Decoder with Nilay Patel

Latest Episodes:

Watching Silicon Valley Bank melt down from the front row with Brex CEO Henrique Dubugras Apr 04, 2023

Show notes

Brex CEO Henrique Dubugras found himself playing an important role during the Silicon Valley Bank collapse.

Brex is what you might call a neobank — not a traditional bank but rather a financial services provider that helps companies manage how they spend money, corporate cards, travel expenses and the rest. In the middle of the SVB collapse, Brex was more than just a spending management company. It was also a safe place to park money.

Brex saw billions of deposits in a very short period of time, giving Dubugras a bird's-eye view of what was happening — and what was happening was not great for the banking system, especially in Silicon Valley. (Our own Liz Lopatto has been covering this in depth.)

I wanted to hear Dubugras' perspective on SVB both as a fintech CEO and a founder himself, whether he thought the crisis was rational or just a panic caused by group texts and easy-to-use mobile banking interfaces, what he thinks will happen to the startup ecosystem next, and how much of an opportunity all this was for Brex.

Dubugras is a young CEO. He just turned 27. He really surprised me with his depth here, and he will probably surprise some of you as well.

Okay, Henrique Dubugras, CEO of Brex. Here we go.

Links:

The tech industry moved fast and broke its most prestigious bank

Liz Lopatto - The Verge

A fintech CEO is trying to raise more than $1 billion to fund bridge loans for startups impacted by the Silicon Valley Bank collapse

Robinhood Users Say The Trading App Won’t Cash In Their Profitable Bets Against Silicon Valley Bank

What Is A Neobank? – Forbes Advisor

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23433504

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

It was produced by Creighton DeSimone and Jackie McDermott and it was edited by Callie Wright.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Editorial Director is Brooke Minters and our Executive Director is Eleanor Donovan.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks Mar 31, 2023

Show notes

Chris Cocks is the CEO of Hasbro, a company that just turned 100 this year. Hasbro is a huge company, making everything from Transformers to Lincoln Logs to My Little Pony and Monopoly. It also makes Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons, which are massive and growing businesses. Chris was the head of that division, called Wizards of the Coast, before he became the CEO of Hasbro overall last year. Since then, he’s started the process of restructuring the company, which is pure Decoder bait.

He’s also dealt with some crises: He’s fended off an activist investor that wanted him to spin Wizards of the Coast out into a new company. The Magic community was upset that too many card sets were being released, including rare collector cards that could suddenly be bought by anybody who had enough money. Then, an attempt to change the open gaming license for Dungeons & Dragons led to a fan backlash, and Hasbro walked the entire plan back. We talked about these challenges, how he handled them, and what it means for toys and games to have such passionate fandoms. It really changes how Hasbro operates.

He’s also selling off part of eOne, the company’s TV and film production company — we get into why and how he decided to do that.

Chris is a lifelong gamer — you’ll hear him talk about that history several times. And he’s also keenly aware that toys and games have become an adults’ market as much as a kids’ one, and that changes the company’s business strategy. This is really a remarkable conversation: toys are a big, complex business.

Links:

Chris Cocks Is Hasbro’s Gamer in Chief

Chris Cocks Statement at Hasbro Investor Day

Hasbro strongly refutes claims it is ‘destroying’ Magic: The Gathering

Dungeons & Dragons finally addresses its new Open Gaming License

Hasbro CEO on D&D fiasco: ‘We misfired’ on the OGL but have ‘since course corrected’

Magic: The Gathering Becomes a Billion-Dollar Brand for Toymaker Hasbro

Hasbro Puts Newly Acquired TV Brand Entertainment One (eOne) Back Up For Sale

Transcript:

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Creighton DeSimone and Hadley Robinson and it was edited by Amanda Rose Smith. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Editorial Director is Brooke Minters. And our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? Mar 28, 2023

Show notes

Today I’m talking to Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko. Mastodon is the open-source, decentralized competitor to Twitter, and it’s where a lot of Twitter users have gone in this, our post-Elon era. The idea is that you don’t join a single platform that one company controls, you join a server, and that server can show you content from users across the entire network. If you decide you don’t like the people who run your server, or you think they’re moderating content too strictly, you can leave, and take your followers and social graph with you. Think about it like email and you’ll get it – if you don’t like Gmail, you can switch to something else, but you don’t have to quit email entirely as a concept.

Now if you are like me, you hear the words open-source and decentralized, and then the word CEO, and you think – wait, why does the decentralized open standard have a CEO? The whole point is that no single person or company is in charge, right? Well, welcome to the wild world of open-source governance. It’s a riot, my friends – you’re going to hear Eugen and I say the phrase benevolent dictator for life in dead seriousness, because that’s how a lot of these projects are run.

Of course, we also talk about money, and structure – Mastodon doesn’t make a lot of money, and Eugen is figuring out how to build a structure that scale past just a handful of people — but keep that in mind, actually. This tiny mostly volunteer labor of love might very well be the future of social networking, and, if you believe the hype about ActivityPub, might have some part in the future of the web. That’s pretty exciting, even if things are seem a little messy in the moment.

Links:

More than two million users have flocked to Mastodon since Elon Musk took over Twitter

A beginner’s guide to Mastodon, the hot new open-source Twitter clone

Elon Musk

Benevolent dictator for life

Mastodon Social

Eugen Rochko (@Gargron@mastodon.social)

XKCD

Erase browser history: can AI reset the browser battle?

Twitter alternatives for the Musk-averse

We tried to run a social media site and it was awful

Denial-of-service attack

Transcript:

https://www.theverge.com/e/23422689

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

It was produced by Creighton DeSimone and Jackie McDermott and it was edited by Callie Wright.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Editorial Director is Brooke Minters and our Executive Director is Eleanor Donovan.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

How to play the long game, with New York Times CEO Meredith Kopit Levien Mar 23, 2023

Show notes

Meredith Kopit Levien is the CEO of The New York Times, which is perhaps the most famous journalism organization in the world, and certainly one of America’s most complicated companies.

The Times is 172 years old, and has only recently become a force on the internet. It’s hard to remember, but back in 2014 and ‘15, people thought the Times was doomed — that it would be replaced by BuzzFeed and Vice and Vox. Instead, the company has undergone a radical and sometimes painful public transformation, and emerged as something closer to Netflix or Spotify – a subscription business with a huge investment in product and engineering.

Meredith has led a lot of that change, and in particular, she’s led the charge in turning a Times subscription into much more than paying for news – NYT Cooking and Games are hit apps, and of course she bought Wordle last year in a bit of a coup.

We talked about that structure, how Meredith intends to appeal to a broader audience with all those products when the country is basically divided in half politically and one half doesn’t care for the Times at all, and about platforms and growth. And like all media organizations, the Times has a complex relationship with Google, so we talked about that, too.

Links:

Our Strategy | The New York Times Company

NYT CEO outlines plans to reach 15 million subscribers by 2027

Why the New York Times is buying the Athletic

Wordle has been bought by The New York Times, will ‘initially’ remain free for everyone to play

The Economics at the Heart of the Times Union Standoff

'Unstoppable innovator': The meteoric rise of Meredith Kopit Levien, the next New York Times CEO

Transcript:

https://www.theverge.com/e/23416720

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

It was produced by Creighton DeSimone and Hadley Robinson and it was edited by Amanda Rose Smith

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Editorial Director is Brooke Minters and our Executive Director is Eleanor Donovan.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Taylor Swift vs. Ronald Reagan: The Ticketmaster story Mar 21, 2023

Show notes

This special episode dives deep on Taylor Swift, Ticketmaster, and how a handful of policy changes in the 1980s led to one firm so thoroughly dominating the live events business in the United States that Congress held a hearing in 2023, because Taylor Swift fans were so upset about antitrust law. That sentence is wild. We’re going to unpack all of this with the help of some experts. Here we go.

Transcript:

https://www.theverge.com/e/23409098

Credits:

Thanks so much to everyone who talked to us and shared their valuable insights for this episode including Dean Budnik, Florian Ederer, Russ Tannen, and Sandeep Vaheesan. And special thanks to Makena Kelly and Jake Kastrenakes.

This episode was written and reported by Jackie McDermott and Owen Grove. It was produced by Jackie McDermott, Owen Grove, and Creighton DeSimone with help from Jasmine Lewis. It was edited by Callie Wright.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots Mar 16, 2023

Show notes

In this installment of our Centennial Series on companies that are over 100 years old, we are talking to Barnes & Noble CEO James Daunt. The last few decades have thrown some hurdles in Barnes & Noble’s way, however. Far from being the monster that inspired the plot of the movie You’ve Got Mail, it’s had to face down a new Goliath called Amazon and the general decline of big-box retail stores. After years of closures and declining revenues, Barnes & Noble was bought out by activist investors in 2019, who installed Daunt as CEO, and he’s managed to turn things around by doing two main things.

First, he has decentralized operations of the stores, letting each store act like a local bookshop and giving his booksellers more control over what titles they sell and display. He immediately ended a system that allowed publishers to pay for special placement in bookstores, which he said corrupted the entire system in service of short-term profits. Second, he’s using Barnes & Noble’s scale to build a purchasing and distribution pipeline that serves as the rest of the book industry’s competitor to Amazon.

We get into all of it — the culture wars, J.K. Rowling, book ban bills in states across the country, and how Barnes & Noble went from being the bully on the block to competing with Amazon.

Links

Hedge Fund Buys Barnes & Noble

Can Britain’s Top Bookseller Save Barnes & Noble? - The New York Times

How Barnes & Noble transformed its brand from corporate bully to lovable neighborhood bookstore

Barnes & Noble to expand, marking a new chapter for private equity

#BookTok: Is TikTok changing the publishing industry?

How book lovers on TikTok are changing the publishing industry

Barnes & Noble History

Transcript:

https://www.theverge.com/e/23406145

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

It was produced by Creighton DeSimone and Hadley Robinson and it was edited by Jackson Bierfeldt.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Editorial Director is Brooke Minters and our Executive Director is Eleanor Donovan.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Why Spotify wants to look like TikTok, with co-president Gustav Söderström Mar 14, 2023

Show notes

Gustav Söderström has worked at Spotify for a long time; his first big project was leading the launch of its mobile app back in 2009. That makes him the perfect company leader to talk to about Spotify’s recent redesign, which introduces a visual, TikTok-like feed for discovering new content on the app’s homepage. As his boss CEO Daniel Ek put it last week, it’s “the biggest change Spotify has undergone since we introduced mobile.”

With the title of co-president and chief product and technology officer, Söderström is responsible for not only how Spotify looks and feels but also all the AI work happening behind the scenes to power its increasingly important recommendations. According to Söderström, it turns out that improving those recommendations is actually at the heart of the big redesign. “I think companies that don’t have an efficient user interface for a machine learning world are not going to be able to leverage machine learning,” he told Alex Heath on the newest episode of Decoder.

Links:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napster

Spotify is laying off 6 percent of its global workforce, CEO announces

Spotify’s new design turns your music and podcasts into a TikTok feed

Alex Heath's Tweet

Functional versus Unit Organizations

Two-Pizza Teams

Transcript:

https://www.theverge.com/e/23402123

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

It was produced by Creighton DeSimone and Jackie McDermott and it was edited by Callie Wright.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Editorial Director is Brooke Minters and our Executive Director is Eleanor Donovan.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Can Xerox reinvent itself for another 100 years? Mar 09, 2023

Show notes

Intro:

Steve Bandrowczak, the CEO of Xerox, an iconic company that got started all the way back in 1906 as a manufacturer of photo paper and is, of course, best known for pioneering the copy machine. Here in 2023, Xerox has moved well beyond paper. It now works with companies large and small to provide IT services: it optimizes workflows, manages data, automates parts of businesses, and yes, still fixes the printers.

Steve insists there’s still a lot in the world to print, and selling and servicing printers continues to be where Xerox begins its relationships with most customers. And fixing printers is getting high tech: Steve is excited about his new AR app that walks you through getting the copy machine working again so you don’t have to wait for a technician to come fix it.

We also talked about the future of Xerox’s legendary Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC, whether Xerox wants more consolidation, and we even spitball some ideas about how to get Gen Z excited about printers.

Links:

John Visentin, Xerox C.E.O., Dies at 59

Xerox Ousts CEO In Deal With Icahn

Carl Icahn Makes Case for Xerox-HP Union

Xerox abandons $35 billion hostile bid for HP

Apple Lisa: the ‘OK’ Computer

About PARC, a Xerox Company

Transcript:

https://www.theverge.com/e/23394156

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

It was produced by Creighton DeSimone and Hadley Robinson and it was edited by Jackson Bierfeldt.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Editorial Director is Brooke Minters and our Executive Director is Eleanor Donovan.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

How Reddit is getting simpler — and dealing with TikTok, with chief product officer Pali Bhat Mar 07, 2023

Show notes

Pali Bhat joined Reddit from Google about a year ago — he’s actually Reddit’s first-ever chief product officer, which is pretty surprising considering that Reddit is a series of product experiences: the reading experience, the writing experience, and importantly, the moderation experience. One thing we always say on Decoder is that the real product of any social network is content moderation, and Reddit is maybe the best example of that: every subreddit is shaped by volunteer moderators who use the tools Reddit builds for them. So Pali has a big job bringing all these products together and making them better, all while trying to grow Reddit as a platform.

This was a really deep conversation, and it touched on a lot of big Decoder themes. I think you’re going to like it. Okay, Pali Bhat, the chief product officer of Reddit. Here we go.

Links:

New features aimed at making Reddit easier to use: an update on our product priorities focussed on simplification

Reddit’s new features include a TikTok-style video feed

Reddit is bringing back r/Place, its April Fools’ Day art experiment

How to buy a social network, with Tumblr CEO Matt Mullenweg

Microsoft thinks AI can beat Google at search — CEO Satya Nadella explains why

AI-generated fiction is flooding literary magazines — but not fooling anyone

Transcript:

https://www.theverge.com/e/23390325

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

It was produced by Creighton DeSimone and Jackie McDermott and it was edited by Callie Wright.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Editorial Director is Brooke Minters and our Executive Director is Eleanor Donovan.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne Feb 28, 2023

Show notes

We taped this episode live at Hot Pod Summit. That’s our conference for the podcast industry. We have a whole newsletter for podcasters. It’s called Hot Pod, written by our very own Ariel Shapiro. Hot Pod Summit is where we bring that community of creators, trendsetters and decision-makers together to explore the latest developments in podcasting, audiobooks, and more. It was a packed house and a great time.

We ended the day by recording our first-ever live Decoder with Conal Byrne, CEO of iHeartMedia’s digital audio group. Conal oversees podcasting at a giant radio company, and his group accounts for a quarter of iHeart’s revenue, which was $1 billion last quarter alone. His team makes some of the biggest podcasts around, with huge talent like Will Ferrell, Shonda Rhimes, and Charlamagne tha God, who you’ll hear Conal talk about quite a lot.

Conal and iHeart Digital earned that success by doing some unconventional things. Whereas other big podcasting players like Spotify and Apple have tried to boost revenue through subscriptions or platform exclusivity, Conal shunned those approaches and said he’s going for big audience reach, made possible in part by his ability to run ads and even shows on iHeart’s huge network of traditional radio stations.

But that maverick approach has included some controversial steps as well. Last year, Verge alumni and Bloomberg reporter Ashley Carman reported that iHeart worked with a firm called Jun Group to essentially buy podcast downloads through video games. To many in the industry, that seemed pretty disingenuous. So of course I asked Conal about that and lots more. He was a great guest, super game to answer the questions, especially in front of a live audience.

Links:

iHeartMedia Buys Stuff Media for $55 Million - WSJ

Podcasters Are Buying Millions of Listeners Through Mobile-Game Ads

Cost Per Thousand (CPM) Definition and Its Role in Marketing

Spotify reportedly paid $200 million for Joe Rogan’s podcast - The Verge

Chris Dixon thinks web3 is the future of the internet — is it? - Decoder, The Verge

Decoder with Nilay Patel (@decoderpod) Official | TikTok

Transcript:

https://www.theverge.com/e/23381445

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

It was produced by Creighton DeSimone and Jackie McDermott and it was edited by Callie Wright.