YouSaid · the spoken record

Katerina Fake

lines on the record: 42
first: 2020-10-27
most recent: 2020-10-27
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Masters of Scale is a weightwood original. Our executive producers are June Cohen and Darren Triff. Our producers are Dan Kedmy, Chris McLeod, Jenny Cataldo, and Ben Manila. Our supervising producer is Jay Punjabi, original music and sound design is by the holiday brothers. Mixing and mastering by Brian Pugh. Special thanks to Chris Ye, Saeda Sepieva, Elisa Schreiber, David Sanford, and Stephanie Kent. Visit masters of scale.com to find the transcript for this episode.”
2020-10-27 · Masters of Scale · Build a more human internet, w/Caterina Fake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it's a tricky question. I'm not sure I know where to strike the balance between editorial anarchy and Orwellian control. The question has actually dogged the creators' online communities since the invention of the internet, but if we reframe the question as how do we invigorate good behavior so it drowns out the bad and ugly behavior, then the solution comes into view. First, invigorate the good behavior from day one. Make that the foundation of your community. At the very least, you'll have a wall between your first users and the barbarians at the gate. Second, never tell yourself the battle for civility has been won. It hasn't. It never will be. The barbarians are coming. But if you arm your community with good tools, good manners, and good examples from day one, you'll be ready. I'm Reed Hoffman. Thank you for listening.”
2020-10-27 · Masters of Scale · Build a more human internet, w/Caterina Fake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Behavior and preferences. You might reply Well, if you let that run wild, we'd all be clicking on the seven deadly sins all the time, whether it's nude pictures, hate speech, a photo of a baby cheetah sitting on your new maserati, and that's real, by the way. Look it up on rich kids of Instagram if you don't believe me. Anyway, the list goes on. We know that those are our triggers, and we don't want to be collectively reduced to our basis instincts. We don't want to become a quivering mass of the seven deadly sins. On the other hand, when people say, well, you know, Facebook should have human editors, I think, oh, human editors, and they'll decide what two billion people who use Facebook today should and should not see? Who are these trusted supervisors who will oversee Facebook's Ministry of Truth?”
2020-10-27 · Masters of Scale · Build a more human internet, w/Caterina Fake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I generally agree with Katerina. In the case of Flicker, they tolerated the bare midriff and they welcomed the Brittany Spears fans, but they drew a bright red line at white supremacists. And the truth is every founder of an online community tends to draw lines like this in their heads. They just tend to get a bit sheepish about stating them aloud and with good reason. There's a standard way of thinking about this in Silicon Valley which argues that large online platforms are inherently objective and do not have values of their own. I think this is incorrect. All platforms are in fact value laden. The question for a very large platform then becomes how do you create a set of values that has the kind of shared objectivity? For example, on the Facebook side, they say, well, what people click on mass demonstrates their actual preferences, what they actually like. And so we have a democratic platform that promotes what people click on. It's a reflection of actual”
2020-10-27 · Masters of Scale · Build a more human internet, w/Caterina Fake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Bottle was valued at over $700 million with 50 locations worldwide, and the customers, they're as passionate as ever. So once again, you can see how the earliest interactions with users or customers sets the tone for the community as it grows, whether it's a physical store or a virtual community, the same principles apply. And once something goes awry, you can place a pretty good bet that what went wrong went wrong early on. Katerina sees a lot that's gone wrong with today's social media platforms, but the biggest problem she says, they don't know who they are.”
2020-10-27 · Masters of Scale · Build a more human internet, w/Caterina Fake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Katarina would go on to found and invest in many companies drawing impressive returns. Her latest venture is an investment fund with her partner Yuri Engstrom called Yes Ventures. They'll specialize in seed and precede investments, and yes, you can predict that cultivating communities broadly defined will be at the center of what they do. But her investments that interest me the most are the ones that I could never have made myself because they're just too far outside the area of my expertise. I asked her about the one that's farthest out for me. It was another investment in a passionate community, but of a totally different sort. What was your vision of the possibility in Blue Bottle? How did you see it as something that could interestingly scale into being a great product and a great company?”
2020-10-27 · Masters of Scale · Build a more human internet, w/Caterina Fake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kickstarter, the crowdfunding platform that lets fans fund projects by artists and makers. It sounded unlikely at the time, but who go on to fund nearly one hundred fifty thousand projects to the tune of three point five billion dollars pledged would initially drew Katerina was what this community of communities could mean to the world.”
2020-10-27 · Masters of Scale · Build a more human internet, w/Caterina Fake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Katarina clearly knows it when she sees it. In 2009, she made another bet that had other investors scratching their heads.”
2020-10-27 · Masters of Scale · Build a more human internet, w/Caterina Fake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And they also played an advantage Etsy had in the commerce world. Rather than competing, the sellers were collaborating. Another sign that this commerce-driven community would have a self-propelling power to go the distance”
2020-10-27 · Masters of Scale · Build a more human internet, w/Caterina Fake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Katerina served as Etsy's board chair for eight years and was intimately involved in growing the company. Her eye for community offered foundational insights. She knew that for Etsy to thrive, the founders had to include the community in decision making. These weren't trolls, but rather passionately devoted community members who had a real stake in what happened inside their civilization. And that's an important distinction. It's critical to recognize the difference between members who care about the health of the community and those who only care about themselves. When you recognize these members, you see the early signs of scale, and it comes back to the theory what you are when you're small gets amplified when you grow. The Etsy leadership knew they had to water these seeds of collaboration by including the community in key decisions and fostering the connections between them. In the early days, these decisions helped Etsy stay true to its homespun culture.”
2020-10-27 · Masters of Scale · Build a more human internet, w/Caterina Fake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Etsy also showed all the signs of a community that could thrive. When Katarina took a close look at those first two thousand sellers, what she saw was not just willing merchants, but passionate community members.”
2020-10-27 · Masters of Scale · Build a more human internet, w/Caterina Fake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Katarina called this one right because she was looking for different markers than I was. She saw an Etsy, a start of a countercultural movement, a movement that placed the value on the homemade, the artisanal, the local. It was another parade she could get in front of.”
2020-10-27 · Masters of Scale · Build a more human internet, w/Caterina Fake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Maybe it's 1AX. Oops But this latent potential is what catering is saw from the start. I asked her about it. When you were looking at Etsy as part of this, what made you see that in this marketplace there was something that could sufficiently scale into a breadth of humanity? What made you look at Etsy and go, this isn't just a knick-knacks thing, but actually, in fact, is a handmade or a custom-made revolution.”
2020-10-27 · Masters of Scale · Build a more human internet, w/Caterina Fake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My mistake was not realizing that once you get to a network connected world, that what business people called TAM, total addressable market, isn't significantly higher than you think. Because like, for example, I was going as well. Is it just like the gourmet chocolate store in San Francisco? It's like, no, no, because it's an online marketplace, it's the gourmet chocolate store in every city, each different. And you get a piece of them. And that would have gone, oh, actually an early stage investment in that might actually be reasonable. And so part of the mistake was when she presented to me was before it was venture invested. I could have put in money essentially as an angel. And, you know, I don't know what Etsy's valuation is today, $2 billion, something like that, but, you know, that would have been a probably 50x investment. Oops.”
2020-10-27 · Masters of Scale · Build a more human internet, w/Caterina Fake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I told Katerina, I regretted passing on Etsy, and I do. What I missed about it was this. You know, it was pitched as handmade goods. Literally handmade goods is the opposite of scale. Like, you can't make handmade goods. I mean, I can hire a bunch of people maybe to make handmade goods. Then it's kind of a factory. How many can they make? Like, how do you grow your business? How scalable is that? It's a little bit like, are you creating the corner bookstore? Are you creating Amazon, right? Or are you creating the gourmet chocolatier, which is really cool, or you're creating Godiva or Nestle, right? And so I was kind of like, well, that's cool, but it isn't really a good investment.”
2020-10-27 · Masters of Scale · Build a more human internet, w/Caterina Fake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A college student who wanted to create a marketplace for home knitted hats, it was not an obvious win. But Katerina saw something that others, including me, missed.”
2020-10-27 · Masters of Scale · Build a more human internet, w/Caterina Fake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Etsy, the marketplace for small scale artisans selling homemade goods from quirky ceramic mugs to whimsical fuzzy socks. The company went public in twenty fifteen with a valuation of roughly three point five billion dollars. Revenue in twenty sixteen was north of three hundred fifty million dollars, but in two thousand five, it was a different picture. They had around 2,000 users, a few staff members, and a dream.”
2020-10-27 · Masters of Scale · Build a more human internet, w/Caterina Fake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Listeners, Bob, here, if you listen to rapid response on Masters of Scale, you may be missing half the show because every Friday we release a second rapid response exclusively in the rapid response feed. The guests and topics are just as compelling and timely from Ford CEO to NASA's administrator to the lessons from the Devilware's Prada. It takes about 10 seconds to find, just search rapid response wherever you listen to podcasts and hit follow to make sure you never miss an episode. I hope to see you there.”
2020-10-27 · Masters of Scale · Build a more human internet, w/Caterina Fake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Always had a clear idea of how people should engage, and this helped Flickr grow quickly and civilly into a platform with remarkably few trolls amongst a remarkably large user base. In march two thousand five, less than a year after their pivot, Flickr sold Yahoo, and Katerina found herself for the first time with both money and time to pursue what she loved and what she loved as much as community and art and borges was entrepreneurs. She started a parallel career of angel investing in early stage companies, especially ones that had all of the signs of a flourishing fledgling community.”
2020-10-27 · Masters of Scale · Build a more human internet, w/Caterina Fake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hallway, and now we're connected. That was not the sort of interaction we were trying to recreate on LinkedIn. Instead, we wanted users to say, oh yeah, I met this person at a conference. They seem pretty interesting and solid. What they're interested in seems to be something that's interesting to you. So here I'm passing along the introduction. That was the conversation we aimed for. That was the conversation we designed for, and that we never lost sight of. That said, some small percentage of people started putting their total number of connections in the headline because they wanted to keep playing the game. The point is, you need to imagine those interactions in vivid detail. You need a hypothesis for how the community should behave so you can model the behavior you want to see. And as you see that good behavior emerge, you'll have clarity about the way forward. You can set the guardrails that keep interactions from veering off course in the often unpredictable ways that humans can.”
2020-10-27 · Masters of Scale · Build a more human internet, w/Caterina Fake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was an excellent way to drive user growth, and we could have just let the game go on ad nauseum. There was just one problem. As users got a bit too hooked on the game, and inevitably some of them would, then that connection score would signify nothing. It would represent a pointless tally of how many hands a user could shake a day. In fact, I remember one person on LinkedIn who amassed thirty two thousand connections. There's no way he knew thirty two thousand people. So he capped the score at 500. After that, the score remained fixed, and you got stuck with a boring old plus sign, 500 plus game over. The point is, we were aspiring to create a very real and specific social interaction. Connections on LinkedIn had to be people you knew well enough to refer to other people that you know. Anyone who has ever attended a network event will know how this can play out in the real world. You'll make superficial connections where you just say, hey, I bumped in you.”
2020-10-27 · Masters of Scale · Build a more human internet, w/Caterina Fake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This bare midriff issue may sound trivial. In fact, decisions like these are the lifeblood of your community. It isn't that any one decision is the right decision, you can imagine other flourishing communities coming down against the bare midriff, but you have to decide. This is what I mean by creating a hospitable climate for certain types of behavior. Every founder of an online community must grapple with it daily. If you're not grappling with it, you're living with a false sense of neutrality. You're actually allowing your most extreme users to make the decision for you, because in these cases a non decision is also a decision. So for example, early on LinkedIn, we created a connections game. The number of connections you have with other members was your score. We put that score front and center on your profile so that people would play the connections game.”
2020-10-27 · Masters of Scale · Build a more human internet, w/Caterina Fake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Katerina understood instinctively not only the importance of cultivating a community, but also the complexity, have no doubt, community building is complex and it's filled with traps. It's not sufficient to simply say hello to new users and send them on their merry way. Remember, you are building a civilization. You have to lead by example, but it will only take you so far. Sometimes you have to assert your values at the risk of losing users, and you may be surprised how quickly users test your values. Flickr was tested very early and very vocally by its users, and this shaped catering is fundamental approach to online communities. You have to know who you are, who you're for, and what you stand for.”
2020-10-27 · Masters of Scale · Build a more human internet, w/Caterina Fake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Culture sticks. It's hard to appreciate just how much it sticks. The tone you set from day one, from the first greeting is the tone you keep. Katerina understood this instinctively, and as counterintuitive as it may sound, she knew it was worth her time as a founder to get it right. What really astonishes her is how quickly founders try to distance themselves from the community they're trying to build.”
2020-10-27 · Masters of Scale · Build a more human internet, w/Caterina Fake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Most founders would consider these social interactions grunt work and try to automate them away as quickly as possible with bots or interns. McCanarina, she just keeps engaging.”
2020-10-27 · Masters of Scale · Build a more human internet, w/Caterina Fake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“These early interactions set the tone for everything that will follow, and in every kind of community from a company to an online photo sharing site, culture cements very quickly. It's critical to get in front of it. But that's not to say it's easy.”
2020-10-27 · Masters of Scale · Build a more human internet, w/Caterina Fake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, their timing was impeccable, but it wasn't the only secret to their success. Katerina did more than just get users to click on the upload a photo button. She shaped their conversation. From day one, she volunteered to greet each and every new user on Flickr, personally.”
2020-10-27 · Masters of Scale · Build a more human internet, w/Caterina Fake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Flickr would pave the way for every social site that would come after him, like Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, Snapchat. They introduced conventions like tagging and following that are now deeply woven into the fabric of our online relationships. And if you ask Katarina, there were two hidden secrets behind Flickr's success.”
2020-10-27 · Masters of Scale · Build a more human internet, w/Caterina Fake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You can hear all about that miserable march on the Masters of Scale episode called The Big Pivot. I want to focus instead on its happy ending. There was a buried feature in the game that let players share photos and leave notes for one another. A conversation emerged, a community formed, and that photo sharing system would eventually form the foundation of Flickr, a service that did nothing short of rewrite the way people interacted online. Remember that bolt of lightning that strikes an amoeba and creates a new life form? This was it, and it would go faster than anyone could have predicted.”
2020-10-27 · Masters of Scale · Build a more human internet, w/Caterina Fake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Back then, Silicon Valley was a wild west of job opportunities. Katerina hopped from one startup job to the next, picking up new skills along the way. She worked for a CD-ROM company, a research lab. All the while she held fast to one enduring truth. People loved to connect online. Her first entrepreneurial venture was a multi-user game called Game Never Ending. That name rings a bell. Congratulations. You're clearly listening to this show carefully. A previous guest slack Stewart Butterfield worked on the very same game. You might recall how that early venture fared.”
2020-10-27 · Masters of Scale · Build a more human internet, w/Caterina Fake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Craze in Silicon Valley for A versus B testing, when a programmer says C, when the button is read and jiggles a little bit, you click on it a lot more. But Katerina doesn't fight for clicks, she fights to create that homey feeling that she first experienced in the Borges message room. The connection between people. That's what she hopes to scale. She is a passion for human interaction that's not exactly typical in Silicon Valley. So how did Katerina, the Borges fanatic, and liberal arts graduate, wind up in Silicon Valley? It was a logistical error, actually. She got waylaid on a trip to the Himalayas.”
2020-10-27 · Masters of Scale · Build a more human internet, w/Caterina Fake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think about it. She felt more at home online than she did in her actual hometown. This is the power of an online community writ small. Notice how she can't even remember which tool she used for communication. To Katarina, the tool is an afterthought. What sticks out in her memory is the conversation, the connection she forged with her fellow users, and this deep seated appreciation for these very human factors is one of the things that sets Catherine apart from so many other entrepreneurs and investors. A lot of founders, especially the tech entrepreneurs, tend to think of the tool they want to build as opposed to community. The primary paradigm tends to be here's a tool, it's a hammer, it's a screwdriver. I give it to users to do a specific thing, and the secondary thing tends to be, here is the interface. How can I modify it to make the behavior addictive? You can see it in the”
2020-10-27 · Masters of Scale · Build a more human internet, w/Caterina Fake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you have no familiarity with Borges, you're not alone. In fact, you're in the majority. It's the Borges fans who are more likely to feel alone, which is exactly what drew Katerina to a primitive chat room for fellow fans.”
2020-10-27 · Masters of Scale · Build a more human internet, w/Caterina Fake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And board member in shaping many other iconic online communities. Companies like Etsy, Kickstarter, and Stack Overflow, which expanded our very definition of what an online community could be, her eagle eye for the seeds of communities that can scale have made her an impressive investor. Kettery's fascination with online communities began as a teenager. We're tuning in and out of each other's conversations. Katerina had dabbled with computers and early chat rooms, but what hooked her was a long-distance connection around a shared passion.”
2020-10-27 · Masters of Scale · Build a more human internet, w/Caterina Fake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Those early users are a bit like a primordial amoeba just moments before it devolves into a more advanced life form. Lightning strikes and what crawls out of the muck is anybody's guess What you can control, however, is the climate in which this microscopic community evolves. You can make it hospitable to good behavior or to bad behavior. You can get the troll like creatures to shrivel up and die, or you can let them grow, to grotesque proportions, and lord it over everyone. One rule of scale, whatever you are when you're small gets amplified when you're big. So take a really close look at what you are, the good and the bad. And if there is anyone who believes founders can and must shape their communities, it's Katarina Fake. I wanted to talk to her about this because she played a key role in shaping so many iconic companies that set the standard for what an online community could be. Her first company, Flickr, launched many of the conventions now common in social media. It's hard to overstate the influence she has had. She also played a role as an investor, advisor.”
2020-10-27 · Masters of Scale · Build a more human internet, w/Caterina Fake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Your first users and the tone of their first interactions will set the norms for the entire civilization. Maybe you don't think you're an online community. Maybe you think you're a platform or a marketplace. Maybe you think you're a commerce site with reviews or a content site with comments. Maybe you think your social media, I have news for you. Those are all online communities. And given the year we had in 2017, we all have a lot to learn. And I say this recognizing that no cider platform can 100% control what its users do, particularly when they run in the millions or billions. Some of them will run amok. Count on it. That's all the more reason to put the guardrails in place before it's too late.”
2020-10-27 · Masters of Scale · Build a more human internet, w/Caterina Fake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is Masters of Scale. I'm Reed Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn and Vestra Greylock, and your host, and I believe that every founder of an online community has a responsibility to shape the culture from day one because the tone you set is the tone you're going to keep.”
2020-10-27 · Masters of Scale · Build a more human internet, w/Caterina Fake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If anything, Katerina is no longer the Abraham of social media. She is the Noah, moments before the flood. What she sees in today's social media is a corruption of the online communities she hoped to see blossoming across the web. To fix them, she says, you almost have to start over, go back to the founding principles. And this doesn't apply only to what we call social media. There are many communities online, marketplaces, crowdfunding platforms, content sites, and many of them are thriving because they recognize, as Katarina does, that what you're creating is a civilization. You are the framer, the giver of laws, the establisher of norms, and the way you lead your first generation of users will shape how they lead the next generation and the next. That's why I believe every founder of an online community has to shape the culture from day one because the tone”
2020-10-27 · Masters of Scale · Build a more human internet, w/Caterina Fake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I know plenty of people who would love to take credit for the genesis of social media, even partial credit or accidental credit. Katerina, however, doesn't want to take any credit at all. Social media to her is like an alien that burst out a flicker's stomach, and to anyone who lumps flicker together with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, she wants to make one thing clear. That was not what she was trying to beget.”
2020-10-27 · Masters of Scale · Build a more human internet, w/Caterina Fake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's Katarina Fake. She's the co-founder of Flickr, and arguably the Abraham of social media. Flickr begat a whole series of innovations that would shape the way we use social media. Back in 2004, which is basically biblical times in Silicon Valley, Flickr was the home to a teeny tribe of people who started sharing their photos online. Photo sharing begapped the idea followers. Followers begat activity feeds. Activity feeds begat more followers. And then bots pretending to be followers. It's actually astonishing how many conventions of social media were begat by Flickr. And when Katerina looks back through that long series of begats and beholds her creation, what does she say?”
2020-10-27 · Masters of Scale · Build a more human internet, w/Caterina Fake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hey, folks, Jeff Berman here. I'm thrilled to share some of the new names who will be joining us at this year's Masters of Scale Summit. This may be our biggest stage yet. Read Hastings, Meredith Whitaker, Van Jones, Amjad Massad, and more will be there with us october twentieth through twenty second in San Francisco. If you're building something great or you want to build something great, we want you there with us too. Join us at masters of scale dot com slash apply twenty six. That's masters of scale dot com slash apply twenty six.”
2020-10-27 · Masters of Scale · Build a more human internet, w/Caterina Fake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The very best founders I know are brilliant at building systems. They connect teams, they remove bottlenecks, and they eliminate single points of failure. And yet, when it comes to their own wealth, most are running a disconnected stack. A tax accountant here and a state attorney there, a wealth manager who doesn't talk to either one of them. Creative planning was built to fix exactly that. One integrated team of tax professionals, state planners, investment specialists all coordinated by a dedicated wealth manager who sees your full financial picture and keeps every piece working together. Proactive tax efficiency, state strategy investments all under one roof, creative planning where wealth works together. Learn more at creative planning dot com slash masters of scale.”
2020-10-27 · Masters of Scale · Build a more human internet, w/Caterina Fake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT