Decoder with Nilay Patel

Today Nilay Patel talking to Daniel Dines, the founder and CEO of UiPath, one of the biggest automation companies in the world. But not the automation you might think; UiPath sells software automation, or what consultants call “robotic process automation” so they can sound fancy and charge higher fees. UiPath and other software automation companies have a different approach to solving issues with...

Tony Fadell was instrumental in the development of the iPod and iPhone at Apple and then co-founded Nest Labs, which kicked off the consumer smart home market with its smart thermostat in 2011. Tony sold Nest to Google for $3.2 billion in 2014 and eventually left Google. He now runs an investment company called Future Shape.  Links: Inside the Nest: iPod creator Tony Fadell wants to reinvent the t...

Cindy Cohn is the executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, or EFF. If you’re an internet user of a certain age like me, you know the EFF as the premiere civil liberties group for the internet. The EFF has fought pitched battles against things like government surveillance, digital rights management for music and movies, and government speech regulations that would violate the First...

Alan Yeung is a professor of entrepreneurship at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the former head of the Foxconn project in Wisconsin. If you don’t quite remember, the Foxconn project in Wisconsin was announced in 2017 as a massive deal to build the first “Generation 10.5” LCD factory in North America. It was also one of the first big moments in the Trump presidency, complete with President...

Chris Dixon leads crypto investing at the storied Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, or a16z. He’s responsible for leading funding rounds for Coinbase, which went public about a year ago, the NFT marketplace OpenSea, and Yuga Labs, which is behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club among others. He is also a prolific user of Twitter, where he posts lengthy threads about crypto and web3...

Julia Alexander was the perfect guest to come on our show and talk about the state of the streaming industry – we’re a couple years into the huge shift to streaming entertainment in Hollywood, and it’s clear the streamers are here to stay. Apple just won the Oscar for Best Picture for a film it bought out of Sundance called Coda. Amazon now owns MGM. Netflix is investing in games and hinting at ad...

For this episode, I’m talking to Steve Aoki. He is a superstar DJ, producer, record label owner, and prolific entrepreneur. Steve has been part of the music industry since 1996, so he’s been through a lot of these big tech transitions, and now he’s heavily invested in another, with Web3, the Aokiverse. It involves selling tokens and NFTs and, over time, is meant to be part of the metaverse. Becaus...

Aparna Chennapragada is the chief product officer at Robinhood, the popular stock and crypto trading app. And we have some news to discuss: Robinhood is launching a new cash card today that allows people to spend money directly out of their Robinhood account and set up various plans to automatically invest by rounding up purchase amounts to the nearest dollar and putting the difference in various...

Margrethe Vestager is one of the driving forces behind tech regulation worldwide. Appointed as the European Commission’s Commissioner of Competition in 2014 and an executive vice president in 2019, she’s pursued antitrust cases against Apple, Google, Meta (formerly Facebook), and Amazon among others. Now, with the EU on the verge of implementing a new antitrust law called the Digital Markets Act,...

Matt Mullenweg is the CEO of Automattic, the company that owns WordPress.com, which he co-founded, and Tumblr, the irrepressible social network it acquired from the wreckage of AOL, Yahoo, and Verizon. Matt’s point of view is that the world is better off when the web is open and fun, and Automattic builds and acquires products that help that goal along. Links: Exclusive: Automattic CEO Matt Mullen...

Today I’m talking to Eben Upton, the CEO of Raspberry Pi, a fascinating company that makes beloved tiny hackable computers that are extremely inexpensive. They’re also some of the only readily available computers that are designed to be tinkered with. They’re not heavily locked down, and using one requires learning how a computer actually works. And that’s the entire point: Eben told me the idea o...

This week I sat down with Patrick Spence, the CEO of Sonos, and Eddie Lazarus, his Chief Legal Officer. I wanted both Patrick and Eddie on the show to talk about when a company like Sonos makes the decision to head to the courts and increasingly, Congress. Sonos has long accused other tech giants of stealing its tech, but in 2019 it actually sued Google for patent infringement. Sonos recently won...

I’m going to let you in on a Decoder secret: at the end of last year, I tasked our producers with finding better ways for us to cover crypto and Web 3.0 on Decoder. I don’t think it’s any secret that I’m fairly skeptical of crypto, but I want to come by that skepticism honestly—and on the flip side, I want to make sure to see its opportunities and benefits clearly. We’ve already done episodes on B...

Bärí Williams is a legal and operations advisor to tech companies who focuses on AI and diversity. Her credentials are rock solid: Bärí was lead counsel at Facebook working on various projects, including internet connectivity efforts and diversifying the company’s supply chain. After that, Bärí went to work at StubHub, an AI startup studio called All Turtles, and a data and identity analytics comp...

Lauren Williams is the co-founder and CEO of Capital B, a new nonprofit media company dedicated to news for Black audiences. Capital B launched on January 31st, with both a national news site and a local newsroom dedicated to Atlanta – and they plan to expand to more cities over time. Links: Capital B Recode Media Podcast Tired Of The Social Media Rat Race, Journalists Move To Writing Substack New...

It’s an interesting time to talk to someone in the business of helping people get new jobs — we’re still fully in the middle of the pandemic-driven Great Resignation, and a record 4.5 million people quit their jobs in November 2021, and it doesn’t seem to be slowing down. But that’s exactly what Career Karma and CEO Ruben Harris are doing. Links: Career Karma A record 4.5 million workers quit thei...

Regular listeners of Decoder know car CEOs love coming on the show. There is a lot of change in the car industry, a lot of big ideas about how to manage that change, and a lot of big problems to solve: the transition to electric vehicles, the fact that cars are basically turning into rolling smartphones, how to make self-driving work safely, and more. And, of course, we always end up talking about...

Links Dieselgate coverage on The Verge VW vows to build massive electric car charging network across US Electrify America announces doubling of charging network with 1,800 stations and 10,000 chargers Transcript https://www.theverge.com/e/22652357 Credits Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Today’s episode was produced by Creighton DeSimone, and Jackie...

Cristiano Amon is the president and CEO of Qualcomm, and he’s always been a relentless cheerleader for what mobile computing can do for people — especially if that mobile computing is powered by Qualcomm’s chips. Links: Apple supplier TSMC confirms it’s building an Arizona chip plant Intel will make Qualcomm chips in new foundry deal The Verge 5G landing page Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chip...

In this special, Thursday episode of Decoder, Andrew Hawkins spoke with secretary of transportation Pete Butigieg ahead of his speech at CES 2022. 2021 was an eventful year for Buttigieg, the youngest and arguably the most notable person to take on the role of transportation secretary in many years. Congress passed President Joe Biden’s $1 trillion infrastructure plan, which will provide billions...

Logitech is one of those ubiquitous companies — it’s been around since 1981, selling all kinds of important things that connect to computers of all shapes and sizes: mice, keyboards, cases, cameras, you name it. Nilay Patel spoke with Logitech CEO Bracken Darrell about how the company met increased demand during the pandemic, whether that changed his plans to shift to a services company, and how t...

So today I’m talking to Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, about one of the hardest problems at the intersection of tech and policy right now: the question of how to regulate social media platforms. Everyone seems to think we should do it – Democrats, Republicans – even Facebook is running ads saying it welcomes regulation. It’s we...

John Hanke is the CEO of Niantic, a company that makes the wildly popular Pokemon Go mobile game in partnership with Nintendo and the Pokémon company. Pokemon Go, and its predecessor Ingress, are now the largest and most successful augmented reality games in the industry, which means John has long been at the forefront of what we’ve all started calling the metaverse—digital worlds that interact wi...

Jonah Erlich is one of the core members of a group called ConstitutionDAO, a group that raised $47 Million to try to buy one of the original copies of the United States Constitution at an auction held by the high-end auction house Sotheby’s. Links: ConstitutionDAO Endaoment Crypto collective raises $27 million to bid for rare copy of US Constitution ConstitutionDAO loses $43 million auction of rar...

Kat Norton is a Microsoft Excel influencer. She has over a million followers on TikTok and Instagram, where she goes by the name Miss Excel, and she’s leveraged that into a software training business that is now generating up to six figures of revenue a day. That’s six figures a day. And she’s only been doing this since June 2020. Nilay Patel talks to her about how she built the business, how she...