Decoder with Nilay Patel

Latest Episodes:

Rewind: How big companies kill ideas — and how to fight back, with Tony Fadell Sep 06, 2022

Show notes

This episode was originally published on May 3rd, 2022.

Tony Fadell was instrumental in the development of the iPod and iPhone at Apple and then co-founded Nest Labs, which kicked off the consumer smart home market with its smart thermostat in 2011. Tony sold Nest to Google for $3.2 billion in 2014 and eventually left Google. He now runs an investment company called Future Shape.

Links:

Inside the Nest: iPod creator Tony Fadell wants to reinvent the thermostat

General Magic - Trailer

Inside Facebook’s metaverse for work

Silicon Graphics

Google is reorganizing and Sundar Pichai will become new CEO

Fire drill: can Tony Fadell and Nest build a better smoke detector?

Google purchases Nest for $3.2 billion

Twitter accepts buyout, giving Elon Musk total control of the company

Nest is rejoining Google to better compete with Amazon and Apple

Apple Music Event 2005 - Motorola Rokr E1 / iTunes Phone

Activision Blizzard hit with another sexual harassment lawsuit

Nest buying video-monitoring startup Dropcam for $555 million

What matters about Matter, the new smart home standard

ZIGBEE ON MARS!

Directory:

Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple

Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel

Pat Gelsinger, current CEO of Intel

Sundar Pichai, current CEO of Alphabet

Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, SpaceX, and The Boring Company

Jeff Williams, COO of Apple

Matt Rogers, Nest co-founder

Jeff Robbin, VP of consumer applications at Apple

Steve Hoteling, former CEO gesture recognition company Finger Works

Jon Rubinstein, senior VP of the iPod division at Apple

Steve Sakomen, hardware engineer and executive at Apple

Avie Tavanian, chief software technology officer at Apple

Scott Forstall, senior VP of iOS software, Apple

Jony Ive, chief design officer, Apple

Transcript:

https://www.theverge.com/e/22817673

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 Jackie McDermott and it was edited by Callie Wright.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Sr Audio Director is Andrew Marino and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.

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

How the head of Facebook plans to compete with TikTok and win back Gen Z Aug 30, 2022

Show notes

We’ve got a special episode of Decoder today – an interview between Verge deputy editor Alex Heath and Meta’s Tom Alison, the head of Facebook. Alex is the co-host of the newest season of Vox Media’s podcast Land of the Giants. This season is about Facebook and Meta. The season finale comes out tomorrow.

Alex has been reporting for Land of the Giants for many months, and along the way he interviewed Tom. Facebook has a lot of challenges, but it seems like the biggest problem is TikTok: Facebook's problem is that it spent years – you spent years – building out a social graph that, it turns out, is less interesting than just being shown content that the company thinks you might like. Alison has been at Facebook for more than a decade and previously ran engineering for the News Feed, so he knows more than almost anyone about the history of feeds and where they are going.

Links:

Land of the Giants

Facebook is changing its algorithm to take on TikTok, leaked memo reveals

Facebook is revamping its home feed to feel more like TikTok

Transcript:

https://www.theverge.com/e/23092319

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 Jackie McDermott and it was edited by Callie Wright.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Sr Audio Director is Andrew Marino. Our Editorial Director is Brooke Minters. And our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.

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

Advertising is everywhere. Wieden+Kennedy CEO Neal Arthur explains how it works Aug 23, 2022

Show notes

One thing that strikes me, in all these episodes of Decoder, is how little any of us really pay attention to the advertising industry, and how deeply connected it is to almost other every modern business. After all you can start a company and invent a great product, but you still need to market it: you need to tell people about it, and eventually convince them to buy it. And so you take out an add on a platform and, well, the platform companies we all depend on mostly run on ads. Google’s entire consumer business is ads. Meta’s entire business is ads. And when we talk to creators, they’re even more tied to ads: their distribution platforms like TikTok and YouTube are all ad-supported, and a huge portion of their revenue is ads.

This week I’m talking to Neal Arthur, the CEO of Weiden and Kennedy, one of the few independent major ad agencies in the world, and maybe the coolest one? It’s got a rep. Weiden is the agency that came up with Just Do It for Nike and Bud Light Legends for Bud Light. They’ve done campaigns for Coke, Miller, Microsoft, ESPN – you name it. Coming off our conversation last week with Katie Welch about building a brand from the ground up using influencer marketing and potentially never hiring an ad agency, I wanted to get a view from the other side: how does a big ad agency work? Where does their money come from? So many of the big agencies are merging into what are called holding companies – why is Wieden still independent?

Links:

Bud Light puts creative account up for review after years with Wieden+Kennedy

Mover Over Millennials -- Here Comes Gen Z

How Selena Gomez's Rare Beauty Goes Viral, With CMO Katie Welch

Mad Men (TV Series 2007-2015)

Transcript:

https://www.theverge.com/e/23081723

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 Jackie McDermott. It was edited by Callie Wright. And researched by Liz Lian.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Sr Audio Director is Andrew Marino. Our Editorial Director is Brooke Minters. And our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.

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

How Selena Gomez's Rare Beauty goes viral, with CMO Katie Welch Aug 16, 2022

Show notes

Katie Welch is the Chief Marketing Officer of Rare Beauty — the beauty products company founded by superstar musician and actress Selena Gomez. Rare Beauty sells its products online and in Sephora retail stores, and importantly, Katie does almost no traditional marketing: Rare Beauty is a true internet brand, that depends on social media strategy, influencer marketing, and community to drive sales. Specifically, the enormous community around Selena Gomez, who, again, is an international superstar with a fandom of her own.

This kind of marketing is essentially new. Famous people making their own products and companies and using their online reach to launch and grow those businesses is a combination of art and commerce that is 10 – 15 years old at most, Rihanna’s Fenty Beauty is only five years old, but it’s redefined the industry and helped make her a billionaire. Some of the first big successes came from the Kardashian-Jenners including Kylie Cosmetics, founded in 2015, as well as Kim Kardashian’s Skims, founded in 2019.

I’ve been really curious about how these businesses work, how they reach their audiences and customers, how CMOs like Katie measure success, whether being the marketing executive for an super online celebrity-driven business feels different than being a traditional marketing person, and whether the ever-present risk of weird things happening online make her plan differently.

Transcript:

https://www.theverge.com/e/23071490

Links:

Why BeReal is breaking out

Why Hank Green can’t quit YouTube for TikTok

Apple’s app tracking transparency feature isn’t an instant privacy button

Apple’s app tracking policy reportedly cost social media platforms nearly $10 billion

Updating The Verge’s background policy

Marketing Funnels

Katie's TikTok

Instagram walks back TikTok-style changes — Adam Mosseri explains why

Makeup company Glossier to sell its products at Sephora as new CEO pushes to expand reach

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 Jackie McDermott and it was edited by Callie Wright.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Sr Audio Director is Andrew Marino. Our Editorial Director is Brooke Minters. And our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.

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

The risky new way of building mobile broadband networks Aug 09, 2022

Show notes

In 2019, the Trump administration brokered a deal allowing TMobile to buy Sprint as long as it helped Dish Network stand up a new 5G network to keep the number of national wireless carriers at 4 and preserve competition in the mobile market. Now, in 2022, Dish’s network is slowly getting off the ground. And it’s built on a new kind of wireless technology called Open Radio Access Network, or O-RAN. Dish’s network is only the third O-RAN network in the entire world, and if O-RAN works, it will radically change how the entire wireless industry operates.

I have wanted to know more about O-RAN for a long time. So today, I’m talking to Tareq Amin, CEO of Rakuten Mobile. Rakuten Mobile is a new wireless carrier in Japan, it just launched in 2020 – it’s also the world’s first Open RAN network, and Tareq basically pushed this whole concept into existence. I really wanted to know if ORAN is going to work, and how Tareq managed to make it happen in such a traditional industry. So we got into it – like, really into it.

Links:

Rakuten

Rakuten Edge Cloud

"Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM"

Rakuten Group to Acquire Mobile Industry Innovator Altiostar

Gadgets 360

Massive MIMO

Transcript:

https://www.theverge.com/e/23061797

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 Jackie McDermott and it was edited by Callie Wright.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Sr Audio Director is Andrew Marino. Our Editorial Director is Brooke Minters. And our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.

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

Why Hank Green can’t quit YouTube for TikTok Aug 02, 2022

Show notes

Today I’m talking to Hank Green. Hank doesn’t need much introduction. In fact, he invited himself on Decoder to talk about YouTube's partner program, which shares ad revenue between YouTube and the people making videos. The split is 55/45 in favor of creators. But other platforms don't have this. There is no revenue share on Instagram. There is no revenue share on Twitter. There’s no revenue on Twitter at all, really. And importantly there is no revenue share on TikTok: instead there’s something called a creator fund, which shares fixed pool of money, about a billion dollars, among all the creators on the platform. That means as more and more creators join TikTok, everyone gets paid. You might understand this concept as: basic division.

This episode is long, and it’s weedsy. Honestly, it’s pretty deep in our feelings about participating in the internet culture economy, and the relationship between huge platform companies and the communities that build on them. But it’s a good one, and it’s not really something any of us talk about enough.

Links:

Vlogbrothers

Decoder interview with YouTube Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan

Viacom Has Officially Acquired VidCon, A Global Online Video Convention Series

Patreon Acquires Subbable, Aligning the YouTube Stars

The Verge EMAILS t-shirt

Crash Course

SciShow

Eons

The medium is the message

The Kardashians hate the new Instagram

Hank Green: So… TikTok Sucks

Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast, “TikTok vs YouTube with Hank Green”

Decoder: The videos that don’t work on YouTube and the future of the creator business with Nebula CEO Dave Wiskus

Awesome Socks Club

Awesome Coffee Club

Transcript:

https://www.theverge.com/e/23051537

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 Jackie McDermott and it was edited by Callie Wright.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Sr Audio Director is Andrew Marino. Our Editorial Director is Brooke Minters. And our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.

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

Rent the Runway CEO Jennifer Hyman thinks clothing rental is inflation-proof Jul 26, 2022

Show notes

Today we’re talking to Jennifer Hyman, co-founder and CEO of Rent the Runway.

Rent the Runway is a a pretty simple idea: it’s a clothing rental and subscription business for women which launched in 2008. The basic idea is pretty simple: you can rent clothes one by one, and Subscribers pay a certain monthly amount for a certain number of pieces that they can swap out anywhere from 1 to 4 times a month depending on the tier of their membership. Rent the Runway also lets customers buy secondhand clothing either after they rent it or just outright.

But Rent the Runway has had a pretty intense path from its founding in 2008 to going public in 2021: the onset of the pandemic in 2020 cratered the business as 60 percent of customers canceled or paused their subscriptions, and Jennifer was forced to make drastic cuts to survive. But she says that now things are swinging back, as more and more people are spending their dollars going out, traveling, and generally shifting their spending from things to experiences. There’s a post Covid wedding boom going on: Rent the Runway is right there for people.

Jenn and I talked about that swing in the business, but we spent most of this conversation talking about running a company that basically does really high-risk logistics: sourcing clothes, sending them to people, getting them back, cleaning them, and sending them out again. Spotify and Netflix run subscription businesses where the products never wear out or get dirty; Jenn has to deal with red win stains at scale. In fact, Rent the Runway runs one of the country’s biggest dry cleaning operations, which I find to be completely fascinating: what does dry cleaning innovation actually look like, and how does it hit the bottom line?

My favorite episodes of Decoder are the ones where simple ideas – renting clothes – turn out to be incredible complicated to execute. This is one of those.

Links:

Apple defends upcoming privacy changes as ‘standing up for our users’

Rent the Runway, a secondhand fashion site, makes its trading debut.

Transcript:

https://www.theverge.com/e/23041884

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 Jackie McDermott and it was edited by Callie Wright.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Sr Audio Director is Andrew Marino. Our Editorial Director is Brooke Minters. And our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.

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

Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball Jul 19, 2022

Show notes

All right, let’s talk about the metaverse.

You probably can’t stop hearing about it. It’s in startup pitches, in earnings reports, some companies are creating metaverse divisions, and Mark Zuckerberg changed Facebook’s name to Meta to signal that he’s shifting the entire company to focus on the metaverse.

The problem, very simply, is that no one knows what the metaverse is, what it’s supposed to do, or why anyone should care about it.

Luckily, we have some help. Today, I’m talking to Matthew Ball, who is the author of the new book called The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything. Matthew was the global head of strategy at Amazon Studios. In 2018, he left Amazon to become an analyst and started writing about the metaverse on his blog. He’s been writing about this since way before the hype exploded, and his book aims to be the best resource for understanding the metaverse, which he sees as the next phase of the internet. It’s not just something that you access through a VR headset, though that’s part of it. It’s how you’ll interact with everything. That sort of change is where new companies have opportunities to unseat the old guard.

This episode gets very in the weeds, but it really helped me understand the decisions some companies have made around building digital worlds and the technical challenges and business challenges that are slowing it down — or might even stop it. And, of course, I asked whether any of this is a good idea in the first place because, well, I’m not so sure. But there’s a lot here, so listen, and then you tell me.

Links:

Matthew Ball on Twitter

Mark Zuckerberg on why Facebook is rebranding to Meta

Microsoft, Meta, and others are founding a metaverse open standards group

Android emoji will actually look human this year

Apple’s app tracking policy reportedly cost social media platforms nearly $10 billion

Microsoft and Activision Blizzard: the latest news on the acquisition

Microsoft HoloLens boss Alex Kipman is out after misconduct allegations

European Parliament Think Tank memorandum—Metaverse: Opportunities, risks and policy implications

Transcript:

https://www.theverge.com/e/23033211

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 Jackie McDermott and it was edited by Callie Wright.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Sr Audio Director is Andrew Marino and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.

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

Land of the Giants: Facebook gets a facelift Jul 14, 2022

Show notes

This week, we're sharing the first episode of Land of the Giants: The Facebook/ Meta Disruption. Long before Mark Zuckerberg renamed Facebook Meta and made an unprecedented pivot into the metaverse, he invented a feature that turned Facebook into a social network behemoth. The News Feed, which put your friends’ status updates onto your homepage, changed the way we interact online. It was a strong statement of Zuckerberg’s values: that connecting, and sharing, at scale would be de-facto good for the world. It was also his first public controversy. Follow Land of the Giants to get new episodes every Wednesday.

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

How arson led to a culture reboot at Traeger, with CEO Jeremy Andrus Jul 04, 2022

Show notes

Happy Fourth of July to our listeners in the States. Decoder is only a year old, but we’ve decided a Decoder tradition is that every summer, we’re going to do an episode about the outdoor grill industry, which is gigantic and growing.

Last year, I talked to Roger Dahle, the CEO of Blackstone Products, a griddle company that blew up on TikTok and actually went public a few months after we talked.

This year, I’m talking to Jeremy Andrus, the CEO of Traeger, which makes beloved wood pellet smokers with all sorts of features — the high-end models even have cloud connectivity so you can control them from your phone. Traeger also recently went public; the company says it will book between $800–850 million in revenue this year.

The Traeger story is fascinating: the company was around for 27 years and not growing very much when Jeremy bought it with the help of a private equity firm and became the CEO. He had no background in cooking; he had previously been CEO of Skullcandy, the headphone brand. His early run as CEO of Traeger was a bit of a nightmare, culminating in an arson of a truck at one of Traeger’s warehouses. Jeremy responded by cleaning house, replacing most of the team, and moving the company from Oregon to Utah.

Since then, Traeger has grown its revenue by 10 times and hopes to close in on a billion dollars in revenue soon. But, it has all the challenges that come along with shipping big, heavy hardware products through the supply chain crisis, looming recession, and changing consumer behavior as one version of the pandemic seems to be ending and people are spending their money on travel instead of home goods. Jeremy was game to talk about all of that; we really got into it.

Links:

How Traeger's CEO Cleaned Up a Toxic Culture

Jeremy Andrus Found Success With Skullcandy. Now He Hopes To Do It Again With Traeger Grills.

Traeger buys wireless thermometer company Meater

Jeremy Andrus Found Success With Skullcandy. Now He Hopes To Do It Again With Traeger Grills.

Traeger's stock opens 22% above IPO price, to value the grill market at $2.6 billion

Transcript:

https://www.theverge.com/e/22953717

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 Jackie McDermott and it was edited by Callie Wright.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Sr Audio Director is Andrew Marino and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.