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

“There are other people who love that very same thing. I don't know who they are. I have a couple of them that are my friends, but there are people in the world who love that and they're talking about that, sharing content about that. We want Flipboard to be able to help you find that tribe of people, share content together so that you can be better landscape photography and like learn more about mirrorless cameras and LICA and so on. If you take of that and you think about that for democracy, for gun control, or for wellness and fitness or parenting, whatever, these passions, these things that drive people where they're truly passionate, and not just mildly interested, but passionate, if we can collect those people and those stories together like a magazine did, then I think we have something really special. And so that's not how anyone else has thought about this. Right.”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. And so the idea of fellow, like I love landscape photography with mirrorless cameras. And it's just one of my things I love to do with Leica cameras, right”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's no social elements in Apple News. It's not driven by anything, by anyone that you know or anyone that you respect. It's just a bunch of algorithms giving you a bunch of articles. You can get that anywhere.”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because people have thought about it more as a reader. Right. We've thought about it more from a social perspective. Apple News, it's a reader.”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, as you started to do this, a ton of companies Google and others competed. I know Google talked to you about buying you and you didn't do that. They've all fallen by the wayside. AOL had one. Everybody had one. Facebook had one. What was Facebook scholar? I forgot”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that you can harness the value of that? How can you find all the mountain bikers who love to mountain bike in Santa Cruz and see the stories that they're sharing? And that's a very different way to think about browsing the web.”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just that concept has now way more sophisticated because what you have, the web is now not just a node or collection of documents, it's people and documents. It's people pointing to other people, people pointing to other sites, and effectively endorsing content or endorsing other people. And when you look at that web, that's a very different web than the web browser that we all use today Was designed for. It's a much more sophisticated, much more powerful web, what I would argue, the power of which we've only just begun to tap into. So this idea of a social web needs a social browser. And that was the beginning of thinking about Flipboard. Not as a reader of just like, go find some RSS feeds, but more as how do we navigate this network of people and content.”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a fun thing to do on a weekend, add a few beers into the mix, it gets really fun. But the fascinating thing about this is like, yeah, what would you do? How would you still have a browser? Would you still monetize the same way? Knowing all the things we've learned in a mobile social world. And one of the big insights we had then is like this idea of the web where it was a document pointing to another document on a network, which was amazing, just that simple concept created more than a trillion dollars in value.”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So when I think about when we were in the early days before Flipboard was named or where we knew what it was going to be really, I gathered a group of my friends from the Netscape Microsoft days together in my living room and we did a thought experiment. We asked ourselves, what if the internet, the web, just got deleted by accident And we needed to create a totally new one from scratch. Just like if you accidentally deleted an email.”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, people thought of it as a reader, but interestingly enough, if you go back and look at the first product that we came out with, the first release, we called it a social magazine. And we were very specific about that terminology. Now, some people like to put it into the terms that they know and understand. It's a reader. And certainly it acted in many ways like a reader. But if you look just a little under the covers, every single story that you saw on Flipboard was a tweet. It came from Twitter. That's not a reader. A reader, you would take RSS feeds and you'd mash them together and that would be what you would see. This was a very different thing. And when you go back and look deeper. What you really see is that flipboard was a browser for the social web.”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Something new. And do you when you are thinking of when you started versus now, what is the big difference between what's happened in that time period? Because it was a reader, I would call it, I think that's what we call it. It was a reader.”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You can't not be. You can't be just a media or just a technology company if you're in this space. So, you know, it's a hybrid. It's something new.”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. I think that if you're in the business of selling advertising, And working with content, then you're in the media industry. Does that mean you're media company? Well, it depends on what you mean by that. I think if, of course, also similarly, if you're building apps that you download that are built over years and with a platform in the back end and all this advanced technology, you're technology company too. So the reality is that's a blend.”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, we're not creating the content, but what we're doing is we're curating it. We're curating content, and not just us, our community is curating and our publishing partners are curating it, algorithms are curating it. It's this wonderful mixture of curation where you get basically what amounts to being a deeply personal magazine about something that you uniquely are massively passionate about. so that you can find stories in there that can inspire you and inform you, help you do what you love better.”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About that, right? That's pretty cool. You look at Wired. Wire isn't just a collection of tech stories. It's a collection of tech stories with a perspective.”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Still has and still will be. If you want to know where we're going in the future, go pick up a great magazine and look at it and compare where we are now with what is in that magazine. And that is our roadmap. And will be for a long time. They're a legendary guy named Clay Felker who started New York magazine. Once called magazines tribalorganizing documents”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. And it was early to these. Then there were a lot of them all of a sudden, a lot of these readers and sort of different takes on the content business. So talk just briefly, and then the next thing I'm going to talk about where it's going now, but what was the purpose then? Because it was a very different internet. And there were readers, there were, Google had one, there were so many of them. There were tons of these in this area. What has changed in that time period? Because initially it was really literally just make a magazine, but you've been changing the product quite a bit and trying to get it as the content needs are changing.”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Say how you do a lot of things. Yeah, well, I think that like, you know, when you have a purpose, a friend of mine who had cancer, he knew he was dying, and he once told me, I was like, Mike, you're in your heroic phase of life right now. You really need to like do something meaningful. Don't just like retire And so I really felt like, but this is one of those things that just grabs you. I didn't set out to start a company. I just, this idea, which in many ways was rooted in some of the things that were left undone at Netscape, really grabbed me.”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I started Flipboard because this idea of creating a platform where great stories could thrive, help journalism move more into the digital world in a way that was healthier for the whole ecosystem was very attractive and very powerful as an idea and as a mission. I think in life you have to have a purpose. It took about a week or two of just not doing anything before I realized this. Is boring”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's not what technology in Silicon Valley is about. This is about, you know, and it does sound a little now stereotypy, but it's about fusing technology with the world's problems and figuring out ways to advance society through technology.”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, for some kind of exit. If that's the way you think about it, I mean, there are some people who do that and I think that's just, it's a shallow existence.”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With people who really do love your product, and you're not just gaming the numbers and kind of gaming the valuation and gaming.”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so for me, if you had asked me when I started telling me, is it going to be public? Is it going to be sold? I don't see, I don't know. And I think you have to be open-minded to whatever the right thing to do is at the time given where you are. Otherwise, I think you cut off options. I think, in fact, companies are more valuable when they have options. You want to always preserve as many options as you possibly can. Yeah, exactly. And that's just good, solid thinking as an entrepreneur. But I'll tell you, though, that can't be your main, you can't be thinking about that as your main thing. What you have to do is focus. When I'm coaching other CEOs, I really try to get them to realize that it's about building something that is inherently endurably valuable, a real business that can actually be profitable.”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you know, the thing is that I don't go into this thinking about one outcome or another. One of the things that, you know, as an entrepreneur that always kind of bugs me a little bit is when people ask me, Mike, what's your exit strategy? And that's actually a VC term. That's like if you're an investor and then you get your money out. But as an entrepreneur, you cannot think that way, in my view, because you're in it for the cause. You don't just like exit your dream. You don't exit something that, you know, that you believe in, you figure out ways to continue to build it. It's a very different way of thinking.”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“$50 million. That's right. Well, you know, and it was not our main business. Right. But I saw that was where things were going, and I figured that at Microsoft, we could actually make that happen. And now it's become Cortana, which is great. But it was at that time when I looked at how we would progress at TellMe with that industry makeup. And we had been at the company now for eight years building, it just felt to me like it was the right thing to do. And also, you know, when I looked at, you know, how many more 800 numbers would we get on our platform and how much longer is that business really going to last? So I was looking at that too. So all of those things sort of factored into saying, you know, Maybe this is a good idea”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we had a consumer experience that we had just come out with where it was a kind of a lot like Siri and it was really great, but we had like 3,000 people using it. And I knew it was the future, but there was no...”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the opportunity for us to integrate what we were building into everything that they were doing was very attractive. And at that time, tell me didn't have a lot of options for distribution. This was before the iPhone. There was no such thing as an App Store. At that time, to get your apps out there, they had to be signed off by carriers.”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, and which is counter well, and also particularly for me where I didn't think they would ever give me a badge, right? The idea of Microsoft scale”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And speech recognition, and it was really successful. And over many years of just hard work, one deal after deal after deal, I had an amazing team that I did this with. And sure enough, you know, at the time, one day I had a meeting with Steve Baummer and he was incredibly excited about what we were doing and the future. Bill Gates was always a big fan of speech recognition and voice user interface. And Steve asked if I'd be interested in becoming part of Microsoft. And we talked more about it.”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was one business, and then we had another business where we had gotten a couple of these companies on our platform. They were paying us to host their phone presents. And we looked at those two things and we're like, yeah, this whole ad thing is not going to work right now. So we had to make the painful decision to put that, we didn't completely kill it. We just put it on ice and kind of slowed it down and we put all of our energy into building out the platform for these companies that at that time economically actually really needed what we had so that they wouldn't have to go buy a bunch of hardware and software themselves to run voice services. We created an outsourced in the cloud service for voice telephony.”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it was conceived of as in the initial business. But interestingly, what we did is we built a voice platform. And then on top of that, we built a consumer experience. And our thinking was that later we would go and add in.”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We did. We did deals with major telcos, major enterprise companies. Our voice platform became the way that a lot of 800 number calls were being answered.”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, yeah, I mean, we sold six years after the internet crashed, the dot-com crash. And so what happened there is like, you know, we were very successful early on in raising money. And getting a product out there. But building a company is a lot of hard work, as you know, and it takes time to build out your business model, win customers, try different economic models out, get to profitability. And that's what we did for six years after the dot com crash. We just focused on first principles and kept building something that was valuable to our customers, our users, and would be cash flow positive and eventually profitable.”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's very gratifying to work on products and technologies that ultimately help shape things, whether it's our company or something else that someone else does later on down the road. It's all part of the collective advancement of the technology realm. But, you know, obviously if you're building a company, you want to try to find the right zone. And that's important.”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think, yeah, I think you can run the risk of either being too far out there or too kind of near. You know, I think it was Benjamin Franklin that said there's nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come. And that's one of those things about building a company. You could kind of try to have to figure out the right timing. And sometimes you might get it right. Sometimes you might not. There's a certain amount of luck that comes along with that. But I think that for me, you know, as a entrepreneur, it's.”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“VoicePortal was way too early. Both with virtual reality and with voice portals. I mean, we were, I really believe in skating to where the puck is going to be. But you know, at some point you have to stay in the same stadium. You cannot just wait forever for them to get there”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the idea of connecting an audio web and allowing people to navigate that from a mobile device, from a phone with their voice seemed like a no-brainer. And talking more to Angus about it, we really got excited about the idea. So we started to develop it and hired some phenomenal people. We actually got John, Geene, and Andrea, who runs Google search today, became our founding CTO. I got to know him at Netscape. and then a guy named Hadi Partovi, who was my arch enemy. At Microsoft, my nemesis. Who was building Internet Explorer, he became our head of engineering. And the four of us set out to build this company. And it was”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, a guy that I worked with at Netscape, who I hired at Netscape, he was also the youngest employee at Netscape, a guy named Angus Davis, brilliant, just incredibly type A person. He came to me one day and he's like, you know, we got to figure out how to build a voice browser for the web. And I kind of dismissed the idea initially. He kept at it, kept at it. And then when we left, when I left, Netscape, you know, he came at that idea again. He's like, we should do this. And, you know, I thought about it. I was like, wow, this is actually a really interesting idea. And there was a new language that had been started to, or a new standard called voice XML. And it reminded me of my VRML days, the virtual reality modeling languages, his voice markup language.”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. People used to call it a voice portal. Back when portals were a thing. I used to call it dial tone 2.0 back when dial tone was a thing. And the idea is you say what you want and you get it to your phone”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, right, interesting. How do these guys make money? Yeah, well, good thing you didn't buy it now. I mean, it may be at the time. Who knows? You know, it's so funny when you think about all the acquisitions that could have happened and Yahoo looked at Google and AOL looked at Google. And it was kind of interesting during that time period. So you then left Netscape to start telling me.”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And Mark and I actually were advocates of acquiring Yahoo. But, you know, internally people didn't really get that. Why would you do that? We're a software company. Yeah, right. Interesting. How do these guys make money?”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And also, you know, I think one of the things too is that we focus, we were a web company that converted ourselves into a software company, which, you know, from a pure revenue point of view, we were public, that was the business model that made sense. It was the clear business model. Had it just been a couple years later when the ad business model, which Mike Homer was a huge advocate of and was pushing harder. Exactly.”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then the Federal Trade Commission ruled against that acquisition. And then Microsoft then basically went to go compete with Intuit. And they came out with Microsoft Money Compete with Quicken. And I remember a full page ad in the Wall Street Journal, and it said, today we're giving away money. And Microsoft just gave away Microsoft money, same playbook that they used against Netscape. And intuit, instead of kind of over rotating on that competition, just focused on making quick and better. And systematically every day. And what happened was they thrived. And I think that was just a visceral lesson for me and a lot of other people.”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that was. If you compare Netscape to Intuit, let's say it, if you remember. Microsoft was going to acquire into it”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right No, they were the accelerant. I think that the cause, and by the way, I don't think Netscape had a downfall, just to be clear, I think Netscape was a breakthrough company. Who did amazing things? And it was acquired for $4 billion that went to $8 billion in total value. I mean, this is a success story in that regard. But it could have been bigger. It could have done more. I think the key thing is that the way we handled the competition for Microsoft put us more on the defensive. And we thought more about them than actually what we were trying to do for the customers and the future of the web. Even though if you had told us that back then, we would have said, no, that's not the case. But looking back on it in hindsight,”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Correct. So it was fascinating. I participated in the Department of Justice action and actually helped write the brief to break up Microsoft.”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think the number one mistake that I made when I was there is that I overrotated on the competition. I woke up every day thinking about Microsoft and why they were trying to kill us and how to avoid that. Instead of waking up every day and thinking about, you know, the people that we're using our product.”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was the hottest company until the day I got there and started its long decline. It rolled down the stairs. I learned so many lessons there and I made a lot of mistakes at Netscape that echo to this day in me. Such?”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Couldn't believe it. And so you got here, worked at Netscape. Of course, that ran that right into a wall. I mean, but you were there for those key years where they were, it was the hottest company at the time.”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I couldn't, yeah. It's like, yeah. I felt like that garage band that manages to open up for the Rolling Stones one day, you know? I couldn't believe it”
2017-02-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mike McCue, CEO, Flipboard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT