Show notes
Bob Goodson was the first employee at Yelp, founder of social media analytics company Quid, co-inventor of the Like button, and co-author of the new book Like: The Button That Changed the World. On Oct 1, 2025, Bob spent a day with our MBA students at the University of Kansas, and he shared so much great content that I asked him if we could put together some of the highlights as a podcast, which I've now put together in three chapters: First is Careers, second is Building Companies, and third is AI and Social Media. As a reminder, any views and perspectives expressed on the podcast are solely those of the individual, and not those of the organizations they represent. Hope you enjoy the episode. - [Transcript] Nate: My name is Nate Meikle. You're listening to Meikles and Dimes, where every episode is dedicated to the simple, practical, and under-appreciated. Bob Goodson was the first employee at Yelp, founder of social media analytics company Quid, co-inventor of the like button, and co-author of the new book Like: The Button That Changed the World. On Oct 1, 2025, Bob spent a day with our MBA students at the University of Kansas, and he shared so much great content that I asked him if we could put together some of the highlights as a podcast, which I've now put together in three chapters: First is Careers, second is Building Companies, and third is AI and Social Media. As a reminder, any views and perspectives expressed on the podcast are solely those of the individual and not those of the organizations they represent. Hope you enjoy the episode. Let’s jump into Chapter 1 on Careers. For the first question, a student asked Bob who he has become and how his experiences have shaped him as a person and leader. Bob: Oh, thanks, Darrell. That's a thoughtful question. It's thoughtful because it's often not asked, and it's generally not discussed. But I will say, and hopefully you'll feel like this about your work if you don't already, that you will over time, which is I'm 45 now, so I have some sort of vantage point to look back over. Like, I mean, I started working when I was about 9 or 10 years old, so I have been working for money for about 35 years. So I'm like a bit further into my career than perhaps I look. I've been starting companies and things since I was about 10. So, in terms of like my professional career, which I guess started, you know, just over 20 years ago, 20 years into that kind of work, the thing I'm most grateful for is what it's allowed me to learn and how it's evolved me as a person. And I'm also most grateful on the business front for how the businesses that I've helped create and the projects and client deployments and whatever have helped evolve the people that have worked on them. Like I genuinely feel that is the most lasting thing that anything in business does is evolve people. It's so gratifying when you have a team member that joins and three years later you see them, just their confidence has developed or their personality has developed in some way. And it's the test of the work that has evolved them as people. I mean, I actually just on Monday night, I caught up for the first time in 10 years with an intern we had 10 years ago called Max Hofer. You can look him up. He was an intern at Quid. He was from Europe, was studying in London, came to do an internship with us in San Francisco for the summer. And, he was probably like 18, 19 years old. And a few weeks ago, he launched his AI company, Parsewise, with funding from Y Combinator. And, he cites his experience at Quid as being fundamental in choosing his career path, in choosing what field he worked in and so on. So that was, yeah, that was, when you see these things happening, right, 10 years on, we caught up at an event we did in London on Monday. And it's just it's really rewarding. So I suppose, yeah, like I suppose it's it's brought me a lot of perspective, brought me a lot of inner peace, actually, you know, the and and when you're when I was in the thick of it at times, I had no sense of that whatsoever. Right. Like in tough years. And there were some - there have been some very tough years in my working career that you don't feel like it's developing you in any way. It just feels brutal. I liken starting a company, sometimes it's like someone's put you in a room with a massive monster and the monster pins you down and just bats you across the face, right, for like a while. And you're like just trying to get away from the monster and you're like, finally you get the monster off your back and then like the monster's just on you again. And it just, it's just like you get a little bit of space and freedom and then the monster's back and it's just like pummeling you. And it's just honestly some years, like for those of you, some of you are running companies now, right? And starting your own companies as well. And I suppose it's not just starting companies. There are just phases in your career and work where it's like you look back and you're like, man, that year was just like, that was brutal. You just get up and fight every day, and you just get knocked down every day. So I think, I don't wish that on anybody, but it does build resilience that then transfers into other aspects of your life. Nate: Next, a student made a reference to the first podcast episode I recorded with Bob and asked him if he felt like he was still working on the most important problem in his field. Bob: Yeah, thank you. Thanks for listening to the podcast, as this gives us… thanks for the chance to plug the podcast. So the way I met Nate is that he interviewed me for his podcast. And for those of you who haven't listened to it, it's a 30 minute interview. And he asked this question about what advice would you share with others? And we honed in on this question of like, what is the most important problem in your field? And are you working on it? Which I love as a guide to like choosing what to work on. And so we had a great conversation. I enjoyed it so much and really enjoyed meeting Nate. So we sort of said, hey, let's do more fun stuff together in the future. So that's what brought us to this conversation. And thanks to Nate for, you know, bringing us all together today. I'm always working on what I think is the most important problem in front of me. And I always will be. I can't help it. I don't have to think about it. I just can't think about anything else. So yes, I do feel like right now I'm working on the most important problem in my field. And I feel like I've been doing that for about 20 years. And it's not for everybody, I suppose. But I just think, like, let's talk about that idea a little bit. And then I'll say what I think is the most important problem in my field that I'm working on. Like, just to translate it for each of you. Systems are always evolving. The systems we live in are evolving. We all know that. People talk about the pace of change and like life's changing, technology's changing and so on. Well, it is, right? Like humans developed agriculture 5,000 years ago. That wasn't very long ago. Agriculture, right? Just the idea that you could grow crops in one area and live in that area without walking around, without moving around settlements and different living in different places. And that concept is only 5,000 years old, right? I mean, people debate exactly how old, like 7, 8,000. But anyway, it's not that long ago, considering Homo sapiens have been walking around for in one form or another for several hundred thousand years and humans in general for a couple million years. So 5,000 years is not long. Look at what's happened in 5,000 years, right? Like houses, the first settlements where you would actually just live at sleep in the same place every night is only 5,000 years old. And now we've got on a - you can access all the world's knowledge - on your phone for free through ChatGPT and ask it sophisticated questions and all right answers. Or you can get on a plane and fly all over the world. You have, you know, sophisticated digital currency systems. We have sophisticated laws. And like, we've got to be aware, I think, that we are living in a time of great change. And that has been true for 5,000 years, right? That's not new. So I think about this concept of the forefront. I imagine, human development is, you can just simply imagine it like a sphere or balloon that someone's like blowing up, right? And so every time they breathe into it, like something shifts and it just gets bigger. And so there's stuff happening on the forefront where it's occupying more space, different space, right? There's stuff in the middle that's like a bit more stable and a bit more, less prone to rapid change, right? The education system, some parts of the healthcare system, like certain professions, certain things that are like a bit more stable, but there's stuff happening all the time on the periphery, right? Like on the boundary. And that stuff is affecting every field in one way or another. And I just think if you get a chance to work on that stuff, that's a really interesting place to live and a really interesting place to work. And I feel like you can make a contribution to that, right, if you put yourself on the edge. And it's true for every field. So whatever field you're in, we had people here today, you know, in everything from, yeah, like the military to fitness to, you know, your product, product design and management and, you know, lots of different, you know, people, different backgrounds. But if you ask yourself, what is the most important thing happening in my area of work today, and then try to find some way to work on it, then I think that sort of is a nice sort of North Star and keeps things interesting. Because the sort of breakthroughs and discoveries and important contributions are actually not complicated once you put yourself in that position. They're obvious once you put yourself in that position, right? It's just that there aren't many people there hanging out in that place. If you're one of them, if you put yourself there, not everyone's there, suddenly you're kind of in a room where like lots of cool stuff can happen, but there aren't many people around to compete with you. So you're more likely to find those breakthroughs, whether it's for your company or for, you know, the people you work with or, you know, maybe it's inventions and, but it just, anyway, so I really like doing that. And in my space right now, I call it the concept of being the bridge. And this could apply to all of you too. It's a simple idea that the world's value, right, is locked up in companies, essentially. Companies create value. We can debate all the other vehicles that do it, but basically most of the world's value is tied up in companies and their processes. And that's been true for a long time. There's a new ball of power in the world, which is been created by large language models. And I think of that just like a new ball of power. So you've got a ball of value and a ball of power. And the funny thing about this new ball of power is this actually has no value. That's a funny thing to say, right? The large language models have no value. They don't. They don't have any value and they don't create value. Think about it. It's just a massive bag of words. That has no value, right? I can send you a poem now in the chat. Does that have any value? You might like it, you might not, but it's just a set of words, right? So you've got this massive bag of words that with like a trillion connections, no value whatsoever. That is different from previous tech trends like e-commerce, for example, which had inherent value because it was a new way to reach consumers. So some tech trends do have inherent value because they're new processes, but large language models don't. They're just a new technology. They're very powerful. So I call it a ball of power. but they don't have any value. So why is there a multi-trillion dollar opportunity in front of all of us right now in terms of value creation? It's being the bridge. It's how to make use of this ball of power to improve businesses. And businesses only have two ways you improve them. You save money or you grow revenue. That's it. So being the bridge, like taking this new ball of power and finding ways to save money, be more efficient, taking this new ball of power and finding ways to access new consumers, create new offerings and so on, right? Solve new problems. That is where all the value is. So while you may think that the new value, this multi-trillion dollar opportunity with AI is really for the people that work on the AI companies, sure, there's a lot of, you know, there's some money to be made there. And if you can go work for OpenAI, you probably should. Everyone should be knocking the door down. Everyone should be applying for positions because it's the most important company, you know, in our generation. But if you're not in OpenAI or Meta or Microsoft or whoever, you know, three or four companies in the US that are doing this, for everybody else, it's about being the bridge, finding ways that in your organizations, you can unlock the power of AI by bringing it into the organizations and finding ways to either save money or grow the business. And that's fascinating to me because anybody can be the bridge. You don't have to be good with large language models. You have to understand business processes and you have to be creative and willing to even think like this. And suddenly you can be on the forefront of like creating massive value at your companies because you were the, you know, you're the one that brings brings in the new tools. And I think that skill set, there are certain skills involved in being the bridge, but that skill set of being the bridge is going to be so valuable in the next 5 to 10 years. So I encourage people, and that's what I'm doing. Like, I see my role - I serve clients at Quid. I love working with clients. You know, I'm not someone that really like thrives for management and like day-to-day operations and administration of a business. I learned that about myself. And so I just spend my time serving clients. I have done for several years now. And I love just meeting clients and figuring out how they can use Quid’s AI, Quid’s data, and any other form of AI that we want to bring to the table to improve their businesses. And that's just what I do with my time full-time. And I'll probably be doing that for at least the next 5 or 10 years. I think the outlook for that area of work is really huge. Nate: Building on the podcast episode where Bob talked about working on the most important problem in his field, I asked if he could give us some more details on how he took that advice and ended up at Yelp. Bob: So I was in grad school in the UK studying, well, I was actually on a program for medieval literature and philosophy, but looking into like language theory. So it was not the most commercial course that one could be doing. But I was a hobbyist programmer, played around with the web when it first came up and was making, you know, various new types of websites for students. while in my free time. I didn't think of that as commercial at all. I didn't see any commercial potential in that. But I did meet the founders of PayPal that way, who would come to give a talk. And I guess they saw the potenti…
Full show notes at the publisher 
Our TOPPODCAST Picks 
Stay Connected
