YouSaid · the spoken record

Nicole Wong

lines on the record: 122
first: 2018-09-12
most recent: 2018-09-12
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

“Part of it, and part of it super personal. So they had actually caught me right after my grandfather had passed. And he had instilled in us the sense that like You have every right to be here and you have a right to participate in your community and your government. And if you get the opportunity, it's your responsibility and your privilege to do so. And knowing that when the call came in from the White House, there's no way that I can't walk that walk. And so the opportunity to serve, and candidly, and I don't know if you know Todd Parkwell, he's phenomenal. And the vision that he had for bringing all of government services up to another level to be able to participate at such a high impact. That was huge and it wasn't so. And you focused on what there. So my portfolio was innovation, internet, and privacy policy.”
2018-09-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Nicole Wong, former deputy CTO of the United States · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Alex McGillivry was the general counsel, and he and I had worked at Google together, and it was a pleasure to work with him again. And the job was to build up their product council team. Right. And so I was there, but I was there for literally, I think, six months before I got a call from the White House to join the Obama administration as the Deputy CTO.”
2018-09-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Nicole Wong, former deputy CTO of the United States · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And there's only one answer to that. It's like every working mom's neighbor. But I was able to do it and totally enjoyed the year and a half. And after a year and a half, my daughters were literally like, what did you do all day? Yeah, right. All right, so it's time for me to go back to work. So I went back, I went to Twitter to work with”
2018-09-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Nicole Wong, former deputy CTO of the United States · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Part of it was I was ready and I had a team that was ready to take on the responsibility. A lot of it was, I don't know that I've ever said this to people who were not just friends. My youngest daughter, one Christmas said to me, I was like, what do you want for Christmas? And she said, more time with you.”
2018-09-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Nicole Wong, former deputy CTO of the United States · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Fuck with that. I'm never. So it took a year and a half off to hang out with my kids In my family, and then at the end, like around”
2018-09-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Nicole Wong, former deputy CTO of the United States · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And Iran. Right. And no one in the United States. It kept saying big in Brazil. I'm like, you keep going with Brazil. I'm sure you'll somehow catch Facebook with that. I'll never forget that big in Brazil. So you then went to Twitter then.”
2018-09-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Nicole Wong, former deputy CTO of the United States · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In Brazil, India, and Iran. Right. And no one in the United States. And they kept saying big in Brazil. I'm like, you keep going with Brazil. I'm sure you'll.”
2018-09-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Nicole Wong, former deputy CTO of the United States · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. For, I mean, it was all of our big products. It was in and out of China. It was lots of new possible business areas that we then closed down. We had, I don't know if you remember like ORCID, the social network. I know Orchid. I swear.”
2018-09-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Nicole Wong, former deputy CTO of the United States · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The lawyers who were there at the time, Preet Rana, David Drummond, Alex McGillivri, Miriam Rivera, we were all really good at finding the place where we could add value. Be valued by the client, which is the thing that you have to do. Like, you can't be the lawyer that says no all the time. You have to figure out a way, not this way. But what if we designed it a different way? And I think that's the part that made it the most fun, which is how do you figure out how to achieve the business and the product ends? Well being legally compliant.”
2018-09-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Nicole Wong, former deputy CTO of the United States · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was responsible for the launch of all of our products globally. And so in 2004, it was just search. But after the IPO, it very quickly became much, much more than search, right? StreetView was a big thing. The acquisition of YouTube, the acquisition of double click, all of those areas that Google started to grow in over the next seven and a half years. Were the things I was involved in? I grew up a team of product counsel with my good friend Alex McGillivary. And they went on to do amazing things. And then some of my responsibilities expanded. So I had responsibility for at various times litigation patent, trademark, copyright, privacy, and broad regulatory types of stuff.”
2018-09-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Nicole Wong, former deputy CTO of the United States · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it was like 1,100 people, I think, when I joined. They hired me as senior compliance counsel, which we immediately changed to like product counsel. Because nobody invites the compliance guide to blind. But if your job is styled as like, I'm here to help you get your product out the door.”
2018-09-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Nicole Wong, former deputy CTO of the United States · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It has responsibilities to the people who are on it and to the people who read it. So that was a lot of the first part of my work. But I missed, I think I recognized as a lawyer, and especially when you're the outside lawyer, that you don't get to have say on the design of the project. You don't get to have say about what is the business responsibility around this product. And that you get by being in-house. That's how you get to the table. So I had an opportunity to go to Google. In 2004”
2018-09-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Nicole Wong, former deputy CTO of the United States · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Platforms that deserve the immunity We are totally going to get to that, right? But I think a lot of the work that I was doing at the beginning was helping those companies appreciate what it means to be a message board and it's not just software.”
2018-09-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Nicole Wong, former deputy CTO of the United States · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the thing that I most enjoyed about counseling clients was actually helping them build the products And so when Yahoo, when we first started presenting Yahoo, they had only two lawyers in their legal department, neither of which who had a background in sort of publishers' responsibilities and rights. During that time, and I think a lot of people forget, Lot of the folks who were moving onto the internet thought of themselves as software developers and didn't appreciate their role as publishers. Right. And so they still don't. There is that. So there's consistency. Although I think they've gotten better in a lot of cases because they talk about issues”
2018-09-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Nicole Wong, former deputy CTO of the United States · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Why did you do that? A lot of people have done that. A lot of people haven't. I know lots of different lawyers who have done that and moved along. But you were covering lots of tech companies and in startups and making law, like really, because a lot of those deal making, there's all kinds of different legal issues to deal with.”
2018-09-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Nicole Wong, former deputy CTO of the United States · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A bunch of them, right? It was such an exciting time to be both in the valley, but also a lawyer where the law was still unclear. So that's how I got into that. In 2004, I left the law firm, went to Google.”
2018-09-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Nicole Wong, former deputy CTO of the United States · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so we went in and made the case that if you don't have an afternoon paper, if that execution happens overnight, no one's going to know about it the next morning because of the way print cycles worked before the days the internet. So that was one of the cases I worked on. A lot of them were small. A lot of them were like, we need access to that courtroom, we need access to public records. Some were defamation cases, some were libel cases, some were reporters' privilege cases. But like in the mid-90s, those newspapers started going online. And then the partner that I had, and I've followed them there. And in 1997, we started getting our first pureplay internet clients. And so Yahoo was one of the first clients. Some that you wouldn't remember, maybe like Silicon Investor. Hotmail before it was acquired by Microsoft, Netscape.”
2018-09-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Nicole Wong, former deputy CTO of the United States · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know if you remember when the Ninth Circuit ordered, they reversed not doing the death penalty in the United States. In California, excuse me. And so we did our first execution in, I think, like 1994 in California. And then there was a case in California where like, we were going to do an execution at San Quentin and the afternoon paper, the San Francisco examiner got locked out.”
2018-09-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Nicole Wong, former deputy CTO of the United States · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I'm from San Diego, but like that I did my internship. At the end of it, I kind of decided that actually a law was going to be... Yeah, because we're useless. You got that? You figured that one out? Something of that tactics, like the law part appealed to me, but I ended up doing First Amendment law when I came out of school. So the first part of my career was representing newspapers, TV stations, radio stations in the Bay Area on First Amendment issues, which was fabulous.”
2018-09-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Nicole Wong, former deputy CTO of the United States · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I am a lawyer by charge. You know what? When I was growing up, I wanted to be you, Kev. I wanted to be a journalist for like the time I was in sixth grade. And I ended up going to, I only applied to law schools that had joint law and journalism degrees. Oh, it happened.”
2018-09-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Nicole Wong, former deputy CTO of the United States · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I have dragoons you here because there's so many topics that you are an expert on and that you've been inside the belly of the beast you've been outside in government that there's a lot of things we've got to talk about everything from election issues to content moderation to what these companies are doing to the legislation that's may be coming for these tech companies probably not because Congress is a bunch of idiots that's my opinion so let's start first by talking about your backgrounds people get an idea of where you've been sure so you started you're a lawyer by the way”
2018-09-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Nicole Wong, former deputy CTO of the United States · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I am Kara Swisher, editor at large of Recode. You may know me as Vox Media's CTO, which stands for Chief Tweeting Officer, but in my spare time I talk tech and you're listening to Reco Decode from the Vox Media Podcast Network. Today in the red chair is Nicole Wong, the former Deputy Chief Technology Officer of the United States. She served under President Obama from 2013 to 2014. But before that worked for Google and Twitter in very critical positions, I've known her for a long time. Thank you, Nicole, for coming on Trico Decode.”
2018-09-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Nicole Wong, former deputy CTO of the United States · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT