I Am Anil Dash and This Is How I Work

Glitch wants to do for web apps what YouTube did for videos, Flickr and Imgur for images, and Twitter for bad opinions: make them easier to create, share and embed and give them a chance to reach the right audiences or even go viral. I spoke with CEO Anil Dash about Glitch, his career, his online exposure, and how and why to run a socially responsible company. This is a microhistory of how the Internet took over the world, how the world destroyed the Internet, and how we brought back both.

Tell me about your past and how you got here.

I grew up in rural Pennsylvania and in junior high I started making grading charts for my neighbor who was a local college professor. In the 90s, if you knew how to hook up a printer, you could get the job done. It was either hamburger flipping. A guy hired me to help set up networks and printers. I started the company the day after graduating from high school, he co-founded me. This is how I got into the technique.

We said, “What do you want? We got it ”[view of the store]. I wanted to install Windows 95 for people in some places. Some places write non-standard software to update systems. I was in the construction [works], so we created the software for the construction crews.

My parents had a house that they rented out when I was a kid. And tenants invariably threw it in the trash. So as a child, I had to build a lot. I would do anything: hang siding, install drywall, plumbing, electricity and HVAC. So I kind of came in handy. And my business partner was a reseller of a construction accounting application, which is the least attractive thing in the world. But I got carried away, that’s how I learned business. He was a great salesperson to this day and he gave me sales training at the age of 17. It struck me, it [not] the stereotype of the schematic used car salesman, it was the solution to the problems. It was not at all an agreement.

I would work with these construction companies. When I finished installing the printer driver or something, they asked, “Can you swing a hammer?” Are you skinny, can you run the docks and pull the cable? It was an odd hybrid, but it was great. I had a client list in four states.

So I did it for seven years. I learned how to run a business. I learned that tax filing tires me as hell. It was college for me.

[One] company didn’t switch to Windows, everyone switched to Windows 95. I offered a software migration contract, four months, 25 thousand. They said yes. I [felt like] just hit the jackpot. I put on a suit, went there, broke them and got it. It was a dream.

I got clients in New York, I spent more time in the city, and I always wanted to be here. In the summer, when I was 21, I moved here. Perhaps the girl was involved. I didn’t know anyone, and the company wasn’t doing well. I was not a master at this. It was cruel then. I got a sublease in Spanish Harlem, was almost broke, the company went to the side.

I started getting a job. Pinpoint comas began to arrive. There was a startup doing online video streaming for music videos. It was a farcical title, but I was the CTO. For most of the day, I’ve transcoded the video to Quicktime, Windows Media Player, and RealPlayer. Building systems for this. We went to labels and put their videos on the internet. At that time, the clips were about 20 seconds long. You cannot put all videos over a dial-up connection. But I built a pretty good system and learned how to program in PHP.

It’s funny, but it was a video portal like YouTube. Looks like a bunch of video clips. They weren’t all videos and you should have had a player, the experience was not good. But it was super, super instructive. Previously, it housed a film studio. They moved into the dot-com world because everyone was. So it was terribly wrong, but it was very educational. I lived in Manhattan, earning 26 thousand a year. Not the best way to live. But I was here and tried my best.

BMG Records was one of the big players at the time, and their office was right in Times Square, overlooking the plaza. We’re on the top floor of this large conference room. I have to go to the meeting with the big gate, but I am obviously a child, so I sit at the back of the room and sit quietly. Finally, they asked questions. I asked what are you doing with Napster? He said what is Napster?

At that moment I thought, my God, they don’t know anything about the Internet. We’re fucked. I have to get out of here. And still this place exploded.

I made my way to the Village Voice concert. His 1999 album has a Prince song called “All the critics love you in New York.” I figured it was about Village Voice. So I saw a banner in front of the Voice office in Cooper Square, and I was in a hurry to get in as a web developer. I had to work a lot with the editors, people who were observing the events. For example, what do you need if you need to say who plays in Webster Hall? How can I specify that they will play every Thursday for three weeks, but not on odd weeks? I was really interested in the technical details.

On the second day I was there, Craigslist was launched in New York.

One of my main responsibilities was making lists of apartments that they earned most of their money from. At the time, I didn’t understand what this violation of protocol was, but I went to my boss’s boss and asked what are you going to do with Craig? And she asked who Craig was?

I [thought], I’m sure they have it. They will understand this. So I bowed my head. September 11 happened two months later. So I thought, I’m not going anywhere, I’m not going to mess with it. I squatted down.

The following month, the number of secret lists fell [about] 70 percent. [They blamed] the attacks. I thought that people still want an apartment! That same month, friends of mine launched Movable Type [blogging publishing system]. I’ve been blogging.

How did you recognize them?

The blogging world was small. You could just see anyone doing it. I started in 99. [Twitter, Medium & Blogger Co-Founder] Ev Williams asked me to maintain a list of interesting blogs on Blogger. So I looked at new blogs all the time. I saw a site called Dollar Short that was done by [Movable Type co-founder] Mena Trott. It was an incredible letter, an incredible design.

And as a developer, I tested the beta version of [Movable Type]. It came out and it was a hit. I thought you guys weren’t charging enough, you’re going to run over yourself. I remember going home from Voice at the end of the day and making spreadsheets like how to charge for it, how many users … I just started helping them informally.

A couple of months later, Nick Denton contacted us. Said, “I run a gossip blog and I want to show you something.” He asked Mina to build a Gawker. [He] asked [designer and blogger] Jason Kottke to make a logo. Mena did everything for Gizmodo and Jason did the designs for Gawker.

We met at the KGB bar on the Fourth. Nick had an IBM laptop with a dim screen three inches thick. Back then, no one took their laptop to the bar. He had all these mockups and snapped them. He had a Gawker secret url.

[In The Voice] I went downstairs and found [gossip columnist] Michael Musto. I showed him the Gawker. He wasn’t rude, but he’s like, yes, I’ve been doing this shit for years. I’m like, they’ll update about five times a day. He’s like, “Good.”

Well, things didn’t go as I thought! Confused, I went upstairs. Oh shit, now I’m at odds with this tough guy. He was very polite, but indifferent, so what? I think I went deeper into explaining what a web blog is without touching on its cultural significance.

Around the same time, a MetaFilter meeting took place at the Bowery. Nick was there, and [eventual Gawker founding editor] Liz Spiers was there. She wrote an economic blog. And I introduced them.

I started working on Movable Type because I got fired from Voice. I knew they were trying to get funding and none of us knew what venture capital was. They started paying me out of their pockets. I helped them put together a presentation and they raised money from Joy Ito.

This Round A was $ 600,000 when valued after receiving $ 1.8 million in cash. (Our Glitch round last fall was $ 30 million.) And I thought 600k was all the money in the world. I think we immediately sent $ 400,000 of that to Dell to buy servers. Amazon Web Services did not exist. So we didn’t see any of this. The company already had positive cash flow, it should have been because funding wouldn’t do shit.

I was there at Six Apart [owner of Movable Type] for seven years and it was crazy. I [moved] to San Francisco. Obama just took office. I ended up creating a nonprofit researching how social media will influence politics. The MacArthur Foundation gave us half a million dollars. I started working again with [Lifehacker founding editor] Gina Trapani. Nick said he was looking for a developer for [Gawker Media Platform] Kinja, so I introduced them.

But we created a non-profit organization, Gina was the lead technologist, and I led the interaction. We went to the White House, to the State Department, everywhere to show that social media influences politics. At the White House, they said that we can’t go to Facebook because we have Internet Explorer 6. It was a very Wild West.

The open source project became popular, so we turned it into a startup, built a crowdfunding campaign. At the same time, I founded the consulting company Activate. I could never have imagined management consulting, but the idea that it is based on the concept of competence, that you are here because you know your shit, was exciting to me. I learned a lot about rigor of analysis and these MBAs that could break things down.

We’ve worked with Dropbox, whatever. Did a ton of work with Condé Nast. And that echo was: when we returned Gourmet Magazine, we had Paul Ford there, we had Liz Spiers there.

By doing this in tandem with a startup, I’m doing pretty well, but not that good. The death knell was that we depended on platforms to give us access to data. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. They never said no, they just dragged us along. “We’re going to bring this API back to you in three months, two months.” We will not be able to scale the business if features disappear.

We switched to Makerbase, which was the IMDb for apps. It was cool, I wish it existed, people still want it to exist. But Gina burned out. And she went to work with Paul at Postlight. On Monday April 2016, we spoke and said that [the company] was over. On Tuesday, I wrote to our investors. I thought the worst [reaction] would be for them to say, “You fucking why did you lose our money?”

On Wednesday, I found out that the worst part is that you get an automatic reply: “Thanks for your message. I am not looking at my email right now. If it’s important, call my administrator. ” Oh, they don’t really give a damn about what makes me crazy. The prince died on Thursday of that week.

I thought … “I don’t like this.”

Two weeks later, Joel Spolsky called and said that I had something to show you. Previously, he said twice that it is Trello and Stack Overflow. I arrived at the office, saw the prototype of Gluck. It looked pretty damn cool. I said, “You need to do blah blah blah,” this list. “You have to be able to remix. Not a fork, but a remix. “

Joel said, “You should come and run this thing.” I thought, “I just killed a startup, I won’t do this anymore. No way. “So six months later, I joined us.

Joel and Michael were very busy running other companies. And after a year or two, we moved to headquarters, sold the business that had been bread and butter for the previous 17 years, including a third of the company that left with it, which was very emotional.

We renamed the product Glitch, renamed the company Glitch, and then attracted the largest consumer A round of funding in New York last year. These were our first one and a half years. And while we did that, Glitch took off and people created the first million apps. And we turned the team from being almost 100% homogeneous to being as representative as possible.

Let’s talk about what you are famous for now. You are known to be a tech guy who loves Prince, you write, you are involved in politics.

My public identity is somewhat incoherent. Most of the people who know me know me because of social media. There is one way to be a public intellectual. Or a writer. Which is the closest thing to being known.

Plus I have a strange obsession with pop culture. People know I like the Prince. I think by normal standards I would be a huge Star Wars fan. Until recently, I would have been a huge fan of Michael Jackson.

One last thing: I am the CEO of a very successful startup that has raised $ 30 million and has dozens of employees and millions of users. This is the part I’m least known for!

People are surprised to see me in a room when I am in a room full of activists. People are still surprised to see me in a room at a tech conference! They are like, “I see you talking shit on Twitter and also calling tech leaders and venture capitalists, so how could you get an invite?”

I have been writing more visible things for a longer time than many people who consider themselves to be writers. But as a writer, no one represents me. Which is moderately frustrating. No wonder, but I had a column at Wired.

For twenty years I was angry that [ Postlight co-founder] Paul Ford wrote something before me. And not only that he is there, but he is also a better writer than me. But this is a writer. Paul is a writer, I am a writer. But he is also the CEO of the company!

Let’s talk about Gluck. We live in this time when all the famous startups agree that they are mostly bad for the world, and if we use them, we are trapped. There is a correlation between wanting to be a big startup and dark things.

Even intentionally destructive [things]. What, say, Uber is doing to the job market is blatant and deliberate.

And people, even those who know him, can openly say that the Twitter CEO is terrible and supportive of the Nazis – even if we use the product because there is no other game in town.

In technology, this is generally accepted: we have a narrative that all large, successful or notable people are corrupt and complicit. And still.

Previously, Glitch was called Fog Creek Software. They have created Stack Overflow and Trello over the years. Billion dollar companies were spun out of this company even before it became Glitch. Trello came out for $ 425 million. Before that, they only took a tiny bit of funding, so it was a very successful exit. They were sold to Atlassian. These guys are pretty brooding too. I mean, I don’t like using Jira, but this is not an ethical glitch. And I really enjoy using Trello.

And all of these companies together that I just talked about are probably worth $ 50-100 billion. And half a dozen different CEOs, many of whom are white, straight men from the CIS countries, and they all made public statements about what they are going to allow on their platforms, what they are going to include, how they are going to make their money. All of their business models are: “We sell goods and services in exchange for money”, not “We secretly trade your shit behind your back, steal your data.” But this is not a story. Uber is. And the worst parts of Facebook and Twitter or whatever.

Why isn’t Slack’s success story as successful as Slack? Or Trello, GitHub – companies are very large, very influential and do not pretend to be destructive.

This literally limits my ability to lead a technology company. Other tech events want me to come and say “Facebook is bad!” than want me to come and tell about Gluck. Although there are about 3 million apps on Glitch. Glitch has about 50 percent more apps than Apple’s App Store.

In a sense, infrastructure will never be as cool as a consumer-facing application. This is partly why I am leaning towards making Glitch a consumer app as well as a business development tool. The industry needs, the world needs an example of a technology company that … our business model for Glitch is very simple. It is very, very easy to create applications with Glitch. So use it at work to build apps. Then pay for it. Everyone loves that it makes sense.

And then we say, by the way, that because it makes it easier to build applications, there is also a consumer side. You want to create apps for your friends, or for a fun art project, or because you are an activist, or whatever. They are all there too. This does not bother anyone.

I’m trying to contribute to creating a storytelling not just for Glitch, but for all of us who were optimistic about technology because it can be useful. You can create things that are only good parts. And I think that’s why people build on Glitch.

People are not worried about harassment here. They don’t worry about abuse. And they are like, “Every day I find something funny or interesting from a technical point of view.”

This is an app that went viral this week from a young woman — I think she’s Ukrainian — it uses computer vision and your camera on your computer, and if you slouch in your chair, [your screen] becomes more blurry. This forces you to sit up straight to keep the screen blank.

It’s a gimmick, but cool that it’s possible! It uses advanced artificial intelligence technology from Google. And since this is a Glitch app, it is open source and visible. So you know the data isn’t going anywhere. You know that she does not collect or misuse your information.

And this is true for every Glitch app, are they open source?

Yeah. They can be closed, but no one does it. I expect that when we have more companies using it, they are going to, just for privacy, [block] them. But by default they are all open source and they are all remixable. But the cool thing is that people like to see behind the scenes, like how does it work?

I am not a machine learning expert, I am not very good at computer vision, but I can go there and see, oh, this is how it works. And this is how you train the system for these things. And here’s how you can make the screen fuzzy because they slouch in the chair.

[This app] was all over the Daily News, Daily Mail, Vice. And [the developer] is a young woman, I think she’s in her early 20s. And people all over the world are responding to this app. It should be good. There is [something] clean in the words, “I did something cool and I want you to check it out.”

I remember going to Fark.com or MetaFilter at one time and the web was just great stuff. And that was good! During lunchtime, to see what’s distracting and to feel good and not get depressed, and also not to feel like he’s just watching me and trying to steal my data. People want it. I want to. This is not a retro throwback. I’m not like, “We will bring back the ancient Internet!” It just was the last time we had it.

When it comes to visibility, I constantly come across products built with Glitch. Can you see how these things spread for the first time? Are they spinning some social features on Glitch itself before breaking out?

As far as the stage we’re at, it’s primarily about what we used to call viral spread in the olden days, when apps are gaining popularity in their communities.

I can talk about the Stop Slouching Chair app, which is a very popular thing. The same thing happens with developers: “I love this JavaScript framework and this cool demo is on Glitch.” There are a little more of them within the community, because there are a lot of programmers hanging out there.

There is no giant dichotomy between people who understand technology and people who have something to share with the world. We have found, especially among our mainstream community, a lot of people are building music apps around this. During the day, they work as a coder at Google, go home and want to say something.

They create tons of virtual reality web art. They say, “I have a VR rig for my game system, but I want to do something expressive.” So Glitch is probably the largest VR and XR content community in the world. We’re not trying to create YouTube for virtual reality, but it happens on its own.

The phase we’re in is kind of a lazy Sunday-style YouTube. Nobody typed YouTube.com in their browser. They read Gawker or some other site, and it had Lazy Sunday built in. And they’re like, “Okay, this is how I’m playing the video now.”

People find Glitch because there is a data visualization for the article, which turns out to be a built-in Glitch app. And if you are a nerd, then let me look at this data on this, and you press a button and you will be taken to Glitch. Someone reads Reddit or a news article one day and ends up in a place where people can create with code.

You can definitely imagine making a video because you see embedded YouTube videos all over the place. Sometimes you read an article and there is a podcast embed on SoundCloud about it. Basically this is the space we are in.

We create more professional tools when you want your entire team to work on creating something. You want to sign it with your google account, whatever you’d expect. This is the business we are building. And I would be shocked if in a year this is not the main focus of our company. But they build each other. There is no tension between engaging business users and building a healthy community.

Some things seem so mundane, and you understand how frustrated people are with the complexity of technology. There is a timer application. It’s literally like setting a 15 minute countdown timer. But it is beautiful and full screen. I think the teacher did it.

Classrooms, like my child’s classroom, have a large smart whiteboard at the front of the class. It drives me crazy. His teacher googled a “countdown timer” and found the first result. It was surrounded by advertisements. You have a whole room of seven-year-olds who watch ads in the browser all day.

It scares me.

It’s horrible. And it’s normal for them, so they don’t realize it. But for a person who knows how it happened to the world, this is terrible.

Anyway, the teacher said it sucks, let’s just do it. It has nothing but time and it works on a touchscreen and all that. And then people start using it at work. “Oh, we’re going to set timers for our meetings so that they end on time. This is a horizontal need. Sometimes everyone needs it. It doesn’t push the boundaries of computer science. It just looks nice and solves the problem. This is along with applications using advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence.

I look at people solving problems that their IT department will never solve. And it happened within us. We have a publicly available company directory and publish all of our policies there. And this is, of course, the Glitch app.

We want meetings to be inclusive, so we don’t just get the youngest person on the team or the woman on the team to take notes every time. Fortunately, since we have a good gender balance here, it is very rare that there is only one woman in a room. But we had the natural impulse of a bunch of nerds like us: let’s make an app that randomly shuffles all the people in a room and picks someone to take notes.

He makes sure that the same person is not selected three times in a row and all that. Then we put it there. Again, picking a random name from a list is the first thing you learn to program. This is not a revolutionary innovation in computer science. It’s just a helpful problem-solving app.

And I can see every team that is using Glitch at work using this app. Because if you get stuck [taking notes], you are very interested. And if you are the type of person who wants to treat your colleagues well, you are very motivated. And it removes social friction. [You shouldn’t] say, “I don’t want to do this in this meeting.”

We always talk about the unforeseen consequences of technology, how they change our interactions, often for the worse. It’s nice to reduce the friction of being nice.

A small push is enough to relieve people of a lot of stress, and technology has done a great job of it. Sometimes it still happens. And I think people have the impetus to create that.

But this application will never become a business. No one can build a startup by reminding people whose turn it is to take notes. So there was no place in the industry where this opportunity could be realized. Even if you did it for your company, how are you going to share it with anyone else? You won’t be like Find it on GitHub.

Or you build an app and gradually realize that keeping it on the Apple Store costs money. So, join an ad network and now you’re showing tons of ads …

Exactly. There are a million different points of friction. It is impossible to share culture through technology between communities or companies. This is exactly what Glitch does.

My neighborhood group wants to clean up the park, and I don’t want Facebook [where we organize it]. So I made a little mailing list application. Someone might take someone who organizes in Iowa because of Elizabeth Warren, and they don’t want to depend on Facebook, but they can use the same app, redesign it, change the logo.

So there are no assholes on the platform right now. How much is this already due to active choice, and how much is due to the fact that they have not come yet?

Both. There is an escalation path for people who want to sin. The first wave – people have a bad day. It’s always there. Someone is rude because [their] dog has died.

Then there is [the people]: “Let me see what I get away with.” They are not even evil. They are the same, you know, teenage boys. These are people who are performative about wrongdoing. Typically, these things aren’t all that harmful or toxic.

But they can be obscured, the form of the offense I want to commit is the use of this insult or this unworthy behavior. And if allowed to flourish, it will open the door to willful harm-doers. This sets the tone. Someone uses hateful insults because they are a teenager who is trying to provoke. And something else like “I believe in the use of this word.” They cannot be distinguished in a naive system. So you have to rule it out.

I remember being a teenager, going to a diner with friends at 2 am. And the noisiest guy in the group was burping very loudly. And then we did it all. And then you got kicked out. I don’t think anyone has ever been like this, why did you kick us out? They thought you guys were assholes. And depending on how they did it, de-escalation usually took place. And in fact, this is the most important thing that we [at Glitch] do. I often do what I think, “Come on guys.”

Internet community management [is] the same as physical space management. Would you see what you would do in the park? What would you do at a party if people get hot or someone drank too much and behaves aggressively?

When I was in my early twenties, someone might say, “Hey man, you gotta get the hell out of here.” And it will escalate. And the drunk guy is not going to retreat. And then I was under thirty. Someone is like, “I think you had too many of them. Let me take your keys. We will take you home. It’s not your fault. ”And this is the maturity that I hope you get.

All major technology platforms are not even in their infancy yet. They’re like, “Why don’t we let these drunk guys have a party?” And they’re just now coming to the conclusion, “Hey bro, that’s not cool!” And this aggravates the situation. This becomes the proof. This is partly because the alt-right and their cohorts are playing with the referee. “We are censored. I have the same right to be at this party and be drunk like everyone else! “No, don’t! This is my fucking house!

So we have [the approach] “Look, dude. That’s not what we’re doing here. ” This is our style of community moderation. And the fact that it was done on the scale of millions of applications eliminated almost all types of common abuse. Because people are like, “We won’t win there.” And I think it will scale.

This is a lot of work. You have to have a temperament about how we tag things and how we communicate, and that there are no stereotyped messages. “Your app was alleged to have violated rule twenty-six dash four.” We’re like, “Hey, we’ve seen this thing. We don’t do that here. ” Almost literally these words. “Your application, there is this term in its description, we do not use it here.”

I think I was given two things as CEO in which someone was somehow breaking the rules. There was a guy, I think, in Turkey. And his avatar was Hitler on his Glitch profile. I think he logged into one of his other accounts and that led to his avatar. I don’t know much about what kind of shit Hitler’s avatar represents in Turkey! I do not care. So I thought, yes, we don’t do that here. I think we dropped it on some other platform and said, “Hey, please don’t do this.” I just took it off. There was no dialogue.

There was something else like that, a message about self-harm. It had to be ironic, it was bad, we didn’t like it. And the creator of it was a young woman. She said, oh, I was shitty with my friend and we were joking. I didn’t think anyone would see this. I’m sorry. She said, “I’m so sorry!” And she uninstalled the app.

And, having done this a couple of times and being proactive, he stops the cycle of rapid metastasis that occurs with such toxic substances. So we don’t need to guard the crowd of people.

Also, we haven’t created a lot of social features. We haven’t created [a way] to have a private group where you can tell each other about these terrible things. I think the only groups that will have this kind of functionality will be paid teams. The companies that are using it right now are Google and Microsoft, as well as big, big companies. They have their own problems. But that won’t be one of them. They are not going to create mass hate apps.

All of these things are intentional. And I’ve been doing this for 20 years. I know how we screwed up on LiveJournal back then. I’m on the Stack Overflow board and this hasn’t been as welcoming community as it should have been. Basically, it was not broken, people could get help. And this release of information was really powerful. But the first experience was that people are jerks because, as it turns out, we created a game that rewarded the gatekeepers. So we [had to] change the game. They do it. I wish they would have done it faster, but the team did it and recognized it. And the community supports this shift. This taught us, let’s not even get to this point, [let’s] there will be nothing to fix. It is quite doable. It is 100 percent doable. And at the scale of millions and millions of applications.

I am thinking of Apple App Store versus Google Play. Apple sets the tone. And I would disagree with some of their decisions. But they don’t really get a ton of transgressive apps because people know what they are looking for.

I don’t like the view model. I think this is incompatible with open web, activism and journalism. In fact, Apple has banned journalism from accessing its stores. But we can set fairly clear policies on what we do not tolerate in terms of harassment and targeting, and should not filter content.

One of the reasons I don’t need an assertion model … So there are adult toys that are connected to the internet. Most of these sex toys are proprietary horrible apps [just like] bad smart home devices. So there is the open source and open access sex toy movement. And they say Glitch is perfect for that.

There was a conversation between one of the leading developers in this community and the teacher who was more important to you. Wonderful. But I have high school students who are learning to program in Glitch. And they can’t search ass and find your smart butt plug. Because they’re going to look for cigarette butts.

It was great to watch this conversation play out between these two people who were both interested. First, they believed in Gluck. But they are both: I love and respect what you do. Very mutual: “What you do must exist in the world.” So how do you fix this problem? And very quickly I came to the conclusion that this function that we are creating.

Everyone thought they needed to make the “unsafe for work” flag. [But] it’s not about that. Neither elementary school nor butt plugs work. I want us to state the following: “Please do not show this to the children.” This could be because you are doing police violence journalism. There are a million reasons.

Testing this with users, they were like, “I love that you allow me to articulate my intentions for my creation.” Not “I see it as a platform that you shouldn’t be a working tool.” I really want people to read about police violence and journalism happening at Glitch during their lunch break at work. Moreover, sex work is work.

Of course, people immediately thought, what if someone was a jerk, did something terrible and did not mark it “please do not show this to children”? Well, then they expressed their intention to us. It’s very easy for me to moderate!

So, by developing this system, allowing the creator to express intent, we got a dialogue. We now have a community, not a platform where people can impose themselves on each other. You can tell us what you tried to do, and we can answer.

Nobody has that kind of toxicity dialogue on Facebook because who would believe Zuk is going to listen to them and turn them into a product?

This seems to be a fundamental way to make sure it can be scaled up later. Now you understand a lot before you suddenly need to redirect millions of people doing something that will no longer fly.

You cannot cancel. One can only foresee. And we will not understand everything. I want to reduce the surface of harm enough so that we can spend time catching the unexpected or unprecedented things. But for all that is a known problem, shame on us if we don’t deal with it.

A while ago I was talking to a man who runs a very large, very visible platform. And I said, oh, this mutual acquaintance of ours was punished for his work. And they asked what kind of doxing? In the same conversation, I mentioned whipping. And they didn’t know what slapping was. The isolation and lack of responsibility is so great.

I think the biggest thing I have for me is the advantage as a leader in being persecuted and persecuted. And therefore, for my personal safety, well-being and concern for my family, I must be fluent in attack vectors. Several senior executives on our team have held this position and are fluent in it.

If we said, “There is no one on our team who is familiar with security vulnerabilities,” you would say, “This is nonsense, they are doomed.” But if you say, “We don’t have anyone who is familiar with serious cultural vulnerabilities,” that will be business as usual. Not here.

I’m really interested in the idea of ​​a public directory and how it helped you build a better team. Our union agreement with our publisher G / O Media is public .

I grew up in a union family and worked in trade and construction for many years. And it’s very easy when you know how a computer works, which is more and more true and people who are on the brink are better taken care of. My mother, as a woman of color in a city where there were practically no people of color, worked at a job where she was protected by the union, changed our lives.

The company started in 2000 under the name Fog Creek. Joel Spolsky was our founding CEO and Michael Pryor co-founded it. And from day one [they] were super transparent. Joel has made a name for himself blogging about how they run the company.

Joel built a salary ladder very early on. This is how compensation works and how you can get ahead. Michael Pryor, another co-founder, took over as CEO of Trello. And he was the first seemingly white male CIS CEO in tech who ever approached me about how to deliver inclusive training for his team. I thought, Michael, what [incident] happened? Like, why did you need it? And he’s like, what do you mean? This is what we do.

When I came here, we started asking questions: “What are our values?” And over the years, we’ve found tremendous value in sharing things publicly. People always said, “Fog Creek has a private area for every encoder, and they wrote about it, so now we can do it.”

Stack Overflow, our sister company with the same founders as me, created a payroll calculator. You take into account all factors, your years of experience and your role. And it was based on industry-wide data. And people liked it. So we spent a year working on wage transparency. We realized that we have other valuable HR and company policies.

And everyone was pleased to document them. Since I was an activist in the communities of which I was a part, [I learned] that if it’s not in writing, then it’s not real.

When I introduced the climate change leave policy, we saw its power. Half of our team has been removed. We have had people displaced at the same time by wildfires and hurricanes.

We just said that if you are being crowded out by the weather, a climate that is becoming more prevalent, you will still have a job and we will take care of you. The same as the sick leave. We track in the same way.

And it exploded. Obviously, activists want to be able to point this out. This is what we need to keep in mind. But that was also just pragmatism. This was not contrived.

I think people like the CEO of the Social Justice Warrior are advocating. I thought that we have several people on the staff who are currently forced to leave their homes! So you have to write a policy! And since we’re going to write a policy, let me write a policy and put it there, because it will help other people do the right thing.

Maciej Ceglowski who makes Pinboard [was] very cynical. He didn’t say it that way, but he was just ashamed to say it was a signal of virtue. Like, “You’re just saying these platitudes, of course you’re not going to fire these people.”

And I told him that your opinion of who gets fired from tech is shaped by your experience as a white guy. Our team has a ton of underrepresented people who are like, “I don’t care what [the company] says, if I don’t come to work, I don’t believe that I will still have my job. … You may have that confidence, but I don’t.

Obviously, this is partly due to the fact that we show off our products. The guide is a Glitch app and we want people to use it. We are proud of this. You can remix and change it yourself. Another company stated, “We redesigned the Glitch manual, used it as a starting point for our own, changed it to what we can do.” Not every company can afford what we do.

I was at my best all day because our team improved the working environment for the other team, and in this loosely coupled way. We didn’t have to puff up the rat in front of their office.

As you posted the guide, you noted that a good package of benefits means that sometimes the salary will not be as high as in a comparable job elsewhere. Can you talk about the consequences of this?

That is, we pay well. Nobody is starving. We’re looking at industry data – and that’s a small cut – but there are 20 percent of very high-paying tech companies. And they usually pay to have you pinched your nose when you walk through the door. You look at Uber and – well, being here, close to Wall Street, a lot of banks – and you can make tons of money. If you want to work on the Uber self-driving car team, you’ll make tons of money. And we all know why.

We are not asking anyone to cut their wages, to make a vow of poverty, but we cannot pay like Google. But we’re tying that, I think, to the 75th percentile in basic compensation, in cash.

This is not mentioned in the Harvard Business Review or business management books, but it should: our managers are freer to manage their teams because they are not in a constant passive aggressive wage battle with their employees. At any other company, including when I was a coder, I used to say, “I can’t tell my boss why I’m thinking about this because I’m trying to get a promotion next year and I don’t want to be that way.” troublemaker. It all goes away.

We overestimate the benefits. We provide 16 weeks of parental leave, whether it is adoption or childbirth, regardless of your gender. And people accept it. We recommend that you accept this. It’s the same with vacations. We really encourage you to take it, and we are good at it. But there are also functional things. Our working day ends at the end of the working day. People go home at 5:30, 6 o’clock. I take my child out of school with me.

There are even expectations for boundaries around Slack warnings. It does not send notifications outside of business hours. We do not conduct death marches. We build private offices for all of our programmers. So there are many amenities, and certainly no difficulties.

And there is a real correspondence with what we are doing. Everyone understands where we are going and what we are trying to do. We want everyone on the web to be able to create a web. Very simple.

So we have people from Google, from Snapchat, from the New York Times, from your name. And a lot of people who were independent entrepreneurs. They know the compromise. I tell people, I am very grateful, you could be anywhere.

Five years ago, we were a very homogeneous team when I was an outside fan of the company. Now the majority of the team are women and non-binary people, including managers. I think 30 percent of our team identify as LGBTQ. We have a fairly proportional representation by race in the team, including blacks and Hispanics, which is not very common in technology. I think I’m the only South Asian man in the company. Quite unusual for a software company.

I think there is still a long way to go. We are still in technology, we still need to work with companies. Everyone is talking about the tech industry these days, for example, are you going to work with Palantir? Luckily they are not using our product, so I have nothing to worry about right now.

But I still can’t articulate how this differs from working with Amazon, Google or Microsoft. And we will work with these companies. They also do amazing things! I look at the Chrome team, I think this shit is awesome.

So there will be a compromise. But can we form a rubric and rationale for how we make our choice so that everyone is happy with it, or at least clearly understand it and does not feel that this is a creeping, gradual deterioration? I think it comes from this level of trust.

We acted very deliberately, investors have no place on the board of directors. And this is unprecedented. Especially on the scale of what we do. They support me very much, we have an extremely positive relationship with them. And where to get the money does matter.

But I would like to diversify the board and have a representative of the community, someone who is a creator who is outside our normal circles and has a different point of view.

If Glitch fails – and this happens with most startups – people are not going to say, “Their strategy for organizing containers in the cloud was wrong.” They will say, “This warrior for social justice tried to prove his point and therefore could not build a business.” I feel this pressure every day.

I really strive to be successful in this. We were able to do this thanks to the values ​​that we have, thanks to our team, because we do everything right, because the community is not toxic and not harmful to the Internet. So we have to win. Because we have to prove it to be true.

It’s not that others didn’t – as I said, Slack won without harming the world. But the narrative is wrong. This is a “weird messaging app” and not a consumer brand.

I lost my head when Janelle Monet tweeted about Slack. “It should be us.” But, you know, give us a year or two.

This interview has been edited for clarity.