At and a lot of things are for filling that. This is your fourth company. How is that different at this point in your career versus the earlier ones . One of the things interesting about this, having done it a few times, you spent a lot of times deciding where we want to go. Weve been the lifetime talking about, how do we connect several years of payments . Dewey really have a line on what mobile buying would look like . Speaking of making Global Payments easier, there is something you have wanted to announce right . The one touch buying experience that we started with, and then put in data with paypal two weeks ago will now be generally available. It will be the first in the industry to allow a one touch mobile buying experience. No one will know your credit card information or shipping address, no one will know your password. We are the first to do that across platforms. That is a big part of when i came to braintree early on a big part of how i felt it will play out, we needed this. Now we can put that in the hands of millions of paypal users. This is huge. It has the opportunity to really change the way people interact with mobile device for commerce. When we were talking a year ago, you get into the apps and you click on it and pay and you dont have to think about reentering your credit card. What does the experience look like . We started doing this, creating a coop across different apps. Now that we have access to that paypal users, we have made it so it is even cleaner, where there is a fast switch that lets you pay in a single touch. Can we roll the video . [video clip] is one of those things where you look at it and it looks really slick and simple. And you say, why hasnt it always been that way . It is pretty difficult. It will work for all paypal users, correct . Yes, anyone with a paypal mobile app will have access to this weird. Very exciting news. This is the default way you can buy on a mobile device. The other thing you want to announce as you are now allowing merchants to accept bitcoin. One of the things we have always done is given easy access to sophisticated payments. That started with one touch payments and one of the interesting things happening is it going. As someone who has worked with the ecosystem directly, i think bitcoin as a protocol has that potential to address a love that. We are announcing paypals first foray into bitcoin. We are partnering with going a and we will start coin bay and we will start within the next couple of months to accept bitcoin the our partnership. It will be a slick experience on the consumer side. You can pay with something easily presented for consumers to pay with a highly Adaptive Mobile optimized experience. When did your first interest in bitcoin start . I have had it for a long time. In the early days of bitcoin, as paying i was paying close attention. Around 2009 i was really following it. It was a question of when what is the right time. There was regulatory compliance, and consumer experience. A lot of those things needed to be solved. It seems like we are at the right moment where we can do this in a highquality way. But we are still in the early days where there is a lot of growth to happen. What made it the right time now . I think it is sort of the right confluence of several factors. You have reputable providers like coin bay highquality Consumer Experiences and also demand from merchants that are also interested in looking at the legacy payment. All of those things come together. We are at the right time to really start to step further into this and see how we can help propel it forward. Is this just braintree accepting coin or is it paypal . This is the first time for braintree. It is not just raintree, we are looking at this, and ebay also said he is interested in bitcoin. Paypal is our first move to really embrace bitcoin via braintree. Does this mean some of your bigger partners are going to start accepting transactions in bitcoin, like airbnb . We dont have any specific merchants now, but we will announce them over the next couple of months. We do expect a lot of heavy interests. We are hearing already that they had interest. Both the one touch mobile payments will be announced as well as bitcoin is going to be high interest to a lot of merchants. Great. Inc. You so much. Thank you. [applause] how many of you have gadgets . How many people have one with them right now . Do you guys hear me . I know you can. Chances are, this guy was involved with the creation of that gadget. So please welcome liam casey. [applause] no one can hear anything. There we go. How many of you know this is . Nobody . How many of you own electronic product. This cap probably handled most of them. He personally ships a lot of stuff. I was told that he would wear your traditional irish dress. I feel very out of sorts. That said, you are the guy who does amazing stuff in hardware. And in 2007, he went over to china and did a fascinating article about what china makes and the world takes. You are essentially one of the major figures in that article. You are mr. China. Why do you tell these folks a little bit allowed about Pch International . We are a managing company with development. We take ideas for a product from the concept to the consumer. The development, engineering and manufacturing, packaging and logistics to get it to a consumer in as possible. We work with Tech Companies and hardware stocks startups. Startups are really exciting space to be in at the moment. In 2000 you are mr. China. That was when chinese were building billions of things. Are you still mr. China . For anyone who has been in china, you know very quickly that you know very little about china. I know as little about china today as i did when i went the first day. It is such a big space and so complex. We had fantastic people on the ground who were able to execute. That is what we do. Does it matter if you are mr. China anymore . What has happened over the past decade is that you used to go to china and build one million things. A million routers ipads. Now you can just told one thing. What is happening that is allowing this to change . I dont think it is a geographic thing. I think we track data of our products that moved from production lines right through to the consumers home. We try to replace inventory with data. It is not necessary about making one million things, we just want to make what there is demand for. Sometimes you dont want to make a million things. He just want to make what people would like. When you shrink a supplychain, and in some cases some of the Bigger Companies would have a supplychain to take a product from a production line in china to a consumer in the western world and take up to three months. We can do it in six days. And we have done that for some retailers. We have taken a product reengineered the supplychain, and taking it from reduction in china to the retail source in six days. From production in china to the retail source in six days. We do it based on demand. So the these guys are probably going to be thinking in more entrepreneurial terms. What does it take to be a success in hardware right now . Is very interesting when we look at our startups. When we look at the applicants that supply to come into, we are looking for the same thing that any incubator or accelerator are looking for. We are looking for a great team. We look for in a team. You can have a great idea and products, but if you dont have a great team to deliver, it will not happen. We look for a great entrepreneurs. We have been fortunate to work with phenomenal entrepreneurs with startups. Recently i wrote about how you guys partnered with radioshack unit in my experience i have not been in a radioshack since they stopped giving out battery cards. [applause] i believe i still have some. You guys recently partnered with them. From my understanding, you are going to put items in stores. But you have essentially changed the entire supply chain for them. Yes. I spent 10 years in the retail business. Before i set up pch. In retail there are very different types of retail. Theres destination and highspeed retail. When you look at typical cell phone carriers stores, that is a destination retailer. If someone walks into a destination retailer, they are going to get a cell phone. That is what they want. The products that we work with that is not what we want sold. You want them sold where there is a better experience. Today Consumers Want to have a great experience. They want the entire experience if they are going to brian buy a product. We think that radioshack is a company that can actually do it. Joe and it seemed there have been phenomenal to work with. They understand highspeed retailing as opposed to destination retailing. When actually walk into a high street store like radioshack they are more open to browsing. That is where we can actually create a much better environment for startups to display product. To do that first the most important thing for me was that we created a lien supplychain. For our startups, they wanted to put into his inventory into Distribution Centers around the world. If the capitalist is tied up in a warehouse, then it doesnt matter if it is ecommerce or retail. Some of these companies have 20 30 warehouses. For a started to actually enter inventory in there, it is a huge risk. We have one center in china three hours from factories where we work, where 90 of the consumers apply the product around the world. We wanted a lien supplychain. We did not want to be in Distribution Centers. When you can send an astronaut to the space center in six hours, you dont need Distribution Centers around the world. So from radioshack Distribution Centers, etc. Any weeks to take a piece from when we look at the supplychain, we look at their end to end supplychain. It can take three months. We are not doing it for Radioshack Stores in about six days to the store. Across the whole range of products. Not just our own products but other products. That has released quite a lot of capital because it is coming in set of having it kind of in the channels direct to the store. I remember used to work in fashion. For 10 years you did fashion before you did this. It is not very similar, is it . Is interesting because the convergence of fashion and technology is an interesting space. Especially to highway one companies. At the end of the day, all businesses want customers of some sort. Lets talk about highway one. Highly one is an incubator that you guys just recently started. You are making money hand over fist selling products for Companies Whose name begin with a and l and e. Why did you do something for hardware startups . Product innovation and hardware startups are challenging. The companys popular five years ago, and the pace of hardware innovation is very slow because you have technology roadmaps. Product roadmaps. That can really slow down the whole bringing in ideas ready for a consumer. We find that actually working with this generation of why not entrepreneurs, but actually venture into the hardware space, they want to go into the market. We find that in this space, and experience is a phenomenal innovator. They will ask is, why not . Why cant i think it direct from production line to the consumer . Traditionally companies would not ask that question. They have too much experience. They were too conservative good we like the whole disruption that comes with the incubator space and highway one. And the way entrepreneurs think. They have a fantastic cando attitude. Bringing a product to market is very lean, and it is one that i think any company today, for me this is probably one of the most dynamic things we have done as a company. It actually forces us to be able to react to the startups and to be able to when they say when can we do it . You have to think ok, when can we . You have to ask questions that Traditional Companies would not. If these guys are the big guys, the old guys are exhausted. They seem exhausted. Sony is on its last legs. Samsung is hanging in there. What is the future for those guys, making 500,000 or a million units. Are they going to be able to sell those . What is the way forward for them . For us, being nimble is so important. You have always talked about the money curve and being at the high end of the curve is where we are focused. Engineering and product development. We have retail distribution relationships and the block where we actually sell products. We have been at the bottom of that curve and very focused. For me, we enable startups to take a product from a production line to a consumer, with the same service as a big Company Without having the burden and overhead to do it. To me it is one of the great enablers for hardware. Tell me about some of the highway one guys you have been talking to. Blaze is a bike like that he featured. Did you buy her company . No. Please is out of london. Fantastic entrepreneur. It came to our access program. As did little bits. Again, a great entrepreneur. They have these great ideas for products. They actually take the products and come up with the ideas. We love to focus on companies that understand design and that really invest in designs. We work with companies passionate about designs and brand. They are passionate about the consumer experience. We manage the entire process so we can delivered a great deliver a great experience. It comes down to parties of one. Anywhere in the world we can actually monitor a product that is shipping and manage the experience. We do it with a company like blaze. They were very focused on design. Emily was very focused on making sure there was a phenomenal design. What other cool stuff did you get to see . This week we are shipping a product, a raspberry pie computer. Again, these were all products. Did you and bill young go out and write the rain . [laughter] weve got lively, watching a watch today, for helping parents if they are living alone. If you want to help them extend their time in their own homes so they dont have to go into care. His is one of the best products we have seen for models for working at home remotely and families feel comfortable they can stay connected to their parents. That is a great one that Just Launched a watch connected to the hub and the family. So if they fall down, they press a button . Yes. And it is one that you can wear, a stylish one. And an intelligent George Foreman grill . That is another great one. There are connected scales for baking. To an ipad. What you like better, making a lot of stuff for Big Companies are working with these guys . I just love the energy that comes from entrepreneurs. That is what is really feeling innovation. The Big Companies are really attracted to these startups that we work with. Sometimes they are very envious of the process that we take them through. You are absolutely certain you are not being paid by Big Companies to destroy Small Companies . [laughter] if you want to nod or whatever. We are champions of innovation. So you are helping everybody. I have a couple of last questions. If you look under your chairs, there are apple iphone 6 is there. Is what i wanted to say. Liam does some work for these guys. We need to discuss specifically the iphone 6. You have one in your pocket right now. Are you going to give me one . The iwatch, do you have one for me . Cant hear you. [laughter] how does it feel to hang out with will. I. Am . Another hardware fanatic. What are all of these big guys, bono and neil young getting into hardware for . There is a huge interest in hardware. When i was in the fashion industry, i would go to a fabric mill and by small buy small roles of fabric. You could make any garment you wanted from that role of fabric. When i got into technology, i was so far from what you could do. You could never you had to mwait months and years for new technologies. So we saw innovation where it was a downturn in engineers here going into the garages. They were starting to prototype products. They had we noticed that they had tools for the fabrics of technology were changing. Today you have connected modules , which is phenomenal. You have 3d printing and androids. Now you have the fabrics to actually prototype. Everyone says there was a renaissance in manufacturing. We think there was a renaissance in prototyping. That prototyping generally came out of Energy Around creativity of fee is physical goods. That is where we actually play and what we look for his entrepreneurs i want to build companies around that. That is where we are always looking for. Today, you can sketch a piece of hardware and then in a very short time, you can produce a prototype. You can somebody a prototype and it is far more convincing than a powerpoint presentation. Liam casey, Pch International. Thank you very much. Give this guy around of a pause. A plus. [applause] it would be kind of hard to believe almost that watching other people play video games could become a business where its almost a billion dollars. When i was a kid, they would have called that the couch. These guys have done it. Please welcome twitch founders, and our moderator. Thank you for joining us. The first question is, for the last couple of months i think the assumption was that you guys had been purchased by google. All of a sudden we get this news about amazon. How was getting that set up . Everyone assumed google is the way it was going to go down. It seemed like a natural fit. Why choose amazon . It is an easy assumption to make. Your natural assumption is. Amazon is really great fit for us for a couple of reasons. We pitched them, we talked to them about our future and talk to them. They pitched us on what they thought their future was. We got to get that meeting of the mines on gaming and where we got gaming was going and how we saw the future of the gaming industry. We really had the same vision. We also had a shared vision for it being twitch that did it. We assumed we would be a powerful independent rent. Amazon has a great track record of buying companies that way. Look at imdb which they bought 10 years ago. That mimi really except that that made me really excited to have that level of experience. What is the vision of what you think gaming will become . If you look at the history of gaming and go back to the very beginning, you have this very social atmosphere. People gained in arcades. He spent most of your time waiting are watching someone else play. That was the start. As you look at where video games have gone over time, we have gone from a social shared audience, interactive experience. It was to something you play at home. We see a reemergence of the arcade but at this scale that millions of times your than the arcade ever was. You can fill whole stadiums and get massive viewership online. We see that as the next phase of gaming. Single player, multiplayer twitch. We see it as a new mode you can interact with video games. Amazon really also sees that future. They see this feature off videogames as becoming increasingly networked and social. That was sort of the future that they bought into with us. Fun fact. The first story i wrote at techcrunch is how google would avoid ruining twitch. The issues gaming gamers had at the time, on reddit and twitter, was the content id system. Someone streaming play and playing their own music. A curated experience. They were worried that content id would he use all of their videos and ruined the appeal for their audience. Content id isnt necessarily a problem any any more now but as you guys are a multibilliondollar enterprise now it seems like it will be a big target. Are you guys letting people distribute copyrighted material . How will you guys deal with that . If you look at the situation they let you use upload videos through websites. Figuring we are in a fortunate position where because we have a very specific set of content we encourage, because we cannot limit that and stick with just gaming content we are urging and have to work with Gaming Companies excited to have people stream their games because they have a functional business model. It hasnt really been a problem surprisingly. We are a generalpurpose video platform. It comes up a lot. When you come with something that is specialized like twitch, you can really secure those rights. You do have a system in place for monitoring whether people are using copywriting material right . It impacts less than 20 of our videos. It is out there, but it is not so 20 of videos. You have a lot of people streaming. Then there are the big league of legends world tournaments. Where is the 20 impacting . Evenly distributed. Roughly. Once you get down to one or two streams, you cant get down to 20 . It is not let one is a fixed set of users. Video and demand is different from life. For variety reasons. Has you manage people expectations . I think everyone on the internet recognizes that music licensing is a real thing you have to deal with. They may not like it, but it is just a fact. So the other big thing when google was rumored to have acquired you guys, was the google plus profile. With that said, that is clearly not a problem now. Are you guys thinking of amazon ids . We are excited about the potential is we can work with amazon. There are a lot of obvious places about about synergy. Our attitude is not where we have to do xyz, now we had the opportunity. We can put our Engineering Team with theirs and get together. We can put together the music Licensing Team and have the opportunity to see if it will make sense for both companies. We will not force anything, though. Those are the back end of things. I think some people are concerned that twitch is going to becomepeople dont want twitch to become something where you see if the game is something you want to buy. I thank you become an native advertising are you going to become a native advertising platform . I would say we already are. We already are the place you go on the internet, our entire website and seven cents is a native advertising site for video games. We already tried. Our partners already use Amazon Affiliate links along with a variety of other places you can buy video games. They already sell videogames through their channels. We dont currently supported, but it is some thing where our partners have come to us and said, can you help me sell videogames more. I think we will be doing a lot more to aid our partners when they want to. There is a difference between that and becoming a storefront for amazon. If amazon wanted a storefront, they could build it themselves. But what they see is an Awesome Community of people who love video and gathered to celebrate that and celebrate the experience share the experience. If you make it into a storefront you destroy what is great about twitch. Am i going to be watching a stream and go on amazon later and say, you might be interested in this . We have not discussed data sharing like that. Who knows what the future brings but i dont think that i dont think it is that exciting. We start from, is it something that our users want and create a kid experience. If the answer is no, it is not that exciting. By the way, you can buy this right now with a discount, that can set that broadcasters want to offer. And viewers are probably like, we might go with that deal. But we will not force synergy data, i just dont think is that affected. Effective. It seems like amazon expects events again to get a lot bigger. Where is the growth going to come from . One of the most important things is, we have thrown a lot into pc. We have started growing a lot on console as well. The two xbox one and playstation for integration we did. Theres a huge room to grow on consoles because these new generations they dont have the problems the last generation did. We expend expect to see a lot of growth on consoles and continued growth on pc. We also expect growth on mobile as well. We are creating growth in the top mobile games as broadcasting from mobile platforms becomes more possible. To me it seems like that doesnt really appeal to me. What games do you play clash of cla ns . I was really interested in how i could build an empire better, and how i could make an army. Spend my research efficiently. There are people now who are in the top players, sharing strategies to play clash. And it is super popular. Just like any strategy game on the pc. It is not going to work for every game. If you play a game where you play your phone on your forehead and try to guess something, that is probably not going to translate very well. Let games like clash translate very well. But games like clash translates very well. As a result of that, you will see more and more mobile games on twitch. Along with the mobile, there is another big platform getting attention. Virtual reality. Especially with facebook buying oculus. Had you feel about Virtual Reality. Our rule of thumb is simple. Anywhere that you play video games, and had an experience, we want to enable you to share that. There are obviously technical barriers in sharing a Virtual Reality experience. But the players point of view is rarely the best view for watching. If you think about it like, you wouldnt watch football from ago pro strapped to the head of an nfl quarterback. Its much better to have a topdown view. Same thing is true for Virtual Reality. Eventually you might drop yourself into the world and watch it through Virtual Reality as well. Is likely that you will get a topdown view on a flatscreen, rendered separately from the Virtual Reality experience. We are exciting about that excited about that. Anyway there is gaming, we think twitch can be. The thing im thinking is, the consuls we had out today are struggling with getting 60 frames per second at 1080 p. Dealing with broadcasting and stream and maybe virtualreality, are those systems ready to accommodate rendering separately of you that is optimal for outside perspective . Knows. The new generation consuls work really well for that kind of stuff. They had true multicasting builtin, they have no trouble playing a game and streaming into twitch. I dont think there is a problem there, actually. The next generation is really prepared for streaming. With that said, going back to virtualreality and that experience, you talked about rendering separately. Is that something with mobile and the are you have to reach out to developers . Saying, lets integrate our technology and find ways to provide twitch experience technology . \ one is a viewing experience where you can enhance where it doesnt feel like you are watching with other people. Auditorium style, watching an eventbased content versus Game Companies that can go down the road and as you are watching a firstperson shooter, is not going to be the best viewing experience. Topdown may be good, but imagine being able to go into a game and move independently at your own collision. Volition. I think that is what is going to be fascinating. Couple that with the twitchbased phenomenon where the audience can interact, that will create cool experiences that dont exist today. I think we are pretty excited about it. I think the advances in virtualreality will come fast and quick. We will pay a lot of attention to that. The thing about that experience, like watching a Football Game with men and actually being in the space, it seems like that is the experience delivered natively. You are not necessarily watching a twitch stream. How do you get developers to be on board with making twitch a part of that experience and not trying to own it themselves . I think they are. You can watch and go to tv or watch as a spectator. What we built is something that is largely on top of that. It is more social experience. It reaches a broader audience. Part of the value of twitch is being able to reach people who dont play video games. Developing futures where features where it encourages people to watch content in addition to playing. That is what a lot of Companies Want to do with us. When you have those endgames spectator modes which are cool you dont have chat. You cannot do it from a web browser. You can watch it from your android. You cant stream it to your xbox or position. You have to be on the same platform. What we see is the wish it doesnt just come from one platform viewership doesnt just come from one platform. We actually found that when does get released, they grow the twitch audience because they become an entry point to learn about this. When you want the chat mode interactivity or want to get access to questions in a side channel next to the game, you come to twitch because we provide that experience. That is what we focus on. Speaking of chat and the community. That is a part of how you have grown. With that said there are people who stream and the feedback is not so positive. Also i dont know if you have been paying attention to gamer gate, but rhetoric that is not so favorable towards women is an issue in the gaming community. There are female streamers who are being abused. There are other reasons why someone would get heated on. How do you deal with that . You cannot police your community but , you cant make it so people dont want to stream. It is an inevitable problem when you let humans interact. It is unfortunate. But if that is the reality but that is the reality of interacting on the internet. It is a problem anyone faces. We get powerful tools to the stream or where they can moderate channels and set up special modes. They can prevent unverified accounts from chatting and control who has the right to speak in their room. It could be an experience they want to have. Some people like to have a freeforall. And they decided sent batteries set boundaries. Some people want a more controlled and polite experience. I would be one of those people. In that case, we encourage you to have moderators and force that as well. We continue to build more powerful broadcasters to create experiences they want to create. Along the same lines of and powering broadcasters, a lot of the celebrities i guess, actually have outside game sponsorships are getting scholarships. The thing about that, a lot of those sponges since are actually for competing stores that sell digital versions of games. Now amazon will compete with them. How do they feel about that . Amazon. Com cells xbox points. Sells xbox points. Amazon thinks about what they can do to attract the consumer. We will probably find a way to make it a winwin. Amazon is not the kind of company that believes in trying to set everyone else out and create this thing where no one outside her gets to sell anything to a customer. Ever gets to sell anything to a customer. I think that our view is we want to offer the best experience. I think that we really believe in, if it is good for the gamer in the long run, that is good for us. One of the things i noticed and it is pretty obvious, if you go to the main page it is like league of legends, 120,000 viewers. And then his it is a long tail of people streaming each game. In the long run do you worry about being overreliance on big competitive games . It is not quite as skewed as that. It might look like that. But there are 600 game flies game slots. And that represents a huge percentage of our viewership. But we have seen over time increasing diversity. Those gains continue to grow. Games continue to grow. But other games are growing faster. That means you are actually seeing more spread and what people are watching and more variety. We really courage everyone to think about what their audience is. When you have a big competitive title, your streaming outreach strategy is more obvious. If you are a game like minecraft, it takes more time to figure out how duly ill and awesome streaming experience how do we build an awesome streaming experience. We think there are huge potential in games like minecraft, and games that dont have a giant board component. Along with that, i guess were one running out of time. The world finals for league of legends is coming out. How many people do you expect to draw in. They have a pretty big barge across this year. Last year, online viewership was 32 million. This year, 60,000 physical attendees. The game has grown a lot. We did not think about International Growth as well. More and more people are paying attention to competitive gaming in general. It will be a pretty big number. There was a championship for nba finals game seven. Last year sony did a Big Playstation sponsorship. Can we look forward to anything for actual the super bowl gaming. Is there anything to look for . The industry is trending towards that. At any big, bigger sponsors want to get in on that. This year, who knows. All right. I will go about 15 minutes overtime. Thank you guys for coming. Walter, you have a new book coming out. It is called, the innovators. It is a book you started before you started writing about steve jobs. I started about 15 years ago when i was doing this digital media. I was surprised that i couldnt figure out how did the personal computer and original Mainframe Computers start, who came up with a logical circuit notions and how did the internet develop. It would be interesting to start gathering all of the people i was working with. Obviously steve jobs, and bill gates who helped with the personal computer. I started doing oral histories and interviews. I put it aside when i wrote a job a book about steve jobs. That made me more interested in going back to look at the intersection of the internet and personal computer. I have read the book. I finished it last night. I couldnt stop here it i really enjoyed it. I really liked the way you took it through you start way back. Is a lovely is an interesting and littleknown character. Lady byron was not particularly fond of lord byron. She has ada tutored only in mathematics as if that would be an antidote for becoming a romantic poet. She ends up with somebody who loves poetry and mathematics and technology. She is a symbol, as steve jobs was, as someone who can connect humanity to technology. Her father was a luddite a follower. But they taught them to do beautiful patterns. They said you can do that with calculating machines and do any sort of logical sequencing, not just of numbers but of music or words. She comes up with the notion of a computer. I wanted to start with her. Phonetically it pulls through, even with the personal computer. A lot of those concepts she laid out. They still ring true. Ada lovelace is the spiritual person who brings us at williams. One of the interesting things that happens when the web is created in the early 90s, we started pouring old wine into new bottles. We were taking a magazine and trying to make it a website. It was not what the internet was invented to do. But that was able to create bloggers. That was a simple way to bring a whole lot of people into the ability to publish. But also the ability to form communities. To me, we have the trifecta. That was something that helped take the web and make it more into an open Community Thing as opposed to something that publishing houses will pull out of magazines. You could publish a paragraph. You can interact with the readers. Anyone could do it. Suddenly you have this new form that took advantage of the network before we realize, what do we do. If i could ask, one of the themes of digital success is as you watch here. Those who can make something much simpler. It starts with the videogame when you take space wars, this wonderful videogame created at m. I. T. , and said we are going to make it simple. And steve jobs who was working the night shift would come to visit and they would do reg out and other things. And you watch every step of the way whether it is the ipod which is fanatic. You took sections of the book and published them publicly to let those people comment on them. Kind of like a proofreading experiment. One night, i was writing the part about the real creation of Steve Crocker for the ad. It was there so preachers ares it was theres the researchers could collaborate. I thought why dont i try to see how that works on the internet today . I had been involved in wikipedia. I was saying, what if you tried it with a book . In the early days, we had bbs and newsgroup. I said, how would those tools compare the ones we had today . Put we put a draft of a chapter out. I did it on seven or eight places. Medium has a collaborative tool. Some people from the old days were saying, no, we didnt drop acid at first, it was later that night. Dan bricklin said here is how we did visit count visivou count. It is still in the rudimentary stages. This is kind of interesting. Lets find a way to you via the royalties and the Payment System. Have an easy Payment System so that people together can create a book with the author acting as a curator instead of controlling the whole thing. Then, say weve gotten this book, put up your original code for the darwin kernel that you put in the operating system, or for new limits. Show me the pictures and codes. All of that can be put into a collaborative space with an author trying to keep the narrative going but giving all of this material that was crowd sourced and having away a way. Even tim bernerslee wanted to have systems where everybody could collaborate but you could allocate the resources. Do you see medium as something you have been making a transition in paying people to create content for you , which takes you away from the pure platform approach. You have also been hosting publications that are creating these collections of authors that are writing on a central theme. How do you see the future of medium as the collaboration tool that can enable authors to do things like this . Collaboration have been it seems the beginning. From a very Broad Perspective our goal is everyone to share their ideas and stories all over the web. , but how can we make the whole better than the sum of the part . This was one mechanism we created to do that. It occurred to us early on but the internet has been great historically at bringing people together to create things that are better than what they could do on their own. You see examples of this commercially and noncommercially with wikipedia and open source software. Other types of this content is often that someone can create a blog and be their own writer, editor, designer promoter, but it seems like we can get more done if we take advantage of the specialization of collaboration. How can we use medium to bring people together to create Something Better than they can on their own . That the theme we are continuing to iterate on. We look at medium as a platform. We are here to help spur that platform along. The internet developed with two strength. One was publishing. The other was community. Those have had somewhat of contention. You thought of it as a publishing platform. Joining the publishing and community platforms, that is where the power lies in the future. That is clearly what twitter is. I came to twitter with an informationspreading mindset. I think jack originally was looking at it more as people keeping in touch with each other. That has bloomed into something very powerful. If you look at any major platform today, it obviously combines those elements. With blogger, we didnt have common for a long time because who wants to talk to people . I dont want to talk to people on the internet, i just want to see their thought. It turns out, people want to talk to each other. One of the central themes of the book is this myth of the Silicon Valley creator. You dissected over and over as each of these major inventions pushed the web or computer forward and break apart to show that there were many ideas and collaborators and scooby ideas together and coming up with the one that will work to push the idea forward. I think its one of those things where, versus twitter, there is constant talk about who invented what. The truth is that a lot of people did. Those of us who are biographers know that we have a dirty little secret. We distort history. We make it seem like there is a guy in a garage that comes up with a lightbulb moment. In fact, most of the innovation and disruptions of the digital age were done collaboratively by team. That is why we dont quite know who invented the computer. There were four or five teams working on it. These were collaborative efforts. Like with the internet. Leaving aside the al gore jokes there is no person who can say the invented the internet. Nick wilson there was that exchange in the twitter book of nobody invented twitter. One of the cofounders said they invented it. The answer is no. Years and years ago, when i was just coming out of college, i wrote a book with a friend called the wise friend. I want to get back to that because collaboration is the key to creativity. Innovation is a team sport. We biographers have to get away from saying, here is the lone inventor. Going back to blogging, it was very clearly a series of incremental steps. I certainly didnt invent blogging. There is Little Things we stumble upon that become very common and become part of the fabric. They occur to most people working in the internet at the same time. It is the next adjacent thing to what we are all used to. It is much easier in the headline to say soandso created this. On the cover . Who do i put on the cover . It is actually more interesting to try to show for example on the computer here it computer. You talk about this guy vincent who was at iowa state in the basement of the physics will the. He created electronic circuit. He could never get the computer working. He gets drafted into the navy and nobody knows with this machine is and they throw it away. At the same time, there is a whole team at the university of pennsylvania led by eckert and motley with these six women who were doing a program. 20 engineers. They built something that worked. It shows that the lone inventor cant do it in the digital age. Even sometimes when you have a team, it doesnt work either. A team without a visionary. Vision without execution is just hallucination. If you have a lot of execution but you dont have a visionary driving it, then it becomes barren. When you look at the transistor driven by two or three visionaries, or the original computer, you have to have the right combination of visionaries and a team that can execute. And timing. If you are a startup trying to bring something to a market there are so many things today that you can look back 10 years ago and say, oh yeah, that company tried that but it was too early. Right seeds have to fall on fertile ground. Ripe seeds. There is one thing i saw you mention which was very interesting. You mentioned the concept of an environment or community convincing itself its revolutionary by saying it is over and over again. That reminded me a lot of Silicon Valley. Everybody gets up on stage and says their product is going to revolutionize tech. Du think they can self manifest that by saying it . The word innovation and the word disruptor have been so used that they sometimes get drained of their meaning. There is a wonderful book, i tried to read about the scientific revolution. The book is by steve shape and. It starts by saying that there is no such thing as a scientific revolution that here is a book about it. If you look at the way things are being changed by the confluence of personal computers, mobile devices, and network such as the internet, that has so disrupted things, it is like the combination of the steam engine, the loom, and the other things that created the industrial revolution. Thank you guys very much for coming up here to talk. Good to see you. Thank you. Friday on cspan, and discussion about the obama administrations new cuban policy and what it could mean for relations with cuba. We will hear from the executive director of the center for free cuba. Here is a preview
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