Today on Decoder, I’m talking with Peter Kafka, who is chief correspondent at Business Insider and host of Channels, a podcast about the media industry. And it’s a big week for the media industry — Comcast just announced that it’s splitting itself up, into the Comcast broadband company and the NBCUniversal entertainment company. That’s after […]
We’ve got another special episode of Decoder today, recorded at the Cannes Lions advertising festival in the South of France. I’m talking with Ali Berman and Raina Penchansky, who run the Creators division at United Talent Agency. UTA is an enormous talent agency. Half the people you’ve ever heard speak or perform or who show […]
Before Keurig, the coffee in your office was almost certainly terrible. Old, burned, made by someone who would rather poorly eyeball than properly measure. Just altogether gross. After Keurig? You could make your own coffee, a cup at a time, exactly when you needed it. The single-cup brewer was an elegant solution to an extremely […]
For decades, to be a gamer was to accumulate a lot of stuff. Consoles, controllers, accessories, weird VR gloves that never worked properly, but mostly the games themselves. Over the years, games have come in every shape and size you can imagine. And now that era appears to be ending. On this episode of The […]
We’ve got a special Decoder today — I had the chance to talk with Amy Lanzi, the CEO of Digitas North America, in front of a live audience at the Uber Villa at the Cannes Lions advertising festival in the South of France. I know, it’s a hard gig, but I do it for you. […]
It’s time for our annual Fourth of July grill episode here at Decoder. This is when we invite the CEOs of outdoor cooking companies onto the show to explain just how their businesses kind of look like every other business. And this is a very special edition. Today I’m talking to Roger Dahle, the CEO […]
The founding story of Nest is pretty much a perfect tech myth. A legendary product maker (in this case, Tony Fadell) helps create one of the most successful products ever (the iPhone) and then rides off into the sunset to enjoy the rest of his life, only to have an experience that drags him back […]
Meta is, by and large, a company built on other companies’ ideas. It has almost perfected the strategy: wait for a new platform or social mechanic to take off, then either buy or clone it, put it next to Meta’s unmatched user base and advertising engine, and watch the money pile up. Well, the next […]
Today, I’m talking with Jack Conte, the CEO of Patreon. Jack last joined me on the show almost exactly five years ago, in the summer of 2021, and a lot has changed on the internet and in the creator landscape since then, so I was very excited to talk to him again, especially since his […]
If you had a Roomba, especially in the early days of the robot vacuum, it was in many ways a fairly unsophisticated machine. It would just bump around your house, looking for something to suck up, until its battery died or its (way too small) tank filled up. Not that it mattered, though. You probably […]