 How are you? I'm good. I think about it. We never had any Talked-gover on stage conversation exactly indeed many off-stage conversations many many So Tariq and I have known each other for a long time. We were both early web folks. We were Kind of free web 2.0. What do we call that the dot-com era exactly and so and both of us were heavily involved in the Starting up of many social media startups. We're both serial entrepreneurs net vives That vibes early cloud and now thinking about new project as as you probably do I think You reminded me that earlier you were the first one to To design what is now the the main component of social media the activity feed The activity feed now. Yeah, so that was I think that was 2004 On flicker and Basically what it was was it was based on blogs Which was the most common form that we were used to using at that time and it was just a reverse-cron thing But what the difference was about the activity feed then was that it included activity from other people and their Reactions to the things that you had posted in the case of flicker. It was it was photographs, but things went South things went awry things did not go as they should and I actually think that one of the things that made the activity feed become such a Kind of like a dangerous way of Receiving your information actually was that they started to Swerve them algorithmically by the things that got the most attention and so It started to you know your activity feed already has a great deal of confirmation Bias built into it. You read things from people that you already agree with and it just kind of reinforces your beliefs and You end up in what Eli preser calls a filter bubble and then the algorithms Enhanced that in some way or frankly detract from the truth in many ways And this is kind of how we ended up in on this kind of like fake news world and all of our attention being Maybe we should remind that you have to imagine 2004 basically the internet had Frozen you had this Microsoft that Internet Explorer and the web was not so great and then suddenly Mozilla came in and These things were talking about the activity feed. I was working on widgets all this technology was possible You could think about something as a consumer entrepreneur At the time build it and make it happen today It feels like you have to see first the TOS of the Facebook platform before you want to push anything The TOS of the Android platform the TOS of the iPhone platform and suddenly as Because we're both product people we could do this and today we say well This is the place the little thing here where you can operate. So it's a very different dynamic I just wanted to remind that to yeah, and it we can't we come from like our background is actually in the open web and things have become increasingly trapped and imprisoned and and Smell and and our our rules in the capacity Actually for entrepreneurs has diminished a great deal and you know, there's no one that you can can currently Compete with you know Google for speed For example, yes, no, but the thing is I my last two companies were in some ways competing with a business of Google Netvives they came out with I Google. I had a jolly cloud where you came back with a Chromebook and Then at some point you cannot compete. There's this ability that At some point they have so much resources so much engineers so much traction that it become really hard to To build something meaningful and but also they also have all of the data. Yes They have all of the members. They have a great deal of lock-in. They have the social networks absolutely and Honestly, the data as as things have progressed. I think since the kind of mid to late 2000s to the present day Data has become more and more Important in the products that we've been building and nobody has more data than the big four Problem is this data floated if you dare flows in this data the way I mean think about what you guys were listening on the radio ten years ago And what you people change the data change we change and in some ways This platform are sticking us in a same person. I I think it was the founder of Forshan who said that we're not simple people were diamonds. We have multiple faces and unfortunately We are sometime through social media or Facebook and Instagram Only one of his faces and I found it kind of as an entrepreneur. I wish we could We could build something different Well, I mean, I think that the what's going on is that you're actually yourself editing a lot of what's happening is I call it social Peacocking right you you kind of you kind of present your your best self You know, you're you're you're kind of how you're hanging out with your cool or your words depends on who is on social media depending on who it is and but I Also think one of the things that has limited people here's another thing too is that when we started out we had a had a very different experience because it was a very small community of people that were online, especially in the late 90s when I started out and What ended up happening is that? We had actually kind of created this idea of having followers on flicker that there was like not Mutual following required which the prior social networks had had like Friendster and MySpace and all these other kind of kind of things but Somebody could follow you somebody that you didn't know and this in the beginning It had kind of had unintended consequences, but one of the unintended consequences of that is that you became less and less Confident that the people that were following you and the people that were watching you and kind of react responding to you Knew you understood you came from a similar kind of perspective from you so then you you kind of Naturally meet yourself more blend less interesting you kind of like smoothed off the edges of yourself and Created this you know we all became Brand marketers of ourselves, and this is a kind of a terrible destiny You don't want to become a product yourself and that and that kind of is one of the inevitabilities of having followers Which we hadn't anticipated if you look at how now I'm if you're not young entrepreneur, and you want to launch your company In one way we have is incredible networks distribution platform like everybody has a phone at a time We it was not like that you had to to get a URL you had to be seen on On the web to do SEO so you have this ability to scale really fast But that came with a drawback the fact that suddenly To scale You're ready to do anything we call that sometime growth hacking you're able to almost lie Because you want to have address the biggest crowd possible and what I've learned hanging out with chef And by the way if you're a product person or an entrepreneur you should spend time with with chef is that? The quality of what you do first. It's really hard to do good quality every day when you see But also that's ultimately the reason why people will come to see you, and I I think that in some ways I see many companies now trying to scale and and also politicians basically trying to sell an ID But it's not their true ID to get this Access to that network and at some point we are with the seed because that's not what we were signing for for the first in the first place So I think that really what we want to talk about is the future of it, right? Yes, and this is kind of the past and we came from you know, you know, we came from What we really considered to be the golden age It was the independent web everybody wasn't locked into these kind of like pre-existing social platforms were for limited by You know whatever features that they have You came from open source. Yes, and a lot of the a lot of the Kind of the modularization of open source the kind of the infinite kind of Malleability of the things that you could build an open source have been largely lost because now we have these the kind of the big four Companies which were kind of locked into we were having this interesting conversation recently about you know Which one is the best of all of those which one do we try which one do we trust more? That's a very tough question. Yeah, Tariq. Which one do you trust the most? It depends for what? Yeah, it really depends for what I I think that I trust Google when I want to find an address I'm not sure. I want to trust Google for Learning and mining my data. I trust Amazon to get product right on down right on time, but And Facebook I think I don't know if you agree with this what happened with the US election basically what The consequence of social media Where basically we gave a blank check to four companies and now we're discovering that we have Brexit at the Trump election We have this influx of hate because these this works really well We we seen that with the with the election where you can package hate hate people hate Specific targeting Do you think we're we're moving into something different you think it's the first step toward something different or there is so Things are in in unbelievable flux right now, and I've actually spent probably about the last Three to five years Somewhat down on social media somewhat down on the social web and I think that now Suddenly we're in this period of incredible transition We have exposed all of the problems and that's something Fantastic and wonderful is around the corner, and we don't know what it is I'm actually quite optimistic right now about the future of online sociality because It seems right now that these companies Google Apple Twitter Facebook are absolutely impossible to dislodge But you know we've been through this cycle before right it wasn't it wasn't that long ago before my space and AOL and Yahoo were ascendant and they look at them now So I do think that there's always a kind of an opportunity for disruption all of the the dirty underbelly that we had been you know ignoring at our own peril has now been exposed and It's just a matter of time before the next phase begins, and I think that it's a lot of things are happening Both positive and negative as a consequence of social media right now We're really really focused on the the bad consequences of that, but I Do you think it's it's coming it's coming seeing no agree. I think to get back to the parallel with food. I I came to So first of all, I I mean that's public, but I'm a couple years ago. I had to go through a very terrible Moment I lost many of my friend during their Paris attack and I was I was late to one of the meetings And that's the reason I'm here. So it took me a couple years to to process but I've experienced first place right after this how the social media was just you know when you see something so horrible and Honestly, the only thing that saved me was the fact that I've seen the worst But also the best in people People bounding people supporting people creating I mean, you know the human connection that we all wish to see but in the everyday life It doesn't happen because everybody's busy doing this thing and suddenly you have this crazy event and everybody works together a lot of people are actually saying that Social media is largely responsible for you know, what's going on in Kerala for Brexit for all of these kind of post-national kind of post-citizen kind of movements that have been happening and a lot of this is because people are thinking of themselves thinking of their citizenship thinking about their Affiliation who they belong to they're kind of post-citizen Forms of thinking that are developing and that are coming about I'm from California. I live in California and After the election in in you know, this the latest one, you know, California suddenly became I guess I went out and I had the impetus to buy for example a California flag Which I had never acquired before because I felt very strongly as a Californian I stood opposed to a lot of the things that were being Put nationally forward and so I think that a lot of people's identities are in are in flux A lot of people's sense of like where they belong There's a kind of a very strong sense of return to the city-state for example and a lot of pre-existing boundaries are breaking down Then I think the the future is small and slow That's why I usually talk about a slow web as a as the equivalent of what slow food is to food because in some ways Facebook and Google are McDonald. They just you know What is interesting about a company like McDonald is they source locally the salad the tomatoes the meat and they produce the same Generic product that's what is actually what these companies are doing they source all the information locally and then they turn that into a very generic experience and Yeah, whatever turn me on actually as a consumer are like these small brands these small things that are people are doing that really have value Small restaurants and I I think if we can connect that to the incredible power of the internet That's gonna be an incredible revolution Well one thing that we had done three years ago Actually, my partner Yuri and I who's also has a background in social media Was that we started a cafe here in Helsinki coffee lasili, which is in capilla And and really what it was was that our background was really in community building and Connecting people and we felt that we had actually dissolved that we had we had kind of lost something magical in the human connection and It really was a kind of a reassertion of the importance of community and Why we initially built this software because when we built it it's now called social media But that is a misnomer because what we were building when we were building it was online Communities and the reason that it became renamed Yes social media is because you can sell things against media. It's it's a container It's content against which you can sell advertising whereas you can't Sell community you know when it's false. You can't advertise Belong to one you're not and now you're absolutely right. I think the we're gonna start seeing the social media aspect Be becoming separated from the the communities We're going back to the early days of the well of the the online communities I mean if you haven't read all the origin of how the internet was created you should do that because I truly believe it's We're going full circle, you know, we're talking just before About how sci-fi, you know, I don't know if you have seen the new blood runner But the how the vision of the future 40 years later is exactly the same We have a hard time imagining what's after the future. I mean technology right now is recycling The 50s and 60s and 70s and 80s science fiction Movies and books into product, but at the time we had this incredible humanistic vision and now it's just you know Straightforward product is a cushion. So all these things which now seem inevitable and monolithic You know the Facebook's and the Google's and all of this of the world Is not because you know also at one time it seemed as if we would never escape the divine right of Kings So you're optimistic about the future. I am optimistic. I was not I am again, and I think you should we should all be Thank you so much. Thank you, Tariq