technology. So the notion of being evangelical, of being a preacher, which meant also being a doer, was kind of core to the Wired Credo. And so the reason I did all these side things and did the research that led to the long tail and free and makers was that that was the hands-on, that was the doing. I mean, that's what Silicon Valley is all about.”
2017-07-05 · Masters in Business · Chris Anderson: Don’t Confuse Valuation With Tech Adaptation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I did. Well, I mean, I think I was, you know, obviously I had a good staff. And, you know, my general philosophy on leading teams is to kind of point them in a direction, set some guidelines of what success looks like. Meas”
2017-07-05 · Masters in Business · Chris Anderson: Don’t Confuse Valuation With Tech Adaptation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I'm married and have five kids, and a lot of hobbies because they ended up starting a drone company on the side of the Maker Dad and then DIY Drugs. You had a lot of different things.”
2017-07-05 · Masters in Business · Chris Anderson: Don’t Confuse Valuation With Tech Adaptation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Awards in the industry? I think what we did is we believed in the underlying story. The reason I left the economist, which is the best gig ever, by the way, was that Wired had changed my life. As a physicist sitting there nerding away on these networks, you know, not believing they were any more than physics, wired opened my eyes to the potential technology to change the world. I know it's very kind of cliche to say that, but that's what it did. And so when I had the opportunity to run Wired, I said, well, this is the biggest story of my lifetime. The ability to be there in the middle of Silicon Valley and tell this story is, you know, that story is not done. And all I did is just kept the faith.”
2017-07-05 · Masters in Business · Chris Anderson: Don’t Confuse Valuation With Tech Adaptation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I didn't. The call credit goes to Connie Mass. It was clearly it needed to be done. And just years went by and valuations kind of stabilized and appropriately brought it back.”
2017-07-05 · Masters in Business · Chris Anderson: Don’t Confuse Valuation With Tech Adaptation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe 98 and didn't work, filed again, didn't work, had taken out some finance, some debt on anticipation that it would go public, and ended up having to kind of”
2017-07-05 · Masters in Business · Chris Anderson: Don’t Confuse Valuation With Tech Adaptation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, if you wanted to do Again, before my time, but yeah, so Wired was sort of before the dot-com bubble, there were previous bubbles, and Wired was the hottest thing around in the late 90s, basically created a lot of online media. So like Apache, the web servers used was actually created in the wired offices. The first banner ad was on Wired. A lot of the things we take for granted today were actually being pioneered in the laboratories that were wired. And they filed to go public. Wired?”
2017-07-05 · Masters in Business · Chris Anderson: Don’t Confuse Valuation With Tech Adaptation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because there was something real there. People wanted what we were making. And the fact that it was cheaper only accelerated the adoption.”
2017-07-05 · Masters in Business · Chris Anderson: Don’t Confuse Valuation With Tech Adaptation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly Yeah, no, Dan's super smart, and the book's great. I think when you look back now at that decade, it's almost impossible to see the bust. When you look at the underlying adoption curves and data curves, et cetera, it's weird. I mean, you can obviously see it on NASDAQ. In the 90s?”
2017-07-05 · Masters in Business · Chris Anderson: Don’t Confuse Valuation With Tech Adaptation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Consensus was that Wall Street had financed an extraordinary infrastructure buildout which made fiber capacity super cheap, and this was the best thing ever for restarting, that suddenly the cost, the barriers, the cost of entry was very low. Thank you. Thank you, Wall Street, and that we would just now build for the next two years without the financial microscope and see where it goes.”
2017-07-05 · Masters in Business · Chris Anderson: Don’t Confuse Valuation With Tech Adaptation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No I was actually in China during the bubble during the dot-com bubble, so I can't really say what the collective view was, but I do think that the underlying belief that there was something fundamental going on here with the networks was never doubted. Now, there's, of course, how the internet works, there's the layers, right? There's the hardware layer with a fiber optic cables. And then there's like, you know, then the software layers and content layers. A lot of the valuations were at the higher level of the content. And the notion was the content was ephemeral. It would come and go. But the underlying notion of connecting the world was really important. And so, you know, I think when I got there, the...”
2017-07-05 · Masters in Business · Chris Anderson: Don’t Confuse Valuation With Tech Adaptation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For me, it was super easy. So I would say that, and I think you're going to be talking to Mark Andreessen as well, those of us who were there then never doubted that the internet was real. We understood the distinction between the stock market valuations and the underlying technology.”
2017-07-05 · Masters in Business · Chris Anderson: Don’t Confuse Valuation With Tech Adaptation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. So I think that they'll forgive me for saying that this is a little bit of a kind of a post facto explanation. I think what really happened at the time is there was a new printing process. This is cool. Let's play five. It was a five-color printing process and was very expensive and some printing plants that invested in these new kind of five-color processes were looking for some examples to show them off. And just basically that like a fancy ink, like fluorescent ink became available affordably, and so they took advantage of it.”
2017-07-05 · Masters in Business · Chris Anderson: Don’t Confuse Valuation With Tech Adaptation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I can take no credit for that whatsoever. That was the vision of the original founding team, Louis Rosetto, Jane Metcalfe, and John Plunkett, who was the original designer. And their inspiration at the time, the dear friends right now. As a matter of fact, every time there's a new editor, Nick Thompson from the New Yorkers, now the editor, and we all had dinner together, we always kind of infuse the new editor with the creation myth and all that. But the idea, you know, if you ask them with a story, they'll say, well, you know, this was the emergence of computers. And so print, ink has got reflective properties, but screens have emissive properties. Sure. So pixels emit light. And so we wanted to, we want to use an aesthetic that seemed emittive. Like it glowed. And a lot of the page.”
2017-07-05 · Masters in Business · Chris Anderson: Don’t Confuse Valuation With Tech Adaptation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About a year later, after I started, got all this data, then you maybe remember this AOL, then people, academics started saying, hey, there's some interesting data here. Let's ask for it. AOL released a bunch of data and anonymized it, but didn't anonymize it well enough. It got deanonymized privacy issues and then became impossible to get data again. So there was like a window of about two years where you could have done the long tail, and I just happened to be there then.”
2017-07-05 · Masters in Business · Chris Anderson: Don’t Confuse Valuation With Tech Adaptation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, well, no, because typically the academics weren't looking at that because that was considered sort of cultural and trivial. The companies themselves were just starting to bring up the data scientists and the economists was quite early. And journalists just typically weren't quantitative. Weren't method. So there was a brief window if you asked nicely. And, you know, science NDAs, et cetera, that you could actually get that data. And so I got the data from places like it was Rhapsody, I think it was music service, his original one. But I also got sort of scrubbed data from eBay and elsewhere. I just started analyzing it, and the long tail just popped right out of it. It was clearly obvious there was a kind of a power law distribution and that the size of the tail, depending on how you split it, it was about the size of the head, which suggested that there was a submerged marketplace out there beyond confidence, beyond hips. The big sellers. And what's interesting is that...”
2017-07-05 · Masters in Business · Chris Anderson: Don’t Confuse Valuation With Tech Adaptation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Indeed. Indeed. So I needed some numbers to crunch. And I was thinking, you know, I was like, okay, look, I believe that this is the seeds of the 21st century being formed in the Googles and Amazon's and eBays around me”
2017-07-05 · Masters in Business · Chris Anderson: Don’t Confuse Valuation With Tech Adaptation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, things like the long tail or drones, which I do right now. So basically there's two elements. One of them is that it's just exciting, you know, it's just shiny and exciting and my heart sings and all that kind of stuff. But that's necessary but not sufficient. What's sufficient is that it also has to align with my worldview of what works, this sort of notion of openness or emergence or the fact that it benefits from democratization. So my first book The Long Tale, I mean an article as well, I mean the way that happened was not, it wasn't an idea. What happened is that I'm sitting here, you know, it's 2001, 2002. I'm a physicist in Silicon Valley, right? I'm now running a magazine. I'm not really trained as a journalist. I had a staffful brilliant narrative storytellers, but I was just kind of a nerd with number cruncher.”
2017-07-05 · Masters in Business · Chris Anderson: Don’t Confuse Valuation With Tech Adaptation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's at the very lowest level. But in terms of the content itself, the fact that it is truly democratic, a meritocratic system, that is actually the more important rule. And that's why we work so hard to protect the openness of the Internet is because the emergent properties come from that openness.”
2017-07-05 · Masters in Business · Chris Anderson: Don’t Confuse Valuation With Tech Adaptation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. So that's the value element, but the governance structure, the fact that it was not centrally controlled, I mean, there's some trivial central control.”
2017-07-05 · Masters in Business · Chris Anderson: Don’t Confuse Valuation With Tech Adaptation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The notion of the collective voice. So my first survey on the internet was entitled The Accidental Superhighway. And the notion of things happening by accident suggests that really they're happening by nature. that this emerged. It was an emergent problem of the universe, exactly. And the fact that it was emergent rather than synthetic meant that it was more real.”
2017-07-05 · Masters in Business · Chris Anderson: Don’t Confuse Valuation With Tech Adaptation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was, I think, my faith in technology was completely unshaken. As a physicist, you basically think in terms of like, you know, what's like fundamental in the world? And there's something about the internet that just struck me as fundamental. It struck me as in the same category as democracy and evolution. It's kind of one of these truisms. And as a matter of fact, when I was at the economist, they had these things called surveys, which are these big, like 16-page special features. It's the only time you get to use your name as an author.”
2017-07-05 · Masters in Business · Chris Anderson: Don’t Confuse Valuation With Tech Adaptation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On the cheap. They were available. And thirdly, my year on years, I had a really low baseline, exactly the next year. I was just going to blow through my numbers.”
2017-07-05 · Masters in Business · Chris Anderson: Don’t Confuse Valuation With Tech Adaptation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you can't succeed in that environment, secondly, a lot of talent had come to Silicon Valley during the boom, and they were available, so I was able to hire really good people. On the cheap.”
2017-07-05 · Masters in Business · Chris Anderson: Don’t Confuse Valuation With Tech Adaptation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Precisely. So I was betting that the internet was real and that the dot-com bust was about Wall Street, not about Silicon Valley. And as you say, when you buy at the bottom, you get three wonderful things. First of all, your failures are cloaked by the marketplace's failures.”
2017-07-05 · Masters in Business · Chris Anderson: Don’t Confuse Valuation With Tech Adaptation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it was basically created this sort of aesthetic and philosophical foundations of the internet is going to be big. It's like the biggest thing since electricity. That was kind of the wired concept. I took over in 2001, so this is after the stock, after the dot-com bust, and six weeks before September 11th.”
2017-07-05 · Masters in Business · Chris Anderson: Don’t Confuse Valuation With Tech Adaptation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was originally, and then I went to China to run the Bureau there and was a China from just before the handover of Hong Kong in, I guess that was 97 to after WTO in 2001. Fascinating time to be in China. I got to sort of see Mother China emerge. And that was in New York where you and I spent time together and then was recruited from there to my conduct and asked to run wired. So the only publication I would leave The Economist for.”
2017-07-05 · Masters in Business · Chris Anderson: Don’t Confuse Valuation With Tech Adaptation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Physics Laboratory, and the first big data was physics data. Supercomputers using accelerator data. And so you really only had, so most people sort of said, well, what do I got here? I got statistical skills. I can crunch big data. I'll go to Wall Street to be a quant. That was the natural one. A lot of people went and did that. Go for the money. Go for the money. Some of us said, well, okay, yeah, we can do that. But there's also this internet thing, which seems kind of interesting. The time it was really just a network to connect.”
2017-07-05 · Masters in Business · Chris Anderson: Don’t Confuse Valuation With Tech Adaptation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The LHC and CERN in Switzerland wait in line for like 20 years and maybe your experiment would be a success and maybe it wouldn't. You could take the skills that you learned in physics and apply them elsewhere. So the skills were, when you think about it, the internet was invented in the physics world to connect labs. The web was invented at CERN.”
2017-07-05 · Masters in Business · Chris Anderson: Don’t Confuse Valuation With Tech Adaptation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About 30 years, had to do, it's kind of an interesting path. So physics in the late 80s, early 90s, which is when I was there, we were all inspired by the great physicists of the 20th century, the pheromon. Richard Feynman, etc. And that really was the noble science. Unfortunately, the quest of physics was to get closer and closer to the Big Bang, to understand the origins of the universe and closer to the Big Bang means higher energies, which means bigger particle accelerators, which means more money. And eventually, we just scaled out of government budgets. And so there were no more particle accelerators in the US that were going to be built. And so you had two choices. You could either wait in line for...”
2017-07-05 · Masters in Business · Chris Anderson: Don’t Confuse Valuation With Tech Adaptation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I ran various bureaus, but it was mostly writing, as is the case for most people, the economist. I mean, you're absolutely right. There's a straight line from physics to drones and measuring the world and analyzing it, et cetera. The wiggly in-between bits, which consists of a...”
2017-07-05 · Masters in Business · Chris Anderson: Don’t Confuse Valuation With Tech Adaptation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Indeed, indeed, and it's not fair to Contin. But when you're in the elevators of what at the time was four times square and supermodels up and down, you ask yourself, how did I get here? It does require some explaining.”
2017-07-05 · Masters in Business · Chris Anderson: Don’t Confuse Valuation With Tech Adaptation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is. It is. In its big dimensions, it doesn't make a lot of sense. I went from physics to ultimately ended up working for a fashion company. It's Conde Nast, but fashion advertising is the main revenue. Okay, but...”
2017-07-05 · Masters in Business · Chris Anderson: Don’t Confuse Valuation With Tech Adaptation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I didn't actually study either of them properly. My degree is in computational physics, but it just so happened that in writing up my resume, I have taken a class in science journalism, which at the time seemed the only link I had to journalism, so I stuck it on my resume. But no, my degree's in computational.”
2017-07-05 · Masters in Business · Chris Anderson: Don’t Confuse Valuation With Tech Adaptation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How to adapt? It's worth noting you're in Berkeley, which is the nicest part of the Bay Area Do say so. Yeah. It's a little”
2017-07-05 · Masters in Business · Chris Anderson: Don’t Confuse Valuation With Tech Adaptation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source