The Future of Publishing with Verst CEO AJ Frank | Greymatter

Hi, this is John Lilly with Greylock, and the podcast for Today is with A.J. frank, the CEO of Versed. Thanks for coming, A.J.

Thanks for having me.

So we'll get into your background in a minute. You've had some very interesting jobs that are also very topical. But just let's start off by saying, what is verst? Not everybody may know what verst is.

Well, verst is a modern publishing platform for websites.

What does that mean? Like a blogging platform, you can build.

Blogs, but also fully featured websites. And we're also adding a layer of intelligence that doesn't exist today.

It's 2017. We've got WordPress, we've got Tumblr, we've got Medium, which is a great luck investment. Does the world need another blogging platform?

I think that's a great question. And the truth is, a lot of these technologies were built 10, 15 years ago. I think the world's actually ripe for a paradigm shift. So when we talk to publishers today, they're really unhappy with their current solutions. And I think there's a big gap in the market for VERSE to provide a solution that's both intuitive and easy to use for publishers, but also powerful and allows them to take advantage of modern technology such as advanced analytics and a B testing and all these things that you see the buzzfeeds of the world using, but not necessarily your smaller publishers.

So I guess this is probably where I should disclose that I'm on the board and investor at Versed and have been involved with the company for a little while. And when we invested, we talked to lots and lots of people who had stories and messages and sort of publishing strategies and content. They were a little more involved than just being a publication on Medium, but they were intimidated by going onto WordPress and your SEO plugin and this. And that just took a lot of work. You look at somebody like Ben Thompson at Tratecary or Tim Ferriss, you have these sort of mini publishing empires. I think it's sort of the future in the mold of 538 and these guys. Is that what you mean? So it makes it easy to set up for publishers?

Yeah, absolutely. So someone like a Ben Thompson has spent an entire year building his stack, and that's not something that's available to every single publisher.

So he's based in Hong Kong, but he's got people sort of based in the US and around working on his site and on the email and on the customer. What do the people do?

Yeah, exactly. So I think it's really complicated if you want to use WordPress and plug in any type of advanced technology, WordPress is just sort of a core of a CMS, essentially. And so if you want to have any type of advanced functionality, even something as simple as caching and SEO, you have to cobble together this ecosystem of plugins to make that work. And Ben, on top of that, actually has people who are subscribing to his newsletter, and that's a whole other stack that he has to put together to be able to actually run a newsletter at scale the way he does.

What you're saying then is, I guess from the Vantage of 2017, we kind of understand what a modern publishing stack should look like, because we've got these publishers who are putting out daily or weekly content. Ben Thompson or Tim Ferriss or the information a little bit more, A little bit one step up. And they've got email lists, they've got subscribers, they've got premium content. They'd like to be doing AB tests to figure out what works, what doesn't work. And since we know all that stuff, then it's easy to to kind of think about how to build a stack from the ground up that is not quite as fully general as something like WordPress, but is more specific around how you build a publishing platform today. Does that sound right?

Yeah, absolutely. And the thing I would add is if you're a publisher, you don't differentiate by having a really awesome backend. Right. You differentiate by creating amazing content. And the more time that you have to spend digging into analytics, learning how to write HTML, CSS and JavaScript to make your site look the way you want it to, or investigate a plethora of plugins to actually lock the functionality that you want to have for your publishing platform, the less time you have to create content. So the idea behind Verse is for everything that publishers need to be in one package and for everything to be super easy and intuitive to use so that you don't need to have a PhD in statistics to understand how your audience is interacting with your content.

Awesome. So I think we've got it, so we'll circle back around to this and talk about it in some more depth as Podcast goes along. Let's talk about you for a few minutes. So you've had some interesting jobs. Uber, Vine, Twitter, Google. Tell us about your journey. What's your background? Computer science. Is it technical? What did you do at Google and how did you progress from there?

Yeah, I actually was a business major undergrad and started my career at Boston Consulting Group, which was an amazing experience and I learned a fabulous set of generalist skills. But my heart has always been in technology and that's something that I really wanted to do. So I moved out to California, took a job at Google and got actually to work at YouTube when it was really, really small and before people had even decided if it was going to be successful or not, which is kind of hilarious to think about now.

That's pretty early.

Yeah. So I ended up working in a strategy and operations group and then a business development team and sort of made myself more and more technical on the fly. Actually do some coding now and I've contributed to our code based at Verse, which has been really fun for me.

Well, you didn't tell me that in the board meeting, so we have to go back and audit that. I have some questions.

So spent actually five years at Google and got to see YouTube grow up from a platform that people weren't sure was going to exist in five years to a multi billion dollar business and worked on a bunch of really important deals for YouTube, including getting YouTube to count towards the Billboard Hot 100, which really changed our positioning with artists. And music's about 50% of YouTube's revenue. So it's really important that artists kind of get more value out of YouTube than just the views and the revenue that are coming out.

How did you do that? You had to convince the Billboard people to do it. Did you have to convince them to convince the publishers? Because that seems like a fundamental music publishing dynamic.

You have to kind of convince everyone, even people internally to Google. There were people at Google who thought it was a bad idea to share that type of data publicly. So the nature of working at a bigger company is you kind of have to bring everyone along for a ride. So it was definitely convincing Billboard, it was definitely convincing the artists and the labels and the publishers, and it was definitely convincing people internal Google. But that's kind of what I was getting paid, I suppose.

Yeah, I remember that when that happened, suddenly the quality of Billboard 100 changed dramatically. It turned from music that I kind of wanted to listen to, to music that my son mostly wants to listen to.

Yeah, it's been really interesting. There was this hit back then called the Harlem Shake, which was really, really popular. And that was number one the day that we kind of debuted the integration, which was pretty cool.

What'd you do after YouTube after that?

I actually went over to Twitter to work on vine and ended up becoming the general manager of the team. So I was running sort of the Full Stack team there's about 60 people. Product, engineering, design, as well as business teams. And was this amazing opportunity to lead a product that was reaching 300 million people every month and really having an outside effect on culture. So a fabulous experience to continue to work with creative people and build a platform that has launched a bunch of really huge careers in the digital space. People like Shawn Mendes. Shawn Mendes for sure. Lele Pons, King, Bach, et cetera, et cetera. Kind of all your who's who. A lot of them grew up on Vine.

Yeah. As I mentioned, I only know Shawn mendes because my 12 year old son. And you moved back to. Did you move to New York for Vine?

That's right, yeah. My wife got into a nurse practitioner program at Columbia, so we went out to New York and I had worked with a product manager at Google who ended up at vine and that's how I ended up there.

Oh yeah. And what were some of the interesting things you learned about Vine? Like a lot of people when they started Google and they spend time in that culture, it's pretty different. It's pretty like jumping into a cold pool or something. Because there's not a lot of places that are like Google from an engineering and product perspective.

Yeah, I mean, I think the biggest thing was our team was much, much smaller than what I'd experienced at YouTube and other places at Google. So we had to lean into those advantages. And I think the biggest advantage is you can move super fast and be nimble. It was almost like a startup within Twitter. And so I really focus the team on Velocity and not being afraid to take risks. Because the fabulous thing about software is you can actually roll a change back if something you make is a mistake. So as long as you have the hooks in place to monitor whether the feature that you rolled out is actually having the impact that you expected, you can always roll it back if it's not working.

Yeah. So Fritz Lammon, the chairman of Versed and another board member and the founder, really and I were recruiting you back then when you were at vine and then you turn us down, which is what it is. But you went to Uber for a little while. Tell me about what you did at Uber.

I was leading a product efforts for Uber Rush, which is Uber's delivery service. And the engineering and design teams were all based out of New York and they actually didn't have any product people. So I came in to kind of wrangle everyone together and build a vision for the product.

There were no product people on Uber Rush. There are no product people on Uber In New York.

There were no product people on Uber in New York and there was someone in California who was spending a small part of his time in Uber Rush. So it was kind of a product that was growing and didn't have a lot of, I guess, focus at the time.

Yeah. How did you, how do you start. How do you start when there's no product people around?

I think it's kind of how you start with any product problem. You want to really talk to the customer and understand what their needs are and build a product that's solving their needs. And I also like to take a look at the market and see what is out there that's serving needs today and what the gaps are. And then of course, talking to people who are working on a particular product is a really great way to get insight both in terms of what they think they should be doing and what challenges they've had so far. So I think like to take all this piece and sort of cobble them together into a plan that I think will address the customer pain point and allow the product to be successful.

Yeah. And you were at Uber, I mean, I guess they all were like this. But Uber, at a time of massive growth and massive chaos at some level, though, maybe not compared to today, what are some of the things that you learned from Uber about how to operate that were kind of different than you'd learn at Twitter and Google?

Uber took the sense of ownership to an extreme where it was really critical that everyone owned their initiatives that they were driving forward. And I've never seen so much autonomy among teams before, which I think has pros and cons. But it was really inspiring to see people fully own the work that they were doing and pushing it forward. So I could kind of trust that if someone said they were going to do something, they were going to do it. And like a small example, when I was at Google, when I was at Twitter, engineers never wrote tickets. And at Uber the engineers wrote their own tickets, which was like mind blowing.

What's a ticket?

It's just a way to keep track of what work is going to be done that week. So you write tickets for like, hey, make this button blue or whatever it is.

But engineers didn't do that work at.

Google and Twitter, never. And at Uber, the engineers were writing their own tickets and I texted my product manager friends and they were like, their minds were blown. So I think that's just a small example of kind of the sense of ownership that you saw. And it was really required by the company.

And I guess Then you say there are pros and cons. What are some of the challenges when you've got that sort of ownership culture?

I think the biggest challenge is if everyone's operating autonomously, they're pushing forward their agendas, and it may be more of a local maximization than what's good for the overall company. It's kind of the dynamic programming problem of what may be the right thing in one instance is not the right solution for the entire ecosystem. And especially with the decentralized sort of city model happened over and over again. And I think people kind of butted heads because of it, which caused probably more churn than was necessary.

Yeah, that's sort of an exclusive management style. Sort of survival of the fittest, though, I guess.

Yeah.

And then we kept in touch. So Fritz is a good recruiter, the CEO of ClassPass and the chairman of Erst, and he kept pinging you and bugging you, and you took some more meetings with us finally. And then you finally signed up. We were looking for a CEO last year and we brought you on last year. Why were you willing to take the plunge?

Yeah, there were three reasons for me. Number one, I've worked my whole career with creators and people who want to put their art out in the world, and clearly there were the seeds of a platform that would help enable that with Versed, and so I was really excited to work in that space. Number two, you and Fritz have done an amazing job of building this incredible technical team in New York, which you really don't see at Series A startups outside of maybe something that Brett Taylor is able to build at Quip or something like that.

Right. He didn't do it in New York.

That's true. As someone who loves building products, to be able to have a team like that to work with is really inspiring. And I think the third reason, honestly, is working with you and Fritz and getting to learn from you guys. So the combination of things was something I couldn't pass up.

Yeah, it's been a nice relationship so far. When you came, we were. When we invested in the company three years ago, the need that we saw in the market was the publishers just didn't know what to do. They saw the rise of mobile. I mean, the rise of mobile was obvious. People had apps. New York Times is experimenting with apps. The Washington Post had some apps. Every publisher, HuffPo probably had apps. And people just couldn't really figure out where things were going to go. And then over the last few years, it's become clearer and clearer that things have gone towards Twitter and Facebook and these hub platforms. You came on at a time when we were trying to figure out the split between mobile web and desktop web and apps. And you came on and you cleaned it up pretty quickly. You said, look, let's forget about apps, let's make sure people can publish from their phones, but let's really focus on mobile web and publishers being able to create their own space. Can you talk about what that journey was like for you and how you talked to customers and what you learned from them?

Yeah, absolutely. And I think there are two sides of this. There's sort of the reader experience or the audience, and then there's the publisher experience. So on the reader side, you're seeing this macro trend of people having fewer and fewer apps on their phone and really spending their time in a browser, email, Facebook and if you're younger, Snapchat. Right. And so this idea of having an app for every single site that you want to visit really passed quickly. And you saw also the rise of mobile web. It's kind of funny because I think people thought there was going to be the rise of the mobile web quite a few years ago. It didn't happen. And now we're seeing a resurgence. I think the technology is getting better and connections are getting better. You're also seeing publishers lose a little bit of their control over the brand as they rely more and more on social networks for their distribution. So readers want to view stuff on mobile, but through the browser, publishers want to own their brand and have control over the audience that they've generated. And so having a presence outside of Facebook and Instagram and other places is really critical to kind of match that all together. So if I'm a big fan of Bill Simmons, there's a reason that the Ringer has a website that's mobile optimized and doesn't go directly to Facebook and not have a presence because they want to a, communicate their brand in a specific way and B, have access and control over the audience that they've generated. On the publisher side, people have different preferences for the tools that they want to use. And so for me, it's really important for publishers to have a first class experience on desktop, of course, on tablet and on mobile. And so we spent a lot of time developing not only our desktop site, but also our iOS experience on both tablet and mobile, such that people can run their business from any of the platforms. I think that's really different if you think about the other players in this space, their mobile experiences are super hobbled and really under invested in. And given that many people are running their lives from their phones, it was critical to me that that experience be just as good as the desktop experience.

Yeah, I mean, I don't blog as often as I want to, but it's just as easy for me to blog from my phone or tablet with Versed as it is from my desktop. I think we have this kind of little bit of a blind spot because we still imagine people who are content publishers creating content on desktops, and that's changing. Are you guys seeing a change in your user mix?

Absolutely. I think when you talk to publishers, they might think that they don't want to publish on their phone. I think that's because the experience is bad. I think 10 years ago people would have said, I don't want to bank on my phone or I don't want to take photos on my phone. But it turns out as the technology progresses and you can do those things easily on the device that's in your pocket and with you all the time, you're going to do it. Now that we've built an experience that's just as good, we're seeing more and more usage on mobile as people realize that, oh, this is the device I have, and I can do all the things that I want to do on this device.

So you talked about Bill Simmons for a minute in the Ringer, his new thing after Grant Land went away from espn. Bill Simmons originally put the Ringer on Medium. So can you maybe talk about how you think about Medium and Verse, both Greylock investments that we're super happy about, but how they're different?

Yeah, and I actually think the two products are complementary. Medium is this incredible network of content that becomes a discovery mechanism for people. I have Medium on my phone and I look at it all the time when I'm in line at the bathroom or whatever it is and really find great stuff to read. And it's a free tool, and so I think it's meant for more of a casual publisher who maybe writes occasionally, but also a discovery tool. Right. Our platform is really meant for professionals who are trying to generate revenue from their business. So we charge a monthly fee. Medium doesn't. And we have a lot more sort of power tools built in, such as deep analytics, AB testing, et cetera. So I think the audiences are completely different. And in fact, the publishers that are on Versed, I encourage to share to Medium just like they would share to Facebook or Twitter.

You have a monthly fee for the publisher. Medium now has a membership product for the consumer to read content that they're working with to see how to bring some monetization back to the publishers, I guess. So the ringer just moved, just announced they're moving from medium onto, I guess, Vox's platform. Is that what they said? And you've heard the story from others who are people who are coming off of WordPress or Tumblr and going on to Conde Nast platform or Vox's platform or what have you. You talked to a few of these publishers. What do you hear when you talk to them?

It's pretty interesting. I think publishers are frustrated with the experiences that they're having with third party tools and are largely trying to create homegrown solutions. I think this is problematic for a bunch of reasons. Mainly it's not core competency of these media companies to build technology. And it turns out that actually building a CMS is very difficult. It feels like a big opportunity for us to step in and build a product that meets the needs of these publishers, but also take the burden of having to build and support pretty complicated technology off their hands. Something I'm really excited about is we're also building the platform in such a way that we're taking advantage of modern technology and advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence. And I suspect that that's not something that's on the top of mind of the people at Conde Nast who are building these platforms. Right.

Let's talk about the AI stuff for a second because I think that's one of the things where Verse really spikes as a special platform and I think most people don't know about it yet. Building a homegrown solution is you have to really want it to build a homegrown solution. So what do they. What are the functions and capabilities that people feel like they need that causes them to go far up Ruby or far up go or start empower some developers or whatever.

I think it's a combination of ease of use with the power that people have come to expect with modern platforms. So the ability to really understand the audience that's coming in and what they're doing on the platform, the ability to ab test everything and let the market decide what the best headline is or what the best image is, at the same time making sure that the CMS and the editor aren't getting in the way of you doing your job. And I think these tools are falling short that are out there in the market, are falling short on one or both dimensions. And so there's this utopian vision of being able to build Something internally that's going to suit your needs perfectly. My guess is we're going to have a lot of publishers who are frustrated with their internal solutions and don't have the technical team or the core competency to be able to actually build that solution.

Yeah, in a lot of ways it's a funny retrograde step because the move to the cloud for virtually every category of software it used to be, everybody would install complicated software, Oracle or SAP or whatever, and then they go and they customize it because they felt like their workflow processes were super special. Then it was just such a hassle to implement and get running all this stuff. And then you got to the cloud, people said, oh, well, maybe we can run on Salesforce, maybe we can run on workday, and maybe we're not such a special snowflake in our processor or more than that. Like, maybe maybe the way we run our HR process is not so special that we have to be differentiated. And so we're okay using this, this platform. And it feels like that's what people started moving towards with publishing, like with Tumblr, medium and stuff. And then it seems like there's just some mismatch between what they need today and what they maybe needed when the platforms were starting to get built. Is that your sense too?

I think that's exactly right. And the intuition is if we build this in house, we'll be able to control it. But there's a reason that you don't want to build your own HR software. It's complicated and it's not going to differentiate you and allow you to be competitive in the marketplace. What's going to allow you to be competitive, as we were talking about earlier, is creating great content that people want to consume. It's not building an awesome scalable back end and cms. Yeah.

Well, so let's talk about. Let's talk about two things. One is the AI stuff we talked about, and then the other is you talked about making it super easy to publish from your phone. So I always find it a little intimidating to. Before, I found it a little intimidating to push from my phone because I never had the right pictures at hand, I never had the right content. I wasn't quite sure how to link. So can you talk about some of the things that you've done to make it easy to publish from your phone quickly?

Absolutely.

It's really not just publishing text, it's about making content that's beautiful.

Yes, absolutely. So one thing that we've built that is pretty unique is something we call Embedded content search. And all that really means is you can search key sources for multimedia content. As we know, multimedia content is more engaging than text and often can complement text that you're writing so very, very easily from your mobile phone. You can search YouTube, you can search SoundCloud, you can search Giphy, and you can search Bing images and pull that media right into an article that you're writing on the fly. And we also have support for basically every kind of embed that you could ever imagine. And so putting together not just text, but a multimedia rich post on your phone is just as easy as on the desktop.

Yeah. In fact, I guess now you've got systems on the back end that are even kind of watching what you're posting about and saying, oh, here's a suggested header shot or hero shot for the post, or I notice you're talking about Game of Thrones or here's media that's relevant to Game of Thrones. It'll notice the entities you're talking about and kind of pull that stuff in to the extent that you want it.

Yeah, exactly. We have someone on our team, has a PhD in Natural Language processing, so we're doing a lot of cool work in terms of figuring out what are you writing about and what kind of multimedia content can complement that. And I think what gets really exciting is we can start to understand what types of articles are resonating with your audience and help you hone the content that you're creating to get more engagement and grow the people who are coming to your site every day.

Is this your sense of what the future of publishing? I mean, obviously the future of publishing is multi screen, multimodal content anywhere. But is it also like your sense that people are going to try to write the content that they want and then the machine is going to figure out best time to publish, best headlines, best hero shots, best stuff around the core content. Is that your sense of what the future of publishing is?

Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I'm not sure we're ever going to get to a world where computers can write as well as humans. I mean, maybe like in a thousand years or something like that. But I think computers can do a lot of things to make content that's been written better and more engaging and reach a wider audience, whether that be to your point, helping you optimize a headline such that it's more engaging and will get more click through, or finding the right multimedia to complement the content that's been written, or helping you understand when to publish and which platforms to publish to.

So what other things have you built into the publishing experience that make it really powerful for publishers that you think are unique or new? Things like easier to search or get SEO easier for mobile reading? Things like that.

Yeah, I mean there's a bunch of things, a couple of things I'd highlight. Number one, everyone knows that analytics are important, but not everyone understands how to take advantage of raw analytics. And that's actually one of the key pain points that we hear when we talk to customers. So we obviously have raw analytics that people can tap into if they want to. But we also are using this machine learning capability to understand what insights can Verse as a platform derive from these analytics to give publishers actionable insights such that they can improve their sites in a way that drives conversion and helps them meet their business goals. So to give you kind of an easy example, let's imagine that you wrote an article about Jeff Sessions involvement in the Russia scandal that's been going on a couple months ago. When it first came out, when he first recused himself from the investigation, he.

Was definitely not involved. That's what he said.

You can imagine that yesterday people might come back to that article because he was in a hearing. Right. We can then tell you, oh, your article's spiking. For whatever reason, you should share it to Facebook again or even share it for you automatically kind of abstracting away the work that you need to do as a publisher normally to make sure you're getting distribution for your content. Because again, you want to be writing content, you don't want to be constantly monitoring Google Analytics.

So your sense you're trying to help publishers understand how to run their whole corpus of content over time, not just how to get this article pushed today.

Absolutely. And I think the more that we can abstract away those complexities and make it super easy for publishers to take advantage of what really are network wide insights across the Verse ecosystem. The better that they're going to be able to grow their business and therefore the more value they're going to be getting out of the Verse platform.

It's been fun to watch and fun to move my own blog. Like I started blogging almost 15 years ago on Type Head, I guess. And I've kind of woven my way through Typad and WordPress and Medium. I've had a bunch of different properties. One of the more interesting things to observe is when you just had auto ingestion from all my content, you sort of aimed it at all my previous content and said go when it kind of went and Created a new blog for me, johnollilly.com, which looks amazing, but it's also just. It was very, very performant, especially on mobile, because you went off and you just automatically implemented Google's AMP standard. So it flies. And you do this with my partner Reid Hoffman's side too. And it also got a bump in Google rankings because of that.

Yeah. So SEO is this sort of black box that publishers know they should care about, but not quite sure what to do. And so we try to do as much of that as possible automatically. And speed is a huge component of how your site ranks in Google. So if I can nerd out for a minute, your Verse site is actually a React app, which has a bunch of really cool advantages. A normal website, the way a browser parses it is it reads the HTML, it loads the JavaScript, it goes to the server and pulls the files in. And as you know, this can be really, really slow. With React, we can actually set up a node server that has a copy of the HTML and when the browser calls your site, it can load that HTML almost instantly and everything else can load in the background. So you kind of skip the first two steps and your site renders almost automatically. And that speed Boost A is better for the reader, but also gives you a huge advantage in terms of SEO and Google ranking.

Yeah, I really like the all in one. That's sort of the holistic thinking here, because with WordPress, for example, you might install an SEO module, you might install an AMP module, but you. You really have to think about all the ways that everything kind of fits together to get that virtuous cycle. Whereas in Verse, it's been pretty instantaneous and pretty integrated.

Yeah, you get all of that for free. Again, we want the publishers to do as little work as possible. And the other thing that's exciting is everything in Versed is built in a modular fashion. And what that means is all of our components can be swapped in and out and work across multiple breakpoints. We actually designed everything across six breakpoints. So your site will look good at every screen size.

Yeah. Which is getting more important because there are screens of all sizes now, and it's really hard to design for manually. I guess one of the things about your design system, and you guys worked in the design system for, I think, the better part of a year, is it really does scale up and scale down, irrespective of the way you're looking at it.

Yeah. And what's really differentiated is you can make massive changes to the design of your site. And it won't break. The problem with templated sites like Squarespace is if you want to make a big change to your design, you basically break the entire thing and you have to rebuild it from scratch. Whereas if you want to make a huge change to a Verse site, everything will work automatically.

Yeah. Tell me a little bit about why that. How's that possible? So you talk about templated sites and templated, you're arguing they're a little bit brittle, they kind of match specific screen sizes. And if you make a layout change, you have to, you have to figure out how to make it work across all ranges. But verse is not like that.

That's right. We've built everything in a componentized fashion that allows you to swap components in and out and it'll still kind of play nicely with the rest of your site. So, for example, we have sort of a classic blog style layout and we have a bunch of different card layouts. And if you want to switch between those, there's no difference in terms of performance and you don't have to make any adjustments on your end to make those work. I think it gets kind of exciting over time to think about the fact that like on Halloween or on Christmas, you could have a completely different looking site and then switch back to your regular layout the next day. You also can keep up with the trends. It's really interesting to see, to give Reid a little bit of a hard time when we went to switch his site over. You know, you could tell what year he built a site based on the design because it's really hard to update the design. And now his site will never look outdated because we can keep up with the design trends on his behalf.

Yep, that's interesting. So when adverse sort of 1.0 launch.

So we launched in the beginning of March and I consider that more or less a beta launch. And, you know, I followed Reid's advice to launch something I was embarrassed by. And I was really happy we did that because we learned a what publishers were liking about the platform, but also what the obvious gaps were. And the team's been working super hard to close those gaps over the last three months. And I think what we're launching is going to be a really viable and exciting product for people in the market.

So tell me about some of the interactions with your publishers now. So you've got some people who are using this sort of beta product in your words. And your Reed's quote is basically, if you're not embarrassed by your first product, you've waited too long to release it. And his feedback is always get the product out there because that's when you get real feedback. So tell me how that experience has been with publishers and how you're attracting publishers to, to use Versed and what they've been saying.

Yeah, I mean, I learned two things. One is that there was enough of a product there that people were excited about that. We've gotten a solid amount of usage in paying customers. And we also learned that there were major gaps that we needed to close. So it really helped us focus our roadmap. But you're seeing amazing sort of individual publishers. There's someone named Ian Kapstick who is an entrepreneur and sort of a political analyst in Canada that has built his site on Versed and has helped him gain more and more of an audience and really express his views of the world in a space that he can own. We've also seen some really cool businesses. Come on. There's this company called Stigma that's actually the number one rated app for mental health in the App Store right now. And they didn't have a web presence before and so now their site is on Versed and they have gained a ton of audience via having a website presence and they've put $0 into marketing. So they're really, really happy with the fact that they were able to organically get so much more of an uplift by having a place where they can control their brand presence and their voice.

And they're willing to put up with the beta nature of the first release just because getting their own web presence has been so critical for them.

Yeah, absolutely. And what we're seeing is kind of a two step process. People are initially attracted to Verse because it's super easy to use and they can get their website set up in minutes. And I think a lot of people have slogged through the existing tool set and can't believe how easy it is to use Versed. Then once they've got their site set up, they start to realize, oh, there's all these really powerful features built into the platform that are actually going to help me grow my business and my audience. I've seen engagement with some of our more advanced features go up and up and up over time as people spend more time on the product, which has been really exciting.

Yeah. I mean, one of the things we talked about last week in New York was that once you publish a few posts, you start to use the AB testing. You want to talk about the built in A B testing.

Yeah. So I think something that if you're a BuzzFeed or a Huffington Post. It's critical that you a B test everything you can, whether that be the headline or the image or even the placement of the article or the time that you publish it. And these large media companies have really optimized their entire process via this testing. And the thing you learn about AB testing really quickly that's interesting is the headline that you think is going to win doesn't always win.

My headlines always lose.

A side note, we were testing different kind of lead sentences on our site and one I didn't particularly like was winning consistently. And you said to me, it doesn't matter what you like. And I think that's a good point. Right. Your personal opinion doesn't matter. It's what resonates with your audience. This has been a complicated thing to do for people who aren't at BuzzFeed scale, even if you use a tool like an optimizely, which happens to be expensive and fairly technically complicated. So we made it so you can run an A B test with basically two clicks from your mobile phone or desktop. And we render everything server side, meaning it's not going to slow down your page at all. And we'll automatically pick the winner for you and promote it so you don't have to worry about monitoring the AB test once you've run it.

Yeah, it's been humbling to use it because invariably I'll. I'll write the headline that I think captures the right thing and I'll say, let me put this stupid headline in and I'll type something and invariably the one that's stupid performs better. And so I've lost my ego on that one. But you also do it on call to action CTAs.

Absolutely. And I think our Call to Action Builder has been one of the features that people have really loved.

What is a Call to Action?

Call to Action is basically buy my book, sign up for my newsletter, anything that you want your audience to do beyond engage with your content. And oftentimes actually the type of customers that we're attracting, the content is almost a Trojan horse to get you to take some other action. So the call to action becomes a critical component of the website. So we have this Call to Action Builder that makes it really easy to get set up. Put the call to action across your entire website and then test everything about it so you can ultimately get more and more people to click through and convert to whatever business goal you have. I think selling goods is one that you often see, and signing up for Email newsletters is another.

Yeah, it's been interesting to see too. It's, it's super easy to put it in. So I'll turn it on and turn it off sometimes as it makes sense. Let's move a little bit and talk just a little bit about how you're building the company and what do you think? It's different. I mean, I've been involved in a few companies in New York now Tumblr most obviously, but now Versed. What do you think is different about building something in New York? A technology company in New York versus here? Is it changing? Is it easier? Is it hard? What's easy? What's hard?

I think the heterogeneity and the energy of New York is very different than say San Francisco, which can be a double edged sword. Right. I found that when I was living in San Francisco, people were not as likely to want to get drinks after work because often they were taking a shuttle from Mountain View or Menlo park and it was going to take them two hours to get home. Whereas in New York it's very easy to find people to distract you from whatever task you have at hand. So one of the things that's special about New York is the diversity. So you're not surrounded by people who are in technology all the time. I was in Phil's Coffee and Soma the other day and I was hearing the table next to me talk about a Kubernetes instance they were setting up. You would never hear that conversation in New York. And I think in some ways that's bad because people aren't as maybe focused. But I think it's good ultimately because there's this mosaic that can help you get inspired by verticals that are outside of technology.

Yeah, we don't have a lot of verticals that are outside of technology here, but we are very, very good at Kubernetes instances you've built a team. I think of Facebook and Google in particular as having built up very, very robust technology teams there, maybe poaching out of what used to be the investment banks and that kind of thing. How is it recruiting for a startup for real core technology talent?

Yeah, I think there's a myth that you can't find talent outside of Silicon Valley and I think that's absolutely not true. I've managed to build what I consider to be world class teams at both vine and First. My proof point for that is the vine team that I built now works at Snapchat, Instagram and Google. Kind of what you consider to be Three of the best companies in the world. Clearly the talent that we had was on par with any talent that they have at those companies. Same at Versed. We have just this incredible amount of engineering talent. I think the challenge that all startups face is not unique to, you know, it's not unique to New York is you don't have the compensation ability that some of these larger companies have. So you really need to have A, I think a mission that resonates with people and B, an environment where they're going to be able to learn and grow outside of their day to day job. So I focus really heavily on those two things, such that we can continue to attract top talent. I actually get really excited about the idea of building a company that's headquartered in New York that's considered to be as engineering centric as a Google or a Facebook, because I think we're really missing that in New York right now. People are either flocking to satellite offices of San Francisco headquarter companies or starting their own thing. But there's not the layer of Airbnb, Pinterest, Dropbox, et cetera that's competitive with those companies that I think should exist in New York. So I'm excited to hopefully build that with Versed.

Yeah. But I think there's something special. I think that the early New York successes of a lot of them have tended towards publishing and advertising. And so it's something sort of endemic to New York about those verticals at least. So tell me about. So you guys do some special things about the way you screen for engineers and you hire engineers and the way you interview them. Can you talk about that for a little bit?

So I think the more that you can have people simulate their actual job, the more accurate information you're going to get on them. So we certainly do whiteboard algorithm challenges just like any other company. But what's different about Verse is we have a coding practicum as the last round. And what that means is candidates come in for four hours and we give them a coding problem that they sit down and work on. And at the end we go through their code with them. And it's not just about seeing the structure of their code, whether they're using functional programming or object oriented with code quality. And of course those things are important. You also learn a lot by the questions that the candidates ask or did they write tests and really get a sense of what it would be like to work with this person. And we had tremendous success using that.

Wait, so people go off just next to engineers that are working on Versed features and they just sit down with their laptop and they code for four hours.

Exactly.

And are they connected up on Slack? Do they talk to people? What's the.

So they have someone who's proctoring the test is not the right word. But the challenge who that they can ask questions and they have full access to the Internet. So anything that they want to look up, they can. It's supposed to simulate what it would be like to work in the environment. So there's no really constraints other than do this in a reasonable amount of time. Yeah. Interesting.

And people aren't intimidated by that?

I guess. Not the kind of people we want to hire.

One of the things that I've learned a lot from watching you in the few months since you got to Versed is that you set up your core set of operating principles and you really try to express those in how you run the company. Can you talk about what your operating principles are for? Verst?

Yeah, absolutely. The first one is around ownership and really wanting everyone in the company to feel ownership both over their individual projects as well as over the overall company. So I go out of my way to make sure that people are involved in decision making. They feel a sense of ownership over the company and hire for and reward people who are able to take projects and push them forward autonomously. The second is something I call learn and adapt. And the idea here is both at an individual level and as a company level, we should be constantly learning and constantly adapting to that information as it comes along. So that manifests itself in both being data driven in terms of product development as well as for everyone on my team, we have a personal development goal outside of their day to day. So people feel like they're being challenged and growing kind of every day. The third one is done is better than perfect, which is somewhat of a Silicon Valley mantra, but I actually don't see happen in practice very often. And the idea of let's get a feature out the door, show it to users, get feedback from them, and continue to iterate that way versus thinking that we're going to be able to build something perfect without showing it to people. And the last one is transparency and clarity. And this is something that's super important to me. I try to give all the information that I have available to my team and ultimately treat the people who work with me like adults and allow them to make the best decisions that they can with the information available. Not only that, I think it's really important to take that information and distill what that actually means for the company. So here's my take on this information and what we should be doing because of it. If you'd like to see the underlying data, you have a complete access to it.

Yeah, this is something I learned in Mozilla where I learned the difference between transparency and clarity. For a long time I thought transparent was the most important thing to be as a leader. And I read this essay by a guy named John Maida, who was head of RISD at the time, is a media lab and is not actually automatic working on WordPress. But he said that transparency can be used as a crutch sometimes if people don't understand your decision making, say, well, here's all the data and that mostly what people want is clarity of leadership. And that was a big aha for me that I didn't really get before. So I'm glad. It seems like you're pretty crisp on that, but anyway. All right, well, thanks a lot for doing the podcast, AJ.

Thank you so much, John.