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Gary Liu

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33
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2016-02-26
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2016-02-26
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  1. “A great one to finish on. We are trying very, very much to create the best content discovery in the world, also have the best conversation in the world. That's the intersection where Dig sits. And we do think that when we get there, we are going to become, and I'm going to use the term that Sam Lesson used many years ago. He said that people have their stutter step apps. These are the apps that when you are in between things, you will always go to. That's your default app when you're in between things. And we think that if we get best kind of discovery and best conversation and we find the intersection between those two, then it can become that stutter step app and that's where we want to be in five years.”

    2016-02-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Digg CEO, Gary Liu on The Rebirth Of Digg & The Evolution Of Content · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “My favorite book, I'm a huge JD Salinger fan, you know, the small canon of JD Salinger books. And I think my favorite there is probably Frannie and Zoe because there's this incredible footnote that effectively ties together the entire JD Salinger world, introduces Seymour Glass into the Franny story, and then eventually you get to tie everything together with Catcher the Rye. It's just a fascinating short footnote that it makes the book phenomenal.”

    2016-02-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Digg CEO, Gary Liu on The Rebirth Of Digg & The Evolution Of Content · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “I think both. I think there is absolutely a place for both. There's a need for both. Breaking news starting in short form, going into long form, and then there are definitely plenty of investigative deep dive topics that can really only be covered properly in long form.”

    2016-02-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Digg CEO, Gary Liu on The Rebirth Of Digg & The Evolution Of Content · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Honestly, it's Gmail. I don't know how often you get that answer. I use Gmail as my primary productivity tool. I set my Gmail up with multiple inboxes, all of my action items and tasks go into one of those with a tag. So I use it as my getting things done productivity tool within Gmail.”

    2016-02-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Digg CEO, Gary Liu on The Rebirth Of Digg & The Evolution Of Content · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Right now, I'm trying to introduce everyone I meet to Ben Sung, who is a partner at Primary Ventures here in New York City. He also was the founder of a series of social sites back when, including Asian Avenue, Black Planet. And he just is an incredible founder. He's an operator that became a VC. And even as a VC continues to have these incredible ideas that he builds, including coupon, which is the massive South Korean company that just got, I think, a billion dollars worth of investment.”

    2016-02-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Digg CEO, Gary Liu on The Rebirth Of Digg & The Evolution Of Content · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “One of my favorites right now is John Russell, who's the Asia editor for TechCrunch every week publishes an Asia Tech News Review as a newsletter. I actually really love that newsletter. I highly recommend it because most tech blogs don't cover Asia properly. John happens to be embedded in Asia and knows the market really, really well. It's a fascinating marketplace, and I think he's the best at distilling what's going on there.”

    2016-02-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Digg CEO, Gary Liu on The Rebirth Of Digg & The Evolution Of Content · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “But here's a more fun story. When I was at Spotify, I had the opportunity to watch an incredible scene where large Orok, the drummer from Italica, Aunt Champarker, one of the founders of Napster, kind of made up on stage. And what happened that evening was we were at a launch party for Spotify with Larzorg. And I sat next to Larzoric as he filled a thermos with some kind of hard liquor and invited me to go outside to drink on the street, which I politely declined, but that was a great moment in my career, I think.”

    2016-02-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Digg CEO, Gary Liu on The Rebirth Of Digg & The Evolution Of Content · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “So recently we had a partnership with Blue Apron. We love Blue Apron as a service. And so we actually created a page that taught you how to cook a perfect stick. So we actually created a bunch of gifts that showed you step by step how to get your steak perfectly medium rare. And by the way, that should be the only way that you eat steak. And so we made sure that it was a very, very easy step-by-step gift-led process to teach you how to cook that steak. And that, we thought, was a piece of content that people would actually care about anyway. It wasn't a long form piece of content about investigative journalism or about some, you know, uncovering some secret of the internet world. But it was something that added value and Blue April was more than happy to partner with us on a piece of content like that.”

    2016-02-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Digg CEO, Gary Liu on The Rebirth Of Digg & The Evolution Of Content · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “That's exactly right. So our ant product right now is relatively simple. On our homepage, and we really care a lot about what goes up on our homepage. We're very careful about it. We actually go out and search for some of the best products, services, educational platforms that as dig editors and dig employees, we would want to use. So in the same vein as Dig introduces you to great articles and content, we want to introduce you to great services and products. So once a day, we would choose one of these products and services and we will promote it on our homepage. And a lot of times it does click directly through to a landing page, but we work with the advertiser or the brand to make sure that that landing page is actually telling you something that you didn't know before, that's actually adding value to your day. Or we will create the piece of content that the click-through lands on.”

    2016-02-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Digg CEO, Gary Liu on The Rebirth Of Digg & The Evolution Of Content · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “What high quality content, there has to be a way of allowing this content and the needs of an advertiser to meet so that brands can actually co-create quality pieces of content that otherwise a user would want to read or watch anyway. And it just happens to be brought to you or sponsored by or in partnership with a brand, brand X, Y, and”

    2016-02-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Digg CEO, Gary Liu on The Rebirth Of Digg & The Evolution Of Content · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Now that iOS has built it in as a native feature in the new iOS build. So the app dollars are disappearing because of that because the inventory is going down. Ads are not showing and people are actually not willing to give away their data for the sake of highly high quality targeted ads, it turns out. And that was an assumption for a period of time. How do publishers and media deal with it? I'm not sure there is a correct answer to this yet, right? There are a lot of people talking about this. Effectively, every single conference I go to now that has anything to do with media, this is one of the key topics of discussion. The one answer that at this point seems repetitive, but really is the direction that the industry is going in is branded content. So what you would call native advertising. It's the realization that, okay, people want content.”

    2016-02-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Digg CEO, Gary Liu on The Rebirth Of Digg & The Evolution Of Content · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “I do think that we'd be naive in the publishing and media world not to be concerned about this disappearing ad dollar. So let's actually address that first and then I'll talk about how Dig is approaching the problem. So the biggest issue at this point is ad blockers. For a while, publishers and media were hoping that ad blocking a niche product. And it turned out that that's not the case. Deservedly so, our audiences, the general public, they want a great user experience when consuming content. Now there is a value gap between content creation and content consumption because of the internet everyone assumes that we should be able to get content for free without really thinking about the cost of creating high quality content that you would actually want to read and consume. This was the exact same problem that we addressed at Spotify for music. This is happening in media as well and the rest of media as well. So Applockers are here and I think that they are absolutely here to stay especially”

    2016-02-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Digg CEO, Gary Liu on The Rebirth Of Digg & The Evolution Of Content · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Helping them discover quality content, we had earned the right to go back to them and say, hey, what should be next? Overwhelmingly, what they wanted was to be able to talk and have thoughtful civil conversations about this content, these articles of these videos that we are surfacing to them. And so we went about trying to build the right conversational platform. And our first stab at it is what we call Dig Dialogue. What that is, is it's a every day we have one conversation on Dig. that is anchored on one great piece of content. Our product itself, the actual conversational platform, is built to feel much more like a live chat than a commenting system where you have to refresh. And we pre-moderate just to make sure, at least for now, that the conversation, the content is thoughtful, is civil, is the kind of dialogue that our users are demanding of us and from the community and really, in our opinion.”

    2016-02-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Digg CEO, Gary Liu on The Rebirth Of Digg & The Evolution Of Content · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Learn something in some degree, and this is very qualitative and becoming a better person. That's sort of the lens through which we're looking at the content world. And we still think that people haven't quite figured out what quality content is. Companies haven't quite figured out how quality content discovery should work. And we're trying to build the right product there. On top of that, and what is relatively new to Dig or this version of Dig is that we want to reintroduce quality conversation into the platform. Comments are really, really quite difficult on the internet. I think we all know that. We're watching some of our favorite publishers turn off commenting sections or at least take a break from their commenting sections because it's highly unpredictable or actually when it is predictable, it's predictably bad. And so when we were looking at our product and talking to our users, and we felt like after three years of”

    2016-02-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Digg CEO, Gary Liu on The Rebirth Of Digg & The Evolution Of Content · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “You're right. Yeah, Jonah's done an incredible job with that team of going from just listicles to really being on the forefront of all three of these categories. They really do have great breaking news journalists. They have obviously phenomenal social viral content, which is where they started. And now they're cranking out some incredible quality long-form content. So the way we're looking at it is it's not really publisher specific for us, right? We're going to take all the publishers effectively equally and by all the publishers, I mean just even individuals who are publishing on medium or publishing through personal blogs. Anyone who is creating incredible content, it doesn't have to be long form, but certainly long form as a format lends itself to quality. It can be shorter form, but we really do care about content that once you read it or once you consume it or once you watch a video, you're leaving that piece of content having”

    2016-02-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Digg CEO, Gary Liu on The Rebirth Of Digg & The Evolution Of Content · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “No, that's a great question. The new sector is extremely crowded and generally speaking when we, and by we, I mean the Dig team, look at the new sector, at the marketplace that we're in, we break down products and platforms in three different ways. We have breaking news. We have social and viro content, and then we have quality content discovery. And we believe that we sit in that third bucket. And what we're not trying to do, we're not trying to replace the folks that are in breaking news, and we're not trying to replace the folks that are in social bio content. We're trying to make the best possible product for quality content discovery.”

    2016-02-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Digg CEO, Gary Liu on The Rebirth Of Digg & The Evolution Of Content · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “And then and very, very talented, arguably one of the best editorial teams in the media business reading through all of those and deciding what articles and what pieces of content really was good enough to make it to the Dig homepage. And that is actually what the product is today with some small tweaks. That's what we have as Dig.com today.”

    2016-02-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Digg CEO, Gary Liu on The Rebirth Of Digg & The Evolution Of Content · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Together. And originally, the idea was that, okay, we're going to cut out all of the fat and we're going to make dig.com. Once again, we're going to rebuild it as a simple effective way to find the most interesting content online. The original idea really was to use just data. And as Mike and his team were refactoring news.me, the data infrastructure that news.me had at the time and rebuilding the front end of Dig.com, what they realized was that data just wasn't quite enough. And so we hired a very talented editorial director, David Wiener, to come and look at the content that outdated layer was saying, hey, you should pay attention to this. And very quickly, we came to this kind of hybrid, which was an incredible amount of data telling us about the velocity and the shareability and whatnot of all this content that we had access to.”

    2016-02-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Digg CEO, Gary Liu on The Rebirth Of Digg & The Evolution Of Content · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “and decided to buy the Dig brand. Now at that point there was a company being built within Betaworks called News.me. It had originally come out of the New York Times R&D team and then landed at BetaWorks with an incredible lead engineer who is now the CTO and really the founder of this version of Dig. His name is Mike Young. And he was building a product that was incredibly simple. Now you will have heard of this concept by now because this is what Nuzzle is. You enter in your Twitter account and you get a newsletter that tells you all of the top stories or all the top pieces of content that are being shared through your Twitter network. That's what news.me was. So there was an incredible layer of data that Mike and the news.me team had already assembled. And so what BetaWorks did was they took the Dig brand and they took news.me and they kind of mashed it.”

    2016-02-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Digg CEO, Gary Liu on The Rebirth Of Digg & The Evolution Of Content · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Did an incredible job over two years 2010 to 2012 to try and stabilize the product and stabilize the community. By the end of 2012, what happened was that DIG was really split apart into kind of three different deals. The first was that a lot of the folks, the people and the tech went to Washington Post. And then the second was that a bunch of the patents went to LinkedIn. And then finally the brand, Dig brand itself, the URL was sold to BetaWorks. John and his partners thought that, hey, there was still quite a bit of brand equity.”

    2016-02-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Digg CEO, Gary Liu on The Rebirth Of Digg & The Evolution Of Content · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “But it really was that. And a lot of people at that point decided to look for an alternative. And one of the things was that this was actually paired at the same time as the front page becoming less and less relevant because there was suddenly this group of super users that could effectively control what articles made it to the front page. And the community kind of lost trust in the front page being a truly democratic way of discovering great content on the internet. And so all of those things together made a lot of folks look for alternatives. And at that point, the alternative was Reddit. Alexis was very, very vocal about the changes that were going on at DIG and he was offering his product and his platform and the democratic nature, the truly democratic nature of his community as an alternative. And a lot of people left for that. So that happened.”

    2016-02-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Digg CEO, Gary Liu on The Rebirth Of Digg & The Evolution Of Content · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “It really was Dig version 4 that was a launch in the summer of 2010 where DIG effectively fundamentally changed as a product. It wasn't just a user experience change. It wasn't just a branding change. It was the functionality and it was the kind of community that Dig seemed to want to keep with the features that they launched. First of all, the release itself was slightly unstable. I remember that it was unstable. A lot of things just didn't quite work the way that they were supposed to. And it did for the community, of which you and I were a part of, it felt slightly tone deaf, unfortunately. The reality was that a bunch of features were removed that people really cared about and introduced a bunch of social features that no one really wanted. Now, I'm speaking from a fan and a community member's point of view, which is a little bit odd for me now that I'm CEO of the company to look back at history like this.”

    2016-02-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Digg CEO, Gary Liu on The Rebirth Of Digg & The Evolution Of Content · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “I think he was 2010. He was right around, or maybe a little bit after the V4 launch in 2010. Let the company through twenty twelve. And then now is the CEO of Pro.com, which by the way is also another phenomenal product.”

    2016-02-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Digg CEO, Gary Liu on The Rebirth Of Digg & The Evolution Of Content · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Five different people who were involved in Dig at the time, you'll probably get 10 different opinions about what exactly happened.”

    2016-02-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Digg CEO, Gary Liu on The Rebirth Of Digg & The Evolution Of Content · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “So Dig really invented the wisdom of the crowd as a way to organize content. Dig history is fascinating. Founded, I think, in 2004 by Kevin and Jay, the old version of Dig, and had an incredible run through really about six years until 2010. It really was, like you said, the darling of the internet. It was the front page of the internet. And during that six-year run was when the term, the dig effect was coined where publishers all around the world actually could see in their data when their articles hit the dig front page because it would just drive an immense amount of traffic. And it really was, I mean, back then, we didn't quite have the same vernacular as we do right now, but Dig was the viral and social content king without a doubt. What happened was in 2010, and by the way, if you ask three different people or four”

    2016-02-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Digg CEO, Gary Liu on The Rebirth Of Digg & The Evolution Of Content · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Trying to figure out how best to monetize. And so a lot of lessons about efficiency and productivity and business planning that came out of my AOL stint. And then finally at Spotify, certainly in the US, and you can make an argument for even globally at that point in 2011, it wasn't scaled. It wasn't the ubiquitous brand that Spotify is today. There was a clear product market fit, but definitely we needed to figure out how to generate revenue, very specifically for me on my side of the business, the revenue for the free service. And so there was a lot of movement, a lot of growth. I got to actually be part of a startup as it went through hypergrowth, actual, that scale.”

    2016-02-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Digg CEO, Gary Liu on The Rebirth Of Digg & The Evolution Of Content · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “We're thinking about whether they go to a small startup or they go join Google for a couple of years. And there seems to be sort of a stigma of folks that feel like they have an entrepreneur's spirit going to a big company like Google now. I do recommend that folks always think a little bit more critically about what it means to go to Google and at the very least know exactly what you are trying to build for the rest of your career. So that's sort of Google and I think I took a lot of lessons from that. When I was at Patch and AOL, it wasn't quite working. Patch hadn't figured out a business model, yet it had scaled the company. So Patch was 1500 people when I was there. And unfortunately, we had not been generating material revenue yet. And we were trying to figure that out. And so it was a fascinating process of taking what was already a high cost organization in a business that was very, very difficult, which is local news.”

    2016-02-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Digg CEO, Gary Liu on The Rebirth Of Digg & The Evolution Of Content · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “I definitely hope that I've taken some of those principles to dig. Otherwise, I feel like it would be a serious misuse of the luck that I've had along the way. The funny thing is at all of these three companies that you mentioned, Google AOL and Spotify, I entered into those companies. I joined them during very different phases of each company's growth. So at Google, I joined when it was already massively scaled, obviously working. They'd figured out not only a very clear product market fit, but also an incredibly profitable business model. And it really already at that point was a North Star of HighTech companies should operate. And I was very, very fortunate to start my tech career there because I got to see what the rest of us for the rest of our lives really are trying to build. They're trying to chase after what Google was able to accomplish in a bunch of different ways. And I may sound a little bit like a Google Homer, but that's the reality of it. And that's what I always tell folks.”

    2016-02-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Digg CEO, Gary Liu on The Rebirth Of Digg & The Evolution Of Content · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “And like you said earlier, very recently transition into the CEO role as Andrew moved back to being a full-time partner at Betaworks and also the chairman of the big board.”

    2016-02-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Digg CEO, Gary Liu on The Rebirth Of Digg & The Evolution Of Content · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “Absolutely. I was a dig user early, early on, again, back in the Kevin and Jay days like you. And I was also one of the folks that was really, really sad in 2010 when the entire community fled for a bunch of reasons. And I went with them, to be very honest, who read it about, I think it was in late 2013, a colleague of mine at Spotify reintroduced me to what the new dig looked like. And I just thought it was a beautifully built product. And day in and day out introduced me to some incredible articles and videos that I honestly would otherwise have not found in any of my social networks. And then hearing Andrew talk about why they built Dig the way they did and what they want to do in the future, maybe really, really excited about the business. And so when they offered to really allow me to join as the chief operating officer, I kind of jumped at the opportunity and I joined them in March of this year of 2020.”

    2016-02-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Digg CEO, Gary Liu on The Rebirth Of Digg & The Evolution Of Content · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “Product strategy for two years, then I ended up leading labs for the last year and a half or so that I was at Spotify. And at some point, I was introduced to Andrew McLaughlin. He's one of the BetaWorks partners. And Dig CEO, since the relaunch in 2012. So we got to chatting very quickly, I kind of caught the dig bug, the dig vision, got impressed really impressed by what the team had built since 2012 and what the team wanted to build after that.”

    2016-02-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Digg CEO, Gary Liu on The Rebirth Of Digg & The Evolution Of Content · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “There at Clickable doing a myriad of different things. And then a year and a half in I left to join AOL to lead revenue operations and strategy at what is now the infamouspatch. com. I was actually lucky enough to move on from patch before all of the infamy, all the drama eventually hit. But yeah, so I was there for not an incredibly long time, but got to grow a revenue strategy and operations team from effectively non-existent to a 65 person team there. And then when I left, I left to go to Spotify. Now Spotify, this was in 2011. The team in New York was still very small. It was about 30 people. It legitimately felt like a scrappy startup, even though it had a couple of years of history in Europe, certainly, and it was much larger than the 30 that we had here in New York. But it felt like a scrappy startup. And there I led at the...”

    2016-02-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Digg CEO, Gary Liu on The Rebirth Of Digg & The Evolution Of Content · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “The right answer here is that I got very, very lucky. But the trajectory of that luck started off at Google. So I started my tech career in sales operations at Google in Annurban, Michigan of all places. I was literally scrubbing and qualifying leads for a mid-market AdWords sales team. I graduated to analytics at Google and then eventually left Google to join a small VC-backed startup here in New York City called Clickable. Clickable was building a search management platform or SAS for SMBs, not a very sexy industry at all. At that point, it was also increasingly getting crowded, but we were trying to build something that made search advertising easy for folks that really only had maybe 10, 15, 20 minutes per week to figure out how their search advertising spend is being spent and to optimize it. So I spent about one and a half years.”

    2016-02-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Digg CEO, Gary Liu on The Rebirth Of Digg & The Evolution Of Content · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source