YouSaid · the spoken record

Steven Levy

lines on the record: 129
first: 2020-02-24
most recent: 2020-02-24
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 done in speedball red, and they look a lot like the Big Brother posters in the movie 1984. And they all have these slogans, like move fast them, break things, or what would you do if you're not afraid?”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, if you just look at the walls, you could see all the posters there. And actually get into how these posters are created. There's a little shop called the Analog Research Lab where people can screen these posters.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I mean, if you're a member of that team, this was true for many years. In the last couple of years, there's been a little shift in this. We could talk about, but being a top executive meant you were a mark loyalist. You were part of the mark some people called a cult.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And what happens then to the other executives around him? I mean, what kind of power does anyone have? I mean, one of the arguments I'm always making, there's a lot of talks on Cheryl and actually Scott Gallant argue about this. I'm like, nobody matters but Mark. So what's the difference?”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So he has, and basically he feels he's the best person to make decisions for Facebook and anything that impedes that would be bad for Facebook.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Helped Mark set up a structure where he would have a big share of the stock. And later on, he took out Lesson to Heart when they went in their IPO, where he not only did what the Google people had done, but he went further in terms of setting up the company where he had this voting share to have control, but he had like a huge percentage of the stock. He could always win, right? So Larry and Sergei at Google, neither of them obviously had enough stock to overwhelm everyone, but Mark controls, I think, 56% of all the stocks. So even the board can't significantly overrule him. And he could do things like not tell the board when he was going to buy Instagram for a billion dollars on the eve of the IPO.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Here's a little debt to Sean Parker because of that. So, his initial advisor when the structure of the company was being set was Sean, who had been screwed a couple times out of his plateau. Yeah, exactly. Sean, from the first investment,”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So talk a little bit about that, about what that means, why he had the need to have complete control. He was also worried about losing control of the company. That was very early on. He made a lot of decisions that turned out to be very good ones not to sell, not to do certain things because he had complete control. Explain that for people who don't understand. I've explained it. He cannot be fine. He's the man who cannot be fired because he controls the whole place.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so, where does that? I'm going to get into where it's going in the future, but in terms of running this company then, from your perspective, it's entire history is about him and his control over the company and his domination of the company, correct? Well, he says, yeah.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Clearly, I mean, you read the book, you know that on one hand there was a utopian impulse, but the growth growth growth part was the one that won.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, because he's sweat. So there was a famous interview I did, which Steven's referring to where Marx me and Wasburg did, where he sweat precipitously like a lot. Like it was really embarrassing for him and it was fine. It got a lot of attention. In any case, what I'm talking about is this idea of growth, growth, growth. And I think the word, when he's yelling domination at meetings, when he's using those kind of terms, loving the Roman emperors, I don't think it was naively utopian. I think it was about domination the entire time. And then every now and then he goes back to all I want to do is connect the world. Which one is it? I think it's the latter, the former.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was an amazing interview where he. Problem that he had. And his publicist, Brandy Barker, who you know, she told me that before his appearances, he would use a hair drawer to blow dry his armpits.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He was so nervous that he couldn't even stand issue, actually speaking of which, we almost had it code at one of our amazing interview where he sweated. I was worried about him fitting because I was aware of that problem that he had. And his publicism.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At one point, he almost literally was leaning against the desk because he was so nervous that he couldn't even stand up. You have a sainting issue, actually.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I love that slide. And in Gatsby was actually their victim of this. Talk about that because I think it's a kind way of putting it. Naitha utopian and it's sort of, you're saying it in a passive voice. This is a mentality of the founder, which is growth, growth, growth. I'm going to be biggest. I'm going to dominate. He said the word dominate at meetings when he opened them. He's very nervous at these meetings. I was told by very early people that he had at one point.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. So, this is a concept you write about, in fact. But Facebook crisis is something unique. It began with a gloriously idealistic goal to connect the world, but the assumption was overly optimistic and the company pursued its naively utopian and undeniably self-serving goal with a tragic disregard for consequences. To critics, Facebook was a 21st century corporate Gatsby. By the way, Daisy and Thomas, who you're actually guessing. I got it. I got it. I got it. You got to fix that. Oh, my God. Keralitz and its privileges, self-involved in serving its own needs and prefers. I only say that because I referred to that famous quote in F. Scott Fitzgerald about Tom and Daisy. They were careless people. They broke things and then they retreated into their wealth. And it's a very famous quote from Masters and Listen.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. And Shamath was unbelievable, and he tried every trick in the book, right? He was really on the edge when he did in growth. But Mark was with him all the way.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Polyopatia. One of our favorite guests. You say that better than I do. I really, everyone just calls him chamoth. Yeah. He's like Madonna”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so he, in some senses, grew up, and in other sense, he was the same. He was still very, very competitive. And in these issues where privacy came face to face with the lure of growth, it was always growth that won. And growth is just huge at Facebook. And I spent a lot of time talking about that. And the guy they picked the growth team, Chamath.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A messy IP. Right. Well, at one point, they even felt in mobile that they had to make their own phone to compete with Apple and Android. And I tell that story for the first time about how the was called Ghostface Killer, the phone. Yeah.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, he changed in some ways. He grew up, he got married, he had to handle some crises at Facebook. The big crisis of Facebook took place in 2012 when the whole company was always made obsolete because they were slow to pick up mobile.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So as you move through this, everything's going really well. They still have this sort of overhang of privacy constantly, this idea of, and this push pull between free speech and control. And it doesn't really rise until this past few years. So everyone loved them. This was a company that was dominating things, getting more and more powerful. From your perspective, did Mark change in that time period?”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think they've always had actually a pretty good relationship, though obviously there's been strains on it in the last couple years. Things work great. I mean, she, besides sales, Cheryl also had a role in the culture. I think even Mark recognized there was sort of like a bro aspect to the culture. It had a lot of dorm room DNA to it. And Cheryl very consciously purged that. She made it a friendlier place for women.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And they met, it was kind of like a dating almost thing, professional dating where they went to the Flea Street cafe and closed the joint and went to Cheryl's place and she had to throw them out. She said, my kids are asleep. My husband's up there. I got to get up tomorrow morning, leave here. But something clicked and she took the job. And she was going to be have more authority than any of his previous lieutenants had. But the split was very stark that he would get all the product stuff and she would get everything else, all the stuff that didn't interest him, like sales or policy. She was going to be in charge of the content on there and policing the content. And these are things that he thought were less important to the future of Facebook, but some of them turned out to be very important to the future of Facebook. Right.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, yeah. So he's looking for his executive, right? And, you know, you think back to Google when they needed a CEO, right? They lit him. Interestingly, Mark's executive was not a technical person. It was a great manager, someone who built a business side of a company. Cheryl made her bones at Google doing ads.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure. All right, but we're going to talk a little bit about the conflating of lots of things. So just because you have a success in one area doesn't mean privacy violations are good in another and people will calm down. And so he tends to conflate a lot. And I think that's very common in Silicon Valley. I was right about this, and therefore I'm right about everything. I think that happens with lots of founder driven companies, which is an unfortunate problem. And then no one goes against them. You know, Trump sort of plays that game. I'm right. You'll see I won, that kind of thing. So it's a quality of a certain personality that tends to give them success and also tends to be the thing that makes them undone. So he gets Cheryl. Get to Cheryl. Right, yes.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. But that quote was really telling me people were new. That people were more voyeuristic. Not that I did anything wrong, but that, wow, this is an insight that I need to use later in my life. Right, I guess I cherry”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The key thing in Facebook is the launch of the newsfeed. And that was something that when it first showed up, there was a huge outcry. Most of Facebook's users were objecting to it. And this was something that previously before the news feed, you had to look at people's profiles to learn what they were up to. Like Go, what's Kara's profile? And then I'd learn, oh, Kara has a baby, you know, whatever, or whatever. But the news feed changed. All that information will be pushed at you. And it was a different experience. Some people felt their privacy was being violated. And Mark said, we were faced with this. People were panicking at Facebook, but Mark eventually came to understand that actually people were using the news feed and loved it. And he put some privacy features in.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was Mark. And basically, and this is something that happened not just with Beacon, but a number of things. I go through all of them where people close the mark, his top some of his top... Technical people, help engineers would say to him, Mark, this isn't a good idea. Sometimes even say, Mark, this is just wrong. And he would overrule them. He would say.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“thoughtlessness about people's roles and That was one of the number of things that led to that 2011 consent decree. So after that, he felt that, wow, I really need to bring on something to help this company grow up really”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And set a tone which had been throughout his history of scraping privacy violations and thoughtlessness about people's roles. And, oh, we're not using information. In fact, they were. This kind of pattern of, and to me, that Beacon was just another example of the same thing, and it led to the consent decree with the federal government.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Watch what you do when you went on the web and when you bought something, if you missed the little dialog box that flashed up and didn't respond to it, the default was that your purchase would be shared with all the people on your news feed. Literally someone bought an engagement ring for their prospective fianc ⁇ and this showed up on her newsfeed because of this product beacon. And it was a disaster for the company.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay. So that, you know, because even just recently we did this excerpt in Wired. And it focused on the notebooks. And I asked them again, I'm able to, part of the access is I could just send him a message. And he responds within a couple hours. And I said, you know, really, why'd you do it? Some people told me it was for legal reasons. He said, no, no, no, no, no. It was because... I was affected by that, and I didn't want this stuff exposed out of context.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He told me he destroyed them because he didn't want people to cherry pick them like they did with his instant messages and write embarrassing things about it.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the key book was called The Book of Change, and that was the book that in 2006 he gave all his ideas for the news feed and for open registration, which was when Facebook opened up from students to the whole world. And he also talked about how Facebook would operate. It would be this amazing information utility where everyone could learn about everyone else. And he even had a few pages about these things he called dark profiles where there would be profiles of people who hadn't signed up on Facebook.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, right. He always had sort of a second in command, and the person's job was to do the things that he didn't want to do. Right. Yeah, yeah. He loved product. And what he wanted to do was just build the product, design the products. And I got hold of this notebook. He always kept this little notebook where he wrote his visions. And he had destroyed them after a certain number of years. And again, because he was haunted by the exposure of his early work.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But it's still there. It's still the same personality is still there, which is interesting, but he certainly evolved as a person. But in general, very ungenerous, always insulting other people's products, always wanting to be on top. It's a big strain, which Mark has in spades here, which is also the case. So he starts to Facebook. You have the Sean Parker stuff telling that story. Talk a little bit about how it evolved, because he went through a number of CEOs and COOs and people before he settled on Cheryl.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And they're friendly. I interviewed him. He told me his mentor. Right, right. And when I interviewed Bill Gates, you know, he actually brought up the comparison. Obviously, there's some things like they both dropped out of Harvard and then started these big companies. Though Gates made sure I knew that he did more coding, Gates did more coding. He made sure to get that one in.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're here with Stephen Levy. He's a well known tech journalist. I've worked around him, not with him actually at anything in Silicon Valley for many years. He's the author of a new book, Facebook, The Inside Story. We got unprecedented access to Mark Zuckerberg and Cheryl Sandberg. So in building this company, I think we can agree, he's a killer. He's a killer. Like that's another thing I got is this guy was going to win at all costs, essentially, which is, I think, an element of Bezos, of Gates, much more so Gates. He reminds me quite a bit of Gates when I'm friendly. He told me he was his mentor. Yeah, he told me Bill Gates was his mentor in that podcast, which I was surprised but not in any way surprised.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was something that the engineering mindset, the troubles the company was having could not be solved by the engineering mindset, and he had to look farther. And that deals, I'm sure we're going to talk about this later, with the split of the company between Cheryl had one.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the reason why I didn't put a big exclamation point on top of it is. I have a what the fuck there. Well, that's why it's in there so you can write what the fuck. Why didn't you? And then keep reading. This is like a narrative. And I'm telling a story and I'm placing the gun in Act 1 that clearly goes off later on. And when he was on his little domestic tour, you know, being a visit to Toccaville, right? 2017, towards the end of it, I met up with him in Kansas. And I brought that up. I said, well, do you still think this is like a whole in engineering thing? Maybe the engineering mindset, just as you said, hurt Facebook. And he admitted that, yeah, it's kind of more now, that maybe...”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But you didn't make a comment on, I would have been appalled when he said that. And I think I did argue with him about just that issue in that podcast when he said, I'm an engineer, I just want to fix it. And I said, but you broke it. And then he said, I just want to fix it. I just am an engineer personality. And I said, you're the arsonist.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You were talking about this quote I thought was right near the top, which was about thinking of things in terms of being an engineer. And I thought it was a really interesting quote. I'm just an engineer like a lot of you guys. This is when he's in Lagos, Nigeria. He's talking to them. And for me, engineering comes down to two real principles. The first is you think of every problem as a system and every system can be better no matter how good or bad you can make everything better that goes for whether you're writing code or building hardware or your system is a company. Facebook has had attacks problems of business and culture in the same way coders solve problems. Running a company is not so different from writing code and writing different functions and subroutines. I do think there's something really fundamental to this engineering mindset. Now, I think it's fundamentally a problem at Facebook because life is not an easy system to fix. You can't just improve it. Things are messy and complex and there's all kinds of shifting.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm just saying, like, I get that, but the action. We'll get to that in a minute, his new attitude, because I think what happens is not a learning experience of what can I do not to get into that jam again, like kind of stuff. So let's go forward to one of the things I thought was interesting to you was a quote that he gave you. I'm going to be all over the place here.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But what I found fascinating about that whole instant messaging thing, and this is something I really hadn't seen anyone get out of him, was how that played on his psyche. You never really saw him. In pain. I know you did a fantastic podcast with him a couple years ago. A lot of interviews. Yeah, but remember that big podcast you did where you kept saying again, well, Mark, how do you feel? And he would not answer that question. But, you know, eventually he came to tell me that he was really wounded and hurt by the exposure of all those IMs. And it actually affected the way he ran Facebook. And to this day, the most recent big Facebook initiative is this private messaging thing. And he told me, he said, one reason I did that is because...”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He didn't. He didn't know. Yeah. One of the hallmarks of Facebook is they're qualifying of everything. They always have some excuse of why exactly what it looks like, which I thought was, that answer was disturbing to me too today.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On that part, but I didn't think he did drag his feet. We see the text that's proof of that. So the access gave me a chance to ask him about that and say, Mark, after all these years, will you admit that you did that? And he couldn't bring himself to do it. He didn't know that. He said, well, maybe I didn't communicate clearly.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I agree that there were. It's not a pretty picture of the pain. Jerky aspects to him. There were also, it was interesting how within his circle he was like, but there's just no question at all that, for instance, he slowed down intentionally the competing project, the Winklevi project. I don't believe that the Winklevos project would have ever become anything. They had been like a year just talking about it before they hired Mark and Marvin.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, what did you end up assessing from these early days? And then I want to get into when Facebook was started. I have to say when I was reading it, and I do like Mark. I think something can be very interesting to talk to and compared to a lot of people, much more pleasant to talk to. But I thought, what a jerk. Your first section of the book, I was like, I forgot what a jerky was. And especially the texts, which I think, you know, he doesn't want them seen as much, but boy, do they say a lot. They do. And I don't care how you change in your life.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Program he used that's hot or not, and he scraped the data from people that he shouldn't have scraped and almost got kicked out or at least suspended. Skated right by it. He was seen unbothered when he was on the verge of possibly being suspended. So it was something where he had this confidence and he had this feeling that he wouldn't have to suffer the consequences. And really he never did for quite a long time.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT