YouSaid · the spoken record

Jonah Peretti

lines on the record: 63
first: 2015-09-16
most recent: 2015-09-16
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

“Not they weren't new. Voice dictation on a set top box, games on Apple TV, Stylus, a keyboard, a phone with a better camera, a selfie camera. These things are not new. But Apple does them in a way they feel is philosophically different from how other companies do them. And some of these things were new for Apple.”
2015-09-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But the truth I tested it and I thought Yeah, if it became a replacement for a laptop, then I would be happy. You're right, and you need windows open. You're right. Right. Absolutely right. All right, Lauren, overall, grade.”
2015-09-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, you know, tablets are just, I don't think they've quite met expectations. And I think if you ask Apple about that right now, they'd say, no, we've sold many millions of them. Of course they've met expectations. But the truth is that they're on a different upgrades cycle from smartphones. Consumers are not upgrading them as much as they do their smartphones. If you look at the quarter over quarter or even year over year numbers, tablet sales are on the decline. And I think in general they're kind of like Samsung just put out a flagship tablet too. And it's just sort of, I tested it and I thought, okay. And it's incrementally better than the last one. And so I think Apple with this one was really striving to do something that would be different and exciting.”
2015-09-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Good enough Yeah, there's no touchscreen. There's no touchscreen. There is actually the touchscreen on the iPad Pro is, so first of all, the display is the highest resolution display in anything that Apple makes, even more so than the MacBook Pro Retina. And the display is also super sensitive. And that's partly because, I mean, now you're using it with the stylus, right? And so there can't be any latency when you're using that stylus or it's going to feel awkward. But it also feels like my laptop. Yes. You would. Yes. But would you miss, so Apple's done a little bit with multitasking and iOS 9, but would you miss the idea of having multiple windows open? Because that's what I really like about using a laptop, or if you want to call it a desktop. Yes, yeah. I mean, having the ability to manipulate Windows”
2015-09-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I haven't seen this thing yet. Yes, in this case, yes, if it's good enough. Yeah, because I can carry it's thinner to carry around, I guess. And it has the same capabilities. And the whole problem with the Mac is you can't touch it. I mean, you can't swipe and you can't. Yeah”
2015-09-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that's tough to say. I think there's always going to be a. I know some people have written about, oh, this is the demise of Mac and the Mac is going away and eventually we're not going to, I think the Mac still has a long tail. In my personal opinion, I think some people, I mean, would you give up your MacBook Air? I haven't seen this.”
2015-09-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Uh so I think that Apple, let's go back a little bit and talk about when iPhone first came out. iPhone was a pure consumer play. It was consumer play for years. And then people started liking their iPhone so much. And they were just so ubiquitous after a while that the BYOD trend took place and people started bringing them into their offices. And at first, like IT people with, you know, departments would say, no, we're not supporting these. And then eventually they had to cave. And so now, you know, iPhone is... It's basically like what Blackberry was because the iPad wasn't enough.”
2015-09-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, maybe. Well, it takes a long time to make movies. I mean, part of it is we don't want all of our executives to be distracted by the cycles of Hollywood, right? Where it's meeting after meeting and lots of deals and everything being negotiated and tons of haggling with talent and producers. And so in order for us to actually make things in that system, we need to have a relatively lower friction model for doing it where we focus on the web where we can iterate in a much tighter loops and then extend to a system where we have partners in place to help us do these things. So there's a lot of setup time. So I think you'll see it'll take longer than you might think. But then once it's up and running, you might see more.”
2015-09-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This includes Discover. But, you know, and all views aren't created equally, some can monetize better, some, you know, so it's not like a perfect Apples to Apples comparison, but when you look at what is the distributed media company look like, you're seeing views happen on many platforms, some owned and operated our site, our apps, some distributed, like Snapchat Discover, Facebook video, YouTube, and then perhaps in the near future some untraditional linear platforms like TV or theatrical release of a film or other platforms like that.”
2015-09-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of the content views. And then views from other platforms like the Pinterest and Twitter, like 4%. And then there may be a couple things that aren't included here. But this is just sort of a rough rundown of the diversity of where people are seeing our content. Did you say Snapchat?”
2015-09-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, so these numbers are pretty rough, and I can actually get you better ones. Or more vetted ones, but 23% of our traffic, of our views are direct to our site or to our apps. 14% are YouTube views, meaning content view on YouTube, 2% Google search to our site, 6% Facebook traffic to the site, 27% is Facebook native video, 4% images on Facebook, 21% Snapchat content views.”
2015-09-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But if you look at this is total views of content across BuzzFeed, site, apps, and distributed around the web, you can see the percentages are just very different than you would seen a few”
2015-09-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Moving to the network integrated model where we're publishing on lots of different platforms and we just care about getting the data back to help us optimize. Now we're starting to see the relationship between all the different places. So really building out an intelligent network where if we see something works well on Instagram it can be adapted for Snapchat. If we see something works well as opposed to can be adapted as a video, if something works well in the UK, it can be adapted for Australia. So we start to see that Bean in many markets and being on many platforms lets us learn more. And when we learn more, we can make better media across the entire network. So the nodes of the network are very autonomous, but they share learnings back with a larger network. And that piece of it has been really the key to it. And it gives us an advantage relative to a company that's just in one country or a company that's just in one platform because they're not able to learn as much from all the different ways that they're making content, all the different audiences that they engage with every day. So that has been huge.”
2015-09-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, a few things. So we talked before about the idea of the vertically integrated company, which was how BuzzFeed started where we made our whole CMS and made the content and had our own brand, the full stack.”
2015-09-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would not have imagined how big it is. It's phenomenal what he's built, and it's definitely beyond our expectations, and it's incredible. But I always thought he could build something great if he had the right opportunity and the right context he has.”
2015-09-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I was always a fan of Zay's work. I mean, Zay has had an influence on web video far beyond any value he's captured. So many of the conventions that YouTube stars use were created by Zay when he made his year-long show, which I don't know if you saw the show. And so many ideas that he's developed over the years have ended up being very influential. And so the thought was they was if you had a phenomenal talent like that and we worked together to figure out how to capture the value that his very creative and analytical mind produces, that you could build something big. That was really the idea.”
2015-09-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And a similar question about, say, Frank and Video, right? A few years ago you hadn't hired Zay and Video didn't really exist at BuzzFeed. And now it's, I think, really sort of one of the major driving forces of the company, maybe the driving force of the company. Did you see that video was going to be huge for you a couple years ago? And this was always planned out? I got the sense that you hired, say, almost as a favor just to give him something to do. And now he's got four acres out in LA and he's building studios and making TV shows.”
2015-09-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And they've been able to really deliver, and that's resulted in lots of scale, and it's been good for our brand, but it's also been good for our growth and our distribution and our revenue.”
2015-09-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I think the planned part is a broad strategic direction and all the specifics are very iterative. So, like, you know, Ben, I don't think for all of us, it's been kind of remarkable and unexpected where the company has ended up. And I think if you've said to Ben when he joined a little over three years ago now, that he was going to have foreign correspondence around the world and that there would have a long-form team and that we'd have a San Francisco Bureau and DC Bureau. Indiana and Australia and Europe. And I don't think he would have said, oh, yeah, that's definitely where this is all headed. But we've been able to build a good business and we've been able to attract really amazing people on the edit side. So great reporters, great entertainers, great storytellers.”
2015-09-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, how much of the emphasis on that creation of new news, on hiring all these people, on really committing to going out and creating your own stuff with stuff that you thought about in advance of hiring Ben and how much of it is you hired Ben. Ben wanted to do it. You guys did more of it. How much of this is sort of like iterative versus planned?”
2015-09-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't not really. I mean, I think part of it is I had a connection with Ben and he had a vision to build something and a big part of running the company is finding people where you have a lined vision and they're going to build something great. And I think Ben shaped a lot of what we built on the news side.”
2015-09-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, we have investors who've been in the news business. You know, Eric Hippo, I mean, he's more direct about these things than I am maybe, but Eric is like, there's a lot of money in news. And people who read news are educated and smart, and they're the best consumers. So I think that it depends on which board member you'd ask or which investor you'd ask. But to varying degrees, they all have think news can be both a good business and also something that is exciting. Because there was a period.”
2015-09-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People like to share, and people want to share the authoritative original story. So that's part of it. Another part of it is making things allows you to operate cross-platform much better, you know, because if you have original content, you can adapt that content for lots of different platforms and places and countries. Also, it's just a lot more rewarding and more fun and more interesting to have reporters around the world covering stories and have people doing original work instead of derivative work.”
2015-09-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Humor and comedy, and so we started to see that changing, and we were actually a little behind. People were starting to share news on Facebook and Twitter, and we didn't have a way to make news.”
2015-09-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There were two things. The first was Huffington Post sold to AOL, and I stopped working at Huffington Post after the point of the sale. And that meant that I could look at BuzzFeed with fresh eyes and say, what should BuzzFeed be doing and not have more than half of my idle thoughts thinking about another company? And so that led me to be more excited about hiring an editorial team. And we had an editorial team at Huffington Post, and I got that enjoyment from being involved with the edit team at Huffington Post. And so now that I was no longer at Huffington Post, it felt exciting to do that at BuzzFeed. The other thing that we were focused on the social web and sharing, and it wasn't really possible to do news content on Facebook and Twitter when we started because Twitter was what you had for lunch, and Facebook was internet memes.”
2015-09-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Projects you did where you scraped together content from the web and assembled it. And at some point you made this conscious effort to say in addition to that, in addition to things that are social, we also want to start paying to create our own content and then eventually paying to create sort of traditional news. What got you to an hired Bensmith, who was then at Politico, what prompted you to hire Ben and sort of invest a lot of resources into creating your own stuff?”
2015-09-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We are working on many different Blender sites as part of BuzzFeed. I mean, that's partly how we crack new markets. We're always looking for new opportunities and new approaches, new platforms. And so replicating that is within BuzzFeed is something that is hugely important to us.”
2015-09-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One nice thing. Yeah. Is that we were doing a lot of this in obscurity, so we could experiment and we could learn. And when you see companies that instantly become hot companies, it's very hard because you're in the spotlight trying to try new things and experiment before you figure things out. We had three years of having not had anything, not being inarticulate, not being able to explain what we were doing and trying lots of things and figureing out. Right. You had a little bit of a”
2015-09-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so then we said, you know what? Forget Google. Like when they finally figured out it was a bug, we're like, you know, before we figured out it was a bug, it was like, look, social's the future. It's super small now. We're not actually getting that much traffic from it, but we can't depend on Google because they took all our traffic away, focus on social, focus on social, don't try to hedge between the two. And that actually turned out to be a good thing in retrospect, but was a terrible month and a half until we figured it out.”
2015-09-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we thought one of those things pissed off at Google. It turned out what the problem actually was, and it took forever to actually get to Matt Cuts and go through investors and try to figure this out, that we were embedding, when we would embed for JavaScript security, we would embed media through a different domain that was buzz-fed instead of BuzzFeed. And Google's thought that was a confusingly similar domain, and some people inject bad code. So Google Mexico.”
2015-09-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That would grab left wing content and right wing content and put it together in a left versus right thing. We had people in the community would post something like download a movie for free and it would get all the search traffic. And then we would what we call jacking because the guy who did it was named Jack. We would change it into the best article about the movie and pull the link to the pirating site, but keep the page up.”
2015-09-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, Facebook and Twitter and stumble upon. And I mean, anytime there was social dynamics that could result in cascades that would allow for diffusion of content, we were excited and we embraced it. We did, however, with BuzzFeed try to hedge and also do search. And that turned out to be problematic. It's very hard to think from the worldview of search and the worldview of social at the same time. And it wasn't a bug in Google that de-indexed BuzzFeed from search that actually caused us to go all in on social because it was still the social web wasn't very developed. We still got the biggest referral of traffic was search. And then all our search disappeared overnight. And we didn't know why. And we investigated and did we do something wrong. And we thought we must have done something wrong because we're constantly experimenting. We had scrape.”
2015-09-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it became clear along the way. I don't know how far I had we were, but it was something that we wanted to do before there was a way to do it. Right. So when faced.”
2015-09-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And was that clear to you as you were watching Facebook grow and move from an Ivy League thing to a college thing, something that opened up to the entire world? You say, oh, this is what's going to make this concept possible”
2015-09-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so you'd get the same person would get 27 emails. And then now on Facebook, you say 27 of your friends shared this, you get it once. And so what ended up happening was email in the early days, there was a period where people would forward to their whole inbox, but then that started to get shut down because it was a broken dynamic for social. And so there wasn't really the tech platforms to enable social distribution. And mobile, the iPhone didn't exist when we first started BuzzFeed. And so mobile and social were these two huge things that enabled these ideas to actually work. So the ideas about network and network science and six degrees of separation and those kind of things. And was that clear to you?”
2015-09-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so there was email, and it was this very disorganized thing, right? So if there was a funny article, you'd get 20 emails instead or a bad rumor.”
2015-09-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The problem was that you couldn't actually build a big site based on sharing. Because When we started, well, because when we started having a post, Facebook was a way to organize the parties for”
2015-09-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was always what my interest was, even before Huffpost, you know, the Nike email and black people love us and the rejection line were all social. Right, that's where you're true line. Yeah, people shared because they thought they were funny or provocative or interesting. And I had Duncan Watts, who, as our science advisor, who's figured out the mathematics of six degrees of separation in small worlds. And I was interested in network science, network theory, how do things spread through word of mouth, how do things spread through networks.”
2015-09-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so I'm just trying to figure out at what point did you say, oh, this is the business. The business we're going to do is some version of creating content that's meant to be shared socially. That's the core of it as opposed to doing SEO, which is what you've done at Halving the Post, making things for Google. We're going to make things for Facebook just for simplicity's sake. When did that sort of, was that always the idea from the get-go or did you evolve to that point?”
2015-09-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because they're all over the place. And so we're not actually getting anything proprietary, and you're getting access to this nice tool. But over time, it became clear that you can't really be in the analytics and optimization business and be building your own content company at the same time. And so we ended up making the decision to shut down that network and focusing all of our tech development not just on our own site.”
2015-09-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and it was based on this idea that you shouldn't just look at what you're promoting, you should look at how much viral traffic is going to a piece of content, because that's really what growth is. You can promote a piece of content a lot, but if nobody's sharing it, if it's not spreading on its own, then that's not really where you should focus. And so that really grew a lot. And we had a part of the front page of BuzzFeed were the most viral things from all these publishing partners. What happened was BuzzFeed started to get really big and then publishers started to pull the code. So the New York Times was like, why are we having BuzzFeed? You know, you're not just a small little tech company. You're not Switzerland. Why are we letting you have access to all of the data of what's trending on the New York Times? And we would say, well, look, we have a firewall. We're not looking at all your data. We're only looking at the most popular things that trigger the most popular things that trigger are also kind of obvious.”
2015-09-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I ended up doing that after Huffington Post sold AOS. On BuzzFeed, and it could see things more clearly because I didn't have my, you know, I wasn't trying to understand and think about two totally different organizations. But at the time, the idea was we are a pure tech company. We had some editorial people as test pilots to try out technology and that we would maybe power other sites. And so we came very close to signing a deal with the Washington Post where we would power their site. And then we ended up not doing it because by the time the deal was signed, we had grown so much as a site, we realized that we should focus on growing BuzzFeed and not other publisher sites. We had this network where we had a little code that lived on a bunch of different popular websites and we would send them an alert when something started to go viral on their site. And so the idea was it was a trend detection technology that any publisher could use. And Huffington Post used it, the New York Times used it, the Daily Mail used it, Fox News used it.”
2015-09-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so we built the BuzzFeed network, which was a little code that lived on other sites. And would track when something was starting to go viral. And really, the idea, the early idea of BuzzFeed was that we weren't an editorial business. And part of the reason for that was HuffPost had editors. And so I couldn't really or didn't want to compete directly with another company. And so maybe I sort of deluded myself that BuzzFeed should be a pure tech company and not have that. But you weren't creative.”
2015-09-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so, but we managed to always grow. And we were growing from a very small base, so no one really noticed, but we always were doubling every year from a very small base because the experiments we were doing and the things we were learning allowed us to continue to grow.”
2015-09-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They would have been the first investor. And SoftBank said, why don't we continue to work at HuffPost? And you can do both. And Union Square was right. The idea that I would work at HuffPost and be the CEO of a startup didn't make that much sense. But SoftBank was in both companies, and so they were okay with it. And so it was a strange arrangement where some of the early BuzzFeed board meetings where people talking about HuffPost the whole time until the board meeting started. And then it was like, oh, and there's this little site. And as you said, I wasn't so articulated explaining what we were doing. And so it was like this little site and we don't totally understand it. And neither does Jonah.”
2015-09-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we raised money in part. I mean, our primary fundraiser was Softbank Capital, who was HuffPost's biggest investor. And so partly they invested to keep me at HuffPost because the other term sheet we had, which was from Union Square Ventures, would have required me to leave HuffPost and just focus entirely on BuzzFeed. And so”
2015-09-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, it was hard to speak clearly because it wasn't clear what we were doing. We were more of a lab than we were a company. Even though you'd”
2015-09-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was before Huffington Post had sold, and I took no salary at BuzzFeed for the first three years or something and would live off a part-time salary at Huffington Post. And BuzzFeed site started to grow because we were doing experiments. Some of them worked. We started to, you know, we launched the site. After doing a few other experiments, we launched the site and then the site started to grow. And then there was employees and people working on it. And so I took a round of funding from outside to be able to actually fund the operation. And once we did that, John didn't have to keep bankrolling the company month to month. And it also meant we had investors and had to take it a little bit more seriously and say, okay, we got to at least double every year. We got to, you know, in terms of our growth. And we have to start thinking a little bit about revenue.”
2015-09-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, part of it was I felt, I started to feel a little bit guilty that John, my friend, was funding Buzzfeed entirely out of his own pocket. So it wasn't a normal funding round. It was just every month he would cover our costs.”
2015-09-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then when did you think, all right, there's a thing here that at Buzzfeed that I should turn my attention to and it should become a full time job, and this is what I should spend most of my time on or all of my time on.”
2015-09-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT