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SPEAKER_02: Hey, everybody. Welcome to This Week in Startups.

SPEAKER_03: It's been an amazing year or two for alternative ways to manage information with remote workers. And we've seen a collection of tools that have changed the way we work in the pandemic. But these tools have their origins inside of companies like Google or Slack, where people were trying to run large distributed development teams, product teams, sales teams, et cetera. And in companies where people wanted to stay in front of their monitor, but communicate and collaborate. And that gave them an edge on big incumbent companies that had meeting culture. And everybody being informed, everybody having a seat at the table, everybody having a voice is one of the central tenants in Silicon Valley. And actually pulling from people who don't want to speak and getting them to speak up and getting that information transparently shared across the organization is one of those edges that companies from Google to Netflix to Facebook that made them so strong. And let's face it, it made them kick ass around the world and build some of the greatest brands in history. Well, our guest today, Shashir Mehrotra. Mehrotra, did I get it correct?

SPEAKER_05: Yes. Yes. Good job. Oh, God, my dyslexia and Indian names is like one of the biggest challenges.

SPEAKER_07: My parents are going to be proud of you.

SPEAKER_03: Well, Shashir, you worked at YouTube or inside of Google for a number of years, including, and when you got to YouTube, they had created this Google suite of products, which was Sheets and Docs originally. They had presentations later. And you were, in fact, inspired by, I think,

SPEAKER_09: a lot of that distributed work for us to create Coda. If you don't know what Coda is, you can go to C-O-D-A dot I-O.

SPEAKER_03: Part of the cohort, along with Notion, and I think these are the natural successors to the Google Docs and Office suites, are they not?

SPEAKER_10: Yeah, I think so. I mean, maybe to tell that context,

SPEAKER_12: I got to YouTube in 2008. Before starting Coda, I spent about six years. Most of the time running the YouTube group for Google. And when I got there, YouTube was, people may forget this, but YouTube was not seen as an obvious success. And in fact, my first two years at Google was mostly defending YouTube to the company to make sure that they didn't spin it out and sell it to someone else and so on, because it was not seen positively. One of the things that happened because of that was whenever we wanted to do something, they were quite happy to let us do whatever we wanted. It's, you know, crazy YouTube guys are going to do a different way to do their task system or a different way to do goals or a different way to do comp or a different way to do. One of my favorite examples was if you hit flag on a YouTube video, for years, it would create a row in a spreadsheet on an office person's desk. And what we basically did, because we had no corporate support and Google Docs existed, we basically ran the entire company on Docs, Sheets, Slides, and so on. And it sort of formed our ethos. For a while, we were kind of apologetic about it. Like, this is maybe not the way that a multibillion-dollar corporation should be run. But over time, we realized that it was our secret sauce. It's why we could plan the way we wanted. It's the reason our flagging system could evolve the way we wanted. It was the reason we could hire who we wanted. So that idea, I think your introduction was great to it, was just watching that generational transformation happen very quickly, right? As we went from the office world to the Google Docs world, completely changed how we built this division.

SPEAKER_16: And in fact, YouTube was a falling knife

SPEAKER_09: that Google caught midair. I mean, they had essentially paid $1.6 billion for the largest lawsuit in the history of business and then had to figure out a way to get a very vindictive Viacom and other players. But I think Viacom's the one that really went to the mat in terms of saying,

SPEAKER_18: hey, you know, you built this thing off of our backs and then it was incredible in the discovery. People can look up the history of YouTube and we'll have the YouTube founders on at some point,

SPEAKER_09: but to tell it themselves. But they basically had one set of group in media companies sending them videos saying, hey, can you put this up for us? Or can you promote this?

SPEAKER_12: We want in summary judgment. The case was basically that, hey, YouTubers, you should be able to see this clip from Daily Show and you should be able to automatically take it down. And it turned out that many of the clips were being uploaded by the Viacom marketing team themselves. And it was one of the best defenses of the DMCA that I've seen across any case. And it's sort of iconic for why it's,

SPEAKER_10: I think, one of the most brilliant pieces of legislation that Congress has put in place in the last 20 years.

SPEAKER_03: And that section 230 where you're a common carrier and the platform is not responsible for how people publish to it if they're not making editorial decisions, which YouTube was very careful not to do. I remember being an early YouTube partner. They would not feature videos. They would be very careful like, hey, the algorithm would let things trend. And now we have some controversy, which you can talk about since you're not at Google anymore with people specifically Trump saying, I want section 230 taken down. I'm not happy with how people are using social media after being delighted with how it worked for him when he won. What are your thoughts on what is a reasonable way to look at section 230 to look at the DMCA and say, you know, well, Facebook does have an algorithm that surfaces content. Is that an actual editorial decision when you write an algorithm? Feels like it to me. How do you think about it as somebody who was in the eye of the storm?

SPEAKER_12: Yeah, I mean, I fall on the side. First off, I'd say this legislation has very far reaching effects. And so the idea of, you know, we're going to veto it based on sticking it to some other bill and so on, that seems crazy to me. I mean, all things can be improved. All things can be improved, but it's not so simple. And there are clearly extremes, right? The section 230 DMCA were created around the extremes of ISPs. And, you know, should Comcast be held responsible for everything going across its pipes? Like, of course not. That seems crazy. Right. And then on the other side, there's should the New York Times be held responsible? Yeah, probably. Like, so there's some line you cross there. And so the DMCA has a particular threshold. They call it the right and ability to control. And if you can establish that you have the right and ability to control what is on your platform, then you have responsibility for it. And if you can't, then you don't. And just to be clear, like, I don't think it's, it's not a thing that gets abused. It's just true. Like this thing with Viacom is a good example. It's just impossible. There's no way to take hundreds of hours per minute that are uploaded to YouTube and do anything that is actually, can be held to a approval first test. Just wouldn't work. And I think same is true of Facebook and Twitter and so on. Now, is there like some better line of what should happen when somebody flags something? What should the recourse policies be? I think there are better lines. I actually think of the, Zuck and team published his, the Facebook version of what they should do. Most of which I thought was pretty good, actually. I mean, I thought it was a very thoughtful view of, hey, like the principle should stay in place, but when something happens, you know, you should be able to escalate to a real court. Like it should not be fickle like that when you deal with these things. So I think there are reasonable improvements, but the spirit of it, if you were to take these platforms and say, we're just going to assume they look at every piece of content and make a judgment beforehand, we'll end up in bad spots. Just to give you an example, YouTube, these platforms all deal with laws in multiple countries. And one of the things I think people miss is that the U.S. is one set of laws, but you have to build things for every country. We had a person in Thailand who went to jail, not because of her video, but because there was a comment on her video that she didn't moderate fast enough. And it happened to be criticizing the king of Thailand. And like, if you just think about what level, like how would you feel if like every piece you put out, this podcast could get taken down because of a comment that came on the phone, it would be crazy. Like you would just stifle all sorts of speech. So, you know, we definitely don't want to be Thailand in that.

SPEAKER_11: This would be like taking the author of a book and being like, you know what? We found that somebody wrote in the back page of the book in the library,

SPEAKER_06: something critical of President Trump. And you're the author and you didn't print this book, but there's a million copies of the book in circulation, but you're responsible for this. What specifically about algorithms do you think?

SPEAKER_09: Because this seems to be a very interesting place. I don't know if you saw Jack at Twitter said, hey, what if you could roll your own algorithm or pick your own algorithm? Because we do know that the algorithms are taking a bunch of data and it really is just about increasing

SPEAKER_03: the mantra inside of YouTube was just time on site. How much time, how many minutes did you watch? And it's kind of blind to what it's sending you to. And then there was this accusation it was sending people down this like dark, you know, alt-right conspiracy there. So when we get back to this quick break, what do you think about the idea of when you go onto a YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, whatever it is, it says, here are some algorithm choices for you. Here's one that is going to increase time on site. Here's one that's going to send you towards pages that are and content that is more verified from more trusted sources. And this one's going to be a free for all or you'll just have time based when we get back on This Week in Startups.

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SPEAKER_18: You can go check that out at Coda.io, which we're going to get into in a minute. But since we have you here and you have so much knowledge about the history of all these things,

SPEAKER_03: what do you think of that pitch by Jack? That, hey, you could bring your own algorithm to the party or none at all?

SPEAKER_34: I'll say I'm a little skeptical.

SPEAKER_12: Okay. Why? The, the, so we ran, um, one of our sort of famous moments, my time at YouTube, we set this goal. We call it the billion hour goal. Um, uh, and the, the basic idea was that, uh, we said in 2012, I set a goal that YouTube would get, uh, a billion hours a day of viewership. Um, and at the time we were at less than a 10th of that. And so it was, it was a big audacious goal. It would take, it would take us four years to get there, um, and so on the same time. And we knew that this was going to cause a big change in a focus on time on site. And that, like you said, it, it, it was very clarifying. It meant we could make all sorts of decisions where time on site became a way to decide, uh, uh, between things. Um, but we, I like to say that every time a lot of companies will talk about picking a Northstar metric. I, and I think when you pick a Northstar metric, you always want to figure out what your compensating metric is. What is the thing that takes whatever harm you might find and you compensate for it. So we had this discussion about it and we call this the nutritious versus delicious discussion. And it's a very simple idea is that, you know, we can choose to be a company that is, um, just delicious. And, and all we do is, is get people to eat more, or we can focus on being nutritious. And we used, you know, whole foods as a, as an inspired, inspiring analogy for this. Um, I'm not so sure how true it is in the past few years, but certainly at that time, you know, whole foods was this emblem of a company that was both a pretty good business and stood for nutrition. And we actually, um, set about to try to measure this now, just as context at the time, this was back in 2011, 2012. Well, the concern was less about some of today's concerns, maybe today, what people are worried about, about fall down, fall down the rabbit hole and, and, and, and some of the, the, the echo chamber effects that we're seeing at the time we were mostly worried about, um, time wasting. We were worried about, were we, uh, were we a good use of people's time? Um, so we started running this, um, this, uh, survey and, and we did it in the product. So, but what happened is YouTube has this, uh, one of the things we built is famous ad product, the skippable ad unit, where you see the ad and you can skip it. We call it true view. Um, so we replaced that for a certain percentage of users with a little survey and it would ask you, um, the, the top, the, the question was, which is a more, uh, which is a better use of an hour of your time? Uh, and the options were, um, see if I get them right, uh, reading a book, uh, going to the gym, watching television, watching YouTube. And the goal was not to win. Like, I mean, it was obvious we were not going to go to the gym is obviously better than all of these things.

SPEAKER_43: Yes.

SPEAKER_12: Hopefully. I mean, some people would rank the book higher, but whatever, that's the, but like YouTube was clearly not going to win this, but what it allowed us to do was it gave us a real signal at what the cost was for being nutritious versus delicious. And now the other thing it allowed us to do is it allowed us to tune to it. Right. And so now we could, Hey, I'm about to ship this new algorithm. It increases watch time by this and decreases our nutrition score by X. Now we can tune for it that, and you know, YouTube since replaced it with a thing they call valuable watch time, which, uh, guy who runs search there, Christos was telling me about my last visit. And I think, I think everybody's trying to do it. One of the key things to remember about these companies though, is being nutritious is generally good for them. Like, it's not, I think people look at it as this is a, this is a, uh, a disincentive. Most of these companies discovered that if you start associating this product with a bad use of time or bad for society or so on, you will probably, in a long arc, you will use it less. Um, and, and you'll certainly deal with a lot more drama.

SPEAKER_35: I mean, we saw Facebook is being, uh, you know, targeted for breakup and kind of doesn't make total sense because they're looking in the rear view mirror.

SPEAKER_09: I don't know if you've looked at it, but you know, yeah, it's like, does this make any sense?

SPEAKER_12: Microsoft when the government came after Microsoft as well.

SPEAKER_09: Uh, yeah, and I, I think it's like, I don't know if you have this perception, but it does feel like Facebook is being targeted because they have a reputation for maybe not being as thoughtful about these issues. Uh, and maybe even being a little standoffish about them. And it seems to have pissed off a lot of people.

SPEAKER_03: Um, even if, and maybe Google has dodged this a bit because it does seem like they are very thoughtful about it.

SPEAKER_11: Is it, you think I'm correct in my assessment?

SPEAKER_12: Oh, I absolutely. I mean, I think Ben Thompson uses a term for this called strategy, strategy credits, that certain companies accrue these strategy credits where they kind of presume you're, you're doing things for the benefit of the world. And I think Google generally stands at one extreme of that, that many of the things we did were like on the edge, better for the world than they were just locally for Google. And people have, have seen that, you know, you go map the world before anybody spent a lot of money on it before everybody thinks that's a, that's a valuable thing. You get some strategy credit for it and you, you, you, you bother to get down to the little geographies that everybody else would have ignored and make the little roads in India show up on the map. You get strategy credit for it and people believe you're in the right spot. And I do think companies, especially these companies that have a natural economy of scale and know that they're going to get big, um, it behooves them to think about that early. My, my point in the nutritious, delicious pieces, I think there are companies for which it's not aligned. I mean, if you, if you work at a cigarette company, you kind of screwed, like there's no real way to just like work into your ethos. Let's be a little more nutritious. Like you are going to, you're just going to have to pay the price. I think one of the challenges is these companies, the YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, it actually isn't, it is well aligned with their incentive to be known to be nutritious, not delicious. It's just very hard to do. And, and so I think the, and the thing, just back to your question on the algorithm, the challenge is that say you handed people this algorithm and say you could hand them a choice. It says, um, you know, uh, I want to see more of this content or more of that content. Well, they kind of already do that. I mean, every one of these platforms has a show me more like this, show me less like that. Okay. So maybe I want them to optimize for a different metric. Okay. So what metric, like what, what would you like me to optimize for? I mean, if it's not time on site, what should it be? Um, and like, what is that thing that's not well correlated? And once you can establish that thing and describe it to someone, why not do that for everyone? Like, why, why, why, why, why is it, why is it the case that like some people would choose time on site and some people would choose nutrition? Like, I just think if you can measure it well, you're probably better off just doing it for everyone. So I, I'm not, the reason I think the suggestion of everybody choose their own algorithm, I think it's not very practical.

SPEAKER_53: It's very hard to describe an algorithm. And if you can do it.

SPEAKER_09: I was thinking more other people in the open source community would make them and just say, hey, you could try these different ones. This one is leaning towards science. This one is leaning towards the left, towards the right, towards fact checking, you know, high production value. This one is chaos, whatever, you know, this one's keywords.

SPEAKER_03: It just, it would also, I think, you know, when, um, Chrome opens up or Android opens up and it's like, which browser would you like, which search engine would you like to use? Yeah, I kind of feel like when you put the choice right up front, it does give you a little bit of these credits to Ben Thompson sort of point. Like, hey, listen, you opened up your Chrome browser and it gave you the option of Bing, you know, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo or Google. And you picked, you know, which one you picked. So consumer choices there, tell me, what was the origin of, of Coda?

SPEAKER_12: Yeah. So the, this is a project that in some sense or the other, I've been thinking about or working on in some form for almost 20 years. So some part, people that know me well will describe it. Sometimes you think about like entrepreneur product fit. This is very high entrepreneur product fit. This is a, a product that nobody is surprised that I'm, I'm building. Uh, I mean, a lot of it did happen through that YouTube experience and Coda is born out of two primary observations of the world. One is that we think, uh, docs run the world, not apps. That if you ask any team, how they operate or any person or any business, and they'll start rattling off all the different applications. And we've got the CRM system, this task system, this inventory system, and then you actually watch what they do all day. They're probably surrounded by docs, spreadsheets, presentations, and so on. It's just sort of what runs the world. And that's observation number one. This was definitely true of YouTube, but basically every, every team I could see operated this way. The second observation is those tools haven't fundamentally changed in over 40 years. And there's this running joke at the company that if Austin Powers popped out of his freezing chamber, he wouldn't know what music to listen to or what clothes to wear, but he would know how to work a document, a spreadsheet, and a presentation. And the reason is very simple. Like the core metaphors that we're looking at are exactly the same as WordStar, Harvard Graphics, and VisiCalc. And we haven't fundamentally, all we've done is copy and paste it through multiple generations of operating systems to get to what we have today. So if you take these two observations and stick them together and say, the world runs on docs, not apps, those docs haven't fundamentally changed in 50 years. Now you start to say, what if we started from scratch? What if we built something totally different? And we didn't worry about backwards compatibility and, you know, can you import and export into this thing? Just don't worry about that.

SPEAKER_17: Just focus on if you were building a new doc, what would you build? And that's how we got started.

SPEAKER_35: And what I really love about the product is when you open it up, it's like, hey, what are you trying to accomplish?

SPEAKER_09: As opposed to here's a tool, you know, here's a hammer, here's a saw. You're saying, hey, are you doing a meeting? Are you doing a project? What is the purpose of this? And then let's give you a template when we get back.

SPEAKER_03: I want to understand what people are using it for and who are the early users of the product when we get back on this week in startups.

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SPEAKER_64: Let's get back to this amazing episode.

SPEAKER_18: All right. Shashir is here from Coda. He has been working on it since 2014. And is on the board of directors of Spotify. Wow. That's been quite an experience, I'm sure.

SPEAKER_10: Super fun. I got hooked up with Daniel because of this bundling paper I wrote a while back about why subscription dynamics are a little bit different than people might think. It's called Four Myths of Bundling. It's been an awesome journey working through that with Spotify.

SPEAKER_16: Yeah. What do you think about their commitment to podcasting and non-musical audio?

SPEAKER_10: That's part of the bundling theory, right? So the core idea is this somewhat, I guess, at this point, famous paper on four myths of

SPEAKER_12: bundling that we put together that walks through some of what people presume about bundles and subscriptions that is generally not quite accurate. And one of them talks about how the power of the sort of fourth myth of the set is that the best bundles minimize super fan overlap and maximize casual fan overlap. The idea of how do you expand a product like this is to find the things that actually don't align with what your current users are doing and expand your base. And I think what we're doing with podcasting at Spotify is a great example of that. I think Daniel has done a really good job of taking that idea and just driving a freight train

SPEAKER_17: to the whole industry of doing it. So thanks. Yeah, it's what do you think?

SPEAKER_09: Well, you know, I like open standards. And so, you know, and we were part full, full disclosure, Daniel's been on the pod. I'm friends. I don't own the stock or anything. I'm not an investor, early investor or anything. But there are concerns of exclusivity and breaking RSS and having Joe Rogan be only available on Spotify, you know, come January. And then there are some concerns about censorship and, you know, can a tech company deal with comedians, etc. It doesn't seem like, you know, the jokes that are being made on Netflix are shaking up and rocking the culture of Netflix. They bought into that. But, you know, the Spotify team, obviously, some number of them did not buy into having Joe Rogan have certain guests on. And so I think there's going to be some growing pains there. But people should just opt in or opt out of being at a company like that.

SPEAKER_03: And I do think it's great for the industry if there is somebody who is willing to buy the top podcasters for exclusivity. And that gives a path to other people ranking. So if Joe Rogan is number one on the iTunes, on Apple's podcasting app, and he's number one on, you know, Google's podcasting app, when he goes exclusive to Spotify, guess what? Now somebody else gets to be number one on those lists. And people should get paid for performance. And so I love it. I know some people who are purists are not a fan of, you know, breaking RSS, etc. And will this result in what Twitter basically did, which was break the RSS sort of contract with people, right? Like the open source nature of it, but, you know, Spotify still is going to be supporting all RSS feeds and you still have to apply to be part of the podcast program. So, you know, it's Google and iTunes will take a different approach and vive la difference,

SPEAKER_58: right?

SPEAKER_12: I mean, the analogy you drew there is one at YouTube used to call this farm league pro league, which is the YouTube is a wonderful to use the baseball analogy is a wonderful, wonderful farm league. I mean, so many musicians, comedians, you know, and all sorts of people that got their start there, there's zero wall to get, to get up and get spread and so on. And then one of the things that always kind of frustrated us at YouTube was we didn't, we never really did a great job with the pro league with, as those people got really popular, what happens next? And so what would generally happen is they'd leave and they'd go get a Netflix show and they'd show up on cable and, and, and so on. And I think one of the things Spotify has traditionally been more pro league. And I think one of the things podcasting is doing is as, as you said, it's sort of expanding the base of it and it's going almost the opposite direction. And it's been entertaining for me having sort of lived through both directions of what differences in how you build a platform, how you build a culture, as you pointed out, employees who join a pro league company feel differently than employees who join a farm league company. They're generally drawn to different value systems. And, and I, so far, I think Daniel and his team have done a really nice job of, of sort of straddling those worlds and, and both for their users and for their, their, um, partners and employee base and just all the different constituencies that come into it.

SPEAKER_17: Um, but yeah, I think all, all, all the observations are, are well taken.

SPEAKER_11: Listen, my observations are going to change dramatically. If, you know, we, I think we had, we're, we're at about $2 million in revenue for this podcast

SPEAKER_18: and we do it three to four days a week and we're trending towards five days a week. And it's the love of my life to do it.

SPEAKER_03: We've got a team of six or seven, you know, it, it would be if, if Daniel came to me and said, Oh, we want this week in startups exclusive. We'll give you two minute. I'd be like, no, I'd rather just read the ads and, you know, uh, keep it independent. But if he came to me and said, we'll give you 6 million. And I could hire a bunch more people, uh, I'd have to think about it.

SPEAKER_09: Right. So I think that there is, uh, you know, uh, if they're willing to pay a premium and then I don't have to have advertising, um, and users just have to have it. And it's free where it's part of a subscription or half of it's free. I would have to give it some thought, you know? And I, so I, there is a group of people who are now on the bubble where these things

SPEAKER_03: are becoming real businesses. For me, I make my money investing in companies like, you know, $2 million a year on the revenue for this podcast is, I mean, it's, I'm, it's wonderful. I'm, I'm sure that puts me in the 1% of revenue for podcasters or top 5% or whatever it is, but that's not why I do it. Right. I do it. Cause I love having a conversation and meeting somebody new like you. So it's definitely got me thinking.

SPEAKER_18: Um, and I would consider it, I guess, if the money was, you know, two or three acts, I wouldn't consider it if it wasn't right. Cause then what would the point be?

SPEAKER_12: I suspect that people's aspirations on this are well short of what they should be in it. Well, I, uh, one quick story when I joined YouTube, I joined in 2008 and I took this, um, pretty soon afterwards, I took this flight is going to New York and sit down on the plane. And, um, uh, and I sit next to this woman and like often happens on a plane, sort of exchange pleasantries. You're going to New York, you're coming back. But where, where, and, um, and I said, well, you know, where do you work? And she said, oh, I work, uh, uh, work at YouTube. And I said, really? Like YouTube at the time was like a hundred people. I knew everybody worked at YouTube. It was like, there's no way she worked at YouTube. And, uh, I said, really? You work at YouTube, which office? And she says, no, no, no, no. I mean that you guys send me my check every month. And so I don't have another job. That's what I do. I work at YouTube. And at the time that was exceptional. Like it didn't happen that often. And we used to have this, this, um, one of our aspiring statements and the early days of YouTube was maybe someday we're going to have many people that say they make their living off YouTube. And maybe someday we'll have kids that aspire to be YouTubers. And we used to say it and kind of laugh about it. Like, this is not going to happen. I think if you look at where the podcasting industry is now, it feels very similar. Like it's a unique person that makes any money on podcasts. And, you know, the way you described it as like, hey, make a couple million bucks a year on podcasts, like you have a really popular show and a really popular following. Like it should be, it should be more than double that. Like the, the, the, the, the, the, I just remember like nowadays we look at YouTubers and like we have YouTubers that are making, you know, tens and hundreds of millions of dollars a year. And like, they're, yeah, of course, some of them.

SPEAKER_85: What does the biggest one make you think now? 20, $30 million on the platform?

SPEAKER_12: I mean, PewDiePie, PewDiePie talks a bunch about what he makes and, and I forget the numbers now, but, and Joe Rogan, of course, makes a ton of money. The, the, but I think the, um, the challenge with that question for YouTube is because this Farm League, Pro League thing, the best ones leave, right? And so, you know, what, what, what are the best, the people that grew up on, on YouTube, where do they actually make their money?

SPEAKER_87: I think YouTube should take credit for, you know, Justin Bieber and like that, that phenomenon would not exist.

SPEAKER_45: It's also a lot of responsibility to be responsible for people's livelihoods and then also not know them. Correct?

SPEAKER_30: What do you mean? Oh, you mean just like, oh, in terms of running a platform like that?

SPEAKER_91: Yeah. I mean, people are dependent upon it.

SPEAKER_12: Yeah. I mean, I think it's one of the things, it's still the case that YouTube is the only truly open platform out there that pays people money, um, at, at any reasonable level, um, and will pay just about anybody, uh, money. So yeah, it's, it, it comes, comes with a lot of responsibility. And I think, I think the team there now, um, it's interesting. I had an old boss that told me once that every business goes through three phases. First, you're a joke. Uh, nobody believes in you. Then you're a threat. Everybody's scared of you. And then you're obvious. And everybody just presumes what you're going to do is going to work and everything flips around and all you can do is wrong. And, you know, I got to YouTube when we were clearly a joke, like you said, as big lawsuits and so on. And I think I, uh, I was there and we got to lead it through that joke to threat period. And I think I left right as it became obvious. And now Susan and Neil and Scott and the team running, running, uh, Robert running YouTube. Now that team is now running it through this obvious period. And the interesting thing about what you just said is like the responsibility that comes with, with paying people's incomes, you know, in my phase, every article about it was like, just so excited. Like, can you believe these kids that the Charlie bit my finger got to pay for their college through this video? Like that was like, you know, so heartwarming nowadays. I feel like it's like the rare press article that's actually positive about what's happening there is that, you know, we now have thousands of people making their livings off this platform, generally doing something they love doing. Um, but of course now it's easy to look the other side of it and say the responsibility comes with it and the obligations come with it.

SPEAKER_17: And I think that's just the nature of the expectations. The business have shifted. Right.

SPEAKER_75: This happened after your time.

SPEAKER_11: And I don't know if you're comfortable talking about it, but in 2018, a YouTuber who was

SPEAKER_18: obviously suffering from some mental illness, went to the YouTube campus and shot people because the, she felt the rules had changed on her and it was unfair and she had been blocked

SPEAKER_19: and there's no appeal process really. What are your thoughts on that tragedy and what we can learn from it?

SPEAKER_12: What a wake up call. I mean, I think, I think it's a thing that, um, is old Spider-Man line of with great power comes great responsibility. And I think, I think it was back to like, it was a formative story for me to sit on this plane and how this woman say she works at YouTube. And I don't think for many of us, it quite clicked. Like you said, the responsibility that comes with that, that you're now, these people are an extended employee group and there are other companies facing this. I mean, I think what Uber just went through with their proposition. So, and it's a pretty good example of similar, like you're having a level of impact on people's lives that is, that is large and, and it isn't well regulated and it isn't like you can appeal to any place. And I think if it, you know, one of, one of my viewpoints is these companies are gradually becoming like an orthogonal government system for the world. And, you know, the, the regulators are free speech and the regulators are free enterprise and so on. And I do think it's important back to your section 230 comment that those companies, and I think they're all doing it. They're recognizing that, oh, our role is more similar to governments than it is to companies. And we are, we are beholden to multiple constituencies. And we sometimes have to make decisions that, that take into, take into consideration factors beyond your, beyond shareholders. I, again, I don't, back to Nutrition is delicious. I don't think it's actually, there's no disincentive to do it. I mean, they, they know this is going to make the, everybody, everybody knows that if YouTube feels more fair, then people are much more willing to participate. So I think Susan and her team are doing a great job doing whatever they can, but the, you know, there is a limit to what, what you can reasonably do. And the world hasn't yet, you know, come, you know, come to terms with what that limit is. Um, but it's different. Yeah. I mean, you have to, you have to realize that you're now paying salaries for a lot of people, you're regulating speech, you're, you're affecting public opinion. There's a lot of things that you, that come with that.

SPEAKER_35: Yeah.

SPEAKER_09: And, and it, one of the challenges is when you decide to do any kind of arbitration, when you decide to bring up these discussions, the lawyers inside the organization say, Hey, you're opening us up to liability, even having this discussion, or even, you know, treating things in a, in a, in a non-standard way because of the previous legal framework. And so there's, there, I feel there's like a, almost, um, uh, a culture of like, well, we, we have this sort of set approach. We can't change it. So if somebody loses their Twitter handle, it's like, okay, you know, the New York post got suspended. They have to go 48 hours and then Jack has to come in and go, okay, that didn't make sense. And who's making these decisions inside the organizations to your point of like, Hey, it's becoming like a government, um, you know, how do we actually mitigate this?

SPEAKER_102: Um, and it's, it's beyond the scope of what we'll solve here, but it does absolutely.

SPEAKER_12: I think they're trying. I think they all want to try. I don't think, I mean, on the lawyer's point, the, the, the GC at YouTube's woman, Nicole Alston, who's amazing, one of the best lawyers on the planet. And I don't, I would, I would characterize her as very fair actually, and very knowledgeable about, I learned things in every discussion, um, uh, from her and from that team. I do think we have a current political environment that makes it impossible to make progress on just about anything. And this is, this is a particularly tricky one. So there isn't, it's not like, it's not obvious that there's like a partisan viewpoint that actually works for this. You just have to sit down and work out the details. And I, I'm really hopeful that in the next few years, that culture changes a little bit and people can rationally sit down and say, look, neither extreme is reasonable here. We all want products like these to exist. They add a lot of positive energy to the world. But there's, they would all prefer, I mean, I never, I didn't like that we had to make these choices on, you know, free speech matters. I'd rather hand it to a court. It's not like, there's not.

SPEAKER_11: Yeah, it'd be much rather if there was some third party arbitrate. I mean, that's actually an interesting idea is if when you sign the terms of services, some of these documents, there was an arbitration clause, anybody who's making over, you know, whatever it is, 10,000 a month agrees to an arbitration with this third party. The third party makes a decision.

SPEAKER_03: It could be actually, then if they had a complaint about something, they could say, hey, I want to arbitrate, you go and, you know, there's some sort of process. When we get back from this break, I want to know, go ahead.

SPEAKER_12: Yeah, Zuck's section 230 proposal has something like that.

SPEAKER_03: Yeah. All right, when we get back from this quick break, I want to know what are the top use cases and top customers of Coda when we get back on This Week in Startups.

SPEAKER_64: All right, as somebody who's invested in over 250 companies, advised hundreds, maybe thousands

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SPEAKER_18: All right, Shashira is here from Coda.io. And what a great guest. I love the fact that you're willing to talk about anything. That's one of the great things about you must have done well when you worked at YouTube. You were an early Google employee. So you obviously did well, I take it?

SPEAKER_111: Yes. I did so. Yeah. Yeah. Did well. It works okay.

SPEAKER_19: You were one of the first 100 people at YouTube?

SPEAKER_30: I got brought in. The company was probably a little over 100 people at the time.

SPEAKER_112: Wow. Who was wondering? Salar?

SPEAKER_12: So Salar and I joined on the same day. So Chad and Steve had just taken his medical leave. And then Salar and I came in both in this kind of this, I think it's kind of the second phase of YouTube where it sort of moved from this like hyper growth, amazing consumer product to, okay, now we own this thing and we got to do something with it. And so our first meeting with Patrick was a CFO at Google. Our first meeting with Patrick was kind of hilarious. Patrick had these three charts laid out. And we sit down and he says, here's what I see. And he says, this is how much money YouTube is losing per year. And it was like hundreds of millions of dollars. So now, nowadays we see companies go public with much more, but at the time it wasn't generally seen. Okay.

SPEAKER_115: And that was because of bandwidth and storage, right?

SPEAKER_12: No.

SPEAKER_49: It's because of music. Salaries?

SPEAKER_12: No, because of music.

SPEAKER_116: Oh, the music licensing. Yes.

SPEAKER_12: Yeah. It was not. I mean, like if you go look at, I think the way the music industry is part of our lives and it's really, I mean, I don't know if people realize it's one of the biggest checks Peloton writes is to the music labels. It's crazy.

SPEAKER_13: It's like 30%. It's like 30% of their revenue or something.

SPEAKER_12: It's, it's, it's, I was talking to John about it. It's a big deal. How they, like the music license.

SPEAKER_117: What do you think it is for them? I think it was 30%.

SPEAKER_12: Oh, I don't know.

SPEAKER_30: He told me the number one point, but it's, it's probably in their filings.

SPEAKER_75: It's so high. I think there's an argument that Peloton should just hire a hundred musicians and DJs. No, I can't do that.

SPEAKER_53: You can't do that because people, people want popular music, right? It's like, there's a reason why, like the, we try. So, okay.

SPEAKER_12: So these were, this is Patrick's chart. So he has these three charts. One chart says, this is how much money YouTube is losing per year. It's hundreds of millions of dollars. Here's how much money YouTube is losing per view, which is actually a lot of money. It wasn't quite a penny, but it was close. And then the third one was, here's what views are doing. And views weren't like this. They were like, you know, on a rocket ship. And he said, this is like the worst business on the planet. This is like, this is never going to work. And, you know, he was, to Patrick's credit, he was doing this to like challenges, not because he was that, like that really worried. But he has all sorts of hard questions about like, is this a good business? Should we be in it at all? And so on. Thankfully, Eric, who had, you know, was still running the company at the time and was very, like viewed it as one of his statements to make this work, said, you know, this is, this is going to work. Give these guys a try. And so Sal and I joined sort of the same day with a kind of mandate of take this amazing consumer phenomenon and turn it into something that isn't going to, you know, plow itself into the ground. And it was, you know, lawsuits and, and lots of, lots of ways to lose money and, you know, grainy videos and dogs on skateboards. And so there's, there was a lot of work to be done. I mean, one of the best experiences of my life, running through, starting from that to, to where it's at now where people, I think, take it for granted. Like this thing didn't have to exist.

SPEAKER_127: It is amazing when you think about it. I mean, before YouTube, if you put a video on the internet, the reward you would get for

SPEAKER_03: people viewing it is you would hit your $5,000 a month limit on your web hosting company

SPEAKER_09: and they turn the video off. So whenever videos went viral online, it was like a race to see the video before it

SPEAKER_03: got turned off and to download it before it got turned off. And if you download it, you just cost the person another penny and you got them that much quicker to it.

SPEAKER_09: So going back to Coda, you open up the app and you get this beautiful templates there. What is the use cases? And who is the company for, uh, and, and who are the sort of ideal customer profile?

SPEAKER_03: Are you going after startups, uh, or, you know, departments inside of companies and what do they use it for? What are, what are the use cases that you get people in there for?

SPEAKER_30: Yeah. Uh, great questions. Um, so, uh, first off, just for, for your listeners and viewers, you know, Coda is a new all-in-one

SPEAKER_12: doc, uh, it's, we call it a doc for teams, which answers part of your question, uh, blends the best parts of documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and applications into one new surface. The promise, so the mission is it allows anyone to make a doc as powerful as an app. Um, we launched the, uh, the product, uh, February of 2019. So we're just about to cross two years in market. Um, and, you know, took off as you might expect for a product like this, that tends to be shared a lot, took off super fast. We have, you know, over 25,000 teams now using Coda with this incredibly long tail of use cases. I mean, we have, uh, teams that basically every country in the world, every department and so on. And so there's, there's a pretty wide spectrum of how people use it. But if you think about the core, I think most people who start with Coda think of it as a supercharged doc and you just like fun side note, the name Coda is a doc backwards. That's what, that's where the name came from. Um, so for these folks, like for the initial users of Coda, the way they view it is it's the best part of modern docs, you know, real-time collaboration, all the things that we take for granted and just expanded into an all-in-one center. And then gradually what happens is people take that and they grow and grow and grow and start using it for bigger and bigger things. And then we have at the other end of the spectrum, people who use Coda as an application platform. And we have many businesses who run 100% of what they do on Coda. I was talking to a business, uh, the other day that's replaced their ERP system, the CRM system, their inventory system, their, their task system. Everything is now running in Coda and so super wide spectrum from advanced documents to, uh, to running applications.

SPEAKER_35: You know, I think we actually use it internally for our accelerator for applications because of the API integrations and Zapier and all that kind of stuff. Yeah.

David Friedberg: I think we, we see a lot of, we see a lot of that I'd say, um, you know, so very broad

SPEAKER_12: use, uh, uh, across teams, uh, we do tend to be a little bit more business focused. Um, and so the, the vast majority of our users are, are corporate clients, um, small businesses, big businesses. I mean, there's a lot of big businesses using Coda, uh, big customers of Uber, New York times, uh, square, so on are all really big customers of Coda. Um, and I'd say if you look at their use cases, I mean, I'd say that the, the, the most typical use case is what we call team project hubs. It's very typical if, for example, you're at Uber, uh, if you start a new team, you create your email list, you create your Slack channel, you create your Coda doc and it's everything. It's where your notes go, it's where your specs go, it's where your tasks go, it's where you're, where the list of customers you're on boarding goes, where the list of cities you're rolling out to goes, all that in one place. My favorite Coda use cases, um, that I think are, uh, really emblematic of what we stand for are ones where Coda becomes a part of the ritual of a team. Um, have you ever, have you had Bing Gordon on the show before?

SPEAKER_16: No, I don't think so.

SPEAKER_12: Bing, um, Bing's one of my favorite, uh,

SPEAKER_16: I know Bing, Bing is, uh, he was like Mark Pincus's mentor, KPMG, I've met him a bunch

SPEAKER_12: of times. So he's his partner at KP now, and he's, he's on the board of Amazon and he was the first chief chief creative officer at electronic arts. And he has this line I really like, which is, um, every company has a small list of what he calls golden rituals. And there are three tests of golden rituals. Um, uh, let me see if I can get them right. Uh, number one here, actually I have, I have his quote right here. Let me tell you, okay, number one, uh, three golden, uh, three, uh, uh, um, characters of golden rituals. Number one, they are named number two, every employee knows them by their first Friday and three, they are templated. And when he told me, it's like, it totally resonated with me. Okay. That's what we do with Coda. And just to give you an example, one of the, one of the things, if you ask any code employees been here for a week, what the Coda golden rituals are, they'll talk about this thing we call Dorian pulse. And very simple idea if you're in a, uh, if you're in a meeting in Coda or you write a document or so on, you almost always add what's called a Dory. A Dory is a, it looks like a Q and a, uh, tool. So you, you hit slash Dory in a Coda doc and, uh, it's named after the fish from finding Nemo who asks all the questions and you add questions and you can vote them up and down. And it's a very simple idea, but it's a big part of our rituals because what it allows is instead of you get in this meeting and everybody just starts asking questions and whoever's the loudest person dominates the meeting, you get this ability for everybody can contribute. Um, we do a second one called pulse, but very similar idea, but you hit slash pulse in Coda doc. You'll get a table with, um, a row per person where everybody puts in their opinion. You say, Hey, should we, uh, should we go on Jason's podcast and everybody will write in there, but you click a little checkbox and it hides everybody else. So you, you like privately write yours and then you click it and you show it again. And this, these two things together are the heart of how we're able to scale quickly and bring all the best ideas together. And so, so I'd say, how does Coda get used? You know, it's a new type of doc, people build apps on it, but really the thing that Coda represents for people is a way to take their rituals and turn them into actionable ideas

SPEAKER_17: for their, for their team. So lots of great examples of that.

SPEAKER_09: So Dory is for, Hey, here are all the questions people have vote them up. So we go through them in the order in which people think they're important, which also gives you a signal. So people think, Hey, we're talking about how we're going to market Coda and you're having a debate over outdoor advertising, podcast, advertising, YouTube ads, or content marketing or evangelist. People can then ask questions about that and you'll see which one comes up the highest. Um, and then that's the Dory part. What's the second one? That's pulse or pulse.

SPEAKER_52: Yeah.

SPEAKER_12: So the pulse is, it's kind of like an in-meeting survey and the. I, I, I give you another example of that, that I, uh, we just, um, we use it in our board and actually we just switched over the Spotify board meeting to working this way. And it's very interesting. I'm sure you've had this experience. You go, you're meeting a company or you're on a board or so on and, and you sit down, they send you a bunch of material and this would often happen to me. I'm going to a board meeting. They send me like in Spotify's case. They spend me literally hundreds of pages of material before every board meeting. Um, and then you read through everything and you know, the board's pretty diligent and, and we go through it and then you make your list of topics. Um, and these are things that I want to get feedback on. And, and so, you know, the, the, you kind of got a hopefully small list, you show up at the meeting and then, uh, how do most of these meetings go? People start presenting, there's this like, there's like parade of people and your job as a board member is ask a question at some moment where you actually don't really care about what the answer to the question is. All you really want is an opening to be able to get on your soapbox and talk about this topic that you want to, that you want to describe and God forbid that you were asked a question about something that actually isn't on your list of three items that you're trying to, trying to talk about. And so, so what pulse does, and we now do this like a Spotify board meeting is everybody sits quietly and just writes down, like, here's what I think, uh, here's how I think the company's doing. Here's what I'm worried about. Here's what I'm not worried about. And we make everybody give a little score. I do this in my own board meetings too, uh, one to five, how do you think the company's doing? And, and it's, it's just such a good way for everybody to actually get across. Here's what I think without being, you know, sort of, uh, adulterated by everybody else's view. And so these, these two things, Dory and Paul's have become like a really core part of how Koda gets used at Koda and also, honestly, it's what they're, they're two of our most popular.

SPEAKER_18: So you could do something like, how do you just using Spotify example, you say, how do you feel we're doing with lyrics, how, you know, over videos? How do you feel we're doing with podcasting? How do you feel we're doing music? How do you feel like we're doing with live events? How do you feel we're doing with merch? How do you do feel?

SPEAKER_30: Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_12: Or like, should we buy this company? Right. Should we buy, should we buy Jason's podcast? Right. And you go through it and you say like, yes, no, yes, no. And you, you don't want, just to be clear, one of the things I think that great companies do and great teams do is that they design their rituals, like they design their products, like they design their apps. And you think about the incentives. So like you get this pulse from everybody and you say, Hey, okay, I got, you know, 10 board members is what five of them are favorite, five of them are not. Is it a democracy? Like you know, first you got like, probably not. Right. So, so, so, but you want to know, right? You want to, you know, why bother having all these great people there if you don't, if you don't get everybody's viewpoint and so like, we'll often build in this thing, a very simple thing that'll just highlight who the decision, the decision makers row. And you'll say like, everybody's inputs there, but like this person's going to make the call. So just so everybody understands, they've now heard everybody and you know, this person can, but you can design that however you want and you can say, maybe it is a democracy. There's some situations which are like, Hey, we're going to just meeting our Tuesday and Thursday. I don't really care. I, and I think the Dory pulse example by themselves are really powerful, but really what I think Coda represents and if I sort of step back Coda and this whole class of, like you mentioned, we're seeing this like interesting renaissance of productivity, right? It's like all of a sudden we went, you know, 40, 50 years with the Austin powers, we're all using, using these productivity tools the same way. And now all of a sudden, like we have such great ability to reshape these tools. But I think what's actually going to happen is every team, every organization, every family, every group is rethinking how they want to operate and they're letting, they're, they're, they're shaping their tools around that. And so I, that's why I love Bing's quote, uh, you know, what are your golden rituals? What are the incentives you want? What do you want your company to be known for? Amazon's known for six pagers. Google's known for TGIF. Like each one has their, has their thing.

SPEAKER_146: What do you have?

SPEAKER_12: Yeah. Google's are probably the most indicative I of teams. I mean, I've gotten a chance to work on some amazing teams. I think Coda as a team is one of the, we have a, we have one of our philosophies, this thing. We say great ideas can come from anywhere. And that's the thing a lot of people say, but not a lot of people do. We have another one that goes with it. That is a great ideas. Take time to grow. Um, and you know, I, I'll give you one example. We, uh, we run hackathons at Coda, um, once a quarter, actually our next one's next, next week. And, um, probably I would not be understating it to say that 70, 70 plus percent of the best ideas in Coda came out of hackathons. Of course. And the reason. Yeah. What's the reason? So interestingly. Yeah. Well, no, so YouTube, it wasn't true. We used to do this innovation week and it would be once a year and it sucked. We never got any good ideas out of it. We mostly got conflict. We mostly got the teams like squabbling over what they should work on. So we stopped doing it because it was, it was not effective. We have one rule in our hackathons, which is you're not allowed to ship. Whatever you build, you can't ship it. And it's amazing what it does because most people do these hackathons like, Hey, we're going to get together. We're going to spend two days. We're going to like ship some amazing stuff. Our Coda team ships at this crazy velocity and we not that I don't love this metric, but we did 50 unique launches last year. We've already done a hundred this year and we still have a whole set left for the last three weeks of the year. We ship really, really fast, but hackathons, you're not allowed to ship. What that means is, so all these great ideas in the product, many of them came from a hackathon, but from a hackathon that from two years ago, from three years ago, like the, the, the, and,

SPEAKER_09: and. So it lets people dream big and it lets them disconnected from reality. Maybe be a little silly, a little playful, have fun. And it, you don't have to make it perfect either. Right? You're like, just experiment. It doesn't matter if the cake collapses when you serve it. Let's just push the boundary here, whereas the YouTube one, it sounds like it became a

SPEAKER_35: political way to maybe force an agenda of where you wanted the company to go.

SPEAKER_12: Exactly. And so the pressure, like the YouTube one became high stakes, ours is very low stakes. You're done. It's no stakes. Yeah. And it even affects the individual. You're getting this team and there's four people and you can't quite agree on how to build it. Like, well, it's only a hackathon. We'll do it your way. You know, that's it. We'll see. And then, and we'll see how it plays out. And then, you know, if it didn't work, then we've had multiple, like we just shipped today, we shipped two big launches. We ship forms and we shipped attachments, which are two like very heavily requested features in code as the ability to send out a form and get back feedback and really attach files and so on to, uh, into your, into your documents, um, forms has, uh, I think I have personally done three hackathon projects on forms, um, each one slightly different. And the benefit to the customer is like, now they get the one we decided to ship and it's been sort of honed into, okay, this is what we landed on as a good way to do it. So I think that if you ask people what's emblematic about Coda, uh, about the culture inside the company, this is probably what they would talk about.

SPEAKER_35: Is there going to be a, a singularity between, you know, the survey monkey type form, the notion Coda and the slack formerly hip chat, Microsoft teams, because it does seem to, and

SPEAKER_09: then there's zoom, of course. So we have audio video support inside of slack. I use it once in a while. Nobody else does. We have zoom. We're paying for that a second time. We use notion. Uh, we use Coda Coda for forms notion doesn't have an API, blah, blah, blah. And so everything's so disparate and all over the place. Do you, you have people inside your company saying we should connect, um, you know, video or slack into Coda and make documents alive with video. And how do you think about that or documents alive with chat?

SPEAKER_85: And how do you think about that? Or should these things be separate and stay in their separate lanes?

SPEAKER_12: I, I, you, you pick one particular axis of like documents and communication tools. I think there's a similar one for documents and, um, what I normally think of as packaged applications, like there's a, you know, you can use Coda as a task management system, or you can use Jira and connect it into Coda and the, that like both ways work. Well, I suspect what we're going to find is products like Coda and some of the other ones you mentioned notion. So on all, all have a similar ethos of our job is to provide building blocks. And then people were going to stretch it in all the different ways. And what's characteristic about this genre of software is it's built for a group I call the maker generation and the, the, I'll give you a quick version of this analogy. So when I, when I, uh, when I joined YouTube, the very first talk I gave on YouTube, actually after that flight, when I went to New York, I gave this talk and I use this line. I said, online video is going to do the cable, what cable did to broadcast. And we use that line over and over and over again. We're going to go from three channels to 300 channels to 3 million channels. And at the time people laughed us out of the room. They thought I had people come up to me afterwards and say, I don't understand what you mean. Like you think dogs on skateboard can compete with ESPN and Disney. Like that seems weird. And at the time YouTube's competition was my space and Flickr. That's what people thought we were up against. Right.

SPEAKER_161: So dumb. They didn't understand it.

SPEAKER_12: Now, of course, when people say like, you know, online video is going to do the cable, cable did the broadcast. It seems like really obvious. I think the thing that people missed is they misunderstood makers. They thought that often have people tell me you can't be a real, you can't be on television and not live in LA, not go to USC film school. Like this is set. There's a list right here. Of course, none of that's true. Like all we've seen this genre of people that can do it. Now, if you take the same idea and look at software, we apply all the same rules. We say all the same things and say, in order to be a, in order to build an app, in order to build a new way to do, uh, run your podcast, whatever it might be, you know, you need to go hire a developer and they have to have this training and they have to have gone to the school and they have to have this degree and so on. But the truth is that like, with this next batch of tools, the audience they're all aimed at is what we call the maker generation. And this, and I like to say that, that Coda and tools like Coda are going to do the software, what YouTube did to video. And so the lines, you sort of described building block lines, should, you know, should Coda have chat, should Coda have, Coda already has chat. I've, we've seen many people that build chat in Coda. Um, we have all sorts of different ways that people have gone and create, recreated those things. And, you know, we still use Slack, so I don't, I'm not suggesting it's necessarily, uh, the ways, the building blocks we have for it are not great for it. And we, we sit well side by side, but these things, but I think like, where's the line going to be? I think the more interesting line is going to be the line between Coda and package applications. Um, but I think what we're going to find is that, uh, you know, when you buy a package application, you go, you go by a particular product tracking tool or inventory tool or so on, what you're really buying is that group of creators, founders, so on their view on how your business should operate. And that's like, that's actually what you're buying. You're buying their expertise.

SPEAKER_164: You're kind of like pursuing the no code in which case, you know, the people who actually

SPEAKER_09: run the, uh, department or run the function build their own app. And that's what this group of creators are.

SPEAKER_03: They're not developers necessarily, but they can script together the job function and not bother the developer team.

SPEAKER_53: I, I, the, the label no code, and maybe you can help me come up with a better word for

SPEAKER_12: it. I really don't like that word because I, the, the reason I don't like it is, so we use this line, anyone can make a doc as powerful as an app. And sometimes people will say, what about the opposite line? Anybody can make an app as easily as a doc. I say, those sound similar, but they're actually quite different. Like they're, they're, they're, and, and so what I would say is like, to go back to Dorian pulse as an example, I don't think anybody would describe that as an app. Like, you're not going to like that. Is that not like, I'm just taking notes in a meeting and I add a Dory thing and now people can add their questions. It doesn't sound like app building. It doesn't seem. And the reason I think that's interesting is if you go back to like YouTube, part of the reason people underestimated YouTube is people did not understand that when you go from three channels to 300 channels to 3 million channels, I kept getting asked, how is a channel going to compete with Disney? And it's not the right way to think about it, right? A channels on YouTube don't have no intention of competing with Disney. They just cover their one little niche.

SPEAKER_18: So people buy a thousand cuts to Disney, you know, like, you know, you're going to find a niche for everybody and yeah, they're not going to get a hundred million people to watch their video. They're going to have a hundred videos that 10,000 people watch each over a year.

SPEAKER_09: And it, it's, I think it was a way to think about it is, I don't know if you remember Lotus one tooth, uh, Lotus notes back in the day. Yeah. So you and I are old, um, but like, you know, this kind of workflow software that, you know, never really got completed, never really hit its benchmark, you know, in terms of adoption,

SPEAKER_03: it was so far, I keep trying to get Ray Ozzy on the podcast, um, you know, who created it and he's a little podcast shy. We got to take another shot at him, Nick, now that we're doing remote, maybe he'll do it. But, uh, you know, he really did create that, that whole genre of workflow and, you know, this document flows to the next person, flows to the next person. I don't know if you've seen pitch.com yet.

SPEAKER_173: Have you seen the, uh, just had the founder on it. Great job. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: The really interesting thing I love about what they're doing with presentations and their keynote PowerPoint competitor is they have a feature where it, you know how, you know, loom as well. The, we had the founder of loom also on the pockets, little circles where it uses AI to know that's your face. And then when you and I are editing, we can put these little circles on a video and it just, we don't have to pop up a zoom. So right now we're having this debate internally.

SPEAKER_09: I don't know if you've had this one where, okay, we're on the zoom. We love gallery view because you get to see your, you know, Brady bunch style, everybody in the company. And then does everybody open their Coda or notion or Slack page or Google sheet, or do we share screen share? And then nobody can edit in it. And what are we supposed to do here?

SPEAKER_11: And what I want to do is just put everybody's little circles on the document, right? Do you have that feature yet? Or is on the roadmap? What do you think about that one?

SPEAKER_10: I think we have cursors, which do something very similar.

SPEAKER_12: And it's actually, interestingly, we also get the request the other way of, can I, can I hide them all? Um, and, uh, you can also in Coda, you can follow someone so you can go press the thing and you can see where they're at, um, which is also where they are in the Coda workspace in the Coda doc. Yeah. So you can, uh, Figma has a really good version of this feature too, that we'll do a lot, which is like, everybody don't share it. And actually zoom is working on a thing. I think they're calling zoom apps. That is a, a version of the like hybrid between these two things so that you can, you can share without it being flat. And so you can all sort of work in the space together. But I do think there's something that, that can be done there, but there's that, I mean, one of the interesting things about what happens in Coda is, uh, the meeting sort of turns inside out. And so, so like when we do this Dory pulse thing, we, we just got out of one of our, we do this meeting twice a week called catalyst, which is our kind of decision-making forum. And what will often happen is you send out the doc in advance, which I think is a best practice for a lot of companies. Now, um, you send out this, like, here's the write up, here's this thing we're going to talk about. You put your Dory and your pulse in there. Here's where questions go. Here's where sentiment goes. And oftentimes the, first off, everybody's supposed to fill it out before you get there. And oftentimes you look at it and you say, oh, everybody's all agreed. Cancel the meeting. Um,

SPEAKER_05: I love that. Oh, and it's my dream come true.

SPEAKER_53: Right. So it's so interesting. A dynamic.

SPEAKER_182: Everybody's dream come true.

SPEAKER_53: Yeah. What's so what's the, like, I always, I often describe meetings as they're the forcing function to do the pre-work. Right. And if you could just, if you could just structure the pre-work a little bit better, then Hey, like what the meeting actually represents is an end time for feedback.

SPEAKER_12: And like, you know, if we're not done, all right, we've got it set up so we can get on and we can figure out what we need to do. And yeah, maybe there's a real dispute. It's not everything can be solved asynchronously, but I think the, I think that aspiration for how teams work, be a little bit more thoughtful, have some space. Don't be like meaning dynamics are kind of crappy for, for decision-making and so on. It's like actually not a very good way to do it. Um, wait for one person to talk at a time and so on, slow down to the pace.

SPEAKER_185: The extroverts take over politics. Yeah.

SPEAKER_12: So these are all like little things that I think, I think this, we're going to see this get turned inside out. And I actually think the role of synchronous time, whether it's virtual or in person will shift to being less about things like we need to get, we need to make this decision. So let's get all, I'll get on a zoom and it'll switch to, we need to make this decision. Let's all get in a duck. We need to get to know each other better. Let's get on a zoom. So that's it. We need to go. We need to do trust building exercise. We need to like learn a little bit more about each other. Now let's get on a zoom.

SPEAKER_188: That's actually very, were you guys remote before this?

SPEAKER_12: We were. Yeah. Not, not this level. Uh, like we, we had, we had three offices and about 10% of the team spread all over the world. Um, and of course now we're, we're much more so, I think we've had 10% of the company move since we started. Um, Whoa. Uh, like to other places, my co-founder now lives on a big ranch in Idaho. My, like everybody kind of. So they're never coming back. Oh no, no, they, they're not coming back. That's not, this is, this is it.

SPEAKER_192: What do you think happens to San Francisco? You've been here for a while, right?

SPEAKER_12: Yeah. I've been here for almost 20 years on and off the, the, I would say I'm of the, of the set of people on, you know, saying their goodbyes on Twitter, I think they're a pretty small minority. I think, I think San Francisco is going to continue to be a very special place. When we, I started my first company, Sentrada, I was living in Boston. It was, it started out, uh, uh, went to MIT and we were starting it out of school. And I still remember the, uh, Vinod funded the company, Vinod Khosla. Yeah. And one of his requirements in the term sheet was you have to move from Boston to Silicon Valley.

SPEAKER_194: You gotta be within 50 miles of his, of Sand Hill road. People forget this was in the term sheets.

SPEAKER_12: It was in the term sheet. In his case, it wasn't 50 miles. We literally moved into, you know, the space, 2750 Sand Hill, where it's Cali. Yeah, sure. They have a little office right underneath it. We lived out of that office, right?

SPEAKER_195: That's a, he's like, I want to be able to see what time you come in and leave. Yeah.

SPEAKER_12: I want to walk down the hill and so on. But the, um, the, and at the time I argued with them, I'm like, this, like, this is like so dumb, like how, how, you know, Boston's a great place and so on. And then you asked me a year later and I would say, you know, there's something different about the, uh, the dynamics that allow, um, for Silicon Valley to exist. It's funny when YouTube started really getting moving and we started seeing people building real careers on YouTube and so on, this weird thing happened. A lot of them moved to LA, like a bunch of YouTube creators. Yeah. Like all moved to LA. They didn't live in LA. They were all over the place and they all moved. Yeah. And why'd they do that? Well, in fact, a lot of them live together. There's a lot of famous romances and marriages. And so come out of, uh, come out of that crew and, but it was, you know, people like to be a little bit around people, a little bit, you know, that density of the community and

SPEAKER_09: collisions and all that's, that serendipity that occurs.

SPEAKER_03: I mean, if you go to LA, there's 10,000 video editors and 10,000, you know, camera operators who are available to you today to do a collaboration. We, you were at Google at a very interesting time when, I mean, speaking and we're, yeah, we're going to date ourselves here, but for young folks who are founders listening to this podcast, used to be, you had to come to live within X number of miles in your term sheet.

SPEAKER_09: Also founders who were young, first time founders were not allowed to be CEOs of their companies. In fact, Larry and Sergey at Google, uh, brought in professional, I'm using air quotes here, Eric Schmidt, who did a great job, but they basically didn't think wall street would take Larry and Sergey seriously.

SPEAKER_03: They brought in Eric Schmidt and then you were there when Larry said, you know what? I'm back in charge. I'm the captain now. And he had a view on remote work that he wanted to consolidate all the teams. He was like, enough of this distributed work. I want maps and YouTube and everybody in the same building and tell that story because I think it's pretty instructive.

SPEAKER_204: Oh boy. This is, uh, so, so.

SPEAKER_205: To the extent you can be honest about it without burning. I don't want you to burn your relationship with Larry.

SPEAKER_12: No, no, I think Larry, the one of the best parts about Larry is he tells you exactly what he thinks and he expects the same out of you. Uh, there's, there's no, there's no holding, um, holding back with Larry. And I think anybody who spent time with Larry, he can make you think about anything. I mean, he's, he's got such a unique way of thinking about things. So as you described in 2011, I think Larry took over as CEO and he made a bunch of changes and he, he turned us into business units. Like it's kind of crazy to imagine that like up to that point, we were like 20,000 people and all of engineering, all the products on, they all reported into Eric. Um, it's like, that's crazy. That's, I mean, we had all these multi-billion dollar businesses and everybody reported in Eric. So Larry said, this is dumb. We're going to, we're going to have, uh, we're going to have, we didn't call them GMs because of a bunch of sec rules, but whatever. That's roughly what they were. Um, and so each of us had our divisions and so on. And then, uh, and he went through a bunch of other changes. And one of the changes he asked for, as you described, was he said, I want to bring everybody back into Mountain View and, and specifically what he said was he asked each of us to, uh, reduce our office footprint to three offices. One of which was in Northern California, um, and like for YouTube, I had eight engineering offices around the world and like 20 plus sales offices. We were only really talking about the product offices, uh, but the maps team was in, I think 22 offices. The Chrome team was in like 19, like they're all over the place. And, and, and so we had this big debate about it, what, what, what do we do? And like everybody kind of revolted and in particular it was hard because Larry was the creator of this dynamic, right? Google is kind of famous for in the early days, Larry basically said, if you can find three engineers in the city, you can open an office there. And so like Google kind of spread through the world this way. And for YouTube in particular, this has been a big deal because as I mentioned earlier, like YouTube was not the golden child at Google for a very long time. And so for me to grow the business, I had to open offices in other places. Like I couldn't get people in, in San Bruno to work on things in San Francisco to work on things. So I got a team in Tokyo and a team in Zurich and a team in Paris. And that's like, I had to do it. There's no way I could have hired the same people here. So I had this really interesting conversation with Larry where, um, Larry tried to convince all of us and he would go one by one and he would like try to convince us. And, um, by the way, the story played out, we shut down exactly one office, the Atlanta office. Um, there was so much revolt. We stopped and everybody forgot about it.

SPEAKER_35: And so in a way it was like, we had this decision we made when we were a very young nascent organization, we grew up and we thought we needed to change it.

SPEAKER_209: And then we realized we were right with our first instinct.

SPEAKER_12: Well, so, okay. So he asked me, he was doing our, our one-on-one, one-on-ones Larry were always entertaining. It's always the, the one that he asked me this question is, and a lot of them would be like these hypotheticals. So he'd say, he said to me in this case, he said, uh, just imagine I could snap my fingers and we could take the 2,000 people working on YouTube and have them all be in San Bruno tomorrow. Don't you think that would be better? Is it, don't you think that should be our North star? And I had to like, really think about it. Like, you know, that, that seems like good. Um, and I eventually came and said, I don't think so. And, and I gave him my reasons and actually wrote a doc about it. It's called Shashir's guide to distributed teams. It talks a little bit about these, but I said, you know, first off, it's impractical. Like I don't have the office space for it. I don't have the parking for it. I don't like, these are all things that like, they sound small, but that's just a big deal when you're trying to, you know, trying to build these things up. Um, second, like many people, even if you could get me that 2,000 people, I still need the next 8,000 people where they're going to come from. Many people don't want to live in San Francisco, but the thing that I said that was most important was, I think we operate better as a distributed team than as a single site team. And this, I think is like the key point of like back to rituals and so on. Like Dorian pulse were invented for Coda because we were distributed. We're on a meeting and how are we supposed to ask the question and, and, and, you know, people don't know how to start and we said, okay, we'll just put it in a table and you

SPEAKER_53: can vote it up and down. And this, but it turns out that when, even when we're in one room together, we use Dorian pulse because it's just a better way to do it.

SPEAKER_117: Well, that was the weird thing about, I remember Google, everybody would have their laptops

SPEAKER_09: open during the meetings. Yeah. That was considered something you were outlawed from doing in meetings. You had to have a pen and paper.

SPEAKER_26: Yeah. I mean, it's a, you look at that and you say, what are the behaviors that were happening?

SPEAKER_12: Because we were a little more distributed, I mean, one that, um, you know, most companies that are like big into distributed culture, we'll talk about it. Distributed companies tend to write things down more. And I think that's actually quite important. And, you know, people will say, yeah, well, people will, yeah. So why is it important is a good question. The most common rebuke out here is don't you just want to be able to get the team, they get the right people together at the, at the water cooler and make a decision. And I say, first off, like anybody who's worked in any reasonably sized company knows that that isn't actually what happens. Like there is no, like the ability to get the 10 people together that matter, it takes forever to find the schedule. You don't run into them at the water cooler. It's not really what happens. But then think about what message you're sending to your company that, Hey, you're supposed to hang out at the water cooler all day. Are you going to miss the big decision? Like what kind of thoughtful, what kind of thoughtful process are you going to get out of that, out of that dynamic? And so I think it just leans into a lot of the, the challenges that teams run into is, you know, this small group of people that, uh, are making decisions with incomplete data with, without communicating them well with, you know, not thinking through them. So like best companies all, all gradually lead towards, Hey, I want people to think through things. And by the time it comes up to everyone else, I want, I want an understanding of what it's about. I wrote, um, I wrote a doc about a, a, a name for this. We called eigenquestions. Um, and it's, it's probably a longer story so we can do it at next podcast, but the, it just, it all, it talks about how important it is to ask the right question. And I, and I don't think the, I don't think the dynamics, it's not totally correlated that you have to be a distributed team to ask the right questions or not, but there, but there are, there are some signals that it leads to that I think distributed teams just tend to work better.

SPEAKER_09: Um, I think also writing things down, codifying them, uh, makes it, makes people think, right? I've always felt writing is clarity of thought.

SPEAKER_11: Yes. And in order to, when you write something down, if you're struggling, you have writer's block, it's because you have not clarified. Yeah, yeah, you've not clarified your thinking and that is really the key.

SPEAKER_09: And I've had to really get used to it as a social animal now being forced with the pandemic. Uh, you think this pandemic is going to end and people will come back to work.

SPEAKER_219: What do you, what do you think the new normal is going to be?

SPEAKER_12: I think 90% of companies are going to go back to what they were doing before. I mean, I think, I think we're, I think we are in like this tech ecosystem. We, we, a lot of us will change, but it represents a very small portion of the economy and like, you know, every friend of mine who lives in any other place is like itching for, for we're just going back into the office doing the same thing. Um, I think for the tech industry in particular, I do think we'll see a pretty big shift. And I think the, like for our business, we are, we are distributed, we were distributed before we're now distributed at a completely different level. Um, I actually think offices will continue to be important, but offices form there. There are, uh, I think we're going to end up with more like your offices are your company's personal WeWorks, not your, everybody who's in this office is like, you have to be near this particular office to be near the CEO or so on. I think that dynamic will, will start shifting for tech companies. Um, but we'll see what happens. I think most of our customers, that's not what's going to happen. They're, they're, they're, they'll, they'll, I think they'll snap back.

SPEAKER_18: Uh, I agree. Um, I just got a crazy notification.

SPEAKER_11: I don't know if you got this on your iPhone just a second, but COVID exposure notifications are now enabled on iPhones with some Cal, with some California app that is awesome.

SPEAKER_52: I can't, I can't believe it took them so long. CA notify.

SPEAKER_224: Have you seen this before?

SPEAKER_52: Yeah. Uh, Newsom just rolled it out. I mean, the tech, the technology for that was ready, what, eight months ago?

SPEAKER_225: It's so ridiculous.

SPEAKER_12: It's, it's, I mean, this is back to your, like where the role of government and private company, Apple and Google got together epic deal. And said, we will share location data between these two things and do it in a way that's locked to only government apps. I mean, like talk about a company's willingness to be nutritious, not delicious. And like, Hey, we understand the government has a role here. We will open up to allow this to happen. And no state took advantage of it till now.

SPEAKER_03: It's unbelievable. I mean, this is where leadership matters.

SPEAKER_09: Every other country that's beaten this, whether it's Taiwan or Australia, New Zealand, they had contact tracing on six months ago and they did it on a federal level.

SPEAKER_11: And I know we have a distributed system, but my God, leadership matters because the tech industry is the hero here. They got all this shit done. Like you said, six months ago, eight months ago, we knew this and we just did not execute. It's incredibly frustrating. Isn't it?

SPEAKER_30: And to be clear, like I'm, I got many frustrations, our federal government, but you know, our state

SPEAKER_12: could have done it too. I mean, this is, this is not a, obviously they're doing it now. There's nothing about that app that couldn't have been done eight months ago. And I mean, it's unbelievable. And we would, I mean, think about live, save time, save the economy. That's just crazy to me.

SPEAKER_18: Unbelievable. I mean, what a disaster people are going to be watching this podcast in 10 years, trying

SPEAKER_03: to understand what happened during the pandemic. We executed as a country, the worst of any other country on the planet. We were an absolute unmitigated disaster. All right, listen, you are a great guest. Thank you so much for talking about such a range of topics. And absolutely, I'm booking you again for one year from today. So sit tight, everybody, and go check out Coda. The domain name is coda.io, right?

SPEAKER_48: Yep.

SPEAKER_03: And you're hiring, I assume?

SPEAKER_48: We're hiring fast. Every role. Oh, every role.

SPEAKER_03: Okay, so if you can spell shashir at coda.io, you're probably going to get the CEO. You might have a job or two. But hiring for every role, get on the rocket ship now, and we'll see you all next time on This Week in Startups. Bye-bye.