YouSaid · the spoken record

Mike McCue

lines on the record: 120
first: 2017-02-13
most recent: 2017-02-13
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

“And it's going to be like raising a child. It is one of these things that has a lot of ups and downs. And so if you're going to do it, do it for something you love and do it for something big. Because, you know, it's actually just as hard. In fact, maybe in some ways it's even harder to build a small company, a small idea than it is a big company with a big idea that's going to change the world. So it's actually one of the things that I try to help people understand if they're interested in becoming an entrepreneur is, you know, think big.”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There are people who can be successful, and I think that's one of the things I try to coach people, they just hit the lottery. They were lucky that they were successful. But I think that those are probably the biggest lessons. I guess one last one I would say is building a company is hard work.”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is don't think about the end game while you're play the game. You know, don't constantly think about the end game. Third, I would say is treat your team with respect and treat your users with respect. And good things will happen. I've seen too many entrepreneurs try to act like they think Steve Jobs was. Which, you know, there were some things that he did, but on the other hand, he was also a remarkably good leader in many ways. And I think people can be to, you know, if you're respectful to both your users. And to your team members, and you build something that has real value, you can get a lot done here in the technology renaissance that we're living in. You can do amazing things. If you try to take shortcuts, if you treat your people with a lack of respect, if you treat your users with a lack of respect,”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think for me, I mentioned this earlier, one of the biggest lessons I learned, and there's a couple of lessons I've learned. One is don't overrotate on your competition.”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Being sensible. It's really hard. You can make more money being toxic. Very last question I ask everybody what's the one mistake you made as an entrepreneur if you could give a tip to an entrepreneur or it doesn't have to be a mistake what's one thing”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were profitable in Q4 Q4 is always the best quarter of the year. So we had our first profitable quarter ever. We'll get there, get a full year of profitability, I hope, next year.”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're just going to continue with this mission. We're just going to keep building what we're building. And I'm trying to recreate that idea of the magazine for a modern mobile social world, a place you can go to read about something you love. And all you see, story after story is about that thing that you love. And the ads. Every ad is about that thing you love.”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It can be extremely damaging. It brings out the worst in people. It does. And I think that that's, you know, there's a place for anonymity, but you can't treat everybody on the platform the same. If they're anonymous, they should be able to have a certain amount of impact, but not so much impact, as the same as someone who's a verified user, who clearly has a reputation. You may not agree with their points of view, but they're not threatening people either.”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I also think anonymity has a lot of to do with this. Anonymity can sometimes be a good thing for people who can't speak truth to power without repercussions. On the other hand,”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think if companies collaborate more here on techniques to deal with trolls and hate speech and so on, you shouldn't get banned from Twitter. You should get banned from all sorts of things. So if you go off the rails and threaten somebody. That should be something that you just can't delete an account and go do some other social service or come back again. There should be a longer-lasting impact to you”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and I think it is absolutely again, Jack, I think, is making some good steps forward there But I absolutely think this is a solvable problem. By the way, the other thing, too, Kara, I think, is it's really important for companies to cooperate on this stuff. There is actually a lot of cooperation already today on things like child pornography. Sure.”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Some portion of our users I agree. I've been saying that. I'm like, Facebook's become kind of toxic a little bit more. And it shouldn't be like look what's happened to Twitter. They didn't fix it early enough. So if you were running, you'd bring in editors, these bionic editors and things like that to try to improve that.”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And look, you're going to lose some readers or some users when you take that stand. And you have to be willing to do that. Otherwise, you will kind of just be driven by the, you know, all these negative toxic dynamics. If you take a stand and say, look, we're going to build a business based on, let's say, fewer users. We're willing to have some portion of our users not actually use the product, then you actually make a better business, frankly. I agree.”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a very good point, Kara. I think in this day and age in particular, I think it's very important for technology leaders and products to take a stand. Not against right or left, but against truth and fiction.”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“More like an empowered editors are using technology to do their job faster and better, right? And you can design tools for them to do that, which is actually something we have at Flipboard is a whole set of tools and analytics that allow our curators to find hot spots and problems as well as really great things that people should discover. And then they apply their own judgment on that.”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, for example, you can give an editor a task to say, I want you to find these great stories. And they could go look at every single story one by one, or they could use an algorithm to find the initial collection of stories. I”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm not close enough to these guys to know whether they're taking responsibility or not. I think a lot of it has to do with just a mentality, a mentality that technology can solve the problem, technology alone. And I think it's just something that people are starting to realize, wait a minute, maybe this is why editors are a good thing. Maybe we have to apply some judgment. And when you start to do that, you start to then think about, okay, there are ways to like create bionic editors. There are ways to scale, yeah, to scale curation, right? To scale human judgment.”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A lot of these companies draw a lot of engagement fixed. So it's not fair, and people can't do what they want, you're making them, you know, it's almost, it's sort of like the soda companies and the potato chip companies, you know, they're making something, or even this same thing as a cigarette company in a lot of ways. It's impossible. There is some responsibility there. Why don't they take responsibility? It drives me crazy, as you know.”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Why aren't there? Why aren't there? Because you believe in curation. Flip war believes in curation. It's a very different high-minded compared to everyone else. And every time I go to some of these companies, they're like, well, Cura people should be able to do what they want. They're very libertarian. And I feel like the game is fixed. They've got their engineers making you do stuff. They create stuff that's impossible to resist. They have a business model all around engagement. There's a dark.”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At Twitter for sure. I mean, look, I think it takes a lot of focus. And, you know, part of it is that you need to kind of think about what your first principles are for your platform. If you let anyone say anything at any time without any sort of moderation, which you could call free speech, you could also call toxic. And so there has to be some mechanism. You can't yell just as you can't yell fire in a crowded movie theater, the classic free speech test. There needs to be similar analogies in the world of social media when it's all about technology.”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's amazing. Now, when you have a platform like that, but that's that open, then obviously it can be abused. And so this is one of those very significant product challenges that you have to really work through and think about. I think Jack made some very good steps forward yesterday. And that has to be a continuous, ongoing drumbeat of improvements to sort of move Twitter out of the realm of the trolls and back into the realm of civilized conversation.”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, if you think about it, like how do you get a message to the President of the United States before Twitter? Or to the President of Iran”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I think, first of all, Twitter is, I just have a fondness for because they are one of the very few, it's actually, I think the only platform where you can actually at message the president of the United States. Right. That's amazing”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not really moments, I suppose it's kind. Kind of an effort. Kind of. What happens to them? Because they've truly become a cesspool of problems. And they're trying hard. Yesterday they tried to announce some anti-trolling stuff. But they've got Trump on there doing crazy stuff. And so they've never been more relevant. And then they're challenged from a business point of view at the same time. But one of the biggest problems is... Experience, the nature of the experience feels bad, like it feels, it can feel bad. What do you imagine something like that? What do they do?”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can you talk? Same thing with Twitter. You were on the board of Twitter. You come off because there were obvious conflicts of interest with what Flipford was doing. And what they were doing. Did they have a news reader? No, they sort of.”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's like if you ate potato chips all day long, right? I mean, you have to have a balanced information diet. There's nothing wrong with looking at Facebook. It's just like, if that's all you do, right.”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, it's really interesting. I think sometimes I think of news feeds as like the mystery meat of your information diet. And it may be great initially, but then it's not like when you finish reading your Facebook feed after a half hour, you're like, that was a great use of time. You said it the other day. How do you feel?”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so you've got to look at it. It's sitting there, it's like a cupcake. Like, I got to eat it. I got to eat it. I don't know. And then you become addicted to it. That's right. It's a really interesting problem.”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is. You have the engineers working to get you to see that content more and you have the people that are writing that content who are specialists at infusing passion and emotion in people.”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Where they can trust it absolutely. And the problem is this stuff is so infectious, and I use that in the gross way, infectious, and hard to look away from. And it's combined with techniques that engineers back at Google or Google or Facebook are doing to try to get me to look at it more. So it's like, it's almost like a...”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And right, I mean, there's things happening in Syria and in our government and so on. This is why people want to come to read Flipboard. I'll tell you too, one of the things that I think people sometimes Think is that it's only people only want to see Link Beta. They only want to go see these news feeds. That's just not true. There are a lot of people, millennials included, who absolutely want to dive deep and learn.”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think that they are onto some of the right things that they're doing. It's not like it's not a problem that can't be solved. There's some very straightforward things that can be done. I think that if I were to counsel them, I would say, you know, you really need to have those feeds be driven by editors and not algorithms. The idea of a trending news feed. We learned very early on in Flipboard. I remember seeing a story driven by algorithms when everything was powered by Twitter on Flipboard about somebody microwaving a pet. And I thought, okay, this is not the kind of news that people come to Flipboard to see.”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For any sort of nefarious reason, it's more just like that's what technology companies do, they rely on technology and they've built something that's with a certain center of gravity. And to do anything that's counter to that center of gravity is just going to take a lot of time.”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. Again, the big challenge for Facebook is if they want to be a news platform, you have to build something totally different. The idea of Facebook is very powerful, connecting people together and friends and family. And that's a mission that I think is very powerful and could do a lot of good in the world to also try to be a platform for news and for informing people is a completely different business architecture. This is one of the things I think at Netscape we were an internet company that converted ourselves to a software company, right? I think that this is why you see, it's not that they're moving slowly”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I'm just using them because they relies on tech. But yeah, what do they do? They're always talking about false positives and it's so difficult. And it seems like it may not be quite as complex as.”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, and by the way, I think it's not just Facebook. It's anyone kind of deeply rooted in the world of technology. Right. What do they do?”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, what do you do? Because they seem to be picking Facebook over you or anybody who's doing something intelligent. And what can Facebook do? I mean, I know they're trying these various things. And as usual with Facebook, it's the slow walk to the inevitable. You know what I mean? You're realizing.”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the sharing. And I think how many people still believe that Barack Obama was born outside the US? Significant percentage of people. How many people don't even know the difference between Obamacare and the Affordable Health Care Act? They think they're different things. They don't realize they're the same thing. An educated electorate is in all of our best interests. A highly charged electorate that's focused on extremist propaganda for the left or the right is you're going to get what we get now.”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. Now, how do you quantify that? How do you prove that? It's common sense. Just look at the tonality and the extremism”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. And we, you know, it may well be that those 60,000 votes that made the difference in the electoral college were swayed by”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, it's dangerous because you're allowing computers to basically then propagate content that is extremist because extremist content is going to get the most clicks. And extremist content is going to create the most emotion and passion, which is going to cause the most shares and the most engagement. And it all feeds on itself. And so then if you're in the world of creating stories, over time, one of the things that I think is very challenging is that you have a combination of factors that are causing Creating incentives for writing extremist content and linkbait. You also have people that are playing into that in various strategic ways knowing that the False, they're writing propaganda, and they're utilizing these algorithms to spread that propaganda.”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That is, first of all, that's a massive difference. And when you have a user experience and a platform that's optimized for friends versus one that's optimized for interests and topics and passions, totally different, you know, everything is different. And so that's one big thing. The second thing is that we really believe that stories are more than just a bunch of ones and zeros packaged together. You know, the technology industry can sometimes overrot on the technology aspect and say, yeah, this is a great story because most people are clicking on it. But there's no algorithm for true or false. For fact or fiction. There's no algorithm for insightful or important or meaningful. A lot of the algorithms that are out there tend to focus on is engagement. And for a very specific economic reason.”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We are. What we're trying to do is create an experience where, first of all, you go there for the topic, not for the people, right? So you go there. Right, or a passion, right? So you go there to go specifically learn about dive into politics or economics or gun control, immigration.”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Tell me why it's dangerous because I agree, but it's what's happening, it's how people are doing. I think Facebook is what 50% of the news distribution. They become a very powerful player in this. They have.”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's one of the big problems If you rely on getting your news from your friends or if you rely on getting your news through just a bunch of algorithms That's a very challenging semi-dangerous way to get your nutrients”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You have no idea what you're going to get. You're going to get whatever your friends are sharing at that moment. That can be really great. It can also be not great. It's totally random. So that's what I mean by a slot machine for content. It's not about any one topic. It's just whatever is going on at the moment, whatever your friends decided to share.”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You were going against everything that's happening because now that isn't happening. It's become, as I use the term vomit very particularly because that's what it feels like. And you used the term, I think, slot machine for content. Yes, that's right. Explain that. Like right now.”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“More smart, more personalized, and also interestingly, it's a mix of editorial and algorithms that has never been done before.”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Landscape photography, you'll see really it's not all photography. Right. It's a particular thing. Tech is another great thing, right? Before Fora, we would give everybody the same tech feed. all editorially driven interestingly enough but if you're an enterprise software or you're instagram e-commerce or you're you're in drones i mean you're going to have a different perspective on tech if you're an entrepreneur versus a designer versus a product manager versus a marketer you're going to have a different perspective on tech. We want you to be able to personalize your own technology magazine and have it become the definitive resource for you as a participant in the tech industry.”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And Well, we're introducing a very powerful new capability we call smart magazines. And what that does is it allows you to, for a given passion like photography, you can pick the specific elements that you love about photography. So even more.”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT