Harry McCracken, Fast Company Global Tech Editor

Before I introduce this month's guest, allow me to brag a moment about the great team that brings you this podcast. This past May, Pressing Matters earned an honorable mention PRNews Digital Award for best podcast. Thank you to the people who really make this show come to life. Katie Wong-Shin, our executive producer and Big Valley's president. Forrest Taylor, our co-producer and social media guru, both for the podcast and the firm. And Aileen Fernandez de Soto, who produces and edits so well that it almost sounds like I know what I'm doing. Almost. Also, congrats to the other honorees in our category, including the winner, Live Forward by Experience Columbus. Congratulations. Now on to this month's show. Fast Company Global Tech Editor Harry McCracken is from a long line of entertainers and storytellers. Broadway and Hollywood types, writers, dancers, novelists. So it's no surprise he made a career out of journalism. And given he was that kid in his neighborhood who had a TRS-80, an early Radio Shack home computer, nor is it a surprise that he made a career out of tech journalism. A veteran of PC World, Time, and others, Harry has been at Fast Company now for 14 years, leading a team that helps set the agenda for what is cool and innovative. In the tech world. Harry stopped by recently to talk to us about the evolution of Fast Company, his upbringing on both coasts and both sides of the Atlantic, and his recent elegy for computer magazines for this edition of Pressing Matters by Big Valley Marketing. Pressing Matters is the podcast that brings you conversations with the top media and influencers in B2B tech. I'm Dave Reddy. Head of Big Valley's Media and Influencers practice, and I'm your host. Through research and good old-fashioned relationship building, we've identified B2B tech's top 200 media and influencers, including Harry McCracken. Here's my chat with Harry. Enjoy. Harry, thanks so much for being on Pressing Matters. We really appreciate your time.

Hey Dave, it's great to be here and I'm sure it'll be fun.

I hope so. We do have something in common. We both grew up in Massachusetts. I'm a native Cape Codder and, well, I guess you didn't grow up in Massachusetts, but you were born there in Allston, which is essentially the westernmost part of Boston, right? Near, near past Fenway.

I did part of my growing up in Boston for sure, in two chunks. We did live in Alston when I was a baby. And when I was a toddler, we moved to Portland, Oregon, and we lived in London for a year. And then my parents decided they liked Boston best of all. And so we moved back to Boston and I continued growing up there from the age of 9 onwards.

Wow, that is a, that's around the world in not quite in 80 days, but in 8 years. What precipitated all the moves? Were you of a military family or just? Mom and dad trying to find the best place to live?

I think it was mostly because my parents were academics and my father taught at Boston University when I was born and then taught at Reed College in Portland. And he and my mother had a research fellowship that took us to London and then he got another job at Boston University. And so that's why we moved back and stayed there for quite a while. And he had that new job at BU for close to 30 years. Mm-hmm.

That, those are three really different cities. Uh, I'll ask you later as the final question, which one you prefer the most, but what did you learn as a kid and how does that at all living in Portland and Boston and to be specific, Portland, Oregon, not Portland, Maine and London, three very different cities in such a short time. And is that, does that do anything in terms of informing your storytelling today?

Um, that's an interesting question. I'm not— I can't think of any specific ways that it does. I mean, there are things I remember, such as the fact that, um, going to school in London for a year as an American kid was a little strange because I learned an awful lot of stuff about topics such as the Magna Carta, which I would not have learned back home. And, um, we played soccer, which today sounds like no big whoop, but this was before soccer was, was quite so predominantly a thing that kids did in the U.S. But then when we moved back to the US, there was all the stuff that the kids back home had learned, which I hadn't learned in London. So that, that required a certain amount of adjustment. And, um, yeah, I mean, I don't think it necessarily affected my storytelling other than that. Um, I'd say like everybody in my family kind of has a love of learning and knowledge and books and information, um, which we pursued in all those places we lived and certainly did have some impact on what I grew up to do.

I wanted to ask you about that because your Facebook, aside from being prolific, it's one of the most interesting Facebook feeds I get to see. And thank you for that, by the way. It's a joy almost every day. You, for those who don't see it, you have photos dating back seemingly forever of family members, friends of family members, a whole cast of characters, entertainers, folks from Broadway, folks from Hollywood, writers, and not an uncle who danced. First of all, what's with all the photos? Did you somehow—

did you—

I just picture you going into an attic in Alston or somewhere and finding this cachet, or were you just always a family that, that took photos?

Well, a little bit of it was being a family that took photos. I'd say particularly my grandmother and my father were both pretty avid photographers, but, um, it was not an attic I found these in. A lot of them I found in my mother's basement. She had photos from our family and also ones that her mother had collected, and her, her mother had had photos from her sister, and they all sort of sat in my, my mother's basement for decades. And eventually I went down there and started discovering them and, and scanning them and learning about the people in them and figuring out what to do with things like slides and negatives and how to get those into digital form. Along the way, I've been sharing some of them. I should say, I feel like I haven't shared all of them that much lately, except when Facebook reminds me of stuff I posted 2, 3, 4 years ago, I often reshare it and people seem to enjoy it the second time around as well.

They're all great stories. And how do you— did you at some point sit down and interview the whole family or were you just a storytelling family? Because you always— it's not simply the photo, you've got 2 or 3 really cool details about the photo.

In some cases, they are, they are things that have been kind of passed down through the years. In a lot of cases, I mean, these are not people I personally knew, or if I did meet them, it was briefly. And, um, I've done a lot of online research. Um, I should say my grandfather was a genealogist. I'm on my father's side, I have a lot of the research he did. And on my mother's side, I had to do things like use newspapers.com, which is a great resource because 100 years ago, if you lived in a relatively small town and maybe even a fairly major city, you had a pretty good chance of getting into the newspaper when you did something like graduate or get married or, you know, had some misfortune befall you, like, like having your house robbed. And so I've assembled a lot of this stuff just through online research, and part of the reason why I tend to talk about people who did things like work in Hollywood is just because it's a little bit easier to find information on those folks than the ones who were coal miners or college professors or whatever.

Sure. By the way, I was today years old when I learned about newspapers.com, so I'm going to be spending way too much time on this.

It's kind of expensive. It's not free, but I use it multiple times a week for one reason or another, so it's a great resource.

That is very cool. Now, you make a good point that there were other people doing other things in the family, and it's easy to find out about the entertainers, but It does seem like there were just a lot of entertainers in the McCracken family and the various names. What's that all about? Is there a— is there— is that a coincidence or is there something to that?

Well, these are, um, I'd say these, these people were on my mother's side of the family. My mother's four grandparents were all immigrants to the U.S. from Eastern Europe who came here and set down stakes, and in a lot of cases the first generation of these Jewish people from countries that over the course of time were in Russia or Poland or Lithuania. The first generation were often small-town merchants, but I'd say their kids often went on to do interesting things and often creative things. And yeah, I had a cousin who unfortunately I never met who was a successful sportswriter and he wrote a novel and a Broadway play and did a lot of stuff in Hollywood in terms of writing and producing and directing and a couple of others who did that. Um, you mentioned dancing. I, I had a, um, a couple of aunts who I would not say were famous folk dancers, but they did a lot of folk dancing. And one of them had a husband who was also a folk dancer, and he was a photographer. So I ended up with a very large number of photographs of these relatives folk dancing in interesting costumes.

So mom's side of the family is Jewish, dad's side of the family is, is McCracken an Irish or Scottish name?

We started out in Scotland and then moved to Ireland and then came to the US really early on. The McCrackens got here kind of as the country was being born and for the most part lived in Pennsylvania and were kind of working-class people in Pennsylvania for like the first 100, 120 years.

That's an interesting combination and one I share of part Jewish, part Irish. Heritage, two of the biggest storytelling cultures. So we're coming back to that question again. Um, was that, was storytelling, you know, as a, now as a reporter, do you look back and see that, that whether it be from the entertainment side or all these stories that were passed down to you, is that just part of the, is that in the genes?

Maybe a little bit. You know, my parents, uh, both wrote and taught, both of them, both things that involve a fair amount of storytelling. My sister's a novelist. My grandfather on my father's side wrote a number of books. This guy's the genealogist I mentioned. My grandmother on my mother's side wrote a couple of books, one of which she published when she was about 85. Various other members of the family have been reporters and written in one form or another. So I don't know whether there's anything to be in the genes, but it certainly is common. Although In a lot of cases, these are not people I knew or even knew about until fairly recently. So other than my immediate family, they probably didn't influence what I did particularly.

Unless it is in fact genetic. I hear you. Maybe so.

Maybe this is evidence it's genetic.

So you go to Boston University. I almost went to Boston University myself, which is essentially in Allston or very close. Did you major in journalism or something in technology? Because I know you also had the tech bug as a kid?

Um, I majored in history partially because I was interested in it, and I felt like it was not a bad background to have for almost anything I might do. And I certainly feel like majoring in history and thinking about historical context is a valuable skill for a journalist. And at the time, oddly enough, even though I actually had done some freelance writing for money, it kind of didn't necessarily occur to me that was something I could do full-time as a profession. And so I was still in the course of figuring out what I wanted to do during college.

I minored in history, so again, all about telling stories. So did you have a particular interest? I did American and British.

A fair amount of American history, some Chinese history as well.

Really?

Yes. Which again, actually is kind of helpful for a tech journalist, given the degree to which China has become a really important part of the technology of the world.

I was gonna say, has been for a couple of decades, but particularly now it is so foremost. So that has come back to serve you. Now talk to me about tech. I wanna get into the elegy of sorts that you wrote for Mac/PC and MacLife in a bit. But you wrote in that that you loved computer magazines. You had a TRS-80 as a kid. I did too. I was the only one on the block God bless my parents. Of course, I used to play games, which probably wasn't what they were thinking of, but you were interested in genuine computer tech and were coding in BASIC and all sorts of things like that. Where did that interest come from?

I think I can credit my father for that, because he had something of an interest in computers. And in the late 1970s, when kind of PCs were first becoming a consumer thing, he went to Radio Shack on the BU campus and got a TRS-80 and brought it home. And at that point I was in junior high and did not really know much about computers, but I was interested in video games and animation. And when I saw that you could play games and write games on a TRS-80 and create graphics, that knocked me out and I started to learn how to program in BASIC. So that, that's where that interest comes from.

And for those who aren't maybe as long in the tooth as you and I are, can you describe a TRS-80? I mean, for instance, I don't know if you guys had a monitor, but my monitor was my television.

Well, um, I'm guessing you may have had something other than the original TRS-80 Model 1, which, which came with a monitor. And it was a, I'd say, a pretty utilitarian kind of computer. One of its big competitors was the Apple II, which did amazing color graphics, and you could get joysticks and paddles for it, and it did sound. And the TRS-80 only had black and white blocky graphics, but it was a really useful machine. People have tended to have forgotten how successful the TRS-80 was. It was more popular than the Apple II for quite a while, and there was a ton of software written for it and all kinds of businesses built around it and multiple magazines that did nothing but cover the TRS-80. And so it was just an ecosystem unto itself in much the same way that later on Windows and the Mac and the iPhone became ecosystems.

Indeed, Radio Shack's one of those sort of unfortunate stories in American history where they were, The kings at first, but now are forgotten. And I think the last Radio Shack in my town down the street went out of business several years ago.

Um, yep.

You started your career and kept it going for quite a while in Boston, uh, with some of those Boston area tech publications. Again, I think people younger than us may forget that Boston was, for lack of a better term, the original Silicon Valley. Uh, IDG. And then, and this is what I remember meeting you, you came out here about 20 years ago to work with IDG in San Francisco. What was that like coming to this area in the early 2000s? We'd just gotten through the bubble and things were starting to pick up again. Actually, at that point, maybe things hadn't completely picked up again, but can you describe what Silicon Valley 2002 was versus Silicon Valley 2023 for those who may not remember?

Well, I started at PC World magazine in 1994, and it had a large Boston office at the time because Boston was still kind of a center of tech publishing. But I found myself coming out to San Francisco more and more often since that's where we were headquartered. And I would have colleagues and bosses who would encourage me to move here, but I was kind of an old stick in the mud, mud about doing that. And it got to the point where I was coming out all the time, like more and more times, or like I would, I would come out for a week, then go home, then come out for a week. And, um, I would always go to the post office in Boston and have them hold my mail. And eventually I went there and they said I was abusing that privilege and they would no longer hold my mail, which I kind of took as a sign. And, uh, and I had a great boss at the time who, um, essentially made me an offer I couldn't refuse in terms of getting the opportunity to be the editor of PC World if I moved. And That was 2002. That was this time where the bubble had burst in the not too distant past and things were kind of quiet. And it was a little bit like today in terms of the media business being a little bit dicey and things folding all around me. And I remember when I came out and found my apartment, I was able to negotiate my rent downwards. Which was extremely unusual at the time, given that more often than not in San Francisco, you know, you're fighting other people to get an apartment and you have to overbid. So I figured that if the San Francisco thing didn't work out, Boston would still be there. And in fact, 2002 was kind of the start of an inflection point of things getting interesting again. So it was not through any particular design of my own, but the timing worked out well.

And I know this wasn't the only moment, but I think it was 2 years later that the iPod came out, and, or at least the, I remember that version with all the U2 songs on it. And then there was the, in 2007, of course, the iPhone, just as a couple of things that Apple did.

Yes, the original iPod came out a little bit before I moved out, but then after I got out here, they made the first iPod for Windows, which was a big moment for Apple in terms of people other than Mac fans paying attention to the company again.

And again, for those who may not remember, this was still long before there was a Facebook, Google was a young company, et cetera. But one thing that had started, you mentioned, was the golden era for print, in part because of, you know, this industry we both love, technology, had started to unravel. You recently wrote about the end of maximum PC, in MacLife, which I mean, I gotta give them credit for getting this far. They issued their last print editions in April. It wasn't that long ago that I'd walk into a Barnes Noble and the magazine rack would be the length of the back wall, a very long back wall. One-third of those magazines would be tech. But you know, that stuff has disappeared. And I wanna quote what you wrote in your, again, in your elegy of sorts. For these two outlets. You wrote, I'm declaring the demise of these two dead tree publications as the end of computer magazines in this country. I take the loss personally, and not just because computer magazines kept me gainfully employed from 1991 to 2008, but as a junior high school student and Radio Shack TRSA fanatic, I bought my first computer magazine in late 1978, 3 years after Byte invented the category. It was an important enough moment in my life that I can tell you what it was, the November-December 1978 issue of Creative Computing, and where I got it, Harvard Square's Out of Town News, the same newsstand that had played a critical role in the founding of Microsoft just 4 years earlier. Talk about that. I mean, that's a pretty intense paragraph. This is— been here.

Yeah, I mean, um, I'd say that, well, I did take the fact that Maximum PC and MacLife leaving print as the end of computer magazines. It's been a very long, slow end because, um, PC Magazine left print in 2008, I think, and, um, other magazines like PC World and Macworld a few years after that. And even, even they were kind of survivors because I'd say the majority of computer magazines folded, uh, really starting in the late 1990s and early in this century. So the, the era of them being the primary place where you went for tech information is long over. And it is really kind of amazing to consider the fact that, um, there were some weekly tech publications, but those were kind of primarily aimed at business people and were not consumer publications. And so if you were a consumer and you wanted information about computing, you got that primarily from monthly magazines. And that's just a totally different pace from today when you wake up in the morning and the tech news will have meaningfully changed by the time you go to bed and there'll have been a whole bunch of stories on all these websites. You learned about stuff at just a much slower pace, but in a lot of detail. And as I said in my story, people certainly remember the fact that these magazines were extremely thick with advertising. But what they may not remember so well is that we spent a lot of the profits from that advertising on some really ambitious service journalism of a type which has not completely gone away on the web, but, but is much, much harder to fund. And that, that to me is the valuable thing about the print magazine era. Not so much that it involved dead trees, but the business model allowed for some really serious work.

I want to get back to that in a second, but you also say that as much as you miss it, the golden era, you wouldn't go back there. I'm curious how you'd explain that.

Sure. Well, I mean, there is a lot of value to the fact that you can learn about stuff in a much quicker, more interactive way. It's not just words on the web, it's video and all kinds of interactivity. And In the old days of print, if you were a tech journalist, you probably got a certain amount of mail from your readers, but you couldn't really have an ongoing dialogue with them in the way that's very easy to do online. Back then, if you wanted to write about tech, you needed to find some large publishing company who was willing to hire you to do that. Some of us still do that today, but you can also just start a blog or get on Twitter and do stuff without anybody's permission, which I think is great. Before I worked at Fast Company and Time, I had my own site technologizer for a while, which was a lot of fun and not something I could have done in the 1990s.

Let's talk about that, your most recent gigs. Of course, you've been at Fast Company. We'll talk about that in a second for, gosh, almost 10 years, but you were at Time back when Time and Newsweek and maybe even US News and World Report actually bothered to cover tech other than Apple, and they basically integrated your, uh, Technologizer column, correct? What was that like? Got yourself a page or more every edition, if I remember correctly.

Um, not every edition. Certainly I wrote quite a bit for print, and online I wrote, um, a lot. And, uh, online in particular, I basically— my work habits did not really change too much from when I was doing it on my own. I just wrote about stuff that interested me and I thought would interest other people. One of the reasons that I came to Time and, and liked working at Time is just the fact that I like strong brands. Time is one of a handful of publications that you can make the case it's the most famous magazine that ever existed. If my grandfather, who I'm named after, who died before I was born, was somehow aware that I had grown up to work at Time, he would have understood that and be thrilled by it. And so that legacy mattered a lot. And writing for print was fun. And also just sort of being part of the team that figured out how to make Time make sense on the web was also an enjoyable challenge.

Now you leave Time and you go to where you are today. And it seems like you've been there forever. Your name is almost synonymous with Fast Company and vice versa. Been tech editor for a couple years now, you've been global tech editor. One thing about Fast Company is feels to me, and this is a good thing in my opinion, that the mission and vision have changed. And you can tell me I'm out of my mind. I get a lot of requests and I don't like to talk too much about public relations on this podcast. But I do get a lot of requests from clients saying, "Hey, we're a fast company. Can you get me into Fast Company?" Harry, I don't think that's what you guys are about now. It may have been what you were about 20 years ago, but how do you see the mission of the magazine, how it has evolved?

I think in some ways, on the very highest level, the overarching goal has not changed all that much. We still are trying to reach people who believe that business and innovation have a shot at making the world a better place and would like to be part of that. And that, that's kind of a through line from the early days until to now. But I think how we express that has actually changed quite a bit. If you look at the early days of Fast Company, a lot of it sort of has a self-improvement feel. It was like kind of like full of tips on how to be more successful. We still do some of that, so that hasn't gone away entirely, but it's no longer quite at the heart of things in the way it once was. When I started at Fast Company, if you looked at our covers, you would find people like Mark Zuckerberg on them frequently. I think he was on 7 or 8 times in less than 7 years. You'd see Tim Cook and Jeff Bezos and Jack Dorsey and those folks sometimes in stories that I wrote. And these were often kind of optimistic, upbeat stories that in some cases made these people feel like heroes. I'd say that more recently, people kind of have a higher bar of what a hero is and are more instinctively skeptical of the proposition that, that business and tech make the world a better place. I still certainly feel that they can make the world a better place, but it's by no means automatic. And in fact, in a worst-case scenario, they make the world a worse place. And we certainly acknowledge that in a lot of what we do. And if you look at our covers and the people we write about today, it's a more diverse, eclectic, interesting group of people. And we are not quite as inclined to go back to the short list of extremely well-known white guys who happen to be the CEOs of familiar tech companies as we once were. Good for you.

And I'm reminded too of, and I can't remember, Harry, if this predated you, I think it did, joining Fast Company, 'cause it was when I first got into public relations, but there was a, an unrelated sister site, pardon my language, called Fucked Company. Do you remember that?

Yes, I used to read it all the time.

It was clearly trying to, and I'm amazed Fast, maybe they did, Fast Company didn't sue them because they had even the logo looked exactly the same. And of course that was all about what you were just talking about, or in part what you were just talking about, the notion of companies using technology to absolutely screw up the world.

And it was a good place to learn about the latest layoffs. Which is something which once again, we probably need a website to do that.

Maybe whoever did it will come back and start it up again. But one of the other questions I always ask is, can tech still be a source for good? You somewhat answered that already, but what needs to happen for us to get back to that place, or do you think we've crossed the line?

Well, there certainly is no shortage of stories that are discouraging. But I mean, just in general, good news is not as interesting to people in some cases, unfortunately, as bad news. And sometimes it gets glossed over. But I would say if you came to our website or an issue of the magazine and kind of audited it, you would discover that we actually are pretty good at finding these stories of people who actually are trying to do constructive things. And at least in some cases, are succeeding at it. We certainly went through a kind of a period where Facebook was the model of success. And regardless of what you think about Facebook in general, the fact is that, you know, essentially it's this company that their business model was to get enormous amounts of free content from billions of people and sell advertising based on that, which is not an inherently inspiring uplifting business model. And so personally, I like stories of companies that are doing stuff that actually is helpful and constructive and ideally in a way where it has enough of a business model behind it that it can thrive. And I'm not just talking about things like companies tackling stuff like sustainability, although that is important, but also just kind of basic stuff like people are creating productivity tools that help people work more efficiently. And we are at this inflection point where AI all of a sudden is probably going to change almost everything. So this, this is one of the most interesting periods I have seen as a tech journalist, just in terms of it not being terribly easy to predict what the interesting opportunities will be like over the next 3, 4, 5 years.

On AI, it feels to me like AI got famous overnight over the course of 10 years, if you get what I'm trying to say. Why all of a sudden do you think we're excited about something we seem to have been excited about for a while? Is it merely ChatGPT?

I think part of it is just that ChatGPT came along and was free and accessible to anybody and pretty astounding. I think if you've been following AI more closely, at least over the kind of 2 to 3 years preceding that, you might have had a sense that things were about to change a lot. And a lot of the basic concepts behind what's happening are decades old. Like, I did a story a few years ago on this documentary that was shown on CBS in 1960, which is actually still fun to watch and which tackles all kinds of issues which are still resonant today. And the only problem is that in 1960, the AI scientists expected that by about 1964 or 1965, they would have been able to achieve things which, which are only being achieved right now. They were just wildly over optimistic about what they could do with the computing horsepower available to them at the time. And that continued to be true. And just in the last few years, the computing resources available for this stuff have caught up with the needs of AI.

I'm curious as you come out with the— well, I guess you did World-Changing Ideas 2023. And by the way, I wanted to hearken back to what you were talking about in terms of doing positive journalism. You guys do two of the most, in my opinion, positive things each year, the most innovative list in the world World Changing Ideas list. And you don't have to be a new company to win World Changing Ideas because your last, uh, World Changing Company of the Year was a little company called Dell for their solar-powered shipping containers and etc. How much do you think AI is going to affect those two lists the next time they come out?

I mean, I think some of this will take a few years to unfold, so I'm sure it will impact those and everything else we do. And it is already doing that. But I think that you will also see interesting things happen a little bit further down the road that are probably not really on anybody's radar yet, just because it takes a while to figure out what's going to matter and where the opportunities are. And I also think I've always felt that, you know, that technology matters when people kind of stop talking about it. Like when I got involved in tech journalism, multimedia was a huge topic and people, you know, their entire magazines devoted to computing with CD-ROM drives and sound cards and full-motion video. But very quickly, that stuff was everywhere. And so people stopped talking about multimedia. It was just assumed that it was part of the computing experience. And I think as AI starts to be everywhere, it's not gonna be like a separate topic where you need dedicated people writing only about AI. It will just be almost synonymous with computing. And I expect that to happen pretty quickly.

Getting back to journalism, one final question. The future of journalism and AI seem to be inextricably linked inasmuch to your earlier, the point you just made that AI and tech are essentially inextricably linked. So we've got ChatGPT and journalists, including a former past guest on this show, Connie Guglielmo, who's now working to figure out how to use AI at CNET. Given that deepfakes, social media, the death of print, lack of monetization, There's a lot of reasons to be pessimistic about journalism. Do you remain optimistic?

I'm probably ultimately kind of an optimistic guy, and I like having a job where I wake up in the morning and I'm excited about it, which I still am, even though if you just look at news over the last few weeks about media outlets that have gone out of business or declared bankruptcy, it's easy to be discouraged by it. Um, and I think that in order to be optimistic, you need to be willing to change and experiment and roll with the punches, uh, all of which I feel like I'm— I do a decent enough job of doing. And, um, so yeah, I'm not personally discouraged even though I am concerned about the state of the media business. And there certainly is lots of possibility of stuff like AI in some cases having a detrimental effect on journalism, although there are at least an equal number of places where it might be a constructive thing as well.

Okay, Harry, we have come to the last question, which I ask of every guest with two choices, sometimes different. This is one I've asked before. Boston or San Francisco?

I love living in San Francisco, so I'm not going to make the case for Boston over the West Coast.

What is it about San Francisco that you love so much?

A whole bunch of things ranging from the fact that even if I just wrote about companies I could walk to from my desk here on Mission Street, that would be a cool job to the ability to do all kinds of interesting things within about an hour drive where we live.

San Francisco certainly has issues. How concerned are you for the future of the city?

I am concerned, but I also think that anybody who's lived here and been paying attention for at least the last 30 years has had lots of reason to be extremely concerned. So, um, while some of San Francisco's issues are getting worse. I feel like almost none of them are new. And if anything, again, maybe I'm just trying to be optimistic, but the fact that people are at least discussing them and taking them seriously could ultimately lead to more progress than we've seen in the time that I've visited here and lived here.

Well, Harry, optimism is refreshing and perhaps a bit too rare these days. So thank you for that. And thank you for being on the show. Harry McCracken, global tech editor of Fast Company, still doing great work, and I presume will be doing great work for a long time with that magazine. Thanks again, Harry.

Thank you so much, Dave.

I'd like to thank you all for listening today, and once again, a big thank you to Harry McCracken for joining us for this edition of the Pressing Matters podcast. Join us next month when we chat with another member of B2B Tech's Top 200 Media and Influencers. Now, if you've got feedback on today's podcast, or if you'd like to learn more about Big Valley Marketing and how we identified the B2B Tech Top 200, be sure to drop me an email at dready@bigvalley.co. That's D-R-E-D-D-Y at Big Valley, all one word, dot C-O, no M. You can also email the whole team at pressingmatters@bigvalley.co. Thanks again, and as always, think big.