Welcome to the stage actress, activist, and investor Sophia Bush, and tech visionary and co-founder of Twitter, Medium, and Mosy, Ev Williams.
Here we go. Here we go. Here we go. Here we go. Here we go.
Wow. Hi, friends. And people are awake on the second morning after a first night at Summit. I'm very impressed there's folks here. Hi.
Well, good morning, everybody. I think we had a VOG introduce us, but I'm Sophia Bush. This is Ev Williams. And we're going to—
Oh, I love you, too. Should we do this every morning? This is kind of great.
Love this. Thanks, guys. We've known each other a long time.
We've been lucky enough to know each other a long time. And we were talking backstage about the sort of phase in life we find ourselves in, and what it's like to have seen the sort of before the internet and to live in this place where clearly it needs a little bit of tweaking. I'm curious for you guys in the audience, how many of you would say you feel more exhausted emotionally, socially, in any way than you did 5 years ago? Yes. Okay, great. So, it's not just us. Now, I think some of that overwhelm can come from the constant input from all of this, which is great, but hard to manage. And Ev, I'm really curious from your perspective really because when I'm trying to figure out like how I feel about where technology is going, I always want to pick your brain because you helped create the internet as we know it. So, congratulations and how dare you, right? What would you say from your perspective is something you saw in the early promise of social media that you think we've lost and so many of us are clearly trying to find again?
Yeah. Well, I think the early promise of social media was that it was social, and turns out it's just media. And look, I don't think that's entirely bad. There was a brief moment in time, and it didn't include everybody in the world, where getting online felt like talking to your friends and you made friends and it was fun. It was like a party, and you could hang out every day and talk about what interested you, and it was actually social. Even though at Twitter in particular that was the feeling of early Twitter, but we didn't really design it as a social network; we designed it as what I saw as an information network, as a way to learn and express ideas. But it was open to everybody, and I think that's the difference now, and that's what social media means now. It's not that it's actually social like you're interacting with someone you know necessarily—obviously that happens less and less—but in the early days that was fun and that was cool. I just think it wasn't realistic that that lasted.
We didn't realize it at the time, but the reason now it's just media is just the incentive structures of the businesses and really of people, where we reward attention. And that's what the media business has always done. And so as more and more attention went to these screens that we have on more than we have on our television, then the incentive to capture the attention of that screen is higher, and therefore the people who spend more time on it and who hack the system get rewarded. If the entire world is competing for your attention when you turn on that screen, it's entirely the same as when we used to turn on the TV and just flip channels.
And therefore you get the same type of stuff as when you turn on TV and flip channels. Some of that stuff is great, by the way, but it's not hanging out with your friends,
And that's what I think we've realized. I also think that's okay because I don't think the mediated conversation with friends or wannabe friends was ever a very natural human way to be. Having follower counts or friend counts, or you know, how many hearts you got on that comment or photo, was a very artificial and warped way to interact as humans.
And so now I think we're getting out of that phase, like, okay, that's just media, and it has good and bad parts like media has always had. There's atrocious things and there's amazing human, touching, educational things, but social is a whole different thing: how we interact with people, how we make friends, how we connect, express ourselves. If you're not trying to be a media star, that needs to happen in a different realm.
Right. Well, it sort of strikes me that what gets rewarded in the way you're talking about in these digital spaces is more addictive behavior. It's more antisocial behavior. But we've seen this real uptick in anxiety, depression, and isolation because if people are doing this all day long, they're not in spaces like this. They're not having conversations with their friends, and it's having more implications than just, "Oh, the internet is a cesspool and the bots are very mean to us." It's permeating our physical world as well. I guess I'm curious because over the last 20 years, you've built Blogger, Twitter, Medium. Now you're building Mosy, which is entirely designed around helping us gather in real spaces. On the surface, that feels really exciting to me socially—I'd really like to see my friends more often—and societally, it feels like a bit of an antidote to these ever more radical spheres and the us-versus-them insanity that really gets volumized online. So did it feel kind of like a mission, or were you just personally trying to figure out how to hang out with your friends more often? Where did the idea come from, and was it like a 2:00 AM idea or a 10:00 AM idea? I always like to know.
It was a slow hunch over a period of time, as it's a phrase from Steven Johnson talks about in *Where Good Ideas Come From*. It's like something that keeps nagging at you and it's like, "I have a feeling, I have a feeling." You keep picking at that and unraveling it. Everything I've done that works has come from my own felt need: "This is what I want." And I think that's the most reliable compass that I found to know what to build, and it's also the most satisfying thing.
So Mosy came from a desire to sort of connect in real life, frankly, and from a very practical need at first. It's like, where are my friends? It was post-COVID. I had moved, so many people moved. So many people in this audience don't even have homes, not in a bad way. You ask people where they live and it's like—and so, just very practically was like, where are people if you want to hang out? Noticing Facebook actually answered that question for a while, and then people I knew, it wasn't a good gauge for where people were. So I was like, look in my contacts app, and you don't really have addresses in there; sometimes have first names and numbers. And someone cool you met somewhere was like, "Who is this person? I have no context."
It's like we need better information on people we know if we want to reconnect, build relationships. That was what I was prioritizing at that time. This was maybe 3 years ago that I started thinking about this. Then, of course, that was mirrored with many, many people, and COVID shook everything up. People want to reconnect. People, I think, are generally feeling this burnout of, "I don't want to be online all the time, even if I'm addicted." And so it's like, okay, how do we solve that problem for ourselves? What are the bigger impacts of that? When I started thinking about what if you really—like I said, I didn't think of Twitter as a social network; I thought of it as an information network, and it obviously had social aspects. Does that bell mean time's up?
I don't know. I'm like, snacks? What's happening?
Then I started thinking, what if you build a social network that is really optimized for relationships, and what would that look like? That started to get exciting as a product, as a business, because I think you would do a ton of things differently. It wouldn't be about consuming content. Everything would be private by default. Nothing public, no status game, just really utility that helped you. Right now the main focus is on getting together in real life. We see other potential utilities for it if you can't get together in real life, but that started feeling like the need that was most relevant right now.
Mhm. It's interesting because the itch you talk about—well, you called it a slow hunch. I think about it like when you have an idea, it's almost like an itch you can't scratch. It just keeps poking at you. And what you're talking about with Mosy, wanting to figure out a way for us to be together, I'm realizing in real time is exactly why I started my podcast. I wanted to sit down on *Work in Progress* and do this and have an hour-long conversation with an interesting person because my brain felt like it was breaking living in 140 characters. I was like, it can't just be the headline; it can't just be the quick turn. How do we sit and really get to know each other, really share ideas, really learn how to meet in the middle again? And I think it's conversation. I think it's gathering.
So for people who aren't early adopter nerds like you and I are—because I found out I had a very low Mosy number and I was like, feels very cool. I was also early on Path, which I still miss. Like I love to try a new thing and see how it works. I will admit to you, which is embarrassing, that when Twitter first really hit, I was like, "This is so stupid. I don't care what anyone's eating for breakfast." Turns out I do. I follow every food blogger on every social platform in the world now. But at the time, I didn't really get why you'd want to invite more in.
And then what I realized is it could be a really amazing, as you said, information tool. Like I got to go to battle for the environment after Deepwater Horizon on Twitter, and I just was posting stuff from Louisiana, and before I knew it, was on a satellite media tour doing interviews on the news because they were like, "Oh, they're not telling the truth there." I was like, "You think the big oil company's not telling the truth about the spill they caused? Shocking." So it's really incredible when you can create something that allows for us to share differently. Obviously, now with the paywalls and everything else, that's a different thing. So, how does Mosy work for folks who aren't on it yet?
Mosy is very simple. Right now, you connect your address book. It's encrypted. We don't push any messages to anybody, but that allows us to bring in your contacts. And then if they're on Mosy, you can share basically more details. There was a great idea like 25 years ago called Plaxo. Who remembers Plaxo? So Plaxo spammed everybody and grew like crazy. We don't do that. But when I heard about Plaxo, I remember thinking, "Oh, that's a great example of how the internet's going to change everything because we're connected. You don't have to update your address or your phone number or where you live in my address book. I mean, I don't have to update yours. You can update that for everybody if you've shared it and you trust those people."
It's like, "Duh, that's how things will work now." And then some of us still get Postables for Christmas cards and these different questions, and we still don't have this information. So that was the initial idea for Mosy, is a connected address book. And then one of the most useful utilities we found is just the city you're at is super useful for those you want to share it with. So now if you bring up Mosy and you're connected to people, you'll see, "Oh, all these people I know are in Detroit right now."
That's useful to know. Or what used to happen to me: I would go to New York once a month, and on my way there every time, I was like, "Who do I know in New York again? Who do I want to see? Who do I want to invite to dinner?" And so that's how it works right now. And there should be a card on your seat to scan the QR code for Mosy.
Yeah, so you can get on it, which feels exciting. Okay, so when you think about building all these platforms, they're all very cool and I'm sure other technologists would want to ask you much nerdier questions about how they work. I'm curious about the philosophy behind them because you said something a long time ago that really stuck with me. You said that amazing art can't be plotted. It's a thing you start; it's a thing that happens. How does a philosophy about art shape the way that you build tech platforms?
Well, I build everything from this feeling of "I want this to exist in the world."
And it's hard sometimes to keep orienting on the internal compass versus the external one. If you are lucky enough to build something that gets big, then it's reasonable to start focusing on what other people want, not just you. But in the early days and for quite a while, I think the best gauge of what to build is what you want to exist in the world. And you can apply this in many ways. I applied this as an investor as well. I always had a rule that I would only invest in things that I would be happy if they succeeded even if I didn't make money from them.
And so that just rules out a lot of things, obviously, that are maybe socially negative, but even neutral things. I was like, "If I want this to exist and I want this to succeed and I think it will, then that's a gauge to whether to invest or not." And ended up forming a venture capital firm, Obvious Ventures, which James Joaquin runs, who's in this audience, based on that philosophy. But on the product level, that applies to what problem do I want to solve? Like what do I want? And you can test that out, like does this resonate? Am I completely weird in wanting this? You want it to be a common felt need.
But it also applies—what happens time and time again I see with startups is that sense gets you to an initial product and then it starts to grow, and then the tendency of companies is they turn external. Then they go, "Okay, what do the numbers say? What does the user research say?" And those are helpful information sources, but they also can be very distorted, just as distorted as your own sense of what to build. I've made many mistakes via those sources that tell you, "Well, people really want this," or the numbers are making this go up, and then you're like, "Wait, is that really what we're trying to do?" And so, yeah.
I like that because it reminds me of something else you said that I think is really interesting, because you talk about how you're chasing serendipity, not scale. And if all you're chasing is scale, you might not be considering impact. You might not really be ready to pivot when a pivot is called for. But if it's the serendipity you're looking for, that's going to be the thing that you pursue. Just like you're saying, if it's the thing you want to exist in the world whether or not you profit from it, it just is a different energetic way of operating that I would imagine, sure, is a great foundation to have better success, but also to have a better quality of life. I think we know a lot of people who prioritize scale overall who are sort of monstrous. So serendipity feels right to me.
Yeah. Well, and for Mosy, we like this idea of serendipity. You're going to run into people you otherwise wouldn't. To be clear, we want to create serendipity at scale.
Listen, you still have a company. You've got to do the thing.
