YouSaid · the spoken record

Lauren Williams

lines on the record: 77
first: 2022-02-08
most recent: 2022-02-08
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

“What all this fundraising was moving into last week was like help us launch, help us launch, help us make this thing a reality. Now this thing is a reality. And the next step is to really like recalibrate and figure out the pitch for help us take this thing into the next stratosphere.”
2022-02-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · News with a Capital B: CEO Lauren Williams on why we need news for and by Black people · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How do you think about the next step, right? Which is you've done all this fundraising, you've launched, you've got a week under your belt, and now the next step is X. What do you think that next step is?”
2022-02-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · News with a Capital B: CEO Lauren Williams on why we need news for and by Black people · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Me talking about how hard it was for me in June of 2020. And I try to be just really relatable. And, you know, I'm not a super formal person. I don't take these meetings in a super formal way. I think that if I went into them feeling like I had to do that, I don't think I would be quite as successful.”
2022-02-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · News with a Capital B: CEO Lauren Williams on why we need news for and by Black people · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We don't ask people if they want to see it and we don't use it. And we do listen to it afterward. I generally just launch into our origin story and I explain our model and why we're doing what we're doing. And I generally tell an incredibly personal story about my state of mind when we came up with capital B. a story so personal that I'm not going to even say it here. And, you know, that's where the conversation starts and people really respond really well to that level of detail that I give and the honesty of my story. And if the person is a mom, they respond really well to.”
2022-02-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · News with a Capital B: CEO Lauren Williams on why we need news for and by Black people · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would definitely say that, at least in my experience at Vox Media, I was definitely the all seeing, all dancing salesperson. When we were in meetings together. But that's fascinating to me, right? Like the actual process of taking a meeting and asking for something is not normal for editorial people We're not in a business of making transactions in that way.”
2022-02-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · News with a Capital B: CEO Lauren Williams on why we need news for and by Black people · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Actual friends, actual people who know each other. We have actual chemistry, and that just worked. And we're just real. And to the extent that we can keep that going and can keep that with the new people. Honest about what we're doing and why we're doing it. I think that that will continue to work.”
2022-02-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · News with a Capital B: CEO Lauren Williams on why we need news for and by Black people · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I did not think that I was going to be particularly good at fundraising. The place that I generally have held in work is that I'm competent and I'm good at the job I do, but I am a behind the scenes kind of person. When you're co-founding an organization, that doesn't really work anymore. these meetings I had to just be the voice of capital B. I found that when it's your mission and your idea and it's just really truly authentic you don't even have to use your deck or Have to have a bunch of flash. You just have to talk, and it really resonates with people. And that ended up being something that worked the best for us, just being very, very natural. We are a Kodo and I are like.”
2022-02-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · News with a Capital B: CEO Lauren Williams on why we need news for and by Black people · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not really. I think the really interesting thing that we found really overall is, I don't know, you know me. I'm interested to know if you would imagine that I'd be good at fundraising or not good at fundraising. It's a pleasure.”
2022-02-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · News with a Capital B: CEO Lauren Williams on why we need news for and by Black people · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Fascinating to me just that all these kind of organizations are making these commitments, there might not be a lot of places to spend the money seems like something that you identified, or you could create new places for them to spend the money. But then because of remote, it was actually easier to make those connections than it might have been in a normal circumstance seems like a very unique set of things lining up. Did you tailor your approach to that situation? Did you find yourself changing midstream as you raised money?”
2022-02-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · News with a Capital B: CEO Lauren Williams on why we need news for and by Black people · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, I think it was actually easier. I mean, because I think that three years ago you had to fly places for these meetings. And now they're all on Zoom. And I think that that will continue. And I think everyone involved is happier about that.”
2022-02-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · News with a Capital B: CEO Lauren Williams on why we need news for and by Black people · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's not one party where the billionaires are, and at the big foundations. Have to get an introduction somehow. And if you're not in, you're not in.”
2022-02-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · News with a Capital B: CEO Lauren Williams on why we need news for and by Black people · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, how does this work if you don't know anyone? And that's something that we ran into a lot, particularly for me. I mean, is it Vox for almost seven years? I don't, I'm not from the philanthropy world. I did not have any contacts in this space at all. So there's lots of hitting brick walls because you do have to know someone to get into these rooms.”
2022-02-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · News with a Capital B: CEO Lauren Williams on why we need news for and by Black people · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Who were starting a news organization like ours. And so that created a lot of opportunities for us and doors that were open to us that would not have been opened otherwise. It was still really hard. Raising money, you know, foundations are really interesting on their homepage, they'll have this big splashy like we care about racial equity. Kind of thing. And then once you get down to like finding the contact to get a meeting, they'll say, don't call us, we'll call you. No unsolicited, like no unsolicited grants. We will, we don't take meetings. We identify for ourselves the people we want to give grants to”
2022-02-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · News with a Capital B: CEO Lauren Williams on why we need news for and by Black people · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, one of the reasons you asked earlier why we decided to do this now and I gave a true answer, but one of the things that I left off was in 2020, there was an enormous kind of new will in the country to address racial equity issues in our country. And every industry, every corner of business had their own reckoning and philanthropy was no different. And we also know that those things are fleeting. And it really did seem like we needed to jump on that moment before it went away so that we could raise money for capital B. And so while we were raising money last year, it was all these foundations had their racial equity funds that they had created and were really, really, really interested into Black women founders.”
2022-02-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · News with a Capital B: CEO Lauren Williams on why we need news for and by Black people · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I feel like a very underappreciated part of a founder's life is just the amount of time spent on raising money. Did that look like what were those meetings like? Were you going after people you thought you could win? Were you going after everybody? How did you make that strategy?”
2022-02-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · News with a Capital B: CEO Lauren Williams on why we need news for and by Black people · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's been a lot of really intense fundraising, most of it. We needed to raise a lot of money to do what we wanted to do. Our idea is ambitious to have a national newsroom and also launch a local newsroom and have a centralized business function that's going to be able to support not just our first local newsroom, which is in Atlanta, but our subsequent local newsrooms. That's not cheap. And to be able to do the kind of journalism that we want to do for our audience that we feel like our audience deserves, that's also not cheap. And so we get to raise a lot of money. And it's hard to raise a lot of money. And it took a while before we could start hiring and making the plans we needed to make to actually launch.”
2022-02-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · News with a Capital B: CEO Lauren Williams on why we need news for and by Black people · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it sits next to it, but it is in that sense a part of that movement of something here is not working, something here in traditional media is too kind of constrained or too set in its ways, either from a business perspective or from an editorial perspective to respond to the needs of the moment. That is, I think really, really seen in local news, which is failing across the country and desperately needs refreshing. That is a business issue for local news. It's a cultural issue as well. I mean, there's an enormous trust problem. And those business issues and those trust issues really do. Go hand in hand, they're aligned. And the effects of those issues are one and the same. Misinformation and disinformation is rising. Lack of local news contributes to polarization. And we need new ideas to respond to those issues.”
2022-02-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · News with a Capital B: CEO Lauren Williams on why we need news for and by Black people · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I just think it's interesting that it's hard to remember what that felt like almost two years ago now, right? Like even, I think for everyone, but that moment, particularly in media around the time of the George Floyd test in the middle of the pandemic, there was an election coming up. It did feel like the media was failing. It had failed to tell some important story. A lot of people were just opting out of the traditional media ecosystem. Do you think that Capital B sits as a part of that traditional ecosystem?”
2022-02-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · News with a Capital B: CEO Lauren Williams on why we need news for and by Black people · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Who's coming with me kind of thing? I am much too cautious for that. And I have a mortgage. A kid in daycare, and that's I don't feel like I grate resignated, resigned.”
2022-02-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · News with a Capital B: CEO Lauren Williams on why we need news for and by Black people · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really, don't feel like it. And I also don't really feel like the substack wave. I mean, I guess not all of the substack wave, right? Because I feel like the great resignation in its purest sense is people just leaving, right? Like leaving the workforce. You know, a lot of the substack people, that's just like moving to a new job. They got paid. Right. You know, it's an alternative type of work, of course. But, you know, it wasn't without security. And I kind of feel the same way about what we were doing. I didn't make the call to leave Vox until we secured enough funding to know that we were going to be able to get paid, that this was something that had Resonance in the philanthropy world where I knew we were going to get real funding. It was a gamble for sure, but it wasn't like a Jerry Maguire.”
2022-02-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · News with a Capital B: CEO Lauren Williams on why we need news for and by Black people · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we just talked to Reuben Harris, who's the CEO of Career Karma about the great resignation. I want to remind people that that moment in 2020 was the beginning of a pretty intense convulsion. The entire job market, like that's when people started quitting, in particular in media, that's when I would say the substack discourse really picked up. Like lots of people started leaving institutional newsrooms to build new kinds of things. Do you put yourself in that waved? Does that feel like the same moment in time or do you feel like you're doing something substantially different?”
2022-02-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · News with a Capital B: CEO Lauren Williams on why we need news for and by Black people · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know the state of the industry, the state of coverage of black issues in the industry, the state of black journalists in the industry. It was also a moment where things felt kind of apocalyptic. And, you know, it was a thing that we could have talked about forever and ever at maybe a different moment in time. But I think because of where we were in COVID, because of all of the uncertainty about the future, instead of making us kind of hunker down and not do anything, I think it had the opposite effect and it made us say, if the world's going to end, let's do this thing. Let's actually make this happen. Let's put our Our experience and our skills towards something that we think could make a real difference for industry, could make a difference for not to sound too lofty democracy”
2022-02-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · News with a Capital B: CEO Lauren Williams on why we need news for and by Black people · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I actually announced I was leaving in November 2020. I actually left officially in February of 2021. But the thing that made me take the leap was my co-founder, Okoto Aforiata, and I, I think, we've known each other for 11 years. We met when we started working together at the root as editors a very long time ago. In June of 2020, as newsroom leaders, she was managing editor at the Trace at the time, we were having a lot of feelings about”
2022-02-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · News with a Capital B: CEO Lauren Williams on why we need news for and by Black people · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Want to ask why specifically why now, but let's just step back. You were the editor in chief of vox.com. That's a big job in this media ecosystem. You left in November 2020 to start working on Capital B. What made you take that leap?”
2022-02-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · News with a Capital B: CEO Lauren Williams on why we need news for and by Black people · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm just going to admit to the audience. Lauren and I know each other very well. You used to be the editor in chief of ox.com. Just down the hall when the hall was like an actual physical concept. So we have spent a lot of time talking to each other about running media organizations. That's the disclosure. I'm going to try to ask really hard questions.”
2022-02-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · News with a Capital B: CEO Lauren Williams on why we need news for and by Black people · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And how she thinks about standing out in a media business where the pressures of social media and search traffic kind of make everything look the same. And of course, I wanted to know how she plans to grow. Now that she's the CEO, how is she making decision about Capital B's path forward? One note, Lauren was just on the Recode Media podcast with Peter Kafka, where she talked in more detail about the editorial vision for Capital B. That conversation's great, you should listen to it, but it's not what we talked about. I wanted to spend more time on decoder stuff, being a founder, raising money, making decisions, all that sort of thing. Lauren is a really sharp leader. I've personally learned a lot from her. I think you're really going to like this one. Okay, Lauren Williams, co-founder and CEO of Capital B. Here we go.”
2022-02-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · News with a Capital B: CEO Lauren Williams on why we need news for and by Black people · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Welcome to Decoder. I'm Neil Patel, editor in chief of the Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm talking to Lauren Williams, the co-founder and CEO of Capital B, and some new nonprofit media company dedicated to news for black audiences. Capital B launched last week with both a national news site and a local newsroom dedicated to Atlanta. We plan to expand to more cities over time. Now, I'll just be honest with you, this episode's a little looser than usual since Lauren used to be the editor-in-chief of Vox.com, the Virgil's sister site at Vox Media. We were co-workers for a long time. We're still friends. So while I did my best to ask all of the decoder questions, we made each other laugh a little bit more than usually happens on this show. But I still wanted to know why Lauren decided to go and do a startup, what the last year of building that startup ahead of the launch has been like.”
2022-02-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · News with a Capital B: CEO Lauren Williams on why we need news for and by Black people · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT