People in those communities with urban wood goods, for example, we have our sellers as they scale up. Theyre making money and doing well but also submitting orders to smaller manufacturers in their area, which is creating jobs. I really think everything we do is because it is based on that principle of fairness that i talked about, everything we do is intended to build a really healthy economy. And, again, is the mission about more fulfilling and lasting world, were not saying etsy is the place to sell more stuff. We want all of the mechanisms in the company to make the world better, not in the trite Silicon Valley make the world better, because i think that can be overused. But making things, selling things promoting community. Those are things that really do make the world better. In the work you do and the technology you put together, what is the part of it thats difficult that nobody from the outside fully appreciates . You know, every job has something thats harder than anybody on the outside knows. What is it for you . I think in talent. Theres so much happening. You know, a new app launches every day, like dozens of apps, hundreds. And there are people building those things. So assembling a company when everyone is looking for the same talent and running that company is really difficult. I think because my background was in technology, and i know how the internet works and all that kind of thing, there are some days i wake up and im surprised that the internet actually works. [laughter] because in some ways, its very patched together. So i think the hard part of the job is just every day 24 7, making the company work, technologywise and talentwise. We have one minute left. Were here in d. C. Weve heard about all the things difficult here. If you were plummeted into some Governmental Organization now and could apply what you have learned to making things function better here, what would it be . I have to pause for a moment, even though we have a minute. I think its really to for me, its really about addressing fear. I think theres a fear of technology in washington what ive seen. Theres kind of a superstructure of Government Contractors and all this sort of thing. What i would do is really change the way software is built in the government, to be more like what were doing in new york, more like Silicon Valley. I think its notable to me that, you know i hate to bring up healthcare. Gov but when you look at healthcare. Gov, it took a group of Silicon Valley people top technologists to come in and fix it. Lets build things the right way so people dont have to come in and fix it. With those encouraging words please join me in thanking chad dickerson. Next, a Washington Ideas Forum discussion with mike. He talks about the latest trends in mobile technology and the evolution of the flip board app which provides customized news and information feed. This is about 15 minutes. [applause] so weve been told if theres time at the end, we each have to do 20 pushups in front of you. The bar is pretty high. Mike is one of the most successful serial founders in Silicon Valley. I want to go to the founding of flip board. So the ipad launched in 2010. Flip board launched not after. The experiment at the creation of flip board, it was a really interesting one. As i understand it, it was if the web was washed away and you had to rebuild it from scratch start the web from scratch what would you do . That was the experiment behind flip board. Can you talk about the conclusions, the convictions that that thought experiment led you to and that played eut in out in flip board . Yes. This all happened, when your writing an email, great email. Youve got everything right. Youre about to hit send and the computer crashes. You lose the email. And youve got to write it again. But when you write it the second time its better. You know, you realize, well, i probably could have done this a little bit better, could have been more concise here. And it is something better. That was the thinking around how i approached my next venture. I wasnt even sure i was going to start a company. I was just doing what i loved following pickens advice, just doing what i loved, Building Products thinking about, you know technology. And, you know, the big thing for me was i felt that content stories were being lost on the web. When you flip through the atlantic or national geographic, you have a narrative. Theres a sense of pacing. Theres a beauty to it. You have beautiful photography beautiful, you know, typography. There are inset maps, things that kind of guide you along. You dont have any of that on the web. Increasingly over time, its getting better. But back when we were starting flip board, five years ago, four years ago, the web looked like it was frozen in the mid90s. And so we wanted to say, well look, you know, if you were going to build a new web today if you were going to build the web today, you would optimize it for these mobile touch screen devices. That was one of the key things we wanted to do. The reason why magazines are so beautiful, in part, is they dont have to have lots of controls. You dont have to have a menu bar and navigation bar. You just have great content and you use your finger to flip through pages of that content. That was something we really wanted, that beautiful presentation. With a touch screen device, you can have that kind of beauty. The other really important thing is the power of people. You know, people know how to tell a story. People know what makes a great story. And we wanted to leverage social, the idea that the web is becoming a not just a connection of an article to another article, which is a very powerful thing but now its a person to an article. Its a person to another person. A person to a group of people. So you have this new curated web that i dont think we, as an industry, have even begun to grasp how powerful it is. So the things are visual and social essentially navigation of content. Its almost five years since the launch of flip board. What do you know now that you didnt know when you were imagining what the web should be, almost five years ago . Probably the biggest thing is the importance of people and machines interwoven together to create great content. And the second thing would be the importance of structure to content. What i mean by that is, today you know you have social media. Theres just this ongoing stream. Its an infinite stream, people posting things endorsing content. Thats very powerful. However, you know, Great Stories help influence people, Great Stories move the world forward. Great stories have an end. Theres a beginning, middle and end. And in this world of infinite streams, there is no end. When is the end . You have a sense of timelessness when everything is always realtime. How do you allow people to step back and think about things and have that context to understand what really matters . And so thats something that we really believe in. And i really want to try and figure out how to enable that to happen. Again, you have that in print. You just dont have that in social media. So that sense of, you know, people cricketing content contributing content but in a way that can have more of a narrative form to it, i think is really important. So you have an interesting aggregate view on some really kind of fundamental questions. The most fundamental is, how do people spend their free time . How do people spend their waking hours . Because you see people using your app you actually know when theyre awake and when theyre reading and across the world you see patterns of things. So what are some of the most interesting and surprising takeaways about how human beings use their free time or at the very least, what their Reading Habits look like . One of the most shocking things is how much people use their phone to read. People spend a lot of time on their phone reading. It can be a 50page article and theyll read it, tb its a good if its a good article. The other thing thats been encouraging has been the amount of great longform journalism that people want to read. You know, the problem is, its a little too hard to filter out the noise. You get distracted by other noise before you get to that great content. But people do want to be able to read that. Those are two observations. People will read journalism on the phone if its presented well. Thats tricky to do, but if you can do that, i think thats a pretty big deal. Whats your watch strategy . Ha ha will people read longform journalism on an apple watch or the samsung watches . Are you thinking about presenting content on watches . Not so much presenting content but perhaps presenting moments when you might want to look at content on your phone more contextual moments. Theres a variety of things there. Theres the obvious like, okay, theres breaking news. You might want to know about that and read it. But also the not so obvious. You might be in a location, standing near the white house. And you might get a notification that, you know, theres something really interesting about this right now, this place that you should know about. So it comes into your watch and leads you to your phone . To your phone. Theyre very much linked together. I think theres a tremendous amount of linkage between the phone and watch that i think is going to be critical. We should talk for a second about tablets. So flip board was essentially launched with the ipad. Whats really interesting is that ipad sales at least are falling. So in the last quarter, they were down Something Like 12 from a year earlier. There are people now who are saying that in between the larger and larger smartphones the tablets and the lighter and lighter laptops like the mac book airs. What is the purpose of a tablet computer . What is the purpose of an ipad . How do you see that . Well, tablets are still growing quite fast. They may not be growing as fast as they were a year ago. Part of that probably is due to the fact that you have some larger screens on phones now and phones are starting to become more like tablets. But also part of that is the tablet from a form factor point of view, hasnt achieved a fundamental breakthrough. Its gotten thinner. The new ipad is really a beautiful product, incredibly thin and light. But i think there are still opportunities for it to break through further. You know, to have it feel more like paper. And i think when that happens youll see that there will be a continuation of that tablet form factor. But the idea of a touch screen is with us now everywhere. And i think youre going to see that on laptops and Computing Devices that will be able to be used as a tablet or laptop. Youll have phones. So these worlds are blending together. I want to ask you about a few companies that you work with very directly. One of them is apple. One of the big concerns or questions, when tim cook took over, is apple going to be as good at products, at design, in the poststeve jobs era . Weve now had a few years of this, the latest raft of products. Whats your verdict on that . Oh, i think apple is alive and well and thriving. And, you know, there are a lot of great product leaders at apple that, you know, are still there. You know johnny being a good example but there are many others. I think tim has done an amazing job at marshaling the creative energy, the innovation, in a way that yields great products time and time again. And so yeah. I think theyre doing incredibly well. Facebook. Uhhuh. So so much of the focus on how people consume content is around facebook. Right. You have Media Companies that have sprung up, whose strategies really are built primary around distribution through facebook, in some cases through other peoples content. Facebook is the mechanism for the consumption of content. How do you think of how do you see facebooks involvement with Media Content Consumption right now . Well, its evolving. Theyre certainly in a significant role, as is twitter linkedin. Social media in general and social networks are a fundamental part of how media is discovered right now particularly by millennials. I mentioned the social web, this idea that people and content are intricately connected together if ways that were just never before possible. Facebook is a big component of that. But theyre not the only one. I think its important that there are multiple, you know, places like this where this curated web is developing. Do you think its distorting, that content is being created to play to facebooks algorithms . Theres always a risk of that. You know theres also, for example, the socalled linkism. The headlines that are written specifically more google to pick pick up in search results. Youre always going to have a little bit of that. But this is where the great journalists are separated from the ones that arent so great. I think the ones who really have something to say, the publishers publications who have a strong point of view and really believe in the power of editorial great journalism are going to be able to thrive. And so facebook is if you know how to use it, consider very helpful, as can twitter linkedin, flip board. Across the board, you need to think comprehensively. Its just kind of how the web works now. I think one of the most important elements is that its easy for you to fall into the trap that, you know, everyone used to come to our site and look at our content structured in our way. There will be people who will do that. But also you need to be able to think about your content in an atomic way. You know these atomic units that travel throughout this curated web. There will be a group of people who are really passionate about something. For example, on flip board, i found a magazine this morning called middle east for the perplexed. Its a guy hand picking great content from around the world about the middle east, to help explain it to normal people without all the hype. Thats a really big deal. That idea that that person is forming a new node in this curated web, with a collection of all this great content. So for publishers, its really important to think about that. They might be on facebook or twitter or linkedin or all of the above. Thats just how the web works now. There was some new research in august. What was concluded was that the average u. S. Smartphone user downloaded zero apps. Ha ha per month. In a world how do you reach new users when people arent using arent