YouSaid · the spoken record

John Borthwick

lines on the record
73
first
2015-10-21
most recent
2015-10-21
sittings or episodes
1
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podcast

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  1. “No, I think that the incubator model in Web 1.0, I think that the term studio has become sort of a good term for this. I mean, one of the terms out there, there's incubator, there's Accelerator, there's startup school. And I think that, and then the startup studio. And I think that startup studio is the most apt one for this model.”

    2015-10-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Betaworks CEO and co-founder John Borthwick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “So it's a hybrid of sort of traditional investing and it's sort of the seed stage and then building companies. You would bristle if I called you an incubator, right? Because that's a term you've got an issue with or makes you think people can't create their own. Can't get their own desks and pencils.”

    2015-10-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Betaworks CEO and co-founder John Borthwick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “Since we're fundamentally thesis driven, right? So we have ideas about the world. We just talked about one for about 10, 15 minutes notifications. You can expect us to invest and build around notifications over the next 12, 24 months. There were a bunch of companies that we're interested in who had notification summit. There were some of those we've already invested in, other ones we might. And then things we will build around there. So sort of a fundamental sort of guiding post is thesis driven. We have ideas about the world and about the world that we're trying to construct and make real. And then we will build and we will invest. And we sometimes bought companies around that. So it's built by an invest as the instruments to Against the thesis.”

    2015-10-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Betaworks CEO and co-founder John Borthwick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “that help us accelerate the development of those companies. And we started in the early days, as you mentioned, we bitly in Charbeat and then roll all the way forward now to dots to Gify, to Pancho, to things which are more recent. These are all things that we have developed at the studio. Related to that is we do seed investing”

    2015-10-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Betaworks CEO and co-founder John Borthwick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “So, you know, at the outset, we talked about or described BetaWorth as startup studio, and I've used the studio term from the beginning. The idea of BetaWorks has always been, for me, is can we bring together a set of entrepreneurs we can build a set of companies in parallel in a studio construct, so build the same way that gaming studios build multiple games or movie studios do multiple games. You have ideas.”

    2015-10-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Betaworks CEO and co-founder John Borthwick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “I mean, I think that clearly for some publishers, the big platforms are becoming the sort of the fire horses from which they can drink. Now, they can also have some control of how notifications work in those environment, but it's them all limited. They're not only gated by Apple at the high end, but they're gated by the sort of the social platform, the Facebooks of the world step down from that. So they kind of have two gates to pass through before they get to the user. But I think that for a lot of media companies, that's just reality.”

    2015-10-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Betaworks CEO and co-founder John Borthwick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “I lied, I have one other notification question. When you said you should get an app, you should have an app. Everyone says they want to have an app. It turns out that most people don't want your app, right? That's why a lot of people sort of give it up, or they sort of said, look, it turns out the app is Facebook. The app is Twitter to a smaller degree. We're going to publish on the web. If we're lucky, Facebook will send through their app will send us their traffic and their users. That's really effectively all we can do. So are you really saying that notifications are a big deal, which means that notifications on Facebook are a really big deal?”

    2015-10-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Betaworks CEO and co-founder John Borthwick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “I hate to think about simplified as an ad, but I think if you consider it to be like an ad unit and track the way that you guys track ad units, track content that way, it would actually do you good because I think that all that tracking and all that investment that you've placed on ad units try to turn that around and actually think of your content as something you need to understand and track. I think that would be a good starting place.”

    2015-10-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Betaworks CEO and co-founder John Borthwick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “Well, I think a couple of things is, first of all, that you need to actually have an app, the way iOS is architected, you can't push a notification through the browser. And so you need to have an app. So you need to invest in mobile strategy. And then we had in the room, we had John Steinberg from Daily Mail. We had some people from Vox. We had some BuzzFeed people there. We had the Dig team there. We had a bunch of people from media who were in the room. And so as we talk through and a bunch of them said, is figuring out how to use contextual data, naming, you know, make that simple as the data we have about you that the app has about you, make it relevant when you push me a notification, and then track what people are doing with those, right? Are they clicking on them? It's a notification is almost like you think about it as...”

    2015-10-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Betaworks CEO and co-founder John Borthwick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “So since we don't have seven hours to talk about this, just let's get one more notifications idea here. You deal a lot with media companies. We were talking before we went on air about sort of your dismay that the big publishers hadn't figured out technology this time around and were sort of at the control of Facebook, et cetera. If you're a publisher, if you're someone who makes media, for instance, and you say, John, that's a great idea you've got here about notifications. I agree they're important. What do you do? How do you lean forward into this?”

    2015-10-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Betaworks CEO and co-founder John Borthwick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “Four more coming, we had a lot to talk about. We talked about it all the way from alerts all the way to bots. Right? And so, you know, I think that these notifications become programmable and you start really speaking to the computers. And that's a very, very rich opportunity and opens up a whole new world.”

    2015-10-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Betaworks CEO and co-founder John Borthwick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “So, really interesting people who are in all different sort of stakeholders in this evolving notifications world, and we pulled it together and held a summit on October 1st, and we just started to post the videos.”

    2015-10-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Betaworks CEO and co-founder John Borthwick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “Yeah, you're definitely right about that, but I would argue sort of at BetaWorks generally. And I would argue that this whole concept of an early adopter, which is basically what you're referring to sort of early and late adopters, I think has been eviscerated. I think that many, many, many more people in the world are figuring out how to become what we used to call an early adopter. I think the early adopter crowd now is becoming net larger, but it's also becoming more accessible to more people. And every time somebody learns the basics of trying to set up their phone or set up something, they learn it once and they can repeat and continue doing it in 10 different places. But yeah, you're right. It's going to take time. And we're definitely at the early part of the cycle. That's why we did the summit. Steve Gilmore and I pulled together six deals.”

    2015-10-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Betaworks CEO and co-founder John Borthwick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “Even though this seems a pretty wonky thing right now for me to go in and change my notifications, I've got to go, I've got to know that I can do it. I've got to go several layers into my systems thing and push and pull levers. I mean, I'm thinking about my late father-in-law who was this year was still a. AOL subscriber. It seems like this is maybe something that's going to affect sort of people at the edge of the spectrum.”

    2015-10-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Betaworks CEO and co-founder John Borthwick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “Yeah, so I would not say that I don't think it's more passive. It may actually be more active. I think that the person who is the primary say here will be the platform owner has a huge say in this. So let's talk about Apple. I think after that, the users have a huge say in this. And so I think that the way it's architected is that the users can come in, they can modulate, they can turn notifications off if they're getting annoying. They can say that's a good one. They can begin to speak back to the notifications. I love this idea of instead of thinking about notifications.”

    2015-10-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Betaworks CEO and co-founder John Borthwick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “Compute evolves, the computing stack evolves. There's another point of view to it, which is that the phone is just the initial navigation of the phone, the apps, has become difficult. have downloaded a lot of apps the data suggests that people spent quite a bit of time organizing apps on the home screen but they only use a limited number of apps every day That there's more star apples desire incentive Google to somewhat, but let's focus on Apple, because I think they're the real player here, is that people will use their phones as much as possible, therefore get as much out of their apps. And I don't think they're getting nearly as much out of their apps through the app icon as they could.”

    2015-10-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Betaworks CEO and co-founder John Borthwick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “I mean, I would say at a very high conceptual level, I would say that, you know, you could see this sort of TikTok cycle that we go through in computing where we move from these very flexible text-based interfaces that speak machine language to these highly visual interfaces that speak human language, in other words visual metaphors. And we're getting better and better now at actually machine speaking visual, but generally we've seen that TikTok cycle, I think from DOS to Windows, think from the very early web, which was primarily texted all the way to the rich sort of flash web, which was primarily visual. This new layer is a text-based layer. So there's one sort of point of view of this. This is just sort of the evolution of the stack and how”

    2015-10-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Betaworks CEO and co-founder John Borthwick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “Why is this happening? This is happening at a base level, right? Because Google and Apple have created architecture, I guess, that allows this to happen. Is this something Google and Apple want to happen? Is this something they're actively doing, or is this sort of a side effect of some way they've built their OS?”

    2015-10-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Betaworks CEO and co-founder John Borthwick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “And increasingly you're going to think that's going to come to me at the right time when it's relevant to me. And so using the phone, using your social graph, using contextual data about where you are, what's important to you right now, the ability to push you something, sort of re-architects and changes the world from a pull world into a push world, which is a big change”

    2015-10-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Betaworks CEO and co-founder John Borthwick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. “A period of seven to some people would say 14 years where there was some stability and predictability around how people would navigate and use their PCs. The mobile device, I think, is still very much in flux. And this new notifications layer has the potential to re-architect that. And I see that happening. There's a series of things that are going to play out and we're going to do or not do as an industry in the next 12, 18 months that I think will shape that. But it fundamentally changes a lot. So it changes navigation. It also fundamentally changes the way you think about services and content. So today you think about I need to go somewhere to get an article from”

    2015-10-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Betaworks CEO and co-founder John Borthwick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  21. “I think it has the potential. We're right at that sort of tipping point where the potential change all of the above. And so I think that the new platform, the mobile platform is still in a period of flux. It still hasn't, you know, we went through on the PC platform.”

    2015-10-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Betaworks CEO and co-founder John Borthwick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  22. “It's a big deal to me because I'm always thinking about what is the Of primary experience that people have, what's the first way that they're touching. Both content and services on their device or as they relate to the cloud and computer.”

    2015-10-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Betaworks CEO and co-founder John Borthwick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  23. “So, you know, periodically through the history of Betawax, and I think through the history of technology as I've been part of it, we've seen these sort of transitional points. New platforms emerge That becomes the primary interface for user interaction. So, what that means is that when you wake up in the morning, what you used to do on the internet was go to a browser, probably go to Google, and sort of start your day, right? When you wake up in the morning today, many people will open their phone and use their home screen to navigate the apps that they put on their home screen, essentially a hierarchy of apps, a field of icons that they use to navigate and sort of start their day with one app and then the other app. Increasingly, the notification screen, what you described as sort of an alert structure is becoming, it's sort of routing around the applications or the apps and giving people a direct path into a specific application or a specific thing. It's all times-based, right? In iOS 8.”

    2015-10-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Betaworks CEO and co-founder John Borthwick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT