Remote Work and Ice Cream Sandwiches • The speaker worked from home next to their fridge and gained weight, due to constant snacking on ice cream sandwiches. • Gizmodo was entirely remote and there was never an office. • The speaker’s team used precursors to Slack, such as Aim, to communicate.
Guy Raz
And where, did you work out of an office? Was it like, would you go into an office every day with a couple other people?
Brian Lam
I work from home and I work right next to my fridge. And whenever we get scooped, I’d eat like an ice cream sandwich, like 10 in the morning. I would eat an ice cream sandwich. I was just eating every time we got scooped. That’s how I gained like 30 pounds in that job.
Guy Raz
So Gizmodo was never, there was never an office. It was entirely remote.
Brian Lam
Yeah. I think at some point there was a move to like get everyone into an office and we were just like, no, which is a very modern thing, you know, but I worked remote the entire job.
Guy Raz
I’m trying to figure out how you did it then without Zoom and Slack and all that stuff that makes it so much easier now. There were some precursors to Slack that we used.
Brian Lam
I don’t remember them now. AIM probably. But we used what we used. Yeah. Yeah, we were using, oh my God, you’re right. We were using AIM.
Guy Raz
AIM, you were using AIM, yeah.
Brian Lam
We built a $300 million media company on AIM. That’s right.
Guy Raz
Amazing. But I mean, in a sense, it’s like the parallel between what you’re doing at Gizmodo and at the gym to me seem very similar because you were just focused. It was like you’re going in, you’re just like working out and just exhausting yourself and eating dinner and going to sleep. And it’s the same sounds like it was a similar kind of rhythm at Gizmodo.
Brian Lam
It’sThe iPhone Jailbreak Story: A Risk Worth Taking for More Impactful Sales • The speaker was willing to go to jail for an iPhone as they saw it as a marketing opportunity. • Steve Jobs understood and appreciated the speaker’s commitment to their cause. • The speaker believed that they were making a positive impact by discouraging people from buying the old iPhone model before a new one is released.
Brian Lam
Then bad cop came he was like you know this is serious stuff you can go to jail for this and i just said i would love to go to jail for an iphone because i was just thinking about how much traffic We can make from it i mean how much more legendary would that story have been if we went to jail? I mean, he knew that at that point that I think Steve also understands. My understanding of Steve Jobs from talking to people who work at Apple, he just understands when he finds someone who also is fully committed.
Guy Raz
Yeah.
Brian Lam
And so at that point, kind of just backed off and he got the letter written. And I knew that we would impact sales and I was glad because you shouldn’t buy the old thing right before the new one comes out at the same price, especially because you’re going to keep These things for multiple years. And that’s a really big deal for people spending their money. These things cost so much money now. So I felt very spiritually engaged in this idea of this telling people to wait, because most people have no idea about the timing and the cadence of product release. And I think he was really upset for many months. He would probably against all advice, would go to a conference where he was speaking and he would start talking about Gizmodo being horrible randomly.How Wirecutter Grew Without Marketing • Wirecutter did not do any marketing for their product. • The company had a small team with no business or social media personnel. • Wirecutter distinguished itself from other media companies by its unique approach. • The success of Wirecutter was due to word of mouth.
Guy Raz
Curious. I mean, did you – I mean, you had a – people knew who you were from Gizmodo, obviously, in San Francisco for sure – And you had a reputation for being a solid editor. But how were you getting the word out about Wirecutter? Did you have like a big social media presence? Were you doing that kind of marketing? Like how did people discover it at all?
Brian Lam
We did no marketing. We were mostly editors. We didn’t have business people. We didn’t have social media people. We were really light. We had no offices. I really liked having silent media company because it’s just like all of media is like this party where everyone’s talking over each other and saying the same things other people are Saying. Even worse, they’re spending money on reporting, duplicating other people’s work. And so I just wanted to contribute in this way that was different. And the power and focus of it, I think, caught people off guard in our industry. And it was all word of mouth.
Guy Raz
So you were really, I mean, it sounds like you were motivated by just like something that you would have wanted, right? Which is just save people time. Just like trust us. We’re going to do the work for you and you can have this informationThe Impact of Format Changes on Time and Traffic in Online Media • Editors in other publications wanted a similar format. • Business people were apprehensive about the loss of time on page and traffic. • Moving away from advertising was a conscious decision. • Advertising is viewed as a great evil with shallow metrics.
Brian Lam
Think editors were freaking out in other publications because they wanted a format like that. And business people were maybe scared of that change because you’re talking about a severe loss of time on page and traffic. If someone’s just clicking on one article and leaving in two minutes, they have to understand that can lead to a different type of business and a better service. But you’re also sacrificing maybe 50 page views and like an hour on your site. It’s significant. So people were really slow to move. And at first I was scared people were going to copy. And then I realized that big companies are incapable of really competing in that way.
Guy Raz
And from the get-go, you knew that advertising was just not a direction you wanted to take because it was basically a race to the bottom to chase those ads.
Brian Lam
I think advertising is one of the great evils of the world because gets in your brain no matter what. And the metrics they use are basically what has made media what it is today, like really shallow, fast cadence. And it’s crazy that if you are like a high-endThe negative effects of advertising on media and society • Advertising is considered a great evil as it has a strong impact on people’s minds. • Metrics used by advertisers have led to the present state of media which is shallow and fast-paced. • Even high-end brands need to advertise alongside low-quality content. • Advertisers do not get money back for being next to bad content. • Affiliate fee gets reversed if a recommended product is returned, resulting in zero income for the advertiser.
Brian Lam
Is one of the great evils of the world because gets in your brain no matter what. And the metrics they use are basically what has made media what it is today, like really shallow, fast cadence. And it’s crazy that if you are like a high-end brand for like a watch or something it’s crazy that you don’t want to help reverse that because your amazing watches need to live next to like Bs top 10 lists or like a magazine you flip through in like five minutes that they took a month to put together yeah it’s all just like really trashy and i can’t wait for this trend to reverse And reverse in more areas than just what Wirecutter did around product. Yeah. And the other thing is if someone returns something that you recommend, the affiliate fee gets reversed and you get zero. You can’t say that for like the Rolex ad next to the top 10 list or something factually incorrect. The advertiser never gets that money back for being next to articles that are terrible. And the readers don’t get that time back on clickbait. So for me, it’s more ethical. Yeah.
Guy Raz
I think about two years in, you started to see some profitability, enough where you could pay yourself a little bit of money. But did you, I mean, I know that you started this because you really wanted to do it. It wasCollaborating with The New York Times on Cheap Printer Test • The Times published a wrong leaked number which was not an extraordinary amount. • The speaker believes The Times deserved better service and collaborated with them for a successful project. • The speaker received an email from someone on the strategy team asking about selling.
Brian Lam
That number is actually wrong. It was a leak that was incorrect, but the Times published it. It was more, but it wasn’t an extraordinary amount. I always knew that we would end up at the Times. I thought it could fit in there from an editorial standpoint. I had an introduction to some of the Salzburgers and I told them about what we were doing. And I said, I love the Times and I believe the Times deserves better and the readers deserve better service. And so there was another meeting after that meeting where I said, let’s do a collaboration. So I commissioned a cheap printer test. And I said, we actually found the best cheap printer. You can do this work if you are motivated enough to do it. And we did a collaboration. It was one of the most traffic pieces they had because it had that wire cutter punch of we were actually doing the work. And so we did more collaborations. And then one day, I got an email from someone on the strategy team saying, do you ever think about selling? And I was like, yeah, I’ve thought about it before. We started a process. It’s pretty remarkable.
Guy Raz
I mean, five years, more or less, within five years of launching this thing, you took it from nothing, an idea, to a company that sold to the New York Times for, you know, more than $30 million. I mean, that’s, I mean, if you… And probably didn’t feel that way at the time, but that’s pretty great. I mean, that’s pretty fast.
Brian Lam
It’s fast considering it was bootstrapped, more or less. Yeah. And it’s fast considering the first year, I was only working on it 10 hours a week, because that’s all I had.
Guy Raz
That’sRecognizing the Value of Craft and Starting Something New • The speaker emphasizes the importance of today’s values when starting a business focused on physical goods. • The speaker is currently interested in and practicing woodworking with Japanese hand tools. • The speaker recognizes the value of craftsmanship and believes that the best media is also light craft.
Brian Lam
Let’s put it this way. If I were starting something now, it wouldn’t necessarily be about things. Yeah. But since that’s kind of my wheelhouse, maybe it would be, but it would have to be in a way that’s more in tune with today’s values yeah you know i spend most of my time these days fixing up This old house and i’m basically talking with craftsmen all day and i have started to build and practice craft myself specifically woodworking with japanese hand tools. And like a lot of these tools are made by hand by blacksmiths and the speed of craft and the values of craft are so precious and humbling to me. And I’ve started to recognize that the best media is also like craft, the best podcast, the best books, the best everything is not capitalistic at scale. It still needs to be capitalistic. People
